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Shadow Masters

By Daniel Estulin (Trine Day, LLC, Walterville, Oregon, 2010, 357 pages.)

Book Review by Dennis Moore

Award-winning investigative journalist and best-selling author of The True Story of the Bilderberg Group, Daniel Estulin, has followed up with another powerful expose in a similar vein, Shadow Masters. To carry the Bilderberg theme further, the author demonstrates how governments and their intelligence agencies are working with international drug dealers and terrorists for mutual benefit and profit. As he explains in his book, this extraordinary investigation examines how behind-the-scenes collaboration between governments, intelligence agencies, big business, drug traffickers and “terrorists” has lined the pockets of the elite on one hand, while on the other profoundly contributing to the destruction of sovereign nation-states in favor of more efficient units, but without such messy things as the US Constitution and its Bill of Rights. Estulin indicates that; “Dealing their cards from the darkness, the Shadow Masters create ‘reality,’ inventing the good guys and the bad buys, playing a rigged game for power, profit and … our future.” In his book, we find out just who these “good and bad guys” are.

As in The True Story of the Bilderberg Group, the author takes us inside the secret meetings and sheds light on why a group of politicians, businessmen, bankers and other mighty individuals formed the most powerful society. Shadow Masters, from the author’s viewpoint, is that natural extension of what those in the Bilderberg Group had in mind. In my initial communication(s) with the author, I inquired of him as to what was behind his thinking, the naming of his book, Shadow Masters? He stated that he kept thinking of these people as “psychotic little gray men working from the shadows, running and in some cases controlling the events around the world from behind the curtain. The word “Master’ somehow logically fell into place as in someone in control, the head person. And I already had the word ‘Shadow.’ Thus, Shadow Masters.”

Benjamin Disraeli, one of England’s greatest Prime Ministers, puts Shadow Masters in perspective, by noting; “The world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” Estulin follows up by recalling in his book the words of a former US Ambassador to the Republic of Seychelles, David Fischer; “The whole game of intelligence is called a wilderness of mirrors. You look at it, but what you see isn’t reality, it’s always changing. I had a feeling that none of what I was seeing was real.” Thus, the crux of Estulin’s book!

Drugs, diamonds and dirty money, are an integral part of the Shadow Masters, and is emphasized throughout the book. The illegality of the plants – coca, cannabis and the opium poppy – creates the world’s largest “black” marketplace: over one trillion annually of untaxed, cash dollars, supplying the Shadow Masters with funds to corrupt our financial institutions, according to the author.

Perhaps more to the point in the author’s book, and his observations, he states; “What looked like a clean and simple narrative, a morality tale pitting a heroic ‘human rights’ crusader and former KGB against a tyrannical leader of Russia – a rough nation of lawlessness and corruption doomed to imprisonment by its bloody past – has, on closer examination, turned into something quite different, and far more complex. Again, why would the President of Russia, at the peak of his popularity and awash in oil revenues, risk a breach with every Western nation by ordering the protracted public murder of a man, at worst, was a nuisance to the regime?” All this, and more, is answered in the Shadow Masters.

Estulin asks in Shadow Masters such probing questions as “Who Killed Litvinenko,” the former KGB agent, and what his death had to do with the overall scheme of things? He speaks candidly throughout the book about a Victor Bout, named the “Merchant of Death,” who has been designated second only to Osama bin Laden as the world’s most evil person. The author’s explosive investigation of Bout rips the lid off one of the most sinister and mind-boggling deceptions of recent times. Estulin spent over six months in Thailand, attending court hearings and visiting Bout in prison, obtaining exclusive interviews. And, with unprecedented access to Bout’s business files and personal materials, the author shows the accusations against Bout to be less than the truth – a fable serving the needs of the Shadow Masters, according to Estulin. He indicates in his book that one way to delve into the innermost secrets of the Shadow Masters and the world’s interlocked terrorist networks is to look at clandestine arms trafficking, and that according to the main-stream press, the most infamous gunrunner of them all is Victor Bout. He further states that corporate media defines Victor Bout as a savvy, ambitious, modern-day, multinational entrepreneur. Estulin states in his book: “Victor Bout is the poster boy for a new generation of post Cold War international arms dealers who play a critical role in areas where the weapons trade has been embargoed by the United Nations. The story spans several continents and involves a large network of shady individuals, front companies and government officials; corrupt African bureaucrats and thieving East European military officials.” Thus, the Shadow Masters!

Sure, on one hand, the mainstream press has tried to portray the author’s investigative journalism as conspiracy fiction, but there is no denying that his discussions of the Shadow Masters have been drawing full houses across North America, Europe and Southeast Asia. The undeniable facts that he has presented in his book, supported by government documentation, lends credence to the theme of his book.

Estulin’s hypotheses and/or the “connecting of the dots” in his book, can be summed up in his statement: “So, you have an international terrorist (Osama bin Laden) trained and funded by the CIA, an international terrorist organization (the KLA, excuse me, the Kosovo Protection Corps) trained and funded by the British, American and German Secret Services and Special Forces, and an American establishment (Clinton, Gore, Clark, Albright, Holbrooke, Lieberman – all BIlderberg and CFR members, who represent the interests of the New World Order) fighting to re-establish ‘democracy’ and bring justice to a long suffering and oppressed people. Truth when unraveled, in many instances is indeed stranger than fiction.”

With a cast of characters that would challenge a Hollywood script writer, in the mold of a John Grisham novel, Shadow Masters is a must read that I highly recommend.

Dennis Moore is a member of the San Diego Writers/Editors Guild. He has written for LifeAfter 50 Magazine in Pasadena, California, and the Baja Times Newspaper in Rosarito Beach, Mexico. Mr. Moore can be contacted at demoore21@sprint.blackberry.net.