It’s been a bad fortnight for the Bad Guys and a good one for the Good Guys. Hooray! No fewer than two evil dictators have been badly undermined.
One might even be dead. I had planned on writing about the problems the dastardly ‘Hun’ is having with his Ebola campaign, but that will now be the next column.
The first evil dictator to have come a cropper is the guy with the funny hairstyle — he would of course say in response that at least he has hair — Kim Jong-Un. Having whacked his uncle, it rather looks as though his uncle’s supporters may have whacked him.
Like the Norwegian Blue, he may already have fallen off his perch, i.e. have become an ex-dictator. He has not been seen at all this last week. The media have been briefed that he’s had an operation on his ankles, having become so fat he had trouble walking.
That doesn’t sound like a briefing from a Jong-Un loyalist. Indeed, it’s as suspicious as a medical briefing from the White House to the effect that Michelle Obama was having an operation on his Adam’s Apple. That was a humorous observation by the way – I am neutral on the Michelle Obama gender issue.
Norwegian blue
My analysis is that we have a coup in North Korea. It is however too early to say whether or not it has been successful. As for who is behind it, again it’s too early to say — a powerful faction inside the North Korean military, yes, but probably also a large gold-owning family in Korea, and possibly a faction in China. There is no way that China would be neutral.
My guess is that Peking are backing the coup, whilst the PLA, who shot down MH370, are opposed.
The second ‘evil dictator’ to have run into trouble in the last 14 days, emphasising that the description ‘evil dictator’ is tongue-in-cheek of course, is the UK’s Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood. Prime Minister Cameron is only a figurehead – he doesn’t have any real power. He probably doesn’t even do his own boxes. He’s the monkey, and Heywood’s the organ-grinder, no offense to either intended.
I don’t wish to do the man an injustice, but Heywood is believed to be in favour of British membership of the EU. That cause has taken a severe knock with UKIP’s triumph on Thursday night in the Clacton-on-Sea by-election.
They romped home by a massive 12,000 votes — their share of the vote being just under 60%. Since their candidate was an uncompromising – and very nice – conservative, that should put an end to all this hysterical nonsense about winning over floating voters being the key to winning elections.
Jeremy Heywood
Allow me to explain, dear readers. Despite a rigorous selection procedure, designed to exclude candidates of integrity with conservative political principles from standing in the Conservative interest, one sneaked through. His name is Douglas Carswell.
No doubt Conservative Campaign HQ are already conducting an internal inquiry as to how the modern Tory Party could possibly have selected such a man of integrity to represent it in Parliament.
Until fairly recently Doug Carswell genuinely believed in David Cameron’s bogus promise to hold a referendum. When he learnt – as he obviously did – that Cameron has agreed with Heywood to resign after the failure of the spoof EU reform negotiations, he did the honourable thing and resigned.
Having resigned he created a new political convention, now being talked about as the ‘Carswell Convention’, whereby an MP who crosses the floor should resign, unless a General Election is pending, and fight a by-election.
Doug Carswell’s brilliant victory in Clacton has changed the landscape. Like a DVD-triggered tsunami, UKIP is threatening to wash over the pro-EU parties, each of whose leaders sees keeping Britain in the German sphere of influence as more important that winning an election.
To have a political party with a charismatic leader willing to stand up for the British interest has come as a real shock to them. They tend to see politics as a zero-sum game, which in a country without Aussie-style compulsory voting, is absurd, not least when turnout is as low as 60%. Many of those who voted for Doug Carswell will not have voted at all in the last election, and given the unappetising, pro-EU policies of the then three main parties, who can blame them?
Doug Carswell
The logic of a UKIP/Tory deal is now compelling. By waiting so long, the Tory Party has ensured that this will be a deal on UKIP terms, i.e. one which encompasses leaving the hated EU. That in turn means dumping David ‘von’ Cameron, our Brussels-loving leader. He’s going anyway, so what’s the point of keeping him?
If we go into the General Election as we are, with Cameron at the wheel — or rather, since we are a rudderless ship, sulking in his cabin — Labour will win, with a working majority.
That would mean another 5 years in the EU, at a minimum cost to UK Inc, in 2013 prices, of $3.5 trillion, with the prospect of at least another million EU migrants flooding across our undefended borders, taking away another million jobs from British workers.
Thousands of acres of Green Belt land would have to be built upon to accommodate them, and the Cabinet Office’s uglification program would continue unabated. It is a hateful prospect, which is bound to lead to social unrest, as an unpopular government rammed the EU down the throats of a resentful populace.
Some of those migrants would no doubt be killers, like Arnis Zalkans, the probable murderer of poor little Alice Gross, the slight and defenceless teenage girl savagely murdered, when her whole life was before her. I am well aware that her distraught elder sister does not want anyone making political points on the back of her sister’s murder.
I have every sympathy for Alice’s family. Overwhelmed as they are with grief, it is understandable that they cannot see the bigger picture. However Alice has gone, sadly, and thanks to Zalkans she’s not coming back.
Clacton-on-Sea
I am thinking of the next girl who encounters a merciless, slobbering, European killer whilst walking by our beautiful canals, or through our wonderful public parks.
There are two aspects to this. The EU says that we must let European murderers and other violent scum across our borders, free to murder at will. We cannot even deport them if, like Zalkans, they carry out sex attacks and their innocent victims are too terrified to give evidence against them.
EU
The notorious European Court of Human Rights says that we cannot deter murderers like Zalkans with the death penalty. Had Zalkans been arrested and tried (our grossly inefficient and incompetent police have made sure that won’t happen) the trial judge would have been limited to life imprisonment, with a fixed minimum period to serve. The European Convention on Human Rights, as amended by the Sixth Protocol, bans the death penalty.
Stained with the blood of young Alice, the EU and the ECHR say that we must continue to place the lives of our children at needless risk, not just from imported European killers, but from home-grown sex maniacs as well. Well, they can go to hell. We’re coming out of the EU, and we’re bringing back the death penalty.
I have no doubt that the shocking murder of Alice Gross by an imported European killer played its part in the verdict on the EU and the ECHR delivered by the people of Clacton on Thursday. The British people are angry at Europe, and rightly so. Europe would do well to pay heed.
If any European Commissar, sorry Commissioner, or ‘judge’ of the European Court of Human Rights, doubts what we are capable of when, as a nation, we rise up in righteous anger against our European enemies, they would do well to go and take the short tour of Dresden’s pre-war architecture. There is no long tour.
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The hanging of Arnis Zalkans
Arnis Zalkans found dead
There is much of forensic interest for the intelligence analyst in the strange death of Arnis Zalkans. He was found hanged in a park near Boston Manor, in West London, not far from the scene of his brutal crime.
Officially his badly decomposed body had been there for weeks, in a public park, which had already been searched by the Metropolitan Police. I know that in their defence they are saying that they are incompetent, and could not have been expected to find the body (at least that’s what I think they are saying).
However even with the pro-EU Boris Johnson as Mayor it is unusual to see dead bodies swinging from trees in London’s parks. It’s the sort of thing that passers-by notice, and, if they are law-abiding, report to the authorities, if only to make sure that the refuse goes in the right bin.
The police say they never saw the body. Smarter readers will already have spotted the flaw in that argument. Decomposed bodies tend to pong a bit — sorry if you’ve not yet had your tea. If you don’t believe me get up close, or try to, to a body which has been in the open for a few weeks, quietly, or not so quietly, decomposing. The smell is overpowering.
I can buy our useless police not spotting the body, even though it was supposedly hanging from a tree, but how come they never smelt it? Readers who are in law enforcement will I am sure accept that the smell of a decomposing body is the sort of thing that tends to grab their attention.
The answer of course is that the body was dumped where it was found, sometime after the last search. Not even our police are that stupid. The interesting question is, who whacked Arnie Zalkans?
This may be linkedto the questions of who brought him into Britain and why. The media are describing him as a ‘labourer’. They are however a bit short of employers. He also lived in a pretty expensive part of London, where you won’t buy a house for much under half a million bucks.
Partly because they’re a bit psychopathic themselves, German intelligence has always found roles for psychopaths. The SD, Abwehr and DVD are well up in the top ten list of employers of psychopaths in human history. I suspect that Zalkans was brought in by GO2, the DVD’s hated operation in London, and was one of their hired thugs.
Murdering human beings in cold blood at close quarters is not as easy as it sounds. You have to be an especially mean person in order to ignore the victim’s cries of despair and pain. You won’t find many psychopaths for hire at your local Jobcentre. As a proven killer, who had been done favors by the Latvian legal and political establishment, Zalkans would have had an attractive resume for GO2. Maybe that’s why he was let out of jail in Latvia so early.
One thing Bad Guy intel agencies do not want is their hired guns killing on their own account. This danger is particularly acute with proven killers of women, like Zalkans. They see a pretty young girl and cannot help themselves. G02 may have hanged him, or may even have asked the DVD to do it in Latvia (shifting dead bodies across Europe is easy enough to do these days – you just stick them in a refrigerated container and drive across Europe’s undefended frontiers).
The Latvians were old German allies, remember. There were quite a few Latvians in the SS and Wehrmacht in World War II. GO2 and the DVD may also have wanted to silence him. A trial might have proved embarrassing.
Another possibility is that Brussels and the Cabinet Office may have wanted to get the bad news out of the way in one go. Murdering Zalkans — as a murderer himself he could hardly be heard to complain too loudly about the due process issues — would have been a neat way of avoiding a trial and all the associated bad publicity for the EU, and with a General Election coming. If so, at least we should be grateful they didn’t leave empty packets of co-proxamol by the body!
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Top Gear go into Reverse
I see plucky Jeremy Clarkson and the Top Gear boys had to reverse out of Argentina in a hurry, after someone at the BBC set them up with a dodgy number plate guaranteed to remind the paranoid locals of their crushing defeat in the Falklands War. Since nobody died, thank goodness (Clarkson is a popular and patriotic figure and may have been sanctioned by GO2 or the Cabinet Office) the episode has its amusing side.
There is however a serious strategic lesson to be drawn, apart from avoiding Patagonia for your next vacation. Argentina still claims the Falkland Islands as hers. As I explain in Spyhunter there was no peace treaty at the end of the first Falklands War. We should start making preparations to resist a second Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands and South Georgia.
The Falklands should be reinforced, and the Royal Navy’s South Atlantic Station restored, with a two-star in command, as after the Battle of the River Plate in 1939, where the Falklands played a key role, offering sanctuary to the badly damaged 8” heavy cruiser HMS Exeter. We need more ships, fighters, AAA and an AWACS down there.
The whole of Latin America should sit up and take notice after this latest episode of Top Gear. They should assume all-out war between Great Britain and Argentina at some time in the next decade.
They should not assume that we will be as gentle with the Argies as we were last time, indeed they should assume strategic bombing of Argentina’s military-industrial complex, initially by Tomahawk land attack missiles, followed up by RAF Mount Pleasant based Tornados. The problem with only inflicting light casualties on the enemy is that sometimes he just doesn’t get the point.
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Oleg Ivanovsky
Oleg Ivanovsky
I would like to mark the sad departure from the scene of the great Russian rocket scientist Oleg Ivanosky. A true pioneer of spaceflight — one of the support team for Yuri Gagarin’s historic first flight into space — his place in humanity’s long and wonderful story is forever secure. We can best pay tribute to Oleg and the other pioneers of space exploration, both Russian and American, by picking up the baton and going ever deeper into space.
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Classic Bond Move – The Man With The Golden Gun (1974), dir. Guy Hamilton
Sir Roger Moore’s second outing as 007, the movie is a long way from the book, which is set in Jamaica. It is however a great movie, with the very talented Sir Christopher Lee as the baddie, Scaramanga, the man who liked to use golden bullets. Hervé Villechaize is also very good, as his helper, Nick Nack. The rather lovely Britt Ekland plays Miss Goodnight, Bond’s secretary in the books (Miss Moneypenny of course worked for M).
Set during the energy crisis the movie was highly topical, Bond’s mission being to recover the fictional ‘Solex agitator’, a device for converting solar power into electricity. The science is more science fiction than fact, but it’s all good fun.
For aviation buffs there’s the interesting and fairly rare Republic Seabee, an attractive amphibian about as far away from Republic’s other models (like the P-47 Thunderbolt) as you could get, and still be an airplane. There’s also the famous carplane, which actually flew, although I am sure the transition from automobile to plane took a bit longer than in the movie.
Christopher Lee
Sheriff J W makes another cameo appearance, and is good value, as always. The chase scene with the AMC Hornet, with the spiral jump, is justly famous. There’s nothing computer-generated about that scene, except the computations for the jump of course.
This is the only Bond movie where AMC got to supply the cars. Their cars weren’t in fact that bad, and it’s a shame they went out of business, sacrificed to Washington’s desire to appease Japan by having unfair tariffs.
There’s also an appearance by the great ocean liner RMS Queen Elizabeth, at least what was left of her after the Chinese set fire to her in Hong Kong Harbour. It was a clever fictional location for the Secret Service’s Far East office. Notice I said ‘Secret Service’, not ‘MI6’. MI6 have always tried to lay claim to 007, but Ian Fleming never worked for them. He was always Naval Intelligence and MI18.
M was modeled on Fleming’s wartime boss, Admiral Godfrey, not Mansfield Cumming, the enthusiastic but not terribly bright (with respect – he was a nice chap, with a great taste in ink) first head of ‘Six’.
The first ‘C’ was chosen by the wily ‘Hun’ as he didn’t pose a threat to their men Asquith, Lloyd George and Hankey. In the Bond books his service is usually referred to as “the Secret Service”, not MI6. Fleming’s ‘00’ section was a play on GO2, of course. What we know as the COREA or Correa Group may have the internal DVD designation of GO1.
If you haven’t seen The Man With the Golden Gun for a while it’s well worth another look.No book review this week, I’m afraid, another if saying I haven’t had time to re-read Live and Let Die (the books and the movies are way out of sequence!)
I am sorry to say that the fine character Angus Lennie has passed. He will be known to all y’all as Flying Officer Archibald, a.k.a. ‘The Mole’, who keeps company with the immortal Steve McQueen in The Great Escape. He’s the guy the ‘Jerries’ machine-gun on the wire. He also starred in two series of Doctor Who, including one of my favorites, The Ice Warriors (1967), with Patrick Troughton, which I can remember watching when I was 11.
October 11th 2014
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Spyhunter
Michael Shrimpton is a barrister, called to the Bar in London 1983. He is a specialist in National Security and Constitutional Law, Strategic Intelligence and Counterterrorism.
Michael was formerly an Adjunct Professor of Intelligence Studies in what was then the Department of National Security, Intelligence and Space Studies at the American Military University.
Michael’s ground-breaking, 700 page intelligence text “Spyhunter: The Secret History of German Intelligence” is available on Kindle.
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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