Atlantic Storm and Global Mercury were additional loud notes amplifying persistent Pentagon signals that biosecurity was the emerging growth sector for national defense. In response to such tocsins, private military contractors began thronging to the pandemic “surveillance and psyops” sector like hogs to a corncrib.
Long before Robert Mercer (with his daughter Rebekah) became Donald Trump’s biggest private donors, and before they launched the right-wing social media platform Parler, he created the first private-sector provider of psychological warfare services in 1993. The Mercers’ Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) Group was the parent company to the notorious data-manipulating firm Cambridge Analytica. This brand new psyops firm, headquartered in the UK, drew some of the largest crowds in 2005 when it set up a high-tech propaganda “ops center” at the UK’s annual military technology showcase.142
As a contemporary article in Slate described the SCL simulation, “classic signs of smallpox” are “threatening a pandemic of epic proportions” when “a shadowy media firm steps in to help orchestrate a sophisticated campaign of mass deception.” SCL takes on the task of convincing the entire country’s population to comply with lockdown rules by inventing a lie about an unleashed cloud of toxic chemicals. The mission’s objective is to prevent mass panic and casualties from the classified threat of smallpox. SCL feeds disinformation to the press and manufactures medical data. “Londoners stay indoors . . . convinced that even a short walk into the streets could be fatal.”143
The article continues: “If SCL weren’t so earnest, it might actually seem to be mocking itself, or perhaps George Orwell. At the end of the smallpox scenario, dramatic music fades out to a taped message urging buyers to ‘embrace’ strategic communications, which it describes as ‘the most powerful weapon in the world.’ . . . What makes SCL’s strategy so unusual is that it proposes to propagate its campaign domestically, at least some of the time, and rather than influence just opinion, it wants people to take a particular course of action.”144
The company based its psyops strategies on propaganda techniques developed by a virtual lab called the Behavioral Dynamics Institute, run out of Leeds University by Professor Phil Taylor, a consultant to UK and American defense agencies until his death at 56 in 2010. The article identified SCL only as “funded by private investors.”145 Company chief Nigel Oakes described its nefarious skullduggery as “mind-bending” for political purposes.146 In a March 20, 2018 interview with Yahoo Finance, Oakes described himself as a man “without much of an ethical radar.”147
According to SCL’s public affairs director Mark Broughton, “Basically, we’re launching ourselves . . . on the defense market and homeland security market at the same time.” Aware that the company might face criticism over its promotion of totalitarian security states, Broughton emphasized to Slate the company’s role in saving lives. “There is some altruism in it,” he said grudgingly, “but we also want to earn money.”148
How War Games Became Instruments for Imposing Obedience
Dark Winter, Atlantic Storm, and Global Mercury were only three of over a dozen Germ Games staged by military, medical, and intelligence planners leading up to COVID-19. Each of these Kafkaesque exercises became uncanny predictors of a dystopian age that pandemic planners dubbed the “New Normal.” The consistent feature is an affinity among their simulation designers for militarizing medicine and introducing centralized autocratic governance.
Each rehearsal ends with the same grim punchline: the global pandemic is an excuse to justify the imposition of tyranny and coerced vaccination. The repetition of these exercises suggests that they serve as a kind of rehearsal or training drill for an underlying agenda to coordinate the global dismantlement of democratic governance.
Military intelligence analysts first introduced scenario planning, as a strategic device during World War II. RAND’s iconic military planner, Herman Kahn, used sophisticated war game simulations to model nuclear engagement strategies in the Cold War era.149 Working for Royal Dutch/Shell, futurologists Pierre Wack and Peter Schwartz of the Global Business Network (GBN) pioneered scenario-planning simulations as a strategic device for their corporate clients in the 1970s and 1980s.150 By the millennium, simulations had evolved into an indispensable vehicle for military policy makers, intelligence agency planners, public health technocrats, and the petroleum and pharmaceutical multinationals for reinforcing prescribed responses that allow predictable and rigid control of the outcomes of future crises.
After 9/11, the rising biosecurity cartel adopted simulations as signaling mechanisms for choreographing lockstep response among corporate, political, and military technocrats charged with managing global exigencies. Scenario planning became an indispensable device for multiple power centers to coordinate complex strategies for simultaneously imposing coercive controls upon democratic societies across the globe.
Virtually all of the scenario planning for pandemics employ technical assumptions and strategies familiar to anyone who has read the CIA’s notorious psychological warfare manuals for shattering indigenous societies, obliterating traditional economics and social bonds, for using imposed isolation and the demolition of traditional economies to crush resistance, to foster chaos, demoralization, dependence and fear, and for imposing centralized and autocratic governance.151
In particular, the exercises incorporate psyop techniques gleaned from the notorious “Milgram Obedience Experiments.” In those 1960s exercises, Yale social psychology professor Dr. Stanley Milgram was able to show that researchers could formulaically manipulate “ordinary citizens” from all walks of life to violate their own conscience and commit atrocities, so long as an authority figure (a doctor in a white lab coat) ordered them to do so. The subjects believed they were torturing fellow volunteers, by electrocution, out of sight in an adjacent room. As a doctor instructed them to rev up the juice, the recruits could hear the nightmarish screaming of actors pretending to be suffering electrocution and their pleadings for mercy. Of Milgram’s forty subjects, some 65 percent administered the full-bore 450-volt shocks they had been told were potentially fatal. Milgram describes his experiments as proof that “obedience to authority” trumps morality and conscience:
Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study.152