Monday 31 October 2011

Pope John Paul II's Attempted Assassination Intended To Help Cover Up Reagan's

by Trowbridge H. Ford

Assassinations are like other murders except in one important regard - the motive of the assassin or assassins in doing so. While ordinary murders are committed because the killer wants the victim dead for some personal reason, assassins increasingly do it because it suits other persons' reasons, especially officials involved in government, and for which they for benefit in return. Signle assassins, despite convenient myths, are essntially a thing of the past, as assassinations have become a likely action for mordern governments, facing problems that they cannot solve by legal means, and wanting to avoid more destructive means, especially regime-changing war.. For persons investigating such murders, it then becomes a question of how the victim was actually killed.

One must also remember that assassinations almost never work oot as planned - what requires a more careful, long-range search if one ever hopes to discover for the truth. There are so many things that can go wrong, explaining why critics of alleged conspiracies often get their way because neither investigors nor the public have the resources, time, and effort to determine otherwise. Even if the actual killing goes according to plan - and more often it doesn't - the perpetrators can have second thoughts about what they have done, can fall out with their employers for some reason, and commit unexpected actions which just complicate matter further, often resulting in more assassinations. The corrective for this is for the investigator to look for a string of such crimes, or attempted crimes, if one wants to get the whole story.

Just think about the JFK assassination. While it seemed to go according to plan since he was shot dead several times as his motorcade went by the Texas School Book Despositor on the afternoon of November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas. No killing seemed like a more open-and-shut case of assassination than this, but it wasn't. The deliberate or accidental wounding of Texas Governor John B. Connally - especially because they proved not to be fatal, and he vowed to get those responsible - resulted in all the subsequent efforts, particularly blaming the communists for it, and taking out Castro's regime, to be scrubbed. JFK's actual killers, Richard Cain and Chuckie Nicoletti, ran into Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit while making their escape, and were required to kill him for fear that he would expose them as the assassins. Then the convenient capture of Lee Harvey Oswald, the communist patsy for the shooting, before he could go to Cuba was ruined because he had an alibi for the killing - what required assassination manager on the scene Jack Ruby to kill him as quickly as he could.

A similar sequence of events occurred when Sweden's Prime Minister Olof Palme was assassinated in Stockholm on Februarty 28, 1986 - what was planned to trigger a non-nuclear conclusion to the Cold War with the Soviets as the expense of the Swedish troublemaker. While the assassination went off exactly as planned, the conspirators were unable to make the patsy this time, Soviet spy Stig Bergling who was on compassionate release from prison at the time to get married, escape to the USSR, leaving the assassination without any likely assassin. When the false leads failed, Admiral Carl-Fredrik, Sweden's officlal responsible for approving arms transfers, was pushed, it seems, in front of a train six days before he was to testify the special prosecutor investigating the Iran-Contra shipments which led to Palme being targeted. Nine months later, disgraced Schleswick-Holstein politician Uwe Barschel was assassinated when he threatened to expose the scandal in making a comeback.

Then the context in which assassinations are placed change the longer they go on without a solution. The longer an individual lives, whether he be the intended victim or the perpetrator, the greater the chance of his being exonerated or overlooked for the tragedy. After the Dallas assassination, Connally, despite his alarming cry when he belatedly discovered that he too had been shot - crying out most shockingly, "Oh, no.no. no. My God, they are going to kill us all." - went on to become Nixon'sSecretary of the Treasury, and would have become Spiro Agnew's replacement as Vice President if it had not been for Watergate. Nixon, as we all well know, ultimately managed to arrange him own election after his attempt to shoot his way into the White House after LBJ surprisingly got himself elected after the Dallas tragedy.

Then time gives historians all kinds of reasons for revising assessments of deceased leaders. Events may turn out to see them in a more favorable light than originally thought. The opening of archives, both official and private, often provides a basis for seeing them in a different, usually more favorable way. Abe Lincoln and Jack Kennedy have both benefited in this way, explaining explain why they, of America's four assassination Presidents, are honored by memorials in Washington. Then President Ronald, like Nixon, has a presidential libaray and museum supported by the federal government under the terms of the National Archives and Records Adiminstration Act, and some still hope to see the Gipper's face, smiling down from Mount Rushmore. Of course, the more revisionary history there is - the more arguments, one way or another, go on - the more it promotes everyone's reputation who participated in the process.

In few cases do all the factors come more readily to mind than in the attempted assassination of Polish Archbishop and Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, better known as Pope John Paul II. A most surprising victor in a bitterly fought election after the surprising death of his predecessor, Pope John Paul I, to the Pontificate, he was almost cut down by an assassin's bullets before he had really gotten started, but, fortunately, he survived, and went on a make a name for himself as the world's leading evangelist, the faithful's staunchest pastor, and the poor's greatest protector.

By the time he was finished, he was seen, after the UN's Secretary General, as the world's leading politician, with heads of states recognizing him worldwide, and heads of governments constantly seeking audiences with him to gain approval for their policies, and legitimacy for their rule. All recent American Presidents sought audiences with him to boost their appeal with voters and fellow politicians, and Reagan even gave the Roman enclave diplomatic status in 1983. The Nordic states finally ended the Reformation by granting diplomatic relations with the Vatican during his tenure as Pontiff. Britain, that great bulwark against the so-called Anti-Christ, ultimately succumbed, with Queen Elizabeth even paying the Pope a visit.

Actually, this impression is quite removed from the much dirtier reality, as we have slowly learned. While Wojtyla was known for this piety, prose and poetry in first Nazi-occupied, and then in Soviet-occupied Poland - often prone to lapse into deep thought while involved in most mundane matters - he was a quick learner, and at no time was this better illustrated than when he became Pope. Not only did he prudently adopt the name of his fallen predecessor, but he also refused to support
anything he actually stood for.

During the previous half-century, the Curia had completely made peace with the financial and political interests which had dominated Benito Mussolini's fascist regime. The Curia itself was controlled by P2, a mysterious Masonic Lodge, which had converted the Vatican Bank - which was untaxed by the Italian government, thanks to its Concordat with El Duce - into a multi-national one which had all kinds of connections with Mafia and extreme right-wing interests worldwide for making illegal stock transactions and conducting similar money laundering.

P2's founder was Licio Gelli who had the closest political friendships with politicians like former Nazi Klaus Barbie, Nixon Chief of Staff Alexander Haig, Italian Prime Minister Sylvio Berlusconi, the Bushes, and Ronald Reagan. It constituted a "shadow government" for all kinds of Axis war-criminals who were seeking to save their skins, and their skimmings of Nazi loot from the fallout of WWII. By the time Wojtyla became Pope, Gelli was coordinating Operation Glaudio, its plan to roll back the Iron Curtain with a network of 15,000 agents and informants if a shooting war erupted with the Soviets.

The bank itself was run by American Bishop (and later) Archbishop Paul Marcinkus who relied heavily upon P2 members Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi for arranging corrupt transactions with companies it owned, thanks to its vast war-profiteering under Pope Pius IX. It had been particularly successful in fleecing Serbs and Jews, an estimated 500,00 people, who had been rounded up by the Ustasha, the Croatian secret police, during WWII.

When Pope John Paul I aka Archbishop Alberto Luciani let the Curia's Cardinal Villot know that he planned to rid the Papacy of its bank, and of many of its Masons on September 28, 1978 - only 33 days after he had been elected to the Holy See - he was dead within six hours from a massive heart attack. The new Pope had immediately indicated that he planned something like this when he addressed the Vatican press corps thus: "We have no temporal goods to offer, no econimic interests to discuss."

While a house physican claimed that death was the result of myocardial infarction, no autopsy was ever performed - the Curia claiming falsely that there was no precedent for such a procedure - and no death certificate was ever issued. The Pope had been taking Effortil - a drug to correct low blood pressure - and conspiracy theorists, given the circumstances, seemed quite right in claiming that it was the result of an overdose - today's favorite way of explaining way a convenient murder . Villot had immediately called the papal morgue rather than any physician when he first heard about the Pope's incapacity. He added to suspicions by removing from the death scene without a trace all important evidence - the drug bottle, the Pope's last writings in his dead hands, and the vomit which was lying on his night clothes - which could help determine its cause.

"When Karol Wojtyla, John Paul II, won election as Luciano's successor he received an immediate briefing on the radical plans of Pope John Paul I," Jonathan Vankin and John Whelan have concluded in their account of the real story of the Godfather, Part III in The 60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time. "He implemented not a single one." (p. 118)

Instead the new Pope established an iron-grip on the Church, reminiscent of how communists ran the Soviet Union from the Kremlin, and his Polish compatriots from Warsaw. In canon law, he strengthened the hand of the Curia in determining church doctrine, official promotion, and recognition of saintly deeds. John Paul II had little tolerance for debates and critics within the heirarchy about questions regarding social and economic conditions, celibacy among the priesthood, and the place of women in the church. Priests were instructed to sign the "mandatum" which upheld the magisterium of the Pope in such matters. John Paul II even expected bishops in diocese throughout the world to oversee the hiring of teachers in all Catholic colleges and universities.

And, of course, the Pope would brook no compromise when it came to questions of contraception, homosexuality, abortion, and euthanasia - policies which seem to fly in the face of the dire conditions confronting today's world. How anyone can maintain such stands with an overpopulated world being daily decimnated by AIDS, other diseases, and a lack of basic needs, and people who contact them dying slow, hopeless deaths is beyond me. In fact, the Pope's own death seems an ironic twist of the issues, with him finally succumbing despite all kinds of desperate measures - a tracheotomy to keep him breathing, food tubes through his nose and stomach to keep supplying nutrition, an electric shock which restarted his heart after he had suffered brain damage because of a stoppage, etc.

John Paul II did not simply lay down the law but saw to its implementation. "A consumate politician," Kenneth L Woodward wrote in Newsweek, "he nonetheless forbade priests in Latin America from joining political movements and those in the United States from holding elective office." The Pope hated everything about Jesuit "liberation politics" among America's suppressed native peoples, and is well remembered for admonishing Father Ernesto Cardenal, the Sandinistas' Culture Minister, for practicing it in Nicaragua.

People may have forgotten, though, that the prohibition against priests holding elected office in America was directed specifically against Father Robert Drinan, S.J., former Dean of the Boston College Law School, and a Congressman from Massachusetts when Watergate broke. Drinan introduced the first impeachment petition into the House against Nixon on July 31, 1973, claiming rightly that he ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia, and engaged in various "high crimes and misdemeanors", especially the secret taping of Oval Office conversations, and ordering the illegal break-ins by E. Howard Hunt's Plumbers. Drinan, in sum, was one of the very few real statesmen at the time, as Jimmy Breslin in How the Good Guys Finally Won wrote, and the Pope was certainly not among them when he prevented Drinan from continuing.

And this too might have come back to haunt the Pope. By the time that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan gained office, John Paul II had largely outlived his usefulness. He had changed the character of the Church, set its new agenda, and started carrying it out, and there was no need for him to continue. Someone else could certainly carry on in his footsteps. The nearly-successful assassination of the just inaugurated Reagan by John Hinckley, Jr., on March 30, 1981 almost made that a necessity as the new Pope had apparently taken the place of Lech Walesa as a Polish intelligence service spy after the CIA had gone to such lenghts to woo the labor leader away from it. The assassination of John Paul II was a forerunner of the one which killed Palme, an independent player who gummed up the plots..

Reagan's near assassination was the result of a plot, one to get rid of President Carter if he threatened to get re-elected, especially through some kind of 'October Surprise', and the plan was scrubbed when it no longer seemed necessary. And when this assumption apparently proved unfounded, the plotters settled for shooting Beatle John Lennon instead because Hinckley was no longer available. The Lennon assassination reactivated Hinckley, though, because he was so distressed by it, but by then, he knew how he had been used and abused earlier, and turned on the man responsible, Vice President George H. W. Bush, and then on the President when he proved available. It is a case of blowback without parallel.

This is well established if one takes the time to read Lou Cannon's tome, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime. There is no attempt to explain the assassination, just a brief discussion of what happened afterwards when Secretary of State Alexander Haig tried illegally to take command when Vice Presdient Bush was returning to Washington from Texas (pp. 164-5), and Cannon' noting that White House aide Edwin Meese gave the President the daily intelligence brief in writing rather than National Secuirty Adviser Richard Allen in person while he was recovering from the assassination attempt. "For Reagan, his national security adviser was both out sight and out of mind." (p. 156)

Cannon should have added that this was because Allen had activated Ted Shackley who got social psychiatrist Leilani Siegfried to do a quick hypnosis on Mark David Chapman which resulted ultimately in the Manchurian Candidate killing Beatle John Lennon - what resulted in Hinckley's surprise blowback.

Former Governor John Connally had surprisingly not even made it to Washington in Reagan's administration because of the false scare that he had made about Carter having pulled off the surprise - what resulted in the activation of Allen who got Shackley involved in the unnecessary killing of Lennon. While Nxion's former Secretary of the Treasury had the highest recommendations from the former President, Reagan would have none of him, not even as Defense Secretary, stuck out in the Pentagon, as he had proven a most unnecessary "wheeler-dealer". (Quoted from Cannon, p. 62.)

Pope John Paul II had proven a big disappointment in stoking up the conflagation that charismatic Lech Walesa and his Solidarity trade union movement was
creating in Poland's shipyards. The dramatic rise of food prices in the summer of 1980 caused such a wave of hidden discontent surfacing that the Kremlin feared that the Polish communist government in Warsaw would not survive unless it instituted a crackdown - what it consistently declined to do for fear of a bloodbath. On August 27th, the Pope - who Poles contended had burned his party card when he became Pontiff - persuaded Edward Gierek's government to agree to their demands for independent unions, and organizations of self-government - what seemed to strike at the heart of continued communist rule in Eastern Europe.

It turned out to be hardly anything at all. Polish Primate Stefan Wysynski, who was the real Catholic leader behind the strikers, died, replaced by the much more conciliatory Cardinal Jóseph Glemp. Gierek was ultimately replaced by the much shrewder General Wojciech Jaruzelski who was finally willing to bite the bullet, and put down the dissidents by force. And all the while, the Pope, starting with his meeting in the Vatican on January 15th with Walesa, was stringing him along - to just sit tight, and let things work themselves out. Things did not work themselves out until the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 when a Solidarity-led government finally came to power with the collapse of the communist one-party state.

The assassination of the Pope seemed like a replay of what Shackey had arranged at Lennon's expense when The Gipper's presidential hopes seemed to be going down the tubes, thanks to an 'October Surprise' that Carter's people had arranged with Tehran's mullahs. The Pope's assassination - and Mehmet Ali Agca intended to kill him in no uncerrtain terms - would divert attention away from what most embarrassingly and surprisingly had happened to the President - what could lead to a constitutional crisis over a suspect coup.

The badly wounded Pope, though not intended, served an even better cover. Whether the President and the Pope would even recover, much less fully, kept all kinds of actions in a state of limbo which their perpetrators exploited further.

The most liikely suspect of the assassination was Italy's most corrupt Intellegence service, SISMI. Hardly had all the mess been cleaned up at St. Peter's Square than it produced a document from a meeting of the Warsaw Pact which claimed that the assassin had been trained in the USSR - what proved to be a forgery. (Vankin and Whelan, p. 340) To back up the claim, it was then falsely contended that the Bulgarian secret service had recruited Agca to do the job to "...demoralize uppity Poland, the Holy Father's communist-infested homeland." (Quoted from ibid., p. 339.)

During the fallout from the assassination attempts, both Washington and John Paul II tried to hide from one another who they thought had really tried to kill them, why, and what they were doing about it. As soon as the Pope was truly fully recovered, Reagan paid a visit to the Vatican Library on June 7, 1982 during which they traded pleasantries and confidences about the ill-advised consequences of the Yalta agreement which confused everyone, and led nowhere. It seemed like just more stringing along which both leaders were noted for.

Then Casey's CIA, Italy's SISMI, and agents of the Curia tried to prove that Ali Agca was not a lone assassin, and certainly not one connected to the
neofascist Grey Wolves but really one that Bulgarian intelligence had activated for the KGB. Just before the trial, Agca confessed, claiming that he had been recruited by a Bulgarian spy master, Colonel Sergei Antonov, whose apartment he described in great detail. "The strange thing was that he had described the Antonov suite to a T- with the exception of one salient architectural detail in every other apartment in the complex, but not Antonov's. (p. 341)

The complex had an apartment which the Curia had access to, and it worked up Agca to make the case against the Bulgarians there, thanks to help supplied by an Italian-speaking CIA agent working in an American college. (Information withheld to protect source.)

Agca reminded one of James Earl Ray, MLK's assassin, when he constantly changed his story, so much so that the Pope, like King's survivors, finally agreed to meet with their nemeses, acknowledging that they were not really responsible for what happened.

It all provided good cover for the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, the largest private bank in Italy, when it was discovered to be missing $1,300,000,000 - what was finally traced to the Vatican Bank.It refused to allow any investigation of it, claiming successfully papal immunity, but it did agree to give creditors $241,000,000 in compensation for its "moral involvement" in its illegal deals - like supplying Solidarity with $12,000,000.

Calvi, whose life was depicted in the film God's Bankers, was jailed for four years, and fined £8,200,000 for the illegal export of money from the bank. He was found hanging from Blackfriar's Bridge in London on June 17, 1882 while out on appeal - what was orginally judged a suicide but was changed to murder at a second
inquest, caused by his survivors. Gelli received a 12-year sentence for the affair, and is currently living as an exile in America - at the retirement community of Sun City in Arizona. Sindona died in prison from a poisoned cup of coffee.

Given the rot surrounding Rome, it was hardly surprising that the Pope devoted his last years to travel, and reflection. His evangelical efforts, and supporting those of others - beatifying and canonizing more than all his predecessors combined - seem intended to compensate for the failings of his underlings, especially in the American child sex-abuse scandal - what Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law was obliged to cover up at great expense.

In the Pope's later writing, he pretty much scrapped his earlier ideas about the dignity of labor (1983) and the evangelization of its culture for keeping up with the G8 in such matters when he wrote his 1991 pastoral letter, "One Hundred Years", emphasizing the virtues of globalism and free markets in making an economically and socially more efficient capitalism.

Terry Eagleton, the cultural theorist at Manchester University, best summed up John Paul II for me when he wrote for The Guardian: "He was one of the greatest disasters for the Christian Church since Charles Darwin."

Tuesday 25 October 2011

Sichuan Earthquake: Wily Pentagon Completely Confused China About What It Had And Was Doing?

Trowbridge H. Ford

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell's inaugural address in June 2007 about cancelling the Misty satellite program - what Republican Congressman Peter Hoekstra, Republican Chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, conveniently said was a serious compromise of national security - was a most clever move to persuade America's opponents to think that it would not have undetected space ability to destroy their capability to defend themselves, whether it be tracking such weapons or destroying them in case of war. It seemed that America had only two such satellites according to Professor Jeffrey Richelson, author of The Wizards of Langley - one put up in 1990 and another in 1999 - and the cancellation apparently left America naked to its potential enemies, as the first one was certainly not even still airborne, as satellites only have a shelf-life of about six to eight years, and time was clearly running out on the second one if it was still in the sky.

The ending of the $9.5 billion project, way over budget, was justified because America no longer needed stealth satellites to spy on the defunct Soviets but smaller, trickier ones after the 9/11 attacks to track down difficult "...terrorist cells and underground sites for nuclear programs run by countries such as Iran and North Korea." (Associated Press, "Spy Chief Scraps Satellite Program," June 21, 2007) Lexington Institute's Loren Thompson, an independent space weapons expert, confirmed that the budgetary decision was indeed a fact, while Congresswoman Heather Wilson, the top Republican on its intelligence panel, downplayed the consequences of the termination by explaining that some of the technology developed by the Misty program could be used in other ones, though she conveniently declined to provide any examples.

Of course, distinguishing stealth satellites from image and radar-seeking ones is a most false one as all satellites should have a stealth capability so that they can most effectively do what they are designed to do, whether it was to capture images of Soviet ICBMs going on line for a possible launch, or discover bunkers of some potential enemy where its nuclear weapons are stored. Without a stealth capability, the ICBMs might only be prepared for launch during overcast conditions, or the potential enemy might move them underground which prevents them from being seen under any conditions. The distinction, in short, seems to have been disinformation to confuse potential targets of America's satellites from suspecting what it was preparing for.

The problems with this public demonstration was that its disclosures were largely belied by what the Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne had said months before. In an article about Chinese ground-based lasers blinding US image and radar satellites, the usually tight-lipped Wynne said that America still had an "enormous" lead over the Chinese in space, and, consequently, the Pentagon and the American public should not be worried. The US had at least three heavy satellites of the Keyhole-Lacrosse-Misty kind, so even if one of them became inoperable or crashed, it would still have its normal complement for dealing with the problem.

For more on the subject, see this link

As for what the real complement of space satellites of military value the Pentagon had, there was still that infamous National Reconnaissance Office shoulder patch which showed four satellites, three apparently of an image-making variety, and one with a radar-destruction capability - what a big airborne laser could achieve. Director Donald Kerr had replaced it because it was too revealing of their offensive capabilities. The replacement patch did not change the agency's capability, though, only provided a less alarming cover of what it was capable of - what illustrated in spades the capability that Wynne had alluded to.

At this time, the American government was preventing the publication of Danny B. Stillman's book, Inside the Chinese Nuclear Weapons Program - a big book about what he had learned while he was working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, finishing up as its intelligence director. Stillman had visited China nine times during the 1990s, obtaining a good view of what Deng Xiaoping had had rebuilt in the mountains near Chengdu after the 1976 earthquake in Tangshan - the one apparently destroyed by Soviet airborne lasers - had effectively wiped out its first nuclear establishment. During Stillman's visits to China, he learned all about its Institute of Nuclear Physics and Chemistry around Mianyang; Beichnan - the home of the father of China's nuclear program, Deng Jiaxian - the nuclear research, testing, and manufacturing center way up west in the mountains at Dashita; and the nuclear underground assembly and storage facilities still further north in this most remote area.

When Stillman tried to get the courts to overturn the refusal by the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Pentagon to allow the publication of 23 long passages in the manuscript despite the contracts he had signed about disclosures - what, in effect, gutted the project's attractiveness - he finally failed, the Appeals Court for the District of Columbia explaining that its publication could "...cause serious damage to national security, create serious risks to intelligence sources and methods, and/or cause significant strategic and diplomatic setbacks to the United States. The Court also is convinced that the disputed passages contain information that is not in the public domain." (Danny B. Stillman v. Central Intelligence Agency)
It did not require a rocket scientist to determine that the manuscript was a road map to the essentials of China's nuclear capability. Its publication might ruin future efforts to mine what it was developing, and its outcome might well result in a serious setback to Chinese-American relations.

The reason why the American defense establishment fought so hard against the publication of Stillman's manuscript was because it was most concerned about China's possible proliferation of nuclear technology to Libya, Pakistan, North Korea and other rogue states - what could well call for focused counter measures to punish the growing Pacific power. When it was finally learned through Colonel Qaddafi that Beijing had indeed been helping these powers gain a nuclear capability through its help in providing them with the technology for generating electricity through atomic power, Washington was understandably looking for ways of stopping the process. China justified the covert operation in the hope of stopping India from becoming the primary player in the region by helping Pakistan and possibly others keep up with its nuclear achievements.

Any doubts about what Stillman and his associate Thomas C. Reed were up to when he visited China were completely ended when they published in 2009 many details about them in The Nuclear Express, as these quotations amply demonstrate:
"At every stop within China, Stillman found English-speakers translating U. S. documents night and day, alumni of prestigious and lesser-known U. S. schools working the problems, and a suffocating attention to every scrap of information dropped by visitors." (pp. 127-8)

The Chinese test site area (known as Milan) is seven times larger than the U. S. Nevade Test Site. It is an electronically secure facility." (p. 354)
"But there is another advantage to an atmospheric test ban: the privacy it gives the testing nation. Without tests in the atmosphere, competing and inquisitive neighbors cannot collect fallout debris. They will have a harder time understanding the devices tested by their rivals, it becomes easier for the testing nation to bluff." (p. 128)
"That reactor, FBR-2, was capable of delivering an intense flux of neutrons and gamma rays within microseconds, thereby simulating the radiation emitted during an actual nuclear device detonation." (p. 227)

"This was Stillman's second visit to that epicenter of Chinese nuclear weapons technology (Science City), and it was far more informative than the first. He was taken to see high-explosive test facilities, chambers capable of containing the debris from the detonation of a dozen pounds of high-explosives wrapped around heavy metals simulating uranium." (Ibid.)

"For reasons not clear, in 1999, the American door into China's nuclear world slammed shut." (p. 229)

"The coming of the internethas brought an awareness of wealth disparity to rural China. It has also made possible the near-instantaneous assemby of huge crowds to protest dam-building, land-seizures, or simple mismanagement. If one such protest burns out of control. a hundred million Chinese will know about it winthin and hour. Could the establishment within the cities withstand such sponteneous combustion? Probably not..." (pp. 233-4)

Any understanding or concern about this turn of events was completely undermined by the finishing touches that Naomi Klein put to The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Earthquakes, especially their causes, were not even considered disasters except when she was alluding to the consequences of the Indian Ocean tsunamis in Sri Lanka. Thanks to the role of climate change, she claimed, "disaster generation can therefore be left to the market's invisible hand." (p. 540) No conspiracy theories were required for dealing with all the disasters, only how their consequences were handled. There was no more a conspiratorial dimension to disasters than thinking that the US government "...had a hand in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop them 'because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East'."(p. 539)

This was all apparently written with a straight face while recounting that "...hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires (were) all increasing in frequency and intensity," (p. 525) while Lockheed Martin, the aerospace giant noted for making satellites, missiles, airborne lasers, integrated defense systems, and the like, was taking in $25 billion of taxpayer money in 2005 alone, more than the gross national product of 103 countries, and more than a good bit of the US government itself. In recounting what it made, she somehow left them out, preferring to site its running the government's computer systems, data management, sorting the mail, totalling up one's taxes, running space flights, and monitoring air traffic.

The disparity between what Lockheed Martin manufactures, and what Klein said it does seems more than accidental, especially when one reads what she said about Boeing, the giant airplane, satellite, and arms manufacturer. Boeing is now particularly known for its lasers, airborne weapons, and integrated defense systems but she made it look more like simply a civilian aviation industry which has sprouted into making a $2.5 billion project to fence off Canada and Mexico from the USA with electronic sensors, unmanned aircraft, surveillance cameras and eighteen hundred towers. (p. 555) She even mentioned it providing $20 million to start up neocon Richard Perle's Trireme Partners, a venture capital firm to develop products and services for homeland security and defense. (p. 405)

As if this wasn't strange enough, Ms. Klein added that Deng Xiaoping's China was primed for a bout of disaster capitalism because of its having adopted a double dose of the Chicago boys' shock treatment - the first to open up its command economy to globalization, and the second when it crushed the protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989. With the eradication of popular opposition to Deng Xiaoping's radical reforms, the Chinese leadership risked terrible blowback if there was some kind of disaster, especially if it exposed helter-skelter work that was done in the process. The raw terror of the suppression, she concluded, kept the country quiet for awhile, but it was now increasing in incidence and vehemence. "China too," Klein concluded, "is coming out of shock." (p. 579)

In so concluding, Ms. Klein overstated the role of Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang and future President Jiang Zemin had played in the showdown with the rebellious students, thanks to their meeting with neocon rabblerouser Milton Friedman - what she thought indicated a serious division within the Party leadership over how to deal with the protests, and threatened a new civil war.
Actually, Zhao never really saw himself as the instigator of serious trouble, and didn't realize that he had been sent into exile until years after the uprising had been suppressed. In the process, she vastly overstated how many had been killed, two to seven thousands (p. 237), rather than the 300 to 700 - what indicated that China was less of a powderkeg than she thought.

To set the stage for triggering the still necessary disaster, McConnell made his pursuit of bringing down the Misty satellite an open obsession, as I have already discussed.

The demonstration knockdown was to show the Chinese leadership that Washington could knock down its own, spent satellites with a missile too - what Beijing had secretly done to one of its own satellites two years previously, starting the whole process of somehow figuring how to deal with the troublesome Chinese - but more important to show that the Pentagon apparently no longer had such radar satellites to take the offensive..

After the Misty satellite was knocked down, the Air Force could have failed to keep track of its falling debris, leading to the first loss of one of its famous stealth bombers, a B-2, while it was taking off from Anderson Air Force Base in Guam, to confirm the shootdown.

At least, that was the way it seemed when the Air Force provided a video of the group of four B-2s taking off. After the first one lifted off without difficulty, the second one was doing the same until right after liftoff when apparently a piece on the runway bounced up, hitting the trailing edge of its left wing, causing its engine to explode, and the plane quickly crashing in front of the control tower, the two pilots ejecting safely in the split-second, slam-bang operation. It all almost seemed staged to give the impression that the Air Force was hopelessly out of control in any operations.

For more, see this link.

America's covert government then sprang into high gear, hoping that its actions to help loosen Chinese control of Tibet would ultimately so shake its control in other foreign areas, especially Myanmar and North Korea, and even domestically that its continued existence would be placed in jeopardy. The campaign was triggered by the Dalai Lama, head of Tibet's government in exile, condemning China's brutal rule of the country in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the failed coup in 1959 - what was precipitated by the successful flight of the 14th Dalai Lama when it really commenced. The current one's speech triggered riots in Lhasa and throughout the country, resulting in the death of many ethnic Chinese residing there, and of some Tibetan protesters. The results did not augur well for similar Chinese living in Myanmar and North Korea if further rioting occurred, thanks to unexpected events or disasters.

Tibet's continuing plight reminded the CIA all too well about its own troubled past in the isolated country. Its first two heroes, Douglas Mackiernan and Hugh Redmond, had died in trying to prevent the Chinese communists from occupying the country, and then promoting its rollback. Mackiernan had been killed, beheaded, and buried in an unmarked grave by Tibetan border guards while entering the country in 1950, hoping to mobilize the Muslims in surrounding areas of western China against Mao's advancing People's Liberation Army. As Ted Gup wrote in The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives, "...a key part of his mission was to embolden and advise the very resistance..." (p. 20) which he had only alluded to in a letter to his wife.
In a dedication service at CIA headquarters in 1997, DCI George Tenet revealed that MacKiernan was its first agent to die while doing foreign service for it, and his name which had not been revealed in Gup's book.

Redmond's mission in 1951 was to infiltrate as a foreign illegal operative, posing as a business man, the newly established communist regime with agents recruited from Shanghai in the hope of mounting resistance against it through acts of sabotage. (p. 50) Redmond was simply rounded up, though, by the communist authorities as a security measure, and languished in prison for the next nineteen years after having been convicted of espionage in 1954.

In 1970, just when young Robert Gates - later to become DCI himself, and recently the Secretary of Defense - was starting his career with the Agency in earnest, it was shocked to learn that Redmond had finally committed suicide after a covert ransom plan, involving famous Americans, and a $1,000,000 in Agency funds, to gain his release had failed.

And then there was the plight of other agents, and missionaries who finally were freed by Beijing. China, in sum, was the biggest source of losses by the CIA, even bigger than the former USSR, and it was high time for a payback for all its setbacks - what Tenet had started with the laser-guided bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the campaign to force Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw his forces from Kosovo, due to its "faulty information". Gup concluded: "This was paired with scandalous accounts of Chinese spying at U.S. nuclear weapons labs and wholesale theft of America's most sensitive secrets." (p.371)

To give added credence to this claim about "wholesale theft of America's most sensitive secrets", and provide insurance against being seen as the culprit as the countdown of the attack against China neared its end, the Justice Department was putting the finishing touches on its indictment of fallguy Dr. J. Reece Roth - an expert on plasma technology, what the latest Misty satellites were equipped with to make them undetectable by Chinese radar - for spying for Beijing. Roth was working with graduate students from China and Iran on protecting drones with plasma technology, and had visited China twice to help in the research.

Upon his return in 2006, he was arrested by the FBI, and it ultimately determined that Roth's lack of concern about the security of his research, especially allowing his assistants to see many Defense Department articles about plasmas, constituted espionage, and, like Samuel Loring Morison back in 1985, Roth faced a long time in prison if convicted of the 18 counts.

To pull off an earthquake around China's nuclear weapons center in Sichuan with the least cause of suspicions, the Air Force heated up with its latest Misty laser satellite Cyclone Nargis in the Bay of Bengal in late April 2008, much like it had Hurricane Katrina when it passed by Cuba in 2005, changing its direction to the northeast, and having it slam into the militarily-led Myanmar with deadly consequences. Its junta had long been on the Pentagon's hit list because of its close relationship with China, and its continued holding hostage of democratically elected Aung San Suu Kyi. Its generals simply did not know what had hit it, and how to respond to its devastation, as this link recounts.

While the world was mesmerized by how the Burmese junta would react to the devastation Nargis had wrought, especially how it would treat the help offered by the French and Americans in ships lying offshore, the US Air Force turned the aim of its space weapons upon targets northwest of the Sichuan area in China, the desert where its qanats were attacked, causing a minor earthquake which loosened the connections between the Indian and Asian plates, hoping to destabilize the connections at their other end where the threats of underground facilities collapsing, landslides, rock falls, cave-ins, dams bursting, viaduct failures and the like had been increased by Chinese secret development of the area. It was all very similar to what the USS Jimmy Carter did to the Indian-Australian plate's connection to the Antarctic one in anticipation of the earthquake which occurred two days later where it met the Burmese one.

As the process moved to the Wenchuan area further south, the signs of an impeding but most unexpected earthquake increased, leading to all kinds of warnings to officialdom, but Beijing could not afford to heed them because of the rapidly approaching Olympic Games. China was caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. If it reacted vigorously to the reports - say even attempting to shoot down the offending Mistry satellite, an apparent act of war - it risked the most expensive Games turning out to be a non-event. If it did nothing, it seriously risked national security, especially if the suspected earthquake turned out to be a massive disaster. In sum, it just had to act as if nothing serious was happening, and hope that whatever happened would not threaten the regime itself.

Starting on May 2nd, there were increasing reports of cloud formations coming from Sichuan, a precursor of a large earthquake occurring according to Professor Zhonghao Shou's vapor theory about their cause, though he was surprisingly quiet about it all, leading one to suspect that the Pentagon had shut him up too by making him sign secrecy contracts in order to receive remuneration. Ever since 1991, Papa Bush had insured that no federal employees could blow the whistle on anything the government did except waste, fraud, and waste to Congress. (Angus Mackenzie, Secrets: The CIA's War at Home, p. 171)

A laser was apparently causing them, peppering the open, loose area with beams which increasingly shook and dried out all the underground places where water was. The whole area was a kind of qanat system where man had helped nature in opening up the whole area to catastrophic collapse. When the Air Force became worried that the Chinese might be on to what was going on, especially after there was a massive toad migration at Mianzhu three days before the quake - a traditional precursor of one - it had the Misty satellite activate its plasma envelope, causing the second kind of rainbow clouds, which made it invisible to Chinese radar, and permitted the beaming to continue during the daytime.

For more on the two types of cloud, etc., see this link.

On May 12th, the devastating earthquake happened, burying everything in the area in rubble except for those places which had a firm rock foundation. Beichuan city, thanks to a rippled effect it received from the epicenter, was simply buried in rubble - what no kind of earthquake protection building would have prevented - and the Chinese government has simply left untouched as a memorial to the dead. The underground nuclear assembly plant, and nuclear weapons storage sites high in the mountains received the same fate. The testing site at Dashita was so severely damaged that its nuclear reactor apparently exploded during the earthquake, but was completely covered in the ensuing rubble as if the Chinese themselves had programmed its destruction as if it were simply a test.

For a picture of the devastation, see this link.

It was the best example yet of what Naomi Klein had called "so-called Acts of God or by Acts of Bush (on orders from God)," and it is most interesting to see how the world, especially Ms. Klein, reacted to what had been wrought, as we shall see.
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Monday 24 October 2011

Yitzhak Rabin Assassination: Israeli Statesman Helped Dig His Own Grave

By Trowbridge H. Ford

No democratic, developed country has more secretive, conspiratorial ways than the state of Israel, and they were never more in evidence than when its Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated on November 4, 1995 after attending a "Yes to Peace, No to Víolence" rally in Jerusalem by apparently a young, 3rd-year-law student at Bar-Ilan University, Yigal Amir.

While the media portrayed the killing as the result of a right-wing fanatic, opposed to any peace settlement with the Palestinians, it was actually caused by a covert operation gone wrong, reminiscent of John Hinckley's nearly successful assassination almost fifteen years earlier of President Reagan rather than the mythic 'lone assassin' theory which people in the Western world have become accustomed to when such killings occur.

The real key to understanding the murder is appreciating the close connection that Israel established with the United States during its 40-year existence. Without Washington's increasing support, the Israeli state never would have made it, given the problems the Disapora and Holocaust had caused masses of Jewish people trying to resettle in Palestine. The Truman administration's prodding of the new Labour government in Britain to give up its Palestinian Mandate was followed by the May 1948 war in which Israeli forces triumphed against all the odds over those from the weak Arab states of Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt.

While Atlee's government attributed Truman's stance of pandering to Jewish voters - and the President did acknowledge to a group of Mid-East ambassadors that he had no Arab constituents to contend with - he was genuinely committed to the Zionist cause. To enhance Democratic chances at the polls, Truman pressed for the admission of 100,000 Jewish refugees, and called for the partition of the country. When the Mandate expired on May 16, 1948, the USA, along with the USSR, immediately recognized the new state of Israel. Still, Truman's support of the Zionist cause did not play a significant role in his election in November.

During the War of Independence, Rabin, a native of Palestine, was in an ideal position to take military command of the situation as the British were forced by Jewish terrorists to withdraw. Since he had helped British forces to attack Vichy ones in Lebanon during WWII, he was domestically positioned by 1944 to take command of the Palmach commando unit of the Haganah - what would become the nucleus of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). It took the lead in ousting Arabs from key territory around Tel Aviv, and on the road to Jerusalem. While the Palmach failed to secure the Old City after the British finally departed, Rabin was still seen as a leading hero of the struggle.

The most controversial incident regarding Rabin's alleged activities during the struggle for independence occurred on June 22, 1948 when a ship-load of Jewish Freedom Fighters, and munitions on the Altelena were prevented from joining up with Menachem Begin's Irgun guerrillas. They had blown up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in July 1946, and it was feared that they would break the agreement for the cessation of hostilities.

Before the ship sailed from Port-de-Bouc in France, the Irgun in Palestine had signed an agreement with the government of David Ben-Gurion in Tel Aviv that all arms and fighters independently recuited would be handed over to the IDF, though the ship sailed in the hope of getting round it somehow, and secretly landing them unnoticed somewhere in Palestine - what was largely defeated by Radio London announcing its depature at the time.

When the ship finally fanded at Klar Vitin, David Even's IDF brigade, thanks to an order given by the government, set about seizing the 1,000 men, and confiscating the 4.5 ton cargo of weapons, ultimately resulting in fighting during which six of them were killed. The ship then sailed on to Tel Aviv, and before the whole confrontation was settled, another 10 died, and the ship was set afire.

In the accounts of the Altelena Affair, there is no mention of Rabin having played any significant role in the confrontation - what apologist Ben Shapiro made up for by having him carry the can when Rabin was assassinated for the failure of Begin, Ben-Gurion and Even to settle the difficulty peacefully.

During the Suez Crisis, Rabin, as commander of the Harel Brigade, was most eager to take advantage of its incursion on October 28, 1956 into the Sinai towards the Suez Canal, but the failure of Tel Aviv, Paris, and London to clear the whole operation with Washington resulted in it all going for naught. The invaders were confident that they could force Eisenhower's hand into backing the ouster of Egypt's uppiddy dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser, but the American President reacted with unprecedented opposition and speed, causing all those involved, especially Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, Defence Minister Shimon Peres, IDF chief Moshe Dayan, and Rabin never to forget the lesson.

Washington had learned something about what was planned by intercepts that the new National Security Agency (NSA) had made of messages between Tel Aviv and Paris, and those between its allies in Paris and London, but had not learned the substance of. Thanks to the divsion that Washington and London had made for eavesdropping on the world under the terms of the the postwar communications agreement, listening on what was transpiring in the Middle East was left to Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) to pass on to NSA.

It was sending along only a few which did not reveal what was planned. When Eisenhower learned the full extent of their perfidy, Washington took the necessary actions to reverse it, and NSA vowed never again to be caught short in supplying the necessary intelligence in such crucial Cold War confrontations.

The fallout from the fiasco had resulted in the Soviet Union tightening its hold on the Soviet bloc by suppressing the uprising in Budapest at the same time. Ike, still suspecting that at worst the action in the Middle East was a surprise attack on Jordan, was completely taken aback when the Israelis invaded the Sinai, advancing within 25 miles east of the Canal - just when Imre Nagy, Hungary's new Prime Minister, announced the restoration of multi-party rule.

America's U-2 intelligence gathering concentrated upon determining what was slowly unfolding in Egypt for fear that the USSR would take advantage of the fiasco there when, in fact, Moscow was arranging a rollback of what was happening in Budapest. On November 4th, two days before the American election, the Red Army began its suppression of the Hungarian revolution - something that Ike admitted that America, under the circumstances, could do nothing about. (Christopher Andrew, For The President's Eyes Only, pp. 236-7).

By 1964, Rabin had become the IDF's Chief-of-Staff, and he planned to pay back Washington and Cairo for the humiliation he and the IDF had experienced eights years earlier - what resulted in the devastating Six-Day War three years later. This time, Israel revealed its aggression to no one, counting on the fact that it could dictate Washington's response after the fact, thanks to tight security its military-intelligence establishment was noted for, and the political influence Jewish Americans had on the beleaguered Johnson administration, bogged down in Vietnam, and facing the prospect of a tough re-election campaign. There would be no babbling by the Israeli Prime Minister and her defence establishment to Washington about what was in the works this time, as had happened with Prime Minister Anthony Eden et. al. during the Suez Crisis.

The Israeli attacks on its neighbors, starting on June 4, 1967, were masterful deceptions, fooling everyone, it seemed, about who was attacking who with what - making Germany's deceptions before its soldiers marched into Poland in 1939, and the CIA's ones before the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 look like the most crude attempts.

The only surprise in the whole operation was the unexpected appearance of the American spy ship, USS Liberty, off El Arish on Egypt's Mediterranean coast on June 8th during the height of the struggle. The spy ship had great advantages in eavesdropping over other means as it could stay in an area where trouble was anticipated, and it could monitor and analyse all kinds of intelligence from close in, 24-7. Its only drawback was that it could hardly defend itself if discovered and attacked.

As James Bamford has described in the greatest detail in Body of Secrets, the Israelis attacked the snooper with the greatest force from sea and air for fear that it was montoring the slaughter that Rabin's forces were carrying out on shore against Egyptian prisoners: "...Israeli troops killed, in cold blood, as many as 1,000 Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai, including some 400 in the sand dunes of El Arish." (p. 202)

In an attempt to prevent the war crimes from coming out, the IDF killed 34 servicemen on the ship, wounded 171 more, and nearly sank the ship itself. It was only after the Israelis had failed to eradicate the mission that they falsely claimed that the attacks were a mistake, and agreed most reluctantly to pay measly compensation for what they had done.

When Washington learned of the hostilities, Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban told the American Ambassador to Israel Walworth Barbour that the Egyptians had started them - a considerable armored force had entered its territory, and had given IDF ones battle. The Foreign Minister lied about Israeli intentions, claiming that they were just interested in containing Egypt's aggression when, in face, they were involved in grabbing terrirtory which had eluded them nine years earlier.

While Israel wanted Washington to put pressure on the Soviets not to intervene, Moscow preempted the effort by sending an unprecendented message on the hot line, urging Washington to do all that it could to end hostilities, particularly exerting pressure on Israel to do the same. After a hectic half hour in the White House over how to respond to the Soviets' entreaty, Washington told Moscow that it would not be entering the conflict

It was only afterwards that President Johnson learned of the ship's dire straits, especially the carnage on board. In anticipation of such a conflict, Washington had sent the USS Liberty there is the hope of preventing it, or at least containing it from becoming a conflict with the USSR. On May 23rd, it was ordered to leave Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, and steam as fast as possible to the US Navy base in Rota, Spain, a journey of 3,000 miles, and requiring eight days travel.

There, it picked up five Arabic linquists and one senior analyst Marine Sergeant Bryce Lockwood to assess the meaning of what the Egyptians were planning and doing. (Bamford, pp.188-9) While Frank Raven told Bamford that the lack of any Hebrew linquists was due to their shortage, it indicated that NSA was only planning to eavesdrop on what the Muslims were doing. On June lst, the ship left Rota, and deployed just off El Arish when the Israli attacks started.

It seems that this effort was conducted secretly from the Israelis to give them cover without there being any revealing feedback from what was happening. The ship would have all kinds of messages deciphered about what Nasser's forces were doing, but none from the Israelis - what would quell any complaints, especially by the Soviets, of Israeli aggression. It would have no record of any massacres of prisoners by the IDF, and there were still no Hebrew linquists back at headquarters in Athens. It apparently was the Johnson administration's compensation for the damage the Israelis had suffered at the hands of the Eisenhower administration.

The only trouble with it for the Israelis was that they knew nothing about it, so they went bonkers when they discovered the spy ship just off the coast in international waters, fearing that it was collecting information about war crimes which would be used against Israel's military leadership There was no other way they could interpret this new surprise.

And when LBJ learned of the attack, Washington was more interested in sinking the ship in order to protect its vital Sigint secrets from falling into enemy hands, and to protect Israel from any embarrassment by inflaming American public opnion than saving it, and providing succor to its crew .While LBJ was afraid that the Soviets had attacked the ship, he was soon informed by his ambassador in Tel Aviv that the Israelis had confessed to having attacked it "in error". NSA had discovered the attack before anyone else, though, showing that it had been eavesdropping on all Israeli communications to have just the right record for what it had originally planned - what Bamford still cannot explain. (p. 224)

After the President informed the Soviets that the Israelis had indeed attacked the ship "in error", Washington hoped that the ship would indeed just sink. LBJ amazingly ordered the Joint Chief of Staff to have fighters from the Six Fleet which had arrived on the scene to protect the ship from further attack to be recalled. "President Lyndon Johnson came on," Rear Admiral Lawrence Geis, commander of the carrier force, added in information released after his death, "with a comment that he didn't care if the ship sunk, he would not embarrass his allies." (Quoted from p. 226.)

Never in American military history had the Commander-in-Chief been so cruel in the treatment of his own forces, and it can only be explained by the political motives in starting it in the first place. The political fallout domestically, it seems, helped induce him not to run for re-election in 1968. Rabin was so upset by what he had done to Egytian prisoners, and American eavesdroppers that he had a nervous breakdown while the fighting was still in progress.

To contain the damage done by the assault, Rabin was sent to Washington as its new ambassador, and he flouted diplomatic convention by going out of his way to make friends with members of Nixon's new Republican administration. Rabin's close relationship with NSA Henry Kissinger and DNSA Alexander Haig came in most handy when the Syrians and Egyptians tried to pay back Israel for the 1967 war by springing the Yom Kippur War on it in October 1972. Thanks to information NSA supplied the Israelis, Ariel Sharon's forces were able to beat back the Egyptian forces behind the Suez Canal which had surprisingly crossed it, and the Syrian threat to the Sea of Galilee was stymied just at the last moment. When the Soviets threatened to intervene in the war, Haig forced Breznev to back down by placing American forces around the world on the highest alert short of imminient war.

In reading the former Nixon Chief of Staff's book, Inner Circles: How America Changed the World, one gets a good glimpse of just how Haig manipulated Nixon to help the Israelis while Rabin was manipulating Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in the defense of Jordan from Syrian attacks. Little wonder that when she retired shortly thereafter, Rabin triumphed over Peres in a bitter battle for the Labor Party leadership, and succeeded her as Prime Minister.

Three years later, though, Rabin's coalition government fell apart over an alleged financial scandal, and he went into the political wilderness. Rabin had made enemies out of the leading players by acting as if he were in the process of solving everything - i.e, the surprise threats to Israel's very existence, claiming how he had been so instrumental in its creation by stopping Begin's reckless intrusions during the Altelena Affair, and covering up the Liberty one by successfully persuading Washinging that it was indeed an accident.

Though Rabin had negotiated the Sinai Interim Agreement with Egypt, setting the country on its way to making peace with Anwar Sadat, and authorized the Entebbe raid which recovered almost all of the passengers who had been kidnapped by Uganda's Edi Amin, Rabin found dealing with the Carter administration and his fellow Isrealies over the continuing Palestinian problem so difficult that he resigned after the Labor Party was defeated in the 1977 election, doing so because his wife Leah had broken the rule about no Israeli having a foreign currency account without proper authority - what she had failed to do by opening a dollar one during their days there when he was the ambassador.

It seemed more like an excuse to avoid difficulties ahead all by himself, as if he had some fears of his own safety.

During his absence, the governments in Tel Aviv and Washington worked continuously to break down Arab opposition to Israel's existence, while trying to get Israeli voters to agree to some kind of swap of land for security. By this time, Israel had more land than it needed, and the Palestinians were becoming increasingly isolated.

The Camp David Accords that President Carter negotiated between Sadat and Begin ended Egypt's support of an armed Palestinian struggle, though Sadat was to soon lose his life at the hands of Muslim extremists. Sharon's IDF responded by driving Yasser Arafat's PLO out of Lebanon.

To soften American hostility to what Sharon had done, Prime Minister Begin went out of his way to tell the Reagan administration that Rabin had lied when he told previous American administrations that the attack on the Liberty was simply a mistake. "We... had a choice," he admitted in 1982. "The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him." (Quoted from Bamford, p. 186)

In 1984, Rabin joined a government of national unity, headed by Labour Party leader Shimon Peres, and soon thereafter he, as Minister of Defence, was obliged to suppress the first Intifada.

He did avoid being implicated in the spying by Jonathan Pollard for the Soviets, and the illegal arms dealing by Ollie North et al. during Iran-Contra. Rabin had insisted that Reagan unequivocally approve the sale of Israeli weapons to Iran in return for the hostages held there, and in August 1985 the President telephoned NSA Bud McFarlane to confirm his approval, adding that Washington would replenish Israeli weapons stocks. (Lou Cannon, President Reagan, The Role of a Lifetime, pp. 544-6)

The trouble with a bipartisan attempt in both Tel Aviv and Washington to solve the Palestinian problem was that it was done without consulting their top leaders while Iran joined the countries willing to support their increasingly fragmented leadership. Israel had long been the Shah's closest friend in the area, and his overthrow, coupled with Sadat's assassination, left Begin's government nearly surrounded by enemies, and too few resources for dealing with them. Iran's SAVAK (the National Intelligence Organization) had long done much dirty work for the Mossad and CIA, its joint creators, and they had reciprocated in kind, but their joint operations were ultimately its undoing when the young mllahs it had recruited turned on the Shah.

As a result, Israel had to increasingly do its own dirty work - what it had only seriously done before in reaction to the killing at its Olympic athletes at the Munich Games in 1972 .The Mossad had Said Hammami, the PLO's London representative, shot dead by agents of Abu Nidal's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in January 1978 when it feared that he, an Arab moderate, was attempting to negotiate a peace deal with the Israelis for Arafat.

"The conflict had made little progress ten years later," Tony Geraghty added in The Bullet Catchers, "when Afarfat's military commander, Abu Jihad (real name, Khalil al-Wariz) was assassinated with military precision at his villa near Tunis, probably by agents of Israel's secret service, Mossad." (p. 376).

During the interim, Nidal's terrorist group had seen to the highjacking of the Italian liner Achille Lauro, the assassination of Jewish invalid passenger Leon Klinghoffer, and the shooting up of the airports in Rome and Vienna during the terrorist countdown to the shooting of Sweden's statsminister Olof Palme in Stockholm on February 28, 1986 - what was intended to trigger a solution to all the problems the West and Israel faced with a non-nuclear conclusion to the Cold War with the USSR.

Rabin's forcing Washington to approve any arms shipments to Iran before they occurred proved most helpful to Tel Aviv when the fallout from Iran-Contra was occurring. The various investigations of the scandal, especially the Tower Commission, believed McFarlane's testimony about which came first. "The accumulated evidence," Cannon concluded, "did show that Reagan had given prior approval." As a result, former head of the Israeli Air Force, and current Israeli businessman Al Schwimmer had to take personal responsibility for trying to sneak 80 HAWK missiles through Sweden on November 17th without statsminister Olof Palme's approval, beginning the whole massive scandal which resulted in his assassination along the way,

Rabin while he was in New York had even called McFarlane earlier in November while he was in Geneva where Reagan and Gorbachev were to meet for the first time to make sure that he obtained Palme's permission for using Sweden for the weapons transfer. "Rabin had asked for help in arranging for an Israeli shipment of Hawk missiles to pass through a third country and be transferred to non-Israeli planes for delivery to Iran. McFarlane had directed Oliver North, who was in Washington, to attend to the matter." (Lawrence Wash, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up, p. 39)

When Rabin proved unable to crush the Intifada, and the Soviet bloc and Union collapsed in a peaceful way, Rabin easily replaced Shimon Peres as Labor Party leader in its election in February 1992. The result was hardly surprising as the former Prime Minister aka "Mister Loser" had been working behind Rabin's back with Ollie North's people so that the arms shipments would go ahead no matter what he wanted, and Palme demanded, as all the American investigations had indicated. (For more, see Walsh, p.37ff.) In the surprising victory, Peres was made a most dangerous enemy, a leader who was more interested in making sure Rabin failed somehow rather than succeeded.

Thanks to Rabin's convincining Knesset victory in the July 1992 election, he set about implementing his mandate for a permanent peace with the Palestinians - what Washington outsider Bill Clinton, just elected President, was most eager to achieve.

Upon becoming Premier, Rabin ordered Israel's General Security Service, Shin Bet, to focus its activities on the right-wingers opposed to any settlement, and appointed close associate, Karmi Gillon, its director general - instead of the veteran and more qualified Gideon Ezra - to carry out the mission which Gillon himself had pointed out the need of. Several senior Shin Bet people quit in protest over the new mission. "This policy change resulted in the most dangerous and bitter split ever in Israeli society," Uri Dan and Dennis Eisenberg wrote in "A slanderous tongue." Rabin thought it was necessary if there was to be any hope of making the dream of peace a reality.

Once the Olso Accords had been agreed to, and Rabin, Peres, and Arafat received the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize, its prospects deteriorated as suicide bombers continued to kill Israelis, and Orthodox rabbis started a most threatening campaign against Rabin's leadership. Peres helped set up Rabin as the prime cause of the trouble by making him make the symbolic handshake with PLO leader Arafat at the signing of the agreement in Oslo.

They revived two obsolete halachic precepts from the Talmud - the din rodef (the duty to kill Jews who imperil other Jews), and the din moser (the duty to kill Jews who threaten to turn in other Jews to non-Jewish authorities). Religious law student Yigal Amir soon became acquainted with these precepts while attending Bar-Ilan University. The precepts were soon being used against Rabin who had claimed during the 1992 election campaign that he would never negotiate with Arafat - what Yossi Beilin had met the PLO's Abu Mazen in secret in May to work out the details of. Because of Rabin's actions in the Altalena Affair, right-wingers like Ben Shapiro were so clamoring that he was no hero at all since he had seen to the killing to his fellow Jews then, and was leaving others to fall into the hands of foreign authorities now.

To stem the anti-Rabin tide, Gillon, it seems, hired agent proocateurs, particularly Avishai Raviv. They created hostile groups like Eyal, composed of angry settlers and right-wingers, to denounce and protest his policies in an increasingly violent way. Reminiscent of the campaign against Olof Palme, they called Rabin a traitor, and a Nazi. The protesters cursed the Premier outside his apartment in Ramat Aviv, and Eyal teenagers produced a video, calling for a military coup. When an Arab was murdered in Halhoul by persons wearing IDF uniforms, Raviv claimed that members of Eyal had done it, though, it turned out after Rabin's assassination that Arab thieves had done it.

Rabin's cabinet, especially Minister of Agricultuire Ya'acov Tzur, still believed the deception, complaining bitterly when there were no arrests for the killing.

On October 5, 1995, there was a mass protest by the right-wingers at Zion Square, attended by Rabin's apparent assassin. During the demonostration, a poster was raised on which Rabin's face was pasted over the figure of Heinrich Himmler - what had been made originally by Raviv and Amir at a Eyal summer camp on the Kinneret. Amir responded to the sight thus: "Because of this dog, this country is going to be destroyed." When Amir noted TV cameras recording the scene, he said: "Instead of fliming, will you come to the funeral? Will you come to the funeral tomorrow?" Then, Binyamin Netanyahu told the crowd being observed by guests including Sharon: "Rabin is a dog - In blood and fire we'll drive Rabin out - will bring the government down."

Then the group marched on the Knesset during which they attacked Rabin's empty limousine without any response by security people. Then it attacked Housing Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezar in his car, threatening to kill him. Once he escaped harm, he charged after Netanyahu, exclaiming: "The settlers have gone crazy, and someone will be murdered here, if not today, then in another week or another month."

It was 30 days later, on November 4th, that Rabin was assassinated after Amir had fired blanks in a fake attempt to rally public support when it failed, as he went to his limousine after addressing the peace rally, while his bodyguards once again looked helplessly on. Once in the limoince, Rabin was shot twice by covert operators, dying on the way to the hospital. It was a case of hijacking the scene that the Prime Minister had made up in order to dispose of him without any serious blowback, at least not until Shimon Peres dies.

Thanks to Gillon's deceptive campaign, as the Shamgar Commission investigating the assassination duly recorded, but was prevented from releasing the damaging details of, it was a case of 'mirror-imaging' which had completely confused his security detail about the dire threat of. The most daming evidence about a double-agent operation having gone horribly wrong was the admission that Raviv had urged Amir to kill Rabin to prove his manhood - what Amir achieved after shooting the blanks when he told police: "Do your work. I've done mine."