Monday 13 October 2008

Why Austria's Jörg Haider Was Assassinated

by Trowbridge H. Ford

The death of Jörg Haider, Austria's maverick right-wing leader, in an early morning accident on a road leading out of Klagenfurt is just too convenient and suspicious not to have been an assassination, either by his former Freedom Party supporters, especially leader Heinz-Christian Strache, because of the challenge he represented to their survival or the Mossad's Meir Dagan because of the threat he represented in the safe prosecution of the Josef Fritzl case, particularly when the police and the media are so quick to dismiss it as simply an accident with all the suspect bits left out.

While Haider earned his neo-Nazi credentials justifiably as a youth, Carinthian politician, and governor, he became increasingly unpredicable in the 1990s, leading one to suspect that he had been compromised by the Mossad because of his child abuse and gay sexual activities. Haider had certainly been involved in trying to prevent the election of Kurt Waldheim as Austria's ninth President in 1986 - what the Mossad had apparently 'sexed up' by supplying forged documents about Waldheim's alleged war crimes in the Balkans during WWII, and Alfred Worm's Profil magazine had disseminated to the electorate. This campaign was apparently to get back at Waldheim because of his criticism of Israel's actions in Lebanon, particularly by Ariel Sharon, while he was Secretary General of the UN.

After Likud Party politician Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's Ambassador to the UN, found the forgeries, Austria was obliged to appoint an International Committee of Historians, led by Simon Wisenthal, to investigate the claims - what turned out to be a complete exoneration of Waldheim. The World Jewish Congress and later Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, a Jew, had justified the inquiry by stating that they "won't allow the Jews abroad to order us about and tell us who should be our President." The Chancellor at the time of the election, Frantz Vranitsky, had threatened to resign if the riots against Waldheim's winning continued - 5,000 protesters, including Haider, had gathered outside St. Stephens Cathedral, and had marched to the Hofbrau to protest the prospect.

About this time, the spying by the Mossad's Zev Barkan aka Bruckenstein, its agent in Brussels, started to kick-in. For quite awhile, the infamous Marc Dutroux had been kidnapping kids, particularly girls, for Europe's leading child abusers, especially screwed-up right wing politicians. When Barkan learned what was going on, he had Bernard Weinstein infiltrate the operation, resulting in the blackmail of those exposed for Israeli purposes - particularly stopping anyone questioning The Holocaust, and those interested in isolating the Jewish state. Ultimately, Dutroux owned several empty houses in which he conducted his dirty business, even building an underground dungeon for the most prolonged torture and sexual abuse.

When Dutroux found out what Weinstein was doing, he tortured him to death, smashing his testacles in the process, and burying him while he was still alive. Still, Barkan was pleased with the result, and he moved on to Vienna in 1996 to take advantage of what was known about Haider. On March 21, 2000, at the height of Haider's political progress, the Berlin-based Tageszeitung reported that the Freedom Party leader was a homosexual - a charge he refused to answer. Then the "Homosexual Initiative" in Vienna added that his 'outing' was the result of inside information which had been known for a decade, and justified publishing it so that other closet gays could be exposed.

The decline in Haider's neo-Nazi activities was dramatic while he was obviously being blackmailed. While the son of rabid Nazis during the lead-up and conduct of WWII - who were punished in the post-war period for their activities - Haider started out as a good son of his suffering parents, only to become a most unpredictable maverick during the 1990s. While he said rather banal things like there were "decent people" in the SS, Hitler's pre-war employment policies solved the problems of The Great Depression, and undesirables, like the Jews, were locked up in punishment, not concentration, camps, his more disturbing acts were to hire Peter Sichrovsky as his private secretary, and to allow him to set his agenda. The consequences of this were Haider running off to Iraq to settle the looming Anglo-American ouster of Saddam Hussein just before it happened, and his cozying up to Libya's dictator Muammar Gaddafi when he was still the leading target on their hit list.

Of course, Haider's antics made him less and less popular with the Party's faithful, resulting in its growing split - what he tried to bridge by popular appearances with Austria's growing youth. The shit hit the fan, though, when Sichrovsky was exposed as working for the Mossad, as this link describes:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article528859.ece

Sichrovsky's exposure was based upon an exposé that Haider's old associate, publisher Alfred Worm, had written in the News. Its most explosive revelation was that Sichrovsky had accompanied fellow, Freedom Party member, the Austrian Defence Minister, on a trip to Syria in the autumn of 2000, alleged to achieve the release of three Israeli soldiers being held by Hezbollah in Lebanon. It seems to have been spying on what the country was up to after the death its leader, Hafez Assad.

Of course, Haider dismissed the claims about Sichrovsky as worthless, as Israel had apparently gained nothing by it, even if true about his working for the Mossad. When Haider was apparently finished politically, Worm confirmed it, claiming surpringly in A Dispute with Joerg Haider that Haider was a true neo-Nazi throughout - what resulted in Worm being given the journalist of the year award by the Österreichische Journalist 2006 . Someone, it seems, took violent offence to Worm's 'rehabilitation' of Haider since Worm conveniently died of a 'heart attack' three days later.

Haider could have suffered a similar attack on early Saturday morning when he was driving home to celebrate his mother's 90th birthday. His car skidded off the road uncontrollably in Lambichel, and he never regained control of it before hit a concrete barrier 150 meters further on. I know from similar experience what can happen when one is poisoned. I nearly drove off the road, and down a mountain when I nearly lost control of my car as I was driving between Porto de Mos and Mire da Aire in the early spring of 1996 on my way to Spain. If I hadn't managed to safely stop before I nearly went unconscious, and had simply crashed down the mountain, the Portuguese police, as the Austrian immediately did in Haider's case, would have immediately written it off as just another death through an accident.

But then, Haider's official car could have been tampered with - e. g., the buttoms on the computerised driving system having settings he was not familiar with, and didn't know how to change while the car veered out of control, the wheels on the left side having had their lugs loosened, the steering mechanicism sabotaged, the undisclosed woman who reported it having been involved in pushing Haider off the broad road, etc. Of course, these probabilities would be rendered less likely if Haider's body was given an autopsy, and the car was given a rigorouse inspection - what did not happen since the police dismissed any possible problems.

These suspicions are increased when Chief Prosecutor Gottfried Krantza, while denying both "foul play" and "technical glitches" in the crash - announced to a press conference that Haider was driving at twice the authorized speed on the wide highway; yet, he was unwilling to answer a question about whether his blood had been tested to determine its alcohol level. By not answering, everyone ignorant of the fact that Haider almost never drank would assume that he was drunk at the time.

Then the description by the undisclosed woman who said that Haider lost control of the VW Phaeton V6 while overtaking her car - who has since conveniently disappeared - hardly matched the video which showed that Haider's car crashed into a concrete barrier on the passenger's side of the road before spinning back left onto the highway. Then the press has contended that Haider was returning home late after having visited a nightclub when witnesses claimed that he had gone to a local government celebration, and a book promotion launch where he sipped a half glass of champagne before returning home.

Then Haider's driver, Friedrich Schager, said that the provincial governor persuaded him to let him drive home by himself after he had dropped off Schager at his house, though Haider seemed tired - something that he regrets now. This was the same route - one Haider "hated" - because he had a similar accident on it back in 1993, one he miraculously escaped serious injury from; yet, everyone now is willing to contend that he was willing to test fate yet again. Actually, it seems more like someone wanting to teach Haider a deadly lesson for having betrayed them back then.

As for who would want Haider murdered, the most likely suspects seem those who wanted to see the end of Worm - i. e., its former followers in the Freedom Party, especially leader Strache. Right before the most recent parliamentary elections in September, he showed the greatest emnity to his former mentor: "Haider, he says," when Marion Kraske asked Strache if there was any chance of a reconcilation with his former boss in "The Populist and His Protégé" on SpiegalOnLine on September 26, 2008, "would sell 'his own grandmother' for his political ambitions. No, he says, he's had enough of liars and cheats."

While Kraske never asked him to explain what he had in mind when it came to Haider's lies and cheating, it is clear that he was referring to Haider's betrayals of the movement for the benefit of Israel. And Strache's anger must have turned to fury when Haider made a political comeback when his Alliance for the Future of Austria did far better than anyone expected in the polling, drawing nearly 12% of the vote, and making his party the key to any coalition government in Austria. Certainly, the Freedom Party had enough on Haider to want him killed.

But there is more to the story, and it makes the Freedom Party look like the convenient fallguy for a Mossad murder. When Barkan was building up his case against officialdom around Brussels, thanks to Marc Dutroux's efforts, similar ones had been made in Austria, given its Nazi past, especially among the Catholic Church's bishops. Israel was looking for, and recruiting persons who could assist the process, particularly people vulnerable because of their own sex crimes. They are the best grounds for recruiting anyone because of the potential of blackmail.

Josef Fritzl was apparently recruited by the Mossad because his past was made so readily available to it. Son of an Austrian mixed marriage aka Mischlinge during the Hitler days - one between a Gentile and a part Jew - Josef grew up, like Haider, feeling that he too was an outsider but for just the opposite reason - i. e., being too little Austrian rather than too much. Fritzl is apparently one-quarter Jewish since his maternal grandmother was completely Jewish. While mixed marriages generally fared better than fully Jewish ones during the Third Reich, officials still tried to force the break up of mixed ones by forcing the non-Jew in it to seek a divorce - and Josef's father left home in 1939 when he was just four - or to criminalize them for real or fabricated legal violations. The most broken of these families were the ones like the Fritzls where the non-Jewish father was allowed all kinds of liberties in the hope that he would permanently split.

As a result, the young Josef developed an almost incestuous relationship with his love-starved mother, forcing him to seek marriage in 1956 when he had just reached his maturity. His wife, Rosemarie, had more than she could handle with his sexual demands, having seven children in only ten years. Apparently, Josef's sexual needs were so great by then that he is suspected of having raped and killed youths Martina Posch and Anna Neumayr in 1966 when he and his wife were running a restaurant and hotel across Mondsee Lake from where Posch's body was finally discovered in 1986, and Neumayr's was found near her home in Pfaffstaett bei Mattinghofen, near Salzburg. Then Josef was convicted of another rape, attempted rape, and indecent exposure, serving 18 months in the slammer for the first offense.

During the 1970s, Fritzl was more careful about committing violent sexual acts because of his record, turning more and more to prostitutes and visitors to the hostel that he and Rosemarie ran for Israeli tourists who visited the area. It is hard to imagine that Josef did not have sex, of some sort or another, with many of the female tourists. When his daughter Elisebeth reached puberty in 1977, Josef started abusing her sexually, and building the dungeon in his cellar for taking full advantage of her sexual charms when she became an adult.

And Peter Sichrovsky obtained a good picture of what he was up to when he interviewed persons about how children of German and Austrian survivors of The Holocaust, and Nazi war criminals fared in the post-war world: Strangers in Their Own Land: Young Jews in Germany and Austria Today (1986), and Born Guilty: Children of Nazi Families (1988). Josef was one of the few German-speaking children who fell into both camps.

Once Elisabeth was confined to Josef's dungeon to satisfy his essential sexual needs, the Mossad knew that it a convenient fallguy aka cutout for any operation planned, what became necessary when Washington and London decided to assassinate Sweden's Olof Palme for stopping the shipment of Israeli arms to Iran through Sweden on November 17, 1985, and were looking for a convenient scapegoat. Israel was pressured to do so because of all the spying that Jonathan Pollard had done for Tel Aviv in the runup to the non-nuclear showdown with the Soviets - what was to be triggered by the killing, and required all kinds of communication changes to facilitate. He had supplied the Israelis - and, consequently, the Soviets, thanks to the Shamir government's own agenda with Moscow - with the latest version of America's Radio Signal Notations, the 10-volume manual of its global electronic surveillance network.

Israel was forced to provide some scapegoat when the CIA's Rod Carlsson failed to persuade Stig Bergling, the Swedish convicted Soviet spy, to flee to the USSR on the night of the shooting while he was on compassionate leave from prison in order to get married.

The Israelis apparently supplied Fritzl, aka Wilhelm Kramm and the "Mad Austrian", as the fallguy for the real assassin. Kramm sent a letter to Hans Holmér, the Social Democrats' leading crime fighter, sometime before the assassination, stating that he hated him, should be killed, and had associates in Wiesbaden who were prepared to do it. When Palme was shot, the police, led by detective sergeant Börje Wingren, quickly assumed that Kramm had done it. Then Wingren picked up the statsminister's son, Mårten - who had seen a possible suspect before the shooting - and tried to persuade him that the man he had seen was the "Mad Austrian", by using a old photograph of the "wild-looking character with staring eyes, thick lips, and a hugh beard." (Quoted from Jan Bondeson, Blood on the Snow: The Killing of Olof Palme, p. 60.)

The only trouble with this quick, connived solution to the assassination - what all the important Swedish investigators were prepared to believe - was that the "Mad Austrian" had an alibi for the shooting - i. e., he was stopped by the police in another part of town when Palme was killed, drunk and on his way to an appointment at 11:30 PM, nine minutes after the shooting, with a notorious, rough prostitute, known as "Marjatta". He was still in bed with her the next morning when the police pulled in for the killing, only to be totally disappointed when he proved to have an iron-clad alibi. The police let him simply disappear - like the woman who first observed the Haider accident - though he had threatened public officials when a most serious crime was committed.

Back in Austria, though, Fritlz was continually obliged through blackmail to mount protests against Waldheim as its President, and Haider as a leading politician, and Barkan was clearly calling the shots from his post in the Israeli Embassy in Vienna. The kinds of actions where Haider was concerned was when many of Austria's 9,000 Jews said in the runup to the 1999 election that they would leave if he and his Freedom Party became part of any coalition government. Then 50 people were injured in February 2000 riots in Vienna when this became a real possibility. A year later, following the Opera Ball, 42 people were arrested in another disturbance, including many Germans and Americans, causing Haider to refrain from taking part in any government.

It seems that Fritzl's role was to recruit anyone he could for such action, thanks to directions that he received from Barkan outside the country while the Mossad agent was still serving in Vienna and then moving on to the Far East, especially Thailand, and then Barkan seeing that they were provided with false identities to avoid any serious problems if they were caught. While Barkan ultimately became notorious for the process - particularly getting false identities for Mossad agents in New Zealand so that they could, it seems, assassinate its PM, Helen Clarke, without serious risks of capture, Fritzl helped carry on a similar, less risky process in Austria to make sure than Haider never got anywhere really serious.

After 24 years of abusing his daughter because of this, Fritzl was relieved of it by exposure only of his perverted family life. The only problem was it would become more of a problem if he or Haider decided to make something of it - what successful criminal charges against Fritzl, and successful electoral changes for Haider now
threatened.

As usual, the Mossad took the appropriate prophylactic action, taking out Haider when he least expected it through apparently electrical glitches in the car - what left Fritzl without a paddle when he attempts to justify what he has done. The 'false flag' operation will be blamed at best upon the Freedom Party and Heinz-Christian Strache. And the Mossad did it on the 21st anniversary of the murder of German political and publisher, Uwe Barschel, another person who threatened to talk out of turn about the whole Iran-Contra operation.