In a recent interview with Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, world-renowned British novelist John le Carré briefly touched the third rail of respectable political discourse:

JOHN LE CARRÉ: We also have a charming case, which we look back on with embarrassment, where a leading member of the Rothschild family and our present Chancellor of the Exchequer—that’s finance minister and the éminence grise of the Labour Party at that time, Lord Mandelson, were all found holidaying together off the coast of Corfu, sitting on the boat of a man called Deripaska, who at that time, I believe, was wanted in the United States for -- on money laundering charges. So we have a certain amount of evidence before us which you would think would silence critics who say we’re all in perfect shape.
AMY GOODMAN: Could you read the beginning of Our Kind of Traitor?
Apparently, Amy Goodman was so eager to hear le Carré’s fictional account of international corruption that she hadn’t time to ask him about the very real connection between Nathaniel Rothschild and Oleg Deripaska -- one of eight of the nine richest Russian oligarchs who qualify for Israeli citizenship. With the help of an advisory team hand-picked by the pro-Israeli Larry Summers, President Barack Obama’s former top economic adviser, the oligarchs looted an estimated $1 trillion from Russia’s struggling post-Communist economy. Or enough to buy lots of art, sports teams and yachts like the one on which Deripaska entertained prominent members of Britain’s political elite. Goodman might have also recalled that in 2003 another oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, had named Nathaniel’s father, Lord Jacob Rothschild, as a possible successor to take over his Yukos oil company shares if he were jailed on fraud charges. When Khodorkovsky was subsequently put on trial by the Russian state, the Rothschild-connected Economist magazine disparaged the case as a “show trial.”
With these behind-the-scenes machinations in mind, let’s take a brief look at whether there might be more to the WikiLeaks saga than meets the eye…
WikiLeaks: A Very Short Coincidence Theory
It is surely just a coincidence that the law firm -- Finers Stephens Innocent --which represents Julian Assange and set up the Julian Assange Defense Fund is also legal adviser to the Rothschild Waddesdon Trust; that the partially Rothschild-owned Economist gave Assange its 2008 Freedom of Expression Award; that Lord Rothschild is deputy chairman of BSkyB, whose warmongering chairman Rupert Murdoch and his propagandist father were lauded as fearless advocates of the truth by the WikiLeaks founder in an op-ed in the Murdoch-owned The Australian; that Benjamin Netanyahu, who often stays with Murdoch in London and has the award-winning pro-Israel media magnate on his “list of millionaires” (i.e. potential donors), was not only the sole world leader “undoubtedly delighted” by the leaks but was singled out by Assange as a believer in diplomatic transparency; and that the criminal state for which WikiLeaks provided an unexpected “diplomatic coup” was first promised to British Zionists in an enigmatic 1917 letter to an earlier Lord Rothschild.
These intriguing connections—which might appear suspicious to those suffering from the “crippled epistemology” associated with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are undoubtedly coincidental.
Maidhc Ó Cathail writes extensively on U.S. foreign policy and the Middle East.
Photo: George Osborne (left), Oleg Deripaska (middle) and Peter Mandelson.