BEIJING, China (WMR)—According to WMR’s intelligence sources in Hong Kong, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s first cousin, Leonard Romney, heads up a Mormon LDS Church intelligence operation in Brussels that targets the headquarters of the European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the Belgian capital.
Relatively little is known about Romney’s cousin whose LinkedIn page describes him as an “Independent Government Relations Professional” in the “Brussels Area” of Belgium. Romney was born in Salt Lake City and is the son of Miles Pratt and Janice Cahoon Romney, Mitt’s uncle and aunt. Miles Pratt Romney was the brother of former Michigan Governor George Romney.
Leonard held senior leadership positions with the Mormon church that included missions in southern and western Germany and Russia’s South Moscow Mission. In Brussels, the Mormons use the International Center for Law and Religious Studies, an arm of the J. Reuben Clark Law School of Brigham Young University in Utah, as its intelligence-gathering cover. The center was founded in 2000 to “promote freedom of religion worldwide and to study the relations between governments and religious organizations.” The center was founded by Cole Durham, a law professor who taught at Brigham Young and as a visiting professor at the Central European University in Budapest, the latter founded and funded by George Soros.
From October 7–9, 2012, the center is sponsoring the 19th Annual Symposium on Religion, Democracy, and Civil Society that is scheduled to draw as speakers Ambassador Suzan Johnson Cook, President Obama’s ambassador-at-large for International Religious Freedom, and Katrina Lantos Swett, a member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, the daughter of the late California Democratic congressman Tom Lantos, and wife of former Democratic New Hampshire Representative and U.S. ambassador to Denmark Richard Swett. Katrina Swett and her husband, as well as Lantos’s widow, are Mormons. Katrina and her mother are converts to Mormonism from Judaism.
In May 2009, Leonard represented the organization at the Roundtable of the European Group on Ethics on Ethical Aspects of Synthetic Biology that covered such areas as human embryonic stem cell research, nanomedicine, implants in the human body, animal cloning for food production, deadly pathogen research and the weaponization of pathogens, genetic material or “bio-bricks” ownership, and genetically-modified foods.
Romney’s cousin has also worked in positions in higher education in Utah and has been active with Alzheimer’s disease organizations. Appearing on KUED on December 12, 2010, Leonard Romney and his wife were described as the “ideal American couple.”
Over the past few decades, the CIA has recruited a number of Mormons to its ranks, mainly because of their proficiency in foreign languages from their overseas missionary work and their often squeaky-clean records for alcohol and drug use. However, little is known about cooperation between the global Mormon intelligence network and official intelligence agencies like the CIA.
Although Mitt Romney worked as a missionary in France for more than two years, his campaign has been punctuated by frequent European-bashing statements. After he won the New Hampshire primary last January, Romney described Europe as “weak, socialist, an object of pity and, compared with the shining American model, lacking inspiration.” In June, Romney described President Obama as favoring “a European-style welfare state.”
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
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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).
