This is the third of three essays examining the Gaza Pier, and the pasts and present futures of imperial theft, by many names. The first part, “Land Grab, By Sea” can be found here, and the second, “Mission Accomplished”, here.
Dear reader–let’s follow a trail of tangents, where the destination is as uncertain as the path itself:
Shadow organizations, dead-end Limited Liability Companies (LLCs), and grifts are part of an age-old playbook for collusion, cover-ups, and corruption. And while prominent state actors and non-governmental groups nab headlines during what’s now one year of worlds-ending genocide across Gaza and greater Palestine, some of the lesser-publicized (purposefully buried/obfuscated) stakeholders contributing to this catastrophe wield immense influence in this moment’s accelerating brutality. Their portfolios, profits, and buybacks lend clarity to what lies ahead.
Over recent months, the rapid construction-pause-reconstruction-dismantling of the “temporary” Trident Pier on Gaza’s shores–as land grab, as expedient for slaughter–begs us to interrogate who is involved, in addition to the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) and US and UK militaries…rather, who profits from this obliteration? While examples abound, Fogbow Maritime LLC (hereafter, Fogbow) is one such organization.
Headlines insist a stagnant body count of ~40,000 for months (a settler colonial calculation of worth)…we’re ‘counting the dead’ on June 19, 2024 at approximately 186,000, then estimating over 335,500…how many universes are beneath the debris, twelve months on? How many times over does a mother die, when unable to breastfeed her baby due to forced starvation and dehydration?
On September 18, 2024, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor circulated an infographic detailing over 120 unmarked mass graves across Gaza, created since October 2023. But, how many more have since been bombed into oblivion? September 26, 2024, via Hossam Shabat on X: “The Palestinian health ministry initially declined to accept a truckload containing 88 decomposed bodies, seeking more information. After Israeli occupation forces refused to provide the requested de ytails, the bodies were buried in a mass grave without any identification.”
The IOF and US-financed and furnished genocidal rampage against Palestinians is unprecedented in its documentation, circulation, and the worldwide mobilization against its barbarity. But while most of us are familiar with the most prominent perpetrators of this latest depravity, there are many quieter cogs in this mass extermination machine. Fogbow[1] is an organization you likely haven’t heard of–despite the closeness of attention paid.
BOOTS, AS THEATRE
If ruminating on ambiguous US-led military, security, and/or “humanitarian” contractors, our brains might bounce to Blackwater Worldwide[2]–a private military company founded in 1996 by Erik Prince and Al Clark. The tentacles of Blackwater insidiously extend far beyond this piece’s range; but observing the genesis of the company and the irreparable damages done by a so-called “full service risk management” consultant group perhaps point us to the implications of Fogbow’s entanglement in the Gaza genocide, as well as the US, UK & European Union’s rapacity regarding planned construction and maintenance of a temporary permanent port in Gaza, in the service of transnational capital’s interests.
The current President, State Department, and Department of Defense’s obsessive regurgitation of “no boots will be on the ground”–synecdoche with military-jargon history dating to General Westmoreland’s attrition warfare against the Viet Cong, when US troop numbers surged between 1965-1968–is per chance intended to placate those still chaffed from the Obama administration’s cloaking of US intervention in Syria. The obscure phrasing, as unpacked in 2015:
The phrase “boots on the ground” isn’t being used by the administration to communicate what the words actually mean [soldiers on the ground], but instead to indicate something more like “the step beyond which we are currently militarily engaged”. In other words, it’s a sleight of hand trick, used to mislead by gesturing towards things that aren’t happening instead of describing the things that are.
Piercing through the fluff–many US military and private contractor boots have been on the Gaza Pier and the actual ground across occupied Palestine causing immense destruction, (predating, of course, but also) since October 2023 through today. US State Department Spokesperson, Matthew Miller [September 19, 2024]:
It remains a very difficult, volatile region. That has been long before – through – long before President Biden took office. It will probably continue to be true long after President Biden leaves office. What I can [sic] you the United States will continue to do is supply–is to apply all of our diplomatic muscle to trying to ease tensions, to trying to de-escalate tensions…That, of course, is no guarantee for the future–the investment line about past results being no guarantee to future success.
Here, Miller frames up this administration’s (and its collaborators’)–ceaseless–failures as forgivable; that it’s all too complicated, too difficult, for something like a…(for example) total arms embargo against Israel could remedy. Rather, a year on, the policy is severe region-wide escalation, for “de-escalation” (like sending additional US troops to the already 40,000+ stationed across the Middle East).
Daily, more US boots are on the ground…and on the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman… and two Navy destroyers and a cruiser currently sailing from Norfolk, Virginia. We can surmise that Fogbow directors’ soles have also, ‘maybe’, extensively plodded across these occupied lands, too.
Fogbow filed as a LLC with the State of Wyoming on March 13, 2024. Both the principal and mailing address are in Jackson, Wyoming–a tiny, world-class ski town–where folks like Kim Kardashian, Harrison Ford, and Former US Vice President Dick Cheney bought up massive tracts of Shoshone, Cheyenne, Uma Tilla and Walla Walla Indigenous territory–and Fogbow’s registration is geolocated right at the base of Snow King Mountain; the “local’s ski hill.” Teton County, more broadly, boasts an extraordinarily dense concentration of global millionaires and billionaires–drawn to the area not only for its exceptional beauty, ruggedness and relative desolation (Manifest Destiny 2.0, if we will), but–for The Cowboy Cocktail. As the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists details:
The cocktail and variations of it–consisting of a Wyoming trust and layers of private companies with concealed ownership–allow the world’s wealthy to move and spend money in extraordinary secrecy, protected by some of the strongest privacy laws in the country and, in some cases, without even the cursory oversight performed by regulators in other states.
Millionaires and billionaires from around the world have taken note. In recent years, families from India to Italy to Venezuela abandoned international financial centers for law firms in Wyoming’s ski resorts and mining towns, helping to turn the state into one of the world’s top tax havens. A dozen international clients who created Wyoming trusts were identified in the Pandora Papers…exposing the movement of wealth around the world.
According to the State of Wyoming, trust companies manage (as of 2021) at least $31.5 billion in assets. Jackson Hole real estate companies, for example, boast low-cost, low-maintenance and zero state tax incorporations; this includes minimum filing fees, no minimum capitalization requirements, and corporate flexibility where directors, officers, and shareholders needn’t live in or even hold meetings in Wyoming.
The ICIJ furthers:
At the heart of those arrangements are trusts, legal agreements that allow people to stash away money and other assets so they are protected from creditors and incur few or no tax obligations for themselves or their heirs. In exchange for these benefits, trust owners appoint an independent manager — typically a relative, friend or financial adviser — to determine when and how money is invested and spent. Customers can also establish a second company inside their trusts to hold the assets, such as property and bank accounts, concealing wealth behind yet another corporate layer.
Ostensibly, creating a business, a LLC in Jackson, Wyoming, permits Fogbow layers of concealment/anonymity to move money around into/from the United States with potential for tax avoidance/evasion while shielding clients and their assets. But nuanced tax law and legalese exceeds this bit’s range; alternatively, we can maybe better understand Fogbow and its ongoing aiding and abetting of the US/IOF-led annihilation of Gaza through those at the organization’s helm, and, their potential collusion in and prolongation of this genocide.
SCRUBBED SITE, SCRUBBED HANDS
Details on Fogbow are hard to glean, and, over recent months–information has been removed from their website. Earlier in Summer 2024, the site featured three principal leaders of the organization: Mick Mulroy, Chris Hyslop, and Sam Mundy. There isn’t space to itemize their CVs–each full of lines of (proximity to, complicity with) atrocity. For instance, Mundy served in the Marines for 38 years and was Commander of Marine Corps Forces Central Command (MARCENT), and from 2011-2013 he served as the Executive Officer to the US CENTCOM Commander. In 2022, he participated in the Jewish Institute for National Security of America delegation (“JINSA”, whose Gemunder Center Experts include retired IOF general Yaakov Amidror and Elliott Abrams). Hyslop, the Fogbow “Humanitarian Coordinator”, has 25+ years expertise in “Civ-Mil Coordination” (civilian-military) and Mick Mulroy is a retired Marine (who, amongst other titles/duties, was an armored crewman of an M1 Abrams tank), joined the CIA in 1997, and was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (October 2017-December 2019); he was responsible for implementing the National Defense Strategy of 2018 in the Middle East, as well as the Irregular Warfare Annex (IWA).
Fogbow’s founders, though, are Steven Fox, Brook Jerue, and Robb Fipp. Fox is a former US State Dept. Foreign Service Officer, partner/advisor at Autumn Road Capital, and founder/executive chairman of Veracity Worldwide (launched in 2007 with “the objective of bringing knowledge from government experience to clients in the private sector”). Jerue was a US Marine F/A-18 pilot and part of the Marine Corp Special Operations Command, also a partner/advisor at Autumn Road, and Managing Director of Veracity. Fipp is founder and managing partner at Wulff Creek Advisors–a “boutique investment advisory firm”–and is managing partner at Autumn Road and founding partner of Veracity.
Reminder: these six white men–career militarists and venture capitalists, are the ones tasked by the US government to oversee the Trident Pier in Gaza (and, potentially, the Nuseirat Massacre, and beyond), and the purported delivery of humanitarian aid to 2.4 million Palestinians whose forced famine, illness, and violent ongoing displacement is the direct result of these organizations’ and governments’ belligerence, callousness, and bloodthirst.
A damning article from July 2024 elucidates how, in early February 2024, Hyslop and former US Navy Seal Eric Oehlerich (listed as part of the Fogbow “Core Team”–now entirely deleted) approached UN front-line aid workers with Fogbow’s “Blue Beach” proposal. It is worth noting that a hotel by the same name, the “Blue Beach” Hotel, was a luxury resort in north Gaza financed by Palestinian billionaire Bashar al Masri, near Al-Shati Camp (Sept. 22, 2024: at least seven massacred in Kafr Qasim School) and Al-Quds University (presently decimated, as all universities across Gaza).
Early January 2024, hasbara outlets reported that the 14th brigade combat team, “operating under the 162nd Division in coordination with the Yahalom combat unit, uncovered seven shafts leading to Hamas tunnels” and promptly “destroyed the entire infrastructure.” The Blue Beach plan did not initially demand Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore (JLOTS) execution, but would receive IOF securitization for the beachhead (shielding, by the same people blocking over-land humanitarian aid), and funding for implementation was to be funneled through the Maritime Humanitarian Aid Foundation (incorporated March 16, 2024–registered in New Castle, Delaware but with a Swiss website–three days after Fogbow Maritime LLC incorporated); it is not difficult to imagine how the Swiss presentation in these circumstances can go a long way to give the project a respectable, neutral, humanitarian veneer.
The Maritime Humanitarian Aid Foundation’s (MHAF) Executive Director, Cameron Hume, was the former chair of NOAA’s Ocean Exploration Advisory Board and a career member of the US State Department’s Senior Foreign Service. He is also an advisor for Veracity. MHAF’s Director, Naro Zimmerman, is Deputy Head of Private Client Services for JTC (‘private fund solutions’, including venture capital and private equity), and a ‘certified anti-money laundering specialist’, who operates in, you might have guessed… the Cayman Islands.
Predating the Blue Beach plan’s circulation, in October-November 2023, Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides floated the “Amalthea Initiative” as a potential maritime aid corridor to Gaza operating in conjunction with other European Union leaders, not dissimilar from former Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s 2010 (and, reproposed in 2018) “Lieberman Proposal,” where French Foreign Legion and EU member states commando units would police Gaza’s border crossings. In May 2024, Cypriot and Qatari officials engaged in informal private meetings about ties across pivotal sectors like energy, trade, investment, and tourism–as well as the Amalthea Initiative:
Qatar Petroleum’s involvement in the Cypriot Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), particularly in Blocks 10 and 5, underscores mutual interests in the energy sector. Block 10, home to the promising “Glafkos” drilling site, stands as a testament to the potential for fruitful collaboration in energy exploration and production.
“Fruitful collaboration”, here, possibly leaning hard into unfettered access to offshore drilling, pipeline construction, and military base expansion (for the British Armed forces and allies) across Cyprus. Two leaked powerpoint slides (Fig. 1 & 2) from Hyslop and Oehlerich’s February 2024 presentation point to Fogbow’s involvement with the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT)–a unit of the Israeli Ministry of Defense that oversees logistical coordination between “Israel” and Gaza, and attributed backing for the project from ‘wealthy individuals’ along with the United Arab Emirates government.
Fig. 1 & 2 Fogbow powerpoint presentation slides (February 2024). Via France24
Besides meeting with UN workers, Fogbow/MHAF leaders met with White House officials in early 2024, along with a handful of retired Army generals–and touted secured funding in the tens of millions from private firms and donor governments, with expected additional funding from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).
A pause here, to contemplate Trump-era “normalization” vis a vis the Abraham Accords; for instance, in September 2022, the Middle East Institute–of which Mulroy and Mundy are Senior Fellows–shared: “After two years, the participating governments continue to see the Abraham Accords positively as advancing their national interests; and normalization has opened the door to private-sector elements, especially in the UAE, that were well-positioned to take advantage of the resulting bilateral trade and commerce opportunities.”
Rather, the Zionist settler colonial violence across Palestine, as financed, armed, and propagandized by the United States, has laid foundations for this ongoing Nakba since its inception; land/resource theft, the plunder of culture–of life–from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea (including, the Leviathan, Tamir, and Gaza Marine natural gas reserves) is a 100+ year project that’s brought us to this moment’s nefariousness.
A FULL YEAR OF FAILURE
The mise-en-scene needn’t include an evidence board for us to string this together a bit: Two LLCs, whose paperwork was filed just days after President Biden’s 2024 State of the Union–which introduced the nation to “the pier” as a temporary aid project–primarily in a US state with devious tax laws–were formed by a tight collective of former high-ranking US military officials and venture capitalists (with specialization in “anti-money laundering”…knowing the rules, to potentially subvert them), with financial backing by the UAE, Qatar, the Department of Defense, plus other private stakeholders to ensure aid-delivery (failure)…as sinkhole for the ‘next iteration’ of infrastructure, of securitization (read: billions in munitions and surveillance) and IOF collusion.
On September 24, 2024, we learned that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected the US Agency for International Development’s (USAID) assessment of the IOF’s blocking of food and medicine into Gaza; on May 10, 2024, he declared to Congress, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance.”
February 7, 2024: “Hundreds of Israelis from across the political spectrum are at the Kerem Shalom crossing, blocking aid trucks from reaching besieged Palestinians.” July 9, 2024: “UN experts declare famine has spread throughout the Gaza Strip.” July 17, 2024: Vice Admiral Brad Cooper stated, “Our assessment is that the temporary pier has achieved its intended effect to surge a very high volume of aid into Gaza and ensure that aid reaches the civilians in Gaza in a quick manner,” adding that nearly 20 million pounds of aid was delivered to Gaza.
See also: US Foreign Assistance Act, Section 620I [3].
Reminder: the siege and near-total blockade of Gaza (including acute famine, malnourishment, and poisoning of drinking water/land/agriculture/sea–the totality of life, of living[4]) is more than 17 years long, and counting.
Reader, we are to never accept this as normal. Yet, the peaceful ‘million-people marches’ in defiance have proven ineffective. What would work? Us, blockading everything. Every weapons factory, every rail line. On September 26, 2024, Democracy Now’s Nermeen Shaikh and Amy Goodman asked ProPublica’s Brett Murphy, “[Murphy]: The situation is as bad as it’s ever been, including since the Rafah incursion. But this law [for Foreign Assistance] does not only have — you know, whenever Blinken addresses Congress to it; it can be applied at any point. [Amy Goodman]: That they could cut off, that the U.S. government could cut off aid to — military arms to Israel. [Murphy]: Absolutely. If it assesses that the Israelis are deliberately blocking humanitarian assistance at any point, they can apply this law. That’s right.”
“Successful” aid delivery–as paraded by US State Department, the IOF and US CENTCOM (and Fogbow)–is charade for the continuation of torture and starvation…means the “enemy” is still at large, the operation must persist, means the weapons can legally continue shipping…the Forever proceeds the War.
While private contractors operating in war zones are increasingly common, the fangs of disaster capitalism are sharpened daily–especially as Israeli settlers and international real estate speculators–”the market” writ large, including the Genocide Gentry and Kahanist politicians–salavate for “the day after” in Gaza (see, for example, “Gaza 2035” and events in Los Angeles’s Shaarey Zedek Congregation and Adas Torah synagogue).
Fogbow’s involvement in Gaza is no humanitarian mission, regardless of its facade of charity-centric stock images. It is a collection of lifelong war mongers-turned-opportunists (and, vice versa) seeking to cement unimpeded access for the exploitation of 1.1 trillion cubic feet of offshore energy reserves (amongst other profitable conquests)–including but of course never limited to control of: the Suez Canal, Gulf of Aqaba, Bab al-Bandab Strait, and flows of US/UK/EU weapons from Cyprus bases.
In a May 1, 2024 Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) event, Cameron Hume joined a panel to discuss “DoD’s [Department of Defense’s] Gaza Pier and the Maritime Corridor–Gaza: The Human Toll.” Said CSIS Senior Vice President Stephen Morrison:
A lot of the folks involved in putting this together are emphasizing that this is a – this is – creating the pier and maritime corridor, laying the groundwork in the long term for a recovery operation still to be – to be defined. There’s discussion also around this pier as a feature for a – for a postwar Gaza.
Just 77 days after this sham of a conversation, the disastrous pier project shuttered; the circus of MISSION(S) ACCOMPLISHED aside, we know precisely what this mission failed to do. Aid was not (and still is not) adequately delivered…the forced starvation (compounding incessant displacement and US/UK/EU-funded and fueled terror) hastens. But the sickness, the status quo, the one-year-and-counting, is that investors are pleased by the necessity of next contracts, next frontlines, next billions in DoD budget requests. Some of their sites have been scrubbed,[5] particularly since the pier’s “formal” July 17, 2024 closure; but make no mistake: their vision for a postwar Gaza is little more than a blueprint for the next war to be funded. It is our task to halt them all.
Footnotes
[1] The UK’s national meteorological service describes a fogbow: [It] is similar in some respects to a traditional rainbow forming from sunlight interacting with water droplets contained in fog, mist or cloud rather than interacting with raindrops as it does in a classical rainbow…These tiny droplets cause the light to undergo different physical processes, most notably diffraction, which leads to fogbows appearing to be devoid of colour. It is for this reason that fogbows are sometimes known as white rainbows.
[2] Lest we confuse this with BlackRock. Both are deadly in different ways. Blackwater is the mercenary company, created by Erik Prince, made infamous by the massacres it committed while serving as a private military contractor for the US in Iraq. BlackRock is the world’s largest asset management company with an estimated net worth of $132.02 billion as of September 16, 2024–whose chairman, Thomas E. Donilon–former National Security Advisor to the Obama Administration–is married to Catherine Russell, executive director of UNICEF and longtime advisor to Joe Biden.
[3] Subsection 620I(a) provides that: “No assistance shall be furnished under this Act or the Arms Export Control Act to any country when it is made known to the President that the government of such country prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance.”…“Israel’s restrictions on humanitarian assistance for Gaza, as summarized in a CIVIC-Oxfam fact-sheet, begin with Israeli Defense Minister Gallant’s announcement on Oct. 9, 2023 of a “complete siege” on Gaza. For a time, all crossings between Israel and Gaza were closed. Even after the siege ended, according to Oxfam obstructions of humanitarian aid reduced food reaching people in Gaza to merely two-percent of the pre-conflict amount.” This is to say, Sec. Blinken’s refusal of acceptance of the USAID reports on restricted aid for Gaza directly correlates with the continued flow of US developed, manufactured, and financed munitions for the IOF.
[4] Hossam Shabat on X [September 30, 2024]: We’re running out of soil to bury our dead.
[5] In the May 1, 2024 CSIS interview, Maritime Humanitarian Aid Foundation Executive Director, in conversation with CSIS Senior Vice President Stephen Morrison: “[Dr. Morrison]: Cameron, for the benefit of our – of our audience, explain a little bit of what is Fogbow. And this is a(n) initiative that emerged in parallel, really, to the announcement by the president at the State of the Union address to put the pier in. Fogbow was already entertaining this idea, right, of using its capabilities and mobilizing donors – the French or the Qataris or whoever – to donate funds, creating a foundation, and being operational to open this route. Explain a little bit more for our readers what this is. People don’t know what Fogbow is. [Mr. Hume]: Right. Well, Fogbow has a website. (Laughs.)”