ROUNDTABLE #8 “How Dreams Activated the Mystical in Our Lives”
For over four decades dreams and synchronicities led us from the politics of Afghanistan to its mysticism. Join our discussion about how we discovered the real power of the political is in the mystical.
A FREE Zoom Event Wed. April 27, 2022 3:00-4:30 p.m./EST #8 “How Dreams Activated the Mystical in Our Lives” Registration Required at Valediction.net/eventlist
Imagine a Future Based on JFK’s Dream of World Peace By Paul & Liz
The Voice (Preface) By Paul & Liz
A Once and Future Myth by Dan Sewell Ward
PANELISTS
-RA “Kris” Millegan, Host and TrineDay Publisher (150 books so far). “The folks in the shadows who lie, cheat and steal to manipulate us must be exposed so we can create a better world for our children.”
-Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, co-authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story; Crossing Zero: The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire; and The Valediction: Three Nights of Desmond (Book One) and Resurrection (Book Two).
-Bruce de Torres moderator and author of God, School, 9/11 and JFK: The Lies That Are Killing Us and The Truth That Sets Us Free.
THE VALEDICTION ROUNDTABLES “Exposing the Failure of Empire and Reclaiming the Narrative Creation Process” Inspired by THE VALEDICTION, the two-book memoir by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould about their journalism in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion, their return home, where corporate media would not broadcast the truth that they had found, and their journey into history, mysticism, and the real power behind empires.
Imagine a future based on JFK’s Dream of World Peace
OpEdNews 3/21/22
By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
King Author’s Round Table 1470 Source Bibliothèque nationale de France public domain
The Religious Motives behind JFK’s Assassination
Something about the potential of America died along with our president on November 22, 1963 that has never returned. And despite a staggering wealth of information provided by researchers over the last sixty years the deeper examination of the JFK assassination hasn’t moved far. Even among those researchers not confined to the lone gunman theory, discussions are still limited to conspiracies between Cuban Americans, the Mafia, the CIA and the Military Industrial Complex all of whom had motives for wanting JFK dead. But when hatred for Rome is added as a motive, fresh avenues of investigation and resolution open and new possibilities emerge that reveal the workings of a conspiracy that traces back a thousand years.
JFK was hated for his religion and it was well known as his presidential campaign began in 1960. Right wing cabals in the US, especially in South Texas had been historically opposed to a Catholic becoming president. For many who deeply believed in America’s Masonic roots and viewed the nation’s creation as a safe haven from Rome’s persecution of a Medieval Knighthood known as the Knights Templar, JFK was an existential threat.
14th century Philippe IV Source le Bel et sa famille. public domain
How did this happen?
On October 13, 1307 the French King Philip the fourth—who was in debt to the Templars—ordered them arrested and charged with heretical practices. Then on November 22 under pressure from King Philip, Pope Clement the fifth issued a papal bull instructing all the monarchs of Europe to seize their assets. When the last Templar Grand Master, Jacques de Molay was burned at the stake by the Pope’s Inquisitors in 1314 it would serve as an inspiration to generations of heretics dedicated to overthrowing the Papacy.
Jacques de Molay Source Bibliotheque Nationale de France public domain
Far-fetched? In 2016 we published an article stating that the time had come to stop the revenge and retribution cycle that justified the killing of JFK and received this statement from a self-described heretic: “This country [the USA] was created by Free Masons to escape the killing machinery of the Roman Catholic Church. The USA was created as a safe haven to launch a counter war on that church hence separation of church and state. And yes, JFK, a Catholic, was taken out because of a history beyond his control. Who would allow a Catholic to run a Masonic refuge? So no, we will not forget and we do not forgive an evil institutional empire of conquest and profit and power. It is our work to bring it to a halt. “Not to us Lord, not to us, but to Your Name give the glory.”
Purchase the book here
The official narrative of the JFK assassination remains static. The time has come to dig deeper and our books, Valediction Three Nights of Desmond and Valediction Resurrection suggest the place to begin is with JFK’s ancestors and some well-known myths surrounding the Fitzgerald family’s connection to the Camelot legend.
Why does the assassination of JFK still haunt us to this day?
The Fitzgerald dynasty began in 1097 with the marriage of Gerald FitzWalter of Windsor to Princess Nest, daughter of Rhys ap Tewdwr, king of South Wales, a kingdom known as the home of Grail mythology. The marriage was arranged under the auspices of King William Rufus the son of William the Conqueror. As a Tudor Princess, Nest’s lineage traced back to the mythical Celtic court of Arthur, forming the basis of the grail legends associated with the presidency of JFK.
“How Galahad drew out the sword from the floating stone at Camelot.” Source Published 1920 by Macmillan, NY Arthur Rackham 1867–1939 public domain
On August 2, 1100 King William Rufus was slain in the New Forest by an arrow shot by Walter Tirel – a close friend of Rufus. Although everyone knew who’d shot the arrow—Tirel was never held accountable. It is suspected that Rufus knowingly accepted his fate and became the sacred sacrifice required by the ancient rules of kingship. Britain’s new Norman aristocracy wanted to prove its legitimacy to the people. The way to get it was by combining political and the mystical power of the Grail narrative with sacred killing.
Like William Rufus JFK’s murder fits a pattern of sacred sacrifice. He was shot in Dealey Plaza at a Masonic triangle and suffered the Celtic triple death—strangled by a shot through the throat, shot in the back and virtually-decapitated with the third shot. Whoever really killed JFK on November 22—the Masonic Day of Revenge for the destruction of the Knights Templar—was allowed to escape. But even more telling is that like Rufus, JFK’s actions prior to November 22, seemed to indicate he understood his fate and he too accepted the role of the sacred sacrifice. Did JFK’s assassination complete a grail cycle that William Rufus inaugurated almost 900 years ago with the marriage of Gerald and Nest and the creation of the Fitzgerald dynasty?
Once opened up to the idea that the JFK assassination was an act of retribution for a seven hundred year old vendetta, new thinking becomes possible. Understanding a deep-state that goes back thousands of years requires deep-questions and the willingness to accept deep-answers, no matter where they lead. We found our deepest answer in the mythology surrounding the Fitzgerald family.
Royals may control the Historical Record but not our Myths
Royal bloodlines claim divine rights because they trace their lineage back to ancient times while most of humanity’s history has been lost due to the devastating wars started by the royals themselves. The seeds of divinity reside within all humans thereby making one and all royal, regardless of a traceable lineage. And then there is the unique record that can never be destroyed, lost or stolen. According to faith healer and psychic Edgar Cayce a “mystical” storehouse of every thought, deed, word, feeling, taste, smell, sound and intent anyone has ever experienced lives on in what is called the Akashic Records. Accessed through dreams, synchronicities and otherworldly experiences, these records provide us with the source material for the creation of our myths. Cayce described their importance this way, “These records connect each and every one of us to each other. They contain the essence of every archetypal symbol or mythic story which has ever deeply touched patterns of human behavior and experience. They have been the inspiration for dreams and invention. They draw us toward or repel us from one another. They mold and shape levels of human consciousness. They are a portion of Divine Mind. They are the unbiased judge and jury that attempt to guide, educate, and transform every individual to become the very best that she or he can be. They embody an ever-changing array of possible futures that are called into potential as we interact and respond to the circumstances of our lives.”
Understanding the myth process is the path to finding truth
Myths have been created by every culture world-wide for millennia. They are the stories of our encounters with the mystical handed down from one generation to the next. When myths are merged with the historical record the interaction aids in deciphering a more complex meaning of history. Joseph Campbell explains the importance of myths to each one of us with this challenge, “What is it we are questing for? It is the fulfillment of that which is potential in each of us. Questing for it is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself. There is nothing you can do that’s more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way you will find, live, become a realization of your own personal myth.”
Elizabeth I (1533-1603) Royal Collection Source Blackwork Guild public domain
The Origins of the Fitzgerald Mythology
In our research into the Fitzgerald family’s rise and fall from power—starting with the 12th century Norman invasion of Ireland and ending four hundred years later with the beheading of the last earl of Desmond by Elizabeth I—we were faced with the limits of the historical record. Fortunately the age of myth lived on in Ireland into the mid—20th century allowing us the ability to access a rich layer of meaning beyond history.
Starting with the Fitzgeralds’ arrival in Ireland in 1169 an outpouring of prophecies believed to be connected to the family was already in existence. Over time these prophecies became entwined with the prophetic legacies of Merlin, the Grail legends from Wales, the Irish prophets Moling, Brechan, Patrick and Colmcille and the ancient Irish legends of Finn and the Dagda. The myths about the family itself, and especially the Earls of Desmond, began to form as stories in the early 14th century.
Maurice Fitzgerald’s son Gerald, known as Gearoid Iarla in Gaelic, inspired the origin myth of the family. Born in 1338, Gearoid succeeded to the Earldom in 1358 making him the 3rd Earl of Desmond and the leader of the Munster branch of the Fitzgeralds—the most powerful Norman family in late medieval Ireland. Gearoid’s castle at Lough Gur, Co. Limerick became the center of the earldom and a home for his love of Gaelic culture.
As a highly respected composer of Gaelic love poetry, Gearoid Iarla became a leading example of the Norman lords’ willingness to embrace their own Gaelicization. “More Irish than Irish themselves” was a phrase used by later historians to describe this phenomenon of total cultural assimilation.
Maurice FitzGerald in the Expugnatio Hibernica, written in 1189 by his nephew, Gerald of Wales public domain National Library of Ireland
The Fitzgeralds, as the new Norman overlords of Munster, adopted the mythic symbolism of the Gaelic tradition and embraced the beautiful Aine as their goddess of Munster sovereignty. A poet in their employ in the 14th century referred to Gerald’s father, Maurice as “Aine’s king” and Gerald as “the son of Aine’s knight.” According to the folklore, Maurice was walking by the shore of Lough Gur when he saw the beautiful Aine bathing. He seized her cloak, which magically put her under his power, and then lay with her. Aine told Maurice that she would bear him a son Gearoid Iarla whom he was to bring up with the best of care. One caution she gave to Maurice, he was not to show surprise at anything however strange that his son should do.
The boy grew into a handsome young man and one night there was a gathering at the castle with dancing. None of the ladies none could compete with Gearoid Iarla’s dancing. When the dance ended one young woman engaged him in another contest as she rose and leaped over the guests, tables and dishes and then leaped back again. The old Earl turned to his son and said “Can you do anything like that?” No said Gearoid. “Well stand up and try.” Gearoid then rose and leaped into a bottle, and out again. There was great applause for his feat. Then the Old Earl made the mistake of looking with shock at his son’s performance. “Were you not warned, said the young Earl, never to show surprise at anything I might do? The Old Earl’s display forced his son to leave his father’s world. Once Gearoid’s feats were recognized as magical he would be defined as godlike and have to go with his mother into the otherworld. “You have forced me to leave you” were his last words to his father. When Gearoid left the castle he entered the water of the river, and swam away in the form of a goose.
The folklore concerning Gearoid, the most famous of the Desmond earls, continued to grow. It was said that had not died, but mysteriously disappeared from this world. During the 15th century, London grew nervous about the growing power of the Desmond earls. Despite continued challenges to their rule the Fitzgeralds maintained control and the adulation of the Irish people continued as their prestige grew throughout Europe. The Gherardini, a leading Florentine family claimed they were related. But tension continued to grow in the early16th century as rumors spread that the Fitzgeralds were plotting to invade and seize London’s power.
For over four hundred years the Fitzgeralds were absorbed into the local mythology of southwest Ireland. Then in 1558, the 14th Earl of Desmond succeeded to the title. His name was Gerald, the first to have that name since Gearoid Iarla. The English had deprived Gerald of his family estates while keeping him locked up in London Tower for long periods of time. Rather than breaking Gerald’s will, upon his return home in 1573, he took on an even stronger pro-Irish stance. Within a few years he had joined the rebellion against the English. Hopes ran high for the Fitzgerald campaign as the prophecies were circulated. In later folklore it was claimed that the new Gearoid Iarla embodied the same great Fitzgerald spirit of his 14th century ancestor.
From their contacts in Florence, the Fitzgeralds would have heard the myths of Emperor Frederick I, who had died in 1190 but was claimed to be alive and waiting to return. There is evidence that the Emperor’s legends inspired the Fitzgeralds to believe good fortune was coming back soon. Gearoid Iarla had not died but was waiting to return at the hour of the family’s greatest need. It is said that a man passing by Lough Gur one night, saw a light and found the entrance to a cavern, where he saw an army of knights and horses asleep. There was a sword on the floor, and as the man drew it out the army awakened. Then its leader, Gearoid Iarla, asked if the time had come yet, but the man ran away. The army fell back to sleep, and the entrance to the cavern could not be found later.
Although the 14th Earl of Desmond was an inspiration to those who knew him by 1583 Gerald’s cause was lost and he was beheaded. The great affection for the family lived on, as did the hope that one of them would someday free Ireland. There are repeated references to this mystical belief in documents from the 17th to the 19th centuries as well as London’s concern for the Fitzgerald’s embrace of Gaelic ways in clear defiance of English law.
Despite London’s fierce opposition, Gearoid Iarla and the myths surrounding him would continue to inspire future Fitzgeralds while winning the admiration of the Irish people. But as the power of these myths became entwined with Ireland’s political history London found itself justifying a war of genocide to eliminate an existential threat to London’s rule far beyond mere competition. To the royals, siding with the “people” over loyalty to the Crown was the highest treason of all. That revelation made clear why the marriage of Gerald and Nest in 1097 would inevitably lead to the ritual killing of JFK in 1963.
(Sources: Myth, Legend and Romance: An Encyclopedia of the Irish Folk Tradition by Dáithí Ó hÓgáin, Mythic Ireland by Michael Dames)
The Alchemy of Myth, Prophecy, Martyrs and JFK
The Expugnatio Hibernica is a firsthand historical account of the Fitzgeralds coming to Ireland in 1169. The author of book, Giraldus Cambrensis, known as Gerald of Wales, was a grandson of Gerald of Windsor and Princess Nest. As a prolific writer and influential figure of the twelfth century he was known to work with a mythical sensibility, including prophecy, dreams and visions.
Included in his book was a 12th century reading of a 6th century prophecy by Merlin Silvester. In Gerald of Wales’ adaptation he presented parallels to the 1170 murder of his friend Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, which helped to explain the nature and the reality of ritualistic murder. Below you can read the original prophecy as well as a following summary of Gerald of Wales’ adaptation of that prophecy.
The 6th century Merlin Silvester prophecy
‘A new martyr will be revealed by a new kind of miracle. In western lands, and in the age when the world is drawing to its end, he will, by his own peculiar power, restore to the maimed and wretched limbs that have been wrenched out or cut off.’ And again: ‘Grief will be transformed into joy when sons butcher their father in their mother’s womb. The West will enjoy what was formerly the prerogative of the East, and at the setting of the sun, while the sun rises in its setting, while its light seems to be quenched and extinguished; the daylight illumines with a new brightness the mists of the western land and of the closing age of the world. Orators will come from the East, and princes and principal men will worship the footsteps of a new martyr in the lands that lie on the western borders of the ocean.’”
A summary of Gerald of Wales’ 12th century adaptation of the prophecy
“Thomas archbishop of Canterbury … the luster of his whole martyrdom was crowned by all the following circumstances: that he personally opened the doors of the church to his enemies, men mad with hate; and running towards their swords with head uncovered he placed the hallowed crown of his head in the path of their blows; that he was killed in the mother church before the altar; that his murderers were four of the ‘dogs of the palace, raging with a fury more than canine, from whom he received four wounds upon the crown of the head, that this soldier of Christ and noble martyr, fearlessly enduring suffering, gained the distinction of martyrdom only in that part of his body which represents Christ’s passion, that he sanctified with his own blood the sacred week of our Lord’s birth….and just as the first Thomas preceded our Lord’s birth day by five days, so this second Thomas rounded off the same number of days after Christmas…Just as St. Thomas exposed his body to cruel torturers to exalt this actual fabric of the church, so Thomas Becket did not shrink from becoming a victim of the sword so that he might preserve intact the spiritual form of the church. These two short verses sum up very well the triumphant glory of such a mighty victory: ‘A true lover of Christ died for the spouse of Christ, close to Christ’s birthday, in Christ’s church. When his limbs had been scattered and thrown out of the grave, he put new ones in their place-a kind of miracle hitherto unheard of-and by displaying this new kind of miraculous power truly appeared as a new martyr.”
Our 21st century Adaptation of the 6th century Merlin Silvester prophe
Inspired by Gerald of Wales’ weaving the prophecy into the reality of his day, we decided to do an update for a 21st century sensibility with one critical difference. It has been interpreted that the prophecy was foreshadowing the end of time and that a final martyr would return to redeem the world. Becket’s martyrdom could not end the cycle 900 years ago. Now that we are faced with the authentic end of time we have chosen JFK to be the one who will end the cycle of martyrdom itself.
“John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the slain son is the martyr (at the end of time) revealed by a new kind of miracle. In western lands, and in the age when the world is drawing to its end, he will, by his own peculiar power, restore to the maimed and wretched limbs that have been wrenched out or cut off.’ And again: ‘Grief will be transformed into joy when (the fathers stop sacrificing their sons to endless war and recognize the sons’ right to bring peace to the world. The fathers have been coveting control of the mothers’ womb against the sons’ own rights to his mother’s wisdom.) The West will enjoy what was formerly the prerogative of the East, and at the setting of the sun, while the sun rises in its setting, while its light seems to be quenched and extinguished; the daylight illumines with a new brightness the mists of the western land and of the closing age of the world. Orators will come from the East, and princes and principal men will worship the footsteps of a new martyr in the lands that lie on the western borders of the ocean.’ “
Transforming Revenge & Retribution into JFK’s Dream of World Peace
The last earl of Desmond was slain in 1583 while fighting for the Irish people. Even with that devastating blow to the cause of Irish freedom, the affection for the Fitzgerald family continued to grow and has lived on to this day. As the president of the United States John Fitzgerald Kennedy rose to the level of his great ancestors and won the hearts of the American people. JFK’s dream for a peaceful world was killed that day in Dallas in 1963. If we who believe in his vision can come together to resurrect his dream we will restore to the world what was lost with his death. The mystical Gearoid Iarla and his army of phantom soldiers have already been stirred from their slumber and will rise from Lough Gur to help JFK’s spirit return to the American people at our time of greatest need. This is how the power of myth really works for the people.
Copyright © 2022 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved
“Paul and Liz’s Magical Mystery Tour with Oliver Stone and How It Relates to Our Future”
The mystical has long intrigued Hollywood, intelligence agencies and the “rulers” of the world. Join our Roundtable #7 discussion to find out why that matters as we share astonishing stories about our mystical Hollywood experience. For more info visit valediction.net.
A FREE Zoom Event Wed. Mar 23, 2022 from 3-4:30 pm EST RSVP today at Valediction.net/event list
Panelists:
- R A “Kris” Millegan, TrineDay publisher, “The folks in the shadows who lie, cheat and steal must be exposed so we can create a better world for our children.”
- Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, Crossing Zero: The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire, The Voice and The Valediction: Three Nights of Desmond
- Bruce de Torres, panelist and moderator, author of God, School, 9/11 and JFK: The Lies That Are Killing Us and The Truth That Sets Us Free
Our interview with author and investigative journalist Daniel Estulin
Buy the book here
J.G. Michael, host of Parallax Views interviews Fitzgerald and Gould
Listen to the interview here parallaxviews.podbean.com January 31, 2022
On this edition of Parallax Views, Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, Crossing Zero: The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire, and now the novelized memoir The Valediction, join me to discuss their forty year journey investigating American Empire, the Cold War arms race, military Keynesianism and destruction of the civilian economy, covert operations, the rise of the peculiar ex-Trotskyites that came to be known as neocons, the politicization of intelligence vis-a-vis “Team B”, the death of the SALT treaty, and the political maneuverings of the foreign policy heavyweight Zbigniew Brzezinski in the Jimmy Carter White House all through their attempts to understand the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
We begin the conversation by delving into Paul’s work in the talk show business. Paul discusses how an anti-SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) treay documentary led him to make a documentary that was pro-SALT. This led him to speak with the well-known economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who told him about some key Cold War hawk figures like Paul Nitsze. Liz explains how many thought the end of the Vietnam War and later the Carter Presidency would lead to a new era that would lead to a reinvestment in the American civilian economy rather than the Wall Street and military economy. The SALT treaties were part of this hope as were talks of peace and détente. Paul then goes on to explain what Paul Warnke told him about peace talks going back to Lyndon Johnson’s Presidency.
From there we jump into the topic of the neoconservatives and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Paul and Liz discuss the involvement of the virulently anti-Soviet Zbigniew Brzezinski in the Carter administration as National Security advisor. In this regard we talk about Paul and Liz’s interview with Dr. Charles Cogan, chief of the Near East and South Asia Division in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations (1979–1984), in which Cogan talked about asking Zbigniew Brzezinski about the “Afghan Trap”, the idea that Brzezinski intentionally lured the Soviets into Afghanistan via covert operations, and Brzezinski’s surprising response. This leads us to talk about Brzezinski’s infamous interview with Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998 and the controversy surrounding it.
From there we delve into a number of different odds and ends including the death of Adolph “Spike” Dubs; explaining what the Afghan Trap was; the relationship between Trotskyism, game theory, and neocons; Team B and the politicization of intelligence, the mujahadeen, the neoconservative casus belli, Cold War political theater, Zbigniew Brzezinski ad a Dr. Faustus character, late-stage imperial dementia, and much, much more.
The Brzezinski Interview with Le Nouvel Observateur (1998) Afghanistan Between Three Worlds (Documentary)
Buy the book here
Roundtable #6, RESURRECT JFK AND THE USA
You can watch Roundtable #6, RESURRECT JFK AND THE USA HERE
The American Dream Thrived during the “Camelot” the Presidency of JFK
Join with us for Roundtable #6, RESURRECT JFK AND THE USA. If you missed #5 it can be viewed here. For more information visit valediction.net. Pass this information on to your friends. Hope to see you soon! Paul & Liz
— A FREE Zoom Event, Wed. Feb. 16, 2022, 3:00-4:30 pm/EST — Please CLICK HERE to register
Panelists:
- R A “Kris” Millegan, TrineDay publisher, “The folks in the shadows who lie, cheat and steal must be exposed so we can create a better world for our children.”
- Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, Crossing Zero: The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire, The Voice and The Valediction: Three Nights of Desmond
- Carol Brouillet, organizer, activist, Founder of the Northern California 9/11 Truth Alliance
- Bruce de Torres, moderator, author of God, School, 9/11 and JFK: The Lies That Are Killing Us and The Truth That Sets Us Free
The Dark Answers to Imperialism, JFK and Afghanistan are hidden in the Mystical–Two Authors’ Journey of Discovery
OpEdNews January 13, 2022
Jack’s Blog January 15, 2022
By Paul Fitzgerald Elizabeth Gould
The first thing an academic tells you when you mention the mystical side of Afghanistan is that you shouldn’t talk about that. The study of foreign policy cannot be seen as motivated by anything other than rational and objective reasons and measured by the metrics of quantitative analysis. How then to explain ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, the first director of the OSS and the father of today’s CIA calling his agents Knights Templars?
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How then to explain the American military’s fascination with medieval knighthoods? How then to explain the use of New Testament biblical passages engraved on the gunsights of American and British troops in Afghanistan? How then to explain American exceptionalism whereby the United States gets to do anything it pleases because America is right no matter what it does or how it does it?
People have heard about the holy warriors of the Muslim world, but what most Americans are unaware of is the mystical component of the warriors who fight for America and how that component has been setting the agenda for American politics from behind the scenes with no public scrutiny.
In Maine they use the expression “You can’t get there from here,” to explain this sort of disconnect. It’s being used to make the point that you can’t get exoteric Afghanistan unless you understand the esoteric and you can’t understand the esoteric without accepting your own personal motivationsIn researching for our books, we discovered a trove of esoteric history surrounding the West’s attraction to Afghanistan starting with the British. It revolves around Mystical Imperialism, a term first used to describe 19th-century British imperial efforts to colonize the non-Christian world by applying Judeo Christian ethics and philosophies.
Simply put, mystical imperialism rationalizes the expansion of a nation’s authority by conquest over other nations by infusing a sense of the divine into the raw politics of empire building. Today’s practitioners of American mystical imperialism are a hardened core of ideological defense intellectuals and military officers who combine their own esoteric and religious beliefs with Washington policy making.
These individuals can trace their philosophical DNA back to 19th-century European secret esoteric societies who were known to be heavily involved in espionage on both British and Russian sides. Reflected in the fictional quasi-Masonic exploits of Rudyard Kipling’s two soldiers in The Man Who Would be King, the “hidden” or occult game for control of Afghanistan and Central Asia was a factor in the foreign policy of the 19th century for the British and the Russians, and continues to this day through the United States
Afghanistan’s most notorious ‘Holy Warrior’ Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
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As the ancient home of Zoroaster and the Avesta, the foundation document for the Judeo/Christian war of light against dark, of good versus evil, 19th-century Afghanistan and its surroundings provided a mystical underpinning to what today is dryly regarded as geopolitics.
Described as the “World-Island” by early 20th-century British geo-strategist Halford Mackinder, Russia’s geographic position at the center of the Eurasian land mass rivaled
Britain’s as an island fortress. Mackinder foresaw Russia expanding with ferocity beyond its borders. From the outset – a Russian dominance of Central Asia spawned nightmares for the British of an apocalyptic horde sweeping from the Russian steppe across Europe, which had to be stopped at any cost.
Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president, supported an expedition in 1934 with the intention of establishing a spiritual settlement in the Himalayas. Wallace expressed his enthusiasm for the plan known as the Shambhala Project, stating that, “the political situation in this part of the world is always rendered especially intriguing by the effect on it, of ancient prophecies, traditions and the like.” Wallace anticipated that those prophecies were at last coming due.
Hidden to human eyes, Shambhala was said, by Tibetan Buddhists, to lie somewhere near Tibet and would finally be revealed at the end of time. Others believed it was hidden in the valleys of the Pamir mountain range in Northeastern Afghanistan. This was the Shambhala that concealed the lost wisdom, the secrets of immortality and the beginnings of the human race. Adolph Hitler sent an expedition to Tibet and Afghanistan in 1939 in the hopes of uncovering proof of Aryan links to modern German society in the soil of Central Asia.
From Halford Mackinder at the beginning of the 20th century to the American Cold Warrior James Burnham, the godfather of neo-conservatism, to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the
Grand Master of Geostrategic American foreign policy, Eurasia represented the central basis for American global primacy, in a world defined by Manichean opposites. In a 1945 Partisan Review article titled “Lenin’s Heir” Burnham, while still at the OSS, infused his apocalyptic political views with mystical allusions to the Eurasian heartland as “the magnetic core” of Soviet power, comparing it to the mystical “reality of the One-of-Neo-Platonism,” whose inexorable and unstoppable “progression… descends through the stages of Mind, Soul, and Matter… towards its ultimate destination beyond the Eurasian boundaries and through…Appeasement and Infiltration England and the United States.”
As an “anti-Communist ideology” Burnham’s apocalyptic warnings about the inevitability of Soviet expansion from Eurasia’s magnetic core ring like a medieval theologian’s incantation throughout Winston Churchill’s 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech, which set the terms of the Cold War.
Twenty-six years later, Senator William Fulbright would realize that only because of the disastrous outcome of Vietnam was there any willingness to reexamine the basic assumptions of the Cold War. The 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, known as SALT, would spring from this rational re-assessment, as would the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and eventually SALT II.
President Jimmy Carter and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev sign the Strategic Arms Limitation
Talks (SALT II) treaty, June 18, 1979, in Vienna.
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But because of National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s unyielding hostility toward any compromise with the Soviet Union over Afghanistan, President Carter would ask the Senate to delay consideration of the treaty on the Senate floor. That treaty would never be passed and the United States would begin a long slow march into what Burnham described as the magnetic core of the World Island.
Our initiation into the realm of Mystical Imperialism began six months before the December 27, 1979, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan while we were producing Arms Race and the Economy: A Delicate Balance, a documentary for televangelist Pat Robertson‘s Christian Broadcast Network (CBN).
The station had been airing the American Security Council‘s The Salt Syndrome, a propaganda film railing against the passage of SALT II (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) that would limit defense spending. As host of CBN’s public affairs show, our documentary was to be the rebuttal to The Salt Syndrome as required by the Fairness Doctrine. We were aware that Robertson’s proselytizing on his flagship 700 Club program was already engaged in a religious crusade to change America.
While working on the documentary our eyes were opened to a merging of powerful pro war political, business, and religious interests that were using their combined influence to push America into a Holy War against the Soviet Union.
As we continued to work on the production, experts from the opposite side of the political spectrum, such as economist John Kenneth Galbraith, informed us about the damage that a massive diversion of tax dollars would represent to the civilian economy. Galbraith insisted that accelerated defense spending following the end of the Vietnam War–as the military-industrial complex was demanding–would destroy the civilian economy.
He was convinced that the Cold War had already made America more like the Soviet Union, ideologically rigid, increasingly orthodox and ruled by a military-industrial-academic establishment suspended from reality.
By the time our program aired, the argument was no longer whether our government should call a halt to the nuclear arms race and reinvest in the civilian economy. According to President Carter the December 27, 1979, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War.
That statement instantly rolled back the narrative to 1947, the Truman Doctrine and the psychological warfare campaign necessary to bring it back to life. We realized that the powerful pro-war political, business, and religious interests calling for Holy War in The SALT Syndrome had just won the brass ring.
The point man for that campaign was Zbigniew Brzezinski. As an acolyte of geo-strategist Halford Mackinder, Brzezinski believed the Soviet takeover of Afghanistan and its pursuit of global dominance was foreordained and not subject to rational empirical observations.
Beginning in 1978, Brzezinski had been dialoguing with the Chinese and the Pakistanis over Soviet influence in Afghanistan and how to respond to it. In the summer of 1979, six months before the Soviet invasion, Brzezinski had President Carter sign a finding enabling propaganda support to the insurgency that would help draw the Soviets into what Brzezinski referred to as “the Afghan trap.”
When the Kabul government expelled the Western media one month after the Soviet invasion, we jumped at the chance to get behind the propaganda and break the news blackout. Once we had secured the visas in the spring of 1981, a friend in local TV news connected us to CBS Foreign News Editor Peter Larkin. Larkin was an intense man–Saigon bureau chief during the Vietnam War–and wanted the story immediately.
What we saw in Kabul was indeed in stark contrast to the picture playing on evening news. After struggling with our footage for a month CBS finally aired a segment about the Soviet troops that we didn’t see. Our involvement with CBS News was the beginning of an education in the MSM’s fact-free restructuring of the Afghan narrative that continues to hold sway today.
Following the distribution of Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, a PBS documentary we produced in 1982, we got a call from Major Karen McKay of the Committee for a Free Afghanistan. She complained that we didn’t mention anything about the Soviets’ use of chemical weapons in the documentary.
We explained those charges hadn’t been proved. But the Major countered that since the New York Times and the Washington Post had accepted her evidence why wouldn’t we.
Because, we explained, the claims we’d reviewed came from second- or third-hand sources or were based on hearsay evidence. Then we politely suggested what seemed like common sense, that the Major could make a better case if she had some hard evidence. Major McKay’s answer was revelatory as she snapped, “When it comes to the Russians we don’t need proof. We know they’re guilty.”
Once again, it was made very clear to us that when it came to the MSM narrative, facts REALLY didn’t matter.
When the third opportunity to challenge the MSM’s narrative arrived, we still had hope and again jumped at the chance. In the spring of 1983 we returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation Project Director Roger Fisher for ABC’s Nightline.
Our aim was to establish the credibility of the American claims that the Soviets had no intention of withdrawing from Afghanistan. We had a number of credible sources stating that the Kremlin wanted desperately to abandon the war, but the Reagan administration was dragging its feet.
From the moment they entered the White House the new administration had demanded that the Soviets withdraw their forces, while at the same time keeping them pinned down through covert action so they couldn’t leave. Though lacking in factual backup, this hypocritical campaign was embraced by the entire American political spectrum and our effort with Roger Fisher to further the negotiation process remained willfully unexamined by America’s mainstream media.
By 1987 we were so frustrated with getting nowhere at changing the official narrative with the facts on the ground we had to question all our assumptions about journalism. If facts did not matter, what did?
That’s when we looked at our story from a personal perspective and wondered what had called us to the Afghan story in the first place. We started writing screenplays out of our accumulated materials and research and by the end of the 1980s had completed four. But we had yet to find the right path to tell our story.
Then in September of 1991, our ten-year-old daughter Alissa told us about a dream she had with Paul’s deceased father whom she had never met. He was accompanied by a man wearing a Scottish plaid suit with bell-bottom trousers and a matching hat. The man told Alissa he was 800 years old. We already knew the Fitzgerald family had come to Ireland as mercenaries for King Henry II 800 years before and decided to consider Alissa’s dream as a mystical encouragement to dig deeper into the past for answers.
Three months later we saw Oliver Stone’s film, JFK, and found the inspiration we had been looking for. Stone’s decision to include the involvement of an esoteric secret society with deeper motives resonated with us.
In our research into the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1170, an enterprise largely run by the Fitzgerald family, we had discovered historical reasons why members of some secret societies might have been motivated to eliminate JFK in the modern era as retribution for past “crimes.” We then developed The Voice research paper with the hope that Stone would become interested in this esoteric perspective too, but he wanted our Afghanistan story instead.
Maurice FitzGerald as shown in the Expugnatio Hibernica, written in 1189 by his nephew, Gerald of Wales
(Image by National Library of Ireland) Details DMCA
Once we began to work on the script, the mythic implications of the Afghan story began to emerge when many of the documents preceding the crisis were declassified. As we trailed the clues, we found pseudo-religious references in Washington’s official policy to the Manichean war of the light against the dark-whose origins began in the region now known as Afghanistan.
We then discovered a synchronistic connection that we could not have imagined. One of the books we had purchased was written by an ex-CIA agent about British efforts in the 19th century. In the book were many photos of prominent Brits and Afghans and of the battles they fought. But also included were photos of two
Americans. One of these men was dressed wearing a Scottish plaid suit with bell-bottomed trousers and a matching turban. The photo was of Alexander Gardner, a mercenary who’d found his way to Afghanistan in the 1820s. He’d discovered the religion of Zoroaster settled in the mountains and married an Afghan Princess. He not only lived the real life of Rudyard Kipling’s Man Who Would Be King; it has been said Gardner provided Kipling with essential information for his novel.
Alissa confirmed that day when she came home from school that the soldier in the photo wearing a clan uniform of his own design, was the man from her dream. Alissa had somehow tapped a synchronicity about our Afghan adventure that gave it a deeper meaning.
Colonel Alexander Gardner
(Image by Sotheby’s) Details DMCA
As we continued to develop The Voice as a novel, over time Stone became intrigued and asked us to connect its esoteric background with the fact-based Afghanistan script. Now titled Three Nights of Desmond, we found ourselves merging the past, present, and future into a very different kind of story.
In writing the script, the antagonist (modeled after CBS Foreign News Editor Peter Larkin) emerged as a tragic archetype: an angry, wounded veteran who was determined to twist the Afghanistan story to get back at the Soviets for what he believed they had done to him in Vietnam. In The Voice, published in 2001, the character had matured as a victim of his own propaganda. Through that narrative the character of Alissa, as Paul’s daughter, resolved the conflict between the “Larkin” character and Paul.
Even though Alissa had no involvement in our work, over the decades many of our Afghan contacts, that she had never met, continued to cross into her life as if by magic. The most powerful synchronicity occurred when she came to meet the real Peter Larkin through her friendship with his daughter Brett. We had known nothing about this friendship until December 23, 2011, when Peter and Brett arrived at our home for a holiday party at 7:00 pm as guests of Alissa.
Having the man who launched us into our Afghan saga join with us for our holiday party was beyond surreal. It was as if a dream had materialized before our eyes. The novelized encounter between Paul and Peter through Alissa (which had been foreshadowed in The Voice) had been delivered to us through our front door. The reality of the script we struggled to write for Stone had finally written itself. It was a revelatory moment produced by our daughters that completed a journey begun 30 years before between two competing storytellers.
CONCLUSION
Back in 1979 when we first encountered the MSM’s propaganda Afghan narrative we could not have imagined that narrative would still be presented as fact in 2021. The science is very clear; a narrative built with no facts is still more powerful at changing minds than facts alone. This MSNBC report is a stark reminder of that fact. From the ancient oral to the modern written tradition humans have always been drawn to stories. The power of narratives to transform people’s views is well documented. Like a recipe being offered as food, presenting even solid facts without framing it in a narrative is not enough to motivate most people to action. Our big breakthrough came when we realized that the power to win hearts and minds was not by trying to change the MSM’s empty narrative; it was in creating a new narrative with our own facts. When you create a good story out of solid facts that is truly food for thought!
We’ve often wondered what would have changed in the American dialogue on the JFK assassination if Oliver Stone had created a film based on the concept we gave him in 1992; going back to the origin of the Fitzgerald family and their dicey relationship with London. What Stone did do for us was put us back on the Afghan course we had walked away from; and in that process crossed us over into the mystical telling of our own story. We came to see that the weaving back and forth of the screenplay and the novel had become a way of understanding the multi-dimensional nature of narrative creation. Although our three years of work with Stone did produce the Three Nights of Desmond script concept, it was never fulfilled. Thirty years in the making, we finally brought the script concept created for Stone to fruition as the heart and soul of, The Valediction Three Nights of Desmond and The Valediction Resurrection that will be available next spring. Copyright © 2022 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved
Roundtable #5 – “The Quest For The Grail is Resolved: The Oldest Spy Operation In History”
READ OUR ARTICLE: The Dark Answers to Imperialism, Afghanistan and JFK are hidden in the Mystical–Two Author’s Journey of Discovery IT DELIVERS SOME OF WHAT WE’LL BE DISCUSSING IN RT#5
TrineDay’s The Valediction Roundtable Series
Dear friends,
Join with us for a FREE Zoom Event: “ The Quest For The Grail is Resolved The Oldest Spy Operation In History: ” January 19th from 3:00-4:30 pm/ET. You won’t want to miss it! For more about The Valediction Three Nights of Desmond visit valediction.net.
All best, Paul and Liz
Registration Required at Valediction.net/eventlist
Panelists:
- RA “Kris” Millegan, TrineDay publisher “The folks in the shadows who lie, cheat and steal to manipulate us must be exposed so we can create a better world for our children.”
- Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, Crossing Zero: The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire, The Valediction: Three Nights of Desmond and The Voice
- Bruce de Torres author of God, School, 9/11 and JFK: The Lies That Are Killing Us and The Truth That Sets Us Free and moderator
Valediction Roundtable Series: “Exposing the Failure of Empire and Reclaiming the Narrative Creation Process
Roundtable #4 – “Into the Mystic: The Murder of JFK and How It Relates to The Valediction” –
FREE Zoom Event Dec. 8, 2021 from 3:00-4:30 pm/ET Registration Required at Valediction.net/eventlist
For more information visit valediction.net
Panelists:
- RA “Kris” Millegan, TrineDay publisher “The folks in the shadows who lie, cheat and steal to manipulate us must be exposed so we can create a better world for our children.”
- Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, Crossing Zero: The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire, The Valediction: Three Nights of Desmond and The Voice
- S.K. Bain, author of The Most Dangerous Book in the World: 9/11 As Mass Ritual; Black Jack: The Dawning of the New Great Age of Satan; Most Dangerous: A True Story; and The End Is Only the Beginning: 2022 and the Coming of God
- Jay Dyer, public speaker, lecturer, comedian and author of Esoteric Hollywood: Sex, Cults and Symbols in Film. His graduate work focused on the interplay of film, geopolitics, espionage and psychological warfare.
- Sean Stone, filmmaker (Greystone Park, Enter the Fist, A Century of War, co-host Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura, RT news show Watching the Hawks) and author of New World Order: A Strategy of Imperialism
- Sarah Whalen journalist and author of Royal Vengeance, The Assassination of Princess Diana and the Ancient Royal Cult of Human Sacrifice
- Katherine Wilson screenwriter, film-maker and author of Echoes From the Set 1967-2017 — 50 Years of Filming On-Location (Volumes 1 and 2)
- Bruce de Torres author of God, School, 9/11 and JFK: The Lies That Are Killing Us and The Truth That Sets Us Free and modera
A New Memoir Reveals How Brzezinski’s Chessboard Led to U.S. Checkmate in Afghanistan
Nearly as suspenseful as the Taliban’s meteoric return to power after the final withdrawal of American armed forces from Afghanistan is the uncertainty over what will come next amid the fallout. Many have predicted that Russia and China will step in to fill the power vacuum and convince the facelift Taliban to negotiate a power-sharing agreement in exchange for political and economic support, while others fear [that] a descent into civil war is inevitable. Although Moscow and Beijing potentially stand to gain from the humiliating U.S. retreat by pushing for an inclusive government in Kabul, the rebranded Pashtun-based group must first be removed as a designated terrorist organization. Neither wants to see Afghanistan worsen as a hotbed of jihad, as Islamist separatism already previously plagued Russia in the Caucasus and China is still in the midst of an ongoing ethnic conflict in Xinjiang with Uyghur Muslim secessionists and the Al Qaeda-linked Turkestan Islamic Party. At this point, everyone recognizes the more serious extremist threat lies not with the Taliban but with the emergence of ISIS Khorasan or ISIS-K, the Islamic State affiliate blamed for several recent terror attacks including the August 26th bombings at Hamid Karzai International Airport in the Afghan capital which killed 13 American service members and more than a 100 Afghans during the U.S. drawdown.
Three days later, American commanders ordered a retaliatory drone strike targeting a vehicle which they claimed was en route to detonate a suicide bomb at the same Kabul airport. For several days, the Pentagon falsely maintained that the aerial assault successfully took out two ISIS-K militants and a servile corporate media parroted these assertions unquestioningly, including concocting a totally fictitious report that the blast consisted of “secondary explosions” from devices already inside the car intended for use in an act of terror. Two weeks later, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) was forced to apologize and admit the strike was indeed a “tragic mistake” which errantly killed ten innocent civilians — all of whom were members of a single family including seven children — while no Daesh members were among the dead. This distortion circulated in collusion between the endless war machine and the media is perhaps only eclipsed by the alleged Russian-Taliban bounty program story in its deceitfulness.
If any Americans were aware of ISIS-K prior to the botched Kabul airstrike, they likely recall when former U.S. President Donald Trump authorized the unprecedented use of a Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb, informally referred to as the “Mother Of All Bombs”, on Islamic State militants in Nangarhar Province back in 2017. Reportedly, Biden’s predecessor had to be shown photos from the 1970s of Afghan girls wearing miniskirts by his National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster, to renege on his campaign pledge of ending the longest war in U.S. history. As it happens, the ISIS Khorasan fighters extinguished by the MOAB were sheltered at an underground tunnel complex near the Pakistani border that was built by the C.I.A. back in the 1980s during the Afghan-Soviet war. Alas, the irony of this detail was completely lost on mainstream media whose proclivity to treat Pentagon newspeak as gospel has been characteristic of not only the last twenty years of U.S. occupation but four decades of American involvement in Afghanistan since Operation Cyclone, the covert Central Intelligence Agency plan to arm and fund the mujahideen, was launched in 1979.
Frank Wisner, the C.I.A. official who established Operation Mockingbird, the agency’s extensive clandestine program to infiltrate the news media for propaganda purposes during the Cold War, referred to the press as its “Mighty Wurlitzer”, or a musical instrument played to manipulate public opinion. Langley’s recruitment of assets within the fourth estate was one of many illicit activities by the national security apparatus divulged in the limited hangout of the Church Committee during the 1970s, along with C.I.A. complicity in coups, assassinations, illegal surveillance, and drug-induced brainwashing of unwitting citizens. At bottom, it wasn’t just the minds of human guinea pigs that ‘The Company’ sought to control but the news coverage consumed by Americans as well. In his testimony before a congressional select committee, Director of Central Intelligence William Colby openly acknowledged the use of spooks in journalism, as seen in the award-winning documentary Inside the C.I.A.: On Company Business(1980). Unfortunately, the breadth of the secret project and its vetting of journalists wasn’t fully revealed until an article by Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame appeared in Rolling Stone magazine, whereas the series of official investigations only ended up salvaging the deep state by presenting such wrongdoings as rogue “abuses” rather than an intrinsic part of espionage in carrying out U.S. foreign policy.
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Operation Mockingbird, CIA Media Control Program – YouTube CIA Funding and Manipulation of the U.S. News MediaOperation Mockingbird was a secret Central Intelligence Agency campaign to influence domestic and foreign … |
Clip from Inside the CIA: On Company Business (1980)
The corrupt institution of Western media also punishes anyone within its ranks who dares to swim against the current. The husband and wife duo of Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, authors of a new memoir which illuminates the real story of Afghanistan, were two such journalists who learned just how the sausage is made in the nation’s capital with the connivance of the yellow press. Both veterans of the peace movement, Paul and Liz were initially among those who naively believed that America’s humiliation in Vietnam and the well-publicized hearings which discredited the intelligence community might lead to a sea change in Washington with the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976. In hindsight, there was actually good reason for optimism regarding the prospect for world peace in light of the arms reduction treaties and talks between the U.S. and Moscow during the Nixon and Ford administrations, a silver lining to Henry Kissinger’s ‘realist’ doctrine of statecraft. However, any glimmer of hope in easing strained relations between the West and the Soviet Union was short-lived, as the few voices of reason inside the Beltway presuming good faith on the part of Moscow toward détente and nuclear proliferation were soon challenged by a new bellicose faction of D.C. think-tank ghouls who argued that diplomacy jeopardized America’s strategic position and that the USSR sought global dominion.
Since intelligence assessments inconveniently contradicted the claims of Soviet aspirations for strategic superiority, C.I.A. Director George H.W. Bush consulted the purported expertise of a competitive group of intellectual warmongers known as ‘Team B’ which featured many of the same names later synonymous with the neoconservative movement, including Richard Pipes, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. Bush, Sr. had replaced the aforementioned Bill Colby following the notorious “Halloween Massacre” firings in the Gerald Ford White House, a political shakeup which also included Kissinger’s ouster as National Security Advisor and the promotion of a young Donald Rumsfeld to Secretary of Defense with his pupil, one Richard B. Cheney, named Chief of Staff. This proto-neocon soft coup allowed Team B and its manipulated estimates of the Soviet nuclear arsenal to undermine the ongoing Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) between Washington and the Kremlin until Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev finally signed a second comprehensive non-proliferation treaty in June 1979.
The behind-the-scenes split within the foreign policy establishment over which dogma would set external policymaking continued wrestling for power before the unipolarity of Team B prevailed thanks to the machinations of Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. If intel appraisals of Moscow’s intentions and military capabilities didn’t match the Team B thesis, the Polish-American strategist devised a scheme to lure the USSR into a trap in Afghanistan to give the appearance of Soviet expansionism in order to convince Carter to withdraw from SALT II the following year and sabotage rapprochement. By the time it surfaced that the C.I.A. was supplying weapons to Islamist insurgents in the Central Asian country, the official narrative dispensed by Washington was that it was aiding the Afghan people fight back against an “invasion” by the Red Army. Ironically, this was the justification for a proxy conflict which resulted in the deaths of at least 2 million civilians and eventually collapsed the socialist government in Kabul, setting off a bloody civil war and the emergence of the Taliban.
Even so, it was the media which helped manage the perception that the C.I.A.’s covert war began only after the Soviets had intervened. Meanwhile, the few honest reporters who tried to unveil the truth about what was happening were silenced and relegated to the periphery. Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould were the first two American journalists permitted entry into the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in 1981 by the Moscow-friendly government since Western correspondents had been barred from the country. What they witnessed firsthand on the ground could not have contrasted more sharply from the accepted tale of freedom fighters resisting a communist “occupation” disseminated by propaganda rags. Instead, what they discovered was an army of feudal tribesmen and fanatical jihadists who blew up schools and doused women with acid as they waged a holy war against an autonomous, albeit flawed, progressive government in Kabul enacting land reforms and providing education for girls. In addition, they learned the Soviet military presence was being deliberately exaggerated by major outlets who either outright censored or selectively edited their exclusive accounts, beginning with CBS Evening News and later ABC’s Nightline.
Not long after the Taliban established an Islamic emirate for the first time in the late 1990s, Brzezinski himself would shamelessly boast that Operation Cyclone had actually started in mid-1979 nearly six months prior to the deployment of Soviet troops later that year. Fresh off the publication of his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, the Russophobic Warsaw-native told the French newspaper Le Nouvel Observateurin 1998:
“Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs that the American intelligence services began to aid the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet intervention. Is this period, you were the NationalSecurityAdvisor to President Carter. You therefore played a key role in this affair. Is this correct?
Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujaheddin began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet militaryintervention.
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into the war and looked for a way to provoke it?
B: It wasn’t quite like that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q :When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against secret US involvement inAfghanistan ,nobody believedthem .However, there was an element of truth in this. You don’t regret any of this today?
B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.” Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for theregime,a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?
B :What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”
If this stunning admission straight from the horse’s mouth is too candid to believe, Fitzgerald and Gould obtain confirmation of Brzezinski’s Machiavellian confession from one of their own skeptics. Never mind that Moscow’s help had been requested by the legitimate Afghan government to defend itself against the U.S. dirty war, a harbinger of the Syrian conflict more than three decades later when Damascus appealed to Russia in 2015 for military aid to combat Western-backed “rebel” groups. Paul and Liz also uncover C.I.A. fingerprints all over the suspicious February 1979 assassination of Adolph Dubs, the American Ambassador to Afghanistan, whose negotiation attempts may have inadvertently thrown a wrench into Brzezinski’s ploy to draw the USSR into a quagmire. Spurring Carter to give his foreign policy tutor the green light to finance the Islamist proxies, the timely kidnapping and murder of the U.S. diplomat at a Kabul hotel would be pinned on the KGB and the rest was history. The journo couple even go as far as to imply the branch of Western intelligence likely responsible for his murder was an agent from the Safari Club, an unofficial network between the security services of a select group of European and Middle Eastern countries that carried out covert operations during the Cold War across several continents with ties to the worldwide drug trade and Brzezinski.
Although he was considered to be of the ‘realist’ school of international relations like Kissinger, Brzezinski’s plot to engineer a Russian equivalent of Vietnam in Afghanistan increased the clout of neoconservatism in Washington, a persuasion that would later reach its peak of influence in the George W. Bush administration. In retrospect, the need for a massive military buildup to achieve Pax Americana promoted by the war hawks in Team B was a precursor to the influential “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” manifesto by the Project for the New American Century cabal preceding 9/11 and the ensuing U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Fitzgerald and Gould also historically trace the ideological roots of neoconservatism to its intellectual foundations in the American Trotskyist movement during the 1930s. If a deviated branch of Marxism seems like an unlikely origin source for the right-wing interventionist foreign policy of the Bush administration, its basis is not as unexpected as it may appear. In fact, one of the main reasons behind the division between the Fourth International and the Comintern was over the national question, since Trotsky’s theory of “permanent revolution” called for expansion to impose global revolution unlike Stalin’s “socialism in one country” position which respected the sovereignty and self-determination of nation-states while still giving support to national liberation movements.
The authors conclude by highlighting how the military overhaul successfully championed by the neoconservatives marked the beginning of the end for U.S. infrastructure maintenance as well. With public attention currently focused on the pending Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to repair decaying industry at home just as the disastrous Afghan pullout has put President Joe Biden’s favorability at an all-time low, Fitzgerald and Gould truly connect all the dots between the decline of America as a superpower with Brzezinski and Team B. Even recent statements by Jimmy Carter himself were tantamount when he spoke with Trump about China’s economic success which he attributed to Beijing’s lack of wasteful spending on military adventures, an incredible irony given the groundwork for the defense budget escalation begun under Ronald Reagan was laid by Carter’s own foreign policy. Looking back, the spousal team notes that the ex-Georgia governor did not need much coaxing after all to betray his promises as a candidate, considering his rise to the presidency was facilitated by his membership alongside Brzezinski in the Trilateral Commission, an elite Rockefeller-funded think tank. What is certain is that Paul and Liz have written an indispensable book that gives a level of insight into the Afghan story only attainable from their four decades of scholarly work on the subject. The Valediction: Three Nights of Desmond is now available from Trine Day Press and the timing of its release could not offer better context to recent world events.