When Edward Shevernadze, the president of Georgia was overthrown in what a CNN dubbed "the Rose Revolution" (on November 22, 2003) I was in Croatia. And just before the "election" of his successor (January 4,2004) Mikhail Saakashvili, the American educated lawyer who was his former Minister of Justice, I was in Serbia. The Balkans, as it turns out, are a perfect place from which to observe the developments in the Caucasus, because the covert operations which are currently being deployed in Georgia, have already been used with devastating effect across all of South-East Europe.

There can be no doubt that the change of the regime in Tbilisi is the result of the US secret service operations. The allegations that the elections on November 2^nd were flawed was based exclusively of exit polls conducted by an American "polling agency"; also, the student activists from the "Kmara" organization are modeled on, and trained by, their US-backed opposite numbers in Serbia, "Otpor". The two groups even have the same logo, presumably so as to give their sponsors some economies of scale when it comes to printing costs.

Everything down to the storming of Parliament in Tbilisi of November 22^nd 2003, in Belgrade on October 5, 2000, and the visit of the Russian foreign minister Igor Ivanov, to ensure the hand-over of power, followed exactly the same carefully choreographed plan. Moreover, the identity of the choreographer is not difficult to establish: the last posting of Richard Miles, the current US Ambassador in Tbilisi, was Belgrade.

While in Serbia, I came across unexpected confirmation of the extent of the US secret service involvement in politics of that country. Tim Marshall, a reporter for the Sky TV, has published as book in Serbia on the period 1998-2000 i.e. the Kosovo war and the overthrow of Milosevic. Marshall is very proud of his connections with the Secret Services, especially the British ones, because his book, entitled "Shadowplay", is a detailed account of their activities, which are presented as the key factors in the political events that he describes. The value of his account is all that much greater, because Marshall, like all other TV reporters, supports the US New World Order view that Slobodan Milosevic was evil and that NATO was correct to attack Yugoslavia in 1999.

At every turn, Marshall seems to know who the main intelligence players are. His account is thick with references to "an M16 officer in Pristina"; "sources in Yugoslav Military Intelligence"; "a CIA man who was helping to put together the coup"; "an officer of the US naval intelligence"; and so on. He quotes secret surveillance reports from the Serbian secret service; he knows who the Minister of Defense desk officer is in London who draws up the strategy for getting rid of Milosevic; he knows that the Foreign Secretary’s telephone conversations are being listened to; he knows who are the Russian intelligence officers who accompany Yevgeni Primakov, the Russian Prime Minister to Belgrade during the NATO bombing; he knows which rooms are bugged in the British Embassy; and where the Yugoslav spies are who listen to diplomats conversations; he knows that a staff member on the US House of Representatives International Relations Committee is, in fact, an officer of US intelligence; he seems to know that secret service decisions are often taken with a very minimal ministerial approval; he describes how the CIA physically escorted the KLA delegation from Kosovo to Paris for the pre-war talks at Ramboiillet, where NATO issued Yugoslavia with an ultimatum it knew that it could only reject; and he refers to "a British journalist" acting as go-between London and Belgrade for hugely important and very high-level secret negotiations, and people sought to betray one another as Milosevic’s power collapsed.

Perhaps the unidentified journalist is himself. For one of the themes which inadvertently runs through his book, is that there is a thin line dividing the journalists and the spooks. We have observed this phenomena in Georgia, as Western newspapers do the work of the secret services by gushing with undiluted propaganda about the "hopes" the Georgian people have in their "young" new American-installed president.

Above all, Marshall makes it clear that in 1999, the USA’s State Department and its intelligence agencies decided to use the Kosovo Liberation Army to get rid of Slobodan Milosevic. He quotes one source, quoting Mark Kirk a US intelligence officer saying that: "Eventually we opened up a huge operation against Milosevic, both secret and open. We gave KLA both military, technical, officers as directors, logistical support, we smuggled drugs, ran prostitution rackets and murdered civilians, and blamed all this on the Serbs and Milosevic."

The war was started and Yugoslavia was ferociously bombed. But Milosevic stayed in power and the people rallied to the cause. So London and Washington then started the "political warfare" since military bombing only solidified the will of the people. This involved giving very large sums of money, logistical support, arms, to various "democratic opposition" groups and also the "non governmental" organizations in Serbia. The US was operating then through the International Republican Institute, yet another CIA front, which had opened their offices in neighbouring Hungary for the purpose of getting rid of Milosevic.

It was agreed at one of their meetings, writes Marshall, "that the ideological arguments of pro-democracy, civil rights and a humanitarian approach would be far more forceful if accompanied by large bags of American dollars." This plus others things were shipped to Serbia via the diplomatic pouches, through and from Sweden, which was not participating in NATO, thus they were able to maintain a full embassy staff in Belgrade. The US CIA set up the radio station B92 and funded it – and this station B92 is Marshall’s publisher of his book. All of these organizations were largely funded by George Soros, and he was later to play a crucial role in 2003-2004 events in Georgia. These "democrats" were, in reality, nothing but foreign agents – just as the Yugoslav stolidly maintained all the time.

They pushed Kostunica as a single candidate, since he was unknown by the general public, and Marshall also describes the so-called "spontaneous uprising" of the people and the carefully arranged people to appear on the TV screens.

All of the above will eventually be known publicly and the lies, deception, intrigue, murder, assassinations, and the kidnapping of Milosevic.

After Marshall’s expose of the reality behind the almost identical events in Serbia, there can be no doubt that the US takeover of Georgia is a textbook case of US covert operations at work.