Was it a Russian Intelligence Failure That Led to the Assad Ouster?

Depends how you define "failure".

Everyone is trying to figure out who is to blame for all of this recent unpleasantness in Syria. The Resistance types have settled on blaming Assad or his army to spare Russia and Iran any criticism. But anyone with half a brain understands the crucial role that Moscow and Iran played in handing over power to the Washington-backed “rebels” in Syria. Putin apparently admitted to Kremlinites that he was caught flat-footed and blindsided by the Turkish and Israeli SMO into Syria.

Here:

Still haunted by video of the mob killing and mutilation of Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi in that country’s civil war in 2011, the Kremlin moved to save its ally even as it concluded that it could do nothing to prop up Assad’s regime any longer.

President Vladimir Putin is demanding to know why Russia’s intelligence service didn’t spot the growing threat to Assad’s rule until it was too late, said a person close to the Kremlin with knowledge of the situation.

Russia persuaded Assad that he would lose the fight against armed groups led by the former al-Qaeda offshoot HTS and offered him and his family safe passage if he left immediately, according to three people with knowledge of the situation, asking not to be identified because the matter is sensitive.

A lot to unpack here … so the FSB or GRU got Assad to surrender and run?

Yikes.

Russian intelligence agents organized the escape, flying Assad out via its air base in Syria, two people said. The aircraft’s transponder was turned off to avoid being tracked, one of them said.

The intervention to carry the Syrian dictator and his family into exile ended the Assad dynasty’s more than half a century rule, after Bashar succeeded his father Hafez who was president from 1971 until his death in 2000. Within hours of Assad’s departure, the militants swept unopposed into Damascus and claimed victory in the Syrian conflict that had raged for nearly 14 years.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Putin hasn’t spoken publicly, so far, about the collapse of the Assad regime.

“This was damage control,” said Ruslan Pukhov, head of the Moscow-based Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a defense and security think-tank. He said it was “very logical” for Russia to tell Assad to give up as it wanted to avoid a bloodbath in which he met the same fate as Qaddafi or Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who was hanged in 2006 following a trial.

(…)

Russian media are pushing a message that Assad was to blame for his defeat, while Moscow kept its word by not abandoning him and should now focus on maintaining its strategic interests in Syria and the wider Middle East.

Russia had bombed opposition fighters initially, in an attempt to push them back and bolster Assad’s forces. But with the Syrian army offering little resistance as rebels seized the city of Hama within days of capturing Aleppo, Russia concluded it couldn’t protect the regime as the opposition bore down on the strategic city of Homs, one of the people said.

Ah, but can we trust the source of the leak and am I a CIA-Satanist for sharing it?

Well, I recommend you simply look at track records for accuracy, and not make evaluations based on emotional resonance with the information (believing what you want to be true). The record shows that Bloomberg accurately reported on the negotiation situation over Istanbul and the grain deals and the energy strike backdoor deals.

(So did I, for that matter, using Kremlin-critical samizdat sources speculating on Telegram.)

The fact of the matter is that Putin’s Kremlin is extremely leaky because most of the people who work there have Israeli citizenships. Yes, this is very similar to the Trump White House. As a result, a lot of the leaks that were coming out in those years about Trump’s policy ended up being confirmed even though the people reporting on the leaks were implacable enemies of MAGA (libtards). It was un-American and un-patriotic and un-MAGA to read these reports, but many ended up being true nonetheless.

We have a similar situation here.

Now, this sinks the narrative that it was all actually a clever patriotic trap for the globalists to, like, create a chaos pit in Syria or something and win that way … which is what many of the more dedicated Z-shills have been claiming. To keep this fantasy alive, they will simply insist that Putin is just pretending that he suffered from an intelligence failure to actually keep luring in rebels into Syria to effect his chaos strategy. Again, nothing that I or Putin or Assad or anyone says at this point can disprove their hair-brained theories because they can just ignore all facts that don’t fit with the narrative by claiming that they are clever disinfo to confuse the globalists. My only question remains the same since I started this blog: if this is a secret plan to trick the globalist-salafiist-ottomans, why are you revealing it over social media to hundreds of thousands of people who read your stuff religiously?

I have never received an answer to this query.

The second and more interesting narrative is that this was all an unfortunate mistake and that someone is to blame for it. Maybe it was Assad, maybe it was Tehran, maybe it was the Russian intelligence services, as Putin is apparently thinking. I don’t buy this narrative because it is almost certainly being used to cover up the truth, which is that this was a premeditated and negotiated handover of power, and Moscow and Tehran both signed off on it. So, they weren’t caught by surprise, no. They were instrumental in the ouster of Assad.

(Who, by the way, we haven’t seen photographed or video’d anywhere in Moscow yet.)

Putin actually literally always claims that he’s being fooled or tricked or morally bamboozled. This is his go-to PR strategy. Without fail, he or Peskov will whine that they were tricked! He claims that he and his government are too moral to ever be able to predict, prevent or prepare for the West’s latest escalations. I’ve covered a dozen examples of Putin using this strategy, so please, newbies, read this article at least:

So now we have two tiers of obfuscation outlined. The astute reader of the blog will no doubt remark that these tiers of narrative building are the same regardless of what event transpires.

Narrative 1: “everything is actually the opposite of what it seems, this is actually a great victory for Putin/Assad/Xi/whoever they’re claiming is anti-Globalism. The patriots are actually winning and here is why.”

Narrative 2: “OK well, mistakes were made, but it wasn’t our fault really and even if it was it is because we are too moral to not be tricked while our opponents are dishonest and led us astray.”

And then Narrative 3 is what I provide here on this blog.

I explain how Putin and all of these other “Resistance” governments are actually collaborating and conspiring together and then lying using Narrative 1 or 2. Although, sometimes, the propagandists and officials will just lie without a chaser or any kind of narrative sweetener. There’s no law saying that they have to tell the truth, is there?

Like, take for example the latest NATO missile that landed into Russia.

Usually, the MoD lies that they’ve shot down these missiles and the drones, but that, tragically, debris ends up immolating the target of the attacks anyway. They also lie when they say that they will “answer” these attacks with some attack of their own. They do no such thing. Zelensky strikes into Russia with NATO weaponry with impunity. Even if there was some secret 5D answer that the MoD inflicted on him as punishment for the escalation and the strikes … where is the result? Of what use are these counter-strikes if they do not act as a deterrent? They clearly aren’t deterring anybody because the NATO missiles keep raining down.

…

More and more, I’m starting to think that the real reason that Putin wanted to go into Syria was to get a piece of the lucrative drug trade that Assad was running there. Now it will fall back into the hands of either the Turks or the CIA or Mossad. Here:

In fact, this has long been an open secret. (https://t.me/infantmilitario/143672) Maher Assad's deputy, Hassan Bilal, is listed as a top executive in the Makhlouf-Assad family drug cartel, which earned about $140-150 billion (and this is the lower estimate of income) from the Captagon trade. A huge amount of information about the drug cartel was obtained in 2021 after the arrest of the cartel's trade representative, Hassan Dakka, in Lebanon after the seizure of a shipment of Captagon bound for Saudi Arabia. The shipment was several hundred million tablets, worth more than $2 billion.

Another very large layer of published information happened in 2022 after the capture of the headquarters of one of the leaders of the pro-regime militia, Raja Falhut, associated with the supply of captagon through the structures of the 4th division of the SAA, commanded by Maher al-Assad.

In general, information about the huge drug cartel created in Syria has long been known, but for obvious reasons in Russia it is practically taboo - how to explain to the people the cooperation with drug lords around the world?https://t.me/anatoly_nesmiyan/22226

One good thing from the Russian withdrawal will be that drugs will become harder to get in Russia, at least temporarily, until new routes are set up. Iran used to be a huge dealer in Afghan drugs sending them north into Russia via the Caucasus. The CIA-appointed Islamic Iranian government once waged jihad against both Yugoslavia and the USSR. The USSR was even preparing to invade Iran themselves, before Andropov intervened and scrapped the invasion in favor of Afghanistan.

By the way, I do deep dives into Soviet lore that you can check out if you get behind the paywall. Some of this information has never been presented in English ever before, to my knowledge at least. Well worth the 7 bucks, but hey, that’s just my opinion:

Finally, one of the ideas that I want to impress upon my new readers is that the narrative that “no one could have seen it coming” is totally false. People can and have seen it coming, to varying degrees of accuracy. These people were simply ignored.

Case-in-point: Former nationalist politician in Russia (now dead) Vladimir Zhirinovsky predicted the intervention of Iran and Russia into Syria and the eventual ouster of Assad.

He made these prescient calls 10 years ago.

How did he do this? Did he have a crystal ball?

No, he simply had friends in Israel who told him what the plan was. Soviet diaspora highly placed in the Israeli spook state. Zhiri also understood how the board was set, and how the pieces would behave. He never labored under the impression that Putin was motivated by Christian-Antifa-Morality-Values like the plebs do. Nor did he misunderstand who and what Assad and his government were either. Put simply, Zhiri knew what the Israeli and American plan for the region was and he knew that Russia would go along with it, and that Assad was no threat to this plan.

He also said that Turkey’s government would be toppled eventually, as will the Gulf State monarchies.

Maybe we should listen to him?

…

Guys, I think I’ve said enough about Syria for now. Forgive me for milking the hot button topic for a bit. It has been an exciting week and I’ve been getting lots and lots of new readers and financial support. Some people even wrote me some heartfelt messages apologizing for being mean in the past. If you find yourself in the same boat, remember that money does a very good job of papering over any grudges that I might have. Pay up and be forgiven — that’s my motto!

But anyway … we need to get back on track though and talk about what is going on in the Slavlands again.

The big news is that Zelensky says that he’s ready for negotiations with Putin now. We will cover this tomorrow, probably. He no doubt is quaking in his boots after seeing Putin’s performance in Syria and understands that he stands no chance against Russia now, right? That’s why he is on his knees begging to surrender now, I’m sure. Always go into negotiations from a positions of weakness — that’s just common sense!

Me, I’ve made some very firm predictions about what to expect from this so-called “surrender” or “peace” deal already.

Newbies, take the time to read these older posts as a kind of homework assignment before I write about these negotiations again, please.

We will see whether or not I was right soon enough.

Like Zhirinovsky, I am able to make accurate predictions because I understand what Putin is and isn’t and I understand what the plan of Washington for Russia is. Like Assad, Putin won’t do much to stop it.