A major part of this project is showing the public what happens when someone refuses to “play ball”.
We continue with the testimony of a real journalist who lost his life in the last few years (2017). The picture developing here is very consistent with what I’m seeing from my perspective.
While it is scary to go up against all these shadowy hands, I think it is even more scary to just let them keep on going the way they are doing now. We don’t elect elements in these intelligence agencies and we can’t vote them out or have any say WHATSOEVER on what they are doing. What if elements in these agencies collaborated to war on humanity through hypnosis (NLP), media control and lies? What if elements in these agencies were protected by and really working for the owners of central banks and corporations? What would be our recourse? How could we protect ourselves from abuse?
And what's with the sponsorship of journalists by political parties? Do the citizens out there really believe that the graduates from the CDU - sponsored journalist academy at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation or the SPD-sponsored journalist academy at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation will just flip a switch in their heads after getting this party-affiliated education and then simply provide neutral reporting for the rest of their careers?
My long years of experience only tell me one thing: No, that is impossible. I was also sponsored and trained by that elite network, one that subtly wraps itself around influential journalists and guides their pen like a kraken. It all seemed so natural to me: At the same time that I was supposedly an independent journalist at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, I was also a member of the planning committee at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation – with its close connections to the CDU.
A kraken
Looking back, I was a lobbyist. A lobbyist tries to, for example, influence public opinion through mainstream media in favor of special interest groups. I did that. Like for the German Foreign Intelligence Service The FAZ expressly encouraged me to strengthen my contact with the Western intelligence services and was delighted when I signed my name to the pre-formulated reports, at least in outline, that I sometimes received from them.
Like many of the reports I was fed by intelligence services, one of many examples I can remember well was the exposé, "European Companies Help Libya Build a Second Poison Gas Factory" from March 16, 1993. Needless to say, the report caused a stir around the world. However, I watched as two employees of the German Federal Intelligence Service (the German CIA, the Bundesnachrichtendienst or BND), drafted it in a meeting room of the FAZ offices at Hellerhofstrasse 2 in Frankfurt.
In other words: They basically told me what to write, paragraph for paragraph, right there in the FAZ editorial offices and then the article was published. One of the duties of these two BND employees was writing reports for large-circulation German newspapers. According to employee accounts, the BND fed reports to many German newspapers at the time - with the knowledge of their publishing houses.
The Federal Intelligence Service even had a little front company with an office directly above a shop on the Mainzer Landstrasse in Frankfurt, only two blocks away from the FAZ's main office. In any case, they had classified materials there that came from the BND.
Once you became a "player" on the team that drafted such articles, this was followed by the next level of "cooperation": You would be given stacks of secret documents that you could evaluate at your leisure. I remember we brought in a steel filing cabinet just for all the secret reports at the FAZ. (When I was visiting colleagues at a magazine in Hamburg, I saw that they'd done the same thing in their editorial offices).
Back then, I didn’t know how contemptuously intelligence agencies spoke about journalists. "You can get a journalist for less than a good whore, for a few hundred dollars a month." These are the words of a CIA agent, as quoted by the Washington Post editor Philip Graham.
The agent was referring to the willingness and the price journalists would accept to spread CIA propaganda reports in their articles. Of course, this was also with the approval of Germany, the Federal Intelligence Service was the extended arm of the CIA, basically a subsidiary.
I was never offered money by the Federal Intelligence Service, but they never even had to. I, like many of my German colleagues, found it thrilling to be a freelance writer for an intelligence agency or to be allowed to work for them in any capacity at all.
Some of the things I found out, I wasn't allowed to report on. These were actually tests of my reliability as a water boy and lackey for the intelligence agencies. Foreign intelligence agencies also financed my travels. Like the British Service for my trip to the intelligence agency conferences at Wilton Park.
After the Second World War, this English country estate was initially used by the British as a re-education camp for select Germans and was later also used to provide guidance to Germans, including journalists such as myself.
The British Services financed it. However, there doesn't appear to be anything at all on this among the classified documents released by the NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden.
During the summer of 2005 when I was the "chief correspondent" of the glossy magazine Park Avenue, I had a phone call with the Director of the CIA James Woolsey, which lasted more than an hour. His wife is active in the transatlantic propaganda organization German Marshall Fund (but we’ll touch on this later).
Sitting in my Hamburg office at Grüner + Jahr publishing, I was amazed that I didn't lose the connection, because at the beginning of our conversation Woolsey was sitting in his office in Virginia, then he was in a limousine and after that in a helicopter. The connection was so good, it was as if he was sitting right next to me.
James Woolsey
We spoke about industrial espionage. Woolsey wanted me to publish a report through Grüner + Jahr that would give the impression that the USA doesn't carry out any industrial espionage in Germany through their intelligence services. For me, the absurd thing about this conversation wasn't its content, which was fortunately never printed. What I really found absurd was that after the conversation, Grüner + Jahr sent the CIA henchman Woolsey's secretary in Virginia a bouquet of flowers after the call, because someone at Grüner+ Jahr wanted to keep the line to the CIA open.
Yes, looking back, I was one of the perpetrators who was fed materials from the outside and exploited. I was a lobbyist who was supposed to influence public opinion through the mass media. I just didn’t want to believe it back then. That's why I can understand when my former colleagues who still do the same things today and, for example, are members of pro-American lobbies or are close to these lobbies, don’t want to believe it either. Regardless, looking the other way doesn't make it right. A lobbyist reports with bias.
This biased reporting in the German mainstream media (based on multiple examples from sources such as the FAZ) is also confirmed in a 2012 undergraduate thesis out of Munich titled, "Biased Attribution in German Print Media.
A while ago, I came across the following headline: "Study: For lobbyists, FAZ is way up at the top of the reading list.* The article states: "The publication read most frequently by German lobbyists is the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. It is at the top of the reading list for 88 percent of them." Why is that? Let's take a closer look.
How an Oil Company Greased my Palms
The former President of Germany Johannes Rau (SPD) once said, "It becomes dangerous when journalists influence political processes or even the outcome of elections through active meddling, which is guided by outside interests. It becomes dangerous when sentiments are deliberately intensified or even fostered in the first place by aggravation or half-truths."