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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   25768 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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I don't have much to add, other than some fun excerpts from the first article for those who won't read the whole thing

Three years later, a British former undercover cop, who now works as a private investigator and goes by Jon, was hired to work for a client who had set up temporary residency at the Dorchester hotel, in London. The client was well built, with close-cropped hair and an even stubble. He was of Libyan background, but had grown up in France, spoke flawless English, and tipped the hotel staff with high-denomination notes. “He wanted countersurveillance on himself when he was in the U.K., to make sure that no one was following him,” Jon told me.

Jon doesn’t like the term “private investigator,” because he thinks it diminishes the scope of what he does. On an average day, he collects the travel histories and police files of five to ten targets, through contacts in the public sector. They don’t know his full name—they just know not to ask questions, and that they will be paid in cash. His clients include businesses, government agencies, and billionaires, and his duties range from spying on philandering spouses to helping international criminal gangs insure that a stolen passport can be used to get a murderer across a border. “There’s a lot that is very questionable that I can do, that I have done,” he said. “In the police, you have to have morals—or you’re meant to. That’s the whole point of being a police officer. And then you come out into the private sector and—let’s be honest—it really doesn’t matter.” For almost four hours, he spoke candidly, on the condition that I neither publish his full name nor describe him physically.

...

In the following months, the attacks on short sellers grew increasingly personal, and even violent. Fahmi Quadir was punched in the head by a masked man with brass knuckles while walking her poodle on the Upper West Side; she was knocked unconscious, and the assailant, who stole nothing, was never found.

It also appeared as if operatives were collecting detailed information on Nick Gold’s trades; in the next few months, all his leveraged bets were liquidated, with losses into the tens of millions of pounds. “My name was tarnished. Banks were now shutting me off, overnight,” Gold recalled. “My wife left me.”

If I read all that on some random substack, I wouldn't think twice about disbelieving and ignoring it.

Speaking of disbelieving, the authors of the second article are the same as the authors of the havana syndrome piece from last week, one I was as skeptical of as some others here. I'm genuinely not sure if / how much I should discount the content of the second article as a result - the Havana article does lay out its evidence in a way that makes the faulty inferences clear, while this new article directly states the main points, idk.

What part of beating up a short seller with probably $3 million under management feels fake to you?

Maybe she has more money but beating up the cranks in the financial market would seem to only raise attention versus squashing it.

Funny thing is her valeant short position didn’t even work. It quadrupled till it got the kiss of death of a Jim Cramer buy recommendation.

If she was actually any good she would have gotten super long valeant.

Okay, this bit here with "Jon" is sounding very Steele Dossier to me. You can totes trust this is 100% accurate! After all, he's a former spy! Why would he lie or make shit up when talking to us?

If a guy is telling me "I have no morals, I'll help murderers escape so long as they pay me enough", why should I trust that he's never ever going to fib the teeniest bit when selling me a story?

The story doesn’t need Jon. The ex-Libyan intelligence chief (who is quoted by name in the other article) discusses the operation mostly openly. Marsalek hired him to target short-sellers, he hired people like “Jon” and others to do it. The organized effort to attack short-sellers also isn’t fictive, as I said the German government literally opened a criminal investigation into the Financial Times for supposedly conspiring with short sellers to drive down the share price because they published articles questioning Wirecard’s accounting.

The thing about both this and the Havana Syndrome piece is that they obviously come from intelligence, meaning that someone in (probably the UK/US) government sent them this dossier and told them to publish it; otherwise these journalists would never have most of the information in the piece like when random Russian intelligence figures happened to enter or leave certain countries, precise meeting times, even references to historic CCTV footage that would have been collected for counterintelligence purposes. An implicit but unstated part of the story is that UK and US intelligence probably knew how compromised the Austrian security service was but used it to try to figure out what the Russians were doing; the problem was that the Russians were also aware that they knew and had so thoroughly compromised the Austrians that they were still actually able to get away with a lot under the nose of counterintelligence.

The Austrians have finally charged their ex-intelligence chief based in evidence they announce is from MI5 last week. The suggestion is that the guy, Ott, was Marsalek’s contact after he had been temporarily forced out of Orthodox priesthood and asked to be the handler for a Bulgarian-Russian spy ring in suburban England which British police busted a few months ago. But yes, it should be very clear that this is a specific side to the story.

The thing about both this and the Havana Syndrome piece is that they obviously come from intelligence, meaning that someone in (probably the UK/US) government sent them this dossier and told them to publish it;

If so, then the dossier was originally assembled, vetted, edited, approved, and ultimately released as a political op. The most significant thing that can be reliably concluded from the story is (further) evidence that western intelligence agencies carry out such political-narrative ops on their own citizens. I am surprised at the willingness to accept the story at close to face value, given all that we've learned in recent years.

Yeah yeah you can’t believe anything the government says etc etc. This is a trite, banal, useless, pointless, infantile, irrelevant and altogether worthless criticism. It says nothing and means nothing. Yes, I think the broad outline of events as described in the article is true. There is little reason to believe otherwise. Likewise, there are truths discussed in the Russian and Chinese state press. In this case, this has to do with a longstanding and very real series of events that have been unfolding for many years, mostly in public view. The real sheeple, as ever, question everything without believing anything, which means - of course - that they know nothing at all.

The real sheeple, as ever, question everything without believing anything, which means - of course - that they know nothing at all.

Not at all. We know this is an intelligence op, therefore it should not be trusted. That does not apply to everything. But now I'm surprised that you don't agree? Do you trust the narratives ("...unfolding over several years...") surrounding Trump as a Russian asset?

No, Trump was never a Russian asset, although a half-hearted attempt was made via Manafort. The IC largely ridiculed the Steele dossier even at the time, at least people I know who are part of it did.

And if they are deliberate leaks, that makes me even less willing to take on trust that all the story says is exactly as it happened.

I think it’s pretty likely things mostly happened as described, it’s just that the entire other side of the story is missing. US intelligence likely engages in a lot of similarly underhand action with our geopolitical foes, for example, which these guys or Bellingcat aren’t going to expose.

It does strike me as a push against the frame of the gaslighting Overton window that Western media continues to present Grozev/Bellingcat as an independent journalistic outfit rather than the intelligence agency mouthpiece that it obviously is. It would be one thing if they acknowledged the suspicions but argued against it, but there seems to be a universal consensus that to treat them as anything other than brave and resourceful citizen journalists, who happen to have a particular knack for uncovering dastardly schemes by America's geopolitical opponents using Google search and tea leaves, would just be giving air to enemy conspiracy theories.

Well, I suppose there are degrees of control. Obviously Bellingcat is very tightly integrated with Western intelligence and almost all its sources are from there, but that’s the nature of intelligence reporting; your source is either your intelligence agents or theirs, nobody is ‘neutral’ in that world. The agencies use it kind of like the associated press, it’s a source for the stories printed by various other mainstream outlets. But again, I don’t think anyone in that space would dispute that it’s essentially an outlet for what the CIA / MI6 etc are willing to disclose.

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