Why is Genie Oil “Troubleshooting” North Korea?

Eric Terman

Jan 19, 2018·14 min read

The United States has no official ambassador to North Korea, but unofficially Bill Richardson has served as America’s so-called North Korea “troubleshooter”. Richardson made trips to North Korea in 2013, 2010, and 2007. He made a trip to North Korea in 2005. He negotiated with North Korea in 2003. He went to North Korea in 2002, in 1996, and in 1994. If there’s any American who knows what’s going on in North Korea, it’s Bill Richardson. The Former Governor of New Mexico, seven term Congressman, Chairman of the Democratic Governor’s Association, Ambassador to the UN, and Energy Secretary, had one of the most impressive resumes of any U.S. politician when he ran for president in 2008. But there was title he didn’t receive:

Barack Obama nominated Bill Richardson to be his Secretary of Commerce. But in January 2009 Richardson was forced to withdraw his nomination due to a Federal grand jury investigation surrounding his PAC Moving America Forward. Then in August, charges were dropped “without exoneration”. And by 2010 a suddenly untarnished Richardson was back to serving in his unofficial role as U.S. Ambassador to North Korea. Then in September 2015 he was one of four new additions to the Genie Energy Advisory Board. Joining Michael Steinhardt, Jacob Rothschild, Dick Cheney, and Rupert Murdoch were Bill Richardson, Mary Landrieu, Larry Summers, and Jim Woolsey:

Now a member of Genie Oil’s exclusive Strategic Advisory Board, Bill Richardson continues his role as America’s North Korea “Troubleshooter”:

What happened to Richardson’s pay-to-pay investigation? Why would the paranoid North Korean government allow the CEO of Google to snoop around their computers? Why does North Korea like Richardson so much? “Troubleshoot” is a term often used in the tech industry. Are we all being trolled?

There’s an outsider who might be even closer to the North Korean government than Richardson who may be able to tell us — or perhaps would have been able to tell us had he not been assassinated a few weeks after Trump won the 2016 presidential election:

Here’s the referenced interview by Andrei Karlov’s widow Marina Karlova, translated from Russian:

- The first trip of Andrei Karlov to North Korea was in 1976. In what capacity?

- He was appointed to the post of the duty referent — this is the lowest step of the diplomatic ladder. Then he became dragoman — interpreter of Oriental languages. By the way, he dreamed of writing a book of memoirs and calling her “Last Dragoman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs”, because soon this post was canceled. We planned with him: now he will return from Turkey, we will sit down, we will remember, and he will start to write. But…

- What are the brightest moments of his life, do you think, in this book exactly entered?

- I think first of all — Korea. Still, in total we spent 21 years on the Korean peninsula. It was there that Andrey was formed as a good analyst, practitioner, negotiator. And when in 2001 he went to the DPRK as an ambassador, this country was for us a native, in fact — the second motherland. We liked everything there — culture, food, nature, people … Yes everything!

Ambassador Karlov spent most of his diplomatic career on the Korean peninsula before becoming Russia’s ambassador to Turkey, and according to his wife he was planning on writing a memoir. What secrets about North Korea did Karlov take to the grave? And could this have been the real motivation behind his assassination? Ostensibly, Karlov was killed in an attempt to stop the Turkish government from uniting with Russia — thus ending its efforts to overthrow the Assad government in Syria. The overthrow of Assad, specifically because of oil disputes, has been an explicit goal of the U.S., Israeli, and Turkish governments ever since it was Bashar al-Assad’s father Hafez al-Assad running Syria. And when I say explicit, I mean the CIA actually underlined it and specified: this is the only reason we are doing this.

Here is a declassified CIA document from 1983 that looks like it could have been written in 2016. The plan was for Iraq, Israel, and Turkey to attack Syria at once for “the sole goal of opening the pipeline”:

Here’s another declassified CIA doc from 1986 explaining that racial and religious tensions in the region must be escalated in order to bring down the Assad government and install “business-oriented moderates”. The CIA acknowledged that this strategy risked destabilizing the region and spreading terrorism, but determined that the risks were worth it:

These documents were declassified not long after Wikileaks revealed that National Security and Foreign Policy Advisers spanning the Bill Clinton, GW Bush, and Obama administrations and the Hillary Clinton campaign (James Jeffrey, Stephen Hadley, Jacob Sullivan, John Podesta) were discussing how use ISIS’ advances in northern Iraq as an opportunity to transfer oil revenue from the Kurdish regional government to the notoriously corrupt “DFI” (Development Fund for Iraq), reasoning that the KRG only wanted more autonomy. James Jeffrey (Bush’s deputy national security adviser and ambassador to Turkey, Obama’s ambassador to Iraq) suggests that General James Jones (Obama’s national security adviser) pitch the idea to the KRG:

The goals do not appear to have changed under a Trump administration. Genie Energy has been drilling for oil in the disputed Golan Heights region of Syria. Jason Greenblatt, Trump’s adviser to Israel and America’s first ever “Special Representative for International Negotiations” owns stock in Genie. He’s also apparently related to the Rothschild family through someone named Karen. Lord Jacob Rothschild is one of the eight members of the Genie Strategic Advisory Board.

But the Trump administration’s connections to Genie Energy don’t stop there. While the administration was bombing the Shayrat airbase in Syria, Jared Kusnher’s lawyer Ira Greenstein was President of Genie Energy. Another member of the Genie Oil Strategic Advisory Board — former Bill Clinton CIA Director James Woolsey — was part of Donald Trump’s transition team. This is where the Genie story ties back to Andrei Karlov…

Trump’s incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn made his first infamous phone-call to Russian diplomat Sergey Kislyak on December 22nd 2016, 3 days after Karlov’s assassination. Flynn, who wrote an op-ed on election day demanding the extradition of Turkish exile Fethullah Gulen, undoubtedly wanted to express condolences to the Russian government in the wake of their ambassador to Turkey being gunned down in broad daylight by a police officer. We also know that Flynn “asked Russia to delay or defeat a U.N. Security Council resolution, approved Dec. 23, 2016, that would have condemned Israel’s building of settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem”.

When General Flynn plead guilty, it wasn’t for his lobbying on behalf of the Israeli government, nor was it for being an unregistered foreign agent for the Turkish government (he didn’t register until March 2017), nor was it for the alleged Gulen kidnapping plot that Woolsey reported witnessing before leaving the Trump transition team:

“The claim made by Mr. Woolsey that General Flynn, or anyone else in attendance, discussed physical removal of Mr. Gulen from the United States during a meeting with Turkish officials in New York is false,” Flynn spokesman Price Floyd said in a statement. “No such discussion occurred. Nor did Mr. Woolsey ever inform General Flynn that he had any concerns whatsoever regarding the meeting, either before he chose to attend, or afterwards.”

Flynn plead guilt simply to lesser charge of lying to the FBI (about what was discussed in the phone calls). And to make matters worse, Woolsey — who appears to have played an integral role in getting Flynn fired as National Security Adviser — was working with the same Turkish businessmen as Flynn because they thought he could help them bring down Fethullah Gulen.

With the unpopular General Flynn out — thanks in part to Woolsey’s testimony — the popular bipartisan-supported General H.R. McMaster was able to take over as National Security Adviser — this despite McMaster’s alleged torture of hundreds of Iraqi prisoners in 2005 and his lamentations about how the United States lost the Vietnam War in part because the U.S. didn’t drop enough bombs. A month after McMaster took over as National Security Adviser, Jim Woolsey wrote an op-ed in The Hill urging frightened Americans to be much more scared of North Korea:

Whatever the motives for obfuscating the North Korean nuclear threat, the need to protect the American people is immediate and urgent:

The U.S. must be prepared to preempt North Korea by any means necessary — including nuclear weapons.

Launch a crash program to harden against EMP attack the U.S. electric grid to preserve American civilization and hundreds of millions of lives. This could be part of President Trump’s infrastructure modernization project.

Beef up national missile defenses. Revive President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the unfairly derided “Star Wars.” Space-based missile defenses could still render nuclear missiles obsolete and offer a permanent, peaceful, solution to problems like North Korea.

Woolsey’s warning that America may have no choice but the preemptively nuke North Korea — because their space weapons could kill almost every single American — rings false, especially when considering how much Russia and China’s space programs intimidate the U.S. government. Russia and China first proposed their “Treaty on Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space and of the Threat or Use of Force Against Outer Space Objects” in 2008. The Obama administration rejected it in 2015.

So why is the former CIA director (and member of Genie’s Strategic Advisory Board) telling us that we’re not afraid enough of North Korea’s space weapons program — while omitting Washington’s refusal to negotiate with Russia and China on their obviously far more powerful space weapons programs? Woolsey’s hyperbolic warning about North Korean space weapons, while omitting a decade of Russia and China urging a treaty on space weapons, seems disingenuous at best.

Here’s the aforementioned James Jeffrey (from the Wikileaks email) explaining that “H.R. McMaster stands out in the Trump administration as the strongest advocate of a hawkish position” on North Korea, and that he might be right:

Again, no mention is made of the ten years the U.S. government has spent rejecting Russia and China’s proposed space weapons treaty. Every discussion of North Korea is about how to pressure Russia and China to stop North Korea’s weapons program. We know from Secretary Clinton’s leaked Goldman Sachs speeches that the Obama administration threatened to surround China with a ring of missiles if it didn’t shut down North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. One wonders if warnings about North Korean nukes are really a pretext for action against the far more powerful Chinese and Russian military capabilities. Why else keep the public in the dark for ten years about Russia and China’s space weapons treaty?

For Trump “resistors” who cheered Jim Woolsey taking down Michael Flynn, there’s another reason to be skeptical of Bill Clinton’s former CIA Director’s intentions. In addition to being on the Strategic Advisory Board for Genie Oil, Woolsey is the Chairman of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) President Clifford Mays was Communications Director for the Republican National Committee before founding FDD shortly after the September 11th attacks. Genie Energy was also founded in 2001 immediately after the 9–11 attacks. And Woolsey isn’t the only connection between Genie and FDD. Genie Strategic Advisory Board Chairman Michael Steinhardt was one of the early financiers of the think tank. “Steinhardt is a hedge fund mogul who contributed $850,000 to FDD from 2001 to 2004”.

In 2015 FDD lobbied against the Iran nuclear deal. FDD also has a Michael Flynn connection. Their Iran expert Dr. Michael Ledeen co-wrote Flynn’s book “Field of Fight: How to Win the War Against Radical Islam and its Allies.” For some reason, “Resistance” press has now gone silent on FDD despite its numerous connections to the Trump administration. But the MSM was never vocal about Genie Energy to begin with. Even heavy investment by Renaissance Technologies (whose CEO Robert Mercer helped fund the Brexit movement and the pro-Trump Breitbart publication) isn’t enough for the “Resistance” press to shine a spotlight on Genie.

In November 2017, shortly before Genie announced it would “suspend” its drilling in the Golan Heights region (we’ll see), Woolsey told the Jerusalem Post that America should use MOABs (mother of all bombs) to obliterate Iran’s nuclear facilities:

Pressed that this approach could drag the US into a highly volatile and unpredictable war with Iran and its proxies, he was unfazed.

…Regarding the Iran deal, unlike former CIA director Michael Hayden, who told the Post in October that he was in favor of fixing the deal but against Trump’s decertification of the deal, Woolsey was disappointed that Trump did not scrap the deal entirely.

Though Hayden was a Republican appointee and Woolsey a Democratic one, on the Iran deal, Woolsey outflanked Hayden from the right, saying that “the Iran nuclear deal is worse than worthless.”

…Woolsey was critical of Trump for leaking Israeli intelligence to Russia and for his propensity for broadcasting so much of his national security strategy.

(I previously discussed Trump’s alleged leaking of Israel intelligence to Russia in “Achilles Heel on Sleeve”, a story that the popular bipartisan approved H.R. McMaster and his deputy Dina Powell called false. So either McMaster and Powell are lying for Trump, or the story is fiction.)

One has to assume at this point that Trump’s “Resistance” press continues to ignore organizations like FDD and Genie — while warning about the dangers of Trump’s foreign policy — because their “Resistance” is to a personality and not his actual policies.

When Bill Richardson says North Korea is engaging in a cover-up and that Celebrity Apprentice contestant Dennis Rodman “is the only game in town” because “he’s the only American that’s ever spoken to Kim Jong Un” one has to ask what the United States is covering up about its diplomacy with North Korea.

It’s clear that the U.S. is heading towards military confrontation with Iran. And it’s clear that the U.S. is disinterested in deescalation of tensions with Russia and China. But we’re supposed to believe that Dennis Rodman knows more about Kim Jong Un than any of the people in this article: more than anyone at the Pentagon? More than anyone in the CIA? More than Google, whose CEO got to go there. More than anyone at Genie Energy? And even if that is somehow true, are we also supposed to also believe that the election of the host of Celebrity Apprentice is a coincidence?

Russia’s North Korean troubleshooter is dead; the first American to call the Russian government about it was taken down by one member of Genie’s Strategic Advisory Board and then replaced by the biggest North Korea hawk in the entire Trump administration. 13 months later yet another Genie board member who was involved in the controversy hasn’t spoken a word about what Ambassador Karlov knew. What was he planning to write about North Korea? And why would — not only the U.S. government — but also the North Korean government, stay silent on the assassination of their longtime Russian counter-part at the hands of a police officer from a NATO nation?

The North Korean government isn’t the only one engaging in a cover-up. Where’s a real troubleshooter when you need one? And what the hell ever happened to Bill Richardson’s corruption charges that were dropped but that he was never technically “exonerated” from?

I cited F. William Engdahl in my most recent article “Pacific Gaslight: Why Big Brother Needs A President You Hate” for his startling conversation with a former CIA agent about how America needed the North Korean threat in order to justify its continued military presence in the Pacific after the Cold War ended. Engdahl says North Korea is a “vassal state” of the United States.

Roughly halfway in between Trump’s victory in the presidential election and the assassination of Ambassador Karlov, Engdahl wrote an article warning about Trump’s connection to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and citing many of the figures who are in this article. You tell me if Engdahl knows what he’s talking about. I’ll give him the last word:

The Trump Presidency has been planned in minute detail by them and their think tanks. Quite simply, had they continued the policies that Hillary Clinton represented… they saw they were losing power over huge parts of the world, essential geopolitical power…

…when one country after the other comes closer in economic and political cooperation to Russia, to China and to their growing Eurasian economic cohesion around the One Bridge One Road Eurasian infrastructure great project, it was clearly time to install a Plan B President.

That Plan B is casino mogul Donald Trump, a political tabula rasa, a power-possessed person with a blackmail potential that will keep him on program for them, an alpha male who is quite gifted at being able to make people fear…

I state clearly my conviction, and please recall this as Trump Presidency policies unfold after January 20, 2017 to see if I am correct or not: Donald Trump was put into office to prepare America for war, a war the banks of Wall Street and the US military industrial complex are not presently in a position economically or industrially or otherwise, geopolitically, to win. His job will be to reposition the United States for them to reverse the trend to disintegration of American global hegemony, to, as the Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz Project for the New American Century put it in their September, 2000 report, “rebuild America’s defenses.”

To do that preparation, a deception strategy that will fatally weaken the developing deep bonds between Russia and China will be priority. It’s already begun. We have a friendly phone call from The Donald to Vladimir the Fearsome in Moscow… It’s classic Kissinger Balance of Power geopolitics–seem to ally with the weaker of two mortal enemies, Russia, to isolate the stronger, China. Presumably Vladimir Putin is not so naïve or stupid as to fall for it, but that is the plot of Trump’s handlers. Such a strategy of preventing the growing Russia-China cooperation was urged by Zbigniew Brzezinski in a statement this past summer.

Because he’s been selected (and not by us dear voters) to play a definite role… for reconfiguring the Sole Superpower strategy.