Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and Helsinki were using the Trust to deliver

228 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and Helsinki were using the Trust to deliver arms and supplies to their partisans inside Russia. The Trust also furnished spies’ and exiled leaders’ fake passports, which allowed them to sneak back into Russia to participate in clandestine mis- sions. It even undertook sabotage and assassination missions paid for by Western intelligence services. As they learned of police stations being blown up and political prisoners escaped from prisons, these agents and dissidents came to further believe in the power of the ‘Trust. By the mid-1920s, no fewer than eleven Western intelligence services had become almost completely dependent on the Trust for information about Russia. They also sent millions of dollars into Russia via couriers to finance its activities. But suddenly exiled leaders working in Russia under the aegis of the Trust began to vanish. Then top Western intelligence agents, including Sidney Reilly and Boris Savinkov, were arrested, and their networks were eliminated. Instead of the Communist regime col- lapsing, as the Trust had predicted, it consolidated its power and © wiped out all the dissident groups. Finally, in 1929, the Trust was © revealed by a defector to be a long-term false flag operation run by the Russian intelligence service. Even the Trust building, rather than being the cover for a subversive conspiracy, was the headquarters for the Russian secret police during this eight-year operation. The secret police had provided the documents fed to Western intelligence, briefed the agents who pretended to defect, published the dissident newspapers the Trust distributed, fabricated the passports it supplied exiles, blew up Russian buildings, and staged jail breaks to make the deception more credible. It also collected the money sent in by West- ern intelligence services, which more than paid for the entire decep- tion. Because it was running the show, it could offer those lured into the trap an opportunity to work for it as double agents. The alterna- tive, if they refused, was to face a firing squad. Even after the Trust itself had been fully exposed, the Russian intel- ligence service continued to succeed with other false flag deceptions. During the Cold War, it set up a fake underground in Poland called WIN, modeled on the Trust. It set up false flag groups in Ukraine, Georgia, Lithuania, Albania, and Hungary. It also had agents mas- | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.indd 228 ® 9/30/16 8:13AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019716