Showing posts with label George HW Bush. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George HW Bush. Show all posts

Monday, 6 August 2007

It's the 1930s All Over Again

I often wondered how the German people could allow Hitler to do what he did, looking at the USA in 2007 I begin to see it much more clearly!


Jittery stock markets, an economy drunk on credit, and politicians calling for varieties of dictatorship: what a sense of déjà vu! Let us recall that the world went bonkers for about ten years way back when. The stock market crashed in 1929, thanks to the Federal Reserve, and with it fell the last remnants of the old liberal ideology that government should leave society and economy alone to flourish. After the federal Great Depression hit, there was a general air in the United States and Europe that freedom hadn't worked. What we needed were strong leaders to manage and plan economies and societies.

And how they were worshipped. On the other side of the world, there were Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini, but in the United States we weren't in very good shape either. Here we had FDR, who imagined himself capable of astonishing feats of price setting and economy boosting. Of course he used old-fashioned tricks: printing money and threatening people with guns. It was nothing but the ancient despotism brought back in pseudo-scientific garb.

Things didn't really return to normal until after the war. These "great men" of history keeled over eventually, but look what they left: welfare states, inflationary banking systems, high taxes, massive debt, mandates on business, and regimes with a penchant for meddling at the slightest sign of trouble. They had their way even if their absurd posturing became unfashionable later.

It's strange to go back and read opinion pieces from those times. It's as if everyone just assumed that we had to have either fascism or socialism, and that the one option to be ruled out was laissez-faire. People like Mises and Hayek had to fight tooth and nail to get a hearing. The Americans had some journalists who seemed to understand, but they were few and far between.

So what was the excuse for such a shabby period in ideological history? Why did the world go crazy? It was the Great Depression, or so says the usual explanation. People were suffering and looking for answers. They turned to a Strongman to bail them out. There was a fashion for scientific planning, and the suffering economy (caused by the government, of course) seemed to bolster the rationale.

All of which brings me to a strange observation: when it comes to politics, we aren't that much better off today. It's true that we don't have people running for office in ridiculous military suits. They don't scream at us or give sappy fireside chats or purport to be the embodiment of the social mind. The tune is slightly changed, but the notes and rhythms are the same.

Full story...

Friday, 8 June 2007

Recent Undisclosed Mossad 'False Flag' Operations, III

by Trowbridge H. Ford
The Lindh Assassination from the Mossad's Perspective
Now that the assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic has been officially covered up - especially thanks to the two assassinations of Dr. David Kelly and former Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh which came after it, and are intimately connected to it - it is time to complete my examination of the three murders which the war on terror necessitated, and Meir Dagan's Mossad apparently saw to the accomplishment of - what he vowed to do to any supporter of alleged Muslim terrorism after Al-Qaeda killed 13 Israelis tourists in a Mombasa hotel with a car bomb, and another 261 when it nearly shot down an airliner departing from its airport in November 2002. While Djindjic was murdered to make sure that none of its most secret operations to help Serbian nationalist Slobodan Milosevic's war against Muslims leaked out after the ouster of Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Kelly was killed for fear that his claims to the BBC's Andrew Gillian about Downing Street's 'sexing up' his claims about its WMD threatened a critical review by him of the whole neocon adventure in the Middle East which would reveal its Mossad origins, and Lindh's followed because it was feared that she would use it to make a damaging political case against Israel's political existence.
Djindjic's assassination had long been in the offing since the vastly exaggerated claims about Saddam's WMD - thanks to alleged critical assistance across the board from the ousted Serbian President - were proving increasingly untrue since the Iraqi dictator was not threatening to use them, especially nuclear weapons made with material from Belgrade's Vinca Institute of Nuclear Sciences, as a last resort to save his regime. The delay in the killing had been caused by finding the proper assassins, making enough unsuccessful attempts to fool the public about who was behind it and why, and waiting until just the last moment before the invasion of Iraq to insure that the killing would soon be overshadowed by what happened in the Middle East - what would lead the media to soon write off the shooting as just more senseless Serbian violence, especially when the two assassins, it seemed, were cornered, and conveniently killed in a police shootout during the subsequent state of emergency. In the process, it was thought, Serbian President Vojislav Kostunica and his security apparatus, including Israeli operators, who helped plot the whole process would escape detection.
The event which triggered Djindjic's assassination was neither the overthrow of Milosevic nor his being shipped off to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for human rights violations, as Franko 'Frenki' Simatovic's Red Berets had gone along with these damage-limitation measures. It was the belated arrests for similar crimes in November 2002 of the infamous Banovic twins, Nenad and Predrag, by Milorad 'Legija' Ulemek aka Milorad Lukovic which started the process rolling. 'Legija' was so upset by their arrests that his force then shut down the center of Belgrade, but the two former guards at the infamous Keraterm prison were still shipped off to The Hague for trial. Ulemek still managed to get the Djindjic government to sack its secret service chief, Goran Petrovic, and his deputy, Goran Mijatovic, for this apparently reckless act - what threatened to expose who were really the brains behind the ethic-cleansing in Bosnia-Hercegovina, and later in Kosovo, clearing the way for Zoran's assassination.
The Banovic brothers 'Ban' and 'Capo' were deeply involved in brutally torturing and killing the most knowledgeable Muslims for information in clearing the area around Prijedor of Bosniacs and Croatians - what threatened to reveal the real make-up of the 300 Red Berets aka 'Frenki's Boys' leading the operation. 'Frenki' was so concerned about keeping their identity secret that he once threatened to kill a reporter who tried to take their picture if he ever tried it again. His greatest concern was about the identity of self-proclaimed volunteers, especially Jews, who had come from outside Yugoslavia to settle scores with Bosniacs and Croatians for previous alleged crimes against their people. Recently, Christopher Walker of The Times acknowledged that around 40 Israeli volunteers were still helping the Serbs control Kosovo in recognition of what the Partisans had done during WWII to help Jews from Nazi oppression - what had required a larger Israeli force, and a more official one when the Serbs were trying to prevent the breakup of Yugoslavia a decade earlier.
The danger of the Banovic brothers, and their prison associates talking about who was behind and directing the terror campaign against non-Serbs in Bosnia increased in February 2003 when Dragan Vasiljkovic supplied the ICTY with a video he had taken of the whole Belgrade security force which had secured the area north of the Una river around Glina for Greater Serbia. Vasiljkovic aka Captain Dragan, an ex-patriot from Australia, had returned to Serbia to help out in the ethnic-cleansing, and he led the force which cleared the area. The video - what Vasiljkovic had taken himself - showed apparently the presence of many Israelis in the group, possibly even including the IDF's Meir Dagan who was carrying out Ariel Sharon's call for wiping out alleged Muslim terrorisim, and called it quits after the conclusion of the Bosnian war. Of course, the submission not only panicked the ICTY but also those worried about having to answer war crimes charges still back in Serbia.
The only hitch with the assassination was that the shootout shot Mile Lukovic rather than Milorad Ulemek, the former Red Beret commander who had been recruited along with Zemun crime boss Spasojevic back in December 2002 by Kostunica's emissaries Rade Bulatovic, his security adviser, and General Aco Tomic, the military intelligence chief, to do the job, once released from prison. The arrangement showed that changes in Yugoslavia were much smaller than the outside world had anticipatated. Kostunica was conspiring to create a Serbia without Milosevic and its state-dominated economy, thanks to crucial assistance by his former security network. Djindjic's assassination would cap the process, leading to the drying up of war criminals going to The Hague, especially Bosnia's Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic.
The assassination itself went off like clockwork on March 12, 2003 - with the two assassins lying in wait for hours until Djindjic was clearly in sight while on his way to meet fellow opponent of the current Israeli administration, Sweden's Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, and while the surveillance cameras were conveniently turned off - but the process was badly damaged when the wrong Lukovic was assassinated during the shootout with crime boss Spasojevic two weeks later. Milorad Ulemek was tipped off about his demise, apparently with help from the Mossad, and made his escape to Hungary, only to return voluntarily 14 months later when Kostunica was firmly in place as Serbia's Prime Minister, guaranteeing that all the important questions about the killing would remain unanswered.
In the interim, the key witness, Kujo Krijestorac, was assassinated on the second try, March 1, 2004. Krijestorac, a respectable businessman, had seen two assassins and their accomplices, fleeing from their sniper's nest - what threatened the veracity of the freely-offered confession of Zvezdan 'Zveki' Jovanovic, a former deputy commander of the Red Berets, who claimed that the missing Ulemek had persuaded him alone to do all the dirty work.
When this convenient confession did not wind up the trial, Dejan 'Bugsy' Milenkovic and others treated the court to tales about who did, and who didn't commit all kinds of killings, thanks to all kinds of gossip from people, particularly the dead Spasojevic, but no one heard a word about the involvement of either Kostunica or Bulatovic in the process. Even when Ulemek finally turned himself in, prosecutors dealt first with his assassination of former Yugoslavian President Ivan Stambolic, and an attempted one on the current Foreign Minister, Vuk Draskovic, which killed four of his bodyguards to make sure that the evidence against him from these trials would stick in the Djindjic one.
While the verdict in the case hardly satisfied anyone - most people, especially Djindjic family counsel and that for his bodyguard wounded during the assassination -believing that a complicated conspiracy had occurred in which five of the 12 convicted were still at large - things were hardly progressing better at The Hague. Instead of Milosevic's trial, thanks to additional charges against him of human-rights abuses, proving that he had called the shots in Bosnia and Kosovo, he turned it into a venue, as The Times concluded after he had been driven to his own death, where he portrayed himself as a hero of the Serbian people. In fact, the process proved so effective that those who might have really called the shots - first Ljubisa Beara, head of the Bosnian Serb security service, and now former Major General Zdravko Tolimir, intelligence chief of Mladic's Srpska Army Staff -started turning themselves into the ICTY, knowing that their punishment would never fit their crimes as those somewhat responsible for them, apparently Dagan's Mossad, would never be identified.
This was alluded to when Milosevic's former lawyer Geoffrey Nice complained that Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte had made a deal with Serbian Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic shortly after Djindjic had been assassinated that key Serbian military and political documents dealing with Bosnia and Kosovo would not be made public if they were handed over to the ICTY - what helped the International Criminal Court find in February that Serbia, as a state, had not been guilty of genocide for what happened in Srebrenica in July 1995. Svilanovic had been most involved in strengthening bilateral relations with Israel after Milosevic's ouster, and in stonewalling the flow of key documents to The Hague. No sooner was Djindjic dead than the Foreign Minister wrote to Del Porte, stating that they would be supplied, provided they were never released to the public. (For more on this, see Lisa Clifford, "Del Ponte Denies Belgrade Deal Claims," Dnevrik Triband, April 20, 2007.)
Instead of stating what the documents disclosed, though - what led observers to speculate that that they must have involved what happened in SDC meetings in Belgrade at the time - Nice got the Chief Prosecutor riled up about having apparently approved the deal without proper authority. Actually, she just passed along what the judges had approved, leaving their import largely unknown. All that was said about them was that they did not involve Serbian national security. So, whose national security did they involve? It seems that it must have been Israel's, showing that its officials and combatants had helped in the Srebrenica genocide - the worst holocaust in Europe since The Holocaust - hardly something anyone in Europe wanted to imply. And Djindjic had certainly added his name to the list of its victims by being Serbia's biggest proponent of all its culprits going to The Hague to answer for their war crimes.
Similarly, the killing of British microbiologist and former UNSCOM inspector for chemical and biological weapons in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Dr. David Kelly, on the night of July 17, 2003 on Harrowdown Hill, Oxfordshire, was never even seriously investigated, much less crudely explained, because the intelligence services who arranged it, and journalists who reported it wanted it that way, wittingly or unwittingly. The British services, particularly MI6, wanted the potentially most dangerous whistleblower so completely discredited that they had the Prime Minister publicly out him, leaving him completely vulnerable to a Mossad assassination kidon, it seems, after he had been the object of unprecedented public ridicule - resulting in a complete diversion about the cause of the Iraqi war which Washington most wanted, and about which the Iraqi dictator, despite his most dramatic lessons for alleged traitors, was in no position to do anything about.
Kelly's investigation and analysis of Iraq's WMD had been the basis of all the dossiers that Washington and London had drawn up after the 9/11 attacks in America regarding regime change in Iraq, though they did not want to show it, and he personally doubted that the dictator any longer possessed any. When this proved the case after he was toppled, all the statements by the Coalition leaders to justify the pre-emptive war proved most damaging. Australian PM John Howard had announced on its eve that it was ending an "inherently dangerous" situation by having "taken from her her chemical and biological weapons." (Gary Hughes, "Iraq: how we were duped," uruknet.info, p. 2) The previous September, British PM Tony Blair had released a dossier, stating it had established "beyond doubt" that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, and is prepared to use them. American Secretary of State Colin Powell told the UN Security Council that Iraq had a stockpile of at least 100 tons of such material, ready to fire off at a moment's notice.
The most embarrassed party because of the failure to find WMD in Iraq was the Clinton administration which had put the 'bug in the bonnet' of both the Blair and Bush administrations about it, though one would never know it from reading various accounts about it, especially Bob Woodward's State of Denial. Bubba himself had often pronounced that Saddam's Iraq was a rogue state which had vast quantities of WMD which it was either prepared to use or to provide to other terrorists. (See his address, for example, to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on February 18, 1998.) Senior counterterrorist adviser on Clinton's NSC Richard Clarke even justified the missile attack on the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan during the showdown over Clinton's impeachment, claiming that he was "sure" that Iraqi nerve-gas experts were using such facilities to produce VX-like poison gases. (Vernon Loeb, "Official Cites Gains Against Bin Laden," The Washington Post, January 23, 1999, p. A02)
In fact, when the subsequent administrations were making up their dossiers about Saddam's WMD in anticipation of his ouster, former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger visited in May 2002 the National Archives to refresh his memory about what it had discussed and done about it - material in which Kelly's claims figured quite prominently, and Berger was most interested in what Clarke had recorded about it. What Kelly had told New York Times reporter Judith Miller and the BBC's Tom Mangold about Saddam's chemical and biological weapons programs had been largely responsible for President Clinton's near paranoia on the subject.
Of course, when neither Judy Miller, embedded in the US Army's 'Field Expedient' Artillery Brigade to find Saddam's massive chemical and biological weapon capability as the Coalition took over Iraq, nor the UN Iraqi Survey Group, led by David Kay, for the same purpose came up with anything to prove the wild claims, Kelly became increasingly uneasy about what had happened, especially his apparent role in it, and anxious to correct it. No sooner did Kelly learn that all the intelligence about Saddam's alleged WMD rested upon the most flimsey evidence than he started talking to the BBC's Andrew Gilligan, resulting in May 29th program which claimed that Blair's closest adviser Alastair Campbell had 'sexed up' the intelligence in the September dossier.
Instead of being dragged into another Serbian problem without proper preparation and care, this time the Mossad was well out in front, announcing to the British public while Kelly was dealing with Gilligan that it had sent a kidon assassination squad to assist its 15 domestic katsas in preventing more attacks on Israel - two suicide bombers from Britain had just attacked Mike's Place in Tel Aviv, killing three Israelis, and wounding many others. The Mossad was ordered to "carry the war to our enemies", and the threat to Israel or to Jewish institutions in Britain was considered real enough for the spy agency to take pre-emptive action against 50 Al-Muhajiroun, claiming that they were "primed and ready to go."
"We know from past experience that a kidon can make murder look like an accident," a MI5 source told Gordon Thomas, writer of "Mossad's Killing Machine Comes to Britain". "It is their specialty." While the kidon was not permitted to use either guns or explosives in Britain, it was equipped with long and short knives, along with piano wire for straggling suspects. Rafi Eitan, a former director of Mossad operations, added: "We are like the official hangman or the doctor on Death Row who administer the lethal injection. We ware simply fulfilling a sentence sanction by the prime minister of the day." While stressing that the love-hate relationship between Britain and Israel was over, Eitan added: "Nevertheless, the Mossad team will virtually operate on its own rules."
The White House moved to distance itself from the growing dispute between Downing Street, the BBC, and Kelly by starting one of its own after DCI George Tenet announced that the discredited Iraq-Niger uranium deal, claimed by the British government, should never have been included in the President's State of the Union speech before the war - apparently with the intention that it would be capturing the headlines if the one with Kelly turned dirty. Bush instructed Cheney to mount a campaign against former US American ambassador Joe Wilson for leaking findings of his inquiry into the 'yellowcake' claim - what Tenet embroidered by stating to Bob Woodward that his wife, Valerie Plame, worked as an Agency WMD analyst, and that she had gotten him the job.
On July 8th, Cheney's Chief of Staff 'Scooter' Libby passed the story on to Judy Miller, adding during a telephone conversation four days later that she should write about the highly secret parts of the National Intelligence Estimate regarding Saddam's WMD programs. For good measure, Wilson had gone public with his claims in a NYT Op-Ed piece, and syndicated columist Robert Novak "unmasked" Plame as the unknown Agency analyst. America was all abuzz when Kelly was apparently murdered three days later, and it was all intended to show that unauthorized leaking of most sensitive information, gossiping with reporters about such matters, lying about it all, loss of public reputation and employment for doing so, etc., were not the monopoly of London.
While a long book could be written about why, how, and by whom Kelly was murdered, we shall settle here for a most abbreviated version - what shows that it was a conspiracy murder, apparently conducted by the Mossad's resident kidon. Kelly provided no evidence that he would ever kill himself, no evidence that he actually did so, and if such matters were still so cut-and-dried, why did Blair order an unprecedented and uncalled for inquiry into it - what resulted in a most unsatisfactory result which few people believe. The Hutton Report is even more scandalous than the one the Warren Commission put together after President Kennedy's assassination.
To show that Kelly was murdered, one need only read the testimony of the first few witnesses who discovered the deceased, but were only interviewed by the inquiry after the case of suicide had essentially been made. On September 2nd, Louise Holmes, a member of the Thames Valley Lowland Search Team, told the inquiry how she, Paul Chapman, and her dog Brock found the deceased at 9:20 a.m. after having looked for an hour and a half. During it, they came across a party of three or four men who had spent the night in a moored boat along the Thames nearby. When asked if they had seen anything, she testified: "They said they had seen the helicopter up the previous night but they had not seen anybody or anything other than that." (Hutton interview, September 2, 2003, paragraph 10, lines 15-17)
Paul Chapman testify subsequently, stating that the party was composed of three or four people. "They had heard the helicopter," he continued, adding crucially, "and seen some police officers at some point previously." (ibid., paragraph 22, lines 24-25) Their testimony showed that these individuals had been in the area during the whole time that Kelly was said to have died, knew that some search and rescue mission was afoot, were not part of the police looking for the missing person, and did not leave the area when Holmes' search party was closing in on the dead Kelly.
The only way to explain this most extraordinary behavior is that they were involved in Kelly's disappearance and death, and were sticking around to see that he had been found dead - what would require a most hasty departure from not only the scene but also the country if he had still managed to survive from his struggle with them. (For more on this, see my e-mail below to the Hutton Inquiry about the murder (*) - what it never acknowledged the receipt of, much less answered, though it seems to have required Hutton to take more time in making his report.)
The Thames Valley Police's handling of all this, especially the four apparently unknown persons being in the area during which a controversial death occurred, is nothing short of scandalous. While it was apparently carrying out a surveillance operation to protect Kelly - Operation Mason - it seems never to have encourtered Kelly, the four men, and their boat while doing so, only having its DCs Graham Coe, Shields and possibly another rush directly from Kelly's house, a distance of about a mile, once a still unidentified person had reported seeing the boat people near the scene of the crime, to make sure that no one suspected anything more than the missing person had been found dead, apparently the victim of suicide. Coe did not seek out the boat and question the men on suspicion of having committed a crime. He only wanted to make the search party think that they belonged to the police.
Coe himself was questioned in a most perfunctory manner about the matter by the inquiry, never even asked if he was part of the police Chapman had referred to. Shields was never even interviewed by Hutton's people. The whole matter was conveniently covered up for them when Assistant Chief Constable Michael Page finally testified. He stated that all the persons in the area were police officers who he had accounted for, failing to mention the presence of the four men and their boat - what no one asked him about. This was all so successful that Hutton didn't mention anything about their presence, and confused the troublesome DC Graham Coe in disposing of it with the English sprinter Sebastian Coe in his final Reoport.
The outing of the Agency's Valerie Plame caused similar turmoil in Washington, but at least she did not end up dead in the woods somewhere. Instead, Libby was finally sent to prison for 30 months, and fined $250,000 for his lies and obstruction of justice. Cheney immediately declassified the whole National Intelligence Estimate about Saddam's WMD programs to make sure that there were no more crimes committed in leaking its contents. Former President Clinton surprisingly appeared on Larry King LIve a few days later, justifying Saddam's ouster because he had not unaccounted for his WMD.
The most surprising thing of all, though, was former NSA Sandy Berger's trip back to the National Archives as soon as Kelly's death was reported to make sure its papers, especially those of Richard Clarke, did not show that the Clinton administration had panicked the Bush and Blair governments with claims from Kelly into doing the overkill that was now going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then, and once later in October, Berger surreptiously removed serveral copies of a 15-page memo regarding the background to the 9/11 attacks, and failed to return one or more of them on his last visit to the Archives on October 2nd. While Clarke downplayed the significance of the missing memo, Berger gave up voluntarily his law practice in order to avoid any investigation of his malpractice by an American Bar Association inquiry.
The Israeli intelligence services, especially the Mossad, predictably blamed the death upon Israel's enemies - what Gordon Thomas lapped up - either the wily Chinese SIS or Saddam Hussein in case the Hutton inquiry still came up with a finding somehow of murder. The most diverting article was the one by Thomas, "The Secret World of Dr. David Kelly," which indicated that Kelly, who had worked with the Mossad, had probably been murdered by the feared Mukhabarat because of what he had done for the Israelis, and what he knew about what the Iraqi dictator had done illegally behind the scenes, particularly with the Chinese and Yugoslavia's ousted President Slobodan Milosevic. Kelly, according to Thomas, was just the last in a long line of microbiologists who had been murdered by the Iraqi intelligence service because of their efforts to provide Tel Aviv with a genetic weapon - what conspiracy theorists are still going on about when calling for a new inquiry into Kelly's murder. See these links:
Still, the Mossad had to be worried about what Hutton might still come up with. While the Israeli assassination had been an example of what Dagan's crítics had complained about when he was given the job of director - doing whatever he saw fit without any concern about foreign rules, relationships or reactions - Prime
Minister Blair seemed to have encouraged the killing by the clever way he used to out Kelly - the most authoritative voice about how the Israelis themselves had really 'sexed up' the dossiers about Saddam's WMD - to the media.
The first stage of the examination of witnesses by the Hutton Inquiry had not clearly clarified matters either. While Blair's testimony had not indicated any serious complaints about what officials, domestic and foreign, had done during the tragedy, Hutton had been quite laid back during the proceedings, so much so that only a most careful reading of them would show that he had already decided how Kelly had died - by his own hand - when he adjourned the proceedings on September 4th to take stock of what it had been told. Hutton's announcement of possibly recalling witnesses or calling new ones, especially intelligence officials, and the possibility of their performance being officially criticized was still rather unsettling, since he alluded to no official ruling on the aim of the inquiry, to determine the cause of death.
This ten-day adjournment gave Dagan's men the opportunity they needed to get rid of the biggest thorn in the side of the Israeli government - the Swedish Foreign Minister, Anna Lindh. She stood for everything that Sharon did not want - e. g., preventing conflict, implementation of the Oslo Accords, the breakup of Yugoslavia and bringing Milosevic et al. to the ICTY to pay for various crimes against humanity, the NATO bombing campaign of Serbia to force his army to withdraw from Kosovo, working with Yasser Arafat, the legitimate leader of the Palestinian people, to institute the Road Map with Sharon's government, and the EU dropping diplomatic recognition of the Israeli government because of the way it was treating its Occupied Territories - and opposed almost everything that Tel Aviv wanted - the Iraq War and the ouster of Saddam Hussein, the extrajudicial killings of suspected Muslim terrorists by both the Israelis and Americans, unprecedented license to do whatever it wanted in the Middle East and beyond. Furthermore, she was in a much better position than anyone else in getting her way, being a increasingly powerful player in European politics who was expected to replace soon Göran Persson as Sweden's statsminster.
And the Mossad had the ideal candidate for building the assassination around, the 25-year old Mijailo Mijailovic - the product of a broken Swedish-Serbian home who had become a highly impulsive drop-out and druggie. His parents had come to Sweden after WWII, and he was born there, though he returned to Serbia when he was six, along with his mother and sister, to live in his grand parents' house in Mladenovac, and after retuning to Sweden, he often visited Serbia to see his father who had returned to Pozarevac, just east of Belgrade, subsequently. While living in both places, Mijailovic developed bad views of both Sweden and Euope, especially NÁTO since he constantly received complaints about them because he continued to reside in both.
Thanks to his experience in Sweden and to his travels to Serbia, he became increasingly depressed, so depressed that he wildly attacked his father with a knife when he was only 17, and another time he made an impulsive call to a woman he had been stalking, along with her sister, for four years, threatening her. He was also caught, possessing illegal weapons. Mijailo had a fixation about knives, and he spent more time sleeping than most people, thanks to the powerful sleeping tablets he took without a doctor's prescription. While he was supplied with anti-depressants to prevent such behavior leading to impulsive action, he was ultimately confined to a medical facility for treatment from which he was conveniently discharged just days before the assassination.
Sweden, like Britain, had apparently accepted the presence of a Mossad kidon and its katsas on its soil, thanks to an unprecedented address that MI5 director Eliza Manningham-Buller had delivered in London in June. She claimed that a major terrorist attack occurring in a major European city by Muslim terrorists was just a matter of time - recalling the alarm that British authorities had raised about Jewish interests in Stockholm just before Olof Palme's assassination back in 1986. The presence of Mossad agents was justified again to prevent attacks upon Jews and Jewish institutions, especially the Orthodox Synogogue near the famous department NK in the city center, a condition which also allowed them to take any pre-emptive action they saw fit.
In this regard, the most alarming capability the Mossad had was subliminal mind control - what the famous conspiracy theorist Joe Vialls had recently written two articles about. Of course, most people consider Vialls to be just the opposite from Gordon Thomas when it comes to the Israeli agency - what Vialls claims could not possibly be true. In addition, most people think that the creation of 'voices' in other people's brains by microwave devices is just a fantasy, only believed by unbalanced persons, although the capability has long existed. Dr. Joseph Sharp successfully developed the technology at Walter Reed Army Research Institute in 1973 - what Dr. Robert Becker has fully explained in his book, The Body Electric. Such a device, easily assembled from components available at gun shops, could drive an unaware targeted individual crazy with 'voices' or deliver undetectable instructions to a programmed assassin. "Furthermore," as Alan Yu has added in his article "Microwave voice devices and patent", "if the invisible personnel pretend themselves (or him) as Devil (angel or God) during sending microwave voices, it can mislead the unknowning victim to following their order/voices to commit crimes..." In order to avoid such results, Yu recommended: "If you hear microwave 'voices' in head, it must be sent by invisible operators with microwave device and don't listen to it to kill."
Well, Mijailo was put through such torment when he returned to his apartment in a southern suburb of Stockholm, once released from the medical hospital, increasingly hearing 'voices' while he had trouble sleeping - what put him in no position to resist such calls when September 10th arrived. Thanks to his previous days stalking Lindh and other politicians involved in the referendum campaign over the adoption of the euro, he started out from his apartment with the same objective in mind for central Stockholm, only to be directed to a shop, The Pub, where 'voices' urged him to steal a knife, and go to NK. At the same time, the kidon, it seems, was keeping track of what Lindh - who had just days before blamed Israel and America for the breakdown of peace talks regarding the implementation of the Road Map - and a friend were planning on doing during her lunch break, and followed them to the department store where Mijailovic was now moving aimlessly around its atrium.
"I was on my way out," he explained later, "but took a wrong turn and saw Anna Lindh. Then the voices came." Being in such an open space, the microwaves had no trouble reaching Mijailovic's brain from any location. They were in Serbo-Croat, indicating that his programmer was a fellow Serb who was using cultural ties to pump up his courage to kill her. "I couldn't resist the voices," Mijailo added, especially since they came from Jesus Christ who urged him to attack her. Once involved in the process of stabbling her, his mental instability took over, making a meal of the matter. The most important evidence of the assassination was the film in the surveillance cameras in the store - what was bound to lead to his discovery - but they were not used to see if he was accompanied by someone else - what other statements by him indicated. Once caught, the only real question was whether he was temporarily insane when he killed her or whether he only suffering from diminished mental responsbility when he did it. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled the latter, though giving no indication of who might also be responsible for the tragedy.
The denouement of the whole process occurred the following January when the Israeli Ambassador to Sweden Zvi Mazel - who had said that Lindh's criticism of Israeli human rights violations against Palestinians could not be tolerated - viewed the art work of Dror and Gunilla Feiler at an exhibition at the Museum of National Antiquities, angrily vandalizing their depiction of the Palestinian tragedy as a two-sided struggle which resulted in a sea of blood. For Jews, and Dror is a Jew who belongs to "Jews for Palestinian Peace", to do such work was nothing short of treason, and Mazel went wild about the picture of suicide bomber Harradi Jaradat - who had shortly after Lindh's assassination killed many Israelis by bombing a Tel Aviv restaurant - floating in the boat on the red sea. On the other side of Jaradat's photograph, though, were written the words "Snow White" in Swedish, an obvious reference to the fallen Swedish leader, as Jaradat looked more like the "Black Madona", who had similarly been killed in the struggle.
While Tel Aviv defended Mazel's actions in a most knee-jerk fashion, he was soon retired for making such a spectacle over an inference that Israel had killed her too.

Thursday, 30 November 2006

Rome-Tel Aviv-Moscow-London Connection to Litvinenko's Murder

by Trowbridge H. Ford

During March 1992, Vasili Mitrokhin, who had spent his last 12 years in the KGB copying its First Chief (Foreign Intelligence) Directorate's files for his own private use while transferring them from the Lubyanka to its new headquarters at Yasenevo, finally made his move with them after eight anxious years of retirement - taking a sample of his cache to the capital of a newly-freed Baltic state in the hope of persuading the British Secret Intelligence Service aka MI6 not only to take the whole lot but also his whole family too. After three more trips to the Baltic capital with much more evidence of what he had to offer the British, he and his family, along with the rest of his archive, made their way safely to the West on November 7th, apparently a most fitting conclusion to the 75th anniversary of the ill-fated Bolshevik Revolution.

For the next three years, MI6 went carefully through the material Mitrokhin provided, the FCD
documents and the notes he had made about various reports and incidents - what resulted in the intelligence services around the globe being informed of what betrayals and espionage their subjects had apparently been guilty of, ones which considerably exaggerated its scope, and added little to what researchers already knew. And once the process was completed in late 1995, Mitrokhin was freed to use the material as he saw fit - what resulted in the publication in 1999 of Christopher Andrew's The Sword and The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB. During the process, there were increasing reports in Washington and
European capitals about alleged spies within their regimes and among their populations, thanks to the information, it seemed, that Mitrokhin had supplied.

Andrew concluded his introduction to the book by claiming that Mitrokhin's Archive had made possible disclosures about KGB activity which went far beyond what any of its former masters "...could have envisaged." (p. 22) Of course, this was an obvious bit of exaggeration as no agency, especially a secret one, can hope to keep all its records. Particularly stupid missions and ones leading to disastrous consequences are unlikely to leave any paper trail in the files of any intelligence service. And the process that Mitrokhin went through to get his archive out of Russia hardly could have escaped the notice of the KGB's successor, the SVR (the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service).

It was apparently quite happy to see the archive go since it could help defuse much lingering
bitterness over the now ended Cold War - especially revelations from the losers about operations in which the victors were badly battered, like during Washington's efforts to get rid of Castro one way or another. It is at moments like this when Andrew's hand is most evident, explaining away some blunder - say how the Soviets learned the need and way of making an atomic bomb from America - without even a mention of Mitrokhin. Most important, intelligence reports are hardly definitive ones about who really did what and to whom for whatever reason; they just raise all kinds of questions regarding such matters.

Still, there is a gaping hole in the material that Andrew provided - the role of the KGB in Italy since WWI, the country in Western Europe with the strongest communist movement. What the Soviets did in the country was generally seen as just a supplement to what they were doing in France, and little more than only 10 most uninformative pages out of a book of 565 pages were included. While the codenames of many alleged agents - DARIO, DEMID, UCHITEL ("Teacher"), QUESTOR, NEMETS, ORLANDO, and several others - were revealed, there were no actual names of real people. Moreover, the names of Italy's leading intelligence agencies penetrated by the above - the Servizio Informazioni Generali e Sicurregga (SISDE), Servizio perle Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militaire (SISMI), and the Secondo Reparto (SIOS) - are not even to be found in the list of abbreviations and acronyms used in the volume (pp. xi-xiv), unlike any other country, much less in the book's substance.

All that Andrew wrote about these Soviet agents in Italy is censored beyond belief. DARIO, a reporter who worked for Moscow for 40 years, was discovered and imprisioned by the Mussolini regime in 1942. (p. 277) After the war, DARIO and his wife, still unidentified by name resumed spying for Moscow until they retired, started receiving their pensions, and were awarded the Order of the Red Star in March 1975. (p. 476) We learn even less about three other Italian journalists, FRANK, PODVIZHNY and STAZHER, though they were receiving the highest monthly salaries from the Center in Moscow. "The other three agents paid 240 roubles a month by the Rome residency," Andrew added, "were DARIO, the veteran agent-recruiter in the Foreign Ministry; NEMETS ("German"), a well-known left-wing politician; and ORLANDO, who cannot be clearly identified from Mitrokhin's notes."(p. 481) And so it goes with many lesser-paid agents.

The reason for this lack of disclosure is partially explained in the book's Forward: "For legal reasons, some of the Soviet agents identified in the KGB files can be referred to in this book only by their codenames. In a limited number of cases, chiefly because of the risk of prejudicing a possible prosecution, no reference can be made to them at all. These omissions do not, so far as I am aware, significantly alter the main conclusions of any chapter." (p. xvii)

Then there is a lack of any disclosure of KGB activity which cast a bad light on what Western services, especially Italian ones, were doing. About Pope John Paul's assassination on May 13, 1981, Andrew could only write this: "On the first anniversary of the assassination attempt, he made a pilgrimage to Fatima to place Agca's bullet on her altar. If the Pope had died, the KGB would doubtless have been overjoyed, But there is no evidence in any of the files examined by Mitrokhin that it was involved in the attempt on his life." (p. 522)

This conclusion is, however, brought into question when the reader sees the note upon which it is based where Oleg Gordievsky, the more famous defector, declared that half the fellow agents he talked to suspected that Department 8 of Directorate S, the one responsible for assassinations, had been involved. (no. 25, p. 664)

And this lack of candor about the Pope's activities, and how the KGB dealt with them occurred when Andrew discussed the actions of the Papacy under his leadership as if it were actually located in Poland rather than the Vatican. The reader is told in chapters about the Polish Pope and the rise of Solidarity, and the Polish crisis and the crumbling of the Soviet bloc as if Karol Wojtyla were still operating out of Kraków rather than Rome where the KGB had all kinds of sources about his ideas and aims. The whole process culminated in June 1983 when John Paul II finally came to Poland for a 10-day visit, at the end of which he even met the leader of the underground movement, Lech Walesa.

The same lack of candor occurred when Andrew discussed the kidnapping and murder of Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro in central Rome on March 16, 1978. As far as the Cambridge historian was concerned, it only involved Soviet and Italian Communist Party (PCI) anxiety over the Red Brigades who had kidnapped him receiving assistance from the Czech Securtiy and Intelligence Service (StB). Soviet Ambassador Nikita Rhyzov is reported as saying that the Czechs had only received a "pennyworth of benefit (from the Red Brigades), but did a hundred times more damage," (Quoted from p. 299.) though Andrew didn't explain what it was.

All this avoidance of serious analysis of KGB activites in Italy seems to center around the identity and actions of UCHITEL ("Teacher"), who, it seems, is Romano Prodi, the one-time professor at the University of Bologna, and now The Union coalition's Prime Minister of Italy. About him, Andrew wrote:

"Probably the most important Line X agent at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s was UCHITEL ("Teacher"), who taught at a major university and was controlled by Kuznetsov. Using his wide range of academic and business contacts, UCHITEL provided S&T from a toal of eight major companies and research institutes in Italy, West Germany, France, and Belgium, and carried out other KGB asignments in the USA and FRG. UCHITEL'S most valuable intelligence seems to have concerned military aircraft, helicopters, aero-engine construction and airborne guidance systems. Among the intelligence he supplied was information on NATO's newest combat military aircraft, the Tornado, jointly developed by Britain, the FRG and Italy." (p. 480)

UCHITEL's intelligence was so important that his handler, Anatoli Kuznetsov, prevailed successfully upon the Soviet Foreign Ministry, over the protests of Ambassador Rhyzov, to establish a consulate in Milan just to handle his take more easily - what might well indicate that Prodi was also the Foreign Ministry's agent too, NEMETS (("German"), the well-known left-wing politician, though Rhyzov could have just been concerned about unduly risking such a treasure-trove of information. When Kuznetsov was expeled from Italy for spying in August 1981, the Center in Moscow panicked for fear that UCHITEL'S whole network had been blown because of Kuznetsov's comings-and-goings. But it turned out that Vladimir Vetrov (codenamed FAREWELL), a most disgruntled agent in Directorate T in Moscow, had provided thousands of S&T documents to the French Security Service (DST), obliging President Francois Mitterrand to expel 47 Soviet intelligence officers in France, and the Italians to go along with Kuznetsov's expulsion.

While Prodi's spying, it seems, was most important in Soviet efforts to keep up with the West's technological advances, he is best known for feedback from Moscow which helped reduce suspicions that the Soviets were involved in the Moro assassination, and the attempt on Pope John Paul II's life. While Minster of Industry in Guilio Andreotti's government, Prodi came very close to preventing Moro's murder. On April 2, 1978, he claimed that the Christian Democrat was being held by the Red Brigades at Gradoli, thanks to information provided apparently at a séance with his deceased party predecessors during which a oaija board was used. Actually, it must have come from the extra-parliamentary left, probably the Soviets, who certainly did not want him murdered. Unfortunately, the police thought that Prodi was referring to the Rome suburb by that name rather than the Rome headquarters of the Red Brigrades, Gradoli 96.

And Prodi helped defuse the political crisis after Mehmet Ali Agca shot the Pope on May 13,1981 - what Alexander de Marenches, Director General of France's Service de Documentation Exterieure et de Contre-Espionage (SDECE) had let run because of all the S&T spying that the Soviets had been carrying on, thanks particularly to UCHITEL's efforts, until his arch-domestic enemy, DST, had closed down the process. A month before the shooting, the extreme anti-communist spook predicted that there was an Eastern Bloc plot afoot to kill the Pope, and six days after it almost succeeded, the SISMI provided a document, claiming that a Soviet official had announced to a meeting of the Warsaw Pact that Agca had been trained by Moscow to do the job - what turned out to be a crude forgery. Robert Gates, the White House's choice to replace the totally discredited Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, was still maintaining the claim during his Senate confirmation hearings to be the DCI for the first Bush administration despite the findings by the Agency's own analysts.

Actually, the shooting appeared to be just what a group of neo-fascist Turks, the Gray Wolves, had put together, and only after Agca had been in prison for a year, and coached by SISMI agents to confess more that he said that three Bulgarian agents, headed by Colonel Sergei Antonov, had induced him to do it in Antonov's apartment, though Agca could not describe it properly. Apparently, Agca was talking about another apartment in the building where dissident Roman Catholics - agents who had helped get rid of the new Pope's predecessor, radical reformer John Paul I - had helped persuade him to do so. In sum, Agca's alleged Bulgarian Connection was disinformation concocted by various neofascists, like CIA's Paul Henze - author of The Plot to Kill the Pope - to cover up what they were most responsible for in the hope information would ultimately surface which would change their apparent lies into the truth.

While they were left waiting, Prodi was steadily burning his bridges with his communist past, and spying for the Soviets. In 1982, thanks, in part, to his efforts to limit the fallout from the Pope's near murder, he was appointed chairman of the famous state-holding company, IRI, which Mussolini had started where he put his research about increasing competition and developing small and medium size businesses to work. And though he left it after the Cold War collapsed, he returned again to IRI's chairmanship in 1993. During his tenure there, he brooked no questioning of his apparent integrity in office by twice suing successfully reporters who charged him with conflict of interests in awarding a contract to his own economic research company, and for selling a loss-making food conglomerate, SME, to Unilever when he had been a consultant for the private conglomerate.

In fact, Prodi so improved his public image that he led the Olive Tree coalition to victory in the 1996 parliamentary elections, becoming the country's Prime Minister. He championed the growth and strengthening of the European Community until, it seems, the fallout from the Mitrokhin Archive began to threaten his political position, arranging then with Massimo D'Alema, head of coalition partner, the Democrats of the Left (formerly the PCI), his ouster by withdrawing his party's support, a never before used parliamentary maneuver. D'Alema might well have been NEMETS, the well-known left-wing political, and his wife Linda Giuva, a
computer and information systems specialist, the mysterious ORLANDO.

Of course, one would never know it by looking at what D'Alema did as Prime Minister. It was only because of his support of NATO's bombing campaign of Yugoslavia - what even Silvio Berlusconi and the right opposition opposed - that Clinton's effort was successful, as the military alliance could not have sustained it for more than a few days without Italy's ground support. As Bob Woodward has implied in State of Denial, mass suicide seemed likely in the White House if Italy had not made possible the 78-day bombing campaign required to force Yugoslav President Slobodan Milsoevic to cave in. (p. 61) By doing so, Italy gained new-found respect among the Israelis since it finally got a European country involved in stemming the threat of international terrorism.

When the D'Alema government fell, and Berlusconi took over, Prodi became President of the European Commission during which the Community expanded further, and adopted the euro. Behind the scenes, though, Prodi threw his weight behind America's program of extradordinary renditions of suspected terrorists. In Sweden, he even got Foreign Minister Anna Lindh to go along with the kidnapping of two suspected terrorists in December 2001, Stockholm's security officials merely looking on while CIA agents stripped them of their clothes, bundled them onto their plane at Bromma's airport, and took off for parts unknown. Then there was the famous kidnapping of Hussan Mustafa Osama Nasr aka Abu Omar which I have written about earlier on this site - what was carried on with Prodi's approval, and behind the back, it seems, of Berlusconi's government with SISMI help.

Then one can only wonder what high approval went for the SISMI's Colonel Antonio Nucera
forging documents for "cut out" Rocco Martino, claiming that Saddam Hussein was seeking yellowcake from Niger in order to restart his nuclear program, and then its head, Niccolo Pollari, taking them directly to Vice President Dick Cheney, avoiding the customary link, the CIA, in the process. It was thanks to these false documents apparently that President Bush included those famous 16 words in his 2003 State of the Union address which took the Coalition to preventive war against Iraq - "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." (Quoted from p. 218.)

SISMI, to cover its tracks, as best it could, placed La Republica reporters Giuseppe D'Avanzo and Carlo Bonini under surveillance for breaking the story that Saddam's pursuit of Niger yellowcake was based its forgeries. Then a judicial investigation discovered that SISMI had been carrying on a vast surveillance program, and had allegedly been trying to discredit Prodi - what seems to have just been cover for what they both were doing. To limit any possible fallout for the military intelligence agency after the Milan kidnapping surfaced, Pio Pompa, Pollari's aide, forced Libero to print a stroy that Prodi, as EC President, had authorized the now vast CIA rendition program of suspected terrorists.

In this context, what the SIS made available of the Mitrokhin Archive to Italian intelligence services was the last thing they wanted to see, and they made short work of it - neither
exposing nor identifying anyone as Soviet spies, especially Prodi and D'Alema. And when the Senate committee, under the leadership of Paolo Guzzanti, got its chance, the group found nothing really important, thanks to the investigations by Mario Scaramella, a professor at the University of Naples, and a likely SISMI agent.

In a report, entitled "Parliamentary Commission Destroys Soviets Information Intended to Defame the CIA," issued March 28, 2006, the Guzzanti Commission declared that it had
discovered "...the deep manipulation of the 'Mitrokhin File'." These turned out to be that there was a Bulgarian Connection to the Pope's assassination since a photograph showed Sergei
Antonov apparently standing next to Agca in St. Peter's Square when John Paul II was assassinated, and that Moro's kidnapping was, it seems, a left-wing diversion so it could steal NATO's counter invasion plans for Northern Italy from the Ministry of Defense in case of a Soviet invasion.'

Six days later, MEP Gerard Batten, head of the British Independent Party, dropped the verbal equivalent of a polonium bomb in Brussels by declaring that the Italian Prime Minister was the Soviets' leading agent there, and calling for a parliamentary inquiry into his activites. Citing Litvinenko's story (but wihout naming him) about what the former deputy head of the Federal Security Branch General Anatoly Trofimov had told him when the former KGB Lt. Col. finally planned to flee Russia - "Don't go to Italy, there are many KGB agents among the politicians: Prodi is our man there." - Battan raised all the questions that the Italians, Israelis, Russian and Britons were most eager to forget, much less answer, especially since Trofimov and his wife had been brutally gunned down in 2005, and later the same day, the BBC reported that Litvinenko, "another high-level source, a former KGB operative in London, has confirmed the story."

Three week later, Battan increased the pressure not only for a parliamentary investigation of Prodi's activities but also Litvinenko's assassination by declaring: "Former senior members of the KGB are willing to testify in such an investigation, under the right conditions." (Quoted from Ludwig De Braeckeleer, "Was Romano Prodi the Top KGB Man in Italy?," Ohmy News, November 23, 2006.) Battan added that Litvinenko had passed the information along to Scaramella, consultant for the Guzzatti Commission, in Febraury, showing that the Bulgarians and Soviets were behind the assassination of John Paul II.

Litvinenko's claims could not have been more reckless - embroidering Prodi's spying for the Soviets for the benefit of neo-fascists, and telling it to a source who could broadcast it to the world without reservation or amendment. While no reliable newspaper would have published his claims, even if completely true, a European parliamentarian could broadcast it without fear of any censorship under the protection of sovereign immunity. Batten, in doing so, put all the onus for it on Litvinenko. The only wa it could possibly be undo was to silence him while demonstrating to those similarly inclined and informed what would happen to them if they did.

To get Litvnenko's claims back on a less-threatening level, threats on Anna Politkovskaya, who was investigating Moscow's conduct in Chechnya - what Litvinenko had written about in Blowing up Russian: Terror from Within shorty after his arrival in Britain - soon resumed. Once everyone was alerted to them, she was murdered in Moscow by a single masked gunman. Then Paola Guzzanti was claiming that the SVR had assassinated her too, like Trofimov - thanks apparently to information that Scaramella had picked up during his regular visits to his FSB
successor. Just before the assassination, Litvinenko travelled to Israel to meet Boris Berezovsky's former deputy, Leonid Nevzlin, at Yukos who was residing there, and was told how President Putin was allegedly dealing with his enemy oligarchs in the oil business:

"Several figures linked with Yukos are reported to have disappeared or died in mysterious circumstances while its head, Mikhail Khodorkosky, and others have been jailed." (Quoted from Daniel McGrory and Tony Halpin, "More people tasked for poisoning after spy dies," TIMESONLINE, November 27, 2006.)

Then Scaramella scheduled a most secret meeting with Litvinenko on November lst where he would reveal the SVR's latest actions against Putin's enemies, and what he should be most
tight-lipped about for, it seems, security reasons. Before meeting Scarmella, Litvinenko had tea at the Millennium Hotel with former fellow employee of Berezovsky's at his Russian TV station, Andrei Lugovoy. And after the meeting with a most nervous Scaramella, he dropped by Berezovsky's headquarters and a few other places before heading home, leaving apparently a trail of radioactive polonium-210 along the way.

Whoever of these persons poisoned him - and Lugovoy seems the most likely - the others saw the doomed man in succession to help provide themselves with alibis for his assassination. This would explain Scaramella's discomfort during the meeting at the Japanese Sushi Bar - his not even being hungry for anything while Litvinenko proceeded to eat away in front of him.

The whole operation was a classic example of using disinformation to lure your prey into position to poison himself to death, and a way which would not be lost on anyone else inclined to talk out of turn, especially at any EC investigation Gerard Batten might arrange.

Monday, 23 October 2006

The David Kelly "Dead in the Woods" PSYOP

by Rowena Thursby

British diplomat David Broucher describes to the Hutton Inquiry a meeting he had with David Kelly in February 2003. An audible gasp goes up when he recalls how the government scientist apparently predicted his own suicide. But evidence subsequently unearthed by Kelly's daughter, shows their one and only meeting actually took place in February 2002 - a whole year earlier. It would have made perfect sense in February 2003 for them to have discussed Resolution 1441, the September dossier and ‘the 45 minutes’ as Broucher claims; but wind back the clock to February 2002 and what do we find? None of them were in existence. Was the whole Broucher-Kelly conversation a fabrication? Had this civil servant been sent to help contrive one of the biggest cover-ups in British history?

Discovered in July 2003 slumped against a tree with his left wrist slashed, the consensus was that Dr David Kelly had committed suicide after being pushed to the edge by the MoD. Media pundits concurred that being humiliated in front of a televised government committee was for him, the last straw.

But many of his colleagues were incredulous that this steely weapons expert, highly-respected and at the peak of his career, would have crumbled to the point of taking his own life. Kelly was a man ‘whose brain could boil water’; who had, in the course of his career, dealt skilfully with evasive and threatening Iraqi officials. E-mails written just before his disappearance were upbeat, expressing his strong desire to return to Iraq and get on with the ‘real work‘.

Asked by US translator and military intelligence operative Mai Pederson, if he would ever commit suicide, he had replied, ‘Good God no, I would never do that.’ Immediately after his death, Pederson asserted, ‘It wasn’t suicide’. This, for the establishment’s sensitive apparatus, was an alarming statement that could not be allowed to resonate.

Any intimation of state-sponsored killing on British soil was politically seismic. The notion must be quashed, doubters turned. Additional motives had to be found to account for Kelly’s alleged final act. A simple but ingenious plan was devised: a civil servant, skilled in the art of deception, would convey a startling piece of fiction, and convince the world that this ‘suicide’ had been Kelly’s answer to a thorny predicament.

KELLY'S GRILLING

Two days before he went missing on 17th July 2003, Dr Kelly gave evidence before a Kafkaesque Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC). It had been stated in the government’s September 2002 dossier that Iraq was capable of launching an attack on a British base within 45 minutes. The committee was convened to determine whether the weapons expert had been the source of Andrew Gilligan’s allegation on the BBC’s ‘Today’ programme, that in using ‘the 45 minutes’ knowing it to be false, intelligence and facts were being - in the words of MI6’s Richard Dearlove - ‘fixed around the policy‘.

Dr Kelly admitted that he had met Andrew Gilligan to discuss Iraq. However the crux of the issue - whether Kelly had accused the government of taking military action using shaky intelligence - could not be resolved: Kelly denied it, and the FAC construed it unlikely that Kelly was Gilligan’s source. It appeared he was off the hook.

Three days later the world was stunned when David Kelly was found dead on Harrowdown Hill.

POLITICAL FALL-OUT

Astonishingly, within hours of his body being found, Lord Chancellor and old flatmate of Blair, Charles Falconer, appointed the establishment’s Brian Hutton, to head an inquiry into his death. Normally Inquiries take months to set up; this one took just five working days.

The remit: ‘urgently, to conduct an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr Kelly’ conveniently circumvented the main issue. The ‘elephant in the room’ - whether or not the death was suicide - was skilfully avoided by framing the whole affair in terms of a ‘battle’ between the war-hungry government and Gilligan’s employer, the unrepentant BBC.'

Had there been an inquest, witnesses would have been subpoenaed and cross-examined, their evidence given on oath.

At the Hutton Inquiry, their version of events went unchallenged, no real investigation took place, and at the end of it, no verdict emerged - Hutton merely rubber-stamped the line that Dr Kelly took his own life.

EVIDENCE AGAINST SUICIDE

But did he? A detailed analysis of Hutton evidence by the Kelly Investigation Group indicated that Dr Kelly‘s body was moved - twice; and that ‘haemorrhage’, listed as the primary cause of death, was almost certainly a mistake.

It is known that doctors rarely agree. But in this case, nine doctors - four of them surgeons - concurred that from a single transected ulnar artery Dr Kelly would have lost no more than a pint of blood: the tiny artery would have immediately constricted and retracted, and blood-clotting would have ensued. This is consistent with the paramedics‘ observation that there was remarkably little blood at the scene. As for the secondary cause - co-proxamol ingestion - tests revealed that the amount in his blood was only a third of what is normally fatal - and there was no alcohol in his system.

The Coroner nonetheless declared himself ‘satisfied’ with Lord Hutton’s conclusion that the government scientist took his own life.

‘I WILL PROBABLY BE FOUND DEAD IN THE WOODS’

The Hutton Inquiry was for the most part a pedestrian affair, with civil servants, politicians and reporters obediently recounting their connections to Dr Kelly. But on 21st August 2003 one particular appearance set the proceedings alight.

David Broucher, Permanent Representative to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, was relaying an account of a meeting with David Kelly which he declared took place on 27th February 2003.

The court heard how Broucher and Kelly had talked over the problem of achieving Iraqi compliance with the 1972 Convention on Biological Weapons. Resolution 1441 had been passed, putting pressure on the Iraqis to give up their weapons. They discussed the government’s September 2002 dossier, and all the difficulties with ‘the 45 minutes’. It seemed a straightforward account - but one phrase electrified the court.

When Broucher asked Kelly what he thought would happen if Iraq were invaded, Broucher said the weapons-expert responded:

‘I will probably be found dead in the woods'

According to Broucher, Kelly had promised the Iraqis that the West would not bomb, as long as Iraq complied with weapons inspections. The diplomat said he had thought Kelly believed Iraqi intelligence might have him killed if he reneged on his promise. But now, in the light of the scientist’s apparent suicide, Broucher ‘realised’ Kelly meant he might be shamed into taking his own life.

It was a breathtaking piece of courtroom drama: such prescient words from the grave!
But there is a massive problem with Broucher’s story. There is strong evidence that this meeting did not take place on 27th February 2003 - as he claimed - but on 18th February 2002.

Everything hinges on this date. If Broucher’s meeting took place in February 2003 then its content would be plausible. But since, as Hutton concedes in his report, it almost certainly took place in 2002, and not 2003, then none of the following makes sense:


* Resolution 1441 was not passed until 8 October 2002 . So it was not, as counsel Dingemans said, in force at the time,
* ‘The September dossier’ was not even at the draft stage in February 2002, and was not published until the September of that year,
* ‘the 45 minutes’ with all the problems it incurred, did not exist in February 2002 - it was not introduced until August of that year.

Rather than be mesmerised by the magic phrase, ‘I will be found dead in the woods’, we must question whether the words were ever uttered.

Suspecting the substance of this meeting was invented to exert a particular effect, let us examine how and why it was done.

NO HEAD FOR DATES?

David Broucher had been a civil servant for nearly forty years - surely he would have kept careful records. Not this time it seems. His meeting with Kelly, he tells us, was convened at short notice, and so was not in his diary.

Doing ‘the best that [he] can’ as Dingemans prompts, he dons the cloak of a gauche amnesiac who must dig into a ‘very deep memory hole’ to dredge up the content of a rendezvous which, he maintains, took place only 5 months before.

He tells the inquiry he had only one meeting with Kelly, and to the best of his knowledge, this took place on 27th September 2002. But then, in trying to work out when the weapons expert could have been in Geneva at the same time as himself, he corrects that to 27th February 2003. Matters are further confused when he says they had tried to meet on 8th November 2002, but that had not proved possible; 27th February 2003 is his final date.

But Broucher’s date is wrong - and he knows it.

According to an entry in one of Kelly’s diaries, discovered afterwards by his daughter Rachel at his home, this meeting did not take place in February 2003, but in February 2002. Could there have been a mistake? All the evidence suggests not. Rachel informs the inquiry that her father painstakingly recorded events in his diary after they happened. She relays a number of examples where her father’s original plans had changed, and the correct entry was made after the event. The one entry in Kelly’s diary mentioning Broucher reads:

'Monday 18th February 2002, 9.30, David Broucher, US mis' [mission]

Rachel goes on to say that this entry gives details of her father’s flights both into Geneva on 17th February and out of Geneva on 20th February.

Lord Hutton writes in his report:

‘Therefore it appears to be clear that Dr Kelly's one meeting with Mr Broucher was in February 2002 and not in February 2003‘.

It can therefore be established with some confidence that Broucher met Dr Kelly not on 27th February 2003, but on 18th February 2002. And the start time was not ‘noon’ as Broucher claims for his 27th February 2003 meeting, but 9.30 a.m.

To tighten this up further, let us see where Kelly was on February 27th 2003 - the day Broucher claims they met.

According to Kelly’s half-sister, Sarah Pape, the day after his daughter Ellen’s wedding on Saturday 22nd February 2003, he flew out to New York. Puzzled by Broucher‘s evidence, Pape remarks to the inquiry, ‘he certainly did not mention he was going to be flying almost straight back to visit Geneva.’

Broucher: … he [Kelly] did not attend a meeting in Baltimore on 28th February that he was due to attend, so my feeling is that he probably returned to Geneva - to Europe early and that he came to Geneva, because I did see him there.’

But according to another of Kelly’s diaries published on the Hutton website, on 27th February he was still in New York on UNMOVIC business. There is no entry to indicate that he had a meeting in Baltimore on Friday 28th February as Broucher claims - the diary entry records that on Friday 28th February he was on leave in New York, and that he did not return to London until Sunday 2nd March.

In the diaries Rachel found, there was no entry for Broucher in 2003, and no mention of any trips to Geneva that year.

In a nutshell, neither Rachel’s diaries nor the Hutton website diaries contain an entry for Broucher or Geneva in 2003, whereas the entry in Rachel’s 2002 diary shows a meeting time, date and flight details. Thus there is convincing evidence that the Broucher/Kelly meeting took place on 18th February 2002.

Let us now review the contents of their alleged conversation.

THE CONVERSATION THAT NEVER HAPPENED

Had reporters been alert, they might have questioned how, despite Broucher’s poor recall of dates, he was nonetheless able to squeeze from his memory every twist and turn of his professed conversation with David Kelly. If he did not keep a record of the date of the meeting, presumably he did not keep contemporaneous notes. If he had, he would have dated and filed them. So how was he able to provide such a vivid and detailed account?

Broucher claims Dr Kelly phoned him while in Geneva and suggested a meeting at very short notice. But why would Kelly have stopped off in the centre of Europe on the off-chance that Broucher would be free to see him - or that Broucher would even be in Geneva? Curious too that Kelly allegedly instigated this meeting, since it was Broucher who was ‘keen to pick his brains’ knowing him to be ‘a considerable expert on these issues in relation to Iraq.'

According to Broucher, the meeting lasted about an hour. They began by discussing Iraq’s biological weapons capability. Counsel Dingemans then raised the question of Resolution 1441 which ordered Iraq to allow weapons inspections within 45 days.

Dingemans: 'And at this stage, we know that Resolution 1441 has been passed and there had been further subsequent inspections; Dr Kelly was not part of that team.'

However when this meeting actually took place - February 2002 - 1441 had not been passed by the Security Council; it did not come into force until 8 November 2002.

The alleged discussion then moved on to the possible use of force in Iraq. Broucher ventured he did not understand why the Iraqis were courting disaster by refusing to give up whatever weapons remained.

Kelly said the Iraqis were concerned that revealing too much about their state of readiness might invite an attack, but he had tried to reassure them that if they co-operated with weapons inspectors they would have nothing to fear. However, he also believed that the invasion might go ahead anyway, which would put him in a morally ambiguous position, for the Iraqis would consider he had lied to them.

Thus we are provided with the first new suicide motive: guilt.

The most telling indication that Broucher’s account is a falsehood, is his claim that he and Kelly discussed the dossier and ‘the 45 minutes’. The September dossier was published on 24 September 2002. A paper on WMD capabilities was commissioned in February 2002, and another followed in March; but the early papers were not for public consumption. Broucher’s says his task was to ’sell’ the dossier to the UN - this did not apply to the early papers. The dossier referred to by Broucher and Kelly - in which ‘every judgement… had been closely fought over’ - was clearly the September dossier.

As for ‘the 45 minutes’, according to both Lord Butler and Lord Hutton, this piece of intelligence was submitted to MI6 on 29 August 2002 - 5 months after the date Broucher alleged the meeting took place. Thus there is no way Broucher and Kelly could have discussed it.

We can infer therefore, that the following passage is a complete fiction:

‘We did discuss the dossier. I raised it because I had had to… it was part of my duties to sell the dossier, if you like, within the United Nations to senior United Nations officials; and I told Dr Kelly that this had not been easy and that they did not find it convincing. He said to me that there had been a lot of pressure to make the dossier as robust as possible; that every judgement in it had been closely fought over; and that it was the best that the JIC could do. I believe that it may have been in this connection that he then went on to explain the point about the readiness of Iraq’s biological weapons, the fact they could not use them quickly, and that this was relevant to the point about 45 minutes.’

Broucher reminds us here of Kelly’s concern over the 45 minutes - as would later be conveyed to the BBC’s Andrew Gilligan.

He then throws something else into the mix: he tells us that Kelly felt undervalued at the Ministry of Defence and would have preferred to go back to Porton Down:

‘He felt that when he transferred into the Ministry of Defence they had transferred him at the wrong grade, and so he was concerned that he had been downgraded.’

New suicide motive number two: job dissatisfaction because of unfair downgrading.

Broucher has thus given us two new motives: guilt over a promise Kelly knew might be broken, and unhappiness with his position at the MoD.

The diplomat then introduces the stunningly theatrical line he attributes to Kelly:

'I will probably be found dead in the woods.’

He terms this a ‘throwaway’ remark, affecting not to have thought it significant at the time. But far from being ‘throwaway’, it was actually designed as the climax of the whole drama: it suggested that Kelly was, in a sense, predicting his own suicide.

Broucher was implanting the idea that 5 months in advance, Kelly would, under certain circumstances, contemplate suicide. However, since the actual date of this meeting was February 2002 (not 2003), it was not 5 months ago, but 17. Are we seriously to believe that way back in early 2002 David Kelly was predicting that a promise to senior Iraqis he had not yet made might have to be broken, possibly driving him to take his own life? He would not have been making any promises to the Iraqis at the time - the previous round of inspections ended in 1998.

While war was secretly on the agenda, it was not officially so. A secret memo to Tony Blair, dated 14 March 2002, revealed that UK Foreign Policy Advisor David Manning reported telling George W Bush at a dinner, that the Prime Minister ‘would not budge in his support for regime change’ in Iraq - an embarrassing revelation for Blair, who was outwardly insisting the reason for invasion would not be regime change, but failure to comply with weapons inspections. Publicly, an invasion of Iraq was barely on the cards in Britain at the time, and weapons inspections did not resume until 18 November 2002.

In summary, Broucher’s ‘conversation’ was a fabrication from start to finish. His ineffectual persona was a cover. The confusion he sowed around dates was to protect him from future ’blowback’. This diplomat was less the bumbling fool, more the conniving fox.

HARD LABOUR

Oxford-educated barrister James Dingemans - Hutton‘s choice - took a soft-glove approach to witnesses, glossing over inconsistencies in their evidence. He and Broucher make an extraordinary duo. Nowhere else in the inquiry do we find such stilted language and tedious repetition.

After a blow by blow account of the alleged conversation, with its ‘memory hole’ and ‘throwaway remark’, we are forced to go back over it when Broucher reads from an e-mail he wrote to press officer Patrick Lamb at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to alert him to the conversation he supposedly had with Kelly.

Once again we are told, absurdly, of Broucher’s ‘straining’ to dig up details of the meeting from a ‘very deep memory hole.’ Six more times we hear that ‘I will be found dead in the woods’ was a ‘throwaway remark’.

By referring to it as an inconsequential throwaway remark, Broucher implies he was under no obligation to report it at the time. The casualness of the phrase belies the fact that this ‘throwaway remark’ was a pivotal part of the psyop; its purpose, to remind us of the primary newly-supplied motive - guilt.

On hearing of Kelly’s death, Broucher ‘realised’ that the scientist had not meant that he might be killed by the Iraqis, but ‘may have been thinking on rather different lines’ - an oblique way of inferring that Kelly was foreseeing he might be driven by his own conscience to take his own life. Thus we are lured into accepting the idea that Kelly had been envisaging suicide for months.

Then, nauseatingly, Dingemans reinforces the ‘throwaway remark‘ and the ‘very deep memory hole’ yet again:

Dingemans: 'In terms of strength of recollection, you have suggested that it was, as you thought at the time, a throwaway remark, and you have shown on the e-mails a very deep memory hole. Is that reasonable to characterise the way in which you had approached it at the time?'

The hypnotic effect of this deliberate repetition allowed the new message to be implanted within the public mindset.

THE SYSTEM TRIUMPHS?

Given that we now know the actual conversation took place in 2002, it is clear that the whole David Broucher/dead-in-the-woods ‘event’ was staged to offer more persuasive grounds for David Kelly’s ‘suicide‘. The new message: that after the invasion of Iraq, David Kelly, deeply unhappy with his lot at the MoD, and sick with guilt at having betrayed the Iraqis, had finally been driven to take his own life. Thus his ‘suicide’ was not simply a desperate reaction to government pressure, but a response to the dictates of his own conscience.

It was a slick and clever operation, and the world fell for it. But as with most deceptions there was a flaw: the planners had not foreseen that Rachel Kelly would publicly highlight the relevant diary entry at the Hutton Inquiry - and send Broucher’s edifice of deceit toppling like a house of cards.

Since they had met in 1998, Mai Pederson had become Kelly‘s close friend, introducing him to the Baha’i religion. After his death she told her Baha’i associates, ‘There will be more coming out on this… Don’t believe what you read in the papers.’ Her optimism was misplaced. Denied the right to have her identity disguised at the Hutton Inquiry, she was whisked out of sight.

No more came out, no one else ‘talked‘. History had been suitably revised. The ‘dead-in-the-woods’ psyop- in conjunction with MoD silencing tactics - had been a success.

FINAL WORD

But why take the risk in setting up such an operation? Maybe Pederson was right in saying, ‘It wasn’t suicide’.

At a highly-charged press conference in Asia after Kelly’s death, Blair was stunned by the question: ‘Is there blood on your hands, prime minister?’ We may never know.

But as his plane flew back to Britain, a TV journalist overheard Alastair Campbell ranting:

'This is what you wanted, you asked for this, so play the game Tony.'*

* It has been recently confirmed that this exchange between Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell did take place as described.

Full story...

Wednesday, 27 September 2006

The Reddaways: Britain's Answer to Cambridge's 'Ring of Five' Spies

by Trowbridge H. Ford

The secret services of developed, Western countries have long been known for their connections to their various 'old boy networks', thanks especially to the scathing comments about their recruitment, operational and advancement practices in Peter Wright's Spycatcher. Wright, apparently not one of 'theirs' - to use the lingo of civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby in the BBC comedy series, Yes, Minister! - laced his tales about his days at Britain's MI5 and during his visits to Washington with constant references to how deeply inbred and hidebound they all were within their closed worlds which wreaked of betrayals and distrust. Their set ways were, perhaps, best illustrated when Wright tried to reform the Security Service's way in more scientific, professional ways, as Bernard Porter has noted in Plots and Paranoia, only to receive this response from its gentry family recruits who had been educated at Public Schools and at Oxbridge: "That's all right, Peter old chap, I don't need to know Ohm's law. I read Greats."
(Quoted from p. 189.)

Wright laced his own account with what happened because of such intelligence practices, concentrating upon what Oxbridge had been capable of producing with its rings of spies, particularly the contributions of Cambridge's 'Ring of Five' - Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, and John Cairncross. To get to the bottom of their betrayals required political will, and risked leakage of damaging information if official inquiries were conducted. "This dilemma was particularly acute when facing the problem at Oxford and Cambridge in the 1930s. Most of those we wanted to interview were still part of a closely knit group of Oxford intellectuals, with no necessary allegiance to MI5, or the continuing secrecy of our operations." (p. 236) As a result, the Security Service was only able to conduct secret ones, under the direction of Wright himself. And by the time he finished, Harold Wilson's Labour government was so suspected of betrayals that MI5, according to Wright, conspired in its overthrow. Soon afterwards, Wilson resigned.

The consequence of this sequence of events, and their recounting by the embittered former counterintelligence officer has been the impression that Britain's intelligence services were simply a laughingstock. While this characterization had much to be said for it when it came to their dealings with the Soviets and dissent at home, they have a much better record in dealing with the withdrawal from empire, and helping manage former colonies which still matter, though accounts of this concentrate more of failures rather than successes. A good corrective for this is to study the activities of Norman and David Reddaway, scions of an old gentry family whose contributions to MI6 at the time, and up to now have greatly improved Britain's standing in the world without its hardly knowing.

The Reddaways are about as Cambridge-connected as any family can be. At the turn of the 20th century, William F. Reddaway was a fellow of King's College, and a founder member of the Cambridge Historical Journal. He was particularly interested in making known the manuscripts the University library was acquiring, and he wrote articles about Scandinavian affairs during the 17th century when these powers still had European ambitions. He supplied the account of these matters in the fifth volume of the Cambridge University Press's History of Europe, the series that Lord Acton started. His Oxbridge credentials were established when he wrote another article about the Danish Revolution for The English Historical Review. William Reddaway had five sons, and they almost all had academic careers, mostly at Cambridge. It was hardly surprising then when Professor Christopher Andrew gave lectures on Cambridge's famous spies at Fitzwilliam College in July last year, they were delivered at the Reddaway Room.

In this rather stifling atmosphere for the sons, it was to be expected that the youngest of them, Norman, sought a career in the Foreign Service after having gained a Double First in French and German in his examinations at King's College, and having served in the GHQ Reconnaissance Regiment aka the "Phantom" during WWII. Norman's first big assignment at the Foreign Office was to help Christopher Mayhew institute the Information Research Department (IRD) aka FORD, an agency desisgned to spread black propaganda throughout the world, based upon all the contacts that the war had created with people of influence, like George Orwell, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Arthur Koestler, who were now back in civil society, particularly in journalism and the arts. They could write material, help ferret out any communists and fellow-travellers in the media, and propose stories which could counter any Soviet claims far better than any cash-pressed government agency per se. "Many operations to influence the press run by SIS and IRD," Richard Aldrich wrote in The Hidden Hand, "required armies of temporary staff contracted for such specfic projects."(pp. 132-3)

While the IRD was officially part of the Foreign Office, it regularly recruited agents from MI6 aka SIS, and often became deeply involved in its operations. Norman Reddaway soon began working for SIS, and his first duty with it was with the staff of the British High Commissions in Ottawa, Canada. While this would seem a most low-level assignment, Reddaway was given the duty of restoring stronger ties with the self-governing member of the British Commonwealth by playing up the lingering ties with London. The British Embassy there has been located since 1930 in 'Earncliffe', the former residence of Canadian first Prime Minister, Sir John Macdonald, and Reddaway was given time off to write a book about it, timed to appear in 1955, the centenary of the founding of Ottawa which the Embassy helped in the celebrations of. While the Reddaways were there, their son David was born.

In 1955, they returned to London which was still recovering from the surprise defections of the IRD's Burgess and MI6's Maclean to Moscow three years before. Then Philby was sacked by SIS but he still admitted nothing about his being the ring's Third Man, and Norman soon had to deal with the fallout from the Suez fiasco - what was essentially caused by too much secrecy by all concerned. The joint military operation by the Israelis, French, and British was not only doomed because of their failure to inform Washington what they had planned (Operation Musketeer), but it also came as a bolt from the blue for the British public, causing widespread protests and condemnations when the full scope of the conspiracy became known. "Despite Eden's personal exhortations," Aldrich wrote, "Britain's psywar was a disaster." (p. 490) The IDR was then given the responsibility of making sure that this never happened again, especially operations taking the public by surprise. The media would be primed by whatever was required in future. (For more, see Reddaway's interview for the Oral History Project (1989-1991) at the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King's College.)

Reddaway then was off to Beirut to see that this approach was put in practice when it came time to overthrow Iraq's General Qassem while Kim Philby conveniently made his way to Moscow. While Philby thought that Britain's security services had completely forgotten about him and his interests, Reddaway made sure they hadn't, even helping him find a position as a correspondent for The Observer and The Economist while he was awaiting his fate. After the IRD put together the stories to blacken the Iraqi dictator's reputation, and a list for the world's media of all the troublesome Iraqi communists and fellow-travellers to clean out while his overthrow was taking place, MI5 assigned Nicolas Elliott, a former MI6 resident in Beirut, to force Philby's flight on January 23, 1963 to Moscow by claiming that he had finally been exposed as the Third Man, so that he would not be around to prevent the clean-up in Baghdad. (Yuri Modin, My Five Cambridge Friends, pp. 287-9) Qassem was overthrown a few weeks later, and his killing was followed by a bloodbath by the Baathists' National Guard. (Con Coughlin, Saddam, p. 41ff.)

Qassem's overthrow having proved so successful, Reddaway and the IRD used the same plan, but on a much grander scale - thanks to the £100,000 that Foreign Secretary Joe Garner had given them with no strings attached - when it came time to get rid of Indonesia's President Sukharno. (For a conventional explanation of his ouster, see Aldrich, pp. 585-91, though note that it, like Coughlin's about Qassem's, is missing any mention of either Reddaway or the IDR.) "MI6 spread lies to put Suharto in power," The Independent explained on April 16, 2000. "The BBC, The Observer and Reuters carried 'fake stories' manufactured by agents working for the Foreign Office." The whole process, it added, was arranged by propaganda expert Reddaway, one so successful that the world's media explained it in just the terms he had crafted - conniving Sukharno and his Army Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Pranoto Reksosamadra kidnapped and killed several uncooperative fellow officers in order to start a PKI (communist) bloodbath in Djakarta.

Defence Minister at the time, Labour's Denis Healey, upon being finally able to comment on what was afoot, exclaimed: ""Norman Reddaway had an office in Singapore. They began to put out false information and I think that, to my horror on one occasion, they put forged documents on the bodies of Indonesian soldiers we had taken." (emphasis his) Healey still denied knowledge of the President's ouster, and the massive bloodbath of Chinese and communists that followed, though he would have supported MI6's campaign to arm Sukharno's Islamic opponents. Similarly, Stella Rimington, much later the Security Service's Director General, was recruited into it to help with the campaign from Delhi, as she explained in her autobiography, Open Secret: "I was merely told to carry out the rather basic task of stuffing envelopes with all sorts of printed material, which was sent out from London, and posting them off to a whole series of addresses. It was very important, I was told, to get the right stuff in the right envelopes..." (pp. 74-5)

With this under Reddaway's belt, he was soon back in London as the Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office to help organize public support for Britain's entry into the European Economic Union. The means by which this was accomplished were lavish breakfasts that Lord McAlpine provided at the Dorchester Hotel for all those in Parliament, Europe, and America who could play a part in making it happen. "By the late sixties," Paul Lashmar and James Oliver wrote in "How MI6 pushed Britain to join Europe" for The Daily Telegraph on April 27, 1997, "IRD had more than 400 people occupying River-walk House opposite the Tate Gallery and undercover officers in embassies all over the globe." This later was included in their book, Britain's Secret Propaganda: The Foreign Office and the Cold War, 1948-1977 which was so revealing but damning of Reddaway's career.

While the Heath government was able to cobble together enough parliamentary support to join the EEC, it was done so at terrible cost, especially since it lost power little over a year later in the February 1974 General Election, setting off increasing treachery by Britain's covert network since it suspected the Heath's replacement, Harold Wilson, was a Soviet agent. Despite Wilson's acquiescence in Unionists destroying the Power-sharing Executive which had been agreed to at Sunningdale, Berkshire, just before the election, key secret operatives, led by Reddaway, thought that the Labour Prime Minister was far too soft on subversion all round, resulting in the IRD leading a mini-destructive campaign, especially in Northern Ireland, against his government. While he and his ministers were increasingly attacked for their alleged communist pasts, efforts were made behind the scenes to crank up the war in Ulster despite Home Secretary Merlyn Rees's strengthening of the border with the Reopublic with more troops.

The basis of the subversion in Northern Ireland was found in two 1971 documents that reporter Paul Foot found in which Reddaway, Donald Maitland, and MI6's Dick White called upon Clifford Hill and Hugh Mooney to mount an anti-IRA campaign, connecting it with the alleged aims of international communism - what had been so effective in bringing down Qassem and Sukharno. Maitland, who went on to become Head of the Permanent Representation to the ECC, had been Stella Rimington's boss when she had been stuffing all those envelopes back in Delhi. (p. 65) While the new effort just made reporting of events throughout Ireland just what the British securocrats wanted the public to know by getting rid of independent reporters like Mary Holland of The Observer, thanks to the dictates of owner Conor Cruise O'Brien, efforts included tactical military operations, especially across the border with the Republic, when it was thought that Rees was not doing enough about the problem. (For more, see Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, The Origins of the Present Troubles in Northern Ireland, p. 99.)

While it is more difficult to determine who pulled the strings which resulted in such action, it is not difficult to determine what was the first operation which so stirred up both the Wilson government and that of Liam Cosgrave in the Republic - the shooting of Patrick McElhone in Pomeroy, located on the border, on August 7, 1974 - one of the 'quick jobs' that a senior Special Air Service (SAS) officer told The Guardian's Simon Winchester about in December 1976, . McElhone had no connection with the IRA, and he was killed by trigger-happy troops, apparently members of the SAS, who had just been introduced into the area. When the Irish parliament complained about the killing, the PM directed Martin Burke of the Republic's Department of Foreign Affairs to investigate the matter, and the fat was in the fire when the Wilson govenment allowed him to visit the murder site - what started a ferverish campaign to get rid of Wilson, once he won re-election in October.

(For more, see: http://www.nuzhound.com/articles/irish_news/arts2005/jan3_Irish_government_shocked_at_shooting.php )

As for who arranged efforts which resulted in this killing and subsequent ones, especially those of totally innocent Paul Duffy and John Boyle, it seems to have been the work of Airey Neave, who would become Margaret Thatcher's Shadow Cabinet minister for Northern Ireland, long after he had arranged Heath's overthrow as Conservative Party Leader. Just before Wilson's surprise resignation in March 1976 - long before the make-up of any Thatcher government had been determined - he had a meeting with both Thatcher and Neave on January 6, 1976 about the deteriorating security situation in the province, indicating that the PM thought that he had been responsible for more than his parliamentary performance indicated.

The previous day, the IRA had murdered in cold blood 10 Protestant workers at Kingsmills, County Armagh - what had been triggered by loyalists murdering two members of the Catholic Reavey family, and three members of the O'Dowd family the day before - resulting in Wilson announcing that he was sending in another 600 troops, including 150 from the SAS, into the province, and what Neave's biographer completely misrepresented by having the massacre occur after the meeting, and adding that Neave thought unbelieveably that the IRA had been 'dead for a long time.' (Quoted from Paul Routledge, Public Servant, Secret Agent:The Elusive Life and Violent Death of Airey Neave, p. 281.) What else could explain a most knowledgeable writer so deliberately distorting a sequence of events, and so obviously misrepresenting what Neave must have said to Wilson?

Wilson's depature resulted in James Callaghan, the Foreign Secretary, becoming the new PM, and David Owen going to the Foreign Office. About his first action there was closing down the IRD, resulting in Reddaway being sent off to Warsaw as its new British ambassador, where he undoubtedly helped in getting Cardinal Karol Wojtyla more aware of, and active in Polish politics, resulting in his election as Pope John Paul II on October 16, 1978. The campaign where the Polish press was mobilized, the Pope was tuned in to what was going on so that he could make the most of it, and the Soviets were caught on the back foot sounds just like more IRD practice to be accidental. (For more, see Christopher Andrew, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, p. 508ff.)

With Norman Reddaway ending his official career on such a high note, it was hardly surprising that his rather maverick son, David, changed his mind about finishing his eduction, and getting a post in the Foreign Service. After attending Oundle Prep School, like his father, he did voluntary work in Ethiopia before going back to Cambridge to finish his education, obtaining an M.A.in history, like his grandfather, before joining the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1975. It was while he was serving in Iran in 1978 that circumstances dictated that he join the SIS too. While stationed in Tehran, the Iranian Revolution took place, resulting in the slow incapacitation of all the Americans operating there, especially when all the staff of their embassy was taken hostage on November, 4, 1979.

In this context, Washington was almost totally dependent upon Britain for its intelligence, and while David Reddaway has discussed how he held the Iranian militants at bay at the British Embassy, his assistance to the Americans was much more important. Reddaway had now become quite fluent in Farsi, and he became quite involved in exfiltrating the six Americans hiding, unknown in the Canadian Embassy, and in the planning of Operation Eagle Claw, the military one in April to forcibly remove all the hostages from Iran. As President Carter explained afterward, it was "a real clock-and-dagger story," though all the claims about CIA agents on the spot, and trained elsewhere doing all the dirty work must be taken with many grains of salt since its whole network had been nearly wiped out by the seizure of its "diplomats". (Quoted phrase from Christopher Andrew, For The President's Eyes Only, p. 450.)

While Eagle Claw turned out to be complete fiasco, it was not because of any failure by Reddaway. He apparently did the reconnoitering for the landing sites and secret storage sites. Then there was allegedly a CIA agent, posing as an Irishman - something Americans are notoriously bad at - and buying trucks and seeing to their safe storage in anticipation of the mission. "CIA agents in Tehran," Andrew added in the same vein, "disguised as foreign businessman and media mployees, reported that the guards at the U.S. embassy had become lax, and convinced Carter that 'security around the compound was no longer a serious obstacle to a surprise entry by force.' " (p. 452) Someone even found the Pakistani cook - who was still working at the US embassy, and knew exactly where the hostages were being held because he was providing their meals - and persuaded him to take a flight out of Tehran to inform Washington of the intelligence.

For his efforts, the 27-year-old Reddaway was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire, an almost unprecedented honor for such a young person, and he was made First Secretary (Political) at the Madrid Embassy. With every MI6 agent having to do his own black propaganda operations since the IRD no longer existed, the new First Secretary kept an eye on what Libya's Qaddafi was up to while cranking stories which served Anglo-American purposes, especially the continuance of its parliamentary system under King Carlos, as Andrew has explained in a fashion any former member of the IRD would appreciate:

"During 1981, for example, the KGB sought to fuel Spanish opposition to seeking membership in NATO by planting media stories that Reagan was putting pressure on the king of Spain. In November Spanish journalists were sent copies of a forged letter from the president, urging the king "to act...with dispatch to remove the forces obstructing Spain's entry into NATO.' " (Quoted Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, eds., Instructions from the Centre, p. 152.)

It seems most unlikely that any KGB agent would be allowed to send such a crude, counter-productive message - especially after the King Juan Carlos had just closed down the coup by disgrunted Civil Guards - to the Spanish media which could only backfire on the Soviets, and this suspicion is strengthened when one reads the Andrew and Mitrokhin volume, only to find no mention of this forgery in the KGB files the former librarian smuggled out of the defunct USSR. And there is no shortage of alleged forgeries about other matters in the Mitrokhin Archive - KKK messages to Olympic committees of African countries about their possible athletes being treated like monkeys if they came to the US Olympics (pp. 238-9), Willy Brandt being an agent of influence for various foreign countries (pp. 442-3), and the like. The planted stories seemed like Reddaway work to strengthen the King's hand in solidifying Spain's march to become a stable democracy - what was achieved when Socialist Felipe González won a parliamentary majority in the next election.

Shortly after that, Reddaway returned to London to help the FCO achieve some kind of resolution to the continuing Falkland Islands problem with Argentina, but before much headway could be made on this score, he was caught in the Thatcher government's involvement in the Anglo-American plan to end the Cold War with the Soviet Union without a nuclear war - what was to be triggered by the assassination of Sweden's Olof Palme, and to be accomplished by American attack submarines sinking Soviet nuclear ones when a suprised Moscow sent them hurriedly on line as a countermeasure to any pre-emptive attack. (For the full story about this, see my article about the Palme assassination (Operation Tree) in Jerre's ThinkTank at skog.de.) Reddaway was made private secretary to the totally inexperienced new Minister of State Lynda Chalker at the Froeign Office to make sure that she went along with any awkward arrangements the process might require.

And there were many when the plan to blame the assassination on the Soviets failed because of its penetration of the operation by spies, particularly CIA's Rick Ames, the Bureau's Robert Hanssen, the Mossad's Jonathan Pollard, the US Navy's Ronald Pelton, and the Walker spy ring. When the whole plot then proved an utter fiasco, without even a likely assassin of the statsminister being found, Washington, London, Tel Aviv, and Moscow had find a likely scapegoat for it, and punish him - what was started by the Libyans apparently blowing up a West Berlin discotheque on April 5, 1986. What Reddaway - thanks to what he had learned about America's help in recapturing the Falklands - had to do was to persuade a most reluctant Thatcher and Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe that Gaddafi was responsible for this terrorism, and that British bases could be used by US F-111s in the retaliation against Libya without ignighting a wave of bombings of Britain's embassies in the Middle East. He succeeded, staying on with Chalker until Howe was sacked in July 1998 for having failed to prevent Captain Simon Hayward, Palme's apparent assassin, from complaining about his treatment in Sweden by British officialdom in Under Fire: My Own Story. (For more, see my article about how Thatcher committed political suicide by sacking Howe in the archive of informationclearinghouse.info.)

Reddaway was then sent to the British Embassy in New Delhi, studying the foreign relations of the area before Britain resumed diplomatic relations with Tehran. Once it occurred, he was ideally suited to be named its Chargé ´d'Affaires, having married Roshan Firous, a prominent Iranian woman, during his first tour there. Reddaway essentially did what he had done before - developing agents among the Iranians who could prove helpful when Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq finally came crashing down. Unfortunately, the Bush administration would not permit this when Operation Desert Storm was in its closing stages, and all the Shiite rebels in the South, and Kurds in the North who Reddaway had encouraged to revolt against Baghdad went for naught when Saddam's revived Republican Guard ripped into them. Still, he was made a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George in 1993 for his aborted efforts when he left for Argentina.

While Minister there, he became involved in various 'false flag' operations that Israel's Mossad was mounting to make the Western powers more supportive of its aims in fighting the so-called war on terrorism against the Muslims. While the Israelis were bombing their Embassy and Balfour House, Finchley, in London, resulting in the wounding of 19 people, most of them Jews - thanks to their setting up various Palestinians for the crimes - the Mossad was setting up the Iranian Ambassador Hade Soleimanpour to Buenos Aires in a similar way eight days earlier, thanks to help there from Reddaway in the British one. (For more about the one in London, especially its 'false flag' aspect, see Annie Machon, Spies, Lies & Whistleblowers, p. 225ff.) The bombing of the Jewish Center in Argentina - which had been the site of a similar but small bombing two years ealier - killed 85 people.

The best evidence of MI6's complicity, especially Reddaway's, in these bombings are the facts that he has never been mentioned in any of the lists of MI6 agents which have been leaked to the press - apparently by disgruntled former agent Richard Tomlinson - just when the pursuit for the killers was getting most heated; that no one has ever been convicted of the crimes - a result so bad that the Argentine federal judge handling the Buenos Aires case Juan José Galeano has been impeached, removed from office, and now he and eight other officials are being investigated for complicity in it; and the absurd stories that Tomlinson and other alleged whistleblowers, particuarly former MI5 officers David Shayler and Annie Machon and 'Martin Ingram' and 'Kevin Fulton' of the British Army's Force Research Unit, have peddled in order to keep the real secret operations covered up.

Perhaps, the most diverting effort in all this was the The Executive Intelligence Review publishing an article in the May 14, 1999 issue, "The 'MI6 factor' in the murder of Princess Diana," along with a list of hundreds of alleged SIS agents, including its top leadership which it claimed not only murdered her but also Dodi Al-Fayed. "The attached list identifies," the article added, "the unprincipled and unscrupulous individuals involved with MI6 worldwide." While the current MI6 Director Sir David Spedding and his staff were getting raked over the coals for their alleged conspiracy in Paris which killed the two on August 31, 1997, David Reddaway was getting a clean bill of health by not being listed for what had happened back in Buenos Aires in July 1994, and what he was now doing back in London to make sure that the investigations of the two bombings got nowhere, adopting the cover of handling routine issues for the FCO's Southern European Department, and then of Director of Public Services while doing so.

When the 9/11 attacks occurred, the threats caused by the earlier bombings essentially disappeared, and Reddaway was ready to move on with the Coalition's new agenda, attacking the "axis of evil" at it central point, Iran, but Tehran would not hear of his becoming the British Ambassador there. Their own intelligence services had learned a lot about him by then, and what they hadn't learned themselves had been filled in by books, especially the one by Lashmar and Oliver. While there was no official explanation as to why he had been rejected, a conservative Tehran daily newspaper claimed that he was a "Zionist MI6 agent" - what the British media and officials strongly denied, especially trying to make out that the anti-Semites in Tehran thought he was Jewish when it was only referring to his relationship with the Mossad. Reddaway had to settle for being the UK's Special Representative for Afghanistan.

Once affairs had settled down there after the Taliban's ouster, he was appointed British High Commissioner to Canada, the country which London and Washington considered most important to get on board with its war on terrorism. While Canada had supplied 2,300 troops to help police Afghanistan, it refused to help militarily in Saddam Hussein's ouster, and Reddaway's assignment was to get Ottawa to make up as best it could for this failure. He did everything imaginable to make this happen - supporting associations like the Canada Club of Ottawa and The Ireland Fund for Ireland while constantly playing up Ottawa's traditional associations with Britain from the residence 'Earnecliffe' where McDonald once lived. And when the three Christian Peacemakers, two of them Canadians, were rescued earlier this year by British and Canadian special forces, Reddaway took the lead in explaining the lengths the British had gone to in order to secure their release. "Anthing we can learn about how this was done," he explained, "will be very useful for another time."

Reddaway's personal expectations were suddenly cut short, though, when the revelation about Martin Burke's investigation of the murder of Patrick McElhone back in 1974 finally sunk in with the Foreign Office and MI6 - what started in the summer of last year when the official files of the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs were released under its 30-year rule. Reddaway just happened to be serving in Ottawa by coincidence with now the Irish Ambassador to Ottawa Martin Burke, and they had become the closest of friends. While Reddaway had gone to Canada with the expectation of serving there for four years, it suddenly had to be cut short so that he could go to Dublin to prevent dangerous blowback from the McElhone and subsequent murders - what ultimately culminated in Neave's own assassination - especially since Burke was now going off to Luxemburg to be Ireland's ambassador there.

Before Reddaway even presented his credentials to the President of Ireland Mary McAleese on September 12th, MI6 was apparently already at work in Northern Ireland to create deceptions
which would reduce the possibility of much blowback. Aine de Baroid, another high-ranking official with the Republic's Department of Foreign Affairs, had been working with Mrs.McAleese's husband Martin in East Belfast in the hope of getting loyalist paramilitaries there to disarm so that the Good Friday Agreement could finally be implemented, and in August she started receiving anonymous threats, ones the PSNI took so seriously that she was obliged to return to Dublin to continue her work - what was intended, it seems, to make loyalist threats and murders rather than British military ones back in the 1970s the pressing question of the day. The loyalists suspected of being the culprits, the Shoukri brothers, have now denied the claim, and one can only wonder if it were just loyalist dissidents involved, why they would not have threatened the husband of the hated Republic's President instead.

How it all plays out from here, we shall just have to wait and see. Though, by any standard, Cambridge University has made amends for the betrayals by its 'Ring of Five', thanks to the efforts by the Reddaways.