New disclosures add weight to theory that Burisma was part of CIA operation
On February 21, 2019, a confidential source told the FBI that two CIA officers went with Mykola Zlochevsky, owner of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that appointed Hunter Biden to its board, to the office of Yuriy Lutsenko, the prosecutor general of Ukraine from May 2016 to August 2019.
According to a newly declassified document released by Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA), the CIA men told Lutsenko that Zlochevsky was “protected by the U.S.” and urged Lutsenko to stop the investigation on Zlochevsky and let him back into Ukraine.
Subsequently, a deal was made whereby Zlochevsky could pay $3 million in damages to get back into Ukraine while avoiding prosecution for an assortment of white-collar crimes.
The same source told the FBI that then-Vice President Joe Biden had met directly with then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko “to protect the interests” of his son and, by extension, Zlochevsky, who was paying Hunter around $1 million per year between May 2014 and April 2019 to serve on Burisma’s board.
According to the FBI informant, Zlochevsky had offered Poroshenko $100 million in “shares and guaranteed profits from gas sales” to stop an “Interpol investigation” into Burisma.
By his own admission, Biden pressured Ukrainian officials to fire Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin in December 2015 by threatening to withhold up to $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees after Shokin had launched a corruption probe into Burisma.[1]
Shokin was ousted months later by a vote of the nation’s parliament and replaced with Lutsenko who had been imprisoned for years for embezzlement while serving as Minister of the Interior. Despite his appointment as Ukraine’s top prosecutor, Lutsenko amazingly did not even have a law degree.
Mikheil Saakashvili, the former president of Georgia and governor of the Ukrainian province of Odessa in 2019, called Lutsenko a “filthy creature” and “typical crook” who “closed corruption cases for dough.”
While the story about Burisma has been exposed prior to the latest document release, what is new is the information about the role that the CIA purportedly played in meeting with Ukraine’s prosecutor general and possibly threatening him and protecting Burisma from prosecution.
CovertAction Magazine has previously raised suspicion that Burisma was operating as part of a CIA covert operation to finance fascistic militias in Ukraine that provided a key backbone of military operations in eastern Ukraine following the February 2014 U.S.-EU-backed Maidan coup.
Journalist John Helmer found evidence that the central shareholder of Burisma was Ihor Kolomoisky, Ukraine’s most powerful oligarch at the time of the Maidan coup who controlled Burisma through the two directors of Burisma’s board—Anzelika Pasenidou and Riginos Kharalambus—who worked for a Cyprus-based law firm connected to Kolomoisky.
A primary financier of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during the run-up to Ukraine’s 2019 elections, Kolomoisky financed private militias, such as the 2,000-person Dnipro Battalion and neo-Nazi-led Azov Battalion, which played a key role in halting the advance of rebels from their strongholds in Donetsk and Luhansk.
The war in eastern Ukraine broke out after those latter two provinces voted to secede following the Maidan coup, subsequently drawing in the Russians.
Kolomoisky was appointed as governor of his home Dnipropetrovsk region near the war’s front line. His militias included 17,000 foreign mercenaries from more than 50 countries, including some U.S. white supremacists. They were crucial to the war because the Ukrainian military was ambivalent about fighting its own citizens.
A key sign of Burisma’s fronting for a CIA black operation was its appointment of Joseph “Cofer” Black to its board in February 2017.[2]
Black was a top CIA official whose experience running clandestine wars went back to the Reagan administration’s covert action program in Angola, where the CIA armed anti-communist warlord Jonas Savimbi.[3]
From 2005 to 2008, Black served as vice chairman of Blackwater. A graduate of the University of Southern California, he ran the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and anti-bin Laden unit after 9/11 before forming his own private intelligence company, Total Intelligence Solutions.[4]
Former State Department staffer Mike Benz stated that Burisma was a CIA operation—epitomized by Black’s appointment—designed to assist CIA efforts to break down the Russian energy company Gazprom and swing the gas market away from Russia to NATO-backed countries and the U.S.
The latter operation included the destruction of the Nord Stream II pipeline and, according to Benz, lasted for more than 16 years.
Benz said that the policy imperative of privatizing Ukrainian energy assets and placing them under U.S. control was aided by the appointment of Biden and Black to Burisma’s board, and was “part of the reason that we [the U.S.] overthrew the Ukrainian government in 2014…we were going to be cutting Russia off. So, Western stakeholders wanted to profit from this trillion-dollar windfall if Russia could be kicked out of the European energy market. This is common activity for the Central Intelligence Agency, which was created by corporate lawyers in 1947 as its first class.”
Benz continued: “The corporate espionage side of the CIA operation here [in Ukraine] has geopolitical dimensions. If you kill Russia’s energy exports, you kill their military, which means you kill their ability to run air defense systems to Syria [which Russia was supporting against U.S.-backed regime-change operation]. You kill their ability to run small arms to sub-Saharan Africa to oppose U.S. control over lithium, and cobalt, and copper, and aluminum, and gold, and oil, and gas there, too.”
In addition to all this, the CIA appears to have used Burisma as a cover for its biological weapons program in Ukraine that fed off earlier CIA bioweapons development at a secret U.S. army facility in Fort Detrick, Maryland.
Hunter was the founder of the investment firm Rosemont Seneca, which invested $500,000 in the pathogen research company Metabiota and raised millions more for it from firms that included Goldman Sachs.
According to leaked emails, Biden forged an agreement between Metabiota and Burisma, for a “science project” involving biosecurity labs in Ukraine.[5]
Hunter’s CIA connection had been evident in his appointment to the board of the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the Democratic Party branch of the CIA’s most notorious cutout, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley said that the CIA was involved in impeding an IRS investigation into Hunter Biden.
Further, 51 former intelligence officials, led by CIA Director John Brennan (2012-2016), signed a letter stating that the Hunter Biden laptop story—which revealed extensive crimes—was “Russian disinformation.”
Joe Biden’s long symbiotic relationship with the CIA was apparent in 1980 when he threatened a CovertAction Information Bulletin editor with jail.
One of the key aides advising Biden’s Ukraine policy when he was vice president, Eric Ciaramella, was a career CIA analyst who worked for John Brennan and was put on CIA detail at the White House when Biden became president.[6]
Journalist Russ Bellant compared Biden to JFK and Allen Dulles who raised a private army to try to overthrow the Castro government in Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.
In both cases, according to Bellant, the U.S. government used private companies to raise revenues and fronts for arms smuggling and clandestine operations run by right-wing extremists.
Neither Kennedy nor Dulles, however, involved their own family members in extortion schemes.
Biden brazenly admitted to blackmail before the Council on Foreign Relations in January 2018, stating that he told Poroshenko that “his plane was leaving in six hours and that he wouldn’t get his $1 billion if the prosecutor was not fired…well son of a bitch, he [Shokin] got fired….and they put in his place someone solid.” According to Oleksandr Onyshchenko, a former member of parliament, Poroshenko paid bribes amounting to $2 million to get the parliament to sanction Shokin’s removal—when initially it was reluctant to do so. Despite Biden’s own admission, Wikipedia and many liberal media outlets continue to present the story of Biden firing Shokin as a “conspiracy theory”—a term long ago weaponized by the CIA to try to denigrate investigative journalists and whistleblowers. ↑
The “liberal” HuffPost, amazingly, framed Black’s appointment to Burisma’s board as “good news” in a puff piece written by Toby Nwazor. ↑
Readers can learn more about the CIA’s criminal operations in Angola and monstrous nature of Jonas Savimbi by reviewing Covert Action Information Bulletin’s coverage. See for example, Louis Wolf, “UNITA’s Savimbi Seeks U.S. Understanding–Again,” and “Stockwell Scores Savimbi,” Covert Action Information Bulletin, December 1979-January 1980, 25-27. ↑
Originally from Connecticut, Black played a key role in the CIA-led campaign to support the Northern Alliance against the Taliban after 9/11; was involved in the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program, and is thought to have protected two 9/11 Saudi hijackers—Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar—when they worked in the U.S. He received the CIA’s distinguished intelligence medal, the agency’s highest achievement. Mike Benz noted that Black served as Mitt Romey’s “sherpa to the intelligence community during his presidential run in 2012.” Romney was on the board of the International Republican Institute (IRI), which Benz calls “the CIA cutout counterpart to the NDI.” ↑
See, among other sources, Arnaud Develay, Foreign Entanglements: Ukraine, Biden & the Fractured American Political Consensus (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2024); Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, “U.S. Lied About Funding “Dangerous Pathogen” Research in Secret Ukrainian Biolabs, Newly Leaked Documents Reveal,” CovertAction Magazine, March 22, 2022; Jon Levine and Jesse O’Neill, “Hunter Biden helped secure funds for US biolab contractor in Ukraine: e-mails,” New York Post, March 26, 2022; Josh Boswell, “EXCLUSIVE: Hunter Biden DID help secure millions in funding for US contractor in Ukraine specializing in deadly pathogen research, laptop emails reveal, raising more questions about the disgraced son of then vice president,” The Daily Mail, March 25, 2022. Victoria Nuland admitted to the existence of U.S. biolabs in Ukraine. Biden founded Rosemont Seneca with Devon Archer, who was also appointed to Burisma’s board, and Christopher Heinz, John Kerry’s grandson. The CIA’s historical involvement in U.S. bioweapons research is detailed in Hank Albarelli Jr. A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIAs Secret Cold War Experiments (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2011). Former senior CIA officer Sam Faddis who reviewed emails on Hunter’s laptop found it odd that a Metabiota executive in an email enthused to Hunter about ways in which the company could “help assert Ukraine’s cultural and economic independence from Russia and continued integration into Western society.’” Faddis said this discussion of a larger geopolitical agenda was not usual business practice and “raised the question, what is the real purpose of th[e] venture?” ↑
Holding an M.A. from Harvard, Ciaramella served as deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council; he also served on the National Security Council staff, first as director for Ukraine and then as acting senior director for Europe and Russia, and was also a senior political analyst at the CIA, where he specialized in Europe and the former Soviet Union. He is now a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, focusing on Ukraine and Russia. Incidentally, Ciaramella was credited with helping to spark the Trump impeachment proceedings over Ukraine. Paul Sperry of Real Clear Investigation called Ciaramella “the ‘whistleblower’ who sparked Donald Trump’s first impeachment” who “touched off a political firestorm when he anonymously accused Trump of linking military aid for Ukraine to a demand for an investigation into alleged Biden corruption in that country.” ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
