Unnatural Disasters – Something in the Air

What Got the CIA and John Young Thinking I Am A Spy

by   Trowbridge H. Ford                                                                      edited by  Jim W. Dean

Bertrand Russell concluded A History of Western Philosophy on this optimistic note:

“In the welter of conflicting fanaticisms, one of the few unifying forces is scientific truthfulness, by which I mean the habit of basing our beliefs upon observations and inference as impersonal, and as much divested of local and temperamental bias, as is possible for human beings.

To have insisted upon the introduction of this virtue into philosophy, and to have invented a powerful method by which it can be rendered fruitful, are the chief merits of the philosophical school of which I am a member….In abandoning a part of its dogmatic pretensions, philosophy does not cease to suggest and inspire a way of life.” (p. 836)

For the first time since the classical Greek philosophers, according to Russell, philosophy, thanks to what has happened in science since Copernicus, had a proper method, modern analytical empiricism, by which it can slowly build up a theory of the natural world – what had traditionally been corrupted by the preconceptions and aims of moral and political thinkers.

Coupled with quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, physics was putting its house finally in order with philosophy following suit, promising a world of liberalism where mankind would flourish.

Russell never revised and updated his tome, though he lived another quarter century, and the reason for it is not difficult to determine.

The development of atomic weapons, and the possibility of mankind’s annihilation increasingly occupied his thoughts and actions.

While the philosopher did not object to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – apparently because they shortened the war with Japan – he became alarmed about their possibilities, once the Soviets demonstrated that they too had the bomb.

Russell never had any sympathy either in theory or practice with the Soviet Union, considering it only to be the latest and most virulent form of fanaticism.

As Russell grew older, he became angrier.

His more traditional betes noirs, adherence to traditional religion and their secular counterparts, ideologies were replaced by the spiraling arms race between the superpowers and the chances of wars like in the one in Vietnam setting off their use for real.

The Korean War became Russell’s alarm call as it showed the Soviet Union and Red China coming together in ways which could trigger nuclear annihilation.

To stem the tide, Russell enlisted the dying Einstein in 1957 to join the Pugwash movement – an organization of scientists worldwide to force their governments to renounce nuclear weapons.

Its conferences attempted to put on an institutional basis what Dr. Joseph Rotblat, a refugee Polish physicist in the Manhattan Project, did – resigned – when he learned that Hitler’s Germany was not pursuing its own bomb to win WWII.

The American intervention in the Vietnamese civil war turned Russell’s opposition to it increasingly into nearly hysterical outbursts, as Alan Ryan has written in Bertrand Russell: A Politcal Life, but there was no reason in his concerns that Ryan was willing to admit.

In 1961, Russell wrote Has Man a Future?, elaborating upon the threat because of the willingness of scientists to put their expertise to harmful uses. The Russian atomic scientists, led by Igor Kurchatov, had successfully exploded a hydrogen bomb of their own design on November 22, 1955.

Then the Soviets produced a fusion reactor which had all kinds of military uses, especially being able to create massive amounts of neutrons on demand, and what could be directed on a target anywhere with the proper accelerator. And, of course, the USSR was well ahead of the West in the development of missiles for the delivery of atomic bombs.

In this pressure-cooker atmosphere, the aims of Russell’s Pugswash movement had little chance of recruiting Soviet scientists until Stalin had departed the scene, and some kind of détente was achieved with Washington.

When the Soviet Union felt comfortable enough about its situation to sign the Helsinki Accords on Security and Co-operation in Europe, its privileged scientists, notably Andrei Sakharov who designed its thermonuclear bomb and fusion reactor, were increasingly inclined to tell Moscow what should be done across the board to make sure the country was strong enough to ensure peace.

Only by all Soviet citizens being able to speak their minds could the country be assured of reasonable policies in science and politics at home and abroad.

Sakharov’s leadership of dissent brought all kinds critics, especially other scientists like P. L. Kapitsa, Lev Landau, Vladimir Bukovsky, and Yuri Orlov, of Soviet policy, to the fore.

With the Helsinki Accords in place, the USSR promised to establish an environment where truths of all kinds could flourish instead of one where Moscow relied upon borrowed ideas, one way or another, from the West regarding accelerators, atomic energy, shortwave technology, jet propulsion and the like.

The turning point had occurred when Kapitsa challenged the new leader Khurshchev in January 1955 on the way Moscow managed the whole scientific enterprise, starting with the revival of the study of genetics.

The attitude of main-line Soviet scientists, though, was still best captured when Kurchatov was queried at a 1956 lecture in Britain about the chances of exchanging information on the possible peacetime uses of nuclear energy.

Kurchatov had played catch-up too long with the West in the field – and would never have caught up if it had not been for the spying for Moscow by ‘K’ apparently aka SCOTT and Peter Wright – to take the proposal too seriously:

“Kurchatov considered privately that the conception of science overstepping national frontiers,” his interpreter Malcolm Mackintosh related, “was inadmissible at the monent. He himself was a Russian first and a scientist second.” (Quoted from David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, p. 362.)

Of course, the Americans were equally involved in developing the use of the whole spectrum of atomic waves for military purposes – everything from thermonuclear weapons to tabletop-sized, nuclear explosions, thanks to what lasers and accelerators could provide.

American scientists became more and more America Firsters, though, as the process went on because of the fallout from the McCarthy era, and the deciphering of Soviet coded cables during WWII by the Venona Project.

Thanks to what happened to scientists J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Theodore Hall, Clarence Hiskey,Giovanni Lomanitz, Joseph Weinberg, Martin Kamen, David Bohm, Hyman Goldsmith, Morris Perelman, William Perl and many others – rightly or wrongly – the American scientific community learned the hard way to do whatever its employers asked, whether public or private, and never ask the reason why or to complain to others.

While the development of missiles and atomic bombs took the world to the brink of annihilation, as the Cuban Missile Crisis played itself out in October 1962, the threat of it realizing what the policy, mutually assured destruction (MAD), was intended to prevent led the superpowers to seek other weapons systems.

While the covert operations against Cuba to precipitate a showdown with the Castro regime – making it look like it shot down John Glenn’s risky obiter circling the globe if the mission went belly up, like it attacked the American base at Guantanamo to expel the colonial power from the island, and the like – have been previously emphasized.

Washington’s manipulation of Cuba’s weather – what it had been working on since 1947 when it was unsuccessful in diverting a hurricane from hitting Savannah – especially increasing the power of hurricanes and tropical storms, was much more devastating.

During the 1960s, the Atlantic Basin experienced a rising tide of hurricanes, with 6 occurring in 1961, 5 in 1964, and 3 in 1966. There were only 18 such storms during the 25-year period from 1944 to 1969.

The timing of these waves of hurricanes is just too politically convenient for them not to have been deliberately made by covert government in Washington – right after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the assassination of JFK which gave the green light to everything covert government could muster, and right after it become completely bogged down militarily in Vietnam.

This is not to say that Washington created the tropical storms in the first place. It only intensified ones which suited its agenda, and guided them as best it could over Cuba.

And there is no doubt that America had the capability to do these things if it wanted, and could have had the power to create earthquakes if it had so chosen. As Lt. Col. Thomas Bearden belatedly remarked at the 1981 US Psychotronics Association, all one had to do to make a tropical storm into a hurricane was to dephase the frequency of standing electromagnetic waves – what powerful lasers could do with new accelerators – into the air it was passing through.

Psychotronics is broad program to direct people, objects or equipment through various software to do things contrary to their own programming. It was increasingly interested in hypnotizing operators from a remote distance instead of developing Nikola Tesla’s hardware, and Bearden was informing the public of what needed to be done while American inventors and operators were catching up with Moscow in the field.

As go-for-broke Professor Gordon J. F. MacDonald of UCLA’s Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics explained 15 years before in his paper, “How to Wreck The Environment,” for a volume provocatively entitled Unless Peace Comes:

“The key to geophysical warfare is the identification of environmental instabilities to which the addition of a small amount of energy would release vastly greater amounts of energy.”

This knowledge and capability could result in engineering earthquakes, melting the polar ice cap, depleting the ozone layer, weather manipulation, climate modification, ocean wave control, and even brain wave manipulation of whole populations.

Unfortunately, as Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen have indicated in The 60 Greatest Conspiracies, America chose MacDonald’s program in remote viewing instead of the other options.

“In this way,” the mad Doctor explained, “one could develop a system that could seriously impair the brain peformance of very large populations in selected regions over an extended period….No matter how deeply disturbing the thought of using the environment to manipulate behavior for national advantages, to some, the technology permitting such use will very probably develop within the next few decades.” (Quoted from p. 435.)

To give cover to the making of these hurricanes, and to come up with a means of preventing them if the need arose, Washington carried out Operation Stormfury, starting in 1962 – the project to seed storms with silver iodide, lead, and dry ice in the hope that they would prevent hurricanes from forming by breaking storms up by, on occasion, man-made tornadoes.

The whole project was like many others in the scientific field where finding a remedy for something terrible – like stopping cults – necessitated the need of creating them for studying and testing correctives.

When it came necessary to use the project in Vietnam to stop Vietcong transport on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and to attack targets with greater cloud protection, the Air Force hid its transfer of the expensive capability from the Gulf by causing a great cloud to develop over Hispaniola, causing the inhabitants of Haiti and the Dominican Republic to run in terror, fearing the end of the world.

The effects of climate change by the superpowers were evident by the 1960s for all to see if only one had taken the time to look.

The polar ice caps and the ozone layers were starting to diminish – what would quicken when they, especially the Soviets, began attacking the areas with electromagnetic waves of certain frequencies, causing standing waves of devastating proportions.

While scientists would belatedly claim that this was the result of using choroflurohyrocarbons, it was essentially the result of human rayguns which cooked up a dangerous mixture of waves, sea water and sunlight, creating deadly side products of bromine and chlorine which degraded the ozone layers.

The reason for these efforts was not just for immediate tactical success but also long-term strategic advantage. The US Navy, for example, helped melt down the ice cap over the North Pole so that Russian submarines of all types would have few places to hide in a Cold War showdown.

Little wonder that it is now looking at an ice-free Northwest Passage in the near future, and wondering how to defend it.

The USSR’s program Woodpecker has so warmed up Siberia, making its vast mineral deposits accessible, but the process has left Russia with the western part increasingly contaminated with methane, and the eastern part drying up like a desert.

And they both have been monkeying around with the weather at the South Pole in the hope of gaining new resources – which only degraded further its ice cap and ozone layers.

While this whole reckless process was going on, the Soviets, it seems, decided to increase its geo-political position by chopping down Mao Zedong’s China a peg with its new earthquake-making capability. No sooner had America withdrawn from South Vietnam than China’s leaderhip was confronted with the growing possibility of encirclement – the domino effect in reverse.

While the Vietnamese were taking the measure of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Leonid Brezhnev and KGB Chief Yuri Andropov settled scores with China’s Cultural Revolution, helping finish off its Old Guard in the process.

The scene was set for the showdown when the Norwegians decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Sakharov right after Moscow had agreed to the Helsinki Accords – though he was prevented from leaving the country to accept it just to be on the safe side.

The Kremlin decided that in making a big stink over giving it to the noted scientist and human rights worker, it could create a smokescreen for a crippling attack on its upstart neighbor.

By branding Skaharov as “Public Enemy Number One”, and taking the most crude measures to silence him and his supporters, especially his wife Elena Bonner, scientist Yuri Orlov, and Peter Wright’s one-time handler Vladimir Bukovsky, the Soviet leadership fixed the world’s attention on apparently another series of show trials, reminiscent of Stalin’s more paranoid days.

For a most ill-conceived analysis of the process, see Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield, p. 322ff.

With the world’s attention fixed on whether Sakharov would too be tried, and Orlov, a leading candidate for another peace laureate, would soon follow. The Soviets apparently caused an 8.2 earthquake during the early morning of July 28, 1976 in the city of Tangshan, southeast of Peking, destroying nearly all of it, and half of its one million inhabitants.

The earthquake came without any tremors, and at a time when all the preparations to render some disaster less destructive were useless because all the people were sleeping. Scientists did not think that such a powerful earthquake was possible for another century, given the area’s previous history.

While Western scientists considered the quake a matter of nature simply taking its course, Chinese official were much more suspicious about its cause, though they too predicted the possibility of a moderate one occurring at the time.

On the night before, people noticed strange lights – so-called ‘earthquake lights’ (“Tesla Effect”) – animals, fowl and fish were behaving in all kinds of strange ways, and underground water temperatures were completely abnormal.

The earth was literally shaking, with intermitant flashes of light, before the quake finally struck.

Sino-Soviet relations immediately began to improve after the terrible disaster. The “Curse of 1976” was followed two months later by Mao’s death.

Zhou Enlai and Zhu De had died a few months before the quake, and Mao’s followers, The Gang of Four, were badly embarrassed by not visiting the stricken site while charging Deng Xiaoping with having sabotated relief efforts.

Mao’s titular successor Hua Guofeng and Chen Yonggui, who had made a personal visit to Tangshan on August 4th to survey the damage, then saw to the end of The Gang of Four and China’s isolation.

In the January 1978 edition of Specula magazine, when the smoke from the disaster had settled, Andrija Puharich – an American doctor and lawyer deeply involved in the remote viewing program at his home, Turkey Farm, in Ossining, New York – published an article, entitled “Global Magnetic Warfare – A Layman’s View of Certain Artifically Induced Unusual Effects on the Planet Earth During 1976 and 1977, “

…charging that the Soviets had done it. “By interferometer techniques, giant standing waves,” he explained, “can be combined to produce a focused beam of very great energy.”

Given Puharich’s close connections to the Agency, everyone apparently assumed that this was just some of its black propaganda, hiding perhaps what Washington had really done, and the CIA did what it could to bolster the claim by, it seems, burning down the Turkey Farm, targeting him for assassination on several occasions, and even killing him in 1995 apparently when the Clinton administration decided to go into the weather manipulation business big time.

Until then, Washington was afraid to admit how far behind it was in the earthquake-making business for fear of terrorizing its citizens.

Soviet defector Oleg Kalugin, for example, claimed in 1993 that the Soviets had tried to achieve the same results by attempting to plant nuclear weapons off America’s West Coast, and exploding them to create devastating results.

It would have been a far different matter if Yuri Orlov, the Soviets’ expert on its particle accelerator projects, had been running around the world, talking about them in order to improve his credentials for the Nobel Peace Prize. Orlov was a troublemaking genius.

The high energy physicist had formed the Moscow chapter of Amnesty International in 1973, causing his dismissal from Moscow’s Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism in 1976.

While in “soft exile” in Armenia, he became such an important player in its particle accelerator projects at Yerevan that he was brought back to Moscow.

There, instead of causing more trouble, though, he was soon arrested in February 1977, held incommunicado for months, tried and sentenced to Siberia in May 1978, and only released in 1986 by Gorbachev after the showdown with America after the assassination of Sweden’s statsminister Olof Palme had passed without Armageddon.

The only important thing which happened in this area in the interim was the buildup of the capability so what Washington could cause earthquakes on demand if the Cold War called for it – what was in the offing after Palme’s assassination at the end of February 1986 in Stockholm.

An Anglo-American conspiracy hoped that this would trigger a final showdown with Moscow, once its attack submarines started sinking Soviet nuclear ones when they hurriedly went on line after the surprise.

Washington and London planned to start the air and land attack with America’s Task Force Eagle joining NATO’s Anchor Express Exercise in an assault on the Kola Pennisula to convince Moscow that the gig was up.

And if the Kremlin continued the hopeless struggle, to follow up the assaults with laser destruction of ICBMs preparing for a retaliatory launch, and earthquakes around its boomer submarine pens in the mountains near Sevastapol.

Fortunately, as I have already written, the Challenger Shuttle disaster prevented this part of the conspiracy from ever occurring

When a capable Misty radar satellite was finally successfully launched in 1988, there was little use for it with the Cold War coming to an end, and it was only thanks to Danny Stillman’s idea of using it to cause an earthquake in northwest Iran to make sure that it stayed onside during the showdown with Saddam that it was finally tried over the Manjil-Radbar area.

Robert Gates – the former Director of Central Intelligence, and just now the Secretary of Defense who is noted for saying things when he shouldn’t, and for not saying things when he should – made its source quite clear when he added this to the dustjack of Stillman and Thomas Reed’s The Nuclear Express:

“(Stillman’s) ability to adapt the latest advances in science to solve unmanageable problems and to analyze foreign technologies made him an invaluable asset to the Intelligence Community.”

In case anyone actually read the book, Reed and Stillman added this about Iran at the time:

“The very large, underground, and once-secret uranium -enrichment facility near Natanz is to accommodate fifty thousant centrigue machines, running around the clock.

The centrigue hall apears to be built underneath layers of burster slabs: strata of concrete interleaved with soil to defat penetrating warheead attacks. These bunders appear to have been dsigned and built by European contractors.

The list goes on, but the details are less important than the overall message. The Islamic fundamentalist in control of Iran have embarked on a massive but ambiguoous nuclear program.

It is focused on the development of a nuclear weapon capability, if not the assemby of a weapn itself, within the near future. In its 2007 report of the subject, Newsweek magazine condensed the story into four very accurate words: ‘Twenty Years of Deceit.’ ” (p. 294)

In 1993, Clinton’s White House agreed to testing its equipment by having an experimental one in Australia’s Great Victoria Desert. As Bill Bryson explained four years later in The New York Times:

“The seismographic traces didn’t fit the profile of an earthquake or mining explosion, and anyway the blast was 170 times more powerful than the most powerful mining explosion ever recorded in Western Australia.”

Bryson was most inclined to blame the explosion on a bomb built by the Japanese terrorists, the Aum Shinrikyo, since they conveniently owned property near the center of the explosion, though there was apparently no evidence of radiation.

Bryson’s apparent disinformation induced Jason Jeffrey to write an article, “Earthquakes: Natural or Man-Made?”, for a 1999 issue of New Dawn magazine, taking issue with the claim that the Aum Shinrikyo group probably did it.

By this time, America, it seems, had used the equipment for real, causing a 6.7 or greater earthquake in Izmit, Turkey on August 17, 1999 – a country paralyzed by no effective government, and not knowing where to turn.

As with the one in China, experts had recently predicted that there was only a 12% of one happening like this in the next 30 years. To add to the unreality of the analysis of the disaster, the US Geodetic Survey quoted from Ammianus Marcellines’s account of Izmit’s destruction by an earthquake in 358 A.D.

As in the tragedy in Tangshan, Jeffrey described the piezolectric effect aka “Tesla Effect” just before it struck. Two days before it happened, fish and crustaceans in large amounts were found floating dead in the water, and nets and rocks were burned. “Furthermore,” Jeffrey added,” just before the quake, the bottom of the sea in Izmit went red and sea temperature went up to 40-45 degrees C. However, there are no underwater volcanoes in the Sea of Marmara.”

About the test in the Australian desert, Jeffrey agreed with Harry Mason’s 19-page report – what was later published too in New Dawn magazine. Witnesses told him that “they saw the sky ablaze, heard loud explosions and felt the ground shake, in one case knocking beer cans off a table.”

Mason was in no doubt that it was caused by “a very advanced eletromagnetic weapons system.” As for whose it could be, Jeffrey added:

“And most worrying is mounting evidence that the US military now has the ability to create earthquakes – the ultimate weapon of war.”

In the 21st century, the Pentagon has let it all hang out – what Clinton too started with a new cycle on hurricanes for strategic purposes in 1995 – just when the Norwegians had finally recognized the efforts by Rotblat and the Pugwash movement for peace by awarding them the prize in 1999.

In the period 1990-2004, there have been 269 hurricanes worldwide, an increase of over 50% from the previous 15-year period.

Of course, I am not saying or implying that it has caused them all or even many of the devastating earthquakes and hurricanes, but it has caused enough to help bring on a period of violent weather whose conclusion no one can easily predict.

And it will do no good to back away from what is happening, as Jeffrey did when he updated his thoughts about who or what was causing them after the Asian tsunami in December 2004 in a recent issue of New Dawn magazine.

But it won’t be pretty, and the American government has much to answer for helping make it happen.

Trowbridge Ford

Trowbridge Ford (1929 – 2021) was the son of William Wallace Ford, the father of the US Army’s Grasshoppers.

He attended Phillips Exeter Academy, and Columbia University where he received a Ph.D. in political science after a stint in the Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps as a draftee during the Korean War, and after being discharged, worked as the sports editor and a reporter for the now-defunct Raleigh Times.

Thought academia was the thing for him.  He was quite satisfied teaching all kinds of courses about European and American politics while writing his dissertation about an under-appreciated British politician, Henry Brougham, who became the Lord Chancellor of the famous Reform Government (1830-34).

At the same time, Trowbridge became most interested in the role that A. V. Dicey, a famous Oxford legal professor, played in settling the Irish question – another figure that historians didn’t think did much about.   It was while he was doing research on the dissertation at the British Museum in London that President Kennedy was assassinated, and it slowly led him to take a dimmer view of academic life, especially when joined by campus protests over the growing Vietnam War.  He was fired by two institutions of higher learning because of his protests against the war.

When the Vietnam War finally ended, he got involved in researching the Dallas assassination, and his first serious efforts about it appeared in Tom Valentine’s The National Exchange in 1978 – what Fletcher Prouty thought was quite good, just urging him to go higher in the Agency and the political world for the main culprits.

He slowly started doing this, ultimately deciding to retire early in 1986, planning on finishing his Brougham biography while living in Portugal. While he did this, he had made too many enemies with the White House not to be punished – first by attempts to establish that he maliciously tried to destroy Richard Nixon during Watergate by libeling him, and when he died, DCI George Tenet tried to have me killed by poisoning – what would make his death look like a suicide or a natural one.

As a result of this, once he had finally determined the cause, he moved to Sweden to not only save his skin but also investigate and write about assassinations, covert operations, ‘false flag’ deceptions, preventive wars, weapons development, and their use, etc.  He passed away in 2021.