‘Cherry picking’ leaked documents: a CIA art form

The US Central Intelligence Agency, rather than attempt to deter massive leaks of sensitive documents, including classified US government materials, has figured out it is much more advantageous to “cherry pick” certain information and then release it as “major news” to a corporate media eager and willing to run with what they are handed. Such has been the case with the so-called “Panama Papers.“

A so-called non-profit entity, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), cherry-picking information from a purported leak of 11.5 million documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. In turn, the findings of this consortium were provided to a network of over 100 media partners, including some of the largest newspapers in the world. What was not reported by the newspapers, all too eager to stenographically report what they were provided by the consortium, is that ICIJ is financially supported by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the Central Intelligence Agency-directed US Agency for International Development (USAID).

The corporate media played up the connections of various off-shore tax-dodging contrivances and money laundering vehicles to a collection of world leaders. However, instead of focusing on leaders who have direct connections to money laundering and tax evasion, for example, Argentina’s neoconservative fascism-friendly president, Mauricio Macri, the ICIJ, as is their usual method, hyped fuzzy “guilt by association” links to specific leaders. Not surprisingly, the chief targets for ICIJ were the CIA’s number one and number two foes, respectively—Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

As Russian president spokesman Dmitry Peskov correctly maintained, the chief target of the “Putinophobic” ICIJ, Soros, and USAID was Vladimir Putin and not an old acquaintance of the Russian president named in the ICIJ’s cherry-picked document revelations. Peskov also rightly stated that ICIJ has links to the US government.

And, of course, the ICIJ, Soros, and USAID could not help themselves from linking, again indirectly, Mossack Fonseca to the impeachment charges against Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and the investigation of her predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Also hyped by ICIJ and their co-conspirators, Soros and USAID, are fuzzy indirect links to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in the Panama Papers. There was also a failed attempt by the cherry pickers to implicate former Argentine presidents Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and her late husband Nestor Kirchner. A mere mention of individuals’ names in an interrogatory letter do not constitute prima facie evidence of wrongdoing. That is, of course, unless one is engaged in CIA cherry picking for psychological warfare and information operations purposes.

The ICIJ runs an entity called the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). The OCCRP, in turn, is operated under the aegis of the Journalism Development Network (JDN) based in Washington, DC and which maintains a European affiliate in Bucharest. Not surprisingly, the OCCRP and JDN employ propagandists, not journalists, with experience at the US government-funded and Soros-directed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty / Radio Free Asia. The OCCRP and JDN have focused their efforts on undermining leaders who do not follow the dictates of Washington. The role of these two organizations in the dubious Magnitsky case, a lame attempt to discredit the Russian government, is a case in point. The US was able to use some of the “yellow journalism” produced by OCCRP and JDN to implement sanctions against Russian individuals and institutions. OCCRP and JDN partner with Soros-linked “independent” journalism entities throughout the Balkans, including Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Romania, as well as Latvia, Armenia, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, and Moldova, all countries heavy with the unmistakable stench of Soros’s subterfuge and political troublemaking.

The ICIJ, OCCRP, and JDN troika are now using their corporate media connections to tarnish the leaders of all the BRICS nations: Putin, Xi, Rousseff, South African President Jacob Zuma, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

And although much is being made of the resignation of Iceland’s Prime Minister Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson over ICIJ revelations that his wife maintained an offshore shell company handled by Mossack Fonseca, it was under Gunnlaugsson’s watch that Iceland imprisoned its bankers who ran the nation into bankruptcy. And those jailed bankers were doing the bidding of, among others, George Soros and his ultimate masters: the Rothschild banking family.

In 2005, the chief of the Swiss private bank Julius Baer’s Cayman Islands branch leaked a compact disk containing clients’ transactions, including every deposit made, from Baer’s Cayman unit that dealt with anonymous trusts. In January 2008, WikiLeaks began publishing details of Baer’s clients—who were accused of tax evasion and money laundering. The clients resided in the United States, Hong Kong, Germany, Switzerland, Greece, Spain, and Peru. On December 4, 2008, Alex Widmer, 52, the CEO of Julius Baer and a widower with three children, was found dead from a dubiously-reported suicide. Widmer had discovered links between the bank’s leaks of client information to the media and WikiLeaks, Mossad, and the Soros network. Only the New York Times reported that Widmer’s death was from a suicide and an autopsy report was never released. The ICIJ was nowhere to be found on the Julius Baer story and how Julius Baer, after the leak of the client information, saw its share values drop by 60 percent, thus making it vulnerable to a hostile takeover by Soros and Goldman Sachs.

In 2008, the same global media that finds the Mossack Fonseca documents so newsworthy barely raised an eyebrow when documents leaked from the Luxembourg bank Clearstream were made public. After French intelligence managed to alter the original Clearstream documents, the entire matter was shelved. The reason was that Clearstream was a pass-through entity for paying bribes to a number of world leaders by the CIA and Mossad. At the time of the Clearstream revelations, these leaders were friendly to the George W. Bush administration and Israel. One of the alleged bribe recipients was French President Nicolas Sarkozy who reportedly used the pseudonyms “Paul de Nagy” and “Stéphane Bosca” to hide his identity with Clearstream financial transactions. Sarkozy was suspected of illegally receiving kickbacks involving the sale of six French frigates to Taiwan in 1991. Banks and companies with Clearstream accounts included the defunct CIA-linked Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), Bank Menatep run by Russian criminal oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Banco Ambrosiano (also known as the Vatican Bank), Bahrain International Bank (with reported links to Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda), and Bush family-connected Carlyle Group.

The global corporate media failed to do its job on the Clearstream matter because it stood to embarrass not America’s opponents, but the American president’s father. Clearstream banker Ernest Backes revealed that he was in charge of the transfer of $7 million from Citibank and Chase Manhattan to pay Iran for the release of the US diplomatic hostages in Tehran. The transfer occurred on January 16, 1981, four days before Ronald Reagan’s swearing in as president. The deal was worked out by Reagan’s vice presidential running mate and future president George H. W. Bush as part of an effort to undermine the re-election of President Jimmy Carter. Backes gave the incriminating documents to the French National Assembly, which did nothing with it.

In the world of massive “leaks” to the media, it is the CIA psychological operations agents and their water carriers like Soros and certain phony journalists and editors who decide what can and cannot be published. It was that way with Clearstream, the State Department cables, Julius Baer, Snowden’s NSA documents, and now with the tranche from Mossack Fonseca.

This article originally appeared in Strategic Culture Foundation on-line journal.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).