21st Century Wire

Not About Flamingos: Albania’s Revolt Against a Foreign Takeover

Global Affairs — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:02:41 +0000

For a week now, Albania’s streets have been screaming a story the headlines refuse to print. On paper, the Kushner–Trump resort at Sazan and Zvërnec is a tasteful argument about “development” and biodiversity, flamingos versus luxury villas, wetlands versus “jobs and growth.” On the asphalt in Tirana and on the sand of the Zvërnec–Narta beach outside Vlorë, nobody is marching for flamingos. They are shouting “Albania is not for sale,” “Israel out of our country,” “Israel, America, get out,” “Our land in Albania is not for sale.” What they are describing is not a planning dispute. It is a slow, deliberate capture of land, labour and the Albanian state itself.

When Albanian anti-corruption prosecutors froze the bank accounts of a Qatari-owned land company on June 2, 2026, the glossy version of the Sazan story finally shattered. Those accounts belonged to Albania Land Development, controlled by the Al-Khayyat brothers. Inside them sat roughly 195 million dollars wired specifically for the purchase of disputed Zvërnec beachfront plots. That land is the mainland anchor of the planned 1.4-billion-euro luxury mega-resort that is supposed to stretch across Sazan Island and the Zvërnec coastal zone.

IMAGE: Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump (source: Via Getty Images)

For months, the public story had been effortless and sun-drenched. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump supposedly discovered an uninhabited island during a Rothschild yacht tour, fell in love with it, and decided to build up to ten thousand hotel rooms and villas. Saudi and Qatari money would pour in, jobs would appear, and Albania would finally get its sparkling new tourism landmark on the protected Adriatic shoreline.

That narrative collapsed the moment SPAK, Albania’s Special Prosecution Against Corruption and Organised Crime, stepped in. The frozen money wasn’t a side payment. It was the financial fuel behind the very land on which the resort is being built. Titles and court records were never clean to begin with, and trace straight back to a documented 2018 forgery conviction. To anyone following the paper trail, it quickly stops feeling like just another tourism venture and reveals itself as something carefully pieced together, one that started with forged Ottoman-era documents in a provincial courthouse, moved through disgraced judges and Miami-based operators, and culminated in strategic-investor status handed down by Prime Minister Edi Rama’s government, just five days before Donald Trump’s second inauguration.

The story does not simply begin with Kushner buying an island, but with tainted land titles, opaque corporate vehicles, post-administration influence networks, Gulf sovereign capital, and a former nuclear garrison at one of Europe’s most sensitive maritime chokepoints, all stitched together into something meant to look entirely legitimate.

DOCUMENT: Visual network diagram from the June 2026 investigative dossier showing the connections from convicted forger Pellumb Petritaj through original land claimant Artur Shehu, disgraced judge Alaudin Malaj, the Qatari buyer Albania Land Development (assets frozen June 2, 2026), and onward to Kushner-linked entities and Prime Minister Edi Rama’s approvals.(Source: Created by Author)
Albania Resort Controversy Stakholder Map

The Contaminated Foundation

The trouble did not start on a yacht in the Mediterranean. In fact, it started years earlier amid the messy aftermath of Albania’s post-communist property restitution near Vlora.

IMAGE: Superyacht Planet Nine, owned by Nathaniel Philip Rothschild, the “friend’s boat” on which Ivanka and Jared Kushner were reportedly aboard when she discovered the private island of Sazan, Albania (Source: Luxury Launches)

Court records show that on April 3, 2018, the Vlora Court convicted local businessman Pellumb Petritaj, who served as legal proxy for the Shehu family, of forging an Ottoman-era document to seize 181 hectares of Zvërnec land. He received a three-year prison sentence. Prosecutors laid out a scheme that involved fabricating court-archive files, attributing them to real judges (one killed in a 2011 mafia-style explosion, another long gone from Albania), then pushing the paperwork through state offices, subdividing the plots, and selling them, sometimes through Petritaj’s own daughter. Three officials from the Vlora Property Restitution and Compensation Agency, today known as Agjencia e Trajtimit të Pronave (ATP), were convicted with him. The alleged fraud eventually covered up to 500 hectares across Zvërnec, Uji i Ftohtë, Karaburun, and Palas. Petritaj was arrested again in 2019 on fresh forgery and money-laundering charges involving another 100 hectares. Albania’s Supreme Court upheld the core forgery conviction in 2024.

The main beneficiary, according to a 2018 judicial commission, was Artur Shehu, a Vlora-born businessman who fled Albania in 1999 after a fatal gunfight at his bar, won U.S. asylum in 2001, and settled into a multimillion-dollar Miami villa. Italian anti-mafia investigators in Lecce once alleged he funnelled about a million euros in Albania on behalf of a senior figure in the Sacra Corona Unita crime syndicate. Albanian officials called him a key player in coastal land grabs around Vlora. In February 2026, just days before Ivanka Trump’s visit, Shehu applied for a duplicate ownership certificate covering 51,944 square metres of disputed forest inside the resort footprint, claiming the original document had been lost. Villagers immediately filed objections.

Those contested titles gained extra legitimacy through rulings by Judge Alaudin Malaj, then president of the Tirana Court of Appeal. In a 2013 civil case, he sided with the Shehu family on 156 hectares. In 2019, he sat on a panel that tossed out forgery charges against Petritaj. Both decisions were later overturned by the Supreme Court. Malaj never disclosed that a family member had bought land from Shehu, a clear conflict of interest. He resigned in July 2020, right before mandatory anti-corruption vetting and was banned from the justice system for fifteen years. Local media still call him the richest former judge in Albania.

Once cleaned up through this judicial and administrative pipeline, the titles were passed to the Qatari-owned Albania Land Development controlled by brothers Moutaz and Ramez Al-Khayyat. SPAK is now investigating whether those titles are fraudulent, whether the 2024 reclassification of protected Vjosa-Narta land amounted to improper favoritism, and how Kushner-linked entities won strategic-investor status without the usual requirements.

Viewed against that history, one conclusion is hard to avoid. The land was never clean. The development machine simply treated the contamination as part of the plan.

IMAGE: Moutaz (left) and Ramez Al-Khayyat, accused of using their accounts at Doha Bank to fund Al-Nusra Front, an Al-Qaeda-affiliated group (Source: Arab News)

DOCUMENT: Detailed corporate and personnel mapping compiled in June 2026 of Kushner and Affinity vehicles in Albania, including Atlantic Incubation Partners LLC, Sazan Real Estate Development LLC, the Dutch trust structure behind Zvërnec South Adriatic Development, and local intermediaries such as Musa Kastrati. ( Source: Created by Author)
VKIS_Resorti_Turistik_Ishulli_i_Sazanit_.sq.en

Further down the chain the structure becomes harder to see. Sazan Real Estate Development LLC names long-time Kushner associate Asher Abehsera, CEO of Affinity Global Development, as chairman. On the Zvërnec shoreline side, Zvërnec South Adriatic Development sh.p.k. sits inside a Dutch-administered trust involving Blue Industries Investment Holding B.V. and Dutch Trust Management B.V. Ultimate beneficial owners Nikita Maximovich Vinogradov and Zoya Georgieva Gyurova hold fifty-fifty control of the parent vehicle. Five unnamed Albanian shareholders together own twenty-four percent, just under the usual threshold for public disclosure. Local intermediaries including Redi Struga through South Adriatic Development and Musa Kastrati, son of powerful oligarch Shefqet Kastrati, have been linked to land negotiations and key meetings with Ivanka Trump and Rama. SPAK has already raided premises connected to Struga.

READ MORE: Exporting the Abraham Accords: The Hidden Network Converging on Albania’s Shoreline

This is textbook jurisdictional layering. Delaware provides the clean entry point, Dutch trusts add opacity, and Albanian vehicles handle local execution. In practice, the big-name investor stays high above the fray while the operational layers absorb the heat.

The Affinity Team

Kushner supplies the brand, but the actual machinery belongs to Affinity Partners, and the team reads like a reunion of former Trump administration insiders with glaring conflicts of interest.

Senior legal counsel Chad Mizelle served as chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Justice in 2025. CFO Lauren Key received a sharp letter from Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden after reports showed that ninety-nine percent of the funds she managed came from Saudi and other Middle Eastern governments. Wyden wrote that those governments appeared to be using the vehicle to pay millions in fees to the president’s son. John Rader’s Hoover Institution biography lists him as a senior counselor at Palantir and a former chief of staff to Senator Bill Hagerty. Major General Miguel Correa, retired, was defense attaché in Dubai; he coordinated a secret special-forces rescue of a downed Emirati helicopter in Yemen and is sometimes credited with helping coin the term Abraham Accords. Avi Berkowitz led White House negotiations on those same accords.

Asher Abehsera is the steady operational bridge and chairman of the project company. Richard Grenell, former acting director of national intelligence (DNI) and Trump’s special envoy for delicate missions in the Balkans, Venezuela, and beyond, has been openly credited by Kushner with first suggesting the Albania deal and opening the necessary doors. Grenell is also known for his strong pro-Israel stance and was a key figure in advancing sanctions against Iran and the normalisation of relations between Israel and the UAE.

None of this looks like an ordinary real-estate team. Taken together, these characters constitute a network of former senior officials, intelligence-adjacent figures, and Abraham Accords architects now turning government access into private opportunity in a geopolitically sensitive corner of Europe.

The Strategic Island

Sazan is no ordinary island. Even Google Maps hints at its military past. It sits exactly where the Adriatic becomes the Ionian Sea, roughly fifty-six miles from Italy, at the narrowest point of the Strait of Otranto, the only maritime gateway between the Adriatic and the wider Mediterranean. Every major navy that wanted to dominate or monitor this corridor has held it at one time or another: Ottomans, Italians, Albanians, and Soviets.

IMAGE: Sazan Island

During the Hoxha regime, the island became a nuclear-survivable fortress. It contains thirty-six hundred bunkers, ten miles of underground tunnels linking command posts, ammunition stores, submarine pens, and hideouts, plus deep-water anchorages. The chain of control ran from the Ottomans to the Italians to the Albanians to the Soviet Navy and back to the Albanians. Now it has passed to a private American-linked group. Much of that infrastructure remains intact.

Today, the island lies inside the Karaburun-Sazan Marine National Park, Albania’s only marine protected area. The same regulations that safeguard flamingos, monk seals, and sea turtles also control who can anchor, dive, or operate in the surrounding waters. Whoever holds the surface resort and the underlying titles effectively gains the legal power to shape activity both above and below the waves.

An island this strategically located, already equipped with hardened underground capacity, seems an odd choice for a simple tourism project. When the buyers are tied to Abraham Accords diplomacy, Gulf sovereign wealth, and former U.S. intelligence figures, the questions multiply. The geography makes it impossible to ignore and invites further questions. Could the resort narrative, intentionally or not, end up providing long-term access to a ready-made observation and logistical platform in one of Europe’s critical maritime gateways? The geography itself forces the question, even if the evidence has not yet supplied the final answer. The island and the strait are simply too important to be only about luxury villas. Fold in the warren of tunnels beneath Sazan, an underground network of tunnels never opened to the public, and the island’s well‑documented submarine base, and the place suddenly looks purpose‑built for underwater maneuvers, intelligence work, and quiet surveillance games.

From MEK Camp to Coastal Carve‑Outs

This is not the first time Albanian territory has been quietly repurposed for someone else’s war. Between 2013 and 2016, thousands of members of the Iranian opposition group MEK, the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran, were transferred from Iraq to a fortified camp in Albania under a UN‑ and US‑backed arrangement. Officially, it was “humanitarian resettlement.” In practice, it turned Albania into a rear base for an exiled, US‑aligned group used in pressure campaigns against Iran, with a fenced‑off enclave operating largely outside normal public scrutiny.

The MEK compound at Ashraf‑3, outside Manzë, shows what this looks like on the ground: a walled “city of exiles” built on tens of hectares of Albanian land, with its own internal rules, security perimeter and regimented communal life. It functions less like a refugee camp than a fortified commune, an imported kibbutz without farmers, a closed collective planted on foreign soil, defended in the name of higher causes and insulated from the society around it. For many Albanians, that is the template they have in mind when they speak of “kibbutz‑style” plans for the 100 hectares at Zvërnec and Vjosa–Narta.

Local media and security analysts have long warned that hosting MEK in this way destabilises an already fragile region, tying Albania tightly into US and Israeli confrontation with Tehran while ordinary Albanians absorb the security, diplomatic and reputational risks. The camp, some 30 kilometres from Tirana, sits in the same political logic that now underpins the Sazan–Zvërnec resort: parts of the country treated as platforms, zones of exception where foreign networks can operate with special protection so long as Edi Rama delivers.

If we consider this in the broader picture, the Kushner–Affinity project is not an aberration but the coastal extension of a pattern that began inland. A government willing to host an exiled extremist organisation at Washington’s request, to sign strategic defence and technology deals with Israel, and to export its own citizens as cheap labour to Israeli agriculture, is the same government now fast‑tracking the transfer of 100 hectares of coastline to a foreign investment vehicle. For the Albanians chanting “Albania is not for sale” and “Israel out of our country,” MEK, drone factories, data centres and luxury resorts belong to the same architecture: Rama’s Albania as a low‑cost platform for US–Israeli power, with land, law and sovereignty as the entry fee.

The State Facilitator and the Live Crisis

None of this would have advanced without the Albanian state. In 2024, Rama’s government declassified Sazan for civilian use and rewrote protected-area rules. On December 30, 2024, the Strategic Investment Committee, chaired by the prime minister, granted Atlantic Incubation Partners fast-track status without the usual full business plan or feasibility study. Ivanka Trump’s visit to Zvërnec in January 2025 turned the village into a closed zone. Heavy police kept residents out while she met repeatedly with Rama, toured the old St. Mary’s Monastery, and lit candles. Local television coverage somehow failed to mention the families whose land claims remain unresolved.

VIDEO: Donald Trump’s daughter continues her visit to Vlora, travels to Zvërnec under strict security measures (Source: Report TV)

https://21stcenturywire.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/YTDown_YouTube_Media_ixNzVpr9kRU_001_1080p.mp4

.
Musa Kastrati, son of one of Albania’s most powerful oligarchs, Shefqet Kastrati, attended key meetings with Ivanka and Rama and has been linked to landowner negotiations. Redi Struga, through South Adriatic Development and related companies, controls large parcels inside the project area and serves as a local intermediary. SPAK has now raided premises connected to him.

Public anger has not faded. As of June 6, the protests had entered their seventh straight day in Tirana, Vlorë, and Zvërnec under the banner “Albania Is Not For Sale.” Environmental groups report damage that cannot be undone: millennial dunes in Zvërnec already bulldozed, water exchange in Narta Lagoon disrupted, and the Adriatic Flyway for migratory birds fractured. Two private security firms lost their licenses after clashes with demonstrators. Greek diplomats filed complaints after a Greek citizen was injured. The European Union has repeatedly warned against extending strategic-investment rules inside protected zones.

In the international press, the protests are carefully packaged as a dispute over wetlands, flamingos and coastal biodiversity. That framing is not neutral, as it erases the core political demand. The crowds in Tirana and Vlorë are not marching for abstract environmental clauses; they are marching to say they want Israel and the United States, and the entire Kushner–Affinity architecture behind them, out of Albania.

One of the clearest voices on this is Olsi Jazexhi, a whistleblower and long‑time critic of Edi Rama’s government, known domestically for his outspoken warnings about the sell‑off of Albania’s sovereignty. Far from being an anonymous “IT insider,” he has spent years publicly documenting how key sectors of the economy are being handed to foreign interests while Albanians are pushed to the margins.

In our interview, Jazexhi describes what he calls the “outsourcing of Albania’s future.” Instead of contracting highly capable Albanian IT engineers and companies for major digital infrastructure and public‑sector projects, he argues, the Rama government systematically funnels strategic work to Israeli firms and other foreign contractors. For Jazexhi, this is not modernization but managed dependency, where the brain of the country is being surrendered along with its land.

VIDEO: Patrick Hennigsen interviews Albanian national, Olsi Jazexhi about the nature of the recent and on going protest in Albania (Source: 21st Century Wire)

.
His warning is echoed in the streets of Tirana and Vlorë, where chants of “Albania is not for sale” and “Israel out of our country” turn abstract concerns into a concrete indictment of the regime. For the protesters shouting “Israel, America, get out” and “Our land in Albania is not for sale,” this is not about a single resort but about the same diagnosis Jazexhi has been making for years: a country whose territory, labour and even digital infrastructure are being traded away to keep Edi Rama in power.

Long before he became the West’s favoured interlocutor in the Balkans, Edi Rama’s own past raised questions that never fully went away. In the 1990s, he lived in France as a painter, exhibiting in Paris and elsewhere, but Albanian and regional outlets have repeatedly claimed that during that period he was arrested or even convicted in France for stealing religious icons and later changed his name from Edvin to Edi to make that trail harder to follow. Rama has denied criminal wrongdoing, and the full court records have never been publicly aired, but the allegations remain part of his domestic shadow biography: a leader whose ascent was accompanied by murky episodes abroad, and whom some critics now accuse of having been co‑opted early by foreign intelligence networks.

For Albanians now watching him clear the way for US‑ and Israeli‑linked projects from Sazan to Zvërnec, that shadow biography is significant. It feeds a widely shared suspicion that Rama is not merely corrupt, but structurally dependent, and a man whose survival in office is bound up with the interests of the very states and networks now carving up their coastline.

SPAK’s investigation now stands as the only serious brake on the entire operation. Whether it can cut through the Delaware-Dutch-Albanian layering is still an open question.

What All This Means

The Sazan and Zvërnec project has moved far beyond a simple resort controversy. It stands as a near-perfect case study of how influence works in the 2020s. Forged titles and judicial favors create the land base. Delaware and Dutch vehicles supply the legal cover. A revolving-door team of former officials delivers access and credibility. Gulf sovereign wealth provides the capital. Local power brokers such as Artur Shehu, Pellumb Petritaj, Redi Struga, and the Kastrati network smooth the path on the ground. And a strategically located island with intact Cold War infrastructure supplies the prize itself. All of it is enabled by fast-track state approvals in a country still struggling with the weaknesses of post-communist rule of law.

Kushner and his partners insist this is a legitimate private investment that will create jobs and tourism infrastructure. On the narrowest legal reading, they may be correct. Yet on any fair reading of the record, the full picture, 195 million dollars in frozen Qatari funds tied to forged titles, post-government monetization by Abraham Accords architects, and a former nuclear garrison at Europe’s southern maritime doorstep, points to something larger. It looks like the quiet privatization of strategic territory wrapped in the language of luxury development.

Whether the underground complex ever serves any purpose beyond high-end villas remains unknown for now. What is clear is that the machinery was designed to move the deal forward with as little friction as possible. In Albania, right now, that machinery sits under criminal investigation, the beaches are being levelled, and thousands of citizens are in the streets declaring that their country is not for sale.

The rabbit hole does not stop at a five-star resort. It leads straight to a much bigger question. Who ultimately controls the bunkers, the tunnels, the strait, and the long-term future of this corner of Europe?

READ MORE EUROPE NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Europe Files

SUPPORT OUR INDEPENDENT MEDIA PLATFORM – BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV

VISIT OUR TELEGRAM CHANNEL

SUNDAY WIRE EP 598 – The Epstein Class Head for Albania

NEWS WIRE — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 12:36:49 +0000

Episode #598 of SUNDAY WIRE SHOW resumes this week, June 7, 2026, broadcasting LIVE on Alternate Current Radio (ACR)…

Sunday Wire Radio Show Archives

LISTEN LIVE ON THIS PAGE – START TIMES:

5pm-8pm UK Time | 12pm-3pm EST (US) | 9am-12pm PST (US)

This week on SUNDAY WIRE returns with host Patrick Henningsen, covering the biggest stories in the US and internationally. This week we unpack the fake Lebanon “truce” agreement being pushed by Trump and Netanyahu, which was quickly rejected by Hezbollah. Also, we get into Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s latest gaudy property deal in Albania—as the self-absorbed Epstein Class covet another private island—a public-private partnership land grab that’s now triggered a massive backlash in Albania. Later in the Overdrive segment, we’re joined by teammates Bryan “Hesher”McClain, Adam “Ruckus” Clark, and Basil Valentine for deeper comment and analysis on this week’s earth-shaking geopolitical development. All this and more…

SUPPORT OUR PLATFORM AND JOIN OUR 21WIRE COMMUNITY @21WIRE.TV

This month’s featured music artists: The Real Anthem Band, Joseph Arthur, Peyoti for President, Peter Conway & Red Rumble, and Phil Zimmerman

WATCH IT LIVE ON YOUTUBE, X, RUMBLE, FACEBOOK AND HERE:

.
Listen to latest available audio upload here:

Download latest episode here

NOTE: Our weekly show will be available in podcast recording after the LIVE program, here at 21WIRE and on all major podcasting platforms (see links below).

Sunday Wire Radio Show Archives

SUNDAY SCREENING – Empire Unmasked Redux 911 Israeli and Saudi Roles (2025)

Global Affairs — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 06:00:00 +0000

Our weekly documentary film, curated by the editorial team at 21WIRE.

The greater crime of 9/11 has been the endless wars and terrorism it unleashed across ancient regions, killing countless lives. It is vital to understand how the attacks were actually carried out as a joint U.S.-Israeli-Saudi intelligence operation that used an Al-Qaeda cell as its battering ram, never truly independent of state sponsorship. The truth was buried under lies and disinformation, while the event spawned proxy forces to enforce Western corporate hegemony, all directed by Israeli interests that have shaped U.S. foreign policy for decades. The Redux is Dawson’s most comprehensive ~4-hour film, an updated and expanded version focusing on Israeli and Saudi roles, declassified documents, and the broader geopolitical aftermath. Watch:

.

.
Run time: 4h 29 mins
Written by: Ryan Dawson
Produced and Directed by: Ryan Dawson

SEE MORE SUNDAY SCREENINGS HERE

READ MORE 911 NEWS AT: 21st CENTURY WIRE 911 FILES

SUPPORT OUR INDEPENDENT MEDIA PLATFORM – BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV

VISIT OUR TELEGRAM CHANNEL

Israel’s Plan to Annex Lebanon’s Land & Resources + Trump’s Real Legacy – Henningsen on Dialogue Works

NEWS WIRE — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:39:43 +0000

The supposed ceasefire deal proposed by Lebanon’s government was actually a US-Israeli demand handed to the Lebanese President, and a road map to a violent civil war in Lebanon. We explain how and why. Another crucial mechanism for the continued war and genocide in the Middle East, as well as the erosion of civil liberties and rights in the West—is the heavily distorted and politicized labeling and proscription of “terrorism” by Israel and its Western allies. History will look back on this weaponization as the source of most of the international strife we’ve witnessed over the last 40 years. Meanwhile, Iran continues to demonstrate how its regional hegemony is increasing, while Trump and MAGA continue to collapse at home ahead of the Midterm elections this fall. Meanwhile, Israel and US are incredibly exposed militarily, and are now buying for time to restock their dwindling defenses. All this and more.

Dialogue Works host Nima Alkhorshid talks to editor of 21st Century Wire Patrick Henningsen. Watch:

.
READ MORE IRAN NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Iran Files

SUPPORT OUR INDEPENDENT MEDIA PLATFORM – BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV

VISIT OUR TELEGRAM CHANNEL

UKC News: Starmer Bans Cenk & Piker + What’s Behind Kushner’s Albania Land Grab

NEWS WIRE — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 11:58:15 +0000

This program was broadcast on Friday June 5, 2026. Here are the main stories…

War: Ukraine update and analysis of UK’s position

Lebanon: Ceasefire or no ceasefire? That is the question

Polanski: Green leader backs campaign monitoring IDF Brits

UK ban Cenk & Piker: Controversial cancelling comes under fire

Albania: Private island one big investment opportunity

Vaccines: AI is designing jabs (and the BBC loves it)

Ofcom AI: New guidelines claim neutrality but show direction of travel

In Case You Missed It: Stories spotted by our UKC sleuths

Hosts Patrick Henningsen and Mike Robinson, joined by Basil Valentine with Friday’s end-of-week news round-up. Watch:

.
See more UK Column News at their archive here.

SUPPORT OUR 21WIRE FUNDRAISING DRIVE – BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV

VISIT OUR TELEGRAM CHANNEL

Geopolitical & Economic Shift: What Are Russia and China Planning? – Henningsen talks to Krapivnik

NEWS WIRE — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 11:40:04 +0000

Too many moving parts. Can the checkers players in Washington outflank the chess masters in Moscow and Beijing? From Trump family business and real estate scams, to Greater Israel’s new settlements in Cyprus, Marco Rubio’s ambitions to be crowned Viceroy of Cuba and Venezuela, and the crumbling of Uncle Sam’s, NGO soft power complex, the US empire is in a major bind now. Meanwhile, Russian and Chinese gold and financial resilience underpins BRICS, as a new world order emerges. All this and more.

Host Stanislav Krapivnik talks with Patrick Henningsen. Watch:

.
READ MORE BRICS NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire BRICS Files

SUPPORT OUR INDEPENDENT MEDIA PLATFORM – BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV

VISIT OUR TELEGRAM CHANNEL

‘All For What’ – A Message to America from Col. Doug Macgregor

NEWS WIRE — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 11:03:24 +0000

Iran: a war “you didn’t vote for”, and a supply chain that snaps at Hormuz. The American public needs to understand how key economic and geopolitical elements such as fuel, fertilizer, food prices, and foreign influence—all feed into one blunt thesis. The result: gas is way up, your grocery bill is way up (and won’t be coming down anytime soon). And then there’s the question that nobody in Washington wants to be asked on camera: “Who is governing this country and for whom?” How has Washington allowed its foreign policy and military deployments in the Middle East to be completely dictated by a foreign lobby? How can this same foreign lobby be allowed to run constitutional Congressional representatives out of office? Hear the argument, and decide for yourself.

Col Douglas Macgregor, CEO of the National Conversation, lays out the importance of understanding the dire crossroad which America currently finds itself at – and what needs to happen next. Watch:

.
READ MORE TRUMP NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Trump Files

SUPPORT OUR INDEPENDENT MEDIA PLATFORM – BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV

VISIT OUR TELEGRAM CHANNEL

The Quiet Coup That Put Israel Inside Americas Intelligence Core.

Global Affairs — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 09:45:05 +0000

Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

While Washington’s media class was loudly hyperventilating over Section 224 of the defense bill, the brazen attempt to weld the U.S. and Israeli militaries into a single high-tech fighting force, a far more consequential power shift was quietly advancing through the Senate with almost no resistance.

Section 622 of S. 4615, the Intelligence Authorisation Act for Fiscal Year 2027, is not some routine bureaucratic tweak. It is a calculated, multi-year project to permanently embed Israeli strategic priorities into the bloodstream of American intelligence.

DOCUMENT: A full, standalone copy of Section 622 of S. 4615 — “United States-Israel Intelligence Sharing Enhancement” — direct reference to the bill’s operative language (Source: Senate/Congress document system)
section_622_official

Where Section 224 focuses on tanks, jets, and joint weapons production and AI, Section 622 targets the invisible nervous system that often matters more: raw intelligence flows, surveillance capabilities, cyber operations, data streams, and regional early-warning networks. And it has moved forward with almost zero public debate.

The bill doesn’t politely encourage closer ties. It mandates them. It orders the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to aggressively expand intelligence sharing with Israel across cyber threats, sanctions evasion, missile and drone attacks, non-state actors, and air-and-space domains. It then extends this integration to the Arab states that signed the Abraham Accords, effectively building a U.S.-backed, Israel-centred intelligence bloc across the region.

This is a five-year strategic lockdown, with Congress demanding annual reports tracking “seamless integration” of Israel into regional air and missile defense architectures, full interoperability of technology networks between the U.S., Israel, and Abraham Accords partners, and detailed catalogs of every remaining legal, technical, policy, counterintelligence, and security barrier still in the way. At this stage, one could assume that lawmakers aren’t overseeing the relationship; they’re issuing marching orders to keep deepening it.

To block any future president tempted to pull back, the bill installs heavy procedural padlocks. Section 622 prohibits any suspension, reduction, or material limitation of intelligence cooperation with Israel except in the narrow case of a “specific and identifiable national security concern,” with mandatory 15-day advance notice to Congress. Another section in the same bill adds a second tripwire, naming Israel (alongside Ukraine and Taiwan) as one of the privileged few countries that trigger immediate congressional alarm bells if support is ever curtailed.

The double standard is glaring. In Section 620, Congress carefully wrote an explicit off-ramp for Ukraine, allowing intelligence support to be limited in cases of human rights violations, atrocities, or breaches of the laws of armed conflict. For Israel, they wrote nothing of the sort. No human-rights conditions. No equivalent brake. Only extra layers of statutory armor. This was not haste or oversight but a deliberate hierarchy in which Israel First is now codified in law.

The bill doubles down on the fusion elsewhere. It expands private-sector intelligence pipelines, shields those exchanges from FOIA and public scrutiny, rolls back reporting requirements on privacy, civil liberties, and oversight risks, and accelerates artificial intelligence tools for targeting and surveillance. All of this while Israel’s notorious private surveillance industry stands ready at the receiving end.

Chief among them is NSO Group and its infamous Pegasus spyware — military-grade malware repeatedly deployed against journalists, human rights defenders, dissidents, and political opponents. The Pegasus Project, Amnesty International, Citizen Lab, and others have documented its use on targets ranging from associates of Jamal Khashoggi to reporters and activists worldwide. In 2025, a U.S. court ordered NSO Group to pay more than $167 million in damages to WhatsApp for unlawfully hacking over 1,400 devices. Congress is widening the pipes that feed into this ecosystem while simultaneously weakening transparency and accountability.

The timing sharpens the cynicism. These binding commitments are being locked in just as Bill Pulte, a Trump loyalist pulled from housing finance with zero intelligence experience, has been installed as acting Director of National Intelligence. The architecture is being built, the guardrails are being removed, and the keys are handed to someone chosen for loyalty rather than expertise.

Section 224 and Section 622 together reveal the full picture. One noisy fight over military fusion, one stealth operation over intelligence fusion. Both push the same way, tightening integration, raising barriers to reversal, and triggering a tilt that puts Israeli security and regional dominance ahead of independent American judgment.

This is not standard alliance maintenance. It is legislative entrenchment of a one-sided special relationship at a moment when the costs, risks, and moral hazards have never been more urgent. Critics like Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace have sounded the alarm for good reason.

If this is what “America First” looks like in practice, the fine print exposes something much closer to Israel First, hard-coded into U.S. statute, insulated from democratic accountability, and engineered to survive any future attempt at course correction.

READ MORE US NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire US News Archive Files

SUPPORT OUR INDEPENDENT MEDIA PLATFORM – BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV

VISIT OUR TELEGRAM CHANNEL

The Athanor Affair: French Intelligence Veterans Ran a Masonic Murder Ring

Global Affairs — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 17:29:07 +0000

Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

France is watching one of its own monsters crawl out of the shadows. In a sealed Paris courtroom, twenty-two men sit in the dock. They stand accused of turning a quiet Masonic lodge into a private murder-and-intimidation franchise. The indictment reads like a disturbing merger between active officers from the DGSE, France’s foreign-intelligence service (the French CIA), veterans of the DGSI, the domestic-intelligence agency often compared to the FBI, street cops, ex-spooks now posing as “security consultants,” lodge bigwigs, businessmen, and hired muscle. What started as men in white gloves calling each other “brother” allegedly became a shadow service that sold surveillance, beatings, and killings to anyone with a grudge and enough cash.

It blew open the morning two supposed “agents” were caught sitting in a blacked-out Renault in Créteil, fake plates on the bumper, gloves on, a pistol fitted with a homemade suppressor, and a GPS tracker ready to go. Their target was Marie-Hélène Dini, a business coach who’d crossed the wrong people. When police swarmed them, the pair claimed they were on a classified DGSE op and that Dini worked for Mossad. Officially, the DGSE is banned from running lethal operations on French soil. The story fell apart almost instantly. What stayed behind was a straightforward contract killing and the realisation that men tied to French intelligence and a Masonic lodge had been ready to pull the trigger.

A pattern of violence

Once that hit squad was exposed, the same names and methods started leaking across other case files like blood under a door. Racing driver Laurent Pasquali, deep in debt after a sponsorship deal soured, was found shot through the heart in his garage. Local councillor Jean-François Le Helloco was dragged from his car outside his house in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés and beaten bloody in a vicious political power play. Factory technician Hassan Touzani, a Yellow Vest regular who wanted to start a union, was quietly slated for “neutralisation.” Every single case traced back to the same pattern: a client with money and rage, an intermediary with Masonic contacts and an intelligence résumé, and a crew of operators who still moved and talked like they were on official state business.

This is the Athanor affair, named after the Puteaux lodge at its centre, and it is forcing France to stare at its own rotten reflection.

The brokers of Athanor

At the centre sits Frédéric Vaglio, the slick ex-intelligence type who ran a string of “strategic intelligence” firms in France and Switzerland. Inside the Athanor lodge, he played the broker, turning respectable contracts for audits and crisis management into black-bag jobs. Need the new mayor in Saint-Maur spied on? Done. Want a troublesome councillor taught a lesson on his own driveway? Handled. Racing driver won’t pay up? Assets “recovered”, one bullet to the chest. Union activist getting loud at a plastics plant in Oyonnax? Fold him into a risk assessment and put him on the list.

Daniel Beaulieu, a former senior figure inside domestic intelligence, supplied the institutional gravitas. As a high-ranking DGSI man, he once ran authorised operations in the name of national security. After retiring, he kept speaking the language of the state, missions, national interest, necessity, while allegedly building operations that escalated from watching targets to applying pressure to putting them on the ground. He recruited the trigger-pullers, including underpaid corporals from the DGSE’s Cercottes base who thought they were doing off-the-books work for the Republic.

Jean-Luc Bagur, the Venerable Master of the Athanor lodge and a business coach himself, allegedly provided the private chamber where it all happened. In that Puteaux apartment, under the protection of ritual and secrecy, intelligence veterans, cops, and clients could launder personal vendettas into what they called counter-intelligence operations. Dini wasn’t simply a rival coach. She was reframed as a Mossad asset. A petty turf war in the coaching world became a national-security threat worthy of a hit team.

Clients in the shadows

The intermediaries and street muscle believed it, or desperately needed to. Men like protection specialist Sébastien Leroy spent years doing surveillance and clean-ups, convinced they were serving France through unofficial channels. The DGSE soldiers told themselves the same comforting lie. On the stand, they’re still clinging to it. They were lied to. They’re patriots. This was never supposed to be criminal. Prosecutors have the chats, the payments, and the complete lack of any official paper trail. No orders from headquarters at Boulevard Mortier, where the DGSE is based. No green light from the Interior Ministry. Just cash, lodge dinners, and encrypted instructions from private companies.

The clients look even more damning precisely because they look so normal. Wealthy motorsport sponsors who lost money on Pasquali. Factory owners in Plastics Valley annoyed by a mouthy technician. Local political allies of an ex-minister and mayor locked in a knife-fight with rivals on the right. None of them had to meet gangsters in back alleys. They sat in offices with men who still carried the scent of the state, flashed the right acronyms, wore the right lodge ring, and spoke the soothing language of security. Violence arrived gift-wrapped in consultancy jargon.

The warning

Now the courtroom is stripping the wrapping off. Dini recounts the terror of learning two armed men had been waiting for her outside her home. Le Helloco describes the ambush at his gate and the warning about his wife and kids. Touzani talks about discovering his boss’s complaint had escalated into a plan to make him disappear. Pasquali’s mother waits for answers about her son’s burned car, the months of silence, and the remains found in a forest.

This isn’t one rogue lodge. It is a warning shot about an entire ecosystem, the revolving door between French intelligence and private consulting, the way state tools and secrecy culture get privatised, the parallel economy of repression available to mayors, CEOs, and anyone rich enough. Freemasonry’s broader networks will protest it’s just one bad apple. Maybe so. But the image of aprons and gavels in a murder trial is going to linger.

When the verdicts come, some will walk and some will go down. The real test is whether Paris treats this as a freak accident or the visible tip of something deeply systemic. Because if the revolving doors keep spinning, the lodge apartments stay private, and ex-spooks keep selling their black arts to the highest bidder, Athanor won’t be the last time French intelligence veterans decide to run their own private death squad on the side.

READ MORE FRANCE NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire France Files

SUPPORT OUR INDEPENDENT MEDIA PLATFORM – BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV

VISIT OUR TELEGRAM CHANNEL

Exporting the Abraham Accords: The Hidden Network Converging on Albania’s Shoreline

Global Affairs — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:37:16 +0000

Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

A quiet stretch of Albania’s Adriatic coast is being reshaped by two luxury tourism projects: a vast resort planned on the Zvërnec peninsula south of Vlorë, and a 1.4-billion-euro island complex backed by Jared Kushner on nearby Sazan Island. One site lies inside a protected wetland landscape, the other on a decommissioned military island tied to the same coastal ecosystem and tourism frontier, and together they have turned a once obscure corner of the country into a test case for how much of Albania’s coastline can be handed to strategic investors.

The corporate veil: Dutch holdings and hidden Albanian stakes

On paper, the two developments are packaged as separate bets on high-end tourism: one led by Zvërnec South Adriatic Development S.H.P.K. on land the government insists is private, the other by Atlantic Incubation Partners LLC with the Albanian state as shareholder. The ownership filings, the protests at Zvërnec, and the strategic-investor status granted to Sazan – all point toward the same underlying structural problem: Dutch holding companies, hidden Albanian stakes, Gulf partners and state entities linking the peninsula and the island.

CHART: Ownership chain linking Dutch holding companies, Zvërnec South Adriatic Development and the Sazan project vehicles (Source: Created by Author)

The paperwork on Zvërnec South Adriatic Development S.H.P.K. leads quickly out of Albania. Official extracts list South Adriatic Development as an Albanian company owned by Smart Construction Invest sh.p.k., controlled by businessman Redi Struga, while investor material and media reports say the Zvërnec resort vehicle is owned by Universal Properties Projects B.V. in the Netherlands. Separate Dutch filings place Universal in the same Amsterdam network as Blue Industries Investment Holding B.V. and Dutch Trust Management B.V., companies that also appear in the Sazan structure.

Interestingly, five Albanian ghost shareholders hold 24 percent inside Blue Industries, according to reporting on the beneficial-ownership chain behind the structure. A 24 percent slice is low enough to avoid public disclosure and high enough to preserve real weight inside the company. Foreign investment can be advertised through the Dutch shell while a significant Albanian interest remains out of sight.

DOCUMENT: Corporate Dossier on Blue Industries Investment Holding B.V (Source: Created by Author)
Blue_Industries_Investment_Holding_BV_Report

The chain is simple on paper: Vinogradov and Gyurova sit above Universal, Universal sits above Blue Industries, and Blue Industries sits above Dutch Trust Management. The Dutch names on the filings are only part of the story. The more revealing question is why this structure was chosen and who it allows to stay out of view.

The same Dutch configuration appears again in the larger Sazan project. There, the field expands to include Atlantic Incubation Partners LLC, a vehicle linked to Jared Kushner, and Power International Holding, the Qatari conglomerate associated with the Al-Khayyat brothers. An investigation published by BalkanWeb and BIRN traced Sazan Operations S.H.P.K. and other foreign companies behind the island project back to the same Blue Industries structure and the same 24 percent Albanian bloc.

Separate on paper, intertwined on the ground

Zvërnec and Sazan are sold as separate developments with different land questions and different legal treatment. The paperwork points elsewhere: the same Dutch layer, the same partially hidden Albanian participation, overlapping foreign partners and, on the Sazan side, the Albanian state itself.

The proposed Sazan Island Resort has been valued at around 1.4 billion euros and is intended to turn a decommissioned military island into a high-end tourism complex through a public-private partnership involving state actors. The company behind the Zvërnec peninsula project says its own investment could exceed 4 billion euros, generate more than 10,000 jobs and contribute 3 to 4 percent of Albania’s gross domestic product (GDP) within five years. Numbers on that scale point to more than a pair of resorts. They imply new transport patterns, new access rules, new security arrangements and a different political relationship to the coastline itself.

Prime Minister Edi Rama has tried to keep a distinction between the two projects, insisting that the Zvërnec project stands on private property while Sazan is different because it is state land and the state has sought to be a partner. Legally speaking, that distinction is valid, but in the ownership map, many of the same names still run through both projects.

IMAGE: Map of southern Albanian coast showing Vlora Airport, Sazan Island and Zvërnec peninsula (Source: Satellite imagery 29/08/2023)

From local fences to national protests

The demonstrations at Zvërnec are unfolding in the same protected coastal landscape and political moment that frame the push to turn nearby Sazan into an elite destination. The 2026 Zvërnec protests began as local resistance in the villages of Zvërnec and Nartë and widened into a national issue after clashes near the project site drew country-wide attention. Demonstrators in Tirana rallied under the slogan “Albania is not for sale,” marching to the prime minister’s office and casting the fight as a defence of public coastline and protected landscape rather than a narrow dispute over property titles.

By the time the language in the streets turned from property to sovereignty, the conflict had already moved beyond planning law. Fences, guards, scuffles and police action gave the public something concrete to attach to an otherwise technical investment story.

During a May protest in the Portonovo area near Zvërnec, police initiated proceedings against 17 demonstrators after they attempted to block works at the site. Video showing private security personnel pulling a protester into the enclosed zone led to the revocation of the licences of two security firms, Myrto Security and Major Security. When a protester with Greek citizenship was injured, Albania’s Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs issued a response saying those responsible for the violence had been arrested and would face prosecution.

A project sold as an investment began to look, on the ground, like a struggle over force, access and who gets removed from the frame when development arrives. Residents were left facing fences, guards and criminal proceedings while the companies behind the project continued to speak in the language of growth and jobs.

A protected lagoon under pressure

Zvërnec lies in or near the Narta Lagoon, part of the Vjosa–Narta Protected Landscape and a wetland recognised as internationally important for migratory waterbirds. Conservation groups have warned that the area is significant for dozens of species listed under international agreements and that further large-scale infrastructure or tourism development would damage habitats already under pressure.

The pressure did not begin with the current project. Earlier reporting on the so-called “Zvërnec Trust” described plans for construction of up to eight floors within the protected area. The current fight belongs to that longer history of protected land repeatedly reopening to investor ambition.

Sazan: military base to luxury resort

Sazan carries a different history but the same tension. For decades, it was a military island, restricted, strategic and largely inaccessible before reappearing as a luxury resort proposition. Moving it from restricted state territory into private tourism changes not only the use of the land but the meaning of the island itself.

On Sazan, the state is inside the project, holding shares and signing as a partner. Albanian records show that the government created a joint‑stock company, Albanian State Development & Real Estate, to represent the state in the “Tourist Resort, Sazan Island” project, and that the company is wholly owned by the Albanian Investment Corporation. AIC is led by Elira Kokona, a former senior government legal official who now heads the corporation and sits at the centre of the state’s real‑estate strategy. Elira Kokona, a long‑time ally of Edi Rama, sits at the centre of the state’s real‑estate strategy. Separate reporting on the project notes that the public‑private partnership involves these state entities alongside Kushner’s Atlantic Incubation Partners and that the development has been granted strategic‑investor status under a ten‑year set of conditions.

Strategic-investor status comes with faster procedures, privileged access to ministries and a smoother route through the bureaucracy than most citizens or smaller investors could expect. In a case this politically sensitive, speed can work in favour of opacity. A project can reach the point of no return before the public has had a clear view of who is behind it and on what terms the state has entered the deal.

The wider geopolitical picture

Foreign policy also runs through the projects. Albania has deepened ties with Israel in recent years in cyber-security, energy and technology, including a memorandum of understanding on ‘cyber cooperation’ after cyber-attacks targeting Albania that the government in Tirana and its allies have attributed to Iran. Those ties have extended into tourism, aviation and economic branding through direct flights and related promotion.

Kushner’s presence sits inside that wider shift. He was one of the key political architects behind the Abraham Accords and later founded the Abraham Accords Peace Institute, an organisation built to deepen the trade, tourism and investment ties created by the normalisation agreements. Reporting around the institute’s annual work has described trade among Abraham Accords partners surpassing 4 billion dollars, with the broader real value estimated much higher once sectors such as services and energy are counted.

Tourism was one of the tools that turned diplomatic normalisation into a permanent economic interest. Analyses of the accords’ economic effects describe tourism growth, direct flights and cross-border business routes as central to making the new alignments profitable and durable. Public reporting in the Gulf press described around 450,000 Israeli tourists visiting the United Arab Emirates in the first two years after the accords.

Set against the tourism and trade deals that followed the Abraham Accords, Sazan falls into line as another link in that chain rather than an outlier. Policy discussion around the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) and related regional integration plans has emphasised the role of ports, infrastructure, tourism and trade routes in binding markets and states together. A luxury development on a strategic Albanian island backed by Kushner, Qatari partners and the Albanian state fits neatly into that picture, whatever commercial language is used to describe it.

An unfinished question

Both the documents and the clashes on the coast circle back to the same question. The point is not to argue against outside money, but to ask whether strategic stretches of coast are being reorganised through opaque structures that hide who profits and leave local people with little say over what is built around them.

Even after following the filings through Albania and the Netherlands, the identities behind the five Albanian shareholders remain off the public record. Public reporting also makes clear that Albania will hold a share through Albanian State Development & Real Estate in the Sazan resort, while the detailed conditions of the partnership remain difficult for citizens to examine in a consolidated form.

As long as those names and terms stay out of view, the story cannot really be closed. The key questions, amongst which are “who those shareholders are, how profits are divided, and what the state has promised, are still the hardest for citizens to answer from official documents alone.

Update (3 June 2026): As this article goes to press, thousands of protesters marched in Tirana on 2–3 June under the slogan “Albania is not for sale”, explicitly linking the Zvërnec and Sazan developments, while the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecution Office (SPAK) opened a formal investigation into the 2024 changes to the protected status and land ownership in the Vjosa–Narta area. According to a recent OCCRP report, Albania’s special anti-corruption prosecution office has now ordered a preventive seizure of the accounts of Albania Land Development, a company tied to the project’s land side, as part of an investigation into allegedly fraudulent property titles

Until those questions are answered, the fences and protests at Zvërnec will continue to stand for more than a local dispute. They point instead to a wider suspicion that the coast is being reorganised through a system legible to investors and officials but only partly legible to the public asked to live with the consequences.

READ MORE EUROPE NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Europe Files

SUPPORT OUR INDEPENDENT MEDIA PLATFORM – BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV

VISIT OUR TELEGRAM CHANNEL