Eric Zuesse
Michael Isikoff and David Corn lie so many times in their new book, so that the motive would be puzzling, except that it’s really not, because they lie in accord with the U.S. Government’s own demonstrable lies, which happen also to be basic to today’s CIA — so, Isikoff-Corn’s propagandistic agenda, at least, is clear and consistent — they lie for a clearly identifiable propagandistic purpose, the U.S. Government’s purpose, as will be documented here.
Their book is titled RUSSIAN ROULETTE: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump. It was published on March 13th, and already (as of this writing) has 541 customer reviews at Amazon, with the average customer-review rating being 4.8 out of 5 stars — almost as favorable as can possibly be. This book will be reviewed here.
There is lots of precedent for the CIA controlling the press in America, starting with the establishment of the CIA’s operation Mockingbird in 1948, which continues to this day. One illustrative example (Udo Ulfkotte) of the CIA’s control over the media will be briefly cited, before getting to the main topic, the Isikoff-Corn book.
Udo Ulfkotte was a prominent German journalist who reported, and finally became an editor, for the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung, during the 17 years from 1986 through 2003, and who then seems to have become increasingly alienated from the journalistic profession, and consumed by moral pangs about his having been secretly a German propaganda-agent of the U.S. CIA, as he subsequently reported in his confessional book, which is banned in the U.S., and which was titled Journalists for Hire: How the CIA Buys the News. (Russian TV interviewed him about it in English.)
The Isikoff-Corn book might as well have been written for the CIA, like Ulfkotte used to do, but at least Isikoff-Corn have done it (if they did — there could be other reasons why they lie consistently in accord with the U.S. Government’s lies) for their own nation’s ‘intelligence’ service, and they seem (unlike Ulfkotte) to be quite shameless in the lies that they indubitably tell. This review will cover just the most consequential of their lies.
The biggest single issue that Isikoff-Corn lie about is the one for which the economic sanctions have been placed against Russia, ever since 2014 — it precipitated the start of ’the new Cold War’ — the events that have been cited also to ‘justify’ the massing now of over 100,000 U.S. and other NATO troops and tanks and other weapons onto and near Russia’s border, prepared to invade. (It’s sort of like the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis now, but even more extreme, and in reverse: U.S. now placing missiles on Russia’s border.) That alleged issue, the start of the revived Cold War, is Ukraine, and is Russia’s alleged ‘aggression’ against Ukraine and ‘seizure’ of Crimea. So, these are very consequential lies, which are essential to the restoration, and now even the escalation, of the Cold War.
On page 46, Isikoff-Corn write about a particularly seminal event that occurred on 27 January 2014 and which was uploaded to youtube on 4 February 2014. This key event was a phone call, which occurred 24 days before Ukraine’s President Victor Yanukovych was overthrown on February 20th, and it was 30 days before the new person to head Ukraine’s Government, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, became officially appointed to rule the country. This phone-conversation wasn’t between Ukrainians, however; it was between two U.S. Government officials — between Victoria Nuland, who was U.S. President Barack Obama’s agent controlling U.S. Government policy on Ukraine, and Geoffrey Pyatt, who was Obama’s U.S. Ambassador in Ukraine: she was here giving Pyatt instructions. She told Pyatt not to appoint Vitally Klitschko, the EU’s favorite, to that function, but instead Arseniy Yatsenyuk; and, here is that, the most crucial part of this historically crucial phone-conversation:
Nuland: … Yats is the guy who’s got the economic experience the governing experience; he’s the… what he needs is Klitsch and Tiahnybok [an admirerer of Hitler] on the outside; he [Yats] needs to be talking to them four times a week you know. I just think Klitch going in, he’s going to be, at that level, working for Yatsenyuk; it’s just not going to work.
Pyatt: Yeah [you’re right], no [I was wrong to think that Klitschko should become the new ruler], I think that’s right. Ok. Good.
Then, she referred in the call, to her agent (just like she was Obama’s agent), Jeff Feltman, who had been assigned to persuade the U.N.’s Ban ki-Moon and his envoy handling Ukraine, Holland’s former Ambassador to Ukraine, Robert Serry, to go along with the U.S., in this context:
I talked to Jeff Feltman this morning; he had a new name for the UN guy Robert Serry; did I write you that this morning?
Pyatt: Yeah I saw that.
Nuland: Ok. He’s now gotten both Serry and Ban ki-Moon to agree that Serry could come in Monday or Tuesday. That would be great, I think, to help glue this thing, and to have the UN help glue it, and, you know, Fuck the EU.
Feltman chose Serry to become appointed on 5 March 2014 by Ban ki-Moon to “mediate the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.” (Whether Putin ever knew that the U.N.’s ‘mediator’ had been chosen by Obama’s people, is unknown.)
On page 46, is the only Isikoff-Corn passage which refers to this crucial conversation; and here it is, so that the Isikoff-Corn version can be compared against the documented one, just presented here:
“Nuland and Pyatt were working with the Ukrainian opposition to create a coalition government that would include Yanukovych and opposition leaders. On this call, the two Americans candidly discussed the merits of various oppsition leaders who could join the coalition. They also expressed frustration that the European Union was not doing more to help end the crisis. ‘Fuck the EU,’ Nuland told the Ambassador.”
That’s all the book provides about it.
Here was the youtube that was uploaded on 4 February 2014, of this Nuland-Pyatt phone call, so that you can hear it for yourself, and judge whether that, the Isikoff-Corn account, was an honest summary of it; or whether, in fact, they were covering-up the fact that this conversation was between two U.S. operatives planning a coup, which occurred less than a month later, and which installed the coup-plotters’ chosen person to rule Ukraine after the coup. If Isikoff-Corn are not CIA agents, or at least CIA assets (paid by the CIA or on behalf of the CIA but not formally agents or “officers” of the CIA), then why would they misrepresent this absolutely crucial piece of historical evidence?
On page 48, Isikoff-Corn refer to events occurring during the coup as “demonstrators being gunned down by government [Yanukovich’s] snipers.” Though that is the CIA-U.S.-and-alied official line on that, it has been amply disproven, and the first instance when it was, is this phone conversation which occurred on 26 February 2014 when the coup culminated and the foreign-affairs chief of the European Union, Catherine Ashton, was confidentially informed by her investigator, Urmas Paet, regarding his findings as to what had been the cause of the murders and other violence that brought down the Ukrainian Government of President Viktor Yanukovych — whether it was Yanukovych himself, or the people who had opposed Yanukovych and who had supported Ukraine’s joining the EU (which Yanukovych had finally decided not to do). This Ashton-Paet conversation makes absolutely clear that the EU had not participated in bringing down Yanukovych and was shocked to learn that Yanukovych had not been behind the violence on that historic occasion, which had occurred only days prior to that conversation.
On page 50, appears: “Russian forces … grabbed the Black Sea port of Sevastopol” in Crimea, but that statement too is a lie. Russia had had that port and all of Crimea itself, ever since 1783; they didn’t “grab” it; and only as recently as 1954 did the Soviet dictator arbitrarily transfer Crimea from Russia to Ukraine, and even U.S-and-allied polls of Crimeans continued to show that the vast majority of Crimeans still, despite what the Soviet dictator did in 1954, considered themselves to be Russians and not Ukrainians, and even after the referendum on 16 March 2014 when Crimeans voted over 90% to be restored to Russia, all evidence is that Crimeans want to remain as Russians and not at all be represented by Ukraine’s Government. The Soviet dictator, Nikita Khrushchev, never cared what the residents of Crimea wanted, and neither did Barack Obama, but Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, did, and does. Furthermore, even under the Khrushchev-installed regimen in Crimea, Russia’s lease on Sebastopol had been extended in 2010 to expire in 2042 at the very earliest; and, so, even with Crimea as being a Ukrainian region, it’s a lie to say, as Isikoff-Corn do, “Russian forces … grabbed the Black Sea port of Sevastopol.”
Also on page 50 they state: “Putin announced Crimea’s formal annexation into the Russian Federation — the first seizure of land from another nation in Europe since the end of World War II,” and they totally ignore that the U.S. regime had seized Ukraine from its existing neutrality, and turned it rabidly pro-nazi and anti-Russian; it wasn’t Putin who ‘seized’ Crimea; it was Obama, who had seized Ukraine.
Then, on page 181, they employ the phrase “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.” Here’s the reality, which was documented in this 19 November 2017 Italian video: some of the U.S-hired 2014 mercenaries themselves, years later, and entirely voluntarily, if not proudly, admitted that they had been hired for the job; and these snipers were from the nation of Georgia and were being paid by Mikheil Saakashvili, upon whom Washington had been relying during the 2008 color-‘revolution’ in Georgia, but whom America’s stooge President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, appointed to be the governor of the rebellious region of Odessa in Ukraine, and Saakashvili then became a favorite of Ukraine’s two nazi parties, to replace Poroshenko; so, Poroshenko fired him. The U.S. regime is one of only two or three governments in the entire world that stands up, and continues to stand up, at the U.N. for nazis, and the ‘journalism’ and ‘history’ that’s written by the likes of Isikoff and of Corn is in that traditional ideological vein, of propaganda.
Even before that, on 15 February 2015, German state television had documented that definitely there were bullets from Yanukovych’s opponents that were found in the corpses of demonstrators and of police, but that only maybe there were bullets also from Yanukovych’s side. None of the actual evidence clearly implicates anyone but Obama and his people (such as Saakashvili). If there were others (snipers on Yanukovych’s side), then the evidence for that has been, and remains, lacking — even though the regime that Obama installed in Ukraine has controlled Ukraine’s Government since that time and can therefore reasonably be presumed to be overwhelmingly predisposed to find such evidence.
For a fuller account of how Obama seized Ukraine, see this. (However, when in 2016 Lee Fang and Zaid Jilani, at The Intercept, revealed that NATO Supreme Commander in Europe, Philip Breedlove, with help from Wesley Clark and others, had tried to force Obama to go directly to war against Russia over the Ukraine issue, the 216 reader-comments were as condemnatory against Obama for his having refused to be quite that extreme, as they were against Breedlove for his persistently trying to provoke his own Commander-in-Chief into World War III. Those readers, unfortunately, didn’t know the truth, which is documented here — they were just confused.)
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.