Oswald Le Winter

[Wombaticus Rex]

First and foremost, Oswald is dead, so 2013 is a good time to consider his gnarled legacy.

Via: http://thetandd.com/news/local/obituari ... f887a.html

Oswald Le Winter 81, of Holly Hill, died peacefully Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2013, after an extended illness. His loved ones will hold a private memorial service in San Francisco. Please sign the families’ online guestbook at http://www.dukesharleyfuneralhome.com

Mr. Le Winter was born April 2, 1931, in Vienna, Austria a son the late Louis and Regina Mandel Le Winter. He received a B.A. Degree from University of California, Berkley and a Master Degree from San Francisco State College. Mr. Le Winter worked as an English instructor at Penn State University. In 1969 he was named vice president and director of marketing at Systems Simulations, Inc. He was an accomplished author and poet having written a number of books including Shakespeare in Europe (1970), Desmantelar a America (2001), Democracia e Secretismo (2002), Ages of Chaos & Fury (2005) & More Atoms of Memory ( 2006). He received the International Rilke Prize in Poetry (1997) and appeared in two Allan Francovich movies, Gladio (1992) & The Maltese Double Cross (1994).

He left behind a grateful family that will always cherish his memory.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Via: http://jclass.umd.edu/archive/newshoax/ ... DPoet.html

Tinker, Tailor, Poet, Spy?

He's Played the Part of an Ex-CIA Agent for Years Now. It's a Convincing Act

The Washington Post
February 15, 2001
By Vernon Loeb and Bill Miller

Sitting on the patio outside a luxury Austrian hotel, John Macnamara listened intently as a man he knew as "George Mearah" spun an incredible story: The British spy service was behind the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed, and for $ 15 million, he could get access to the intelligence documents that would prove it.

It was April 22, 1998, nearly eight months after that horrific car crash in a Paris tunnel. A onetime supervisor at Scotland Yard, Macnamara had been investigating the deaths for his boss, Mohamed Fayed, whose son had been courting Diana. Fayed -- who openly expressed doubts that the car wreck was an accident -- was offering big money to people who had information, and the meeting with Mearah was set up after middlemen first offered the telltale documents to Macnamara several weeks before.

Macnamara calmly sipped his soda that sunny afternoon, while Mearah kept talking about CIA telexes that would show the U.S. spy agency knew of the murderous plot. Mearah said he used to be in the CIA, had helpful contacts there, and assured Macnamara he could deliver. At one point he wanted $ 20 million for the materials, but now, he said, $ 15 million would do.

"Fifteen million dollars?" Macnamara recalls asking. "There just aren't that many U.S. dollars in Vienna. Have you any idea of the volume of money you're talking about? I'd need a porter to carry the suitcases!"

"Four million," Mearah replied.

They agreed to meet that evening. But unbeknown to Mearah, Macnamara had alerted the FBI, CIA and Austrian authorities. Undercover law enforcement authorities were on the patio that afternoon. And they were at the bar of the Ambassador Hotel that night, where they arrested Mearah on criminal charges.

Soon after that, the truth came out. Instead of negotiating with a renegade CIA operative, Macnamara had been dealing with Oswald LeWinter, a poet and former literature professor who had been posing as an intelligence operative -- with often spectacular success -- for the better part of two decades.

The story LeWinter was peddling would have made Hollywood proud: Dodi Fayed and Princess Diana had been assassinated by British intelligence forces because Buckingham Palace was incensed by the relationship. Speeding and drunk-driving by chauffeur Henri Paul, who also died, weren't to blame, no matter what the French authorities were saying. The CIA hadn't participated in the plot -- but had sent a telex from its Langley headquarters that referred MI6, Britain's spy service, to a Mossad hit squad. LeWinter had proof of it all -- the internal CIA documents obtained directly from CIA agents, even an intelligence report that would reveal Princess Diana was pregnant when she died.

It was all a hoax. To the uninitiated, the documents were ingenious copies. But to anyone who knew anything about the CIA, they were obvious forgeries.

LeWinter, 69, may not be a spy, but he clearly is one of the most brazen confidence men on Earth.

He made his public debut in the late 1980s as a key source in the "October Surprise" hoax -- an allegation that Republicans had tried to delay the release of American hostages in Iran to hurt Jimmy Carter's reelection bid. It became such a serious political issue that a congressional commission was impaneled to lay the matter to rest as a bogus conspiracy.

Unmasked by Congress, LeWinter went on to glory in his fictitious persona as a CIA operative, starring in a prime-time British documentary on the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. Much of his allure undoubtedly stems from a Zelig-like quality he has long possessed for befriending important and interesting people, from novelist Saul Bellow to Czech spy Karl Koecher.

"The guy is a chameleon," says Vincent Cannistraro, former operations director at the CIA's Counterterrorist Center. "He can show up and pretend to be anyone."

Columbia University research scholar Gary Sick -- a former National Security Council official who cited LeWinter in his book "October Surprise" before repudiating him as a fraud -- calls his intelligence cons "pernicious."

"He picks a high-profile issue and portrays himself as having inside knowledge, which he almost certainly does not," says Sick. "And as time goes on, he is doing it to get money."

His attempted shakedown of Fayed was both audacious and personally disastrous: He was imprisoned for almost three years in Austria for fraud, getting out just before Christmas. But that's far from the end of the matter.

Fayed, Macnamara and their attorneys in Washington remain incensed by the U.S. government's recent decision not to bring criminal charges against LeWinter or others who worked with him to peddle the fake documents.

Indeed, Mark S. Zaid, one of Fayed's Washington lawyers, wonders whether LeWinter might actually have served the CIA in some capacity that the agency would just as soon forget. How could the government just drop its criminal investigation, he asks, after urging Fayed at one point to meet the document sellers' demand for $ 25,000 -- so the government could get LeWinter and his associates for wire fraud, if nothing else?

"The U.S. government promised [Fayed] protection and then abandoned him -- and has no interest in righting the wrongs that it created," Zaid says. "That's where this case smells." Adds Fayed: "I just can't believe this can happen in the United States. In Austria they locked the guy up . . . because it was black and white."

The story begins in March 1998. Douglas Marvin, a Washington lawyer working for Fayed, listens in astonishment to a call from Hollywood attorney Keith Fleer. Fleer says he is in contact with certain "principals" who have CIA documents showing that MI6 assassinated Dodi and Diana at the behest of Buckingham Palace.

Over the next three weeks, Fleer and one of his associates in the deal, George Williamson, a former San Francisco Chronicle reporter, negotiated by phone with Marvin and Macnamara, Fayed's chief of security, about how much the documents would cost, who would turn them over, where the transfer would take place and how Fayed's people would verify that they were authentic.

Fleer made it clear that the "principals" would not turn the documents over in the United States, first suggesting that the transfer take place in international waters off the coast of Mexico. When Fayed refused, he suggested Europe. Fleer also said the "principals" had three documents and the ability to "procure" a CIA investigative report on the crash from others at the agency for a "seven-figure" amount.

"They will be able to show that the palace was aware of the desired assassination," Fleer told Macnamara in a recorded April 2 conversation, according to transcripts Fayed turned over to prosecutors.

"What is the actual risk to your people -- are they serving intelligence people or are they retired or what?" Macnamara asked.

"They are not retired," Fleer said.

"Oh, so they are serving," Macnamara said.

Less than two weeks later, after Fleer asked that $ 25,000 in expense money be wired to a firm in New Mexico, Fayed's representatives went to the FBI, the CIA and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington. Prosecutors authorized a sting and expressed no objection to the $ 25,000 payment, hoping the transaction could be used to bring wire fraud charges, according to Fayed's attorneys.

"What they want to do is meet in Vienna, a week from tomorrow," Fleer told Macnamara on April 14, the same day Williamson picked up the $ 25,000 in New Mexico.

Six days later -- two days before the parties were scheduled to meet in Vienna -- Williamson told Macnamara that a CIA officer would show him one of the documents for authentication.

"But what will the document be, George?" Macnamara asked, according to the transcript.

"One of the telexes," Williamson said.

"What telex? Now this is dealing with the assassination of Dodi and Diana?" Macnamara said.

"Yes, yes, yes, yes," Williamson said.

"And it does involve the British intelligence, doesn't it?"

"The answer is yes, best not talk too much on the phone," Williamson said.

Fleer's attorneys say their client was acting only as a transactional entertainment lawyer and never vouched for either the authenticity of the documents or the "principals," explaining to Macnamara that he would have a chance to authenticate the documents before any money was paid.

Williamson said in an interview that he was merely passing on a tip about the involvement of MI6 in the deaths of Dodi Fayed and Princess Diana that he'd picked up from LeWinter, whom he had known over the years and considered a credible intelligence source.

On the day of the climactic meeting in Vienna, Macnamara waited in a cafe outside the Ambassador Hotel in central Vienna. At 2:30, a man wearing an overcoat, sports jacket and sweater approached him and said he was a former CIA officer named "George Mearah."

The man spoke for half an hour in great detail: There had been a meeting in London between an MI6 man, Spelding, and a CIA man, Harrison. Spelding asked Harrison for help in assassinating Dodi Fayed. Harrison cabled back to Langley, but all the CIA was willing to do was put MI6 in contact with an Israeli Mossad "K Team" -- a hit squad -- in Geneva.

When he was finished, "Mearah" gave Macnamara a number to call at 5 p.m. to arrange another meeting in which a document could be authenticated. Austrian authorities immediately traced the number to the Bamberg Hotel in Vienna's red-light district, where Oswald LeWinter was registered.

Macnamara and "Mearah" -- LeWinter -- met again at 6:30, this time in the AmbassadorHotel's bar, where Austrian authorities arrested the bogus secret agent. As they wrestled him out of the bar, LeWinter screamed that he and other CIA operatives would kill Macnamara and Fayed. A short while later, authorities searched LeWinter's hotel room and found a pile of forged CIA documents, $ 10,000 in cash and a gas pistol with 25 rounds of ammunition.

The supposed CIA documents included a memo from the Directorate of Operations' Domestic Collection Division -- a unit that hasn't existed for 20 years.

Who is Oswald LeWinter? This is not an easy question. Born in Vienna and raised in Brooklyn by Jewish immigrant parents who ran an upholstery store, LeWinter early on displayed on uncanny knack for befriending -- those who know him best might say manipulating -- those he met.

The FBI says his masquerading dates back to at least 1953, when he was arrested for illegally wearing a Marine Corps uniform -- a federal offense -- to hitch a ride on a Coast Guard plane to Florida.

As a New York college student and aspiring poet in the 1950s, he became friends with novelist Saul Bellow, according to someone who knew him well earlier in his life but does not want to be identified.

By the late 1950s he had moved to California; he finished his BA at the University of California at Berkeley, received a master's at San Francisco State, got married and moved back to New York. He worked on a Ph.D. at Columbia, edited a book called "Shakespeare in Europe," for which he achieved some acclaim, and won various awards for poetry, according to Contemporary Authors, an authoritative reference journal. By 1965, Contemporary Authors reports, he was working as a professor at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

But he lost his job at Marist in a dispute with his superior in the late 1960s, recalled the person who knew him well, and wound up working for a discount travel broker in New York City.

LeWinter was arrested in London in 1971 after authorities caught him with a New York City police detective's badge and papers suggesting he was a diplomat. One certificate proclaimed he was the Honorable Dr. Oswald LeWinter, ambassador extraordinary, who should be afforded diplomatic privileges because he was with the Sovereign Order of the Knights of Malta. British authorities jailed LeWinter briefly before deciding not to pursue charges.

By the early 1980s, LeWinter was divorced, working as a University of Maryland professor teaching psychology to American military personnel in Germany.

"I knew him for about five minutes when he told me he was a CIA officer," said one U.S. government official, who befriended him at the time and remains in contact with him to this day, playing the part of LeWinter's confessor.

The official, now back in the United States, calls LeWinter "a total fraud" but considers him relatively harmless -- "if you don't believe anything he tells you."

Not long after, LeWinter bought a big house in Wurzburg with his new German wife, the official recalls. In 1984, LeWinter was arrested by German authorities and extradited to Newark, N.J., where he pleaded guilty of taking part of a $ 100 million scheme to smuggle into the United States a chemical used in the illegal manufacture of methamphetamine. Bellow wrote a letter to the judge on LeWinter's behalf, vouching for his earlier literary gifts.

Imprisoned at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, LeWinter met and befriended Koecher, a Czech spy caught working as a translator for the CIA whom U.S. authorities eventually traded for Soviet Jewish dissident Natan Sharansky. Koecher obviously left a big impression on LeWinter: As he prepared to shake Fayed down years later in Vienna, Koecher was on hand -- lured to Vienna by his former prison mate. Koecher, who booked LeWinter's room at the Bamberg, later denied any involvement in the plot and said he left before LeWinter even met with Macnamara.

After serving two years of a six-year sentence -- LeWinter now claims he was planted in prison by the CIA to debrief Koecher -- LeWinter returned to Germany, married another German woman and set himself up as a psychoanalyst.

His cons were soon to reach new and dangerous proportions.

In 1988, LeWinter, using the alias "Razine," emerged as a key source for at least two authors and numerous journalists in the "October Surprise" hoax that morphed into a political scandal. The plot line was straight out of Hollywood: Members of the Reagan campaign in 1980 allegedly cut a deal with Iranian officials to delay the release of U.S. hostages in Iran until after the presidential election -- thus preventing an "October Surprise" by the Carter administration to bolster its election chances.

LeWinter presented himself as a CIA operative who provided security during a meeting in Paris that involved William Casey, soon to become CIA director; vice presidential candidate George Bush; and CIA official Donald Gregg.

A congressional task force concluded in 1993 that the whole thing was a hoax. While reluctant to be interviewed under oath, LeWinter told the commission's chief attorney, former federal prosecutor E. Lawrence Barcella Jr., that his "October Surprise" allegations "had been a complete fabrication."

"LeWinter stated that he began to construct the story during his incarceration in 1986-87 at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, where he was serving a sentence for federal drug conspiracy charges," the commission reported. "He said he felt he had been wrongly treated by the federal government and wanted to extract revenge. LeWinter stated that his idea of extracting revenge became a preoccupation, and that he started researching and investigation. . . . He even began to study Farsi, reading Persian poetry, to sharpen his language skills."

"A renowned Czechoslovak spy" -- Koecher -- "was housed just a few cells away," the commission said. "From conversations with him, LeWinter obtained added texture and background for the story that was developing in his head."

No sooner had he been unmasked by Barcella, however, than LeWinter popped up again as a longtime CIA officer in a 1995 British documentary on the bombing of Pan Am 103 called "The Maltese Double Cross," which exonerated two Libyan intelligence officers -- one of whom finally was convicted in the Netherlands earlier this month.

The documentary, which aired on Britain's Channel 4, presented LeWinter as an officer who served in the CIA from 1968 to 1985. LeWinter helped bolster the documentary's thesis that U.S. and British authorities engaged in a coverup after the bombing and may have known about it in advance and failed to intervene. The U.S. government denounced the documentary and LeWinter's claim to be a CIA agent.

LeWinter surfaced again in 1997 offering evidence about the Kennedy assassination. The final report of the congressionally established Assassination Records Review Board states that a researcher contacted the panel to determine whether LeWinter was the CIA's deputy director of counterespionage, as he was claiming at the time.

"FBI and CIA files indicate that LeWinter is a well-known fabricator with an interest in intelligence and law enforcement activities who frequently makes claims related to sensational or unusual news events," the panel reported. "The records that the Review Board examined did not show that Oswald LeWinter was ever employed by or worked for the CIA in any capacity."

Within two months of LeWinter's arrest in Vienna, Fayed became concerned that U.S. authorities were losing interest in pursuing charges against LeWinter and the others. Attorney Terrence O'Donnell, who worked with David E. Kendall at Williams & Connolly representing Fayed, expressed his client's dismay and sense of "lost momentum" in a June 1998 letter to a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office.

In the letter, O'Donnell, former general counsel at the Pentagon, said: "There is no innocent middle ground here. . . . If they believed [the evidence] was not genuine, then, of course, they were participants in an elaborate fraud. If instead, they believed the 'evidence' to be genuine, then they were participating in the theft or trafficking of government property."

O'Donnell and Kendall finally filed a civil fraud suit in July 1999 in Los Angeles against LeWinter, Fleer, Williamson and another man. But a judge dismissed the suit in October 1999, ruling there was no fraud because Fleer, in his conversations with Macnamara, hadn't guaranteed the authenticity of either the documents or the "principals" and had negotiated an arrangement in which Fayed could authenticate the documents before he paid for them.

Despite the setback, Fayed's attorneys continued to push for criminal charges -- and the U.S. Attorney's Office assured them the probe was ongoing. "Your client, Mr. Al-Fayed, certainly appears to have been the victim of criminal activity," U.S. Attorney Wilma A. Lewis said in a December 1999 letter to Kendall.

But finally, in a meeting with Kendall last summer, prosecutors changed their position. LeWinter, they explained, was the prime mover in the scam and was already in jail. All the others, interviewed by FBI agents, asserted a belief that the documents might have been real.

Which leaves Fayed wondering if there was some truth behind the scam after all. He called LeWinter "a gangster, a crook," but said he now believes much of his story. Otherwise, he says, the United States would have taken action to prosecute the men. "They know they have covered up," he said.

There is no doubt that both the CIA and the FBI sank considerable resources into the Fayed case, sending investigators to Vienna to watch the meeting between Macnamara and the man with the CIA "documents." In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Zaid on Fayed's behalf, the FBI acknowledged having 1,500 pages of documents on the probe.

But U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials say their reasons for abandoning the case are far less mysterious than either Fayed or Zaid imagines.

One senior CIA official scoffs at the notion that the agency has anything to hide. "We had to take these allegations seriously," says the official. "Once we determined the documents were forgeries, there was no reason to be there anymore."

Indeed, the CIA went out of its way to disavow any relationship with LeWinter in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Fayed's attorneys to obtain classified CIA documents pertaining to Dodi Fayed and Princess Diana.

"Although the FOIA does not require an agency to provide you with information, only records, the Agency, as a matter of its discretion, will advise you now that the CIA has never had any manner of employment, operational or contractual relationship with Oswald LeWinter whatsoever."

The probe officially ended in September 2000, when U.S. Attorney Lewis sent a one-paragraph letter to Kendall. "Although we appreciate your tireless resolve on behalf of your client, Mr. Al-Fayed, there is, in our view, insufficient credible evidence to mount a criminal prosecution here."

LeWinter walked out of jail in Austria two days before Christmas, a free man. In an e-mail exchange last week, a correspondent identifying himself as LeWinter remains unapologetic about the Fayed case, insisting that he was not responsible for the forgeries.

"I received the copies of the documents from the leader of the operation the night before I was arrested," he writes.

He has nothing more to say about whom this "leader" might be, dismissing skepticism about his own CIA credentials. "I have been bona fided by a handful of people who KNOW," he writes. "Among them is a former Italian senator, a former German minister who had oversight powers and verified things via BND archives, and a number of former French and British intelligence officers. What may be obvious to you is not as obvious as you think."

Indeed, the 32 months he spent in an Austrian prison became yet another covert operation. "I was in touch with many old boys all over Europe running an investigation from inside the prison," he writes. "The results will be published as a novel, 'After the First Death.' It is the way I have chosen to tell what I discovered."

But LeWinter is not altogether unrepentant. He acknowledges hurting his children, "whom I love," with some of the stories he has told, and the price he says he's paid has been quite high.

"I am existing below the poverty level and I am seriously ill," he writes. "I'm not crying on your shoulder. Like Faulkner says in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 'I shall prevail.' But unlike Thomas More, I have no energy left to palaver with doubters. I'm grateful if I make it from morning until evening. I'm writing. I bear you no ill will. I've been maligned for a long time for the things I did but mostly for what I didn't do."

He will tell all, he promises, in an autobiography titled "For the Honor of Lying."

Asked about the meaning of the title, LeWinter says he lied for a cause. "I was honored for lying but damned for telling the truth," he writes. "I had the dubious honor of lying in the service of national security. You can believe that or not."

[Wombaticus Rex]

Via: viewtopic.php?p=426273#p426273

Amazing, thank you. I though Ledeen was simply a student of shitstory and an admirer of Italian Fascism with the bizarre notion that it was all about "Democratic Revolution."

His appearances in the BBC Timewatch series are in a whole new light now...guess it's time to re-re-re-rewatch now.

You probably already know about this, but when re-watching, it's worth knowing that Oswald LeWinter appears in it too - the notorious "hoaxer", whistleblower, or CIA disinformation specialist, depending on who you believe. He is one of the guys who appears in shadow, claiming to be a NATO colonel (which he isn't) if I remember right - he's sitting by an open balcony and looks like he's got a fake belly. I think that's him anyway. He's a truly odd player in this story - and in just about everything else.

He appeared in two of Francovich's CIA-centric films, apparently as part of an effort to discredit them, by later discreditting his own testimony by...um... discreditting himself. Hard to say how it was all meant to work, really, except the minute most people hear there's a known hoaxer involved in the production, who got himself past the researchers and the onto the screen, their brains happily shut down and they're prepared to throw out a lot of the other evidence (with relief) as being fake or slanted. To me, the fact that somebody (a possible CIA agent, or asset) wormed their way into the film to throw a spanner in it's works just makes the rest of it all the more convincing. And it's not like anybody faked-up Giulio Andreotti's revelations in the Italian Chamber of Deputies, though given his nature we do have to wonder why he chose to do that in the first place.

It's also possible LeWinter is a creature of the LaRouche intelligence network (not that that would exclude him from being CIA as well) as he was involved in promoting the October Surprise allegations very early on, not long after it was first broken in the pages of EIR. Gary Sick had to publically renounce him, after using him for a source in "October Surprise", so he's been planting himself into conspiracies for a long time and doing his best to make them seem less believable to the general public.

Some people now believe that parts of Gladio, whether by accident or design, later morphed into things like the Dutroux network (for want of a better name for it) and other similar paedo/extreme right/intelligence/blackmail/Brownstone groups with apparent state links and protections. I think some of those ideas might come from LaRouche as well, though - weren't there suggestions here that the Project for the Exposure of Hidden Institutions and the Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics (who did some great work on tying Gladio to the Dutroux group and Michel Nihoul - though without providing any verifiable direct links) were LaRouchian fronts, or at least took funding from one of his orgs?

It's all hella confusing. Finding verifiable info on a guy like LeWinter is near impossible too. For instance, this craziness is on his wiki page:

He almost certainly was the man who purchased an almost random set of clothing in Paul Gauci's shop in Malta, which was found at the site of the Pan Am 103 crash. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oswald_Le_Winter

Apart from the fact that it was Tony Gauci's shop, not Paul's (whoever he is), just WHAT THE FUUuu....?!

So yeah... disinfo and confusion. There's a lot of it about if you're looking into what Gladio got up to post-P2, and it's at-first abortive, but now successful and thriving, takeover of the Italian government, judiciary, and media.

Via: viewtopic.php?p=355589#p355589

I remember him in that documentary, he seemed somehow dishonest to me at the time.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style ... 61637.html

"LeWinter is an example of a brilliant mind gone to the bad," former CIA counter-terrorist expert Vincent Cannistraro said in a conversation about the man two years ago. "His father was a professor at Columbia University. He grew up in a New York City suburb with all the privileges. It is amazing how far he has fallen."

Beyond this, however, facts about Mr LeWinter are hard to come by. When I dealt with him in 1996 - spending a week with him at his Mojave Desert home in California - for a Channel 4 documentary that never made it into production, the psychological warfare he waged against me left me uncertain about almost everything concerning him.

Spy buffs know Mr LeWinter as a former CIA operative. A Vienna tabloid last week quoted Rodney Stich, author of Disavow - a CIA Saga of Betrayal, as saying that Mr LeWinter worked for more than 30 years for the CIA under the codename "Razine"; he was recruited in the Sixties, during the Vietnam war, as a college professor, and acted first as an informer on students.

Mr LeWinter told me he had become involved with the CIA while a college professor. "I was invited to go on a lecture tour to eastern Europe, to talk about Shakespeare," he said. "The CIA approached me. I became one of their fish." He claimed he had become a deputy director of the agency under the late James Angleton, its legendarily paranoid counter-espionage expert. But a former Washington DC police intelligence chief pointed out flaws in his account of his CIA career that cast serious doubt on this and other claims.

His personal life is also hard to pin down. He told me he had married an heiress to the Humble Oil fortune with whom he had two sons - one now a successful executive, the other a beach bum - but the marriage had foundered and in the Eighties he married a German woman, an executive at the German software firm SAP. They have a daughter.

He told me that from 1979 he worked for the CIA at Itac, the Brussels- based intelligence coordinating arm of Nato. In the Eighties he was arrested and convicted of drug dealing in Germany. His admission that he served a prison term in Germany - for moving amphetamines from Libya to the US - is qualified by his insistence that the operation was one of Oliver North's secret missions. It was after this miscarriage of justice, he said, that he became a renegade.

http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2004/06/ ... -moon.html

You probably don't know the name. You may recall, however, that there was a fellow who tried to sell a forged document to Mohammed Al Fayed. The document, which came at a very hefty price, allegedly revealed the ghastly truth behind the deaths of Al Fayed's son and Princess Diana. LeWinter was the man behind the scam; he was caught, and did time.

During the Vietnam war, LeWinter was a professor at U.C. Berkley -- an expert on Shakespeare, as I recall. He befriended at least one leader of the anti-war movement. At the same time, he was relaying info to the feds. In the years since, he has claimed to be either a general or an intelligence operative. Reportedly, he was friendly with CIA man George Cave.

Using the name "Razin," he provided researchers with "inside" info on the October Surprise scandal. Later, before a congressional committee, he admitted that he had been lying. Although the October Surprise story was confirmed by more reliable sources -- including French intelligence head Alexandre de Marenches, Russian prime minister Sergei V. Stepashin, Israeli secret agent Ari Ben-Menashe, former Iranian president Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, and former Israeli prime minister Yitshak Shamir -- LeWinter's odd games deep-sixed official inquiry into the event.

He is, in short, a very strange man. He now writes for a somewhat loopy (okay, very loopy) conspiracy site, where he has turned out stories with names like "Bush-Cheney Cabal: Pedophilia, Arms Dealing, Murder." His Moon piece seems fairly good. Even so, when dealing with a shady fellow like LeWinter, caveat lector!

http://rigint.blogspot.com/2006/12/marr ... topus.html

Sometimes you can tell a conspiracy by the high grade of disinformation that accrues about it, including the number and quality of shadowy "renegade insiders" eager to step up, speak out and muddy the waters. ... Former CIA agent Oswald LeWinter tried to sell to Mohammed Al Fayed apparently forged documents that spelling out in big, block letters an alleged DIA-MI6 assassination plot. And it may even be true, but to showcase the truth within the framework of a lie is to strip its consideration of credibility. (Regarding LeWinter, Al Fayed's attorney Mark Zaid told CNN six years ago that he "was responsible for disseminating a lot of the - what's been deemed disinformation about [the October Surprise]. He has shown up in allegations that Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was murdered, he has shown up involving allegations of the bombing of Pam Am 103, and then he showed up in this latest endeavor of his. He is quite a man of mystery.")

You can find his name linked to lots of suspicious things, if you look further.

In reference to this potential disinfo linking Dutroux to Ritto, his time living in Portugal and even publishing books in Portuguese might lend some credence to his claim. It stinks if you ask me.

[semper occultus]

1 of 1,000 selected for the kindertransport to the US - a select bunch ( Rothschild connections ? )




was his father Louis or Leon ?
was he a shop-keeper or a Professor ?

Mr. Le Winter was born April 2, 1931, in Vienna, Austria a son the late Louis and Regina Mandel Le Winter.

Born in Vienna and raised in Brooklyn by Jewish immigrant parents who ran an upholstery store,

His father was a professor at Columbia University.

source :

[Wombaticus Rex]

Semper, that is a stunning, stunning find. Thank you so much. Working on a tribute piece.

[semper occultus]

......happy to oblige Mr Rex...just plugged him into the Amazon search-box.....there was a hit from The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams aswell...a 1953 letter on his poetry from WCW....

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=aTHyWwez2TgC&pg=PA318&dq=william+carlos+williams+letter+oswald+le+winter&hl=en&sa=X&ei=6vvnUd-OH8aJOLq_gIgO&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAA

[Wombaticus Rex]

Dear John


The chopper with the mail barely made it
to the valley firebase where VC bursts
blossomed like red poppies from the bush,
to bring old news from home and take back
wounded and, if space allowed, the dead.

I have a letter, not too thick, postmarked
March. But this is May, almost June,
and it's the first from home since Christmas.
It begins with dear and ends with sorry,
please forgive, and blames the stupid war.

Why should I blame the war? The war
did not betray my trust. I never trusted it.
The war did not forsake my bed. We never slept
together more than minutes in a hole, mud
and fleas huddled in with me, threesome of dread.

I had carried an old vision in my head of home,
of soft breasts, thighs parting, after brimming eyes
greeted me as I filled the doorway of the house,
returned at last, to love, a shared life of years
among books, symphonies, laughter and talk,

a war that seized me with peremptory legalities,
had interrupted. Nine thousand miles
from the low bungalow encroaching on the river,
rage held me in a vise. Twisting, I sought enemies
but found none I could blame for any sin at all.



Recollections in Turmoil


Here I sit, an old spider, patiently placing word
after word, hoping the whole will hold some meaning,
some basic revelation, some eternal certainty
and the accident of perfection that is finally each life.

All metaphors are caskets in which to bury half-
known feelings we attempt to name, rages intuited,
or loves that ripened slowly like soft cheese we desired
to feast on, despite its bouquet of decay.

I have not lived peacefully! Why should I then be
tranquil when I write poems; pretend the words
I confiscate from abstract decoys in order to possess and
brand them as my own with immediate joy, immediate

despair, and the laughter of a man about to hang,
leave me cool and distant as a star whose light reaches us
long after it has died. No, they are something else,
if you like, dancing partners held with fiercest passion,

and uncertainty as well. Bitch Goddess! I am
your suitor in hand-me-down trousers, your ugly frog
who wishes nothing more than to be changed into the blond
prince of my Jewish dreams by your prized kiss.

I know full well that I may end stiffly spurned, holding
nothing but myself in tired and arthritic hands, on a hard bench
in the ghetto of old age, and yet I keep on rising
every time the quartet in the mind strikes up another tune.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Via: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style ... 61637.html

Al Fayed and the CIA conman
In a plot that would make Le Carre blink, the Harrods boss has seemingly foiled a scam and caught a fugitive

WHATEVER you think of Mohamed Al Fayed - the deception about his past, the scabrous language, the weakness for conspiracy theories - the man has an undeniable talent for getting in on the action. Last week he popped up again - this time as a friend and ally of the US Central Intelligence Agency.

The bare bones of the story are straightforward: Mr Fayed was approached by a man claiming to have proof confirming the Harrods owner's darkest suspicion: that the car crash in which Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed died was murder.

The man wanted to sell the proof for pounds 10m. This was a sting. The documents are 99.9 per cent certain to be forgeries. Oswald LeWinter, the 67-year- old American made the offer, turned out to be a renegade agent the CIA has long wanted to bring down.

Mr LeWinter is, by many accounts, the most formidable confidence man in the world today, and last week, at a meeting in Vienna with Mr Fayed's security officer, John McNamara, he was arrested on fraud charges and carted off screaming to jail.

THE CIA immediately descended on Vienna in force. First, to make sure Mr LeWinter was properly bagged, then to debrief a man who has helped journalists who believe the CIA is implicated in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie. The other reasons the CIA was in Vienna were to make sure that the man led to it by Mr Fayed did not slip through its grasp as a result of Austria's known laxness in high-profile espionage cases, as well as Mr LeWinter's possible connections with East Europe's organised crime.

"LeWinter is an example of a brilliant mind gone to the bad," former CIA counter-terrorist expert Vincent Cannistraro said in a conversation about the man two years ago. "His father was a professor at Columbia University. He grew up in a New York City suburb with all the privileges. It is amazing how far he has fallen."

Beyond this, however, facts about Mr LeWinter are hard to come by. When I dealt with him in 1996 - spending a week with him at his Mojave Desert home in California - for a Channel 4 documentary that never made it into production, the psychological warfare he waged against me left me uncertain about almost everything concerning him.

Spy buffs know Mr LeWinter as a former CIA operative. A Vienna tabloid last week quoted Rodney Stich, author of Disavow - a CIA Saga of Betrayal, as saying that Mr LeWinter worked for more than 30 years for the CIA under the codename "Razine"; he was recruited in the Sixties, during the Vietnam war, as a college professor, and acted first as an informer on students.

Mr LeWinter told me he had become involved with the CIA while a college professor. "I was invited to go on a lecture tour to eastern Europe, to talk about Shakespeare," he said. "The CIA approached me. I became one of their fish." He claimed he had become a deputy director of the agency under the late James Angleton, its legendarily paranoid counter-espionage expert. But a former Washington DC police intelligence chief pointed out flaws in his account of his CIA career that cast serious doubt on this and other claims.

His personal life is also hard to pin down. He told me he had married an heiress to the Humble Oil fortune with whom he had two sons - one now a successful executive, the other a beach bum - but the marriage had foundered and in the Eighties he married a German woman, an executive at the German software firm SAP. They have a daughter.

He told me that from 1979 he worked for the CIA at Itac, the Brussels- based intelligence coordinating arm of Nato. In theEighties he was arrested and convicted of drug dealing in Germany. His admission that he served a prison term in Germany - for moving amphetamines from Libya to the US - is qualified by his insistence that the operation was one of Oliver North's secret missions. It was after this miscarriage of justice, he said, that he became a renegade.

In 1995 Mr LeWinter appeared in The Double Maltese Cross, a documentary which argued that the Libyans had nothing to do with bombing Pan Am 103, which was done by Syrian drug dealers doubling as CIA sources. This film was financed by Tiny Rowland. It was meant to open the 1995 London Film Festival, but it was dropped at the last minute. It was shown in the House of Commons under the auspices of the Labour MP Tam Dalyell. In it Mr LeWinter was identified as a former CIA agent.

Shortly after The Double Maltese Cross faded from the news Mr LeWinter rang me, introduced himself, said he had a document that might be of interest, and agreed a meeting at Frankfurt airport. He turned out to be a squat, barrel-chested man with straggly grey hair sticking out of a baseball cap. He was in his sixties and constantly perspired. He was suffering, he said, from Epstein-Barr Syndrome, an immune deficiency disease. He spoke with a tough-guy New York accent. He championed the cause of Israel. Later, this advocacy metamorphosed into hints that he was an agent for the Mossad. He was the best-informed person I have ever met on intelligence matters. His views on everything from geopolitics to literature were sophisticated.

The document he plonked down on the airport bar looked like a field report from a US Drug Enforcement Administration agent based in Switzerland. It suggested that Mark Thatcher had been involved in an arms-for-drugs deal with a Syrian named Monzer al-Kassar. Mr al-Kassar is known to spy buffs because he was arrested in Spain for supplying weapons to the hijackers of the Achille Lauro cruise ship who murdered the passenger Leon Klinghoffer. Later, however, he was acquitted of all charges in a trial in Madrid.

DURING my week in California waiting for Mr LeWinter to provide corroborating evidence for his document - corroboration which never came - he showed me coded messages he said he had stolen from the CIA, read me selections from a book of poetry he said he was soon to publish, talked of his friendship with Norman Mailer, and claimed he had run for a US relay team in the 1956 Olympics. His genius was to make each story credible even though, as they piled up, the atmosphere became increasingly surreal.

After showing the document about Mark Thatcher and his putative arms- for-drugs deal to the Drugs Enforcement Administration, the FBI via the former Washington DC intelligence chief, and the US District Attorney's office in New York, I concluded it was a fake. After that Mr LeWinter rang me once to complain that the DEA had visited him to ask about the Thatcher document. That was the last time I spoke to him. I had all but put the acutely unpleasant experience of being the target of one of his stings out of my mind when I read that the CIA, with Mr Fayed's help, had finally run him to earth.

According to the Vienna press, Mr Fayed was first approached about three weeks ago by a prominent Beverly Hills lawyer and a reporter from a Hollywood scandal sheet. He was told that there were documents proving that the CIA and MI6 were responsible for the deaths of his son and the Princess. A meeting was arranged between Mr Fayed's security chief, Mr McNamara, and Mr LeWinter, who got a $25,000 advance to cover expenses. Mr LeWinter arrived in Vienna on 20 April and checked into a modest, two-star hotel, the Hotel Stadt Bamberg, not far from the city's red-light district.

The booking at the hotel was made by Karl Koecher, who is well known to the Austrian security forces from his previous career as a Czech agent. Mr Koecher is famous in the spy world for being the man who walked east over the Potsdam Bridge in Berlin in 1985 when, in a Cold War exchange, the Soviet dissident Natan Shcharansky walked west.

Mr LeWinter and Mr McNamara met once, then a second time. As he was dragged out of the hotel where the meeting was held, Mr LeWinter screamed that his five accomplices would make sure that Mr Fayed met the same fate as his son. A search of Mr LeWinter's hotel room turned up a batch of documents, of which four sheets were considered relevant. Two of them were in code. The Austrian fraud squad says they are forgeries.

Mr LeWinter is now said to be co-operating with authorities. He has reportedly named his accomplices. The Austrian authorities managed to keep Mr LeWinter's arrest on 25 April secret until last Tuesday, when Peter Grolig, one of Austria's best crime reporters, broke the story in the Kurier newspaper.

Mr Fayed's spokesman at Harrods declined to comment. "Our Austrian lawyers have put a gag on us," he said.

However, Mr Fayed spent much of last week in Vienna. The man who has for so long been the scourge of much of British life deserves some credit - if only to remind us all that, in an age of buttoned-down global markets, there is still business to be done, and even fortunes made, by operating on the wild side of the commercial life.

Additional reporting from Vienna by Sue Masterman

[Wombaticus Rex]

SUIT LINKS CIA TO LOCKERBIE BOMB
by Robert H. Taylor
October 9, 2004

After the conviction of a lone Libyan intelligence agent in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103, the case was apparently closed. Libyan leader, Muhammar Quadaffi has even been cleared to start paying billions in restitution to the families of those who died on the ill fated flight.

Unfortunately, truth has a way of rising to the surface at the most un-opportune time.

Four former U.S. Intelligence Agents and journalists have filed a $150 million federal lawsuit in Washington, DC October 4, 2004 that claims the bomb that killed 259 passengers and crew originated, in of all places, Houston, Texas. It was built using explosive expertise provided by the United States Central Intelligence Agency. The suit charges that the CIA sold Quadaffi 20 tons of Plastique explosives in the early 1980’s, and, most importantly, trained Libyan hit-squads to build bombs inside portable radios.

The Plaintiffs claim Libya used CIA expertise to construct the PAN AM bomb in 1988 that was contained in a Toshbia radio. They claim the CIA violated their civil rights by consipiring to silence them to cover-up the CIA – Libyan connection.

The clubs used to bludgeon the truth and silence all four are strikingly similar.

Dr. William Chasey published a book after the Pan Am bombing, titled AGENT 4221, exposing the CIA’s suspected links to Libya through the U.S. Embassy in Rome, Italy. Chasey revealed that the CIA Station Chief in the 80’s was Soviet Double Agent, Aldredge Ames, now serving a life sentence. The CIA’s PAN AM bomb investigator turned out to be another former CIA Rome Station staffer, by the name of Vincent Cannestraro. Records uncovered by Attorney Adler prove Ed Wilson’s Quadaffi operation was run out of the Rome Station. Chasey was demonized, his life threatened, and persecuted by a long string of federal agents, from the IRS to the FBI.

Elements of his book was used in the production of a documentary film titled: THE MALTESE DOUBLE CROSS which aired in the United Kingdom and 16 other countries around the world. The film was researched and directed by international film-maker, Alan Francovich. Francovich was an American who had moved to Europe so he could produce documentaries, a format that had fallen on hard times back home. He had made another film, ON COMPANY BUSINESS that linked the CIA to the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile, by backing the murderous Penochet regime.

Oswald LeWinter is a former CIA operative who appeared in the film. LeWinter pointed fingers at the CIA and obtained conclusive evidence that there was more to the bombing than a single minded terrorist attack. LeWinter confirmed that the bomb was carried aboard by a courier from a family linked to the CIA in an operation to capture wanted terrorists, Fawaz Younes in 1987.

Another U.S. intelligence agent appeared in the film. Lester K. Coleman had linked the bomb to a drug sting gone bad Coleman appeared on NBC Nightly News the day after the bombing, raising questions about Libya and former CIA agent, Edwin Wilson. A book Coleman co-authored with former New York Times Editor, Don Goddard also questioned Wilson’s true CIA affiliation. Wilson was a retired CIA officer the government had imprisoned for selling C-4 plastique explosive to Libya and for training Libyan terrorist to build bombs. Wilson was sentenced to 52 years in prison, and spent twenty-two years in solitary confinement, until his recent release.

The connection between the terrorist bomb and the CIA may have never come to light if not for the dogged research by Houston lawyer, David Adler. Adler was appointed by U.S. District Judge, Lynn Hughes six years ago to represent Edwin P. Wilson.

Wilson has claimed since his 1983 conviction that he was working for the CIA all along. At his trial the government presented a sworn affidavit claiming Wilson had no connection with the Agency when he did the Quadaffi deal.

It was all a CIA lie.

Attorney Adler turned up more than 900 pages of CIA documents that confirmed Wilson was working for the Agency, and that the Libyan deal was sanctioned by the CIA.

On October 27, 2003 Judge Hughes over-turned Wilson’s conviction underlined with a scathing condemnation of the CIA, and the Justice Department. The Judge ruled that the CIA had more than 80 contacts with Wilson during his dealings with Quadaffi. Judges Hughes wrote, "of course the government could have produced records supporting Wilson, that the CIA knew and even authorized the shipment of explosives to Libya, but it did not."

In 1997 Alan Francovich dropped dead while attempting to clear U.S. Customs at Houston, Texas International Airport. He had reportedly uncovered the truth about the CIA connection to Libya’s bomb making expertise, and was tracking Wilson’s story.

A few months later, in 1998, Oswald LeWinter was having lunch with Mohammad Fayad at a hotel in Vienna, Austria., Fayad was the father of Dodi Fayad, who was killed with Princess Diana in the Paris car crash the previous August. LeWinter was about to supply Fayad with some documents obtained from his handlers at the CIA when he was arrested for possessing forged documents. State police accompanied by U.S. FBI agents marched LeWinter off to jail. He was imprisoned for two years.

Six months later, in July, 1999, Lester Coleman was meeting with clients in a Lexington, Kentucky hotel when local police accompanied by federal agents swooped down and arrested him for possessing forged documents, over checks, they claimed came from overseas banks, interestingly cleared on deposit. Coleman is buried in a rural Kentucky prison.

Francovich was dead, and both LeWinter and Coleman were in jail. The two former intelligence agents had been scheduled to appear at the trial of two Libyans accused of the PAN AM bombing, but their incarceration assured their silence.

The exposed Wilson – Libyan link dates back to 1975 and 1976 when George H. W. Bush ran the CIA. It was under DCI Bush that Wilson opened ties to Quadaffi and began selling him explosives and equipment. While living in Libya under the CIA umbrella, Wilson hired former Green Berets, some of who were actually active troops posing as rogues and retirees out for money. Wilson set up an intensive instructional training program for Quadaffi that was intended to make the Libyan Colonel a credible terrorist – threat to any opponent, anywhere in the world. The operation was an unqualified success. People and things started blowing up and dying all over the place.

This would not be the first time that a so-called enemy of the United States in the Arab world would be supplied with weapons of mass destruction under George Bush’s watch. Iraqgate and the scandal around BANCO NATIONALE DE LAVORO, and Kennamental showed how George Bush had secretly armed Saddam Hussein before the Gulf War. Even Ted Shackely’s own book, The Third Option suggests that arming both sides of a conflict often is the best way to control the outcome.

While Wilson was training and equipping Quadaffi, he was also lunching with top CIA covert operative, Theodore Shackley and with Bush himself. Wilson was providing personal airplanes for Air Force General Richard Secord to fly around, using a CIA proprietary company, Consultants International, as cover.

With the January 1977 change in presidents from Ford to Carter it was inevitable that George Bush ( the elder ) would have to leave as Director of Central Intelligence. Shackley remained in charge of covert operations until December of that year. Then, as Wilson’s work and life became increasingly high-profile, The new Director, Stansfield Turner removed Shackley. It was at the same time that Turner gave 800 CIA career covert operatives pink slips and "early retirement". It was no coincidence, according to the files obtained by Attorney Adler, that the Bureau of Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) started investigating Wilson at the same time.

President Jimmy Carter had already begun the groundbreaking work with Menachem Begin of Israel and Anwar Sadat of Eqypt that would lead to the Camp David Peace Accords. It would not be good PR for the U.S. to be exposed secretly arming Sadat’s bitter enemy and next door neighbor, Muhammar Quadaffi, especially when Quadaffi was plotting to kill Sadat.

According to incredibly detailed reports compiled by BATF, the FBI and the CIA’s own Inspector General, the CIA was " operationally tasking" Wilson and his employees to accomplish specific objectives in Libya before, during and after the delivery of the C-4. Both the Justice Department and the CIA had witness statements that the CIA had been tasking and debriefing Wilson’s employees at exactly the same time that they were teaching Quadaffi’s people to blow up things like airliners.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Obituary: Allan Francovich

That Allan Francovich should die prematurely, succumbing to a heart attack in the Customs Area of Houston Airport, is hardly astonishing to those whose lives were touched by this remarkable, hyperactive film director. I picture him arriving to meet me in the Central Lobby of the House of Commons, bag and baggage full of contents, out of breath, and blurting out the latest discovery that he had made about the iniquity of the authorities.

He reeled off facts at a mind-boggling rate. Yet, unlike most conspiracy theorists - of which he was proud to be one - Francovich was scrupulous about fact, and particularly about unpalatable facts which did not suit his suspicions. I never caught him cutting any inconvenient corners to arrive at the conclusion he wanted. He was, above all, a seeker after truth, wheresoever that truth might lead.

Francovich was born in 1941, into a Jewish engineer's family in New York, but brought up in the Mira Flores district of Lima, one of the most sophisticated societies in the Americas. At an early age his extraordinary facility for languages was developed. It was to prove a launching pad, not only for academic success, but also for making investigative films which required mastery of precision in language as the complicated projects he undertook crossed international borders. Nothing Francovich either said or did was other than complicated.

From the University of San Marcos in Lima, he went to Notre Dame in the United States, where did a Bachelor of Arts in English, Romance and Slavic Languages. From there he went to the Sorbonne to study Comparative Literature and to L'Ecole des Langues Orientales, where he studied Russian, Serbo- Croat and the Arabic that was to prove so useful two decades later in untangling the complexities of Lockerbie.

He completed his education at Berkeley, California, where he studied the Dramatic Arts and was prominent in the university when Flower Power was at its height.

In 1970, Francovich married Kathleen Weaver, a graduate of Edinburgh University, who collaborated with him in his first major investigative film, Short Circuit (1970), relating to the murder of nuns in El Salvador. His linguistic talent was put to effective use in another joint venture, On Company Business (1980). Their work run the prestigious International Critics Award for the best documentary at the Berlin Film Festival, exposing as it did many of the thuggish practices of the Central Intelligence Agency.

It was a matter of sadness to him that he drifted apart from his wife and was without her during the creation of the documentary Gladio (1992) which was partially instrumental in bringing down an Italian government by exposing its links with American intelligence and the Americans' gross misbehaviour in assaulting democracy in Italy.

My first introduction to Francovich was from Dr Jim Swire of the British Lockerbie Victims, who said that he had persuaded the best investigative film director in America to turn his attention to the crash of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Dumfriesshire, on 21 December 1988 that had killed his daughter Flora along with 269 other victims.

Once persuaded that there was a cause for suspicion, Francovich was the most determined of ferrets. The end result was his film The Maltese Double Cross (1995), made in conjunction with his fervently loyal colleagues John Ashton and David Ben-Aryeah and their cameraman Jeremy Stavenhagen. The showing of the film on Channel 4, and in the House of Commons, did more than anything else to awaken the British from J.S. Mill's "deep slumber of a decided opinion" about responsibility for Lockerbie.

Quite simply, Francovich proved the so-called Malta connection, on which the case against Libya depends, was a fabrication. Francovich identified the shooting down by the USS Vincennes of an Iranian airliner carrying pilgrims to Mecca as the starting point for Lockerbie. The Iranian Minister of the Interior, Ali Akbar Mostashemi, swore that there should be a "rain of blood" in revenge. He had been, crucially, the Iranian ambassador in Damascus from 1982 to 1985, and had close connections with the terrorist gangs of Beirut and the Bekaa valley. They had infiltrated an American drug sting operation, which allowed them to circumvent the security precautions at the Rhine Main airport in Frankfurt. It was typical of Frankovich that he could go to the Jafaar family of the naive courier who had perished in Pan Am 103, and capture them on film in a powerful sequence showing up the activities of the Neuss terrorist gang operating in Germany.

It was Francovich's multi-dimensional, multilingual talents which I am sure will eventually unlock the truth about Lockerbie. Rare indeed, outside fiction, are the crusaders of truth who, time and again, have put themselves in personal danger as Francovich did.

Tam Dalyell

Allan Francovich, film director: born New York 1941; married 1970 Kathleen Weaver (marriage dissolved 1985); died Houston, Texas 17 April 1997.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Via: http://www.leopoldreport.com/LRsajt74.html

Disinformant # 3: Oswald LeWinter

FBI lied about the CIA agent who did most damage to the Palme murder investigation; he was active as a disinformant on both sides of the Atlantic

Oswald LeWinter is the disinformant who did most damage in the Palme murder investigation. He kept the Police Investigation Group (PU) working for four years. LeWinter led an incredible double life. Behind the scenes, he was a professional disinformant, intelligence agent, and infiltrator, operating under cover names like "Y", "Razin", Razine", "Racine", "Wamma", and "Ibrahim Razin". The face he showed the world, however, was as a sophisticated and respected literature professor who had authored the book "Shakespeare in Europe ', a politician, and a poet.

LeWinter was extremely forthcoming for Swedish and international media that gullibly reported his startling stories that mixed facts and lies together in a disinformation campaign against PU.

In parallel, he carried out another extensive disinformation campaign directed against the journalists and authors who tried to investigate the alleged scandal surrounding the hostage crisis in Iran and the US presidential elections in 1980, which was known as October Surprise (see Part 2). When he first took on the Palme investigators, he had for many years been a professional disinformant, infiltrator, and provocateur.

But Oswald LeWinter, which eventually turned out to be his real name, was also a moderately well known literature professor, poet and writer who had taken part in high-level politics.

US Intelligence Agent

This is, however, primarily a story about LeWinter's life as a US Intelligence agent. LeWinter operated under several aliases, making it virtually impossible for others to connect with him. His style was to take his own contacts with American media, writers and others who wrote about October Surprise, directly or through intermediaries. This was also his operational modus in Europe in connection with the investigation into the murder of Olof Palme. He collaborated with media in many countries, including Sweden, Germany, the UK, Portugal, and Austria, and at one point he also made a much-publicized appearance in Italian television, where he wearing a mask alleged that the CIA and the Italian P2 Lodge were responsible for the Palme assassination (more about this below).

His tales were normally so well founded in facts around the Palme investigation that media considered him credible. Most probably, his supervisors were able in several ways to obtain information on the murder investigation that was passed on to LeWinter. He must have been given clear orders about which media to contact, who to talk to, and what they had written previously. Based on this, he and his supervisors could design the kind of disinformation to be presented.

A lot of LeWinter's activities are recounted in the report from the Swedish Government's Palme Commission (GK) (see timeline). Although he operated under several different aliases, PU was after two years (in the autumn of 1990) able to obtain information that his full name (probably) was Oswald LeWinter.

Disinformation from the FBI

LeWinter claimed in various contexts that he was a senior CIA officer and second-in-command for the CIA in Europe (e. g. Willan 1991:81). In the autumn of 1991, a year after PU from various sources had learned about his identity as Oswald LeWinter, the FBI responded to a series of requests about him with a long and falsified list of his criminal activities that would prove him not credible. This would implicitly prove that he did not belong to the CIA, hence that his allegations of CIA involvement in the assassination of Olof Palme could not possibly be true.

Earlier, the FBI had provided PU with only very brief comments about the various "unknown" cover names, never mentioning the name Oswald LeWinter. At one point, PU asked the FBI about the name George Cave, which according to an anonymous tip was LeWinter's real name. In its answer, the FBI lied to the Swedish investigators by claiming that "information about George Cave was missing". Not a word was mentioned about George Cave as one of Oliver North's closest associates in the Iran-Contra affair with frequent television appearances during the Congress hearings in the late 80's.

It was in this answer the FBI suddenly branded Oswald LeWinter as a criminal, who i. a. had been sentenced to six years imprisonment for involvement in one of Europe's biggest drug deals, while he actually had infiltrated and helped to collar the drug gang as an undercover agent (see more on this below).

FBI's apparently forthcoming cooperation had solidified its relations with PU. The Swedish investigators had no reason to doubt a word of the FBI's statements and were therefore an easy target for disinformation. In Sweden, authorities were so impressed with the FBI's efforts that the then Interior Minister Bengt K. A. Johansson in a solemn letter thanked the US Attorney General for help given to the investigators (GK p. 439). In reality, the "help" consisted of short answers with little real content, and sometimes lies mixed with half truths.

Of course we can not trust what either the FBI or LeWinter himself claimed about his background. But who, then, were his true superiors? Who provided him with information about the Palme murder? Who paid for all his travels? What was his source of income? Why didn't US authorities launch an American investigation when LeWinter claimed that the CIA was responsible for the assassination of PM Olof Palme, who also was the UN peace broker in the Iran-Iraq war?

German Police: LeWinter Worked for the CIA

It will appear from this article that LeWinter indeed worked for the CIA. This is not a paradox, since one very sophisticated kind of disinformation is to start by having the disinformant telling much of the true story that is supposed to be repudiated later, for example by revealing that the story-teller is a non-credible person, for other reasons than the contents of the story told - just like in this case.

One of the journalists who hunted LeWinter in connection with the October Surprise allegations was Martin Killian, the Washington correspondent of the German news magazine Der Spiegel. In the autumn of 1988, he was told by German police officials that LeWinter was a CIA contract agent (that is, he was working on specific CIA assignments, but not formally employed). In addition, he probably also worked for the Israeli intelligence service Mossad. (Parry 1993:72).German police had some years earlier cooperated with the FBI in the drug operation where LeWinter had been used as an undercover agent (see below) and knew who he was very well.

LeWinter and October Surprise

At 17 September, 1988, LeWinter appeared in the popular US radio program Bill Moran Show. Listeners were invited to call in their comments during the live broadcast. The topic at that day was the October Surprise allegations. One caller presented himself as "Y", claiming that he personally had taken part in connection with "the cleaning up" after October Surprise meetings in Europe. Present in the studio was also Barbara Honegger, who for three years had been a research and policy analyst in the White House after having participated in President Ronald Reagan's election campaign and transition team. She was working on a book to reveal the October Surprise scandal (causing a lot of attention when it appeared in 1989 with the same title). "Y" was one of her primary sources. Later, LeWinter continued to call around to American journalists about October Surprise, always under different aliases.

Robert Parry was one of those journalists. He worked for the Associated Press and Newsweek in the eighties, and published many breaking news stories related to the Iran-Contra affair in various media. Later, he also authored several books (see list of sources). He discovered that there was much misinformation related to the October Surprise allegations, but also that they had some substance that he wanted to clarify.

To start with, he wanted to identify "Y" or "Razine" and to determine which of his claims that were true and which that were lies. He also wanted to know whether he had any superiors. With his extensive knowledge about the Iran-Contra affair and all lawful and unlawful US covert operations through official and unofficial networks, Parry had the qualifications required to understand the possible serious implications. However, he focused entirely at LeWinter's October Surprise allegations, and did not pay any attention to his claims about the Palme murder.

Recognized from his Voice

In the autumn of 1988, an audiotape from the Bill Moran Show circulated among American journalists. As a result, he was already at that time recognized from his voice (Parry 1993:70):

"Tapes of the performance circulated among reporters on the West Coast in fall 1988, and one columnist in San Francisco recognized the lightly disguised voice of Mr. Razine as the real voice of a New York literature professor named Oswald LeWinter."

The German journalist Martin Killian traced LeWinter to the War and Peace Foundation in New York, where he worked on a television program about the United Nations. There is reason to believe that he had taken this job to prepare for his operation against the Palme murder investigation, since there were few other places in the US that he could obtain so much information on Palme's activities. Hence, we can already see a similarity to Disinformant #1, Robert Harkavy, who probably used the Swedish peace research institute SIPRI for the same purpose

When Killian contacted LeWinter in the autumn of 1988, he panicked over having been unmasked as "Razine" and "Y". Later, he told Killian that he had worked for the CIA for 20 years. In December, 1988, Parry and Killian decided to cooperate. LeWinter agreed to meet them both in Washington. At that time, the two journalists had revealed that several of his allegations in the radio program were false, and Parry questioned him about it (Parry 1993:73):

"'So why did you lie?' I asked, as an opening question.

'Well, I didn't exactly lie,' LeWinter answered, moving uncomfortably in his seat. 'I told some things that were true and some things that weren't.'"

Parry now recognized LeWinter's "gravelly voice" as the voice of the man that had called him three months earlier (using one of his cover names).

LeWinter further claimed:

"..that he had been recruited by several American intelligence figures to spread a version of the October Surprise allegations that was skewed enough from the truth to be debunked."

The journalists were uncertain about whether he now was telling the truth, but left it at that for the time being.

New Meeting in Germany in 1990

Two years later, at 28 October, 1990, Parry travelled to Germany where he again interviewed LeWinter. Parry was now working for the PBS television program Frontline, and had received new information from an Israeli source (Parry 1993:74).

According to Parry, LeWinter now edited a small Jewish magazine (the same that is discussed as SEMIT in GK p. 439). LeWinter was now afraid that Killian & Co. would disclose his role as a secret agent in Der Spiegel, but decided that among the two evils, Frontline was the lesser.

Parry asked LeWinter why he had contacted journalists to - as he claimed - expose October Surprise, when he had submitted so much obviously false information. One of these was that he claimed that one of Reagan's advisers had been in Paris and negotiated with the Iranian leadership, when it was easy to prove that the same person at that time was in the US - as a participant in a live television program (Parry 1993:67ff).

Admits Being a Professional Disinformant

LeWinter replied:

"I was asked by some people to mount a disinformation campaign". [..] "Barbara Honegger [..] had started enough interest in the newspaper community and the media to throw a negative light on George Bush's candidacy, potentially a negative light. The people who asked me to intervene felt that the country could not stand another Watergate, another major political scandal and upheaval, and also worried that the Democratic party's candidate might have hurt the intelligence community, which was just in the process of recovering from the damage that had been done to it during the Carter administration."

His next statement is important:

"I contacted Barbara Honegger through another person. [..] I managed to pass on some information to her which had factual elements in it, but also elements that with a little bit of digging could be discovered to be questionable. The story would lead some investigators to spend time and effort running into blind alleys, with the result that eventually the whole story would be discredited."

LeWinter also admitted to having received USD 100,000 in payment for his disinformation campaign.

Highly relevant for the Palme investigation, we now get first-hand information from a professional disinformant about the purpose for and use of disinformation.

Parry remained uncertain about the truth or falsehood of LeWinter's statements.

Was this just a new disinformation campaign to lure him onto thin ice? Was it really true that LeWinter in 1988, as he claimed, had been commissioned to destroy the entire October Surprise story that was on its way to be confirmed, in which case it would become a new Watergate? Or was he commissioned to revive the story to lure the critics down the slippery slope to set them up for the fall?

Then, when Parry in October, 1990, was together with LeWinter in Germany, he wondered for himself if it was possible that there never had been any real October Surprise. Could it rather have been other operations that had been converted to something else, which later could be denied and used to attack the critics for staging a malicious campaign against Reagan and Bush? Was LeWinter's intention this time to discredit critical journalists and Democrats in front of the upcoming presidential election? If they revitalized the October Surprise allegations, they could very well be accused of using dirty methods to hurt President Bush in his bid for re-election.

Nothing was certain about LeWinter, except that he was a very sophisticated professional disinformation agent, and that his behaviour led back to groups that wanted to reinforce Reagan's position and ensure that Bush was elected his successor.

And that is sufficient for our purpose.

"The CIA's Second-in-Command in Europe!"

In several of his anonymous interviews, including the interview on Italian television about the P2/Gladio accusations in Italy in 1990, LeWinter gave the impression of having intimate knowledge of CIA activities in Europe, and especially in Italy. I. a., he referred to extensive money transfers from the CIA to the so-called P2 Lodge, which in turn had passed money on to terrorist groups that by their acts of terror increased attention to the "red danger" and helped keeping the Communists outside the government (Avveniementi 1990).

The P2 lodge was headed by Licio Gelli. It had an incredible roster of members from the Italian power elite. P2 was investigated from 1981 because of suspected links to various financial scandals and terrorist attacks. The big scandal didn't come until 1990, when also P2's connection with Gladio (the Italian Stay Behind - see below) was revealed, and thereby both organizations' relationship to the CIA as well as Italian secret services. This triggered a judicial and political earthquake in Italy (Willan 1991, Christie 1984, and others). Licio Gelli's name was involved in the Palme case by LeWinter in connection with the alleged telegram that "the Swedish tree is to be felled - regards to our good friend Bush". (See Part 2: William Herrmann's disinformation).

LeWinter's alleged knowledge that the CIA transferred money to the P2 lodge may have contributed to the belief that he for a period was the CIA's Second-in-Command in Europe, published in various connections (e. g. Willan 1991:81). He also claimed that a NATO body had decided that Palme was to be removed. Of course, none of this was actually true, but it illustrates once again the incredible lies and myths LeWinter created around himself, and not least his eminent and detailed knowledge of the intelligence services in the US and Europe.

Professor, Politician and Psychologist

LeWinter had in the 60's taught English, Humanities and Comparative Literature at university level. He had been awarded prizes for his poetry, and published a book on Shakespeare. He was a friend of several American writers, including Saul Bellow. In 1968, he worked in Hubert Humphrey's presidential campaign. In 1976, he worked for a conservative Democrat in Indiana to dig up dirt on the Republican rival candidate. Until the early 80's, he worked for military intelligence in Germany, mainly as a psychologist with clients from the US forces. German intelligence service even confirmed that he appeared in a Brigadier-General's uniform (i. a. Sick 1991:150, 260, Parry 1993:72ff, and LeWinter 1963).

As we begin to see who LeWinter really was in the 20-year period from the early sixties, we see a solid pillar of society with broad commitment and extensive skills, who obviously was met with respect wherever he went. Also in this regard, he is very similar to Disinformant #1 Robert Harkavy.

Undercover Agent in Anti-Drug Operation in Germany

In 1985, we find LeWinter on a new special assignment when he took part in a German-American joint venture where the FBI and German Police trapped a gang exporting chemicals for production of drugs to the United States. Then, LeWinter used the cover name "Wamma." The gang leaders were sentenced to 20 years in prison, while LeWinter was extradited to the US to be handled by the US authorities.

Spying on Italian Rogue Agent

After a very mild sentence - as the official story went - LeWinter was placed in a cell together with the Italian Francesco Pazienza. Pazienza had been arrested in the US, and Italian authorities wanted to have him extradited to Italy where investigations were proceeding about his role in the P2 Lodge, Gladio, and a number of terrorist acts, including the 1980 bombing of the railway station in Bologna, where 85 people were killed. Pazienza had detailed knowledge of Italian and American intelligence operations and activities of the Republican Party, and represented a serious security risk for these. We assume that LeWinter's mission was to keep Pazienza under surveillance and extract information from him.

Pazienza was an agent for the Italian secret service (SISMI). He was in a period Licio Gellis right-hand man and Second-in-Command for Gellis secret operations. This is particularly interesting, since Gelli's name later was involved in the Palme case by LeWinter with the alleged telegram that "the Swedish tree is to be felled ... regards to our friend President Bush" (see Part 2: William Herrmann's disinformation).

The Rome Court found that Pazienza was an important agent for the French intelligence service where he had close contact with its head Alexandre de Marenches. It also found it proved that he had good relations with foreign centres of power, including to the then US Secretary of State Alexander Haig (Herman and Brodhead 1986:95-96).

Pazienza was also indicted for his participation in the so-called Billygate operation in 1979, in which President Carter's brother Billy was more or less tricked into shady dealings with members of the family of Libyan dictator Muammar Gadaffi (Herman and Brodhead 1986:96). Billy Carter's dealings with Libya may have influenced the outcome of the 1980 Presidential Election in which Carter lost to Reagan.

In these operations, Pazienza's partner was Michael Ledeen, who had prominent roles in several organizations close to the Israeli intelligence service Mossad (CAIB 1987 # 27:68-70). Ledeen's relationship with Pazienza was very close during the Reagan administration. In an article in L'Espresso, it was claimed that all bilateral contacts between the US and Italy during the Reagan administration was handled unofficially by these two (Herman and Brodhead 1986:94-96). Ledeen was close to the White House when he served as an adviser on the National Security Council (NSC), and this made Pazienza an even greater security risk.

LeWinter was perfectly fit to spy on Pazienza, win his trust, and try to find out how he thought and what he wanted to do. Later (1990), LeWinter himself admitted that he had been commissioned by the authorities to spy on other detainees (Sick 1991:221).

A person convicted of serious drug offenses as LeWinter was, will usually find it very difficult to get a job. But immediately after LeWinter had "served his sentence", he was appointed to a trusted mission at the War and Peace Foundation in New York, from where he could operate as disinformant in the October Surprise matter - and against the Palme murder investigation.

LeWinter and Resistance International

Resistance International (RI) was a mobilization campaign against global communism founded by a group of exiled Russian writers (Nilsson 2001:183). RI had its international headquarters in Paris, and was considered to be funded by the CIA and private right-wing groups (Hermansson and Wenander 1987:172, 185).

The author Saul Bellow was in 1986 a board member of the American Chamber of the RI (Barry et al 1986:46). He was also a board member of the Committee on the Present Danger (Sanders 1983, p. 155ff), a right-wing pressure group that had as its purpose to get the Carter Administration to open its eyes to the growing global Soviet threat and thereby to convince Carter to increase defence spending. Bellow was also a good friend of the literature professor Oswald LeWinter, whom he supported in various ways.

For example, Bellow pleaded for LeWinter in a letter to the judge, when LeWinter in New Jersey in June, 1985, was awaiting his sentence for his participation in the attempt to smuggle chemicals for production of drugs into the United States. It ended with what probably was a plea bargain about a very short sentence (Sick 1991:260, footnote 14).

That LeWinter escaped a severe punishment, while others were sentenced to 20 years in prison, indicates that LeWinter acted as a provocateur and undercover agent for the FBI and the German police. This, as well as the convenient internment together with Pazienza, also shows that it was a straight FBI/CIA operation.

The controversial Swedish teacher Curt Bergström was a prominent RI representative in Sweden. 46 days after the Palme murder, at 15 April, 1986, he lectured at a RI seminar in Switzerland where he launched the theory that the Soviet Union/KGB was behind the assassination of Olof Palme through the Kurdish organization PKK. This was the first time the PKK lead was mentioned internationally, and it was four months before the Swedish Government was informed by Investigation Leader Hans Holmér that the PKK was the main lead. It was also the first time it was suggested anywhere that the PKK had murdered Palme on behalf of the KGB. However, the KGB and Russian diplomats in Stockholm had already from day one been accused of the murder - by the CIA in Stockholm, resulting in a secret and illegal bugging of a suspected diplomat, undertaken by CIA surveillance experts, conveniently in Stockholm at the time.

We will later in this series of articles show that the PKK lead was based on disinformation. What's interesting is that the RI already two years earlier, in 1984, had hosted an international seminar on precisely the subject of disinformation, showing that it considered this an important part of the business (Hermansson and Wenander 1997: 191-192). That Bergström so soon after the murder launched the PKK lead internationally also indicates that he was involved in the disinformation operation against PU.

The Swedish RI branch was founded at 21 March, 1985 (a long time after the main organisation was founded), and withered away in September, 1987. This was shortly after the Turkish magazine Hürriet at 2 September, 1987, published a large front page article claiming that a group of five PKK members were behind the Palme murder. Some time later, the article's author Ali Yula admitted that the tip came from a person easily identified as the Swede Bertil Wedin. Earlier, Wedin had from his residence in Turkish Cyprus twice attempted to plant the PKK lead, without success.

Wedin had for many years worked for South African security (BOSS), as well as the Swedish security police, SÄPO.

He also worked for the CIA (CAIB 1983 #18).

Hence, Saul Bellow was linked to a CIA-funded organization that just like LeWinter was engaged in disinformation in connection with the Palme murder. Interestingly, RI and LeWinter came up with two directly opposite versions about who was guilty of murdering Palme: The Soviet Union/PKK, and the CIA, respectively. Their supervisors had probably not foreseen that anybody would even think about connecting Bellow and LeWinter, and then connect the disinformation from Bergström to the disinformation from LeWinter, with the CIA directing both campaigns.

This also serves to illustrate how demanding cases like this are for the investigators' proficiency to process and analyse information. After PU had revealed the identity of LeWinter and his false information, it should have proceeded by using the disinformation as a lead in its own right. It would then have found all LeWinter's connections to US intelligence, and it could have combined this with other knowledge. This would have provided clear evidence that the murder of Olof Palme was an American state-controlled operation. It would have enabled the investigators to leave aside the red herring theories about "a lone madman" and PKK, and instead to focus at the search for a perpetrator who either was just a tool or also an important part of the conspiracy.

LeWinter and Stay Behind

Stay Behind in Europe, which is mentioned in connection with Gladio/P2 above, was during the Cold War a NATO-initiated network of groups that also were established in non-member as well as in neutral countries. Gladio was the name for Stay Behind in some Southern European countries. The purpose of Stay Behind in Western Europe was to facilitate guerrilla warfare and resistance after a possible Soviet invasion. It was funded by the CIA and the intelligence services in the respective countries. Its main headquarters was in England. In addition, there was a reserve headquarters in the US in case all of Europe was occupied. Both were localized physically outside NATO's own facilities.

Zoom (1996) is an Austrian anthology about Stay Behind/Gladio. It includes a chapter on the organization's activities in Sweden, starting with the first group Sveaborg that was established in 1941 at the initiative of the Swedish Nazi Otto Hallberg (LeMay 1996).

In this chapter, the author uses LeWinter as one of its sources:

"Seine (Hallberg's) Organisation soll aber noch 1989 intakt gewesen sein. Fragen im Zusammenhang mit dem Mord am schwedischen Minister-Präsidenten Olof Palme drängen sich auf. Soll der zweite Mann der CIA in Europa und Chef des Intelligence Tactical Assessment Center (ITAC), ein gewisser Oswald LeWinter, Papiere vorgelegt haben, die beweisen sollen, das Palme im Zuge einer ´Operation Tree´ ermordet werden sollte." [..] ".. und der ehemalige Stay Behind-Chef und frühere Skandia-Versicherungs-Direktor Alvar Lindencrona teilgenommen haben. Das Skandia-Haus in Stockholm - früher Thule-Haus - soll die Zentrale der Stay-Behind-Netze gewesen sein. Vor diesem Haus wurde Olof Palme am 28.2.1986 mit einem Smith & Wesson erschossen."

In English translation:

"His (Hallberg's) organization, however, is assumed to have been operational in 1989. This raises questions about a connection to the murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. The Second-in-Command for the CIA in Europe and Head of the Intelligence Tactical Assessment Centre (ITAC), a certain Oswald LeWinter, has submitted documents that are supposed to show that Palme was to be murdered as the target of 'Operation Tree'." [..] "..and Alvar Lindencrona, former Head of Stay Behind and former Director of the Skandia insurance company, was supposed to have participated. The Skandia House in Stockholm - formerly the Thule house - was believed to have been the headquarters for the Stay Behind network. Palme was at 28.02.1986 shot with a Smith & Wesson in front of this house."

This was an obvious reference to the telegram saying that "the Swedish tree is to be felled". The story about this telegram had originated from LeWinter. The Skandia House and the people visiting there at the night of the murder have always been of interest to the Palme investigation, since it for a period indeed was the Stay Behind headquarters. But the information quoted must of course be seen in light of the fact that it comes from a notorious liar and disinformant.

Of course LeWinter was not the Second-in-Command for the CIA in Europe, nor the Head of ITAC. This is therefore a good example of the influence he gained as disinformant about the Palme murder in various places in Europe.

The really interesting point is that we in an Austrian book on Stay Behind, in a chapter on its network in Sweden, find information from the Austrian-born disinformant Oswald LeWinter leading us down to the Sveavägen murder scene and to the Skandia House.

The FBI's Sabotage against PU

Oswald LeWinter is the man's true identity. He has in recent years been active in Portugal and Austria, and is reportedly now in the United States. He is alive, and therefore available to the Swedish Government, the Swedish Government's Palme Murder Investigation (PU), and the Obama Administration, and is one among many excellent starting points for solving the Palme murder.

LeWinter is a reasonably well-known literature professor, poet and writer. He has worked as a psychologist and been involved in top-level politics. For a few decades from 1970, he was hired by the CIA and the FBI as an agent for intelligence, disinformation, provocation, and infiltration, in a wide range of operations. In addition, he had assignments for the Army. (Sick 1991:150).

In these roles, it was his mission to cause as much confusion as possible about who he really was and what he was doing, by making use of many different aliases as well as spreading disinformation about himself.

In this respect, he was in his Palme operations provided from start to finish with excellent help from the FBI - to the extent that the FBI directly sabotaged the murder investigation - see the Timeline summarizing the communication between the Swedish murder investigators and the FBI.

[semper occultus]

.....lightbulb moment of convergence with this character's MO.....Robert Eringer

( sorry I keep hi-jacking your threads but they often set me off )

...seems to be another wierd denizen of the twilight zone where the con-man & the intelligence operative converge & co-mingle like the pigs & humans at the end of Animal Farm..... Le Winter, Leo Wanta, Eringer ....( weirdly Leo Wanta is aka Lee Wanta >>> Le Winter......odd )

Eringer made a name whistle-blowing on the Bilderbergers rather than Gladio


.....who seems to have many versions of his life & activities in circulation.....although swimming rather more at the articles-in-Penthouse and spy-thrillers end of the pool than Shakespeare studies and high-brow poetry....

Looking at Robert Eringer:

Name: Robert Eringer
Age: 58 years
Mission: False spy in Monaco

Particularities: speaks and writes a lot for a secret agent…

Robert Eringer, a secret agent of operetta in Monaco
Eringer Robert was born on October 5, 1954 in Los Angeles. Journalist, novelist, blogger, he is best known on the web as the creator of websites and blogs hostile to Prince Albert II of Monaco. Robert Eringer claims to have directed the Secret Service of Le Rocher between 2005 and 2007, when he was ousted. Robert Eringer’s assertions that he had carried out spy missions on Prince’s behalf are controversial. Robert Eringer’s appeal was dismissed, and he had been repeatedly condemned. The author has already boasted about his secret agent’s past, ensuring that he carried out missions for the CIA and the FBI. The circulation of his books that oscillate between reality, fiction and science fiction, is limited. Most were published on account of the author.



Freelance journalist in the Great Britain
Between 1977 and 1990, Robert Eringer had been working for British tabloids, including The Sunday Mirror and News of the World of Rupert Murdoch. Specialized in the revelation of scandals and sex cases, it ceased publication on July 10, 2011 following the scandal on illegal wiretapping.

Installed in Britain as a freelance journalist, Robert Eringer was also a correspondent for several newspapers in North America: The American, The Blade, The Toronto Star, The Investigator, The Santa Barbara News-Press.

>>> looks like some his journalistic oevre here : http://recolumns.blogspot.co.uk/

In the conspiracy wake
Robert Eringer enjoys certain popularity among conspiracy theorists. Author of a book on the Bilderberg group called The Global Manipulators (Pentacle Books UK, 1990), he adheres to the thesis that the world is in the hands of an invisible government led by the Freemasons and the Illuminati. Several groups and individuals close to the movements of UFO enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists rank Robert Eringer among their favorite authors. The French Christian Cotten, convicted of abusive proceedings against parliamentarians, was among those who registered on the site of Robert Eringer to support him.

Controversial past as a spy
Robert Eringer claims to have carried out missions for the FBI between 1990 and 2002. According to the author, he worked with, among others, Clair George, a former deputy director of the CIA operations. One of its missions would have been to win the confidence of Edward Lee Howard, a former CIA officer recruited by the Soviets in 1985. The Spy Who Got Away (MW Brooks 1988), a reference work on the case of Edward Lee Howard, does not mention the role allegedly played by Robert Eringer in the arrest of Edward Lee Howard. In his book, Ruse, the journalist also claims to have played, in the name of the FBI, a role in Samuel Einhorn’s extradition from the French territory in 2001 – Einhorn was prosecuted for a murder committed in the United States 23 years earlier. His propensity to mention his alleged missions in central U.S. intelligence casts doubt on their reality.

The Monaco episode
Robert Eringer says he was hired by Prince Albert II of Monaco in 2002. According to him, he had to conduct intelligence missions on the new fortunes settling in Le Rocher but also on the royal entourage suspected of feeding the tabloids with gossip. According to another version, Albert, seduced by the grandiloquence of this colorful character, would end up hiring him as an adviser. In 2005, Robert Eringer proclaims himself chief of intelligence of Monaco. The only and unique employee, he orders himself a secret agent card bearing the number 001 in reference to the famous secret agent created by Ian Fleming. A fantasy that eventually casts doubt on the seriousness of the character. In 2007, Prince Albert II of Monaco decides to end the joke and to separate from this employee who became uncontrollable.

...contd at site : http://www.fakespy.org/

The Prince And The Blogger

In July, while Prince Albert II of Monaco celebrated his three-day-long, $65 million wedding to Charlene Wittstock, his lawyers tried to stomp out allegations that His Highness had raped a young female painter seven years ago. His legal team focused its artillery power–13 lawsuits–on Robert Eringer, a novelist and former spymaster, whom the Palace called a “shakedown” artist. These days Eringer has turned irrepressible blogger, devoting many of his waking hours in Santa Barbara, Calif. to embarrassing the prince any way he can on his website, eringer33.com.

Robert Eringer

http://wikibin.org/articles/robert-eringer.html

Born in 1954, Robert Eringer is thought to be either American or British.

In 1984 Jack Anderson and his short-lived magazine, The Investigator, was sued by Liberty Lobby over an article that did not carry Eringer's byline although Anderson maintained that a phantom Robert Eringer was largely responsible for its editorial content.

Charles Bermant (the bylined reporter) never even met Eringer yet "he turned out to be the sole and exclusive source for five of the defamatory statements."

Some believe that either the Central Intelligence Agency or Mossad conceived the name "Robert Eringer" as an alias for an agent in an undercover operation to discredit conspiracy theorists in general, and that "Eringer" infiltrated Liberty Lobby to expose it as a front for neo-Nazis.

Around the same period, Eringer turned up in Bydgoszcz, Poland, while that country was under martial law. He claimed to be a mushroom buyer, though one source claims Eringer was instrumental in distributing a manual titled How to Conspire among the Solidarity underground to defeat communist oppressors.

Various articles on the Internet connect Robert Eringer to Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, in addition to the CIA. In one piece, convicted murderer Ira Einhorn voices his belief that Eringer was involved in an operation to make him disappear while he was still living in France contesting extradition. (Einhorn currently lives at Houtzdale State Prison in Pennsylvania.)

Another piece, by rogue MI6 spy Richard Tomlinson, whose blog actually did disappear after mentioning Eringer by name, claimed that Eringer was part of an operation to make his writings disappear.

One blogger contends that Eringer himself disappeared in a boating accident off the coast of St. Tropez over a year ago.

Eringer also turned up as co-owner of the London-based Bedlam Bar, which exhibited the artwork of Britain's most dangerous prisoner, Charlie Bronson. (The Bedlam Bar has disappeared.)

Eringer is said to have been a secret agent for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, for whom he fooled a freelance writer into revealing to him the full details of her circus investigation- then diverted her to instead write about the company that makes the Mars Bar.

A plein air nocturnal artist named Thomas Van Stein claims Eringer traveled with him to England, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Andorra, Switzerland and Liechtenstein-- in search of creativity and madness.

Eringer seems also to have some kind of esoteric connection to the Principality of Monaco. Someone who claims to have visited Eringer's office in Monte Carlo said its walls are adorned with insignia from the Freemasons, the Illuminati, and Skull & Bones. Additionally, it is said that Monaco's Sovereign, Prince Albert II, is a regular visitor to this office.

It is believed that Robert Eringer is a pseudonym for Robert Douglas, the name that was used in an infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan in 1979. (The resulting KKK story, a front page and center spread in the UK Sunday People, was published beneath a Robert Eringer byline.)

Five novels have been published under the name Robert Eringer, with varying descriptions of the author but always with a painting of Eringer instead of a photograph.

Eringer also authored The Global Manipulators (Pentacle Books), a 1980 book about the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commissions; The Conspiracy Peddlers (Loompanics, 1981), which now appears on syllabuses of courses on conspiracy theory; and Strike for Freedom! The Story of Lech Walesa and Polish Solidarity (Dodd, Mead, 1982).

Eringer's latest book, which connects him to Edward Lee Howard and Ira Einhorn, was published in spring 2008 by Potomac Books Potomac Books.

Eringer now writes a weekly column--"The Investigator"--for the Santa Barbara News-Press.

Books
* Zubrick's Rock (National Press Books, 1995)
* Crinkum Crankum (Enigma Books, Bartleby Press, 1998)
* Lo Mein (Corinthian Books, 2000)
* Parallel Truths (Corinthian Books, 2001)
* Spookaroonie (Corinthian Books, 2002)
* Bedlam Books:
** Granny's Lost Her Marbles
** The Battle for Dung Hill
** Gone Berserk
** An Ear in Provence
** My Summer Vacation

[Wombaticus Rex]

Funny, I always see your thread hijacking as "awesome contributions" -- perception is a strange thing, innit?

I, too, am interested in the species itself even more than the specimen Le Winter.

Thanks for these threads!

[semper occultus]

...aah well thankyou Mr X ....the way this place is kicking-up atm you can't be too sure....

.....could I perhaps burnish its awesomeness by further proposing both an evolved and devolved form of the species : in terms of the direction of travel from which the criminal:intel interface is approached : placing the 3 above miscreants in the evolved category...having emerged from their respective murky depths to a position they were grabbing hold of genuine live political power-rails - with say Edwin P Wilson as a devolved example...although with both cases motivated primarily by concerns of a highly personal mercenary nature ...

[Wombaticus Rex]

Wilson is so central, yes. A one-man nexus point. Currently re-reading Our Man in Mexico and Blond Ghost and it’s remarkable how many covert lives Wilson managed to intertwine his saga with. (Those two titles being biographies of, respectively, Winston Scott and Ted Shackley.

Some good old Jeff Wells comes to mind: http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2 ... e-men.html

Disreputable Men
Gary Sick's is an interesting story. Sick is the author of October Surprise, one of the best accounts of the covert deal struck in the Fall of 1980 between senior Republicans, arms merchants and Iranian mullahs to delay the return of the American hostages until Ronald Reagan's inauguration. But as interesting as it is, that's not the story I mean. I'm talking about Sick's own story: his passage from career White House insider to "conspiracy theorist."

Sick served on the National Security Council under three presidents and was the principal White House aide on the Iran file during the fall of the Shah and the hostage crisis. He knew, or so he thought, how Washington worked, because he'd been working it. And though the timing of the hostages' release appeared suspect, there was no need, Sick thought, to resort to talk of conspiracies. However, as time went on, "seemingly inescapable fragments of information began to appear....

My experience was not unlike that of a medieval scholar discovering traces of a hidden text beneath the script of an old parchment.... I felt as if I were wandering into a spy novel. The backgrounds and activities of some of these individuals who were emerging from the shadows of this operation seemed to come out of fiction, and yet they were real.... most of my professional life had been spent as an analyst of political and military intelligence. I knew that there were operatives for hire, ready to skirt the law for money, perhaps out of habit or duty, or simply for the thrill and sense of power illegal acts conveyed. But it was nonetheless a shock to meet them....

Gradually, this Beltway veteran was introduced to a whole other level at which Washington conducted its business. Despite all his years at the NSC he'd had no experience of this, and though he'd always known a covert world existed, he'd spared it little thought. But there it was, in the corroborating testimony of witnesses, arms dealers and operatives. And what he was learning was nothing less than the secret history behind the official history he'd helped to write.

If you think you've undergone a paradigm shift, spare a thought for Gary Sick.

He discovered the secret company which respectable men like William Casey and George Herbert Walker Bush kept: liars, cheats, gunrunners and drug traffickers. Disreputable men. Intelligence agencies would be lost without them. And if they ever squeal, they are readily dismissed on nothing more than the broad outline of their character; their incendiary allegations against the powerful and respectable extinguished with barely a sizzle, regardless of the evidence supporting their charges.

Here's Sick, again, in October Surprise:

Such characters are a researcher's nemesis; they are meant to be. When the CIA or other intelligence agencies need to hire a "contractor," who may be required to carry out taks that are potentially dangerous and of questionable legality, they look for three things: a specific and useful skill (a knowledge of money-laundering, perhaps); a romantic streak that glorifies both the secrecy and the risk; and a propensity for exaggeration and trouble. One former CIA officer, David MacMichael, has said that the agency looks for these freelancers at small community airports and gun ranges - places where men go to escape the boredom of everyday life. Looking for adventure, these men are fascinated by the imagined glamour and excitement of the world of espionage. MacMichael said that often, after one or two assignments, the agency will put a contractor on a case in which he runs afoul of the law. The contractor finds himself in a compromising position - nothing so major as to put him permanently out of commission, but significant enough that if he ever starts telling tales out of school about covert operations, his record will discredit his testimony.

This is something the coincidence theorist perpetually refuses to credit: the perfect plausible deniability inherent in employing such characters. These are scoundrels, liars and criminals. If they ever choose to talk, who's going to take their word over that of respectable men of high station?

And to the practiced coincidentalist, it doesn't matter how well the testimony is corroborated. The evidence is discarded, sometimes for fantastic reasons, with the circular, unspoken rationale that if it confirms the word of a known liar then it must be false.