Enlightenment:
A note to the non-ravers out there: codshit is
NOT a derogatory or insulting term and bears no relation in offensiveness to its four-letter
cousin, it's a word used to describe the nonsense that people sometimes talk
when they're off their heads.
Wisdom:
So there, we have figured it out, go back to bed America, your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed America, your government is in control again. Here, here's American Gladiators. Watch this, shut up. Go back to bed America, here's American Gladiators. Here's 56 channels of it. Watch these pituitary retards bang their fuckin skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom. Here you go America, you are free... to do as we tell you.
.: Bill Hicks :.
Americans have different ways of saying things. They say 'elevator', we say 'lift'...they say 'President', we say 'stupid psychopathic git'....
.: Alexi Sayle :.
If you confront the Universe with good intentions in your heart it will reflect that and reward your intent. It just doesn't always do it in the way you expect.
.: G'kar :.
The George and Tony Capitalist Exploitation Brigade (a.k.a. Warmongers 'R' Us) are making the world such a safe place with their "War on Terrorism" (a.k.a. "War on Feedom, Democracy and Human Rights"), instead of less violence we have more violence and this time it could all go nuclear, doesn't that make you feel so super you just want to shag Big Gay Al up the batty? Our corporations are being allowed to exploit a lot of innocent people and one day it's going to turn around and bite us on the arse. It's like one enormous male-ego pissing-competition with intercontinental ballistic missiles, have we all lost our fucking minds people?
The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Thursday the world could be headed for destruction if it does not stop the spread of atomic weapons technology, which has become widely accessible.
In an opinion piece in the New York Times, Mohamed ElBaradei wrote that nuclear technology, once virtually unobtainable, is now obtainable through "a sophisticated worldwide network able to deliver systems for producing material usable in weapons."
Above all ElBaradei echoed President Bush's call in a speech on Wednesday for states to tighten up the control of their companies' nuclear exports to proliferators.
ElBaradei, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director-general, said the world must act quickly because inaction would a create a proliferation disaster.
"The supply network will grow, making it easier to acquire nuclear weapon expertise and materials. Eventually, inevitably, terrorists will gain access to such materials and technology, if not actual weapons," he wrote.
"If the world does not change course, we risk self-destruction," ElBaradei said.
Every year there's a different craze; a new gadget on the market that everybody has simply got to have. First it was mobile phones, then it was digital cameras and now this year's big fashion is for nuclear warheads. Suddenly they've become so easy to buy that street traders have them piled up at the covered market on Saturday mornings.
"I don't want a nuclear weapon; I want an iPod," says the teenage boy doing his birthday shopping with Mum. "You can't have an iPod, they're too expensive; what's wrong with some enriched uranium and the technology to develop an atomic bomb? Kevin's got one - he got sent home from school, remember?"
Now George Bush has said that the illegal trade in nuclear technology has to be stopped. The turning point was the confession by Pakistan's top nuclear scientist that he had flogged nuclear secrets to North Korea, Libya and Iran through the black market. "Oh, spiffing. Anything else?" asked Donald Rumsfeld. "Perhaps he'd like to get Bin Laden some nerve gas for his birthday."
"What's this guy's name?" asked the worried president.
"Abdul Qadeer Khan." Bush processed this information and somehow deduced that he must be one of the bad guys. Apparently, Dubya has some sort of secret code; when he hears a name like Abdul Qadeer Khan he just immediately knows which side of the fence to place him on. Indeed, his first rule for policing the spread of atomic weapons is "no nuclear technology for anyone with the letters Qa in their name".
It is amazing it has taken America this long to wake up to the rapid spread of enriched uranium to regimes less stable than a Russian reactor. A couple of years back Bush clearly stated: "We have to cessate the proliferisation of atomical capacibility" but his advisers just smiled and nodded at him.
For those of you who know me and are reading this, this poem is not about the real me, it's about a hypothetical me that probably exists as someone else in a different life.
Couldn't sleep agian last night, got this feeling that something's not quite right it's not the bills piling up on the floor it's not the stranger knocking on the door it's not the nameless voices on the phone someone, please, give this dog a bone!
I go to a dead-end job every day it sucks but my luck just seems to be this way no matter what I do it all seems to blow back in my face this life is such a stupid mindless race sometimes I wonder if my boss even knows who I am! Maybe it's all just part of the scam!
I sit dreaming of better things, somewhere over there... I just don't know how I'm gonna make it without going spare and the clock ticks on by; as I sit here and wish that time would fly. But it never does. It never does.
posted by ewar @ 3:56 PM
Insomnia
Right click the link above and copy the location to link directly to this article.
Phony Tony and His Cronies want this story to go away, they want us to forget that we were lied to in order to justify a war of aggression against a sovereign Nation State - an Act of War according to the Geneva Convention. The fact that almost nobody has ever died from slashing their wrists doesn't seem to matter to anyone in government or the idiot media, but it's true so that should tell you something about their veracity. They lied to us, a lot of people have died and most of the population neither understands the ramifications nor really gives a shit one way or the other. All they want to see is more tits, arse, Johnny Depp and Jordan in the fucking Jungle! The thing that scares me is that the lies are becoming so blatant it's like the System just doesn't care anymore.
Since three of us wrote our letter to the Guardian on January 27, questioning whether Dr Kelly's death was suicide, we have received professional support for our view from vascular surgeon Martin Birnstingl, pathologist Dr Peter Fletcher, and consultant in public health Dr Andrew Rouse. We all agree that it is highly improbable that the primary cause of Dr Kelly's death was haemorrhage from transection of a single ulnar artery, as stated by Brian Hutton in his report.
On February 10, Dr Rouse wrote to the BMJ explaining that he and his colleague, Yaser Adi, had spent 100 hours preparing a report, Hutton, Kelly and the Missing Epidemiology. They concluded that "the identified evidence does not support the view that wrist-slash deaths are common (or indeed possible)". While Professor Chris Milroy, in a letter to the BMJ, responded, "unlikely does not make it impossible", Dr Rouse replied: "Before most of us will be prepared to accept wristslashing ... as a satisfactory and credible explanation for a death, we will also require evidence that such aetiologies are likely; not merely 'possible'. "
Our criticism of the Hutton report is that its verdict of "suicide" is an inappropriate finding. To bleed to death from a transected artery goes against classical medical teaching, which is that a transected artery retracts, narrows, clots and stops bleeding within minutes. Even if a person continues to bleed, the body compensates for the loss of blood through vasoconstriction (closing down of non-essential arteries). This allows a partially exsanguinated individual to live for many hours, even days.
Professor Milroy expands on the finding of Dr Nicholas Hunt, the forensic pathologist at the Hutton inquiry - that haemorrhage was the main cause of death (possibly finding it inadequate) - and falls back on the toxicology: "The toxicology showed a significant overdose of co-proxamol. The standard text, Baselt, records deaths with concentrations at 1 mg/l, the concentration found in Kelly." But Dr Allan, the toxicogist in the case, considered this nowhere near toxic. Each of the two components was a third of what is normally considered a fatal level. Professor Milroy then talks of "ischaemic heart disease". But Dr Hunt is explicit that Dr Kelly did not suffer a heart attack. Thus, one must assume that no changes attributable to myocardial ischaemia were actually found at autopsy.
We believe the verdict given is in contradiction to medical teaching; is at variance with documented cases of wrist-slash suicides; and does not align itself with the evidence presented at the inquiry. We call for the reopening of the inquest by the coroner, where a jury may be called and evidence taken on oath.
This gets better and better with each passing day :-)
A former senior intelligence officer challenges Lord Hutton's account
Imagine you are a retired and very proud guards officer watching trooping the colour. How embarrassed and puzzled you would feel if things started to go wrong. Small things, initially, that others not brought up in the system might not notice. The columns of scarlet-clad troops slightly out of sync with the marching music. Some of the orders being given by men in suits rather than by the sergeant majors on parade. I used to work for the defence intelligence staff (DIS) and the Cabinet Office assessments staff - who draft the papers for the joint intelligence committee (JIC) and intelligence reports for No 10 - and that's how I felt during the Hutton inquiry, and how I feel now.
I left the assessments staff just six months before the dreaded dossier was published. From what came out at the Hutton inquiry I could hardly recognise the organisation I had so recently worked for. Meetings with no minutes, an intelligence analytical group on a highly specialised subject which included unqualified officials in Downing Street but excluded the DIS's lifetime experts (like Dr Brian Jones), vague and unexplained bits of intelligence appearing in the dossier as gospel (notably the 45-minute claim), sloppy use of language, that weird "last call" for intelligence like Henry II raving about Thomas a' Becket - with "who will furnish me with the intelligence I need" substituted for "who will rid me of that turbulent priest".
I looked forward to Lord Hutton making some serious suggestions about how to keep the intelligence process free of political manipulation and analysts free from the preparation of propaganda dossiers. I thought he might help explain, too, why the intelligence community had been taken by surprise by the aftermath of victory in Iraq.
When the report came I was puzzled at first - serious people seemed to be taking it so seriously. And then everyone started to laugh. Some of the passages - particularly "the possibility cannot be completely ruled out that the desire of the prime minister ... may have subconsciously influenced ... members of the JIC ... consistent with the intelligence available to the JIC" are masterpieces of comic writing.
In two years as an intelligence officer, and four-and-a-half years as an analyst at the highest level, I never once heard the phrase "consistent with intelligence". It means nothing. I have often been asked whether I was sure that I had reviewed all the available intelligence or whether I was sure I was on the right track. But no one has ever asked me whether something was consistent with the intelligence. Intelligence is by its nature inconsistent. Very often the right answer, the answer closest to the truth, draws on just a small part of the material available to you because you have discounted the rest. It was consistent with the intelligence for the German high command to expect that the D-day landings were going to take place near Calais. Consistent - except that the intelligence was part of a deception operation.
But it has recently got even more embarrassing. The prime minister told the House of Commons that he was unaware at the time of the war debate that the 45-minute piece of intelligence referred only to battlefield rather than strategic weapons. Let me list just some of the procedures which must have been executed incorrectly to allow him to be kept in such a state of ignorance at such a crucial time on such a crucial matter when other members of his cabinet (Cook and Hoon) appear to have been in the know.
The disappearance of President Reagan's Navy Secretary John F. Lehman, Jr. from the American political scene after he apparently resigned on February 16, 1987, was the greatest mystery until recently. The high-flying, flamboyant youngster, still in his forties, seemed destined to much higher position, hoping even to take over from beleaguered National Security Adviser Vice Admiral John Poindexter when the Iran-Contra scandal broke, and being among the short list of candidates to head the Pentagon when Vice President George Bush set about forming a new administration in January 1989.
Instead Lehman became almost a pariah whom no one was willing to talk about, much less give a position to. Ronald Reagan, for example, though enamored with Lehman's Navy, failed to even mention him in his memoirs, An American Life, as did Lou Cannon in his biography, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime. One could only wonder why. When Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh investigated Iran-Contra, Lehman escaped any embarrassment, merely acting as a Reagan loyalist, calling Walsh "a sleazy bounty hunter" (Firewall, p. 440) because of his apparently politically-inspired inquiry.
About the former Navy Secretary's alleged culpability, Gregory Vistica, in Fall from Glory: The Men Who Sank the U.S. Navy, wrote that Lehman fell because he engaged in obscene acts at the gathering of the 1986 Tailhook Association at the Las Vegas Hilton, what triggered disclosure of a whole series of scandals which led the public and Congress to question ultimately his build-up of the Navy to meet the Soviet threat. The question was whether it was worth it, and if not, was it Lehman's fault? (p. 15) Ultimately, Vistica concluded that it wasn't, and that it was Lehman's fault, a most strange conclusion since the father of "the Six Hundred Ship Navy", despite Lehman's claim, was Donald Rumsfeld, SOD in the Ford Administration (p. 64), who recently returned to Washington as George W. Bush's SOD. James Webb, Lehman's successor, particularly favored his naval build-up (Robert Timberg, The Nightingale's Song, p. 399), a claim Vistica feebly discounted. (p. 249)
For good measure, Admiral Frank Kelso, the central partner of Lehman's dream team who went on to became Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), attended the much more controversial 1991 Tailhook Association convention, witnessing a scene of lewd acts by officers with hookers and strippers, and an assault on Lieutenant Kara Hultgreen by an Australian officer during which he bit her on the bottom, and she threatened to kill him if he continued. (pp. 325-8) This was the convention where Lieutenant Paula Coughlin, Admiral Jack Snyder's aide, was forced to run the gauntlet during which male F/A -18 pilots tried to tear her clothes off, and threatened to gang rape her. It was only three years later that Kelso was forced to retire early because of the bitter fallout from it, and other scandals.
Lehman's memoirs, Command of the Seas, did little to clarify matters too, saying nothing about the scandals, and little about his operations, the maritime strategy reduced to a simple flow chart which even political scientists would have been uncomfortable with. (p. 494) Lehman made it seem as if he were just fortunate enough to have been a member of a team whose actions in grand events made such a difference. (p. xi) While he was building up the fleet despite the opposition of "an elephantine bureaucracy and byzantine political arena," others directed its use. "By 1985," he explained regarding his plans to retire, "the navy's confidence and morale had been restored, the maritime strategy was in place, and the management philosophy was established." (p. 417) His somewhat premature departure was caused by a leak of his intentions to quit, by his nemesis, Pentagon staffer and CNO Carlisle Trost, with whom he was having a bitter dispute over unprecedented promotions of submariners - the admirals' revenge, Lehman claimed, for his sacking of Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear navy. (p. 418)
Well, the only Rickover now on the scene is the submarine Hyman G. Rickover, SSN-709, and Trost and his fellow admirals have long since retired. Still, Lehman has not made a reappearance, even with the White House full of Republican hawks like Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney was the first Bush's SOD, and he named the unassuming H. Lawrence Garrett III, undersecretary to Webb, his navy secretary, confident, as Vistica explained, that the admirals would make sure that he did not become another Lehman. (p. 283)
It was only the terrible miscalculations by the Bush White House in the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks - what the stunned American public finally forced an inquiry into - which resulted in Lehman being called back as a member of the commission where he was obviously to help cover up the mess. The appointment seemed like another example of using a politician with a most controversial record to stop further controversy. Even so, it required more to even get Lehman named to the 9/11 Commission as former Republican Senator Majority Leader Trent Lott sneaked his appointment by critics while the country was invovled in disputing his claims about the dubiety of desegregation on the 25th anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination - what forced the outspoken Mississippian's replacement.
So what were Lehman's problems?
They seem to have been the result, strangely enough, of his rabid anti-communism, one so virulent that it went far beyond just sacking de´tente with the Soviets. Lehman's anti-communism exceeded that of other Republican hawks like Henry Kissinger, Al Haig, and Robert McFarlane. For Lehman, no other concern was worthy of serious consideration when it came to getting rid of communism, and its apparent supporters, as fast as possible, and without any restrictions. Lehman truly believed that it was better to be dead than run the slightest risk of being red.
Thanks to his upper-middle class, Catholic upbringing in Philadelphia, his ideological antipathy to anything even smacking of socialism was almost pathological. "His aunt was Princess Grace of Monaco." (Vistica, p. 19) Lehman attended parochial schools in the city, and graduated from its Jesuit St. Joseph's College where he worked for the causes that Catholic conservative William Buckley was noted for at Yale Lehman's first act as navy secretary was no accident - to name a new attack submarine the Corpus Christi, "the body of Christ", to indicate the Church's going to war with the hated infidel - touching off a controversay even within the Church which Reagan had to settle by connecting the name to the secular city in Texas.
Thanks to getting to know Georgetown Professor Richard Allen while doing his graduate work, having met him while chairing a conference on arms control, something Lehman loathed, he was appointed to the Nixon National Security Council. While serving on it, Lehman took advantage of the completely politicized environment in which Washington's national security policy-making was conducted, developing more than a healthy disrespect for the efforts by his superior which he compounded by his antics as a pilot while serving in the naval reserve - what George W. Bush took to heart when he became President. Lehman became completely indoctrinated with the new Republican ethos by joining the ultra conservative Catholic organization, the Knights of Malta, which included Haig, Allen, McFarlane, and DCI William Casey among its membership. By the time Reagan appointed him navy secretary, Lehman was more than ready to take command of the seas.
Washington was in greater flux then than at any other time during the Cold War. Bolstered by the release of the American hostages in Teheran - what the new President conveniently arranged for his inauguration by bribes that his Vice Presidential candidate George H. Bush and Allen paid to the Iranians - and yet still bitter about Soviet advances, especially in Afghanistan, during President Carter's watch, Lehman arranged for the President to delegate competely the conduct of the Navy's secret war against the Soviets to the Pentagon, and then managed to establish that its conduct was his responsibility, not that of either the admirals or SOD Caspar Weinberger.
On March 6, 1981, the leaders of the new administration were briefed by the Pentagon leadership with videos and slides that Lehman knew would be most effective with Reagan about the new maritime strategy that Rick Haver's Team Charlie was putting together, the SOD completing the process by getting the President to sign off in advance on all the sensitive espionage operations it would entail - tapping all communication cables Moscow relied upon, completing the sound surveillance system (SOSUS) so Washington would know the whereabouts of all Soviet shipping, provoking responses of all kinds by underwater and surface intrusions of the seas surrounding the Soviet Union to determine its counter strategies, mounting NATO exercises for offensive, defensive, and deceptive purposes, etc. (Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, Blind Man's Bluff, p. 313ff.)
Back at the Pentagon, Lehman's legal adviser, Captain Ted Gordon, and Rear Admiral John Jenkins, the Navy's Judge Advocate General, prepared a file on the navy secretary's statutory powers, so that their boss could wield power away from CNO Thomas Hayward and the admirals. "The secretary of the Navy," Vistica wrote, not the admirals, or the SOD, "was king of the empire." (p. 94) Furthermore, the secretary, while he no longer had a seat in the Cabinet, was still the President's sole adviser on naval affairs, what Lehman did behind Weinberger's back, and to his increasing annoyance and anger. Lehman's broad, unprecedented interpretation of his powers would have a profound effect not only upon the Navy but also the whole world.
While historians have concentrated upon Lehman's use of the fleet, especially Admiral James "Ace" Lyons' efforts (Vistica, p. 105ff.), to challenge Soviet exercises, strategies, and facilities, and the submarine eavesdropping on Soviet naval communication cables in the Barents and Okhotsk Seas (Sontag and Drew, p. 222ff.), Lehman's direction of activities in the Baltic against the newly-establihed social democratic government of Olof Palme was more to the point - dangerous missions against a long-time neutral country which would cause an international uproar if discovered. Palme had long been a thorn in Washington's side by his denunciation of its war in Vietnman, and his now comparing its operations against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Lehman wanted to find out if Palme was a Soviet stooge, what defectors Anatoli Golitsyn and Arkadi Shevchenko had long been claiming, and seemed to be increasingly likely after the Soviet Whiskey class submarine U-137 ran aground off Karlskrona in 1981.
The scene was set by the departing government of Thorbjorn Falldin inviting a contingent of American ships, the cruiser Belknap, the frigate Elmer Montgomery, and the supply ship Monongahela, to visit Stockholm in late September 1982, as Ola Tunander has comprehensively explained in Hårsfjärden. The Swedish Navy, especially Chief of Staff, Vice Admiral Bror Stefenson, justified the action as a test of whether the Soviets were violating territorial waters, thinking that Moscow might want to take advantage of the visit for operational purposes, what Stockholm organized Operation NOTVARP to determine.
Soon after the American surface ships left, there were all kinds of submarine sightings, involving four to six conventional submarines, perhaps even a Whiskey Class one, and at least one, perhaps three, midget ones. Their origin, though, should not have been a foregone conclusion as Washington had even bought a Whiskey sub from the Indonesian government. During the first three weeks of October, there was a protacted hunt for the underwater vessels which, according to Tunander, resulted in two or three of them, one seriously, being damaged. The sound signatures of the ships did not match Soviet ones either. The results would have been worse if the hunt had not been called off twice, apparently by Stefenson, in NATO's interest.
The submarines directly involved apparently included two of the American Sturgeon Class, most probably the USS Cavalla and USS Puffer, while the USS Guitarro and USS Bergall were standing by to assist further off shore. The deep-diving submersibles engaged were the Turtle, and probably Sea Cliff and NR-1. The reason why we know that most of these submariners were involved is because with the end of the Cold War, all the underwater warriors wanted to be recognized for their feats, leading to the publication of what awards they received, and when. (Sontag and Drew, Appendix C, U.S. Submarine Awards, pp. 415-35) British and West German submariners were also probably involved, though London was not contributing what it wanted because of the demands of the Falklands War.
While by most conventional standards, these intrusions into Swedish waters would be considered a failure, especially since one of the attack subs was seriously damaged, they determined that Stockholm would not take too seriously further intrusions, and whatever sightings were subsequently reported, the public would believe that they were Soviet ones, thanks to Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, and James Schlesinger claiming that Palme had showed statesmanship by allowing the damaged "Soviet" one to escape.
Still, the hawks in the West kept pressuring Palme about Soviet intrusions, especially after the Swedish Parliamentary Submarine Commission reported that there were six Soviet ones, obliging the statsminister to protest to Moscow about them. Lynn Hansen, in a paper prepared for the SOD in 1984, claimed that the Hårsfjärden intrusions were part of a Spetsnaz exercise, preparation for an invasion, like the Soviets had done five years before in Afghanistan. Right before Palme was assassinated, Edinburgh's Professor John Erickson, who had been an advisor of the Parliamentary Commission, and was an expert on Soviet inexorable advancement, reminded Swedes on television that Palme had negotiated the release of the "Soviet" submarine back in October 1982.
At the same time, Lehman and his people were perfecting the maritime strategy, what Moscow might do with its expanding naval forces, and what the West had to do to contain them - what gave the Pentagon insights into how to conduct a permissible first strike against the Soviets. While there were four scenarios about what might happen, only the last one is important for our purposes, a US offensive which stopped the Soviets before they even got started. Once US-led forces had knocked out Soviet submarine and air defenses in the Far North, asTunander had explained in Cold Water Politics, "one carrier battle group may seek shelter in Vestfjord in order to attack the Kola bases in concert with two carriers further north. The fourth carrier battle group is assumed to have sailed down into the North Sea to participate, should the conflict escalate to the Central Front." (p. 101)
While CNO James Watkins, a Lehman man when it came to strategies, thought that the Navy would have the outright capability to do this by the early 1990s ("Carrying the Fight to the Enemy" in "The Maritime Strategy," US Naval Institute Proceedings, January 1986 (Supplement), pp. 9-13), he overlooked, perhaps intentionally, how the time frame could be moved up by some surprises. The most important was the discovery that the Soviets could be devastatingly degraded as a nuclear power if their nuclear submarines, the boomers, were suddenly sunk on station by conventional means, what Joseph Nye elaborated upon in Nuclear Ethics, particularly to quiet Watkins' concerns about the conflict going nuclear almost immediately. This way there would be no innocent lives lost, helping induce Moscow to see that capitulation did not constitute a catastrophic defeat. This would permit the achievement of what Reagan always envisioned too - the triumph of good over evil without nuclear oblivion, Armageddon - the prospect of which induced him to scale down his rhetoric against the USSR. (Cannon, p. 247ff.)
In late August 1985, Lehman gained approval of his promotion slate, the so-called "twenty-four-star switch", which put his admirals in all the important operational slots. While the secretary's favorite, Lyons, became commander in chief Pacific, the immediately relevant advancements were of Admiral William Crowe to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and submariner Admiral Carlisle Trost to head the newly created Atlantic command, what Lehman had originally wanted to give Lyons. (Vistica, pp. 189-90) These changes gave Lehman a red-tape free chain of command to effect dramatic actions at the drop of a hat, as was demonstrated two months later by the apprehension of the Leon Klinghofer's killers by F-14s from the USS Saratoga of Vice Admiral Frank Kelso's Sixth Fleet.
The last surprise, the most unexpected one, was Palme's refusal to let 80 HAWK missiles to be transshipped through Sweden by Lt. Colonel Oliver North's Enterprise on November 17th. The group that the NSC's point man had put together expected it to be agreed to as a matter of course, failing even to attempt to get the necessary clearance from Stockholm. In doing so, they ignored this election pledge of Palme:
Swedish territory is to be protected against incursions by all available means. Confidence in our will to protect our neutrality must be maintained. Neither fears, nor hopes should be created that Sweden should abandon its neutrality policy as a result of strong external pressure....We are determined to repel by all available means, all those who violate our territory, our air space or waters. (Quoted from Cold Water Politics, p. 118. N. b. that when Pentagon hawk Milton Leitenberg quoted this passage in his Soviet Submarine Operations in Swedish Waters 1980-1986, pp. 101-2, he interjected this passage into the statsminister's conculsion in case anyone thought the West could have been culpable: " ' Since the sharp diplomatic note sent to the Soviet Union in 1983, the underwater activity has still been carried out but' despite all our efforts it has been impossible to identify the nation or nations involved. Thus the prerequisites necessary for diplomatic actions to be taken against a particular state have not existed.")
To foreclose any possibility of such diplomatic action, North decided to have Palme killed, thanks to his increasing connections with London through SAS Major David Walker's KMS private security firm. North had been introduced to Walker by Lehman.
No sooner had the HAWK missile shipment ended in fiasco than Lehman was seeking congressional approval for an aggressive use of American attack submarines in the hope that it could provoke a final showdown with the Red Banner Fleet, resulting in the destruction of its crucial boomers on station, and ending the Cold War in a Warsaw Pact whimper. The Navy Secretary was especially wanting such a senario since he had had to accept the plea-bargain for John Walker's spy ring, preferring instead to have the ringleader literally drawn and quartered. For 17 years, this submarine Warrant Officer had supplied Moscow with key intelligence about American underwater operations. (Sontag and Drew, pp. 351-3) Thanks to Vitali Yurchenko's 'defection', Washington was not only able to make the case against Walker's people but also against National Security Agency (NSA) agent Ronald Pelton who told Moscow that Washington was also tapping its communication cable to the Sea of Okhotsk (code name Ivy Bells). (David Wise, Nightmover, p. 132ff.)
The day after Pelton was arrested, the Senate Intelligence Committee agreed to Lehman's request despite Maine Republican Senator William Cohen's reservations after it was revealed that the Chairman of Team Charlie, Rick Haver, had reported three years before that the program had probably been betrayed to the Soviets: "Cohen pressed on. Was it prudent, he wanted to know, to continue to operate the cable-tapping program, push it full tilt ahead, when there may have been a spy?" (Sontag and Drew, p. 355) While the Senators concluded that it probably wasn't, it was okay now since Pelton did not know about the tap on the cable in the Barents, and, consequently, the Soviets did not know either.
The result was the Navy sending a pack of at least a dozen gung-ho attack submarines, headed apparently by the USS Hyman Rickover, and including the all important USS Parche on its sixth trip back to the Barents (See ibid., Appendix C, pp. 426-7, and n. b. that there is no accounting for this trip in the book.), in the hope that it would provoke a crucial confrontation with their Soviet counterparts, leading to a fatal degrading of Moscow's deterrence.
While Lehman's submarines were moving into the Norwegian Sea - what NATO Admiral Wesley McDonald had obtained permission for in 1985 - London did everything it could to promote, and protect the operation. The biggest need was for Prime Minister Thatcher to get rid of maverick Secretary of Defence Michael Heseltine. While he had set up Defence Secretariat 19 in March 1983 to counter the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament's support for Labour's unilateralist nuclear policy - what Palme wanted too - a task which got MI5 involved, and F Branch's Cathy Massiter complained about on Channel 4's 20/20 Vision program, MI5's Official Secrets, in March 1985 (Michael Smith, New Cloak, Old Dagger, pp. 67-8), Heseltine still seemed like a most risky heir apparent at the MOD if its operations with the Security Service's help became even more questionable legally, and controversial politically.
In December 1985, when the government seemed teetering on collapse, opening the door apparently for Neil Kinnock's unilateralists,Thatcher forced Heseltine's resignation, and that of Leon Brittan, who had acknowledged while Home Secretary that MI5's pursuit of subversives was getting out of hand, by suddenly chosing Sikorsky, the American helicopter producer, to rescue Westland Helicopters rather than a European consortium of Swedish, German, and British suppliers that Heseltine had put together. (Private Eye, Jan. 24, 1986, p. 7) Brittan, who favored Sikorsky, had been obliged to resign as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry because it was his department which had leaked the Attorney General's letter of rebuke to Heseltine for resigning without first informing the Commons. (Alan Clark, Diaries, p. 132)
While it may have seemed much ado about nothing, it did have far-reaching consequences. For one thing, it put more pressure on Thatcher to act because of failing to sanction an American attack on Libya after Abu Nidal's massacres, thanks to weapons supplied by Manzer al-Kassar, at the Rome and Athens airports. Heseltine got his revenge by leading the unseating of the Prime Minister in 1990. In the interim, Thatcher was obliged to take advantage on the new lease on life, the European arms merchants going 'ape' over the growing tilt in America's favor.
The YGGRASIL arms cartel, including a Swedish delegation headed by Pieter Wallenberg, apparently topped the agenda for its January meeting in its Wiltshire country house with consideration of Palme's assassination (Operation Tree) because of his alleged agenda for his April meeting with CPSU General Secretary Michael Gorbachev - removal of signal intelligence devices to the Skagerack, and the closing down of the naval bases at Musko and Karlskrona (alleged minutes of NATO's Special Operations Planning Staff (SOPS), January 1986, supplied by Oswald Le Winter, former Chief of NATO's Intelligence Tactical Assessment Centre) - what MI6 claimed to have stolen from his office in Rosenbad, and CIA station chief in Stockholm, Jenonne Walker, had conveniently discussed with most disgruntled Swedish naval officers at a Christmas cocktail party at the Embassy.
While many doubt the authenticity of the SOPS minutes, especially because of Le Winter's most questionable reliability, they seem accurate, particularly since Le Winter has claimed that they show that SOPS gave the go-ahead for the assassination. Actually, they only show American and British representatives attempting to hijack the meeting for this purpose:
Current status of above makes it imperative that operation Tree be carried out successfully. SOPS has been assured that arms length will be maintained to ensure deniability. Project management is local, technicians imported. SOPS requires details to be kept fully compartmented on need to know basis.
The Dutch representative then protested what the American and British representatives were attempting, claiming that the relation between NATO's secret structure to coordinate action by Stay-Behind forces in case of a Soviet attack, and the YGGDRASIL group was completely informal, and not recognized in any way by the member countries. The chairman then polled all the representatives, unanimously confirming what the Dutch representative had claimed.
The American, and British representatives persisted in making the case that SOPS assume joint responsibility for the operation. Le Winter claimed in an editorial note that the bivalent position that it adopted on the possible assassination represented a hierarchical one. If bivalent means anything, it is a completely horizontal one where parity and independence of the parts is maintained. Then the British representative claimed that Palme had his own Contragate, shipping weapons grade uranium-235 to India by means of false country of origin certificates, what Christer Larsson had asserted in Ny Teknik, and Palme had long denied. (Chris Mosey, "Secret nuclear weapons row breaks in Sweden," The Observer, April 28, 1985, p. 17)
When the US representative got a chance, he not only supported what the British representative was claiming but also added that Palme's role in trying to settle the Iran-Iraq war was dubious too, apparently a reference to his stopping the weapons shipments to Teheran. Soon the complaints against the statsminister for allegedly helping the PKK, IRA, and Nelson Mandela's ANC became so vociferous that the British representative expressed concern about Britian's ability to maintain its sphere of influence in Scandinavia. The American member then said he would prepare a report for the meeting in February to detail Palme's alleged assistance of Moscow's interests in Angola and Namibia, inducing the Swedish delegation to assert, to the chairman's amazement, that Palme was a Soviet agent of influence, as defectors had universally claimed. (Anatoliy Golitsyn, New Lies for Old, p. 55ff.)
The purpose of the whole exercise was to give an aura of NATO approval for all that London and Washington had planned for the statsminister in Stockholm, and the Soviets at sea. To complement the thrust that American attack submarines were carrying out in the Barents, Washington, it seems, had the USS Seawolf lead a contingent of submarines, including the deep-diving submersible NR-1, and the missile submarine USS Sam Houston converted to carry Navy SEALS into the Baltic (Sontag and Drew, pp. 427-35), to give the impression that Moscow planned to follow up Palme's murder what an invasion of Sweden, what these same subs would exploit with devastating results once the Russian ruse, it seems, was exposed. To give the ruse greater credibility, British Oberon class subs, outfitted with Special Boat Service forces, went around the Baltic, and down Sweden's east coast (Hårsfjärden, p. 305ff.), to give Stockholm the impression that they were Soviet attacks submarines, moving into position for an assault on Swedish installations.
While the submarines were moving into place, Washington concentrated upon preparing the public for the showdown, something more than simply a bolt from the blue. The centerpiece of this propaganda was the January 1986 Supplement of US Naval Institute Proceedings which amounted to a White Paper for degrading the Soviet nuclear deterrent. For Lehman, scenario four pinpointed Soviet weakness, calling for a first strike no matter what they did. ("The 600-Ship Navy," vol. 112, no.1, pp. 30-40) CNO Watkins provided the most authoritative source on the maritime strategy (Cold War Politics, pp. 70-1), concluding that American attack submarines would start sinking Soviet boomers within five minustes, anytime Moscow carried out another suprise attack, as it had in Afghanistan. Marine Commandant P. X. Kelley promised Normandy-type assaults from the North Cape to the eastern Baltic if the Soviets started something.
The fact that dangerous operations were afoot did not escape everyone's notice. For example, no sooner did the Boston Globe read Watkins' article than it compared him to the swashbucking Admiral John Dewey at Manila in 1898. For the benefit of Lehman's attack submarine captains, it added: "Yet since the skipper in the underwater combat cannot tell whether the sub he is chasing carries anti-ship torpedoes or nuclear missiles, he might sink both." ("A plan to win a war," Jan. 11, 1986, 18-1-E) Seth Cropsey, Lehman's deputy undersecretary, was not dissuaded by such wimpish drivel: "Do the military experts at the Globe have another idea - besides victory - of what we should aim for if we find ourselves in a war at sea? Would the Globe be happy with a tie, for instance?" (Feb. 6, 1986, 14-5) Nor was Watkins, as he explained to readers of The Times two days before the statsminister's shooting:
But if they (the sub skippers) can do this within three minutes during a conventional war, they can also do it out of the blue in peacefime. Keeping your opponent in your sights, being able to knock the weapon from his hand the moment he moves, may in some circumstances feel good. But what will be the Soviet reaction to this new explicit state of affairs? (Wayland Kennet, "Crisis under the Ice," Feb. 26, 1986, p. 14) The CNO was confident that the Soviets would throw in the sponge as a result.
In fact, the ruse about Russian offensive ambitions was so successful that the West had Stockholm eating out of its hands by the time the assassination actually took place. Washington believed that it would have comprehensive, mole-free intelligence of Soviet readiness on land, sea, and in the air, and how it reacted to any showdown, starting with photgraphs from the spy satellite, KH-11, explaining why DCI Casey was so paranoid about its existence just before the assassination that Pentagon employee Samuel Morrison was successfully prosecuted for publishing its picture of a Soviet aircraft carrier being built in a Black Sea shipyard in Jane's Defence Weekly (Angus Mackenzie, Secrets, pp. 135-41), and why Thatcher was similarly inclined towards Duncan Campbell after the Stockholm shooting. (Mark Urban, UK Eyes Alpha, pp. 56-61) Besides its double agents, especially Valeri Marytov, Sergei Motorin, and Boris Yuzhin, in the USSR, the CIA had a miniaturized version of the sea cable tap placed on an important communication cable in Moscow (Sontag and Drew, note, p. 309), and had a cargo container, filled with electronic sensors to monitor the slightest sound, travelling westward across the USSR from Vladivostock on the Trans-Siberian railroad. (Operation ABSORB). (Pete Earley, Confessions of a Spy, p. 197)
When the Challenger disaster prevented NSA from putting up a new MAGNUM satellite "...to intercept Soviet missile test signals (telemetry), and data-links as well as microwaves" (Urban p. 59), and the British super spy ship HMS Challenger threatened to break down again (ibid., p. 247), the Swedish Navy came to the rescue, supplying its new spy ship, Orion, which could monitor Soviet military activites in the eastern Baltic. More important, it came with US intelligence personnel on board, and Swedish intelligence officers putting a priority on reconnaissance against Soviet low-level air defence systems, its SA-10s intended to be used against US air-launched cruise missiles, and low-flying B-1 bombers, what its previous captain, Commander Björn Eklind, a veteran of the 1982 sub-hunt, had refused. (Hårsfjärden, pp. 227-9) Navy Chief of Staff Bror Stefenson apparently cooked up a case against Eklind for having behaved provocatively with a Soviet destroyer while following a Kilo class submarine, forcing his early retirement a month before the assassination.
With the scene set for the Stockholm shooting to trigger a showdown with the Soviets in Scandinavia's surrounding seas, we must not overlook that Moscow was completely prepared for the crisis, thanks particularly to the spying by the Agency's Aldrich "Rick" Ames, and the Bureau's Robert Hanssen. Now Oleg Gordievsky briefed the former about the timing of the statsminister's shooting, and the latter had allowed the former to rush without proper authorization to his Soviet handler, Viktor Cherkashin, in the Embassy in Washington on February 14th with the message. In fact, when the crisis passed without mishap, Cherkashin, and six other leading KGB counterintelligence officials were awarded in an unprecedented ceremony at Yasnevo the Order of Lenin by the head of its FCD, Vladimir Kryuchkov, who was well on his way to becoming its first KGB Chief. (Wise, note, p. 327)
London and Washington still thought that they were on top of everything, arranging the arrest of a Soviet arms supplier, US Navy Commander John Bothwell, a week later in Bath, and the defection in Athens of KGB Colonel Viktor Gundarev, a Courtship agent, who worked with not only him but also the vastly undervalued 'defector' Yurchenko. (Ronald Ostrow and Tyler Marshall, "Defection of KGB official linked to arrest of American in Britain," Boston Globe, Feb. 22, 1986, p. 3) Bothwell apparently knew about SOPS and YGGDRASIL deliberations about killing Palme, but he was arrested before he could pass on the latest details to his Soviet contact.
By this time, Moscow had completely absorbed Operation ABSORB, and Ames had even tipped off the Soviets about the tap on the Moscow telephone cable. (Sontag and Drew, op cit.) Unknown to the West, the Soviets also had 82 nuclear-armed SS-23 missiles in East Germany, and the USSR (Urban, p. 290) under the command of Marshal Nicholai Ogarkov, eager to make amends for shooting down KAL 007. The over-confident contingent to Brixmis in East Germany, the 200 British personnel to insure compliance with the Four-Power Agreement, had overlooked their existence (Ken Connor Ghost Force, p. 430ff., and Urban, pp. 79-80), and their surpirse contribution to an escalating East-West showdown would have been devastating. In sum, KGB Chief Victor Chebrikov knew what he was talking about when he unprecedentedly warned the West to back off from what it had planned on the morning to Palme's assassination. (Christopher Walker, "KGB reveals big swoop on state spies," The Times, March 1, 1986, p. 1)
Unfortunately, the warning went for naught, as the West was so eager for the showdown that it could hardly wait for the shots to ring out on Stockholm's Sveavägen. Chris Mosey, MI5's journalist on the scene, and a continuous source of stories about the statsminister being a Soviet stooge, was so eager to break the news to the world that he called up, it seems, the Rikskriminalpolisen to see if Palme had been shot before the police even knew it had happened (Kari & Pertti Poutianen, Inuti labyrinten - Om mordet på Olof Palme, pp. 152-4), claiming that he had heard about the assassination from Washington Post reporter Karen de Young, who allegedly said that she had already heard an ABC flash about the assassination. (See the incredible forward to Mosey's Servige och mordet på Olof Palme.) The reason for the hurry in getting out the news was, of course, so that the Soviets would then react in the anticipated ways.
Moscow did nothing to further the West's purposes, though, even closing down its KBG residency to prevent any bugged conversations or calls taking place, especially with convicted Soviet spy Stig Bergling. Nor did the CIA or the FBI receive any calls from its double agents, especially Motorin (Wise, pp. 256-7), indicating that the Soviets were behind the shooting, the Red Banner Fleet was caught completely off guard, and was rushing to fill the gap - what Marytnov and Yuzhin were expected to add. It was to be a replay of the Cuban Missile Crisis, arranged again by the CIA's Rodney Carlson, only this time the Soviet deterrent would be fatally degraded, and the double agents, followers of Oleg Penkovsky, would live to tell the tale, and take the credit.
With the Soviet boomers completely in position, either under the Arctic icepack, or in bastions protected by killer submarines, Lehman's attack subs were completely at a loss as to what to do, as the Globe's military experts had envisioned. Still, the Navy Secretary's timetable moved ahead, with a 10-man Marine team, led by Captain Steve Little, landing southwest of Tromsö in northern Norway (Task Force Eagle), to prepare the ground for American carrier groups, loaded with other Marines, moving in from the Atlantic. Further south at Narvik, 20,000 NATO troops were gathering as part of Anchor Express Exercise, waiting for another American carrier group to come up Vestfjorden. Without having eliminated the threat from Soviet submarines and airforces, NATO was gathering up its forces for a thrust across Finnmark to attack the Kola Peninsula (Operation Armageddeon). ("Avalanche kills 11 NATO soldiers on exercises above Arctic Circle," Boston Globe, March 6, 1986, p. 9)
Fortunately, the three American batttle groups never arrived. During the interim, the tent Little's men were in caught fire, burning three of the Marines. Anchor Express Exercise turned out to be a complete fiasco too, at least 16 Norwegian engineers being killed by an avlanache when its forces, despite warnings from the locals, moved into the dangerous Vassdalen Valley 16 miles northeast of Narvik. "As the death toll mounted and conditions worsened Nato's senior allied commanders met through the night in emergency session." (Tony Samstag, "Avalanche disaster stops Nato Exercise," The Times, March 7, 1986, p. 8) While Commander-in-Chief Frederick Bull-Hansen, who had been doing all he could to arrange a showdown with the Soviets, acted as if the dangerous conditions were unexpected; exercise leader Major General Martin Vadset ordered its go-ahead despite warnings that the conditions were more dangerous than enemy soldiers; and what the emergency was, no one explained, obliging the government to appoint an unprecedented comission under assize court judge Mrs. Agnes Haug to investigate the disaster. (Tony Samstag, "Norway angered by snow tragedy," The Times, March 10, 1986, p. 4) In the end, Heseltine's replacement at the MOD, George Younger, who had specially come over to help direct Anchor Express, had to settle for simply seeing a series of safer, smaller demonstrations.
Lehman's was not dissuaded by such setbacks, though, calling for Admiral Frank Kelso's intelligence-gathering ship Caron and the Aegis cruiser Yorktown to challenge the Soviet base at Sevastopol (Vistica, p. 214), and for yet another wave of attack submarines, led by Lehman's favorite, City of Corpus Christi, and including the USS Dace, Dallas, Jack, and Tullibee (Sontag and Drew, p. 427) into the Barents itself towards the Gremikha naval base in the hope of triggering a Moscow response. The Soviets kept their cool throughout, though, obliging former CNO Watkins ultimately to confess about the maritime strategy:
Their intelligence sources were good, and we wanted them to know how self-confident we were. That's the role it plays. It's not a matter of charging up there and shooting up a lot of ballistic missile submarines as being the goal to prevent them from even launching first strike. No. That's not the way they would deploy their submarine force, and not the way that we would deploy ours. (Quoted from Sontag and Drew, p. 480.)
The best corroboration of all this occurred when Lehman set about finding a replacement for Watkins as CNO. Once the Soviets had finally diverted Washington and London to attack Libya after its People's Bureau had been persuaded to blow up La Belle Discotheque in West Berlin on April 5th, what double agent Gennady Varenik had long claimed Moscow had contingency plans for (Earley, p. 194ff.), the Navy Secretary was adamant about Kelso, a very junior Vice Admiral, becoming the next CNO. (Vistica, p. 223) Trost didn't even express an interest in the position though he was most qualified, and the Atlantic Fleet commander. Lehman explained his opposition to the previously favored submariner thus: "You're insufficiently compliant." "You're just another fucking Boy Scout." (Quoted from Vistica, p. 224.) Lehman even threatened to resign if he didn't get his way on the appointment. Trost, thanks to his relation with NSA Vice Admiral John Poindexter, who was finally getting the message about what Lehman, North, and Major David Walker had been up to, ended up getting the position, but the Navy Secretary decided to stay on.
While Lehman wanted to act as if Trost's mutiny over the handling to Task Force Eagle had never occurred, treating promotions in the conventional way when they were due, Trost would have none of it. According to Lehman, the NCO wanted an unprecedented 80% of the submariners promoted from commander to captain, while only 55% for the favored commanders in the surface fleet, and in the air. (p. 418) Of course, Trost wanted to reward the commanders undersea who had had such a difficult time in the build-up of Operation Armageddon, and who could not be recognized in an other way. When Trost again got his way with Weinberger, Lehman again threatened to retire, and this time it was accepted. (pp. 247-8)
Once Lehman finally left the Pentagon,Trost gave an unprecedented interview with a reporter from the Cox News Service, introducing his complaints of the autocratic, cocksure Secretary thus: "John Lehman was not a balanced human being." (Quoted from Vistica, p. 252.)
The denouement of the whole process occurred when Trost finally met his Soviet opponents, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, and Admiral K. A. Makarov, during the showdown in another meeting at the Pentagon in December 1987. The NCO had already tried to reassure them by issuing "Looking Beyond the Maritime Strategy" in the January 1987 issue of Proceedings, explaining that it really was just a strategy, and not a secret operational plan to catch the Soviets off guard in some showdown. No sooner did Akhromeyev spot Trost than he exclaimed: "You, you're the problem." (Quoted from Sontag and Drew, p. 367.)
While Trost tried to calm the Soviet Chief of Staff down, explaining that he was not the problem, Rick Haver of Team Charlie, and Admiral Kinnaird McKee, a former captain of the USS Dace, tried to make small talk with Makarov, but he would have none of it. Haver heard Makarov's translator identify him with the CIA, and the Commander of the Red Banner Fleet had something to add when McKee referred to the Dace's high-jinks in 1968 at his expense. Makarov could not pass up reference to another patrol, apparently the one in March 1986, when he was following the Dace, and "...that he had known it was the Dace even then." (Ibid.) When Haver tried to discuss the matter further, Makarov cut him off coldly, and when he persisted, Makarov blurted out: "Tell this young man that when veterans get together, it doesn't matter who won or lost. It's enough that both survived."
Without the spying of Ames and Hanssen, Trost's insubordination, and a predictable assist from the Norwegian winter, though, no one might have. As it was, only Palme, and about 40 Norwegian soldiers, Soviet double agents, and Northern Ireland scapegoats were murdered. No wonder that even the hawks in Washington have had it with Lehman.
Well, I've been having a Dyke of a time - oral surgery, stitches, swelling, antibiotics - all the fun a Calvinist could wish for. And when you look like Barbra Streisand after three weeks under water and your pain relief is preventing you from tying, or even recognising, your own shoes, then you're in the perfect condition to stay at someone else's house and watch cable TV.
So now I finally have a proper grasp of what's important in modern life. And mainly it's tits - big tits, cheap tits, posh tits, Germans pan-frying tits with their consent, plastic tits, real tits, squint tits, famous tits and the unfortunate tits of strangers. If I'd known how fascinating tits were I'd have spent quality time with mine much more often. But if tits don't do it for you, I've seen more arses in these last weeks than I would have if I worked on an arse farm. Why do arses matter? Well, I'm still unsure, but I think it's because you can siphon the fat up out of them, then inject it back into your face.
Never mind the rollingshite news channels and their inability to notice when EVIL IRAQI DEATH DRONES WILL RAIN HORROR ON AMERICA IN MINUTES turns seamlessly into "WMD-related programme activities". They're just really happy that Mr Bliar - in all good faith, with an open and Christian heart and not a naughty thought in his head - accepted and promoted "intelligence" that professionals were loudly finding laughable long before the first coalition cluster bomb liberated the first Iraqi child's fingers.
No, let's get into some proper journalism about Hitler - Hitler's arse, Nazi arses, Hitler's plans to inject Aryan arse fat into plucky British lips, Hitler manipulating the media, creating a climate of fear, claiming draconian emergency powers and pre-emptively invading well-endowed countries in order to strip them of their wealth. Or maybe not that last one - a bit irrelevant.
Because I am now completely up to speed on the vital issues of the day. Is your sofa new enough? Are your teeth white enough? Is there enough fat in your arse to inflate your head in case of emergency? And are you spending enough? Because if you're only spending what you've got, that's not enough - you need to be IN DEBT. Not just a little bit overdrawn, I mean proper, wake up screaming, selling your underwear, Russian roulette in Soho basements to win back your kidneys debt.
Because we're going all out to reproduce the US economic miracle and you must play your part. Bush lowered interest rates, cut taxes for the super rich, slashed social programmes and solved his nation's problems. Cataclysmic borrowing, soaring unemployment and homelessness, soup kitchens, bankruptcy, increased racial segregation and collapsing access to medical care and education are all signs of a healthy economy; and Gordon Brown is so confident that Britain will thrive just as spiffingly under a Bush-style regime that he nobly helped keep the PM in place, ensuring Tony will be in charge when the arse fat hits the fan.
But because many important people's money is slightly theoretical and much of the profit Operation Iraq Rip-off was to make hasn't quite materialised, it's important for you little people to support the economy by paying to borrow more money than you can manage. And if your loans are out of control, take out more loans to cover your loans. Above all, don't save - and don't wonder why you'd only get 0.04% interest and a free tea towel if you did save, when you pay out 25% for borrowing.
And the best thing to spend your money on? A car. A large car. A 23 yards to the gallon, 12ft wide, 40ft long unparkable multisportsperson luxury carrier turbosystem. Leave the engine running while you nip into the house for a bath, stoke on those revs at the lights, drive for fun, drive for friendship, drive as a hobby and, instead of sex, climb into your surrogate orgasm, your sad excuse for a life, and burn petrol, no matter what.
When a C-123K supply plane loaded with lethal weapons, allegedly belonging to a Pennsylvania company, Corporate Air Services, was shot down over Nicaragua on October 6, 1986, killing pilots William Cooper and Wallace Sawyer, and the CIA's cargo-kicker Eugene Hasenfus was taken prisoner by the Sandinistas, the Reagan administration's, and the Thatcher government's crucial covert operations threatened to be exposed, a record which risked the President and the Prime Minister being removed from office, and many of their most important subordinates going to prison.
Actually, the plane was part of the fleet that retired Air Force Major General Richard Secord had put together for Lt. Colonel Oliver North's effort in the National Security Council (NSC) to supply support for the Contras against the regime in Managua, and the Mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan from the illicit profits of prohibited weapon sales to Teheran in the hope gaining release of hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Enterprise consortium was composed of arms dealers, intelligence agents, mercenaries, and the like - what the CIA, Mossad, and others had helped put together to make up for congressional cutoff of funds, culminating in the Boland Amendments, which required North to take over its management because of prohibitions of Agency participation.
Any serious investigation of it would have led to international arms dealers like Syria's Manzer al-Kassar, Saudi petrobillionaire Adnan Khashoggi, Iranian wheeler-dealer Albert Hakim, former SAVAK (the Shah's intelligence service) informant, and go-between with its successor Manucher Ghorbanifar, Britain's private security expert, and entrepreneur Major David Walker, and a wide collection of Israelis, especially arms dealer Al Schwimmer, Aman's (Israeli military intelligence) Yaccov Nimrodi, Mossad fixer Rafi Eitan, and false record keeper Ari Ben-Menashe. "According to North," Tony Geraghty has written in The Bullet Catchers, "some of the resultant military action in Nicaragua - attacks on military aircraft - were farmed out to David Walker of KMS. If true, it was an interesting example of the 'seamless robe' of Anglo-American policy outside the Nato area." (p. 245)
Unfortunately, the claim was more than true, as the seamless web of cooperation between Washington and London within the NATO area included farming out operations to their respective navies, and to Walker's KMS too, backed up by assistance, and disinformation from CIA, MI6, and MI5. If these operations, especially the assassination of Olof Palme (Operation Tree), had been investigated, the trail of culpability would have gone right up through the Agency's Directorate of Operations to DCI William Casey, and to the Oval Office, while in London the Security Service's Director General Anthony Duff and the leading counterterrorist officials of MI5, especially DD Patrick Walker, and MI6, particularly Director of Requirements and Production Colin McColl, would have been in similar difficulty, thanks to Downing Street's direction by Cabinet Secretary Sir Robert Armstrong. The investigation would have heated up further when it was learned that Shimon Peres's counterterrorist expert Amiram Nir, along with assassination arrangers Felipe Vidal, Craig Williamson, and Michael Townley, were also involved.
Hasenfus was no simple crew member either. He worked for the Agency's Felix Rodriguez aka Max Gomez, friend and former subordinate in Vietnam of Vice President George Bush's national security adviser, Donald Gregg. Rodriguez, a veteran of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, helped track down, and murder Ernesto Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967 (Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara, pp. 718-50), and was now working surreptitiously with the Agency's Central American task force chief Alan Fiers, and his subordinate Joseph Fernandez, station chief in Costa Rica, to assist Secord's supply efforts from El Salvador's Ilopango base. (Lawrence E. Walsh, Firewall, p. 79ff.) Gregg was providing backdoor, deniable oversight for operations.
Fiers had taken over the project after the congressional cutoff from Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, who became head of CIA's West European division of the operations directorate which was involved in all kinds of double-agent efforts (Operation Courtship) to prove that the Soviets were promoting and assisting terrorism from Central America across the North Altantic to Scandinavia, and down to Afghanistan. This ruse would ultimately justify North's countermeasures to go after targets from Castro's Cuba to the sources of growing neutralism in Europe, particularly on NATO's periphery, especially in Sweden. Fernandez's office in San Jose served as the communication link, thanks to NSA-supplied KL-43 encryption devices, between the Contra forces in the field, North's people in Washington, and arms shipments arranged by The Enterprise from Europe and the Middle East.
The whole operation had become even more complicated, and conspiratorial after a shipment of HAWK missiles in November 1985 from Israel to Iran had been prevented from being transshipped through a still officially unidentified European country, where it was to pick up more weapons, because of opposition by its government, leading to a fiasco invovling Portugal which ultimately obliged Clarridge, and CIA to officially supply the needed transport, what required President Reagan to sign an ex post facto presidential finding two weeks later to authorize the action which was then compounded by the White House's failure to inform Congress of its existence.
A month later, on January 6th, Reagan was persuaded by North alone to expand the arms sale operation by getting the CIA, and unspecified "third countries" directly involved so the hardliners in Teheran could be overthrown (Walsh, p. 45) while radically changing the strategic balance with the USSR (Operation Armageddon), what resulted in signing National Secuirty Decision Directive NSDD-207 which strenghtened the operational capability of the Restricted Interagency Group's Operations Sub-Group (OSG), now composed of counterterrorism hardliners Charles Allen from CIA, Oliver "Buck" Revell from FBI, the Pentagon's Noel Koch, Lt. Gen. John Moellering from the Joint Chiefs, and the State Department's Robert Oakley, to include 'neutralizing' terrorists which had been been denied when it was created in April 1984. (Robert Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987, pp. 361-2) To run this secret network which even had its own "FLASH" communication system which bypassed all normal ones, North was given the Office to Combat Terrorism, assisted by fellow Annapolis graduate Robert Earl and Craig Coy from Bush's Task Force on Combating Terrorism.
North seemed like a most unlikely candidate for the position, but he had just the right qualifications, qualities, and connections that the situation called for. He had joined the staff of National Security Adviser (NSA) Richard Allen, working in the Latin American section, because he had caught the eye of the new Navy Secretary, John Lehman, Jr., by recommending in an article the use of battleships in the new Maritime Strategy against the Soviets while serving as a instructor at the Naval War College. (Gregory L. Vistica, Fall from Glory: Men Who Sank the U.S. Navy, p. 116) While North was serving well in Vietnam, starting in 1968, as a flamboyant, can-do platoon leader in a dying cause, winning the Silver Star for valor, he developed briefing skills (Robert Timberg, The Nightingale's Song, pp. 149-50), the sine qua non for uniformed officers seeking policy-making positions, as General Alexander M. Haig, Jr.'s career had demonstrated. North's field of operations vastly expanded when fellow Annapolis graduates Robert McFarlane followed Haig's lead to become NSA after William Clark, Allen's replacement, left, and John Poindexter worked up its ranks from military aide, as Haig had, to become his assistant.
McFarlane put together an aggressive foreign policy, scuttling de´tente, from what Haig had been attempting in the Caribbean and South America over the protests of Britain, Lehman was seeking around the northern periphery of the Soviet Union despite the reluctance of Europe and NATO, and the CIA was promoting in the Middle East and Afghanistan inspite of opposition by terrorists and Arab states.
In the wake of the Falklands War, McFarlane, taking advantage of the contacts he had made while working at State, wanted to put the struggle with the USSR, as Downing Street desired, back on an East-West plane where NATO worked together in a coherent way, challenging the Soviets and their supporters on every front whether there was movement or not. The policy required putting together a Maritime Strategy which would take advantage of the West's growing naval superiority, thanks to Lehman's pursuit of a 600-ship navy, by responding to any presumed Soviet land threats with naval surface and underwater actions on the periphery, particularly in the Barents and Baltic Seas.
The new troublespots were Olof Palme's Sweden, Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran, and Muammar Qaddafi's Libya. Sweden's new statsminister was particularly troubling because of his claims that he could act as mediator across the board while holding the Soviets at bay in the Baltic, a position apparently belied by his equating American intervention in Nicaragua with that of the Soviets in Afghanistan. Chris Mosey, in Cruel Awakening: Sweden and the Killing of Olof Palme, compared his efforts for the Sandinistas, the first European head of government to visit Managua, with what he had done against the Americans in Vietnam (pp. 142-3), the ultimate red flag for the new team in the White House. Soviet defector Anatoliy Golitsyn claimed in New Lies for Old that Palme was working hand in glove with KGB terrorists to promote Eurocommunism. (p. 349ff.) According to Robert Timberg, even the slightest suggestion of such a nightingale's song would revive all the bitter Vietnam memories of the veterans now running the White House's Situation Room. (p. 16ff.)
When Clarridge left Central America for Europe in 1984, the plight of the Contras was desperate. Cut off from weapon assistance by Washington officialdom, and reduced to meager humanitarian aid, North felt obliged because of his experience in Vietnam to do whatever was necessary to see that they had the necessary funds, means, and expertise to defeat the Sandinistas. While much has been said about his operations to sell arms for illegally obtained profits to help the Contras (See, e. g., Walsh, p. 197ff.), little could be expected from them if they were not made into an effective fighting force, what required real leadership and training in guerrilla warfare. This had been explicitly denied by the allegedly timid Agency DD John McMahon the previous April when North sought passage of National Security Decision Directive 138, a prohibition still cast in doubt when the Associated Press, and The New York Times announced in October that the Contras had been receiving a CIA primer on how to kill Sandinistas. (Woodward, Veil, p. 388)
To get around this continuing difficulty, North enlisted the services of Major David Walker who he was introduced to by the Navy Secretary, probably at one of Lehman's famous parties on his barge in the Potomac. Lehman and Walker had attended Cambridge University together, and the former Special Air Service (SAS) officer was now running KMS aka Kini Mini Services, and Saladin companies which provided skills any gamekeeper or poacher could require. In 1975, KMS had been contracted by the Foreign Office to protect vulnerable diplomats, thanks to MI5's advice, especially in Dublin after the IRA assassination of the British Ambassador, Christopher Ewart-Biggs, where use of the SAS was excluded. KMS's role was replaced by the new Thatcher Government in reaction to the assassination of Airey Neave by the Royal Military Police.
KMS revived its gamekeeping function, though, even with the help to regular serving officers, for the Foreign Office during the Falklands War, as was graphically demostrated in Washington in 1984 when an arriving Saudi Prince saw a KMS officer come quickly to his aid after the leader of the State Department's protection team lost his ability to do so when his belt supporting all his equipment embarrassingly broke as the minister was descending the ramp. (Geraghty, p. 8) KMS bogyguards came armed, and fully prepared to use their weapons. The marriage of Anglo-Amereican counterterrorist forces was made even closer by the IRA's Patrick Magee's near successful attempt to assassinate Prime Minister Thatcher, what Reagan had experienced three years earlier at the hands of John Hinckley, Jr., by blowing up Brighton's Grand Hotel on October 16th. (Peter Taylor, Brits: The War Against the IRA, pp. 265-6)
To employ Walker's companies, North called upon McFarlane to see that FBI Director William Webster approved their use without the usual checks about their reliability and accountability. (North's Top Secret memo, "Assistance for the Nicaragua Resistance," Dec. 4, 1984) Dr. David Owen, when he was Foreign Secretary for Harold Wilson's Labour Government, was so dissatisfied by the KMS role in Yemen that he attempted to prevent it from getting the FCO contract. (Geraghty, p. 210) According to SAS veteran Ken Connor, KMS got started in Aden during Operation Nina in which SAS Fijians and British Arabists, who could pass for natives, went undercover in its warren of streets and back alleys to search out targets of opportunity in a guerrilla war, the precursor of what the 14 Intelligence Company did later in Northern Ireland. (Ghost Force, pp. 195-6)
In this context, KMS fitted its Swahili meaning - an unseen movement by a snake in the grass. James Callaghan, when he replaced the beleaguered Wilson, was so convinced that MI5 was behind his downfall because of its role in contracting KMS that he saw any so-called improvement in security as a potential threat, mistaking, Geraghty explained,"...the politically loyal Special Branch protection team with the maverick spirits of military counter espionage." (pp. 157-8) About who these spirits might be, Geraghty discussed the so-called 'shoot-to-kill' murders in South Armagh in the fall of 1982 as a "...policy of counter-assassination, instead of operating within the law." (p. 167)
Geraghty added, thanks to the insights by a counterterrorist officer who knew KMS operations well, the plight its trained bodyguards had caused the Presidents of North Yemen during the 1970s when they allowed him and his brother to run off with two beautiful French whores without protection, leading to their assassinations on the way back to Sana'a, and his successor's bodyguards failing prey to the "double bluff" ploy when the President of South Yemen sent two briefcases of presents, one stashed with American money which was embarrassingly opened in public, and the next one somewhat later with 5 pounds of plastic explosive which exploded in private with devastating results. (p. 277)
Walker's companies, given their leadership, expertise, and contacts, were instrumental in turning around the Contras' efforts during 1985. On March 6th, right after Saudia Arabia doubled its monthly cash contribution to the Contras, Walker's people blew up the main Sandinista military depot in downtown Managua for a $50,000 fee, and followed up by clearing the mines protecting the port facilities at Puerto Cabezas, where Soviet and Cuban assistance was arriving, so that it could be attacked. While Walker's Saladin firm was helping train the Contras into an expanded, effective guerrrilla force, his specal teams attacked Sandino airport, as Walker had recommended, destroying the recently received Soviet HIND-D helicopters on the ground, and its maintenance facilities. In fact, the demands on Walker's companies were so great that his mercenaries Peter Glibbery and John Davies were openly recruiting 40 ex-British Army volunteers in London during May to expand the Contras' war. (Nick Davies and Jonathan Foster, "British dogs of war recruited to fight in Nicaragua," The Observer, May 26, 1985, p. 1)
This permitted North to carry his war with Marxism further afield. When 234 Marines were blown up in Lebanon on October 23, 1983, recalling the defeats in Vietnam, North had helped organize with McFarlane and Lehman two days later the invasion of the Commonwealth's Grenada by 6,000 Marines to rescue it, especially its 1,000 Americans, from the grip of Maurice Bishop's 600 allegedly rampaging communists. A year later, when Abu Abbas's Palestinian terrorists seized the Achille Lauro cruise liner in the Mediterranean, murdering an invalid Jew, Leon Kilinghofer, with al-Kassar provided weapons in the process (Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics, p. 16), North pushed successfully the idea of the Navy hijacking them as they made their escape to Tunisia on EgyptAir flight 2843, a plan calling for the use of F-14s from the USS Saratoga of Admiral Frank Kelso's Sixth Fleet, reminiscent of how the Navy had disposed of Japanese Admiral Yamamoto over Truk during WWII. (Vistica, pp. 219-20) It was the success of this red-tape free operation which led Reagan to utter his now famous one-liner: "You can run, but you can't hide."
North moved immediately to put this capability on a worldwide basis at Palme's expense, the statsminister having retained power, with the help of the Swedish communists, in the fall general election despite all the negative predictions and propaganda. The Enterprise, whose manager David Kimche, the former director general of Israel's Foreign Ministry, had provided Iran with tons of US tanks, Katysha rockets, air-to-air missiles, artillery shells, rifle rounds, and the like from six countries, including Sweden, thanks to the false end user certificates Ben-Menashe had supplied, had its management expanded to include Major Walker, and former CIA operative Miles Copeland (Gordon Thomas, Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad, p. 141), upsetting the "sweet operation" in the NSC that Kimche had been carrying on with Eitan since 1981.
Walker's KMS had carried out all kinds of "wet affairs" for the Israelis - e. g., the assassination of Arafat's moderate negotiator Said Hammami in his London office in January 1978. In 1987, Englishman Ian Davidson, a member of Arafat's Force 17 bodyguards who, it seems, had penetrated them for the Mossad, would apparently double as a poacher to kill cartoonist Ali-Adhami in a street in Chelsea for having the temerity to publish one of the PLO leader's latest mistress. (Geraghty, pp. 389-90) Both Walker and Copeland, because of their involvement in protecting the Shah, were similarly worried over their own safety because of their known role by the Khomeini regime (Connor, pp. 225-6), and were most eager to please the new leadership in Teheran.
To kills two birds with one stone, Secord arranged for 80 HAWK missiles to be shipped through Sweden on November 17th for the now desperate Iranians in their war with Iraq. Schwimmer and Nimrodi purchased weapons from Bofors for Teheran, contrary to Palme's pre-election commitments to stop them, and had leased three planes to fly all the weapons from Arlanda without authority from Inspector of War Materiel, Admiral Carl-Fredrik Algernon. (Richard Reeves, "The Palme Obsession," The New York Times Magazine, March 1, 1987, esp. p. 56) The Enterprise hoped to force the statsminister's hand, as Washington and London had done with their submarines in the Baltic about alleged Soviet intrusions when he was returning to power in October 1982. (Ola Tunander, Harsfjarden, p. 13ff.)
The passage of the weapons through Sweden would show, if ever the NSA tapes of the conversations during transit were revealed, that Palme was being completely hypocritical when he claimed that he was adhering to official US policy of not assisting militarily this sponsor of state terrorism (Operation Staunch), and that he was a honest broker in trying to settle its war with Saddam Hussein. The Swedish communists would only conclude too that Palme was taking the coalition for a ride when he denied being anti-Soviet. By stopping the shipment, as Richard Reeves described in an article in The New York Times Magazine, the statsminister threw everyone into unanticipated confusion.
For North's network, this meant somehow terminating Palme's apparent efforts to assist the Soviet expansion, what works like Arkady Shevckenko's Breaking with Moscow, Viktor Suvorov's Soviet Military Intelligence and Spetsnaz, and Henry Denham's Inside the Nazi Ring, sponsored by the CIA, MI5, and MI6 respectively, were increasingly calling for. The problem was that Moscow was doing little to promote the claim, while rolling up double agents in Clarridge's Operation Courtship, especially Gennady Varenik in Bonn, Gennady and Svetlana Smetanin in Lisbon, and Valeri Martynov and Boris Yuzhin in Moscow, trying to maintain it, thanks to the spying by the Agency's Aldrich "Rick" Ames and the Bureau's Robert Hanssen.
In this context, Britain and America did things to make it seem that Soviet expansion was in the works. Operation Brave Defender was carried out, a rehearsal apparently of WWIII where Spetsnaz forces overwhelmed everything NATO was capable of, giving the myth of Soviet invincibility a boost. (Connor, p. 441) Then Palestinian Abu Nidal, who Geraghty would later be persuaded by British military intelligence killed Palme (The Bullet Catchers, p. 247ff.), carried out attacks with al-Kassar provided weapons on the airports in Rome and Vienna right after Christmas, killing five Americans, and fifteen others. To make the case that Qaddafi was another Soviet client promoting IRA terrorism, a convenient cover for what was planned in Scandinavia, the 14 Intelligence Company joined the Irish Gardai a month later, thanks to American signit intelligence, in seizing prematurely tonnes of Libyan weapons, including machine guns to shoot down army helicopters, that Adam Hopkins' Kula, formerly the Casmara, provided (Tony Geraghty, The Irish War, p. 182), resulting in the retribution execution of IRA quartermaster Frank Hegarty despite British assurances for the tipoff. (Raymond Murray, The SAS in Ireland, pp. 374-6)
Then Anglo-American intelligence, especially MI5's F and G Branches, raised public anxiety about terrorism to a fever pitch by over-the-top stories about the GRU's Spetsnaz forces, claiming that 25,000 of them under civilian cover had infiltrated Western Europe, even Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) protesters of the stationing of cruise missiles at Greenham Common. While Connor saw this disinformation as the result of intelligence analysts overselling efforts to discredit CND with compliant journalists (Connor, pp. 439-41), actually it was to prepare the public for a showdown with the Soviets. The Times and Jane's Defence Weekly considered the threat so real that they discussed the matter in late January issues. The Times reporter Michael Binyon in Washington started a regular column, "Terrorism and America," explaining the effort that Robert Oakley, who North had enlisted to get the HAWK missile shipment transported through Portugal (Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, p. 550), was mounting in NATO to contain the 'low intensity warfare' threatening Europe.
When Palme seemed to be, as Golitsyn had long claimed, a Soviet stooge afterall, all kinds of unexpected fallout from the HAWK fiasco had to be fixed. No sooner had Reagan signed the illegal finding on December 5th than Kimche resigned from The Enterprise, explaining that "the wrong men now had too much power in the consortium." (Thomas, p. 142) Kimche, the Mossad's former deputy director general, was replaced by the reckless Nir. The Agency's DD McMahon also had to go because of his having forced the President to sign the first finding (Cannon, p. 552), and was replaced by the gung-ho Robert Gates. McFarlane, who objected to the overthrow of Chile's democratically-elected President Allende while serving in Nixon's NSC, was so distressed by the turn of events that he too resigned, restricting his activities to gaining the release of the remaining hostages while Poindexter took over as NSA.
North concentrated on stifling blowback from operations in Central America, especially by Jack Terrell, Peter Glibbery, and Steven Carr of Tom Posey's Civilian Military Assistance which had been seeking mercenaries in Britain. They had become so disaffected by CMA's attempts to assassinate Contra Southern Front leader Eden Pastora (Operation Pegasus), the brainchild of CIA's Frank Camper which forced their explusion from Hondurus when its President learned about it, and North inviting Walker's people to take their place (Cocaine Politics, note 19, p. 235), that they were willing to testify to the FBI about them, particularly those by Felipe Vidal aka Charles Morgan. On February 16, 1987, the day this public advocate of international terrorism against pro-Castro targets was finally brought to heel, The Miami Herald reported that he had been arrested seven times on narcotics and weapons charges. Thanks to feedback from the Bureau's George Kiszynski and Revell, though, North was able to make it look as if Terrell was the terrorist, threatening ultimately to kill Reagan. (Cocaine Politics, p. 132ff.)
Why North was so concerned about Terrell's whistle-blowing efforts was because Morgan was already in Stockholm, looking for an assassin of the statsminister. In November, Morgan aka Peter Brown met Jovan von Birchan for a beer at the Continental Bistro during which Morgan asked him if he would be willing to carry out an assassination. Later, Morgan said that he was willing to pay him $2,000,000 to kill Palme. While von Birchan did not take the offer seriously, he changed his mind during a January meeting in which Morgan explained emphatically: "it was decided that Olof Palme was going to be assassinated and you don't have to worry about any police protection. I stand by my offer of 2 million dollars." (Swedish military intelligence's (SSI's) agent Joel Haukka's report, "Samtal med von Birchan 4 april 1986") Palme, in the interim, had stopped a Bofors deal with India, worth 15 billion Swedish crowns, that London's AE Services weapons dealer Bob Wilson, an aquaintance of Morgan's, had arranged. Around New Year's Day, CIA agent "Milan" asked, it seems, Kenneth Neilberg also in Stockholm if he were willing to do the hit with the same assurances for 1,000,000 SEK.
When neither took up the offers, Morgan apparently went to London, seeking out an assassin, as Duncan Campbell belatedly explained in a Frontlines article, "MI6, Whistleblowers in Baltic Battle," in the New Statesman:
Shortly after Palme was killed, I was told by three independent sources that recruiters for the killing -variously described as a group of Swedish businessman, with Finns and Germans also involved, possibly financed by a South African group, had approached mercenaries and arms dealers in London in order to find a suitable 'hitman'. All the sources agreed that the former SAS (Special Air Service) and other possible killers approached had turned down the contract, and had then passed details of the approaches to Special Branch or to MI6 contacts. In turn, MI6 passed a warning to Sapo (SAK), the Swedish secret police. One source said that the purpose of the killing was to destabilise Sweden and its powerful liberal stance on such matters as apartheid. A senior Special Branch, Detective Chief Inspector David Palmer-Hall, liases directly with the Secret Intelligence Service. (MI6) A former Special Branch commander, Rollo Watts, also works for Saldin (sic) Security, the cover company for the private British mercenary service KMS Ltd. KMS which is registered in Jersey was most recently and controversially used by Colonel Oliver North to assist in guerrilla missions with Contra forces in Nicaragua. (June 17, 1988, p. 7)
Whatever Morgan, and Campbell's sources were attempting, the failure to find a mercenary to do the hit provided the perfect deception, it seems, for an officially-connected KMS one, with a built-in alibi.
While North worked out arrangements with CIA and MI6 to connect a suitable scapegoat, apparently Soviet spy Stig Bergling who was being groomed as the disgruntled party policeman, for the killing in Stockholm with Operation Courtship, making it look as if Moscow was behind the murder because of the countermeasures it took so that the US Navy and NATO could mete out a devastating first strike against the Soviets in reprisal, KMS arranged a fatal "double bluff" at Palme's expense the next time it reassessed the performance of his bodyguards in Stockholm. Connor has supplied a discrete history - no names, please - of how British forces got involved in training, and reassessing Swedish bodyguard protection of its leading figures, especially the statsminister, in just the way Walker wanted of complete secrecy. (p. 153ff.)
Sweden's Granskning Kommission has filled in without realizing it many of the details about the reassessment team which started working from its just constructed shed outside Palme's apartment in the Old Town two days before the assassination while the statsminister was on a visit to Hede, Sveg, and Ostersund in the far north. Witnesses testified about seeing two or three professional-looking men with walkie-talkies who spoke a kind of Swiss-German, just what a reassessment would be doing.
Jarl N spoke of seeing a dangerous-looking man down the street at the pharmacy, speaking so to a colleague: "He was 185-190 cm. tall, and had pale colored hair" (Brottsutredningen after mordet pa statsminister Olof Palme, p. 250), testimony that witnesses Mare R and Leif C corroborated. The reason why the commission did not take their testimony more seriously was because of the confusion about who uses walkie-talkies in assassinations, and because the witnesses had been so slow in coming forward with it. They, unlike the reassessment team, did not know the location of where the Palmes lived, and thought, like most people, that assassins needed walkie-talkies. Bodyguards and their reassessors need them.
In this context, it was easy for one of the reassessors to kill the statsminister after he had monitored the performance of the bodyguards for a couple of days. On February 27th, North was so ecstatic about possibilities from Operation Recovery that he sent a Prof message to McFarlane, exclaiming "that we may well be on the verge of a major breakthrough - not only on the hostages/terrorism but on the relationship as a whole." (Quoted from Walsh, p. 121.) The NSA replied: "Roger,Ollie. Well done - if the world only knew how many times you have kept a semblance of integrity and gumption to US policy, they would make you Secretary of State. But they can't know and would complain if they did - such is the state of democracy in the late 20th century." (Quoted from Cannon, p. 572.) Litte wonder that when the scandal broke, North tried to destroy all the Prof messages, and Cannon and Walsh have minimized respectively what he was attempting, and McFarlane's reaction.
The blondish, 185-190 cm. tall reassessor would have a cakewall the following evening after all his stalking the statsminister when the Palmes attended the Grand Cinema on Sveavagen to see the movie Mozart, what Geraghty's military intelligence expert claimed was a "night on the town" (p. 388), the statsminister's alleged illicit pleasure which helped do him in like North Yemen's President. Teheran was so upset by Palme's stopping the November missile shipments, putting the lie to all American claims that only Portugal was involved, as Reeves explained on the anniversary of the assassination, now that the Tower Commission had safely covered it up: "An Iranian military delegation came to Stockholm to protest the stopping of deliveries. That was on Feb. 4, 1986, three weeks before Palme's murder." (p. 56)
This gave the reassessor an absolute alibi for the assassination, explaining also why the statsminister seemed to recognize him before he shot him, and why his wife's first reaction to the shooting was thus: "It emerged at the weekend that Mrs. Palme had noticed two men acting strangely outside their house and watching their door, but she had not reported it to the police." (Martin Linton, "Few clues in the hunt for Palme's killer," The Guardian, March 2, 1986, p. 1) Unfortunately, by then, the police had been primed to look for Khomeneini's Iranians settling scores with the statsminister.
Fortunately, though, the operations North had arranged went no further, thanks particularly to the spying by Ames and Hanssen for the Soviets which tipped them off about the timing of Palme's assassination, thanks to Oleg Gordievsky's briefing of the former in February, and there is no need now to follow the whole shabby story. Its leading items were the diversions at Libya's expense, Reagan's presents for Iranian Speaker Ali Rafsanjani in May, and the President's thanking Gordievsky in the Oval Office for what he had done! (Christopher Andrew, For the President's Eyes Only, pp. 476-7)
Things only got interesting again for North when the scandal could be exposed after the shootdown, and Reagan forced North and NSA Poindexter to resign, asking crony Attorney General Edwin Meese to investigate the matter without the help of the Bureau or the Justice Department. While he cautiously did so, North and his people were busily destroying evidence, and creating a false chronology which would protect the President - leaving out the attempt to sneak the HAWK missiles through Stockholm. (Cannon, p. 611ff.) McFarlane intensified the process by attempting suicide in February 1987. (Timberg, pp. 425-9) Then Congress granted immunity to the main principals, starting with North, and Independent Counsel Walsh, when he finally got started, continued the process, especially with his assistant Earl, and secretary Fawn Hall (Walsh, p. 99ff.), making any serious convictions most unlikely. Ultimately, even Poindexter was not convicted of perjury and obstructing justice, the verdict being thrown out on appeal.
During all this confusion, behind the scenes the Senate Intelligence Committee was determining the scope of the conspiracy, the Tower Commission informed the public of a sanitized version of it, and the joint Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran publicized it, what its leading Senators William S. Cohen and George Mitchell legitimized in their book, Men of Zeal: A Candid Inside Story of the Iran-Contra Hearings. Cohen was the connecting link in the whole process, centered around the Senator from Texas, and Vietnam hawk, Tower, who had helped cover up the JFK assassination, and was equally committed to the men of zeal he had collected around him while serving on the Senate Armed Services Committee. While Cohen claimed he was involved in a "comprehensive search for the truth" (p. 21), he was actually engaged in legitimizing the false chronology, covering up the attempt to sneak the HAWK missiles through Sweden, and getting Reagan to minimize the problem by admitting that suppying arms for the release of hostages was wrong. (David E. Rosenbaum, "Senator Says Reagan Must Face 'Mistake'," The New York Times, Jan. 13, 1987, A8; and Jan. 15, A12)
Cohen's efforts, though, were seriously undercut by the book's own chronology of events, where there was a gaping hole between the Nov. 17th meeting that McFarlane had with Chief of Staff Donald Regan to inform him of the trouble over the missile shipment, what North recruited Secord to fix the next day, and the actual delivery of 18 HAWK missiles a week later (p. xxii). Then there was a most confusing rigmorole about Portugal being the only country in question, though the White House refused to declassify the names of countries which actually supplied arms to the Contras, causing Cohen and Mitchell to refer to them only by number (p. ix), Sweden apparently being "Country Six", only for them to discuss in detail Dewey Clarridge's role in trying to dragoon Portugal into the process (pp. 255-6).
This use of numbers to hide the truth proved so successful that Walsh even adopted it when Judge Webster, now the new DCI, was smoothly smothering any chance of the truth coming out. Director Webster, of course, knew all about Iran-Contra, thanks to his paving the way for North to use Walker's firms, and by his refusing to allow the FBI to get involved in their operations for fear it would commit illegal acts just when Palme was assassinated. (Mark Riebling, Wedge, pp. 368-9) While Webster, by Washington's standards, had a squeaky-clean reputation, Reagan, once the attempt to simply slip Gates into the deceased Casey's place failed, had moved him to head the troubled Agency to limit the fallout from Iran-Contra, what he had already helped by allowing Meese, of all people, to secure the evidence, and by slowing the process of disclosure of the little left as the cover up was being assembled. (Walsh, pp. 147-8)
Finally, it was a question if Webster's team at CIA would supply Walsh with the last remaining evidence that NSA had about North's operations, buggings, and FLASH messages, especially the NSA tapes about weapons shipments, what McFarlane had put the highest priority on destroying when the scandal broke. (Walsh, p. 8) Walsh needed the tapes to establish the criminality of Fernandez, what the Independent Counsel hoped to achieve at a Sunday, July 23, 1989, meeting with DCI Webster, DDCI Robert Kerr, and DO Richard Stolz, Webster's classmate at Amherst (Riebling, p. 389), who was already involved in collecting money for Fernandez's defence. When the Agency seemed to be wavering on the matter, Stolz exclaimed: "What will they think in Olso?" (Quoted from Walsh, p. 216.)
While Walsh thought the comment irrelevant, it concerned the NSA eavesdropping facility at Vardö on Norway's North Cape. Release of any of its material would be a precedent for a flood which could swamp far more than just the Reagan administration. For starters, it had the crucial tape of the flight of the 80 HAWK missiles which Palme's government stopped in mid-transit on November 17, 1985. Without the tapes, Walsh opted for a system of cards identifying each CIA station and facility being discussed with a number so jurors could keep track of the testimony, a procedure that the judge dismissed as a "kindergarten-like proposal" (Walsh, p. 17), and Attorney General Richard Thornburgh refused by remedy by allowing the necessary classified information to be introduced in court.
While no one had noticed, London had been doing what was necessary to cover up its side of the scandal. As the above long quotation indicated, Duncan Campbell was most knowledgeable about the 'special relationship' between Britain and America, and their joint operations, thanks to his coverage of the counterterrorism Britain was conducting in Northern Ireland. (Mark Urban, UK Eyes Alpha, p. 56) No sooner had Campbell, a thorn in the establishment's side, started questioning Defence officials, and Public Accounts Committee chairman Robert Sheldon, brother of Legal Adviser to DGSS Duff, about an independent satellite system free from NSA's vagaries (ZIRCON), especially in the wake of the Challenger disaster, for his BBC television series, Secret Society, than Prime Minister Thatcher had it banned. When Campbell persisted in his efforts, publishing an article in the New Statesman, she instructed Attorney General Michael Havers to issue an injunction against his writing any more, and to have Special Branch raid the Glasgow offices of the BBC, and the Labour journal in London for tapes and papers about what was in the pipeline "...to protect the intelligence services from journalistic scrutiny, even if the politcal cost was high." (Urban, p. 61)
While this gagging of the press was tightening, British intelligence services arranged the set-up in Sweden of a person resembling the description by the above mentioned witnesses, and the Photo-Fit representation of the killer by the witnesses of the assassination - apparently Captain Simon Hayward aka James Rennie, officially a member of the Household Cavalry but actually the Operations Officer of the 14 Intelligence Company's South Detachment. Hayward left Northern Ireland on February 12, 1987, and five days later he departed England for the fateful 'holiday' with his brother Chris in the Mediterranean. Once Hayward was safely put away in Sweden, Ruth Freeman apparently aka Simon Freeman, who had just written The Secret Life of Anthony Blunt, published Death of a Statesman, thanks, it seems, to MI5 funding (N. b. that he was a roving foreign correspondent, 1986-89, Contemporary Authors, vol. 133, p. 132.), explaining the assassination in such self-serving terms for the beleaguered Captain that anyone would suspect him if the trumped up case against Swedish and PKK scapegoats broke down.
Right after the assassination, a British consultant and MI6 operative, apparently Gordievsky, had gone to Stockholm, and told publisher and owner of a private intelligence company Ebbe Carlsson, and the two Sapo officers, who had bugged the KGB residency on the night of Palme's assassination on the instruction of the CIA Stockholm station chief Jenonne Walker, that the Iranians had arranged for the PKK to kill the statsminister because of his stoppage of weapons shipments, starting in November 1985. (Jesus Alcala, "Polisen ville tro pa PKK-sparet," Dagens Nyheter, Feb. 28, 1996) MI6, knowing now the safety in numbers, had the same operative, it seems, tell his friend Karl-Gunnar Back, the Swedish Chairman of Civil Defence, that mercenary Craig Williamson had arranged the assassination hit-team, Koevoet/COIN, for disgrunted groups within the Swedish and South African security services (Operation Longreach). (Roger Magnegard and Mari Sandstrom, "Sydafrika planlade mordet," Svensk Dagbladet, May 27, 1987, p. 7.)
Needless to say, the Swedish police investigated these leads conscientiously, once they had disposed of the Agency-supplied decoy Victor Gunnarsson as a suspect, but they never got anywhere. Hans Holm´er, who was leading the investigation, was so obsessed with the idea that PKK had done it that he had to be sacked. MI6 was unable or unwilling to suppy any more information. As a result, Swedish Ministers of Justice, particularly Anna-Greta Leijon, and interested citizens, especally Ebbe Carlsson, became increasingly frustrated, the former finally instructing the latter on May 4, 1988, to go to London behind the police's back on a secret mission to see if he could develop more information about the assassination from "the relevant British Authority." (Campbell, op. cit.) No sooner had Carlsson arrived than his letter of introduction was leaked to the press, touching off what Duncan Campbell called Sweden's 'Contragate' - a private network pursuing its own agenda at the expense of established practice, and the public interest. Exploiting Ms. Leijon's belief that the British really knew who killed Palme, and they did, according to Campbell, what her own police were apparently failing to take advantage of, the Brits were able to turn the tables completely on Stockholm, and Campbell was permitted to publish the results.
In the end, Walsh considered prosecuting North again after his first conviction had been thrown out because it was based upon immunized testimony - thanks to the greatest rationalizations by Reagan-appointed Court of Appeals Judge Laurence Silberman, and now a member of the commission looking into alleged intelligence failures about Iraq's WMD - leading to a showdown between the Independent Counsel and the former NSC staffer. By then, the three most dangerous witnesses of his operations, Nir, Major Charles McKee, and the CIA's Matthew Gannon, had been killed in sabotaged airplanes - Ben-Menashe had Gene "Chip" Tatum, who has now disappeared, shoot down the Cessna T-210 Nir was flying in over Morelia, Mexico on Nov. 30,1988, while McKee and Gannon were on board Pan Am Flight103 which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, a few weeks later. Nir's problem was that he had recorded a conversation with Vice President Bush at Jerusalem's King David Hotel on July 29, 1986 about Iran-Contra, which McKee, and Gannon witnessed, and what he threatened to reveal at North's trial.
According to Joel Bainerman, the publisher of an Israeli intelligence report who had questioned another witness, a Navy Commander, of the conversation, "North told him," Thomas repeated, "that Nir was killed because he threatened to go public with the recording of the Jerusalem meeting." (Quoted from p. 316.) McKee, Gannon, and three other CIA agents apparently fell afoul of arms dealer al-Kassar's independent operations in their attempt to set up a new hostage rescue mission. According to Interfor's investigation into the tragedy, al-Kassar's masters blew up the airliner before McKee's team could blow the whistle on them, thanks to the bungling by German police at Frankfurt's airport, and CIA managers at Langley. (Jonathan Vankin and John Whelan, The 60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time, p. 280ff.) Gannon, whose father-in-law was CIA's Tom Twetten who had served as the Agency's liaison with North on the NSC (Ted Gup, The Book of Honor, p. 314), was simply trying to clean up the whole Iran-Contra mess as neatly as possible, but only got killed in the process.
The whole question about a retrial concerned what would appear in North's memoir, Under Fire: An American Life, the title and anticipated substance most reminiscent of the British Army's counterterrorist specialist Captain Simon Hayward's Under Fire: My Own Story. While North's manuscript was still being prepared in October 1991, largely being ghost-written by William Novak who wrote Nancy Reagan's memoirs, the text would turn on what North meant by "diversion", and "the secret within a secret". North told reporter George Lardner that Reagan approved the diversion of profits to the Contras, and directed him and Poindexter to take the blame in order to divert attention away from everything else the President and his advisors knew and approved of. ("North: Reagan 'Knew Everything' ," The Washington Post, Oct. 20, 1991, A, 4:1) Their darkest secrets apparently concerned the 1985 arms shipments to Iran, the 'findings' to justify it, the false chronology to cover it up, etc.
Three days later, Walsh dropped all charges against North (Lloyd Grove, "In From Cold," ibid., Oct. 23, 1991, B, 1:4), and he reciprocated in kind with the first installation of his book for Time by claiming that the diversions, the secret within a secret, and the false chronology were merely to protect the diversion of the $12,000,000 in profits to the Contras the following April. "The secret within a secret" turned out to be the Iranians not getting the weapons they bargained for in November 1985, at the fair, market price, and the illicit profits going to the enemies of their allies, the Sandinistas. ( "Reagan Knew Everything," Time, Oct. 28, pp. 47-8) North's most serious offenses, it seems, were to put his hand in the till to help pay for a car (Walsh, pp. 201-2), and to build a security fence around his house to protect his family from the likes of Abu Nidal! ("Notes & Amends," Eye Spy!, Issue Nine, p. 4) North, instead of being the chief plotter, turned out to be, it seems, just another target of the so-called Palestinian hitman.
In sum, Iran-Contra turned out to be a far lesser crisis than Watergate, thanks to the complete separation of the effective counterintelligence and countermeasures that the Soviets had taken to save themselves (Riebling, p. 430ff.) from the comprehensive cover-ups that the Americans and the British had mounted to trivialize North's operations (pp. 367-412), what President Bush completed by pardoning everyone else, except Poindexter, just before he left office.
Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.
Washington has dismissed a United Nations report that finds no evidence Iran has been seeking atomic weapons.
John Bolton, the top US arms control official, said the International Atomic Energy Agency assessment was "impossible to believe".
He said Iranian efforts to acquire nuclear capabilities only made sense as part of a weapons programme.
The IAEA report leaked this week said Iran had admitted to producing high-grade plutonium, but not weapons.
It said there was no sign that Tehran had secretly been developing weapons but had nonetheless admonished the Iranian authorities for being secretive.
"To date there is no evidence that [Iran's] previously undeclared nuclear material and activities... were related to a nuclear weapons programme," the agency said.
"However," it added, "given Iran's past pattern of concealment, it will take some time before the agency is able to conclude that Iran's nuclear programme is exclusively for peaceful purposes."
Iran has always claimed its nuclear programme is designed to meet the country's energy needs.
However, Mr Bolton, speaking at a dinner for the US publication The American Spectator, threw scorn on Tehran and the IAEA.
"After extensive documentation of Iran's denials and deceptions over an 18-year period and a long litany of serious violations of Iran's commitments to the IAEA, the report nonetheless concluded that "no evidence" had been found of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme," he said.
But he stopped short of directly criticising the head of the IAEA, Mohammed ElBaradei, according to BBC correspondent in Washington David Bamford.
The tone of Mr Bolton's statement, our correspondent adds, indicates the US is prepared to take on the UN's nuclear body and state contrary conclusions.
Mr Bolton had wanted to confront Iran in the UN Security Council, while others, including the Europeans, have sought quiet diplomacy to resolve the issue.
Ok, I know you probably think that I, and by default this site, are a little bit on the lunatic fringe of society - you're probably right. Be that as it may, the one impression that I don't want you to have is that I hate you; no matter who you are, what religion you follow, what colour your skin is, what job you have, or how much money you have - or don't have. The purpose of this site is to reflect some of the things happening in my mind, or to publish things that I read or people send to me. I don't necessarily believe all (or any) of it, it's just there - a reflection of the world around me and somewhere that I can say what I want to. The world is full of a lot of crazy things, if you're reading this page then you've found one of them! But amongst all the craziness and selfishness and greed, this planet has a heart that beats in tune with ours some of us have really messed up ideas - but that's all they are! IDEAS. I guess that's my point, codshit tries to attack ideas. When I'm attacking Bush I'm not attacking the man, I'm attacking the IDEAS his administration has brought to the world. He (and Phony Tony) are the figureheads for this monstrosity of lies and deception and WAR. We were lied to and the buck stops with them, it's as simple as that. If you still don't believe me then here's a story about how much The System really cares about those who SACRIFICE THEIR LIVES, WHETHER THEY ACTUALLY DIE OR NOT! It took 60 years for them to pay for UK vets to visit the battlefields where they gave their soul for us! "War is a racket." General Smedley Butler USMC (circa 1930, I think, if you care that much look it up I can't be arsed but he did say it)
If you have a good idea about how to save us from ourselves then please email it to me and I'll post it to the site. If it's a good idea it doesn't matter how crazy it is email jumperb at yahoo dot com (codshit email is dead R.I.S. (rest in spam)) :-(
Quote of the day: "War kills all those who participate in it, even the ones who survive." - ewar 100204
There's no emotional sting like the one inflicted by that 500 number. It's larger now, the total of Americans dead from an Iraq war launched on false pretenses, but 500 is getting a lot of usage as the ultimate cost of this mess. It's a cost 500 can't begin to illuminate.
How about at least 9,000 servicemen and women wounded, sickened or injured? How about 6,891 troops medically evacuated for non-combat conditions between March 19 and Oct. 30, 2003?
"There are about 2,500 combat casualties," Dave Autry said on the phone from the Disabled American Veterans offices in Washington. "The rest are attempted suicides, vehicle accidents, other accidents, illness. Something that's becoming a big concern is lesions caused by exposure to sand fleas that carry a particularly virulent bacteria."
All of this could be categorized as the inevitably horrible cost of post-modern war in the desert, but the scandal is what is happening to these survivors once their government brings them home. Tom Keller, the immediate past commander of the DAV in Ohio, wrote to me last month about the secretive nature of the process.
"I can't speak for the DAV's national organization," Tom said, "but I have my own feelings about why the Bush administration is bringing the casualties back to the States in the middle of the night and wants to keep organizations like the DAV away from them. I believe the administration wants to keep the American people in the dark about the number of troops being wounded, the severity of the injuries they are receiving and the types of illnesses that may be surfacing."
There are reasons potentially too disturbing even to ponder as to why the Defense Department, for example, would want to do what Keller is suggesting, but the evident reason appears to be depressingly common: money. It appears that the government does not want these veterans even to be aware of, let alone receive, the benefits due them for donating their limbs and their souls and their innocence to America.
The DAV's executive director, David Gorman, who left both his legs in a stinking Southeast Asian jungle more than 30 years ago, took up the subject early last month in a letter to Secretary of Offense Donald Rumsfeld.
On the night of October 9, 1987, four loyalist gunmen working for the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) broke into the West Belfast flat of Francisco Notarantonio, long time member of the IRA, and retired taxi driver, and killed him as he lay in bed with his wife. According to Peter Harclerode in Secret Soldiers, the incident finally persuaded his Force Research Unit handlers in the British Army that its mole Brian Nelson, the Association's chief intelligence officer, might be passing along information from its Crucible and Vengeful computer systems to facilitate sectarian murders.
Starting in May 1987, Nelson had helped organize the UDA's shooting of bread van driver Dermot Hackett, two other taxi drivers, Edward Campbell and Mickey Power, in July and August, Patrick Hamill in the same fashion as Notarantonio shortly thereafter, and finally young Jim Meighan on Sept. 20th. Alex Maskey, a Sinn Fein city councillor for Belfast, only escaped for awhile the murderous efforts of another UDA assassin, posing as a cabbie, because of the quick work by surgeons at the Royal Victoria Hospital. A year later, as Peter Everett discussed in Issue Eleven of Eye Spy!, Nelson called upon FRU free-lancer Ken Barrett, apparently aka 'Geoff', to finish the job, but he arrived too late at the restaurant where Maskey was eating to effect the killing. Nelson, when questioned by his handlers about these incidents, denied, of course, that he had had any knowledge that the information he supplied to the UDA was to be used in the slayings.
According to Nicholas Davies in Ten Thirty Three - The Inside Story of Britain's Killing Machine in Northern Ireland, Nelson, aka Agent 6137, had earned his place in the UDA after he was released from prison in 1980 for helping kill a Catholic by beating him, setting his hair afire, and finally denying him life-sustaining medication. Nelson, codename 10-33, had become a member of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) after he had been discharged from The Black Watch in 1969. In November 1985, Nelson reportedly offered his services to British military intelligence as an informer so that he could exact revenge upon another UVF member who the UDA refused to discipline for trying to rape his wife.
In April 1986, four months after the fallout from the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement had setted, especially the 14 Intelligence Company's kidnapping, and the IRA's reprisal killing of renegade Derry quartermaster Frank Hegarty for tipping off authorities about the locations of various IRA depots of Libyan-supplied weapons in the Republic, the Nelsons moved suddenly to West Germany where he became a professional roof tiler. Then in October, Nelson was sent to South Africa to procure arms from supplier Armscor for a leaner, meaner UDA whose UVF and UFF murder squads were seeking military-like proficiency. At the same time, Nelson, who had been approached again for disclosure of UDA plans in sectarian struggles by the FRU's Colonel J, aka Gordon Kerr, because of pressure from MI5's Joint Irish Section, informed his FRU handlers of the trip, and they arranged a three-week visit for him to Johannesburg, under the watchful eye of MI6, to complete the deal.
By January 1987, the FRU was so happy with Nelson's performance that two of its agents went to Munich to persuade him, and his family to return to Northern Ireland for more mole work within the UDA. In explaining his new found wealth, the FRU arranged with West German counterintelligence for Nelson to win, it seems, a lottery for £20,000. "Shortly after his return to Belfast," Harclerode added, "he was given a series of conducted tours of republican areas by the FRU, with establishments frequented by the Provisionals being pointed out to him." (p. 561) Nelson was to funnel what he gained from UDA intelligence on republican activities to FRU handlers so that joint plans could be devised about what the IRA was planning, and what was to be done about it. The operation was to contain republican terror in the province.
The relation between Nelson and the FRU apparently proved perfect when the UDA decided to assassinate Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams in June 1987, what it had attempted but without success on March 14, 1984. On that occasion, a UFF assassination squad, led by John Gregg and Gerard Welsh, decided to kill the just-elected London MP as he left an adjourned magistrates court session in Belfast, answering charges of obstructing justice. As Joe Keenan, son of long-time IRA volunteer, and fellow passenger Sean Keenan, was driving down Howard Street, Gregg's UFF car, driven by Colin Gray, overtook the one Adams was in, spraying it with at least 12 rounds, three of which hit Adams in the neck, shoulder, and arm, and one of which hit Sean Keenan riding in the backseat.
Fortunately, it seems, another military intelligence informer had told it about the attack, and it had had the 14 Intelligence Company remove powder from the ammunition planned for use in the attack so that it would not be lethal. Since neither the car nor the driver had been incapacitated in the attack, Adams and Sean Keenan were driven directly to the Royal Victoria Hospital for the necessary repairs. Then members of the Intelligence & Security Group appeared on the scene, and arrested the three UFF members. The shooters were subsequently given 18 years in prison for the attempt, and driver Gray received 12 years for his trouble.
In the summer and fall of 1987, the UDA planned three attempts on Adams' life, all using motorcyclists, but none of them materialized because of tipoffs to the FRU by Nelson. In the first case, the 14 Intelligence Company, and the RUC's Special Branch, along with regular policemen, and soldiers, had the site, the Housing Exectuive offices, so well surrounded that not even the craziest of assassins would have tried it. Two weeks later, it was the same arrangement at another site. Some months later, the UDA planned another attack, with motorcyclists pulling up beside Adams' car to put a limpet mine on its roof, set to explode later, but the effort was called off, apparently because it was too reminiscent of the first effort.
Then in 1988, the UDA, finally fully armed, thanks reportedly to the arms shipment from South Africa, went on a sectarian shooting spree, highlighted by Michael Stone shooting up the mourners attending the funerals of the three volunteers killed by the SAS at Gibraltar in May, resulting in the murders of Kevin Brady, John Murray, and Thomas McErlean. It was these killings which resulted three days later in the brutal murders of the two Army corporals, Robert Howes and Derek Wood, when they stumbled across the funeral cortege of one of the above.
The campaign had been kicked off in January with the killing of Catholic Billy Kane, also lying in bed, and was followed the next day by the murder of Ulster Defence Regiment Captain Timothy Armstrong, the assassins thinking that he was another undesirable Catholic. In May, there was a repeat of these killings, with the UDA this time killing Seamus Murray, and Terry McDaid, the FRU finally assuring the shaken Nelson that he had connections with his dangerous brother, Declan. Then the UDA, with FRU approval, had its assassins kill senior PIRA officer Brendan Davison, feigning that they were regular RUC policemen making a security check. The UDA, with full FRU assistance, finished the year by killing suspected PIRA member Gerard Slane, and the McNally brothers, Francis, and Phelim, more cases of mistaken identity.
In 1989, the chief victim of the UDA/FRU shooting spree was solicitor Pat Finucane, who had represented famous hunger-striker Bobby Sands, and was employed by Gervaise McKerr's widow to determine why he was killed by an RUC Headquarters Mobile Service Unit back in the fall of 1982. According to Everett, Finucane was murdered because of his successful defence of Patrick McEwen, who was charged with killing the two corporals. According to Harclerode, the UDA had planned to assassinate Finucane in September 1987, but the FRU saw that he was provided the same protection that Adams had been given three months before. (p. 568) In March 1988, the same process resulted in Finucane being protected from assassination. In February 1989, it was an entirely different matter, though, when three UDA assassins got lucky, marching into his house unnoticed, and gunning him down in front of his wife and children, only to escape without difficultly.
Other significant UDA killings in 1989 were finishing off Catholic Ian Catney in January, what the breakaway Irish National Liberation Army had attempted two years before at Belfast's Smithfield Market. Then there was another mistaken identity shooting, that of Protestant David Dorman, a week later due to faulty intelligence. "The two gunmen," Harclerode added, "had been seen running towards a nearby loyalist housing estate which was quickly sealed off. Shortly afterwards, four men were arrested and taken way for questioning." (p. 567) Nelson's career with the UDA was finally finished in August 1989, according to Harclerode, when two of its assassins used a RUC P-Card plan of his residence, and photograph of Loughlin Maginn, to kill him. When the UDA bragged about its intelligence in murdering the PIRA intelligence officer, producing the expected scepticism about the claim, it published the FRU file on Maginn, obliging the government to appoint Deputy Constable of the Cambridgeshire Police John Stevens to conduct an inquiry of Army collusion in loyalist killings.
The trouble with these sometimes erroneous explanations of FRU/UDA murders is that they are dealt with in a disjointed, episodic fashion, an approach which seems completely unjustified when we are told by Davies that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, as chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, was continually provided with Military Intelligence Source Reports (MISRs) regarding individual operations. This was no renegade, hit-or-miss campaign. We need to put these killings, and others in the changing counter-terrorist context of Northern Ireland, one which appreciates its evolving causes, objectives, strategies, organizations, operatives, and limitations. After the successful completion of the Falklands War, Britain was prepared to go all out with its own campaign of terror in order to defeat revolutionary Irish nationalism.
The disjointed character of Harclerode's analysis is best captured in his setting the scene, the Hyde Park bombings by the PIRA in the summer of 1982 (p. 134), as far away as possible from the six reprisal killings in the province a few months later (pp. 532-5), what led to the appointment in March 1984 of John Stalker, Deputy Chief Constable of the Greater Manchester Police, to conduct an inquiry similar to Stevens's. With Britain's defence forces stretched to the limit because of the growing confrontation with Argentina, the killing of four soldiers in the Queen's Household Cavalry, two police officers, and six Royal Green Jackets bandmen with nail bombs was the last thing Britain needed.
To settle scores, though, Captain Simon Hayward of the Life Guards volunteered to lead UDA squads, and re-inforced Headquarters Mobile Service Units of the RUC to settle scores with the republicans, resulting in the above killings, and a few others. The killings, though, were completely unfocused, thanks to more faulty intelligence from George Poyntz, and apparently David Burton aka Bertelstein. Hayward teamed up with the UDA's John McMichael and Michael Stone, already notorious for working with now murdered Captain Robert Nairac, to kill Seamus Grew on September 22, 1982, but without success, requiring a similarly led HMSU to do it two and a half months later. Hayward, McMichael, and Stone, it seems, did manage to assassinate ex-internee Peter Corrigan in the meantime.
Once the crisis passed, Hayward decided to join the 14 Intelligence Company, hoping that the new service could find a permanent place for the somewhat disabled but most talented captain. Hayward had lost the middle segments of the middle and ring fingers on his right hand in an accident involving a Ferret vehicle in Cypres in March 1976, and thought that the unconventional force might be able to give him a new identity too, especially in light of the Stalker inquiry. By the time this police officer had put his Interim Report together during the summer of 1985, requiring only the tapes of the controversial killing of Michael Tighe in a Lurgan hayloft on November 24, 1982, to complete his inquiry, Hayward had successfully completed the course for the Company, and had become Operations Officer for its South Detachment in Northern Ireland, adopting the operational identity of James Rennie just to be on the safe side. (For his highly fictionalized account of the transformation, see The Operators: On the streets with Britain's Most Secret Service. The most telltale examples, what government censors should have excised, was his listing the essentials of his Army career in the Fontispiece, and his allegedly changing his shooting hand from his natural left to his actually injured right, what created all kinds of operational surprises, and was responsible for his "cackhandedness" (p. 90), hardly something an aspiring assassin would deliberately choose.)
Rennie now seemed far removed from any trouble Stalker could make, especially given the opposition of RUC Chief Constable Sir John Hermon, and MI5 to handing over the tapes. Stalker was then removed from the inquiry under suspicion that he was connected to the criminal activities of Manchester's Quality Street Gang, especially drug-running, through dealings with businessman Kevin Taylor.
Just when Colonel Gordon Kerr was recruiting Nelson to become a military mole in the UDA, the JIC was altering its focus on what to do with the PIRA, and its supporters, a change which required Hayward aka Rennie from trying to stop IRA Active Service Units (ASUs) in East Tyrone from blowing up undermanned RUC police stations to directing more sectarian killings, as he had done in 1982. Thatcher's JIC was committed to making it seem that the Soviets, through their clients, especially Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, were assisting the republicans in taking over the North by force, a ploy it would punish by helping to destroy the USSR as a Cold War player.
Hayward's assignment was to expose the stockpiling of Libyan weapons in the Republic by means of Hegarty's arrest while leading another series of so-called shoot-to-kill murders to meet the alleged PIRA threat which would give him a believable alibi for triggering the showdown with the Soviets, the shooting to Swedish statsminister Olof Palme in Stockholm at the end of February 1986. Hayward saw to it that McMichael and Stone disposed of joiner Kevin McPolin in Lisburn as the new campaign commenced. Then he apparently led the drawn-out assassination of arms mover Francis Bradley on February 18, 1986, one so outrageous that it was being hotly debated in the press when Palme was murdered. Hayward had been actively sizing up Bradley for the shooting, even having his picture taken in military battlegear outside McVeys' cafe in Magherafelt during the process, ever since unknown parties had shot up the Castledawson Police Station on December 9, 1985.
While the shooting of Palme, apparently by Hayward while reassessing the performance of his bodyguards, went off without a hitch, the problems with the South Detachment's Ops Officer only increased for British officials as the Swedish police failed to find a suspect for the shooting, thanks particularly to SIS's false leads. Jo Thomas of The New York Times published a belated story of the recent killings in the province, especially Bradley's, to keep Hayward's alibi going, and he added to it by helping entice Seamus McElwaine from across the border two months later, in the hope of catching the long sought-after James Lynagh, resulting in McElwaine's execution, and Sean Lynch's wounding.
Still, Group 13, which included Chairman of the Joint Intelillgence Committee Sir Percy Craddock, former SIS Chief Sir Colin Figures, current chief Christopher Curwen, his deputy Colin McColl, Defence Intelligence Staff Chief Derek Boorman, DIS Director General for Management and Support of Intelligence Vice Admiral John Kerr, DGSS Anthony Duff, DDGSS Patrick Walker, G Branch Director John Deverell, Cabinet Secretary Sir Robert Armstrong, and Sovbloc operatives Gordon Barrass, Harry Burke, and Gerry Warner, and who had helped arrange the statsminister's shooting, were increasingly anxious about Hayward's continuing presence, and functioning in Northern Ireland, especially when the Iran-Contra scandal started unraveling in the fall. These officials are responsible for Whitehall's unwritten code of keeping quiet at all costs about current operations. To ease the pressure, Hayward attended the PQS 2 course back in Ashford, successful completion of which would apparently lead to his being promoted to major, and given a top military intelligence post in Whitehall.
Just when Hayward was taking leave of Northern Ireland in early 1987, Nelson was back at work with the UDA over the strongest protests by MI5. Deverell believed that his use in the Hayward case would just compound the problem rather than end it, especially by leading the UDA to suspect that Nelson was working for the PIRA. His first assignment, it seems, was to help IRA volunteer, and longest British mole within the republican movement DOOK (aka DUKE and 'Steak Knife') set Hayward up on a drugs smuggling charge in Sweden. This would lead to his being in the hands of Swedish authorities if investigations of Iran-Contra, now underway, ever revealed his role in the Stockholm assassination. Hayward's brother Christopher, who had purchased the drug-running catamaran True Love from Kevin Taylor, was apparently forced to join the plot under threat from DOOK that he would kill his Army agent brother if he didn't cooperate. As for who DOOK is, he sounds like Padraic Wilson, long-time leader of the PIRA, and its commanding officer in the high security Maze Prison until his release in 1999 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.
Wilson had apparently been turned by the British when the Keenans, Adams, and Martin McGuinness made a mess of the breakaway Provisionals. At first, Wilson tried to make the most of the revolutionary Free Derry movement, going to the greatest trouble despite the security net to attend the funeral of one of Sean's sons killed in the process. Before Bloody Sunday - what might have been sparked by a McGuinness first shot, and was in any case inflamed by his so claimingm - Wilson, according to Harclerode, told members of the Mobile Reconnaisance Force (forerunner of the FRU), who had set up the Gemini Health Studio massage parlour on Belfast's Antrim Road to gather intelligence from talkative clients, who of his colleagues had killed three young Scots of the lst Battalion Royal Highland Fusiliers, based at Girdwood Barracks where internment interrogations would be established later in response. (p. 317) This intelligence gathering operation by the MRF 'ladies' was 'blown', as they say, in October 1972 after double agents Seamus Wright, Kevin McKee, and an unknown third one were forced to disclose to the PIRA leadership its relation to the Four Square Laundry intelligence-gathering operation next door.
What Harclerode, nor anyone else for that matter (See, e.g., Tony Geraghty, The Irish War, p. 89ff.), failed to tell us is how Wilson somehow managed to escape both execution at the hands of the PIRA, and incarceration at those of the British. Wilson would have had all kinds of problems explaining his visits to the massage parlour. Perhaps, he was the third unknown volunteer (n. b. that Harclerode makes no mention of him), suspected of working with the 'Freds', but since he was only 15, he was excused because of expected adolescent impulses. Afterall, the Ardoyne IRA had already murdered enough mere youths. While the PIRA leadership was making Wright and McKee pay for their liberties, and the MRF and its allies in the 'Det' were regrouping elsewhere after the attacks on October 2nd, Wilson, it seems, was able to become an Army informer, at that time not yet an anathema within the nationalist community. (Taylor, pp. 59-60)
Harclerode thought that he had gotten round these difficulties and developments by writing vaguely about Paddy Wilson, a leading figure in the nationalist community, divulging the names of the PIRA killers of Dougald McCaughey, John, and Joseph McCaig one night after drinking beer with the boys, and bonking the girls from the MRF. Harclerode was apparently alluding to the veteran SDLP Senator to the old Stormont upper house, Paddy Wilson, who was assassinated, along with his secretary, by the UFF's John White on June 26, 1973, shortly after the ending of the massage parlour, and laundry collection operations. Wilson and Protestant Irene Andrews were savagely stabbed to death, and their bodies mutilated in a quarry just outside Belfast. She even had her breasts sliced off to indicate, it seems, the sectarian sources of the slayings.
Of course, there was no way that this moderate Catholic politician would have known who killed the soldiers. And if he had, there was no way that he would have been honored, along with hard-line Unionist Senator from Strabane, Jack Barnhill, in the Senate Rotunda with memorials of the new Northern Ireland Assemby, what colleague Gerry Fitt, now Lord Fitt, had been recommending for years, and the cross-party Stormont Commission agreed to. Barnhill was assassinated, and his house destroyed by the Official IRA on December 12, 1971, thirty years to the day before the memorials were commenorated. Innocent victim of the Troubles Senator Paddy Wilson was mentioned, along with Barnhill, and British Conservatives Airey Neave, and Ian Gow, when Irish Taoiseach John Bruton opened the All-Party Negotiations leading to the Good Friday Agreement. In sum, Senator Paddy Wilson could not have been Harclerode's Paddy Wilson.
If he were Padraic Wilson, this leads to all kinds of ugly conclusions. First, it shows that there was systematic collusion between the Intelligence and Security Group (NI), and the loyalists paramilitaries much longer than previously thought. Wilson provided British authorities with inside information about armed assaults, like the one at Loughgall in 1987, and arms shipments, especially the ones from Libya, starting in 1971. White could only have murdered Senator Wilson, and Ms. Andrews on a tip from the female MRF agents, what they saw as ideal cover for Padraic Wilson not being suspected by the PIRA as being an Army informer. He would have been assured of the safety of his covert role by their assassinations. This assurance would have been strengthened when White was finally brought to trial, and convicted of the murders in 1978 when the military campaign by MI5 and the SAS against the nationalists was in full swing.
As with all clandestine relations, when things change, what was previously accepted or at least tolerated can become a death warrant. 'Steak Knife' seems to have prevented some unnecessary killings while MI6's Michael Oatley was seeking a settlement with the IRA's Billy McKee. Once negotiations broke down, and MI5 and the 'Det' started going after the republicans, however, 'Steak Knife's role became increasingly unacceptable, especially when the UDA's "Shankill Butcher" Lennie Murphy, recruiter of McMichael and Stone, became involved. Then the Active Service Unit, directed apparently by Brian Keenan, in Britain went wild, culminating in the famous Balcombe Street shootout. 'Steak Knife' apparently did help arrange the SAS assassination of John Francis Green, the suspected leader of the shooting of the Scottish soldiers; helped in the 1980 imprisonment of Keenan for 18 years for conspiring to cause the explosions on the British mainland; and arranged for the UDA to kill Murphy when he threatened again to go on the rampage after being released from prison during Hayward's 1982 retribution campaign.
Wilson's long-time association with the Army, for which he was paid £75,000 per year in a secret Gibraltar bank account, suffered a severe setback, though, when the UDA, with 14 Intelligence Company assistance, almost killed Brian Keenan's father, and Gerry Adams, not to forget the risks to brother Joe. Wilson had not bargained for this kind of retribution. While the military intelligence people have cooked up this story about having safely doctored the ammunition, no one in his right mind would believe it, given the extent and seriousness of the wounds. And one doubts that Wilson was ever told of the precautions. As former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Sir Patrick Mayhew explained about such murders: "If you do shoot, then you don't shoot to tickle, you don't shoot to miss, you do shoot to kill." (Quoted from Peter Taylor, Brits: The War Against the IRA, p. 255) This may help explain why subsequent assassination attempts on Adams got nowhere, thanks to Wilson's disclosures to the IRA leadership.
For good measure, MI5 officer Michael Bettaney, while on remand in Brixton jail for spying for the Soviets, had given fellow prisoners in the IRA, particularly Keenan, an earful of what the Security Service, and Army intelligence had been doing against it in Northern Ireland (Mark Urban, Big Boys' Rules, p. 99), what became a red flag for DOOK (or 'Steak Knife') when he saw the Army captain 'holidaying' with his brother Chris on Ibiza in February 1987. DOOK had apparently learned from Martin McGuinness of the 150-ton shipment of Libyan arms on the Eksund for a PIRA 'tet offensive' (Ed Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA, p. 1ff.), and had stationed himself on the island to help the FRU intercept it from Malta. What Bettaney had seen in the province while working for MI5 was so bad that he converted to Catholicism, took up drinking, and became a left-winger.
While Simon's brother maneuvered him into driving his Jaguar to Stockholm, on the pretext that it was being sold to an Englishman living there, the luxury car was loaded with 50.5 kilos of cannibis to secure his imprisonment when discovered. (For an explanation of this, see Simon Hayward's rare autobiography, Under Fire: My Own Story; not to be confused with co-conspirator Oliver North's Under Fire: An American Story.) In order to hide the cargo properly, the Jaguar had to be stolen for the time-consuming operation to be performed, necessitating Hayward being drugged by someone calling himself 'Brian' (p. 69), apparently Nelson. Meanwhile, DOOK, the well-heeled, nasty IRA man, in the company of a 35-year-old brunette, apparently calling herself Heather Weissand (whose existence and identity Hayward was most reluctant to recognize), made arrangements with drug dealer Forbes Mitchell to secure his arrest after he arrived in Sweden - what happened outside Linköping on Friday, March 13, 1987.
While Brian Nelson, along with RUC Special Branch's Ian Phoenix, and FRU's Mags, ultimately known as Captain M, and really Captain Margaret Walshaw, were making up as best they could for Hayward's absence from Northern Ireland, he was slowly being prosecuted in the Swedish capital for drug smuggling. Phoenix replaced Hayward during Operation Judy, the Loughgall Massacre of 8 IRA volunteers on May 8th - what 'Mary', according to Peter Taylor, had forced when she was called off at the last moment from protecting UDR officer William Graham from an IRA AUS. (See her description in Taylor, pp. 270-1.) She had been leading Graham's protective surveillance since Hayward's depature 10 weeks before. Expecting the case to be dropped because of Hayward's connections in the UK, given the fact that it depended upon what Britain's National Drugs Intelligence Unit officers could persuade Mitchell to testify to, he was shocked when found guilty in August. Hayward reacted by hiring a private detective to determine facts surrounding the case so that its prosecution could be overturned on appeal.
It was heard in early October, and turned on whether DOOK could persuade the court that Hayward knew what he alone was doing all along, what Weissand was prepared to corroborate. Of course, Hayward wanted DOOK to be forced to appear so that he could be subjected to cross examination about his role, but he persisted in refusing, claiming that he had already testified truthfully. When his lawyer, Dutchman H. K. ter Brake, was obliged to testify, he was asked who his client was. He declined to identify him, explaining to the court: "He is afraid of anything that will reveal his identity. He is afraid of the British Army." (Quoted from Hayward, p. 340.) ter Brake was never asked why. Then the court heard a letter from DOOK, claiming that he was the victim of a plot by the British press to scapegoat him, but he added that "...the truth will come out." DOOK implied that if something happened to him because of UDA/FRU action, his lawyer would have more to tell the court. On this note, it was adjourned on October 7th.
Two nights later, Notarantino instead of 'Steak Knife' was assassinated, thanks to intervention by the FRU's Captain M or Mags who decided that changing targets was essential, given DOOK's obvious threat. (It is interesting to note that Hayward was soon calling his wife of be, Sandra Agar, 'Sands' after meeting her through a personal ad he had placed in Private Eye.) When the court reconvened on October 15th, Hayward began to suspect that his appeal was doomed, once a letter from Ms. Weissand to ter Brake was introduced, confirming a conversation she had had with one of the prosecutors the day after Notarantino's assassination. She stated that she had been present at the meeting of Simon, Chris, and DOOK at Santa Eulalia, and that at no time had Chris and DOOK left the table to conspire against Simon. (For its text, see Hayward, p. 356.)
While the defence tried to make much of the fact that no one knew who Ms. Weissand really was, and that she too was afraid to appear in person, these doubts were cleared up by the time the court rejected the appeal two weeks later, as one of the prosecutors summed up: "...Heather Weissand sounded credible to me on the telephone, HK ter Brake thought the same...Dook is not involved in this affair...that is nothing but a smokescreen put forward by the defence to cloud the issue..." (Quoted from p. 361.) Apparently, London had reassured Stockholm under the strictest secrecy that Weissand was a British military intelligence officer, unavailable for the court because of assignment on a chartered sailing yacht, apparently DOOK's. On October 28th, it had helped secure the capture of the Eksund off the coast of Brittany by French authorities. Clearly, British ones put a higher priority on keeping on good terms with the PIRA man than the Ops Officer.
Once Hayward was safely locked up for a five-year sentence, Britain's 'killing machine in Northern Ireland,' to use Davies' term, saw to the elimination of grounds for further blackmail by either 'Steak Knife' or Rennie, the details of which will have to be left for another time.
While the British government thought that its troubles, caused primarily by the assassination of statsminister Olof Palme in Stockholm on February 28, 1986, were rendered manageable by the imprisonment of apparent hitman Captain Simon Hayward aka James Rennie in Sweden on trumped-up drug smuggling charges for five years in November 1987, they vastly increased, so much so, in fact, that London ultimately had to start seeking peace with the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA). Once anybody succumbs to blackmailers, it is almost impossible to escape without continuing to give into their demands.
Hayward became such a thorn in Britain's side, first in Malmö's maximun security prison, and then back in London, that it was ultimately obliged to make good on his claim that he had been Rennie all along, finally even giving him a position in Whitehall that it had only deceptively promised originally. The IRA's 'Steak Knife', apparently aka DOOK, was such a blackmailing threat, dead or alive, during the process that the Army's Force Research Unit (FRU) had to work overtime to make sure that nothing happened to him, unless at the hands of fellow Provisionals, what helped result in the threats to, and killing of many others, particularly solicitor Pat Finucane, to make sure that its mole in the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), Brian Nelson, was not fatally compromised to the loyalists. Nelson became a such nervous wreck, trying to protect 'Steak Knife' from loyalist assassins, that his minions were ultimately obliged to leak FRU files to justify the chaos, resulting in the UDA's chief intelligence officer finally being tried, and imprisoned by specially appointed investigator, Sir John Stevens.
If 'Steak Knife' had been assassinated on October 9, 1987 while Hayward's appeal hearing in Stockholm was in recess, it, no doubt, would been confronted with an alarming statement from the deceased by his counsel, H. K. ter Brake, when it resumed. The IRA operative would have apparently claimed that he, an innocent, law-abiding subject, had accidentally become embroiled while on holiday in Ibiza in covert British operations, an assassination attempt upon Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, it seemed, by the agent in the dock who had directed so many unfocused killings in Northern Ireland that he had been called upon by the security forces to kill Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, an apparent Soviet stooge. If an FRU/UDA asssassination attempt on 'Steak Knife' had failed, what seemed more likely, given his recognition of the threat, he might well have appeared in person to make the same claims, what undoubtedly would have thrown the hearing, and Swedish relations with Britain into unprecendented turmoil.
While the FRU finally admitted its intervention in UDA plans to kill 'Steak Knife', Nelson's handler Captain M aka Mags, and really Captain Margaret Walshaw, having retired taxidriver, and former IRA activist Francisco Notarantonio targeted instead, the fallout within UDA ranks was immediate. They, especially John 'Flint' Stone, suspected that assassination squad leader, John McMichael, had been turned by the PIRA into killing the wrong target. No sooner had Hayward's appeal of his conviction for drug smuggling failed than the UDA's Second-in-Command became obsessed with the idea that everyone was planning to kill him. "McMichael," Tony Geraghty has written in The Bullet Catchers: Bodyguards and the World of Close Protection,"was fanatically cautious about his security, changing his car every two weeks and usually accompanied by a bodyguard." (p. 391)
To no avail, though, as he was blown up in his booby-trapped car in December. When there was no expected Protestant blacklash, Geraghty added, security sources suggested that McMichael had been killed by his own side for allegedly working with the nationalists in seeking peace! (This was about as likely as the Devil joining forces with the Lord.) It was thought to be a repeat of what the UDA's James Pratt Craig had been able to arrange with a member of the IRA's Belfast Brigade (Number 9 on the RUC Special Branch E4A list) in disposing of Lennie Murphy, the Shankill Butcher, after he kidnapped, tortured, and killed Catholic Joseph Donnegan on October 24, 1982 shortly after having been released from prison. Number 9 seems to have been none other than 'Steak Knife' who consulted with the UDA about matters of mutual interest - i.e., Hayward's retribution campaign against the IRA not being confused by unfocused loyalist killings - until it almost killed Gerry Adams, veteran IRA Derry republican Sean Keenan, and son Joe on March 14, 1984.
The reason why there was no Protestant blacklash to McMichael's murder is because the FRU arranged through Nelson for an across-the-board campaign of terror to keep everyone in the dark about why Notarantonio had been killed, resulting in reprisals by the PIRA. On January 15, 1988, Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) assassins, thanks to FRU files that Nelson had been supplied, assassinated Catholic Billy Kane in the same fashion that Notarantonio had been disposed of. The next day, Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) Captain Timothy Armstrong was murdered, the UDA belatedly explaining that he had been mistaken for an unknown Catholic. The same day, the PIRA killed the UDR's John Stewart in reprisal for Kane's killing, and two days later, it eliminated Catholic Anthony McKiernan, thinking apparently that he had fingered Kane. Then the circle started again six days later with the UDA killing of Catholic businessman Jack Kielty. (See Raymond Murray's The SAS in Ireland, p. 397, for details.)
McMichael's murder threw Hayward into an absolute tailspin, given the upholding of his drugs conviction in Stockholm the previous month. The South Detachment's Ops Officer was already in a most depressed state because of the failure of British officialdom to gain his release despite efforts by London MP John Gorst. Life Guards commanding officer, Colonel James Emson, had taken National Drug Intelligence Unit claims of his drug dealing seriously enough to come to Stockholm to question him about them (Simon Hayward, Under Fire: My Own Story, pp. 100-1), and commiserating colleague Major Simon Falkner was also working behind the scenes to see that the Stalker inquiry into the 1982 killing in South Armagh was provided with a second tape of the controversial killing of Michael Tighe in a Lurgan hayshed on November 24th (John Stalker, The Stalker Affair, pp. 248-9), what Hayward apparently accomplished while leading a re-inforced RUC Special Branch E4A squad. Now London was, it seemed, more interested in protecting nationalists, particularly Gerry Adams, and their defenders, especially solicitor Pat Finucane, than Crown operatives, and their agents who were carrying the fight to the IRA.
To disabuse Hayward of this erroneous misconception, Attorney General Sir Patrick Mayhew announced to the Commons on January 26, 1988 that the Crown was taking no action 'in the public interest' against the RUC officers who were allegedly responsible for the six deaths in South Armagh during the fall of 1982, which Stalker had been appointed to investigate, and what Sir Colin Sampson, his replacement, recommended upon completing the inquiry. Any prosecutions would have resulted in the officers contending that they only covered up for others, particularly Hayward, on instruction by superiors - what would have opened a whole Pandora's Box of secrets. Later, Lord Mayhew explained vaguely: "A lot of intelligence matters would have been brought out that would have been very deleterious to the intelligence operation that was essential in the circumstance of the time." (Quoted from Peter Taylor, Brits: The War Against the IRA, pp. 252-3.)
In the wake of the PIRA bombing of the British cenotaph at Enniskillen on November 8th (Remembrance Sunday), which killed 11 bystanders, and injured another 60 instead of members of the security forces, the British Court of appeal upheld the wrongful conviction of the Birmingham Six, and Parliament made permanent the Prevention of Terrorism Act, what had made possible indiscriminate acts of terror by Hayward, the UDA, and FRU against Northern Irish subjects. For good measure, on February 23rd, Private Ian Thain, sentenced to life in prison for killing a Catholic, was released after having served little over two years, and the only imprisoned soldier during the Troubles was then returned to duty with his regiment, The Light Infantry. Hayward, in sum, could follow the same route though overseas, as his letter of resignation from the Army had not yet been accepted.
The operation Lord Mayhew was referring to was stopping the PIRA's plan to blow up British troops during the changing of the guard outside the Governor's residence in Gibraltar, what its West Fermanagh unit had attempted in Belmore Street in Enniskillen the previous fall, and for which it was obliged to disband when the unfocused atrocity occurred. (Peter Harclerode, Secret Soldiers, p. 148. N. b. that he has discussed this bombing as far away as possible from the murders on The Rock, p. 548ff.) No sooner had the PIRA's Council approved of the attack than an informer, undoubtedly 'Steak Knife', disclosed the plan to British authorities. 'Steak Knife' was most desirous of getting back on good terms with them, especially in light of Enniskillen, and they were most eager to oblige because of the continuing problems with Hayward, highlighted by Notarantonio's murder.
To make 'Steak Knife's participation more likely, the security forces allowed in January 1988 an ASU in Belgium to escape after the massive car bomb it had planted in Brussels was discovered. The bombing was intended, like Patrick Magee's in Brighton in December 1984, to decimate the government's senior ranks attending a European Union summit. While Ed Moloney, in his just-published A Secret History of the IRA, has expressed puzzlement over why the security forces did not move against the terrorists, he then answered his own query by stating that the Prime Minister wanted to give the PIRA a "bloody nose" at Gilbraltar.
While all accounts of the shooting on The Rock (Operation Flavius) have concentrated on what happened to the members of the Active Service Unit on the fatal day, especially because of SAS overkill on the ground, and official disinformation in the press, hardly any attention has been paid to who set them up, apparently 'Steak Knife', Mags aka 'Mary' (Sergeant Margaret Walshaw of the FRU), and, according to some accounts, someone even standing in for Hayward. The whole point of the unexpected shootings by the SAS markmen, what Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, and Secretary of Defence George Younger had approved in late February (Quoted in Murray from Colin Brown's Sept. 5, 1988 article in The Independent, pp. 411-2.), was to give 'John Oakes', 'Katherine Smith', and others the chance to make their getaway during the cull.
Howe was the principal target of the car bomb in Brussels, and Younger had had to contain the mess when the Americans did not show up during NATO's Anchor Express Exercise, what Palme's assassination was to trigger against Moscow. The Foreign Secretary was understandably most desirous of getting back at his attempted murderers, and Younger of seeing the end of the Hayward affair. Downing Street intervention completely upstaged what MI6, MI5, and military intelligence had been planning from their operational headquarters in Gibraltar's Rock Hotel.
'Oakes' was clearly the informer from the PIRA's Council, and 'Katherine Smith' was his expert on terrorism, sounding much like the FRU's Captain M. He, apparently aka DOOK, given his connections with Giltraltar, would have been the ideal man to prepare the operation on the ground, and she seems to have been his constant companion, using the aliases of his PIRA associates when appropriate. They constituted the Malaga-based ASU which made regular visits to The Rock, starting on February 23rd, and triggering the Cabinet decision. 'Oakes' and 'Smith', as Father Murray has written, used a red Ford Fiesta to transport the explosive from Valencia to Marbella, and then they loaded it into a white Ford Fiesta that 'Smith' had rented for the mission. (pp. 402-3) The third car, the blocking one for the bomb-laden white Ford Fiesta, was rented, according to Geraldine Mitchell, and Andy Pollack of The Irish Times, by a man missing the middle and ring fingers of his right hand, a telltail sign of Hayward, though his actual presence seems most unlikely, given his imprisonment in Sweden.
About 'Smith', Jack Holland and Susan Phoenix have written in Phoenix: Policing the Shadows, she was observed by the SAS the day before the cull, "...reconnoitring the area around the governor's palace, where, it was thought, the Provisionals were going to target a changing-of-the-guard ceremony. She was followed into a nearby Catholic chapel, where she was observed lighting a candle before leaving. It is unknown whether this was for the bombing team or for the hundreds of potential innocent victims." (p. 199) It turned out that the candle was for the bombing team, as they were the ones blown away as she mysteriously made her escape. Her identity becomes even murkier when we are told that she, allegedly the only member of the ASU to escape, continues to sit on Sinn Fein's Central Committee despite the well-documented case against her for conspiring to commit mass murder.
'Smith', in sum, was definitely not the real 'Mary Parkin', volunteer Mairead Farrell, who had accompanied Daniel McCann and Sean Savage when the site was surveyed in November, though Farrell used the alias on occasion. Farrell was diminutive, with long, dark hair, while 'Smith' was "slightly built with short curly hair." (p. 403) Duncan Campbell, in his article 'Panic in the street" in the June 17,1988 issue of the New Statesman (the same one that had his article about MI6 not approving the use of any British mercenaries, especially from Major David Walker's KMS and Saladin firms, to kill Palme), claimed that it was because British and Spanish intelligence officers lost track of 'Mary Parkin' that the decision was made to kill the three volunteers for fear that 'Parkin' was in the process of setting off the bomb. In sum, there were six people involved in the operation, three of whom were working for British authorities.
While the original plan, among other things, had been to betray 'Oakes' fatally to his PIRA colleagues, the resulting overkill by the Thatcher-led SAS determined an entirely different outcome. Britain's European colleagues, especially Spain, were appalled by their misuse in this clear act of international terrorism. MI5, especially DCI John Deverell, was totally demoralized by the result, what it had planned to break the security forces' links with the sectarian paramilitaries, especially 'Steak Knife'. Instead of 'Oakes' being suspected, exposed, and executed by his republican colleagues for the mission's abject failure, the PIRA made a meal of the new Shoot-to-Kill murders of the unarmed volunteers.
When the nationalist leadership turned out for Farrell's burial, as the Unionists had for McMichael's funeral, the UDA's Michael Stone thought that he had the FRU's green light from Nelson to kill as many of them, particulary Wilson, as possible, resulting in the murders instead of Kevin Brady, John Murray, and Thomas McErlean, and the wounding of some seventy others while the the Army and the RUC were deliberately absent. Consequently, in March 1989, Stone had the book thrown at him, receiving a sentence of 648 years in prison for not only the above killings, but also those of Patrick Brady, Kevin McPolin, and Dermott Hackett. As the obvious fallguy for others, particularly Hayward, at his trial explained in killing van driver Hackett: "I read his file. He was a legitimate target." (Quoted from Murray, p. 430.) If Hackett was a legitimate target, everyone was.
When undercover Corporals Robert Howes and Derek Wood of the Royal Signals Corps interfered inexplicably with Kevin Brady's funeral three days later, they sparked a savage attack by republicans which resulted in their being literally ripped apart. Some mourners had concluded erroneously that the SAS, which often worked with the RSC, was involved in another republican cull, while others thought it was the work of loyalists. Enoch Powell, the independent Unionist, was so angered by the turn of events that he called for a determination of who was responsible for the two military disasters.
As for who 'Mary Parkin' really is, it is interesting to note that Peter Taylor found a 'Mary', the same one who took over the 14 Intelligence Company's protective surveillance of the UDR's William Graham after Hayward was arrested in Sweden, who was most eager to talk about the dangers to the weakest of women in the FRU who recruited informants and agents within paramilitary organizations:
What you must remember is that if ever we were captured by the IRA or any of the splinter groups, or by any terrorist organization, then they would undoubtedly play with us in the form of interrogation before they would kill us. So you had to be equipped for those instances and training was part of it. (Quoted from Taylor, p. 148.)
This same 'Mary' was also most sang froid about killing terrorists Dessie Grew, Seamus's brother whom a Hayward-led RUC E4A squad had apparently disposed of eight years before, and Martin McCaughey when they went to collect weapons from a mushroom shed in the autumn of 1990, reminiscent of Hayward's shootings of Michael Tigue in 1982, and Francis Bradley in 1986:
I didn't feel sad or elated. I didn't feel anything at the terrorists' deaths. The terrorists had a clean 'getaway' car as well as the 'operational' car there. And in the clean car was a bottle of whisky. Now why would you have that? Only to celebrate the death of some innocent person they're just going out to murder in cold blood. (Quoted from p. 304.)
Preemptive strikes to kill potential murderers are no less murders.
When 'Steak Knife's set up of the Gibraltar volunteers went so cruelly wrong, thanks to Prime Minister Thatcher's introduction of SAS marksmen into the operation, and the UDA concluding that it constituted an open season to kill nationalists, the PIRA went on a campaign of increasing violence and efficiency. In May, three RAF servicemen were murdered in Holland in a series of bomb attacks. In July, nine airmen were injured when a bomb exploded inside the barracks' perimeter fence at Duisberg. The following month, three Royal Engineers and a civilian were injured by an explosion at Roy Barracks, outside Dusseldorf. A week later, Welch Regimental Sergeant Major Richard Heakin was assassinated in Ostend. In September and October, there were several more killings and woundings of British forces in West Germany. Failure of other bombs to explode, and sucess by European police rather than the Intelligence and Security Group's usual informants at British facilities in capturing suspects prevented the toll from being higher.
In Britain, while the PIRA bombing campaign was slower in coming, it was more deadly in its results. At the beginning of August, Lance Corporal Michael Robbins was killed, and nine soldiers injured when a bomb exploded at London's Mill Hill Barracks. With 'Steak Knife' cutting off all meaningful contact with British intelligence in Ulster, the carnage was horrific. It was a classic case of the double agent going sour - the worst kind of blowback. Suddenly, 'Steak Knife', while still drawing his £75,000 salary, and making all his meetings with handlers, especial Captain M or 'Mags', just didn't seem to know what the Provisionals were really up to.
In the meatime, on June 15th, the PIRA killed six British soldiers in a booby trapped van in Lisburn after it was left unattended outside British Army Headquarters in Northern Ireland, and two months later, another eight soldiers were killed in a bus on the Ballygawley-Omagh Road in a classic remote-control bombing. Two days later, Navy recruiter Lt. Alan Shields was killed in a car-bombing attack in Belfast. Downing Street was so alarmed by the turn of events that it tried to impose a ban on direct statements to the press by paramilitaries, fearing that those from the PIRA would explain why the attacks were occurring, since Sinn Fein's News Letter promised more until Thatcher responded. (Caroline Kennedy-Pipe, The Origin of the Present Troubles in Northern Ireland, pp. 139-40)
In fact, the killing became so confused that the UDA began to suspect that Nelson was working for the IRA. To spread more confusion, the UDA had assassinated Terry McDaid in May, mistaking him for his dangerous brother, Declan, though he had been under surveillance for months. Then, in July, it executed Brendan Davison, a senior officer in the IRA who also happened to be Special Branch's leading informer in the republican movement. Nelson hated Davison so much that he thought of himself 'as if he was waging a war' against the other man. Still, according to Geraghty in The Irish War, he warned the FRU of the threats against Davison, though the Army apparently failed to take the necessary steps to protect him, ultimately concluding conveniently that the IRA had done it. (p. 157)
"In August 1988, Nelson was taken to a house on the outskirts of Lisburn and subjected to a violent interrogation by the UFF in which he was 'assaulted, brutalized', and thrown into 'physical convulsions on the floor' when he was stabbed on the back of the neck with an electric cattle-prod." (Taylor, pp. 294-5) When Nelson survived the ordeal, the UDA turned its suspicions on leading member James Pratt Craig and associate Timothy McCreery who had arranged Lennie Murphy's assassination back in 1982 after consultations with the PIRA's 'Steak Knife' aka Padraic Wilson (Number 9 on the RUC's E4A list). Craig and Number 9 had mysteriously escaped arrest by the RUC soon after the 1984 failed assassination attempt on Adams. (Phoenix, p. 159) Suspecting that something was amiss, and knowing that 'Steak Knife' was off limits with the FRU, the UDA assassinated Craig on October 15, 1988, suspecting that he had been working for the much infiltrated INLA all along.
By 1989, the FRU was frantic over what to do about 'Steak Knife'. To reduce the possibilities of his exploiting the Hayward case at Britain's expense, officials did as much as they could to quiet the Guards officer's fury over having been railroaded in Stockholm. When his brother David was killed in an automobile accident in Scotland, they tried to get him compassionate release from prison to attend the funeral. They even tried to arrange his serving his sentence in a British prison. Hayward had an article published in the Daily Mail, and was allowed numerous press interviews to calm hostile interpretations of his incarceration. Hayward was encouraged to write his side of the story, MPJohn Gorst and others supplying research materials, and officials in London promising to see to its publication upon completion.
Once Hayward was deeply involved in the project, the MoD accepted his letter of resignation in November 1988, believing rightly that he would no longer make a fuss about his predicament, especially since London was seeking his early release - what would result in his serving only half his sentence. Then Downing Street - the same triumvirate which had decided to use the SAS on The Rock - ordered Patrick Finucane's assassination back in Ulster. By this time, Wilson had employed Finucane, the leading republican solicitor in Belfast, to safeguard his interests, and Hayward was increasingly concerned about Finucane's growing involvement in legal redress for the 1982 Shoot-to- Kill victims. Given Finucane's knowledge of 'Steak Knife's activities, and status within the legal profession, he was seen as a bigger threat to British interests than his client.
In March 1988, Nelson had reported to the FRU that the UDA was again plotting Finucane's assassination, and it had made sure that Ian Phoenix's RUC Tasking and Coordination Group, and the Army prevented it. "At the same time, however," Harclerode wrote, "more attention began to paid to Finucane's contacts with senior members of the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein activists." (p. 568) Right before the assassination, Home Office Minister Douglas Hogg warned the Commons that some solicitors were being "unduly sympathetic" to republicans, a charge that deputy SDLP leader Seamus Mallon claimed would determine the fate of the Thatcher government if an assassin's bullet made it a reality. On the night of Finucane's murder, William Stobie, a loyalist quartermaster and RUC informer, warned his handler twice that someone was going to be assassinated that night, but nothing was done to prevent the killers from taking murder weapons to the assassination site. After the Davison fiasco, the different security forces were hardly even talking to one another.
Given Nelson's known hatred of anyone working with the PIRA, and its operatives, especially 'Steak Knife', it was easy for him to initiate the targeting of Finucane. On the night of February 12, 1989, the UFF's Johnny "Mad Dog" Adair, the UVF's Brian Robinson, and the FRU's free-lancer Ken Barrett apparently broke into his house, and killed him in a hail of bullets in front of his family while it was having dinner. Nowhere in sight were his bodyguards, or any security forces, thanks to FRU inaction. Adair was most desirous of filling the gap left by 'Flint' Stone's difficulties, and thereby taking over the UFF's 'C' Company on the Shankill Road. Robinson was the UVF's specialist in motorcycle shootings, having apparently been involved in all the recent plans to kill Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams. Barrett, as Peter Everett discussed in his article about the FRU in Issue Eleven, was given an FRU photograph of Finucane by Nelson, and was driven by his house by the UDA intelligence chief to make sure that there was no slipup this time. On the appointed night, an RUC policemen called Nelson to inform the team that the area was free of security forces, and an hour later Finucane was murdered.
While London thought that its troubles with 'Steak Knife' would be reduced by Finucane's assassination, they, of course, only increased. Only officials with the greatest secrets, and guilty consciences could have thought of such a ploy in the first place. Only such persons would have given any special credibility to 'Steak Knife's legal representation, and what it might claim whether he lived or died. If 'Steak Knife' had been assassinated, any deathbed confession he might have made through his legal counsel would have been dismissed by the general public as just more PIRA propaganda. London had already tipped its hand that this was no ordinary case, though, by sentencing MI5 officer Michael Bettaney, who the Soviets had declined to have spy for them, to 23 years imprisonment in 1984 for telling IRA prisoners tales about its operations in Northern Ireland while on remand in Brixton prison. (Mark Urban, Big Boys' Rules, p. 99) Fincuane's assassination was the most vivid, and telling confirmation of veteran reporter David McKittrick's claims that such killings showed that London was more interested in protecting members of the security forces who pulled the triggers than in justice. (The Irish War, p. 103)
The PIRA's response to Finucane's murder was immediate, and had the hallmarks of 'Steak Knife' settling scores with the security forces who had betrayed him. While the UDA tried to make out that the Finucane murder was just part of a sectarian murder campaign by killing Sinn Fein councillor John Joseph Davey of Gulladuff, Magherafelt two days later, ten days later 50 paratroopers narrowly escaped death when Tern Hill Barracks, Shropshire were largely destroyed by Semtex bombs. There were frustrated attempts a few days later at Stoke Newington, North London, and then at North Yorkshire again against Prime Minister Thatcher when she was scheduled to address another Conservative Party conference.
The campaign had the hallmarks of the Hayward affair. Dessie Grew, whose brother, the unarmed volunteer Seamus, was the target of two assassination attempts by the Guards officer back in 1982 before he was disposed of, had trained the ASU responsible for the attacks on British servicemen in Germany, and was wanted by the police for questioning regarding the murder of an RAF Corporal, and his six-month-old daughter in October 1989. (Harclerode, pp. 573-4) While Lt. General Sir David Ramsbotham, physically responsible for the SAS training base in Hereford, escaped assassination in November when a bomb was discovered under his car in Kensington, a few days later Staff Sergeant Andrew Mudd lost both his legs, and his wife was injured when their car was blown up in Colchester. Mudd, who had been mentioned in despatches back in 1984 for helping capture the gunmen who had tried to kill Adams (Murray, p. 433), was now considered no better than the rest of them.
The Conservative government cracked under the strain. While Home Secretary Douglas Hurd, Hogg's boss, declared right after the latest attempt against the Prime Minister outside Scarborough that the government would not cease its war with the IRA until it was extirpated, and the 'Iron Lady' persisted in her uncompromising pose, the Thatcher ministry was reorganized to seek peace with the republicans. Instead of getting rid of 'Steak Knife' and Hayward, she settled for getting rid of Howe and Younger, moves she would soon come to regret.
Howe was consigned to the ministerial wasteland of Deputy Prime Minister, Lord President of the Council, and Leader of the Commons, and Younger gave up the MoD for a place in the Lords. Tom King went to Whitehall from Belfast, and the untried John Major became Foreign Secretary. Peter Brooke, the new Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, shocked the country three months later when, after admitting that the IRA could not be defeated, he announced that the government was prepared to make peace with it when it gave up terrorism. (Taylor, pp. 313-4)
The immediate reason for the government's July U-turn was John Gorst's learning what was really in Hayward's manuscript, scheduled for publication right after he was released from a Swedish prison in September. Instead of a prosaic apology for his predicament - what would lead to his rehabilitation, it seems, in the new guise of James Rennie - Hayward was so bitter in his description of his treatment by British officials, so graphic in discussion of who he really was, so detailed in how he related to the controversial killings in Ulster John Stalker had been asked to investigate, and so revealing about who DOOK, his helpers Brian, Heather Weissand, and his brother Christopher really were that the British MP felt obliged to add a defusing Foreward about alleged Swedish injustice to the manuscript, and forced Hayward to add an accommodating Acknowlegements preface to all the right people - Brigadier James Emson, Major General Sir Desmond Langley, and Colonel Andrew Parker Bowles - before it was published. London obviously hoped that readers would read no further.
For those who did, it was a shocker. Its cover had a photograph of Hayward in civilian clothes while on a mission, one in which he looked much like a Photofit reconstruction, based upon witnesses' evidence, of statsminister Palme's assassin. Hayward made it crystal clear inside that he was Britain's leading uncover agent in Northern Ireland during the times of the most controversial killings. (Under Fire: My Own Story, p. 40) He made much of the loss of the middle joints on the middle and ring fingers of his right hand (pp. 35-9), injuries which restricted his service to gun-slinging for the 'Det'; yet, he was so embarrassed, and ashamed about his eighteen months service in Northern Ireland that he had not told his wife-to-be about it. He spoke so sarcastically of Swedish officials being the source of claims that he was so employed that the reader was disabused of the idea by the time he was tried for drug smuggling, what was made the result of Stalker's dogged pursuit of him. (p. 276)
When Hayward learned the extent of his set up in Sweden - that DOOK instead of being an incidental player in the process was its central figure, with connections right up through the Foreign Office - his rage knew no bounds. When his solicitor's request to Sir Geoffrey Howe on April 13th that it assist in seeing that he was properly represented was turned down, the accused sarcastically explained: "It was not Government policy to interfere in the internal affairs of another state." (p. 162) When it turned out that the PIRA's DOOK had cleverly shifted the physical set up from Hayward's brother to himself, and then apparently gotten National Drugs Intelligence Unit officers to go along with an informant's claim that Hayward was knowingly involved in his brother's drug trafficking, Simon explained: "My arrest could well have been seen as an ideal opportunity to take a swing at any army officer who had supposedly been 'killing our boys'. The planting of such information is well within the capabilities of the IRA." (p. 173)
Once Simon had learned from his brother how DOOK had set him up, and that his brother's wife, Chantal, had apparently been murdered because she could testify about the IRA man's role in the process, Hayward wrote extensively about DOOK's wealth, family, and associates. The terrorist, though with no visible source of income, had at least two homes, and apartments in Santa Eulalia and Gibraltar, possessions one would expect of one who was receiving $£75,000 per annum in a secret bank account there from the FRU. DOOK also had a grand yacht which Hayward had visited on several occasions. The IRA man also had a number of false passports, including an American one. DOOK had also apparently married, and had a child, though he was often in the company of another woman, as Hayward explained when they met again at Santa Eulalia's Royalty Cafe:
Sitting at a table on the pavement outside it was a dark-haired woman of about thirty-five, with an angular face and wearing sunglasses. I can remember nothing else about her except that she seemed vaguely familiar and was holding a small child, or was it a small dog, in her lap. I am almost one hundred per cent certain that she was Duke's wife, a Dane called Gitta or something similar. She appeared to recognize me and I in turn realized why she looked familiar. She had been on Duke's yacht when we had gone to it for a drink on my last visit. (p. 58)
Ultimately, this woman turned out to be not DOOK's wife but Heather Weissand, apparently aka Captain M, and really Captain Margaret Walshaw. It was her testimony which ultimately secured Simon's conviction on appeal.
Ms. Weissand had told DOOK, and his associate Brian all they needed to know about the mission. The first comment by both men upon meeting Hayward was to ask him about his Army employment (pp. 59 and 69), indicating that she had briefed them about him. Irishman DOOK was described thus: "He was small, about five foot seven, slim and wiry, in his late thirties or early forties. His hair was blond to gingerish, and on this occasion he was clean-shaven, although I remembered a beard from our previous meeting." (p. 59) Brian, while fair-skinned, had a deep tan, and mousey-colored hair. He was making a living on the island, doing odd jobs. Regarding the actions by these conspirators, Richard New, a former British Customs Inspector, and a Director of Veritas Management, concluded in his report for the defence, which was published in the book's Appendix: "...it is my opinion that Simon Hayward should have been acquitted by the Appeal Court, and I consider that that would have been the outcome had he been tried before an English court." (p. 473)
Of course, the reason why the appeal failed was because of the machinations in the UK while it was being heard. Under the circumstances, Hayward's feelings of betrayal went deep. "I have many regrets, but above all my Swedish experience has taught me never to trust. There are very few people to whom I would extend that privilege today. My confidence in a system I have been brought up to believe in and to support has received an almighty dent." (p. 448) Hayward poured scorn on Foreign Office Minister David Mellor's lack of action in his case: "If the government supported such a protest against the Israeli treatment of Palestinian refugees, why could it not take some measure of action over Swedish treatment of a British soldier?" (p. 449)
The failure of the Foreign Office to mute Hayward's bitter criticism of Britain goes a long way in explaining Howe's dismissal. Younger's failure in preventing its publication achieved the same result because he resigned in protest over the Foreign Secretary's sacking. Tom King was brought down from Belfast to contain the damage, what seemed to be a large order with Hayward threatening to become a totally "loose cannon". While the former Guards officer was prevented from appearing on Terry Wogan's talk show because the BBC cancelled it, and the press was making light of his book - The Times reviewer Stuart Teller claiming, for example, that readers would have to wait for its sequel to figure out what the story really was - the FRU decided to reduce its risks from either Hayward or 'Steak Knife' by ending Nelson's career with the UDA by court action. He just knew too many of the secrets for all concerned.
To nail Nelson, the FRU arranged the assassination of the PIRA's Loughlin Maginn by the UVF's Brian Robinson and an associate, apparently Davy McCullough, after a prolonged struggle at his house on the night of August 25, and then a week later, the FRU, led by 'Mags' in two unmarked cars, took out these assassins after they had gunned down Catholic Patrick McKenna in the Ardoyne in a drive-by shooting. "The soldiers crashed a car into the motorbike," Father Murray wrote, "and then shot Robinson dead." (p. 439) The female operator, Harclerode added, killed the flattened Robinson with one shot to the back, one in the wrist, and two to the head (p. 572), reminiscent of Hayward's role in the killing of Francis Bradley. McCullough and an associate, consequently, were the only ones left to take the rap for McKenna's murder.
This unprecedented action by the security forces had the added benefit of getting rid of one of Finucane's killers, who the RUC was apparently pursuing. Robinson had been crowing about the Maginn murder, and once he too was eliminated, the UDA published the Army file on the PIRA's intelligence officer to justify his killing - what led to Stevens' appointment to investigate collusion between the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries in murdering republicans.
While Thatcher was being forced to the sidelines, Hayward and 'Steak Knife' were more dangerous than ever, as we shall see.
Prescriptions for It and Its Cover Up Simply Didn't Work
by Trowbridge H. Ford
As the media did not tell us what we should have known about Lord Hutton when he was appointed to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr. David Kelly, we were not informed of Dr. Keith Hawton's most important research regarding suicide after he delivered his court-appointed verdict to the inquiry on September 2, 2003. As a result, the public was denied seeing how Kelly's murder was planned, and after its was necessarily botched, it was inadequately covered up by a judge who has had long experience in such matters.
When Lord Brian Hutton was appointed hastily by Prime Minister Blair to prevent his government from being consigned to history's dustbin, the media told us what an independent fellow he was, and how his remit guaranteed a full and fair investigation of the matters in question. Not only would we learn how the microbiologist really died but also who in government had 'sexed up' the intelligence about Iraq's WMD. If this proved to be untrue, there would be hell to pay for the BBC, and its reporters, especially Andrew Gilligan.
Of course, we should have been told that Lord Hutton had been more than just Northern Ireland's Lord Chief Justice, and a leading Law Lord in the kingdom's highest court, as his most terse resume for the inquiry stated.
Sir Brian Hutton was been more responsible than anyone else for the current mess in Northern Ireland - from the adoption in the early 1970s of mass detention of terrorist suspects, particularly of the Irish Republican Army, without trial to the current stalemate of the peace process in the province. Hutton allegedly knew just who to arrest, detain under stressful if not torturous circumstances, imprison with the greatest facility, silence of opposition with threats of prosecution, and the like.
It was only after the use of such abilities during his inquiry, resulting in the most blatant whitewash, that we were finally told about all this. Hutton picked his hearing of witnesses, giving of partial testimony, avoiding all kinds of obvious questions, and the recalling of certain ones to validate the most controversial conclusions. People outside Northern Ireland were not supposed to know how such verdicts have often been reached there.
Little wonder that when the whole fraud started to unravel, Danny Morrison, the Provisionals' former "Lord Chief Justice", was permitted in The Guardian to give his side of the story, provided that he didn't say more than absolutely necessary. After reciting many of Hutton's recorded excesses while at Stormont Castle, he alluded to his trial before its Lord Chief Justice back in 1990 in only the vaguest terms. Hutton sentenced Morrison to eight years in prison for threatening taxidriver Sandy Lynch's life while trying to determine who within the Provisionals was leaking its operations to the British.
I mention this because it is just another piece of dirty linen London has in the province, and what it must wash if it hopes to advance peace there - what I alluded to at the end of my column on the matter. The Provisionals were desperate to catch 'Steak Knife', its mole with the British Army, because of its nearly disastrous raid on the Derryard checkpoint, County Tyrone, reminiscent of the cull at Loughgall back in 1987.
Morrison was hoping that Lynch, an RUC informer, could explain how the December raid had been tipped off, and the bomb set to go off next to the troops' quarters had been sabotaged, reminiscent of the PIRA's failure to sink the Eksund, filled with Libyan arms for a 'tet offensive', when French ships were closing in on it off the coast of Brittany in October 1987. Joe Fenton had been hastily executed for allegedly leaking this, so he could not have been the main mole since the Derryard fiasco had still occurred.
Actually, 'Skeak Knife' had gone completely off the reservation because of the effort by Prime Minister Thatcher, Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe, and Secretary of Defence George Younger to make him the fall guy for the cull of Provisional volunteers at the Rock - what made him go on a rampage of attacks, highlighted by the atrocity at Deal, Kent in September 1989, killing ten Royal Marines. Thatcher's government was hoping to reclaim him, with the help of mole 'Stake Knife' aka Freddie Scappaticci and others, to return to his spying for the Army by merely repelling the attack at Derryard.
In sum, Morrison's arrest and conviction was to keep the Provisionals quessing about who had infiltrated its ranks for the British, and was continuing to tip them off about operations - information that Stormont Castle still thinks too sensitive for any meaningful disclosure of, and the British media slavishly follow. No wonder the peace process is not getting anywhere.
The same censorship by the media is manifest when the public tries to understand who Dr. Keith Hawton is, and how he might have unwittingly supplied the plan for Dr. Kelly's murder, and followed it in the cover up. When Hawton introduced himself as a witness before the inquiry, he was quick to announce all his degrees, positions, and honours in the study, and prevention of suicides.
Actually, like most scientists in any field, Hawton had first learned how to assist what he later worked to prevent. The most glaring examples of this are scientists investigating mind-control who learned how to create sects, and then designed means to control them, leaving all kinds of violent groups, like the Symbionese Liberation Army, and robot assassins, like John Lennon's killer, along the way.
Keith Hawton did ground breaking-work in promoting assisted suicide, as his article with Joe Catalin, "Attempted Suicide: A Practical Guide to its Nature and Management," clearly demonstrates. Hawton wanted to put self-deliverance from the pain of dying on a modern basis - what had too long been dominated by extreme measures, dangerous means, and terrifying conclusions.
When Michael Marsden decided to create a web site on the subject, he gave prominent exposure to Hawton's solution to the problem: take 30 tablets of propoxyphene (2 grammes), and something to make you quickly unconscious, like alcohol, provided you eat something with it. For good measure, put a plastic bag over your head, and secure it with a band, and you will be dead within an hour or so.
Now it seems most likely that Kelly's killers decided to use this well-known prescription, especially since Hawton at nearby Oxford would undoubtedly be called by any inquest, to secure his apparent suicide. The only change required was the replacement of propoxyphene by coproxamol, the pain killer Janet Kelly used to allievate the pain caused by her arthritis. Coproxamol has allegedly become the tablet of choice for suicide seekers.
The only trouble with Hawton's directions for Kelly's killers was that he was talking about Assisted Suicide, not Resisted Suicide - what an assassination squad apparently attempted after it bushwhacked him while he was on his walk. The microbiologist put up a fierce fight. While his attackers were forcing 29 of 30 coproxamol tablets down his throat after prying open his mouth, he only vomitted them back up, and, of course, nothing happened, as death from such a dosage can only occur after several days. It takes much longer to destroy the liver. The killers had apparently failed to read the fine print about what coproxamol could accomplish.
Of course, the attackers had no better luck in trying to subdue Kelly with a plastic bag over his head, or severing an artery on his left arm with all this thrashing around in the dark - what would make the murder crystal clear if they persisted. They, after moving Kelly to another site to dispose of alarming clues, finally stuffed a pill down his throat to cause a massive heart attack - what a Mossad kidon had tried on the leader of Hamas in Jordan back in DannyYatom's days - placed an ECG monitor on his chest, and withdrew to their nearby boat to check on its effect.
With this, it seems, being the case, it is easy to imagine how Hawton immediately saw the result as one of assisted suicide by an individual - probably explaining why the idea of second parties was brought unnecessarily into the inquiry - and no amount of evidence to the contrary - personal, physical, pharmacological or toxicological - would persuade him otherwise. While Kelly's killers apparently read Hawton properly - another true believer in his own ideas - they misread Kelly, and the fine print about the blister tables in most ham-fisted ways.
posted by ewar @ 10:16 AM
The Kelly Murder Case
Right click the link above and copy the location to link directly to this article.
The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Thursday the world could be headed for destruction if it does not stop the spread of atomic weapons technology, which has become widely accessible. 
Since three of us wrote our letter to the Guardian on January 27, questioning whether Dr Kelly's death was suicide, we have received professional support for our view from vascular surgeon Martin Birnstingl, pathologist Dr Peter Fletcher, and consultant in public health Dr Andrew Rouse. We all agree that it is highly improbable that the primary cause of Dr Kelly's death was haemorrhage from transection of a single ulnar artery, as stated by Brian Hutton in his report.
Imagine you are a retired and very proud guards officer watching trooping the colour. How embarrassed and puzzled you would feel if things started to go wrong. Small things, initially, that others not brought up in the system might not notice. The columns of scarlet-clad troops slightly out of sync with the marching music. Some of the orders being given by men in suits rather than by the sergeant majors on parade. I used to work for the defence intelligence staff (DIS) and the Cabinet Office assessments staff - who draft the papers for the joint intelligence committee (JIC) and intelligence reports for No 10 - and that's how I felt during the Hutton inquiry, and how I feel now. 
The disappearance of President Reagan's Navy Secretary John F. Lehman, Jr. from the American political scene after he apparently resigned on February 16, 1987, was the greatest mystery until recently. The high-flying, flamboyant youngster, still in his forties, seemed destined to much higher position, hoping even to take over from beleaguered National Security Adviser Vice Admiral John Poindexter when the Iran-Contra scandal broke, and being among the short list of candidates to head the Pentagon when Vice President George Bush set about forming a new administration in January 1989.
Well, I've been having a Dyke of a time - oral surgery, stitches, swelling, antibiotics - all the fun a Calvinist could wish for. And when you look like Barbra Streisand after three weeks under water and your pain relief is preventing you from tying, or even recognising, your own shoes, then you're in the perfect condition to stay at someone else's house and watch cable TV.
When a C-123K supply plane loaded with lethal weapons, allegedly belonging to a Pennsylvania company, Corporate Air Services, was shot down over Nicaragua on October 6, 1986, killing pilots William Cooper and Wallace Sawyer, and the CIA's cargo-kicker Eugene Hasenfus was taken prisoner by the Sandinistas, the Reagan administration's, and the Thatcher government's crucial covert operations threatened to be exposed, a record which risked the President and the Prime Minister being removed from office, and many of their most important subordinates going to prison. 
Washington has dismissed a United Nations report that finds no evidence Iran has been seeking atomic weapons. 
On the night of October 9, 1987, four loyalist gunmen working for the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) broke into the West Belfast flat of Francisco Notarantonio, long time member of the IRA, and retired taxi driver, and killed him as he lay in bed with his wife. According to Peter Harclerode in Secret Soldiers, the incident finally persuaded his Force Research Unit handlers in the British Army that its mole Brian Nelson, the Association's chief intelligence officer, might be passing along information from its Crucible and Vengeful computer systems to facilitate sectarian murders. 
While the British government thought that its troubles, caused primarily by the assassination of statsminister Olof Palme in Stockholm on February 28, 1986, were rendered manageable by the imprisonment of apparent hitman Captain Simon Hayward aka James Rennie in Sweden on trumped-up drug smuggling charges for five years in November 1987, they vastly increased, so much so, in fact, that London ultimately had to start seeking peace with the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA). Once anybody succumbs to blackmailers, it is almost impossible to escape without continuing to give into their demands.
