Conspirators

That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain ... William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1 Scene V

Into the Wilderness of Mirrors

By chance the final touches to this book were made during the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989. It didn't actually fall, rather the East German authorities announced on November 9 that access to West Berlin was open, and jubilant Berliners simply disassembled most of it over the next days and weeks. Since then it has become emblematic of the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the "post-history," "unipolar" world touted by American neoconservatives. The benefits from removing the expense of the arms race and from the spread of Western capitalism and finance – the "peace dividend" – would lead inevitably to a new golden age, a New American Century. It wasn't meant to be.

Beyond the significant specifics, the fundamental message of this book is that on the world stage, things are rarely as they seem. Leaders meet at G-20 meetings, national legislation is enacted, UN resolutions are passed, NATO forces are dispatched, and only rarely do the real reasons for these actions even approximate their justifying rhetoric. Such is the reach of the Shadow Masters.

At the time I watched the party in Berlin – for that is surely what went on – with as much pleasure as anyone who had experienced Communist rule firsthand. But my meeting with Vladimir was years ahead, and I took the events at face value: as a vindication for Ronaid Reagan's carrot-and-stick approach to better relations with the USSR. It would not be long before the USSR was no more, and Muscovites would be partying like the Berliners, albeit on a tighter budget. It seemed as if the wildly popular Boris Yeltsin would be leading a no-longer-belligerent Russia into a new age of free enterprise and progress. It wasn't meant to be.

Instead, Yeltsin presided over years of decline and economic disaster, all the while himself clearly declining into a world of alcohol and illness. When he abruptly left office, naming the ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin as his successor, Yeltsin was the most hated man in Russia. Yeltsin, who had sold off state assets at bargain prices to oligarchs and foreign interests, was seen clearly as the West's stooge, and US-Russian relations have cooled considerably since.

The answer to "what went wrong?" depends on who is asked. The Shadow Masters' answer is another question: "What's not to like?" Their world of deception thrives on conflict, both real and imagined. They consistently play both ends against the middle, and vice versa.

They relish a war in Afghanistan precisely because it can be sold to the publics among the "coalition of the willing" as the defense of Western civilization against the forces of Islamo-Fascism, whatever that may be. In fact it appears to be an occupation to protect and control the most lucrative drug trade in the world while stationing powerful military forces on the high ground between America's potential rivals Russia and China. It has the added "benefit" of further destabilizing the Indian subcontinent while appearing to threaten Iran. As I said, what's not to like?

Few Americans took much notice of the June 2001 formation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a mutual security concord including Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kirgizstan, and Tajikistan. The Shadow Masters noticed. The invasion of Afghanistan took place in less than six months. A glance at any globe will show the immense swath of Eurasia that these six states comprise. In an effort to gain greater influence, the SCO has granted observer status to Mongolia, India, Pakistan, and Iran, which applied for full membership in March 2008. These ten nations together comprise over 25 percent of the world's land-mass and over 45 percent of its population. Among other activities, which have included military exercises, the SCO has stated its intent to curtail the drug trade. Western dominance of Afghanistan is viewed as essential in limiting the power of the SCO.

However, the current global financial crisis, though largely engineered, does provide an opportunity for more and more people to see through the veil of deception. This is particularly true outside the US, a phenomenon discussed by F. William Engdahl by way of an ancient Chinese concept:

The problem for the US power elites around Wall Street and in Washington is the fact that they are now in the deepest financial crisis in their history. That crisis is clear to the entire world and the world is acting on a basis of self-survival. The US elites have lost what in Chinese imperial history is known as the Mandate of Heaven. That mandate is given a ruler or ruling elite provided they rule their people justly and fairly. When they rule tyrannically and as despots, oppressing and abusing their people, they lose that Mandate of Heaven.

If the powerful private wealthy elites that have controlled essential US financial and foreign policy for most of the past century or more ever had a "mandate of Heaven" they clearly have lost it. The domestic developments towards creation of an abusive police state with deprivation of Constitutional rights to its citizens, the arbitrary exercise of power by non elected officials such as Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson and now Tim Geithner, stealing trillion dollar sums from taxpayers without their consent in order to bailout the bankrupt biggest Wall Street banks, banks deemed "Too Big To Fail," this all demonstrates to the world they have lost the mandate.

In this situation, the US power elites are increasingly desperate to maintain their control of a global parasitical empire, called deceptively by their media machine, "globalization." To hold that dominance it is essential that they be able to break up any emerging cooperation in the economic, energy or military realm between the two major powers of Eurasia that conceivably could pose a challenge to future US sole Superpower control – China in combination with Russia.

The world has discovered that risk has been globalized far more than either democracy or prosperity. The US bubbles in housing, banking and insurance have led to economic ruin even among America's traditional friends like Ireland and Iceland. Their publics have been awakened by another type of "shock-therapy," applied by the same culprits who used that as a justification for the "reforms" necessary to devastate the Russian economy.

But again, none of this seemed likely, or even possible, when the Berlin Wall was crumbling. It had been not yet thirty months since President Reagan had issued his famous injunction during a speech in Berlin: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall!" The irony was lost on me at the time, but if I had known in the wake of the Cold War's end what I do now about spycraft, I would have noticed a significant...