The Creative Side - Patreon
I’ll say it yet again, as I evidently have to...as I've spoken on this and written about it, ad nauseam... because this is serious, and it’s no longer just a warning. It’s a reality. But it's been a while since I addressed this in such detail as I'm about to. There is no bragging here, merely the facts to make clear my orientation and veracity. And as a professional communicator for decades, I feel it is necessary.
Something I shared with a friend just this week. As a professional communicator, I try to offer ways to those at a loss in how to respond to what many feel powerless against: disinformation, propaganda, and authoritarianism. Many, like Donald Trump, think he's a swell guy, incapable of putting his behind-the-scenes (at times right out in front) actions with his demeanor they are attracted to. And right now, it’s no longer creeping. With Trump and the disinformation coming straight from the Oval Office, it’s here—now.
On narcissists.
"You and I both know that the American leaders were once public servants; we're now in the age of public self-servants." — Anthony Scaramucci on Kara Swisher's August 5, 2025 Pivot podcast
To explain my veracity on these topics...Russia, disinformation, autocracy, the GOP, Trump...I can only share my lived experience and orientation. I don’t speak from ego, but from decades of firsthand exposure, careful observation, and a lifelong commitment to sharpening the mind.
Before diving into my background, I want to make clear...as I always do in my non-fiction writing...that I include this only to establish my bona fides. If you're already willing to accept that, feel free to skip most or all of what follows and jump straight to the core of the topic.
This is aside from my membership in the 1990s and early 2000s in an international cybersecurity group that had the support of the then presidents and law enforcement, with briefings from various government, police, and corporate cyber/IT groups.
I spent my university years earning a psychology degree, concentrating in phenomenology—the study of lived experience and consciousness. That was no accident. Since childhood, I’ve held a belief in bettering one’s mind, refining it much like a bodybuilder trains muscles: through focused effort, discipline, and an unrelenting pursuit of growth. I’ve never seen intellectualism as elitist. For me, it was a way of making the most of what I thought was a flawed mind.
I didn’t know until much later in life that I had ADHD—something I’d always suspected was both a curse and, in many ways, a gift. My stepfather once told me I was "stupid." And for a while, I believed it. I was a consistent C student—until I got to college. Let me address that issue about academia and thinking processes. I obviously don't have standard normal processing. But among other things, I'm incredibly good at patter recognition.
After the military, I enrolled in university on the GI Bill and decided early on not to obsess over grades. I realized few people in the professional world would care about my GPA—but the knowledge I gained would define the rest of my life. So I made it my mission to absorb as much as I could in four years—on the people's dime—as a form of respect for that opportunity. I saw it as a civic duty: to get the most value possible out of my education.
And it paid off. My primary psychology advisor—an intense, no-nonsense professor who didn’t suffer fools—once told me I was nationwide, “in the top 10% of the top 10% of all 'university' psychology students in the country.” That's roughly the top 1% overall. That is a small number, and it stuck with me. Not as a point of pride, but as a confirmation that the mind I was told was defective... wasn’t. I had simply been underserved, misjudged, and misunderstood.
So when I speak now—about propaganda, disinformation, authoritarian creep, and political manipulation—I do so not as a pundit or partisan, but as someone who’s spent a lifetime trying to understand how people think, how they’re manipulated, and how truth gets buried in favor of control.
That is the lens I bring. That is why I write what I do.
Back in the 1970s, during my time in the U.S. Air Force, I received regular classified briefings at the Secret level—standard for my role. But those briefings ignited something deeper in me: a lasting interest in Soviet tactics, propaganda, and disinformation, particularly the strategies developed by the KGB. I was seriously considering a career in intelligence.
I passed the initial screening and testing for OSI. According to the Commanding Officer at our base's OSI office, he said I had scored “the highest I’ve ever seen.” I still remember the look on his face—some mix of admiration, maybe even appreciation that someone like me had walked into his office and volunteered. Maybe he was comparing me to other candidates, or maybe to the agents already serving under him. I don’t know. But it meant something.
My interest in OSI stemmed from more than curiosity. I had entered the Air Force with thoughts of eventually working for the CIA or a similar agency. Growing up near McChord AFB in Tacoma, Washington, I had served as a Flight Commander in the Civil Air Patrol, the USAF’s civilian auxiliary since WWII. Intelligence work felt like a calling.
I’d met a few OSI agents on base through the course of their investigations. One case involved a B-52 drag chute that tested positive during a random K-9 sweep. The dogs had alerted to it while it was queued for packing in our parachute shop. Turned out, the chute had scooped up a few spent shotgun shells—probably from a hunter who somehow wandered near the runway. Odd, considering how meticulously those areas are maintained.
But honestly, I wasn’t overly impressed by the agents I met. No offense to them, but they didn’t strike me as particularly sharp. They seemed tired, maybe nearing retirement. This wasn’t the elite crew I’d imagined. That contrast only sharpened my interest in what the higher-level work must be like—where the real stakes were.
Professionalism had always been a personal compass, instilled in me by my grandmother—a self-taught woman who surrounded herself with educated, thoughtful people and passed that mindset on to me. She believed in living a life of purpose, and I took that to heart.
For me, studying Soviet methods wasn’t just intellectual curiosity—it was preparation. I truly believed I might one day be up against these people. When I applied to OSI, I told the CO I wanted to learn everything. He initially recommended the Philippines, where he said agents learned all the procedural paperwork inside and out due to the rampant crime at the time.
I told him I didn’t want paperwork—I wanted fieldwork.
He smiled and said, “Then there’s only one station I can recommend... but it’s dangerous.”
"Berlin."
At the time, there was an open agent slot at the Berlin Station that had remained vacant for nearly a year. He told me the position was empty because the previous agent had allegedly been killed in a KGB operation...a bomb was planted in his car.
That's not true, actually. This is how it went...
I gave him my response. “Sign me up.”
His face went blank for a moment, then he grinned. "OK, if you want. We can do that." He saw no hesitation, so he wrote something down. I wasn't jubilant but determined. Someone had died after all, someone else could die. I could die. But this wasn't a vacation, it was a serious career consideration.
As it happens, when I would have been stationed there, a certain KGB agent named Vladimir Putin was also operating in Berlin. And yes, I still have all that paperwork.
Brief aside. Decades later I made friends with a Ukrainian at our local Aikido dojo where I was on the Board of Directors. We were having drinks one night and talking and this topic came up. When spoke of the OSI and Berlin, he got excited and said he too had considered such service, with the KGB. I said, then we could have one night run into one another in a dark alley, on opposite sides.
He was a big guy, and we had thrown one another around on the practice mats many times. I told him that I wouldn't have wanted to have had to take him on in a life-or-death scenario. We would have been younger obviously and in even better condition. He knew I had started martial arts in grade school, everyone at the dojo knew that and I was the unofficial dojo martial arts historian. He then said he wouldn't have wanted to go up against me in that situation, either. I took that as a compliment. Then we both just laughed.
But had we happened into that situation on some dark street in Berlin one night, well, it could have been epic, to be sure. Had that instead been Vladimir? I've often considered that and how he was back then? We might have even gotten along. That wasn't unusual in those cold war days. For a variety of reasons.
In today’s world, the rise of open-source intelligence (OSINT) has changed how we verify, explore, and re-examine stories that were once confined to shadows. What used to be whispers in briefing rooms can now—sometimes—be triangulated through declassified archives, historical analysis, and public-access data. And yet, there are still events that resist confirmation. One such moment for me has lingered for decades.
In 1978, while pursuing a position with the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI), I was told by the OSI Commanding Officer at my base that an OSI agent stationed in Berlin had been killed the year before in a car bombing—allegedly by the KGB. He didn’t speak lightly of it, and I had no reason to doubt that the information had been passed through the appropriate channels, possibly even directly from Berlin Station itself.
Over the decades, I’ve made multiple efforts to verify that claim, but I’ve never found an official or open-source record of such an incident. That in itself is telling. The Cold War was not only a time of open conflict and covert operations, but also of strategic silence. If the agent’s death was operationally sensitive or politically volatile, it’s entirely possible the record was suppressed—or deliberately misattributed. That’s not conspiracy thinking—it’s how intelligence agencies operate when the stakes are high enough.
Assuming the bombing did happen, several possibilities remain plausible. The KGB, of course, had both motive and means. Berlin was a front-line city in the Cold War, and Western intelligence assets were always under threat. It could also have been the Stasi—East Germany’s notorious secret police—acting independently or in coordination with Moscow.
Other Soviet-bloc services had capabilities too. Alternatively, the attack could have come from a group like the Red Army Faction (RAF), who were very active in Germany in the mid-to-late '70s and did not shy away from targeting U.S. personnel. Finally, it’s not inconceivable that the killing stemmed from a criminal or gray-zone intelligence matter—something off-book, personal, or unofficial that would never see the light of day.
For more about this, see the end of this blog.
To this day, the absence of an answer continues to echo. And in a way, it serves as a reminder: in the world of espionage, it’s often what isn’t in the record that deserves your closest attention. Stories like this helped shape my lifelong interest in intelligence and disinformation—not just as tactics, but as cultural languages spoken in half-truths and silences.
I ultimately didn’t take the OSI assignment, for reasons that were personal, and—at the time—necessary. Did I regret it? For years, yes. Though with what I know now? Not so much. What I haven't yet mentioned was in merely going to the OSI office on base, I was actually already risking my life. But that's a story for another time.
But the decision didn’t dull my passion or focus. From the late 1970s on, my study of Soviet strategies, especially those of the KGB, became deeply personal and lifelong.
I share this now because I believe it's more important than ever to pay attention. What we’re seeing today—disinformation, psychological operations, and the normalization of authoritarian tactics—isn’t new. It’s an evolution of Cold War techniques, updated for the digital age and internalized by some of our own political actors.
Back then, I was preparing for a future I feared might come. That future is here. Now.
But it affected me for the rest of my life. I remember, when the Soviet Union fell in the early 1990s, wondering...WHY did I waste my life so focused on the Soviets and the KGB? UNTIL...I started to see those very same tactics being used by our conservative political party here, within OUR United States.
For most of my life, until one day when I finally accepted, I wasn't going into that life, I read no spy fiction fearful it might pollute my understanding and stored facts. I read books and watched documentaries about and by KGB agents, retired heads of the KGB. I triangulated that with non-fiction books by other retired agents from various other secret agencies especially from the UK, but also from Japan, and others. I learned that by reading several accounts of a specific incident, one could indeed divine the reality of a situation, even if the information wasn't pristine.
By the 1990s, I began noticing disturbing parallels emerging within the U.S.—specifically, within the Republican Party. The language was shifting. The messaging was changing. The subtle manipulation of facts, the reframing of truth, the eroding of trust in institutions and media—it was all eerily familiar.
I started warning people.
I told friends, colleagues, anyone who would listen, that I saw the GOP adopting methods that felt straight out of the Soviet disinformation playbook. Few believed me. Not because they dismissed me as a conspiracy theorist—I don’t fit that mold—but because the implications were too disturbing to accept.
"That couldn’t happen here," they said.
"Not in America."
It sounded too far-fetched.
I didn’t blame them. Even I had trouble believing it at times. But the signs were there—plain as day.
Then Came Trump
And then, Donald Trump emerged on the political scene. With him came a tidal wave of misinformation, attacks on truth, and open disdain for democratic norms. As POTUS45, Trump told over 30,000 documented lies. He was impeached—twice—and much of what he did, he admitted to publicly. It wasn’t hidden. It wasn’t subtle. It was blatant.
And now, as POTUS47, he's done something even more brazen, and even more dangerous.
He has fired the head of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics—a nonpartisan civil servant whose job was to provide accurate, apolitical economic data to the American people. Why? Because the numbers didn’t align with Trump’s narrative. Because the truth challenged his desires. Not his beliefs—his illiberal, authoritarian desires.
Let that sink in.
This isn’t a difference of opinion. This is the manipulation of national data—the very numbers that inform policy, investment, public discourse, and our understanding of economic reality.
And that, my fellow Americans, is textbook Soviet disinformation strategy.
This Is Domestic Information Warfare
What we’re seeing is not normal political maneuvering. It’s not “hardball” or just “spin.” It’s domestic information warfare—against the American people.
It’s about power.
It’s about permanence.
And it’s about the entrenchment of disreputable MAGA-style political oppression—designed to outlive Trump himself.
By discrediting institutions, distorting truth, and controlling the flow of information, Trump and his enablers are reshaping the very nature of American democracy. And unlike a single election cycle, these effects won’t simply vanish when he eventually exits the political stage.
This will take decades to repair—if it can be repaired at all.
This is no longer about Trump the man. This is about a movement and a machinery built on disinformation and authoritarian tactics.
A Changed America
And make no mistake: this has already changed the character of America.
For all the talk about “American exceptionalism,” we are now facing a future where truth itself is a battleground, and facts are bent to serve political power. The very thing many of us believed could never happen here—has.
This isn’t just about Trump. It’s about what he’s normalized. It’s about the GOP’s long flirtation with authoritarianism turning into a full-blown affair. It’s about a country where too many still deny the danger, still excuse the behavior, and still act as if this is politics as usual.
It’s not.
Straight From the KGB Playbook
I saw this coming because I’d studied the tactics.
Long before Trump appeared on the scene, I had watched the GOP lean into the methods used by Soviet propagandists—methods honed by the KGB and later mimicked by regimes like Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, and Kim’s North Korea:
-
Undermine trust in media
-
Attack the legitimacy of democratic institutions
-
Blur the line between truth and falsehood
-
Replace facts with "alternative facts"
-
Stoke chaos, fear, and grievance
-
Erase objective reality in favor of cult loyalty
What we are seeing now is not new—it is imported. And it is being deliberately applied against the American public.
The Bottom Line
This is not alarmism.
This is not exaggeration.
This is not theory.
This is the playbook.
And unless we confront it head-on, reject it outright, and reassert our commitment to truth and democratic values, it will remain the new normal.
If you're still pretending it's not happening, ask yourself: why did a sitting president just fire a data official because reality didn’t suit him?
Because that is not democracy.
That is control.
That is disinformation.
That is the legacy of the KGB, now wearing a red hat that says MAGA.
And unless we dismantle this movement at every level—politically, culturally, and legally—it may become permanent.
END OF BLOG DETAIL—
More on who might have been responsible:
If the bombing occurred, there are several plausible culprits worth considering—each with their own motives, methods, and histories in Cold War-era Berlin:
1. The KGB (Soviet Committee for State Security)
As the USSR’s primary foreign intelligence and security agency, the KGB had both the motive and operational reach to eliminate Western intelligence threats, especially in Berlin—one of the most active espionage hotspots of the Cold War.
KGB assassinations abroad were rare but not unheard of. They typically involved:
-
Surveillance and psychological pressure
-
Recruitment or compromise of local assets
-
Direct sabotage or assassination, especially when a Western agent posed a serious threat to ongoing Soviet operations
If the OSI agent was involved in counterintelligence work, double-agent handling, or surveillance of Soviet diplomatic/GRU personnel, the KGB would have considered him a legitimate target—especially if he was close to uncovering something sensitive.
2. The Stasi (East German Ministry for State Security)
The Stasi was among the most ruthless and efficient intelligence services in history, with deep roots inside East and West Berlin. While technically subordinate to the KGB, the Stasi conducted its own operations against U.S. military and intelligence personnel, especially those stationed near the border or involved in surveillance.
If the OSI agent had infiltrated or disrupted a Stasi-run operation—such as courier lines, smuggling routes, or informant networks—the Stasi could have retaliated, possibly using a car bomb or similar method.
They were known for:
-
Psychological warfare (“Zersetzung”)
-
Targeted surveillance and blackmail
-
Occasional direct attacks or assassination under deep cover
3. GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence)
While less publicized than the KGB, the GRU was often more aggressive in its methods, and Berlin was a key city for their operations targeting NATO infrastructure. The GRU sometimes operated without KGB coordination, and its officers were embedded in Soviet military attaché offices, embassies, and disguised as trade envoys.
If the OSI agent had been collecting information on Soviet military movements, electronic surveillance, or East German troop readiness, and the GRU caught wind of it, he could have been neutralized as part of countermeasures.
The GRU also had experience with sabotage techniques, including:
-
Explosives
-
Booby traps
-
Disguised attacks using local criminal proxies
4. Red Army Faction (RAF, or Baader-Meinhof Group)
The RAF was highly active in West Germany in the 1970s, particularly during their so-called “German Autumn” of 1977. They targeted U.S. military bases, West German officials, and corporate elites. While they leaned domestic in focus, the RAF was known to receive material support from the Stasi and possibly the KGB, including safehouses in East Berlin.
They were well-trained in:
-
Bomb-making
-
Vehicle-based attacks
-
Urban guerrilla tactics
If a U.S. intelligence agent was seen as a “tool of imperialism,” especially one operating in the field and not just administrative staff, the RAF might have seen him as a legitimate target.
5. Criminal Underworld or “Gray” Actors
Cold War Berlin was also home to a thriving black market and criminal underworld, particularly in the American and British sectors. Western agents occasionally ran afoul of smugglers, black marketeers, or informants who straddled the line between crime and espionage.
It's possible—if less likely—that:
-
The OSI agent got too close to something illicit and was silenced
-
An informant double-crossed him
-
He was operating in unofficial or covert capacities, and his death was covered up or not attributed to state actors
These “gray zone” deaths are hardest to trace because they often go unclaimed and unresolved.
This breakdown doesn’t deliver a definitive answer, but it helps frame the context in which a covert assassination could have occurred—and gone unacknowledged. In Cold War Berlin, plausible deniability wasn’t just a tactic—it was standard operating procedure.
Cheers! Sláinte!
Compiled with aid of ChatGPT
No comments:
Post a Comment