Northern Ireland's Loyalists links to Israeli Mossad

[Yago]

Interestingly enough, the Apartheid South African Intelligence services had very tight links with the Israeli Mossad and even worked hand by hand, as Israel was interested in protecting Jewish interests in South Africa. This cooperation is made clear here, as the weapons had falllen in the hands of Israeli security forces and then passed on to South African hands, or were directly handed over to the UDA by the Mossad.

Judging by his name, Leon Flores could well be of Sephardic origin.

But even more interesting is the story that broke on December 1992, that the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League, was involved in a massive operation of spying American citizens who were critics with Israeli and South African policiy, with the intention of passing this information on Mossad and S.A. Intelligence hit squads.

There are a few articles in this link about the ADL's activities and connections. But most interesting is the connection of the ADL with South Africa's Apartheid's Intelligence Services: The ADL links with racist activism

The underbelly of a city of assassins

The Observer
October 3, 2004

In his new book 'UDA - Inside the Heart of Loyalist Terror', The Observer's Ireland editor Henry McDonald shines light on a murky tale of spooks, murderers and dodgy bullets

At the beginning of the 1990s, the Ulster Defence Association in Belfast had a major problem with bullets. The arsenals of the two loyalist terror groups - the UDA and the Ulster Volunteer Force - had been filled with a new range of weaponry at the end of the previous decade, thanks to the Lebanese civil war and South African arms dealers and agents.

With the proceeds of a bank robbery in Portadown, Co. Armagh, in 1987, the loyalists had bought a large number of AK-47 rifles, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), explosives and ammunition.

The weapons had once belonged to the IRA's old Middle Eastern friends, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, but they had been captured by the Israelis and their Lebanese Christian allies after the 1982 invasion of south Lebanon.

The loyalists were quick to employ their new firepower against a range of targets. The RPGs from Lebanon were used to blow up Sinn Fein advice centres, while the AK-47s were employed in atrocities ranging from the Ormeau Road betting shop massacre to the Halloween slaughter at Greysteel. Armed with their new weapons, the UDA's murder rate rapidly shot up until the tally of murders by the UDA and UVF exceeded that of the IRA in 1993.

It was, however, a death toll that could have been far higher. The arms had arrived in Northern Ireland, hidden in a ship transporting roof tiles from Cyprus. However, unknown to the loyalists, as they took possession of their new arsenal there was a serious problem. Much of the ammunition was of Chinese origin and of poor quality.

Over the next seven years, numerous lives were saved as the guns continually jammed due to faulty rounds.

As one active loyalist, who was involved in terrorism in the early 1990s, put it: 'There are a lot of people walking the streets of Belfast today who don't know how lucky they are to be alive.'

One of those whose life was spared by a jammed weapon was white, South African-born Dr Adrian Guelke, a Queen's University lecturer. The 44-year-old academic was shot once in the back after UDA gunmen burst into his south Belfast home on 4 September, 1991.

The shooting took place in Fitzwilliam Street at about 4.30am, while Dr Guelke lay asleep, his assailant's weapon jamming after the first round was fired.

The attempted killing of Guelke would reveal much about the murky nature of where security, terrorism and competing international intelligence groups lethally coincided in Northern Ireland.

At first, the murder bid bewildered the RUC. For although Guelke had written about Northern Irish affairs, his main interest was in his native South Africa as a critic of the apartheid regime.

The reality of the loyalist assassination attempt on Guelke would turn out to be one of the most bizarre episodes of the Troubles.

It was a set-up job concocted by the South African Defence Forces' intelligence branch, which had used a doctored RUC intelligence report to convince a loyalist hit squad that Guelke was an IRA asset and link man to the African National Congress.

In an affair with twists as complicated as any thriller, South African intelligence had decided that it wanted Guelke dead, and to achieve this end it planned to use an RUC Special Branch file on a second academic [who cannot be named for legal reasons].

The second academic, unlike Guelke, was deeply involved with the IRA. He had worked closely with Eamon Collins at Queen's University in the early 1980s. He was the IRA activist who would later betray his former comrades and be murdered for it. It was he who had helped the IRA obtain an arms cache from the PLO in the Middle East as part of that organisation's own arms procurement effort. It was this man, too, who almost certainly was the real link man with the ANC.

So it was little surprise that he should not only have been the target of an RUC Special Branch intelligence operation, nor that the file on him should have been shared with interested foreign agencies, including Mossad.

While no one knows how the file on the academic came to be with the South Africans, one thing is now certain: someone saw it as an opportunity to set Guelke up. That person was Leon Flores, a South African agent who worked out of the embassy in London and was eventually deported from the UK in April 1992. Taking the original document, Flores replaced the name and details of the IRA-linked academic with Guelke's.

With the doctored RUC document, Flores flew to Belfast via London in the autumn of 1991 and contacted the UDA, providing the South Belfast Brigade with the revised intelligence report. To make sure that they had got the point, he even brought a UDA unit to Guelke's home in Fitzwilliam Street in the University area just days before the shooting.

The plot was all the more ironic because, far from being a supporter of IRA violence, Guelke was also an opponent of republican violence in Northern Ireland and had established a working report in his academic pursuits with the old UDA leadership of the late John McMichael and the organisation's ousted chairman, Andy Tyrie.

'I used to go to dinner with Tyrie and spoke to McMichael regularly. I got on extremely well with both UDA leaders. Obviously the UDA men sent to kill me never knew this,' Guelke reflected 12 years later.

Flores continued to dabble in the murky world of loyalist terrorism even after Adrian Guelke was shot. In London, he linked up with a UDA unit in the UK capital urging them to kill a South African dissident in exchange for more South African weapons.

'If we had got our hands on the original RUC file and found out who the real IRA link was [the other lecturer] we would have used that and put him down a hole instead,' one UDA commander reflected more than 10 years after the Guelke debacle.

What the Flores connection demonstrates about the UDA was its willingness to seek help from any quarter, regardless of the hidden agenda of those allegedly aiding the loyalist cause.

The same UDA commander, who has since come to regret the organisation's role as patsy for the South Africans, also admits that the UDA had a tendency back then to take information and source material from anyone willing to provide it. 'Very few times did we ask ourselves if we were being set up or used. We just took the stuff and did the business.'

Fortunately for Guelke, the incompetence of his would-be assassins, and the faulty nature of the ammunition in 1991, prevented the 'business' from being carried out.


[source]

[Dvx]

I don't remember where I found this picture, but in Portuguese there's a saying: "Há imagens que falam por si" (There are images that speak by themselves)...

[Jacob Le Bin]

Originally Posted by Dux

Judeo-Protestants. Or "people of the Old Testament". Or put more simply, "the Empire".