Creative Destruction: 9/11, Enron, & American Bitcoin

Controlled demolition is a phrase often used in some circles when discussing the events of September 11, 2001. However, this is usually reserved for theories regarding the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, and is less often applied to the political, economic, and technological pillars that upheld the world before these attacks. As this piece will attempt to outline, both the physical and “creative destruction” that occurred on that day have had cascading and compounding effects on society as we knew it then, and especially as we know it today.

While the term creative destruction is typically associated with the Marxist school of thought, specifically based on analyses of Karl Marx’s work via Joseph Schumpeter and Werner Sombart, in the context of conspiracy, the phrase refers to the intentional demolition of markets, technological structures and regulations due to a deliberately triggered event. The goal of that event is to intentionally and purposefully bring about a specific, wanted change to the aforementioned pillars of the status quo — leading to an advantaged consolidation by the very conspirators of the event.

The players in this act of creative destruction that occurred at the onset of the new millennium are hardly limited to the usual cast of characters often brought up when discussing September 11, 2001 (9/11). They include members of the various businesses affected and crucially involved in the events surrounding the terrorist attacks; notably, security broker giant Cantor Fitzgerald, led by Howard Lutnick; the infamous American energy pioneer Enron, led by Ken Lay; investment bank and underwriter Alexander Brown & Sons, led by Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard and his deputy Mayo Shattuck III; and stalwarts of the public-private “revolving door” such as Dick Cheney and James Baker, as well as the lesser-known Thomas Barnett.

Thomas Barnett, a former strategist, professor and researcher at the Warfare Analysis & Research Department at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, RI, was selected to join members of the government, Cantor Fitzgerald, and various other public, private and intelligence sector partners atop the World Trade Center to “war game” in the years that preceded the 9/11 attacks. Specifically, these war games were part of the “New Rule Sets Project,” which “explore[d] how the spread of globalization alters the basic ‘rules of the road’ in the international security environment” with a focus on “how these changes redefine the US Military’s historic role as ‘security enabler’ of America’s commercial network ties with the world.”

The aforementioned concept of creative destruction is immaculately laid out by Barnett in his post-“war game” book, The Pentagon’s New Map. Barnett posits that the American national security state properly understood that there was a very real and looming danger downstream from the 1990’s Clinton-era, which saw a booming economy due to the “Information Revolution.” The country could not simply rest on its laurels, despite its immense success in distributing its state-funded technological developments across the globe. As Barnett and his national security state benefactors saw it, both globalization and digitalization must be achieved on their geopolitical terms, not just on their technology stacks.

Barnett explains:

America could behave in this fashion because the boom times of the new economy suggested that security issues could take a backseat to the enormous changes being inflicted by the Information Revolution. If we were looking for a new operating theory of the world, surely this was it. Connectivity would trump all, erasing the business cycle, erasing national borders, erasing the very utility of the state in managing a global security order that seemed more virtual than real… The Clinton Administration spent its time tending to the emerging financial and technological architecture of the global economy, pushing worldwide connectivity for all it was worth in those heady days, assuming that eventually it would reach even the most disconnected societies. Did we as a nation truly understand the political and security ramifications of encouraging all this connectivity? […]

Though I worked primarily for the US military, my research during these years focused on everything but actual warfare. Instead, I found myself instinctively exploring the seam between war and peace, locating it first in US military crisis responses and then America’s foreign aid, and finally focusing on its leading edge — the spread of the global economy itself. What I found there in the late 1990s was neither ‘chaos’ nor ‘uncertainty’ but the defining conflict of our age — a historical struggle that screamed out for a new American vision of a future worth creating. And so I began a multiyear search for such a grand strategy, one that would capture the governing dynamics of this new era. [emphasis added]

The problem identified here by Barnett and other national security “planners,” i.e. how to meld the “emerging financial and technological architecture of the global economy” with “a new American vision of a future worth creating,” would ultimately be the impetus for the “creative destruction” that occurred on 9/11 in tandem with the collapse of the Twin Towers and Building 7. These lesser known acts of “destruction” that occurred on that day were meant to be invisible to the public, but were deemed necessary by the “planners” to ensure that the aforementioned architecture of an increasingly digital economy — now pinned largely on the flows of both information and energy — would be dominated by US interests. More specifically, the goal was to have this architecture be dominated, not necessarily by the national interest, but rather by the nexus that had come to control the American national security state and their corporate allies. Described in One Nation Under Blackmail in detail, this nexus — sometimes referred to as the “private CIA” — was at the core of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, with many of its top operatives returning to government yet again under George W. Bush in early 2001.

As will be noted in this investigation, some actors within this same nexus had previously worked within the Nixon and Ford administrations and used similar “creative destruction” tactics to establish US economic hegemony by: marrying American public debt to global oil markets; clandestinely turning the ruling powers of major oil producing nations in the Gulf into their automatons; and developing plans to one day turn the US into the de facto energy superpower.

Yet, the inter-connectivity of international communication had numerous implications for the world economy and thus America’s place at its peak. Notably, the global proliferation of this inter-connectivity was largely due to the internet via the personal computer — technological developments that had been spawned by US military/intelligence-funded entities in both the public and private sector. In order to retain the hegemony of the US dollar, as well as America’s role as the leading innovator of “disruptive” technologies, serious changes had to be made to how the Pentagon, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury, and their respective private sector partners operated in this new, incoming paradigm which they themselves created.

Barnett writes:

Working as a senior strategic researcher at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, I first led a long research project on the Year 2000 Problem [Y2K] and its potential for generating global crises — or ‘system perturbations,’ as I called them. Early in the year 2000, I was approached by senior executives of the Wall Street bond firm Cantor Fitzgerald. They asked me to oversee a unique research partnership between the firm and the college that would later yield a series of high-powered war games involving national security policymakers, Wall Street heavyweights, and academic experts. Our shared goal was to explore how globalization was remaking the global security environment — in other words, the Pentagon’s new map. Those war games were conducted atop World Trade Center One; the resulting briefings were offered throughout the Pentagon. When both buildings came under attack on 9/11, my research immediately shifted from grand theory to grand strategy. Within weeks, I found myself elevated to the position of Assistant for Strategic Futures in the Office of Force Transformation, a new planning element created within the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Our task was as ambitious as it was direct: refocus the Pentagon’s strategic vision of future war. [emphasis added]

So what is the Pentagon’s “strategic vision of future war?” How does this relate to 9/11, Enron, and the immense power capacity and compute build out now evident in the AI and Bitcoin industry? In order to answer this question, and its relevance to today, one simply has to explore the role of energy, currency, and information — all upheld by various infrastructures and legislation — in statecraft, and how all three have evolved to meet the “new map” of technological inter-connectivity.

The very nexus explored in this piece, which was critical in the creation and upholding of the petrodollar system, has now since coalesced around the data center build out, the nuclear energy that powers the compute, and the new digital asset age. While major aspects of the resurgence of the nuclear industry as well as the data center construction spree have been framed as opportunistic and responsive only to recent developments, this investigation will reveal that they were planned long ago on the part of the “planners” to secure economic, information and energy hegemony for the US empire and the corrupt, unaccountable nexus at the core of its military/intelligence network.

As a consequence, key actors in prior “creative destruction” episodes are yet again present as the “planners” lead us to the doorstep of yet another “catalyzing event.” Whether triggered by the Iran War, data center-related debt bubbles, or AI-enabled cyberattacks is irrelevant. The end result will be the same, just as it has been in the past — the consolidation of power and control over the flows of information and energy in the hands of those who previously capitalized on the 9/11 attacks, instigated the Gulf Wars, and created the petrodollar.

Enron And 9/11: Toppling The Petrodollar

Five weeks after the first Gulf War began, and exactly eleven years before the 9/11 attacks, then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney briefed the Senate Armed Services Committee on September 11, 1990. In that briefing, he stated that:

Our strategic interests in the Persian Gulf region, I think, are well known, but bear repeating. We obviously also have a significant interest because of the energy that is at stake in the gulf… Once [former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein] acquired Kuwait and deployed an army as large as the one he possesses, he was clearly in a position to be able to dictate the future of worldwide energy policy, and that gave him a stranglehold on our economy and on that of most of the other nations of the world as well. [emphasis added]

An important historical primer to this conundrum, i.e. the US’ reliance on foreign petrol suppliers to help ensure the ever-demand for US dollars, is the context surrounding the formation of this agreement — specifically the Yom Kippur War in October 1973. President Nixon had only recently severed the tie of the US dollar to gold ounces in 1971, and the country soon entered a largely inflationary period, which would last throughout the decade. In order to source demand for US Treasuries — the reserve asset purchased by domestic banks which “back” dollar creation via lending — Nixon’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made an agreement with Saudi Arabia to provide the country US military protection in exchange for the Saudis denominating their future oil sales in dollars. Thus, any developing nation that wanted to purchase oil to pursue industrialization had to first purchase US dollars using their local currency.

This axiom generated incessant demand for dollars, which was innately tied to the purchasing price of oil. Before the onset of the Yom Kippur War in the last quarter of 1973, oil was trading at or slightly below $4 a barrel. By the first quarter of 1974, oil breached $10 and was well on its way to pushing $40 by the end of the decade. This immense increase in the cost of oil — combined with its forced denomination in dollars and a reinvestment in American securities by OPEC nations — meant the US Treasury and Federal Reserve found an immense increase in demand for dollars, which helped mitigate its highly inflationary environment. This mechanism was directly threatened again, years later, when Saddam Hussein floated taking Iraq into an Euro-settled petrol market in September 2000. With Dick Cheney returning to government as Vice President in January 2001, the Bush administration quickly began considering drastic actions were they to keep this economic system in place. One former Bush official later stated that the administration’s plans for the invasion of Iraq had been made early in 2001, shortly after Bush and Cheney had been sworn in.

George W. Bush’s journey from Texas governor to the White House had been aided in no small part by Ken Lay, the infamous Enron founder and Bush mega-donor with close ties to George H.W. Bush both personally and professionally. Decades prior, in the early 1970s, Ken Lay had served Richard Nixon’s Federal Power Commission as a technical assistant in 1971, and was later named Deputy Undersecretary of Energy in 1972. Prior to this appointment, Lay used military data made available to him from the Pentagon while on assignment from the Navy Officer Candidate School to write his doctorate thesis on how military spending affects the domestic economy. According to the Texas State Historical Association, Lay’s years in the Nixon administration were “eventful with a natural-gas shortage causing brownouts in 1972 and the Arab Oil Embargo causing severe gas shortages in 1973.” Lay was reportedly “heavily influenced by these events” and “determined that the way to energy independence and security for the U.S. was through deregulation.” Furthermore, the book Enron Ascending notes that Lay helped “take the lead in drafting President Richard Nixon’s first presidential message on energy” given in April 1973 and that he worked “on petroleum-allocation issues with the White House.”

It was also during this period, in November 1973, that President Richard Nixon announced Project Independence, which Nixon reportedly considered as being “in the same league as the Manhattan Project and the space program.” Project Independence’s aim was “the strength of self-sufficiency” in energy — a goal that was achieved in 2018 when the US became a net exporter of oil and the world’s largest oil producer. In the president’s address to the nation explaining Project Independence — very likely written with help from Lay — Nixon stated that “we must develop new sources of energy which will give us the capacity to meet our needs without relying on any foreign nation.” Specifically, Nixon tasked the Atomic Energy Commission “to speed up the licensing and construction of nuclear plants” and “reduce the time required to bring nuclear plants on line.”

As will be explored later in this piece, these Nixon-era policies are analogous in several key ways to the energy policies of George Bush Sr. and George W. Bush as well as the current energy policies of the Trump administration. In addition, when many of Nixon’s energy policies were revived in part by Reagan/Bush energy deregulation, Lay formed Enron, which succeeded in securing the rapid proliferation of the domestic liquid natural gas (LNG) industry. Enron’s early success was largely financed by Michael Milken’s “junk bond” empire at Drexel Burnham Lambert, which was intimately tied to Reagan/Bush intelligence network as well as the Bush family-linked scandal of Savings and Loan institutions of that same era. This is suggestive of Lay’s Enron having been built with that network’s backing. The fact that, years later, a more established Enron would then create a super liquid, internet-based energy market, would — as we shall see — play into the hands of “creative destruction” efforts that occurred in 2001, the year of Enron’s collapse.

This nexus’ understanding of how energy, specifically oil, dictates the world economy led to their imminent interest in oil producing nations like Kuwait. In the example of Kuwait, its entanglement in this network is reflected by the ties forged between Kuwait’s royal family and US energy stalwarts such as Enron, US military contractors, the US military itself, security brokers, US banks and the CIA (specifically the CIA networks tied to George H.W. Bush and Ted Shackley). Of particular note is how US interests spent the decade before 9/11 reformulating the country’s regulatory environment for the energy industry, complete with a pivot towards nuclear capacity, in order to set up the controlled demolition of the petrodollar directly into the modern stablecoin issuance, Bitcoin mining and AI industries.

While the petrodollar system worked well for decades, the US knew that eventually this system would have to break due to its reliance on cooperation from the increasingly-enriched OPEC nations, and a new system must be constructed to take its place. A report from the Council on Foreign Relations from October 2013 noted that “US policymakers have been concerned about the country’s dependence on imported energy since World War II,” which was “highlighted in the 1970s when episodes of sharply rising oil prices led to recessions, economic stagnation, and high inflation.” However, the report notes that “technological advances combined with high oil and gas prices have enabled increased production” via the so-called “shale revolution” after 2008, which changed “the dialogue about U.S. energy strengths and vulnerabilities.”

Put simply, an increase in oil prices internationally made previously economically-nonviable domestic oil sources available, thus reducing our dependence on imports and the OPEC nations. But this was only the first step taken in redesigning the country’s energy and economic vulnerabilities, and an overt shift towards nuclear capacity will further the US’ energy independence at the onset of the digital asset economy and the AI boom.

Unfortunately, many of the players behind this economic and energy phase shift were also complicit in the events of the two Gulf Wars, as well as the set up and response to the 9/11 attacks.

Enron’s Board

Shortly after taking office in January 2001, George W. Bush created the National Energy Policy Development Group “to develop a national energy policy designed to help the private sector, and as necessary and appropriate, Federal, State, and local governments, promote dependable, affordable, and environmentally sound production and distribution of energy.” Vice President Dick Cheney, previously the head of the energy services firm Halliburton, was put in charge of the task force, which then became colloquially referred to as Cheney’s energy task force. The task force was officially only staffed by government employees, but it was subsequently revealed by former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill — a member of the task force — that this was done by Cheney to explicitly avoid disclosures of participants and records as required by the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). As previously noted, the task force would go on to become notoriously secretive, managing to fight off several lawsuits arguing for disclosure regarding the task force’s activities and its ties to corporate executives. One of these lawsuits eventually went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately sided with Cheney.

In May 2001, a few months after forming, the task force produced a series of policy recommendations for the President in a report called National Energy Policy: Reliable, Affordable, and Environmentally Sound Energy for America’s Future. This report ultimately became the blueprint for the energy deregulation policies of the Bush administration. Cheney’s decision to keep the task force’s activities beyond the reach of FACA disclosures was likely due to the fact that its policy recommendations were largely written on behalf of industry insiders and lobbyists, as attested to by O’Neill and also by subsequent reports which revealed extensive meetings between task force members and industry executives. The companies whose executives met with members of the task force included Ken Lay’s Enron as well as Constellation, whose top executive at the time was Mayo Shattuck. Shattuck, a career banker with significant CIA links, is discussed in detail in later in this piece for being one of the main suspects in the 9/11 insider trading scandal as well as for his role in shaping the company that would later spawn the Trump family-linked firm, American Bitcoin.

It later emerged that at least a half dozen of these “secret” meetings between task force officials and industry leaders had involved Enron specifically. Cheney also personally met with Enron CEO Ken Lay in April 2001 to discuss “energy policy matters.” While leading Halliburton, Cheney had worked closely with Enron. Additionally, Cheney’s replacement at Halliburton upon taking office was David Lesar, who had previously worked at the infamous auditor of the fraudulent Enron — the accounting firm Arthur Andersen — for 16 years. While there, Lesar had specifically focused on the Halliburton account. In addition, as previously noted, Enron and Lay were notably closely linked to the Bush family, both personally, professionally and as political donors.

The influence Enron wielded during these various meetings related to Cheney’s energy task force were apparently considerable. This reportedly resulted in policies “tailor-made” to benefit Enron. In one example noted by the Washington Post in 2002:

[T]he White House last year amended a State Department draft proposal to include a provision calling for boosting energy use in India — which would have directly benefited Enron in its dispute with the Indian government over Enron’s gas-fueled Dabhol plant.

The Post also later reported that “President Bush’s National Security Council led a ‘working group’ with officials from various Cabinet agencies to resolve Enron’s troubles” with respect to its Dabhol project. It also noted that Cheney had broached Enron’s concerns with an Indian official while Bush was due to also broach the issue with India’s Prime Minister. However, Bush’s personal overtures ultimately did not take place, as his visit with India’s PM occurred after Enron had filed documents with the SEC that revealed its dire financial situation in November 2001. In addition, a separate report in The Nation argued that Lay’s private conversation with Cheney in April 2001 had directly influenced Cheney’s subsequent public remarks with respect to the California energy crisis just a day later. It was separately argued by members of Congress that, with respect to the policy report issued by the task force in May 2001, there were “at least 17 policies in the White House energy plan that were advocated by Enron or that benefited Enron.”

Research on the collapse of Enron, published by the Vinson & Elkins law firm in January 2002, noted the Enron board’s intimate role in the firm’s collapse, including “suspend[ing] Enron’s ethics code to approve creation of partnerships between Enron and chief financial officer Andrew S Fastow,” which helped to keep “significant debt off Enron’s books” and “masked much of what was really going on at company.” Notable Enron board members who signed off on this accounting included Lord John Wakeham, a former UK Secretary of State for Energy and leader of the House of Lords, whose proximity to Enron began when he was “appointed energy secretary by Margaret Thatcher in 1989 with the task of privatizing the electricity industry.” As energy secretary, Wakeham oversaw the contracts given to Enron for multiple British power stations before quitting in 1994. Shortly after leaving government, Wakeham joined Enron as a non-executive director. A few months after his Enron appointment, in January 1995, he was controversially outed as having become a director of the merchant bank NM Rothschild.

Another Enron board member, Robert Jaedicke — the Dean Emeritus of the Stanford Graduate School of Business — sat on the California Water Service Group board. California’s water industry played a crucial role in minimizing the California energy crisis in 2001 by turning off large water pumps to prevent further rolling blackouts. The energy crisis was provoked by extensive market manipulations concocted by Enron’s energy trading desk, which had “artificially increase[ed] or decrease[ed] wholesale prices in their favor.” The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission later found that “Enron had entered into undisclosed partnerships with numerous market participants, which allowed it to control energy scheduling and physical infrastructure.”

Enron’s Jaedicke also sat on the board of CM Capital alongside Eugene Kleiner, the founder of Kleiner Perkins — the pioneering Silicon Valley venture firm which had seed-funded Sun Microsystems, among others — and who was also a leader of the infamous “traitorous eight” which founded Fairfield Semiconductor. Both Fairfield Semiconductor and Kleiner Perkins are known for collaborating with Pentagon and intelligence officials to help privatize and commercialize technology developed with government and military funding — specifically in the fields of computing and networking.

One of the more overtly corrupt board members at Enron was Wendy Gramm, the former Chairwoman of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), who is married to former Senator Phil Gramm. During the 1990s, according to reporting from Fort Worth Star-Telegram, both Gramm and his wife “pushed agendas favored by Enron and its accountants at Arthur Andersen.” Particularly relevant to Enron’s eventual collapse is the fact that the CFTC, where Wendy Gramm had served, is described as “a federal agency that oversees commodities trading to protect markets from fraud and manipulation.”

During her tenure, Wendy Gramm was criticized for her January 1993 role in urging the CTFC to “remove the trading of certain energy futures and swap contracts from government scrutiny.” While this move was initially interpreted as benefiting traditional financial institutions, Enron was “reporting more than $4 billion in interest-rate swaps at the time of the commission’s vote.” Only a week later, Wendy Gramm resigned from the five-member CFTC board. Then, a little over a month later, she formally joined Enron’s board and its audit committee.

Wendy’s husband, Phil Gramm, was “the second highest recipient of Enron campaign donations in the Senate with $97,350 secured.” When Phil Gramm announced his campaign for presidency in 1996, Gramm asked his “longtime friend” Ken Lay of Enron to be his regional chairman. During his time in the Senate, Gramm notably chaired the Senate Banking Committee as its “ranking Republican.” In December 2000, Phil Gramm successfully “tacked on” the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which he had co-authored, to an appropriations bill “in the final days of the Clinton administration without discussion by Gramm’s own committee.” Said legislation deregulated energy trading, specifically allowing “unregulated subsidiaries” to trade energy futures without government oversight — which was particularly useful for Enron’s online trading subsidiary, EnronOnline. This piece of legislation allowed Enron to “operate a power auction” that allowed the company to quickly gain “control over a significant share of California’s electricity and natural gas market.” This played a key role in the aforementioned California energy crisis — netting billions in revenue for the energy stalwart.

Phil Gramm was also the beneficiary of $76,850 from Enron’s accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, and he received more from them than any other Senator. Naturally, there was a large conflict of interest given that his wife was serving on Enron’s audit committee, which was responsible for Arthur Andersen’s contract, fees, controls and auditing practices. Unfortunately, the issues hardly end there, as Phil Gramm also helped fight a proposal by the SEC in 2000 that attempted to “prevent an accounting firm to audit a company’s books while providing consulting work.”

Phil Gramm released several news bulletins on behalf of the Senate Banking Committee calling for the SEC to “provide ‘proof’ of problems with auditor independence.” He was quoted as saying: “You can make the argument that any time you are paying an auditor, there is a conflict of interest, but if you are going to make the kind of changes that we are talking about, you have to do more than argue that there might be a conflict and that conflict might override the credibility of the people who are leading these firms.” Phil Gramm announced his desire to leave the Senate only three weeks after Enron CEO Jeff Skilling himself announced his departure from the company in August 2001. The company formerly collapsed in early December of that same year. Phil Gramm was reported to have implied that “he will have accomplished all he set out to do in politics when his current term expires next January.”

Another Enron board member at the time of its collapse who is worth examining in detail is Herbert “Pug” Winokur Jr. Winokur, like Ken Lay, came from a background in the US military and worked specifically on the Pentagon’s “financial control systems” from 1967 to 1970. Subsequent reports on Enron’s Ken Lay refer to Winokur as Lay’s “Pentagon friend,” as Lay had worked in the same part of the Pentagon as Winokur from 1968 to 1971. In 1970, Winokur co-founded ICF, which specialized “in policy planning for senior government and business officials,” and helped establish “an office of international energy policy” for the Treasury Department.

Subsequently, Winokur was intimately involved in Penn Central, which had gone bankrupt in 1970 — the largest bankruptcy in US history prior to Enron — shortly before Winokur joined. Penn Central, prior to its bankruptcy, had been tied to Rockefeller interests and also Clint Murchison Sr., a prominent Texas oilman, while also having done significant business with individuals closely tied to the CIA-linked David Baird Foundation. Researcher and author Peter Dale Scott later referred to Penn Central’s collapse as “bankruptcy fraud with organized crime overtones.”

Prior to its collapse, significant sums of Penn Central’s funds were funneled into a company called Executive Jet Aviation via a “covert marriage” of the two companies that had been facilitated by Glore Forgan, which boasted close ties to both companies as well as former CIA director William Casey. The “Forgan” in Glore Forgan represents one of the firm’s most important past partners, James Forgan, who had led the European division of the CIA’s predecessor, the OSS, where he had worked with both William Casey and another former CIA director, Allen Dulles. Forgan later helped create the CIA.

After Penn Central’s bankruptcy, Winokur became deeply involved in the management of the company post-bankruptcy. At that time, Penn Central was dominated by corporate raider Saul Steinberg, who had previously tried to acquire Pergamon Press from Robert Maxwell, and Ohio financier Carl Linder Jr. Linder had close ties to cocaine smuggler Jack DeVoe, Israeli businessman Meshulam Riklis and Leslie Wexner’s “ business mentor,” Max Fisher.

Linder’s and Steinberg’s positions in Penn Central were largely facilitated by Drexel Burnham Lambert’s “junk bond king” Michael Milken, whose illegal financial activities were deeply connected to the looting of Savings & Loans institutions in the 1980s and the covert intelligence activities of the Reagan-Bush era. Enron, which was also closely tied to Bush, had notably built up its corporation foundation in the mid-1980s thanks to Milken’s junk bonds, with one article claiming that Enron “might not exist today had it not been for Milken’s ability to raise junk-bond financing for them.” Also, during the 1980s, both Enron and Lay were closely affiliated with Milken’s junk bond lobbying group, the Alliance for Capital Access.

As for Executive Jet Aviation, the company’s planes later became frequently used by Larry King, the architect and main operator of the Franklin Scandal child trafficking network that spanned Nebraska and Washington D.C. Its pilots were also later recruited to work for Leslie Wexner’s The Limited after The Limited successfully courted the CIA-linked airline Southern Air Transport to run its cargo out of Rickenbacker airport in Columbus, OH.

Winokur’s subsequent activities also have ties to both the world of Leslie Wexner, as well as the Franklin Scandal. For instance, Winokur managed the investments of businessman David Murdock, including when Murdock was involved with a deal with Wexner to take over the auction house Sotheby’s. In this same role, Winokur was also involved in launching a joint venture between Murdock’s Pacific Holdings Corporation and Peter Kiewit & Sons, creating the Kiewit-Murdock Investment Corporation. Peter Kiewit & Sons was notably one of the main companies that had “poured millions into the Franklin Credit Union,” which was a front for the child trafficking activities of the aforementioned Larry King. As noted in One Nation Under Blackmail, Kiewit’s chairman Walter Scott Jr. was simultaneously on the board of Nebraska’s FirsTier Bank, which provided “cover” for the Franklin Credit Union when it ran overdrafts. However, in the context of this article, it is more important to note that the entire purpose of the Kiewit-Murdock joint venture was to acquire the Continental Group Inc., where Ken Lay had served as its president. As previously mentioned, Lay and Winokur were close friends from their days together at the Pentagon. This further establishes Lay’s ties, via Winokur, to the US military and intelligence networks tied to these many scandals.

In addition, around the time he helped oversee the Kiewit-Murdock joint venture, in 1988, Winokur became chairman of DynCorp, a position he held until 1997. At the time Winokur chaired DynCorp’s board, it was closely linked to CIA covert operations and later widely accused of sex trafficking women and minors in conflict zones, most notably in Bosnia and Afghanistan. Also on DynCorp’s board alongside Winokur was James Woolsey, who served as CIA director under Clinton and who was also a key fixture of the neoconservative Project for a New American Century (PNAC). PNAC, whose signatories included Dick Cheney (VP under Bush) and Donald Rumsfeld (Secretary of Defense under Bush), has since become infamous for its “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” policy paper that asserted that a new “Pearl Harbor” event was needed to catalyze the group’s proposed “transformation” of the American military shortly before 9/11.

While being steeped in these clandestine intelligence-linked networks engaged in financial criminality and child trafficking, Winokur joined Enron’s board in the late 1980s (while also chairing DynCorp) and later became chair of the Finance Committee of Enron’s board. Winokur’s connections to Lay both before and after he joined Enron’s board also helps solidify Lay’s own ties to these clandestine networks.

Two other prominent members of Enron’s board, Frank G. Wisner and Thomas W. Kelly both had significant ties to the Middle East during the onset of the first Gulf War. Wisner, the son of founding CIA and OSS member Frank Wisner, was elected to join Enron’s board in 1997, alongside Skilling and two other Enron executives. At the time, Wisner was Vice Chairman of AIG, and had been the American ambassador to Egypt when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. AIG itself has extensive ties to American intelligence networks and scandals and, incidentally, also has a series of “unusual” connections to the 9/11 attacks, including the largely forgotten 9/11 insider trading scandal.

As for Kelly, who was nominated for a seat on Enron’s board of directors in 1991 prior to his retirement from the military, was a Lieutenant General known for being the Pentagon’s spokesman during the Gulf War. Kelly was further known for acting as the Director of Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff since 1988, serving as “the direct link between its chairman, [then-]General Colin Powell, and the heads of each of the armed services,” in addition to being a top advisor to then-Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney.

Both Powell and Cheney served prominent roles in both Gulf Wars and America’s response to the events of 9/11, serving under both generations of Bush presidencies. Kelly was dispatched to Kuwait on behalf of Enron in 1993 alongside former President George H.W. Bush — only three months removed from office — his wife Barbara, his sons Neil and Marvin Bush. Neil Bush, had played a role in the looting of Silverado Savings & Loan during the aforementioned S&L scandal of the 1980s. Also joining the trip was George H.W. Bush’s former Secretary of State James Baker.

James Baker, who was first hired by Enron as a consultant in 1993, had served as Secretary of State from January 1989 through August 1992. He had also previously served as Secretary of the Treasury from 1985 to 1988 under President Ronald Reagan. Well prior to those appointments, he was a long-time personal friend of George H.W. Bush.

Baker, upon stepping down as Secretary of State, had stayed in the Bush administration as his White House Chief of Staff and Senior Counselor. Baker had led the campaigns of Reagan, Bush and President Gerald Ford — the latter of which nominated him as Under Secretary of Commerce. In the aftermath of 9/11 and the subsequent military action in the Middle East, President George W. Bush appointed Baker as “special presidential envoy” on the issue of Iraqi Debt in 2003.

During the aforementioned Kuwait trip in 1993 alongside the Bushes, Baker met with “several high-ranking Kuwaitis on behalf of Enron,” which was “seeking billions of dollars in contracts to rebuild war-damaged Kuwaiti power plants” as a consequence of the Gulf War. According to reporting from Seymour Hersh for the New Yorker, Enron was looking to win “as much as four billion dollars in Kuwaiti contracts to rebuild three power plants and operate them over a twenty-year period.” Enron’s operations in Kuwait started during the “six-month occupation of the country” in which “Iraqi troops destroyed a power plant known as Shuaiba North.” Enron also held a “twenty-one-per-cent investment in the Kuwait Electricity Company, a consortium whose other holders include Wing-Merrill and nine Kuwaiti firms, including the Kuwait Finance House, which has a twenty-six-per-cent interest.” In a proxy statement made by Enron in 1993, Fmr. General Kelly was to be paid “a thousand dollars per megawatt for each of the first five hundred megawatts of each successfully negotiated commercial-plant project, and five hundred dollars a megawatt after that.” Hersch speculated that Kelly — an Enron consultant like Baker — could stand to earn “four hundred thousand dollars in fees if the Enron consortium wins the bidding for the construction of Shuaiba.”

When asked for comment on the controversial decision to send two men who had been intimately involved with the Gulf War, Enron CEO Ken Lay was quoted as saying:

Is it bad taste for American companies to do business with Kuwait? Did we fight the war so American companies could profit from it? Absolutely not. Having not done that, is there any reason American companies shouldn’t profit from the war in Kuwait?

What’s wrong with hiring former American officials to encourage investments anywhere in the world? Jim Baker has given us some very helpful advice to be more competitive in the world. I ask you, what in the hell is wrong with that?

While Enron’s business dealings in Kuwait are controversial in their own right, the US’ businesses with relationships to the country feature many of the central figures in the events of 9/11 and are worth their own inquiry entirely.

Kuwait, Enron, and the Taliban

Starting in the early 1980s, Kuwait emerged as a critically large holder of US securities, amassing around $7 billion mid-way through 1981. According to reporting from The Arizona Republic, “confidential documents” obtained by the Chicago Tribune “dispute the repeated statements of Treasury and other government officials” that “OPEC’s petroleum billions invested in the United States” are primarily invested in Treasury bills. The bank in charge of holding their equity was none other than Citibank, which was managing “five equity portfolios for Kuwait” marked at “around $3.7 billion” with “another $3.3 billion” in bonds and short-term securities.” In order to “guard the identity of the owner of these equities,” Citibank “list[ed] the Kuwaiti holdings in a secretly coded ‘M’ account” held in their “branches in London and Nassau, Bahamas.” Many of the Kuwaiti equity holdings in the US demonstrated “ownership in 15 US banks,” including “systemically important” banks like Bank of America and Chase Manhattan.

As it relates to the themes of this piece, the article furthers that the Kuwaitis were also “using their surging oil revenues to buy up sizable chunks of America’s most important energy companies” with “more than 22 percent of their two biggest portfolios” centered in “oil and oil service companies.” This immense investment in American energy stalwarts led some analysts to wonder “whether economic leverage by OPEC countries might undermine American institutions.” Citibank documents further revealed that Kuwait also invested “nearly $100 million to buy close to 1.8 million shares” of communications titan AT&T. According to reporting from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Kuwait was Citibank’s single largest investor.

Citibank, which later became Citigroup, was also the single largest creditor in the Enron bankruptcy case, paying $2 billion to settle a class action lawsuit due to its role in “orchestrat[ing] a massive accounting fraud that led to the energy trader’s collapse.” Citigroup subsidiary Salomon Smith Barney was also the largest tenant of WTC Building 7, and featured both Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld on their board immediately prior to their appointments under George W. Bush. Previously, Cheney and Rumsfeld, long-time friends and co-workers, had been part of a “parallel government,” i.e. an unelected shadow government, during the Reagan Bush years, according to a 1987 article in the Miami Herald. In that capacity, the two men had worked together on the controversial Continuity of Government program during the 1980s, which was reportedly enacted, at least in part, during the events of September 11, 2001.

After the destructive fallout from Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the Houston Post reported that “financing Kuwait’s reconstruction could put heavy demands on [the] US bond market.” During this same reconstruction period, as described in One Nation Under Blackmail, the government of Kuwait awarded insurance broker Alexander & Alexander “a $350 million insurance brokerage contract” to “find marine and war-risk insurance for $500 million worth of cargo to be shipped from all over the world as part of an international relief effort.” This relief effort employed the controversial nonprofit AmeriCares, founded by George H.W. Bush’s roommate at Yale, Robert Macauley. Working alongside AmeriCares in this endeavor was the infamous CIA-linked airline Southern Air Transport — which later relocated to Columbus, OH to work closely with Leslie Wexner’s The Limited. That deal had closely involved Wexner’s longtime “fixer” Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein was reportedly first introduced to Wexner in 1985 by an insurance executive named Robert Meister, who had recently become a Vice Chairman of Alexander & Alexander, and later became an executive at Aon Insurance when Aon and Alexander & Alexander formally merged in January 1997. Aon lost 176 employees during the events of 9/11, and was situated right at the impact zone in the North Tower.

Back in October 1981, the Kuwait government entered a $2.5 billion bid to purchase the oil company Santa Fe International Corp of Alhambra California. According to reporting from the Associated Press, the purchase “would be the largest Arab investment in the United States in a publicly traded company.” The terms of the deal read that “48.5 million outstanding shares of common stock of Santa Fe” were to be purchased “at $51 a share by Kuwait Petroleum Corp.,” which was “owned by that country’s government.” In November 1981, the deal encountered a “potential obstacle in the form of Defense Department concerns about its ‘national security aspects’.” Richard Perle, then Assistant Secretary of Defense, rose issues on behalf of the DoD’s “concerns.” These concerns were focused “on the nuclear engineering activities of a Santa Fe subsidiary, C. F. Braun & Co., which Kuwait also would acquire.” While Braun did not work on nuclear weapons, it “performed important design and engineering work on the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons plant at Rocky Flats, CO., and at the Hanford Reservation in Washington.”

That December, the Department of Justice approved the sale of Santa Fe, whose board boasted former President Ford, to Kuwait only after removing the nuclear subsidiary CF Braun. Reports published at the time noted that CF Braun had only recently been purchased by Santa Fe, with Ford joining his former SEC Chairman Rod Hills on the board six months later. Ed Shannon, Santa Fe’s acting President, suggested to “his Kuwaiti friends” that they “buy the whole Santa Fe company, including Braun,” offering double the current stock price.

A House subcommittee, headed by Rep. Ben Rosenthal, brought up the potential national security concerns of the Kuwaitis purchasing “nuclear know-how”:

‘It is theoretically possible,’ offered the staffer in a memo, ‘that Kuwait, if it owned Braun, could sell a reprocessing plant to a country that was interested in producing nuclear weapons.’ Fifty present Braun employees have the ‘Q’ security clearances; 5,000 documents, not classified but considered most useful to nuclear-plant builders, are in the company’s files.

To charges that Kuwait would be buying access to sensitive information, Santa Fe replied: ‘This notion preposterously assumes that Braun’s employees in mass will violate US law and their security clearance oaths and attributes clandestine conduct and bad faith to the Government of Kuwait.’

But is it so preposterous to assume that a sophisticated outfit, which has just engineered a plutonium recovery facility, cannot also design, engineer and build something similar — like a uranium processing plant? Not a secret document need be stolen nor a law broken: as Santa Fe’s proxy statement says, ‘Braun’s services for Government agencies have given its staff significant experience in emerging technological areas.’

In 1986, the SEC investigated the Santa Fe purchase with Kuwait Petroleum as the largest ever insider trading case, awarding $7.8 million in settlements. In June 1989, Halliburton purchased CF Braun from Santa Fe. While not yet under the direction of Dick Cheney, Halliburton was awarded numerous contracts during his tenure as Secretary of Defense, including one to help extinguish oil fires in Kuwait after Hussein’s invasion and a $9 million contract with Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root Services “to study how private military companies could provide support for American soldiers in combat zones.” Santa Fe engineers had previously worked in Kuwait on projects “long before the company was acquired by Kuwait Petroleum.”

Reporting from the LA Times stated that “four Kuwaitis — including a Sheik — s[at] on the company’s six-man board of directors, and the company has served as a training ground for many young Kuwaiti engineers and managers.” However, the article furthers that “US managers, including longtime chief executive Edred L. Shannon Jr., operate the company with minimal interference from Kuwait,” according to former executives. “The company was run really by an entirely American management,” one such former executive stated. “The Kuwaiti involvement was limited to one as owners and as directors but not as management.” The article furthers that CF Braun “counted on Kuwaiti contracts for more than 50% of its business at one point,” according to a former executive. The energy firm Santa Fe was “formed in 1953 by a group of former Unocal employees, including Shannon.”

Unocal, according to Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars, had numerous connections to the intelligence apparatus of the US, with one of its top executives, Marty Miller, reportedly providing information to the CIA’s Houston office. Notably, petrodollar architect Henry Kissinger was also a consultant to Unocal. In 1996, Unocal opened an office in Kandahar, Afghanistan during the Taliban’s efforts to take over the country. Unocal “rented a house in central Kandahar directly across the street from one of [Osama] bin Laden’s new compounds.” In 1997, Robert Oakley, a former US Ambassador to Pakistan and then-Unocal board member, advised Miller to “reach the Taliban by working through Pakistan’s government.” Coll furthers:

He also suggested that Unocal hire Thomas Gouttiere, an Afghan specialist at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, to develop a job training program in Kandahar that would teach Pashtuns the technical skills needed to build a pipeline…Unocal agreed to pay $900,000 via the University of Nebraska to set up a Unocal training facility on a fifty-six acre site in Kandahar, not far from bin Laden’s compounds…Gouttiere traveled in and out of Afghanistan and met with Taliban leaders…In December 1997 Gouttiere worked with Miller to arrange for another Taliban delegation to visit the United States.

According to reporting from The New York Observer, Unocal “had been courting the Taliban to build a massive pipeline system across Afghanistan” and “promised the Taliban that it could expect up to $100 million in transit fees from the proposed $4.5 billion project.” The article furthered that whistleblower Julie Sirrs claimed that anti-Taliban leader Ahmad Shah Massoud “told [her] he had proof that Unocal had provided money that helped the Taliban take Kabul.” Richard Labeviere’s Dollars For Terror similarly claims that “the CIA and Unocal’s security forces ha[d] provided military weapons and instructors to several Taliban militia.”

Members of the Taliban came to Texas in 1997 to discuss “an international energy company that wants to construct a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to Pakistan.” This company was Unocal, whose board featured John W. Creighton, before he became its Chair in 2001. Creighton later took over as CEO of UAL/United Airlines on October 29, 2001, in an unexpected move only weeks after United Airlines flights 93 and 175 were hijacked during the events of 9/11.

Zalmay Khalilzad, a Unocal consultant and founding signatory of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), was also a key figure in the CIA-backed Operation Cyclone which created, armed and financed Afghanistan’s Mujahideen forces, including individuals who would go on to create both Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Khalilzad’s ties to the Taliban continued well after they took power and he was also a key fixture in efforts by the Clinton administration and Unocal in negotiating a $1.9 billion pipeline deal with the Taliban. The project was backed by both the US government and the US intelligence community in part because the pipeline would “help free the new nations of Central Asia from dependence on Russia, avoid alternate routes across Iran and bring needed energy to Pakistan and India.” Khalilzad had also “conducted risk analysis for CentGas and worked for RAND Corporation and the Bush administration.” Enron had conducted the “feasibility study for the CentGas project” and the pipeline, once completed, was expected to benefit their embattled Dabhol project in India. After the invasion of Afghanistan, the Bush administration installed Hamid Karzai as the country’s leader, Karzai — in addition to being closely connected to CIA drug trafficking networks via his brother — had notably been a Unocal consultant prior to the US invasion.

The attempt and intent to build out this pipeline was echoed by Thomas Barnett’s general thesis of connectivity in his book, The Pentagon’s New Map:

Since Iraq had simply been passed over by the Information Revolution, it completely lacked a cell phone infrastructure and its wireline industry was antiquated. So when Saddam’s statues were falling all over Iraq, ordinary citizens had no other way to reach loved ones overseas than to beg the international media pool for calls on their satellite telephones. Once the fighting stopped, Kuwaiti entrepreneurs rushed in armed with portable cell phone towers and a plan to provide the country with complete cell phone coverage within six months. Based on cell phone penetration rates in other Middle Eastern countries, experts are predicting an Iraqi subscriber base of at least six million out of a total population of twenty million.

What these examples of disconnectedness being overcome say is that globalization’s frontiers are far from fixed. They also say that peace and stability are essential for such connectivity to flow from the Core to the Gap. That means the fundamental measure of effectiveness for any US military intervention inside the Gap must be: Did we end up improving local security sufficiently to trigger an influx of global connectivity? Not whether we created an instant democracy or a loyal military ally—or even defeated an enemy in record time. Increasingly, our military interventions will be judged by the connectivity they leave behind, not the smoking holes. [emphasis added]

Barnett’s war game partners had understood the directive from their government counterparts: in order to break free of the iron lung that was the petrodollar system, a new type of connectivity had to be made. Aspects of this exact issue were the subject of many Barnett-led war games with Cantor Fitzgerald and national security insiders from 1996 through 2001. If the public and private partnerships chosen by this nexus were to succeed in dominating the incoming digital asset and AI age, pipelines had to be replaced with fiber optic lines, oil refineries with data centers, and massive stockpiles of oil with nuclear capacity. Key to this transition was the domestic build out of the broadband network, financed in large part due to accounting fraud at Enron.

In order to successfully pull off this heist of the world economy and its energy markets, careful construction and a subsequent controlled demolition had to be perfectly executed — and perfectly covered up.

Securacom, Enron, and Controlled Demolition

During the aforementioned trip to Kuwait in 1993 that had been tied to Enron and included members of the Bush family, Marvin Bush joined the board of a company called Securacom (later Stratesec) which was owned by the KuwAm Corporation. The Bush family had long-standing connections to the Kuwaiti royals, first forged by George H.W. Bush prior to his stint as CIA director via his CIA-linked oil company Zapata well before he was even Ford’s CIA director. Securacom, incidentally, had numerous connections to World Trade Center security prior to and during the 9/11 attacks.

Securacom was founded as Burns & Roe Securacom in 1987 by an assistant to Nelson Rockefeller named Sebastian Cassetta. Rockefeller had been Ford’s Vice President, though George H.W. Bush had also been considered for the job. A few years later, in 1991, Securacom was hired by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which still owned the WTC complex at this point, to provide a review of the security risks at that complex. As noted by Kevin Ryan in his book Another Nineteen, Securacom’s report had warned that “international activities” arising from “Mideast events” could soon target the World Trade Center. KuwAm Corporation took over ownership of Securacom the following year, in 1992.

Securacom continued to manage WTC security up through the 9/11 attacks, a responsibility they shared with other contractors including Kroll Inc., which had been referred to as the “CIA of Wall Street” by at least one foreign intelligence agency. At the time, Kroll was a subsidiary of the American intelligence-linked insurance giant AIG. According to journalist Margie Burns:

[Securacom/Stratesec] had an ongoing contract to handle security at the World Trade Center ‘up to the day the buildings fell down.’ Yet instead of being investigated, the company and companies involved with it have benefited from legislation pushed by the Bush White House and rubber-stamped by Congressional Republicans. Stratesec, its backer KuwAm, and their corporate officers stand to benefit from limitations on liability and national-security protections from investigation provided in bills since 9/11.

In addition to the WTC, Securacom also contracted with “the US Army, US Navy, US Air force, and the Department of Justice,’ in projects that ‘often require state-of-the-art security solutions for classified or high-risk government sites.’” More interesting in the context of 9/11 is that Securacom’s second biggest client, after the WTC, was the Metropolitan Washington Airport Authority, which oversees Dulles airport where one of the hijacked 9/11 flights had taken off. There, it provided “electronic security” and “maintained the airfield access system, the closed circuit television system and electronic badging.” Securacom also counted United Airlines as a client, which was the airline of the other flights hijacked on 9/11, though the company later claimed that this had been “a single-site contract, in Indianapolis.”

Nevertheless, the overlap of Securacom’s security contracts with the major places/companies involved in the attacks is considerable. It is worth noting here that, at the time of the attacks, Marvin Bush was no longer on Securacom’s board, having left a few months before 9/11. However, Bush’s investment firm still held significant stock in “other contractors at the Dulles and Reagan airports.”

In addition, another Securacom client at the time included Los Alamos National Laboratory, which was notably an early target of Robert Maxwell’s espionage efforts related to the PROMIS software scandal. Los Alamos, shortly after 9/11, publicly announced it possessed “Super-Thermitic matches” that it advertised as able to trigger “explosives for the mining, demolition, and defense industries.” However, it is unclear how long before the 2003 announcement Los Alamos had developed the technology, given that its experiments with thermitic materials date back to 1968. The matches and the related development of thermitic materials that had been developed by US National Laboratories, like Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, have long been of interest to those investigating the 9/11 attacks, given that at least one study revealed that thermitic material was found in larger amounts in the dust that covered ground zero and the surrounding areas. As a consequence, one common theory holds that thermitic materials had been used to provoke the rapid “free-fall” collapse of the twin towers.

While Marvin Bush had left the company’s board shortly before the attacks, other Securacom directors that worked alongside Bush, including one of his cousins, are worth examining in greater detail. For instance, according to author Kevin Ryan, Securacom director James Abrahamson was the business partner of a Pakistani businessman, Mansoor Jiaz, who claimed on many occasions that he was able to contact Osama bin Laden. Furthermore, many Securacom employees had been hired from a subsidiary of the Carlyle Group. The Carlyle Group, sometimes referred to as “the CIA of the business world,” was partially funded by the Bin Laden family and also closely linked to the Bush family. A recent Unlimited Hangout article noted that the Bush administration’s apparent role in securing Jeffrey Epstein’s sweetheart deal in 2007 may have been influenced by the Carlyle Group and its ties to the takeover attempt of several US ports by DP World — an Emirati conglomerate led by Epstein associate Sultan bin Sulayem.

On the mornings of September 10 and 11, 2001, the Carlyle Group was holding its annual conference in D.C., which was attended by figures like George H.W. Bush, James Baker (then working for both Carlyle and Enron), and Frank Carlucci — the former CIA deputy director who was then Carlyle’s chairman. Also joining them was Shafik bin Laden, a relative of Osama bin Laden’s whose family firm, the Bin Laden Group, were major investors in Carlyle funds.

Returning to Securacom, it is worth examining in greater detail another Securacom director aside from Marvin Bush — a man named Wirt Walker. Walker was, incidentally, Marvin’s relative. He was also the son of a CIA official and had begun his career at the aforementioned investment firm Glore Forgan, which was tied to the CIA and its predecessor, the OSS. Not long after, as noted in Kevin Ryan’s book Another Nineteen, “Walker went from being an investment broker to running an assortment of small companies that tended to go bankrupt. Yet, somehow, he always had funding.” Securacom was no exception, as it went bankrupt shortly after 9/11 in 2003. Walker was among those sued by Securacom shareholders after the bankruptcy.

As noted in James Corbett’s book Reportage and other sources, Walker and his wife purchased 56,000 shares in Securacom/Stratesec on September 6, 2001, which the SEC later referred to the FBI for criminal investigation into potential 9/11 insider trading. The stock Walker had purchased doubled in value “in the one trading day between September 11^th and when the stock market reopened in September 17^th.” The FBI never interviewed either Walker and both were quickly cleared of any wrongdoing without any actual investigation taking place.

In 1982, Walker was named managing director of Securacom’s parent company, KuwAm Corporation, due to his close relationship with Mish’al Yusuf Saud Al-Sabah, who was well connected to the Kuwaiti royal family and had known Walker since his teenage years. Kevin Ryan’s Another Nineteen details extensively how KuwAm Corporation was tied to networks involving the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a shadowy CIA-linked bank tied to terrorism, drug and sex trafficking, as well as figures in the George H.W. Bush-tied intelligence networks, including Ted Shackley, sometimes referred to as the CIA’s “blonde ghost.” BCCI, much like Enron, attempted to hide its immense debt in off-shore vehicles and other means of accounting fraud before eventually succumbing to regulatory seizure in 1991.

According to reporting from the Online Journal, the unexpected collapse of WTC Tower 7, which contained offices of the building’s largest tenet Citibank, also housed the FBI, the Department of Defense, the US Secret Service, and the SEC and the IRS — the latter two having lost records in the attacks relating to corporate tax fraud, including Enron’s. Citibank occupied 39 floors of the 47 floor building, and the firm reported that “some of its operations were obliterated when the building imploded.” Citibank also stated that “back-up tapes of corporate emails from September 1998 through December 2000 were stored at the building and destroyed in the attack.”

Reports from New York Lawyer the week after Tower 7’s demolition included quotes from a New York attorney that claimed “ongoing investigations at the New York SEC will be dramatically affected because so much of their work is paper-intensive.” He emphasized that “this is a disaster for these cases.” The SEC’s investigation into Enron was publicly announced by the firm on October 22, 2001, noting previous inquiry had occurred in the weeks prior. Reporting from The Street claimed that “maybe no financial institution lost more critical documents than the Securities and Exchange Commission,” and that “it suffered setbacks in a number of long-running securities investigations.” A securities lawyer in New York was quoted as saying that, “regardless of what the regulators say, they lost a ton of files,” and that “it was a wholesale loss of documents.”

A few months before Enron collapsed, in April 2001, Richard Grubman of Highfields Capital Management in Boston “asked to see Enron’s balance sheet” during an earnings call with CEO Jeff Skilling but was told it “would not be available until its inclusion in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing later this month.” After being denied, Grubman bluntly stated “You’re the only financial institution that can’t come up with balance sheet or cash flow statement after earnings.” In response, Skilling replied “Well, thank you very much, we appreciate that. Asshole.” Highfields Capital were one of the few firms that had become publicly and positionally skeptical of Enron’s financial situation. When Enron’s stock began its descent shortly after the vulgarity display from Skilling, it was set to make huge gains. Notably, Highfields Capital helped manage a large portion of Harvard’s endowment of which Mayo Shattuck’s father — Mayo Shattuck II, a Vice President at State Street — helped manage before his death in 1975. The aforementioned Enron board member Herb “Pug” Winokur was also a Director of the Harvard Management Company, which helps oversee the university’s immense endowment, while also serving on the board of the Harvard Corporation, the executive governing body of Harvard University. After Enron’s collapse, Winokur was accused of giving “inside knowledge on Enron stock” that allowed Harvard to profit off of Enron’s collapse. Winokur stepped down from the board of the Harvard Corporation in April 2002, only to be replaced the same week by former US Treasury Secretary and Citigroup CEO Robert Rubin.

According to The Smartest Guys In The Room, an award-winning profile on Enron, one of the firm’s “key advantages over its competitors was information.” The energy business’ “physical assets provided information” and they “simply had more of it than its competitors.” The authors also claimed Enron “employed former CIA agents who could find out anything about anyone.” Other reports from Newsweek echoed this claim, stating that “former CIA and FBI agents were hired to enforce security.” Said former intelligence officers would use “‘sniffer’ programs” to “pounce on anyone e-mailing a potential competitor” and “were known to barge into offices and confiscate computers.”

In addition, Enron had also signed a four-year agreement in May 1998 to provide energy and services to Lockheed Martin Missiles & Space, in which their press release notes that “this agreement expands an existing relationship between Lockheed Martin and Enron.” A year later, in 1999, Lockheed’s top executive at the time, Norm Augustine, worked closely with Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard, a long-time CIA operative in the banking sector who was then serving as CIA director George Tenet’s “counselor,” to create In-Q-tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm that later proved pivotal in privatizing major aspects of the surveillance state. Krongard, along with his protégé Mayo Shattuck, are also major suspects in the 9/11 insider trading scandal and a later focus of this piece.

A key factor in the collapse of Enron was its novel broadband business, Enron Broadband Services. On March 9, 2001, Enron Broadband Services announced they were terminating a video streaming deal with Blockbuster, which had previously been a crown jewel in both their public perception of success and their novel mark-to-market accounting scheme. For example, at the onset of their deal, Enron “booked the present value of decades of expected cash flow” at signing, despite winding down the 20-year deal after only 8 months. The Enron stock hit an all time high of $90.75 only a few weeks after the partnership’s announcement in August 2000. By the time the deal’s cancellation was announced, the stock fell below $70 — well on its way to its collapse to zero. Interestingly, the previously mentioned Marvin Bush had ties to the emerging Blockbuster in its infancy, including owning a number of Blockbuster Video franchises, with his father reportedly going to the Houston store “almost every day.”

Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, joined Enron during an announcement in January 2000, which helped make the “energy company’s share price soar.” According to reporting from NBC, McNealy’s “appearance was designed to help convince the analysts that Enron had partnered with tech sector heavyweights,” and only occurred after Enron “agreed to buy several thousand servers” from SUN, costing “untold millions.” Many of these “18,000 Netra™ carrier-grade and Enterprise™ servers” were installed in Enron’s data center in Nevada, which was sold to today’s data center empire Switch during Enron’s bankruptcy. McNealy was also a very close, personal friend of the aforementioned Mayo Shattuck.

According to reporting from Data Center Dynamics, “[Switch CEO] Rob Roy turned up to the auction for the Enron data center and put in a low bid,” only to be revealed later that he “was the only person to bid.” Roy “retracted the offer and resubmitted one that was even lower.” Ultimately, “a facility that cost millions and took years to build was sold for just $930,000.” In late 2022, Switch was sold to DigitalBridge for $11 billion. Digital Bridge was formerly known as Colony Capital, founded by President Trump’s longtime friend and first campaign advisor Tom Barrack, who today is also known for his intimate relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and his controversial business and political ties to the Middle East. DigitalBridge would later agree to be purchased by Softbank in 2025 — one of the primary backers of OpenAI’s Stargate.

Enron Broadband Services had also invested in the infamous Digital Entertainment Network (DEN), which was co-founded by fellow Epstein-affiliate Brock Pierce who would go on to found the stablecoin issuer Tether — a crucial business partner of Howard Lutnick’s Cantor Fitzgerald and current financial weapon of the US state. The other two co-founders of DEN, Marc Collins-Rector and Chad Shackley, had previously founded Concentric Networks, which in 1997 had partnered with BNY Mellon and the US Treasury to work on “secure electronic commerce,” with Concentric Networks providing BNY Mellon with a virtual private network, or VPN.

There is perhaps an important parallel between today’s public equity and debt-driven data center build out with the 2001 Enron collapse. Despite the financial implosion, crucial infrastructure for the coming digital economy and internet-driven inter-connectivity was left behind and available for pennies on the dollar. Enron played a critical role in financing the expanding fiber optic lines needed for a broadband internet, which domestically had grown to nearly 15,000 miles of cable by 1999. Reporting from Forbes shows that in June 2000, Enron “sold $100 million worth” of “‘dark fiber’ or fiber-optic cables without the electronic gear necessary to transmit digitized information” to a partnership run by Enron CFO Andrew Fastow called LJM2. In December of that year, LJM2 “sold $40 million of the dark fiber” to “industry participants” and the “remainder to another Enron-related partnership for $113 million in December.”

While surely the use of the fraudulent LJM2 to hide the debt obligations of the sales should raise eyebrows, the reality is that the fiber laid by Enron is still in use today — not to mention the servers purchased by Switch. They have since played a large role in the expansion of high-speed internet within the United States. If a similar debt bubble is to pop with the data center build out, the compute and chips purchased will surely remain within the country, and almost certainly will be used by whoever comes in to pick up the asset pieces. Of course, this also stands to be true regarding the immense energy and power capacity rapidly being built out to power these data centers.

The developer of OpenAI’s Stargate Argentina, Emiliano Kargieman, has openly spoken to the fact that this “creative destruction” methodology occurs alongside every industrial bubble of consequence. Kargieman, whose other company, Satellogic, is deeply tied to Howard Lutnick and Cantor Fitzgerald as well as Tether, has argued that the infrastructure build-out for new technologies, financed by debt bubbles, still remains after the bubbles pop and that “someone ends up using it.” More specifically, Kargeiman stated that:

Once Stargate Argentina is up and running, who is likely to benefit most of from this massive Patagonian data center? Per Kargieman, it may not be his main partner in Argentina — OpenAI. In his recent interview with La Nación, Kargieman noted that OpenAI’s Sam Altman has acknowledged to him (and also publicly) what many investors have been warning more feverishly in recent months, that there is an AI market “bubble.” Kargieman says that such a bubble existing is “normal,” adding that “all the major industrial revolutions were accompanied by bubbles.” In the case of those who invested in factories or other infrastructure in past bubbles linked to past industrial revolutions, Kargieman stated that “whoever invested in that building goes bankrupt, but someone ends up using the building.” Thus, he sees it as irrelevant whether Stargate Argentina is ever used by OpenAI or not and, in his words, seems to imply that OpenAI itself may disappear after an inevitable market correction.

From Kargieman’s point of view, it doesn’t matter “whether it is OpenAI or not [using Stargate Argentina’s projected data center], what matters is the long-term demand of the sector.” In response to that statement, his interviewer said: “So, if OpenAI does poorly, there will be others looking to use this type of infrastructure.” Kargieman responded in the affirmative and stated that “the infrastructure is going to be used for something regardless of whether it is OpenAI or not.”

Whenever there is a financing bubble, whether during the Dot Com bubble in the late 1990s or the AI build out today, there lies a crucial and under-explored participant — the underwriter. In the case of Big Tech, an industry incubated by the US national security state from their origins through the Dot Com bubble and into modern AI boom, arguably their most important underwriter was the CIA-linked bank Alexander Brown & Sons, or Alex. Brown & Sons.

Mayo Shattuck: CIA-adjacent Shadow Banker

Alex. Brown & Sons traces its beginnings back to the first investment banking firm, which took on that name after Alexander Brown was joined by his sons at the firm in 1810. The firm would later give rise to Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., the Bush family-linked bank deeply tied to US intelligence as well as the Yale secret society Skull & Bones. It is also controversial for having partially financed the rise of Adolph Hitler and also for later spawning Drexel Burnham Lambert, the aforementioned scandal-ridden bank that boasted ties to Bush family intelligence networks involved in the S&L looting scandal, as well as other related financial scandals, of the 1980s.

Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard, by his own admission, was first recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the late 1950s, while a student at Princeton. Roughly a decade later, in 1969, he joined the bank Alex. Brown & Sons. In the early 1990s, Krongard became the bank’s executive director and the chairman of its board. The entirety of his time at the bank, Krongard was actively on the CIA’s payroll, as noted by an incisive profile on Krongard and Alex. Brown & Sons penned by Javier Ferrandis for Kickback News. After leaving Alex Brown, Krongard would notably become “counselor” to then-CIA director George Tenet, later rising to serve as Executive Director of the agency. The role of “counselor” to the director had previously not existed at the CIA, with Tenet having made it just for Krongard.

Prior to ascending to the presidency at the bank, Krongard was joined by Mayo Shattuck III, who was hired in 1985. Shortly after Shattuck was hired, he and Krongard worked closely together on underwriting the IPOs of the tech companies Microsoft, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems in 1986. Oracle’s CIA-linked origins and long-term connection with the agency is now a matter of record. Thus, Krongard’s role in underwriting their IPO while also being on the CIA’s payroll further compounds the entanglement of the company with US intelligence.

In addition, Sun Microsystems, which Oracle later acquired, was a long-time government and intelligence contractor that similarly was founded thanks to the aegis of American military and intelligence networks. The company was founded when a “clutch of Stanford University computer scientists working a decade ago under DARPA contracts acted on the agency’s encouragement to set up private companies.” “The developments we did on DARPA budgets were things other companies were ignoring,” stated Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of the computer firm. He added that, “without DARPA, it might never have happened this way.” Recent reporting has also detailed that Sun had helped Steve Job’s company NeXT boost production at the behest of US intelligence in the 1980s.

In the case of Microsoft, that company was, from the mid-1990s on, closely entangled with the Epstein-Maxwell network, including Ghislaine Maxwell’s twin sisters, one of whom previously worked with their father Robert Maxwell in running an intelligence front company that played a key role in the PROMIS software scandal.

A year after these IPOs, Krongard and Shattuck would also, via Alex. Brown & Sons, provide the seed money for the Carlyle Group, the private equity giant. As noted earlier in this piece, Carlyle has long-standing and significant CIA connections and it later came under scrutiny in the aftermath of 9/11 for its significant ties to both the Bush and Bin Laden families, as well as its influence over the George W. Bush administration.

Together, both Mayo Shattuck and Alvin Krongard ended up underwriting the majority of today’s Big Tech giants during the 1980s and 1990s at Alex. Brown & Sons. They did this alongside another small investment bank/brokerage house, Hambrecht & Quist. Hambrecht & Quist also boasted national security connections at the time.

As noted by Kickback News:

The Vice-President of Hambrecht & Quist between 1981 and 1986 was William Perry who joined Hambrecht & Quist after serving as Director of the Department of Defense D.A.R.P.A. agency. He was appointed by President Reagan in 1983 to serve on the President’s Commission on Strategic Forces. He served as US Deputy Secretary and Secretary of Defense during the Clinton administration between 1993 and 1997. After leaving public office Perry would join Hambrecht & Quist (HQ) again as a member of the Board of Directors.

Together, these two small firms underwrote, sometimes together and sometimes separately, the IPOs of such companies as: Amazon, Nvidia, Netscape (Marc Andresseen’s firm), Adobe, Apple, AOL, Qualcomm and those listed above (Microsoft, Sun and Oracle). One of the other reasons for Alex. Brown & Sons’ success in being selected as an underwriter for some of these IPOs was at least partially due to the close friendship between Mayo Shattuck and Scott McNealy, the long-time chairman of Sun Microsystems. The pair also underwrote key IPOs for Israel’s tech industry, which resulted in Shattuck and Krongard conducting meetings with former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who in turn was closely tied to the Maxwell family and allegedly first introduced Jeffrey Epstein to Ehud Barak.

Shortly after underwriting the IPO of Amazon with Hambrecht & Quist, Alex. Brown & Sons was purchased by Bankers Trust (which was notably Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ previous employer). Bankers Trust, like Alex Brown, had significant intelligence connections and had previously been involved in the covert US seizure of the massive World War II gold stash of the Japanese empire — often referred to as Yamashita’s Gold, or the Golden Lily treasure — from Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos after his ouster in 1986.

Marcos had been closely linked to the CIA and had received much of the seized gold from US networks prior to 1986. The US intelligence apparatus had used the gold stash both prior to and after Marcos’ ouster to finance a slew of off-the-books covert operations, including but not limited to many of the operations under the umbrella of the Iran-Contra scandal. Some of Yamashita’s Gold was reportedly laundered through Barrick Gold, which involved Iran-Contra figures like Adnan Khashoggi as well as Canadian oligarch Edgar Bronfman. Mayo Shattuck has been alleged to have served as a financial advisor to both Bronfman and Khashoggi in matters pertaining to Barrick Gold.

The 1997 merger between Alex. Brown & Sons and Bankers Trust was rushed through and took many executives at Alex. Brown by surprise, as it appeared to have been arranged at the last minute. However, Shattuck was not surprised by the merger, as he had helped to engineer it. The apparent reason for the rapid pace of the merger was that Bankers Trust was extremely exposed to Russian Federation securities and loans, which had reportedly been facilitated by Enron in 1993 and were considered a ticking time bomb by the top management of both Bankers Trust and Alex. Brown & Sons. Bankers Trust had also been on the receiving end of several lawsuits alleging that it had committed financial crimes in marketing risky derivatives to clients prior to the merger. By ramming the merger through, certain executives at Alex. Brown were likely unable to fully investigate the state of Bankers Trust’s riskier assets and practices, including those which had spawned those lawsuits.

Bankers Trust’s Russian securities caused major financial trouble for the firm when Russia experienced a sizable financial crisis in 1998, a crisis which was arguably triggered by the same US policy that had also caused a financial crisis in Asia that same year. Krongard was, fortuitously for him, recruited to formally join the CIA in January 1998, right before the Russian downturn that so negatively impacted Bankers Trust. Krongard had been recruited to serve in a newly created role as “counselor” to CIA Director George Tenet. Upon joining the CIA, Krongard gave an interview claiming to have already “known [Tenet] for centuries” and that they had long shared lunch dates at CIA headquarters in Langley, VA or in Washington prior to Krongard’s move. While working as Tenet’s “counselor”, Krongard was intimately involved in creating the CIA’s venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, with Lockheed Martin’s Norm Augustine. A few years later, in March 2001, Krongard was named as the CIA’s Executive Director, with reports listing him as having been a “longtime consultant to the agency.”

While Krongard left at just the right time in 1998, Mayo Shattuck stayed on at Bankers Trust/Alex. Brown and became Vice Chairman of Bankers Trust. Due to its exposure to risky derivative schemes and Russian securities, Bankers Trust was nearing collapse until it was fortuitously announced that Deutsche Bank planned to acquire the flailing bank, thereby rescuing it. While the press tried to frame it as a “win-win” for both sides, Bankers Trust had posted a quarterly loss of $488 million in October 1998, less than a month before Deutsche Bank announced the agreement to purchase Bankers Trust at a “premium” price of $10 billion. Deutsche Bank is believed to have lost several billions by acquiring Bankers Trust at this time, leading some analysts to paint the merger as a bailout of sorts. Notably, Deutsche Bank, like Bankers Trust, had also previously been tied to the clandestine movement of Yamashita’s Gold through the global financial system for the benefit of US intelligence covert operations.

Alex. Brown and 9/11 Insider Trading

After the merger between Bankers Trust and Deutsche Bank, Mayo Shattuck subsequently became chairman of the board and the head of the newly created Deutsche ABS (ABS being Alex. Brown & Sons). He would serve in that position until he resigned in the days surrounding the attacks of September 11^th, 2001 on the World Trade Center (WTC).

Prior the September 11^th attacks, a large volume of short sales and “put” options were made that targeted the domestic airlines whose planes were reportedly used in the attacks. A few weeks after the attacks, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on the case and stated the following:

Investors have yet to collect more than $2.5 million in profits they made trading options in the stock of United Airlines before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to a source familiar with the trades and market data.

The uncollected money raises suspicions that the investors – whose identities and nationalities have not been made public – had advance knowledge of the strikes.

“Usually, if someone has a windfall like that, you take the money and run,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Whoever did this thought the exchange would not be closed for four days”… “This smells real bad.”

The markets were closed for four days after the attack, giving investigators time to notice the anomalous trades.

Securities regulators and law-enforcement agents throughout the United States and Europe are investigating unusual patterns in short sales and the purchase of “put” options, both of which are financial-market bets that the price of a given stock will fall. Authorities here and abroad have not publicly disclosed any conclusions they have reached and refuse to discuss the case.

Later on, the report noted that many of these trades targeting United Airlines’ stock had been made by the Mayo Shattuck-led “Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown, the American investment banking arm of German giant Deutsche Bank.” Notably, the unusual trades had also been identified by Germany’s Central Bank, with its then-president Ernst Welteke stating that a study from the bank had found that “there were activities on international financial markets that must have been carried out with the necessary expert knowledge” not only on airline stocks, but also on insurance companies and commodities like gold and oil.

The German financial journalist Lars Schall, well known for his investigations into 9/11 insider trading, once interviewed financial journalist Max Keiser, who is currently perhaps better known for his long-term Bitcoin evangelism. Keiser, who had previously worked at Alex. Brown & Sons under Krongard and Shattuck, told Schall that he “had spoken with many brokers in the towers of the World Trade Center around that time” and that “I heard firsthand about the airline put trade from brokers at Cantor Fitzgerald days before.”

Cantor Fitzgerald is the financial services firm long helmed by Howard Lutnick, the current Commerce Secretary under Trump. Cantor’s relevant connections to suspect financial transactions prior to the 9/11 attacks, as well as to alleged suspicious occurrences at Deutsche Bank/Alex. Brown’s WTC location immediately prior to the attacks, are discussed in the next section of this article.

Returning to Keiser, he had also told Schall the following about these put options and related trades:

There are many aspects concerning these option purchases that have not been disclosed yet. I also worked at Alex Brown & Sons (ABS). Deutsche Bank bought Alex Brown & Sons in 1999. When the attacks occurred, ABS was owned by Deutsche Bank. An important person at ABS was Buzzy Krongard. I have met him several times at the offices in Baltimore. Krongard had transferred to become executive director at the CIA. The option purchases, in which ABS was involved, occurred in the offices of ABS in Baltimore. The noise which occurred between Baltimore, New York City and Langley was interesting, as you can imagine, to say the least.

Krongard’s connections to both the CIA and Alex Brown were also discussed by the UK’s The Independent in connection with 9/11 insider trading. That report stated the following:

Further details of the futures trades that netted such huge gains in the wake of the hijackings have been disclosed. To the embarrassment of investigators, it has also emerged that the firm used to buy many of the “put” options – where a trader, in effect, bets on a share price fall – on United Airlines stock was headed until 1998 by “Buzzy” Krongard, now executive director of the CIA.

Until 1997, Mr Krongard was chairman of Alex Brown Inc, America’s oldest investment banking firm. Alex Brown was acquired by Bankers Trust, which in turn was bought by Deutsche Bank. His last post before resigning to take his senior role in the CIA was to head Bankers Trust – Alex Brown’s private client business, dealing with the accounts and investments of wealthy customers around the world.

There is no suggestion that Mr Krongard had advance knowledge of the attacks.

Krongard’s top role at the CIA before and during 9/11 as well as the apparent insider trading conducted by his former bank, which he largely ran while also on the CIA’s payroll, may explain why US authorities (as noted above) “have not publicly disclosed any conclusions they have reached and refuse to discuss the case.”

Notably, Krongard’s long-time deputy, Mayo Shattuck, was the person actually running the bank in question at the time those trades were made. In other words, if Krongard had passed “insider knowledge” of the attacks from the CIA to individuals at Alex Brown, it likely would have first passed through Krongard’s closest confidante who was still at the bank, Mayo Shattuck.

Shattuck has been widely reported to have resigned his post at Deutsche Bank/Alex. Brown on September 12^th, 2001, a day after the attacks. However, mainstream coverage of his resignation was first reported on September 14^th, 2001, when trading was still closed in the aftermath of attacks and it became clear that investigators had noticed trading anomalies in connection with those attacks. As noted above, the San Francisco Chronicle had reported that “whoever did this [i.e. the options trading and put options] thought the exchange would not be closed for four days” and when the exchange was closed for four days and those trades were noticed, they had decided to not claim the money. Lars Schall also noted that, when Shattuck resigned, he was walking away from an extremely lucrative three-year contract with Deutsche Bank/Alex. Brown, which Schall described as “strange.” However, other reports, discussed later in this investigation, state that Shattuck’s decision to leave the bank had been made shortly before the attacks, not long before the questionable trades took place.

Cantor and the “Cannibal”

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a series of suspicious transactions were rapidly conducted from within the World Trade Center (WTC) just prior to the attacks. This fact was reported by Reuters after the attacks. That article opened as follows:

German computer experts are working round the clock to unlock the truth behind an unexplained surge in financial transactions made just before two hijacked planes crashed into New York’s World Trade Center on September 11.

Were criminals responsible for the sharp rise in credit card transactions that moved through some computer systems at the WTC shortly before the planes hit the twin towers?

Or was it coincidence that unusually large sums of money, perhaps more than $100 million, were rushed through the computers as the disaster unfolded?

In that article, the director of the German data-recovery firm Convar was quoted as saying:

The suspicion is that inside information about the attack was used to send financial transaction commands and authorizations in the belief that amid all the chaos the criminals would have, at the very least, a good head start. [. . .] Of course it is also possible that there were perfectly legitimate reasons for the unusual rise in business volume. [. . .] It could turn out that Americans went on an absolute shopping binge on that Tuesday morning. But at this point there are many transactions that cannot be accounted for.

[. . .] Not only the volume but the size of the transactions was far higher than usual for a day like that. There is a suspicion that these were possibly planned to take advantage of the chaos.

In Michael Ruppert’s book Crossing the Rubicon, Ruppert recounts “partially confirm[ing]” aspects of this Reuters article after interviewing a Deutsche Bank employee who had survived the attacks by fleeing the WTC shortly after they began. Ruppert wrote that, according to this employee, “the entire Deutsche Bank computer system had been take over by something external that no one in the office recognized and every file was downloaded at lightning speed to an unknown location.”

What could that external software have been? Past 9/11 investigations have posited that it could have been the e-link developed by Silverstream software, which was used to link Marsh & McLennan to the aforementioned AIG. As brought to light by 9/11 whistle blower Richard Grove, this “e-link” was meant to be “used to electronically connect Marsh to its major business partners via internet portals, for the purpose of creating ‘paperless transactions’ and expediting revenue and renewal cycles.” Prior to this, Silverstream had also built electronic trading platforms for Alex Brown and Bankers Trust, which later merged, as well as the bank which would later acquire them both — Deutsche Bank.

While Silverstream may well have been the external software attested to in the testimony of the Deustche Bank employee, there is also another possibility. A few months before the attacks, in July 2001, the Mayo Shattuck-led Deutsche Bank entered into a “business partner relationship” with Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street firm helmed by Howard Lutnick. As part of that “business partner relationship,” Deutsche Bank agreed to “channel its electronic market-making engines and liquidity” using Cantor’s “electronic trading platform,” eSpeed. The rapid transactions observed in Deutsche Bank’s system during 9/11 could have been due to eSpeed’s relatively recent presence on its server.

While this is certainly speculative, it is worth noting that among the handful of surviving Cantor employees were a small team of senior eSpeed executives. According to one of those executives, Joseph Noviello, they had not been in their offices at the time of the attacks because their planned fishing excursion for that morning was canceled at 8 a.m. on the morning of the events due to bad weather. This is despite videos and photographs from 9/11 showing a mostly cloudless sky in the area that day. Noviello later said that, after learning of the attacks, he and this group of executives immediately headed to Cantor’s “newly acquired secondary data center in New Jersey” where “all the data and software [that had been present in the WTC] was mirrored.” The decision begin mirroring all of that data and software to the New Jersey data center was made back in February 2001.

If Deutsche Bank’s servers saw “every file [. . .] downloaded at lightning speed to an unknown location” and had recently begun running eSpeed, the fact that Cantor’s New Jersey data center had “duplicates of everything” destroyed in its WTC offices (if not other affiliated offices) is further suggestive of a possible connection.

The potential connection between strange, and allegedly illicit, trading activity at Deutsche Bank and Cantor Fitzgerald is notable, as Cantor — not unlike the Mayo Shattuck-led branch of Deutsche Bank — also boasted close ties to the National Security State in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks.

In fact, in the months before 9/11, Cantor held economic “war games” in conjunction with the Naval War College. Reports linked these war games to a long-standing relationship between the Naval War College and Cantor Fitzgerald. One of the key figures in these ”war games” was the previously mentioned Thomas Barnett, then an “obscure Defense Analyst” who had recently been recruited to the college from the Center for Naval Analyses. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Barnett became Assistant for Strategic Futures in the Office of Force Transformation, a new Pentagon office created after the attacks by Donald Rumsfeld. As mentioned earlier, Rumsfeld, Cheney and other figures who were then serving the George W. Bush administration had posited that a “catalyzing event” like 9/11 was needed so that their desired “transformation” of the military could take place.

In his book The Pentagon’s New Map, Barnett described how these “war games” with Cantor had come about:

Early in the year 2000, I was approached by senior executives of the Wall Street bond firm Cantor Fitzgerald. They asked me to oversee a unique research partnership between the firm and the college that would later yield a series of high-powered war games involving national security policymakers, Wall Street heavyweights, and academic experts. Our shared goal was to explore how globalization was remaking the global security environment — in other words, the Pentagon’s new map.

According to Barnett, “Pentagon strategists and Langley [i.e. CIA] intelligence officers” were in the room during several of these “war game” workshops. As for some of those “spies,” Barnett claimed that he had been told “not to introduce them” or refer to them during the exercises.

Elsewhere in his book, Barnett notes that the Naval War College’s relationship with Cantor Fitzgerald went back even farther than 2000, beginning well before the events of 9/11 in 1996. That partnership was based around what Barnett refers to as the “New Rules Sets” partnership, “which brought together Wall Street and the Pentagon to discuss the future of the world.” The partnership was initially forged by William “Bud” Flanagan, a former Navy Admiral who retired from military service to join Cantor Fitzgerald as senior managing director. According to Barnett, among the first things Flanagan did upon joining Cantor was to set up a “research partnership” between his new firm and the Naval War College.

Among the “real-world scenarios” gamed out by Defense officials and Cantor Fitzgerald between 1996 to 2000 included “a terrorist strike on Wall Street, war in the Persian Gulf and a financial crisis in Asia”, all of which — per Barnett — “proved amazingly prescient” as each one of those scenarios ultimately unfolded after being “gamed out” as part of the partnership.

One article from 1997, originally published in the Journal of Commerce, noted that the Navy-Cantor Fitzgerald “war games” had “mull[ed a] Pearl Harbor scenario on Wall Street.” More specifically, the report stated that “the next Pearl Harbor-style sneak attack may well be aimed at the United States’ economic and information infrastructure” and that “because of that threat, the US Navy has begun conducting war-game exercises on Wall Street to prepare for possible ‘cyber sabotage,’ or physical attacks on such major financial venues as the World Trade Center.”

As noted earlier, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), closely tied to the George W. Bush administration, had called for a “new Pearl Harbor” as being necessary to “rebuild America’s defenses.” In addition, other CIA-linked think tanks like ANSER’s IHS (Institute for Homeland Security) saw its many experts use the term “new Pearl Harbor” numerous times in the press leading up to the attacks. ANSER’s IHS was notably the architect of another “war game” called Dark Winter, which predicted major aspects of and government policy responses to the 2001 Anthrax Attacks a few months before those attacks transpired. Thus, Cantor’s war games with the Navy seem to fit within this unusual phenomenon of oddly prescient war games and exercises that preceded the 9/11 attacks.

Flanagan and his office partner Phil Ginsburg, the company‘s chief economist and leader of a Cantor bond-trading division, were also among the small group of Cantor Fitzgerald executives who just happened to be late to work on the morning of 9/11. Flanagan and Ginsberg were also essential parts of the Cantor “war games” exercises along with then-head of Cantor and current Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who had described the war games he participated in as “really fascinating.”

A few years before Cantor ran its war games with Barnett, Howard Lutnick’s younger brother Gary joined the firm in 1991. He was hired to lead the trading team of Cantor’s Global Trading Strategies group, and according to former members, Gary Lutnick would “sometimes grab bonds on the screen in front of the customer and then sell the customer his newly purchased bonds at a slightly higher price.” This was only possible “because customers see the trading screen” but not “who bought the bonds ahead of them.” In 1994, due to Gary Lutnick’s aforementioned activities, Cantor was ordered to pay up to $90,000 in profits and interest, in addition to a $100,000 fine “for poor record-keeping in connection with a complex scheme to accumulate risk-free positions at Treasury bond auctions.”

In order to clear the air regarding these regulatory penalties, in 1997, Cantor hired former SEC Chair Richard Breeden to investigate whether “Cantor’s government securities brokerage was giving Gary Lutnick better execution for his trading than it gave to its other wholesale customers.” Breeden informed Forbes that while “the electronic trade-matching system Cantor installed in its government securities brokerage rooms” had “made the possibility of such preferential treatment remote,” his investigation was “fairly narrowly focused,” and he “did not go back and look” at previous years. Notably, Breeden had led the SEC’s enforcement on the soon-to-be Citigroup subsidiary Salomon Brothers Inc for manipulating Treasury auctions, and was hired as a Director of Cantor’s eSpeed in 1999. Later, in April 2007, Breeden was appointed as the “Distribution Agent to submit a proposed Distribution Plan to the SEC and to oversee the distribution of funds collected in this matter to eligible investors” for the Enron bankruptcy case. Like a handful of other eSpeed executives, Breeden was not at the World Trade Center on the morning of the attacks.

Like Flanagan,Ginsberg and eSpeed’s top executives, Howard Lutnick was also late to work on the morning of 9/11. Most of the other executives that managed to be uncharacteristically late for work that morning were also, notably, participants in the “war games” exercises. However, the traders who had participated in the “war games” ultimately perished, along with the vast majority of Cantor’s traders and brokers. Gary Lutnick, Howard’s brother, was one of the Cantor bond traders who died.

In 1999, a few years before the 9/11 attacks and while actively “war gaming” with the Navy, a Bloomberg report detailed how Lutnick was planning to “cut out middlemen” at Cantor as his “expansion plans for an online trading subsidiary could eliminate the need for many of his firm’s brokers” and traders. That online trading subsidiary was none other than eSpeed. The 1999 report further noted that eSpeed “threatens to eliminate the need for people who sell US federal Treasury securities as well as the need for Cantor’s 1,500 brokers.” The article continued by noting that “the prospectus eSpeed filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission says competition between Cantor Fitzgerald’s brokers and its own electronic-trading business may raise conflicts of interest for Mr. Lutnick, who runs both of them.”

With respect to this conflict of interest, Lutnick made it clear his preferences when he stated that: “Cantor’s future lies in the electronic world, not in the harried, mostly male brokers working the phone on his cluttered trading floor” in the World Trade Center’s North Tower.

The Bloomberg article concludes as follows:

“Cantor has spent more than $200-million developing eSpeed, which Mr. Lutnick says will enable Cantor to arrange trades faster and more cheaply than it can with traditional brokers. Some of the middlemen [i.e. traders and brokers] may not survive the electronic revolution, he says.”
[emphasis added]

Ultimately, 658 Cantor employees, among them the bulk of Cantor’s traders and brokers, were killed when the North Tower collapsed on 9/11. The plane that hit that tower had hit directly below Cantor’s offices, preventing any of its employees who were there from escaping the towers.

Thomas Barnett himself later noted the apparent conflict of interest between Cantor’s trading floor and their new eSpeed product:

Cantor created its own worst nightmare competitor in 1999, and they called it eSpeed. It was set up as an electronic clone of the traditional Cantor firm, meaning if a competitor was going to create the perfect online version of Cantor in order to steal its market away, it would have looked an awful lot like eSpeed. It was — in effect — a “cannibalizing agent” within the company, designed to steal business from the traditional company and migrate employees along with that business to the new version of the company. When Cantor lost 685 employees in one fell swoop, the company as a whole could survive, in large part, because eSpeed and other entities like it within Cantor’s family of companies were able to shoulder more load. [emphasis added]

In the aforementioned Bloomberg article from 1999, Lutnick himself had used similar language to discuss eSpeed, stating that, with respect to Cantor’s apparent choice between human-powered and machine-powered trading methods: “You can cannibalize yourself, or you can be cannibalized by others.”

Shortly after the attacks, Cantor managed to get up and running again, for which eSpeed was heavily credited. As a consequence, after the tragedy, the company announced that it would “rely even more on eSpeed going forward” and that they were “getting away from voice brokers.” A Cantor spokeswoman further noted that, after 9/11, “the company is going to look different [. . .] it’s going to have more technology; the US Treasury market has shifted to become dominantly electronic.” While framed as a consequence of the recent loss of life, it was left unmentioned by company officials that this shift had been Howard Lutnick’s exact plan for the company as far back as 1999.

One of Lutnick’s earliest decisions in rebuilding the Cantor after the attacks was to cut off paychecks for employees who were dead or missing on September 14^th. In response to public outrage, Lutnick, among other things, created a charity shortly thereafter called the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund, which was designed to financially support the families of Cantor employees who had died in the attacks for five years. The fund has long been run by Lutnick’s sister, Edie Lutnick, who was also notably involved in Ghislaine Maxwell’s TerraMar project.

Another interesting anecdote about Lutnick and 9/11 also relates to the firm’s ownership of famous casts of Auguste Rodin’s “The Thinker” sculpture. Those sculptures had been in Cantor’s offices when the towers collapsed, but some of them resurfaced after the attack, before “mysteriously disappearing” again. In the interim between the sculptures resurfacing and then again disappearing, Lutnick was photographed in a trailer with them as well as remnants of the landing gear from one of the planes that hit the towers. He apparently kept a hand.

In the years since the 9/11 attacks, Cantor and its affiliates have been forced to pay millions in fines “to settle at least eight separate investigations of illegal gambling and money laundering, incomplete, false or misleading statements in financial filings, and other issues,” according to enforcement records cited by the New York Times. Simon Andriesz, a former senior employee of Cantor subsidiary BGC, was cited in recent Epstein file releases as stating that Lutnick had “made his money through Ponzi schemes and money laundering” and had also initially revealed key aspects of Lutnick’s close relationship with his one-time neighbor, Jeffrey Epstein. Andriesz died last month while at a trauma treatment center, where he seeking treatment for stress related to what he described as “retaliation” from Lutnick and Cantor due to his whistleblowing. His death was reported as a suicide.

While Cantor was still reeling from the events of 9/11, critical anomalies occurred within the Treasury market the morning of the attacks. Their effects lasted for months, including emergency measures that were taken by the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve had notably participated in at least one of the aforementioned Cantor-Navy “war games” in the years preceding the attacks.

Among those emergency measures was the Federal Reserve of New York’s decision to immediately purchase an immense amount of US Treasurys (USTs), reporting $61 billion acquired via repurchase agreements on September 12, up from an average of $12 billion the year prior. At the same time, the Federal Reserve of New York offered loans to banks through their discount window to the tune of a whopping $45 billion — up from “a $59 million average of the previous 10 Wednesdays.” The Fed urged banks to “restructure loans for borrowers with liquidity problems,” and thus “passively extended credit” by clearing checks without debiting the paying bank. The float on these cleared checks neared $23 billion that day, which was over “30 times the average float” over the previous 10 Wednesdays. The Fed was also quick to immediately offer swap lines with two central banks located far, far away from the Manhattan skyline — the European Central Bank and the Bank of England. They also further “augmented” the swap line with the Bank of Canada.

While the Fed’s immense role in the immediate response to the events is mathematically obvious according to their own data, as illustrated above, their actions were far from over. For starters, the Fed committee responsible for setting the federal funds rate, the FOMC, immediately lowered the target by half a percentage point, to 3%, taking effect on September 17 — the day the New York Stock Exchange reopened. The FOMC reinforced this action with two more 50 basis point reductions on October 2 and November 6 and with a 25 point reduction on December 11, lowering the rate target to 1.75% — a 50% rate reduction from the 3.5% rate that stood on the morning of September 11. This sudden, unexpected rate cut had immense implications on the cost of borrowing in US dollar-denominated loans, which in turn had immense effects on foreign currency exchange and the world economy at large. Domestically, the rate cut slashed the interest owed by holders of USTs, of which Cantor was the largest broker in the country.

Also of note is the significant increase in Treasury settlement failures during the week of the attacks, which jumped from an average of $7.3 billion per day the week before to a staggering $190 billion during the week that ended on September 19. According to the New York Fed itself, “settlement fails in the Treasury market did not abate quickly to pre-attack levels.” Primary dealers, the most important of which was Cantor, reported “daily average fails of $190 billion for the week ending September 19, $105 billion for the week ending September 26, and $142 billion for the week ending October 3.” The New York Fed argued that the “persistence of high levels of fails” should be attributed to “specials rates at or close to zero” in the weeks following the events, further arguing that due to these low rates, market participants had “an incentive to fail ‘strategically.’” To this point, remarks to the SEC made the following January pointed to the communication disruptions caused by the attacks as being a “critical element” which had led to “some of the most significant systemic problems experienced by the securities industry in the aftermath of September 11.” They furthered:

In particular, the widespread communications and other problems experienced by one of the two clearing banks for the government securities market prevented market participants from confirming the status of their accounts at that bank, and whether the delivery of funds or securities to those accounts had been made. The impact of these errors snowballed and led to a dramatic increase in the number of settlement fails in the government securities markets-an issue that took well over a month to be resolved. This issue of clearing bank concentration in the government securities markets is one that undoubtedly the Federal Reserve will take the lead in addressing.

The SEC later suggested that the communication disruptions apparent that day, “particularly in the clearance and settlement area,” had demonstrated the need for “proceeding diligently to implement a T+1 settlement cycle [transactions are finalized “one business day after the trade date”] and further restricting the use of physical certificates.” Both of these measures played right into the hands of Cantor’s pivot to digital settlement via eSpeed. In the years since, this trend has only progressed further due to the increased digitization of the securities market seen today by the establishment of FedNow, and the incoming tokenization and stablecoin boom pioneered by Cantor’s business partner, the dollar stablecoin issuer Tether.

Shattuck and Constellation Energy, Enron

As for Mayo Shattuck, after leaving Deutsche Bank shortly after the 9/11 attacks, he was appointed CEO and president of Constellation Energy a little over a month later on October 26 of that same year. However, other reports present a different version of those events. For instance, a 2001 report from the Baltimore Sun stated that Shattuck made the decision to leave Deutsche Bank on September 4, 2001. The report also notes that, “around the same time,” Shattuck had met privately in the Alex. Brown & Sons tower in Baltimore with Christian Poindexter, the then-CEO of Constellation. Poindexter, in the meeting, told Shattuck he was ready to “hand over the reins” of Constellation to Shattuck, which had “surprised” the career banker. Shattuck, prior to the meeting, had been on Constellation’s board of directors for seven years.

Shattuck’s private meeting with Poindexter adds another interesting layer to the discussion regarding Shattuck and his connections to national security insiders prior to the 9/11 attacks. This is because Christian Poindexter’s brother is John Poindexter, a long-time national security insider who is best known for being Reagan’s National Security Adviser as well as the highest-ranking government official charged in connection with the Iran-Contra scandal. In 2001, John Poindexter was in the private sector, serving as Vice President of Syntek Technologies, a military contractor that had worked closely with the Office of Naval Research and DARPA. Shortly after 9/11, Poindexter was tapped by then-Vice President Dick Cheney to run DARPA’s newly created Information Awareness Office, which sought to develop an all-encompassing surveillance dragnet with “pre-crime” functionality. When that that office was defunded by Congress due to its unconstitutional invasion of Americans’ privacy, Poindexter helped Peter Thiel and Alex Karp privatize major aspects of that DARPA office, e.g. the Total Information Awareness program, into what is now Palantir alongside In-Q-tel. As previously noted, Shattuck’s mentor Krongard had helped create In-Q-tel a few years before.

Charles Poindexter was later “praised” for appointing Shattuck to run Constellation, as the latter is credited with leading Constellation through the “deregulation” era. That era was largely ushered in by Dick Cheney’s controversial and highly secretive Energy Task Force — officially known as the National Energy Policy Development Group — in early 2001. Task force staff and the Bush administration succeeded in fighting off numerous FOIA requests and lawsuits to make information about the task force public. Some of that information was later leaked to the press in 2007, revealing that top executives from energy companies like Constellation and Enron, had had private meetings with task force staff and even with Cheney himself. However, other meetings between Enron executives and Cheney prior to Enron’s notorious collapse in December 2001 had been detailed in reports published in 2002. Those reports also noted that Enron in particular had had an apparent out-sized influence on the Cheney-led task force’s efforts to pursue a national strategy of energy deregulation. These were discussed in more detail earlier in this article.

Notably, one of Shattuck’s earliest decisions involved ramping “up [Constellation’s] commodities trading business” just as Enron was collapsing in December 2001. Shattuck was later criticized for this decision, with critics stating that he was trying to turn Constellation “into an investment bank” and had also tried “to take over the energy derivatives trading business” right “when Enron blew up.”

Shortly before its collapse, Enron had been a major competitor of Constellation’s energy derivative trading subsidiary, Constellation Power Source. Prior to Enron’s collapse, the unregulated side of the business was not a major focus of Constellation, with most of its earnings coming mostly from its regulated utility business. However, with Shattuck at the helm, the company reversed that trend in a few short years, with the bulk of earnings coming from its heavily leveraged and unregulated subsidiaries, e.g. Constellation Power Source. In addition, Constellation Power Source, the unregulated subsidiary, gobbled up around 20,000 Enron retail contracts shortly after Enron’s bankruptcy in 2002. The likely goal of this strategy, on Shattuck’s part, was to use the assets of the regulated subsidiaries as collateral for the unregulated ones.

Constellation’s ability to weather major ruts in electricity trading markets in a way its competitors could not, including during the market instability that had been provoked by Enron’s collapse, was explained by both Shattuck and other Constellation executives as being directly related to Constellation’s affiliation with Goldman Sachs. Shattuck in particular argued that Goldman Sachs came from “a world of conventional procedures and compliance,” while those with similar platforms who suffered, e.g. Enron, had been “run by cowboys.”

However, this argument doesn’t necessarily hold water because Goldman Sachs was intimately involved with the “cowboys” at Enron, as they underwrote Enron’s securities and helped Enron “make early payments of more than $1 billion to commercial-paper investors” roughly a month before Enron’s bankruptcy. Goldman ultimately paid nearly $20 million in settlements to Enron creditors for their activities with the firm prior to its collapse, revealing that there was little tangible difference between Goldman’s “world of compliance” and the “cowboys” at Enron. Shattuck’s former employer prior to joining Constellation, Deutsche Bank, was similarly ordered to buy $25 million in settlements due to their role in the Enron fraud.

Two intimate post-bankruptcy figures in the Enron case quickly joined Mayo Shattuck at Constellation, including Charles “Chuck” Ward, and the former CEO of Exelon, Corbin A. McNeil. McNeil, a former Navy commander, is also notable due to his role as the “architect of the merger between two of the country’s largest electric utilities,” when Exelon was formed from Peco Energy Co. and Unicom Corp joining forces — in total involving at least 10 nuclear power facilities.

In September 2010, Shattuck appeared before the the US Chamber of Commerce in which, according to reporting from EnergyCentral.com, he argued that “Enron deserves credit for advocating, with considerable success, the deregulation of electricity markets across the United States.” The Constellation CEO furthered that “we have markets now where the important thing is that people have choice.” In this same appearance, Shattuck made clear the importance of nuclear moving forward for the build out of US infrastructure. “We need nuclear to be between 30 and 40 percent [of the nation’s electricity.]” Shattuck stated, later clarifying that it is “not just about building the next 100,” but “rebuilding the first 100.”

Shattuck also made it clear that it would be necessary to partner with the US government to accomplish this, claiming that “the capital markets are not going to allow us to build a nuclear plant without some sovereign [i.e., government] support.”

Constellation Goes Nuclear

Constellation’s pivot into nuclear began around a year or two before Mayo Shattuck took over the company’s leadership from Charles Poindexter. In 2000, under Poindexter, Constellation created Constellation Nuclear Services, a “one-of-a-kind consulting agency” that was created “to help nuclear power plants win relicensing from the federal government.” In doing so, Constellation “essentially cornered [this] market.”

Constellation Nuclear Services helped herald “the resuscitation of the nuclear power industry as a whole” and did this by promising its clients that they could help them replicate the success of Constellation Energy, the parent company of Constellation Nuclear, in securing the re-licensing of the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant in March 2001. However, critics wagered that this re-licensing only succeeded because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) had “prevented the public from fully exploring the safety of the plant.”

The practice of turning a blind eye to safety issues at these power plants became a recurring theme of Constellation’s early pivot into nuclear energy, largely enabled by the energy deregulation policies encouraged by Enron via lobbying of the Bush administration and their participation in the Cheney energy task force. However, in the months before Bush took office, there was already the effort nationwide — led by Constellation Nuclear — to re-license old nuclear power plants, including those deemed “costly and dangerous” by local groups. As will be explored shortly, this same effort has again accelerated under Trump, with Constellation as a major beneficiary.

As noted in a January 2001 article about the efforts to auction off the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, the “owners of the plant want[ed] to sell in part in preparation for electric deregulation [due to the anticipated policies of then-incoming President Bush], and in part because as the plant ages, the potential for costly shutdowns and even closure increases.” Another report from 2003 noted that another trend involved the “shift in ownership of aging nuclear plants from regulated utilities to a sprinkling of energy companies.” In other words, what was essentially happening in this era was an effort to sell aging nuclear plants, whose safety risks increase with age, to private energy companies that were anticipating a laissez faire approach from the Bush administration with respect to the energy industry. Also notable is how this tendency, incubated by Bush-era policies, also led to the rapid centralization ownership of American nuclear power into the hands of just a few massive corporations, Constellation among them.

The efforts by energy companies like Constellation to gobble up nuclear power plants sped up thanks, once again, to Cheney’s secretive energy task force, whose policies had largely been shaped by companies like Enron and Constellation. Among the task force’s policy recommendations as it related to nuclear power were calls to renew legislation “shielding nuclear companies from unlimited liability for accidents,” enable “easier re-licensing of existing nuclear power plants beyond their design lifetimes,” and to encourage “new nuclear power plants at existing nuclear sites, possibly without any new environmental impact statement process.”

As Shattuck was joining Constellation, in October 2001, the company added another nuclear plant to its collection — Nine Mile Point in New York. The move came after Shattuck began the process of unwinding the previously planned separation of Constellation’s regulated utility business and its unregulated businesses. As previously noted, Constellation’s unregulated side moved to quickly take over some of Enron’s key assets following its collapse and to fill the void left by Enron in energy derivatives trading. Beginning a few months after Constellation sealed its acquisition of Nine Mile Point, the plant had recurrent safety issues, leading Constellation to blame its company’s “culture” for the plant’s “recent substandard safety performances.”

By 2006, Shattuck was credited with transforming Constellation “into the country’s largest provider of commercial and industrial power” by pursuing his strategy “to buy energy assets and sell power competitively,” a strategy largely borrowed from Enron, as previously noted. Of course, this strategy came back to bite Constellation as the 2008 economic crisis unfolded. Constellation managed to survive the 2008 crisis only because it was forced to sell off major parts of its nuclear power business to Electricite de France SA to avoid a takeover attempt by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.

In 2011, the Shattuck-led Constellation, a few years after its near collapse during the 2008 financial crisis, was acquired by Exelon Corporation for $7.9 billion. The deal was finalized in 2012. This allowed Constellation to again pursue its pivot into nuclear power that had begun in 2000 and 2001 and was subsequently shepherded by Mayo Shattuck. That same year, in October 2011, Shattuck joined the Center for Strategic & International Studies’ (CSIS) Commission on Nuclear Energy Policy in the United States as a co-chair of the board. CSIS is currently co-chaired by Epstein associate Thomas Pritzker and CSIS’ CEO Ret. General Joe Dunford — the latter being a key board member alongside Cantor Fitzgerald’s Howard Lutnick in a previous investigation from Unlimited Hangout on the Tether-funded Satellogic. Shattuck had also joined the Nuclear Energy Institute, led by his old friend and the former CEO of Constellation, Christian Poindexter.

Before the merger, Exelon was the largest operator of nuclear power plants in the United States and it still maintains that title today. Shortly after the acquisition, Shattuck became executive chairman of Exelon, from which he retired a year later in 2013. However, he became the chair of Exelon’s board of directors in 2012, a position which he held until 2022. He apparently decided to retire following the separation of Exelon’s regulated and unregulated businesses that same year. Constellation has since emerged as a key nuclear energy provider in Meta/Facebook’s data center in Illinois.

Prior to his retirement from Exelon, in December 2021, Shattuck joined the primordial iteration of Hut 8 — US Data Mining Group, Inc. (doing business as U.S. Bitcoin Corp., USBTC). There, he reunited with his old friend from Alex. Brown & Sons, Hut 8’s Chair Bill Tai, upon the merger of the two companies in November 2023.

AI, Bitcoin, Data Centers and Energy

Bill Tai’s career contains numerous important positions at — as well as investments in — many of the most critical companies that now make up the software, hardware, and energy pillars of today’s digital world. Tai began his career at LSI Logic Corporation, a pioneering ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) producer and designer that was founded by the former CEO of the infamous Fairchild Semiconductor mentioned earlier in this investigation.

ASICs are particularly important in today’s data center build out, for they allow hardware to act in a highly efficient manner, built only to perform a specific task rather than general computation. For example, as will be highly relevant to Tai’s later work with Hut 8 and American Bitcoin, a Bitcoin miner is an ASIC, in that it can only perform the specific hash function needed to mine bitcoin blocks, and is otherwise incapable of, say, running Microsoft Word, Google Chrome or any other computer program. The AI industry will likely soon feature AI-specific ASICs in order to efficiently perform certain compute needed for modern LLMs.

After his time at LSI Logic, Tai enrolled in Harvard Business School to earn his MBA before returning back to Taiwan at the formation of the most important chip manufacturing facilities in the world, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). He was such an early member of the TSMC team that he was given employee badge #A001. It is not an understatement to say that the world of smart phones, laptops, routers and general computational hardware that we live in today would not have been possible without TSMC, which produces 60% of the entire world’s semiconductors, and over 90% of the “most advanced ones.”

Tai left Taiwan to join Shattuck and Krongard at Alex. Brown & Sons in 1987. There, he helped establish their immensely important investment and underwriting practices within the blossoming semiconductor industry. Tai left in 1991 to start his venture capital career, joining venture capital firm Walden Group, later known as Walden Capital.

Walden was founded by Lip-Bu Tan, and was instrumental in investing in the blossoming silicon industries of China and Israel. Tan became the CEO of Cadence Design Systems in 2009, leaving in 2017, eventually joining Intel as CEO in 2025. Tan, Cadence and Intel all made headlines in 2025 when President Trump called for Tan’s resignation from Intel after the Howard Lutnick-led Department of Commerce called for a ban on exports to China, including Cadence products. Tan scheduled a meeting with the President, and shortly after the US government — in particular Lutnick’s Commerce — took a 9.9% stake in Intel. In July of that year, Cadence pleaded guilty and paid over $140 million to “resolve US charges for selling its chip design products to a Chinese military university believed to be involved in simulating nuclear explosions,” according to the Justice Department as reported by Reuters.

Tai left Walden in 1996 and joined Institutional Investment Partners that next year, known for its early investments in routing pioneer Juniper Networks, and American cryptocurrency stalwart Coinbase. Juniper Networks co-founder Pradeep Sindhu went on to found the data center start up Fungible, which was purchased by Microsoft in 2023 to accelerate their data center build out. Tai continued to work in the venture field, and was a successful, early investor in various internet companies, including Zoom, Scribd and Canva.

During the early 2000s, Tai struck up a friendship with SecondLife founder, Philip Rosedale, and came up with a monumental idea to gather users to the pioneering online virtual world:

Around 2003, years before the wave of cryptocurrency hit, I had a friendship with Second Life creator Philip Rosedale. When Second Life launched, user engagement was low. I suggested to Philip, “Let’s create an economy inside Second Life.’” I used Las Vegas as an analogy — how a desert with nothing became a thriving economy with poker chips. In Second Life, I proposed that if everyone passed around $1 poker chips according to a simple rule, the economy would start moving. A currency could be the basis for the creation of an economy. That currency was named the ”Linden dollar”. Users can use Linden dollars to buy land, items, or services within the virtual world. The ability to exchange Linden dollars for real-world currency also became a key feature, supporting the economic activity within Second Life.

My avatar in Second Life has the name AlanGreenspan Golem (named after the then-chair of the US Federal Reserve) as a tribute to someone handling monetary policy in an economy. The name Linden comes from the street where SecondLife was created — inside Linden Labs on Linden Ave in San Francisco.”

Linden dollars were a pioneering digital currency, with a vast, distributed user base, and with liquid exchange into various world currencies, including pairs with Bitcoin as early as 2011. Tai had tweeted about his discovery of Bitcoin as early as November 2010, only a few months after the first bitcoin transaction for real world goods took place — 10,000 BTC for Two Pizzas — in May 2010.

Tai went on to co-found the Necker Blockchain Summit, on Sir Richard Branson’s Necker Island, in addition to numerous other ventures in the cryptocurrency space. Necker Island has acquired a bit of an infamous reputation, having hosted the 2007 wedding of Google co-founder Larry Page as well as hosting the sex cult NXIVM multiple times — the latter of which boasted post-bankruptcy CEO of Enron, Stephen Cooper, as a client.

In 2011, the same year Linden dollars began trading against Bitcoin, pioneering Bitcoin mining company BitFury Group was founded. Tai was an early backer, and even personally funded their Bitcoin mining ASIC — one of the first of its kind. Tai explained:

In 2010, over Thanksgiving weekend, I started learning about Bitcoin. The idea of building a decentralized economy using Bitcoin began to take shape in my mind. At that time, Bitcoin was priced around $0.07 and even though there were no liquid markets I could see the potential for a peer to peer method of value exchange. I started to look at pioneers implementing the bitcoin algorithm in silicon and around 2011, met the team building Bitfury and funded their 28 nm ASIC.

By 2016, BitFury was the largest mining company in the world with data centers over time in Iceland, Finland, Norway, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Republic of Georgia, Canada, and the US with a footprint that grew to be around 800 Megawatts with Bitfury.

BitFury was also supported by Crypto Currency Partners, which later became Blockchain Capital, a venture firm founded by Tether founder Brock Pierce. BitFury itself later invested in firms including Xapo, which sold its pioneering bitcoin custody service to Coinbase. Today, that custody service is home to the US government’s bitcoin, in addition to the majority of today’s Bitcoin ETFs, including BlackRock’s iShares IBIT. Both Blockchain Capital and Xapo feature prominently in Unlimited Hangout’s The Chain series. Featured on the BitFury Group board is its former CEO Brian Brooks. Brooks famously kicked off the US government’s positive regulation of the cryptocurrency space with a bulletin issued in the final days of the first Trump administration that allowed banks to hold digital assets, including stablecoins.

According to an interview with Tai from 2025, during “the early days between say 2012 and 2015” Bitfury “had 40% of the world’s Bitcoin mining infrastructure out there.” Tai, however, then noted an emerging trend in Bitcoin mining companies pivoting towards the blossoming AI industry, noting that “a lot of the Bitcoin mining companies of old have migrated into this space” due to them “naturally already ha[ving] the skill set and the knowledge” needed “to build ultra dense compute, massive scale data centers.”

BitFury spun off a subsidiary called Hut 8 in 2017, of which Tai was a founding board member, alongside Michael Novogratz of Galaxy Digital, who is also featured prominently in Unlimited Hangout’s The Chain. According to Tai, Hut 8 purchased a bunch of Nvidia GPUs in “2020 or so,” in addition to a BitFury subsidiary focused solely on GPU data centers, highrise.ai — not to mention Hut 8 became an energy infrastructure company outright. In November 2025, BitFury left the bitcoin mining entirely, and launched a $1 billion fund to support the AI data center build out. The reporting from their press release at the time explicitly states “Bitfury hopes to encourage other companies to abandon Bitcoin mining, as it no longer holds the same financial appeal it once did, and to focus on creating an ecosystem where ethical and sustainable technology can grow alongside financial success.”

Hut 8 has recently put their experience and technological prowess to the test with large data center build outs, including a $9.8 billion center in Texas, and a $10 billion center with Google-backstopped Fluidstack in Louisiana — the latter of which will support AI stalwart Anthropic. In December 2025, Hut 8, Fluidstack, and Anthropic entered into a partnership “to accelerate the deployment of hyperscale AI infrastructure in the United States.”

In May 2026, Hut 8 refinanced a $200 million bitcoin-backed loan from Coinbase with FalconX, the largest institutional crypto prime brokerage. This is notable due to FalconX having previously entered into their own financing deal with Cantor Fitzgerald for over $100 million in May 2025. Also notable is FalconX’s partnership with the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial and their stablecoin USD1, in addition to being the primary liquidity partner for Xapo. Furthermore, FalconX helped provided over 30% of all the Bitcoin transactions for ETF issuers on the first day of trading in the first weeks 2024. FalconX also boasts the aforementioned Trump appointee Brian Brooks as an advisory board member, who also serves on Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin treasury pioneer Strategy’s board, which currently holds 848,517 bitcoin as of October 19, 2026.

Hut 8’s relationship via FalconX to the Trump family’s growing crypto empire and Cantor Fitzgerald financing should come as little surprise given Hut 8’s intimate ties to another Trump family-linked crypto venture, American Bitcoin.

The American Bitcoin Company

In late March 2025, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump announced the launch of American Bitcoin Corporation (ABTC), a Bitcoin mining and treasury management firm. The company was created after a deal was struck between Hut 8, the Bitcoin mining infrastructure company formerly known as US Bitcoin Corp., and American Data Centers Inc., which was formed by the American investment firm Dominari Holdings alongside Trump’s sons. The deal saw Hut 8 commit “substantially all” of its ASIC miners in exchange for a majority interest in the Trump family-linked data center company. Following the deal, American Data Centers Inc. was rebranded as American Bitcoin Corporation, according to a March 2025 press release. That press release also noted that Hut 8 would serve the newly renamed company as its “exclusive infrastructure and operations partner through a series of long-term commercial agreements.”

“It is a great honor to partner with Hut 8, a recognized leader in the Bitcoin space, as we launch American Bitcoin,” Eric Trump was quoted as saying upon ABTC’s launch. “By combining Hut 8’s proven operational excellence in data centers with our shared passion for Bitcoin and decentralized finance,” Trump continued, “we are poised to strengthen our foundation and drive significant future growth.” A few months later, in August 2025, Eric Trump, Don Jr. and Hut 8 took ownership of 98% of ABTC following its merger with Gryphon Digital Mining, with 80% of that firm reportedly held by Hut 8.

Upon the christening of ABTC, it was announced that the company would be governed by a four member board. Among these the board members are the “technology investors” Michael Broukhim and Justin Mateen. Mateen is best known for co-founding the dating app Tinder. He was also an investor in one of Michael Broukhim’s companies, a “women’s lifestyle subscription box company” called FabFitFun. Broukhim, like Mateen, is now a successful angel investor. Broukhim’s ascent initially began as a digital strategist first managing key aspects of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s failed presidential bid before becoming a start-up founder. As an angel investor, Broukhim’s investments have notably included Hut 8.

In January of this year, it was announced that a new venture capital fund called Deep33 had emerged from stealth, with Broukhim named as its co-leader. Broukhim’s other half at the company was listed as Israeli investor Lior Prosor, who is a major investor in Carbyne. Carbyne is an Israeli intelligence-linked emergency services firm that has become infamous due to its deep ties Jeffrey Epstein and Epstein associates like former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel. Not unlike Carbyne, Deep33 counts among its team former, high-ranking Israeli military and intelligence personnel including a former commander of the controversial Talpiot program. Broukhim is co-leading Deep33 while simultaneously sitting on the board of ABTC with Eric Trump.

Perhaps most telling is Deep33’s stated mission to invest in the infrastructure necessary to “sustain a modern sovereign state” while also backing the companies that operate within what the firm calls “the US-Israel allied infrastructure corridor” with respect to 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR) technologies. Given this and other statements made regarding the firm’s exit from stealth, the focus of their fund — co-led by someone personally entangled with President Trump’s family business interests — is to help Israeli companies largely drawn from its military and intelligence apparatus become critical parts of US government’s AI infrastructure. As Broukhim himself told Israeli outlet Ynet, Deep33 “focuses on what he called an under-served intersection between Israeli engineering talent and US national resilience.” He was further quoted as saying that Deep33’s “platform is designed to help founders cross the hardest chasm, moving from breakthrough invention to large-scale industrial and governmental adoption.” Deep33 further announced that “it has already completed five initial investments aligned with its focus on critical US and Israeli infrastructure.”

The conflict of interest represented by Broukhim’s new firm, which involves a highly controversial foreign security apparatus, and his open involvement with the US president’s sons is significant in its own right. However, another important conflict of interest to explore is that represented by the company Hut 8 itself. What is specifically worth scrutiny is Hut 8’s ambitions to both retain its connection to bitcoin mining via ABTC while also pivoting to AI data center infrastructure, particularly energy policy.

It seems that Hut 8’s overtures and now deep financial connection to Trump’s family were forged to facilitate the growing dominance of Hut 8 and its partners in the intersection between nuclear power, bitcoin mining and the AI boom. As noted earlier, Hut 8 officially began as US Bitcoin Corp., which was created in 2020 by Mike Ho and Asher Genoot. The company merged with the Bill Tai-linked Hut 8 a few years later, in 2023. Ho and Genoot then became top executives at the merged entity, which kept the Hut 8 name. Both are also now on the board of directors of the Trump-led American Bitcoin. In addition to being a board member, Mike Ho is also American Bitcoin’s executive chairman.

In late 2025, Ho stated that, in creating US Bitcoin Corp., and then again after the merger with Hut 8, “we built our board around energy executives” in order to take an “energy first approach” that “emphasized energy,” with Bitcoin mining being described as a “secondary” focus of the company. This is contrary to the company’s marketing in years prior as a Bitcoin mining-focused firm.

Ho mentioned one figure in particular, Mayo Shattuck, as one of the aforementioned energy executives and noted that Shattuck had long been a “huge support” for the company, including before the merger between US Bitcoin Corp. and Hut 8. Shattuck first sat on the board of US Bitcoin Corp and was one of the energy executives that Ho and Genoot initially courted. He continues to be a board member of Hut 8 since the merger as well as the creation of American Bitcoin.

The Nuclear/AI Build Out

In the years since Mayo Shattuck helped lead the charge at Constellation to revive the nuclear power industry in tandem with Bush-era deregulation, “surging electricity demand from energy-hungry data centers” has led to dramatic investments in nuclear power “after decades of stagnation.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the main investors in the more recent crops of nuclear power-focused firms are also heavyweights in the world of AI and AI-focused venture capital. These include Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and the late Paul Allen and co-founder of Sun Microsystems Vinod Khosla. As mentioned above, both Amazon’s, Sun’s and Microsoft’s IPOs had all been underwritten by Shattuck and his former boss at Alex. Brown and Sons, Alvin Krongard.

Other notable overlaps include PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, Thiel protégé and OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman as well as Facebook (now Meta) co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, who owe much of their company’s success to Thiel. For instance, Sam Altman is a major early investor in and former chairman of the nuclear energy company Oklo, which was one of the few companies selected by Trump’s Department of Energy (DOE) last year “for its new pilot program to build advanced nuclear fuel lines.” In addition, Thiel and Altman have co-invested in nuclear fusion start-up Helion Energy, along with Capricorn Investment Group, which manages $5 billion in assets for eBay co-founder Jeff Skoll. Helion’s significant 2023 power purchase agreement with Microsoft notably also includes the formerly Shattuck-led Constellation Energy as its “power marketer.”

Thiel is heavily invested in several nuclear energy companies, with tens of millions in investments just through Thiel Macro LLC alone, not to mention his other firms like Mithril Capital and Founders Fund. One company worth noting, financed in part by Thiel’s Founders Fund, is General Matter. General Matter was founded by Scott Nolan, a Founders Fund partner and former employee of Elon Musk’s SpaceX. It is currently creating, with U.S. government support, the first privately developed uranium enrichment facility in the country, meant to provide fuel to the litany of new nuclear reactors that the Trump administration is determined to bring online as a matter of “national security.”

General Matter’s facility is based in Paducah, KY, and is focused on reopening Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, which severely contaminated local groundwater and exposed many locals to dangerous levels of radiation back when it was operational from 1952 until its closure in 2013. This was despite plant management claiming that radiation levels were normal, when they were not. Understandably, locals are concerned about General Matter’s reopening of the plant causing many of the same problems. Despite local efforts, Paducah Mayor George Bray, who supports the project, has said that he “didn’t think an independent environmental study [of General Matter’s project] is ‘really in the cards’” because of the federal government’s control over the site. Notably, the current Vice President J.D. Vance, is a long-time associate of Peter Thiel and formerly worked at Thiel’s Mithril Capital. Furthermore, as will be discussed in greater detail shortly, the Trump administration’s strategy to circumvent radiation concerns from the public has been to propose eliminating a 50-year-old rule that seeks to keep radiation exposure to workers and the public as low as possible in order to promote “innovation.”

Many of the Trump administration’s policies with respect to nuclear power have come courtesy of one of Thiel’s longtime associates, Michael Kratsios, a former principal at Thiel Capital who is now the United States’ “Chief Technology Officer.” In that capacity, he “advises President Donald J. Trump on a broad range of technology policy issues and drives United States technology priorities and strategic initiatives.” Among Kratsios’ promoted policies is a push to further deregulate the nuclear industry, as he argues that the industry stagnated due to being “regulated […] into paralysis,” despite the significant deregulation that has occurred over the past two and a half decades. As a consequence, Kratsios, to the great benefit of Thiel and other investors in both AI and nuclear power, pushed for overhaul of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to facilitate the rapid approval of new reactors. Similarly, the nuclear fusion lobby group, the Fusion Industry Association, has argued that their industry “must not be regulated like nuclear fission, and should not require the same lengthy [NRC] permitting processes for each facility.”

Trump pushed through many of Kratsios’ recommendations in a May 2025 executive order, which framed nuclear power as a pillar of “national security.” While there is no doubt that some NRC regulations were outdated, critics have argued that the order’s implementation of fixed timelines for approval, pressure from the Trump White House and its Big Tech benefactors, and reductions in NRC staff will lead to trade-offs that ultimately undermine the NRC’s traditional focus on safety and environmental impacts. Augmenting these concerns is the fact that the Trump administration proposed a new rule that would eliminate a 50-year-old NRC standard called “As Low As Reasonably Achievable,” “which requires the nuclear industry to drive radiation exposure for workers and the public below the stated limits where possible. The new rule also creates a carve-out for some workers to get higher exposures to radiation in special circumstances.” Current NRC chairman Ho Nieh has expressly stated that “the reason we’re taking these regulatory reforms is because there’s a demand for, an urgent demand for more electricity in the United States, due to artificial intelligence, data centers and industrial growth.”

In addition, the Trump Department of Energy has sped up the restarting of nuclear reactors that had been shut down for decommissioning. One of the main beneficiaries of this policy has been the formerly Mayo Shattuck-led Constellation Energy, which received a $1 billion government loan to restart the controversial Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, which experienced a partial meltdown in 1979. Earlier this year, in the wake of Trump’s recent deregulatory reforms, the NRC “determined that an exhaustive, in-depth study and environmental impact statement were not required” in its efforts to facilitate the re-opening of Three Mile Island, which was initially built over fifty years ago in 1974. Constellation has since renamed the plant to the “Crane Clean Energy Center.”

One of the main reasons behind the efforts to restart this controversial nuclear power plant is a 20-year agreement made in 2024 between Constellation and Microsoft to use the plant to power Microsoft data centers. The Trump administration is also continuing the process of restarting Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan, an effort which initially began under Biden, as well as the Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa. The latter had significant safety issues due to poorly performed maintenance work as well as significant storm damage prior to being taken offline in 2020. Owned by NextEra, a subsidiary of the “regulated monopoly” Florida Power and Light, the plant is being reopened to power Google data centers.

It is also worth noting that there are considerable efforts to establish the narrative that only nuclear power can fuel the “AI revolution.” Take, for example, the words of IAEA Director General Manuel Rossi, who stated that: “Only nuclear energy can meet the five needs of low-carbon power generation, round-the-clock reliability, ultra-high power density, grid stability and true scalability.”

Aligned with Rossi are Big Tech executives like Manuel Greisinger, a senior Google AI executive, who has argued that:

We need clean, stable zero-carbon electricity that is available around the clock. This is undoubtedly an extremely high threshold, and it is not achievable with wind and solar power alone. AI is the engine of the future, but an engine without fuel is almost useless. Nuclear energy is not only an option, but also an indispensable core component of the future energy structure.

Beginning within the last one to two years, Bitcoin Mining firms en masse have dramatically shifted away from mining Bitcoin to servicing AI data centers. Many of those firms have also, since their transformation, become closely aligned with the re-emergent nuclear power industry. Take, for example, Crusoe AI, which was originally created to mine Bitcoin using flared gas, spun off its Bitcoin mining business entirely and sold it in order to become “the AI factory company.” Earlier this year, Crusoe AI partnered with Aalo Atomics, a nuclear energy company whose modular reactor was originally designed by the DOE, in order to develop and deploy “the first AI data center powered by a small modular nuclear reactor.”

Crusoe AI’s co-founder and CEO, Cully Cavness, recently joined Peter Thiel during a visit to South America, where the pair met with the heads of state of Argentina, Paraguay and Chile (and potentially more).

In Paraguay, which has been the home to a large Bitcoin mining sector for several years, the country’s Telecommunication chief, Gustavo Villate, stated that, as soon as Bitcoin mining contracts with the State expire, the country should “unplug crypto and plug in AI.” Former Paraguayan president Santiago Peña, who was recently removed from office in connection with the Ueno bank scandal, was a Javier Milei ally who met with Thiel and Cavness in May. Not long before he was removed from office, he had promised to bring the “world’s biggest AI hub” to Paraguay in partnership with the Taiwanese government and Bill Tai’s former employer, the semiconductor chip manufacturer TSMC.

After the trip around South America, Thiel announced he was moving to Argentina, which has sought to codify the near-complete deregulation of data center construction in the country, particularly in Argentine Patagonia. One the biggest data center deals recently announced in Argentina is Stargate Argentina, the first global expansion of OpenAI’s Stargate project. The man largely overseeing the project, Emiliano Kargieman, has significant ties to Cantor Fitzgerald’s Howard Lutnick and Tether through his satellite surveillance company Satellogic.

For several years, Cantor Fitzgerald’s real estate subsidiary Newmark has been involved in significant data center deals, with Cantor expanding its team specializing in data center projects in 2023. Newmark not only helped handle real estate concerns for these projects, but also helped secure power supplies and financing for data centers. Since Howard Lutnick became Commerce Secretary, Cantor’s data center business has boomed. While Cantor is now “officially” run by Lutnick’s sons Kyle and Brandon to avoid “conflicts of interest,” the transfer of his stake in Cantor was not completed until October 2025, i.e. after he had already been Commerce Secretary for 10 months. In that interim, Cantor’s Newmark announced it had helped cement more than $25 billion in data center deals. Also in October 2025, Brandon Lutnick proclaimed that “we are having our best year ever” at a Tether-linked conference in Lugano, Switzerland.

Two of Newmark’s data center projects are worth noting in particular. One is the OpenAI-Oracle Stargate data center project in Abilene, Texas. As previously detailed in an Unlimited Hangout report, one of the apparent goals of the global Stargate project, both in the US and abroad, is the “digital transformation” of the State. Newmark helped secure financing for the Texas Stargate facility and Lutnick, as Commerce Secretary, had brokered a deal that saw the Emirati government pour funds into the Stargate project’s “global network of data centers” in exchange for access to tightly guarded chips.

Another Newmark project is under way in Columbus, Ohio, where Newmark is seeking a tenant — most likely a data center — to neighbor Rickenbacker Airport, which recently became the site of Anduril’s large drone factory, Arsenal-1. Anduril is a military contractor created by Palmer Lucky and Trae Stephens, who both are extremely intertwined with Peter Thiel and current Vice President J.D. Vance. The only disclosed investor in Newmark’s efforts to find the “next Anduril” to fill the Rickenbacker-adjacent property is the O.H.I.O Fund, which has also funded J.D. Vance’s Narya Capital and which invests in projects of The New Albany Company. New Albany was co-founded by Ohio billionaire Leslie Wexner and his close associate John Kessler, while also intimately involving Jeffrey Epstein, who is said to have “run” that company for many years.

Another one of the companies pivoting from Bitcoin mining to AI is, of course, Hut 8, shaped in part by Mayo Shattuck. As noted previously, Hut 8 essentially spun of its Bitcoin mining operation to focus on data centers into American Bitcoin with the President’s sons. Surely, this further magnifies the conflicts of interests shaping government policy with respect to data centers as well as nuclear power. Unsurprisingly, given Shattuck’s involvement, Hut 8 has heavily embraced nuclear power. For instance, one of its flagship data centers, River Bend in Louisiana, is being built right by the River Bend Nuclear Generating Station. When completed, the site will service Google and Anthropic.

Another point to consider is that it appears that the recent and dramatic shift away from Bitcoin may have been long planned, at least in Hut 8’s case. Earlier in this piece, it was noted that American Bitcoin chairman and Hut 8 co-founder Mike Ho had said that, despite marketing itself as a Bitcoin mining concern for years, it had always viewed mining as “secondary” and had instead built the company “around energy executives,” Mayo Shattuck in particular. While there have been efforts to frame Hut 8’s transformation as indicative of the recent and widespread trend, Ho’s words suggest that the move away from mining had been long planned. Adding to this probability is the fact that Mayo Shattuck, as a long-time board member with great influence over the company, not only helped the emergence of the biggest “Big Tech” companies now building AI data centers while at the CIA-linked Alex Brown, but also helped guide the nuclear industry to precisely this point where it is now the preferred energy solution for feeding Big Tech’s AI expansion efforts.

In yet another example of how the world of bitcoin mining has since pivoted to embracing the marriage of AI data centers and nuclear power, the DOE official in charge of the loan program being used to restart decommissioned nuclear reactors for the Trump administration, Gregory Beard, was previously the CEO and chairman of Stronghold Digital Mining, a Bitcoin mining company. Stronghold “buys power plants where it installs Bitcoin mining operations, and then makes money by mining Bitcoin or selling power into wholesale markets, whichever is more profitable.” It was acquired by Bitfarms (now known as Keel) another Bitcoin mining company that pivoted into AI and data center infrastructure.

While Unlimited Hangout has made numerous arguments in the recent past regarding the role of Bitcoin as a predominantly US-owned asset that could act as a dollar-debt sink in the incoming reset of the world economy, one could also argue that Bitcoin’s ability to monetize high capacity energy supply during low demand environments was astutely created to finance the needed power capacity growth during the data center build out happening today.

Regardless of Bitcoin’s ultimate role, the data center and AI-backed system of inter-connectivity it helped finance and create was surely the product of long-term, careful planning.

The Creative Destruction Pattern

The many threads presented in this piece have been carefully intertwined by a mostly hidden yet inter-connected set of hands, culminating in a decades-long pattern of creative destruction.

Interestingly, Thomas Barnett’s book, written long before the two fields of digital assets and artificial intelligence properly existed, discussed the axioms of power, money, and even crime, as it related to the US’ plans to deal with an emerging China as a “rising near-peer competitor”:

Of course, the purpose of the workshop as far as Cantor and I were concerned was to explore the inescapable reality that Developing Asia was going to need a lot of money to finance a doubling of its energy demand in a mere generation’s time. This was the second workshop in the New Rule Sets Project. The first was on energy, and we billed that one as the “motive,” as in,”Asia’s gotta have it!” This second workshop would be about “opportunity,” as in, “Who’s gonna pony up the money?” The third event would be about the “crime” of all the environmental damage that might result.

Barnett even accurately predicted “the seemingly unbelievable notion that a major stock market could be disabled for days on end,” which would trigger “additional ‘market quakes’ around the world” and eventual push “the global economy toward recession.” It was within the market paradigm that changed so suddenly after 9/11 and Enron’s collapse that helped lead to the simultaneous regulations and deregulation that helped incite the Great Financial Crisis. That crisis, in turn, ultimately spurred Bitcoin and the digital asset revolution.

For starters, the aftermath of 9/11 led to the Patriot Act, which stripped civil liberties and birthed the modern surveillance state in the pursuit of fighting terrorism. This legislation also contained measures which exacerbated the tendrils of the Bank Secrecy Act — both of which are levered today by the Treasury and its national security state partners to fight transactional privacy within the Bitcoin and stablecoin space.

According to its co-founder Peter Thiel, PayPal was the first company to file in the US for a public offering right after the events of 9/11. The downstream effects of that day would have large implications for the world at large, and the reactionary regulations the U.S. would subsequently put in place would both limit capabilities of new ventures, while king-making incumbents such as PayPal. As Thiel himself stated, “I actually do not know if a company like PayPal could have been started even two, three years later.”

He would further articulate this concept in an interview with The Rubin Report:

In the aftermath of 9/11, we got the Patriot Act in the U.S and that attached, you know, much more regulatory scrutiny to financial transactions, to payments, that know-your-customer rules became much, much trickier. And so I do think that there’s a weird way in which there was an opening to start a business like PayPal in 1999, 2000, [but] even three years later, I think it might not have been possible.

The massive push towards a resurgence of domestic nuclear power by the likes of Shattuck is currently helping power the AI data centers, which, in turn, help analyze the public ledgers of the blockchain boom, while also powering the kinetic arm of America’s modern warfare division via drone technology and other autonomous weaponry.

The direct aftershocks of 9/11 also led to the digitalization of the securities industry and a push for instant settlement — an ambition that could only be fully realized upon the invention of blockchain. Even Bitcoin itself, the first iteration of a blockchain, offers a unique ability for said data centers and power plants to arbitrage lulls in electrical demand and monetize excess energy in the form of Bitcoin mining and the issuance of new coins — an increasingly important pillar in the primordial stages of the data center build out. Today, as AI companies and their banking partners take on unprecedented amounts of debt to build out their compute capabilities, the pivotal stablecoin legislation known as the GENIUS Act, championed by Lutnick and quickly passed at the onset of Trump’s second term, provides a key loophole enshrined by Congress into law that allows trillions of dollars of assets financed by said gargantuan loans to be funneled directly into stablecoins in lieu of bankruptcy — crucially required to be backed by US Treasuries further helping the Treasury find a buyer for government debt during the current bond market uncertainty.

This newfangled triangulation of energy, software, and government debt is hardly an accident, much like it was hardly an accident that the collapse of Enron left shareholders holding the worthless bag from the build out of the modern communications grid and energy market. The remaining, valuable assets were sold off for pennies on the dollar to a small consortium of private companies. In the context of the modern, debt-fueled build out of AI data cetners, this paradigm is still being upheld today. In a grand and telling irony, recent reporting from the Financial Times claims that “the US looks set to mark the 25^th anniversary of the collapse of Enron by watering down regulations put in place to prevent it happening again.” These were and are not accidents at all, but rather instances of creative destruction from conspiring criminal enterprises that have defrauded the American public, and along with it, the entire world.

Barnett didn’t simply explain this to a few Cantor Fitzgerald executives during their war game workshops on top of the Twin Towers, his ideas directly spawned the actions taken by the United States’ public and private sectors at the onset of the new millennium:

As the “vision guy,” my job was to generate and deliver a compelling brief that would mobilize the Defense Department toward generating the future fighting force demanded by the post- 9/11 strategic environment. Over the next two years I gave that brief well over a hundred times to several thousand Defense Department officials. Through this intense give-and-take, my material grew far beyond my original inputs to include the insider logic driving all of the major policy decisions promulgated by the department’s senior leadership. Over time, senior military officials began citing the brief as a Rosetta stone for the Bush Administration’s new national security strategy. But the brief was not a partisan document, and the Defense Department was not the only audience hungry for this strategic vision.

Within months, I was fielding requests from the National Security Council, Congress, the Department of State, and the Department of Homeland Security. When Esquire magazine named me one of their “best and brightest” thinkers in December 2002, I began getting more requests, this time to brief in the private sector, concentrating in the field of finance and information technology. After I then published an article in the March 2003 issue of Esquire, called “The Pentagon’s New Map,” which summarized the strategic thrust of the brief, invitations from both the public and private sectors skyrocketed. [emphasis added]

In order for a chicken to be born, it first must destroy its entire world, using its beak as a tool to crack open its egg. But unlike this metaphor, the new world we are entering, located squarely on the Pentagon’s Not-So-New Map, is anything but a process of nature, and instead a product of conspiracy-derived creative destruction.

Or as Barnett so eloquently put it, “motive, opportunity, and crime all coming together in a neat little package.”