by Trowbridge H. Ford
Part I
On August 11, 1984, Jane's Defence Weekly, a new magazine printed by the authoritative Jane's Fighting Ships, published high quality photographs of the Nikolaiev 444 shipyard in the Crimea's Sevastopol, one on the weekly's cover and three more on the inside, showing the Soviet aircraft carrier Lenoid Brezhnev under construction. Then many newspapers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, reprinted them. When US Navy Captain Captain T. Fritz of its Naval Intelligence Support Center (NISC) noticed them while reading his paper over breakfast, he immediately called the FBI to report that they were ones missing from its facility at Suitland, Maryland.
The photographs had been taken by the National Reconnaisance Office's new KH (Keyhole) -11 satellite, the first to suppy digital imaging of targets, and developed by the National Security Agency's Program 1010 aka Kennan. KH-11 used systems developed by the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, the previous Keyhole project, and were later the basis of the Hubble Space Telescope.
In keeping with the National Security Decision Directive 84 - what the Willard Group, appointed by President Carter, had proposed to stop leaks resulting from Watergate, and in the assassination of CIA covert operatives, and President Reagan had adopted - the FBI was contacted so that if no criminal laws were broken in the leak, at least the leaker could be weeded out of the government.
When the Bureau's agents contacted Jane's editors about the leak, they simply handed over the photographs which had had secret classifications snipped from their tops and bottoms. Once a fingerprint was identified as that of Samuel Loring Morison, son of the famous Harvard historian who had written, with Henry Steele Commanger the standard survey of American history, and who was working at the NISC, "Morison was arrested as he was about to board a plane on his way to vacation in England," Angus Mackenzie has written in Secrets: The CIA's War at Home. "He was charged with theft and espionage." (p. 136)
When Morison's trial finally occurred in October 1985, it was most baffling, as Mackenzie has recounted. The charge of espionage seemed most unjustified since a real spy, William Kampiles, had already been convicted of selling the operating manuels for KH-11, so it could be assumed that the photo in Jane's Defence Weekly had told Moscow nothing new about the photo reconnaissance obiter, but the prosecution begged to differ, contending that knowing nothing new about a highly covert program was in itself potentially harmful to the United States. Then the defense finally found an expert who would testify on behalf of Morison, Professor Jeffrey T. Richelson, but his testimony about how easy it was for even the average person to spot a KH-11 in the sky was quashed by the trial judge because it was based upon a top-secret report, and Richelson had signed a secrecy contract not to release such information.
Morrison's defence team compromised his case further by admitting to the court why it had not called him to the stand to defend his own actions while other defence witnesses had undermined his case. While CIA Deputy Director of Science and Technology Richard E. Hineman admitted that other photographs from KH-11 satellites had been published, he confirmed that the ones Morrison had seen to the printing of would confirm of Moscow that the satellite was still working - a vital piece of information since others launched were not for various reasons, and all satellites had a limited life-span. Furthermore, when Mark Lynch, head of Morrison's lawyers, was asked why he did not take the stand, one of them volunteered: "Have you ever meet Morrison? (Quoted from ibid., 140.), a most unnecessary admission which was bound to influence the jury.
The jury found that he had potentially damaged America's security - especially since he had done so for money - and he was sentenced to two years in prison.
While Mackinzie was understandably upset about the verdict, he never got round to explaining why Morison ended up spending so little time in jail, only eight months. The reason seems to be that the Reagan administration decided to make Morison's disclosure a positive bit of disinformation as the planned showdown with Moscow by the US Navy was finally taking shape - what an Anglo-American conspiracy hoped to trigger with the assassination of Sweden's statsminister Olof Palme, sink Soviet nuclear submarines aka boomers while they went on station in response to the surprise, and then clear out all the naval facilities on the Kola Peninsula by American and NATO air and army operations. Where Morison, either deliberately or ignorantly, fitted into all this is determined by just considering what Moscow had learned from all its spies at the time.
Since Kampiles had given the Soviets all the capabilities of the KH-11, they could at least take all the necessary countermeasures while it was passing overhead, if not even arrange to blow it up. Then the John A. Walker Jr. spy ring had resulted in Soviet attack submarines being almost as difficult to spot as American ones - what enraged Navy Secretary John Lehman, Jr. so much that he called publicly for Walker to be drawn and quartered instead of given a life sentence, with eligibility for parole after merely 10 years in prison. Then Ronald W. Pelton, another NISC employee, had told the Soviets about the tapping of their land lines in Sea of Okhotsk to their naval base at Petropavlovsk (Operation Ivy Bells). (For more about this, see Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, Blind Man's Bluff: The Story of American Submarine Espionage, p. 351ff.)
For good measure, the Reagan administration allowed failed Agency agent Edward Lee Howard to escape to the USSR - hoping that the Soviets would think that he was another Kim Philby when it came to Agency operational methods in Moscow - and Jonathan Pollard, another NISC employee, was sentenced to life in prison for supplying Shamir's anti-American government in Israel with satellite and signal intelligence regarding the structure of US deterrent forces in case there was some kind of Cold War showdown - what Tel Aviv exchanged with Moscow for the release of more Soviets Jews who wanted to immigrate to the Holy Land. (For more on Agency deceptions regarding Howard's defection, see Mark Riebling, Wedge: The Secret War between FBI and CIA, p. 355ff.)
Of course, this information would hardly help Moscow for what Washington and London had planned, as it was a question of the Soviets spotting Lehman's attack submarines as they sought out the Soviet boomers and their own attack subs, stopping communications to the West by double agents involved in Operation Courtship and from bugging other lines of communication, and stemming the planned attack over the Finnmark region of Norway with some kind of defense in depth. Defector Vitaly Yurchenko was even programmed by Moscow into the whole deception operation by telling tales on various agents, especially Pelton and Howard, when he came over, and then being allowed to escape back to Moscow by the CIA with the most important double agent, Valeri Martynov, in his entourage. It was the most important, complicated deception operation in the history of the Cold War, and who would ultimately triumph was not known until the very end.
While we now know that the spying for the Soviets by the CIA's Rick Ames and the Bureau's Robert Hanssen saved everyone's skin, as I have described in many articles, the role of Morison in the process has not been told. His conviction was to reassure Moscow that any KH-11satellite which showed up over the Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol was just another photo reconnaissance one - what the Soviets would neutralize one way or another. Little did they realize that any new ones would also contain an airborne laser accelerator, feigning to be just a Magnum satellite - what could possibly cause massive earthquakes in the unstable area if necessary. As it circled over the area 15 times a day, it could make a devastating earthquake there in relatively little time at all.
The Red Banner Fleet submarine base at Balaklava - the site of the famous charge by the British Light Brigade in the Crimean War - was hewed out of a mountain in an area noted for its earthquakes. In nearby Yalta, the site of the famous agreement between the Allies in WWII, had experienced devastating earthquakes in 1927, and more were expected. The underground submarine pens and their connecting canals to the Black Sea were thought to be so inpregnable to atomic attacks that the Chinese had modeled a similar facility in its remote mountains of Zichan after the devastating earthquake at Tangshan in 1976 had destroyed its original atomic research facilities - what the Soviets, it seems, had caused in order to get the Red Chinese back in line. Moscow did not appreciate that continuous laser attacks around the Balaklava could cause a complete collapse, one so severe that it might swallow up the whole north coast of the Black Sea in a tsumani.
As with so many conspiracies - what usually results in so many cock-ups - the best laid plans were destroyed by a foul-up. When the space shuttle took the laser accelerator aloft on August 28, 1985 (No. 7 in the Kennan program), it failed to be launched because of a premature engine shutdown. NASA did a rush job to prepare another space shuttle, Challenger, for a replacement mission on January 28, 1986 but, as we all know, it ended in tragedy with the space craft separating from the booster rockets almost immediately, and plunging into the Atlantic, off the Kennedy Space Center. While the Reagan administration made much of the loss of life, especially woman astronaut and school teacher Christa McAuliffe, Washington was more concerned about the lost satellite.
Instead of the White House scrubbing the planned non-nuclear end to the Cold War with Moscow, it pushed ahead with reckless abandaon despite the fact that it had lost its most crucial element in any surprise showdown with the Soviets. The CIA's Rod Carlson had tried to recruite Sweden's leading Soviet Stig Bergling in the hope that he would be the fall guy for Palme's assassin by fleeing to the USSR while on prison release to get married, the Agency's resident in the Stockholm Embassy Jennone Walker got the Swedish security service Säpo to bug the Soviet Embassy telephones and KGB residence in the hope that Bergling would call to arrange his escape - what would confirm Moscow's being behind the assassination - and Britain's SOD George Younger was on hand when NATO's Anchor Express Exercise commenced in Norway, so that he could direct it against the Kola Peninsula when America's carrier battle fleet, Operation Eagle, arrived off Narvik.
Fortunately, the whole conspiracy went a cropper when Bergling declined to flee, Operation Eagle never arrived because Atlantic Fleet Commander Admiral Carl Trost refused to follow Navy Secretary Lehman's direct orders twice, and Anchor Express Exercise immediately got caught in devastating but expected avalanches which killed 17 Norwegian engineers. It was all just as well, though, as KGB Chief Viktor Chebrikov had announced on the morning of Palme's assassination that it had uncovered the plot, and taken appropriate counter measures.
The collapse of the submarine base at Balaklava would have deprived Moscow of its second-strike, underwater ballistic missiles which were threatening southern Europe in any showdown. To make up for the laser satellite, lost on the Challenger mission, Lehman's navy still tried twice to provoke a surface response by Moscow while his attack submarines were still trying in vain to sink Soviet boomers in the White and Black Seas, as Greg Vistica has vaguely noted in Fall from Honor: The Men Who Sank the U. S. Navy: "The intellignce-gathering ship Caron and the Aegis cruiser Yorktown sailed to within six nautical miles of the Crimean coast. On another mission, the two ships operated nine miles from the Black Sea fleet headquarters at Sevastopol." (p. 214)
If Washington and London had succeeded in triggering the showdown with the boomers by conventional weapons - what they attempted on two occasions - the result would have been devastating to us all, as the Soviets had 82 nuclear-armed SS-23 missiles in East Germany and Western Russia which the vaunted Western intelligence knew nothing about, and would have fired them with a shooting war broke out. (For more on this, see Mark Urban, UK Eyes Alpha: The Inside Story of British Intelligence, p. 290.)
Little wonder that when the scope of the whole cock-up began to emerge, and the political atmosphere between Reagan and Gorbachev began to change dramatically at the Reykjavik meeting in October 1986, Morison was released early from prison. It was a far different matter with the Walker gang and Pelton, however. Admiral William Studeman, a former NISC chief and the
director of the Naval Intelligence Service, wrote a convenient affidavit for the trial of one of the former in California in late September 1986, claiming gratuituously and falsely that Pelton's spying had presented the Soviets with war-winning possibilities in any showdown with the West. It was the spying by Ames and Hanssen which presented the Soviets with such possibilities, explaining why they have been locked up forever.
Studeman was the driving force in Navy ranks behind the whole confrontation that Secretary Lehman sought, directing the attack submarines in the latest Ivy Bells Operation, having Chief of Naval Operations James Watkins coordinate the planned attacks with the British MOD, and seeing that Admiral Frank Kelso's Sixth Fleet in the Black Sea tried to make up for the absence of the KH-11 (No. 7) satellite. (For more sanitzed details about the whole fiasco, see Vistica, p. 213ff.)
Of course, while America lost the satellite on Challenger, it had the capability to make more, and once the problems with launching the heavily loaded space shuttles safely were solved, it sent two more KH-11s into orbit in 1987 and 1988, and a more advanced one, called LACROSSE, into space on an orbit which flew over the Middle East all the way to North Korea, as this was the area of concern with the USSR and the Soviet bloc going down the drain. China was now the hot target, especially after its leadership intensified and institutionalized its repression of dissent after the forceful clearing of Tiananman Square on June 4, 1989. The new Bush administration was most interested, though, in keeping on talking terms with Beijing, "constructive engagement", because of what it had planned for Iraq, and the now independent oil-producing nations of Central Asia.
Despite the Chinese crackdown, Washington wanted to persuade the Chinese leadership to ease up on the protesters, especially on the Uighur, Muslims, in Xinjuing province where vast new deposits of oil were discovered, and worked to persuade Congress not to invoke sanctions on Beijing but to maintain China's most favored nation status in trade as bargaining chips. In return, China's Foreign Minister Qain did not block Washington's UN approach to punishing Saddam for his invasion of Kuwait.
And by this time, Admiral Studeman had managed to become NSA's director, and was interested in what KH-12 satellites could really do rather than make them simply survivable in the event of a Soviet attack - what the previous director General William Odom was obsessed with. Studeman was able to work easily behind the back of his nominal superior, DCI Judge William Webster, who had been selected to clean up the Agency's image after the Iran-Contra scandal.
While the world was occupied with the West's growing confrontation with Saddam Hussein, Washington apparently pulled a surprise on the troublesome Iranians, causing an earthquake in its northwest along the Iraqi border around the towns of Rudbar and Manjil on June 20, 1990 - reminiscent to what the Russians had done 14 years earlier in North China. The 7.7 quake on the Richter scale killed or injured 370,000 people, and forced Tehran to concentrate on helping its beleaguered citizens rather than offering any possible assistance to the cornered Iraqi leader. The mullahs had been looking for settling scores with Washington ever since one of its ships shot down an Iranian airliner in 1988.
The satellite's laser had taken advantage of the sandy terrain, and the shoddy construction of the area's buildings, causing a series of rapid earthquakes to occur in the middle of the night - when the most devastation would happen - along the line where the Arabian and Eurasian plates collided. It was the largest eathquake in that part of the Caspain region in 1,200 years. Given the presence of extensive qanat systems in the area for the collection of water, it was easy to heat up from overhead the passageways to underground collection chambers until the sand collapsed, causing the resulting goo to shift, and everything based upon it too.
While Washington's role in the tragedy escaped completely unnoticed, even the Iranians to start with, Richelson published an article, "The Spies in Space, in Air and Space, which raised all kinds of questions about its possible role - what NSA tried to quash by classifying the article 'SECRET', and Representative Geroge Brown tried to make light of by bringing up the matter in the House on November 26, 1991. By this time, Richelson had become a leading authority on America's satellite capability, having written many books on the subject, especially The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology which showed that it was involved in much more than just trying to find "The Manchurian Candidate".
Richelson, after having explained the role various KEYHOLE satellites had played in some confrontations and wars, declared: "And still others become the catalyst for further collection efforts and eventually for action political, diplomatic, or military." While he did not indicate what ones had been involved in military follow-ups, he did give this operational scope to them: "Satellities search for signs of new nuclear reactors or missile deployment in countries that buy arms and nuclear technology from China, including Algeria, Iran, Palestine, Saudia Arabia and Syria."
While the earthquake had the desired effect upon the Iranians when it came to Saddam's problems, it made Tehran, it seems, more interested in having nuclear weapons to protect inself from more such surprises. In 1991, China signed a contract with Iran to supply it with a 20 Mega Watt research reactor, much like what the Soviets had supplied Yugoslavia's Marhal Tito, and were increasingly causing the West with concerns regarding Belgrade. Then in September 1992, the two countries agreed to China supplying it with two 300 MW pressurized water reactors within ten years. While the Clinton administration apparently put enough pressure on China to cancel both deals, no one could be absolutely sure, as subsequent developments would show.
It did not take a space scientist to figure out that this country was the apex of the alleged axis of evil, and that Washington may well have considered action against its increasing threats - what the Chinese, unlike the Iraqis who laid fiber optics cables to protect the security of their messages,
still using micro wave communications had made crystal clear.
Richelson concluded his article by surprisingly discounting the effectiveness of digital-imaging reconnaissance vehicles in countries which had very cloudly weather, very secretive regimes, and took effective countermeasures against their intrusions, making one wonder why the NSA was going for broke with the new LACROSSE program when China was the only regime which presented these problems.
The answer was supplied, it seems, by an obscure Chinese chemist Zhonghoa Shou working for the Hangzhou Quality Control Institute, and investigating the effects of climate change on its fishing industry when the deadly Iranian earthquake struck. Shou had predicted it 18 hours before it happened. He based his prediction upon the unexpected cloud which developed from the eventual epicenter, and the consequent fracturing of the surface which developed from it. It seemed as if some huge area was being stressed by external forces, causing the cloud to steadily appear, and as the process intensified, the geoeruption commenced, ultimately resulting in the devastating earthquake.
The only problem left to be explained was the source of the external forces, as the area was not known for having volcanoes either.
To head off Shou's claims from becoming widely known, he was allowed to come to California in May 1993, and while he was studying the history and evidence of its earthquakes, the Clinton administration became involved in its own program of earthquake-making. By this time Studeman had taken over the actual running of the CIA, having become its Deputy Director. He
apparently made the arrangements for the test quake in Australia's Great Victoria Desert in 1993 from the US Henry E. Holt naval base on the North Cape - what American Secretary of Defense William Cohen did for real in Turkey on August 17, 1999. It was the
severest punishment, coming at 3:01 a.m., of its right-wing regime for having complicated the bombing campaign against Serbia for its actions against Kosovo by leaking details of NATO's operations to President Slobodan Milosevic - what ultimately resulted in the destruction of the Chinese Embassy there when it was determined to have been complicit in the operation.
Cohen had done everything he could to deflect suspicion from Washington for having caused the Izmit disaster - another area noted for its easily collapsable qanat sytem - by announcing that it was something one could expect from unknown terrorists.
In August 2000, after the NSA had launched its latest LACROSSE satellite from Vandenberg Air Base - neither National Reconnaissance Office nor the Air Force discussing its 66-foot nose cone and its orbit in any way - the NRO did issue a shoulder patch to commenorate all its orbiters in a most menacing way. It was entitled - "National Reconnaissance Office - We Own the Night", and underneath it were the four vehicles transversing the globe and going along a line from Turkey into Russia, and another across the Middle East towards China - striking back with deadly boomerangs. A boomerang is an Australian native instrument which recoils on its user with deadly consequences - a most telling depiction of what the Americans had been up to in Down Under's desert and beyond.
It was a most dangerous admission to make, as we shall see.
Monday, 20 April 2009
Tuesday, 7 April 2009
The Two Faces of Barack Obama
by Justin Raimondo
The news from Europe, if you listen to our infatuated media, is that the Euros love President Obama: according to the American reportage, his recent trip there was a cavalcade of photo-ops, cheering crowds, and hugs from the queen of England. Even the French were in awe of him! However, if you look beneath the surface, not that far beneath the gloss and the glam there runs a current of irritation, and, dare I say it, resentment.
Take, for example, his stop in the Czech Republic, where he declared that he was seeking a nuclear-free world – that is, a world free of nuclear weapons. This is a goal the United States has a special moral responsibility to seek, he averred, because we are the only nation that has actually used these weapons. The crowd loved it. What they didn’t at all love, however, was his announcement that
“‘As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile defense system that is cost-effective and proven. Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile activity poses a real threat, not just to the United States, but to Iran’s neighbors and our allies.’”
"The governments of the Czech Republic and Poland, he added, are ‘courageous’ for ‘agreeing to host a defense against these missiles.’"
One supposes it takes a fair amount of courage to defy the wishes of your own people and obey the dictates of a foreign power, albeit not the sort of courage appreciated by Obama’s audience. As the London Telegraph put it:
"The crowd enthusiastically cheered the more idealistic parts of Mr. Obama’s speech but was relatively subdued when he spoke about his backing for missile defense.
"Petr Sramek, 33, was among those disappointed that Mr. Obama had not dropped a policy that was opposed by more than two thirds of Czechs. ‘I really liked the clear message on nuclear disarmament but I am against the missile defense system. It is more about geopolitical influence then defense against missiles.’
"Arena Protivinska, 30, described herself as a ‘big fan’ of Mr. Obama but accused him of ‘hypocrisy’ for urging world peace while also pushing forward with the missile shield. ‘He sounded like George W Bush saying that we should be afraid in order to justify missile defense.’"
Like Americans, the Europeans want to believe – but they see the two faces of Barack Obama too clearly, and the contrast is too apparent to be denied. The gullible Americans, who take things at face value, still believe their new president represents a real change, a challenge to the status quo, while the more sophisticated Europeans are quick to pick up on Obama’s inconsistencies – made all the more glaring by his habit of pairing two mutually contradictory stances on the same issue.
This includes not only coupling missile "defense" in Eastern Europe with the prospect of a nuclear-free world, but also the recent launching of his "Af-Pak" initiative. Although dressed up as a diplomatic offensive, this is essentially a military offensive aimed at widening the war in Afghanistan to include portions of Pakistan.
The administration and its media lapdogs portrayed the Af-Pak rollout as a definitive break with the bad old days of the Bush White House, when it was all about troop movements. The new regime, we’re told, will initiate substantial diplomatic and humanitarian aid efforts, notably an effort to reach out to dissident elements of the Taliban. However, the real core of the Af-Pak strategy is a radical escalation of the military element, in effect an Afghan "surge" spilling over into Pakistan’s tribal areas: it means the addition of some 21,000 soldiers to U.S. forces, with the prospect of more to come.
The Janus-faced American hegemon speaks out of both sides of his mouth, and in two voices: one for the masses, who delight in his soaring idealism and seeming ability to express their deepest aspirations, and one for the elites, who hear a promise of continuity rather than change.
This two-track narrative framed even his Prague declamation of a nuclear-free world. According to a top White House aide, we are not to take this idea all that seriously:
"Gary Samore, a White House adviser on arms control, indicated that Mr. Obama’s call for ridding the world of nuclear weapons should not be taken too literally. ‘In terms of a nuclear-free world, we recognize this is not a near-term possibility,’ he said. Rather, the call was an attempt to ’seize the moral high ground’ in order to increase pressure on countries such as North Korea and Iran."
Obama giveth with one hand, and taketh away with another – smiling that oil-slick grin the whole time. Although I agree with the sentiments of the Czech woman cited above, the Obama method goes way beyond mere hypocrisy. It is a conscious technique of inverting the true meaning and intent of his policies.
Thus, his launching of an intensified military campaign in Central Asia is portrayed as an effort to "stabilize" the region. His provocation against Russia in Eastern Europe is paired with a call to abolish nuclear weapons. And, of course, this ploy carries over into the domestic arena, as well, where – in the process of giving certain favored sectors of the financial industry trillions in subsidies – he has launched a campaign against "corporate greed" and outrageously extravagant executive salaries and perks. He rails against corporate irresponsibility, yet he has appointed to his administration the very corporate insiders who got us into this mess in the first place.
Obama ran for president as the spokesman for the underdog – the little guy just managing to make ends meet, whose volunteerism and contributions over the Internet catapulted the Illinois senator into the running. Yet the reality is that Obama was corporate America’s candidate from the very beginning, and they showed it by lavishly financing his campaign: the money emanating from Goldman Sachs was quite impressive, and, together with the DNC, Wall Street buried the Republicans, who were outspent by three-to-one [.pdf] (and out of gas in any event). Unsurprisingly, the top echelons of the president’s economic team are filled with former Goldman Sachs officials – and, not coincidentally, that firm is the primary beneficiary of the AIG/bank bailout.
The ruling elites of this country, confronted by the specter of a rising populist anger, have found in President Obama a subtle and skillful anger-management expert. For years they’ve been frustrated in Washington, as their efforts to fight a spreading war met increasing resistance from the American people. Divine Providence smiled down on them, however, as Obama suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Here was an "antiwar" candidate who said we’ve been fighting the wrong war all along – and, upon taking office, immediately rectified that by sending 21,000 more troops to the wilds of Central Asia.
What a godsend to the War Party Barack Obama is! As he moves toward confrontations with Iran, Russia, and Pakistan, and continues to unnecessarily irritate China, Asia’s sleeping giant, the media portray him as the Great Peacemaker. As the mask slips, however, and the reality becomes all too apparent, how will his "progressive" supporters react? Will they rise in protest, or sign on to Obama’s war?
Stay tuned to this space for the answer…
Full story...
The news from Europe, if you listen to our infatuated media, is that the Euros love President Obama: according to the American reportage, his recent trip there was a cavalcade of photo-ops, cheering crowds, and hugs from the queen of England. Even the French were in awe of him! However, if you look beneath the surface, not that far beneath the gloss and the glam there runs a current of irritation, and, dare I say it, resentment.
Take, for example, his stop in the Czech Republic, where he declared that he was seeking a nuclear-free world – that is, a world free of nuclear weapons. This is a goal the United States has a special moral responsibility to seek, he averred, because we are the only nation that has actually used these weapons. The crowd loved it. What they didn’t at all love, however, was his announcement that
“‘As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile defense system that is cost-effective and proven. Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile activity poses a real threat, not just to the United States, but to Iran’s neighbors and our allies.’”
"The governments of the Czech Republic and Poland, he added, are ‘courageous’ for ‘agreeing to host a defense against these missiles.’"
One supposes it takes a fair amount of courage to defy the wishes of your own people and obey the dictates of a foreign power, albeit not the sort of courage appreciated by Obama’s audience. As the London Telegraph put it:
"The crowd enthusiastically cheered the more idealistic parts of Mr. Obama’s speech but was relatively subdued when he spoke about his backing for missile defense.
"Petr Sramek, 33, was among those disappointed that Mr. Obama had not dropped a policy that was opposed by more than two thirds of Czechs. ‘I really liked the clear message on nuclear disarmament but I am against the missile defense system. It is more about geopolitical influence then defense against missiles.’
"Arena Protivinska, 30, described herself as a ‘big fan’ of Mr. Obama but accused him of ‘hypocrisy’ for urging world peace while also pushing forward with the missile shield. ‘He sounded like George W Bush saying that we should be afraid in order to justify missile defense.’"
Like Americans, the Europeans want to believe – but they see the two faces of Barack Obama too clearly, and the contrast is too apparent to be denied. The gullible Americans, who take things at face value, still believe their new president represents a real change, a challenge to the status quo, while the more sophisticated Europeans are quick to pick up on Obama’s inconsistencies – made all the more glaring by his habit of pairing two mutually contradictory stances on the same issue.
This includes not only coupling missile "defense" in Eastern Europe with the prospect of a nuclear-free world, but also the recent launching of his "Af-Pak" initiative. Although dressed up as a diplomatic offensive, this is essentially a military offensive aimed at widening the war in Afghanistan to include portions of Pakistan.
The administration and its media lapdogs portrayed the Af-Pak rollout as a definitive break with the bad old days of the Bush White House, when it was all about troop movements. The new regime, we’re told, will initiate substantial diplomatic and humanitarian aid efforts, notably an effort to reach out to dissident elements of the Taliban. However, the real core of the Af-Pak strategy is a radical escalation of the military element, in effect an Afghan "surge" spilling over into Pakistan’s tribal areas: it means the addition of some 21,000 soldiers to U.S. forces, with the prospect of more to come.
The Janus-faced American hegemon speaks out of both sides of his mouth, and in two voices: one for the masses, who delight in his soaring idealism and seeming ability to express their deepest aspirations, and one for the elites, who hear a promise of continuity rather than change.
This two-track narrative framed even his Prague declamation of a nuclear-free world. According to a top White House aide, we are not to take this idea all that seriously:
"Gary Samore, a White House adviser on arms control, indicated that Mr. Obama’s call for ridding the world of nuclear weapons should not be taken too literally. ‘In terms of a nuclear-free world, we recognize this is not a near-term possibility,’ he said. Rather, the call was an attempt to ’seize the moral high ground’ in order to increase pressure on countries such as North Korea and Iran."
Obama giveth with one hand, and taketh away with another – smiling that oil-slick grin the whole time. Although I agree with the sentiments of the Czech woman cited above, the Obama method goes way beyond mere hypocrisy. It is a conscious technique of inverting the true meaning and intent of his policies.
Thus, his launching of an intensified military campaign in Central Asia is portrayed as an effort to "stabilize" the region. His provocation against Russia in Eastern Europe is paired with a call to abolish nuclear weapons. And, of course, this ploy carries over into the domestic arena, as well, where – in the process of giving certain favored sectors of the financial industry trillions in subsidies – he has launched a campaign against "corporate greed" and outrageously extravagant executive salaries and perks. He rails against corporate irresponsibility, yet he has appointed to his administration the very corporate insiders who got us into this mess in the first place.
Obama ran for president as the spokesman for the underdog – the little guy just managing to make ends meet, whose volunteerism and contributions over the Internet catapulted the Illinois senator into the running. Yet the reality is that Obama was corporate America’s candidate from the very beginning, and they showed it by lavishly financing his campaign: the money emanating from Goldman Sachs was quite impressive, and, together with the DNC, Wall Street buried the Republicans, who were outspent by three-to-one [.pdf] (and out of gas in any event). Unsurprisingly, the top echelons of the president’s economic team are filled with former Goldman Sachs officials – and, not coincidentally, that firm is the primary beneficiary of the AIG/bank bailout.
The ruling elites of this country, confronted by the specter of a rising populist anger, have found in President Obama a subtle and skillful anger-management expert. For years they’ve been frustrated in Washington, as their efforts to fight a spreading war met increasing resistance from the American people. Divine Providence smiled down on them, however, as Obama suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Here was an "antiwar" candidate who said we’ve been fighting the wrong war all along – and, upon taking office, immediately rectified that by sending 21,000 more troops to the wilds of Central Asia.
What a godsend to the War Party Barack Obama is! As he moves toward confrontations with Iran, Russia, and Pakistan, and continues to unnecessarily irritate China, Asia’s sleeping giant, the media portray him as the Great Peacemaker. As the mask slips, however, and the reality becomes all too apparent, how will his "progressive" supporters react? Will they rise in protest, or sign on to Obama’s war?
Stay tuned to this space for the answer…
Full story...
Thursday, 19 February 2009
Is Chancellor Angela Merkel A Former Communist Spy?
by Trowbridge H. Ford
Whenever a sovereign nation is conquered by another, its inhabitants, whether they be from its elite or dregs, ultimately have a hard time adjusting to foreign occupation because they don't know how long it will last, and what it may be replaced by. The process is made more difficult if it seems that there is no alternative to the conquerers, especially if they appear to represent some wave of the future. But then, there are always surprises in history, and some seemingly sure things turn out to be nothing more than delayed dead ends. Of course, the alternative to such a course is to continue to fight the occupiers tooth and nail as there seems to be no choice about the matter, but the costs of such a course are usually devastating.
The best example of the latter is the sad fate of Poland when it was confronted by nemeses on both its borders as World War II approached. It refused to compromise with either of its threatening neighbors, and paid heavily for its choice. The victim of yet more partitions of Poland, it still refused to accommodate with either of its invaders. Poland was the only country in Europe, when overrun, refused to recognize and cooperate with its conquerors. In fact, it proved so obstreperous to its Soviet occupiers that it felt obliged to execute the leading officers of its military in the infamous Katyn Forest massacres for fear that they would fight with the invading Nazis when the showdown between Berlin and Moscow finally occurred. The uncooperative Poles in the German occupied areas fared even worse as they were forced to fight back because of the Nazi liquidation of increasing numbers of its Jewish citizens, culminating in the infamous elmination of the Warsaw Ghetto.
The Poles preferred, in sum, partitions of their country aka Polonization rather than experience some kind of 'Quisling' rule - the sobriquet given the German occupation of Norway under the collaborationist administration of Vidkun Quisling. Traditionally, the term Polonization had meant the political and cultural expansion of the country at the expense of its neighbors, especially Germans and Lithuanians, but now the term was used to identify the reverse process. Ever since the failed Warsaw uprising of 1831, except for the chaos left after the collapse of World War I, the Poles had been resigned to the fate history had dictated for them, as was amply demonstrated when neither the French nor the British supplied the help they had promised when the Nazi blitzkrieg struck in 1939.
The trouble with this passive, go-it-alone strategy by the Poles when it came to improving the nation's fortunes was that it could easily be sidetracked by others. When the prospects of its government in exile in London started to improve, its head, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, was conveniently assassinated in Gibraltar by the Brits, it seems, in July 1943. Sikorski was a courageous leader who was willing to make hard choices, deciding better 'Stalin than Hitler' immediately after the Nazi forces invaded the USSR, and his vigorous cooporation with them promised some hope for the Poles in the postwar settlement - what Churchill recognized, and had MI6 apparently sabotage the plane's controls while it was refueling, making it look like a Soviet plane, parked next to it, had been its source. Without Sikorski, the anti-communist Poles tried to go it alone when the Soviets forces approached Warsaw, but Stalin would not hear of it.
The postwar settlement in Poland was the most repressive of all in Eastern Euope. The country itself was a convenient hodge-podge at German expense which just provide another example of Polonization. The terms of the Yalta Conference guaranteed that its politics would be Soviet-dominated, and the consequences were the least troublesome to its authorities when it came to anti-regime efforts, as the Vasili Mitrokhin files from the KGB demonstrate. There is hardly any mention of Poland in the book Christopher Andrew wrote about it, The Sword and The Shield, until the revival of Catholicism during the late 1970s under Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, and the rise of Lech Walesa's Solidarity Movement in the 1980s. Until then, the Polish regime had essentially bought off its opponents under the watchful eye of Moscow. When the fear of Soviet military intervention collapsed in Poland, the regime fell surprisingly quickly, like a stack of cards.
For anyone living in Europe after WWII, especially in the Soviet bloc, Poland offered the least insights into how to deal with Soviet Communism domestically, and how it would fare in the world. Poland seemed like the worst place to choose as a jumping off spot for some kind of better future as the soft, repressive character of its communist regime appeared like a fixed monolith, quite impervious to change, because of the immediate presence of the USSR right next door - what turned out to be a paper tiger when Mikael Gorbachev took over.
Actually, a more flexible, compromising attitude towards an invader seems like a more profitable course for an subject country, as France experienced under Nazi rule, and after its liberation. Paris, always worried about the discontinuaties of its turbulent past, always kept a lifeline to its republican past, no matter how comforting the autocratic ways of Marshal Pétain, and the prospects of the Nazi-invaders seemed while it too experienced partition with the creation of the Vichy regime. The duplicity of all concerned was well-illustrated by the behavior of the National Assembly which voted away its power after the fall of France, only to try to restore itself after the departure of the Germans. The Marshal's infamous Deputy Premier, Pierre Laval, and then his successor, Admiral Darlan, were quite prepared to work for the Nazis until it seemed much more profitable just to work for themselves.
The same transition occurred within the population at large, as the chorus of support for Pétain turned slowly in favor of a unfied resistance, General de Gualle was transformed from a troublesome traitor into the nation's savior, insignificant resistance groups became the National Resistance Council, and right-wing hopes of an administered autocracy were dashed by the Vichy fiasco. One can still only wonder if liberation would have turned out so well if Churchill's dealing with the difficult General had resulted in this one's assassination too. When Churchill only informed de Gaulle of the D-Day landings after they occurred, he reacted so furiously that the British Prime Minister wrote him "..a letter," Gordon Wright has written in France in Modern Times, "breaking off all personal relations and ordering de Gaulle off British soil." (p. 394) Fortunately, the letter was not sent.
The experiences of Poland and France during WWII, and in the post-war world must have influenced everyone growing up in their mutual neighbor, Germany, West and East, especially one who moved from zone one to the other. The whole socializing process on either side of the border would have created all kinds of problems between peers and parents. And it would have become even more disruptive if there was an ideological-religious difference between parents and children. The divided character of the country would have proven most vexing to all Germans, as they seemed caught up in an endless quandry of occupation - what no one really knew the outcome of, and when it would occur.
This analysis seems germane while trying to put together the life of Angela Kasner, eldest daughter of Lutheran priest Horst Kasner, and current Chancellor of the German Federal Republic, especially since she is most reluctant to talk about it. Born in Hamburg in 1954, and moved to East Germany shortly thereafter as her father obtained a pastorship in Quitzow, near Perleberg, in nearby Brandenburg, she had the Cold War almost embedded in her very bones. He was born in the Pankow district of Berlin, then part of the Soviet sector. Her mother's parents still lived in Elblag - formerly East Prussia's Elbing - in Poland when Angela was born. The area was allocated to the USSR under the terms of the 1939 Treaty with the Nazis, and was sold to the Soviets in January 1941 for $7,500,000, so the Kasners were victims too of various invasions and partitions.
The Kasners' move to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was apparently an effort to better position themselves for whatever happened to their divided country, particularly since they lived further in the GDR, setting up a household in Templin, 80 kilometers north of Berlin. While Horst was trying to improve relations between the West's and the East's Lutheran churches, Angela was attending state schools, becoming a member of its Free German Youth (FDJ) program, though she did not take part in its Jugendweihe, the secular coming of age rite, preferring to be confirmed in the Lutheran church. Apparently, there was growing tension between the stern father, and the ambitious, talented daughter. Angela became so proficient in Russian that she even won a prize.
After Angela graduated from secondary school in 1973, though, details about who she was becoming, and what she was doing become few and far between. She attended the University of Leipzig. She also married in 1976 fellow undergraudate student Ulrich Merkel, explaining that it was considered the thing to do, though they never had any children, and the marriage started breaking down as soon as she got appointed to Berlin's Academy Sciences where she became FDJ's secretary for recruiting aka 'agitprop' children of its members into its program, showing that she was covertly supporting the GDR's future. In fact, she was so busy doing other things that it wasn't until 1986 that she finally completed her Ph.D degree.
Quantum chemistry aka quantum physics is a highly theoretical field which combines quantum mechanics with general field theory, and has all kinds of practical applications regarding plasmas, nuclear rehabilitation, and electromagnetism. The Soviet Union had built all kinds of nuclear devices on a crash basis - weapons, power plants, nuclear-powered submarines, radioisotope thermo-electric generators (RTGs), etc. - and were becoming concerned about what to do with them when they were no longer useful. There were nuclear power generating plants all around the country whose safety was becoming questionable, nuclear-powered submarines around the ports of Murmansk and Archangel which were dangerously rotting away, and spent RTGs littering the Kola Peninsula.
While the Soviets did not have the resources to deal with these problems, they looked to the East Germans - whose Berlin Academy of Sciences still had a great reputation in the field - to find the know-how, given its contacts in the West. The Berlin establishment traced its origins back to 1700 when the Prussian Academy of Sciences was started, and included among its membership such distinguished scientists as Gottfried Leibniz, Max Planck, and Albert Einstein. Even though it had been revived by the GDR after WWII, it still had over 200 members, including some two dozen from the West. It had grown now to include research in quantum chemistry - where Angela was working at its Central Institute for Physical Chemistry.
To take advantage of Merkel's potential, Markus Wolf's foreign section of the Stasi, the Hauptverwaltung Aufkluring (HVA), recruited her, it seems, to handle illegal agents the GDR was sending across The Wall to gather secrets from research facilities in the Federal Republic (FRG), France, Norway, and other Western countries - what she had learned about from her meetings and contacts at the Institute.
The future seemed to be turning in the GDR's favor since détente had been established between Washington and Moscow, and the two German states had recognized one another's existence in 1972. Most important, the Stasi had nursed along Willy Brandt's bridge-building government towards the GDR until 1974 when its spies in the Chancellor's Office, the Guillaumes, were exposed, Gunter declaring proudly: "I am an officer of the (East German) National People's Army!" (Quoted from Andrew, p. 445.) Despite Wolf's claims after the GDR's collapse that this was a grave mistake - what Andrew believes - it was deliberate, thinking that it would just enhance Eric Honecker's potential in German reunification.
Thanks to the KGB Archives that its librarian Vasili Mittrokhin supplied Andrew, we now know about the extensive use of Stasi 'Romeo' spies who provided the KGB with all kinds of information. The glaring exception was the performance of Wilhelm Kahle (codenamed WERNER), a laboratory technician who assumed the identity of a West German resident in the GDR, and worked in the West in various capacities, and capitals, particularly in labs at Cologne and Bonn universities. By the late 1970s, though, his intelligence take had become too thin, though quite extensive, resulting in a ten-volume file in the Archives, that the KGB became suspicious of his bona fides, especially when it learned through his communications with his mother in East Germany that he was fearful of being recalled to Moscow because of the wealth he had amassed in Paris.
In 1978, Kahle was summoned back to Moscow, and given a lie dedector test on a contrived basis just to determine how unreliable he had become. It proved that it was extensive, resulting in its putting its most accomplished agent, codenamed ANITA - who spoke both German and Russian fluently - on the case. It was one of putting a 'Juliet' on a runaway 'Romeo', apparently a first in intellgence history. After intensive questioning during their liaisons, Andrew wrote, "ANITA's report confirmed the Centre's suspicions." (p. 450) She wrote that he had become an ideologically unreliable, completely self-serving agent who had no qualms about using others, even targets, for his own purposes. "As a result of ANITA's report," Andrew concluded, "Kahle appears to have been sidelined. He was formally removed from illegal work in 1982."
The trouble with Andrew's treatment of ANITA is that he never explained how she had become such an important counterintelligence specialist, who she might be, and why he never explained in the notes the disposition of her case since the Berlin Wall had come down, and the Cold War was over. Then Andrew went out of his way in the notes to make it appear that all 'Romeos', except Wolf's spy FELIX, had been identified - even going out of his way to account for the identity of "Franz Becker" aka Hans-Jurgen Henze (note 57, p. 649) - when there is no idenfication of either Kahle and his superior 'Romeo' ANITA.
Also, there are questions about what she might have done for the KGB after Mitrokhin's records ran out. She could well have been the KGB agent who infiltrated Egon Bahr's entourage - what Andrew mentioned when he discussed SDP Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's dealing with the newly elected President Reagan over a month's delay of his visit to Washington - what KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov explained, thanks to the KGB agent's report "of special importance", to the Soviet chief Leonid Brezhnev, was "designed to enable Washington to gain time to build up its armaments with the aim of overtaking the USSR in the military field." (Quoted from ibid, p. 455.)
The KGB source also stated that there were all kinds of Western agents flooding Bonn to stop the growing commercial contacts between the FRG and the USSR, especially the proposed construction of a pipeline to bring natural gas from Siberia to the West - what Schmidt, to Moscow's delight, was vigorously pressing ahead with.
With the KGB's agent - stationed in the GDR, and apparently Angela Merkel - tipping off Moscow about Washington's new arms race, it was hardly surprising that she finally received her Ph.D. in quantum chemistry. Thanks to her contacts, and the input from various illegals in the West, she had obviously learned alot about what was going on in the field. Just compiling her agent reports into a coherent document would have been enough for the Institute to give her the degree. More important, the whole field was becoming much more important with the Soviets having to face nuclear rehabilitation with its aging nuclear arms, and everyone having to worry about nuclear meltdowns of atomic plants - what happened at Chernobyl just when she received her doctorate.
Unfortunately for Merkel, her hopes for Honecker's all-German socialist republic did not work out, at least as far as we know now. Thanks to the Reagan arms buildup, and Gorbachev's refusal to engage in an arms competition after the near fatal non-nuclear showdown with the Anglo-Americans - what was to be triggered by the assassination of Sweden's statsminister Olof Palme - the communist Soviet bloc, and its individual states underwent deadly collapse, triggered by the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Merkel, to cut her losses from potential blowback, suddenly got involved in politics, joining East Germany's new party, Democratic Awakening. Following the first democratic election in the GDR, she became deputy spokesperson for the pre-unification Prime Minister Lothar de Maiziere, a long-time Christian Democratic politician, and suspected agent of Erich Mielke's Stasi - an allegation which led to his disappearance from politics after Helmut Kohl's CDU/CSU gained control of a united Germany.
Kohl's promotion thereafter of Merkel, aka his " Madchen", cost him dearly though. He had to engage in all kinds of bribes to get the Stasi to destroy embarrassing files, especially those relating to ANITA. and when he refused to identify who supplied the money, he was finished politically after 16 years in office.Then the intelligence coordinator of the Chancellor's Office, Ernst Uhrlau - who went on to become the director of Germany's foreign intelligence service (BND) - went to the greatest lengths to retrieve a Stasi index file of its agents (Operation Rosewood) that the CIA had, and was refusing to turn over. "It is unacceptable in the long run," Uhrlau explained to the Associate Press on December 10,1998 regarding the possibilities of blackmail, "for the German government that relevant files are sitting in the United States, and a possible or likely double in Russia." After a two-year effort, the files were returned to Berlin.
It was not prepared for the fact that Moscow long had held the most dangerous ones, those regarding ANITA, and they had been released to the world by the tome that Christopher Andrew wrote, thanks to the Archive Mitrokhin he had access to. This book was doubly troublesome because by that time Merkel had married, it seems, her old flame, WERNER aka Wilhelm Kahle and now divorced Joachim Sauer. They had had at the same time similiar totally unexplained careers at the Central Institute of Physical Chemistry. Sauer is even more tight-lipped about his life than she is, even declining to mention that he was born in East Germany in Senftenberg, 50 kilometers north of Dresden - where he called his mother when he got into the KGB's soup.
Of course, this would explain why Sauer has adopted such a low-profile existence to Merkel's growing importance and popularity. He seems afraid that someone, especially one of his 'honey trap' victims might still recognize him. It would also explain why his wife has the best relation with Russia's Vladimir Putin, and why she is apparently being blackmailed by the Mossad when it comes to Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, EU policy towards Iran, and missteps by the Pope when it comes to The Holocaust.
In fact, she has followed a policy so favored by the Social Democrats in the current economic meltdown that her CSU Economics Minister Michael Glos suddenly resigned two weeks ago - what the press explained in terms of an alleged lack of input when it came to economic policy-making, but he explained ominously: "She always believed I didn't have a clue about a lot of things."
It seems that as other people learn more about who Angela Merkel really is, she will have increasing political difficulties. She seems to have taken just too many risks in our ever-changing world.
Whenever a sovereign nation is conquered by another, its inhabitants, whether they be from its elite or dregs, ultimately have a hard time adjusting to foreign occupation because they don't know how long it will last, and what it may be replaced by. The process is made more difficult if it seems that there is no alternative to the conquerers, especially if they appear to represent some wave of the future. But then, there are always surprises in history, and some seemingly sure things turn out to be nothing more than delayed dead ends. Of course, the alternative to such a course is to continue to fight the occupiers tooth and nail as there seems to be no choice about the matter, but the costs of such a course are usually devastating.
The best example of the latter is the sad fate of Poland when it was confronted by nemeses on both its borders as World War II approached. It refused to compromise with either of its threatening neighbors, and paid heavily for its choice. The victim of yet more partitions of Poland, it still refused to accommodate with either of its invaders. Poland was the only country in Europe, when overrun, refused to recognize and cooperate with its conquerors. In fact, it proved so obstreperous to its Soviet occupiers that it felt obliged to execute the leading officers of its military in the infamous Katyn Forest massacres for fear that they would fight with the invading Nazis when the showdown between Berlin and Moscow finally occurred. The uncooperative Poles in the German occupied areas fared even worse as they were forced to fight back because of the Nazi liquidation of increasing numbers of its Jewish citizens, culminating in the infamous elmination of the Warsaw Ghetto.
The Poles preferred, in sum, partitions of their country aka Polonization rather than experience some kind of 'Quisling' rule - the sobriquet given the German occupation of Norway under the collaborationist administration of Vidkun Quisling. Traditionally, the term Polonization had meant the political and cultural expansion of the country at the expense of its neighbors, especially Germans and Lithuanians, but now the term was used to identify the reverse process. Ever since the failed Warsaw uprising of 1831, except for the chaos left after the collapse of World War I, the Poles had been resigned to the fate history had dictated for them, as was amply demonstrated when neither the French nor the British supplied the help they had promised when the Nazi blitzkrieg struck in 1939.
The trouble with this passive, go-it-alone strategy by the Poles when it came to improving the nation's fortunes was that it could easily be sidetracked by others. When the prospects of its government in exile in London started to improve, its head, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, was conveniently assassinated in Gibraltar by the Brits, it seems, in July 1943. Sikorski was a courageous leader who was willing to make hard choices, deciding better 'Stalin than Hitler' immediately after the Nazi forces invaded the USSR, and his vigorous cooporation with them promised some hope for the Poles in the postwar settlement - what Churchill recognized, and had MI6 apparently sabotage the plane's controls while it was refueling, making it look like a Soviet plane, parked next to it, had been its source. Without Sikorski, the anti-communist Poles tried to go it alone when the Soviets forces approached Warsaw, but Stalin would not hear of it.
The postwar settlement in Poland was the most repressive of all in Eastern Euope. The country itself was a convenient hodge-podge at German expense which just provide another example of Polonization. The terms of the Yalta Conference guaranteed that its politics would be Soviet-dominated, and the consequences were the least troublesome to its authorities when it came to anti-regime efforts, as the Vasili Mitrokhin files from the KGB demonstrate. There is hardly any mention of Poland in the book Christopher Andrew wrote about it, The Sword and The Shield, until the revival of Catholicism during the late 1970s under Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, and the rise of Lech Walesa's Solidarity Movement in the 1980s. Until then, the Polish regime had essentially bought off its opponents under the watchful eye of Moscow. When the fear of Soviet military intervention collapsed in Poland, the regime fell surprisingly quickly, like a stack of cards.
For anyone living in Europe after WWII, especially in the Soviet bloc, Poland offered the least insights into how to deal with Soviet Communism domestically, and how it would fare in the world. Poland seemed like the worst place to choose as a jumping off spot for some kind of better future as the soft, repressive character of its communist regime appeared like a fixed monolith, quite impervious to change, because of the immediate presence of the USSR right next door - what turned out to be a paper tiger when Mikael Gorbachev took over.
Actually, a more flexible, compromising attitude towards an invader seems like a more profitable course for an subject country, as France experienced under Nazi rule, and after its liberation. Paris, always worried about the discontinuaties of its turbulent past, always kept a lifeline to its republican past, no matter how comforting the autocratic ways of Marshal Pétain, and the prospects of the Nazi-invaders seemed while it too experienced partition with the creation of the Vichy regime. The duplicity of all concerned was well-illustrated by the behavior of the National Assembly which voted away its power after the fall of France, only to try to restore itself after the departure of the Germans. The Marshal's infamous Deputy Premier, Pierre Laval, and then his successor, Admiral Darlan, were quite prepared to work for the Nazis until it seemed much more profitable just to work for themselves.
The same transition occurred within the population at large, as the chorus of support for Pétain turned slowly in favor of a unfied resistance, General de Gualle was transformed from a troublesome traitor into the nation's savior, insignificant resistance groups became the National Resistance Council, and right-wing hopes of an administered autocracy were dashed by the Vichy fiasco. One can still only wonder if liberation would have turned out so well if Churchill's dealing with the difficult General had resulted in this one's assassination too. When Churchill only informed de Gaulle of the D-Day landings after they occurred, he reacted so furiously that the British Prime Minister wrote him "..a letter," Gordon Wright has written in France in Modern Times, "breaking off all personal relations and ordering de Gaulle off British soil." (p. 394) Fortunately, the letter was not sent.
The experiences of Poland and France during WWII, and in the post-war world must have influenced everyone growing up in their mutual neighbor, Germany, West and East, especially one who moved from zone one to the other. The whole socializing process on either side of the border would have created all kinds of problems between peers and parents. And it would have become even more disruptive if there was an ideological-religious difference between parents and children. The divided character of the country would have proven most vexing to all Germans, as they seemed caught up in an endless quandry of occupation - what no one really knew the outcome of, and when it would occur.
This analysis seems germane while trying to put together the life of Angela Kasner, eldest daughter of Lutheran priest Horst Kasner, and current Chancellor of the German Federal Republic, especially since she is most reluctant to talk about it. Born in Hamburg in 1954, and moved to East Germany shortly thereafter as her father obtained a pastorship in Quitzow, near Perleberg, in nearby Brandenburg, she had the Cold War almost embedded in her very bones. He was born in the Pankow district of Berlin, then part of the Soviet sector. Her mother's parents still lived in Elblag - formerly East Prussia's Elbing - in Poland when Angela was born. The area was allocated to the USSR under the terms of the 1939 Treaty with the Nazis, and was sold to the Soviets in January 1941 for $7,500,000, so the Kasners were victims too of various invasions and partitions.
The Kasners' move to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was apparently an effort to better position themselves for whatever happened to their divided country, particularly since they lived further in the GDR, setting up a household in Templin, 80 kilometers north of Berlin. While Horst was trying to improve relations between the West's and the East's Lutheran churches, Angela was attending state schools, becoming a member of its Free German Youth (FDJ) program, though she did not take part in its Jugendweihe, the secular coming of age rite, preferring to be confirmed in the Lutheran church. Apparently, there was growing tension between the stern father, and the ambitious, talented daughter. Angela became so proficient in Russian that she even won a prize.
After Angela graduated from secondary school in 1973, though, details about who she was becoming, and what she was doing become few and far between. She attended the University of Leipzig. She also married in 1976 fellow undergraudate student Ulrich Merkel, explaining that it was considered the thing to do, though they never had any children, and the marriage started breaking down as soon as she got appointed to Berlin's Academy Sciences where she became FDJ's secretary for recruiting aka 'agitprop' children of its members into its program, showing that she was covertly supporting the GDR's future. In fact, she was so busy doing other things that it wasn't until 1986 that she finally completed her Ph.D degree.
Quantum chemistry aka quantum physics is a highly theoretical field which combines quantum mechanics with general field theory, and has all kinds of practical applications regarding plasmas, nuclear rehabilitation, and electromagnetism. The Soviet Union had built all kinds of nuclear devices on a crash basis - weapons, power plants, nuclear-powered submarines, radioisotope thermo-electric generators (RTGs), etc. - and were becoming concerned about what to do with them when they were no longer useful. There were nuclear power generating plants all around the country whose safety was becoming questionable, nuclear-powered submarines around the ports of Murmansk and Archangel which were dangerously rotting away, and spent RTGs littering the Kola Peninsula.
While the Soviets did not have the resources to deal with these problems, they looked to the East Germans - whose Berlin Academy of Sciences still had a great reputation in the field - to find the know-how, given its contacts in the West. The Berlin establishment traced its origins back to 1700 when the Prussian Academy of Sciences was started, and included among its membership such distinguished scientists as Gottfried Leibniz, Max Planck, and Albert Einstein. Even though it had been revived by the GDR after WWII, it still had over 200 members, including some two dozen from the West. It had grown now to include research in quantum chemistry - where Angela was working at its Central Institute for Physical Chemistry.
To take advantage of Merkel's potential, Markus Wolf's foreign section of the Stasi, the Hauptverwaltung Aufkluring (HVA), recruited her, it seems, to handle illegal agents the GDR was sending across The Wall to gather secrets from research facilities in the Federal Republic (FRG), France, Norway, and other Western countries - what she had learned about from her meetings and contacts at the Institute.
The future seemed to be turning in the GDR's favor since détente had been established between Washington and Moscow, and the two German states had recognized one another's existence in 1972. Most important, the Stasi had nursed along Willy Brandt's bridge-building government towards the GDR until 1974 when its spies in the Chancellor's Office, the Guillaumes, were exposed, Gunter declaring proudly: "I am an officer of the (East German) National People's Army!" (Quoted from Andrew, p. 445.) Despite Wolf's claims after the GDR's collapse that this was a grave mistake - what Andrew believes - it was deliberate, thinking that it would just enhance Eric Honecker's potential in German reunification.
Thanks to the KGB Archives that its librarian Vasili Mittrokhin supplied Andrew, we now know about the extensive use of Stasi 'Romeo' spies who provided the KGB with all kinds of information. The glaring exception was the performance of Wilhelm Kahle (codenamed WERNER), a laboratory technician who assumed the identity of a West German resident in the GDR, and worked in the West in various capacities, and capitals, particularly in labs at Cologne and Bonn universities. By the late 1970s, though, his intelligence take had become too thin, though quite extensive, resulting in a ten-volume file in the Archives, that the KGB became suspicious of his bona fides, especially when it learned through his communications with his mother in East Germany that he was fearful of being recalled to Moscow because of the wealth he had amassed in Paris.
In 1978, Kahle was summoned back to Moscow, and given a lie dedector test on a contrived basis just to determine how unreliable he had become. It proved that it was extensive, resulting in its putting its most accomplished agent, codenamed ANITA - who spoke both German and Russian fluently - on the case. It was one of putting a 'Juliet' on a runaway 'Romeo', apparently a first in intellgence history. After intensive questioning during their liaisons, Andrew wrote, "ANITA's report confirmed the Centre's suspicions." (p. 450) She wrote that he had become an ideologically unreliable, completely self-serving agent who had no qualms about using others, even targets, for his own purposes. "As a result of ANITA's report," Andrew concluded, "Kahle appears to have been sidelined. He was formally removed from illegal work in 1982."
The trouble with Andrew's treatment of ANITA is that he never explained how she had become such an important counterintelligence specialist, who she might be, and why he never explained in the notes the disposition of her case since the Berlin Wall had come down, and the Cold War was over. Then Andrew went out of his way in the notes to make it appear that all 'Romeos', except Wolf's spy FELIX, had been identified - even going out of his way to account for the identity of "Franz Becker" aka Hans-Jurgen Henze (note 57, p. 649) - when there is no idenfication of either Kahle and his superior 'Romeo' ANITA.
Also, there are questions about what she might have done for the KGB after Mitrokhin's records ran out. She could well have been the KGB agent who infiltrated Egon Bahr's entourage - what Andrew mentioned when he discussed SDP Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's dealing with the newly elected President Reagan over a month's delay of his visit to Washington - what KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov explained, thanks to the KGB agent's report "of special importance", to the Soviet chief Leonid Brezhnev, was "designed to enable Washington to gain time to build up its armaments with the aim of overtaking the USSR in the military field." (Quoted from ibid, p. 455.)
The KGB source also stated that there were all kinds of Western agents flooding Bonn to stop the growing commercial contacts between the FRG and the USSR, especially the proposed construction of a pipeline to bring natural gas from Siberia to the West - what Schmidt, to Moscow's delight, was vigorously pressing ahead with.
With the KGB's agent - stationed in the GDR, and apparently Angela Merkel - tipping off Moscow about Washington's new arms race, it was hardly surprising that she finally received her Ph.D. in quantum chemistry. Thanks to her contacts, and the input from various illegals in the West, she had obviously learned alot about what was going on in the field. Just compiling her agent reports into a coherent document would have been enough for the Institute to give her the degree. More important, the whole field was becoming much more important with the Soviets having to face nuclear rehabilitation with its aging nuclear arms, and everyone having to worry about nuclear meltdowns of atomic plants - what happened at Chernobyl just when she received her doctorate.
Unfortunately for Merkel, her hopes for Honecker's all-German socialist republic did not work out, at least as far as we know now. Thanks to the Reagan arms buildup, and Gorbachev's refusal to engage in an arms competition after the near fatal non-nuclear showdown with the Anglo-Americans - what was to be triggered by the assassination of Sweden's statsminister Olof Palme - the communist Soviet bloc, and its individual states underwent deadly collapse, triggered by the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Merkel, to cut her losses from potential blowback, suddenly got involved in politics, joining East Germany's new party, Democratic Awakening. Following the first democratic election in the GDR, she became deputy spokesperson for the pre-unification Prime Minister Lothar de Maiziere, a long-time Christian Democratic politician, and suspected agent of Erich Mielke's Stasi - an allegation which led to his disappearance from politics after Helmut Kohl's CDU/CSU gained control of a united Germany.
Kohl's promotion thereafter of Merkel, aka his " Madchen", cost him dearly though. He had to engage in all kinds of bribes to get the Stasi to destroy embarrassing files, especially those relating to ANITA. and when he refused to identify who supplied the money, he was finished politically after 16 years in office.Then the intelligence coordinator of the Chancellor's Office, Ernst Uhrlau - who went on to become the director of Germany's foreign intelligence service (BND) - went to the greatest lengths to retrieve a Stasi index file of its agents (Operation Rosewood) that the CIA had, and was refusing to turn over. "It is unacceptable in the long run," Uhrlau explained to the Associate Press on December 10,1998 regarding the possibilities of blackmail, "for the German government that relevant files are sitting in the United States, and a possible or likely double in Russia." After a two-year effort, the files were returned to Berlin.
It was not prepared for the fact that Moscow long had held the most dangerous ones, those regarding ANITA, and they had been released to the world by the tome that Christopher Andrew wrote, thanks to the Archive Mitrokhin he had access to. This book was doubly troublesome because by that time Merkel had married, it seems, her old flame, WERNER aka Wilhelm Kahle and now divorced Joachim Sauer. They had had at the same time similiar totally unexplained careers at the Central Institute of Physical Chemistry. Sauer is even more tight-lipped about his life than she is, even declining to mention that he was born in East Germany in Senftenberg, 50 kilometers north of Dresden - where he called his mother when he got into the KGB's soup.
Of course, this would explain why Sauer has adopted such a low-profile existence to Merkel's growing importance and popularity. He seems afraid that someone, especially one of his 'honey trap' victims might still recognize him. It would also explain why his wife has the best relation with Russia's Vladimir Putin, and why she is apparently being blackmailed by the Mossad when it comes to Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, EU policy towards Iran, and missteps by the Pope when it comes to The Holocaust.
In fact, she has followed a policy so favored by the Social Democrats in the current economic meltdown that her CSU Economics Minister Michael Glos suddenly resigned two weeks ago - what the press explained in terms of an alleged lack of input when it came to economic policy-making, but he explained ominously: "She always believed I didn't have a clue about a lot of things."
It seems that as other people learn more about who Angela Merkel really is, she will have increasing political difficulties. She seems to have taken just too many risks in our ever-changing world.
Tuesday, 10 February 2009
Why and How Anna Lindh Was Assassinated
by Trowbridge H. Ford
In the aftermath of the bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the Bush administration was desperate to capture similar militants like the suicide bombers on the planes in the hope of learning more about what other people knew about the attacks, not so much about other possible attacks, for fear that there would be devastating blowback from the massive cock-up. The fact that no more attacks were anticipated was graphically demonstrated when President Bush continued reading to those children in the elementary school in Florida after he had been informed of the airliners being highjacked after they had taken off from distant airports in Boston, Newark, and Washington.
The Pentagon, under Donald Rumsfeld's direction, had caused the cock-up by allowing George Tenet's CIA to steal a march in its counterterrorism duel with the FBI - seriously embarrassed by the belated discovery of the spying by its agent, Robert Hanssen, for the now defunct Soviets - by allowing 15 of its agents - unarmed, and under the general direction of Barbara Olson, wife of the Solicitor General, on the plane which crashed into the Pentagon - on the last three flights in the hope that they would catch the alleged highjackers red-handed, and force them to surrender to the authorities after the four planes had landed in LA. The Secretary of Defense had assured this outcome by making himself the one to be called by the National Military Command Center in case of emergency - what resulted in him doing nothing in time to shoot down the planes when he was alerted of the highjackings.
It was to be a replay of what Tenet had arranged against Al-Qaeda attacks back in November and December 1999 during the Millennium celebrations, thanks to National Security Agency (NSA) telephone intercepts, 34 in all, resulting ultimately in the capture of Algerian jihadist, Ahmed Ressam, when he entered the USA illegally from Canada in the hope of blowing the same Los Angeles International Airport. DCI Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, tried on July 10th to get National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on board for a similar operation, thanks to all the renewed telephone noise about "something spectacular is coming" - as Bob Woodward recounted in State of Denial - but she declined to initiate an extraordinary response, opting instead for policy making to take its course - what resulted in the adoption of National Security Presidential Directive-9 just the day before the attacks.
When the hijackers turned out to be deadly suicide bombers, and carried out their assignments with essential precision, though, Tenet's covert government in Washington had a mass of damning evidence to cover up. The Agency was blamed for not taking action against the long-suspected leaders of the hijackers, Khalid Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf Al-Hazmi, from entering the country until after they were already arrived, and had then bought 10 airline tickets for men fo Middle-Eastern origin to fly to LA from Boston. While the CIA claimed that it was a lack of knowledge which permitted the disaster to happen, it was really the result of an ad-hoc remedy for the presumed highjackers rather than simply preventing them from getting on the four planes.
The immediate problem was to suppress evidence that the 15 agents were on the last three planes. To accomplish this, authorities refused to release the full passenger lists for the four flights, leaving out the names not only the 19 well-known suicide bombers by then, but also the names of the Agency agents - what would cause all kinds of damaging blowback if the general public learned of them. Of course, leaving out the names of the suicide bombers allowed all kinds of government disinformation agents and their ignorant followers to claim that there were no such people - what helped facilitate all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories - e. g., the planes were never highjacked, merely taken control of by electronic equipment on the ground by unknown conspirators who then crashed the planes where they wanted.
The existence of the 15 agents was not eliminated, though, by only releasing the abbreviated passenger lists as recorded cellphone calls by the passengers, especially from Barbara Olson to her husband Ted, kept suspicions alive that more was going on than the government was admitting. While everyone was wondering how the spooks could have screwed up so much, she was reported to have twice called the Solicitor General, confirming, apparently the expected, stating: "Our plane is being hijacked." (Quoted from "The Dead," NYHT, September 13, 2001, p. 7.) Then after the pilot had been herded unexpectedly into the back of the plane as it made its way towards The Pentagon, she called again, asking frantically: "What do I tell the pilot to do?." Apparently, there was an expectation that the hijacking would go smoothly until the plane approached its destination, what the herding of passengers, and the reversal of course indicated was no longer in the cards.
Then the government went to increasing lengths to downplay the cellphone calls, soon raising doubts that Ms. Olson had even called her husband, and then trying to make out that no calls from the planes were possible at the time of the highjacking, though there were several articles about such calls, as this article in Time reported: "HIGH IN THE AIR, FROM INSIDE THE planes and skyscrapers where their final moments slipped away, dozens of victims spoke their last words to faraway people closest to their hearts." ("The Last Phone Call," September 24, 2001 issue, p. 76) The government so persisted, though, that the calls from the planes were most unlikely, if they ever really occurred, that the Solicitor General ultimately doubted that he really spoke to Barbara during the last minutes of her life!
Of course, immediately after the attacks occurred, all kinds of blowback began to surface in the leaderless, embarrassed FBI. Louis Freeh had retired the previous May as Director, and his replacement, Robert Mueller, was still in hospital, recovering from an operation. More important, the Bureau's most dedicated counterterrorist, John O'Neill, had been so isolated from the hunt for the highjackers that he had not only resigned, but was also killed in the WTC collapse. (For more on this, see Trowbridge Ford, "O'Neill: A Voice in the Wilderness," Eye Spy, Issue Thirteen, pp. 22-3.)
Bureau agents in Minneapolis had such well-founded suspicions, thanks to input that the imprisoned Ahmed Ressam had supplied, that Zacarias Moussaoui was involved in some kind of highjacking that they had arrested him for immigration fraud, but superiors in Washington, apparently not to tip off the other highjackers what it knew, had not allowed them to pursue the case further. Special Agent Ken Williams in Phoenix had alerted headquarters in Washington of several persons of Middle East origin, seeking suspicious limited pilot training, but nothing was done about it. Then Mohammad Al-Kahtani tried to enter the USA in Orlando in August, apparently as a "muscle man" for the understaffed flight which crashed in Pennsylvania, but was denied entry - ending up as one of the first inmates of the notorious prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba aka Gitmo.
None of these arrests, even after Al-Kahtani was tortured, resulted in any significant information about who had planned the attacks, really knew about them, and represented serious threats to the administration in Washington if what they knew really leaked out. To meet this challenge, two days after the attacks, President Bush instituted the extraordinary rendition policy - sending suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists to places like Saudi Arabia for harsh interrogation to make them talk. "In the immediate wake of 9/11," Bob Woodward wrote in State of Denial, "Bush wanted answers from those who had been detained." (p. 81) Of course, it wasn't clear what the questions really were, so the Agency went for broke to get as many possible sources of information for questions that might become necessary - what resulted in apparently the first rendering of suspects in a trolling way - the shipment of Egyptian-born Ahmed Agiza and Mohammed Al-Zery from Stockholm to Cairo on December 18, 2001.
Before this, over 200 suspects arrested for terrorism had been sent to various secret locations in the hope of finding out more about what they apparently knew through harsh measures since the US Constitution did permit unrestricted interrogations of its residents. The most successful rendering of terrorist suspects had been that of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef - the mastermind of the 1993 WTC bombing, and a nephew of Al-Qaeda leader Khalid Mohammad - from Islamabad back to the States in 1995 by the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Egyptian authorities had not only warned American ones about the bombing, but also had kept track of where Yousef had disappeared to. Agiza and Al-Zery seemed to be ideal sources for a deep 'fishing trip' with the Egyptians for more possible suspects since they were connected to the jihardists who had assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
Cairo, it seems, alerted the State Department that it was still looking into the alleged terrorism that Agiza and Al-Zery had committed, and would like to interrogate them further. The Egyptian authorities had gone to the State Department because it had no confidence in working with either the FBI or the CIA because, as the Yousef problem demonstrated, they always worked at cross purposes. (For more on this, see Mark Riebling, Wedge:The Secret War Between The FBI And CIA, p. 433ff.) State's Bureau of Diplomatic Security then contacted the Foreign Department in Stockholm, stating that it was of the utmost urgency that they be taken to Egypt for questioning about possible threats against American establishments, especially the Embassy, in Sweden.
Despite the BDS's success in Yousef's capture, things had not gone well with it since, thanks to budget cuts, and security lapses, so it was looking for some big surprise to improve its funding and stature. Its biggest problem was failling to prevent the attacks on its embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1996, and then there were the disappearances of secret information through either institutional or personal failure. It was also still suffering from the blowback from the spying in 1989 for the Soviets by the State Department's Felix Bloch - the most important one it ever experienced - especially since he escaped prosecution for it because of the lack of proper coordination with other law enforcement agencies.
To help prevent this in future, State had established a Rewards for Justice program where it was willing to pay up to $5,000,000 to anyone preventing such security failure. Since it was started in 1984, about 40 persons had been paid nearly $62,000,000 by the program.
Under the circumstances, Foreign Minister Anna Lindh had little choice but to go along with the request after informing the Göran Persson's Cabinet of it, and gaining its approval of it. According to her former press secretary, Eva Franchell, in Girlfiend, an account from Rosenbad, Lindh was told she would be sacked if she didn't. While she was marking arrangements for their orderly deportation, though, the process was speeded by Såpo agents on the afternoon of December 18th when the suspects were taken to the police office at Bromma Airport where they met by two officials from the American Embassy, apparently the BDS's regional director, and the CIA's resident. When they checked in there with police officer Paul Forell, Stephen Grey wrote in Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Rendition and Torture Program, "they gave their first names and said they were from the U. S. Embassy. They obviously knew the SAPO officers officers, he recalled."
Of course, this raised the real possibility that the Såpo agents thought they were in the running for some kind of reward from the State Department's justice program, explaining why they were so eager to do the work. They were certainly in the running for something as they were not just informing the BDS of possible terrorism but were actually handing over the suspects allegedly involved in it. Little wonder, then, they stood back, and watched confidently as the two were taken to one of the CIA's Gulfstream V jets where they were stripped of their grab, sedated with suppositories for the trip, dressed in prisoner uniforms, and chained to the plane for the flight to Egypt.
Since the suspects just disappeared without a trace for almost everyone, it took awhile for Swedish authorities to learn what had happened to them, Thomas Bodström learned in January from Såpo director Jan Danielsson that the suspects had been whisked away to Cairo by the CIA. Lindh learned from them what had happened to them, and what feedback they were supplying their torturers about their alleged colleagues - what proved to be little more than what they had learned during their stays in the Middle East about who might have worked for Al-Qaeda and Saddam in most menial capacities.
In June, US Attorney General announced that José Padilla, who planned to set off a 'dirty' bomb in the States, had been captured, thanks to the information which had been tortured out of British resident Binyam Mohammed after he had been snatched away at Karachi Airport because of MI6 tipoffs, and rendered by the CIA to Morocco. Then Lindh leared from British Foreigin Secretary Jack Straw, with whom she had close relations, about other renderings involving British territory, especially those of Australian David Hicks, and Tunisian Abdellah Al-Hajji who was caught in Pakistan and rendered shortly thereafter to the American prison in Gitmo. Britain was the focal point of the rendition transit system, and the Foreign Office was the best informed agency in the world about what was going on.
Under these circumstances, the Swedish Foreign Department was not about to go along with another unannounced rendering of a Swedish resident, this time fellow Tunisian Kerim Chatty, when he attempted to board a RyanAir flight from Västerås to London Stansted on August 29, 2002. Chatty was an ideal follower to the 9/11 suicide bombers, having attended flight training courses in South Carolina in 1996, and having converted to radicial Islam while serving a prison sentence for illegal arms possession. It was with a similar illegal, loaded pistol that Chatty tried to get on the plane - what a military source, apparently America's Defense Intelligence Agency, later told Reuters - with the plan "...to crash the plane into a US embassy in Europe."
To make the plan seem even more real, the Embassy in Stockholm had installed many illlegal cameras around its premises to catch anyone on tape, casing the joint.
While one cannot be sure what US agents planned for if Chatty had gotten on the flight, it seems likely it was to be a replay of what their deceased predecessors had planned on 9/11, only this time there would be enough physical power to make sure that he did not get control of the plane, much less attempt to crash it into the Stockholm facility. This time Såpo was on a very short leash, thanks to strict instructions from the Foreign Department, not even allowing Chatty to get on the plane, but charging him with attempted highjacking. Then Såpo denied the claims about Chatty being on a suicide mission, dismissing them as disinformation. Ultimately, Chatty was not even charged with attempted highjacking, only found guilty in December of firearms offences for which he was sentenced to four months in prison.
Foreign Secretary Lindh was radicalized by this whole process. Now she, during Sweden's Presidency of the European Commission, was committed to building up democracy in Serbia, strengthening the EU, settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, preventing the ouster of Saddam Hussein's regime without a UN mandate, and stopping extra-judicial killings by the Americans and their allies in the war on terrorism. She also called for greater respect for international law and human rights in the conduct of foreign affairs, especially in Palestine. At the end of January, she called for Ariel Sharon's government to "end the occupation, give up settlements, and agree on a pragmatic solution to Jerusalem." Most observers saw these initiatives as her staking her claims to be Sweden's next Prime Minister.
Unfortunately, this was not to be, as she was stopped every step of the way, ultimately resulting in her being assassinated. Her attempt to bolster Zoran Djinjic's fledgling democratic government in Serbia - which had sent Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague's War Crimes Tribunal - was stopped cold when she went to meet him in Belgrade as he too was assassinated right before the meeting was scheduled to take place. Lindh was unsuccessful in stopping the invasion of Iraq without a mandate - what could only have happened if the UN arms inspectors had discovered evidence that Saddam had restarted his WMD programs. And Washington and Tel Aviv were in no way moved by her recommendations or restrained by her complaints. Actually, they only moved her into the bullseye, as I have already indicated in my article about her assassination.
The trigger was the feared blowback from the murder of Dr. David Kelly on July 17, 2003 In Oxfordshire - what was necessary because of what the famous weapons inspector planned to do, now that it had been determined that there was no WMD justification for the invasion of Iraq, a finding which Lindh was bound to take the greatest advantage of within the EU. When the Hutton Inquiry suspended its hearings in early September without a clear indication of how it would rule on his killing, covert operators - a Mossad kidon apparently, as in the killings of Djinjic and Kelly - carried out the assassination.
This time, though, it was neither the result of distant snipers, nor an apparent suicide, but a Serbian - high on drugs, and hearing microwave instructions aka 'voices' - who was directed to the murder site, Stockholm's famous NK department store, after stealing a weapon from another store along the way, where he was moved by still more 'voices' to cut up the defenseless woman with near impunity, as the Swedish Security Service had not seen fit to provide her, of all the leading politicians, with bodyguard protection.
One, in light of what had happened to Olof Palme, and what Lindh had done, can only wonder why.
In the aftermath of the bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the Bush administration was desperate to capture similar militants like the suicide bombers on the planes in the hope of learning more about what other people knew about the attacks, not so much about other possible attacks, for fear that there would be devastating blowback from the massive cock-up. The fact that no more attacks were anticipated was graphically demonstrated when President Bush continued reading to those children in the elementary school in Florida after he had been informed of the airliners being highjacked after they had taken off from distant airports in Boston, Newark, and Washington.
The Pentagon, under Donald Rumsfeld's direction, had caused the cock-up by allowing George Tenet's CIA to steal a march in its counterterrorism duel with the FBI - seriously embarrassed by the belated discovery of the spying by its agent, Robert Hanssen, for the now defunct Soviets - by allowing 15 of its agents - unarmed, and under the general direction of Barbara Olson, wife of the Solicitor General, on the plane which crashed into the Pentagon - on the last three flights in the hope that they would catch the alleged highjackers red-handed, and force them to surrender to the authorities after the four planes had landed in LA. The Secretary of Defense had assured this outcome by making himself the one to be called by the National Military Command Center in case of emergency - what resulted in him doing nothing in time to shoot down the planes when he was alerted of the highjackings.
It was to be a replay of what Tenet had arranged against Al-Qaeda attacks back in November and December 1999 during the Millennium celebrations, thanks to National Security Agency (NSA) telephone intercepts, 34 in all, resulting ultimately in the capture of Algerian jihadist, Ahmed Ressam, when he entered the USA illegally from Canada in the hope of blowing the same Los Angeles International Airport. DCI Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, tried on July 10th to get National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on board for a similar operation, thanks to all the renewed telephone noise about "something spectacular is coming" - as Bob Woodward recounted in State of Denial - but she declined to initiate an extraordinary response, opting instead for policy making to take its course - what resulted in the adoption of National Security Presidential Directive-9 just the day before the attacks.
When the hijackers turned out to be deadly suicide bombers, and carried out their assignments with essential precision, though, Tenet's covert government in Washington had a mass of damning evidence to cover up. The Agency was blamed for not taking action against the long-suspected leaders of the hijackers, Khalid Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf Al-Hazmi, from entering the country until after they were already arrived, and had then bought 10 airline tickets for men fo Middle-Eastern origin to fly to LA from Boston. While the CIA claimed that it was a lack of knowledge which permitted the disaster to happen, it was really the result of an ad-hoc remedy for the presumed highjackers rather than simply preventing them from getting on the four planes.
The immediate problem was to suppress evidence that the 15 agents were on the last three planes. To accomplish this, authorities refused to release the full passenger lists for the four flights, leaving out the names not only the 19 well-known suicide bombers by then, but also the names of the Agency agents - what would cause all kinds of damaging blowback if the general public learned of them. Of course, leaving out the names of the suicide bombers allowed all kinds of government disinformation agents and their ignorant followers to claim that there were no such people - what helped facilitate all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories - e. g., the planes were never highjacked, merely taken control of by electronic equipment on the ground by unknown conspirators who then crashed the planes where they wanted.
The existence of the 15 agents was not eliminated, though, by only releasing the abbreviated passenger lists as recorded cellphone calls by the passengers, especially from Barbara Olson to her husband Ted, kept suspicions alive that more was going on than the government was admitting. While everyone was wondering how the spooks could have screwed up so much, she was reported to have twice called the Solicitor General, confirming, apparently the expected, stating: "Our plane is being hijacked." (Quoted from "The Dead," NYHT, September 13, 2001, p. 7.) Then after the pilot had been herded unexpectedly into the back of the plane as it made its way towards The Pentagon, she called again, asking frantically: "What do I tell the pilot to do?." Apparently, there was an expectation that the hijacking would go smoothly until the plane approached its destination, what the herding of passengers, and the reversal of course indicated was no longer in the cards.
Then the government went to increasing lengths to downplay the cellphone calls, soon raising doubts that Ms. Olson had even called her husband, and then trying to make out that no calls from the planes were possible at the time of the highjacking, though there were several articles about such calls, as this article in Time reported: "HIGH IN THE AIR, FROM INSIDE THE planes and skyscrapers where their final moments slipped away, dozens of victims spoke their last words to faraway people closest to their hearts." ("The Last Phone Call," September 24, 2001 issue, p. 76) The government so persisted, though, that the calls from the planes were most unlikely, if they ever really occurred, that the Solicitor General ultimately doubted that he really spoke to Barbara during the last minutes of her life!
Of course, immediately after the attacks occurred, all kinds of blowback began to surface in the leaderless, embarrassed FBI. Louis Freeh had retired the previous May as Director, and his replacement, Robert Mueller, was still in hospital, recovering from an operation. More important, the Bureau's most dedicated counterterrorist, John O'Neill, had been so isolated from the hunt for the highjackers that he had not only resigned, but was also killed in the WTC collapse. (For more on this, see Trowbridge Ford, "O'Neill: A Voice in the Wilderness," Eye Spy, Issue Thirteen, pp. 22-3.)
Bureau agents in Minneapolis had such well-founded suspicions, thanks to input that the imprisoned Ahmed Ressam had supplied, that Zacarias Moussaoui was involved in some kind of highjacking that they had arrested him for immigration fraud, but superiors in Washington, apparently not to tip off the other highjackers what it knew, had not allowed them to pursue the case further. Special Agent Ken Williams in Phoenix had alerted headquarters in Washington of several persons of Middle East origin, seeking suspicious limited pilot training, but nothing was done about it. Then Mohammad Al-Kahtani tried to enter the USA in Orlando in August, apparently as a "muscle man" for the understaffed flight which crashed in Pennsylvania, but was denied entry - ending up as one of the first inmates of the notorious prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba aka Gitmo.
None of these arrests, even after Al-Kahtani was tortured, resulted in any significant information about who had planned the attacks, really knew about them, and represented serious threats to the administration in Washington if what they knew really leaked out. To meet this challenge, two days after the attacks, President Bush instituted the extraordinary rendition policy - sending suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists to places like Saudi Arabia for harsh interrogation to make them talk. "In the immediate wake of 9/11," Bob Woodward wrote in State of Denial, "Bush wanted answers from those who had been detained." (p. 81) Of course, it wasn't clear what the questions really were, so the Agency went for broke to get as many possible sources of information for questions that might become necessary - what resulted in apparently the first rendering of suspects in a trolling way - the shipment of Egyptian-born Ahmed Agiza and Mohammed Al-Zery from Stockholm to Cairo on December 18, 2001.
Before this, over 200 suspects arrested for terrorism had been sent to various secret locations in the hope of finding out more about what they apparently knew through harsh measures since the US Constitution did permit unrestricted interrogations of its residents. The most successful rendering of terrorist suspects had been that of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef - the mastermind of the 1993 WTC bombing, and a nephew of Al-Qaeda leader Khalid Mohammad - from Islamabad back to the States in 1995 by the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Egyptian authorities had not only warned American ones about the bombing, but also had kept track of where Yousef had disappeared to. Agiza and Al-Zery seemed to be ideal sources for a deep 'fishing trip' with the Egyptians for more possible suspects since they were connected to the jihardists who had assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
Cairo, it seems, alerted the State Department that it was still looking into the alleged terrorism that Agiza and Al-Zery had committed, and would like to interrogate them further. The Egyptian authorities had gone to the State Department because it had no confidence in working with either the FBI or the CIA because, as the Yousef problem demonstrated, they always worked at cross purposes. (For more on this, see Mark Riebling, Wedge:The Secret War Between The FBI And CIA, p. 433ff.) State's Bureau of Diplomatic Security then contacted the Foreign Department in Stockholm, stating that it was of the utmost urgency that they be taken to Egypt for questioning about possible threats against American establishments, especially the Embassy, in Sweden.
Despite the BDS's success in Yousef's capture, things had not gone well with it since, thanks to budget cuts, and security lapses, so it was looking for some big surprise to improve its funding and stature. Its biggest problem was failling to prevent the attacks on its embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1996, and then there were the disappearances of secret information through either institutional or personal failure. It was also still suffering from the blowback from the spying in 1989 for the Soviets by the State Department's Felix Bloch - the most important one it ever experienced - especially since he escaped prosecution for it because of the lack of proper coordination with other law enforcement agencies.
To help prevent this in future, State had established a Rewards for Justice program where it was willing to pay up to $5,000,000 to anyone preventing such security failure. Since it was started in 1984, about 40 persons had been paid nearly $62,000,000 by the program.
Under the circumstances, Foreign Minister Anna Lindh had little choice but to go along with the request after informing the Göran Persson's Cabinet of it, and gaining its approval of it. According to her former press secretary, Eva Franchell, in Girlfiend, an account from Rosenbad, Lindh was told she would be sacked if she didn't. While she was marking arrangements for their orderly deportation, though, the process was speeded by Såpo agents on the afternoon of December 18th when the suspects were taken to the police office at Bromma Airport where they met by two officials from the American Embassy, apparently the BDS's regional director, and the CIA's resident. When they checked in there with police officer Paul Forell, Stephen Grey wrote in Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Rendition and Torture Program, "they gave their first names and said they were from the U. S. Embassy. They obviously knew the SAPO officers officers, he recalled."
Of course, this raised the real possibility that the Såpo agents thought they were in the running for some kind of reward from the State Department's justice program, explaining why they were so eager to do the work. They were certainly in the running for something as they were not just informing the BDS of possible terrorism but were actually handing over the suspects allegedly involved in it. Little wonder, then, they stood back, and watched confidently as the two were taken to one of the CIA's Gulfstream V jets where they were stripped of their grab, sedated with suppositories for the trip, dressed in prisoner uniforms, and chained to the plane for the flight to Egypt.
Since the suspects just disappeared without a trace for almost everyone, it took awhile for Swedish authorities to learn what had happened to them, Thomas Bodström learned in January from Såpo director Jan Danielsson that the suspects had been whisked away to Cairo by the CIA. Lindh learned from them what had happened to them, and what feedback they were supplying their torturers about their alleged colleagues - what proved to be little more than what they had learned during their stays in the Middle East about who might have worked for Al-Qaeda and Saddam in most menial capacities.
In June, US Attorney General announced that José Padilla, who planned to set off a 'dirty' bomb in the States, had been captured, thanks to the information which had been tortured out of British resident Binyam Mohammed after he had been snatched away at Karachi Airport because of MI6 tipoffs, and rendered by the CIA to Morocco. Then Lindh leared from British Foreigin Secretary Jack Straw, with whom she had close relations, about other renderings involving British territory, especially those of Australian David Hicks, and Tunisian Abdellah Al-Hajji who was caught in Pakistan and rendered shortly thereafter to the American prison in Gitmo. Britain was the focal point of the rendition transit system, and the Foreign Office was the best informed agency in the world about what was going on.
Under these circumstances, the Swedish Foreign Department was not about to go along with another unannounced rendering of a Swedish resident, this time fellow Tunisian Kerim Chatty, when he attempted to board a RyanAir flight from Västerås to London Stansted on August 29, 2002. Chatty was an ideal follower to the 9/11 suicide bombers, having attended flight training courses in South Carolina in 1996, and having converted to radicial Islam while serving a prison sentence for illegal arms possession. It was with a similar illegal, loaded pistol that Chatty tried to get on the plane - what a military source, apparently America's Defense Intelligence Agency, later told Reuters - with the plan "...to crash the plane into a US embassy in Europe."
To make the plan seem even more real, the Embassy in Stockholm had installed many illlegal cameras around its premises to catch anyone on tape, casing the joint.
While one cannot be sure what US agents planned for if Chatty had gotten on the flight, it seems likely it was to be a replay of what their deceased predecessors had planned on 9/11, only this time there would be enough physical power to make sure that he did not get control of the plane, much less attempt to crash it into the Stockholm facility. This time Såpo was on a very short leash, thanks to strict instructions from the Foreign Department, not even allowing Chatty to get on the plane, but charging him with attempted highjacking. Then Såpo denied the claims about Chatty being on a suicide mission, dismissing them as disinformation. Ultimately, Chatty was not even charged with attempted highjacking, only found guilty in December of firearms offences for which he was sentenced to four months in prison.
Foreign Secretary Lindh was radicalized by this whole process. Now she, during Sweden's Presidency of the European Commission, was committed to building up democracy in Serbia, strengthening the EU, settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, preventing the ouster of Saddam Hussein's regime without a UN mandate, and stopping extra-judicial killings by the Americans and their allies in the war on terrorism. She also called for greater respect for international law and human rights in the conduct of foreign affairs, especially in Palestine. At the end of January, she called for Ariel Sharon's government to "end the occupation, give up settlements, and agree on a pragmatic solution to Jerusalem." Most observers saw these initiatives as her staking her claims to be Sweden's next Prime Minister.
Unfortunately, this was not to be, as she was stopped every step of the way, ultimately resulting in her being assassinated. Her attempt to bolster Zoran Djinjic's fledgling democratic government in Serbia - which had sent Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague's War Crimes Tribunal - was stopped cold when she went to meet him in Belgrade as he too was assassinated right before the meeting was scheduled to take place. Lindh was unsuccessful in stopping the invasion of Iraq without a mandate - what could only have happened if the UN arms inspectors had discovered evidence that Saddam had restarted his WMD programs. And Washington and Tel Aviv were in no way moved by her recommendations or restrained by her complaints. Actually, they only moved her into the bullseye, as I have already indicated in my article about her assassination.
The trigger was the feared blowback from the murder of Dr. David Kelly on July 17, 2003 In Oxfordshire - what was necessary because of what the famous weapons inspector planned to do, now that it had been determined that there was no WMD justification for the invasion of Iraq, a finding which Lindh was bound to take the greatest advantage of within the EU. When the Hutton Inquiry suspended its hearings in early September without a clear indication of how it would rule on his killing, covert operators - a Mossad kidon apparently, as in the killings of Djinjic and Kelly - carried out the assassination.
This time, though, it was neither the result of distant snipers, nor an apparent suicide, but a Serbian - high on drugs, and hearing microwave instructions aka 'voices' - who was directed to the murder site, Stockholm's famous NK department store, after stealing a weapon from another store along the way, where he was moved by still more 'voices' to cut up the defenseless woman with near impunity, as the Swedish Security Service had not seen fit to provide her, of all the leading politicians, with bodyguard protection.
One, in light of what had happened to Olof Palme, and what Lindh had done, can only wonder why.
Monday, 26 January 2009
Friday, 28 November 2008
Mumbai The Mossad Angle
by Amaresh Misra
It is 4AM in India right now. I am in Mumbai reporting from the ground. I have not slept a wink. Mumbai is under attack. People and forces who killed Mahatama Gandhi, who demolished the Babari Mosque have triumphed. More than 16 groups of terrorists have taken over Taj, Oberai and several hotels. Hundreds of people are dead. For the first time no one is blaming Muslim organizations. The Mumbai ATS chief Hemant Karkare and other officers of the ATS have been killed. These were the same people who were investigating the Malegaon Blasts–in which Praggya Singh, an army officer and several other noted personalities of the BJP-RSS-Bajrang Dal-VHP were arrested. Karkare was the man to arrest them. Karkare was receiving threats from several quarters. LK Advani, the BJP chief and several other prominent leaders of the so-called Hindu terrorism squad were gunning for his head. And the first casualty in the terrorist attack was Karkare! He is dead–gone–the firing by terrorists began from Nariman House–which is the only building in Mumbai inhabited by Jews. Some Hindu Gujaratis of the Nariman area spoke live on several TV channels–they openly said that the firing by terrorists began from Nariman house. And that for two years suspicious activities were going on in this house. But no one took notice.
Our worst fears have come true. It is clear that Mossad is involved in the whole affair. An entire city has been attacked by Mossad and probably units of mercenaries. It is not possible for one single organization to plan and execute such a sophisticated operation. It is clear that this operation was backed by communal forces from within the Indian State. The Home Minister Shivraj Patil should resign. The RSS-BJP-VHP-Bajrang Dal should be banned. Advani and others ought to be arrested. Today is a day of shame for all Indians and all Hindus. Muslims and secular Hindus have been proven right. RSS type forces and Israel are all involved in not only destabilizing but finishing India. India should immediately snap all relations with Israel. We owe this much to Karkare and the brave ATS men who had shown the courage to arrest Praggya Singh, Raj Kumar Purohit, the army officer and several others.
A photograph publushed in Urdu Times, Mumbai, clearly shows that Mossad and ex-Mossad men came to India and met Sadhus and other pro-Hindutva elements recently. A conspiracy was clearly hatched.
This is a moment of reckoning especially for Hindus of India. The killers of Gandhi have struck again. If we are true Sanatanis and true Hindus and true nationalists and true patriots we have to see this act as a clear attack by anti-national deshdrohi forces. Praggya Singh, Advani and the entire brand is anti-national. They ought to be shot. Any Hindu siding with them is hereafter warned of serious consequences.
This is a question of nationalism. If no one else, the Indian army will not take this lying down. Communal, anti-national forces have attacked the very foundation of the Indian constitution and the nation. We will fight a civil war if need be against the pro-Hindutva, communal forces and their Israeli backers.
Full story...
Wednesday, 5 November 2008
Thank you America!!!
Congratulations President-elect Obama. In case you're wondering that noise you're hearing is 6 billion people taking a deep breath. The ball is in your court now Mr President, you have the hopes of an entire planet resting with you. Please don't let us down!
Full story...
Tuesday, 4 November 2008
Then There Was The Pim Fortuyn Assassination
by Trowbridge H. Ford
Once Jörg Haider resigned as leader of the Freedom Party in Austria's newly-established governing coalition with the Austrian People's Party in February 2000, it was time for the Mossad's Zev Barken aka Bruckenstein to move on. The anti-Haider riots in Vienna on the 6th in which over 50 people were ínjured, most of them policemen, had achieved their purpose, and the mechanism Barkan had established for producing them - foreigners, especially German and American protesters, using false passports that the Mossad had gotten eleswhere, mostly from tourists in Asia - was well in place if needed again. Josef Fritzl, aka Wilhelm Kramm and the 'mad Austrian', was also readily available in Anstetten, and firmly entrenched in the process of arranging the transfer of false identities, thanks to his sexual enslavement of his daughter Elisabeth in his basement dungeon which he was being blackmailed over, to keep it going when required.
And the Mossad still had infiltrated Haider's private office, with its secret agent Peter Sichrovsky acting as his private secretary. Sichrovsky would be in an ideal position to know if, and when Haider decided to contest the claims that the Tageszeitung had made that he was gay - what had been circulating around Austrian circles for the last decade. Any truth to the claim has yet to be provided, making one suspect, at best, that it goes back to Haider's early student days before he got married. Whether true or not, the big thing was to be in a position to make a most shocking case about the allegation if Haider ever sought to deny it, or override it in making a political comeback.
To minimize action in this direction, Barkan by now had helped organize the Publix Theatre Caravan to travel around the country to make the most persuasive case against everything Haider stood for. The group - made up of druggies, gays, and anarchists - had originally taken possession of the Ernst Kirchwegan Haus (EKH) in Vienna, and soon it was putting its skills together in popular, impromptu performances which stressed a social-democratic agenda - accepting homosexuality, encouraging immigration, condemning racism and anti-semitism, European expansion, etc. It recalled the efforts by Kurt Weill during the beleaguered days of the Weimar Republic. Thanks to government support, the group planned to carry their campaign to other Austrian cities in May, and then it would take its message to Klagenfurt, the center of Carinthia where Haider remained as governor.
The effectiveness of these measures was well demonstrated when the EKH people organized demonstrations against the Opera Ball festivities on Feb. 22, 2001 - complaining about Austria's isolation from the EU because of Haider's Freedom Party continuing to be part of the governing coalition, a condition which prevented many international big-wigs from attending the annual event. In fact, the government's riot police aka the Cobra force got so riled up over what the beatniks were doing that it attacked those in EKH with great brutality, causing the coalition further embarrassment. The riot police justified its actions by complaining that many "professional troublemakers", using false passports, generally German ones, had come into the city to cause trouble, resulting in the arrest of 42 of them.
With Haider so much on the defensive, it was time for the Mossad to move back to the heart of the problem rather than stay on the periphery - the problems shaping up at Brussels while the European Union was seeking radical expansion. The problems could become insurmountable if all the sexual excesses of its leadership came out - what the prosecution of paedophile Marc Dutroux still threatened. While Dutroux had been arrested over four years before, he had not been tried for any crime, only having confessed to the rape of six young girls, and the killing of four of them.
Dutroux had focused concerns more upon himself by escaping from prison miraculously before he had even begun being prosecuted, the primary reason for the stoppage being the sacking of investigating Judge Jean-Marc Connerette, about the only Belgian really interested in getting to the bottom of the gigantic crime wave, for alleged conflict of interest. He had collected the testimony of about a dozen witnesses, mostly adult women, who had survived their ordeal with their kidnappers. It was quite probable that Barkan took leave of the Israeli Embassy in Brussels then for a post in Vienna for fear of being exposed in the process.
Then Judge Jean-Cluade Van Espen, who had represented the former wife of a partner of Dutroux’s in crime, Jean-Michel Nihoul -a real conflict of interest -, had prevented any progress in the case until 1998 when he was finally forced to resign. In the meantime, the Belgium police had ruled Dutroux simply a pervert, Nihoul totally innocent, and the prime witnesses against them, especially Regina Louf, as completely unreliable liars and kooks. Finally, in 2000, the Belgium authorities prosecuted Dutroux for theft and assault, resulting in his being sentenced to five years in prison, to ease the embarrassment over failing to prosecute him for his real crimes.
Furthermore, other witnesses, about 20 in all, were dying like flies. It had all started before Dutroux was even arrested with truck driver Bruno Tagliaferro being poisoned because he knew that Dutroux had abducted two of the young girls, and his partner Fabienne Jaupart joined him in December 1998 in a set fire because she too knew too much. Then Anna Konjevoda, who was tempted to provide information about Dutroux's operations in Eastern Europe on investigating magistrate Connerette's open line, but somehow didn't, was beaten, strangled, and her body thrown into the Maas River a year and a half later though she never testified what she knew. Sandra Claeys, a former girlfriend of Dutroux accomplice Michel Lelièvre, committed suicide on November 4, 1999.
For more on this, see this link, The Institute For The Study of Globalization and Covert Politics listing of "alleged assassinations in Belgian history".
The most interesting of the killings, though, was that of Chris van der Werken - a former professional friend of Volkert van der Graff, and residing near him in Harderwijk, east of Amsterdam -shot twice in the back while he was walking in a forest nearby in December 1996. Van der Werken apparently knew too much about Volkert for his own good. Van der Graff, of course, would assassinate Dutch maverick politician Wilhelmus Simon 'Pim' Fortuyn five and a half years later.
Regina Louf knew about a much wider, vicious operation than Belgium officials were claiming, and went public with her information, once the Belgium Superior Court dismissed it as lies which would never be used in any trial of Dutroux or his associates. She was born in Ghent in 1968, but moved to Knokke, on the Belgian-Dutch border - across the Scheldt estuary from Middleburg in Holland - when she was three where her grandmother soon put her to work as a prostitute. "Among those who shared her at house parties," Frank Connolly of The Sunday Business Post reported just before Fortuyn was assassinated, "were some of Belgium's most powerful and famous citizens - and paedophiles." While she provided the the names of several leading figures who had abused her, especially "another man still in poltics at a high level," Connolly understandably declined to identify them.
In 1979 when she returned home to Ghent, her abuse bacame even worse as she was turned over to her mother's lover, boarder Tony Van den Bogaert, who pimped her services for everything imaginable, including sado-masochistic parties in townhouses, country estates, and even on a boat from Brussels to the Dutch border. Dutroux's ultimate prosecutor explained that if only a small fraction of her claims turned out to be true, it would mean the end of Belgium. "There are connections," he added, "with the Netherlands and France."
Louf claimed that Dutroux was just part of a satanic cult, run by Nihoul, Michel Vandereist and others which killed young people in wild orgies - what she recalled after Dutroux was arrested. Bogaert had sold her to the Nihoul ring who terrorized her, on and off, for 15 years. She only escaped because she found a man, Erwer, during the ordeal who agreed to marry her, and this allowed her to finally escape their clutches.
The most alarming aspect about Louf's testimony was that she was able to provide concrete details, names, and places about where these terrible acts had occurred, particularly the murders of Carine Dellaert in 1982, of Catherine de Cuyper a few years later, and of Christine Van Hees in 1984. Hees' murder occurred at the mushroom farmhouse ruins at Champignonn`ere in Auderghem, just east of Brussels. Louf had advised Hees to strike up a love affair like she had in order to escape from the place. When Vandereist got wind of the plan, he killed her in order to win a bet with Nihoul about who could kill one of kidnapped kids first. "I didn't know that this affair had caused so much fuss in Brussels over the years," Louf explained in a January 10, 1998 interview about her slowness in coming forward earlier.
When Barkan got back in the area, Brussels it seems, he immediately put pressure on those who wanted to know more about, or were marginally connected to the whole satanic operation to vacate the scene, one way or another - after others had provided most diverting disinformation to faraway places from what had happened of a most corrupt nature around EU and NATO headquarters during the past decade. The first people died in most suspicious ways, apparent assassinations intended to limit investigations to those already suspected so that the people really behind the whole blackmailing operation, the Mossad, were not even suspected.
Barkan's associates, headed by Arie Scher, had deliberately opened its own paeodophile ring with Israelis in distant Brazil to give the impression that it had nothing to do with what was happening around Belgium. It's SOP with the Mossad, as was most recently demonstrated right after Haider was assassinated, Mossad Director Meir Dagan immediately circulating the rumor that the same thing had almost happened to him in faraway Amman, Jordan.
The killing campaign started on March 1, 2001 when paedophile hunter in the Dutroux affair, Jean-Jacques Feront, died of an apparent heart attack. Four weeks later, Nadege Renard, ex-girlfriend of high society brothel keeper in Charleroi Jean Pol Taminiau - who was assassinated in 1995 - apparently committed most belated suicide. In May, Pierre-Paul 'Pepe' De Rycke, owner of the fascist Jonathan Club who knew Nihoul quite well, committed suicide too apparently. More important, in November, Philippe Deleuze, brother-in-law of Judge Van Espen, and a partner in the legal firm of Boutyal and Nihoul, died from a strange disease.
The whole process peaked on March 17, 2002 - after Dagan had taken over official control of the Mossad - when Alain Van der Biest was harried so much that he too committed suicide. Biest had been the Minister of Interior when Dutroux was released from prison in 1991 after having only served 3 of a 13-year sentence for rape. Moreover, Biest was suspected of having been behind the assassination of Walloon, Socialist politician André Cools in 1994. The suspicion essentially rested on the fact that one of the suspected gunmen, Richard Taxquet, had been Biest's former chauffeur but it could have been just the basis of a set up. Cools was thought to have been killed because he was involved in or knew too much about the Agusta affair - where Socialist parties in Belgium were being bribed to buy the conglomerate's new helicopter - but he, as the just retired minister of government for the Walloon Region, could have been killed because he knew too much about what was going on in the sex ring.
Starting in 2000, Israeli Vice-Consul Scher in Rio de Janeiro had done a rush job in creating a paedophile ring there, and had fled to Israel in July after pictures of its activities had been posted on the internet in the hope of attracting Israeli paedophiles and other foreigners to go there. The photographs and videos had been taken at his home, and police had found copies of them at the home of Hebrew-language teacher, Professor George Schteinberg. There was even a photograph of the two alleged gays in which Scher was holding Schteinberg by the penis. Israel refused to hand over the wanted Scher, justifying its stand by claiming that there was no extradition treaty with Brazil.
One would have thought that there would at least be a trial in Israel for Scher's paedophile activities, but there never was one - showing that it was a covert action to divert public attention away from any similar Israeli activity in the Low Countries. Scher went on to become involved in Barkan's failed attempt to assassinate, it seems, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark in 2004. Remember when Mossad agents Eli Cara and Uriel Kelman tried to get a false passport for a invalid New Zealander - what Barkan apparently was going to use in making his getaway from the shooting.
Well, during the blowback of whole operation, Senior Israeli Consul in Canberra Amir Laty was discovered having been involved in setting up the operation's base in Australia, and was expelled, the Howard government feebly explaining that he had apparently been trying to steal secrets through a honey-trap relationship with young Caitlan Ruddock, daughter of Attorney General Philip Ruddock. The Israeli government named Scher as Laty's replacement, but Scher withdrew from the appointment, once his paedophile activities were discovered. The Sharon government thought that it was just part of his covert position.
Fortuyn seems to have gotten mixed up with the paedophile operation after he moved to Rotterdam in 1988. There was a boys' brothel there, run apparently by Lothar Gandolf, and given Pim's interest in having sex with underage males, he must have visited the place on occasion. The port was the entry point of youths from Africa and the Middle East, and Fortuyn liked exotic encounters. Such behaviour was in the grey area of Dutch law since brothels were not yet fully legal, but were tolerated by local authorities, leaving what happened in them pretty much anyone's guess. While he could justify such visits in the name of sociology, a field in which he had a Ph.D from Groningen University, his employer in Rotterdam, Erasmus University, took a different view, refusing to renew his contract for a privately-funded chair there in 1995. Pim, of course, could not have cared much, laughing it off to prying journalists as another example of "Fortuyn's Law", one in which all his employment ended in acrimony and controversy.
The loss of academe did not cramp his style, as he continued to live a most flamboyant, expensive life while writing weekly columns for Elsevier Magazine. While they expressed increasingly negative opinions about Islamic invasions of Dutch culture, society and political life, what he learned behind the scenes seems more relevant. Given how the columns helped fix popular opinion in Israel's corner, as he condemned anti-Semitism, and supported substantial aid to Tel Aviv, by all parties, it seems likely that he was being supported by various Jewish interests despite or because of his sexual excesses. Obviously, Fortuyn did not consider this any kind of blackmail but support from an expected source.
While Fortuyn was doing this, he learned more about what the Nihoul satanic gang had been doing long before Dutroux came on the scene, explaining Pim's unexpected appreciation of Socialist Prime Minister Joop den Uyl, a party he supported while theoretically still a Marxist. In 1976, it was learned that America's Northrop aircraft company had given Prince Bernhard, Queen Juliana's husband, a $750.000 bribe to help secure the Dutch purchase of its latest fighter plane - a forerunner of what the Belgians were doing with Agusta. Holland had already been shaken to its foundations by an earlier revelation that he had obtained a $1.1 million bribe from Lockheed for a similar purchase. Disclosure of the Northrop one would have led to a court trial of what the one-time SS-member, and sex-mad first president of the Bilderberg group had done. It might even discover that Regina Louf did visit his yacht Jumbo VI for wild orgies.
Uyl decided to cover up the new scandal for fear that it would lead to the end of the Dutch monarchy - the institution which kept the country together - since Crown Princess Beatrix had said that she would not succeed her father under such conditions. Fortuyn can only have heard about this from people he had contact with during his own sex activities, as the Dutch PM locked up all the details of the Northrop scandal in his personal archives. They were only discovered by journalist Anet Bleich when she was researching a biography of the deceased - what has only been recently published.
Prince Bernhard, founder of the notorious 1001 Club in 1971 where many of the important business contacts were made through money, sex and blackmail, was the leading establishment figure who encouraged the revival of Fortuyn's special kind of Dutch nationalism - what increasing numbers of Muslim immigrants were inflaming. Fortuyn wanted to get rid of the multicultural, nanny state which foreigners of all sorts, especial semities, were exploiting, thanks to the dö-nothing attitudes of the governing elite.
With the passage of the law in 2000 which legalized brothels, and permitted consenual sex between almost everyone 12 years or older, Fortuyn decided to act upon his long-held dream of becoming prime minister, mobilizing the frustrated working classes by his ultra-nationalism, thanks to the funds the new entreprenuers in computers, information technology, and the media were liberally providing with few questions asked. Muslim immigrants were a convenient symptom to attack as it drew on the deep-seeded nationalism which had largely been suppressed since WWII, largely because of the plight it had caused Dutch Jews during the German occupation, and by scapegoating them he largely relieved the guilt, aggression, and blame he was suffering from because of Holland's and his own chequered past.
When Fortuyn started outlining his cure for Holland's cultural decay, his supporters, especially the newspaper NRC Handelsblad, became increasingly concerned, particularly when he said he was planning changing the constitution's provision against discrimination. The liberal paper is a strong supporter of Israel, complaining particularly about the EU's disparity in giving aid to the country, and the Palestinians, and has just teamed up with like-minded Der Spiegel.
There must be more to the story than the one reported as the constitutional provision has changed little when it comes to discrimination since there is a balancing of all human rights in disputes, and the judiciary has no judicial review of legislation. If it were adopted, the Netherlands would not be going back to the pre-WWII situation where its Jews were discriminated against so terribly by it. The proposed rejection of the latest post-war position seemed like just a vote getter for the uninformed and alienated. Still, Fortuyn's financial backers asked for their money back from the high-living populist, and when he refused, the paper turned against him.
And the same thing happened when dissatisfied voters formed the Leefbarr Nederland (Liveable Netherlands) party after it had selected him as their leader, only to learn what he really wanted later, resulting in his sacking. That's when he formed his own, the Lijst Pim Fortuyn, and it was backed by most of the previous ones, particularly property developers Ed Maas, John Dost, Chris Thienisse, and Harry Mens. After Fortuyn's book - The Purple Ruins, a root-and-branch condemnation of Holland's coalition politics - was published, and two successful tv debates took place on March 6th and April 27th with his most reluctant opponents, the shocked country was predicting that his purely personal party could win up to 40 seats in the new 150- seat Parliament - what would make him a kingmaker in any future government.
At this point, Barkan or someone else in the Mossad prepared an assassin to take him down before the mid-May polling, and it already had an ideal one for the assignment - Volkert van der Graff, the apparent killer of Chris van der Werker in December 1996. Volkert had told him about his sexual dealings when he lived in MIddelberg, and visited the facilities across the Scheldt where Regina Louf worked. About boys like van der Graff, who was in his early teens at the time, she said in the 1998 interview: "There were also homosexuals who cut a girl first for hours, which excited them a lot, and then went with a boy." He, it seems, told Chris about the experiences, perhaps even the involvement of Prince Berhard's boat in orgies that Nihoul's gang arranged, and he had been obliged by Barkan to eliminate him so as to limit possible problems.
The Dutch national police knew that van der Graff killed van der Werken, but it had kept mum about any prosecution for fear of explosive blowback. A witness to the shooting, "Farmer B", said that Chris had told him that Volkert had threatened to shoot him a few weeks before it happened. There were witnesses who said that they had seen Volkert's red Opel Kadett near the scene, the Welna estate, of the murder. Volkert's landlord had found a weapon, a Walter PPK, in his apartment when he made an uninvited visit, and other witnesses told him where he could get other similar weapons if he was serious about committing suicide. And after Pim was assassinated, the police found that the ammunition used in both killings was the same.
While the police then went to great lengths to explain that any difficulties between Volkert and Chris had to do with their environmental differences over how to deal with factory and fur farms, especially their financing, there was no interest in why van der Graff would be thinking of suicide. It goes back to his early childhood in Middelberg - what he was so concerned about that he even denied ever living there, claiming that he was born and brought up in Hilversum where Pim's assassination took place on May 6, 2002. Then Volkert became increasingly out of sorts after his girl friend gave brith to a baby girl on the previous December 6th - what everyone would expect any father, except a previous abuser of such infants, to be overjoyed about.
The timing of Pim's assassination was triggered by the appearance of Olenka Frenkiel's article, "Belgium's silent heart of darkness," in The Observer on May 5th. While the article had obviously been researched and written sometime sooner, it called attention to all the child abusers and orgie organizers that their activities ran the risk of becoming quite loud and much wider unless something radical was done to stop the rot, especially given Nihoul's boasting that nothing would be done to end the six-year period of legal inaction on the Dutroux front, particularly his alleged involvement in it: "He is confident he will never come to trial and that the evidence against him will never be heard by any jury."
(Note the article has been replaced by one by Andrew Osborn, a Guardian stringer who often provides diversions for conspiracy assassinations, like in the case of Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh.)
Late, the next afternoon, Volkert killed Pim with a barrage of bullets from his Firestar pistol as he left from another radio interview in Hilversum, a squad car of police nearby to make the necessary arrest of the murderer though the Wim Kok government had denied that there were any threats on his life, and had refused to provide him with bodyguards. Pim's assassination stopped any serious overhaul of purple coalition politics.
Dutch and Belgium authorites were slow to take most limited, legal action against van der Graff, Dutroux, Nuhoul et al. so that no one would suspect that they were connected. And when few did, the Dutch national police came forward with their case against Volkert for killing Van der Werken in the hope of making his 18-year sentence on appeal for killing Fortuyn even harsher but it was dismissed as irrelevant. The only interesting statement from van der Graff was his claiming that Pim scapegoated the Muslims for what he was really up to.
Furthermore, Olenka Frenkiel continued to supply a smokescreen about it all, going on endlessly in film and on the BBC the about Israel's "Secret Weapon", its nuclear complex that Mordechai Vanunu had been complaining about for years.
For Meir Dagan, now the official head of the Mossad, it was a great feather in his cap, the first of many. It was the best example of his strategy when dealing with Israel's alleged enemies - i.e., kill the source, and you get rid of the problem. Little wonder that the Israeli government keeps extending his tenure in office - apparently we can expect still more, but possibly getting rid of Jörg Haider too may have satisfied their expectations of him.
Once Jörg Haider resigned as leader of the Freedom Party in Austria's newly-established governing coalition with the Austrian People's Party in February 2000, it was time for the Mossad's Zev Barken aka Bruckenstein to move on. The anti-Haider riots in Vienna on the 6th in which over 50 people were ínjured, most of them policemen, had achieved their purpose, and the mechanism Barkan had established for producing them - foreigners, especially German and American protesters, using false passports that the Mossad had gotten eleswhere, mostly from tourists in Asia - was well in place if needed again. Josef Fritzl, aka Wilhelm Kramm and the 'mad Austrian', was also readily available in Anstetten, and firmly entrenched in the process of arranging the transfer of false identities, thanks to his sexual enslavement of his daughter Elisabeth in his basement dungeon which he was being blackmailed over, to keep it going when required.
And the Mossad still had infiltrated Haider's private office, with its secret agent Peter Sichrovsky acting as his private secretary. Sichrovsky would be in an ideal position to know if, and when Haider decided to contest the claims that the Tageszeitung had made that he was gay - what had been circulating around Austrian circles for the last decade. Any truth to the claim has yet to be provided, making one suspect, at best, that it goes back to Haider's early student days before he got married. Whether true or not, the big thing was to be in a position to make a most shocking case about the allegation if Haider ever sought to deny it, or override it in making a political comeback.
To minimize action in this direction, Barkan by now had helped organize the Publix Theatre Caravan to travel around the country to make the most persuasive case against everything Haider stood for. The group - made up of druggies, gays, and anarchists - had originally taken possession of the Ernst Kirchwegan Haus (EKH) in Vienna, and soon it was putting its skills together in popular, impromptu performances which stressed a social-democratic agenda - accepting homosexuality, encouraging immigration, condemning racism and anti-semitism, European expansion, etc. It recalled the efforts by Kurt Weill during the beleaguered days of the Weimar Republic. Thanks to government support, the group planned to carry their campaign to other Austrian cities in May, and then it would take its message to Klagenfurt, the center of Carinthia where Haider remained as governor.
The effectiveness of these measures was well demonstrated when the EKH people organized demonstrations against the Opera Ball festivities on Feb. 22, 2001 - complaining about Austria's isolation from the EU because of Haider's Freedom Party continuing to be part of the governing coalition, a condition which prevented many international big-wigs from attending the annual event. In fact, the government's riot police aka the Cobra force got so riled up over what the beatniks were doing that it attacked those in EKH with great brutality, causing the coalition further embarrassment. The riot police justified its actions by complaining that many "professional troublemakers", using false passports, generally German ones, had come into the city to cause trouble, resulting in the arrest of 42 of them.
With Haider so much on the defensive, it was time for the Mossad to move back to the heart of the problem rather than stay on the periphery - the problems shaping up at Brussels while the European Union was seeking radical expansion. The problems could become insurmountable if all the sexual excesses of its leadership came out - what the prosecution of paedophile Marc Dutroux still threatened. While Dutroux had been arrested over four years before, he had not been tried for any crime, only having confessed to the rape of six young girls, and the killing of four of them.
Dutroux had focused concerns more upon himself by escaping from prison miraculously before he had even begun being prosecuted, the primary reason for the stoppage being the sacking of investigating Judge Jean-Marc Connerette, about the only Belgian really interested in getting to the bottom of the gigantic crime wave, for alleged conflict of interest. He had collected the testimony of about a dozen witnesses, mostly adult women, who had survived their ordeal with their kidnappers. It was quite probable that Barkan took leave of the Israeli Embassy in Brussels then for a post in Vienna for fear of being exposed in the process.
Then Judge Jean-Cluade Van Espen, who had represented the former wife of a partner of Dutroux’s in crime, Jean-Michel Nihoul -a real conflict of interest -, had prevented any progress in the case until 1998 when he was finally forced to resign. In the meantime, the Belgium police had ruled Dutroux simply a pervert, Nihoul totally innocent, and the prime witnesses against them, especially Regina Louf, as completely unreliable liars and kooks. Finally, in 2000, the Belgium authorities prosecuted Dutroux for theft and assault, resulting in his being sentenced to five years in prison, to ease the embarrassment over failing to prosecute him for his real crimes.
Furthermore, other witnesses, about 20 in all, were dying like flies. It had all started before Dutroux was even arrested with truck driver Bruno Tagliaferro being poisoned because he knew that Dutroux had abducted two of the young girls, and his partner Fabienne Jaupart joined him in December 1998 in a set fire because she too knew too much. Then Anna Konjevoda, who was tempted to provide information about Dutroux's operations in Eastern Europe on investigating magistrate Connerette's open line, but somehow didn't, was beaten, strangled, and her body thrown into the Maas River a year and a half later though she never testified what she knew. Sandra Claeys, a former girlfriend of Dutroux accomplice Michel Lelièvre, committed suicide on November 4, 1999.
For more on this, see this link, The Institute For The Study of Globalization and Covert Politics listing of "alleged assassinations in Belgian history".
The most interesting of the killings, though, was that of Chris van der Werken - a former professional friend of Volkert van der Graff, and residing near him in Harderwijk, east of Amsterdam -shot twice in the back while he was walking in a forest nearby in December 1996. Van der Werken apparently knew too much about Volkert for his own good. Van der Graff, of course, would assassinate Dutch maverick politician Wilhelmus Simon 'Pim' Fortuyn five and a half years later.
Regina Louf knew about a much wider, vicious operation than Belgium officials were claiming, and went public with her information, once the Belgium Superior Court dismissed it as lies which would never be used in any trial of Dutroux or his associates. She was born in Ghent in 1968, but moved to Knokke, on the Belgian-Dutch border - across the Scheldt estuary from Middleburg in Holland - when she was three where her grandmother soon put her to work as a prostitute. "Among those who shared her at house parties," Frank Connolly of The Sunday Business Post reported just before Fortuyn was assassinated, "were some of Belgium's most powerful and famous citizens - and paedophiles." While she provided the the names of several leading figures who had abused her, especially "another man still in poltics at a high level," Connolly understandably declined to identify them.
In 1979 when she returned home to Ghent, her abuse bacame even worse as she was turned over to her mother's lover, boarder Tony Van den Bogaert, who pimped her services for everything imaginable, including sado-masochistic parties in townhouses, country estates, and even on a boat from Brussels to the Dutch border. Dutroux's ultimate prosecutor explained that if only a small fraction of her claims turned out to be true, it would mean the end of Belgium. "There are connections," he added, "with the Netherlands and France."
Louf claimed that Dutroux was just part of a satanic cult, run by Nihoul, Michel Vandereist and others which killed young people in wild orgies - what she recalled after Dutroux was arrested. Bogaert had sold her to the Nihoul ring who terrorized her, on and off, for 15 years. She only escaped because she found a man, Erwer, during the ordeal who agreed to marry her, and this allowed her to finally escape their clutches.
The most alarming aspect about Louf's testimony was that she was able to provide concrete details, names, and places about where these terrible acts had occurred, particularly the murders of Carine Dellaert in 1982, of Catherine de Cuyper a few years later, and of Christine Van Hees in 1984. Hees' murder occurred at the mushroom farmhouse ruins at Champignonn`ere in Auderghem, just east of Brussels. Louf had advised Hees to strike up a love affair like she had in order to escape from the place. When Vandereist got wind of the plan, he killed her in order to win a bet with Nihoul about who could kill one of kidnapped kids first. "I didn't know that this affair had caused so much fuss in Brussels over the years," Louf explained in a January 10, 1998 interview about her slowness in coming forward earlier.
When Barkan got back in the area, Brussels it seems, he immediately put pressure on those who wanted to know more about, or were marginally connected to the whole satanic operation to vacate the scene, one way or another - after others had provided most diverting disinformation to faraway places from what had happened of a most corrupt nature around EU and NATO headquarters during the past decade. The first people died in most suspicious ways, apparent assassinations intended to limit investigations to those already suspected so that the people really behind the whole blackmailing operation, the Mossad, were not even suspected.
Barkan's associates, headed by Arie Scher, had deliberately opened its own paeodophile ring with Israelis in distant Brazil to give the impression that it had nothing to do with what was happening around Belgium. It's SOP with the Mossad, as was most recently demonstrated right after Haider was assassinated, Mossad Director Meir Dagan immediately circulating the rumor that the same thing had almost happened to him in faraway Amman, Jordan.
The killing campaign started on March 1, 2001 when paedophile hunter in the Dutroux affair, Jean-Jacques Feront, died of an apparent heart attack. Four weeks later, Nadege Renard, ex-girlfriend of high society brothel keeper in Charleroi Jean Pol Taminiau - who was assassinated in 1995 - apparently committed most belated suicide. In May, Pierre-Paul 'Pepe' De Rycke, owner of the fascist Jonathan Club who knew Nihoul quite well, committed suicide too apparently. More important, in November, Philippe Deleuze, brother-in-law of Judge Van Espen, and a partner in the legal firm of Boutyal and Nihoul, died from a strange disease.
The whole process peaked on March 17, 2002 - after Dagan had taken over official control of the Mossad - when Alain Van der Biest was harried so much that he too committed suicide. Biest had been the Minister of Interior when Dutroux was released from prison in 1991 after having only served 3 of a 13-year sentence for rape. Moreover, Biest was suspected of having been behind the assassination of Walloon, Socialist politician André Cools in 1994. The suspicion essentially rested on the fact that one of the suspected gunmen, Richard Taxquet, had been Biest's former chauffeur but it could have been just the basis of a set up. Cools was thought to have been killed because he was involved in or knew too much about the Agusta affair - where Socialist parties in Belgium were being bribed to buy the conglomerate's new helicopter - but he, as the just retired minister of government for the Walloon Region, could have been killed because he knew too much about what was going on in the sex ring.
Starting in 2000, Israeli Vice-Consul Scher in Rio de Janeiro had done a rush job in creating a paedophile ring there, and had fled to Israel in July after pictures of its activities had been posted on the internet in the hope of attracting Israeli paedophiles and other foreigners to go there. The photographs and videos had been taken at his home, and police had found copies of them at the home of Hebrew-language teacher, Professor George Schteinberg. There was even a photograph of the two alleged gays in which Scher was holding Schteinberg by the penis. Israel refused to hand over the wanted Scher, justifying its stand by claiming that there was no extradition treaty with Brazil.
One would have thought that there would at least be a trial in Israel for Scher's paedophile activities, but there never was one - showing that it was a covert action to divert public attention away from any similar Israeli activity in the Low Countries. Scher went on to become involved in Barkan's failed attempt to assassinate, it seems, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark in 2004. Remember when Mossad agents Eli Cara and Uriel Kelman tried to get a false passport for a invalid New Zealander - what Barkan apparently was going to use in making his getaway from the shooting.
Well, during the blowback of whole operation, Senior Israeli Consul in Canberra Amir Laty was discovered having been involved in setting up the operation's base in Australia, and was expelled, the Howard government feebly explaining that he had apparently been trying to steal secrets through a honey-trap relationship with young Caitlan Ruddock, daughter of Attorney General Philip Ruddock. The Israeli government named Scher as Laty's replacement, but Scher withdrew from the appointment, once his paedophile activities were discovered. The Sharon government thought that it was just part of his covert position.
Fortuyn seems to have gotten mixed up with the paedophile operation after he moved to Rotterdam in 1988. There was a boys' brothel there, run apparently by Lothar Gandolf, and given Pim's interest in having sex with underage males, he must have visited the place on occasion. The port was the entry point of youths from Africa and the Middle East, and Fortuyn liked exotic encounters. Such behaviour was in the grey area of Dutch law since brothels were not yet fully legal, but were tolerated by local authorities, leaving what happened in them pretty much anyone's guess. While he could justify such visits in the name of sociology, a field in which he had a Ph.D from Groningen University, his employer in Rotterdam, Erasmus University, took a different view, refusing to renew his contract for a privately-funded chair there in 1995. Pim, of course, could not have cared much, laughing it off to prying journalists as another example of "Fortuyn's Law", one in which all his employment ended in acrimony and controversy.
The loss of academe did not cramp his style, as he continued to live a most flamboyant, expensive life while writing weekly columns for Elsevier Magazine. While they expressed increasingly negative opinions about Islamic invasions of Dutch culture, society and political life, what he learned behind the scenes seems more relevant. Given how the columns helped fix popular opinion in Israel's corner, as he condemned anti-Semitism, and supported substantial aid to Tel Aviv, by all parties, it seems likely that he was being supported by various Jewish interests despite or because of his sexual excesses. Obviously, Fortuyn did not consider this any kind of blackmail but support from an expected source.
While Fortuyn was doing this, he learned more about what the Nihoul satanic gang had been doing long before Dutroux came on the scene, explaining Pim's unexpected appreciation of Socialist Prime Minister Joop den Uyl, a party he supported while theoretically still a Marxist. In 1976, it was learned that America's Northrop aircraft company had given Prince Bernhard, Queen Juliana's husband, a $750.000 bribe to help secure the Dutch purchase of its latest fighter plane - a forerunner of what the Belgians were doing with Agusta. Holland had already been shaken to its foundations by an earlier revelation that he had obtained a $1.1 million bribe from Lockheed for a similar purchase. Disclosure of the Northrop one would have led to a court trial of what the one-time SS-member, and sex-mad first president of the Bilderberg group had done. It might even discover that Regina Louf did visit his yacht Jumbo VI for wild orgies.
Uyl decided to cover up the new scandal for fear that it would lead to the end of the Dutch monarchy - the institution which kept the country together - since Crown Princess Beatrix had said that she would not succeed her father under such conditions. Fortuyn can only have heard about this from people he had contact with during his own sex activities, as the Dutch PM locked up all the details of the Northrop scandal in his personal archives. They were only discovered by journalist Anet Bleich when she was researching a biography of the deceased - what has only been recently published.
Prince Bernhard, founder of the notorious 1001 Club in 1971 where many of the important business contacts were made through money, sex and blackmail, was the leading establishment figure who encouraged the revival of Fortuyn's special kind of Dutch nationalism - what increasing numbers of Muslim immigrants were inflaming. Fortuyn wanted to get rid of the multicultural, nanny state which foreigners of all sorts, especial semities, were exploiting, thanks to the dö-nothing attitudes of the governing elite.
With the passage of the law in 2000 which legalized brothels, and permitted consenual sex between almost everyone 12 years or older, Fortuyn decided to act upon his long-held dream of becoming prime minister, mobilizing the frustrated working classes by his ultra-nationalism, thanks to the funds the new entreprenuers in computers, information technology, and the media were liberally providing with few questions asked. Muslim immigrants were a convenient symptom to attack as it drew on the deep-seeded nationalism which had largely been suppressed since WWII, largely because of the plight it had caused Dutch Jews during the German occupation, and by scapegoating them he largely relieved the guilt, aggression, and blame he was suffering from because of Holland's and his own chequered past.
When Fortuyn started outlining his cure for Holland's cultural decay, his supporters, especially the newspaper NRC Handelsblad, became increasingly concerned, particularly when he said he was planning changing the constitution's provision against discrimination. The liberal paper is a strong supporter of Israel, complaining particularly about the EU's disparity in giving aid to the country, and the Palestinians, and has just teamed up with like-minded Der Spiegel.
There must be more to the story than the one reported as the constitutional provision has changed little when it comes to discrimination since there is a balancing of all human rights in disputes, and the judiciary has no judicial review of legislation. If it were adopted, the Netherlands would not be going back to the pre-WWII situation where its Jews were discriminated against so terribly by it. The proposed rejection of the latest post-war position seemed like just a vote getter for the uninformed and alienated. Still, Fortuyn's financial backers asked for their money back from the high-living populist, and when he refused, the paper turned against him.
And the same thing happened when dissatisfied voters formed the Leefbarr Nederland (Liveable Netherlands) party after it had selected him as their leader, only to learn what he really wanted later, resulting in his sacking. That's when he formed his own, the Lijst Pim Fortuyn, and it was backed by most of the previous ones, particularly property developers Ed Maas, John Dost, Chris Thienisse, and Harry Mens. After Fortuyn's book - The Purple Ruins, a root-and-branch condemnation of Holland's coalition politics - was published, and two successful tv debates took place on March 6th and April 27th with his most reluctant opponents, the shocked country was predicting that his purely personal party could win up to 40 seats in the new 150- seat Parliament - what would make him a kingmaker in any future government.
At this point, Barkan or someone else in the Mossad prepared an assassin to take him down before the mid-May polling, and it already had an ideal one for the assignment - Volkert van der Graff, the apparent killer of Chris van der Werker in December 1996. Volkert had told him about his sexual dealings when he lived in MIddelberg, and visited the facilities across the Scheldt where Regina Louf worked. About boys like van der Graff, who was in his early teens at the time, she said in the 1998 interview: "There were also homosexuals who cut a girl first for hours, which excited them a lot, and then went with a boy." He, it seems, told Chris about the experiences, perhaps even the involvement of Prince Berhard's boat in orgies that Nihoul's gang arranged, and he had been obliged by Barkan to eliminate him so as to limit possible problems.
The Dutch national police knew that van der Graff killed van der Werken, but it had kept mum about any prosecution for fear of explosive blowback. A witness to the shooting, "Farmer B", said that Chris had told him that Volkert had threatened to shoot him a few weeks before it happened. There were witnesses who said that they had seen Volkert's red Opel Kadett near the scene, the Welna estate, of the murder. Volkert's landlord had found a weapon, a Walter PPK, in his apartment when he made an uninvited visit, and other witnesses told him where he could get other similar weapons if he was serious about committing suicide. And after Pim was assassinated, the police found that the ammunition used in both killings was the same.
While the police then went to great lengths to explain that any difficulties between Volkert and Chris had to do with their environmental differences over how to deal with factory and fur farms, especially their financing, there was no interest in why van der Graff would be thinking of suicide. It goes back to his early childhood in Middelberg - what he was so concerned about that he even denied ever living there, claiming that he was born and brought up in Hilversum where Pim's assassination took place on May 6, 2002. Then Volkert became increasingly out of sorts after his girl friend gave brith to a baby girl on the previous December 6th - what everyone would expect any father, except a previous abuser of such infants, to be overjoyed about.
The timing of Pim's assassination was triggered by the appearance of Olenka Frenkiel's article, "Belgium's silent heart of darkness," in The Observer on May 5th. While the article had obviously been researched and written sometime sooner, it called attention to all the child abusers and orgie organizers that their activities ran the risk of becoming quite loud and much wider unless something radical was done to stop the rot, especially given Nihoul's boasting that nothing would be done to end the six-year period of legal inaction on the Dutroux front, particularly his alleged involvement in it: "He is confident he will never come to trial and that the evidence against him will never be heard by any jury."
(Note the article has been replaced by one by Andrew Osborn, a Guardian stringer who often provides diversions for conspiracy assassinations, like in the case of Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh.)
Late, the next afternoon, Volkert killed Pim with a barrage of bullets from his Firestar pistol as he left from another radio interview in Hilversum, a squad car of police nearby to make the necessary arrest of the murderer though the Wim Kok government had denied that there were any threats on his life, and had refused to provide him with bodyguards. Pim's assassination stopped any serious overhaul of purple coalition politics.
Dutch and Belgium authorites were slow to take most limited, legal action against van der Graff, Dutroux, Nuhoul et al. so that no one would suspect that they were connected. And when few did, the Dutch national police came forward with their case against Volkert for killing Van der Werken in the hope of making his 18-year sentence on appeal for killing Fortuyn even harsher but it was dismissed as irrelevant. The only interesting statement from van der Graff was his claiming that Pim scapegoated the Muslims for what he was really up to.
Furthermore, Olenka Frenkiel continued to supply a smokescreen about it all, going on endlessly in film and on the BBC the about Israel's "Secret Weapon", its nuclear complex that Mordechai Vanunu had been complaining about for years.
For Meir Dagan, now the official head of the Mossad, it was a great feather in his cap, the first of many. It was the best example of his strategy when dealing with Israel's alleged enemies - i.e., kill the source, and you get rid of the problem. Little wonder that the Israeli government keeps extending his tenure in office - apparently we can expect still more, but possibly getting rid of Jörg Haider too may have satisfied their expectations of him.
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