Hey, remember that story that’s been occasionally popping up here, the sort of weird, not-entirely-fitting-together story that Julian Assange was charged with grooming an 8-year-old girl in the Bahamas for sex? Let me summarize. An unknown dating site called “toddandclare.com” files a report with the UN Global Compact claiming Julian Assange is under investigation for online grooming of child for sex in the Bahamas — and then is shortly thereafter delisted from the UN organization. They post a mildly racist post on Facebook alleging that Assange put pressure on the UN to delist them, and that the Bahamas police refuse to help their child victim.
Neither the family of the child ever comes forward. The woman in the Bahamas said to have hosted the family says she knows nothing. The Bahamas police confirmed that a case was opened with them but they were unable to find the supposed victim or her family to take statements. So we were left with the suspicion falling on this rather unknown website.
This, however, appears to be just the beginning.
Julian Assange, posting on the Wikileaks account, fanned the flames by tweeting about the story:
twitter.com/…
He cites an elaborate plot that he says begins with him receiving veiled threats for what would happen if he would refuse a Russian bribe:
wikileaks.org/...
The source of the $1,000,000 is the Russian government. It will be wired to Mr Assange’s nominated account, upon his cooperation, and before filming of the ToddandClare.com Ad by the SoHo camera crew.
The reasons why Julian’s cooperation are necessary at this stage, are beyond the scope of this email message.
Disclosures on Helena Kennedy
So that Hannah’s “offer” is taken seriously, please let us provide Julian with 3 facts about his attorney that are unknown to the public.
FACT A:
Inside Helena’s North London house, there is a unique, spiral metal staircase located near to the front door, which leads down to the kitchen, which is also the basement. The inside of the house, where Helena has lived since the 80s, is not visible on Google Streetview nor any public database.
FACT B:
Inside Helena’s house, on a mantelpiece near to Iain’s office where he executes his Maxillofacial hospital papers; there has existed a framed photo of Tony Blair and his family, incl. wife Cherie and Blair’s young children.
FACT C:
Historically, Helena’s son “Keir” was removed from a catholic school in Fulham called The London Oratory. Neither Helena Kennedy nor her family have discussed this publicly at any time.
PART 2
Our source has provided information that Julian’s stay in Ecuador will not be permanent. Exit visas are imminent onto London streets.
This dramatic turn of events is planned to have a “spectacular” conclusion.
If Julian wishes to avoid ADX Florence, we suggest he considers, given the extent of restrictions in place in Knightsbridge, how else the Russian government could credibly contact Mr Assange, other than through Hannah Hammond who is based on her Telstra computer in Australia?
PART 3
The Ad for ToddandClare.com will serve as a government delivery platform. Julian will be paid the $1,000,000 whether or not the Ad ultimately airs on Lifetime as is currently planned.
And so forth. Baited by the whiff of conspiracy, over on the Wikileaks reddit people begin digging up details on “toddandclare” — and boy do they find it:
www.reddit.com/…
For a graphical summary of what they found, see here:
imgur.com/...
In short, the physical address for Todd and Clare turns out to be the same address listed on the websites of multiple companies involving all sorts of people closely involved with Clinton and the Obama administration. The focus primarily centers around a company called Veritas Data Corporation, but also other one called Firstline Medical:
www.veritas.com
firstlineapp.com
Let’s summarize what we have.
1. A series of what look like shell companies get registered, around an address of a business connected to the Clintons.
2. Assange gets blackmailed, trying to set him up as a Russian stooge, involving incredibly detailed personal information of a type you’d only expect national intelligence agencies to know.
3. Assange bravely refuses, and instead gets set up as a pedophile.
Hero redditors uncover the plot. Clinton works with the US government to tear down Assange’s reputation and threatens his assassination if he doesn’t take part. The end.
Or is it? Because there are other potential actors in play, and one of them is Russia. Let us begin here with a bit of background on the sort of operations Russia has been carrying out of late:
www.nytimes.com/…
Around 8:30 a.m. on Sept. 11 last year, Duval Arthur, director of the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness for St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, got a call from a resident who had just received a disturbing text message. “Toxic fume hazard warning in this area until 1:30 PM,” the message read. “Take Shelter. Check Local Media and columbiachemical.com.”
St. Mary Parish is home to many processing plants for chemicals and natural gas, and keeping track of dangerous accidents at those plants is Arthur’s job. But he hadn’t heard of any chemical release that morning. In fact, he hadn’t even heard of Columbia Chemical. St. Mary Parish had a Columbian Chemicals plant, which made carbon black, a petroleum product used in rubber and plastics. But he’d heard nothing from them that morning, either. Soon, two other residents called and reported the same text message. Arthur was worried: Had one of his employees sent out an alert without telling him?
If Arthur had checked Twitter, he might have become much more worried. Hundreds of Twitter accounts were documenting a disaster right down the road. “A powerful explosion heard from miles away happened at a chemical plant in Centerville, Louisiana #ColumbianChemicals,” a man named Jon Merritt tweeted. The #ColumbianChemicals hashtag was full of eyewitness accounts of the horror in Centerville. @AnnRussela shared an image of flames engulfing the plant. @Ksarah12 posted a video of surveillance footage from a local gas station, capturing the flash of the explosion. Others shared a video in which thick black smoke rose in the distance.
Dozens of journalists, media outlets and politicians, from Louisiana to New York City, found their Twitter accounts inundated with messages about the disaster. “Heather, I’m sure that the explosion at the #ColumbianChemicals is really dangerous. Louisiana is really screwed now,” a user named @EricTraPPP tweeted at the New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter Heather Nolan. Another posted a screenshot of CNN’s home page, showing that the story had already made national news. ISIS had claimed credit for the attack, according to one YouTube video; in it, a man showed his TV screen, tuned to an Arabic news channel, on which masked ISIS fighters delivered a speech next to looping footage of an explosion. A woman named Anna McClaren (@zpokodon9) tweeted at Karl Rove: “Karl, Is this really ISIS who is responsible for #ColumbianChemicals? Tell @Obama that we should bomb Iraq!” But anyone who took the trouble to check CNN.com would have found no news of a spectacular Sept. 11 attack by ISIS. It was all fake: the screenshot, the videos, the photographs.
…
The Columbian Chemicals hoax was not some simple prank by a bored sadist. It was a highly coordinated disinformation campaign, involving dozens of fake accounts that posted hundreds of tweets for hours, targeting a list of figures precisely chosen to generate maximum attention. The perpetrators didn’t just doctor screenshots from CNN; they also created fully functional clones of the websites of Louisiana TV stations and newspapers. The YouTube video of the man watching TV had been tailor-made for the project. A Wikipedia page was even created for the Columbian Chemicals disaster, which cited the fake YouTube video. As the virtual assault unfolded, it was complemented by text messages to actual residents in St. Mary Parish. It must have taken a team of programmers and content producers to pull off.
The article is very much worth a read — particuarly the way it ends. Russia runs the world’s largest online “troll” army, designed to promote Russian foreign policy by spreading misinformation online:
Another email contained a spreadsheet that listed some of the troll accounts the agency was using on the English-language web. After BuzzFeed reported on the leak, I used the spreadsheet to start mapping the network of accounts on Facebook and Twitter, trying to draw connections.
One account was called “I Am Ass.” Ass had a Twitter account, an Instagram account, multiple Facebook accounts and his own website. In his avatars, Ass was depicted as a pair of cartoon buttocks with an ugly, smirking face. He filled his social-media presences with links to news articles, along with his own commentary. Ass had a puerile sense of humor and only a rudimentary grasp of the English language. He also really hated Barack Obama. Ass denounced Obama in posts strewn with all-caps rants and scatological puns. One characteristic post linked to a news article about an ISIS massacre in Iraq, which Ass shared on Facebook with the comment: “I’m scared and farting! ISIS is a monster awakened by Obama when he unleashed this disastrous Iraq war!”
Despite his unpleasant disposition, Ass had a half-dozen or so fans who regularly liked and commented on his posts. These fans shared some unusual characteristics. Their Facebook accounts had all been created in the summer of 2014. They all appeared to be well-dressed young men and women who lived in large American cities, yet they seemed to have no real-life friends. Instead, they spent their free time leaving anti-Obama comments on the Facebook posts of American media outlets like CNN, Politico and Fox News. Their main Facebook interactions, especially those of the women, appeared to be with strangers who commented on their physical appearance. The women were all very attractive — so attractive, indeed, that a search revealed that some of their profile photos had been stolen from models and actors. It became clear that the vast majority of Ass’s fans were not real people. They were also trolls.
I friended as many of the trolls on Facebook as I could and began to observe their ways. Most of the content they shared was drawn from a network of other pages that, like Ass’s, were clearly meant to produce entertaining and shareable social-media content. There was the patriotic Spread Your Wings, which described itself as “a community for everyone whose heart is with America.” Spread Your Wings posted photos of American flags and memes about how great it was to be an American, but the patriotism rang hollow once you tried to parse the frequent criticisms of Obama, an incoherent mishmash of liberal and conservative attacks that no actual American would espouse. There was also Art Gone Conscious, which posted bad art and then tenuously connected it to Obama’s policy failures, and the self-explanatory Celebrities Against Obama. The posts churned out every day by this network of pages were commented on and shared by the same group of trolls, a virtual Potemkin village of disaffected Americans.
Why is this worth mentioning? Beyond the pattern of a network of shell entities and fake personas, there’s a key detail to note: there is nothing that actually physically ties a domain registration or website address to a physical place. You can write whatever you want when you register a domain. You can also make a website that says whatever you want. Sound a bit like Columbian Chemicals?
Russia is a strong promoter of what is called “Hybrid Warfare”:
understandingwar.org/…
Russia has been using an advanced form of hybrid warfare in Ukraine since early 2014 that relies heavily on an element of information warfare that the Russians call “reflexive control.” Reflexive control causes a stronger adversary voluntarily to choose the actions most advantageous to Russian objectives by shaping the adversary’s perceptions of the situation decisively. Moscow has used this technique skillfully to persuade the U.S. and its European allies to remain largely passive in the face of Russia’s efforts to disrupt and dismantle Ukraine through military and non-military means. T
Hybrid warfare means using strategic disinformation organized at a high level to affect an enemy’s perceived view of a situation for long enough to achieve a given goal, before the disinformation can be fully unraveled and disseminated. Russia Today was very quick to publish an article on this conspiracy “discovered” by Reddit:
www.rt.com/...
Regardless, we can list some basic aspects here.
A) There are three main entities which could provide the information in the Assange letter.
1) The US government (not private individuals acting on their own)
2) The Russian government
3) Assange himself
Other foreign intelligence services are possible, but hardly seem applicable to the situation. Private investigation by an uninvolved third party also could be possible, but the level of detail seems to great for private investigation.
B) The plot was “hidden”, but only behind a thin facade that could be easily unraveled with only minimal investigation… with not low-level US government agents behind the curtain, but Clinton supporters.
Which of the above three entities actually have the motive to set up such a scenario? I would argue only #2 and #3. The fact that there was intelligence gathering or inside knowledge of Assange’s life involved suggests a carefully investigated plot by professionals. The plot appears to have been in the works for an entire year and involved numerous angles. Registering the plot to the same address as companies with Clinton backers prominently listed on them, most distinctly does not speak to any sort of sophistication, and indeed is rather inconceivable that it could occur accidentally.
It does not bear to mention Russia’s motive in this, nor go even more over their history of spreading disinformation and trying to interfere in US politics. However, it is worth mentioning case #3 as well: Assange himself.
Assange lives his life like a spy — and has since before he became famous. Assange spent a period in his childhood in a new-age white-supremecist cult called The Family, aka the Great White Brotherhood. You can read the details of the cult here. Its guru, Anne Hamilton-Byrne, collected blonde-haired children (their parents were to teach them that Anne was their mother), tried to keep their appearances identical, controlled them through abuse and drugs, all as part of her long view where the world would be destroyed in an apocalypse and her “family” would inherit the Earth. Assange’s mother fled with him and spent several years moving from hideout to hideout as members of The Family pursued them. In 1991 he was convicted for hacking into Nortel — but never left his hacking days behind him.
(Subsequent quotes from “Ghosting” by Andrew Hagan, Assange’s ghostwriter, who recorded his conversations with Assange for posterity, although I considered linking some of the chat logs from the “Siggi Hakkari” case as well)
One of the things Julian found it hardest to admit to was the amount of hacking he did himself. He had worked out that being an 'editor' was somehow a necessary front for much that he did. He objected to the idea that WikiLeaks 'stole' secrets: according to him they simply understood, at a deeply sophisticated level, how the flow of information in society could be altered.
He moved frequently. As his fame with Wikipedia grew, so did his paranoia:
There was this incredible need for spy-talk. Julian would often refer to the places where he lived as 'safe houses' and say things like, 'When you go to Queensland there's a contact there you should speak to.'
'You mean a friend?' I'd say.
'No. It's more complicated than that.' He appeared to like the notion that he was being pursued and the tendency was only complicated by the fact that there were real pursuers. But the pursuit was never as grave as he wanted it to be. He stuck to his Cold War tropes, where one didn't deliver a package, but made a 'drop off'. One day, we were due to meet some of the WikiLeaks staff at a farmhouse out towards Lowestoft. We went in my car. Julian was especially edgy that afternoon, feeling perhaps that the walls were closing in, as we bumped down one of those flat roads covered in muck left by tractors' tyres. 'Quick, quick,' he said, 'go left. We're being followed!' I looked in the rear-view mirror and could see a white Mondeo with a wire sticking out the back.
'Don't be daft, Julian,' I said. 'That's a taxi.' 'No. Listen to me. It's surveillance. We're being followed. Quickly go left.' Just by comical chance, as I was rocking a Sweeney -style handbrake turn, the car behind us suddenly stopped at a farmhouse gate and a little boy jumped out and ran up the path. I looked at the clock as we rolled off in a cloud of dust. It said 3.48. 'That was a kid being delivered home from school,' I said. 'You're mental.' 'You don't understand,' he said.
He phoned ahead to the police station to tell them he
was coming. There were two phones on his lap but he answered neither one
himself. A French journalist was following the car but lost us. At the
police station, Sarah stopped and said: 'Shall I do the honours?' I watched
as she went out and searched the bushes.
'Is she checking for paparazzi?' I asked. 'I wish,' said Julian. 'What then?' 'Assassins.'
People turned up out of nowhere. No one introduced them properly, and they didn't have titles anyway: they were just Carlos or Tina or Oliver or Thomas. One night in Ellingham Hall, a French guy called Jeremy came in with a sack of encrypted phones. Julian always seemed to have three phones on the go at any one time – the red phone was his personal one – and this latest batch was designed to deal with a general paranoia that newspapers were hacking all of us. It was always like that: sudden bursts of vigilance would vie with complete negligence. There was no real system of security or applied secrecy, not if you've read about how spy agencies operate. Julian would speak on open lines when he simply forgot to take care. The others kept the same mobiles for months. And none of them seemed to care about a running tape recorder. Granted, I was there to ask questions and record replies, but still, much of what they said had nothing to do with the book and they simply forgot about it. Only once was I asked to sign a confidentiality agreement, when Julian gave me a hard-drive containing very sensitive material, but they forgot I had the drive and never asked for it back.
Included in his spycraft repertoire was terrible disguises:
www.standard.co.uk/…
WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange 'fled in disguise'
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange dressed up as an old woman to try to shake off American agents he feared were trailing him, according to a new book.
Assange, 39, believed he was being followed by the CIA in London after the release of US embassy cables last November on the whistle-blowing website, it is claimed in WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War On Secrecy, by Guardian reporters David Leigh and Luke Harding.
The Australian is said to have put on the disguise to avoid detection as he travelled from Paddington to the Norfolk home of WikiLeaks supporter Vaughan Smith, where he is living while fighting extradition to Sweden to face sex assault allegations. He denies wrongdoing.
In the book, it is claimed that even though there was no sign of pursuit, Assange insisted on periodically pulling the car off the road and sitting in the darkness.
www.vanityfair.com/…
You couldn’t have behaved more conspicuously than Julian did. He used to walk up and down the street, looking left and right, trying to identify my front door, until at some point I came and collected him.
Perpetually concerned with finding a new look and the perfect disguise, he had borrowed a blue East German sweatshirt and a pair of sunglasses and teamed them with a brown baseball cap. I laughed to myself at his childlike urge to play. He didn’t look any less conspicuous as a result, but his obvious disguise was somewhat touching. The next time that I went to look for him, he came around the corner dressed like this, with a wooden pallet on his shoulder. I wasn’t convinced that this was a very professional disguise.
Sometimes I think Julian had been overly influenced by certain books, which, mixed with his own imagination, had resulted in a special set of Julian Assange rules of conduct.
I could keep going, but that’s probably enough to convey the sense of how much he lives his life like a character in a spy novel, where everything is “plots upon plots upon plots”. And indeed, he orchestrated no shortage of his own. When Edward Snowden leaked information, Assange conspired with the Ecuadorian ambassador, without approval from the Correa government, to issue forged travel documents for Snowden — leading to a personal rebuke from Correa. That rebuke was followed by a rebuke from Evo Morales where Assange tipped off European and American government officials with false information that Snowden was aboard Morales’ plane, leading it to be forced to land.
www.telesurtv.net/…
He once put together an elaborate hoax involving a fake New York Times website to trick readers into thinking that one of his critics was instead supporting him:
newsfeed.time.com/…
The very fleeing to the UK involved a stereotypically Assange plot, wherein his lawyer insisted that Assange was preparing to come into custody while he fled so that they would not put a warrant out for him, claimed not to be in touch with him during the period where he did the move, then insisted for a month that his client was getting ready to come back any day when it came out in the news media that Assange was in the UK. This left the investigators in Sweden in disbelief about what was going on, repeatedly reserving interpreters for interviews that never occurred because Assange didn’t show up:
16:06 Ny -> Hurtig: Hello! Is it clear whether it was (is) good for questioning Tuesday at. 17? Marianne
16:48 Hurtig -> Ny: No, I have not had contact with my client after I talked to you. I continue to seek him and will contact you as soon as I get hold of him. But I can on Tuesday. Regards Bjorn Hurtig
16:52 Ny -> Hurtig: Thanks for the reply. We start to move from Tuesday, 17:00 is fine. Grateful for the definitive answer as soon as possible. Sincerely, Maria
nne
16:54 Hurtig -> Ny: I promise to get back to you as soon as I hear from him. Regards Björn H
** 23 sep 2010 **
08:19 Lejnefors -> Ny: Hello! Will Mats book an interpreter Tues 17:00? Erika
17:46 Ny -> Hurtig: Hello! Have you had contact with your principal? Sincerely,
Marianne Ny
** 27 sep 2010 **
09:01 Hurtig -> Ny: Hi, can only tell you that I have not been able to establish
contact with my client. M vh Bjorn Hurtig 09:11 Ny -> Hurtig: Hello! Thanks for your answer. I'll get back to you later to day on our planning. Regards Marianne Ny ** 30 sep 2010 ** 08:18 Lejnefors -> Ny: Hello! Just talked with Hurtig. A is abroad. They can come to hearings 10 alt. October 14 Call you during sc.
** 1 okt 2010 ** 07:16 Hurtig -> Ny: Hey, I heard your message. I'm sitting in the interrogation to 12:00. Calling you after the hearing. Regards Bjorn Hurtig 07:18 Ny -> Hurtig: It's fine. I can be reached. 07:53 Ny -> Lejnefors: Hello! I have asked Hurtig and received a reply this morning that he calls after 12:00. I'll let you know later this afternoon. regards Marianne
** 5 okt 2010 **
Hello! Would you and A to enter into the hearings tomorrow at the suggested. 16:
30? Regards Marianne Ny
** 6 okt 2010 **
06:52 Ny -> Gelin: I have sent sms, but heard nothing. I dare not try to call until almost 8:30. M
06:55 Ny -> Mats Gelin: I'll call you when I know something. Marianne
12:10 Lejnefors -> Ny: What's up with ABF? According to the network, the A part
in a demonstration on Saturday in Stockholm for people in visual culture front.
I am looking for someone alt Mats in the next break. Erika
** 8 okt 2010 **
12:35 Ny -> Lejnefors, Gelin: Hello! Hurtig has not been heard from yet. I get him another hour. Marianne 15:17: Lejnefors -> Ny: Nonsense! Sure he'll come here. Strange that he no longer is available on Thurs. Erika 13:34: Ny -> Hurtig: Hello! I was looking for you earlier today to discuss possible dates for the hearings. Grateful if you call. Regards Marianne 15:04: Ny -> Lejnefors, Gelin: Hello! Now called Hurtig. A is abroad and completing a larger work. He offered to participate in the hearings by telephone. H investigates whether A can appear in person on Thursday. Marianne
And on and on. By mid November, Ny had given up on Hurtig. Nonetheless, she give him one final chance to actually follow through on what he was claiming:
13:35 Ny -> Hurtig: Hello! I have attempted repeatedly and left a message on your answering machine. We are awaiting a decision on where and when you want to take up the material. Until we give the custody petition on Thursday morning, we are, as before, ready to receive your principal for questioning.
He did not respond. After the warrant was issued and the trials began in court, Hurtig testified in court that his client had been free to leave the whole time and no attempt had been made to interview his client, with no mention made of his private communications with Ny. When this came to light, he censured by the court and the Swedish Bar Assocciation.
I bring these up as just a few of the many examples of Assange’s love of setting up elaborate “plots” — and indeed, they’ve been getting more elaborate with time.
I do not know what is behind the current “conspiracy” that’s unfolding. But someone does. And hopefully the actual truth will come out eventually.