THE SHADOW PARTY

NELSON CURRENT

Contents

Chapter One

The architect and guiding genius of the Shadow Party, its Lenin-if one is careful with the analogy-is billionaire activist George Soros. Like Lenin, Soros excels at waging revolution from "above"-through manipulation of economic and political forces at the highest levels. However, Soros also resembles Lenin in his diligent cultivation of insurgent forces from "below."

Like the Shadow Party he created, Soros has many layers. On the surface, he is a well-known public figure, a philanthropist and financier who is frequently in the news. Yet another George Soros remains cryptic and elusive, his goals and activities obscured by a smokescreen of denial and calculated misdirection.

Soros denies that he plays any special role in the Shadow Party he has created. He claims that he is just one of its many financial contributors. In fact, as we will show in these pages, Soros founded and organized the Shadow Party personally, and exercises a degree of authority over its operations not unlike that of a corporate president over a company.

Americans need to become better acquainted with Soros and his radical perspective. They also need to familiarize themselves with the sophisticated mechanism he has built for getting his way.

George Soros is one of the most powerful men on earth. A New York hedge fund manager, he has amassed a personal fortune estimated at about $7.2 billion. His management company controls billions more in investor assets. Since 1979, his foundation network has dispensed an estimated $5 billion. Soros claims that his Open Society Institute donates up to $425 million annually to various causes.

For all his wealth, Soros' greatest influence comes not from spending his own money, but from inducing other people to spend theirs. This is most obvious in his approach to the financial markets. Soros' reputation as a financial prognosticator is such that legions of investors hang on his word, and buy or sell at his signal. An op-ed piece by Soros published in the Wall Street Journal or an interview broadcast on Bloomberg or CNBC can move vast sums of money in the financial markets, which far exceed Soros' personal spending power. As the New York Times once put it, "When Soros speaks, world markets listen."

Through the years, Soros has matched his strength more than once against the economic power of nations, and emerged victorious. He famously shorted the British pound in 1992, wagering $10 billion on a drop in its value. In a desperate bid to keep its currency afloat, the Bank of England tried to buy up pounds as fast as Soros could dump them. However, as more and more investors followed Soros' lead and joined his efforts, the Bank of England eventually gave up. The British pound was devalued, launching a tsunami of financial turmoil from Tokyo to Rome. When it was over, millions of hardworking Britons confronted their diminished savings, while Soros counted his gains. He had personally made nearly $2 billion on the catastrophe, and was henceforth known as "the man who broke the Bank of England."

Breaking the pound sterling was a formidable undertaking. Soros had to risk $10 billion in order to accomplish it. On other occasions, he has wreaked similar havoc by investing nothing more than the time it takes to compose a letter. On 9 June 1993, Soros sent a letter to the Times of London suggesting that the German mark was weak. "I expect the mark to fall against all major currencies," he wrote. The statement triggered twenty-four hours of panic selling, which sent the Deutschmark into a tailspin. Soros repeated the feat on 14 July 1998, this time with far more destructive consequences, when he suggested in the Financial Times of London that the Russian government ought to devalue the ruble by 15 to 25 percent. Panic selling again ensued, plunging Russia into a deep depression.

Few private individuals in the history of finance have possessed the power to break currencies with a single utterance. Soros is one of those few. He likens his influence to the magic of alchemy. In his 1995 book Soros on Soros, he wrote, "The alchemists made a big mistake trying to turn base metals into gold by incantation. With chemical elements, alchemy doesn't work. But it does work in the financial markets, because incantations can influence the decisions of the people who shape the course of events."

The possibility that Soros might one day deploy his market alchemy to the disadvantage of the United States has long been a topic of anxious discussion among America's financial watchdogs. Democrat Congressman Henry Gonzalez of Texas-then chairman of the House Banking Committee-expressed this concern in a speech to the Congress on 8 June 1993. "Recent press accounts state that Mr. George Soros, the manager of the Quantum Fund, made over $1 billion betting against the British pound. I am interested in ... the U.S. bank exposure to Mr. Soros' fund." Gonzalez said.

What Gonzalez feared has come to pass. "I have to disclose that I now have a short position against the dollar." Soros announced on CNN in May 2003. At a time when the US dollar had fallen to a four-year low against the euro, Soros now helped push it lower by informing the world that he had begun cashing in dollars in exchange for euros and other foreign currencies. Soros knows better than most that, when currencies fall, governments often fall with them. His attack on the dollar is an attack on George Bush and on the war Bush is waging in Iraq. Regrettably, it is not the first time Soros has used his financial might to thwart America's War on Terror.

On 26 February 1993, Muslim jihadists struck the World Trade Center the first time, in what was then the most ambitious terror attack ever attempted. Their plan was to knock over the Trade Center's north tower, causing it to fall against the south tower, killing hundreds of thousands of people. To this end, they planted an enormous truck bomb in an underground garage beneath the north tower. The bomb contained more than half a ton of urea nitrate, with a nitroglycerine detonator. It also contained hydrogen cyanide, which the bombers hoped would envelop the blast zone in a cloud of poison gas.

Fortunately, the bomb failed to perform as intended. The cyanide burnt up harmlessly in the blast. The bomb blew a hole six stories deep beneath the Tower, punching through five basement levels, but it failed to undermine the north tower. Thousands were injured and six killed, but the Towers remained.

The Clinton administration handled the first World Trade Center bombing as an ordinary crime. Clinton left the matter to the criminal justice system. Four of the bombers-one Egyptian and three Palestinians-were captured, fingerprinted, mug shot, tried, convicted and sentenced within weeks of the attack. At least three other bombers found refuge in foreign countries, including the team leader, a suspected Iraqi agent named Ramzi Ahmed Yousef. All but one of the seven suspected bombers were eventually caught and convicted. However, US authorities never succeeded in figuring out who ordered the attack in the first place, or in identifying its perpetrators as part of a global terrorist army mobilized against the West.

Much evidence pointed to Saddam Hussein, who had vowed vengeance on America for his defeat in the Gulf War. The terrorist ringleader Yousef had entered the country with an Iraqi passport and was known in New York as "Rashid the Iraqi." Another suspect, Abdul Rahman Yasin, was a US-born Iraqi whose family had taken him back to Iraq to live when he was still a child. After the World Trade Center bombing, Yasin fled to Baghdad, where he was given asylum and, according to one source, a government job. Somehow he eluded US occupation forces when they arrived in Iraq. Yasin remains at large to this day, with a $5 million reward for his capture.

Back in 1993, FBI assistant director James Fox, who then headed the Bureau's New York City office, suspected that the Iraqi intelligence service Jihaz Al-Mukhabarat Al-A'ma had orchestrated the bombing, using Islamist volunteers from other countries as cover. However, Fox was not permitted to pursue this line of inquiry. He later confided to terrorism expert Laurie Mylroie that Janet Reno's Justice Department pressured him to ignore any possible involvement by foreign governments. Reno's people "did not want state sponsorship addressed," Fox explained. They simply wanted to arrest and jail the terrorists as common criminals.

President Clinton sought to downplay the attack in every way possible. He pointedly avoided visiting the blast site. In interviews and press conferences, he urged Americans not to "overreact." Following Clinton's lead, New York State governor Mario Cuomo told NBC-TV on 1 March that, "Americans killing one another with guns" posed a bigger threat to public safety than terrorism. Cuomo soliloquized, "We're more threatened by ourselves than we are by foreign terrorists.... We're still the most violent place in the world, not because they do it to us but because we do it to ourselves. Terrorism is hardly the problem that the instinct for violence and the refusal to acknowledge it ... is to us internally."

The passivity and introspection that the bombing evoked from leaders of America's ruling political party-which at the time was the Democrats-served to encourage further attacks. In June 1993, the infamous "blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman and nine of his followers were arrested for plotting a "Day of Terror" in New York. They planned to bomb UN headquarters, a federal office building, the George Washington Bridge, and the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, and kill 250,000 people. Investigators soon realized that Rahman was implicated in the earlier World Trade Center attack as well. Several of the bombers involved in the 1993 attack turned out to be followers of Rahman.

Again, Clinton relegated the matter to the criminal justice system. Investigators focused on a small group of low-level perpetrators. Rahman was convicted and jailed, but the global terror network of which his group formed a small but important node went about its business unmolested, enjoying the hospitality and financial support of innumerable friendly regimes in many countries. Had Clinton treated the first World Trade Center attack with the seriousness it deserved, the second attack might not have happened. Tragically, Clinton chose to treat terrorism as an ordinary crime, rather than facing up to what it really was-an act of war against the United States.

We now know that the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center in 1993 had ties with the al-Qaeda network-the same network that returned on 9/11 to finish the job. George Soros knew this when he wrote his anti-Bush polemic The Bubble of American Supremacy in 2002. He knew that eight years of police work had failed to neutralize the terror network and failed to protect the towers. He knew that treating terrorist acts as ordinary crimes does not work. Soros knew all these things, yet he went ahead and wrote, "War is a false and misleading metaphor in the context of combating terrorism. Crimes [like the 9/11 attack] require police work.... In the case of terrorists we are dealing with a crime. We need detective work, good intelligence, and cooperation from the public, not military action." Why did Soros write these words, when he surely knew they were not true?

When the second and final attack on the Twin Towers came on 9/11, it brought Wall Street to a standstill. All trading stopped on the New York Stock Exchange until the following Monday, which was 17 September. As the world waited anxiously for Monday's opening bell, the American investment community loyally vowed that it would not let the markets falter. "The patriot in me thinks nothing would be a better slap in the face of some terrible people than a market rally," volunteered money manager Langdon Wheeler in a letter written on Friday, 14 September, urging 100 of his clients to buy stock on Monday. Many shared Wheeler's sentiment. Major companies such as Pfizer, Cisco Systems, Fleet Boston Financial and American International Group announced their intention to spend billions of dollars buying back their own stock, in order to help prop up the market. Dozens of giant pension funds with hundreds of billions of dollars under management likewise declared their intention to keep the market afloat through massive buying on Monday. Smaller investors rose up from the grassroots, filling the Internet with chain e-mails calling for an invest-in-America campaign. "Rally the Market on Monday!" one e-mail urged, exhorting patriotic investors to buy 100 shares of their favorite stock before Monday's closing bell.

US officials did what they could to encourage such patriotic investment. The Federal Reserve released a flood of cash into the economy, while regulatory officials pleaded behind the scenes with Wall Street hedge fund managers, asking them to resist the temptation to profit from America's tragedy by short-selling stock in wounded industries. Selling a stock short means betting against the stock on the hope that it will drop in value-exactly what Soros had done to the British pound. In the stock market, this is accomplished by leasing shares of the targeted stock from a broker, then selling the shares while the price is still high. After the stock crashes, the investor buys back the shares at the new lower price, returns them to the broker, and pockets the profit from the transaction.

The danger of short selling is that it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, actually helping to depress the market. The shorting investor obviously has a big stake in seeing the stock fall. If it rises, his investment-and then some-is lost. The more shares of the targeted stock short-sellers dump, the lower the price falls. SEC officials feared massive short selling of US securities after 9/11, and tried to discourage it.

Many brokerage houses had lost people in the 9/11 attack. When Monday morning arrived, Wall Street traders observed two minutes of silence to honor the dead, followed by a reaffirming chorus of "God Bless America." Ground Zero rescue workers rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. Despite these symbolic appeals to national unity, predatory traders drowned out the efforts of America's investor-patriots that day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted a record 685 points before the closing bell.

Following Monday's market crash, many observers blamed leading hedge funds. Some of these funds made fortunes short-selling the stocks of hard-hit industries such as hotels, auto and other transport-related companies. One financial services insider told NewsMax.com, "We had calls from small people trying to invest $100 to $500. The people were attempting to be patriotic and wanted to invest in America. I find it absolutely sickening and heartbreaking that billionaires investing money for extremely wealthy people are helping to push the markets lower."

One such billionaire was Soros. On Wednesday, 19 September, he was in Hong Kong speaking to a group of business leaders. At a press conference that day, he refused to divulge whether or not his Quantum Fund had been short-selling US assets. Nevertheless, he dropped a useful hint to investors listening. "I don't think you can run markets on patriotic principles," Soros declared. For many Soros followers, that was all they needed to know. It was the signal that he did not support the invest-in-America campaign.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE SHADOW PARTYby DAVID HOROWITZ RICHARD POE Copyright © 2007 by David Horowitz and Richard Poe. Excerpted by permission.
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