Those familiar with Tom Secker know him to be a preeminent deep state researcher. Resolutely averse to going further than evidence allows, committed to demolishing harebrained conspiracy theories along the way, his efforts shine candid light on the nefarious activities of Western intelligence agencies.

His work has never been mentioned, or featured, by the corporate media, but mainstream journalists could surely learn a thing or two from Mr. Secker, in particular his aptitude for unearthing compromising internal documents. The determined Brit is quite so skilled at Freedom of Information requests he's even uncovered UK Foreign Office memos complaining about his activities - obviously flustered officials refer to Mr. Secker as a "repeat offender" on a "fishing expedition."
As of 2018, his primary areas of interest have included the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Operation Gladio, the 7/7 attacks in London, and Pentagon and CIA meddling in the US entertainment industry. Along the way, he's produced a steady stream of articles, books, documentaries and podcasts.

War on 'Our' Terror?

His current focus is the infamous al-Qaeda. In a sense, this represents a full circle journey for the disputatious 35-year-old - he began his research in the wake of 9/11, having watched the event live on TV like so many others.

"It had quite an impact on me. I saw this hyper-aggressive foreign policy and absurdly paranoid domestic security policy erupt, with al-Qaeda the primary rationale. I concluded the idea the 'War on Terror' was an adversarial battle between Western liberal democracy and Middle East terrorism - an "us vs. them" crusade - was fictional. In fact, I found they were only able to carry out major attacks by working with covert Western agents, and the sheer range and number of alleged intelligence failures that allowed them to continue their toxic activities," Mr. Secker told Sputnik.

Mr. Secker's work fundamentally challenges the simplistic conventional narrative of al-Qaeda, which states the group was an unintended outgrowth of Operation Cyclone - the US operation which saw funds, arms and training given to Islamist extremist fighters during the Soviet-Afghan War.

It also challenges the more critical, minority mainstream view that al-Qaeda's notorious activities are accidental consequences of an ongoing covert relationship between the group and Western authorities. He believes the attacks are either actively intended by certain individuals within Western intelligence agencies, or seen as a "cost" of intelligence work.

"The notion intelligence agents actively try to prevent terrorist attacks carried out by people they're actually employing to use terrorist tactics in support of Western policy is untenable. There may be some within agencies trying to stop attacks, but they're thwarted by compartmentalization of information, in order to protect assets and agents on the ground. This leads to an extremely messy situation, and cover-ups. These are 'our' terrorists we've supposedly been fighting, making the war on terror a war against one of the darkest elements of our own societies, masquerading as a moral crusade." - Tom Secker Deep State Researcher

ENDURING TIES

According to some reports, the CIA were aware of the group's formal founding in 1988 - whether true or not, the critical factor in al-Qaeda's history for Mr. Secker is just how many undercover agents were embedded within the group at every stage of its existence, and "just how easily" they escaped authorities' clutches in the wake of major terror strikes.

"The ideological leader of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing plot, the Blind Sheikh, was a CIA asset, allowed to stay in the US for over a year after his visa - itself approved by CIA officials - was revoked. The FBI also pulled an informant out of the group six months before the bombing, failing to follow up on information from another informant only weeks before the attack. These informants were likely getting too close to whatever the CIA were up to with the Blind Sheikh and his followers," Mr. Secker states.

The plot was carried out February 26 1993 - a truck bomb detonated below the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. The 606 kilogram urea nitrate-hydrogen gas enhanced device was intended to destroy the North Tower and send it crashing into the South Tower, bringing down both and killing tens of thousands. The plot failed, only killing six and injuring around 1,000.

While most of the individuals involved were arrested following the bombing, both Ali Mohamed - the group's lead trainer, former US Special Forces soldier and FBI informant - and bomber Ramzi Yousef got away. Yousef went on to become infamous for the Bojinka Plot, hatched in the Philippines in conjunction with his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, supposed 9/11 mastermind.

Al-Qaeda's network in the Philippines was financed by Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, likely US intelligence agent. Meanwhile, Ali Mohamed flew round the world training terrorists, constructing the cell that would carry out the 1998 US embassy bombings in Africa.

For these evasions of justice to be legitimate, Mr. Secker suggests the FBI are either "the most incompetent agency the world has ever seen," or "fall guys" for CIA covert operations.

"The same thing happens with the '98 embassy bombings and 9/11, and in the years running up to 7/7, particularly with UK al-Qaeda franchise Al Muhajiroun. Every time the four alleged bombers linked up with al-Qaeda figures, they did so via a probable secret agent. There were also frequent bizarre 'intelligence failures' meaning they were never interdicted, remaining free right up until the attacks. MI5 demonstrably lied every single time they were asked about this, highly incriminating behavior by any measure," Mr. Secker told Spuntik.
BREAKING UP THE BALKANS

Mr. Secker says there are many examples of Western collusion with al-Qaeda throughout the group's history - but the Balkan wars of the 1990s are the "textbook example."

"You had the Pentagon flying in mujahideen to fight in Bosnia - they went on to become the Kosovo Liberation Army, trained byUS mercenary firm MPRI, and then the National Liberation Army in Albania. In the early 1990s, the Blind Sheikh helped recruit young men to go and join the fight in the region, later it was the Al Muhajiroun group, the leaders of which - Omar Bakri, Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada - all had relationships with UK intelligence," Mr. Secker told Sputnik.

Among the Islamist fighters battling in the region were alleged Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, and two Saudi volunteers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khaled al-Mindhar, who would hijack American Airlines flight 77 and crash it into the Pentagon.

Bin Laden was also active during the war, funding fighters - although his organization did much else conducive to NATO's destabilization plans for the region, which ultimately precipitated the fragmentation of Yugoslavia.

On top of "plenty" of Western intelligence assets and agents in their ranks, they fought alongside militants being directed by Western governments, militaries and intelligence agencies. They also, Mr. Secker suggests, benefited from years of "intelligence failures" which meant they avoided interdiction or arrest, even when intelligence agencies had considerable evidence of their criminal activities.

"Whether all that adds up to collusion or conspiracy is not entirely clear, but ongoing relationships prove either they were being directed by Western military and intelligence agencies, or these groups simply don't care when their agents or assets blow up buildings and kill hundreds. Without these organizations and operations, there never would have been an al-Qaeda in Europe on any scale, posing any meaningful threat," Mr. Secker states.

ENDLESS COLLUSION

Of all Tom's investigations, the tale of Ali Mohamed remains "the most incredible spy story" he's yet come across.

Without Mohamed, Mr. Secker suggests there would be no al-Qaeda as the world knows it - "probably no WTC93, no embassy bombings, quite possibly no 9/11." Mohamed trained most of al-Qaeda's important footsoldiers in a dozen countries, and Bin Laden's bodyguards, conducted surveillance for the 1998 US embassy attacks in Sudan, and helped move Bin Laden from Sudan back to Afghanistan in 1996 - all while being a part-time FBI informant, serving in the US Special Forces and working for the CIA. The CIA claimed Mohamed was sacked in the mid-1980s, but Mr. Secker claims this is "total nonsense."

"When one of the defense lawyers in the US vs Rahman trial attempted to subpoena Mohamed, the prosecution wouldn't reveal where he was. When they eventually tracked him down, the prosecution told him to ignore the subpoena, and he never testified. Years later he was arrested, cooperated with authorities and offered one brief allocution, before disappearing, perhaps into protective custody. He even offered, in the wake of 9/11, to help the US government find Bin Laden and bring him to justice, leading one special forces unit to consider dropping Mohamed into Afghanistan, and injecting him with a time-delay poison pill," Mr. Secker told Sputnik.

A "less clear" yet still "incredibly important" example is "whatever was going on" with 9/11 hijackers Khalid Al Midhar, and Nawaf Al Hazmi. The CIA and NSA were monitoring al-Qaeda's communications hub in Yemen - as a result, Mr. Secker believes US authorities should've been able to stop the attempted bombing on USS The Sullivans, the successful bombing of the USS Cole, and "probably" 9/11 as well.

The first two were carried out by a local al-Qaeda arm financed by Jamal Khalifa, who also funded the Bojinka Plot - and was Bin Laden's brother-in-law. Former US National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counter-Terrorism Richard Clarke has said the CIA deliberately withheld information on Al Midhar and Al Hazmi from the FBI and White House, because they'd recruited them, or were trying to - an aspect of 9/11 the official investigation failed to scrutinize.

"Finally, 18 months after the two al-Qaeda men arrived in the US, the CIA, in a very low key way, passed a report to the FBI about al-Mihdhar and al-Hamzi. It was too late. Their trail had gone cold. They'd entered the final phase of preparations for 9/11. Nothing in the joint congressional investigation, the 9/11 Commission's work or the CIA Inspector General's investigation explains why the CIA hid its knowledge about these two al-Qaeda operatives," Clarke has alleged.

However, Mr. Secker believes the behavior of certain officials, most prominently Tom Wilshire of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, suggests even Clarke's narrative doesn't truly get to the bottom of things. Despite alerting superiors to Al Midhar's significance and impending involvement in a major al-Qaeda attack, he continued to protect and hide information on the target.

"This suggests Al Midhar was still working for the CIA in some way, right up until the moment Flight 77 smashed into the Pentagon," he grimly concludes.

On January 19, Turkish forces began military action across their southern border with Syria in 'Operation Olive Branch'. They started by shelling Kurdish-held areas in Afrin, and soon followed with airstrikes and a ground incursion. This move came after Ankara's condemnation of the United States' intention to create a 'Border Security Force' of 30,000 men in northern Syria, formed out of Kurdish YPG/SDF fighters. This was the catalyst for the Turkish move, although it simply adds to Turkey's long-standing disapproval of the Americans' continuous supply of weapons and training to Kurdish militias, according to Turkey's former foreign minister, Yasar Yakis.

Judging by the Americans' inconsistent and uncommitted reaction to 'Olive Branch', Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's move caught the US by surprise. Having failed in the objective of toppling the Assad government by allowing proxy armies of mercenaries and jihadists to advance unchallenged, the second-best alternative for the US and allies was to play on the ambitions of the Kurds for an independent state of their own and seize a sizeable part of Syria's northeastern territory - the so-called 'Plan B' that would enable the permanent US (and perhaps Israeli) military presence in a subservient state of Kurdistan. The Border Security Force was an obvious step in this direction, and while there was nothing Syria could do about it without risking dire consequences, Turkey could.

Unable to directly confront Turkey, a key NATO ally which hosts the US nuclear airbase at Incirlik, and disinclined to give up entirely on their Kurdish pawns, American officials could only manage to send mixed, lukewarm messages:

• On January 17, two days after Erdogan called the Border Security Force an "army of terror", which he promised to "strangle before it is born", US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson tried to backtrack by declaring that the "entire situation has been mis-portrayed, mis-described, some people misspoke. We are not creating a Border Security Force at all." This was in spite of Colonel Thomas F. Veale's previous confirmation that the coalition was already working with the SDF and that 230 individuals had already passed training. Evidently, Tillerson was only sorry that the force had been revealed too soon.

• On the same day as Tillerson's apparent change of mind, Pentagon spokesman Adrian Rankine-Galloway dumped the thousands of YPG fighters in Afrin with this statement: "We don't consider them as part of our 'Defeat ISIS' operations, which is what we are doing there, and we do not support them. We are not involved with them at all."

• On January 21, US Defense Secretary James Mattis recalled that Turkey is a NATO ally: "It's the only NATO country with an active insurgency inside its borders. And Turkey has legitimate security concerns... We'll sort this out."

• Two days later Mattis changed his tone, but not drastically: "The violence in Afrin disrupts what was a relatively stable area in Syria and distracts from the international effort to defeat [Daesh]."

• Interestingly, the CIA World Factbook website's entry on terrorists groups in Syria now recognizes that the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD, aka YPG) is the Syrian wing of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). As the latter has long been classified as a terrorist group by several countries, including the US and Turkey, the CIA is admitting that the US has been allied to a terrorist group operating in Syria. The site was last updated on January 23.

The YPG, by the way, is none other than the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The Turkish newspaper Hurriyet published the following on January 24:

It is beyond any doubt that the U.S. military and administration knew that the People's Protection Units (YPG)...had organic ties with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which Washington officially recognizes as a terrorist group....The YPG is the armed wing of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which is the political wing of the PKK in Syria. They share the same leadership...the same budget, the same arsenal, the same chain of command from the Kandil Mountains in Iraq, and the same pool of militants. So the PYD/YPG is actually not a "PKK-affiliated" group, it is a sub-geographical unit of the same organization....

Knowing that the YPG and the PKK are effectively equal, and legally not wanting to appear to be giving arms to a terrorist organization, the U.S. military already asked the YPG to "change the brand" back in 2015.

U.S. Special Forces Commander General Raymond Thomas said during an Aspen Security Forum presentation on July 22, 2017 that he had personally proposed the name change to the YPG.

"With about a day's notice [the YPG] declared that it was now the Syrian Democratic Forces [SDF]," Thomas said to laughter from the audience. "I thought it was a stroke of brilliance to put 'democracy' in there somewhere.It gave them a little bit of credibility."

As usual, terrorist groups are not terrorists as long as they are useful for imperial designs. However, with a history of kidnapping children to recruit as soldiers, drug-trafficking, killing civilians (including Kurds), ethnic cleansing of Christian and Muslim Arabs (only 40% of the population of Syria's 'Kurdistan' is Kurdish), and a peculiar radical ideological mix of Kurdish nationalism, Marxism, Leninism and feminism, the YPG/SDF can be rightly listed as a terrorist organization.

• Deputy Assistant Secretary Jonathan Cohen visited Ankara from January 23 to January 24 to discuss 'Olive Branch' with a Turkish Foreign Affairs delegation. After the meeting, a US official told Turkish media: "We did tell them that we do intend to fulfill that commitment [of taking back heavy weapons delivered to the YPG]. But I can't give you a specific time frame."

• On January 24, Rankine-Galloway added that if any element of the YPG said "Hey, we'll no longer fight ISIS and we are going to support our brothers in Afrin," they would no longer be considered a coalition partner. The SDF would only retain coalition support on military operations specifically focused on ISIS.

• On that same day, President Trump spoke on the phone with Erdogan and asked Turkey to "limit its military action and avoid civilian casualties," according to a White House statement.

• Up to this point, the US seemed to cautiously acquiesce to Turkey's military operation while asking for moderation in exchange for some vague concessions - like taking weapons away from the YPG... 'sometime'. However, Turkey is not taking half-measures. Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu demanded on January 27 that US forces withdraw from the city and region of Manbij, where 2,000 American soldiers are stationed. General Joseph Votel, head of US Central Command, replied by telling CNN that leaving Manbij is "not something we are looking into." Similarly, Colonel Ryan Dillon, spokesperson for the US-led coalition, told Kurdish media: "The Coalition will continue to support our Syrian Democratic Forces in the fight against ISIS. We have said this all along, and we have said this with the Kurdish elements of the SDF. We will provide them equipment as necessary to defeat Daesh." Talk about mixed messages from the US!

Note the possessive adjective "our" preceding "Syrian Democratic Forces", an organization formed by the US in Syria's far northeast just 10 days after Russia began military operations in the country in October 2015 (hence 'Plan B').

What Now?

The way US officials have handled the situation pleases neither Turks nor Kurds. Erdogan has long complained of the US alliance with Kurdish (and other) terrorists, and the situation in Manbij will only exacerbate the tension. Now the Kurds themselves arelearning that they have been used by their American sponsors and might soon be entirely discarded:

"With the coalition, especially the US forces, we saw some double standards," a Kurdish military officer by the name of Khalil told RT's Ruptly agency. "What we demand from the US, in particular, is to fulfill the promises to the [US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces] - that is to protect the liberated areas, including Afrin, which, as we can see, has been fighting heroically and fiercely for seven days against Turkish occupation..."

Unless the Turks have a sudden change of heart and head back across the border, the US presence in Syria's northeast is increasingly untenable and the US military may soon find that all parties in the region are either distrustful or hostile. How realistic is it then for the US to retain their illegal bases in Syria purely by force? Politically, US credibility is very low in the eyes of all sides on the ground.

They have only themselves to thank for this situation. This is what happens when you intervene in a sovereign democratic nation under false pretenses, and those pretenses are exposed. Other nations, such as Russia and Turkey, have learned to see through the mask and to skillfully exploit US contradictions via diplomatic or military means. In the case of 'Olive Branch', Adam Garrie asks if Turkey checkmated the US. I think that, ultimately, the US checkmated itself - Turkey and Russia just helped in the process.

This does not mean that the conflict is over - the quagmire between Turkey, Syria, the Kurds and the US can deteriorate and force the involvement of other parties such as Russia or Iran. But it does mean that, whatever the US does now in Syria, plans A and B have failed, at least for the foreseeable future.

What will those in the distant American halls of power, who make a living out of war, do now? An article published on Moon of Alabama takes note of two recent neocon op-eds that call on the Trump government to take "action" and engage in a larger war in Syria.

This strikes me as neocon wishful-thinking. It is unlikely that the US will make the mistake of a large-scale military operation simply because, historically, the US has only engaged in wars it estimates it can easily win at little or no cost - and only then if there are no proxy parties available that can be manipulated into doing the fighting for them. But Russia, Iran and the yet undefeated Syrian government stand in the way of the implementation of that scenario. And almost all Syrian factions - both for and against al-Assad -are currently meeting in Sochi, Russia, to hear out peace proposals.

Another possibility is that the fight is taken elsewhere. Writing on this issue, The Saker thinks the next stop could be Ukraine (again):

Remember how the USA ignited the Ukraine to punish the Russians for their thwarting of the planned US attack on Syria? Well, the very same Ukraine has recently passed a law abolishing the "anti-terrorist operation" in the Donbass and declaring the Donbass "occupied territory". Under Ukie law, Russia is now officially an "aggressor state". This means that the Ukronazis have now basically rejected the Minsk Agreements and are in a quasi-open state of war with Russia. The chances of a full-scale Ukronazi attack on the Donbass are now even higher then before, especially before or during the soccer World Cup in Moscow this summer (remember Saakashvili?).Having been ridiculed (again) with their Border Security Force in Syria, the US Americans will now seek a place to take revenge on the evil Russkies and this place will most likely be the Ukraine. And we can always count the Israelis to find a pretext to continue to murder Palestinians and bomb Syria. As for the Saudis, they appear to be temporarily busy fighting each other. So unless the Empire does something really crazy, the only place it can lash out with little to lose (for itself) is the eastern Ukraine. The Novorussians understand that. May God help them.

The 'reality-creators' of Washington will reignite conflicts around the globe again and again. But with every imperial adventure, the rest of the world, particularly the emerging Asian powers and their partners - Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, Syria - are learning their lessons and growing in their ability to outsmart the arrogant empire.