The claim that the CIA used bribes to bury findings supporting a COVID lab leak brings scrutiny of an influential D.C. consulting firm filled with former intelligence officials.
Last week, lawmakers in Congress probing the origins of the coronavirus pandemic revealed that they had heard testimony from a new whistleblower, reportedly “presents as a highly credible senior-level CIA officer,” who claimed that CIA leadership had suppressed an assessment that COVID-19 came from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
According to the whistleblower, six of seven CIA officers researching the outbreak of COVID-19 found evidence to make a “low confidence assessment” of origin from the Wuhan lab. But a senior official allegedly helped muddy the waters and used financial incentives to persuade the officers against the lab assessment, ensuring that the CIA did not blame China.
The lawmakers requested that CIA chief operating officer Andrew Makridis, who coordinated the agency’s response to the pandemic until retiring last year, participate in a voluntary interview with congressional investigators. Makridis, the whistleblower claimed, “played a central role in its formation and eventual conclusion that the CIA was unable to determine” the origins of COVID-19. The congressional letter makes clear that Makridis could soon face a subpoena.
While the source of the virus is still unclear, growing evidence suggests that COVID-19 first emerged at the Wuhan lab and escaped under subpar biosafety standards. Many fear that such a conclusion will further harm U.S. ties to China, and potentially disrupt the $800 billion in trade relations between the two countries.
Makridis, notably, left the CIA to pass through the revolving door into a Washington, D.C. business that monetizes the nexus of U.S.-China relations. He now serves as a senior advisor to Beacon Global Strategies, a firm that helps corporate clients navigate delicate national security concerns, particularly surrounding China.
Beacon Global Strategies, founded by a bipartisan group of officials from the CIA, Defense Department, and House Intelligence Committee, maintains high-level contacts throughout the U.S. government and regularly speaks with national security agencies, information that it uses to help clients understand the geopolitical and regulatory landscape.
Kiriakou later became a well-known whistleblower. He was the only CIA employee who went to prison for the agency’s torture program, sentenced in 2013 to 30 months behind bars—not because he himself tortured anyone, but because he told an ABC News reporter about the waterboarding to which the agency subjected a war on terror captive.
When Kiriakou was a CIA official, he says, the agency leaked regularly to The Washington Post correspondents Woodward, David Ignatius and Joby Warrick—as well as “a half-dozen reporters” at The New York Times—because Langley spymasters knew they “will carry your water.”
John Kiriakou looked up from his desk at CIA headquarters and was stunned to see The Washington Post investigative reporter, Bob Woodward, walking through the secure area without an agency escort. On another occasion, Kiriakou, who rose at the CIA to become executive assistant to the deputy in charge of operations, the spy agency’s dark activities—saw CNN host Wolf Blitzer wandering unattended through the same area, despite the CIA’s ban on communicating with the media.
“We like to think there’s a Chinese wall between the CIA, especially senior CIA officials, and the American media,” Kiriakou recently told the London Real podcast. “In fact, they’re in bed together.”
Kiriakou later became a well-known whistleblower. He was the only CIA employee who went to prison for the agency’s torture program, sentenced in 2013 to 30 months behind bars—not because he himself tortured anyone, but because he told an ABC News reporter about the waterboarding to which the agency subjected a war on terror captive.
These days, Kiriakou is outraged for a different reason: the tight connection between the CIA and the media elite. All too often, he says, the national security journalists who are granted access by Langley can be trusted to see world affairs—and the U.S. empire’s dominant role in them—the way the CIA wants them to. Whether it’s the war in Ukraine, tensions with Russia and China, or U.S. military exploits in the Middle East and Africa, coverage in The New York Times, The Washington Post and on television reflects the slanted view of the national security establishment.
When Kiriakou was a CIA official, he says, the agency leaked regularly to The Washington Post correspondents Woodward, David Ignatius and Joby Warrick—as well as “a half-dozen reporters” at The New York Times—because Langley spymasters knew they “will carry your water.”
Washington journalists who contradict the U.S. national security line—even legendary ones like Seymour Hersh, who enjoyed CIA access for many years—soon find themselves in the cold, according to Kiriakou. Hersh once worked for The New York Times and The New Yorker, but was forced to publish his exposé on the lethal U.S. raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, which tied the alleged 9/11 mastermind’s execution more to clandestine collaboration with Pakistani intelligence than to American heroics, in the low-circulation London Review of Books. Last year, Hersh was relegated to Substack to publish his investigative report on the explosion of Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline, which blamed the act of war on U.S. Navy divers in a secret CIA operation ordered by President Joe Biden. (The New York Times still finds the sabotage a “mystery.”)
Hersh forced to self-publish? “That’s how bad it’s gotten in the United States,” Kiriakou says.
“Back in the good old days, when things were more innocent and simple, the psychopathic Central Intelligence Agency had to covertly infiltrate the news media to manipulate the information Americans were consuming about their nation and the world,” observed Caitlin A. Johnstone in MR (Monthly Review) Online. Now the CIA is the media, she ruefully concluded.
In 1977, Johnstone reminded her readers, Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame exposed the fact that the CIA supervised 400 reporters as agency “assets.” (Bernstein conveniently overlooked The Washington Post, which has a long history of coziness with intelligence. The newspaper’s current owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is a major CIA contractor.) When Bernstein’s article ran in Rolling Stone, it caused a tempest. Nowadays, nobody blinks an eye when “liberal” TV channels like CNN and MSNBC openly employ veterans of the CIA, FBI, NSA and other security agencies, such as commentators John Brennan, Jeremy Bash, Michael Hayden, James Clapper and Malcolm Nance.
Even Rolling Stone, once the voice of 1960s counterculture, which published radical and progressive writers like Tom Hayden, David Harris, Dick Goodwin and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—can no longer be trusted by free-thinking readers. RS is one of the publications vacuumed up by the upstart empire, Penske Media, which also purchased Variety, Hollywood Reporter and most of the entertainment industry media as well as New York Magazine.
Under Penske Media—run by Jay Penske, the 44-year-old known for his floppy hair, model-like looks and not much else save the fact that his father is trucking mogul Roger Penske—Rolling Stone has taken a sharp turn to the right. When not attacking Kennedy as an “anti-vaxxer” and “conspiracy”-obsessed lunatic, RS touts the bloody stalemate in Ukraine and the presidency of “boring” Biden.
“NYT buries in the 21st paragraph that it has an independent source who confirms the two IRS whistleblowers’ claim that David Weiss said he was blocked from bringing charges against Hunter Biden in California,” Ross said in his tweet.
“Of course they did,” responded the House Judiciary Committee GOP’s account.
Conde was truly a rare gem: a thoughtful writer and political analyst and gifted researcher with a wealth of personal knowledge and experience who paid a heavy price for his defiance.
David W. Conde set the groundwork for Philip Agee’s 1975 whistleblowing account, Inside the Company.
In 1970, David W. Conde, an American journalist working in Japan, who had served with the U.S. Army Psychological Warfare Branch in World War II, published a now-forgotten book in New Delhi, CIA—Core of the Cancer.
Five years before publication of CIA whistleblower Philip Agee’s Inside the Company: A CIA Diary, the book provided a damning indictment of the CIA’s involvement in criminal operations—particularly in Southeast Asia—and manipulation of public opinion through tax-exempt foundations financed by large corporations that corrupted a generation of intellectuals.
Conde wrote that, “while there seems no question that historians will record that the CIA’s greatest defeat was its failure to overcome [Fidel] Castro’s forces at the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the CIA’s greatest victory may well turn out to be not its food poisoning, its ballot-stuffing, its coup d’états, or its mobilization of labor unions or students to serve U.S. interests overseas, but its research grants to U.S. and foreign scholars.”[1]
These scholars played an influential role in helping condition the public in the U.S. and in countries around the world to support U.S. foreign policy interests and Cold War mobilization against the Soviet Union.
Conde noted that, “in Hitler’s Germany and Prince Konoe’s Japan, thought police used torture, and ordered death or [used] the threat of death to convert communists into anti-communists, but America being a rich country, relied upon the power of its money.”
This money had a deeply corrupting effect, tarnishing intellectual and scientific integrity, debasing political life and causing almost all societal institutions to be up for sale.
A Maverick Caught in the Cross-Hairs of an Anti-Red Psychopath
Another FBI whistleblower has stepped forward to tell the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Federal Government that the agency had him boost domestic terrorism figures by dividing cases into multiple subdivisions.
FBI Special Agent Garret O’Boyle from the Kansas City field office told Congressional investigatorsthat the agency had him divide a single domestic terrorism case into “four different cases,” so that the FBI could go to Congress and say “look at all the domestic terrorism we’ve investigated,” Fox News reports.
“Where, really, I was working on one case,” O’Boyle continued. “But, the FBI can then say, well, he actually had four, and so we need you to give us more money because look at how big of a threat all this domestic terrorism is.“
He also said that the FBI created a specific threat tag for pro-lifers “THREATSCOTUS2022” amid the leak of the Supreme Court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center – as opposed to the raging pro-abortionists nationwide.
Huff says he quit EcoHealth “due to a large number of ethical concerns with the scientific work and EcoHealth Alliance as a whole.” He is suing the group in New York, according to The Sun.
A scientist who helped lead a group collaborating with coronavirus research at a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan vouches for the theory that COVID-19 was genetically engineered and leaked from the facility.
Dr. Andrew Huff, the former vice president of EcoHealth Alliance who has written a new book, claims grant funding from the United States government for research in China led to the “biggest US intelligence failure since 9/11,” according to The Sun.
“EcoHealth Alliance and foreign laboratories did not have the adequate control measures in place for ensuring proper biosafety, biosecurity, and risk management, ultimately resulting in the lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” he writes in his book, The Truth About Wuhan.
Dr. Francis Collins, who was the director of the NIH, rejected the notion that federal funding led to the pandemic. “Analysis of published genomic data and other documents from the grantee demonstrate that the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant are genetically far distant from SARS-CoV-2 and could not possibly have caused the COVID-19 pandemic. Any claims to the contrary are demonstrably false,” he said.
Huff worked at EcoHealth Alliance from 2014 to 2016 and has since become a whistleblower. He says the U.S. taxpayer-funded nonprofit group instructed the Wuhan lab in the “best existing methods to engineer bat coronaviruses to attack other species” for years and claims “China knew from day one that this was a genetically engineered agent.”
This, you may recall, is the same agency that tried to persuade Martin Luther King Jr. to kill himself. It’s the same agency that compiled a list of 12,000 Americans, and, upon the outbreak of the Korean War, urged President Truman to jail them without trial. It’s the same agency whose response to the KKK’s murder of civil-rights worker Viola Liuzzo — a murder that may have been abetted by an undercover FBI agent — was to spread rumors that Liuzzo was a heroin-addicted communist and a deadbeat mom.
The bureau is a violent, expansionist, self-aggrandizing, and careless outfit that sits awkwardly within the American constitutional order.
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In the New York Times this week, Bret Stephens complained that, in unholy conjunction with the Department of Justice, the FBI had disgraced itself yet again with its public smear of Representative Matt Gaetz. “I don’t like Gaetz’s politics or persona any more than you do,” Stephens told a characteristically bewildered Gail Collins. “But what we seem to have here is a high-profile politician being convicted in the court of public opinion of some of the most heinous behavior imaginable—trafficking a minor for sex—until the Justice Department realizes two years late that its case has fallen apart.”
Which . . . well, yeah. That’s what the FBI is for. Last week, a whistleblower named Kyle Seraphin told theWashington Times that the FBI had adopted “an entirely ridiculous internal process for determining every single national priority.” One must ask: “ridiculous” from whose perspective? Relative to the FBI’s stated mission, its behavior does indeed look “ridiculous.” Relative to its historical conduct, its behavior seems pretty standard. What the FBI did to Matt Gaetz is precisely what it did to Donald Trump. And what it did to Donald Trump is what it’s been doing since it was founded: namely, spying on, or attempting to discredit, anyone who irritates the powers that be.
This, you may recall, is the same agency that tried to persuade Martin Luther King Jr. to kill himself. It’s the same agency that compiled a list of 12,000 Americans, and, upon the outbreak of the Korean War, urged President Truman to jail them without trial. It’s the same agency whose response to the KKK’s murder of civil-rights worker Viola Liuzzo — a murder that may have been abetted by an undercover FBI agent — was to spread rumors that Liuzzo was a heroin-addicted communist and a deadbeat mom. It’s the same agency that kept a file on John Denver — the author of such subversive works as “Take Me Home, Country Roads” — because he was opposed to the Vietnam War. When, in 1974, Deputy Attorney General Laurence Silberman was tasked with reviewing J. Edgar Hoover’s secret papers, he was horrified by what he found. Hoover, Silberman wrote, had allowed his FBI to “be used by presidents for nakedly political purposes” and engaged in “subtle blackmail to ensure his and the bureau’s power.” Matt Gaetz is merely the latest in a long line of victims.
This is a huge development. Essentially, what is being admitted in this claim is that a portal existed into FBI databases within the law firm that represents democrats. This means access to FBI database searches exists inside the office of the DNC and Clinton legal group. Think about the ramifications here.
There is very little that surprises me, but this is completely stunning. An FBI whistleblower came forth to inform Rep Jim Jordan and Rep Matt Gaetz that the FBI maintains a workspace inside the law firm of Perkins Coie. {Direct Rumble Link}
In response to a letter sent by Rep. Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan, Perkins Coie, the legal arm of the DNC and Hillary Clinton, admitted they have been operating an FBI workspace in their Washington D.C. office since 2012. Pay attention to that date, it matters. WATCH:
This is a huge development. Essentially, what is being admitted in this claim is that a portal existed into FBI databases within the law firm that represents democrats. This means access to FBI database searches exists inside the office of the DNC and Clinton legal group. Think about the ramifications here.
CTH has long claimed there was some kind of direct portal link between the Clinton campaign team and the FBI databases. There were too many trails of extracted non-minimized research evidence in the hands of the Clinton team that CTH could not trace to a transferring FBI official. If Perkins Coie operated a portal in their office that allowed them to conduct search queries of American citizens, then everything would make sense. That access portal is exactly what is being claimed and admitted in this report.
The start date of 2012 is important for several reasons, not the least of which is FISA presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer criticizing the scale and scope of unlawful FBI database access going back to exactly 2012. Keep in mind a FISA-702 search, is simply an unlawful FBI warrantless electronic search of an American (“702” represents the American citizen) into the central database -maintained by the NSA- that contains all electronic data and communication.
I have been in the deep hole of the FISA-702 database search query violations for so long I don’t even need a flashlight.
By Kit Klarenberg, an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg
Leading medical journal The BMJ has published an incendiary report exposing faked data, blind trial failures, poorly trained vaccinators, and a slow follow-up on adverse reactions in the phase-three trial of Pfizer’s Covid jab.
Central to the exposé is Brook Jackson, who, for two weeks, served as regional director at Ventavia Research Group, the company contracted to assist with the pivotal trial. She provided The BMJ with dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails supporting her concerns.
Jackson reveals that Ventavia staff who conducted quality-control checks were overwhelmed by the volume of problems they were identifying. She repeatedly informed her superiors of poor laboratory management, and patient safety and data integrity issues.
Asked if he is worried that the release of so many secret documents could cause the deaths of U.S. military personnel, WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange replied: “No, I’m worried that the press chooses to credibly report statements like that from the Pentagon…. Most wars that are started by democracies involve lying. The Vietnam War and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution involved lying. The start of the Iraq war involved very serious lies that were repeated and amplified by some parts of the press.”
The publication of nearly 400,000 secret U.S. military documents about the Iraq war by the whistleblower WikiLeaks earned condemnation from governments on three continents within hours of their posting on the Internet. The U.S. government, the British defense ministry, and the Iraqi prime minister’s office all quickly condemned the documents being revealed to the public.
The October 22 WikiLeaks posting of 391,832 secret U.S. government intelligence reports on the Iraq war from 2004 through 2009 was a follow-up on the nearly 90,000 secret documents revealed by WikiLeaks on the Afghan war back in July. The “Iraq War Diary,” as WikiLeaks called its most recent group of documents, reveals that the U.S. government kept detailed files on civilian casualties in Iraq (despite claims to the contrary) and allowed the press to underestimate civilian casualty numbers by more than 15,000.
According to the U.S. government, the WikiLeaks posting endangers American lives. “This is an extraordinary disservice to America’s men and women in uniform,” Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell charged in a government press release. “That danger is now exponentially multiplied as a result of this leak because it gives our enemies the wherewithal to look for vulnerabilities in how we operate and to exploit those opportunities and potentially kill our forces. That is just shameful.”
The British Defense Ministry claimed that WikiLeaks “can put the lives of UK service personnel and those of our allies at risk and make the job of armed forces in all theatres of operation more difficult and more dangerous.”
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s office also released a statement that the WikiLeaks posting was an attack “against national parties and leaders, especially against the prime minister.”
Asked if he is worried that the release of so many secret documents could cause the deaths of U.S. military personnel, WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange replied: “No, I’m worried that the press chooses to credibly report statements like that from the Pentagon…. Most wars that are started by democracies involve lying. The Vietnam War and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution involved lying. The start of the Iraq war involved very serious lies that were repeated and amplified by some parts of the press.”
The Pentagon charged that WikiLeaks had endangered U.S. service personnel or informants after it posted information in July on the U.S. war in Afghanistan, but has since made no mention of any actual deaths resulting from the public posting of the documents.
The condemnation of WikiLeaks by governments seems largely to have been because the documents reveal crimes by these governments. “Britain’s role in the alleged torture and unlawful killing of Iraqi civilians may be the subject of legal action,” the British Manchester Guardian reported October 23. The Guardian noted that Phil Shiner of the British group Public Interest Lawyers claimed the WikiLeaks-released documents have exposed prosecutable war crimes. “Some of these deaths will be in circumstances where the UK [has] a very clear legal responsibility,” Shiner contended. “This may be because the Iraqis died while under the effective control of UK forces — under arrest, in vehicles, helicopters or detention facilities.”
Meanwhile, the government condemnations have forced WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange into a virtual life on the run. “Julian Assange moves like a hunted man,” the New York Times reported October 23. “He demands that his dwindling number of loyalists use expensive encrypted cellphones and swaps his own as other men change shirts. He checks into hotels under false names, dyes his hair, sleeps on sofas and floors, and uses cash instead of credit cards, often borrowed from friends.” Assange is being investigated for anonymous accusations of rape in Sweden, a nation with strong free press laws where the WikiLeaks website is hosted, and he has been denied residency in the country.
MCViewPoint 
