Sitemeter on medawar's Cornflakes

Medawar has removed Sitemeter from this blog, because it's stopped working as it used to.

It will be re-instated only if there's some evidence that the old service will be available again, without any attempted blackmail or other nonsense.

Syrian Sarin: Fading Legacy of Soviet "Aid"

There is mounting evidence that some casualties arriving at clinics and hospitals in Syria have been exposed to the nerve agent, Sarin.  However, there's been no mention of the large numbers of fatalities in a fairly small radius that would might expect from an attack on an urban area with Sarin-filled military munitions. This has caused David Cameron and other Western leaders to display their technical ignorance by talking about "small scale" use of nerve agents such as Sarin. What matters with chemical weapons is not scale, so much as concentration. For some reason, the concentration of Sarin gas in the affected area was so low that many (most?) of the casualties were still alive when they reached hospital. This is also what happened when an extremist cult released quantities of homemade Sarin onto the Tokyo underground rail system.

In Tokyo, cult members hurled the contents of sarin-filled jamjars and glass bottles around, in very crowded underground tunnels. The consequences ought, on the face of it, to have included hundreds if not thousands of passengers dying within a few minutes. This did not happen. The probable explanation was that by the time the attack was mounted, the jars of "Sarin" contained relatively little actual Sarin. Sarin isn't hard to make, but it is hard to make Sarin that's particularly pure, and it apparently took months for the cult to make and distribute (to followers) all of the Sarin that was used in the coordinated mass attack. Sarin is not very stable, and unless made from exceptionally pure ingredients, it can degrade (that is, a substantial proportion decomposes into simpler chemical breakdown products) within months, or even weeks. In the days when Iraq actually had a chemical warfare programme, the Sarin munitions that Iraq was making had a shelf life of weeks. So, assuming that the cult's chemists couldn't do better than an Iraqi government factory,  it's probable that most of the Sarin which the Tokyo cult made (over a nearly two year period, according to some sources) had degraded by the time it was used.

It's important to note that the breakdown products of Sarin are themselves quite toxic, but not in the same immediate way. They tend to result in chronic health problems and cancers, rather than prompt shutdown of the body's vital functions. The lethal dose would be many times higher, too.

The United States, having made a huge stockpile of Sarin and Sarin-filled munitions in the fifties and early sixties, stopped making new Sarin in the late sixties. Instead, the US Army redistilled degraded Sarin from existing weapons and storage containers, yielding a smaller amount of pure Sarin each time, along with a lot of breakdown products which were disposed off, not always very sensibly, around Denver, Colorado. By nineteen-eighty, there simply wasn't enough actual Sarin left for this to be worth doing anymore, and binary weapons were introduced as a replacement. (The binary weapons often involved a more modern nerve agent, VX, too.)

Syria is known to have received Soviet Chemical Weapons, and as importantly, gas masks, protective clothing, warning equipment and antidote kits, during the "Yom Yippur" war against Israel in 1973. Indeed, the automatic antidote injectors which NATO subsequently developed were inspired by surprisingly advanced devices issued to Syrian tank crews and captured by the Israelis when the tide of war turned in their favour.

Most of the actual weapons seem to have taken the form of chemical munitions for rocket launchers and heavy mortars which the Syrians already had, as well as aerial bombs. In all cases, there's a lot of commonality between Soviet chemical munitions and other weapons; for example: a Sarin or Mustard gas mortar bomb will be identical to a phosphorous incendiary bomb, except that instead of plastic capsules of white phosphorous being packed in the casing around a small bursting charge, there will be triangular capsules of a poison, usually Sarin or Mustard gas. Aerial bombs for poison gas have a lot of parts in common with explosive cluster bomb dispensers, and so on. This reduces training and industrial costs, and allows one type of launcher to deliver chemical, incendiary and explosive attacks. It also makes accidental or unauthorised release of chemical weapons a more than theoretical possibility.

Mustard gas munitions from 1973 might very well prove lethally effective, assuming that the propellants and bursting charges were in good condition, but Sarin munitions of that vintage would almost certainly contain mostly breakdown products diluting a quite small amount of actual Sarin. This would still cause casualties, including some fatalities, and quite a lot of long-term health problems amongst those living in the affected area afterwards. But a decisive military effect would be most unlikely.

Recent Israeli intelligence/propaganda has emphasised, not the Syrian legacy stockpile of Soviet-era chemical munitions, but a more recent alleged programme to build a laboratory capable of making bulk nerve agents in a short time, ready for prompt use on the battlefield. (They also heavily suggest attempts to make much more modern and sophisticated agents than Sarin, too.) 

If true, and if the laboratory is still able to function after two years of civil war, this would represent a genuine capability to use nerve agents on the battlefield to genuine military effect. It is this which would represent the sort of threat to the wider region, and world, which might justify international military intervention. And it is this which remains unproven. Indeed, the nature of the incidents which do appear to have occurred, rather suggests that freshly-made, pure and viable Sarin is not actually available to the Assad regime.

The Soviet legacy chemical weapons stockpile is not harmless, however. Degraded Sarin will not drop thousands of people dead in their tracks, but it will make hundreds or thousands chronically ill and seriously shorten their lives in the long run, as well as causing economic impoverishment. And experiences on the Great war battlefields of France and Belgium inform us that forty, or even sixty years after manufacture, mustard gas munitions are still horribly dangerous.

These dangers might well justify the provision of gas masks and protective clothing, and even more importantly, first aid and medical guidance, perhaps to rebel groups, certainly to any third party such as the UN or Red Crescent, able to operate in contested areas.

Footage shown on the BBC shows supposed Sarin victims, being given oxygen in hospital, but still wearing their street clothes, presumably as they were when the gas hit them. This is a very basic and avoidable mistake, which can't have helped any of those casualties recover.

Sarin gets into clothing, and into hair. It is absorbed through the skin, and is inhaled. Clothing contaminated with Sarin can continue to exude Sarin into the air and into the skin, for half an hour or more after the casualty is moved into clean air. Cloth contaminated with mustard gas is slightly less dangerous, but stays dangerous for weeks.

The first thing that has to happen to a chemical weapon casualty, is that their clothes come off and are left outside the hospital. Oxygen may be given as they are stripped and washed, but if they are not stripped and washed, the oxygen is only going to buy them a few minutes extra. In a Muslim country, there's a reluctance to strip casualties in a public place where others may see. But where the clothes may harbour Sarin, or Mustard gas, the longer the patient wears those clothes, the more harm will be done. Not just to the casualty, but to others, including those trying to help them.

Ideally, there needs to be a compartmentalised process, where clothes come off outside, there's a tent in which casualties are washed, and only then do they enter the hospital. Oxygen, and if it is available, an antidote might be given outside, but every item used on a casualty in one stage, has to stay in that stage and not follow the casualty into the next stage. The only thing passing down the line needs to be the patient.

Freedom of Speech in Great Britain

For years, there has been an increasing sense that British democracy has been progressively undermined by the three "main" political parties: the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party, colluding to ensure that the electorate are never presented with any effective way to vote against an unpublished but not completely secret (not for want of trying), political agenda common to all three parties. On issues such as the European Union, all three parties present effectively the same policy, and use every trick known to man to deny a platform to any emerging political party which might even question this agenda. It cannot be called a consensus, because it is only the politicians who consent: on nearly every issue on which the three parties collude, they are seeking something which the electorate tends to oppose.

But this week, all of a sudden, on what may be the most important political issue in Britain since the Second World War, the three parties have not colluded in secret: they have done it openly, and in the presence of members of a totally unelected pressure group, representing mainly the very rich and very powerful, which was allowed to effectively dictate the substance of draconian restrictions on free speech and free expression in the United Kingdom, whilst delegating to the politicians concerned the task of dressing up that substance to look like virtue instead of evil. Each of us has a particular skill, and the pressure group "Hacked Off" knew exactly what the politicians at its beck and call were good at.

This link is to an article describing the measure, and to some extent the circumstances of its drafting.

As well as the direct attack on democracy inherent to the collusion between the three "main" parties, there's a corrosive threat to democracy on another front, because that collusion robs most members of Parliament of any real purpose other than to claim expenses, occasionally lobby for constituents or a paying client, and vote the way they are told, when they are told. Since the only way in which a backbench MP could express any creativity at all, was therefore in his expenses claims, there was a very major scandal about MP's expenses, which caused the press, completely justifiably on this occasion, to present British politicians in general as financially corrupt. Well they generally were: those were the facts, and exposing those facts are precisely what a free press is for, and also what makes a free press one of the most precious things in the world. However, the politicians, already corrupted by the long-standing collusion between the three "main" parties, seethed with resentment at being exposed and held to account, and have proved highly receptive to plots of revenge.

What most plots to impose repression have in common, is a carefully chosen "victim group" in whose name freedoms and their champions can be trampled. News International, a part of News Corporation alongside Fox News, NDS (see other posts below) and 21st Century Fox, supplied the plot with its victim group, when it became clear that News International journalists had broken existing laws by intercepting private communications, mainly by "phone hacking". The key words back there are "broken existing laws": crimes had been committed, the criminal and civil law already offered penalties and remedies, and where sufficient evidence exists, criminal charges have been brought and damages offered and in many cases already paid: A wrong was done, not by the free press as a whole, but by one part of it. Existing laws prohibited the conduct involved, and remedies are not only available, but have already been applied in many cases, with punishments awaiting the proper and necessary step of a fair criminal trial.

The law as it already stood, provided every single thing necessary to right the wrong and prevent a repetition. This is still in train as this is being written. Yet now, without waiting for any fair trails and verdicts from any jury, we are faced not only with a new law, but with a new law unprecedented in the restrictions it imposes, not just on a free press, but on personal expression such as internet blogging, too. The law is also unprecedented in that the Prime Minister, David Cameron, is actually making a virtue of it being packaged as a complicated perversion of a Royal Charter, hitherto (for a thousand years) used to confer essential rights, not deny them. 

It is a real world example of a classic joke from The Simpsons "The Reversal of Rights Act". Even in the fantasy world of The Simpsons, the Reversal of Rights Act turned out to be a hoax, but this in the real world and it is all too real.

Many American journalists and politicians are deeply shocked, not only by the proposed restrictions on free speech -and even more especially by the insistence of severe punitive measures against those who persist in trying to expose wrong-doing by the rich and powerful. The Russian government has already condemned the measures, though Medawar doesn't expect the Obama White House to follow the Kremlin's lead -unless the Congress propels him into doing so.

What will Britons do about it?

This measure is anti-democratic, and therefore inherently un-British. It will be resisted, persistently but almost certainly not violently -at leats not on the part of the opponents of oppression. Medawar cannot guarantee the behaviour of corrupt and bullying politicians and millionaires on the other side, and it would be wise to anticipate foul play, while hoping it doesn't happen. Those who resist will be punished, in all sorts of unlawful and unscrupulous ways, by those with power, who want to exercise that power, unchallenged. Resistance will continue, regardless, for as many years as it takes, until freedom of speech is restored.

How can citizens, journalists and politicians in other countries help?

Make no mistake, these restrictions on the free press are every bit as significant as the Apartheid Laws, and Medawar saw those in operation, on buses and Post Offices in Cape Town, for example. The world responded to those with economic sanctions, which probably hurt the victims of Apartheid more than anyone else. The world has learned from that, and opposes the current tyranny in Zimbabwe via a selective travel ban on Robert Gabriel Mugabe, his key ministers and most important supporters. This is the sort of thing which would help, and which would be justified, but it must be very precisely targeted on those who are key to the problem, not their opponents, nor their dupes, nor any innocent passer-by.

For example, although the Cabinet Office minister, Oliver Letwin, was a key instigator of the new and complicated mechanism for political control of the press, the Justice Minister and former Chancellor, Kenneth Clarke QC MP, was not. Indeed, Mr Clarke had previously introduced much-needed legislation to reform English libel laws, which President Obama had found so obnoxious that he passed a measure to protect US citizens from them. Shockingly, that Bill was hijacked and wrecked at the last minute by Lord Fowler (a former health secretary) and Lord Puttnam (a former film maker) amending it till it became a prototype for the repressive mechanism now agreed upon by the three "main" parties under the direct supervision of the pressure group "Hacked Off". So, Mr Letwin is a compelling candidate for a travel ban, but Mr Clarke has clearly done everything in his power to protect free speech, and was actually attempting to improve the situation.

The Prime Minister and the other two party leaders are directly responsible for the measures against free speech (and to corrupt and twist the meaning of Royal Charters), so they must be included in any travel ban.

This would not materially affect Britain's place in the world, or its cooperation with the US or any major power on any matter of substance, as long as the Defence Secretary, Chancellor, Home Secretary and the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary were excluded. Everything that actually matters is negotiated with these office holders, with the Prime Minister appearing to take the credit once everything has been settled. A travel ban would deny him that credit, but would not materially affect Great Britain's ability to negotiate and cooperate with any foreign power.

The travel ban should include and be limited to, the following persons:

Directly responsible politicians:

David Cameron (Prime Minister and Conservative Party Leader)
Nick Clegg (Deputy Prime Minister and Liberal Democrat Party Leader)
Ed Milliband (Leader of the Opposition and Labour Party Leader)
Simon Hughes (Liberal Democrat MP and enthusiastic supporter of the restrictions and punitive measures)
Maria Miller (Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, in theory the responsible minister, even if Mr Letwin actually did the deal.)
Harriet Harman (Mrs Miller's Shadow and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party)
Lord Falconer (Mr Clarke's predecessor and an active supporter of the measures)
Lord Fowler (Former Health Secretary who helped Lord Puttnam wreck the libel reform bill in pursuance of these measures)

Law Firms actively assisting the pressure group "Hacked Off" which stand to gain an enormous income from enforcing the press restrictions and which stood to lose an enormous income from Mr Clarke's reforms to the libel laws:

Mischon de Reya
Solomon Taylor & Shaw

All full partners of these firms should be included in the travel ban, but not ordinary employees or junior members.

Other key supporters of the measure and leaders of the pressure group "Hacked Off":

(Note, this does not include any of the victims of past journalistic misconduct who have lent their names to the campaign.)

Lord Puttnam (Former film-maker and peer, supports the measure and wrecked libel law reform)

Hugh Grant (An actor and figurehead of the pressure group)

Max Moseley (A motor sports promoter and son of the fascist leader, Oswald Moseley)

Ben Bradshaw MP (ringleading support)

Dr Evan Harris (former MP and founder of the pressure group)

Brian Cathcart (former journalist and supporter of the pressure group)

Common Purpose:
Behind the pressure group "Hacked Off" and the uncanny coordination of three political parties to its will, is a much more shadowy and publicity-shy organisation "Common Purpose".

See also Medawar's relevant post, below.

Although any nation which believes in, and wants to keep, a free press, freedom of expression and free speech, would be well advised not to let Common Purpose "graduates" across its borders, there are something like 30,000 of them, too many for Medawar to list here. However, this is a link to an .XLS database with some of the known names.

Great Britain effectively invented the freedom of the press with the Bill of Rights in 1689. If that freedom can be extinguished in Great Britain at all, let alone in this sordid and duplicitous manner, then it really isn't safe anywhere, not even in those countries which boast a "written constitution" because the Bill of Rights is precisely that, and this measure breaks it. It could happen to you, gentle reader, wherever you reside, next, and it quite possibly will, unless the mischief is stopped.

Common Purpose versus News International

The Daily Mail has published an in-depth report (the printed edition is several pages long) into the way that front organizations for a group called "Common Purpose" have been seeking, not just to impose statutory regulation on the Press in the UK, but also to ensure that their own people would be the regulators. They also created a "non-profit" organisation, the "Centre for Investigative Journalism" which they intend one day to be funded by a levy (tax) on newspapers. In effect, they are proposing that the State should conduct all necessary investigative journalism. Needless to say, the CIJ's first major outing, to produce a report under contract to the BBC's Newsnight programme, managed to create a completely false impression that a senior conservative politician, Lord McAlpine, was a paedophile. Not just libeling him, but also creating a smokescreen and a great deal of covering fire for some other political figures, against whom such an accusation would be a great deal more supportable.

The Daily Mail's report is here.

However good and thorough this report is, and the investigative parts of it are indeed good, the Mail insists in interpreting the assault by Common Purpose on News International, as if the accusations against News International and the rest of the Murdoch Empire were as spurious and unfounded as the smear against Lord McAlpine. Unfortunately, it isn't all unfounded, and indeed is sometimes an understatement of the truth. (Especially when News International has pulled a stunt which is too close to home for Common Purpose to be safely exposed...)

Medawar has published several articles about News International, and especially its Israeli sister company NDS, involving multi-billion pound fraud and possible murder. (Too many to link, just search this blog for NDS and it'll get you started.)

Other bloggers have documented, carefully and at great length, numerous links between the operations of News International, the murder of Daniel Morgan, intimidation and smearing of some senior officers who tried to investigate this, and repeated and outstandingly successful efforts to pervert the course of justice in this case. That in turn links to alleged corrupt activities by the former senior police officer, Ray Adams, which links in turn to the notorious gangster, bullion-thief, money-launderer and murderer, Kenneth Noye.

See the Brown Moses blog, here.

(You will need to go through the archives, because many articles are about Syria at the moment.)

And the "Daniel Morgan Murder" blog here.

Medawar does not write either of the two above blogs and does not know the people who do. (Some of the contributors to Brown Moses do seem to be closely connected to past investigations into the corruption surrounding the Daniel Morgan case, and have useful information.)

Furthermore, the Mail is a Johnny Come Lately with regard to investigating "Common Purpose" and here is a source of deeply-researched information, upon which the Mail seems to have drawn without acknowledgement.Common Purpose seeks a communitarian state, and seeks to bring this about by almost any means other than open statement of their aims and the democratic process, which makes them subversive in the strictest definition of the word. Here is Medawar's view of communitarianism, from 2009.

The best way to describe the battle between "Common Purpose" and all its spurious pressure groups, and News International, is not a battle between good and evil, but a battle between two competing evils with the same objective: control of all news investigated and reported in the United Kingdom and beyond. In one case by political scheming, rigged regulators, bogus pressure groups and Common Purpose members planted in official positions, in the other case by abuse of a multi-media monopoly, itself built often by illegal means, such as the hacking campaign to eliminate On Digital as a rival to News International's BSkyB broadcasting arm.

Not Michael and his angels fighting in the sky with Satan and his angels, but Al Capone taking on Bugs Malone in an underground garage.

Evidence That Ray Adams Recruited Hackers In the Nineties

This link is to an article revealing interesting information about the role of former Chief Superintendent Ray Adams in the recruitment of hackers (the actual job title!) for the Murdoch company, NDS, based in Israel.

Readers who have read the Brown Moses blog article, might then want to re-read this article, from Medawar's Cornflakes. And then perhaps this article, too.

It is worth noting that Saad Al Hilli, too, was an expert in many technical subjects, including the rather specialist field of encryption of satellite communications, which is the very discipline for which Mr Adams was so busy recruiting hackers for NDS in the late nineties. This link is to a recent Daily Mail article about the brutal murder of Mr Al Hilli, his wife and mother-in-law, and the attempted murder of his older daughter. (Not to mention the ordeal suffered by his younger daughter, who spent hours hiding under her mother's dead body.)

Bringing The Dirty Tricks Home From Moscow

Medawar has written this article on behalf of the blog owner at "Victims of Organized Crime in Central Texas", who is currently being harassed very intensely, in part to stop her telling her story in public, but mainly to prevent her making effective preparations for what may be a crucial court hearing in the middle of October. The court hearing is part of a long-running attempt by a property developer and attorney in Fredericksburg, Texas, to deprive the blog owner of her home. Some of those assisting and advising on the harassment, are former Secret Service agents who live in houses provided for them, on very generous terms, by the same property developer. They are breaking not only State and Federal laws, but also their oaths, and they are doing so in order to deny an innocent and law-abiding citizen precisely the thing they have been rewarded with for their connivance: a home. Throughout their careers, they were paid a reasonable salary and they now enjoy pensions secured by the taxpayer (those who made their living in the private sector seldom have a completely secure pension fund...) A heavily subsidised house is a thick layer of icing on the cake for those who were already set for a much more comfortable retirement than most Americans can expect.

Some of the harassment which "VOCCT" suffers from, will be familiar to almost anyone who's found themselves in the way of a crooked property developer: tailgating, "brighting" and other forms of aggressive driving directed at them every time they drive to work, try and run essential errands, or simply visit family and friends. Constant intrusion onto the property and daily vandalism, too, will be family to those whose property is coveted by a developer, or whose homes happen to overlook the preferred pitch of the local drugs pusher. It's just that there's very big money at stake for this developer (less so for VOCCT, who merely aspires to live a blameless life in her own home) and he has, over his whole adult life, accumulated contacts, henchmen and favours, which he and his sons are now cashing in to make this everyday harassment as intense as it possibly could be. And then there is the extra special thing, the enhanced harassment only available to a crook who has ex Secret Servicemen, FBI Agents and even Texas Rangers, in his pocket.

When Medawar first made contact with VOCCT, she and her adult daughter were most worried by the fact that people they met in Fredericksburg, would pointedly refer to things they had done in conditions of strict privacy, such as the bathroom, or quiet, private conversations they had had in their kitchen. They believed that not only were the people harassing them extensively bugging the house, but that illegal video surveillance had been embedded in the structure of the house -and that choice images and footage from this was being made available to their neighbours and staff at businesses they frequented. Some of the individuals who appeared to have seen bathroom footage were clearly inclined towards sexual predation as well as voyeurism, and this added real fear of sexual violence to humiliation and embarrassment. (Anyone who has studied methods by which the KGB and STASI used to harass dissidents, will recognize this trick. And they will recognize one or two more before this article is done.)

Medawar provided VOCCT with a straightforward RF detector (which cost about £89 at the time) intended mainly for locating bugs and hidden cameras. It is essentially a low gain receiver, and the gain can be turned even lower, so that it only normally responds when it is within a couple of feet of a radio frequency transmitter, such as a bug, wireless webcam, or a more professional video bug. By then turning the gain down, the source can be located to within inches. This device allowed VOCCT to provide Medawar with a set of architect's plans of her house, with little coloured dots to show RF sources all over the house. Not only were these very numerous, with several in each bath or shower room, but there was an absolute Babel of transmission modes, transmission bands and other characteristics, suggesting that several technological generations of illegal surveillance devices were present, and still active, all over the house and its outbuildings. There also turned out to be covertly-performed structural modifications in the loft and elsewhere, apparently intended to allow intruders access to the loft from the porch roof, and from the loft to other spaces between rooms and behind fixtures, all over the upper floor.

At the same time, it became apparent that a crawl space into the basement had been engineered to allow intruders free rein there, below the ground floor and its fixtures, blank spaces and piping runs, too. But the most pertinent point in this instance is this: in late 2010 and early 2011, it was possible to pick all of these point RF sources out from the background: they did not trigger the detector unless it was fairly close and the gain turned up.

In the past couple of months, VOCCT has complained of failing health as well as intensified harassment, at home and everywhere she goes to earn her living or run errands. She also discovered a discarded instruction leaflet for some high-power Radio-related equipment on her land.

Medawar advised her to see if she could use her detector to trace any new radio signal to a possible point of origin. At which point, VOCCT discovered that the radio frequency environment inside her house and indeed throughout the surrounding property, had changed from lots of discrete, locatable low to medium power point sources, to an all-pervasive, very high amplitude field of radio frequency signals, which didn't seem to decline in strength on any side of the house, or, indeed, on any side of the pasture associated with it. This is very unusual indeed.

There is a cellphone tower not far away, but this was already there and fully operational when VOCCT mapped out all of the point sources, now completely blanketed by the new signal field, and in any case, the signal strength from the tower would be strongest on the near side and much weaker immediately in the lee of what is a large stonebuilt house. (When it was possible to map individual signals, the cellphone tower signals were detectable mainly in the loft and roofspace.) Such an all-pervasive and strong RF field has been seen before, in the United States Embassy in Moscow, between 1965, when various American intelligence agencies and the Secret Service first discovered it, and 1976, when they finally allowed a fuss to be made about it, at which point it disappeared as mysteriously as it had started.

Because they had no idea what the signals in the Embassy were meant to accomplish, the CIA and the Secret Service (who had to be consulted about the Ambassador's safety) actually shared their findings with pretty well all US Intelligence agencies and several allied ones, because they wanted to know if the same thing was happening in other Embassies, and whether anyone knew what it was.

As far as Medawar knows, the Canadians, West Germans, French, Australian and British intelligence agencies were told about the basic problem. Medawar doesn't think that such strong signals were found at the British Embassy. At the time, this was housed in a rather majestic town house overlooking the Kremlin, so if the signals were caused by the Russians, as seemed probable, and were considered harmful, one would expect a building overlooking the Kremlin to be exempt. If, however, as the US Intelligence community told their own Embassy staff, the signals were merely there to activate physically harmless listening devices, there was no special reason for them to be absent from the British Embassy.

As well as Britain's overseas intelligence agency the SIS aka "MI6", the CIA's James Anderton consulted Peter Wright, an acknowledged radio expert working for the domestic security agency, MI5. This seems to have been a matter of expertise rather than jurisdiction. There appeared to be several radio beams, from shortwave to microwave, entering the US Embassy from a number of neighbouring properties in all directions, and all converging on a then-unique-in-Moscow IBM golfball typewriter in the Ambassador's outer office.

Supposedly, this allowed the Russians to read any document that was typed on the IBM machine, but Wright could have accomplished this without transmitting any signal at the typewriter. (Indeed, he had already read text typed at equivalent machines at the French Embassy in London during negotiations over Britain's entry to the Common Market). When operating, this typewriter had quite a distinctive electromagnetic signature of its own, and it was known to be in the US Ambassador's outer office. (The golfball spins and thumps: the ratio of spin to thump tells you the possible characters, and once you've got one word right, the whole message will fall into place.)

This made it an easy aiming point: KGB or GRU technicians setting up transmitters for the various shortwave and microwave beams in neighbouring buildings, could line their equipment up on the EM signature of the only Golfball typewriter in Moscow and know they were aimed at the Ambassador's office. And, indeed, the Ambassador's office, where all the beams converged, had by far the strongest field strength in the Embassy.

There were intelligence rumours that this was a sort of "mind control" project, and despite the obvious "tin foil hat" lunacy of this theory, it couldn't be discounted because there were several senior GRU and KGB officers known to sponsor research into tin foil hat projects. So much so, that any KGB scientist or technician wanting to do serious work, had to think of a supposed mind control application to get funds, and make his real project a spin-off from that. It didn't take many years for the CIA's own research-funding pattern to take the same form.

It was decided to tell the Embassy staff a cover story: that it was just attempted surveillance (which for all they knew in 1965, it might have been) and then observe everyone closely over a few years to see what happened, whilst the radio fields were constantly measured and monitored.

The Ambassador, Walter J. Stoessel Jr and his staff showed no signs of being mind-controlled, even after several years, but he and several of his secretarial staff and senior colleagues (the people who were in his office the most) became very ill: initially with blood disorders and then with lymphoma in the Ambassador's case and other cancers in the case of his senior members of staff.

Whether it was ever intended to "control minds" or not, the strong multi-frequency radio field in the Ambassador's office caused general malaise and nausea quite quickly, and more life-threatening conditions over time.

The radio frequency environment at VOCCT's house in Fredericksburg seems, at the time of writing, to closely resemble that in the US Ambassador's office in the Moscow Embassy between 1965 and 1976. There are radio beams converging on the house from adjacent properties on all sides (some of which are unoccupied) and this results in there being no part of the property which offers any refuge or even much alleviation from the very strong field that results where these beams all meet. However, the field seems to be strongest in VOCCT's bedroom and bathroom.

Without going into detail, (some of the information must wait for legal proceedings) the developer wants to obtain the house and its associated pasture, for development. He does not want to pay VOCCT any money for this, despite it being her lawful property from the settlement when the developer's son divorced her. The developer's contractors had a hand in building the house, in the eighties, which may explain why its structure is riddled with features helpful to intruders and voyeurs. The developer's son, a doctor, had advance knowledge of (and some influence over) the nearby hospital's long term expansion plans, and this may be why the house was built on a site which the hospital would eventually need. The divorce, and the inevitable award of the house to VOCCT as part of the settlement, must have thrown a spanner in the works of any long-term plan to profit from advance knowledge of the hospital's future.

The developer has gone to great lengths to cultivate, and indeed, house, mainly at his own expense, former Secret Servicemen, FBI Agents and Texas Rangers. The former are likely to have had secondhand knowledge of the radio beams in the Moscow Embassy just by being in the Secret Service at the time, and some of them may well even have been part of the investigation. Every agent concerned with the safety of serving and former presidents, would have been fully briefed on the radio beams and their dangers, even if the Embassy Staff weren't told.

The developer has provided subsidised housing to a group of people who would have known all the details of the radio beam harassment which Ambassador Walter J. Stoessel Jr. was subjected to, and, as if my magic, his ex daughter-in-law and grand-daughter, who have legal title to a property he'd like to develop, are being subjected to what looks like almost identical radio harassment.

As a parting thought: The breakdown of the relationship between the developer's son, and VOCCT, appears to date from the weekend of the 23rd to the 26th of April, 1999, when the developer's son appeared to travel a long way from home at very short notice and then lied about where he'd been, and attempted to create a false impression and record of precisely when he'd come back to Fredericksburg. That weekend will mean nothing to American law enforcement, but it should mean a great deal to Chief Superintendent Hamish Campbell and other senior officers of the Metropolitan Police Service at Scotland Yard.

What Kind of a YOU Am I?

In 1673, when William Kiffin (who was very wealthy, but also respected, not least by Bunyan, as a Christian gentleman) declined to discuss one of the controversies of the day with John Bunyan, "because of my low descent among men, stigmatising me for being a person of THAT rank, who needed not to be heeded or attended upon", John Bunyan made the following response:

What need you, before you have showed one syllable of a reasonable argument in opposition to what I assert, thus trample my person, my gifts and graces, have I any, so disdainfully under your feet? What kind of a YOU am I? And why is MY rank so mean, that the most gracious and godly amongst you may not duly and soberly consider of what I have said?

This isn't the first occasion on which Medawar has made reference to that particular protest of John Bunyan. To put it in a little bit of context: This statue is within a few minute's walk of where John Bunyan was tried, where he was imprisoned, and only a couple of minutes more walk from St John's Parish Church, where he was for a while a Pastor within the Church of England. He was, by 1673, a nationally recognised writer and preacher and by no means the lowliest person in post civil war society, though he was always humble. If Bunyan was treated with disdain by those who held wealth and power after a civil war in which thousands of common men had died for the rights of Parliament, and not, as it turned out, themselves, the difficulty of any genuinely common man making his voice heard through any means other than a riot, is obvious.

Which brings us to David Cameron, his ministers, friends and advisors, and the present day. It also brings us to the "Comment is Free" threads on The Guardian website. In short, the present day William Kiffins -and something much worse, which expresses hatred as carelessly as Kiffin expressed disdain.

Slavery, Unexplained Deaths and Unidentifiable Victims

This picture (Copyright Hertfordshire Constabulary via BBC News Website) is a forensic artist's reconstruction of a man whose body was found in Puttock Hill Woods, near Welwyn, Hertfordshire, on the 27th of March 1994. He was wearing blue overalls and had no identification, or meaningful personal effects, on him. He had died of heart disease, so his death didn't seem to be suspicious, and he had presumably been working with contractors who were doing some management and brush-clearance work on the woods. However, none of the contractors appeared to know who he was. (They simply cheerfully accepted that a stranger was willing to work alongside them, for no pay, until he dropped dead?)

Exhaustive inquires and television appeals by Hertfordshire Constabulary failed to identify this man, although they did have some success identifying the deceased in some other cold-case unexplained deaths.

In the light of the recent slavery case in Leighton Buzzard, and another similar one in Hampshire, where homeless, mentally-ill and mentally-handicapped men were abducted, held prisoner (sometimes for years) and forced to perform often back-breaking manual labour as their captors acted as construction site "groundworking contractors" as well as offering tarmacking and paving services to householders, not only in Beds, Bucks and Herts, but also, it appears in Skane and possibly other parts of Sweden, it's quite likely that the contractors who police spoke to, knew a lot more than they admitted to. However, since the man seemed to have suffered from nothing more than hard work, there was no particular reason, at the time, for police to be suspicious.

There is, now, a lot of reason to be suspicious, because apart from offences involved with servitude, not reporting a death and not ensuring the proper health and safety of a worker, the work regime and diet that we now know these slaves were subjected to, for very periods of time, coupled with denial of the freedom to seek medical care and advice, would give a slave with a normally treatable heart condition almost no chance of long-term survival. A jury might find that to be manslaughter, culpable homicide or even murder (if the denial of freedom and forced labour was so reckless of the man's well-being that any reasonable person would have expected it to lead to his death.) It would certainly be grounds to review whether judges should have life sentences available to them in servitude cases!

Men rescued from the Greenacres traveller's site by Bedfordshire Police, related that they had been threatened with violence and death if they attempted to escape, and that they were taunted by being told that the body of at least one former slave was buried in a nearby field. In that context, it's pretty obvious that a sick man would be taken somewhere where no-one would ask him reasonable questions with very awkward answers, and that a dead man might be buried, or left propped against a tree with no means of identification.

And since the police appeals to potential relatives were all about "a man working in outdoor trades" and this may well not have been what the victim was doing the last time his family heard about him, it's not totally surprising that the police television appeals drew a blank.

And a further body:

The skeletal remains of a man were found in Cardington lock a few years ago, following flood conditions on the river Great Ouse that required the lock gates to be opened at both ends to supplement the normal flood gates and spillway, which almost certainly mean that the body didn't actually start off where it was eventually found, and had been in the river, somewhere further upstream for months or years. (Pictures taken around the time of discovery, of side-channel just upstream of Penstock Weir and at Cardington Lock itself.) This man has never been identified, either, but the location is a mile or so downstream from a regular, if illegal, traveller's pitch in a riverside meadow near the Oasis Swimming Pool. A dead traveller is laid to rest with great ceremony and a great deal of emotion, quite possibly any forced labour travelling with them is treated with a good deal less gentle love and respect when they expire. Preventing a decent burial is a serious criminal offence in England, regardless of to what extent the accused contributed to the death.

NB: all navigation locks on the river Great Ouse have a steel visor gate on the upstream side and canal-type swing-gates on the downstream side. The latter are normally swung closed by any great flow of water, but provision is made for chaining them open during extreme flow conditions, allowing the visor gate to be raised and very high volumes of water to be discharged via the navigation channel. It is quite evident from the author's pictures what the chances are, of a sunken body staying where it was sunk once Cardington Lock has been opened to discharge water rather than for navigation purposes.

The final picture, above, shows that even the torrent coming through Cardington Lock was just a  small fraction of the total in the river at the time, this is the junction between the spillway channel to the right and the (normally idle) canoe slalom course, to the left, which doubles as an emergency flood relief channel. There are two further big discharge gates at "Cardington Sluice" and Penstock weir feeds water into a purpose-built flood relief channel, the "New Cut". A linking channel connects the top of the New Cut at Penstock, with the main river and navigation channel close to the meadows beside the Oasis pool. There's the force there to move a dead body a mile or two, not so much "over time" as quite suddenly in extreme flow and not at all in more normal conditions.

Servitude and Leighton Buzzard

The Greenacres Slavery case has reached a verdict on some of the charges, although the jury couldn't agree a verdict for a couple of dozen other charges, some of which will be retried. This means that Medawar isn't totally free to comment on every aspect of the case.

This link and this one give a pretty fair impression of the basic news and journalistic reaction, so far.

However, there are two aspects arising from the charges that have been dealt with, upon which it is permissible and necessary to comment. Both, really, a product of the fact that when Parliament passed the current servitude legislation, it didn't really know the gravity and extent of the practices it was attempting to outlaw. This is nobody's fault; it's a product of shining a light into a very dark hidden corner, that something much worse than expected may crawl out.

One of those convicted was given an eleven year sentence, out of what Medawar believes is an absolute maximum of fourteen years. Until the facts of the Leighton Buzzard case were examined in court, eleven to fourteen years must have seemed adequate or even harsh, because the laws were really introduced to prevent the sort of abuse of foreign workers which immigration authorities and the gangmaster licensing authority, knew about prior to 2010. That included unlawful detention, poor housing, excessive work, no pay, coercion and inadequate provision of food and minimal care and concern for safety. But it was envisaged that these unacceptable things were happening over a period of weeks or months.

One of the slaves who was freed by Bedfordshire police from the Greenacres Traveller's site, had been held there for fifteen years: more than the maximum sentence available to judges for punishing those holding him there. He was held in conditions unquestionably worse than those in any English jail, and subject to threats of violence and abuse of a kind which would be extraordinary in any context, even inside jail. This does not mean that the practice of abducting and keeping homeless and mentally-ill men as slaves started fifteen years before the police raid: there's some evidence that it had been going on for something more like thirty years. This takes us back pretty well exactly to the period when the Thatcher government repealed previous anti-slavery legislation, mainly in surrender to European pressure to get rid of any remaining English and Scottish laws still carrying the death penalty. As far as one can tell, and it's not a subject on which those directly responsible are ever likely to enlighten us, the practice of some Irish Traveller clans using homeless men as forced labour started immediately it ceased to be a potentially capital offence to do so.

In the light of severity and sheer duration of the cruelty inflicted via Greenacres, there needs to be an urgent modification to the sentences available to judges in forced servitude cases. Not necessarily to increase the amount of time actually served in jail, but in order to alter the legal basis on which they are released, having served it. And it does seem possible that if this is how bad it looks on what is only the third or fourth occasion a servitude case has come to court under the new laws, that we're going to see even worse, perhaps quite soon. Judges are going to have trouble responding properly to the very worst cases.

The solution is to make life sentences available. The crucial difference between a life sentence with an eleven year tariff, and an eleven year sentence, is that release from prison from a life sentence, is only ever done on licence. The licence can be revoked at any time and the offender recalled to prison if there appears to be any likelihood of a further offence. And release from a life sentence does not happen in the first place, if the offender appears to be unrepentant.

The second problem with the servitude laws as they stand is this:

More particularly in connection with another case, involving offenders with the same family name as those from Leighton Buzzard and tried in Luton, but officially unconnected and tried in Hampshire, evidence and testimony emerged of individuals abducted from the streets and dole queues and used as forced labour, were traded and sold between different individuals and between different branches of the same family living and working from different sites.

Men were trafficked and sold within England. There is also a body of authoritative and officially-published evidence that men seized for the purposes of forced labour in England, have been taken to and from the Skane region of Sweden.

The servitude laws do not really address the sale and trafficking of forced labourers, and this kind of trade is only vigorously pursued by the police and customs if it involves sexual offences and/or children.

This needs to change: trading in slaves was outlawed by Parliament a whole generation before keeping slaves was outlawed. Largely because it was in the trade and transport of slaves that the worst cruelty and abuse was perceived, by Georgian society, to be happening.

There need to be specific offences of trading in forced labour and profiting from servitude, because it's possible that those profiting most from the practice of forced labour, may be far removed from the day-to-day administration of it. As things stand, someone who puts up the capital or resources in kind for someone to set up in the forced labour trade, is going to be exceptionally difficult to prosecute, even though the offence simply would not be happening without their, distant, involvement.

It must be made more straightforward to prosecute those who provide the capital, sites vehicles and equipment for acts of servitude. It must also be possible, where appropriate, to prosecute those who award contracts to gangmasters or "subcontractors" using forced labour. And that prosecution must be a significant charge with a severe penalty, and not something that can be viewed as an administrative risk or expense.

The final issue is this: 

All the media reports and political debate uses terms like "virtual slavery" and "slavery-like conditions" to describe something which meets any reasonable, let alone dictionary, definition of slavery. It is fairly obvious that the sole reason for doing this, is that white journalists are afraid that the black community will take them to task for implying that there's any connection between what happened to white people at Greenacres and what happened to Afro-Caribbean communities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 

There is a connection: it is the same thing. We need to use the same word, or we devalue the language, we mitigate the guilt of the modern slaver, and we betray all those who suffered in previous centuries, including those Cornishmen kidnapped as slaves by Barbary pirates and those from so many countries and cultures who was taken as slaves to Rome, by letting it happen again.

Taking men by a mixture of trickery and force, keeping them by pure force and threats of death, making them work the same way and maintaining this oppression and exploitation, year in, year out, is slavery pure and simple and to pretend otherwise, or demand some other weaseling form of words, is both dishonest and complicit.

Anyone who will not call a slave a slave, is ultimately making life easier for the slave-master.

A Security Breach Waiting to Happen: Serving Officers as Consultants

Last week, Sam Hallam was acquitted by the Court of Appeal, after serving eight years in prison for a murder he couldn't have committed. Counsel for the Crown seems only to have read the full case files about halfway through the hearing, because that was the point where the Crown suddenly withdrew its opposition to the appeal without any public explanation. Interestingly, Mr Hallam uses his first major interview, with the Mail on Sunday, to express, not merely his indignation at the way he was treated by an inquiry team led by then-Chief-Inspector Michael Broster, but also his concern that the conduct of the now-Superintendent Broster in the Gareth Williams case may have fatally compromised what is now and always should have been, a murder inquiry. See several articles in this blog about the Williams case, below.

Mr Hallam rightly observes that the Gareth Williams case was "really important" and mistakes were unacceptable, let alone near duplicates of the kind of mistake which led to his own wrongful conviction and the escape from justice of the real killer. (Broster and his team ignored compelling evidence against one Tyrone Isaacs even as they ignored compelling evidence supporting Mr Hallam's claim to innocence.)

Above all, Broster failed to keep a  "policy book" which is a document designed to allow their superiors or any future inquiry team, or those working on a parallel case, to understand their reasons for taking specific actions, interpreting evidence in a particular way or why they should have pursued one line of inquiry whilst abandoning others. Without a policy book, other records reveal almost nothing about why an investigation went wrong. The only time anyone benefits from a policy book not being kept, is when the reason why an investigation went wrong is itself unacceptable: i.e: something more sinister than a mistake.

The action which, above all others, cries out for explanation, is why Broster's team actually gave back a stick that had been taken from Tyrone Isaacs as a potential murder weapon. It's simply impossible to see why an essentially valueless possession should be returned when it might still have yielded forensic evidence of value if subjected to the most modern techniques. It's almost as if Mr Isaacs had a kindly sponsor.

Medawar isn't going to draw the reader's attention to the ways in which all of this is an exact parallel with the ways in which Superintendent Broster and his SO15 colleagues systematically derailed the murder investigation in the Williams case, because they are quite obvious to anyone comparing the details of the two cases.

Medawar would like, instead, to draw the reader's attention to the ways in which Superintendent Broster's career trajectory parallels that of two former executives of "News Data Services", a News Corporation company which has been thoroughly implicated in a global hacking fraud designed to drive competitors to News Corp broadcasters, (On Digital, for example) out of business, causing News Corp to profit by billions of pounds and gain considerable global political power for its principals.

Superintendent (latterly "Commander") Ray Adams was the head of Scotland Yard's Criminal Intelligence Branch, SO11, and Reuven Hasak was a former deputy Chairman of the Shin Bet, Israel's security service. Like SO15, SO11 officers have a very high security clearance, which the unscrupulous can exploit to prevent other officers questioning or even knowing about, their activities, whether properly sanctioned or not. Especially not. The same goes for Shin Bet officers in general, let alone the deputy chairman.

In recent years, the high security clearance of SO11 and SO15 officers has led to their being given exclusive access to classified material, so that any senior investigating officer needing access to classified material, secure premises or military and intelligence personnel in order to solve a murder (or multi-billion pound fraud), have to channel all their requests via SO15 and simply accept whatever they are given or told, without question. Somewhere in the mind of successive Home Secretaries, this arrangement "serves national security". In practice, of course, it does the opposite:

Exclusive access to privileged information gives officers a very high market value. And being effectively beyond being questioned by their colleagues gives those officers the opportunity to exploit that market value for all it's worth.

Both Ray Adams and Reuven Hasak had top jobs at NDS within weeks of leaving public service, and it's simply impossible for them to have been up and running so quickly without overlap: they must have been briefed into their new roles, and had an idea of the (criminal, as it happens) large-scale enterprise they would be engaged in, even while between them they still had access to the most secret and sensitive files of both the UK's police and security services and those of Israel.

And since neither of them is exactly an ace programmer or experienced financier, what was it that made them ideal candidates for senior roles in News Corp's software arm, if it wasn't their security clearances and unfettered access to national secrets?

Now we learn that Superintendent Broster is due to leave the Metropolitan Police, later this year. But he is already advertising and presumably selling, his services as a "security consultant". This is precisely the same highly questionable overlap, which does not so much open the door to corruption as send hawkers round the streets, seeking out corruption and issuing invitations.

How in the world is this system more secure than simply allowing a senior investigating officer, whose investigation touches on military or intelligence matters, to go and talk to the relevant agencies and their officers on her or his own account? They would be in a much better position than SO15 or SO11 to judge what evidence was actually pertinent, and they would almost certainly occupy the attention of military and intelligence officers for less time in consequence. Not having a privileged "elite" position, their conduct could be scrutinised and any "mistakes" rectified. They could also benefit from the advice of peers and superiors in a way that "elite" officers never seem to.

Moreover, it wouldn't be possible for a foreign power or major criminal gang to predict which officers would end up having access to classified material, and when they did have access, it would indeed be limited to that pertinent to a single inquiry at a time. By reducing both the opportunity and the payoff for anyone corrupting an officer, in whatever way, national security -and the rule of law- would be strengthened.

Above all, allowing serving officers, with high security clearances, to enter private practice and advertise their services, is a suicidal practice in terms of national security and should be replaced with something like the quarantine period imposed on former ministers. Senior police officers have generous pensions, precisely to compensate them for all the opportunities for personal enrichment which they supposedly forgo in the public interest. So how come they need to be allowed to flaunt their security clearances on the internet and around City boardrooms -as if they were standing in a doorway in Soho with a set of  doorkeys in their hands and a look of bored acceptance, if not enticement, on their faces?

Stairway to Hell

The Westminster Coroner has given a narrative verdict in the unexplained death of Gareth Williams. This link is to the Daily Mail article; Medawar has had trouble finding a link to the original narrative itself, which would be far more useful, but this link, to the Guardian's report, contains more of the narrative and less speculation. Dr Wilcox did say, very clearly, that Gareth Williams was not gay, not a cross dresser, not actively interested in bondage, and that all the "leaks" (via News Corporation media in almost every case) to the effect that he was, may well have been an attempt to manipulate perceptions of the evidence. This vindicates Medawar's position on this from the earliest days of the investigation. Even if, by some strange quirk, this were not a murder, the crime of perverting the course of justice has still been committed, on a very large scale. But, as Dr Wilcox has determined, the overwhelming probability is that this was an unlawful killing, and where these involve the concealment or manipulation of evidence and deliberate non-reporting of the death, they generally are murders and not negligent manslaughters or culpable homicides.

The truth about his interest in women's fashions, so far as it matters, is that Gareth Williams was heterosexual and also admired women as objects of beauty, which can be how some gay men see them. He delighted, not in wearing women's clothes, but in putting beautiful clothes on the women he loved. He seemed to be taking steps to acquire the skills needed for fashion design, and this would have been a remarkably suitable creative hobby for him to adopt. Especially as his day job was so secret, and presumably quite stressful. A bit of recognition for his fashion ideas would have compensated for the necessary secrecy of his work, and would not have been a security risk in the slightest. It would certainly have been more rational and less risky than some of the recreational activities attributed to his erstwhile colleagues at MI6. (Such as racing sports cars through the Swinehead tunnel!)

The BBC reports last night were of the general disparaging tone that Dr Wilcox's narrative would allow "conspiracy theorists" to weave elaborate theories. We have a murder and manipulation of evidence and public perceptions of evidence. In such circumstances, it is completely irrational to believe in anything other than a conspiracy! However, care must be taken to avoid fastening on the obvious and slow-moving target of MI6, because the evidence and perceptions of it have indeed been manipulated, probably by an individual or small group with an eye to letting MI6 take all the flak. And it's always best to avoid elaborate conspiracy theories, because conspiracies that involve murder tend to be brutally simple when the truth is finally known.

Various articles below detail Medawar's view that the motives for the murder of Gareth Williams are most likely to be found in the late nineties, while he was a Phd student at Manchester and before he was recruited by GCHQ during further studies at Cambridge. GCHQ were by no means the first entity to recognise his skills: it is known that a News Corporation company, NDS, was recruiting hackers and computer-games experts from 1996 onwards, for what turned out to be completely illegal work. Articles below name two suspects, with the capability (and experience) to do all that Dr Wilcox suspects was probably done, including the manipulating of evidence and perceptions of evidence. For what follows, though, we'll leave their names where they are, because this is about how Gareth Williams could have been murdered, regardless of whether Medawar's suspicions about those two senior NDS employees are right or not.

Mr Williams' top floor flat in number 36 Alderney Street was not "highly secure", in that there were only fairly ordinary locks (the letting agent had a key) and no high technology entry system to log every visitor and keep strangers at bay. However, it was eminently defensible, and that is important, because it means that a surprise attack would have been necessary and there was probably only one circumstance tn which an unusually fit and agile occupant, such as Gareth Williams, could have been taken by surprise with any degree of certainty:

The front door to his top floor flat was actually on the floor below, opening onto a narrow staircase up to the main living area of the flat. This is defensible in the same way that many areas of Skipton Castle were designed to be defended: a strong man at the top of narrow stairs can hold off several men trying to get up the stairs. Even if the adversaries have firearms, it's still not a straightforward thing to get up such a flight of stairs if someone at the top is determined to resist. It's certainly not a thing which could be done without alerting every other resident of the building to a battle in progress! Chairs and tables would have been hurled down, the first face to poke its way round the top of the stairs would have collected Mr Williams' fist or his foot, on arrival. A kick in the head from a champion cross country cyclist ought to fell the toughest of men.

And although the door to those stairs could be fairly easily opened, it wouldn't be possible to force, unlock or pick-lock that door, and ascend the stairs, without a person in the living area of the flat knowing that someone was on their way up. The only place in that flat from where a covert entry could not be immediately detected and countered, would be the bathroom. Especially if the occupant was standing in the bath to have a shower. (There is a full height transparent shower screen at one end of the bath, rather than a separate shower cubicle.) The screen, and the bathroom door, would have partially shielded Mr Williams from any noises at his front door or on that flight of stairs, and if the shower was running, he would have heard nothing.

Timing an invasion to coincide with Gareth Williams taking a shower would probably have required a certain amount of stalking beforehand, but experienced men who knew what they needed to know and weren't too bothered about other things, could have done this without raising too many suspicions. Although, some lady friends of Mr Williams (there do seem to have been rather more of these than the smear campaign suggested) have reported that he claimed that he was being followed. Stalking to determine his habits would only have been sufficient to insert a couple of men into the building at the right sort of time. They would have needed confirmation that he was indeed using the shower, or taking a bath, before tackling the flat's front door and sneaking up the final flight of stairs into the living area of the flat.

This could have been provided by an external observer, who wouldn't necessarily have needed to be able to see in any of the windows. Line of sight to a boiler flue, bathroom extractor fan, or the bathroom waste water pipes, would have been enough. Especially if a Thermal Imaging camera or even just a laser thermometer were available. (These are not exactly James Bond devices and are widely available at modest cost.) Any steady flow of steamy air out of a bathroom vent, or warm water down a pipe, would have been proof of showering.) The Russian emigre who spotted Russian Embassy cars in the general vicinity reported one of them in a multi-storey car park directly behind Mr Williams' building, which sounds like an excellent vantage point for this kind of surveillance, against not only his flat, but quite a few others owned by MI6 as well.

The observer might have communicated by some means other than a mobile phone call or text message, to avoid leaving evidence. A cheap set of walkie-talkies (no licence required) and a couple of syllables would have been enough. The two men in the building would have opened the door, by whatever means (it's not impossible they could have copied the letting agency key) and quickly gone up the last flight of stairs. One would have concealed himself by the bathroom door, the other would have waited in a more visible position to occupy Mr Williams' attention when he emerged, in his bathrobe. (If the relevant pipes are inside the building, it's entirely possible that two men in the building could have managed without an external observer. Might the place where the pipes run also offer concealment while they waited?)

Any confrontation with a man unexpectedly in direct view when he came out of the shower, would have been swiftly terminated by one who hid, and some incapacitant applied. This could have been a Taser, but the dart-firing variety also distribute tiny little tags with the serial number of the cartridge on. A chemical incapacitant or a direct-contact electronic stun gun would be more likely. Mr Williams would have collapsed on the carpeted living area floor, rather than the tiled bathroom floor, pretty much where his discarded bathrobe was found. That space, and that forgiving surface, would have made it relatively easy to get him into the holdall he was found in, without damaging the bag.  Two men could have lifted the holdall with him in it, straight back into the bathroom. 

It is undetermined whether the holdall his body was found in, belonged to him or was brought to the scene by his killers. He did own a similar one if a different colour which he used to store items beneath his desk at the MI6 building at Vauxhall Cross, and some images taken inside his flat show another bag from the same maker on a sofa. If it was one of his own holdalls, the odds are there was something in it when his killers entered the flat, and this may account for the various items neatly laid out on the table and bed.

All this could have been accomplished within a few minutes. If there are any traces (or by-products) of chemical incapacitant left, the most likely places would be the carpet near the bathroom door, and the bathrobe. If a Taser was used, the little tags would most likely be in the same places.

Turning the heating on, in August, not only accelerated the decomposition of the body (which may or may not have been intentional) and would certainly have accelerated the evaporation and/or oxidisation of any chemical incapacitant.

Traces of GHB were found in the body, and if sprayed in the face, this would be an incapacitant. However, given the strength and fitness of the victim, something much more instant and decisive might have been used. High pressure spray cans (like MACE or Pepper Spray cans) of Fentanyl have been on the market in other EU countries, and have figured in some murder attempts and many more kidnaps, rapes and robberies. If planning to employ such a weapon, indoors, the two killers would have certainly worn some kind of mask to prevent inhaling the incapacitant themselves, and this would have helped minimise the amount of forensic evidence they left behind them, too. But were they ever to be found, the filters of any such masks would be a goldmine of forensic evidence, of many kinds.