© ainhoaristizabal.wordpress.com]
Vasily Prozorov, a former officer with the Security Services of Ukraine (SBU) stated soon after his defection to Russia in 2018 that the SBU had been advised by the CIA since 2014.
"CIA employees [who have been present in Kyiv since 2014] are residing in clandestine apartments and suburban houses," he said. "However, they frequently come to the SBU's central office for holding, for example, specific meetings or plotting secret operations."
See video
© mirror.co.ukVasily Prozorov (left) at work in the anti-terrorist operation zone in Donetsk region with Colonel Sergey Krivonos.
© tellerreport.comVasily Prozorov
The campaign bears comparison with Operation Phoenix in South Vietnam, which resulted in the killing, imprisonment and torture of thousands of South Vietnamese, including civilian officials accused of being loyal to the left-wing, anti-imperialist National Liberation Front (NLF).
© youtube.comPhung Hoang or Phoenix program image.
In the Ukrainian case, one of the targets of the SBU death squads was the mayor of the eastern city of Kreminna in the Ukrainian-controlled side of Luhansk, Volodymyr Struk.
On March 1, Struk was kidnapped by men in military uniform and then shot in the heart, with his tortured body displayed before the public. Struk had reportedly urged his Ukrainian colleagues to compromise and negotiate with pro-Russian officials.
© rostov.tsargrad.tv]Volodymyr Struk
© charter97.org]Anton Gerashchenko
© wikipedia.orgOles Buzina
© mintpressnews.comScene of Buzina’s murder.
© ukrinform.netYuri Prylypko
© timesofisrael.comDenis Kireev
Police State
Currently, Zelensky is promoting a bill that would expand the SBU's powers. The head of the SBU, Ivan Bakonov, is a close friend of his.
© wikipedia.orgIvan Bakonov
© globalhappenings.comOleksandr Poklad aka The Strangler
Openly fascist and pro-Nazi parties like the Azov National Corps were left untouched.
On April 12, Zelensky announced the arrest of his principal political rival, Viktor Medvedchuk, by the SBU. In a photo released to the public, Medvedchuk's face appeared to be swollen and bruised, the likely result of beatings by SBU goons.
© thegrayzone.comViktor Medvedchuk
Phoenix Redux
Douglas Valentine, author of the seminal book The Phoenix Program (1990), sees eerie parallels between the original Phoenix program and Zelensky's operations today. In both cases, Valentine told CAM in an exclusive interview, "neutralism wasn't tolerated."
© mymetmedia.com
© nsarchive.gwu.eduLucien Conein
Valentine noted that under Phoenix, or Phung Hoang as it was called by the CIA's South Vietnamese counterparts, due process was totally non-existent. South Vietnamese civilians whose names appeared on blacklists could be kidnapped, tortured and murdered simply on the word of an anonymous informer — which is again happening in Ukraine.
Tellingly, after Volodymyr Struk's death, Anton Gerashchenko claimed that Struk had been judged by the "court of the people's tribunal" rather than any formal legal state court structure.
© thegrayzone.comStruk: killed after a “people’s trial,” Phoenix-style.
The Grayzone Project reported that, since Russian troops entered Ukraine on February 24, "Ukraine's SBU security service had been on a rampage against any and all iterations of internal political opposition," which indeed sounds a lot like Phioenix. "Leftist Ukrainian activists have faced particularly harsh treatment, including kidnapping and torture."
On March 3 in the city of Dnipro, SBU officers accompanied by Azov ultra-nationalists raided the homes of activists with the Livizja organization, which has organized against social spending cuts and right-wing media propaganda.
While one activist said the Azov member "cut my hair off with a knife," the state security agents proceeded to torture her husband, Alexander Matjuschenko, pressing a gun barrel to his head and forcing him to repeatedly belt out the nationalist salute, "Slava Ukraini!"
"Then they put bags over our heads, tied our hands with tape and took us to the SBU building in a car. There they continued to interrogate us and threatened to cut off our ears," Matjuschenko's wife told the German publication Junge Welt.
The Azov members and SBU agents recorded the torture session and published images of Matjuschenko's bloodied face online.
© thegrayzone.comThe torture of left-wing activist Alexander Matjuschenko on March 3 in Dnipro, recorded by Azov members and posted on Telegram by the city of Dnipro.
Among those targeted by the SBU were Mikhail and Aleksander Kononovich, members of the outlawed Leninist Communist Youth Union of Ukraine. Both were arrested and jailed on March 6 and accused of "spreading pro-Russian and pro-Belarusian views."
© change.orgMikhail and Aleksander Kononovich
© pressenza.comYuri Tkachev
© thegrayzone.comOleg Novikov under arrest.
© nytimes.comNguyen Van Thieu, left, and Nguyen Cao Ky, center.
© delfi.itAnatoly Shariy
According to the World Socialist website, the SBU — a successor of the Stalinist secret service KGB in Ukraine — has long-standing ties to the Ukrainian far right, including the neo-fascist Azov Battalion.
It has been heavily involved in efforts by the Ukrainian state to rehabilitate the Nazi collaborationist organizations, the Ukrainian Insurgency Army (UPA), and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which was headed during World War II by fascist Stepan Bandera.
© encyclopediaofukraine.comAn offshoot of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists pose for a photo with American supporters in the early 1930s.
During World War II, Ukrainian fascists of the OUN-B were involved in the massacres of tens of thousands of Jews and Poles, as well as of Ukrainian opponents of fascism. After the war and well into the 1950s, both the OUN-B and UPA were engaged in an insurgency against Soviet rule, with backing from the CIA, during which the UPA killed another 20,000 Ukrainian civilians.
CIA Pacification
Not surprising perhaps given his historical outlook, Nalyvaichenko nurtured close ties to Washington when he served as general consul to the Ukrainian Embassy in the U.S. during the George W. Bush administration. During that time, Nalyvaichenko was recruited by the CIA, according to his predecessor at the SBU, Alexander Yakimenko, who served under the Russian-oriented government of deposed President Viktor Yanukovych.[3]
© dreamstime.com]SBU Headquarters in Kyiv.
"Organizationally, Phoenix coordinates CIA foreign intelligence and covert action officers and operations from the highest national level through the provinces down to the most remote territorial outposts.
Foreign intelligence officers advise SBU security service to assure 'top tier' internal security and political control; and Ukrainian CIA agents run ops into Donbas, Russia and Belarus, sending illegal travelers, smugglers, and agents to set up agent nets and penetrate the enemy in his territory, [and carry out] sabotage and subversion. SBU and Ukrainian CIA are where hit-lists get authored. CIA officers advise military, militias and mercenaries in deniable political, paramilitary and psychological operations to terrorize and otherwise persuade civilian population to support Zelensky while demoralizing and fighting the enemy."
© informnapalm.org]SBU emblem and military intelligence officer with SBU emblem on uniform.
© video.foxnews.com
According to Valentine, the disaster now unfolding in Ukraine has long been in the works. Starting in 1991 with the fall of the USSR, the CIA began buying property and setting up organizations and businesses in Ukraine so it would have fronts and safe houses.
"All these things serve as places where CIA officers can meet and plot and engage in unilateral recruitments to put politicians and civil servants and businessmen in place who can assure that the CIA can reorganize the economy and the government and put a Defense Minister and Minister of the Interior in place who is on their payroll, who will then appoint police chiefs who will be on the CIA payroll — for the purpose of furthering U.S. policy, not Ukraine policy."
© gettotext.com
Meanwhile, Valentine says, "the CIA is building a compatible civil base through unilateral recruitments. Also, U.S. universities and unions send advisers to help create schools and indoctrinate youth and workers.
Business advisers create a Rotary Club and a Chamber of Commerce. They create a foreign relations council. This is how the CIA rules a foreign society: through the ownership of property and having the proper people in government security and defense industries and control of the civic institutions."
According to Valentine, "the CIA is working with bankers. They want Ukrainians putting their money in a Morgan Stanley brokerage firm in Kyiv. They want to suck the life out of Ukrainians. People do it on the promise of a brighter future — others are bribed, still others like Zelensky in my humble opinion are blackmailed."
© theweek.inVolodymyr Zelensky—was he bribed?
It would be like the Russians coming here to the United States and recruiting people and our police forces and our government institutions. It's illegal. You can't do it. You can't take money from a foreign intelligence agency and work against your own government, but that is what the CIA is doing in the Ukraine right now on a massive scale."
Valentine further notes:
"They're always finding a reason to start a war, so they can send the next generation of young men into battle, to learn how to kill people in the most brutal fashion — that's Phoenix, always rising from the ashes of war. The U.S. has an imperative to be as super-aggressive as it can be, so it doesn't lose its edge. If its predatory impulse to dominate was stilted in Vietnam, that doesn't mean the soldiers and spies aren't going to pop up someplace else. They're always going to pop up someplace else. They always do. Like in Ukraine."
Where Is the Congressional Oversight?
Valentine pointed out that, at the conclusion of the congressional hearings into the original Phoenix program in 1971, Representatives Pete McCloskey (R-CA), John Conyers (D-MI), Ben Rosenthal (D-NY), and Bella Abzug (D-NY) stated their belief that "the people of these United States ... have deliberately imposed on the Vietnamese people a system of justice which admittedly denies due process of law.... In so doing, we appear to have violated the 1949 Geneva Convention for the protection of civilian peoples" in time of war."
"Some of us who have visited Vietnam," they further said, "share a real fear that the Phoenix program is an instrument of terror... and that U.S. civilian and military personnel have participated for over three years in the deliberate denial of due process of law to thousands of people held in secret interrogation centers built with U.S. dollars." They added that "Congress owes a duty to act swiftly and decisively to see that the practices involved are terminated forthwith."[6]
Now where is the congressional oversight of the CIA's abuses in Ukraine? And mainstream media scrutiny, which would generate the kind of public outrage necessary for instituting congressional hearings?
- Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2000), 13. ↑
- Buzina advocated for unity among Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia and campaigned to outlaw neo-Nazi organizing. ↑
- Mintpress reported that the CIA has an entire floor in the SBU headquarters in Kyiv. ↑
- For the historical pattern, see Jeremy Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012). ↑
- CIA agents trained their Ukrainian counterparts, according to a Yahoo News exposé, in sniper techniques and use of Javelin anti-tank missiles. ↑
- Valentine, The Phoenix Program, 235. ↑
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