NEWLY UNEARTHED DOCUMENTS today reveal what really happened in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in 1989—how the protests were prepared, how teams caused them to escalate, and how they really came to an end.
And they provide the most detailed account yet about one of the biggest hoaxes in modern history—one so successful that the perpetrators, an ocean away, later boasted on YouTube of being “the ghosts in the machine” who were “pulling the strings” in what was erroneously reported about events in Beijing.
Key points:
* There was no “Tiananmen Square massacre” in 1989;
* US units started training Chinese protesters in 1988;
* Their cover was a NED-financed “magazine publishing” group in Beijing;
* The CIA provided well-equipped offices for anti-government activists;
* US military psyops specialists trained protesters to escalate street battles;
* The US gave places in top universities such as Harvard and Princeton to co-operative student leaders;
* The fake “Tiananman Square massacre” narrative was emerging in late May;
* After June 4, the fictional story of the “Tiananmen Square massacre” (10,000 killed as soldiers machine-gunned students) was distributed by US, UK and Australian diplomats;
* But many consul staff and journalists knew the massacre never happened before the end of the first week.
* British Ambassador Alan Donald disowned his debunked “10,000 massacred in Tiananmen Square” allegation, but AFP, BBC, DW, HKFP and other media continue to push it.
SOURCES
The documents on which this report is based were gathered by a group of Hong Kong people working with the present writer. The documents were not stolen or hacked. They are technically public access, but are not easy to find and assemble, which is why the full story has not been told before.
The material reveals the existence of a generously financed operation involving the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy, researchers in protest escalation, and a US Army specialist in psychological warfare, or PSYOPS. Some of their documents are or have been public access.
PREPARATIONS TOOK PLACE THE PREVIOUS YEAR
The story really begins in 1988, with three things happening. First, a Chinese language journal called The Chinese Intellectual opened an office in Beijing to publish a quarterly magazine of essays for distribution in major cities of China.1
Second, a retired American army Colonel reportedly flew from the United States to Hong Kong—secretly monitored by an Indian counter-terrorism agent.2 (More about this pair below.)
And third, an American university professor who ran an organization called the Albert Einstein Institution in the United States took an interest in China and casually predicted protests there.3
Nothing too controversial, on the face of it. But look more closely and alarm bells start to go off.
First, most journals in East Asia ran at a loss on tiny budgets of a few hundred dollars (the present writer knows, having run one). But The Chinese Intellectual was astonishingly wealthy, with a budget of between US$130,000 and US$235,000 a year.4 Where did those huge sums come from – and what were they being spent on?
Second, the staff from this Beijing-based publication were from the US, and didn’t just edit essays. They organized public events which drew in the people of the city to discuss politics—particularly young people.5 What were they preparing for?
Third, anyone who went through the records of the Albert Einstein Institute, or AEI, would find it had literally nothing to do with the scientist of that name, or physics, or even science. It was founded in 1983 as a US operation collecting and generating strategies to destabilize foreign governments through street protests.6 The man who ran it, Dr Gene Sharp, had his specialty listed on documents: “coups d’etat” – which is French for “overthrowing governments”. 7
FOLLOW THE MONEY
Next, follow the money. By tracking funding sources, we learn that the suspiciously rich journal was funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, or NED. That is a body first proposed in a document written by William J Casey of CIA fame.8
He was proud of his organization’s special skill: the creation of narratives so as to enable mass deception. He is famous for saying: “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” 9
After being created at the end of 1983, the NED’s initial target was China. “The Endowment’s very first grant, in 1984, was for The Chinese Intellectual…” operative Louisa Coan would later report in a speech to Congress.10
The NED was run by a man named Carl Gershman, who wrote in 1987 that his team was “working to ‘open’ closed societies” such as “China, where the magazine The Chinese Intellectual has established a bridge between the reformers and the democratic world…” 11
The term “reformers” clearly refers to pro-Washington activists being cultivated in China through the “magazine publishing” unit, known as China Perspective. The aim was to “reform” the Chinese out of being Chinese and bring the country into the glorious light of US-style western liberal democracy.
Still following the money, the Albert Einstein Institute seems to have a variety of funding sources, including the NED and affiliates. The AEI’s fifth anniversary document, written by Gene Sharp in August of 1988, included a curious prediction for the near future: “More demonstrations for greater democracy may happen in China, Korea and many other countries.” 12 Since there are roughly 200 countries in the world, this line seems oddly specific as well as oddly vague.
Oh, and we mentioned a US army man on his way to Hong Kong. Colonel Robert Helvey was not a tourist. He was an expert in the expanding field of US military psychological warfare, or psyops—and his speciality was making use of students and other young people to escalate street protests into full-scale regime change.13
OPENING MONTHS OF 1989
Now we move to 1989. By the opening weeks of that year, the Americans had achieved much in growing the anti-government movement right under the noses of the Chinese leadership. One US official would later describe these efforts to a journalist from Canada’s Vancouver Sun:
“For months before the June 3 attack on the demonstrators, the CIA had been helping student activists form the anti-government movement, providing typewriters, facsimile machines and other equipment to help them spread their message.” 14
Also, some of the leaders of the nascent anti-government movement in China were reportedly transported to the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong for training in protest escalation at the hands of experts from the United States.
But someone was watching. Keeping an eye on these activities was a senior officer of India’s foreign intelligence service. His name was Bahukutumbi Raman, and he was head of counter-terrorism activities in India. 15
He was particularly interested in Col Robert Helvey’s activities in Asia. Anything which could affect the security of India’s neighbours could affect the security of India, after all.
Raman later wrote about Helvey in a report: “In 1988-1989, he also trained in Hong Kong the student leaders from Beijing in mass demonstration techniques which they subsequently used in the Tiananmen Square incident of June, 1989.”
But let’s go back to our main timeline – we are in the opening months of 1989, in Beijing, and a student-based movement of anti-government campaigners has been quietly trained in the protest escalation / regime change methods of Dr Sharp and Colonel Helvey.
The Chinese government seems to have realized something strange was happening. On February 6, the US embassy sent a cable to Washington in which they listed concerns that the Chinese had raised. One thing the Chinese wanted to do was…
“REGISTER CONCERN WITH U.S. ACTIONS PERCEIVED AS INTERFERENCE IN PRC INTERNAL AFFAIRS.” 16
We can find no documents responding to this point.
AWAITING THE FLASHPOINT
Meanwhile, the team in Beijing and other Chinese cities, the anti-government activists trained by the CIA and the NED and the psyops specialists, were standing by. What were they waiting for? The chosen flashpoint: they needed genuine public grievances to reach a certain level of intensity.
CIA agents felt this was just days away. On February 9, three days after the Chinese complaint, CIA agents in Beijing wrote a secret report entitled “China: potential for political crisis”. It visualized a situation in which “popular discontent” “sparks widespread student and/or worker unrest”. 17
And that’s what happened, right? The western mainstream press said that in April and May of 1989, a massive pro-democracy protest sprang up in Beijing. The way the story was told, the citizens were calling for freedom, democracy and human rights.
In fact, the real story was very different. On 15th of April, a popular leader named Hu Yaobang died of a heart attack, and some members of the public mourned in public. He was a good man, treated badly by some of his rivals, and corruption, people felt, was delaying the implementation of an important policy called the Four Modernizations: the government wanted to turn China into a science and technology powerhouse.
But this protest suddenly and unexpectedly escalated. The classic CIA technique has always been to always take genuine grievances, whether corruption, or extradition, or lese majesty or whatever, as the flashpoint. They then use their well-polished techniques to grow the demonstrations until they become street battles—and then the media does its job, which is to rebrand whatever is happening as “pro-democracy protests”.
PURER, STRONGER SOCIALISM
And that’s what the press did in April of 1989, despite the fact that the protesters were really patriotic Communist Party supporters calling for purer, stronger socialism. They carried pictures of Chairman Mao and sang the Chinese national anthem repeatedly.
Two days after Hu’s death, organized groups of thousands of students appeared from several universities, all on the same day, arriving in Tiananmen Square. That evening, they handed out a joint list of Seven Demands. (Not one less! Remind you of anything? Hong Kong? Bangkok? Almost everywhere else the US has escalated demonstrations into street battles?)
Meanwhile, the CIA reportedly had “a network of informers among the students who led the protest” so of course they knew exactly what was happening, moment by moment. 18
The US State Department had by this time withdrawn US ambassador Winston Lord, and replaced him, on May 8, with James Lilley, a veteran CIA agent. At a time when high level diplomatic skills would have been useful, the US preferred to instead slip in an intelligence operative.
Sharp-eyed observers noted that the original banners after Hu’s death in April were in Chinese, but later banners were written up in English, calling for democracy. For example, one said: “Give me democracy or give me death”, a pastiche of a 1775 US saying “give me liberty or give me death”. It would have meant nothing to a Chinese student but would work well for an English-speaking international media audience, which was of course the intended target.
The protesters were advised to create a statue and began work on May 27. But, as good socialists, students chose to make it as unlike New York’s realistic Statue of Liberty as possible, basing their sculpture on the highly stylized work of Russian revolutionary communist sculptor Vera Mukhina.
To celebrate socialism, the students modelled their statue on the work of the Soviet Union’s Vera Mukhina (above). The students’ “Goddess of Democracy” (below) was recreated in many western countries, with westerners unaware of the strong pro-socialism message inherent in the stylized design.
READY FOR THE BLOODSHED NOW
On 22 May, new US Ambassador James Lilley wrote to Washington: “A confrontation resulting in bloodshed is probable at this point.” 19
Indeed, Ambassador Lilley’s words seemed to anticipate the narrative about a crackdown against pro-democracy campaigners in Tiananmen Square—two weeks before that story was actually launched. It was coming, so time for us to keep our heads down, he advised.
His cable said: “THE UNITED STATES SHOULD CONSIDER NOW TAKING MEASURES TO DISTANCE OURSELVES FROM THE CHINESE AUTHORITIES WHO APPEAR TO BE GETTING READY TO CRACK DOWN ON THEIR OWN PEOPLE. ALL SIGNS INDICATE THIS IS A POPULAR UPRISING SUPPORTING BASIC PRINCIPLES OF DEMOCRACY.”
But he was wrong. There was no violent crackdown. Things remained calm.
A week later, on 28 May, Dr Gene Sharp, America’s self-claimed expert at compiling methods to escalate street protests into coups d’etat, flew into Beijing with his assistant Bruce Jenkins. Sharp portrayed himself as a casual visitor, conducting research. He spent time with one of the student leaders: a man named Li Lu. 20
But the truth is that Sharp had long been associated with Colonel Robert Helvey, and they had known each other since at least 1987, both being based at Harvard University at the time, and both focusing on transforming innocent protests into upheavals that would lead to regime change.
Yet those final days of May highlighted a problem for the Americans: there was still no violence, either from the students or from the government.
A PEACEFUL END?
It was as if the Chinese were just less prone to smashing up buildings than those in the west and other places. Worse still, from the US point of view, the Chinese students wanted to get back to studying! Not regime change, but STUDYING. As May turned into June, the energy level dropped and it looked like the whole thing was calming down. What to do?
The US reportedly contacted key leaders among the protesting students and made them an offer—don’t wind down, go harder on the protesting and we’ll give you US passports, CIA-run safe passage out of China, a new home in the richest country in the world, and enrolment in top US universities—Harvard, Princeton, Columbia.
Now that was an offer hard to refuse.
In late May, student leader Chai Ling gave her infamously puzzling interview/ talk, where she seemed to predict a Tiananman Square massacre in which she would die.
She said she was speaking her last words, as there would be “a massacre which would spill blood like a river through Tiananmen Square” – but she also included the information that she “would not be there” as her new plan was to move to the United States to study there! 21
Years later, she wrote that her remarkable prediction of a coming violent crackdown which would lead to a Tiananmen Square massacre was something she had heard from Li Lu, not her own forecast. 22
Another person in the leading student group, Kong Qingdong, later recalled how he how he had come across undergraduates using a mimeograph machine to makes copies of personal documents, to give to the US Embassy in return for passports. Two of the top leaders, Chai Ling and Feng Congde, were getting them, he was told by fellow undergraduates. 23
Kong angrily declined to join them. He felt the protests were about standing up for China and enabling socialist modernization for the people—not grabbing passports handed out by a hostile foreign power.
HE’D SEEN THIS IN A MOVIE
Something else was troubling Kong, which he found hard to articulate. He later said: “I wasn’t fond of the way the forceful way the government spoke. But what they were actually saying was: ‘This is a complex situation. There are certain forces behind the scenes, sowing discord.’ This was the truth.”
Think about that line of agreement between the students and the government: There are certain forces behind the scenes, sowing discord. In other words, some protesters as well as the government knew what was really happening under the surface.
But if things were calming down, what changed? How did violence break out? Kong’s answer to that question was cryptic. “When we were little, we watched movies like Guerrillas Sweep The Plain,” he said.
That answer would have meant nothing to a western audience—but it was clear to many Chinese. This was a reference to a classic 1955 Chinese movie in which there are tensions between two groups. They have disagreements but don’t fight. Suddenly, a hidden third body, the Eighth Army, opens fire at both sides and then quickly hides, triggering bloodshed. 24
THE VIOLENCE IS TRIGGERED
And that is what happened. Soldiers and students were sharing food.
But on June 3, mysterious thugs, some of whom were said to be from ethnic minorities, triggered a fight in Mu Xi Di, in the west of the city, attacking army buses with petrol bombs and setting them alight, burning the occupants to death. The perpetrators were never found.
Soldiers who managed to escape the burning buses were beaten to death. Other military men arrived and chaotic fighting broke out, with scores of deaths.
This was five kilometers away from Tiananmen Square.
At the Square, in the early hours of June 4, soldiers arrived and called on students to leave. Student leader Feng Congde worked to gauge protesters’ opinions, and concluded that the majority wanted to vacate the space. “So I announced the decision to leave,” he said. Students left peacefully.
Violence did break out, not in the square, but in the streets around it.
One witness, Larry Wortzel, watched protesters attack a military vehicle and noted how well it was organized—someone had definitely trained them. “This was clearly a tactic rehearsed and even practiced among the demonstrators, since it was used in the same way in separate places around the city,” he wrote. 25
“All verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully,” said the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews. 26
Now this is where it gets strange. The next day, a very different story appeared from a few foreign embassies saying that 10,000 people had been killed. This tale said the students in the square had not left. They had stayed and been massacred with machine guns, their bodies pushed into piles with bulldozers, and then incinerated by troops with flamethrowers. This gruesome horror story, supported by no evidence at all, is now viewed by eastern and western historians as entirely fictional.
BRITISH AMBASSADOR’S ROLE
Rumor said that British Ambassador Alan Donald was a key figure sending out the fake story—and this was later confirmed when documents were declassified years later and seen to have his name on them. 27
But the same bizarre report was sent out by the Australian Embassy, delivering similar information in sometimes the exact same words. A textual comparison shows that they had clearly got the story from the same source, although each version differed in details. 28
“When all those who had not managed to get away were either dead or wounded, foot soldiers went through the square bayoneting or shooting anybody who was still alive,” said the concocted report.
One of the more bizarrely augmented versions of the tale was a few hours later read out loud by then Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke before TV cameras. He wept as he read it. “They had orders that nobody in the square be spared, and children and young girls were slaughtered, anti-personnel carriers and tanks then ran backwards and forwards over the bodies of the slain until they were reduced to pulp, after which, bulldozers moved in to push the remains into piles which were then incinerated by troops with flamethrowers.”
This was astonishingly different from what had actually happened – and what the TV cameras showed, which was students peacefully filing out through a southern gate under the leadership of Feng Congde.
ONE WITNESS SAID HE SAW HUNDREDS KILLED
How could the invented tale be taken seriously by anyone? Well, there was one apparent witness, who was repeatedly interviewed by the western mainstream media. This student, Wu’er Kaixi, said he could confirm the details of the Tiananmen Square massacre tale were true and he had personally watched the machine gun slaughter of hundreds of students.
But the other students pointed out that he wasn’t even there at the time. He had left the square hours earlier. And that division of the army had no machine guns anyway.
It was later revealed that Wu’er Kaixi was actually a US-allied Xinjiang Uyghur named Örkesh Dölet. He was afterwards spirited out of China and taken to the US to be enrolled at a top university. 29
But back to that first week of June, 1989. The narrative had split. The main newsrooms of the international media, in London and New York and elsewhere in the west, chose to canonize the fictional “Tiananmen Square massacre” story as a factual record of the end of the protest at that location. The Wall St Journal coverage was typical: 30
“Even if the current Chinese government survives, it probably won’t fully regain popular support,” it said on June 5. It described Deng Xiaoping as “an out-of-touch ruler who chose to fire on unarmed demonstrators.”
The journal said: “What started six weeks ago with student pleas for a little more freedom and a little less repression has climaxed in a display of official violence that ranks almost with the great horrors of Maoist rule.”
THE REAL STORY
That was the melodramatic media version—but it was a lie. And it was not the tale eyewitnesses related to each other in Beijing. The problem for western media chiefs was that many individuals at the scene, including their own staff, knew it was fiction.
The massacre story was quite wrong, said Jay Mathews, former Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post. “A few people may have been killed by random shooting on streets near the square, but all verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully.” 31
New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof, a relentlessly bitter critic of China, wrote: “There is no massacre in Tiananmen Square, for example, although there is plenty of killing elsewhere.” 32
James Miles, a senior BBC correspondent in Beijing at the time, sat on the real story for years, but finally admitted in 2006 that he had “conveyed the wrong impression” and that “there was no massacre on Tiananmen Square.” Hilariously, he described the massacre story as “one detail”. So, wall-to-wall coverage of the “Tiananmen Square massacre” for years, was wrong in “one detail” – there was no massacre! (A rather big detail, one might say.) 33
Back in 1989, Madrid’s ambassador Eugenio Bregolat noted that western journalists were reporting the non-existent massacre as fact from their hotel guestrooms, while Spain’s TVE channel had a television crew physically in the square that evening and knew it was false. 34
Many diplomats knew that no massacre had happened in the square. “Within a few days, certainly within a week, it was clear that the information about what happened in the square itself was incorrect,” Professor Richard Rigby, a staff member at the Australian Embassy in 1989, years later told reporters on an ABC news show. 35
WIKILEAKS EXPOSES THE TRUTH
US Embassy officials interviewed a Chilean diplomat who had been present in the Square and confirmed that he had seen no Tiananmen Square massacre of any kind. But US officials chose to keep the information secret, allowing the fake story to circulate for decades – until it was exposed by Julian Assange’s Wikileaks operation in 2011. 36
Diplomats weren’t stupid. They quickly realized that the Tiananmen Square massacre fiction was “a black op”, a term referring to a type of covert operation typically led by the US, often with UK help. Gregory Clark, a British-born Australian diplomat who heroically insisted on speaking the truth in the face of media skepticism, said: “The mystery report was very likely the work of the US and UK black information authorities ever keen to plant anti-Beijing stories in unsuspecting or cooperative media.” 37
In a book, human rights campaigners George Black and Robin Munro, extremely harsh critics of the Chinese government, wrote: “The phrase ‘Tiananmen Square massacre’ is now fixed firmly in the political vocabulary of the late twentieth century. Yet it is inaccurate. There was no massacre in Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3.” 38
Yet almost all the mainstream media clung tightly to the fiction. NBC’s Tim Russert absurdly indicated that even larger numbers of people were killed in the square. “On May 31 on Meet the Press, Russert referred to ‘tens of thousands’ of deaths in Tiananmen Square”, Mathews notes. 39
A group called Human Rights in China started compiling a list of the names of fictional tale’s 10,000 dead students, expressing concern for the “Tiananmen mothers”. But the effort petered out at about 200 names. And even then, some were identified in vague terms, and most were not students. Many were soldiers–which didn’t fit the western narrative, which needed the representatives of the government to be seen as the killers, not the victims. Still, the western media was happy to quote this artificial group. Indian security chief B. Raman, unlike the media, printed that it too was funded by the NED. Our research notes that the human rights group’s head office address was in the United States. 40
AMBASSADOR BACKTRACKS
Even British Ambassador Alan Donald in Beijing soon tried to disassociate himself from the embarrassingly unsupported 10,000 dead story, as student leader Feng Congde reported. 41 Three weeks later, Donald said the true figure was much lower, perhaps 2,700 to 3,400. (This was still 10 times higher than the more widespread estimates, which are closer to the Chinese government’s estimate, which says 200 to 240 may have died overall, but none in Tiananmen Square.)
To put this in context, 600 to 900 people die of gun-related injuries in an average week in the US. In the US invasion of Panama in 1989, when American tanks rolled into the country, 516 people died, according to verified Pentagon records. What the US authorities did in Panama was a shocking violation of international law, yet has received a tiny fraction of the attention given to the massacre that didn’t occur in Tiananmen Square. 42
Despite the media overkill in the west, there were many people in China, including individuals from the US, who wanted the real story told. Consider this passage from Richard Baum’s 2010 book China Watcher, about his friend Peter Geithner:
“In a meeting with the Ford Foundation’s resident Beijing director, Peter Geithner, I was surprised to hear him issue a rather spirited defense of the Chinese government’s actions on June 3-4. Peter spoke of the need to set the record straight concerning the many hyperbolic Western media reports that, he said, had severely inflated the civilian death toll and falsely depicted a massacre of innocent students sitting peacefully in Tiananmen Square. He spent the better part of an hour telling me how such reports had been wilfully distorted-how no one had been shot in the square itself, how the civilian shooting victims east and west of the square had been mainly nonstudents, and how there had been serious, repeated provocations before the soldiers opened fire.”43
In 1996, a US State Department document (see below) confirmed yet again that the PLA did not shoot at students in Tiananmen Square. But at the time, they chose to keep it secret. When the document was declassified, the media simply ignored it.
MEDIA REVIVE DISCREDITED NUMBER
But here’s the strange thing. Even though every source, including Alan Donald himself, had abandoned the “10,000 killed in Tiananmen Square” allegation as clearly wrong, the BBC and other media, like AFP, have worked hard for many years to keep it alive. A 2017 BBC headline said: “Tiananmen Square protest death toll ‘was 10,000’.”
At the same time, AFP reported: “At least 10,000 people were killed in the Chinese army’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, according to a newly released British secret diplomatic cable that gives gruesome details of the bloodshed in Beijing.”
Even though east and west historians (and the original source Alan Donald) have debunked or abandoned the “10,000 massacred” claim as entirely fictional, the western mainstream media (including the China-hostile Hong Kong publication Hong Kong Free Press) continued to present it as the main story about the events of that night.
Gregory Clark said: “A major lesson from all this is the need to control our Western black information operations. Few seem to realize the depth of their penetration in Western media.” 44
The false tale not only continued to circulate but had extra details added, sometimes years afterwards. The “Encyclopedia of the World”, published by Houghton Mifflin Co, in 2001, tells the children of the world, in shocked capital letters, a version of the tale even more extreme that the psyops version: “June 3-4: PLA TROOPS ENTERED TIANANMEN SQUARE DURING THE NIGHT AND FIRED DIRECTLY INTO THE SLEEPING CROWD.” 45
A MAGAZINE OFFICE SUDDENLY CLOSES
Now let’s go back to where we started. Remember, the journal called The Chinese Intellectual, that opened an office in Beijing in 1988?
Suddenly it was no longer needed. A NED document published after the events of 1989 says that the operation closed its offices in China and moved back to the United States.46 China’s reputation had been badly harmed – there was no regime change, but a worthwhile secondary target had been achieved. Job done.
The NED document added that the staff at the magazine’s publishing unit had changed function. The staff “has begun providing support for Chinese students in the West who are currently unable, for political reasons, to return to China”. You might think that providing migration advice was an odd thing for a “publishing group” to do, but nothing about the NED “publishing group” made sense.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO…?
What happened to Wu’er Kaixi, real name Örkesh Dölet, exposed as confirming a non-existent massacre? He was given a place at Harvard University in the US, and has made a career of demonizing China for elements of the western mainstream media, which has been oddly ready to believe everything he says.
He would later become a key player in manufacturing yet another major US hoax, the non-existent “genocide” of China’s Uyghur ethnic minority.
And what happened to Chai Ling, whose words sounded as if she was aware of the fictional narrative of the ” Tiananman Square massacre” days before it happened? She went on to Princeton University in the US, and became a businesswoman.
And Li Lu, friend of Gene Sharp? He went to Columbia University in the United States, and became a wealthy investment expert. He became famous for tipping Warrant Buffet off about the wisdom of investing in Chinese firms such as BYD.
PROUD OF THEIR ACHIEVEMENT
But perhaps the most bizarre part of the story is something that happened more recently.
Three years ago, the US military’s psyops division decided that it should boast about its successful work in deceiving the world about a 1989 massacre in China that never happened.
So they made a TV commercial about it, which they uploaded to YouTube (link provided in notes47). It starts with strange dark images and then an archetypal news announcer’s voice fades in: “As the world watches and listens in horror, the peaceful pro-democracy demonstration in China comes to a violent and bloody end.”
Then it shows images of shadowing military people in the background and poses a question: “Who is pulling the strings?”
And it delivers the answer: “You’ll find us in the shadows.”
The rest of the advertisement includes images of successful US military psyops, with pictures of protests in various places, including Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the Hong Kong riots of 2019, both of which were joint NED/ CIA/ US military psyops efforts. “Warfare is evolving and all the world’s a stage,” the video says. It ends with a web address that takes you to a US military recruitment page for the US military psyops department.
They are very proud of having fooled the world—and William J Casey would have been proud of their achievement.
INCALCULABLE HARM
Yet we should ask: just how much harm has been done? To the innocent people of China, to the journalism industry, to the prospect of peace in the world, to the people who value truth? The former diplomat Gregory Clark points to the incalculable harm done to humanity by “CIA/MI6 black information massacre myths and Western media gullibility”.
These factors have prevented, and continue to prevent, any sort of accurate understanding of the recent history of the most populous community on earth.
With the western mainstream media having chosen to revive the debunked story, it is up to the rest of us to share the truth – so that there is at least a chance of achieving peace.
NOTES AND SOURCES
Many of these sources are shown in the video version of this report, which is embedded near the top. Other footnotes are below.
1. Details are contained in the National Endowment for Democracy annual reports, 1984 to 1989. The magazine was originally aimed at PRC students outside China, but by 1988 was reported in an NED document as having “developed a significant circulation and distribution network in China”.
2. More on the army man and the Indian spy can be found later in this report, items 13 to 15.
3. The Albert Einstein Institute published numerous documents from 1983.
4. The accounts are in the NED annual records of grants.
5. As number 1.
6. As number 3.
7. Page 8 of the AEI Biennial Report 1988 to 1990.
8. The Casey letter is still on the internet, here for example: https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/casey-meese.pdf
9. Some sources have doubted he said this, but the person who claimed to have noted it provided details. Staff member Barbara Honegger wrote, on-line, that she heard him say it at a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in February 1981.
10. On 20 January 1999, Louisa Coan, NED Senior Program Officer for Asia, briefed the House Committee on International Relations Hearing on ‘Human Rights in China’ as follows:
“The National Endowment for Democracy has been providing support to Chinese dissidents since its creation. The Endowment’s very first grant, in 1984, was for The Chinese Intellectual, a Chinese language journal edited in the United States and circulated both inside China and among exiles, students and scholars outside China.”
Source: US Congress. Statement of Louisa Coan, Senior Program Officer for Asia National Endowment for Democracy, House Committee on International Relations Hearing on “Human Rights in China, 106th Congress, 1st Session, Issue: Vol. 145, No. 9. Statement in Appendix.
11. NED 1987 Annual Report.
12. Albert Einstein Institute document.
13. Colonel Robert Helvey was technically retired from the army but became a destabilization operative in Asia, first in Burma (Myanmar) and then China. According to Indian intelligence: “He was an officer of the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) of the Pentagon, who had served in Vietnam and, subsequently, as the US Defence Attache in Yangon, Myanmar, (1983 to 85) during which he clandestinely organised the Myanmarese students to work behind Aung San Suu Kyi and in collaboration with Bo Mya’s Karen insurgent group.”
14. The Vancouver Sun, Sep 17, 1992, page 20. https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/494838478/ (paywall)
15. India’s intelligence service was launched as RAW in 1968, with B. Raman becoming its best known staffer until his death in 2013. “Bahukutumbi Raman, 77, one of the founders of Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), passed away in Chennai on Sunday evening after a prolonged fight with cancer,” said the Express News Service in June 2013.
Raman wrote two reports on the activities of the NED in Asia, both of which are still available on-line. Look up: “The USA’S National Endowment For Democracy (NED): An Update, by B. Raman”. Or go to this link: https://www.arsipso.com/CHINESE-ANGER-AGAINST-NED.asp
16. Confidential US Embassy cable, now declassified.
17. Secret cable from the CIA in China to Washington, now declassified.
18. The Vancouver Sun, Sep 17, 1992, page 20. (See item 14.)
19. Cable to Washington from the US Embassy in Beijing, now declassified.
20. This information is from a newsletter, Nonviolent Sanctions, number 2, published by the Albert Einstein Institute.
21. This speech, and a similarly confusing interview, are widely available on the Internet. See here: https://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/china_1950_chailing.htm
22. She attributes the premonition of the “Tiananman Square massacre” to Li Lu in a book, A Heart for Freedom by Chai Ling, 2011, Tyndale House, page 165.
23. Kong’s statements, translated to English, can be found here: https://fridayeveryday.com/kong-qingdong-gives-insight-into-protest-of-1989/.
24. “Guerillas Sweep the Plain” is known by several similar names, including “Guerillas on the Plain”. It is listed on IMDB and can be seen on YouTube.
25. Larry Wortzel worked at the US Embassy. While publicly noting that the demonstrators had clearly been trained by someone, he went on to enthusiastically back the “massacre in Tiananmen Square” myth. He was a Military Attaché at the US Embassy at the time. His essay can be found here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep11967.6?seq=1
26. Jay Mathews caused a stir with his essay The Myth of Tiananmen, published in 2010 in the Columbia Journalism Review, since it so dramatically contradicted the standard western mainstream media line that a massacre had occurred in the square. The essay is easily found on-line here: https://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_myth_of_tiananmen.php
27. The documents were declassified in the UK in 2017.
28. A report on Hawke’s mistake-based speech, and a comparison of the two texts can be found here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-03/bob-hawke-tiananman-classified-cable/100184916
29. The information about his two names and his identity are now openly known, and even mentioned in Wikipedia. He is still taken seriously by elements of the Western mainstream media.
30. Wall Street Journal, 5 June 1989.
31. See 26.
32. The NYT writer wrote this in a lengthy article on 12 November, 1989.
33. This appeared in a BBC report at this link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8057762.stm
34. Bregolat wrote about this in a book written in Spanish. He fell in love with China and was reposted to the country three times. Profile here: https://newseu.cgtn.com/news/2023-03-11/Bridge-Builders-Three-time-Spanish-ambassador-to-China–1i4kX4wUfXW/index.html
35. Details of Rigby saying how he realized that they “had been fed a line” can be found at the link on item 28.
36. The Wikileaks cables are here: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/89BEIJING18828_a.html
37. Gregory Clark’s report, well worth reading, is at this link: https://gregoryclark.net/thejapantimes/jt2007/the-tianamen-square-massacre-myth-expanded-version/
38. The authors are highly critical of China in their 1993 book, Black Hands of Beijing: Lives of Defiance in China’s Democracy Movement, still available on Amazon.
39. See the link at item 26.
40. B. Raman (see notes 14 and 15) mentions the funding of the “Human Rights in China” group in his second essay.
41. Feng Congde was quoted in various places saying this, including at this link: https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/at-least-10-000-killed-in-1989-tiananmen-crackdown-british-cable/uicjlaqr1. The link is also a good example of an article designed to call for the discredited, disowned statistic to be believed by the public.
42. The Pentagon says 516 people were killed by machine guns, tanks and other weapons in the 1989 crackdown by the USA on the (CIA-installed) leadership in Panama. This link shows the United Nations statement in defence of Panama. https://documents.un.org/doc/resolution/gen/nr0/549/99/pdf/nr054999.pdf
43. The book is available for purchase at on-line bookstores, or through jstor, the academic site: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvcwnh4d
44. Link in item 37.
45. This is still for sale, through Amazon .com.
46. The NED annual report.
47. At the time of writing, the YouTube link was live, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA4e0NqyYMw
The montage at the top is by Fridayeveryday. Most other images are historical documents or used as such, plus quotes from various documents identified in the footnotes.
This document can be freely reproduced.