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.


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[Yago]

More connections between South African Apartheid squads and British paramilitaries in Nothern Ireland.

Agents on mission to kill: South African intelligence operators who plotted with Ulster loyalists to assassinate police defector in Britain were foiled by tip-off to MI6

The Independent
July 15, 1992

Dirk Coetzee walking the London street yesterday that his would-be killers staked out. Mr Coetzee is a former South African security policeman who turned on his old employers in 1989 and fled to Zambia, where he told about his role poisonings and wayside murders carried out by undercover South African security agents. He sought asylum in Britain in March 1991. Mr Coetzee was a key witness in the Harms Judicial Commission, which looked into political assassinations, and he named senior policemen as instigators of murder. He says his former colleagues want him dead because he joined the ANC and said he intended to return to South Africa and investigate the death squads.

Two South African agents on a secret mission to London this spring plotted with Ulster loyalist paramilitaries to assassinate the South African defector Dirk Coetzee, considered the number one traitor by former police colleagues.

The plot was foiled by a tip-off to British intelligence from a concerned officer within the South African police. The two agents, one a woman captain in military intelligence, were followed from their arrival at Heathrow Airport on 11 April until 15 April when they were arrested as they were about to fly back to South Africa.

Together with one of their Ulster contacts, they were interrogated for three days under the Prevention of Terrorism Act before being released and put on a flight home.

Sources close to the investigation believe the agents - Captain Pamela du Randt and Leon Flores, a former policeman on the South African military intelligence payroll - had orders to plan the attack on Mr Coetzee, which would then be carried out by a loyalist hit squad. Du Randt has been identified as the secretary of the head of military intelligence, General Christoffel van der Westhuizen.

The two agents were met at Heathrow by an Ulsterman with known South African connections, the same man who was later detained with them on 15 April. He took them to a pub in West Kensington, The Three Kings in North End Road, where they met three loyalist paramilitaries.

Two of these men were subsequently watched as they reconnoitred a flat in Hinde Street, in the West End of London, where Mr Coetzee lived with his two teenage children. By that time, he had been out of London for two weeks. The two South Africans checked into the Royal National Hotel in Bloomsbury, using genuine passports in their own names.

Mr Coetzee is a potential prime target of hardliners within South African security, not only because he defected but because he subsequently joined the African National Congress (ANC) and might give evidence about abuses perpetrated by former colleagues. He has been in London under police protection since March 1991. He told the Independent last night: 'Scotland Yard confirmed to me that this was a very serious attempt on my life. I missed death by the skin of my arse.'

The British authorities informed the government of F W de Klerk about the operation when du Randt and Flores were detained. The South African President promised his full cooperation and recently dispatched a trusted senior law officer to London. Michael Hodgen, the acting Attorney-General of the Eastern Cape, had talks last month with British officials investigating the South Africa-Ulster link. He also met Mr Coetzee and officials of the ANC , which had also been informed by the British about the assassination plot. On 8 May, Mr de Klerk also appointed Mr Hodgen to head an investigation into the murder of the black activist Matthew Goniwe in 1985 in which suspicion falls on General van der Westhuizen's security forces. The general is reported to have handed over an affidavit to Mr Hodgen on 15 May.

Although the mission was clearly authorised at a high level, there is no evidence that either Mr de Klerk or any of his ministers was aware of the plot. The revelations may give him ammunition with which to crack down on uncontrolled elements within his intelligence community.

After the two agents were released and returned to South Africa, Mr de Klerk ordered military intelligence to carry out a full investigation. This concluded that there had been a plot to kill Mr Coetzee involving some collusion by desk officers within military intelligence, although it implied that ultimate responsibility lay within the police force. The matter was referred to the South African police for further investigation.

During their three days of interrogation, du Randt and Flores made no attempt to disguise their identities but they stuck relentlessly to their cover story - that they were in London to investigate alleged links between the IRA and the ANC.

The sources close to the investigation, however, say that the true nature of the mission was suspected even before the couple arrived at Heathrow. The tip-off to MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, revealed that two agents were bound for London on an unspecified mission. British intelligence had been aware for some time of the threat against Mr Coetzee from hardliners in South African police and security circles. MI5, the Security Service, and Metropolitan Police Special Branch were called in to handle the surveillance operation once the two suspects landed.

The tip-off, coupled with the results of the surveillance, provided circumstantial evidence of the plot. But in the absence of confession by the two agents, the decision was taken to release them. They were flown out, without fanfare, during the Easter weekend. The loyalist paramilitaries decamped to Belfast, where they are presumed to be under continued surveillance by the security authorities.

Neither the loyalists nor the organisation to which they belong have been identified. There are proven links between South African security and the loyalist movement. Since 1985 South Africa has tried to obtain Britain's latest anti-aircraft missile technology developed at Shorts in Belfast by offering loyalist paramilitaries money and guns in exchange for parts and blueprints. Three Ulstermen, a South African diplomat and an American arms dealer were arrested in Paris for arms trafficking in 1989. Last year an exiled South African academic, Adrian Guelke, was the target of a botched assassination attempt in Belfast by gunmen of the underground Ulster Freedom Fighters. The UFF said the attack was a case of mistaken identity.

Since the London incident at Easter, the South African government has been asked by Britain to provide full details of covert links between its security forces and loyalist groups.

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