From Russia with Love
In 1954, the Reece Committee saw Norman Dodd testify that the major foundations were deliberately working toward convergence with the Soviet system.
Congress didn’t act.
Twenty-one years later, that convergence was being studied in secret.
In April 1975, a CIA intelligence report on Gosplan was prepared at the request of Alan Greenspan — then Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Ford1.
Twelve years later, Greenspan became Chairman of the Federal Reserve2.
The report3 describes Gosplan’s operational architecture in terms Yevenko would recognise: drawing up plans, monitoring implementation, and employing ‘the absolute authority of the Soviet state in imposing the economic policy and decisions of the central leadership’. It details the material balance system — ‘planning ‘material balances’ or ‘input-output’ relationships’ — and the five-way decomposition of the economy: by productive sector, by geographic area, by end use, by physical flows, and by financial counterpart.
Five dimensions. Map them onto the contemporary system: ISSB (sector), EU regional policy (geography), EU Taxonomy (end use), CBAM (physical flows), NGFS and Basel (financial counterpart). Five contemporary institutions performing what the CIA described Gosplan doing in one building.
The report also covers Gosplan’s Main Computer Center under Lebedinskiy4, who advocated ‘sliding fifteen-year plans, in which a new fifteen-year plan would be formulated every five years’. Long-term projections updated periodically, each triggering present-day obligations. That’s NGFS climate scenarios5 — described as Soviet planning methodology in a classified briefing to the man who would run the Federal Reserve.
Lebedinskiy was a member of the US-USSR Working Group on Computers6 — one of several bilateral channels that emerged from the same programme. In 1966, Lyndon Johnson called for scientists of East and West to work together on problems beyond the military: energy, environment, health7. He enlisted McGeorge Bundy to pursue it. Bundy commissioned a feasibility report from RAND — the institution that had designed PPBS8 — written by Roger Levien9, who became IIASA’s second director. Bundy then met Jermen Gvishiani, Deputy Chairman of the Soviet State Committee for Science and Technology.
Gvishiani became Chairman of the IIASA Council10.
The timeline is worth stating plainly. Johnson extended PPBS across all federal agencies in 196511. Johnson’s executive orders gave the Federal Reserve structural oversight of commercial bank data in 19651213. Johnson initiated the IIASA project with Kosygin in 196614. RAND — which designed PPBS — wrote the report that launched IIASA. One president, one three-year window: the American version of the architecture installed domestically and the formal merger with the Soviet version initiated internationally.
By the time Nixon arrived in Moscow on 22 May 197215, the bilateral channels had been running for six years16. The working groups were operational, the IIASA charter was being negotiated, and the systems analysis merger was already underway. The environmental treaty didn’t initiate the cooperation, but it did provide a public-facing ethic for channels that were already built.
Five months later IIASA opened, not because the treaty made it possible but because six years of preparatory work had already constructed it.
It wasn’t just one treaty. On 23 May, in St. Vladimir Hall in the Grand Kremlin Palace, Nixon and Podgorny signed three agreements: environmental protection17, science and technology cooperation18, and medical science and public health19. The SALT arms control agreements got the headlines20. The environmental, science, and health agreements were barely noticed, drowned out by the noise of the upcoming meeting in Stockholm which yielded the UNEP21 (United Nations Environment Programme) — and never connected to each other.
Until now.
Those three tracks had been specified together from the start — a single thread running unbroken for over fifty years:
1968 — The UNESCO Biosphere Conference specifies environmental monitoring and human health as integrated concerns — including zoonotic diseases arising from interactions between man and animals, and ‘the establishment of the necessary balance between man and his environment’22.
1972 (May 23) — The US-USSR agreements formalise both tracks simultaneously as bilateral cooperation. Environmental protection and medical science/public health signed within few days of one another23.
1973 — SCOPE extends the GEMS (Global Environmental Monitoring System) proposal to include human health impacts of environmental change24.
1974 — UNEP’s GEMS incorporates public health surveillance on the basis that ‘man is part of the environment’25.
1975 — The UNESCO Belgrade Charter calls for a ‘global ethic’ and the integration of environmental education into school curricula worldwide26.
1979 — The World Climate Conference in Geneva, organised by foundation-funded ICSU, establishes the carbon consensus — the specific cognitive standard the environmental track requires. The health track has pathogens, while the environmental track has a molecule27.
1987 — Gorbachev declares he feels ‘responsible for the world’s destiny’ and signals environmentalism as the unifying global cause28. The same month, the CIA analyses Soviet objectives in seeking a renewed US-USSR scientific cooperation agreement29 — the bilateral channels from the 1970s reopened to support Gorbachev’s economic modernisation and address the Soviet Union’s ‘continuing technological dependence on the West’.
1992 — The WHO Commission on Health and Environment publishes Our Planet, Our Health, formally linking environmental degradation to human health outcomes30. The same year the Earth Summit produces Agenda 2131, the UNFCCC32 and the Convention on Biological Diversity33. The health track and the environmental track converge through parallel institutional channels in the same twelve months.
1997 — Alleged H5N1 avian influenza in Hong Kong triggers mass poultry culling, livestock surveillance systems, and vaccination programmes — the 1968 specification’s ‘zoonotic diseases arising from interactions between man and animals’ operationalised for the first time34.
2004 — One Health formalises the integration: human health, animal health, environmental health as a single managed system35.
2020 — The integration is operationalised. An alleged zoonotic virus triggers environmental policy (lockdowns reducing emissions), health surveillance (digital COVID certificates), and economic governance (pandemic recovery funds tied to green transition) simultaneously. All three tracks activated through one event.
Environment and health were never separate programmes. They were specified together in 1968, formalised together in 1972, monitored together from 1974, and merged operationally in 2004. One Health is the completion of a design specified in the UNESCO Biosphere Conference recommendations fifty-six years earlier — and signed into bilateral superpower cooperation in Moscow in 1972.
The clearing function doesn’t just control financial flows. It also governs biological flows. And the institutional basis for governing both through a single architecture was laid on 23 May 1972.
The name
In February 1981, a classified CIA briefing36 was sent from Robert M. Gates — who would later serve as CIA Director and Secretary of Defense37 — to Richard Pipes at the National Security Council. It covered Soviet internal politics and preparations for the 26th Party Congress.
In the section on agro-industrial reorganisation, the CIA reports intelligence from ‘Leonid Yevenko, an economic specialist with the Institute for the USA and Canada’.
The Institute for the USA and Canada was founded by Georgi Arbatov in 196738. It was one of the primary channels for Soviet-American policy dialogue throughout the Cold War — the same institutional interface as IIASA, operating from the Soviet side.
A Yevenko operating at the exact intersection Planning in the USSR mapped: a Soviet economist specialising in the USA, positioned within the institutional channel connecting Soviet planning expertise to American policymakers, briefed on by the CIA, in a document sent from the man who would run the CIA to the man advising Reagan on Soviet policy.
Yevenko provided intelligence that a supra-ministerial body would be created to administer the agro-industrial programme. A permanent apparatus, purpose-built, embedded above the ministerial level. The same institutional form the SIIAG recommended for Britain in 2025 — the Office for the Impact Economy39.
By 1986, the CIA was monitoring the next iteration: inter-industry scientific-technical complexes coordinating research, planning, and production across all ministries, with Gosstandart40 — the State Committee on Standards — inspecting enterprise compliance against standardised quality certification. From 1987, the CIA reported, ‘the whole of the country’s industry will operate under the new conditions’.
The SIIAG’s Office for the Impact Economy and the ISSB’s harmonised reporting, operational in Moscow decades earlier.
The hybrid
The architecture continued to develop. In 1965, the Kosygin-Liberman reform41 shifted Soviet economic management from administrative command to economic methods. The key concept was khozraschot42 — self-financing for enterprises. Firms remained state-owned but operated on a profit-and-loss basis, keeping account of all outlays covered by income plus a margin of profit.
Not free market. Not command economy. State direction with enterprise autonomy within the lanes. The individual is free within parameters they didn’t set. PEP43 called it Freedom and Planning44 in 1932. The CIA called it the World Congress for Freedom and Democracy in 196145. The IFDA called it The Third System in 1979. Blair called it The Third Way in 199146. Reinicke called it Trisectoral Networks in 200047. The form predates all of them. Lenin called it the New Economic Policy in 192148.
The reform’s stated objective: ‘shifting emphasis at all levels of planning and guidance to economic methods of socialist management’. Economic methods replacing administrative methods. Fewer direct orders — more indicators. Same planning, through economic levers instead of administrative commands. That’s the transition from Gosplan command to ISSB disclosure-based governance — thirty years before the ISSB existed.
And the governing principle: ‘what is beneficial for society is beneficial for the enterprise and for the workman’. Enterprise profit aligned with social benefit through institutional design. That’s ‘impact investing’ stated as Soviet economic policy, thirty years before the term was coined at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center.
Impact investing aligns capital with social outcomes. The Soviet principle aligns enterprise profit with social benefit. Same alignment, same direction, same institutional design — described from opposite ends of the transaction.
The Soviets were already building the hybrid — market mechanisms as instruments of planning. The contemporary system picked up where they left off.
The export
The architecture wasn’t confined to Soviet territory. A 1989 RAND Corporation report analyses a Gosplan advisory group’s work in Ethiopia49 — Soviet planners embedded inside the Ethiopian Central Planning Commission.
The results were predictable. Grain production fell. Exports declined 67%. Military spending consumed 59% of the budget. The same ‘disproportionality’ Yevenko described — produced by the same architecture, under an African Marxist ethic instead of a Soviet one. Different ethic. Same outcome.
But the most revealing detail is the response. Even while recommending a temporary liberalisation, the Gosplan advisers called for ‘greater authority for central planners, more rigid price controls, tighter regulation of customs and foreign exchange transactions, higher and better administered taxes’. The architecture’s response to its own failure is always more architecture — more standards, more clearing… more control.
Their recommended solution had a name: a New Economic Policy — the same NEP Lenin introduced in 1921, the same hybrid the contemporary system now operates permanently. Private enterprise permitted ‘for the next three to five years, but not permanently’. The market freedom is the backup mode the architecture defaults to when command fails — grant autonomy within reason until the system can stabilise. Lenin’s temporary fix became the permanent operating mode, because the market turned out to execute the plan more effectively than Gossnab ever could.
RAND — the institution where PPBS was developed — analysing Gosplan’s overseas operations. And RAND’s observation, buried on page two: ‘the customary techniques long employed by Soviet economists to explain away malfunctions in their own country’s economy were applied to the Ethiopian situation’. The architecture doesn’t just export its institutional form — it even exports its failure narratives.
Blame the operator, blame the conditions. Never blame the system itself.
The gate
A 1957 CIA intelligence report describes how Gosbank operated at the rayon level in Baku50. The source was a field agent with direct access.
The basic criterion for approval of loans was the state of the account of the respective enterprise. If the enterprise had a debit account, the loan was not granted.
What clears, proceeds. What doesn’t, is blocked.
The Chief Accountant was actually the only person in the bank who approved loans.
Lenin’s accounting and control51 — the person doing the bookkeeping operates the clearing function.
Enterprises applied for loans twice a month to pay wages — the advance and the salary. No clearing, no wages. Every worker’s pay flowed through clearing, with Gosbank evaluating the enterprise’s compliance and releasing funds accordingly.
The CIA filed this report in the same document as a report on conditions in Forced Labor Camp 385/1, Mordovskaya ASSR. Three hundred women dying of tuberculosis every year. Bread rations cut from 600 to 300 grams for failing to meet production norms. Professor Shefir, a woman TB specialist from Moscow, still in the camp.
The CIA understood what these essays document: Gosbank and the gulag are two aspects of one system. The clearing function handles compliance through conditional settlement. The camp handles what the clearing function can’t. The contemporary version removes the camps but retains clearing.
The ratchet
An August 1961 CIA report — written the same year McNamara installed PPBS at the Pentagon — analyses Soviet industrial planning reorganisation52. Its key finding:
A decree of 27 July ‘On Further Expanding the Authority of the Gosbank of the USSR’ provided even closer financial monitoring of industrial enterprises than Gosbank had exercised under the ministerial system.
During a supposed ‘decentralisation’, the clearing function tightened, and the monitoring expanded.
The CIA also documented the technique that made this possible.
The industrial reorganisation of 1957 and subsequent changes have contained elements of both centralization and decentralization. A considerable amount of administrative detail has been decentralized. Republic councils of ministers now administer enterprises accounting for 94 percent of total industrial production — but their control over these enterprises is far from complete.
Local administration, central standards, central monitoring — the autonomy covers trivial matters while the authority over everything that counts is retained at the top. The EU calls this principle ‘subsidiarity’ and presents it as a ‘democratic safeguard’: decisions taken at the most local level appropriate53.
But which level is appropriate for allegedly global matters?
And the CIA identified anticipatory governance as Soviet methodology:
The attempt to obtain greater continuity in plans, whether it succeeds or not, will force planners to look ahead in greater detail and may lead to a more accurate anticipation of the requirements of future planning periods.
Long-term planning forcing planners to anticipate future requirements — which then become present-day obligations. The equivalent of contemporary NGFS climate scenarios54, described by the CIA in 1961 as Soviet planning methodology.
The sliding plan
Lebedinskiy’s ‘sliding fifteen-year plans, in which a new fifteen-year plan would be formulated every five years’ deserves its own section, because the contemporary system runs on the same cycle.
Agenda 2155 (1992) became the Millennium Development Goals56 (2000–2015), which became the Sustainable Development Goals57 (2015–2030), which will become whatever replaces them58. Each a rolling long-term plan. Each updated at a periodic summit. Each with the substance decided before the summit begins — at invitation-only convenings held at family estates, foundation centres, and venues dressed in academic branding.
The Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. Waddesdon Manor under the Rothschild Foundation. Sir Bani Yas under the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince’s office. The Smith School forums at Oxford. Each convening produces a framework — a vocabulary, a set of definitions, a financing structure. The framework is published through an academic institution or a foundation-funded think tank. From there it reaches an international body — the OECD, the FSB, the WHO, the UNDP — which adopts it as standard recommendation. National regulators then enforce the standard through their own legislative mechanisms, presenting it as either international best practice or a domestic policy choice.
By the time Parliament votes, the sliding plan has already been formulated — the vote ratifies what the convening decided.
Gosplan’s Main Computer Center under Lebedinskiy produced the control figures that cascaded downward through every tier of the Soviet system, measured through indicators at every level. The contemporary convenings produce the frameworks that cascade downward through international bodies, national regulators, and fiduciary obligations — measured through OECD indicators59, SDG indicators60, and ESG metrics at every level.
The mechanism is identical. The venue changed from Moscow to Bellagio, and the classification from state secret to Chatham House rules. The sliding plan rolls forward regardless.
The funding
The convenings don’t fund themselves. The foundations do.
The Rockefeller Foundation coined ‘impact investing’ at Bellagio61. David Rockefeller co-founded the Trilateral Commission62. The Rothschild Foundation hosted the Stranded Assets Forums at Waddesdon Manor63. The Ford Foundation funded the early systems analysis programmes64. The Gates Foundation deploys blended finance globally65. The Turner Foundation funded Reinicke’s trisectoral networks research6667. ICSU has been free of state oversight since 193168 — funded by philanthropic foundations throughout.
The foundations don’t operate the clearing function. They fund the cognitive standard — the research, the vocabulary, the metrics, the frameworks that define what the system measures. The architecture then clears against those standards automatically. The foundations don't need to run the clearinghouse. They just need to define what it checks for. As The Rothschild Nexus documented: the power belongs to whoever writes the rules; the clearinghouse is merely the mechanism. The two are rarely the same people.
The Rothschilds have operated this principle for six generations — each form harder to see than the last, from named banker to family network to institutional clearing to foundation-funded cognitive standard.
The tax exemption isn't incidental. It means the cognitive layer of the clearing function — the research, the vocabulary, the frameworks — is funded outside the public budget, beyond legislative oversight, and exempt from the taxation every other institution pays. The operating budget for the standard-setting layer is subsidised by the public that never voted for the standards.
Dodd told the Reece Committee exactly this in 195469. Congress held hearings, heard the testimony, and did nothing. Seven decades later, the foundations are still tax-exempt and the architecture they fund is still expanding.
The finding
Eight threads. Eight confirmations.
The future Fed chairman studying Gosplan through intelligence channels. A Yevenko at the Soviet-American policy interface. The Soviets building the market-planning hybrid thirty years before the West completed it. RAND benchmarking Gosplan’s export operations. The CIA documenting the clearing function at ground level — filed alongside the camps that enforced it. The CIA identifying anticipatory governance as Soviet methodology in the same year the American version was installed. Lebedinskiy’s sliding fifteen-year plans running today through the SDG cycle, updated at convenings held under Chatham House rules at foundation estates. And the foundations funding the cognitive standard that defines what every clearinghouse evaluates — tax-exempt, unelected, and operating above the architecture they finance.
The previous essay mapped the architecture from a single Soviet planning manual. The CIA’s own files confirm that the people who built the Western equivalent knew exactly what they were building — because they’d been studying the Soviet original through classified channels for decades.
The architecture didn’t migrate by accident. It was studied, briefed, understood, and rebuilt — by people with security clearances, working from intelligence reports, deploying the same functional logic under a different ethic.
And every principal involved eventually said what they were doing. Lenin said ‘accounting and control’70. Gorbachev said he felt ‘responsible for the world’s destiny’71 — then co-founded the Earth Charter to supply the replacement ethic72. The CIA briefed Gosplan’s operational specifications to the man who would run the Federal Reserve. Nobody hid it. They just used vocabulary the public couldn’t parse.
The question is whether a system that achieves planning objectives through financial exclusion, without visible state violence, is less totalitarian than one that uses camps — or more totalitarian because the coercion is no longer legible enough to resist.
The Soviets published the manual, while the CIA classified the briefings. The foundation-funded architecture is completing its arrival — with hardware the Soviet leadership could only dream of73.
T/y to Freedom Fox for the links which led to this essay.
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Very enlightening. My grandmother somehow understood most of this in the 1970s when I was a teenager. She got mostly blank stares when she tried to explain what was going on. Today in the US we are being told by the Illuminati on the right that we are facing a new(21st century) Red-Green axis and that this is our greatest threat, the alignment of convenience between Commmunism and Islamism to overthrow the West. But there is scant evidence presented that this is a true alliance or that there is any organization whatsoever behind it. Some illumination here would be helpful, whether affirming or debunking. If it seems right your acute powers of analysis and ‘uncovering’ would be welcome.