The British media have gone berserk again. The feeding frenzy this time was induced by the rozzers, who found a couple of dodgy Russians, almost certainly linked to organized crime, on CCTV, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, conveniently traveling to Salisbury in March. These idiots are supposed to have wandered through Gatwick Airport complete with a canister of Novichok, stayed in a cheap hotel, and then bounced along to Salisbury on South West Railways train. The canister is supposed to have contained enough deadly nerve agents to wipe out the entire train if its contents spilt out. They are then supposed to have left it lying around for poor Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley to have picked it up a couple of months later.
There is just one wee, tiny, technical flaw with the rozzers’ narrative, enthusiastically seized upon by beleaguered Prime Minister Theresa May: it’s bollocks. It’s bollocks on so many levels it would actually be quite funny if it were not for the damage it’s doing to Anglo-Russian relations. It’s like electing a peanut farmer for president – in another era, it would seem strange. (I never worked out, BTW, whether Jimmy Carter farmed salted or dry roasted peanuts.)
There was no Novichok
The first problem is that no Novichok was used at Salisbury at all. The MSM won’t tell you this, but as was exclusively revealed on this site the agent used at Salisbury was BX. How do we know this? Well for one thing nobody died, at least not in the initial attack.
Novichok is fatal. As Editor-in-Chief Gordon Duff and others have pointed out, you don’t come down with a touch of Novichok poisoning and wake up in hospital. The only Novichok in the Salisbury sample sent to the Hague was a small quantity added afterward by Porton Down, on the orders of the Cabinet Office, in order to boost the British Government’s false anti-Russian narrative.
You don’t leave Novichok lying around
No professional intelligence officer is going to leave a flask of Novichok lying around for someone else to discover. That part of Whitehall’s narrative is simply silly. It’s not clear what killed Dawn Sturgess, but it won’t have been Novichok unless that is GO2 used some of Porton Down’s stockpile to murder her in order to bolster the false narrative. They’re pushing this one like the Reichstag fire, so I wouldn’t be surprised.
You don’t take Novichok on a train
In point of fact you shouldn’t be boarding a passenger train with any WMDs, let alone an agent as deadly as Novichok. Whereabouts on the train were Petrov and Boshirov supposed to have stored this Novichok? To anyone who has ever bounced along the West of England Main Line from Waterloo to Salisbury, as I have, the whole idea is absurd.
Just to recap: the official narrative is that two experienced military intelligence officers are supposed to have boarded a train with enough deadly nerve agents to kill every passenger on board in the event of an accident. They are then supposed to have gone to Salisbury, traveling in their own names, where they are supposed to have tried to murder a former GRU officer, who had been swapped, conveniently leaving CCTV footage of themselves from Gatwick Airport to Salisbury and back.
It sounds more like the plot of a Morecombe and Wise spy movie. In comparison, the plot of Carry on Spying looks like a credible scenario.
The CCTV
The CCTV footage looks odd. Whilst shots may have been taken from different cameras the absence of other passengers at Gatwick is remarkable. However, the footage released by the police appears to be genuine. In their interview on Russia Today yesterday the pair admitted traveling to Salisbury on the dates in question.
Are Petrov and Boshirov GRU?
Clearly not. Apart from anything else, the GRU would never indulge in such insanity. They’re not like the Defence Intelligence Staff – the GRU is run by serious intelligence professionals, with respect, who wouldn’t contemplate going back on a spy swap in the first place.
They don’t seem to speak much English, to judge from their interview, which was conducted in Russian. Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov are also their real names. When did you last hear of wet-work specialists traveling in their real identities? On a train?
The Metropolitan Police, who are Useful Idiots at best (no offense intended), clearly never expected Petrov and Boshirov to show up on TV. Indeed they seem to have been convinced that the pair were traveling on false passports.
Although they were charged, the Met only ever applied for a European Arrest Warrant, a pointless procedure, since Russia isn’t actually in the EU. No application was made for extradition, sensibly, since the Russian courts aren’t as bent as ours, no offense intended, and would review the evidence against Petrov and Boshirov, such as it is, objectively. The Security Minister at the Home Office, Ben Wallace MP, could scarcely refrain from smirking when asserting on TV that Petrov and Boshirov would receive a ‘fair trial’ in England. The idea only has to be stated for its absurdity to be apparent, sadly. We gave up on fair trials some time ago.
Who were they working for?
This is unclear. I’m not buying the tourist argument – it seems an awful long way to go just to look at Salisbury Cathedral. I happen to have worshipped there and it’s a lovely cathedral, but I’m not sure I would travel all the way from Moscow just to visit it.
As explained above, they’re not GRU, indeed they’re clearly not intelligence officers. They could be enforcers of Russian organized crime, which is largely controlled by the German DVD, but again I think that’s unlikely.
It’s probable that they’re a couple of UIs (useful idiots). I suspect somebody asked them to go to Salisbury that weekend, and told them where to go and what to do. Since GO2 was responsible for the attack on the Skripals, and GO2 work for the DVD, it is reasonable to presume that the request came from the DVD, but there is no way it would have gone from Dachau directly. These boys are way too junior for that.
Senator John McCain
Gordon Duff, and other VT contributors who were there, will have their own comments to make on McCain’s record in ‘Nam. Take it from me, he was no hero.
Ben Fulford has made the interesting suggestion that McCain was executed, i.e. that his brain tumor was induced. Ouch! It’s not impossible – the Department of Justice is so corrupt, no offense intended, and so penetrated, that a fair trial was never going to be possible. It is possible, just, that the late Senator for the Mob, sorry Arizona, was whacked. It is also just possible that ONI tried to whack him way back in ’67.
John McCain should have been given a fair court-martial and shot, nicely of course, following the tragic fire aboard the USS Forrestal (CVA-59) on July 29th, 1967, which cost the lives of 134 fine sailors. McCain was very close to that incident, so close in fact that he later claimed that the rogue 5” Zuni rocket from the F-4B which started the incident hit his A-4. It didn’t, but McCain’s A-4 was parked next door.
Sinking a US carrier off ‘Nam was a major DVD ambition during the war. They were desperate to relieve the pressure on Hanoi. Figures vary, but a full-size US attack carrier can have 4-6,000 souls aboard. Forrestal’s peacetime complement was 4,142, but she would carry more in wartime. The Forrestal class as designed had provision for 750,000 US gallons of aviation fuel (that’s way more than a Ford Pinto) and 1,800 tons of ordnance.
The German intent, clearly, was to fireball the Forrestal. They knew the US Navy would be lucky to get half her crew off. McCain’s father, an admiral at the time (he later became CINCPAC) may well have been in the loop – like father, like son. The attack on the Forrestal was carefully planned.
That it failed was nothing to do with poor planning. The sabotage of the F-4B and the A-4’s drop tank was skilfully done. In theory, the resulting fire was uncontainable and should have led to the loss of the ship.
The DVD reckoned without the courage and skill of the Forrestal’s damage control parties, however. They also reckoned without the daring of the commander of the USS Rupertus (DD-851), which closed to within 20 feet of the carrier, cooling her magazines and stopping the stores from cooking off. She also rescued men from the water and helped fight the fires. She did great work.
The saving of the Forrestal was an outstanding example of damage control and fine seamanship. Not for the last time German intelligence underestimated the US Navy. You guys stayed in the war, and the US Navy’s carriers stayed on Yankee Station.
The Janet and John version of events released to Congress and the public would not have fooled the ONI. It was for the consumption of idiots only – editors of the New York Times, CBS anchor-men, Senators, and Congressmen. That sort of idiot.
A serious inquiry would have been carried out by ONI. I believe it fingered McCain, whose grandfather had worked for the Japanese in World War II. (I know he was wearing the uniform of the US Navy, but he was working for the Japanese.) As COMAIRSOPAC McCain Snr pulled the air patrols which led to Allied defeat in the Battle of Savo Island. British Rear-Admiral Victor Crutchley VC, a fine fighting admiral, who had commanded HMS Warspite in the Second Battle of Narvik in 1940, got the blame, but the defeat was largely down to McCain. Admiral Crutchley, rightly, was not relieved of his command and was later promoted.
I suspect that in 1967 the ONI had the name of a McCain (at least one) down against this latest disaster as well. McCain’s shootdown over North Vietnam in October may not have been entirely unexpected. With a DVD asset in charge of the Pentagon (Robert McNamara) a court martial was out of the question. Had McCain been killed it wouldn’t have been the first time that an embarrassment had been conveniently disposed of in combat.
You can forget McCain’s own account of what went on in the Hanoi Hilton. Hell, there were probably guests in the Washington Hilton getting worse treatment. I think readers will find Gordon Duff a more reliable source.
It will be some time before the public learns the truth, sadly. They certainly won’t get it from the MSM, or by listening to Obama’s eulogy. (When I heard this week that some university had given ‘von’ Obama a prize for ethics in government I had assumed it was the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, but, no, it turned out that it was an American university!).
My battle with the Bar Standards Board
As regular readers may have guessed, I’ve had a few distractions in recent weeks! My three-day Disciplinary Tribunal starts on Wednesday, at 9 Gray’s Inn Square, at 1030 am. (It’s a public hearing.)
Dell has finally pulled the rug from under the police and the Crown Prosecution Service by giving the serial number of my hard drive to my computer expert. It doesn’t match the prosecution’s number, of course. I’ll let you know what happens, but no responsible prosecutor could now defend the indecent images charge. It’s been blown out of the water, and it takes the bomb hoax charge down with it since they held it over me to deter me from cross-examining prosecution witnesses.
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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