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 by 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.

Update: 31st of July 2017  The author of VOCCT, subject of the radio harassment detailed above, is currently being treated for lymphoma, just like the Ambassador, following a diagnosis earlier this year.