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The News That Matters about the Nuclear Industry Fukushima Chernobyl Mayak Three Mile Island Atomic Testing Radiation Isotope

Conflicts of interest in the Trump group’s push to sell nuclear reactors to Saudi Arabia.

May 12, 2025 Posted by | marketing, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

The Deep State & the Death of Democracy

This is a must read – The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government

Bruce Gagnon, May 10, 2025, https://brucegagnon177089.substack.com/p/the-deep-state-and-the-death-of-democracy?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3720343&post_id=163213827&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1vapg7&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

This is an important book – The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. I would say without any hesitation that this is one of the top 3-4 most important books that I have ever read. I highly recommend that everyone read it.

There is so much I learned from the book and I’ve been studying the whole US-Nazi connection after WW II for many years – but author David Talbot really wrote a spell-binding book – it’s like reading a real life mystery story. You come away from the book with a very clear understanding how the US became the corporate fascist state that we have today.

“During the war [Maj. Gen.] Gehlen had served as Hitler’s intelligence chief on the eastern front. His Foreign Armies East (Fremde Heere Ost) apparatus relentlessly probed for weaknesses in the Soviet defenses as the Nazi juggernaut made its eastward thrust. Gehlen’s FHO also pinpointed the location of Jews, Communists, and other enemies of the Reich in the ‘bloodlands’ overrun by Hitler’s forces, so they could be rounded up and executed by the Einsatzgruppen death squads. Most of the intelligence gathered by Gehlen’s men was extracted from the enormous population of Soviet prisoners of war – which eventually totaled four million – that fell under Nazi control. Gehlen’s exalted reputation as an intelligence wizard, which won him the Fuhrer’s admiration and his major general’s rank, derived from his organization’s widespread use of torture.”

To make it quick and simple, Maj. Gen. Gehlen made a deal with Allen Dulles (then running the precursor of the CIA called the OSS) that if he and his team were spared trial at Nuremberg he’d turn over his ‘rat line’ of fascist operatives throughout Europe and would work for the US. Gehlen was brought to the US and put through loyalty tests and eventually sent back to the newly created West Germany where he was put in charge of intelligence in the post war ‘free’ Germany.

Gehlen’s post-war operatives across Europe where used to disrupt and destroy left-wing attempts to win electoral victories in European countries (Operation Gladio). His death squads were used to target the Algerian independence movement. Gehlen and Dulles worked overtime to destabilize the Soviet eastern bloc taking great pleasure in making Stalin hyper-paranoid thus getting him to overreact and launch brutal internal crackdowns on innocent Soviet citizens.

Talbot quotes JFK White House staffer Arthur Schlesinger Jr. saying he was offended by “the notion of American spooks” like Dulles and other leading post-war CIA operatives “cheerfully consorting with people like General Reinhard Gehlen….There was something aesthetically displeasing about Americans plotting with Nazis, who had recently been killing us, against Russians, whose sacrifices [27 million killed during the war] had made the allied victory possible.”

Talbot painstakingly reveals how Dulles used his CIA rat line to set up the JFK assassination in 1963. One of the key players in the killing of President Kennedy was the CIA agent William Harvey who worked closely with Gehlen’s notorious fascist organization, and Gehlen came to consider Harvey a “very esteemed [and] really reliable friend.”

In the spring of 1968, soon after the killing of Sen. Bobby Kennedy, Allen Dulles took the time to write to the last Kennedy brother Ted sending his “sympathy and regards”. Talbot reports that Dulles hated Bobby and had used his seat on the President Lyndon Johnson appointed Warren Commission to smash any hopes for a true investigation into the killing of JFK that Dulles had been a mastermind in executing. Bobby had been privately hoping to expose Dulles and the CIA as the killer of his big brother if he were to be elected president.


Talbot shares that in the fall of 1968 the main social event of the season for Dulles was “the Washington fete in honor of Reinhard Gehlen, the West German spy chief Dulles had resurrected from the poison ashes of the Third Reich. On September 12, Gehlen’s US sponsors threw a luncheon for him, and that night there was a dinner for Hitler’s old spy chief at the Maryland home of Heinz Herre – Gehlen’s former staff officer on the eastern front, who had become West Germany’s top intelligence liaison in Washington.”

One could easily say that the US and German fascists had all the bases covered.

Why then have the American people, and the people of the world, been largely ignorant about this ugly history of the resurrection of the Nazi war machine during the post WW II years? After viewing the video [ Operation Mockingbird, CIA Media Control Program https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDCfTIapds0&t=89s ]about the CIA’s clandestine infiltration of US and international media it is no surprise that the public has been spoon fed only what the propagandists, disguised as democratic patriots, wanted people to know. History has been rewritten to suit the needs of the deep state.

In 1977, Rolling Stone Magazine alleged that one of the most important journalists under the thumb of the CIA’s media control program called Operation Mockingbird was Joseph Alsop, whose articles appeared in over 300 different newspapers. Other journalists alleged by Rolling Stone to have been willing to promote the views of the CIA included Stewart Alsop (New York Herald Tribune), Ben Bradlee (Newsweek), James Reston (New York Times), Charles Douglas Jackson (Time Magazine), Walter Pincus (Washington Post), William C. Baggs (The Miami News), Herb Gold (The Miami News) and Charles Bartlett (Chattanooga Times). According to Nina Burleigh (A Very Private Woman), these journalists sometimes wrote articles that were commissioned by the CIA’s Frank Wisner (director of the Office of Special Projects). The CIA also provided them with classified information to help them with their work.

Operation Mockingbird had a major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. These organizations were run by people with well-known right-wing views such as William Paley (CBS), Henry Luce (Time and Life Magazine), Arthur Hays Sulzberger (New York Times), Alfred Friendly (managing editor of the Washington Post), Jerry O’Leary (Washington Star), Hal Hendrix (Miami News), Barry Bingham, Sr., (Louisville Courier-Journal), James Copley (Copley News Services) and Joseph Harrison (Christian Science Monitor).

The American democracy story is illusion created by what author Bertram Gross called “three piece suit fascism” years ago in his book entitled Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America. But to emerging democracy movements around the world, brutally suppressed by the CIA and its death squad agents, there was nothing friendly or democratic about these tactics. Because of the relative affluence of America during this period the public was docile and easily keep under control by the manipulations of the media and the political circles controlled by the deep state.

Now that the American imperial project is crashing and burning the story has begun to emerge and the blinders of deception are steadily falling from the public’s eyes. What comes next is unknown but until the American people learn the real story behind this ‘Hollywood democracy’ little can change for the good.

May 10, 2025 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

‘It’s deceitful’: Critics slam owners of TMI Unit 2 for not reporting fire at plant

Penn Live, By Charles Thompson | cthompson@pennlive.com,  May. 08, 2025

Accidents can happen.

But when they happen at a nuclear power plant, who gets told, and when?

That’s a question that some neighbors of the still-shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear power stations are asking after recent disclosures about a small fire at the Three Mile Island Unit 2 reactor building this winter.

The owners of Unit 2 – the scene of the notorious March 1979 partial meltdown – have received a “non-cited violation” from federal regulators for the fire that broke out at its reactor building on Feb. 11.

The fire got its first public disclosure through a May 2 posting on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s public library.

No one was hurt in the incident, in which a partition surrounding a worksite at the crippled plant’s ongoing deconstruction ignited.

And according to the NRC’s inspection report, there were no releases of radiation associated with it.

Overall, and importantly, the inspection report concludes, the incident itself was one of “very low safety significance.”

But the fact the fire was not publicly reported in real time is raising some alarm bells with some of the plant’s critics.

Neither plant owners TMI-2 Solutions nor federal or state regulators put out a real-time public notice about the incident.

It also wasn’t briefed at a March meeting of a community advisory panel established specifically “to enhance open communication, public involvement and education about the… decommissioning project,” according to two people who attended that session.

“It’s not only tone-deaf. It’s deceitful, because they know how the public feels about it,” said Joyce Corradi, a Lower Swatara Township resident who 45 years ago was a founding member of Concerned Mothers’ and Women, a grassroots group concerned about the accident.

To be clear, TMI-2 Solutions wasn’t exactly hiding the situation.

The company did make same-day courtesy calls to “appropriate stakeholders” including the NRC, the state Department of Environmental Protection …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

“Constellation Energy does not own Three Mile Island Unit 2, but anything that happens at Unit 1 can be influenced by accidents at Unit 2,” Stilp said.

“The best solution is not to restart Unit 1, so that there will never be a chance that a nuclear incident will occur there.”

And the lack of full public disclosure infuriated others.

“It undermines confidence in their ability to communicate during a (bigger) incident or accident,” said Eric Epstein, longtime leader of Three Mile Island Alert.

“This is how we had the (1979) accident in the first place,” said Corradi, who co-founded the women’s group after the partial meltdown. “A lack of checking out the details and doing things safely.”…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

https://www.pennlive.com/news/2025/05/its-deceitful-critics-slam-tmi-for-not-reporting-fire-at-plant.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawKKKKJleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkE

May 10, 2025 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

US-Ukraine minerals deal ‘hides secret agreements’ – Ukrainian MP

2 May 25 https://www.rt.com/news/616662-ukraine-us-deal-secret-agreements/

Separate provisions outline Kiev’s “indefinite obligations” and bypass parliamentary ratification, Irina Gerashchenko has claimed.

The US-Ukraine minerals agreement announced this week “hides” details of Kiev’s “indefinite obligations” to Washington, a Ukrainian lawmaker has claimed.

In a Facebook post on Friday, Irina Gerashchenko, a member of European Solidarity party said the deal includes two “secret,” supplementary documents that will not be subject to parliamentary ratification.

The minerals deal reportedly grants the US preferential access to Ukrainian mining projects in exchange for assistance with an investment fund to support the country’s reconstruction. Initially portrayed by Washington as repayment forbears of military support – estimated at $350 billion by President Donald Trump – the final text, published on Thursday by the Ukrainian government, states that only future aid will count toward US contributions to the fund.

Gerashchenko claimed however that instead of one agreement, the US and Ukraine signed three.

“The Zelensky government has not provided deputies and society with all the agreements signed in the US, which, as it turned out, are three, not one,” she wrote. “Meanwhile, they want to ratify only one framework document in the Verkhovna Rada. Others are labeled ‘implementation documents,’ despite the fact that it is in these two secret agreements that all the technical details of indefinite Ukrainian obligations are hidden.”

Ukrainian Prime Minister Denis Shmigal “avoided” commenting on the two documents and the lack of security guarantees in the published agreement – reportedly a key point of contention during negotiations – Gerashchenko told the country’s parliament on Friday.

The claim has raised questions among Ukrainian lawmakers and the public on the actual scope of the agreement. MP Yaroslav Zheleznyak claimed on Telegram that, when pressed, Shmigal acknowledged the two additional documents but downplayed them as “technical” and exempt from ratification. The texts “must be signed after the ratification” of the main agreement, Shmigal claimed, noting that lawmakers would see them when the Ukrainian negotiating team returns from the US next week.

Western media reports have also noted the existence of additional documents and claimed that a last-minute dispute arose when Washington demanded Kiev sign all three. Ukrainian officials reportedly argued they could not sign the annexes until the main agreement was ratified in Parliament. Later reports suggested all three documents were ultimately signed.

Further details about the contents of the supplementary documents have not been publicly released, and the Ukrainian government has not issued an official statement addressing their existence or content.

May 5, 2025 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Scotland does not need nuclear power and people aren’t being told the truth

 Commonweal 1st May 2025,
https://www.commonweal.scot/daily-briefings/briefing-r57be

The nuclear industry has one of the most aggressive lobbying and public relations campaigns of all energy sources. It pushes relentlessly on politicians and the public to support the merits of nuclear power based on partial or inaccurate information. Very often this goes unchallenged in the Scottish media.

Given that nuclear power presents itself as a pragmatic response to decarbonising energy and given the scale of the PR campaign, it is perhaps not enormously surprising that SNP voters appear to split with their party over this issue. But would they continue to support nuclear power if they knew the numbers?

Here are some stark realities. The cost of generating of electricity from renewable sources is £38 to £44 per MWh. The estimated cost of the same electricity from nuclear (at the new Hinkley Point C reactor) in 2025 is £150 per MWh. It can only be presumed that the participants in this survey were not told that generating electricity would become between three times as expensive with nuclear.

But even that hides the true costs. Nuclear power is very dangerous and, at the end of its lifecycle, is very complex to decommission and make safe. Every spent rod of nuclear fuel takes a full ten years simply to cool down. They must be immersed in a deep pool of cold, constantly-circulating water and monitored closely for ten years just to bring them down to a cool enough temperature that they can be processed.

That’s just the ongoing fuel. The complexity of decommissioning and entire nuclear power plant is significantly greater. In fact the current estimate of the cost for decommissioning nuclear power is about £132 billion. That is not paid for by consumers in their electricity bill – it is paid for by consumers through their tax.

This is the second stark reality that nuclear power works hard to conceal; not only is it three times as expensive as renewables to run, there is then a cost of at least £4,600 for every household to decommission the nuclear power plants and make them safe for the future.

Of course, safety is another issue here. Nuclear power stations are very vulnerable. They are extremely sensitive sites which require substantial long-term attention. There are currently concerns around the world that unreliable power supplies could mean existing plants may struggle to keep spent fuel rods from combusting if they cannot constantly and continually keep large amounts of cold water circulating round spent fuel.

Nuclear power stations do not like loss of electricity, especially for any extended period of time. This makes them very climate-vulnerable. And of course who knows what sorts of extreme weather we may face before the lifetime of a nuclear station is complete. Fukushima is not a cautionary tale for no reason.

And it is uncomfortable to dwell on the risks of nuclear sites if they become targets for terrorism or in war. No-one is expressing continent-wide anxiety over the threat-to-life status of Ukraine’s wind turbines; they absolutely are over the shelling of Ukrainian nuclear power stations.

The remaining case for nuclear is to provide ‘electricity baseline’ – the ability to bring electricity provision on and off line as renewable generation rates rise or fall (if the wind does blow), or during periods of peak demand. This just isn’t really honest – nuclear power does not like rapid changes in supply and are designed to run flat out, all the time, not least because costs rise rapidly if they are running at less then full power. You can’t just ‘turn them on and off’. So yes, they can provide baseline electricity but not ‘on demand’ electricity that can balance renewables.

Hydrogen storage can though. Scotland currently dumps enormous amounts of perfectly useable electricity in the ground if it is generated when there is no demand. This can be turned into hydrogen and then, on demand, converted back into electricity. At the moment the cost of electricity from hydrogen is about half as much again that of generating by nuclear. But there are big caveats to that.

First, the current hydrogen electricity price is about £230 per MWh, but this is a rapidly-developing area of technology and the current industry target is £100 per MWh. That makes it cheaper than nuclear. Second, there is no hidden capital cost – the incredible costs of building and decommissioning nuclear which are hidden from consumers by subsidy from tax just isn’t there for hydrogen. It is a simple technology.

Third, these costs all assume that you are generating hydrogen from electricity at full wholesale grid prices. But if you are using electricity that would otherwise be dumped because it is being generated at the ‘wrong time’, the hydrogen becomes a waste product. It is in practice much cheaper than nuclear and can supply long-term baseline. (Battery storage for short term is even cheaper.)

That is the reality that respondents in this poll were not given. Try the poll again with ‘do you want to pay three times as much for your electricity with an additional costs to your household of £4,600 to have unsafe nuclear power when renewables with hydrogen storage are cleaner, cheaper and safer’.

Consistent, reliable renewable energy isn’t hard to solve in Scotland. There are nations where nuclear may have to be part of a clean energy solution, but Scotland is not one of them. You need to withhold a lot of information from people to make them believe the wrong thing about nuclear.

May 4, 2025 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, UK | Leave a comment

Kingston Fossil Plant and Oakridge Nuclear Facility – an unholy alliance of radioactive pollution,

While no one was killed by the 2008 coal ash spill itself, dozens of workers have died from illnesses that emerged during or after the cleanup. Hundreds of other workers are sick from respiratory, cardiac, neurological, and blood disorders, as well as cancers.

The apparent mixing of fossil fuel and nuclear waste streams underscores the long relationship between the Kingston and Oak Ridge facilities.

Between the 1950s and 1980s, so much cesium-137 and mercury was released into the Clinch from Oak Ridge that the Department of Energy, or DOE, said that the river and its feeder stream “served as pipelines for contaminants.” Yet TVA and its contractors, with the blessing of both state and federal regulators, classified all 4 million tons of material they recovered from the Emory as “non-hazardous.”

A U.S. Environmental Protection Agency analysis confirms that the ash that was left in the river was “found to be commingled with contamination from the Department of Energy (DOE) Oak Ridge Reservation site.

For nearly a century, both Oak Ridge and TVA treated their waste with less care than most families treat household garbage. It was often dumped into unlined, and sometimes unmarked, pits that continue to leak into waterways. For decades, Oak Ridge served as the Southeast’s burial ground for nuclear waste. It was stored within watersheds and floodplains that fed the Clinch River. But exactly where and how this waste was buried has been notoriously hard to track.

A Legacy of Contamination, How the Kingston coal ash spill unearthed a nuclear nightmare, Grist By Austyn Gaffney on Dec 15, 2020  This story was published in partnership with the Daily Yonder.

In 2009, App Thacker was hired to run a dredge along the Emory River in eastern Tennessee. Picture anindustrialized fleet modeled after Huck Finn’s raft: Nicknamed Adelyn, Kylee, and Shirley, the blue, flat-bottomed boats used mechanical arms called cutterheads to dig up riverbeds and siphon the excavated sediment into shoreline canals. The largest dredge, a two-story behemoth called the Sandpiper, had pipes wide enough to swallow a push lawnmower. Smaller dredges like Thacker’s scuttled behind it, scooping up excess muck like fish skimming a whale’s corpse. They all had the same directive: Remove the thick grey sludge that clogged the Emory.

The sludge was coal ash, the waste leftover when coal is burned to generate electricity. Twelve years ago this month, more than a billion gallons of wet ash burst from a holding pond monitored by the region’s major utility, the Tennessee Valley Authority, or TVA. Thacker, a heavy machinery operator with Knoxville’s 917 union, became one of hundreds of people that TVA contractors hired to clean up the spill. For about four years, Thacker spent every afternoon driving 35 miles from his home to arrive in time for his 5 p.m. shift, just as the makeshift overhead lights illuminating the canals of ash flicked on.

Dredging at night was hard work. The pump inside the dredge clogged repeatedly, so Thacker took off his shirt and entered water up to his armpits to remove rocks, tree limbs, tires, and other debris, sometimes in below-freezing temperatures. Soon, ringworm-like sores crested along his arms, interwoven with his fading red and blue tattoos. Thacker’s supervisors gave him a cream for the skin lesions, and he began wearing long black cow-birthing gloves while he unclogged pumps. While Thacker knew that the water was contaminated — that was the point of the dredging — he felt relatively safe. After all, TVA was one of the oldest and most respected employers in the state, with a sterling reputation for worker safety.

Then, one night, the dredging stopped.

Sometime between December 2009 and January 2010, roughly halfway through the final, 500-foot-wide section of the Emory designated for cleanup, operators turned off the pumps that sucked the ash from the river. For a multi-billion dollar remediation project, this order was unprecedented. The dredges had been operating 24/7 in an effort to clean up the disaster area as quickly as possible, removing roughly 3,000 cubic yards of material — almost enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool — each day. But official reports from TVA show that the dredging of the Emory encountered unusually high levels of contamination: Sediment samples showed that mercury levels were three times higher in the river than they were in coal ash from the holding pond that caused the disaster.

Then there was the nuclear waste. Continue reading →

May 3, 2025 Posted by | employment, environment, history, legal, PERSONAL STORIES, politics, Reference, safety, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Australian Government ignores AUKUS ‘very high risk’ warning from the Admiral in charge


Admiral Mead sought to bell the cat while Defence Minister Marles has not been straight with the Australian people about the very high risks of AUKUS, even though he has been briefed on and appears to have informed Cabinet of those risks.

Marles should front up about this concealment without delay.

Labor not blameless

by Rex Patrick | Apr 29, 2025, https://michaelwest.com.au/government-ignores-aukus-high-risk-warning-from-the-admiral-in-charge/

The AUKUS submarine project faces huge risks, and Cabinet knows. But as the Government ships $2B of taxpayers’ money to the US this year, with much more to follow, the taxpayer is not being told. Rex Patrick reports.

On 26 February this year, Vice Admiral Jonathan Mead, the man in charge of AUKUS, advised the Senate that the AUKUS submarine program was “very high risk”. He said, “We’ve made that clear to government, and the government has made that clear to the public.”

However, it has not.

I follow AUKUS closely and had not heard that publicly before. Whilst it is absolutely the case, and something MWM has reported on extensively, this was the first public admission of the very high risk nature of the project from the Australian Submarine Agency.

Concerns about US submarine production rates and the weakness of the UK’s submarine industrial base have generated grave doubts about whether the $368B AUKUS scheme will deliver nuclear-powered submarines for Australia.

Moreover, former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has revealed, after conversations with insiders, that there is no Plan B.

“Plan B is that we will not get any submarines.”

FOI ahoy

I was somewhat surprised by Admiral Mead’s unusual candour, so on 27 February, I moved to test the veracity of his remarks with an FOI application directed at the Australian Submarine Agency (ASA) seeking access to “any ministerial submission or briefing provided by ASA to the Minister for Defence … that refers to the AUKUS nuclear submarine program as involving ‘high risk’ or ‘very high risk’.”

I also sought access to ‘any statement made by the Minister for Defence or the Minister for Defence Industry and Capability Delivery that refers to the AUKUS nuclear submarine program as involving ‘high risk’ or ‘very high risk’.”

A decision on those was made this week. FOI applications can reveal the truth by what is disclosed, by what is withheld, and by confirming what doesn’t exist.

ASA confirmed the existence of a ministerial briefing characterising the AUKUS submarine program as involving ‘high risk’ or ‘very high risk’, but refused access to that briefing on national security and Cabinet secrecy grounds. Significantly, ASA’s refusal decision confirmed this document was produced for the dominant purpose of briefing a Minister on an attached Cabinet submission.


In effect, the Submarine Agency confirmed Admiral Mead’s statement that ASA has briefed the government on the ‘high risk’ or ‘very high risk’ nature of the AUKUS project, and that briefing was submitted to the Defence Minister for Cabinet consideration.

“That high-risk assessment has gone to the very top of the Government.”

Alarm bells should be ringing.

Misleading the public

But the FOI decision also reveals that Defence Minister Richard Marles has not been forthcoming with the Australian public about the full hazards of AUKUS.

In relation to statements the minister has made to the public on the risk status of the project, the Australian Submarine Agency advised that ‘no in scope documents were identified’ that show the Defence Minister has made any public statement that acknowledges the ‘high’ or ‘very high’ risk of the AUKUS scheme.

The agency was able to find only a handful of statements referring to risk management in general and assertions that the United Kingdom will carry the primary risks of the AUKUS-SSN construction.

Admiral Mead was not correct in his statement to the Senate, but more importantly, the Government has been caught red-handed fudging the risks associated with the AUKUS scheme. The public has been misled.


Admiral Mead sought to bell the cat while Defence Minister Marles has not been straight with the Australian people about the very high risks of AUKUS, even though he has been briefed on and appears to have informed Cabinet of those risks.

Marles should front up about this concealment without delay.

Labor not blameless

Last week, at a pre-polling booth, I was standing next to a Labor volunteer who was handing out how-to-vote cards for the seat of Adelaide. An elderly gentleman stuck out his hand and asked the volunteer for a how-to-vote card.

“We have to stop the Liberals getting in”, he said. “We don’t need nuclear power”.

I couldn’t resist. “But you’re taking a Labor how-to-vote”, I said. He gave me a strange look. “What about the eight naval reactors?” I queried. “A naval reactor is a reactor, and naval nuclear waste is nuclear waste”.

Many in the Labor camp think AUKUS is Morrison’s (and Peter Dutton’s) baby. But for Labor, that’s just a convenient mistruth. In September 2021, Morrison announced AUKUS. But he only announced a study. It was Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at the March 2023 San Diego “kabuki show” (as described by Paul Keating) that turned it into a formal Defence project behemoth with a projected cost of $368 billion.

Pre-polling booths are a good place to hang out for political gossip. I also held a discussion with a long-standing grassroots Labor Party member who proceeded to tell me how he had been sidelined for his opposition to AUKUS.

There’s no doubt the Labor rank-and-file have been cut out of the party’s decision-making with the Labor leadership ramming an AUKUS endorsement through the party’s 2023 national conference. Since then, the dissenting views of many, perhaps even a majority of Labor members, have been marginalised and suppressed.

AUKUS to be torpedoed

Politics aside, any project manager worth their salt would put an end to AUKUS. It’s a looming procurement shipwreck.

The US will not be able to supply the Virginia Class submarines to the Royal Australian Navy. The US Congressional Research Service has calculated a US build rate of 2.3 boats per annum is necessary to enable the US to provide boats to Australia without harming US undersea warfare capability. The current build rate is somewhere between 1.1 and 1.3 boats per annum.

The British submarine industry is one big cluster fiasco. Fruit that will flow from that program will be late, possibly rotten, and far more expensive than planned.

Meeting delivery obligations by the US and UK under the program will be really hard. And the fact that the Australian Government can’t even be up front and honest about the program

Rex Patrick is a former Senator for South Australia and earlier a submariner in the armed forces. Best known as an anti-corruption and transparency crusader, Rex is running for the Senate on the Lambie Network ticket next year – www.transparencywarrior.com.au.

“suggests there is no chance of success.”

But Albanese need not worry, nor Marles. By the time all of this sinks in, they’ll be out of the system. It will be our children who suffer from the tens of billions wasted and the massive hole in our national security capability.

Rex Patrick

May 2, 2025 Posted by | AUSTRALIA, secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

Covering up Ukrainian Nazis is nothing new – the Canadians have been doing it for almost eighty years

Ian Proud, April 29, 2025. https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/04/29/covering-up-ukrainian-nazis-nothing-new-canadians-have-been-doing-it-for-almost-eighty-years/

A number of topics remain taboo in discussing the war in Ukraine. Busification, Zelensky’s democratic mandate, Ukraine’s casualty numbers and anything suggesting that Ukraine cannot win are all off limits. Likewise the problem of alleged neo-Nazis in Ukraine.

One of the most embarrassing episodes since the Ukraine war started in 2022, was when Yaroslav Hunka, was given two standing ovations in the Canadian House of Commons public gallery by MPs during the visit of President Zelensky in 2023. Hunka has been accused by Russia of genocide, because of his alleged involvement in the Huta Pieniacka massacre of February 28 1944 in which more than 500 ethnic Poles were murdered in a village, in what is now western Ukraine. Hunka was a member of the SS Galicia Division, a mostly Ukrainian unit of the Waffen SS, which Commissions in Germany and Poland later found guilty of war crimes.

This was shocking because it opened the lid on a topic of conversation that has been largely silenced by the western mainstream media since the beginning of the war: Ukraine’s contemporary challenge of far-right ultranationalism. But the Hunka case also illustrates how western authorities airbrushed discussion of nazis in Ukraine after World War II too.

On 13 July 1948 the British Commonwealth Relations Office, what is now part of the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, sent a telegram to Commonwealth governments, proposing an end to Nazi war crimes trials in the British zone of Germany. “Punishment of war crimes is more a matter of discouraging future generations than of meting out retribution to every guilty individual… it is now necessary to dispose of the past as soon as possible.”

After the conclusion of the Nuremberg War Trials in 1946 the western world faced a new enemy in the Soviet Union. Limited security resources in cash-strapped Albion and its colonies were re-deployed to uncover suspected Soviet agents and Communists, rather than to identify and track down lower-order Nazi war criminals.

Around this time, many Ukrainians fled the Soviet Union to settle in Canada. In the thirty-year period after the start of Operation Barbarossa, the Ukrainian population in Canada almost doubled, from 300,000 to almost 600,000 people. While most of them, I am sure, would not have been Nazi collaborators, some, undoubtedly, were. They were joined by lesser numbers of Latvians, Hungarians, Slovaks and others.

Within that exodus would have been so-called “lesser” war criminals; persons who had organised the transportation of Jews, Slavs, gypsies and homosexuals to death camps, acted as informers, committed murders, or become involved in war crimes as other ranks and non-commissioned officers in death squads. They were the lower echelon collaborators, acting as the instruments of the genocide initiated by the Nazis.

Yet, following the British instruction, Canada progressively relaxed its immigration policy between 1950 and 1962, steadily removing restrictions against the entry of German nazis and non-German members of German military units like the SS Galicia Division.

However, in 1984 the Simon Wiesenthal Center wrote a letter to the Canadian government claiming to have obtained evidence that the ‘Angel of Death’ Josef Mengele had applied for a landed immigrant visa to Canada in 1962. Though this proved to be incorrect, it caused such outrage among Canada’s Jewish community that a Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada was established in 1985.

Known as the Deschênes Commission, it uncovered a list of 774 persons who had allegedly entered Canada and who required further investigation. Of that list, only 28 underwent serious investigation and trial.

Michael Pawlowski, accused of murdering 410 Jews and 80 non-Jewish Poles in Belarus in 1942, was acquitted as judges blocked the prosecution from gathering evidence in the Soviet Union.

Stephen Reistetter of Slovakia was not tried for allegations that he kidnapped 3000 Jews to have them sent to Nazi death camps while serving in the Hlinka party, a far right clerical-fascist movement with Nazi leanings. His case fell apart because a witness died.

Erich Tobias, was accused of involvement in the execution of Latvian Jews but died before his case went to court.

By 1995, with no convictions for war crimes having been secured, the Canadian Justice Department cut the size of its war crimes unit from 24 to 11 people. In the absence of criminal prosecutions, the Canadian Government tried civil proceedings to revoke citizenship from alleged war criminals.

Wasily Bogutin collaborated with the Nazi occupation forces in the town of Selidovo, in Donetsk, and was personally and directly involved in effecting the roundup of young persons for forced labour in Germany. In February 1998, Judge McKeown, of the Trial Division of the Federal Court, found that Bogutin had concealed his role in war crimes, but he died before he could be extradited.

Joseph Nemsila, who commanded a Slovak unit that sent civilians to Auschwitz died in 1997 after a decision not to revoke citizenship was overturned, but death prevented exportation.

In only 7 cases was order made for the suspect to be extradited or exported. This included Ladislaus Csizsik-Csatary, accused of involvement in the confinement of thousands of Hungarian Jews and their subsequent deportation to death camps. In July 1997, just before his trial was to begin, he decided not to oppose the loss of his citizenship and voluntarily left the country.

Vladimir Katriuk was accused of having taken part in the Khatyn Massacre in Belarus and Wasyl Odnynsky, a guard at SS labour camps at Trawniki and Poniaka. Moves were made to revoke their citizenship, but they were allowed to remain in Canada until all court proceedings were lifted in 2007.

Progress in prosecuting alleged war criminals in Canada was always slow, often held up by foot-dragging by often reluctant judges, and a refusal to allow for the gathering of evidence in the Soviet Union.

Today, the media and Jewish groups still pressure the Canadian government to reveal the names of all of the 774 persons considered by the 1985 Deschênes Commission with so far little success.

An American academic recently discovered what is believed to be a similar list of 700 suspects which included Volodymyr Kubiovych, a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator who helped organize the SS Galicia division and who was editor in chief of the Encyclopedia of Ukraine compiled at the University of Alberta. A photograph of a parade in Lviv, Ukraine, in July, 1943, shows Mr. Kubiovych making a Nazi salute alongside Otto Wächter, a senior member of the SS who also served as governor of Galicia and Krakow.

Yaroslav Hunka was not on that list, raising questions about how many Nazi collaborators in Canada were never discovered.

I don’t think that Ukraine today is a Nazi society and, even at its high watermark, the Svoboda party only garnered 10% of the national vote. But ultranationalism is a major problem, particularly in the west of Ukraine, in that area known as Galicia during World War II. And the refusal of western governments to acknowledge the issue of ultranationalism in Ukraine or speak out means that we are turning a blind eye once more to activity that we would never tolerate in our own countries.

May 2, 2025 Posted by | Canada, secrets,lies and civil liberties, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Chernobyl’s Hidden Impact: Disinformation and Nuclear Politics

And yes it is oxymoronic to have the same agency being responsible for safety and promotion of nuclear power

Chernobyl is not the past.

every nuclear power plant ever built assumes there will never be a war on the site.

April 26 2025 , https://paxus.wordpress.com/2025/04/26/chernobyls-hidden-impact-disinformation-and-nuclear-politics/?fbclid=IwY2xjawJ-qChleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBicmlkETFBSUs5cEUwaHVhSmt1NE11AR5WmsYFgugAy3502vFG3fKu80SWDxjhbNp8xXETEZ7ygNIrwakT8SZAx_iycg_aem_rCKscMA_09VKeljU4_Bisw

Chernobyl explosion was “perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union.” According to Mikhail Gorbachev who was the last leader of the Soviet Union and was in power during the meltdown. But perhaps the more important lesson from the Chernobyl catastophe is that disinformation can kill you. It is important to remember that the largest and most deadly nuclear accident in the world was not even reported initially by the secretive and corrupt Soviet Union. It was not until 2 days after the meltdown that the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant in Sweden detected the radiation and forced the Soviets to admit there had been an accident. Forsmark is 1100 km from Chernobyl.

Disinformation about Chernobyl is not confined to the Soviet Union, western nations and especially the UN played a critical role in down playing and distorting information about the effects of the disaster. This is most obvious in the fatality estimates associated with the catastrophe.

In 1959, the powerful UN agency responsible for both promoting and monitoring nuclear power, the IAEA, signed an agreement with the UN’s health monitoring agency, WHO, that restricted them from reporting on nuclear accidents. And as part of the western public relations cover up, 4 months after the meltdown the then general director of the IAEA, Hans Blix, would affirm: “The world could tolerate a nuclear accident as serious as Chernobyl every year.” WHO was blocked from releasing any independent Chernobyl studies and ultimately the IAEA (with WHO) would officially report that there were only between 4000 to 9000 deaths. [And yes it is oxymoronic to have the same agency being responsible for safety and promotion of nuclear power.]

Consensus is not your friend. There have been many scientific studies of the affects of Chernobyl. Greenpeace did an anthology of these studies at the 25th anniversary and estimated that at least 93,000 people will have died and the actual total is likely well be over 200,000 premature deaths. Why the big difference between the UN’s official tally and independent scientists? The answer is consensus. The IAEA has representatives from pro-nuclear states on it’s Chernobyl Forum, they release their reports operating by consensus and those invested in nuclear energy have a strong interest in down playing the effects of accidents. Independent scientists have also found radiation levels in the exclusion zone to be over three times higher than the IAEA reports.

How effective is this western mis/disinformation campaign? Check out Wikipedia or ask any AI. You will quickly find the IAEAs 4000 person fatality rate. Depending on the source more accurate information is either buried or not revealed in your first responses. Lots of people on the nuclear payrolls have put a bunch of effort into minimizing the impact of all nuclear accidents. This is not a (known) conspiracy, per se, but rather contemporary industrial capitalism functioning as designed. But perhaps more revealing is that almost no mainstream news sources are covering this years 39th anniversary. Far more important in our attention economy is that Trump is going to the Pope’s funeral and we are arresting judges in the US.

Chernobyl is not the past. In February of this year a relatively low cost attack drone blew a hole in the second $1.7 billion Chernobyl sarcophagus. The fire from this attack burned for 3 weeks, requiring technicians to make further holes in the exterior shell in a high stakes game of “nuclear whack a mole”

“We did a lot of safety analysis, considering a lot of bad things that could happen,” said a senior technical adviser on the project. “We considered earthquakes, tornadoes, heavy winds, 100-year snowfalls, all kinds of things. We didn’t consider acts of war.”

It is worth pointing out that every nuclear power plant ever built assumes there will never be a war on the site. Assuming otherwise would be yet another in the long list of reasons why nuclear power should not be considered or continued. Other major problems with civil nuclear power include: subsidized insurance, proliferation risks, uneconomic construction and operation, perverse effects on avoiding climate disruption and the threat to democracy. The total cost of the Cheronbyl accident has been estimated at $700 billion which is about 5 times the Ukraines average GDP for the last 10 years.

The only good nuclear news on this anniversary is the complexity of nuclear power plants combined with the previous globalization of the nuclear construction and fuel supply chain mean that Trump’s tariffs may put the breaks on any new nuclear construction in the US. Or perhaps more sadly, these Trump taxes will just increase the already ridiculous price of nuclear power to both taxpayers and ratepayers.

May 1, 2025 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, Ukraine | Leave a comment

On Neo-Nazi Influence in Ukraine

The Azov Battalion, which arose during the coup, became a significant force in the war against the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass, who resisted the coup. Its commander, Andriy Biletsky, infamously said Ukraine’s mission is to “lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival … against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”

the Azov backer’s television channel had by this time aired the hit TV show Servant of the People (2015-2019), which catapulted Volodymyr Zelensky to fame and ultimately into the presidency under the new Servant of the People Party. The former actor and comedian’s presidential campaign was bankrolled by Kolomoisky, according to multiple reports.

Zelensky was elected president on the promise of ending the Donbass war. About seven months into his term he traveled to the front line in Donbass to tell Ukrainian troops, where Azov is well-represented, to lay down their arms. Instead he was sent packing. The Kyiv Post 

A short history of neo-Nazism in Ukraine in response to some who say, “There is no evidence that Nazism has substantial influence in Ukraine.” Joe Lauria reports. 

By Joe Lauria, Consortium News, 20 Apr 25

The U.S. relationship with Ukrainian fascists began after the Second World War. During the war, units of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) took part in the Holocaust, killing at least 100,000 Jews and Poles. 

Mykola Lebed, a top aide to Stepan Bandera, the leader of the fascist OUN-B, was recruited by the C.I.A. after the war, according to a 2010 study by the U.S. National Archives. 

The government study said, “Bandera’s wing (OUN/B) was a militant fascist organization.” Bandera’s closest deputy, Yaroslav Stetsko, said: ““I…fully appreciate the undeniably harmful and hostile role of the Jews, who are helping Moscow to enslave Ukraine…. I therefore support the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine….”

The study says: “At a July 6, 1941, meeting in Lwów, Bandera loyalists determined that Jews ‘have to be treated harshly…. We must finish them off…. Regarding the Jews, we will adopt any methods that lead to their destruction.’”

Lebed himself proposed to “’cleanse the entire revolutionary territory of the Polish population,’ so that a resurgent Polish state would not claim the region as in 1918.” Lebed was the “foreign minister” of a Banderite government in exile, but he later broke with Bandera for acting as a dictator. The U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps termed Bandera “extremely dangerous” yet said he was “looked upon as the spiritual and national hero of all Ukrainians….”

The C.I.A. was not interested in working with Bandera, pages 81-82 of the report say, but the British MI6 was. “MI6 argued, Bandera’s group was ‘the strongest Ukrainian organization abroad, is deemed competent to train party cadres, [and] build a morally and politically healthy organization….’”  An early 1954 MI6 summary noted that, “the operational aspect of this [British] collaboration [with Bandera] was developing satisfactorily. Gradually a more complete control was obtained over infiltration operations …

Britain ended its collaboration with Bandera in 1954. West German intelligence, under former Nazi intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen, then worked with Bandera, who was eventually assassinated with cyanide dust by the KGB in Munich in 1959.

Instead of Bandera, the C.I.A. was interested in Lebed, despite his fascist background. They set him up in an office in New York City from which he directed sabotage and propaganda operations on the agency’s behalf inside Ukraine against the Soviet Union.  The U.S. government study says:

“CIA operations with these Ukrainians began in 1948 under the cryptonym CARTEL, soon changed to AERODYNAMIC. … Lebed relocated to New York and acquired permanent resident status, then U.S. citizenship. It kept him safe from assassination, allowed him to speak to Ukrainian émigré groups, and permitted him to return to the United States after operational trips to Europe. Once in the United States, Lebed was the CIA’s chief contact for AERODYNAMIC. CIA handlers pointed to his ‘cunning character,’ his ‘relations with the Gestapo and … Gestapo training,’ [and] the fact that he was ‘a very ruthless operator.’”

The C.I.A. worked with Lebed on sabotage and pro-Ukrainian nationalist propaganda operations inside Ukraine until Ukraine’s independence in 1991. “Mykola Lebed’s relationship with the CIA lasted the entire length of the Cold War,” the study says. “While most CIA operations involving wartime perpetrators backfired, Lebed’s operations augmented the fundamental instability of the Soviet Union.” 

Bandera Revival

The U.S. thus covertly kept Ukrainian fascist ideas alive inside Ukraine until at least Ukrainian independence was achieved. “Mykola Lebed, Bandera’s wartime chief in Ukraine, died in 1998. He is buried in New Jersey, and his papers are located at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University,” the U.S. National Archives study says.  

The successor organization to the OUN-B in the United States did not die with him, however.  It had been renamed the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), according to the International Business Times (IBT).

“By the mid-1980s, the Reagan administration was honeycombed with UCCA members. Reagan personally welcomed [Yaroslav] Stetsko, the Banderist leader who oversaw the massacre of 7,000 Jews in Lviv, in the White House in 1983,” IBT reported.  “Following the demise of [Viktor] Yanukovich’s regime [in 2014], the UCCA helped organise rallies in cities across the US in support of the EuroMaidan protests,” it reported.

That is a direct link between Maidan and WWII-era Ukrainian fascism.

Despite the U.S. favoring the less extreme Lebed over Bandera, the latter has remained the more inspiring figure in Ukraine.

In 1991, the first year of Ukraine’s independence, the neo-fascist Social National Party, later Svoboda Party, was formed, tracing its provenance directly to Bandera. It had a street named after Bandera in Liviv, and tried to name the city’s airport after him. (Svoboda won 10 percent of the Rada’s seats in 2012 before the coup and before Sen. John McCain and U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland appeared with Svoboda’s leader the following year.)

In 2010, pro-Western Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko declared Bandera a Hero of Ukraine, a status reversed by President Viktor Yanukovych, who was overthrown with the help of Ukrainian neo-Nazis in 2014. 

More than 50 monuments, busts and museums commemorating Bandera have been erected in Ukraine, two-thirds of which have been built since 2005, the year the pro-American Yuschenko was elected. A Swiss academic study says:


“On January 13, 2011, the L’vivs’ka Oblast’ Council, meeting at an extraordinary session next to the Bandera monument in L’viv, reacted to the abrogation [skasuvannya] of Viktor Yushchenko’s order about naming Stepan Bandera a ‘Hero of Ukraine’ by affirming that ‘for millions of Ukrainians Bandera was and remains a Ukrainian Hero notwithstanding pitiable and worthless decisions of the courts’ and declaring its intention to rename ‘Stepan Bandera Street’ as ‘Hero of Ukraine Stepan Bandera Street.’”

Torchlit parades behind Bandera’s portrait are common in Ukrainian cities, particularly on Jan. 1, his birthday, including this year. 

Mainstream on Neo-Nazis

From the start of the 2013-2014 events in Ukraine, Consortium News founder Robert Parry and other writers began providing the evidence NewsGuard, which bills itself as a news-rating agency, says doesn’t exist. Parry began reporting extensively on the coup and the influential role of Ukraine’s neo-Nazis. At the time, corporate media also reported on the essential part neo-Nazis played in the coup. [See: ROBERT PARRY: Ukraine’s Inconvenient Neo-Nazis]

As The New York Times reported, the neo-Nazi group, Right Sector, had the key role in the violent ouster of Yanukovych. The role of neo-fascist groups in the uprising and its influence on Ukrainian society was well reported by mainstream media outlets at the time.  

The BBC, the NYT, the Daily Telegraph and CNN all reported on Right Sector, C14 and other extremists’ role in the overthrow of Yanukovych. The BBC ran this report a week after his ouster:

After the coup a number of ministers in the new government came from neo-fascist parties.  NBC News (100 percent NewsGuard rating) reported in March 2014: “Svoboda, which means ‘Freedom,’ was given almost a quarter of the Cabinet positions in the interim government formed after the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych in February.”

Svoboda’s leader, Tyahnybok, whom McCain and Nuland stood on stage with, once called for the liberation of Ukraine from the “Muscovite-Jewish mafia.” The International Business Times (82.5 percent) reported:

“In 2005 Tyahnybok signed an open letter to then Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko urging him to ban all Jewish organisations, including the Anti-Defamation League, which he claimed carried out ‘criminal activities [of] organised Jewry’, ultimately aimed at the genocide of the Ukrainian people.”

Before McCain and Nuland embraced Tyahnybok and his social national party, it was condemned by the European Parliament, which said in 2012:

Continue reading →

April 25, 2025 Posted by | history, secrets,lies and civil liberties, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Bribery at Hinkley Point

A claim for unfair dismissal by project director Garrick Nisbet against Notus Heavy Lift Solutions – one of the heavy lift subcontractors working for EDF on the construction the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station in the UK – has highlighted cases of bribery and corruption at the site, relating to the supply of heavy lift and rigging services.

An employment tribunal held last year was told that Ashley Daniels – at the time EDF’s head of lifting and temporary works at Hinkley Point C – accepted gifts from Nisbet on the basis that it would help ensure more business for him and his employer Notus. The ‘gifts’ included an £11,000 quad bike, £2,000 worth of tickets for a boxing match and of all things a refill for a Montblanc pen. Daniels’ activities are reportedly the subject of an ongoing investigation by EDF.

Notus Heavy Lift dismissed Nisbet without notice in April 2023 when evidence came to light, indicating that he had given the quad bike to Daniels in exchange for more work or to retain existing work levels. Daniels had apparently told Nisbet that the quad bike would give “Notus a bit of breathing space”.

In evidence given by the former managing director of Notus Heavy Lift, the tribunal heard that Daniels had “the full authority to decide who came on site and that without Ashley’s approval, Notus would not have any work on the site”.

Nisbet claimed that the ‘favours’ he had offered Daniels were limited to lunches, coffee and biscuits, and argued that he had nothing to do with the boxing tickets, adding that the Montblanc refill was simply a spare he had bought, which Daniels had asked for.

Employment judge Colm O’Rourke found that Nisbet’s use of the word “favours” was “disingenuous”, adding that the items given were “clearly bribes”………………………

………………………….More information on the ruling and evidence

This case was concluded in October last year but updated earlier this month.

To see the full list of reasons and evidence in this case go to: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/673c76869a48a5ab14acc394/Mr_G_Nisbet_-vs-_Notus_Heavy_Lift_Solutions_Limited_-_6001564.2023_-_Written_Reasons.pdf

Vertikal 24th April 2025
https://vertikal.net/en/news/story/46007/bribery-at-hinkley-point

April 24, 2025 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, UK | Leave a comment

CIA: Undermining and Nazifying Ukraine Since 1953

In 1969, AERODYNAMIC began advancing the cause of the Crimean Tatars. In 1959, owing to Canada’s large Ukrainian population, Canada’s intelligence service began a program similar to AERODYNAMIC codenamed «REDSKIN».

AERODYNAMIC continued into the 1980s as operation QRDYNAMIC, which was assigned to the CIA’s Political and Psychological Staff’s Soviet East Europe Covert Action Program. Prolog saw its operations expanded from New York and Munich to London, Paris, and Tokyo. 

Assistant Secretary of State for European/Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, the baked goods-bearing «Maiden of Maidan,» told the US Congress that the United States spent $5 billion to wrest control of Ukraine from the Russian sphere since the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the recent disclosures from the CIA it appears that the price tag to the American tax payers of such foreign shenanigans was much higher.

by Wayne Madsen, Voltaire Network | 14 January 2016

The CIA programs spanned some four decades. Starting as a paramilitary operation that provided funding and equipment for such anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance groups as the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (UHVR); its affiliates, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), all Nazi Banderists. The CIA also provided support to a relatively anti-Bandera faction of the UHVR, the ZP-UHVR, a foreign-based virtual branch of the CIA and British MI-6 intelligence services. The early CIA operation to destabilize Ukraine, using exile Ukrainian agents in the West who were infiltrated into Soviet Ukraine, was codenamed Project AERODYNAMIC.

The recent declassification of over 3800 documents by the Central Intelligence Agency provides detailed proof that since 1953 the CIA operated two major programs intent on not only destabilizing Ukraine but Nazifying it with followers of the World War II Ukrainian Nazi leader Stepan Bandera.

A formerly TOP SECRET CIA document dated July 13, 1953, provides a description of AERODYNAMIC: «The purpose of Project AERODYNAMIC is to provide for the exploitation and expansion of the anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance for cold war and hot war purposes. Such groups as the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (UHVR) and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army (OUN), the Foreign Representation of the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (ZPUHVR) in Western Europe and the United States, and other organizations such as the OUN/B will be utilized». The CIA admitted in a 1970 formerly SECRET document that it had been in contact with the ZPUHVR since 1950.

The OUN-B was the Bandera faction of the OUN and its neo-Nazi sympathizers are today found embedded in the Ukrainian national government in Kiev and in regional and municipal governments throughout the country.

AERODYNAMIC placed field agents inside Soviet Ukraine who, in turn, established contact with Ukrainian Resistance Movement, particularly SB (intelligence service) agents of the OUN who were already operating inside Ukraine. The CIA arranged for airdrops of communications equipment and other supplies, presumably including arms and ammunition, to the «secret» CIA army in Ukraine. Most of the CIA’s Ukrainian agents received training in West Germany from the US Army’s Foreign Intelligence Political and Psychological (FI-PP) branch. Communications between the CIA agents in Ukraine and their Western handlers were conducted by two-way walkie-talkie (WT), shortwave via international postal channels, and clandestine airborne and overland couriers.

Agents airdropped into Ukraine carried a kit that contained, among other items, a pen gun with tear gas, an arctic sleeping bag, a camp axe, a trenching tool, a pocket knife, a chocolate wafer, a Minox camera and a 35 mm Leica camera, film, a Soviet toiletry kit, a Soviet cap and jacket, a .22 caliber pistol and bullets, and rubber «contraceptives» for ‘waterproofing film’. Other agents were issued radio sets, hand generators, nickel-cadmium batteries, and homing beacons.

An affiliated project under AERODYNAMIC was codenamed CAPACHO.

CIA documents show that AERODYNAMIC continued in operation through the Richard Nixon administration into 1970.

The program took on more of a psychological warfare operation veneer than a real-life facsimile of a John Le Carré «behind the Iron Curtain» spy novel. The CIA set up a propaganda company in Manhattan that catered to printing and publishing anti-Soviet ZPUHVR literature that would be smuggled into Ukraine. The new battleground would not be swampy retreats near Odessa and cold deserted warehouses in Kiev but at the center of the world of publishing and the broadcast media.

Read more: CIA: Undermining and Nazifying Ukraine Since 1953

The CIA front company was Prolog Research and Publishing Associates, Inc., which later became known simply as Prolog. The CIA codename for Prolog was AETENURE. The group published the Ukrainian language «Prolog» magazine. The CIA referred to Prolog as a «non-profit, tax exempt cover company for the ZP/UHVR’s activities». The «legal entity» used by the CIA to fund Prolog remains classified information. However, the SECRET CIA document does state that the funds for Prolog were passed to the New York office «via Denver and Los Angeles and receipts are furnished Prolog showing fund origin to backstop questioning by New York fiscal authorities».

As for the Munich office of Prolog, the CIA document states that funding for it comes from an account separate from that of Prolog in New York from a cooperating bank, which also remains classified. In 1967, the CIA merged the activities of Prolog Munich and the Munich office of the Ukrainian exiled nationalist «Suchasnist» journal. The Munich office also supported the «Ukrainische Gesellschaft fur Auslandstudien». The CIA documents also indicate that US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents may have interfered with AERODYNAMIC agents in New York. A 1967 CIA directive advised all ZPUHVR agents in the United States to either report their contacts with United Nations mission diplomats and UN employees from the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR to the FBI or their own CIA project case officer. CIA agents in charge of AERODYNAMIC in New York and Munich were codenamed AECASSOWARY agents. Apparently not all that taken with the brevity of MI-6’s famed agent «007», one CIA agent in Munich was codenamed AECASSOWARY/6 and the senior agent in New York was AECASSOWARY/2.

AECASSOWARY agents took part in and ran other AERODYNAMIC teams that infiltrated the Vienna World Youth Conference in 1959. The Vienna infiltration operation, where contact with made with young Ukrainians, was codenamed LCOUTBOUND by the CIA.

In 1968, the CIA ordered Prolog Research and Publishing Associates, Inc. terminated and replaced by Prolog Research Corporation, «a profit-making, commercial enterprise ostensibly serving contracts for unspecified users as private individuals and institutions».

The shakeup of Prolog was reported by the CIA to have arisen from operation MHDOWEL. There is not much known about MHDOWEL other than it involved the blowing of the CIA cover of a non-profit foundation. The following is from a memo to file, dated January 31, 1969, from CIA assistant general counsel John Greany, «Concerns a meeting of Greaney, counsel Lawrence Houston and Rocca about a ‘confrontation’ with NY FBI office on January 17, 1969. They discussed two individuals whose names were redacted. One was said to be a staff agent of the CIA since 8/28/61 who had been assigned in 1964 to write a monograph, which had been funded by a grant from a foundation whose cover was blown in MHDOWEL (I suspect that is code for US Press). One of the individuals [name redacted] had been requested for use with Project DTPILLAR in November 1953 to Feb. 1955 and later in March 1964 for WUBRINY. When the Domestic Operations Division advised Security that this person would not be used in WUBRINY, Rocca commented that ‘there are some rather ominous allegations against members of the firm of [redacted],’ indicating one member of that firm was a ‘card-carrying member of the Communist Party.’ The memo went on to say that Rocca was investigating the use of the individual in Project DTPILLAR concerning whether that person had mentioned activities in Geneva in March 1966 in connection with Herbert Itkin». Raymond Rocca was the deputy chief of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Division. Itkin was an undercover agent for the FBI and CIA who allegedly infiltrated the Mafia and was given a new identity in California as «Herbert Atkin» in 1972.

In 1969, AERODYNAMIC began advancing the cause of the Crimean Tatars. In 1959, owing to Canada’s large Ukrainian population, Canada’s intelligence service began a program similar to AERODYNAMIC codenamed «REDSKIN».

As international air travel increased, so did the number of visitors to the West from Soviet Ukraine. These travelers were of primary interest to AERODYNAMIC. Travelers were asked by CIA agents to clandestinely carry Prolog materials, all censored by the Soviet government, back to Ukraine for distribution. Later, AERODYNAMIC agents began approaching Ukrainian visitors to eastern European countries, particularly Soviet Ukrainian visitors to Czechoslovakia during the «Prague Spring» of 1968. The Ukrainian CIA agents had the same request to carry back subversive literature to Ukraine.

AERODYNAMIC continued into the 1980s as operation QRDYNAMIC, which was assigned to the CIA’s Political and Psychological Staff’s Soviet East Europe Covert Action Program. Prolog saw its operations expanded from New York and Munich to London, Paris, and Tokyo. 

QRDYNAMIC began linking up with operations financed by hedge fund tycoon George Soros, particularly the Helsinki Watch Group’s operatives in Kiev and Moscow. Distribution of underground material expanded from journals and pamphlets to audio cassette tapes, self-inking stamps with anti-Soviet messages, stickers, and T-shirts.

QRDYNAMIC expanded its operations into China, obviously from the Tokyo office, and Czechoslovakia, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Soviet Central Asia, the Soviet Pacific Maritime region, and among Ukrainian-Canadians. QRDYNAMIC also paid journalist agents-of-influence for their articles. These journalists were located in Sweden, Switzerland, Australia, Israel, and Austria.

But at the outset of glasnost and perestroika in the mid-1980s, things began to look bleak for QRDYNAMIC. The high cost of rent in Manhattan had it looking for cheaper quarters in New Jersey.

Assistant Secretary of State for European/Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, the baked goods-bearing «Maiden of Maidan,» told the US Congress that the United States spent $5 billion to wrest control of Ukraine from the Russian sphere since the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the recent disclosures from the CIA it appears that the price tag to the American tax payers of such foreign shenanigans was much higher.

April 16, 2025 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Ambassador does not deny Russian attempts to track UK subs

Alys Davies BBC 12th April 2025

Russia’s ambassador to the UK has not denied allegations that Russian sensors have been hidden in seas around Great Britain in an attempt to track UK nuclear submarines.

Andrei Kelin said that while he did not deny Russia was attempting to track British submarines, he rejected the idea that such activities presented a threat to the UK.

Asked on BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg whether he objected to the claims, Kelin said: “No”.

“I am not going to deny it, but I wonder whether we really have an interest in following all the British submarine with very old outdated nuclear warheads… all these threats are extremely exaggerated,” he said.

Pressed further by Kuenssberg, the ambassador added: “I’m denying existence of threats for the United Kingdom. This threat has been invented, absolutely, there is no threat at all from Russia to the UK.”

Kelin’s admission follows an investigation published by the Sunday Times earlier this month, detailing the discovery of alleged Russian sensors in seas around Britain.

In its investigation, the Sunday Times said the devices are believed to have been planted by Moscow to try to gather intelligence on the UK’s four Vanguard submarines, which carry nuclear missiles……………………………………………………………………………………..
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yl2729nmjo

April 15, 2025 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, UK | Leave a comment

Tory peer helped secure meeting with minister for Canadian nuclear firm he advises

Ian Duncan ‘facilitated an introduction’ for Terrestrial Energy, which was seeking government funding

Rob Evans and Henry Dyer, Guardian 10th April 2025,

 A Conservative peer helped to secure a meeting with a minister for a
Canadian company he was advising while it was seeking government funding
worth millions of pounds. Ian Duncan was on an advisory board of
Terrestrial Energy, a nuclear technology company, when he “facilitated an
introduction” between its chief executive and a new energy minister while
the company was applying for a government grant. The revelation raises
questions for Duncan about whether his actions broke House of Lords rules.
The meeting with Andrew Bowie, the nuclear minister at the time, enabled
the chief executive of Terrestrial Energy to lobby for easier access to UK
government funding. Lord Duncan of Springbank has been an adviser to the
company since 2020, after he was recruited by another peer, Lady
Bloomfield. He took the position months after a stint as a junior climate
minister. He does not receive a salary for the role, but was given share
options at the outset of his appointment.

These give him the right to buy shares in the company at a preferential rate if they become profitable. In March, the company announced a deal that would result in its shares being listed on a US stock market at the end of the year, with the company valued at about $1bn. The move could allow Duncan to make a significant profit……………………………………………………………………

Peers are banned under House of Lords rules from seeking to “profit from membership of the house”. They are barred from making use of their position to “help others to lobby” members of either house, ministers or officials, “by whatever means”.

Dr Jonathan Rose, a political integrity expert at De Montfort University, said Duncan’s conduct appeared to be “extremely problematic”. “I think there needs to be an investigation specifically into Lord Duncan to understand whether he actually did break the rules. It seems to me that he is providing parliamentary advice and services, which he’s not allowed to do.”

Details of Duncan’s conduct are being published by the Guardian as part of the Lords debate, a series examining the role of the House of Lords and the conduct of its members, at a time when the government is proposing to reform the upper chamber.

 Guardian 10th April 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/apr/10/tory-peer-helped-canadian-firm-advising-secure-meeting-minister

April 14, 2025 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, UK | Leave a comment

Ex-Hinkley boss called ‘greedy toad’ over bribes

A senior manager at a nuclear power plant has been described to a tribunal as a “greedy little toad” over claims he accepted bribes.

Ashley Daniels, who worked at Hinkley Point C in Somerset under the French energy company EDF, accepted an £11,000 quad bike from a subcontractor looking to secure more work, the employment tribunal in Bristol heard.

Mr Daniels, who the BBC understands no longer works for the company, was not the subject of the tribunal, which was brought by a former employee of the subcontractor.

The tribunal heard Mr Daniels also received gifts including £2,000 hospitality tickets for a boxing match and a refill for his Montblanc fountain pen.

The hearing, for a claim of unfair dismissal, was brought by engineer Garrick Nisbet against the subcontractor, Notus Heavy Lift Solutions.

Mr Nisbet was dismissed without notice in April 2023 in the belief he had gifted the quad bike to Mr Daniels – at the time the head of lifting and temporary works at Hinkley – to “ensure that work was directed” to Notus, the hearing was told.

Speaking about messages he had sent regarding the alleged bribes, Mr Nisbet told the tribunal Mr Daniels was “cheeky and a greedy little toad”.

In other messages, the tribunal heard, he said the purchase of the quad bike would give Notus “a bit of breathing space”, later saying Mr Daniels was “hard to say no to”.

‘Clearly bribes’

Hinkley Point B halted operations in August 2022 having come to the end of its life, with Hinkley Point C under construction since late 2018………….

 BBC 8th April 2025 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn7xv8vyzp3o

April 11, 2025 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, UK | Leave a comment

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