HONG KONG – The question tormenting millions of cyber-sleuths is Why? What could be the motive behind the elaborate plan for the midair capture of Malaysian Airlines flight 370?

Among the 200-plus passengers bound for Beijing, the target group for the hijack is narrowing down to 20 tech employees working for Freescale Semiconductors, based in Austin, Texas. Among these programmers and systems designers are 12 Malaysians and 8 citizens of mainland China.

The company is no newcomer but has long-time connections in East Asia, as the former design subsidiary of Motorola, which once dominated the Asian communications market in the postwar era. Freescale has design centers in Kuala Lumpur and in China, including Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Chengdu and Suzhou.

Besides its lucrative production of microchips for automotive components, Freescale has extensive contracts with the U.S. military, producing wafers and circuits for navigation, periscopes, electronic targeting, self-guided missiles and other weapons systems that require intelligence controls.

Any defense-related company at the nerve center of Pentagon hardware is bound to attract the attention of weapons designers from both adversarial and allied nations upgrading their military capability. Japan, France and the UK, along with Russia, China and Iran, all want the leading edge that contractors like Freescale provide.

What technological innovation would prompt the Pentagon’s military intelligence agencies to electronically interdict a civilian airliner in mid-flight, while disposing of the collateral passengers as shark bait?

Ultra-small Microcontoller

In February 2013, Freescale unveiled the Kinesis KL02, the world’s smallest microcontroller, measuring 1.9 mm by 2mm and containing RAM, ROM and a clock. The company brags that the device is so small that it can be swallowed for medical uses, such as releasing drugs according to prescription schedule or directing micro-surgery.

Tiny though it may be, the micro-controller is the key to next-generation warfare based on self-guidance, tactical versatility and hierarchy of commands, in short, an adaptive thinking weapon that can outsmart foes. Potential applications include:

– Drones smaller than a fly, either as remotes or autonomously, on surveillance missions or to deliver biowarfare packets, for example, lab-cloned viruses or toxic drugs. Their light weight means longer flying periods or even indefinite hovering time if solar-powered.

– Injectable implants to insert a human-machine interface, for example, a targeting system attached to the optic nerve, rendering Google glasses obsolete. Bionic implants could be implanted in nerves of the limbs to control battery-powered prosthetics, realizing the Pentagon’s dream of a human-centered robotic warrior, known to anime fans as “meka”.

– Maneuverable micro-satellites and mini-submarines that can be operated as drones or act independently to track and hunt larger weapons systems, spy satellites too small to be detected by ground telescopes, and orbiting warheads containing chemical, biological or nuclear materials.

Strategic Versus Commercial Interest

The series code of Kinesis KL02 stands for Version 2 made in Kuala Lumpur, which is the capital of Malaysia. This core of America’s next-gen weapons systems was developed overseas, in a Muslim-preponderant country economically allied with China, Russia and Japan and often at odds with US foreign policy. Therefore, an upcoming round of testing in China, and possible manufacture of Version 3 in Beijing, was a prospect that the Pentagon agencies, especially the NSA, the US Air Force’s Space Command and DARPA, had to stop by any means available.

As Freescale Malaysia prepared to test Kinesis at its sister research labs in Beijing and Tianjin, alarm bells were sounding at the DARPA-funded Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in n Cambridge, Massachusetts. That leading weapons-research facility was created during World War II to build navigation systems and bomb sights stabilized against turning and vibrations by inertia. It has since moved on to microchips for every military application, including inertial guidance for ballistic missiles, communications, GPS, intelligent targeting systems, orbital piloting for the International Space Station and, under the cover of “biomedical”, the transhuman super-soldier program.

The release of Kinesis exposed the Pentagon’s dilemma over dual-use technology, which can garner vast profits through civilian applications, as shown by GPS for cars and smartphones, yet threaten to wipe out America’s technological lead in warfare. The choice of whether to down on a new technology is not limited to Pentagon insiders and generals, since defense contractors and elite corporate executives are also involved.

Dirty Work for Israel

In the case of Freescale, the executive management and several veteran board members are connected with the Carlyle Group, which favors civilian commercialization of defense-related technologies to benefit its investment partners, including George Bush Senior and several retired defense secretaries.

On the other hand, Freescale is financially contolled by private-equity group Blackstone, with major investors including the Rothschild banking family and several of its business partners. As top financiers behind the Zionist movement, the pro-Israeli interest is to prevent miniaturized robotic weapons from falling into the hands of Iran and its allies Hezbollah and Hamas. Micro-vehicles, self-guided and with tactical flexibility, swarming against Israeli cities, ports and airfields would be a nightmare for the Israel Defense Force.

Therefore, the defenders of the Jewish state had to take action. Better to kill 200 Malaysian enemies and Chinese nobodies than to harm one hair on the head of any of the Chosen People. And thus, the order came down from the Red Shield, the House of Rothschild, to their neocon subordinates inside the Pentagon: Stop Flight 370 at any cost to America’s reputation.

The New Boss

Thus, in November, just a few months before the MH370 hijack, Freescale seated a new member on its Board of Directors. Joanne Maguire is an executive with three decades of experience in the Lockheed Martin Space Division. She studied electrical engineering at University of Michigan and UCLA, where she earned her master’s degree. She was invited to the Harvard Program for Senior Executives in National and International Security. Caltech honored her with the Karmann Wings Award and she received the Peter Teets Award from the National Defense Industrial Association.

As the very embodiment of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Maguire was the ideal choice to serve as watchdog against the corporate profiteers at Freescale.

Hijacking the Truth

There is no point in further disparagement of the pilot and co-pilot of the ill-fated flight, given their political connections with a compromised opposition beholden to the colonial past. The practicing with landing at Diego Garcia on the pilot’s flight simulator indicates a deep background with the Western intelligence services and probably Israeli espionage operating out of Singapore.

Whatever the role of the plane crew, the NSA and US Air Force Space Command do not need manned piloting, except to maintain the appearance of normality at takeoff from Kuala Lumpur International Airport. As discussed in my earlier article, voice communication and navigational signals would have been disabled by a burst of powerful narrow-aperture radar used for electromagnetic warfare. The cockpit computer would then be reprogrammed, using Boeing’s own emergency piloting system, expanded with Pentagon and Israeli software.

From the South China Sea to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, the jetliner would be remote-controlled by a drone operator. Its unscheduled flight path would be tracked and subsequently remoted from data records by the NSA listening posts in Sri Lanka and the Jindalee eavesdropping facility in northwest Australia. Radar stations in the Maldives, installed under a US maritime accord, served to guide the jetliner to the southernmost atoll of the archipelago toward Diego Garcia, immediately to the south.

The airliner’s descent over the Maldives, according to witnesses, went smoothly, for a safe landing on the long tarmac at the US Air Force Base on Diego Garcia Island, a CIA rendition center with underground hangars and prison used during the Iraq and Afghan wars.

Upon arrival, the passengers would be herded into separate waiting areas, with the prize captives from Freespace sent to a debriefing facility, where their hard drives, laptops and smartphones would be confiscated and data downloaded, while the human intelligence assets were being questioned. The interrogators had a fairly easy task in telling the defenseless programmers: Join us or die with the rest.

The cooperative would be given a new identity, and reintroduction into civilian life in a remote North American community after being administered memory-erasing drugs, similar to the ones first developed in the MK-ULTRA program.

After vetting of all passengers, the uncooperative and high-risk suspects would be drowned and their corpses tossed near a phony “crash site”, off the coast of Western Australia, while US submarines discharge other bits of “evidence” into the cold waters. The crew of the plane was probably rewarded with a short walk off the plank into the jaws of waiting sharks. Anyone who puts their trust in imperial power deserves no less.

Once the operation is completed and the media begin the mourning rituals, tearful American diplomats will attend memorial services for the missing victims of a tragic accident. Meanwhile, a cabal of Air Force officers and defense contractors will be clinking beer mugs with their former boss and guru, General Michael Hayden, the bureaucrat who militarize spaced and expanded the NSA into the global monstrosity that it has since become.

MH370 will be remembered on the History Channel as an unsolved riddle wrapped in mystery, but no TV station will mention the other code involved in this dreadful affair – KL02 – cause of the untimely deaths and mangled memories of any survivors.

Yoichi Shimatsu is a Hong Kong-based science writer, former editor of The Japan Times Weekly and a founding faculty member of journalism schools in Hong Kong and Beijing.