Re: [New post] Wikileaks Russian Ties: Julian Assange’s Forgotten Trips To Moscow

[Mike Weaver]

Given the source of the information it might be sensible to look for 
some other verification before assuming the facts are accurately 
presented. Louise Mensch <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Mensch> 
who runs Patribotics has form, to say the least. She was a rising star 
in the Conservative Party here before she resigned from Parliament and 
decamped to New York.

And a happy (?) new year to you all.

Mike


On 03/01/2020 20:36, David Morris wrote:
> When you say you don't ascribe to this article, does that mean you doubt
> the faces presented re. Assange's history w Russia?  Like, this might be
> fake facts?
>
> On Fri, Jan 3, 2020 at 2:18 PM Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I don’t endorse this. I just saw it
>> and thought it might spark some conversation.
>> kd
>>
>> Www.keithdavismusic.com
>>
>>> On Jan 3, 2020, at 9:59 AM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> 
>>>
>>> Www.keithdavismusic.com
>>>
>>> Begin forwarded message:
>>>
>>>> From: Patribotics <donotreply at wordpress.com>
>>>> Date: January 3, 2020 at 12:51:15 AM EST
>>>> To: kbob42 at gmail.com
>>>> Subject: [New post] Wikileaks Russian Ties: Julian Assange’s Forgotten
>> Trips To Moscow
>>>> 
>>>> New post on Patribotics
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Wikileaks Russian Ties: Julian Assange’s Forgotten Trips To Moscow
>>>> by Louise Mensch
>>>> Julian Assange, who rang in the New Year in Her Majesty's Prison,
>> Belmarsh, appears to have spent a significant amount of time in Russia in
>> the 1990s. Additionally, he lived in Paris with a Russian-speaking
>> 'girlfriend' and was part of group of hackers intimately connected with
>> Russia and the then KGB as a teenager. Assange has also admitted to being
>> deeply steeped in Russian culture, reading Russian and pro-Russian Ukranian
>> authors, and even being devoted to Russian vintage children's cartoons.
>>>> Biographies and profiles of Assange have, inexplicably, glossed over
>> the Wikileaks' founder's youth and activities prior to starting Wikileaks.
>> As attention focused on Assange's ties to Russia in 2016, and even before
>> then, as Assange fled to the Ecuadorean Embassy while dodging a trial for
>> rape in Sweden, countless biographies and profiles of Assange have been
>> published.
>>>> Bizarrely, most of them completely omitted Assange's clearly extensive
>> ties to Russian intelligence, that go back as far as his early years as a
>> proto-hacker, part of an international group of 'phone phreakers'. The
>> general impression has been left of Wikileaks as an idealistic organization
>> that somehow 'went wrong' as Assange's anti-Americanism drove him into the
>> arms of the Kremlin, as an 'unwitting idiot'. The facts, however, make it
>> clear that this approach gives the Australian both too much, and too
>> little, credit. Too much, in that it assumes Assange meant no harm, and was
>> merely tricked by the GRU into his assault on American democracy; too
>> little, in that it underestimates the length and witting depth of Assange's
>> treacherous association with Russian intelligence, dating back to the days
>> of Yeltsin and the KGB.
>>>> Biographies and profiles such as those on Wikipedia, The New Yorker,
>> the Guardian, (by no less an authority than David Leigh and Luke Harding),
>> the Independent, and several others this author found simply omit, and
>> apparently do not even know about, Assange's travels to Russia before
>> founding Wikileaks and his connections to Russian intelligence. The LA
>> Times profile of Assange, for example, published last spring, says only:
>>>> Born in 1971, Assange’s coming of age coincided, somewhat fatefully,
>> with the dawn of the internet era. He showed an early talent for
>> puzzle-solving and mathematics that swiftly morphed into a knack for
>> computer programming and coding – and for hacking, which led to a brush in
>> his 20s with Australian law enforcement.
>>>> A 2013 CNN 'Fast Facts' on Assange simply starts in 2006, with the
>> foundation of Wikileaks. The New York Times' timeline on Assange and the
>> United States likewise starts in 2010, with the Chelsea Manning (then known
>> as Bradley Manning) link to Wikileaks.
>>>> In 1996, Julian Assange was tried for hacking in Australia. In 2006, he
>> founded Wikileaks.  In the ten years in between, according to almost all
>> public biographies, Assange 'lived quietly' in Melbourne, attending, then
>> dropping out of, university. Nothing to see here. In their book on Assange,
>> "Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy", David Leigh and Luke
>> Harding, both highly respected Guardian journalists, describe some (not
>> all) of Assange's programming activities after the trial and before
>> Wikileaks, but they also mistakenly report:
>>>> As early as 1999 he came up with the idea of a leakers' website, he
>> said, and registered the domain name 'Wikileaks[.]org'. But otherwise, he
>> didn't do much about it. Assange was living in Melbourne and quietly
>> raising his son.
>>>> That wasn't true. In 1998 and 1999, Julian Assange was traveling in
>> Eastern Europe, Russia and China. And since 1999 is when "he came up with
>> the idea of a leakers' website" this seems galactically significant.
>>>> Julian Assange Pre-Wikileaks: Money and Moscow
>>>> According to Assange himself, in a now-deleted 2011 interview
>> originally hosted on Wikileaks,  and preserved on archives of both
>> Wikileaks mirrors and other sites, he was a frequent visitor to Moscow, and
>> was intimately familiar with its system and even its TV shows:
>>>> When I was in Russia in the 1990s, I used to watch NTV in Moscow. NTV
>> was the freest TV I have ever seen. I don’t know if you’re familiar with
>> Spitting Image. It was a British public satire that was very politically
>> aggressive, but NTV and other Russian channels had far more guts. And that
>> was because at that time, Russia had something like 10 independent points
>> of power. It had the army. It had the remnants of the KGB and the external
>> KGB, which ended up becoming the SVR. It had Yeltsin, and his daughter, and
>> that mob. It had some broader mish-mash of bureaucracy that was left over
>> from the Soviet Union. And it had seven oligarchs. That meant, in terms of
>> media control, the state plus the oligarchs with own their own independent
>> media. As a result, you could actually put out almost anything you wanted
>> under the patronage or protection of one of these groups. And when Putin
>> came in, he tamed the oligarchs. Some were arrested, some had their assets
>> seized, and some were exiled. The result was that they fell in under
>> Putin’s centralized patronage pyramid. The ownership of the TV stations
>> also reined popular democracy under Putin’s pyramid. And now, in order to
>> get anything of scale done in Russia, you have to have a sponsor in the
>> pyramid somewhere.
>>>> Assange carried this deep knowledge with him into Wandsworth prison,
>> where Russian authors and popular culture inspired him:
>>>> As for inspirational texts, well, there isn’t one in particular. But
>> when I was in prison, I read Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and
>> I’ve been a long-term appreciator of Solzhenitsyn and other Russian
>> literature....Pasternak and Dostoyevsky, and yes, Tolstoy when I was
>> younger, and Bulgakov, though he’s a Ukrainian who wrote in Russian. Cancer
>> Ward is a wonderful book. Solzhenitsyn was in a cancer ward after being
>> released from prison and exiled in Siberia, and he draws parallels between
>> experiences in a Soviet labor camp and a hospital ward, but also uses these
>> as a way to get at power relationships within a Sovietized state. But
>> having cancer in a cancer ward is even worse than being locked in the
>> basement of Wandsworth Prison in solitary confinement. So I found it oddly
>> cheering.
>>>> Asked what 'the most beautiful story you ever heard' was, Assange says:
>>>>
>>>> I’m very fond of Russian children’s cartoons from the 1970s and 80s.
>> These cartoons embody the highest representation of childhood and beauty
>> and innocence and curiosity—all together. This is terribly underappreciated
>> in Western society in this particular period. For something that I find
>> beautiful, this is what comes to mind instantly.
>>>> Russophilia is not, of course, a crime. But the facts on Assange's
>> history indicate actual recruitment. Several biographers did go as far as
>> to note his co-byline on the early history of a hacking group he was
>> involved in, "Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession". This
>> includes a limited amount on himself, "Mendax", as his nom-de-phreak had
>> it. But Assange is an author of the book, and thus intimately involved with
>> all the hackers in it. Take this early mention of Germany's "Chaos Computer
>> Club":
>>>> Pengo... a well-known hacker with links to the German hacking group
>> called the Chaos Computer Club.... Pengo had been involved with people who
>> sold US military secrets - taken from computers - to the KGB.
>>>> Oh. Well, OK then.
>>>>
>>>> His real interest was in hacking, not spying. The Russian connection
>> simply enabled him to get access to bigger and better computers. Beyond
>> that, he felt no loyalty to the Russians.
>>>> More on the 'Chaos Computer Club' and its KGB assets shortly. But
>> Assange also writes a long chapter on 'Anthrax', who was involved in human
>> trafficking and liked, in his off-time, to listen to Radio Moscow.
>>>> In 1996 Assange was tried in Australia for a string of hacking
>> offenses, including of United States military sites, the same targets his
>> KGB-connected friends in the Chaos Computer Club had hit. He was convicted,
>> and, essentially, let off with a warning. He was 25.
>>>> Most Assange biographies gloss over the next few years. But that is a
>> horrible dereliction of duty. As soon as the trial was over, Assange,
>> formerly an indigent teenage hacker, met his biological father again and
>> "came into money". This money was large enough to allow him to travel all
>> over the world:
>>>> Well, I’ve been traveling all over the world on my own since I was
>> twenty-five, as soon as I had enough money to do it.
>>>> Not only, even before skating on charges of attacking the US military,
>> did Assange get enough cash to travel the world, an unnamed "Italian real
>> estate investor" [sic] gave him and his anti-US-military co-conspirator
>> "Trax" enough money to buy a mainframe computer at an Italian university.
>>>> Note how this models what Assange wrote of 'Pengo' - the Russians gave
>> Pengo access to 'bigger and better computers'
>>>> In 1992 Mendax and Trax teamed up with a wealthy Italian real-estate
>> investor, purchased La Trobe University's mainframe computer (ironically, a
>> machine they had been accused of hacking) and started a computer security
>> company. The company eventually dissolved when the investor disappeared
>> following actions by his creditors.
>>>> Uh-huh.
>>>>
>>>> It is genuinely amazing that the Guardian would wrongly report in 2011,
>> of the time when Assange himself said he had enough money to travel the
>> world, that:
>>>> Convicted but leniently treated, Assange was now an unemployed father
>> in Melbourne surviving on a single parent pension.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Assange's Choice of Travel - Moscow, St. Petersburg, Irkutsk, Beijing
>>>> In 1998 Assange was in the long period of traveling that he admitted
>> started in 1996. According to the biography he refused to allow to be
>> published, which has not come out in e-book, he announced some few of the
>> destinations in a round-robin email for his "international" group of
>> hackers: Frankfurt, Berlin, Poland, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Irtkutsk, and
>> Beijing.
>>>> If anyone feels like getting together for beer, vodka, Siberian bear
>> steak.... just let me know
>>>> It is apparent, then, that several of his round-robin emailees lived in
>> Russia. It would be pretty hard to meet him for Siberian bear steak in
>> Irkutsk if they did not.
>>>> The Chaos Computer Club, the KGB, and... the 2016 Election?
>>>> Starting in Frankfurt and Berlin was also significant. The Chaos
>> Computer Club was the one Assange wrote about back in 1997 - admitting one
>> of his friends there had sold US military secrets to the KGB.
>>>> But what is this? A 2018 Washington Post profile of Andy Muller-Maguhn,
>> going to visit Assange, says that in 2016, Muller-Maguhn:
>>>> ...typically brings Assange books, clothes or movies. Once in 2016, he
>> delivered a thumb drive that he says contained personal messages for the
>> WikiLeaks founder, who for security reasons has stopped using email.
>>>> These visits have caught the attention of U.S. and European spy chiefs,
>> who have struggled to understand how Assange's organization operates and
>> how exactly WikiLeaks came to possess a trove of hacked Democratic Party
>> emails that the group released at key moments in the 2016 presidential
>> campaign.
>>>> No, ma'am, Ms. Nakashimae - US and European spy chiefs have no problems
>> whatsoever understanding how Wikileaks operates - it's a lazy as hell
>> mainstream media that overlooked how Wikileaks operates.
>>>> The piece continues:
>>>>
>>>> The roots of Müller-Maguhn's relationship with Assange trace back to
>> his teenage years in the 1980s when his walk to school in Hamburg took him
>> past the offices of the Chaos Computer Club.
>>>> Oh.
>>>>
>>>> In a Herculean effort to whitewash Muller-Maguhn, the profile then goes
>> on to admit that the German works for the Chinese state and has attended
>> conferences in Moscow.
>>>> One of his clients is in China, a state known for its suppression of
>> the Internet and its surveillance of dissidents....In recent years,
>> Müller-Maguhn's consulting and advocacy work has carried him all over the
>> world, including Moscow, where in 2016 and 2017 he attended a security
>> conference organized by the Russian Defense Ministry.
>>>> Riigggghhhhhht. (Dr. Evil voice)
>>>>
>>>> In the superseding espionage indictment of Assange, the Chaos Computer
>> Club is mentioned by name.
>>>> In 2007, Assange admitted he had a "girlfriend" in Paris helping him
>> build the Wikileaks website by translating Russian for him:
>>>> I had a girlfriend who would come round. She just brought food and I
>> stayed at the computer. She spoke Russian, and would sometimes lend a hand
>> with that
>>>> Why would Mr. Assange need Russian translated to build the Wikileaks
>> website? Before he'd received a single, solitary leak?
>>>> Because Russians were helping him build it and directing the build.
>>>>
>>>> Timeline of Assange's Russian Connections
>>>> Here is a partial timeline of Julian Assange's Russian connections, as
>> demonstrated in this piece from open source research. Taken as a whole, it
>> should be amply clear that Assange has been working, knowingly, with
>> Russian intelligence since the days of the KGB; that he has been funded by
>> outlets working for Russia; that the 'Chaos Computer Club' is an offshoot
>> of the GRU, best considered as contractors to Russian and Chinese
>> intelligence; and that Wikileaks was a Russian-intelligence approved effort
>> to use naive Western hackers and activists to help Russian military
>> intelligence access United States Military facilities.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> This blog has long exclusively reported that the Mueller Grand Jury
>> case is 'United States vs Wikileaks, et al,' and that the Government's case
>> is that Wikileaks has always been a witting partner of the GRU. Once this
>> is proven, the Trump campaign's partnership with Wikileaks becomes a
>> legally chargeable partnership with the GRU, and DOJ can and will charge
>> them with collusion.
>>>> Julian Assange's completely forgotten and overlooked trips to Moscow
>> and other Russian cities, and the influx of money he received after hacking
>> the US military, entirely support our reporting and analysis. In their book
>> on Wikileaks, David Leigh and Luke Harding describe the meeting the paper's
>> journalists had with a triumphant Assange just before the Guardian
>> dutifully published the leaks the GRU and Assange had jointly taken from
>> Chelsea Manning.
>>>> The partners again headed for dinner in the Rotunda restaurant beneath
>> the Guardian offices... Here, as the journalists sank pints of Pilsner...
>> Assange confided he was thinkin
>>>> g about going to Russia. Russia was an odd choice - especially in the
>> light of soon-to-be-published cables describing it as a 'virtual mafia
>> state'.....
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> But, of course, Russia was not at all an 'odd choice', and had the
>> Guardian done any research whatsoever into the man they were assisting and
>> his motives, they would have realized that.
>>>> Later, Guardian journalists would hide behind their opposition to the
>> Russian anti-semite and open Russian intelligence asset Israel Shamir, who
>> scorned to hide his affiliation with, and payment by, Assange and
>> Wikileaks. 'Oh look, as soon as we realized Assange was deep in with
>> Russian racists, we pulled back.' But by then, the damage to Western
>> security had been done, by Russia, with their willing assistance.
>>>> The Guardian, the New York Times, and all the other Western
>> institutions who unwittingly helped Russian intelligence attack their own
>> nations by giving Assange such a platform, now had a built-in disincentive
>> to ever really examine the origins of Wikileaks and the motivations of its
>> deeply repellent founder. Because if they "committed journalism", as
>> Assange apologists like to say, they would have to report that they,
>> themselves, had been so-called 'useful idiots'. And a headline like that is
>> unlikely to make the front page.
>>>> Timeline of Assange's Early Russian Connections
>>>> Here is a partial timeline of Julian Assange's Russian connections, as
>> demonstrated in this piece from open source research. Taken as a whole, it
>> should be amply clear that Assange has been working, knowingly, with
>> Russian intelligence since the days of the KGB; that he has been funded by
>> outlets working for Russia; that the 'Chaos Computer Club' is an offshoot
>> of the GRU, best considered as contractors to Russian and Chinese
>> intelligence; and that Wikileaks was a Russian-intelligence approved effort
>> to use naive Western hackers and activists to help Russian military
>> intelligence access United States Military facilities.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> 1971 - Julian Assange born.
>>>>
>>>> Late 80s - Julian Assange becomes part of an international group of
>> hackers including the Chaos Computer Club in Germany
>>>> 1986 - 1988 - 'Pengo', of the CCC, has been hacking the US military and
>> selling its secrets to the KGB for 'access to better computers'. Assange
>> gleefully records this in his book. Pengo hands himself in to German
>> authorities after his fellow hacker of the US, Habgard, who also sold
>> secrets to the KGB is burned alive before a court case, presumably because
>> the KGB thought he would talk.
>>>> 1989 - Julian Assange hacks NASA with the WANK worm, dropping the name
>> of Midnight Oil into his code.
>>>> 1989-1991 Assange befriends another hacker, Anthrax, an antisemite who
>> likes to listen to Radio Moscow
>>>> 1991 - Assange hacks the US military Milnet and gets caught, but the
>> trial date takes several years
>>>> 1992 - Assange and a fellow hacker suddenly come into enough money to
>> buy a huge mainframe computer at an Italian University
>>>> 1992-1996 Assange starts reading extensively in Russian literature
>>>>
>>>> 1996 - Assange is convicted but let off by an Australian judge, despite
>> having done extensive damage to the US military
>>>> 1996 - Assange comes into a large amount of money and begins
>> extensively to travel the world alone. He sets up bulletin boards for
>> international hackers, including hackers in Germany with the Chaos Computer
>> Club, the KGB's partners, and Russia
>>>> 1997 - Assange writes and publishes his self-laudatory book about
>> hackers, from which many of the above facts are sourced
>>>> 1990s in general - Assange spends enough time in Moscow to become
>> intimately familiar with their TV shows and cartoons
>>>> 1998 - Assange sends a 'round robin email' to his string of hacker
>> friends asking to meet them in Berlin 'or Siberia' . He announces he will
>> be visiting Germany, then Moscow, St. Petersburg and Irkutsk in Siberia,
>> followed by Beijing, China
>>>> 1999 - Assange registers Wikileaks
>>>>
>>>> 1999- 2007 - These years are obscured by Assange, apart from a short
>> stint dropping out of college in 2003, but, of course, despite having
>> convictions and no gainful employment, he is able to travel all around the
>> world on, it may fairly be assumed, Russian money. Assange has never
>> explained the source of the wealth he came into at 25, once he was 'let
>> off' for hacking the US military
>>>> 2006 - Wikileaks 'soft launches' in Iceland
>>>>
>>>> 2007 - Assange's Russian-speaking girlfriend in Paris is helping him
>> code the Wikileaks website, and he uses her for Russian translations
>>>> 2009 - the Chaos Computer Club and Assange solicit US military
>> materials in Malaysia, as described in Assange's superseding indictment for
>> espionage
>>>> 2009 - Chelsea/Bradley Manning responds to the solicitation and Assange
>> helps her crack US military passwords with the help of "Wikileaks
>> Affiliates" who, I submit, are clearly agents of the GRU; the superseding
>> indictment states:
>>>> ASSANGE, WikiLeaks Affiliates,and Manning Shared the Common Objective
>> to Subvert Lawful Restrictions on Classified Information and to Publicly
>> Disseminate it.
>>>> Readers will note the indictment does not speak of other members of
>> Wikileaks, but "Wikileaks Affiliates".
>>>> 2012 - Russia Today gives Assange his own television show, paying him
>> handsomely, and sets up his flight to the Ecuadorean embassy by arranging
>> for Correa to be his guest
>>>> 2016 - the Chaos Computer Club's Andy Muller Maughn delivers Assange a
>> thumb drive, while openly boasting he works for Russian intelligence and
>> the Chinese government
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Louise Mensch | January 3, 2020 at 12:50 am | Tags: Assange, chaos
>> computer club, GRU, Impeachment, Louise Mensch, Mueller Report,
>> Patribotics, Russian Hacking, Wikileaks | Categories: Mueller, Trump
>> Russia, Wikileaks | URL: https://wp.me/p8iY1U-2Zp
>>>> Comment         See all comments
>>>> Unsubscribe to no longer receive posts from Patribotics.
>>>> Change your email settings at Manage Subscriptions.
>>>>
>>>> Trouble clicking? Copy and paste this URL into your browser:
>>>>
>> https://patribotics.blog/2020/01/03/wikileaks-russian-ties-julian-assanges-forgotten-trips-to-moscow/
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l