Friday, 8 June 2007

Recent Undisclosed Mossad 'False Flag' Operations, III

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

Wednesday, 14 March 2007

The Voice of the White House - 12 March 2007

Anti-Jewish? No! Anti-Israel? YES! Here's why.

Washington, D.C.,: “We are rapidly approaching a major confrontation here yet very few people are aware of it. The military has told Bush that to “retake” Baghdad” i.e., kick out the insurgents and, most important, secure the city against a return, the U.S. will need ca 50,000 new troops!

Bush wouldn’t dare risk a public explosion on top of the growing medical lack-of-care- scandal so he is shipping men over in small increments. He won’t stop until he had reached the 50,000 goal. The same military estimates that with luck, they can “fully secure” Baghdad within four months and then establish iron control over it to prevent any return of the insurgents.

Not only were an officially-recognized 21,000 sent over, most without proper weapons, no body armor of any kind or any serious urban warfare training, but an additional 4,000+ were also shipped over as “support troops” which are not considered combat troops.

Today, I learn that Bush is sending over another 7,000 men and in the end, the remainder will be send in small batches, the press told to keep this under wraps for “national security” reasons. On top of this, there are not any more armored Humvees, no body armor currently in stock and the ammunition is very low. Bush does not care about this but he does care about the rapidly collapsing on the Unknown Front, Afghanistan.

He stripped our troops out, leaving the British and other to confront a growing Taliban which is slowly, and viciously, retaking much of northern Afghanistan, killing anyone who is suspected of helping the U.S.

Now why is Bush doing this?

Some say the oil ,and Iraq has huge oil reserves, but this is not the real reason for the coming and obvious disasters.

The real reason are the frantic demands of Israel for the U.S. to remain in Iraq as a buffer to protect them. Bush, as is well-known here, is fanatically pro-Israel and the Jewish lobby and diplomatic corps here has been fiercely lobbying their co-religionists in Congress to support them by any means.

This is a terrible thing to say but I must say it: Every dead and mangled GI is the direct fault of Israeli demands. We are not bringing democracy to Iraq but security for Israel and there is no other explanation.

Any Congressman, and there are a growing number, who dares to oppose the wishes of Israel runs the very real risk of immediate reprisal from the Israeli lobby and, most especially, by the heavily pro-Israeli American media.

The Army has been tapping phones and DISA systems here and all of this sickening business is a fact, not some idiot blogger rantings.

It used to be said that the Voice of the People was the Voice of God but in 2007 Washington, it is the Voice of Israel that has become the Official Voice of Jehovah.

Bush, and Congress, hear and they obey.

I, and many, many others, think the time has come for the American public, not the politicians, to become aware of this ugly business and express their views in very loud and determined voices or the death and maiming tolls of their children, fathers and lovers will continue to soar.

Israel is buying her security with the blood of America’s youth, and neither Bush nor Israel care.”

Full story...

Wednesday, 7 February 2007

Who Are The Real Terrorists In Iraq?

by Steve Watson, Infowars.net

An article in the Sunday Telegraph this weekend pointed towards evidence that an secretive and elite unit of the British army is actively engaged in recruiting and training Iraqi insurgents and terrorists as double agents.

This confirms what many have speculated for a long time, that Britain and the US are deeply involved in bombings and attacks inside Iraq which are subsequently attributed either to Sunni insurgents or shadowy terrorist cells such as "Al Qaeda in Iraq".

The Telegraph article states:

Deep inside the heart of the "Green Zone", the heavily fortified administrative compound in Baghdad, lies one of the most carefully guarded secrets of the war in Iraq. It is a cell from a small and anonymous British Army unit that goes by the deliberately meaningless name of the Joint Support Group (JSG), and it has proved to be one of the Coalition's most effective and deadly weapons in the fight against terror.

Its members - servicemen and women of all ranks recruited from all three of the Armed Forces - are trained to turn hardened terrorists into coalition spies using methods developed on the mean streets of Ulster during the Troubles, when the Army managed to infiltrate the IRA at almost every level. Since war broke out in Iraq in 2003, they have been responsible for running dozens of Iraqi double agents.

A look into the history of the secretive JSG or Force Research Unit (FRU), the cover name it operated under in Northern Ireland, reveals the extent to which the British government supports and engages in acts of terrorism in order to further its agenda in occupied territories. Iraq, as it turns out, is unsurprisingly no exception.

The FRU is the same ultra secret cell of the SAS whose criminal activities in Northern Ireland were under investigation by former Scotland Yard commissioner Sir John Stevens for more than a decade, during which time it emerged that the unit was involved in the murder of civilians in Northern Ireland.

According to Detectives, 'Military intelligence was colluding with terrorists to help them kill so-called "legitimate targets" such as active republicans...many of the victims of these government backed hit squads were innocent civilians.'

“Beginning in the 1980s the highly secretive FRU was sent into Northern Ireland to recruit and train double agents to work inside the paramilitary groups,” writes Michael S. Rose.

“The FRU combated IRA terrorism by the use of paid informers, blackmail, ambushes, and other methods not approved by the Geneva Convention. In the worst case, British officers decided that in cases when it would be difficult to bring suspected IRA terrorists to justice by legitimate means, the FRU would enlist outlawed guerilla groups that possessed both the desire and the means to murder the IRA men. According to Stevens Three, the FRU assisted Protestant terrorists in carrying out what were, in effect, proxy assassinations of Catholics. In order to forge such alliances, the British officers had to overlook the fact that the interests of the Protestant death squads were not those of the United Kingdom and its government.”

The FRU was further exposed by former member turned whistleblower Kevin Fulton.

Fulton worked for the FRU for much of his career as he was infiltrating the IRA. In his role as a British FRU agent inside the IRA, he was told to 'do anything' to win the confidence of the terrorist group. Fulton Told the Sunday Herald:

"I mixed explosive and I helped develop new types of bombs. I moved weapons. If you ask me, 'Did I kill anyone?' then I will say 'no'. But if you ask me if the materials I handled killed anyone, then I will have to say that some of the things I helped develop did kill.

I reiterate, my handlers knew everything I did. I was never told not to do something that was discussed. How can you pretend to be a terrorist and not act like one? You can't. You've got to do what they do. The people I was with were hard-hitters. They did a lot of murders. If I couldn't be any good to them, then I was no use to the army either. I had to do what the man standing next to me did.

I broke the law seven days a week and my handlers knew that. They knew that I was making bombs and giving them to other members of the IRA and they did nothing about it. If everything I touched turned to shit then I would have been dead. The idea was that the only way to beat the enemy was to penetrate the enemy and be the enemy. At the time I'd no problem with this way of thinking."

Fulton revealed that his handlers told him that his operations were 'sanctioned right at the top... this goes the whole way to the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister knows what you are doing.'

Every major IRA bombing in England and Northern Ireland has had the fingerprints of the British government and the FRU all over it.

Full story...

Tuesday, 6 February 2007

Iran: The war begins

by John Pilger

As opposition grows in America to the failed Iraq adventure, the Bush administration is preparing public opinion for an attack on Iran, its latest target, by the spring.


The United States is planning what will be a catastrophic attack on Iran. For the Bush cabal, the attack will be a way of "buying time" for its dis aster in Iraq. In announcing what he called a "surge" of American troops in Iraq, George W Bush identified Iran as his real target. "We will interrupt the flow of support [to the insurgency in Iraq] from Iran and Syria," he said. "And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."

"Networks" means Iran. "There is solid evidence," said a State Department spokesman on 24 January, "that Iranian agents are involved in these networks and that they are working with individuals and groups in Iraq and are being sent there by the Iranian government." Like Bush's and Tony Blair's claim that they had irrefutable evidence that Saddam Hussein was deploying weapons of mass destruction, the "evidence" lacks all credibility. Iran has a natural affinity with the Shia majority of Iraq, and has been implacably opposed to al-Qaeda, condemning the 9/11 attacks and supporting the United States in Afghanistan. Syria has done the same. Investigations by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and others, including British military officials, have concluded that Iran is not engaged in the cross-border supply of weapons. General Peter Pace, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said no such evidence exists.

As the American disaster in Iraq deepens and domestic and foreign opposition grows, "neo-con" fanatics such as Vice-President Dick Che- ney believe their opportunity to control Iran's oil will pass unless they act no later than the spring. For public consumption, there are potent myths. In concert with Israel and Washington's Zionist and fundamentalist Christian lobbies, the Bushites say their "strategy" is to end Iran's nuclear threat. In fact, Iran possesses not a single nuclear weapon, nor has it ever threatened to build one; the CIA estimates that, even given the political will, Iran is incapable of building a nuclear weapon before 2017, at the earliest. Unlike Israel and the United States, Iran has abided by the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which it was an original signatory, and has allowed routine inspections under its legal obligations - until gratuitous, punitive measures were added in 2003, at the behest of Washington. No report by the International Atomic Energy Agency has ever cited Iran for diverting its civilian nuclear programme to military use. The IAEA has said that for most of the past three years its inspectors have been able to "go anywhere and see anything". They inspected the nuclear installations at Isfahan and Natanz on 10 and 12 January and will return on 2 to 6 February. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, says that an attack on Iran will have "catastrophic consequences" and only encourage the regime to become a nuclear power.

Unlike its two nemeses, the US and Israel, Iran has attacked no other countries. It last went to war in 1980 when invaded by Saddam Hussein, who was backed and equipped by the US, which supplied chemical and biological weapons produced at a factory in Maryland. Unlike Israel, the world's fifth military power - with its thermo nuclear weapons aimed at Middle East targets and an unmatched record of defying UN resolutions, as the enforcer of the world's longest illegal occupation - Iran has a history of obeying international law and occupies no territory other than its own.

The "threat" from Iran is entirely manufactured, aided and abetted by familiar, compliant media language that refers to Iran's "nuclear ambitions", just as the vocabulary of Saddam's non-existent WMD arsenal became common usage. Accompanying this is a demonising that has become standard practice. As Edward Herman has pointed out, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "has done yeoman service in facilitating [this]"; yet a close examination of his notorious remark about Israel in October 2005 reveals how it has been distorted. According to Juan Cole, American professor of modern Middle East and south Asian history at the University of Michigan, and other Farsi language analysts, Ahmadinejad did not call for Israel to be "wiped off the map". He said: "The regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." This, says Cole, "does not imply military action or killing anyone at all". Ahmadinejad compared the demise of the Israeli regime to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Iranian regime is repressive, but its power is diffuse and exercised by the mullahs, with whom Ahmadinejad is often at odds. An attack would surely unite them.

Full story...

Tuesday, 30 January 2007

Christopher Andrew: Western Intelligence's Ultimate Spin Doctor

by Trowbridge H. Ford

When Vasili Mitrokhin was attempting to arrange the defection of his archive and family to the West during the demise of the Soviet Union, Western intelligence services were so alarmed by his disclosures that they panicked. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) wanted nothing to do with the information which reflected so badly about its performance from its very inception, hoping that Mitrokhin and his voluminous documents would simply disappear during the USSR's last days. Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) aka MI6 was more forthcoming, however, since it was even more responsible for the incredible mess, and had realized over the years that intelligence failures could be largely covered up if false leads about the most important enemy spies, and appropriate disinformation about compromised operations were liberally disseminated. Ultimately, London was so successful in this process that Washington was even persuaded to go along.

The core of the failures was the fact that Western intelligence had been massively compromised by the spying for the Soviets, it seems, by Peter Wright, ultimately the Assistant Director of Britain's MI5, its Security Service. Wright had not only told Moscow about all kinds of covert operations and secret intelligence but also had enlisted many other agents to unwittingly do his corrupt bidding - what resulted in their pursuing all kinds of dead ends and red herrings. Wright started his spying while he was attending Oxford's School of Rural Economy where as an agent, codenamed SCOTT, he was able to help steer all kinds of communists to positions in Whitehall. While Stalin's signing the Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler stopped his spying until Germany attacked the Soviet Union, Wright apparently was soon back on board as an atomic spy, codenamed K', who informed Moscow that making an atomic bomb was, indeed, feasible, Washington had embarked upon its construction, and how to make one of its own.

"Describing 'K's relationship with the NKVD," Nigel West and Oleg West wrote in The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives, hander Vladimir "Barkovsky noted in a letter to the Centre that he had been motivated by ideology, and was scrupulous when it came to money: ' 'K', as before works for us with enthusiasm, but still turns down the slightest hint of financial reward...' "(p. 233) 'K' supplied Moscow with material upon which guidlines were set for which research groups to target, and Igor Kurchatov, the father of the Soviet bomb, said this about what he supplied: "Wonderful materials, they fill in just what we are lacking." (Quoted from David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, p. 95.) For more on this, see my article, "MI5's Peter Wright: The Cold War's Most Important Spy" at:

http://codshit.blogspot.com/2004_01_18_codshit_archive.html

Once Wright started working for MI5, he was able to recruit others, especially CIA's chief of counterespionage James Angleton, who carried out operations of a most counterproductive nature while Wright was continuing to provide Moscow with helpful intelligence through his own efforts, or those by others who escaped capture because of compromised counterespionage missions. Wright's most damaging input at the Agency was to get it to assassinate Castro no matter what, first in 1959 (p. 154), and then in 1961 (p. 146ff.) despite Attorney General Robert Kennedy's efforts to stop them - what so captured William King Harvey's operational agenda that he ultimately plotted JFK's assassination. After that happened, Wright, with CIA assistance, took over the Security Service's Venona Program to ferret out Soviet spies from the unknown cryptonyms in Soviet secret messages during WWII - what he made sure only implicated innocents like Judith F. W. Hart rather than real ones like Edith Tudor Hart.

Moreover, there can be no doubt that Mitrokhin provided the identification of Wright in all his guises, especially SCOTT, 'K', and HUNT, and of important spies, especially UCHITEL, ACE, MOOR, and KELLY, who he had been most helpful in preventing the discovery of. Barkovsky, as the above quotation indicated, showed that the first two codenames applied to the same person, and since he met him in person, there can be no question about his knowing their true identity. As for the identity of the third code name, Andrew even wrote in The Sword and the Shield, "For legal reasons neither HUNT'S real identity nor the government departments for which he worked (included in Mitrokhin's notes) can be identified." ( "Notes", Chapter Twenty-four, #7, p. 641.) Mitrokhin's description of UCHITEL points clearly to Romano Prodi, even having him go "on ice" in 1982 as Prodi became chairman of the Italian state corporation IRI after handler Anatoli Kuznetsov had been expelled the previous year.

Mitrokhin's information about Wright showed that the Thatcher government was not being paranoid when it tried to stop publication of Spycatcher. Its main complaint apparently was that MI5 had not been serious enough in investigating Soviet spying in Britain - a failure that Wright had made sure of by messing up every inquiry - but actually it had been Wright's own efforts in forcing the retirement of Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson by claiming that the KGB had killed his predecessor, Hugh Gaitskell, in order to make its agent Leader (pp. 362-4) - what ultimately encouraged militant anti-communists like Airey Neave and Norman Reddaway to organize Operation Clockwork Orange, a smear campaign which forced his retirement. Paul Routledge has shown in his biography of Neave, Public Service, Secret Agent, that Wright was in the thick of the conspiracy to destroy Wilson. (pp. 270-1)

Further afield, the Mitrokhin Archive apparently showed that Soviet leadership, especially during Stalin's time, had had a most positive attitude about the value of intelligence in making crucial decisions, whether they concerned foreign policy, internal or external
security. Stalin, for example, was quite right in not making any provocative moves in anticipation of Operation Barbarossa - what Britons, of all sorts, were constantly warning him of - for fear that the Red Army was not ready for any such offensive operation, Nazi forces were still tied down in the Mediterranean, and by June Hitler had not made any provision for a winter campaign in the USSR, what any victory would require. When Hitler still blundered in, Stalin, thanks to Richard Sorge's spying and signal intelligence regarding Japanese plans, timed his counterattack just perfectly when the Wehrmacht reached the gates of Moscow, winning the crucial battle of WWII, and assuring Allied victory.

Perhaps the greatest contribution that the Mitrokhin Archive made was in understanding how the Soviet leadership, especially Stalin and Yuri Andropov, reacted to the severe challenges the West presented it during the Great Terror of the 1930s, and the early 1980s when Washington threatened to hit Moscow with a surprise, preemptive attack to end the Cold War without a nuclear conflagration. After all, Mitrokhin, born in Central Russia in 1922, was old enough to have experienced the collectivization of agriculture, and the show trials of the Terror, so had they been unduly severe, one could hardly expect him to have been a defender of Stalin, and to join the Committee of Information (MGB) after the end of WWII. While serving it during Stalin's last days, Mitrokhin was critical of his underlings, especially its chief Lavrenti Beria, rather than the deceased dictator, learning that he had been blackmailing associates for Western interests. (pp. 2-3.)

Mitrokhin was a strong supporter of Alexander Shelepin, believing that the charismatic Komsomol leader could not only reform the system but also see to its expansion by placing intermediate-range ballistic missiles on Castro's Cuba. When this failed, Shelepin was one of the leaders of Krushchev's ouster, but he was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev rather than
Shelepin. As the USSR became increasingly reactionary under his rule, Mitrokhin became increasingly disillusioned by the KGB's performance, especially when Andropov was running it, though his assistant and later KGB chief himself, Viktor Kryuchkov, improved its performance during Moscow's dying days. It was while Kryuchkov was chief of its FCD that it recruited the CIA's Aldrich 'Rick' Ames, the Bureau's Robert Hanssen and several others whose information led to the exposure and elimination of the plannned non-nuclear conclusion in Europe's Far North of the Cold War by sinking its boombers as they hurriedly went on station in anticipation of a first strike by the West - what was to be triggered by Britain's surprise assassination of Sweden's statsminister, Olof Palme. Gorbachev was so pleased with this accomplishment that he changed his original critical opinion of its perforamnce.

While such a treasure trove of damning evidence of Western intelligence performance, it was hardly surprising that London and Washington did everything but the obvious thing with Mitrokhin's Archive - publish its contents, and start criminal proceedings against all those spies, so identified. Of course, to have done so would have resulted in at least the end of CIA and SIS. They had proved not only totally incapable of meeting the Soviet challenge but also had supplied the crucial evidence about their own incompetence. It's hard to imagine a more damaging indictment, but at least these agencies still enjoyed a most undeserved reputation, thanks to a steady stream of propaganda about their performance from a most compromised media - what gave them an opportunity to mount a dissembling counterattack before any of the bad news reached the public.

The most massive need was to identify all the hundreds of spies and suspected ones on both sides of the Atlantic - what caused the reopening of the Venona program which had been closed down in the early 1980s because of its lack of progress. From 1991 until 1995, National Security Agency (NSA) cryptographers worked frantically to connect the decrypts with the names Mitrokhin supplied, a massive task but not a very difficult one since it was just a question of connecting them up properly. Nigel West explained the most belated disclosure by NSA of Soviet spies like diplomat Alger Hiss, atomic physicists Bruno Pontecorvo, Klaus Fuchs, and Ted Hall, and CPUSA members Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
most disingenuously thus in Venona: The Greatest Secret of the Cold War: "Until the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, this seemed unlikely, but in 1995 the decision was taken to declassify the whole collection." (p. xv)

The hurried, contrived disclosure of the decrypts is made crystal clear when Nigel West's earlier book - co-authored by Oleg Tsarev - The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives is consulted. Thanks to an interview with Vladimir B. Barkovsky, West learned about the existence of communist and atomic spy recruiter SCOTT (p. 274ff.), 'K' (pp. 231-5), and apparently HUNT, though the authors cut short their analysis in order not to have to deal with HUNT's spying. And there is some information about how Edith Tudor Hart may well have discovered SCOTT, and had Theodor Mally, a great illegal, recruit him. However, there is no mention of all this and more in West's subsequent book, not even mention of the West and Tsarev volume in its Bibliography. (pp. 371-2)

And even fuller demonstration of the use of the Mitrokhin Archive in making the Venona program look like a successful one is found in John Ear Haynes' and Harvey Klehr's in Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. Of course, they engaged in the same deception that the NSA program had long been completed, and it was only made public because of the efforts by the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, chaired by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In fact, what had happened is the NSA cryptographers took the names that they had supplied from CPUSSR sources in Moscow in their earlier book, The Secret World of American Communism, and applied them to the decrypts with the information that Mitrokhin had supplied, though, they, of course, made no mention of his role, attributing their discoveries simply to their computers. The result was one where the CPUSA came up seeming like a fifth column, and the decrypters smelling like roses.

While these deceptive works were being put together, Cambridge University's Christopher Andrew's For the President's Eyes Only appeared, what integrated what Haynes and Klehr were finding about Soviet spying in America with what the intelligence agencies, especially NSA, had passed along to the Presidents. Andrew was the perfect academic to do the study since he had done a similar study of the origins of British counterparts during WWI, had trashed Wright's Spycatcher as pure fiction, and had gotten other researchers to believe that he knew all about KGB operations, thanks to his collaboration with apparent defector Oleg Gordievsky in not only publishing 'instructions' from its Center by former FCD director Kryuchkov but also collaborating with Gordievsky in writing the first history of the agency, KBG: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev.

The explicit purpose of this work was to resolve finally the identity of the 'Fifth Man' - the last member of the Cambridge spy ring, aka the "Magnificent Five", who Andrew had long suspected was John Cairncross, and the Cambridge history professor had tried numerously but unsuccessfully to get to confess being so. The recent defector from Moscow, Gordievsky, had ended the whole problem by simply announcing that Cairncross was indeed the 'Fifth Man' - what provided a reasonable precedent for resolving any shortage of evidence in proving that any other difficult suspect was a spy too. Gordievsky also declared that Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt's wartime adviser, was also another one. Hopkins had warned the OGPU's Vasili Zarubin that Hoover's FBI was bugging his efforts in the Washington Embassy to recruit members for the USACP, especially atomic spy recruiter Steve Nelson. In fact, Hopkins' pro-Soviet efforts became so legendary that KGB agents were boasting years later that he was one of theirs. Andrew and Gordievsky played down the claims by another alleged defector, Anatoil Golitsyn, in his book, New Lies for Old, about other Soviet spies, though, especially Swedish statsminister Olof Palme since he had been conveniently assassinated since Golitsyn had called for such remedies for dealing with the growing communist menace. And Kryuchkov was understandable seen in a more favorable light apparently since Palme's assassination had not resulted in a fatal showdown with Moscow.

Given this new assignment, the only serious complaints that James Bamford made in his review, "Gordievsky's People", of his previous work for the November 18, 1990 issue of the New York Times - he always used secondary sources, and never questioned what Gordievsky told him - were evident in abundance. By citing what most academics had written on the subject, and quoting Gordievsky when in difficulty, Andrew only had to add some bits from operatives, particularly former DCI Richard Helms, to guarantee a favorable reception. Andrew would not hear of possible conspiracies, foreing or domestic, when it came to the political assassinations throughout its history, even those of JFK, MLK, and RFK during the 1960s. Oswald "...had no link with the KGB" (p. 312), Dr. King was only hounded by the intelligence agencies, especially the FBI, but not killed by them, RFK's assassination was not even made mention of, and George Wallace's "would-be assassin" (p. 383), Arthur Bremer, was apparenty only being set up by Nixon cronies Charles Colson and Plumber E. Howard Hunt to look like he had been inspired to do it by George McGovern campaign literature.

In all this, and more, Andrew relied on interviews and material provided by leading CIA operatives to make it look as if the Agency was behaving most properly, if not effectively, and all the real problems were caused by its superior, the Presidents. For example, when Truman complained about the CIA's performance right after the JFK assassination, former DCI Allen Dulles recalled what he had apparently told the President about the covert steps he had agreed to in implemnting the National Security Act - what its first head, Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers, had conveninetly saved in his papers at the Harry Truman Library but was not in Truman's own papers. (Note # 91, p. 572) Then Helms was completely relied upon in divulging Ike's 1969 death bed enthusiasm, it seems, about CIA's performance (p. 256), the "nutty schemes" that Attorney General Robert Kennedy was apparently calling for to enhance Operation Mongoose's efforts to oust Cuba's Castro (p. 275ff., and note that there is no footnote for the claim), what ultimately boomeranged on his brother 13 months later in Dallas, led LBJ to think that the Cuban leader was behind a conspiracy which assassinated JFK, so gained LBJ's trust that he finally agreed to the Agency's "...daily brief in his early morning papers (p. 335), and was so distrustful of Nixon that the Agency played no part in what the Plumbers did, and what the President wanted covered up. (p. 379ff.)

Where Helms left off as Andrew's all-knowledgeable insider, Gordievsky took over. Thanks to his surveillance of Nixon when he visited the USSR in July 1974, the stressed-out President may well have not paid due care and attention to the fact "...that his rooms in the Kremlin palace and elsewhere in his Soviet travels were bugged." (p. 394) Gordievsky worked for the "European Bicentennial Committee" in Copenhagen when it was claiming that the USA was becoming a second-rate rogue state - what Ronald Reagan would exploit to help get elected in 1980. (p. 422) Gordievsky added substance to DCI William Casey's suspicions that Yuri Andropov's KGB had assassinated Pope John Paul I in order to head off a US-led surprise nuclear attack on the USSR (Operation RYAN) - what led to his putting together with Andrew the two volumes of FCD Kryuchkov's directions for countering it.

Then Andrew claimed that NATO's Operation Able Archer resulted in the most dangerous confrontation with the Soviets since the Cuban Missile Crisis - what was apparently only defused by Gordievsky's passing on to SIS the substance of Kryuchkov's latest, paranoid directive for countering it. (p. 471ff.) According to Andrew, the CIA's Aldrich 'Rick' Ames, when he started spying for Moscow in the spring of 1985, repaid Gordievsky for his sacrifices by tipping off the KGB of his disclosures - what would have led to his execution if the SIS had miraculously rescued him from the USSR while he was under its surveillance. Andrew concluded the book by announcing that the Ames affair, when finally discovered, was so embarrassing to the Agency since it led to Kryuchkov being promoted unprecendentedly from the FCD its director that Congress was finally obliged to investigate it.

About the Venona program, Andrew discussed it too as if it had been a great success: "By the time McCarthyism began, the NKVD decrypts were steadily producing clues, some clear, others cryptic, to the identities of wartime Soviet agents in the United States." (p. 180) Though who had been exposed by this intelligence program was too secret even be revealed in court, they included the executed atomic spies, the Rosenbergs, Britain's Donald Maclean, and the atomic physicist who had provided the Soviets with the atomic bomb, Klaus Fuchs (p. 178), and the process would have continued if William Wiesband had not told Moscow about the program. The last message which was successfully decrypted was sent during WWII when the Soviets were pressed into using code pads more than once, and Wiesband did not tell the Soviets about it until 1948 - what NSA memorialized the cause of by calling it forever Black Friday. But there was no mention of NSA's Robert Lipka, and several hundred other spies, it seems, who were only discovered when SIS examined Mitrokhin's Archive.

In this pressure cooker atmosphere, it was hardly surprising that MI6 manufactured the capture of an apparently important spy to take some of the heat off the beleaguered Anglo-American intelligence community - what was almost paranoid about any disclosure of all the Soviet spies in its midst, and failed missions in its wake. In 1990, SIS, it seems, made contact with Michael John Smith, and persuaded him to provide industrial intelligence under the ruse that he was dealing with just a representative, a Mr. Harry Williams, of a commercial competitor. Smith was a former member of the CPUK, and had lost his security clearnance as a test engineer at Feltham's EMI Defence Electonics in 1978 because of it. In December 1985, Smith, despite his lack of any security clearance, was given a position as a quality assurance engineer at the GEC Hirst Research Centre at Wembly, where his ability to work on defense contracts was upgraded seven months later to a need-to-know basis. Smith was working there when Williams contacted him.

A complicated arrangement for delivering intelligence, and collecting payments at either St. Mary church at Harrow on the Hill or at the Roxeth recreation park at South Harrow
was agreed to. And for the next two years, Smith provided extensive technical intelligence about GEC's defense contracts to Williams, and received £19,000 in payments in return. On August 8, 1992, though, the operation came to a crashing conclusion as Smith, recently made redundant, was enticed to go to a phone box in Kingston-upon-Thames under the assumption, it seems, that he was to meet a friend, 'George', of an old friend, 'Viktor'. When Smith arrived there, he discovered that he had been tricked by a Russian-speaking member of MI5 into making the rendezvous, and he was arrested by Special Branch officers. When they searched his premises, they found £2,000 in cash, and found documents on a Rapier ground-to-air missile system, and Surface Acoustic Wave military radar technology in the trunk of his Datsun.

It all seemed pretty small potatoes, no matter who was paying for the commerical intelligence, and what it was, as Mark Urban has indicated in a Chapter 17 of UK Eyes Alpha: The Inside Story of British Intelligence, entitled "1992: Time for Revenge" (p. 221ff.), unless it was part of a bigger plot, and it was. In July, SIS agents in Paris and St. Petersburg had made arrangements for its spy Colonel Viktor Alekseevich Oshchenko (codenamed OZEROV) to flee to Britain, and tell all about his Line X experience in the London residency during the 1970s. The police interviews of Smith (codenamed BORG) and Oshchenko about how he was recruited, why he essentially only went on missions to test his trustworthiness, the intelligence he allegedly supplied, apparently only the radio frequency of the radar fuses for Britain's freefall nuclear bombs (WE-177), why he was still being paid when he was unable to supply any secret intelligence for seven years because he was working for two braches of EMI in non-defense work, why did the KGB reactivate such an apparently unproductive agent in 1990, etc., seem so riddled with red herrings, confusions and contradictions that one is tempted to assume that Britain's securocrats were putting together a framework which would simply stand up in court.

At Smith's trial, the Crown improved upon what Gordievsky had done to Cairncross,
Cambridge's alleged 'Fifth Man', by simply having him and his counterespionage boss and later MI5 director, Stella Rimington, testify that the defendant was, indeed, a KGB spy. This, plus the scientific evidence that Dr. Meirion Lewis provided about the alleged secrecy of the information that, it seems, he supplied the Soviets, was enough to convict, though Oschenko never testified in court, and neither Gordievsky nor Rimington ever provided any Security Service evidence to back up the charge. The defector even testified that he knew nothing about Smith's alleged spying.

When Rimington wrote her memoirs, Open Secret, she said this about how difficult it was for any foreign intelligence service, especially the KGB, to pull off any surprises in Britain: "When Oleg Gordievsky defected from the Soviet intelligence residency in London, we learned that our identifications of the intelligence personnel in the UK had been consistently accurate over the years and our operations therefore well directed." (p. 142) Since Gordievsky had worked for the Soviets there from 1982 to 1985, though, that hardly seemed conclusive, especially for a sentence of 25 years in prison, since the Crown was claiming that Smith spied for Oschenko and other handlers during the 1970s, and again, starting in 1990.

Since the British media had assisted the Crown's conviction of Smith by mounting an incredible witch hunt against him, it was hardly surprising that it reinforced the legitimacy of the sentence by making the most exaggerated claims about the case. The Evening Standard declared that Smith was the most important spy since George Blake, Philby, Burgess and Maclean. Michael Smith wrote in New Cloak, Old Dagger that stopping Smith's spying was a more "startling success" (p. 158) than obtaining "walk-in" Vladmiri Pasechnik's information about how Biopreparat's illegal biological weapons programs in Russia, involving at least 20 separate research facilities, were being hidden from the public. "In 1993," Urban
concluded in UK Eyes Alpha, and with the Smith case particularly in mind, "a jubliant SIS officer told me, 'We've taken them apart, absolutely screwed them.' " (p. 224)

To resolve all these imbalances, and many others, SIS finally gave Andrew the task in late 1995 of squaring what had been done by Western intelligence agencies, and what needed to be further covered up when it came to their Soviet counterparts with what was apparently in Vasili Mitrokhin's Archive, now that a most favorable environment had falsely been prepared for its reception. Putting the Smith case in a much more convincing context took a top priority -especially since he had even written Andrew in 1996 asking for his help in quashing his conviction but without receiving even a reply - since it could help explain away some of the spying that HUNT (apparently Wright) and ACE (apparently Giuseppe Martelli) had done for Moscow.

Andrew provided considerable detail about Smith's spying, it seems, all based upon a single item from the Archive, vol. 7, ch.14, item 12, and a host of hostile articles from the British press and some material from the Security Commission which reviewed his sentence. Item 12 is even used to square Smith's alleged spying with what Gordievsky knew about his activities: "In 1984 it was decided to put him 'on ice' for the next three years." (p. 435) This was the same year that Mitrokhin retired as the KGB's archivist, and his last revelation about spies for working for it - all just too conveniently tied up to be believeable, especially since Smith, by all accounts, had been inactive since 1978 or so.

Andrew exploited an admitted Soviet spy, Melita Norwood (codenamed TINA), in a similar way to cover up, as best he could, all Peter Wright's spying, for Moscow. "Norwood's file in the Centre," Andrew wrote, "shows her to have been, in all probability, both the most important British female agent in KGB history and the longest-serving of all Soviet spies in Britain." (p. 115) In making such exaggerated claims, ones which obviously pleased the SVR, Andrew minimzed the roles of Edith Tudor Hart, Wright's recruiter as a spy, and SONYA (Ruth Kuczynski), the handler of the Oxford spies, including Wright, beyond all recognition. Andrew acted as if Kuczynski only ran Fuchs and Norwood, ignoring the possibility that he had just raised about Communist scientist codenamed 'K' being another one of them. There is no mention of Hart having recruited 'K' aka SCOTT in the first place, as Andrew preferred to have the mysterious agent handled solely by Vladimir Barkovsky. In fact, Andrew ended up making it appear that Barkovsky was running Norwood too rather even suggesting who the identity of 'K' really is, especially since it sounds like she recruited Wright as a paid agent, codenamed HUNT, in 1967, and resumed contact with him in 1975 after he had been put 'on ice' for a few years for fear MI5 would finally catch the famous 'spycatcher'.

About the Venona project, Andrew wrote as if its secrets had long been exposed but Kim Philby of the "Magnificant Five" apparently kept the Centre informed of new developments because of his "...regular access to VENONA decrypts." (p. 155) While Philby was able to betray hundreds of agents sent on covert missions into the Soviet bloc because of them, they allegedly identified Maclean, the Rosenbergs' ring, Fuchs, Frenchman Pierre Cot, British journalist and intelligence officer Cedric Belfrage, Harry Dexter White, Harvard physicist Ted Hall, and Alger Hiss as Soviet spies, citing many times the earlier claims about Soviet spying by researchers like John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, Fridrikh Firsov, and Nigel West, but ignoring their books on Venona like the plague except in the Bibliography. Andrew used the released decrypts themselves as the source of his claims, though he did now deny Gordievsky's contention that Harry Hopkins was a Soviet spy too: "These (KGB) boasts were far from the truth." (p. 111) And there was no VENONA confirmation that the Rosenbergs had a ring, and that Ethel Rosenberg was a spy. In short, this seemed like much hoopla over relatively very little.

Mitrokhin's really important information about who the spies were - like the ones mentioned at the beginning of this article and many others - were withheld allegedly for fear of "prejudicing a possible prosecution" (Foreword), but turned out, since none were forthcoming, to be just spin to protect the various security services which allowed them to do their betrayals. Besides the ones already referred to, especially Wright, there were UCHITEL aka "Teacher" and apparently Romano Prodi, the many agents he and others recruited in Italy. Moreover, while the book identified Norwood as Britain's most important spy, HMG never prosecuted her for fear of what she might say about the Oxford ring she kept going after SONYA departed the scene.

Such failures make nonsense out of Andrew's claim in the Foreward that these omissions did not "...significantly affect the main conclusions of any chapter." They made nonsense out of much of what he said about spying in the USA, Italy, the USSR, and the UK, especially when considers the liberties taken to make a scapegoat out of Smith in order to protect the real spies. Little wonder that Mitrokhin became so dispirited after he learned the full scope of the misuse of his material that he died suddenly after telling now assassinated former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko all his complaints about how his material had been treated.

Tuesday, 23 January 2007

The Amazing Warnings Of Benjamin Freedman

A Jewish Defector Warns America

NOTE: Benjamin H. Freedman was one of the most intriguing and amazing individuals of the 20th century. Born in 1890, he was a successful Jewish businessman of New York City at one time principal owner of the Woodbury Soap Company. He broke with organized Jewry after the Judeo-Communist victory of 1945, and spent the remainder of his life and the great preponderance of his considerable fortune, at least 2.5 million dollars, exposing the Jewish tyranny which has enveloped the United States.

Mr. Freedman knew what he was talking about because he had been an insider at the highest levels of Jewish organizations and Jewish machinations to gain power over our nation. Mr. Freedman was personally acquainted with Bernard Baruch, Samuel Untermyer, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Joseph Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, and many more movers and shakers of our times.

This speech was given before a patriotic audience in 1961 at the Willard Hotel, Washington, D.C., on behalf of Conde McGinley's patriotic newspaper of that time, Common Sense. Though in some minor ways this wide-ranging and extemporaneous speech has become dated, Mr. Freedman's essential message to us -- his warning to the West -- is more urgent than ever before. -- K.A.S.


Here in the United States, the Zionists and their co-religionists have complete control of our government. For many reasons, too many and too complex to go into here at this time, the Zionists and their co-religionists rule these United States as though they were the absolute monarchs of this country. Now you may say that is a very broad statement, but let me show you what happened while we were all asleep.

What happened? World War I broke out in the summer of 1914. There are few people here my age who remember that. Now that war was waged on one side by Great Britain, France, and Russia; and on the other side by Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey.

Within two years Germany had won that war: not only won it nominally, but won it actually. The German submarines, which were a surprise to the world, had swept all the convoys from the Atlantic Ocean. Great Britain stood there without ammunition for her soldiers, with one week's food supply -- and after that, starvation. At that time, the French army had mutinied. They had lost 600,000 of the flower of French youth in the defense of Verdun on the Somme. The Russian army was defecting, they were picking up their toys and going home, they didn't want to play war anymore, they didn't like the Czar. And the Italian army had collapsed.

Not a shot had been fired on German soil. Not one enemy soldier had crossed the border into Germany. And yet, Germany was offering England peace terms. They offered England a negotiated peace on what the lawyers call a status quo ante basis. That means: "Let's call the war off, and let everything be as it was before the war started." England, in the summer of 1916 was considering that -- seriously. They had no choice. It was either accepting this negotiated peace that Germany was magnanimously offering them, or going on with the war and being totally defeated.

While that was going on, the Zionists in Germany, who represented the Zionists from Eastern Europe, went to the British War Cabinet and -- I am going to be brief because it's a long story, but I have all the documents to prove any statement that I make -- they said: "Look here. You can yet win this war. You don't have to give up. You don't have to accept the negotiated peace offered to you now by Germany. You can win this war if the United States will come in as your ally." The United States was not in the war at that time. We were fresh; we were young; we were rich; we were powerful. They told England: "We will guarantee to bring the United States into the war as your ally, to fight with you on your side, if you will promise us Palestine after you win the war."

In other words, they made this deal: "We will get the United States into this war as your ally. The price you must pay is Palestine after you have won the war and defeated Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey." Now England had as much right to promise Palestine to anybody, as the United States would have to promise Japan to Ireland for any reason whatsoever. It's absolutely absurd that Great Britain, that never had any connection or any interest or any right in what is known as Palestine should offer it as coin of the realm to pay the Zionists for bringing the United States into the war. However, they did make that promise, in October of 1916. And shortly after that -- I don't know how many here remember it -- the United States, which was almost totally pro-German, entered the war as Britain's ally.

I say that the United States was almost totally pro-German because the newspapers here were controlled by Jews, the bankers were Jews, all the media of mass communications in this country were controlled by Jews; and they, the Jews, were pro-German. They were pro-German because many of them had come from Germany, and also they wanted to see Germany lick the Czar. The Jews didn't like the Czar, and they didn't want Russia to win this war. These German-Jew bankers, like Kuhn Loeb and the other big banking firms in the United States refused to finance France or England to the extent of one dollar. They stood aside and they said: "As long as France and England are tied up with Russia, not one cent!" But they poured money into Germany, they fought beside Germany against Russia, trying to lick the Czarist regime.

Now those same Jews, when they saw the possibility of getting Palestine, went to England and they made this deal. At that time, everything changed, like a traffic light that changes from red to green. Where the newspapers had been all pro-German, where they'd been telling the people of the difficulties that Germany was having fighting Great Britain commercially and in other respects, all of a sudden the Germans were no good. They were villains. They were Huns. They were shooting Red Cross nurses. They were cutting off babies' hands. They were no good. Shortly after that, Mr. Wilson declared war on Germany.

The Zionists in London had sent cables to the United States, to Justice Brandeis, saying "Go to work on President Wilson. We're getting from England what we want. Now you go to work on President Wilson and get the United States into the war." That's how the United States got into the war. We had no more interest in it; we had no more right to be in it than we have to be on the moon tonight instead of in this room. There was absolutely no reason for World War I to be our war. We were railroaded into -- if I can be vulgar, we were suckered into -- that war merely so that the Zionists of the world could obtain Palestine. That is something that the people of the United States have never been told. They never knew why we went into World War I.

After we got into the war, the Zionists went to Great Britain and they said: "Well, we performed our part of the agreement. Let's have something in writing that shows that you are going to keep your bargain and give us Palestine after you win the war." They didn't know whether the war would last another year or another ten years. So they started to work out a receipt. The receipt took the form of a letter, which was worded in very cryptic language so that the world at large wouldn't know what it was all about. And that was called the Balfour Declaration.

The Balfour Declaration was merely Great Britain's promise to pay the Zionists what they had agreed upon as a consideration for getting the United States into the war. So this great Balfour Declaration, that you hear so much about, is just as phony as a three dollar bill. I don't think I could make it more emphatic than that.

That is where all the trouble started. The United States got in the war. The United States crushed Germany. You know what happened. When the war ended, and the Germans went to Paris for the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 there were 117 Jews there, as a delegation representing the Jews, headed by Bernard Baruch. I was there: I ought to know.

Now what happened? The Jews at that peace conference, when they were cutting up Germany and parceling out Europe to all these nations who claimed a right to a certain part of European territory, said, "How about Palestine for us?" And they produced, for the first time to the knowledge of the Germans, this Balfour Declaration. So the Germans, for the first time realized, "Oh, so that was the game! That's why the United States came into the war." The Germans for the first time realized that they were defeated, they suffered the terrific reparations that were slapped onto them, because the Zionists wanted Palestine and were determined to get it at any cost.

That brings us to another very interesting point. When the Germans realized this, they naturally resented it. Up to that time, the Jews had never been better off in any country in the world than they had been in Germany. You had Mr. Rathenau there, who was maybe 100 times as important in industry and finance as is Bernard Baruch in this country. You had Mr. Balin, who owned the two big steamship lines, the North German Lloyd's and the Hamburg-American Lines. You had Mr. Bleichroder, who was the banker for the Hohenzollern family. You had the Warburgs in Hamburg, who were the big merchant bankers -- the biggest in the world. The Jews were doing very well in Germany. No question about that. The Germans felt: "Well, that was quite a sellout."

It was a sellout that might be compared to this hypothetical situation: Suppose the United States was at war with the Soviet Union. And we were winning. And we told the Soviet Union: "Well, let's quit. We offer you peace terms. Let's forget the whole thing." And all of a sudden Red China came into the war as an ally of the Soviet Union. And throwing them into the war brought about our defeat. A crushing defeat, with reparations the likes of which man's imagination cannot encompass. Imagine, then, after that defeat, if we found out that it was the Chinese in this country, our Chinese citizens, who all the time we had thought were loyal citizens working with us, were selling us out to the Soviet Union and that it was through them that Red China was brought into the war against us. How would we feel, then, in the United States against Chinese? I don't think that one of them would dare show his face on any street. There wouldn't be enough convenient lampposts to take care of them. Imagine how we would feel.

Well, that's how the Germans felt towards these Jews. They'd been so nice to them: from 1905 on, when the first Communist revolution in Russia failed, and the Jews had to scramble out of Russia, they all went to Germany. And Germany gave them refuge. And they were treated very nicely. And here they had sold Germany down the river for no reason at all other than the fact that they wanted Palestine as a so-called "Jewish commonwealth."

Full story...

Iranian leader did NOT say 'wipe Israel off the map' or anything like it

Lost in translation

Experts confirm that Iran's president did not call for Israel to be 'wiped off the map'. Reports that he did serve to strengthen western hawks.

My recent comment piece explaining how Iran's president was badly misquoted when he allegedly called for Israel to be "wiped off the map" has caused a welcome little storm. The phrase has been seized on by western and Israeli hawks to re-double suspicions of the Iranian government's intentions, so it is important to get the truth of what he really said.

I took my translation - "the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time" - from the indefatigable Professor Juan Cole's website where it has been for several weeks.

But it seems to be mainly thanks to the Guardian giving it prominence that the New York Times, which was one of the first papers to misquote Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, came out on Sunday with a defensive piece attempting to justify its reporter's original "wiped off the map" translation. (By the way, for Farsi speakers the original version is available here.)

Joining the "off the map" crowd is David Aaronovitch, a columnist on the Times (of London), who attacked my analysis yesterday. I won't waste time on him since his knowledge of Farsi is as minimal as that of his Latin. The poor man thinks the plural of casus belli is casi belli, unaware that casus is fourth declension with the plural casus (long u).

The New York Times's Ethan Bronner and Nazila Fathi, one of the paper's Tehran staff, make a more serious case. They consulted several sources in Tehran. "Sohrab Mahdavi, one of Iran's most prominent translators, and Siamak Namazi, managing director of a Tehran consulting firm, who is bilingual, both say 'wipe off' or 'wipe away' is more accurate than 'vanish' because the Persian verb is active and transitive," Bronner writes.

The New York Times goes on: "The second translation issue concerns the word 'map'. Khomeini's words were abstract: 'Sahneh roozgar.' Sahneh means scene or stage, and roozgar means time. The phrase was widely interpreted as 'map', and for years, no one objected. In October, when Mr Ahmadinejad quoted Khomeini, he actually misquoted him, saying not 'Sahneh roozgar' but 'Safheh roozgar', meaning pages of time or history. No one noticed the change, and news agencies used the word 'map' again."

This, in my view, is the crucial point and I'm glad the NYT accepts that the word "map" was not used by Ahmadinejad. (By the way, the Wikipedia entry on the controversy gets the NYT wrong, claiming falsely that Ethan Bronner "concluded that Ahmadinejad had in fact said that Israel was to be wiped off the map".)

If the Iranian president made a mistake and used "safheh" rather than "sahneh", that is of little moment. A native English speaker could equally confuse "stage of history" with "page of history". The significant issue is that both phrases refer to time rather than place. As I wrote in my original post, the Iranian president was expressing a vague wish for the future. He was not threatening an Iranian-initiated war to remove Israeli control over Jerusalem.

Two other well-established translation sources confirm that Ahmadinejad was referring to time, not place. The version of the October 26 2005 speech put out by the Middle East Media Research Institute, based on the Farsi text released by the official Iranian Students News Agency, says: "This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history." (NB: not "wiped". I accept that "eliminated" is almost the same, indeed some might argue it is more sinister than "wiped", though it is a bit more of a mouthful if you are trying to find four catchy and easily memorable words with which to incite anger against Iran.)

MEMRI (its text of the speech is available here) is headed by a former Isareli military intelligence officer and has sometimes been attacked for alleged distortion of Farsi and Arabic quotations for the benefit of Israeli foreign policy. On this occasion they supported the doveish view of what Ahmadinejad said.

Finally we come to the BBC monitoring service which every day puts out hundreds of highly respected English translations of broadcasts from all round the globe to their subscribers - mainly governments, intelligence services, thinktanks and other specialists. I approached them this week about the controversy and a spokesperson for the monitoring service's marketing unit, who did not want his name used, told me their original version of the Ahmadinejad quote was "eliminated from the map of the world".

Full story...

Wednesday, 17 January 2007

Did The Government Force BBC To Drop Menezes, 7/7 Docu-Dramas?

New revelations may have influenced decision to can recreations

by Steve Watson


The family of Jean Charles de Menezes, the innocent man who was gunned down by British police in the wake of the London bombings, has today accused the BBC of aiding a cover up after plans to film a politically sensitive docu-drama about his murder were unceremoniously dropped. The filiming of a docu-drama about the 7/7 London bombers has also been suddenly abandoned.

The London Guardian reports that the BBC shelved both projects because, despite unearthing "difficult or dark" new evidence, it claims it has given the events enough coverage on news and current affairs programming.

But de Menezes cousin Alex Pereira said:

"They are trying to make people forget what happened. It is all political. If the BBC just wanted to do the right thing, they would show the programme. To show the truth is not illegal, to show how the police treated me is not a crime. But they won't because they want to protect the criminals, the police. All reports say they are innocent in everything they have done. We can't prove there is a cover up but we think it is a cover up .Because it will look bad for the police, they won't do that because the BBC is part of the government."

The move is indeed a strange one given that the BBC had, according to the award-winning producer of the project, previously been touting the drama as "the most important television commission of the year".

So did the government have a hand to play in the decision as Pereira suggests? It is not so far fetched to imagine so, particularly given that the BBC has been on a tight leash ever since the 45 minute warning revelations and the dodgy Iraq dossier business in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq.

The government has certainly gone to great lengths in the past to cover up the murder of de Menezes. It would be no surprise if this was a continuation of that policy.

Full story...