Hedge fund tycoons bankroll Liam Fox office as Werritty affair deepens

[Magda Hassan]

Inside the corporate intelligence company which bankrolled Liam Fox

A South African intelligence expert made payments of as much as £60,000 through his security company for an unregistered charity linked to Dr Liam Fox.

Dr Liam Fox quit after it emerged that he had allowed Adam Werritty, right, to attend official government meetings (PHILIP IDE)






Robert Mendick and Patrick Sawer

9:04PM BST 22 Oct 2011


Andre Pienaar, a multi-millionaire who keeps out of the public limelight, runs G3 Good Governance Group, a corporate security and intelligence company whose clients include the defence contractor BAE Systems.

In a lucrative industry reliant on insider information and expertise, Mr Pienaar has made it his business to be well-connected. A number of Establishment figures are on the company's payroll.

G3's main source of income is providing intelligence for big business including "competitor analysis" and cyber security at a cost of tens of thousands of pounds. There is no suggestion that the company, which is worth about £20 million, has operated in any way outside the law.

The chairman of G3's advisory board is the Duke of Westminster, while the company worked behind the scenes and free of charge as security consultants in the run-up to this summer's royal wedding. As a result, Mr Pienaar, 41, received an invite to the wedding ceremony as a guest of Buckingham Palace.

Lt Gen Sir Graeme Lamb, the former director of UK Special Forces, is also listed as a G3 adviser, while Lord Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, is a non-executive director of Proven, an investigatory arm of G3.

Geoffrey Tantum, a former MI6 Middle East director with wide-ranging connections, is also on the advisory council. Mr Tantum's daughter, Laura, operates Universal Exports, G3's charitable foundation which is also the name of the fictional company used as cover by James Bond.
The charity's trustees include Lord Ashdown and Lady Deborah Peat, the wife of the Prince of Wales's former principal private secretary.
According to sources, Dr Fox's office first approached Mr Pienaar in 2008 for funding for a Sri Lankan-based charity. Dr Fox had a long-standing interest in the country, dating back to the mid-1990s when he was a junior foreign office minister. Dr Fox's best man Adam Werritty, whose friendship led to his downfall, was also involved in the negotiations.
They agreed that G3 which has no commercial interests in Sri Lanka would pay to set up the Sri Lanka Development Trust through a Scottish law firm to help with reconciliation and reconstruction of a country torn apart by years of civil war. The charity, however, was never registered with the Charity Commission nor with Companies House.
No details of its accounts appear in any public records. The Sunday Telegraph has been told that G3's co-founder Hugh Petre, an Old Etonian who has since left the company, was never told about the payments linked to Dr Fox.
The former Defence Secretary travelled to Sri Lanka three times on flights paid for by the trust in 2009 and 2010 while he was in opposition. The flights were declared in Dr Fox's register of MPs' interests. The trust's address is given as the business address of G3, although the company says it never carried out any work for the charity on its premises.
Between 2008 and 2011, G3 says it made payments to the Sri Lanka Development Trust totalling "no more than £45,000". A further payment of £15,000 was paid to Pargav Ltd in June this year, which G3 believed would be given to the trust. Pargav is a company set up on behalf of Mr Werritty and funded his travel around the world and even the purchase of shoes, a handmade suit and a trip to a topless bar in New York. G3 is now reviewing the payment made to Pargav.
A spokesman for G3 said last week: "In 2008, we were asked by Dr Liam Fox, then the shadow defence secretary, to give advice about the reconstruction of northern Sri Lanka after the sudden end of the civil war.
Dr Fox explained that he wanted to play a constructive role in the peaceful reconstruction of the country. Our advice, which was provided on a pro bono basis, related to how a charity of this nature might be structured.
"The Sri Lanka Development Trust was subsequently established but we have never had any involvement in its work. Good Governance Group has no business or other related business in Sri Lanka, has no clients there and has never worked for its government."
G3 admits holding meetings with Dr Fox, both in government and in opposition, but says officials or civil servants were always present. Mr Pienaar is chief executive of G3 although he sold his shares in the company in the spring to a Swedish investment company for about £14 million before the scandal over Dr Fox emerged.
He was previously head of the South African division of Kroll, the world's biggest risk and security consultancy. G3 has been hugely successful since Mr Pienaar co-founded it in 2004. The company saw its turnover double between 2010 and 2011 from £6 million to £12 million and raised its profits from £1.3  million to £2.4 million during the period Dr Fox was appointed as Defence Secretary.
A source in the security and intelligence business said Mr Pienaar had been keen to help Dr Fox while he was in opposition. "G3 had defence clients but wanted to get more," said the source. "The deal with Fox was kept quiet even within the company."
A Buckingham Palace source confirmed G3 had undertaken work in the run-up to the royal wedding but did not comment on whether Mr Pienaar had been invited.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics...m-Fox.html

[Magda Hassan]

Gould-Werritty: A Real Conspiracy, Not a Theory

by craig on November 25, 2011 1:33 am in Uncategorized
There is a huge government cover-up in progress over the Werritty connection to Mossad and the role of British Ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould, and their neo-con plan to start a war with Iran.
Yesterday at 22.15pm I submitted by email a Freedom of Information request for:

All communications in either direction ever made between Matthew Gould and Adam Werritty, specifically including communications made outside government systems.

At 23.31pm I was astonished to get a reply from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The request was refused as it was

"likely to exceed the cost limit".

Now it is plainly nonsense that to gather correspondence between two named individuals would be too expensive. They could just ask Gould.
And a reply at nearly midnight? The Freedom of Information team in the FCO is not a 24 hour unit. Plainly not only are they hiding the Gould/Werritty correspondence, they are primed and on alert for this cover-up operation.
Even more blatant was the obstruction of MP Paul Flynn, when he attempted to question Cabinet Secretary Gus O'Donnell on the Gould-Werritty connection at the House of Commons Public Administration Committee. These are the minutes: anybody who believes in democracy should feel their blood boil as you read them:
Publc Admininstration Committee 24/11/2011

Q<369> Paul Flynn: Okay. Matthew Gould has been the subject of a very serious complaint from two of my constituents, Pippa Bartolotti and Joyce Giblin. When they were briefly imprisoned in Israel, they met the ambassador, and they strongly believeit is nothing to do with this case at allthat he was serving the interest of the Israeli Government, and not the interests of two British citizens. This has been the subject of correspondence.
In your report, you suggest that there were two meetings between the ambassador and Werritty and Liam Fox. Questions and letters have proved that, in fact, six such meetings took place. There are a number of issues around this. I do not normally fall for conspiracy theories, but the ambassador has proclaimed himself to be a Zionist and he has previously served in Iran, in the service. Werritty is a self-proclaimed
Robert Halfon: Point of order, Chairman. What is the point of this?
Paul Flynn:> Let me get to it. Werritty is a self-proclaimed expert on Iran.
Chair:> I have to take a point of order.
Robert Halfon:> Mr Flynn is implying that the British ambassador to Israel is working for a foreign power, which is out of order.
Paul Flynn:> I quote the Daily Mail: "Mr Werritty is a self-proclaimed expert on Iran and has made several visits. He has also met senior Israeli officials, leading to accusations"not from me, from the Daily Mail"that he was close to the country's secret service, Mossad." There may be nothing in that, but that appeared in a national newspaper.
Chair:> I am going to rule on a point of order. Mr Flynn has made it clear that there may be nothing in these allegations, but it is important to have put it on the record. Be careful how you phrase questions.
Paul Flynn:> Indeed. The two worst decisions taken by Parliament in my 25 years were the invasion of Iraqjoining Bush's war in Iraqand the invasion of Helmand province. We know now that there were things going on in the background while that built up to these mistakes. The charge in this case is that Werritty was the servant of neo-con people in America, who take an aggressive view on Iran. They want to foment a war in Iran in the same way as in the early years, there was another
Chair:> Order. I must ask you to move to a question that is relevant to the inquiry.
Q<370> Paul Flynn:> Okay. The question is, are you satisfied that you missed out on the extra four meetings that took place, and does this not mean that those meetings should have been investigated because of the nature of Mr Werritty's interests?
Sir Gus O'Donnell:> I think if you look at some of those meetings, some people are referring to meetings that took place before the election.
Q<371> Paul Flynn:> Indeed, which is even more worrying.
Sir Gus O'Donnell:> I am afraid they were not the subjectwhat members of the Opposition do is not something that the Cabinet Secretary should look into. It is not relevant.
But these meetings were held
Chair:> Mr Flynn, would you let him answer please?
Sir Gus O'Donnell:> I really do not think that was within my context, because they were not Ministers of the Government and what they were up to was not something I should get into at all.
Chair:> Final question, Mr Flynn.
Q<372> Paul Flynn:> No, it is not a final question. I am not going to be silenced by you, Chairman; I have important things to raise. I have stayed silent throughout this meeting so far.
You state in the reporton the meeting held between Gould, Fox and Werritty, on 6 February, in Tel Avivthat there was a general discussion of international affairs over a private dinner with senior Israelis. The UK ambassador was present. Are you following the line taken by the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government who says that he can eat with lobbyists or people applying to his Department because, on occasions, he eats privately, and on other occasions he eats ministerially? Are you accepting the idea? It is possibly a source of great national interestthe eating habits of their Secretary of State. It appears that he might well have a number of stomachs, it has been suggested, if he can divide his time this way. It does seem to be a way of getting round the ministerial code, if people can announce that what they are doing is private rather than ministerial.
Sir Gus O'Donnell:> The important point here was that, when the Secretary of State had that meeting, he had an official with himnamely, in this case, the ambassador. That is very important, and I should stress that I would expect our ambassador in Israel to have contact with Mossad. That will be part of his job. It is totally natural, and I do not think that you should infer anything from that about the individual's biases. That is what ambassadors do. Our ambassador in Pakistan will have exactly the same set of wide contacts.
Q<373> Paul Flynn:> I have good reason, as I said, from constituency matters, to be unhappy about the ambassador. Other criticisms have been made about the ambassador; he is unique in some ways in the role he is performing. There have been suggestions that he is too close to a foreign power.
Robert Halfon:> On a point of order, Chair, this is not about the ambassador to Israel. This is supposed to be about the Werritty affair.
Paul Flynn:> It is absolutely crucial to this report. If neo-cons such as yourself, Robert, are plotting a war in Iran, we should know about it.
Chair:> Order. I think the line of questioning is very involved. I have given you quite a lot of time, Mr Flynn. If you have further inquiries to make of this, they could be pursued in correspondence. May I ask you to ask one final question before we move on?
Sir Gus O'Donnell:> One thing I would stress: we are talking about the ambassador and I think he has a right of reply. Mr Chairman, I know there is an interesting question of words regarding Head of the Civil Service versus Head of the Home Civil Service, but this is the Diplomatic Service, not the Civil Service.
Q<374> Chair:> So he is not in your jurisdiction at all.
Sir Gus O'Donnell:> No.
Q<375> Paul Flynn:> But you are happy that your report is final; it does not need to go the manager it would have gone to originally, and that is the end of the affair. Is that your view?
Sir Gus O'Donnell:> As I said, some issues arose where I wanted to be sure that what the Secretary of State was doing had been discussed with the Foreign Secretary. I felt reassured by what the Foreign Secretary told me.
Q<376> Chair:> I think what Mr Flynn is asking is that your report and the affair raise other issues, but you are saying that that does not fall within the remit of your report and that, indeed, the conduct of an ambassador does not fall within your remit at all.
Sir Gus O'Donnell:> That is absolutely correct.
Paul Flynn:> The charge laid by Lord Turnbull in his evidence with regard to Dr Fox and the ministerial code was his failure to observe collective responsibility, in that case about Sri Lanka. Isn't the same charge there about our policies to Iran and Israel?
Chair:> We have dealt with that, Mr Flynn.
Paul Flynn:> We haven't dealt with it as far as it applies
Chair:> Mr Flynn, we are moving on.
Paul Flynn:> You may well move on, but I remain very unhappy about the fact that you will not allow me to finish the questioning I wanted to give on a matter of great importance.

It is shocking but true that Robert Halfon MP, who disrupted Flynn with repeated points of order, receives funding from precisely the same Israeli sources as Werritty, and in particular from Mr Poju Zabludowicz. He also formerly had a full time paid job as Political Director of the Conservative Friends of Israel.
But despite the evasiveness of O'Donnell and the obstruction of paid zionist puppet Halfon, O'Donnell confirms vital parts of my investigation. In particular he agrees that the Fox-Werritty-Gould "private dinner" in Tel Aviv was with Mossad, and that Gould met Werritty many times more than the twice that O'Donnell listed in his "investigation" into this affair.
Of the six meetings of Fox-Gould-Werritty together which I discovered, five were while Fox was Secretary of State for Defence. Only one was while Fox was in opposition. But O'Donnell has now let the cat much further out of the bag, with the astonishing admission to Paul Flynn's above questioning that Gould, Fox and Werritty held "meetings that took place before the election." He also refers to "some of those meetings" as being before the election. Both are plainly in the plural.
It is now evident that not only did Fox, Gould and Werritty have at least five meetings while Fox was in power with never another British official present they had several meetings while Fox was shadow Foreign Secretary. O'Donnell is right that what Fox and Werritty were up to in opposition is not his concern. But what Gould was doing with them a senior official most definitely is.
A senior British diplomat cannot just hold a series of meetings with the opposition shadow Defence Secretary and a paid zionist lobbyist. What on earth was happening?
The absolutely astonishing cover-up and lack of honesty from the government about the Fox-Gould-Werritty relationship is being maintained with cast-iron resolve. Not only is Gould a self-declared fervent zionist, he was born in the same year as Chancellor George Osborne and attended the same private school St Paul's. At least some of the time he was meeting Fox and Werrity while they were in opposition, Gould was Private Secretary to New Labour Foreign Secretary David Milliband. That opens up the question of whether David Milliband, another fervent zionist, was part of the discussions with Mossad and US neo-cons on how to engineer war with Iran, for which Werritty was the conduit.
That would help explain the completeness of the cover-up. The government appears able with total impunity to refuse to answer MPs' questions on Gould/Fox/Werritty, and they will not respond to Freedom of Information requests. It is now proven without doubt that O'Donnell lied blatantly about the number of Gould-Fox-Werritty meetings, and that Mossad was involved. And yet every single British mainstream media outlet still refuses to mention it.
I know from a mole that the plot involves a plan to attack Iran. For the cover-up to be so blatant and yet so comprehensively maintained, the secret at the heart of this conspiracy must be great, and those complicit must include a very large swathe of the British political and media establishment.
UPDATE: access to this blog is now blocked from FCO and Cabinet Office terminals. Very wise truth can be contagious.
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2...-a-theory/

[David Guyatt]

The Liam Fox - Adam Werrity affair finally (well, almost anyway) gets a proper airing. By former Uk Ambassador, Craig Murray. And very interesting it is too.

Just like the US, the UK is far too subservient to Israeli and neocon interests.

Why Has Israeli Spy Shai Masot Not Been Expelled? 1
8 Jan, 2017 in Uncategorized by craig


There is no starker proof of the golden chains in which Israel has entangled the British political class, than the incredible fact that "diplomat" Shai Masot has not been expelled for secretly conspiring to influence British politics by attacking Britain's Deputy Foreign Minister, suggesting that he might be brought down by "a little scandal". It is incredible by any normal standards of diplomatic behaviour that immediate action was not taken against Masot for actions which when revealed any professional diplomat would normally expect to result in being "PNG'd" declared persona non grata.


Obama has just expelled 35 Russian diplomats for precisely the same offence, with the exception that in the Russian case there is absolutely zero hard evidence, whereas in the Masot case there is irrefutable evidence on which to act.




To compare the two cases is telling. Al Jazeera should be congratulated on their investigation, which shames the British corporate and state media who would never have carried out such actual journalism. By contrast, the British media has parroted without the slightest scrutiny the truly pathetic Obama camp claims of Russian interference, evidently without reading them. When I was sent the latest "intelligence report" on Russian hacking a couple of evenings ago, I quite genuinely for several minutes thought it was a spoof by the Daily Mash or similar, parodying the kind of ludicrous claims that kept being advanced with zero evidence. I do implore you to read it, as when you realise it is supposed to be serious it becomes still more hilarious.


The existence of a natural preference in Russia to see a US President who does not want to start World War III is quoted as itself evidence that Russia interfered, just as the fact that I could do with some more money is evidence I robbed a bank. The fact that Russia did not criticise the electoral process after the result is somehow evidence that Putin personally ordered electoral hacking. Oh, and the fact that Russia Today once hosted a programme critical of fracking is evidence of a Russian plot to destroy the US economy. Please do read it, I promise you will be laughing for weeks.


In passing, allow me to destroy quickly the "we have smoking gun evidence but it's too secret to show you" argument. Given the Snowden revelations and the whistleblowing of the former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney, for the US government to claim to be hiding the fact that it can tack all electronic traffic in the USA is risible. This is like saying we can't give you the evidence in case the Russians find out the sky is blue. If there were hacks, the NSA could identify the precise hack transmitting the precise information out of Washington. Everybody knows that. There were no hacks so there is ne evidence. End of argument. They are internal leaks.


The two stories Russian interference in US politics, Israeli interference in UK politics also link because the New York Times claims that it was the British that first suggested to the Obama administration that Russian cyber activity was targeting Clinton. Director of Cyber Security and Information Assurance in the British Cabinet Office is Matthew Gould, the UK's former openly and strongly pro-Zionist Ambassador to Israel and friend of the current Israeli Ambassador Mark Regev. While Private Secretary to David Miliband and William Hague, and then while Ambassador to Israel, Regev held eight secret meetings with Adam Werritty, on at least one occasion with Mossad present and on most occasions also with now minister Liam Fox. My Freedom of Information requests for minutes of these meetings brought the reply that they were not minuted, and my Freedom of Information request for the diary entries for these meetings brought me three pages each containing only the date, with everything else redacted.


I managed to get the information about the Gould/Werritty meetings as a result of relentless questioning, where I was kindly assisted by MPs including Jeremy Corbyn, Caroline Lucas and Paul Flynn. The woman with whom Shai Masot was conniving to undermine Alan Duncan, was Maria Strizzolo, who works for Tory Minister Robert Halfon. It was Halfon who repeatedly tried to obstruct Paul Flynn MP from asking questions of Cabinet Secretary Gus O'Donnell that threatened to get to the heart of the real Adam Werritty scandal.


Both Robert Halfon and Adam Werrity received funding from precisely the same Israeli sources, and in particular from Mr Poju Zabludowicz. He also formerly had a full time paid job as Political Director of the Conservative Friends of Israel. Halfon's assistant is now caught conspiring with the Israeli Embassy to attack another Tory minister.


House of Commons Publc Admininstration Committee 24/11/2011


Q<369> Paul Flynn: Okay. Matthew Gould has been the subject of a very serious complaint from two of my constituents, Pippa Bartolotti and Joyce Giblin. When they were briefly imprisoned in Israel, they met the ambassador, and they strongly believeit is nothing to do with this case at allthat he was serving the interest of the Israeli Government, and not the interests of two British citizens. This has been the subject of correspondence.
In your report, you suggest that there were two meetings between the ambassador and Werritty and Liam Fox. Questions and letters have proved that, in fact, six such meetings took place. There are a number of issues around this. I do not normally fall for conspiracy theories, but the ambassador has proclaimed himself to be a Zionist and he has previously served in Iran, in the service. Werritty is a self-proclaimed
Robert Halfon: Point of order, Chairman. What is the point of this?
Paul Flynn:> Let me get to it. Werritty is a self-proclaimed expert on Iran.
Chair:> I have to take a point of order.
Robert Halfon:> Mr Flynn is implying that the British ambassador to Israel is working for a foreign power, which is out of order.
Paul Flynn:> I quote the Daily Mail: "Mr Werritty is a self-proclaimed expert on Iran and has made several visits. He has also met senior Israeli officials, leading to accusations"not from me, from the Daily Mail"that he was close to the country's secret service, Mossad." There may be nothing in that, but that appeared in a national newspaper.
Chair:> I am going to rule on a point of order. Mr Flynn has made it clear that there may be nothing in these allegations, but it is important to have put it on the record. Be careful how you phrase questions.
Paul Flynn:> Indeed. The two worst decisions taken by Parliament in my 25 years were the invasion of Iraqjoining Bush's war in Iraqand the invasion of Helmand province. We know now that there were things going on in the background while that built up to these mistakes. The charge in this case is that Werritty was the servant of neo-con people in America, who take an aggressive view on Iran. They want to foment a war in Iran in the same way as in the early years, there was another
Chair:> Order. I must ask you to move to a question that is relevant to the inquiry.
Q<370> Paul Flynn:> Okay. The question is, are you satisfied that you missed out on the extra four meetings that took place, and does this not mean that those meetings should have been investigated because of the nature of Mr Werritty's interests?
Sir Gus O'Donnell:> I think if you look at some of those meetings, some people are referring to meetings that took place before the election.
Q<371> Paul Flynn:> Indeed, which is even more worrying.
Sir Gus O'Donnell:> I am afraid they were not the subjectwhat members of the Opposition do is not something that the Cabinet Secretary should look into. It is not relevant.
But these meetings were held
Chair:> Mr Flynn, would you let him answer please?
Sir Gus O'Donnell:> I really do not think that was within my context, because they were not Ministers of the Government and what they were up to was not something I should get into at all.
Chair:> Final question, Mr Flynn.
Q<372> Paul Flynn:> No, it is not a final question. I am not going to be silenced by you, Chairman; I have important things to raise. I have stayed silent throughout this meeting so far.
You state in the reporton the meeting held between Gould, Fox and Werritty, on 6 February, in Tel Avivthat there was a general discussion of international affairs over a private dinner with senior Israelis. The UK ambassador was present. Are you following the line taken by the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government who says that he can eat with lobbyists or people applying to his Department because, on occasions, he eats privately, and on other occasions he eats ministerially? Are you accepting the idea? It is possibly a source of great national interestthe eating habits of their Secretary of State. It appears that he might well have a number of stomachs, it has been suggested, if he can divide his time this way. It does seem to be a way of getting round the ministerial code, if people can announce that what they are doing is private rather than ministerial.
Sir Gus O'Donnell:> The important point here was that, when the Secretary of State had that meeting, he had an official with himnamely, in this case, the ambassador. That is very important, and I should stress that I would expect our ambassador in Israel to have contact with Mossad. That will be part of his job. It is totally natural, and I do not think that you should infer anything from that about the individual's biases. That is what ambassadors do. Our ambassador in Pakistan will have exactly the same set of wide contacts.
Q<373> Paul Flynn:> I have good reason, as I said, from constituency matters, to be unhappy about the ambassador. Other criticisms have been made about the ambassador; he is unique in some ways in the role he is performing. There have been suggestions that he is too close to a foreign power.
Robert Halfon:> On a point of order, Chair, this is not about the ambassador to Israel. This is supposed to be about the Werritty affair.
Paul Flynn:> It is absolutely crucial to this report. If neo-cons such as yourself, Robert, are plotting a war in Iran, we should know about it.
Chair:> Order. I think the line of questioning is very involved. I have given you quite a lot of time, Mr Flynn. If you have further inquiries to make of this, they could be pursued in correspondence. May I ask you to ask one final question before we move on?
Sir Gus O'Donnell:> One thing I would stress: we are talking about the ambassador and I think he has a right of reply. Mr Chairman, I know there is an interesting question of words regarding Head of the Civil Service versus Head of the Home Civil Service, but this is the Diplomatic Service, not the Civil Service.
Q<374> Chair:> So he is not in your jurisdiction at all.
Sir Gus O'Donnell:> No.
Q<375> Paul Flynn:> But you are happy that your report is final; it does not need to go the manager it would have gone to originally, and that is the end of the affair. Is that your view?
Sir Gus O'Donnell:> As I said, some issues arose where I wanted to be sure that what the Secretary of State was doing had been discussed with the Foreign Secretary. I felt reassured by what the Foreign Secretary told me.
Q<376> Chair:> I think what Mr Flynn is asking is that your report and the affair raise other issues, but you are saying that that does not fall within the remit of your report and that, indeed, the conduct of an ambassador does not fall within your remit at all.
Sir Gus O'Donnell:> That is absolutely correct.
Paul Flynn:> The charge laid by Lord Turnbull in his evidence with regard to Dr Fox and the ministerial code was his failure to observe collective responsibility, in that case about Sri Lanka. Isn't the same charge there about our policies to Iran and Israel?
Chair:> We have dealt with that, Mr Flynn.
Paul Flynn:> We haven't dealt with it as far as it applies
Chair:> Mr Flynn, we are moving on.
Paul Flynn:> You may well move on, but I remain very unhappy about the fact that you will not allow me to finish the questioning I wanted to give on a matter of great importance.
It is shocking but true that Robert Halfon MP, who disrupted Flynn with repeated points of order, receives funding from precisely the same Israeli sources as Werritty, and in particular from Mr Poju Zabludowicz. He also formerly had a full time paid job as Political Director of the Conservative Friends of Israel. It is not surprising that Shai Mosat evidently views Halfon as a useful tool for attacking senior pro-Palestinian members of his own party.


But despite the evasiveness of O'Donnell and the obstruction of paid zionist puppet Halfon, O'Donnell confirmed vital parts of my investigation. In particular he agreed that the Fox-Werritty-Gould "private dinner" in Tel Aviv was with Mossad, and that Gould met Werritty many times more than the twice that O'Donnell listed in his "investigation" into the Werritty affair. The truth of the Werritty scandal, hidden comprehensively by the mainstream media, was that Werritty was inside the UK Ministry of Defence working for Israel. That is why it was so serious that Defence Minister Liam Fox had to resign


Of the eight meetings of Fox-Gould-Werritty together which I discovered, seven were while Fox was Secretary of State for Defence. Only one was while Fox was in opposition. But O'Donnell let the cat much further out of the bag, with the astonishing admission to Paul Flynn's above questioning that Gould, Fox and Werritty held "meetings that took place before the election." He also referred to "some of those meetings" as being before the election. Both are plainly in the plural.


It is evident from the information gained by Paul Flynn that not only did Fox, Gould and Werritty have at least seven meetings while Fox was in power with no minutes and never another British official present they had several meetings while Fox was shadow Foreign Secretary. O'Donnell was right that what Fox and Werritty were up to in opposition was not his concern. But what Gould was doing with them a senior official most definitely was his concern. A senior British diplomat cannot just hold a series of meetings with the opposition shadow Defence Secretary and a paid Israeli lobbyist.


All of this underlined the pernicious influence that Israel has in the political class, which is founded on the Israeli lobby's shameless use of cash for influence as witnessed in the discussion between Shai Mosat and Labour Firends of Israel and his flaunting of a million. Attitudes towards the plight of the Palestinians are an extreme example of the disconnect between public opinion and the views of the political class, and Al Jazeera should be congratulated heartily on giving us a peek into that.


No further evidence is required. There could be no more conclusive evidence of Israel's undue and pernicious influence than the astonishing fact that Shai Mosat has not yet been expelled.

Source

[David Guyatt]

An earlier blog post by Craig Murray on the Liam Fox/Adam Werrity/Mathew Gould affair.

It is startling that a British ambassador worked for, and showed allegiance to, a foreign power. By any measure of interpretation that is treasonous. It is hardly surprising that others inside the Foreign Office/MOD decided to out this story - as best they could, given the British media's neocon leanings.

Matthew Gould and the Plot to Attack Iran 440
14 Nov, 2011 in Uncategorized by craig




This is Matthew Gould, second from right, British Ambassador to Israel, who was pictured speaking at a meeting of the Leeds Zionist Federation that was also the opening of the Leeds Hasbarah Centre. The Leeds Zionist Federation is part of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland, motto "Speaking Up for Israel." A collection was made at the meeting to send packages to members of the Israeli Defence Force.


On 29 May 2011 The Jerusalem Post reported: "British Ambassador Matthew Gould declared his commitment to Israel and the principles of Zionism on Thursday".


Remember this background, it is unusual behaviour for a diplomat, and it is important.


The six meetings between British Ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould and Minister of Defence Liam Fox and Adam Werritty together only two of which were revealed by Cabinet Secretary Gus O'Donnell in his "investigation" into Werritty's unauthorised role in the Ministry of Defence raise vital concerns about a secret agenda for war at the core of government, comparable to Blair's determination to drive through a war on Iraq..


This is a detective story. It begins a few weeks ago, when the Fox-Werritty scandal was first breaking in the media. I had a contact from an old friend from my Foreign Office days. This friend had access to the Gus O'Donnell investigation. He had given a message for me to a trusted third party.


Whistleblowing in the surveillance state is a difficult activity. I left through a neighbour's garden, not carrying a mobile phone, puffed and panted by bicycle to an unmonitored but busy stretch of road, hitched a lift much of the way, then ordered a minicab on a payphone from a country pub to my final destination, a farm far from CCTV. There the intermediary gave me the message: what really was worrying senior civil servants in the Cabinet Office was that the Fox-Werritty link related to plans involving Mossad and the British Ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould.


Since I became a notorious whistleblower, several of my ex-friends and contacts have used me to get out information they wanted to leak, via my blog. A good recent example was a senior friend at the UN who tipped me off in advance on the deal by which the US agreed to the Saudi attack on pro-democracy demonstrators in Bahrain, in return for Arab League support for the NATO attack on Libya. But this was rather different, not least in the apparent implication that our Ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould, was engaged in something with Werritty which went beyond official FCO policy.


I was particularly concerned by this because I knew slightly and liked Matthew Gould, from the time he wrote speeches for Robin Cook. I hoped there was nothing much in it. But then Gould's name started to come up as professional journalists dug into the story, and reported Werritty's funding by pro-Israeli lobby groups.


I decided that the best approach was for me to write to Matthew Gould. I did so, asking him when he had first met Werritty, how many times he had met him, and how many communications of every kind there had been between them. I received the reply that these questions would be answered in Gus O'Donnell's report.


But Gus O'Donnell's report in fact answered none of these questions. It only mentioned two meetings at which Fox, Gould and Werritty were all three present. It did not mention Gould-Werritty bilateral meetings and contacts at all. To an ex-Ambassador like me, there was also something very fishy about the two trilateral meetings O'Donnell did mention and his characterisation of them.


This led me to dig further, and I was shocked to find that O'Donnell was, at the most charitable interpretation, economical with the truth. In fact there were at least six Fox-Werritty-Gould meetings, not the two given by O'Donnell. Why did GOD lie? I now had no doubt that my informant had pointed me towards something very real and very important indeed.


Matthew Gould was the only British Ambassador who Fox and Werrity met together. They met him six times. Why?


The first meeting to which O'Donnell admits, took place in September 2010. O'Donnell says this was


"a general discussion of international defence and security matters to enable Mr Gould better to understand MOD's perspective."
O'Donnell says Werritty should not have been present. An FCO spokesman told me on 21 October that


"Mr Gould's meeting with the Defence Secretary was arranged by his office as part of his pre-posting briefing calls."
All Ambassadors make pre-posting briefing calls around Whitehall before taking up their job, as you would expect. But even for our most senior Ambassadors, outside the Foreign Office those calls are not at Secretary of State level. Senior officials are quite capable of explaining policy to outgoing Ambassadors; Secretaries of State have many other things to do.


For this meeting to happen at all was not routine, and Werritty's presence made it still more strange. Why was this meeting happening? I dug further, and learnt from a senior MOD source that there were two more very strange things about this meeting, neither noted by O'Donnell. There was no private secretary or MOD official present to take note of action points, and the meeting took place not in Fox's office, but in the MOD dining room.


O'Donnell may have been able to fox the media, but to a former Ambassador this whole meeting stunk. I bombarded the FCO with more questions, and discovered an amazing fact left out by O'Donnell. The FCO spokesman replied to me on 21 October 2011 that:


"Mr Werritty was also present at an earlier meeting Mr Gould had with Dr Fox in the latter's capacity as shadow Defence Secretary."
So Gould, Fox and Werritty had got together before Gould was Ambassador, while Fox was still in opposition and while Werritty was what, exactly? This opened far more questions than it answered. I put them to the FCO. When, where and why had this meeting happened? We only knew it was before May 2010, when Fox took office. What was discussed? There are very strict protocols for senior officials briefing opposition front bench spokesman. Had they been followed?


The FCO refused point blank to answer any further questions. I turned to an independent-minded MP, Jeremy Corbyn, who put down a parliamentary question to William Hague. The reply quite deliberately ignored almost all of Corbyn's question, but it did throw up an extraordinary bit of information yet another meeting between Fox, Werritty and Gould, which had not been previously admitted.


Hague replied to Corbyn that:


"Our ambassador to Israel was also invited by the former Defence Secretary to a private social engagement in summer 2010 at which Adam Werritty was present."
Getting to the truth was like drawing teeth, but the picture was building. O'Donnell had completely mischaracterised the "Briefing meeting" between Fox, Werritty and O'Donnell by hiding the fact that the three had met up at least twice before once for a meeting when Fox was in opposition, and once for "a social engagement." The FCO did not answer Corbyn's question as to who else was present at this "social engagement".


This was also key because Gould's other meetings with Fox and Werritty were being characterised albeit falsely as simply routine, something Gould had to do in the course of his ambassadorial duties. But this attendance at "a private social engagement" was a voluntary act by Gould, indubitable proof that, at the least, the three were happy in each other's company, but given that all three were very active in zionist causes, it was a definite indication of something more than that.


That furtive meeting between Fox, Werritty and Gould in the MOD dining room, deliberately held away from Fox's office where it should have taken place, and away from the MOD officials who should have been there, now looks less like briefing and more like plotting.


My existing doubts about the second and only other meeting to which O'Donnell does admit make plain why that question is very important.


O'Donnell had said that Gould, Fox and Werritty had met on 6 February 2011:


"in Tel Aviv. This was a general discussion of international affairs over a private dinner with senior Israelis. The UK Ambassador was present."
There was something very wrong here. Any ex-Ambassador knows that any dinner with senior figures from your host country, at which the British Ambassador to that country and a British Secretary of State are both present, and at which international affairs are discussed, can never be "private". You are always representing the UK government in that circumstance. The only explanation I could think of for O'Donnell's astonishing description of this as a "private" dinner was that the discussion was far from being official UK policy.


I therefore asked the FCO who was at this dinner, what was discussed, and who was paying for it? I viewed the last as my trump card if either Gould or Fox was receiving hospitality, they are obliged to declare it. To my astonishment the FCO refused to say who was present or who paid. Corbyn's parliamentary question also covered the issue of who was at this dinner, to which he received no reply.


Plainly something was very wrong. I therefore again asked how often Gould had met or communicated with Werritty without Fox being present. Again the FCO refused to reply. But one piece of information that had been found by other journalists was that, prior to the Tel Aviv dinner, Fox, Gould and Werritty had together attended the Herzilya conference in Israel. The programme of this is freely available. It is an unabashedly staunch zionist annual conference on "Israel's security", which makes no pretence at a balanced approach to Palestinian questions and attracts a strong US neo-conservative following. Fox, Gould and Werritty sat together at this event.


Yet again, the liar O'Donnell does not mention it.


I then learnt of yet another, a sixth meeting between Fox, Gould and Werritty. This time my infomrant was another old friend, a jewish diplomat for another country, based at an Embassy in London. They had met Gould, Fox and Werritty together at the "We believe in Israel" conference in London in May 2011. Here is a photo of Gould and Fox together at that conference.


I had no doubt about the direction this information was leading, but I now needed to go back to my original source. Sometimes the best way to hide something is to put it right under the noses of those looking for it, and on Wednesday I picked up the information in a tent at the Occupy London camp outside St Paul's cathedral.


This is the story I was given.


Matthew Gould was Deputy Head of Mission at the British Embassy in Iran, a country which Werritty frequently visited, and where Werritty claimed to have British government support for plots against Ahmadinejad. Gould worked at the British Embassy in Washington; the Fox-Werritty Atlantic Bridge fake charity was active in building links between British and American neo-conservatives and particularly ultra-zionists. Gould's responsibilities at the Embassy included co-ordination on US policy towards Iran. The first meeting of all three, which the FCO refuses to date, probably stems from this period.


According to my source, there is a long history of contact between Gould and Werritty. The FCO refuse to give any information on Gould-Werritty meetings or communications except those meetings where Fox was present and those have only been admitted gradually, one by one. We may not have them all even yet.


My source says that co-ordinating with Israel and the US on diplomatic preparation for an attack on Iran was the subject of all these meetings. That absolutely fits with the jobs Gould held at the relevant times. The FCO refuses to say what was discussed. My source says that, most crucially, Iran was discussed at the Tel Aviv dinner, and the others present represented Mossad. The FCO again refuses to say who was present or what was discussed.


On Wednesday 2 November it was revealed in the press that under Fox the MOD had prepared secret and detailed contingency plans for British participation in an attack on Iran.


There are very important questions here. Was Gould really discussing neo-con plans for attacking Iran with Werritty and eventually with Fox before the Conservatives were even in government? Why did O'Donnell's report so carefully mislead on the Fox-Gould-Werritty axis? How far was the FCO aware of MOD preparations for attacking Iran? Is there a neo-con cell of senior ministers and officials, co-ordinating with Israel and the United States, and keeping their designs hidden from the Conservative's coalition partners?


The government could clear up these matters if it answered some of the questions it refuses to answer, even when asked formally by a member of parliament. The media have largely moved on from the Fox-Werritty affair, but have barely skimmed the surface of the key questions it raises. They relate to secrecy, democratic accountabilty and preparations to launch a war, preparations which bypass the safeguards of good government. The refusal to give straight answers to simple questions by a member of perliament strikes at the very root of our democracy.


Is this not precisely the situation we were in with Blair and Iraq? Have no lessons been learnt?


There is a further question which arises. Ever since the creation of the state of Israel, the UK had a policy of not appointing a jewish Briton as Ambassador, for fear of conflict of interest. As a similar policy of not appointing a catholic Ambassador to the Vatican. New Labour overturned both longstanding policies as discriminatory. Matthew Gould is therefore the first jewish British Ambassador to Israel.


Matthew Gould does not see his race or religion as irrelevant. He has chosen to give numerous interviews to both British and Israeli media on the subject of being a jewish ambassador, and has been at pains to be photographed by the Israeli media participating in jewish religious festivals. Israeli newspaper Haaretz described him as "Not just an ambassador who is jewish, but a jewish ambassador". That rather peculiar phrase appears directly to indicate that the potential conflict of interest for a British ambassador in Israel has indeed arisen.


It is thus most unfortunate that it is Gould who is the only British Ambassador to have met Fox and Werritty together, who met them six times, and who now stands suspected of long term participation with them in a scheme to forward war with Iran, in cooperation with Israel. This makes it even more imperative that the FCO answers now the numerous outstanding questions about the Gould/Werritty relationship and the purpose of all those meetings with Fox.


There is no doubt that the O'Donnell report's deceitful non-reporting of so many Fox-Gould-Werritty meetings, the FCO's blunt refusal to list Gould-Werritty, meetings and contacts without Fox, and the refusal to say who else was present at any of these occasions, amounts to irrefutable evidence that something very important is being hidden right at the heart of government. I have no doubt that my informant is telling the truth, and the secret is the plan to attack Iran. It fits all the above facts. What else does?


Please feel free to re-use and republish this article anywhere, commercially or otherwise. It has been blocked by the mainstream media. I write regularly for the mainstream media and this is the first article of mine I have ever been unable to publish. People have risked a huge amount by leaking me information in an effort to stop the government machinery from ramping up a war with Iran. There are many good people in government who do not want to see another Iraq. Please do all you can to publish and redistribute this information.


UPDATE A commenter has already pointed me to this bit of invaluable evidence:


"My government absolutely agrees with your conception of the Iranian threat and the importance of your determination to battle it." Dealing with the Iranian threat will be a large part of my work here." Gould said.
From Israel National News. It also says that he will be trying to promote a positive atmosphere between Israel and the Palestinian National Authority, but the shallowest or the deepest search shows the same picture; an entirely biased indeed fanatical zionist who must give no confidence at all to the Palestinian Authority. He must be recalled.

Source