Organ-stealing by the CIA: SBU series part III

spooks, spooks, nazis, the spy nazi Godfather, more 2000s politics, war no peace

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The last article went into the interesting story of Viktor Yuschenko’s rise to power in 2004. This article will look at how his reign saw the SBU being ever-further coopted by western secret services.

The brain behind the organs

While first lady of Ukraine (with a US passport), ‘fervent anticommunist’ and (remote, I presume) veteran of operation Cyclone Kateryna Chumachenko cast her spells over the president, a man called Valentyn Nalyvaichenko became the head of the SBU.

Nalyvaichenko

A long-time friend of Yuschenko, he set about on the sacred path of Ukrainian reformers – blaming the predecessors (‘poperednyky’ in Ukrainian, the basis for constant jokes to this day) for present problems.

Nalyvaichenko set about on an interminable investigation of the supposed state organized rigging of the first round of presidential elections in 2004, the riggings whose exposure led Yuschenko to power. The problem was that his ramblings on the topic in a 2008 interview come to the anticlimactic conclusion that he never found anything. This didn’t stop him from arresting a number of people (4500 officially accused of election falsification and 900 already punished) despite being unable to bring any charges against the organizers. The only claim of substance he made in the interview was that the western partners were quite eager to see more arrests.

When pressed by the journalist as to whether the famed ‘falsifying transit server’ that was often spoken of in 2004 by the orange camp actually exists, he answered that ‘it isn’t a piece of metal, it isn’t a physical thing which can be found by the SBU, no, it is a group of actions which led to the aforementioned interference.’ When asked if these ‘actions’ have actually been proven, he answers ‘Certainly. We are not naming them yet, but this does not mean that the materials will not be submitted to the court. Hopefully this will be done soon. But there is a second component, much more important. We are already receiving assistance from our partners in Europe [my bolding] in order to prevent anything like this from abroad or from our territory at the next (or early) elections.’

American ambassadors in notable places

The interesting events kept on coming. In 2008, there was a scandal over the fact that newly graduated SBU officers were given their epaulettes at the base in Dnepropetrovsk in the presence of the US ambassador.

The fact this happened in this city is probably no coincidence. This eastern Ukrainian industrial city, closed to outside visitors under the USSR due to the military rockets developed there, became the focal point of post-soviet oligarchic struggles. The home turf of the ‘gas queen’ Yuliya Tymoshenko and the infamous ‘zhidobanderite’ Igor Kolomoisky, the Dnepropetrovsk clan was eternally locked in combat with the Donetsk clan. This was the principal contradiction around which Ukrainian politics revolved, until its brutal ‘resolution’ in 2014, with Donbass as a whole amputated from the body politic.

William Taylor, US ambassador to Ukraine who supposedly was present during the swearing-in of new SBU officers

Where the Donetsk oligarchs focused on industrial monopolization and eschewed ‘political technology’ in favor of a mixture of bribes and assassinations, the Dnepropetrovsk clan was quite different. Perhaps it was a manifestation of their economic differences – where the Donetsk businessmen were focused on quite straightforward industrial operations – mining coal, selling it, forging iron, selling it – the Dnepropetrovsk businessmen made their bread through quite complex corporate raiding operations, buying companies, selling them, buying up banks, bankrupting them and moving onto the next victim. But for both groups, control of the central government was of paramount importance. Hence their constant clashes.

In stark contrast to the Donetsk indifference to politics per se, it was Tymoshenko and her partners that set up the first advertisement campaigns in Ukraine, back in the 90s. They began allying with the western Ukrainian nationalist intelligentsia to tar the Donetsk clan – and region as a whole – as being a Russian fifth column. They allied with the distant western powers against their eastern copatriots. Kolomoisky boasted about sponsoring the 2004 orange revolution in interviews, saying he is ‘Yuschenko’s biggest fan’ because the value of his assets rose greatly after the 2004 maidan.

Tymoshenko became prime minister because of 2004, after which she gradually usurped power from Yuschenko, to his immense chagrin. It was the Dnepropetrovsk clan that played the key role in sponsoring the 2014 maidan, both through their media empires and the street. I have written a long article on this last topic, and if my interminable struggle to get it published at a ‘reputable academic journal’ is indeed doomed to failure, I will upload it here.

The Godfatherland

It should come as no surprise that the CIA-infiltrated SBU had quite good relations with far-right groups. Paternal relations, one might say. In fact, Nalyvaichenko was the godfather of the children of Dmitro Yarosh’s, himself the infamous leader of Right Sector, which played such a fateful role during euromaidan, only to fade into (illusory) desuetude after. Nalivaichenko was a public figure on the pro-maidan media circuit during the fateful events of late February 2014.

The liberal ‘Ukrainian Truth’ newspaper released scandalous photos of classified documents in which Yevhen Karas of C14, Yarosh and other rightwingers were contracted by the ministry of internal affairs to attack communists and other allies of Yanukovych after maidan. The same article claimed that Yarosh was Nalyvaichenko’s advisor, with photos of an identity document to prove it:

‘Dmitro Yarosh, assistant-consultant on a civilian basis to V. O. Nalyvaichenko’

Nalyvaichenko, right, Yarosh, left

Asides from his fateful role in the Maidan Sniper massacre, Yarosh became one of the leading ‘guardians of the revolution’ after 2014. Despite their total electoral insignificance, people like Yarosh prevented the Ukrainian government from even thinking of implementing the Minsk agreements and returning Ukraine to the state of political pluralism that existed before 2014. Yarosh’s role in this, which involved threatening to ‘hang Zelensky from a lamp pole’ if he implemented Minsk, has been excellently documented on the Bandera Lobby substack, along with the important place of Washington-based ‘lobby groups’ with remarkably collegial ties with the leaders of a variety of western governments.

Stefan Romaniw, one of the leaders of diaspora Ukrainian Banderite networks, meets with former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott. Romaniw often meets with Australian prime ministers and publishes hawkish articles in top Australian newspapers.

Now, the close links between the SBU and the most extreme Ukrainian rightwing groups are quite well known. Occasionally annoyed by the zeal of some of these ‘patriots’ in even attacking quite patriotic members of the LBGT community and such, even Ukrainian liberals at hromadske have devoted several publications to the topic of ties between the SBU and the neo-nazi organization C14. Keep this in mind, since there does exist bad blood between ‘the collective west’ and the SBU. Reducing the powers of the SBU is one of the main western ‘reform demands for Ukraine’ in wartime (and before that as well).

Undated photo of Yevhen Karas (centre), leader of C14. Nowadays, he is a top Ukrainian media personality, commonly interviewed on government TV, amassing hundreds of thousands of views on youtube, along with having over 300 thousand subscribers on his own youtube channel.

The public arguments is they dislike the SBU because of how large, corrupt, and ridden with enemy spies it is. I’d also hazard to guess that reduction of the powers of the secret services is essential insofar as any potentially ‘sovereign’ (not necessarily progressive, I should add) actors must not be allowed to hold power in Ukraine, if the country is to play the role of a self-destructive kamikaze nation. That was the argument of my articles about the struggle by the west against Ukraine’s oligarchs, who, to borrow the sadly missed Dmitry Dzhangirov’s phrase, were Ukraine’s last sovereign force.

Back to C14 and Karas. Here is an excerpt from my old article on the topic of his relations with the organs:

Karas has also openly admitted to cooperation with the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU). In an interview, he said that C14 engages in delivering people he judges to be ‘separatists’ to the SSU, and that the SSU ‘transmits C14 information’ about upcoming ‘separatist’ political activity – in other words, that the SSU tells C14 which unfriendly political figures to attack. One wonders what the SSU told C14 about Oles Buzina, the journalist murdered in 2015. Karas gave as an example of ‘separatist protests’ the events of May 2nd 2014, when 42 ‘pro-Russian’ protestors were burned to death and killed in various ways by armed nationalists in Odessa, a crime for which no one has been charged. According to him, the SSU tells C14 in advance about such events – ‘it’ll be a mess, come along and help us’.

Former member of the SSU Ivan Stupak confirmed the organization’s cooperation with the SSU. In his words: "There has always been this idea - to take secret control over any public organization that has a power bloc. The SSU at certain stages involved in its operational contacts, that is, found certain common points of view with the leaders of "C14" and sent them to solve certain operational tasks. For instance, the search for and detection of separatists, whom the SSU for some reason cannot detain due to legislature - while if you send a public organization, it can break the car or inflict bodily harm.’

In any case, for those acquainted with the history of third world allies of the free democratic world, such as Turkey in the GLADIO years, it should come as no surprise that there was a sort of love triangle between western intelligence service, local intelligence services, and local rightwing paramilitaries.

CIA Carpathian Camps

Pavel Gubarev, himself a rather interesting individual

Pavel Gubarev, a Donetsk-born leader of the local separatist movement that rose to prominence in 2014, wrote in his memoirs of CIA-organized camps in the Carpathian mountains of western Ukraine, where his Banderite enemies got top military training. He noted this with no small amount of envy, noting that Russia never did anything similar for him and his friends (he was then a member of the ultra-rightwing ‘Russian National Unity’ movement, lead by Alexander Barkashov):

The Barkashovist guys organized field gatherings. For example, in the Belgorod region or in the Don region, in the Rostov region [southern Russia, on the border with Ukraine]. I attended such gatherings from 1999 to 2001.

They played a huge role in shaping me. We played rugby, undertook 80-kilometer marches, and engaged in combat and military-political training. By the way, at the same time, our enemies in Western Ukraine were doing essentially the same thing with the local youth. They organized training camps in the picturesque Carpathian Mountains. It should be noted that the scale of such activities among our enemies was much larger. Patriotic and sports education within the framework of the Russian National Unity (RNE) was the initiative of several dozen activists of the Russian people, while Ukrainian nationalists received support from local and central authorities, the church, and wealthy emigrant organizations, some of which were sponsored by Western intelligence services.

Gubarev also had interesting things to say about the older relation between the CIA and rightwing Ukrainian groups, regarding which I must again praise the Bandera Lobby substack. I’ll go into some more archival information about this in my upcoming post about the book ‘Hitler’s Shadow’, which summarizes findings from declassified CIA documents on the topic:

let's return to the Banderites as one of the key elements of the neo-Nazi project. For instance, the co-founders of the World Anti-Communist League, an organization coordinating transnational far-right underground activities, included General Chiang Kai-Shek and OUN-Bandera follower Yaroslav Stetsko. The establishment of this organization marked a turning point for the collaborationist emigres, which were previously intimidated by security services. Integration into the extensive project of Western intelligence agencies not only allowed them to whitewash their biographies and start anew but also strengthened the national communities, in which representatives of Banderite organizations began to play a leading role. Consequently, the lives of several generations of the Ukrainian diaspora, including extracurricular education, sports sections, and summer camps, were overseen by Bandera supervisors.

It’s also worth noting that Gubarev and his colleagues considered Nalyvaichenko one of their greatest enemies in the maidan camp, listing him alongside the eccentric/possessed Turchynov (fervent Baptist and author of apocalyptic novels) and bland neoliberal fascist Yatsenyuk:

On April 8th in Donetsk, when the formation of the first government of the Donetsk People's Republic (DNR) began, the political wing of our militia presented its demands and a draft declaration to the People's Council. "The statement of the People's Council of the Donetsk People's Republic to the representatives of nationalist band groups who unlawfully seized the organs of state power in Ukraine - Turchinov, Yatsenyuk, Nalyvaichenko, and others…"

Organs without a body

We’ve seen how the organs did what they were meant to – there was no implementation of the Minsk agreements, Russia and Ukraine became embroiled in forever war, opponents to the post-2014 order were hunted down and neutralized. Emerging from relative obscurity, in December 2021 Dmitry Yarosh became advisor to Valery Zaluzhny, head of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, though his stint there was supposedly short-lived.

The organs took control over the mind to destroy the body. In a later post, I will explore a literal case – SBU forced ‘recruitment’ through torture mind-control of an Odessan man into becoming part of a far-right hitman team.