Why Most Confused Neo-Nazi Anders Breivik Finally Went on the Rampage In Norway

by Trowbridge H. Ford

Without doubt, the most destructive, recent 'false flag' operation has been the 'sleeper cell' one that the Mossad put together to entrap neo-Nazis wanting memorabilia of Hitler's regime - particularly pieces of the entrance sign to the Auschwitz concenteration camp - to help fianance attacks on governments which were not doing enough for Israel.(1) It turned into an uttter fiasco when middleman in any transfer, Anders Högström, turned whistleblower - what ultimately induced the terrible blowback by Anders Brevik in Norway. He turned deadly on the authorities who had aided and abetted its efforts without real results up until then, killing 77 of the up-and-coming supporters of Norway's government by bombing Oslo's government center, and then shooting Labor youths being indoctrinated to take over on a nearby island.

The attacks were more deadly and destructive of Israeli interests than the so-called Lavon affair where agents of the Israeli Defence Force, posing as agents of Egypt's Nasser regime, carried out attacks on American and British facilities in 1954, only to be caught red-handed in the process. The blowback then only resulted in the execution and imprisonment of the culprits, and undermined the reputation of many of Israel's leaders while the blowback from Breivik's massacre destroyed much of the support that the Jewish state had in Scandinavia.

Meir Dagan's Mossad was most upset by the surprise fiasco as it expected the heist of the Auschwitz rntrance sign to be the crowning achievement of his tenure as director - what would restore flaging support for Israeli interests because of what Hitler's regime had done to the Jews during The Holocaust. The sign would be transported and cut up in Sweden for sale to collectors of such memorabilia for money which neo-Nazis would allegedly use to finance terrorist attacks upon Swedish government buildings and leading politicians because of weak support of Israeli interests, especially their supplying support for Muslims displaced by the continuing conflicts in the Middle East. This way Tel Aviv would achieve the best kind of result - rekindling support for its claims about anti-semitism while hurting those who cared for those hurt by its conflicts while at the least risk of any serious blowback.

The mission had been hastily called after the expected death of rabid anti-semite James von Brunn who had shot up the American Holocaust Museum in Washington the previous July, and whose trial because of the murder of a security guard was sure to garner new support for Israel.

Högstrom was most interested in setting up infamous neo-Nazi millionaire, Lars Göran.Whalström, in Sweden as the cruel collector of such memorabilia. Högstöm had started the violent Nationalist Front in the early 1990s, apparently with Whalströms help, but he turned against it in 1999 after it assassinated trade unionist Björn Söderberg. He also started the group Exit to assist like-minded neo-Nazis leaving the movement. The heist was a 'false flag' operation to make up for the unexpected death of von Brunn.

The Mossad was planning on selling it to targets whose exposure - like Marc Garlasco of Human Rights Watch, and later a UN most Senior Human Rights officer -would be more productive. Garlasco really isn't an anti-semite, and denier of The Holocaust, only an official who did not suit Israel's interests while dealing with the Palestinians. When Högström discovered that the stolen sign was not on its way to Sweden, but stored nearby Auschwitz to be shipped on a Corendon airliner to Israel where it would later be transported elsewhere for sale, he turned informer.

Breivik was most interested in arranging a sale with an English millionaire in Stockholm of the same sort for the Mossad mission because he was starting to run out of funds because of his comings and goings. He apparently had financed his operations by selling gifts he had been given to avoid the authorities wondering where his funds were coming from. Högström's informing made any operation difficult to put together, forcing him to rely more and more on just his own efforts.

There were also problems of sending Högstrom to Poland for his involvement in the crime because he could stymie an extradition request by justifying what he had done - what would certainly reveal Corendon's involvement in the shipment, and that would implicate Captain Thomas Salme in the process. Salme had gotten into flying while working as a mechanical engineer for SAS airlines at Arlanda Airport. He could have become a role model for the 9/11 highjackers as he just decided to move into the cockpit by forging the necessary credentials while practicing on a flight simulator for Boeing 737s.

As Salme expalined on the Kevn Trudeau Show about the crude Swedish flying permit he put together with just a logo and a regular piece of white paper: "It wasn't laminated, and looked like something I'd put together at home." (2) At the time, the commercial flying business in Europe, especially cargo flights, was lacking qualified pilots, and he used the shortage without question to pilot flights for 13 years with Air One, Jet 2, Apollo, Air Sweden, and Turkey's Corendon where he had been a captain for two years.(3)
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The Swedish Transport Authority, to make up for its lack of oversight regarding Salme's being a pilot, and to take advantage of what Högstrom knew, got rid of the problem by tipping off ones in Holland about his lack of qualifications, and he was conveniently arrested just before takeoff in a Coredon flight from Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport on March 3, 2010.

For all the trouble and embarrassment Salme had caused, one would hardly know it by the way he was treated. A Ducth court fined him $2,500 for flying without a license all those years, and prohibted him from flying for a year. Then he was treated as a celebrity, appearing, for example, on the Kevin Trudeau Show, as if he were just another crazy highjacker who found fame for it. Jouranlist and publicist Stefan Lovgren is helping Salme write his autobiography, 13 Years in Heaven, and found a publisher for it. It will apparently appear in 2012 - thanks to Norstedt's, one of Sweden's oldest, and most respected publishers, taking it on. Certainly showed, as the old adage goes, crime pays.

Breivik certainly didn't miss the disparity in treatment between Högström and Salme, deciding that he would proceed alone, as best he could, in his efforts - a crusade which not only settled scores with his betrayers but also with the authorities who had not taken them too seriously. In late August and early September, Breivik was in Prague to purchase arms for some kind of shootout. He even hollowed out the areas underneath the seats of his Hyundai Atos so that they could be filled with an AK-47, a Glock pistol, and rocket and hand grenades. Brevik even took up a prospectus about mining so that it could justify his seeking explosives for even greater carnage. He came back to Norway empty-handed, though, discovering that it was easier to obtain such items in Oslo than in the Czech Republic.

Meanwhile, Högström had the book thrown at him by the Polish authorities. Once he had been extradicted there, it was just a matter of time before he was sent to the cooler. Marcin Auguscinski, who had been recruited by Högström to do convenient neo-Nazi missions while he worked on his family's estate in southern Sweden, filled in all the details about the theft that he and other Poles had carried at Högström's direction, leaving no other one higher to be exposed in the Mossad operation. By December, Högström was headed for 32 months in prison for serving as its middleman - what he managed to be served in Sweden by year's end because of his cooperation in the investigation.

Breivik by then had decided to use a suicide bomber to do the trick, relying upon what the English Defence League (EDL) had been able to gather to finance such operations, and an operative to do it. The EDL had long had a jihadist, Glasgow nursing student Ezedden Al-Khadeli collecting money in bank accouts that he had esblished at TSB, the Post Office, The Halifax, and The Bank of Scotland, often with the use of stolen identities. He had become at jihadist while attending the University of Luton, along with Swedish resident Taimour Abdulwahab aka Al-Abdaly. He was persuaded to become a suicide bomber, thanks to almost all the money that Al-Khadeli had collected. The target would be Stokholm streets - not its government buildings and officials as originally planned, it seems, by Whälstrom's neo-Nazis - filled with Christmas shoppers.

The plan was an ingenious one where an unsuspected jihadist obtained the necessary equipment - fertilizer, pressure cookers, batteries, and mobile phones to trigger the explosions - and set them off in a country whose capital was considered one of the safest places on the planet. While the Czechs had put Breivik on the watch list for wanting similar items, the Norwegians didn't, considering him not to be dangerous. Anders helped in the disguise by buying on the internet 300 grams of sodium nitrite - a good chemical to triggeer an explosion - from a Polish supplier, Wroclaw, just at this time, showing that he was apparently using the fertizer he had bought to further his mining plans back home.

On December 11th, it was easy for Al-Abdaly to drive into central Stockholm from a suburb, park his car on Drottingatan, and set it afire - what caused people to take shelter when it feebly exploded. Then he went into another street, and his bomb belt started exploding, most likely accidentally, killing himself and injuring two passersby. He, it seems, didn't know how to wire a string of bombs in series with cables.

The most suspicious aspect of the suicide bombing was that an onlooker suddenly appeared on the site, and took zoom-photos of the dying bomber - what two people witnessed, and a 24/7 surveillance camera had taken pictures of belonging to a shopowner who had installed across the street for his own security. The police, and the security agency, Säpo, were surprisingly not interested in viewing it - what could at least identify who he was.

Thr bombing certainly did not have the desired effect of Islamophobes, though it did quite frighten the public. Sweden did not tighten up its security laws. The eavesdropping agency, FRA, was not given greater powers to find such suspected terrorists - what was used by some to explain the litttle success that the suicide bomber had had. More important, the Swedish government did not tighten up its admission of immigrants, especially Muslims from the Middle East, from seeking sanctuary in Sweden. The most telling sign of the mission's failure was the e-mail which was sent to Säpo and the Swedish news service (TT), demanding that Sweden withdraw its 500 troops from the NATO mission in Afghanistan, and justifying such violence because of Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks protraying Mohommad as a dog (4) - what the government has gone out of its ways to show that it has no intention of changing these policies.

The failure of Säpo and the police to take advantage of the video that the shopowneer offered looks more suspicious, though. The government, in November, had appointed a special prosecutor to look into the American Embassy in Stockholm, spying unlawfully on Swedish citizens. It was going along with what the Norwegians were doing when similar charges were made about the Embassy in Oslo.(5) In neither, it seems, had American security informed the respective government authorities of what they were doing - what could only be justified in Stockholm if the Americans had placed signs below their dozen monitoring cameras, explaining that they were taping the scene.

It would prove most contradictory if the Swedish authorities then used the illegal videos that the shopkeeper had made to get to the bottom of the plot, so they just forgot about the whole matter, especially since only the suicide bomber had been killed in the bombings.

The person most upset by all this was the photographer who had taken the close-ups, apparently Anders Breivik. Instead of having a scene of carnage whose photographs would put all people in Scandinavia on notice about the capabilities of Muslim jihadists, he was left with little more than close-ups of the incompetent deceased - what were of no use to him or anyone else.

Despite all the claims about Breivik's verbal abilities, he was most involved in photography and creating art to represent his reality. This he now used in finishing his famous 2083 - A Europesan Declaration of Independence, and his day-by-day entries in his diary. It was filled with all kinds of pictures, photos, digitally-enhanced images, cartoons, and made-up propaganda in case viewers could not glean the meaning of his verbal attacks upon cultural marxism, multiculturalism, islam, muslim immigration, feminisim, and the like. It is a illustration of what can be done with photo psychology and reading pictures.

Anders' fixation on his looks was well illustrated when he went to America for a face job after some Muslim friends had broken his nose, scared his forehead and chin in a fight which helped make him an islamophobe. His incredible narcissism was portrayed in the self portraits he took of himself as a Freemason, a Norwegian military hero, and a covert operator or photographer - what he is most worried about authorities suppressing now with less glamoress ones. The killer is obsessed with appearances - what was the root cause of his undoing.

More important, it revealed a knowledge of Anders Högström which everyone, especially authorities in Norway, have completely forgotten about. Instead of talking about it in a way which would expose and hurt Högström for his betrayals, though, Breivik spoke of him as a like-minded comrade in arms. "Now we have come to the conclusion," Swedish afternoon daily Aftonbladet explained, "that mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik believed that plans (for such attacks) could have been started by his sister-cell in Sweden."(6) About who was leading the sister-cell, Breivik hoped that it was Högstörm, leading one of the neo-Nazi organizations in Sweden. "I have always wondered, " Breivik added, "if there are real nationalsocialists or like-minded persons who are supporting my efforts. Perhaps, there are comrades who are with and connected to the knights Templar, my sister-cell?" (7)

Breivik was also setting up shop and testing explosions in Norway so that he would prove far more effective in arousing the West about the threat than Al-Abdaly had. In May 2011, he finally gave some semblance of life to his alleged farming interests by buying six tons of fertilizer for bomb making at his Geofarm at Åsta, 83 miles northeast of Oslo, and then moving there to test a bomb - what he accomplished on June 13th. He claimed that the project cost him around 300,000 euros.

It took him - the knight Justiciar grandmaster of the new Templars who he had even portrayed himself in the closing pages of his manifesto when the Muslims had allegedly been chased back by 2083 to where they had come from - another six weeks to get his targets straight, and screw up the courage to get it started. He had to find some competent Muslim he could trust to do a bombing in Oslo, something he thought was impossible and never materialized. Or else, he had to find some like-minded Norwegian who waa willing to become a suicide bomber to achieve his goals.

But in making up for Högstrom's betrayals, and Al-Abdaly's imcompetence, he overlooked the facts that he was not a Muslim, and Högstrom was never on his side, so doing dirty work allegedly with them was bound to become increasingly confusing.

One can only suspect that his original supporters - especially Director Meir Dagen of the Mossad, now not wanting to retire on such a risky note - had decided that Breivik had outlived his usefulness, and had dropped him, explaining why he decided to turn the tables on it by attacking those in Scandinavia who opposed its efforts, not realizing how stupid it would seem, and counterproductive it would be.

As a Norwegian, he should have settled for a car bomb at one of its mosques, and taken his chances by fleeing the country .By bombing public offices in Oslo, resulting in eight deaths, and killing another 69 at the Labour Party's Worker Youth League summer camp at Utoya only made some kind of sense until the authorities found out that he was just like them, another native Norwegian. He had just lost the thread of the whole plot while atttempting to carry it out.

What had triggered the chaos was the announcement by Eskil Pedersen, the head of the Labor Party's Youth Movement, that it was calling upon the government to impose an "unlimited economic embargo of Israel from the Norwegian side" because of its continuing mistreatment of the Palestinians, as the tabloid Dagbladet reported two days before the shooting. The announcement sent him into a complete tailspin which he resolved by setting off the van, filled with explosives outside the goverment complex, only to rush off to the island to kill those who were willing to support the embargo until his cellphone pleas to the security authorities as one of its Commanders to stop it was achieved when its Delta force arrrived on the scene, and he had run out of ammunition.

In short, because of the confused, convoluted history Breivik had had in trying to punish the jihadists at old neo-Nazi expense, he had become the paranoid schizophrenic that his apologists belatedly acknowledged.

References

1. For more, see my article about the Auschwitz sign heist.
2. Jesus Diaz, "The Guy Who Flew Thousands Of Passengers As A Fake Pilot," May 18, 2010.
3. For more, see: http://www.thelocal.se/25330/20100303/
4. http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/Europe/12/11/Swden_explosion/Index=html?hpt=T1
5. http://cnn.com/2010-11-06/swden_us-investigator_swedish-law-Swedish-authorities-stockholm?_s=PM:WORLD
6 http://aftonbladet.se/nyheter/terrordadetinorge/article13376839.ab
7. Quoted from ibid. in english.

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

by Trowbridge H. Ford

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



References

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

Why America's NSA and Britain's GCHQ Had Gareth Williams Assassinated

by Trowbridge H. Ford

The National Security Agency's new Director in 1999, Air Force General Michael Hayden, had a long career in its surveillance operations but his primary qualification for office was his adherence to the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement - one which sought direct religious experience with Christ through pentacostal and evangelical experience. It was a millinarian type of religious group, reminiscent of the crusading orders of the Middle Ages, and best exemplified in the modern world by the Knights of Malta, the great recruiting agency of many of today's New World Order people. Its capacity to find essential professionals, and fit them into key government positions goes far beyond what Yale University's Skull and Bones Society can accomplish. While Hayden was attending Pittsburgh's Duquesne University, he studied American history - getting an M.A. on the impact of the Marshall Plan upon Europe, the first step in the West's renewal after the catastrophic collapse in WWII. "Like many of his religious and conservative classmates," James Bamford wrote, "Hayden rejected the antiwar movement and the social revolution and instead would embrace the military." (1)

CIA Director George Tenet became interested in Hayden's potential to ignite NSA in an fightback against the continuing stalemate over Palestine, and growing Muslim hostility toward America. "The CIA chief liked what he heard and Hayden flew back to Korea virtually assured that he had the job as director of the NSA." (2) It recalled Henry Kissinger's hiring of lowly Major Alexander Haig as his military aide as the Nixon administration was gearing up to pull off a surprising victory in the Vietnam War despite the apparent hopelessness of the struggle, and all the campaign rhetoric about negotiating peace with the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong. Despite appearances, both military men were well versed in the operation of America's covert government, whatever was required at a given moment. It looked like new Tonkin Gulf incidents were required if any new initiative was to be established.

While Tenet certainly mentored Hayden, it is worth remembering that Tenet was mentored by former DCI Richard Helms, so much so that he had Helms' official portrait at the Langley headquarters moved into his office so that every DCI would see him as a model. It is also worth remembering that Helms had such a bitter hatred of his rival William Colby that he ultimately volunteered in his unexpected memoirs, A Look Over My Shoulder - even an allusion to such treachery - that Colby hurt Western intelligence more than the notorious KGB spy, Kim Philby.(3) It seems most likely that Tenet, while Deputy Director when Colby was assassinated, was given the nod by Helms to arrange the killing - what resulted in DCI John Deutch to suddenly resign when he learned about it, clearing the way for Tenet to take over officially. After Deutch's departure, an inquiry was started to see if he should be prosecuted for having classified materials on his laptops, what seems like a belated effort to explain it away, but Attorney General Janet Reno refused to prosecute him, and President Bill Clinton pardoned him for the alleged offense on his last day in office.

Hardly had Hayden taken over at Fort Meade than he showed Tenet that he was the right person to run NSA. The bombing campaign of Serbia was in full swing but NATO's planes were not hitting anything of value in Slobodan Milosevic's military arsenal, thanks to a Turkish informer within its ranks informing Belgrade of intended targets through the Chinese Embassy. NSA learned of this through its capture of microwave commuications to the Chinese through its eavesdropping satellites and ground-based stations, most likely in Bad Aibling in Germany and Menwith Hill in Yorkshire - what seemed like a resumption of Operation Shamrock under modern conditions.

Then CIA played dumb with its maps, acting as if the Embassy was a Yugoslav military facility. On May 7, 1999, NATO bombers hit the facility with five bombs, killing three residents. For good measure, NSA's Keyhole laser satellites were used the following August to trigger an earthquake in the qanat system of Izmit, Turkey to punish its Nationalist leadership for betraying NATO secrets to Yugoslav President Milosevic. The mission was a good example of what former SoD Robert Gates said about former Los Alamos intelligence chief Danny "(Stillman's) ability to adapt the latest advance in science to solve unmanageable problems and to analyze foreign technologies made him an invaluable asset to the Intelligence Community."(5)

The earthquake was intended to so embarrass Turkey's government during the relief effort that it would be overthrown, either at the polls or by its military - what occurred during the 2002 elections when Bulent Ecevit's government was soundly trounced. It was a brilliant use of new technology to take advantage of ancient technology to fulfill Washington's goals.

Given such achievements, Washington wasn't too concerned about what Al-Qaeda was up to, helping explain why both Tenet and Hayden were kept at their posts after George W. Bush defeated Al Gore in the 2000 presidential poll. It was more concerned about the exposure of satellite abilities to gain vital informaion, and to deliver devastating reprisals than deliberately stopping any of its small scale operations. "In the few years between 1991 and 1994," Bamford wrote, "the number of spy satellites dropped by nearly half."(6) He failed to add that the remaining ones were far more versatile and powerful than the ones they replaced. As a result, the Al-Qaeda calls emanating from and received by its headquarters in Yemen were ignored, resulting in the 1998 devastating bombings of US embassies in East Africa, and the attack on the USS Cole the following year when it docked in Aden to refuel.(7)

NSA was still almost paranoid about its operations being leaked somehow, and did not want to take any unnecesary risks by going to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a warrant.

Director Hayden based his decision upon three factors - fears that NSA would be seen "as America's secret and powerful 'boogeyman' ", that NSA officials would again be threatened with prosecutions for eavesdropping on Americans, and fears that its activities would be leaked to the press and America's foes. The best way to avoid the first two concerns, Bamford wrote tellingly, "...was to keep his agency's operations as far away from U.S. territory as possible. If a terrorist in the U.S. was communicating with his masters in a foreign country, Hayden reasoned, that was the FBI's responsibility, not his."(8) The ability of the Bureau to meet its responsibility was seriously impaired, though Hayden didn't mention it, by the continued spying for the Russians by its agent Robert Hanssen - what was finally disclosed in February 2001, and he pleaded guilty to 19 counts of espionage in July after colleagues, like in the Ronald Pelton case, recognized his voice in a conversation long before with his KGB handler in Washington on a NSA tape recording.

The wheels for a payback now for Al-Qaeda's operations far away from America's shores had started turning soon after Hayden started working at Fort Meade. Rich Taylor, NSA's Deputy Director for Operations, wanted to fix the agency's aimless, eavesdropping operations by adopting project Thinthread: "The first and most important issue for NSA/CSS (Central Security Service)," Bamford quoted, "is to reform our management and leadership system...we have good people in a flawed system."(9)

Thinthread called for the encryption of all messages and phone calls entering and leaving the States - so as not to need a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Security Court (FISC) - except the headers of such messages which would show their origin or destination. It would solve the problem of getting an FISA warrant without engaging in undue search and seizure while obtaining probable cause to continue eavesdropping without committing anything illegal.

Tests of the proposal in 1998 had proven quite successful Also, NSA needed to strengthen its ties with strategic partners, especially the other members of the Five Eyes group, Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand.

Hayden wanted nothing to do with the proposal, preferring instead a program called Trailblazer. Instead of running the risks of trying to catch terrorists, concerns that the Bureau should be involved in, Hayden wanted to catch foreigners before they even got involved in the process. It essentially collected everything it could get its hands on, hoping that super computers could make sense of the mass of information collected - "...the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mails." (10) While Taylor and Hayden continued to argue about which system to adopt, it peaked in the fall of 2000, with the Director going for Trailblazer, and Taylor heading for the exit.

While Hayden then asked for bids from defense contractors for working on Trailblazer, there was no big time response by NSA's contractors - Boeing, IBM, SAIC, Computer Science Corporation, and Litton - persuading Hayden and Tenet that some big time event was necessary to shake up the country for more direct action.

The last operational hurdle to such action was the continued presence of the Bureau's counterterrorist expert in New York, John O'Neill. He was responsible for getting to the bottom of the first terrorist attack on the WTC in 1993, and was certain that Muslim terrorists would try it again. He was committed to stopping them, the last thing that Tenet and Hayden wanted, so he was sidelined from the planning of the covert operation for fear, it seems, that leaks from it would jeopardize what CIA and NSA had in mind.(11)

The plan that Tenet and Hayden had in mind was to catch the now well-identified 19 highjackers in the act of hijacking the four planes on September 11.To prevent the highjackers from getting wind of the plan, leader Mohamed Atta - whose calls from the States, especially the San Diego area, were never passed on by NSA to other security agencies (12) - and four of his associates, were allowed to board the first plane leaving from Boston without any accompanying CIA agents.

The 15 agents were on the other three flights, under the direction of Barbara Olson, wife of Solicitor General Ted Olson, and they were to overpower the highjackers as the planes neared LA. The link between the Agency and NSA was the close association that Tenet had with Hayden.(13) To give more propitious effect to the ploy, NSA's associate agency, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), conducted a training exercise of a plane crashing into one of its buildings 50 minutes after American Airline's Flight 77, carrying Olson and three of the agents, had already taken off from Washington's Dulles Airport.

The covert operation, of course, ended up as a complete tragedy after the highjackers turned out to be suicide bombers. The best evidence that it had gone wrong was when the President stayed put in the Florida kindergarden while the operation was still going on, and Secretary of Defene Donald Rumsfeld had Air Force fighters shoot down the last highjacked plane in western Pennsylvania before it could crash into the Capitol or the White House.

The most important act in damage-control was preventing the full disclosure of the planes' passenger lists - what left out the names of the 19 suicide bombers, and the unarmed 15 agents who had futilely tried to stop them - what permitted conspiracy theorists to go wild about who was really on the planes, who or what piloted them, why the buildings around the WTC really collapsed, etc. The most damaging evidence that Washington, especially NSA, could not suppress was all the telephone calls, especially those of Barbara Olson, that passengers on the planes made and received before they died.

At least her husband finally admitted to Bamford: "I, by this time, had made the calculation that these were suicide persons, bent on destroying as much of America as they could."(14)

Hayden acted as if the tragedy was another Pearl Harbor, and it was, though President Roosevelt was dealing with a desperate imperial Japan while NSA only had been confronted by 19 suicide bombers - what Japan lost hundreds of from Okinawa during the final days of WWII through Kamikazi attacks. NSA's incredibly cautious approach to eavesdropping on them had directly led to the attacks, and now Hayden would go for broke in making sure that it was not repeated.

While much has been written about what ensued, the only aspect to be considered in this article is what NSA, the Bureau and GCHQ could legally do in the process, though it should be noted that Tenet and Hayden combined when it came time to make sure that Iran did not take advantage of the West's showdown with Saddam by either helping him in his difficulties, or, more likely, try to take part of Iraq's Shia-dominated area during the struggle - what was prevented by NSA seeing that the NRO caused the earthquake in the qanat areas surrounding Bam with the chemical laser aboard its Misty radar satellite, leaving Iran with more than enough troubles of its own.

For NSA and the FBI, anything went when it came to warrantless eavesdropping as Hayden, an American historian of sorts, thought that the post 9/11 emergency justified the overriding of all of the protections that the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution provided against undue searches of one's home, person and possessions as the tapping of phone lines and cellphones didn't amount to this, especially since NSA's lawyers agreed. And the Bureau was willing to go along with such sentiments after presiding FISA court judge Royce C. Lamberth approved all the surveillance it wanted to get the culprits of the attacks, and Attorney General John Ashcroft's subordinate John C.Yoo agreed independently with Hayden's lawyers about what the emergency permitted.(15) While others disapproved of what they knew or suspected was happening, there was nothing they could do to really challenge it, much less stop it.

In Britain, there have never been any serious restrictions on what its intelligence community, particularly GCHQ, can do. Actually, given its policy of ever eavesdropping if it serves the national interest, the legal provisions of the Official Secrets Acts are all against employees and members of the public leaking secrets. And any employee who wants to or is required to work for American agencies can do so without risking any legal penalty, as Bamford explained: "Hayden suggested that such activity was not prohibited by federal law. Instead it was prohibited only by presidential executive order, and executuive orders can be canceled or changed at the whims of a president. 'By executive order,' Hayden said, 'it is illegal for us to ask others to do what we cannot do ourselves, and we don't do it'."(16)

The crisis over what became known as NSA's Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP) occurred when it came time for its renewal, March 11, 2004. Underlings of Ashcroft and Yoo at the Justice Department, James Comey and Jack Goldsmith, decided that it was an abomination to the Constitution, and recommended that it not be renewed. This led to a political firefight between the White House and the headless Department of Justice because Ashcroft was then in the hospital, suffering from gallstone pancreatitis. "Without Comey's signature," Bamford wrote, "the NSA would have to immediately pull the plug on the operation or possibly face criminal charges." (17)

With the public totally oblivious of what was going on, the White House and Ashcroft's subordinates fought it out in a manner reminiscent of 'Tricky Dick' Nixon's 'Saturday Night Massacre'. While Bush reauthorized the program without Justice Department approval, he seemed to agree to changes in it which would bring it back within the law. In the end, the changes only amounted to getting rid of the most egregious violations of FISA, and their continued justification.

Hayden's protection of his secret, illegal operations started to fray a few months later when New York Times reporter James Risen, who helped break the spying for the Soviets by the Bureau's Robert Hanssen, called, asking Hayden about his warrantless eavesdropping on Americans.(18) Of course, Hayden panicked over the call, denying that anything untoward was going on at NSA, but he believed TSP's days were numbered. While Bamford seemed completely uninterested in who was Risen's source, it was Russell Tice, but the newspaper was unwilling to pursue it because it could not find anyone else to back up his claims, and word got out that Tice was a bit paranoid, leading to his being fired by NSA in May 2005. Perhaps,Tice was deliberately chosen to kill the story, once his lack of credibility was determined.

In any case, more than a year later Thomas A. Drake - a NSA software purchaser executive who supported what Taylor had tried to get Hayden to do, especially the adoption of ThinThread rather than the most expensive wild goose chase that Trailblazer promised - apparently started whistleblowing too on NSA. With ThinThread, Drake thought that NSA could have prevented the 9/11 attacks, and by 2002 he was telling anyone who would listen just that.

Supported by NSA's math specialist William Binney and communication analyst J. Kirk Wiebe, Drake soon got Diane Roark, a Republican aide to the House Intelligence Committee, taking his complaints seriously. Drake testified before congressional committees about his complaints, and worked with the DoD's Inspector General for two and a half years to obtain official action regarding them but without any evidence of success in his December 2004 report. On his supporters' advice, he not only contacted reporter Siobhan Gorman of The Baltimore Sun but apparently also the NYT.(19)

The Times article ultimately appeared on December 16, 2005, and a little over a year later, Attorney General Gonzales announced that the warranltess eavesdropping program had ended. Once again, all eavesdropping would be subject to FISC warrants, as the President, this time, had refused to reauthorize TSP when it was needed for it to continue. NSA would not need to apply for a warrant, though, in foreign-to-foreign communications except when one end of it reached a U.S. phone, and then NSA had three days to apply to the court with an emergency application for the tap to be legal.

Shortly thereafter, Hayden left NSA, replaced as Director by General Keith Alexander while joining former NSA Director Mike McConnell, National Intelligence Director, as his deputy. Because of the blowback from the murder of Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi, who was repeatedly raped first, and her family in Iraq, National Intelligence made a meal of the kidnapping of two of the soldiers involved by gettting the Justice Department to sign a emergency FISA request, certifying that it had probable cause for the Bureau to put the suspected kidnappers names on the watch list, and targeting their activities.

Then McConnell, thanks to input from Hayden, panicked Congress into passing the FISA Amendment Act which replaced the expiring Protect America Act - giving legal immunity to telecoms which engage in eavesdropping so that there would be no new Shamrock scandal, weakened the authority of its court, and gave NSA a freer hand in targeting suspected terrorists abroad.(20) It and the Bureau would still have to get an FISA order to target Americans and green card residents living in the States.

Despite Senator Obama's campaign pledge that he would straighten out the whole warrantless eavesdropping mess if elected Preisdent, he has done nothing of the sort. If anything, he has made it worse, claiming it is necessary in the war on terror while protecting 'state secrets' .(21) One can only speculate what secrets he had in mind. The murder of former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko in London comes readily to mind back in November 2006. The CIA was going through another terrible period in its history with the forced resignation of Director Porter Goss in May 2006, and Hayden taking over at the end of the month, starting a period during which the National Security Archive released the Agency's Family Jewels, many of which concerned Helms' violation of its Charter - MH-CHAOS, Shamrock, MK-Ultra and the stirring up of the Hungarian Uprising.

On the day Litvinenko was apparently poisoned, the George Washington University institution released the worst files, highlighted by a bit of the NYT front page where a Seymour Hersh article described Watergate's fallout at Helms' expence.(22) The Agency's staff needed something to stem the flow of damaging revelations, and Hayden's presence there deflected attention away from its cause.

NSA certainly had an interest in shutting up Litvinenko, who has threatening everyone he knew anything about, starting with Italy's Romano Prodi with blackmail - what could go all the way back to the non-nuclear showdown with the Soviets after triggering it by assassinating Sweden's Prime Minister Olof Palme. Not only would the leaderships of Washington and London risk being implicated in this claims but also the double agent spying on Moscow which neither of them wanted aired again. Little wonder that he was killed in a most confusing way, particularly where he was poisoned, by what, by whom, and for what reason.(23) The poison was most notable for its delayed, devastating effect.

Edward Epstein, famous for helping cover up previous CIA-NSA plots, conveniently claimed that Litvinenko must have poisoned himself with the polonium-210 for some unknown reason.

The plot was intended to implicate Russian President Vladimir Putin in the assassination, but he stood his ground without flinching, protecting the alleged assassin Andrei Lugovoy, and making the plotters even more eager to punish the now Russian Prime Minister. They, headed by CIA's director of operations Stephen Kappes, started a new assault on Moscow by building up a 'false flag' operation, dealing with illegal agents called New Rodina, based upon what the KGB had done with their original operation to genuinely do the same with real illegals back in the 1970s under Yuri Andropov. The covert operation was the leading one in President Obama's secret agenda, explaining why he did nothing about warrantless eavesdropping, and why he was so supportive of Leon Panetta to be DCI.

Panetta, as head of OMB and as Chief of Staff during the Clinton administration, knew about the convenient assassinations, particularly that of Colby, and now wanted to move on in a more coherent, structured way. Of course, liberal Democrats like California's Dianne Feinstein just cleared the way for his getting started by claiming she would only support his confirmation if he kept Kappes on, and when DNI Admiral Dennis Blair tried to interfere with what Panetta was doing with his resident agents in places like London, he was given the door after Leon blew his customary cool over the matter.

The sleeper cell contained 10 Russians, and their Canadian handler Robert Christopher Metsos. For several years, the ten tried to integrate as well as they could into American society, reminiscent of how illegal KGB agent Vilyam Fisher ran the most effective VOLUNTEER group in NYC during the late 1940s. "Under his later alias 'Rufolp Abel', Fisher was to become one of the best-known of all Soviet illegals, whose career was publicized by the KGB as a prime example of the success and sophistication of its operations in the West during the Cold War."(24) While Andrew characteristically debunked Abel's achievements, the so called Manhattan 11 group never really got started, just sleeping away along America's east coast, and collecting their pay while awaiting instructions about doing something significant. It seems that all but Metsos thought that they were there to infiltrate really sleeper groups for Moscow.

When it came time to entrap them, just before President Dmitri Medvedev came to Washington for a fence-mending meeting with President Obama, the Bureau set up Anna Chapman, the only one connected to Britain, by having her send deeply encrypted messages by a computer wireless network she had been given to another of the sleepers, at the suggestion of an FBI agent feigning to be a Russian Embassy official, about getting a false passport. The messages were sent on sophisticated laptops which the Bureau had provided, and had software to encrypt and decrypt them - what prevented Bureau agents from being involved in any illegal wiretapping.

When Chapman ultimately refused to go ahead with the exchange, thanks to advice from her father, a former KGB agent, Chapman and the others were arrested as foreign agents, and the media went wild over the story.(25)

The Bureau soon learned that it would be in difficulty if it went ahead with these most serious prosecutions as the evidence could be quickly shown to be fraudulent, charging them instead with only failing to register with the Attorney General as agents of a foreign power, and for money laundering with the secret payments they received. Then Prime Minister Putin surprisingly agreed to exchange them for four real spies being held by the Russians.

The weakness of the evidence was manifest when the Bureau on Hallowen released the videos of Operation Ghost Stories, showing ten of the sleepers doing most ordinary things or deliberately contrived ones when no known Russian handler was ever exposed - only Bureau agents posing to be so. Sleepers are said to be shown engaging in tradecraft when there is no evidence of their actually doing so, and making exchanges when only they, particularly Metsos, are identified.

The best example of the contrivance that the Bureau engaged in is shown in the 7:40 minute-long video of sexy Anna Chapman walking around a department store on January 29, 2010, allegedly communicating with her Russian handler outside. The stacked videos of her are quite clearly ones of the store's, looking for shoplifters. Chapman certainly looks like one while aimlessly walking around it rather than engaged in any wireless conversation. At the same time, the man outside - with his face blacked out - is endlessly talking to someone on his cellphone. There seems to be no conversation between them at all, and the handler could not be a Russian official as the FBI would have loved to have displayed his face if he had been one. Ghost Stories indeed!

The Bureau's concerns were that spy prosecutions would be seen as the result of a deliberate fishing expedition for years to get around the law - what did violate the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution about unreasonable searches and seizures, and that the "wall" between intelligence and criminal squads had been broken through during the process.

"The FBI then decided to allow only agents and analysts assigned to intelligence duties access to FISA materials, not the criminal investigators." (26) For good measure, anyone who reviewed transcripts of domestic electronic surveillance must sign a certification that court approval was required before they were handed over to criminal prosecutors. None of this was done, and the Bureau's leaderhip would be in serious trouble if it were exposed by someone with inside credibility.

And that person was Gareth Williams, GCHQ's whiz kid software man who could encrypt messages to remain secret during any transmission or decode any such message received, and who was on secondment to MI6 to help out its spies to get what they wanted. While it seems a bit of a stretch that he was actually involved in helping entrap the Manhattan 11, it seems quite clear that he knew that he was in no trouble whatever the Bureau had done.(27)

When that became important was when a couple visited his safe flat in Mayfair right after the case broke. The couple could have been Putin's agents, seeking approval for the spy swap. Then it could have been her former husband Alex Chapman, and her former roommate Lena Savitskaya who knew only about the MI6 flat, not who had occupied it, explaining why they knocked on other doors first to find out where it was in the building, once they had gained entrance. The meeting resulted in their adopting a plan to embarrass NSA/GCHQ as much as possible, with Gareth apparently supplying the funds up front to get it started.

Williams went back to the States in July, and started asking questions about what NSA had really been doing when it came of warrantless eavesdropping, especially after it became clear of Thomas Drake's plight for whistleblowing about the problems at NSA.(28) He faced 35 years in prison for continuing to air his complaints through reporter Gorman who had now moved on to The Wall Street Journal - what he had even tried to get Seymour Hersh to go along with, but without success. Drake's problems just made Williams want to get to the bottom of the covert operations more, so much so that he apparently disclosed his aims to a GCHQ colleague and her husband who were at Fort Meade in his stead, forcing MI6 to transfer them to Denver on another alleged covert mission so that they could not be involved in any further developments.

The assassination of Williams and its cover up were the main problems. He was apparently poisoned by death cap mushrooms, amanita phalloides, just before he left to go back to Britain on 10th August, either by their being placed in the food at his apartment there or while he was eating out somewhere. Shortly after he returned, he suffered the vomiting, diarrhea, stomach cramps, etc. which are characteristic of this kind of poisoning, but he seems not to have taken it seriously at first.

Almost everyone has had such experiences, and almost never have suspected that they were the results of deliberate, deadly poisoning, especially when they soon stopped - what also happened in this case. The only problem was that this was the second stage of the poisoning, and not just getting over some cook's alleged revenge. It apparently ended on the 14th after Williams bought some medication at Harrods Dispensing Pharmacy to deal with the resumption of the problems(29), but by now it was too little too late. Taking pills like rifampicin, antamanide, paclitaxed and the like orally are no substitute for them taken intervenously, especially if one has not at first cleaned out one's gut some way.

The plight of Williams is seen in the video tapes of him, both apparently taken on the 14th though the police say that one, the one outside Harrods, was on the 15th. Both show a very jaundiced, feverish soul, dragging himself around as best he can. His palour at the Holland Parik Station is that of a person going into the final stage of phallotoxin poisoning where the cells of the liver are dropping dead.(30) The police want, it seems, to explain away Williams having bought £90-worth of medication on the 14th, making it look like it was for women's toiletries - the cause of his alleged cross dressing - because they found a bill from the pharmacy at the flat but no signs of the medications. They want to maintain the myth that he was a perfectly healthy person until he surprisingly died for some unknown reason.

When Williams realized he was dying, perhaps on the night of the 14th, there was nothing he could do about it which would make it any better physically or mentally. Calls to family and friends would have only alarmed them, and alerted them that he was being murdered for some alleged betrayal. Going to a hospital or a doctor would end with results even worse. So he just allowed himself to die, slowly in his flat. The death could have occurred any time after the 15th, as the process usually takes between six and sixteen days after ingesting the poison. Williams hoped that the murder scene would be seen as such by the police when they finally discovered it.

It seems that Williams dead or dying was discovered by British covert agents, helping out NSA in the process. They were the ones who let themselves into the flat, found Williams' body, moved it into the carryall, zipped it up and padlocked it, recovered all his medicines, and then let themselves out, locking the door behind them. They hoped that investigators would see it as the result of some sex game, gone wrong. The only thing they overlooked was leaving the receipt for Williams' medical assistance.

It was most interesting that NSA immedidately and unprecedentally denied that his death had anything to do with its operations.(31) An alleged former CIA officer in London was sure that it had nothing to do with his work. Now the investigation of the murder is in a state of suspended animation, letting the Bureau agents see if they can connect the Mediterranean-looking couple to the killing - apparently a lead to Alex Chapman and his female associate - and if they can't, Williams will be written off as an accidental self-killing, like that of former GMP Chief Constable Mike Todd.


References

1. James Bamford, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, p. 29. For more on the Catholic movement, see this link:
http://www.nsc-chariscenter.org/AboutCCR/
2. Ibid., p. 30.
3. For more belated discussion about the deadly controversy in Helm's memoirs, see Thomas Troy's review of it in Studies in Intelligence, and the cover-up response to it:
http://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/sci-studies/vol48no1/article.08.html
http://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/sci-studies/vol48no4/exception.html
4. For more, see: http://mirror.robert-marquardt.com/cryptome/001/usa-disasters.htm
5. Quoted the back of the dustcover of Thomas C. Reed and Danny B. Stillman, The Nuclear Express.
6. James Bamford, Body of Secrets: How America's NSA and Britain's GCHQ Eavesdrop on the World, p. 549.
7. Bamford, op. cit., p. 8.
8. Ibid., pp. 31-2.
9. Quoted in ibid.,p. 41.
10 Bamford, The..., p. 329.
11. For more, see Trowbridge H. Ford, "O'Neill: A Voice in the Wilderness?," Eye Spy!, Issue Thirteen, pp. 22-23.
12. Bamford, The..., pp. 40-1.
13. For more, see Trowbridge H, Ford, "The Prelude: US Intelligence - 11 September 2001," Eye Spy!, Issue Eight, pp. 26-33.
14. Quoted from Bamford, The..., pp. 90-1.
15. Ibid., pp. 115-6.
16. Ibid., p. 38.
17. Ibid., p. 281.
18. Ibid., p. 287.
19. For more, see James O'Rourke's article: http://politicsorpoppycock.com/2010/07/14/act-of-honor-or-betrayal/
20. Bamford, The..., p. 307.
21. For more, see this link: http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2009/04/05
22. http://www.gwu.edu/~asarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB222(index.htm And remember that Hayden was DCI when Studies in Intelligence printed the exchange which attempted to rehabilitate Helms
23. For more, see these links:
http://cryptome.org/mi6-litvinenko.html
http://codshit.blogspot.com/2008/07/why-and-how-alexander-litvinenko-was.html
24. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield, p.148
25. See, e. g., this link: http://www.cbsnews/com/stories/2010/06/28/world/main6627393.shtml
26. Bamford, The..., p. 67.
27. Ibid., p. 38.
28. See O'Rourke, op. cit.
29. For its existence - what some investigators deny - see this link: http://www.londontoolkit.com/whattodo/harrods.htm
30. http://www.thisislondom.co.uk/standard-23874697-last-images-of-spy-in-bag-gareth-williams.do
31. http://blog.wshingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/09/gareth_williams_death_not_spy-.html

CIA's Aggressive Spying Operations Against Russia Result in Continuing Fiascoes

by Trowbridge H. Ford

As the Cold War was ending, the scientific establishments of Moscow and Beijing were most desirous of letting the world know what they had been able to achieve regarding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) since their inception, inviting Danny Stilliman, the former director of the Technical Intelligence Division at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, to visit Chinese facilities on many occasions, and former Soviet ones once in December 1991. While his hosts were most eager to let the world know what they had been able to achieve on their own in these various fields, Washington was not only most interested to learn for itself what had been accomplished but also engage in a good bit of spying to be on the safe side regarding current relations with the world powers which were seemingly losing much of their expansive punch. Director of Central Intelligence Robert Gates had just been confirmed to make sure that Washington was finally up to speed about their remaining potential. The world's only superpower, though, could not be complacent about what the future might have in store.

While Stillman's visits to China were by far the main interest of President Bush's decision-makers, his single trip to Russia was not without importance, especially if Moscow's counterparts were to revert, it seems, to their former Soviet ways. The Soviet Union had just experienced the previous summer the hardliners' unsuccessful coup, led by KGB Chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, to save it despite Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, and President Boris Yeltsin did not manage to fully secure power until he defeated Vice President General Alexander Rutskoi and parliamentary speaker Russlan Khasbulatov in their attempt to seize power, thanks to his calling in Vladimir Putin and remnants of the security services to help out. No one could be sure how the struggle would finally work out, and whether it could provide serious problems for the West. After all, it was because of a lack of similar concern when Josef Stalin was gaining power that the original Cold War developed.

Thomas Reed, in telling of Stillman's Russian visit the following December in The Nuclear Express, juxtaposed it with the meeting Yeltsin and the new elected Presidents of the Ukraine and Belarus were holding in Brest to finally abolish the Soviet Union. It was there that Leon Trotsky signed the armistice with the Germans back in 1918 which started the Bolshevics on their way to world power. Regarding the substance of the meeting that Stillman had with former Soviet nuclear physicists, Reed took some liberties in discussing the role of his host, Yuliy Khariton, acting as if he was the grand old man of the Soviet atomic project when, in fact, he was only dragged into it by its real father, Igor Kurchatov, and had outlived many on its more important scientists. "He wanted recognition for all," Reed explained, "including credit to certain Americans for unknowingly giving help, but he also wanted to mark the boundary between espionage and Soviet science, and he wanted to be the one who drew that line." (p. 27)

Reed then reported that Khariton only admitted that German physicist Klaus Fuchs had helped the Soviets in designing their atomic bomb, adding quite erroneously that Fuchs was sending messages by "...the Greenglas-Rosenberg courier system" (p. 30) - obviously to implicate the executed couple in the most serious Soviet espionage when his handler was chemist Joseph Arnold Robbins aka Raymond. (Ronald Radosh and Joynce Milton, The Rosenberg File, p. 21) Communist physicists Ted Hall, George Koval and several other unnamed spies of various sorts were mentioned to remind Khariton of what dedicated Americans had contributed to Moscow's program. "Thus," Reed added, "the Soviet claim that Fuchs 'was our only spy' remains an article of Soviet cant, but it is not true." (p. 32) Then, when it came time for the Soviets to come up with their own thermonuclear bomb, he added sarcastically, they showed the same "impeccable physical intuition" (p. 37), so characteristic of Kurchatov's secret work, in discovering radiation implosion to trigger one which they had shown in coming up with a successful atomic bomb in the first place.

Reed got so carried away by the level of Soviet spying - what really got nuclear proliferation started - that he invented one, the alleged efforts of a Mr. Arthur Fielding (code name PERSEUS), another alleged American spy at Los Alamos who kept Moscow abreast of nuclear developments for years, only suspending connections for a few years because apparently of so many of his fellow spies being caught, and the Cold War really getting started. PERSEUS, well-connected to all the American nuclear scientists like Edward Teller and Stanislaus Ulam assigned to build a thermonuclear, was allegedly obliged to rejoin KGB spying efforts by playing up to his vanity, offering financial rewards, threatening him with exposure, and the like.Thanks to his spying, Teller, according to Stillman and Reed, became the father of both the American and Soviet H-bombs.(p. 41) Moreover, Andrei Sakharov did not originate the two-stage, radiation-imploded, thermonuclear bomb - only thought it worth looking into - what seasoned Soviet physicists German Goncharov and Lev Feoktistsov apparently corroborated - though Reed did not consider the possibility that they were just telling him tales to make him feel superior.

The same goes for Stillman and Reed accepting Lona Cohen' s deathbed confession to KGB operative Anatoly Yatsov aka Anatoly Yakovlev that PERSEUS was recruited by her husband Morris, and was indeed, the Soviet spy working all those years at Los Alamos. (p. 30, n. 10) The claim is obviously intended to make former communist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the chief science advisor to and one-time director of the Atomic Energy Commission, and the vigorous opponent of building any H-bomb, America's chief traitor, but there are all kinds of problems with doing so. The Cohens almost certainly did not recruit him, as books on Venona with this title by Nigel West (pp. 175-6), and John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr (pp. 317-21) show, and whose identity the Russians are most committed to keeping secret even now. The apparent reason is that PERSEUS was a far more effective spy than Oppenheimer ever could have been, though he would have been a great catch, and the disclosure of this true identity would have been a great embarrassment to the West, especially the special arrangement between Washington and London.

PERSEUS, it seems, is Peter Wright aka 'K' and SCOTT, the one-time Oxford recruiter in the days leading up to WWII, and who became so well-established by the time Germany invaded the Soviet Union, thanks to his discovery of the way to demagnetize ships against torpedoes, that he had access to all the secrets of the Manhatten Project in Britain.

Recently, a memo, dated July 1941, by KGB chief Vsevolod Merkulov was found, identifying SCOTT as civil servant Arthur Wynn, but this was just a convenient cover for Wright - whose candidate for the role had always been Wynn (Spy Catcher, pp. 265-7) - who the Soviets hoped would soon be rejoining them as 'K' since the Non-Aggression Pact with the Nazis was over. It was while he was working with Gordon Lonsdale's spy ring well after the war's end that he got to know of the Cohens, then known as the Krogers, and now his courier for stolen material, and little wonder that Lona finally did what her Soviet masters wanted by not revealing his identity. In the process, Moscow was doing Britain a favor by not divulging his identity, and Reed and Stillman took advantage of the gap at Oppenheimer's apparent expense.

Stillman still kept up the threat of Wright's possible exposure by reporting to the FBI in Santa Fe in the mid-1990s his suspicions about PERSUES but the investigation of him soon got sidetracked by the Bureau checking on another Stillman charge of communist spying - that allegedly of Los Alamos's Wen Ho Lee for the Chinese (p. 38). Certainly, PERSEUS could not have been Oppenheimer since he was long dead, and Stillman said that the Soviet spy was still alive. Peter Wright was sill alive. After PERSEUS finally died, Stillman and Reed still refused to identify who they thought he was "...since he can neither defend his faimly nor refute our arguments..." Then one can only wonder why they did make the claims while he was still alive, and they then incredibly added: "The actual identity of PERSEUS does not matter - his fingerprints are what count." The point seems to be to make people a bit paranoid about the possibility of spying

If anyone has any doubts about their believing that other unidentified Americans are still spying for Moscow in large numbers - what continues to fuel the runaway nuiclear express which is threatening the destruction of the civilized world, they should just read more carefully what they have written. When Stillman and Reed were making thier farewells from Moscow, Khariton still repeating the alleged myth that only Fuchs had helped it with its program, they reminded readers that he "...also neglected to mention Khrushchev's decision, in April 1957, to pass on Khariton's sophisticated nuclear technology to the People's Republic of China (P.R.C.) an aid package that was to include an atomic bomb."(p. 44)

For anyone who had any doubts about where this could lead, they said this at the book's outset: "Certain parts of the Chinese government may have decided it would be in their best interest to accept, or even encourage, multiple nuclear events (or wars) within the Western world: thus the apparent Chinese tolerance of North Korean, Pakistani, and Iranian nuclear amibtions." (p. 4.)

To meet this apparent threatening challenge, Stillman and Reed urged the West, espcially Washington, to gear up for a new Cold War with its new enemies. The Presidents of the United States and Russia must see that existing safeguards against nuclear proliferation are observed. Their scientists, engineers, and technicians must not be allowed to obstruct, divert, or interfere with the process. There must be no return of either Maoists or Leninists to positions of power in either China or Russia. To know what is really on the minds of our new enemies, the American intellligence community must know that it "...can only be accomplished on the ground, with great effort, training, and by the recruitment of Muslim and North Korean agents in place." (p. 327) America needs, according to them, a good, independent DCI - unlike what it has received from recent, politically-minded ones. "Divisive efforts," they concluded, "will surely bring about the greatest train wreck in the history of mankind.(p. 330)

The trouble with these Cassandra-like calls is not that they have been ignored but rather that they have been taken too seriously. Since Obama's election as President, Washington has essentially done what they called for - e. g., using its vast lead in space weapons to help stop nuclear proliferation, increasing dramatically the funding of its intelligence community and seeing that the Director of National Intelligence gets out of the covert intelligence business, putting a new emphasis upon humint and a DCI who will see to its use in spades, attempting to determine what important possible adversaries are thinking about doing and developing networks to learn how what has been decided is being executed, etc.

Of course, these are admirable aims - what almost all intelligence communities have contended they were doing - but they must be done in the right context, and with a due sense of proportion. A go-for-broke mentality - where anything goes, cost is not an important considertion, all kinds of agencies to do it, and there is no concern about unexpected blowback - can only lead to more and more unexpected surprises. These operations are carried out in the real world - not some secure laboratory - and the more they are engaged in, the more America's opponents will see what is going on, and adopt appropriate countermeasures.

In the post-Soviet period, the alarms raised against Moscow et al.- what Stillman and Reed have almost made an avocation of - have generally proven quite overblown. Weapons systems - whether they be missiles, nuclear weapons, or other weapons of mass destruction, and the whereabouts of scientists who know how to make and use them - have often been overstated, and when finally determined, the Cassandras only come up with new claims, like Putin being a kind of intelligence dictator. While he is no Hitler, they remind readers, "...he does describe the dissolution of the Soviet Union as 'the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century'." (p. 200) The latest scare, according to Stillman's and Reed's "highly placed Russian sources" (p. 200), is Moscow's development of domes of light which will incapacitate intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) by nonnuclear means while still outside the atmosphere, and well away from their intended targets, rendering the INF treaty meaningless. They even included photographs of these mysterious light rays to help raise alarm about what they say the Russians are up to.

Little wonder that the Agency began focusing its intelligence gathering on such mysterious projects, hoping through efforts in Russia and China especially, and through talent-hunting for potential spies in the States, Washington could determine what was afoot. It was the Soviets' Great Illegal agents during the 1930s - such as Arnold Deutsch who was so successful in recruiting Cambridge University graduates, Nazi-posing journalist Richard Sorge who gave Stalin just what he needed to know about what the Japanese were planning before Pearl Harbor, and, of course, Ruth Kuczinski aka SONYA who recruited the Oxford spies, especially Fuchs and Wright - who gave the Soviets such insights into what they might be facing, and what they must do if they hoped to prevail. Illegals, particularly due to their talent-hunting, have a long-range potential which no other spies can match. Of course, the problems are finding ones in the right places, who are willing and able to do the job, and will always be most careful about their role, particularly not saying anything unnecessary to those recruited.

A 'false-flag' one is an easier job, at least at first, as it is easy to misrepresent who one is really working for, and to entice naive youngsters, eager to try out something exciting with few questions asked.

This, it seems, is what happened with the Manhattan 11, a group recruited by the Agency in Russia while largely youths. under the impression that they would be on the lookout for SVR illegals in West, working for the mysterious Putin people, while living comfortable lives there, particularly in the USA. The paymaster was Christopher Metsos who received considerable funds from his alleged Russian handler, and buried it in a Northern Virginia park for his agents to retrieve. Richard Murphy, husband of fellow spy Cynthia, then dug up a good bit of it, and took it to New Jersey where Michael Zottoli and Patricia Mills, living near the Agency's headquarters in Northern Virginia, went to pick up sizeable sums, and valuable assets on at least four occasions.

They, and Michael Semenko, conveniently turned themselves in to US authorities when they heard of other arrests. Another Russian in Cambridge stole the identity of Canadian Donald Heathfield - what Soviet agents like Colonel Rudolf Abel aka Gordon Lonsdale and Colonel Vasili Gordievsky had used to such great advantage - and spoke to an employee of the US government about nuclear weapons research in 2005, alerting the Bureau to his bogus status as so many false Canadian passports were being used then by covert agencies, especially the Mossad.

I must add that this all reminds me of what was intended to happen two years ago when I went to California to help in the rehabilitation of my girl friend's son. This. according to the Agency, was just a pretext for my going to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to learn what was going on there from employees and/or calling or visiting Reed himself who lives in nearby Healdsburg to discuss the latest in America's nuclear weapons research.

An alleged woman spy in the Manhattan 11 case, Peruvian-born journalist Vicky Pelaez, was offered a £1,300 monthy stipend, and a chance to live the rest of her life in Russia by apparently recruiting her husband, retired CUNY Baruch College Professor Jaun Lagaro, as a fellow spy, but he successfully denied the charge, and his wife refused the offer. Last but not least, this group's alleged Mata Hari was Anna Chapman, who is as likely to appear on the cover of Playboy magazine than in any intelligence agency. It all seems much lost time, trouble and expense for absolutely nothing.

To top it all off, domestic paymaster Metsos, the only operator who could shed serious light on the whole matter, jumped his puny bail after having been arrested in Cyprus, and has gone ever since conveninetly missing.

As spy games go, the whole operation was a success, with Moscow having to go along with the set up for fear to becoming the world's laughing stock if it didn't, though it still only acknowledged originally that all but one of the alleged spies were Russians. In return, Washington received back four of its own real, low-level spies. In strategic terms, though, it just caused more problems than it solved. Washington is still having to pay a price in the long run for making such an essentially pointless mess.

And to prevent this, the FBI just posted yesterday a video of its most belated, decade-long surveillance of the eleven spies. What is really interesting, though, is that all the encounters are shown with the alleged Russian spies, particularly Chapman, Murphy and Metsos, clearly shown while only the backs or the blurred faces of their handlers or contacts are shwon.

It would seem most telling if they were really Russian agents in Washington or at the UN who were involved in making the drops, and picking up others. It would prove most embarrassing and difficult for those in Moscow.

Instead it is just more disinformation by the Bureau to suit the making of Russian spies by the CIA, especially while Leon Panetta was DCI, like all those stories about sexy Anna getting all those top jobs and publicity for being a Mata Hari who Putin was obliged to take back under his wing.

He must still be laughing