Difference between revisions of "Document:Angola 1975 to 1980's"

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==Document Provenance==
 
==Document Provenance==
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{{Killing Hope|Chapter 41}}
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An article by [[Trowbridge H Ford]] linking the deaths of GCHQ Spook [[Gareth Williams]] and Gudrun Loftus, a lecturer at St Johns College Oxford <ref>[http://www.cherwell.org/content/10737 Tragic death of German tutor at St John's College]</ref>
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{{DocDisclaimer}}
  
 
==Document==
 
==Document==
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===The Great Powers Poker Game===
 
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It is spring 1975. Saigon has just fallen. The last of the Americans are fleeing for their lives. Fallout from Watergate hangs heavy in the air in the United States. The Pike Committee of the House of Representatives is investigating CIA foreign covert activities. On the Senate side, the Church Committee is doing the same. And the Rockefeller Commission has set about investigating the Agency's domestic activities. The morning papers bring fresh revelations about CIA and FBI misdeeds.
 
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The CIA and its influential supporters warn that the crescendo of disclosures will inhibit the Agency from carrying out the functions necessary for national security.
 
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At CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, they are busy preparing for their next secret adventure: '''Angola.'''
 
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To undertake a military operation at such a moment, the reasons, one would imagine, must have been both compelling and urgent. Yet, in the long history of American interventions it would be difficult to find one more pointless or with less to gain for the United States or the foreign people involved.
 
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The origin of our story dates back to the beginning of the 1960s when two political movements in Angola began to oppose by force the Portuguese colonialågovernment: the MPLA, led by Agostinho Neto, and the FNLA, led by Holden Roberto. (The latter group was known by other names in its early years, but for simplicity will be referred to here only as FNLA.) The United States, not normally in the business of supporting "liberation" movements, decided that inasmuch as Portugal would probably be unable to hold on to its colony forever, establishing contact with a possible successor regime might prove beneficial. For reasons lost in the mists of history, the United States, or at least someone in the CIA, decided that Roberto was their man and around 1961 or '62 onto the Agency payroll he went.{{ref|1}}
 
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At the same time, and during the ensuing years, Washington provided their NATO ally, the Salazar dictatorship in Lisbon, with the military aid and counter-insurgency training needed to suppress the rebellion. John Marcum, an American scholar who walked 800 miles through Angola into the FNLA guerrilla camps in the early 1960s, has written:
 
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{{QB
 
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|By January 1962 outside observers could watch Portuguese planes bomb and strafe African villages, visit the charred remains of towns like Mbanza M'Pangu and M'Pangala, and copy the data from 750-point napalm bomb casings from which the Portuguese had not removed the labels marked "Property U.S. Air Force".{{ref|2}} 
 
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The Soviet Union, which had also given some support to Roberto, embraced Neto instead in 1964, arguing that Roberto had helped the discredited Moise Tshombe in the Congo and curtailed his own guerrilla operations in Angola under pressure from Washington.{{ref|3}}  Before long, another movement, UNITA by name, entered the picture and China dealt itself into The Great Powers Poker Game, lending support to UNITA and FNLA.
 
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Although MPLA may have been somewhat more genuine in its leftist convictions than FNLA or UNITA, there was little to distinguish any of the three groups from each other ideologically. When the press made any distinction amongst them it was usually to refer to MPLA as "Marxist", but this was ill-defined, if defined at all, and simply took on a media life of its own. Each of the groups spoke of socialism and employed Marxist rhetoric when the occasion called for it, and genuflected to other gods when it did not. In the 1960s, each of them was perfectly willing to accept support from any country willing to give it without excessive strings attached. Neto, for example, went to Washington in December 1962 to put his case before the American government and press and to emphasize the fallacy of categorizing the MPLA as communist. During the following two years, Roberto appealed for aid to the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, Algeria, and Nasser's Egypt. Later, Jonas Savimbi, the leader of UNITA, approached the same countries (with the exception perhaps of the Soviet Union) as well as North Vietnam, and accepted military training for his men from North Korea.
 
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Each group was composed predominantly of members of a particular tribe; each tried to discourage aid or recognition being given to the others; they each suffered from serious internal splits and spent as much time fighting each other as they did the Portuguese army. The Vietcong they were not.{{ref|4}}
 
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Author Jonathan Kwitny has observed that the three tribal nations had a long history of fighting each other ...
 
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{{QB
 
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|It was not until the latter part of the twentieth century, however, that Dr. Henry Kissinger and other political scientists discovered that the real reason the Mbundu, the Ovimbundu, and the Kongo had been fighting off and on for the past 500 years was that the Mbundu were "Marxist" and the Ovimbundu and Kongo were "pro-Western".{{ref|5}}
 
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That the CIA's choosing of its ally was largely an arbitrary process is further underlined by a State Department cable to its African Embassies in 1963 which stated: "U.S. policy is not, repeat not, to discourage [an] MPLA ... move toward West and not to choose between these two movements."{{ref|6}}
 
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Even in 1975, when the head of the CIA, William Colby, was asked by a congressional committee what the differences were between the three contesting factions, he responded:
 
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{{QB
 
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|They are all independents. They are all for black Africa. They are all for some fuzzy kind of social system, you know, without really much articulation, but some sort of let's not be exploited by the capitalist nations.
 
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And when asked why the Chinese were backing the FNLA or UNITA, he stated:
 
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{{QB
 
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|"Because the Soviets are backing the MPLA is the simplest answer."
 
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::"It sounds," said Congressman Aspin, "like that is why we are doing it."
 
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::"It is," replied Colby.{{ref|7}}
 
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Nonetheless, the committee, in its later report, asserted that in view of Colby's statement, "The U.S.'s expressed opposition to the MPLA is puzzling".{{ref|8}}
 
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Finally, it is instructive to note that all three groups were denounced by the Portuguese as communists and terrorists.
 
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Before April 1974, when a coup in Portugal ousted the dictatorship, the aid given to the Angolan resistance movements by theiråvarious foreign patrons was sporadic and insignificant, essentially a matter of the patrons keeping their hands in the game. The coup, however, raised the stakes, for the new Portuguese government soon declared its willingness to grant independence to its African colonies.
 
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In an agreement announced on 15 January 1975, the three movements formed a transitional government with elections to be held in October and formal independence to take place the following month.
 
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Since 1969, Roberto had been on a $10,000-a-year retainer from the CIA.{{ref|9}} On 22 January, the Forty Committee of the National Security Council in Washington authorized the CIA to pass $300,000 to Roberto and the FNLA for "various political action activities, restricted to non-military objectives."{{ref|10}} Such funds of course can always free up other funds for military uses.
 
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In March, the FNLA, historically the most warlike of the groups, attacked MPLA headquarters and later gunned down 51 unarmed, young MPLA recruits.{{ref|11}}  These incidents served to spark what was to be a full-scale civil war, with UNITA aligning itself with FNLA against MPLA. The scheduled elections would never take place.
 
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Also in March, the first large shipment of arms reportedly arrived from the Soviet Union for the MPLA.{{ref|12}}  The House investigating committee subsequently stated that "Later events have suggested that this infusion of US aid [the $300,000], unprecedented and massive in the underdeveloped colony, may have panicked the Soviets into arming their MPLA clients".{{ref|13}}
 
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The Soviets may have been as much influenced by the fact that China had sent a huge arms package to the FNLA the previous September and had dispatched over one hundred military advisers to neighboring Zaire to train Roberto's soldiers only a month after the coup inPortugal.{{ref|14}}
 
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The CIA made its first major weapons shipment to the FNLA in July 1975. Thus, like the Russians and the Chinese, the United States was giving aid to one side of the Angolan civil war on a level far greater than it had ever provided during the struggle against Portuguese colonialism.
 
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The United States was directly involved in the civil war to a marked degree. In addition to training Angolan combat units, US personnel did considerable flying between Zaire and Angola carrying out reconnaissance and supply missions,{{ref|15}}  and the CIA spent over a million dollars on an ambitious mercenary program.{{ref|16}}  Several reports appeared in the US press stating that many American mercenaries were fighting in Angola against the MPLA -- from "scores" to "300" -- and that many others were being recruited and trained in the United States to join them. But John Stockwell, the head of the CIA's Angola task force, puts the number of American mercenaries who actually made it to Angola at only 24.{{ref|17}}  However, Holden Roberto was using CIA money, with the Agency's tacit approval, to recruit many other mercenaries -- over 100 British plus a scattering of French and Portuguese.{{ref|18}} The CIA was also directly financing the arming of British mercenaries.{{ref|19}}  (The mercenaries included amongst their number the well-known Englishman and psychopath George Cullen who lined up 14 of his fellow soldiers-of-fortune and shot them all dead because they had mistakenly attacked the wrong side.){{ref|20}}
 
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Subsequently, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger informed the Senate that "the CIA is not involved" in the recruitment of mercenaries for Angola.{{ref|21}}
 
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There were also well over a hundred CIAofficers and American military advisers scurrying about Angola, Zaire, Zambia and South Africa helping to direct the military operations and practicing their propaganda skills.{{ref|22}} Through recruited journalists representing major news services, the Agency was able to generate international coverage for false reports of Soviet advisers in Angola. One CIA story, announced to the press by UNITA, was that 20 Russians and 35 Cubans had been captured. Another fabrication concerned alleged rapes committed by Cuban soldiers in Angola; this was elaborated to include their capture, trial, and execution, complete with photos of the young women killing the Cubans who had raped them.{{ref|23}}
 
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Both stories were reported widely in the American and British press and elsewhere. Some of the major newspapers, such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Guardian of London, were careful to point out that the only source of the information was UNITA and their articles did not attempt to ascribe any special credence to the reports.{{ref|24}} But this could not of course prevent the placing of seeds of belief in the minds of readers already conditioned to believe the worst about communists.
 
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The disinformation campaign took place within the United States as well. FNLA delegates came to New York in September to lobby for support at the UN and with the New York press, distributing as they went copies of a "white paper" on the Angolan conflict prepared at CIA headquarters but made to look like it was produced in Zaire, French and all.{{ref|25}}  John Stockwell described the paper as sometimes "false to the point of being ludicrous" and other times "simply inaccurate".{{ref|26}}
 
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Afterward, representatives of UNITA went to Washington and presented to members of Congress, the State Department, theWhite House and the media, verbal reports about the situation in Angola which were the product of briefings given them by their CIA case officers.{{ref|27}}
 
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In January 1976, William Colby sat before the Senate investigating committee and solemnly assured the Senators:
 
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{{QB
 
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|We have taken particular caution to ensure that our operations are focused abroad and not at the United States to influence the opinion of the American people about things from the CIA point of view.{{ref|28}}
 
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There was virtually no important aspect of the Angolan intervention which Colby, Kissinger, and other high officials did not misrepresent to Congress and the media.
 
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The odds never favored a military victory for the US-backed forces in Angola, particularly in the absence of a relatively large-scale American commitment which, given the political atmosphere, was not in the cards. The MPLA was the most organized and best led of the three factions and early on controlled the capital city of Luanda, which housed almost the entire governmental machinery. Yet, for no reason, apparently, other than anti-Soviet spite, the United States was unwilling to allow a negotiated settlement. When Savimbi of UNITA sent out feelers to the MPLA in September 1975 to discuss a peaceful solution he was admonished by the CIA. Similarly, the following month when an MPLA delegation went to Washington to once again express their potential friendliness to the United States, they received a cool reception, being seen only by a low-level State Department official.{{ref|29}}
 
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In November MPLA representatives came to Washington to plead for the release of two Boeing jet airliners which their government had paid for but which the State Department would not allow to beexported. John Stockwell relates the unusual development that the MPLA men were accompanied by Bob Temmons, who until shortly before had been the head of the CIA station in Luanda, as well as by the president of Boeing. While the two Angolans and the man from Boeing petitioned the State Department, the CIA man made known to Agency headquarters that he had come to share the view of the US Consul General in Luanda "that the MPLA was best qualified to run the country, that it was not demonstrably hostile to the United States, and that the United States should make peace with it as quickly as possible."
 
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The State Department's response to the MPLA representatives was simple: the price for any American co-operation with the Angolan government was Soviet influence out, US influence in.{{ref|30}}
 
  
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At one time or another almost two dozen countries, East and West, felt the urge to intervene in the conflict. Principal amongst these were the United States, China, South Africa and Zaire on the side of FNLA/UNITA, and the Soviet Union, Cuba, the Congo Republic and Katangese troops (Zairian rebels) supporting MPLA. The presence of South African forces on their side cost the United States and its Angolan allies dearly in support from other countries, particularly in Africa. Yet, South Africa's participation in the war had been directly solicited by the United States.{{ref|31}}  In sharp contrast to stated American policy, the CIA and the National Security Agency had been collaborating with Pretoria's intelligence service since the 1960s and continuedåto do so in regard to Angola. One of the principal focuses of the intelligence provided by the US to South Africa was the African National Congress, the leading anti-apartheid organization which had been banned and exiled.{{ref|32}}  In 1962, the South African police arrested ANC leader Nelson Mandela based on information as to his whereabouts and disguise provided them by CIA officer Donald Rickard. Mandela spent almost 28 years in prison.{{ref|33}}
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===A "Gareth Williams - Gudrun Loftus axis" ?===
  
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In 1977, the Carter administration banned the sharing of intelligence with South Africa, but this was largely ignored by the American intelligence agencies. Two years earlier, the CIA had set up a covert mechanism whereby arms were delivered to the South Africans; this practice, in violation of US law, continued until at least 1978, and a portion of the arms were more than likely put to use in Angola.{{ref|34}} South Africa in turn helped to ferry American military aid from Zaire into Angola.{{ref|35}}
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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.
  
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In fairness to the CIA, it must be pointed out that its people were not entirely oblivious or insensitive to what South Africa represented. The Agency was very careful about letting its black officers into the Angola program.{{ref|36}}
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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 his book "The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret [[NSA]] from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America" <ref>ISBN 0307279391 The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret [[NSA]] from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America</ref>  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." {{ref|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..." {{ref|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.
  
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A congressional cutoff of aid to the FNLA/UNITA, enacted in January 1976, hammered a decisive nail into their coffin. Congressmen did not yet know the full truth about the American operation, but enough of the public dumbshow had been exposed to make them incensed at how Kissinger, Colby, et al. had lied to their faces. The consequence was one of the infrequent occasions in modern times that the US Congress has exercised a direct and pivotal influence upon American foreign policy. In the process, it avoided the slippery slope to another Vietnam, on top of which stood Henry Kissinger and the CIA withåshoes waxed.{{ref|37}}
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Of course, 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 {{ref|3}}, and in London in July 2005 {{ref|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, and 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.
  
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By February, the MPLA, with indispensable help from Cuban troops and Soviet military equipment, had all but routed their opponents. The Cuban presence in Angola was primarily a direct response to South African attacks against the MPLA. Wayne Smith, director of the State Department's Office of Cuban Affairs from 1977 to 1979, has written that "in August and October [1975] South African troops invaded Angola with full U.S. knowledge. No Cuban troops were in Angola prior to this intervention."{{ref|38}}
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"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." {{ref|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 as they tried 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.
  
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Savimbi at this time again considered reaching an understanding with the MPLA. The response from Washington was: Keep fighting. Kissinger personally promised UNITA continued support if they maintained their resistance, knowing full well that there was no more support to give. During the two weeks that Savimbi waited for his answer, he lost 600 men in a single battlefield.{{ref|39}} Yet, incredibly, less than two months before, the Secretary of State had stated: "We are not opposed to the MPLA as such ... We can live with any of the factions in Angola."{{ref|40}} The man was wholly obsessed with countering Soviet moves anywhere on the planet -- significant or trivial, real or imagined, fait accompli or anticipated. He was perhaps particularly driven in this case, for as he later wrote: "Angola represents the first time that the Soviets have moved militarily at long distance to impose a regime of their choice."{{ref|41}}
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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 the need for linguists in all kinds of European languages like Polish, Albanian, Bulgarian, Chechen, Georgian, Basque, Greek, etc.{{ref|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.
  
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If this seems far removed from how the academics tell us American foreign policy is made, it's still more plausible than the other explanation commonly advanced for the policy in Angola, viz: it was done to please Sese Seko Mobutu, the head of Zaire, characterized as America's most important ally/client in Africa, if not in the Third World.{{ref|42}} (Zaireåwas home to the CIA's largest station in Africa.) Mobutu desired an Angolan government he could sway, primarily to prevent Angola being used as a sanctuary by his arch foes, the rebels from Katanga province in Zaire. Accordingly, the Zairian leader committed his US-equipped armed forces into combat in Angola, on the side of the FNLA, for Holden Roberto happened to be a relation of his, although Roberto and the FNLA had little else going for them. As Professor Gerald Bender, a leading American authority on Angola, testified before Congress in 1978:
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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." {{ref|7}} The lack of proper staff was dramatically indicated in not only Operation Crevis but also in Operation Overt, 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 Muslims 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.
  
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Although the United States has supported the FNLA in Angola for 17 years, it is virtually impossible to find an American official, scholar or journalist, who is familiar with that party, who will testify positively about its organization or leadership. After a debate with a senior State Department official at the end of the Angolan civil war, I asked him why the United States ever bet on the FNLA. He replied, "I'll be damned if I know; I have never seen a single report or memo which suggests that the FNLA has any organization, solid leaders, or an ideology which we could count on." Even foreign leaders who have supported Holden Roberto, such as General Mobutu, agree with that assessment. When asked by a visiting U.S. Senator if he thought Roberto would make a good leader for Angola, Mobutu replied, "Hell no!"{{ref|43}}
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To remedy the problem, Sir David Pepper, GCHQ's Director, started recruiting mathematicians and linquists through the backdoor from his base at St. John's College, Oxford, where he had received his Ph.D. from 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 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.{{ref|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, so 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 when asked by the public.
  
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Kissinger himself told the House investigating committee that promoting the stability of Mobutu was one of the prime reasons for the American policy in Angola.{{ref|44}} Yet, even if this were one of Kissinger's rare truthful remarks about the Angola situation, and even if this could be a valid justification for serious intervention in a civil war ina third country, his statement challenges, if it does not defeat, comprehension; for in June 1975, a month before the United States shipped its first major arms package to the FNLA, Mobutu had accused the US of plotting his overthrow and assassination, whereupon he expelled the American ambassador (see Zaire chapter).
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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." {{ref|9}} Of course, allowing the introduction of intercepts into court cases would not only divert needed resources from more assignments in preparing them but more important 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 since 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 assess, process, and store Internet data and telephone calls by twentyfold.
  
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The Secretary of State, never at a loss for the glib line custom-made for his immediate audience, also told Israeli officials that failure to stop the Russians in Angola "could encourage Arab countries such as Syria to run risks that could lead to a new attack on Israel, backed up by the Russians."{{ref|45}}
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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]]..." {{ref|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 Falkland Islands. Scholar is quite beholden to the Americans.
  
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The American ambassador to the United Nations, Daniel Moynihan, did not greatly enhance the level of discussion when he declared that if the United States did not step in "the Communists would take over Angola and will thereby considerably control the oil shipping lanes from the Persian Gulf to Europe. They will be next to Brazil. They will have a large chunk of Africa, and the world will be different in the aftermath if they succeed."{{ref|46}} A truly baroque train of thought, and another example of what cold- war conditioning could do to an otherwise intelligent and educated person.
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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. {{ref|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, and what he seemed most certainly inclined to dispel 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.
  
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With only a change in place names, similar geo-political- domino theories have been put forth to give a veneer of rationality to so many American interventions. In this case, as in the others where the "communists" won, nothing of the sort ensued.
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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 degreee from Tubingen University 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 Buckingham's theatrical group, The Old Gaolers.
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{{QB
 
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|"In all respect to Kissinger," Jonathan Kwitny has written, "one really has to question the sanity of someone who looks at an ancient tribal dispute over control of distant coffee fields and sees in it a Soviet threat to the security of the United States."{{ref|47}}
 
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The MPLA in power was restricted by the same domestic and international economic realities which the FNLA or UNITA would have faced. Accordingly, it discouraged union militancy, dealt sternly with strikes, exhorted the workers to produce more, entered into commercial contracts with several multinationals, and did not raise the hammer and sickle over the president's palace.{{ref|48}} The MPLA urged Gulf Oil Co. to continue its exclusive operation in Cabinda province and guaranteed the safety of the American corporation's employees while the fighting was still heavy. Gulf was completely amenable to this offer, but the CIA and the State Department put pressure on the company to discontinue its royalty payments to the MPLA, thus jeopardizing the entire oil venture in a way that the "Marxist" government never did. One aspect of this pressure was a threat by Kissinger to open an investigation of international bribery by the company. Gulf compromised by putting its payments into an escrow bank account until the civil war came to an end of sorts a few months later, at which time payments to the MPLA were resumed.{{ref|49}}
 
  
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Contrary to accepted Western belief, Cuba did not enter the Angolan war as a Soviet surrogate. John Stockwell has noted that after the war the CIA "learned that Cuba had not been ordered into action by the Soviet Union" but that "the Cuban leaders felt compelled to intervene for their own ideological reasons."{{ref|50}} In 1977, the New York magazine Africa Report stated that "The Cubans have supported [MPLA leader Neto's] pragmatic approach toward Western investment and his attempts to maintain a foreign policy of non-alignment." The magazine also reported that on 27 May the Angolan government had announced that, aided by Cuban troops, it had crushed a rebellion by a faction of the MPLA whose leader claimed to have Sovietsupport.{{ref|51}}
+
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 civil war in Angola did not actually come to an end in 1976 as it appeared to, for the fighting lingered on intermittently, sometimes moderately, sometimes ferociously.
+
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 - 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 {{ref|12}} - the code words they developed for their targets in Washington {{ref|13}}, and that the plot was completed on July 16, 2001.{{ref|14}}
  
−
In 1984 a confidential memorandum smuggled out of Zaire revealed that the United Statesand South Africa had met in November 1983 to discuss destabilization of the Angola government. Plans were drawn up to supply more military aid to UNITA (the FNLA was now defunct) and discussions were held on ways to implement a wide range of tactics: unify the anti-government movements, stir up popular feeling against the government, sabotage factories and transport systems, seize strategic points, disrupt joint Angola-Soviet projects, undermine relations between the government and the Soviet Union and Cuba, bring pressure to bear on Cuba to withdraw its troops, sow divisions in the ranks of the MPLA leadership, infiltrate agents into the Angolan army, and apply pressure to stem the flow of foreign investments into Angola.
+
The expertise that Loftus's network provided European securocrats is well documented, though, understandably, without any acknowledgment. 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 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 worse than anything Europe had ever experienced {{ref|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 last April, [[Gareth Williams|Williams]] was playing a role in the ongoing process not only in Washington but also in Afghanistan. {{ref|16}}
  
−
The United States branded the document a forgery, but UNITA's representative in Washington would neither confirm nor deny that the meeting took place. He stated, however, that UNITA had "contacts with US officials at all levels on a regular basis".
+
When Williams was found dead on August 23rd, apparently 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 organisation, and where I was headed when it came to what happened to Williams.
  
−
The aim of the operation, according to the memorandum, was to force part of the Angolan leadership to negotiate with UNITA, precisely what Washington had successfully discouraged years earlier.{{ref|52}}
+
When I supplied the follow-up about Williams' 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 down the steep, spiral staircase from the landing outside the Senior Common Room, falling backwards 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.
  
−
A month after the reported US-South Africa meeting, the UN Security Council censured South Africa for its military operations in Angola, and endorsed Luanda's right to reparations. Only the United States, abstaining, did not support the resolution.{{ref|53}}
+
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 {{ref|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.
  
−
In August 1985, after a three-year battle withCongress, the Reagan administration won a repeal of the 1976 prohibition against US military aid to rebel forces in Angola. Military assistance began to flow to UNITA overtly as well as covertly. In January 1987, Washington announced that it was providing the rebels with Stinger missiles and other anti-aircraft weaponry. Three months earlier, Jonas Savimbi had spoken before the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France in an appeal for support. Following his talk, however, a plenary session of the Parliament criticized American support for the guerrilla leader and passed a resolution which described UNITA as a "terrorist organization which supports South Africa."{{ref|54}}
+
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 last Thursday evening.  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.
  
−
Finally, in September 1992, elections were held, but when it became apparent that the MPLA would be the winner in a run-off -- in polling which the UN certified to be free and fair -- Savimbi refused to accept the result. He ended a year-old cease-fire and launched one of UNITA's largest, most sustained offensives of the war, still being supplied by South Africa, and, in recent years, by American "private" airlines and "relief" organizations with interesting histories such as previous contacts to the Nicaraguan contras.{{ref|55}}
+
One can be sure that when she does return, Sir Michael and Mrs. Scholar won't be there.
  
−
In May 1993, Washington finally recognized the Angolan government. In January, just before the Clinton administration took over, a senior State Department official had declared: "Unita is exactly like the Khmer Rouge: elections and negotiations are just one more method of fighting a war; power is all."{{ref|56}}
+
Where the Loftus killing ends up is anyone's guess, like the Williams one.
  
−
The war -- which had taken more than 300,000 lives -- was still raging in 1994, continuing to produce widespread hunger and what is said to be the highest amputee rate in the world, caused by the innumerable land mines.
 
  
−
===NOTES===
 
−
#{{note|1}} New York Times, 25 September 1975; 19 December 1975.
 
−
#{{note|2}} John A. Marcum, The Angolan Revolution, Vol. I, 1950-1962 (MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1969) pp. 229-30.
 
−
#{{note|3}}  New York Times, 17 December 1964, p. 14.
 
−
#{{note|4}} Comparison of the three groups:
 
−
##Jonathan Kwitny, Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World (New York, 1984) chapter 9;
 
−
##Marcum, Vol. II, 1962-1976 (1978) pp. 14-15, 132, 172 and elsewhere;
 
−
##Basil Davidson, In the Eye of the Storm: Angola's People (London, 1972) passim;
 
−
##Ernest Harsch and Tony Thomas, Angola: The Hidden History of Washington's War (New York, 1976) passim. International appeals for support made by Roberto and Savimbi: see also New York Times, 4 January 1964, p. 15; Kwitny, p. 136; Declassified Documents Reference System, 1977 volume, document 210D (cable, 17 July 1964, US embassy Congo to State Department).
 
−
#{{note|5}} Kwitny, pp. 132-3.
 
−
#{{note|6}} State Department Circular 92, 16 July 1963, cited in Marcum II, p. 16.
 
−
#{{note|7}} Hearings before the House Select Committee on Intelligence (The Pike Committee) published in CIA - The Pike Report (Nottingham, England, 1977) p. 218; hereafter referred to as Pike Report.(See Notes: Iraq for further information.)
 
−
#{{note|8}}  Ibid., p. 201.
 
−
#{{note|9}} New York Times, 25 September 1975; 19 December.
 
−
#{{note|10}} Pike Report, p. 199, the words in quotes are those of the Pike Committee; the date comes from John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies (New York, 1978) p. 67. Stockwell was a CIA officer and head of the Agency's Angola task force.
 
−
#{{note|11}} Stockwell, pp. 67-8; Marcum II, pp. 257-8 (he cites several international press accounts).
 
−
#{{note|12}} New York Times, 25 September 1975
 
−
#{{note|13}} Pike Report, p. 199.
 
−
#{{note|14}} Stockwell, p. 67.
 
−
#{{note|15}} New York Times, 12 December 1975; Harsch and Thomas, p. 100, citing CBS-TV News, 17 December 1975, and Senator John Tunney, 6 January 1976.
 
−
#{{note|16}} New York Times, 16 July 1978, p. 1
 
−
#{{note|17}} Interview of Stockwell by author.
 
−
#{{note|18}} Stockwell, pp. 223-4; see also Harsch and Thomas, pp. 99-100.
 
−
#{{note|19}} Chapman Pincher, Inside Story: A Documentary of the Pursuit of Power (London, 1978) p. 20
 
−
#{{note|20}} Stockwell, p. 225.
 
−
#{{note|21}} New York Times, 16 July 1978, referring to Kissinger's statement of 29 January 1976.
 
−
#{{note|22}} Stockwell, pp. 162, 177-8, plus interview of Stockwell by author.
 
−
#{{note|23}} Ibid., pp. 194-5
 
−
#{{note|24}} The capture of Russians and Cubans story appeared in the press 22 November 1975; the rape story, 12 March 1976.
 
−
#{{note|25}} Stockwell, p. 196.
 
−
#{{note|26}} San Francisco Chronicle, 9 May 1978.
 
−
#{{note|27}} Stockwell, pp. 196-8.
 
−
#{{note|28}} Foreign and Military Intelligence, Book 1, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (US Senate), 26 April 1976, p. 129.
 
−
#{{note|29}} Stockwell, p. 193.
 
−
#{{note|30}} Ibid., pp. 205-6 ("Bob Temmons" is probably a pseudonym); after the war ended, the State Department did release the planes to Angola.
 
−
#{{note|31}} Newsweek (International Edition), 17 May 1976, p. 23, implicitly admitted to by South African Prime Minister Balthazar Johannes Vorster.
 
−
#{{note|32}} New York Times, 16 July 1978, p. 1; 23 July 1986, p. 1; Stockwell, pp. 208, 218; Stephen Talbot, "The CIA and BOSS: Thick as Thieves" in Ellen Ray, et al., eds., Dirty Work 2: The CIA in Africa (New Jersey, 1979) pp. 266-75 (BOSS is the South African Bureau of State Security); Bob Woodward, VEIL: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987 (New York, 1987), p. 269.
 
−
#{{note|33}} The Guardian (London), 15 August 1986; The Times (London) 4 August 1986, p. 10.
 
−
#{{note|34}} New York Times, 25 March 1982, p. 7, citing a report of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
 
−
#{{note|35}} Stockwell, p. 209.
 
−
#{{note|36}} Ibid., p. 75.
 
−
#{{note|37}} Stockwell, pp. 216-17 discusses how this came about.
 
−
#{{note|38}} Wayne S. Smith, "Dateline Havana: Myopic Diplomacy", Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.) Fall 1982, p. 170.
 
−
#{{note|39}} Stockwell, pp. 234-5.
 
−
#{{note|40}} New York Times, 24 December 1975, p 7.
 
−
#{{note|41}} Henry Kissinger, American Foreign Policy (New York, 1977, third edition), p. 317.
 
−
#{{note|42}} See, for example, New York Times, 25 September 1975.
 
−
#{{note|43}} Hearings before the Subcommittee on Africa of the House Committee on International Relations, 25 May 1978, p. 7.
 
−
#{{note|44}} Pike Report, p. 200.
 
−
#{{note|45}} New York Times, 9 January 1976, p. 3.
 
−
#{{note|46}} Washington Post, 18 December 1975, p. A23.
 
−
#{{note|47}} Kwitny, p. 148.
 
−
#{{note|48}} Harsch and Thomas, pp. 82-91; New York Times, 8 February 1981, IV, p. 5.
 
−
#{{note|49}} Stockwell, pp. 203-4, 241; plus interview of Stockwell by author.
 
−
#{{note|50}} Stockwell, p. 172.
 
−
#{{note|51}} Galen Hull, "Internationalizing the Shaba Conflict", Africa Report (New York) July-August 1977, p. 9. For further discussion of possible Soviet connection to the rebellion and the Russian attitude toward Angola, see Jonathan Steele, "Soviet Relations with Angola and Mozambique" in Robert Cassen, ed., Soviet Interests in the Third World (Published by Sage for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, London, 1985), p. 290.
 
−
#{{note|52}} The Observer (London), 22 January 1984.
 
−
#{{note|53}} The Guardian (London), 21 December 1983.
 
−
#{{note|54}} The Times (London), 23 October 1986, p. 8; the vote in the EuropeanåParliament was 152-150.
 
−
#{{note|55}} The Guardian (London), 25 June 1990, p. 10; Sharon Beaulaurier, "Profiteers Fuel War in Angola", Covert Action Quarterly (Washington, DC), No. 45, Summer 1993, pp. 61-65.
 
−
#{{note|56}} New York Times, 17 January 1993, IV, p. 5.
 
  
 +
==References==
 +
<references/>
  
−
[[Category:US Intervention]]
+
==Notes==
−
[[Category:Angola]]
+
#{{note|1.}} p. 27.
−
[[Category:Books]]
+
#{{note|2.}} p. 70.
 +
#{{note|3.}} For more, see my article: http://codshit.blogspot.com/2004/04/why-spain-suffered-its-911-attacks.html
 +
#{{note|4.}} For more, see my article: http://codshit.blogspot.com/2005/07/perfect-conspiracy-london-bombings.html
 +
#{{note|5.}} /Op. cit.,/ p. 219.
 +
#{{note|6.}} /Ibid./
 +
#{{note|7.}} /Ibid./, p.230.
 +
#{{note|8.}} For more, see: http://www.sjc.ox.uk//368-748/Modern-Languages-and-joint-schools.html
 +
#{{note|9.}} /Op. cit./, pp. 220-1.
 +
#{{note|10.}} James Bamford,/ Body of Secrets: How America's NSA and Britain's GCHQ Eavesdrop on the World/, p. 398.
 +
#{{note|11.}} For more, see this link:http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=fb6_1277386170
 +
#{{note|12.}} Bamford, /The.../, p. 42.
 +
#{{note|13.}} /Ibid./, p. 71.
 +
#{{note|14.}} /Ibid/., p. 62.
 +
#{{note|15.}} See this link: http://www.rusi.org/analysis/commentary/ref:C48EOFBFBOEC6C/
 +
#{{note|16.}} http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/aug/29/mi6-officer-bondage-claims-untrue
 +
#{{note|17.}} http://current.com/news-and-politics/92628912_president-obama-national-security-issue-carroll-foundation-trust-case.htm

Revision as of 11:51, 25 October 2010

Document Provenance

An article by Trowbridge H Ford linking the deaths of GCHQ Spook Gareth Williams and Gudrun Loftus, a lecturer at St Johns College Oxford [1]

Disclaimer (#3)

Document

A "Gareth Williams - Gudrun Loftus axis" ?

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 his book "The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America" [2] 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 course, 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, and 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 as they tried 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 the need for linguists 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, 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 Muslims 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 linquists through the backdoor from his base at St. John's College, Oxford, where he had received his Ph.D. from 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 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, so 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 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 assignments in preparing them but more important 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 since 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 assess, process, and store Internet data and telephone calls by twentyfold.

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 Falkland 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, and what he seemed most certainly inclined to dispel 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 degreee from Tubingen University 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 Buckingham'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 - 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 acknowledgment. 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 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 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 last April, Williams 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, apparently 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 organisation, and where I was headed when it came to what happened to Williams.

When I supplied the follow-up about Williams' 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 down the steep, spiral staircase from the landing outside the Senior Common Room, falling backwards 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 last Thursday evening. 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.

One can be sure that when she does return, Sir Michael and Mrs. Scholar won't be there.

Where the Loftus killing ends up is anyone's guess, like the Williams one.


References

  1. ↑ Tragic death of German tutor at St John's College
  2. ↑ ISBN 0307279391 The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America

Notes

  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-schools.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-national-security-issue-carroll-foundation-trust-case.htm
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