Gladio, NATO's Dagger at the Heart of Europe: The Pentagon-Nazi-Mafia Terror Axis is wellicht het beste boek dat over Operatie Gladio werd geschreven vanuit onverdachte bron. Auteur Richard Cottrell was immers een politicus voor de Britse Conservatieve Partij en lid van het Europees Parlement van 1979 to 1989.

Ook België komt uitgebreid aan bod in dit boek.

• Waar komt de terreurtactiek van Gladio vandaan?
  The architect of these tactics was an elusive and extremely dangerous Frenchman called Yves Guérin-Sérac. In a black sense, the man was a genius. A small and wiry figure, he was a decorated veteran of the French colonial wars in Indo-China and Algeria. He was in thrall to his personal vision of a Christian-Fascist New World Order. He was also the intellectual mentor of Gladio terrorism. He wrote the basic training and propaganda manuals which can be fairly described as the Gladio order of battle. He devised the ‘steering’ of urban revolutionaries by planting interlopers. These could in turn incite acts of terror. They could also uncover plots that were then ‘just allowed to happen.’ When we analyse all the European terrorism committed during the Cold War, it appears that many atrocities were in fact intercepted by the authorities well in advance. They sat on their hands and looked the other way. In the subsequent disorder, they appeared as statues of calm. The bullet and the bomb were foremost intended to destroy the existing political order and fix the blame on the communists.
• Het verhaal van een Gladio Contract Killer:
  Çatlı’s fabulous career as gangster, mercenary, government agent provocateur and Gladio contract killer came to a sudden end on 3rd November 1996, in what became known as the Susurluk Incident. He died in a car crash in the undistinguished small town of that name in western Anatolia. The Mercedes he was driving in some haste smashed into the back of a heavy truck. He died instantly, along with his girl friend, an attractive fashion mannequin called Gonca Us. A third body pulled from the wreckage was that of Hüseyin Kocadağ, the former deputy chief of the Istanbul gendarmerie. He was also closely connected to Counter-Guerrilla, the Turkish Gladio, and frequently given ultra-secret assignments for the special operations department of the national police force. Sedat Bucak, a powerful Kurdish clan leader, whose men were armed by the state to fight against separatist violence, survived with little more than a broken leg and a fractured skull. As investigators got to work, it emerged that Çatlı possessed a clutch of eight national identity cards, each with a different alias. These included documents made out in the name of Mehmet Ozkay, the same alias that Mehmet Ali Ağca often used on his travels. He also held two Turkish diplomatic passports which had been approved by none other than the interior minister Mehmet Agar, who was also a high True Path party official.
• Linken tussen Gladio en Iran-contra:
  In the usual way of these things, Iran-Contra was accidentally exposed when a lone supply plane ditched in the rain forest. Every individual involved, right up to the president himself, lied copiously. Daniel Ellsberg, the State Department whistleblower who exposed the US military’s best-kept Vietnam secrets (immortalized as the Pentagon Papers) denounced Iran-Contra as ‘quite the worst covert operation in US history.’ Reagan, transparently guilty as charged, dodged an impeachment rap by invoking the ‘took an afternoon nap’ immunity clause. It surely befitted the image of a venerated public institution metaphorically rocking his chair on the front porch of the White House, sucking on a hickory pipe and nodding warmly at passers-by. Iran-Contra was a natural offshoot of the years of lead which rocked the European continent for more than twenty years. Many players had dual roles and loyalties in different camps, including NATO, the Pentagon, the CIA, the Holy See, Eastern bloc states Bulgaria and Romania, Turkish criminal gangs and the Mafia. Supporting roles were reserved for Mossad, British, German and Italian intelligence.
• De stay-behind netwerken worden opgezet oa. met medewerking van Paul-Henri Spaak:
  Some five hundred years before Christ, the Chinese master warrior-philosopher Sun Tzu wrote a manual of war extolling the virtues of the skilful leader who ‘subdues the enemy’s troops without a fight… who overthrows their kingdom without a lengthy fight in the field.’ Even before WW2 was over, the future American counter-intelligence chief Allen Welsh Dulles, Winston Churchill and European leaders including Paul Spaak of Belgium and future president Francesco Cossiga of Italy, laid the basis of a network of ‘stay-behind armies,’ pop-up guerrillas intended to wreak havoc among Soviet invaders behind the lines. They drew on the practical experience of the ‘Jedburgh Teams,’ or ‘Jeds,’ - established early in 1944 - to join the talents of Britain’s Special Operations Executive, the US Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA) and commandos drawn from Dutch, Belgian and Free French forces. Small specialised units were dropped on moonless nights deep into enemy-occupied territory to liaise with local resistance groups, arrange airdrops of arms and ammunition and generally stir up acts of sabotage against the Germans. The American ‘Jeds’ included Bill Colby, future chief of the CIA spookocracy during the imperial reigns of Nixon and Gerald Ford.[7] Colby was credited with much of the footwork in setting up the Gladio secret army programme across Europe, including theoretically neutral Sweden, actually a shadow NATO member. He confided in his memoirs Honourable Men (1978) that only an exclusive coterie of insiders in each country were entrusted with the knowledge that these forces existed within their own national boundaries. He regarded Gladio as a straightforward strategic decision with little in the way of moral complexity. Victory over the Axis powers did not eliminate the potential for conflict with the victors’ former ally, the Soviet Union. Ambiguity did arise.
• Centrale rol werd echter vervuld door CIA-agent Frank Wisner. Hij pleegde in 1965 zelfmoord:
  Wisner’s fertile imagination ran amok even on American soil, strictly speaking outside the Agency’s purview, according to its founding articles. He dreamt up Operation Mockingbird, after the Texan song thrush that artfully mimics the calls of other birds. It was a disinformation highway, featuring Wisner the ideological traffic cop directing the re-writing of history. He proudly called his creation the ‘Mighty Wurlitzer.’ Wisner’s mockingbirds included some of America’s best-known reporters and commentators, who eagerly signed on to the CIA’s subsidy to exaggerate the Russian threat. The Wurlitzer hummed with great irony from the offices of the future Watergate-busting Washington Post, whose publisher, Philip Graham, and his powerful spouse, Katherine ‘The Great,’ jointly reigned as king and queen of the Georgetown set.
  Wisner gave every impression of being crushed, and never regained a semblance of his old irrepressible confidence. He was side-lined on permanent sick leave. A genius of a certain black school, it was perhaps scarcely surprising that behind all this hyperactivity, he nursed a condition of undiagnosed mental illness. He gradually surrendered to the lure of chronic clinical depression. In 1965 he placed his own son’s shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.[9] An important Gladio godfather was laid to rest.
• Het bestaan van Gladio & de stay--behind netwerken is lang alle kanten op officiële wijze bevestigd:
  Four months later, a string of revelations concerning the secret armies largely unstitched all his good work. In November, Guy Coëme, Belgian Minister of Defence, confessed to the Belgian units of sleeping soldiers, and was followed by his Greek counterpart, who admitted another troop known as ‘Sheepskin.’ Turkey shared with Italy the experience of decades-long, politically-skewed violence. On 3rd December 1990, General Kemal Yılmaz, chief of special forces in Turkey (the Special Warfare Department, or OHD), revealed the existence of Counter-Guerrilla.
  Almost immediately in the wake of the Italian revelations, veteran quasi-socialist statesman Bülent Ecevit informed the press that he was initiated into the existence of Counter-Guerrilla immediately after he began his first term as premier in 1974. Ecevit, who was locked up after General Evren’s Counter-Guerrilla and CIA-backed coup in 1980 - and therefore had a quiver of reasons to fulminate revenge - was then indiscreet enough to imply that Counter-Guerrilla units might indeed have been involved in domestic terror. He specifically cited the stay-behind army’s role in the bloody Taksim Square massacre in Istanbul on 1st May 1977. On hearing Ecevit’s pronouncement, Defence Minister Safa Giray snapped: ‘Ecevit had better keep his f***ing mouth shut!’ Or else, one presumes.
• Zelfs het brave onschuldige sociaal-democratische Zweden paste perfect in het Gladioschema (niets is wat het lijkt).
  Sweden is classically one of those countries where things are never quite as placid as they appear to the surface. The murder in 1986 of the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, a galvanising figure in world politics, rocked Scandinavia with an impact similar to the John and Robert Kennedy assassinations and ignited nearly as many conspiracy theories. Palme was premier of a country often described as the epitome of non-aggression and clammy omnipresent state paternalism. The revisionist view from John Ray, who writes about psychological forms of authoritarianism, regards Sweden as an example of ‘fascism in slow motion.’ In WW2, she leaned towards the Nazis, allowing war materials and troops to transit the country (to attack Norway), and fed the Germans with vital ores. The tightly organised folkhemmet (the Social Democratic people’s state), developed from 1932 onwards, was a rigid form of corporatist society where high personal taxation - which paid for generous social and welfare benefits - functioned as a subtle means to exercise control over the population. Per Engdahl (1909-1994), charismatic leader of the Swedish far Right, was a great friend and ally of the British Blackshirt leader Sir Oswald Mosley. They worked together in the 1950s designing an anti-Semitic, pan-European fascist confederation. Engdahl always had strong support among the Swedish officer corps and the national Polisen. But his influence spread far wider. When he was in Stockholm setting up the Sveaborg unit, Bill Colby of the future watery grave - ever one to snap up a Nazi - recognised Engdahl’s potential and quickly put him on the CIA’s books. One of his first tasks was picking safe hands for the Swedish Gladio unit.
  Jerker Widén, an analyst at the Swedish National Defence College, painted a picture of a highly militarised state enjoying most-favoured nation status with the US and NATO, ushered to the innermost corridors of power, and showered with the latest high-tech weaponry. Sweden was in truth a shadow member of the NATO joint command (as it is now) and in war would occupy a vital forward position. But Swedes at large did not share the knowledge possessed by Palme - that her western fjords bristled with American nuclear submarines, atom-tipped missiles trained on Moscow, until 1994.
• Als u bovenstande leest, bent u dan nog verbaads dat de Zweden er als de kippen bijzijn om lidmaatschap van de NAVO te vragen? Plus ça change....Maar wat dan met de moord op Olaf Palme?
  The brief facts about Palme’s last moments to be stated with any certainty are the following. As a champion of open government, Palme spurned bodyguards, strolling freely about the streets like any private citizen. Close to midnight on 28th February 1986, as he was leaving the Grand Cinema in central Stockholm with his wife Lisbeth, a figure stepped from the shadows, drew a revolver and shot him once in the back, the barrel positioned to pierce the heart. The victim died instantly. A second round lightly wounded Mrs. Palme. The gunman’s actions were performed at a leisurely pace. He displayed no signs of concern at committing cold-blooded murder in full view of witnesses, and then vanished calmly into the night without visible haste. Several observers commented his body movements seemed to indicate he knew to a second exactly when the premier would reach the spot where the execution would be performed.
  The indications of a contract job, rather than a rash act performed by someone with a disordered mind, were compelling. Two years after the event, the obliging patsy duly made his appearance, a grubby petty criminal and drug runner called Christer Pettersson. His useful pedigree included a previous homicide and a tendency to brag that he wanted to kill Palme. The psychological urge to confess is not uncommon (as in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment), particularly if the individual is a wrong side of the track hankering for attention. Pettersson was well known to powerful Stockholm criminal clans, who probably served up his head on a plate. He was tried, convicted, and then cleared on appeal, which is how the matter stood until he too was murdered in 2004. Pettersson suddenly announced to the media that he had an ‘important message’ for Palme’s son, Mårten, who agreed to a meeting - which in the event never took place. On 16th September, Pettersson was found lying in a coma at his home with devastating head injuries. Reports circulated in the media that he received a visit from the police on the 15th and was not seen outside his home thereafter. He never recovered consciousness. This crime is also unsolved. Like Jack Ruby, who struck down Lee Harvey Oswald, Christer Pettersson knew everything and nothing at the same time. A decayed and shattered personality was supplied with a sense of mission (again like Ruby) by the Palme slaying, which led him to claim responsibility even after he was cleared by the highest courts. As a serious candidate, he was perfectly incredible. We shall never know what he intended to tell Mårten Palme concerning the murder of his father on the eve of his own death in 2004. But it was sufficiently compromising for his skull to be smashed like an egg shell before he could open his mouth.
• Waarom verlopen die moordaanslagen toch altijd op dezelfde manier? Misschien omdat er dan toch iets meer achter zit? Hallo, Johan Braeckman? Wat had Palme misdaan om een moordaanslag te verdienen? Is er een motief? Want er zijn aanwijzingen dat Palme zelf verbonden was met Gladio. Had hij "second thoughts"? Moest hij het zwijgen worden opgelegd?
  At the end of 1950, Palme organised a conference in Stockholm which led to the creation of the International Students Conference. The CIA, secretly funding this organisation, wanted Palme to be the head, which he declined in favour of the diplomatic service. In 2009, Ingmar Engman - a former agent in Sweden’s military intelligence - shed light in dark corners when he said ‘Olof Palme’s co-operation with the Americans and the CIA was well known throughout the military intelligence service.’ Other sources described Palme as closely involved in setting up the Sveaborg stay-behind unit, which unquestionably would have placed him in close liaison with the secret soldier mastermind Bill Colby.
• Had het iets te maken dat Palme een andere richting insloeg m.b.t. het Israelische-Palestijnse conflict. En kijk eens welke namen weer opduiken?
  The Wallenberg dynasty rules the largest family-owned company in Europe, a banking and industrial combine accounting for about one-third of Sweden’s economy. It was a pivotal Bilderberg meeting, as documented by F. Wm. Engdahl in A Century of War. An American viceroy - probably Bilderberg regular Henry Kissinger - presented the vassals of Europe a daring strategy to rescue the dollar: an oil shock followed by petro-dollar recycling, and a long-term turn away from growth to ‘greening’ - controlling economies rather than growing them. A few months later, Kissinger instigated the Yom Kippur War, which gave the Saudis the pretext for the new oil price level, and for Israel to occupy more Palestinian territory.
• Had Palme kennis van Iran-contra?
  Scarcely a month after he was killed, a plane crashed in the Nicaraguan jungle; it was loaded with munitions, which led to the exposure of the Iran-Contra affair. If Palme had somehow intercepted the activities of the voluble Lt.-Col. Oliver North, then any man in possession of such knowledge was certainly walking a slender path between here and eternity.
• De bewijzen van een Gladio contract zijn overweldigend:
  The accumulation of evidence which points to a Gladio contract killing is compelling. Two CIA whistleblowers suggested the gunman was acting on orders from Gladio in Italy. They were Richard Brenneke and Gene ‘Chips’ Tatum, an Iran-Contra operations pilot who claimed Palme was victim of a hitherto unknown CIA secret assassination programme called Pegasus. In April 1992, Dagens Nyheter published a series of articles alleging a NATO-commissioned assassination, drawing on documents stating: ‘planning local, technician imported.’ (Full details in the endnote.(N5)) That same year, the Italian state television channel RAI broadcast a claim that CIA hit man Michael Townley visited Stockholm about a week before the shooting, supposedly on a reconnaissance exercise. In Rome, President (and former Gladio boss) Francesco Cossiga panicked himself into sending premier Giulio Andreotti an urgent letter pleading for advice what to do. Andreotti maintained his usual Olympian silence, and he had sound reasons. Townley was a close associate of the Italian neofascist Stefano Delle Chiaie, who crops up many times in these pages. Delle Chiaie moved in the inner circle of Gelli’s P2 lodge. He was on warm terms with many intimates of Gladio, prelates and criminals, who were operating the secret finance conduits within the Vatican, and a secret outpost in Portugal acting as the command centre behind the anni di piombo.
• Nog meer Gladio-slachtoffers in Zweden (of van de Mossad? Of maakt dat geen verschil?):
  The Swedish foreign affairs minister - the young and popular Anna Lindh, rising star of the Social Democratic Party, widely tipped as the next premier - was fatally stabbed in an apparently motiveless and frenzied attack while shopping in a busy Stockholm department store. Like Palme, she always shunned security details. The police pounced on a 25-year-old Swedish-born Serb, Mijailo Mijalovic, who appeared to hail from false-flag central casting. Mijalovic was rootless and dysfunctional, those excellent qualifications for the aspiring patsy. But difficulties immediately arose concerning conflicting descriptions of the alleged assassin, who to complicate matters kept referring to ‘we’ under interrogation. There was a reprise in Norway eight years later. The gunman Anders Behring Breivik, accused of a crazed solo massacre in July 2011 that claimed scores of victims, also spoke of accomplices. Some witnesses (pointedly not called to court) who were present in the store that lunchtime insisted the knifeman was ‘tall and powerfully built,’ aged perhaps 35, with a hardened pock-marked face and a bulky military-style jacket. As Christopher Bollyn’s superb investigation for the American Free Press later suggested, this image was completely incompatible with the widely-circulated fuzzy video snaps of the pathetic Mijalovic strolling into the store clad in a sweatshirt and baseball cap. Mijalovic was duly sentenced to life. After legal arguments, the sentence was confirmed but the prisoner - diagnosed as mentally ill - was placed incommunicado in a closed psychiatric ward, where he remains. He spoke of presences in his head, especially Jesus, that egged him on to stab the minister. But other voices heard shortly after her death observed factually that Lindh was the fourth in a line of unremitting Swedish political champions of the Palestinian cause to meet a violent end. The chain commenced with Count Folke Bernadotte, the chief UN negotiator in Palestine, gunned down by Stern Gang terrorists in Jerusalem in 1948. Then came another famous UN peacemaker, Dag Hammarskjöld, in 1961. Lindh’s political mentor Olof Palme, who was also a UN-appointed peacebroker and a prominent advocate of the Palestinian cause, had died seventeen years earlier. Lindh had accused the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon of ruthless war crimes, campaigned for a nuclear-free Middle East (not sparing Israel’s atom silos) and insisted in 2003 that the EU sever all ties with Israel. This was scarcely likely to spare her from the long arms of Mossad or the CIA. Like the assassinated trio of Palme, Hammarskjöld and Count Bernadotte, Anna Lindh was another obstacle to big power machinations.
• Something rotten in de state of Belgium, en de Islamitische bogeyman:
  The chronic story of the disintegration of this patchwork country, thanks in no small degree to the activities of paramilitary outfits owing allegiance to NATO, earns a chapter to itself (Something Rotten in the State of Belgium, Chapter XIII). For now we can say the long political crisis which began in summer 2007 dramatised the intrinsic ungovernability of Belgium against a creeping barrage of propaganda intended to encourage and dignify the full independence of Flanders. Such a state would of course prove the perfect safe haven for the North Atlantic Alliance, the armed camp manipulating the country’s direction for almost 40 years. It was no coincidence that this electoral impasse occurred against a background of rising unrest and violence centring on Belgium’s 500,000 strong Muslim community. The explosive growth of the Islamic population, which far outstrips the ethnic Belgian birth rate, raised to American and thus NATO minds the spectre of fabled Eurabia as successor to the lapsed communist bogey. Eruptions of street violence - especially in Antwerp with its fast-swelling immigrant Arabic population, all credulously reported by the media as the work of Islamic troublemakers.
• Wie deelt feitelijk de lakens uit in België?
  In June 2003, Donald Rumsfeld, then the US defense secretary, threatened to withdraw NATO HQ from Belgium unless the government revoked legislation granting Belgian courts the right to try US military personnel for war crimes committed anywhere in the world. Denouncing ‘harassment by a pack of Left-wing lawyers,’ Rumsfeld’s threats - empty, if anyone thought seriously about it - nonetheless neatly encapsulated the contemptuous regard the US authorities hold towards a sovereign allied state and its government. This was exactly the attitude that resulted in NATO’s eviction from France by President de Gaulle. The Belgians caved in, which left few doubts concerning the nature of the real power in the land.
• Veel lijkt er niet veranderd in België. Nog iets dat nooit veranderd: psychologische oorlogsvoering:
  One of those primarily responsible was air force colonel and later general Edward Lansdale, who devoted his career to the madlands of macabre counter-insurgency and destabilisation plots. He earned his laurels practicing counter-insurrection in the Philippines and later Indo-China, before he was let loose on the world. Lansdale seemed to have stepped straight out of a surreal retake on James Bond, and the claim has been made he was the role model for Alden Pyle in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. But Pyle was much too sanctimonious.[24] Lansdale, on the other hand, decidedly was unquiet and quite possibly pathologically unbalanced. He was industrially mischievous, self-promoting and intelligent, and responsible for this gifted insight on black warfare: ‘In using it in today’s dirty, secretive wars, or in the future, the important thing to remember is that it is a weapon and that a weapon has its own unique use and its own effect.’ Wary sceptics denounced him as susceptible to any ‘nutty ideas that seemed to him plausible.’ Yet he wrote with considerable perception: ‘Psychological warfare is probably man’s oldest weapon, aside from bare hands.’ He developed an amateur grasp for the anthropology of myriad indigenous tribes, and soon began to convert their customs and superstitions into tools of war. One day he cheerfully had his men swoop down from the trees and impersonate blood-sucking vampires to terrify members of a particularly rebellious Filipino tribe. Colonel Walter Kurtz, who in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now goes crazy on drugs and mutates into a depraved warlord surrounded by grisly tribal fetishes, is eerily close to a newsreel of Lansdale-inspired adventures carried out amid the lush vegetation of Asia. Lansdale’s comrades, who wrote him off as a fantasist living out an extended practical joke in the blistering jungle heat, failed to see that beneath his affinity for eccentric and peculiar methods lay the deeply-held conviction that he was a political warrior employing the best local materials that came to hand.
• Een belangrijke leider van de Gladio-operatie was Generaal Lemnitzer, de man achter Operation Northwoods:
  Unwittingly, JFK provided Lemnitzer with safe conduct to finish his plan. The necessary accommodations were made with the CIA, who were of the same mind and willing to bury the hatchet in this greater cause. The agency’s secret purse would prove extremely useful in funding the operation. Even before he was safely ensconced in his NATO day job, Lemnitzer was behind the schemes to murder President Charles de Gaulle, with the aid of disaffected Algerian veterans, Hungarian dissidents and Gladio guerrillas.
  Dealey Plaza bore the template of a ready-made made Gladio-style assassination project. Among the items which have long teased investigators is a photograph depicting the so-called ‘three tramps’ being led off by a rather unruffled cop, who looks as though he has been assigned a mundane chore. One of these scruffy individuals was later identified as Charles Harrelson, a contract killer with the Red Squads - undercover police intelligence units operating in the 1920s to infiltrate, harass and gather intelligence on suspicious political and social groups. Another of the tramps is reputed to be Chauncey Holt, supposedly the ‘figure on the grassy knoll’ appearing in the famous grainy footage, apparently taking aim at the JFK cavalcade. Holt was a brilliant counterfeiter with a curious sideline in painting celebrity portraits. Clint Eastwood was among those who sat before his easel. Holt never denied he was one of the tramps. Both were accustomed to working for the CIA and organised crime at the same time. They had also become enmeshed in the so-called ‘International Rescue Committee,’ the secret slush fund created by the CIA to launder money the agency earned from its freelance drug rackets. Holt explained his role was to drive into town one of the most feared terminators in the mob world, Chicago hitman Charles ‘Chuckie’ Nicoletti, who had at least twenty scalps to his belt. Nicoletti, it was said, never missed. The third is said to be Charles Rogers, a Houston resident accused in 1965 of chopping up his parents and freezing their remains in the family refrigerator. He has never been seen again, which may explain the swirl of rumours he left behind claiming he was a CIA sub-contractor. Lois Gibson - world-renowned ‘woman of a thousand faces,’ for her extraordinary expertise in facial profiling and pathology of photographic images - has stated unequivocally that all three tramps are correctly identified as Holt, Harrelson and Rogers. As investigators began to pore over the identity of everyone in this strange snap, there were those who felt able to identify with some certainty a furtive figure creeping alongside a fence behind the three so-called tramps. According to his peers, this was none other than Edward Lansdale, not long before sacked by Robert McNamara for refusing to co-operate in the killing of Lansdale’s long-time friend and best buddy housemate, South Vietnamese strongman General Diệm. Another account tendered requiring settlement. Lansdale was seen in Dallas that day by associates who swore they recognised him.
• Nog wat meer over Lemnitzer:
  When he finally hung up his uniform after 51 years, he went on to become a prominent fraterniser with the neocons and especially their schemes to deceive western publics over the scale of the Soviet threat. He sat on neocon-packed CIA-baiting committees whose objective was to trash all intelligence which suggested Russia was probably collapsing economically and politically, as indeed it was. Lemnitzer died in 1988.
• De CIA in Afrika:
  The Portuguese dictator, the ageing António de Oliveira Salazar, turned up his collar against the ‘wind of change’ because, like the CIA, he feared a surge tide of communism. Guérin-Sérac’s press gang was behind the assassination of the renegade Portuguese General Humberto Delgado, gunned down in the border town of Olivenza on 13th February 1965. Next to go was Eduardo Mondlane, charismatic leader of the Frelimo independence movement, because he posed an increasing threat to Portuguese rule in the east African colony of Mozambique. He was a beacon for millions of young Africans all over the continent, drawn to liberation and empowerment. The tall and handsome scholar loved the bookish academic world he gave up just six years before. What followed proved that his enemies knew their man all too well. He was killed on 3rd February 1969, probably by an Aginter-devised booby trap mailed in a book, which exploded in his face at an American friend’s villa in the Tanzanian capital of Dar-es-Salaam. The bomb set off another explosion, a brutal civil war from which the country has never recovered, while the CIA stealthily constructed a massive surveillance and espionage operation covering the whole of East Africa. The ‘last enemy’ Amilcar Cabral, mulatto leader of the freedom movement in the strategically interesting archipelago of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, probably signed his own death sentence in Havana in 1966 when he declared: “We the peoples of the countries of Africa, still completely dominated by Portuguese colonialism, are prepared to send to Cuba as many men and women as may be needed to compensate for the departure of those who for reasons of class or of inability to adapt have interests or attitudes which are incompatible with the interests of the Cuban people.” Cabral could not be trusted with a clutch of gale-battered islands that happened to offer an almost-perfect haven for submarines cruising the Atlantic. He was assassinated, allegedly by PIDE agents (but quite probably by Guérin-Sérac’s death squad) on 20th January 1973, just before his movement unilaterally declared independence.
• De CIA in Latijns-Amerika:
  There Aginter was destined to play a command performance. In 1963, the CIA provoked a series of three revolutions, in Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala. The Guatemalan business was grisly, involving the deaths of some 50,000 civilians in the tiny banana republic. Aginter people were involved in all these operations, but especially Guatemala, where a laconic, drawling American called Jay Sablonsky came to prominence. He was sometimes just plain Jay Salby, or Hugh C. Franklin (on his Aginter-forged Guatemalan passport). Supposedly a businessman hailing from Philadelphia, he was actually the third member of the triumvirate who controlled Aginter. The Scottish anarchist Stuart Christie, renowned for attempting while yet a teenager in 1964 to blow up Generalissimo Franco, believes he may have crossed paths with Sablonsky, when the two found themselves in the same Spanish hospital. But there was something else rather curious about this middle 30s, stubble-chinned Clint Eastwood look-alike. A string of loyalties at various times connected this roaming hero of Gladio to the US Army’s infamous School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, the Bay Biscayne waterfront boys in Miami, the CIA and the OAS. By 1973, the goal of nailing down Latin America seemed tantalisingly close. Guérin-Sérac’s Fascist International iron circle acquired additional tangible form in 1975, when an exclusive club of six Latin American dictators met in conclave, and created Operation Condor with the aim of crushing all resistance. Some key facilities, such as the radio communications hub at the US Army’s Southern Command HQ in Miami, were lent out to tyrannical secret police units who ran the Condor death machine on a day-to-day basis. Condor was stiffened with OAS survivors. Reinforcements arrived in the early ‘70s, among them P2 puppet master Licio Gelli, who laid the foundations for long-running connections between P2 and the South American clique of grisly fascist dictators.
• Grossouvre, Mitterand, zijn extreem-rechtse start, de Rainbow Warrior en Gladio in Frankrijk:
  Grossouvre was estranged from his old boss Mitterrand, whose inscrutable visage was known to everyone in France as Le Sphinx. The media obligingly spun the cover story that he committed suicide from an ‘aching sense of loss.’ The small difficulty was that slugs fired by the pistol which sent him to eternity appeared not to perfectly match the revolver, a point 357 Magnum he was still gripping in one hand. Another curiosity was exactly how he managed to score two shots to his own head. There was talk, gulped down by the newspapers, of an ‘indecipherable message,’ manic depression, signs of weariness and yearning to leave this world. When he did - voluntarily or otherwise - he carried off many useful secrets. The man of the shadows was former commandant in chief of the French stay-behind army, who began his secret military career as officer in charge of Arc-en-Ciel - the Rainbow - based in Lyon. He was privy to Mitterrand’s personal decision to sink the Greenpeace yacht Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour, New Zealand, on 10th July 1985. And he knew exactly why Mitterrand sanctified Yves Guérin-Sérac, the most fanatical terrorist in contemporary French history. In the course of a long life as a wealthy businessman, media magnate, counsellor of state, agent for French external intelligence SDECE and the CIA, the lean-framed, bearded aristocrat managed to find time to father six children. But he was really married to his lifelong muse en chef, François Mitterrand. In the course of his confusing wandering can imagine how keenly Le Sphinx hung on news from Africa, preening himself for his arrival at the long-anticipated pinnacles of public life. The melodramatic Mitterrand, whose socialism was not even skin-deep, schooled himself in a pre-war nursery of political parties that skidded to a halt a hairsbreadth short of full-blown fascism. As Europe drifted to war in the mid-1930s, he belonged to the National Volunteers, a paramilitary group associated with far-Right movements, including the Croix de Feu (the Cross of Fire) which toppled a sickly, Left-leaning government in 1934. He wrote for L’Echo de Paris, mouthpiece of the Far Right, and was regularly seen at mass demonstrations with a strong xenophobic flavour. He had close friends in La Cagoule (The Cowl), extremists who made a considerable nuisance of themselves. Formally titled the Comité secret d’action révolutionnaire, or plain CSAR, La Cagoule had a fondness for causing terrorist explosions which were then blamed on the Left - the standard Gladio tactic. It was tightly organised on military lines, with cell structures later identified with the NATO secret armies. Prominent Cagoulards included Eugène Schueller, founder of the L’Oréal cosmetics empire; Jean Filliol, international assassin and leading officer of the Vichy military police; and General Henri Giraud, commander of the Free French forces in Algeria, who prepared the way for the Allied landings there in 1944. Lifting the stones from La Cagoule is to uncover a network of connections leading to the Jesuits, the Knights of Malta and ephemeral conspiracies like the Synarchists, usually dismissed as a paranoid fantasy of a big business plot to rule the world.[29] Keeping such exotic company as this, Mitterrand might be excused as a young man searching for a cause. What he definitely never found was socialism - even as ultimately the leader, nominally, of the French socialist party. Mitterrand’s fluid political personality meant he suffered no discomfort in the company of men like the Gladio mastermind Yves Guérin-Sérac, and of course, his lifetime aide François de Grossouvre. Their willingness to employ any means to meet the ends suited his aims perfectly.
• Meer over François de Grossouvre:
  Scarcely had the dust settled from the Pont-sur-Seine ambush than NATO HQ received a furious diplomatic protest from de Gaulle himself, ordering Alliance officials to cease ‘manipulating’ the French underground army forthwith. The president was clearly referring to the recent attempt on his life. De Gaulle’s source was his personal supervisor of intelligence services, Jacques Foccart, an ambiguous figure always ready to work both sides of the tracks. He will shortly make a worthy bow in greater detail. Mention of Foccart at once conjures up a fourth, dimly-visible figure in the frame of Pont-sur-Seine. François de Grossouvre was the alter ego of Foccart in the murky world of scheming and plotting. His well-thumbed rolodex read like a Who’s Who of the French deep state. In fact, the pair were in a duel of the rolodexes, except when - in the usual manner of le souterrain politique français - they found common ground.
  Grossouvre, like his boss Mitterrand, was a figure of the Right but inclined to cross-dress politically when the incentive arose. So was Foccart, and they worked comfortably together setting up the extreme nationalist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen’s personal militia. The explanation was simple, at least in France. Le Pen controlled a large reservoir of electoral support which could be swung in either direction of the political pendulum. It was also the natural gravitational sump for the half million or so ex-Algerian colonist pieds-noirs who fled to France. Le Pen’s presence and importance in the French political landscape was sufficient to have an intelligence source planted close to him, and the support he controlled nourished against the day when it might be needed. These were still very young days of the infant Fifth Republic, when anything might happen, or could be made to happen. For de Gaulle, an axis of Foccart and Grossouvre presented the risk of liaisons dangereuses. Foccart’s intuition that Gaullism might not be a passing phenomenon was a prominent factor in the assassination attempt at Pont-sur-Seine. If natural evolution of the political succession in France required a good shove now and again, then Foccart was the man to see to it. Bald and bespectacled, so rarely photographed he was known as ‘the invisible man,’ he was just as effective at mustering delinquents as he was bringing them to heel. For this reason he earned another title: ‘master of infidelities.’
• Cia, drugshandel, Permindex, CMC, Ferenc Nagy etc...
  De Gaulle’s additional justification accused Bastien-Thiry of bringing ‘three Hungarians’ into the plot. These were the three individuals listed on the charge sheet, including the young Varga László, who fought bravely in the Budapest insurrection at the age of fourteen. Unravelling the riddle of how this unusual trio came to be in the Avenue Petit Clamart leads to the dagger hidden beneath the cloak, clutched by a Hungarian CIA asset called Ferenc Nagy. He was briefly premier of Hungary, until the communists took over and then forced him from office at the end of May 1947. They allowed him safe conduct to Switzerland, to rejoin his son who had been kidnapped, as part of the persuasion exercise to get him to resign and leave the country. Nagy was granted asylum by the US and emigrated to the Washington DC area in 1948, where he went to work for the FBI. He then became an intimate of Frank Wisner, the CIA’s Deputy Director of Special Plans. Given this warm relationship, it is quite likely that Nagy was the power behind the scenes in the CIA’s widely-suspected clandestine backing for the doomed Hungarian rising in 1956. The CIA shopfront Permindex [Permanent Industrial Expositions] was incorporated in Basel with Nagy as president in 1956, on the eve of the Hungarian uprising. Nagy was also a director of the World Trading Centre (aka CMC or Centro Mondiale Commerciale) in Rome, and president of its American board. Both outfits were conduits for the CIA’s covert worldwide commercial activities, including arms and dope trafficking, white-washing money, lubricating extremist organisations close to Gladio and running deals with European gangsters. Permindex had an offshoot in Italy, where P2’s puppet master Licio Gelli sat on the board.
• Wie Permindex zegt, zegt Clay Shaw, en zegt moordaanslag op Kennedy:
  New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw, arrested and questioned in connection with the JFK assassination, was for a time on the Permindex American board. These companies had the curious distinction of seeming very well oiled, while never actually engaging in any visible commercial transactions. As was observed by the Italian campaigning newspaper Paese Sera, which in the ‘60s mounted detailed investigations of WTC’s activities in Rome, ‘It is a fact that the CMC [Centro Mondiale Commerciale] is the point of contact for a number of persons who, in certain respects, have somewhat equivocal ties whose common denominator is anti-communism.’
• Chemische oorlogsvoering, Fort Detrick, Porton Down:
  By now, Scotland Yard was on the case, with MI5 and MI6 in hot pursuit, as the theory of a political assassination took hold, which of course demanded the customary news management for maximum effect. The corpse was transferred again, this time for autopsy at the top-secret chemical warfare establishment operated by the Ministry of Defence at Porton Down, on the edge of Salisbury Plain. The talents assembled there included, remarkably, Dr. Christopher C. Green, fresh in from Washington, one of America’s leading forensic scientists and toxicologists, whose brief included reporting personally to the future US president George H. W. Bush, then director of the CIA. He was joined by Porton Down’s chief toxicologist, the late Dr. David Gall. Markov and the scintillating umbrella mystery were being groomed for posthumous star billing. Septicaemia does reflect some symptoms of poisoning by ricin, which works in the same fashion by wrecking the immune system. The mysterious pellet was the X factor. Dr. Green declared in a subsequent declaration: ‘We knew that the material used to kill him, ricin, had been under development by a foreign service,’ finger-pointing which suggested the culprits would be traced to the Evil Empire lurking behind the Iron Curtain. An essential feature of the disinformation exercise was the constant pretence of ignorance among western authorities of the dangerous functions of ricin. Dr. Gall, as the chief Porton Down toxicologist, and in that position party to all Britain’s chemical warfare secrets, certainly knew otherwise. Dr. Green was carefully selective in what he left out. He did not say that the United States and United Kingdom were pioneers investigating ricin as a chemical weapon during WW1, and tested practical applications - sprays and cluster bombs - during WW2. It was found unsuitable for mass destruction, such as mustard gas employed in WW1, but potentially useful for more selective work. Nor did he reveal that the US Army’s Fort Detrick chemical warfare centre in Maryland had patented a range of small weapons - including adapted umbrellas - to fire toxic pellets specifically intended for targeted assassinations. These devices, after extensive testing, had already been supplied to his employers, the CIA, and disclosed to the US Congress. (The details, including the inventor, follow shortly.) The spin machine claimed Markov had been warned by a mysterious caller he would be killed by a poison ‘that the West knew nothing about and would not be able to trace.’ This was pejorative case-building after the event. The ‘West’ had known all about the castor oil plant and the fearsome properties of its beans for many centuries. Way back in Roman times, farmers knew to steer their cattle away from the bush and its deadly fruit. In 1888, the German chemist Peter Hermann Stillmark wrote his famous benchmark doctoral thesis on ricin as a toxin, which led in turn to the new field of biochemical science called lectinology.
  In 1975, three years before these incidents, CIA director Bill Colby told an interesting story to the Church Committee (the US Congressional Committee of Inquiry investigating covert agency CIA activities, headed by the pronounced CIA agnostic Senator Frank Church). Colby admitted the CIA possessed a top-secret assassination kit in the form of a .45 caliber pistol, powered by batteries concealed in the butt, which silently fired miniaturised darts, or ‘flechettes’ as Colby called them. These could be tipped with toxic poisons. Colby admitted the idea was to kill people with a highly portable, silent weapon, which could thus be used in quite open public spaces. The senators then heard evidence from a biological weapons designer, Charles Senseney, that he manufactured to CIA instructions precisely such a lethal toy. Furthermore, the disguises to conceal the firing device ranged from walking sticks, fountain pens, drinking straws - even an umbrella. All of this had been put together at the Fort Detrick biological and chemical weapons site in Maryland. Coming to the crucial issue of penetrating clothing, Senseney said tests were done with ‘various dogs.’ But when it came to the impact on humans, the labs used tailors’ dummies with various thicknesses of clothing to assess the velocities required to penetrate different garments. So the Kostov ‘rehearsal’ story takes another knock.
  (In June 2011, these same Fort Detrick labs were under suspicion of manufacturing the deadly, hysteria-provoking strain of E.coli bug, unknown in nature, strangely immune to the full pack of antibiotics, that curiously wandered into the raw vegetable chain all over the States and Europe.)
• Ook Turkse deep state heeft banden met Gladio:
  Stibam’s chief proprietors (and protectors) were the Turkish mafia and deep state intelligence cells, but the firm also had strong ties to the Italian underground world, via Licio Gelli’s Propaganda Due lodge and onwards to the Gladio secret army. It was also used as a front by Mossad, Bulgaria being the only country in the East Bloc with which Israel held genuinely fraternal and long-lasting ties (a tribute to the amazingly successful wartime efforts to rescue the country’s Jewish minority from the death camps). Kintex was a highly successful operation, a vital cog in the illicitly-controlled, government-conspired contraband chains.[40] As we shall discover in due course, its partner Stiban would figure in the attempted assassination of John Paul II.
• En daar hebben we Robert Maxwell:
  Twenty-six years after Markov died, more detail emerged of the extraordinary power of MI6 and western intelligence in Bulgaria, in the substantial shape of Robert Maxwell - media tycoon, patron saint of money launderers and criminal conspiracies, and vintage asset of a clutch of spy outfits including, to keep the list short, Mossad, the KGB, MI6 and the CIA. In 2004, American investigative writers Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon published The Assassination of Robert Maxwell, exposing him as a ruthless predator responsible for institutionally corrupting Bulgaria, particularly its banks: “Under communism, there were no oversights in place and in the Maxwell case, you had high level officials involved in the deceit, including members of the intelligence community… our investigations were directed at Maxwell’s links with the Bulgarian élite and other senior communist officials, especially in the period before November 1989, and how those links had a detrimental effect on the country after that period and post Maxwell’s assassination.”
  Dillon’s most explosive charge was not centred on Maxwell; it was his insistence that among the bank’s customers were front organisations sheltering the CIA, ever on the lookout for invisible ink to mask its global contraband chains.
  Five years after Maxwell’s death, Lukanov was gunned down outside his home in Sofia. The usual suspects in this unruly and violent Chicago-style crime citadel of the East slipped away into the shadows.
• De Georgi Markov-zaak:
  Logan had an ear to the strange goings-on within a court that frequently resembled the machinations of a medieval kingdom. Not content with making his explosive charges of the contract job, Logan went very public by pursuing senior figures at Westminster to re-open the Markov case and finally pin down the truth. Some - like the feisty red-haired Robin Cook, the former Foreign Secretary who resigned about the same time because he disagreed with Blair’s invasion of Iraq - seemed to be taking Logan seriously. (Cook would in any event know the facts. Just weeks before he died of a heart attack while climbing a Scottish mountain, he declared openly that Al Qaeda was a creation of western intelligence. There was no exhumation of the Markov case.)
• Communisten en fascisten : één pot nat?
  One of these, a man who declined to be named for fear of reprisals, described himself to Georgieff as a professed ‘non-violent anarchist’ living in Denmark since before the war. He shattered all the assumptions of the Cold War divide by confirming co-operation between communist authorities and ‘terrorist and fascist organisations’ in the West that were far more explicit than otherwise revealed or even suspected, ‘red mingled with black.’ And the game they played was ‘very dirty.’ He added the telling words that Gullino was an ‘idealistic and convinced fascist’ and belonged to an ‘organised international fascist movement.’ According to Georgieff’s source, the Markov murder was only a fragment of the Cold War spy puzzle as ‘there were much bigger things involved.’ Furthermore, Markov was ‘not a clean man, and neither was Kostov.’ These claims gained further traction from Kostov’s statement he was sent to Paris as a correspondent for the Bulgarian Communist party newspaper, conducting himself with such aplomb he was promoted to colonel in the secret service. According to the source, most of the people involved in such operations, both east and west, were still very much active with illegal arms sales and trafficking in drugs. Georgieff’s informant connected Gullino to the attack on Pope John Paul II and the murders of Aldo Moro and Olof Palme.
• De Rothschilds duiken ook weer op. Welke connectie hebben deze Joodse bankiers met het Vaticaan, Italiaanse neofascisten en (de dood van) Robert Calvi, God's Bankier?
  On 12th July 1987 the Knightsbridge safe deposit vaults in London were robbed by an Italian neofascist, Valerio Viccei. He was a colleague in Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari with Roberto Fiore, who was busily assembling a business fortune in the UK at that time. Italian neofascists breaking into supposedly closely-guarded high security premises in the UK are a decidedly rare species, particularly when they are connected to figures such as Sergio Vaccari Agelli. He was an Italian art dealer based in London who enjoyed business and political contacts with Chichiarelli, Licio Gelli - and Roberto Calvi. Agelli was the last person to see Calvi alive, at the Chelsea Cloisters suites, where the disgraced banker was roosting. Agelli was also connected to the disappearance and murder of Jeanette May Bishop, the divorced socialite wife of Baron Evelyn Rothschild, a member of the iconic Jewish banking and investments clan. She and her local guide disappeared late on 29th November 1980, during a house-hunting expedition near Macerata, an ancient city on central Italy’s Adriatic coast. Their well-hidden bodies were discovered by boar hunters two years later, entirely devoured by wild animals down to the bones. After the usual leisurely trawl of the evidence, the Italian authorities concluded the pair were murdered, by whom remains unsolved. A link was traced between Bishop and a robbery at Christie’s auction rooms in Rome in 1980. It was organised jointly by that well-known pair of connoisseurs and art traffickers, Sergio Agelli and Chichiarelli. The story ran that some of the valuables found their way to Bishop, whether purloined or as a present from Agelli, with whom she evidently had become intimate in London. A middle-aged divorcee, she was often in desperate need of money. But there is an alternative explanation.
  The Zurich branch of the Rothschilds became hopelessly entangled in a typically convoluted web of financial transactions devised by Calvi, on behalf of P2. The intention was to acquire the Rizzoli newspaper group. The bonus would be the control of Italy’s most prestigious newspaper, the Milan-printed Corriere Della Sera. This was Calvi’s last big throw of the dice, and undoubtedly formed a significant marker on the trail that led to Blackfriars Bridge. He created a magic carousel through which Ambrosiano lent $142 million to a Panamian shell company called Bellatrix SA, which then deposited the funds at Rothschilds in Zurich to pay for the shares. That was the straightforward part. Bellatrix were then to pay an inflated price for the Rizzoli shares - ten times market value - in order to generate a cash windfall for the real bidders, who were P2 represented by Gelli and Calvi. The dynamite element came from the claims circulating in Rome and Milan that the $142 million was in part the proceeds of the Christies robbery, and thus Mob property. The pack of cards came tumbling down when Italian regulators torpedoed the deal on a technicality. The bid was to be made through Ambrosiano’s Luxembourg office, and that made it a foreign acquisition. The fatal torpedo was actually fired by the sitting premier, Arnaldo Forlani, a weak puppet standing in for the Divine Julius Andreotti. Il Divo had decided that Licio Gelli had grown too big for his boots and it was time to cut him down to size. The Rizzoli deal would have given Gelli and P2 commanding influence in the event that il piano di rinascita democratica had succeeded. There was now a two-horse race between Gelli and Calvi to get at the hoard stashed in Zurich. With the whole scheme dropped on the floor, Calvi decided that the $142 million sitting in Zurich was his own private ‘reserve fund.’ His final destination was supposed to be Zurich, not London. Sergio Agelli knew every nut and bolt of this project. If he had divulged the details to Jeanette May Bishop, she might have been tempted to blackmail her former husband’s family firm, given her appetite for money. This would be quite sufficient to earn the attention of Gladio sub - contractors organised by Italian secret services.
  After the raid on his villa, Gelli sharply bolted to Switzerland, keeping low until he attracted attention by trying to extract tens of millions of dollars from the famous Zurich account. He was arrested on 13th September 1982, confined to the modern, high-security Challon prison near Geneva, miraculously escaped (less miraculously by handsomely bribing his guards) and then fled to the shelter of South America. Three days after Gelli was arrested in Switzerland, Sergio Agelli was murdered, on 16th September 1982. This was roughly at the time the remains of Jeanette May Bishop and her companion were found by the hunters. The story of these affairs in Italy is invariably the use of signpost clues. Two months after the raid on Gelli’s villa, Pope John Paul II was almost killed in an attack blamed on the KGB in cohorts with their associates in Bulgaria. Propaganda Due quietly slipped from the headlines.
  The coroners’ jury, under direction, returned a verdict of suicide. Calvi’s son, Carlo, hired the well known American firm of Kroll Associates to make an independent assessment of his father’s death. They suggested plausibly that Calvi was killed elsewhere. His body was then taken to the bridge in a small boat. The orange rope was tied to his neck, and then weighed down by bricks to prevent the corpse floating laterally. In 1991, a Mafia supergrass called Francesco Marino Mannoia (nicknamed Mozzarella, after the delicious soft Italian cheese made from buffalo milk) began to sing an interesting story. He informed the Rome public prosecution authorities that Calvi had been strangled by a certain Francesco Di Carlo on instructions of the mob cashier Pippo Calò. Kroll investigators had already discovered that $100,000 had been deposited in Mannoia’s account at Barclay’s Bank in London, on 16th June, the day before Calvi was murdered.
• De Britse Royals en hun rol:
  The next important step was to secure Royal patronage. To that end, press baron Cecil King, a veteran MI5 asset and publisher of the mass circulation Daily Mirror, gave a lunch for Earl Mountbatten - uncle of the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip. King proposed the Earl might step in as caretaker prime minister, while the army went around ‘restoring order.’ Mountbatten then had a long talk with his nephew the Queen’s consort. Three of Philip’s sisters had married into German nobility with strong Nazi ties, and the Duke’s own outspoken Right-wing views have often verged on notoriety. He once publicly mused that National Socialism was a ‘welcome change’ to the Weimar republic because it re-kindled hope, a quality apparently in short supply in the Britain of these times. (Philip also said that Hitler made the trains run on time, a legendary feat usually attributed to Mussolini; this may suggest the boundaries of the Duke’s retentive faculties). The episode had a strange aftermath. Mountbatten was murdered in mysterious and never clearly explained circumstances by an Irish terrorist in August 1979. Chapter XX, The Strange Tale of Two Earls, sheds fresh light on this royal assassination and the legendary vanishing act of the gambling peer Lord Lucan, a leading light in the Clermont Set, amid the prevailing neo-Weimar mood in the UK of the 1970’s.
• De Cia start een lastercampagne tegen premier Wilson:
  Wilson had barely set foot in Downing Street when he became the target of a smear campaign orchestrated at the highest levels of the CIA. James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s legendary spy-catcher-in-chief, tipped off his opposite numbers in London that Wilson was a closet KGB agent. Some thought that Angleton was merely indulging in sour grapes, after being thoroughly duped by the urbane British defector Harold ‘Kim’ Philby, with whom he formed a close friendship during Philby’s posting to the Washington embassy. When MI5 pressed for harder evidence, Angleton refused point-blank unless given a copper-bottomed guarantee - bluntly refused - that the British would not pass on the information. The stance reflected The Kingfisher’s evident worries of more moles burrowing away in British intelligence circles. But his source, he believed, was impeccable, if still the cause of some nagging personal embarrassment.(N2) Angleton was on excellent terms with MI5’s director of counter-intelligence and deputy controller, Sir Maurice Oldfield. Initially, Oldfield considered the Wilson claims vague and insubstantial, but to be on the safe side, he put a small team on the job, consisting of officers with strong anti-socialist leanings, even by the prevailing tilt of the service.
• Media in de greep van geheime diensten, ook in Groot-Brittanië:
  Professor Roy Greenslade, who specialises in media at London’s City University, has commented on the virtually unchanged climate of the war on terror: ‘Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in general - are playthings of MI5.’ Jonathan Bloch and Patrick Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of ‘one of Britain’s most distinguished journals’ as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll. Thomas Jefferson wrote somewhere that he pitied the man who read newspapers and thought he then knew something about what was happening in the world. It is advice to be remembered.
  Among those regularly duped in this way was Private Eye, which in the 1970s was fed stories of a triangular link between Wilson, the Israeli secret service and the KGB. The former editor, Richard Ingrams, glumly admitted: ‘Looking back on it, it’s obvious that the Eye could have been used by MI5.’ In any event, the print magnate Cecil King - nominally one of the pillars of the orthodox Left - obligingly informed MI5 spymaster Peter Wright that the Daily Mirror’s columns were always open to any anti-Wilson dirty laundry the intelligence services might need airing.
• Met Wilson uit de weg, werden de peilen gericht op Edward Heath, die ook niet deugde:
  With the opinion poll forecasts set fair for victory, Wilson called a snap election in 1970. He lost by thirty-one seats to the virtually unknown Tory leader Edward Heath. The politics of the paranormal now moved into overdrive, for in truth Heath was no more acceptable to the secret policemen than Wilson. The unsound Heath government was stuffed with MI5 and MI6 placements (political appointees), to which he was oblivious. When Harold Macmillan resigned as Tory leader, there was an MI6 putsch in which they levered their long time princeling, the landed Scottish earl Alec Douglas-Home (pronounced ‘Hume’) into the Tory leadership. Heath was a shabby substitute and decidedly to the conservatives’ Left, so the full force of a Wilson-brand smear campaign swivelled around 180 degrees to fix on the new target, with the notion of shaming him to resign in favour of a trustworthy Right-winger.
  (H)e was easily tricked by Douglas-Home, his Foreign Secretary, into the Great Russian Spy Purge of 1971, in which 105 diplomats were ousted at a fell stroke. The news broke over the country like a thunderclap, suggesting that a Soviet coup had only just been nipped in the bud, moreover as the barometer of industrial tension rose towards bursting point. On the outermost fringes of parapolitics, a revolution was in the air. The name ‘Angry Brigade’ surged to occupy the daily headlines. The general public was sold the insidious idea that a small cell of committed anarcho-communists was bombing its way mostly round the capital, attacking a range of choice targets - the Post Office tower, the home of a cabinet minister and even the Miss World contest. The Millbank rumour factory churned out the story of an urban guerrilla warfare organisation attacking these prominent symbols of capitalism, so tightly knit and cleverly organised it was difficult to detect. In the weeks after Home Secretary Robert Carr had his front door blown off, the élite of the Scotland Yard counter-terrorism squad raced all over London, raiding houses of so-called Left-wing extremists, a posse of well-briefed paparazzi and reporters following in hot pursuit. The Sunday Telegraph painted a suitably alarming picture of an unknown enemy within, whose fate was to be ruthlessly hunted down by a special flying squad, headed by a ‘rough and ready’ commander who was incognito ‘for his own protection.’ IRD spinners nodded with approval over their hyper-ventilated press cuttings. ‘The squad is taking a tough line. It will raid hippy communes, question avowed members of the underground and build up a complete file on the sub-culture that threatens the present social order.’ The rippling of fresh newsprint over the breakfast toast of Middle England was sufficient to spark a hurricane.
  One of the constant themes of Gladio operations anywhere they appeared was to take out a franchise on local terror organisations. The Angry Brigade, or more accurately Brigades, were no exception. Of the hundred or so attributed incidents, it was never possible to decipher how many might have been the work of a few woolly-jumpered libertines, or planned in the underworld of the secret state. No one went to jail specifically for planting bombs in a campaign which lasted the best part of half a decade. Forensic evidence was extremely weak and the number of acquittals significant. Where convictions were secured, the courts handed down a string of judgements for conspiracy. Protesting victims received suitably extended sentences until the heat died down and memories dimmed. The essential moving parts of the MI5/Gladio psy-ops strategy at this stage were the following: to depose Heath and replace him with a strong Right-wing alternative; destroy the Labour Party for all time; and wreck the credibility of the Liberals, to prevent them from becoming the third force that might preserve the socialists in power. It was still a soft campaign that fell short of Greek or Turkish-style bloodletting, or the Italian Gladio direct-action dagger blow. But the time for that was fast approaching. Heath’s government was by now locked in combat with the striking miners’ union, bearing powerful pre-revolutionary overtones. The country lay under the gloom of the three-day working week, as power and supplies of all sorts ran short. Inflation topped double figures. Heath, cast as a modern political Tosca, was in extremely serious trouble, with no obvious escape route save to appeal to the electorate for judgement as to exactly who ran the country, the government or unelected union czars. In the depths of winter 1974, the British people returned a Solomonic judgement in this highly polarised climate of blackouts and flickering candles. Virtually, a hung parliament. The chalice narrowly passed to Wilson, and thus a first tick appeared on MI5’s shopping list. Heath’s political ambitions were at an end. Wilson tried again in October the same year. It was to be his last turn on the carousel of fate. He was awarded a paltry majority of three.
• Thatcher was daarentegen veilig:
  For her part, Thatcher was thought to be in the safe manipulative hands of her husband Dennis, whose pronounced Right-wing opinions were backed up by strong ties to the Bureau of State Security (BOSS) - the South African apartheid state’s secret service. Dennis Thatcher’s links to the spy world were heavily alluded to in the stage version of the long-running ‘Dear Bill’ spoof correspondence in Private Eye.
• Meer over Wilson en Heath, slachtoffers van Gladio:
  There was another conspicuous footprint on the trail. When the small MI5/MI6 black ops team working up the Wilson and Heath plots got down to work in the early ‘70s, they made a subliminally curious choice of ‘Clockwork Orange’ as the in-house code name. Stanley Kubrick’s disturbing and controversial film adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s story of deranged misfits plaguing the streets was widely regarded at the time as a ‘queer’ exercise in sexual debauchery if not an actual motif, as many saw it, for blatant homosexuality. Was it merely a co-incidence that Heath was smeared all over London as a closet gay, or that the bombastic Ulster Protestant, the Rev. Ian Paisley, another victim on the same hit list, would be dragged into a scandal concerning paedophilia in the Kincaid children’s home? The implication of a dirty tricks sting against Wilson on the grounds of sexual skeletons rattling in his cupboard could hardly have been more obvious to future investigators. If Wilson was going to be flirty-fished by the CIA and their friends in London, and he knew it, then we may have the explanation for so smartly clearing his desk. Equally, the descent of the veils of silence in the halls of the Labour party. The appearance of George H. W. Bush in Downing Street might have been akin to setting out the best bone china for the Grim Reaper.
  Lib-Lab pact, had been thoroughly stitched by the destruction of their own leader, the jaunty, trilby-hatted Papageno, Jeremy Thorpe. He was driven from parliament in the MI5-fabricated conspiracy to implicate him in a plot to murder his male lover. It was indeed a rosy dawn, from certain perceptions.
• Over naar Frankrijk, naar Alexandre de Marenches, Frankrijk's belangrijkste spion, de Safariclub en de moordpoging op Paus Johannes-Paulus II.
  The trail shifts to Paris, and the elegant figure of Count Alexandre de Marenches (1921-1995), chief executive of the Service of External Documentation and Counter-Espionage (SDECE) from 1970 to 1981. He was unquestionably one of the most extraordinary figures in the history of French espionage. This aristocratic Knight of Malta, thorough-going authoritarian and virulent anti-communist, managed to run the French equivalent of MI6/CIA alongside his own private enterprise show at the same time. This was the Safari Club, a kind of shadow CIA established in the mid-70’s with Saudi money and the backing of George H. W. Bush and the Shah of Iran. Kamal Adham, head of Saudi intelligence, directed the outfit alongside de Marenches. From 1979, a member of the inner court of the Saudi royal family, Prince Turki al-Faisal, shared the helm. The Safari Club was crowded with ex-CIA people who for one reason or another were fired or left for more exciting pastures. These included the legendary Theodore ‘the blond ghost’ Shackley, who was present in Rome the day the Pope was shot. The only aim of the Safari Club was to discredit communism, by any means. Its functionaries were also accustomed to performing contract jobs on behalf of the ‘real’ CIA. Its shadow in the underworld was now about to undertake its most spectacular operation: the assassination of Pope John Paul II.
• Ook vinden we de onvermijdelijke neoconservatief Michael Ledeen op ons pad:
  Michael Ledeen’s personal trajectory through Italy offers many important insights into the formation of a personality steeped in latter-day romantic fascism, and a penchant bordering on the pornographic for violence as the chief weapon of state. He arrived in Italy in 1974, and immediately set about soaking himself in worship of his idol, Benito Mussolini. He became a key tool on behalf of the CIA inside the complicated layers of the Italian intelligence fabric. He made ends meet writing for the Milan daily Il Giornale Nuovo, long suspected as a mouthpiece for the CIA. From 1976 he was active, alongside Sterling, in undermining Aldo Moro’s concordat with the communists. Much of Ledeen’s thinking amounts to addiction for military Viagra, not so much for conquest as the bloody glory of violence for its own sake. In a book that he published in 1999 (Machiavelli on Modern Leadership) he pleads the need for ‘Machiavellian wisdom and leadership,’ while ignoring Machiavelli’s prudent injunctions never to get involved in wars where the local population are the invader’s first enemies. This is a typical example of neocon commandeering of long-dead sages (Plato is another) to justify the state of eternal war. Ledeen eulogises the ‘manly vigour of strong leaders,’ who must be prepared ‘to fight at all times,’ while taking good care to personally steer well clear of the field of battle. It is enough for him to write that the ‘great scholars who have studied the American character have come to the conclusion that we are a warlike people and that we love war.’ The mainstream Right detects another explanation. Dr. John Laughland, himself an acerbic Right-wing British conservative, wrote in the June 2003 edition of the American Conservative that Ledeen ‘drew more from fascism than the American Right.’(N3) Deception - the ‘noble Platonic lie’ promoted by the German-Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss, high priest of the neocons - is stock in trade to Ledeen. Despite his denials, he is believed by his many critics to have inflated the Yellowcake Affair - the claim later exposed as utterly false - that Saddam Hussein bought nuclear enrichment materials from the West African republic of Niger. He was steeped in Iran-Contra, and famously claimed to have once said that ‘every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.’ (Would that it would be only once in ten years; in recent times it seems to happen every year, if not more often.) Incited by Ledeen, newspapers and writers in Italy with well-known CIA connections latched on to the KGB plot. Il Giornale Nuovo began touting the story about the same time as the West German revelations, picked up by the New York Times, thanks in no small measure to Claire Sterling.
• De moordaanslag op de Paus, omwille van zijn "détente" ten aanzien van de communisten en de Sovietunie?
  The Pope’s battalions around the globe include (or so it is claimed) more than a billion committed worshippers, 400,000 clergy, an impressive global diplomatic service, highly-sophisticated espionage skills and cradle-to-the-grave mind conditioning systems aided by schools, universities and the media. Taken together they enable the Holy See to perform as a world power. When Paul VI died in August 1978, the western camp was deprived of its trusty rock of ages. In 1978 John Paul II succeeded to St. Peter’s Throne following the 33-day interregnum of the tragic ‘little sparrow’ John Paul I. His sudden death has never been properly explained, and remains the source of many theories that he was murdered to block radical reforms of the Holy See’s internal structures. In fact Pope John Paul II, the first non-Italian reign since Pope Adrian VI in the mid-fourteenth century, was to prove no less radical. He immediately broke with the long-standing post-war concordat that automatically bound the Catholic church to priorities set by Washington. He was determined to seek an accord with the Kremlin, to unfreeze the Vatican’s relations with the millions of Catholics locked behind the Iron Curtain. Yet he was also prepared to turn the papal blind eye to the rackets within the sacred precincts (particularly as some of them were his own). John Paul’s personality was deeply affected by the impact of Nazi tyranny, the Soviet invasion, and the subsequent occupation of his homeland. The young Karol Józef Wojtyła was forced to work in quarries and factories. There was never enough food, and political suppression was everywhere. He responded by adopting a very particular brand of Christian humanism, which also enabled him to deal with the communists on a pragmatic basis. Poland, his homeland, had been gift-wrapped by Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta and Tehran and then presented as a war prize to Stalin in 1945. After an initial period of friction, the godless ones and the holy church slowly settled down under the same roof. Not exactly easy bedfellows, but uniquely in the Soviet camp, millions of the devout trooped to Sunday Mass.
  That he was alone among the West’s powerful leaders in dealing on a daily first-hand terms with a communist leadership was obvious. To the great consternation of Washington, he now proposed to translate this experience to his dealings with the Kremlin. When whispers circulated that John Paul II had been Moscow’s favoured candidate for St. Peter’s throne, there was genuine substance. Many years later, this was duly acknowledged by Mikhail Gorbachev in the presence of the Pope himself. What the western leaders forgot was another of John Paul’s qualities, the fact that he was a Slav, like the Russians, and therefore gifted with unique insights into the workings of the Soviet leaders’ minds.
  Such a tryst placed John Paul on a starkly divergent path from the one followed by the western alliance. By the time he was shot, John Paul II - old hand at playing poker with communists - was sure he had reached an accommodation with the Soviets to allow Solidarnosc to peacefully enter the government in Warsaw. Moreover, Solidarnosc was already operating as a fully-fledged and legally registered political movement, committed to negotiating a peaceful concordat with the communist authorities. Less than two years before, in June 1979, John Paul preached to vast throngs across his homeland, which the communist authorities did nothing to frustrate. But for the backdoor scheming in Washington and Brussels, the Iron Curtain might have collapsed some years earlier than it actually did.
• De "strategy of tension" wordt geëscaleerd vanaf de late jaren zeventig:
  During the period known as the Second Cold War, lasting until 1986, the Reagan administration spent $2.2 trillion on new weapons, not to mention fruitless experiments such as Star Wars. This Mars-like stance deepened the anti-war mood that began in the late 1970s against the rolling out of nuclear-tipped American Cruise Missiles. The fabulous Star Wars initiative, intended to focus vaporising rays on Russian missiles approaching from space, seemed to suggest the imminence of nuclear war. Far from making Europeans feel safer and better protected against the Soviets, this new twist of the arms race stirred suspicions of NATO as aggressive and looking for trouble. NATO was fast losing credibility, threatening its entire raison d’être. The Gladio Strategy of Tension switched into top gear. The number of so-called terror attacks attributed to Leftist radicals rose dramatically. Especially in countries considered front-line states - Belgium, Italy, Germany and Greece - the years of lead returned with renewed force. Viewed from Washington and Brussels, the need was more acute than ever for headline-making distractions suggesting the beast behind the Iron Curtain had not changed its manners, the constant theme of the Strategy of Tension.
• Nog maar eens Robert Maxwell:
  Gorbachev was a designated heir of the briefly-reigning, long-sighted Yuri Andropov, the only true intellectual ever to head the Politburo, although Kryuchkov, his former deputy at the KGB, was of the same stripe. With Andropov’s encouragement, he set about the papal Noah’s Ark project. It was to quietly escort the most senior inner party members to the safe haven of about 600 companies established on western lines, to secure a future in the inevitable transition from the command economy to western-style corporatist capitalism.[52] From the seed corn capital transmitted through the Vatican, giants such as Gazprom arose from the ashes of the communist party. The recipients of this secret nourishment were destined to flower as the all-powerful oligarchs who came to dominate post-communist Russia (and Poland too, where a similar project was bearing fruit). By weaving trading links with western companies and learning through their expertise, these KGB front companies would obtain access to the refreshing energies of capitalism. Robert Maxwell, the American taxpayer, the Mafia and the Pope appeared as an unlikely quartet to get the wheels turning. Maxwell was an old Moscow hand. John Major turned to the man the London satirical magazine Private Eye dubbed ‘Captain Bob,’ rather than MI6 or the Moscow embassy, to understand what was really happening behind the scenes in the great flap that surrounded the manufactured coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991. Giddy at the power and profits bound to flow from this veritable El Dorado opening up before him, Maxwell turned, in his customary way, to the underworld to help things along. His practised eye fell upon a Ukrainian-born Jew called Semion (‘Simon’) Mogilevich, the ‘Brainy Don’ of the Rising Sun mafia syndicate, one of Moscow’s most powerful criminal clans. He was already a highly respected figure in the emerging Russian crime scene, a shrewd operator capable of assembling complex international schemes, a perfect fit with Maxwell himself. Soon, thanks to Maxwell’s good offices, he was equipped with an Israeli passport to develop the money laundering, weapons smuggling and narcotics trafficking that were his core activities. It was the Maxwell-Mogilevich channel that formed a vital artery in transmitting covert funds to the nascent oligarchs in the dying USSR, His Holiness cheerfully oiling the gears.
• Gebeurenissen beginnen zich nu snel op te volgen:
  the Holy Father appeared to be serenely preserving his head, while all around, others were dashing about in dread of losing theirs. His patient efforts to control the Solidarnosc situation are clearly visible from the mosaic of events over this tumultuous period. But the perfect storm, the one that almost swept him away, was fast approaching. Now, taking up General Ambrogio Viviani’s earlier cue to examine the envelope of events: The trail that led to St. Petersgate: The Years of Tension 1979-1981 * 20th March 1979: Carmine ‘Mino’ Pecorelli, Italian journalist with close links to Italian intelligence, shot dead. Cited Gladio in the death of Aldo Moro. Intended to expose the NATO involvement in the guns for narcotics ring, P2’s connection and the links to the ‘Divine Julius’ Andreotti. * 11th July 1979: Giorgio Ambrosoli, lawyer and liquidator of Michele Sindona’s imploding banking operations, shot dead in Milan. Sindona eventually convicted of murder. * 21st July 1979: Boris Giuliano, police superintendent investigating Mafia links to an arms and drugs ring, looking for connections to Sindona’s operations, shot dead in Palermo. * August 1979: Under indictment in the US, Sindona stages a bogus kidnapping to conceal a three-month trip to Italy. He tries to blackmail fellow P2 collaborators in high places. * 25th November 1979: Ali Ağca sprung from military prison in Istanbul. * 13th June 1980: Michele Sindona convicted of conspiracy, fraud, perjury, false bank statements and misappropriation of bank funds. * 2nd August 1980: Blast attributed to the Red Brigades wrecks Bologna railway station. Neo-Fascists linked to intelligence circles and Gladio planted the device. * 31st October 1980: Poland’s communist authorities register Solidarnosc as a recognised trade union. * 17th March 1981: Propaganda Due and the Putsch Plan exposed. Licio Gelli - the Grand Master - exposed as controller of P2. Carabinieri uncover a P2 plot to take over the country with the aid of Gladio. * Spring 1981: Cruise missile protests erupt around Europe. * 10th May 1981: Mehmet Ali Ağca arrives in Rome after criss-crossing Europe for weeks. * 13th May 1981: Pope John Paul II seriously wounded in St. Peter’s Square. * July 1981: Roberto Calvi’s Banco Ambrosiano, laundry to the arms-drugs carousel, collapses. * 22nd July 1981: Ağca is sentenced to life imprisonment. * 13th December 1981: Martial law declared in Poland, Solidarnosc outlawed. * 17th June 1982: Roberto Calvi, God’s Banker, discovered hanged beneath Blackfriars Bridge over the River Thames in London. By May 1981 - with Solidarnosc finally recognised as an independent trade union by Polish courts - the Pope relaxed with quiet satisfaction. There would be no bloody rising in his homeland, and no Russian invasion either. Both objectives were handsomely achieved, as history confirms.
• Wie was de would-be moordenaar van de Paus?
  The spotlight now returns to the alleged assassin. In August 1979, while serving a life sentence for murdering the newspaper editor Abdi Ipecki, Ağca made his quiet walk to freedom from the Istanbul military prison. He strolled out wearing an army uniform. He appears to have quietly sat out the six months he served of a life sentence, knowing full well he was too useful to moulder in jail. The sole alibi to blame the shooting on a communist plot rested on Ağca’s sojourns at different times in Bulgaria en route to Rome. But his shuttles around Europe had nothing to do with biding his time waiting for the summons to shoot the Pope. He was simply going about his principal day job of middling manager and fixer in the great narcotics ring. Given that Sofia was a vital hub of the network , and as Uğur Mumcu wrote , virtually the smuggling capital of Europe , Ağca’s regular line of business had taken him in and out of the city for years .
• De moordaanslag: false flag? Waarom vergaf de Paus zou aanvallen? Waarom was Rusland oprecht geschokt? Moest voorkomen worden dat er een "detente" kwam tussen Rusland en het Vaticaan?
  Çatlı was also a key figure in the neo-fascist support network underpinning Gladio operations all around Europe, along with Guérin-Sérac and Stefano Delle Chiaie. Between them, the trio amounted to three of the most dangerous men on the loose in Europe - yet protected by an invisible hand of official immunity. If Delle Chiaie was merciless and cruel by nature, he was also, like many of his comrades, a calculating planner. These talents were put to good use by Franco, who hired him to organise Spanish death squads. He and Guérin-Sérac worked closely on this task, frequently visited by their mutual friend Abdullah Çatlı, who was again spotted meeting with Delle Chiaie in South America in 1982, less than a year after the papal shooting. The probability that Abdullah Çatlı was actually the Running Man of Turkish appearance dashing from St. Peter’s Square moves from circumstantial to probable when the facts of his own death are considered. But before reaching that point, it is essential to pose our recurring question: Cui bono?
  As several Italian newspapers were quick to observe, the attack on the Pope took place as the Vatican and the Soviet Union were moving toward diplomatic rapprochement on important issues: nuclear disarmament, diplomatic recognition of the PLO, and the Solidarnosc crisis. There the real difficulty was not Russian obstinacy but the ambitious General Jaruzelski, Poland’s de facto military dictator. In the immediate aftermath, conspiracies flourished by the score. For their part the Russians seemed genuinely shocked and taken aback. Indeed they might well have been, given the steady payments of ransom money gushing from Rome, and the generally warm relations with the Lateran State. Within a few days of the attack, and still far from certain he would recover, the Pope revealed his own doubts. He issued a personal statement that he had forgiven ‘our brother’ Mehmet Ali Ağca.
• Indien niet Agca, wie dan wel?
  These are the possible characters who formed the execution squad: * Abdullah Çatlı: stage manager and director, bearing a diplomatic passport and official licence to kill, allowing him to cross frontiers without fear of Interpol. Principal candidate as the Running Man. *  Francesco Gullino: shadowy Danish-Italian suspected in a string of international slayings with a penchant for deadly accuracy, holding close connections to Çatlı and the Portuguese Aginter network. He was in Bulgaria at the time Ağca made periodic visits there. Admitted later that he now steers clear of Italy. * Hot suspects: Oral Çelik and Bekir Çelenk. * Theodore Shackley, representative of the Safari Club (and the CIA).
• Meer over Shackley:
  (H)is side was his old second in command, Tom Clines.[56] Clines was suspected in the murder of Chilean president Salvador Allende. Both were accused of organising death squads in various Latino republics. Shackley had been deeply immersed in plots such as Mongoose, the Cuban Zapata saga and many more capers to overthrow Castro. Tarpley’s suggestion of a Roman attachment is significant because in their Latin American years, Shackley and Clines worked with Stefano Delle Chiaie and the various Propaganda Due offshoots scattered around the Latin American continent. Clines was a key player too in the globe-spanning Enterprise outfit. Between them, they possessed ideal skills to carry out a perfect diversionary exercise from troubles crowding in on CIA interests in Rome, while landing a blow on Moscow at the same time. They were not in the Eternal City to admire Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. When he journeyed to Bulgaria in the spring 2002, the Pope publicly announced that he had never believed in the ‘Bulgarian connection.’ He absolved all Bulgarians of complicity in the plot to kill him. He had long since forgiven Ağca, understanding very clearly his walk-on role in a much bigger plot. John Paul II was too steeped in the ways of detecting hidden hands, dating well back to his formative years in communist Poland, not to suspect that western intelligence might have been attracted to using him as a Cold War martyr. At Christmas 1983 a unique moment occurred in the history of the Catholic Church, a personal and intimate encounter between a Pope and his would-be assassin. The season of forgiveness was certainly in the Pope’s mind, but so was the all-important question of who had given Ali Ağca his orders. Italian state television was permitted to record the extraordinary moment during the interview when the Pontiff leaned forward to listen carefully to Ağca’s words. There was a pause, and the Pope seemed momentarily frozen. Then he covered his face with his hands. He appeared deeply moved but quickly calmed himself: ‘What we have told each other, that will remain our secret.’ Ağca kept his word - and the Pope his.
• Wist de Paus wie werkelijk achter de aanslag zat? Lijkt mogelijk. Hoe dan ook blijf weg van de Katholieke Ker, of anders:
  Actors in the drama: how the fates intervened. * Roberto Calvi: 17th June 1982, discovered swaying at the end of a rope beneath Blackfriars Bridge, London. No convictions secured. * Henri Arsan: Died suddenly in San Vittore prison, Milan, November 1983, allegedly of a heart attack. * Michele Sindona: 22nd March 1986, died in prison after drinking poisoned coffee. * Robert Maxwell: 5th November 1991, fell or was pushed overboard from his luxury yacht Lady Ghislaine while cruising off the Canary Islands. * Abdullah Çatlı: 3rd November 1996, killed in a car crash with government officials, in possession of a Turkish diplomatic passport and documents allowing him to carry arms overseas. * Bekir Çelenk: 1996, murdered in prison, Istanbul. * Archbishop Paul ‘the untouchable’ Marcinkus, head of the Vatican bank for 17 years: 20th February 2006, died of undisclosed causes in Sun City, Arizona, aged 84. He was still protected by Vatican diplomatic immunity. * Sergei Antonov: Accused as complicit in the assassination attempt, but acquitted for lack of evidence. Mentally and physically scarred from his spell in Italian jails, force-fed on mind-bending drugs, he spent the remainder of his life as a hermit. Died in Bulgaria August 2007. * Mehmet Ali Ağca: Pardoned by Italian president Carlo Azeglio Ciampi at the personal insistence of John Paul II in June 2000. Extradited to Turkey, where he was imprisoned for the 1979 murder of the newspaper editor and two bank robberies. Released early in 2010.
• Nog onverklaarde slachtoffers van Gladio?
  Ron Brown died on 3rd April 1996 in a mysterious plane crash. He was killed along with the entire crew and a delegation of 34 American businessmen when his air force Boeing came down on approach to landing in Dubrovnik, in the Balkan state of Croatia. It appears the pilot made a terrain judgement error. This may have been due to the planting of a false radio beacon in the surrounding hills. There was a hint that Brown may have survived, briefly (as did one crew member) from the indications - afterwards suppressed - of a small-bore bullet hole in his cranium. Amanda Hill met her own fate. She was ruined by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Her flourishing broadcasting business was utterly destroyed.
• En dan zijn we eindelijk beland in België. De connectie tussen Paul Latinus en Dutroux, kindermisbruik, blackmail en Opus Dei:
  One early DIA recruit was an idealistic fascist signed to the payroll at the tender age of seventeen. His name was Paul Latinus, and his chief qualifications were small-time car thief, street runner and general factotum to the Belgian criminal gangs. His absence of a moral compass qualified him for expensive NATO career training in secret warfare by the British SAS, plus a spell at the US Army’s Fort Bragg black ops finishing school; he was then planted as a reserve lieutenant with the Royal Belgian Air Force. He sneaked on politicians and other public officials for state security. This was mainly to set them up for blackmail, which brought him into touch with underground sex channels involving minors. He joined the Front de la Jeunesse and then helped to found its Flemish counterpart, Westland New Post in the early eighties. Latinus reached the ranks of the crème de la crème when he was eventually installed as the head of Group G in the Belgian coup structure code-named F-4, which was maintained on permanent standby, and nearly activated once, in the 1974 crisis. This was the direct thread that led from NATO HQ, to the Belgian national gendarmerie, the Westland New Post militia and then finally to the street gangs who carried out many dirty tricks operations on the orders of higher interests. Among his regular contacts was Jean-Michel Nihoul, mastermind of the rapidly expanding sex traffic and paedophile industries, and several of his corporals, including the Monster of Charleroi, Marc Dutroux. Latinus was discovered by his girl friend, roped up in the bathroom at his home on 24th April 1984. Post-mortem examinations were inconclusive. Whether he was murdered or killed himself remained unexplained, which the cursory investigations by the police did nothing to answer. Latinus always claimed that he kept a secret file as his life insurance policy. If so, it seems to have worked in reverse. An extremely inconvenient figure connecting the Belgian Gladio operation and the depravity soaking Belgium, was now off the stage. Dutroux and Latinus knew each other from their common passion for stealing expensive cars. But Latinus’ trade speciality was setting up targets for blackmail, which lends strong support to later allegations that child abuse networks had the prime objective of luring clientele into places where they would be secretly filmed with young girls and boys. The content of videos intended for the worldwide black market remains to this day a highly toxic and unresolved mystery, which the Belgian authorities have done all in their power to suppress. When the Dutroux time bomb finally exploded in all its horrific detail, some dozens of victims came forward with alarming stories of snuff movies involving torture, murders, ritual sacrifice, blood drinking and extreme psychological stress. They mentioned target practice involving child victims. The state’s defence has always been that none of this incriminating evidence physically existed, while admitting that much of the material seized by police is concealed from prying eyes. The persistently dogged Belgian MP and subsequently Senator Hugo Coveliers, chairman of the special investigating committee probing gangsterism and terrorism in Belgium (1988-1990), tracked the presence of incriminating materials to a special unit called the ‘judicial police.’ Here is what Coveliers said on what became known as the ‘scandal of the X-Dossiers.’ “Imagine, everywhere you hear that story about a blackmail dossier in which organisations of the extreme right are in the possession of pictures and videos on which a number of prominent people in and around Brussels have sex with young girls; minors it is said. The existence of this dossier has always been vehemently denied. Until it was proven that testimonies and videos of this affair indeed were in the possession of the police services. The at first non-existing dossier turns out to exist. The videos without substance then turn out to be interesting enough after all to be handed over to the examining magistrate tasked with the investigation into the Gang of Nivelles [held responsible for some of the shop massacres]. But this person subsequently is afraid to testify about that! What do you think has been going on here!” Incriminating pictures of high officials abusing children would be enough for the state to panic. But in a summary written by a trio of investigative Belgian journalists in 1999 - The X-Dossiers - there is powerful evidence, painstakingly accumulated, with all doubtful or unreliable claims discarded, that tapes which the police still hold in their possession - and insist are ‘worthless’ - do feature evidence of sadistic abuse connected with public officials.(N3) Moreover, they lend weight to two extremely dangerous avenues of exploration. One of these leads to an entrapment technique in which victims are lured into ever more perverse activities, and then effectively placed under political blackmail, with no line of retreat.
  The second points to the chilling possibility that some of the activities reputedly recorded on tape and retained in top secret files , were actually part of cultist initiation ceremonies . It was alleged these involved paganistic neo - Nazi traits such as blood rituals , practised by elements within the state’s secret forces , as well as the orthodox military structure . More disturbing questions were raised by an allegation from a former treasurer of the Parti Social - Chrétien ( PSC ) youth division called Jacques Thoma . He is on public record as claiming he was once invited to mass orgies by his superior , an associate of Jean - Michel Nihoul and Marc Dutroux . They were explained to him as ‘ an Opus Dei initiation test . ’ Once again we find mystical currents seeping from neo - Nazis and the paedophile gangs , implying the possibility of seamless connections to the Vatican’s so - called ‘ church within a church . ’ Opus Dei , which translates to ‘ Work of God , ’ has been accused by its detractors of various ungodly activities , featuring the intimidation of members , denigration of women , and infiltration of governments . The organisation’s bonding practices are said by critics to involve self - mortification , with devotees obliged to wear spiked chains around their thighs , whip their buttocks and sleep on hard boards . For all its protestations to the contrary , it is certainly true that Opus Dei operates well below visible radar and venerates secrecy . When I undertook the European Parliament’s high - profile probe into family - splitting cults , Opus Dei attracted by far the largest response in my mailbag , more even than high - profile organisations like the Moonies and Scientology . It was excluded from the report after heavy lobbying from the Vatican hierarchy and its powerful supporters in Strasbourg , including perhaps the most prominent Euro - MP , the late Austro - Hungarian archduke Otto von Habsburg .
• Michel Nihoul: de werkelijke ringleider (met Dutroux als handpop)?
  The man long suspected of being the real high priest of the grisly sex rings and drugs rackets was Nihoul, known to intimates - and his alleged victims - as ‘Mich.’ He was a familiar figure on the shady night-club circuit, who could be seen in the company of important figures from the Belgian upper crust. He was known as the man who could fix anything to suit particular tastes. He rose up from street gang territory and made good money on the bar and drugs scene to become the most powerful crime boss in the country. He would always talk himself down as a mere ‘pub owner.’ Those who knew him better understood that his network of alliances was respected by the most powerful élites.
  Dutroux acted as a pimp and sometimes master of ceremonies for Nihoul’s orgies, that were alleged to attract prominent public notables. There was a certain irony when Mr. Big found himself dragged into the limelight concerning his underling. His smirking arrogance at his own court appearances was such that he bawled to reporters that he would never be convicted because he ‘knew too much.’ So, for that matter, did Latinus, but he was not available after 1984 to answer questions. ‘Mich’ had another line of defence. Like his corporal Dutroux, he was a police sneak on the side. Thus, a protection racket worked in reverse, even when Dutroux’s trafficking, torture and murder of young girls and boys was known to senior officers of the gendarmerie.
• De connectie met Paul Van Den Boeynants en de CIA-drugshandel:
  There was another link between Nihoul, Latinus and the street gangs that could be highly compromising to both the Belgian state and the Gladio circuit, and which probably accounts for Latinus’ sudden exit. He knew a good deal - and probably, far too much - concerning another important figure in Group G. This was Paul Vanden Boeynants (‘PvB’ for short), the paunchy and wealthy son of a pork butcher, who became defence minister and twice premier. Compared to the average dour prime minister of Belgium, he had an unusually colourful career. His ‘Social Christian Party’ was infiltrated by western intelligence, and was really little more than a vehicle for himself. He put his chubby hands to everything that offered profit, beginning with the national gendarmerie’s National Bureau for Drugs, where he installed a pliant general who was on the CIA’s payroll. His task was to make sure that regular shipments of marihuana and cocaine bound for the CIA crossed the border into Belgium without harassment . Boeynants , the made - good butcher’s son , found time to open a meat processing factory in Malta as another cover to wash CIA dope funds .
  in large part to the CIA’s long-established international drug circuits, with a certain amount creamed off by Nihoul and partners in return for co-operation on the marketing side. On his part, PvB’s carefully articulated populist charms disguised his control over an enormous bundle of enterprises owing strong connections to the underworld and the CIA. When the time came for scores to be settled, the enemies that he made in the years of good fortune arranged his prosecution for tax evasion. Boeynants responded with threats to sing in no uncertain terms. He was let off with a slap on the wrist , even if his ambitions to become burgomaster ( mayor ) of Brussels travelled no further . Then , early in 1989 , Vanden Boeynants was kidnapped by members of the well-known Haemers gang, which, it later transpired, had close connections to both Belgian Gladio units and Dutroux’s activities. The government tried to pretend he had been snatched by an unknown cell called the ‘Socialist Revolutionary Organisation,’ which strongly suggested Gladio fingerprints. PvB was held for a month, then released after payment of a whopping ransom. This being the surreal state of Belgium, there were further twists to the episode. First, the prominent gang boss Patrick Haemers - someone else who knew too much - joined the lines of convenient prison suicides. His two accomplices were luckier. One fine day in 1993 at the Brussels - St . Gilles prison , their guards left their cells unlocked . They quietly strolled away to freedom . Behind such a carnival lay the revelations from a troop of witnesses that Vanden Boeynants frequently participated with judges, army officers, lawyers, businessmen and other élite figures, in orgies involving young children and acts of ghastly bestiality, including hunts where children were chased through the woods with Dobermans. PvB is dead, following a heart operation that went wrong. All that he knew about Belgium’s depravities has usefully gone to the grave. Yet his legacy lives on, connecting him to almost every organisation spinning in the orbit of crime, neo-Nazi cults and the key figures in the secret army operations. In this domain we find the Public Information Office (PIO) which cropped up in 1974. In a sense, the name was an appropriate pun on its actual task, to act as a sponsored private army headed by one Major Jean-Marie  Bougerol . He was a member of SDRA - 8 - heart of the Belgian stay - behind network . He was also one of the chief suspects , alongside Vanden Boeynants , behind a projected Right - wing coup - the ‘ April Crisis ’ of 1973 .
• Was VDB van plan een staatsgreep te plegen in 1974 om een NAVO-gezinde regering aan de macht te brengen?
  The intention was to evict the weak socialist government then in power. PIO was bidden to co-ordinate the coup and supervise all the hard work Gladio people would need to do. Vanden Boeynants was widely touted as NATO’s choice as figurehead premier, and Bougerol as the brains. The plot was sufficiently advanced to have the country’s armed forces standing on full alert, before the order came from the Ministry of Defence - and, some say, the royal palace - to pull back. It was a precipice moment. The government tottered on for another year before the matter was settled at the ballot box. In March 1974, the dependable and solidly pro-NATO Flemish Bilderberger Leo Tindemanns emerged as premier, following the election that tilted the country firmly to the Right .
• NAVO - CIA - Wackenhut Corporation - Westland New Post - drugs, sex, politiek, Bende Van Nijvel (?) en Lemnitzer (Gladio):
  PIO also reached into the pockets of big business, including immensely secretive Belgian banks. Just as the Nihoul network washed its sex traffic and narcotics haul through numbered anonymous accounts in obliging Belgian banks, so the CIA - and Lemnitzer’s ever-shadowing DIA - used the same route to clean up the funds collected from the dope industry. How much money travelled from the private commercial world to the secret subterranean state in these times will never be established. But there are important clues. The strange tale of the Wackenhut Corporation and its role in Belgium is one of these. It was started as a private security operation in Florida in the 1950s by a rough diamond called George Wackenhut, whose personal opinions belonged so far to the Right he left Senator Joe McCarthy in the shade. The FBI took him on as a special agent to spy on suspected Left-wing subversives. Enshrined in his own business, he never gave up the habit. From the outset, it was stuffed with ex-FBI and CIA cronies, including one really big cheese, Frank Carlucci - former deputy director of the CIA, Reagan’s adviser on national security and later defense secretary 1987-89. The Wackenhut outfit followed Lemnitzer to Belgium, where it was soon working for the local military and NATO. Wackenhut also drew for some of its employees on the Westland New Post paramilitaries. One of these was a known bomber and hit man, the Frenchman Jean-François Calmette, a notorious veteran of the OAS rebellion against de Gaulle and close conspirator of Yves Guérin-Sérac. He was director of the Belgian division of Wackenhut up until 1981, while doubling as senior Westland New Post commander. These were curious relationships for such a prominent businessman in the security business. Among his more exotic activities was looking after security for a lavish tinselled Christmas gala, the ultimate fantasy of a Gladio Ball staged in a swank Brussels hotel. The guests at what was officially a Vanden Boeynants party read like a VIP Who’s Who of the Belgian secret state. Beneath the sparkling chandeliers, a Belgian industrialist’s consort was as likely to take the floor with a member of a NATO-sponsored street gang as a high-flying army officer.
  In 1982, Barbier was assigned as a Wackenhut security guard to the synagogue on the Rue de la Régence in Brussels. During his watch, it mysteriously blew up. The plans of the building were later found in Barbier’s home. This same Marcel Barbier was later discovered to be a close personal associate of Paul Latinus, effectively his deputy. The plot thickened. Security duties agreed with the Belgian army involved the strange melting away of Wackenhut security patrols during a number of incidents in which these bases were supposedly ‘attacked’ by revolutionary forces. In every case, these Strategy of Tension assaults were mounted by paramilitary units, with Westland New Post to the fore. On occasion they were directly supported by US army units, as when a troop from US special forces flew in from Fort Bragg and parachuted into the Ardennes. They hid up for a few days, and then with the aid of local SDRA-8 people, shot up a gendarmerie post in the small town of Vielsalm, killing one officer. On another occasion, a similar US-led raid on an army barracks was supposedly pulled on ‘higher orders’ from Brussels. The Americans (DIA paramilitaries or perhaps members of some other ultra-secret Pentagon unit) continued to cruise the neighbourhood camouflaged in civilian clothes, and then went in on their own to attack the barracks, leaving two more fatalities and a dozen injured. In the mid-1980s, Wackenhut closed down...
• Was de Bende Van Nijvel een psy-op bedoeld om de aandacht af te leiden van het verzet tegen het plaatsten van kernwapens? (zoals de Maanmissies bedoeld waren om de aandacht af te leiden van de Vietnamoorlog)
  The supermarket massacres (rather a misnomer, since a wide range of shops and restaurants were attacked, including typically Jewish-owned targets such as jewellers) all occurred during the early ‘80s, during NATO’s roll-out of manoeuvrable, nuclear-tipped American cruise missiles across Europe. NATO was taken aback by the strength of public opposition in Belgium. The socialists found themselves with such a strong and galvanising populist groundswell they began to tout the idea of leaving NATO. The Belgian parliament, which subsequently investigated the attacks, concluded with unusual cross-linguistic support that purely criminal explanations advanced by the gendarmerie were absurd. On one occasion, a sack of looted money was discovered tossed in a stream. Bank robbers are rarely so charitable.
  No logical criminal purpose could ever be adduced. The special Paramilitary Inquiry concluded it was a false-flag exercise, controlled by the hand of the state to sow confusion and fear among the populace. Voters would be prompted to flock to a Right-wing, law-and-order orientated government which would muzzle opponents of the missile programme. In short, the classic Strategy of Tension ploy. Rumours of involvement in the Brabant/ Nivelle imbroglio persistently swirled around the debonair figure of the part-Algerian secret policeman Madani Bouhouche, who worked for the national gendarmerie’s BOB special investigations unit. He doubled these tasks with a closet role at Westland New Post. The X-File investigators believe that Madani Bouhouche belonged to a group of neo-Nazi officers in the gendarmerie who were responsible for ‘a terror exortion campaign’ connected to the ballets roses, the so-called ‘pink ballet’ juvenile sex orgies. Bouhouche drove a fast BMW which some of the victims claimed he used to take them to a factory just outside Brussels, where they were systematically abused, and some victims murdered. In 1982 he was arrested on a charge of murdering an Algerian gun-runner. Shortly afterwards Bouhouche’s friend and fellow militant Jean Bultot shot off to Paraguay (that popular sanctuary for Nazis), where he informed a pursuing newshound from Le Soir that every single incident had taken place with the help of the state ‘at the highest levels.’ Bouhouche was eventually convicted for the murder of the Algerian arms salesman and the later killing of a diamond dealer. Released on parole, he rented a cottage in a remote part of the French Pyrenees. In November 2005 he managed to behead himself while cutting wood with a chain-saw.
• Idem voor het Heizeldrama?

  On 29th May 1985, television pictures flashed around the world told the story of a bloody massacre at the Heysel football stadium in the Flemish-dominated outskirts of Brussels, long a dominion of neo-Nazi thugs and skinheads. An encounter between the European Cup titans Liverpool and Juventus finished in one of the worst riots in the history of the game, leaving the bodies of 39 Italian fans crushed to death on the terraces, and dozens more injured. What happened that day at Heysel bore all the signs of a deliberately incited, designer riot. But now as the football world mourned, it was time to beckon on the usual scapegoats. Knee-jerk reactions placed the blame squarely on Liverpool supporters. Margaret Thatcher, who intrinsically despised anything tainted by socialist Merseyside, led the charge. British football was instantly banished from Europe, while Liverpool FC found itself the subject of odium for years to come over the alleged behaviour of its supporters. There was some general muttering about the inadequacy of Belgian crowd control, but almost no one except Liverpool chief executive Peter Robinson noted the disturbing background to the catastrophe. Robinson, an objective and thoughtful administrator, was puzzled how such a devastating riot could occur, when prior to kick-off, rival fans had been indulging in good-natured banter. His careful post-mortem included crucial evidence that nearly all the tickets had been sold by Belgian sources, in defiance of the usual rigid precautions. Over-concentration of ticket sales in the hands of the host state is often a contributory factor to violence.  Moreover, the usual strong police contingent expected for such a high - profile clash had been downgraded to little more then a handful of men . It would have taken a more skilled eye to note that the officers on the scene were not the customary gendarmes but men from the Rijkswacht , the élite military police force under the direct control of the Minister of Defence , one of the main components in the Gladio structure .
  Robinson and the Juventus management had protested over the choice of Heysel, a structure so obviously run down and decrepit it was unfit to stage any public event. They were coldly over-ruled by the Belgian authorities. When the managers jointly proposed a security zone with strong barriers to isolate Juventus and Liverpool supporters, that suggestion too was tossed aside. In the end, the only crush barrier was a flimsy fence, against which both groups of heaving fans pressed. And finally, large amounts of seditious material, in the form of Nazi-type banners and even BNP [British National Party] literature, had apparently been stored inside the stadium and scattered around well in advance. The BBC radio station in my Bristol constituency rang my apartment and asked me to file an eye-witness account of the aftermath. Aside from the scene of expected devastation in the wake of the deadly stampede, the most remarkable reactions came from local people, who spoke of a large contingent of Belgian skinheads who entered the stadium as kick-off time approached. Locals were astonished to see Rijkswacht officers, whose duties were well known to be reserved for the highest matters of state security. They concluded prominent VIPs must be present. But other eyewitnesses noted how the senior commanders apparently not only expected the phalanx of skinheads, but were sufficiently acquainted with their leadership to get into ‘smiling conversations.’ One ordinary gendarme I found told me as he surveyed the shambles: ‘This could only have been made to happen.  Those people [ the rival fans ] were shunted so close together that it was like preparing a match for gunpowder . Then our skinheads were let into the ground and that was when the trouble started . ’ He shook his head and went on : ‘ It’s like Brabant , Nivelles . ’ When the staff of my Brussels office tried to contact this same gendarmerie officer about a week later , giving the rank and serial number that I noted down , they were informed that no such person had ever served with the force . Much was later made of the Juventus contingent taunting British fans with florid banners covered with Nazi insignia. There was some comment, however, in the Belgian media, that their design appeared to owe their cultural origins to paganistic Belgian skinhead gangs rather than Italian backgrounds. The one Italian connection that seemed clear involved a Juventus supporter who had been boasting to the home contingent he was ‘with MSI’ [the Italian post-fascist party]. He appeared shouting and firing a pistol at the height of the rioting. Despite being recognisably clear in the live TV coverage, that key figure was never arrested. MSI was an integral component of the Gladio and P2 structures in Italy. Nor was any official inquiry held into the ‘spontaneous’ Heysel riot. No authority in Belgium formally requested one. The British football authorities failed to demand an investigation , because they had been so utterly cowed by Thatcher for her own political ends . The searing shame , on the city as well as the club , was too great.
  Here was an utterly cynical diversion designed to focus the country’s voters away from the missiles affair, the growing pension crisis and accelerating economic woes, and of course, the rival attractions of the Left. Stupefied Belgians - preoccupied above all with the one uniting passion that holds this fragile country together, namely the national game - could think of nothing else but the tragedy. A semi-ruined soccer stadium, close to skinhead and neo-Nazi territory, skimmed of virtually any security precautions despite a high likelihood of friction between the protagonists, came straight out of Gladio central scripting.  In a country where families were mown down while doing their shopping , children tortured to death in dark cellars or chased through the woods by ravenous dogs , Heysel fitted the black landscape of designer atrocities .

• En ook de CCC was wellicht een psy-op of false flag:
  As the 1980’s drew on, a series of storms erupted over kickbacks involving NATO defence contracts. A general who knew of links between huge US arms firms such as Lockheed Martin, leading Belgian politicians and the Royal family, was found dead in circumstances that pointed more to murder than the official claim of suicide. A really large head rolled when Willy Claes, former foreign minister and at the time Secretary General of NATO, was toppled in a kick-backs scandal involving Italian Augusta helicopters. The attention-diverting tactics of Gladio instantly swung into play. The country reeled at the spectacle of violent attacks on armoured cash trucks by raiders armed with military bazookas, assault rifles and battering rams and - echoes from the earlier Brabant/ Nivelles Gang business - random murders committed in supermarkets and parking lots. Special attention was reserved for American business symbols and installations linked to NATO Blame was pinned on a terror group , the Cellules Communistes Combattantes ( CCC ) , whose chief architect - Pierre Carette , bearing all the credentials of a convenient patsy - was eventually jailed for attacking all these standard temples . The Strategy of Tension carpet was rolled out once again.
• En toen volgde nog 1991 met de moord op André Cools:
  1991 was to prove another of those years when momentous events occurred in the Gladio calendar, pointing to something extremely sinister beneath the covers of the state. André Cools, a significant figure in the vastly corrupted Walloon socialist party, and an ex-deputy premier, suddenly threatened to blow the whistle on links to secret funding and worse, implicating people in high places. He was almost immediately assassinated, in a drive-by shooting in Liège in July that year. Cools was tainted by the Italian Agusta helicopter bribes affair, and implicated in the mysterious disappearance of millions of dollar bonds supposedly in safe transit at Brussels airport. Unquestionably, Cools - a characteristically corrupted and vain Belgian politician with much to hide - was being blackmailed, and decided that if he was going down with the ship, then he would take all hands with him . The newspapers were engrossed at precisely this moment with the widely suspected links between prominent Belgian politicians and the stories of sordid sex trafficking .
• Cools werd dus vermoord omdat hij alles wou uitbrengen rond "de roze balletten" en andere zaken, zoals Dutroux?
  The Flemish newspaper De Standaard pitched with delight on the Walloon socialist organisation. It was portrayed as the centre-piece of a sprawling web of corruption linking big business, major banks, insurance firms and construction companies, with many ties to crime networks. What the paper could not say was how much money the party (and its leaders individually) banked directly from NATO slush funds. Cools may have intended to discuss the matter en plein air. Witnesses who escaped the Nihoul sadistic orgy circuit often cited Cools as a regular participant, which adds force to his statements just before his death that he was about to make some ‘shocking revelations’ about the Belgian mafia and their links to some of the most important people in Liège . By early 1997 , Dutroux was practically a footnote in the scandal tearing at the foundations of the rickety state .
  All the powers of the establishment were set loose, including state radio and television networks, to isolate Dutroux as a one-off, isolated pervert, demolish the stories of a national sex and sadism circuit, and not least clear Nihoul of all incriminating charges. In an especially despicable episode, a young woman called Regina Louf, who came forward to testify she had seen her closest girlfriend murdered at one of Nihoul’s wretched parties, was traduced by official spinners and investigating magistrates as an insane liar.[59] The police interrogating team was sacked and replaced by another, which tossed out all her charges. Another side of the same force raided a decrepit mushroom farm specified by Louf and found the dead girl’s remains in exactly the circumstances she described, roped and tied so that she asphyxiated herself during excruciating torture for the amusement of onlookers. It is hard to credit a political system with the slightest perception of civilisation when it refuses to bring the perpetrators of such a horror to justice , particularly when they are known to the authorities . The innocents of a misfit country drown in the ordure of its criminalised élites . Dutroux was also present at this ghastly spectacle , according to Louf.
• In de zaak Dutroux kwamen zeker 9 getuigen op verdachte wijze aan hun einde:
  * François Reyskens: in July 1995, on his way to a police appointment to present evidence concerning two of Dutroux’s victims, he fell under a train. * Bruno Tagliaferro, an ironmonger in Charleroi and acquaintance of Dutroux, who declared he had a compromising list of names connected to Dutroux. In November 1995, he was found dead, supposedly from a stroke. Forensic evidence indicated poison. * His wife Fabienne Jaupart demanded a fresh autopsy. A little while later, her charred body was discovered on a smouldering mattress, doused with inflammable liquid. * In August 1995, Guy Goebels, a police inspector investigating the deaths of two young Dutroux victims, supposedly shot himself with his service revolver. * Simon Poncelet, the police inspector investigating Dutroux’s car swindles, was found shot in February 1996. * In 1996, Anne Konjevoda called police to say she had crucial information linking the kidnappings and the stolen car racket in Charleroi. She was never interviewed. In April 1998, her body was fished from the canal in Liège. She had been strangled. * Brigitte Jennart, Nihoul’s friend and personal dentist, reportedly killed herself in April 1998. Jennart was arguably among the most important of the deceased witnesses, because she intended to reveal Nihoul’s involvement in deals with African asylum seekers that involved child trafficking. * Jean-Marc Houdmont, another acquaintance of Marc Dutroux, died in a car crash in February 1997 en route to testify in court against Dutroux. * And finally, Hubert Massa, chief prosecuting attorney of the investigation into Dutroux and the lead investigator into the 1991 murder of André Cools, ‘shot himself’ on 12th July 1999.
• Maar het waren er wellicht nog veel meer, zoals gesuggereerd door een min of meer officiële bron:
  In March 2004, the German state television channel ZDF suggested that as many as 27 people with important evidence concerning the vice, blackmail and extortion rings had been killed, committed suicide or disappeared in suspicious circumstances.
• Het proces-Dutroux bleek een farce en Nihoul gaf toe bescherming van bovenaf te krijgen:
  At a trial crowded with hundreds of reporters, Dutroux was convicted for kidnapping, the murder of two victims and manslaughter of two more (who starved in his dungeons while he was absent). At an earlier hearing, the element of farce overwhelmed the grimness of events when Dutroux, supposedly heavily guarded, ‘slipped’ his handcuffs in a feat of ingenuity worthy of Houdini and briefly escaped. The impression some keys belonging to warders played a role in this miracle was not lost on the media. The trial was another farce. In an unprecedented development, the jury formally protested at the presiding judge Stéphane Goux’s behaviour, particularly in rushing victims’ testimonies, without sufficient time for the evidence to sink in or allow for examination. Nihoul was excused all the paedophile charges and jailed solely for unrelated drug running. He was proved correct when he bawled to reporters he would never be convicted for sex trafficking. It was already public knowledge that he enjoyed protection in high places. These extended to convenient relationships with the judge investigating the Regina Louf allegations . Belgians concluded this was the end of the business and quite possibly the state itself .
• De aanslagen in Madrid en Londen nu. Ook Gladio?
  The bombs were ‘ordered’ just three days before the elections, but the planning for the operation may have started up to a year earlier. There were two different sets of bombs: ten loaded with high explosives, which wrought the carnage, and four more which posed little threat and did not explode, or even as some Guardia officers insisted, were not real bombs. Evidently one highly-sophisticated operation was superimposed on top of another, amateur effort. Del Pino has founded a movement - Peones Negros (The Black Pawns) - devoted to exposing the lies and the machinery ‘moving in the shadows,’ which squashed any prospect of an honest exposure from the very beginning. One editorial in El Mundo suggested the skills to pull off the operation could obviously be found in TEDAX, the specialist bomb squad, which clearly knew far more about the sequence of events than any of those subsequently swept into the police dragnet - in short, a Gladio-style deep state blueprint. Certainly the show trial of the 28 accused conspirators failed to produce a shred of evidence of Al Qaeda provenance. Seven of the men walked free from the courtroom. None of the questions disputing the type of explosives used or the meticulous planning were aired. The court case was written off by international observers as a cover-up and a farce. It was a rehearsal for virtually the same stage script with the London bombings, fifteen months later. The Spanish court elected to ignore all the basic rules of evidence in order to divert speculation - in the interests of ‘social calm’ - from the possibility of a conspiracy organised at the heart of the government.(N3) When Judge Javier Gómez Bermudez handed down his judgements at the close of the record-breaking 21-month, chaotic trial, no one in Spain was any the wiser who was responsible for the most appalling episode of mass murder in Spain since the civil war of the late 1930’s. Only one minnow, Jamal Zougham, was actually convicted of planting explosives, in a rucksack. Others went down for long sentences amounting to thought crimes. Much of the evidence was entirely circumstantial, which is conveniently permitted in Spanish courts. No effort was made to explain how a league of amateur conspirators with such diverse backgrounds gained the sophisticated ability to co-ordinate such a complex attack. To cap it all, the so-called emir of the entire enterprise, an Egyptian, left the court a free man, once it was proven the Guardia fabricated incriminating phone messages he purportedly made to other conspirators.
• Vernietiging van cruciale bewijzen. Waar hebben we dat nog gezien?
  Just two days after the bombings, the mangled coaches were broken up and melted down for scrap, a wanton destruction of crucial evidence.
• Reden voor de aanslag in Madrid?
  Despite all their hesitancy to vote for a party with Francoist sympathies, Spaniards - tired of the crime barons with claws stuck in every corner and cleft of society - voted in 1996 for Aznar and his pledge of clean government. Aznar’s war on crime - especially in the lucrative field of building permits, and particularly in Marbella, the Spanish Las Vegas-on-the-Med - struck a popular chord. In 2004, another four years of brute Aznarism was something that the crime syndicates could well do without. A socialist government traditionally soft on crime presented a rosier prospect. When billions are involved, a certain price is worth paying.
• Madrid en de merkwaardige connectie met 11 september: er zaten 911 dagen tussen. Noot: ook tussen de moord van Pim Fortuyn (06-05-2002) en Theo Van Gogh (02-11-2004) zaten ook precies 911 dagen.
  There is a curious footnote, either by random co-incidence or perhaps some carefully devised subliminal message, to connect the World Trade Centre and the Madrid train attacks. They fell precisely 911 days - or 2.5 years - apart. I am not one to search for esoteric occultist messages and symbolism - I leave that to the talents of Dan Brown - but this one, to the surface at any rate, seems to stretch the point of accidental happenstance to curious limits.
• De gelijkenissen met de aanslagen in Londen (7/7) zijn veel frappanter echter:
  Sifting through the debris of Madrid and London bombings is close to inspecting a strange symbiotic relationship between the sum of events in two countries.[66] Consider the following, as a short list * The clash of narratives between haversack bombs and something far more lethal originating from military sources. * How such enormous damage to the trains could be explained by amateur bombs. * The vagueness of any connections between the young men alleged as the bombers in both capitals, and allegiance to Al Qaeda. * Suspects in Madrid and London under surveillance by the police and security services without gaining clues to bomb trains. * The indecent haste to destroy important evidence (alweer!), such as the wrecked train carriages. * True, there were no worrisome elections on the horizon in the UK. But there was a pressing and urgent need to bolster support for Blair’s faltering adventures in the Middle East and Spain’s participation in America’s unpopular wars.
  The sum of co-incidence does not end there. Up until 1990, Power was an officer with the Metropolitan Police anti-terrorist squad. This does not make him a conspirator or personally incriminated in the day’s events, but invites a large degree of inevitable compromise. Almost exactly a year earlier, he was one of a select panel of experts selected to assist the BBC in preparing a distinctly Orwellian fictional preview of the 7/7 attacks. This was broadcast on the flagship Panorama current affairs programme as ‘London Under Attack.’ It might have been a documentary enticed from a parallel universe, because it featured the same script of bombed underground trains and solemn political denunciations of Al Qaeda. A chlorine tanker stood in for the red double-decker bus wrecked a year later in real time. The BBC’s publicity department contributed this advance promotion, as events transpired, of an actual event; ‘This fictional day of terror unfolds through the immediacy of rolling news bringing the catastrophic attack into our living rooms.’ George Orwell, who was paid to broadcast wartime propaganda on the BBC, would instantly recognise the dangerous transition from news reporting to social manipulation. It was after all the ideological spinal chord of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
• Het houden van oefeningen of drills vlak voor de gebeurtenis zelf plaatsvindt, waar hebben we dat nog gezien? Event 201 iemand? Of de drills van 9/11? Of antraxaanvallen na 9/11 geoefend enkele maanden eerder in Dark Winter? Londen dus:
  The unfolding story of No. 30 is nothing less than television drama viewed in real time: * Number 30’s normal route sweeps along Euston road, then makes a sharp loop around Euston Square. Why was this particular No. 30 not steered away from Euston Station altogether, instead of sending it on the detour? Why was it the only bus on route 30 diverted that morning, up to the point of the explosion? * Why was it the only bus serving that particular route to undergo 20 hours of special CCTV maintenance in the previous days? How did this ‘maintenance’ come to be performed by a technician the garage managers did not recognise, and who was admitted in defiance of strict Health and Safety rules? No further need to inquire why none of the all-seeing eyes on board or on the street were working that day. * Who gave the sudden order to switch routes, and why?
  Many witnesses corroborated reports that the bombs went off beneath the carriages. Metal surrounding the blast holes twisted into a crown-shaped formation, and the holes were big enough to swallow victims while they were still alive, which happened in at least one case. Passengers bled to death from the force of injuries to the lower half of their bodies. There were ghastly descriptions of people staring in disbelief at the exposed stumps of their shattered legs. To those dissatisfied with the explanation of suicide bombers, suspicion focused on explosives placed on the track. Possible, but doubtful. During the overnight shutdown, cleaners and maintenance teams swarm through the tunnels. Unusual objects would be noticed or set off by scouring equipment. But not if the explosives packages were slung underneath carriage floors, then triggered by the short circuit or similar fault. For this, the perpetrators would require access to the service depots. We should remember the unrecognised technicians who secured entry to the depot where the doomed route 30 bus was garaged. Now the blasts and the surge can be reconnected. A mass of contradictions collide in this compressed interstice. * TfL’s first accounts spoke of ‘power surges.’ * Police and broadcasters at first followed the same line. * Because of the inconsistencies in the travelog, it is extremely unlikely that Tanweer, Khan and Lindsay were actually aboard the subway trains. * Were the Luton Four hired as extras in a simulation exercise, which might require Asian-looking actors playing parts in a terrorist attack? It would explain why they bought return tickets, an inexplicable nicety if they were fixing to blow themselves and a host of innocents to Kingdom Come. * Could they have been secretly ‘personality profiled’ in advance to fit the subsequent claim they were the bombers, acting entirely alone? * Like the Spanish general election, the casus belli was a big-ticket event, Blair’s heroic preening before the G8 conclave in Scotland. The issue of the explosives is soaked in political interference. There were indications grimly apparent to the first teams who crawled over the wreckage, broken bodies and remnants of charred clothing, that enormously powerful explosive had been used. The French anti-terrorist chief, Christophe Chaboud, who was urgently summoned to the scene from Paris, pointed to the signs of military-type explosive such as C4 (plastique) - possibly imported from the Balkans - which he described as ‘highly disturbing.’ Chaboud made himself unpopular in London by pointing to Iraq as the real fuel for the attack. Of course, his suspicion of the powerful munitions involved could not fit lone bombers high on inflammatory Jihadist fuel. Military-type bombs indicated sophisticated planning. Within two weeks, government officials began to insist that the bombs were made with basic household materials set off by primitive timers or by the bombers themselves . M . Chaboud returned to Paris , and was not asked for his unsettling opinions again .
  Any psychologist understands that part of the grieving/ healing process is empathy with the physical remains of the deceased. Yet, in the wake of the bombings an extraordinary cover-up ensured that bereaved relatives were not allowed to see their loved ones for up to a fortnight. Some, like the family of 30-year-old Rome-born Benedetta Ciaccia, who died at Aldgate, were advised not to see her body - ‘better to remember her as she was before.’ Poignant, harrowing stories from that awful day abound.
• Merkwaardig genoeg was het veertien dagen later bijna weer van dat:
  On 21st July 2005, four bombs again disrupted London’s transport system. Small explosions occurred around lunchtime on that day aboard subway trains at Warren Street, Oval and Shepherd’s Bush stations. A fourth incident occurred on a bus in the East London suburb of Shoreditch. Curiously, the bus came from the same depot in Stratford, East London, as the one blown up on 7/7. A co-incidence too far? Coming only fourteen days after the savagery of 7/7, the heated propaganda impact in the media re-inforced the impression of the British capital under siege by Islamic fanatics. Excitable and untruthful hyperbole of devices packed with nails and other sharp objects, detonated by Chapati flour mixed with hair gel or hydrogen peroxide, seized the media; but how then to explain why the actual explosions had the force of little more then a noisy firework. In effect they were paltry smoke bombs. There were no injuries and the bombers fled unharmed. In the service of stoking the agenda of fear, reporters were fed the utterly false account that one of the alleged bombers had tried to explode his package with a revolver. However, it is significant that shortly before these squibs went off, a number of passengers on board the three trains described the same noxious rubbery smell that was also reported by survivors of the 7th July explosions. Was this the consequence of another electrical voltage spike? If so, were the Chapati flour bombs really intended as a mask for another deadly assault? In that event, 21st July - and the still unexplained murder of the Brazilian jobbing electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes, aboard a busy rush-hour tube train at Stockwell station the following day - acquire a dramatically enlarged significance.
  There are two potential suppositions here. The first is that 21st July was actually intended as a deadly repeat performance of 7th July, resulting in a similar scale of casualties. I find this explanation at least partly persuasive because of one very important clue. On 21/7, the day before the murder of Menezes at Stockwell tube station (which occurred at 10.06 am) there was a serious incident on the Victoria Line near Vauxhall, in south London. Vauxhall is the next stop immediately north of Stockwell. At approximately 9.10 a.m., an emergency was declared aboard a train heading in the northbound direction. It was sufficiently disturbing to call for a line of emergency vehicles on the nearby Thames-side Albert Embankment. There are some reports that this impressive convoy assembled in advance of the alert. This is the story of the phantom 21/7 bomb, which has until now eluded the serious attention that it so obviously merits. In short, was there an attempt to blow up an underground train near Vauxhall station that morning, an almost replica incident to the three explosions on the tube network two weeks earlier? The answer is almost certainly positive. The emergency began when a woman passenger noticed an unattended bag, panicked and activated the alarm to stop the train. In the moments before the incident, the passengers in this carriage noticed something very significant and familiar: the air in the compartment filled with choking, acrid fumes, and a bluish mist appeared in the tunnel. As we noticed in the descriptions of events in London on 7/7, this acrid rubbery smell accompanied by a strange blue illumination was described by many witnesses shortly before the deadly explosions that day. It is the tell-tale indicator of the over-heating of electrical circuiting that comes with accidental or deliberate voltage spikes. Subsequently TfL insisted that the fumes were provoked by the driver applying the brakes, which is entirely disingenuous because the passengers were aware of the fumes and the strange blue glow in the minutes before the driver applied an emergency stop procedure.
  (Q)uite unlike the fireworks on three other trains that day, there were no reports of anyone on board acting suspiciously. There were no sinister figures fiddling with potentially explosive devices, just the acrid choking fumes and mysterious blue glow. The appearance of bomb disposal units who remained on the scene, apparently working in complete secrecy for some three hours, leaves little doubt that some kind of device was aboard the train. The supposition must be that having failed to explode, it was then defused and removed behind a security screen. The episode passed into the media fog as a ‘false alarm,’ and there it rested. The question that immediately arises is why the authorities did not leap to instantly bang the drums of yet another seemingly tailor-made episode in the war on terror. Here was a rare blanket of silence. The answer can only be that the script had not been prepared for the eventuality of a plot that failed.
  The second supposition is that the Brazilian-born electrician, who was hunted down the following day by Scotland Yard police and a top-secret military squad, may have been in possession of compromising information concerning an intended repeat performance of 7th July. The excuse that he was mistaken for someone that he did not remotely resemble is simply fantastic. There is no evidence that Menezes ever worked for the various companies operating the underground network, even as a sub-contractor. But it is not impossible that as a freelance electrician he might have made enough contacts to stumble on some compromising information concerning the malfunctioning of electrical circuits. This might explain that Menezes was selectively killed as a warning to possible collaborators who might share his knowledge. There is another explanation to be explored later: that Menezes was himself connected in some way to British intelligence, and eliminated on those grounds because of something immensely compromising that he knew concerning the failed attacks the previous day. What is absolutely certain is that in the final hours of his life, Menezes never displayed the slightest indications that he was a terrorist setting off single-mindedly to attack an underground train. All the posthumous claims that he was acting suspiciously, wearing a thick belt trailing wires, failed to stop when ordered by the police, were exposed as blatantly false. This means that the ‘mistaken identity, we got the wrong guy’ alibi trotted out in the wake of the shooting automatically collapses.
  On the morning of 22nd July, just after ten o’clock, 27-year-old Menezes was shot seven times in the head on a rush-hour Northern Line underground train at Stockwell tube station. The media filled with reports that he was mistaken for a suicide bomber. By the law of unintended consequences, the grisly assassination of a man revealed subsequently as innocent of any wrong-doing whatsoever, raised the curtain on the apparently stupefying muddle and operational chaos among shadowy operational units inside Scotland Yard and deeper levels of the British secret state. The searchlight beam also identified a Scotland Yard SWAT squad with powers to carry out no-questions-asked killings. Its activities were code-named Kratos, after the Greek deity renowned for strength and power , and tellingly , the lead character in a fictional computer game which features the Spartan captain of a rapidly growing and powerful army.
• Bent u nog mee? Hier de conclusie van Richard Cottrell
  My conclusion in considering and analyzing all these ‘unique’ factors is that British intelligence knows a great deal about the purpose and motives behind the organized and deliberate murder of Jean Charles de Menezes. Should we be privileged to share that knowledge, then much more would be known about a far larger event, namely the bombings that cruelly decimated so many lives in London on 7th July 2005. Scarcely twelve months later, on 2nd June 2006, another event occurred which bore disturbing similarities to the Menezes affair. Certainly it was clear from the outcome of ‘Operation Volga’ that the Metropolitan Police, for all the official crocodile tears wept over the murdered Brazilian, had gained little in practical experience. A huge force of 250 policeman reaped an unexpected overtime paycheque bonus when they stormed a four-room house in Forest Gate, North London. There a ‘skilled marksman’ shot and almost killed another innocent man, 25-year-old Mohammed Abdul Kahar, as he came down the stairs, half asleep and confused. Although he was struck in the shoulder, about an inch from his lung, he survived to tell another tale proving that nothing had been learnt from the culling of Menezes, save the necessity to maintain Londoners hovering in a state of permanent emergency. When it become obvious that Forest Gate was yet another grotesque mistake, Sir Ian Blair calmly refuted any criticism of the Metropolitan Police. His language implied that members of the Muslim community living in the United Kingdom should accustom themselves to such armed raids, in the interests of public safety.
• False flag's, allemaal om de politiestaat verder te introduceren:
  Of course they dutifully worked to the pre-rehearsed script, every word of the Yard’s account the gospel of the day’s events, while the shifty Arabs stepped straight from central casting. The Observer newspaper celebrated the death of English liberalism and the latest advance of the national police state with the words; ‘Better a bungled raid than another terrorist outrage.’ The Newham Project team who followed the affair closely, concluded; ‘Much of the responsibility for the media strategy following the raids must rest with members of the senior management team in New Scotland Yard. Amongst this group of officers were personnel who had virtually total control of the operational information finding its way into the media and credited as police sources.’ In short, blackwash, political propaganda. On 3rd August, following a rushed inquiry, the Independent Police Complaints Commission concluded with depressing familiarity that the shooting was yet another police accident, with no indication of reckless behaviour by the officer concerned.
• Gladio keert terug. Nog een false flag: de aanslag op Place Saint-Lambert in Luik (let op de datum), met een terrorist met NAVO-wapens:
  Witnesses in the Place Saint-Lambert spoke of other gunmen armed with powerful rifles, casually taking aim at their victims. As the shooting died away, one masked armed man was seen by a number of witnesses running off through a subway. The number of casualties accomplished in such a brief episode also raises serious questions. Amrani was said to have used a Belgian-manufactured FN-FAL self-loading repeating rifle, which is commonly used by NATO armies as a battlefield weapon. Considering that he was supposed to be under close police scrutiny, after his earlier conviction for holding illegal and dangerous weapons, it is strange that such a powerful gun associated with NATO came to his possession. The FN-FAL can fire off 600 rounds a minute, so for a mass killer it would be perfect. But the time frame enclosing the shootings definitely indicates the presence of more than one gunman to score so many hits, moreover from different directions. This is a significant conflict with the official account. Amrani, a rather short, round-faced, bearded individual, was not the classic Islamic terrorist portrayed in the usual official identikits. He could not speak nor could he read Arabic, and gave the mosque a wide berth. He had no associations with militants of any description. He grew cannabis, but then who doesn’t in Belgium. On the way to his shooting spree, a five-minute trip from his apartment, he apparently paused to kill a 45-year-old woman who kept house for a neighbor. The pretext for a murder conducted on the spur of the moment was never adjudged. There was talk of attempted rape, which went no further. Still less, why he decided to launch his onslaught in the Place Saint Lambert shortly after 12.30 pm that same day. The mystery seems irresolvable, unless we approach the possible solution from a fresh direction.
  As some media accounts did notice, his police supervision was lax to the point of invisibility, despite his apartment supposedly bristling with dangerous weapons. We are beginning to sense the appearance right on cue of the standard cultivated patsy. Just before the shootings, Amrani’s parole was due to expire. He greatly feared returning to prison, as he frequently told his live-in girl friend. Given that he was allowed such a free hand to acquire his fabulous store of munitions, it would be a simple act of persuasion to strike a bargain concerning his parole, so long as he agreed to take part in a forthcoming short police training exercise in the city centre. I suspect that he believed he was firing blanks. Likewise, he believed that the grenades were dummies intended for effect, like a thunderflash, not to kill. And he did not commit suicide with the Magnum revolver. In this scenario, he was executed by a rifle shot fired at a distance, before he could tender some differing account. The fate of the housekeeper that he supposedly molested and then killed, belongs with other hands. As we have seen from our earlier studies of homicide in Belgium, this explanation is entirely coherent. Recall that lengthy list of key witnesses in the Dutroux affair who conveniently died, were murdered or had accidents before they could tell their stories in open court.
• Cui bono?
  Amrani might not have been the standard mosque militant , but he still filled the bill for the Strategy of Tension : he was a Muslim by birth , he played with deadly weapons , he was easily manipulated or controlled , and he came from nowhere in the sensitive Christmas season to wage horror on god - fearing innocent Christians . The similarities with the earlier atrocity in Norway are so striking that a strong
  suspicion arises that the design and organisation came from the same stable .
• En dan hebben we natuurlijk ook nog de moord van Pim Fortuyn en de merkwaardige figuur Volkert Van der Graaf (alweer een patsy?):
  Do we assume Van der Graaf found some quiet place for target practice? His deadly professional accuracy was a classic shooting gallery performance, quite remarkable for a man who must have been under considerable emotional stress, undoubtedly shaking at the prospect of killing a man - and an eminent one at that - for the first time in his life. To a professional with a steady hand, firm eye and grim resolve, no more than the demands of his calling; for a rank amateur, an extraordinary feat of accuracy.
  The mish-mash of motives served up by his assassin, Van der Graaf, looks like another example plucked straight from the Lee Harvey Oswald/ Jack Ruby/ Sirhan Sirhan/ Timothy McVeigh/ Ali Ağca hall of fame. Ağca may be the closest relative. We noticed that after the Papal shooting he was whisked away to a distant prison far from Rome, where an obvious and sophisticated indoctrination exercise then took place. Van der Graaf was held in close confinement for several weeks, and then for some months afterwards - still in isolation - declined to explain why he killed Fortuyn. However, the award-winning Dutch thriller writer Tomas Ross did venture an explanation in his semi-fictional book 6/5 (De zesde mei, The Sixth of May). The plot depicts Dutch intelligence duping Van der Graaf into killing the maverick Fortuyn, who was grinding on the nerves of the entrenched political establishment, particularly over his equivocal stand on a controversial multi-billion-euro defence contract with the United States. Ross’ friend Theodore van Gogh made the book into a film, with a mix of fact and fiction that is the common style nowadays. The important thing about it was the inflammatory gesture of publicly muddying the official line by fingering the secret services. 6/5 hit the internet and movie theatres early in 2004.[74] A few months later, Van Gogh was horribly murdered. With his invocation of the secret state in the Technicolor tragedy of Pim Fortuyn, did he then invite his own death, displaying every sign of a furious revenge killing, at the hands of a 26-year-old Dutch-Moroccan who belonged to a group thoroughly that was penetrated by the AIVD?
• Was Fortuyn vermoord omwille van zijn verzet tegen de Joint Strike Fighter? Intussen gebeurde met Van der Graaf ook vanalles:
  Van der Graaf was sent to a forensic psychiatric institute for assessment, where the government tried to have him kept under strict supervision 24 hours a day. The doctors at the Pieter Baan centre in Utrecht apparently resisted, arguing they would never be able to assess his true mental condition under such restrictions. He was judged fit to face trial, although diagnosed as suffering from obsessional disorders, which should have cried out as a disqualification.
  The assassin now begins to resemble the standard patsy, of which there is further convincing evidence to come. On 23rd November 2002, a full seven months after the shooting, the prosecution announced the prisoner had finally made a humble confession admitting his full guilt. The contents of this important document, or even its physical existence, remain secret. The evidence submitted to the court included the puzzling affair of Fortuyn’s DNA, alleged to match traces found on Van der Graaf. How was this remarkable transmutation remotely possible, given there was never any opportunity for physical contact between the two men? Immediately after the shooting, Van der Graaf bolted, until he was cornered moments later by Fortuyn’s chauffeur in a nearby petrol station. Ten years ago , the niceties of DNA procedure were not as popularly understood as they are now , so no piercing questions were asked about the magical properties of Fortuyn’s DNA to disperse itself at will.
  Had Fortuyn lived to become premier, one of his first decisions would be the fate of Dutch participation in the highly contentious Joint Strike Fighter project promoted by the United States through the Lockheed Martin company. Fortuyn correctly sniffed another multi-billion dollar boondoggle with the built-in capacity for a massive cost over-run, yet was compelled out of Realpolitik to consider the jobs impact on big-payroll Dutch sub-contractors like the giant Philips electronics conglomerate. Lockheed Martin, one of the great bulldozers of the military-industrial complex, dragged the Dutch royal family through scandal dirt a quarter of a century earlier, throwing Queen Juliana’s consort Prince Bernhard a $1.1 million dollar bribe to favour a Lockheed jet for the Dutch air force. He spent most of it feathering a nest in Paris for one of his many courtesans, weeping crocodile tears it should have gone to the World Wildlife Fund, where he was a prominent figure. Fortuyn’s quibbles over the JSF - he was not a pacifist but wary of the over-weening military-industrial complex - ensured powerful enemies in the Dutch military establishment, and even within the ranks of his own list. I have identified at least one possible intelligence plant sprouting there, well known to myself, which suggests a certain naivety in Fortuyn’s judgment in choosing his collaborators. Although his associates later claimed he toned down his anti-JSF line, his mind on that subject by the time he died was frankly not known. He was certainly having his arms roughly twisted.[76] Willem Oltmans is a name well known in Holland as an acerbic critic of the Dutch establishment. In a quite extraordinary episode, which partly involved the Orange royal family, Oltmans was awarded eight million guilders compensation in 2000, when the Dutch government tacitly conceded trying to gag him for the past decade. Not long after that he was in trouble again, this time for claiming that the US Ambassador in The Hague, Clifford Sobel, secretly met with Fortuyn to resolve the fighter plane impasse. This might be seen as a perfectly acceptable instance of diplomatic lobbying to resolve a contentious issue. Why then did Oltmans claim shadowy figures from the Dutch deep state suddenly threatened to kill him (he died in 2004) or have him locked up in a mental home. This mystery, like so many others, died with Fortuyn, but I am certain that the JSF controversy was connected directly to the murder. I suspect Sobel reported back to the State Department the stubborn premier-in-waiting would not budge, unless there were strict rules on cost over-runs. In which case, the encounter was sensitive, to say the least, given the embassy denied the meeting ever took place. The JSF express certainly gathered remarkable speed, not to say indecent haste, as soon as Fortuyn was out of the way.
  The faction’s new leader , Mathieu Herben , formerly a long - serving staffer at the Defence Ministry , took over and sharply moved the party line in favour of the fighter project . Only thirty days after Fortuyn was slain , Edward Aldridge , Pentagon secretary responsible for defence acquisitions , flew in to the US Soesterberg air base near Utrecht , to sign the official documents of Dutch participation with defence secretary Henk van Hoof . The election returned a large party of Fortuynista at the price of complete chaos , even by the usual Dutch standards , in forming a coalition . The long years of ‘ poulder politics ’ - stability achieved by carefully gauged consensus - imploded , never to surface again . Van Hoof’s own days were numbered . He was a hangover from the outgoing government of Wim Kok , a caretaker in office , yet was allowed to sign one of the most important international treaties of recent years , despite a complete power vacuum in government .
• Is de Hofstadgroep, de Islamitische terreurgroep waar de moordenaar van Van Gogh lid van was, een creatie van de Nederlandse geheime dienst AIVD?
  But Sévèke’s most explosive charge concerned the gruesome deaths of the twin national celebrities, Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh. On the very eve of his death, he appeared on television accusing AIVD of deliberately fabricating its own fake Al Qaeda terror group called Hofstadgroep. Sévèke insisted the plainly unbalanced individual accused in the grisly Van Gogh murder was expressly linked to the same organisation, which was true. It would emerge he was the leader of it. ‘That is their normal way of working,’ Sévèke declared. When the AIVD boss predictably clamoured for more special powers and agents, he specifically identified Hofstadgroep as multiplying everywhere in the country, for which there was not a shred of proof, then or since. Sévèke then published and broadcast claims it was a cloak for agents provocateurs working in an underhand fashion - the same Gladio tactic of old - to supply hand grenades and weapons to ‘a very dangerous group,’ knowing full well the uses they would be put to. Such grenades wounded police officers in 2006, when they stormed a so-called Al Qaeda safe house in The Hague, after the usual tip-off from an unknown source.[77] The story of what is or is not Hofstadgroep now takes an interesting twist.
  The Dutch authorities were forced into the great embarrassment of admitting the assassin of Theo Van Gogh, 26-year-old Mohammed Bayouri, was well-known to the secret services, and the subject of a bulging file. He was kept under round-the-clock surveillance, until the snooping was inexplicably dropped two weeks before the murder. The lame excuse was advanced that he knew only minor figures. Yet, as the story dripped out in court, he was the ringleader of this alleged tightly-knit terrorist cell, composed of at least thirteen alleged hard-line conspirators, who regularly trooped to his flat on the Antheunisstraat in The Hague. This was festooned from top to bottom with listening devices installed by AIVD, so the assumption must be that as these excitable young men cheerfully babbled away about their nefarious plots and schemes, all was automatically heard and jotted down. The tailing may have been called off, but the eavesdropping, not. Clearly, it is impossible to dissociate the security services from the acts of a small and apparently seditiously-minded group if they have them under the microscope night and day. This is not quite the claim of synthetic terrorism advanced by Sévèke, but it is close enough to accept his case as proven. The name Hofstadgroep - which means in Dutch the equivalent of a group at court, in the sense of the royal presence at The Hague - was never employed by the conspirators, but invented by AIVD as a code for the evil ones they were watching. This did not prevent the eye-rolling media from using the term as a generic label for all the terrorism in Holland, a classic instance of disinformation and mission creep in the same breath. The nebulous nature of this organization , if it really existed in any concerted form , was to become the subject of torturous legal debate akin to defining the sexual status of angels .
  Bar the single case of Mohammed Bayouri, the authorities were left with demanding convictions for hot air and generalities: heady talk of bumping off MPs, downing airliners, bombing a nuclear power station and so forth, for which they apparently lacked the necessary sophistication or the equipment. The picture which arose from the extended court proceedings suggested a lot of high-flown Jihadist rhetoric and little else. The highest court in the land thought so too. On 23rd January 2008, the national appeals court sitting in The Hague threw out certain earlier judgments of lower courts in cases that involved planning terrorist plots. The judges lightened the sentences or acquitted a number of suspects because they found no convincing evidence the Hofstad network really existed. In Holland, it is possible to appeal against appeals, so the legal roundabout continues to dizzily whirl, with prosecutors arguing that absence of a formal organization is no excuse for acquittals. Reading between the lines, the appeals court decided something different altogether. This was to question the central thesis of the prosecution case , namely the physical existence in Holland of an organized and directed terrorist cell , equipped with a clear programme and the necessary ongoing capabilities . Of course , the credibility of the ongoing Dutch war on terror demands there should be .
• Ten slotte, enkele observaties rond de Breivik-zaak:
  Within hours of the attacks, the EU’s policing offshoot Europol announced a new multi-national task force, charged with investigating and infiltrating potentially hostile political movements deemed as potentially dangerous. In other words, exactly those groups which supposedly inspired the 33-year-old market gardener Anders Behring Breivik to kill 77 people, 55 of them teenagers. Another 62 suffered bullet wounds. The massacre commanded world headlines and news channels. But when the news leaked out six weeks later that Norway’s crack anti-terrorist squad had just finished a ‘training exercise’ on the day, which exactly mirrored the bombing in downtown Oslo and the following shooting frenzy on Utøya Island (wéér een voorbeeld, TFB), the only official response was silence. The bomb that practically wrecked a large area of the downtown business and government district exploded less than half an hour after the so-called drill ended. A senior police spokesman brushed it off as a mere ‘co-incidence.’ The chances against such a random co-incidence are multiples of millions to one. The odds rose even further when it emerged that the first police officer who stepped ashore amid the bloodshed on Utøya Island not only recognised Breivik immediately, but addressed him directly by name. According to other reports in the media, Breivik had also called the police several times during the attack at Utøya. What these reports tell us is that whistle-blowers within police ranks are fully aware of the true story behind 22/7, and intended that it should come out. We are in the same territory as the NORAD drill involving the use of jets as weapons on 9/11, and the simulated terrorist attack on the London underground system, which ‘just happened’ to overlap with the real-time deadly bombings.