Friends & Enemies (10/7/23) Russia infiltrated Israel

Russia has infiltrated Israel and also Britain, which is used as a conduit for espionage. The threat to Israel is much worse.

Nyquist: I’m Jeff Nyquist. This is Alex. Another freewheeling discussion. I had a very intelligent reader response to our conversations. And it’s a reader that really enjoys Alex’s work and enjoys this analysis of of the Roman Empire being a model, you know, for everything.

And he raised this issue of: Well, you don’t talk about class. You don’t seem to talk about this. And I actually do. But, you know, when you go to graduate school and you get Marxism rammed down your throat, you don’t want to talk about it because you’ve heard more about it than you’ll ever want to hear. And he made a comment that Marx would never recognize the modern communist governments as real communists. Because they’re really aristocrats, they’re they’re an elite. Slavoj Zizek made this point in his debate with a Jordan Peterson.

Jordan Peterson said that Marxism was egalitarianism. And Slavoj Zizek corrected him and said, oh, no, Marx never, ever advocated egalitarianism. He said each according to his ability, each according to his need. That’s not egalitarian. It was very clearly elite oriented, the vanguard, you had to have organized communist parties to win, to make Marxism work. Which means you have to have an elite, which means it’s not democratic, it’s oligarchy. And in fact, Lenin signed his name “Vladimir Ulyanov”, his real name, and “Aristocrat”. Karl Marx had a profound obsession and admiration for aristocrats because he wanted to make his own aristocracy, a red one.

And of course, he wanted to know about the Chinese speech about a biological attack against the US. In the secret speech the Chinese general said they wanted to exterminate Americans, so China takes the lower 48 states. And how do I know that’s valid? I thought it was too good to be true; a fraud. When I first heard about the secret speech and I  actually read it I found that it corresponded with the testimony of Colonel Lunev, who spoke Mandarin, worked in China, worked in the U.S. He was present when the Russian generals made an agreement with the Chinese generals and worked it out 1991 and 92.

And he was at the meeting of the Russian general staff that he attended in early 92. And they said the Soviet Union’s gone, the Cold War is over, but we’re still going to have a future. We’re against America and China is going to invade the lower 48 states. We are going to invade Alaska and parts of Canada.

And when I saw the China speech, I saw the elements of the testimony in the speech, which dumbfounded me. But then, of course, how do you prove it’s real? Well, I knew a military intelligence colonel who introduced me to one of the Pentagon colonels, one on the team who translated the speech and actually did the work of determining it really was real.

Mandarin is a unique language. Your use of the words is like a fingerprint. And it was definitely Jiao Chen’s speech. He wrote it himself.It had the same pattern as in other speeches

And so, about class and the Marxist being classist, I also quoted Robert Michels, who wrote the famous book Political Parties, and it was the Iron Law of Oligarchy, all political systems are oligarchy.

There is no utilitarian utopia. Utopia means nowhere, actually. There is no egalitarian world. We will never be equal politically. We never have been, and it’s impossible. So it’s like talking about the tooth fairy or the Easter Bunny and I don’t believe in those and I don’t really want to talk about them. So that’s why I don’t really mention class much, except that it’s real.

Benesch: When you have looked at history, thousands of years of history, and if you have never found this myth, you’ve never seen it this mythical egalitarianism, obviously you don’t consider it to be to be realistic. I’m being very clear about this. I do not want to live in in Roman times as a farmer; that that was not fun, obviously. But even if you were somewhat more privileged, you were still required to perform military service. And if that worked out for you, you were given a plot of land and you could try to work your way up in society. But you still had the risk of military service and that could end badly for you. So even in somewhat higher levels in society, it wasn’t pretty. And even in the much higher ranks of Roman society, things could turn out really bad because of the civil wars, the backstabbing, the intrigues. I mean it should be known to people that even as a Roman emperor, you could literally get stabbed in the back. And so every every part of society had its unique challenges. And for a long time there was no other system that could be implemented in a realistic timeframe, no other system that would be able to compete with these other traditional empires. And only when modern science came around and the printing and more people had more skills and knowledge, then we could start thinking about changing things and modernizing things.

But of course these ideas differed. And if you if you reduce this complex society, if you reduce it to an to a degree where things become quite detached from reality, you end up with sort of this baseline socialist ideology. It’s so far reduced, it’s really detached from reality.

Nyquist: And all ideology really is detached from real sense.

Benesch: If you reduce it that much and you think, well, we’re just going to have government officials and they make all these decisions and they divide everything up. You know, it sounds good in theory, of course. And also when the Enlightenment happened, the socialists complained that enlightenment wasn’t good enough because enlightenment did not make private property illegal, private ownership illegal. Only by declaring it illegal could you prevent a new upper class, a new ruling class and all that. Now, if you reduce the reality so much, it may sound somewhat plausible, but things are way, way more complicated than this.

Nyquist: In political science we call it the theory is reductionist.

Benesch: And now today, when this person that that commented on the video, if that person mentions the current state or the later stages of communist leadership…. I mean, take, for example, current China. They have Roman problems. So right now they have this very powerful dictator and others in government they want the power to be spread out more. So it’s the same problem that the Romans had. So in certain phases of the Roman Empire, it was believed by some, no by all, that you need a dictator for a time to prevent or to end civil war. But they had the same kind of problems. There is also this backstabbing. And so even so, real life, any real life, communism cannot escape reality. And it can it cannot escape baseline principles, which even the Romans had to deal with.

Nyquist: So, yeah, in the same goes for this, this other strange word, democracy, which is often heard in tandem with socialism. You go back to Athens, it was the first city state to spectacularly adopt a democratic system that turned into an empire. And it was before the Roman Empire really. I mean, Rome was a republic at the time, but but Athens, Athens had this amazing empire. But what Robert Michels wrote in “political parties2 is that democracy is just a different way of organizing oligarchy, because you’re organizing an organization of players and so on. In Athens, what you get is Pericles. Pericles is this amazing figure in Athens. There is no Athenian democracy without Pericles. And you’re saying, Well, wait a minute, this guy is was a dictator? He’s like this man with the magic mouth and the magic political touch that makes the Athenian democracy, and he makes the strategy of that democracy effective. And when he dies, sort of everything goes downhill, you know, they lose what we now call the Peloponnesian War, which is just a series of wars between the Democratic Athenian empire with its fellow democratically organized city states. And you had Sparta, which was this oligarchical, you know, aristocratic military kind of state, and that they fought each other for decades off and on until Athens finally lost. And the thing is, is that you cannot escape. We can’t escape the realities of empire, hierarchy, war. There’s never going to be perpetual peace.

Benesch: Even in a small group, let’s say let’s say a group of 100 people or a thousand people, actual people, not just people on the Internet. If you if you have an organization of that size, you have to figure things out, who gets what position, who is competent in this field, who is more competent in that field, who gets to decide what, who gets paid what, who makes the decisions. So this is one of the most essential things in human life. And you cannot pick some ideological method. The Communists tried this and the Nazis tried this. So your position was higher if you showed more allegiance and more loyalty and you knew the right people. And this translated to for example, to horrendous problems in communist Chinese agriculture, when they were growing rice because they planted the seeds too close to each other because they thought, according to communism, things need to be close together. And so they put ideology over science and it was the same with the Nazis. If you were a member of the movement early, like one of my ancestors, his name was Theo Benesch. He became quite important just because he was in the movement early. And he showed complete and utter agreement with the ideology and for a time he even worked at Der Stürmer, the infamous anti-Semitic newspaper. He knew absolutely nothing about Jewish people. He knew absolutely nothing about this alleged Jewish world conspiracy where these tiny families took over the British Empire, no questions asked. Nobody stopped them. He knew nothing about the British Empire. He knew nothing about these other empires. He was a mechanical engineer, like almost all the men in my family. He was capable of making precise things out of metal. That was his qualification. And all the members of the family, they were quite good at it. But he was in a completely different position and that became, of course, a massive, monstrous problem. Because he was a loyal national socialist and he was willing to spread the ideology, he then was able to work for Der Stümer. And he became NSDAP regional chief, then the Bavaria chief, and then he was in the Reichstag. He has a Wikipedia entry. And I found some old postcards and photos of him. And he loved this stuff, but he was completely unqualified to make decisions and judge these things and if you look at politics today, people judge each other based on how much they agree to a certain ideology. And this goes down to sentences and slogans. In communism, they used specific phrases and terms; it was almost like an incantation. So in any official function, they had to use these terms which showed agreement with the ideology and you cannot judge people by that, by those metrics. It’s just a horrendous, horrendous idea. And if the pressure mounts, if the economy is going downhill, if there’s a threat of internal war, if there’s threat of external war, things have to function. This is just the reality.

Nquist: If you use the language of race and anti-Semitism, you then show that you’re loyal to the party, that you belong to the group, to the ruling group. If you’re in the Soviet Union and use Marxist phrases and Lenin’s formulas, that proves that you belong to the group, that you’re a member of it. And so this is this is sort of how we form these ruling groups. And it’s really kind of a distortion because, as you say, it’s a simplification. But yet they they carry forward their program, their strategy, and it actually becomes a form of madness after a while, because the people actually believe their thinking, believe it’s the truth, believe that it’s effective, because, after all, it gave them power. I am powerful, our party’s powerful, therefore, it must be the truth.

Benesch: The Nazis actually took an architect, Albert Speer, and put him in charge of leading the war production effort. Why do you take a trained architect who was really good as an architect and put him in that position? Why do you make an idiot the head of the Navy? Why do you put these these political guys in in those positions?

Nyquist: Which idiot were you referring to? Räder.

Benesch: No, the later guy, Dönitz. And so many others, they were just horrendously unqualified, like the head of the Luftwaffe, the Air Force.

Nyquist: Hermann Goering.

Benesch: It was so bad. And this pervaded all of the Nazi empire. How do you judge people and how do you assign certain positions? The British, they did it a different way. They had this intricate system developed over centuries of forming bonds and aristocratic families and judging them and figuring out how to take the right person, the right person for the job, and even recruiting new people into this realm and finding new talent. So the British had this down to a T, but the Germans, they decided to learn from the losers, not from the winners.

Nyquist: Explain that. What do you mean?

Benesch: Well, if you if you look at other countries and you look at what works and what doesn’t, I mean, you could have learned things from America. You could have learned things from the British. But they instead listened to ideologists. Like the actual editor in chief of this Stümer newspaper, Mr. Streicher. His IQ was a tiny little bit above 100 and he was regarded as mentally unstable and he was pushing ideology and was in charge of teaching people how the world works and so they were referring to older authors and these authors were usually just completely unqualified.

Nyquist: So they built on a foundation of garbage.

Benesch: Yeah. And they based their foreign policy on that. The Protocols of Zion. They based their whole concept of internal intelligence on that concept. So they thought killing Jews means counterintelligence. But of course there were traitors everywhere in the Nazi empire from all sorts of groups and especially aristocratic people. And the Nazis trusted the aristocrats and they thought, well, if they kill all the Jews, then the counterintelligence work was done. That was kind of the idea.

Nyquist: And of course, we have national socialist regimes in the Middle East that use the protocols of the elders to this day;  Muslim regimes and Arab regimes. You know, both Syria and Iran is a national socialist regime. Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a basically a national socialist regime. And of course, you could see the same thing for Egypt in its in its actual foundations under Nasser. And of course, you look at Iran. So. So tell me, what do you know about, you know, Hamas and Syria and Iran and their use of the protocols and the use of these same things the Third Reich used, I mean, of the communists?

Benesch: Yeah, some of the things in the in the current war between Hamas and Israel, some of the things are very convoluted and super complicated. And there’s this big chaos of espionage and different agendas. And it’s very, very complicated even for people involved in this. But some things you can actually falsify, some things are more baseline and you can actually get to the bottom of it. And so the foundational charter of Hamas is actually based on the fake Protocols of Zion. In Article 22, the Charter of Hamas says that Freemasons, Jews, and even the Rotary Club, they’re working for the Zionists. And the Lions Club, they’re working for the Zionists. And the Jews were responsible for the French Revolution, Western colonialism, communism and the world wars. And this is basically what the Nazis believed. And based on that, the Nazis fell for deceptive maneuvers by the British and the Nazis made some really, really weird foreign policy decisions because the Nazis believed they could distinguish friend from foe and some of these aristocrats, even the ones who were still living in Germany at the time, were related to the British. Some of these aristocrats for a long time had been involved in right wing organizations, and they played the nationalist German card to make themselves seem credible. And in those right wing circles, this idea became really fashionable that the tiniest Jewish families had somehow taken over the British Empire undisturbed. And the same nonsense is believed by Hamas. Now, by that logic, Hamas and others in the Islamic world, they probably believe by destroying Israel they could behead the world conspiracy and create a better world. Beheading the world conspiracy by destroying Israel and then destroying parts of America and in Europe, and presto, you have destroyed the entire world conspiracy. And then, you know, the Islamists can happily take over the world.

Nyquist: And along the way when they see Washington, when they see London, they really see the the Jews, their enemy behind Washington, behind London.

Benesch: I mean, Jews are responsible for Western colonialism? What about the actual history of empires. Is that even familiar to them? I mean, empires more or less have worked the same and functioned the same for thousands of years. The Muslims came late to the party and the Muslims actually learned from neighboring empires, the Persians and the surviving eastern Roman Empire. Those neighbors were sort of an inspiration for the new Muslim empire. And as it always happened in the ancient world, even before that, an emerging smaller empire may actually recruit experts from older, bigger empires, experts in warfare, shipbuilding, all that kind of stuff. And there’s some good studies on how the Muslims actually recruited experts from their neighboring countries and empires, because you need those experts. You know, everybody is not the same. It’s not an egalitarian world. Some people are more valuable to an empire than others. And the results, I think, speak for themselves. So then you had the Soviet defector, Pacepa. He was from Romania. The intelligence agency called the Securitate. He defected in 1978, and he gave us a bunch of really valuable information, and some of it concerns how the Soviets actually spread this conspiracy nonsense in the Muslim world. So Yuri Andropov, for example, he started a campaign and up to the year 1978, the Soviets managed to recruit and train 4000 agents of influence, recruit them from the Islamic world to work on the Islamic world and hundreds of thousands of copies of the Protocols of Zion were printed. And that was not all.

Nyquist: You know, I just thought I would mention I had a long correspondence with Mike Pacepa. What was interesting to me was his experience with Yasser Arafat. Arafat was not only trained in Moscow, but he spent time in Romania, in Bucharest, and they recorded him. The Romanian Secret Service was ordered to record him with his  bodyguards. Yasser Arafat, was not only a communist, you know, recruited by the Soviets, but he was a a homosexual. And they really liked that about him. And he had homosexual bodyguards people would say that he would play lion and lamb, this sexual game with his bodyguards. And they would record him, I assume, on video. But he said there were audio recordings, at least that he knew of. And of course, this was at the same time, imagine in the Arab world, this is not something that Muslims would accept. This is not something you would ever want to be shown .

Benesch: You would not recover from that one.

Nyquist: No, no, he wouldn’t. And of course, he I think he got married. I think Arafat got married when he was around 60 years old, just a few years before his death. But that was only for show and this is one of the things where they recruit somebody who’s a homosexual because ideology is not enough, because ideology is bunk. Politics is about power. Ideology is just a vehicle or a weapon. It gets you further in the game if you could get dupes to follow it. But you and I had this conversation. I don’t know if you want to talk about it, about the use of homosexuality in these networks and how it actually could become important. People like Yasser Arafat can turn out to be homosexuals.

Benesch: Yeah, we talked about this German study on Adolf Hitler. About his homosexuality. And I think this  German study by Lothar Machtan is really well done, his use of sources and he thinks like an intelligence guy, which I would say doesn’t happen too often. The way he weighs evidence and he assigns probabilities, I think he does that really, really well. And I used the study from him as kind of a launching board to look even further and look even deeper into some of this. And I think Hitler may have even been, in his very early days, a snitch, because if you were in those homosexual circles back then in Austria, the Austrians considered you a security risk, especially if you knew people who knew people who were important, you were considered a security risk. Therefore, the Austrian government and also the Bavarian government later, they always wanted to know who was gay. And then the infamous incident happened where a very high ranking military officer in Austria, Mr. Alfred Redl, was exposed as a traitor who sold all the military secrets to Russia.

Nyquist: This was 1913, 1912?

Benesch: Right before Hitler suddenly moved to Bavaria, Redl was caught. Which is an interesting timing.

Nyquist: Has any researcher suggested that Hitler was used as a snitch or an agent?

Benesch: There are things quoted in Machtan’s study where a pretty famous leftwing scientist who was working with sexual topics, sexual research, got a hold of old police files, I think, from Bavaria. And he basically got photos, got police files, put them into a package and sent it to Moscow. And there’s also things quoted from German officers who hated Hitler, but they had material on him which protected them. And there’s also quite a bit of evidence pointing towards some people stashing evidence of that nature outside of Germany with a dead man’s switch. So in case anything should happen to them, this material would then get released or handed to, let’s say, the British government or who knows where else. And so basically, if you were gay and if you were gay in Austria, if you were gay in Germany, for that matter, you were considered a security risk. And there was a lot of espionage with gay circles. And this this guy I mentioned, this Austrian high ranking traitor, was gay, but it turned out that him being gay wasn’t the real reason why he became a traitor. But nonetheless, this launched the debate at the time. A public debate in Austria. Are gays trustworthy or not? So this was viewed from a security standpoint, not just a moral standpoint according to the morals at the time. Even with, you know, people in the Muslim world, it’s not just a means to have something on somebody and to use the material. They can provide sort of a safe space for for gay people and in high places, and they can shield those activities. So it’s also a reward system.

Nyquist: And by the way, if you’re living in a society that does not accept homosexuality you’re living a double life already. Which means you already have developed all the qualities you need to be a spy.

Benesch: Exactly. Yeah. You have a public persona and you have your real hidden self, code words, phrases, handshakes. They went to certain meeting places and they were asking certain things, phrases that seem really inconspicuous, phrases that seem normal. But somebody who was in the know would recognize that phrase.

Nyquist: And it is a secret community, because they can get punished for it, that community has contacts going throughout a country, leading to all kinds of places. So you would be in a position to know that important people are part of that community.

Benesch: Exactly. And so in Hitler’s days being gay meant being a criminal, according to the authorities. So it’s very well documented that Hitler was going out all the time. So he spent his nights somewhere every night and would come back in the morning and sleep till the afternoon and then groom himself. He was really known, especially in his very early days by people who rented him his apartment, especially in Munich. They noticed how he was totally grooming himself, which was very uncommon at the time. And then he would go out in the early evening and come back in the morning. And he did that for a very long time. And if you were gay and if you were living that kind of a life, you were getting caught at some point and the choice would have been: Snitch for us or go to jail and Hitler probably would have chosen to become a snitch.

Nyquist: If the police arrested a homosexual back then in 1912, 1913, how long would you go to jail for regular cases?

Benesch: I think it was a year. And prisons were very bad. And there were some police files mentioned in Machtan’s book, which concerned Hitler’s alleged encounters with men who were like 16 or 17 years old. So if you were caught with minors, that would have been worse.

Nyquist: Wait a minute. There’s police files showing that he was caught with minors when he was older?

Benesch: Yes. Yes. And more Nazi high officials collected materials against one another because there were quite a few gays in the higher Nazi ranks. And this was used as a way to further your own position if you could put pressure on somebody and if you had something on somebody. If you had contact with somebody, if you provided additional services to somebody, if you were used as a courier, it was worse. I mean, Hitler worked as a courier in World War One. So maybe he did some side work for people that he knew back then. And this could get you in prison, that could get you into quite a lot of trouble.

Nyquist: And so Hitler, being a courier in World War One, that was kind of a protected job. It kept him out of the trenches. It kept him away from the fighting.

Benesch: Yeah, some couriers were quite, quite close to the trenches or in the trenches. And it was dangerous.

Nyquist: But there were some homosexual commanders or generals and that he joined the List regiment because maybe he was part of the homosexual community in Munich.

Benesch: I remember the latest study on Hitler’s war service, I think he saw like one real battle, one big battle. And quite shortly afterwards he was just removed from the front and used behind the front as as a courier. And after the war, he was formally educated as a spy, as an informant. And he was supposed to infiltrate these new political parties and he infiltrated the DAP which then became the National Socialist German Workers Party and so for a while, and this is confirmed, he had a double income. He was working for the party, and he was also working as an informant for the Bavarian government. And yeah, there’s so much to it. And at some point we might do a whole episode on that.

Nyquist: So we know Yasser Arafat, we’ve got Hitler. There’s obviously other examples. We’ve got the Cambridge moles.

Benesch: Yeah, the Apostles, Burgess Blunt, McLean, Philby, Cairncross and all these guys; apparently they never felt as if they really fit in. They could go to these universities and they had all these options for their future lives. But somehow they felt like the outcasts. They felt like they had their own world. And the Soviets, they took advantage of that, I guess. I’ve got some notes here. That’s also from Pacepa, the the Soviet defector. I mean, he gives quite a quite a bit more detail. So the fake Protocols of Zion ended up in the school curriculum in Muslim nations. It’s on television. And there’s other stuff like the International Jew, this essay collection, which was also really popular with the Nazis and then so yeah, this became sort of the modern core of how the Muslims viewed the world and viewed history. I mean, usually it’s always the Koran and the other supplemental texts. This is how they judge things. But then came the Protocols of Zion and conventional conspiracy mythology. And it seems like Hamas is consciously or subconsciously basing some of their most important decisions on the fake Protocols of Zion. This idea that tiny Jewish families took over the British Empire unmolested.

Nyquist: And of course, do we find this in Iran, among the clerics? I do recall a number of people like David Duke types in the United States have been invited to Tehran. They had a some kind of historical revisionist conference in Iran some years ago under Ahmadinejad. All these Holocaust denying, you know, historical revisionists. And this made the news here in the West.

Benesch: There are some right wingers out there aligning with Muslims, radical Muslims, because they think they have a common enemy. Jewish people. And then the Soviets told the radical Muslims, we have a common enemy and it’s the Jews. And where does this end? In 1965, the Egyptian government published a pamphlet called The Enemy of Africa. So, this basically brought this to Africa.

Nyquist: The protocols were created by the Russian Secret Service, back more than 120 years ago.

Benesch: Exactly. So people in North Africa, they think that Europe is also run by Jews. And, you know, it’s just this blend of Christians and Jews that must be destroyed so Muslims can take over Europe. So everybody is believing this stuff.

Nyquist: A couple of thoughts about why this stuff is used and why it seems to be so effective and why it gets people going. I you yourself are devious, you’re a conspirator. You use secret methods, you manipulate people. A story about somebody else doing it diverts away from the fact that that’s exactly what you’re doing. And then, in fact, the story about a secret conspiratorial group actually hides the fact that you’re the conspiratorial manipulator. Do what I say because I’m going to help you get rid of the enemy, right?

Benesch: Yeah. There’s material that has been confirmed by others, material provided by the defector Pacepa to radicalize Muslims. And there was also the link to the Communists in the West. We had a terrorist problem a few decades ago in Western Germany. Communist terrorists were trying to destabilize Western Germany. This was right around the time the Americans had, I think the Weathermen.

Nyquist: This was Baader Meinhof gang.

Benesch: Right, Exactly. And so this was a group of rather young communists in Western Germany, and they visited Muslim training camps, which were basically run by the Soviets or aided by the Soviets. So you have communists working with radical Muslims to get trained in terrorism, to attack Europe. And so by that logic at the time the communists thought they had the same enemy as the Muslims as well, which makes really no sense. And of course, some Muslim countries, as you said, tried their own version of socialism, but fundamentally socialism is anti-religion and it’s anti tradition and it’s anti-patriarchy and it’s anti-so-many-things. Quite a few communist terrorists actually were trained by these radical Muslims. And it was sort of a revolving door because Soviet Eastern Germany, they had a unit, I think it was called the AKS, as they called it. And this was sort of a communist version of the British Special Operations Executive. They tried to copy the Soviet training down to a T, and so the Stasi directed it. The communists trained people in these methods to take over Western Germany, but they also trained Moslems.

Nquist: I had a Czech source 23 years ago just before or after 9/11 who told me that Mohammed Atta, the lead terrorist in the 9/11 bombing, was trained in 1987 in a communist terrorist training camp in Czech communist Czechoslovakia. And when he was a student in, I think Hamburg, he was an engineering student in a German university, but that he would slip over the Iron Curtain and he would get this training presumably in the summer when he wasn’t in school. What do you think of that story?

Benesch: Oh, this. Yeah, I’ve seen some things that that are’t quite similar. The Soviets controlled certain Muslim territories so they tried to get into the radical Muslim game and there’s quite a bit of overlap between the Russians and these Muslim extremist networks who were tied to 9/11.

Nyquist: And the Russian communists really got very deep into Yemen, which is very interesting because Osama bin Laden’s family’s originally from Yemen.

Benesch: Now, obviously, American intelligence and British intelligence tried to infiltrate the Muslim world for obvious reasons. And it’s sort of a very, very tough balance to strike, because if you don’t infiltrate, you’re blind. But if you do infiltrate, this can become a problem as well. And my sneaking suspicion is that especially Britain is compromised. Britain is probably very, very compromised by the Russians. And this has been going on for a very long time. As I said, Britain was responsible for some of the worst intelligence failures, and it was always the Americans who had to deal with the consequences. The Cambridge spies, the atomic spies. I mean, the British promised the Americans that these atomic scientists were safe, they were vetted. People like Klaus Fuchs who was known to be a communist in Great Britain. His whole family was communist. They were all communists. And in recent studies, like in the book Trinity, experts have looked at this over and over. And they figured that British intelligence had to catch this guy early, but they didn’t. And it was so bad that people even assumed there must have been a highly placed mole to protect Klaus Fuchs, send him to America, to the Manhattan Project. And so he could steal all these atomic secrets.

Nyquist: This book here is Treachery by Chapman Pincher. This is part of the whole spy catcher scandal that the head of MI5, Sir Roger Hollis at the time of Klaus Fuchs, was responsible for watching all the communists domestically in Great Britain and ultimately became in the sixties the head of MI5. And it was it was the deputy head of MI5 who wrote the book Spy Catcher, who said, Look, I was the deputy head of MI5, I believe the head of MI5, my boss, Sir Roger Hollis, was a Soviet agent. And William West wrote a book documenting Sir Roger Hollis’ background, showing his communist connections. Chapman Pincher did incredible work on that. And it’s like you go back and you go, Oh, my gosh, Sir Roger Hollis covered up for Klaus Fuchs. It’s a fact.

Benesch: Yeah, it’s horrendous. And so if we apply this problem to this current situation, Britain has some control over Qatar and Qatar is really successful with energy. So they’re moving quite the amount of liquid gas and other stuff. They make quite a bit of money. And some of that Qatar money ends up with Hamas. So at some point Iran was paying Hamas quite a bit. Then others chipped in and now apparently for the last couple of years, Qatar has been financing Hamas.

Nyquist: And Hamas is aligned with Moscow even now.

Benesch: Yeah, the Russians do not consider Hamas to be a terrorist organization. And Russia’s allies also do not consider Hamas to be a terrorist organization.

Nyquist: And China doesn’t either. And that is so interesting. So here we have this problem and it’s an intelligence problem. It’s a problem of distinguishing friends from enemies. And we’ve got all these people in the West who are actually double agents who are blurring the line between friend and enemy.

Benesch: Let’s imagine high placed moles in Britain, right? Traitors who give these secrets to the Russians. Britain has some control over Qatar and Qatar has some control over Hamas. And it’s probably the case again that the British tell the Americans, do not worry, we’re handling this because Britain has this old history in the region, Egypt and all these places.

Nyquist: Lawrence of Arabia, right?

Benesch: Yeah, T.E. Lawrence.

Nyquist: Some people say was a homosexual. Right. So we get back to that again.

Benesch: So the British say we got all these old networks in the region, you know, dating back 100 years or even more. So let us handle this and we figure things out with the Saudis and the Qataris and all that. So we, the British, we infiltrate radical Islam and it’s all going to work out fine in the end. But what if there are these high placed moles in Britain and they give away all these secrets to the Russians? This could be a disaster not just for Israel, but also for many others. And so Israel depends on Europe, Britain and the United States for help. But how compromised are the helpers?

Nyquist: And now we’ve got a lot of Israelis come out of the former Soviet Union, some come out of the West, some kind of come out of central Europe. Talk about Mossad for a second.

Benesch: The Mossad itself is fairly tiny, but of course, intelligence for the longest time, was not done by big formal organizations. There’s new studies on the Roman Empire. Intelligence was far bigger than we previously thought. And my opinion is that in in the later history, especially Europe, intelligence networks were far greater than previously believed. It was oftentimes family based, aristocratic families. And it was not like you would expect it to be today, like this big headquarters and, you know, a formal name and a formal budget. So they did it the old school way. And I think the Israelis are very much the same. So they what you see is the Mossad, this tiny thing because Israel is such a tiny country. But of course they have these other networks around the world and they try their best to protect Israel and provide security. But as you mentioned, when Jews came from the Soviet Union to Israel, I mean, we know Stalin wanted to try to infiltrate Israel. And Stalin even formally accepted Israel to be a country.

Nyquist: Yes, he was he was one of the first to step up and do that in and of course, the Zionists were socialists. They believed in a kind of socialism.

Benesch: Right from the beginning of Israel and these formal organizations such as the Mossad, there was a problem. Usually people talk about the connection to the British Rothschild arm. And often this is interpreted as  this Jewish world conspiracy thing which isn’t real. Especially the Rothschild family initially was recruited by German aristocracy. It was the Landgraf of Hessen Kassel. So this was part of Germany back in the old days, Germany was not a unified empire such as others and especially Hessen became really, really important. The aristocratic families of Hessen at some point controlled the British throne and the Russian throne. So the czars in Russia, they were Hessen and Schleswig-Holstein and the British throne, especially in the later generations, the British throne was a mix of Hessen, or Mountbatten, and Sachsen Coburg and Gotha.

Nyquist: And what about Catherine the Great?

Benesch: Yeah, she’s Putin’s favorite.

Nyquist: And she was not Russian at all. She was German.

Benesch: Yes. She had this operation running to kill her predecessor and she spied against Germany. Otto von Bismarck.

Nyquist: She basically took over Russia in a coup.

Benesch: Yeah. And from that moment on, the czars kept bringing in these German princesses in to a point where the Russian throne was the same as the British one. So it’s Hessen, Schleswig-Holstein, and with the British it was Sachsen Coburg and Gotha. So these names describe the aristocratic families and also the places they initially controlled.

Nyquist: And of course, if you study the life of Queen Victoria, you find out that the people that that mentored her, that that set up her arranged marriage with her husband, that they had this vision for peace in Europe by linking all the largest royal families in Europe to a common bloodline. So they would all be one family and there would be peace supposedly in Europe.

Benesch: So you had these these aristocratic families and they, on a regular basis, would recruit new people for specific tasks. This was a European tradition. So aristocratic families, they tended to recruit some Jewish people to conduct foreign trade because they spoke the languages and even for espionage, and also because if if the ruling aristocrat had some unpopular changes to implement, he could use some Jewish people, to force these changes to happen. So people would get angry at those Jewish folks. And one other reason why they used Jewish people was you could control them even more than any regular person because Jews had almost no legal protection whatsoever. And they were usually centered in these tiny places. And back in those days, you could not just threaten a specific asset you had recruited. You could also threaten his family, his neighbors and the entire Jewish community. So the ultimate threat is was to just burn down the whole Jewish community if somebody proved to be illoyal towards the aristocracy. So at some point, the Landgraf of Hessen Kassel recruited the first Rothschild to perform certain tasks, protect his money from Napoleon, for example, and regain some assets from the French. And Rothschild did what he was expected to do, and that’s why Rothschild was then referred to the British government, to the British throne, and as I suspect, British intelligence. And so then British intelligence uses the Rothschild family to supply money to the Duke of Wellington. So this was just a task. You recruit people, they do a task. And at some point, the British developed the new banking system and they needed people as the public face of these private merchant banks like Lloyds and Barclays and so on. Some people were the Rothschilds, but others were the Baring family. The Barings Bank was quite a big bank for a while. And the Barings are from Hanover, which is the origin of King George the first and his is successors. So this was an important territory and so they recruited people like the Barings for certain tasks and then gave them bigger tasks. So if you have people like the Rothschilds involved in the foundation of Israel and you have British people involved in Israel, that opens up all kinds of espionage problems, because if the British are compromised, then it’s a very bad situation. So it’s possible that the Russians were able to infiltrate Israel from two sides, the migrants and also the Western efforts.

Nyquist: Yeah, the Western networks that were compromised. For example, the head of German military intelligence during World War Two ran into this. He was against Hitler. He wanted the war to be ended too early. He wanted to save lives. He wanted to save Jews. But then when he worked with the British, when he tried to give something to the British, you had Kim Philby, who was in a position to know whom the British were communicating with. Canaris was communicating with them, and Kim Philby would go and tell Soviet intelligence who he was really working for. And so the Soviets then would, for example, leak information to Reinhard Heydrich, who was the head of the S.A., who then realized the Canaris was committing treason. And so then the British had to go in and send a team to assassinate Heydrich to keep Heidrich from revealing Canaris. And this caused a whole bunch of innocent Czech people to die because of that, because they made it look like the Czech Underground had killed him. And I think they did use some Czechs but in in essence, the whole assassination of Reinhard Heydrich was about covering up for the fact that Canaris was working with the British, which got found out by the Soviets who tried to leak it. So you look at how complicated this interaction is.

Benesch: Yeah. And before before World War One British intelligence tried to help the Tsarist Russian intelligence, and they sent a bunch of people. And you had all the big names involved. You had Cummings.

Nyquist: And Sidney Riley.

Benesch: Yeah. And they built these networks in Russia. And they were hoping that this would actually pay off and this would work out in everybody’s interests. And I have a sneaking suspicion that the British throne was considering getting into the socialist game, toying with the idea of maybe have a monarchy and socialism below that. So the monarchy is in charge, but anything below the monarchy, the normal people, they would live in some sort of a socialist system.

Nyquist: Isn’t that really what King Charles the third believes?

Benesch: Well the British didn’t create the London School of Economics for nothing and they didn’t create the Fabians for nothing. And I have a sneaking suspicion that the same idea was toyed with for the Russian empire because the czars they knew they couldn’t continue the way the empire was going. But you had this regular aristocracy, this older aristocracy in Russia, that did not want change. And there was some some stuff in the communist early literature where this idea was floated, keep the czars, but have socialism below that. Now, it’s not exactly clear and I’ve been working on this for a while. It’s not exactly clear how exactly the British got themselves involved in that. Maybe they messed up again, which they have done so often.

Nyquist: Your classic Tory British aristocrat isn’t going to go for this.

Benesch: No, it was the the German based high level aristocracy. So families like Hessen. So these people kept to themselves. They always kept to themselves. And people in Britain, after King King George the first ascended to the throne, expected those new kings and their relatives to marry into the broader British aristocracy. But these weird families that came from Germany kept to themselves.

Nyquist: And so why, if they had gotten into the Romanovs, why didn’t they try then to reestablish the Romanovs? What was the game there? And of course, they put one of their members on the throne of Greece.

Benesch: The full name of the Romanovs is Schleswig-Holstein-Romanow-Gottorf. So they are from the house of Schleswig-Holstein and Hessen. The Czars had this big problem. They did not have full control over Russia, and they had to share the power with the regular traditional Russian aristocracy. And those were actual Russians. Those were not Germans. And so they had to share the power. And it became a problem because Russia was so backwards. But the Russian regular aristocracy did not want change.

Nyquist: That was one of the factors in the Russian Revolution, wasn’t it? Of course, we’re talking about the February revolution. Wasn’t it that they thought, look, the Tsarina is really sympathetic to the German cause, to our enemy and that we can’t trust her?

Benesch: I’ve been I’ve been doing this report on the czar who managed to infiltrate the German circles of Otto von Bismarck and just steer things in a way so that Mr. Bismarck would make the wrong choices. You know, just have Germany entangled with the French and the Austrians. So that there wouldn’t be this alliance between France and Germany, because Russia did not want that alliance. At the time, Otto von Bismarck was the Reichskanzler. The Russians actually infiltrated his close circle. And so he made all the wrong choices.

Nyquist: Well, of course, von Bismarck was always very pro-Russian. He wanted Prussia to be aligned with Russia. So tell me a little more. So you think that Bismarck was compromised by Russian intelligence?

Benesch: I think the people around him were highly suspicious. And how they influenced his choices. And he made specific choices that proved to be disastrous for Germany in in in the following decades. Let me just pull this up real quick.

Nyquist: I mean, the classical history of Bismarck says that Bismarck was right. And Kaiser Wilhelm the second was wrong about Russia. Kaiser Wilhelm jumped his alliance with Russia to ally with Austria-Hungary. And that was ultimately disastrous. That was the ultimate disaster for Germany because it created the central powers and they got Germany trapped in a two front war, World War One, which was ultimately a loser for Germany.

Benesch: Well, the dominating force in Germany at the time was was Prussia, which is kind of the east, the east of Germany. And the main family line in Prussia was called Hohenzollern. And they did have family relations to Britain and Russia. Yes. But ultimately the Hohenzollern lost power, they lost that game. And because of these limited family relations, there was always that hope for Germany to make an arrangement with the British and making arrangement with the Russians. But that proved to be very, very deceptive. 1859 Bismarck was sent to Saint Petersburg in Russia.

Nyquist: That’s right. And he loved it there.

Benesch: He was a diplomat in St Petersburg and he had a love affair, which was probably set up for him. He had a love affair with an aristocratic woman, Katharina Orlowa, who was the wife of the Russian diplomat for Belgium, a certain. Alexievich Orlov. So the Orlow clan was involved in espionage and five brothers from the Orlov clan, they were awarded in 1762 by Catherine the Great from the house of Holstein Gottorf with an aristocratic title because they helped her remove her husband from power.

Nyquist: Which was Paul.

Benesch: Yeah, so the Orlovs helped her get rid of this guy and the guys then were rewarded and in later decades, this Orlov guy basically allowed his wife to have an affair with Otto von Bismarck.

Nyquist: Bismarck was the guy who would have affairs. Yeah he was a guy that was susceptible to that.

Benesch: Exactly. Germany thought it was a good idea to have a war with the French, which was not a good choice. There was also unnecessary tensions with the Austrians. You know, a lot of bad decisions were made and…

Nyquist: And so you think the Franco-Prussian War? Are you talking about the Franco-Prussian War? Napoleon the third started that war, the great bad choice he made.

Benesch: The French knew you could not trust the Germans because the Germans in the past had allied themselves with enemies of France.

Nyquist: This Franco-Prussian war was used to create the German empire. It made Germany, right?

Benesch: Yeah. And it looked like a big victory, you know, of course they were prancing around in the French palace.

Nyquist: And everybody had a victory march through Paris there.

Benesch: Exactly. Everybody thought this was a great victory. And there was just a big problem attached to this.

Nyquist: When Germany annexed Alsace-Lorraine, the French were so angry about that that they contemplated revenge ever after and were eager to get into the World War, to take that territory back, which they ultimately did, and even the German territory, because officially Germany became an empire.

Benesch: Because before it was just lots of small empires and now it was supposedly one empire. There was just a big problem. It really wasn’t a unified empire because all these different bits and pieces were governed by different families. And some of these families were basically the same families as the British throne and the Russian throne. So, for example, the territories that were incorporated into the new German empire were full of spies who basically were members of these certain aristocratic families. And then when Bismarck was regarded as this great, successful man, he was managing his his wealth and he picked a certain person to manage his money, a man by the name of Gersson Bleichroeder. And that was not a good idea because Bleichroeder’s father was a close partner of the Rothschild Banking Clan, which, of course, has its own history with specific aristocratic families and the British Empire.

Nyquist: If you go back to the Seven Years War and the British Empire and all these families and Prussia were all part of this alliance that fought what was really the first real World War, the Seven Years War that made the British Empire what it was and established sort of the primacy of Britain as the most powerful country in the world in all kinds of respects. And of course the American Revolution was a bit of revenge that the French had by helping the Americans. But other than that, when the French Revolution happened Napoleon comes along, the British were at hand to again work with Prussia, work with the German states, work with Austria, work with Russia. And it was sort of like Napoleon against all of them.

Benesch: Yeah. And so the Germans wanted to prevent another Napoleonic era. So it was the German Empire’s explicit desire to keep France as weak as possible, which pretty soon led to an alliance between France and Russia, of course.

Nyquist: And the alliance of France and Russia happened because France was so angry at Germany that they then offered to build the Russian railroad system because the military French knew that if Russia had modern railroads, Russia had the biggest population in any of the countries that were in Europe, and they could have the biggest army. And if that army could get on trains, they could woo woo rail right up to the German border and invade Germany.

Benesch: So when I recently reread the 2012 book by Christopher Clark, I think he’s a Cambridge historian, he basically tells you that the driving force behind World War One was Russia, not Germany, because Germany was in a weak alliance. They had no desire to have a big war.

Nyquist: After our presentation last time you had mentioned this and I had a caller or reader who asked me or who wrote a kind of a long thing about this question. But wait a minute. I had made the comment, Russia did mobilize first right before Germany, and then they brought up these papers that Kautsky had done the investigation. You’re familiar with Kautsky’s papers, people misread it and thought, well, maybe Germany actually made the decision to mobilize first. But Kautsky cleared that up and said, no, that isn’t the problem. But the but but the problem is, is that that people say that the Germany made all these mistakes, that Germany had this, you know, this Schlieffen plan and that Germany wasn’t innocent in all this. Could you explain how is it that Russia wanted World War One and engineered it?

Benesch: Well, first of all, for hundreds of years in Europe – and any self-respecting historian will have to admit that – the game was played like this: You tries to form a strong alliance and then you destroy the weaker alliance. It’s like the television show Survivor, right? When you have these different groups and they have to make secret alliances and then at a certain point, you try to blindside.

Nyquist: Well, they did it to destroy Napoleon. Yeah. You have to try to blindside the opposition.

Benesch: And so that’s how the game was played. So every country was either waging war or preparing the next war. So this is where the infamous saying comes from. If you want peace, prepare for war. It sounds paradoxical, but it describes sort of this crazyness.

Nyquist: It’s an old Roman proverb that exactly describes the reality and which we saw here.

Benesch: And so this was the game. So obviously every country was always preparing for war. And they had war plans ready in case they were needed. So you can’t really pinpoint, oh, this country wanted war. They all were living in this reality. Warfare was happening again and again. And so when Germany was in a weak alliance with Austria, they were not in the position to think in terms of “let’s have a big war and we’re going to be successful”. That was not the time.

Nyquist: They knew they were already surrounded by France.

Benesch: So the stronger alliance was France, Britain and Russia, and especially Russia had scaled up its military to 1.5 million soldiers.

Nyquist: So yeah, and the Germans also were tricked because they thought Italy was their ally. And Italy had these secret deals that were working for the other alliance.

Benesch: So I’m perfectly aware that everybody always wants to play the victim, and this is unfortunately a reality. But if we look at World War One, it’s simply a matter of “am I in the weak alliance or am I in a strong alliance?” And so Germany was in a weak alliance.

Nyquist: And Germany probably didn’t know that Italy was not going to support Germany and Austria. And they probably thought Italy was going to. And they also had Turkey, by the way, Turkey was part of the central powers and did go to war. But so let’s just go to the sequence of events. Somebody mentioned Harry, Elmer Barnes and he’s an American historian who wrote against the German war guilt thesis in World War One. And I just ordered his book because I read him so long ago, I don’t remember much of it, but I get let let’s go through the sequence now. Archduke Franz Ferdinand is assassinated by the Black Hand terrorists in Sarajevo in, what was it, June of 1914, something like June. And then, of course, because he’s the heir to the throne of Austro-Hungarian, Hungary. This is a terrible blow to the royal family. It’s a terrible blow to the monarchy, and it’s a terrorist act. And of course, there’s this argument about the black hand and Serbian intelligence being behind it. And you hear stories about who’s really at fault. And of course, the Serbians are the are southern Slavs. They look to Moscow for protection. So Austria gives an ultimatum and of course the Germans are aligned with Austria, they’re supporting. So the Russians say no, you don’t! If you mobilize against Serbia, we will mobilize against you. And the Kaiser says, wait a minute, if you mobilize, I’m going to have to mobilize. So explain to me, why weren’t the Russians just protecting their Serbian allies? Why did the Russians intentionally trigger the war for their own reasons. I mean, after all, Russia had just lost the Russo-Japanese War. Did they really have confidence they were going to win? Is that why they pushed so hard? Was it intentional?

Benesch: Well, Russia Russia could not really afford that kind of a war. But they leveraged anything. They had territory, mines, anything they could they would leverage anything to loan money from France and other places and buy arms and build these railroads. So they were going going all in.

Nyquist: And so if you look at this from the other side, for a potential enemy of Russia this was an attractive option of starting a war against Russia.

Benesch: Not really, because it’s the same problem that Napoleon had. You know, the front line is too long and the distances are too long, the weather is too bad. Of course, some German military guys had floated ideas. Oh, maybe we could attack Russia one day. Ideas were always floated.

Benesch: The elder Moltke. I know this from my military history. The elder Moltke who won the Franco-Prussian War, who was the soldier that stood next to Bismarck, when he saw this idea of a Franco-Russian alliance. He had common sense. And Moltke said, look, if you have France and Russia surrounding Germany and you go to war, it’s very simple. You march into Russia, you smash their armies you force them to peace because the Russians are just really bad at war. They just don’t have the sophistication we do. And you just use the Rhine as a shield. You build a west wall and it’s a short enough front. You can hold the French off and then you turn around and you confront France and you say, look, we just defeated your ally. We’re twice as big as you. You’re going to come to terms with us.

Benesch: If Britain is another problem, then you’re basically at a three front war.

Nyquist: But Britain is only a problem if you don’t build a big fleet and then you invade Belgium, which Britain has these ancient treaties to protect Belgium lands.

Benesch: Of course, all these countries, they always had developed plans to attack another country.

Nyquist: Did the Czars want a world war? Or did someone else in Russia want the World War and decide we’re going to do the mobilization no matter what because we’re going to come out on top?

Benesch: War is always a calculation. So you make the decision based on the numbers you run and the probabilities you run because you can always choose to not have war and wait for a better opportunity. And you know, this alliance of France, Britain and Russia, they seem fairly confident and they seem fairly confident that this was the right time. I mean, you shouldn’t forget that at the time industrialization was picking up speed in Germany. You had all these new inventions, you had the scaling up of German industry. And apparently in the minds of Russia, which was really backwards, it was a bad choice to wait, because if you wait ten more years, 20 more years, the Germans may gain the advantage through technology. So there’s all kinds of factors that go into this decision of going to war. They always project into the future. What’s this going to be like in ten years or in 20 years or in 30 and 30 years? And I think at a certain point, the Germans had actually more industrial production than Britain.

Nyquist: Germany was overtaking Britain, it was open market and the leader was still the United States, but Germany was advancing rapidly.

Benesch: And maybe that was a factor to decide for war instead of waiting. To the Germans it was clear that war was coming one way or the other because the Russians had scaled up their troops to 1.5 million men. So it was just a question of when that would happen.

Nyquist: But my understanding is Russia mobilized for war first in terms of general mobilization. Austria was mobilizing against Serbia, though, right.

Benesch: The distinctions were not clear anymore. You know, in the earlier or maybe 100 years earlier, there was a very clear distinction between a partial mobilization, a general mobilization and peacetime. But with the new technology and the mass logistics, it was not a clear distinction anymore. So if Russia scales up its troops like this and builds all this artillery and buys all this ammunition, you don’t need a formal, uh, a formal document. You don’t need a formal mobilization.

Nyquist: Well, I think the actual mobilization is when the order goes out that, everybody is being mobilized. And the fact is, you can’t hide a general mobilization. The minute that order goes out because you’re mobilizing millions of people, everybody’s going to know you’re doing it because you’re mobilizing millions of people. And so and the thing is, is that very famously, it was a Russian general who said, mobilization is war. Yeah, right. Because the minute you mobilize, you, the other guys got to mobilize. Now, you got a runaway train. You cannot stop this mobilization process because if you stop your mobilization and the other one continues, he’ll have the advantage. And also it happens in modern warfare.

Benesch: Things happen in stages. So, I mean, Russia was running out of artillery shells in 1915. So they still had logistical problems.

Nyquist: Russia is the country that has always had these logistical problems and had these technology problems. And, you know, it’s just sort of the nature of Russian Russian military.

Benesch: So  let’s run a different hypothetical scenario. Let’s assume Germany had an alliance with the British and the French. If that had been the case, if that had been a strong alliance, you know, the Germans, the British and the French, they may have decided to attack Russia and take over Russia. That is entirely conceivable. So we’re not talking in these simplistic black and white moral categories. It’s always a calculation. And there’s many factors that go into this. But this notion that Germany was going nuts and they were envisioning these great victories, that was just not real.

Nyquist: People like Barbara Tuchman and actually the former president Teddy Roosevelt, kind of depicted the Germans in this way, that they were these evil imperialists, kind of this image of Germany and, of course, Kaiser Wilhelm himself, the way he behaved publicly. But he actually behaved in a way so they could depict him in this way. Right, Because he’s a guy who kind of had a chip on his shoulder. And he was he was a grandson of Queen Victoria, but the family didn’t really like him. They treated him badly. And of course, he had a birth defect.

Benesch: And for a long time Germany was really boring. I mean, it was not a unified empire for hundreds and hundreds of years. And you had all these major players, such as France and Britain and many others, some that came and went and Germany was rather boring. They always had to hedge their bets. And some parts of Germany had to align themselves with Napoleon for a while because they felt they were forced to do that.

Nyquist: And it was also this division in Germany between Catholic and Protestant. It went back to this area where they were killing each other. They were killing each other on German territory. And it was it was not a central major player, but you had Colonel Richelieu, whose entire policy was based on dividing and conquering Germany and keeping Germany from ever being united.

Benesch: Yeah. So there was no German history of “let’s play the big mega empire” and let’s just overtake everybody else. I mean, that came later with the Nazis because they were properly bonkers. And with the Nazis, it’s fairly obvious when they declared war, when they went into Poland. Of course they made excuses. But I mean, Second World War is a different case. The Second World War was different. And it’s interesting that a Cambridge historian such as Christopher Clarke puts this book out in 2012 when Germany is no longer relevant in a military sense. But the big threat is now Russia. So two years before taking Crimea, this book comes out and it says the driving force behind World War One was really Russia, not the Germans.

Nyquist: So because the Russians wanted Constantinople, they wanted to to extend their empire into the Balkans, they already had extended. Bulgaria was essentially created as a country by the czar.

Benesch: In the 50 years prior, the Russians did extend, they had expanded quite a bit. And everybody knows Russia always expands when it can and it contracts when it has to.

Nyquist: Americans get this from the left wing propaganda from the Cold War. It’s like, well, Russia’s always been peaceful. They’re always being invaded. And they can’t think of the big invasions of Russia. They forget Russia’s invaded more than it’s been invaded because you do not get to be the world’s largest country without that. The Russian empire was more than 12 time zones. Now there are 11 time zones, but you don’t get to be the world’s biggest country if you don’t invade a lot of people, you know. And the fact is, is why do you get invaded? Because you’re such a nuisance. You keep invading. People are afraid of you. They start to take you back.

Benesch: In the times of Napoleon, you didn’t have motorized vehicles, you didn’t have the modern logistics and all that. So it was it was an advantage that Russia had for a long time that they could watch the enemy move into Russian territory and then get themselves into trouble. I mean, Napoleon, he famously was sitting down in the big Russian palaces, in the Kremlin. And they were cheering themselves on, but they knew they could not hold it. And even escaping would be a problem.

Nyquist: The mayor of Moscow released all the prisoners from the prisons in Moscow and they gave them incendiaries to burn the city down around Napoleon. So what they did is they basically burned the city down around Napoleon. So he had no shelter. He couldn’t spend the winter there. They had plundered all the grain, they’d burned down all the grain. So basically Napoleon had to leave the city and I think it was it in, in late October, he was waiting for the czar to make peace with them. And he had to go and find somewhere where there was food and warmth for his army and fighting for the retreat.

Benesch: Napoleon’s retreat was so problematic that he rrived back home with barely any functioning troops, barely any horses that were still alive. Yeah, their horses all died, many officers died and he promised he could raise another 300,000 soldiers. But the officers would have to be trained. The horses didn’t exist right?

Nyquist: Yeah. He had no horses, so he didn’t have the cavalry to win. Exactly right. It was a mess. So you see, Russia tried to use its territory to their own for their own advantage. Yeah. Russia was the big victor in the Napoleonic wars in terms of of, you know, it doesn’t matter how many battles they lost when it came to nations, the Battle of nations, the Battle of Leipzig, they won and then Napoleon was done. He could not come back from that anymore. Yeah. And it was at some point, of course, it was an alliance of multiple states against Napoleon.

Benesch: But yeah, I mean, this this didn’t really work out in the end for the Germans. I mean they, they thought they did what they had to do, just push back against France and get rid of the French there.

Nyquist: There’s an issue that relates to us in all this and that, that the monarchies and the conservative powers, which included, you know, the United Kingdom, Great Britain, Prussia, Austria, Russia, they saw the French Revolution as a existential threat and. Of course, the French Republic ended, Napoelon made himself emperor, but they saw Napoleon and the liberal empire that he created as a as not legitimate. They didn’t accept it. You know, Edmund Burke did not accept the French Revolution. And Burke was very influential among German conservatives. Mednick was very much influenced by Burke. So but now we go to the what’s really interesting is seems like here we are in the 21st century and we’ve got this this I guess you could call it the leprosy of the French Revolution has come back on us all. We we’ve got all these countries. They believe in different kinds of egalitarianism and we’ve got the Soviet successor regime under Vladimir Putin, which is definitely, definitely not a legitimate country. We’ve got the communist left infiltrated all throughout Europe and is really behind Russia and China and the Russia and China alliance. This is the problem have with a lot of my conservative friends is that what do I say to them? They go, well, America’s bad. The European Union is bad. And it’s like, well, yeah, they’ve all there’s a crisis of legitimacy, of right and wrong, of bad ideology everywhere. But yet there is something fundamentally wicked about communist China, about the Russian Federation, about you know, Iran. I mean, how do you view all this?

Benesch: When we talk about, let’s say, the United States and we talk about Europe, the European Union or even a smaller specific country in Europe, it’s actually a very complex thing, a very complex organism. And this goes back to the confusion that was described by Christopher Clark when he wrote about the First World War. Because people are used to saying, well, “France did this and Germany did that”. But when you actually get down into who made the decisions, it’s actually quite a bit of work to figure out who made the decisions and who was in charge of what exactly and who influenced whom. So this is something that people need to remember. For example, when an empire feels the necessity to do something, to do something harsh, it’s it’s always based on an actual calculation. And so when you do certain operations, it’s based on fulfilling that calculation. And so when somebody does a certain task and he reports to his superior, he trusts that superior. But what happens when you have moles, high placeed moles, What happens if there are malicious networks? Because it’s easy when you’re young and when you’re a bit naive and it’s very black and white to you. The world seems very different if you’re actually in the action, if you’re right in the action. So if an empire or a state or whatever, if they do something that’s kind of nefarious or harsh, it’s not always the same. It might be a reasonable calculation behind this, but then it might be nefarious, very nefarious.

Nyquist: Well, what about just the stupidity of massive miscalculation. We don’t have Napoleons or Bismarcks now, you know, the kind of geniuses that sort of managed this? What if they’re just not as smart as they used to be?

Benesch: Yeah, I think a lot of this goes back to obfuscation techniques. For example, when the Russians or the Soviets, when they did this operation TRUST, they made sure it was so convoluted that not even a traitor, not even a defector could understand all of it. So you try to overwhelm people with the complexity, artificial complexity of an operation. And so everybody just falls in line. They do what they’re told because they have no way of understanding the core of this thing.

Nyquist: And so do you think that the Russians are still on top and that they’re the ones that are overwhelming everyone with this complexity?

Benesch: I think one of the big secrets of the Russians success was the infiltration of Britain. And by having all these moles in Britain, moles that potentially got access to everything, that also compromised America because the British knew many American secrets. And I suspect after the American independence, Britain tried to flood the United States with assets, with agents, and they built these networks. And some of these networks may have gotten compromised by the Russians.

Nyquist: But even these networks in America may not understand that they have been compromised. So you’re talking about interests that are connected to banking and large corporations, Right?

Benesch: Yeah. So it’s just this thing when you’re part of an old network and you believe you were working for Britain and you’re working for the Anglo-American way of life. Even multi-generational networks, you know, just, just parents recruiting some of their children for this and they all believe it’s for the right cause. But they don’t know that somewhere in Britain there’s a super high placed mole and these secrets end up with Russia.

Nyquist: And Russia has access to these American networks and Russia and China are together because China says, oh, we have all this cheap labor and we don’t have environmental regulations we can make we can make BMW and Mercedes and, you know, Chrysler automobiles in China.

Benesch: Yeah. And so I think this was kind of the secret to the communist success, because I’ve looked at this from all kinds of scientific angles and the communist intelligence circles never invented a new trick.

Nyquist: They inherited everything from the old Ochrana.

Benesch: Yeah. And they use baseline techniques, yet still they were so incredibly successful. What is the secret? What is the secret sauce? And to me, it’s the failures of Britain and by those failures of Britain, old British networks in America were also compromised.

Nyquist: This is unbelievable. Let me suggest there’s another element to the secret sauce, and it’s the fact that this territory was under the under control of the Mongols and the Mongol princes, the grandsons of Genghis Khan were educated in China, and they were taught Sun Tzu, who emphasized spies, that spies were the key to all. And and then you had Felix Dscherschinski, who was the founder of the Cheka. He had a deputy. Right. They were Polish aristocrats, spoke fluent Mandarin. He loved China. He had traveled many times to China. And he was the one who thought up this operation trust. He was the brain behind these elaborate deception operations, which became the tradition that Lenin followed. And Gusinsky, you know, was was part of helping to provide the manpower and the organization. So you have this this Oriental, this importation, because because my GRU defector friend says Russia is not a European country, It is Asiatic. He would say that over and over again. You have to understand. And of course, he was a mandarin speaking Russian. He worked in China, he knew the Chinese, and he realized how much China had influenced Moscow.

Benesch: Yeah, and I always tell people that in intelligence, the timeline matters so much. The time when something happens and how far something reaches back. So, for example, if you discover a breach, a break in or a defector, you have to actually go back and find out when did this traitor start becoming a traitor? So you have to go back in time enough to figure out what is now compromised. And so I think for a very long time older intelligence has been underestimated, especially in Europe. So if you look at Weiner’s book on the CIA, I mean, he’s this big expert and he says there was no major intelligence agency efore the 20th century. So America didn’t have a proper foreign intelligence service. And in other books, it says the British did not have something like that. I read books where it says the British did not have proper intelligence, even when they had a global empire with all these colonies and they controlled India with very little personnel, somehow they supposedly managed to do all this with no proper intelligence except a bit here and there. I mean, it’s ridiculous.

Nyquist: It’s nonsense. Of course it’s ridiculous.

Benesch: And of course, you didn’t have in the past these singular, monolithic bureaucratic entities to conduct intelligence.

Nyquist: You had aristocrats like Major Andre in America who controlled networks in what was then the American colonies, one of which his spies was Benedict Arnold. The American general who won the Battle of Saratoga, that was the battle that was credited with bringing France into the American Revolution. That man was your spy.

Benesch: I strongly believe there are still some really big traitors that have not been discovered yet.

Nyquist: Do you know how Major Andre did it? You know how he recruited Arnold? Through Arnold’s wife. That’s Arnold’s wife. It’s fascinating because Sidney Riley said women were the key to espionage, you know?

Benesch: Remember how little money was provided for Washington’s troops and everything? They was strange sabotage from within and, you know, all kinds of shenanigans. You have to assume in the 13 colonies the British had a spy network. And I think parts of the spy network even survived the revolution. And then in the expansion phase of the United States, guess what happened? Migrants from Britain and Germany, especially German territories ruled by certain aristocratic families. Now, I think today 50 million Americans have at least one German ancestor. How many spies were disguised as migrants and merchants and became American citizens? How many networks were actually built that have never been properly looked at? As I said, you have to figure out when the breach happened and the further back the breach goes, the more problems you have. And this is not a uniquely American problem. This is also a German problem. This is a problem that Israel, even Israel has now. It’s hard to tell who is who and who has what agenda.

Nyquist: I once was in the committee for China and they had a a guest speaker and this guy he praised the Mossad up and down and I asked him I said well what do you think is the best intelligence service in the world. “Oh, the Mossad”. And I thought to myself, this guy does not know what he’s talking about, right? Because. Because for the same reason that you just said, when you have a country that’s a polyglot that’s made from all these groups, this country is ideal for planting spies in.

Benesch: You don’t have a clean place to start, right? Have a safe place, a safe situation to start with.

Nyquist: Russia had the oldest monarchical dynasty in the history of the world. You’ve got England, you’ve got these countries that that have this continuity that goes back forever and ever.

Benesch: In Germany today there are almost no Jewish people who live here. I think the number is about 100,000. So you almost never meet any Jewish people here. And the only time I actually personally met several Jewish people was at a martial arts training event. Because this Israeli martial art is is being taught in all these other countries. And one of my kids was in this martial arts group, and they had this big event and you had all these people there and you saw quite a number of Jewish people even visiting from other countries. And what I saw was blend of Jews and people who tended to be Slavic. So with some people you couldn’t tell out of context, is this a Russian? Is this a Jewish person? And I think that became sort of a an intelligence nightmare at some point. And there was this article in The New York Times where they were talking about these oligarchs that have become sort of an issue in the media because they’re Jewish, they’re sort of Russian. They move around in these all these places and so The New York Times tried to explain this to the readers, but they couldn’t really explain this because I think very few people actually get it.

Nyquist: You got the wilderness of mirrors and you can’t really go back to this and understand it from some baseline somewhere. And if you don’t have a method for actually dissecting and analyzing it and then synthesizing it, you are never going to understand it, you know?

Benesch: If more people understand intelligence, they can they have a better chance of figuring out who is who, who has what agenda, who is really transparent. And you can sort of prevent these mistakes from happening where somebody is performing tasks, as an intelligence officer or whatever. He’s doing what he’s always done, but he’s not aware of a breach higher up. He’s not aware of a mole. And he’s just he’s making these mistakes without even realizing it.

Nyquist: So just try to say something about this war in Ukraine. Now, I have noticed this shift is definitely happening. We saw the speaker of the House of the U.S. Congress was just voted. It was unprecedented. A sitting speaker removed by his own party. You know, this does not happen in America, but it happened here. And the people that replaced him are against supporting Ukraine, against giving money. And that was one of the issues in the budget. And I’m amazed because this is rather it’s it seems to me rather obvious that America does not want the Russian army on the border of NATO. And if we don’t support Ukraine, that’s going to happen. So looking at the events in America with House Speaker McCarthy being replaced and this whole issue of Russia and then, of course, Poland having this breakdown of the relationship between Poland and Ukraine, which is seen in all these incidents and this this bickering, this infighting between Poland and Ukraine. Do you think the Russians are on the road now with their secret networks? They thought the war was going to be short, but they ended up stuck and then they engaged their networks and now they’re going to be unstuck.

Benesch: So from your perspective, you’re looking at American politicians who are doing exactly the wrong thing. When we in in Germany, look at our politicians who also do the wrong thing about Ukraine, there’s still a whole other dimension to this because our current chancellor was a flaming communist, Scholz. So very much pro Eastern bloc. When he was a young communist, he visited Soviet Eastern Germany on multiple occasions and was treated almost as if he was a head of state. So it’s even way more crazy over here when you look at a single politician. Of course, in America, they can have all these excuses. Oh, we’re being pragmatic or whatever. There’s all kinds of excuses. But over here we have a chancellor like this. The last one was Angela Merkel. She was actually raised in communist East Germany. And she has this whole crazy back story. And by the way, this back story also touches upon old networks, which I was surprised to find. Then before her, we had a chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, who was really, really friendly with Vladimir Putin.

Nyquist: Well, he worked for the big gas for Russia company.

Benesch: He adopted Russian children. He was for the pipelines, he was for everything. I think he was even accused by German intelligence of ruining counterintelligence against the Russians. I think that was even a thing back then. And oh, by the way, he actually this Gerhard Schroeder, a former chancellor of Germany, he actually took legal action against a researcher who was very good, a man by the name of Jürgen Roth. Unfortunately, he’s dead now. He warned about all of this. He warned about exactly what was going to happen ten years, 20 years before everybody else. And so the former chancellor took legal action against one of these books because of the question when exactly did Gerhard Schroeder get to know Vladimir Putin, who once worked for the KGB in eastern Germany. And some middlemen, some former confirmed Stasi middlemen were involved in these gas deals. When did Schroeder actually meet these people in Dresden, in these places? And so this author said they met earlier, and this chancellor said, no, that’s not true. I’m going to take legal action against you. It’s that crazy here. That’s the big secret. That was especially in the eighties when, you know, it was really touchy feely between the separated parts of Germany. And so preparations were made. And then, of course, when the wall came down, all these middlemen who know Putin and who know Schroeder. When did Schroeder meet these middlemen?

Nyquist: One of my readers mentioned one of the heirs to the Austrian monarchy, Otto von Habsburg. He was giving a talk about when he first knew Putin, when he first heard the name Putin. Have you seen this, this presentation that he gave Phil Murphy, the headline a few days ago? Some of my readers commented on it and it was really interesting. And I watched it. I watched his speech. And of course, he’s kind of bragging that he knew Putin before everybody else and that Putin was really very sinister and really more important. You know, he’s now portrayed as an unsuccessful KGB guy in Dresden who wasn’t really that important, but Habsburg seems to say something different.

Benesch: The surviving files are not complete. I think somebody took out stuff from the Putin files. He was KGB, but he was also attached to the East German Stasi. And so they had like this dual file system. And so the stuff at the Stasi files, I think somebody took out some stuff and, trying to reconstruct it, he was involved in technological espionage. They tried to figure how the West German power system was built.

Nyquist: If I recall correctly Putin had involvement with the Baader Meinhof gang. He had them steal stereo equipment for him.

Benesch: Yeah, he was active in left right circles, right wing circles. T here’s this weird anecdote in Catherine Belton’s  book on Putin’s cronies, where she said one of her sources from the banking world told her the story, how a young Vladimir Putin had actually visited this this castle from the Metternich family because one of the Metternichs had married a Russian princess.

Nyquist: Now, there’s one other thing that that really troubled me, but it’s like you’re not supposed to say this. You’re not supposed to mention it. We talked about Hitler and Yasser Arafat and the homosexual thing. And it is the claim that Alexander Litvinenko made that Putin is a homosexual. And of course, there are some of my former defector contacts, former KGB guys who think that. People involved in that trial were murdered lately or died under strange circumstances. So we know there’s a there’s a horrific trail of blood. I mean, “from Russia with blood” is a British book about the all the murders in in Great Britain. And Litvinenko had written this thing some months before his death, saying, look, when I was at the FSB in 1996, when Putin became the head of the FSB, my mentor colonel, I forget his name, you know, said, oh, now the homosexuals and the child molesters are in charge of the KGB or in charge of the FSB. And this colonel died, he was murdered under strange circumstances. And one of the claims was from another source involved with Andropov, was setting up these pedophile networks in Europe. And that some kind of sexual network like this homosexuality, pedophilia, whatever it was, that that was part of what was what Putin was doing in East Germany, in Dresden. Have you ever heard anything like this?

Benesch: Well, piecing this together from different sources, it does make sense. I mean, it’s something that really, really needs to be looked into because, for one, I don’t know exactly where I read it, but it’s this  narrative that Putin always wanted to be in the KGB, he got himself recruited, but then he was at first only used inside of Russia, which was a sign that he was a not really talented or maybe because he was gay.

Nyquist: Well, yeah, he was training for the first Chief Directorate. They discovered was gay, and they wouldn’t let him go into the first Chief Directorate because of that?

Benesch: Everybody in the KGB wanted a foreign posting. Because it was paid better. And you could live outside of Russia. You’re more in the action. And the big dream of Putin has always been to get a real foreign posting. So not Soviet East Germany, but Western Germany. He wanted to infiltrate Western Germany and be this big hero. It’s claimed he was discovered during his training missions in Russia, this one apartment that was rigged with cameras, hidden cameras. And somehow Putin was discovered as gay according to this narrative. And he later tried to clean the archives and remove all incriminating stuff. So then he gets posted in Dresden, which is a safe territory for a spy because it was, you know, occupied part of Germany. It’s possible he was running operations that had a pedophile nature and there’s some indications in newer research actually. Supposedly Putin was running assets in West Germany, some ultra right wingers. And there was at least one mention that some of these neo-Nazis that he was running were involved in under-age prostitution. And there was one guy who was a criminal and there were underage victims, and he was protected by intelligence. So there are indications. There are indications of that. And I mean, if if if the Stasi was more in on it and this was not exclusively run by the KGB, if the Stasi was in on it, who has these missing pages in in Putin’s files? Because stuff was removed, certainly. And of course, of course even in in the decades before Putin’s service, there were these older networks here, even occult groups here. And traditionally even groups such as the the OTO or the Golden Dawn, they were extensively used for espionage purposes. I read this recent paper from a professor from Idaho, and he wrote Aleister Crowley was a British spy and he infiltrated the OTO and infiltrated the Golden Dawn. And I think the OTO was originally an Austrian or German creation for spying purposes. So basically some crazy Austrians or some crazy Germans created a cultist organization, including sex, magic and all that. And they start recruiting people and they expand into other territories and countries. So there’s all kinds of activity on German territory. So it’s always been used for espionage. And it was a way to reward assets and incriminate assets and control assets.

Nyquist: And illicit sex becomes a tool for compromising and blackmailing. And yeah, I mean, we talked about earlier we talked about how for for the longest time, homosexuals, they have their own world, they have their own codes, they have their own language. 100 plus years ago when most everybody was a Christian, if you were in a cult, it was better to hide it under your hat.

Benesch: So cultists have their own thing and even pedophiles have their own world. So they view it as kind of a group of their own and nobody else understands them and nobody else can be privy to their secrets. And if communism is merged with occultism and pedophilia, it’s a very explosive mix. And a couple of days ago, I did a text on occultism linked with intelligence work and revolutionary movements because especially before a revolution happens, in that preparatory phase, you see a lot of a cult activity. And this was the same with the communists. I mean, the earlier communists before the revolution, they were crazy as heck. I mean, they were all cults all over. And this was in preparation for this, this operation they were planning.

Nyquist: Interesting. Well, thank you, Alex. And I’m is Jeff Nyquist, and I want to thank everybody for joining this.

So we’ll continue next week and we’ll do more and there’ll be a transcript available of this. You’re usually posted on your site. Why don’t you give your site information?

Benesch: The website is candor Intel dot com and you can find the transcripts there.