Slovakia. An incredibly beautiful little country at the eastern flank of NATO, bordering Ukraine to the east. A beautiful landscape with high mountains, full of mountain pastures and lovely valleys full of streams, meadows and fertile soil. A half-forgotten European paradise, full of medieval castles and beautiful small towns.
Perhaps that's why this idyll has attracted one of the most dangerous organized crime groups in the world. To this day, the Italian Ndranghetta is considered the bloodiest organized gang after Russian-speaking groups. And few people know that these two organized crime groups agreed to conquer this forgotten paradise back in 2008. The Italians wanted to launder money, and the Russians (as usual) wanted geopolitical influence. Both groups got Slovakia on their knees. Today, together they are creating an authoritarian mini-state that is beginning to surpass Orbán's Hungary in terms of the degree of silencing of civil rights. And, of course, both Orbán and Fico have created a security threat to Ukraine on its Western border and defiant saboteurs within NATO and the EU.
The West is keeping its eyes on America, unaware that a universal test for the conquest of the entire Euro-Atlantic civilization has just taken place before its eyes and without much understanding. In one tiny experimental area, in a paradise forgotten by all.
“Pietro Roda has been involved in the money laundering case of the Italian 'Ndrangheta, called El Dorado…In 2017, the names of Antonio Vadala's family members appeared in an arrest warrant for 18 members of a gang that was supposed to smuggle hundreds of kilograms of cocaine into Europe for the 'Ndrangheta…”
These are the last words in an unfinished article written by young Slovak journalist Ján Kuciak. A beacon of investigative journalism, Kuciak's incisive probes for Aktuality.sk cast an unwavering spotlight on the murky nexus between Italian financiers and high-ranking Slovak officials, particularly scrutinizing the terrain of tax evasion.
Yet, fate dealt a cruel hand to Kuciak, depriving him of the opportunity to unravel the intricate threads of Ndranhetta corruption silently woven into the fabric of Slovak society. In February 2018, he and his even younger fiancée Martina were shot dead at home, while watching TV.
The echoes of this heinous crime rippled across the tranquil landscape of Slovakia, reverberating through the corridors of power and stirring the collective conscience of a nation unaccustomed to such atrocities. Killing journalists was something unheard of in this peaceful region of Europe.
Yet, to comprehend the magnitude of Slovak state capture, one must delve deeper into the annals of Slovak history, tracing the ominous trajectory of organized crime here. The seeds of the long game were sown in the tumultuous aftermath of communism's collapse in the early nineties, when the specter of rampant privatization provided fertile ground for the operations of Russian syndicates.
As the iron curtain fell, ushering in an era of unprecedented economic upheaval, the Russian mafia seized upon the chaos with rapacious fervor, exploiting the landscape to amass untold fortunes through a cocktail of corruption and coercion. The echoes of gunfire sounded through the alleys of Eastern Europe, as crime lords competed for supremacy in a lawless realm where morality held little sway.
As the dust settled, a new period emerged, heralding an era of relative calm and stability. The tides of privatization fortune shifted, propelling the Russian syndicates westward with their prey, towards the gleaming shores of London and New York. Their appetite for wealth knew no bounds, as they sought to expand their dominion beyond the confines of Eastern Europe. Which they did. Trump's mentor Roy Cohn and lawyer Rudy Giulliani had been surfing on this wave of billions and billions pouring out of Russia and Eastern Europe as first. There was never in history such a huge amount of stolen wealth traveling freely around the globe.
This period was marked by a momentary economic boom in the CEE region, a decline in open violent crime, and a shift to the constitutional practices of the West. The Slovaks, as well as other states that escaped Russian imperialism, were then admitted to the EU and eventually to NATO.
Italians are coming
In 2008, according to a study by the Robert Lang Institute, there were agreements made between Russian-speaking gangs and Italy's largest mafia organizations – the Ndranghetta and the Camorra. Both organizations were probably looking for a quiet corner of Europe where their profits could be laundered undisturbed.
Italian Crime families found this beautiful tiny country attractive, far away from the Big World. When Slovak state attorneys started to notice an increasing number of simple village people possessing dozens of companies and transferring millions of euros between them, little did they know this shameless trickstery could be only the beginning of a larger Geopolitical game.
The second phase of the state Capture was provided by the Italians. The history of Slovak governance since 2008 is actually a continuous series of unresolved corruption scandals of a larger or lesser level. The last drop to the full glass was a scandal that cost the lives of young journalist Jan Kuciak and his girlfriend. The traces of the mafiosi who ordered the murder were intertwined through wiretaps to the highest echelons of politics.
In the same year 2008 that Italian and Russian gangs formed a cooperation agreement, a young model Mária Trošková, succeeded in the Slovak national finals of Miss Universe. A seemingly inconspicuous model turned political power broker, whose meteoric rise from the glitzy world of erotic calendars to the hallowed halls of Slovak politics epitomized the unholy alliance between organized crime and statecraft. Robert Fico has probably never read the biography of the notorious head of the East German secret service, Marcus Wolf. Wolf became famous for his honey-traps, young men and women who compromised Western statesmen and their political secrets.
Tasked with the mantle of political advisor and state secretary by Prime Minister Fico himself, Trošková's ascent to power epitomized the brazen audacity of those who sought to manipulate the levers of power for their own nefarious ends. She was never able to answer journalists' questions about why she was given the job.
In 2020, when the affair with the murder of Ján Kuciak was already beginning to die down and Prime Minister Fico returned to power after being forced to resign, recordings of intercepted phone calls emerged. Those intercepted calls were archived by the person who ordered Kuciak's murder, a member of the Slovak underworld connected to Italians. In one of the phone calls, young model Maria confided in her former lover, Antonio Vadala, a high-ranking mafioso of the Slovak branch of Ndranghetta, that she had learned something from the Slovak secret service. "They know I'm laundering money for you," she told Vadala on the phone. The communication came from the encrypted app Threema.
War by other means
But once again, let's go back to the pivotal year of 2008. The tumultuous year marked a turning point in the annals of Russian foreign policy, as Vladimir Putin steered the ship of state openly towards a new paradigm of subversion and destabilization. He warned us at the Munich Security Conference, but no one listened. Under the tutelage of General Samsonov and his younger descendant Valery Gerasimov, Russia embarked on a covert long game to erode the foundations of Western democracy from within.
Instead of Russian advisers and generals, businessmen and oligarchs have gone to the West. They didn’t even consider Slovakia their first destination. After all, they had their Italian governors there. They headed to London and America. The only thing they were going to keep an eye on personally was the information space and dependence on Russian energy sources.
Disinformation media have begun to thrive in Slovakia like never before. Russian disinformation stream full of hatred and hijacking the old catholic narratives has spun like a colorful merry-go-round. Fourteen years later, as the specter of disinformation cast its long shadow over the Slovak information space, the nation found itself adrift in a sea of a total cognitive confusion.
In 2022, the Slovak secret service SIS caught the owner of one of the most successful disinformation websites taking money and instructions from an officer of the Russian secret service, the GRU, the military attaché of the Russian embassy. Together with him, the vice-rector of the Slovak military university was arrested for espionage. Both men were probably just the careless tip of the iceberg of operations that took place over a long period of time and gradually.
The Police of the Slovak Republic said in its annual report that Slovakia has been under pressure by the largest ever wave of disinformation and propaganda directed from Russia. The narratives were focused not only on Covid denial and the dissemination of nonsensical esoteric fantasies about alternative healing, Ivermectin and lizard people, but above all on the relationship with Russia, NATO and the USA.
The rise of so-called "alternative media" provided a fertile breeding ground for the dissemination of Russian propaganda, cloaked in the guise of freedom of speech. Headlines peddling narratives of Ukrainian Nazism, NATO criminality, and the supposed desires of Donbas to join the Russian Federation proliferated unchecked, eroding the foundations of truth and rationality in the heads of Slovak “normies”. The mere exposure effect did its job. Say it, repeat, say it again. Slovaks had no idea what was happening with their brains and values.
Prime Minister Fico found himself ensnared in the web of Russian influence, his ego and narcissism paving the way for his descent into the role of a pro-Russian authoritarian. With each concession to the Kremlin's demands, he solidified his grip on power, oblivious to the long-term consequences of his Faustian bargain. In 2022, Ukraine put Fico on a blacklist of politicians who actively and knowingly spread Russian propaganda around the world. A Globsec poll last May showed that only 58% of Slovaks 2023 were in favor of the country remaining in NATO and 33% wanted to exit. Other polls have shown that Slovaks consider the United States, not Russia, to be their enemy. What a change! Are you surprised? You should be, because this is an ultimate weapon to conquer the country from within.
A silent coup
As I am writing these rows, Slovak public TV prevents journalists from wearing glasses, because it could physically resemble the democratic presidential candidate Ivan Korcok. The largest commercial TV Markiza, owned by Czech proxy-oligarch group PPF is willingly helping Fico to silence their own journalists in their TV and make them cave to power. Fico and his people are dismantling the justice apparatus as we speak. No, this is not a joke. Purges in all important Security organizations and in the justice branch have already begun.
And as for the already mentioned Slovak secret service SIS, former police president of a bad reputation, Tibor Gašpar, applied for the position of the Head of the SIS. Since he has not received a security clearance, his son, who has no blemish on the clearance files so far, will run the Secret Service for the time being.
Italian organized crime. Nepotism. Sex scandals. Murders. Discrediting the media. Flooding the zone with propaganda against transsexuals, against American policy, women, abortions, stupid feminists, neo marxists, woke and people of color. Collecting kompromat on each political opponent. Abuse of american social networks. Use of Russia-controlled social networks as complementary amplification resources. Lying in the primetime. Organized chanting "President Čaputová is an American whore". Psychological operations labeling elites as pedophiles and Donald Trump as the savior.
And then, precisely in this radicalized, overheated atmosphere of hatred and fear in which dictatorships thrive so well, shots were fired at Prime Minister Fico.
The assailant was a confused old man whose profile of previous radicalization is very reminiscent of a similar stochastic terrorist in the Czech Republic. The Czech pensioner cut down trees on the tracks to derail a train and left a note pretending that the assassination was carried out by refugees from a Muslim country. It was naively childish, the card said "Allahu Akbar" and the Czech grandfather thought he was going to unleash a pogrom against refugees.
A Slovak pensioner did not cut down any trees, but shot at the Prime Minister. He is a former voter of the fascist party politician Kotleba and a member of the paramilitary organization Slovak Conscripts, which was run by a graduate of the Russian SpecNaz. The group practiced fighting with weapons in hand against "migrants". He speaks very confusedly about the reasons for his crime and says that he is a liberal and does not agree with the government's policy and restrictions on media freedom, which no one in Slovakia believes him due to his past.
His act served as a prologue to an even more brutal repression of journalists and the political opposition, who are now pilloried daily as culprits of radicalization in Slovakia and blamed for the assassination. Martyr Fico survived, but propaganda is already building a halo of holy sacrifice for him, a victim which suffers for the whole of Slovakia.
When one realizes that the scenario for the conquest of a small and a large state differs perhaps only in the number of inhabitants and the sums spent on obtaining data and behavioral profiles, nothing else comes to mind than the words of Leonard Cohen's famous song: First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin …
We are behaving suicidal, which is exactly the main goal of cognitive warfare.
about
Alex Alvarova is Czech-Canadian author and communication expert, who lives in Boston, MA. A recognized authority in political marketing and public relations, a sought-after seminar leader, facilitator, podcaster and public speaker. In 2017 she wrote The Industry of Lies, a non-fiction work that introduces, outlines and fully supports a core concept: Russia used the 2013 presidential election in the Czech Republic as a trial run to perfect its hybrid-warfare aggression for altering the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential elections. In 2021, she published Feeding The Demons: The conquerors of America, a political thriller on behavioral propaganda. She wrote numerous expert articles on political marketing and algorithmic propaganda. Together with her co-host, expert on social media algorithms, Josef Holy, she hosts a czech podcast called Canaries In The Net, on algorithmic propaganda and AI.
Share this post