By Lord Dreadnought
Translated from the Russian
May 27, 2016 Anno Domini

The start of the business of V.M. Gundyaev (Patriarch Kirill) was appointed in 1992-1994. The most extensive dossier on this business was compiled by Doctor of Historical Sciences Sergei Bychkov, who published more than a dozen articles, mainly on the tobacco business of the future patriarch. None of his publications was officially refuted. In many respects Kirill admitted that the facts collected by Bychkov were true.

In addition to the villa in Switzerland, the Tobacco Skiing Patriarch has palaces in Peredelkino, in the Danilov Monastery, in Gelendzhik, next to Putin’s palace, and a penthouse with a terrace in the House on the Embankment—overlooking the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

About how the High Priest of the Putin Reich, Patriarch Kirill (he is already a KGB agent Mikhailov) amassed his billions of dollars in speculation in tobacco, alcohol, and oil (exempted from taxes and excise taxes) in the dashing 1990s, how he, the head of the bandit empire of the Russian Orthodox Church, eliminated its competitors, many have already written.

Cigarettes

In 1993, with the participation of the Moscow Patriarchate (Russian Orthodox Church), the Nika financial and trade group emerged, and Archpriest Vladimir Veriga, the commercial director of the Department for External Church Relations (DECR MP), headed by Kirill, became its vice-president. A year later, under the Government of the Russian Federation and at the DECR MP, two “parallel” commissions on humanitarian aid appeared: the first one decided what kind of aid could be exempted from taxes and excise taxes, and the second one imported this aid through the church line and sold it to commercial structures. Thus, most of the tax-exempt aid was distributed through the regular distribution network, at normal market prices. Through this channel, in 1996 alone, the DECR MP imported about 8 billion cigarettes into the country (data from the government commission on humanitarian aid).

This caused serious damage to the “tobacco kings” of that time, who had to pay duties and excise taxes and therefore lost in the competition with the DECR MP—it is believed that they “ordered” an information campaign to expose Kirill’s business. According to Bychkov, when Kirill decided to leave this business, more than $50 million worth of “church” cigarettes remained in customs warehouses. In the course of the criminal war for these cigarettes, in particular, the assistant to the deputy Zhirinovsky, a certain Zen, was killed.

And here is a letter from the State Customs Committee of the Russian Federation to the Moscow Customs Administration dated February 8, 1997, concerning “church” cigarettes:

“In connection with the appeal of the Commission on International Humanitarian and Technical Assistance under the Government of the Russian Federation and the decision of the Prime Minister of January 29, 1997, No. VCh-P22 / 38 I authorize the production of customs clearance of tobacco products in accordance with the established procedure with payment of only the excise duty received in the customs territory before 01.01.97, in accordance with the decision of the above-mentioned Commission. “

So, in fact, since then a new title has been assigned to Metropolitan Kirill—”Tobacco” (however, now he is no longer titled like that). Now it is customary to call him “Skiing” – with the light hand of Orthodox bloggers who drew attention to the enormous importance in the life and work of Kirill of his hobby for skiing (this hobby is served by a villa in Switzerland and a private jet, and on Krasnaya Polyana it helps to consolidate informal relations with strong of this world).

The piquancy of Kirill’s tobacco business is given by the fact that in Orthodoxy, smoking is considered a sin: it is actually detrimental to human health and life. Cyril himself tried to justify his participation in this business: “The people who were doing this did not know what to do: burn these cigarettes or send them back? We turned to the government, and it made a decision: to recognize this as a humanitarian cargo and provide an opportunity to implement it.” Government representatives categorically denied this information, after which Patriarch Alexy II liquidated the DECR MP commission and created a new ROC MP Commission on humanitarian aid, headed by Bishop Alexy (Frolov).

Oil

But let us return to the “dashing years”, when “the curvature of our history” arose. In addition to the aforementioned Nika fund, DECR MP was then the founder of the commercial bank Peresvet, JSC International Economic Cooperation (MES), JSC Free People’s Television (SNT), and a number of other structures. After 1996, Kirill’s most profitable business was the export of oil through the MES, which was exempted from customs duties at the request of Alexy II. Kirill was represented at MES by Bishop Victor (Pyankov), who now lives as a private citizen in the United States. The company’s annual turnover was about $2 billion in 1997.

Due to the closed nature of this information, it is now difficult to understand whether Kirill continues to participate in the oil business, but there is one very eloquent fact. A few days before the start of the U.S. military operation against Saddam Hussein, Kirill’s deputy, Bishop Feofan (Ashurkov), flew to Iraq.

Seafood

According to Portal-Credo.Ru, in 2000, information was made public about Metropolitan Kirill’s attempts to enter the market of marine biological resources (caviar, crabs, seafood) – the relevant government structures allocated to the company established by the hierarch (Region JSC) quotas for catching Kamchatka crab and shrimp (total volume – more than 4 thousand tons). According to Kaliningrad journalists, Metropolitan Kirill, as the ruling bishop of the Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate in the Kaliningrad region, participated in an automobile joint venture in Kaliningrad. It is characteristic that, even after becoming patriarch, Cyril did not appoint a diocesan bishop to the Kaliningrad see, leaving it under his direct control.

Luxury

In 2004, Nikolai Mitrokhin, a research fellow at the Center for Shadow Economy Research at the Russian State Humanitarian University, published a monograph on the shadow economic activity of the ROC MP. The value of the assets controlled by Metropolitan Kirill was estimated in this work at $ 1.5 billion. Two years later, the journalists of Moskovskiye Novosti tried to count the assets of the head of the Church Foreign Ministry and came to the conclusion that they already amount to $ 4 billion.

And according to The New Times, in 2002, Metropolitan Kirill bought a penthouse in the “House on the Embankment” overlooking the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Incidentally, this is “the only apartment in Moscow, registered specifically to the metropolitan by his secular surname Gundyaev, about which there is a corresponding entry in the cadastral register.”

Another attribute of this life, which has become the subject of widespread discussion, is a Breguet watch worth about 30 thousand euros, which Ukrainian journalists filmed on the left hand of the patriarch next to the monastic rosary. It happened the day after Kirill pompously broadcast live on the main Ukrainian TV channels: “It is very important to learn Christian asceticism … Asceticism is the ability to regulate one’s consumption … This is a person’s victory over lust, over passions, over instinct. And it is important that both rich and poor possess this quality.”

Both the luxurious corteges of Patriarch Kirill and the security services from the FSO, which he uses, have become the talk of the town. In Moscow, when the patriarch rides, all the streets along his route are blocked, which naturally causes massive indignation of car owners. In Ukraine, Cyril’s half-kilometer motorcade completely shocked local residents: even the president travels much more modestly in a neighboring country.

True, we must pay tribute to Kirill: for official visits he charters the planes of the “Transaero” company, and uses his personal fleet only for personal purposes.

A separate and almost inexhaustible topic is the palaces and residences of the patriarch. Kirill seeks to keep up with the top officials of the state in this matter. His permanent residence was a newly-built palace in Peredelkino, for the sake of which several houses of local residents were demolished. From the windows of electric trains in the Kiev direction, it looks like a large Russian tower – like the Terem Palace in the Kremlin. Cyril does not like living there: he is worried about the nearby railway. Therefore, the current patriarch ordered to redecorate the palace in the Danilov Monastery, which did not look poor before. The construction of the Patriarchal Palace in Gelendzhik, next to the legendary “Putin’s palace” in Praskoveevka, was not without scandals. As in the case with Putin, the patriarch’s palace caused the indignation of local ecologists in the first place: it was built on the territory of the reserve, many trees listed in the Red Book were cut down during construction, and the territory of the palace blocked access to the sea for local residents. There are also patriarchal residences in all more or less large monasteries in Russia.

Capital outflow is blessed

But back to the Danilov Monastery. After the head of Putin’s headquarters, Govorukhin, uttered wonderful, highly spiritual words that under Putin, corruption in Russia has finally acquired civilized forms, it no longer seems strange that Patriarch Kirill welcomes the outflow of capital from Russia (after all, his own savings are by no means stored at home) … “The fact,” said Kirill to Putin, “that today in Spain, when it is one of the most prosperous countries, is being massively sold by the Spaniards and bought by Russians in large quantities, is a very good signal to the whole world. A country that is poor, that is in crisis, cannot afford what rich countries do not allow today. ”

The phrase, albeit confusing, is understandable that, from a Christian point of view, we must identify the “beautiful life” of the nouveau riche abroad with the glory and wealth of our country.

As Kirill prophesies, “Sergianism” (the policy of complete subordination of the Church to power), about which the Chekist Putin spoke so warmly in his speech, again demonstrates its advantages over Christian confession and martyrdom. To which the patriarch can hardly strive so much, whose earthly life is protected by the FSO officers.

(Editor’s note: Pacepa claims that Primakov hates Israel; however, Operation SIG tells us the opposite and that supporting Arab radicalism has nothing to do with sleighting the Jews but, instead, has to do with helping them create a necessary dialectic, divide-and-conquer strategy for the Middle East, with themselves as players.)

By Ion Mihai Pacepa
The Washington Times
August 21, 2003 Anno Domini

On March 20, Russian PresidentVladimir Putin denounced the U.S.-led “aggression” against Iraq as “unwarranted” and “unjustifiable.” Three days later, Pravda said that an anonymous Russian “military expert” was predicting that the United States would fabricate finding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov immediately started plying the idea abroad, and it has taken hold around the world ever since.

As a former Romanian spy chief who used to take orders from the Soviet KGB, it is perfectly obvious to me that Russia is behind the evanescence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. After all, Russia helped Saddam get his hands on them in the first place. The Soviet Union and all its bloc states always had a standard operating procedure for deep sixing weapons of mass destruction — in Romanian it was codenamed “Sarindar, meaning “emergency exit.”Iimplemented it in Libya. It was for ridding Third World despots of all trace of their chemical weapons if the Western imperialists ever got near them. We wanted to make sure they would never be traced back to us, and we also wanted to frustrate the West by not giving them anything they could make propaganda with.

All chemical weapons were to be immediately burned or buried deep at sea. Technological documentation, however, would be preserved in microfiche buried in waterproof containers for future reconstruction. Chemical weapons, especially those produced in Third Worldcountries,which lack sophisticated production facilities, often do not retainlethal properties after a few months on the shelf and are routinely dumped anyway. And all chemical weapons plants had a civilian cover making detection difficult, regardless of the circumstances.

The plan included an elaborate propaganda routine. Anyone accusing Moammar Gadhafi of possessing chemical weapons would be ridiculed. Lies, all lies! Come to Libya and see! Our Western left-wing organizations, like the World Peace Council, existed for sole purpose of spreading the propaganda we gave them. These very same groups bray the exact same themes to this day. We always relied on their expertise at organizing large street demonstrations in Western Europe over America’swar-mongering whenever we wanted to distract world attention from the crimes of the vicious regimes we sponsored.

Iraq, in my view, had its own “Sarindar” plan in effect direct from Moscow. It certainly had one in the past. Nicolae Ceausescu told me so, and he heard it from Leonid Brezhnev. KGB chairman Yury Andropov, and later, Gen. Yevgeny Primakov, told me so too. In the late 1970s, Gen. Primakov ran Saddam’s weapons programs. After that, as you may recall, he was promoted to head of the Soviet foreign intelligence service in 1990, to Russia’s minister of foreign affairs in 1996, and in 1998, to prime minister. What you may not know is that Primakov hates Israel and has always championed Arab radicalism. He was a personal friend of Saddam’s and has repeatedly visited Baghdad after 1991, quietly helping Saddam play his game of hide-and-seek.

The Soviet bloc not only sold Saddam its WMDs, but it showed them how to make them “disappear.” Russia is still at it. Primakov was in Baghdad from December until a couple of days before the war, along with a team of Russian military experts led by two of Russia’s topnotch “retired”generals,Vladislav Achalov, a former deputy defense minister, and Igor Maltsev, a former air defense chief of staff. They were all there receiving honorary medals from the Iraqi defense minister. They clearly were not there to give Saddam military advice for the upcomingwar—Saddam’sKatyusha launchers were of World War II vintage, and his T-72 tanks, BMP-1 fighting vehicles and MiG fighter planes were all obviously useless against America. “I did not fly to Baghdad to drink coffee,” was what Gen. Achalov told the media afterward. They were there orchestrating Iraq’s “Sarindar” plan.
The U.S. military in fact, has already found the only thing that would have been allowed to survive under the classic Soviet “Sarindar” plan to liquidate weapons arsenals in the event of defeat in war — the technological documents showing how to reproduce weapons stocks in just a few weeks.

Such a plan has undoubtedly been in place since August 1995 — when Saddam’s son-in-law, Gen. Hussein Kamel, who ran Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological programs for 10 years, defected to Jordan. That August, UNSCOM and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors searched a chicken farm owned by Kamel’s family and found more than one hundred metal trunks and boxes containing documentation dealing with all categories of weapons, including nuclear. Caught red-handed, Iraq at last admitted to its “extensive biological warfare program, including weaponization,” issued a “Full, Final and Complete Disclosure Report” and turned over documents about the nerve agent VX and nuclear weapons.

Saddam then lured Gen. Kamel back, pretending to pardon his defection. Three days later, Kamel and over 40 relatives, including women and children, were murdered, in what the official Iraqi press described as a “spontaneous administration of tribal justice.” After sending that message to his cowed, miserable people, Saddam then made a show of cooperation with U.N. inspection, since Kamel had just compromised all his programs anyway. In November 1995, he issued a second “Full, Final and Complete Disclosure” as to his supposedly non-existent missile programs. That very same month, Jordan intercepted a large shipment of high-grade missile components destined for Iraq. UNSCOM soon fished similar missile components out of the Tigris River, again refuting Saddam’s spluttering denials. In June 1996, Saddam slammed the door shut to UNSCOM’s inspection of any “concealment mechanisms.” On Aug. 5, 1998, halted cooperation with UNSCOM and the IAEA completely, and they withdrew on Dec. 16, 1998. Saddam had another four years to develop and hide his weapons of mass destruction without any annoying, prying eyes. U.N. Security Council resolutions 1115, (June 21, 1997), 1137 (Nov. 12, 1997), and 1194 (Sept. 9, 1998) were issued condemning Iraq—ineffectual words that had no effect. In 2002, under the pressure of a huge U.S. military buildup by a new U.S. administration, Saddam made yet another “Full, Final and Complete Disclosure,” which was found to contain “false statements” and to constitute another “material breach” of U.N. and IAEA inspection and of paragraphs eight to 13 of resolution 687 (1991).

It was just a few days after this last “Disclosure,” after a decade of intervening with the U.N. and the rest of the world on Iraq’s behalf, that Gen. Primakov and his team of military experts landed in Baghdad — even though, with 200,000 U.S. troops at the border, war was imminent, and Moscow could no longer save Saddam Hussein. Gen. Primakov was undoubtedly cleaning up the loose ends of the “Sarindar” plan and assuring Saddam that Moscow would rebuild his weapons of mass destruction after the storm subsided for a good price.

Mr. Putin likes to take shots at America and wants to reassert Russia in world affairs. Why would he not take advantage of this opportunity? As minister of foreign affairs and prime minister, Gen. Primakov has authored the “multipolarity” strategy of counterbalancing American leadership by elevating Russia to great-power status in Eurasia. Between Feb. 9-12, Mr. Putin visited Germany and France to propose a three-power tactical alignment against the United States to advocate further inspections rather than war. On Feb. 21, the Russian Duma appealed to the German and French parliaments to join them on March 4-7 in Baghdad, for “preventing U.S. military aggression against Iraq.” Crowds of European leftists, steeped for generations in left-wing propaganda straight out of Moscow, continue to find the line appealing.

Mr. Putin’s tactics have worked. The United States won a brilliant military victory, demolishing a dictatorship without destroying the country, but it has begun losing the peace. While American troops unveiled the mass graves of Saddam’s victims, anti-American forces in Western Europe and elsewhere, spewed out vitriolic attacks, accusing Washington of greed for oil and not of really caring about weapons of mass destruction, or exaggerating their risks, as if weapons of mass destruction were really nothing very much to worry about after all.

It is worth remembering that Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, chose to live in a Soviet gulag instead of continuing to develop the power of death. “I wanted to alert the world,” Sakharov explained in 1968, “to the grave perils threatening the human race thermonuclear extinction, ecological catastrophe, famine.” Even Igor Kurchatov, the KGB academician who headed the Soviet nuclear program from 1943 until his death in 1960, expressed deep qualms of conscience about helping to create weapons of mass destruction. “The rate of growth of atomic explosives is such,” he warned in an article written together with several other Soviet nuclear scientists not long before he died, “that in just a few years the stockpile will be large enough to create conditions under which the existence of life on earth will be impossible.”

The Cold War was fought over the reluctance to use weapons of mass destruction, yet now this logic is something only senior citizens seem to recall. Today, even lunatic regimes like that in North Korea not only possess weapons of mass destruction, but openly offer to sell them to anyone with cash, including terrorists and their state sponsors. Is anyone paying any attention? Being inured to proliferation, however, does not reduce its danger. On the contrary, it increases it.

 Ion Mihai Pacepa, a Romanian, is the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc.