There is a consensus among western intelligence officials that Russian intelligence operatives hacked the thousands of embarrassing Democratic National Committee emails that were released by Wikileaks to the press the first day of the Democratic National Convention proceedings, causing an uproar including the resignation of DNC Chairperson Debby Wasserman Schultz, but no consensus about where Wikileaks obtained the emails.
Now, an online operator called Guccifer 2—the original Guccifer is a Rumanian jailed by the FBI for hacking a number of classified sources dating backing to the George W. Bush Administration—has dumped a new batch of purloined DNC documents including an opposition research document called “The Trump Report.” In response to all this sound and fury, Trump held his extraordinary and unprecedented press briefer yesterday morning encouraging the Russians to release, if they have them, the 33,000 emails that Hillary Clinton’s lawyers erased from her private server. Whether or not Hillary Clinton’s server was hacked by the Russians or Chinese is unknown, though the original Guccifer’s claim to have penetrated her server has been shown by the FBI to be a lie.
No one knows for sure whether the Russian government is conspiring to elect Donald Trump president, but enquiring minds—the National Enquirer is Trump’s journalistic bible—would like to know.
We do know that the pro-Putin Trump has invested in Russian companies (though he won’t release his tax returns containing detailed info), that his campaign manager, Paul Manafort, has been on Putin’s payroll as a lobbyist as have several of Trump’s advisers on international affairs and the global oil business, and that ubiquitous Trump flack Roger Stone wrote a book blaming the JFK assassination on Lyndon Johnson. The real purpose of Stone’s book seems to be exonerate Lee Harvey Oswald and obscure as much as possible the evidence that, for a while at least while he was in Russia, Oswald was watched and manipulated by the KGB, as was long ago documented by Edward Jay Epstein.
Trump’s relationship with Putin also needs to be put in the broader context of past and present efforts by Russia, before, during, and after the official reign of the Soviet KGB, to influence western politics. This history’s current episode involves Arron (sometimes Aaron) Banks, a little-known insurance entrepreneur and UK Independence Party (UKIP) donor, who it now appears was largely responsible for funding the Brexit campaign. Banks and his Russian-born wife may have been cut-outs for the FSB, the successor to the KGB, and Putin’s instrument in his efforts to secure the UK’s departure from the EU.
In terms of earlier history, the Progressive Party, which ran Henry Wallace for president of the U.S. in 1948, was effectively controlled by Moscow through its American Communist Party operatives. The Progressive Party failed in its primary purpose of defeating Democratic Harry Truman, but it did succeed in costing him the electoral votes of New York State.
Back during and after World War I, Jewish Georgi Rosenblum, otherwise known as Sydney Reilly “Ace of Spies,” was a master operative for Britain’s MI6 in Germany and in Russia where he unsuccessfully tried to assassinate Lenin. In 1925, he was sent back into the Soviet Union by The Trust, ostensibly an anti-Soviet organization but which in fact was run by Felix Dzerzhinsky, who led the precursor to the Soviet KGB. In 1925, Reilly was captured and executed in Russia, but the year before while still in London he concocted the fraudulent so-called Zinoviev Letter which was leaked to the British press to embarrass the Labour Party in the 1924 elections.
You don’t have to be John Le Carre to see how today’s bromance between Putin and Trump may be just the tip of the iceberg of a new Russian conspiracy to influence the U.S. 2016 presidential election, defeating Hillary Clinton, just as earlier this year Putin apparently influenced the UK’s Brexit vote.
The difference between pre-Putin and Putin eras is that, before the fall of the Soviet Union, a Russian communist government tried to subvert non-communist political left and center-left parties in the UK and the U.S. In contrast, today Putin, who wants to elect Trump, leads a right-wing Russian regime whose chief ideologue, Aleksandr Dugin, is a fascist anti-Semite.
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