Washington's Female Rasputin in Kiev: the CIA and SBU part II

Part 2: the Orange Revolution and the Chicago Girl - operation cyclone, regime change election technologies, mysterious poisons

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In the previous article, I reminisced upon my encounter with someone who was most likely a wandering alcoholic but psyopped me into thinking he was a sinister asset. This time, I’ll get into the real history of transatlantic ‘cooperation’ between the American CIA and the Ukrainian SBU.

Orange Chemicals

The history of CIA cultivation of the SBU goes back long into the 20th century, and to do justice to it we would even have to explore Polish dictator Pilsudsky’s megalomaniacal ‘Prometheus Project’ and the associated network of anti-Russian, anti-communist nationalist groups, but I will begin around the year 2004 – the so-called Orange Revolution.

The western narrative is that Viktor Yanukovych (representative of the south-eastern Ukrainian social democratic strand of Ukrainian politics) won the first round of elections, these were found to have been rigged by reputable NGOs and the constitutional court, which necessitated a second round that was won by democratic darling Victor Yuschenko.

Yuschenko, left, Tymoshenko, right. This duo cranked up the revolutionary peasant mysticism to the maximum and beyond during the orange revolution. Their friendship would quickly come undone after taking state power due to Tymoshenko’s insatiable lust for influence.

In reality, what happened is that the ‘reputable NGOs’ were Canadian and USAID sponsored election monitors. Their polls didn’t match with the results of the first round, so the supreme court (totally unconstitutionally) arranged a second round. The US and Canadian governments were spending millions of dollars ‘training election personnel’ in Ukraine at the time. The following is from an article by veteran Canadian journalist Mark Mackinnon:

All told, the Canadian embassy spent a half-million dollars promoting "fair elections" in a country that shares no border with Canada and is a negligible trading partner….. Canada also invested in a controversial exit poll, carried out on election day by Ukraine's Razumkov Centre and other groups, that contradicted the official results showing Mr. Yanukovich had won. Thirty months later, Razumkov director Yuriy Yakimenko maintains the poll was impartial and scientific -- but also boasts that it brought Yushchenko supporters into the streets.

While Yuschenko won the second round, though only by an 8% margin, he would never actually arrest any of the supposed organizers of the election fraud that he claims to have suffered from in the first round, despite years in power (more on this in the next article). Nor would he ever arrest anyone for the spectacular poisoning that he was subject to during the elections, in the dramatic leadup to the orange revolution. There were various insinuations about those responsible, but despite years at the head of government, he could never uncover those responsible. He also refused to ever get blood tests done in Ukraine, preferring Austrian clinics.

Yuschenko’s mysterious poisoning disfigured him.

The whole episode is a fascinating instance of US regime-change technologies. A later post will go into more detail about it. Yuschenko, on taking office, implemented a range of ‘brave reforms’ applauded by his euro-atlantic ‘partners’. He liberalized the economy, he followed IMF recommendations for monetary policy, he got Ukraine on the road to join the EU and NATO. All very popular decisions in the euroatlantic press.

Less so among the Ukrainian public, where support for NATO hovered around or below 20% throughout the 2000s. Pushing for Ukraine’s entry into it, as Yuschenko did, explicitly went against Ukraine’s constitution. Yuschenko’s support plummeted to the single digits quite quickly, reaching 3% approval rating by the end. Not only was he pushing through anti-popular reforms, his grand promises to liquidate corruption and make Ukraine ‘a normal, civilized, western country’ were somewhat complicated by the constant corruption scandals he and his family were implicated in.

Now, it was in the Yuschenko period that a series of interesting events started happening around the organs.

The Chicago Girl

To begin with, Yuschenko’s wife, a US citizen who only became a Ukrainian citizen in 2005 (after becoming first lady of the country), was herself a quite spooky person. Her ‘civilized’ credentials also didn’t stop her from getting embroiled in quite ‘eastern’ corruption scandals, particularly around a series of hospitals she patronized that were never finished or built for exorbitant scandals.

Kateryna Yuschenko, right, and Laura Bush, left.

Yuschenko’s first lady of Ukraine had some quite interesting work experience before swooping in to rescue Ukraine from Yanukovych’s barbarism. The following is from the pro-western KyivPost:

After working in the U.S. State Department, she arrived in Kyiv and co-founded the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation, a non-profit organization that strives for democratic development and free market reforms. It still has a local presence in Ukraine.

She met Yushchenko while advising the central bank, which he headed, as part of her work for KPMG, an international audit, tax and advisory firm. They married in 1998 and she left her job in 2000, after the birth of her second of three children.

The Los Angeles Times also makes a fairly half-hearted attempt at dispelling Kremlin narratives:

During the election campaign of her husband, Viktor Yushchenko, critics tried to make an issue of her American citizenship and implied that the CIA was trying to manipulate the election results.

But those who knew Katherine Chumachenko [her maiden name] when she was a public liaison official in the Reagan White House remember a fervent anticommunist who was passionate about bringing democracy to her parents’ homeland -- a consummate Cold Warrior….

Katherine Chumachenko graduated from Georgetown University and became, her friend Bruce Bartlett said, one of the few nonprofit management majors at the University of Chicago School of Business, known for its commitment to freewheeling capitalism. Bartlett, a fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a think tank in Dallas, said Chumachenko’s feeling for Ukrainian democracy was “the zeal of the recently converted. I remember her complaining that Lydia’s children didn’t even speak Ukrainian….

Eager to contribute in her parents’ homeland, she left her Washington job for Kiev. In 1993 she became country manager for KPMG, an American consulting firm that provided training and technical advice for Ukraine’s financial managers. One of them was Viktor Yushchenko, then governor of Ukraine’s central bank…

“She is smart, charming and capable,” said Rudolph G. Penner, her former boss at KPMG and now a fellow at the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank. “Viktor was something of a hero to most Western bankers. When he was governor of the central bank, he controlled inflation. It was enormously courageous.”

A ‘Chicago Girl’. The boys go south, the girls go east…. If one searches her name online, one comes up with reports of close personal relations between her and the CIA-Banderite ‘Anti-Bolshevik League of Nations’. According to a 2006 article by the Asia-Pacific Journal:

Yushchenko’s wife, Kateryna Chumachenko Yushchenko, a Chicago-born Ukrainian-American, had previously served in the Reagan White House and State and Treasury departments, and did liaison work with Afghani and other anti-Soviet US-sponsored opposition groups, such as Bush neo-conservative Zalmay Khalilzad’s Friends of Afghanistan. She also sat on the board of a pro-NATO neo-conservative US think-tank, New Atlantic Initiative, along with Radek Sikorski, Poland’s effusively pro-Washington Defense Minister. Sikorski is a close friend and former American Enterprise Institute colleague of Richard Perle and the other neo-con hawks.

The same KyivPost article I already cited, despite bemoaning ‘pro-Kremlin narratives’ about the malign influence of the spooky Kateryna on her husband, nevertheless describes how

Vadym Karasiov, a political consultant who advised Yushchenko during his presidency, named Andriy Kyslinsky, a former presidential aide and deputy head of the State Security Service, as one of Kateryna’s Cabinet “appointments.” The association proved embarrassing in 2009, after Kyslinsky was found to have falsified academic credentials. Oleh Rybachuk, Yushchenko’s former chief of staff who has known the ex-president since the early 1990s, said the first lady had a sort of “kitchen cabinet,” although he downplayed her influence. “Kateryna had the ability to arrange meetings, but never did it through me and during Yushchenko’s work time,” Rybachuk said.

Ukraine is indeed more progressive than Russia - where the latter had the lecherous male Rasputin, the former had the suave Chumachenko! In our next installment, we will dig deeper into the love triangle between the CIA, SBU, and neo-nazi groups in Ukraine.