Deep MI6 Operator Neil Heywood Killed To Avenge Brutal Murders of Williams, Loftus & Rawlings

by Trowbridge H. Ford

Nothing is more fundamental in intelligence work than keeping covert operations completely separate from counter intelligence. To help insure that everything goes according to plan, agents, especially in high positions, must be carefully vetted to start out, and must have serious checks on their reliability periodically. There must also be strict observance to the principle of needing to know about serious matters for fear that rumors, loose talk, and ultimately spying with ruin serious operations, possiblity at great cost to not only its agents but more important the host nation itself. And all of this despite appearances has suprisingly become more important and difficult as operations and programs have become more complicated, and integrated, even involving foreign services which might not be so careful in recruiting personnel, making sure that they stay loyal, and carrying out actions.

The classic case which comes to mind when these matter were not observed is when Great Britain failed to keep Soiviet spy, and later MI5's Assistant Director Peter Wright under any kind of control. Wright, son of Admiralty scientist and Marconi Engineer in Chief Maurice Wright, became totally dissaffected during the lead-up to WWII, and started recruiting spies in British government for the Soviets, codenamed SCOTT, while attending Oxford's School of Rural Economy. While adoption of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact stopped his spying, he resumed it as Soviet atomic spy 'K', once Hitler invaded the USSR. Wright's handing over information to his handler Vladimir Barkovsky about an atomic bomb being feasible, and the Anglo-American effort to build one was instrumental in Stalin doing the same.(1) Peter's official job at the time was a Navy scientist, attached to his father's firm.(2)

After the war in 1949, Wright was appointed the Security Service's director of research, to improve its ability to eavesdrop on the Soviet enemy, thanks to the old boys' network of meeting such concerns. In doing so, the Director General of the Foreign Intelligenc Servcice aka MI6 Colonel Malcolm Cumming and the MoD's Chief Scientist Frederick Brundfett overlloked or were unaware of how alienated Peter had become because of his father's alcoholism during the Great Depression - what had forced Peter to study to become a farmer rather than seek an Honours degreee at one of Oxbridge's colleges."The trauma of those events," Peter wrote bitterly, "brought back my ill-health and I was afflicted with a chronic stammer which rendered me at times virtually speechless." (3)

Wright contrasted what had apparently happened to him while similarly inclined youths who could afford to go to Oxford became communists. While he contended that he only learned of the comparison years later while he was tracking them down for MI5, the disparity could not have been missed at the time since Margaret Leigh, a fellow traveller, had not only followed his footsteps in seeking subsidence but also had been obliged to hire him to work on one of her crofting farms in the Scottish Highlands, "Achnadarroch" near Plocktown in Wester Ross. The area had become the center of Celtic Communism ever since liberal Lord Leverhulme had evicted crofters from the islands of Lewis and Harris after WWI. Ms.Leigh had gone to the area after her father, an Oxford don, had died, and she and her mother too could no longer afford to live there.

While Margaret Leigh finally taught Peter to master his stammer, he learned first hand what made real people, not those spoiled by capitalism, become communists, as she and he were forced to move to a farm in Cornwall after they had been evicted in Scotland by another greedy landlord. "They had enjoyed to the full the privileged background and education denied me, while my family had suffered at the capricious hand of capitalism. I experienced at first hand the effects of slump and depression, yet" he added most dishonestly, "it was they who turned to espionage." (4)

If ever one deserved a complete vetting for any position, particularly in the intelligence services, it was Peter Wright, the domestic communist who had soon become one of the world's most important spies. While his father Maurice was denied a comeback in a senior position because of his alcoholic reputation - offered instead a position of an ordinary scientist on a trial basis - Peter went sailing through without any question.

Once working with MI5, Wright, still a traitor, was able to run circiles around his superiors for Moscow's benefit - getting the service to chase the wrong targets when it came to Soviet spies, especially himself, and important people domestically disaffected, and even when someone important was being checked, the persons concerned often escaped because of some unexpected surprise, or some misreading of the situation that he was guilty of. And when the mistakes were finally discovered, Wright was very good at placing the blame on others, especially MI5 Director General Roger Hollis.

An early, best example of this occurred when MI5 loused up exploiting leads defector Igor Gouzenko supplied about Soviet spying in North America, particularly who was the spy, codenamed Elli. As Chapman Pincher has stated in his latest, and undoubtedly last effort to cover up Wright's handiwork, Treachery: Betrayals, Blunders, and Cover-ups: Six Decades of Espionage Against America and Great Britain: "It was an inexcusable gaffe by Peter Wright - later the self-styled 'spycatcher' - and the other counterintelligence investigators of the Hollis case to have failed to read the biographical books by Roger's well-known brother, which were on the shelves of many libraries." (5) There was then continuing mention of Wright's and other counterterrorists' gaffes which just compounded problems while making ways for Hollis to be made to fit the puzzle.

In doing so, Pincher left out almost all of what Wright really did of importance, though the book is a most hefty one, and the absences seems most deliberate since Peter wrote much about it himself, especially his getting American counterparts, particularly Agency ''Executive Action' Director William KIng Harvey, his boss Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms, and the National Security Agency's Deputy Director Louis Tordella, to do his and the Soviets' bidding, especially when it came to getting rid of Presidents Fidel Castro, and ultimately President Kennedy. There is no mention of these key operators on the American scene in Pincher's book who got going after Castro, thanks Wright's 1959 briefing on how to get such troublemakers (6), and its renewal after the Bay of Pig fiacso (7) despite Attorney General Robert Kennedy' s order that it stop. When the President himself reiterated the order after the settlement of the Cuban Missile Crisis. these very officials took the lead in seeing that JFK was assassinated.

As Wright told Harvey after the second meeting when he thought that the Brits were holding back on their continuing role in the world: "I've told you, Bill. We're out of that game. We're the junior partner in the alliance, remember? It's your responsibility now." (8) Not only did Harvey take it to heart when it came time to get rid of the President in Dallas at the expense of the Cuban Revolution and Castro - what only Governor Connally's wounding turned the coup into a cockup - but he resumed it in 1968 when it came time to keep America's nose to the grindstone in Vietnam by seeing to the killing of Martin Lurther KIng, and Robert Kennedy, the only peacemakers who could change the scene (9) Harvey, as the covert leader of The Plumbers, helped arrange the assassinations apparently of potential troublemakers former Alabama Governor and President LBJ to Nixon's re-election in 1973 (10)

While Wright retired in 1976 - especially since his major surrogate Harvey had died, apparently killed to keep the lid on his secrets in light of the Watergate scandal - his legacy of the West pursuing the wrong policies, and chasing the wrong suspects lived on, thanks to efforts by Arthur Martin and Stephen de Mowbrary in mining the continuing false leads of Soviet double agent Anatoliy Golytsin. He had long helped Wright chase down the wrong agents, and now his complaints about alleged Soviet agents of influence in New LIes for Old came in most handy when the Iran-Contra conspiracy decided to get rid of the Soviet regime at alleged agent Olof Palme's expense. The assassination went off like clockwork, but the coup in Moscow failed because of all the spying by the Soviets' new spies, particularly the Agency's Rick Ames, the Bureau's Robert Hanssen, and the Mossad's Jonathan Pollard. Instead of Armageddon, though, we got Gorbachev, and the end of the USSR.

In its wake, London was most anxious to keep the lid on how it had helped create the Cold War, and extend it far beyond anyone's expectation. Of course, the biggest efforts were to quash suspicions of Wright having been Moscow's most important spy, and agent of influence, as Pincher's lifelong work demonstrated. Wright's helping give the Soviets importand spies, and the bomb was ignored as much as possible by researchers (11), while continuing to pursue the dead end leads that he had provided. (12) Even poor Pincher sounded quite happy with his endless wild-goose chases, ending his tome on this note. "...I would elect to repeat it in preference to any other prefession. It continues to excite and entrance, with new mateerial continuing to reach me from sources in Russia and elsewhere." (13)

Still, the British intelligence services, it seems, had such a bad record in the post-Cold War period that they increasingly had to call in others, especially the Mossad, to clean up the mess. While MI5, with help from the British Army's Force Research Unit, did manage to get the Provisional IRA to agree to a permanent ceasefire, sign the Good Friday Agreement, and then disarm, it was at considerable cost. MI5 agent William Perkins aka the future Director General Jonathan' Bob' Evans apparently arranged sabotaging the Chinook helicopter flight going to a intelligence meeting in Scotland where more generous terms for the Provos were on the table, killing the 25 intelligence officer who favored it.(14)

Increasingly, though, MI5 and M16 relied upon the resident kidon to do the dirty work, whether it be getting Britain more supportive of Israeli interests, stopping damaging blowback from ill-considered regime-change efforts in the USSR or Saddam's Irag, and taking out politicians successfully who were feared to exploit it. The assassinations which come to mind are those of Dr. David Kelly, Royal Cadet Stephen Hilder, German politicians Jurgen Möllemann, Scottish politician Robin Cook, and former KGB whistleblower Alexander Litvinenko.(15)

To stem the flow of any damaging blowback, former MI5 agents Annie Machon and David Shayler were allowed to publsih Spies, Lies & Whistleblowers. It was a recitation of much of which Wright was famous for, and much in his manner. Shayler, stating many times during his vetting that he showed his dedication for wanting to save the world, by repeatedly publishing extracts from Spy Catcher while it was under injunction in 1988 not to do so (16), and Annie illustrated her case against the Security Service's illegal activities for over 80 years by citing what Wright did while there.(17) "It is clear that there are officers within MI5 and MI6 who are working to their own agenda," she concluded, "rather than the protection of this country, its people and its democracy." (18)

They made it quite clear that the agenda should be Washington's.They were postive that Libya's Gaddafi was behind the Lockerbie bombing, and claimed that Libayn intelligence officers had offered him milllsions to speak out against the evidence, and campaign for the release of suspects al-Megrahi and Lamin Fhimah.(19) Actually at this time, MI5 was helping Gaddafi's agents interview Libyan refugees in London about what they knew, and were doing, helping render the biggest problems to where the American could deal with them.(19) MI6 also worked with the Libyans to set up a mosque in some undisclosed European citry, most likely Hamburg, to get wind of what Al-Qaeda was planning. Then Shayler claimed most unconvincingly that MI6 had tried unsuccessfully to assassinate the Libyan leader.

The disparity between fact and appearance was even more in evidence when they talked about the role of the Mossad in Britain, like their claims that the Security
Service really did not come to grips with the IRA (20) . They made it quite clear that MI5 should have prevented the bombing of the Israeli Embassy and Balfour House in London on July 26, 1994. Instead the bombings went ahead because of alleged MI5 mistakes, and convenient fallguys, Samar Alami and Jawed Botmeh, were imprisoned for the crimes. Actually, MI5's failure was deliberate to help open the door for an official Mossad presence in the kingdom - what they even lied about when Director General Eliza Manningham-Buller allowed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.(21)

In sum, the book was a trail run, carried out by Shayler, and recounted by Machon, of what whistleblowers could expect if they tried to clear up the disparity - something which seemed likely with the heads of the key agencies, especially MI6's Director General Sir John Scarlett, apparently just going along with whatever the Prime Minister called for. The brutal killing of Soviet whistleblower Alexander Litvinenko was the example of the warning being acted upon whether it wa just another Mossad killing or whether MI6 was now getting its hands dirty in assassinations. The radioactive polonium-210 which slowly killed him could have come from either Britain or Israel. Litvinenko was just the kind of whistleblower - a covert agent who was threatening another who would listen about KGB operations during the non-nuclear showdown when Palme was assassinated, and about Soviet spies in the West, particularly Italy's agent of influence Romano Prodi (codenamed UCHITEL).

These problems really came to a head when Washington and London decided again to overthrow the government in Beijing after the massive, Pentagon-made
earthquake in Sichuan in May 2008 failed to cause regime-change as its designers, Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman hoped.(22) As they stated in The Nuclear Express, Communist China was such an unstable regime that a serious disaster would probably lead to its overthrow by its growing, increasingly dissatified middle classes. "Those 'youngsters' are turning fifty now, and they are building a new society via the Internet and their world markets. Their turn may soon come, a generational clash that may make the 1960s in the United States seem tranquil." (23)

The problem was no longer being able to cause mayhem in China, but exploiting it - what required somehow putting in place when its new President and Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party were selected, a leader who could exploit any new disaster with devastating effect. The outline of the plan was made by the new DCI, Leon Panetta, and was agreed to in Washington when British Prime Minister Gordon Brown visited there, with all the diversions necessary to hide that something new in the Special Relationship was emerging, especially removing the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office. As in the Palme assassination, London would supply the key player, MI6 agent of influence in China, Neil Heywood, who would help make the necessary arrangements for CCP boss in Chongqing, Bo Xilai, to join its new Standing Committee, and succeed Hu Jintao as its next President. Outsider John Sawers, a specialist in regime change and nation-building, was made MI6's DG to hide suspicions that anything earthshaking was afoot.

While affairs were going along quite nicely in China, a surprise in London and Washington occurred which set off alarm bells - just what Machon and Shayler had hoped to avoid with their warnings. High-flying computer and encryption wizard Gareth Williams went off the rails again, and threatened to expose what the FBI had done. Williams, apparently a Welsh nationalist, had not even been properly vetted when he joined the Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) sigint agency, and his attempts at spying with Daniel Houghton - while he was working temporarily with MI6 - had been overlooked because he was such a whiz at breaking into any computer, and reading its coded messages.Williams was brought by America's National Security Agency (NSA) into catching the Manhattan ll 'sleeper cell' - noted for difficulties that sultry Anna Chapman caused - what put Williams back into the spying business, apparently for the Russians.(24)

When Williams expanded his work by decrypting the Afghan Log, and handing it over to Julian Assange's Wilileaks for release to major media outlets without redacting the names of personnel involved, NSA decided to dipose of him when he came to its Fort Meade headquarters, looking for more information to back up exposure of America's plots. It was then that he ingested some poison which caused a slow, painful death, apparently the notorious death cap mushroom. The lurid accounts of his death were all illustrations of just what a mutli-purpose murder it was. Difficult to know how he died, who was responsible for it, where did it start, and when it was completed, etc., all intended to make a convincing solution almost impossible.

And when Gareth's partner in dicphering the Afghan Log - St. John's College, Oxford's senior lecturer, and GCHQ's expert on mastering colloquial German Gudrun Loftus - indicated that she was planning to take his place in divulging secrets, she was murdered in an even more mysterious way - falling down the stairstairs backwards from the landing where the College's Senior Common Room was located early one October morning in 2010, and apparently when she was having an early morning meeting with someone apparently interested in her plans, but really only a British covert agent to finish her off..(25) .The Thames Valley Police (TVP), as expected, did little to investigate the unexplained killing, as it only investigates them if the next o kin call for it, and covert government allows it. Jerry Loftus made no call for one.

Now, the questions are about what Williams and Loftus were collecting, for whom, how did the interested spying agency find out about it, and what action it took about it. Seems that Williams was decoding Foreign Office and British Intelligence Services communications, particularly to China, and recording them on his laptop and/or his MP3. They showed the deep operation that Heywood was engaged in, and explained why the British securocrats were most interested in recovering when his body was finally discovered. Seems the material was being collected for the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS), but since neither Williams nor Loftus made it out of the UK, the Chinese had little idea of what the plans were which made them willing to take such unprecedented risks. Apparently, like with Rick Ames et al. in the Palme plot, they thought likely results were worth it.

How the MSS more about what was afoot seems to rest on what Professor Steven Rawlings, a world-famous astrophysicist, and Don at St. Peter's College, Oxford, suspected about the Loftus murder, and what he learned in China while trying to get the massive Square Kilometer Array (SKA) space telescope built. Rawlings was addicted to the Inspector Morse novels about crimes around Oxford, and he soon thought had murder at occurred at the college, St. John's, which was apparently never used in any way in the series.

More important, Rawlings' dealing with his Chinese counterpart Professor Jun Yan, Director of the National Astronomical Observatories, led to some discussions about the Heywoods, Neil in China, and Ian, another Oxford astrophysicist at Oxford. While Rawlings and Yan were discussing ways to see that the SKA telescope was built in the southern hemisphere - the UK dropping out as a possible site early, and then Beijing followed suit - they apparently gossipped about what the high-flying Bos were accomplishing in Chongqing and Oxford. Ian - apparently a relative of Neil's and possibly even his brother, though I had been unable to reach him by calling his listed phone number since my calls are cut off before the number even finishes ringing (26) - must have played a role in getting the Bos' son Guagua into Bailliol College, and Rawlings must have helped out too.

It isn't hard to imagine that they had discussed the Loftus and Williams killings too - what had led to Rawlings' increasing mental deterioration - and that the MMS's Director Geng Hui Chang put together a good picture of what was planned by Neil and Bo at the next elections of the CCP. Bo's wife Gu was obliged to make Neil come to Chongquig in November where he was poisoned in no uncertain terms with potassium cyanide - a compound which is easily determined in the deceeased because of its effects on the body - and which she prevented any discovery of by getting Neil's wife to agree to immediate cremation. Beijing explained away Neil's murder successfully as a natural one until a Chinese blog said in early March that it was murder, though not mentioning the Bos' role in it.

Neil's death just made Rawlings more convinced than ever that a muderous plot was going on, and when a dinner was held St. John's College in January, he apparently not only claimed afterwards on the way home that Loftus had been murdered, but also that his long-time friend accompanying him, Dr. Dewinter Sivia, another of its lecturerers, had apparently helped cover it up, if not had done it himself. In the ensuing struggle, Rawlings was killed. While the TVP was obliged to investigate the most suspicious death as a possible murder, the case soon collapsed after Rawlings' wife, apparently after some persuasion by the security services, dismissed it as an unforunate accident between friends, going back to their undergraduate days at Cambridge. Just the other day, the case was closed.

The scandal is an incredible reminder of how best to run intelligence services, at least to avoid their most serious pitfalls like little or no vetting of agents, ignoring independent counter intelligence, overplaying the role of covert operations and surprises, and just plunging ahead with reckless abandon when serious blowback starts occurring, etc., and to depict it for the public would require all the writing skills of a Colin Dexter and the acting ones of another Inspector Morse.


References

1. For a biography of Wright's loife, see: http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/08/29/mi5s-peter-wright-secret-spy-doubel-agent-and-agent-provacaterur-3/
2. Peter Wright, Spy Catcher, p.4.
3. Ibid., p. 13.
4. Ibid.
5 Pincher, p. 20.
6. Wright, op. cit., p. 154.
7. Ibid., p. 153ff.
8. Quoted from p. 162.
9. Trowbridge H. Ford, "Manchurian Candidates: Mind-Control Experiments and The Deadliest Secrets of the Cold War," Eye Spy, Issue Eight 2002, pp. 50-5.
10. http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/08/21/more-likely-nixon-say-off-lbj-than-he-masterminded-the-the-jfk-assassination-3/
11. See, for example, how Christopher Andrew made out that 'K' was, in fact, his handler Vladimir Barkovsky in The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, Index, p. 689.
12. Wright, op. cit., p. 179ff.
13. Pincher, op. cit., p. 635.
14. http://codshit.blogspot.se/2011/12/mi5-killers-sabotaged-chinook.html
15. http://codshit.blogspot.se/2012/01/assassinations-of-jurgen-mollemann.html
16. Machon and Shayler, pp. 21-2.
17. p. 8.
18. p. 378.
19. pp. 122-3.
20. p.57ff.
21. For the lies, see pp. 234-5.
22. For more, see: http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012(01/19/sichuan-earthquake-did-pentagon-completely-confuse-china-about-what-it-was-up-to/
23. Reed and Stillman, p. 329.
24. For more, see this link: http://codshit.blogspot.se/2010/10/why-americas-nsa-and-britains-gchq-had.html
25. For more, see: http://codshit.blogspot.se/2010/11/gareth-williams-and-gudrun-loftus.html
26. The number I have been calling is this: +44 01865 273535. And his connection, it seems, on Linkedin is closed.

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

by Trowbridge H. Ford

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 David Kelly "Dead in the Woods" PSYOP

by Rowena Thursby

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

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

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

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

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

KELLY'S GRILLING

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

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

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

POLITICAL FALL-OUT

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

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

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

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

EVIDENCE AGAINST SUICIDE

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

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

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

‘I WILL PROBABLY BE FOUND DEAD IN THE WOODS’

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

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

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

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

‘I will probably be found dead in the woods'

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

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

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


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

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

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

NO HEAD FOR DATES?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lord Hutton writes in his report:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let us now review the contents of their alleged conversation.

THE CONVERSATION THAT NEVER HAPPENED

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HARD LABOUR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE SYSTEM TRIUMPHS?

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

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

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

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

FINAL WORD

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

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

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

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

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

Full story...

Existence of "Al-Qaeda" Is Crap; Quite Literally

A more perfect story could not exist for this website!

by Paul Joseph Watson

The origins of the name "Al-Qaeda," and its real arabic connotations prove that every time the Bush administration, Fox News, or any individual who cites the threat of "Al-Qaeda," as a mandate for war and domestic authoritarianism, they are propagating the myth that such a group ever existed.

An organization by the name of "Al-Qaeda" does not exist and has never existed outside a falsely coined collective term for offshoot loose knit terror cells, the majority of which are guided by the Pakistani ISI, Mossad, the Saudis, MI6 and the CIA, that were created in response to America's actions after 9/11 - as the recent NIE report shows.

According to the BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares, the infamous footage of Bin Laden marching around with armed soldiers was a ruse on the part of Osama himself, graciously propagated by the lapdog press, in which actors were hired off the streets, given uniforms and guns and told to look aggressive.

So if the group doesn't exist, where did the name come from?

You have heard before that "Al-Qaeda" roughly translates into "the base," but were you aware that "Ana raicha Al Qaeda" is arabic colloquial for "I'm going to the toilet"?

Would hardened terrorists hell bent on the destruction of the west name their organization after a euphemism for taking a shit?

The truth about where the name "Al-Qaeda" originated explains why no would-be fundamentalist suicide martyr could have been involved in its creation.

Former Leader of the House of Commons Robin Cook, who admirably resigned in protest of the 2003 Iraq invasion, penned a piece in the London Guardian shortly before his death that shed light on the true genesis of the name.

"Al-Qaida," states Cook, "literally "the database", was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians."

Former French Military Intelligence official Pierre Henry Bunel expands, noting that "Al-Qaeda," was an early form of intranet, which was used by Islamic nations and influential families to communicate with each other. It was also used by the "American agent," Osama bin Laden to send coded or covert messages back to his CIA handlers from Afghanistan.

It's worthy to conclude with Bunel's assertion that "Al-Qaeda" as an organization is about as genuine as George W. Bush's Texas brush clearing cowboy image.

"The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the 'devil' only in order to drive the 'TV watcher' to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only interested in making money."

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.