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

By  Trowbridge H. Ford

 

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

During 1971, the Official and Provisional Irish Republican Armies had established “no-go” areas in Derry, much unlike the situation in Belfast, and much to the British Army’s disgust. London’s introduction of internment without trial earlier had been in the hope of separating the troublemakers from the general Catholic population in the expectation of re-establishing some kind of stability but it wasn’t working in Derry.To deal with the problem, London adopted the plan of Commander Land Forces, Major General Robert Ford, of carrying out a search and control operation for the gunmen while clearing away the barricades.(1) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The biggest trouble was not only were joy-riders made out to be terrorists, but also Karen Reilly was no Provo volunteer but the adopted daughter, it seems, of RUC policeman, and colleague of Phoenix’s, John Reilly whose wife Diane who had been married to James McGrillen when she had Karen.(14) McGrillen, an IRA volunteer, had been shot dead similarly in 1976 for car theft. While the killing of Peake and Karen Reilly had just been a result of the Paras going after alleged Provo terrorists, the Reillys saw it as the result of Pheonix’s Special Branch going slow on stopping real terrorism, goading the ´Paras to do more. Despite the fact that Ian and Susan Phoenix tried to band with the Reillys over the tragedy, making out that it was simply an accident, and even Ian attending her funeral despite orders against it (15), the Reíllys would not have any of it. Phoenix, it seems, had made a mortal enemy which nothing could undo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then Annie Machon, with help from David Shayler, added complete fiction about the confrontation in Spies, Lies & Whistleblowers where the RUC was hardly mentioned at all, and its Special Branch and Ian Phoenix never. The struggle with the Provisionals was seen as all a mainland matter, and its slowness in dealing with the challenge timely and properly. The only time Northern Ireland was mentioned in any serious regard was when colleague William Perkins – name changed on orders of MI5, and apparently Jonathan ‘Bob’ Evans who is its Director General – was obliged to go to the province just before the crash, apparently to make the necessary arrangement. There can be no doubt that Perkins is Evans after she wrote this: “He looked much older than his age, 38, as he was almost totally bald on top and had a Zapata mustache, which also dated him.”(27)

The best example of the cover up occurred when Perkins was sent off to Northern Ireland on this note by his head of section: “And what ca we say about Bill? He has had to suffer the double misfortune of being posted to Northern Ireland without his wife and of having broken his right wrist.” (28)

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

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

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

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

 

Previous post on this topic

Was Oxford’s Gudrun Loftus Killed Because She Threatened To Become Another Gareth Williams?

by Trowbridge H. Ford
 
In the so-called war against terror, the role of eavesdropping upon its participants has become increasingly important despite the opposition of humint agents on the ground, whether it be catching terrorists before they do something, or apprehending them after they have. While the hardware involved in doing so, whether it be tapping land or fiber optic cables or wireless communications, has been extensively discussed, too little has been said about the technicians who collect the messages, whether it be encrypted or not, and the analysts who determine what it all means.  Of course, the biggest reasons that their role is not mentioned is because it would tip off potential terrorists about the risks involved, and would put the lives of those agents involved in greater danger.
 
Still, the increasing role of cryptologists and linguists in the process must be evident to all. If the open messages by the 9/11 suicide bombers had been focused on, and their import had been determined, there is little doubt that the bombings would have been prevented.  As James Bamford has stated in The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America regarding Osama bin-Ladin’s calls to action: “But inexplicably, the fact that the calls from Mihdhar had a U. S. country code and a San Diego area code – something that should have been instantly obvious to the NSA’s signals intelligence exerts – was never passed on to the FBI, CIA or anyone else.” (1)  To confound counter-terrorist experts about what they were up to, “…the group had worked out a series of code words, and using those terms…” (2) – ‘architecture’ meant the WTC, ‘arts’ the Pentagon, ‘law’ the Capitol, and ‘politics’ the White House – kept themselves informed about what was being planned, and what was required.
 
Of couse, when the bombings proved so successful, the National Security Agency (NSA), Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), and others amounted a great effort to capture such messages, and determine what they meant so that there would be no recurrence of the tragedy. Unfortunately, they were repeated in Madrid in March 2004 (3), and in London in July 2005 (4) where messages were not received, were ignored, or were misunderstood.  The basic problem, though James Bamford has nothing to say about its cause, was that GCHQ, MI6, and MI5 were convinced that Al-Qaeda was going to pull off a terrorist attack around London, thanks to the electronic chatter that it was picking up in Britain and Spain from jihadist mullahs. When this proved terribly wrong, they dismissed as a danger the Leeds group, led by Mohammad Sidique Khan – which they had already tried unsuccessfully to set up as terrorists during Operation Crevice – only for it to be totally ignored in surveillance operations, allowing it to pull off the 7/7 bombings with no interference.
 
“In an effort to attract new Web-savvy recruits,” Bamford explained after the tragedies had occurred, “GCHQ has turned to ad campaigns within online computer games such as Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Double Agent and Rainbow Six Vegas. And to find talented cipher-brains, the agency joined the British Computer Society to sponsor a code-breaking competition called the National Cipher Challenge.” (5)  The challenge was carried out on the Internet, lasted three months, and obliged competitors to decipher coded messages exchanged between Lord Nelson and British naval intelligence during the wars against revolutionary France. They were required to keep on top of a Napoleonic plot to buy a mysterious Chinese weapon – what could only be fully understood by decrypting writings that Elizabethan spy Christopher Marlowe had written two centuries before.  It was a good test for future cryptographers to meet the demands of qualitative literacy in this field for today’s covert world.
 
The problems, though, are more complicated than the test and what Bamford indicated. Today, the messages are in all kinds of languages, and what they mean is more difficult than understanding anything Christopher Marlowe may have written. Cryptographers have not only to break down messages in all kinds of esoteric codes but also linguists must be able to make sense of them, especially since the controlling language is often not English, and the real meaning of ones in another language will require a colloquial understanding of their use. Little wonder that Bamford immediately added GCHQ’s, like NSA’s, need for linguists in all kinds of languages without explaining why, particularly in all kinds of European languages like Polish, Albanian, Bulgarian, Chechen, Georgian, Basque, Greek, etc.(6)  It is interesting to note, though, that Bamford made no mention of the most likely European languages – German, French, Spanish, Russian, and Italian – an oversight which does not seem accidental. 
 
Of course, the Treasury allocated all kinds of money to GCHQ to recruit such experts, but the money failed to meet the demand, as they, especially the linguists, were reluctant to join the spy agency in sufficient numbers. “At $1.6 billion,” Bamford explained. “GCHQ was the most expensive part of the budget, yet it was still overstretched.” (7) The lack of proper staff was dramatically indicated in not only Operation Crevis but also in Operation Overt. It was a massive surveillance and intelligence collecting investigation where securocrats hoped to prove that two cells of wantabe militants were seriously involved in plots to blow up transatlantic airliners – thanks to MI5 prodding – when they seemed to be more interested in making films, showing the plight of Muslams in Islamic countries. The problem was really caused by the eavesdroppers not being able to understand what the suspects were really up to, given their most crude messages.
 
To remedy the problem, Sir David Pepper, GCHQ’s Director, started recruiting mathematicians and linguists through the backdoor from his base at St. John’s College, Oxford, where he had received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics thirty years before. During Pepper’s thirty years at ‘ the Q’, he was able to establish a most solid base at the college for training the proper analysts. 
 
He and Principal Sir John Scholar became the closest of friends through their interests in music, walking and gardening. The Modern Language Department and its Associate Schools deeply trained graduates in just the languages Bamford made no mention of – German, Russian, Italian, French and Spanish.(8) The teaching and translations of its German experts – Taylor Professor Ritchie Robertson, now of the University of Oxford, and Lecturer in German Gudrun Loftus up until her mysterious death – have made its graduates the cream of the crop as many surveys have shown. Little wonder that some in German, and others in other European languages, have gone on to do secret work at Cheltenham, especially since continued professional work at university or in the private sector would give them excellent cover for what they are doing.  It’s always easier to have a most acceptable peg to hang one’s covert work on when asked by the public.
 
Pepper has been the biggest opponent of disclosing anything about GCHQ, even himself, especially in court cases, claiming that it will only benefit terrorists who the agency is having trouble keeping up with. “…As the GCHQ packed more and more eavesdroppers and analysts into the doughnut,” Bamford explained, “the quality of the intelligence went down.” (9) Of course, allowing the introduction of intercepts into court cases would not only divert needed resources from more important assignments in preparing them but more importantly disclose intelligence collection techniques. While Sir David, the perfect technospy according to Bamford, went on about keeping up with coded messages on the Internet, he made no mention of the role of GCHQ linguists. Given the failure of Bamford to mention their role in deciphering German, Russian, Spanish, Italian and French messages, it seems that Cheltenham’s linguists are the hub of such activity in Europe – what London is desperate to keep secret. It would show that the Scope system – a secure one to connect GCHQ with other intelligence agencies and their overseas offices – is superfluous. The Intelligence and Security Committee has increased GCHQ’s ability to access, process, and store Internet data and telephone calls by twenty fold.       
 
Scholar obtained all the proper academic credentials at Oxbridge’s other St. John’s College in Cambridge, and the administrative ones by serving at the Treasury, and becoming ultimately the Permanent Secretary of the Welsh Office, and then the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). His being a political insider was best illustrated when he became Prime Minister Thatcher’s Private Secretary (1981-3), just when she was cutting the unions, especially at GCHQ, down to size, and when reconnecting London to the Reagan administration in Washington became so important. NSA knew all about Thatcher’s problems because it “…always has a sizable number of its own personnel working at GCHQ…” (10)  Scholar had his hands full while dealing with GCHQ Director Brian Tovey in getting rid of the unions there, and while getting essential intelligence from NSA during the risky war with Argentina over the Falklands Islands. Scholar is quite beholden to the Americans.
 
While at the Welsh Office, Scholar became so helpful in integrating its universities into meeting GCHQ’s needs that he was unprecedentedly honored by them.  The University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and the University of Cardiff made him an Honorary Fellow.  He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Glamorgan in 1999. While at DTI, Scholar became responsible for handling the affairs of the Carroll Foundation Charitable Trust – what became the largest one in the world during the 1990’s, controlling 85 large corporations. (11)
 
In addition, in August 2007, Scholar became the shadow director of the UK Statistical Agency. It seems that he used this post to help recruit qualitatively relevant experts covertly for GCHQ by acting as a front for it for those who were nervously interested in joining it – what was apparently in violation of its steering clear of engaging in politics. He seemed most certainly inclined to dispel this by speaking out against anyone who used Britain’s statistics improperly, even Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Home Secretaries Jaci Smith and Alan Johnson, once the agency was officially established.
 
At the center of this whole network was St John’s College Senior Language Lecturer in German Gudrun Loftus. She was a refugee from East Germany who made her way West, and up the academic scale in an unprecedented way despite her only having an undergraduate degree from Tubingen University. She was able to do so because of her ability to plumb the depths of the language, and teach it most effectively to those just starting out but not in a misleadingly simplistic way or taking out of context the subtleties of modern German.  At the same time, she was so proficient in English that she soon became an actress for Buckinghamshire’s theatrical group, The Old Gaolers.
 
She co-authored three books, one with her husband Gerry, about learning German basic grammar, practicing its use, and providing a learning resource for more advanced students about the colloquial use of the language – what she and Ms.I. Scheiblauer expanded upon by running the Oxford Language Centre.  The Centre provides classes in the five key European languages, plus Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic, and its library has sources for 135 other languages for students to study independently.  And being only 37 miles away from Cheltenham, it is ideally placed for any students who may want to go there, or any spooks who have any questions about the subtleties of any language they are dealing with.
 
The basic counter-terrorist aim that NSA/GCHQ has is to make sure that another 9/11 or worse terror act doesn’t occur. While the activities of its leader Khalid al-Mihdhar is most often discussed, what went on at its operational center, Hamburg, was most important in knowing if a recurrence was not to happen. Counter-terrorists needed to know where the terrorists live, where they went, what kind of mosque they attended, what kinds of communications did they carry on with one another, what kinds of covert words did they use, and what did they mean, etc.
 
Here the center of attention should have been on Mohamed Atta, the organizer of the 9/11 attacks. If the three German intelligence agencies had had an inkling of what Atta and his associates were planning, they might well have stopped it, but because of their lack of technical and analytical expertise, they didn’t have a clue. They didn’t know just how mad Atta and his friends had become after Israel’s April 1996 Grapes of Wrath massacres in South Lebanon – what resulted in his signing his last will and testament against Israel and its allies in Hamburg’s al-Quds mosque (12) – the code words they developed for their targets in Washington (13), and that the plot was completed on July 16, 2001.(14)
 
The expertise that Loftus’s network provided European securocrats is well documented, though, understandably, without any acknowledgement. Germany, while having twice as many Muslims as either Britain or Spain, has not experienced a counter-terrorist cockup like either Madrid’s 3/11 or London’s 7/7. Its best example of stopping a 9/11 attack was its dogged pursuit of Eric Breininger, a German national who hoped to become a home-grown Mohamed Atta. In September 2007, the Federal Crime Office and the Foreign Intelligence Service (BND) caught three members of his notorious Sauerland group – two native-born Germans who had converted to Islam, and a Turkish resident planning attacks on German cities and American bases.
 
They were not worse than anything Europe had ever experienced (15), thanks to technical equipment they had used to break into their communications, and analysis of its take by Loftus-trained analysts that GCHQ had supplied them.  By the time Breininger was finally killed in April 2010, GCHQ/MI6 agent Gareth Willaims was playing a role in the ongoing process not only in Washington but also in Afghanistan. (16)
 
When Williams was found dead on August 23rd, it seems murdered, Loftus apparently began to have second thoughts about what she had been involved in, and when I wrote my article about the background to his murder, someone, apparently she, wrote an most approving endorsement of it which a poster, using the site name of  Shader Writing, passed along:  “This is obviously a great post. Thanks for the valuable information and insights you have so provided here. Keep it up!”
 
Of course, I was most pleased, especially since it showed much more clearly where I was headed than I imagine the vast majority of viewers possessed. The person had apparently been most taken by my mentioning the murder of former DCI William Colby, and the priority that NSA put on recruiting foreign experts, especially in Britain, for cryptological and linguistic posts in Appendix C of Bamford’s Body of Secrets.   The quoted source had digested all I had said about the illegal, covert, and, if necessary, the murderous ways of the NSA/GCHQ organization, and where I was headed when it came to what happened to Williams.
 
When I supplied the follow-up about Willaims’ murder on October 4th, I was most distressed to learn that Loftus had been killed early the next morning when she visited the Senior Common Room around 6 AM, apparently to meet someone about a most unexpected development.  It seems that she had decided to go public – what GCHQ could have easily learned by eavesdropping on her conversations – and the agency had sent a person to check out just how serious she was about her plans to blow the whistle on it too.
 
When the person she met learned of her determination, she was pushed backwards down the steep, spiral staircase from the landing outside the Senior Common Room, falling all the way down to the bottom, fatally injuring herself in the process. There were, it seems, no witnesses to the killing, and the person who discovered her body, possibly even her killer, has not been identified. And my plea to Shader Writing afterwards to confirm that her comments about my article regarding the background to the Williams one had nothing to do with Loftus has gone unanswered.
 
It was right after Williams’ body had been found, apparently a murder NSA arranged just before he left the States on August 10th, that President Obama joined law-enforcement officials on both sides of the Atlantic in getting the new Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, to stop stonewalling the prosecution of the Carroll Trust Case (17)  – one which apparently is most threatening to Scholar while he was Permanent Secretary of the DTI. The idea that Grieve is protecting the head of the UK Statistical Agency is best illustrated when he went out of his way to agree with Scholar’s criticism of Labour Ministers using statistics about knife crime in Britain incorrectly. One can only wonder that Loftus’s killing is to deflect further pressure in the States against him by his seeing that a favor for all the eavesdroppers is achieved.
 
The former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher helped deflect any embarrassing moments or comments by deciding not to attend her 85th birthday party at No. 10  shortly afterwards.  Her former Private Secretary and wife had been invited, and there would have been uncomfortable conversation about the killing of Mrs. Loftus at St. John’s, and the unprecedented scandal at the Carroll Trust, so the ‘Iron Lady’ turned yet again – what she had done before when it came to getting of the Soviets and the Provisionals by force – not ‘returning’ to Downing Street, claiming conveniently yet again her sickly condition.
 
She has not managed a makeup party at No. 10 for either last year or this.
 
Where the Loftus killing ends up is anyone’s guess, like the Williams one.             
 
              
 
References
 
1. p. 27.
2. p. 70.
3. For more, see my article:  http://codshit.blogspot.com/2004/04/why-spain-suffered-its-911-attacks.html
4. For more, see my article:  http://codshit.blogspot.com/2005/07/perfect-conspiracy-london-bombings.html
5. Op. cit., p. 219.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., p.230.
8. For more, see: http://www.sjc.ox.uk//368-748/Modern-Languages-and-joint-schoools.html
9. Op. cit., pp. 220-1.
10. James Bamford, Body of Secrets: How America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ Eavesdrop on the World, p. 398.
11. For more, see this link:http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=fb6_1277386170
12. Bamford, The…, p. 42.
13. Ibid., p. 71.
14. Ibid., p. 62.
15. See this link:  http://www.rusi.org/analysis/commentary/ref:C48EOFBFBOEC6C/
16.  http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/aug/29/mi6-officer-bondage-claims-untrue
17.  http://current.com/news-and-politics/92628912_president-obama-nation-security-issue-carroll-foundation-trust-case.htm