by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The history of British intelligence starts and ends with the enemy inside the palace plotting overthrow.  That’s the domestic enemy – not the foreign one.

For Queen Elizabeth I’s spymaster, Francis Walsingham (1570-1589), the enemy was Mary Queen of Scots. The enemy within was still as vigorous in 1936, when Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin (1935-37) ordered the chief of the domestic security service MI5 to find compromising information on King Edward VIII’s lover, whom Baldwin regarded as a threat to the monarchy. The King’s telephone was also tapped in an operation Baldwin intended for pushing him off the throne; the plot succeeded on December 10, 1936. Neville Chamberlain, who followed as prime minister between 1937 and 1940, then ran a personal system of surveillance through MI5, and through an ex-MI5 agent he put in charge of the Conservative Party’s research department.  Their targets were Chamberlain’s political rivals for power – Anthony Eden and Winston Churchill. Domestic spy plots were just as active in the 1960s for toppling the Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson (1964-70). A decade later, Prime Minister Edward Heath (1970-74) sent his spies into the transport workers’ and miners’ unions to find evidence of their plots against him, or to provoke and fabricate them. That’s the reality for the prime ministers.

But in this new history of the role which the British intelligence services have played in the affairs of the prime ministers since the start of the 20^th century, it has been the enemy without that has been of much greater reward. Not the genuine warmongering enemy like the Germans or the Irish Republicans with the means and the will to kill; as priority targets they came a distant second compared to the Russians whom the British, keeping the secret to themselves, knew to lack both.  

The Russian enemy has always been the meat in the British secret services’ sandwich — the hungrier the services’ appetite, and the fatter their sandwich has grown over time, the more valuable the Russian enemy proves to be.  So the British bite more often.

From this and over the past century,  the Russians appear to have learned anticipation and wariness.  But not yet have they learned deterrence, nor —  perish the thought —  bite back.  The proof of this has been the Skripal case, and at this very moment the Navalny plot.  

by Editor - Sunday, October 11th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Alexei Navalny has given an interview to the BBC Russian Service contradicting the crucial  evidence and allegations which he and his associates have made earlier about the alleged poisoning attempt against him in Tomsk on August 20.

Navalny’s new admissions expose fabrication of evidence by the German Government and by the German Army’s chemical warfare laboratory in Munich. Navalny has now implicated Chancellor Angela Merkel more deeply in the Novichok plot than has been revealed before.  

by Editor - Thursday, October 8th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

A report issued by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), dated on  October 6, has failed to identify the poison weapon which Alexei Navalny and his supporters claim was used to attack him in a Tomsk hotel on August 20.

Instead, the OPCW claims to have found “biomarkers” of Navalny’s metabolic disorder which may have been caused by an unidentified chemical poison. According to a leading British organophosphate chemist, these “biomarkers” may not have been caused by a crime.

“Biomarkers is the wrong term. Biomarkers means metabolites or other compounds which are not the parent nerve agent compound. The vagueness could mean anything,” the expert, who has requested anonymity, concludes. “As always, we need the compound name, but the labs are indicating that somehow they knew they were not identifying a metabolite. Somehow the Germans and the two other labs knew that the compound they identified were not metabolites, they were the parent novel compound. How could they know this?”

The OPCW report, which has been exceptionally delayed before public release, also acknowledges that it did not investigate the Tomsk hotel water bottles which Navalny and his associates have claimed to be the murder weapon. The OPCW analysis also ignored Navalny’s clothing,which he and his associates have insisted to be additional evidence of the alleged assassination attempt.

“If this were expert evidence at the Old Bailey,” a London criminal law source comments, “the defence would rise to say it is evidence of the victim’s illness. It is not identification of the weapon. It’s not evidence of a crime. So there is no case to answer here. The prosecution’s case has failed and should be dismissed.”  

by Editor - Tuesday, October 6th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The Dutch Government has rigged the trial for Russian murder in the shooting-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 on June 17, 2014. The outcome will be a guilty verdict. For Prime Minister Mark Rutte, this is more easily predicted than his survival in power in six months’ time, when Dutch voters go to the polls on March 17, 2021.

The immediate consequence is that the defence of Russian Army Lieutenant Colonel Oleg Pulatov, the one Russian accused who has responded to the Dutch indictment, is pointless; it should stop at once. The Rotterdam lawyers, Boudwijn van Eijck and Sabine ten Doesschate, who are representing Pulatov in court, should withdraw. If they are reluctant, then Anatoly Kovler and Yelena Kutyina, the Moscow lawyers who arranged their engagement and the money to pay them, should order a walk-out.

The Russian side gains nothing, and loses much, by collaborating in the show trial.

A guilty verdict for Pulatov, and by extension the three other defendants and the Russian government behind them, can’t make a significant difference to the outcome of the Dutch election. The MH17 trial will be continuing that month, if it is running on the timetable already announced.  According to that, the verdict cannot be delivered until the very end of 2021 or the first weeks of 2022.

Before the March election day, however, if Pulatov has already abandoned the trial, ordering his lawyers to leave the courtroom, there is a chance that Rutte’s campaign of deceptions will be comprehended by Dutch voters as they go to the ballot box. Just a chance. If then they throw Rutte out, the outcome and verdict of the trial aren’t likely to be directly affected. But Russians will say that Rutte has been felled by the truth.

by Editor - Wednesday, September 30th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The Dutch police have hired a professor called Maurice Punch to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. He tried; the Dutch police think he succeeded in a report called “Passionate Professionals: The Dutch Police Response to the Shooting Down of Malaysian Airlines’ MH17 in the Ukraine.”   Punch concluded that to the Dutch police the MH17 disaster has been worth its weight in guilders, I mean gold.

by Editor - Tuesday, September 29th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

In the trial of Russian murder alleged in the shooting-down of Malaysia Airlines MH17, Dutch lawyers for the defence announced on Monday for the first time that their client, Lieutenant Colonel Oleg Pulatov (lead image, left) declares himself innocent. The lawyers added their acknowledgement that their client must prove his innocence — not that the Dutch prosecution should prove him guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

In a brief resumption of the MH17 trial in The Netherlands, the presiding judge Hendrik  Steenhuis (right) attacked the two lawyers representing Pulatov  for delaying their filing of requests for additional investigations of the evidence in the case.  Steenhuis also dismissed the defence requests for lifting court orders already issued for the secrecy concealing where and how the alleged parts of the Buk missile were found which Pulatov is charged with firing against the aircraft on July 17, 2014. Steenhuis even ruled that the name of the investigating judge who initiated the orders for secrecy covering the alleged weapon should remain secret. That the investigating judge is a woman was all Steenhuis allowed to be known.

by Editor - Tuesday, September 29th, 2020
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  @bears_with

PUBLISHED THIS WEEK

> 642 pages, 758 references, maps, illustrations, index<

The first book to prove the Dutch Government is running a show trial, with Dutch judges, prosecutors, lawyers, and police serving as soldiers in the Kiev regime’s  and the NATO war against Russia.

Every one of them is making more money than they were before MH17 was shot down — €35 million more for the judges; €13 million more for the prosecutors; €221 million for the police.

An encyclopaedic demonstration  of  Ukrainian evidence tampering, US satellite faking,  and witness lying under SBU torture and bribery to demonstrate that the Russians accused have no case to answer; that the judge’s guilty verdict has been rigged, and that the defence lawyers should now walk out of the court.

by Editor - Sunday, September 27th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

Cheese goes well with warfare.

In ancient Roman times, legionaries on the march would be issued daily rations of aged hard cheese, to be eaten with bread, strips of bacon and wine.  In 2014, after the European Union  imposed sanctions on Russia for defending itself from NATO attack in Crimea, the Russian government imposed counter-sanctions, banning imports of French, Italian, Dutch and Finnish cheese.  This not only revived domestic demand for the traditional Russian soft cheeses, but it inspired the fabrication of altogether new Russian hard cheeses never been tasted in the market before.

The rapid acceleration of production reached a million tonnes last year, making Russia the third largest producer of cheese after the European Union and the US. With consumption also accelerating to 1.2 million tonnes, growing at 10% per annum, Russia is now ranking second in the world table of cheese importers after Japan.

If you think of cheese as mozzarella melted on top of a pizza, or cheddar sliced inside a child’s  sandwich, the one as tasteless as the other, you’re more American than Russian. “Last year, the industry registered not only quantitative, but also positive qualitative changes,” reported Dairy News, a Russian industry publication. “In particular, the cheese market in Russia recorded a faster growth in the production of more expensive hard and semi-hard cheeses. Customers began to buy not just more cheese, they are increasingly choosing high-quality products.”

“If the current trends continue, the volume of the cheese market in Russia will increase by 150-200 billion rubles [about $3 billion] in 2024 compared to the results of 2019. This will create conditions for the development of cheese production in the country and the transition from an import substitution strategy to the orientation of production to foreign export markets.”

by Editor - Wednesday, September 23rd, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

What with all the noise of the dogs and camels, a swan song can be easily missed. But not Maria Pevchikh’s (lead image, right) broadcast by the BBC’s Russian Service.

For the first  time, the British state propaganda organ has said too much too loudly in defence of one of its Russian assets, and confirmed the combination of celebrity, political ambition, and money which has made the poisoning of Alexei Navalny a faulty fabrication; and Navalny’s attempt to make political capital out of it,  a modest  success for the British secret services;  an immodest failure for the German Foreign Ministry, Defence Ministry, German Army, and the Berlin medical clinic which goes by the name of Charity.  

The difference between the evidence of success and failure is the problem the BBC has attempted to overcome in an unusually long interview Pevchikh recorded with the BBC in Berlin, published on September 18.  

She is recorded as saying that she and her colleagues from the Navalny group had been having breakfast in the restaurant of their Tomsk hotel when they received the news that Navalny’s flight to Moscow had been diverted to Omsk, and that he was in hospital with symptoms of poisoning. She then went to his hotel room, she said, to recover the evidence of the poisoning – three blue-capped bottles of Saint Springs water drunk by Navalny during the night before.

The time shown on the wrist watch of Pevchikh, in the film she directed and released last week, 28 days after the event, shows a time when Navalny’s flight was still in the air. This was more than an hour before his poisoning had been discovered and reported to his team in Tomsk, and to the rest of the world.

Navalny’s dogs were barking, but their caravan had failed to start according to plan. The BBC has demonstrated what that plan was.  

by Editor - Monday, September 21st, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

If Alice Mayhew (lead image) hadn’t been a real person, the New York book market and the US Government would have had to invent her. Now that she’s dead (1932-2020) – “a veritable best-seller machine”, memorialised Vogue – she’s an invention that will be easy to replace. Best-sellers, like money, are fungible.

by Editor - Monday, September 21st, 2020
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