Tuesday, June 11, 2013

MADELEIN MCANN

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The following text is an unredacted version retrieved from Google cache, with redacted text in red identifying a former undercover police officer who worked with MI5. See other hosts of this via Google on "Henri Exton."
September 25, 2009
Mark Hollingsworth Investigates The McCann Files
Disillusioned with the Portuguese police, Gerry and Kate McCann turned to private detectives to find their missing daughter. Instead the efforts of the private eyes served only to scare off witnesses, waste funds and raise false hopes. Mark Hollingsworth investigates the investigators.
by Mark Hollingsworth
It was billed as a ‘significant development’ in the exhaustive search for Madeleine McCann. At a recent dramatic press conference in London, the lead private investigator David Edgar, a retired Cheshire detective inspector, brandished an E-FIT image of an Australian woman, described her as ‘a bit of a Victoria Beckham lookalike’, and appealed for help in tracing her. The woman was seen ‘looking agitated’ outside a restaurant in Barcelona three days after Madeleine’s disappearance. ‘It is a strong lead’, said Edgar, wearing a pin-stripe suit in front of a bank of cameras and microphones. ‘Madeleine could have been in Barcelona by that point. The fact the conversation took place near the marina could be significant.’
But within days reporters discovered that the private detectives had failed to make the most basic enquiries before announcing their potential breakthrough. Members of Edgar’s team who visited Barcelona had failed to speak to anyone working at the restaurant near where the agitated woman was seen that night, neglected to ask if the mystery woman had been filmed on CCTV cameras and knew nothing about the arrival of an Australian luxury yacht just after Madeleine vanished.
The apparent flaws in this latest development were another salutary lesson for Kate and Gerry McCann, who have relied on private investigators after the Portuguese police spent more time falsely suspecting the parents than searching for their daughter. For their relations with private detectives have been frustrating, unhappy and controversial ever since their daughter’s disappearance in May 2007.
The search has been overseen by the millionaire business Brian Kennedy, 49, who set up Madeleine’s Fund: Leaving No Stone Unturned, which aimed ‘to procure that Madeleine’s abduction is thoroughly investigated’. A straight-talking, tough, burly self-made entrepreneur and rugby fanatic, he grew up in a council flat near Tynecastle in Scotland and was brought up as a Jehovah’s Witness. He started his working life as a window cleaner and by 2007 had acquired a £350 million fortune from double-glazing and home-improvement ventures. Kennedy was outraged by the police insinuations against the McCanns and, though a stranger, worked tirelessly on their behalf. ‘His motivation was sincere,’ said someone who worked closely with him. ‘He was appalled by the Portuguese police, but he also had visions of flying in by helicopter to rescue Madeleine.’
Kennedy commissioned private detectives to conduct an investigation parallel to the one run by the Portuguese police. But his choice showed how dangerous it is when powerful and wealthy businessmen try to play detective. In September 2007, he hired Metodo 3, an agency based in Barcelona, on a six-month contract and paid it an estimated £50,000 a month. Metodo 3 was hired because of Spain’s ‘language and cultural connection’ with Portugal. ‘If we’d had big-booted Brits or, heaven forbid, Americans, we would have had doors slammed in our faces’ said Clarence Mitchell, spokesperson for the McCann’s at the time. ‘And it’s quite likely that we could have been charged with hindering the investigation as technically it’s illegal in Portugal to undertake a secondary investigation.
The agency had 35 investigators working on the case in Britain, France, Spain, Portugal and Morocco. A hotline was set up for the public to report sightings and suspicions, and the search focussed on Morocco. But the investigation was dogged by over-confidence and braggadocio. ‘We know who took Madeleine and hope she will be home by Christmas,’ boasted Metodo 3’s flamboyant boss Francisco Marco. But no Madeleine materialised and their contract was not renewed.
Until now, few details have emerged about the private investigation during those crucial early months, but an investigation by ES shows that key mistakes were made, which in turn made later enquiries far more challenging.
ES has spoken to several sources close to the private investigations that took place in the first year and discovered that:
* The involvement of Brian Kennedy and his son Patrick in the operation was counter-productive, notably when they were questioned by the local police for acting suspiciously while attempting a 24-hour ‘stake out’.
* The relationship between Metodo 3 and the Portuguese police had completely broken down.
* Key witnesses were questioned far too aggressively, so much so that some of them later refused to talk to the police.
* Many of the investigators had little experience of the required painstaking forensic detective work.
By April 2008, nearing the first anniversary of the disappearance, Kennedy and the McCanns were desperate. And so when Henri Exton, a formerundercover police officer who worked on MI5 operations, and Kevin Halligen, a smooth-talking Irishman who claimed to have worked for covert British government intelligence agency GCHQ, walked through the door, their timing was perfect. Their sales pitch was classic James Bond spook-talk: everything had to be ‘top secret’ and ‘on a need to know basis’. The operation would involve 24-hour alert systems, undercover units, satellite imagery and round-the-clock surveillance teams that would fly in at short notice. This sounded very exciting but, as one source close to the investigation told ES, it was also very expensive and ultimately unsuccessful. ‘The real job at hand was old-fashioned, tedious, forensic police work rather than these boy’s own, glory boy antic,’ he said.
But Kennedy was impressed by the license-to-spy presentation and Exton and Halligen were hire for a fee of £100,000 per month plus expenses. Ostensibly, the contract was with Halligen’s UK security company, Red Defence International Ltd, and an office was set up in Jermyn Street, in St James’s. Only a tiny group of employees did the painstaking investigative work of dealing with thousands of emails and phone calls. Instead, resources were channelled into undercover operations in paedophile rings and among gypsies throughout Europe, encouraged by Kennedy. A five-mansurveillance team was dispatched in Portugal, overseen by the experienced Exton, for six weeks.
Born in Belgium in 1951Exton had been a highly effective undercover officer for the Manchester police. A maverick and dynamic figure, he successfully infiltrated gangs of football hooligans in the 1980’s. While not popular among his colleagues, in 1991 he was seconded to work on MI5 undercover operations against drug dealers, gangsters and terrorists, and was later awarded the Queen’s Police Medal for ‘outstanding bravery’. By all accounts, the charismatic Exton was a dedicated officer. But in November 2002, the stress appeared to have overcome his judgement when he was arrested for shoplifting.
While working on an MI5 surveillanceExton was caught leaving a tax-free shopping area at Manchester airport with a bottle of perfume he had not paid for. The police were called and he was given the option of the offence being dealt with under caution or to face prosecution. He chose a police caution and so in effect admitted his guilt. Exton was sacked, but was furious about the way he had been treated and threatened to sue MI5. He later set up his own consulting company and moved to Bury in Lancashire.
While Exton, however flawed, was the genuine article as an investigator, Halligen was a very different character. Born in Dublin in 1961, he has been described as a ‘Walter Mitty figure’. He used false names to collect prospective clients at airports in order to preserve secrecy, and he called himself ‘Kevin’ or ‘Richard’ or ‘Patrick’ at different times to describe himself to business contacts. There appears to be no reason for all this subterfuge except that he thought this was what agents did. A conspiracy theorist and lover of the secret world, he is obsessed by surveillance gadgets and even installed a covert camera to spy on his own employees. He claimed to have worked for GCHQ, but in fact he was employed by the Atomic Energy Authority (AEA) as head of defence systems in the rather less glamorous field of new information technology, researching the use of ‘special batteries’. He told former colleagues and potential girlfriends that he used to work for MI5, MI6 and the CIA. He also claimed that he was nearly kidnapped by the IRA, was involved in the first Gulf War and had been a freefall parachutist.
Very little of this is true. What is true is that Halligen has a degree in electronics, worked on the fringes of the intelligence community while at AEA and does understand government communications. He could also be an astonishingly persuasive, engaging and charming individual. Strikingly self-confident and articulate, he could be generous and clubbable. ‘He was very good company but only when it suited him’ says one friend. He kept people in compartments.’
After leaving the AEA, Halligen set up Red Defence International Ltd as an international security and political risk company, advising clients on the risks involved in investing and doing business in unstable, war-torn and corrupt countries. He worked closely with political risk companies and was a persuasive advocate of IT security. In 2006, he struck gold when hired by Trafigura, the Dutch commodities trading company. Executives were imprisoned in the Ivory Coast after toxic waste was dumped in landfills near its biggest city Abidjan. Trafigura was blamed and hired Red Defence International at vast expense to help with the negotiations to release its executives. A Falcon business jet was rented for several months during the operation and it was Halligen’s first taste of the good life. The case only ended when Trafigura paid $197 million to the government of the Ivory Coast to secure the release of the prisoners.
Halligen made a fortune from Trafigura and was suddenly flying everywhere first-class, staying at the Lansborough and Stafford hotels in London and The Willard hotel in Washington DC for months at a time. In 2007 he set up Oakley International Group and registered at the offices of the prestigious law firm Patton Boggs, in Washington DC, as an international security company. He was now strutting the stage as a self-proclaimed international spy expert and joined the Special Forces Club in Knightsbridge, where he met Exton.
During the Madeleine investigation, Halligen spent vast amounts of time in the HeyJo bar in the basement of the Abracadabra Club near his Jermyn Street office. Armed with a clutch of unregistered mobile phones and a Blackberry, the bar was in effect his office. ‘He was there virtually the whole day,’ a former colleague told ES. ‘He had an amazing tolerance for alcohol and a prodigious memory and so occasionally he would have amazing bursts of intelligence, lucidity and insights. They were very rare but they did happen.’
When not imbibing in St James’s, Halligen was in the United States, trying to drum up investors for Oakley International. On 15 August 2008, at the height of the McCann investigation crisis, he persuaded Andre Hollis, a former US Drug enforcement agency official, to write out an $80,000 cheque to Oakley in return for a ten per cent share-holding. The money was then transferred into the private accounts of Halligen and his girlfriend Shirin Trachiotis to finance a holiday in Italy, according to Hollis. In a $6 million lawsuit filed in Fairfax County, Virginia, Hollis alleges that Halligen ‘received monies for Oakley’s services rendered and deposited the same into his personal accounts’ and ‘repeatedly and systematically depleted funds from Oakley’s bank accounts for inappropriate personal expenses’.
Hollis was not the only victim. Mark Aspinall, a respected lawyer who worked closely with Halligen, invested £500,000 in Oakley and lost the lot. Earlier this year he filed a lawsuit in Washington DC against Halligen claiming $1.4 million in damages. The finances of Oakley International are in chaos and numerous employees, specialist consultants and contractors have not been paid. Some of them now face financial ruin.
Meanwhile, Exton was running the surveillance teams in Portugal and often paying his operatives upfront, so would occasionally be out-of-pocket because Halligen had not transferred funds. Exton genuinely believed that progress was being made and substantial and credible reports on child trafficking were submitted. But by mid-August 2008, Kennedy and Gerry McCann were increasingly concerned by an absence of details of how the money was being spent. At one meeting, Halligen was asked how many men constituted a surveillance team and he produced a piece of paper on which he wrote ‘between one and ten’. But he then refused to say how many were working and how much they were being paid.
While Kennedy and Gerry McCann accepted that the mission was extremely difficult and some secrecy was necessary, Halligen was charging very high rates and expenses. And eyebrows were raised when all the money was paid to Oakley International, solely owned and managed by Halligen. One invoice, seen by ES, shows that for ‘accrued expenses to May 5, 2008’ (just one month into the contract), Oakley charged $74,155. The ‘point of contact’ was Halligen who provided a UK mobile telephone number.
While Kennedy was ready to accept Halligen at face value, Gerry McCann ­ sharp, focused and intelligent ­ was more sceptical. The contract with Oakley International and Halligen was terminated by the end of September 2008, after £500,000-plus expenses had been spent.
For the McCanns it was a bitter experience, Exton has returned to Cheshire and, like so many people, is owed money by Halligen. As for Halligen, he has gone into hiding, leaving a trail of debt and numerous former business associates and creditors looking for him. He was last seen in January of this year in Rome, drinking and spending prodigiously at the Hilton Cavalieri and Excelsior hotels. He is now believed by private investigators, who have been searching for him to serve papers on behalf of creditors, to be in the UK and watching his back. Meanwhile, in the eye of the storm, the McCanns continue the search for their lost daughter
TAL&QUAL, Lisbon weekly newspaper
Friday, 14 July 2000
Translated from the original Portuguese article by the author, Frederico Duarte

Coelho under surveillance

The European Parliament has chosen the Portuguese European Parliament Member MP Carlos Coelho to lead the investigation on "Echelon,", the worldwide eavesdropping system. The Portuguese is going to be the man that, for a year, will be under the most stringent surveillance of the world of espionage
The Portuguese European Parliament Member, Carlos Coelho, of PSD (Partido Social Democrata, Social-Democrat Party, member of the Christian Democrat group in the European Parlament-EP), newly-appointed president of the investigation committee of the EP that, starting in September, will investigate the Echelon spy system, will be the most watched man in the world during the next year.
"My telephones, faxes and e-mails might already be under surveillance," he told a Tal&Qual reporter this week with a shrug of shoulders that shows his perfect awareness of the situation.
Originally from Lisbon, where he was born 40 years ago, Carlos Coelho was president of the Young Social-Democrats and became the youngest MP in Europe at the age of 19 when he replaced the late MP Natália Correia in the Portuguese national parliament. His personality is marked by a very peculiar sense of humour that makes him, for instance, wear ties with rabbit images (in Portuguese Coelho = rabbit), which is enough to break with protocol rules in the most serious situations.
Carlos Coelho was also one of the youngest Portuguese government member when he was the under-secretary to the minister of Education Manuela Ferreira Leite. Now, his election for "first-vigilant" of Echelon is due to the fact that he¹s a member of the Committe on Citizen¹s Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs at the EP.
On the other hand, if our man in Strasbourg faces any difficulty penetrating the complex world of espionage, he can always hope for advice from his colleague and leader of the PSD MP¹s at the EP, Pacheco Pereira, the author of the introductory text of the Portuguese version of the most polemical espionage book since the end of the Cold War: The Mitrokhin Archive, which will be published next November in Portugal.
Industrial espionage
Carlos Coelho is going to co-ordinate a group of 36 MPs for a year, starting next September. "There's a system which is organized and controlled by the American secret services which has the capacity to intercept practically all forms of communication of voice and data at a planetary scale," Carlos Coelho said last March to the European Committee, in Brussels.
After the Berlin Wall fell and the end of Cold War between the United States and the former USSR, this powerful surveillance system known as Echelon "was directed not with purely military and defence intentions, but with commercial, industrial and tecnological goals," the Portuguese MP also said.
Several journalistic investigations about Echelon, the most recent made by Duncan Campbell, shows well how information gathered by the spy satellites from the USA ruined important business of European companies. In 1994, for instance, the system intercepted telephone calls between the French company Thomson-CSF and the Brasilian SIVAM to negotiate a surveillance system in the Amazon jungle. After those telephone interceptions, bribe allegations were raised that the French had tried to buy over a member of the Brasilian governmental board. In the end, the business went to the American company Raytheon, the same that is in charge of the maintenance and engineering services of the American Echelon base in Sugar Grove, Virginia, in the US.
A year later it was the turn of the aviation company Airbus, also French, to be the victim of the action of the US spies.
According to the Duncan Campbell report the American satellites got access to every fax and telephone call between Airbus, the government and members of the air force of Saudi Arabia. The agents found that the French were offering a bribe to a Saudi official. Thanks to this information, the Americans won the 6 billion dollar business that went to Boeing and McDonnell Douglas.
Allies
One additional problem for Carlos Coelho is that one of the partners of the Americans on this spy system is the United Kingdom, also a member of the European Union. "If France tells us that we can't have acess to certain information because they consider it to be a state secret, we are not going to insist on the request. As for UK, the case might be different...," explained Carlos Coelho this week to Tal&Qual.
"In September, I will start co-ordinating the group, first asking the nations involved on Echelon  for the necessary co-operation. Only afterwards will I see what can be done in face of the answers that we will get from those countries," added the same Euro MP.
The origins of Echelon date to 1947, when the secret services of the UK and USA created the UKUSA agreement. The intention was to watch the movements of the nations that after Word War II were left behind the iron curtain raised by the communists from Moscow.
As years went by, the antennas of the UKUSA agreement spread to the allied countries of Canada, Australia and New Zeland, creating a privileged net of Anglo-Saxon information. Excluded from this group are the other powerful European nations such as France, Italy and Germany.
Abbreviations
For the study about Echelon it's better to forget CIA. The name to remember for this information net is NSA -- National Security Agency. Created in 1952, NSA's main goal is just to gather information. It has no agents like CIA, and doesn¹t make international operations able to inspire espionage romances like the mythical John Le Carré. But, in order to get an idea about how effective they are, let's just state the fact that it was the NSA which found the exact location of the Argentinian guerrilla Che Guevara when he was in Bolivia, information that led to his death.
For the most part members at NSA are recruited from the Air Force, Navy and Army. Only a small number are the civilian.
As for the English, forget the lesser and lesser secret services of MI5 and James Bond's MI6. Now the abbreviation is GCHQ -- Government Communications Headquarters. But, let's not assume that on this game there's any kind of loyalty. One example: the NSA men at the American embassy in London do spy on the diplomatic talks of their allies at UKUSA. It's a spy world.
Well informed sources
In order to know more about the world of espionage, and in particular about Echelon, the best place where Carlos Coelho might start looking is the internet site ... This place is managed by John Young, a New York architect that, without geting a penny for it, publishes every day documents that arrive to him from every part of the world. His archive is large and has the most diverse information on cryptography, news, articles and documents about actions made by several "intelligence" services of several nations. The archive is available on-line and can be very precious to our Euro MP.
On the other side, in case Carlos Coelho think it might be necessary, he can always call to testify on his committtee the former British secret agent of MI5, David Shayler, that now lives in a farm near Paris and that can not return to the UK. The former agent, in case he returns home, faces the risk of being arrested because he revealed less than correct actions of the secret services while he worked there. David Shayler will also be able to explain to the committee how easy it is for the British services to spy inside and, mainly, outside their borders.


Frederico Duarte is a 27-year-old journalist at Tal&Qual since 1996. Mr. Duarte is preparing a book on Michael John Smith who was convicted in 1993 of charges by the British Government that he was a spy for the KGB. Mr. John Smith was sentenced to 25 years and is now in Full Sutton Prison, York.



Mr. Duarte has researched and written on intelligence and espionage since 1992, when his interest was stimulated by the John Smith case that had connections with Oporto, Portugal, Mr. Duarte's hometown. Mr. Duarte has found information on the John Smith case not presented during the trial which supports Mr. John Smith's claims of innocence. He welcomes additional information on the case. Send to: fredericoduarte@lycos.com

Cielo e terra (duet with Dante Thomas)