One thing for which the right-wing neoconservatives specialize is the production of dodgy dossiers and “official” reports. England has been ground-zero for the production of many dodgy dossiers, including the latest passed to NBC News’s resident “useful idiot,” Richard Engel, by a Mikhail Khodorkovsky-funded entity in London called the Dossier Center.
It is noteworthy that Engel was heavily relied upon to report on “intelligence” reports issued by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is run by a Syrian expatriate named Rami Abdulrahman and operates out of his clothing shop in Coventry. Abdulrahman was a pass-through operation for the anti-Bashar Assad Syrian opposition that was found to be operating with subsidies from Britain’s MI-6 Secret Intelligence Service.
The infamous British government “Dodgy Dossier” on Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” was proffered by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s director of Communications and Strategy, Alastair Campbell, to a gullible media in February 2003. The dossier was used by Blair and US President George W. Bush to bolster their decision to invade and occupy Iraq. The so-called intelligence in the dossier on Iraq was deliberately exaggerated by London and Washington to justify the rush to war.
Following along Britain’s recent history of producing false and misleading files and dossiers, the overly hyped Steele Dossier, authored by former MI-6 agent Christopher Steele, has been used to cast blame on the Russian government for meddling in the 2016 US presidential election on behalf of Donald Trump. Left out of the Steele Dossier was any mention of the pro-Trump activities of other non-US actors, including exiled Eastern European oligarchs resident in Britain and Israel, as well as the governments of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Britain, the Netherlands, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey in the 2016 election.
With regard to British-based exiled oligarchs, the Khodorkovsky-financed Dossier Center in London recently passed a dossier, said to contain the communications of Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, to NBC News’s Engel. The news network even admitted that it had “not independently verified the materials” prior to reporting on the dossier’s contents.
One alleged communication in the dossier, titled “Development Strategy of a Pan-African State on US Territory,” proposed “several ways to further exacerbate racial discord in the future, including a suggestion to recruit African Americans and transport them to camps in Africa ‘for combat prep and training in sabotage.’ Those recruits would then be sent back to America to foment violence and work to establish a pan-African state in the South, particularly in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.” The alleged proposal called for “enlisting poor, formerly incarcerated African Americans ‘who have experience in organized crime groups’ as well as members of ‘radical black movements for participation in civil disobedience actions’ to ‘destabilize the internal situation in the US’”
NBC’s report is assuredly based on a hoax because the underlying plot to which it refers is over fifty years old. The idea for a majority African American nation to be called the Republic of New Africa, carved out of the US South, was first promulgated in 1968 by the Malcolm X Society, named after the assassinated leader of the Nation of Islam. The states proposed as part of the Republic of New Africa were Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina – the very same states named in the Khodorkovsky dossier—in addition to adjacent black-majority counties in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina; and to the black-majority counties adjacent to this area in Arkansas, Texas, North Carolina, Tennessee and Florida. As a further clue to the Khodorkovsky Dossier being a hoax is the inclusion of majority African American regions of Texas on a map of the envisaged black nation in the South. The dossier’s documents are such a forgery, the authors could not even offer a degree of originality to the Republic of New Afrika’s model from 1968.
The Khodorkovsky Dossier’s authors obviously believed that no one, including NBC News, would recall that its proposed black secessionist nation in the American South was the fifty-one year-old Republic of New Afrika. Many of the architects of the Republic of New Afrika died long ago. They include the republic’s provisional first president, Robert Williams, a North Carolina civil rights activist, who later fled to Cuba and China. Milton Henry, also known as Brother Gaidi Obadele and a student of Malcom X, was elected the republic’s first vice president and Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s widow, was elected second vice president. Succeeding Williams as president in 1970 was Milton Henry’s brother, Richard Henry, who was also known as Imari Obadele. The capital of the republic was designated as a member’s farm in Hinds County, Mississippi. Mississippi’s state capital, Jackson, is one of the two county seats of Hinds County.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation immediately declared the Republic of New Afrika a seditious organization and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover made the arrest and prosecution of the republic’s leaders among his top priorities. The Republic of New Africa maintained a paramilitary group called the Black Legion. In 1969, a gun battle between the Black Legion and the Detroit police resulted in the death of a Detroit police officer.
Another Republic of New Afrika leader was “Monster Kody” Scott, also known as Sanyika Shakur. Before embracing black nationalism, Shakur had been a member of the Los Angeles street gang called the “Eight Tray Gangster Crips.”
There has always been a belief by many informed observers that the “threat” of the Republic of New Afrika, which was advanced by the FBI, was exaggerated as part of the bureau’s Counter Intelligence Program, also known as COINTELPRO. If the FBI hyped the Republic of New Afrika until COINTELPRO’s dissolution in 1971, Khodorkovsky’s Dossier Center in London is surely doing so today by resurrecting the Republic of New Afrika as a threat. COINTELPRO’s psychological warfare against groups like the Republic of New Afrika, Black Panthers, Nation of Islam, the Communist Party USA, and the Socialist Workers Party was on a plan to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, or otherwise neutralize” targeted groups by creating a “negative public image” and “releasing negative personal information to the public.” In effect, Khodorkovsky’s Dossier Center has adopted the key elements of J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO to resurrect the Republic of New Afrika and falsely assign blame to the Russian government.
The only relevance of the Republic of New Afrika to the present day is Chokwe Lumumba, formerly Edwin Taliaferro of Detroit, elected second vice president in 1971. In 2013, Lumumba was elected mayor of Jackson, Mississippi. Lumumba died on February 25, 2014, from an unknown cause, said to have started out from the symptoms of a common cold. Many of Lumumba’s supporters believe that the mayor’s death was the result of a medically-induced homicide. The Hinds County coroner refused to perform an autopsy of Lumumba, increasing suspicions about the cause of his death.
The only possible result of the Khodorkovsky Dossier being relevant today is the possible desire to stoke residual suspicions about Lumumba’s death in 2014. Otherwise, the Republic of New Afrika is but a distant memory and a footnote of American history. However, the dupes at NBC News, who were not able to realize they have been played like a cheap fiddle, have treated dusting off the Republic of New Afrika by Khodorkovsky’s London propaganda operation as a major newsworthy event.
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).
