BUSH AND PUTIN ON 9/11
The potential for a thermonuclear confrontation or even of an all-out thermonuclear exchange growing out of 9/11 has generally been ignored by the US controlled media, but such a potential was clearly present. It was inherently present because of the tense relations among the US, Russia, and China in the wake of the bombing of Serbia and the Kursk incident. It was made explicit when a flying object, probably a cruise missile, hit the Pentagon. As the 9/11 commission report notes, one fighter pilot who saw the damage to the Pentagon immediately thought of Russia as the most likely adversary. This innate mental reaction must have been repeated thousands of times in the minds of non-witting military personnel on the day of 9/11. Clarke points out that the US proclamation of Defcon Delta, the level of readiness just below actual war, was inevitably immediately noticed by Russia, and came near causing immediate countermeasures of readiness on the Russian side. This was the first Defcon Delta since Henry Kissinger had ordered a world- wide alert to deter possible Soviet intervention into the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East in October 1973. Defcon Delta posed the danger of an escalation of mobilization between the two leading nuclear powers:
Frank Miller reported that DOD had gone on a global alert, DEFCON 3: "This hasn't happened since the '73 Arab-Israeli War."
"State, State, go." Armitage acknowledged the call. "Rich, DOD has gone to DEFCON 3 and yoi know what that means." Armitage knew; he had been an Assistant Secretary of Defense in the first Bush administration.
"It means I better go tell the Russkies before they shit a brick." Armitage activated the Nuclear Risk Reduction Center, down the hall from the State Department Operations Center. The NRRC was connected directly to the Russian Ministry of Defense just outside of the Kremlin. It was designed to exchange information in crisis to prevent misunderstanding and miscalculation.
Armitage reappeared. "Damn good thing I did that. Guess who was about to start an exercise of all their strategic nuclear forces?" He had persuaded his Russian counterpart to defer the operation. (Clarke 15-16)
Most US 9/11 commentators have virtually nothing to say about Bush's famous telephone conversation with Russian President Putin; Bamford, Thompson, and others exhibit elaborate disinterest in this matter. And yet, this is another one of the central moments of 9/11. In order to avoid a possible thermonuclear exchange, Putin needed to be reassured that the US Defcon Delta was not a cover for a thermonuclear sneak attack upon his country, something perfectly within the realm of possibility from the Russian view. Putin also needed to be told that thermonuclear launches from the US toward the Middle East or other areas were the work of a rogue network, not of the constituted government. Putin, in short, had to be asked for cooperation and restraint.
During the hours after the 9/11 attacks, Putin became the first world leader to place a call to Bush. Officially, this was done so that Putin could offer his condolences. But in the course of this conversation, Putin told Bush that he had ordered a stand down of Russian strategic forces, meaning that the maneuvers planned for the Arctic Region were cancelled. Putin also sent an official telegram to Washington DC conveying "anger and indignation" against the "series of barbaric terrorist acts directed against innocent people." (See "On Russian President Vladimir Putin's Telegram of Condolence to US President George Bush, 11 September 2001, Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, www.In.mid.ru ) [4] Bush later noted his appreciation for Putin's gesture and for Putin's strategic stand down of the Russian strategic rocket troops in deference to the US Defcon Delta. "It was a moment where it clearly said to me that he understands the Cold War is over." (Washington Post, October 4, 2004)
In a national television address later that day, Putin vehemently condemned the 9/11 attacks as "an unprecedented act of aggression on the part of international terrorism." These attacks, he claimed, were not a localized American issue but an event that "goes beyond national borders." Terrorism, Putin declared, is the "plague of the twenty first century" and "Russia knows first hand what terrorism is. So, we understand as well as anyone the feelings of the American people." Putin described 9/11 as "a brazen challenge to the whole of humanity, at least to civilized humanity." Resonating with Bush, Putin set up his own Manichean dichotomy between terrorist barbarism and 'civilized humanity.' Putin assured Bush that "we entirely and fully share and experience your pain. We support you." ("Statement by President Putin of Russia on the Terrorist Acts in the US, Moscow, September 11, 2001," www.In.mid.ru ) Putin later declared a national minute of silence in commemoration of the victims of the attacks.
Putin's actions on 9/11 can be seen as a successful attempt at war avoidance in extremis. Putin, as a KGB veteran, would have had no doubt that the official US version was hogwash, something a number of prominent Russian military officers expressed in the wake of 9/11. Putin could also see that the rogue network responsible for the bombing of Serbia and the sinking of the Kursk momentarily had the upper hand, and with them negotiation would be fruitless.
Putin was determined not to play into the hands of the unhinged US rogue network behind 9/11. At a deeper level, his policy was therefore one of strategic deception or of maskirovka -- to gain time in the wake of the catastrophe. Putin must have seen that secret government madmen ferociously hostile to Russia had now taken over the US regime to an unprecedented degree. He could also see that the neocons, with their obsession with Israel's strategic predicament, might well attack various countries in the Middle East before they got around to attempting to deal with Russia.
Such Middle East tar baby scenarios could only weaken, overextend, discredit, and isolate the United States, thus offering Russia some advantage. Putin was also busily working on the follow-on to the very formidable Topol missile, a weapons system that was probably superior to anything in the US arsenal, which would very likely allow Russia to defeat the US side's primitive off-the-shelf missile defense system. All these considerations suggested that Putin should camouflage himself for the time being as Bush's bosom buddy.
On September 24, 2001 Putin made a major television address, which grew out of a weekend of strategizing with his top advisors and a forty-minute phone call with President Bush. In this speech Putin accepted the establishment of US bases in the former Soviet republics of central Asia, which the US wanted to set up as staging areas for the imminent invasion of Afghanistan. On the surface this was capitulation, but underneath was still strategic deception. For a time, it appeared that a great US-Russian alliance was in the making, but this was more appearance than substance. Bush joined with Putin at a school in Crawford, Texas on November 15, 2001. The Bush-Putin honeymoon lasted into 2002. By the time Bush began seeking UN carte blanche for his war on Iraq, Russia had been attracted into the French-German continental bloc.
The existence of Russian strategic maneuvers on 9/11 involving bombers had been known to the Pentagon, since it was the explicit premise for the maneuver Northern Vigilance. In this case, it would have been known to the plotters as well. Therefore, the planners of 9/11 were well aware that their incendiary actions would take place against a backdrop of simultaneous US and Russian aircraft maneuvers.
BAMFORD: THE US INTELLIGENCE VERSION
Bamford compares Bush's actions on 9/11 with the behavior of President Lyndon B. Johnson on the day of the Kennedy assassination. Despite worries that the killing of the president might have been just the beginning of the strategic decapitation of the US under conditions of Cold War confrontation with the USSR, Johnson flew directly back to Washington and gave a short television address just after leaving his airplane. According to the usual procedure, Cheney should have gone to Site R on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border. But he refused to go. Why?
"Bush could have easily ordered Vice President Cheney to a secure location outside Washington to preserve the continuity of government and then flown back to Andrews Air Force Base and given a defiant, Johnson-like speech. Then, with the public -- and the rest of the world -- feeling confident that despite the terrorist actions the US government remained stable and firm, he could have gone back either to the White House or to one of the other highly protected, secure locations. That would have been the courageous thing to do." (Bamford 2004 70)
"Instead, the decision was made to leave Vice President Cheney in the White House while President Bush hopscotched around the country. Though reporters were told of a supposed call to the White House threatening Air Force One -- the reason for the President's odyssey -- later it was concluded that no such call or threat ever took place. 'They've been unsuccessful in trying to track down whether there was such a call,' one administration official told the Associated Press. CBS News reported the call 'simply never happened,' and the Washington Post headlined its article on the subject: 'White House Drops Claim of Threat to Bush.' (Bamford 2004 70)
Bamford thus avoids most of the really essential questions about 9/11.
THE ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE VIEW
One of the most detailed accounts of the high-level state secrets possessed by the 9/11 conspirators was provided by the internet journal Debka, which often reflects the views of the Israeli Mossad. This Israeli analysis stresses the extent of the top-secret information controlled by the plotters, and the extensive network that would be necessary to have gathered such information. According to Debka, the message "Air Force One is next" was received by the U.S. Secret Service at 9 AM. For Debka, Cheney was hustled into the bunker three minutes later.
Debka suggests that the code name of Air Force One is changed daily, and that "the terrorists' message threatening Air Force One was transmitted in that day's top-secret White House code words." At the heart of Debka's account is the estimate that
...the terrorists had obtained the White House code and a whole set of top-secret signals. This made it possible for a hostile force to pinpoint the exact position of Air Force One, its destination and its classified procedures. In fact, the hijackers were picking up and deciphering the presidential plane's incoming and outgoing transmissions. The discovery shocked everyone in the president's emergency operations center -- Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta. Their first question was; How did the terrorists access top-secret White House codes and procedures? Is there a mole, or more than one enemy spy in the White House, the Secret Service, the FB1, the CIA or the Federal Aviation Administration?
Nor was this all; the reach of the conspirators was even greater: "In the week after the attacks in New York and Washington, more hair- raising facts emerged. The terrorists had also obtained the code groups of the National Security Agency and were able to penetrate the NSA' s state-of-the-art electronic surveillance systems. Indeed, they seemed to have at their disposal an electronic capability that was more sophisticated than that of the NSA."
According to Debka's information, the US intelligence community also believed "that terrorists are in possession of all or part of the codes used by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the National Reconnaissance Office, Air Force Intelligence, Army Intelligence, Naval Intelligence, Marine Corps Intelligence and the intelligence offices of the State Department and Department of Energy."
According to Debka, the plotters had even mastered steganography, a technology which "enables users to bypass electronic monitoring by hiding messages randomly in seemingly innocent digital files, such as music files, those of the popular online marketplace eBay, pornographic files or even e-mail headers."
Here were the sure-fire premises for an incontrovertible argument that the 9/11 attacks were the work of a rogue network of dissident moles inside the US government and military. But after having made precisely this case, Debka attempted to lead its audience back to the myth of al Qaeda, this time presented as possessing scientific and technological capabilities superior to those of the US government! As one of the parties guilty of having given al Qaeda the codes, Debka fingered World Space Communication, described as "one of the known bin Laden assets," which the US counter-terrorism agencies, including the NSA, had supposedly been tracking. Debka also alleged that "Bin Laden also has the NSA beat on the employment front," since the wily Saudi had supposedly hired "the best computer experts on the market. One such is Nabil Khan Kani, a Syrian who lived in Barcelona with his Spanish wife, Jenna Florine, in the late 1980s and early 1990s."
Through one salto mortale after another, Debka clawed its way to the astounding conclusion that the only agency which could have secured access to all those code words was -- Iraq!! Debka wrote:
The nagging question of a mole in the highest reaches of the U.S. government and intelligence community -- with direct or indirect links with bin Laden -- remains. Since no single individual has access to every top-level code at any given time -- a single mole would not answer the case; it would have to be a large, widely spread number. U.S. experts do not believe bin Laden was capable of infiltrating double agents into the heart of the U.S. administration on a large scale. They are looking elsewhere, instead, at a country with a very well-oiled intelligence apparatus -- Iraq. (Debka, "Digital moles in White House? Terrorists had top-secret presidential codes." WorldNetDaily.com, September 22, 2001)
While this conclusion was absurd in the extreme, Debka had provided a valuable estimate of how high up in the US command structure the rogue network reached.
A CRITICAL FRENCH ACCOUNT
During the weeks after 9/11, the Reseau Voltaire of Paris represented one of the strongest voices calling the official version into question. Reseau Voltaire's most prominent writer was Thierry Meyssan, the well-known civil rights activist. His book on 9/11, L'effroyable imposture, was primarily a demonstration that the official thesis of a large commercial airliner striking the Pentagon was absurd and impossible. But Meyssan also focused on the central political-institutional questions posed by 9/11, and especially the "angels" question. For Meyssan, the plotters' use of top-secret code words suggested that they had access to other codes, including the US nuclear missile launch codes. At the heart of 9/11 was therefore a blackmail threat to the Bush regime that, if he refused to launch the war of civilizations, the plotters were in a position to do it on their own in a much more sweeping manner, by launching a US nuclear strike against a series of Arab and Islamic capitals. Whatever the Russian and Chinese attitude to such a launch might have been was not specified. Meyssan's thesis was that "from 10:00 AM to approximately 8:00 PM (on Sept. 11), US government officials were not thinking that this was the work of Arab terrorists, but rather that it was an expression of a military coup being carried out by U.S.-based extremists who were capable of provoking a nuclear war." ( www.reseauvoltaire.net , September 27, 2001)
On his website, and in his later books The Big Lie and Pentagate, Meyssan offered a detailed analysis of the events of the day, with special stress on the insurrectionary behavior of the US rogue network. He narrates that
About 10:05, the Secret Service, in charge of protecting top personalities, reportedly received an encoded telephone call from the assailants. They thus would have had at their disposal transmission and authentication codes for the White House and Air Force One. In other words, the security of the top American leaders is no longer guaranteed and the enemies of America are able to usurp the identity of President Bush, including to order a nuclear launch. According to Brian L. Stafford, director of the Secret Service, it is not a matter of the United States' facing terrorist actions, but facing a situation of war. He orders the implementation of the COG (Continuity of Government) plan. This ultra-secret procedure is orchestrated by FEMA ... which has already been supervising the rescue operations and working in coordination with the FBI. From this moment, FEMA steps ahead of the FBI and becomes the highest civilian authority of the administration. This agency, which cultivates opacity, is directed by Joe M. Allbaugh, a former campaign treasurer for the Bush family. (www.reseauvoltaire.net )
The keystone of this aspect of Meyssan's analysis is the "angel" call:
According to sources close to George W. Bush, the Secret Service received during the course of the morning a telephone call from the authors of the attacks, probably to make demands. In order to accredit their call, the assailants revealed presidential transmission and authentication codes. Only a few trusted persons at the apex of the state apparatus could have access to these codes. It therefore follows that at least one of the authors of the September 11 attacks is one of the civilian or military leaders of the United States of America.(www.reseauvoltaire.net)
For Meyssan, the "angel" call definitely came from the "sponsors of the terror attacks in New York and Washington." He argues that "from 10 AM to 8 PM approximately, American officials did not think that those strikes were the result of Middle Eastern terrorists, but that they manifested an attempted military coup by American extremists capable of provoking nuclear war." The content of the call had been not so much to claim responsibility for the attacks, but to "pose an ultimatum, to force the hand of the President of the United States." The trump card of the plotters was their possible possession of nuclear launch codes, and to counteract that, "during some 10 hours, President Bush was forced to run away from Washington and to go personally to the US Strategic Command (Offut, Nebraska) both to take direct control of the armed forces; and especially so that no one could usurp his identity and unleash nuclear war." In Meyssan's view, in the wake of the "angel" call, "No member of the National Security Council thinks any longer about terrorist attacks, all think about a military putsch which is ongoing. Calm will only be restored at 8:30 PM." (Reseau Voltaire, Information Note 235-236, September 27, 2001)
The call was followed by the descent of Cheney and Rice into the White House bunker. Meyssan sees the defense preparations around the White House as directed against a possible attack by insurrectionary US troops:
Simultaneously, the Secret Service has the Presidential areas evacuated, and deploys special agents and sharpshooters armed with machine guns and rocket-launchers in the surrounding area. It prepares to repel a possible assault by airborne troops. The Secret Service also informs President Bush of the situation; he is on board Air Force One, en route to Washington.
Within this context, Meyssan sees the pattern of threats to Bush and to Air Force One:
The U.S. Strategic Air Command indicates to the President that it has detected a signal, moving towards Air Force One. Considering the velocity, it is probably a missile. To protect the President, the military demand that Air Force One, despite its profile, continue its flight at tree- top level and follow an evasive course, while the F- 5 and F-16 join it and escort it. But the military do not shut off its weather apparatus on board the Presidential plane, such that it continues to emit a signal allowing the international meteorological network to know its position continuously ... Over a scrambled phone line, Bush consults the Vice President. He decides to go to Offutt Air Force Base (Nebraska), headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Air Command. If his identity can be usurped by the perpetrators, the only possibility to prevent them from giving orders to the U.S. army in his place, is for him to be physically where all the weapons of mass destruction are controlled, including nuclear bombs. But Air Force One consumes too much fuel flying at low altitude, and its refueling in flight is impossible for safety reasons. A stop is therefore planned for the military base at Barksdale. (www.reseauvoltaire.net )
Meyssan reported that his research team attempted to determine what network might have been behind the 9/11 attacks. His prime suspect was a group he called the "special forces underground," a terrorist network associated with US-controlled stay-behind networks of the Gladio type which in his opinion maintained close ties to Bin Laden among others. (Reseau Voltaire, Information Note 235-236, September 27, 2001)
Meyssan sums up the world-historical significance of 9/11 in these terms: "The attacks were thus not ordered by a fanatic who believed he was delivering divine punishment, but by a group present within the American state apparatus, which succeeded in dictating policy to President Bush. Rather than a coup d'etat aimed at overthrowing existing institutions, might it not involve instead the seizure of power by a particular group hidden within those institutions?" (Meyssan 202 48) This means that the September criminals are still at large, and capable of striking again.
THE RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE VIEW: NAMAKON
The Russian opposition weekly newspaper Zaftra, edited by the maverick Russophile Aleksandr Prokhanov, published on July 16, 2002 excerpts from a German-language EIR news agency report on the background of the attempted internal U.S. coup of 9/11. EIR's thesis was that "the New York and Washington attacks could not have occurred without the witting complicity of high-level rogue elements within the US military-intelligence command structures." Together with this material, Zaftra included some comments on the 9/11 issue from "Namakon" -- the pen-name used by a group of top-level former Soviet intelligence officers. Namakon agreed that the events of September 11 could not have occurred without high-level complicity by a network or faction within the U.S. military. Namakon also emphasized that the decision by President Bush, urged on by Tony Blair and others, on the evening of September 11 to endorse and embrace the Bin Laden cover story "meant a de facto capitulation of the U.S. Presidency to the real organizers of the attack, and the adoption of their policy of confrontation with the Islamic world, according to Huntington's formula for a 'Clash of Civilizations."'
Namakon also called attention to the much-neglected fact that the attempted orchestration of an escalating nuclear alert between the U.S. and Russia was a crucial part of the 9/11 coup plot. Namakon explicitly linked this potential for thermonuclear confrontation with the August 2000 sinking of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk, the full story of which has yet to be told. Namakon wrote that this "hypothesis leads us to ask whether the Kursk catastrophe might not also have been an included facet of the operations of the US putsch group, since an attack of such dimensions would necessarily lead to a large-scale reaction by the Russian military and population, creating an atmosphere favorable to provoking nuclear escalation." The escalation of the Kursk incident, which high ranking Russian military officials repeatedly blamed on the presence of NATO submarines near the site of the sinking in the Barents Sea, came perilously close to succeeding. A serious confrontation was avoided only by a direct hot line consultation between Russian President Putin and then-U.S. President Clinton. This telephone call was followed within 48 hours by a highly unusual visit to Moscow by CIA Director George Tenet. (Zaftra, July 16, 2002; EIR, July 22, 2004) In the case of 9/11, the immediate parallel was the telephone conversation between Bush and Putin, which, strangely enough, is never mentioned by an otherwise well-informed author like Bamford.
Many features of the analysis developed here with the help of lsraeli, French, and Russian sources in particular have become current among well-informed European circles. On August 23, 2002, at a moment when the neocon drive for war with Iraq appeared stalled, an influential British political figure made the following comments to the late investigative journalist Mark Burdman of EIR:
I have been noticing, as you have, the growing opposition, in Britain, in the United States, to this Iraq war. Last night, something occurred to me that I think is very relevant. I think the crowd that wants this Iraq war may well do something drastic in the coming days to regain the momentum. Some very big terrorism, perhaps. It is all very well that there are these challenges to the Iraq war. But we should not lose sight of the fact that there are powerful people in Washington, who pulled off this September 11 last year. They have their Plan A, which is now in trouble. But they also have their Plan B, Plan C, Plan D. They may well have been thinking until very recently that their coup that began on September 11 was going very well. But suddenly, they have to re-think. And I think they are desperate, and capable of a lot. (EIR, August 23, 2002)
