by Trowbridge H. Ford
Whenever a sovereign nation is conquered by another, its inhabitants, whether they be from its elite or dregs, ultimately have a hard time adjusting to foreign occupation because they don't know how long it will last, and what it may be replaced by. The process is made more difficult if it seems that there is no alternative to the conquerers, especially if they appear to represent some wave of the future. But then, there are always surprises in history, and some seemingly sure things turn out to be nothing more than delayed dead ends. Of course, the alternative to such a course is to continue to fight the occupiers tooth and nail as there seems to be no choice about the matter, but the costs of such a course are usually devastating.
The best example of the latter is the sad fate of Poland when it was confronted by nemeses on both its borders as World War II approached. It refused to compromise with either of its threatening neighbors, and paid heavily for its choice. The victim of yet more partitions of Poland, it still refused to accommodate with either of its invaders. Poland was the only country in Europe, when overrun, refused to recognize and cooperate with its conquerors. In fact, it proved so obstreperous to its Soviet occupiers that it felt obliged to execute the leading officers of its military in the infamous Katyn Forest massacres for fear that they would fight with the invading Nazis when the showdown between Berlin and Moscow finally occurred. The uncooperative Poles in the German occupied areas fared even worse as they were forced to fight back because of the Nazi liquidation of increasing numbers of its Jewish citizens, culminating in the infamous elmination of the Warsaw Ghetto.
The Poles preferred, in sum, partitions of their country aka Polonization rather than experience some kind of 'Quisling' rule - the sobriquet given the German occupation of Norway under the collaborationist administration of Vidkun Quisling. Traditionally, the term Polonization had meant the political and cultural expansion of the country at the expense of its neighbors, especially Germans and Lithuanians, but now the term was used to identify the reverse process. Ever since the failed Warsaw uprising of 1831, except for the chaos left after the collapse of World War I, the Poles had been resigned to the fate history had dictated for them, as was amply demonstrated when neither the French nor the British supplied the help they had promised when the Nazi blitzkrieg struck in 1939.
The trouble with this passive, go-it-alone strategy by the Poles when it came to improving the nation's fortunes was that it could easily be sidetracked by others. When the prospects of its government in exile in London started to improve, its head, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, was conveniently assassinated in Gibraltar by the Brits, it seems, in July 1943. Sikorski was a courageous leader who was willing to make hard choices, deciding better 'Stalin than Hitler' immediately after the Nazi forces invaded the USSR, and his vigorous cooporation with them promised some hope for the Poles in the postwar settlement - what Churchill recognized, and had MI6 apparently sabotage the plane's controls while it was refueling, making it look like a Soviet plane, parked next to it, had been its source. Without Sikorski, the anti-communist Poles tried to go it alone when the Soviets forces approached Warsaw, but Stalin would not hear of it.
The postwar settlement in Poland was the most repressive of all in Eastern Euope. The country itself was a convenient hodge-podge at German expense which just provide another example of Polonization. The terms of the Yalta Conference guaranteed that its politics would be Soviet-dominated, and the consequences were the least troublesome to its authorities when it came to anti-regime efforts, as the Vasili Mitrokhin files from the KGB demonstrate. There is hardly any mention of Poland in the book Christopher Andrew wrote about it, The Sword and The Shield, until the revival of Catholicism during the late 1970s under Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, and the rise of Lech Walesa's Solidarity Movement in the 1980s. Until then, the Polish regime had essentially bought off its opponents under the watchful eye of Moscow. When the fear of Soviet military intervention collapsed in Poland, the regime fell surprisingly quickly, like a stack of cards.
For anyone living in Europe after WWII, especially in the Soviet bloc, Poland offered the least insights into how to deal with Soviet Communism domestically, and how it would fare in the world. Poland seemed like the worst place to choose as a jumping off spot for some kind of better future as the soft, repressive character of its communist regime appeared like a fixed monolith, quite impervious to change, because of the immediate presence of the USSR right next door - what turned out to be a paper tiger when Mikael Gorbachev took over.
Actually, a more flexible, compromising attitude towards an invader seems like a more profitable course for an subject country, as France experienced under Nazi rule, and after its liberation. Paris, always worried about the discontinuaties of its turbulent past, always kept a lifeline to its republican past, no matter how comforting the autocratic ways of Marshal Pétain, and the prospects of the Nazi-invaders seemed while it too experienced partition with the creation of the Vichy regime. The duplicity of all concerned was well-illustrated by the behavior of the National Assembly which voted away its power after the fall of France, only to try to restore itself after the departure of the Germans. The Marshal's infamous Deputy Premier, Pierre Laval, and then his successor, Admiral Darlan, were quite prepared to work for the Nazis until it seemed much more profitable just to work for themselves.
The same transition occurred within the population at large, as the chorus of support for Pétain turned slowly in favor of a unfied resistance, General de Gualle was transformed from a troublesome traitor into the nation's savior, insignificant resistance groups became the National Resistance Council, and right-wing hopes of an administered autocracy were dashed by the Vichy fiasco. One can still only wonder if liberation would have turned out so well if Churchill's dealing with the difficult General had resulted in this one's assassination too. When Churchill only informed de Gaulle of the D-Day landings after they occurred, he reacted so furiously that the British Prime Minister wrote him "..a letter," Gordon Wright has written in France in Modern Times, "breaking off all personal relations and ordering de Gaulle off British soil." (p. 394) Fortunately, the letter was not sent.
The experiences of Poland and France during WWII, and in the post-war world must have influenced everyone growing up in their mutual neighbor, Germany, West and East, especially one who moved from zone one to the other. The whole socializing process on either side of the border would have created all kinds of problems between peers and parents. And it would have become even more disruptive if there was an ideological-religious difference between parents and children. The divided character of the country would have proven most vexing to all Germans, as they seemed caught up in an endless quandry of occupation - what no one really knew the outcome of, and when it would occur.
This analysis seems germane while trying to put together the life of Angela Kasner, eldest daughter of Lutheran priest Horst Kasner, and current Chancellor of the German Federal Republic, especially since she is most reluctant to talk about it. Born in Hamburg in 1954, and moved to East Germany shortly thereafter as her father obtained a pastorship in Quitzow, near Perleberg, in nearby Brandenburg, she had the Cold War almost embedded in her very bones. He was born in the Pankow district of Berlin, then part of the Soviet sector. Her mother's parents still lived in Elblag - formerly East Prussia's Elbing - in Poland when Angela was born. The area was allocated to the USSR under the terms of the 1939 Treaty with the Nazis, and was sold to the Soviets in January 1941 for $7,500,000, so the Kasners were victims too of various invasions and partitions.
The Kasners' move to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was apparently an effort to better position themselves for whatever happened to their divided country, particularly since they lived further in the GDR, setting up a household in Templin, 80 kilometers north of Berlin. While Horst was trying to improve relations between the West's and the East's Lutheran churches, Angela was attending state schools, becoming a member of its Free German Youth (FDJ) program, though she did not take part in its Jugendweihe, the secular coming of age rite, preferring to be confirmed in the Lutheran church. Apparently, there was growing tension between the stern father, and the ambitious, talented daughter. Angela became so proficient in Russian that she even won a prize.
After Angela graduated from secondary school in 1973, though, details about who she was becoming, and what she was doing become few and far between. She attended the University of Leipzig. She also married in 1976 fellow undergraudate student Ulrich Merkel, explaining that it was considered the thing to do, though they never had any children, and the marriage started breaking down as soon as she got appointed to Berlin's Academy Sciences where she became FDJ's secretary for recruiting aka 'agitprop' children of its members into its program, showing that she was covertly supporting the GDR's future. In fact, she was so busy doing other things that it wasn't until 1986 that she finally completed her Ph.D degree.
Quantum chemistry aka quantum physics is a highly theoretical field which combines quantum mechanics with general field theory, and has all kinds of practical applications regarding plasmas, nuclear rehabilitation, and electromagnetism. The Soviet Union had built all kinds of nuclear devices on a crash basis - weapons, power plants, nuclear-powered submarines, radioisotope thermo-electric generators (RTGs), etc. - and were becoming concerned about what to do with them when they were no longer useful. There were nuclear power generating plants all around the country whose safety was becoming questionable, nuclear-powered submarines around the ports of Murmansk and Archangel which were dangerously rotting away, and spent RTGs littering the Kola Peninsula.
While the Soviets did not have the resources to deal with these problems, they looked to the East Germans - whose Berlin Academy of Sciences still had a great reputation in the field - to find the know-how, given its contacts in the West. The Berlin establishment traced its origins back to 1700 when the Prussian Academy of Sciences was started, and included among its membership such distinguished scientists as Gottfried Leibniz, Max Planck, and Albert Einstein. Even though it had been revived by the GDR after WWII, it still had over 200 members, including some two dozen from the West. It had grown now to include research in quantum chemistry - where Angela was working at its Central Institute for Physical Chemistry.
To take advantage of Merkel's potential, Markus Wolf's foreign section of the Stasi, the Hauptverwaltung Aufkluring (HVA), recruited her, it seems, to handle illegal agents the GDR was sending across The Wall to gather secrets from research facilities in the Federal Republic (FRG), France, Norway, and other Western countries - what she had learned about from her meetings and contacts at the Institute.
The future seemed to be turning in the GDR's favor since détente had been established between Washington and Moscow, and the two German states had recognized one another's existence in 1972. Most important, the Stasi had nursed along Willy Brandt's bridge-building government towards the GDR until 1974 when its spies in the Chancellor's Office, the Guillaumes, were exposed, Gunter declaring proudly: "I am an officer of the (East German) National People's Army!" (Quoted from Andrew, p. 445.) Despite Wolf's claims after the GDR's collapse that this was a grave mistake - what Andrew believes - it was deliberate, thinking that it would just enhance Eric Honecker's potential in German reunification.
Thanks to the KGB Archives that its librarian Vasili Mittrokhin supplied Andrew, we now know about the extensive use of Stasi 'Romeo' spies who provided the KGB with all kinds of information. The glaring exception was the performance of Wilhelm Kahle (codenamed WERNER), a laboratory technician who assumed the identity of a West German resident in the GDR, and worked in the West in various capacities, and capitals, particularly in labs at Cologne and Bonn universities. By the late 1970s, though, his intelligence take had become too thin, though quite extensive, resulting in a ten-volume file in the Archives, that the KGB became suspicious of his bona fides, especially when it learned through his communications with his mother in East Germany that he was fearful of being recalled to Moscow because of the wealth he had amassed in Paris.
In 1978, Kahle was summoned back to Moscow, and given a lie dedector test on a contrived basis just to determine how unreliable he had become. It proved that it was extensive, resulting in its putting its most accomplished agent, codenamed ANITA - who spoke both German and Russian fluently - on the case. It was one of putting a 'Juliet' on a runaway 'Romeo', apparently a first in intellgence history. After intensive questioning during their liaisons, Andrew wrote, "ANITA's report confirmed the Centre's suspicions." (p. 450) She wrote that he had become an ideologically unreliable, completely self-serving agent who had no qualms about using others, even targets, for his own purposes. "As a result of ANITA's report," Andrew concluded, "Kahle appears to have been sidelined. He was formally removed from illegal work in 1982."
The trouble with Andrew's treatment of ANITA is that he never explained how she had become such an important counterintelligence specialist, who she might be, and why he never explained in the notes the disposition of her case since the Berlin Wall had come down, and the Cold War was over. Then Andrew went out of his way in the notes to make it appear that all 'Romeos', except Wolf's spy FELIX, had been identified - even going out of his way to account for the identity of "Franz Becker" aka Hans-Jurgen Henze (note 57, p. 649) - when there is no idenfication of either Kahle and his superior 'Romeo' ANITA.
Also, there are questions about what she might have done for the KGB after Mitrokhin's records ran out. She could well have been the KGB agent who infiltrated Egon Bahr's entourage - what Andrew mentioned when he discussed SDP Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's dealing with the newly elected President Reagan over a month's delay of his visit to Washington - what KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov explained, thanks to the KGB agent's report "of special importance", to the Soviet chief Leonid Brezhnev, was "designed to enable Washington to gain time to build up its armaments with the aim of overtaking the USSR in the military field." (Quoted from ibid, p. 455.)
The KGB source also stated that there were all kinds of Western agents flooding Bonn to stop the growing commercial contacts between the FRG and the USSR, especially the proposed construction of a pipeline to bring natural gas from Siberia to the West - what Schmidt, to Moscow's delight, was vigorously pressing ahead with.
With the KGB's agent - stationed in the GDR, and apparently Angela Merkel - tipping off Moscow about Washington's new arms race, it was hardly surprising that she finally received her Ph.D. in quantum chemistry. Thanks to her contacts, and the input from various illegals in the West, she had obviously learned alot about what was going on in the field. Just compiling her agent reports into a coherent document would have been enough for the Institute to give her the degree. More important, the whole field was becoming much more important with the Soviets having to face nuclear rehabilitation with its aging nuclear arms, and everyone having to worry about nuclear meltdowns of atomic plants - what happened at Chernobyl just when she received her doctorate.
Unfortunately for Merkel, her hopes for Honecker's all-German socialist republic did not work out, at least as far as we know now. Thanks to the Reagan arms buildup, and Gorbachev's refusal to engage in an arms competition after the near fatal non-nuclear showdown with the Anglo-Americans - what was to be triggered by the assassination of Sweden's statsminister Olof Palme - the communist Soviet bloc, and its individual states underwent deadly collapse, triggered by the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Merkel, to cut her losses from potential blowback, suddenly got involved in politics, joining East Germany's new party, Democratic Awakening. Following the first democratic election in the GDR, she became deputy spokesperson for the pre-unification Prime Minister Lothar de Maiziere, a long-time Christian Democratic politician, and suspected agent of Erich Mielke's Stasi - an allegation which led to his disappearance from politics after Helmut Kohl's CDU/CSU gained control of a united Germany.
Kohl's promotion thereafter of Merkel, aka his " Madchen", cost him dearly though. He had to engage in all kinds of bribes to get the Stasi to destroy embarrassing files, especially those relating to ANITA. and when he refused to identify who supplied the money, he was finished politically after 16 years in office.Then the intelligence coordinator of the Chancellor's Office, Ernst Uhrlau - who went on to become the director of Germany's foreign intelligence service (BND) - went to the greatest lengths to retrieve a Stasi index file of its agents (Operation Rosewood) that the CIA had, and was refusing to turn over. "It is unacceptable in the long run," Uhrlau explained to the Associate Press on December 10,1998 regarding the possibilities of blackmail, "for the German government that relevant files are sitting in the United States, and a possible or likely double in Russia." After a two-year effort, the files were returned to Berlin.
It was not prepared for the fact that Moscow long had held the most dangerous ones, those regarding ANITA, and they had been released to the world by the tome that Christopher Andrew wrote, thanks to the Archive Mitrokhin he had access to. This book was doubly troublesome because by that time Merkel had married, it seems, her old flame, WERNER aka Wilhelm Kahle and now divorced Joachim Sauer. They had had at the same time similiar totally unexplained careers at the Central Institute of Physical Chemistry. Sauer is even more tight-lipped about his life than she is, even declining to mention that he was born in East Germany in Senftenberg, 50 kilometers north of Dresden - where he called his mother when he got into the KGB's soup.
Of course, this would explain why Sauer has adopted such a low-profile existence to Merkel's growing importance and popularity. He seems afraid that someone, especially one of his 'honey trap' victims might still recognize him. It would also explain why his wife has the best relation with Russia's Vladimir Putin, and why she is apparently being blackmailed by the Mossad when it comes to Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, EU policy towards Iran, and missteps by the Pope when it comes to The Holocaust.
In fact, she has followed a policy so favored by the Social Democrats in the current economic meltdown that her CSU Economics Minister Michael Glos suddenly resigned two weeks ago - what the press explained in terms of an alleged lack of input when it came to economic policy-making, but he explained ominously: "She always believed I didn't have a clue about a lot of things."
It seems that as other people learn more about who Angela Merkel really is, she will have increasing political difficulties. She seems to have taken just too many risks in our ever-changing world.
Thursday, 19 February 2009
Tuesday, 10 February 2009
Why and How Anna Lindh Was Assassinated
by Trowbridge H. Ford
In the aftermath of the bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the Bush administration was desperate to capture similar militants like the suicide bombers on the planes in the hope of learning more about what other people knew about the attacks, not so much about other possible attacks, for fear that there would be devastating blowback from the massive cock-up. The fact that no more attacks were anticipated was graphically demonstrated when President Bush continued reading to those children in the elementary school in Florida after he had been informed of the airliners being highjacked after they had taken off from distant airports in Boston, Newark, and Washington.
The Pentagon, under Donald Rumsfeld's direction, had caused the cock-up by allowing George Tenet's CIA to steal a march in its counterterrorism duel with the FBI - seriously embarrassed by the belated discovery of the spying by its agent, Robert Hanssen, for the now defunct Soviets - by allowing 15 of its agents - unarmed, and under the general direction of Barbara Olson, wife of the Solicitor General, on the plane which crashed into the Pentagon - on the last three flights in the hope that they would catch the alleged highjackers red-handed, and force them to surrender to the authorities after the four planes had landed in LA. The Secretary of Defense had assured this outcome by making himself the one to be called by the National Military Command Center in case of emergency - what resulted in him doing nothing in time to shoot down the planes when he was alerted of the highjackings.
It was to be a replay of what Tenet had arranged against Al-Qaeda attacks back in November and December 1999 during the Millennium celebrations, thanks to National Security Agency (NSA) telephone intercepts, 34 in all, resulting ultimately in the capture of Algerian jihadist, Ahmed Ressam, when he entered the USA illegally from Canada in the hope of blowing the same Los Angeles International Airport. DCI Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, tried on July 10th to get National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on board for a similar operation, thanks to all the renewed telephone noise about "something spectacular is coming" - as Bob Woodward recounted in State of Denial - but she declined to initiate an extraordinary response, opting instead for policy making to take its course - what resulted in the adoption of National Security Presidential Directive-9 just the day before the attacks.
When the hijackers turned out to be deadly suicide bombers, and carried out their assignments with essential precision, though, Tenet's covert government in Washington had a mass of damning evidence to cover up. The Agency was blamed for not taking action against the long-suspected leaders of the hijackers, Khalid Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf Al-Hazmi, from entering the country until after they were already arrived, and had then bought 10 airline tickets for men fo Middle-Eastern origin to fly to LA from Boston. While the CIA claimed that it was a lack of knowledge which permitted the disaster to happen, it was really the result of an ad-hoc remedy for the presumed highjackers rather than simply preventing them from getting on the four planes.
The immediate problem was to suppress evidence that the 15 agents were on the last three planes. To accomplish this, authorities refused to release the full passenger lists for the four flights, leaving out the names not only the 19 well-known suicide bombers by then, but also the names of the Agency agents - what would cause all kinds of damaging blowback if the general public learned of them. Of course, leaving out the names of the suicide bombers allowed all kinds of government disinformation agents and their ignorant followers to claim that there were no such people - what helped facilitate all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories - e. g., the planes were never highjacked, merely taken control of by electronic equipment on the ground by unknown conspirators who then crashed the planes where they wanted.
The existence of the 15 agents was not eliminated, though, by only releasing the abbreviated passenger lists as recorded cellphone calls by the passengers, especially from Barbara Olson to her husband Ted, kept suspicions alive that more was going on than the government was admitting. While everyone was wondering how the spooks could have screwed up so much, she was reported to have twice called the Solicitor General, confirming, apparently the expected, stating: "Our plane is being hijacked." (Quoted from "The Dead," NYHT, September 13, 2001, p. 7.) Then after the pilot had been herded unexpectedly into the back of the plane as it made its way towards The Pentagon, she called again, asking frantically: "What do I tell the pilot to do?." Apparently, there was an expectation that the hijacking would go smoothly until the plane approached its destination, what the herding of passengers, and the reversal of course indicated was no longer in the cards.
Then the government went to increasing lengths to downplay the cellphone calls, soon raising doubts that Ms. Olson had even called her husband, and then trying to make out that no calls from the planes were possible at the time of the highjacking, though there were several articles about such calls, as this article in Time reported: "HIGH IN THE AIR, FROM INSIDE THE planes and skyscrapers where their final moments slipped away, dozens of victims spoke their last words to faraway people closest to their hearts." ("The Last Phone Call," September 24, 2001 issue, p. 76) The government so persisted, though, that the calls from the planes were most unlikely, if they ever really occurred, that the Solicitor General ultimately doubted that he really spoke to Barbara during the last minutes of her life!
Of course, immediately after the attacks occurred, all kinds of blowback began to surface in the leaderless, embarrassed FBI. Louis Freeh had retired the previous May as Director, and his replacement, Robert Mueller, was still in hospital, recovering from an operation. More important, the Bureau's most dedicated counterterrorist, John O'Neill, had been so isolated from the hunt for the highjackers that he had not only resigned, but was also killed in the WTC collapse. (For more on this, see Trowbridge Ford, "O'Neill: A Voice in the Wilderness," Eye Spy, Issue Thirteen, pp. 22-3.)
Bureau agents in Minneapolis had such well-founded suspicions, thanks to input that the imprisoned Ahmed Ressam had supplied, that Zacarias Moussaoui was involved in some kind of highjacking that they had arrested him for immigration fraud, but superiors in Washington, apparently not to tip off the other highjackers what it knew, had not allowed them to pursue the case further. Special Agent Ken Williams in Phoenix had alerted headquarters in Washington of several persons of Middle East origin, seeking suspicious limited pilot training, but nothing was done about it. Then Mohammad Al-Kahtani tried to enter the USA in Orlando in August, apparently as a "muscle man" for the understaffed flight which crashed in Pennsylvania, but was denied entry - ending up as one of the first inmates of the notorious prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba aka Gitmo.
None of these arrests, even after Al-Kahtani was tortured, resulted in any significant information about who had planned the attacks, really knew about them, and represented serious threats to the administration in Washington if what they knew really leaked out. To meet this challenge, two days after the attacks, President Bush instituted the extraordinary rendition policy - sending suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists to places like Saudi Arabia for harsh interrogation to make them talk. "In the immediate wake of 9/11," Bob Woodward wrote in State of Denial, "Bush wanted answers from those who had been detained." (p. 81) Of course, it wasn't clear what the questions really were, so the Agency went for broke to get as many possible sources of information for questions that might become necessary - what resulted in apparently the first rendering of suspects in a trolling way - the shipment of Egyptian-born Ahmed Agiza and Mohammed Al-Zery from Stockholm to Cairo on December 18, 2001.
Before this, over 200 suspects arrested for terrorism had been sent to various secret locations in the hope of finding out more about what they apparently knew through harsh measures since the US Constitution did permit unrestricted interrogations of its residents. The most successful rendering of terrorist suspects had been that of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef - the mastermind of the 1993 WTC bombing, and a nephew of Al-Qaeda leader Khalid Mohammad - from Islamabad back to the States in 1995 by the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Egyptian authorities had not only warned American ones about the bombing, but also had kept track of where Yousef had disappeared to. Agiza and Al-Zery seemed to be ideal sources for a deep 'fishing trip' with the Egyptians for more possible suspects since they were connected to the jihardists who had assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
Cairo, it seems, alerted the State Department that it was still looking into the alleged terrorism that Agiza and Al-Zery had committed, and would like to interrogate them further. The Egyptian authorities had gone to the State Department because it had no confidence in working with either the FBI or the CIA because, as the Yousef problem demonstrated, they always worked at cross purposes. (For more on this, see Mark Riebling, Wedge:The Secret War Between The FBI And CIA, p. 433ff.) State's Bureau of Diplomatic Security then contacted the Foreign Department in Stockholm, stating that it was of the utmost urgency that they be taken to Egypt for questioning about possible threats against American establishments, especially the Embassy, in Sweden.
Despite the BDS's success in Yousef's capture, things had not gone well with it since, thanks to budget cuts, and security lapses, so it was looking for some big surprise to improve its funding and stature. Its biggest problem was failling to prevent the attacks on its embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1996, and then there were the disappearances of secret information through either institutional or personal failure. It was also still suffering from the blowback from the spying in 1989 for the Soviets by the State Department's Felix Bloch - the most important one it ever experienced - especially since he escaped prosecution for it because of the lack of proper coordination with other law enforcement agencies.
To help prevent this in future, State had established a Rewards for Justice program where it was willing to pay up to $5,000,000 to anyone preventing such security failure. Since it was started in 1984, about 40 persons had been paid nearly $62,000,000 by the program.
Under the circumstances, Foreign Minister Anna Lindh had little choice but to go along with the request after informing the Göran Persson's Cabinet of it, and gaining its approval of it. According to her former press secretary, Eva Franchell, in Girlfiend, an account from Rosenbad, Lindh was told she would be sacked if she didn't. While she was marking arrangements for their orderly deportation, though, the process was speeded by Såpo agents on the afternoon of December 18th when the suspects were taken to the police office at Bromma Airport where they met by two officials from the American Embassy, apparently the BDS's regional director, and the CIA's resident. When they checked in there with police officer Paul Forell, Stephen Grey wrote in Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Rendition and Torture Program, "they gave their first names and said they were from the U. S. Embassy. They obviously knew the SAPO officers officers, he recalled."
Of course, this raised the real possibility that the Såpo agents thought they were in the running for some kind of reward from the State Department's justice program, explaining why they were so eager to do the work. They were certainly in the running for something as they were not just informing the BDS of possible terrorism but were actually handing over the suspects allegedly involved in it. Little wonder, then, they stood back, and watched confidently as the two were taken to one of the CIA's Gulfstream V jets where they were stripped of their grab, sedated with suppositories for the trip, dressed in prisoner uniforms, and chained to the plane for the flight to Egypt.
Since the suspects just disappeared without a trace for almost everyone, it took awhile for Swedish authorities to learn what had happened to them, Thomas Bodström learned in January from Såpo director Jan Danielsson that the suspects had been whisked away to Cairo by the CIA. Lindh learned from them what had happened to them, and what feedback they were supplying their torturers about their alleged colleagues - what proved to be little more than what they had learned during their stays in the Middle East about who might have worked for Al-Qaeda and Saddam in most menial capacities.
In June, US Attorney General announced that José Padilla, who planned to set off a 'dirty' bomb in the States, had been captured, thanks to the information which had been tortured out of British resident Binyam Mohammed after he had been snatched away at Karachi Airport because of MI6 tipoffs, and rendered by the CIA to Morocco. Then Lindh leared from British Foreigin Secretary Jack Straw, with whom she had close relations, about other renderings involving British territory, especially those of Australian David Hicks, and Tunisian Abdellah Al-Hajji who was caught in Pakistan and rendered shortly thereafter to the American prison in Gitmo. Britain was the focal point of the rendition transit system, and the Foreign Office was the best informed agency in the world about what was going on.
Under these circumstances, the Swedish Foreign Department was not about to go along with another unannounced rendering of a Swedish resident, this time fellow Tunisian Kerim Chatty, when he attempted to board a RyanAir flight from Västerås to London Stansted on August 29, 2002. Chatty was an ideal follower to the 9/11 suicide bombers, having attended flight training courses in South Carolina in 1996, and having converted to radicial Islam while serving a prison sentence for illegal arms possession. It was with a similar illegal, loaded pistol that Chatty tried to get on the plane - what a military source, apparently America's Defense Intelligence Agency, later told Reuters - with the plan "...to crash the plane into a US embassy in Europe."
To make the plan seem even more real, the Embassy in Stockholm had installed many illlegal cameras around its premises to catch anyone on tape, casing the joint.
While one cannot be sure what US agents planned for if Chatty had gotten on the flight, it seems likely it was to be a replay of what their deceased predecessors had planned on 9/11, only this time there would be enough physical power to make sure that he did not get control of the plane, much less attempt to crash it into the Stockholm facility. This time Såpo was on a very short leash, thanks to strict instructions from the Foreign Department, not even allowing Chatty to get on the plane, but charging him with attempted highjacking. Then Såpo denied the claims about Chatty being on a suicide mission, dismissing them as disinformation. Ultimately, Chatty was not even charged with attempted highjacking, only found guilty in December of firearms offences for which he was sentenced to four months in prison.
Foreign Secretary Lindh was radicalized by this whole process. Now she, during Sweden's Presidency of the European Commission, was committed to building up democracy in Serbia, strengthening the EU, settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, preventing the ouster of Saddam Hussein's regime without a UN mandate, and stopping extra-judicial killings by the Americans and their allies in the war on terrorism. She also called for greater respect for international law and human rights in the conduct of foreign affairs, especially in Palestine. At the end of January, she called for Ariel Sharon's government to "end the occupation, give up settlements, and agree on a pragmatic solution to Jerusalem." Most observers saw these initiatives as her staking her claims to be Sweden's next Prime Minister.
Unfortunately, this was not to be, as she was stopped every step of the way, ultimately resulting in her being assassinated. Her attempt to bolster Zoran Djinjic's fledgling democratic government in Serbia - which had sent Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague's War Crimes Tribunal - was stopped cold when she went to meet him in Belgrade as he too was assassinated right before the meeting was scheduled to take place. Lindh was unsuccessful in stopping the invasion of Iraq without a mandate - what could only have happened if the UN arms inspectors had discovered evidence that Saddam had restarted his WMD programs. And Washington and Tel Aviv were in no way moved by her recommendations or restrained by her complaints. Actually, they only moved her into the bullseye, as I have already indicated in my article about her assassination.
The trigger was the feared blowback from the murder of Dr. David Kelly on July 17, 2003 In Oxfordshire - what was necessary because of what the famous weapons inspector planned to do, now that it had been determined that there was no WMD justification for the invasion of Iraq, a finding which Lindh was bound to take the greatest advantage of within the EU. When the Hutton Inquiry suspended its hearings in early September without a clear indication of how it would rule on his killing, covert operators - a Mossad kidon apparently, as in the killings of Djinjic and Kelly - carried out the assassination.
This time, though, it was neither the result of distant snipers, nor an apparent suicide, but a Serbian - high on drugs, and hearing microwave instructions aka 'voices' - who was directed to the murder site, Stockholm's famous NK department store, after stealing a weapon from another store along the way, where he was moved by still more 'voices' to cut up the defenseless woman with near impunity, as the Swedish Security Service had not seen fit to provide her, of all the leading politicians, with bodyguard protection.
One, in light of what had happened to Olof Palme, and what Lindh had done, can only wonder why.
In the aftermath of the bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the Bush administration was desperate to capture similar militants like the suicide bombers on the planes in the hope of learning more about what other people knew about the attacks, not so much about other possible attacks, for fear that there would be devastating blowback from the massive cock-up. The fact that no more attacks were anticipated was graphically demonstrated when President Bush continued reading to those children in the elementary school in Florida after he had been informed of the airliners being highjacked after they had taken off from distant airports in Boston, Newark, and Washington.
The Pentagon, under Donald Rumsfeld's direction, had caused the cock-up by allowing George Tenet's CIA to steal a march in its counterterrorism duel with the FBI - seriously embarrassed by the belated discovery of the spying by its agent, Robert Hanssen, for the now defunct Soviets - by allowing 15 of its agents - unarmed, and under the general direction of Barbara Olson, wife of the Solicitor General, on the plane which crashed into the Pentagon - on the last three flights in the hope that they would catch the alleged highjackers red-handed, and force them to surrender to the authorities after the four planes had landed in LA. The Secretary of Defense had assured this outcome by making himself the one to be called by the National Military Command Center in case of emergency - what resulted in him doing nothing in time to shoot down the planes when he was alerted of the highjackings.
It was to be a replay of what Tenet had arranged against Al-Qaeda attacks back in November and December 1999 during the Millennium celebrations, thanks to National Security Agency (NSA) telephone intercepts, 34 in all, resulting ultimately in the capture of Algerian jihadist, Ahmed Ressam, when he entered the USA illegally from Canada in the hope of blowing the same Los Angeles International Airport. DCI Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, tried on July 10th to get National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on board for a similar operation, thanks to all the renewed telephone noise about "something spectacular is coming" - as Bob Woodward recounted in State of Denial - but she declined to initiate an extraordinary response, opting instead for policy making to take its course - what resulted in the adoption of National Security Presidential Directive-9 just the day before the attacks.
When the hijackers turned out to be deadly suicide bombers, and carried out their assignments with essential precision, though, Tenet's covert government in Washington had a mass of damning evidence to cover up. The Agency was blamed for not taking action against the long-suspected leaders of the hijackers, Khalid Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf Al-Hazmi, from entering the country until after they were already arrived, and had then bought 10 airline tickets for men fo Middle-Eastern origin to fly to LA from Boston. While the CIA claimed that it was a lack of knowledge which permitted the disaster to happen, it was really the result of an ad-hoc remedy for the presumed highjackers rather than simply preventing them from getting on the four planes.
The immediate problem was to suppress evidence that the 15 agents were on the last three planes. To accomplish this, authorities refused to release the full passenger lists for the four flights, leaving out the names not only the 19 well-known suicide bombers by then, but also the names of the Agency agents - what would cause all kinds of damaging blowback if the general public learned of them. Of course, leaving out the names of the suicide bombers allowed all kinds of government disinformation agents and their ignorant followers to claim that there were no such people - what helped facilitate all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories - e. g., the planes were never highjacked, merely taken control of by electronic equipment on the ground by unknown conspirators who then crashed the planes where they wanted.
The existence of the 15 agents was not eliminated, though, by only releasing the abbreviated passenger lists as recorded cellphone calls by the passengers, especially from Barbara Olson to her husband Ted, kept suspicions alive that more was going on than the government was admitting. While everyone was wondering how the spooks could have screwed up so much, she was reported to have twice called the Solicitor General, confirming, apparently the expected, stating: "Our plane is being hijacked." (Quoted from "The Dead," NYHT, September 13, 2001, p. 7.) Then after the pilot had been herded unexpectedly into the back of the plane as it made its way towards The Pentagon, she called again, asking frantically: "What do I tell the pilot to do?." Apparently, there was an expectation that the hijacking would go smoothly until the plane approached its destination, what the herding of passengers, and the reversal of course indicated was no longer in the cards.
Then the government went to increasing lengths to downplay the cellphone calls, soon raising doubts that Ms. Olson had even called her husband, and then trying to make out that no calls from the planes were possible at the time of the highjacking, though there were several articles about such calls, as this article in Time reported: "HIGH IN THE AIR, FROM INSIDE THE planes and skyscrapers where their final moments slipped away, dozens of victims spoke their last words to faraway people closest to their hearts." ("The Last Phone Call," September 24, 2001 issue, p. 76) The government so persisted, though, that the calls from the planes were most unlikely, if they ever really occurred, that the Solicitor General ultimately doubted that he really spoke to Barbara during the last minutes of her life!
Of course, immediately after the attacks occurred, all kinds of blowback began to surface in the leaderless, embarrassed FBI. Louis Freeh had retired the previous May as Director, and his replacement, Robert Mueller, was still in hospital, recovering from an operation. More important, the Bureau's most dedicated counterterrorist, John O'Neill, had been so isolated from the hunt for the highjackers that he had not only resigned, but was also killed in the WTC collapse. (For more on this, see Trowbridge Ford, "O'Neill: A Voice in the Wilderness," Eye Spy, Issue Thirteen, pp. 22-3.)
Bureau agents in Minneapolis had such well-founded suspicions, thanks to input that the imprisoned Ahmed Ressam had supplied, that Zacarias Moussaoui was involved in some kind of highjacking that they had arrested him for immigration fraud, but superiors in Washington, apparently not to tip off the other highjackers what it knew, had not allowed them to pursue the case further. Special Agent Ken Williams in Phoenix had alerted headquarters in Washington of several persons of Middle East origin, seeking suspicious limited pilot training, but nothing was done about it. Then Mohammad Al-Kahtani tried to enter the USA in Orlando in August, apparently as a "muscle man" for the understaffed flight which crashed in Pennsylvania, but was denied entry - ending up as one of the first inmates of the notorious prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba aka Gitmo.
None of these arrests, even after Al-Kahtani was tortured, resulted in any significant information about who had planned the attacks, really knew about them, and represented serious threats to the administration in Washington if what they knew really leaked out. To meet this challenge, two days after the attacks, President Bush instituted the extraordinary rendition policy - sending suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists to places like Saudi Arabia for harsh interrogation to make them talk. "In the immediate wake of 9/11," Bob Woodward wrote in State of Denial, "Bush wanted answers from those who had been detained." (p. 81) Of course, it wasn't clear what the questions really were, so the Agency went for broke to get as many possible sources of information for questions that might become necessary - what resulted in apparently the first rendering of suspects in a trolling way - the shipment of Egyptian-born Ahmed Agiza and Mohammed Al-Zery from Stockholm to Cairo on December 18, 2001.
Before this, over 200 suspects arrested for terrorism had been sent to various secret locations in the hope of finding out more about what they apparently knew through harsh measures since the US Constitution did permit unrestricted interrogations of its residents. The most successful rendering of terrorist suspects had been that of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef - the mastermind of the 1993 WTC bombing, and a nephew of Al-Qaeda leader Khalid Mohammad - from Islamabad back to the States in 1995 by the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Egyptian authorities had not only warned American ones about the bombing, but also had kept track of where Yousef had disappeared to. Agiza and Al-Zery seemed to be ideal sources for a deep 'fishing trip' with the Egyptians for more possible suspects since they were connected to the jihardists who had assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
Cairo, it seems, alerted the State Department that it was still looking into the alleged terrorism that Agiza and Al-Zery had committed, and would like to interrogate them further. The Egyptian authorities had gone to the State Department because it had no confidence in working with either the FBI or the CIA because, as the Yousef problem demonstrated, they always worked at cross purposes. (For more on this, see Mark Riebling, Wedge:The Secret War Between The FBI And CIA, p. 433ff.) State's Bureau of Diplomatic Security then contacted the Foreign Department in Stockholm, stating that it was of the utmost urgency that they be taken to Egypt for questioning about possible threats against American establishments, especially the Embassy, in Sweden.
Despite the BDS's success in Yousef's capture, things had not gone well with it since, thanks to budget cuts, and security lapses, so it was looking for some big surprise to improve its funding and stature. Its biggest problem was failling to prevent the attacks on its embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1996, and then there were the disappearances of secret information through either institutional or personal failure. It was also still suffering from the blowback from the spying in 1989 for the Soviets by the State Department's Felix Bloch - the most important one it ever experienced - especially since he escaped prosecution for it because of the lack of proper coordination with other law enforcement agencies.
To help prevent this in future, State had established a Rewards for Justice program where it was willing to pay up to $5,000,000 to anyone preventing such security failure. Since it was started in 1984, about 40 persons had been paid nearly $62,000,000 by the program.
Under the circumstances, Foreign Minister Anna Lindh had little choice but to go along with the request after informing the Göran Persson's Cabinet of it, and gaining its approval of it. According to her former press secretary, Eva Franchell, in Girlfiend, an account from Rosenbad, Lindh was told she would be sacked if she didn't. While she was marking arrangements for their orderly deportation, though, the process was speeded by Såpo agents on the afternoon of December 18th when the suspects were taken to the police office at Bromma Airport where they met by two officials from the American Embassy, apparently the BDS's regional director, and the CIA's resident. When they checked in there with police officer Paul Forell, Stephen Grey wrote in Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Rendition and Torture Program, "they gave their first names and said they were from the U. S. Embassy. They obviously knew the SAPO officers officers, he recalled."
Of course, this raised the real possibility that the Såpo agents thought they were in the running for some kind of reward from the State Department's justice program, explaining why they were so eager to do the work. They were certainly in the running for something as they were not just informing the BDS of possible terrorism but were actually handing over the suspects allegedly involved in it. Little wonder, then, they stood back, and watched confidently as the two were taken to one of the CIA's Gulfstream V jets where they were stripped of their grab, sedated with suppositories for the trip, dressed in prisoner uniforms, and chained to the plane for the flight to Egypt.
Since the suspects just disappeared without a trace for almost everyone, it took awhile for Swedish authorities to learn what had happened to them, Thomas Bodström learned in January from Såpo director Jan Danielsson that the suspects had been whisked away to Cairo by the CIA. Lindh learned from them what had happened to them, and what feedback they were supplying their torturers about their alleged colleagues - what proved to be little more than what they had learned during their stays in the Middle East about who might have worked for Al-Qaeda and Saddam in most menial capacities.
In June, US Attorney General announced that José Padilla, who planned to set off a 'dirty' bomb in the States, had been captured, thanks to the information which had been tortured out of British resident Binyam Mohammed after he had been snatched away at Karachi Airport because of MI6 tipoffs, and rendered by the CIA to Morocco. Then Lindh leared from British Foreigin Secretary Jack Straw, with whom she had close relations, about other renderings involving British territory, especially those of Australian David Hicks, and Tunisian Abdellah Al-Hajji who was caught in Pakistan and rendered shortly thereafter to the American prison in Gitmo. Britain was the focal point of the rendition transit system, and the Foreign Office was the best informed agency in the world about what was going on.
Under these circumstances, the Swedish Foreign Department was not about to go along with another unannounced rendering of a Swedish resident, this time fellow Tunisian Kerim Chatty, when he attempted to board a RyanAir flight from Västerås to London Stansted on August 29, 2002. Chatty was an ideal follower to the 9/11 suicide bombers, having attended flight training courses in South Carolina in 1996, and having converted to radicial Islam while serving a prison sentence for illegal arms possession. It was with a similar illegal, loaded pistol that Chatty tried to get on the plane - what a military source, apparently America's Defense Intelligence Agency, later told Reuters - with the plan "...to crash the plane into a US embassy in Europe."
To make the plan seem even more real, the Embassy in Stockholm had installed many illlegal cameras around its premises to catch anyone on tape, casing the joint.
While one cannot be sure what US agents planned for if Chatty had gotten on the flight, it seems likely it was to be a replay of what their deceased predecessors had planned on 9/11, only this time there would be enough physical power to make sure that he did not get control of the plane, much less attempt to crash it into the Stockholm facility. This time Såpo was on a very short leash, thanks to strict instructions from the Foreign Department, not even allowing Chatty to get on the plane, but charging him with attempted highjacking. Then Såpo denied the claims about Chatty being on a suicide mission, dismissing them as disinformation. Ultimately, Chatty was not even charged with attempted highjacking, only found guilty in December of firearms offences for which he was sentenced to four months in prison.
Foreign Secretary Lindh was radicalized by this whole process. Now she, during Sweden's Presidency of the European Commission, was committed to building up democracy in Serbia, strengthening the EU, settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, preventing the ouster of Saddam Hussein's regime without a UN mandate, and stopping extra-judicial killings by the Americans and their allies in the war on terrorism. She also called for greater respect for international law and human rights in the conduct of foreign affairs, especially in Palestine. At the end of January, she called for Ariel Sharon's government to "end the occupation, give up settlements, and agree on a pragmatic solution to Jerusalem." Most observers saw these initiatives as her staking her claims to be Sweden's next Prime Minister.
Unfortunately, this was not to be, as she was stopped every step of the way, ultimately resulting in her being assassinated. Her attempt to bolster Zoran Djinjic's fledgling democratic government in Serbia - which had sent Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague's War Crimes Tribunal - was stopped cold when she went to meet him in Belgrade as he too was assassinated right before the meeting was scheduled to take place. Lindh was unsuccessful in stopping the invasion of Iraq without a mandate - what could only have happened if the UN arms inspectors had discovered evidence that Saddam had restarted his WMD programs. And Washington and Tel Aviv were in no way moved by her recommendations or restrained by her complaints. Actually, they only moved her into the bullseye, as I have already indicated in my article about her assassination.
The trigger was the feared blowback from the murder of Dr. David Kelly on July 17, 2003 In Oxfordshire - what was necessary because of what the famous weapons inspector planned to do, now that it had been determined that there was no WMD justification for the invasion of Iraq, a finding which Lindh was bound to take the greatest advantage of within the EU. When the Hutton Inquiry suspended its hearings in early September without a clear indication of how it would rule on his killing, covert operators - a Mossad kidon apparently, as in the killings of Djinjic and Kelly - carried out the assassination.
This time, though, it was neither the result of distant snipers, nor an apparent suicide, but a Serbian - high on drugs, and hearing microwave instructions aka 'voices' - who was directed to the murder site, Stockholm's famous NK department store, after stealing a weapon from another store along the way, where he was moved by still more 'voices' to cut up the defenseless woman with near impunity, as the Swedish Security Service had not seen fit to provide her, of all the leading politicians, with bodyguard protection.
One, in light of what had happened to Olof Palme, and what Lindh had done, can only wonder why.
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