MORE ON THE “PANAMA PAPERS…”

...this is a story that's not going away, at least, not for the moment. Literally mintues after I had completed and posted last Thursday's News and Views from the Nefarium, a kind individual posted that he and his friends had tried to track down thje story of Mr. Putin declassifying things from the 1930s in the Russian archives. The story, it seems (according to their researches) was from a Russian alternative media site, as no official government outlet was mentioning it. So, was this just a publicity stunt by the site to drive attention to itself, or a nice psychological operations game on the part of the Russian government during all the Panama Papers attention? Who knows, but in today's world I'd put my money on the latter actually.

Wayne Madsen's analysis ties the leaks back to the CIA and (who else?) George Soros in the following artcile shared by Mr. A::

«Cherry picking» leaked documents: a CIA art form

A so-called non-profit entity, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), cherry-picking information from a purported leak of 11.5 million documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. In turn, the findings of this consortium were provided to a network of over 100 media partners, including some of the largest newspapers in the world. What was not reported by the newspapers, all too eager to stenographically report what they were provided by the consortium, is that ICIJ is financially supported by George Soros's Open Society Foundations and the Central Intelligence Agency-directed US Agency for International Development (USAID).

The corporate media played up the connections of various off-shore tax-dodging contrivances and money laundering vehicles to a collection of world leaders. However, instead of focusing on leaders who have direct connections to money laundering and tax evasion, for example, Argentina’s neoconservative fascism-friendly president Mauricio Macri, the ICIJ, as is their usual method, hyped fuzzy «guilt by association» links to specific leaders. Not surprisingly, the chief targets for ICIJ were the CIA's number one and number two foes, respectively – Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping

Well, if this is all a CIA-Soros(and therefore, Nazi) thing, then the anti-Putin anti-Xi motivation does raise the possibility, again, of a Russian response in the form of its own deliberate leaks.

But... as Mr. A also pointed out in this article which he also shared, Zero Hedge's "Tyler Durden" is contemplating the idea that the leaks may have been a Russian operation to begin with:

Was The Panama Papers "Leak" A Russian Intelligence Operation?

"Durden begins by considering this theory of David Murray, we'll call it the "Big Corporations are not Reporting Everything" theory:

The first plausible theory I came across attempting to explain the strangeness of it all was proposed by Craig Murray, and it basically went something like this. The leaker is a real whistleblower, but he placed the information in the wrong hands, therefore the organizations and journalists reporting on the story were not giving us the whole truth. Here’s some of that theory from the post, Are Corporate Gatekeepers Protecting Western Elites from the Leaked Panama Papers?

Then there's the CIA-Soros Get Putin theory:

The fact that we seem to know nothing about “John Doe” concerns me. Say what you will about Edward Snowden, but he came out publicly shortly after his whistleblowing and offered himself up for the world to judge. His life, career and personality have been put on full display, and each and every one of us has had the opportunity to decide for ourselves whether his motivations were noble and pure or not.

With the Panama Papers’ “John Doe” we are given no such opportunity, and in fact, the whole thing reads very much like a script concocted by some big budget intelligence agency. Once I started coming around to this conclusion, the obvious choice was U.S. intelligence; given the lack of implications to powerful Americans, the clownishly desperate attempts to smear Putin, and the appearance of Soros, USAID, Ford Foundation, etc, linked organizations to the reporting.

So for someone who already thinks the whole Panama Papers story stinks to high heaven, a CIA link to the release seems obvious; but is it too obvious? Perhaps.

Going on to cite Clifford Gaddy of the Brookings Institution, Zero Hedge comes to Gaddy's The Russians Are Behind it THeory, simply because no one seems to gain from the whole exercise other than Russia:

So let’s say that the “who” is the Russians, and the “why” is to deflect attention and show that “everybody does it.” But how? Given Russia’s vaunted hacking capabilities, a special cyber unit in the Kremlin may have been able to obtain the documents. (Monssack Fonseca is maintaining that the leak was not an inside job.) But it is most likely that such an operation would be run out of an agency called the Russian Financial Monitoring Service (RFM). RFM is Putin’s personal financial intelligence unit—he created it and it answers only to him. It is completely legitimate and is widely recognized as the most powerful such agency in the world, with a monopoly on information about money laundering, offshore centers, and related issues involving Russia or Russian nationals.

An operation like the Panama Papers, which is only about financial intelligence, would have to be run out of RFM. Not the FSB, not some ad hoc gang in the Kremlin. While it might not (legally) have access to secrets kept by a firm like Mossack Fonseca, it’s privy to lots of international financial information through the international body of which it is a leading member, the Financial Action Task Force. In short, Russians are better equipped than anyone—more capable and less constrained—to hack into secret files.

As for how to leak the documents, it would actually be pretty ingenious to “incriminate” Russia in a seemingly serious (and headline-grabbing) way without actually revealing incriminating information. That’s exactly what we have. The Panama Papers revealed no Russian secrets. They added nothing to the rumors already circulating about Putin’s alleged private fortune. And the story-that-isn’t-a-story was advanced by none other than the ICIJ. So, done right, the last thing anyone would suspect is that the Panama Papers are a Russian operation.

The motivation? Blackmail, and control:

So let’s say that the “who” is the Russians, and the “why” is to deflect attention and show that “everybody does it.” But how? Given Russia’s vaunted hacking capabilities, a special cyber unit in the Kremlin may have been able to obtain the documents. (Monssack Fonseca is maintaining that the leak was not an inside job.) But it is most likely that such an operation would be run out of an agency called the Russian Financial Monitoring Service (RFM). RFM is Putin’s personal financial intelligence unit—he created it and it answers only to him. It is completely legitimate and is widely recognized as the most powerful such agency in the world, with a monopoly on information about money laundering, offshore centers, and related issues involving Russia or Russian nationals.

An operation like the Panama Papers, which is only about financial intelligence, would have to be run out of RFM. Not the FSB, not some ad hoc gang in the Kremlin. While it might not (legally) have access to secrets kept by a firm like Mossack Fonseca, it’s privy to lots of international financial information through the international body of which it is a leading member, the Financial Action Task Force. In short, Russians are better equipped than anyone—more capable and less constrained—to hack into secret files.

As for how to leak the documents, it would actually be pretty ingenious to “incriminate” Russia in a seemingly serious (and headline-grabbing) way without actually revealing incriminating information. That’s exactly what we have. The Panama Papers revealed no Russian secrets. They added nothing to the rumors already circulating about Putin’s alleged private fortune. And the story-that-isn’t-a-story was advanced by none other than the ICIJ. So, done right, the last thing anyone would suspect is that the Panama Papers are a Russian operation.

Now, there's another connection here, and it's a doozy, it is found in this article shared by Mr. S.D.:

The Covert Roots of the Panama Papers

Our concern is this "little" revelation about a fellow named Adna Kashoggi:

Adnan Khashoggi would know. A “principal foreign agent” of the United States, as one Senate report referred to him, the billionaire playboy made a fortune (more than $100 million between 1970 and 1975 alone) from commissions negotiating arms deals with his native Saudi Arabia. He used these windfalls, in turn, to cultivate political clout—including, allegedly, with President Richard Nixon. In the aftermath of Watergate, when Congress began reining in the CIA, Khashoggi helped establish the supranational intelligence partnership known as the Safari Club. Soon after, he aided the CIA in circumventing another congressional impediment. With money borrowed from the Saudi and U.S. intelligence-linked Bank of Credit and Commerce International, he financed the illegal arms sales that set off the Iran-Contra scandal.

One way Khashoggi structured his shadowy holdings during his heyday was through the specialized services of Mossack Fonseca, the law firm that is in the news for having helped global luminaries like Vladimir Putin hide their money. Thanks to a recent report from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, we now know Khashoggi to be among a number of former spies and CIA associates implicated by the 2.6 terabytes of offshore financial documents provided to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung last summer.

As the quotation indicates, Kashoggi is connected to Iran-Contra, Saudi Intelligence, the Bank of Crooks and Criminals...er... the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, and (something the article does not mention) he hovers on the fringes of the Inslaw PROMIS software theft and modification as well.

And now we find him popping up in a big documents leak scandal from a law firm one of whose partners' father served in the Waffen SS, a documents leak scandal that involves the possibility that it is a Russian operation, as outlined about.

So what's today's high octane speculation? Well, without abandoning my overall "this is evidence of factional infighting theory," let's go with the Mr. Putin and the Russian RFM financial intelligence unit did it theory. Consider that this theory does make sense in a wider context, for as regular readers here know, the BRICSA bloc, and Russia in particular, have been scrambing to create their own financial clearing systems independent of SWIFT.  Russia has successfully created an internal system, and you'll recall that it was given access to Japan's widely used system in the western Pacific. Would sending a clear message to the West's plutocrats that I has highly sensitive information - plus the ability to tap into their financial secrets and accounts - fit the pattern? Yes, it would, and in addition, by targeting a law firm with questionable fascist ties, it would work very well with Russian statements in the past years about 9/11 being the world of a global network with hundreds of trillions of dollars in hidden assets, to Sergei Glazyev's more recent statement about Russia's problems are not with the Nazis in Kiev, but the Nazis in Washington, a remark, you'll recall, that was not in its original context merely a bit of rhetorical hyperbole, but a considered measurement and use of words. Finally such a view would be a context that supported that initial story about Mr. Putin releasing archival information, for on this view, he may have already done so, and signaled that he did so, via that alternative Russian site that originally reported it.

Where does it leave us? Well I suggest that the "factional infighting model" is still in play, and that there is a much larger story lurking between the lines of the headlines than we've yet been told, and the key here seems to be the mysterious John Doe that walked into the Suddeutsche Zeitung in the first place. This is still one to watch closely, and as of now, anyone's high octane speculation is as good as mine...

See you on the flip side...

Joseph P. Farrell

Joseph P. Farrell has a doctorate in patristics from the University of Oxford, and pursues research in physics, alternative history and science, and "strange stuff". His book The Giza DeathStar, for which the Giza Community is named, was published in the spring of 2002, and was his first venture into "alternative history and science".

16 Comments

  1. Guygrr on April 10, 2016 at 7:58 pm

    I tried to trace the RIA Novosti story as well and turned up nada. Sucks because I was looking forward to what those files entailed.



  2. goshawks on April 10, 2016 at 2:24 am

    “The leaker is a real whistleblower, but he placed the information in the wrong hands, therefore the organizations and journalists reporting on the story were not giving us the whole truth.”

    I do wonder about this aspect, because it reminds me of the Edward Snowden affair. Snowden placed complete copies of his documents with Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald has released only slightly-damning material since then, while admittedly ‘holding-off’ publishing the real diamonds to avoid systemic-damage. Now, is Greenwald being the prince-of-peace, or is he ‘owned’ or threatened in some way?

    If the Panama Papers are legit in any way, I could see the above-quote being true…



  3. BetelgeuseT-1 on April 9, 2016 at 11:11 pm

    ### Censor-bot test ###



    • BetelgeuseT-1 on April 9, 2016 at 11:42 pm

      Here goes again, with a certain Middle-East based agency (the one that starts with M and ends in D) with different spelling.
      The first attempt didn’t make it passed for whatever reason. Strange though, it does not show up when not logged into the site, but does when logged in.

      Mossack Fonseca.
      Hmm, Mossack, kinda sounds like M.0.5.5.A.D
      Also Mossack Fonseca isn’t only based in Panama, which is what we keep hearing in the “news”. It’s a firm with offices around the world.
      And here’s a real pearler from one of their own pages on their website where they mention the “many prestigious organizations” they are proud members of. Here’s one of them:
      “Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists”.
      Well, that didn’t work. What gives?

      I don’t think either that this is a Russian operation.
      No way would that have received the wall-to-wall MSM coverage that it has.



  4. BetelgeuseT-1 on April 9, 2016 at 10:51 pm

    Mossack Fonseca.
    Hmm, Mossack, kinda sounds like Mossad…
    Also Mossack Fonseca isn’t only based in Panama, which is what we keep hearing in the “news”. It’s a firm with offices around the world.
    And here’s a real pearler from one of their own pages on their website where they mention the “many prestigious organizations” they are proud members of. Here’s one of them:
    “Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists”.
    Well, that didn’t work. What gives?



  5. DownunderET on April 9, 2016 at 5:29 pm

    Well if there was ever a story that needed some “triple” high octane speculation, it’s this one. Claim and counter claim came very quickly, and the speculation that it could be a Russian gig throws another monkey wrench into the mix. Time will tell “how much” will be revealed, that will tell us who gets fingered and IF they belong to the west.
    I think that not much more will be forthcoming, why, because that would reveal some of the dudes who simply don’t want to be revealed, don’t forget, money talks and BS walks.



  6. basta on April 9, 2016 at 5:11 pm

    I don’t buy the Putin/RFM angle, mostly because it comes from Brookings, which de facto means it is disinfo put out there to muddy the waters and cover for the real culprits. Honestly, when have you ever had anything from them that was truthful, unless it was honestly and truly leaked?

    I think go with Occam, and ask a few pertinent questions:

    Q: Who is NOT on the list so far?
    A: Nobody at all from the US. At all. Zero. Nada. Zilch.

    Q: Who is puppetmaster and gatekeeper paying the salaries the “journalists” sifting these documents?
    A:The Soros-Gollum and allied US foundations and NGOs.

    Q: Cui bono?
    A: The US, now officially the world’s biggest offshore tax haven. The Rothschilds are now officialy in Vegas; need I say more?

    They’re fishing with dynamite, blowing up Panama and making the funny money run to Papa. And you can bet the alphabet agencies are watching the internet and telephone traffic in Bermuda, Panama and all the other traditional offshore countries like a hawk.



  7. Pellevoisin on April 9, 2016 at 4:10 pm

    Perhaps the mysterious John Doe who handed this information to the Süddeutsche Zeitung was a Jane Doe with a British passport and an axe to grind in Iceland among her other interests.



  8. Arend Lammertink on April 9, 2016 at 3:28 pm

    Michael Krieger also speculated that the leak may be a Russian intelligence operation:

    http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2016/04/08/was-the-panama-papers-leak-a-russian-intelligence-operation/

    So far, no one seems to have noted the intriguing tweets by WikiLeaks, so I commented:

    -:-
    Let’s also note:

    1) Snowden is in Russia and he has contacts with WikiLeaks;
    2) WikiLeaks is certainly capable of communicating securely with journalists;
    3) WikiLeaks has a poll on asking whether they should release the whole thing, which they reminded of yesterday;
    4) There have been rumours about Russia releasing a “Truth Bomb” for quite some time;
    5) Russia warned about a smear campaign against Putin to be released, which suggests they knew what was in there about themselves.

    The WikiLeaks tweets are intriguing:

    https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/716772373408718849
    “Should we release all 11 million #PanamaPapers so everyone can search through them like our other publications?”

    https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/718171102166585344
    “3 days to go: With 86,987 votes counted over 95% demand full disclosure of #PanamaPapers”

    The first tweet already suggests they have the files, but it could also be interpreted as a call upon ICIJ to release the files. With the second tweet, there is no doubt in my mind that WikiLeaks will release the whole thing, perhaps even as soon as Monday. If there is one thing I know about WikiLeaks and their culture, it is that they do not bluff.

    They HAVE the data and they WILL release the whole thing.

    So, what happens next?
    -:-



  9. Robert Barricklow on April 9, 2016 at 12:40 pm

    Superb Analysis!



    • Robert Barricklow on April 9, 2016 at 12:40 pm

      Of course, its under moderation.
      What else is new?



  10. marcos toledo on April 9, 2016 at 12:03 pm

    But Panama was a kleptocracy from it’s birth first for the Panama canal flag of convenience for shipping. A gangster state a little fish in a ocean of sharks a reliable fall guy patsy when needed.



  11. loisg on April 9, 2016 at 11:53 am

    So, in this theory which makes a lot of sense to me, Putin is blackmailing the western oligarchs (by not releasing their names but claiming they are in there, which, of course they are) so that he can control their responses to his agenda. He knows they will oppose his new financial clearing house, and this is his way of trying to control them. But I don’t think it will work, because the powers that control the western clearing house are not politicians who might worry about their reputations, but people behind the scenes that might really dislike having their names muddied, but won’t let that stop their agenda. Besides, they can just create something else to focus people’s attention elsewhere.



    • Don B on April 9, 2016 at 5:02 pm

      Good point. Putin also has his own oligarchs to pacify or he’ll be out on his koester. I’m sure they won’t play any nicer than ours.



  12. Aridzonan_13 on April 9, 2016 at 9:53 am

    Apparently, the dominoes are falling. Question is, in what direction? A friend, has been sending me links on Reno and LV becoming the new Turks and Caicos, Panama,etc. money laundering center. The last CAF interview I listened to, she stated that they are bringing the money back home. The PTB are doing some downsizing and some of the upper levels are now faced with being out in the cold. Cogitate on that for a moment and what information / consequences that will bring??



    • Sandygirl on April 9, 2016 at 2:47 pm

      The One World Order games are so confusing to me. Who’s on first.
      Aziz – we need a national whistleblowers week. So those upper levels can whistle their secrets before they all get thrown under the bus. And they thought they would be safe, fools. Many people still think their money is going to save them when things fall apart, fools.



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