Our Man in Havana,
Stratfor style
Israel Shamir

I thought they
were
just con-men, - told me Alexander Cockburn about the
private intelligence agency Stratfor when the Wikileaks
published a huge cache of their emails. The late
lamented Counterpunch co-editor’s opinion of state
intelligence agencies was not high, but of private
intelligence services like Stratfor it was lower than a
barmaid’s décolleté. He thought that these guys had a
brisk trade in newspaper cuttings, selling other
journalists’ work as their own at a premium. Alex was
not alone. Much of Stratfor's business model as an
intelligence firm consists of giving clients a brief of
day-old New York Times articles and week-old
Economist stories under the guise of valuable
"intelligence", said The Atlantic. They also
charge $20,000 per annum per client for it.
It would be better if they were sticking to their
cuttings, as our investigation proved, for when they act
independently, the results beat those of Graham Greene’s
character James Wormold, Our Man in Havana.
Often appreciatively described as a “Shadow CIA”, the
“global intelligence company” (whatever that means)
Stratfor has been cited by CNN, Reuters,
The New York Times and the BBC as an
authority on strategic and tactical intelligence issues.
In February 2012, the Anonymous hackers lifted some 5
million emails, and some 25 newspapers began to sift the
lot.
As we expected, the emails revealed a very low level of
intelligence; newspaper articles copy-pasted and
forwarded; some nasty remarks, often in bad taste; and a
certain amount of very interesting titbits of dubious
provenance. For instance, a Stratfor report claimed that
“The Israelis already destroyed all the Iranian nuclear
infrastructure on the ground weeks ago” by their
commando raid “with the help of Kurdish militants”. If
you believe that, you passed the tooth fairy stage.
For nasty remarks and bad intelligence, the plum goes to
Fred Burton, Stratfor's vice president for intelligence.
On February 22, 2010 Burton wrote: "One can look at
Mossad's recent covert activities and get a sense of
their mindset. I also think they will assassinate A-Dogg
[President Obama]. His helo [helicopter] will have a
malfunction." As we know, this dire prediction failed
even two years later. Burton described the Israeli PM
“my good friend BB Netanyahu” and says that “BB trusts
Obama about as much as he trusted Arafat”. Obviously,
every newspaper reported of bad feelings between Bibi
and Obama, but it took Stratfor to dress these reports
as personal knowledge and peddle for a lot of money.
In May 2007, Burton claimed that Mossad covertly
assisted their Saudi counterparts with “intelligence
collection and advice on Iran”, and that "several
enterprising Mossad officers, both past and present, are
making a bundle selling the Saudis everything from
security equipment, intelligence and consultation”. He
also proposed to sell this dubious and vague info to
Prince Bandar, the present head of Saudi intelligence
agency, as “$100,000 deal is nothing to these folks”.
Weird claims are a must with Stratfor agents. James F.
Smith, former director of Blackwater, currently the
Chief Executive of SCG International, a private security
firm, stated that his “background is CIA” and his
company is comprised of “former DOD [Department of
Defense], CIA and former law enforcement personnel.” He
claimed that he participated in killing of Qaddafi, was
connected to Congresswoman Sue Myrick to engage Syrian
opposition. (La Myrick once demanded to strip Jimmy
Carter’s US citizenship for meeting with Hamas leaders.)
Smith claims he is active with the Syrian rebels. But
apparently he is just another con-man in the con-men
outfit.
He allegedly defrauded a Sanford family of $12.5
million. His degree came, not from Harvard, as he
claimed, but from an evangelical school founded by Pat
Robertson. He left Blackwater in 2002 under
circumstances that neither he nor Blackwater would
discuss on the record, says
Linda Minor.
Mossad subcontracted the assassination of Mabhouh in
Dubai, says Burton, and “the Iranian physicist hit was
also a subbed out job”. He adds that he passed the info
to Yossi Melman, a Haaretz writer on intelligence
affairs who is often considered “too close to Mossad”.
(This last rumour undermined an attempt of Melman to get
in touch with Wikileaks: Julian Assange preferred to
steer clear of him.)
However, before we even consider that some of the
Stratfor claims could be worth their print, let us go
into their Russian operation. Their woman in Moscow was
Lauren Goodrich, and she claimed she has the Russian
Prosecutor General Yury Chaika as her regular informer “RU101”.
Plucky Lauren delivered a lot of juicy titbits to her
employers. Once, she dipped into a swimming pool in
Moscow and befriended a Turkmen oil minister who told
her everything about Turkmen plans to build oil
pipeline. She met with the Russian awesome siloviki
(enforcement agencies’ bosses) and they spilled the
beans about Putin and his intrigues. Armed Venezuelans
promised her to tell everything if she will sleep with
them (she refused). Chaika was her best card, for he
told her everything she wanted to know.
An explosion in Moscow? Chaika told Lauren what car it
was, how it was bombed and who did it. Kremlin groups
argue between themselves, and Chaika explains it in
mouth-watering detail. Nothing beats the following
report she named
Fucking Russian Defense Guys:
Just wanted to say that I met for 4 hours with the
Kremlin's Advisory Board to the Ministry of Defense &
have enough incredible info to fill dozens of pages of
intel-all which will make Nate change his pants a few
times. But the meeting did not go as well as I
wished-they spent the first 45 min yelling at me for
"forcing" them to meet with them on a Sunday. One guy
screamed that he was being forcibly kept away from his
wife and two babies just because "this girl happens to
be the darling of a powerful man in the Kremlin". Then
they yelled at me for being a girl "trying to work in
the man's defense area" and then for being connected to
Stratfor and the American Administration. But we did
finally get past all this and discuss the Russian
defense sector. I have info on the real stuff behind the
French Mistral deal for this week's meeting. I'll type
that stuff up first (hopefully tonight), since it is
most timely. Then I hope to start getting to the other
info as I have time. I should have a few hours late
tonight as I am staying the night at my godfather's
[Chaika] house after a dinner he is throwing for me.”
The Russian Reporter, an independent weekly, jumped
on the stuff. They put one of their best investigative
journalists, Mika Velikovsky, with intention of
unmasking the Stratfor spy at the Kremlin, namely Mr
Yuri Chaika. Mika wrote to Chaika’s office, and refused
to take “it is b*shit” for an answer. He was convinced
that Goodrich would not dare to lie in such a brazen
way, while Chaika would, thirtyish Mika, with his
clean-shaven-head and last-week-shaven cheeks, told me
over a customary glass of whatever. His chief editor
Vitaly Leibin added that he was already prepared to go
down fighting in the interests of clean government.
It did not turn out to be necessary. The girl proved to
be a spectacular liar. Mika went to see Ruslan Pukhov, a
well-known Russian military expert, director of the
Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies.
Lauren wrote that he arranged for her meeting with “the
entire board of the Ministry of Defense behind the
Kremlin” (a.k.a. Fucking Russian Defense Guys). Pukhov
actually met the girl, not at the Kremlin, but in the
hotel lobby, and alone, without “the entire board”. He
gave her one of his centre analytic papers, freely
available from their site, including his assessment on
Iskander and Mistral. “Not only she presented it to her
management as an “information bomb”, but she also had
turned our meeting into an impressive conference”, -
said Pukhov.
Other discoveries of Lauren were of similar kind. She
would meet a relatively important person and build up a
story around it, using freely available sources. Only
after checking and faulting a few of her reports, the
Russian Reporter began to have strong doubts in her
integrity. This was quite relieving feeling, said
Leibin. – We were ready to take on Kremlin’s No. 4, and
instead, we found a small but enterprising creature.
Then Mika went all the way to Tomsk in Western Siberia,
where, according to Stratfor files, Lauren Goodrich had
lived with her family for many years, studying and
teaching in the Polytechnic University, organizing her
own NGO “Russian Peace Fund”, setting up five orphan
asylums and a school for the deaf in Tomsk. Her father
was a missionary with the United Methodist Church (UMC).
It turned out that Lauren lived in Tomsk for a few
months, the Russian Peace Fond was established before
she was born and as for asylums – perhaps she visited
one, but not sure. She never taught and hardly studied
in Tomsk U.
Still one can’t help but be impressed by Lauren. A
friend of her youth in Tomsk described her thus: “she is
very emotional, oriented to some romantic, fairy
stories. She wants life to be like a fairy tale, a
prince to appear and everything to become wonderful.”
And so she did.
Eventually some of her lies were uncovered by the
Stratfor investigation, but here the resemblance with
Our Man in Havana continued. Wormold received an
OBE, as it would be too embarrassing to admit his lies.
Lauren Goodich remained Stratfor’s senior Eurasia
analyst and, as before, churns out analytical notes and
reports, comes out on behalf of the organization in the
press, and is the co-author of the book on geopolitics
in the Caucasus, which was out last year, wrote the
Russian Reporter. George Friedman, the boss of
Stratfor, wrote to Lauren after full disclosure: “how
valuable you are in spite of everything!” For Stratfor,
this disclosure also had no consequences. People do not
want to rock the boat.
The Russian expert community was too fast to
conclude: “StratforGate writes off the private
intelligence services. Sometimes they are appendages of
state security, some of their advisers have connections
in the security services, and there are clowns imitating
spies. Stratfor positioned itself as an efficient
private alternative to the state-owned CIA, being better
than media and better than intelligence services. The
Russian Reporter’s investigation proved that they
were a mixture of bad intelligence with bad media”.
Vitaly Leibin is amazed: “How come? We proved that
Stratfor’s analysis is not worth a penny. Some of recent
political history should be re-written, including
Stratfor-supplied assessments of “Russian threat”, of
Venezuela insurrection, of the regime change in the
Philippines. But nothing happened. Our discovery went
into nowhere, nobody picked it up.” Indeed, not a single
Western newspaper reflected on their mind-boggling
discovery, until we came.
The Russians did not understand the real function of
Stratfor and similar bodies: they are to provide excuses
to the global powers, like WMD in Iraq, uranium in
Niger, mustard gas in Syria, evil plans of Chavez. Their
secondary role is to siphon off some of budget money and
share it between old hands like Burton. At that, they
are best. For real information, you’d be better off
subscribing to the Counterpunch.
(First published in the
Counterpunch )