If the plans activated since 8 November 2016 by the “Shadow Men” succeed, the 45th President of the United States will not last in office beyond a thousand days from his swearing-in on 20 January 2017. The term “Shadow Men” refers to officials and policymakers operating in a stealthily coordinated manner to ensure the furtherance of specific agendas unrelated to the public interest. These have, since the declaration of the result of the 8 November 2016 US Presidential elections, activated a plan designed to ensure that the 45th President of the United States, Donald John Trump does not last more than a thousand days in office. They represent the hitherto ubiquitous and dominant Wall Street-Atlanticist alliance that has devised and implemented policy in Washington for several decades. These “Shadow Men” form an informal club of intelligence operatives, businesspersons, officials and politicians, whose relevance to policymaking and whose monetary wealth depend on the continuation of policies helpful to the interests they support, even though these may be harmful to the country they belong to.

Individuals with direct knowledge of the “1000-day plan” and who are based in Chicago, Washington, New York and London, warn that 20 January 2017 marked not just Donald J. Trump’s first day in office as the 45th US President, but the acceleration of an ongoing campaign that has been designed to ensure that President Trump “does not continue in the world’s most powerful job for more than a thousand days”. According to individuals revealing details of the 1,000-day ouster plan, “the preferred route is a steady increase in public pressure, which would lead to the 45th President’s impeachment by the US Congress on the basis of presumed misdemeanours. These would be played up by media persons, who regularly get briefed by officials active in the shadow network.” These sources claim that no fewer than three US Senators and 18 members of the House of Representatives belonging to the Republican Party, “have already signed on to the ‘Dump Trump’ plan through prodding by members of their staff”, who are part of the project to ensure a premature and unpleasant finish to the billionaire’s first four-year term in office. The sources claim that “in the case of Speaker Paul Ryan, it is his spouse who has been instrumental in ensuring that he continues on a path designed to trip up the newly elected President, whatever be his public stance on the matter”. Others have been converted to the Dump Trump move by friends and colleagues, “and recruitment is continuing and will go on until a critical mass is reached, hopefully by the end of the year”. It was explained that the “Shadow Men” are apprehensive that the strong-willed billionaire may refuse to get house-trained in the manner that Hillary Clinton so transparently was. In their view, the role of an elected head of state is in many aspects ceremonial, and on matters of national security and strategy, he or she should, in essence, follow the agenda set for him by the interests represented and protected by the “Shadow Men”.

TARGET OF POWERFUL GROUPS

A source based in New York claimed that the focus of the “Shadow Men” until the final months of the US Presidential campaign was to “disable the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, as their calculation was that Hillary would easily beat Trump in the 8 November polls”. The sources point to President Trump’s signature for decision-making method of securing inputs from an unusually large variety of sources (mostly outside the government), rather than relying on the guidance proffered by a small coterie of officials the way almost all Trump’s post-World War II predecessors have. They say that the self-confidence and independence of mind of the 45th US President are factors that have made him the target of the powerful groups used to getting their own way in Washington. A few of the individuals giving information about the 1,000-day plan are still in significant positions, and with whom details of the “Dump Trump in 1,000 days” operation have been shared by the perpetrators. These sources have decided to only nominally follow the instructions given to them with reference to the 1,000-day operation. This way, they remain au courant of the tactics and the activities of the “Shadow Men” active in the 1,000-day project, and have decided to give information on the subject on the strict condition of anonymity, as “careers and in some cases even lives would be at risk by those we expose”, a source warned.

REMEMBER KENNEDY?

The whistleblowers claim that the first time a US President was subjected to a secret thousand-day limit on his term was John F. Kennedy, “who by June 1963 had become so wary of the advice he was getting from agencies” in which the Shadow Men held key positions, that he was therefore “increasingly showing an independence of mind and action that was anathema to this invisible pillar of the decision-making establishment in the US”. In Kennedy’s case, it was the 22 November 1963 assassination that caused his exit from the White House. However, the jury is still out on whether the apparent success of this particular “1,000-day Operation” was due to the assassination being masterminded by the “Shadow Men”, or because of circumstances unplanned by them and independently carried out by a single killer, as claimed by the Chief Justice Earl Warren Commission on the murder. “What was obvious to intimates during Kennedy’s last months of life is that the 35th President of the United States had fully understood by then the games being played by the leadership of the intelligence community and other agencies of government in promoting narrow agendas that went against the core interests of the United States”, a New York based source said.

A London-based source claimed that “President Kennedy was moving towards an overhaul of US policy, not only in Vietnam, but elsewhere in Asia and Africa”, towards the visionary equalitarian trajectory first suggested by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his wartime conversations with UK Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill about the imperative of a speedy declaration by Whitehall that India would be given its freedom, an undertaking Churchill declined to give. According to a Washington-based individual contacted for this report, “Kennedy’s confidants were, by mid-March 1963, in contact with some of Ho Chi Minh’s old associates in Paris, and their input had led the US President to come to the conclusion that greater involvement in that particular theatre (as demanded by the military and the foreign policy establishment) would be a quagmire negative to US interests. They claim that Kennedy would have begun the process of withdrawing US forces from Vietnam by early 1964. However, such a move would have been contrary to the plans of the Europhile lobby in Washington and New York, who saw any defiance of their former colonial masters by underdeveloped countries to be a trend needing to be opposed and reversed. The “Shadow Men” of that period came up with the superficial but politically potent “Domino Theory”, which posited that withdrawal from Vietnam would lead to the collapse of US-friendly governments in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and other locations. In fact, it was increased US intervention in Vietnam that led to the takeover of power in Laos and Cambodia by elements of the communist movement hostile to Washington.

Subsequently, by end-1967, both President Lyndon B. Johnson as well as the Democratic Party candidate for the US Presidency, Hubert H. Humphrey had reached the same conclusion as Kennedy earlier had, that increased military involvement in Vietnam was counter-productive to the overall national interest, even though this served the purposes of the Europhile lobby, which sought to place the US in lockstep with European capitals working to retain their traditional dominance over most parts of Asia. The same “Shadow Men”, who handed over concocted and defamatory material on Donald Trump to his Republican Party detractors (who immediately ensured that they were released into the public domain), warned Republican Party Presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon in 1968 that President Johnson was about to announce a peace agreement with Vietnam that would be certain to put Vice-President Humphrey (who agreed with such a policy) into the White House. According to an individual who gave details of the clandestine machinations, Henry A. Kissinger assured the “Shadow Men” that Nixon was committed to pursuing the Vietnam War for “at least five more years” (beginning 1969) , no matter what his public statements were. The source revealed that subsequently, through “Shadow Men” working within the agencies of the US government, “misleading information was fed to the Hanoi channel that President Johnson was not sincere about his peace overture”. Such reports served to bring to zero the credibility of the US and other intermediaries working on a 1968 ceasefire and consequent stalemate concerning commitments from Hanoi. At the same time, the Saigon government was encouraged to resort to refuse any peace agreement, thereby dooming the Johnson-Humphrey initiative. Nixon kept the promise made of carrying on the war for five more years at the cost of substantial Vietnamese and US lives and treasure.

A blizzard of misleading reports and disinformation has thus far prevented full disclosure of the longstanding (and successful) efforts of the “Shadow Men” to twist US policy in this and other instances into directions adverse to the overall interests of the people of the world’s most consequential country. In most such instances, a cover candidate was publicised by the “Shadow Men” as the perpetrator, so as to cover up their own involvement. In Vietnam during the 1960s, that role was cast on Claire Chennault, who “at no stage was a significant player in the secret diplomacy surrounding the war and the aborted peace overture during that period”. She was, according to these sources, “seen with amusement rather than with respect by the Saigon government”. Interestingly, in the final year of his truncated term in office, President Richard M. Nixon himself became wary of those at the top of the investigative and intelligence agencies supposedly working under his direction, but who, in fact, followed a separate agenda that he was increasingly coming to regard as negative to US national interest.

WEAKEN POLITICALLY

During the 2016 US Presidential campaign, the “Shadow Men” accepted the view of the Clinton campaign headquarters (with whom they were in constant contact) that Donald Trump would be a relatively weak candidate against Hillary. Even after Trump secured the Republican Party nomination without the anticipated large-scale revolt by party seniors, the perception within the Clinton campaign was that his personality would deter enough voters from supporting the Republican nominee to give the Democratic candidate control of the White House during 2017-2021. Through contacts in the media and within the Republican Party, there was a steady flow of negative comments and reports about Trump, mainly focused on his personal and business dealings, and it was a shock when he nevertheless bested Hillary Clinton on 8 November. From then onwards, the emphasis shifted to, (a) ensuring that he would not be in office longer than a thousand days; (b) would daily face fire-fights designed to distract his attention from consequential issues; (c) would face opposition from within the Republican Party; and (d) would within a year lose effective control over his Administration to select Cabinet picks through a preoccupation with (political) survival. Between 11 November and 17 December last year, material seen as damaging to Trump was collated and scheduled for release every week thereafter till his Inauguration, so that he would take office already diminished. “The plan was to ensure that his key Cabinet picks saw him as a liability and distanced themselves from him both personally and in policy formulation”, a source claimed, adding that the “steady release into the public space of toxic information about President Trump would continue until this objective was achieved”, and by which time the billionaire who won the 8 November 2016 Presidential race, would be “too weakened politically to carry forward his own agenda” and would therefore have no recourse but to fall back on the policy basket favoured by the “Shadow Men”.

MAKING OF A FAKE DOSSIER

The sources spoken to claimed that the recently outed fake dossier concerning a visit by Donald Trump to St Petersburg and allegations of unsavoury activities in his hotel room there were incorporated into the “1,000-day plan” by the “Shadow Men”. They used a London-based Russian oligarch to both “produce and procure the contrived evidence” through a private security agency in St Petersburg. “The funding for ensuring that Russian prostitutes gave false depositions implicating (President) Trump came from a Russian oligarch based in London, who passes off as pro-Putin, but who, in fact, has had from the 1990s an active relationship with MI6”. They added that such operations—which involve seeking to compromise a VIP through real or morphed images—often involve large sums of money, “as in some cases, a body double may get used to make the prostitute believe that the meeting was with the VIP in question”. In the case of the dossier handed over to the former MI6 contact, “it was never used in business blackmail, as the Trump organisation refused to do a deal with the Moscow-based businesswoman who was a rival of the businessman who funded the making of the dodgy dossier. Hence there was never any cause to sabotage a deal that never took place” through production of the dossier and thereby poisoning relations between the Trump organisaton and its proposed Russian partner. Through a “Shadow Man”, member of a US Senator’s staff, the cleverly-crafted dossier was handed over to the Senator, “who read it for two hours at a stretch”, before making several phone calls and thereafter taking the material to Washington to be given to an investigative agency, as suggested by a “Shadow Man” staff member of his. There are “Shadow Men” on the staffs of several US lawmakers, and often they have control over much of the agenda of the Senator or Representative in question. “Don’t forget that a primary task of the ‘Shadow Men’ will be to ensure that enough Republican Party lawmakers join with those of the Democratic Party to impeach and remove (President) Trump from office before the 1,000-day deadline passes”, the source repeated.

MONEY TRAPS

The assessment of the “Shadow Men” is that the President’s son Eric is “so fully focused on expanding his business that he may be vulnerable to snares in the future”. The sources say that the other son (Donald Jr) and the daughters (Ivanka and Tiffany) are not as immersed into business” as Eric Trump, while Barron is too young. They add that Ivanka Trump “is now much more concerned about social issues than on making more money and has a strong idealistic, even spiritual bent”, although husband Jared “has up to now been as determined not to let a business opportunity pass” as Eric, and hence may be susceptible to what may be termed “money traps” i.e. ethical and legal traps disguised as business opportunities. Those active in the anti-Trump operation “worry that daughter Ivanka and wife Melania are, in their separate ways, very protective of the tycoon”, and hence that “they may discover traps before they can be sprung shut (on a member of the Trump family)”. Incidentally, the assessment is that “from about Week 4 or 5 of his quest for the Republican Party nomination, Donald Trump himself almost totally shifted his focus from business to politics”. According to a New York-based source, the “Shadow Men calculate that from the time he won his party’s nomination, Donald Trump changed focus from making more money to ensuring a place in history through implementation of an innovative and people-friendly agenda”. This “change in outlook has made his susceptibility to money traps much lower”, a source added, claiming that White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and Defense Secretary James Mattis “are among Trump appointees who have views almost identical to us”, although both are seen as loyal to the 45th President for the present. The sources say that “the most loyal individual within (President) Trump’s inner circle is Counsellor Kelley Ann Conway, followed by National Security Advisor Michael Flynn”, after of course President Trump’s family, especially First Daughter Ivanka and First Lady Melania.

INTELLIGENCE

Although media reports claim that US intelligence agencies are hostile to the just sworn-in President, “in actual fact most within the middle layers (of these agencies) are supportive of his (Trump’s) views”, with only the politically-connected higher levels signing on to the 1,000-day agenda now in the process of getting implemented. The sources say that the new head of state of the world’s most powerful country “has an astonishing amount of goodwill within the operational levels of the investigative and intelligence agencies”, in contrast to Presidents Kennedy and Nixon. Although they warn that “efforts have begun from day one of the Trump Presidency to portray the Chief Executive as being a divider and a disruptor”. These will move into high gear “only after 200 days of the new administration”. This would “give time for any reserves of goodwill to dissipate, thereby ensuring a better reception within the public for negative depictions” of the new Chief Executive.

WALL STREET ATLANTICIST ALLIANCE

Given the pervasive influence of businesses dependent on China and the Middle East in Washington, a key objective of the “Shadow Men” is to ensure that the Enemy Number One slot remain with Moscow and its allies such as Iran and not migrate to Beijing or to Saudi Arabia. Another is to ensure that the interests of Wall Street and the Atlantic Alliance continue to be given primacy in US policy. The worry of the “Shadow Men” is that a US President “who has yet to be house trained by the bureaucracy the way Barack Obama was in his very first week as President of the United States, and who has over three decades developed strong and consistent views on geopolitics and on economics over decades” of careful cogitation may succeed in shifting US policy away from the Wall Street-Atlanticist embrace that has been the norm since the 1980s. “Trillions of dollars are at stake, so there is nothing to get surprised about that tens of millions have been spent these past months on ensuring that the agenda of the Wall Street-Atlanticist alliance continues to be official US policy”, a source said, adding that President “Trump represents the most potent threat to such interests in two generations”. It may be mentioned that the “Shadow Men” claim credit for “the implosion of the Bernie Sanders bid for the Democratic Party nomination” as the Senator is “in an entirely different way as big a danger (as President Trump) to Business as Usual and Politics as Usual in Washington”. However, the “Shadow Men” could not prevent Donald John Trump from becoming US President, and it is therefore likely that they may similarly fail in their bid to remove him from office within the 1,000-day limit that they have set for themselves.