MI5 Killers Sabotaged Chinook Helicopter That Crashed at Mull of Kintyre in 1994 Finally Exposed?

by Trowbridge H. Ford

The fog has never really cleared since an RAF Chinook helicopter crashed through it on the Hill of Stone at the Mull of Kintyre on June 2, 1994, killing all 25 intelligence agents and the crew of four on board while on its way to Fort George in Scotland to attend an annual conference on counterterrorism. While the incident is of more recent vintage than Bloody Sunday when British soldiers, epecially of the Parachute Regiment, cut down forteen civilians after shots were fired by unknown parties, the helicopter crash caused 29 victims. In addition, the Army massacre occurred in an area where plans had long been made for meeting some such incident, the crash came as a complete surprise. Ultimately, both incidents were the subject of several inquiries which resulted in quite changing explanations of the tragedies. The only sure thing is that Bloody Sunday helped usher in direct rule from London while the helicopter crash helped usher it out.

During 1971, the Official and Provisional Irish Republican Armies had established "no-go" areas in Derry, much unlike the situation in Belfast, and much to the British Army's disgust. London's introduction of internment without trial earlier had been in the hope of seperatiing the troublemakers from the general Catholic population in the expectation of re-establishing some kind of stability but it wasn's working in Derry.To deal with the problem, London adopted the plan of Commander Land Forces, Major General Robert Ford, of carrying out a search and control operation for the gunmen while clearing away the barricades.(1)

In explaining the policy, Ford and lower commanders made it increasingly possible that protesters might be aimed at, and shot in any confrontation over its implementation. This occurred when protesters marched on January 22, 1972 to Magilligan Point to show their opposition to internment Then after the Provisionals shot dead two Royal Irish Constabulary (RUC) police officers, the first in the growing conflict, the Brish Army tried to prevent a similar march from reaching Derry's Guildhall Square a week later by employing the First Parachute Regiment to help "scoop up" the troublemakers.

All hell broke loose on January 30th when a crowd of 10,000 protesters started marching on the City Centre, and a group of troublemakers broke off from the main group as it neared it to confront the barricading soliders. At the same time, straggers started engaging the Paras who had taken up position on the high wall behind the William Street Presbyterian Church. Then shots were exchanged, six in all, one apparently by the Offical IRA, and the other by the British Army, hitting two persons who they falsely claimed to be nail-bombers, and only one of whom was involved in the IRA in the march. Then the military forces behind the barricades, assisted by the Paras, executed a pincer movement against the rioters who were confronting them. In the ensuing mele, a youth was killed in the courtyard of the Rossville Flats."The other tweleve victims of 'Bloody Sunday' died elsewhere." (2) Again, it was a question of who had fired first, if at all on the marchers' side, and how many rounds.

The tragedy was investigated by Lord Widgery, the Lord Chief Justice of England, and he rushed to judgment in no uncertain terms on the side of the forces, merely compounding what was seen by almost all as a outright victory for the Provisionals, as direct rule on London soon followed.

The only trouble was that the IRA, instead of sitting on their laurels and waiting for the British chickens to come home to roost, went on the offensive, culminating in their own Bloody Friday which turned the tables back in Britain's favor. The Offical IRA set off a bomb on February 22nd at the Paras' headquarters in Aldershot, killing five cleaning ladies, an Army chaplain, and a gardener.(3) Then there was a bombing in Derry, and a killing of a young Royal Irish Ranger which caused such blowback against the Officials that they were obliged to call a ceasefire. While the Provisionals were soon obliged to follow suit because of similar mistakes, the whole situation changed for them when they caused Bloody Friday on July 21st - setting of twenty car bombs in Befast, killing nine people and injuring 130.

Instead of the Provos, and the Brits for that matter, admitting their mistakes, and seriously chaning their ways, they just refined them, focusing them more on military targets, and trying to reduce the collateral damage. The battle, consequently, waxed and waned for both sides. The British had the upper hand most of the time, and only losing it when they overplayed their military advantage. This was most obvious during the SAS operations all over the province in the late 1970s after its introduction into South Armagh, Operation 'RANC' against selected targets by Secretary of State Humphrey Atkins' Army after the assassination of Airey Neave,and the cull of Provisionals after the Olof Palme assassination failed to trigger a non-nuclear conculsion to the Cold War at the Soviets' and Gaddafi's expense. About suich shoot-to-kill operations, Father Raymond Murray grimly concluded in The SAS in Ireland that there was no UK solution to the Troubles since the military was on a war footing, and given a license to kill.(4)

Surprisingly, this prediction did not prove to be true, showing once again that even the best informed experts are little better than laymen in predicting the future. Murray's failure was compounded by the fact that he had relied upon the most involved, dedicated politician in making it, the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. At the Brighton Conservative Party Congress in 1988, the town where she had almost been assassinated just four years earlier, and after the SAS had shot dead those three Provo volunteers at Gibraltar, she declared: "We shall never give up the search for more effective means of defeating the IRA. If the IRA think that they can weary or frighten us, they have made a terrible miscalculation. People sometimes say that it is wrong to use the word 'never' in politics. I disagree. Some things are of such fundamental importance that no other word is appropriate. So I say once again today that this Government will never surrender to the IRA. Never." (5)

Margaret Thatcher proved to be her own political gravedigger in making Murray wrong, and she herself right. It all started when the Prime Minister went beserk when Captain Simon Hayward' biography, Under Fire: My Own Story, appeared. Hayward, apparently Olof Palme's assassin who had subsequently been set-up on a drug-smuggling charge in Sweden to conveniently get him out of the way for the still unsolved crime, had written most bitterly about how the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence personnel had dealt with his problems there, and now Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe had allowed it all to be made public - what could only arouse questions about what else was going on.(6) Seemingly out of the blue, the Prime Minister sacked the Foreign Secretary and the Secretary of Defence George Younger had resigned in protest over Howe's treatment.

While this profound shake-up was never explained, only crudely covered up by her underlings, and in her autobiography, it had long-term consequences upon her tenure as Prime Minister. Howe, demoted to Leader of the House of Commons, a completely useless post, was most bitter about his treatment, waiting for a chance to get even. The loss of Younger was even more important since he had handled Thatcher's re-election the last time she was up for party leader. Without Younger, there was no one willing to mobilize support for her, and in a growing political vacuum, she isolated herself even more as her closest adviser on Northern Ireland, Ian Gow, was assassinated in July 1990 in a way which most recalled Airey Neave's murder.(7) It seemed hardly deserved after the British had allowed the IRA's last flying column attack on its Derryard outpost to escape without loss after it had killed two soldiers of the King's Own Scottish Bordereres.

The attack was the long-delayed 'tet' offensive, designed to spark an uprising in the North to join the Republic - what had long been delayed by the capture of the Eksund, loaded wíth Libyan weapons for the Provos. Since the SAS culls of their volunteers, culiminating with the one on The Rock, the Brits had had to play it cool because they overdid it, losing their prime source in the PIRA Council, aka "Steak Knife", in the process. He helped organize the booby trap which killed six British soldiers in Lisburn in June 1988, and the Semtex improvised explovie device which killed another eight along the Ballygawley-Omagh Road two months later.

Peter Brooke had taken over as the Northern Ireland Secretary of State by then, and stunned the public on November 1st that if the IRA stopped their violent activities, the Government might well be obliged to negotiate a settlement with it.(8) This was taken by the Provos as a sign of weakness by the British, so they carried out an attack on the mainland, killing 11 Royal Marine bandsmen at Deal, Kent in following September.

The attack on Derryard, near Rosslea, on December 13th proved how wrong they were. The surprise attack by about 20 volunteers from Fermanagh in the Republic was heavily armed with a flamethrower, and two heavy 12.7mm DShK machine guns mounted on armored vehicles. Others with armed with 11 AK-47s and grenades. No sonner had the attack started, Moloney has written, than "...the column itself came under attack. Heavy gunfire was directed at its members from fields about fifty yards away, while a British army Wessex helicopter appeared from nowhere over a nearby hill. the column fled, leaving behind the primed van bomb." (9)

It was the greatest humiliation that the Provos ever suffered during the Troubles, and this once it could not be blamed on any tout, especially 'Steak knife", tipping off the Brits as he had participated in the attack. The British had learned of it by military eavesdropping in Ulster on their preparations. Its 'Vengeful' system of computers checked on the movement of vehicles concerned while the 'Crucible' one followed the movements of its personnel.(10)

The fallout from the fiasco was so damning that the Provos were obliged most reluctantly to declare a three-day-ceasefire over Christmas - what the media chose to see as a response of Brooke's offer. (11) This revived peace talks which had been dormant for a decade. Only this time, it was "Steak Knife" himself who was dealing with the leading MI5 official John Deverell in Derry rather than MI6's Michael Oatley under now the excuse that the PM was still not interested in talking to the Provos because it would be seen as an obvious U-turn by the *Iron Lady'.

Then a ruse had to be invented to get her out of the way, and make her subordinates do the dealing. Thiis was kicked off by the former Foreign Secretary Howe
challenging her style of leaderhp in his famous resignation speech in the Commons on November 13th. This was seen as opening the door for Michael Haseltine, her arch enemy, replacing her - what seemed to be happening when his challenge for the party leadership resulted in a second ballot on the issue. She chose to see it as failing a vote of confiden, and resigned, to everyone's surprise, as PM. She even tried to stay on without its support, but her colleagues would not hear of such an unprecedented effort. Perhaps, it was just a ruse to show how committed she was against any dealings with the Provisionals.

With the 'Iron Lady' out of the way, steps to arrange a settlement gathered pace. The most imporant one was to hand over the computers systems to the RUC's Special Branch so that it could stop violent incidents while bringing their perpetrators to account rather than just allowing the covert operators do another ambush or cull. The leader of the new approach was Detective Chief Inspector Ian Phoenix.

He was the last policeman one would expect to get the position - having served nine years in the Parachute Regiment, and well acquainted with its former Commaning Officer Peter Chiswell who in 1982 became Commander, Land Forces, Northern Ireland. Perhaps that was the whole idea bejind his appointment. Despite his career during which he had become a Lance Corporal, he had grown tired of struggles, and was most desirous of achieving a peaceful settlement in the province - what led his colleagues in the SAS on more than one occasion to wonder why they were there then. Phoenix even devised an SAS airborne response to another Derryard assault, one which called for the use of no less than eight helicopters.(12) He even suggested the mounting of Tannoys on them, and the playing of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" if their use had ever become necessary

The ensuing struggle between peacemakers and warmakers in Northern Ireland has been more complicated then than anyone imagined, especially from the British side. While the Provos were slowly brought along, thanks to the convenient imprisonment of '"Steak knife" apparently aka Padraig Wilson so that he would not be assaasinated by his more aggressive colleagues, and could bring imprisoned ones along with the peace process, the British were confronted by keeping it officially going by having still a government in Westminster which would endorse it, stopping the infigfhting by warmakers on the mainland and in the province from continuing their disputes, getting counter insurgency elements in Northern Ireland and on the mainland to go along with a single agenda, and forgetting about complaints all concerned had about changing what they had long been involved in. In all this, despite appearances, Phoenix's RUC Special Branch group, involved in reducing political terrorism to just another form of domestic crime, was most central to the process.

Unfortunately, it got off to a most counter productive start after Private Lee Clegg, along with fellow soldiers, of the 3rd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment gunned down Martin Peake and Karen Reilly as they sped past a check point in West Belfast on September 30, 1990. The couple from Fermanagh, along with passenger Markiewicz Gorman, were on a joy ride after having stolen a car but the security forces suspected them of being Provo terrorists. Unwisely, the soldiers involved made out that the stolen car had hit Clegg in the process - what was completely demolished when BBC Panorama reporter John Ware discovered that a "... cardboard cut-out dummy of the Astra, decorated with bullet holes, fixed to the wall of the 32 Para's canteen near Belfast...The caption, on the wall above the dummy...said "VAUXHALL ASTRA: BUILT BY ROBOTS. DRIVEN BY JOY-RIDERS.. STOPPED BY 'A' COMPANY." (13)

The biggest trouble was not only were joy-riders made out to be terrorists, but also Karen Reilly was no Provo volunteer but the adopted daughter, it seems, of RUC policeman, and colleague of Phoenix's, John Reilly whose wife Diane who had been married to James McGrillen when she had Karen.(14) McGrillen, an IRA volunteer, had been shot dead similarly in 1976 for car theft. While the killing of Peake and Karen Reilly had just been a result of the Paras going after alleged Provo terrorists, the Reillys saw it as the result of Pheonix's Special Branch going slow on stopping real terrorism, goading the ´Paras to do more. Despite the fact that Ian and Susan Phoenix tried to band with the Reillys over the tragedy, making out that it was simply an accident, and even Ian attending her funeral despite orders against it (15), the Reíllys would not have any of it. Phoenix, it seems, had made a mortal enemy which norhing could undo.

On an institutional level, matters were just as bad in the province and on the mainland because MI5 aka the BOX thought that the RUC was not doing enough to stop Provo terrorism when it was actually doing more despite appearances. MI5 officials were completely turned off when they discovered while on a vist to the province, Phoenix and his agents having a champagne briefing in the morning during which 18 bottles were consummed for an SAS colleague who was leaving (16). Still, the unit, soon upgraded, was providing 80% of the intelligence which was stopping terrorist attacks. The biggest bone of contention between the BOX and Phoenix's unit was over who was directing the ASUs in Britain which were causing most of the havoc.MI5 believed that it was Sean McNulty in North Shields, and Phoenix's SB unit thought it was Phelim Hamill of Queen's Univeristy.

The biggest asset Phoenix had in stopping IRA killing was Martin McGartland aka 'Carol'.(17) McGartland began informing on the activities of 'H' whose ASU specialized in booby-trapping cars. Thanks to his leads, Ian's people prevented a Ulster Defence Regiment soldier from being blown up in North Down, prevented the blowing up of a policeman and a shopping center on November 1, 1990, and then it almost caught 'H' red handed with his bomb making factory.In all, McGartland was credited with having saved 50 people from death at the hands of the Provos.Ultimately, 'Carol' was captured by the Provos' Civil Administration Team aka the torturers, and only escaped death by jumping out of a windon when they were panicked by a helicopter passing overhead. With his cover blown, McGartland was forced to flee to Britain where he was given a new life as Martin Ashe in Whitley Bay, and £100,000, apparently by MI5.

While the SB unit proved ultimately to be right on the matter, leading to the closing down of Hamill's ASU in England, MI5 took over control from the Mets' Special Branch in May 1992 in stopping Provo operations on the mainland.To gain similar control in Northern Ireland, MI5 wanted to have more direct access to its intelligence - what Phoenix complained to its boss about, and he completely agreed, though it didn't stop. The matter came to a head when the top-secret intelligence conference took place in June 1993 near the Mull of Kintyre at the Machrihanish Air Base in Scotland. "Box claimed that it was not happy," Phoenix recorded bitterly in his diary, "with the Special Branch's 'passage of intelligence' and 'would willingly put some of their people in support of us. Kind of them',"(18) In the spring of 1994, Phoenix discovered that MI5 was carrying out operations which the RUC knew nothing about - what became Standard Operating Procedure after he was no longer there to stop it.(19)

Ian continued his fight against the Security Service by socialing more with the province's secuirty people, and increasing the unit's ability to gather intelligence about intended violence through electronic and human sources. On the day before he went to the 1994 top-secret security conference in Fort George, he even got
£2,000 for a handler to recruit a new Provo source.(20) Then Ian asked an alleged trusted colleague, apparently Reilly, if he could borrow his best Barbour jacket for the trip as he planned to do some hiking between conference meetings. Ian then met him over coffee, and "they briefly discussed the PIRA peace moves and how they might be pushed forward."(21) Then he went home at 2 PM to have lunch, and pack for the 5:45 PM from RAF Aldergrove, only to have the Reilly call again. "Have a good weekend. See you Monday." (22) It seemed a bit contrived, like someone wanting an alibi while being involved in some unknown covert action.

"In an interview hours before the crash, the Head of Special Branch (Bob Fitzsimmons) had told Sunday Times journalist Liam Clarke that Adams was trying to end the violence: 'However, he questioned Adams's ability to do so, and believed that a final decision to stop the killing would not be taken until security forces had weakened the terrorist structure.' " (23) Seems that Fitzsimmons' confidence was based upon the security establishment in Northern Ireland having resumed contact with McGartland, and he was on the ground at the Mull of Kintyre to be picked up so that he could be taken to the conference. He would tell it that the Provos were on the ropes, thanks to what he and Phoenix's people had done - what would be a great embarrassment and set-back to the BOX.

When the Chinook was loaded at Aldergrove, there were 25 secuirty officers on board - ten from the RUC, nine from military intelligence, and six from MI5 - plus a crew of four to fly the machine. After it had been airborne for 13 minutes, its passenger list was put through the shredder for secuirty reasons to help hide what was really going on.(24) Just before impact, the pilots changed the way point (WP) to the one at Corran, removing their immediate postion at the Mull of Kintyre from disclosure(25) The flight was then obliged to use a Covert Personnel Locator System (CPLS) where persons on the ground with a portable handset steered the helicopter in for the landing by a UHF radio signal which is received onboard. The only trouble was that it wasn't the landing pad they wanted but a "vertical corner" which forced it into crashing into the Mull's Hill of Stone, killing twenty nine people whose bodies were found on the ground.(26)

The person they planned to pick up, apparently Martin McGartland, witnessed the crash and was horrified by it. Instead of the conference being obliged to work on closely with the RUC, especially its SB, it just acknowledged that MI5 ran everything now because there was really no one else. The source who McGartland wanted to develop, whoever it was, didn't need to be told that the Provos best hopes in a settlement had been greatly reduced by the crash. Little wonder that three months later, after everyone had been consulted on the mainland and back in Ulster, those in prison and those not, the Provos announced their long-awaited ceasefire. Under the circumstances, Prime Minister John Major, who had taken over for Howe when Maggie sacked himl, was quite subdued about the situation, doubting that it would hold up, but it did.

Conditions got worse for MCGartland when a board of inquiry reported without pointing the finger at the pilots, only to have two senior RAF officers add just that. The inquest could not come up with any answer either for the crash.

When the sabotaging of the Chinook seemed well and truly buried, MI5's Director General at the time was allowed the unprecedented liberty of publishing her intelligence memoirs, Open Secret, and, of course, she nothing of substance about it, only that she was most upset about the deaths of the RUC officers, especially that of Bob Firzsimmons, the head of its SB. The names of her own staff lost, particularly that of DCI John Deverell, was never mentioned.

Then Annie Machon, with help from David Shayler, added complete fiction about the confrontation in Spies, Lies & Whistleblowers where the RUC was hardly mentioned at all, and its Special Branch and Ian Phoenix never. The struggle with the Provisionals was seen as all a mainland matter, and its slowness in dealing with the challenge timely and properly. The only time Northern Ireland was mentioned in any serious regard was when collague William Perkins - name changed on orders of Mi5, and apparently Jonathan 'Bob' Evans who is its Director General - was obliged to go to the province just before the crash, apparently to make the necessary arrangement. There can be no doubt that Perkins is Evans after she wrote this: "He looked much older than his age, 38, as he was almost totally bald on top and had a Zapata moustache, which also dated him."(27)

The best example of the cover up occurred when Perkins was sent off to Northern Ireland on this note by his head of section: "And what ca we say about Bill? He has had to suffer the double misfortune of being posted to Northern Ireland wihtout his wife and of having broken his right wrist." (28)

The best evidence of McGartland being the man to be picked up is how the Provos have gone after him, once he became known to the public in the Northeast when the NOrthumbria police caught him speeding, and discovered who he really is. Provos almost killed him for it in 1999, shooting him six times. By this time, he had written about 'Carol's exploits against them, Fifty Dead Men Walking, which was recently made into a successful film, though McGartland didn't like it.

He did go out of his way to say that the pilots of the Chinook must be cleared, and when judge Lord Philip did just this last July, he was ecstatic on facebook: "True Heroes Place Themselves at Risk for the Benefit od Others, to save lies. Many of those who died were leading anti-terrorism experts who had made such a valuable contribution to defeating terrorism in Northern Ireland and on the UK mainland." (29)

Only time will tell if those who sabotaged the Chinook are finally brought to justice.



References

1. Peter Taylor, Brits: The War Against the IRA, p. 85.
2. Ibid´. p. 99.
3. Ed Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, p. 111.
4. p. 454.
5. Quoted from ibid.
6. For more, see my article at: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5318.html
7. Paul Routledge, Public Servant, Secret Agent, p. 350ff.
8. Taylor, op. cit., pp. 313-4.
9. Moloney, op. cit, p. 334.
10. Tony Geraghty; The Irish War, pp. 158-9. It is interesting to note that after the book appeared in 1998, and the eaverdropping role in achieving a settlement became better known, Geraghty was prosecuted, and almost sent to prison for discussing these systems which were so important in bringing the Provos to heel.
11. See, e. g., Taylor, p. 315.
12. Jack Holland and Susan Phoenix, Phoenix: Policing The Shadows, pp.249-51.
13. Geraghty, op. cit., p. 104.
14 Ibid, p. 108.
15. Holland and Phoenix, op. cit., pp. 276-7.
16. Ibid., p. 240.
17. For more, see ibid., p. 262ff.
18. Ibid., p. 324.
19. Ibid., p. 326.
20. Ibid., p. 331.
21. Ibid., p. 332.
22. Quoted from ibid.
23. Quoted from Mark Urban, UK Eyes Alpha, p. 277
24. Holland and Phoenix - op. cit., p. 333.
25. Ibid., p. 350.
26. For more, see this link: http://globalresearch/PrintArticle.php?articleId=27828
27. p. 98.
28. Quoted from ibid.
29. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Agent-Carol-Martin-Marty_McGartland/165603323467348

MI5 Dame: British Intelligence Busy Creating Terror Events

Unfortunately "Spooks" is just a TV show and the BBC does a good job of portraying them in a very good light. Unfortunately I don't think reality matches up with fantasy in this case.

Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, director general of MI5, wants Brits to be afraid.

“There are up to 30 alleged ‘mass casualty’ terror plots in operation in Britain, as well as hundreds of young British Muslims on a path to radicalization,” reports the Independent. “Describing the scale of the home-grown terrorist problem, she said MI5 and the police were tackling 200 groups or networks totalling more than 1,600 identified individuals in the UK who were ‘actively engaged in plotting or facilitating terrorist acts,’” never mind that such terrorist acts rarely come to fruition, usually instead sputtering out into absurd allegations of liquid bombs and other fantastical plots nipped in the bud, or so we are expected to believe, that is after we suspend credibility, again for the umpteenth time.

In addition to freeze-drying credibility, Manningham-Buller would have us stooped with amnesia as well.

A bit of Google sleuthing produces embarrassing results on the depth and breadth of British involvement in terrorism. For instance, as it now appears, the so-called Dirty War in Northern Ireland was an MI5 affair, with the Brits going so far as to provide “infra-red equipment which was used to provide the IRA with state-of-the-art bomb detonation technology,” according to the Sunday Herald. According to “a former soldier who joined the Provisional IRA at army intelligence’s request,” reported the Guardian in 2002, both MI5 and the FBI were in on the act. As well, it turns out some of the most violent and feared members of the IRA were in fact members of Britain’s special forces, including John Joe Magee, billed as the IRA’s “torturer-in-chief,” again according to Neil Mackay, Home Affairs Editor of the Sunday Herald.

Contrast Manningham-Buller’s comments, obviously designed to trick the gullible into accepting more police state intrusion, with the reported fact British intelligence put Abu Qatada—the “alleged spiritual leader of the al-Qaida terrorist network,” “Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man in Europe,” and “believed by several European countries to be a pivotal figure in international terrorism”—up in a safe house, an assertion apparently corroborated by French intelligence, according to the Guardian. Instead of delivering Qatada to justice, “British security services offered him a chance to escape to Afghanistan,” the Guardian reported elsewhere. In fact, if we are to believe a report published by the Times Online, Qatada “has been revealed as a double agent working for MI5.”

In addition, British intelligence nurtured al-Muhajiroun, said to be a recruiting arm for al-Qaeda in London, run out of the Finsbury Mosque and managed one Abu Hamza al-Masri, now in prison. Abu Hamza al-Masri’s right-hand man, Haroon Rashid Aswat, “is believed to be the mastermind of all the bombings in London,” according to intelligence expert John Loftus. Aswat had connections to British intelligence and while “the entire British police are out chasing him … one wing of the British government, MI-6 or the British Secret Service, has been hiding him.”

But, according to two French intelligence experts, it is worse, far worse. “British intelligence paid large sums of money to an al-Qaeda cell in Libya in a doomed attempt to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi in 1996 and thwarted early attempts to bring Osama bin Laden to justice,” the London Observer reported in November, 2002. “The latest claims of MI6 involvement with Libya’s fearsome Islamic Fighting Group, which is connected to one of bin Laden’s trusted lieutenants.”

Because “of the sheer scale of what MI5 faces, the issue” of preventing terrorism “is a daunting one,” Manningham-Buller told the department of contemporary British History at Queen Mary College in London. Or rather, considering the above, because of the sheer scale of what MI5, MI6, the CIA, FBI, Mossad have created through collaboration, the issue of preventing “30 alleged ‘mass casualty’ terror plots” will be daunting unless the British people consent to live in a police state.

Full story...

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.

Recent Mossad Undisclosed 'False Flag' Operations

by Trowbridge H. Ford

Part 1 - The Yugoslav Case

In today's world where not only newspapers but also news is dying, it is hardly surprising that people have neither a broad understanding of what is going on nor a coherent recall of what happened in the recent past. It is all just a bit of a blur where individual incidents - especially if they involve celebreties, particularly flashy or controversial politicians - capture the headlines, dominate the news reports, and monopolize the talk shows. Public knowledge is just an amalgam of what comedians, tv presenters, and weighty commentators are willing and/or able to make of world events. It has become, as Harold Pinter reminded us while receiving this year's Nobel Prize for Literature, a pernicious blend of art, truth and politics.

Who, for example, remembers what happened in the rest of the world when former American football star and flashy tv ad presenter O. J. Simpson was on trial in California for murdering his estranged wife Nicole and an acquaintance of hers, Ron Goldman, on June 12, 1994? While most people in the developed world were glued to their tv sets, and talking endlessly about what had
happened - e. g., Nicole's 911 call for help after O. J. beat her up again, and LA detective Mark Furman's testimony about his investigation of the murders - how many of them have any recall of what was going on in Bosnia at the same time? And when President Clinton tried to put back the pieces there by sending in American troops as peacekeepers - what Washington had encouraged at Yugoslavia's expense by urging Muslim militant Alija Izetbegovic to seize power as President, declare independence from Belgrade after an illegal referendum, and set about building a Muslim state?

And this had all started when George Bush was still President, and facing a difficult re-election prospect. The European Union was intent on breaking up Slobodan Milosevic's communist Yugoslavia, resulting in both Solvenia and Croatia declaring their independence from it the previous year. To compensate for the losses, Croatia's Franjo Tudjman and Milosevic agreed at Karadordevo on March 25, 1991 to carve up Bosnia along ethnic lines, what would leave its Muslims out in the cold, and tear up what Izetbegovic, Croat Mate Boban and Serb Radovan Karadzic had argeed to earlier in Lisbon about an independent Bosnia.

In an effort reminiscent of how Richard Nixon managed to steal the 1968 presidential election by promising South Vietnam's President Nguyen Van Thieu a better deal if he refused to attend the peace conference that LBJ had called at the last minute to help assure Hubert Humphrey's election, Bush instructed American Ambassador Warren Zimmerman to tell the Muslim leader on March 28, 1992, that he too would get a better deal if he tore up the Lisbon Accords - which he did. In the end, Bosnia got less from the Dayton Accords during the Clinton administration than had been agreed to in Lisbon.

And when Clinton was facing impeachment four years later, how many people recall his missile attacks on Sudan, Afghanistan and Pakistan - what were intended not only to help head off the process but also to give some payback to Osama bin Laden for Al-Qaeda's attacks on the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania? And when everyone was concentrating on the whole sordid details of his dealings with Monica Lewinski, and his lies about them as his impeachment gathered momentum, how many remember Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's meetings with Milosevic's representatives in Rambouillet, France where the Yugoslav President was issued an ultimatum - either allow 28,000 NATO peacekeepers into Kosovo or face a massive aerial bombardment by 430 of its aircraft, including F-117 stealth fighter bombers and B-52s?

I reckon not many because they were all most secret operations whose details, if known, would have reflected most badly on Washington, the Clinton administration, the EU, and, most surprisingly, Israel. Few people took seriously Gordon Thomas's claims in Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad that its agents were tapping the sexual encounters that the President had had over the phone with Ms. Lewinski - what it was now using to blackmail the White House - much less ask for what possible purpose.

And once freed from the threat after the Senate rejected the bills of impeachment on Febraury 12, 1999, the President had NATO rush to put together the bombing campaign in Kosovo which commenced six weeks later. This was to bring to a successful conclusion all the secret operations that the CIA had carried out to help the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) gain independence from the Republic of Serbia. The KLA had originally been trained and financed by Osama's Al-Qaeda, and the job had been completed by CIA security agents, Dyncorp and the MPRI. Their greatest accomplishment was making it look like the Serbs had carried out the massacre of Kosovars at Racak - where several dozen residents had apparently had had their throats slit, and their bodies dumped in a ditch.

While the Yugoslav President had forced some Kosovars out of the province into Serbia both to undermine their claim to self-determination, and to prepare for the apparent NATO onslaught, it was trying to get the Albanian and Kosovar clan chiefs to withdraw their people from the province to make it look as if Milosevic was engaged in ethnic cleansing, but without much success. For those ethic Muslims who refused, the KLA and the CIA took the strongest measures, as the autopsies of some of those allegedly killed at Racak showed. To add to the charge, NATO, thanks to the connivance by agents of the Office of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), overruled two inquests into the Racak affair, claiming simply that the Serbians had carried out a massacre.

Clinton, now cleared of lying and obstructing justice in a significant way, and joined by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, was free to establish his legacy - the ending of the last traces of communism in Europe through the efforts of the Moujahedeen who had ended it in Afghanistan. The only possible downside to the project was the risk of building a trans-national Muslim state across southeast Europe from the Adriatic to the Black Sea, and at the expense of Serbia, Macedonia, and Bulgaria. Still, Clinton thought it was well worth it, and on March 24, 1999, NATO started dropping over 200 million dollars-worth of ordnance a day on selected targets in Serbia to force its army to withdraw from Kosovo, but which only immediately forced the Kosovars to leave in droves. When NATO feared that the public was learning too much about the damage wrought, it bombed Serbian TV with considerable loss of life. When NATO learned that the Chinese Embassy was transmitting messages to the Serbian military after its jets had silenced Slobodan's, it destroyed it. (William Blum, Rogue State, pp. 233-4)

After 78 days of constant bombing - what devastated Serbia's infrastructure, laid waste to vast areas of human habitation, caused many willful, unnecessary and unlawful killings, and contaminated vast areas of land and sea with toxic and unexploded ordnance - Milosevic finally withdrew his army from Kosovo, and the aerial assault ceased. The attacks were aimed at Serbia's economic elite by destroying its infrastructure - who had been softened up by the CIA's National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to push for comprehensive market reform - so that it would oust the old communist warhorse and his inner circle, especially Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic. To see that they got their just desserts, the Americans even agreed to the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

Milosevic's increasingly nationalist regime, seeking a Greater Serbia, had become apparently totally isolated because the need of its acting as a counterweight to the USSR - what had provided Marshal Tito with all kinds of concessions from Europe because of his steadfastness - had collapsed with his death, and that of the Soviet bloc. After Tito died in 1980, his successors, especially Ivan Stambolic, had tried to keep the policies and allies that the famous Partisan leader had established, and things continued pretty much as they had been until Milosevic seized control of the Serbian Socialist Party from Stambolic, and was elected the Republic's President in the late 1980s. And to go along with Milosevic's Serbian nationalism, he switched sides on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, not only resuming diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv - terminated after the Six Day War in 1967 - but also giving the Mossad an increasing role in its fight against the Muslims and separatists.

During the 1990s Israel became Serbia's only remaining ally. While 2,000 of Yugoslavia's few remaining Jews were immigrating to Palestine, Milosevic's government adopted 'false flag' operations which the Mossad had made famous, and for which it provided vital intelligence and assistance. The most active domestic group was Vuk Draskovic's Serbian Renewal Movement (SRM) whose Serbian Guard attempted to make it look like it was serious in ovethrowing Milosevic's regime in 1991 through street protests in Belgrade. When this fizzled out, its aim, along with other Serbian paramilitary groups, was to stoke up hatred with the Croats and Bosniacs by making wild claims - like Tudjman was trying to assassinate Milosevic while conducting secret negotiations with him, and behind the back of Izetbegovic's Bosniacs - and then arranging the killing of those involved, or using the deception as a basis for getting rid of less ideologically committed colleagues.

The organizer of these dummy political parties, and special forces who killed friend and foe alike who impeded the war on Islam was Jovica Stanisic, Milosevic's trusted covert operator who controlled all counterterrorist operations throughtout what was left of Yugoslavia by the draft law in 1997 which made him the Presidential Advisor for National Security. Stanisic's greatest claim to fame was the capture of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez aka 'Carlos the Jackal' back in 1976 in Belgrade after he killed two French secret service officers in Paris trying to arrest him on a tipoff from Mossad informer Michael Moukharbal. Ramirez was apparently a double agent of the Mossad who was a founding member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine's Black September Movement which carried out assassinations, hijacking and kidnappings, guaranteed to insure that it never happened. Stanisic was now involved in a program to put PFLP-style operations against Muslims and Croats on a federation-wide basis to make sure its split-up never occurred.

To commenorate the achievements of Stanisic's State Security Division (RDB) in the Vojvodina region against Croats and Mulims during 1991-5 - what had earlier occurred in Bosnia - a celebration was called for the all the participants in the campaign, especially Dragan Vailjkovic's 300-man unit which stormed the Croatian town of Glina in 1991. At the celebration, a video was shot of the proceedings which became most explosive when it came time to try the various Serbian war criminals at The Hague.

As a witness during the trial of Milosevic explained, as Paul Gallagher reported for Reuters on February 19, 2003, "Milosevic Trial Shown Secret Paramiliary Video": "You can see all members of the Serbian State security in one place, which made it unique. I asked them to give me this tape and they denied it to me because it was very sensitive material." Of course, the presence of people like Milosevic, Stanisic, and his subordinate Franki Simatovi - name-sake of 'Frenkies Boys' which was led by the legendary Milorad Lukovic aka "Legija" - was to be expected.

The video would only be explosive if it showed the presence of foreign advisers, especially Israeli ones, in counterterrorism, and alleged domestic opponents who participiated in the RDB's various 'false-flag' operations. The frames would show that witnesses from Serbian military intelligence (the KOB), especially Slobodan Lazarevic and Mustafa Candic, testifying against Milosevic at his trial at The Hague were telling the truth when they claimed that the whole network of paramilitary groups, assemblies, and officials throughout Yugoslavia were completely under the control of "The Boss" in Belgrade, charges so upsetting to the former President that the court had to order a recess until he could regain his health and composure.

Then who was supplying Belgrade with the necessary information so that operations could be planned, and then carried out? It certainly wasn't the American intelligence community, nor the intelligence agencies of the various European states. The best evidence that Washington was not involved in any kind of black operations when it came to Serbia was demonstrated when President Clinton ordered the National Security Agency (NSA) in early 1993 to recruit on a crash basis 125 linguists to handle tactical communications in Serbo-Croat in the most hostile environment. (James Bamford, Body of Secrets: How America's NSA and Britain's GCHQ Eavesdrop on the World, p. 554.) If Washington were doing anything untoward in Bosnia, it would have trained linquists beforehand.

And it is interesting to note that Bamford does not have a word to say about the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in his book, though the NSA had promised to be much more forthcoming about its achievements at the time, and Bamford has included other contemporaneous developments - like the joint NSA-DARPA program to build a super computer which could fit in a coat pocket. (p. 609) "By 2001," he added, "researchers at MIT were actively attempting to marry the digital with the biological by altering the common E. coli bacterium to function as an electronic circuit." (p. 612)

The Embassy bombing had become for some explained reason an example of renewed NSA secrecy - what Jeffrey T. Richelson had complained about in his "Back to black" article for the May/June 2001 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the only apparent reason for the void is that there was much more to the bombing than Washington is prepared to admit.

And Britain's MI5 does seem to have been most unprotective of Israeli interests for some unexplained reason at this time, allowing its Embassy in London, and Balfour House, Finchley to have been bombed on July 26, 1994, resulting in 19 people being injured. According to the famous reporter Paul Foot, the Mossad had set up four Palestinians living in Britain for the crimes by having its agent Reda Moghrabi get them to buy and test explosives under the pretence that they would be used in Sidon, Lebanon. (For corroboration of this, see Annie Machon, Spies, Lies & Whistleblowers, p. 225ff.) And on July 13th, The Sunday Times reported that Mossad agents had come to London to warn British counterterrorists that Hezbollah planned to attack its Embassy - what turned out to be just another "false-flag" operation.

And, according to Richard Tomlinson, MI6 was trying to assassinate Milosevic back in 1992, hoping to arrange a convenient car crash for the President, a dummy paramilitary organization managing to penetrate his security network, or an Special Air Service (SAS) squad simply staging his assassination - what the Mossad might well have learned from Tomlinson himself who was willing to tell anyone who would listen the SIS's latest transgressions. And the Mossad attack on the London buildings could have well been a wake-up call to the Major government to take Israeli and Jewish security concerns more seriously.

This leaves only the Israelis, and it seems that American fugitive Marc Rich - who had renounced his US citizenship in 1983, and become one of Israel and Spain when his financial empire was charged with racketeering and trading with the enemy, Iran - provided the necessary connections between Belgrade and Tel Aviv so that the necessary trageting of individuals, and Muslim hotspots could take place. The Rich Foundation was a front for the Israeli government itself, and it was managed by important Mossad operatives, especially former directors Avner Azulay and Shabtai Shavit. It may well have transmitted important intelligence to Stanisic's people about how to conduct their campaigns through the Chinese Embassy - what could not be done by the Israeli Embassy because of the real risk of being discovered by NSA - explaining why NATO took it out during the aerial campaign after NSA finally got up to speed in reading its communications. Israel only even gave slight support to the bombing campaign, Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon refusing to cut ties with Belgrade.

In order to keep earlier operations most secret, Belgrade had not been loath, like the Israelis themselves, to eliminate those who might be security risks to the most essential Mossad program.The killings which come to mind are those of Beli Matic on August 11, 1991, Djordje Giska the following month, Aleksandar Knele a year later, and Goran Vukovic in December 1994. Serbian authorities predictably blamed these assassinations upon unspecified Western intelligence agencies rather than the Mossad and apparent domestic opponents - claims which just stoked up zenophobia. Little wonder that Milos Vasic wrote this in exasperation in "Two-years silence" in the June-November 2002 issue of the Bosnia Report after Stambolic had not been seen since 2000:

"For eleven years now the police have been simulating investigations, going through the same ritual motions, knowing all the while that the culprits will never be found. Hence the cyncisim of the police top brass: 'Well, John Kennedy was killed. Olof Palme was killed, it happens'..."

Those assassinated gained the name of the Vozdovac Gang, the place in Belgrade were Karadzic got his training in crowd education and mobilization during two appointments at its Health Center during the 1980s before he went off to Sarajevo in Bosnia to organize the Serbian revolt from its Health Center - what was kicked off by a highly-trained sharpshooter gunning down a Bosniac medical student as he went shopping downtown. The unsuspecting Matic was killed by a single bullet outside his home, as he was unlocking his car - reminiscent of how the Mossad had apparently arranged the killing of Said Hammami, who was seeking a negotiated settlement to the Palestinian-Israeli confict, in his London office in January 1978. (For more on this killing, and others that the Mossad arranged through surrogate killers, see Tony Geraghty, The Bullet Catchers, p. 376ff.)

It was just the kind of action that Ariel Sharon had called for back in 1990 when he grabbed the microphone away from Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir during a Likud Party conference debating the issue, and shouted: "Who's for wiping out terrorism?" And the real possibility that Mossad leaders might well have had something to do with these assassinations, and that of "traitor"
Yitzhak Rabin when he was seriously involved in the implemention of the Oslo Accords to achieve peace between the Israelis and Palestinians was not diminished when his successor, Benjamin Netanyahu, was tempted to make either Efraim Halevy or Meir Dagan the Mossad's Director, only to settle for Danny Yatom after he was advised by a former veteran agent of its foreign relations department against it, declaring that Dagan would especially be a "recipe for disasters", with his "targeted killings during lulls" - what could destroy its relations with other secret intelligence agencies throughout the world.

Instead Dagan served as a counterterrorst expert for the Netanyahu government, and the Barak one which followed, while Halevy continued to run operations as its Deputy Director. And the growing involvement of Israel, especially the Mossad's, in Serbia's struggle was increasingly evident. Ever since the Americans had taken over Albania militarily back in 1991-2, the Mossad had been putting together "The Gazidede File" for Belgrade, named after the Albanians' secret intelligence chief, Baskin Gazidede, who was Albania's link with the Al Qaeda and the KLA. "In February 1999 Jane's" (Defence Weekly), M. Bozinovich has added in the just-posted article on Serbiana, "Al Qaeda in Kosovo", "cites that documents found on the body of a KLA member showed that he had escorted several volunteers into Kosovo, including more than a dozen Saudi Arabians."

By this time, Zeljko Raznatovic, the infamous hit man aka Arkan, was writing to President Clinton, as if he were Dagan, calling attention to the Al-Qaeda bombings in East Africa in the hope that he would take a more pro-Serbian view in the battle against Muslim terrorism. This was a far cry from when Arkan was setting out on his first mission in Bosnia, taking along Jewish photographer Ron Haviv to take pictures of his 'Tiger's atrocities in the hope that publishing them would scare the Bosniacs into submission. Now Arkan, for his trouble, saw his hotel in Belgrade destroyed during the bombing, and the Chinese Embassy joined the list when it was determined that he was using it to pass on military information to the Serbian forces. And then in January 2000, Belgrade arranged Arkan's assassination by Debrosav Gavric, just to keep critics guessing about who was pulling the strings, and calling the shots.

By this time, Vuk Draskovic had given up his charade that he was really opposed to what Milosevic was attempting with Mossad help, having distanced himself from the SRM, and joined the Belgrade government. Serbia had helped resupply weapons lost in the first Gulf War to Saddam Hussein's regime, Con Coughlin tells us in Saddam (p. 292), apparently in return for helping cleanse Yugoslavia of the Muslim menace for Tel Aviv. Baghdad and Abu Nidal aka Sabri Al-Banna of the PFLP had long settled their differences with Israel over the value and role of Arafat and his PLO, though the Mossad still made sure that Saddam was not achieving the means to strike Israel with devastating blows. Saddam had paid his dues to Tel Aviv by fighting its proxy war against Iran - what he tried to cover up as best he could when the Gulf War was commencing by firing a few Scud missiles Israel's way but without any real impact.

In return, Milosevic made sure that Arkin's followers, particularly "Legija", disposed of his most dangerous critic, Slavko Curuvija, and his most dangerous opponent, Stambolic, in the run-up to the 2000 presidential election. Curuvija, a whistle-blowing publisher, knew about all the extra-judicial killings, and threatened Milosevic's wife Mira Markovic, "a kind of communist Rasputin", to tell all - what could well have resulted in the couple being stung by an angry Belgrade mob on the nearest lamppost, like Mussolini and his infamous mistress. Curuvija was assassinated on April 11, 1999, and Stambolic disappeared on August 25, 2000. About Curujiva's killing, his Wikipedia biography adds: "It is still not known who carried out the assassination, nor who ordered it." To hide from the public Draskovic's role in the process, Arkan apparenlty took a shot at him twice but somehow missed both times.

Clinton, once the Yugoslav Army had been forced to withdraw from Kosovo, decided to settle scores with the other members of the secret triumvirate, Israel and China. While they thought that their covert system had remained secret from Washington, it had ultimately learned what was going on from NSA, and decided to strike when the moment was right. Israel had established diplomatic relations with Beijing the same time Belgrade had, and they had built rewarding economic and strategic relations ever since the late 1970s. Now Tel Aviv was under considerable pressure to make amends for the destruction of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, and they worked very cautiously for a settlement - the sale of around a half dozen, radar-equipped, early-warning planes aka Phalcons. Tel Aviv and Beijing had carefully worked diplomatically towards the culimination, Jiang Zemin coming to Israel in April to close the deal, only for Washington to cancel it three months later, sending the staggering Yugoslav ecomony into free fall.

It hit bottom when Milosevic lost the election in October, and refused to resign, obliging almost all his former collaborators, except the military, to organize his ouster. The movement was headed by the victor in the election, leader of Serbia's Democratic Party (DS) Vojislav Kostunica; Draskovic, who had arranged Arkan's assassination, and then had seen to the disposal of his killer, Momir Gavrilovic; and Zoran Djindjic, who took over the DS when Kostunica assumed the Presidency. They were all most eager to cut ties as best they could with the past for fear of being sent along with Milosevic and others charged with war crimes to the special tribunal in The Hague.

Back in Washington, President Clinton, to avoid a similar prospect, decided to reduce the risks by pardoning Rich as he was taking leave of the White House in January 2001. The leader of the campaign to rehabilitate the scofflaw, and expatriot was the director of the Rich Foundation and former Mossad operative, Avner Azulay.

To soften up Clinton to agree to the pardon behind the backs of the relevant Justice Department officials, Azulay gave $100,000 of Rich's money to Abraham Foxman of the Anti Defamation League to talk up his boss's contributions to Jewish causes, and got Rich's former wife Denise, who had already given $450,000 for the Clinton Library, to put the pitch to the President while at a White House dinner in December. For good measure, Azulay lined up various Israeli officials, especially Prime Minister Ehud Barak who had been stung by the Phalcon cancellation, and former Mossad Director Shavit, not only to speak about his charitable efforts and allude to his intelligence help of Tel Aviv but also to press for a pardon for the more controversial spy Jonathan Pollard to make sure that at least Rich was satisfied.

Clinton went along with the backmail which recalled the Mossad's use of Ms. Lewinski because he risked much more by not doing so. There was still the possibility that chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte at The Hague might take up the Canadian suit, claiming that he and many other world leaders had committed war crimes during the bombing campaign of Serbia, especially since even the Pentagon had issued a warning that hacking into Serbia's computer networks for destructive purposes - what the NSA might well have already done, and might explain further the destruction of the Chinese Embassy - could constitute a war crime. (William Blum, Rogue State, pp. 77-8) And the President was always afraid that any inquiry into his activities might revive interest in what he had done back in Arkansas as Governor.

To temper any backlash from the pardon, he also issued one to Adolf "Al" Schwimmer, the key operative in Iran-Contra who started it all by not getting clearance for the shipment of 80 HAWK missiles through a third country, apparently Sweden, from Israel to Iran back in November 1985. (For more on this, see Lawrence E. Walsh, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up, p.37ff.) Then Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin and several Israeli senior officials, especially Shimon Peres and David Kimche, had been deeply involved in this black operation, and it was hardly surprising that when Azulay was trying to induce Clinton to pardon Rich, it was suggested bringing in Rabin's widow, Leah, to strengthen the plea, only to be reminded that she had died the previous November.

Serbia's new President, Kostunica, acted as if it had hardly had any previous relations with Israel. No sooner had he taken office than he stated: "For some strange reasons there are nations and countries that are geographically far apart...but very close to one another," the AP reported on November 10, 2000 in an article entitled "Yugoslav president favors broadened relations with Israel." He said that he wanted to officially visit the Holy Land, and he was the first Serbian President to attend Holocaust Day memorial ceremony the following April. It was all intended to counter anti-Semitic incidents which started right after the presidential election, and it all seemed intended to fool everyone, especially the outside world, about what had been going on before.

To keep everyone guessing, outgoing Mossad Director Efraim Halevy wrote his memoirs, Man in the Shadows, an unprecedented act for a former foreign intelligence chief. The book really didn't reveal anything new - what had been discussed more fully, for example, in Gordon Thomas's work. Halevy seemed intent on making it officially clear that there wasn't anything more to tell - an unbelieveable effort by any former intelligence chief, especially one of the Mossad. And Con Coughlin added to the charade by interviewing him for the Daily Telegraph, entitled "Out of the Shadows", on March 26, 2006, acting as if Halevy's denials of the agency having had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks, and Saddam Hussein settled the matter. In doing so, Coughlin
discounted claims he had earlier made in Saddam that Milosevic and the Iraqi dictator had a secret alliance for him to survive a similar aerial bombardment, and that they were collaborating in the development of nuclear weapons. (p. 318)

While most Israeli leaders were prepared to simply lick their wounds after these setbacks, Sharon and Dagan, who took over from Halevy, were not, and the former's election as Prime Minister, thanks to the latter's efforts, guaranteed that a preemptive agenda would be adopted - one which called for Saddam's overthrow without any significant blowback. To reduce the risks, Dagan arranged the assassination of Abu Nidal in Baghdad on August 16, 2002. Nidal, like his PFLP predecessor, 'Carlos the Jackal', just knew too much about the double-dealing regarding Libya's Gadaffi, Jordan, Israel, Syria, Lebanon, and especially Iraq to be allowed to live. Nidal could particularly deny what was left of the claims about collaboration between Milosevic and Saddam, particularly the claim that the Iraqi leader was going it alone in the production of nuclear weapons, now that Milosevic had departed the political scene.

Thanks to this effort, Dagan was made Mossad's Director on September 10th, and he immediately put together the essentials of the Downing Street dossier about Iraq's WMD - what was traced falsely to others, particularly a most dated American Ph.D. dissertation, when it claims were questioned by others. As Jeffrey Steinberg has written in "Behind the Iraq Dossier Hoax: Intelligence Was Cooked in Israel" in the February 21, 2003 issue of the Executive Intelligence Review:

"In fact, at least 11 of 16 pages were lifted, verbatim, from an Israeli journal, Middle East Review of International Affairs, whose sole proprietor is Dr. Barry Rubin, an American-born Israeli citizen. The 11 pages were drawn from two articles by Ibraham al-Marashi and Robert Rabil, that appeared in the September 2002 edition of that journal."

And reading Steinberg's article further, one discovers that Rubin's effort is part of the International Center for Counterterrorist Policy (ITC) which is financed by the Marc Rich Foundation whose Director is Avner Azulay and "another publicly listed associate of the ITC is Maj. Gen. Meir Dagan, one of Ariel Sharon's most notorious thugs, and the current head of the Mossad."

Given this most unexpected revelation, the Mossad, it seems, moved quickly to stem the damage, having, it seems, Milorad Lukovic aka "Legija" assassinate Zoran Djindjic, the Serbian Prime Minister, by shooting him twice in the chest at long range as he was going to a meeting with Sweden's Foreign Minister Anna Lindh in Belgrade three weeks later. Djindjic, along with Lindh, were great champions of market reform, and bringing all the war criminals, especially those who targeted suspected terrorists for assassination - what could still result in Sharon, Dagan, and many others going to The Hague.

Djindjic's killing was apparently an ideal example of Dagan's work - the strategic move during a lull which could well change the outcome of some complicated operation, as the ouster of Saddam was just days away. And the use of hit man "Legija" would guarantee what few would suspect Israel of the murder.

Liquid Bomb Pakistan Link Is False Flag Smoking Gun

I don't know anyone who believes this government any more. This "foiled terror plot" is as likely to be the work of MI5 as it is some crazy Muslim people!

Veracity of liquid explosives method also put under dubious doubt

by Paul Joseph Watson

Revelations concerning the origins and connections of the alleged liquid bomb terror plot to Pakistan and the 7/7 bombings in London provide a strong indication that the operation, known for months yet deliberately timed for public release, was a synthetic ruse concocted by the Bush/Blair cabal to re-package the flagging war on terror.

Media reports in the days following the alert cite Pakistan's ISI as having identified Rashid Rauf as, "the link between the plot's planners and British-based Muslims who were allegedly preparing to carry out attacks on transatlantic flights."

According to former NSA official Wayne Madsen, the Lashkar-e-Toiba terror group, to which Rashid Rauf is affiliated, is wholly operated and funded by the Pakistani ISI.

The Pakistani ISI is a CIA front and controls terror cells at the discretion of the highest levels of the US military-industrial complex. This means that the potential mastermind of the liquid bomb plot, Rashid Rauf (pictured), was operating under the oversight and direction of Pakistani and by proxy American intelligence agencies.

To understand why the Pakistan link strongly indicates that Thursday morning's terror alert was a manufactured ruse, it is necessary to understand the the nexus that connects Pakistani intelligence, the CIA and terrorist organizations.

In October 2001, under the headline 'Pakistani Intelligence Had Links to Al Qaeda, U.S. Officials Say,' the New York Times reported, "The intelligence service of Pakistan, a crucial American ally in the war on terrorism, has had an indirect but longstanding relationship with Al Qaeda, turning a blind eye for years to the growing ties between Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, according to American officials."

The ISI has received CIA funds to create and control militant organizations, including the Taliban and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.

Funds transferred from Pakistan bankrolled the alleged 9/11 hijackers before the attack. Ahmad Umar Sheikh wired $100,000 from Karachi to alleged lead hijacker Mohammed Atta at the behest of ISI chief Mahmoud Ahmad. If this isn't a direct link from the ISI to Al-Qaeda then nothing is.

Porter Goss, later appointed as director of the CIA, was having breakfast with the money man behind the terrorists as the planes crashed on the morning of 9/11. Ahmad had also met with top defense and intelligence officials in Washington in the days before the attack, including then CIA director George Tenet, Pentagon officials, and White House personnel.

The fact that the Pakistani financier of the alleged hijackers was meeting with the top brass of the US government in the week before the attack was never investigated by the 9/11 Commission.

In addition, alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was repeatedly protected by the ISI, according to Josef Bodansky, the director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare.

Defense Intelligence Agency documents dated from 2001 clearly indicate that the CIA is aware that Pakistan's ISI supports and bankrolls Al-Qaeda groups but they have deliberately chosen to ignore the connection.

This rich history of ISI creation and protection of terrorist cells, allied with the fact that the ISI is a known CIA front, and added to the revelation that the mastermind of the liquid bomb plot Rashid Rauf is under ISI control, it is therefore obvious to conclude that the entire charade was cooked and orchestrated by elements of the Bush/Blair cabal and sold as promotional propaganda for the increased surveillance and behavioral control of UK and US citizens.

At the very least, the terror cell had been fully infiltrated for months - this has already been admitted - and the snap "foiling" of the attack was coordinated and stage-managed for purposes of political grandstanding on the part of Bush, Blair and the Neo-Fascist apparatus that seeks to use the ailing justification of the war on terror for a future military incursion into Iran.

Another dimension to the indication that we are being fed another hoax, are reports detailing the alleged plot's links to the 7/7 London bombings.

As this website has exhaustively documented for over a year, the 7/7 bombings and the patsies that were used to take the fall for them, were controlled and engineered by the British intelligence apparatus.

The alleged ringleader of the attack which targeted three tube trains and one bus, Mohammed Siddique Khan, was an MI5 informant, according to former London Metropolitan Police detective and terror expert Charles Shoebridge. Therefore, in the case of the liquid bomb plot suspects, any link to the London bombers is a link to MI5.

It is clear that the scope of the attack has been greatly exaggerated by the British government to maximize fear and subservience engendered by images of alarmed and frightened airliner passengers.

Doomsday proclamations of ten planes exploding into balls of flames in mid-air do not correlate with the capacity of the liquid explosives the alleged terrorists were to use.

The only other example where terrorists used liquid explosives was the December 1994 Philippines Airline Boeing 747 incident, a dry run for a bigger plot conducted by Ramzi Youssef.

In this case, Youssef planted the explosives explosives under one of the seats in the airliner and timed them to detonate after he disembarked for a connecting flight. The subsequent explosion killed only the Japanese businessman who was sitting directly above the bomb. Besides five people with minor injuries, the other 200-plus passengers were unharmed and the plane landed safely.

Only liquid explosives in large and noticeable amounts can have any literal chance of "blowing up" a plane in mid-air. Confiscating pregnant white women's lip gloss is completely insane and proves in itself that the new airport measures are purely designed to act as a PR coup for the police state.

In addition, photographs of passengers being ordered to pour liquids into one single container completely belies the claim that the alleged terrorists planned to mix the liquids to create the deadly explosives. If mixing liquids was a key component of the bomb making process then why are airport security ordering people to mix liquids?

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