Tuesday, 12 August 2008
Friday, 8 August 2008
The Lies Of Hiroshima Are The Lies Of Today
by John Pilger
When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then walked down to the river and met a man called Yukio, whose chest was still etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.
He and his family still lived in a shack thrown up in the dust of an atomic desert. He described a huge flash over the city, "a bluish light, something like an electrical short", after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell. "I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain I was dead." Nine years later, when I returned to look for him, he was dead from leukaemia.
In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, the allied occupation authorities banned all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted that people had been killed or injured only by the bomb's blast. It was the first big lie. "No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin" said the front page of the New York Times, a classic of disinformation and journalistic abdication, which the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett put right with his scoop of the century. "I write this as a warning to the world," reported Burchett in the Daily Express, having reached Hiroshima after a perilous journey, the first correspondent to dare. He described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries but who were dying from what he called "an atomic plague". For telling this truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared - and vindicated.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. For this reason its apologists have sought refuge in the mythology of the ultimate "good war", whose "ethical bath", as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the west not only to expiate its bloody imperial past but to promote 60 years of rapacious war, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb.
The most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and save lives. "Even without the atomic bombing attacks," concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, "air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that ... Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."
The National Archives in Washington contain US government documents that chart Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the US dispels any doubt that the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including "capitulation even if the terms were hard". Instead, the US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was "fearful" that the US air force would have Japan so "bombed out" that the new weapon would not be able "to show its strength". He later admitted that "no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb". His foreign policy colleagues were eager "to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip". General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: "There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis." The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his satisfaction with the "overwhelming success" of "the experiment".
Since 1945, the United States is believed to have been on the brink of using nuclear weapons at least three times. In waging their bogus "war on terror", the present governments in Washington and London have declared they are prepared to make "pre-emptive" nuclear strikes against non-nuclear states. With each stroke toward the midnight of a nuclear Armageddon, the lies of justification grow more outrageous. Iran is the current "threat". But Iran has no nuclear weapons and the disinformation that it is planning a nuclear arsenal comes largely from a discredited CIA-sponsored Iranian opposition group, the MEK - just as the lies about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction originated with the Iraqi National Congress, set up by Washington.
The role of western journalism in erecting this straw man is critical. That America's Defence Intelligence Estimate says "with high confidence" that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 has been consigned to the memory hole. That Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never threatened to "wipe Israel off the map" is of no interest. But such has been the mantra of this media "fact" that in his recent, obsequious performance before the Israeli parliament, Gordon Brown alluded to it as he threatened Iran, yet again.
This progression of lies has brought us to one of the most dangerous nuclear crises since 1945, because the real threat remains almost unmentionable in western establishment circles and therefore in the media. There is only one rampant nuclear power in the Middle East and that is Israel. The heroic Mordechai Vanunu tried to warn the world in 1986 when he smuggled out evidence that Israel was building as many as 200 nuclear warheads. In defiance of UN resolutions, Israel is today clearly itching to attack Iran, fearful that a new American administration might, just might, conduct genuine negotiations with a nation the west has defiled since Britain and America overthrew Iranian democracy in 1953.
In the New York Times on July 18, the Israeli historian Benny Morris, once considered a liberal and now a consultant to his country's political and military establishment, threatened "an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland". This would be mass murder. For a Jew, the irony cries out.
The question begs: are the rest of us to be mere bystanders, claiming, as good Germans did, that "we did not know"? Do we hide ever more behind what Richard Falk has called "a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence"? Catching war criminals is fashionable again. Radovan Karadzic stands in the dock, but Sharon and Olmert, Bush and Blair do not. Why not? The memory of Hiroshima requires an answer.
Full story...
When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then walked down to the river and met a man called Yukio, whose chest was still etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.
He and his family still lived in a shack thrown up in the dust of an atomic desert. He described a huge flash over the city, "a bluish light, something like an electrical short", after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell. "I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain I was dead." Nine years later, when I returned to look for him, he was dead from leukaemia.
In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, the allied occupation authorities banned all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted that people had been killed or injured only by the bomb's blast. It was the first big lie. "No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin" said the front page of the New York Times, a classic of disinformation and journalistic abdication, which the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett put right with his scoop of the century. "I write this as a warning to the world," reported Burchett in the Daily Express, having reached Hiroshima after a perilous journey, the first correspondent to dare. He described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries but who were dying from what he called "an atomic plague". For telling this truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared - and vindicated.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. For this reason its apologists have sought refuge in the mythology of the ultimate "good war", whose "ethical bath", as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the west not only to expiate its bloody imperial past but to promote 60 years of rapacious war, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb.
The most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and save lives. "Even without the atomic bombing attacks," concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, "air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that ... Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."
The National Archives in Washington contain US government documents that chart Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the US dispels any doubt that the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including "capitulation even if the terms were hard". Instead, the US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was "fearful" that the US air force would have Japan so "bombed out" that the new weapon would not be able "to show its strength". He later admitted that "no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb". His foreign policy colleagues were eager "to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip". General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: "There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis." The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his satisfaction with the "overwhelming success" of "the experiment".
Since 1945, the United States is believed to have been on the brink of using nuclear weapons at least three times. In waging their bogus "war on terror", the present governments in Washington and London have declared they are prepared to make "pre-emptive" nuclear strikes against non-nuclear states. With each stroke toward the midnight of a nuclear Armageddon, the lies of justification grow more outrageous. Iran is the current "threat". But Iran has no nuclear weapons and the disinformation that it is planning a nuclear arsenal comes largely from a discredited CIA-sponsored Iranian opposition group, the MEK - just as the lies about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction originated with the Iraqi National Congress, set up by Washington.
The role of western journalism in erecting this straw man is critical. That America's Defence Intelligence Estimate says "with high confidence" that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 has been consigned to the memory hole. That Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never threatened to "wipe Israel off the map" is of no interest. But such has been the mantra of this media "fact" that in his recent, obsequious performance before the Israeli parliament, Gordon Brown alluded to it as he threatened Iran, yet again.
This progression of lies has brought us to one of the most dangerous nuclear crises since 1945, because the real threat remains almost unmentionable in western establishment circles and therefore in the media. There is only one rampant nuclear power in the Middle East and that is Israel. The heroic Mordechai Vanunu tried to warn the world in 1986 when he smuggled out evidence that Israel was building as many as 200 nuclear warheads. In defiance of UN resolutions, Israel is today clearly itching to attack Iran, fearful that a new American administration might, just might, conduct genuine negotiations with a nation the west has defiled since Britain and America overthrew Iranian democracy in 1953.
In the New York Times on July 18, the Israeli historian Benny Morris, once considered a liberal and now a consultant to his country's political and military establishment, threatened "an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland". This would be mass murder. For a Jew, the irony cries out.
The question begs: are the rest of us to be mere bystanders, claiming, as good Germans did, that "we did not know"? Do we hide ever more behind what Richard Falk has called "a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence"? Catching war criminals is fashionable again. Radovan Karadzic stands in the dock, but Sharon and Olmert, Bush and Blair do not. Why not? The memory of Hiroshima requires an answer.
Full story...
Massive US Naval Armada Heads For Iran
Just because attacking Iran is the most boneheaded dumbass crazy stupid fucking thing they could possibly do, don't think for a second that the nutter zionist neo-cons running the USA on behalf of Israel won't do it. Sending young Americans off to die is just fine by them, as is killing a few million Muslims in the name of Eretz Israel. Unless there is some kind of second American revolution this world may as well put its head between its legs and kiss its arse goodbye. Russia and China will not sit by and let anyone threaten their geopolitical interests in the region - either one may not be able to stand against the US on its own but I bet they both could together! Things get more and more dangerous in this world and the cattle continue to chew their cud oblivious to the fact that the farm could explode at any moment.
Operation Brimstone ended only one week ago. This was the joint US/UK/French naval war games in the Atlantic Ocean preparing for a naval blockade of Iran and the likely resulting war in the Persian Gulf area. The massive war games included a US Navy supercarrier battle group, an US Navy expeditionary carrier battle group, a Royal Navy carrier battle group, a French nuclear hunter-killer submarine plus a large number of US Navy cruisers, destroyers and frigates playing the "enemy force".The lead American ship in these war games, the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN71) and its Carrier Strike Group Two (CCSG-2) are now headed towards Iran along with the USS Ronald Reagon (CVN76) and its Carrier Strike Group Seven (CCSG-7) coming from Japan.
They are joining two existing USN battle groups in the Gulf area: the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN72) with its Carrier Strike Group Nine (CCSG-9); and the USS Peleliu (LHA-5) with its expeditionary strike group.
Likely also under way towards the Persian Gulf is the USS Iwo Jima (LHD-7) and its expeditionary strike group, the UK Royal Navy HMS Ark Royal (R07) carrier battle group, assorted French naval assets including the nuclear hunter-killer submarine Amethyste and French Naval Rafale fighter jets on-board the USS Theodore Roosevelt. These ships took part in the just completed Operation Brimstone.
The build up of naval forces in the Gulf will be one of the largest multi-national naval armadas since the First and Second Gulf Wars. The intent is to create a US/EU naval blockade (which is an Act of War under international law) around Iran (with supporting air and land elements) to prevent the shipment of benzene and certain other refined oil products headed to Iranian ports. Iran has limited domestic oil refining capacity and imports 40% of its benzene. Cutting off benzene and other key products would cripple the Iranian economy. The neo-cons are counting on such a blockade launching a war with Iran.
The US Naval forces being assembled include the following:
Carrier Strike Group Nine
USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN72) nuclear powered supercarrier
with its Carrier Air Wing Two
Destroyer Squadron Nine:
USS Mobile Bay (CG53) guided missile cruiser
USS Russell (DDG59) guided missile destroyer
USS Momsen (DDG92) guided missile destroyer
USS Shoup (DDG86) guided missile destroyer
USS Ford (FFG54) guided missile frigate
USS Ingraham (FFG61) guided missile frigate
USS Rodney M. Davis (FFG60) guided missile frigate
USS Curts (FFG38) guided missile frigate
Plus one or more nuclear hunter-killer submarines
Peleliu Expeditionary Strike Group
USS Peleliu (LHA-5) a Tarawa-class amphibious assault carrier
USS Pearl Harbor (LSD52) assult ship
USS Dubuque (LPD8) assult ship/landing dock
USS Cape St. George (CG71) guided missile cruiser
USS Halsey (DDG97) guided missile destroyer
USS Benfold (DDG65) guided missile destroyer
Carrier Strike Group Two
USS Theodore Roosevelt (DVN71) nuclear powered supercarrier
with its Carrier Air Wing Eight
Destroyer Squadron 22
USS Monterey (CG61) guided missile cruiser
USS Mason (DDG87) guided missile destroyer
USS Nitze (DDG94) guided missile destroyer
USS Sullivans (DDG68) guided missile destroyer
USS Springfield (SSN761) nuclear powered hunter-killer submarine
IWO ESG ~ Iwo Jima Expeditionary Strike Group
USS Iwo Jima (LHD7) amphibious assault carrier
with its Amphibious Squadron Four
and with its 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit
USS San Antonio (LPD17) assault ship
USS Velia Gulf (CG72) guided missile cruiser
USS Ramage (DDG61) guided missile destroyer
USS Carter Hall (LSD50) assault ship
USS Roosevelt (DDG80) guided missile destroyer
USS Hartfore (SSN768) nuclear powered hunter-killer submarine
Carrier Strike Group Seven
USS Ronald Reagan (CVN76) nuclear powered supercarrier
with its Carrier Air Wing 14
Destroyer Squadron 7
USS Chancellorsville (CG62) guided missile cruiser
USS Howard (DDG83) guided missile destroyer
USS Gridley (DDG101) guided missile destroyer
USS Decatur (DDG73) guided missile destroyer
USS Thach (FFG43) guided missile frigate
USNS Rainier (T-AOE-7) fast combat support ship
Also likely to join the battle armada:
UK Royal Navy HMS Ark Royal Carrier Strike Group with assorted guided missile destroyers and frigates, nuclear hunter-killer submarines and support ships
French Navy nuclear powered hunter-killer submarines (likely the Amethyste and perhaps others), plus French Naval Rafale fighter jets operating off of the USS Theodore Roosevelt as the French Carrier Charles de Gaulle is in dry dock, and assorted surface warships
Various other US Navy warships and submarines and support ships. The following USN ships took part (as the "enemy" forces) in Operation Brimstone and several may join in:
USS San Jacinto (CG56) guided missile cruiser
USS Anzio (CG68) guided missile cruiser
USS Normandy (CG60) guided missile cruiser
USS Carney (DDG64) guided missile destroyer
USS Oscar Austin (DDG79) guided missile destroyer
USS Winston S. Churchill (DDG81) guided missile destroyer
USS Carr (FFG52) guided missile frigate
The USS Iwo Jima and USS Peleliu Expeditionary Strike Groups have USMC Harrier jump jets and an assortment of assault and attack helicopters. The Expeditionary Strike Groups have powerful USMC Expeditionary Units with amphibious armor and ground forces trained for operating in shallow waters and in seizures of land assets, such as Qeshm Island (a 50 mile long island off of Bandar Abbas in the Gulf of Hormuz and headquarters of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps).
The large and very advanced nature of the US Naval warships is not only directed at Iran. There is a great fear that Russia and China may oppose the naval and air/land blockade of Iran. If Russian and perhaps Chinese naval warships escort commercial tankers to Iran in violation of the blockade it could be the most dangerous at-sea confrontation since the Cuban Missile Crisis. The US and allied Navies, by front loading a Naval blockade force with very powerful guided missile warships and strike carriers is attempting to have a force so powerful that Russia and China will not be tempted to mess with. This is a most serious game of military brinkmanship with major nuclear armed powers that have profound objections to the neo-con grand strategy and to western control of all of the Middle East's oil supply.
The Russian Navy this spring sent a major battle fleet into the Mediterranean headed by the modern aircraft carrier the Admiral Kuznetsov and the flagship of its Black Sea Fleet, the Guided Missile Heavy Cruiser Moskva. This powerful fleet has at least 11 surface ships and unknown numbers of subs and can use the Russian naval facility at Syria's Tartous port for resupply. The Admiral Kuznetsov carries approximately 47 warplanes and 10 helicopters. The warplanes are mostly the powerful Su-33, a naval version (with mid-air refueling capability) of the Su-27 family. While the Su-33 is a very powerful warplane it lacks the power of the stealth USAF F-22. However, the Russians insist that they have developed a plasma based system that allows them to stealth any aircraft and a recent incident where Russian fighters were able to appear unannounced over a US Navy carrier battle group tends to confirm their claims. The Su-33 can be armed with the 3M82 Moskit sea-skimming missile (NATO code name SS-N-22 Sunburn) and the even more powerful P-800 Oniks (also named Yakhonts; NATO code name SS-N-26 Onyx). Both missiles are designed to kill US Navy supercarriers by getting past the cruiser/destroyer screen and the USN point-defense Phalanx system by using high supersonic speeds and violent end maneuvers. Russian subs currently use the underwater rocket VA-111 Shkval (Squall), which is fired from standard 533mm torpedo tubes and reaches a speed of 360kph (230mph) underwater. There is no effective countermeasures to this system and no western counterpart.
A strategic diversion has been created for Russia. The Republic of Georgia, with US backing, is actively preparing for war on South Ossetia. The South Ossetia capital has been shelled and a large Georgian tank force has been heading towards the border. Russia has stated that it will not sit by and allow the Georgians to attack South Ossetia. The Russians are great chess players and this game may not turn out so well for the neo-cons.
Kuwait has activated its "Emergency War Plan" as it and other Gulf nations prepare for the likelihood of a major regional war in the Middle East involving weapons of mass destruction.
The two-ton elephant in the living room of the neo-con strategy is the advanced biowar (ABW) that Iran, and to a lessor extent Syria, has. This places the motherlands of the major neo-con nations (America, France, the United Kingdom), as well as Israel, in grave danger. When the Soviet Union fell the Iranians hired as many out-of-work former Soviet advanced biowar experts as possible. In the last 15 or so years they have helped to develop a truly world class ABW program utilizing recombination DNA genetic engineering technology to create a large number of man made killer viruses. This form of weapon system does not require high tech military delivery systems. The viruses are sub-microscopic and once seeded in a population use the population itself as vectors. Seeding can be done without notice in shopping malls, churches, and other public places. The only real defense to an advanced global strategic biowar attack is to lock down the population as rapidly as possible and let those infected die off.
Unless the public gets it act together and forces the neo-cons to stop the march to yet another war in the Middle East we are apt to see a truly horrific nightmare unfold in OUR COUNTRIES.
Full story...
Tuesday, 29 July 2008
Why And How Alexander Litvinenko Was Assassinated
by Trowbridge H. Ford
In explaining or assessing any intelligence operation or series of them, it is most important to determine not only what was being attempted, and also by whom, especially if they are suspected of having dubious reliability. Then the explanation may well be just another cover story, and its real
outcome far different from what obvious accounts contend. The role of double agents in the whole process is often either overstated or more importantly not even noticed. And the process becomes even more complicated if the operator has even more personas.
Too often most successful spies or convenient fallguys are called double agents rather than what they really were. Margaretha Zelle, better known as the famous femma fatale Mata Hari, is seen traditionally as the architypical double agent, though she was apparently not one at all. She was merely a famous Paris cortesan and French secret informer who was set up as one during WWI by, it seems, a double agent in intelligence when French fortunes were flagging - reminiscent of how Captain Alfred Dreyfus was treated by Army colleagues when the confrontation with Germany was shaping up. Then Lee Harvey Oswald is considered by many to have been one, especially those US intelligence agents who found it most expedient to blame him for the JFK assassination in the hope of implicating the Soviets in the crime, but actually he was just an American secret agent who had outlived his usefulness to Washington.
The famous Cambridge spies are often considered double agents though in doing so one shows an ignorance of how they were recruited by Moscow. They were recruited while still at Cambridge, and started working for the Soviets when they joined MI6, MI5, the Foreign office, etc. Then there were those recruited while at Oxford around the same time, especially the famous Security Service whistleblower Peter Wright aka SCOTT, 'K', and HUNT, but British officials are unwilling to admit that they too were Soviet agents for fear of the damage it would cause 'the special relationship' with Washington even at this date. After all, Hoover's Bureau had gone to the greatest lengths to prove that double agents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were mainly responsible for the worst of it - Moscow getting the bomb.
Then all kinds of spies, no matter how low-level like the Rosenbergs, are considered double agents simply because their spying proved so unexpected and damaging. Retired US Navy Chief Warrant Officer John A. Walker, Jr., ran a family spy ring for nearly a generation which supplied the Soviets
with key tactical information about its adversary, especially key settings of navy ciphers during operations, thanks to being considered "intensely loyal" by his superiors. Ronald Pelton of the National Security Agency (NSA) provided Moscow with details about the the tapping of its underwater telecommunications cables (Operation Ivy Bells) - an offense so treacherous that Navy Secretary John Lehman, Jr. called for his being drawn-and-quartered just as his attacks submarines were setting off for their most risky intrusion into Soviet waters for a non-nuclear conclusion to the Cold War - what the assassination of Sweden's Olof Palme was intended to trigger at the end of February 1986.
And the famous Double-Cross System - what Britain's MI5 developed under Sir John Masterman's leadership of the Twenty Committee during WWII with captured German spies - hardly constituted a double agent system since its membership had no choice in the matter. The Abwehr and Sicherheitsdienst (SD) agents were captured in various ways, times, and situations, thanks to Britain's Radio Security Service breaking of every important German code, and the spies were given the rather easy choice of continuing to work under London's direction or face imprisonment or possible execution - what actually happened to a few uncooperative ones. It was really a diabolical use of counterintelligence in which the accused was forced to choose between survival and any oaths of loyalty or ties of friendship.
The record these false defectors achieved is quite overstated by the British, however, especially the false information about where the D-Day landings would occur since it did not arrive until after they had started taking place. Moreover, London, to give these false agents any kind of continuing credibility, had to supply them with some Allied secrets - what the German agencies proved that they were hopelessly incapable of doing on their own in preparation for the war against the Soviets. Unaided, the German services were almost totally committed to covert operations, especially when it came to false-flag ones, when it came to doing their job. Britain's limited successes with false defectors would come to haunt it when the KGB took advantage of it with a vengeance during the Cold War. (For more on this, see Peter Wright's Spy Catcher, especially his discussion of its handling of Anatoliy Golitsyn, p. 163ff.)
There was, though, at least one double agent in the Double-Cross System, known as Tricycle in Portugal, code name GARBO. He volunteered to help London, and helped persuade Berlin of the authenticity of Ewen Montagu's deception for The Twnety Committee, "the man who never was" - the English corpse, loaded with false documents and washed up on the Spanish coast , which gave the Germans the erroneous impression of where in the Mediterraneam the Allies were going to attack next. The confusion about these agents' status, though, was well illustrated when the agent in Portugal was called GARBO in recognition of the role that Greta Garbo played as Mata Hari in the famous 1931 film.
The need of free choice in making the switch is essential in determining a real double agent - what a complicated conspiracy can threaten to elicit, and a consequent cockup is bound to strengthen. Of course, if this happens, the rewards for the double agent are substantial, though making him look like just another time-server who is in it for the money, especially if the agent continues to supply important information. Then other agents are inclined to play a similar game, especially if dramatic strategy changes occur during the process. Double agents don't occur often, but when they do, they often come in bunches.
Just look at the list of possible double agents when the non-nuclear showdown with the Soviets occurred after the shooting of statsminister Palme in Stocholm on February 28, 1986 - the Agency's Aldrich 'Rick' Ames, the Bureau's Robert Hanssen, Israel's Jonathan Pollard, the KGB's Vitaly Yurchenko, the CIA agent with the cryptome EASTBOUND, apparently aka Alexander Litvinenko, et al. The two Americans are obviously double agents, having worked for their respective agencies for a long time without any betrayals; yet, deciding that the planned showdown with the Soviets was so reckless and unnecessary that these anti-communists were willing to provide Moscow with crucial information about what was afoot so that it could take appropriate countermeasures. "Yurchenko was the walk-in of a lifetime, " David Wise has written in Nighmover: How Alrdich Ames Sold The CIA To The KIGB For $4.6 Million, "the highest-ranking KGB officer ever to come over in the entire history of the cold war." (p. 127)
Certainly, Pollard was no double agent. He was simply a US Navy civilian analyst who had always worked for the Israelis, so much so that he should have been fired before he was set up as another fallguy, like Samuel Loring Morison, for the showdown with the Soviets in 1986. Pollard was arrested in 1985 for supplying Tel Aviv with the latest information about America's global electronic surveillance network - what Washington intended to upgrade with all the lasers on the KH-11 satellite, scheduled for being put in space in January 1986 by the spaceshuttle Challenger. When it went up in smoke, though, and the showdown with the Soviets did not pan out, thanks to the spying by the real double agents, Washington threw the book at Pollard, like with Morison, out of its frustration over what had transpired, and why.
I also dispute Wise's claim about Yurchenko - believing instead that he crossed over to learn more about what was planned against Moscow, and Ames' reliability in uncovering what was afoot.
There can be little doubt, however that Litvinenko proved to be more than a double agent before he was finally assassinated. Litvienenko was such an 'eager beaver' in counterintelligence that the KGB invited him to join its ranks just before Palme was assassinated, and then he acted, it seems, as one of the FCD's leading entrappers of Western agents while Vladimir Kryuchkov was gaining control of affairs for the newly installed Mikael Gorbachev in office.
During the Boris Yeltsin years, Litvinenko became so disillusioned doing dirty work for the Kremlin, especially againt the Chechans when it proved so counterproductive, that he decided to join its supporters, particularly the discredited oligarch Boris Berezovsky. When their efforts began waning, Litvinenko emigrated to Britain to escape increasing blowback from his efforts, and to strengthen his ties with Berezovsky who had already emigrated there. When this proved increasingly unrewarding, he started informing important persons of what he knew from his KBG experience, and making threats against Western officials who had worked for the Soviets in one way or another, thanks to his growing friendship with Vasili Mitrokhin, the KGB librarian who had also defected to the UK with his extensive files about its agents and operations, and could corroborate much of what Litvinenko was claiming.
When Litvinenko went ahead with his blackmailing plans despite the warnings of a few well-connected and powerful people, he was brutally assassinated by, it seems, Mossad agents, with polonium-210 supplied by Tel Aviv, and while British security agencies turned a blind eye on the whole matter, like in the Dr. David Kelly murder, and the one apparently concerning Manchester Chief Constable Mike Todd.
Unlike most such cases, what Litvinenko did, and learned when he first became an intelligence agent is the most instructive about what ultimately happened to him. In 1980, he joined the Red Army, and after graduating from the Kirov Higher Command School in Vladikavkaz near the Georgian border, he became a platoon commander of an Internal Troops regiment, guarding the security of valuables in transit. Russia's transport system is built around its railways, and the most valuable items shipped along it are its interncontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Railways are needed for their transport because of their weight, and marshalling yards are required for their firing since they use liquid fuel which in unstable, and has to be changed often.
It was shortly after Litvinenko started this new work, in January 1986, that his platoon discovered a cargo container, full of the most up-to-date electronic sensors which an Japanese electronic company,
apparently Toshiba, was shipping along the Trans-Siberian Railway for the CIA to an alleged West German client in Hamburg (Operation ABSORB). Sensors would give valuable information about Moscow preparing some launch, especially if one was fearing a first-strike reaction to some surprise, like the shooting of statsminister Palme. The sensors could pick up micro-wave and landline directions from Moscow, the presence of hazardous material like fuel in the area and its movement in containers, the preparation of ICBMs on armored trains for launch, and the like. This operation would nicely strengthen knowledge of any launch Moscow was in the process of making - what the KH-11 satellite was intended to first detect.
You can imagine the distress in Washington, and the glee in Moscow when both the satellite and the sensors went up in smoke. Still it went ahead with the most reckless showdown. For Litvinenko, it meant being invited to join the KGB, and he became immediately involved in making sure that the source of his discovery remained secret, and apparently at the expense of the original double agent EASTBOUND. He had been recruited by the CIA's Eric Sites in Moscow, and had been supplying information about how a cargo container, full of such sensors, could provide Washington with all the information it needed for a launch of warning, if it became required.
After the crisis had passed, EASTBOUND reappeared to confuse the Anglo-Americans of what had really happened, and why, but he was certainly not the original one but rather, it seems, Litvinenko. Once Moscow had covered its tracks in the whole affair, the Agency learned that EASTBOUND was just another 'dangle', perhaps intended to give Washington the false impression that military researcher Adolf Tolkachev - who was so responsible for Washington catching up when it came to stealth technology, and how to exploit it against Soviet countermeasures - was the source of the leaks. Tolkachev, a Jew, had been recruited by the CIA's Skip Stombaugh, and was arrested just when Ames' spyping was taking hold in Moscow. Tolkachev was executed in September 1986.
By the time the fallout from the Palme assassination was finally overcome when Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, chief of staff of the Soviet armed forces, and the Red Banner Fleet's Admiral K. A. Makarov visited the Pentagon in December 1987, Litvinenko's usefulness to KGB counterintelligence had been greatly revised, and he returned to doing military intelligence work for it, though he had learned much about the whole process, especially Vladimir Putin's role in coordinating the launch of the 82 nuclear-armed, unknown SS-23 missiles in Western Europe from Dresden if their use in the showdown proved necessary, along the way. Litvinenko even survived the destruction of the agency after the abortive coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, assigned to infiltrating criminal gangs within Russia, and then terrorist groups in Chechnya - what proved so inept that Akhmed Zakaey, the Chechen leader, allowed him to stay in place for fear that killing him would only make matters worse.
Ultimately, Litvinenko was writing about, and talking to anyone who would listen about
how Putin, now head of the new KGB, the Federal Security Service (FSB), was orchestrating terrorist attacks to improve his chances of taking over, once Yeltsin retired. As soon as Putin closed down Litvinenko's unit, and forced his retirement because of his holding a press conference with similarly diisgruntled intelligence officers who claimed that Putin was plotting to kill Boris Berezovsky - a leading Russian oligarch who had made such a fortune by exploiting Yeltin's loose form of capitalism, and hoped to continue it by supporting Putin as his successor - Litvinenko started working for him, a process which became increasingly difficult because of Russian law-enforcement officials' pursuit of him after Berezovsky was forced to seek asylum in the UK.
In 2000, Litvinenko and his family were given political asylum there too, thanks to the approval provided by MI6's Director of Security and Political Affairs, John Scarlett. He assumed that Litvinenko would be able to fill in the gaps, and details in Vasili Mitrokhin's KGB Archive which he had been instrumental in bringing to Britain, especially more information about unidentified Soviet spies, and why the planned showdown with the Soviets after the Palme assassination didn't pan out.
When Litvinenko could only reveal more damaging information about Operation ABSORB, MI6 lost all interest in him, forcing him to write more and more wild claims about Putin and the FSB in the hope of reviving its interest. The Russian intelligence service, according to Litvinenko, was the criminal group behind almost every world troublemaker, particularly Carlos the Jackal, Yasser Arafat, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, and every troubling assassination, especially the 7/7 attacks, and the murder of the Russian investigative journalist Anna Politikovskaya. Litvinenko's claims became even a embarrassment to his mentor, Berezovsky, resulting in his support from the obligarch being great reduced in word and deed.
Thanks to increasingly similar treatment of Mitrokhin by British securocrats - what resulted in his unexpected death (possible suicide or even murder) - Litvinenko began exploiting his claims about still unidentified Soviet agents, particularly the Italian spy code named UCHITEL apparently aka Romano Prodi, the former European Union Commissioner, and then the Italian Prime Minister. Litvinenko was so persuasive in his claims about Prodi that MEP Gerard Batten repeated them during its sessions, and Mario Scaramella was questioning him about them for Senator Paolo Guzzanti's Mitrokhim Commission in the Italian Senate on the day that Litvinenko, it seems, was fatally poisoned. While Prodi denied the claims - threatening to sue anyone who repeated them - he never did, as his political career went down the tubes because of them.
This action showed that Litvinenko was making good on the claims he had earlier expressed in person and through e-mails to fellow Russian academic Julia Svetlichnaja about blackmailing everyone he knew anything untoward about, thanks to his spying for the Russians, Chechens, and British. He even supplied her with photographs about his relevant service, especially one showing him "...as an army officer in an elite Russian army unit two decades ago," as The Observer reported in "Revealed: Litvinenko's Russian 'blackmail plot' " in its December 3, 2006 issue. Here Litvinenko was clearly indicating that he was prepared to tell all that he knew about Operation ABSORB and related covert operations. Such action would not only ruin the reputations of all the Anglo-American plotters in the non-nuclear showdown with the Soviets but more important those of all the double agents who had been executed in the joint CIA-FBI Operation Courtship to help accomplish it.
While Andrei Lugovoy - who had worked for Berezovsky, and knew how much Litvinenko's new interests had upset him - met three times with him in the forthnight before the poisoning in the hope of dissuading him from going ahead with his plans - the last time with Dmitry Kotun in the hope apparently of underlining the Kremlin's opposition to what was afoot - Andrei Sidelnikov's similar visit two days earlier with Litvinenko has been completely ignored. Sidelnikov, a former representative and spokesperson for Berezovsky, was the leader of the small Russian opposition party Pora, modeled on the one in the Ukraine which was responsible for the Orange Revolution, in the recent election which hoped to get rid of Putin, and a long-time friend of Aleksei Tolkachev, the grandson of the famous Adolf Tolkachev, and a Ukrainian civil activist. Both Andrei and Aleksei are committed to standing up for the dedicated opponent of the old communist regime.
Andrei claimed that his meeting in a cafe near Oxford Street on October 30, 2006 with Litvinenko was all about the murder of Anna Politkovskaya earlier in the month. Litvinenko was allegedly expecting documents from Russia, implicating the FBS in her assassination, but it seems as if they discussed Litvinenko's plans which could have such a profound effect not only on its politics but also Sidelnikov's life in Russia and his in Britain. Litvinenko could well have been poisoned then and there when he reiterated his commitment. As most experts of polonium-210 poisoning have said, it takes a few days to make its presence felt over the stomach's defenses, and in the meantime, Litvinenko would be laying down a false trail of when and where it happened, and by whom.
When the Russians got interested last December in Sidelnikov as a witness to the Politkovskaya murder, he tried without success to leave the country without proper authority, and then he managed to escape via Belarus into Ukraine from where he made his way to England, thanks to help provided by Alexsei Tolkachev. And earlier this month, he was granted political asylum by the Home Office in record time on the grounds that his life would be at risk if he remained in Russia - much to the Kremlin's anger.
Sidelnikov's treatment by the British securocrats is in strange contrast to that of Litvinenko, once he fell desperately ill. It almost seemed as if they, especially Scarlett's MI6, were glad to be rid of him, hardly surprising given his role and that of Oleg Gordievsky in the aborted showdown with Moscow back in March 1986.
As for what service could have supplied the polonium-210 to Litvinenko's killer, quite possibly Sidelnikov, it seems quite likely that it was Israel's Mossad, especially given Leonid Nevzlin's checking on what Livinenko was up to a few weeks before it occurred. Nevzlin is the former CEO of Yukos who has supplied Israeli authorities with all kinds of documents about its treatment by the Kremlin, and used the claim of Litvinenko supplying more as a cover for what he learned from the increasingly 'loose cannon'.
If you find this claim about the Mossad hard to believe, just recall what happened to Yasser Arafat when he too proved to be an intolerble impediment to what Tel Aviv wanted. Since it somehow managed to sneak the polonium into Arafat's besieged headquarters in Ramalla without discovery, and with the desired result in less than three weeks, it was much easier to dispose of the stronger Litvinenko in the same way in only a slightly longer period of time. Meir Dagan's Mossad has always believed in the saying: "Get rid of the man and you get rid of the problem."
Litvinenko proved to have too many loyalties.
In explaining or assessing any intelligence operation or series of them, it is most important to determine not only what was being attempted, and also by whom, especially if they are suspected of having dubious reliability. Then the explanation may well be just another cover story, and its real
outcome far different from what obvious accounts contend. The role of double agents in the whole process is often either overstated or more importantly not even noticed. And the process becomes even more complicated if the operator has even more personas.
Too often most successful spies or convenient fallguys are called double agents rather than what they really were. Margaretha Zelle, better known as the famous femma fatale Mata Hari, is seen traditionally as the architypical double agent, though she was apparently not one at all. She was merely a famous Paris cortesan and French secret informer who was set up as one during WWI by, it seems, a double agent in intelligence when French fortunes were flagging - reminiscent of how Captain Alfred Dreyfus was treated by Army colleagues when the confrontation with Germany was shaping up. Then Lee Harvey Oswald is considered by many to have been one, especially those US intelligence agents who found it most expedient to blame him for the JFK assassination in the hope of implicating the Soviets in the crime, but actually he was just an American secret agent who had outlived his usefulness to Washington.
The famous Cambridge spies are often considered double agents though in doing so one shows an ignorance of how they were recruited by Moscow. They were recruited while still at Cambridge, and started working for the Soviets when they joined MI6, MI5, the Foreign office, etc. Then there were those recruited while at Oxford around the same time, especially the famous Security Service whistleblower Peter Wright aka SCOTT, 'K', and HUNT, but British officials are unwilling to admit that they too were Soviet agents for fear of the damage it would cause 'the special relationship' with Washington even at this date. After all, Hoover's Bureau had gone to the greatest lengths to prove that double agents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were mainly responsible for the worst of it - Moscow getting the bomb.
Then all kinds of spies, no matter how low-level like the Rosenbergs, are considered double agents simply because their spying proved so unexpected and damaging. Retired US Navy Chief Warrant Officer John A. Walker, Jr., ran a family spy ring for nearly a generation which supplied the Soviets
with key tactical information about its adversary, especially key settings of navy ciphers during operations, thanks to being considered "intensely loyal" by his superiors. Ronald Pelton of the National Security Agency (NSA) provided Moscow with details about the the tapping of its underwater telecommunications cables (Operation Ivy Bells) - an offense so treacherous that Navy Secretary John Lehman, Jr. called for his being drawn-and-quartered just as his attacks submarines were setting off for their most risky intrusion into Soviet waters for a non-nuclear conclusion to the Cold War - what the assassination of Sweden's Olof Palme was intended to trigger at the end of February 1986.
And the famous Double-Cross System - what Britain's MI5 developed under Sir John Masterman's leadership of the Twenty Committee during WWII with captured German spies - hardly constituted a double agent system since its membership had no choice in the matter. The Abwehr and Sicherheitsdienst (SD) agents were captured in various ways, times, and situations, thanks to Britain's Radio Security Service breaking of every important German code, and the spies were given the rather easy choice of continuing to work under London's direction or face imprisonment or possible execution - what actually happened to a few uncooperative ones. It was really a diabolical use of counterintelligence in which the accused was forced to choose between survival and any oaths of loyalty or ties of friendship.
The record these false defectors achieved is quite overstated by the British, however, especially the false information about where the D-Day landings would occur since it did not arrive until after they had started taking place. Moreover, London, to give these false agents any kind of continuing credibility, had to supply them with some Allied secrets - what the German agencies proved that they were hopelessly incapable of doing on their own in preparation for the war against the Soviets. Unaided, the German services were almost totally committed to covert operations, especially when it came to false-flag ones, when it came to doing their job. Britain's limited successes with false defectors would come to haunt it when the KGB took advantage of it with a vengeance during the Cold War. (For more on this, see Peter Wright's Spy Catcher, especially his discussion of its handling of Anatoliy Golitsyn, p. 163ff.)
There was, though, at least one double agent in the Double-Cross System, known as Tricycle in Portugal, code name GARBO. He volunteered to help London, and helped persuade Berlin of the authenticity of Ewen Montagu's deception for The Twnety Committee, "the man who never was" - the English corpse, loaded with false documents and washed up on the Spanish coast , which gave the Germans the erroneous impression of where in the Mediterraneam the Allies were going to attack next. The confusion about these agents' status, though, was well illustrated when the agent in Portugal was called GARBO in recognition of the role that Greta Garbo played as Mata Hari in the famous 1931 film.
The need of free choice in making the switch is essential in determining a real double agent - what a complicated conspiracy can threaten to elicit, and a consequent cockup is bound to strengthen. Of course, if this happens, the rewards for the double agent are substantial, though making him look like just another time-server who is in it for the money, especially if the agent continues to supply important information. Then other agents are inclined to play a similar game, especially if dramatic strategy changes occur during the process. Double agents don't occur often, but when they do, they often come in bunches.
Just look at the list of possible double agents when the non-nuclear showdown with the Soviets occurred after the shooting of statsminister Palme in Stocholm on February 28, 1986 - the Agency's Aldrich 'Rick' Ames, the Bureau's Robert Hanssen, Israel's Jonathan Pollard, the KGB's Vitaly Yurchenko, the CIA agent with the cryptome EASTBOUND, apparently aka Alexander Litvinenko, et al. The two Americans are obviously double agents, having worked for their respective agencies for a long time without any betrayals; yet, deciding that the planned showdown with the Soviets was so reckless and unnecessary that these anti-communists were willing to provide Moscow with crucial information about what was afoot so that it could take appropriate countermeasures. "Yurchenko was the walk-in of a lifetime, " David Wise has written in Nighmover: How Alrdich Ames Sold The CIA To The KIGB For $4.6 Million, "the highest-ranking KGB officer ever to come over in the entire history of the cold war." (p. 127)
Certainly, Pollard was no double agent. He was simply a US Navy civilian analyst who had always worked for the Israelis, so much so that he should have been fired before he was set up as another fallguy, like Samuel Loring Morison, for the showdown with the Soviets in 1986. Pollard was arrested in 1985 for supplying Tel Aviv with the latest information about America's global electronic surveillance network - what Washington intended to upgrade with all the lasers on the KH-11 satellite, scheduled for being put in space in January 1986 by the spaceshuttle Challenger. When it went up in smoke, though, and the showdown with the Soviets did not pan out, thanks to the spying by the real double agents, Washington threw the book at Pollard, like with Morison, out of its frustration over what had transpired, and why.
I also dispute Wise's claim about Yurchenko - believing instead that he crossed over to learn more about what was planned against Moscow, and Ames' reliability in uncovering what was afoot.
There can be little doubt, however that Litvinenko proved to be more than a double agent before he was finally assassinated. Litvienenko was such an 'eager beaver' in counterintelligence that the KGB invited him to join its ranks just before Palme was assassinated, and then he acted, it seems, as one of the FCD's leading entrappers of Western agents while Vladimir Kryuchkov was gaining control of affairs for the newly installed Mikael Gorbachev in office.
During the Boris Yeltsin years, Litvinenko became so disillusioned doing dirty work for the Kremlin, especially againt the Chechans when it proved so counterproductive, that he decided to join its supporters, particularly the discredited oligarch Boris Berezovsky. When their efforts began waning, Litvinenko emigrated to Britain to escape increasing blowback from his efforts, and to strengthen his ties with Berezovsky who had already emigrated there. When this proved increasingly unrewarding, he started informing important persons of what he knew from his KBG experience, and making threats against Western officials who had worked for the Soviets in one way or another, thanks to his growing friendship with Vasili Mitrokhin, the KGB librarian who had also defected to the UK with his extensive files about its agents and operations, and could corroborate much of what Litvinenko was claiming.
When Litvinenko went ahead with his blackmailing plans despite the warnings of a few well-connected and powerful people, he was brutally assassinated by, it seems, Mossad agents, with polonium-210 supplied by Tel Aviv, and while British security agencies turned a blind eye on the whole matter, like in the Dr. David Kelly murder, and the one apparently concerning Manchester Chief Constable Mike Todd.
Unlike most such cases, what Litvinenko did, and learned when he first became an intelligence agent is the most instructive about what ultimately happened to him. In 1980, he joined the Red Army, and after graduating from the Kirov Higher Command School in Vladikavkaz near the Georgian border, he became a platoon commander of an Internal Troops regiment, guarding the security of valuables in transit. Russia's transport system is built around its railways, and the most valuable items shipped along it are its interncontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Railways are needed for their transport because of their weight, and marshalling yards are required for their firing since they use liquid fuel which in unstable, and has to be changed often.
It was shortly after Litvinenko started this new work, in January 1986, that his platoon discovered a cargo container, full of the most up-to-date electronic sensors which an Japanese electronic company,
apparently Toshiba, was shipping along the Trans-Siberian Railway for the CIA to an alleged West German client in Hamburg (Operation ABSORB). Sensors would give valuable information about Moscow preparing some launch, especially if one was fearing a first-strike reaction to some surprise, like the shooting of statsminister Palme. The sensors could pick up micro-wave and landline directions from Moscow, the presence of hazardous material like fuel in the area and its movement in containers, the preparation of ICBMs on armored trains for launch, and the like. This operation would nicely strengthen knowledge of any launch Moscow was in the process of making - what the KH-11 satellite was intended to first detect.
You can imagine the distress in Washington, and the glee in Moscow when both the satellite and the sensors went up in smoke. Still it went ahead with the most reckless showdown. For Litvinenko, it meant being invited to join the KGB, and he became immediately involved in making sure that the source of his discovery remained secret, and apparently at the expense of the original double agent EASTBOUND. He had been recruited by the CIA's Eric Sites in Moscow, and had been supplying information about how a cargo container, full of such sensors, could provide Washington with all the information it needed for a launch of warning, if it became required.
After the crisis had passed, EASTBOUND reappeared to confuse the Anglo-Americans of what had really happened, and why, but he was certainly not the original one but rather, it seems, Litvinenko. Once Moscow had covered its tracks in the whole affair, the Agency learned that EASTBOUND was just another 'dangle', perhaps intended to give Washington the false impression that military researcher Adolf Tolkachev - who was so responsible for Washington catching up when it came to stealth technology, and how to exploit it against Soviet countermeasures - was the source of the leaks. Tolkachev, a Jew, had been recruited by the CIA's Skip Stombaugh, and was arrested just when Ames' spyping was taking hold in Moscow. Tolkachev was executed in September 1986.
By the time the fallout from the Palme assassination was finally overcome when Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, chief of staff of the Soviet armed forces, and the Red Banner Fleet's Admiral K. A. Makarov visited the Pentagon in December 1987, Litvinenko's usefulness to KGB counterintelligence had been greatly revised, and he returned to doing military intelligence work for it, though he had learned much about the whole process, especially Vladimir Putin's role in coordinating the launch of the 82 nuclear-armed, unknown SS-23 missiles in Western Europe from Dresden if their use in the showdown proved necessary, along the way. Litvinenko even survived the destruction of the agency after the abortive coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, assigned to infiltrating criminal gangs within Russia, and then terrorist groups in Chechnya - what proved so inept that Akhmed Zakaey, the Chechen leader, allowed him to stay in place for fear that killing him would only make matters worse.
Ultimately, Litvinenko was writing about, and talking to anyone who would listen about
how Putin, now head of the new KGB, the Federal Security Service (FSB), was orchestrating terrorist attacks to improve his chances of taking over, once Yeltsin retired. As soon as Putin closed down Litvinenko's unit, and forced his retirement because of his holding a press conference with similarly diisgruntled intelligence officers who claimed that Putin was plotting to kill Boris Berezovsky - a leading Russian oligarch who had made such a fortune by exploiting Yeltin's loose form of capitalism, and hoped to continue it by supporting Putin as his successor - Litvinenko started working for him, a process which became increasingly difficult because of Russian law-enforcement officials' pursuit of him after Berezovsky was forced to seek asylum in the UK.
In 2000, Litvinenko and his family were given political asylum there too, thanks to the approval provided by MI6's Director of Security and Political Affairs, John Scarlett. He assumed that Litvinenko would be able to fill in the gaps, and details in Vasili Mitrokhin's KGB Archive which he had been instrumental in bringing to Britain, especially more information about unidentified Soviet spies, and why the planned showdown with the Soviets after the Palme assassination didn't pan out.
When Litvinenko could only reveal more damaging information about Operation ABSORB, MI6 lost all interest in him, forcing him to write more and more wild claims about Putin and the FSB in the hope of reviving its interest. The Russian intelligence service, according to Litvinenko, was the criminal group behind almost every world troublemaker, particularly Carlos the Jackal, Yasser Arafat, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, and every troubling assassination, especially the 7/7 attacks, and the murder of the Russian investigative journalist Anna Politikovskaya. Litvinenko's claims became even a embarrassment to his mentor, Berezovsky, resulting in his support from the obligarch being great reduced in word and deed.
Thanks to increasingly similar treatment of Mitrokhin by British securocrats - what resulted in his unexpected death (possible suicide or even murder) - Litvinenko began exploiting his claims about still unidentified Soviet agents, particularly the Italian spy code named UCHITEL apparently aka Romano Prodi, the former European Union Commissioner, and then the Italian Prime Minister. Litvinenko was so persuasive in his claims about Prodi that MEP Gerard Batten repeated them during its sessions, and Mario Scaramella was questioning him about them for Senator Paolo Guzzanti's Mitrokhim Commission in the Italian Senate on the day that Litvinenko, it seems, was fatally poisoned. While Prodi denied the claims - threatening to sue anyone who repeated them - he never did, as his political career went down the tubes because of them.
This action showed that Litvinenko was making good on the claims he had earlier expressed in person and through e-mails to fellow Russian academic Julia Svetlichnaja about blackmailing everyone he knew anything untoward about, thanks to his spying for the Russians, Chechens, and British. He even supplied her with photographs about his relevant service, especially one showing him "...as an army officer in an elite Russian army unit two decades ago," as The Observer reported in "Revealed: Litvinenko's Russian 'blackmail plot' " in its December 3, 2006 issue. Here Litvinenko was clearly indicating that he was prepared to tell all that he knew about Operation ABSORB and related covert operations. Such action would not only ruin the reputations of all the Anglo-American plotters in the non-nuclear showdown with the Soviets but more important those of all the double agents who had been executed in the joint CIA-FBI Operation Courtship to help accomplish it.
While Andrei Lugovoy - who had worked for Berezovsky, and knew how much Litvinenko's new interests had upset him - met three times with him in the forthnight before the poisoning in the hope of dissuading him from going ahead with his plans - the last time with Dmitry Kotun in the hope apparently of underlining the Kremlin's opposition to what was afoot - Andrei Sidelnikov's similar visit two days earlier with Litvinenko has been completely ignored. Sidelnikov, a former representative and spokesperson for Berezovsky, was the leader of the small Russian opposition party Pora, modeled on the one in the Ukraine which was responsible for the Orange Revolution, in the recent election which hoped to get rid of Putin, and a long-time friend of Aleksei Tolkachev, the grandson of the famous Adolf Tolkachev, and a Ukrainian civil activist. Both Andrei and Aleksei are committed to standing up for the dedicated opponent of the old communist regime.
Andrei claimed that his meeting in a cafe near Oxford Street on October 30, 2006 with Litvinenko was all about the murder of Anna Politkovskaya earlier in the month. Litvinenko was allegedly expecting documents from Russia, implicating the FBS in her assassination, but it seems as if they discussed Litvinenko's plans which could have such a profound effect not only on its politics but also Sidelnikov's life in Russia and his in Britain. Litvinenko could well have been poisoned then and there when he reiterated his commitment. As most experts of polonium-210 poisoning have said, it takes a few days to make its presence felt over the stomach's defenses, and in the meantime, Litvinenko would be laying down a false trail of when and where it happened, and by whom.
When the Russians got interested last December in Sidelnikov as a witness to the Politkovskaya murder, he tried without success to leave the country without proper authority, and then he managed to escape via Belarus into Ukraine from where he made his way to England, thanks to help provided by Alexsei Tolkachev. And earlier this month, he was granted political asylum by the Home Office in record time on the grounds that his life would be at risk if he remained in Russia - much to the Kremlin's anger.
Sidelnikov's treatment by the British securocrats is in strange contrast to that of Litvinenko, once he fell desperately ill. It almost seemed as if they, especially Scarlett's MI6, were glad to be rid of him, hardly surprising given his role and that of Oleg Gordievsky in the aborted showdown with Moscow back in March 1986.
As for what service could have supplied the polonium-210 to Litvinenko's killer, quite possibly Sidelnikov, it seems quite likely that it was Israel's Mossad, especially given Leonid Nevzlin's checking on what Livinenko was up to a few weeks before it occurred. Nevzlin is the former CEO of Yukos who has supplied Israeli authorities with all kinds of documents about its treatment by the Kremlin, and used the claim of Litvinenko supplying more as a cover for what he learned from the increasingly 'loose cannon'.
If you find this claim about the Mossad hard to believe, just recall what happened to Yasser Arafat when he too proved to be an intolerble impediment to what Tel Aviv wanted. Since it somehow managed to sneak the polonium into Arafat's besieged headquarters in Ramalla without discovery, and with the desired result in less than three weeks, it was much easier to dispose of the stronger Litvinenko in the same way in only a slightly longer period of time. Meir Dagan's Mossad has always believed in the saying: "Get rid of the man and you get rid of the problem."
Litvinenko proved to have too many loyalties.
Tuesday, 8 July 2008
G8 summit: Gordon Brown has eight-course dinner before food crisis talks
Sounds like a nice meal! However it's also a wonderful illustration of just what is wrong with this messed up little planet. Millions are not getting enough to eat while a small minority eat caviar and probably throw even more away than we do. It's like the stories about Al Gore's totally environmentally unfriendly house. We are being had! But of course most people are far too interested in Big Brother or Pop Idol to even notice - or care. Humanity, dear readers, is up shit creek without a paddle. Maintaining an interest in this stuff is more of a sado-masochistic pleasure than anything else!
The Prime Minister was served 24 different dishes during his first day at the summit – just hours after urging the world to reduce the "unnecessary demand" for food and calling on British families to cut back on their wasteful use of food.
Mr Brown and his wife Sarah were among 15 guests at the "blessings of the earth and the sea social dinner".
The dinner consisted of 18 dishes in eight courses including caviar, smoked salmon, Kyoto beef and a "G8 fantasy dessert".
Full story...
Monday, 7 July 2008
Spy chief in coma is tested for poisons
Storied like this are always a little suspect, granted that it's not uncommon for 57 year old men to collapse into comas but this is decidedly odd. With the war drums against Iran beating louder than ever, unexplained things like this happening to key people fill me with deep suspicion. There are people out there who want a war and all the chaos it will bring. Invading Iran will not be like invading Iraq - it is likely to cause WW3 and if that happens we are all totally fucked.
The Government's top intelligence adviser was continuing to fight for life in hospital last night, five days after collapsing into a coma.
Alex Allan, 57, who heads the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), reported feeling unwell at the end of last week before falling ill at his London home on Monday.
While it is unclear why he collapsed, Whitehall sources said they did not believe "foul play" was to blame.
It is understood doctors are carrying out toxicology tests to establish the nature of his illness.
Scotland Yard said the incident was being treated as "non-suspicious" and confirmed he remained in a "serious" condition in a London hospital.
A Cabinet Office spokesman would not give any more details about Allan's condition or treatment.
His JIC is part of the Cabinet Office and responsible for briefing the Prime Minister on a weekly basis.
Personnel from MI5, MI6 and GCHQ sit on the committee, and the chairman collates their findings and presents them to the Prime Minister and other senior ministers.
Allan was appointed to the position last November, the same month in which his wife, artist Katie Clemson, died from cancer.
Full story...
Wednesday, 2 July 2008
Mandela taken off US terror list
Did you know that Dick Cheney voted against a resolution calling for Madiba to be released back in 1986? And Bush has been in power for how long? So dear readers, here is ample evidence that terrorists are simply the people "they" want "us" to hate and fear.
US President George W Bush has signed a bill removing Nelson Mandela and South African leaders from the US terror watch list, officials say.
Mr Mandela and ANC party members will now be able to visit the US without a waiver from the secretary of state.
The African National Congress (ANC) was designated as a terrorist organisation by South Africa's old apartheid regime.
A US senator said the new legislation was a step towards removing the "shame of dishonouring this great leader".
Full story...
Sunday, 29 June 2008
This surveillance onslaught is draconian and creepy
by Marina Hyde in the Guardian. An article one cannot help but agree with. In fact some of us have been saying the same thing for a long time.
Closed-circuit TV cameras are the crime-fighting tool so fiendishly sophisticated that they can be foiled by the wearing of a hood. Yet having stuck 4.2 million of the things around this country, with nary a consultation on the matter - nor any significant impact on crime statistics - efforts to pimp them to 2.0 status continue
This week it emerged that scientists at Portsmouth University are developing "listening" cameras. Artificial intelligence software will be able to recognise sounds such as breaking glass, so that, when such a noise is detected, they can rotate in its direction and capture the act of vandalism/terrorism/God that resulted in a milk bottle falling off your doorstep. I paraphrase slightly, but given that the most recent Home Office report on the matter found that better street lighting is seven times more effective at cutting crime than CCTV, the truly suspicious behaviour is our deepening obsession with surveillance.
The past few years have thrown up dozens of instances which made one wince to be a citizen of this septic isle, but a personal low came with the discovery that 500,000 bins had been fitted with electronic tracking devices. Transponders in bins ... Could any morning news item be more designed to force one back against the pillows, too embarrassed about one's country to start the day? Yes, as it turned out. A couple of months ago it was discovered that Poole borough council, in Dorset, had used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act - designed to track serious criminals and terrorists - to determine whether a school applicant and her parents lived where they said they did. They did, and were appalled to discover they had been spied on for three weeks, the subject of surveillance notes such as "female and three children enter target vehicle and drive off". Target vehicle, if you please! The thought of some deep-cover council drone jotting this stuff down as though it were an elite Delta Force operation is not as funny as it is horrifying.
Just who are these people, these swelling legions of unelected, ill-qualified monitors who wield such extraordinary power in our surveillance society? Clarification in one case came last year, when the civilian in charge of a Worcester police station's surveillance team was suspended after detectives found, among one day's footage, a 20-minute sequence of close-ups of a woman's cleavage and backside as she walked oblivious through the streets. Whether the woman ever discovered she was the star of a kind of pervert Truman Show is not recorded. But the offending monitor escaped with a warning and was - unbelievably - back in post within weeks.
In some city centres, such as Middlesbrough, speakers have been put on the cameras, so that those monitoring can interact with potential miscreants. Let's hope these remote bossy boots imagine they're involved in some high-level negotiation, in which they talk down a teenager from his decision to drop a hamburger wrapper on the pavement.
The former home secretary John Reid, on whose draconian watch the Middlesbrough scheme was approved, even suggested at its launch that schoolchildren should enter a competition to become the voice of the cameras - once again laying bare the government's desire to co-opt its citizens into the surveillance process at all levels. We are, of course, coming up to the time of year when we are ordered to shop our neighbours for acts of hosepipe, while the Shoreditch Trust recently trialled a scheme encouraging residents to watch live CCTV feeds on a special local channel, the better to assist in policing.
For all this creepy "outreach", though, the only hands-down beneficiaries of our CCTV obsession (apart from the revenue gatherers) have been broadcasters. For no good reason, all manner of TV networks have been furnished with hours of footage to pad out their witless police chase documentaries, or offensively cheap "street crime UK" shows. Britain's CCTV network: proudly supporting the Bravo channel.
The worst thing is the blithe insistence that this is all necessary and normal. We are watched more closely, by more cameras, with each passing day. But so faultlessly designed is our society that we have never come close to having a say on it.
There's a great bit in Woody Allen's movie Deconstructing Harry when Robin Williams's character goes out of focus, appearing as a sort of fuzzy version of himself, which sounds increasingly like the sort of sickness that should be courted by any attractive woman keen to walk through Worcester. That said, she could always don a hood. Yet there does seem a vaguely depressing irony in governments insisting that constant surveillance is essential to prevent our being overrun by repressive regimes who'd make us all cover our heads and the like. It's these initiatives that drive even the most pliant members of society to dream of taking just that precaution themselves, if only for a bit of privacy.
Full story...
The Crown Dependency of Forvik
Utterly superb, it's a tiny little island but you have to admire this guy!
Many people in Shetland are aware that there is something wrong here. What most do not realise is the size of the deception that has been perpetrated on Shetland by the British government. I have been researching Shetland’s legal and constitutional position for the past five years and it’s now time to put my money where my mouth is in an attempt to expose this fraud and to put it right.
I have recently become the owner of a tiny island off Papa Stour, which itself (for the benefit of non-Shetlanders) is a small island off the west coast of Shetland. I am returning to the Nordic tradition by re-naming it Forvik Island (strictly speaking, it should be Fårvik) – Island of the Bay of Sheep. On 21st June 2008, Forvik, by my Declaration of Dependence, reverted to Shetland’s true constitutional position – that of a Crown Dependency. Other Crown Dependencies include The Isle of Man and The Channel Islands.
Forvik Island, or Forvik for short, recognises neither the British Government, nor the European Union as its superior. Because of Shetland’s unique history, there can have been no legal basis for Shetland to have been involved with either. It recognises Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I of Scotland and II of the United Kingdom as head of state.
For those who do not know, in the 15th century, Shetland was part of Norway. The Norwegian King Christian’s daughter was to marry King James III of Scotland and James was to receive a substantial dowry of 8,000 gold florins. At the appointed time Christian was unable to come up with the money, so he pawned Shetland to James until he, or his successors could produce the cash. James was only holding Shetland in trust until the money was forthcoming and consequently had very limited rights. Although the money was offered on many occasions, James and his successors always managed to evade the issue and hang on to Shetland by various subterfuges. Two hundred years later, in 1667, the plenipotentiaries of Europe confirmed that the pawning document was still valid in full force and that therefore the Scottish Crown could not claim the ownership necessary to incorporate Shetland into the realm. Shetland remained the personal responsibility of the Crown, but with very limited rights.
A further two years later, in a remarkable and little referenced Act of Parliament, Charles II re-confirmed Shetland’s status at the time of the pawning. He made Shetland ‘directly dependent upon His Majesty’, made it a Stewartry, directly answerable to the Crown and made it impossible for Parliament to change that position.
Full story...
Friday, 30 May 2008
Czech President Challenges Al Gore to a Global Warming Debate.....Al Gore Remains Silent
Czech President Vaclav Klaus, a global warming sceptic, is ready and willing to debate Al Gore one on one on the issue of the global warming scam. Al Gore will not respond to this challenge. It is nothing out of the ordinary for Al Gore to debate the "facts" of climate change, he has been challenged before and refuses to do so.
Surely a politician cannot be afraid of debating. Unless he knows that he is full of shit and is afraid to expose himself. After all we have recently learned that he used fictional scenes from the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" in his documentary and claimed they were further signs of man-made global warming. Perhaps this is why he is unwilling to debate.
Klaus is promoting his own book entitled "Blue Planet in Green Shackles - What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?" What a great title, and it underscores the exact point that I have been making here for over a year. That point is, I am going to write it again, I am sorry for the repetition, that global warming is a scam designed to take our money and our freedoms in the guise of saving the planet. And it just so happens to make Al Gore, the father of the movement, rich as well. What a coincidence, huh?
Vaclav Klaus makes no bones about what he thinks the answer to the question in his book title is when he says, "My answer is it is our freedom and, I might add, and our prosperity." Isn't that the truth?
He goes on to compare the global warming movement to communism, something he knows a little about:
Klaus, an economist, said he opposed the "climate alarmism" perpetuated by environmentalism trying to impose their ideals, comparing it to the decades of communist rule he experienced growing up in Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia.
He goes on:
"Like their (communist) predecessors, they will be certain that they have the right to sacrifice man and his freedom to make their idea reality," he said.
"In the past, it was in the name of the Marxists or of the proletariat - this time, in the name of the planet," he added.
These are some of the most scathing remarks that I have seen in this debate, (even if Al Gore refuses to debate), and it feels good to finally hear somebody stand up and make some of the same accusations that I have been writing about.
He goes on to make another of my points, and that is the fact that the scientists, environmentalists, and the meteorologists who tout this issue all have a financial stake in promoting it.
"It could be even true that we are now at a stage where mere facts, reason and truths are powerless in the face of the global warming propaganda," he said.
Klaus alleged that the global warming was being championed by scientists and other environmentalists whose careers and funding requires selling the public on global warming.
"It is in the hands of climatologists and other related scientists who are highly motivated to look in one direction only," Klaus said.
Klaus is out there challenging Al Gore, yet Al Gore remains silent. If Al Gore really wanted to champion his "cause" shouldn't he take the stage and make his case to the whole world? I think so, but he is afraid because he knows the truth, he knows he will be exposed as a fraud and he is unwilling to stand up for what he wants us to believe in.
Full story...
Surely a politician cannot be afraid of debating. Unless he knows that he is full of shit and is afraid to expose himself. After all we have recently learned that he used fictional scenes from the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" in his documentary and claimed they were further signs of man-made global warming. Perhaps this is why he is unwilling to debate.
Klaus is promoting his own book entitled "Blue Planet in Green Shackles - What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom?" What a great title, and it underscores the exact point that I have been making here for over a year. That point is, I am going to write it again, I am sorry for the repetition, that global warming is a scam designed to take our money and our freedoms in the guise of saving the planet. And it just so happens to make Al Gore, the father of the movement, rich as well. What a coincidence, huh?
Vaclav Klaus makes no bones about what he thinks the answer to the question in his book title is when he says, "My answer is it is our freedom and, I might add, and our prosperity." Isn't that the truth?
He goes on to compare the global warming movement to communism, something he knows a little about:
Klaus, an economist, said he opposed the "climate alarmism" perpetuated by environmentalism trying to impose their ideals, comparing it to the decades of communist rule he experienced growing up in Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia.
He goes on:
"Like their (communist) predecessors, they will be certain that they have the right to sacrifice man and his freedom to make their idea reality," he said.
"In the past, it was in the name of the Marxists or of the proletariat - this time, in the name of the planet," he added.
These are some of the most scathing remarks that I have seen in this debate, (even if Al Gore refuses to debate), and it feels good to finally hear somebody stand up and make some of the same accusations that I have been writing about.
He goes on to make another of my points, and that is the fact that the scientists, environmentalists, and the meteorologists who tout this issue all have a financial stake in promoting it.
"It could be even true that we are now at a stage where mere facts, reason and truths are powerless in the face of the global warming propaganda," he said.
Klaus alleged that the global warming was being championed by scientists and other environmentalists whose careers and funding requires selling the public on global warming.
"It is in the hands of climatologists and other related scientists who are highly motivated to look in one direction only," Klaus said.
Klaus is out there challenging Al Gore, yet Al Gore remains silent. If Al Gore really wanted to champion his "cause" shouldn't he take the stage and make his case to the whole world? I think so, but he is afraid because he knows the truth, he knows he will be exposed as a fraud and he is unwilling to stand up for what he wants us to believe in.
Full story...
Tuesday, 20 May 2008
New NSA Whistleblower Tells of Faulty WMD Evidence
Very revealing...
David Murfee Faulk was a translator in the Navy, working in Arabic and Iraqi dialect. In April 2004 he began working for the National Security Agency (NSA) at Fort Gordon outside Augusta, Georgia. (He now writes, under the name Murfee Faulk, for the Metro Spirit newspaper in Augusta, but he has never written about what he did for the NSA.)
Faulk says that in May 2004 he found an extremely large text file containing grid coordinates for alleged chemical weapons sites in Iraq. Faulk showed it to his supervisor, who was surprised. But he was not surprised that the file existed, only that it had not been deleted. The supervisor said he had believed all such files had been deleted, and that there had been a great many of them. In fact, according to this supervisor, U.S. Special Forces had gone to the locations and found nothing.
That's what usually happens, Faulk's supervisor told him, when you get something from the Israelis. "Four out of five times it's complete and total bullshit."
I asked veteran Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst Ray McGovern what he made of this, and he said that there is "no such thing as a 'friendly' intelligence service. Reporting from liaison services always needs to be taken with utmost reserve. That goes in spades for what comes from the Israelis, the more so since they have unique, yes unique, access to the White House and Pentagon, and are thus able to circumvent the intelligence bureaucracy set up to vet and evaluate raw intelligence and prevent unverified and/or tendentious 'intelligence' from reaching senior officials, lest they be misled."
With regard to other pieces of Israeli "intelligence" on Iraq's mythical weapons of "mass destruction," McGovern said: "Yes, most of the Israeli 'intelligence' on things like chemical weapons in Iraq was of little or no value. Worse still, data like coordinates for suspected chemical weapons-related sites could not be dispassionately evaluated by objective intelligence analysts because the key function of imagery analysis was ceded by the CIA to the Pentagon in 1996. What sergeant was going to tell Rumsfeld that Israeli sources and the 'intelligence' from the Israelis or the likes of Chalabi were certainly not worth what Rumsfeld was paying for. At the same time, if truth was not the objective, but rather reports alleging this or that WMD-related sites, well, the Israelis were performing a useful service for the likes of Doug Feith, who would bundle them up and give them to the 'Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal' for passing to the president. Woof! Proof!"
McGovern seemed to find it perfectly possible that "evidence" of the sort that Faulk stumbled upon was voluminous: "The neuralgic search for WMD pointed up the problem. US chief WMD-searcher, David Kay, has told lurid stories of being awakened in Iraq at all hours by people working in the office of the Vice President: 'Hey we got new coordinates; check them out!'"
McGovern recalled one instance of someone speaking openly about the quality of Israeli "intelligence." When John Negroponte was Director of National Intelligence, National Public Radio’s Robert Siegel asked him to explain why the Israelis have suggested a much shorter timeline for Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. "I think that sometimes what the Israelis will do give you the worst-case assessment," Negroponte said.
Faulk is not the first former NSA employee from Fort Gordon to speak about things he saw there. In fact, Faulk contacted me after reading an article I wrote last July ( http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/24183 ) when Adrienne Kinne decided that she would stay silent no longer. (She also told her story on "Democracy Now" this month: http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/13/fmr_military_inte... ). Kinne described the priority that was given to less than credible WMD claims that came in from Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. She also described how the NSA's policies with regard to spying on Americans changed completely on September 11, 2001. Prior to that date, she said, it was unacceptable to listen in on or collect information on Americans. The practice was barred by United States Signals Intelligence Directive (USSID) 18. Kinne recalled an incident in 1997 in which an American's name was mentioned, and she and her colleagues deleted every related record because they took very seriously the ban on collecting information on Americans. After September 2001, she said, it was acceptable to spy on Americans even after identifying them as aid workers for non-governmental organizations. Faulk confirmed that this was the policy when he worked there as well.
It's a shame that we have to learn what our government is up to, after the fact, from former employees daring to speak out, but if more of them would do so the risk to them would be lessened, our knowledge increased, and our government's worst abuses reined in.
Full story...
Thursday, 24 April 2008
Did Wanted Woman Witness of Morgan Murder Help Kill Todd?
by Trowbridge H. Ford
My last article established that there was a direct link between the vicious murder of private detective Daniel Morgan in South London on March 10, 1987, and the trials and tribulations that Captain Simon Hayward was experiencing immediately thereafter in Stockholm over alleged drug trafficking - thanks to a woman contending so in a meeting with a female police officer in the East Croydon railway station on June lst later that year, and a letter someone sounding exactly the same person wrote to Hendon MP John Gorst a fortnight later. Their message was that there was large, Rajneesh, drug-smuggling organisation which included many officers in Britain's Metropolitan police, and Hayward's brother Christopher, but not apparently Simon himself. He was so encouraged by the developments that he finally admitted the true purpose of his going to Sweden - the selling of his brother's Jaguar rather than just to go skiing - thinking that prosecutors would now believe that he didn't know of the 50.5 kilos of cannabis hidden within it.
While I went on to show that these claims became so serious when Met Detective Superintendent Dave Cook's group was investigating Morgan's murder yet for a fifth time that Prime Minister Tony Blair, it seems, was obliged to blackmail Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Yates - who had taken over the Morgan inquiry - when he was also investigating the honours for cash scandal, I made no attempt to determine who the woman was, preferring to allude to how her apparent existence might have determined Greater Mancester Police Chief Constable Mike Todd's demise. Now I suggest that the woman was Chantal Hayward, Christopher's wife, and mother of his child Tarik, though they had been separated since 1982. Christopher Hayward was then living with another woman, Jamille.
Chantal Heubi was Swiss, and had married Christopher in 1972. "Together they set off on the 'Happy Trail'," Simon Hayward wrote in Under Fire: My Own Story, "drifting through Thailand, Bali and India. They also lived in various parts of Europe before finally settling on Ibiza, one of the Balearic Islands off the east coast of Spain." (p. 43) They became disciples aka Sannyassans or Orange People of the Indian Guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh who first established a new wave rehabilitation complex in Bombay, and then moved it to a more luxurious site at nearby Poona. "How Christopher came under this influence," Simon added, "I do not know. I presume it was during his travels in India, or even from the commune on Ibiza, but he took to dressing from head to toe in pinch baggy clothes which caused a certain amount of eyebrow-raising on his infrequent visits home." (p. 44)
After Chantal and Christopher separated, they still lived close to one another, occupying two houses near to one another. When Simon visited his brother there on several occasions during the mid 1980s, he visted Chantal and her son too. By this time Chantal was living with Canadian Jim White. "Chantal was a lovely person," Simon explained, "tall and slim, in her mid thirites with long brown hair....She was a perfect mother, loving, caring and gentle, but at the same time firm and encouraging to Tarik." (p. 57) Before Simon Hayward set out on his fateful trip to Sweden, he and his girl friend Sandra 'Sands' Agar visited Chantal and her son twice, and took Tarik to a Spanish barbacue.
With this background, it seems almost certain that Chantal was the woman interviewed in the East Croydon railway station, and who wrote to Gorst two weeks later. Of course, she could not expose herself to everyone by stating that she was Christopher's wife, so she said only that she had met him, Cay Forbes Mitchell and a Rajneesh cult member called Macunda during 1977 in Poona, India.
How would she otherwise know things like this: "Christopher Hayward, his Rajneesh name is Lokesh, is the organising force behind the smuggling. He has disappeared from his home in Ibiza several weeks ago, and his mother Mrs Hazel Hayward is terribly worried and believes he may have been murdered by contacts in the drugs world" (Quoted from p.177.), especially when Christopher finally called his mother in London of June 11th to reassure her about his well-being, and Simon went out of his way to say that the call had nothing to do with his changing his statement rather than the letter Gorst had received.
Of course, if the letter writer was willing to come forward in any legal proceeding, no matter where it was held, her testimony would have been far more persuasive that anything the missing Christopher could have claimed since she believed that Simon may well have been set up by still others that she was willing to name. This could clearly involve DUKE aka DOOK, apparently the British Army's Force Research Unit's top tout in the Provisional IRA Council, code-name 'Steak knife', and his handler, Heather Weissand, apparently aka Sergeant Margaret Walshaw. Despite the risks, the writer hoped that Gorst would expose the whole drugs conspiracy, especially British involvement in it, so that justice could be served for everyone, especially Simon Hayward. (ibid.)
Chantal Hayward's hopes in writing Gorst proved totally unfounded. Instead of using his authority as a Member of Parliament to insure that law-enforcement authorities in both Stockholm and London did their duty, he used his Early Day Motion on June 29th merely to complain about Swedish violation of Simon Hayward's human rights by holding him without charge for so long rather than he had information that he was totally innocent of what they suspected. Gorst contended that the Swedes were simply holding Simon in solitary confinement until he confessed to the crime. (Quoted on pp. 179-80.) Gorst used his influence with The Daily Telegraph to threaten it with a libel action for stating that he was acting for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in his dealings with the Hayward case - for which he was voluntarily award significant damages - rather than reveal the contents of the letter he had received.
Christopher Hayward served his estranged wife even worse when he called his mother again on June 30th. In it, he falsely claimed that the Simon set-up by DUKE was intended for him, but that he had passed it on innocently to his brother. When Christopher was told by his mother Hazel that her grandson Tarik had been threatened, and she threatened to tell someone about it, Christopher replied: "Not until Tarik goes to Canada, Mummy." (Quoted from p. 180.) She felt that the letter Gorst had received was so important to the case that she asked him if he had been in Poona in 1977. He, according to Simon, unbelieveably replied. "No, I have never been there in my life." (p. 181) He ended the conversation by saying that he would not call again.
By this time, Chantal had gone into hiding in Ibiza, adding even more fears to her mother-in-law since she did not answer any telephone calls. In fact, Hazel was so worried that she had a friend go to the island to try and locate her, and he was, finally, able to locate her. Since Chantal herself had not been threatened, she declined to return to Britain, thinking that since she, her boyfriend, and Tarik would be leaving for Canada in a week, they would be safe.
"A couple of days later," Simon added, "Chantal telephoned my mother to say that she knew who was behind the drugs run in Sweden. It had nothing to do with Simon, and neither was Chris directly involved. I am flying to London en route for Canada next week, and I will tell you everything then. I will speak to Simon's lawyers if you wish, and I am also prepared to testify in his defence. on Chris's behalf, in court" (Quoted from p. 182)
Since the call was obviously monitored by GCHQ in Cheltenhan, and passed along to the security services, particularly MI6, it set off alarm bells there. Since it had already seen, it seems, to Morgan's murder, there was no turning back now since she might well spill the beans while in London. For good measure, Gorst tabled two more Early Day Motions in the Commons about the case, ones which complained about the alleged violations of Simon's human rights in Sweden rather than he had been set up by others in Ibiza, and a vital witness, who was soon coming to London, was willing to come out, and testify about it all.
LIttle wonder that Chantal was apparently murdered a few days later during the night of July 6-7 after a party like the one Simon and Sands had attended four months earlier. She died of a massive overdose, injected into her left forearm, just below the elbow, though she was not known to have taken hard drugs, and her doctor said she had never injected herself with anything. There was, it seems, no real inquest into the cause of her death. While Simon was certain she had been murdered, especially because she was left-handed (pp. 185-7), Gorst made no mention of the facts when he made yet three more Early Day Motion about Simon's plight in Stockholm since he had finally been indicted for drug-trafficking. Gorst could only allude to her "mysterious death" in his introduction to Simon's book (p. 7) when he was soon scheduled to be released from prison after having served half of his five-year sentence.
Soon after Simon returned to England in September 1989, Met SB Detective Chief Inspector David Palmer-Hall went missing from his Sussex home, and it seems the result of Hayward's actions, particularly because of what had happened to Chantal. Palmer-Hall was liaising with MI6 when Palme was assassinated, and former SB Commander Rollo Watts, working for KMS's parent firm Saladin, had assured him and the Swedes that no former SAS personnel or mercanaries in Britain had signed up to shoot the statsminister, as Duncan Campbell reported in a June 1988 issue of The New Statesman. George Galloway, the controversial, former Labour MP so well-connected to Britain's security services, later asked the Home Office about Palmer-Hall's safe release. It apparently occurred because Hayward was told what would have happened if she had not been murdered - i. e., the whole conspiracy assassination of Sweden's Palme would have unraveled, particularly at his expense.
Instead of getting Palmer-Hall, Hayward got a new identify - Capatain James Rennie - who not only published a sanitized account of his covert service in the 14 Intelligence Company, The Operators: On the streets with Britain's Most Secret Service, but also apparently new employment with the Home Office's Organised and International Crime Directorate. It is the latest descendant of the National Drugs Intelligence Unit which saw to his imprisonment in the first place.
And here Chantal's apparent murder remained until the fifth inquiry into Morgan's killing, the one led by Met Detective Superintendent Dave Cook, finally got round to arresting all those who had been suspected from the very beginning. The previous investigations had been plagued by police complicity in the inquiries, false imprisonment awards for those suspected but clearly not involved, the threats of more such suits, false leads to other crimes, especially the Brinks-MAT heist near Heathrow in 1983, etc. Even when Cook's group got serious about the murder, the Home Office still refused to release information from a previous inquiry - what was only remedied by a High Court order - and the Crown Prosecution Service has already declined to prosecute the leaders now rearrested, former detective sergeant at Catford Police Station Sid Fillery and former Morgan business associate Jonathon Rees. Monday's arrests seem like an act of damage limitation.
The best evidence of this is that sixth person involved, 24-year old PC Dean Vian, has been suspended from duty on suspicion of having leaked information about the latest inquiry to his father and uncle, Garry and Glenn Vian. It buggers belief that such a person would have been assigned to a south London police station when his relatives are the leading, long sought suspects in the notorious murder, especially given the Met's long history of its officers colluding with criminals in all kinds of ways. Dean Vian never should have been in such a position, and his being so can only be an organisational contrivance to strengthen a weak case against the accused.
The reason for it seems to be that Cook's group was too optimistic about what it would come up with from the outset. It made another CrimeWatch appeal in June 2002 for the woman interviewed on June 1, 1987 in East Croydon to reappear, offering a £50,000 reward if she did so, as Cook explained:
"I'm seeking the public who may know something about the case or some who, through a change of attitudes or allegiance, may come forward with a piece of information that will allow us to solve the murder. I'm targeting a very small number of people:" ("Police make crime watch appeal," The Western Mail, June 26, 2002) Cook apparently didn't know that the person he was particularly seeking was long dead.
While Home Office opposition slowed progress in the inquiry, Cook was still optimistic about having the unknown white woman come forward when he met with members of Morgan's family and Met's Assistant Deputy Commissioner John Yates four years later, as Jane Bruccoleri explained in "20 year hunt for axe murderer" in The Croydon Guardian on November 15, 2006: "Officers say new information that has recently come to light corresponds with what she told police in 1987 and now detectives urgently need to speak with her." While police explained that she had only given her first name, it would have meant a lot if he had said "Chantal" - a person many people could have identified. Moreover, the police could have determined if she was the person who met their female police officer in East Croydon by consulting the photographs in Simon's book since there is one of her and her husband Chris in it while they were living in Switzerland in 1975.
Since the police have become more and more pessimistic about her ever coming forward as the case has finally resulted in the arrest of five suspects in Morgan's murder, it seems most likely that the group, now led by John Yates, knows Chantal is the person they were looking, but she will never come forward for obvious reasons. One can only wonder how far this secret had circulated within the Metropolitan Police and further afield.
I think quite widely, especially because of my own efforts in the matter. Soon after I arrived in Sweden, I began investigating the Palme assassination, and I wrote around 20 letters to the Palme Group of the Rikskriminalpolisen, headed by Stig Edqvist. I even wrote several letters about it to Säpo's director Jan Danielsson. Having satisfied myself that Simon Hayward had a case to answer in the assassination, I then sent all kinds of letters, outlines and articles about it to Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Home Office's Organised & International Crime Directorate, the Foreign Office, the Secretary of the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisor Committee, and the Northern Ireland Office. Almost all of them were acknowledged, but I never received any satisfactory answers to my claims.
Without going through the whole, tiresome business yet again, I shall only repeat the last letter I received from the Organised & International Crime Directorate:
"Mr Trowbridge H Ford Esq
Sporrvagen 9
181 41 Lidingo
Sweden
14 February 2001
Dear Mr Trowbridge Ford,
Thank you for your letter dated 20 January 2001 that you sent to the Prime Minister, concerning Olof Palme, a copy of which was also sent to Mr D Payne, who has corresponded with you several times on the subject. There is nothing useful that can be added to Mr Payne's earlier replies and I can only reiterate that if you have proof that Olof Palme was indeed assassinated, then you should present this evidence to the relevant authorities, namely the police.
Your faithfully
JR (Signed)
_____
Administrative Officer"
In addition, the envelope was printed with my address on it in the same scraggly hand.
I am confident that this letter was written either by James Rennie aka Simon Hayward or someone acting like him, showing just how arrogant and assured British security authorities are in dealing with this whole matter.
And I have no doubt that much of this information was communicated to John Yates, in one way or another, while he and his men were querying the Prime Minister and his subordinate about the honours for cash scandal, explaining why they were unable to reach any telling conclusions about it and the Morgan murder.
And when Greater Manchester Police Chief Constable Michael Todd got wind of it - in light of the cover up which had resulted in his investigation of Britain's collusion in the CIA rendition program, and the cock ups which had occurred in the unnecessary murders of Stephen Oake and Jean Charles de Menezes - he was most anxious to get even with Downing Street and it minions, explaining why it was decided to kill him, and in a way which would seem to be of his own doing.
Todd, it seems, was contacted in early March by someone feigning to be the long-wanted witness Cook's group had been looking for aka Chantal, and he was ecstatic about the possibilities resulting from a most secret meeting with her. She must have been an operative from the security services, like the FRU's Margaret Walshaw in the Chatal murder. They selected Mount Snowdon as the safest spot possible, and arranged to meet late Monday, March 10th. Todd sent even over-the-top, affectionate text messages to friends, especially his wife Caroline, about what was in store. Todd even brought along a bottle a champagne to celebrate the reappearance of the apparently most cautious witness.
When they finally met up on the slopes of Snowdonia - in cirumstances that the GPM had made completely free of other people - and had a few drinks, he was apparently bushwhacked by others, stripped of his overcoat, and tasered with 50,000 volts in the back, causing immediate cardiac arrest, and falling into a coma on his face in the snow, dying a few hours later.
It was a fitting end for Todd's enemies, the guys and gals who hated the 'coppers' cop' who liked to pull off such risky stunts for the media.
My last article established that there was a direct link between the vicious murder of private detective Daniel Morgan in South London on March 10, 1987, and the trials and tribulations that Captain Simon Hayward was experiencing immediately thereafter in Stockholm over alleged drug trafficking - thanks to a woman contending so in a meeting with a female police officer in the East Croydon railway station on June lst later that year, and a letter someone sounding exactly the same person wrote to Hendon MP John Gorst a fortnight later. Their message was that there was large, Rajneesh, drug-smuggling organisation which included many officers in Britain's Metropolitan police, and Hayward's brother Christopher, but not apparently Simon himself. He was so encouraged by the developments that he finally admitted the true purpose of his going to Sweden - the selling of his brother's Jaguar rather than just to go skiing - thinking that prosecutors would now believe that he didn't know of the 50.5 kilos of cannabis hidden within it.
While I went on to show that these claims became so serious when Met Detective Superintendent Dave Cook's group was investigating Morgan's murder yet for a fifth time that Prime Minister Tony Blair, it seems, was obliged to blackmail Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Yates - who had taken over the Morgan inquiry - when he was also investigating the honours for cash scandal, I made no attempt to determine who the woman was, preferring to allude to how her apparent existence might have determined Greater Mancester Police Chief Constable Mike Todd's demise. Now I suggest that the woman was Chantal Hayward, Christopher's wife, and mother of his child Tarik, though they had been separated since 1982. Christopher Hayward was then living with another woman, Jamille.
Chantal Heubi was Swiss, and had married Christopher in 1972. "Together they set off on the 'Happy Trail'," Simon Hayward wrote in Under Fire: My Own Story, "drifting through Thailand, Bali and India. They also lived in various parts of Europe before finally settling on Ibiza, one of the Balearic Islands off the east coast of Spain." (p. 43) They became disciples aka Sannyassans or Orange People of the Indian Guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh who first established a new wave rehabilitation complex in Bombay, and then moved it to a more luxurious site at nearby Poona. "How Christopher came under this influence," Simon added, "I do not know. I presume it was during his travels in India, or even from the commune on Ibiza, but he took to dressing from head to toe in pinch baggy clothes which caused a certain amount of eyebrow-raising on his infrequent visits home." (p. 44)
After Chantal and Christopher separated, they still lived close to one another, occupying two houses near to one another. When Simon visited his brother there on several occasions during the mid 1980s, he visted Chantal and her son too. By this time Chantal was living with Canadian Jim White. "Chantal was a lovely person," Simon explained, "tall and slim, in her mid thirites with long brown hair....She was a perfect mother, loving, caring and gentle, but at the same time firm and encouraging to Tarik." (p. 57) Before Simon Hayward set out on his fateful trip to Sweden, he and his girl friend Sandra 'Sands' Agar visited Chantal and her son twice, and took Tarik to a Spanish barbacue.
With this background, it seems almost certain that Chantal was the woman interviewed in the East Croydon railway station, and who wrote to Gorst two weeks later. Of course, she could not expose herself to everyone by stating that she was Christopher's wife, so she said only that she had met him, Cay Forbes Mitchell and a Rajneesh cult member called Macunda during 1977 in Poona, India.
How would she otherwise know things like this: "Christopher Hayward, his Rajneesh name is Lokesh, is the organising force behind the smuggling. He has disappeared from his home in Ibiza several weeks ago, and his mother Mrs Hazel Hayward is terribly worried and believes he may have been murdered by contacts in the drugs world" (Quoted from p.177.), especially when Christopher finally called his mother in London of June 11th to reassure her about his well-being, and Simon went out of his way to say that the call had nothing to do with his changing his statement rather than the letter Gorst had received.
Of course, if the letter writer was willing to come forward in any legal proceeding, no matter where it was held, her testimony would have been far more persuasive that anything the missing Christopher could have claimed since she believed that Simon may well have been set up by still others that she was willing to name. This could clearly involve DUKE aka DOOK, apparently the British Army's Force Research Unit's top tout in the Provisional IRA Council, code-name 'Steak knife', and his handler, Heather Weissand, apparently aka Sergeant Margaret Walshaw. Despite the risks, the writer hoped that Gorst would expose the whole drugs conspiracy, especially British involvement in it, so that justice could be served for everyone, especially Simon Hayward. (ibid.)
Chantal Hayward's hopes in writing Gorst proved totally unfounded. Instead of using his authority as a Member of Parliament to insure that law-enforcement authorities in both Stockholm and London did their duty, he used his Early Day Motion on June 29th merely to complain about Swedish violation of Simon Hayward's human rights by holding him without charge for so long rather than he had information that he was totally innocent of what they suspected. Gorst contended that the Swedes were simply holding Simon in solitary confinement until he confessed to the crime. (Quoted on pp. 179-80.) Gorst used his influence with The Daily Telegraph to threaten it with a libel action for stating that he was acting for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in his dealings with the Hayward case - for which he was voluntarily award significant damages - rather than reveal the contents of the letter he had received.
Christopher Hayward served his estranged wife even worse when he called his mother again on June 30th. In it, he falsely claimed that the Simon set-up by DUKE was intended for him, but that he had passed it on innocently to his brother. When Christopher was told by his mother Hazel that her grandson Tarik had been threatened, and she threatened to tell someone about it, Christopher replied: "Not until Tarik goes to Canada, Mummy." (Quoted from p. 180.) She felt that the letter Gorst had received was so important to the case that she asked him if he had been in Poona in 1977. He, according to Simon, unbelieveably replied. "No, I have never been there in my life." (p. 181) He ended the conversation by saying that he would not call again.
By this time, Chantal had gone into hiding in Ibiza, adding even more fears to her mother-in-law since she did not answer any telephone calls. In fact, Hazel was so worried that she had a friend go to the island to try and locate her, and he was, finally, able to locate her. Since Chantal herself had not been threatened, she declined to return to Britain, thinking that since she, her boyfriend, and Tarik would be leaving for Canada in a week, they would be safe.
"A couple of days later," Simon added, "Chantal telephoned my mother to say that she knew who was behind the drugs run in Sweden. It had nothing to do with Simon, and neither was Chris directly involved. I am flying to London en route for Canada next week, and I will tell you everything then. I will speak to Simon's lawyers if you wish, and I am also prepared to testify in his defence. on Chris's behalf, in court" (Quoted from p. 182)
Since the call was obviously monitored by GCHQ in Cheltenhan, and passed along to the security services, particularly MI6, it set off alarm bells there. Since it had already seen, it seems, to Morgan's murder, there was no turning back now since she might well spill the beans while in London. For good measure, Gorst tabled two more Early Day Motions in the Commons about the case, ones which complained about the alleged violations of Simon's human rights in Sweden rather than he had been set up by others in Ibiza, and a vital witness, who was soon coming to London, was willing to come out, and testify about it all.
LIttle wonder that Chantal was apparently murdered a few days later during the night of July 6-7 after a party like the one Simon and Sands had attended four months earlier. She died of a massive overdose, injected into her left forearm, just below the elbow, though she was not known to have taken hard drugs, and her doctor said she had never injected herself with anything. There was, it seems, no real inquest into the cause of her death. While Simon was certain she had been murdered, especially because she was left-handed (pp. 185-7), Gorst made no mention of the facts when he made yet three more Early Day Motion about Simon's plight in Stockholm since he had finally been indicted for drug-trafficking. Gorst could only allude to her "mysterious death" in his introduction to Simon's book (p. 7) when he was soon scheduled to be released from prison after having served half of his five-year sentence.
Soon after Simon returned to England in September 1989, Met SB Detective Chief Inspector David Palmer-Hall went missing from his Sussex home, and it seems the result of Hayward's actions, particularly because of what had happened to Chantal. Palmer-Hall was liaising with MI6 when Palme was assassinated, and former SB Commander Rollo Watts, working for KMS's parent firm Saladin, had assured him and the Swedes that no former SAS personnel or mercanaries in Britain had signed up to shoot the statsminister, as Duncan Campbell reported in a June 1988 issue of The New Statesman. George Galloway, the controversial, former Labour MP so well-connected to Britain's security services, later asked the Home Office about Palmer-Hall's safe release. It apparently occurred because Hayward was told what would have happened if she had not been murdered - i. e., the whole conspiracy assassination of Sweden's Palme would have unraveled, particularly at his expense.
Instead of getting Palmer-Hall, Hayward got a new identify - Capatain James Rennie - who not only published a sanitized account of his covert service in the 14 Intelligence Company, The Operators: On the streets with Britain's Most Secret Service, but also apparently new employment with the Home Office's Organised and International Crime Directorate. It is the latest descendant of the National Drugs Intelligence Unit which saw to his imprisonment in the first place.
And here Chantal's apparent murder remained until the fifth inquiry into Morgan's killing, the one led by Met Detective Superintendent Dave Cook, finally got round to arresting all those who had been suspected from the very beginning. The previous investigations had been plagued by police complicity in the inquiries, false imprisonment awards for those suspected but clearly not involved, the threats of more such suits, false leads to other crimes, especially the Brinks-MAT heist near Heathrow in 1983, etc. Even when Cook's group got serious about the murder, the Home Office still refused to release information from a previous inquiry - what was only remedied by a High Court order - and the Crown Prosecution Service has already declined to prosecute the leaders now rearrested, former detective sergeant at Catford Police Station Sid Fillery and former Morgan business associate Jonathon Rees. Monday's arrests seem like an act of damage limitation.
The best evidence of this is that sixth person involved, 24-year old PC Dean Vian, has been suspended from duty on suspicion of having leaked information about the latest inquiry to his father and uncle, Garry and Glenn Vian. It buggers belief that such a person would have been assigned to a south London police station when his relatives are the leading, long sought suspects in the notorious murder, especially given the Met's long history of its officers colluding with criminals in all kinds of ways. Dean Vian never should have been in such a position, and his being so can only be an organisational contrivance to strengthen a weak case against the accused.
The reason for it seems to be that Cook's group was too optimistic about what it would come up with from the outset. It made another CrimeWatch appeal in June 2002 for the woman interviewed on June 1, 1987 in East Croydon to reappear, offering a £50,000 reward if she did so, as Cook explained:
"I'm seeking the public who may know something about the case or some who, through a change of attitudes or allegiance, may come forward with a piece of information that will allow us to solve the murder. I'm targeting a very small number of people:" ("Police make crime watch appeal," The Western Mail, June 26, 2002) Cook apparently didn't know that the person he was particularly seeking was long dead.
While Home Office opposition slowed progress in the inquiry, Cook was still optimistic about having the unknown white woman come forward when he met with members of Morgan's family and Met's Assistant Deputy Commissioner John Yates four years later, as Jane Bruccoleri explained in "20 year hunt for axe murderer" in The Croydon Guardian on November 15, 2006: "Officers say new information that has recently come to light corresponds with what she told police in 1987 and now detectives urgently need to speak with her." While police explained that she had only given her first name, it would have meant a lot if he had said "Chantal" - a person many people could have identified. Moreover, the police could have determined if she was the person who met their female police officer in East Croydon by consulting the photographs in Simon's book since there is one of her and her husband Chris in it while they were living in Switzerland in 1975.
Since the police have become more and more pessimistic about her ever coming forward as the case has finally resulted in the arrest of five suspects in Morgan's murder, it seems most likely that the group, now led by John Yates, knows Chantal is the person they were looking, but she will never come forward for obvious reasons. One can only wonder how far this secret had circulated within the Metropolitan Police and further afield.
I think quite widely, especially because of my own efforts in the matter. Soon after I arrived in Sweden, I began investigating the Palme assassination, and I wrote around 20 letters to the Palme Group of the Rikskriminalpolisen, headed by Stig Edqvist. I even wrote several letters about it to Säpo's director Jan Danielsson. Having satisfied myself that Simon Hayward had a case to answer in the assassination, I then sent all kinds of letters, outlines and articles about it to Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Home Office's Organised & International Crime Directorate, the Foreign Office, the Secretary of the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisor Committee, and the Northern Ireland Office. Almost all of them were acknowledged, but I never received any satisfactory answers to my claims.
Without going through the whole, tiresome business yet again, I shall only repeat the last letter I received from the Organised & International Crime Directorate:
"Mr Trowbridge H Ford Esq
Sporrvagen 9
181 41 Lidingo
Sweden
14 February 2001
Dear Mr Trowbridge Ford,
Thank you for your letter dated 20 January 2001 that you sent to the Prime Minister, concerning Olof Palme, a copy of which was also sent to Mr D Payne, who has corresponded with you several times on the subject. There is nothing useful that can be added to Mr Payne's earlier replies and I can only reiterate that if you have proof that Olof Palme was indeed assassinated, then you should present this evidence to the relevant authorities, namely the police.
Your faithfully
JR (Signed)
_____
Administrative Officer"
In addition, the envelope was printed with my address on it in the same scraggly hand.
I am confident that this letter was written either by James Rennie aka Simon Hayward or someone acting like him, showing just how arrogant and assured British security authorities are in dealing with this whole matter.
And I have no doubt that much of this information was communicated to John Yates, in one way or another, while he and his men were querying the Prime Minister and his subordinate about the honours for cash scandal, explaining why they were unable to reach any telling conclusions about it and the Morgan murder.
And when Greater Manchester Police Chief Constable Michael Todd got wind of it - in light of the cover up which had resulted in his investigation of Britain's collusion in the CIA rendition program, and the cock ups which had occurred in the unnecessary murders of Stephen Oake and Jean Charles de Menezes - he was most anxious to get even with Downing Street and it minions, explaining why it was decided to kill him, and in a way which would seem to be of his own doing.
Todd, it seems, was contacted in early March by someone feigning to be the long-wanted witness Cook's group had been looking for aka Chantal, and he was ecstatic about the possibilities resulting from a most secret meeting with her. She must have been an operative from the security services, like the FRU's Margaret Walshaw in the Chatal murder. They selected Mount Snowdon as the safest spot possible, and arranged to meet late Monday, March 10th. Todd sent even over-the-top, affectionate text messages to friends, especially his wife Caroline, about what was in store. Todd even brought along a bottle a champagne to celebrate the reappearance of the apparently most cautious witness.
When they finally met up on the slopes of Snowdonia - in cirumstances that the GPM had made completely free of other people - and had a few drinks, he was apparently bushwhacked by others, stripped of his overcoat, and tasered with 50,000 volts in the back, causing immediate cardiac arrest, and falling into a coma on his face in the snow, dying a few hours later.
It was a fitting end for Todd's enemies, the guys and gals who hated the 'coppers' cop' who liked to pull off such risky stunts for the media.
Thursday, 17 April 2008
Tony Blair Saved Self at Morgan's & Todd's Expense
by Trowbridge H. Ford
In laying out my case against Britain's covert government during the collapse of the Soviet Union - i. e., what it hoped to trigger by the assassination of Sweden's statsminister Olof Palme, and resulted in the murders of several others, especially South London private detective Daniel Morgan, to help keep it covered up - I never got around to where it rests now, only concluding with the Home Office's 2002 refusal to establish a police inquiry into why Morgan was murdered. The reason why the Blair government refused is that it knew that any serious investigation would expose the whole dirty mess.
Thanks to continuing pressure by Morgan's family, though, the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA)
ordered yet another inquiry, a fifth one, into the brutal murder shortly thereafter, headed by Detective Superintendant Dave Cook. He picked a team of investigators from outside the area to make sure that it was not plagued by the problems of earlier ones, especially its being infiltrated by the murderers themselves, especially detective sergeant Sid Fillery. Fillery was a close friend of Morgan associate in Southern Investigations and another suspect in it, Jonathon Rees, and he even replaced Morgan in the detective agency after he had been forced to retire.
Cook's team was very interested in making renewed contact with a white woman who had come forward after a BBC Crimewatch appeal in June 1987, three months after Morgan's murder had occurred. She was interviewed by a femal police officer in the East Croydon railway station, as Cook explained just last year: "One of the motives that we are investigating is the Daniel was killed because he was about to expose a drugs conspiracy which was potentially linked into police corruption." ("New suspects in detective murder," BBC News, June 5, 2007) Cook's investigators said that they knew the woman's first name, but they have never released it and it might not be her real one anyway.
It just so happened that MP John Gorst, who was trying to obtain Captain Simon Hayward's release in Sweden from a drug-trafficking charge, received a letter from someone on June 15, 1987, sounding very much like the same woman, as Hayward recounted in Under Fire: My Own Story:
"Dear Mr Gorst
In today's Daily Telegraph you were quoted as saying you believed Captain Simon Hayward to be innocent of the drug smuggling. This may well be so.
The man arrested with Captain Hayward, Cay Forbes Mitchell and also Christopher Hayward, Captain Hayward's brother, are both members of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh cult, so too is Macunda, spelt wrongly in the Telegraph as Macumba.
I know several people who were told by Christopher Hayward and Macunda that the drugs they were carrying was cannabis, when in fact it was heroin, and some were caught and imprisoned.
Christopher Hayward, his Rajneesh name is Lokesh, is the organizing force behind the smuggling. He has disappeared from his home in Ibiza several weeks ago, and his mother Hazel Hayward is terribly worried and believes that he may have been murdered by his contacts in the drugs world.
Also involved with the men arrested in Sweden is Michael Scott who was arrested at Dover early in May of (t)his year when returning from Amsterdam with £5,000 worth of drugs.
Scott is also a Rjaneesh follower, his name is Meru and is a long time friend and fellow drug dealer with the three men mentioned above. Scott is on bail awaiting trial.
I could give you names of other Rajneesh followers who are also drug smuggling, but so far there is no evidence against them.
As my MP perhaps you could do something to bring this into the open. The Rajneesh organisation is deeply involved in drug smuggling, here in England, in Europe and also in India.
I was a Rajneesh follower for eight years, and saw what was going on.
Please excuse me if I don't give my name, the risks involved are quite real.
Yours sincerely, etc." (Quoted from pp. 176-7.)
While Gorst passed the letter along to Scotland yard, it (and he apparently) did nothing about it, as the failure to follow up what the woman at the East Croydon train station was volunteering indicates. And the reason is obvious - it did not want to get to the bottom of the drugs conspiracy because of police and MI6 involvement in it. The anonymous letter writer was quite possibly one of MI6's agents who had infiltrated Rajneesh's bodyguard protection aka 'The Samurai Department'.
Cook's team still seemed to be making progress in Morgan's murder, discovering his old Austin Healey in a lock up in south-east London in October 2006, and hoping to find evidence, especially DNA material, which would tie suspects of the crime. Three men, apparently Rees, bodyguard Paul Goodridge, and Fillery, had already been arrested, and released on bail, and now there were apparently two more suspects, along with two 'supergrasses' who were wílling to tell tales. In November 2006, there was a meeting between members of Morgan's family, Cook, Met Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Yates, and MPA chairman Len Duvall which discussed the history of the case, and what still needed to be done. "We are cautiously optimistic," Alastair Morgan, Daniel's brother, explained, "that someone will be charged." ("3 held in 20-year murder mystery," icWales.co.uk, October 29,2006)
John Yates was yet another member of the Mets' Untouchables who knew that the group had only scratched the surface when it came to its corruption during the '80s and 90s. He had served in London's North and West while the biggest problems were the over 20 murders which had occurred in the south. Still, he led one of its most complex corruption inquiries which resulted in the imprisonment of six serving detectives for sentences totalling 46 years.(Operation Russia)
Yates's hopes for settling the Morgan murder were completely dashed, though, when he ran into Prime Minister Tony Blair over the cash for honours scandal. No sooner did his investigators start questioning the Labour Leader and his colleagues at Number 10 over the allegation that four life peerages had been given to persons had made loans to the party before the last General Election than the optimism about solving the murder began to evaporate. By June 2007, when the third series of interviews about the honours scandal were carried out, Yates's investigators were sounding much less hopeful, as Ian Herbert explained: "Despite the technological advances at their disposal, the police do not seem to feel they have a single, incontrovertable piece of evidence against their suspects."
("Twenty years on, police close in on detective'sa killers," Independent, June 9, 2007)
Nothing has happened since then in the Morgan case.
And Yates was hardly holding back when he explained what or who was responsible for the unsatisfactory investigation of the honours scandal to the Commons Public Administration Committee: "I think it would be quite obvious to all people who that was." ("Honours officer defends inquiry," BBC News, October 23, 2007)
The obvious answer, it seems, to the failure of both inquiries is that that departing Prime Minister made it quite clear to Yates that if he made him sound like another Lloyd George when it came to giving out honours for cash, he would see to the appointment of a police inquiry into the Morgan murder which would make the Met seem like a den of drug pushers and murderers.
And when Mike Todd threatened to revive the Mets' case without any serious blackmailing material to be used against him - as the tabloid campaign against him for fornicating has demonstrated - he had to be murdered, and the security services were pleased to oblige.
In laying out my case against Britain's covert government during the collapse of the Soviet Union - i. e., what it hoped to trigger by the assassination of Sweden's statsminister Olof Palme, and resulted in the murders of several others, especially South London private detective Daniel Morgan, to help keep it covered up - I never got around to where it rests now, only concluding with the Home Office's 2002 refusal to establish a police inquiry into why Morgan was murdered. The reason why the Blair government refused is that it knew that any serious investigation would expose the whole dirty mess.
Thanks to continuing pressure by Morgan's family, though, the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA)
ordered yet another inquiry, a fifth one, into the brutal murder shortly thereafter, headed by Detective Superintendant Dave Cook. He picked a team of investigators from outside the area to make sure that it was not plagued by the problems of earlier ones, especially its being infiltrated by the murderers themselves, especially detective sergeant Sid Fillery. Fillery was a close friend of Morgan associate in Southern Investigations and another suspect in it, Jonathon Rees, and he even replaced Morgan in the detective agency after he had been forced to retire.
Cook's team was very interested in making renewed contact with a white woman who had come forward after a BBC Crimewatch appeal in June 1987, three months after Morgan's murder had occurred. She was interviewed by a femal police officer in the East Croydon railway station, as Cook explained just last year: "One of the motives that we are investigating is the Daniel was killed because he was about to expose a drugs conspiracy which was potentially linked into police corruption." ("New suspects in detective murder," BBC News, June 5, 2007) Cook's investigators said that they knew the woman's first name, but they have never released it and it might not be her real one anyway.
It just so happened that MP John Gorst, who was trying to obtain Captain Simon Hayward's release in Sweden from a drug-trafficking charge, received a letter from someone on June 15, 1987, sounding very much like the same woman, as Hayward recounted in Under Fire: My Own Story:
"Dear Mr Gorst
In today's Daily Telegraph you were quoted as saying you believed Captain Simon Hayward to be innocent of the drug smuggling. This may well be so.
The man arrested with Captain Hayward, Cay Forbes Mitchell and also Christopher Hayward, Captain Hayward's brother, are both members of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh cult, so too is Macunda, spelt wrongly in the Telegraph as Macumba.
I know several people who were told by Christopher Hayward and Macunda that the drugs they were carrying was cannabis, when in fact it was heroin, and some were caught and imprisoned.
Christopher Hayward, his Rajneesh name is Lokesh, is the organizing force behind the smuggling. He has disappeared from his home in Ibiza several weeks ago, and his mother Hazel Hayward is terribly worried and believes that he may have been murdered by his contacts in the drugs world.
Also involved with the men arrested in Sweden is Michael Scott who was arrested at Dover early in May of (t)his year when returning from Amsterdam with £5,000 worth of drugs.
Scott is also a Rjaneesh follower, his name is Meru and is a long time friend and fellow drug dealer with the three men mentioned above. Scott is on bail awaiting trial.
I could give you names of other Rajneesh followers who are also drug smuggling, but so far there is no evidence against them.
As my MP perhaps you could do something to bring this into the open. The Rajneesh organisation is deeply involved in drug smuggling, here in England, in Europe and also in India.
I was a Rajneesh follower for eight years, and saw what was going on.
Please excuse me if I don't give my name, the risks involved are quite real.
Yours sincerely, etc." (Quoted from pp. 176-7.)
While Gorst passed the letter along to Scotland yard, it (and he apparently) did nothing about it, as the failure to follow up what the woman at the East Croydon train station was volunteering indicates. And the reason is obvious - it did not want to get to the bottom of the drugs conspiracy because of police and MI6 involvement in it. The anonymous letter writer was quite possibly one of MI6's agents who had infiltrated Rajneesh's bodyguard protection aka 'The Samurai Department'.
Cook's team still seemed to be making progress in Morgan's murder, discovering his old Austin Healey in a lock up in south-east London in October 2006, and hoping to find evidence, especially DNA material, which would tie suspects of the crime. Three men, apparently Rees, bodyguard Paul Goodridge, and Fillery, had already been arrested, and released on bail, and now there were apparently two more suspects, along with two 'supergrasses' who were wílling to tell tales. In November 2006, there was a meeting between members of Morgan's family, Cook, Met Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Yates, and MPA chairman Len Duvall which discussed the history of the case, and what still needed to be done. "We are cautiously optimistic," Alastair Morgan, Daniel's brother, explained, "that someone will be charged." ("3 held in 20-year murder mystery," icWales.co.uk, October 29,2006)
John Yates was yet another member of the Mets' Untouchables who knew that the group had only scratched the surface when it came to its corruption during the '80s and 90s. He had served in London's North and West while the biggest problems were the over 20 murders which had occurred in the south. Still, he led one of its most complex corruption inquiries which resulted in the imprisonment of six serving detectives for sentences totalling 46 years.(Operation Russia)
Yates's hopes for settling the Morgan murder were completely dashed, though, when he ran into Prime Minister Tony Blair over the cash for honours scandal. No sooner did his investigators start questioning the Labour Leader and his colleagues at Number 10 over the allegation that four life peerages had been given to persons had made loans to the party before the last General Election than the optimism about solving the murder began to evaporate. By June 2007, when the third series of interviews about the honours scandal were carried out, Yates's investigators were sounding much less hopeful, as Ian Herbert explained: "Despite the technological advances at their disposal, the police do not seem to feel they have a single, incontrovertable piece of evidence against their suspects."
("Twenty years on, police close in on detective'sa killers," Independent, June 9, 2007)
Nothing has happened since then in the Morgan case.
And Yates was hardly holding back when he explained what or who was responsible for the unsatisfactory investigation of the honours scandal to the Commons Public Administration Committee: "I think it would be quite obvious to all people who that was." ("Honours officer defends inquiry," BBC News, October 23, 2007)
The obvious answer, it seems, to the failure of both inquiries is that that departing Prime Minister made it quite clear to Yates that if he made him sound like another Lloyd George when it came to giving out honours for cash, he would see to the appointment of a police inquiry into the Morgan murder which would make the Met seem like a den of drug pushers and murderers.
And when Mike Todd threatened to revive the Mets' case without any serious blackmailing material to be used against him - as the tabloid campaign against him for fornicating has demonstrated - he had to be murdered, and the security services were pleased to oblige.
Friday, 11 April 2008
Media Calling In IOUs During Mike Todd Murder Coverup
by Trowbridge H. Ford
In the development of Western democracies, it was hardly suprising that all elements in them, especially the police and the media, became increasingly corrupted by the process. They were just too central to it, and had too many opportunities along the way for these well-established, underpaid professions not to take advantage of any opportunity they had, even illegal ones, once they saw that they were being left behind by the more respected ones, like doctors and lawyers. While the cops and hacks had traditionally been seen as the defenders against corrupt interests in the state and society, especially organized crime, it was not too long before its members started to close the gap in pay and prequisites with other professions by taking liberties with their powers of punishment, disclosure, and independence so as to enrich themselves both financially and in prestige.
It was during the 20th century that policemen and reporters belatedly took advantage of their opportunities, initiatives, and independence in society at the expense of the public. After the end of the alarms caused by the Napoleonic Wars, of course, such incidents had occurred - e. g., coppers fixing up suspects as criminals in order to help themselves, reporters making up stories about complicated irregularities to satisfy certain interests and individuals rather than seeking the truth, investigators assuming a certain result to a mysterious incident and then finding evidence which apparently proved their assumptions, hacks cutting corners in investigating matters of great public interest to beat their competitors in getting the story, etc. - but they became more and more institutionalized as the age of extremes progressed, to use historian Eric Hobsbawn's term for it.
The media relied on the police on getting the essentials about almost all crimes, and the coppers made sure that it received what it wanted the public to see. Along the way, they both coopted as many other organizations in the state and society as they could to help them in getting their way. The cops used interests within state confines, like the Masons, to increase their power and prosperity while the media relied upon mass productions in all kinds of venues to get its message across. "By the century's end," Hobsbawn concluded in The Age of Extremes, "large numbers of citizens were withdrawing from politics, leaving the affairs of state to the 'political class' - the phrase seems to have originated in Italy - who read each others' speeches and editorials, a special-interest group of professional politicians, journalists, lobbyists and others whose occupations ranked at the bottom of the scale of trustworthiness in sociological enquiries." (p. 81)
In the UK, police, defense, and intelligence officials are also part of its 'political class', thanks to The Troubles in Northern Ireland, and what has now come to infect the mainland with the so-called war on terror. The police traditionally relied upon the public - whether to report incidents, to provide confirming evidence, or pass judgment in court after investigations concluded, especially through various kinds of juries - but now they increasingly rely upon their own resources to make a case in any controversy, especially a criminal one, and count on the press to help confirm in the courts, and with the public at large. Through the use of informers, threats of injunctions, DA notices from The Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee (DPBAC), Public Interest Immunity certificates, disinformers on the internet, and former associates in the private sector, particularly alleged whistleblowers and private detectives, these securocrats are able to insure that the press only publishes pretty much what they want the public to see.
And the media is most happy with this comprehensive control of really controversial disputes since it allows it to print most fanciful reports about almost anything with impunity while more qualified military and intelligence reporters refrain from publishing almost anything the least bit controversial. As Admiral Nick Wilkinson, the DPBAC's Secretary, explained in an issue of Eye Spy! magazine: "The DA notice is an attempt at balancing the need for operational secrecy against the need for the public to hear of cover-ups, illegal actions and gross inefficiency in the spending of taxpayers' money," (Issue 8 2002, p. 77) Of course, where operational secrecy should end, and these other issues should come into play is a matter of debate, especially if those involved decide to keep an operation going for the most ill-defined, long-range purposes.
If anyone doubts the impact of such individuals and procedures on the media's performance, much less the criminal justice system, just recall, for example, what happened to John Stalker's inquiry into the Shoot-to-Kill murders during the 1982 emergency in Northern Ireland's South Armagh, thanks to the allegations against him by informer David Burton aka Burtelstein; how threats of injunctions and the use of DA notices have complemented the process by insuring that the public never learned anything really important about how British security services were colluding with all kinds of people, particularly in the Ulster Defence Association, with impunity there on a much wider scale; and how rules prohibiting government agents from dealing with the press are circumvented by intermediaries, especially by alleged whistleblowers like Richard Tomlinson, David Shayler, Oswald Le Winter, Gordon Logan, and Annie Machon, and former agents who are in the security business, like private detectives Daniel Morgan, Duncan Hanrahan, and Jonathon Rees.
Only the beginning of this whole, rotten process has been disclosed, and only then by usually dragging in the KGB as if it had something essential to do with it. In November 1969, The Times published taped conversations it had recorded, showing that Met policemen, especially Detective Sergeant John Symonds, were taking large bribes from criminals like south London gang boss Charles Richardson in order to facilitate continuing criminal activity, especially drug trafficking, across the board. When Symonds fled the country in 1972 while awaiting trial at the Old Bailey, the press was obliged to go after bigger fish in the massive scandal, resulting in 1977 in its Chief Superintendant Bill Moody being sentenced to twelve years in prison for taking bribes over eight years from Soho pornographers so that they could continue their lucrative, illegal business. Moody's whole network was linked to the Masons.
After Symonds returned to Britain in 1980 to face the music for his petty crimes at the Met instead of what he had been doing during the interim for the Soviets, the crime wave continued, thanks particularly to the fact that many of its investigators, especially in the Mets' Criminal Intelligence Branches 2 and 3, were still Masons. The biggest criminal success was the £26,000,000 gold bullion heist at Brinks-MAT outside Heathrow Airport in 1983. The success of the operation depended upon the growing number of private detective agencies, often headed by former coppers with Mason connections, which kept the honest police and media guessing about what was going on, and why. To counteract this lack of intelligence, the Central Drugs and Illegal Immigrants Intelligence Unit was created, soon to be split into two - one of which was the National Drugs Intelligence Unit (NDIU) - because of the growing scope of the problems.
Along with the growing international character of crime, and of law-enforcement to contain it was the growth of private detective agencies and bodyguard services to protect the individuals involved, whatever their occupation, from risks. Daniel Morgan and Jonathon Rees established Southern Investigations which employed off-duty policemen to do its work, some of which was so criminal that it led to a falling out between them over the disappearnce of the funds from a used-car sale. Southern relied heavily upon the input from Met detective Duncan Hanrahan who established his own detective service when he was required to retire because of injuries suffered during a robbery. Then the protection of private persons, especially mobsters and gurus, was becoming a more professional business, as Tony Geraghty has written in The Bullet Catchers: Bodyguards and the World of Close Protection, the better of them hardly distinguishable from the government agencies they previously worked for. (p. 274ff.)
All distinctions between poachers and gamekeepers in the security business disappeared when Paul Goodridge, a 'heavy' bodyguard for some of London's starlets, learned, it seems, in early 1987 that Captain Simon Hayward, while on leave from Northern Ireland's 14 Intelligence Company to reassess the performance of statsminister Olof Palme's bodyguards for Major David Walker's KMS security firm at the end of February 1986, had assassinated him when no one was looking. Now the NDIU was fixing him up as a drug trafficker in Sweden in order to reduce any possible blowback since Swedish investigators were still looking for likely suspects for the crime. The information had apparently come from what it had learned about the role of Met Special Branch officer, Detective Chief Inspector David Palmer-Hall's liaising with MI6, and a former Special Branch Commander Rollo Watts who worked with KMS's cover company, Saladin Security. Never in law enforcement and journalism had there ever been a hotter story.
Morgan was ectastic about the possibilities of the exposé, claiming that he could get £250,000 for it from a newspaper in Fleet Street, apparently Robert Maxwell's Daily Mirror, once the details of the claims were nailed down. 'Cap'n Bob' was hoping to provide Labour with something significant to slow down the Thatcher juggernaut. Maxwell, allegedly an MI6 agent, was said to be financing Labour Leader Neil Kinnock's private office. To do this, Morgan and Rees arranged a meeting with Goodridge in the parking lot of the Golden Lion pub in South London's Sydenham on March 10, 1987. The only trouble was that Goodridge did not appear at the time stated, and Rees got tired awaiting, leaving Morgan alone. Shortly later, Morgan was brutally murdered by an axe-wielding thug - quite possibly police informer, and Kray brothers-connected David Norris - splitting open his head.
The reason for the vicious murder was to warn anyone else, so tempted, of the consequences. Its timing was dictated by the fact that the NDIU, MI6, the British Army's Force Research Unit and others were already deeply involved in setting up Hayward for drug-trafficking in Sweden. Brother Christopher's Jaguar - which had allegedly been bought by someone in Sweden, and Simon was to deliver there - had already been packed with 50.5 kilos of cannabis, and he was already on his way from Barcelona there. The article that Morgan had in mind, if published, would have blown the Thatcher government sky high, catching it red-handed in a complicated coverup of what it had done to the statsminister. It would have been worse than Hayward having been caught red-handed in Stockholm, as London could claim that he was just a gamekeeper who had somehow become a poacher.
Hayward, at first, did not take his arrest in Sweden seriously, thinking that it was just some horrible mistake, but he became increasingly concerned when Swedish prosecutors took most seriously claims by the NDIU' s Detective Inspector David Morgan and Detective Sergeant Brian Moore contended - i. e., his brother Christopher was a professional cannabis trafficker, Simon was driving his Jaguar when he was arrested, had full knowledge that drugs were concealed in it, was paid £20,000 for providing the courier service, and did so also because of the 'excitement' it provided (Under Fire:My Own Story (p. 147ff.) - allegations which were made by drugs dealer Brian Walsh and auto mechnic 'Ronnie Butcher' in England, and confirmed by Forbes Cay Mitchell in Sweden. While the two NDIU officers discussed Simon's guilt without his lawyer present, they did not attend his trial, relying upon the hearsay evidence they had obtained about him to secure his conviction. And they were forbidden from revealing the sources of their information.
While the two NDIU's detectives were convinced of Hayward's guilt (pp.136-8) despite the fact that it was totally based upon hearsay evidence, other British official were not so convinced, apparently assuming that it would achieve the desired result in court, and it did. The Mets' Assistant Commissioner Colin Hewett refused to allow Morgan and Moore to appear at any hearing in Sweden since their information would be inadmissible in any English court. (p. 171) Douglas Hurd, the Home Secretary, had asked by fellow MP John Gorst to have HM's Chief Inspector of Constabulary to investigate the exhange of criminal intelligence between the UK and other countries in light of the Hayward case. (p. 194) And while Gorst was most critical of Swedish authorities in allowing the trial to proceed - resulting in Hayward's conviction, and a sentence of five years in prison - he was most critical of the British media's performance during it, exclaiming: "God save us from a trial by the monsters of the British press!" (Quoted from p. 260.)
The investigation of Daniel Morgan's murder was even less satisfying. The investigating team included a close friend of suspect Jonathon Rees who was removed from it when the relationship was discovered, and he then went on to replace the deceased Morgan at Southern Investigations. The head of the investigation, Detective Sergeant Douglas Campbell, was much more interested in discrediting the claim that Morgan was on to a big story for which some newspaper was willing to pay £250,000, dismissing it as "quite ludicrous", rather than solving the murder. "To earn that much from Fleet Street," he explained away about the small -time detective, "Daniel Morgan had to have been on to something very big." While Campbell's team made a attempt to try Rees, Goodridge, and his girl friend Jean Wisden, it got nowhere, as did three subsequent attempts, along with most belated his inquest. For more on this, see this link:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmhansrd/vo040706/halltext/40706h04.htm
In Morgan's case, though, the absence of serious press interest in it was most surprising, only causing one to wonder why. And this continued after more likely suspect David Norris - still confused with a relative with the same name suspected of having helped kill Stephen Lawrence a decade later - in the Morgan killing was himself murdered, and Robert Maxwell, head of the Mirror Group Newspapers, followed, allegedly falling off his luxury yacht Lady Ghislaine on November 5, 1991 while on his way to a crucial meeting with Israelis in the Canaries to save his crumbling media empire.
For the more conspiratorially minded, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh had set him up as a Mossad agent by alluding so while publicizing his new book, The Samson Option, about Israel's nuclear capability. The story was that Maxwell had tipped off the Mossad about Mordecai Vanunu's tipping off his Daily Mirror and arch-rival the Sunday Times about what Tel Aviv was doing in the field, resulting in his 'honey trap' in Rome, and his kidnapping back to Israel. For slow-learners in the media about the matter, infamous Israeli agent Air Ben-Menashi passed the claims along to various MPs, resulting in their repeating them under the protection of parliamentary privilege.
When 'Cap'n Bob' heard about it, he still had his solicitors issue writs of libel against the offenders despite the alleged protection, and fired foreign political editor Nick Davies for the inconvenience caused, stating that the Mossad claim about him was "ludicrous, a total invention". His apparent murder stopped the real examination of who he was working for, what he really knew about covert operations, and what he was willing to print.
While the performance of the police and the media seemed to improve after Maxwell's death, appearances were largely misleading. In 1992, the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) was created to correct what the NDIU had failed to achieve - "to develop and assess information and intelligence on serious crimes and major criminals and to disseminate that intelligence to the police, other law-enforcement agencies and government departments." (Quoted from Michael Smith, New Cloak, Old Dagger, p. 235.) To clean up with the coninuing criminal mess in the Metropolis, the Met created the Untouchables group whose performance has been discussed in the book by the same title that Guardian investigative reporters Michael Gillard and Laurie Flynn have written.
The only trouble with these changes is the baggage that the personnel of the new organization brought with them. While it is reassuring to note that former Chief Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police Sir Paul Condon and Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington helped clean up the mess surrounding the continuing activites of Southern Investigation and Hanrahan Associates, their activities just became more covert. While Hanrahan as a 'supergrass' helped jail Rees and his own partner Martin King, another former detective constable, he too went to jail when it was discovered that he was not telling the whole story by any means. The Untouchables thought that he, of all people, could lead them to Daniel Morgan's killers, as Rees himself was taped saying: "Hanrahan said what (they) want to do is to fuck us all. He said they keep talking about the Morgan murder every time they see me."
What is even more disturbing is that Ian Blair, Andy Hayman, Brian Moore, and Mike Todd belonged to it too until it closed down in 1998. Hayman was forced to resign this past December over the cock-up aka "unfounded rumors" concerning the murder of unarmed Jean Charles de Menezes the day after the 7/21 attempted bombings in London in 2005. Hayman thought he was some kind of 21st century Eliot Ness, informing a few crime reporters about the terrible fiasco rather than briefing his boss, Ian Blair, about what really happened. Little wonder that his most vulnerable chief was willing to throw him to the dogs in order to stay on.
The most disturbing member of the Untouchables, though, was Brian Moore. One would have thought that since he helped throw Hayward to the dogs under false pretences would have disappeared from official view, along with the NDIU. He is best known for saying this to Hayward after he and Morgan had talked to alleged fellow traffícker Forbes Mitichell in Sweden: "We saw him last night, and he has confirmed all the information we hold. So it does not really matter what you say now." (Quoted from Under Fire, p. 139.) And once the Untouchables were closed down, Moore became Surrey's Chief Constable, making it a model county in reducing crime, and he has just recently gone on to Wiltshire to clean up its law-enforcement mess.
And if anyone is tempted to think that Moore's advancement is just a one-off, my research indicates that his superior at NDIU, David Morgan, became the Press Officer for the Gloucestershire Constabulary to justify Home Office help when it came to expenses after it became increasingly bogged down in convicting serial killers Frederick and Rosemany West, so the rise of politicized police officers in Britain is established practice no matter how dirty it gets.
As for Todd's role with the Untouchables, it seems to be without blemish, but this seems to have been his problem - knowing too much dirt about the others - especially since he was beginning to sound personally more and more like Eliot Ness himself. The famous flying policeman who destroyed Al Capone's drug operations in Chicago with the help of the press during the 'thirties did so at the expense of two failed marriages, a bad drinking habit, and a most active social life.
As for the operational failures of the Untouchables, they took too seriously what Hanrahan and Rees cooked up about Daniel Morgan's murder, apparently at the behest of MI6 - explaining why it is now such a convoluted mess that the Crown will not touch it under any circumstances - but other disinformation which suits MI6's director general Sir John Scarlett to a tee - especially their claims that The Palace, especially the Duke of Edinburgh, was behind the killing of Princess Diana and Jodi Al Fayed. Rees and Hanrahan were constantly caught on tape, stating that they were feeding the press with all kinds of stories about men shagging some Princess in Buckingham Palace, an obvious coded allusion to the Princess - what became a feeding frenzy thanks to the efforts of MI6 agents like Tomlinson, Shayler, Le Winter and Machon. As she wrote approvingly of in Spies, Lies & Whistleblowers, she and Shayler were convinced that MI6 had conspired to kill them - the same way that it had tried unsuccessfully to kill Gaddafi. (pp. 213-4)
Regarding the paparazzo, James Andanson, who arranged the crash, Machon added: "In August 1998 former MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson gave a sworn statement about Andanson's connections to MI6, which has a long record of using journalists ajnd photographers as agents." (p. 214) Tomlinson told a French judge that MI6 had planned to kill Yugoslavia's President Slobodan Milosevic in the same way, and that the manager of the Ritz in Paris, apparently Henri Paul where the couple was staying, also worked for the agency. "But if one matter convinces David and me that MI6," she concluded, "is implicated in the crash, it is the involvement of Oswald or Oscar Le Winter, a conman and intelligence nuisance with connections to MI6. In April 1998, Oscar of Oswald Le Winter tried to sell an alleged telegram indicating CIA and MI6 collusion in the assassination to the Al Fayed family for $20,000,000." (p. 216)
Given the fact that all these statements were either false or misleading - what was intended to cover up killings MI6 had really sanctioned, going all the way back to the Palme one - it was hardly surprising that Gordon Logan even joined their chorus of disinformation, claiming that MI6 had also killed Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in London in 1978 and Maxwell too, but not in a way which made any sense. Logan claimed that MI6 killed Maxwell to force MI6 to help seek the release of former KGB Chief, and failed coup leader in Moscow in August 1991 Vladimir Kryuchkov - what MI6's resident in Moscow John Scarlett at the time would never approve of because of his previous besting by the Soviet service, and didn't prove necessary since President Boris Yeltsin agreed to the release without any prodding, much less murders. But to spice up the claim, Logan alluded to Princess Diana having been killed with the help of then MI6 director Richard Dearlove, concluding on this note: "Because of MI6's involvement in obvious murders JIC Chairman Michael Pakenham has created top secret committee to gag British media because of article which appeared in 1999." For more on his deceptions, see this link:
http://cryptome.org/markov-file.htm
With this whole deck of cards threatening to collapse with the final verdict of the Diana killing being imminent, and Todd himself spoiling for a fight with the Untouchables because of how they had treated him during the investigation of UK collusion in the CIA rendition program, it was imperative that he be eliminated immediately, and with the full support of the media - what we have seen occurred on March 10th and llth on Snowdonia. The only hiccup in the process was the unexpected interview that Peter Walker gave Alan Rimmer and Andrew Chapman - what appeared in the Mail on Sunday, March 30th, and is posted below.
To make up for the faux pax, Rimmer and Chapman posted an article last Sunday, stating that Todd had apparently been shagging black poet Sheryl Sleigh too, though she is saving her comments about their relationship for the inquest. And for good measure, Paul Bracci and Nick Craven added in "The last secret of a ladies' (police) man" that he was another relationship with former policewoman Tracy Clarke, who was suspected, along with Todd, with trying to help a criminal escape justice in typical Met fashion when it is threatened, though there was no shagging here. More important, they have information from a "recently retired senior officer", someone sounding much like GMP former detective chief superintendent Bernard Postles or someone acting in his stead, claiming that Mr. Robinson, husband of a former lover of Todd's, must have been the anonymous caller from the North who tipped off columnist Max Clifford well before Todd's killing about bringing down now a top police chief, when Mr. Robinson only learned of her relationship with Todd four days before his death.
Little wonder that the media have now obliged the PM to surprisingly back down on prison sanctions in the new privacy legislation against its reporters and policemen who violate the privacy of popular private persons, gurus, and important officials.
In sum, the UK really needs a gagging of its press, and a clean up of its police.
In the development of Western democracies, it was hardly suprising that all elements in them, especially the police and the media, became increasingly corrupted by the process. They were just too central to it, and had too many opportunities along the way for these well-established, underpaid professions not to take advantage of any opportunity they had, even illegal ones, once they saw that they were being left behind by the more respected ones, like doctors and lawyers. While the cops and hacks had traditionally been seen as the defenders against corrupt interests in the state and society, especially organized crime, it was not too long before its members started to close the gap in pay and prequisites with other professions by taking liberties with their powers of punishment, disclosure, and independence so as to enrich themselves both financially and in prestige.
It was during the 20th century that policemen and reporters belatedly took advantage of their opportunities, initiatives, and independence in society at the expense of the public. After the end of the alarms caused by the Napoleonic Wars, of course, such incidents had occurred - e. g., coppers fixing up suspects as criminals in order to help themselves, reporters making up stories about complicated irregularities to satisfy certain interests and individuals rather than seeking the truth, investigators assuming a certain result to a mysterious incident and then finding evidence which apparently proved their assumptions, hacks cutting corners in investigating matters of great public interest to beat their competitors in getting the story, etc. - but they became more and more institutionalized as the age of extremes progressed, to use historian Eric Hobsbawn's term for it.
The media relied on the police on getting the essentials about almost all crimes, and the coppers made sure that it received what it wanted the public to see. Along the way, they both coopted as many other organizations in the state and society as they could to help them in getting their way. The cops used interests within state confines, like the Masons, to increase their power and prosperity while the media relied upon mass productions in all kinds of venues to get its message across. "By the century's end," Hobsbawn concluded in The Age of Extremes, "large numbers of citizens were withdrawing from politics, leaving the affairs of state to the 'political class' - the phrase seems to have originated in Italy - who read each others' speeches and editorials, a special-interest group of professional politicians, journalists, lobbyists and others whose occupations ranked at the bottom of the scale of trustworthiness in sociological enquiries." (p. 81)
In the UK, police, defense, and intelligence officials are also part of its 'political class', thanks to The Troubles in Northern Ireland, and what has now come to infect the mainland with the so-called war on terror. The police traditionally relied upon the public - whether to report incidents, to provide confirming evidence, or pass judgment in court after investigations concluded, especially through various kinds of juries - but now they increasingly rely upon their own resources to make a case in any controversy, especially a criminal one, and count on the press to help confirm in the courts, and with the public at large. Through the use of informers, threats of injunctions, DA notices from The Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee (DPBAC), Public Interest Immunity certificates, disinformers on the internet, and former associates in the private sector, particularly alleged whistleblowers and private detectives, these securocrats are able to insure that the press only publishes pretty much what they want the public to see.
And the media is most happy with this comprehensive control of really controversial disputes since it allows it to print most fanciful reports about almost anything with impunity while more qualified military and intelligence reporters refrain from publishing almost anything the least bit controversial. As Admiral Nick Wilkinson, the DPBAC's Secretary, explained in an issue of Eye Spy! magazine: "The DA notice is an attempt at balancing the need for operational secrecy against the need for the public to hear of cover-ups, illegal actions and gross inefficiency in the spending of taxpayers' money," (Issue 8 2002, p. 77) Of course, where operational secrecy should end, and these other issues should come into play is a matter of debate, especially if those involved decide to keep an operation going for the most ill-defined, long-range purposes.
If anyone doubts the impact of such individuals and procedures on the media's performance, much less the criminal justice system, just recall, for example, what happened to John Stalker's inquiry into the Shoot-to-Kill murders during the 1982 emergency in Northern Ireland's South Armagh, thanks to the allegations against him by informer David Burton aka Burtelstein; how threats of injunctions and the use of DA notices have complemented the process by insuring that the public never learned anything really important about how British security services were colluding with all kinds of people, particularly in the Ulster Defence Association, with impunity there on a much wider scale; and how rules prohibiting government agents from dealing with the press are circumvented by intermediaries, especially by alleged whistleblowers like Richard Tomlinson, David Shayler, Oswald Le Winter, Gordon Logan, and Annie Machon, and former agents who are in the security business, like private detectives Daniel Morgan, Duncan Hanrahan, and Jonathon Rees.
Only the beginning of this whole, rotten process has been disclosed, and only then by usually dragging in the KGB as if it had something essential to do with it. In November 1969, The Times published taped conversations it had recorded, showing that Met policemen, especially Detective Sergeant John Symonds, were taking large bribes from criminals like south London gang boss Charles Richardson in order to facilitate continuing criminal activity, especially drug trafficking, across the board. When Symonds fled the country in 1972 while awaiting trial at the Old Bailey, the press was obliged to go after bigger fish in the massive scandal, resulting in 1977 in its Chief Superintendant Bill Moody being sentenced to twelve years in prison for taking bribes over eight years from Soho pornographers so that they could continue their lucrative, illegal business. Moody's whole network was linked to the Masons.
After Symonds returned to Britain in 1980 to face the music for his petty crimes at the Met instead of what he had been doing during the interim for the Soviets, the crime wave continued, thanks particularly to the fact that many of its investigators, especially in the Mets' Criminal Intelligence Branches 2 and 3, were still Masons. The biggest criminal success was the £26,000,000 gold bullion heist at Brinks-MAT outside Heathrow Airport in 1983. The success of the operation depended upon the growing number of private detective agencies, often headed by former coppers with Mason connections, which kept the honest police and media guessing about what was going on, and why. To counteract this lack of intelligence, the Central Drugs and Illegal Immigrants Intelligence Unit was created, soon to be split into two - one of which was the National Drugs Intelligence Unit (NDIU) - because of the growing scope of the problems.
Along with the growing international character of crime, and of law-enforcement to contain it was the growth of private detective agencies and bodyguard services to protect the individuals involved, whatever their occupation, from risks. Daniel Morgan and Jonathon Rees established Southern Investigations which employed off-duty policemen to do its work, some of which was so criminal that it led to a falling out between them over the disappearnce of the funds from a used-car sale. Southern relied heavily upon the input from Met detective Duncan Hanrahan who established his own detective service when he was required to retire because of injuries suffered during a robbery. Then the protection of private persons, especially mobsters and gurus, was becoming a more professional business, as Tony Geraghty has written in The Bullet Catchers: Bodyguards and the World of Close Protection, the better of them hardly distinguishable from the government agencies they previously worked for. (p. 274ff.)
All distinctions between poachers and gamekeepers in the security business disappeared when Paul Goodridge, a 'heavy' bodyguard for some of London's starlets, learned, it seems, in early 1987 that Captain Simon Hayward, while on leave from Northern Ireland's 14 Intelligence Company to reassess the performance of statsminister Olof Palme's bodyguards for Major David Walker's KMS security firm at the end of February 1986, had assassinated him when no one was looking. Now the NDIU was fixing him up as a drug trafficker in Sweden in order to reduce any possible blowback since Swedish investigators were still looking for likely suspects for the crime. The information had apparently come from what it had learned about the role of Met Special Branch officer, Detective Chief Inspector David Palmer-Hall's liaising with MI6, and a former Special Branch Commander Rollo Watts who worked with KMS's cover company, Saladin Security. Never in law enforcement and journalism had there ever been a hotter story.
Morgan was ectastic about the possibilities of the exposé, claiming that he could get £250,000 for it from a newspaper in Fleet Street, apparently Robert Maxwell's Daily Mirror, once the details of the claims were nailed down. 'Cap'n Bob' was hoping to provide Labour with something significant to slow down the Thatcher juggernaut. Maxwell, allegedly an MI6 agent, was said to be financing Labour Leader Neil Kinnock's private office. To do this, Morgan and Rees arranged a meeting with Goodridge in the parking lot of the Golden Lion pub in South London's Sydenham on March 10, 1987. The only trouble was that Goodridge did not appear at the time stated, and Rees got tired awaiting, leaving Morgan alone. Shortly later, Morgan was brutally murdered by an axe-wielding thug - quite possibly police informer, and Kray brothers-connected David Norris - splitting open his head.
The reason for the vicious murder was to warn anyone else, so tempted, of the consequences. Its timing was dictated by the fact that the NDIU, MI6, the British Army's Force Research Unit and others were already deeply involved in setting up Hayward for drug-trafficking in Sweden. Brother Christopher's Jaguar - which had allegedly been bought by someone in Sweden, and Simon was to deliver there - had already been packed with 50.5 kilos of cannabis, and he was already on his way from Barcelona there. The article that Morgan had in mind, if published, would have blown the Thatcher government sky high, catching it red-handed in a complicated coverup of what it had done to the statsminister. It would have been worse than Hayward having been caught red-handed in Stockholm, as London could claim that he was just a gamekeeper who had somehow become a poacher.
Hayward, at first, did not take his arrest in Sweden seriously, thinking that it was just some horrible mistake, but he became increasingly concerned when Swedish prosecutors took most seriously claims by the NDIU' s Detective Inspector David Morgan and Detective Sergeant Brian Moore contended - i. e., his brother Christopher was a professional cannabis trafficker, Simon was driving his Jaguar when he was arrested, had full knowledge that drugs were concealed in it, was paid £20,000 for providing the courier service, and did so also because of the 'excitement' it provided (Under Fire:My Own Story (p. 147ff.) - allegations which were made by drugs dealer Brian Walsh and auto mechnic 'Ronnie Butcher' in England, and confirmed by Forbes Cay Mitchell in Sweden. While the two NDIU officers discussed Simon's guilt without his lawyer present, they did not attend his trial, relying upon the hearsay evidence they had obtained about him to secure his conviction. And they were forbidden from revealing the sources of their information.
While the two NDIU's detectives were convinced of Hayward's guilt (pp.136-8) despite the fact that it was totally based upon hearsay evidence, other British official were not so convinced, apparently assuming that it would achieve the desired result in court, and it did. The Mets' Assistant Commissioner Colin Hewett refused to allow Morgan and Moore to appear at any hearing in Sweden since their information would be inadmissible in any English court. (p. 171) Douglas Hurd, the Home Secretary, had asked by fellow MP John Gorst to have HM's Chief Inspector of Constabulary to investigate the exhange of criminal intelligence between the UK and other countries in light of the Hayward case. (p. 194) And while Gorst was most critical of Swedish authorities in allowing the trial to proceed - resulting in Hayward's conviction, and a sentence of five years in prison - he was most critical of the British media's performance during it, exclaiming: "God save us from a trial by the monsters of the British press!" (Quoted from p. 260.)
The investigation of Daniel Morgan's murder was even less satisfying. The investigating team included a close friend of suspect Jonathon Rees who was removed from it when the relationship was discovered, and he then went on to replace the deceased Morgan at Southern Investigations. The head of the investigation, Detective Sergeant Douglas Campbell, was much more interested in discrediting the claim that Morgan was on to a big story for which some newspaper was willing to pay £250,000, dismissing it as "quite ludicrous", rather than solving the murder. "To earn that much from Fleet Street," he explained away about the small -time detective, "Daniel Morgan had to have been on to something very big." While Campbell's team made a attempt to try Rees, Goodridge, and his girl friend Jean Wisden, it got nowhere, as did three subsequent attempts, along with most belated his inquest. For more on this, see this link:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmhansrd/vo040706/halltext/40706h04.htm
In Morgan's case, though, the absence of serious press interest in it was most surprising, only causing one to wonder why. And this continued after more likely suspect David Norris - still confused with a relative with the same name suspected of having helped kill Stephen Lawrence a decade later - in the Morgan killing was himself murdered, and Robert Maxwell, head of the Mirror Group Newspapers, followed, allegedly falling off his luxury yacht Lady Ghislaine on November 5, 1991 while on his way to a crucial meeting with Israelis in the Canaries to save his crumbling media empire.
For the more conspiratorially minded, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh had set him up as a Mossad agent by alluding so while publicizing his new book, The Samson Option, about Israel's nuclear capability. The story was that Maxwell had tipped off the Mossad about Mordecai Vanunu's tipping off his Daily Mirror and arch-rival the Sunday Times about what Tel Aviv was doing in the field, resulting in his 'honey trap' in Rome, and his kidnapping back to Israel. For slow-learners in the media about the matter, infamous Israeli agent Air Ben-Menashi passed the claims along to various MPs, resulting in their repeating them under the protection of parliamentary privilege.
When 'Cap'n Bob' heard about it, he still had his solicitors issue writs of libel against the offenders despite the alleged protection, and fired foreign political editor Nick Davies for the inconvenience caused, stating that the Mossad claim about him was "ludicrous, a total invention". His apparent murder stopped the real examination of who he was working for, what he really knew about covert operations, and what he was willing to print.
While the performance of the police and the media seemed to improve after Maxwell's death, appearances were largely misleading. In 1992, the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) was created to correct what the NDIU had failed to achieve - "to develop and assess information and intelligence on serious crimes and major criminals and to disseminate that intelligence to the police, other law-enforcement agencies and government departments." (Quoted from Michael Smith, New Cloak, Old Dagger, p. 235.) To clean up with the coninuing criminal mess in the Metropolis, the Met created the Untouchables group whose performance has been discussed in the book by the same title that Guardian investigative reporters Michael Gillard and Laurie Flynn have written.
The only trouble with these changes is the baggage that the personnel of the new organization brought with them. While it is reassuring to note that former Chief Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police Sir Paul Condon and Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington helped clean up the mess surrounding the continuing activites of Southern Investigation and Hanrahan Associates, their activities just became more covert. While Hanrahan as a 'supergrass' helped jail Rees and his own partner Martin King, another former detective constable, he too went to jail when it was discovered that he was not telling the whole story by any means. The Untouchables thought that he, of all people, could lead them to Daniel Morgan's killers, as Rees himself was taped saying: "Hanrahan said what (they) want to do is to fuck us all. He said they keep talking about the Morgan murder every time they see me."
What is even more disturbing is that Ian Blair, Andy Hayman, Brian Moore, and Mike Todd belonged to it too until it closed down in 1998. Hayman was forced to resign this past December over the cock-up aka "unfounded rumors" concerning the murder of unarmed Jean Charles de Menezes the day after the 7/21 attempted bombings in London in 2005. Hayman thought he was some kind of 21st century Eliot Ness, informing a few crime reporters about the terrible fiasco rather than briefing his boss, Ian Blair, about what really happened. Little wonder that his most vulnerable chief was willing to throw him to the dogs in order to stay on.
The most disturbing member of the Untouchables, though, was Brian Moore. One would have thought that since he helped throw Hayward to the dogs under false pretences would have disappeared from official view, along with the NDIU. He is best known for saying this to Hayward after he and Morgan had talked to alleged fellow traffícker Forbes Mitichell in Sweden: "We saw him last night, and he has confirmed all the information we hold. So it does not really matter what you say now." (Quoted from Under Fire, p. 139.) And once the Untouchables were closed down, Moore became Surrey's Chief Constable, making it a model county in reducing crime, and he has just recently gone on to Wiltshire to clean up its law-enforcement mess.
And if anyone is tempted to think that Moore's advancement is just a one-off, my research indicates that his superior at NDIU, David Morgan, became the Press Officer for the Gloucestershire Constabulary to justify Home Office help when it came to expenses after it became increasingly bogged down in convicting serial killers Frederick and Rosemany West, so the rise of politicized police officers in Britain is established practice no matter how dirty it gets.
As for Todd's role with the Untouchables, it seems to be without blemish, but this seems to have been his problem - knowing too much dirt about the others - especially since he was beginning to sound personally more and more like Eliot Ness himself. The famous flying policeman who destroyed Al Capone's drug operations in Chicago with the help of the press during the 'thirties did so at the expense of two failed marriages, a bad drinking habit, and a most active social life.
As for the operational failures of the Untouchables, they took too seriously what Hanrahan and Rees cooked up about Daniel Morgan's murder, apparently at the behest of MI6 - explaining why it is now such a convoluted mess that the Crown will not touch it under any circumstances - but other disinformation which suits MI6's director general Sir John Scarlett to a tee - especially their claims that The Palace, especially the Duke of Edinburgh, was behind the killing of Princess Diana and Jodi Al Fayed. Rees and Hanrahan were constantly caught on tape, stating that they were feeding the press with all kinds of stories about men shagging some Princess in Buckingham Palace, an obvious coded allusion to the Princess - what became a feeding frenzy thanks to the efforts of MI6 agents like Tomlinson, Shayler, Le Winter and Machon. As she wrote approvingly of in Spies, Lies & Whistleblowers, she and Shayler were convinced that MI6 had conspired to kill them - the same way that it had tried unsuccessfully to kill Gaddafi. (pp. 213-4)
Regarding the paparazzo, James Andanson, who arranged the crash, Machon added: "In August 1998 former MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson gave a sworn statement about Andanson's connections to MI6, which has a long record of using journalists ajnd photographers as agents." (p. 214) Tomlinson told a French judge that MI6 had planned to kill Yugoslavia's President Slobodan Milosevic in the same way, and that the manager of the Ritz in Paris, apparently Henri Paul where the couple was staying, also worked for the agency. "But if one matter convinces David and me that MI6," she concluded, "is implicated in the crash, it is the involvement of Oswald or Oscar Le Winter, a conman and intelligence nuisance with connections to MI6. In April 1998, Oscar of Oswald Le Winter tried to sell an alleged telegram indicating CIA and MI6 collusion in the assassination to the Al Fayed family for $20,000,000." (p. 216)
Given the fact that all these statements were either false or misleading - what was intended to cover up killings MI6 had really sanctioned, going all the way back to the Palme one - it was hardly surprising that Gordon Logan even joined their chorus of disinformation, claiming that MI6 had also killed Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in London in 1978 and Maxwell too, but not in a way which made any sense. Logan claimed that MI6 killed Maxwell to force MI6 to help seek the release of former KGB Chief, and failed coup leader in Moscow in August 1991 Vladimir Kryuchkov - what MI6's resident in Moscow John Scarlett at the time would never approve of because of his previous besting by the Soviet service, and didn't prove necessary since President Boris Yeltsin agreed to the release without any prodding, much less murders. But to spice up the claim, Logan alluded to Princess Diana having been killed with the help of then MI6 director Richard Dearlove, concluding on this note: "Because of MI6's involvement in obvious murders JIC Chairman Michael Pakenham has created top secret committee to gag British media because of article which appeared in 1999." For more on his deceptions, see this link:
http://cryptome.org/markov-file.htm
With this whole deck of cards threatening to collapse with the final verdict of the Diana killing being imminent, and Todd himself spoiling for a fight with the Untouchables because of how they had treated him during the investigation of UK collusion in the CIA rendition program, it was imperative that he be eliminated immediately, and with the full support of the media - what we have seen occurred on March 10th and llth on Snowdonia. The only hiccup in the process was the unexpected interview that Peter Walker gave Alan Rimmer and Andrew Chapman - what appeared in the Mail on Sunday, March 30th, and is posted below.
To make up for the faux pax, Rimmer and Chapman posted an article last Sunday, stating that Todd had apparently been shagging black poet Sheryl Sleigh too, though she is saving her comments about their relationship for the inquest. And for good measure, Paul Bracci and Nick Craven added in "The last secret of a ladies' (police) man" that he was another relationship with former policewoman Tracy Clarke, who was suspected, along with Todd, with trying to help a criminal escape justice in typical Met fashion when it is threatened, though there was no shagging here. More important, they have information from a "recently retired senior officer", someone sounding much like GMP former detective chief superintendent Bernard Postles or someone acting in his stead, claiming that Mr. Robinson, husband of a former lover of Todd's, must have been the anonymous caller from the North who tipped off columnist Max Clifford well before Todd's killing about bringing down now a top police chief, when Mr. Robinson only learned of her relationship with Todd four days before his death.
Little wonder that the media have now obliged the PM to surprisingly back down on prison sanctions in the new privacy legislation against its reporters and policemen who violate the privacy of popular private persons, gurus, and important officials.
In sum, the UK really needs a gagging of its press, and a clean up of its police.
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