Few people in the West could grasp the sadness and anger of Russian President Vladimir Putin when he told a select audience of Russian politicians from the Duma in the Kremlin in September 2016, “You know how I feel about the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was unnecessary. We could have introduced reforms, including those of a more democratic nature, without allowing this.”
Putin did not need to describe “this.” Everyone present knew he meant the savage destruction of life, feeling of worth, and pride for most Russians after 1990. If anyone in the US or the EU thought about Putin’s comments—coming amid an unprecedented US and NATO vilification and demonization campaign against the Russian Federation and Putin personally, including economic sanctions—they most likely saw it as confirmation of Washington claims that Putin’s Russia was out to rebuild the Soviet Union.
What was unknown to most in the West was the true background of the destruction of life in Russia and the former member states of the USSR.
The CIA operation began near the end of the 1980s with a network of CIA actors and their corrupted, bought-and-paid-for Soviet KGB generals.
It was called the Yeltsin Era, and it lasted the entire decade of the 1990s until Yeltsin resigned on December 31, 1999.
His resignation had been finally forced by a group of nationalist Russians led by a forty-seven-year-old former KGB officer who briefly headed the successor organization to the KGB known as the SVR, or Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation. The SVR man was Putin, by then Yeltsin’s Prime Minister.
The destruction of the Soviet Union was one of the darkest criminal operations ever undertaken by the US government or, more precisely, by a dark, deep state network buried inside that Washington bureaucracy, sometimes referring to themselves as “the Vulcans,” often simply called neoconservatives.
The key roles in the rape of Russia were played by US President George H.W. Bush and later by Bush’s close friend and protégé, William Jefferson “Bill” Clinton. The venom directed from Washington towards Putin personally since his reelection as president in 2012 and even beginning his revitalization of Russia after his ascendancy to the presidency on December 31, 1999, the day Yeltsin was forced to abdicate his imagined throne, would become clear. Slowly details emerged of what crimes Bush, Clinton, and their covert intelligence circles committed against Russia after 1989.
— Bush’s CIA “Old Boys” —
George H.W. Bush
George H.W. Bush, former director of the CIA, ran the entire foreign and national security operations of President Ronald Reagan from the Office of the Vice President. Through Executive Order 12333, a national security directive drafted by then vice president Bush and signed by Reagan, Bush had made sure he was in charge of all Reagan-era US foreign and national security operations after 1981. [Editor Note: This of course presaged an almost identical scenario when his son George W Bush Jr ascended to power in 2001, and handed over on a silver platter foreign and national security policy to Dick Cheney and his mob.]
People close to [Reagan-era] CIA Chief Bill Casey said that as President, Reagan had little interest in foreign policy. The true role of Bush in the Reagan years was well hidden, however. When Bush’s son George W. Bush Jr took office as President in 2001, one of his first acts was to sign Executive Order 13233, an extraordinary act that cited “national security” as grounds to conceal records of past presidents, especially his father’s activities during the 1990 and 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist Eastern Europe states. Consequently, those records are no longer accessible to the public. The truth can be gathered by evidence of participants in Russia, Eastern Europe, and in the USA, deep research, and congressional and other testimonies of those with direct knowledge. The picture of the destruction that resulted is staggering.
George H.W. Bush ran things covertly through his “old boy” CIA networks, often using various private companies they had set up during the Bush’s illegal Iran–Contra operation of the mid-1980s. The Iran–Contra affair was an illegal, top-secret Bush–Colonel Oliver North scheme to sell US weapons to Iran in violation of an official US arms embargo to Iran, then to divert a part of the Iran arms profits to illegally finance the CIA-backed Contras of Nicaragua, who paid for the weapons with cocaine dollars, hence the name Iran–Contra Affair.
All was done without required the US congressional approval, in violation of US law. When President Jimmy Carter forced the early retirement of 800 CIA agents, many of them loyal to former CIA Director Bush, they regrouped as a private intelligence and business network, a kind of covert “deep state,” informally calling itself “the Enterprise.” This network, active for Vice President George H.W. Bush in the Iran–Contra affair, was used by Bush, now as US president, to loot and deform all of communist Eastern Europe and, ultimately, Russia under their asset, Boris Yeltsin.
The companies George H.W. Bush sanctioned under the code name “the Enterprise” were soon to be responsible for the CIA-financed coup that brought down Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Union in 1991. But the machinery and organization of the Enterprise was also responsible for bribing or corrupting key KGB generals and creating what came to be called the “Russian oligarchs” to loot the crown jewels of the former Soviet State, now legally known as the Russian Federation. Their looting included the entire gold reserves of the Russian National Bank in the early 1990s. That loot was funneled into the vaults of handpicked CIA-controlled banks in Switzerland, off shore bank havens, and New York.
— The CIA’s Yeltsin “Democracy” Coup —
The rape of Russia—the Russian nation, the Russian state, the Russian people—which began at the end of the 1980s, was a coup d’état engineered by the American CIA’s rogue and not so rogue networks directed by former CIA Director, now President, George H.W. Bush. Western accounts of what took place inside the Russian Federation during the Yeltsin years of the 1990s speak of “Russian mafia” or “Russian organized crime.”
Never do they mention or even hint that those Russians who plundered their own country were organized and paid, or made rich, by the West or, to be more precise, by the old boy CIA networks loyal to former CIA director and then US president George H.W. Bush.
What took place in the 1990s under the Russian presidency of Boris Yeltsin was described by one knowledgeable US insider, Mortimer Zuckerman, himself an establishment member of the Council on Foreign Relations and owner of US News & World Report, as “the largest giveaway of a nation’s wealth in history.” The giveaway, or more precisely “theft,” was done through outright robbery, currency war, and a fraudulent loans-for-company stock shares program that was a precondition demanded by Washington to getting aid and loans from the World Bank and the IMF—aid and loans that “never touched ground in Russia,” as Zuckerman noted.
Washington, covertly working with a circle of very select US and European banks, made it possible for the Yeltsin clan to loot the Russian Treasury of its gold reserves. They then offered desperately needed US money to a privatization scheme that created and installed a kleptocracy regime, and created a cabal of hyper-rich oligarchs under Yeltsin, referred to by some in the Russian media as the “Yeltsin Family,” as in the Mafia. Washington and US mainstream media cynically called it “bringing democracy and free market capitalism” to post-communist Russia.
In 1989, soon after his election, US President George H.W. Bush initiated the operation to loot the Soviet Union. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and covert US government money to Poland’s Solidarno?? had severely weakened Moscow’s control over Poland during the decade of the 1980s and ignited anti-communist protest movements all over communist Eastern Europe.
That Polish success—notably, that it was not suppressed by Soviet Red Army tanks as in 1956 in Hungary or during the Prague Spring of 1968—had given major encouragement to similar underground, anti-regime movements across Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, from Hungary to Czechoslovakia to East Germany.
In Afghanistan, after ten bloody years, Soviet Red Army troops finally gave up and left the country in 1989, humiliated in defeat from CIA-trained and armed Islamist Mujahedeen terrorists. In Dresden in East Germany–the German Democratic Republic as it was formally called–from the mid-1980s until the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, a young KGB officer named Vladimir Putin was stationed, watching as the power of Moscow evaporated everywhere.
Moscow itself was financially in dire straits, dramatically so ever since a US State Department–Saudi oil price collapse operation was deliberately launched by Washington in 1986. That oil price collapse hit at the heart of the Soviet primary hard currency sources: its oil export; [the oil price collapse also] severely hurt Soviet earnings of badly needed dollars for Western technology purchases, as well as for countering CIA operations in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Eastern Europe. The decade-long covert CIA campaign in Afghanistan, using fanatical Mujahedeen terrorists mostly recruited by a Saudi CIA asset named Osama bin Laden, had given the Soviet Union what President Carter’s national security director, Zbigniew Brzezinski, later called “Russia’s Vietnam.”
Then in 1989, President George H.W. Bush gave the order to launch an all-out takeover and looting of the crown jewels of the largest and most strategic part of the USSR, the formerly communist Russian Federation. The dissolution of the Soviet Union itself rapidly followed the August 1991 Ukrainian declaration of independence from the USSR.
State-owned oil and gas companies, key raw materials, such as nickel and aluminum, and high-tech Soviet military companies were the prime looting targets of select Western interests trading with insider connections.
Now finally as president, George H.W. Bush decided to go for the kill against a severely weakened Russian Federation. Bush and a CIA network of Western bankers, US government officials, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), together with a cabal of young Harvard University economists—they were dubbed the Harvard Boys—brought into Russia by George Soros in league with a corrupted network of KGB traitors, unleashed one of the greatest criminal looting operations in history.
Confused Russian citizens, fed up with the years of Soviet control and lack of improvement in their daily lives from Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika attempts at reforming the Soviet system, naively and with great hope turned to the West, most especially to Wall Street and Washington.
In 1987, in a desperate attempt to calm growing social unrest over the deteriorating Soviet economy, Gorbachev permitted Soviet citizens to own dollars. It was a disaster of untold dimension. Overnight, a huge black market for dollars grew and the ruble became de facto worthless inside the Soviet Union.
Russians, forbidden to travel to the West, were fed the illusion that everything in America was “bigger and better.” Secret, prohibited shortwave broadcasts from the US State Department’s Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty out of Munich fed those illusions of an American capitalist paradise.
The majority of Russians believed, for the most part, nothing could be worse than life under Soviet communism with the chronic shortages in the shops, endless queues, and lack of basic goods, let alone of luxury goods.
They were soon to realize they were dreadfully wrong.
It could be worse. The bottom fell out in the daily life for most Russians as Yeltsin’s clan and their Western collaborators proceeded to loot the country following the abolition of a communist state during the 1990s.
Pensions went unpaid and medical insurance ended abruptly, as did daycare for working mothers and most state support.’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, Engdahl is the son of F. William Engdahl, Sr., and Ruth Aalund (b. Rishoff). Engdahl grew up in Texas and after earning a degree in engineering and jurisprudence from Princeton University in 1966 (BA) and graduate study in comparative economics at the University of Stockholm from 1969 to 1970, he worked as an economist and freelance journalist in New York and in Europe. Engdahl began writing about oil politics with the first oil shock in the early 1970s.
His first book was called A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order and discusses the alleged roles of Zbigniew Brzezinski and George Ball and of the USA in the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran, which was meant to manipulate oil prices and to stop Soviet expansion. Engdahl claims that Brzezinski and Ball used the Islamic Balkanization model proposed by Bernard Lewis. In 2007, he completed Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation. Engdahl is also a contributor to the website of the anti-globalization Centre for Research on Globalization, the Russian website New Eastern Outlook,[2] and the Voltaire Network,[3] and a freelancer for varied newsmagazines such as the Asia Times. William Engdahl has been married since 1987 and has been living for more than two decades near Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
SEE ALSO:
https://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/putin-documentary-democracy-and-class.html
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