This article was prompted by an address former U.S. Director of National Intelligence
Gen. James Clapper gave at Australia's National Press Club on June 8, 2017, evidently for the purpose of keeping Australia on side with the Anglo-American intelligence operation against President Donald Trump’s forging a cooperative relationship with Russia. Clapper, who served under President Barack Obama, is notorious for his false testimony in March 2013, when he claimed that the National Security Agency does not spy on Americans. It was seeing Clapper "lie under oath to Congress" that prompted whistleblower Edward Snowden to go public with documentation of NSA domestic spying. Thus Clapper is not the concerned American patriot he presents himself to be, but a dishonest shill for the so-called "intelligence community" of the "Five Eyes" (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand). This apparatus is the single greatest obstacle to world peace, responsible as it is for the rise of the al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorist menace, and for fabricating the blatant lies used to justify launching disastrous wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria, which fueled more terrorism. This Anglo-American faction remains committed to a showdown against Russia and China, which can turn into a hot war.
The article appeared in the Australian Alert Service of June 21, 2017, which also printed
annotated excerpts of Clapper’s speech (available in English, at bottom of article).
The first time I heard it asserted that “17 intelligence agencies” of the United States,
civilian and military, had “all” concluded that the Kremlin ordered cyber-attacks on the U.S.
elections, it came from Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, in her third debate with Donald
Trump last October. Who could imagine that seventeen investigations of Russia had been going on, and we hadn’t been told about them!
At a Senate hearing on May 6, 2017, however, James Clapper finally clarified that there
were only three: the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI), and the National Security Agency (NSA). And the October 7, 2016 statement upon which
Clinton’s script-writers based her wild claim had been issued by only two agencies: the
Homeland Security Department and then-Director of National Intelligence Clapper’s own office.
It was Clapper himself who opened the door to the “17 agencies” formulation—which to this day continues to be repeated early and often by Russia-bashing members of Congress—by saying in that October release, “U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of emails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations.” The USIC formally includes 17 agencies, such as subsections of the Defense Department and State Department, most of which had nothing to do with the “Russian meddling” probe.
Continue Reading.
Gen. James Clapper gave at Australia's National Press Club on June 8, 2017, evidently for the purpose of keeping Australia on side with the Anglo-American intelligence operation against President Donald Trump’s forging a cooperative relationship with Russia. Clapper, who served under President Barack Obama, is notorious for his false testimony in March 2013, when he claimed that the National Security Agency does not spy on Americans. It was seeing Clapper "lie under oath to Congress" that prompted whistleblower Edward Snowden to go public with documentation of NSA domestic spying. Thus Clapper is not the concerned American patriot he presents himself to be, but a dishonest shill for the so-called "intelligence community" of the "Five Eyes" (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand). This apparatus is the single greatest obstacle to world peace, responsible as it is for the rise of the al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorist menace, and for fabricating the blatant lies used to justify launching disastrous wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria, which fueled more terrorism. This Anglo-American faction remains committed to a showdown against Russia and China, which can turn into a hot war.
The article appeared in the Australian Alert Service of June 21, 2017, which also printed
annotated excerpts of Clapper’s speech (available in English, at bottom of article).
The first time I heard it asserted that “17 intelligence agencies” of the United States,
civilian and military, had “all” concluded that the Kremlin ordered cyber-attacks on the U.S.
elections, it came from Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, in her third debate with Donald
Trump last October. Who could imagine that seventeen investigations of Russia had been going on, and we hadn’t been told about them!
At a Senate hearing on May 6, 2017, however, James Clapper finally clarified that there
were only three: the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI), and the National Security Agency (NSA). And the October 7, 2016 statement upon which
Clinton’s script-writers based her wild claim had been issued by only two agencies: the
Homeland Security Department and then-Director of National Intelligence Clapper’s own office.
It was Clapper himself who opened the door to the “17 agencies” formulation—which to this day continues to be repeated early and often by Russia-bashing members of Congress—by saying in that October release, “U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of emails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations.” The USIC formally includes 17 agencies, such as subsections of the Defense Department and State Department, most of which had nothing to do with the “Russian meddling” probe.
Continue Reading.
As for the CIA-FBI- NSA report “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections”, released January 6 of this year, its weakness on all points has been discussed in the AAS (January 11, 2017) and many other publications, and is not the subject of this commentary.
What alarms me now, is how a person who states, as Clapper did in Australia on 8 June, that “It is in their [the Russians’] genes to be opposed, diametrically opposed to the United States” could ever have held a post called “Director of National Intelligence” in any country at all, never mind in the USA itself!
During the Cold War, my colleagues and I used to point out that U.S. Intelligence,
relying on “SIGINT” (signals intelligence), might know what Soviet Communist Party General
Secretary Leonid Brezhnev had for breakfast, but was unable to discern what he was thinking.
The problem was lack of knowledge of political and cultural history. Ex-DNI James Clapper has
now taken that ignorance to an extreme, with his “genetic” analysis of the existence of an
inevitable adversarial relationship between Russia and the United States. Contrary to Clapper’s
imaginings, for some two and a half centuries the best thinkers and statesmen in both these
transcontinental nations have recognized a natural affinity between them, which has been
brought to life for mutual benefit (and the world’s) many times. A few of the major moments of
Russian-American cooperation, together with some that remained only proposals, are
summarized here.
1780-83: the League of Armed Neutrality. Empress Catherine II of Russia headed the
League of Armed Neutrality during the American War of Independence from Great Britain. This
alliance of small powers acted to protect ships of their countries from being raided or seized by
the British Navy for allegedly carrying French goods, when France was allied with the
Americans.
1807: Hamilton published in Russia. A group of intellectuals and statesmen brought out
a Russian edition of Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 “Report on the Usefulness of the Manufactories in Relation to Trade and Agriculture” (“Report on Manufactures”)—one of the founding documents of the American System of Political Economy, which enabled the young republic to develop and remain free. Tsar Alexander I’s Minister of Finance D.A. Guryev sponsored the pamphlet, while educator V. Malinovsky wrote in the introduction: “The similarity of the American United Provinces [States] with Russia appears both in the expanse of the land, climate and natural conditions, in the size of population disproportionate to the space, and in the general youthfulness of various generally useful institutions; therefore all the rules, remarks and means proposed here are suitable for our country.”
1809-12: the Adams-Rumyantsev dialogues. In the early phase of Russian-American
diplomatic relations, which were opened in 1807, U.S. Ambassador John Quincy Adams, the
future President and proponent of a doctrine of “community of principle” among sovereign
nations conducted a years-long dialogue on affairs of state, foreign relations and trade, with
Russian Chancellor Count Nikolai Rumyantsev. In the wake of Adams’s diplomatic success in
getting Tsar Alexander to intercede with Denmark to stop detaining American ships as “British”,
Rumyantsev told Adams, “Our attachment to the United States is obstinate”. In 1812
Rumyantsev proposed that Russia join the USA in an anti-colonial policy of developing trade
with the rebelling Spanish colonies in South America. Adams reported that the State Council’s
rejection of Rumyantsev’s proposal was due to “a lurking English influence”. When ousted from
office in 1813, Rumyantsev told Adams, “I could say that my heart belongs to America, and
were it not for my age and infirmities, I would go now to that country.”
1842-51: construction of the St. Petersburg-Moscow railway. Under Tsar Nicholas I,
the committee in charge of building Russia’s second railway (and first major one), from St.
Petersburg to Moscow, hired a team of American engineers for the project. In particular, the
Russian committee leaders Crown Prince Alexander (the future Tsar Alexander II) and engineer
Pavel Melnikov invited George Washington Whistler as a consultant. He was an engineering
graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and a world-famous railroad engineer at
that time. He died in St. Petersburg in 1849 during the project, leaving a legacy of Russian-
American collaboration on developing railway technologies, which continued to have an impact
throughout the century.
1853-56: the Crimean War. During the Crimean War of 1853-56, as Russian MP
Alexander Fomenko wrote in a 2007 article, “when Russia found itself alone against the
Ottoman Empire and all of Europe,” and under attack by England, the USA not only sold arms to Russia, but was “prepared to dispatch volunteers to help Russia to defend Sevastopol” against the British.
1860-65: Russia in the American Civil War. Reciprocating, Russia after its defeat by
the British Empire in the Crimean War, allied with the United States of President Abraham
Lincoln during the U.S. Civil War, when Britain was supporting the Confederacy secessionists
and their slave-labor plantation system. Tsar Alexander II sent fleets of the Russian Navy to
defend the ports of New York and San Francisco. In 1866, when Alexander received him as part of a delegation of American public figures to Russia, the writer Mark Twain told him, “America owes much to Russia: is indebted to her in many ways; and chiefly for her unwavering friendship in the season of her greatest need.”
1867: the sale of Alaska. When Russia sold Alaska to the United States after
negotiations held in secret between Secretary of State William Seward (an ally of Lincoln, who
had been assassinated in 1865) and Russian representative Eduard de Stoeсkl, the London Times openly worried about “a strange sympathy between Russia and the United States.” In Russia, supporters of the sale argued that Russia and the United States were natural allies in the Pacific basin, and that if Great Britain were to attempt to seize “Russian America” (Alaska), the USA would be in a better position to defend it than Russia would.
1891-1916: building the Trans-Siberian Railway. Count Sergei Witte, Russian minister
of transport, minister of finance, and then prime minister, was an advocate of the American
System (called National Economy by Witte), who launched the project to build the Trans-
Siberian Railway. For the World’s Columbian Exposition, held in 1893 in Chicago, Witte
commissioned his staff to prepare a book on Russia’s industrialization and the Trans-Sib project. Through cooperation with American consuls in Russia at that time, the five-volume The
Industries of Russia was published in English and delivered to the exposition.
1941-45: World War II. While the Soviet Union bore the greatest brunt fighting to stop
the fascist Nazi invaders, losing some 27 million people during the war, American assistance to
the Eastern Front became critical and was greatly appreciated in Russia. Under the Lend-Lease program, 120 ships brought 450,000 tons of materiel from American West Coast ports to the Soviet Arctic, for forwarding to the front. At the close of World War II Marshal Georgi Zhukov, the famous Russian commander, said to American Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, “If the United States and Russia will only stand together through thick and thin, success is certain for the United Nations. If we are partners, there are no other countries in the world that would dare to go to war when we forbade it.”
1993: the “Trust” anti-missile proposal. Just two years after the break-up of the Soviet
Union, the Russians prepared for a summit between President Boris Yeltsin and President Bill
Clinton, in Vancouver, Canada, a proposal for a joint Russian-American ballistic missile defense (BMD) program called “Trust”. It echoed the ideas embodied in President Ronald Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative, for ending the reign of “mutual assured destruction” nuclear-war doctrine, in favor of strategic defense based on “new physical principles”. The Soviet leadership had rejected Reagan’s offer of cooperation and technology-sharing under his SDI, and Russian experts said that the “Trust” design, using lasers to generate ionized structures called plasmoids, and then to direct them against missiles, had stemmed from a secret Soviet program for an unconventional response to the SDI. Moscow now proposed that Russia and the United States develop these technologies in tandem.
2001: the 9/11 attacks. As the first foreign leader to phone President George W. Bush on
September 11, 2001, with New York and Washington under attack by Saudi-backed terrorists,
Russian President Vladimir Putin was informed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that U.S. nuclear forces were on high alert. “We already know”, replied Putin, “and we have cancelled our exercises and brought our alert levels down”. Nonetheless, three months later Bush gave Russia notice that the USA was withdrawing from the 1973 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the war party of Vice-President Dick Cheney began the scheme to build a global BMD system based on anti-missile missiles, behind the protection of which nuclear-missile attacks on Russia and China might ultimately be attempted. In the years that followed, Russia renewed proposals for joint Russian-American work on BMD, but the Bush and Obama Administrations plowed ahead with their unilateral program.
All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.
What alarms me now, is how a person who states, as Clapper did in Australia on 8 June, that “It is in their [the Russians’] genes to be opposed, diametrically opposed to the United States” could ever have held a post called “Director of National Intelligence” in any country at all, never mind in the USA itself!
During the Cold War, my colleagues and I used to point out that U.S. Intelligence,
relying on “SIGINT” (signals intelligence), might know what Soviet Communist Party General
Secretary Leonid Brezhnev had for breakfast, but was unable to discern what he was thinking.
The problem was lack of knowledge of political and cultural history. Ex-DNI James Clapper has
now taken that ignorance to an extreme, with his “genetic” analysis of the existence of an
inevitable adversarial relationship between Russia and the United States. Contrary to Clapper’s
imaginings, for some two and a half centuries the best thinkers and statesmen in both these
transcontinental nations have recognized a natural affinity between them, which has been
brought to life for mutual benefit (and the world’s) many times. A few of the major moments of
Russian-American cooperation, together with some that remained only proposals, are
summarized here.
1780-83: the League of Armed Neutrality. Empress Catherine II of Russia headed the
League of Armed Neutrality during the American War of Independence from Great Britain. This
alliance of small powers acted to protect ships of their countries from being raided or seized by
the British Navy for allegedly carrying French goods, when France was allied with the
Americans.
1807: Hamilton published in Russia. A group of intellectuals and statesmen brought out
a Russian edition of Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 “Report on the Usefulness of the Manufactories in Relation to Trade and Agriculture” (“Report on Manufactures”)—one of the founding documents of the American System of Political Economy, which enabled the young republic to develop and remain free. Tsar Alexander I’s Minister of Finance D.A. Guryev sponsored the pamphlet, while educator V. Malinovsky wrote in the introduction: “The similarity of the American United Provinces [States] with Russia appears both in the expanse of the land, climate and natural conditions, in the size of population disproportionate to the space, and in the general youthfulness of various generally useful institutions; therefore all the rules, remarks and means proposed here are suitable for our country.”
1809-12: the Adams-Rumyantsev dialogues. In the early phase of Russian-American
diplomatic relations, which were opened in 1807, U.S. Ambassador John Quincy Adams, the
future President and proponent of a doctrine of “community of principle” among sovereign
nations conducted a years-long dialogue on affairs of state, foreign relations and trade, with
Russian Chancellor Count Nikolai Rumyantsev. In the wake of Adams’s diplomatic success in
getting Tsar Alexander to intercede with Denmark to stop detaining American ships as “British”,
Rumyantsev told Adams, “Our attachment to the United States is obstinate”. In 1812
Rumyantsev proposed that Russia join the USA in an anti-colonial policy of developing trade
with the rebelling Spanish colonies in South America. Adams reported that the State Council’s
rejection of Rumyantsev’s proposal was due to “a lurking English influence”. When ousted from
office in 1813, Rumyantsev told Adams, “I could say that my heart belongs to America, and
were it not for my age and infirmities, I would go now to that country.”
1842-51: construction of the St. Petersburg-Moscow railway. Under Tsar Nicholas I,
the committee in charge of building Russia’s second railway (and first major one), from St.
Petersburg to Moscow, hired a team of American engineers for the project. In particular, the
Russian committee leaders Crown Prince Alexander (the future Tsar Alexander II) and engineer
Pavel Melnikov invited George Washington Whistler as a consultant. He was an engineering
graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and a world-famous railroad engineer at
that time. He died in St. Petersburg in 1849 during the project, leaving a legacy of Russian-
American collaboration on developing railway technologies, which continued to have an impact
throughout the century.
1853-56: the Crimean War. During the Crimean War of 1853-56, as Russian MP
Alexander Fomenko wrote in a 2007 article, “when Russia found itself alone against the
Ottoman Empire and all of Europe,” and under attack by England, the USA not only sold arms to Russia, but was “prepared to dispatch volunteers to help Russia to defend Sevastopol” against the British.
1860-65: Russia in the American Civil War. Reciprocating, Russia after its defeat by
the British Empire in the Crimean War, allied with the United States of President Abraham
Lincoln during the U.S. Civil War, when Britain was supporting the Confederacy secessionists
and their slave-labor plantation system. Tsar Alexander II sent fleets of the Russian Navy to
defend the ports of New York and San Francisco. In 1866, when Alexander received him as part of a delegation of American public figures to Russia, the writer Mark Twain told him, “America owes much to Russia: is indebted to her in many ways; and chiefly for her unwavering friendship in the season of her greatest need.”
1867: the sale of Alaska. When Russia sold Alaska to the United States after
negotiations held in secret between Secretary of State William Seward (an ally of Lincoln, who
had been assassinated in 1865) and Russian representative Eduard de Stoeсkl, the London Times openly worried about “a strange sympathy between Russia and the United States.” In Russia, supporters of the sale argued that Russia and the United States were natural allies in the Pacific basin, and that if Great Britain were to attempt to seize “Russian America” (Alaska), the USA would be in a better position to defend it than Russia would.
1891-1916: building the Trans-Siberian Railway. Count Sergei Witte, Russian minister
of transport, minister of finance, and then prime minister, was an advocate of the American
System (called National Economy by Witte), who launched the project to build the Trans-
Siberian Railway. For the World’s Columbian Exposition, held in 1893 in Chicago, Witte
commissioned his staff to prepare a book on Russia’s industrialization and the Trans-Sib project. Through cooperation with American consuls in Russia at that time, the five-volume The
Industries of Russia was published in English and delivered to the exposition.
1941-45: World War II. While the Soviet Union bore the greatest brunt fighting to stop
the fascist Nazi invaders, losing some 27 million people during the war, American assistance to
the Eastern Front became critical and was greatly appreciated in Russia. Under the Lend-Lease program, 120 ships brought 450,000 tons of materiel from American West Coast ports to the Soviet Arctic, for forwarding to the front. At the close of World War II Marshal Georgi Zhukov, the famous Russian commander, said to American Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, “If the United States and Russia will only stand together through thick and thin, success is certain for the United Nations. If we are partners, there are no other countries in the world that would dare to go to war when we forbade it.”
1993: the “Trust” anti-missile proposal. Just two years after the break-up of the Soviet
Union, the Russians prepared for a summit between President Boris Yeltsin and President Bill
Clinton, in Vancouver, Canada, a proposal for a joint Russian-American ballistic missile defense (BMD) program called “Trust”. It echoed the ideas embodied in President Ronald Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative, for ending the reign of “mutual assured destruction” nuclear-war doctrine, in favor of strategic defense based on “new physical principles”. The Soviet leadership had rejected Reagan’s offer of cooperation and technology-sharing under his SDI, and Russian experts said that the “Trust” design, using lasers to generate ionized structures called plasmoids, and then to direct them against missiles, had stemmed from a secret Soviet program for an unconventional response to the SDI. Moscow now proposed that Russia and the United States develop these technologies in tandem.
2001: the 9/11 attacks. As the first foreign leader to phone President George W. Bush on
September 11, 2001, with New York and Washington under attack by Saudi-backed terrorists,
Russian President Vladimir Putin was informed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that U.S. nuclear forces were on high alert. “We already know”, replied Putin, “and we have cancelled our exercises and brought our alert levels down”. Nonetheless, three months later Bush gave Russia notice that the USA was withdrawing from the 1973 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the war party of Vice-President Dick Cheney began the scheme to build a global BMD system based on anti-missile missiles, behind the protection of which nuclear-missile attacks on Russia and China might ultimately be attempted. In the years that followed, Russia renewed proposals for joint Russian-American work on BMD, but the Bush and Obama Administrations plowed ahead with their unilateral program.
All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.
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