The CIA as Organized Crime in Ukraine

 In a video recorded in 2022, author Douglas Valentine discusses his book The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World (2016) with a particular focus on Chapter 9 which covers the history of the agency’s long project to use Ukraine as a tool to weaken the Soviet Union and Russia.

“The United States occupies Ukraine. Its government is an occupation government that’s supported, funded and directed by the United States. The businessmen, the military people, and the politicians that support the Americans benefit, and those who don’t are put on hit lists and they’re targeted. That’s basically the history and the summary of what’s going on in Ukraine. The CIA, through its agent operations, which have been in place for 70 years, is the vanguard of that operation.”

Introduction

It never ceases to amaze me these days that information like what is given below by Douglas Valentine is continually dismissed by people my age as “whacko conspiracy stuff,” “Putin propaganda,” “right wing,” and other such derogatory terms.

All talk of Russia committing an act of “unprovoked aggression” and “violating international borders” shrinks down to the proper perspective if one is capable of seeing that the Russian reaction, which came after eight years of Russian attempts to settle the conflict peacefully, is a military action that aims to put an end to an illegal occupation of Ukraine. It is a covert occupation in which the occupier does not legally acknowledge its status, but it should be, for all effective purposes, defined as an occupation. NATO countries supply the weapons, the humanitarian aid, and even the money for the national budget of Ukraine. NATO tells the Ukrainian puppet government whether to keep fighting or to negotiate a settlement. If the puppet master left, the Ukrainian government would collapse within days.

When I was coming of age in the 1970s, it seemed to me that everyone my own age was quite jaded by having grown up in the era of political assassinations, social unrest, and war in Southeast Asia. Many had become apolitical and nihilistic, or just interested in making money, but even these people had good bullshit detectors and a healthy skepticism of official narratives.

The revelations of the Church Committee (United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) laid bare the CIA’s mind control programs (MK-ULTRA), surveillance of domestic organizations, assassination plots against foreign leaders, covert overthrow of foreign governments, and its infiltration of American media and entertainment industries (Project Mockingbird).

Reagan’s war on Central America in the 1980s and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s should have solidified the worldview that existed. Of course, there were always millions of people who thought “the war on communism” or “the war on terror” had to be fought everywhere, but there was a large enough portion of the population that opposed them and sometimes stopped the worst from happening. Nowadays, that dissenting population is much smaller and more marginalized. Trump, Brexit, the Covid reaction, economic instability, and anti-Russian propaganda have inflicted to a mass mindfuck that has erased the once-prevalent cynical understanding of the CIA and American foreign policy. Some people of my generation seem to have been altered not by insecurity and fear but by the narcotizing effect of affluence and entertainment. They simply don’t remember and are too lazy to read and learn something more than what can be spoon-fed to them in a soundbite.

The mass media, which was never great but sometimes oppositional, is now just a sponsored propaganda organ for government, “philanthropic” foundations (tax shelters), and corporations. The media logos are the same, so many people carry on under the mistaken assumption that they are still ingesting a virtuous thing called “journalism.” No one told them that that train left the station a long time ago.

The Church Committee, as well as the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations, were bottom-up phenomena—freak openings of the curtain, ephemera, comets that won’t be back this way for a long, long time. They were products of 1970s activism and popular influence over Congress. There were actually elected officials in those days who responded to the popular call to investigate the activities of the security state. These investigations were actually thwarted by the CIA, and their conclusions were watered down (with phrases like “probable conspiracy”), but they had an impact. It is impossible to imagine the benighted masses doing anything similar now to restrain the covert operations, greed and corruption of a civilization that is sleepwalking into catastrophic war. The television audiences don’t know, don’t want to know, or don’t even know that they don’t know.

TRANSCRIPT

DOUGLAS VALENTINE: After World War Two, communism became the bugaboo, and the Soviet Union became the enemy. One of the things the CIA did right after World War Two was hire a lot of Nazis. Guys who had been Nazis were now recycled and brought into the CIA. The Nazi rocket scientist Von Braun went to work for the United States developing intercontinental ballistic missiles. So their Nazi past was forgiven, and Nazis went to work for the United States, including a guy named Reinhard Gehlen, who had been the Nazi military intelligence officer in charge of operations against the Soviets in Eastern Europe. This guy, Gehlen, became the CIA’s main intelligence operator into East Berlin and areas like Ukraine, where he had had Nazis intelligence agents during World War Two. And this guy, Reinhard Gehlen, on behalf of his new CIA masters, just activated all the agent nets that he had during World War Two.

The same thing was going on in Ukraine, although in Ukraine very large swaths of its population were fascists and more actively involved against the war against the Soviets and were enemies of the United States in World War Two. After World War Two, they became assets of the CIA. So the CIA has been developing fascist assets in Ukraine for 70 years. Every year since 1948, when the CIA went into operation, it has had a station in Ukraine with a CIA officer who’s running operations. Those operations have all been directed against, first, the Soviet Union, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, against Russia. There’s a lot of momentum that has built up over 75 years. Vast agent nets have been put in place. Sleeper agents have been in place for decades, and they’re all working against Russia, which is why nowadays it’s so hard for the mainstream media and the government to shift and even consider for a moment having good relations with Russia.

NATO? Its whole mandate and its whole reason for its existence has been to threaten and roll back Russia, and eventually sabotage and subvert it and put it out of business. The CIA’s operations in Ukraine are the cutting-edge vanguard of this effort. So if you look at recent events in Ukraine, you have to see them in that context—how for decades the CIA has been trying to recruit Ukrainian politicians, Ukrainian businessmen who are sympathetic and compatible with Western American ideas, values and interests—who are fighting against the Russians—and recruiting them, and putting them in place and setting them up with bank accounts, giving them paramilitary training, everything the CIA does across the board.

Ukraine has been the vanguard of this operation against Russia. The details are in my book, The CIA as Organized Crime—how this works at the at the agent level, how the CIA would go around after the coup that threw out a pro-Russian government and installed a pro-American anti-Russian government. The CIA had already had security services and military people in place who are able to create private militias that would then work against individuals in Ukraine who were pro-Russian. It was just like they treated South Vietnam or any other country that the United States occupies. That is the situation in Ukraine. The United States occupies Ukraine. Its government is an occupation government that’s supported, funded and directed by the United States. The businessmen, the military people, and the politicians that support the Americans benefit, and those who don’t are put on hit lists and they’re targeted. That’s basically the history and the summary of what’s going on in Ukraine. The CIA, through its agent operations, which have been in place for 70 years, is the vanguard of that operation.

So is the intent and purpose of the CIA and American involvement in Ukraine to topple Russia, to balkanize Russia?

Oh, absolutely, but it’s also to steal from Ukraine, to take all the natural resources that are available there, the profits that can be had. It’s capitalism. It’s nationalism—American nationalists who are businessmen. As soon as the CIA arranged that coup and installed a pro-American government, Joe Biden’s son became the head of one of the biggest oil companies in Ukraine. American businessmen just swooped down like vultures to take over any business, like Mafia dons and Mafia gangsters, that they could steal everything from. That’s exactly what they’re doing, especially in eastern Ukraine, where a lot of the natural resource industries are based. That’s why it’s so contentious there. The CIA, through its assets in private industry, is trying to bring all those people, all those people who are considered compatible, into the American fold. You don’t see it at its dirty level, at the level of blackmailing people, the level of extorting people, the level of the CIA using its underworld contacts to squeeze these people and to force them out of business and to make life miserable for them so that they give up their associations with Russians and Russian businessmen.

That’s what’s going on at the very basic level. Militias are being formed to terrorize anybody who supported Russia in Donbass and places like that. As for the details, you would have to spend years studying them to understand. I suggest you just read the book to see how the CIA has relationships with the security services in Ukraine. As soon as the coup was launched, it took over control of those security services and it started drawing up the hit lists, targeting people that it could go after. The people that they target most highly are people that are sitting on natural resources that American businessmen want. They are not going after plumbers and carpenters. They are going after major businessmen. That’s what the CIA does. It paves the way for American business interests by using illegal methods and by using illegal methods to install politicians in Ukraine that will follow the American line. These are things that you don’t know about, that you’re not told about by the media, which, I should add, is well aware of what’s going on, but just doesn’t tell you because it’s good for their business, too.

Source discussed

Douglas Valentine, The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World (Clarity Press, 2016) Chapter 9: The CIA in Ukraine, pages 129-143.

For information on the popular pressure that led to the creation of the select committees mentioned in the introduction, see Mark Lane, Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK (Skyhorse, 2012).