3rd Feb 1991 - 3 Missing Nukes - David Kelly's fatal secret?

[TonyGosling]

I can't find this article anywhere else on the web...

Kelly's fatal secret
By Tim Shipman Defence Editor 457 words
16 January 2005
Sunday Express (c) Copyright Express Newspapers 2005
He was 'about to reveal' details of missing nukes.

Dr. David Kelly, the weapons expert who died in mysterious circumstances after the Iraq war, may have been about to reveal alarming details concerning missing nuclear weapons.

Security sources say the scientist, who helped expose how Tony Blair's dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was "sexed up", knew that two 200 kiloton nuclear warheads went missing during the first Gulf War.

Sources familiar with Dr Kelly's work with South Africa's security services say he also knew damaging details of how nuclear weapons decommissioned by South Africa were lost in the Middle East in 1991……..

Each was moved in a military ambulance from Iraq to Syria 10-days or so before the start of Gulf War-2. In that way each could be deployed on the battlefield within 45-minutes.

Informed experts who have contacted the Sunday Express claim the missing nuclear weapons found their way to Iraq.

The claims raise new questions about the extent of Dr Kelly's knowledge of British security secrets, which some insiders believe may have contributed to his death.

Some believe he may have been silenced to prevent him revealing more secrets to the media.

The South African weapons allegedly went missing in Oman on their way to be decommissioned in the US and may have then been smuggled to Iraq.

A source claimed: "Dr Kelly knew about the South African nukes because he worked for research facilities there.

Allegations also surround the fate of an American B-52 bomber, which crashed in the Indian Ocean in February 1991 with two nuclear missiles on board. ...these lost USAF nukes are now thought to be in Iran.

A catastrophic electrical failure forced it down on its way back to base on the British island territory of Diego Garcia.

Half the crew drowned, but others were rescued, suggesting they were near to land at the time.

The fate of the nuclear weapons is unknown, but it is thought likely the crew jettisoned them in the sea when the engines caught fire. ....

The Sunday Express source said: "I have reason to believe they beached in Africa and were recovered. Shortly afterwards the Americans deployed troops in Somalia.

Without navigational aids the plane would have hugged the coast before it went down."

Over the last year intelligence sources in both Britain and America have told journalists they believe that whatever Doomsday arsenal Saddam Hussein had accumulated before the second Gulf War was smuggled into Syria before the Spring 2003 invasion.

Last month the Sunday Express revealed that MI5 investigators looking for details of Dr Kelly's involvement with the South African government, seized his laptop computers after he died.

The coroner charged with investigating the Government scientist's death has said he will not reopen the case.



As for the identity of the assassination squad. US Navy Seals it seems?

US considers assassination squads
Pentagon said to be discussing use of units to work abroad
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/aug/13/usa.alqaida
Oliver Burkeman in New York
Tuesday August 13, 2002 = 11-months before Dr. David Kelly's death.
The Guardian

The US government is considering plans to send elite military units on missions to assassinate al-Qaida leaders in countries around the world, without necessarily informing the governments involved, it was reported yesterday.

The Pentagon is discussing proposals which could see special operations units dispatched to capture or kill terrorists wherever they are be believed to be hiding, despite a long-standing presidential order forbidding US personnel from carrying out assassinations abroad, the New York Times reported.

Senior army advisers believe they could justify the practice on the grounds that it would constitute "preparation of the battlefield" in a war against terrorism that has no boundaries, because the September 11 terrorist attacks in effect initiated a world-wide state of armed conflict, the newspaper said.

"We're at war with al-Qaida. If we find an enemy combatant, then we should be able to use military force to take military action against them," a senior adviser to the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was quoted as saying.

The plan was said to be causing concerns in other parts of the US government because it might blur the line between army activity and missions usually handled, under strict legal guidelines, by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The president and Congress monitor CIA activities to ensure compliance with a presidential executive order first signed by President Gerald Ford, but regularly renewed since, forbidding government-sponsored assassinations.

The order followed revelations of CIA plans to murder foreign leaders including Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba of the Congo.

But Mr Rumsfeld is said to be frustrated by the CIA's activities in Afghanistan, especially when the activities of special forces working with local war lords were slowed down because the Afghans were still waiting for cash payments they were promised for co-operating against the Taliban.

The CIA's director, George Tenet, was understood not to oppose the proposals Mr Rumsfeld is considering, and discussions were under way to negotiate a new relationship between the agency and the army, an official said.

The soldiers who would be used in any such plan are the army's secretive Delta Force and the navy's Seal unit.

"The people in these units are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, anywhere around the world. They are very highly trained, with specialised skills for dealing with close-quarters combat and unique situations posed by weapons of mass destruction," a military officer said.

A senior official in the Bush administration told the New York Times that the US had to adapt its methods to match al-Qaida's for speed and stealth.

"If we find a high-value target somewhere, anywhere in the world, and if we have the forces to get there and get to them, we should get there and get to them," the official said.

"Right now, there are 18 food chains, 20 levels of paperwork and 22 hoops we have to jump through before we can take action. Our enemy moves faster than that."

Shortly after last September's attacks, Dick Cheney, the vice-president, indicated that the administration might review the ban on assassinations, because "to be able to penetrate organisations you need to have on the payroll some very unsavoury characters... It is a mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty business out there, and we have to operate in that arena."

Asked directly if there was a law which would outlaw assassinating Osama bin Laden, he said he did not think so, "but I'd have to check with the lawyers on that".

Presidents since Mr Ford have often been accused of side-stepping the executive order by launching targeted military attacks primarily to kill leaders, such as the 1986 attack on Libya authorised by Ronald Reagan, of which he later commented that he would not have shed tears if it had happened to kill the Libyan leader, Muammar Gadafy.

[alenachka]

Was he killed for this?
Interview with and overview of his work as AEA inspector in Iraq and Russia prior to his death/assasination.

Link

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=268935367757039981

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

JULY 30, 2005
Lost Nuclear Warheads from a B-52 Now in Iran?
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/07/30/lost-nuclear-warheads-from-a-b- 52-now-in-iran/

Iran may have the weapons-grade uranium out of three nuclear warheads dumped out of a B-52 back in 1991. Or so at least the US government might have some reason to believe, according to a seemingly well-informed person talking to CounterPunch last week.

On February 3, 1991, this particular B-52G had been deployed to circle around Baghdad. It was armed with 3 SRAM missiles armed with nuclear warheads and fitted with rocket drives to push them 100 miles to the rear of the B-52 before detonating.

The B-52 was heading off to refuel when it developed very serious electrical problems, including the loss of navigational equipment.

Hoping to limp back to base on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, the crew were heading the plane south just off the coast of Somalia when fires in five of the engines threatened to detonate the heat sensitive fuse mechanisms of the SRAMS. Thinking they would plummet into deep water the crew dumped the nuclear bombs, and the B-52 crashed not long thereafter. Some members of the crew died, others survived and were picked up.

But, our informant tells us, the warheads in fact landed in shallow water, on Somalia’s continental shelf. Three months later, in mid-May of 1991, they were allegedly retrieved and passed into the hands of an arms dealer involved in other covert transactions in Somalia at the time.

The dimension of each warhead was 30″ x 18″ x 18″, weighing 560 pounds. Because of sea-water contamination only the weapons grade uranium would be usable, either in a “dirty” bomb, or as the warhead for a new missile.

As the three warheads entered international arms-smuggling loops, the Bush-One and subsequently Clinton administrations dispatched various covert units to recover them, with no success.

As possible substantiation that the warheads may have ended up in Iran, CounterPunch’s informant cites a hour-long BBC-TV Channel-2 documentary, broadcast on May 3, 2005,titled “Iran’s Nuclear Secrets” in which they showed their TV-cameraman with UN weapons inspectors in Iran.

During those searches the inspectors found radiation traces in rooms left by the previous presence of weapons-grade uranium, with an enrichment of 40% to 60%.

The BBC program suggested that as local enrichment had not started then the Iranians must have held non-local black-Market material. The BBC concluded that with this material Iran was already perceived as a threat by Israel and the Scott Ritter’s forecasted raids were a likely possibility.

If the US or Israel does launch an aerial attack on the suspected depository of the three warheads, or of uranium from them, the consequences could be lethal in more ways than one, if a “bunker busting ” raid simply dispersed the nuclear materials into the atmosphere, with unpleasant consequences for all in the wind path.

Vice President Cheney, recently linked to speculation that he is eager to use any future 9/11 type attack in the US as a pretext to attack Iran, was Secretary of Defense back in 1991.

At the Pentagon lost nukes are called Broken Arrows. A few years ago, my coeditor Jeffrey St. Clair wrote a riveting account of how another B-52 lost an H-bomb in the swamps near Savannah, Georgia. It still hasn’t been recovered. You can find the story in his book Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me.

The Plame Affair and the Function of Scandals

Given the enormous disaster of the US onslaught on Iraq, the monstrous suffering engendered by the occupation, the violence around the world that this same occupation has spawned, how strange it is that the counter-attack on the Bush administration should have come in the form of the Plame scandal.

Millions of words have now been written about the outing of Valerie Plame, CIA-tasked wife of Joe Wilson, who undercut the claims of the Bush administration that Saddam’s Iraq was on the edge of having nuclear capability. A special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, has now labored for months. Judy Miller sits in jail for not answering Fitzgerald’s questions. Bush’s senior political adviser, Karl Rove, stands in danger of indictment for lying to Fitzgerald. He already has been exposed as a liar.

These are all big events, yet after all these months I find it hard to understand what the fuss is all about, and to take the Plame scandal seriously.

Supposedly Valerie Plame was exposed as a CIA employee as a reprisal by the White House against her husband. But I’ve never fully understood how this exposure was meant to damage Wilson.

In left-wing circles, at least when there was a serious left, it was supposed to be damaging to one’s political credibility to be called “a CIA agent”.

But we’re not dealing here with left-wing circles. We’re dealing with right-wing circles where employment by the CIA is deemed honorable and a badge of pride. Wilson, for all his popularity among liberals these days, is a right-winger who endorsed the attack on Iraq. Why wouldn’t the disclosure of his wife Valerie’s employer have enhanced his standing?

Again, why was it supposed to be shamefully discrediting to Wilson that his wife put him up as a suitable person to go to Niger to investigate charges that that country was exporting yellowcake uranium to Iraq?

The answer to such questions is in. Wilson wasn’t damaged. The White House maimed only itself. The scandal has satisfactorily demonstrated how truly stupid big-time operators like Rove and his colleagues in the White House can be.

The outing of Plame was no big deal, and maybe wasn’t even technically a crime under the terms of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. Ironically it was former CIA director Bush Sr who pushed for it as a reprisal against lefties who truly sought to damage the CIA by exposing its undercover operatives.

At the level of substance the Bush administration should be reeling in the face of savage attack for the ghastly failure of its mission in Iraq. Yet in the American media that scale of that failure is muffled by prudent reporters and editors.

The fact that America faces as big a national humiliation as it endured in Vietnam is not one much discussed. The antiwar movement is limping along, and the Democratic Party is desperate to be seen as a “loyal” opposition. Many of its leaders call not for an end to the war, but a war fought with more troops, with greater efficiency.

So the Plame scandal becomes the focus of attack, because the real reasons are deemed too contentious to be raised in public. In the same way, thirty years ago, Nixon was never impeached for a secret, illegal war on Cambodia, but because it turned out he had not been truthful about a cover-up of political mischief at home.

This is often the way with scandals. There is much in conventional political life that cannot be said, because to say anything substantive would be to undermine those unstated non-aggression pacts that buttress the ruling elites.

In the United States, among the elites, there is a non-aggression pact about Israel and the consequences of US sponsorship of that nation in all its enterprises, many of them shameful. The topic simply cannot be raised. The same is true of many other vital aspects of the nation’s affairs: trade, nuclear policy, the supervision of the Federal Reserve and so forth.

By contrast, the Plame scandal is something the elites can happily chew upon, even though I’m sure that most ordinary citizens long ceased to take an interest in the intricacies of the scandal. What will be the outcome? Rove may have to resign, may even be indicted. She may languish in prison now, but Judy Miller has been made a martyr to freedom of the press, an ironic consequence, given that with her stories fomenting the attack on Iraq she disgraced the name of journalism.

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

ONE ICY MORNING in February 2012, Hillary Clinton's plane touched down in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, which was just digging out from a fierce blizzard. Wrapped in a thick coat, the secretary of state descended the stairs to the snow-covered tarmac, where she and her aides piled into a motorcade bound for the presidential palace. That afternoon, they huddled with Bulgarian leaders, including Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, discussing everything from Syria's bloody civil war to their joint search for loose nukes.
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/09/hillary-clinton-frackin g-shale-state-department-chevron

[TonyGosling]

Was David Kelly really murdered by a foreign hit squad?
12/19/2004 Posted by Winnower
http://winnowinghistory.blogspot.co.uk/2004/12/was-david-kelly-really- murdered-by.html

19 December 2004 The Express on Sunday Tim Shipman
Startling claim by US security lawyer raises more questions over death of controversial weapons expert

NEW evidence suggests that Dr David Kelly, the weapons expert who sparked a government crisis over the Iraq war, was murdered - possibly by a foreign hit squad.

A security lawyer with links to the intelligence agencies made the claims in the US, but they have never been published in Britain.

They add new layers of mystery and unanswered questions about Dr Kelly's death just a week after two ambulance workers who attended the body said he could not possibly have killed himself in the way that the Hutton Inquiry found earlier this year.

Michael Shrimpton, who has briefed the powerful US Senate Intelligence Committee on national security issues, claimed in a radio interview that senior MI5 and MI6 officers were "furious" that Dr Kelly had been killed.

His body was found in woods near his home in the Oxford village of Southmoor on July 18 last year, a day after he disappeared.

But today the Sunday Express lays out the inconsistencies in the evidence that are casting a dark shadow over the conclusion that he committed suicide. He had been outed as the source of a BBC story claiming the Government had "sexed up" its dossier on Iraq.

Speaking in February this year, Mr Shrimpton said Dr Kelly was mostlikely murdered by a team of assassins from the French DGSE security service and his body dressed up to look like a suicide. Sources told him word had been circulating in Whitehall a week before his death that Dr Kelly was going to be "taken down".

A guest of the US State Department and a contributor to the Journal for International Security Affairs, Mr Shrimpton's credentials give his claims some credibility.

He told Texas radio DJ Alex James: "Within 48 hours of the murder I was contacted by a British intelligence officer who told me he'd been murdered."

The officer pinned the blame on rogue elements in Whitehall using a foreign secret service - a common tactic for assassinations.

But he insisted that neither MI5 nor MI6 were involved. "My sources are telling me that both services are extremely unhappy, " said Mr Shrimpton.

And he was unable to name any ministers who may have been involved in the decision - though he was sure that Tony Blair was not behind it. He claims the French agency may have used Iraqi intelligence assets to cover their tracks.

"The standard French practice when they carry out assassinations is to take their own team out. I am very doubtful that any of the people involved directly in the assassination of David Kelly are still alive, " he added.

All of which sounds fanciful. And it may be. But doubts about the manner of Dr Kelly's death are not just held by Mr Shrimpton.

The ambulance crew who were among the first to see Dr Kelly's body believe that if he had committed suicide by slitting his wrist after taking painkillers, he would have been surrounded by pools of blood. The lack of blood has given rise to a suspicion that his body was moved.

Officially his body was found in a copse, in a wood, but the forensic tents were set up in the adjacent field. One witness described the body leaning against a tree, another that it was lying on the floor near a tree.

The Hutton Report into the affair ruled that Dr Kelly died by "bleeding from incised wounds to his left wrist". But several respected doctors are on record doubting that analysis.

Among those who wrote with their doubts to coroner Nicholas Gardiner was former trauma and orthopaedic medicine consultant Dr David Halpin.

Mr Shrimpton outlined doubts about the slash marks on Dr Kelly's left wrist. "The artery that was cut was the ulnar artery, which is more difficult to reach. It's on the little finger side of the hand, " he said. "It's deeper than the radial artery. Why go for an artery deep in the wrist when you can slit an artery much closer to the surface of the skin?

"The second problem - according to the autopsy report he severed or transected the artery. But once you transect an artery, we have something called vaso-constriction. The artery retracts and that promotes clotting. It's very difficult to bleed out if you sever one artery only."

Most people who commit suicide this way slash both wrists along the artery and keep them in warm water to stop blood clots.

THERE are also doubts about the painkillers found in Dr Kelly's pockets. The amount of Co-Proxamol in his blood was less than a third of what is normally considered a fatal amount. Out of the 29 tablets missing from the bottle, only one-fifth of a tablet was found in his stomach.

All of which leads Mr Shrimpton to conclude: "The suicide theory just doesn't hold water at all."

Other inconsistencies include claims that Dr Kelly was carrying a bottle of water, which would have helped him digest the painkillers, but no reports from the scene mention the bottle.

Some are dissatisfied with abrasions on his head, which were dismissed by the Hutton inquiry as consistent with lying in the undergrowth. But critics say they could be evidence of a struggle - an explanation explicitly dismissed by the Home Office pathologist.

Questions also arise over a police operation called Operation Mason, which began an hour before Dr Kelly set out on his last walk. The file's contents are a closely-guarded secret to be seen only by those with "a strictly need-to -know requirement".

Conspiracy theorists on the internet have also focused on the testimony of one Detective Constable Graham Coe at the Hutton inquiry.

He said he arrived at the scene with one officer - but five witnesses saw him with two. The Thames Valley Police search team leaders, PCs Andrew Franklin and Martyn Sawyer, said they had "no idea" what DC Coe and his companion or companions were doing there.

So if Dr Kelly was killed, how was it done? Mr Shrimpton said: "He was probably murdered by . . .an intravenous injection of Dextropropoxythene and paracetamol, the constituents of CoProxamol, and a muscle relaxant called Succinylcholine."

Succinylcholine leaves no trace.

He claimed the slash to the wrist was done to "disguise the puncture wound" from the injection.

So if Dr Kelly was killed, why was he targeted? Mr Shrimpton believes it was because he had talked to the press and there was a fear of what else he might discuss with journalists.

He was also due to return to Iraq and may have learned fresh information. Dr Kelly himself predicted that he would end up "dead in the woods".

Some conspiracy theorists on the internet even claim that he was on a death list of weapons scientists.

Mr Shrimpton, perhaps fancifully, believes that someone in Whitehall considered Dr Kelly a threat to the survival of the Government and that the French were prepared to co-operate in silencing him because they preferred Mr Blair's pro-European attitude to the alternatives.

Most intriguingly, the Sunday Express has also uncovered details of Dr Kelly's secret links to the bio-warfare programme of South Africa's apartheid regime.

These links - revealed here for the first time - add another layer of mystery to his death.

Shortly after Dr Kelly left his home, he received a telephone call from an MI5 officer to confirm he would be interviewed in the coming days over his role in the apartheid regime's most secret project.

Code-named Project Coast, it was trying to create a genetically engineered weapon to attack only the country's black population and to develop a vaccine to block human fertility in blacks. Dr Kelly had visited the project's headquarters soon after he was appointed in 1972 to be head of the microbiology department at Porton Down, Britain's top-secret biological warfare establishment in Wiltshire.

He met with Project Coast's head, Dr Wouter Basson at his high-security laboratory outside Pretoria. Later, Dr Kelly arranged for Basson to visit Porton Down.

Dr Neils Knobel, a senior scientist with Project Coast, recalled:

"Basson went to Porton Down in 1985. They gave him an entire tour of the place. He saw everything.

He left with manuals. How he got them he never told us".

IT was questions about Basson's visit that MI5 interrogators wanted Dr Kelly to answer. The reasons may lie on the hard drives of the seven laptops that Dr Kelly kept in his study. Shortly before his body was found a team of MI5 officers removed the computers along with all the scores of discs they found in the study. They were never made available to Lord Hutton.

In March, coroner Nicholas Gardiner said there was no need to reopen the inquest.

The Kelly family and Thames Valley police are satisfied with the official version of his death. An increasing number of outsiders are not.