Welcome New Foreign Friends: Please Help Us Catch Our Domestic Traitors!
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One of the many unheralded successes of the Biden Administration has been cleaving countries from the Russian and Chinese orbits while forcing China and Russia into an unhappy marriage.
In some cases you get the sense that the Biden Administration is doing a little bit of the old Double Cross system whereby British intelligence would capture and turn Nazi spies—or so the World War II story goes. Look a little too close and it’s hard to ignore how Tory a lot of the Nazi world really was and remains.
Anyway it’s hard to read the news about the Duong crime family and not come to certain obvious conclusions about the U.S. and Vietnam relationship. Look a little closer and it starts to become more and more obvious. The U.S. and Vietnam have a deal. And it’s a good deal.
Think about that for a moment:
Whereas my uncle by blood (Navy, CIA) hunted Viet Cong and my uncle by marriage (Green Beret) traversed the Mekong River delta I count Vietnamese among my best friends, worst foes and ex-girlfriends. It’s a fascinating language and it’s only going to continue being relevant, especially to the future of California.
I find it pretty interesting how in one generation we can go from firebombing a country to a strategic grand alliance essential for global peace. Blessed are the peacemakers indeed.
Of course the largest threat to global peace is transnational organized crime. The Biden Administration has signed an executive order to that effect and is seemingly applying it everywhere.
So what might that deal portend for the mobbed up politicians and gangsters in our respective countries? Well, it’s not good for them, that’s for sure. Part of the reason the PayPal mafia dislikes Joe Biden is that many of them have connections to the actual mafia. We’ve talked about this before.
Come to think about it, the All In Pod guys used Polymarket to back their claims that Biden will drop out, and they do have a history of pumping and dumping in crypto so maybe I’m right when I say my favorite True Crime podcast is the “All In Pod.” Sorry but our election is not your casino.
But we’re also seeing how many Democrats have their own mafia ties with the panic to replace Joe Biden.
Now there’s no greater mafia business than the “sanitation” or “waste management” business. Olivia Nuzzi, for example, has written a very rough piece on Joe Biden for the mobbed up New York Magazine, itself owned by the very mobbed up Wasserstein family. Nuzzi’s father, John Nuzzi, worked for twenty years in “sanitation” during its most mobbed up New York City era.
To be sure it’s considered crass to point out that a lot of mob kids are in journalism or that many of them work for mob outlets like Olivia has. Are we really supposed to believe that the Daily Beast, which hired her when she was a student at Fordham was just overcome by her journalism? I mean come on now. Nuzzi hates Trump so much for giving her a career and a front page cover on a major magazine.
In October 2018 Trump personally invited Olivia Nuzzi into the Oval Office for an exclusive interview. Joe Biden has no time for her at all. Who do you think she’s pulling for?
Maybe Weiner communications director Barbara Morgan said that Nuzzi, who had infiltrated Weiner’s 2013 mayoral campaign, was “clearly there because she wanted to be seen.... she would just not show up for work," that Nuzzi had signed and violated a non-disclosure agreement, and that Morgan had earlier "tried to fire her, but she begged to come back and I gave her a second chance."
Could Nuzzi want to give Trump a second chance? Well, consider this cover.
While we are on the topic of mobsters and the “waste management industry,” let’s return to the Duongs who are alleged to be actual Vietnamese gangsters trafficking in drugs and people.
For what it’s worth I never much bought the Duong immigrant story and apparently I had good reason. The latest news from Oakland (and California) is decidedly not good for them.
My grandfather Carl W. Lundquist had run Fort Indiantown Gap, the largest Vietnamese resettlement program. He lived in little Saigon in Dorchester and he and I would attend Tết Nguyên Đán, or Vietnamese New Year celebrations together. I still surprise the Vietnamese by ordering cà phê sữa đá. I had a Vietnamese American girlfriend (who later wrote a boring book about me for her Likud handlers) and I have a Vietnamese-Australian ex-business partner who tried to cheat me but in general I like the Vietnamese people. They’re wild.
My grandfather loved them too.
From his obituary you get a sense of how challenging that refugee experience was.
As an Army Reservist, Carl was recalled to active duty numerous times, most notably for the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and for Operation New Arrivals, the effort to resettle thousands of refugees from Southeast Asia after the fall of Saigon in 1975. During that operation, Carl commanded a civil affairs battalion at Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, which was responsible for logistically supporting and resettling more than 30,000 Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees in the US. He often said this operation was the most memorable and satisfying of his 37 years of military service.
I asked Grandpa about that experience which was seemingly logistically quite challenging. He told me the hardest bit wasn’t so much placing the refugees but in determining friend from foe. “Some of those people really wished us harm,” he’d tell me but in general the local Vietnamese refugees would warn my grandfather and his men about the frauds and phonies in their midst.
There are all sorts of immigrant stories and not all the immigrants who come to this country wish us well. Some of them are criminals, fleeing prosecution. Others are spies. Still others are both. Witness Guo Wangui, Steve Bannon’s sugar daddy. So it appears to be with the Duong family.
Much attention has been focused on the Duong crime family’s ties to the California Democratic Party — it looks like they put the domestic partner of the mayor of Oakland on the payroll and are currently under FBI inquiry — but much of their giving seems to have changed during the pandemic with over $500,000 going to the California Republican Party and President Trump.
This is, of course, right around the time that fellow Californian Kevin McCarthy plotted his speakership.
This part might be burying the lede a little but from what I am reading in the Vietnamese press there’s a lot of evidence that Duong has ties to Chinese intelligence and Chinese organized crime. He describes, for example, getting a bag of cash in investment from Chinatown and he speaks admiringly about the Chinese government. You can read about his connections with the Chinese mafia world in the Vietnamese press.
We’ve talked elsewhere about Kevin McCarthy’s organized crime ties but now we’re seeing how those ties have harmed America’s relations in the Indo-Pacific and we’re noticing that those allies have noticed.
Like Japan or the Philippines, Vietnam depends upon the U.S. Navy coming to its rescue in the advent of escalating tensions with China and so naturally the Vietnamese are also unhappy with McCarthy grifting off of the US military base at China Lake Naval Air Station by putting his brother-in-law on the payroll with sham Native American contracts. There’s a huge inquiry into the labor practices at the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake which hasn’t yet concluded but which is thus far quite damning.
But think about it. Were you a Chinese intelligence officer wouldn’t you love the joke about compromising a military facility called China Lake? It’s objectively pretty funny.
And what should we make of Peter Kuo, the Chinese intelligence operative that Kevin McCarthy has installed in the California GOP much to the protestations of other California GOP members?
Well, the California GOP took lots of money from Kuo and Duong — and then promptly installed Kevin McCarthy’s wife Judy Wages on the payroll of the California GOP for a no show job. That should sound familiar as its the exact same charge against Seng Thao, the embattled mayor of Oakland.
When Thao complains that other politicians crime as well she’s not wrong and maybe race does have something to do with the FBI’s attempt to go after her and not Kevin McCarthy. Then again, maybe the FBI could absolve itself of the racist charge by indicting Kevin McCarthy too.
Or has McCarthy bag man, lobbyist (and Netanyahu asset) Jeff Miller’s close relationship with the Mormons who have penetrated the FBI forestall that possibility? I leave this to others to contemplate—and hopefully investigate. I’ll help.
Representative Matt Gaetz has his faults but on the crucial question of defeating Kevin McCarthy he’s hard to beat. Here’s the New York Times talking about McCarthy’s Likud (and no doubt Duong funded) “revenge tour.”
“McCarthy's former aides and friends have gently encouraged him to stop sounding so bitter and preoccupied with Mr. Gaetz. But Mr. McCarthy is committed to the bit, telling people he wants to define Mr. Gaetz in public and prevent him from ever becoming electable statewide, even if it will be almost impossible to beat him in a congressional primary.”
Good luck with that, Kevin. McCarthy is very tied into the Azeri world. The Azeri press very much noticed this detail when he ascended to the Speakership. He was “neutral” unlike Armenian loving Nancy Pelosi. And McCarthy was very rough on Dana Rohrabacher who had very close ties to Armenia.
In fact McCarthy was very close to both the Tory world (through that fat fraud Frank Luntz) and the Israelis and the Mormons (through Jeff Miller).
You get a lot of the way there when you understand that the Azerbaijanis buy their weapons from the Israelis and the Turks.
Ehud Barak, spymaster of Mossad and former Israeli prime minister, was much closer to Armenia than Azerbaijan but he’s in eighties now and the Armenians are being cleansed from Israel.
The quiet Turko-Azeri-Russian alliance seemingly caught Armenia by surprise, especially when it learned that Belarus was secretly arming Azerbaijan in violation of a security alliance. It’s not an overstatement to say that the Armenian Diaspora feared a second Armenian genocide — and began plotting terrorist actions in Russia and elsewhere. While Armenia couldn’t win on the battlefield — Turkish drones saw to that — they could win in the politics or by intrigue. The Armenian foreign minister is set to travel to Washington for a NATO summit this week. Armenia’s recognition of Palestine also sets the stage.
One of the quiet actions they undertook was becoming more allied with U.S. intelligence. The recent indictment of Democratic congressman Henry Cuellar of Texas talks a lot about his ties to Azerbaijan which had effectively put him on the payroll to the tune of $400,000+. The efforts to nab Cuellar also ensnared Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt with the USAID (CIA) helping.
Stitt, widely thought to be corrupt, is close to Matt Michelsen, the human trafficker on the U.S.-Mexico border involved with the fraudulent Covid Tory startup who has received more than $600m from the state of Texas for sham contracts.
The Azeris, like the Turks before them, are missing their chance to become America’s closest ally. They are continuing the same tired petro-politics we’ve come to expect of oil-rich but ethics-poor countries. Will this change around this year’s UN Climate Change Conference in Baku in November? Hard to say. You could imagine Azerbaijan making the pro-American pivot but maybe that’s just wishful thinking.
Now I have a lot of affection for the Turks but they’ve missed every opportunity to more closely align with American interests. How much the Turks are to blame for Erdogan and how much he’s a regular autocrat is a question for the history books but it does seem to me as if a lot of Turkish elites have given up their duties and Türkiye suffers as a result. Turkophile that I am, I am very depressed at how poorly managed Türkiye is.
The Armenians, by contrast, are showing the world that they want to play again. They’ve been swept from Ukraine in favor of the Georgian factions.
But they could still help America and France through their diaspora. In this love of liberty, they have a great tradition and history.
I recommend two great books on Armenians who had all kinds of ties to the intelligence community of their day.
William Rempel, The Gambler: How Penniless Dropout Kirk Kerkorian Became the Greatest Deal Maker in Capitalist History
Jonathan Conlin, Mr Five Per Cent: The many lives of Calouste Gulbenkian, the world's richest man
Having lived in Fresno, Kerkorian is a man near and dear to my heart. I ate often at Armenian restaurants and the Armenian community made me feel as if I was one of them during the few years I lived in Clovis.
Rempel describes a story about Kerkorian that’s extremely suggestive of him working for the intelligence community.
Elizabeth Dole, who was head of the American Red Cross, was looking for money to ameliorate the Rwanda genocide. She called Kerkorian and asked for two million dollars. “You got it,” he said. She then asked for him to raise some money from his friends — something Rempel describes Kerkorian as loathe to do.
“How much do you really need?”
“Four million.”
“You got it.”
Of course the Red Cross is not a CIA front. And I’m sure that Dole’s husband’s position—Senator Bob Dole of Kansas served on the Senate committee overseeing gambling — had little to do with the decision.
No, no. Kerkorian did it all on his own without any help for Uncle Sam or the mob world or both.
I’m kidding. Of course the mob and the deep state were aligned in the American interest. We can and we must get back there again.
Kerkorian became an American in what he did for others though he never forgot his Armenian roots.
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What on earth did the Duongs want so badly with that section of the old Oakland Army base?