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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsMeet the Americans Who Put Together the Coup in Kiev
If the US State Department's Victoria Nuland had not said "Fuck the EU," few outsiders at the time would have heard of Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, the man on the other end of her famously bugged telephone call. But now Washington's man in Kiev is gaining fame as the face of the CIA-style "destabilization campaign" that brought down Ukraine's monumentally corrupt but legitimately elected President Viktor Yanukovych.
"Geoffrey Pyatt is one of these State Department high officials who does what hes told and fancies himself as a kind of a CIA operator," laughs Ray McGovern, who worked for 27 years as an intelligence analyst for the agency. "It used to be the CIA doing these things," he tells Democracy Now. "I know that for a fact." Now it's the State Department, with its coat-and-tie diplomats, twitter and facebook accounts, and a trick bag of goodies to build support for American policy.
A retired apparatchik, the now repentant McGovern was debating Yale historian Timothy Snyder, a self-described left-winger and the author of two recent essays in The New York Review of Books "The Haze of Propaganda" and "Fascism, Russia, and Ukraine." Both men speak Russian, but they come from different planets.
On Planet McGovern or my personal take on it realpolitik rules. The State Department controls the prime funding sources for non-military intervention, including the controversial National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which Washington created to fund covert and clandestine action after Ramparts magazine and others exposed how the CIA channeled money through private foundations, including the Ford Foundation. State also controls the far-better-funded Agency for International Development (USAID), along with a growing network of front groups, cut-outs, and private contractors. State coordinates with like-minded governments and their parallel institutions, mostly in Canada and Western Europe. State's "democracy bureaucracy" oversees nominally private but largely government funded groups like Freedom House. And through Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, State had Geoff Pyatt coordinate the coup in Kiev.
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/22758-meet-the-americans-who-put-together-the-coup-in-kiev
sabrina 1
(62,325 posts)grasswire
(50,130 posts)remind me again who bugged that message?
Laelth
(32,017 posts)-Laelth
cui bono
(19,926 posts)libodem
(19,288 posts)I need a synopsis. I read the whole thing but I don't think I understood all of it. Generally I have good reading comprehension. Complicated stuff.
I've been observing this story for a while, and around every twist and turn are even more twists and turns.
libodem
(19,288 posts)You could write two sentences and encapsulate this for me.
I may have to go back and reread the whole thing.
It is convoluted.
Tommy_Carcetti
(43,182 posts)Occam's Razor.
There's a reason the posts of Mr. Sh and his compatriots are so mind-numbingly obtuse and convoluted.