Ukraine and the New Great Game: the CIA and Neo-Nazis vs Putin’s Postmodern Dictatorship

Color Revolutions

January 5, 2021, it was reported that, to serve as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, then President-elect Joe Biden would nominate Victoria Nuland, who had a complicated history of involvement in exacerbating tensions in Ukraine, by aligning with far-right and Neo-Nazis groups, in pursuit of the US and NATO’s interests in the region.[1] An article in Salon, titled “Who is Victoria Nuland? A really bad idea as a key player in Biden's foreign policy team,” explained:

Who is Victoria Nuland? Most Americans have never heard of her, because the U.S. corporate media's foreign policy coverage is a wasteland. Most Americans have no idea that President-elect Biden's pick for deputy secretary of state for political affairs is stuck in the quicksand of 1950s U.S.-Russia Cold War politics and dreams of continued NATO expansion, an arms race on steroids and further encirclement of Russia.[2]

In addition to serving as US Permanent Representative to NATO from 2005 to 2008, Nuland has also been a member of the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).[3] Putin has come to recognize that the United States and NATO have made use of Western NGOs and social media attacks, orchestrated from abroad under the pretext of supporting democracy, combating electoral fraud or the corruption of the targeted regimes, to catalyze uprisings such as the Color Revolutions and the Arab Spring.[4] The leading NGOs include the NED, as well as the International Republican Institute (IRI) and Freedom House, which are largely supported by government funds, and billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF). The NED, an organization often described as an accessory to American intelligence, and which has been financially supported by Richard Mellon Scaife, who has long-standing ties to the CIA and also funded the Heritage Foundation. The first president of the NED confessed to the Washington Post that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”[5] Acknowledgement of America’s actions has resulted in a growing worldwide trend of governments seeking to limit and delegitimize foreign funding to local NGOs, including not only Russia, but also India, Ethiopia, Hungary, Qatar, Egypt and Israel.[6] At home, the United States’ actions are excused by the perception that the imposition of democracy is not objectionable because it is not just an American, or Western ideal, but a universal one.[7]

As indicated by Robert W. Merry in The Atlantic, given the sizeable expenditures that go into such projects, such intrusion “is a foreign-policy issue that deserves more attention than it is getting in American discourse.”[8] Even if these accusations were to be made public, the general view is, as Merry noted, “that these NGO activists are merely doing what comes naturally to those who believe American democratic structures represent universal values that should be embraced universally throughout the world.”[9] However, numerous critics have confirmed that NGOs have “acted as interest groups rather than as promoters of universal standards, and as tools of US foreign policy rather than as local representatives of the ‘global conscience’ or ‘transnational civil society.”[10] The truth is that the US State Department cannot divulge what are covert foreign policy tactics, and the work of NGOs provide them plausible deniability.[11]

Formerly the Open Society Institute, the OSF was founded in 1993 by Soros to financially support civil society groups around the world, with a stated aim of advancing justice, education, public health and independent media.[12] In 1991, the Soros Foundation Budapest merged with the Fondation pour une Entraide Intellectuelle Européenne, an affiliate of the CIA’s Cold War front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF).[13] Open Society Institute was created in the United States in 1993 to support the Soros foundations in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. And, as remarked in 2007 by Nicolas Guilhot, a senior research associate of CNRS, the Open Society Foundations serve to perpetuate institutions that reinforce the existing social order, as the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation have done before them, reinforcing a capitalist view of modernization.[14]

Putin argued that “the US instigated Color Revolutions in the former Soviet region, using grievances of people against their governments in order to impose their values that contradict local tradition and culture. These efforts were directed against Ukraine, Russia and Eurasian integration.”[15] Russian state media asserted that the American government had been spending millions of dollars in support of the revolution, and Russian websites were published with alleged proof of direct American involvement in the Euromaidan protests.[16]

Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) 

Most controversial was the America’s alignment with Ukrainian far-right and neo-Nazi extremists, who have a long-standing history of collaboration with the CIA. As is well known, the CIA thought highly of various former Nazis who they believed could be employed during the Cold War to fight their shared enemy: communism. To that end, thousands of Nazi scientists were brought over in Operation Paperclip. The CIA hired Reinhard Gehlen, who was chief of the military intelligence service for the Nazis on the eastern front during World War II, after which he was sponsored by the CIA to establish the anticommunist Gehlen Organisation, before becoming founding president of the BND, West Germany’s federal intelligence service.[17] The CIA helped free Hitler’s favorite commando, Otto Skorzeny, who worked closely with Gehlen, and whose activities during the Cold War ranged from Franco’s Spain to South America, including a stint working for Mossad, the Israeli secret service.[18] Skorzeny was a key figure in the network known as the Fascist International, composed of various right-wing extremists, who serviced the CIA’s covert activities around the world, including Condor in South America, the Golden Triangle heroin trade in South-East Asia, and Operation Gladio in Italy.[19]

An important organization linking the CIA covert network of drugs and arms dealing and the Fascist International was the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), whose activities would evolve into the Iran-Contra Operation. The WACL had very close ties with the American Security Council (ASC), which along with its parent organization, the America First Committee (AFC), are considered the origin of the American “Old Right.”[20] Founded in 1940 to lobby to keep the United States out of World War II, the AFC represented a confluence of right-wing organizations, including the Silver Shirts, the German America Bund, the Ku Klux Klan, and was funded by the Nazis.[21] The ASC, which has been referred to as the “heart” of the Military-Industrial Complex, exploited the same fear of communism to help justify the enormous military buildup to protect America’s “freedom,” while simultaneously feeding directly into their profits.[22]

A friend of Chiang Kai-sheck, Japanese millionaire Ryoichi Sasakawa, who referred to himself as “the world’s richest fascist,” was also one of the original founders of the WACL. The United States collaborated with Chiang Kai-shek and South Korean intelligence in founding the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League (APACL) established in South Korea in 1954. The WACL emerged in 1966, when the APACL merged with another fascist organization, the Anti-Bolshevik Block of Nations (ABN), a co-ordinating center for anti-Communist émigré political organizations from Soviet and other socialist countries.[23]

The ABN took its current name in 1946 and claims direct descent from the Committee of Subjugated Nations, which was formed in 1943 by Hitler’s allies, including the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). The roots of the OUN/UPA may be traced to the militantly anti-Communist and nationalist Ukrainian underground founded by Colonel Eugen Konovalets in the 1920s. Although opposed to Stalinism, the group was Fascist, with strong links to the German intelligence service of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. The League of Nations had publicly condemned the OUN as a terrorist syndicate and Polish courts had handed down death sentences to OUN leaders Mykola Lebed (1909 – 1998) and Stepan Bandera (1909 – 1959) for their roles in the 1934 murder of Polish Interior Minister General Bronislav Pieracki, among others. Once released in 1939, after his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, Bandera organized OUN sympathizers into armed squadrons under an Abwehr program code-named Nachtigall, or Nightingale.

The OUN split into two organizations: the less militant OUN-M, and the more extremist group of Stepan Bandera, known as OUN-B, a clandestine group financed in part by German intelligence. After the start of the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union in 1940, the OUN-B in the person of Yaroslav Stetsko (1912 – 1986) declared a short-lived Ukrainian Government under the control of Nazi Germany, and pledged to fight as an ally for Hitler’s “New Order.”[24] The stated aim of the regime was to “closely cooperate with the National-Socialist Greater Germany, under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler which is forming a new order in Europe and the world.”[25] In 1941, Bandera and his deputy Stetsko were held by the Germans in Berlin, where they submitted dozens of proposals for cooperation to different Nazi institutions (OKW, RSHA etc.) and freely communicated with their followers.

The temporary capital of the Ukraine during the German invasion in 1941 was the city of Lviv. The city had been annexed to the Soviet Union in 1939. In the initial stage of Operation Barbarossa on June 30, 1941, Lviv was taken by the Germans. The evacuating Soviets killed most of the prison population, with arriving Wehrmacht forces easily discovering evidence of the Soviet mass murders in the city committed by the NKVD and NKGB. Ukrainian nationalists, organized as a militia, and the civilian population were allowed to take revenge on the “Jews and the Bolsheviks.” Lviv was the original stronghold of the Sabbatean Frankists. At the time of the German attack, about 160,000 Jews lived in the city, fortified by tens of thousands due to the arrival of Jewish refugees from German-occupied Poland.[26]

Supported by the Nazis, the OUN-B formed Ukrainian death-squads which carried out pogroms and massacres. The most deadly of them was perpetrated in the city of Lviv by the Ukrainian People’s Militia with direct participation of civilians, at the moment of the German’s arrival in Soviet-occupied Eastern Poland. Stetsko wrote to Bandera that OUN had “formed a Militsiya to remove the Jews.”[27] There were two separate pogroms in Lviv. The first pogrom took the lives of at least 4,000 Jews. It was followed by the killing of 2,500 to 3,000 Jews by the Einsatzgruppe C, the SS death squads, and the “Petlura Days” massacre of more than 2,000 Polish Jews by the Ukrainian militants. During the pogrom, on June 30, 1941 Bandera declared a sovereign Ukrainian state in Lviv, and a few days later was arrested by the Germans who opposed it.

Shortly after the Lviv pogroms, the “Jewish Worker Camp,” later known as the Janowska concentration camp, began to form under the leadership of the German administration by the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police (UAP), composed in large part of the former members of the Ukrainian People’s Militia.[28] The UAP was created by Heinrich Himmler in mid-August 1941 and put under the control of German Ordnungspolizei in General Government territory. According to Professor Alexander Statiev of the Canadian University of Waterloo, the UAP were the major perpetrator of the Holocaust on Soviet territories based on native origins, and those police units participated in the extermination of 150,000 Jews in the area of Volhynia alone.[29]

Members of the Lviv National Opera, who were held prisoner at Janowska concentration camp, were ordered to play Tango of Death repeatedly. On the eve of Lviv’s liberation, the Nazis ordered 40 members of the orchestra to form a circle. The security ringed the musicians and ordered them to play. First, the orchestra conductor was executed, and then the remainder of the musicians were ordered one by one to come to the center of the circle, put their instrument and strip naked, after which they were shot in the head.[30] A photo of the orchestra players was one of the incriminating documents at the Nuremberg trials.

In July 1941, however Bandera himself was arrested and sent to a concentration camp in Germany, which he left only in 1944. In April 1944, Bandera and Stetsko were approached by Otto Skorzeny to discuss plans for diversions and sabotage against the Soviet Army.[31] During the Cold War western intelligence agencies, including the CIA, covertly supported the OUN.[32] Documents declassified by the CIA under a FOIA request entitled The NAZI War Crimes Declassification Act show that from the time of World War II up until his death, Bandera and Stetsko gained the support of the American government who not only protected them from the Soviet Union, but also in such matters as obtaining visas and secret accommodation. Another document further proves that Stetsko and other “Banderists” received support from the British government as well. Stetsko’s relationship with the CIA and the US government is extensive and stretches from his time in the OUN with Bandera until his death in Munich, where OUN was embedded with American intelligence in a variety of ways in Europe, including Radio Free Europe.[33] Stetsko not only provided information to Americans about the situation in Ukraine, but he also enjoyed the confidence of Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA at the time. “A letter from the CIA expressing Dulles’ interest in Stetsko stated: “You may be assured that the question of nationalism is under constant study by this Agency. It is, as you say, unquestionably a potent force.”[34]

According to US Army intelligence records obtained through the FOIA, OUN appointed Mykola Lebed “Home Secretary and Police Minister” in the Nazi quisling government in Lviv. As leader of OUN-B, Lebed was responsible for the genocide of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. Nevertheless, Lebed emerged after the war as one of the United States’ most important agents inside the OUN/ UPA. The Yad Vashem archives in Jerusalem contain a detailed description of Lebed’s activities personally leading the torture and murder of captured Jews at Krakow as a means of “hardening” his men against bloodshed.[35] Lebed worked with the Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) in Munich, and his “Liberation Council” was receiving a substantial income from American sources. As noted by Christopher Simpson, “Lebed’s new handlers in Munich, it is worth noting, were the same group of American CIC agents who were at that time running Klaus Barbie and Emil Augsburg’s network of fugitive SS men.”[36] Such was the level of protection that Lebed received that Allen Dulles personally wrote a letter of recommendation that not only allowed Lebed to enter the United States but also denied his role in the 1934 assassination of and his collaboration with the Nazis.[37] The CIA constantly monitored Lebed and did everything in its power to avoid the truth about his past being exposed by journalists or the Department of Justice. The CIA and elements of the OSI (Office of Special Investigations), worked together to keep Lebed’s past from being revealed by their own department.[38]

Republican Heritage Groups Council

In World War II, Laszlo Pasztor was a leader of the youth group of the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian equivalent of the German Nazi Party, which became a branch of the Anti-Bolshevik Network (ABN) with ties to the WACL.[39] In 1968, Pasztor was the founding chair of the Republican Heritage Groups Council (RHGC), an Eastern European émigré network which included anti-Semites, fascists, former Nazis, Nazi sympathizers and collaborators, and members with connections to Italy’s P2 Masonic lodge. According to Russ Bellant, “These antidemocratic and racialist components of the Republican Heritage Groups Council use anticommunist sentiments as a cover for their views while they operate as a de facto émigré fascist network within the Republican Party.”[40]

Pasztor was the “right-hand man” of Paul Weyrich, one of the founders of the Heritage Foundation, which took a leading role in the conservative movement during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.[41] Weyrich worked closely with Franz Joseph Strauss, Bavarian head of state, a longstanding fixture of Le Cercle and a very close friend and associate of Third Reich banker Hermann Abs. Strauss was Chairman of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU), which is represented in a common faction with Konrad Adenauer’s CDU, called CDU/CSU. In 1953, Strauss became Federal Minister for Special Affairs in Adenauer’s second cabinet. According to T.H. Tetens, the British press once referred to Strauss as “the most dangerous man in Europe.”[42] As head of the state government of Bavaria, Strauss saw to it that funding was provided to OUN. When Strauss came to the United States in the early 1970’s, Weyrich and Strauss’ Washington representative, Armin K. Haas, planned his schedule, including Capitol Hill appointments. Joseph Coors also helped Haas make new political contacts in Congress.[43]

One organization that brought together, under ASC auspices, the RHGC and Nazi collaborationists is the National Confederation of American Ethnic Groups (NCAEG). Its Executive Vice-President was Z. Michael Szaz, who was an official of the Virginia Republican Heritage Groups Council, an associate of Roger Pearson, and a director of the ASC's American Foreign Policy Institute. Dr. Alexander Ronnett, head of the Romanian American National Congress, an affiliate of the NCAEG, was a supporter of the Iron Guard. The group had long-standing ties to the WACL. A founder of the NCAEG was Austin App, who was also active in the IHR. App belonged to the German American National Congress (also known by its German acronym DANK). App wrote The Six Million Swindle, asserting that the Nazi extermination of Jews didn’t happen. In 1984, Ronnett spoke at the February, 1986 annual meeting of Willis Carto’s Institute for Historical Review (IHR), founded by Willis Carto in 1978 as an organization dedicated to publicly challenging the commonly accepted history of the Holocaust.

The Heritage Groups Council for Citizenship Education, a subsidiary of DANK, was headed by Karol Sitko, who was active in NCAEG. Sitko was described in the Washington Post as an ally of App and Ivan Docheff, head of the fascist Bulgarian National Front. According to Bellant, “The ABN is the high council for the expatriate nationalist groups that formed the police, military, and militia units that worked with Hitler during World War II.”[44] As a forerunner of modern death squads, it is consistent that ABN also has links with the WACL. The Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation (CAL), for many years the Latin-American branch of WACL has a great affinity for the ABN and its members. ABN and CAL drew up a resolution in 1983 whose statements reflected a Third Way ideology. Other ABN affiliates include, Slovak World Congress, a successor organization to the Nazi-allied Tiso regime of Slovakia; Bulgarian National Front; Supreme Committee for the Liberation of Lithuania; World Federation of Free Latvians; Croatian Liberation Movement, whose leadership came from officials of the German-created Croatian Ustashi regime of 1941-44; Byelorussian Central Council; and the Romanian Liberation Movement, a Romanian affiliate of ABN and the WACL.[45]

Other RHGC leaders who have been active with the NCAEG include Walter Melianovich, Nicolas Nazarenko, Alexander Aksenov, and Laszlo Pasztor. Nicolas Nazarenko, was a former World War II officer in the German SS Cossack Division, who headed intelligence operations in Berlin for a Cossack “government-in-exile.”[46] Melianovich was head of the Byelorussian American Republican Federation, which has had Nazi collaborators in leadership roles.[47] Melianovich's federation is closely associated with the Byelorussian American Association (BAA). An early BAA leader was Franz Kushel, an SS major general and commander of the Belarus Brigade, a Waffen SS unit.[48]

The WACL became an ultra-right-wing umbrella organization composed of neo-Nazis, Waffen SS veterans, Eastern European collaborators, Latin American death squad chiefs, and other hard-core anti-Semites. At least three WACL European Chapters (the German, the Austrian, and the Dutch) were taken over by former Nazi SS officers.[49] The WACL, explains Stuart Christie, is “The most sinister of all the internationally active extreme right wing organizations and pressure groups,” and “is based on Goebbels’ ‘Anti-Komintern’ and is the main conduit for funds for extreme right wing organizations throughout the world.”[50] Many of the most infamous CIA operations took place under the aegis of the WACL, like Operation Paperclip and related operations aimed at recruiting Nazis and other fascists, as well as the Phoenix Program, and later Operation Condor and Operation Gladio.

Western Goals

Karol Sitko was supported by JFK conspirator, billionaire H.L. Hunt, and by ASC founder General John Singlaub, who was deeply involved in the WACL, and who worked closely with Ted Shackley’s “Secret Team” in drug-running operations from the Golden Triangle to the Iran-Contra Affair.[51] Singlaub was an associate of ASC member and Shickshinny Knight of Malta General Charles Willoughby, was an associate editor of the National Review for several years and also member of the national advisory board of the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF).[52] The National Review was founded by William F. Buckley, a member of Skull and Bones and Knight of Malta, who worked for the CIA. In 1960, Buckley and AJLAC member Marvin Liebman helped form the YAF, an ideologically conservative youth activism organization that was founded in 1960 as a coalition between traditional conservatives and libertarians on American college campuses.

The selected advisory board for YAF included Senator Strom Thurmond, Senator John Tower, Ronald Reagan, Professor Lev Dobriansky, and Robert J. Morris.[53] Dobriansky was a member of the ASC and the board of the US WACL.[54] As a member of the OSS, Dobriansky worked under Donovan in running many Ukrainian SS officers and their Ukrainian Nazi collaborators to safety in Operation Paperclip.[55] During the Eisenhower Administration, Dobriansky initiated Captive Nations, which employed many ex-Nazis and fascists among Eastern European émigrés in the United States.

The Tower Commission revealed that also part of the Iran-Contra funding network was the Western Goals Foundation, founded by J. Peter Grace in 1979 and John Singlaub, and sponsored by Henry Regnery and Nelson Bunker Hunt, son of H.L Hunt.[56] Western Goals was also associated to Reinhard Gehlen, with whom they shared a connection with the Order of the Knights of Malta (SMOM). J. Peter Grace was also chairman of the Knights of Malta in the United States, as well as belonging to the CFR, and key figure in in Operation Paperclip.[57] Grace’s company, W. R. Grace & Company, was founded by Peter’s grandfather, William Grace, who was a close associate of George de Mohrenschildt. After the end of World War II, de Mohrenschildt moved to Venezuela where he worked for Pantepec Oil, a company with abundant connections with the newly created CIA, and owned by the family of SMOM and Skull and Bones member, William F. Buckley.

Roy Cohn also became a principal figure in its intelligence gathering operation the Western Goals Foundation. Like the Safari Club created with the Saudis, Western Goals was set up to side-step restrictions imposed after the Watergate and COINTELPRO revelations. As a consequence, intelligence files passed into the hands of “retired” officers and their most trusted operatives. Many of these officers, like John Rees and Congressman Larry McDonald, were members of the WACL, the John Birch Society and similar organizations, and joined Singlaub in forming the Western Goals Foundation in 1979. Western Goals acquired a reputation of acting as a “clearinghouse” for some police departments whose intelligence-collecting functions were restricted by laws such as the Freedom of Information Act.[58]

In 1979, Paul Weyrich, Paul Dolan, Richard Viguerie and Howard Phillips persuaded rising televangelist Jerry Falwell to form the Moral Majority in 1979, signaling the birth of the Christian Right.[59] Falwell was a close ally of the ASC, and part of the ASC’s Peace Through Strength campaign in 1983, along with ASC president John Fisher and General J. Milnor Roberts. Falwell’s Religious Council of 56 included General Daniel O. Graham and Clay Claiborne of the ASC, Larry McDonald of Western Goals and Nelson Bunker Hunt. Fisher was described by the Religious Roundtable as a “close friend,” as was Joseph Coors, who served on the board of the American Security Council Foundation (ASCF) through the 1980s.[60]

Viguerie was also a member of the George Town Club, which was the base of Edwin Wilson’s pedophile and blackmail operation.[61] During Koreagate, Viguerie had been involved with South Korean lobbyist Tongsun Park and the Korean CIA. In 1979, shortly after he retired from the CIA, Ted Schackley’s associate Tom Clines moved the offices of EATSCO to 7777 Leesburg Pike, as tenants of Viguerie. “The reality is that 7777 Leesburg Pike became the headquarters for the private CIA,” said former Cappucci employee Mike Pilgrim.[62] The George Town Club was founded by Tongsun Park with high-powered Washington lobbyist, Robert Keith Gray, whom John DeCamp asserted was a specialist in homosexual blackmail operations for the CIA. Together with ASC strategy board member General Robert Richardson, Gray also served on the board of Consultants International, one of Wilson’s front companies.[63] Gray’s personal secret that made them vulnerable to requests from the intelligence community, it was a secret history of homosexuality.[64] Gray was investigated in 1982 by a House Ethics Committee concerning allegations of “using drugs and sexual activity to lobby Congressman.”[65]

Gray was reported to have collaborated with Roy Cohn.[66] Cohn admitted to NYPD detective James Rothstein that he was part of an elaborate sexual blackmail operation that compromised politicians with child prostitutes, carried out as part of an anticommunist crusade. According to Rothstein, “Cohn’s job was to run the little boys. Say you had an admiral, a general, a congressman, who did not want to go along with the program. Cohn’s job was to set them up, then they would go along. Cohn told me that himself.”[67]

Peace Through Strength 

Despite his retirement in 1979, controversy continued to follow Shackley over his alleged involvement in great scandals of the Reagan era, including October Surprise, and later the Iran-Contra affair of the mid-1980s.[68] Reagan was a long-time member of the ASC before his election to the presidency.[69] Two prominent backers of the ASC, oilmen A.C. Rubel and Henry Salvatori, were also part of the trio of Los Angeles millionaires who had launched Reagan into politics after the Goldwater defeat of 1964.[70] Reagan credited the ASC numerous times for providing the overall theme for the administration of his presidency.[71] A co-chairman of the ASC in the 1980s was James Jesus Angleton. In 1976, soon after his forced retirement from the CIA, Angleton set up the Security and Intelligence Fund (SIF). John M. Fisher, founder and long-time president of the ASC, was a founding director of SIF. Other career CIA officers affiliated with the ASC strategy board included Richard Bissell who was deputy CIA director under Allen Dulles, former Deputy Director of the CIA Ray Cline who was co-chairman and member of Shackley’s Secret Team, and Daniel Arnold, a CIA officer apparently deeply involved in the drug trade.

After Jimmy Carter became President in 1977, the ASC began to organize opposition to his plans to ratify the SALT II treaty. For that purpose, the ASC and the ASCF formed the Coalition for Peace Through Strength (CPTS) in 1978, also in order to galvanize a network of right-wing support to defeat the Democratic Party’s nominee in 1980. John Singlaub was Chairman of the CPTS, which, as detailed by Russ Bellant in Old Nazis, the New Right and the Republican Party, had links to Le Cercle and also served as a connecting point between Nazi collaborationists, fascists and the Reagan Administration.

Peace Through Strength (1952) was the title of a book about a defense plan by Bernard Baruch, godfather of the Military-Industrial Complex, who was listed among the founders, benefactors and strategists of the ASC.[72] As a presidential candidate Reagan joined the CPTS in 1978, and after his 1980 victory, the ASC was heavily represented on the transition teams and in his new administration. The CPTS favored military superiority over the Soviet Union, in flagrant violation of the SALT II treaty which was under consideration by the Congress at that time. The ASC produced Attack on the Americas! which was aired on 28 stations in the winter of 1980. The film showed urban scenes of violent military conflict with a voice-over talking about the spread of communism and the threat to the U.S. from Cuba and Central America. A second film, made for the CPTS by the ASC, was entitled The SALT Syndrome, which was aired more than 1000 times.[73] The ASC produced a number such films for television promoting new weapons systems, usually funded partly by major defense contractors.[74]

While the CPTS became more involved in elections and lobbying for Reagan Administration priorities, the number of organizations in the Coalition grew from about forty in 1978 to 171 in 1986. An important member of the Coalition was the Republican Heritage Groups Council (RHGC), whose founding chair was Laszlo Pasztor, former member of the Hungarian Arrow Cross and he founding chair of the Republican Heritage Groups Council (RHGC). The vice-chair of the RHGC was Philip A. Guarino, Republican National Committee advisor, and an honorary American member of the infamous P2 Masonic lodge. Both Michelle Sindona and P2’s Gelli were associates of Guarino.[75] Appointed chairperson of RHGC in 1987 was Anna Chennault, the wife of General Claire Chennault, who gained fame in the 1950’s and 60’s as an ardent advocate of Chiang Kai-Shek’s dictatorship on Taiwan, and later for conspiring with Henry Kissinger to sabotage the 1968 peace talks to end the Vietnam War and ensure Nixon’s election. She was also a member of the China Lobby, which for years has been closely linked to the authoritarian Taiwan regime.

The activities of RHGC head Karol Sitko’s were conducted in concert with the ABN, which served as a common milieu in which many CPTS members associated and networked.[76] When Yaroslav Stetsko, a prominent figure in the OUN who headed the ABN, visited the White House in 1983, his wife Slava Stetsko, who lived in Munich, West Germany, called on the ABN to support Reagan’s re-election. She repeated the call to ABN chapters during 1984 as well. The Reagan campaign cooperated with ABN, including scheduling an appearance by RHGC chairman Michael Sotirhos, head of Ethnic Voters for Reagan-Bush Campaign 1984 as well as the RHGC, at the 1984 ABN conference in New York City. Sotirhos said in an interview that “The Council was the linchpin of the Reagan-Bush ethnic campaign… The decision to use the Republican Heritage Groups was made at a campaign strategy meeting that included Paul Laxalt, Frank Fahrenkopf, Ed Rollins, and others.”[77]

Reagan regarded his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), also popularly known as the “Star Wars” program, a key project of the ASC as a cornerstone of his Peace through Strength strategy.[78] SDI resulted from the efforts Le Cercle contact, retired Lt. Gen. Daniel O. Graham, who was Co-Chairman of the CPTS. A Knight of Malta, Graham was also a member of the ASC, and a close associate of John Singlaub, as well as a member of the Heritage Foundation. Graham was previously Deputy Director of the CIA under William Colby from 1973-1974, and then Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency DIA in 1974-76.[79] Graham was also Vice-President of the American branch of WACL and held posts on honorary committees of the America Friends of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations.[80] In 1976, a year after the foundation of the US Committee of the ISC (USCISC), Bush asked Richard Pipes to work on the staff of Team B Graham.[81]

In March 1982, Graham and Heritage Foundation President Ed Feulner outlined the results of a study that urged the Reagan administration to adopt an all-out effort to develop both military and peaceful uses of space. On 23 March 1983, Reagan announced SDI in a nationally televised speech. In 1984, the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) was established to oversee the program. As Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert Gould explained, SDI was: “…the central military goal of the right-wing movement, as expressed by analysts of the Hoover Institution and the Heritage Foundation, strongly conservative members of congress, and right-wing organizations such as the American Security Council. SDI brings together the sometimes feuding strands of the conservative movement: the traditional right, the New Right, the neoconservatives, and the military Right.”[82]

In Washington, Bandera’s OUN had reconstituted under the banner of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA). “You have to understand, we are an underground organization. We have spent years quietly penetrating positions of influence,” one member told Russ Bellant.[83] By the mid-1980’s, the Reagan administration was interwoven with UCCA members, with the group’s chairman Lev Dobriansky.[84] Dobriansky’s daughter Paula served on the NSC and as an assistant director of the defunct US Information Agency during the George H.W. Bush administration. She was also one of the original Signatories to Statement of Principles of the neoconservative PNAC.

Paula’s friend and colleague was Katherine Chumachenko, an American of Ukrainian descent and wife for former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko. Chumachenko had been one of Lev Dobriansky’s students. She was a former Reagan administration official and ex-staffer at the Heritage Foundation.[85] Chumachenko was formerly the director of the UCCA’s Captive Nations Committee and then Deputy Director for Public Liaison at the White House.[86] During the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election campaign, Chumachenko was accused of exerting the influence on her husband’s decisions, as an agent of the US government or even the CIA.[87] In 2010, Yushchenko awarded Stephan Bandera the title of “National Hero of Ukraine.”

Euromaidan

The pro-European Union or Euromaidan protests, which began on the night of November 21, 2013, were Ukraine’s largest since the Orange Revolution of 2004, which saw President Viktor Yanukovych forced to resign. Yanukovych first ran for president in 2004. Although he was initially declared the winner against former Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko, the election was fraught with allegations of electoral fraud and voter intimidation. This caused widespread citizen protests and Kyiv’s Independence Square was occupied in what became known as the Orange Revolution, and Yanukovych lost to Yushchenko in a second election called by the Ukrainian Supreme Court.

Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland had been closely involved with Ukraine during the Orange Revolution. Nuland’s husband is neoconservative Robert Kagan, who is often dubbed the most prominent representative of modern neoconservative thought on US foreign policy.[88] Kagan is a co-founder of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a member of the CFR. Kagan was an adviser to John McCain during his presidential campaign in 2008. Kagan’s book The World America Made disputes the theory that the U.S has declined as a global superpower. Barack Obama quoted from it several times during his address to the nation in 2012.

Nuland enjoyed a friendly meeting with the openly pro-Nazi Svoboda, one of the “Big Three” political parties behind the protests. This is despite the fact that Nuland is descended from immigrant Ukrainian Jewish parents, Meyer and Vitsche Nudelman who moved to New York from the Russian Empire. Nuland started in the State Department in the last years of the Soviet Union and served as US ambassador to NATO during George W. Bush’s presidency and State Department spokeswoman for Hillary Clinton before becoming assistant secretary for Europe under Barak Obama. Nuland was known as one of the most hawkish members of Obama’s team when it came to Russia.[89] At a December 5, 2013 US-Ukraine Foundation Conference, Nuland boasted of the US’s role in supporting the protests in the Ukraine:

Since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, the United States has supported Ukrainians as they build democratic skills and institutions, as they promote civic participation and good governance, all of which are preconditions for Ukraine to achieve its European aspirations. We have invested over $5 billion to assist Ukraine in these and other goals that will ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.[90]

Events following the Orange Revolution were a terrible disappointment to Nuland, especially after Yanukovych returned to power, and she played a central role in his subsequent overthrow in 2014.[91] The Euromaidan protests, which began on the night of November 21, 2013, were sparked when Yanukovych rejected a US-backed Ukraine–European Union Association Agreement in favor of a $15 billion bailout from Russia. The EU trade agreement, an unfair proposal Yanukovich could not accept, was intended to open Ukraine’s economy to European imports, but without a reciprocal opening of EU’s market to Ukraine. As explained in Salon, “The deal was approved by the post-coup government, and has only added to Ukraine's economic woes.”[92]

In a leaked phone conversation with Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador to Ukraine, Nuland revealed her wish for Tyahnybok to remain “on the outside,” but to consult with the US’s replacement for Yanukovich, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, “four times a week.” Yatsenyuk became prime minister of Ukraine on February 27, 2014.  Nuland told Pyatt she had discussed the plan with UN Undersecretary for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman, and that he would appoint a UN representative to help move it forward. Then Vice President Joe Biden would also be brought into the plan at the right time, according to Nuland. “That would be great to help glue this thing and to have the U.N. help glue it,” was recorded saying. “And you know, fuck the EU.”[93]

To oppose Yanukovich, the State Department mobilized neo-Nazis and extreme right-wing forces, led by the Right Sector militia, who marched on and invaded the parliament building.[94] The ultra-nationalists and the extreme right were a small part of the overall campaign, but at times they have appeared to be the driving force behind the Maidan.[95] Protesters repeated the cry, “Hail Ukraine! Hail the heroes!” taken from the UPA, one of the two organizations founded by Nazi-collaborationist Stephan Bandera. Pro-Russian activists claimed “Those people in Kiev are Bandera-following Nazi collaborators.”[96]

On January 1, 2014, Bandera’s 105th birthday was celebrated by a torchlight procession of 15,000 people in the center of Kiev and thousands more rallied near his statue in Lviv. The march was supported by Svoboda, whose leader, Oleh Tyahnybok, had called for the liberation of his country from the “Muscovite-Jewish mafia.”[97] Svoboda is linked to an international network of neo-fascist parties through the Alliance of European National Movements. The alliance’s founding members were Jobbik, France’s National Front, Italy’s Tricolour Flame, Sweden’s National Democrats, and Belgium’s National Front. At the end of 2011, Marine Le Pen, the new French National Front leader, resigned from the AENM and joined the EAF (European Alliance for Freedom). Nick Griffin of the BNP was its Vice President. Svoboda’s openly anti-Semitic politics did not prevent Senator John McCain from addressing a EuroMaidan rally alongside Tyahnybok.

The scope of the protests soon widened, with calls for the resignation of Yanukovych and his government. As a result, Yanukovych was forced to make concessions to the opposition to end the bloodshed in Kiev and end the crisis. The Agreement on settlement of political crisis in Ukraine was signed by key leaders of the Euromaidan, Vitaly Klitschko, Arseny Yatsenyuk and Tyahnybok, the leader of Svoboda. The signing was witnessed by the Foreign Ministers of Germany and Poland, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Radosław Sikorski, respectively, and the Director of the Continental Europe Department of the French Foreign Ministry, Eric Fournier. Vladimir Lukin, representing Russia, refused to sign the agreement.

The protests led to the 2014 Ukrainian revolution, when Yanukovych and many other high government officials fled the country. Protesters gained control of the presidential administration and Yanukovych’s private estate. Afterwards, the parliament removed Yanukovych from office, replaced the government with a pro-European one, and ordered that former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko be released from prison. On March 17, 2014, the day after the Crimean status referendum, Yanukovych became one of the first eleven persons who were placed under executive sanctions by President Obama.

New presidential elections were scheduled to take place on May 25, 2014, which were won by billionaire businessman and opposition leader Petro Poroshenko. In an interview with the Washington Post, Poroshenko boasted: “From the beginning, I was one of the organizers of the Maidan. My television channel—Channel 5—played a tremendously important role… On the 11th of December, when we had Victoria Nuland and Catherine Ashton [E.U. diplomat] in Kyiv, during the night they started to storm the Maidan.”[98] Poroshenko signed the economic part of the Ukraine–European Union Association Agreement on June 27, 2014, and described this as Ukraine’s “first but most decisive step” towards EU membership.[99]

Postmodern Democracy

The ousting of Yanukovych sparked a political crisis in Crimea, which initially manifested as demonstrations against the new interim Ukrainian government. Events rapidly escalated, which led to the installation of the pro-Russian Aksyonov government in Crimea, conducting the Crimean status referendum and the declaration of Crimea’s independence on March 16, 2014. The Ukrainian territory of Crimea was annexed by the Russian Federation on March 18, 2014, and the peninsula is now administered as two Russian federal subjects, the Republic of Crimea and the federal city of Sevastopol. Putin welcomed the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation by declaring that he “was saving them from the new Ukrainian leaders who are the ideological heirs of Bandera, Hitler’s accomplice during World War II.”[100]

In the last several years, Russia has demonstrated a return to an assertive foreign policy through successful military interventions in Ukraine and Syria. In the Kremlin, Alexander Dugin, represents the “war party,” a division within the leadership over Ukraine. Known as “Putin’s Rasputin,” is an occultist influenced by Aleister Crowley, and the traditions of Nazism and synarchism, and aims to create an “Empire of the End Times.” He considered the war between Russia and Ukraine to be inevitable and appealed for Putin to start military intervention in the eastern part of the country. “Ukraine as an independent state with certain territorial ambitions,” he warns in The Foundations of Geopolitics, “represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia and, without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics.”[101]

It was due to Vladislav Surkov that several of Dugin’s political projects got off the ground.[102] During Putin’s first two terms as president, Surkov was regarded as the Kremlin’s “grey cardinal,” and having directed its propaganda principally through control of state run television.[103] Peter Pomerantsev, a vocal critic of Surkov and his influence on Putin, accuses Surkov of turning Russia into a “managed democracy,” and along with another critic, Pavel Khodorkovsky, termed Russia a “postmodern dictatorship.”[104]

Ned Reskinoff of ThinkProgress, and Adam Curtis in his BBC documentary HyperNormalisation, have claimed that the unique blend of politics and reality devised by Surkov, whose previous career was as a director in avant-garde theater, has begun to affect countries outside of Russia, most notably the election of Donald Trump.[105] Curtis credits Surkov for devising a blend of theater and politics to keep Putin, and Putin’s chosen successors, in power since 2000. Surkov sponsored all kinds of groups, from neo-Nazi skinheads to liberal human rights groups, and even backed parties that were opposed to President Putin. But Surkov would the let it be known that this was what he was doing. At the same time Surkov writes lyrics for a rock group called Agata Kristi and essays on conceptual art.[106] According to Pomerantsev, in an editorial for the London Review of Books quoted by Curtis:

In contemporary Russia, unlike the old USSR or present-day North Korea, the stage is constantly changing: the country is a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime, while, backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away. Surkov is at the centre of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one moment, backing human rights groups the next. It’s a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it’s indefinable.

Surkov’s strategy is one he refers to as non-linear war, whose underlying aim, according to Surkov, is not to win the war, but to use the conflict to create a constant state of destabilized perception, in order to manage and control it.[107] In October 2016, Ukrainian hacker group CyberHunta leaked emails and other documents alleged to belong to Vladislav Surkov, which show a direct Russian role in creating and directing the rebel uprising in eastern Ukraine in 2014. In 2011, then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had reassigned Surkov to the role of Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Modernisation. On 20 September 2013, after he resigned from his position under Medvedev, Putin appointed Surkov as his Aide in the Presidential Executive Office, who became Putin’s personal adviser on relationships with Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Ukraine. On 17 March 2014, the day after the Crimean status referendum, Surkov became one of the first eleven persons who were placed under executive sanctions on the Obama administration.

Dugin is seen to have been the author of Putin’s annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in early 2014.[108] According to Jolanta Darczewska, “The Crimean operation has served as an occasion for Russia to demonstrate to the entire world the capabilities and the potential of information warfare.”[109] The annexation was Russia’s response to the Euromaidan Revolution, a wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Ukraine, which began on the night of November 21, 2013, in Kiev. The protests were sparked by the Ukrainian government’s decision to suspend the signing of an association agreement with the European Union, instead choosing closer ties to Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union. The Russians justified their actions by claiming correctly that the West had backed neo-Nazi elements inside the Ukraine.

In August 2014, Dugin called for a “genocide” of Ukrainians.[110] During the conflict, Dugin also lost his post as Head of the Department of Sociology of International Relations of Moscow State University in 2014, as the result of a petition signed by over 10,000 people. The petition was started after Dugin in an interview expressed his opinion on how to deal with Ukrainians: “To kill, kill, kill. There should be no more conversations. As a professor, I think so.”[111]

On January 15, 2016, Nuland held a closed-door meeting with Surkov. “That it was Surkov, and not [Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory] Karasin—Nuland’s counterpart—is very significant,” said foreign affairs expert Vladimir Frolov.[112] Though he has allegedly been responsible for managing Russia’s Ukraine policy, Surkov had not officially taken part in any prior high-level negotiations with the United States. Both the US State Department and the Russian Foreign Ministry revealed little about the substance of the meeting. Surkov told reporters that the meeting was essentially a “brainstorming” session. State Department spokesman John Kirby said that the two discussed “the situation in eastern Ukraine and the need for a full implementation of the Minsk agreements,” and designed to support ongoing international negotiations to bring the crisis to a close. Kirby said after the meeting on Friday that “[Surkov] is the appropriate person in [the Russian] government [with whom] to have this discussion about Minsk implementation.”[113]

Order of Nine Angels (O9A)

Dugin is also an associate of Kerry Bolton, international distributor for David Myatt’s fascist Satanist Order of Nine Angles (O9A), whose ideology is linked to the neo-Nazis in Ukraine.[114] According to Connell Monette, the O9A may include as many as two thousand members, making it the largest Satanist organization in the world.[115] The O9A surfaced around 1970, when “Anton Long,” according to his own account, was initiated into a Wiccan coven and later became its leader, transforming it into a Satanist movement. Long was the pseudonym of the British neo-Nazi activist David Myatt. At the age of sixteen, Myatt made contact with a coven and later joined secret groups in London practicing the magic of the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley. In 1968, he joined the British Movement (BM), a member organization of WUNS. Later called the British National Socialist Movement (BNSM), BM was started by WUNS co-founder Colin Jordan, for whom Myatt became a bodyguard. Myatt was impressed by Jordan’s writings on National Socialism and was also introduced by Jordan to the writings of Savitri Devi.[116]

From the 1970s until the 1990s, he was involved with paramilitary and neo-Nazi organizations such as Column 88 and Combat 18. Column 88 was founded by former Major Ian Souter Clarence, with the help of the Security Services.[117] As the eighth letter of the alphabet is 8, 88 stands a code for “Heil Hitler.” The origins of Column 88 have been dated to as early as 1945. Gerry Gable has claimed that Colin Jordan was initiated into this secret society at the age of nineteen.[118] According to at least two reports, Column 88, was connected Gladio. According to one of the reports, Clarence “helped set up Column 88 in the 1960s as the British section of Gladio.”[119] Column 88 also had links to the League of St. George, was formed around 1974 as a political club by Odinist Keith Thompson and Mike Griffin as a breakaway from the Action Party, founded by Oswald Mosley. Adopting the emblem of the Arrow Cross, the League sought to forge links with like-minded groups in Europe, like the Vlaamse Militanten Orde in Belgium, and the National States' Rights Party (NSRP) in the United States.[120] According to Clive Bloom, Clarence’s German connections also linked him to Palestinian terrorists in Lebanon and subsequent attacks in West Germany which included the Munich Oktoberfest bombing of the 1980.[121]

It has been reported that the O9A is linked to a number of high-profile figures from the far right and shares members with neo-Nazi terrorist groups who draw a significant amount of influences from American Nazi Party member James Mason’s newsletter Siege, a mid-1980s newsletter of the National Socialist Liberation Front. In 1968, when he was 16, Mason planned to murder the principal and other staff members at his high school, but following the advice of William Luther Pierce, he quit school and began working at the American Nazi Party’s headquarters in Virginia. After the assassination of George Lincoln Rockwell in 1967, Mason aligned himself with the National Socialist White People’s Party and Joseph Tommasi’s National Socialist Liberation Front (NSLF). The name was originally used by the NSWPP’s college student group, whose most well-known member was David Duke. Tommasi frequently found himself at odds with Rockwell’s successor, Matt Koehl, the leader of World Union of National Socialists (WUNS). Koehl objected to Tommasi’s radical viewpoints, as well as his personal habits, which included smoking marijuana, wearing long hair. These led to Tommasi being ejected from the NSWPP in 1973.[122]

In 1982, along with Charles Manson, Mason founded Universal Order, an organization that encouraged terror with notoriety, similar to that achieved by the Manson Family.[123] Siege became the official publication of this new group, which paid tribute to Adolf Hitler, Joseph Tommasi, Charles Manson, and Savitri Devi.[124] In the pages of Siege, Mason argued for sabotage, mass killings, and assassinations of high-profile targets to destabilize and destroy the current society, seen as a system upholding a Jewish and multicultural New World Order. Mason also started cheering on armed attacks by Communists, as well as black and other revolutionary racial nationalists, which were common in the 1970s and 1980s.[125]

Accelerationism

Right-wing extremists and Neo-Nazis have been known to refer to an “acceleration” of racial conflict through violent means such as assassinations, murders, terrorist attacks, and societal collapse, in order to achieve the creation of a white ethnic state.[126] The inspiration for this racist variation of accelerationism is cited as American Nazi Party and National Socialist Liberation Front member and Charles Manson associate James Mason’s newsletter Siege.[127] The hashtag #ReadSiege became popular on “alt-right” social media, especially as groups and influencers connected with the Neo-fascist and Neo-Nazi web forum Iron March promoted the text.[128]

Mason’s works were republished and popularized by the Iron March forum and its offshoot Atomwaffen Division, which has links to the O9A.[129] Iron March, was the primary organizational platform for a transnational neo-fascist accelerationist terrorist network whose ideology is based in large part on Evola.[130] Iron March began as the “International Third Positionist Federation” (ITPF) in 2010.[131] The forum was founded Alexander Slavros, an Uzbek immigrant to Russia whose real name is Alisher Mukhitdinov, who is similarly thought to be living in a district “close to the Kremlin.”[132] Slavros claimed in a direct message on Iron March that Alexander Dugin had once recruited him for the Global Revolutionary Alliance (GRA), which espouses an apocalyptic vision that humanity is at the verge of an end to “capitalism, resources, society, nations, peoples, knowledge, progress,” which it blames on the “global Western-centric world” and “the ruling class of globalism.”[133]

The Atomwaffen Division (Atomwaffen meaning “nuclear weapons” in German), also known as the National Socialist Order, is an international right-wing extremist and Neo-Nazi terrorist network. Formed in 2015 and based in the Southern United States, it has since expanded across the country as well as into the UK, Canada, Germany, the Baltic states, and other European countries. It is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and it is also designated as a terrorist group by multiple governments, including the UK and Canada.

Members of Atomwaffen, as well as many other similar groups, became interested in the Base, founded by Rinaldo Nazzaro, who described himself as a “former CIA field intelligence officer.”[134] Reports have revealed that Nazzaro is an American who moved to Russia from New York in the late 2010s, and that he was once contracted with the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense and U.S. Special Forces.[135] The BBC reported that Nazzaro was an FBI analyst and a Pentagon contractor.[136] Vice News learned that Nazzaro was a Pentagon contractor who worked with Special Operations Command (SOCOM), among a group that briefed special forces officers on military targeting and counterterrorism efforts in the Middle East in 2014. “[I did] multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan over five years,” Nazzaro said in 2019.[137] However, according to US law enforcement and intelligence sources, Nazzaro is “working for Russia and operation a violent neo-Nazi, white supremacist organization directing violent terror attacks on US soil from St. Petersburg, Russia.”[138]

Alt-right personality Matthew Heimbach, another admirer of Dugin, used the Iron March forums to recruit for the Traditionalist Workers Party, which participated in the Unite the Right rally.[139] Prior to its shutdown in 2017, Iron March been linked to several acts of Neo-Nazi terrorism and violent militant groups such as the Nordic Resistance Movement, National Action, Azov Battalion, CasaPound, and Greece’s Golden Dawn, which has connections with Dugin. In addition to Azov, Atomwaffen has ties to O9A. Atomwaffen distributes the magazine Musta Kivi and sells the books of O9A and Kerry Bolton. Atomwaffen Division Finland “Siitoin Squadron” (AWDSS) was formed after the Finnish government banned the Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM) in 2019, following members of the underground group embracing accelerationism and occultism.[140] Representatives of the Suomen Vastarintaliike (“Finnish Resistance Movement”), the Finnish branch of the NRM, visited James Mason in the United States in 2019.[141]

Iron March forum and Atomwaffen Division, which since 2017 has been linked to eight killings in the US and several violent hate crimes, including assaults, rapes and multiple cases of kidnapping and torture.[142]  The network’s transition from activism to terrorism,” explains H.E. Upchurche, “was facilitated by the introduction of violent ritualistic initiation practiced derived from the writings of the Order of Nine Angles, which helped to habituate members to violence as well as to create a sense of shared membership in a militant elite.”[143] Since the 2010s, the political ideology and religious worldview of the Order of Nine Angles (O9A), have increasingly influenced militant Neo-fascist and Neo-Nazi insurgent groups associated with right-wing extremist and White supremacist international networks, most notably the Iron March forum.[144]

The O9A encourages its members to adopt “insight roles” in anarchist, neo-Nazi, and Islamist groups in order to disrupt modern Western society.[145] According to Upchurch, it was most likely through the influence of Ryan Fleming that Iron March was introduced to the O9A ideology. Fleming subsequently went on to become a member of National Action. In early 2021, Fleming, who had previously been convicted of the sexual abuse of children, was jailed for unsupervised contact with children.[146] Atomwaffen Division was closely associated with the American O9A affiliate Tempel ov Blood. National Action was linked to the O9A affiliate Drakon Covenant in the UK. Antipodean Resistance in Australia was involved with Kerry Bolton’s Black Order and the Temple of THEM. From 2010 to 2019, Haakon Forwald, head of the Norwegian branch of Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM), was a devotee of a Scandinavian O9A current known variously as the Misanthropic Luciferian Order, the Temple of Black Light, and Current.[147]

The Iron March chat logs subsequently published by ProPublica revealed that there are around twenty Atomwaffen cells across the United States, and they also show members praising Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof, and Norwegian mass murderer and white supremacist Anders Behring Breivik.[148] Brenton Harrison Tarrant, the perpetrator of the Christchurch mosque massacre that killed 51 people and injured 49 others during Friday Prayer on March 15, 2019, embraced right-wing accelerationism in a section of his manifesto titled “Destabilization and Accelerationism: tactics.” Tarrant claims to have been the author of a 74-page manifesto titled The Great Replacement, a reference to the “Great Replacement” and “white genocide” conspiracy theories. Inspired by Tarrant and similar accelerationist ideas, John Timothy Earnest was responsible for the Escondido mosque fire at Dar-ul-Arqam Mosque in Escondido, California, in March 2019. On April 27, before being identified as a suspect, Earnest entered the nearby Chabad of Poway synagogue and opened fire, killing one and injuring three others. “I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto,” Crusius wrote before committing the El Paso Walmart shooting that killed 23 people and injured 23 others. “The Hispanic community was not my target before I read The Great Replacement.”[149]

Azov Battalion

In mid-February 2022, as tensions mounted between the US and Russia over Ukraine, Western media, including the BBC, MSNBC and ABC News, widely publicized images of Valentyna Konstantynovska, a 79-year-old Ukrainian learning to handle an AK-47, endearingly described as “a granny with a gun,” without noting that her training was conducted by the right-wing extremist and neo-Nazi militia, Azov Battalion.[150] As early as 2015, Congress passed a spending bill that devoted hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of economic and military support for Ukraine, which was specifically modified to allow that support to flow to the Azov Regiment.[151] Azov Battalion was formed in 2014 during the Odessa clashes, and saw its first combat experience recapturing Mariupol from pro-Russian separatists forces. Azov was then incorporated into the National Guard of Ukraine, part of the armed forces that the US has now given $2.5 billion, to assist with fighting against pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.[152] That is despite the fact that Azov’s former commander once said the “historic mission” of Ukraine is to “lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival” in “a crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”[153]

As reported by John Pilger in The Guardian, “Like the ruins of Iraq and Afghanistan, Ukraine has been turned into a CIA theme park – run personally by CIA director John Brennan in Kiev, with dozens of ‘special units’ from the CIA and FBI setting up a ‘security structure’ that oversees savage attacks on those who opposed the February coup.”[154] According to a recent Yahoo! News report, since 2015, according to five former intelligence and national security officials familiar with the operation, the CIA is overseeing a secret intensive training program at an undisclosed facility in the Southern United States for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel. The covert program, run by paramilitaries working for the CIA’s Ground Branch—now officially known as Ground Department—was established by the Obama administration after Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, and expanded under the Trump administration, and has been further augmented by the Biden administration.[155]

In a recent UN vote on “combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism,” the only two countries to vote no were the US and Ukraine.[156] US arms have flowed to Azov, they have been pictured meeting with NATO and US military officials, and members of the militia have talked about their collaboration with American trainers.[157] In 2015, The Daily Beast published an interview by the journalists Will Cathcart and Joseph Epstein in which a member of the Azov battalion spoke about “his battalion’s experience with U.S. trainers and U.S. volunteers quite fondly, even mentioning U.S. volunteers engineers and medics that are still currently assisting them.”[158]

A 2018 FBI affidavit asserted that Azov “is believed to have participated in training and radicalizing United States–based white supremacy organizations.” These include members of the white supremacist Rise Above Movement (RAM) of Southern California, prosecuted for planned assaults on counterprotesters at far-right events, including the alt-right’s Unite the Right rally Charlottesville.[159] Although the perpetrator of the Christchurch mosque massacre might not have traveled to Ukraine as he claimed, he nevertheless took inspiration from the far-right movement there, and wore a symbol used by Azov members while carrying out the attack.[160]

Politico reported that the foreign infiltration of the American white supremacist movement is especially concerning to a number of law enforcement experts who say the Biden administration is failing to utilize the most powerful tool at its disposal to enable law enforcement to monitor such groups more closely: foreign white supremacist groups can be designated as foreign terrorist organizations, and providing “material support” which is designated as a federal crime.[161] January 5, 2021, it was reported that Biden would nominate Victoria Nuland to serve as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs under Secretary-designate Antony Blinken, a former NSC official who was influential in formulating the Obama administration’s response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.[162]

[1] “Biden to tap more Obama vets to fill key national security roles.” Politico. Retrieved from https://www.salon.com/2021/01/19/who-is-victoria-nuland-a-really-bad-idea-as-a-key-player-in-bidens-foreign-policy-team/

[2] Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J.S. Davies & Marcy Winograd. “That would be great to help glue this thing and to have the U.N. help glue it,” she said. “And you know, fuck the EU.” Salon (January 19, 2021). Retrieved from https://www.salon.com/2021/01/19/who-is-victoria-nuland-a-really-bad-idea-as-a-key-player-in-bidens-foreign-policy-team/

[3] “Victoria Nuland.” Brookings Institution. Retrieved from https://www.brookings.edu/author/victoria-nuland/

[4] Orysia Lutsevych. “Agents of the Russian World Proxy Groups in the Contested Neighbourhood.” Russia and Eurasia Programme (Chatham House, April 2016).

[5] David Ignatius. “Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups.” The Washington Post (September 22, 1991). Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1991/09/22/innocence-abroad-the-new-world-of-spyless-coups/92bb989a-de6e-4bb8-99b9-462c76b59a16/

[6] Ronald R. Krebs & James Ron. “Democracies Need a Little Help From Their Friends.” Foreign Policy (June 7, 2018); Robert W. Merry. “Why Do Some Foreign Countries Hate American NGOs So Much?” The Atlantic (April 2, 2012).

[7] Robert W. Merry. “Why Do Some Foreign Countries Hate American NGOs So Much?” The Atlantic (April 2, 2012).

[8] Robert W. Merry. “Why Do Some Foreign Countries Hate American NGOs So Much?” The Atlantic (April 2, 2012).

[9] Ibid.

[10] Andrew Wilson. “Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, NGOs and the Role of the West.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs. 19(1), March 2006.

[11] Robert Pee. “Political Warfare Old and New: The State and Private Groups in the Formation of the National Endowment for Democracy.” 49th Parallel: Myth & Legacy, Issue 22, Autumn 2008.

[12] Kerric Harvey. Encyclopedia of Social Media and Politics (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2013).

[13] Nicolas Guilhot. “A network of influential friendships: The foundation pour une entraide intellectuelle europeenne and east-west culturial dialogue.” Minerva, 44 (2006), pp. 379-409.

[14] Nicolas Guilhot. “Reforming the World: George Soros, Global Capitalism and the Philanthropic Management of the Social Sciences.” Critical Sociology. 33, 3 (May 2007), pp. 447–477. doi:10.1163/156916307X188988.

[15] Evgenii Mikolaichuk, ‘Amerikanskie den’gi na ukrainskoi krovi’ [American money on Ukrainian blood], Vremia.ua (February 1, 2014). Retrieved from

http://vremia.ua/rubrics/zakulisa/5321.php.

[16] See Rukspert statistics, ‘Podderzhka Evromaidana amerikantsami’ [American support of Euromaidan]. Retrieved from

http://ruxpert.ru/Поддержка_Евромайдана_американцами; Cited in Orysia Lutsevych. “Agents of the Russian World Proxy Groups in the Contested Neighbourhood.” Russia and Eurasia Programme (Chatham House, April 2016).

[17] David Livingstone. Ordo ab Chao. Volume Three, Chapter 22: The Cold War.

[18] David Livingstone. Ordo ab Chao. Volume Four, Chapter 6: The Fascist International.

[19] David Livingstone. Ordo ab Chao. Volume Four, Chapter 23: Operation Gladio.

[20] Fernando López. The Feathers of Condor: Transnational State Terrorism, Exiles and Civilian Anticommunism in South America (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), p. 309.

[21] A. E.Kahn & M. Sayers. The Great Conspiracy: The Secret War Against Soviet Russia. 1st ed (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1946).

[22] David Livingstone. Ordo ab Chao, Volume Four, Chapter 7: Red Scare.

[23] Bob Fitrakis. “Reverend Moon: Cult leader, CIA asset, and Bush family friend is dead.” Free Press (September 4, 2102).

[24] Bellant. Old Nazis, the New Right and the Republican Party, p. 71.

[25] І.К. Патриляк. Військова діяльність ОУН(Б) у 1940—1942 роках. – Університет імені Шевченко \Ін-т історії України НАН України Київ, (2004).

[26] Christine Kulke. “Lwów.” In Geoffrey P. Megargee (ed.). Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945. Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe. II, part A (The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2012), p. 802.

[27] Ilyushyn I.I. Dzyobak & I.K. Patrylyak et al. та інші Організація українських націоналістів і Українська повстанська армія (“The Organization of the Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army”). Institute of History of Ukraine (Kiev: National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, 2004), p. 63.

[28] John-Paul Himka. “The Lviv Pogrom of 1941: The Germans, Ukrainian Nationalists, and the Carnival Crowd.” Canadian Slavonic Papers. 53, 2–4 (2011), pp. 209–243.

[29] Statiev Alexander. The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands (Cambridge University Press, 2010) p. 69.

[30] Mikhail Baranovskiy & Dmitry Mintz. Tango of Death. a True Story of Holocaust Survivors: Historical Book for Adults and Teens (Independently Published, 2020).

[31] D.Vyedeneyev; O. Lysenko (2009). “Завдання підривної діяльності проти Червоної армії обговорювалося на нараді під Берліном у квітні того ж року (1944) між керівником таємних операцій вермахту О.Скорцені й лідерами українських націоналістів С.бандерою та Я.Стецьком».” Ukrainian Historical Magazine. 3: 137.

[32] Per Anders Rudling. “The Return of the Ukrainian Far Right: The Case of VO Svoboda.” Wodak and Richardson. Analysing Fascist Discourse: European Fascism in Talk and Text (New York: Routledge, 2013). pp. 229–35.

[33] Paul H. Rosenberg and Foreign Policy In Focus. “Seven Decades of Nazi Collaboration: America’s Dirty Little Ukraine Secret.” The Nation (March 28, 2014).

[34] Audrey Panevin. “America’s Dark History of Supporting Ukrainian Fascists and War Criminals.” Slavyangrad.org (Aug 10, 2015). Retrieved from https://slavyangrad.org/2015/08/10/americas-dark-history-of-supporting-ukrainian-fascists-and-war-criminals/

[35] Christopher Simpson. Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Destructive Impact on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), p. 163.

[36] Ibid., p. 166.

[37] Audrey Panevin. “America’s Dark History of Supporting Ukrainian Fascists and War Criminals.” Slavyangrad.org (Aug 10, 2015). Retrieved from https://slavyangrad.org/2015/08/10/americas-dark-history-of-supporting-ukrainian-fascists-and-war-criminals/

[38] Cristian Salazar & Randy Herschaft. “Revealed: How the CIA protected Nazi murderers.” The Independent (December 12, 2010).

[39] John Simkin. “American Security Council.” Spartacus Educational. Retrieved from https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKamericansc.htm

[40] Bellant. The Coors Connection, p. xviii.

[41] Martin A. Lee. The Beast Reawakens, (London: Warner Books, 1998), p. 314; Tamir Bar-On. Where Have All The Fascists Gone? (Routledge, 2016), p. 303.

[42] Bellant. The Coors Connection, p. 2.

[43] Ibid., p. 2.

[44] Bellant. Old Nazis, the New Right and the Republican Party, p. 75.

[45] Ibid., p. 73.

[46] Ibid., p. 6.

[47] Ibid., p. 3.

[48] Ibid., p. 11.

[49] Marshall, Dale Scott & Hunter. The Iran-Contra Connection, p. 49.

[50] Christie. Stefano Delle Chiaie, p. 42.

[51] Bellant. Old Nazis, the New Right and the Republican Party, p. 45.

[52] David Miller. The JFK Conspiracy (iUniverse, 2002), p. 40.

[53] Brussell. “The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination.”

[54] Peter Dale Scott. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (University of California Press, 1993), p. 216.

[55] Wayne Madsen. “Ukraine and Latin America: Same neocon cabal behind political disruption.” Intrepid Report (March 24, 2014).

[56] Yeadon & Hawkins. Nazi Hydra in America, p. 161.

[57] “Knights of Darkness: The Sovereign Military Order of Malta,” Covert Action Bulletin (Winter 1986) Number 25.

[58] “Western Goals Foundation,” Interhemispheric Resource Center: GroupWatch Profiles (January 02, 1989) [http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/articles/display/Western_Goals_Foundation]

[59] Peter Jesserer Smith. “Catholics Bid Farewell to Pro-Life Lion Howard Phillips.” National Catholic Register (May 6, 2013).

[60] Bellant. The Coors Connection, p. 50.

[61] Jim Hougan. Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA (New York: Random House, 1984). p. 120.

[62] Trento. Prelude to Terror, p. 172.

[63] “The Qaddafi connection.” New York Times (June 14, 1981).

[64] Trento. Prelude to Terror, p. 226.

[65] Peter Dale Scott. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (University of California Press, 1996) p. 238.

[66] DeCamp. The Franklin Coverup, p. 179.

[67] John de Camp. “The Franklin Coverup,” (AWT, Inc, 1996) p. 179.

[68] Peter Dale Scott. “How a Deep State Plot Sank Jimmy Carter.” Who What Why (November 2, 2014).

[69] Lee Norrgard & Joe Rosenbloom III. “The Cold Warriors,” Common Cause Magazine, Jul/Aug 1985; “American Security Council.” Right Web (accessed January 24, 2004).

[70] Marshall, Dale Scott & Hunter. The Iran-Contra Connection, p. 61.

[71] Ronald Reagan. Peace Through Strength Campaign Commercial 1980.

[72] Paul Gottfried. “Consensus Historian.”

[73] Amanda Spake. “Time To Talk Back To Your TV Set,” Mother Jones, (June 1981).

[74] Lee Norrgard & Joe Rosenbloom III, “The Cold Warriors,” Common Cause Magazine, (Jul/Aug 1985).

[75] Bellant. The Coors Connection, pp. 16-17.

[76] Bellant. Old Nazis, the New Right and the Republican Party, p. 45.

[77] Ibid., p. 24.

[78] Lee Edwards. “How Star Wars Went from Fantasy to Fact.” Newsweek (December 19, 2015).

[79] Teacher. Rogue Agents.

[80] Ibid., pp. 472-475.

[81] Ibid., p. 100.

[82] Thomas Bodenheimer & Robert Gould. Rollback!: Right-wing Power in U.S. Foreign Policy (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1989), p. 135.

[83] Bellant. Old Nazis, the New Right and the Republican Party, p. 69.

[84] Peter Dale Scott. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (University of California Press, 1993), p. 216.

[85] Bruce Bartlett. “The Other Election.” National Review (October 27, 2004).

[86] Bellant. Old Nazis, the New Right and the Republican Party, p. 77.

[87] Mark Rachkevych. “Even as private citizen, Kateryna Yushchenko finds criticism remains.” KyivPost (May 6, 2010).

[88] Alexander Gabuyev. “Eastern Roots For Western Duo Staring Down Moscow.” Kommersant (March 9, 2014).

[89] Hannah Levintova. “Russian Activist Alleges New Link Between the Kremlin and Paul Manafort.” Mother Jones (February 8, 2018).

[90] Max Blumenthal. “Is the US backing neo-Nazis in Ukraine?” Salon (February 25, 2014).

[91] Alexander Gabuyev. “Eastern Roots For Western Duo Staring Down Moscow.” Kommersant (March 9, 2014).

[92] Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J.S. Davies & Marcy Winograd. “That would be great to help glue this thing and to have the U.N. help glue it,” she said. “And you know, fuck the EU.” Salon (January 19, 2021). Retrieved from https://www.salon.com/2021/01/19/who-is-victoria-nuland-a-really-bad-idea-as-a-key-player-in-bidens-foreign-policy-team/

[93] Josh Rogin. “State Dept Official Caught on Tape: ‘Fuck the EU’.” The Daily Beast (February 6, 2014). Retrieved from https://www.thedailybeast.com/state-dept-official-caught-on-tape-fuck-the-eu

[94] Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J.S. Davies & Marcy Winograd. “That would be great to help glue this thing and to have the U.N. help glue it,” she said. “And you know, fuck the EU.” Salon (January 19, 2021). Retrieved from https://www.salon.com/2021/01/19/who-is-victoria-nuland-a-really-bad-idea-as-a-key-player-in-bidens-foreign-policy-team/

[95] “Ukraine’s revolution and the far right.” BBC (March 7, 2014).

[96] “A ghost of World War II history haunts Ukraine’s standoff with Russia.” Washington Post (25 March 2014)

[97] Blumenthal. “Is the US backing neo-Nazis in Ukraine?”

[98] Lally Weymouth. “Interview with Ukrainian presidential candidate Petro Poroshenko.” Washington Post (April 25, 2014). Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interview-with-ukrainian-presidential-candidate-petro-poroshenko/2014/04/25/74c73a48-cbbd-11e3-93eb-6c0037dde2ad_story.html

[99] “Ukraine ratifies EU association agreement.” Deutsche Welle (November 16, 2014). Retrieved from http://www.dw.de/ukraine-ratifies-eu-association-agreement/a-17925681

[100] “Ukraine’s revolution and the far right.” BBC (March 7, 2014).

[101] Aleksandr Dugin. Osnovy geopolitiki: Geopoliticheskoe budushchee Rossii (Moscow: Arktogeya, 1997), p. 348.

[102] Charles Clover. Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism (Yale University Press, 2016).

[103] Anna Nemtsova. “Eli Lake: Is This the Mastermind Behind Russia’s Crimea Grab?” The Daily Beast (March 19, 2014).

[104] “Russia: A Postmodern Dictatorship? With Pavel Khodorkovsky & Peter Pomerantsev.” Legatum Institute, (October 14, 2013).

[105] Charles Clover in Moscow. “Kremlin loses its need for a ‘grey cardinal’” Financial Times (May 13, 2013).

[106] Adam Curtis. “The Years of Stagnation and the Poodles of Power.” BBC.co.uk (January 18, 2012).

[107] Tim Hains. “BBC’s Adam Curtis On The “Contradictory Vaudeville” Of Post-Modern Politics.” RealClear Politics (December 31, 2014).

[108] Dina Newman. “Russian nationalist thinker Dugin sees war with Ukraine.” BBC News (July 10, 2014).

[109] Jolanta Darczewska. “The Anatomy of Russian Information Warfare: The Crimean Aperation, A Case Study.” Point of View Number 42, (Centre for Eastern Studies: Warsaw, May 2014).

[110] Sam Jones, Kerin Hope & Courtney Weaver. “Alarm bells ring over Syriza’s Russian links”. Financial Times (28 January 2015).

[111] “В России собирают подписи за увольнение профессора МГУ, призвавшего убивать украинцев”. Ukrainian Independent Information Agency. 15 July 2014.

[112] Matthew Bodner. “Russia Pushing for An Endgame in Ukraine.” Moscow Times (January 21, 2016).

[113] Ibid.

[114] Nick Land. “Occult Xenosystems.” Xenosystems (October 11, 2020). Retrieved from http://www.xenosystems.net/occult-xenosystems/

[115] C. Monette. Mysticism in the 21st Century, p. 87; cited in Massimo Introvigne. Satanism: A Social History (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016), p. 357.

[116] Goodrick-Clarke. Black Sun, p. 217.

[117] Clive Bloom. Violent London: 2000 Years of Riots, Rebels and Revolts (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 388.

[118] Gerry Gable. “The Far Right in Contemporary Britain.” In Luciano Cheles, Ronnie Ferguson, Michalina Ferguson, Neo-Fascism in Europe (Longman, 1991), p. 247.

[119] Martin Durham. Women and Fascism. (Taylor & Francis, 1998), p.63.

[120] R. Hill & A. Bell. The Other Face of Terror- Inside Europe’s Neo-Nazi Network (London: Collins, 1988), pp. 195–6.

[121] Clive Bloom. Violent London: 2000 Years of Riots, Rebels and Revolts (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 388.

[122] Goodrick-Clarke. Black Sun, p. 18.

[123] “James Mason.” Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20190617183023/https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/james-mason

[124] Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity, p. 19.

[125] “James Mason.” Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20190617183023/https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/james-mason

[126] H. E. Upchurch. “The Iron March Forum and the Evolution of the ‘Skull Mask’ Neo-Fascist Network.” CTC Sentinel, 14, 10 (December 22, 2021), pp. 27–37.

[127] H. E. Upchurch. “The Iron March Forum and the Evolution of the ‘Skull Mask’ Neo-Fascist Network.” CTC Sentinel, 14, 10 (December 22, 2021), pp. 27–37; Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity, p. 19.

[128] Ibid.

[129] A.C. Thompson, Ali Winston & Jake Hanrahan. “California Murder Suspect Said to Have Trained With Extremist Hate Group.” ProPublica (January 26, 2018).

[130] Alexander Reid Ross & Emmi Bevensee. “Confronting the Rise of Eco-Fascism Means Grappling with Complex Systems.” Center for Analysis of the Radical Right (July 2020), p. 16.

[131] H. E. Upchurch. “The Iron March Forum and the Evolution of the ‘Skull Mask’ Neo-Fascist Network.” CTC Sentinel, 14, 10 (December 22, 2021), pp. 27–37; Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity, p. 29.

[132] James Bacigalupo, Robin Maria Valeri & Kevin Borgeson. Cyberhate: The Far Right in the Digital Age (Rowman & Littlefield, Jan 15, 2022), p. 113.

[133] Alex Newhouse. “The Threat Is the Network: The Multi-Node Structure of Neo-Fascist Accelerationism.” CTC Sentinel (June 2021), p. 18.

[134] Bacigalupo, Maria Valeri & Borgeson. Cyberhate, p. 113.

[135] Alex Newhouse. “The Threat Is the Network: The Multi-Node Structure of Neo-Fascist Accelerationism.” CTC Sentinel (June 2021), p. 21.

[136] Daniel De Simone & Ali Winston. “Neo-Nazi militant group grooms teenagers.” BBC News (June 22, 2020). Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-53128169

[137] Ben Mach & Mark Lamoureux. “Neo-Nazi Terror Leader Said to Have Worked With U.S. Special Forces.” Vice News (September 24, 2020). Retrieved from https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7qdzv/neo-nazi-terror-leader-said-to-have-worked-with-us-special-forces

[138] Bacigalupo, Maria Valeri & Borgeson. Cyberhate, p. 113.

[139] Newhouse. “The Threat Is the Network,” p. 18.

[140] Daniel Sallamaa & Tommi Kotonen. “The case against the Nordic Resistance Movement in Finland: an overview and some explanations.” RightNow! (Nov 2, 2020). Retrieved from https://www.sv.uio.no/c-rex/english/news-and-events/right-now/2020/the-case-against-the-nordic-resistance-movement.html

[141] “Uusnatsiryhmä Ukonvasama järjestää natsitapahtuman Aurassa viikonloppuna.” Varisverkosto. Retrieved from https://varisverkosto.com/2020/06/uusnatsiryhma-ukonvasama-jarjestaa-natsitapahtuman-aurassa-viikonloppuna

[142] A.C. Thompson, Ali Winston & Jake Hanrahan. “California Murder Suspect Said to Have Trained With Extremist Hate Group.” ProPublica (January 26, 2018).

[143] Alexander Reid Ross & Emmi Bevensee. “Confronting the Rise of Eco-Fascism Means Grappling with Complex Systems.” Center for Analysis of the Radical Right (July 2020), p. 16.

[144] Upchurch. “The Iron March Forum and the Evolution of the ‘Skull Mask’ Neo-Fascist Network.”

[145] Jacob C.Senholt. “Secret Identities in the Sinister Tradition: Political Esotericism and the Convergence of Radical Islam, Satanism, and National Socialism in the Order of Nine Angles.” In The Devil's Party: Satanism in Modernity. (eds.) Faxneld and Jesper Aagaard Peterse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 269; Connell Monette. Mysticism in the 21st Century (Wilsonville, Oregon: Sirius Academic Press, 2013), p. 96.

[146] Upchurch. “The Iron March Forum and the Evolution of the ‘Skull Mask’ Neo-Fascist Network,” pp. 32.

[147] Ibid., pp. 32–33.

[148] A.C. Thompson, Ali Winston & Jake Hanrahan. “Inside Atomwaffen as it celebrates a member for allegedly killing a gay Jewish college student” ProPublica (February 23, 2018).

[149] Beauchamp. “Accelerationism.”

[150] John McEvoy. “Western Media Fall in Lockstep for Neo-Nazi Publicity Stunt in Ukraine.” FAIR (February 23, 2022). Retrieved from https://fair.org/home/western-media-fall-in-lockstep-for-neo-nazi-publicity-stunt-in-ukraine/

[151] James Carden. “Congress Has Removed a Ban on Funding Neo-Nazis From Its Year-End Spending Bill.” The Nation (January 14, 2016). Retrieved from https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/congress-has-removed-a-ban-on-funding-neo-nazis-from-its-year-end-spending-bill/

[152] James Carden. “Congress Has Removed a Ban on Funding Neo-Nazis From Its Year-End Spending Bill.” The Nation (January 14, 2016). Retrieved from https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/congress-has-removed-a-ban-on-funding-neo-nazis-from-its-year-end-spending-bill/

[153] Branko Marcetic. The CIA May Be Breeding Nazi Terror in Ukraine. Jacobin (January 15, 2022). Retrieved from https://jacobinmag.com/2022/01/cia-neo-nazi-training-ukraine-russia-putin-biden-nato

[154] John Pilger. “In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia.” The Guardian (May 13, 2014). Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/13/ukraine-us-war-russia-john-pilger

[155] Zach Dorfman. “CIA-trained Ukrainian paramilitaries may take central role if Russia invades.” Yahoo News (January 13, 2022). Retrieved from https://www.yahoo.com/news/cia-trained-ukrainian-paramilitaries-may-take-central-role-if-russia-invades-185258008.html

[156] Bryce Greene. “What You Should Really Know About Ukraine.” FAIR (January 28, 2022). https://fair.org/home/what-you-should-really-know-about-ukraine/

[157] Branko Marcetic. The CIA May Be Breeding Nazi Terror in Ukraine. Jacobin (January 15, 2022). Retrieved from https://jacobinmag.com/2022/01/cia-neo-nazi-training-ukraine-russia-putin-biden-nato

[158] James Carden. “Congress Has Removed a Ban on Funding Neo-Nazis From Its Year-End Spending Bill.” The Nation (January 14, 2016). Retrieved from https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/congress-has-removed-a-ban-on-funding-neo-nazis-from-its-year-end-spending-bill/

[159] Branko Marcetic. The CIA May Be Breeding Nazi Terror in Ukraine. Jacobin (January 15, 2022). Retrieved from https://jacobinmag.com/2022/01/cia-neo-nazi-training-ukraine-russia-putin-biden-nato

[160] Branko Marcetic. The CIA May Be Breeding Nazi Terror in Ukraine. Jacobin (January 15, 2022). Retrieved from https://jacobinmag.com/2022/01/cia-neo-nazi-training-ukraine-russia-putin-biden-nato

[161] Suzanne Smalley. “Is Biden Ignoring a Key Tool to Combat Violent Extremists?” Politico (February 7, 2022). Retrieved from https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/07/is-biden-ignoring-tool-combat-violent-extremists-00005674

[162] “Biden to tap more Obama vets to fill key national security roles.” Politico. Retrieved from https://www.salon.com/2021/01/19/who-is-victoria-nuland-a-really-bad-idea-as-a-key-player-in-bidens-foreign-policy-team/