Wednesday 27 September 2006

The Reddaways: Britain's Answer to Cambridge's 'Ring of Five' Spies

by Trowbridge H. Ford

The secret services of developed, Western countries have long been known for their connections to their various 'old boy networks', thanks especially to the scathing comments about their recruitment, operational and advancement practices in Peter Wright's Spycatcher. Wright, apparently not one of 'theirs' - to use the lingo of civil servant Sir Humphrey Appleby in the BBC comedy series, Yes, Minister! - laced his tales about his days at Britain's MI5 and during his visits to Washington with constant references to how deeply inbred and hidebound they all were within their closed worlds which wreaked of betrayals and distrust. Their set ways were, perhaps, best illustrated when Wright tried to reform the Security Service's way in more scientific, professional ways, as Bernard Porter has noted in Plots and Paranoia, only to receive this response from its gentry family recruits who had been educated at Public Schools and at Oxbridge: "That's all right, Peter old chap, I don't need to know Ohm's law. I read Greats."
(Quoted from p. 189.)

Wright laced his own account with what happened because of such intelligence practices, concentrating upon what Oxbridge had been capable of producing with its rings of spies, particularly the contributions of Cambridge's 'Ring of Five' - Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, and John Cairncross. To get to the bottom of their betrayals required political will, and risked leakage of damaging information if official inquiries were conducted. "This dilemma was particularly acute when facing the problem at Oxford and Cambridge in the 1930s. Most of those we wanted to interview were still part of a closely knit group of Oxford intellectuals, with no necessary allegiance to MI5, or the continuing secrecy of our operations." (p. 236) As a result, the Security Service was only able to conduct secret ones, under the direction of Wright himself. And by the time he finished, Harold Wilson's Labour government was so suspected of betrayals that MI5, according to Wright, conspired in its overthrow. Soon afterwards, Wilson resigned.

The consequence of this sequence of events, and their recounting by the embittered former counterintelligence officer has been the impression that Britain's intelligence services were simply a laughingstock. While this characterization had much to be said for it when it came to their dealings with the Soviets and dissent at home, they have a much better record in dealing with the withdrawal from empire, and helping manage former colonies which still matter, though accounts of this concentrate more of failures rather than successes. A good corrective for this is to study the activities of Norman and David Reddaway, scions of an old gentry family whose contributions to MI6 at the time, and up to now have greatly improved Britain's standing in the world without its hardly knowing.

The Reddaways are about as Cambridge-connected as any family can be. At the turn of the 20th century, William F. Reddaway was a fellow of King's College, and a founder member of the Cambridge Historical Journal. He was particularly interested in making known the manuscripts the University library was acquiring, and he wrote articles about Scandinavian affairs during the 17th century when these powers still had European ambitions. He supplied the account of these matters in the fifth volume of the Cambridge University Press's History of Europe, the series that Lord Acton started. His Oxbridge credentials were established when he wrote another article about the Danish Revolution for The English Historical Review. William Reddaway had five sons, and they almost all had academic careers, mostly at Cambridge. It was hardly surprising then when Professor Christopher Andrew gave lectures on Cambridge's famous spies at Fitzwilliam College in July last year, they were delivered at the Reddaway Room.

In this rather stifling atmosphere for the sons, it was to be expected that the youngest of them, Norman, sought a career in the Foreign Service after having gained a Double First in French and German in his examinations at King's College, and having served in the GHQ Reconnaissance Regiment aka the "Phantom" during WWII. Norman's first big assignment at the Foreign Office was to help Christopher Mayhew institute the Information Research Department (IRD) aka FORD, an agency desisgned to spread black propaganda throughout the world, based upon all the contacts that the war had created with people of influence, like George Orwell, Malcolm Muggeridge, and Arthur Koestler, who were now back in civil society, particularly in journalism and the arts. They could write material, help ferret out any communists and fellow-travellers in the media, and propose stories which could counter any Soviet claims far better than any cash-pressed government agency per se. "Many operations to influence the press run by SIS and IRD," Richard Aldrich wrote in The Hidden Hand, "required armies of temporary staff contracted for such specfic projects."(pp. 132-3)

While the IRD was officially part of the Foreign Office, it regularly recruited agents from MI6 aka SIS, and often became deeply involved in its operations. Norman Reddaway soon began working for SIS, and his first duty with it was with the staff of the British High Commissions in Ottawa, Canada. While this would seem a most low-level assignment, Reddaway was given the duty of restoring stronger ties with the self-governing member of the British Commonwealth by playing up the lingering ties with London. The British Embassy there has been located since 1930 in 'Earncliffe', the former residence of Canadian first Prime Minister, Sir John Macdonald, and Reddaway was given time off to write a book about it, timed to appear in 1955, the centenary of the founding of Ottawa which the Embassy helped in the celebrations of. While the Reddaways were there, their son David was born.

In 1955, they returned to London which was still recovering from the surprise defections of the IRD's Burgess and MI6's Maclean to Moscow three years before. Then Philby was sacked by SIS but he still admitted nothing about his being the ring's Third Man, and Norman soon had to deal with the fallout from the Suez fiasco - what was essentially caused by too much secrecy by all concerned. The joint military operation by the Israelis, French, and British was not only doomed because of their failure to inform Washington what they had planned (Operation Musketeer), but it also came as a bolt from the blue for the British public, causing widespread protests and condemnations when the full scope of the conspiracy became known. "Despite Eden's personal exhortations," Aldrich wrote, "Britain's psywar was a disaster." (p. 490) The IDR was then given the responsibility of making sure that this never happened again, especially operations taking the public by surprise. The media would be primed by whatever was required in future. (For more, see Reddaway's interview for the Oral History Project (1989-1991) at the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King's College.)

Reddaway then was off to Beirut to see that this approach was put in practice when it came time to overthrow Iraq's General Qassem while Kim Philby conveniently made his way to Moscow. While Philby thought that Britain's security services had completely forgotten about him and his interests, Reddaway made sure they hadn't, even helping him find a position as a correspondent for The Observer and The Economist while he was awaiting his fate. After the IRD put together the stories to blacken the Iraqi dictator's reputation, and a list for the world's media of all the troublesome Iraqi communists and fellow-travellers to clean out while his overthrow was taking place, MI5 assigned Nicolas Elliott, a former MI6 resident in Beirut, to force Philby's flight on January 23, 1963 to Moscow by claiming that he had finally been exposed as the Third Man, so that he would not be around to prevent the clean-up in Baghdad. (Yuri Modin, My Five Cambridge Friends, pp. 287-9) Qassem was overthrown a few weeks later, and his killing was followed by a bloodbath by the Baathists' National Guard. (Con Coughlin, Saddam, p. 41ff.)

Qassem's overthrow having proved so successful, Reddaway and the IRD used the same plan, but on a much grander scale - thanks to the £100,000 that Foreign Secretary Joe Garner had given them with no strings attached - when it came time to get rid of Indonesia's President Sukharno. (For a conventional explanation of his ouster, see Aldrich, pp. 585-91, though note that it, like Coughlin's about Qassem's, is missing any mention of either Reddaway or the IDR.) "MI6 spread lies to put Suharto in power," The Independent explained on April 16, 2000. "The BBC, The Observer and Reuters carried 'fake stories' manufactured by agents working for the Foreign Office." The whole process, it added, was arranged by propaganda expert Reddaway, one so successful that the world's media explained it in just the terms he had crafted - conniving Sukharno and his Army Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Pranoto Reksosamadra kidnapped and killed several uncooperative fellow officers in order to start a PKI (communist) bloodbath in Djakarta.

Defence Minister at the time, Labour's Denis Healey, upon being finally able to comment on what was afoot, exclaimed: ""Norman Reddaway had an office in Singapore. They began to put out false information and I think that, to my horror on one occasion, they put forged documents on the bodies of Indonesian soldiers we had taken." (emphasis his) Healey still denied knowledge of the President's ouster, and the massive bloodbath of Chinese and communists that followed, though he would have supported MI6's campaign to arm Sukharno's Islamic opponents. Similarly, Stella Rimington, much later the Security Service's Director General, was recruited into it to help with the campaign from Delhi, as she explained in her autobiography, Open Secret: "I was merely told to carry out the rather basic task of stuffing envelopes with all sorts of printed material, which was sent out from London, and posting them off to a whole series of addresses. It was very important, I was told, to get the right stuff in the right envelopes..." (pp. 74-5)

With this under Reddaway's belt, he was soon back in London as the Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office to help organize public support for Britain's entry into the European Economic Union. The means by which this was accomplished were lavish breakfasts that Lord McAlpine provided at the Dorchester Hotel for all those in Parliament, Europe, and America who could play a part in making it happen. "By the late sixties," Paul Lashmar and James Oliver wrote in "How MI6 pushed Britain to join Europe" for The Daily Telegraph on April 27, 1997, "IRD had more than 400 people occupying River-walk House opposite the Tate Gallery and undercover officers in embassies all over the globe." This later was included in their book, Britain's Secret Propaganda: The Foreign Office and the Cold War, 1948-1977 which was so revealing but damning of Reddaway's career.

While the Heath government was able to cobble together enough parliamentary support to join the EEC, it was done so at terrible cost, especially since it lost power little over a year later in the February 1974 General Election, setting off increasing treachery by Britain's covert network since it suspected the Heath's replacement, Harold Wilson, was a Soviet agent. Despite Wilson's acquiescence in Unionists destroying the Power-sharing Executive which had been agreed to at Sunningdale, Berkshire, just before the election, key secret operatives, led by Reddaway, thought that the Labour Prime Minister was far too soft on subversion all round, resulting in the IRD leading a mini-destructive campaign, especially in Northern Ireland, against his government. While he and his ministers were increasingly attacked for their alleged communist pasts, efforts were made behind the scenes to crank up the war in Ulster despite Home Secretary Merlyn Rees's strengthening of the border with the Reopublic with more troops.

The basis of the subversion in Northern Ireland was found in two 1971 documents that reporter Paul Foot found in which Reddaway, Donald Maitland, and MI6's Dick White called upon Clifford Hill and Hugh Mooney to mount an anti-IRA campaign, connecting it with the alleged aims of international communism - what had been so effective in bringing down Qassem and Sukharno. Maitland, who went on to become Head of the Permanent Representation to the ECC, had been Stella Rimington's boss when she had been stuffing all those envelopes back in Delhi. (p. 65) While the new effort just made reporting of events throughout Ireland just what the British securocrats wanted the public to know by getting rid of independent reporters like Mary Holland of The Observer, thanks to the dictates of owner Conor Cruise O'Brien, efforts included tactical military operations, especially across the border with the Republic, when it was thought that Rees was not doing enough about the problem. (For more, see Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, The Origins of the Present Troubles in Northern Ireland, p. 99.)

While it is more difficult to determine who pulled the strings which resulted in such action, it is not difficult to determine what was the first operation which so stirred up both the Wilson government and that of Liam Cosgrave in the Republic - the shooting of Patrick McElhone in Pomeroy, located on the border, on August 7, 1974 - one of the 'quick jobs' that a senior Special Air Service (SAS) officer told The Guardian's Simon Winchester about in December 1976, . McElhone had no connection with the IRA, and he was killed by trigger-happy troops, apparently members of the SAS, who had just been introduced into the area. When the Irish parliament complained about the killing, the PM directed Martin Burke of the Republic's Department of Foreign Affairs to investigate the matter, and the fat was in the fire when the Wilson govenment allowed him to visit the murder site - what started a ferverish campaign to get rid of Wilson, once he won re-election in October.

(For more, see: http://www.nuzhound.com/articles/irish_news/arts2005/jan3_Irish_government_shocked_at_shooting.php )

As for who arranged efforts which resulted in this killing and subsequent ones, especially those of totally innocent Paul Duffy and John Boyle, it seems to have been the work of Airey Neave, who would become Margaret Thatcher's Shadow Cabinet minister for Northern Ireland, long after he had arranged Heath's overthrow as Conservative Party Leader. Just before Wilson's surprise resignation in March 1976 - long before the make-up of any Thatcher government had been determined - he had a meeting with both Thatcher and Neave on January 6, 1976 about the deteriorating security situation in the province, indicating that the PM thought that he had been responsible for more than his parliamentary performance indicated.

The previous day, the IRA had murdered in cold blood 10 Protestant workers at Kingsmills, County Armagh - what had been triggered by loyalists murdering two members of the Catholic Reavey family, and three members of the O'Dowd family the day before - resulting in Wilson announcing that he was sending in another 600 troops, including 150 from the SAS, into the province, and what Neave's biographer completely misrepresented by having the massacre occur after the meeting, and adding that Neave thought unbelieveably that the IRA had been 'dead for a long time.' (Quoted from Paul Routledge, Public Servant, Secret Agent:The Elusive Life and Violent Death of Airey Neave, p. 281.) What else could explain a most knowledgeable writer so deliberately distorting a sequence of events, and so obviously misrepresenting what Neave must have said to Wilson?

Wilson's depature resulted in James Callaghan, the Foreign Secretary, becoming the new PM, and David Owen going to the Foreign Office. About his first action there was closing down the IRD, resulting in Reddaway being sent off to Warsaw as its new British ambassador, where he undoubtedly helped in getting Cardinal Karol Wojtyla more aware of, and active in Polish politics, resulting in his election as Pope John Paul II on October 16, 1978. The campaign where the Polish press was mobilized, the Pope was tuned in to what was going on so that he could make the most of it, and the Soviets were caught on the back foot sounds just like more IRD practice to be accidental. (For more, see Christopher Andrew, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, p. 508ff.)

With Norman Reddaway ending his official career on such a high note, it was hardly surprising that his rather maverick son, David, changed his mind about finishing his eduction, and getting a post in the Foreign Service. After attending Oundle Prep School, like his father, he did voluntary work in Ethiopia before going back to Cambridge to finish his education, obtaining an M.A.in history, like his grandfather, before joining the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1975. It was while he was serving in Iran in 1978 that circumstances dictated that he join the SIS too. While stationed in Tehran, the Iranian Revolution took place, resulting in the slow incapacitation of all the Americans operating there, especially when all the staff of their embassy was taken hostage on November, 4, 1979.

In this context, Washington was almost totally dependent upon Britain for its intelligence, and while David Reddaway has discussed how he held the Iranian militants at bay at the British Embassy, his assistance to the Americans was much more important. Reddaway had now become quite fluent in Farsi, and he became quite involved in exfiltrating the six Americans hiding, unknown in the Canadian Embassy, and in the planning of Operation Eagle Claw, the military one in April to forcibly remove all the hostages from Iran. As President Carter explained afterward, it was "a real clock-and-dagger story," though all the claims about CIA agents on the spot, and trained elsewhere doing all the dirty work must be taken with many grains of salt since its whole network had been nearly wiped out by the seizure of its "diplomats". (Quoted phrase from Christopher Andrew, For The President's Eyes Only, p. 450.)

While Eagle Claw turned out to be complete fiasco, it was not because of any failure by Reddaway. He apparently did the reconnoitering for the landing sites and secret storage sites. Then there was allegedly a CIA agent, posing as an Irishman - something Americans are notoriously bad at - and buying trucks and seeing to their safe storage in anticipation of the mission. "CIA agents in Tehran," Andrew added in the same vein, "disguised as foreign businessman and media mployees, reported that the guards at the U.S. embassy had become lax, and convinced Carter that 'security around the compound was no longer a serious obstacle to a surprise entry by force.' " (p. 452) Someone even found the Pakistani cook - who was still working at the US embassy, and knew exactly where the hostages were being held because he was providing their meals - and persuaded him to take a flight out of Tehran to inform Washington of the intelligence.

For his efforts, the 27-year-old Reddaway was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire, an almost unprecedented honor for such a young person, and he was made First Secretary (Political) at the Madrid Embassy. With every MI6 agent having to do his own black propaganda operations since the IRD no longer existed, the new First Secretary kept an eye on what Libya's Qaddafi was up to while cranking stories which served Anglo-American purposes, especially the continuance of its parliamentary system under King Carlos, as Andrew has explained in a fashion any former member of the IRD would appreciate:

"During 1981, for example, the KGB sought to fuel Spanish opposition to seeking membership in NATO by planting media stories that Reagan was putting pressure on the king of Spain. In November Spanish journalists were sent copies of a forged letter from the president, urging the king "to act...with dispatch to remove the forces obstructing Spain's entry into NATO.' " (Quoted Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, eds., Instructions from the Centre, p. 152.)

It seems most unlikely that any KGB agent would be allowed to send such a crude, counter-productive message - especially after the King Juan Carlos had just closed down the coup by disgrunted Civil Guards - to the Spanish media which could only backfire on the Soviets, and this suspicion is strengthened when one reads the Andrew and Mitrokhin volume, only to find no mention of this forgery in the KGB files the former librarian smuggled out of the defunct USSR. And there is no shortage of alleged forgeries about other matters in the Mitrokhin Archive - KKK messages to Olympic committees of African countries about their possible athletes being treated like monkeys if they came to the US Olympics (pp. 238-9), Willy Brandt being an agent of influence for various foreign countries (pp. 442-3), and the like. The planted stories seemed like Reddaway work to strengthen the King's hand in solidifying Spain's march to become a stable democracy - what was achieved when Socialist Felipe González won a parliamentary majority in the next election.

Shortly after that, Reddaway returned to London to help the FCO achieve some kind of resolution to the continuing Falkland Islands problem with Argentina, but before much headway could be made on this score, he was caught in the Thatcher government's involvement in the Anglo-American plan to end the Cold War with the Soviet Union without a nuclear war - what was to be triggered by the assassination of Sweden's Olof Palme, and to be accomplished by American attack submarines sinking Soviet nuclear ones when a suprised Moscow sent them hurriedly on line as a countermeasure to any pre-emptive attack. (For the full story about this, see my article about the Palme assassination (Operation Tree) in Jerre's ThinkTank at skog.de.) Reddaway was made private secretary to the totally inexperienced new Minister of State Lynda Chalker at the Froeign Office to make sure that she went along with any awkward arrangements the process might require.

And there were many when the plan to blame the assassination on the Soviets failed because of its penetration of the operation by spies, particularly CIA's Rick Ames, the Bureau's Robert Hanssen, the Mossad's Jonathan Pollard, the US Navy's Ronald Pelton, and the Walker spy ring. When the whole plot then proved an utter fiasco, without even a likely assassin of the statsminister being found, Washington, London, Tel Aviv, and Moscow had find a likely scapegoat for it, and punish him - what was started by the Libyans apparently blowing up a West Berlin discotheque on April 5, 1986. What Reddaway - thanks to what he had learned about America's help in recapturing the Falklands - had to do was to persuade a most reluctant Thatcher and Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe that Gaddafi was responsible for this terrorism, and that British bases could be used by US F-111s in the retaliation against Libya without ignighting a wave of bombings of Britain's embassies in the Middle East. He succeeded, staying on with Chalker until Howe was sacked in July 1998 for having failed to prevent Captain Simon Hayward, Palme's apparent assassin, from complaining about his treatment in Sweden by British officialdom in Under Fire: My Own Story. (For more, see my article about how Thatcher committed political suicide by sacking Howe in the archive of informationclearinghouse.info.)

Reddaway was then sent to the British Embassy in New Delhi, studying the foreign relations of the area before Britain resumed diplomatic relations with Tehran. Once it occurred, he was ideally suited to be named its Chargé ´d'Affaires, having married Roshan Firous, a prominent Iranian woman, during his first tour there. Reddaway essentially did what he had done before - developing agents among the Iranians who could prove helpful when Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq finally came crashing down. Unfortunately, the Bush administration would not permit this when Operation Desert Storm was in its closing stages, and all the Shiite rebels in the South, and Kurds in the North who Reddaway had encouraged to revolt against Baghdad went for naught when Saddam's revived Republican Guard ripped into them. Still, he was made a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George in 1993 for his aborted efforts when he left for Argentina.

While Minister there, he became involved in various 'false flag' operations that Israel's Mossad was mounting to make the Western powers more supportive of its aims in fighting the so-called war on terrorism against the Muslims. While the Israelis were bombing their Embassy and Balfour House, Finchley, in London, resulting in the wounding of 19 people, most of them Jews - thanks to their setting up various Palestinians for the crimes - the Mossad was setting up the Iranian Ambassador Hade Soleimanpour to Buenos Aires in a similar way eight days earlier, thanks to help there from Reddaway in the British one. (For more about the one in London, especially its 'false flag' aspect, see Annie Machon, Spies, Lies & Whistleblowers, p. 225ff.) The bombing of the Jewish Center in Argentina - which had been the site of a similar but small bombing two years ealier - killed 85 people.

The best evidence of MI6's complicity, especially Reddaway's, in these bombings are the facts that he has never been mentioned in any of the lists of MI6 agents which have been leaked to the press - apparently by disgruntled former agent Richard Tomlinson - just when the pursuit for the killers was getting most heated; that no one has ever been convicted of the crimes - a result so bad that the Argentine federal judge handling the Buenos Aires case Juan José Galeano has been impeached, removed from office, and now he and eight other officials are being investigated for complicity in it; and the absurd stories that Tomlinson and other alleged whistleblowers, particuarly former MI5 officers David Shayler and Annie Machon and 'Martin Ingram' and 'Kevin Fulton' of the British Army's Force Research Unit, have peddled in order to keep the real secret operations covered up.

Perhaps, the most diverting effort in all this was the The Executive Intelligence Review publishing an article in the May 14, 1999 issue, "The 'MI6 factor' in the murder of Princess Diana," along with a list of hundreds of alleged SIS agents, including its top leadership which it claimed not only murdered her but also Dodi Al-Fayed. "The attached list identifies," the article added, "the unprincipled and unscrupulous individuals involved with MI6 worldwide." While the current MI6 Director Sir David Spedding and his staff were getting raked over the coals for their alleged conspiracy in Paris which killed the two on August 31, 1997, David Reddaway was getting a clean bill of health by not being listed for what had happened back in Buenos Aires in July 1994, and what he was now doing back in London to make sure that the investigations of the two bombings got nowhere, adopting the cover of handling routine issues for the FCO's Southern European Department, and then of Director of Public Services while doing so.

When the 9/11 attacks occurred, the threats caused by the earlier bombings essentially disappeared, and Reddaway was ready to move on with the Coalition's new agenda, attacking the "axis of evil" at it central point, Iran, but Tehran would not hear of his becoming the British Ambassador there. Their own intelligence services had learned a lot about him by then, and what they hadn't learned themselves had been filled in by books, especially the one by Lashmar and Oliver. While there was no official explanation as to why he had been rejected, a conservative Tehran daily newspaper claimed that he was a "Zionist MI6 agent" - what the British media and officials strongly denied, especially trying to make out that the anti-Semites in Tehran thought he was Jewish when it was only referring to his relationship with the Mossad. Reddaway had to settle for being the UK's Special Representative for Afghanistan.

Once affairs had settled down there after the Taliban's ouster, he was appointed British High Commissioner to Canada, the country which London and Washington considered most important to get on board with its war on terrorism. While Canada had supplied 2,300 troops to help police Afghanistan, it refused to help militarily in Saddam Hussein's ouster, and Reddaway's assignment was to get Ottawa to make up as best it could for this failure. He did everything imaginable to make this happen - supporting associations like the Canada Club of Ottawa and The Ireland Fund for Ireland while constantly playing up Ottawa's traditional associations with Britain from the residence 'Earnecliffe' where McDonald once lived. And when the three Christian Peacemakers, two of them Canadians, were rescued earlier this year by British and Canadian special forces, Reddaway took the lead in explaining the lengths the British had gone to in order to secure their release. "Anthing we can learn about how this was done," he explained, "will be very useful for another time."

Reddaway's personal expectations were suddenly cut short, though, when the revelation about Martin Burke's investigation of the murder of Patrick McElhone back in 1974 finally sunk in with the Foreign Office and MI6 - what started in the summer of last year when the official files of the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs were released under its 30-year rule. Reddaway just happened to be serving in Ottawa by coincidence with now the Irish Ambassador to Ottawa Martin Burke, and they had become the closest of friends. While Reddaway had gone to Canada with the expectation of serving there for four years, it suddenly had to be cut short so that he could go to Dublin to prevent dangerous blowback from the McElhone and subsequent murders - what ultimately culminated in Neave's own assassination - especially since Burke was now going off to Luxemburg to be Ireland's ambassador there.

Before Reddaway even presented his credentials to the President of Ireland Mary McAleese on September 12th, MI6 was apparently already at work in Northern Ireland to create deceptions
which would reduce the possibility of much blowback. Aine de Baroid, another high-ranking official with the Republic's Department of Foreign Affairs, had been working with Mrs.McAleese's husband Martin in East Belfast in the hope of getting loyalist paramilitaries there to disarm so that the Good Friday Agreement could finally be implemented, and in August she started receiving anonymous threats, ones the PSNI took so seriously that she was obliged to return to Dublin to continue her work - what was intended, it seems, to make loyalist threats and murders rather than British military ones back in the 1970s the pressing question of the day. The loyalists suspected of being the culprits, the Shoukri brothers, have now denied the claim, and one can only wonder if it were just loyalist dissidents involved, why they would not have threatened the husband of the hated Republic's President instead.

How it all plays out from here, we shall just have to wait and see. Though, by any standard, Cambridge University has made amends for the betrayals by its 'Ring of Five', thanks to the efforts by the Reddaways.

The Queen's Death Star

Not only are those fascist arseholes spending my tax money on bombs for innocent babies, those mentally-diseased and depraved sons and daughters of humanity are also poisoning us. And the mainstream media says nothing. Thanks Tony, thanks George, thanks. So they tell us to stop smoking but I wonder how much lung cancer is caused by their "legal" weapons?

Depleted Uranium Measured in British Atmosphere from
Battlefields in the Middle East


NOT IN MY NAME "Did the use of Uranium weapons in Gulf War II result in contamination of Europe? Evidence from the measurements of the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), Aldermaston, Berkshire, UK," reported the Sunday Times Online (February 19, 2006) in a shocking scientific study authored by British scientists Dr. Chris Busby and Saoirse Morgan.

The highest levels of depleted uranium ever measured in the atmosphere in Britain, were transported on air currents from the Middle East and Central Asia; of special significance were those from the Tora Bora bombing in Afghanistan in 2001, and the "Shock & Awe" bombing during Gulf War II in Iraq in 2003.

Out of concern for the public, the official British government air monitoring facility, known as the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), at Aldermaston, was established years ago to measure radioactive emissions from British nuclear power plants and atomic weapons facilities.

The British government facility (AWE) was taken over 3 years ago by Halliburton, which refused at first to release air monitoring data to Dr. Busby, as required by law.

An international expert on low level radiation, Busby serves as an official advisor on several British government committees, and co-authored an independent report on low level radiation with 45 scientists, the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR), for the European Parliament. He was able to get Aldermaston air monitoring data from Halliburton /AWE by filing a Freedom of Information request using a new British law which became effective January 1, 2005; but the data for 2003 was missing. He obtained the 2003 data from the Defence Procurement Agency.

The fact that the air monitoring data was circulated by Halliburton/ AWE to the Defence Procurement Agency, implies that it was considered to be relevant, and that Dr. Busby was stonewalled because Halliburton/ AWE clearly recognized that it was a serious enough matter to justify a government interpretation of the results, and official decisions had to be made about what the data would show and its political implications for the military.

In a similar circumstance, in 1992, Major Doug Rokke, the Director of the U.S. Army Depleted Uranium Cleanup Project after Gulf War I, was ordered by a U.S. Army General officer to write a no-bid contract "Depleted Uranium, Contaminated Equipment, and Facilities Recovery Plan Outline" for the procedures for cleaning up Kuwait, including depleted uranium, for Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton.

The contract/proposal was passed through Madeleine Albright, the Secretary of State, to the Emirate of Kuwait, who considered the terms and then hired KBR for the cleanup.

Aldermaston is one of many nuclear facilities throughout Europe that regularly monitor atmospheric radiation levels, transported by atmospheric sand and dust storms, or air currents, from radiation sources in North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.

After the "Shock and Awe" campaign in Iraq in 2003, very fine particles of depleted uranium were captured with larger sand and dust particles in filters in Britain.

These particles traveled in 7-9 days from Iraqi battlefields as far as 2400 miles away.

The radiation measured in the atmosphere quadrupled within a few weeks after the beginning of the 2003 campaign, and at one of the 5 monitoring locations, the levels twice required an official alert to the British Environment Agency.

Full story...

Fear the October Surprise

by Bob Moriarty

For those who wonder what purpose was served by one of the first official acts of George the 2nd when he issued an executive order classifying the official records from the Reagan-Bush years, we now know. George 1st (Bush Sr) participated in a behind the scenes negotiation with Iran in October of 1980 to gain the promise of the release of the 52 American Embassy hostages. Bush's October Surprise was sufficient to gain Reagan the presidency and the humiliating defeat of Jimmy Carter. And as promised, the Iranians released the hostages on inauguration day in exchange for American arms. The acorn doesn't fall far from the tree.

Private citizens running for public office and conducting arms deals with foreign countries who hold Americans hostage is pretty close to treason. If Prescott Bush could be caught Trading with the Enemy with his Nazi pals during WW II, why shouldn't George 1st carry on the tradition? It runs in the family.

Today we have a presidency coming unglued with a civil war in all but name on a horrific scale in Iraq, the Taliban back in control of most of Afghanistan and Israel goading the US into the Mother of All War Crimes by demanding we attack Iran with nuclear weapons. It's clear that George 2nd lost the first election to Al Gore and was appointed into office by the Supreme Court. And it's also become pretty obvious that Karl Rove managed to steal another election in the Presidential elections of 2004. With two separate court decisions which have determined George 2nd to have violated the law both with his treatment of prisoners in Cuba and illegal wiretapping in the US, George 2nd faces not only impeachment but possible imprisonment should all of the details of 911 be revealed.

Look for an October Surprise.

Fear the October Surprise, it's coming your way soon.

It could be a false flag operation by Israel designed to give the Gang of Fools a Casus Belli to attack Iran with nuclear weapons. Something like hitting one of our carriers in the Persian Gulf with an anti-ship missile fired from a gunboat using Iranian frequency radar. Americans have short memories and Karl Rove is well aware of the evil in the hearts of men. He wallows in evil and the best that can be said of the Bush Regime is that he has brought fear to America.

In any case, the world is in for another six weeks of the greatest danger of nuclear war since the dark days of October of 1962. George 2nd is madder than a hatter. There is a good chance this administration will do anything to prevent the Democrats for taking either the House of Representatives or the Senate. It's entirely possible that Karl Rove will incinerate America before allowing the investigations that would be part and parcel of a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives. They are the ones who vote on Impeachment and it's clear to anyone who listens to Americans speak these days, if we lived in a democracy, Bush would be toast.

If Bush is stupid enough to attack Iran, it won't take months for Americans to realize we have lost the war as was the case with Iraq, we will be able to figure it out in a couple of days. You won't be able to give dollars away and gold is going through the roof as our economy collapses and our form of government disappears. These clowns have lost three wars in a row. Am I the only person to see signs of a pattern here?

It wasn't Adolph Hitler who paid the price for WW II and his illegal war of aggression, it was the German people. We simply cannot torture and murder people on a wholesale basis without paying the butcher's bill.

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Thursday 14 September 2006

Syria Says US Behind Attack On Own Embassy

It was either the US or Israel.

Senior Syrian government official have accused the US of being behind Tuesday's assault on its own embassy in downtown Damascus.

A Baath party official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told WorldNetDaily, "We in the government are 100 percent sure America was behind this attack, which is not the same as other attacks by Islamic groups."

He explained, "Only the Americans can succeed in carrying out an attack just 200 meters from President [Bashar] Assad's residence in the most heavily guarded section of Syria."

The official charged that Washington had orchestrated the attack to "prove Syria is filled with terrorists and to put us in a weak position" in order to extract political concessions. Following the attack, Bush administration officials said they hoped the incident had convinced Damascus of the dangers of Islamic terror and the need to cooperate with the West against the phenomenon.

The US and several of its European allies have repeatedly demanded over the years that Damascus close down the local offices and training camps of several organizations hostile to Israel and the West.

The identities of those who attacked the US embassy Tuesday have not been revealed. Three of the gunmen were killed by Syrian guards during the assault. A fourth was reportedly captured.

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Tuesday 12 September 2006

Who Did 911 - OBL, Bush Or Mossad? The Evidence

by Nashid Abdul-Khaaliq

Another year has passed by since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S. What has been gradually happening is that more and more the initial mainstream media version of what happened on that gruesome day is proving to be less true. Increasing credible and respected people such as scientists, ex-governmental officials, religious leaders, journalists and others are PUBLICLY coming out with information that refutes the mainstream media version of events. What is more interesting is that besides being called "kooks" and the information presented being called "conspiracy theories", the substance of the new information debunking mainstream media is going unchallenged! The new information about 911 and the ones presenting it are being called all kinds of names but the information being presented is not being challenged or proven in anyway to be false.

Furthermore, after all these years after 911 the FBI has not uncovered any Al Qaeda cells in the United States nor has it found any paper trail. Although thousands of Muslims have been arrested not one has been convicted of acts of terrorism. The London Times reported the following one year after 911 and it is still true today:

"Thousands of FBI agents have rounded up more than 1,300 suspects across America since September 11, but they have failed to find a single Al-Qaeda cell operating in the United States...Tom Ridge, Director of Homeland Security could not explain why none had been caught."

Curiously though, according to FOX news, throughout late 2000 and 2001, a total of 200 Israeli spies were arrested. It was the largest spy ring to be uncovered in the history of the US. The Washington Post also reported that some of these Israelis were arrested in connection with the 9-11 investigation. Carl Cameron of FOX News Channel did an excellent four part, nationally televised, series of investigations into this blockbuster scandal. But FOX pulled the investigative series after Zionist groups complained to FOX executives. FOX even went so far as to remove the written transcripts of the series from its website.

The question that each individual needs to answer is what should we do as thinking, rational and reasonable people? Should we give into the herd mentality and continue to blindly believe the mainstream media version of events or should we act like truly reasonable, rational and thinking people and examine the evidence on both sides in order to ascertain the truth? After all someone had to question and and break from the herd perception and look at evidence to ascertain that the world was not flat.

I have written this essay to present both views -- the mainstream media version that led us to believe that OBL and Al-Qaeda did 911 versus the version based on uncovering facts surrounding Israeli and American government involvement. I want you to objectively look at both and think deeply about what is being presented. Go to the links and investigate further. Then make a decision for yourself regarding which is more credible. You will find the facts I present to be unquestionably true but my comments biased. I hope that won't bother you. I am definitely of the opinion that it was Israelis along with corrupt elements in our government who were responsible for doing 911 as most of you reading this essay may believe about OBL and Al-Qaeda doing it.

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Palast Charged with Journalism in the First Degree

by Greg Palast

It's true. It's weird. It's nuts. The Department of Homeland Security, after a five-year hunt for Osama, has finally brought charges against … Greg Palast. I kid you not. Send your cakes with files to the Air America wing at Guantanamo.

Though not just yet. Fatherland Security has informed me that television producer Matt Pascarella and I have been charged with unauthorized filming of a "critical national security structure" in Louisiana.

On August 22, for LinkTV and Democracy Now! we videotaped the thousands of Katrina evacuees still held behind a barbed wire in a trailer park encampment a hundred miles from New Orleans. It's been a year since the hurricane and 73,000 POW's (Prisoners of W) are still in this aluminum ghetto in the middle of nowhere. One resident, Pamela Lewis said, “It is a prison set-up" -- except there are no home furloughs for these inmates because they no longer have homes.

To give a sense of the full flavor and smell of the place, we wanted to show that this human parking lot, with kids and elderly, is nearly adjacent to the Exxon Oil refinery, the nation's second largest, a chemical-belching behemoth.

So we filmed it. Without Big Brother's authorization. Uh, oh. Apparently, the broadcast of these stinking smokestacks tipped off Osama that, if his assassins pose as poor Black folk, they can get a cramped Airstream right next to a "critical infrastructure" asset.

So now Matt and I have a "criminal complaint" lodged against us with the feds.

The positive side for me as a journalist is that I get to see our terror-busters in action. I should note that it took the Maxwell Smarts at Homeland Security a full two weeks to hunt us down.

Frankly, we were a bit scared that, given the charges, we wouldn't be allowed on a plane into New York last night. But what scared us more is that we were allowed on the plane.

Once I was traced, I had a bit of an other-worldly conversation with my would-be captors. Detective Frank Pananepinto of Homeland Security told us, "This is a 'Critical Infrastructure' … and they get nervous about unauthorized filming of their property.

Well, me too, Detective. In fact, I'm very nervous that this potential chemical blast-site can be mapped in extreme detail at this Google Map location

What also makes me nervous is that the Bush Terror Terriers have kindly indicated on the Internet that this unprotected critical infrastructure can be targeted -- I mean located -- at 30º 29' 11" N Latitude and 91º 11' 39" W Longitude.

After I assured Detective Pananepinto, "I can swear to you that I'm not part of Al Qaeda," he confirmed that, "Louisiana is still part of the United States," subject to the first amendment and he was therefore required to divulge my accuser.

Full story...

Recent Mossad Undisclosed 'False Flag' Operations

by Trowbridge H. Ford

Part 1 - The Yugoslav Case

In today's world where not only newspapers but also news is dying, it is hardly surprising that people have neither a broad understanding of what is going on nor a coherent recall of what happened in the recent past. It is all just a bit of a blur where individual incidents - especially if they involve celebreties, particularly flashy or controversial politicians - capture the headlines, dominate the news reports, and monopolize the talk shows. Public knowledge is just an amalgam of what comedians, tv presenters, and weighty commentators are willing and/or able to make of world events. It has become, as Harold Pinter reminded us while receiving this year's Nobel Prize for Literature, a pernicious blend of art, truth and politics.

Who, for example, remembers what happened in the rest of the world when former American football star and flashy tv ad presenter O. J. Simpson was on trial in California for murdering his estranged wife Nicole and an acquaintance of hers, Ron Goldman, on June 12, 1994? While most people in the developed world were glued to their tv sets, and talking endlessly about what had
happened - e. g., Nicole's 911 call for help after O. J. beat her up again, and LA detective Mark Furman's testimony about his investigation of the murders - how many of them have any recall of what was going on in Bosnia at the same time? And when President Clinton tried to put back the pieces there by sending in American troops as peacekeepers - what Washington had encouraged at Yugoslavia's expense by urging Muslim militant Alija Izetbegovic to seize power as President, declare independence from Belgrade after an illegal referendum, and set about building a Muslim state?

And this had all started when George Bush was still President, and facing a difficult re-election prospect. The European Union was intent on breaking up Slobodan Milosevic's communist Yugoslavia, resulting in both Solvenia and Croatia declaring their independence from it the previous year. To compensate for the losses, Croatia's Franjo Tudjman and Milosevic agreed at Karadordevo on March 25, 1991 to carve up Bosnia along ethnic lines, what would leave its Muslims out in the cold, and tear up what Izetbegovic, Croat Mate Boban and Serb Radovan Karadzic had argeed to earlier in Lisbon about an independent Bosnia.

In an effort reminiscent of how Richard Nixon managed to steal the 1968 presidential election by promising South Vietnam's President Nguyen Van Thieu a better deal if he refused to attend the peace conference that LBJ had called at the last minute to help assure Hubert Humphrey's election, Bush instructed American Ambassador Warren Zimmerman to tell the Muslim leader on March 28, 1992, that he too would get a better deal if he tore up the Lisbon Accords - which he did. In the end, Bosnia got less from the Dayton Accords during the Clinton administration than had been agreed to in Lisbon.

And when Clinton was facing impeachment four years later, how many people recall his missile attacks on Sudan, Afghanistan and Pakistan - what were intended not only to help head off the process but also to give some payback to Osama bin Laden for Al-Qaeda's attacks on the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania? And when everyone was concentrating on the whole sordid details of his dealings with Monica Lewinski, and his lies about them as his impeachment gathered momentum, how many remember Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's meetings with Milosevic's representatives in Rambouillet, France where the Yugoslav President was issued an ultimatum - either allow 28,000 NATO peacekeepers into Kosovo or face a massive aerial bombardment by 430 of its aircraft, including F-117 stealth fighter bombers and B-52s?

I reckon not many because they were all most secret operations whose details, if known, would have reflected most badly on Washington, the Clinton administration, the EU, and, most surprisingly, Israel. Few people took seriously Gordon Thomas's claims in Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad that its agents were tapping the sexual encounters that the President had had over the phone with Ms. Lewinski - what it was now using to blackmail the White House - much less ask for what possible purpose.

And once freed from the threat after the Senate rejected the bills of impeachment on Febraury 12, 1999, the President had NATO rush to put together the bombing campaign in Kosovo which commenced six weeks later. This was to bring to a successful conclusion all the secret operations that the CIA had carried out to help the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) gain independence from the Republic of Serbia. The KLA had originally been trained and financed by Osama's Al-Qaeda, and the job had been completed by CIA security agents, Dyncorp and the MPRI. Their greatest accomplishment was making it look like the Serbs had carried out the massacre of Kosovars at Racak - where several dozen residents had apparently had had their throats slit, and their bodies dumped in a ditch.

While the Yugoslav President had forced some Kosovars out of the province into Serbia both to undermine their claim to self-determination, and to prepare for the apparent NATO onslaught, it was trying to get the Albanian and Kosovar clan chiefs to withdraw their people from the province to make it look as if Milosevic was engaged in ethnic cleansing, but without much success. For those ethic Muslims who refused, the KLA and the CIA took the strongest measures, as the autopsies of some of those allegedly killed at Racak showed. To add to the charge, NATO, thanks to the connivance by agents of the Office of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), overruled two inquests into the Racak affair, claiming simply that the Serbians had carried out a massacre.

Clinton, now cleared of lying and obstructing justice in a significant way, and joined by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, was free to establish his legacy - the ending of the last traces of communism in Europe through the efforts of the Moujahedeen who had ended it in Afghanistan. The only possible downside to the project was the risk of building a trans-national Muslim state across southeast Europe from the Adriatic to the Black Sea, and at the expense of Serbia, Macedonia, and Bulgaria. Still, Clinton thought it was well worth it, and on March 24, 1999, NATO started dropping over 200 million dollars-worth of ordnance a day on selected targets in Serbia to force its army to withdraw from Kosovo, but which only immediately forced the Kosovars to leave in droves. When NATO feared that the public was learning too much about the damage wrought, it bombed Serbian TV with considerable loss of life. When NATO learned that the Chinese Embassy was transmitting messages to the Serbian military after its jets had silenced Slobodan's, it destroyed it. (William Blum, Rogue State, pp. 233-4)

After 78 days of constant bombing - what devastated Serbia's infrastructure, laid waste to vast areas of human habitation, caused many willful, unnecessary and unlawful killings, and contaminated vast areas of land and sea with toxic and unexploded ordnance - Milosevic finally withdrew his army from Kosovo, and the aerial assault ceased. The attacks were aimed at Serbia's economic elite by destroying its infrastructure - who had been softened up by the CIA's National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to push for comprehensive market reform - so that it would oust the old communist warhorse and his inner circle, especially Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic. To see that they got their just desserts, the Americans even agreed to the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

Milosevic's increasingly nationalist regime, seeking a Greater Serbia, had become apparently totally isolated because the need of its acting as a counterweight to the USSR - what had provided Marshal Tito with all kinds of concessions from Europe because of his steadfastness - had collapsed with his death, and that of the Soviet bloc. After Tito died in 1980, his successors, especially Ivan Stambolic, had tried to keep the policies and allies that the famous Partisan leader had established, and things continued pretty much as they had been until Milosevic seized control of the Serbian Socialist Party from Stambolic, and was elected the Republic's President in the late 1980s. And to go along with Milosevic's Serbian nationalism, he switched sides on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, not only resuming diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv - terminated after the Six Day War in 1967 - but also giving the Mossad an increasing role in its fight against the Muslims and separatists.

During the 1990s Israel became Serbia's only remaining ally. While 2,000 of Yugoslavia's few remaining Jews were immigrating to Palestine, Milosevic's government adopted 'false flag' operations which the Mossad had made famous, and for which it provided vital intelligence and assistance. The most active domestic group was Vuk Draskovic's Serbian Renewal Movement (SRM) whose Serbian Guard attempted to make it look like it was serious in ovethrowing Milosevic's regime in 1991 through street protests in Belgrade. When this fizzled out, its aim, along with other Serbian paramilitary groups, was to stoke up hatred with the Croats and Bosniacs by making wild claims - like Tudjman was trying to assassinate Milosevic while conducting secret negotiations with him, and behind the back of Izetbegovic's Bosniacs - and then arranging the killing of those involved, or using the deception as a basis for getting rid of less ideologically committed colleagues.

The organizer of these dummy political parties, and special forces who killed friend and foe alike who impeded the war on Islam was Jovica Stanisic, Milosevic's trusted covert operator who controlled all counterterrorist operations throughtout what was left of Yugoslavia by the draft law in 1997 which made him the Presidential Advisor for National Security. Stanisic's greatest claim to fame was the capture of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez aka 'Carlos the Jackal' back in 1976 in Belgrade after he killed two French secret service officers in Paris trying to arrest him on a tipoff from Mossad informer Michael Moukharbal. Ramirez was apparently a double agent of the Mossad who was a founding member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine's Black September Movement which carried out assassinations, hijacking and kidnappings, guaranteed to insure that it never happened. Stanisic was now involved in a program to put PFLP-style operations against Muslims and Croats on a federation-wide basis to make sure its split-up never occurred.

To commenorate the achievements of Stanisic's State Security Division (RDB) in the Vojvodina region against Croats and Mulims during 1991-5 - what had earlier occurred in Bosnia - a celebration was called for the all the participants in the campaign, especially Dragan Vailjkovic's 300-man unit which stormed the Croatian town of Glina in 1991. At the celebration, a video was shot of the proceedings which became most explosive when it came time to try the various Serbian war criminals at The Hague.

As a witness during the trial of Milosevic explained, as Paul Gallagher reported for Reuters on February 19, 2003, "Milosevic Trial Shown Secret Paramiliary Video": "You can see all members of the Serbian State security in one place, which made it unique. I asked them to give me this tape and they denied it to me because it was very sensitive material." Of course, the presence of people like Milosevic, Stanisic, and his subordinate Franki Simatovi - name-sake of 'Frenkies Boys' which was led by the legendary Milorad Lukovic aka "Legija" - was to be expected.

The video would only be explosive if it showed the presence of foreign advisers, especially Israeli ones, in counterterrorism, and alleged domestic opponents who participiated in the RDB's various 'false-flag' operations. The frames would show that witnesses from Serbian military intelligence (the KOB), especially Slobodan Lazarevic and Mustafa Candic, testifying against Milosevic at his trial at The Hague were telling the truth when they claimed that the whole network of paramilitary groups, assemblies, and officials throughout Yugoslavia were completely under the control of "The Boss" in Belgrade, charges so upsetting to the former President that the court had to order a recess until he could regain his health and composure.

Then who was supplying Belgrade with the necessary information so that operations could be planned, and then carried out? It certainly wasn't the American intelligence community, nor the intelligence agencies of the various European states. The best evidence that Washington was not involved in any kind of black operations when it came to Serbia was demonstrated when President Clinton ordered the National Security Agency (NSA) in early 1993 to recruit on a crash basis 125 linguists to handle tactical communications in Serbo-Croat in the most hostile environment. (James Bamford, Body of Secrets: How America's NSA and Britain's GCHQ Eavesdrop on the World, p. 554.) If Washington were doing anything untoward in Bosnia, it would have trained linquists beforehand.

And it is interesting to note that Bamford does not have a word to say about the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in his book, though the NSA had promised to be much more forthcoming about its achievements at the time, and Bamford has included other contemporaneous developments - like the joint NSA-DARPA program to build a super computer which could fit in a coat pocket. (p. 609) "By 2001," he added, "researchers at MIT were actively attempting to marry the digital with the biological by altering the common E. coli bacterium to function as an electronic circuit." (p. 612)

The Embassy bombing had become for some explained reason an example of renewed NSA secrecy - what Jeffrey T. Richelson had complained about in his "Back to black" article for the May/June 2001 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and the only apparent reason for the void is that there was much more to the bombing than Washington is prepared to admit.

And Britain's MI5 does seem to have been most unprotective of Israeli interests for some unexplained reason at this time, allowing its Embassy in London, and Balfour House, Finchley to have been bombed on July 26, 1994, resulting in 19 people being injured. According to the famous reporter Paul Foot, the Mossad had set up four Palestinians living in Britain for the crimes by having its agent Reda Moghrabi get them to buy and test explosives under the pretence that they would be used in Sidon, Lebanon. (For corroboration of this, see Annie Machon, Spies, Lies & Whistleblowers, p. 225ff.) And on July 13th, The Sunday Times reported that Mossad agents had come to London to warn British counterterrorists that Hezbollah planned to attack its Embassy - what turned out to be just another "false-flag" operation.

And, according to Richard Tomlinson, MI6 was trying to assassinate Milosevic back in 1992, hoping to arrange a convenient car crash for the President, a dummy paramilitary organization managing to penetrate his security network, or an Special Air Service (SAS) squad simply staging his assassination - what the Mossad might well have learned from Tomlinson himself who was willing to tell anyone who would listen the SIS's latest transgressions. And the Mossad attack on the London buildings could have well been a wake-up call to the Major government to take Israeli and Jewish security concerns more seriously.

This leaves only the Israelis, and it seems that American fugitive Marc Rich - who had renounced his US citizenship in 1983, and become one of Israel and Spain when his financial empire was charged with racketeering and trading with the enemy, Iran - provided the necessary connections between Belgrade and Tel Aviv so that the necessary trageting of individuals, and Muslim hotspots could take place. The Rich Foundation was a front for the Israeli government itself, and it was managed by important Mossad operatives, especially former directors Avner Azulay and Shabtai Shavit. It may well have transmitted important intelligence to Stanisic's people about how to conduct their campaigns through the Chinese Embassy - what could not be done by the Israeli Embassy because of the real risk of being discovered by NSA - explaining why NATO took it out during the aerial campaign after NSA finally got up to speed in reading its communications. Israel only even gave slight support to the bombing campaign, Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon refusing to cut ties with Belgrade.

In order to keep earlier operations most secret, Belgrade had not been loath, like the Israelis themselves, to eliminate those who might be security risks to the most essential Mossad program.The killings which come to mind are those of Beli Matic on August 11, 1991, Djordje Giska the following month, Aleksandar Knele a year later, and Goran Vukovic in December 1994. Serbian authorities predictably blamed these assassinations upon unspecified Western intelligence agencies rather than the Mossad and apparent domestic opponents - claims which just stoked up zenophobia. Little wonder that Milos Vasic wrote this in exasperation in "Two-years silence" in the June-November 2002 issue of the Bosnia Report after Stambolic had not been seen since 2000:

"For eleven years now the police have been simulating investigations, going through the same ritual motions, knowing all the while that the culprits will never be found. Hence the cyncisim of the police top brass: 'Well, John Kennedy was killed. Olof Palme was killed, it happens'..."

Those assassinated gained the name of the Vozdovac Gang, the place in Belgrade were Karadzic got his training in crowd education and mobilization during two appointments at its Health Center during the 1980s before he went off to Sarajevo in Bosnia to organize the Serbian revolt from its Health Center - what was kicked off by a highly-trained sharpshooter gunning down a Bosniac medical student as he went shopping downtown. The unsuspecting Matic was killed by a single bullet outside his home, as he was unlocking his car - reminiscent of how the Mossad had apparently arranged the killing of Said Hammami, who was seeking a negotiated settlement to the Palestinian-Israeli confict, in his London office in January 1978. (For more on this killing, and others that the Mossad arranged through surrogate killers, see Tony Geraghty, The Bullet Catchers, p. 376ff.)

It was just the kind of action that Ariel Sharon had called for back in 1990 when he grabbed the microphone away from Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir during a Likud Party conference debating the issue, and shouted: "Who's for wiping out terrorism?" And the real possibility that Mossad leaders might well have had something to do with these assassinations, and that of "traitor"
Yitzhak Rabin when he was seriously involved in the implemention of the Oslo Accords to achieve peace between the Israelis and Palestinians was not diminished when his successor, Benjamin Netanyahu, was tempted to make either Efraim Halevy or Meir Dagan the Mossad's Director, only to settle for Danny Yatom after he was advised by a former veteran agent of its foreign relations department against it, declaring that Dagan would especially be a "recipe for disasters", with his "targeted killings during lulls" - what could destroy its relations with other secret intelligence agencies throughout the world.

Instead Dagan served as a counterterrorst expert for the Netanyahu government, and the Barak one which followed, while Halevy continued to run operations as its Deputy Director. And the growing involvement of Israel, especially the Mossad's, in Serbia's struggle was increasingly evident. Ever since the Americans had taken over Albania militarily back in 1991-2, the Mossad had been putting together "The Gazidede File" for Belgrade, named after the Albanians' secret intelligence chief, Baskin Gazidede, who was Albania's link with the Al Qaeda and the KLA. "In February 1999 Jane's" (Defence Weekly), M. Bozinovich has added in the just-posted article on Serbiana, "Al Qaeda in Kosovo", "cites that documents found on the body of a KLA member showed that he had escorted several volunteers into Kosovo, including more than a dozen Saudi Arabians."

By this time, Zeljko Raznatovic, the infamous hit man aka Arkan, was writing to President Clinton, as if he were Dagan, calling attention to the Al-Qaeda bombings in East Africa in the hope that he would take a more pro-Serbian view in the battle against Muslim terrorism. This was a far cry from when Arkan was setting out on his first mission in Bosnia, taking along Jewish photographer Ron Haviv to take pictures of his 'Tiger's atrocities in the hope that publishing them would scare the Bosniacs into submission. Now Arkan, for his trouble, saw his hotel in Belgrade destroyed during the bombing, and the Chinese Embassy joined the list when it was determined that he was using it to pass on military information to the Serbian forces. And then in January 2000, Belgrade arranged Arkan's assassination by Debrosav Gavric, just to keep critics guessing about who was pulling the strings, and calling the shots.

By this time, Vuk Draskovic had given up his charade that he was really opposed to what Milosevic was attempting with Mossad help, having distanced himself from the SRM, and joined the Belgrade government. Serbia had helped resupply weapons lost in the first Gulf War to Saddam Hussein's regime, Con Coughlin tells us in Saddam (p. 292), apparently in return for helping cleanse Yugoslavia of the Muslim menace for Tel Aviv. Baghdad and Abu Nidal aka Sabri Al-Banna of the PFLP had long settled their differences with Israel over the value and role of Arafat and his PLO, though the Mossad still made sure that Saddam was not achieving the means to strike Israel with devastating blows. Saddam had paid his dues to Tel Aviv by fighting its proxy war against Iran - what he tried to cover up as best he could when the Gulf War was commencing by firing a few Scud missiles Israel's way but without any real impact.

In return, Milosevic made sure that Arkin's followers, particularly "Legija", disposed of his most dangerous critic, Slavko Curuvija, and his most dangerous opponent, Stambolic, in the run-up to the 2000 presidential election. Curuvija, a whistle-blowing publisher, knew about all the extra-judicial killings, and threatened Milosevic's wife Mira Markovic, "a kind of communist Rasputin", to tell all - what could well have resulted in the couple being stung by an angry Belgrade mob on the nearest lamppost, like Mussolini and his infamous mistress. Curuvija was assassinated on April 11, 1999, and Stambolic disappeared on August 25, 2000. About Curujiva's killing, his Wikipedia biography adds: "It is still not known who carried out the assassination, nor who ordered it." To hide from the public Draskovic's role in the process, Arkan apparenlty took a shot at him twice but somehow missed both times.

Clinton, once the Yugoslav Army had been forced to withdraw from Kosovo, decided to settle scores with the other members of the secret triumvirate, Israel and China. While they thought that their covert system had remained secret from Washington, it had ultimately learned what was going on from NSA, and decided to strike when the moment was right. Israel had established diplomatic relations with Beijing the same time Belgrade had, and they had built rewarding economic and strategic relations ever since the late 1970s. Now Tel Aviv was under considerable pressure to make amends for the destruction of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, and they worked very cautiously for a settlement - the sale of around a half dozen, radar-equipped, early-warning planes aka Phalcons. Tel Aviv and Beijing had carefully worked diplomatically towards the culimination, Jiang Zemin coming to Israel in April to close the deal, only for Washington to cancel it three months later, sending the staggering Yugoslav ecomony into free fall.

It hit bottom when Milosevic lost the election in October, and refused to resign, obliging almost all his former collaborators, except the military, to organize his ouster. The movement was headed by the victor in the election, leader of Serbia's Democratic Party (DS) Vojislav Kostunica; Draskovic, who had arranged Arkan's assassination, and then had seen to the disposal of his killer, Momir Gavrilovic; and Zoran Djindjic, who took over the DS when Kostunica assumed the Presidency. They were all most eager to cut ties as best they could with the past for fear of being sent along with Milosevic and others charged with war crimes to the special tribunal in The Hague.

Back in Washington, President Clinton, to avoid a similar prospect, decided to reduce the risks by pardoning Rich as he was taking leave of the White House in January 2001. The leader of the campaign to rehabilitate the scofflaw, and expatriot was the director of the Rich Foundation and former Mossad operative, Avner Azulay.

To soften up Clinton to agree to the pardon behind the backs of the relevant Justice Department officials, Azulay gave $100,000 of Rich's money to Abraham Foxman of the Anti Defamation League to talk up his boss's contributions to Jewish causes, and got Rich's former wife Denise, who had already given $450,000 for the Clinton Library, to put the pitch to the President while at a White House dinner in December. For good measure, Azulay lined up various Israeli officials, especially Prime Minister Ehud Barak who had been stung by the Phalcon cancellation, and former Mossad Director Shavit, not only to speak about his charitable efforts and allude to his intelligence help of Tel Aviv but also to press for a pardon for the more controversial spy Jonathan Pollard to make sure that at least Rich was satisfied.

Clinton went along with the backmail which recalled the Mossad's use of Ms. Lewinski because he risked much more by not doing so. There was still the possibility that chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte at The Hague might take up the Canadian suit, claiming that he and many other world leaders had committed war crimes during the bombing campaign of Serbia, especially since even the Pentagon had issued a warning that hacking into Serbia's computer networks for destructive purposes - what the NSA might well have already done, and might explain further the destruction of the Chinese Embassy - could constitute a war crime. (William Blum, Rogue State, pp. 77-8) And the President was always afraid that any inquiry into his activities might revive interest in what he had done back in Arkansas as Governor.

To temper any backlash from the pardon, he also issued one to Adolf "Al" Schwimmer, the key operative in Iran-Contra who started it all by not getting clearance for the shipment of 80 HAWK missiles through a third country, apparently Sweden, from Israel to Iran back in November 1985. (For more on this, see Lawrence E. Walsh, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up, p.37ff.) Then Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin and several Israeli senior officials, especially Shimon Peres and David Kimche, had been deeply involved in this black operation, and it was hardly surprising that when Azulay was trying to induce Clinton to pardon Rich, it was suggested bringing in Rabin's widow, Leah, to strengthen the plea, only to be reminded that she had died the previous November.

Serbia's new President, Kostunica, acted as if it had hardly had any previous relations with Israel. No sooner had he taken office than he stated: "For some strange reasons there are nations and countries that are geographically far apart...but very close to one another," the AP reported on November 10, 2000 in an article entitled "Yugoslav president favors broadened relations with Israel." He said that he wanted to officially visit the Holy Land, and he was the first Serbian President to attend Holocaust Day memorial ceremony the following April. It was all intended to counter anti-Semitic incidents which started right after the presidential election, and it all seemed intended to fool everyone, especially the outside world, about what had been going on before.

To keep everyone guessing, outgoing Mossad Director Efraim Halevy wrote his memoirs, Man in the Shadows, an unprecedented act for a former foreign intelligence chief. The book really didn't reveal anything new - what had been discussed more fully, for example, in Gordon Thomas's work. Halevy seemed intent on making it officially clear that there wasn't anything more to tell - an unbelieveable effort by any former intelligence chief, especially one of the Mossad. And Con Coughlin added to the charade by interviewing him for the Daily Telegraph, entitled "Out of the Shadows", on March 26, 2006, acting as if Halevy's denials of the agency having had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks, and Saddam Hussein settled the matter. In doing so, Coughlin
discounted claims he had earlier made in Saddam that Milosevic and the Iraqi dictator had a secret alliance for him to survive a similar aerial bombardment, and that they were collaborating in the development of nuclear weapons. (p. 318)

While most Israeli leaders were prepared to simply lick their wounds after these setbacks, Sharon and Dagan, who took over from Halevy, were not, and the former's election as Prime Minister, thanks to the latter's efforts, guaranteed that a preemptive agenda would be adopted - one which called for Saddam's overthrow without any significant blowback. To reduce the risks, Dagan arranged the assassination of Abu Nidal in Baghdad on August 16, 2002. Nidal, like his PFLP predecessor, 'Carlos the Jackal', just knew too much about the double-dealing regarding Libya's Gadaffi, Jordan, Israel, Syria, Lebanon, and especially Iraq to be allowed to live. Nidal could particularly deny what was left of the claims about collaboration between Milosevic and Saddam, particularly the claim that the Iraqi leader was going it alone in the production of nuclear weapons, now that Milosevic had departed the political scene.

Thanks to this effort, Dagan was made Mossad's Director on September 10th, and he immediately put together the essentials of the Downing Street dossier about Iraq's WMD - what was traced falsely to others, particularly a most dated American Ph.D. dissertation, when it claims were questioned by others. As Jeffrey Steinberg has written in "Behind the Iraq Dossier Hoax: Intelligence Was Cooked in Israel" in the February 21, 2003 issue of the Executive Intelligence Review:

"In fact, at least 11 of 16 pages were lifted, verbatim, from an Israeli journal, Middle East Review of International Affairs, whose sole proprietor is Dr. Barry Rubin, an American-born Israeli citizen. The 11 pages were drawn from two articles by Ibraham al-Marashi and Robert Rabil, that appeared in the September 2002 edition of that journal."

And reading Steinberg's article further, one discovers that Rubin's effort is part of the International Center for Counterterrorist Policy (ITC) which is financed by the Marc Rich Foundation whose Director is Avner Azulay and "another publicly listed associate of the ITC is Maj. Gen. Meir Dagan, one of Ariel Sharon's most notorious thugs, and the current head of the Mossad."

Given this most unexpected revelation, the Mossad, it seems, moved quickly to stem the damage, having, it seems, Milorad Lukovic aka "Legija" assassinate Zoran Djindjic, the Serbian Prime Minister, by shooting him twice in the chest at long range as he was going to a meeting with Sweden's Foreign Minister Anna Lindh in Belgrade three weeks later. Djindjic, along with Lindh, were great champions of market reform, and bringing all the war criminals, especially those who targeted suspected terrorists for assassination - what could still result in Sharon, Dagan, and many others going to The Hague.

Djindjic's killing was apparently an ideal example of Dagan's work - the strategic move during a lull which could well change the outcome of some complicated operation, as the ouster of Saddam was just days away. And the use of hit man "Legija" would guarantee what few would suspect Israel of the murder.

Friday 1 September 2006

US Army Contemplates Redrawing Middle East Map to Stave-off Looming Global Meltdown

This is scarier than just about anything I've read recently. Friends ask me why I hate "horror" films: because they're not scary, they're just manufactured bullshit. This is real and this is bloody terrifying! Is this world heading into a new Dark Age? Are we REALLY that STUPID?

by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

http://www.opednews.com

In a little-noted article printed in early August in the Armed Forces Journal, a monthly magazine for officers and leaders in the United States military community, early retired Major Ralph Peters sets out the latest ideas in current US strategic thinking. And they are extremely disturbing.

Ethnically Cleansing the Entire Middle East

Maj. Peters, formerly assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence where he was responsible for future warfare, candidly outlines how the map of the Middle East should be fundamentally re-drawn, in a new imperial endeavour designed to correct past errors. "Without such major boundary revisions, we shall never see a more peaceful Middle East," he observes, but then adds wryly: "Oh, and one other dirty little secret from 5,000 years of history: Ethnic cleansing works."

Thus, acknowledging that the sweeping reconfiguration of borders he proposes would necessarily involve massive ethnic cleansing and accompanying bloodshed on perhaps a genocidal scale, he insists that unless it is implemented, "we may take it as an article of faith that a portion of the bloodshed in the region will continue to be our own." Among his proposals are the need to establish "an independent Kurdish state" to guarantee the long-denied right to Kurdish self-determination. But behind the humanitarian sentiments, Maj. Peters declares that: "A Free Kurdistan, stretching from Diyarbakir through Tabriz, would be the most pro-Western state between Bulgaria and Japan."

He chastises the United States and its coalition partners for missing "a glorious chance" to fracture Iraq, which "should have been divided into three smaller states immediately." This would leave "Iraq's three Sunni-majority provinces as a truncated state that might eventually choose to unify with a Syria that loses its littoral to a Mediterranean-oriented Greater Lebanon: Phoenecia reborn." Meanwhile, the Shia south of old Iraq "would form the basis of an Arab Shia State rimming much of the Persian Gulf." Jordan, a US-Israeli friend in the region, would "retain its current territory, with some southward expansion at Saudi expense. For its part, the unnatural state of Saudi Arabia would suffer as great a dismantling as Pakistan." Iran too would "lose a great deal of territory to Unified Azerbaijan, Free Kurdistan, the Arab Shia State and Free Baluchistan, but would gain the provinces around Herat in today's Afghanistan." Although this vast imperial programme could be impossible to implement now, with time, "new and natural borders will emerge", driven by "the inevitable attendant bloodshed."

As for the goals of this plan, Maj. Peters is equally candid. While including the necessary caveats about fighting "for security from terrorism, for the prospect of democracy", he also mentions the third important issue -- "and for access to oil supplies in a region that is destined to fight itself".

The whole thing sounds disturbingly familiar, especially to those who have read the musings of then Israeli Foreign Ministry official Oded Yinon.


Keeping the World Safe... for Our Economy

Despite trying to dress up his vision as an exercise in attempting to selflessly democratize the Middle East, in a contribution to the quarterly US Army War College journal Parameters almost a decade ago, he acknowledged with some jubilation that: "Those of us who can sort, digest, synthesize, and apply relevant knowledge soar--professionally, financially, politically, militarily, and socially. We, the winners, are a minority." This minority will inevitably conflict with the vast majority of the world's population. "For the world masses, devastated by information they cannot manage or effectively interpret, life is 'nasty, brutish . . . and short-circuited.'" In "every country and region", these masses who can neither "understand the new world", nor "profit from its uncertainties... will become the violent enemies of their inadequate governments, of their more fortunate neighbors, and ultimately of the United States." The coming clash, then, is not really about blood, faith, ethnicity, at all. It is about the gap between the haves and the have-nots. "We are entering a new American century", he says, in a veiled reference to the Bush administration Project of the same name founded in the same year he was writing. In the new century, "we will become still wealthier, culturally more lethal, and increasingly powerful. We will excite hatreds without precedent."

In predicting the future course for the US Army, Maj. Peters argues that: "We will see countries and continents divide between rich and poor in a reversal of 20th-century economic trends." In this context, he says, "we in the United States will continue to be perceived as the ultimate haves", and therefore, "terrorism will be the most common form of violence", along with "transnational criminality, civil strife, secessions, border conflicts, and conventional wars." Meanwhile, "in defense of its interests", the US "will be required to intervene in some of these contests." And then he sums it all up in one tidy paragraph:

"There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing."

So what's prompted Maj. Peter's decision to air his vision for the Middle East in the Armed Forces Journal at this time in the wake of the latest Middle East crisis? A number of critical developments.


Source: Imminent Global Crises Converge

According to an American source with high-level access to the US military, political and intelligence establishment, Western policymakers are in no doubt that the world faces the imminent convergence of multiple global crises. These crises threaten not only to undermine the basis of Western power in its current military and geopolitical configurations, but also to destabilize the entire foundations of industrial civilization.

The source said that the latest petroleum data indicates that "global oil production most likely peaked two years ago." This is consistent with the findings of respected geologists such as leading oil depletion expert Dr. Colin Campbell, who in the late 90s predicted that world oil production would peak in the early 21st century. "We have come to the end of the first half of the Oil Age," said Dr. Campbell, who has a doctorate in geology from the University of Oxford and more than 40 years of experience in the oil industry. Similarly, Kenneth Deffeyes, a geologist and professor emeritus at Princeton University, estimates the occurrence of the peak near the end of last year.

The source also said that leading US financial analysts privately believe that "a collapse of the global banking system is imminent by 2008." Although the warning is consistent with the public findings of other experts, this is the first time that a more precise date has been estimated. In a prescient analysis drawing on highly placed financial sources, US historian Gabriel Kolko, professor emeritus at York University, concluded in late July that:

"All the factors which make for crashes – excessive leveraging, rising interest rates, etc. – exist... Contradictions now wrack the world's financial system, and a growing consensus now exists between those who endorse it and those, like myself, who believe the status quo is both crisis-prone as well as immoral. If we are to believe the institutions and personalities who have been in the forefront of the defense of capitalism, and we should, it may very well be on the verge of serious crises."

The source also commented on the danger posed by rapid climate change. Although most conventional estimates suggest that global climate catastrophe is not due before another 30 odd years, he argued that the multiplication of several "tipping-points" suggested that a series of devastating climatic events could be "triggered within the next 10 to 15 years." Once again, this is consistent with the findings of other experts, most recently a joint task-force report by the Institute for Public Policy Research in the UK, the Center for American Progress in the US, and the Australia Institute, which said in January last year that if the average world temperature rises "two degrees centigrade above the average world temperature prevailing in 1750 before the industrial revolution", it would trigger an irreversible chain of climatic disasters. In its report, the task-force says:

"The possibilities include reaching climatic tipping points leading, for example, to the loss of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets (which, between them, could raise sea level more than 10 meters over the space of a few centuries), the shutdown of the thermohaline ocean circulation (and, with it, the Gulf Stream), and the transformation of the planet's forests and soils from a net sink of carbon to a net source of carbon."

The source also revealed that US generals had repeatedly war-gamed a prospective conflict with Iran, but consistently found that the simulations predicted "an absolute nuclear disaster", from which no clear winner would emerge. The scenarios gamed were so dismal, he said, that the generals briefed administration officials to avoid such a war at all costs. However, the source said that the Bush administration is ignoring the fears of the US military.

In this context, it would seem that the musings of Maj. Peters issue less from a concerted confidence in US power, than from a sense of growing desperation and unease as the political, financial and energy architecture of the global system is increasingly fragmenting under the weight of its own inherent instability. Despite the seeming gloominess of the situation, however, there is clearly fundamental dissent about the current trajectory of American and Western policy at the highest levels of power. The source remarked that "humanity is on the verge of a precipice, and either we'll all just drop off the edge, or we'll evolve. I'm not sure what that new human being might look like, but it will clearly have to involve a completely new set of ideas and values, a new way of looking at the world that respects life and nature."

nafeez.blogspot.com

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is the author of The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry. He teaches courses in International Relations at the School of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, where he is doing his PhD studying imperialism and genocide. Since 9/11, he has authored three other books revealing the realpolitik behind the rhetoric of the "War on Terror", The War on Freedom, Behind the War on Terror, and The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism. In summer 2005, he testified as an expert witness in US Congress about his research on international terrorism.

Full story...

Return Of People Power

by John Pilger

In researching a new film, I have been watching documentary archive from the 1980s, the era of Ronald Reagan and his "secret war" against Central America. What is striking is the relentless lying. A department of lying was set up under Reagan with the coy name, "office of public diplomacy". Its purpose was to dispense "white" and "black" propaganda - lies - and to smear journalists who told the truth. Almost everything Reagan himself said on the subject was false. Time and again, he warned Americans of an "imminent threat" from the tiny impoverished nations that occupy the isthmus between the two continents of the western hemisphere. "Central America is too close and its strategic stakes are too high for us to ignore the danger of governments seizing power with military ties to the Soviet Union," he said. Nicaragua was "a Soviet base" and "communism is about to take over the Caribbean". The United States, said the president, "is engaged in a war on terrorism, a war for freedom".

How familiar it all sounds. Merely replace Soviet Union and communism with al-Qaeda, and you are up to date. And it was all a fantasy. The Soviet Union had no bases in or designs on Central America; on the contrary, the Soviets were adamant in turning down appeals for their aid. The comic strips of "missile storage depots" that American officials presented to the United Nations were precursors to the lies told by Colin Powell in his infamous promotion of Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction at the Security Council in 2003.

Whereas Powell's lies paved the way for the invasion of Iraq and the violent death of at least 100,000 people, Reagan's lies disguised his onslaught on Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. By the end of his two terms, 300,000 people were dead. In Guatemala, his proxies - armed and tutored in torture by the CIA - were described by the UN as perpetrators of genocide.

THERE IS ONE MAJOR DIFFERENCE TODAY

That is the level of awareness among people everywhere of the true purpose of Bush and Blair's "war on terror" and the scale and diversity of the popular resistance to it. In Reagan's day, the notion that presidents and prime ministers lied as deliberate, calculated acts was considered exotic; Nixon's Watergate lies were said to be shocking because presidents did not lie outright.

Almost no one believes that any more. In Britain, thanks to Blair, a sea-change in public attitudes has taken place. No less than 80 per cent regard him as a liar; 82 per cent believe his warmongering was a principal cause of the London bombings; 72 per cent believe he has made this country a target. No modern prime minister has been the object of such informed opprobrium. In addition, a majority remain sceptical about the veracity of a "plot" to blow up aircraft flying from Heathrow. The recent, thuggish self-promotion of the Home Secretary (Interior Minister) John Reid is rejected by a clear majority, along with the media-promotion of Treasurer Gordon Brown as the man who brought economic prosperity to Britain while acting as paymaster for various imperial adventures. More than three-quarters of the population believe Brown and Blair have merely made the rich richer (YouGov and Guardian/ICM).

IN MY EXPERIENCE, THIS CRITICAL PUBLIC INTELLIGENCE AND MORAL SENSE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AHEAD OF THOSE WHO CLAIM TO SPEAK FOR THE PUBLIC.

Full story...

A History of America's National Reconnaissance Office

Part VIII

by Trowbridge H. Ford


Part VIII

With the nomination of Representative Gerald R.Ford, the Republican House Minority Leader, to replace the disgraced Spiro T.Agnew as Vice President on October 12, 1973, the Nixon White House was confident that the problems caused by Watergate would rapidly disappear, but it turned out far different from what it planned. While the President believed that the confirmation of Ford, a Nixon loyalist through-and-through, would guarantee that he would never be impeached, much less removed from office, his critics were sure that the Congress would get rid of Nixon, once Ford had been confirmed, as the country was increasingly ready to make anyone President in place of 'Tricky Dick'. NIxon was certain that Ford brought so much unwanted baggage with him that once confirmed, the Congress would never have the temerity to remove him. He figured wrongly, though, that the darkest secrets of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) would never be suspected, much less revealed.

Earlier in the day, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia had ruled that the President must turn over the tapes Judge John Sirica demanded for Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox about the Watergate break-in. Cox, an Eastern Establishment Liberal, and JFK's Solicitor General, was surprisingly picked by the new Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, who was given carte-blanche by the President in making the choice, and Nixon could not risk countermanding it. Cox was interested in not only the break-in but also the Huston Plan, the 1969-71 wiretaps, and the Plumbers themselves - the essentials of the White House's secret government efforts - as Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin have written in Silent Coup. "When Cox asked (the President's counsel Fred) Buzhardt in writing for the detailed records and logs on the Plumbers, Buzhardt refused." (p. 338)

These records would show their composition, especially William King Harvey's leadership of the group, and what they had been doing when former Alabama Governor George Wallace was nearly assassinated, why J. Edgar Hoover and former President Lyndon B. Johnson had suddenly died, and other horrors, not even imagined. The wiretaps would show that NSA Henry Kissinger's military aide Alexander M. Haig, Jr., broke the law when he demanded them to track down the leakers of the secret bombing and invasion of Cambodia for fear that the quid pro quo Agnew had arranged with South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Theiu to steal the 1968 Presidential Election would be disclosed in the process. The call that the Vice President-designate had made to Thieu from Phoenix - what the NRO had recorded for the National Security Agency just before the November election - was still by no means the biggest skeleton in Nixon's closet.

Gerald Ford, despite his genial exterior, was a true believer when it came to Nixon, and he would do anything to keep him President. The House Minority leader had been Nixon's choice when LBJ asked him who he wanted appointed to the Presidential Commission to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy, and Ford did not disappoint Tricky Dick, keeping Director Hoover apprized of what the Warren Commission was looking into to make sure that it got nowhere, and legitimizing its cover up for the public when he co-authored Portrait of the Assassin - an effort which completely scapegoated Lee Harvey Oswald for the government conspiracy which assassinated JFK. The Director's files on its members, especially Ford himself, insured that nothing untoward ever emerged from its inquiry.

Hoover, consequently, had been able to treat Chief Justice Warren, thanks to seven wiretaps that the Bureau had maintained on his telephones, as a mere nuisance whose doubts about LHO's guilt for the murder could safely be rejected. Anthony Summers has added, in his The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, that the FBI, even at this late date, insists that "electronic surveillance transscripts, 'must be kept secret in the interests of national defence or foreign policy'." (p. 205) According to Curt Gentry, the Bureau, besides providing helpful political information, and checking on the suitability of daughter Nina's suitors for the former California Governor, had enough on Warren himself that he was willing to let it solely investigate the assassination. (J. Edgar Hoover, p. 553)

While the Chief Justice grew increasingly difficult for the Bureau during the inquiry - ultimately forcing Hoover to have his name removed from the Special Correspondents list who received inside Bureau information about current political matters that it gleaned through its unfettered efforts - Ford never risked any such independence. The root of Ford's subservience was what the Bureau had collected about his extra-marital, sexual activities, especially thanks to the efforts by LBJ's former infamous aide, Bobby Baker, making him, as Summers had recorded, one of Hoover's "congressional stable" (p. 318) of political informants and manipulators. Carthy O'Brien has even claimed in Tranceformation of America that she was brain-washed by the CIA's Project Monarch, as part of its MK-ULTRA project, as a mere child to become a sex-slave for the Michigan Congressman. (p. 82ff.)

Ford, who the Bureau had helped get elected to the House right after WWII, went to the greatest lengths to shield it from any criticism by the Warren Commission, especially the material that the NRO had collected for the CIA about Oswald's alleged activities at the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City - what was intended to make him look like a recruited communist assassin - and Langley had alerted the Bureau of. It had not taken the apparent threat seriously, though, forcing it to excise the name of FBI agent James Hosty, who was handling the former Marine, from his address book after the assassination. "The commission member Ford opposed criticizing the FBI for having failed to inform the Secret Service that Oswald was in Dallas and working in a building located on the parade route," Gentry added, "but Chairiman Warren insisted it go in..."(p. 556)

Ford's nomination revived all these concerns in a most pointed way. Deceased Democratic Majority Leader of the House, and also former member of the Warren Commission Hale Boggs had also been a target of the Bureau's "Congressional Relations Service" because of his personal behavior, but he had not capitulated to Hoover's threats - what even resulted in threatening visits by agents to his office to make him change his tune about a possible conspiracy, especially one involving the Bureau, being behind the Dallas assassination. And Boggs, as Gentry has described, was the leading sceptic, and rightly feared of the consequences of its possible disclosure - what helps explain not only his sudden death, but also that of the Director himself.

Back in April 1971, just after Hoover had rebutted charges Ronald Kessler's charges in The Washington Post that the Bureau had engaged in any kind of wire-tapping - what resulted in the House Appropriations Subcommittee approving a $31,000,000 increased appropriation - Boggs and Ford had gotten into a most embarrassing altercation about alleged Bureau bugging after the Majority Leader had called for the Director's resignation: "When the FBI taps the telephones of Members of this body and of Members of the Senate," Gentry quoted from the Congressional Record, "when the FBI stations agents on college campuses to infiltrate college organizations, when the FBI adopts the tacts of the Soviet Union and Hitler's Gestapo, then it is time - it was way past time, Mr. Speaker - that the present Director no longer be the Director..." (Quoted from Gentry, p. 677.)

The House was caught completely unawares by Bogg's demand, and only Minority Leader Ford rose to his feet to rebut the charge, claiming that there was no truth to the claims, no need for Hoover to resign, and that Bureau agents did as best they could. "They are humans, as we are," Ford added lamely. It all reminded listeners of the feeble attack that the Minority leader had made a year earlier when Associate Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas was threatened with impeachment. Douglas had claimed that not only were all its deliberations tapped, but that Hoover was trying to pack the Court at his expense to help assist Nixon's conservative political agenda. The Director supplied Ford with inside information about Douglas which they hoped would result in his being removed from the Court, but the effort failed miserably. (Gentry, pp. 625-30.)

While Boggs's attack was dismissed as just another result from his battle with the bottle, he denied the charge, and promised to prove his case, starting with determining the origin of a bug which was discovered on his home telephone, and a tape Congressmen Mario Biaggi and Neil Gallagher supplied him, allegedly from the Bureau, of recorded conversations by fellow Congressmen. When Boggs made a second speech on April 22, 1971 against Hoover, calling for his resignation, and about the Bureau' s covert operations, it fizzled, largely because Biaggi refused to release the tape which would confirm his charges. And then it turned out the bug was apparently not a Bureao one, as it nornally tapped lines from the Old Post Office Building.

The sudden death of the Director, the attempted assassination of former Alabama Governor George Wallace, and the Watergate break-in a year later aroused the Majority Leader's interest again in these matters, especially after he denied that he had ever attacked Hoover personally, and was reminded of his two speeches he made in the House against the
Director. His efforts, though, were not long-lived, as he was killed in a mysterious plane crash while flying with fellow Congressman Nick Begich, his legislative assistant, and the pilot of the twin-engined Cessna from Anchorage to Juneau in Alaska on October 16, 1972. The plane was never officially found, and it seemed like more work by William King Harvey's people, especially given what happened to Dorothy Hunt two months later, in December, when she was threatening to blow the White House sky high over Watergate.

It was only 20 years later that family survivors of the two Congressman became convinced that they had been deliberately killed. That year, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request by Roll Call Magazine, they learned that the plane had been found, and that two of the passengers had survived the crash, thanks to a telex which the Bureau in Anchorage had sent to Washington at the time. "The information indicated an undisclosed 'firm' involved in testing advanced surveillance equipment had located the crash," Dr. Nick Begich, the Congressman's son wrote in a letter to Earthpulse Friends on June 19, 2001. Of course, the 'firm' was the NRO, and the failure of acting Director L. Patrick Gray to act on the telex guaranteed the deaths of the two people. "Some, including several of Begich's children," the Wikipedia internet biography of Boggs added, "have suggested Richard Nixon had a hand in Boggs's death in order to thwart the Watergate investigation." Little wonder that only then did the NRO officially admit its existence - for fear that people might think that it was the 'private firm' involved.

If Boggs were then still alive, the Majority Leader would never have approved Ford's nomination, and since the Democrats controlled the House, that would have ended the effort. But there was still the Bureau's investigation of Ford's credentials for the office, and the Minority Leader's role in covering up covert government, and engaging in child pornography and sex could still torpedo Nixon's choice, especially since the Bureau was conducting its biggest background investigation in history under the new Director, Clarence M. Kelley, the Kansas City police chief. The Bureau assigned 350 agents to conduct interviews, and they talked to 1,000 people, amassing 1,700 pages of documents in the process.

The background investigation would be an ideal way of checking to see if the political environment had cleared since the forced resignations of John Dean, John Erhlichman, and Robert Haldeman, and acting FBI Director L. Patrick Gray had been forced to withdraw his nomination the previous spring. At the time, the press made much in explaining developments because Gray admitted that he had destroyed E. Howard Hunt's files which Dean had kept in his White House safe, the acting Director making sure that they would never see the light of day. Actually, as the Wikipedia biography explains, it was Gray's giving Dean Bureau files which had caused the fatal showdown, what the FBI's legal counsel had advised that he was legally obliged to do. Given Dean's reaction to the files - what led him on confess to Nixon on March 21, 1973 that the Plumbers, especially Gordon Liddy, had created a "cancer on the presidency" - they were even unwilling to consider the possibility of killings and air crashes.

Moreover, Cathy O'Brien, who was allegedly enslaved as a child by the CIA's mind-control program for such sexual purposes, knew Ford aka Leslie Lynch KIng, Jr., as her porn boss (Tranceformation, note #3, p. 86), and Kelley was known for trying to clean up the Mafia reputation of the city. Around this time, O'Brien claimed that she, as a second grader, was taken into the Congressman's office in the Capitol where she was placed on his desk, her panties were removed, and had sex not only with him but also Michigan State Senator Guy VanderJakt. (p. 85) And Kelley, in cleaning up Hoover's Bureau, might well take exception to Ford's covering up for its mistakes before and after the JFK assassination.

Nixon knew his man, though, when he selected Kelley. He had turned a blind eye when
Plumber and former Bureau agent Liddy was caught, carrying out a black bag job in the city. "He'd been released, Bureau scuttlebutt had it," Gentry explained, "only after a call was made to the local police chief, and former special agent, Clarence M. Kelley." (p. 692) More important, Kelley kept on uncritical supporters of Hoover like Mark Felt, and loyalists who followed in the footsteps of sacked John P. Mohr of its Inspection Division. The fact that they had co-opted him in these critical matters became public knowledge when Ford, then President, kept him on as Director in 1976 despite the fact he had let senior FBI officials pay for window drapery valances and a small cabinet for his living room, part of the Bureau's illegal system of perks.

When Carter declined to overlook Kelley's liberties at the Bureau, and refused to keep him on as Director, he still went out to his way to provide cover for the former President when it came time to write his autobiography, The Story of an FBI Director. Kelley claimed that if the CIA had only informed the Bureau through another NRO telex that Oswald was seeing Consul Valeri V. Kostikov, a member of the KGB's Department Thirteen - its 'liquid affairs one' - while visiting Mexico City in October 1963, the FBI would have prevented the
President's assassination, as Kelly explained to Mark Riebling while he was reseaching Wedge: The War betweem the FBI and CIA:

"That omission cost JFK his life. Had Jim Hosty and the Dallas office known the nature of the Russian with whom Oswald had met at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, the FBI in Dallas would have (after learning that the President was coming to Dallas) undoubtedly taken all necessary steps to neutralize Oswald - perhaps by interviewing him on November 22. And history would have taken a different turn....Had our intelligence communities pooled their information on Oswald, had the Oswald-Kostikov-Mexico City information been distributed to the New Orleans and Dallas field offices in time for them to act then, without a doubt, JFK would not have died in Dallas on November 22, 1963." (Quoted on p. 175.)

Back in December 1973 when Ford was confirmed by Congress as Vice-President, Plumber and former CIA agent Harvey could not take such a relaxed view about who killed JFK,
especially since his real murderers, especially former Bureau agent Richard Cain, were continuing to tell anyone who would listen that he, Chuckie Nicoletti, and other Mafiosos had killed the President. "According to FBI reports," Sam and Chuck Giancana wrote in Double Cross, "Cain then met with bureau agents and asked to be hired by the Justice Department. The agreement called for him to continue his Outfit duties and act as a paid FBI informant." (p. 350) Cain let everyone know that he would one day be taking over control of Sam Giancana's Outfit in Chicago.

Given Cain's ties to the CIA in general, and to Harvey in particular, this was too dangerous a condition for America's covert government to allow to continue, and Cain was, consequently, gunned down in Rose's Sandwich Shop in the Windy City on December 20, 1973. The killing had all the overt signs of another Agency assassination, with a gunman wearing a black and a white glove to indicate the involvement of the Mob and CIA respectively in the killing, and the masked killer was directed to the target by walkie-talkie - repeatedly asking "Who's got the package?" (p.351) When told by the party at the other end of the walkie-talkie that the person who had it was coming - Cain - the masked man immediately murdered him with two pointblank, shotgun blasts to the head.

The package referred to was the rifle Cain was supplied in Oswald's 'sniper's nest' but which he had used without test firing, causing the near-fatal wounding of Texas Governor John B.
Connally. When he survived and promised to get those who had apparently double crossed him, plans to blame the assassination upon the communists had to be scrubbed.

While Ford's nomination was proving so successful - safely covering up the last bits of the terrible things the Plumbers had done while confirming a Vice President who had apparently little chance of becoming President - the White House allowed certain liberties to be taken at the NRO's expense in order to have another Middle East war which worked to the advantage of not only Golda Meir's government in Tel Aviv, but also NIxon's beleaguered one in Washington. Egypt and Syria had long been planning to resume their conflict after they had surprisingly had their noses bloodied during the Six Day War in 1967. The NRO had constantly been monitoring the area by reconnaissance satellites, on the lookout for troop movements, and military build-ups along their borders with Israel.

While the photographs came from the satellites which lacked real-time imagery, they still showed the Egyptians constantly practicing how they would cross the Suez Canal with their moveable bridges, even noticing that Cairo was not committing its main armored forces to the original attack which was only to penetrate about 10 kilometers into the Sinai. Syria would obviously make a dash for the Jordan River, and to Israeli terrority. Even Hafez Ismail, an Egyptian diplomat, was forced to admit after the conflict: "The Israelis had a very excellent molibilzation plan." (Quoted from Gerlad S. and Deborah Hart Strober, Nixon: An Oral History of His Presidency, p. 145.) Vernon Walters, the CIA's Deputy Director, added, thanks to the NRO's intelligence: "We knew they had it in mind, but we didn't know when."

The Israelis learned from an Arab spy on the morning of October 6, 1973 that the Egyptian-Syrian attack would take place that afternoon, and the IDF's Chief of Staff General David Elazar advised that the Israelis launch a pre-emptive attack before to blunt the effort. Prime Minister Meir decided against it because of what it would reveal about American intelligence capability and help, while eliminating any further assistance by firing the first shot, especially against Syria. Allowing the so-called Yom Kippur surprise to occur came in most handy when the Israelis started running out of ammunitions, money, and other matériel - what Nixon saw was supplied in profusion by a hastily arranged airlift. Little wonder that a most confident IDF Deputy Chief of Staff predicted a few days before the war started - "If only they will cross, we shall put them to fire. Like torches they will burn." (Quoted from ibid., p. 149.)

Bolstered by these developments, and thanks to feedback that Buzhart was supplying about what the Special Prosecutor was after, Nixon, as Fred Emery has described in Watergate,
became "commander in chief of the tapes situation." (p. 387) When written summaries of tapes would not satisfy Cox, Chief of Staff Alexander Haig apparently aka "Deep Throat" informed Attorney General Richardson that he must relieve Cox of his duties or that he must allow Senator John Stennis, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and a Nixon supporter, to submit the written summaries of the nine tapes wanted to Judge Sirica's Court. While Cox was tempted to go along with the ambiguous settlement, he refused when he learned that Buzhardt would be actually writing the summaries.

After some last-minute efforts by attorney Charles Alan Wright to head off a final rupture, triggered by Cox wanting to expand his investigation yet more, the famous Saturday Night Massacre occurred on October 20th, resulting in the firing by Solicitor General Robert Bork of the Special Prosecutor after Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus had resigned rather than do it themselves, and ordering Bork to assume the position. "A brief sense of euphoria gripped the White House," Emery concluded. "Action at last. Garment remembers the mood. They believed they had cleared the air. If so, it was the onrush preceding a tornado." (pp.399-400)

While the storm clouds were gathering, the NRO decided to cash in on all the good work, much of it unrecognized for one reason or another, it had been doing. Since Dr. John L. McLucas had been its director, it had seen its satellite reconnaissance programs grow at the expense its manned flights. The Air Force was trying to take over the whole lot - the OXCART program by its A-12s, and the U-2s - and seemed well on its way, especially after James Schlesinger was appointed DCI, and given the responsibility of radically trimming its covert operation capability. But when he went to the Pentagon and was slow to react to Israel's needs during the Yom Kippur War, the NRO saw its chance, and jumped.

No sooner had the NRO staff sent a Top-Secret memorandum to the director on Octber 25th, saying that it no longer saw any need to be involved in "aircraft overflights operations", recommending that they be turned over the the Joint Chiefs of Staff, than it completely reversed its position. In order to make the switch more achieveable, McLucas was promoted to be Secretary of the Air Force, and Dr. James W. Plummer replaced him as NRO
Director. Hardly had he settled in than his deputy director sent him another memorandum, dated February 8, 1974, suggesting "...rather than reliquish authority in the area, the NRO reassert it..."

The CIA was clearly hoping to regain much of the authority it had lost through the Watergate scandal through the efforts not only of the NRO but also its National Underwater Reconnaissance Office, as we shall see.