by Trowbridge H. Ford
In laying out my case against Britain's covert government during the collapse of the Soviet Union - i. e., what it hoped to trigger by the assassination of Sweden's statsminister Olof Palme, and resulted in the murders of several others, especially South London private detective Daniel Morgan, to help keep it covered up - I never got around to where it rests now, only concluding with the Home Office's 2002 refusal to establish a police inquiry into why Morgan was murdered. The reason why the Blair government refused is that it knew that any serious investigation would expose the whole dirty mess.
Thanks to continuing pressure by Morgan's family, though, the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA)
ordered yet another inquiry, a fifth one, into the brutal murder shortly thereafter, headed by Detective Superintendant Dave Cook. He picked a team of investigators from outside the area to make sure that it was not plagued by the problems of earlier ones, especially its being infiltrated by the murderers themselves, especially detective sergeant Sid Fillery. Fillery was a close friend of Morgan associate in Southern Investigations and another suspect in it, Jonathon Rees, and he even replaced Morgan in the detective agency after he had been forced to retire.
Cook's team was very interested in making renewed contact with a white woman who had come forward after a BBC Crimewatch appeal in June 1987, three months after Morgan's murder had occurred. She was interviewed by a femal police officer in the East Croydon railway station, as Cook explained just last year: "One of the motives that we are investigating is the Daniel was killed because he was about to expose a drugs conspiracy which was potentially linked into police corruption." ("New suspects in detective murder," BBC News, June 5, 2007) Cook's investigators said that they knew the woman's first name, but they have never released it and it might not be her real one anyway.
It just so happened that MP John Gorst, who was trying to obtain Captain Simon Hayward's release in Sweden from a drug-trafficking charge, received a letter from someone on June 15, 1987, sounding very much like the same woman, as Hayward recounted in Under Fire: My Own Story:
"Dear Mr Gorst
In today's Daily Telegraph you were quoted as saying you believed Captain Simon Hayward to be innocent of the drug smuggling. This may well be so.
The man arrested with Captain Hayward, Cay Forbes Mitchell and also Christopher Hayward, Captain Hayward's brother, are both members of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh cult, so too is Macunda, spelt wrongly in the Telegraph as Macumba.
I know several people who were told by Christopher Hayward and Macunda that the drugs they were carrying was cannabis, when in fact it was heroin, and some were caught and imprisoned.
Christopher Hayward, his Rajneesh name is Lokesh, is the organizing force behind the smuggling. He has disappeared from his home in Ibiza several weeks ago, and his mother Hazel Hayward is terribly worried and believes that he may have been murdered by his contacts in the drugs world.
Also involved with the men arrested in Sweden is Michael Scott who was arrested at Dover early in May of (t)his year when returning from Amsterdam with £5,000 worth of drugs.
Scott is also a Rjaneesh follower, his name is Meru and is a long time friend and fellow drug dealer with the three men mentioned above. Scott is on bail awaiting trial.
I could give you names of other Rajneesh followers who are also drug smuggling, but so far there is no evidence against them.
As my MP perhaps you could do something to bring this into the open. The Rajneesh organisation is deeply involved in drug smuggling, here in England, in Europe and also in India.
I was a Rajneesh follower for eight years, and saw what was going on.
Please excuse me if I don't give my name, the risks involved are quite real.
Yours sincerely, etc." (Quoted from pp. 176-7.)
While Gorst passed the letter along to Scotland yard, it (and he apparently) did nothing about it, as the failure to follow up what the woman at the East Croydon train station was volunteering indicates. And the reason is obvious - it did not want to get to the bottom of the drugs conspiracy because of police and MI6 involvement in it. The anonymous letter writer was quite possibly one of MI6's agents who had infiltrated Rajneesh's bodyguard protection aka 'The Samurai Department'.
Cook's team still seemed to be making progress in Morgan's murder, discovering his old Austin Healey in a lock up in south-east London in October 2006, and hoping to find evidence, especially DNA material, which would tie suspects of the crime. Three men, apparently Rees, bodyguard Paul Goodridge, and Fillery, had already been arrested, and released on bail, and now there were apparently two more suspects, along with two 'supergrasses' who were wílling to tell tales. In November 2006, there was a meeting between members of Morgan's family, Cook, Met Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Yates, and MPA chairman Len Duvall which discussed the history of the case, and what still needed to be done. "We are cautiously optimistic," Alastair Morgan, Daniel's brother, explained, "that someone will be charged." ("3 held in 20-year murder mystery," icWales.co.uk, October 29,2006)
John Yates was yet another member of the Mets' Untouchables who knew that the group had only scratched the surface when it came to its corruption during the '80s and 90s. He had served in London's North and West while the biggest problems were the over 20 murders which had occurred in the south. Still, he led one of its most complex corruption inquiries which resulted in the imprisonment of six serving detectives for sentences totalling 46 years.(Operation Russia)
Yates's hopes for settling the Morgan murder were completely dashed, though, when he ran into Prime Minister Tony Blair over the cash for honours scandal. No sooner did his investigators start questioning the Labour Leader and his colleagues at Number 10 over the allegation that four life peerages had been given to persons had made loans to the party before the last General Election than the optimism about solving the murder began to evaporate. By June 2007, when the third series of interviews about the honours scandal were carried out, Yates's investigators were sounding much less hopeful, as Ian Herbert explained: "Despite the technological advances at their disposal, the police do not seem to feel they have a single, incontrovertable piece of evidence against their suspects."
("Twenty years on, police close in on detective'sa killers," Independent, June 9, 2007)
Nothing has happened since then in the Morgan case.
And Yates was hardly holding back when he explained what or who was responsible for the unsatisfactory investigation of the honours scandal to the Commons Public Administration Committee: "I think it would be quite obvious to all people who that was." ("Honours officer defends inquiry," BBC News, October 23, 2007)
The obvious answer, it seems, to the failure of both inquiries is that that departing Prime Minister made it quite clear to Yates that if he made him sound like another Lloyd George when it came to giving out honours for cash, he would see to the appointment of a police inquiry into the Morgan murder which would make the Met seem like a den of drug pushers and murderers.
And when Mike Todd threatened to revive the Mets' case without any serious blackmailing material to be used against him - as the tabloid campaign against him for fornicating has demonstrated - he had to be murdered, and the security services were pleased to oblige.