Tuesday 4 November 2008

Then There Was The Pim Fortuyn Assassination

by Trowbridge H. Ford

Once Jörg Haider resigned as leader of the Freedom Party in Austria's newly-established governing coalition with the Austrian People's Party in February 2000, it was time for the Mossad's Zev Barken aka Bruckenstein to move on. The anti-Haider riots in Vienna on the 6th in which over 50 people were ínjured, most of them policemen, had achieved their purpose, and the mechanism Barkan had established for producing them - foreigners, especially German and American protesters, using false passports that the Mossad had gotten eleswhere, mostly from tourists in Asia - was well in place if needed again. Josef Fritzl, aka Wilhelm Kramm and the 'mad Austrian', was also readily available in Anstetten, and firmly entrenched in the process of arranging the transfer of false identities, thanks to his sexual enslavement of his daughter Elisabeth in his basement dungeon which he was being blackmailed over, to keep it going when required.

And the Mossad still had infiltrated Haider's private office, with its secret agent Peter Sichrovsky acting as his private secretary. Sichrovsky would be in an ideal position to know if, and when Haider decided to contest the claims that the Tageszeitung had made that he was gay - what had been circulating around Austrian circles for the last decade. Any truth to the claim has yet to be provided, making one suspect, at best, that it goes back to Haider's early student days before he got married. Whether true or not, the big thing was to be in a position to make a most shocking case about the allegation if Haider ever sought to deny it, or override it in making a political comeback.

To minimize action in this direction, Barkan by now had helped organize the Publix Theatre Caravan to travel around the country to make the most persuasive case against everything Haider stood for. The group - made up of druggies, gays, and anarchists - had originally taken possession of the Ernst Kirchwegan Haus (EKH) in Vienna, and soon it was putting its skills together in popular, impromptu performances which stressed a social-democratic agenda - accepting homosexuality, encouraging immigration, condemning racism and anti-semitism, European expansion, etc. It recalled the efforts by Kurt Weill during the beleaguered days of the Weimar Republic. Thanks to government support, the group planned to carry their campaign to other Austrian cities in May, and then it would take its message to Klagenfurt, the center of Carinthia where Haider remained as governor.

The effectiveness of these measures was well demonstrated when the EKH people organized demonstrations against the Opera Ball festivities on Feb. 22, 2001 - complaining about Austria's isolation from the EU because of Haider's Freedom Party continuing to be part of the governing coalition, a condition which prevented many international big-wigs from attending the annual event. In fact, the government's riot police aka the Cobra force got so riled up over what the beatniks were doing that it attacked those in EKH with great brutality, causing the coalition further embarrassment. The riot police justified its actions by complaining that many "professional troublemakers", using false passports, generally German ones, had come into the city to cause trouble, resulting in the arrest of 42 of them.

With Haider so much on the defensive, it was time for the Mossad to move back to the heart of the problem rather than stay on the periphery - the problems shaping up at Brussels while the European Union was seeking radical expansion. The problems could become insurmountable if all the sexual excesses of its leadership came out - what the prosecution of paedophile Marc Dutroux still threatened. While Dutroux had been arrested over four years before, he had not been tried for any crime, only having confessed to the rape of six young girls, and the killing of four of them.

Dutroux had focused concerns more upon himself by escaping from prison miraculously before he had even begun being prosecuted, the primary reason for the stoppage being the sacking of investigating Judge Jean-Marc Connerette, about the only Belgian really interested in getting to the bottom of the gigantic crime wave, for alleged conflict of interest. He had collected the testimony of about a dozen witnesses, mostly adult women, who had survived their ordeal with their kidnappers. It was quite probable that Barkan took leave of the Israeli Embassy in Brussels then for a post in Vienna for fear of being exposed in the process.

Then Judge Jean-Cluade Van Espen, who had represented the former wife of a partner of Dutroux’s in crime, Jean-Michel Nihoul -a real conflict of interest -, had prevented any progress in the case until 1998 when he was finally forced to resign. In the meantime, the Belgium police had ruled Dutroux simply a pervert, Nihoul totally innocent, and the prime witnesses against them, especially Regina Louf, as completely unreliable liars and kooks. Finally, in 2000, the Belgium authorities prosecuted Dutroux for theft and assault, resulting in his being sentenced to five years in prison, to ease the embarrassment over failing to prosecute him for his real crimes.

Furthermore, other witnesses, about 20 in all, were dying like flies. It had all started before Dutroux was even arrested with truck driver Bruno Tagliaferro being poisoned because he knew that Dutroux had abducted two of the young girls, and his partner Fabienne Jaupart joined him in December 1998 in a set fire because she too knew too much. Then Anna Konjevoda, who was tempted to provide information about Dutroux's operations in Eastern Europe on investigating magistrate Connerette's open line, but somehow didn't, was beaten, strangled, and her body thrown into the Maas River a year and a half later though she never testified what she knew. Sandra Claeys, a former girlfriend of Dutroux accomplice Michel Lelièvre, committed suicide on November 4, 1999.

For more on this, see this link, The Institute For The Study of Globalization and Covert Politics listing of "alleged assassinations in Belgian history".

The most interesting of the killings, though, was that of Chris van der Werken - a former professional friend of Volkert van der Graff, and residing near him in Harderwijk, east of Amsterdam -shot twice in the back while he was walking in a forest nearby in December 1996. Van der Werken apparently knew too much about Volkert for his own good. Van der Graff, of course, would assassinate Dutch maverick politician Wilhelmus Simon 'Pim' Fortuyn five and a half years later.

Regina Louf knew about a much wider, vicious operation than Belgium officials were claiming, and went public with her information, once the Belgium Superior Court dismissed it as lies which would never be used in any trial of Dutroux or his associates. She was born in Ghent in 1968, but moved to Knokke, on the Belgian-Dutch border - across the Scheldt estuary from Middleburg in Holland - when she was three where her grandmother soon put her to work as a prostitute. "Among those who shared her at house parties," Frank Connolly of The Sunday Business Post reported just before Fortuyn was assassinated, "were some of Belgium's most powerful and famous citizens - and paedophiles." While she provided the the names of several leading figures who had abused her, especially "another man still in poltics at a high level," Connolly understandably declined to identify them.

In 1979 when she returned home to Ghent, her abuse bacame even worse as she was turned over to her mother's lover, boarder Tony Van den Bogaert, who pimped her services for everything imaginable, including sado-masochistic parties in townhouses, country estates, and even on a boat from Brussels to the Dutch border. Dutroux's ultimate prosecutor explained that if only a small fraction of her claims turned out to be true, it would mean the end of Belgium. "There are connections," he added, "with the Netherlands and France."

Louf claimed that Dutroux was just part of a satanic cult, run by Nihoul, Michel Vandereist and others which killed young people in wild orgies - what she recalled after Dutroux was arrested. Bogaert had sold her to the Nihoul ring who terrorized her, on and off, for 15 years. She only escaped because she found a man, Erwer, during the ordeal who agreed to marry her, and this allowed her to finally escape their clutches.

The most alarming aspect about Louf's testimony was that she was able to provide concrete details, names, and places about where these terrible acts had occurred, particularly the murders of Carine Dellaert in 1982, of Catherine de Cuyper a few years later, and of Christine Van Hees in 1984. Hees' murder occurred at the mushroom farmhouse ruins at Champignonn`ere in Auderghem, just east of Brussels. Louf had advised Hees to strike up a love affair like she had in order to escape from the place. When Vandereist got wind of the plan, he killed her in order to win a bet with Nihoul about who could kill one of kidnapped kids first. "I didn't know that this affair had caused so much fuss in Brussels over the years," Louf explained in a January 10, 1998 interview about her slowness in coming forward earlier.

When Barkan got back in the area, Brussels it seems, he immediately put pressure on those who wanted to know more about, or were marginally connected to the whole satanic operation to vacate the scene, one way or another - after others had provided most diverting disinformation to faraway places from what had happened of a most corrupt nature around EU and NATO headquarters during the past decade. The first people died in most suspicious ways, apparent assassinations intended to limit investigations to those already suspected so that the people really behind the whole blackmailing operation, the Mossad, were not even suspected.

Barkan's associates, headed by Arie Scher, had deliberately opened its own paeodophile ring with Israelis in distant Brazil to give the impression that it had nothing to do with what was happening around Belgium. It's SOP with the Mossad, as was most recently demonstrated right after Haider was assassinated, Mossad Director Meir Dagan immediately circulating the rumor that the same thing had almost happened to him in faraway Amman, Jordan.

The killing campaign started on March 1, 2001 when paedophile hunter in the Dutroux affair, Jean-Jacques Feront, died of an apparent heart attack. Four weeks later, Nadege Renard, ex-girlfriend of high society brothel keeper in Charleroi Jean Pol Taminiau - who was assassinated in 1995 - apparently committed most belated suicide. In May, Pierre-Paul 'Pepe' De Rycke, owner of the fascist Jonathan Club who knew Nihoul quite well, committed suicide too apparently. More important, in November, Philippe Deleuze, brother-in-law of Judge Van Espen, and a partner in the legal firm of Boutyal and Nihoul, died from a strange disease.

The whole process peaked on March 17, 2002 - after Dagan had taken over official control of the Mossad - when Alain Van der Biest was harried so much that he too committed suicide. Biest had been the Minister of Interior when Dutroux was released from prison in 1991 after having only served 3 of a 13-year sentence for rape. Moreover, Biest was suspected of having been behind the assassination of Walloon, Socialist politician André Cools in 1994. The suspicion essentially rested on the fact that one of the suspected gunmen, Richard Taxquet, had been Biest's former chauffeur but it could have been just the basis of a set up. Cools was thought to have been killed because he was involved in or knew too much about the Agusta affair - where Socialist parties in Belgium were being bribed to buy the conglomerate's new helicopter - but he, as the just retired minister of government for the Walloon Region, could have been killed because he knew too much about what was going on in the sex ring.

Starting in 2000, Israeli Vice-Consul Scher in Rio de Janeiro had done a rush job in creating a paedophile ring there, and had fled to Israel in July after pictures of its activities had been posted on the internet in the hope of attracting Israeli paedophiles and other foreigners to go there. The photographs and videos had been taken at his home, and police had found copies of them at the home of Hebrew-language teacher, Professor George Schteinberg. There was even a photograph of the two alleged gays in which Scher was holding Schteinberg by the penis. Israel refused to hand over the wanted Scher, justifying its stand by claiming that there was no extradition treaty with Brazil.

One would have thought that there would at least be a trial in Israel for Scher's paedophile activities, but there never was one - showing that it was a covert action to divert public attention away from any similar Israeli activity in the Low Countries. Scher went on to become involved in Barkan's failed attempt to assassinate, it seems, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark in 2004. Remember when Mossad agents Eli Cara and Uriel Kelman tried to get a false passport for a invalid New Zealander - what Barkan apparently was going to use in making his getaway from the shooting.

Well, during the blowback of whole operation, Senior Israeli Consul in Canberra Amir Laty was discovered having been involved in setting up the operation's base in Australia, and was expelled, the Howard government feebly explaining that he had apparently been trying to steal secrets through a honey-trap relationship with young Caitlan Ruddock, daughter of Attorney General Philip Ruddock. The Israeli government named Scher as Laty's replacement, but Scher withdrew from the appointment, once his paedophile activities were discovered. The Sharon government thought that it was just part of his covert position.

Fortuyn seems to have gotten mixed up with the paedophile operation after he moved to Rotterdam in 1988. There was a boys' brothel there, run apparently by Lothar Gandolf, and given Pim's interest in having sex with underage males, he must have visited the place on occasion. The port was the entry point of youths from Africa and the Middle East, and Fortuyn liked exotic encounters. Such behaviour was in the grey area of Dutch law since brothels were not yet fully legal, but were tolerated by local authorities, leaving what happened in them pretty much anyone's guess. While he could justify such visits in the name of sociology, a field in which he had a Ph.D from Groningen University, his employer in Rotterdam, Erasmus University, took a different view, refusing to renew his contract for a privately-funded chair there in 1995. Pim, of course, could not have cared much, laughing it off to prying journalists as another example of "Fortuyn's Law", one in which all his employment ended in acrimony and controversy.

The loss of academe did not cramp his style, as he continued to live a most flamboyant, expensive life while writing weekly columns for Elsevier Magazine. While they expressed increasingly negative opinions about Islamic invasions of Dutch culture, society and political life, what he learned behind the scenes seems more relevant. Given how the columns helped fix popular opinion in Israel's corner, as he condemned anti-Semitism, and supported substantial aid to Tel Aviv, by all parties, it seems likely that he was being supported by various Jewish interests despite or because of his sexual excesses. Obviously, Fortuyn did not consider this any kind of blackmail but support from an expected source.
While Fortuyn was doing this, he learned more about what the Nihoul satanic gang had been doing long before Dutroux came on the scene, explaining Pim's unexpected appreciation of Socialist Prime Minister Joop den Uyl, a party he supported while theoretically still a Marxist. In 1976, it was learned that America's Northrop aircraft company had given Prince Bernhard, Queen Juliana's husband, a $750.000 bribe to help secure the Dutch purchase of its latest fighter plane - a forerunner of what the Belgians were doing with Agusta. Holland had already been shaken to its foundations by an earlier revelation that he had obtained a $1.1 million bribe from Lockheed for a similar purchase. Disclosure of the Northrop one would have led to a court trial of what the one-time SS-member, and sex-mad first president of the Bilderberg group had done. It might even discover that Regina Louf did visit his yacht Jumbo VI for wild orgies.

Uyl decided to cover up the new scandal for fear that it would lead to the end of the Dutch monarchy - the institution which kept the country together - since Crown Princess Beatrix had said that she would not succeed her father under such conditions. Fortuyn can only have heard about this from people he had contact with during his own sex activities, as the Dutch PM locked up all the details of the Northrop scandal in his personal archives. They were only discovered by journalist Anet Bleich when she was researching a biography of the deceased - what has only been recently published.

Prince Bernhard, founder of the notorious 1001 Club in 1971 where many of the important business contacts were made through money, sex and blackmail, was the leading establishment figure who encouraged the revival of Fortuyn's special kind of Dutch nationalism - what increasing numbers of Muslim immigrants were inflaming. Fortuyn wanted to get rid of the multicultural, nanny state which foreigners of all sorts, especial semities, were exploiting, thanks to the dö-nothing attitudes of the governing elite.

With the passage of the law in 2000 which legalized brothels, and permitted consenual sex between almost everyone 12 years or older, Fortuyn decided to act upon his long-held dream of becoming prime minister, mobilizing the frustrated working classes by his ultra-nationalism, thanks to the funds the new entreprenuers in computers, information technology, and the media were liberally providing with few questions asked. Muslim immigrants were a convenient symptom to attack as it drew on the deep-seeded nationalism which had largely been suppressed since WWII, largely because of the plight it had caused Dutch Jews during the German occupation, and by scapegoating them he largely relieved the guilt, aggression, and blame he was suffering from because of Holland's and his own chequered past.

When Fortuyn started outlining his cure for Holland's cultural decay, his supporters, especially the newspaper NRC Handelsblad, became increasingly concerned, particularly when he said he was planning changing the constitution's provision against discrimination. The liberal paper is a strong supporter of Israel, complaining particularly about the EU's disparity in giving aid to the country, and the Palestinians, and has just teamed up with like-minded Der Spiegel.

There must be more to the story than the one reported as the constitutional provision has changed little when it comes to discrimination since there is a balancing of all human rights in disputes, and the judiciary has no judicial review of legislation. If it were adopted, the Netherlands would not be going back to the pre-WWII situation where its Jews were discriminated against so terribly by it. The proposed rejection of the latest post-war position seemed like just a vote getter for the uninformed and alienated. Still, Fortuyn's financial backers asked for their money back from the high-living populist, and when he refused, the paper turned against him.

And the same thing happened when dissatisfied voters formed the Leefbarr Nederland (Liveable Netherlands) party after it had selected him as their leader, only to learn what he really wanted later, resulting in his sacking. That's when he formed his own, the Lijst Pim Fortuyn, and it was backed by most of the previous ones, particularly property developers Ed Maas, John Dost, Chris Thienisse, and Harry Mens. After Fortuyn's book - The Purple Ruins, a root-and-branch condemnation of Holland's coalition politics - was published, and two successful tv debates took place on March 6th and April 27th with his most reluctant opponents, the shocked country was predicting that his purely personal party could win up to 40 seats in the new 150- seat Parliament - what would make him a kingmaker in any future government.

At this point, Barkan or someone else in the Mossad prepared an assassin to take him down before the mid-May polling, and it already had an ideal one for the assignment - Volkert van der Graff, the apparent killer of Chris van der Werker in December 1996. Volkert had told him about his sexual dealings when he lived in MIddelberg, and visited the facilities across the Scheldt where Regina Louf worked. About boys like van der Graff, who was in his early teens at the time, she said in the 1998 interview: "There were also homosexuals who cut a girl first for hours, which excited them a lot, and then went with a boy." He, it seems, told Chris about the experiences, perhaps even the involvement of Prince Berhard's boat in orgies that Nihoul's gang arranged, and he had been obliged by Barkan to eliminate him so as to limit possible problems.

The Dutch national police knew that van der Graff killed van der Werken, but it had kept mum about any prosecution for fear of explosive blowback. A witness to the shooting, "Farmer B", said that Chris had told him that Volkert had threatened to shoot him a few weeks before it happened. There were witnesses who said that they had seen Volkert's red Opel Kadett near the scene, the Welna estate, of the murder. Volkert's landlord had found a weapon, a Walter PPK, in his apartment when he made an uninvited visit, and other witnesses told him where he could get other similar weapons if he was serious about committing suicide. And after Pim was assassinated, the police found that the ammunition used in both killings was the same.

While the police then went to great lengths to explain that any difficulties between Volkert and Chris had to do with their environmental differences over how to deal with factory and fur farms, especially their financing, there was no interest in why van der Graff would be thinking of suicide. It goes back to his early childhood in Middelberg - what he was so concerned about that he even denied ever living there, claiming that he was born and brought up in Hilversum where Pim's assassination took place on May 6, 2002. Then Volkert became increasingly out of sorts after his girl friend gave brith to a baby girl on the previous December 6th - what everyone would expect any father, except a previous abuser of such infants, to be overjoyed about.

The timing of Pim's assassination was triggered by the appearance of Olenka Frenkiel's article, "Belgium's silent heart of darkness," in The Observer on May 5th. While the article had obviously been researched and written sometime sooner, it called attention to all the child abusers and orgie organizers that their activities ran the risk of becoming quite loud and much wider unless something radical was done to stop the rot, especially given Nihoul's boasting that nothing would be done to end the six-year period of legal inaction on the Dutroux front, particularly his alleged involvement in it: "He is confident he will never come to trial and that the evidence against him will never be heard by any jury."

(Note the article has been replaced by one by Andrew Osborn, a Guardian stringer who often provides diversions for conspiracy assassinations, like in the case of Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh.)

Late, the next afternoon, Volkert killed Pim with a barrage of bullets from his Firestar pistol as he left from another radio interview in Hilversum, a squad car of police nearby to make the necessary arrest of the murderer though the Wim Kok government had denied that there were any threats on his life, and had refused to provide him with bodyguards. Pim's assassination stopped any serious overhaul of purple coalition politics.

Dutch and Belgium authorites were slow to take most limited, legal action against van der Graff, Dutroux, Nuhoul et al. so that no one would suspect that they were connected. And when few did, the Dutch national police came forward with their case against Volkert for killing Van der Werken in the hope of making his 18-year sentence on appeal for killing Fortuyn even harsher but it was dismissed as irrelevant. The only interesting statement from van der Graff was his claiming that Pim scapegoated the Muslims for what he was really up to.

Furthermore, Olenka Frenkiel continued to supply a smokescreen about it all, going on endlessly in film and on the BBC the about Israel's "Secret Weapon", its nuclear complex that Mordechai Vanunu had been complaining about for years.

For Meir Dagan, now the official head of the Mossad, it was a great feather in his cap, the first of many. It was the best example of his strategy when dealing with Israel's alleged enemies - i.e., kill the source, and you get rid of the problem. Little wonder that the Israeli government keeps extending his tenure in office - apparently we can expect still more, but possibly getting rid of Jörg Haider too may have satisfied their expectations of him.