The mainstream media for the most part has moved on. But there are a few more gleanings to be had, of perhaps the most interesting comes from the Daily Mirror, which labels al-Hilli an extremist on the grounds that he was against the war in Iraq, disapproved of the behaviour of Israel and had doubts over 9/11 – which makes a great deal of the population “extremist”. But the Mirror has the only mainstream mention I can find of the possibility that Mossad carried out the killings. Given Mr al-Hilli’s profession, the fact he is a Shia, the fact he had visited Iran, and the fact that Israel heas been assassinating scientists connected to Iran’s nuclear programme, this has to be a possibility. There are of course other possibilities, but to ignore that one is ludicrous.
Which leads me to the argument of Daily Mail crime reporter, Stephen Wright, that the French police should concentrate on the idea that this was a killing by a random Alpine madman or racist bigot. Perfectly possible, of course, and the anti-Muslim killings in Marseille might be as much a precedent as Mossad killings of scientists. But why the lone madman idea should be the preferred investigation, Mr Wright does not explain. What I did find interesting from a man who has visited many crime scenes are his repeated insinuations that the French authorities are not really trying very hard to find who the killers were, for example:
the crime scene would have been sealed off for a minimum of seven to ten days, to allow detailed forensic searches for DNA, fibres, tyre marks and shoe prints to take place.
Nearby bushes and vegetation would have been searched for any discarded food and cigarette butts left by the killer, not to mention the murder weapon.
But from what I saw at the end of last week, no such searches had taken place and potentially vital evidence could have been missed. House to house inquiries in the local area had yet to be completed and police had not made specific public appeals for information about the crime. No reward had been put up for information about the shootings.
Behind the scenes, what other short cuts have been taken? Have police seized data identifying all mobile phones being used in the vicinity of the murders that day?
The idea that the French authorities – who are quite as capable as any other of solving cases – are not really trying very hard is an interesting one.
Which leads me to this part of a remarkable article from the Daily Telegraph, which if true points us back towards a hit squad and discounts the ides that there was only one gun:
Claims that only one gun was used to kill everybody is likely to be disproved by full ballistics test results which are out in October.
While the 25 spent bullet cartridges found at the scene are all of the same kind, they could in fact have come from a number of weapons of the same make.
This throws up the possibility of a well-equipped, highly-trained gang circling the car and then opening fire.
Both children were left alive by the killers, who had clinically pumped bullets into everybody else, including five into Mr Mollier.
Zainab was found staggering around outside the car by Brett Martin, a British former RAF serviceman who cycled by moments after the attack, but he saw nobody except the schoolgirl.
Her sister, Zeena, was found unscathed and hiding in the car eight hours later.
Both sisters are now back in Britain, and are believed to have been reunited at a secret location near London.
There are of course a number of hit squad options, both governmental and private, which might well involve iraqi or Iranian interests – on both of which the mainstream media have been very happy to speculate while almost unanimously ignoring Israel.
But what interests me is why the Daily Telegraph choose, in the face of all the evidence, to minimise the horrific nature of the attack by stating that “Both children were left alive by the killers”? Zainab was not left alive by design, she was shot in the chest and her skull was stove in, which presumably was a pretty serious attempt to kill a seven year-old child. The other girl might very well have succeeded in hiding from the killers under her mother’s skirts, as she hid from the first rescuers, and then for eight hours from the police.
The Telegraph article claims to be informed by sources close to the investigation. So they believe it was a group of people, and feel motivated to absolve those people from child-killing. Now what could the Daily Telegraph be thinking?
and finally as to Wolf connotations there’s this Jerusalem post item about a fecent book on Mossad activities that has caused quite a stir. As it makes interesting reading will post it all.
Jerusalem Post Review of ‘Spies Against Armageddon’ Spotlights What’s Unique about Israeli Intelligence: Human Assets
[On Friday September 21st, The Jerusalem Post newspaper published its review of SPIES AGAINST ARMAGEDDON by Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman. The review was written by the newspaper’s Berlin-based European correspondent, Benjamin Weinthal. Here is Weinthal’s review of the book.]
But without sources, human sources within the enemy centers, you will never discover the kinds of plots that unfolded on September 11.” With these words, Markus Wolf, the former head of the now-defunct German Democratic Republic foreign intelligence service, explained to me 10 years ago in an eastern Berlin cafe the categorical imperative of perfecting human intelligence.
Wolf (1923-2006), son of the famous German Jewish playwright Dr. Friedrich Wolf, very likely knew that the Palestinian Black September group planned to take Israelis hostage at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. Famously known as “the man without a face,” he garnered the reputation as one of the great spymasters of the last century because of his enormous ability to engage in the granular intelligence work of infiltrating the highest levels of the Federal Republic’s chancellery and NATO with human resources.
Wolf’s departure point was human resource penetration – a straightforward albeit frequently neglected tactic by advanced Western services – which has been the overriding espionage method of the various Israeli intelligence services.
With their new book, Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars, Israeli intelligence journalist Yossi Melman and American CBS national political correspondent Dan Raviv travel deep into the weeds of Israel’s intelligence agencies and the people-intensive work of the men and women responsible for Israel’s security.
Melman and Raviv meticulously document “the Mossad’s reliance on human intelligence expertise – humint” over the span of the birth of Israel’s espionage work in the late 1940s to the reported Mossadengineered targeted killings of Iranian scientists working on the clerical regime’s illicit nuclear weapons program. It should be noted that the authors stress the plural over the singular when writing about Israel’s intelligence apparatus and its diverse divisions.
The book has garnered intense attention in the Islamic Republic of Iran and in the United States for its chapter entitled “Assassins” … A July New York Times article headlined “Tehran Abuzz as Book Says Israel Killed 5 Scientists” explored the reception in Iran.
Melman – widely considered to be the gold standard of Israeli news gathering and analysis on the opaque world of Israeli intelligence – and his co-author, Raviv, demystify the preconceived notions about the all-consuming mastery of the Jewish state’s espionage work. The blunders associated with the Lavon affair – an Inspector Jacques Clouseau-like operation – resulted in the capture of Egyptian Jews aiding Israel in 1954 within its most populous Arab neighbor, Egypt. As a result of the severe incompetence of the Israeli mission, the authorities hanged two Egyptian Jewish students and meted out long incarceration sentences to others.
Despite the setback of what Israelis would later call “esek bish” (a rotten affair) in Egypt, Israel’s intelligence services scored a series of impressive achievements in the decades ahead, catapulting its reputation into espionage stardom.
Melman and and Raviv bring to the fore the agents behind the capture in Argentina of Adolf Eichmann – the Nazi official largely responsible for overseeing the elimination of the vast majority of European Jewry. The joint Mossad-Shin Bet operation sent 67 agents to apprehend Eichmann and transport him back to Jerusalem for a trial. Israel’s judiciary sentenced Eichmann to death in 1962. The role of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) in the capture of Eichmann is part and parcel of the book’s analytical breakdown of special operations. There is no shortage of descriptions of colorful and lively intelligence agents and agency heads in the book. and anecdotes of their escapades abound.
What sets Spies Against Armageddon apart, however, is the attention to ordinary Israeli intelligence personnel who employ a revolutionary discipline to preserve their “country’s existence in a hostile world.”
The goal of Israeli covert action and intelligence gathering is, after all, to avoid military conflicts, to punish the murderers of Israelis and blunt Islamic-animated terrorism for its tiny population.
Take the example of Yehudit Nessyahu, the top female agent on the Eichmann team, who did not seek fame with a book about the mission. She was born in 1925 in the Netherlands, mastered several languages and, “as a religious woman… prepared only kosher food during the Argentina mission – even for the notorious Nazi.”
The peculiarity of Israel’s nascent intelligence services was underscored in the famous “revolt of the spies,” in which personnel from the Foreign Ministry engaged in labor defiance in the formative stage of reorganization, refusing to be transferred to the freshly minted Mossad division operated by Reuven Shiloah. Only in Israel could a group of covert agents exercise their right to strike! Israel’s interplay with American intelligence officers provides a window onto the court of US-Israeli intelligence cooperation and a relationship that would transform both countries into long-term allies. The authors excel at showing the ebb and flow of the US-Israel covert relationship.
John Hadden, the CIA’s station chief in Tel Aviv, neatly summed up the mix of admiration for Israel’s top leader coupled with his professional job to extract information.
In 1965, while visiting his wife, who happened to share a semi-private hospital room with David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, Hadden described his chats with “the old man” Ben-Gurion.
“Imagine two weeks with Churchill,” he exclaimed. Hadden, however, did not secure any information from Ben-Gurion on Israel’s developing nuclear program.
James Jesus Angleton, a top CIA official who served as director of counterintelligence from 1954 to 1975, arguably made the greatest contribution to solidifying ties between US and Israeli intelligence. His bond with Amos Manor, then head of counterespionage within the Shin Bet and later its director, paved the way for the staying power of Israeli-American intelligence cooperation during the rocky period of US president Dwight Eisenhower’s administration. After Angleton’s death in 1987, Israel built a memorial honoring Angleton.
Spies Against Armageddon is packed full of information on key phases of Israeli covert operations, from the destruction of Syria’s nuclear reactor in 2007 to the reported assassination of Hamas weapons smuggler Mahmoud Abdel Rauf al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel room in 2010 to the Stuxnet computer worm that infected Iran’s nuclear computer technology the same year.
Though Markus Wolf did not dismiss the use of technology to enhance human intelligence, he consistently relegated sophisticated gadgets to an inferior status in the gathering of foreign intelligence information. Melman and Raviv write in their concluding chapter, “Into the Future,” that “The one thing that the opponents cannot match – at least, not so far – are Israel’s humint assets.”
In short, the world of Israeli covert operations is not governed by a situation like chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov’s defeat in 1997 to the computer Deep Blue. Israel’s intelligence services will have to both develop the Deep Blue technology of the future and at the same time have operatives in place in their neighbor’s back yards in order to stop new dangers.
@Ferret: I don’t know that there is a link, but there does seems to be some sort of theme going with explorers, viking ships, the New World, pilgrims, spying, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakluyt_%26_Company
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakluyt_Society
http://www.pelorus-research.com/about-us
http://current.com/news-and-politics/93909185_hakluyt-co-holdingham-group-thompson-reuters-explosive-carroll-trust-mi6-penningtons-solicitors-london-files-link-10-downing-street-conservative-party-tax-evasion-conspiracy-fraud-scandal.htm
For anyone who missed it, the page for Pilgrim Elite is back:
http://benghazipost.blogspot.ca/2012/09/pilgrim-elite-training.html
“PILGRIM ELITE TRAINING
David Nigel Thomas’ Blue Mountain Security Solutions was formerly known as Pilgrim Elite Training, company code 03722107,
“Nigel Thomas, who runs specialist surveillance and CP company Pilgrim Elite, looked over my list and instantly added things that would be basic to his style of work: Camera, video camera, covert bag for video, dictaphone, night-vision scope, recording device, selection of lenses, tracking equipment, lock-picking kit(!), sleeping bag and spare green kit for CTR and OP scenarios.”
found at: http://www.myspace.com/meidoconsultants/blog/428175974
Posted by JAMES C LANGELLE at 6:54 PM”
Thank you, Bluebird. Special Ops guy only a link or two away from Mollier’s child. Interesting. So close to home.
@ BB:
Thank you for the info re LR- but I already knew her maiden name and that she’s married again.
Then I had a look on FB (I never go there- bad memories…)
Yes – it is the one I’ve seen just before.
The guy you linked here- sorry, but I’m not d’accord with you at all.
These are 2 diff guys – forget it.
And she would be stupid if she would put online a pix with her ex- as they had been divorced 6 years before.
Forget it. It’s eiter her husband (the single guy) nor SM (on facebook tog. with her)
This time wrong track believe me.
Re the links you sent me: they both don’t work.
But I guess we both speak about the same two pix…
I wonder, if this capagnion-site has been closed as they made a complaint because we’re “working” at….
Gonna try later again.
But anyhow, if there’s anything “sinister” about the story (eg state/intelligence ss)
and- given by the facts, it looks very much that way, I doubt we’ll ever find out the truth. We don’t have a clue what is true and what not.
I think, the police (or any other institution involved) knows exacty what’s up- but don’t tell us.
Wasted time to keep on digging?? I’m asking myself by the time…
@Bluebird: Oh, look, the special ops train on bicycles:
http://www.defense.gouv.fr/terre/actu-terre/cyclo-cross-julian-alaphilippe-du-121e-rt-3e-des-championnats-d-europe
Great work Bluebird! Quite astonishing stuff. It’s starting to unravel more and more… And thanks for the summary – very helpful for folks like me who are in a hurry.
Armee te Terre = French Army?
“The French Army, officially the Armée de Terre (English: Land Army), is the land-based and largest component of the French Armed Forces. Just like the Armée de l’Air, the Marine Nationale and the Gendarmerie Nationale it is placed under the responsibility of the French government. The current Chief of Staff of the French Army (CEMAT) is general Bertrand Ract-Madoux.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Army
Was a “pig” used to lure a “wolf” to his death in place reserved now for their preservation, in a valley dedicated to Ire or revenge? “Wolf (1923-2006), son of the famous German Jewish playwright Dr. Friedrich Wolf, very likely knew that the Palestinian Black September group planned to take Israelis hostage at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. Famously known as “the man without a face,””
Another interesting little etymological link for what it’s worth: WIKI: “Wolf Isaac Blitzer (born March 22, 1948) is an American journalist and television news anchor who has been a CNNreporter since 1990. Blitzer explains that his surname goes back for generations, and his first name, ‘Wolf’, is the same first name as his maternal grandfather. In writing for several Israeli newspapers in Washington, Blitzer has used the names Zev Blitzer and Zev Barak.[11] Zev (זאב) is the Hebrew word for “wolf” and Barak (ברק) is theHebrew word for “lightning” (which in German/Yiddish is Blitz) – hence Blitzkrieg (German, “lightning war”)”
Sure was a lightening attack.
@Bluebird
Those Dimastromatteos don’t really fit in, do they? Also
http://fr.viadeo.com/fr/profile/david.dimastromatteo
there’s also a Julien D.
{http://www.linkedin.com/in/juliendimastromatteo}
BTW what was the school meeting ref?
Apart from that interesting French TV video clip (which might have triggered that Daily Telegraph piece) there is not a word in the English (or more tellingly, theFrench)press connecting Mollier with hairdressing.
I guess LM’s FB page is private.
Please, everyone, a simple local boy who never left the area and who works as a welder typically hangs out with special ops and specialists in nuclear medicine from Virginia. Sheesh!
And wolves are the bad guys in every fairy tale, although they’re falling out of fashion lately, due to the rising popularity of zombies.
Like the “Cheetah Reserve” I guess.
And the other lot. “mais pas Kepi Blanc” !
SM: He had two sons, Leo, nine, and Mathis, seven, from a marriage which ended in divorce more than six years ago, after Mr Mollier reportedly …
http://www.acafc.net/article-joyeux-anniversaire-sylvain-76125794-comments.html#anchorComment
false /wrong link- big sorry
!!!
No need to start again about that guy…
Voila: another “55”:
http://www.defense.gouv.fr/actualites/articles/circaete-2012-entrainement-multinational-a-la-surete-aerienne
Explained here in anglais:
http://www.defensa.gob.es/en/politica/seguridad-defensa/contexto/mediterranea/iniciativa5mas5/
One example of a recently-completed drill by the 5+5:
http://magharebia.com/cocoon/awi/xhtml1/en_GB/features/awi/features/2012/11/06/feature-03
Seems “55” means something to soldiers:
http://combation.com/5-5-defense-against-a-knife/
@Tim: Cavalry = horses = Chevaline?
@Bluebird
Yes, Justine is the other hairdresser in Lydie. You’ll see that she gained some hairdressing qualification only in 2011 at Chambery CFA de la Coiffure de la Savoie, Brevet Professionelle.
Q.. Chevaline is “horse butcher”.
shelock
that is the same guy. She must be married with Ringot. How else would she have got his name when her maiden name is Sclosa? She is married with Francois Ringot, that’s why her name is Ringot now. Otherwise her name would be Sclosa or Mollier today.
Shelock,for watching the facebook links you must be a facebook member and login with your facebook account. Otherwise, those deep links are dead for you.
+++++++++++++++++
ferret:
armee de terre are the french special forces, like the 55th special forces. They are the Scouts, the Indians, ect.
http://www.defense.gouv.fr/terre
+++++++++++
felix
school meeting reference (link above, here again):
http://www.ac-grenoble.fr/ecole/ugine.pringolliet.elementaire/articles.php?lng=fr&pg=326
++++++++++++++
shelock, you can calculate the age of Mathis from the school meeting link. Usually they start school with 6. So he could not have been younger than 6 at that time of the link above.
++++++++++++++++
felix:
Neither the “Italian” nuclear scientists nor that “Polish” armee de terre guy fit into friends list of an 8-10 years old boy. But facebook gives you a lot of friends when you’re e.g. friend of your father. They will accept you as their friend when they know the name of your father. It’s a linking chain on facebook. Therefore we can be pretty sure that those names were originally friends of Sylvain.
Yes, I saw the article of that cross country cycle race on the “armee de terre” website. I wonder if they have a wayback section on their website with the results of cycling 2011. Oh yes, I forgot their Clean Team … – but perhaps the wayback machine got it?
You can go on about Spies against Armageddon – conveninetly published just after the massacre in France – but the account about William Herhkovitz just doesn’t add up, and even the worst dummy can see it.
Hershkovitz was recruited into the Oranim program because he had just the right outlook about beseiged Israel, just enough experience with guns, and credentials as an unsuspeceted assassin to pull off what the Mossad wanted done around Lake Annecy – i.e., meet up with two suspected Iranian spies, and assassinate them when they exchanged documents and money for Tehran.
The only trouble was that there were four unexpected persons there when William caught up with Saad al-Hilli and Slyvain Mollier who he discovered while killing them, and seeing that they were not engaging in any spying while he was disposing of them as best he could under the surprising circumstances.
Then back in Israel, Hershkovitz increasingly went off the rails – e.g., having nightmares about what he had done, waking up from them and pounding on the walls, threatening colleagues who were still in similar programs, and ultimately having this deadly showdown with his work-study boss, Armando al-Abed, about what he had done, and why.
If this were not essentially the case, leaders in the program would have seen to his dismissal from the program because he was simply a nut case, as there were all kinds of complaints about his being totally out of control, but they couldn’t because they knew that he would ultimately explain why he did what he did – just like what prevents Washington from releasing Jonathan Pollard because would explain how he prevented Washington and London from triggering Armageddon when he tipped off Moscow what they had in mind by assassinating Sweden’s statsminister Olof Palme.
So the Oranim leadership tried to quiet Hershkovitz behind the scenes in the hope that he would just go back quietly to the States, and seek the appropriate mental help for his problems, but he would have none of it, resulting in the fatal killing of al-Abed, and the convenient killing of Hershkovitz himself.
As Meir Dagan, the mentor of the Mossad’s current director, Tamir Pardo, used to say: “If a person is causing you problems, just kill the source.”
I am also scpetical about the so called “father’s vacation of three years” that Sylvain apparently had during the past three years. I guess that this is fake. You don’t get this vacation for kids that are 8-10 and 12-16 years old. You get this when you have babies or 1-5 years old, but not for school kids. Nowhere in Europe! Those 3 years parental-vacation are fake in my humble opinion like all those stories they had told us about Sylvain and SAH and about the scene were fake and scripted so far. IMHO Sylvain couldn’t have been in a 3 years parental vacation with kids that old. He simply wouldn’t have got it. I had the impression that he had two babies. But they were no babies. They were both already able to use facebook. No way that they need their father at home during the whole day. Europe is social and France is a social country, but definitely they aren’t that social that you can get parental-vacation for three years for two elderly school kids.
Bluebird
But was the “3yrs” a print error ?
Maybe “3 months” ?
No one has confirmed his leave. Nor denied it.
Infact there is “nothing” about him !
…and IF you take a leap, the French “police” say that our man Billy is “ex RAF”. They can’t go back on that, it is reported.
Not “a pilot” or “ex BA”.
Why ?
Well, it makes sense if “two” people with “military” backgrounds are up that road.
I don’t suggest that Molly was “ex sas” !
But a local (and fit) reserve member of something, I can not dismiss.
BB:
I have an facebook account and I used – but stopped some time ago..
But, I guess there is more than one Frederic Brun in France – same with Sylvain Mollier.
So the guy with the cap wasn’t the SM who died.
And this Brun with the sun glases is not identical with the one Mme L. Rigot is married to. They just have the same name in common. nothing more.
I copied both pix in word beside each other. They are def diff persons.
@Bluebird
armee de terre are the french special forces, like the 55th special forces. They are the Scouts, the Indians, ect.
http://www.defense.gouv.fr/terre
No, this is just the website of the regular French army. Nothing “special forces” about it. Where do you get the idea from that it’s special forces?
“Armee de Terre” literally means “land army” so it makes sense that it would be the normal French army.
On the other hand, French special forces are specific units such as this:
“The Army Special Forces Brigade (French: Brigade des Forces Spéciales Terre, BFST) is the French Army’s special forces unit. It is based in Pau, Pyrénées-Atlantiques.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Army_Special_Forces_Brigade
BB:
Slvain Mollier had a baby boy with Mme Schutz in june- so the baby is 3 mths old and his name is Louis. That’s fact as long as THEY told us rubbish in the news.
So – he can quite well be off from work for some time.
My quote about his kids with his former wife, now a married Ringot
“””SM: He had two sons, Leo, nine, and Mathis, seven, from a marriage which ended in divorce more than six years ago, after Mr Mollier reportedly “””
is copied from a newspaper online. These are not my words.
But, as usual- we never know if correct.
But let’s estimate those things are true than these are facts.
Sherlock
Sometime ? What three years ???
I can’t buy that.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/…/The-man-whos-key-Alp... – Diese Seite übersetzen
30 Oct 2012 – Cyclist Sylvain Mollier was originally written off as collateral damage in the Alpine massacre. … He had two teenage sons, Leo and Mathis, seven, from a marriage which ended in divorce more than six …. Click to rate Rating 9 …
@Bluebird
Can I ask you a favour? I would like to be able to get in to the other days of Le Dauphine without registering or paying like I can do with the link you posted to the death notice of FB.
http://www.ledauphine.com/fr/images/getnc.aspx?iMedia=68111275
How do you get to this link? When I click on the links to the pdf versions of the various editions (Chambery in this case) I always end up at a registration page and they want me to pay.
🙁
Hope you can help!
@ James:
may be they got it wrong, yes it’s a long time.
But we don’t know the facts.
May be he got money when his father died.. so he can afford the long off-the-job
May be it was arranged, that he cares for the Baby while CS is taking care of her own pharmacie (as we now know- she took over recently)
May be he was about to change his job
May be he was about to be self-emloyed – or part-time
or… or… or
So we just don’t know- anything is possible
Or it was a typo one reporter started at the beginning and the other copied… and it was 3 months – not 3 years.
We just don’t know.
I, for my part, could estimate that he hadn’t the chance to look after his 2 boys from 1st marriage due to the divorce.. so he wanted to care now for the new baby.
More than he could with having a full-time-job
ferret
I am not a member of ledauphine either.
most of those pdfs are available with a direct link form google.
enter one of the sentences (several words) from the ledauphine that you can see as google index and then use the better google search and enter that you search for a pdf. not all pdf’s are available and free, but you’ll get a direct link from google then if that pdf is directly accessable from google. might be on 10th or 11th page. you have to be patient.
@ferret
you could try to copy the names from
http://www.avis-de-deces.net/v_RHONE-ALPES_73_SAVOIE_UGINE.html?method=1
and google them –