excerpts from the book

Shadow Masters

How Governments and Their Intelligence Agencies are Working with Drug Dealers and Terrorists for Mutual Benefit and Profit

by Daniel Estulin

Trine Day LLC, 2010, paperback

 

p2
The Bilderbergers were founded by circles associated with a former Nazi Party member, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands (who resigned from the Nazi Party as a qualification for marrying the Dutch princess). It was an agency sponsored by the Anglo-Dutch monarchy, under e explicit patronage of the British and Dutch royal consorts. It a significant, and typical part of a network overlapping the same financier interests associated with the same Synarchist International concert of financier interests that had been behind the installation of fascist regimes in Europe during the interval 1922-1945. Its activities have been in the direction of sundry efforts attempting to establish a world-system of international fascism under the mantle of "globalization."

p3
The media use the epithet 'conspiracy theorist' to discredit anyone who discusses the criminal activities of real people.

p8
When the financial system creates bubbles, it drives up the cost of assets far beyond their worth. When the bubble bursts, the value of these assets plummet. Those with ready cash buy up everything.

p9
Without the kind of intervention that the [global elite] launched in the attempt to slow down the rates of economic growth, the nation-states whose commitment is to scientific and technological progress would become dominant. That would signify the death of oligarchy... Nations which foster the creative mental development of their population produce a people which will not tolerate oligarchic forms of rule indefinitely. Illiterate, technologically and intellectually backward populations will.

p9
Ignorant people, uninformed people, can not participate competently in self-government: they do not know what the issues of government are.

p9
For the African-American slaves of the nineteenth century United States, literacy was the first condition of freedom.

p10
The Empire of money depends upon the suppression of generalized scientific knowledge by keeping us backward and dumb.

p12
Those who tell the truth in ordinary conversation take it for granted they will be believed. Liars, on the other hand, more often than not instinctively look at you attentively after they speak, to see if you bought it or if they need to do more in order to persuade you.

p12
The European Parliament, the only elected institution in the EU, is no more than an assembly, with no legal powers to initiate legislation: its sole legal recourse is to ask the Commission to do so. Moreover, the number of proposals is so large that Members have to vote on many with little or no knowledge of what they truly involve. Debate is virtually non-existent, and the strict, five-minute time limits favor most legislative proposals going through virtually unchallenged. The European Parliament has no control over moneys, nor can it impose taxes. The money supply is the domain of the synarchist-controlled European Central Bank, which orchestrated the 1922-1945 spread of fascism throughout much of Europe, and which exists today in the form of a network of private banking houses.

p13
[European Parliament members represent] the interests of a supra-European state, regions on earth and not independent countries. This was made sure through the signing of the Treaty of Amsterdam in October 1997, which removed the border controls between EU states. The next step in the wholesale dismantling of independent nations comes in the form of the Nice Treaty. This is the foundation that is about to strip the people of Europe, of basic individual human rights under the guise of a charter of fundamental rights.

p13
EU Commissioners, all of whom have attended Bilderberg meetings in the past, campaign a great deal for the charter of fundamental rights, supposedly enshrined in the European Constitution, to protect all of its citizens from malice, until you read the fine print of the Constitution and realize that the only rights you are entitled to are the ones specifically mentioned in the charter. What you shall never hear from these people is that all rights, under article 51 of the European Constitution can be suspended if "the interests of the Union" so require.

p21
F. William Engdahl

The US power elites are increasingly desperate to maintain their control of a global parasitical empire, called deceptively by their media machine, "globalization." To hold that dominance it is essential that they be able to break up any emerging cooperation in the economic, energy or military realm between the two major powers of Eurasia that conceivably could pose a challenge to future US sole Superpower control - China in combination with Russia.

p23
The [January 11, 1993] Soviet report declared unequivocally that both William Casey and G.H.W Bush had met secretly with representatives of Ayatollah Khomeini before the presidential election to urge delaying the release of the [American] hostages. It named specific individuals and provided the specific locations in Paris and Madrid and dates. Also present, according to the Soviet report, was Robert M. Gates ... who would become Director of Central Intelligence under George H.W. Bush and Secretary of Defense under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. None of this information was made public, and the report was quietly buried among the task force documents. To this day, the Russian report remains "classified," and its contents have never been officially released.

It was discovered in 1994 among the stored raw documents of the [Iran-Contra] task force by a Washington journalist, Robert Parry, who had broken a number of the Iran-Contra stories for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His 2004 book Secrecy and Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq discusses the matter in detail.

p24
Warfare in today's world is primarily information warfare. Control of the very terms in which discussions are framed, and more so, even the "facts" which underpin the discussions, yields control of the outcomes of those discussions.

p24
"Beliefs: The Power Behind Unending War" by Jeff Gates, Veterans Today [Internet article]

In unconventional warfare, manipulated beliefs are used to displace inconvenient facts. When waging war by way of deception, false beliefs are an oft-deployed weapon.

... First and foremost are the consensus shapers and thought manipulators who target perceptions and opinions until a critical mass of agreement is reached. Then comes war.

... Unconventional warfare is waged with the assistance of those with the means, motive and opportunity to massage consensus opinion. Where are modern-day battles fought? Not on the ground nor in the air nor on the seas.

The mindset is the primary theater of operations. The first battlefield is the public's shared field of consciousness. The death and destruction come later.

Deceit is not new to warfare. What's new is the reach of the technologies-including modern media technologies-that now enable deception on a global scale.

p49
The Russian mob, known as the Vorovskoi Mir, or "Thieves' World," a loose federation of Soviet mobsters, immediately grasped that the "retreat" of Communism heralded a glorious new world criminal order for them.

Within one year of Mikhail Gorbachev's ousting, over 2,600 "crime clans," employing more than three million criminals, had appeared and spread like wildfire throughout the former Soviet empire, according to a research paper written by a group of Fellows for the prestigious Hoover Institute." Forty of them equal or surpass the size of both the Sicilian and American Mafias. Taken together, they comprise the most powerful criminal enterprise on earth.

p49
Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard, 1997

It was in Russia's backyard, the central Asian republics of the old Soviet Union, where Brzezinski saw that the move would have to be made to corner the world's energy reserves. The history of mankind has always shown that controlling the heart of Eurasia was the key to controlling the entire globe.

p50
Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard, 1997

A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa's subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world's central continent. About 75 percent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprise and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 6o percent of the world's GNP and about three-fourth of the world's known energy resources.

p51
Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard, 1997

The Eurasian Balkans are important as a potential economic prize: an enormous concentration of natural gas and oil reserves is located in the region, in addition to important minerals, including gold.

p52
In the mid-1990s ... "shock therapy" privatization and the creation of the Russian oligarchy overnight left 40% of Russians penniless and starving. The term "shock therapy" refers to the sudden release of price and currency controls, combined with the withdrawal of state subsidies, and immediate trade liberalization within a country, all the necessary ingredients for impoverishment of the Russian society.

p52
US efforts [1990s under Bill Clinton] were intended to move large amounts of wealth from the region and debilitate Russia. What happened was that Russia, in the words of Yeltsin himself, became a "superpower of crime," a "mafiocracy," not merely because of the absence of adequate laws ... but because of the inherently corrupt nature of its law enforcement, security organs, and intelligence services.

p52
Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard, 1997

Understandably, the immediate task has to be to reduce the probability of political anarchy or a reversion to a hostile dictatorship in a crumbling state still possessing a nuclear arsenal. But the long-range task remains: how to encourage Russia's democratic transformation and economic recovery while avoiding the re-emergence of a Eurasian empire that could obstruct the American Geostrategic goal ... But, in the meantime, it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger [Russia] emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America.

p53
Today, US world domination is based largely upon its near hegemony in the world oil economy.

p53
a NSC official told Congress in 1997

[Official US policy in Central Asia was to] break Russia's monopoly control over the transportation of oil and gas from that region, and to promote Western energy security through diversification of supply.

p53
In mid-December 1999, US officials participated in a formal meeting in Azerbaijan in which specific programs for the training and equipping of mujaheedin, Muslim guerrilla fighting forces, from the Caucasus, Central and South Asia and the Arab world were discussed and agreed upon.

p77
The Kosovo War [1996] and the subsequent overthrow of the Yugoslav president [Milosevic] occurred because of political strategies secretly conceived at the 1996 Bilderberg Group conference. Their agenda was clear. When the time was right, they intended to implement their plan to solve the "political problem" that Milosevic's political survival and continued socialist policies created in his rejection of their capitalist goals: to turn all of Europe into a "free market."

p78
Sara Flounders, an activist and journalist aligned to the Workers World Party, 1998

Throughout the 90s, as the capitalist market has swept over the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, socialist Yugoslavia has attempted to resist privatization of its industry and natural resources. To break this resistance, the Western countries have played a major role in the break-up of socialist Yugoslavia.

p78
Sara Flounders, an activist and journalist aligned to the Workers World Party, 1998

The lending and credit conditions of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank require the break-up of all state-owned industries. This is true for the oil and natural gas wealth in the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea as well as the diamond mines of Siberia. The decision on who will own or have controlling interest ... will be made by whoever wins the armed struggle raging in Kosovo. NATO domination on the ground would have put US corporations in the best ownership position.

p80
Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa in Canada

The fate of Kosovo had already been carefully laid out prior to the signing of the 1995 Dayton agreement. NATO had entered an unwholesome 'marriage of convenience' with the Mafia ... the narcotics trade enabled Washington and Bonn to 'finance the Kosovo conflict' with the ultimate objective of destabilizing the Belgrade government and fully re-colonizing the Balkans.

p94
Michael Ruppert in his book "Crossing the Rubicon"

Drug money became "an essential part of the world banking and financial system because it provides the liquid cash necessary to make the 'minimum monthly payments' on huge stock and derivative and investment bubbles in the US and Britain.

p95
Michael Ruppert in his book "Crossing the Rubicon"

The drug trade now has power because it is underwriting the investments of the largest corporations in the world. It underwrites politicians... Wall Street cannot afford to let the drug barons fall. Congress cannot afford to let the drug barons fall. Presidents and their campaign finances cannot afford to let the drug barons fall. Why? Because our top down economy, controlled by one per cent, cannot take the risk of letting competition (business or political) have the edge of using drug money. And for every million dollars of increased sales or increased revenues from a buyout, the stock equity of the one percent who control Wall Street, increases twenty to thirty times.

p95
Christian de Brie and Jean de Maillard, in an article "Crime, The World's Biggest Free Enterprise", Le Monde Diplomatique, April 2000

By allowing capital to flow unchecked from one end of the world to the other, globalization and abandon of sovereignty have together fostered the explosive growth of an outlaw financial market. It is a coherent system closely linked to the expansion of modern capitalism and based on an association of three partners: governments, transnational corporations and Mafias... Big business complicity and political laisse faire is the only way that large-scale organized crime can launder and recycle the fabulous proceeds of its activities. And the transnationals need the support of governments and the neutrality of regulatory authorities in order to consolidate their positions, increase their profits, withstand and crush the competition; pull off the "deal of the century" and finance their illicit operations. Politicians are directly involved and their ability to intervene depends on the backing and the funding that keep them in power. This collusion of interests is an essential part of the world economy, the oil that keeps the wheels of capitalism turning.

p110
According to the US DEA and Department of Justice Intelligence reports, about 80% of heroin entering Europe does so through Kosovo.

p110
Jane's Intelligence Review editorial "Unhealthy Climate in Kosovo as Guerrillas Gear Up for a Summer Confrontation", January 3, 1999

Albania has become the crime capital of Europe. The most powerful groups in the country are organized criminals who use Albania to grow, process, and store a large percentage of the illegal drugs destined for Western Europe.

p110
If the KLA were "allowed" to sell drugs and to profit from the sales, it is reasonable to infer that the entire operation was approved from the top down; that is, by the Bilderbergers themselves through
the usual set of intermediaries such as the US Government, the British, German and the US secret service agencies, the UN bureaucracy pertinent NGOs, European Commissions and NATO, all of which they control.

p111
Dennis Dayle, a senior DEA supervisory agent - in a written statement to the Select Intelligence Committees of both houses of Congress submitted by Michael Ruppert in 1997

In my thirty year history in DEA, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA.

p
Michael Ruppert submitted a written statement to the Select Intelligence Committees of both houses of Congress, 1997

The CIA did not just deal drugs during the Iran-contra era; it has done so for the full fifty years of its history... the CIA, and many figures who became known during Iran-Contra ... have been selling drugs to Americans since the Vietnam era.

p113
Monaco ... is the world's most important opium-processing center.

p114
If governments really wanted to eradicate the vile drug trade, they could make laws that would oblige manufacturers of acetic anhydride, the most essential chemical in the manufacture of heroin, to keep meticulous records showing who buys the chemical, for what purpose and where it is going. But such unilateral action on the part of any maverick government would greatly displease the oligarchic families of Europe and the United States Establishment because these people are turning hundreds of billions of dollars each year from the drug trade.

Needless to say, the leader who truly dared to really "take the fight to the drug pusher" would become a target for immediate assassination.

p114
The Bilderbergers are not physically responsible for moving drugs and laundering drug profits. This task is charged to the CIA.

p115
What do international terrorism, the world's financial markets, empire building and capitalism have in common? Their utter dependence on drug profits for their very existence.

p115
The war on drugs is a sham. It has always been a sham and for as long as there is money to be made, it will continue being a sham, while our political classes pay lip service to the dangers of substance abuse.

p115
Professor Carl Trocki in his book "Empire and the Global Political Economy"

The existence of monopoly [capitalism] resulted in the concentration of vast pools of wealth in the hands of a relatively small group of people. Wealth led to accumulation of power. The accumulation of wealth and power created by a succession of historic drug trades have been among the prima foundations of global capitalism and a modern nation-state itself.

p115
Professor Carl Trocki in his book "Empire and the Global Political Economy"

Two major effects are the creation of mass markets and the generation of unprecedented cash flow. Over time, drugs came to be an essential element in the finances of every criminal structure from the sixteenth century European empires up until the present. All depended and depend on enormous profits that come from monopolizing the world's most lucrative business.

p117
Today when we refer to "narco-states" such as Colombia and Afghanistan, we should remember that the first true "narco-state" was run and operated from London.

p117
Drug money is an inherent part of the American and world economy... the amount of profit generated annually by the drug trade is somewhere around $700 billion. This figure includes heroin, opium, morphine, marijuana, cocaine, crack cocaine and hallucinogens.

p117
Drug money is now "an essential part of the world banking and financial system because it provides the liquid cash necessary to make the 'minimum monthly payments' on huge stock and derivative and investment bubbles in the US and Britain.

p117
Some of the world's wealthiest people [are] eight to ten generations of men who built their empires around the opium trade.

p118
[The International Drug Trade is] the most highly organized, top-down political machinery in the world, enjoying the logistical support of a $700-billion-per-annum international cartel, and the protection of every political entity Britain and the US have created through these vast invisible earnings. This protection applies not merely to growing and distribution, but to providing political, intelligence, land ideological support as well.

p119
If 700 billion dollars a year in illegal drug money is moved and laundered through the American and world economy, that money benefits financial markets and especially Wall Street. That's the reason for maintaining the illegal drug trade.

p121
Le Monde Diplomatique in an in-depth investigative report, found US intelligence services, banks, and other multinational corporations at the top of a huge global network of organized crime and money laundering.

p122
The Vietnam War was about drugs. The French were pushed out, and the ensuing vacuum was immediately filled by the Agency [CIA] which took over the drug trade, its processing and distribution.

p122
Christian de Brie and Jean de Maillard, in an article in Le Monde Diplomatique, April 2000 "Crime, The World's Best Free Enterprise"

By allowing capital to flow unchecked from one end of the world to the other, globalization and abandon of sovereignty have together fostered the explosive growth of an outlaw financial market. It is a coherent system closely linked to the expansion of modern capitalism and based on an association of three partners: governments, transnational corporations and Mafias. Business is business: financial crime is first and foremost a market, thriving and structured, ruled by supply and demand. Big business complicity and political laisse faire is the only way that largescale organized crime can launder and recycle the fabulous proceeds of its activities. And the transnationals [corporations] need the support of governments and the neutrality of regulatory authorities in order to consolidate their positions, increase their profits, withstand and crush the competition, pull off the 'deal of the century' and finance their illicit operations. Politicians are directly involved and their ability to intervene, depends on the backing and the funding that keep them in power.

p122
Christian de Brie and Jean de Maillard, in an article in Le Monde Diplomatique, April 2000 "Crime, The World's Best Free Enterprise"

By allowing capital to flow unchecked from one end of the world to the other, globalization and abandon of sovereignty have together fostered the explosive growth of an outlaw financial market. It is a coherent system closely linked to the expansion of modern capitalism and based on an association of three partners: governments, transnational corporations and Mafias.

p122
Christian de Brie and Jean de Maillard, in an article in Le Monde Diplomatique, April 2000 "Crime, The World's Best Free Enterprise"

Big business complicity and political laisse faire is the only way that largescale organized crime can launder and recycle the fabulous proceeds of its activities. And the transnationals [corporations] need the support of governments and the neutrality of regulatory authorities in order to consolidate their positions, increase their profits, withstand and crush the competition, pull off the 'deal of the century' and finance their illicit operations. Politicians are directly involved and their ability to intervene, depends on the backing and the funding that keep them in power.

p123
Drugs are big business, run, controlled and protected by very powerful people who work alongside leading banking institutions on both sides of the Atlantic, members of various governments and principal corporations whose stock is traded on the world's leading stock exchange.

p126
The secret Sykes-Picot Treaty was drafted in 1916 by the soon-to-be "victors" of World War I, France and the British Empire, in which they divided up the Ottoman Empire between them as the spoils of war, with Britain controlling Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine, and France ruling Syria and Lebanon. Their aim has been to prevent at all costs the economic development of a region that is at both the crossroads of Europe and Asia and of Eurasia and Africa. Their intent is to maintain it as trigger for global war by manipulating ethnic, religious, and tribal groups against one another, and against central governments, to create perpetual war.

... Perpetual conflict destroys progress and severely limits the rights of the individual. Stability is bad for business, drug business that is. The drug trade thrives on weak central governments and strong sectarian leadership.

p128
A smallish group of people sustaining a conspiracy over hundreds of years requires a powerful sort of ideological motive.

In the case of drug-funded oligarchs and their cohorts, beginning with the British East Indian Company, the ideological motive is the hatred of the ideal of sovereign nation-state republics, of individual liberties and the pursuit of happiness, and of technological progress.

p215
In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by a relatively small number of persons ... who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires, which control the public mind, and who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.


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