Join the Dots and Spot the Joins

Some call it ‘Intelligence’?

By Frank P

From the mid 70s to the early 80s of the last Century, whilst still a card carrying copper of the London Metropolitan chapter of The Force,  and operating under the aegis of what were then –  and probably still are – the ever-transmogrifying International Organised Crime intelligence units, I interfaced with counterparts from across the full spectrum of  United States policing from all the top Federal Agencies, through State and City Police Forces, down to local town Police Chiefs and Sheriffs: in fact the whole panoply of overlapping jurisdictions that comprise American policing and engender the turf wars that have bedeviled crime-fighting across America since the concept of professional policing began.

At that time, those of us at the sharp end of investigation were all engaged in fighting a number of common enemies, viz.

(a)    ‘Cosa Nostra’ (our thing) – racketeering rooted in the centuries-old Italian Mafia; historically, itself a volatile loose coalition of regional entities, but by then internationalized with branches around the globe. My particular interests were the connections between American mobsters and London gangsters, in particular the Gaming, Pornography, Narcotics and other vice crime-barons proliferating on both sides of the Atlantic and with connections to European cities and as far afield as Australia.

(b)   Resultant corruption within our own organisations, facilitated by ready cash always available from the racketeering sources of (a) above for the grooming of susceptible politicians and officials, by modus operandi perfected over the earlier decades of that century.

(c)    The bureaucracy, diplomatic niceties and stranglehold of red tape on both sides of the Atlantic emanating from the turf disputes, politics – and of course – the aforementioned corruption, by then a complex phenomenon in and of itself.

(d)   Ambitious ‘suits’ within our respective organisations, interested only in their overweening personal ambitions, devoid of real practical experience or nous and unwilling to risk their careers by attacking the enemy in sanguine, relentless confrontation and thereby running the risk of upsetting the careful plans of their corrupt political masters in whose hands their careers rested.

Additionally, while all this was developing, we in the UK were also trying to cope with an Irish civil war which had manifested itself in occasional mainland carnage and terrorism in London and other cities. Ironically some of it was funded from IRA sympathizers from Boston. The military, diplomatic and policing implications of that troublesome phenomenon impacted itself loudly – very loudly indeed at times, on the public consciousness and demanded our constant vigilance. So we were all very busy and it was sometimes necessary to cut through the conventions and bullshit to get things done; this was often achieved, not ‘through the proper channels’ but by informal personal contacts built through mutual trust that exists with those on the front lines of  the policing fraternity both here and abroad.

As the purpose of this piece is to discuss the bombing of the Boston Mass., Marathon, perhaps it is also necessary to add to the equation the climate of racial politics that was also rife in London throughout that period whilst, with some other colleagues at the Yard –  and our US counterparts, attempts were made to grapple with the Italian Mob’s burgeoning criminal empire, an evil construct that utilized the facilities of Jewish associate mobsters, lawyers, bankers, accountants and major retailers, all willing to collude in criminal activity and launder the proceeds of rackets.

To further establish my credentials in cheekily commenting in my dotage on this latest outrage , I cite my experience after retirement from the Met., when I joined a documentary team from Thames TV, resourced with a budget commensurate with the times when Commercial TV was a ‘licence to print money’, in order to research and produce a seven part one hour each episode TV series, entitled Crime Inc. The series was successfully completed and hailed at the time as the best factual series on the Mob ever produced.  Some still consider it to be so. Those financial resources, together with expert contacts within US law enforcement, the US Media and criminological  academia , established while I was still a serving officer, enabled me to recruit the assistance, in making the series, of almost everybody who knew anything about Organised Crime at that time; some have remained firm friends ever since then.

So when I watched the widespread reportage of the Boston bombings, mainly through the auspices of Fox News (excellent by the way) but also, with the help of my recording machines, PC and my Nexus 7 Tablet, the coverage of the BBC and Sky News on our side of the Pond, you can perhaps imagine my frustration when it became obvious that the lessons learned and the innovations achieved by the transatlantic cooperation of the 70s and 80s seem to have been buried by the sands of time as cyclical, perhaps generational problems we all experienced in yesteryear, seem equally present today.

As I watched the immediate reports of the Boston bombing, I was neither surprised nor shocked, though of course I felt the revulsion that anybody else would feel at the results of the infamy.  It has been fairly obvious to me over recent years, from media watching and reading,  conversations with US contacts and blogosphere activity, that since 9/11, a level of complacency has set in among the US citizenry that will not be easily displaced.

Notwithstanding the Fort Hood Massacre; the various and bungled attempts by jihadists to explode IEDs on the US mainland and in planes bound for the US ; or even the Benghazi massacre of the US Ambassador and his staff last year – an incident that should burn deep in the annals of American political infamy – the majority of US citizens seem content that their government is coping with the threat of terrorism and that President Obama is implementing the right policies. They seem generally oblivious to the complexity of Islamic encroachment on the culture of the West, or of the intentions of the jihadists, despite those intentions being widely propagated by the enemy itself on a daily basis and in a variety of ways.

It therefore seemed to me that more than half the American electorate have their heads buried in the sands of the North East coastal beaches or the softer sands of California; or perhaps even buried somewhat more auto-fundamentally. I had figured that it could only be a matter of time before a couple of home-grown jihadists would be able to pull off ‘a spectacular’ and belie the boasts of success of ‘Homeland Security’, in such a climate of apparent lack of concern.

Neither was I surprised, when that day actually came on Monday last, at the frenzied attempts, after the Boston explosions, of the MSM and other Leftist opinion formers, to immediately attempt to attribute the atrocity, using the approximation of dates – Patriots Day, Hitler’s birthday, etc. as an indication of motivation, to ‘another Timothy McVeigh’ or some such ‘right wing’ activist; Oh! How they desperately wanted it to be so.

The very fact that Obama was re-elected just after the Benghazi Embassy debacle and Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State responsible for US Diplomats, has been elevated almost to beatitude since, despite the fiasco, was to me an indication of the current dire state of American politics.

But, given my experience and contacts within US law enforcement across the spectrum, I was  surprised at how slowly the investigators homed in on the two points of explosion using CCTV, media and ‘citizen journalist’ footage, to establish exactly where, when how the bombs were planted and who planted them. It seemed like a no-brainer to me, given this age of immediacy and multiplicity of camera technology.  Then, I naively mused, it will be a ‘piece of p’ from that point on.

Surely, I suggested to my ever patient spouse (who is quite used to my relentless second-guessing of the heirs and successors of policing on both sides of the Pond), with today’s physiognomy recognition and detection devices that the tech industry boasts about, they will be able to pull the identities from either the CIA, FBI or Homeland Security data bases – just let’s hope the terrorists have stuck around to gloat over their handiwork; or that they are already planning another spectacular and will therefore surely be nobbled in flagrante delicto as they try to pull it off.

Yes … well! In hindsight, I should have known better. The usual suspects on the press conference podium  – an array of suits from politics, the Feds and top brass from state and City Police agencies were clearly groping in the dark and had failed to get their act together, even after 48 hours.

When eventually on Thursday evening – our time – the FBI Assistant Director produced the images of the ‘two Caucasian youths’  – I assumed that was a racial profiling description – (as opposed to ‘negroid’ or ‘Hispanic’ etc.), rather than literally from the Caucuses, where it now transpires they originally hailed from; describing them as ‘suspects’ – a raunchy classification, given the legal sensitivity of terminology in these politically correct and strictured times,

I conjectured that perhaps they knew full well who they were, but were playing it safe because they didn’t know where they were momentarily and hoped that a member of the public might be able to tell them where they were, or had recently been, so that they could follow a hot trail; that for legal evidential reasons they were keeping the names up their shirts.

It was inconceivable to me that they were ‘not known to the authorities’ as first suggested.  But when they had not been identified some hours after the images were published, I relented in my assumptions and feared the ‘suspects’ were indeed ‘clean skins’ imported to do the job and had made their escape, either out of the country or to a safe house somewhere in the US..

Then, much later that day, when the proverbial hit the fan on the MIT campus; ‘No.1 Suspect’ was clipped by police during a robbery/hi-jacking incident (admitting to the owner of the hi-jacked vehicle that they were indeed the marathon bombers – boasting of it, no less) and No.2 suspect made his escape after backing the vehicle over the dying brother and hurling gunfire and other ordnance towards pursuing cops, finally making his getaway on foot after abandoning the stolen vehicles.

It  became pretty clear then that the brothers had obviously seen their photographs on TV and knew the game was up, They therefore fled (and were challenged by the Campus Cop, who was killed for his curiosity as they did so). I inferred that the elder brother and later his younger sibling, were identified from documents found on the deceased ‘Suspect No.1’ and until that time the FBI were not aware who they were dealing with. That has since emerged to be a correct assumption.

The FBI immediately denied to reporters that they had any trace of the brothers on record. But this was blown out of the water when someone from the Russian Authorities who, having seen the pictures and having checked their records, blew the whistle on  the FBI by phoning a media contact,  informing him/her that they had warned the Bureau about the elder Chechen brother in 2011.

All the foregoing preamble above was to explain my own mind-set, when I reached this point of departure. From that moment I was disgusted with the performance of the US agencies. It clearly means that the data being stored on Islamic terrorism by the FBI is subject to limitations imposed by strict guidelines based on politically correct attitudes dictating what can and cannot be recorded on FBI data bases. One assumes that the data protection acts in the UK now impose similar strictures – in a nutshell, don’t mention I$lam!

So … all the so-called advances in police intelligence methodology that I helped to innovate back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, seems to have been negated by ludicrous political and policing decisions on archiving recorded info, based on the sensitivities of alien religious or racial groupings, rather than the imperatives of safety and security of indigenous citizens of our Judeo-Christian civilisation

The upshot of it all is that the Chechen brothers should have had a ‘hot’ FBI file; it follows that they – should therefore have been under close scrutiny. Had that been done, their bomb making activities would have been thwarted and the Boston Marathon would have been the happy event that it normally is, instead of a scene of mayhem and chaos.

None of the media discussions and debates I have witnessed since Suspect No. 1 was taken down and Suspect No. 2 was traced (by a member of the public) and taken into custody, have made me think differently.

In fact I once again saw proof positive that it’s all over for Western Civilisation, when I tonight witnessed an ex- FBI agent on Fox on Sunday – his name was Mudd, incidentally, assert that the brothers were not terrorists, they were amateurs and the extant brother should be charged with common or garden homicide. He further asserted that a whole ethnic group/religion should not be besmirched by the actions of two deluded youngsters. Moreover, the ‘ex-FBI SAC was for twenty years an erstwhile Counter-terrorism ‘expert’. Muddy waters indeed!

As I so often say, many tributaries flow into that moment that we call ‘now’; some think that being human includes choice and free will; tell that to those mutilated in the marathon bomb incidents. As a species, Homo Sapiens claims the ability to learn the lessons of experience and history. How often do we hear the plaintive cry – “Lessons will be learned!” But history itself seems to prove that claim as merely another delusion. Cue Dr Pangloss!

And Mr Mudd – that large thing in the room that you seem not to have noticed either by its shape or its rancid smell: no it’s not an elephant – it’s a camel! And its name is Islamic Jihad.

But hey, call Neil Diamond; get him to sing Sweet Caroline. That’ll sort it and then everyone can get on with the feckin’ ball game. Ye Gods!