[Media-watch] FW: PEPIS #61 - Bilderberg's backstabber at the BBC

[David Miller]

on spooks in the media...

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From: "tony at resourceforge.net" <tony at resourceforge.net>
Reply-To: tony at resourceforge.net
Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 14:53:14 -0400
To: david.miller at stir.ac.uk
Subject: PEPIS #61 - Bilderberg's backstabber at the BBC

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PEPIS #61 - Bilderberg's backstabber at the BBC - 30Aug04
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The role of BBC board member and 2004 Bilderberg attendee Pauline
Neville-Jones in the ousting of the BBC's popular Director General Greg Dyke
is revealed in the UK papers this weekend.
Someone somewhere must like Dame Pauline because her term as a governor has
been extended for an extra year beyond the normal maximum.
Below, from today's Independent, is the first analysis, albeit brief, I've
yet seen of the business interrests of the various governors. A subject we
should all make our job to scrutinise.
In another Bilderberg related story a suspected Isreali spy has been found
in the office of Bilderberger, number three civillian oficial and US
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0410.marshallrozen.html
See also this article by Belgian analyst Marek Tysis examining the new
unelected European Commission (government) candidates due to take over on
1st November 2004. http://www.bilderberg.org/2004.htm#corporatism
Tony

My clashes with the two 'posh ladies'

How two pillars of the establishment helped to engineer a very British coup
at the BBC

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,1293003,00.html
Greg Dyke Sunday August 29, 2004 The Observer
Two BBC governors, Pauline Neville-Jones and Sarah Hogg, were far more vocal
than the rest, and I nicknamed them 'the posh ladies'. It was clear neither
liked me much and Sarah, I now know, actively disliked me. The feeling was
mutual.
Pauline, a career civil servant at the Foreign Office and a former chair of
the Joint Intelligence Committee, was among a number of governors who
opposed my appointment as director-general. She was a powerful voice on the
board, worked hard and was very clever in a manipulative, FO sort of way.
But neither I nor the two BBC chairmen I worked with, Christopher Bland and
Gavyn Davies, ever totally trusted Pauline. She had applied to be deputy
chairman and was turned down. She was incredibly ambitious but I always
suspected she had not been as successful in life as she had wished.
Although a big supporter of the BBC, Sarah Hogg never left her politics or
prejudices at the door of governors' meetings. She was married to a
land-owning Tory MP, Douglas Hogg, and lived in a political world.
When we tried to update our political coverage, Sarah led the opposition: we
shouldn't upset the politicians. She was upset by the lack of coverage of
the Countryside March in September 2002 (probably the only march she'd ever
been on). She insisted the BBC was not covering rural affairs properly, and
got a full investigation, costing thousands of pounds.
This struck me as a classic case of special pleading from a governor who
lived on the family estate in rural Lincolnshire.
Her term as a governor was due to finish, and she didn't want it renewed.
Neither did Gavyn or I. By the time Hutton published his report, Sarah's
time was almost up.
The day it appeared the governors met from 5pm until the early hours. Gavyn
and I left after 40 minutes when they began discussing what should happen to
the management team. We had agreed with Pauline Neville-Jones the previous
night that it would be impossible for Gavyn and I to resign at the same
time.
However, Gavyn announced his resignation before the meeting. As we left, I
reminded Simon Milner, the BBC secretary [for governance and accountability]
of what Gavyn and I had told him of our talk. It was Milner's job to tell
the governors that if I was to go on, I needed their public support.
Sarah Hogg had her last chance to settle old scores. I now know that she
arrived determined to get rid of me.
I waited in my office for maybe an hour and a half before Milner came to say
Pauline and the deputy chairman, Richard Ryder, wanted to see me.
Ryder was pretty blunt. He said the governors had decided I should go: if I
stayed I'd be a lame-duck director-general. This was ridiculous: there was
never a chance of me being a lame-duck anything.
I asked if this was the view of them all. Richard told me he hadn't
expressed a view but was reporting the views of the rest. Pauline said
nothing.
I hadn't seen it coming. I was completely shocked. I had no idea what to
say. I pointed out I had a contract they would have to honour, but if they
didn't want me I wouldn't stay.
I went back to my office and sat stunned. I had worked flat out for four
years to turn round a deeply unhappy and troubled organisation, and I was
now being thrown out by the people I respected least, the governors. My main
emotion was disbelief.
Before Gavyn headed home at about 11 pm, he decided to say a final goodbye
to his former colleagues, but when he walked into the room he found the
atmosphere had changed completely. It was a very hostile environment, with
the aggression mainly coming from Sarah, who, he said, 'was seething'.
I've since discovered that she told Gavyn the day before that he shouldn't
resign, but I should. He told her there were no circumstances in which he'd
let me go while he stayed, and I think that was one reason Gavyn resigned:
if one of us should go it should be him, and that way he would protect me.
Others at that meeting say that when Gavyn walked in Sarah launched a
ferocious attack, accusing him of 'cowardice under fire'.
It was three days before I began to realise that perhaps all was not as it
had seemed. This idea came to me when someone at the BBC told me she
believed some of the governors had been out to get me, regardless of Hutton.
It got me thinking: did some of them have another agenda?
By then I knew that three of the 11 governors had supported me in the vote:
the ballet dancer Deborah Bull, the Oxford academic Ruth Deech and voluntary
sector consultant Angela Sarkis.
The 'posh ladies' had opposed me, led by Sarah Hogg.
I began to think about the conversation Gavyn, Pauline Neville-Jones, and I
had the night before Hutton was published. If Pauline had said she thought
it impossible for Gavyn and me to leave at the same time, shouldn't she have
argued on my behalf, given that Gavyn had already gone? Yet she had not. I
thought some more.
Pauline had always been a big supporter of Mark Byford. Like most BBC
lifers, he was better [than me] at the politics of dealing with the
governors.
It was a game I refused to play. I saw no reason to treat the governors
differently from everyone else. I certainly wasn't going to regard the earth
they walked on as holy ground.
After I had left the BBC one senior executive said to me that if I had been
a bit more servile to them, I would still be there today. I have no doubt
that's true. Certainly both chairmen in my time there suggested I ought to
be more respectful and make fewer jokes at governors' meetings, but I was
never going to do that. I have never respected position for its own sake and
I was hardly likely to start in my fifties, particularly when dealing with a
group of people, most of whom knew nothing about the media and who would
have struggled to get a senior job at the BBC.
So why hadn't Pauline supported me? Again I thought back a few months. In
early December 2003, Gavyn told me Pauline and Sarah had been to see him,
demanding that Mark Byford be appointed my deputy and be put in charge of
BBC News. I was then to have been told it was a fait accompli.
I objected, though in many ways the idea of Mark becoming my deputy was a
good one. With Hutton pending, even someone as naturally combative as me
recognised this was not a time for a bust-up with the governors. To appease
them, I suggested we appoint Mark as my deputy, but with different powers
from those they suggested.
The governors agreed, and he began work on 1 January last year. A month
later I was gone and he was acting director-general. The establishment
figures had seized their chance and got rid of the upstart. It was, in many
ways, a very British coup.
The BBC has a good man as its new chairman in Michael Grade, but to do his
job well he needs better, more knowledgeable governors to support him. I
hope the six current governors who voted to get rid of me - Dermot Gleeson,
Merfyn Jones, Fabian Monds, Neville-Jones, Robert Smith, and Ranjit Sondhi -
will realise that what they did that January night was bow to pressure from
a political thug called Alastair Campbell.
What happened to me is irrelevant. Director-generals come and go; but there
is no greater betrayal of BBC principles than to fold under political
pressure, particularly from the government of the day.
These governors got it seriously wrong and they should accept that. They
should now resign. The BBC deserves better.

THE GOVERNORS WHO VOTED FOR DYKE TO GO...
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/media/story.jsp?story=556471
Independent - 30th August 2004
DERMOT GLEESON 
Position: He is executive chairman of MJ Gleeson Group plc. Time spent on
the board: Appointed a BBC governor in November 2000 and reappointed for a
further four years last month. His term of office now runs for another four
years, to the end of October 2008.
BARONESS SARAH HOGG
Position: Chairman of Frontier Economics and 3i. Also a director of P&O
Princess and appointed deputy chairman of GKN from 1 December 2003. Time
spent on the board: Appointed a BBC governor in February 2000, her term
completed February 2004.
MERVYN JONES 
Position: A historian and broadcaster with posts at University of Wales and
University of Liverpool, where he was director of continuing education. Time
spent on the board: BBC national governor for Wales from 1 January 2003
until the end of 2006.
FABIAN MONDS 
Position: Professor Monds is chairman of Invest Northern Ireland, the
economic development agency. Time spent on the board: He becamenational
governor for Northern Ireland in 1999. In June last year his term was
extended to July 2007.
DAME PAULINE NEVILLE-JONES
Position: Chairs the BBC's audit committee and the governors' World Service
Consultative Group. Time spent on the board: She was appointed in January
1998 and her term of office has been extended to the end of next year.
(doesn't mention her job as a director of the new private defense company
QuinetiQ ed.)
LORD (RICHARD) RYDER OF WENSUM
Position: He became acting chairman on 28 January and resumed as
vice-chairman on 17 May. Time spent on the board:He became vice-chairman on
1 January for four years. His resignation from the board took effect in
June.
SIR ROBERT SMITH 
Position: He is chairman of the Weir Group, deputy chairman of Scottish and
Southern Energy and holds several non-executive directorships. Time spent on
the board:He was appointed national governor for Scotland in August 1999. In
2003 his term of office was extended to July 2007. In July this year he said
he would step down at the end of 2004.
RANJIT SONDHI 
Position: He is a senior lecturer at Birmingham University, where he
co-ordinates a new degree in race and ethnic studies. Time spent on the
board: Appointed in August 1998, his term of office was renewed in 2002 and
now finishes in October 2006.

...AND THOSE WHO WANTED HIM TO STAY

DEBORAH BULL
Position: She had a 20-year career with the Royal Ballet until 2001,
becoming principal dancer in 1992 and touring the world with the company.
Time spent on the board: She became a governor on 1 August 2003 for a
four-year term.
RUTH DEECH 
Position: She is a trustee of the Mandela-Rhodes Foundation and a bencher of
the Inner Temple, and holds an honorary doctorate from Strathclyde
University. Time spent on the board: Appointed in October 2002 for a
four-year term.
ANGELA SARKIS 
Position: An independent consultant with a management interest. Member of
the African Caribbean Evangelical Alliance and the Home Office's active
community unit advisory panel. Time spent on the board: Four-year term from
2002.
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/media/story.jsp?story=556471


Iran-Contra II? Fresh scrutiny on a rogue Pentagon operation.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0410.marshallrozen.html

By Joshua Micah Marshall, Laura Rozen, and Paul Glastris
On Friday evening, CBS News reported that the FBI is investigating a
suspected mole in the Department of Defense who allegedly passed to Israel,
via a pro-Israeli lobbying organization, classified American intelligence
about Iran. The focus of the investigation, according to U.S. government
officials, is Larry Franklin, a veteran Defense Intelligence Agency Iran
analyst now working in the office of the Pentagon's number three civilian
official, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith.
The investigation of Franklin is now shining a bright light on a shadowy
struggle within the Bush administration over the direction of U.S. policy
toward Iran. In particular, the FBI is looking with renewed interest at an
unauthorized back-channel between Iranian dissidents and advisers in Feith's
office, which more senior administration officials first tried in vain to
shut down and then later attempted to cover up.
Franklin, along with another colleague from Feith's office, a polyglot
Middle East expert named Harold Rhode, were the two officials involved in
the back-channel, which involved on-going meetings and contacts with Iranian
arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar and other Iranian exiles, dissidents and
government officials. Ghorbanifar is a storied figure who played a key role
in embroiling the Reagan administration in the Iran-Contra affair. The
meetings were both a conduit for intelligence about Iran and Iraq and part
of a bitter administration power-struggle pitting officials at DoD who have
been pushing for a hard-line policy of  "regime change" in Iran, against
other officials at the State Department and the CIA who have been counseling
a more cautious approach.
Reports of two of these meetings first surfaced a year ago in Newsday, and
have since been the subject of an ongoing investigation by the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence.  Whether or how the meetings are connected to the
alleged espionage remains unknown.  But the FBI is now closely scrutinizing
them.    
While the FBI is looking at the meetings as part of its criminal
investigation, to congressional investigators the Ghorbanifar back-channel
typifies the out-of-control bureaucratic turf wars which have characterized
and often hobbled Bush administration policy-making.  And an investigation
by The Washington Monthly -- including a rare interview with Ghorbanifar --
adds weight to those concerns. The meetings turn out to have been far more
extensive and much less under White House control than originally reported.
One of the meetings, which Pentagon officials have long characterized as
merely a "chance encounter" seems in fact to have been planned long in
advance by Rhode and Ghorbanifar. Another has never been reported in the
American press. The administration's reluctance to disclose these details
seems clear: the DoD-Ghorbanifar meetings suggest the possibility that a
rogue faction at the Pentagon was trying to work outside normal US foreign
policy channels to advance a "re!
gime change" agenda not approved by the president's foreign policy
principals or even the president himself.
The Italian Job

The first meeting occurred in Rome in December, 2001. It included Franklin,
Rhode, and another American, the neoconservative writer and operative
Michael Ledeen, who organized the meeting.  (According to UPI, Ledeen was
then working for Feith as a consultant.) Also in attendance was Ghorbanifar
and a number of other Iranians. One of the Iranians, according to two
sources familiar with the meeting, was a former senior member of the Iranian
Revolutionary Guard who claimed to have information about dissident ranks
within the Iranian security services. The Washington Monthly has also
learned from U.S. government sources that Nicolo Pollari, the head of
Italy's military intelligence agency, SISMI, attended the meetings, as did
the Italian Minister of Defense Antonio Martino, who is well-known in
neoconservative circles in Washington.
Alarm bells about the December 2001 meeting began going off in U.S.
government channels only days after it occurred. On Dec. 12, 2001, at the
U.S. embassy in Rome, America's newly-installed ambassador, Mel Sembler, sat
down for a private dinner with Ledeen, an old friend of his from Republican
Party politics, and Martino, the Italian defense minister. The conversation
quickly turned to the meeting. The problem was that this was the first that
Amb. Sembler had heard about it.
According to U.S. government sources, Sembler immediately set about trying
to determine what he could about the meeting and how it had happened. Since
U.S. government contact with foreign government intelligence agencies is
supposed to be overseen by the CIA, Sembler first spoke to the CIA station
chief in Rome to find out what if anything he knew about the meeting with
the Iranians. But that only raised more questions because the station chief
had been left in the dark as well. Soon both Sembler and the Rome station
chief were sending anxious queries back to the State Department and CIA
headquarters in Langley, Va., respectively, raising alarms on both sides of
the Potomac.  
The meeting was a source of concern for a series of overlapping reasons.
Since the late 1980s, Ghorbanifar has been the subject of two CIA "burn
notices." The agency believes Ghorbanifar is a serial "fabricator" and
forbids its officers from having anything to do with him. Moreover, why were
mid-level Pentagon officials organizing meetings with a foreign intelligence
agency behind the back of the CIA -- a clear breach of U.S. government
protocol?  There was also a matter of personal chagrin for Sembler: At State
Department direction, he had just been cautioning the Italians to restrain
their contacts with bad-acting states like Iran (with which Italy has
extensive trade ties).
According to U.S. government sources, both the State Department and the CIA
eventually brought the matter to the attention of the White House --
specifically, to Condoleezza Rice's chief deputy on the National Security
Council, Stephen J. Hadley. Later, Italian spy chief Pollari raised the
matter privately with Tenet, who himself went to Hadley in early February
2002. Goaded by Tenet, Hadley sent word to the officials in Feith's office
and to Ledeen to cease all such activities. Hadley then contacted Sembler,
assuring him it wouldn't happen again and to report back if it did.
The orders, however, seem to have had little effect, for a second meeting
was soon underway. According to a story published this summer in Corriere
della Sera, a leading Italian daily, this second meeting took place in Rome
in June 2002. Ghorbanifar tells The Washington Monthly that he arranged that
meeting after a flurry of faxes between himself and DoD official Harold
Rhode. Though he did not attend it himself, Ghorbanifar says the meeting
consisted of an Egyptian, an Iraqi, and a high-level U.S. government
official, whose name he declined to reveal. The first two briefed the
American official about the general situation in Iraq and the Middle East,
and what would happen in Iraq, "And it's happened word for word since," says
Ghorbanifar. A spokesman for the NSC declined to comment on this and other
meetings and referred The Washington Monthly to the Defense Department,
which did not respond to repeated inquiries. Ledeen also refused to comment.
No one at the U.S. embassy in Rome seems to have known about this second
Rome meeting. But the back-channel's continuing existence became apparent
the following month -- July 2002 -- when Ledeen again contacted Sembler and
told him that he'd be back in Rome in September to continue "his work" with
the Iranians (This time Ledeen made no mention of any involvement by
Pentagon officials; later, he told Sembler it would be in August rather than
September.)  An exasperated Sembler again sent word back to Washington, and
Hadley again went into motion telling Ledeen, in no uncertain terms, to back
off.  
Once again, however, Hadley's orders seem to have gone unheeded. Almost a
year later in June 2003, there were still further meetings in Paris
involving Rhode and Ghorbanifar. Ghorbanifar says the purpose of the meeting
was for Rhode to get more information on the situation in Iraq and the
Middle East. "In those meetings we met, we gave him the scenario, what would
happen in the coming days in Iraq. And everything has happened word for word
as we told him," Ghorbanifar repeats. "We met in several different places in
Paris," he says. "Rhode met several other people -- he didn't only meet me."
Not a "chance encounter"

By the summer of 2003, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had begun
to get wind of the Ghorbanifar-Ledeen-DoD back-channel and made inquiries at
the CIA. A month later, Newsday broke the original story about the secret
Ghorbanifar channel. Faced with the disclosure, Secretary of Defense
Rumsfeld acknowledged the December 2001 meeting but dismissed it as routine
and unimportant. 
"The information has moved around the interagency process to all the
departments and agencies," he told reporters in Crawford, Texas, after a
meeting with Bush. "As I understand it, there wasn't anything there that was
of substance or of value that needed to be pursued further." Later that day,
another senior Defense official acknowledged the second meeting in Paris in
June 2003, but insisted that it was the result of a "chance encounter"
between Ghorbanifar and a Pentagon official. The administration has kept to
the "chance encounter" story to this day.
Ghorbanifar, however, laughs off that idea. "Run into each other? We had a
prior arrangement," he told The Washington Monthly: "It involved a lot of
discussion and a lot of people."
Over the last year, the Senate Intelligence Committee has conducted limited
inquiry into the meetings, including interviews with Feith and Ledeen. But
under terms of a compromise agreed to by both parties, a full investigation
into the matter was put off until after the November election. Republicans
on the committee, many of whom sympathize with the "regime change" agenda at
DoD, have been resistant to such investigations, calling them an
election-year fishing expedition. Democrats, by contrast, see such
investigations as vital to understanding the central role Feith's office may
have played in a range of a dubious intelligence enterprises, from pushing
claims about a supposed Saddam-al Qaeda partnership and overblown estimates
of alleged Iraqi stocks of WMD to what the committee's ranking minority
member Sen. Jay Rockerfeller (D-W.Va.) calls "the Chalabi factor" (Rhode and
others in Feith's office have been major sponsors of the Iraqi exile leader,
who is now under investi!
gation for passing U.S. intelligence to Iran). With the FBI adding potential
espionage charges to the mix the long-simmering questions about the
activities of Feith's operation now seem certain to come under renewed
scrutiny.  
Research assistance provided by Claudio Lavanga.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0410.marshallrozen.html


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