STACKING THE DECK: A TALE OF GLOBAL ESPIONAGE AND A CELLPHONE CLOAKING TECHNOLOGY THAT PROTECTED TRUMP, SNOWDEN AND ASSANGE

By: Alana Dawn Cook {Koch}

In the weeks leading up to the 2016 presidential election, tensions between the campaigns of former President Donald Trump and former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were so high that Trump's security detail had to be increased three-fold. The entire presidential campaign, the history of the United States, and the tenets of freedom it was built on, stood in the balance.

Clinton was busy staving off a political backlash brought on by the Wikileaks email scandal, which many say cost her the election. Trump and his inner circle were dodging a bogus campaign-plaguing dossier that was paid for with Clinton cash. America stood at a crossroads that could make tensions between the United States and Russia tighter than they had been in 30 years.

The world was watching. Trump had a trump card, its name is Defense Enabling and Assisting Framework, or D.E.A.F., a little-known, ultra-powerful cellphone-cloaking technology.

Ears to Hear

As U.S. relations with Russia were on the chopping block, the U.S. Constitution was being denounced by corporate interest groups as an editable, antiquated document of a bygone era not worth the old, rugged paper it was written on. Jailing journalists, a practice common in cold-war-era Russia, was becoming the new norm in the U.S. as Edward Snowden and Julian Assange took center stage, changing the way the political and media game was played.

"It's becoming less and less the National Security Agency and more and more the National Surveillance Agency. It's gaining more offensive powers with each passing day," Snowden said as he took refuge somewhere in the icy suburbs of Russia, in a place where even angels dare to tread. To this day, his whereabouts are unknown, aided by D.E.A.F.

As a fugitive for privacy, Snowden had played a card in 2013 that could have cost the United States everything in terms of strategic placement on the world stage. But, he told the truth. Surveillance of American citizens was at an all-time high with its tentacles reaching into private lives like a speeding box train filled with political prisoners headed to Siberian death camps, never to be heard from again.

Something had to be done.

And so, it was.

Because D.E.A.F. works at quantum-speed levels, which makes information virtually impossible to capture, phone calls can't be tapped. Even if someone was able to capture information from the call, it would be virtually impossible to decipher.

No Deals

How did this loose-cannon presidential candidate, Donald Trump, a man many people thought was destined to lose, manage to pull off the greatest political heist in modern history?

He stacked the deck. He read their faces.
He saw their next move. He heard their words.
He made sure his communications were protected by D.E.A.F.
There would be no deals.
This was war. Silent, yet loud. Paused but ready.

Eyes to See in the Cold

In a small town in Canada, a man many call The Wizard, a retired intelligence veteran who did a long stint in China, sits at his desk putting the finishing touches on yet another lucrative contract for his quantum-based cellphone-cloaking system. (His book about his work saving baby girls in China is soon to be made into a movie by the producers of Angel Networks).

This deal is for a Hindu man he met at Tim Horton's after they struck up a conversation about the dragon on The Wizard's jacket. A few coffees later, the fast friends were in business together.

As the Wizard recounted during a revealing phone interview, D.E.A.F. protected the cellphones of former President Trump, some of his family members, and a couple of hundred members of his inner circle, from being hacked during the critical months leading up to the election.

Absolutely no one could tap into the comms of Trump's inner circle.

D.E.A.F.'s creator, a spy-turned-actor-turned-high-tech-entrepreneur, has learned his craft well during his long tenure on this planet. "I stayed alive by being nice," he said with a snappy Canadian drift as he lamented on his years working in the shadows.

The Wizard said he's privatizing and opening up D.E.A.F. for a nominal subscription-based fee so U.S. citizens can have peace of mind knowing that their conversations are safe.

He flashes a photo of a younger version of himself hanging out in the background of a Kennedy Center concert. In the foreground is a dashing, baby-faced Donald and his then-wife, Ivanka. Donald is sporting a tux and Ivana is wearing an expensive blue formal. Her blonde locks are teased to 80's high society perfection. The photo shows the Wizard looking down at the floor with an upturned smirk as if he knows something the Trumps don't. It's almost as if he's peering through a looking glass into their future, and he sees Trump's win.

It was February 2017 when Retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn resigned as Trump's National Security Advisor, following news reports about his communications with a Russian ambassador. Headlines about the "Pizzagate" scandal alleging high-ranking members of the Democratic National Convention and Clinton advisors had ties to a child trafficking ring were breaking. Trump was just inaugurated and D.E.A.F. was a well-kept secret in journalistic and political circles but was making a slow crawl from obscurity.

"We helped protect Julian Assange," the Wizard said. "And, we helped get Snowden out {of the U.S.} and D.E.A.F. protected the cellphone communications." Then, he hung up the phone.

From the Shadows

That's when The Wizard said that a member of the Pelosi camp tried to steal D.E.A.F.

As The Wizard tells it, Pelosi's relative was trying to get D.E.A.F. in the hands of a Silicon Valley law firm that represents high-tech companies. Though the deal would have netted The Wizard a hefty payout, he said he was "uncomfortable doing business with a firm that has strong ties to the Muslim world."

"Nancy Pelosi sent a relative to Canada to meet with me. My wife and I had dinner with the relative and my wife said that I shouldn't touch any business with Pelosi, her family, or any of their firms," he said. "They tried everything to get D.E.A.F. and when they couldn't, they attacked its authenticity and me personally," The Wizard said as he recounted the event while tempering the sound of annoyance in his voice.

What is D.E.A.F?

Although The Wizard won't disclose exact details about the how and when of D.E.A.F.'s development and what he calls its "secret sauce," he swears by its ability to protect any cell phone from hackers and the prying eyes of governments and political operatives, especially when a person is on a call. (Part-way through the cell phone portion of this interview, our call dropped three times). He says D.E.A.F. has military applications but won't go any further on the how.

Other intelligence sources not only corroborate D.E.A.F.'s existence, but they also say that it does what cyber technology pros say is impossible. It detects when a phone has been hacked and someone is listening, and it drops the call immediately. In other words, it's intuitive and in a way, sentient.

D.E.A.F. received its first nod of credibility when Flynn mentioned it in an early 2017 email to U.S. Army Retired Gen. Paul Vallely.

"It is excellent technology, and the type of niche security capabilities we need going forward, especially for our high-value people and for other assets who we are trying to protect," Flynn said.

The owner of a private security firm who protected several presidents during his tenure as a Secret Service agent explains why D.E.A.F. is different than anything else on the market. "It's not based on any cryptography or algorithms. It's a totally different, unique, and proprietary hard- and software system that serves more as a highly evolved cloaking device than it does an encryption system," the intel source said.

He goes on to explain further.

"I like to use the analogy of hiding a drop of water in the ocean. D.E.A.F. obfuscates data and voice transmissions. If you can envision a transmission of information, everything is comprised of ones and zeros. D.E.A.F. conceals information within other information."

He went on to say that D.E.A.F.'s owners hired top-level hackers to test the system, but none have been able to penetrate it.

Although he can't speak much about his days in China, The Wizard said he sometimes misses the people and the culture but, ultimately, he doesn't trust their business practices.

"There has been a covert war going on behind the scenes between the U.S. and her enemies who have been trying to get their hands on D.E.A.F.," he said. He paused as he recalled an event in early 2017 when he met a Chinese businessman who he said he later reported to U.S. federal authorities for allegedly attempting to steal information about D.E.A.F. The man turned out to be ex-CIA officer Jerry Chun Shing Lee, who recently pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court to spying for China.

The Wizard leaned in close and peered through the video camera as he recounted details of another headline-grabbing mystery he said is tied to D.E.A.F.

"Do you remember that plane, the MH-370 that went missing a few years back? Well, the kids on the plane tried to steal a vital component of what would later become D.E.A.F., but they were offloaded at Diego Garcia," he said. (MH-370 went missing in March 2014 while carrying 239 passengers from Kuala Lumpur Airport to Beijing).

On to Asia - and Huawei

While Trump duked it out with Chinese leaders in a full-on trade war to protect U.S.-based technology, the mysterious little-known story of the death of Dr. Shane Todd, the Seth Rich of the Huawei scandal, re-emerged.

Todd was working for the Institute for Microelectronics in Singapore in 2012 when he was found dead in his apartment in Singapore. Though investigators ruled the death to be suicide, Shane's family insisted it was murder.

Right before he died, Todd told his family that he was being pressured to compromise U.S. security, and he refused to do so. He was worried about his own safety because of the work he was doing with a Chinese company.

The Chinese company was later identified as Huawei, through documents found on Todd's external Seagate hard drive, after his death. Huawei in 2017 filed a legal motion challenging a government ban on its equipment as unconstitutional. The Chinese tech company attempted to push back against Trump-sanctioned policies limiting its global reach. It failed.

A 2018 tweet quoted Yan Xeutong, dean of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He said, "Huawei is a 'symbol of the national future of China,'" and that "The people know, the government knows, that if Huawei cannot survive, [China] will have no hope for rejuvenation."

Most of the microchips that are in U.S. cell phones and many spy satellites are manufactured in China and Huawei is one of China's largest cellphone manufacturers. Trump's rigorous trade policies aimed hard to change the Huawei game.

Dr. Shane Todd was sitting in his apartment having dinner when his Skype rang. On the other line was The Wizard calling to check on how things were going while Todd was working on projects in Asia. Todd lamented that he missed home and The Wizard, a family friend, cracked a joke to help lift his spirits. A week later, Todd was found dead in his apartment and his death was ruled a suicide, but Todd's family say they have reason to believe he was murdered. Todd's work was a hard target of the Chinese spy machine.

Todd, an expert in MEMS switching devices (also used for spy satellites) as pioneered by scientists at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and U.S. Army Research Labs, was working on a power component that would later be incorporated into D.E.A.F. In essence, the component allows D.E.A.F. to run infinitely without needing to be charged. For that revolutionary discovery, The Wizard said, Todd paid with his life. "It's what I do," he said and then smiled with a crooked, soft grin and looked down at his desk and up again with eyes that seemed to peer into forever. "No one has the right to steal anyone else's freedom and privacy. We are all patriots in this fight."

The Wizard just re-emerged on the heels of Trump's second presidential campaign with details about how D.E.A.F. saved the first presidential campaign from the prying ears of his political adversaries at the Democratic National Committee. Will Trump win? Who knows. But one thing is certain, D.E.A.F. never fails.