The thing that's not so widely known but relatively easy to verify is that European and American behind the scenes financial power (international banking, wall street, whatever you want to call it) puts their people in the leadership of the intelligence services, right from their inception. It's like Wall Street opened up a detective agency. If you were managing hundreds of billions of dollars of investments, how much would it be worth to you to get a "heads up" about major events even an hour before the general public found out?