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2nd Issue of 'Voice of Jihad' Al-Qa'ida Online Magazine (Conversion to Islam or Death)
The second issue of "The Voice of Jihad," the new biweekly on-line magazine identified with Al-Qa'ida has been posted. 1 The following are excerpts from the latest issue, which includes a sequel to an interview with Abd Al-'Aziz bin 'Issa bin Abd Al-Mohsen, 2 also known as Abu Hajjer, who isone of the high-ranking Al-Qa'ida members on Saudi Arabia's most-wanted list.
Lead Editorial: Combat Jews and Americans, Not Saudi Security Forces
The second issue of "The Voice of Jihad" opened with an editorial by Suleiman Al-Dosari:
" Our war with the enemies of Allah continues everywhere We will not let the Americans occupy the land of the two holy places [i.e. the Arabian Peninsula] [and feel] secure and safe, and we will not cease our Jihad until we liberate every inch of Muslim land.
"We draw the attention of the Mujahideen to the strategy adopted by the Sheikh of the Mujahideen, Abu Abdallah Osama bin Laden, and Sheikh Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri, and agreed to by many of the great Mujahideen, regarding combat against the enemy: Our number one enemy is the Jews and the Christians, and we must free ourselves to invest all our efforts until we annihilate them and we are able do this if Allah allows us to do it because they are the main obstacle to establishing the Islamic state.
" We must take note of the ploy used by the tyrants [i.e. Arab rulers] in many countries. They attempted to stop the Jihad project in these countries by shifting the confrontation with the occupying enemy (the masters) to confrontation with his guards (slaves) [meaning Muslims], because the tyrants see the killing of one American or Westerner as more serious than the killing of a hundred of their country's soldiers; the blood of an American, in their view, is worth the blood of all Muslims. They are ready to cast hundreds to their deaths so that Americans, in exchange, will enjoy security and comfort.
" We must guard ourselves against this ploy and avoid, as much as possible, confrontations with the armies and forces of the state, so that we can strike lethal blows to the occupiers, Allah willing. This does not mean we will surrender to those who defend the Crusaders if they attack us; on the contrary, in this case we must resist with all the strength we have, and we must punish them so that they turn their swords toward the Americans and fight among our ranks, or refrain from entering [into] a confrontation with us or they will stand against us and wait for what lies in store for them [at our hands], thanks to Allah and His strength "
Sheikh Nasser Al-Najdi: Jihad Must Continue Until All Infidels Convert to Islam or Pay a Poll Tax
The second issue also features an article by Sheikh Nasser Al-Najdi, who wrote: "Islam is an all-encompassing religion. It is a religion for people and for regimes At a time when people are given the choice [of believing] in Islam or paying Jizya [a poll tax paid by non-Muslims living under Muslim rule], Islam is the only alternative for the countries [of the world.]
"Therefore, the crime of the tyrants in infidel [i.e. non-Muslim] countries, who do not rule according to Allah's law, is an enormous sin and we are obliged to fight them and initiate until they convert to Islam, or until Muslims rule the country and he who does not convert to Islam pays Jizya.
"That is the religious ruling with regard to infidel countries and all the more so with regard to those who rule Muslim countries by way of the cursed law [i.e. a man-made law] "
Al-Qa'ida Leaders Praise Jihad
The latest "Voice of Jihad" also features selections from Al-Qa'ida leaders and supporters, including an excerpt of a letter by Sheikh Abu Muhammad Al-Maqdisi (currently imprisoned in Jordan) justifying the suicide bombing perpetrated by Anas Al-Kandari and Jasem Al-Hajeri in the early days of the war against Iraq. The excerpt contains a link to the full letter. 3
In an article titled, "Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet" (the title of Sheikh Ayman Al-Zawahiri'sbook ), Al-Qa'ida's military leader, the Egyptian Seif Al-'Adl Hamasri, told of a C-130 air attack in Afghanistan in which the wives of Al-Qa'ida members were killed.
Also included in the second issue is news coverage of the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf, taken from the website www.islammemo.cc/news.
One page of the issue is devoted to quotes in praise of Jihad by " the Imam of the Mujahideen, Osama bin Laden," " Sheikh Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri," and "the Mujahid Sheikh Mohammad bin Abdallah Al-Seif." The final name most likely refers to Sheikh Abu Omar Muhammad Al-Seif, who appeared recently in a film distributed by Al-Qa'ida that also included the final statements of the Riyadh suicide bombers. Al-Seif has been identified on Islamic websites as the number two leader of the Chechnyan Jihad.
The Murder of Ahmed Shah Massoud: Ordered by bin Laden
The magazine continued its biography of Sheikh Yousef Al-'Ayyiri, who served as personal bodyguard to Osama bin Laden and manager of the Al-Qa'ida website, until he was killed by Saudi security forces. The biography addresses Osama bin Laden's order for the murder of Ahmed Shah Massoud. According to the biographer, after Sheikh Al-'Ayyiri's release from a Saudi prison, he recruited youths and encouraged them to wage Jihad in Afghanistan and take part in the training camps there:
"Afterwards, the greatest event in Afghan history occurred the assassination of the despicable commander, Ahmed Shah Massoud, and there was no describing Sheikh Al-'Ayyiri's joy. I remember asking him, 'What happened?' And he replied by saying that Sheikh Osama asked the brothers: 'Who will take it upon himself to deal with Ahmed [Shah] Massoud for me, because he harmed Allah and His sons?' A few brothers volunteered to assassinate Massoud and be rewarded by Allah, and you heard the good news.
"Afterwards, the happy events took place in America [the September 11 attacks], the bastion of disbelief, and the Sheikh was so joyous he nearly floated on air. I called the Sheikh, and he told me he was in a meeting with the religious scholars of Al-Quseim, because a few of them had been a bit critical of the events that occurred in America. He told me about the discussions and about the meetings conducted with them, which persuaded them to support the Jihad and the Mujahideen "
The biography ends with a description of the final period of Al-'Ayyiri's life, when he was being sought by Saudi authorities and was writing several online articles in support of Jihad.
Two Options for Allah's Enemies - the Jews and Christians: Conversion to Islam or Death
This issue also includes a sequel to an interview with Abd Al-Aziz bin 'Issa bin Abd Al-Mohsen, also known as Abu Hajjer, a name high on Saudi Arabia's most wanted list. Abu Hajjer stated that his goal was "to wave the banner of monotheism and expel the enemies of Allah the Jews and the Crusaders from the land of the two holy places, to conquer the Muslim nations and restore them to their previous state. And may Allah lengthen our days to allow us to infuriate the enemies of Allah, kill them, and strike them by the sword until they either join the religion of Allah or we kill every last one of them. Our model is [the Prophet] Mohammad, who said to the infidels of Qureish: 'I have brought the slaughter upon you.'"
After characterizing his relationship with Osama bin Laden as similar to that of father and son, Abu Hajjer described his reaction upon hearing that his own name was among the top 19 on the Saudi's most wanted list: "I was in a course in which we trained the brothers in one of the valleys. This was a special course, a practical urban warfare course, and after we got back [to the city] I met with one of the brothers, who told me they published a list and my picture was on it I said, 'Allah be praised' When I entered the land of the two holy places, I felt and I also told the brothers that the day would come when we will get exposed. We had done everything in our power to delay that day. But now that Allah had put us to this test, we needed to act patiently."
Controversy Within Al-Qa'ida Over the Bombings in Saudi Arabia and their Effect on Fundraising
Abu Hajjer described a debate within the Jihad movement over the need to attack Americans in Saudi Arabia, which could lead to a more serious entanglement with the Saudi security forces and could hamper fundraising efforts: "Jihad members and lovers of Mujahideen were split: There were those who said we must attack the invading forces that defile the land of the two holy places, and that we must turn the Americans' concerns to themselves and their bases, so they would not take off from there to crush Muslim lands and countries, one by one. There were others who said we had to preserve the security of this base and this country [i.e. Saudi Arabia], from which we recruit the armies, from which we take the youth, from which we get the [financial] backing. It must therefore remain safe.
"My opinion is midway between the two. It is true that we need to keep the enemy occupied with himself and not give him a sense of security, because as soon as he secures his bases and his supply lines, he will have an opportunity to use them to attack our brothers in different parts of countries in the Islamic world. We must therefore make the proper arrangements and prepare ourselves for this momentous event in the best possible way we can. We told them: Wait, we are preparing ourselves, and then we attacked the Americans.
"It is also true that we must use this country [Saudi Arabia] because it is the primary source of funds for most Jihad movements, and it has some degree of security and freedom of movement. However, we must strike a balance between this and the American invasion of the Islamic world and its [strangling of] the Jihad movement and even other Islamic movements
"We must understand that the situation in the land of the two holy places is deteriorating day by day for the Mujahideen and their financial sources, as well as regarding the secularization of the country and the attempt by the treacherous rulers to lead it to moral collapse, in accordance with the dictates of the White House.
"We tell them [those opposed to the bombings in Saudi Arabia]: If only you were to see the prisons filled with Mujahideen youth and pro-Jihad preachers. We have not carried out even one attack. All operations that took place were defensive operations. On the contrary, the brothers try as much as possible to avoid confrontations with the army and security forces. Nevertheless, the government is escalating the war, and it is trying to uproot me, uproot you, and uproot all Islamists."
Abu Hajjer concluded the interview with this message to the youth he trained: "You must do something, you must fight the enemies of Allah, the Crusaders and the Jews, and become a bone in their throats and hearts "
Following the interview was a communiqué published by the Mujahideen in the Arabian Peninsula reacting to recent statements made by the Saudi interior minister: "The communiqué is a response to the Saudi Interior Ministry announcement about the confiscation of a large quantity of weapons. The communiqué claims that many Saudis carry personal weapons, automatic rifles or hand guns, and that the confiscations were actually confiscations of goods possessed by known weapon dealers, who the Interior Ministry falsely connected to the Jihad movement."
"The Voice of Jihad"'s next issue will feature an interview with the wanted Sheikh Abdallah bin Muhammad Al-Rashuod.
October 31, 2003 at 09:39 AM in Al Qaeda | Permalink | TrackBack (133) | Top of page | Blog Home
Times Online - Newspaper Edition
Times Online - Newspaper Edition
Tony Allen-Mills, Washingon
ASKED recently which of his squabbling aides was in charge of policy towards Iraq, President George W Bush replied: âThe person who is in charge is me.â
After a month of bureaucratic backstabbing, malicious leaks and steadily disintegrating discipline at the heart of his administration, Bush will come under pressure this week to prove that he is not losing his grip.
A series of embarrassing rows over his handling of both the international war against terrorism and the economy has raised new questions about Bushâs ability to forge a coherent policy that will secure his re-election next year.
Returning to Washington on Friday after a week-long tour of Asia, Bush found the capital seething with resentment and revolt at the increasingly erratic antics of Donald Rumsfeld, his veteran defence secretary.
The Treasury secretary, John Snow, was also in bad odour after remarks about possible interest rate rises triggered a wave of selling in government bonds and obliged the White House to issue a correction.
Compounding the sense of raggedness in a once formidable administration, 19 Republican senators defied the White House by voting to reject Bushâs policy of restrictions on Americans travelling to Cuba; an even bigger Republican revolt added $1 billion to his budget deficit problems in a vote increasing aid for local election costs.
With attacks mounting on US forces in Iraq â five soldiers were injured yesterday when a Black Hawk helicopter was shot down by ground fire near Tikrit â and yet another row over a Pentagon general who compared Islamic militants to satanic forces, some of the presidentâs supporters were urging him to crack his whip.
âThe president has to come back and get his house in order,â said a Washington source close to the administration. âHe has to call these guys in and tell them: this is the policy, now get behind it.â
The main threat to the presidentâs authority last week came from the Pentagon, where Rumsfeld has been fighting a losing battle to control the war against terrorism. Earlier this month Rumsfeld was snubbed when Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, rearranged responsibilities for Iraq and Afghanistan without consulting the Pentagon.
Rummyâs revenge â as many insiders in Washington saw it â came in the form of a leaked memo in which the 71-year-old defence secretary questioned whether America was âwinning or losingâ the war on terror. In a startling departure from his previous insistence that everything has gone according to plan, Rumsfeld admitted to âmixed resultsâ against Al-Qaeda and warned that ultimate victory would require âa long, hard slogâ.
For White House aides who have been battling to persuade America that it has been misled by the media focus on bad news from Iraq, Rumsfeldâs memo amounted to a slap in the face. For the rest of Washington, the fact that it was leaked at all signalled a dangerous new phase in administration infighting.
Some reports suggested Rumsfeld was âfuriousâ that a memo addressed to only four people should have turned up in USA Today, a national newspaper. Others suspected Washingtonâs wiliest operator had orchestrated the leak himself.
Several commentators noted that the memo showed Rumsfeld in a good light. Criticised in the past for triumphalist views, he instead appeared to be offering an honest assessment of the problems that still lie ahead. Putting a brave face on the leak last week, Rumsfeld said of his handiwork: âI reread the memo in the paper, and thought, âNot badâ.â
The problem for Bush is that his defence secretary is still trying to direct a policy debate that is now Riceâs responsibility. The new tension between the White House and the Pentagon is further confusing US policy objectives and overshadowing a long-standing rivalry between Rumsfeld and Colin Powell, the secretary of state.
Adding to the presidentâs headache are continuing complaints from Capitol Hill about Rumsfeldâs cavalier disregard for bureaucratic niceties. When the evangelical Christian views of Lieutenant-General William Boykin were made public this month, Senator John Warner, a leading Republican, wrote a private letter to Rumsfeld, questioning the appropriateness of a senior army officer publicly denigrating Islam.
Rumsfeld not only failed to reply but declared he had not bothered to read the letter. âIt may be somewhere around the building,â he said. One senior congressional official was quoted last week as warning the White House that Rumsfeld had become âa millstone around the presidentâs neckâ.
With FBI agents combing the White House for signs of a mole who leaked the identity of an undercover CIA agent, and with Bushâs Democratic rivals feasting on evidence of disarray, senior Republicans are beginning to call for some form of mid-term shake-up.
Few Republicans would complain if the president decided to sack Rumsfeld. Other sources doubt Bush would even consider it â not least because it would amount to an admission that Iraq has become a mess.
October 26, 2003 at 01:36 PM in Special Relationship | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
JOHN CROSSLAND
INTELLIGENCE IN WAR: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda
by John Keegan
Hutchinson ÂŁ25 pp443
John Keegan admits in his foreword that he has tried to steer clear of the intelligence world all his working life, having concluded that anyone âwho mingled with it in the belief that he could make use of contacts, would probably be made use of, to his disadvantageâ. He could not have wished for a more timely confirmation of his prejudices than the Hutton Inquiry as this book critically assesses the intelligence communityâs record in delivering victory in British wars over the past one and a half centuries. The author reminds us that intelligence, however good, is not necessarily the means to victory.
He cites six campaigns to make his point; from Nelson at the Nile â a classic example of the application of âhumintâ (human intelligence) â to the second Gulf war, where âin absolutely optimum conditions intelligence failedâ. He believes that the secret services should not look to the intellectuals of Bletchley Park, who broke vital German codes, as a model in the international war against terror. The challenge, he claims, will force the intelligence agencies to resort to âprimitiveâ methods in this age of satellite surveillance. Indeed, Kiplingâs Kim âmay come to provide a model of the anti-fundamentalist agent, with his ability to shed his European identity and to pass convincingly as a Muslim message-carrier . . . far superior to any holder of a PhD in higher mathematicsâ.
The latter prove the whipping boys for the fall of Crete, an unnecessary disaster in Keeganâs view. Bletchley Park, having discovered an almost comprehensive guide to the German airborne assault (âone of the most complete pieces of timely intelligence ever to fall into the hands of an enemyâ) failed to pass on to Freyberg, the C-in-C, the information on which formations were attacking where because they thought he wouldnât understand the raw decrypts.
On the other side of the balance sheet is US Navy Commander Joseph Rochefortâs ruse to counter the planned Japanese knock-out blow for the Pacific Fleet by tapping out a spoof request for water from Midway Island, eliciting a response from an enemy invasion armada (sailing in strict radio silence) that betrayed their position and likely target. It was, says Keegan, âthe most stunning intelligence coup in all naval historyâ. The nail-biting outcome (the turning point in the Pacific war) was not preordained, however. âContingencies and chance were critical determinants of victory.â It depended on a lucky sighting by a patrol aircraft at the limit of its range of a Japanese destroyer that led the Americans to the Japanese carriers. The Japanese, having slaughtered the earlier waves of torpedo bombers, were refuelling when caught by the Americansâ last bomber reserve. In five critical minutes, three of their carriers were blazing pyres. The fourth was sunk within 24 hours.
The often critical part played by chance is vividly illustrated in the two Falkland Islands conflicts, fought 68 years apart. In December 1914, Admiral von Spee, having masterminded a brilliant corsair campaign in the Pacific, and sunk a British squadron, was stymied in his plan to seize the islands by his own diplomatic service, which failed to pass on to him the news that two British battle cruisers were racing south to intercept him. His squadron was sunk , almost with all hands. In 1982, a âmutinyâ by two SAS non-commissioned officers ended a plan to infiltrate raiders on to the airstrip flying off the air strikes against our taskforce. But in any case, papers recovered from the body of a shot-down Sea Harrier pilot had given the Argentines a fix on the position of the ships the same day that HMS Sheffield was sunk. I, for one, am glad that Keegan has overcome his prejudice to give us a thought- provoking and timely work on a widely misunderstood and overhyped subject.
Available at the Books Direct price of ÂŁ20 plus ÂŁ1.95 p&p on 0870 165 8585
October 26, 2003 at 01:33 PM in | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
washingtonpost.com: Search in Iraq Fails to Find Nuclear Threat
No Evidence Uncovered Of Reconstituted Program
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 26, 2003; Page A01
In their march to Baghdad on April 8, U.S. Marines charged past a row of eucalyptus trees that lined the boneyard of Iraq's thwarted nuclear dream. Sixty acres of warehouses behind the tree line, held under United Nations seal at Ash Shaykhili, stored machine tools, consoles and instruments from the nuclear weapons program cut short by the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Thirty miles to the north and west, Army troops were rolling through the precincts of the Nasr munitions plant. Inside, stacked in oblong wooden crates, were thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes.
That equipment, and Iraq's effort to buy more of it overseas, were central to the Bush administration's charge that President Saddam Hussein had resumed long-dormant efforts to build a nuclear weapon. The lead combat units had more urgent priorities that day, but they were not alone in passing the stockpiles by. Participants in the subsequent hunt for illegal arms said months elapsed without a visit to Nasr and many other sites of activity that President Bush had called "a grave and gathering danger."
According to records made available to The Washington Post and interviews with arms investigators from the United States, Britain and Australia, it did not require a comprehensive survey to find the central assertions of the Bush administration's prewar nuclear case to be insubstantial or untrue. Although Hussein did not relinquish his nuclear ambitions or technical records, investigators said, it is now clear he had no active program to build a weapon, produce its key materials or obtain the technology he needed for either.
Among the closely held internal judgments of the Iraq Survey Group, overseen by David Kay as special representative of CIA Director George J. Tenet, are that Iraq's nuclear weapons scientists did no significant arms-related work after 1991, that facilities with suspicious new construction proved benign, and that equipment of potential use to a nuclear program remained under seal or in civilian industrial use.
Most notably, investigators have judged the aluminum tubes to be "innocuous," according to Australian Brig. Gen. Stephen D. Meekin, who commands the Joint Captured Enemy Materiel Exploitation Center, the largest of a half-dozen units that report to Kay. That finding is pivotal, because the Bush administration built its case on the proposition that Iraq aimed to use those tubes as centrifuge rotors to enrich uranium for the core of a nuclear warhead.
Administration officials interviewed for this report defended the integrity of the government's prewar intelligence and public statements. None agreed to be interviewed on the record. Vice President Cheney, in a televised interview last month, referred to a National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which said among other things that there was "compelling evidence that Saddam is reconstituting a uranium enrichment effort." Cheney said investigators searching for confirmation of those judgments "will find in fact that they are valid." His office did not respond to questions on Friday.
'Drain Pipe'
No evidence mattered more to the nuclear debate than Iraq's attempt to buy aluminum tubes overseas. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, among many others, scorned the Baghdad government's explanation that it sought the tubes as artillery rocket casings. By August, news accounts made clear that the U.S. government's top nuclear centrifuge experts dissented strongly from the claim that the tubes were meant for uranium enrichment.
Meekin, whose remarks were supported by other investigators who said they feared the consequences of being quoted by name, is the first to describe the results of postwar analysis.
"They were rockets," said Meekin, 48, director general of scientific and technical assessment for Australia's Defence Intelligence Organisation, speaking by satellite telephone from Baghdad. "The tubes were used for rockets."
A U.S. government official, who was unwilling to be identified by name or agency, said Meekin is not qualified to make that judgment. The official did not elaborate. Kay's interim report this month said the question remains open.
Participants in the Pentagon-directed special weapons teams, interviewed repeatedly since late last spring, noted that Kay's operation has taken no steps to collect the estimated 20,000 tubes in Iraq's inventory -- some badly corroded, but others of higher quality than the ones the U.S. government intercepted in Jordan three years ago and described as dangerous technology.
"If you told me they had access to these tubes and have chosen not to seize and destroy them, it undermines the judgment that these tubes are usable for, if not intended for, centrifuge development," said Robert Gallucci, dean of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, who retains his classified clearances and still consults with government analysts on Iraq.
Meekin said he no longer knows the whereabouts of the tubes once stacked at Nasr. "They weren't our highest priority," he said. "The thing's innocuous." Unguarded, the tubes "could be in arms plants, scattered around, being grabbed by looters, perhaps in scrap metal yards."
Scavengers, he said, most likely have "sold them as drain pipe."
Three Fates
The day Marines and Army mechanized troops marched past the remnants of Iraq's nuclear past, Baghdad's three most important nuclear weapons scientists met three distinct fates.
Mahdi Obeidi, chief of the pre-1991 centrifuge program to enrich uranium, sat anxiously at home awaiting U.S. investigators. Jaffar Dhai Jaffar, who directed alternative enrichment efforts and other component designs under the code name Petrochemical Three, watched the U.S.-led coalition's invasion from the United Arab Emirates, to which he had decamped before fighting began. Khalid Ibrahim Said, the principal overseer of Iraq's nuclear warhead designs, drove incautiously through a newly established U.S. checkpoint. He died in a burst of gunfire from Marines.
A short and pugnacious man, unpopular among his Iraqi contemporaries, Said had been less forthcoming than the other two men in contacts with U.N. inspectors from 1991 to 1998. His loss struck a blow to U.S. occupation authorities, because there were unanswered questions about his portion of the 1991 "crash program" to build a bomb.
Said was believed to have kept comprehensive records of his work, including design details and assembly diagrams, on optical disks. Iraq delivered much of its information to inspectors in electronic form, and it did so again in its seven-volume report of Dec. 3, 2002, titled "Currently Accurate, Full and Complete Declaration of the Past Nuclear Program." That report, a copy of which has been made available to The Washington Post, was not thought to include all the technical details in Iraq's possession.
Kay said this month that Iraq took "steps to preserve some technological capability from the pre-1991 nuclear weapons program." If true, that would represent a violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions, but would fall far short of a resumption of illegal development.
"Everybody, including Donald Rumsfeld, agrees the program was destroyed 12 years ago," said one U.S. expert with long experience on Iraq. "The question for David [Kay] is whether it restarted."
Jaffar, who remains under the protection of the UAE government, agreed to voluntary interviews with U.S. and British investigators. Those familiar with his statements said he was combative, telling the Americans -- as he did during years of U.N. inspections -- that there was no hidden nuclear weapons program. Iraq, he said, never resumed the effort after U.S. bombs destroyed the Tuwaitha reactors during the Gulf War, and the International Atomic Energy Agency dismantled enrichment and design facilities over the next five years.
The Rose Garden
It was Obeidi's former program -- the use of centrifuges to enrich uranium -- that the Bush administration maintained had been resurrected. Obeidi had heard the public statements, according to two close associates, and he waited with growing anxiety for arriving troops to knock at his door.
Anxiety turned to puzzlement when they did not. After two weeks, the Iraqi scientist turned to an unlikely source of help: David Albright, a U.S. nuclear expert and cordial antagonist during Albright's years as a consultant to the IAEA. One of the first things Obeidi told Albright, by the American's account, was that he had read Albright's published writings closely in the mid-1990s to learn which of Iraq's cover stories was working.
On May 1, Albright began looking for someone in the Defense Department or U.S. Central Command who would talk to Obeidi, "but I was rebuffed." Six days later, he reached a contact in the CIA. Obeidi had important information, Albright said, and wanted to come clean.
The first meeting with the CIA, on May 17, did not go well. Obeidi wanted assurance of asylum in the United States. The interviewers were noncommittal and appeared to know little about Obeidi or the centrifuge program, according to interviews with Albright and contemporaneous notes he provided in July.
On June 2, Obeidi led investigators to his rose garden. There they dug up a cache he had buried 12 years before and kept from U.N. inspectors: about 200 blueprints of gas centrifuge components, 180 documents describing their use and samples of a few sensitive parts. The parts amounted to far less than one complete centrifuge, and nothing like the thousands required for a cascade of the spinning devices to enrich uranium, but the material showed what nearly all outside experts believed -- that Iraq had preserved its nuclear knowledge base.
The next day, U.S. Special Forces burst into Obeidi's home and arrested him -- a misunderstanding, the CIA later explained. Shortly after Obeidi's release, on June 17, the CIA made public his identity and described the rose garden cache as proof that Iraq had the secret nuclear program that the Bush administration alleged.
But that, according to sources familiar with Obeidi's account in detail, is not quite what he told his interviewers.
Joe's Return
According to close associates, Obeidi expected to speak to a peer among U.S. centrifuge physicists. He was dismayed, they said, to find that his principal interrogator lacked those credentials.
The man's name was Joe. An engineer with expertise in export controls, Joe made his reputation at the CIA as the strongest proponent of the theory that Iraq's controversial aluminum tubes were part of a resurgent centrifuge program. The CIA asked that Joe's last name be withheld to protect his safety.
In his interviews, Obeidi did not tell Joe what he wanted to hear, U.S. government officials said. Instead, Obeidi confirmed the account laid out in Volume 7 of Iraq's December nuclear disclosure, which said there had been "no nuclear activity since 1991" at seven of the program's previous sites and only "medical, agricultural and industrial" activities at the others.
The centrifuge program died in 1991, Obeidi said, and never resumed. He had buried the documents to prepare for resumption orders that never came. He had nothing to do with the aluminum tubes, he said, and a centrifuge program would have no use for them.
Obeidi's account corresponded closely with the history laid out in Volume 3 of Iraq's official history, which covered enrichment. The program began in 1988, under the designation Al Furat or 1200C, with a design based on rotors made of maraging steel. The following year Obeidi added an alternative design, using a more sophisticated rotor made of carbon fiber. In July 1990, a prototype system succeeded for the first time in separating the desired isotope of uranium from the gas uranium hexafluoride.
If Iraq had in fact revived its enrichment program, it would have needed a fluorine plant to convert uranium ore to that gaseous form and an intricate system of magnets, bearings and pipes to connect thousands of rotors in cascades. Kay's investigators, allied officials said, have found none of those things.
The physics of a centrifuge would not permit a simple substitution of aluminum tubes for the maraging steel and carbon fiber designs used by Obeidi. The tubes in Obeidi's design were also specified at 145mm in diameter; the aluminum tubes measured 81mm.
Joe sent dispatches to Washington over the summer accusing Obeidi of holding back the truth, according to a U.S. official who read one. The Iraqi scientist, fearful of his safety after being named in public, moved with his family to a CIA safe house in Kuwait. For months, he remained in limbo.
"They're just in a conflict of interest," Albright said in a July interview, speaking of Joe and other CIA analysts. "Their bosses are [still] saying the tubes are for centrifuges."
By summer's end, under unknown circumstances, Obeidi received permission to bring his family to an East Coast suburb in the United States. He declined through intermediaries to be interviewed, and a government official asked that his location not be published. Albright, who hopes to employ Obeidi at his Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, is no longer willing to discuss the case.
Book of the Month Club
At Hussein's former palace complex in Abu Ghurayb, lush by Baghdad standards with two small artificial lakes, frustrated members of the nuclear search team by late spring began calling themselves the "book of the month club."
"There's a lot of guys over there read more novels than they will the rest of their lives," said a recently returned investigator, speaking on condition of anonymity. "You've got some bored people over there, big time."
Nuclear investigators had come with expectations set by Bush and Cheney, who gave rhetorical emphasis to Iraq's nuclear threat in their most compelling arguments for war. At least four times in the fall of 2002, the president and his advisers invoked the specter of a "mushroom cloud," and some of them, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, described Iraq's nuclear ambitions as a threat to the American homeland.
On the ground in Iraq, one investigator said, the nuclear investigation began as and remained "the least significant of the missions." The resources, personnel and operational pace of the nuclear team, he said, "were minuscule compared to chem and bio," a reference to chemical and biological weapons probes.
Fewer than one-tenth of 1 percent of the search personnel had nuclear assignments, about a dozen out of 1,500 at the peak strength of the Iraq Survey Group. In the immediate postwar period, investigators had about 600 leads in an "integrated master site list," of which the U.S. Central Command identified a "Top 19 WMD," for weapons of mass destruction. Only three of those were nuclear-related: Ash Shaykhili Nuclear Facility, the Baghdad New Nuclear Design Center and the Tahadi Nuclear Establishment.
"There really wasn't a need for our specialized area of work," Navy Cmdr. David Beckett said in a recent interview. In Iraq, Beckett commanded a group of nuclear-trained Special Forces known as the Direct Support Team. Now program manager for special nuclear programs at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Beckett said the aluminum tubes and machine tools cited in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate -- vacuum tubes, industrial magnets and balancing machines -- were "not a big focus" of his work in Iraq. He added, "To be honest, I've read more about that since I got back."
An administration official, defending the CIA's prewar analysis, said its message had been widely misunderstood. "The term 'reconstituting' means restoring to a former condition, a process often inferred to be short term," he said. "Based on reporting, however, Saddam clearly viewed it as a long-term process. So did the NIE."
Fertile Ground
Meekin, the Australian general who had principal responsibility for collecting Iraqi military technology, said his 500-member unit is disbanding, its work largely done. According to U.S. government officials, some of Kay's leading nuclear investigators have already left Iraq. Nuclear physicist William Domke, who ran the centrifuge investigation, returned last month to his intelligence post at the Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Jeffrey Bedell, Domke's counterpart at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, has also come home.
Domke and Bedell, according to people who know their work, confirmed their prewar analysis that the tubes were not suited for centrifuges and that Iraq had no program to use them as such. They had seen the tubes in December and January, on temporary assignment for the IAEA in Iraq. They were also principal authors of the Energy Department's dissent from the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002.
Neither man replied to messages left by voice mail and e-mail. Steve Wampler, a spokesman at Livermore, said, "They really don't talk about their work." A U.S. government official, speaking for the administration but declining to be named, denied that the two physicists had reached final conclusions. "Domke may be coming back soon," the official said. "Their work is not completed."
Tim McCarthy, an experienced U.N. inspector who returned to Iraq late last month to join Kay's team, said in an interview before departing that the Iraqi rocket program based on 81mm tubes had been known to Western analysts "well before 1996." McCarthy said inspectors gave the tubes "maybe three minutes out of 100 hours" of attention because they did not appear to be important.
Meekin said the Nasr 81 rocket "appeared in a public arms show in 1999" at which Iraqi munitions were displayed for sale. Such sales would have been illegal under U.N. Security Council sanctions, but hardly secret. Meekin said trade magazines covered the show.
Partly for those reasons, the American-led search teams did not even visit Nasr until July. Iraqi Brig. Gen. Shehab Haythem showed them around, the tubes laid out in neat rows. Investigators sent samples to the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and left the rest.
Today, Ash Shaykhili is a hulk. What it contained, apart from demolished remnants of the 1991 program, was exactly the kind of equipment that the CIA cited as part of its compelling case for Iraq's nuclear threat: "magnets, high-speed balancing machines, and machine tools."
"They're not acting as if they take their own analysis seriously," said Joseph Cirincione, director of the nonproliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "If they were so worried about these tubes, that would be the kind of sensitive equipment you'd think the administration would want to seize, to prevent it from going somewhere else -- Iran, Syria, Egypt."
The investigation to date, Meekin said, suggests that Iraqi efforts to obtain dangerous technology since 1991 met with modest success at best.
"By and large, our judgment is that sanctions have been pretty good, or the sanctions effort, to prevent the import of components," he said. In the realm of nuclear proliferation, he said, "I guess there's more fertile ground in North Korea or Iran."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
October 26, 2003 at 11:48 AM in Current Terrorism | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Yahoo! News - German Arrested for Spying for Bulgaria
Fri Oct 17,11:20 AM ET
By Mark Trevelyan
BERLIN (Reuters) - German authorities have arrested a veteran intelligence agent on suspicion of betraying secrets to a female Bulgarian spy, sources close to the case said on Friday.
They said the 64-year-old agent, a Balkan specialist with Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency, was arrested at his home in Munich on October 9.
The federal prosecutors' office in Karlsruhe said in a statement that the unnamed man was suspected of passing secret documents to the woman spy between late 1999 and last month.
It did not name the foreign country, but a source with knowledge of the case told Reuters it was Bulgaria.
In Sofia, the head of Bulgarian military counter-intelligence said such reports were an attempt to smear the ex-communist country before it joins NATO (news - web sites) next year.
"There are thousands of ways to blacken a person... similar schemes could be used to blacken a country as well," Orlin Ivanov told state radio.
DIVORCE AND DRINK
Justice and security sources said the German agent had long worked in the Balkans in human intelligence gathering and had contact with other foreign intelligence agencies.
They said his motives were not known, but he was coping with a number of personal problems, including divorce and alcohol. He was not believed to have had an affair with the Bulgarian agent.
"This wasn't a love affair," one source said. "We don't know yet what the motives were or whether he received money."
The agent has been interrogated by federal prosecutors and held in investigative custody since October 9 -- an indication that the security breach was serious, sources said.
Der Spiegel magazine said in a report in its online edition the German government was outraged over the alleged spying by a friendly nation. As well as joining NATO next year, Bulgaria aims to win entry to the European Union (news - web sites) in 2007.
NATO countries protested recently at plans by Bulgaria's prime minister to appoint a former communist spy as his security adviser. The issue was resolved this week when the official, Brigo Asparuhov, turned down the appointment.
The German government refused to comment on the alleged German-Bulgarian spy affair.
Petio Petev, minister plenipotentiary at the Bulgarian embassy in Berlin, said he was perplexed by reports of the case.
"We have excellent relations with Germany, so it's a very strange publication (in) my personal opinion," he told Reuters.
Petev said the embassy had not been contacted by German officials, but had been in touch with its own foreign ministry in Sofia to brief it on the reports.
October 22, 2003 at 11:55 PM in Current Terrorism | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Ex-Chiefs Disagree on Intelligence Overhaul (washingtonpost.com): "By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 15, 2003; Page A03
A former CIA director yesterday endorsed a drastic overhaul of the nation's intelligence system, while another said radical change could make matters worse.
The opposing views of former directors John M. Deutch and James R. Schlesinger, who testified before a bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, illustrate the depth of disagreement among experts over whether intelligence failures before the attacks can be solved through major reforms.
The debate over the creation of a domestic intelligence agency akin to Britain's is a central question facing the commission, a 10-member panel created by Congress to investigate issues related to the attacks in New York and on the Pentagon.
Deutch, who ran the CIA for two years during the Clinton administration, said that the government should create a domestic intelligence agency to take over counterterrorism responsibilities from the FBI and vest the director of central intelligence with more authority.
Greater centralization "is the best way to improve intelligence and the safety of the American people," Deutch said.
But Schlesinger, who headed the CIA during the Richard M. Nixon years, urged caution. "Tinkering with the organizational structure can help, but by itself will not produce major improvement," Schlesinger said.
Yesterday's hearing -- the fourth held publicly since the panel was formed last year -- was interrupted by a lengthy emergency meeting that involved a "remarkable development" related to disputes over access to documents between the commission and the Bush administration, according to chairman Thomas H. Kean.
A commission spokesman said the development involved an agency other than the White House, but Kean and other members declined to reveal any other details. Kean said the panel will release more information by today. Several administration officials declined to comment or said they were unaware of the dispute.
Kean, a Republican former New Jersey governor, and the commission's vice chairman, former representative Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), have said that the panel's work would be harmed if it does not receive access to crucial administration documents immediately. The commission has subpoena power.
The panel, which has come under sharp criticism from some relatives of Sept. 11 victims for not being aggressive enough in demanding information from the Bush administration, is legislatively required to release a final report in May that will cover broad areas of intelligence policy, border security, airline safety and other matters.
Stephen Push, who heads the group Families of September 11, said he and other relatives are frustrated because "the deadlines always seem to be pushed back" on obtaining key documents, which sources have said include classified presidential daily bulletins issued in the weeks before the attacks.
© 2003 The Washington Post Compay"
October 22, 2003 at 11:53 PM in CIA | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Did MI6 Kill Diana?
The Two Main Theories:
a) One or more rogue "cells" in the British secret service construct and carry out a plot to kill Diana.
b) An official campaign by MI6 to assasinate Diana, sanctioned by elements of the establishment.
The Possible Motives
a) The rogue elements in MI5 (National security) or MI6 (International security) decide that Di is a threat to the throne, and therefore the stability of the state. They take her out.
b) With similar motives to the possible rogue elements, the official campaign is driven by a fear of Diana's possible to conversion to Islam (Dodi being a Muslim) and the implication on the Church and State were the two Princes, William and Harry, to follow their mother's lead.
The Evidence
Circumstantial it maybe, but put together is it capable of raising sufficient doubt that this was an accident?
Below are some of the questions and doubts that are raised by the investigation so far
- The rapid disposal of the bodies of Diana and Dodi. Diana had no post mortem prior to burial in Althorp. Victims of sudden death require a post mortem by law in the UK.
- The missing white Fiat Uno: With such a large-scale investigation by French authorities could only secret agents have evaded the police's net around Paris? We know the car hit the Mercedes used by Di and Dodi, thanks to traceable paint marks on the Benz. Witnesses refer to the car lurching around the road at varying speeds as both it and the Merc entered the tunnel of death.
- Henri Paul, driver of the Limo. The mis-information surrounding this key figure is enormous. First he was said to be driving at up to 120 mph, recent reports by professional crash investigators suggest 60 mph, even less on impact.
Was he really drunk? It is accepted that he had two Ricard drinks at the Ritz, but no other evidence has emerged to support this claim, beyond questionable results from a blood test from his corpse. Why questionable? Because it is common for the alcohol level to rise in bodies after death regardless of consumption. The test also showed a very high level of carbon monoxide (20 per cent) in his blood. Experts say this would have incapacitated him before he set off on his fatal journey, and yet the hotel's video evidence shows him walking around and talking normally. An alcoholic? Well , as a pilot, he passed a rigorous health check two days before the accident. His liver showed no signs of abuse on post-mortem.
Then there is the question of the multiple bank accounts Paul held, with balances showing income far in excess of his 20 000 UKP salary as acting head of security at the Ritz. Some friends have suggested he was a long term "sleeper" agent for a secret service agency, almost certainly French intelligence.
- Trevor Rees Jones (Fayed bodyguard)- The only survivor. One time member of Her Majesty's armed forces, rumours suggest he may have been a "sleeper" agent for MI5 or MI6, particularly as the establishment were keen to keep tabs on Mohammed Al Fayed. Why was he the only person in the car to wear a safety-belt?
- Explosion, followed by Bang- Immediately after the crash news was broadcast, witnesses appeared on US TV saying that they heard an explosion or bang before they heard the car crash. Was this a gunshot, or a bomb?
- White Light- Other witnesses describe an extremely bright white light, much stronger than a photographer's flashbulb, illuminating the tunnel before the crash sounds. Powerful anti-personnel flash-guns are available to private citizens for as little as 250 UKP. The security forces have access to much stronger tools. All of which are capable of blinding a victim for several minutes - easily enough to cause a fatal crash. Crucially there would be no physical evidence left for investigators.
- James Hewitt- Former lover of Diana claims he was warned on several occasions by elements of the security forces and a member of the royal family to stop seeing the Princess or his health would suffer! Hewitt has been exposed previously as being very willing to exploit a situation for his own ends, as in the publication of a sleazy book about Diana to which he contributed.
- Paparazzi- Initially blamed for the crash, most witnesses seem to agree that the bikes were not close enough to the Mercedes in the tunnel to have actually interfered with its progress.
NB These are just a selection of matters which cause concern for investigators. Many other points are raised by the "accident" but for reasons of space are not dealt with here.
Conclusions
There are many questions that arise out of this incident. The most plausible explanation still appears to be a tragic accident - Paul who was driving to some degree under the influence of alcohol, tried to accelerate away from the pursuing photographers, lost control going into the tunnel (after the slight curve in the road, and maybe as the Uno impeded his progress) and crashed into the tunnel's thirteenth pillar.
This maybe the most plausible explanation, however, we feel that without dramatic new evidence , such as the Uno and driver turning up, this will never be certain.
While there remains doubt as to whether it was an accident it is reasonable to question what the possible alternatives are. The most plausible of these has to involve members of the UK establishment and secret service as few others had anything to lose from Diana and Dodi's relationship. To keep such a plot secret we believe it would have to be the work of a small, isolated cell working under its own auspices within the system.
Former agents have told of a plot to destabilise the then Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson in the Seventies. Wilson did indeed resign from office, shocking political commentators at the time. We know that our intelligence service keeps records on Peace campaigners and Union officials for the "threat" of being radicals.
If the service really does operate as efficiently as James Bond films lead us to believe, which we doubt very strongly, then there would be nothing to stop them orchestrating Diana's death AND making it appear to be an accident.
But as yet there is clearly more evidence to support an accident than a secret plot. For us though, the jury is still out.
October 21, 2003 at 04:11 PM in MI6 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Stormont election set for November
· IRA sanctions further decommissioning
· Assembly elections on November 26
· Adams: let's take guns out of politics
· Blair leaves No 10 for Belfast
Matthew Tempest and agencies
Tuesday October 21, 2003
New elections to the devolved assembly in Northern Ireland will take place on November 26, the British government announced today as the IRA confirmed they had authorised "a further act" of decommissioning."
No details were revealed of where or when the destruction of arms took place, but it is understood that General de Chastelain will make an announcement later today confirming the decommissioning act.
The IRA's move - in a traditionally pseudonymous statement signed by "P O'Neill" - came 90 minutes after a public declaration from Sinn FĂ©in leader pledging an end to "physical force republicanism".
The prime minister has now left Downing Street for Belfast.
The setting of an election date raises hopes that the Stormont assembly - suspended a year ago amid allegations of an IRA spy ring - could now finally be established as a permanent power-sharing body in the province.
Statements from the SDLP, Irish and British governments, UUP and DUP are all expected today, in a pivotal day in Northern Ireland.
Speaking at a press conference this morning, the Sinn FĂ©in leader, Gerry Adams, called for "full and irreversible implementation" of the Good Friday agreement.
Quoting the hunger striker Bobby Sands, Mr Adams called on all voters in Northern Ireland to use their vote "and use it wisely for peace".
He welcomed the November date for elections, but criticised "media focus" on the republicans, pointing to almost 10 years of the IRA ceasefire.
He heralded "the end to physical force republicanism", although deliberately avoided any totemic phrases such as "the war is over."
He also appealed to those organisations currently not on ceasefire. "While calling on all armed groups to desist, I want to appeal especially to organisations which present themselves as republican.
His appeal to republicans was strongly aimed at persuading them to stay with Sinn FĂ©in as the political means of securing an Irish republic, admitting: "The past five years have been a political and emotional rollercoaster ride for republicans and unionists alike."
Meanwhile dissenting UUP MP Jeffrey Donaldson - who has challenged Mr Trimble's leadership in the past - stayed in London while the announcements were made in Belfast and sounded an early note of scepticism.
He told Sky News: "What we need is what the prime minister described as 'acts of completion' - that is the bottom line for unionists."
Choreographed statements are now expected from Mr Blair and the Irish taoiseach, Bertie Ahern.
The prime minister's official spokesman said: "Potentially, this could be the most significant day in Northern Ireland since the Good Friday agreement."
Mr Blair was travelling to the province primarily to gauge the current state of IRA decommissioning from General Sir John de Chastelain, the spokesman said.
"There is an agreed sequence of events we are seeing today," he said. "I think what is different from some of the other moments we have had in the peace process is that this is really being driven by the parties, with the government, if you like, giving their support.
"You have not seen Weston Park-style hothousing. You have not seen grandstanding. What there has been is high quality engagement from the parties.
"What we have always said in respect of Northern Ireland is that confidence is the life blood of the political process and without confidence on both sides it makes it difficult to make progress.
"Now, as we have said, there has been a very positive engagement, particularly in the last few weeks."
The Stormont elections - which were postponed from their scheduled date this May since the assembly was suspended - will see a very close fight between David Trimble's Ulster Unionists and the anti-agreement Democratic Unionist party, lead by the Rev Ian Paisley.
Mr Trimble also faces internal dissent within his own party from rebel MP Jeffrey Donaldson, while Sinn FĂ©in appear to have shot ahead of their nationalist rivals, the SDLP.
David Trimble's Ulster Unionists had insisted that power-sharing could not be restored without a declaration from the IRA that it is ending all paramilitary activity.
In a speech to his party conference in Armagh last Saturday, Mr Trimble said republicans needed to give a sense that paramilitarism was coming to an end.
Hardline Ulster Unionists were expected to criticise any deal if, as they suspect, it falls short of their demands for total decommissioning and the disbanding of the IRA.
Internal critics of David Trimble have suggested the Ulster Unionists could go into a November assembly election badly divided, with the party facing the awkward problem of whether it could house among its field of candidates two of the three rebel MPs who have angered their leadership by resigning the party whip.
October 21, 2003 at 09:21 AM in Ireland | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Princess's letter revives claims of a murder plot
By Ian Cobain, Andrew Pierce and Russell Jenkins
Murder plot?: Diana predicted her own death in a car crash in a handwritten note
DIANA, Princess of Wales, predicted her own death in a car crash ten months before it happened, newly published correspondence showed yesterday.
In a comment that is certain to fuel wild conspiracy theories, the Princess wrote that she was sure that an individual â thought to have been a serving police officer â was âplanningâ the accident.
Diana wrote that she suspected that someone was plotting to sabotage the brakes of her car in order to âmake the path clearâ for the Prince of Wales to remarry.
The letter is said to have been written to her butler, Paul Burrell, and was reproduced in yesterdayâs Daily Mirror after the name of the individual suspected by the Princess had been blacked out.
The authenticity of the letter, said to have been written in October 1996, was not seriously questioned yesterday by a handwriting expert commissioned by The Times, who said that it was probably not a forgery.
It was unclear last night why Mr Burrell, 45, failed to make the letter available to the French judge who investigated the death of Diana and Dodi Fayed in a car crash in a Paris road tunnel in August 1997.
Mr Burrell was in the United States promoting a book which is to be published next week and which is being serialised in the Mirror. He was not available for comment.
In the letter, Diana expresses her âlonging for someone to hug me and encourage me to keep strong and hold my head highâ.
She goes on to claim that âthis particular phase in my life is the most dangerousâ, and adds that an individual âis planning âan accidentâ in my car. Brake failure and serious head injury in order to make the path clear for Charles to marryâ.
The letter was written at a time when the Princess was âsignalling her return to the public eyeâ, as one tabloid newspaper reported, with a new hairstyle and a series of well-publicised engagements including a visit to Harrods with a sick child and a trip to Italy to collect a humanitarian award.
Her marriage had ended in divorce less than two months earlier. Although the letter may shed no light on the cause of her death, it does offer some insights into her state of mind.
She wrote that she had been âbattered, bruised and abused for 15 yearsâ, and complained that the Prince of Wales had put her through hell.
âThank you, Charles, for putting me through such hell and for giving me the opportunity to learn from the cruel things you have done to me,â she wrote. âI have gone forward fast.â
At one point she added: âI am weary of the battles, but I will never surrender. I am strong inside and maybe that is a problem for my enemies.â
The Mirror is thought to have been offered the letter with the name of the individual already blacked out, and is not thought to have seen all four pages.
Friends of the Princessâs family said last night that they doubted that it had been sent to Mr Burrell. One said: âThe feeling among her friends is that it is inconceivable that Diana would send Burrell a letter of that nature. How much is he making out of his latest disclosure? Itâs not very nice for William and Harry, is it?â
Aides of the Prince of Wales â who was yesterday at Birkhall, on the Queenâs Balmoral estate, with Camilla Parker Bowles â conceded that the latest wave of headlines would be hugely damaging.
One said: âItâs the last thing we need. It will fuel the conspiracy theories. While we know, and Burrell knows, that they are garbage, the existence of the letter is a terribly revealing insight into the state of mind of the Princess.â
Mr Burrell stood trial at the Old Bailey last year accused of three charges of the theft of items that once belonged to the Princess.
The house in Cheshire that he shares with his wife, Maria, and their two sons had been searched 18 months earlier by police officers who said they were looking for âthe Crown Jewelsâ â thought to have been a reference to potentially damaging letters and tape recordings that the Princess had possessed.
The case collapsed shortly before Mr Burrell had been due to give evidence after the intervention of the Queen, who disclosed to the Prince of Wales that she had talked to the butler shortly after Dianaâs death about possessions that he was looking after.
While it was not clear why Mr Burrell had not revealed the existence of the letter before now, it is clear that its publication will encourage those who have long considered Dianaâs death to have been suspicious, and who have never accepted the conclusion of the two-year French inquiry.
Judge HervĂ© Stephan ruled that the accident was caused by the alcohol and drugs consumed by Mr Fayedâs driver, Henri Paul, and by his excessive speed.
Mohamed Al Fayed, father of Dodi, called on the Prime Minister yesterday to launch a public inquiry into the incident. âThis confirms the suspicions I have so often voiced in public and which have thus far been ignored,â he said in a statement.
âI am disappointed that it has taken Burrell six years to reveal this extraordinary correspondence, and it raises questions as to what other important secrets he may be harbouring.â
Mr Fayed said he believed that Mr Burrell may have withheld this vital evidence after being put under pressure by the Royal Household.
He went on: âIn what must now be seen as a cynical attempt to silence him, Paul Burrell was prosecuted in the criminal courts but this bungled move has simply served to highlight the involvement of the Royal Household in the strange circumstances surrounding Dianaâs death.
âThe Prime Minister must now accept that the time is right for a full public inquiry. Further delay will look as though he is colluding in a cover-up and the people of this country will not tolerate that.â
Solicitors for Trevor Rees Jones, the bodyguard who survived the accident, said: âHeâs not interested in commenting on the crash now. He really just wants to be left alone.â
Publication of the letter will increase pressure on Michael Burgess, the coroner who has yet to hold an inquest into the death of Diana or Mr Fayed more than six years after their deaths.
After the death of Helen Smith, a 23-year-old nurse whose body was found at the foot of a block of flats in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in May 1979, the Court of Appeal ruled that coroners must hold inquests on the unnatural deaths of Britons overseas.
The ruling means that coroners must open an inquest into any âviolent or unnatural death or sudden death of unknown cause wherever the death occurredâ, once the body is returned to his or her jurisdiction. As the Surrey Coroner, Mr Burgess is expected to hold an inquest on Dodi Fayed because he was buried in the county. He is also Coroner to the Royal Household, which means that he must also hold an inquest on the Princess.
Shortly after the pair died with M Paul in the Pont dâAlma tunnel on August 31, 1997, Mr Burgess said that he believed that an inquest would be a âa waste of time and public moneyâ.
This year, a spokesman for Mr Burgess said an announcement on the date for the inquests would be made within days. Hours later the statement was withdrawn on Mr Burgessâs instructions.
âIn time, as the law requires, there will be inquests into the deaths of both Dodi Fayed and Diana, Princess of Wales,â he said. He added, however, that it would be premature to say when the inquests would be held.
Mr Burgess was not available yesterday.
October 20, 2003 at 07:33 PM in MI6 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
NYTimes.com Abstract: "By JAMES RISEN (NYT) 781 words
Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 1 , Column 1
ABSTRACT - Two of highest-ranking leaders of Al Qaeda in American custody reportedly tell CIA in separate interrogations that Al Qaeda did not work jointly with Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein; Abu Zubaydah, Qaeda planner and recruiter until his capture in Mar 2002, is said to tell questioners that Osama bin Laden vetoed idea of working with Hussein's government because he did not want to be beholden to Hussein; separately, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Qaeda chief of operations until his capture this Mar, tells interrogators that group did not work with Hussein; spokesmen at White House, State Dept and Pentagon decline to comment on why Zubaydah's debriefing report was not publicly disclosed by Bush administration last year; senior intelligence official plays down significance of both debriefings, saying everything Qaeda detainees say must be regarded with great skepticism; other intelligence and military officials say evidence of possible links between Hussein's government and Al Qaeda were discovered both before war and since, but no conclusive evidence of joint terrorist operations has been found (M)"
October 18, 2003 at 11:13 PM in Al Qaeda, Iraq | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
David Leppard
SCOTLAND YARD has thwarted a suspected plot to assassinate Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, after arresting a renegade Russian intelligence agent in London.
Detectives from the Yard's anti-terrorist branch SO13 arrested the former KGB major, said to be a trained hitman, and a second Russian after a tip-off last weekend. The two men were allegedly trying to engage Russian exiles in Britain in the conspiracy.
The would-be assassins were detained for five days at a high- security police station in Paddington Green, west London, under the Terrorism Act 2000. Detectives are thought to have questioned them about links to Chechen guerrillas.
Scotland Yard confirmed last night that the two men, aged 40 and 36, had been arrested last Sunday in London. They were released on Friday on condition that they returned to Moscow.
The alleged plot â in which Putin was to be shot dead by a sniper while on a foreign trip â was uncovered by the Yard nine days ago. Police were alerted after they received a detailed legal statement from Alexander Litvinenko, a former intelligence officer in Russiaâs FSB, the main successor organisation to the KGB.
Litvinenko, who defected to Britain three years ago, said he believed the assassin, one of his former KGB colleagues, was working as an undercover agent with the FSB. In a 10-page draft affidavit drawn up in the presence of two senior British lawyers, Litvinenko told police that the renegade agent was known to him as an FSB hitman.
The man, whose identity is also known to The Sunday Times, is said to have outlined the alleged plot in a series of conversations with Litvinenko on the telephone and at a prearranged meeting on a bench outside the Wagamama noodle restaurant in Londonâs Leicester Square.
The hitman is said to have told Litvinenko that Putin needed to be toppled. âHe told Litvinenko that Putin must be overthrown, that he needed to be whacked,â said a source close to the investigation.
A senior Whitehall source said that MI5 was aware of the arrests: âThis is a criminal investigation into something that has an international dimension. Itâs a matter for the Yard who are taking it seriously.â
Documents obtained by The Sunday Times reveal that the two men arrived from Moscow earlier this month and booked into the Hilton Metropole on Londonâs Edgware Road.
One of them then telephoned Litvinenko to say he wanted an urgent meeting. When they met in Leicester Square, the Russian spy â known as Major P â said he knew a senior officer in the FSB department who supervised security for Putin during his trips abroad.
The spy said the officer could provide advance information on Putinâs route while the president was abroad, enabling an assassin to plan his attack. Major P suggested the assassination would be carried out by Chechen separatists who would, according to an insider, âpop up somewhere on Putinâs route with snipersâ riflesâ.
The insider added: âMajor P said (Putin) had to be overthrown because he was bankrupting the country and was going to put everyone in jail.â
Litvinenko told detectives that the alleged assassins had asked him to set up a meeting with Boris Berezovsky, the exiled Russian tycoon recently granted asylum in Britain. The men apparently wanted Berezovsky to finance the plot.
Friends say Litvinenko and Berezovsky feared that it could be an attempt to set them up by implicating them in the plot. They immediately informed the police.
Berezovsky said yesterday that he and Litvinenko were called to a meeting with their lawyer at Scotland Yard on Friday. âThe police told me they were holding two men and that one of them had admitted being involved in a plot to kill President Putin, he said.
October 18, 2003 at 09:44 PM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Key Al Qaeda role for bin Laden son
Saad bin Laden part of networkâs upper echelon
By Douglas Farah and Dana Priest
THE WASHINGTON POST
Oct. 14 Saad bin Laden, one of Osama bin Laden's oldest sons, has emerged in recent months as part of the upper echelon of the al Qaeda network, a small group of leaders that is managing the terrorist organization from Iran, according to U.S., European and Arab officials.
SAAD BIN LADEN and other senior al Qaeda operatives were in contact with an al Qaeda cell in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in the days immediately prior to the May 12 suicide bombing there that left 35 people dead, including eight Americans, European and U.S. intelligence sources say. The sources would not divulge the nature or contents of the communications, but the contacts have led them to conclude that the Riyadh attacks were planned in Iran and ordered from there.
PASSING THE MANTLE
Although Saad bin Laden is not the top leader of the terrorist group, his presence in the decision-making process demonstrates his fatherâs trust in him and an apparent desire to pass the mantle of leadership to a family member, according to numerous terrorism analysts inside and outside of government.
Like other al Qaeda leaders in Iran, the younger bin Laden, who is believed to be 24 years old, is protected by an elite, radical Iranian security force loyal to the nationâs clerics and beyond the control of the central government, according to U.S. and European intelligence officials. The secretive unit, known as the Jerusalem Force, has restricted the al Qaeda groupâs movements to its bases, mostly along the border with Afghanistan.
Also under the Jerusalem Forceâs protection is Saif al-Adel, al Qaedaâs chief of military operations; Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, the organizationâs chief financial officer, and perhaps two dozen other top al Qaeda leaders, the officials said. Al-Adel and Abdullah are considered the top operational deputies to Osama bin Laden and his second-in-command, Ayman Zawahiri, who communicate with underlings almost exclusively through couriers.
The presence of Saad bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders in Iran has become part of a debate within the governments of the United States and Saudi Arabia over the best way to reduce Iranian support for terrorism. U.S. officials have sent stern warnings to the government of President Mohammad Khatami that Iranâs harboring of senior al Qaeda operatives would have repercussions for a nation the Bush administration has labeled part of the âaxis of evil.â
Intelligence officials believe that although the State Department is eager to renew talks with Iran on a variety of issues, primarily its nuclear program, it is not clear whether that nationâs civilian government could deliver its end of any bargain, especially if it entailed turning over al Qaeda leaders.
âIran will continue to pursue an asymmetric strategy in which they court Western acceptance, while maintaining their surrogate leadership roles within the Islamic extremist community,â a U.S. intelligence analysis says.
Similarly, Saudi Arabia, which in recent years has tried to thaw relations with its larger and more powerful neighbor across the Persian Gulf, is trying, unsuccessfully, to persuade Iran to extradite Saad bin Laden and others suspected in the Riyadh bombing. Saudi officials estimate there are up to 400 al Qaeda members there.
âSOMEBODY MUST BE HELPING THEMâ
âThose people are in Iran and somebody must be helping them. The question is who?â Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador, told the San Francisco Chronicle last month. âThis is the problem with Iran. The people who we can deal with canât deliver, they canât lead eight ducks across the street. And the guys who can deliver, theyâre not interested.â
WP: Iranian force's long ties to Al Qaeda
As a child, Saad bin Laden was at his fatherâs side in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s when Osama bin Laden formed the Al Qaeda network. The younger bin Laden was groomed to take a leadership role in the terrorism organization. He is fluent in English and is computer-literate, two qualities rare among al Qaeda leaders and assets that have enhanced his importance beyond his family name.
Yet Saad has only recently emerged as an important target for the CIA, FBI and other organizations trying to disrupt the terrorist network. It has only been since his arrival in Iran in the last year that he has assumed a more active role in directing al Qaeda, and that he has been identified as a senior leader. Before that, analysts said, he often sat with his father in leadership meetings but seldom spoke and was not given a voice in deliberations.
Many experts believe, for example, that he also had direct involvement in coordinating a series of bombings on May 16 that killed 45 people in Casablanca, Morocco.
Kenneth Katzman, a terrorism analyst for the Congressional Research Service, said Saad âis touted as his fatherâs stand-in. Because his father is incommunicado, a lot of people are looking to Saad to give them direct instructions.â
While there is broad agreement that Saad bin Ladenâs role within al Qaeda has grown increasingly important in the past six months, not everyone agrees he is now a senior operational commander. One U.S. intelligence official said Saad is âmore of a player than most of the offspring, but not that significant.â Osama Bin Laden has more than two dozen children with five wives.
But European intelligence officials and independent analysts said Saad bin Laden, while not the most important al Qaeda leader, is helping to make key operational decisions and is an important part of al Qaedaâs logistical network. Some analysts believe he was very close to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, who was captured in March.
âSaad is capable of mounting operations against the West because he knows the West very well,â said Rohan Gunaratna, director of terrorism research at the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies in Singapore. âSaad has been very close to his father, almost functioning as his bodyguard.â
Saad bin Laden is one of the eldest sons of bin Laden and his first wife, Najwa Ghanem, a Syrian who is also the terrorist leaderâs first cousin. The couple had 11 children, but Osama bin Laden has taken at least four other wives and divorced one, according to biographies in the Arab press and U.S. officials. Islam allows men to take as many as four wives at one time.
BATTLING SOVIETS
Born in Saudi Arabia, Saad bin Laden spent time with his father in Afghanistan during the war against the Soviet occupation. His father returned to Saudi Arabia in 1989, but left in 1991 to settle in Sudan. Again, Saad accompanied him. When bin Laden returned to Afghanistan in 1996, so did Saad.
According to one terrorism expert, Osama bin Laden was filmed in Afghanistan admonishing al Qaeda members not to expect their children to take leadership positions in the movement unless the children were willing to work hard for the cause. Bin Laden then singled Saad out for praise as a hard worker and said he was proud of his son.
Gunaratna said that an analysis of bin Ladenâs satellite telephone calls from 1996 to 1998 showed that more than 10 percent were placed to Iran, demonstrating the ongoing contacts with Iran during that time.
Officials said there is also evidence that another key liaison between the hard-line Iranian factions and al Qaeda is Imad Mugniyah, one of the worldâs most wanted terrorists.
Mugniyah, a Lebanese national and senior Hezbollah leader, is responsible for the kidnapping and murder of several Americans, as well as the hijacking of aircraft and the bombing of U.S. military barracks in Beirut in the 1980s, according to the FBI and CIA. Before Sept. 11, 2001, he was responsible for the deaths of more Americans than any other terrorist.
According to court testimony of former al Qaeda operatives, Mugniyah met bin Laden several times in Sudan in the mid-1990s and agreed to train al Qaeda combatants in the use of explosives and other techniques in exchange for weapons.
A description of Mugniyahâs ongoing role was provided to authorities by a member of the Jerusalem Force who defected to Britain earlier this year. In a February interview with the London-based Saudi daily Al-Sarq al-Awsat, the defector said Mugniyah remained in Iran and had personally âplanned the escape of dozens of al Qaeda men to Iran.â
The defector, Hamid Zakiri, said Mugniyah served as âa liaison officer with Dr. Zawahiri and with commanders of other fundamentalist organizations.â
Zakiri said that among those Mugniyah aided were bin Ladenâs youngest wife, Amal al-Saddah, and her infant child, whom he provided with safe passage from Afghanistan through Iran to her homeland of Yemen as the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan began.
European intelligence sources said that much of Zakiriâs information had been verified.
Research editor Margot Williams contributed to this report.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
October 14, 2003 at 08:19 PM in Al Qaeda | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
A Researcher Walks on a Razor's Edge
When she started her career, Olga Kryshtanovskaya signed a pledge for the KGB that she wouldn't poll people about Communist Party bosses. Today, the social researcher has collected some of the most comprehensive archives on Russia's pinnacle of power, from President Vladimir Putin's team to the powerful business barons.
Kryshtanovskaya has headed a department studying the political and business elite at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Sociology for the past 14 years. As such, she says rather matter-of-factly, "I can at any time pull a list of people who are the elite up on my computer and say what they are like."
Kryshtanovskaya recently took the spotlight for a study that found a growing number of former KGB and military officers are securing senior government posts. Among the other research projects tucked away in her files is one tracing the career of Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky from the basement office where he started out as a chief of a Communist Party-affiliated business that charged a commission for cashing the accounts of Soviet enterprises.
Kryshtanovskaya set up her department in 1989, after perestroika had wiped out some Soviet taboos about studying the ruling elite and a former dissident was named the head of the Institute of Sociology.
She picked the elite because she found the topic challenging. She said she also felt a civic responsibility to reveal to the public what she could about those in power. "This is important. Domestic and foreign policy and all of us depend on who these people are," she said.
The first steps were not easy. The team was not sure how far it could go in its investigations. A KGB officer posing as a postgraduate student worked in the department's office for a year and followed researchers to interviews, Kryshtanovskaya said.
"It felt like walking on a razor's edge," she said.
But the tumultuous time also had its bonuses. "$200 could buy you information from the KGB or the Finance Ministry."
Kryshtanovskaya, however, said her department has never published any of this kind of information, partly because it was "fragmentary" and partly because "its time hasn't come yet."
"We were pioneers in Russia. It was unbelievably difficult to get any information, but we burned with enthusiasm," she said.
Being pioneers meant that researchers lacked research techniques and had to learn on the job. Sometimes research required "exceptional detective abilities," as was the case with a study describing the emerging class of millionaires in the waning days of the Soviet Union in 1991. "No one knew who actually was a millionaire. Finding them was like tracking down a criminal," she said.
Struggling to find leads for the study, commissioned by the Moskovskiye Novosti newspaper, she and her team asked well-known people whether they were millionaires, interviewed them if they were, and begged them for further references.
In another example, researchers ended up joining forces with an unusual partner to wrestle responses from tight-lipped bank officials for a report about banks.
"We found a powerful state agency that was interested in the same material, and we sent our requests for information under the letterheads of that agency and ours," Kryshtanovskaya said.
She refused to identify the agency.
In contrast to the secrecy and the opaque nature of the topic of her studies, the soft-spoken researcher seems to have a special liking for light colors. The living room of her apartment, where she was interviewed, has two cream-colored armchairs and a sofa placed around an imitation polar bear skin rug. A collection of small white elephants stand on a table near a white wardrobe.
Kryshtanovskaya's group gathers information by scanning newspapers, collecting stale official biographies and interviewing the subjects of their research.
Former media magnate Vladimir Gusinsky, whom Moscow is currently trying to extradite from Greece on fraud charges, was the hardest person to nail down for an interview. Her department called his office 120 times before he agreed to talk.
Since its inception, Kryshtanovskaya's department has completed 34 studies for clients such as Russian and foreign research foundations, the Russian government and newspapers. The latest project, "Putin's Elite," will be in progress until 2005. Kryshtanovskaya was reluctant to name specific clients, saying only that foreign organizations have been the main ones in the past three years. She said her first major contract came from the Economic and Social Research Council, a leading British research agency. In 1991, the organization ordered a study of the Brezhnev-era elite.
Apparently impressed with the department's work, the Russian government in 1995 asked for an investigation into regional authorities. The reason, Kryshtanovskaya said, was because federal officials "didn't trust their special services."
Kryshtanovskaya's main team numbers 14 people, and the staff swells up to 200 for some studies.
Apart from the large number of former KGB officers in the government, Kryshtanovskaya's research has found that a third of those currently in the elite -- 3,000 -- were also among the elite before the Soviet collapse -- a large number given the whirlwind of changes since that time.
What also has remained the same is that authorities are continuing to keep close tabs on researchers. Kryshtanovskaya said that after the release of the study about former KGB officers, she was grilled by Kremlin officials who wanted to know who was behind the research and who paid for it.
"Now the same feeling of danger as in the beginning has re-emerged," she said. "I feel that I am walking on a razor's edge again."
October 13, 2003 at 02:47 PM in KGB | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Yahoo! News - Web Sites Listed as 'Terror' Groups: "Fri Oct 10,12:31 PM
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has added Web sites to its list of 'foreign terrorist organizations' for the first time, under the category of aliases for conventional groups, a State Department official said on Friday.
A list published in the Federal Register includes newkach.org, kahane.org, kahane.net, kahanetzadak.com as aliases for the Jewish group Kahane Chai or Kach, which is suspected of organizing attacks on Palestinians.
Under U.S. law, it would be illegal to provide money or other material support to the designated Web sites, the people who run them could be denied U.S. visas and U.S. banks must block their funds. The State Department said it was yet clear how this would work in practice.
But the law may not enable the United States to block access to the Web sites, if only for technical reasons. "
October 10, 2003 at 05:18 PM in Current Terrorism | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
The Observer | Magazine | The downfall of Mad Dog Adair: "The downfall of Mad Dog Adair
At the height of his power, loyalist warlord Johnny Adair was responsible for a murder spree that resulted in the deaths of 40 Ulster Catholics. But it was only when he turned the guns on his own people that his reign of terror ended. David Lister and Hugh Jordan recount the demise of the Shankill Godfather "
Sunday October 5, 2003
The Observer
On 15 May 2002, after 21 months in Maghaberry Prison in County Antrim, Johnny 'Mad Dog' Adair was released from jail for a second time. As he jumped out of a white prison van, he punched the air in celebration and shouted the only Latin words he had ever known: 'Quis separabit'. Over the next eight months the UDA's slogan, meaning, 'Who will come between us?', would become a bad joke, but for now there was unbridled euphoria as up to 300 supporters cheered and let off fireworks. Before returning to a triumphant reception outside his home in Boundary Way, West Belfast, he was welcomed by his fellow brigadiers.
The media captured the show of unity as the South Belfast UDA leader Jackie McDonald and his colleagues gathered round to shake his hand. What reporters did not know, however, was that most had been reluctant to go. Looking back, Billy 'The Mexican' McFarland of north Antrim and Derry explained: 'I regret going to meet him. In the end the five brigadiers went and out of those five no one wanted to shake hands with him. There had been stories in the papers about splits in the UDA and John White argued that this would show unity.'
Within weeks, Adair and his spokesman White were contriving to persuade the world that the Shankill loyalist was a changed man. He took up a ÂŁ16,500 post as a prisoners' welfare co-ordinator, a position funded by the British taxpayer. When the news broke, the Northern Ireland Office faced a storm of protest and insisted Adair had only been employed for five weeks. Adair was defiant.
'For years people were complaining, asking what I did to earn money and now they can see that I'm legitimately employed and pay taxes just like everyone else. People complain no matter what I do.' Throughout the summer he continued to pretend his interests now lay in community and political work. Although the majority of the political initiatives came from White, all the evidence suggests Adair knew exactly what he was getting into.'They needed each other,' said one senior police officer. 'Adair needed White to give him some semblance of credibility, precisely because White was the softer face of loyalist terrorism. White needed Adair because he was Johnny Adair. He had power.'
On 2 July, a snappily dressed Adair was part of a loyalist delegation that met John Reid, Tony Blair's third appointment as Northern Ireland Secretary. 'Has the man from the UDA become the Man at C&A?' asked a Sunday newspaper as it pored over his costume. In fact, Adair was considerably more up-market. As he stepped into the East Belfast Mission Hall for the meeting, he was wearing a pinstripe Hugo Boss suit, a yellow tie with a fashionably large knot and a baby-blue shirt. He looked every inch the stylish Mafia boss.
It was the second time Adair had met a serving secretary of state. But just like the previous occasion, when he had met Mo Mowlam inside the Maze, he never opened his mouth. Jackie McDonald, who was among those at the meeting, recalled, 'Johnny didn't say anything, not one word. After it was all over John Reid pointed outside and said, "I'll go out and talk to the reporters now - there's about 40 cameramen out there, but if you want to go for a cup of tea, go in that way. The cameras are that way." So myself and others headed for the tea, but, of course, Johnny headed for the cameras.'
Sectarian tensions had been high since June 2001, when Protestant residents in north Belfast began a 12-week picket of Catholic schoolgirls and their parents as they walked up the Ardoyne Road to the Holy Cross primary school. Although both his brother, Archie, and his friend, Gary 'Smickers' Smith, were sent to jail over the trouble at Holy Cross, Adair did not support the protest and saw it as a public relations disaster for loyalism.
By now, Adair was so obsessed by the media he was starting to irritate even his friends. There was nothing he loved more than being on TV. Maureen Dodds, Winkie's wife, recalls, 'Any time he was on TV no one was allowed to speak. He used to record all his TV appearances and just sit on the edge of the table playing the video over and over again.'
Although the seeds of Adair's downfall were already visible by the time he went to jail in August 2000, the real turning point came on 10 June 2002. Adair, who had just returned from a holiday in Benidorm, was sitting in his living room with the LVF's Jackie Mahood when he heard about the death in jail of Mark 'Swinger' Fulton. His friend and fellow drug dealer, who was on remand in Maghaberry, had been found in his cell with a leather belt around his neck. The fact that he was lying on his bed when he died led to lurid speculation that he had been engaged in an act of autoerotic asphyxiation. Whatever the cause of death, Fulton was genuinely suicidal. He had never fully recovered from the murder in 1997 of Billy Wright, his LVF commander and close friend, and he was also convinced he was dying of stomach cancer.
While Adair was upset at his friend's death, he also saw it as an opportunity. According to one close associate, 'I was talking to Swinger four months before he died and that was the first time I realised what Johnny was up to with the LVF. Johnny was running up and down to Portadown and he would have gone to all these different dos. So my reckoning was that he was definitely working deals with them on the drugs. And I think when Swinger died, Johnny saw that as his move to take over the whole patch.'
The strength of Adair's relationship with the LVF was confirmed on 21 July 2002, when Gerard Lawlor, a 19-year-old Catholic, was shot dead. The murder followed the shooting of Mark 'Mousey' Blaney, a 19-year-old Protestant, earlier that evening. Although Blaney was not killed, the fact that he was shot in broad daylight across the Ardoyne peaceline was seen as a deliberate republican provocation.
Within two hours, teams from C Coy and the UDA in north Belfast were dispatched to kill a random Catholic, shooting and injuring a man in Oldpark and opening fire without success on the Ligoniel Road. Shortly after midnight, Gerard Lawlor was walking home from a pub on the Antrim Road when a motorbike pulled alongside him and a gunman shot him twice in the back with a .38 revolver. Summoning its favourite choice of words, the UFF said the killing was a 'measured military response' and warned of 'further military action'.
By the summer it wasn't just the behaviour of Adair Snr that was attracting attention, but also Adair Jnr. To his father's growing anger, Jonathan Adair was rapidly gaining a reputation as a thug and a troublemaker. In June, his father's men beat him with baseball bats and iron bars after he broke into the home of an 84-year-old woman and stole her purse. In August, Adair had little choice but to consent to a more severe punishment after Jonathan hit a female shop assistant in a filling station on the Crumlin Road. Shortly before midnight on 7 August, Fat Jackie Thompson, who as C Coy's 'Provost Marshal' was in charge of kneecappings, dragged the 17-year-old into the middle of Florence Square in the lower Shankill and shot him in each leg with a 9mm pistol. As punishment-shooting victims go, Adair Jnr was lucky. By shooting the teenager through the calves, Thompson ensured there would be no permanent damage.
'Johnny had no choice other than to give his blessing,' said one of Adair's friends. 'There was a whole catalogue of things. He [Adair Snr] knew it was only a matter of time before he was going to get shot.' Although the shooting surprised few on the Shankill, to the outside world the idea of a father authorising a gun attack on his own son was savage. As Jonathan recovered the following day, Adair was indignant at suggestions that he had sanctioned the shooting or even pulled the trigger himself.
'What man in his own mind would do a thing like that to his own son?' he said. 'Had I known prior to this, I would have had my son on a ferry away from here as fast as possible.' Maintaining he had 'no idea' why the shooting took place, he added, 'He's a quiet boy. He never smoked, never drank, he loved his wee push-bike. Every day he was down the job centre looking for work, he was always doing the old age pensioners' gardens for nothing.'
Adair was fast becoming a caricature of the terrorist godfather, a cult figure whose face was rarely out of the newspapers. It was only a matter of time, it seemed, before his thirst for power and celebrity drove him into open confrontation with his fellow loyalists.
In September 2002 it became clear he was trying to promote a far closer alliance between C Coy and the LVF than the rest of the UDA had realised. On his release from jail, the LVF had presented him with a commemorative mirror bearing the message, 'UFF-LVF Brothers In Arms', but it was now obvious the links went far beyond personal friendship. To its astonishment, the UDA learnt that Adair viewed the mid-Ulster LVF as an extension of his paramilitary empire and claimed to have up to 70 men under his control there.
Jackie McDonald could hardly believe his ears when one of his commanders told him the LVF in Lurgan, County Armagh, had asked to borrow some camouflage equipment on the basis that they were 'all part of the same organisation now'. McDonald, whose south Belfast brigade stretches into mid-Ulster, was determined to confront Adair. He drew up a list of LVF figures in mid-Ulster and went straight to the Shankill to ask Adair about their relationship with C Coy. 'Myself and another fella challenged him about these people who now said they were part of the west Belfast UDA, although they were in the south Belfast area,' he recalled. 'We said this can't be, and he said he had 70 men up there. We said, "You can't have," and he said, "No disrespect to you Jackie, but they want me as their brigadier." I said, "If they want you as their brigadier they should go and live on the Shankill Road."'
The row with McDonald marked the beginning of a sharp deterioration in Adair's relations with his fellow brigadiers. McDonald, a convicted extortionist, was an old-style UDA boss in his early fifties whose views about running the organisation were dramatically different from Adair's. While Adair believed it needed a single charismatic leader, McDonald was convinced the UDA's strength came from the fact that each brigade area was autonomous. Adair despised McDonald because he'd been in prison during the early 1990s and had never taken part in the 'war'. In a rant from his prison cell, he described McDonald as a 'nothing and a nobody' who had 'never once been on the battlefield'. He said: 'He's into fake clothes and fake perfumes and contraband cigarettes.'
But it wasn't just McDonald whom Adair secretly loathed - it was all his fellow brigadiers with the exception of Andre Shoukri. He saw Billy McFarland, of north Antrim and Derry, as a hillbilly, and John 'Grug' Gregg, of southeast Antrim, as a waster who had contributed nothing since shooting and failing to kill Gerry Adams 18 years earlier. Last, but not least, was Jim Gray of east Belfast, for whom Adair reserved special contempt. Gray was a part-owner of the Avenue One Bar on the staunchly loyalist Newtownards Road. A flash dresser, he enjoyed the high life, eating and drinking in the best restaurants and bars, and rubbing shoulders with Glasgow Rangers footballers during regular trips to Ibrox Park. His detractors dubbed Gray and his cohorts 'the Spice Boys', while at every opportunity Adair referred to him mockingly as 'Doris Day', because of his bleach-blond hair.
The spark that set in motion Adair's showdown with his fellow commanders came on Friday 13 September, when Stephen Warnock, a senior LVF drug dealer, was shot dead. He was killed as he sat in his BMW in Newtownards, County Down, with his three-year-old daughter. According to police sources, he was murdered because he had borrowed ÂŁ10,000 from a local drug-dealing cartel and had refused to pay it back.
A friend of Adair's from jail, the two had become increasingly close following the death of Mark 'Swinger' Fulton, triggering speculation that the Shankill godfather intended to install Warnock as his leader in east Belfast in a new loyalist terror group. The LVF was stunned by Warnock's murder, and Adair was immediately convinced it had been carried out by the UDA on the orders of Jim Gray.
Although press reports suggested the killing was the work of the UVF-linked Red Hand Commando, Adair's suspicions appeared to be confirmed when a man was abducted and questioned by the LVF. He told his interrogators that Gray was directly responsible for Warnock's murder. As far as Adair was concerned, it was all he needed to hear.
Three days after the shooting, Gray called at the home of one of Warnock's brothers in east Belfast to pay his respects to the murdered 35-year-old. He was leaving and about to get into his BMW when he heard a voice say, 'This is for Stephen.' As he turned to see who was speaking, a bullet pierced his cheek, shattering his jawbone and teeth before exiting the other side.
Gray recoiled in agony, but he knew that had he not turned his head he would have been dead. The would-be assassin then turned his gun on Gray's UDA colleague, who was about to get into the passenger seat. He leant across the roof of the car and pulled the trigger, but the gun jammed and Gray's friend took to his heels. Despite his injuries, Gray also fled. After finally clearing his weapon, the gunman fired several more shots at the fleeing UDA men before disappearing into the night. With blood streaming from his face, Gray staggered to the nearby police training depot at Garnerville, where he received first aid from officers before being whisked away to the Ulster Hospital at Dundonald. He was lucky to survive the assassination bid, although he now faces an ÂŁ11,000 dental bill to have his mouth rebuilt.
Gray's fellow UDA brigadiers were livid at the attempt on his life. But it was nothing compared to the anger they felt when they discovered that Adair, John White and Andre Shoukri planned to attend Warnock's funeral. McDonald thought it was a sick joke: 'I heard from a mate that Jim Gray was shot. So I phoned John White and said, "What's happening?" He didn't sound at all surprised, and he said, "We have a funeral to go to tomorrow," and I said, "How the fuck can you? Whoever shot Jim Gray will be at that funeral."
This was on the phone about midnight the night Jim was shot. I came over to east Belfast the next morning and they were on the phone to John White saying, "You can't go to the funeral." White was told Jim Gray specifically asked from his hospital bed that they didn't go. He said, "Well, we're going, do you want to have a meeting afterwards?" I said, "If you go to the funeral, there will be no meeting at all."'
Gray's colleagues were sure he had not been involved in Warnock's death. As they pieced together the events leading up to his attempted murder, they uncovered a disturbing piece of information. Adair had been attending Warnock's wake shortly before Gray's arrival and had been moved to a neighbouring house, where he was able to watch the shooting from a window. They believed Adair had deliberately encouraged the attack.
To the consternation of McDonald and the other brigadiers, Adair, White and Shoukri went ahead with their plan to attend Warnock's funeral. On 20 September, Adair was summoned to explain himself at an emergency meeting of the UDA's inner council in a community centre in south Belfast.
The day of reckoning had at last arrived. In a gesture of defiance, Adair gave the go-ahead that morning for a joint UFF/LVF mural bearing the message, 'Brothers in Arms'. As he paced up and down the front room of his offices in Boundary Way, he was determined not to back down. He was furious that a group of middle-aged men who had done next to nothing during the early 1990s was about to sit in judgment over him. He could barely believe it had come to this: Johnny Adair, the loyalist hero who had brought the war to the IRA's front door, who had survived countless assassination attempts and a long stint in jail, was being ordered to explain his actions to the leadership of the Ulster Defence Association. As he became increasingly agitated, his mind churned through a range of possible scenarios, but began to settle on one in particular. There was only one course of action, it seemed, that could salvage his authority and teach McDonald and his cronies a lesson.
As he prepared to travel across Belfast to the meeting in Sandy Row, a police listening device picked up the basic outline of Adair's plan. 'Adair had this idea to walk in and shoot them all,' said one Special Branch officer. 'Special Branch heard him discussing it. He was saying, "I'll just walk in there and shoot all those fuckers. I'll pull a gun on them and shoot them all."' This version of events is confirmed by one of Adair's closest advisers, who was in the office that morning: 'Everything blew up that day. He was so berserk he punched a hole in the door. Johnny was saying, "I'm going to stiff every one, I'm going to stiff that big girl McDonald. I'm going to kill them before they kill me."'
As Adair arrived in a jeep with blacked-out windows, several dozen men from the UDA's other brigade areas were already waiting on nearby street corners. The police were also there in numbers, though they deliberately kept their distance. As Adair walked into the building he was accompanied by Fat Jackie Thompson and James 'Sham' Millar, both of whom were armed. In the gents' toilet, Thompson pulled a 9mm chrome Ruger from under his jacket and handed it to Adair, who tucked it under his waistband and covered it with his fleece. He then walked into the meeting, making it painfully obvious that he had a gun.
Seeing this, McDonald deliberately sat next to Adair, believing he could overpower him if he produced his weapon. But as the meeting wore on, Adair realised that there were other guns in the room and that it would be madness to chance his arm. This was not the time or the place, and he knew there would soon be other opportunities to kill his old comrades. But the meeting, which lasted two hours, became increasingly heated as Adair continued to justify his allegations against Gray. According to McDonald: 'Johnny had this thing about east Belfast. So right away, when Warnock got shot, Johnny assumed they had something to do with it. He saw that as an opportunity. But the evidence produced against the east Belfast UDA was totally ridiculous. McDonald recalls that the meeting broke up abruptly after Adair received a call. 'He was speaking to an LVF man and then he said, "I'll have to go." All the brigadiers headed off, fearing they'd be ambushed by Adair and his men if they hung around.'
As Adair and his C Coy minders drove away from Sandy Row it was clear he intended to make his old colleagues pay for challenging him. Within minutes of leaving the meeting he was kicking up a second storm. He went straight to Ballysillan, where he told senior members of the LVF what had just happened. Unbeknown to Adair, however, he was being monitored by a team from the mainstream UDA. 'We knew everything that happened,' said Billy 'The Mexican' McFarland, who believed Adair's terrorist career was now finished. 'He walked straight into the LVF meeting and told them, "I've just met the puppets."'
Johnny Adair didn't know it at the time, but 25 September 2002 was to be his last day as a member of the UDA. Another emergency brigadiers' meeting was called, but this time Adair and White were not invited. Although still badly wounded, Jim Gray signed himself out of hospital to attend the meeting, at a bar in east Belfast.
Jackie McDonald says it was probably the most important, though shortest, inner council meeting in the organisation's history. There was only one item on the agenda: the dismissal of Johnny Adair as brigadier in west Belfast. In two minutes he was found guilty of treason. McDonald recalled, 'There was no other option for us but to dismiss him. He was involved in the attempted murder of two members. The reality is, Johnny Adair dismissed himself from the UDA.' A short time later, the UDA issued a statement to the press. 'As a result of ongoing investigations, the present brigadier in west Belfast is no longer acceptable in our organisation.'
Ripping up the dismissal notice in front of TV cameras, Adair told reporters, 'It's not worth the paper it's written on, but you'd better ask the UDA what it's all about.' Twelve years after he had seized control of C Coy in a coup, everybody but Adair could see that the game was up. 'It didn't seem to sink in,' said Sham Millar. 'Johnny didn't seem to know the importance of what was happening. He was out, but he didn't accept it. He just sort of went, "Fuck them 'uns."' Adair's only hope was that A and B companies would stick with him and that the UDA in west Belfast would remain defiant.
Shortly before midnight on 4 October, Geoffrey 'The Greyhound' Gray, a 41-year-old LVF member, was blasted to death with a shotgun as he made his way home from a local pub. The killing, on Ravenhill Avenue in east Belfast, was the UFF's retaliation for the shooting of Jim Gray. Three days later, the LVF shot 22-year-old Alex McKinley, a Protestant with links to the UDA in east Belfast. He died of his wounds on 13 October. The following day the LVF held out the white flag, saying that it wanted to 'mediate a settlement' and 'get the UDA leadership to the table to talk'.
Following intervention by Protestant clergymen, senior members of the LVF and UDA met on 18 October in a bid to reconcile their differences. After a flurry of meetings in early November, both sides agreed a truce. In a thinly veiled swipe at Adair, the LVF issued a statement admitting it had been wrong to blame Jim Gray for the murder of Stephen Warnock.
'It has now become obvious that erroneous/false information was furnished to both organisations, which resulted in this unfortunate conflict,' it said. It had cost three murders and seven attempted murders, but the feud with the LVF was over.
The stage was now set for the final confrontation, an all-out war between Adair and his old colleagues. On 1 November, in the first sign of the coming storm, Davy Mahood, one of Adair's political advisers, who had tried to keep himself right with both camps, was shot in the legs behind a community centre in Ballysillan. In a statement read by Sammy Duddy, who replaced Mahood as the group's spokesman in north Belfast, the UDA said the attack followed a four-month investigation into Mahood's activities. It blamed him for staging an attempt on his own life, which Mahood had claimed was carried out by republicans. Duddy, a former drag queen once known as 'Samantha', said, 'Mahood's life was spared, largely because of the intervention of the new regime.'
On 8 November, the UDA said eight families had been attacked over the past two weeks and blamed Adair for the incidents. Calling on rank-and-file members in west Belfast to walk away from their leader, it said: 'The loyalist people of west Belfast do not want this. The west Belfast UDA must take action to distance themselves from these individuals. They have caused enough suffering.' Not to be cowed into submission, Adair and White insisted that their support was as strong as ever and claimed 2,000 west Belfast UDA men had turned out for the 2nd Battalion's Remembrance Sunday parade. They even claimed that they had formed three new units - one in north County Down, one in mid-Ulster and another in Scotland.
The build-up to a new feud began steadily over the next few weeks with a series of threats and attacks, including the shooting of Sammy Duddy's pet chihuahua, Bambi. On the lower Shankill, Adair started to scent treachery everywhere. He turned on some of his oldest friends, including Alan McClean, his welfare officer and head of C9, who was driven off the Shankill. But the clearest sign that Adair was losing the plot came when he fell out with his old friend and ally, Winkie Dodds.
After learning that one of the Dodds family was still dealing drugs with the Shoukris, Adair ordered him to pay a fine of ÂŁ10,000 or leave Northern Ireland. The family scraped together ÂŁ7,000 and offered the payment to Adair, but he refused to accept and the relative fled the country. After the parade on Remembrance Sunday, Winkie's brother, Milton 'Doddsy' Dodds, was standing next to some of Adair's colleagues at the bar when he asked them why they were giving his brother such a hard time. Donald Hodgen responded by hitting him, while later that night Fat Jackie Thompson led a C Coy punishment squad to Milton's house where they broke down the front door and beat him with baseball bats. For Winkie and his wife it was the final straw.
On 21 November, after living on the Shankill all their lives, they moved to the loyalist White City estate on the outskirts of north Belfast, where they were given protection by the UDA's southeast Antrim brigade.
The defection of Winkie Dodds - a living legend in the eyes of many loyalists - should have been a wake-up call for Adair. But it only hardened his belief that he was doing the right thing.
On 6 December, an incendiary device was found outside John White's luxury ÂŁ300,000 home at Carrickfergus on the outskirts of Belfast. Two days later, a sophisticated booby-trap bomb was discovered under the car of John 'Grug' Gregg, the UDA's southeast Antrim brigadier. It was a revenge attack by C Coy, but with an extra twist: the device was said to have been made by the same LVF bombmaker responsible for the booby trap that killed Catholic solicitor Rosemary Nelson in 1999.
As far as the UDA was concerned, it was a declaration of war. Five nights later, 17 shots were fired at the Ballysillan home of C9's Ian Truesdale and his wife's barber shop on the Crumlin Road was destroyed by arsonists. Truesdale, whose wife had refused to pay ÂŁ25 per week in protection money to the north Belfast UDA, immediately moved to the lower Shankill, where Adair gave him ÂŁ4,500 to help decorate his new home.
Just a week before Christmas the stakes rose again. Adair himself was the intended target of two gunmen, who had planned to kill him as he dropped his eight-year-old daughter at school.
By the middle of December, the UDA had launched a concerted propaganda campaign against Adair. It seized on the fact that he had briefly abandoned his beloved C Coy to spend a weekend with his wife, Gina 'Mad Bitch' Adair, in Lapland, a trip that did not go down well with ordinary volunteers in west Belfast. It also encouraged speculation that there was a ÂŁ10,000 bounty on his head, to be doubled if he was killed by Christmas.
Adair remained defiant. Wearing a black Diesel sweatshirt and surrounded by cheering young men in designer tracksuits, he told The Observer, 'The Adair family will have a normal family Christmas. I'm not going anywhere.' Exaggerating as always about the number of murder attempts he had survived, he went on, 'The IRA and INLA tried to kill me. I survived 15 murder bids and I have bullet fragments in my head and side, so I'm hardly worried about a couple of bully boys who sat on their hands and did nothing when loyalists from the west Belfast brigade were taking the war to the IRA.' In a direct reference to Gregg, he added caustically, 'If I was to wait for these people to do anything, I would die of old age.' It was the clearest indication to date that Adair saw the feud as a personal battle between himself and the 45-year-old southeast Antrim brigadier.
Despite two pipe-bomb attacks on Gregg's house and a gun attack on the home of his friend, the loyalist councillor Tommy Kirkham, Christmas came and went without serious violence. All that changed at 7.30am on 27 December. Jonathan Stewart was standing chatting to a friend at a house party in Manor Street when a hooded gunman strode into the kitchen and shot him several times in the head and body. The 22-year-old was killed for the simple reason that he was a nephew of Alan McClean, who had sided with the mainstream UDA since being thrown off the Shankill. But in a cruel example of how paramilitary feuds could divide families, he was also the boyfriend of Ian Truesdale's 19-year-old daughter, Natalie. Her father almost certainly knew his killers.
It was not long before the UDA retaliated. Three days after Christmas, a decision was taken to execute Roy Green, a drug dealer and the UDA's former military commander in the Donegal Road area of south Belfast. A close friend of Adair, Green believed he was playing a clever game, pretending to set him up while in reality keeping him briefed about the UDA's plans to kill him. He even agreed to lure Adair to the Village district of south Belfast and to murder him personally. He was lying through his teeth.
As the UDA watched his movements, it became apparent that Green was keeping Adair informed of Jackie McDonald's whereabouts. He was also suspected of helping to set up Jonathan Stewart. Shortly before 7pm on 2 January 2003, the 32-year-old was shot dead as he left the Kimberley Bar off the Ormeau Road. In a statement, the UDA apologised to the Green family for the execution, but said that he had been a 'double agent'. Among his 'acts of betrayal', it said that Green had tipped off Adair about an intended attempt on his life. 'Green may as well have pulled the trigger himself,' it concluded.
On the morning of 8 January, a blast bomb exploded in the back yard of Johnny Adair's home, though it was not even loud enough to wake him. Branding his former cohorts 'criminals', Adair said, 'If they have somet