Although he hasn’t gone far enough, with respect, and the deal may yet survive, President Trump was right to de-certify it. As always the president is being kept in the dark by his intelligence advisers.
As the CIA knows perfectly well, and as I stated in my book Spyhunter as long ago as 2014, Iran already has nukes. Diplomats and the media have obsessed, and I mean obsessed, over Iran’s enriched uranium program, at the expense of her far more advanced plutonium program.
My estimate in 2014 was around 30 operational nuclear warheads. That may have gone up, although I don’t know the total amount of plute the French shipped to Iran. Plutonium weapons are usually more compact than enriched uranium ones, i.e. are much more suited to Iran’s planned delivery systems.
The Iraq War
The Bad Guys on what was left of the Axis of Evil were stunned by the swiftness of the Allied victory over Iraq. Despite the evidence of the Gulf War they still thought that the US armed forces were affected by Vietnam Syndrome. They had not grasped two things:
- The extent to which the US Army had refined and improved its doctrine since Vietnam, and
- The extent to which the US failure to win the Vietnam War was down to absurd constraints on the US military by DVD political assets in Washington such as Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara.
In the events which happened Saddam was whupped, and whupped hard – that was the last time he got into bed with Al Qaeda and attacked New York. I am well aware in saying that, BTW, that many commentators and politicians have fallen into an Intellectual Black Hole, far too deeply to permit escape, in which Iraq was not involved in 9/11. The facts that Osama bin Laden was a welcome guest in Baghdad, not once, but twice, and that all but one of the 9/11 terrorists were trained in, or transited via, Iraq have escaped them.
The great Allied victory in 2003 opened up huge strategic possibilities for the West. Two other regimes in the Axis of Evil flanked Iraq – Syria and Iran. Of course in 2003 the Bad Guys could not have imagined how successful they would be in persuading the Allies to sit back and wait for the Syrians and Iranians to pour in terrorists, cash and guns across Iraq’s largely undefended frontiers.
Such strategic stupidity could not safely be presumed in 2003 however, even with George W. Bush in the White House and Tony Blair in Downing St, no offense intended. The Allied strategy in Iraq after 2003 did after all plumb new depths of ineptitude.
The French Plute Shipments
The Bad Guys came up with a cunning plan – why not arm Iran with nukes, to deter an invasion? The problem was the Iran had very little or no fissile material, and no plutonium, which was what they really wanted.
The French however had a huge black plute stockpile, derived in part from their fast-breeder reactor program. The Fifth Republic is essentially Vichyist and a German client-state. Germany sponsored the Iranian Revolution, working with the French, who had protected the Iranian pedophile Khomeini.
German assets in Washington, knowing of the plan to topple the Shah, had arranged for supplies of high-tech weaponry to reach Iran prior to the revolution. Again acting on German instructions, MI6 and CIA suppressed intelligence of the revolution from the White House and Downing St. As always, our politicians were desperately ill-informed.
In 2003 the DVD still had at least four refitted Type XXI U-Boats, the famed ‘electroboats’ built to the order of German Naval Intelligence as long-range transport boats at the end of World War II. Their construction ushered in seven decades of confusion for naval historians ignorant of the DVD, who struggled to work out why vast resources were assigned to building them, whilst they were hardly ever used in combat.
The XXIs transferred the plute, I believe from the Gironde Estuary, to the Iranian naval base at Bandar Abbas. The technology to build the weapons came from China, which in turn had acquired it from France and Germany. (The French nuclear program was largely a proxy for the Germans).
All the talk about Iran complying with the nuclear agreement is so much gibberish. The deal was negotiated and signed by Iran in bad faith. Iran is a nuclear-armed state, period.
Iranian Delivery Systems
Analysts have tended to focus on Iran’s IRBM program, to the point of obsession. As I have been pointing out for years, it would be a huge mistake to overlook Iran’s legacy nuclear-capable systems, such as the F-4 Phantom and F-14 Tomcat. Each is capable of fast, low-level, under the radar nuclear weapons delivery.
Such an attack, using the toss-bombing technique, might not be survivable, but the Iranians have never been too worried about sacrificing their military. It would be a rare parent in Iran who got a call from an ayatollah on the loss of their son in combat. As for a cheque, forget it!
The assumption that none of these aircraft are flight-ready is just that – an assumption, and a weak one at that. Not only did the Iranians have other airframes and engines to cannibalise for spares, they have had German technical assistance since 1979. That includes trap-door access to Northrop Grumman’s and Boeing’s systems.
Moreover, there were the Spantax Coronados. They used a civilianised, low by-pass ratio turbofan version of the excellent General Electric J-79 engine, as used in the F-4. What happened to these engines when the fairly well-maintained Spantax kites were scrapped? Spain is in the EU, don’t forget, and the EU is an ally of Iran, hence its opposition to scrapping the nuclear deal.
We should work on the basis that Iran has operational nuclear weapons and viable nuclear-capable aircraft. The President should feel free to ignore Theresa May’s representations about not withdrawing from the deal. With great respect, she’s simply not up to the job. In particular she does not know to handle or acquire intelligence. She’s therefore at the mercy of MI6, poor girl, who are penetrated by Germany’s GO2. In practice she is only allowed to receive intelligence about Iran which has been cleared by Iran’s key ally, Germany.
It was almost certainly pressure from Dachau which forced MI6 to suppress intelligence about the Iranian Revolution from Number 10 in 1979. Any British Prime Minister forced to rely on MI6 for foreign intelligence is bound to be woken up in the middle of the night with disturbing news. Reliance upon MI6 is for idiots and politicians, to the extent that the latter sub-set is not incorporated in the first sub-set.
The Assassination of Dr David Kelly CMG
It is impossible to separate this issue from Dr Kelly’s assassination. David was murdered to stop him passing intelligence about the hot plute shipments to Bandar Abbas to those nice people the Mossad. That’s where I came in – I not only helped with the analysis of the assassination, but found out why David had been murdered and passed the intel on to Israel in his place. All of that is in the public domain.
The Iranians in turn had come after me, trying to get me disbarred with a bogus Bar Council complaint, after I had successfully represented the CIA officer who rebuilt the Agency’s network in Iran after the revolution. City of London Police and the Crown Prosecution Service, which had been penetrated by Iran’s VEVAK, had set the officer up, in order to acquire his ‘black book’. A bent rozzer, thinking that he was being paid by the CIA, since the cash transfers to his account the BVI were in USD, handed it over to the Iranians, who promptly tortured, executed or turned the network. Since then, the Agency have effectively been blind in Iran.
Forget the junk on Wikipedia, or the ‘Janet & John’ report trotted out by Lord Hutton, no offense intended (he’s a nice chap). The suicide theory was always full of holes:
(1) He was supposed to have swallowed a blister pack of Co-Proxamol, but the ratio of the two active ingredients in his blood was nearly ten times higher than it would have been had be swallowed the tablets.
(2) Both drugs, dextro and paracetamol, are available in liquid form and can be injected.
(3) Only a tiny quantity of the inactive ingredients of the tablets were found in his stomach contents, ruling out ingestion of a pack.
(4) Even if he had ingested the pack, one pack was way below the LD50 level, i.e. not a lethal dose.
(5) The artery he was supposed to have cut, the ulnar artery, is deep and difficult to reach. In any event it was thin and transected, i.e. cut right through, which meant the arterial walls would have retracted. There is no known case of a successful suicide by transection of a single ulna artery, let alone in the open air.
(6) There was very little arterial spray at the site, i.e. he could not have died there by exsanguination, i.e. blood loss.
(7) The remaining blood level in the body was probably too high for death to have occurred as a result of blood loss – basically the blood was inside the body, not outside, which is where we like it to be if death is said to have occurred as a result of an arterial bleed.
(8) The body was moved after it was first found, suggesting a tampering with the scene by Thames Valley Police, the corrupt and penetrated police force in whose area the body was dumped, and
(9) In a further sign of tampering, a knife and water bottle were added after the body was discovered. Normally with an unassisted suicide by the cutting of a single wrist, itself a very rare event, we find the cutting implement by the body. It is a rare suicide who is sufficiently thoughtful to get up after he has killed himself or herself and neatly dispose of the knife.
With the honorable exception of the Daily Mail the British media have recycled the junk suicide theory without subjecting it to critical examination. They have got around published critiques of it, e.g. in Spyhunter, through the simple expedient of not referring to them.
The blood ratio point is so powerful that when I was finally asked about the Kelly Assassination on TV some years ago, the interview was carefully edited before being aired. Lord Hutton, with respect, got into a metric muddle, and initially claimed that the paracetamol/dextro ratio was 97,000 to 1! The error was only corrected after I pointed it out.
The two drugs metabolise at about the same rate, so all things being equal the ratios in the blood should be in roughly the same proportion as they are in the drug (10:1). The ratio found in Dr Kelly’s blood suggests that the GO2 death squad which took him out and injected the two drugs at the wound site either didn’t know the correct ratio, or cocked it up, and mixed them in the ratio of 100:1.
Torture
I am not saying that they intended to kill David when they did. He was kidnapped and taken to a GO2 safe house in Essex, where he was tortured. No doubt GO2, the French and the Iranians were keen to find out how he knew about the plute shipments. They were supposed to be a secret.
They didn’t know the poor man had mild arteriosclerosis, which affected his ability to withstand the extreme stress of torture. Please don’t try this at home, but if you are going to torture people and don’t want them snuffing it before they’ve coughed the goods it’s always best to give them a medical check first. GO2 once employed a mass-murderer as a GP (an NHS quack named Shipman, who bumped off over 300 patients, a record, even for the NHS). You would have thought they would have had a tame doc standing by to certify David as fit to be tortured. It’s Torture 101.
The media of course got round the ‘no body’ problem by saying that it must have lain there overnight. I have to tell my American readers that one of the things you are unlikely to find when walking in the English countryside is a dead body, even in Essex. This was Oxfordshire, not Sicily. They tend to notice things like dead bodies lying around in fields in Oxfordshire. Kingston Bagpuize isn’t even the murder capital of the Home Counties, let alone the world.
It’s high time the media and politicians stopped talking drivel about dead bodies getting up and making themselves more comfortable, or disposing of knives after they’ve killed themselves, or people swallowing blister packs of tablets without anything to drink and without matching stomach contents. (I would expect a first year pharmacy student to know that a tablet contains inactive ingredients as well as drugs).
It’s also time we acknowledged that David Kelly was a brave man, and a brilliant scientific intelligence officer, who was murdered doing the Lord’s work. Scrapping the phoney nuclear deal with Iran would be a fitting tribute to his memory.
This Week’s Movie Review: Juggernaut (1974)
This is the one where a series of 1,000 lb Amatol bombs in painted drums are placed aboard an ocean liner by a disaffected bomb disposal expert. It has been released under other names, but it’s always been known as Juggernaut in the UK. It was given a recent showing on the excellent Film Four channel, prompting my review.
It’s a gripping thriller, much of which was actually filmed at sea, on board an elegant German liner which was about to be sold to the Russians and renamed the Maxim Gorky. Originally named TS Hamburg she was actually the first liner to be built in Germany since 1938.
Juggernaut has a powerful cast, led by Omar Sharif as the captain and Richard Harris as the Irish leader of a squad of Royal Navy bomb disposal officers. His is a slightly strange character, but when did you meet a bomb disposal expert who wasn’t at least slightly strange? It’s a tricky line of business, which I am more than happy to leave to them.
The supporting cast, led by Ian Holm, is strong. Roy Kinnear is particularly funny, not that Juggernaut is a comedy. If you can’t have a laugh when you’re about to be blown up however, when can you?
I rather suspect that the producers had access to good bomb disposal advice. You wouldn’t get 1,000 lbs (nearly half a ton) of dynamite into an oil drum, but I think that you could probably squeeze in 1,000 lbs of Amatol. It was used in torpedoes – a 1,000lb warhead would be about right for an 18” torpedo. The plot skims over the difficulties in getting over three tons of high explosives on an ocean liner without anybody noticing. Three tons of Amatol is the sort of thing that even Thames Valley Police might notice if anyone were silly enough to put them in charge of security at a port. (They’re not allowed to handle security at Heathrow for a reason.)
The drama lies in the cunning booby-traps and false trails laid by the bomb-maker, moodily played by Kenneth Cope. There’s good advice for anyone thinking of taking up bomb disposal as a hobby (basket-weaving is safer). Never go in via the plate at the front!
If you can get the DVD, or download it via Amazon, it’s worth watching. It’s also worth watching again if, like me, you haven’t seen it for years.
Michael Shrimpton was a barrister from his call to the Bar in London in 1983 until being disbarred in 2019 over a fraudulently obtained conviction. He is a specialist in National Security and Constitutional Law, Strategic Intelligence and Counter-terrorism. He is a former Adjunct Professor of Intelligence Studies at the American Military University.
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