So where are the accolades and honors for one of America’s greatest investigative journalists? I bet you’ve never even heard his name.
There’s no denying Steve Kangas was the real thing, a CIA spook who dropped out of the game and began revealing deep secrets. Thankfully, much of his journalism survives today because he was one of the first to realize the value of the Internet. I don’t understand why there’s no biography or compendium of his greatest hits. Hopefully, someday, these will emerge.
Kangas was posted in Berlin at the height of the Cold War and grew disgusted by dirty tricks and secret ops, so he got himself honorably discharged and moved to Santa Cruz to pursue some college degrees. He planned to go all the way to PhD with the financial assistance of the G.I. Bill. He was a chess master and quickly became president of the Santa Cruz chess club, which gives you an idea of his intellectual prowess. Had he lived, he’d be the most enlightened political pundit in the world today, so deep was his understanding of secret societies. It took me decades to catch up to where Kangas was in 1999 when he was murdered (although officially, it’s a “suicide” naturally.) There was another journalist working a similar trail even earlier named Danny Casolaro and he was also “suicided” back in 1991. But after Kangas was killed, the CIA went into overdrive inventing fake whistle-blowers to snatch control of the center of conspiracy research. If you see a so-called whistle-blower on the cover of Time magazine, rest assured that’s an op.
Kangas knew the CIA was designed not to foster democracy but fascist puppets favorable to rampant exploitation, which is why the CIA is known on the inside as the “company,” while agents are “assets” and overseas postings, “accounts,” terminology lifted straight from the big business universe they secretly serve.
Kangas was also aware of a deep Catholic connection inside the CIA, and the incredible overlap of CIA officials, corporate CEOs, European royals, heads of state, and Nazi war criminals, all of whom were Knights of Malta (essentially the Pope’s CIA), which means they held citizenship in the only landless entity on earth offering full diplomatic immunity. While masquerading as do-gooders, Knights can whiz easily through customs with nary a second glance, so if you want to move something secret or illegal across international borders, just hand it off to them.
One of Kangas’ most important revelations was Watergate was a CIA op designed to bring down Nixon, who had been trying to wrest control of international relations away from the CIA. Apparently, Nixon’s detente move with China did not have full CIA approval. Early on, Kangas recognized Bob Woodward as a spook, and not a real investigative journalist.
Richard Mellon Scaife became one of Kangas’ main targets and he spent months investigating Scaife’s operations. At the time, Scaife was puppet master of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” trying to bring down President Clinton, as he was pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the effort to wrest the White House from the Democrats. Much of this activity was cloaked inside some highly influential foundations which had been created as tax shelters for the super rich, the biggest of which were:
- Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
- Carthage Foundation
- Earhart Foundation
- Charles G. Koch
- David H. Koch
- Claude R. Lambe
- Philip M. McKenna
- J.M. Foundation
- John M. Olin Foundation
- Henry Salvatori Foundation
- Sarah Scaife Foundation
- Smith Richardson Foundation
One sticky problem Scaife needed to overcome was the large number of women supporting the Democrats, so he began grooming female pundits for his cause. He donated $450,000 to help create the Independent Women’s Forum, which greatly assisted the rise of Ann Coulter.
According to a former Scaife employee: “He has the emotional maturity of a very angry 12-year-old, and he has all this money and he can do whatever he wants with it.” While working as managing editor of a Scaife-funded magazine, Pat Minarcin was given a list of people Scaife wanted attacked in print. Minarcin resigned.
On February 8th, 1999, Kangas took a bus to Pittsburgh from Nevada, and visited the Scaife headquarters. We don’t know what happened next. Was he there to interview Scaife? We only know he was found dead in the men’s room on the same floor as Scaife’s office. And that Kangas’ computer was wiped clean the next day. The death was quickly ruled a suicide, while the police report and autopsy disagreed on the location of the entry wound. There was zero coverage in any media for weeks, and even then, not a single reporter conducted an independent investigation of the death. Eventually, the story was sculpted to assert Kangas had come to Pittsburgh to assassinate Scaife, and had gotten cold feet and shot himself instead, a completely absurd hypothesis accepted faithfully by the national media. My theory is he came to interview Scaife and perhaps tape record his answers when confronted with certain evidence. After the interview was concluded, Kangas stopped off at the men’s room, where Scaife’s goons began separating him from his recorder and evidence. Did Kangas actually possess a weapon, and carry it to Pittsburgh, and if so, why is there zero discussion about it’s forensic trail, because weapons have some.
But this was not the first unexpected death linked to Scaife. Robert Duggan was the powerful district attorney in Pittsburgh, and also boyfriend of Cordelia, Scaife’s sister. Duggan had shepherded Scaife into the highest echelons of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania, but after a federal investigation was launched against Duggan, Scaife planned to subpoena his sister Cordelia to spill whatever beans she knew. In response, Cordelia swiftly married Duggan to prevent any such testimony from taking place. On March 5th, 1974, the same day the corruption indictment came down, Duggan was found dead of a shotgun blast to the chest. The weapon was on the ground several feet away. Cordelia was convinced her brother was behind the killing and the two cut off all communication for decades, although they did reconcile shortly before Cordelia’s death.
On July 4, 2014, Scaife passed away from cancer one day after his 82nd birthday. He left his fortune to two foundations, and his two children immediately filed a lawsuit claiming the billion dollar fortune had been drained of hundreds of millions of dollars just prior to their father’s death.
My coda on this saga is Barbara Olson, one of the attractive right-wing pundits shepherded on a fast-track through the Scaife propaganda mills. Olson was an attorney for Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, which may be the most powerful law firm in America (after Sullivan and Cromwell), before she became a professional pundit. She was on her way to another appearance on Bill Mayer’s Politically Incorrect when she boarded Flight 77. Although cell phones did not work above 1800 feet at the time, she allegedly called her husband from high altitude. The call, although technically impossible, was how the 9/11 hijack story was initially fed into the national media.
Barbara Olson had previously been the primary protector of Clarence Thomas in his battle against Anita Hill, and later morphed into the primary attack dog on Hillary Clinton. Her husband was the lawyer who successfully represented George W. Bush in Bush vs. Gore, a case that handed the presidency to a thief. Ted Olson was rewarded with the post of Solicitor General, a position he held from June 2001 to July 2004.
According to Ted, he received two phone calls from his wife on September 11th, the longest of which lasted for four minutes. The pilots and passengers had been herded to the rear of the plane by men armed only with box-cutters. Barbara asked her husband to provide instructions for the pilot standing near her. However, during the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the FBI revealed there was only one phone call from Barbara to Ted that day and it lasted 0 seconds. In other words, it was an unconnected call, which is what you’d expect from any call made above 1,800 feet. Another suspicious detail is the pilot, Charles “Chic” Burlingame, was a weightlifter and boxer, and more physically imposing than the alleged hijackers, many of whom seem to have been employing other people’s identities and not their own. Just as none of the video from the Pentagon has ever been released to the public, none of the phone records from that day have ever been released, increasing suspicion of a cover-up.