Tuesday, January 27, 2015
more updates
Part 5 of Escaping the Demiurge has been updated, once again. The updated sectioned is in bold, at the end.
Saturday, January 24, 2015
Screenwriter and CIA employee died under mysterious circumstances after efforts to expose 'real reason' for U.S. invasion of Panama
via The Daily Mail:
When the skeletal remains of Hollywood screenwriter Gary Devore were found strapped into his Ford Explorer submerged beneath the California Aqueduct in 1998 it brought an end to one of America's most high profile missing person cases. The fact that Devore was on his way to deliver a film script that promised to explain the 'real reason' why the US invaded Panama, has long given rise to a slew of conspiracies surrounding the nature of his 'accidental' death. It didn't help that Devore's hands were missing from the crash scene, along with the script, and that investigators could offer no plausible explanation as to how a car could leave the highway and end up in the position it was found a year after he disappeared. Now the Daily Mail can exclusively reveal that Devore was working with the CIA in Panama and even a White House source concedes his mysterious death bears all the hallmarks of a cover-up. The findings, published in a new documentary The Writer With No Hands, are the first testimonies ever aired that give credence to the theories that surrounded the case in the late 90s.
hen the skeletal remains of Hollywood screenwriter Gary Devore were found strapped into his Ford Explorer submerged beneath the California Aqueduct in 1998 it brought an end to one of America's most high profile missing person cases. The fact that Devore was on his way to deliver a film script that promised to explain the 'real reason' why the US invaded Panama, has long given rise to a slew of conspiracies surrounding the nature of his 'accidental' death. It didn't help that Devore's hands were missing from the crash scene, along with the script, and that investigators could offer no plausible explanation as to how a car could leave the highway and end up in the position it was found a year after he disappeared.
Now the Daily Mail can exclusively reveal that Devore was working with the CIA in Panama and even a White House source concedes his mysterious death bears all the hallmarks of a cover-up. The findings, published in a new documentary The Writer With No Hands, are the first testimonies ever aired that give credence to the theories that surrounded the case in the late 90s. One line reads: 'With good natured suspicion, Romos speculates on US intent. All this to pick up Noriega?' Another: 'It sounds like the Pentagon planned the bank robbery and the war is just a diversion.' Devore's research for the end product included an article from London's now defunct Sunday Correspondent alleging dictator General Manuel Noriega had compiled a stash of sex tapes featuring top-ranking US officials. Noriega, the article explains, ran a well-known 'honey trap': inviting diplomats to his home filled with alcohol, drugs, beautiful women, and beautiful men - and covertly filming their antics. After years of research, Dr Alford suggests the film may have implied the invasion was nothing more than a diversion that would allow the US into Panama to steal back incriminating photos of senior US officials that Noriega could have used as blackmail.
One line reads: 'With good natured suspicion, Romos speculates on US intent. All this to pick up Noriega?'
Another: 'It sounds like the Pentagon planned the bank robbery and the war is just a diversion.'Devore's research for the end product included an article from London's now defunct Sunday Correspondent alleging dictator General Manuel Noriega had compiled a stash of sex tapes featuring top-ranking US officials.
Noriega, the article explains, ran a well-known 'honey trap': inviting diplomats to his home filled with alcohol, drugs, beautiful women, and beautiful men - and covertly filming their antics.
After years of research, Dr Alford suggests the film may have implied the invasion was nothing more than a diversion that would allow the US into Panama to steal back incriminating photos of senior US officials that Noriega could have used as blackmail
more, via The Guardian:
Everyone who watches films knows about Hollywood's fascination with spies. From Hitchcock's postwar espionage thrillers, through cold war tales such as Torn Curtain, into the paranoid 1970s when the CIA came to be seen as an agency out of control in films such as Three Days of the Condor, and right to the present, with the Bourne trilogy and Ridley Scott's forthcoming Body of Lies, film-makers have always wanted to get in bed with spies. What's less widely known is how much the spies have wanted to get in bed with the film-makers. In fact, the story of the CIA's involvement in Hollywood is a tale of deception and subversion that would seem improbable if it were put on screen.
The model for this is the defence department's "open" but barely publicised relationship with Hollywood. The Pentagon, for decades, has offered film-makers advice, manpower and even hardware - including aircraft carriers and state-of-the-art helicopters. All it asks for in exchange is that the US armed forces are made to look good. So in a previous Scott film, Black Hawk Down, a character based on a real-life soldier who had also been a child rapist lost that part of his backstory when he came to the screen.
No matter how seemingly craven Hollywood's behaviour towards the US armed forces has seemed, it has at least happened within the public domain. That cannot be said for the CIA's dealings with the movie business. Not until 1996 did the CIA announce, with little fanfare, that it had established an Entertainment Liaison Office, which would collaborate in a strictly advisory capacity with film-makers. Heading up the office was Chase Brandon, who had served for 25 years in the agency's elite clandestine services division, as an undercover operations officer. A PR man he isn't, though he does have Hollywood connections: he's a cousin of Tommy Lee Jones.
But the past 12 years of semi-acknowledged collaboration were preceded by decades in which the CIA maintained a deep-rooted but invisible influence of Hollywood. How could it be otherwise? As the former CIA man Bob Baer - whose books on his time with the agency were the basis for Syriana - told us: "All these people that run studios - they go to Washington, they hang around with senators, they hang around with CIA directors, and everybody's on board."
There is documentary evidence for his claims. Luigi Luraschi was the head of foreign and domestic censorship for Paramount in the early 1950s. And, it was recently discovered, he was also working for the CIA, sending in reports about how film censorship was being employed to boost the image of the US in movies that would be seen abroad. Luraschi's reports also revealed that he had persuaded several film-makers to plant "negroes" who were "well-dressed" in their movies, to counter Soviet propaganda about poor race relations in the States. The Soviet version was rather nearer the truth.
Luraschi's activities were merely the tip of the iceberg. Graham Greene, for example, disowned the 1958 adapatation of his Vietnam-set novel The Quiet American, describing it as a "propaganda film for America". In the title role, Audie Murphy played not Greene's dangerously ambiguous figure - whose belief in the justice of American foreign policy allows him to ignore the appalling consequences of his actions - but a simple hero. The cynical British journalist, played by Michael Redgrave, is instead the man whose moral compass has gone awry. Greene's American had been based in part on the legendary CIA operative in Vietnam, Colonel Edward Lansdale. How apt, then, that it should have been Lansdale who persuaded director Joseph Mankewiecz to change the script to suit his own ends.
The CIA didn't just offer guidance to film-makers, however. It even offered money. In 1950, the agency bought the rights to George Orwell's Animal Farm, and then funded the 1954 British animated version of the film. Its involvement had long been rumoured, but only in the past decade have those rumours been substantiated, and the tale of the CIA's role told in Daniel Leab's book Orwell Subverted.
The most common way for the CIA to exert influence in Hollywood nowadays is not through anything as direct as funding, or rewriting scripts, but offering to help with matters of verisimilitude. That is done by having serving or former CIA agents acting as advisers on the film, though some might wonder whether there is ever really such a thing a "former agent". As ex-CIA agent Lindsay Moran, the author of Blowing My Cover, has noted, the CIA often calls on former officers to perform tasks for their old employer.
So it was no problem for CBS to secure official help when making its 2001 TV series The Agency (it was even written by a former agent). Langley was equally helpful to the novelist Tom Clancy, who was invited to CIA headquarters after the publication of The Hunt for Red October, an invitation that was regularly repeated. Consequently, when Clancy's The Sum of All Fears was filmed in 2002, the agency was happy to bring its makers to Langley for a personal tour of headquarters, and to offer access to agency analysts for star Ben Affleck. When filming began, Brandon was on set to advise - a role he repeated during the filming of glamorous television series Alias.
The former agent Milt Beardon took the advisory role on two less action-packed attempts at espionage stories: Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd from 2006, which told an approximate version of the story of the famed CIA head of counter-espionage, James Jesus Angleton; and Charlie Wilson's War, the story of US covert efforts to supply the Afghan mujahideen with weaponry during the Soviet occupation of the 80s. In reality, this was a story that ended badly, as the Afghan freedom fighters helped give birth to the terrorists of al-Qaida. In the movie, however, that was not the case. As Beardon - who had been the CIA man responsible for the weapons
reaching the Afghans - observed shortly before the movie came out, the film would "put aside the notion that because we did that [supply arms], we had 9/11".
Beardon's remark provides a clue to the real reason the CIA likes to offer advice to Hollywood, a clue that was expanded on by Paul Kelbaugh, the former associate general counsel to the CIA - a very senior figure in Langley. In 2007, Kelbaugh spoke at Lynchburg College of Law in Virginia - where he had become an associate professor - about the CIA's relationship with Hollywood. A journalist present at the lecture (who now wishes to be anonymous) reported that Kelbaugh spoke about the 2003 Al Pacino/Colin Farrell vehicle The Recruit. A CIA agent had been on set as a "consultant" throughout the shoot, he said; his real job, however, was to misdirect the film-makers. "We didn't want Hollywood getting too close to the truth," the journalist quoted Kelbaugh as saying.
Peculiarly, though, in a strongly worded email to us, Kelbaugh emphatically denied having said such a thing, and said he remembered "very specific discussions with senior [CIA] management that no one was ever to misrepresent to affect [film] content - EVER." The journalist stands by the original report, and Kelbaugh has refused to discuss the matter further. So, altering scripts, financing films, suppressing the truth - it's worrying enough. But there are cases where some believe the CIA's activities in Hollywood have gone further - far enough, in fact, to be the stuff of movies. In June 1997, the screenwriter Gary DeVore was working on the screenplay for his directorial debut. It was to be an action movie set against the backdrop of the US invasion of Panama in 1989, which led to the overthrow of dictator Manuel Noriega. According to his wife, Wendy, DeVore had been talking to an old friend - the CIA's Chase Brandon - about Noriega's regime and US counternarcotic programmes in Latin America. Wendy told CNN: "He had been very disturbed over some of the things that he had been finding in his research. He was researching the United States invasion of Panama, because he was setting the actual story that he was writing against this; and the overthrow of Noriega and the enormous amounts of money laundering in the Panamanian banks, also our own government's money laundering."
At the end of that month, DeVore had been in Santa Fe, New Mexico, working on another project. He was travelling back to California when, at 1.15am on June 28, he called Wendy, a call she says has been excised from phone records. She told CNN she was "terribly alarmed" because he was speaking as though he were under duress. She was sure "someone was in the car with him". That was the last time Wendy DeVore heard from her husband.
A year passed, but the case refused to die and speculation mounted. Even the Los Angeles Times began contemplating CIA involvement. DeVore was presumed dead, but there was no body, and no end to the questions. Lo and behold, just nine days after the LA Times reported the case, DeVore's body was found, decomposing in his Ford Explorer, in 12 feet of water in the California Aqueduct below the Antelope Valley Freeway, south of Palmdale - a city located in "aerospace valley", so dubbed by locals for its reputation as a US military-industrial-complex stronghold - fuel to the fire for conspiracy theorists.
The coroner went on to declare the cause and manner of DeVore's death to be "unknown", but police eventually reached the tentative conclusion that the screenwriter's death was an accident: he had fallen asleep at the wheel, they said, before careening off the highway and into the water, where he drowned. But loose ends remain: DeVore's laptop computer containing his unfinished script was missing from his vehicle, as was the gun he customarily carried on long trips; after his disappearance, a CIA representative allegedly showed up at DeVore's house to request access to his computer; Hollywood private investigator Don Crutchfield noted that previous drafts of DeVore's script were inexplicably wiped from said computer during the same timeframe; police claimed that DeVore's vehicle careened off the highway, yet DeVore's widow was troubled by the absence of visible damage to the guardrail at the scene of the alleged accident; and how come no one noticed an SUV sitting in the water beneath a busy highway for a whole year? Perhaps the whole incident is too like a conspiracy movie to be a real conspiracy - but many remain troubled by De Vore's death.
Despite the CIA's professed desire to be more open about the role it plays in Holly-wood, it's hard to take its newfound transparency too seriously. After all, what use is a covert agency that does not act covertly, even if some of its activities are public? And if it is still not open about the truth of events decades ago, many of which have spilled into the public domain accidently, how can we be sure it is telling the truth about its activities now? The spy may have come in from the cold, but he still finds shelter in the dark of the cinema.
When the skeletal remains of Hollywood screenwriter Gary Devore were found strapped into his Ford Explorer submerged beneath the California Aqueduct in 1998 it brought an end to one of America's most high profile missing person cases. The fact that Devore was on his way to deliver a film script that promised to explain the 'real reason' why the US invaded Panama, has long given rise to a slew of conspiracies surrounding the nature of his 'accidental' death. It didn't help that Devore's hands were missing from the crash scene, along with the script, and that investigators could offer no plausible explanation as to how a car could leave the highway and end up in the position it was found a year after he disappeared. Now the Daily Mail can exclusively reveal that Devore was working with the CIA in Panama and even a White House source concedes his mysterious death bears all the hallmarks of a cover-up. The findings, published in a new documentary The Writer With No Hands, are the first testimonies ever aired that give credence to the theories that surrounded the case in the late 90s.
hen the skeletal remains of Hollywood screenwriter Gary Devore were found strapped into his Ford Explorer submerged beneath the California Aqueduct in 1998 it brought an end to one of America's most high profile missing person cases. The fact that Devore was on his way to deliver a film script that promised to explain the 'real reason' why the US invaded Panama, has long given rise to a slew of conspiracies surrounding the nature of his 'accidental' death. It didn't help that Devore's hands were missing from the crash scene, along with the script, and that investigators could offer no plausible explanation as to how a car could leave the highway and end up in the position it was found a year after he disappeared.
Now the Daily Mail can exclusively reveal that Devore was working with the CIA in Panama and even a White House source concedes his mysterious death bears all the hallmarks of a cover-up. The findings, published in a new documentary The Writer With No Hands, are the first testimonies ever aired that give credence to the theories that surrounded the case in the late 90s. One line reads: 'With good natured suspicion, Romos speculates on US intent. All this to pick up Noriega?' Another: 'It sounds like the Pentagon planned the bank robbery and the war is just a diversion.' Devore's research for the end product included an article from London's now defunct Sunday Correspondent alleging dictator General Manuel Noriega had compiled a stash of sex tapes featuring top-ranking US officials. Noriega, the article explains, ran a well-known 'honey trap': inviting diplomats to his home filled with alcohol, drugs, beautiful women, and beautiful men - and covertly filming their antics. After years of research, Dr Alford suggests the film may have implied the invasion was nothing more than a diversion that would allow the US into Panama to steal back incriminating photos of senior US officials that Noriega could have used as blackmail.
One line reads: 'With good natured suspicion, Romos speculates on US intent. All this to pick up Noriega?'
Another: 'It sounds like the Pentagon planned the bank robbery and the war is just a diversion.'Devore's research for the end product included an article from London's now defunct Sunday Correspondent alleging dictator General Manuel Noriega had compiled a stash of sex tapes featuring top-ranking US officials.
Noriega, the article explains, ran a well-known 'honey trap': inviting diplomats to his home filled with alcohol, drugs, beautiful women, and beautiful men - and covertly filming their antics.
After years of research, Dr Alford suggests the film may have implied the invasion was nothing more than a diversion that would allow the US into Panama to steal back incriminating photos of senior US officials that Noriega could have used as blackmail
more, via The Guardian:
Everyone who watches films knows about Hollywood's fascination with spies. From Hitchcock's postwar espionage thrillers, through cold war tales such as Torn Curtain, into the paranoid 1970s when the CIA came to be seen as an agency out of control in films such as Three Days of the Condor, and right to the present, with the Bourne trilogy and Ridley Scott's forthcoming Body of Lies, film-makers have always wanted to get in bed with spies. What's less widely known is how much the spies have wanted to get in bed with the film-makers. In fact, the story of the CIA's involvement in Hollywood is a tale of deception and subversion that would seem improbable if it were put on screen.
The model for this is the defence department's "open" but barely publicised relationship with Hollywood. The Pentagon, for decades, has offered film-makers advice, manpower and even hardware - including aircraft carriers and state-of-the-art helicopters. All it asks for in exchange is that the US armed forces are made to look good. So in a previous Scott film, Black Hawk Down, a character based on a real-life soldier who had also been a child rapist lost that part of his backstory when he came to the screen.
No matter how seemingly craven Hollywood's behaviour towards the US armed forces has seemed, it has at least happened within the public domain. That cannot be said for the CIA's dealings with the movie business. Not until 1996 did the CIA announce, with little fanfare, that it had established an Entertainment Liaison Office, which would collaborate in a strictly advisory capacity with film-makers. Heading up the office was Chase Brandon, who had served for 25 years in the agency's elite clandestine services division, as an undercover operations officer. A PR man he isn't, though he does have Hollywood connections: he's a cousin of Tommy Lee Jones.
But the past 12 years of semi-acknowledged collaboration were preceded by decades in which the CIA maintained a deep-rooted but invisible influence of Hollywood. How could it be otherwise? As the former CIA man Bob Baer - whose books on his time with the agency were the basis for Syriana - told us: "All these people that run studios - they go to Washington, they hang around with senators, they hang around with CIA directors, and everybody's on board."
There is documentary evidence for his claims. Luigi Luraschi was the head of foreign and domestic censorship for Paramount in the early 1950s. And, it was recently discovered, he was also working for the CIA, sending in reports about how film censorship was being employed to boost the image of the US in movies that would be seen abroad. Luraschi's reports also revealed that he had persuaded several film-makers to plant "negroes" who were "well-dressed" in their movies, to counter Soviet propaganda about poor race relations in the States. The Soviet version was rather nearer the truth.
Luraschi's activities were merely the tip of the iceberg. Graham Greene, for example, disowned the 1958 adapatation of his Vietnam-set novel The Quiet American, describing it as a "propaganda film for America". In the title role, Audie Murphy played not Greene's dangerously ambiguous figure - whose belief in the justice of American foreign policy allows him to ignore the appalling consequences of his actions - but a simple hero. The cynical British journalist, played by Michael Redgrave, is instead the man whose moral compass has gone awry. Greene's American had been based in part on the legendary CIA operative in Vietnam, Colonel Edward Lansdale. How apt, then, that it should have been Lansdale who persuaded director Joseph Mankewiecz to change the script to suit his own ends.
The CIA didn't just offer guidance to film-makers, however. It even offered money. In 1950, the agency bought the rights to George Orwell's Animal Farm, and then funded the 1954 British animated version of the film. Its involvement had long been rumoured, but only in the past decade have those rumours been substantiated, and the tale of the CIA's role told in Daniel Leab's book Orwell Subverted.
The most common way for the CIA to exert influence in Hollywood nowadays is not through anything as direct as funding, or rewriting scripts, but offering to help with matters of verisimilitude. That is done by having serving or former CIA agents acting as advisers on the film, though some might wonder whether there is ever really such a thing a "former agent". As ex-CIA agent Lindsay Moran, the author of Blowing My Cover, has noted, the CIA often calls on former officers to perform tasks for their old employer.
So it was no problem for CBS to secure official help when making its 2001 TV series The Agency (it was even written by a former agent). Langley was equally helpful to the novelist Tom Clancy, who was invited to CIA headquarters after the publication of The Hunt for Red October, an invitation that was regularly repeated. Consequently, when Clancy's The Sum of All Fears was filmed in 2002, the agency was happy to bring its makers to Langley for a personal tour of headquarters, and to offer access to agency analysts for star Ben Affleck. When filming began, Brandon was on set to advise - a role he repeated during the filming of glamorous television series Alias.
The former agent Milt Beardon took the advisory role on two less action-packed attempts at espionage stories: Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd from 2006, which told an approximate version of the story of the famed CIA head of counter-espionage, James Jesus Angleton; and Charlie Wilson's War, the story of US covert efforts to supply the Afghan mujahideen with weaponry during the Soviet occupation of the 80s. In reality, this was a story that ended badly, as the Afghan freedom fighters helped give birth to the terrorists of al-Qaida. In the movie, however, that was not the case. As Beardon - who had been the CIA man responsible for the weapons
reaching the Afghans - observed shortly before the movie came out, the film would "put aside the notion that because we did that [supply arms], we had 9/11".
Beardon's remark provides a clue to the real reason the CIA likes to offer advice to Hollywood, a clue that was expanded on by Paul Kelbaugh, the former associate general counsel to the CIA - a very senior figure in Langley. In 2007, Kelbaugh spoke at Lynchburg College of Law in Virginia - where he had become an associate professor - about the CIA's relationship with Hollywood. A journalist present at the lecture (who now wishes to be anonymous) reported that Kelbaugh spoke about the 2003 Al Pacino/Colin Farrell vehicle The Recruit. A CIA agent had been on set as a "consultant" throughout the shoot, he said; his real job, however, was to misdirect the film-makers. "We didn't want Hollywood getting too close to the truth," the journalist quoted Kelbaugh as saying.
Peculiarly, though, in a strongly worded email to us, Kelbaugh emphatically denied having said such a thing, and said he remembered "very specific discussions with senior [CIA] management that no one was ever to misrepresent to affect [film] content - EVER." The journalist stands by the original report, and Kelbaugh has refused to discuss the matter further. So, altering scripts, financing films, suppressing the truth - it's worrying enough. But there are cases where some believe the CIA's activities in Hollywood have gone further - far enough, in fact, to be the stuff of movies. In June 1997, the screenwriter Gary DeVore was working on the screenplay for his directorial debut. It was to be an action movie set against the backdrop of the US invasion of Panama in 1989, which led to the overthrow of dictator Manuel Noriega. According to his wife, Wendy, DeVore had been talking to an old friend - the CIA's Chase Brandon - about Noriega's regime and US counternarcotic programmes in Latin America. Wendy told CNN: "He had been very disturbed over some of the things that he had been finding in his research. He was researching the United States invasion of Panama, because he was setting the actual story that he was writing against this; and the overthrow of Noriega and the enormous amounts of money laundering in the Panamanian banks, also our own government's money laundering."
At the end of that month, DeVore had been in Santa Fe, New Mexico, working on another project. He was travelling back to California when, at 1.15am on June 28, he called Wendy, a call she says has been excised from phone records. She told CNN she was "terribly alarmed" because he was speaking as though he were under duress. She was sure "someone was in the car with him". That was the last time Wendy DeVore heard from her husband.
A year passed, but the case refused to die and speculation mounted. Even the Los Angeles Times began contemplating CIA involvement. DeVore was presumed dead, but there was no body, and no end to the questions. Lo and behold, just nine days after the LA Times reported the case, DeVore's body was found, decomposing in his Ford Explorer, in 12 feet of water in the California Aqueduct below the Antelope Valley Freeway, south of Palmdale - a city located in "aerospace valley", so dubbed by locals for its reputation as a US military-industrial-complex stronghold - fuel to the fire for conspiracy theorists.
The coroner went on to declare the cause and manner of DeVore's death to be "unknown", but police eventually reached the tentative conclusion that the screenwriter's death was an accident: he had fallen asleep at the wheel, they said, before careening off the highway and into the water, where he drowned. But loose ends remain: DeVore's laptop computer containing his unfinished script was missing from his vehicle, as was the gun he customarily carried on long trips; after his disappearance, a CIA representative allegedly showed up at DeVore's house to request access to his computer; Hollywood private investigator Don Crutchfield noted that previous drafts of DeVore's script were inexplicably wiped from said computer during the same timeframe; police claimed that DeVore's vehicle careened off the highway, yet DeVore's widow was troubled by the absence of visible damage to the guardrail at the scene of the alleged accident; and how come no one noticed an SUV sitting in the water beneath a busy highway for a whole year? Perhaps the whole incident is too like a conspiracy movie to be a real conspiracy - but many remain troubled by De Vore's death.
Despite the CIA's professed desire to be more open about the role it plays in Holly-wood, it's hard to take its newfound transparency too seriously. After all, what use is a covert agency that does not act covertly, even if some of its activities are public? And if it is still not open about the truth of events decades ago, many of which have spilled into the public domain accidently, how can we be sure it is telling the truth about its activities now? The spy may have come in from the cold, but he still finds shelter in the dark of the cinema.
Lawyers ask again for Prince Andrew to testify under oath
via The London Evening Standard:
Lawyers representing the woman claiming she was forced to have sex with Prince Andrew are re-sending him a letter asking him to testify under oath about the allegations, the Standard can reveal. Virginia Roberts’ legal team are delivering the document for a second time requesting his ‘voluntary cooperation in answering question about his sexual interactions’ with her. Miss Roberts’ lawyers had sent the letter directly to Buckingham Palace the first time but it was claimed it was returned without being opened. Today her lawyers told the Standard “We are attempting delivery through the British Embassy in Washington”.
It came after Andrew spoke out publicly for the first time to deny allegations he had sex with an under-age teenager. Speaking to leading figures from the worlds of politics and business at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort of Davos he said he wanted to “reiterate and reaffirm” Buckingham Palace statements dismissing accusations, made in US court documents, that he had sex with a woman on three separate occasions when she was a minor in 2001. Last night he said: “Firstly I think I must, (and) want, for the record to refer to the events that have taken place in the last few weeks and I just wish to reiterate and to reaffirm the statements which have already been made on my behalf by Buckingham Palace.”
He went on to say: “My focus is on my work.”
Lawyers representing the woman claiming she was forced to have sex with Prince Andrew are re-sending him a letter asking him to testify under oath about the allegations, the Standard can reveal. Virginia Roberts’ legal team are delivering the document for a second time requesting his ‘voluntary cooperation in answering question about his sexual interactions’ with her. Miss Roberts’ lawyers had sent the letter directly to Buckingham Palace the first time but it was claimed it was returned without being opened. Today her lawyers told the Standard “We are attempting delivery through the British Embassy in Washington”.
It came after Andrew spoke out publicly for the first time to deny allegations he had sex with an under-age teenager. Speaking to leading figures from the worlds of politics and business at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort of Davos he said he wanted to “reiterate and reaffirm” Buckingham Palace statements dismissing accusations, made in US court documents, that he had sex with a woman on three separate occasions when she was a minor in 2001. Last night he said: “Firstly I think I must, (and) want, for the record to refer to the events that have taken place in the last few weeks and I just wish to reiterate and to reaffirm the statements which have already been made on my behalf by Buckingham Palace.”
He went on to say: “My focus is on my work.”
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
Billionaire sex offender's phone book contained 21 numbers for Bill Clinton
via The Smoking Gun:
Now that Prince Andrew has found himself ensnared in the sleazy sex slave story of wealthy degenerate Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Clinton can’t be too far behind. Epstein, who paid teenage girls for naked massages at his Palm Beach, Florida mansion, is a convicted sex offender whose circle of powerful friends has included financiers, celebrities, politicians, and scientists. In fact, Epstein, 61, has maintained many of these relationships even after pleading guilty in 2008 to a felony charge stemming from a lengthy probe of his lewd interaction with scores of underage girls, many of whom were recruited while they were students at a Palm Beach high school. Epstein is pictured above in his most recent sex offender registry photo.
But while Prince Andrew and other public figures resumed meeting with a post-prison Epstein, Clinton appears to have avoided the billionaire, who owns a private Caribbean island, a Manhattan mansion, a New Mexico ranch, and a Paris apartment in addition to his waterfront Palm Beach residence. According to court records, Clinton “frequently flew” with Epstein aboard the investor’s private jet from 2002 to 2005, the year news of the police investigation of Epstein was first reported. During the early stages of that probe, cops surreptitiously collected the trash he refuse included documents with the names of some of his many underage masseuses, as well as an Amazon.com invoice for the purchase of sex slave books like “SlaveCraft: Roadmaps for Erotic Servitude--Principles, Skills and Tools,” “Training with Miss Abernathy: A Workbook for Erotic Slaves and Their Owners,” and “SM 101: A Realistic Introduction.”
As part of a civil suit filed against Epstein by several of his victims, lawyers for the women floated the possibility of subpoenaing Clinton since he “might well be a source of relevant information” about Epstein’s activities. While Clinton was never deposed, lawyers obtained Epstein’s computerized phone directory, which included “e-mail addresses for Clinton along with 21 phone numbers for him, including those for his assistant (Doug Band),” according to a court filing.
Now that Prince Andrew has found himself ensnared in the sleazy sex slave story of wealthy degenerate Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Clinton can’t be too far behind. Epstein, who paid teenage girls for naked massages at his Palm Beach, Florida mansion, is a convicted sex offender whose circle of powerful friends has included financiers, celebrities, politicians, and scientists. In fact, Epstein, 61, has maintained many of these relationships even after pleading guilty in 2008 to a felony charge stemming from a lengthy probe of his lewd interaction with scores of underage girls, many of whom were recruited while they were students at a Palm Beach high school. Epstein is pictured above in his most recent sex offender registry photo.
But while Prince Andrew and other public figures resumed meeting with a post-prison Epstein, Clinton appears to have avoided the billionaire, who owns a private Caribbean island, a Manhattan mansion, a New Mexico ranch, and a Paris apartment in addition to his waterfront Palm Beach residence. According to court records, Clinton “frequently flew” with Epstein aboard the investor’s private jet from 2002 to 2005, the year news of the police investigation of Epstein was first reported. During the early stages of that probe, cops surreptitiously collected the trash he refuse included documents with the names of some of his many underage masseuses, as well as an Amazon.com invoice for the purchase of sex slave books like “SlaveCraft: Roadmaps for Erotic Servitude--Principles, Skills and Tools,” “Training with Miss Abernathy: A Workbook for Erotic Slaves and Their Owners,” and “SM 101: A Realistic Introduction.”
As part of a civil suit filed against Epstein by several of his victims, lawyers for the women floated the possibility of subpoenaing Clinton since he “might well be a source of relevant information” about Epstein’s activities. While Clinton was never deposed, lawyers obtained Epstein’s computerized phone directory, which included “e-mail addresses for Clinton along with 21 phone numbers for him, including those for his assistant (Doug Band),” according to a court filing.
Saturday, January 3, 2015
Prince Andrew named in underage sex lawsuit
via The Washington Post:
Prince Andrew was named this week in an ongoing lawsuit brought by a group of women who claim they were trafficked to the world’s rich and powerful as part of an alleged underage “sex slave” ring run by American investment banker Jeffrey Epstein.
The allegation, found in a court filing this week, prompted Buckingham Palace to issue an unusual statement to the Guardian, noting that the allegation surfaced in “long-running and ongoing civil proceedings in the United States to which the Duke of York is not a party.” The statement continues: “As such we would not comment in detail. However, for the avoidance of doubt, any suggestion of impropriety with underage minors is categorically untrue.”
As part of a 2008 plea deal with prosecutors, Epstein spent 13 months in prison on a state charge of soliciting prostitutes. According to unsealed documents pertaining to that deal, Epstein was the subject of a federal investigation probing allegations that the powerful figure abused dozens of underage girls at his Palm Beach mansion. The deal effectively allowed him to avoid potential federal charges stemming from the investigation.
The lawsuit, filed in 2008 by two anonymous alleged victims, charges federal prosecutors with violating a statute by not consulting with them before finalizing the plea deal. The latest filing is a motion to expand that existing case to include the allegations of two more women.
Those women named Prince Andrew, Alan Dershowitz and other powerful associates of Epstein as participants in the alleged sexual abuse ring. It’s the first time the Duke of York’s name has appeared in a court document alleging that he sexually abused Epstein’s alleged victims.
But as the Guardian’s reporting makes clear, this isn’t the first time the Duke of York’s name has been linked publicly to the allegations against Epstein: Prince Andrew was friends with Epstein for years — before, during and after the banker served time in prison. In 2011, responding to a statement from one of Epstein’s former employees, Prince Andrew told Vanity Fair that he never attended any of the notorious pool parties at Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion and denied having contact with the alleged victims. He allegedly ended his friendship with Epstein at some point that year.
In the new motion, “Jane Doe #3″ says she was “forced to have sexual relations with this Prince when she was a minor in three separate geographical locations,” including in British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell’s apartment in London; during an “orgy” on Epstein’s island in the U.S. Virgin Islands; and in New York.
“Epstein instructed Jane Doe #3 that she was to give the Prince whatever he demanded and required Jane Doe #3 to report back to him on the details of the sexual abuse,” the document says. Maxwell is a friend of Epstein’s who is named as a co-conspirator in the suit.
Dershowitz, too, has denied the allegations against him in the new motion. Speaking to Politico this week, the attorney said the claims were “totally, unequivocally and completely false.” Those allegations include a claim that “Deshowitz was an eye-witness to the sexual abuse of many other minors by Epstein and several of Epstein’s co-conspirators,” that “Epstein required Jane Doe #3 to have sexual relations with Dershowitz on numerous occasions,” and that the attorney played “a significant role” in negotiating Epstein’s federal plea agreement....Federal prosecutors identified more than 40 potential victims in their investigation against Epstein before the federal inquiry was dropped in the plea deal. Some of those victims have reached out-of-court settlements with Epstein for undisclosed amounts.
According to the motion, Epstein’s clients included “many other powerful men, including numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known Prime Minister, and other world leaders.” The alleged victim accuses Epstein of requiring the women he gave to powerful individuals to “describe the events” with them “so that he could potentially blackmail them.”
Through her lawyers, Jane Doe #3 issued the following statement to the Guardian in response to the denials of her alleged abusers: “These types of aggressive attacks on me are exactly the reason why sexual abuse victims typically remain silent and the reason why I did for a long time. That trend should change. I’m not going to be bullied back into silence.”
Prince Andrew was named this week in an ongoing lawsuit brought by a group of women who claim they were trafficked to the world’s rich and powerful as part of an alleged underage “sex slave” ring run by American investment banker Jeffrey Epstein.
The allegation, found in a court filing this week, prompted Buckingham Palace to issue an unusual statement to the Guardian, noting that the allegation surfaced in “long-running and ongoing civil proceedings in the United States to which the Duke of York is not a party.” The statement continues: “As such we would not comment in detail. However, for the avoidance of doubt, any suggestion of impropriety with underage minors is categorically untrue.”
As part of a 2008 plea deal with prosecutors, Epstein spent 13 months in prison on a state charge of soliciting prostitutes. According to unsealed documents pertaining to that deal, Epstein was the subject of a federal investigation probing allegations that the powerful figure abused dozens of underage girls at his Palm Beach mansion. The deal effectively allowed him to avoid potential federal charges stemming from the investigation.
The lawsuit, filed in 2008 by two anonymous alleged victims, charges federal prosecutors with violating a statute by not consulting with them before finalizing the plea deal. The latest filing is a motion to expand that existing case to include the allegations of two more women.
Those women named Prince Andrew, Alan Dershowitz and other powerful associates of Epstein as participants in the alleged sexual abuse ring. It’s the first time the Duke of York’s name has appeared in a court document alleging that he sexually abused Epstein’s alleged victims.
But as the Guardian’s reporting makes clear, this isn’t the first time the Duke of York’s name has been linked publicly to the allegations against Epstein: Prince Andrew was friends with Epstein for years — before, during and after the banker served time in prison. In 2011, responding to a statement from one of Epstein’s former employees, Prince Andrew told Vanity Fair that he never attended any of the notorious pool parties at Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion and denied having contact with the alleged victims. He allegedly ended his friendship with Epstein at some point that year.
In the new motion, “Jane Doe #3″ says she was “forced to have sexual relations with this Prince when she was a minor in three separate geographical locations,” including in British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell’s apartment in London; during an “orgy” on Epstein’s island in the U.S. Virgin Islands; and in New York.
“Epstein instructed Jane Doe #3 that she was to give the Prince whatever he demanded and required Jane Doe #3 to report back to him on the details of the sexual abuse,” the document says. Maxwell is a friend of Epstein’s who is named as a co-conspirator in the suit.
Dershowitz, too, has denied the allegations against him in the new motion. Speaking to Politico this week, the attorney said the claims were “totally, unequivocally and completely false.” Those allegations include a claim that “Deshowitz was an eye-witness to the sexual abuse of many other minors by Epstein and several of Epstein’s co-conspirators,” that “Epstein required Jane Doe #3 to have sexual relations with Dershowitz on numerous occasions,” and that the attorney played “a significant role” in negotiating Epstein’s federal plea agreement....Federal prosecutors identified more than 40 potential victims in their investigation against Epstein before the federal inquiry was dropped in the plea deal. Some of those victims have reached out-of-court settlements with Epstein for undisclosed amounts.
According to the motion, Epstein’s clients included “many other powerful men, including numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known Prime Minister, and other world leaders.” The alleged victim accuses Epstein of requiring the women he gave to powerful individuals to “describe the events” with them “so that he could potentially blackmail them.”
Through her lawyers, Jane Doe #3 issued the following statement to the Guardian in response to the denials of her alleged abusers: “These types of aggressive attacks on me are exactly the reason why sexual abuse victims typically remain silent and the reason why I did for a long time. That trend should change. I’m not going to be bullied back into silence.”
Thursday, January 1, 2015
‘Ndrangheta, the Freemasonry of Crime
via Conspiracy Archive:
Italian police have videotaped the initiation ceremony of an elite circle within ‘Ndrangheta – La Santa. A translation has been provided by Euronews:
Invoking the names Garibaldi, Mazzini and La Marmora in the opening is a Masonic reference, as are mention of the stars, the sun and the moon. The rank of santisti, originally “only conferred on no more than thirty-three people,” was instituted as a secret society within a secret society. An innovation from the 1970s, the most important ‘Ndrangheta mafia chiefs decided to implement an occult stage, a secret sect, to “maximize the power and invisibility” of the bosses, the existence of which would only be known by other santisti (Paoli 114). It was intended from the start to allow mafia bosses to join Freemasonry and vice versa, to facilitate more direct influence in civil society, the state and finance. “The very creation of the Santa was greatly influenced by the Freemasonry, with which the ‘Ndrangheta chiefs developed ties during the Reggio Calabria revolt of 1970,” writes Professor Letizia Paoli in Mafia Brotherhoods: Organized Crime, Italian Style (Oxford University Press, 2008).
Further evidence of masonic ties elucidated by Paoli is the fact that the ceremony – now confirmed in the video – is opened “’in the name Giuseppe Mazzini, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and Giuseppe La Marmora,’ three major figures of the Italian Freemasonry, who are personified during the same meetings by three santisti” (ibid). And not captured on tape, another initiation ritual – Fidelizzazione – is more overt:
The creation of the Santa was analogous to the tradition within Italian Freemasonry to set up covered lodges or so-called black lodges (of the P2 variety) as an extra layer of secrecy:
Indeed, in an arrest warrant of some 500 members during 1990s, prosecutors noted:
The emergence of ‘Ndrangheta and the Cosa Nostra in the latter half of the 19th century was itself influenced by Masonry, the Carbonari, and the populist spread of insurrectionary secret societies. During the movement for Italian unification (Risorgimento) the nascent mafia’s organizational model was learned from political prisoners, Masons and Carbonari, mixing with traditional gangs in prison. Thereafter, according to historian John Dickie, they would operate as “Freemasonries of Crime.” Paoli highlights this fact as well. The “Fratellanza of Favara,” for instance, “one of the largest nineteenth-century mafia associations with branches in several towns and villages of the Agrigento province”:
The structure of ‘Ndrangheta is discussed in a UCL lecture by professor John Dickie. The Freemasonry of Crime, it turns out, has a hierarchy not all dissimilar to the 18th Century Bavarian Illuminati. The ‘Ndrangheta have a provincial boss (like Illuminati Provincials), under which there are local branches (Illuminati Prefects and Deans) with members divided into Major and Minor (Illuminatus minor and major) classes of initiates (2:30, 3:10, 4:34; 7:10). The Santa, I suppose could be likened to Regents, and the Senior Ranks, the Areopagites.
Italian police have videotaped the initiation ceremony of an elite circle within ‘Ndrangheta – La Santa. A translation has been provided by Euronews:
Good evening, and good evening to the “santisti”.
Indeed in this holy evening in the silence of the night under the light of the stars and the splendor of the moon, I form the holy chain, in name of Garibaldi, Mazzini and Lamarmora, with words of humbleness, I form the holy society! Say all together with me: I swear ….to repudiate…altogether up to the seventh generation… all the criminal society that I have recognized so far, in order to defend the honour of my wise brothers! Until yesterday you belonged to the criminal society. As far as “N’drangheta” is concerned up to yesterday you were complete! Now you must take a different path. You must arm yourself. You must repudiate all you knew until yesterday. Here there are two paths….the mountains…the holy mountain..
Today, from now on, you judge by yourself! There are two possibilities: if in your life you fail to do something important, your brothers must not judge you. You must know by yourself that you failed and you must choose the way to follow. The oath of poison!! A pill, there is a pill!!…. Cyanide! ….Or you poison yourself. Or you take this one that shoots. The bullets in the gun.. You must always keep one bullet! That is for you!
If they ask you: “Excuse me, do you know whose son are you? Who is your father? You must answer: My father is the sun. My mother is the moon.”
Invoking the names Garibaldi, Mazzini and La Marmora in the opening is a Masonic reference, as are mention of the stars, the sun and the moon. The rank of santisti, originally “only conferred on no more than thirty-three people,” was instituted as a secret society within a secret society. An innovation from the 1970s, the most important ‘Ndrangheta mafia chiefs decided to implement an occult stage, a secret sect, to “maximize the power and invisibility” of the bosses, the existence of which would only be known by other santisti (Paoli 114). It was intended from the start to allow mafia bosses to join Freemasonry and vice versa, to facilitate more direct influence in civil society, the state and finance. “The very creation of the Santa was greatly influenced by the Freemasonry, with which the ‘Ndrangheta chiefs developed ties during the Reggio Calabria revolt of 1970,” writes Professor Letizia Paoli in Mafia Brotherhoods: Organized Crime, Italian Style (Oxford University Press, 2008).
According to the former chief of the Messina ‘ndrina, Gaetano Costa, Mommo Piromalli “who was famous for being a Mason, or – at any rate – extremely close to the Mason circles . .. introduced the rule … according to which any member of the Santa could join the Masonry”. And indeed, according to another mafia witness, Albanese, “all the santisti were part of the Masonic brotherhood or, at least, the chiefs of the Santa were full members.” (116).
Further evidence of masonic ties elucidated by Paoli is the fact that the ceremony – now confirmed in the video – is opened “’in the name Giuseppe Mazzini, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and Giuseppe La Marmora,’ three major figures of the Italian Freemasonry, who are personified during the same meetings by three santisti” (ibid). And not captured on tape, another initiation ritual – Fidelizzazione – is more overt:
…during the ceremony the officiant asks: “Do you know the family of the Masons?” The novice must answer: “No, but if necessary I embrace it with my skin, flesh and bones, swearing the loyalty asked of me to the family of the holy order of the Masons”. Furthermore, as in Masonic practice, while the new member’s name is communicated to all the existing members, theirs are initially not disclosed to him (ibid).
The creation of the Santa was analogous to the tradition within Italian Freemasonry to set up covered lodges or so-called black lodges (of the P2 variety) as an extra layer of secrecy:
As the pentito Giovanni Gulla points out, “the Santa, as a secret sect, is the exact correspondent of the covered Freemasonry vis-a-vis the official one”. In the same way as the secret lodges were formed in the Freemasonry, the Santa and the higher ranks were created to reinforce protection around the inner core of the association through secrecy. In this way, the Santa and the higher ranks functioned to remedy the ‘Ndrangheta’s traditional low degree of secrecy (ibid).
Indeed, in an arrest warrant of some 500 members during 1990s, prosecutors noted:
The [‘Ndrangheta’s] entrance into previously existing or ad hoc constituted Masonic lodges was the way to establish links with those social strata which traditionally adhered to the Masonry, that is, members of the liberal professions (physicians, lawyers, and notaries), entrepreneurs and politicians, representatives of state institutions, among them magistrates and members of the police forces. Through this link, the ‘Ndrangheta was able to find not only new possibilities for economic investment, but previously unconceived political outlets. Above all, that “covering,” accomplished in various ways and in various levels (diversions, lack of investigations, attacks of every kind to noncompliant magistrates, adjustments of trials, etc.), produced a substantial impunity, characteristic of this criminal organization, rendering it almost “invisible” to institutions, to such an extent that only a couple of years back it came to the attention of the national public opinion and of the most qualified investigative bodies (198-199).
The emergence of ‘Ndrangheta and the Cosa Nostra in the latter half of the 19th century was itself influenced by Masonry, the Carbonari, and the populist spread of insurrectionary secret societies. During the movement for Italian unification (Risorgimento) the nascent mafia’s organizational model was learned from political prisoners, Masons and Carbonari, mixing with traditional gangs in prison. Thereafter, according to historian John Dickie, they would operate as “Freemasonries of Crime.” Paoli highlights this fact as well. The “Fratellanza of Favara,” for instance, “one of the largest nineteenth-century mafia associations with branches in several towns and villages of the Agrigento province”:
… practiced rites and initiation procedures of Masonic derivation, explicitly referring to the “universal republic.” Likewise, the Stoppaglieri of Monreale allegedly used rites of a Masonic type, while its founder, Giuseppe Palmeri from Nicaso, was a member of Mazzini’s revolutionary movement for the independence and unification of Italy, which was also heavily influenced by the Freemasonry. The influence of liberal secret societies upon the formation stages of contemporary mafia associations is also echoed in the legends recounted by today’s mafia members. According to Tommaso Buscetta, for example, the current Cosa Nostra was once known as Carboneria – a clear reference to the liberal secret society bearing the same name (104).
The structure of ‘Ndrangheta is discussed in a UCL lecture by professor John Dickie. The Freemasonry of Crime, it turns out, has a hierarchy not all dissimilar to the 18th Century Bavarian Illuminati. The ‘Ndrangheta have a provincial boss (like Illuminati Provincials), under which there are local branches (Illuminati Prefects and Deans) with members divided into Major and Minor (Illuminatus minor and major) classes of initiates (2:30, 3:10, 4:34; 7:10). The Santa, I suppose could be likened to Regents, and the Senior Ranks, the Areopagites.
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