as Russia Today) network. Observer story On June 30, 2013, the London Observer published a front page story sourced to Madsen. According to Michael Moynihan of The Daily Beast, shortly after going to press, The Observer "realized that the story's author, Jamie Doward, failed to conduct even the most perfunctory Google search on Madsen. That would have revealed him to be a paranoid conspiracy theorist in the tradition of Alex Jones, on whose radio show he often appears". The article was quickly removed from the parent (The Guardian) newspaper's website pending an investigation, but not before the print edition had gone to press. According to Forbes magazine, The Observer likely took the story down as it was concerned with the reliability of the source rather than the content as no matter how "left field" the source was, the story seems to be largely true and has been a matter of public record for some years. The story was allegedly sourced from a blog in which Madsen had been interviewed regarding his views on claims by NSA leaker Edward Snowden, alleging connections between the National Security Agency and several European governments known as ECHELON. Joshua Gillin of the Poynter Institute said that The Observer had not interviewed Madsen but had taken the quotes from an online interview with Madsen and that Madsen's "declassified documents", upon which the story was based, were publicly available on the NSA website. However, Gillin later spoke to Madsen who stated that he was interviewed for The Observer article. According to Forbes, on June 30, 2013, the same day that The Observer both published and retracted the article, Reuters reported the same claims, but sourced from NSA documentation supplied by Edward Snowden to support his claims regarding the cyber-espionage programs Tempora and Prism. On July 5, 2013 The Guardian responded to the controversy saying that "The documentary evidence for the story, which was based on a number of sources, was sound, but it was wrong to connect Wayne Madsen with the story. For this reason, the original story was removed from the website, and The Observer splash was replaced." U.S. foreign policy claims In 2002 he suggested to The Guardian newspaper that the United States Navy had aided in an attempted overthrow of Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez. Madsen stated that US military attaches had been in contact with members of the Venezuelan military to discuss the possibility