Tiananmen Was a Color Revolution

There was no ‘crackdown’ on the Tiananmen Square protests, it was an old-fashioned Color Revolution. After six weeks of demonstrations the students were told to return home and that the square would be cleared by unarmed police. After considerable discussion they complied. Throughout the negotiations the relationship remained cordial and respectful.

Meanwhile, in another part of the city, a gang of rioting thugs burned and bludgeoned dozens of unarmed police to death.

The PLA was called in and shot as many rioters as they could find. It would have been just another riot story, hushed up and soon forgotten but for one difference:

Two weeks before the Tiananmen Square denouement Premier Deng was informed of a Color Revolution under way and the USA had seeded student and worker groups with trained agents provocateurs (that’s one in the photograph below, Alan Pessin, looking awfully suss! He was Beijing bureau chief of the Voice of America, and was ordered out of the country within 72 hours for violating martial law restrictions). The US had used the same playbook to overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953.

 

The circumstantial evidence points to an attempted US destabilization of China designed to coincide with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Here’s what I’ve gathered so far and, though it’s not conclusive, it is persuasive:

1. President H. W. Bush served as Chief of the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing (1974 – 1976) then became Director of the CIA (1976–1977).
2. President H. W. Bush withdrew Winston Lord from his position as ambassador to China (1985-1989) during the early days of the Tiananmen Square incident and replaced him with Ambassador James Lilley. Why? After all, Lord spoke some Chinese and was a key figure in the restoration of relations between the US and China in 1972. Wasn’t he the best man for the job during a crisis?
3. Ambassador Lilley (April 20, 1989 to 1991), was a former CIA operative who had worked in Asia helping insert CIA agents into China.
4. In 1985, a social scientist, Gene Sharp, published a study commissioned by NATO, Making Europe Unconquerable. He pointed out that ultimately a government only exists because people agree to obey it: the USSR, for example, could never control Western Europe if people refused to obey Communist governments.
5. Dr. Sharp, who also wrote Civilian-Based Defense: A Post Military Weapons System, had been tasked by the CIA with implementing his theoretical research in China. The United States wanted to topple Deng Xiaoping – a tough, brilliant nationalist – in favor of China’s right wing Premier, Zhao Ziyang.
6. The intention was to stage a coup with a veneer of legitimacy by organizing street protests, as the CIA had given a popular facade to the overthrow of Iran’s Mohammed Mossadegh by hiring Tehran demonstrators during Operation Ajax, in 1953.
7. The difference between Iran – where there was real polarization – and China is that Gene Sharp had to rely on a mix of pro-Zhao and pro-US youth to make the coup look like a revolution. But there was not enough bad blood between the two groups to generate the required violence.
8. Zhao Ziyang, Premier and General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, was like Russia’s Gorbachev. In his memoirs Zhao said, “China should adopt a free press, freedom to organize, an independent judiciary, and a multiparty parliamentary democracy.” He also called for “the privatization of state-owned enterprises, the separation of the Party and the state, and general market economic reforms”.
9. Lilley, Soros and Zhao formed a troika of forces both within and outside the CPC that was extremely well-placed and well-versed in destabilizing and overthrowing established socialist states by hook or by crook.
10. Dr. Sharp was in Beijing in the months leading up to the demonstrations.
11. Deng had Dr. Sharp arrested and expelled to Hong Kong – from whence he directed the Tiananmen operation, as he reports in his nicely titled article, ‘Non-Violent Struggle in China: an Eyewitness Account’.
12. In 1989 the Chinese government banned George Soros’ Chinese NGO, the Fund for the Reform and Opening of China, after interrogating its Chinese director in August of that year and finding that the fund had links to the CIA.
13. The CIA spurred the youth groups into a vain attempt to discredit Deng through the crackdown that followed – several student leaders openly called for bloodshed – but the coup failed.
14. University students of that day will tell you of the influence of the VOA – the Voice of America – and the picture it painted of “freedom and democracy”. And that the VOA was broadcasting to the students 24×7 from Hong Kong during the weeks of the Tiananmen sit-in, offering comfort and encouragement, provocation, strategic and tactical advice.
15. The student leaders knew what they were getting into. They had been protesting for months and had refused (conditional) dialogue with the government. Various government dignitaries including Zhao Ziyang warned them of their peril, and the students knew the risks. They felt they had to stay and make a stand in order to bring democracy to China. Here’s Chai Ling, one of the Commanders in Chief of the student movement, a week before the crackdown: The situation has become so dangerous. The students asked me what we were going to do next. I wanted to tell them that we were [translation of this is disputed] hoping for/expecting bloodshed; that it would take a massacre, which would spill blood like a river through Tiananmen Square, to awaken the people. But how could I tell them this? How could I tell them that their lives would have to be sacrificed in order to win? If we withdraw from the square, the government will kill us anyway and purge those who supported us. If we let them win, thousands would perish, and seventy years of achievement would be wasted. Who knows how long it would be before the movement could rise again?” – Source: Interview with Phillip Cunningham, shortly before the crackdown.

[Chai Ling subsequently became famous for secretly trying to leave the square shortly before the government crackdown, leaving her followers to die].

Lloyd Lofthouse investigated the aftermath:

1. “I returned to my Chinese friends and asked, “How do you know the CIA helped the student leaders of the protest?” “It’s obvious,” was the answer, “it is very difficult, almost impossible, for anyone in China to get a visa to visit the United States. Yet most of the leaders of the Tiananmen incident left China quickly and prospered in the West without any obvious difficulty – many were successful and became wealthy.
2. I returned to my investigation: Let’s Welcome Chinese Tourists was one piece I read from the Washington Post of the time, documenting how difficult it was to get a visa to the US from China. I read another piece in the Chicago Tribune on the same subject. My Chinese wife told me her brother and both sisters were denied visas to the US.
3. I learned that Wang Dan, one of the principal organizers of the Tiananmen incident, went to jail because he stayed in China when most of the student leaders fled. Today, Wang has moved to the West and cannot return to China. Two others went to Harvard and a third went to Yale. Where did they get the money? Private universities are expensive.
4. How about the other leaders who fled to the West? “Some have reincarnated themselves as Internet entrepreneurs, stockbrokers or, in one case, a chaplain for the U.S. military in Iraq. Several have been back to China to investigate potential business opportunities.” [Source: Time].
5. When the PLA failed to fill Beijing with the blood of ‘thousands’ of student democracy martyrs, Washington simply fabricated a massacre and, because of its overwhelming control of our media, most of the world still believes Washington’s version, the official story.

 

You can readily verify everything above. The core truth, that there was no ‘student massacre’ in Tiananmen Square or anywhere, has been known to every Western journalist since 2010. It was thoroughly investigated by the C0lumbia Journalism Review, the leading publication for professional journalists, in their June issue, The Myth of Tiananmen. Our media ignored it. The Journalism Review version was later corroborated by members of the Diplomatic Corps stationed in Beijing at the time, in places like Britain’s ultra-right wing Daily Telegraph and, more recently, by United States State Department official cables, thanks to Wikileaks. Here’s Gene Sharp’s account his personal Tiananmen Adventure:

Last spring, news from China captured world attention. Chinese students were demonstrating for democracy in Tiananmen Square. Their campaign went on for six and a half weeks until June 4, when government troops intervened, killing hundreds, if not thousands. Gene Sharp, President of the Albert Einstein Institution, and his research assistant, Bruce Jenkins, were in Beijing studying the pro-democracy movement firsthand when the government crackdown occurred. They conducted a series of interviews with student leaders and participants in the movement and observed daily events in Tiananmen Square leading up to the June 4 massacre. All told, they spent nine days in Beijing, from May 28 to June 6, 1989.

From its launching to the night of the massacre, was its use of strictly nonviolent forms of protest. We went to Beijing to learn why the students had chosen to conduct their struggle nonviolently and to discover how much they knew about this technique. Where were the ideas of nonviolent struggle coming from? Who was leading the movement, if anyone? Were actions spontaneous in nature, or planned? Was there strategic thinking involved? We went seeking answers to these and other questions. This is what we learned. (Continued on p. 3) Motivations for nonviolent struggle The students’ motivations for pursuing strictly nonviolent methods of resistance were practical in nature (rather than moral or religious). Students gave two reasons why they thought that the movement had developed along nonviolent lines: first, the students were no match for the army, and second, violent actions would give the government an excuse to clamp down on the students. One student cited violent acts in Shanghai in 1986 which led to the crushing of the students’ protest movement at that time. “This time, no excuse,” he said. An older graduate student offered two other reasons why the movement was avowedly nonviolent.

First, the many social and economic “contradictions” in Chinese society could not be settled violently. Rather, the problems needed to be solved by “constructive measures.” He equated these to nonviolent actions. Second, the students did not seek the overthrow of the government, but rather its reform. This could best be achieved by nonviolent, rather than violent, means. Students’ knowledge of nonviolent struggle Among all the students interviewed, there was common familiarity with past cases of nonviolent resistance in other parts of the world (the Philippines, India, Poland, and South Korea being the most mentioned cases; Burma, Taiwan, and the United States were mentioned once or twice). A student told us that Chinese television often gave extensive coverage to “people rising against anti-revolutionary powers.”

However, we were unable to uncover any evidence of more formal understandings of the nature of nonviolent struggle. None of the students we spoke with knew of any books, pamphlets, or audio-visual materials (in any language) dealing with nonviolent struggle. A Canadian diplomat told us that he had heard of books (no specifics) on nonviolent resistance brought from the U.S. circulating around Beijing University, but we were unable to confirm this. Several students spoke of their history textbooks which referred to Gandhi and the Indian noncooperation movement. One student was familiar with Gandhi’s use of the hunger strike. Later reports suggest that some limited materials were available in Beijing and other cities. Organization of leadership Those interviewed often stated that the lack of a “universally recognized organization” was the weakest aspect of their movement. Nearly all students were organized into small, university-based groups.

By the time of the killings, the students had not produced a unified leadership structure. [Below is an attempt to piece together the scant information available on the formation and organization of student leadership groups. It is preliminary at best. Students interviewed did not discuss organizational issues in depth. Many questions remain about factions within each group as well as conflicts and cooperation between them.] By late April/early May, pro-democracy students had taken over existing student organizations (or had established new ones) at the various universities and colleges in Beijing. In early May, representatives from each university group came together to form the Beijing Universities United Autonomous Student Union (Union, for short). This group provided the early leadership and coordination of the movement. Linked to the Union was the Dialogue Delegation, a group of student representatives from all Beijing universities designated to prepare for a future dialogue with the government.

Although it was connected with the Union, the Dialogue Delegation was generally comprised of older graduate students who did not take active roles in street actions. Rather, they served as advisors to younger student leaders. The mass hunger strike began on May 13. In the first few days, 6000 students joined the strike. After the first two days, the number of hunger strikers dropped to around 3000. A large number refused all liquids as well as food, thereby threatening their lives very quickly. Two groups formed around the hunger strike on the square: the Committee of Hunger Strikers and the Committee to Protect the Hunger Strikers. On May 24 (after the hunger strike was called off), these committees coalesced to form the Headquarters of Tiananmen Square. The leadership of this organization was originally comprised of hunger strikers. “The people willing to die first are qualified to be leaders,” we were told.

By this time, however, numerous student groups from outlying provinces were arriving daily to join the occupation of the square. A new leadership was chosen, “through democratic ways,” to incorporate the new student groups on the square. Each student group had a representative in the Headquarters command. There were hundreds of different university groups on the square. Nearly every tent on the square flew a different university banner. One student on the square told us that his university had established a rotation system, sending a group of ten students every seven days to replace their classmates already on the square. During the week before the killings, a massive reorganization of the occupation of the square took place. The students had consolidated their encampment into tighter formations with larger, more secure tent structures. Efforts to clean the square were also in progress. There appears to have been ongoing conflicts between the Beijing Student Union and, at first, the hunger strikers and later with the Headquarters of Tiananmen Square.

One account holds that the Union was against the hunger strike from the beginning. During the week of our visit, we were told that the Union was trying to assert its authority over the Headquarters. Many questions remain about the relationship between leaders of the Union and the Headquarters. It was never spelled out, for example, along which lines the confrontation was taking place: regional, ideological, tactical, or other. Furthermore, some of the most prominent Headquarters “commanders,” such as Chai Ling, were Beijing University students (hence, were they tied to both organizations?). Organizational abilities On the tactical level, the students showed some impressive organizational skills. They extensively employed marshals for crowd control and for maintaining nonviolent discipline. We witnessed marshals “policing” a three foot corridor between soldiers and demonstrators in front of Zhongnanhai (the party compound), both to keep people from touching the soldiers and to lecture the soldiers on the purpose of the demonstrations. Just hours before the shooting started, five students with headbands locked arms to form a protective ring around a soldier and escorted him safely through a hostile crowd of Beijing citizens. We were told that the students had established a telephone information network. Students operating out of the university would receive and place calls throughout the city to keep dispersed groups of students informed of troop movements and latest developments.

The Headquarters had even set up a phone on the square, connecting it by a long wire to a phone in the Museum of the Chinese Revolution. The students had also established their own loudspeaker system on the square, from which they were able to broadcast their appeals and versions of unfolding events. On the square, students had established a “pass” system. In order to enter the concentric security zones around the Headquarters command at the base of the Monument of the People’s Heroes (at the center of the square), one had to present special passes printed by the Headquarters. Different passes connoted different levels of access. This way the students attempted to control the flow of people into their most sensitive areas. We witnessed a propaganda team of two students with a megaphone move through a neighborhood stating the students’ grievances and pleading for support. We were told that many such teams moved throughout the city. Students used drums to alert citizens of troop movements, signaling people to come out into the streets. Outside our hotel the morning of June 3, a group of students pounding a bass drum passed by.

Shortly thereafter, a crowd of citizens on the adjacent street had “captured” a group of forty plain clothes army members. They provided food to the troops and escorted them south, away from Tiananmen Square. Strategy It was difficult to ascertain any significant degree of strategic thinking in the pro-democracy movement. We often received contradictory responses to questions dealing with strategy. Much of the planning of actions appears to have been more tactical than strategic. We found no evidence of coordinated plans which encompassed a range of mutually supporting actions over specified periods of time. Two leaders of the Dialogue Delegation told us that they were directly involved in much planning and analysis of the students actions. However, in discussing the development of the hunger strike and related actions, one leader told us that these actions did not take place according to a “systematic plan. But we did have some plans. For instance, we discussed the situation and discussed measures and responses every night, give ideas to other leaders. Other leaders might rush to our headquarters to ask my, our advice…. We tried to control the direction of student movement.” This same leader told us that “within the Dialogue Delegation, we not only are thinking about the current situation, or just a couple of days, we also think of situation 10 or 20 days later and still some of my classmates who are not in the Dialogue Delegation were thinking about strategic plans, sometimes half a year later and one year later. One time a day … we will meet them to talk about such kind of strategic thinking.”

He did not elaborate, or give any evidence, of such planning. Another leader of the Dialogue Delegation described the action-response relationship between students and the government this way: “Because the contradictions in China are so complicated, once we start ‘refusal movement’ [Chinese term for noncooperation movement], we start a kind of domino chain reaction. … So once movement is started, once people refuse, force govern ment to respond to us. So, according to response of government, we will make a decision, decide what kind of form movement will be, and this movement will be enlarged and deepened. … [Actions have been] in response to government, but these [government actions] initiated by refusal movement.” We were told that the hunger strike and the original blocking of troops and trucks occurred spontaneously, not according to some plan. Only after the first massive street blockades did student leaders try to coordinate (through drum signals and telephone alerts) subsequent efforts to prevent the attempted reentry of the 38th Army into downtown Beijing. Provocations to violence In the late-afternoon prior to the killings, we witnessed deliberate provocations to violence. To the best of our knowledge, this has not been reported elsewhere.

During the week of our visit, the Autonomous Workers Union (three of its members had been detained earlier that week) had set up a tent on the far northwest corner of the square. In the evening just prior to the killings (June 3), they had set up their own loudspeaker system at this corner. Earlier that day, citizens had “captured” (encircled) soldiers at various points in the city. A shrill, female voice came over the loudspeaker calling on the gathered people to “kill the soldiers,” claiming that only “revolutionary violence can defeat the counter-revolutionary violence of the government.” These exhortations, which continued for nearly thirty minutes, met with mild, sometimes excited, applause. Curiously, neither the government’s nor the students’ loudspeaker systems were broadcasting at this time (highly unusual considering there were over 100,000 people on the square that evening). A Chinese-speaking Western diplomat standing next to us on the square confirmed our interpreter’s translation of the broadcast and stated that a French journalist had witnessed someone cutting the students’ loudspeaker wires just hours earlier. These calls to violence stood in stark contrast to the students’ appeals for discipline and nonviolence.

Many questions arise in this connection: Who were the members of the Autonomous Workers Union? Why were they so physically separated from the student occupation? Were there agents provocateurs in their organization? It was reported late that night that this group left the square with their tents about 11:00 pm; the first troops and armored personnel carrier entered the square about 12:15 a.m. Strategic errors In analyzing the student-led democracy movement, two preliminary strategic lessons become apparent. First, a nonviolent occupation of a physical spot of whatever symbolic value is always risky for the protesters. They are easy for the opponents to remove. Indeed, the greater the symbolism of the place, the greater the danger and stimulus for the opponents to act strongly. In this case, the occupation of the vast square containing the Monument of the People’s Heroes, the Mao mausoleum, flanked at either end by the Forbidden City and Qianmen (the front gate), and on the sides by the Museum of the Chinese Revolution and the Great Hall of the People, was a daring challenge to the legitimacy of the government and an assertion that the government had failed to bring to fruition its own ideals.

Added to this was the occupation of much of the front entrance to Zhongnanhai, the compound where the highest government and party officials live — an act of audacity far in excess of, say, anti-war activists camping for weeks on the porch of the White House during the Vietnam War! The students would have been better off to have shifted strategy on their own initiative away from the occupation of the square towards a major campaign of communication with the population. (Most Beijing students had earlier withdrawn from the square. On May 27, student leader Wuer Kaixi called on all the students on the square to withdraw. However, the thousands of students who had recently arrived from universities all over the country demanded to stay to be able to express their convictions.) In retrospect, a very good moment for withdrawal would have been after the people of Beijing had repeatedly halted and turned away the 38th Army. The students could then have claimed victory and gone out to thank the people, spreading their message of anti-corruption and democracy throughout Beijing and eventually the countryside. They could have linked this with further popularizing the need for massive noncooperation in the future, especially among dissatisfied party members, civil servants, police, and soldiers.

It is of course easy in retrospect to make these suggestions, but at the time it must have been tempting to believe that all other military units would also be dissuaded or would, on their own initiative, refuse to implement martial law. Perhaps, even the party and government would bend to the popular demands. As it was, it was clearly tempting for hard-line party and government officials to think that by removing the students from the square the challenge posed by them could also be eliminated. It was a further step for them to think that mere removal was not enough: it must be done in a way so as to strike terror into the rest of the population. As goes a Chinese saying, “One kills the chicken in order to frighten the monkey.” Withdrawal from the square could have removed an easy striking target for the government. Second, regardless of the power of the students’ symbolic challenges, there was a failure to mobilize on a large-scale massive noncooperation with the system by the very people whose work made its continuation possible. This included especially the civil service, the military forces, the police, and the operators of communications and transportation.

The methods of noncooperation, especially in this case political noncooperation (as well as strikes and economic boycotts), usually constitute the most powerful of the many methods of nonviolent struggle. Forms of noncooperation can present a grave challenge to the ruling group and are less provocative than the methods of nonviolent intervention, such as the physical occupation of Tiananmen Square. There were many cases of individual acts of noncooperation by police officers, civil servants, and workers. There were also many examples of collective protests and expressions of sympathy by journalists and teachers’ groups. And perhaps most troubling to the government was the open letter by over 100 retired military officers objecting to the martial law order. However, these acts were not translated into a systematic withdrawal of the main pillars of support of the Chinese communist system. (One could speculate that the potential for such massive noncooperation was growing daily, causing the government to act when it did. But one would first need to know the internal situation in the various armies as well as the workers’ organizations before making any conclusions on this point. The willingness of the soldiers and officers of the 38th Army to turn around when blocked by the citizens of Beijing and not to proceed to Tiananmen Square as ordered was remarkable, perhaps the first such case in history.

It demonstrates the power potential of such action.) Gains of the movement The movement from April to June should be viewed as the initial campaign in a long struggle, for which both gains and losses must be counted. The thousands of deaths and injuries and the ending of open defiance are obvious losses of the movement. The ideological retrenchment of Communist rule may complicate future nonviolent action. Also, the mass killing of nonviolent protesters may lead some Chinese towards violent action against the government. But the movement had its accomplishments as well: The pro-democracy movement made an open challenge to the system. The students conducted what was probably the largest hunger strike in history. The movement successfully defied martial law for about two weeks, as though it did not exist. The movement aroused mass student participation all over China, involving 350 colleges and universities.

Demonstrations against corruption and for greater freedom took place in all major cities. o The student-initiated movement aroused the deep sympathy of much of the urban population (at least) and mobilized it into expressions of support. o The movement split and confused the party and government leadership and led to temporary impotence in face of the audacious challenge. o The movement produced open opposition among serving and retired army generals to the use of troops to suppress the movement. o In Beijing, the population blocked the entry into the city of the 38th Army, produced hesitancy and disaffection among some of the troops, and even turned back many of the soldiers sent to infiltrate their way into Beijing in partial civilian clothes. o The student movement before the massacre had delegitimized the government among much of the population. o The movement set the pattern of nonviolent struggle, although it is unclear whether reliance on this type of struggle will continue.

The massacre continued parts of this process of undermining the regime. Among its consequences are the following: o Permanent alienation of hundreds of thousands of students within China. The system was exposed as one willing to kill massively and apply terror to maintain itself. o Without major policy and governmental changes in China, many or even most of the 60,000 Chinese students studying abroad may never return to apply their knowledge at home. o The world image of the Chinese government has dropped to the bottom of the list of distasteful regimes. o The Chinese government has suffered grave diplomatic losses. o The economic sanctions widely imposed following the massacre will set back the efforts to expand the Chinese economy. Only major policy and systemic changes are capable of correcting and reversing these losses. Conclusion Our trip was one of extremes: extreme amazement at the total defiance of martial law orders and extreme sadness at the brutal killing of unarmed civilians in the streets. The images of defiance and bloody repression will remain with us forever. Although the length of the trip was cut nearly in half, its results were significant. We learned that 1) the students’ motivations for pursuing nonviolent means of protest and resistance were purely practical; 2) the students had no detailed knowledge of the history or dynamics of nonviolent struggle; 3) organization in the movement was weak and divisive; 4) there was very little, if any, strategic planning; and 5) there appear to have been attempts at provoking the students to violence. In addition, insights were gained into “real time” thinking at different levels of the movement, insights which could never be reproduced. We were able to experience firsthand a whole range of nonviolent methods in action: a nonviolent occupation, marches, street blockades, appeals to troops, speeches and declarations, slogans, banners, illegal broadcasting and printing, a student strike, the rejection of authority, popular nonobedience, civil disobedience, sit-ins and ride-ins, symbolic displays, and more. Also, we were able to directly witness the crucial overcoming of fear which all of those interviewed displayed. Since the government crackdown, there have been various reports of further acts of nonviolent struggle in China. These include work slowdowns and the insertion of pro-reform ideas into news stories by journalists, increased sick leave and work slowdowns by other sections of the work force, and veiled student demonstrations at Beijing University. These acts are both encouraging and inspiring, showing once again that brutal government repression will not necessarily halt nonviolent resistance. Read it here..

5 False Flag Operations and How to Spot Them in Future

July 14, 2015 | ANTIMEDIA. Sebastian Swift

The concept of the “false flag” operation has become almost prohibitively stigmatized in recent years because of the 9/11 “truther” movement and the emotional fallout from the tragedies at Sandy Hook, Aurora, Boston and others. In spite of being labeled “conspiracy theories,” real, verifiable false flag events have taken place in the past. Such examples serve to dismantle the notion that false flags are meritless conspiracy theories and can help destigmatize the concept itself, providing the diagnostic lens needed to identify false flags when they arise.

Author Richard Dolan made a presentation at the 2015 Contact in the Desertconference about what he calls the “false flag era.” According to Dolan, because false flag operations require control over the global media narrative and the ability to intimidate other countries into not speaking out against “inside jobs,” only a few countries have the means and motives to pull them off.

The false flag phenomenon is distinctively modern and used as an ideological weapon to control populations with the fear of a manufactured enemy. They are used in ostensibly democratic systems where people believe they have inalienable rights. Such democratic systems—primarily the United States, Israel, and Great Britain—must shock people into sociopolitical and geopolitical consent and, as such, require sophisticated modern propaganda systems and advanced covert operations teams with highly proficient skills.

Operation Gladio

Operation Gladio was a post-World War II program established by the CIA, NATO, and possibly Britain’s M16 to fight communism in Europe by whatever means necessary. The two-decade operation used CIA-created “stay behind” networks as part of a “Strategy of Tension” that unleashed a multitude of terrorist attacks from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. The attacks were blamed on Marxists and other left-wing political opponents in order to discredit communism. The operation involved multiple bombings that killed hundreds of innocent people, including children. The most notable attack was the August 2, 1980 bombing of the Bologna train station, which killed 85 people.

How do we know about Operation Gladio in spite of its incredibly clandestine nature? There are two principle sources. One, the investigations of Italian judge Felice Casson, whose presentation was so compelling it forced Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti to confirm Gladio’s existence. The second source is testimony from an actual Gladio operative, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, who is serving a life sentence for murder. In a 1990 interview with the Guardian, Vincenzo stated that Gladio was designed to psychologically coerce the Italian public to rely on the state for security.

Operation Ajax

In 1953, the CIA launched Operation Ajax in order to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected leader, Mohammed Mosaddiq, and replace him with the Shah, a ruthless dictator. The United States sought to depose Iran’s nationalized Anglo-Persian oil company and install 5 U.S. oil companies to take over the nation’s oil fields. In order to do so, they staged a false flag operation that utilized propaganda and complex political maneuvers in order to create public revolt that eventually led to the United States and Britain’s MI6 military intelligence re-installing the Shah in order to throttle Iran’s oil supplies and transform the nation into a puppet regime of the United States government.

Most information relevant to this CIA-sponsored coup is declassified now and available in the CIA archives.

The CIA described itself Operation Ajax:

“The world has paid a heavy price for the lack of democracy in most of the Middle East. Operation Ajax taught tyrants and aspiring tyrants that the world’s most powerful governments were willing to tolerate limitless oppression as long as oppressive regimes were friendly to the West and to Western oil companies. That helped tilt the political balance in a vast region away from freedom and toward dictatorship.”

The Lavon Affair

In 1954, a year after Operation Ajax, Israel launched its own false flag operation. Code-named Operation Susannah, the Lavon Affair featured the covert operation of Israeli agents who planted bombs in several Egyptian, American, and British-owned cinemas, libraries and educational centers, including a United States diplomatic facility, framing eight Egyptian Muslims as the perpetrators.

One of the bombs detonated prematurely, which caused one of the bombers to be captured. A public trial exposed the Israeli spy ring and the covert operation. The operatives were convicted and two of them executed. Israeli Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon was forced to step down because of the scandal. However, the more far-reaching consequences of the Lavon Affair demonstrate once again how governments use false flags to achieve certain objectives that might not have been possible otherwise. In this case, according to a Stanford published paper, the operation triggered a chain reaction of game-changing events:

“A retaliatory military incursion by Israel into Gaza that killed 39 Egyptians; a subsequent Egyptian–Soviet arms deal that angered American and British leaders, who then withdrew previously pledged support for the building of the Aswan Dam; the announced nationalization of the Suez Canal by Nasser in retaliation for the withdrawn support; and the subsequent failed invasion of Egypt by Israel, France, and Britain in an attempt to topple Nasser. In the wake of that failed invasion, France expanded and accelerated its ongoing nuclear cooperation with Israel, which eventually enabled the Jewish state to build nuclear weapons.”

COINTELPRO

COINTELPRO was a series of clandestine, illegal FBI projects that infiltrated domestic political organizations to discredit and smear them. This included critics of the Vietnam War, civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, and a wide variety of activists and journalists.

An example of the FBI’s attempts to convince Martin Luther King Jr. to kill himself under COINTELPRO. Click to enlarge.

The acts committed against them included psychological warfare, slander using forged documents and false reports in the media, harassment, wrongful imprisonment and, according to some, intimidation and possibly violence and assassination.

A U.S. Congressional committee documented the false flag component of the campaign, describing how the FBI had hired provocateurs from the 1950s through the 1970s to commit criminal and violent acts and falsely blame them on political activists. The campaign worked extremely effectively at disrupting the progressive momentum of the era.

Despite being formally discontinued, new permutations of COINTELPRO have persisted and include present-day efforts to undermine activists, whistleblowers and protests. In fact, a 2012 article published by The Guardian described the FBI’s crackdown on the Occupy movement as a “totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent.”

Gulf of Tonkin

The Gulf of Tonkin incident, a major escalator of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, never actually occurred. The government essentially staged—or at the very least, utilized a patently false report—in order to manufacture a geopolitical narrative with a ready-made enemy, the North Vietnamese.

The original incident—also sometimes referred to as the U.S.S. Maddox Incident(s)—involved the destroyer U.S.S. Maddox supposedly engaging three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats as part of an intelligence patrol. The Maddox fired almost 300 shells.

President Lyndon B. Johnson promptly drafted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which became his administration’s legal justification for military involvement in Vietnam. The problem is the event never happened—and Johnson had no reason to believe it had.

In 2005, a declassified internal National Security Agency study revealed that there were no North Vietnamese naval vessels present during the incident. So what was the Maddox firing at? In 1965, President Johnson commented, “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.”

The NSA’s own historian, Robert J. Hanyok, wrote a report stating that the agency had deliberately distorted intelligence reports in 1964. He concluded that

“The parallels between the faulty intelligence on Tonkin Gulf and the manipulated intelligence used to justify the Iraq War make it all the more worthwhile to re-examine the events of August 1964.”

The Warning Signs of a False Flag Operation:

~There is an immediate comprehensive narrative, including a convenient culprit.Law enforcement, government agencies, and the mainstream media immediately proffer a narrative that completely explains the event and encourages citizens to tie their intellectual understanding of the tragedy to the emotions they experience. In his lecture at Contact in the Desert, Richard Dolan noted that a distinguishing characteristic of a false flag operation is that the official narrative IS NOT questioned by the media. There are often legislative, ideological and sociopolitical power plays waiting in the wings, which the government can immediately implement. The most striking example of this is the Patriot Act, which was written well before 9/11 but seemed to correlate entirely with the events that had transpired.

~The official narrative has obvious domestic and geopolitical advantages for the governing body. The Bush administration used 9/11 to usher in the War on Terror, which has served as a lynchpin for countless civil liberty infringements by the national security state, including ubiquitous domestic surveillance and indefinite detention. It also directly paved the way for an invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq—countries that had nothing to do with the attacks—allowing our government and defense contractors to control the natural gas pipelines and oil fields. This bears a striking resemblance to Operation Ajax.

~The narrative behind the attack serves to leverage emotions like fear, as well as patriotism, in order to manufacture consent around a previously controversial issue. For example, many of the recent domestic terror attacks, including the Aurora shooting, have exacerbated and reinforced advocacy of gun control legislation. More importantly, these attacks divide populations and invite the government and militarized local police forces to have the authority to declare martial law at will, locking down entire neighborhoods. We saw this after the Boston marathon bombing, the most striking example of this nation’s post 9/11 police state mentality.

~Military training drills and police drills occur on the day of and very near the attack itself, causing confusion to obscure eye witness testimony and allowing orchestrators to plant both patsies, disinformation and backup operatives. This is no small point. An incredible percentage of major domestic or international terror attacks have involved simultaneous “training drills.” This list includes, but is not limited to, the infamous NORAD drills of 9/11, the 7/7 London Bombings, the 2011 Norway shooting, the Aurora shooting, Sandy Hook, and the Boston Marathon. Though none of the aforementioned events can be confirmed or denied without a doubt, they bear a striking resemblance to previous false flag attacks and should be looked at with an investigative eye.

The bigger false flags that occurred in the last two decades undoubtedly utilized unimaginable amounts of money and resources. It will take time and many contributions by intrepid researchers and whistleblowers to prove them.

The cases made for and against 9/11 being a false flag “inside job” are voluminous and highly controversial. The narrative is so convoluted with disinformation that despite all of the technology and online resources at our disposal, it is highly unlikely we will know for sure how many layers of shadow and black op agencies were used—if, in fact, they were. What we do know is that shortly before the events of 9/11, then-Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld announced that $2.3 trillion dollars was missing from the Pentagon’s budget. Unfortunately, too much evidence has been destroyed or manipulated to reach a conclusive verdict as to whether it was a full blown false flag or an extreme case of state opportunism.

Remember, the story of the false flag phenomenon is one that is still being written. Our analysis of it must breach the most powerful information control filters the world has ever seen. As technology and social enlightenment make the crimes of the world’s national governments transparent, we will see shocking new chapters added to this history that will shatter mainstream perceptions of reality.

---

This article (5 Confirmed False Flag Operations and How to Spot Them in the Future) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and theAntiMedia.org. Tune in! Anti-Media Radio airs Monday through Friday @ 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. Help us fix our typos: edits@theantimedia.org.

Fuentes:

http://www.inpraiseofchina.com/tiananmen-was-a-color-revolution/