While the verdict in the case hardly satisfied anyone - most people, especially Djindjic family counsel and that for his bodyguard wounded during the assassination -believing that a complicated conspiracy had occurred in which five of the 12 convicted were still at large - things were hardly progressing better at The Hague. Instead of Milosevic's trial, thanks to additional charges against him of human-rights abuses, proving that he had called the shots in Bosnia and Kosovo, he turned it into a venue, as The Times concluded after he had been driven to his own death, where he portrayed himself as a hero of the Serbian people. In fact, the process proved so effective that those who might have really called the shots - first Ljubisa Beara, head of the Bosnian Serb security service, and now former Major General Zdravko Tolimir, intelligence chief of Mladic's Srpska Army Staff -started turning themselves into the ICTY, knowing that their punishment would never fit their crimes as those somewhat responsible for them, apparently Dagan's Mossad, would never be identified.
This was alluded to when Milosevic's former lawyer Geoffrey Nice complained that Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte had made a deal with Serbian Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic shortly after Djindjic had been assassinated that key Serbian military and political documents dealing with Bosnia and Kosovo would not be made public if they were handed over to the ICTY - what helped the International Criminal Court find in February that Serbia, as a state, had not been guilty of genocide for what happened in Srebrenica in July 1995. Svilanovic had been most involved in strengthening bilateral relations with Israel after Milosevic's ouster, and in stonewalling the flow of key documents to The Hague. No sooner was Djindjic dead than the Foreign Minister wrote to Del Porte, stating that they would be supplied, provided they were never released to the public. (For more on this, see Lisa Clifford, "Del Ponte Denies Belgrade Deal Claims," Dnevrik Triband, April 20, 2007.)
Instead of stating what the documents disclosed, though - what led observers to speculate that that they must have involved what happened in SDC meetings in Belgrade at the time - Nice got the Chief Prosecutor riled up about having apparently approved the deal without proper authority. Actually, she just passed along what the judges had approved, leaving their import largely unknown. All that was said about them was that they did not involve Serbian national security. So, whose national security did they involve? It seems that it must have been Israel's, showing that its officials and combatants had helped in the Srebrenica genocide - the worst holocaust in Europe since The Holocaust - hardly something anyone in Europe wanted to imply. And Djindjic had certainly added his name to the list of its victims by being Serbia's biggest proponent of all its culprits going to The Hague to answer for their war crimes.
Similarly, the killing of British microbiologist and former UNSCOM inspector for chemical and biological weapons in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Dr. David Kelly, on the night of July 17, 2003 on Harrowdown Hill, Oxfordshire, was never even seriously investigated, much less crudely explained, because the intelligence services who arranged it, and journalists who reported it wanted it that way, wittingly or unwittingly. The British services, particularly MI6, wanted the potentially most dangerous whistleblower so completely discredited that they had the Prime Minister publicly out him, leaving him completely vulnerable to a Mossad assassination kidon, it seems, after he had been the object of unprecedented public ridicule - resulting in a complete diversion about the cause of the Iraqi war which Washington most wanted, and about which the Iraqi dictator, despite his most dramatic lessons for alleged traitors, was in no position to do anything about.
Kelly's investigation and analysis of Iraq's WMD had been the basis of all the dossiers that Washington and London had drawn up after the 9/11 attacks in America regarding regime change in Iraq, though they did not want to show it, and he personally doubted that the dictator any longer possessed any. When this proved the case after he was toppled, all the statements by the Coalition leaders to justify the pre-emptive war proved most damaging. Australian PM John Howard had announced on its eve that it was ending an "inherently dangerous" situation by having "taken from her her chemical and biological weapons." (Gary Hughes, "Iraq: how we were duped," uruknet.info, p. 2) The previous September, British PM Tony Blair had released a dossier, stating it had established "beyond doubt" that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, and is prepared to use them. American Secretary of State Colin Powell told the UN Security Council that Iraq had a stockpile of at least 100 tons of such material, ready to fire off at a moment's notice.
The most embarrassed party because of the failure to find WMD in Iraq was the Clinton administration which had put the 'bug in the bonnet' of both the Blair and Bush administrations about it, though one would never know it from reading various accounts about it, especially Bob Woodward's State of Denial. Bubba himself had often pronounced that Saddam's Iraq was a rogue state which had vast quantities of WMD which it was either prepared to use or to provide to other terrorists. (See his address, for example, to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on February 18, 1998.) Senior counterterrorist adviser on Clinton's NSC Richard Clarke even justified the missile attack on the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan during the showdown over Clinton's impeachment, claiming that he was "sure" that Iraqi nerve-gas experts were using such facilities to produce VX-like poison gases. (Vernon Loeb, "Official Cites Gains Against Bin Laden," The Washington Post, January 23, 1999, p. A02)
In fact, when the subsequent administrations were making up their dossiers about Saddam's WMD in anticipation of his ouster, former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger visited in May 2002 the National Archives to refresh his memory about what it had discussed and done about it - material in which Kelly's claims figured quite prominently, and Berger was most interested in what Clarke had recorded about it. What Kelly had told New York Times reporter Judith Miller and the BBC's Tom Mangold about Saddam's chemical and biological weapons programs had been largely responsible for President Clinton's near paranoia on the subject.
Of course, when neither Judy Miller, embedded in the US Army's 'Field Expedient' Artillery Brigade to find Saddam's massive chemical and biological weapon capability as the Coalition took over Iraq, nor the UN Iraqi Survey Group, led by David Kay, for the same purpose came up with anything to prove the wild claims, Kelly became increasingly uneasy about what had happened, especially his apparent role in it, and anxious to correct it. No sooner did Kelly learn that all the intelligence about Saddam's alleged WMD rested upon the most flimsey evidence than he started talking to the BBC's Andrew Gilligan, resulting in May 29th program which claimed that Blair's closest adviser Alastair Campbell had 'sexed up' the intelligence in the September dossier.
Instead of being dragged into another Serbian problem without proper preparation and care, this time the Mossad was well out in front, announcing to the British public while Kelly was dealing with Gilligan that it had sent a kidon assassination squad to assist its 15 domestic katsas in preventing more attacks on Israel - two suicide bombers from Britain had just attacked Mike's Place in Tel Aviv, killing three Israelis, and wounding many others. The Mossad was ordered to "carry the war to our enemies", and the threat to Israel or to Jewish institutions in Britain was considered real enough for the spy agency to take pre-emptive action against 50 Al-Muhajiroun, claiming that they were "primed and ready to go."
"We know from past experience that a kidon can make murder look like an accident," a MI5 source told Gordon Thomas, writer of "Mossad's Killing Machine Comes to Britain". "It is their specialty." While the kidon was not permitted to use either guns or explosives in Britain, it was equipped with long and short knives, along with piano wire for straggling suspects. Rafi Eitan, a former director of Mossad operations, added: "We are like the official hangman or the doctor on Death Row who administer the lethal injection. We ware simply fulfilling a sentence sanction by the prime minister of the day." While stressing that the love-hate relationship between Britain and Israel was over, Eitan added: "Nevertheless, the Mossad team will virtually operate on its own rules."
The White House moved to distance itself from the growing dispute between Downing Street, the BBC, and Kelly by starting one of its own after DCI George Tenet announced that the discredited Iraq-Niger uranium deal, claimed by the British government, should never have been included in the President's State of the Union speech before the war - apparently with the intention that it would be capturing the headlines if the one with Kelly turned dirty. Bush instructed Cheney to mount a campaign against former US American ambassador Joe Wilson for leaking findings of his inquiry into the 'yellowcake' claim - what Tenet embroidered by stating to Bob Woodward that his wife, Valerie Plame, worked as an Agency WMD analyst, and that she had gotten him the job.
On July 8th, Cheney's Chief of Staff 'Scooter' Libby passed the story on to Judy Miller, adding during a telephone conversation four days later that she should write about the highly secret parts of the National Intelligence Estimate regarding Saddam's WMD programs. For good measure, Wilson had gone public with his claims in a NYT Op-Ed piece, and syndicated columist Robert Novak "unmasked" Plame as the unknown Agency analyst. America was all abuzz when Kelly was apparently murdered three days later, and it was all intended to show that unauthorized leaking of most sensitive information, gossiping with reporters about such matters, lying about it all, loss of public reputation and employment for doing so, etc., were not the monopoly of London.
While a long book could be written about why, how, and by whom Kelly was murdered, we shall settle here for a most abbreviated version - what shows that it was a conspiracy murder, apparently conducted by the Mossad's resident kidon. Kelly provided no evidence that he would ever kill himself, no evidence that he actually did so, and if such matters were still so cut-and-dried, why did Blair order an unprecedented and uncalled for inquiry into it - what resulted in a most unsatisfactory result which few people believe. The Hutton Report is even more scandalous than the one the Warren Commission put together after President Kennedy's assassination.
To show that Kelly was murdered, one need only read the testimony of the first few witnesses who discovered the deceased, but were only interviewed by the inquiry after the case of suicide had essentially been made. On September 2nd, Louise Holmes, a member of the Thames Valley Lowland Search Team, told the inquiry how she, Paul Chapman, and her dog Brock found the deceased at 9:20 a.m. after having looked for an hour and a half. During it, they came across a party of three or four men who had spent the night in a moored boat along the Thames nearby. When asked if they had seen anything, she testified: "They said they had seen the helicopter up the previous night but they had not seen anybody or anything other than that." (Hutton interview, September 2, 2003, paragraph 10, lines 15-17)
Paul Chapman testify subsequently, stating that the party was composed of three or four people. "They had heard the helicopter," he continued, adding crucially, "and seen some police officers at some point previously." (ibid., paragraph 22, lines 24-25) Their testimony showed that these individuals had been in the area during the whole time that Kelly was said to have died, knew that some search and rescue mission was afoot, were not part of the police looking for the missing person, and did not leave the area when Holmes' search party was closing in on the dead Kelly.
The only way to explain this most extraordinary behavior is that they were involved in Kelly's disappearance and death, and were sticking around to see that he had been found dead - what would require a most hasty departure from not only the scene but also the country if he had still managed to survive from his struggle with them. (For more on this, see my e-mail below to the Hutton Inquiry about the murder (*) - what it never acknowledged the receipt of, much less answered, though it seems to have required Hutton to take more time in making his report.)
The Thames Valley Police's handling of all this, especially the four apparently unknown persons being in the area during which a controversial death occurred, is nothing short of scandalous. While it was apparently carrying out a surveillance operation to protect Kelly - Operation Mason - it seems never to have encourtered Kelly, the four men, and their boat while doing so, only having its DCs Graham Coe, Shields and possibly another rush directly from Kelly's house, a distance of about a mile, once a still unidentified person had reported seeing the boat people near the scene of the crime, to make sure that no one suspected anything more than the missing person had been found dead, apparently the victim of suicide. Coe did not seek out the boat and question the men on suspicion of having committed a crime. He only wanted to make the search party think that they belonged to the police.
Coe himself was questioned in a most perfunctory manner about the matter by the inquiry, never even asked if he was part of the police Chapman had referred to. Shields was never even interviewed by Hutton's people. The whole matter was conveniently covered up for them when Assistant Chief Constable Michael Page finally testified. He stated that all the persons in the area were police officers who he had accounted for, failing to mention the presence of the four men and their boat - what no one asked him about. This was all so successful that Hutton didn't mention anything about their presence, and confused the troublesome DC Graham Coe in his final Report.
The outing of the Agency's Valerie Plame caused similar turmoil in Washington, but at least she did not end up dead in the woods somewhere. Instead, Libby was finally sent to prison for 30 months, and fined $250,000 for his lies and obstruction of justice. Cheney immediately declassified the whole National Intelligence Estimate about Saddam's WMD programs to make sure that there were no more crimes committed in leaking its contents. Former President Clinton surprisingly appeared on Larry King LIve a few days later, justifying Saddam's ouster because he had not unaccounted for his WMD.
The most surprising thing of all, though, was former NSA Sandy Berger's trip back to the National Archives as soon as Kelly's death was reported to make sure its papers, especially those of Richard Clarke, did not show that the Clinton administration had panicked the Bush and Blair governments with claims from Kelly into doing the overkill that was now going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then, and once later in October, Berger surreptitiously removed several copies of a 15-page memo regarding the background to the 9/11 attacks, and failed to return one or more of them on his last visit to the Archives on October 2nd. While Clarke downplayed the significance of the missing memo, Berger gave up voluntarily his law practice in order to avoid any investigation of his malpractice by an American Bar Association inquiry.
The Israeli intelligence services, especially the Mossad, predictably blamed the death upon Israel's enemies - what Gordon Thomas lapped up - either the wily Chinese SIS or Saddam Hussein in case the Hutton inquiry still came up with a finding somehow of murder. The most diverting article was the one by Thomas, "The Secret World of Dr. David Kelly," which indicated that Kelly, who had worked with the Mossad, had probably been murdered by the feared Mukhabarat because of what he had done for the Israelis, and what he knew about what the Iraqi dictator had done illegally behind the scenes, particularly with the Chinese and Yugoslavia's ousted President Slobodan Milosevic. Kelly, according to Thomas, was just the last in a long line of microbiologists who had been murdered by the Iraqi intelligence service because of their efforts to provide Tel Aviv with a genetic weapon - what conspiracy theorists are still going on about when calling for a new inquiry into Kelly's murder. See these links:
Still, the Mossad had to be worried about what Hutton might still come up with. While the Israeli assassination had been an example of what Dagan's crítics had complained about when he was given the job of director - doing whatever he saw fit without any concern about foreign rules, relationships or reactions - Prime Minister Blair seemed to have encouraged the killing by the clever way he used to out Kelly - the most authoritative voice about how the Israelis themselves had really 'sexed up' the dossiers about Saddam's WMD - to the media.
The first stage of the examination of witnesses by the Hutton Inquiry had not clearly clarified matters either. While Blair's testimony had not indicated any serious complaints about what officials, domestic and foreign, had done during the tragedy, Hutton had been quite laid back during the proceedings, so much so that only a most careful reading of them would show that he had already decided how Kelly had died - by his own hand - when he adjourned the proceedings on September 4th to take stock of what it had been told. Hutton's announcement of possibly recalling witnesses or calling new ones, especially intelligence officials, and the possibility of their performance being officially criticized was still rather unsettling, since he alluded to no official ruling on the aim of the inquiry, to determine the cause of death.
This ten-day adjournment gave Dagan's men the opportunity they needed to get rid of the biggest thorn in the side of the Israeli government - the Swedish Foreign Minister, Anna Lindh. She stood for everything that Sharon did not want - e. g., preventing conflict, implementation of the Oslo Accords, the breakup of Yugoslavia and bringing Milosevic et al. to the ICTY to pay for various crimes against humanity, the NATO bombing campaign of Serbia to force his army to withdraw from Kosovo, working with Yasser Arafat, the legitimate leader of the Palestinian people, to institute the Road Map with Sharon's government, and the EU dropping diplomatic recognition of the Israeli government because of the way it was treating its Occupied Territories - and opposed almost everything that Tel Aviv wanted - the Iraq War and the ouster of Saddam Hussein, the extrajudicial killings of suspected Muslim terrorists by both the Israelis and Americans, unprecedented license to do whatever it wanted in the Middle East and beyond. Furthermore, she was in a much better position than anyone else in getting her way, being a increasingly powerful player in European politics who was expected to replace soon Göran Persson as Sweden's statsminster.
And the Mossad had the ideal candidate for building the assassination around, the 25-year old Mijailo Mijailovic - the product of a broken Swedish-Serbian home who had become a highly impulsive drop-out and druggie. His parents had come to Sweden after WWII, and he was born there, though he returned to Serbia when he was six, along with his mother and sister, to live in his grand parents' house in Mladenovac, and after retuning to Sweden, he often visited Serbia to see his father who had returned to Pozarevac, just east of Belgrade, subsequently. While living in both places, Mijailovic developed bad views of both Sweden and Euope, especially NÁTO since he constantly received complaints about them because he continued to reside in both.
Thanks to his experience in Sweden and to his travels to Serbia, he became increasingly depressed, so depressed that he wildly attacked his father with a knife when he was only 17, and another time he made an impulsive call to a woman he had been stalking, along with her sister, for four years, threatening her. He was also caught, possessing illegal weapons. Mijailo had a fixation about knives, and he spent more time sleeping than most people, thanks to the powerful sleeping tablets he took without a doctor's prescription. While he was supplied with anti-depressants to prevent such behavior leading to impulsive action, he was ultimately confined to a medical facility for treatment from which he was conveniently discharged just days before the assassination.
Sweden, like Britain, had apparently accepted the presence of a Mossad kidon and its katsas on its soil, thanks to an unprecedented address that MI5 director Eliza Manningham-Buller had delivered in London in June. She claimed that a major terrorist attack occurring in a major European city by Muslim terrorists was just a matter of time - recalling the alarm that British authorities had raised about Jewish interests in Stockholm just before Olof Palme's assassination back in 1986. The presence of Mossad agents was justified again to prevent attacks upon Jews and Jewish institutions, especially the Orthodox Synogogue near the famous department NK in the city center, a condition which also allowed them to take any pre-emptive action they saw fit.
