This is Matthew Gould, second from right, British Ambassador to Israel, who was pictured speaking at a meeting of the Leeds Zionist Federation that was also the opening of the Leeds Hasbarah Centre. The Leeds Zionist Federation is part of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland, motto “Speaking Up for Israel.” A collection was made at the meeting to send packages to members of the Israeli Defense Force.
On 29 May 2011 The Jerusalem Post reported: “British Ambassador Matthew Gould declared his commitment to Israel and the principles of Zionism on Thursday”.
Remember this background, it is unusual behavior for a diplomat, and it is important.
The six meetings between British Ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould and Minister of Defense Liam Fox and Adam Werritty together – only two of which were revealed by Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell in his “investigation” into Werritty’s unauthorized role in the Ministry of Defense – raise vital concerns about a secret agenda for war at the core of government, comparable to Blair’s determination to drive through a war on Iraq..
This is a detective story. It begins a few weeks ago, when the Fox-Werritty scandal was first breaking in the media. I had a contact from an old friend from my Foreign Office days. This friend had access to the Gus O’Donnell investigation. He had given a message for me to a trusted third party.
Whistleblowing in the surveillance state is a difficult activity. I left through a neighbour’s garden, not carrying a mobile phone, puffed and panted by bicycle to an unmonitored but busy stretch of road, hitched a lift much of the way, then ordered a minicab on a payphone from a country pub to my final destination, a farm far from CCTV. There the intermediary gave me the message: what really was worrying senior civil servants in the Cabinet Office was that the Fox-Werritty link related to plans involving Mossad and the British Ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould.
Since I became a notorious whistleblower, several of my ex-friends and contacts have used me to get out information they wanted to leak, via my blog. A good recent example was a senior friend at the UN who tipped me off in advance on the deal by which the US agreed to the Saudi attack on pro-democracy demonstrators in Bahrain, in return for Arab League support for the NATO attack on Libya. But this was rather different, not least in the apparent implication that our Ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould, was engaged in something with Werritty which went beyond official FCO policy.
I was particularly concerned by this because I knew slightly and liked Matthew Gould, from the time he wrote speeches for Robin Cook. I hoped there was nothing much in it. But then Gould’s name started to come up as professional journalists dug into the story, and reported Werritty’s funding by pro-Israeli lobby groups.
I decided that the best approach was for me to write to Matthew Gould. I did so, asking him when he had first met Werritty, how many times he had met him, and how many communications of every kind there had been between them. I received the reply that these questions would be answered in Gus O’Donnell’s report.
But Gus O’Donnell’s report in fact answered none of these questions. It only mentioned two meetings at which Fox, Gould and Werritty were all three present. It did not mention Gould-Werritty bilateral meetings and contacts at all. To an ex-Ambassador like me, there was also something very fishy about the two trilateral meetings O’Donnell did mention and his characterization of them.
This led me to dig further, and I was shocked to find that O’Donnell was, at the most charitable interpretation, economical with the truth. In fact there were at least six Fox-Werritty-Gould meetings, not the two given by O’Donnell. Why did GOD lie? I now had no doubt that my informant had pointed me towards something very real and very important indeed.
Matthew Gould was the only British Ambassador who Fox and Werrity met together. They met him six times. Why?
The first meeting to which O’Donnell admits, took place in September 2010. O’Donnell says this was
“a general discussion of international defense and security matters to enable Mr. Gould better to understand MOD’s perspective.”
O’Donnell says Werritty should not have been present. An FCO spokesman told me on 21 October that
“Mr. Gould’s meeting with the Defense Secretary was arranged by his office as part of his pre-posting briefing calls.”
All Ambassadors make pre-posting briefing calls around Whitehall before taking up their job, as you would expect. But even for our most senior Ambassadors, outside the Foreign Office those calls are not at Secretary of State level. Senior officials are quite capable of explaining policy to outgoing Ambassadors; Secretaries of State have many other things to do.
For this meeting to happen at all was not routine, and Werritty’s presence made it still more strange. Why was this meeting happening? I dug further, and learnt from a senior MOD source that there were two more very strange things about this meeting, neither noted by O’Donnell. There was no private secretary or MOD official present to take note of action points, and the meeting took place not in Fox’s office, but in the MOD dining room.
O’Donnell may have been able to fox the media, but to a former Ambassador this whole meeting stunk. I bombarded the FCO with more questions, and discovered an amazing fact left out by O’Donnell. The FCO spokesman replied to me on 21 October 2011 that:
“Mr. Werritty was also present at an earlier meeting Mr. Gould had with Dr Fox in the latter’s capacity as shadow Defense Secretary.”
So Gould, Fox and Werritty had got together before Gould was Ambassador, while Fox was still in opposition and while Werritty was – what, exactly? This opened far more questions than it answered. I put them to the FCO. When, where and why had this meeting happened? We only knew it was before May 2010, when Fox took office. What was discussed? There are very strict protocols for senior officials briefing opposition front bench spokesman. Had they been followed?
The FCO refused point blank to answer any further questions. I turned to an independent-minded MP, Jeremy Corbyn, who put down a parliamentary question to William Hague. The reply quite deliberately ignored almost all of Corbyn’s question, but it did throw up an extraordinary bit of information – yet another meeting between Fox, Werritty and Gould, which had not been previously admitted.
Hague replied to Corbyn that:
“Our ambassador to Israel was also invited by the former Defense Secretary to a private social engagement in summer 2010 at which Adam Werritty was present.”
Getting to the truth was like drawing teeth, but the picture was building. O’Donnell had completely mischaracterized the “Briefing meeting” between Fox, Werritty and O’Donnell by hiding the fact that the three had met up at least twice before – once for a meeting when Fox was in opposition, and once for “a social engagement.” The FCO did not answer Corbyn’s question as to who else was present at this “social engagement”.
This was also key because Gould’s other meetings with Fox and Werritty were being characterized – albeit falsely – as simply routine, something Gould had to do in the course of his ambassadorial duties. But this attendance at “a private social engagement” was a voluntary act by Gould, indubitable proof that, at the least, the three were happy in each other’s company, but given that all three were very active in Zionist causes, it was a definite indication of something more than that.
That furtive meeting between Fox, Werritty and Gould in the MOD dining room, deliberately held away from Fox’s office where it should have taken place, and away from the MOD officials who should have been there, now looks less like briefing and more like plotting.
My existing doubts about the second and only other meeting to which O’Donnell does admit make plain why that question is very important.
O’Donnell had said that Gould, Fox and Werritty had met on 6 February 2011:
“in Tel Aviv. This was a general discussion of international affairs over a private dinner with senior Israelis. The UK Ambassador was present.”
There was something very wrong here. Any ex-Ambassador knows that any dinner with senior figures from your host country, at which the British Ambassador to that country and a British Secretary of State are both present, and at which international affairs are discussed, can never be “private”. You are always representing the UK government in that circumstance. The only explanation I could think of for O’Donnell’s astonishing description of this as a “private” dinner was that the discussion was far from being official UK policy.
I therefore asked the FCO who was at this dinner, what was discussed, and who was paying for it? I viewed the last as my trump card – if either Gould or Fox was receiving hospitality, they are obliged to declare it. To my astonishment the FCO refused to say who was present or who paid. Corbyn’s parliamentary question also covered the issue of who was at this dinner, to which he received no reply.
Plainly something was very wrong. I therefore again asked how often Gould had met or communicated with Werritty without Fox being present. Again the FCO refused to reply. But one piece of information that had been found by other journalists was that, prior to the Tel Aviv dinner, Fox, Gould and Werritty had together attended the ZIOCONNED Herzilyah conference in Israel. The programme of this is freely available. It is an unabashedly staunch Zionist annual conference on “Israel’s security”, which makes no pretence at a balanced approach to Palestinian questions and attracts a strong US neo-conservative following. Fox, Gould and Werritty sat together at this event.
Yet again, the liar O’Donnell does not mention it.
I then learnt of yet another, a sixth meeting between Fox, Gould and Werritty. This time my informant was another old friend, a Jewish diplomat for another country, based at an Embassy in London. They had met Gould, Fox and Werritty together at the “We believe in Israel” conference in London in May 2011. Here is a photo of Gould and Fox together at that conference.
I had no doubt about the direction this information was leading, but I now needed to go back to my original source. Sometimes the best way to hide something is to put it right under the noses of those looking for it, and on Wednesday I picked up the information in a tent at the Occupy London camp outside St Paul’s cathedral.
This is the story I was given.
Matthew Gould was Deputy Head of Mission at the British Embassy in Iran, a country which Werritty frequently visited, and where Werritty claimed to have British government support for plots against Ahmadinejad. Gould worked at the British Embassy in Washington; the Fox-Werritty Atlantic Bridge fake charity was active in building links between British and American neo-conservatives and particularly ultra-Zionists. Gould’s responsibilities at the Embassy included co-ordination on US policy towards Iran. The first meeting of all three, which the FCO refuses to date, probably stems from this period.
According to my source, there is a long history of contact between Gould and Werritty. The FCO refuse to give any information on Gould-Werritty meetings or communications except those meetings where Fox was present – and those have only been admitted gradually, one by one. We may not have them all even yet.
My source says that co-ordinating with Israel and the US on diplomatic preparation for an attack on Iran was the subject of all these meetings. That absolutely fits with the jobs Gould held at the relevant times. The FCO refuses to say what was discussed. My source says that, most crucially, Iran was discussed at the Tel Aviv dinner, and the others present represented Mossad. The FCO again refuses to say who was present or what was discussed.
On Wednesday 2 November it was revealed in the press that under Fox the MOD had prepared secret and detailed contingency plans for British participation in an attack on Iran.
There are very important questions here. Was Gould really discussing neo-con plans for attacking Iran with Werritty and eventually with Fox before the Conservatives were even in government? Why did O’Donnell’s report so carefully mislead on the Fox-Gould-Werritty axis? How far was the FCO aware of MOD preparations for attacking Iran? Is there a neo-con cell of senior ministers and officials, co-ordinating with Israel and the United States, and keeping their designs hidden from the Conservative’s coalition partners?
The government could clear up these matters if it answered some of the questions it refuses to answer, even when asked formally by a member of parliament. The media have largely moved on from the Fox-Werritty affair, but have barely skimmed the surface of the key questions it raises. They relate to secrecy, democratic accountability and preparations to launch a war, preparations which bypass the safeguards of good government. The refusal to give straight answers to simple questions by a member of parliament strikes at the very root of our democracy.
Is this not precisely the situation we were in with Blair and Iraq? Have no lessons been learnt?
There is a further question which arises. Ever since the creation of the state of Israel, the UK had a policy of not appointing a Jewish Briton as Ambassador, for fear of conflict of interest. As a similar policy of not appointing a catholic Ambassador to the Vatican. New Labor overturned both longstanding policies as discriminatory. Matthew Gould is therefore the first Jewish British Ambassador to Israel.
Matthew Gould does not see his race or religion as irrelevant. He has chosen to give numerous interviews to both British and Israeli media on the subject of being a Jewish ambassador, and has been at pains to be photographed by the Israeli media participating in Jewish religious festivals. Israeli newspaper Haaretz described him as “Not just an ambassador who is Jewish, but a Jewish ambassador”. That rather peculiar phrase appears directly to indicate that the potential conflict of interest for a British ambassador in Israel has indeed arisen.
It is thus most unfortunate that it is Gould who is the only British Ambassador to have met Fox and Werritty together, who met them six times, and who now stands suspected of long term participation with them in a scheme to forward war with Iran, in cooperation with Israel. This makes it even more imperative that the FCO answers now the numerous outstanding questions about the Gould/Werritty relationship and the purpose of all those meetings with Fox.
There is no doubt that the O’Donnell report’s deceitful non-reporting of so many Fox-Gould-Werritty meetings, the FCO’s blunt refusal to list Gould-Werritty, meetings and contacts without Fox, and the refusal to say who else was present at any of these occasions, amounts to irrefutable evidence that something very important is being hidden right at the heart of government. I have no doubt that my informant is telling the truth, and the secret is the plan to attack Iran. It fits all the above facts. What else does?
Please feel free to re-use and republish this article anywhere, commercially or otherwise. It has been blocked by the mainstream media. I write regularly for the mainstream media and this is the first article of mine I have ever been unable to publish. People have risked a huge amount by leaking me information in an effort to stop the government machinery from ramping up a war with Iran. There are many good people in government who do not want to see another Iraq. Please do all you can to publish and redistribute this information.
UPDATE A commenter has already pointed me to this bit of invaluable evidence:
“My government absolutely agrees with your conception of the Iranian threat and the importance of your determination to battle it.” Dealing with the Iranian threat will be a large part of my work here.” Gould said.
From Israel National News. It also says that he will be trying to promote a positive atmosphere between Israel and the Palestinian National Authority, but the shallowest or the deepest search shows the same picture; an entirely biased indeed fanatical Zionist who must give no confidence at all to the utterly corrupt and ZIOCONNED criminal Palestinian Authority. He must be recalled....
http://www.neptunuslex.com/2011/11/16/sea-harriers/#comments
But it isn't Iran. It's Israel. The world needs a plan to "disable" Israel's military machine. Anyone who is not an Israeli in no matter what country might piss them off--if Israel has been given this capability to strike Iran with impunity they could also strike you.
Oh, and a message to the politically bewildered who seem to haunt these comments...Iran is at present driven with internal conflict and dissent which will eventually spill over into political change. The one sure way to stop that process is for a "western" and Zioconned Criminal probity to attack...IRAN and The LEVANT..... If that happens even the most ardent opponents of the regime in Tehran will rush to the colors. Are you too stupid to see that?
On the subject of hate speech, it's too bad we've heard nothing from the ADL crowd about this screed written by Rachel Abrams, the wife of Bush Mideast criminal/killer-adviser Elliott Abrams, the Iran-contra felon and assassin in Chief within the confines of the most odious White House Murder INC, in the Levant....headed by the Barbarian Dick CHENEY....:
"…round up his [Gilad Shalit's] captors, the slaughtering, death-worshiping, innocent-butchering, child-sacrificing savages who dip their hands in blood and use women—those who aren’t strapping bombs to their own devils’ spawn and sending them out to meet their seventy-two virgins by taking the lives of the school-bus-riding, heart-drawing, Transformer-doodling, homework-losing children of Others—and their offspring—those who haven’t already been pimped out by their mothers to the murder god—as shields, hiding behind their burkas and cradles like the unmanned animals they are, and throw them not into your prisons, where they can bide until they’re traded by the thousands for another child of Israel, but into the sea, to float there, food for sharks, stargazers, and whatever other oceanic carnivores God has put there for the purpose."
Too bad that Jews like Rachel Abrams the bitch-fascist, fail to understand that words have consequences. But Abe Foxman won't tell her that....
We must all remember that Obama chose the son of a murderous violent Israeli terrorist to be his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who was actually named in HONOR after one of the Stern gang's most violent leaders. And his father FOUGHT WITH THE NAZIS. And we haven't heard the last of Rahm.
When you talk about the Zionists' betrayal of their own Jewish flesh and blood, let us be clear: If one really imagines that this betrayal cannot happen again, think again. Benjamin Stalinyahu has actually stated words to the effect that when Israel has sucked America's blood dry, it will not hesitate to discard it. One can see a scenario of a dying American Empire in its last throws, helping Israel attack Iran only to be dumped like a wet rag after all America's money has been plundered, with rich Jews like Bloomberg fleeing to live in Israel just as rich German Jews left for Palestine leaving the rest of American Jewry betrayed and cast off....
Dr. Webster Tarpley: Wahhabis & Israel Fund Al-Qaeda Rebels In Syria
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - A former inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has repudiated its major new claim that Iran built an explosives chamber to test components of a nuclear weapon and carry out a simulated nuclear explosion.
The IAEA claim that a foreign scientist - identified in news reports as Vyacheslav Danilenko - had been involved in building the alleged containment chamber has now been denied firmly by Danilenko himself in an interview with Radio Free Europe published last Friday.
The latest report by the IAEA cited "information provided by Member States" that Iran had constructed "a large explosives containment vessel in which to conduct hydrodynamic experiments" - meaning simulated explosions of nuclear weapons - in its Parchin military complex in 2000.
The report said it had "confirmed" that a "large cylindrical object" housed at the same complex had been "designed to contain the detonation of up to 70 kilograms of high explosives". That amount of explosives, it said, would be "appropriate" for testing a detonation system to trigger a nuclear weapon.
But former IAEA inspector Robert Kelley has denounced the agency's claims about such a containment chamber as "highly misleading".
Kelley, a nuclear engineer who was the IAEA's chief weapons inspector in Iraq and is now a senior research fellow at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, pointed out in an interview with the Real News Network that a cylindrical chamber designed to contain 70 kg of explosives, as claimed by the IAEA, could not possibly have been used for hydrodynamic testing of a nuclear weapon design, contrary to the IAEA claim.
"There are far more explosives in that bomb than could be contained by this container," Kelley said, referring to the simulated explosion of a nuclear weapon in a hydrodynamic experiment.
Kelley also observed that hydrodynamic testing would not have been done in a container inside a building in any case. "You have to be crazy to do hydrodynamic explosives in a container," he said. "There's no reason to do it. They're done outdoors on firing tables."
Kelley rejected the IAEA claim that the alleged cylindrical chamber was new evidence of an Iranian weapons program. "We've been led by the nose to believe that this container is important, when in fact it's not important at all," Kelley said.
The IAEA report and unnamed "diplomats" implied that a "former Soviet nuclear weapons scientist", identified in the media as Danilenko, had helped build the alleged containment vessel at Parchin.
But their claims conflict with one another as well as with readily documented facts about Danilenko's work in Iran.
The IAEA report does not deny that Danilenko - a Ukrainian who worked in a Soviet-era research institute that was identified mainly with nuclear weapons - was actually a specialist on nanodiamonds. The report nevertheless implies a link between Danilenko and the purported explosives chamber at Parchin by citing a publication by Danilenko as a source for the dimensions of the alleged explosives chamber.
The Associated Press reported on November 11 that unnamed diplomats suggested Volodymyr Padalko, a partner of Danilenko in a nanodiamond business who was described as Danilenko's son-in-law, had contradicted Danilenko's firm denial of involvement in building a containment vessel for weapons testing. The diplomats claimed Padalko had told IAEA investigators that Danilenko had helped build "a large steel chamber to contain the force of the blast set off by such explosives testing".
But that claim appears to be an effort to confuse Danilenko's well-established work on an explosives chamber for nanodiamond synthesis with a chamber for weapons testing, such as the IAEA now claims was built at Parchin.
One of the unnamed diplomats described the steel chamber at Parchin as "the size of a double decker bus" and thus "much too large" for nanodiamonds.
But the IAEA report itself made exactly the opposite argument, suggesting that the purported steel chamber at Parchin was based on the design in a published paper by Danilenko.
The report said the alleged explosives chamber was designed to contain "up to 70 kg of high explosives" which it claims would be "suitable" for testing what it calls a "multipoint initiation system" for a nuclear weapon.
But a 2008 slide show on systems for nanodiamond synthesis posted on the Internet by the US-based nanotechnology company NanoBlox shows that the last patented containment chamber built by Danilenko and patented in 1992, with a total volume of 100 cubic meters, was designed for the use of just 10 kg of explosives.
An unnamed member state had given the IAEA a purported Iranian document in 2008 describing a 2003 test of what the agency interpreted to be a possible "high explosive implosion system for a nuclear weapon".
David Albright, director of a Washington think-tank that frequently passes on information from IAEA officials to the news media, told this writer in 2009 that the member state in question was "probably Israel". Although the process of making "detonation nanodiamonds" uses explosives in a containment chamber, the chamber would bear little resemblance to one used for testing a nuclear bomb's initiation system.
The production of diamonds does not require the same high degree of precision in simultaneous explosions as the initiator for a nuclear device. And unlike the explosives used in a multipoint initiation system, the explosives used for making synthetic nanodiamonds must be under water in a closed pool, as Danilenko noted in a 2010 PowerPoint presentation.
Having endorsed the IAEA's claims, Albright concedes in a November 13 article that the IAEA report "did not provide [sic] Danilenko's involvement, if any, in this chamber."
In an interview with Radio Free Europe on Friday, Danilenko denied that he has any expertise in nuclear weapons, saying, "I understand absolutely nothing in nuclear physics." He also denied that he participated in "modeling warheads" at the research institute in Russia where he worked for three decades.
Danilenko further denied doing any work in Iran that did not relate to "dynamic detonation synthesis of diamonds" and said he has "strong doubts" that Iran had a nuclear weapons program during those years.
Albright and three co-authors published an account of Danilenko's work in Iran this week seeking to give credibility to the IAEA suggestion that he worked on the containment chamber for a nuclear weapons program.
The Albright article, published on the website of the Institute for Science and International Security, said that Danilenko approached the Iranian Embassy in 1995 offering his expertise on detonation diamonds, and later signed a contract with Syed Abbas Shahmoradi who responded to Danilenko's query.
Albright identifies Shahmoradi as the "head of Iran's secret nuclear sector involved in the development of nuclear weapons", merely because Shahmoradi later headed the Physics Research Center, which the IAEA argues has led Iran's nuclear weapons research.
But in late 1995, Shahmoradi was at the Sharif University of Technology, which is a leading center for nanodiamonds in Iran. Albright argues that this is evidence supporting his suspicion that nanodiamonds were a cover for his real work, because the main center for nanodiamond research is at Malek Ashtar University of Technology rather than at Sharif University.
However, Sharif University had just established an Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology in 2005 that was intended to become the hub for nanotechnology research activities and strategy planning for Iran. So Sharif University and Shahmoradi would have been the logical choice to contract one of the world's leading specialists on nanodiamonds....
http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/parameters/Articles/08spring/proctor.pdf
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