Mike Tyson (right) and U.S. President Donald
Trump at the White House prior to their departure for a mid-term election
campaign rally held at Syracuse, New York State on October 9th,
2026. Photo credit: Can Hasasu.
Mike Tyson is a boxing legend but often lacking in sound
judgment.
I've heard that he likes Trump because Trump supposedly
stood by him after his rape conviction. So, he presumably thinks that he is
doing the "honourable" and "loyal" thing by supporting
Trump at a campaign rally when Trump's poll ratings are at an all-time low.
Personal loyalty can be a good thing, but it can also be
an albatross.
Personal friendship and loyalty must have limits.
Trump presides over a regime which:
1. Began an unwinnable war against Iran because Israel
insisted that America attack Iran and that America continue the war without
Israel.
2. Embarked on tariff warfare with other countries in the
world which has cost the United States the trust of other countries and has
provided a route to de-dollarisation and the removal of their gold reserves
from America.
3.Presided over a
rise in gas prices. The cost-of-living crisis is biting harder among Americans.
4. Threatens other nations like Venezuela who capitulate
leaving the US to loot their resources and then have Trump brag about it.
5. Is beholden to the State of Israel which uses money and
blackmail to control the US Congress and Trump himself.
6. Is explicitly for "white" supremacy and
"white" chauvinism. They interpret every black person in a position
of high authority -including the U.S. military - as unmerited so-called
"DEI" hires. As retired U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson once put
it: "They don't like black people. Let's be frank about that".
They explicitly hate Muslims too even though Tyson
professes to be a Muslim.
Yet Tyson analogises what he refers to as Trump’s “struggles”
with those faced by the Black American community at large.
7. Has abandoned the rule of law and any notion of
international law. Trump has admitted that he has no morality or sense of
limitations except what is in his mind.
8. Has continued what most of the globe know to be a
GENOCIDE by Israel in Palestine and the attempt by Israel to extend its borders
- both goals of which are consistent with what is the objective of Political
Zionism.
9. Is composed of grotesque personalities such as Hegseth,
Rubio, Miller etc who are crude and cerebrally limited thugs who possess no
qualities expected of statesmen.
Hegseth is a drunk and a sexual predator who belongs to a
"Christian" cult beholden to the cause of Zionism. Rubio is in the
pocket of Zionist benefactors and a clown of a "foreign minister"
whose limited engagement in foreign affairs is encapsulated by Trump's use of
two New York real estate brokers to negotiate with Iran, Russia and Lebanon,
while the hideous Miller is a Jew who bizarrely utilises Nazi imagery and
Goebbelesque language.
Does anyone who is compos mentis see these idiots as the
"saviours" of America and the "white race"?
10. Is fiscally and strategically incompetent. The DOGE
episode has not prevented a waste in expenditure because of failed or failing
military adventures in Iran and Ukraine. America's sovereign debt and continued
to rise sharply under Trump. Strategic oil reserves in the US have dipped to a
dangerous low, as have munitions, missile interceptors etc leaving the US
vulnerable if it had to fight Russia or China.
11. Is extraordinarily corrupt. Trump, who Tyson recently
said in an interview was "broke" in 2026, has used his position to
enrich himself and his family on a scale far in excess of the corruption of
Clinton (Clinton Foundation), Pelosi (insider trading) and others.
Now, Mike may not be aware of much of the above, but he
must surely have an inkling that Trump has been a fundamentally bad president
who is leading America to the abyss.
“It
is in Guinea that we shall stop the criminal hand of imperialism which
strangles Africa.”
-Ahmed
Sekou Toure, President of Guinea, quoted in the March 1st, 1966,
edition of Le Monde, in reaction to the overthrow of President Kwame
Nkrumah of Ghana.
Saturday,
October 29th, 1966.
A Pan-American
World Airways flight enroute to Lagoa is making a stopover at Accra
Airport. On board are the foreign minister of Guinea, Louis Lansana Beavogui,
and three diplomats on their way to a pre-summit meeting of the Organisation of
African Unity’s Council of Ministers in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Also on board are 15 Guinean students who
are scheduled to disembark at the aircraft’s next stop at Lagos where they will
study English as part of a cultural exchange agreement between the governments
of Guinea and Nigeria. Shortly after its landing, the languid atmosphere is
shattered by the arrival of a detachment of Ghanaian security officers who
noisily roam the aisle of the aeroplane seeking all the Guinean nationals on
board. Demands for identification and threats are exchanged with protests and
physical resistance. Newspaper dispatches would report that the security
officers “dragged 19 kicking and screaming Guineans” from the plane. Some had
clung to their seats and had to be carried from the airliner. They were
arrested and taken to places of detention. What followed were 7 days of highly
charged threats between the governments of Ghana and Guinea, as well as frenzied
mediation efforts conducted by the OAU to resolve the crisis. It was a crisis
which the Guinean President Sekou Toure had reason to believe had been
engineered by the United States, which led to a rise in anti-American sentiment
in Guinea that culminated in mob violence, house arrests and the expulsion of
members of the U.S. peace corps from Guinean soil. Thirteen years before the
seizure of its embassy by Iranian revolutionaries in Tehran, the United States
had to handle a hostage crisis while the three-year old OAU discussed the
possibility of expelling Ghana from the body. This extraordinary episode of
state-sponsored kidnapping and high-drama diplomacy was rooted in fierce
personal loyalty and inter-state political antagonism that played out against
the backdrop of the global ideological Cold War.
The
setting to the incident was the overthrow of Ghana’s President Kwame Nkrumah
earlier that year on February 24th. Nkrumah had been on a foreign
tour of nations when news of his deposing reached him soon after his arrival in
China. In the following days, he made his way to Guinean exile where his ally
President Sekou
Toure would make him honorary co-president.
It
was the least that Toure felt that he could do.
When
in 1958, Toure had rejected Charles de Gaulle’s offer to join the Communaute
francaise, famously uttering the words “Il n'y a pas de dignité sans
liberté: nous préférons la liberté dans la pauvreté à la richesse dans
l'esclavage," the French had retaliated by withdrawing its civil servants
along with professional and technical experts. Widespread sabotage of equipment
also occurred. The French took everything from telephones and typewriters to
furniture and electric light sockets. They also took government records. Guinea
faced economic catastrophe, but an injection of $10 million from Nkrumah’s
treasury significantly relieved the burden.
Nkrumah
had been overthrown
by a junta which had had received covert assistance from the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency and which explicitly sought to position itself as an
ally of the United States. This radical realignment of Ghana’s foreign policy
and economic doctrine almost certainly guaranteed an adversarial relationship
with Guinea which along with Nkrumaist Ghana and Modibo Keita-led Mali had
formed a socialist bloc of nations in West
Africa.
However,
what later developed between Guinea and Ghana went beyond conventional rivalry
and competition. It degenerated into outright enmity because Nkrumah was not
subject to the typical conditions of exiled political leaders who are often
foresworn to disengage from overt political conduct. Toure had enabled Nkrumah’s
use of the radio waves to criticise the policies of the Ghanaian military
regime on his “Voice of the Revolution” programme which was broadcast under the
aegis of Radio Conakry. Nkrumah’s frequently strident oratory irritated Ghana’s
military rulers who from the beginning began to supress and persecute his
followers, as well as those who were felt to have been close to his government.
Beyond
irritation was the not irrational fear of the junta that Nkrumah’s penetration
of Ghana’s airwaves through his sermons from Conakry could form the basis of a
future insurrection. This scenario along with a threatened Guinean military
invasion were taken seriously because of repeated pronouncements by both
Nkrumah and Toure. For instance, shortly after Nkrumah’s arrival in Conakry
following his overthrow, he declared that “I have come here on purpose to use
Guinea as a platform to tell the world that very soon I shall be in Accra, in
Ghana”, adding that he would overthrow the military government to “teach them
the lesson they deserve”.
Toure
for his part did not hide the fact that he considered the Ghanaian military
regime to be an illegitimate one consisting of “traitors of Mother Africa”. Three
days after Nkrumah’s overthrow he noted in a broadcast on Radio Conakry that
Guinea “must consider itself in a state of war”. He would go on to state that
he would mobilise and integrate into the Guinean armed forces a sizeable number
of ordinary Guinean men and women who would liberate Ghana.
It
was under these circumstances that the Pan-American plane had been stormed and
its passengers apprehended.
Beavougi
and the diplomats; Fily Sissoko, Abdoulaye Diallo, and Kassory Bangoura, were
taken to Whistler Barracks in Teshie Camp, several miles from Accra, while the
students were held at another army post a few miles away. The students would
later allege that they were subjected to beatings and torture. They also
claimed that valuables which had been confiscated from them by the police were
not returned.
In
a press conference held on Monday, October 31st, Lieutenant General
Joseph Ankrah, the Chairman of the National Liberation Council as the Ghanaian
junta styled itself, justified the action by claiming that the members of the 81-strong
Ghanaian contingent which had followed Nkrumah into exile were being “held
against their will” by the Guinean government and demanded that they be allowed
to leave Guinea. Failure to accede to this would mean that the 19 Guinean
citizens, who Radio Accra described as “hostages”, would remain in detention.
It
was a stunning assertion by a state of its right to blackmail another state.
Ghana’s
actions clearly violated both the spirit and the letter of the Vienna Convention on
Diplomatic Relations
which was signed in 1961. Article 29 provides that “The person of a diplomatic
agent shall be inviolable. He shall not be liable to any form of arrest of
detention.” The protection encompasses situations where the diplomat is in
transit in a third-party country to which they are not accredited. Article 40
afforded them such protection notwithstanding that they did not have Ghanaian
visas because they did not intend to leave the plane at Accra.
During
his press conference, Ankrah sought to remind the world that Ghana had been
victim of what he termed “undiplomatic acts” by the government of Guinea after
the coup which had brought him to power. Guinean security forces had raided the
Ghanaian embassy and permission given to Ambrose Tankey, the head of Nkrumah’s
security guards, to sign cheques on embassy accounts. Further, the Ghanaian
ambassador and his wife had been removed from an airliner and briefly arrested.
While Guinea’s earlier conduct in the aftermath of Nkrumah’s overthrow had
violated the convention, it did not give the Ghanaian regime the right to do
the same. The presence of the Ghanaians attached to Nkrumah in Guinea even if
they were being held against their will did not give Ghana the right to arrest
the Guinean students who did not have diplomatic status because non-of them
were subject to an international warrant of arrest or were wanted by the
Ghanaian authorities or were under suspicion of having committed an offence
while on the flight.
While
an infuriated Toure denounced the Ghanaian regime, referring to them as “that
stooge of the imperialists”, his wrath was mainly directed at the United States
which he blamed for orchestrating the crisis. He claimed that the United States
was “entirely responsible” for the apprehension of the Ghanaians from the aeroplane
and demanded America strongly condemn the Ghanaian government and ensure the
Guineans were released and transported to their original destinations.
Toure
knew of the suspicions at the time -later confirmed- of CIA involvement in the
anti-Nkrumah coup, and his loathing of the junta’s obsequious trait of aligning
itself with U.S. foreign policy objectives in return for receiving favours from
the Americans informed his unwavering conclusion that the Americans had
overseen Ghana’s action. Indeed, in a memorandum to President Lyndon Johnson
dated March 12th, 1966, Robert W. Komer, then a senior staff member
of the U.S. National Security Council informed Johnson that while Nkrumah had
been doing more to undermine American interest than any other Black African,
“the new military regime is almost pathetically pro-American.”
Toure’s
heavy suspicions were justified.
He
believed that the United States, acting in concert with Pan-American Airways,
had tipped off the Ghanaian authorities about the presence of the Guinean passengers
on the flight. The American input was vital because back in the 1960s, the
automated sharing of passenger manifests was practically non-existent for
routine international flights. Airlines compiled paper manifests which were
carried on board. The tradition was not to hand over a passenger list during a
fuel stop provided the passengers remained on the aircraft or in a secure
transit lounge.
Toure’s
indignation at the United States was manifested by the retaliatory measures he
would take over the course of a few days. Three days after Robinson McIlvaine,
the American ambassador had handed his credentials, he was summoned to the
Guinean foreign office which announced that he was being summarily put under
house arrest. His fate was shared with the local Pan-American Airlines
representative and other staff members of the U.S. embassy who State Department
spokesman, Carl Bartch announced had been placed under what he termed “office
arrest”. Describing the situation as “serious”, Bartch noted that most
Americans in Conakry were in protective custody with police guarding their
homes.
With
Radio Conakry filling the airwaves with denunciations of U.S. complicity in the
kidnapping of their countrymen and women, a wave of anti-American feeling was
stirred without much difficulty. On October 31st, a demonstration
was held outside the U.S. embassy in which Radio Conakry claimed there had been
“50,000” participants. They shouted slogans such as “Down with the Yankees!”, “Yankee’s
get out of Africa!” and “Down with American Imperialism!” Other slogans chanted
included “The Imperialist Plot Will Not Succeed in Guinea” and “Down with the
Accra Puppets!” Meanwhile, a mob stormed the residence of McIlvaine where they
broke windows and furniture as his wife and their two children cowered under an
upstairs bedroom. He had been allowed to travel to the embassy without a guard.
Toure’s
directives were of course strictly in breach of international law.
The
Guinea-Ghana crisis presented a severe test for the OAU. As delegates began
gathering for the impending summit in the marble splendour of Africa House in
Addis Ababa, there was a notable growth in support of the expulsion of Ghana
from the OAU. Others felt that the OAU should be neutral on the matter. But led
by Emperor Haile Selassie, the organisation set about the task of finding a
solution because it would be inconceivable that the conference could go ahead
while the Guinean diplomats remained in Ghanaian custody. Selassie had been
quick to dispatch his justice minister to Accra in the hours following the
seizure of the Guineans and by Monday, November 1st, the
organisation had assembled a three-man team to proceed to Accra and Conakry.
They were Justin Bomboko, foreign minister of Congo-Kinshasa, Vice President
Joseph Murumbi of Kenya and John Nelson Williams, the Sierra Leonean minster of
information.
The
OAU team departed on November 2nd and arrived in Accra the same day. They called
on Ankrah to give them a full account of his grievances against Guinea, and
they interviewed three Ghanaian security guards who had recently arrived from
Guinea.
The
key issue for the team was of course to discover first hand whether the
Ghanaians, housed in the Villa Syli compound in Conakry were being held against
their will. This was put to rest when every member of the Ghanaian entourage
explicitly stated they were in Guinea by choice and expressed deep loyalty to
Nkrumah. They all signed a voluntary declaration refusing to return to Ghana
under the military regime. On his return to Addis Ababa, Murumbi reported that
he was satisfied than none of them had been intimidated by the Guinean
government. “At the moment,” he said, “they have good jobs and are quite
content.” The mission concluded that Ghana's claims of unlawful detention were
entirely baseless.
The
findings made the stance of Ankrah -by now in Addis Ababa- untenable.
On
Saturday November 5th, the three elder statesmen of the
organisation: Selassie, President William Tubman of Liberia and President Gamal
Abdel Nasser of Egypt met with Ankrah in a closed conference which lasted for
almost four hours. When they emerged from the meeting the contrast between the grim
exterior of Ankrah and the smiling trio of Selassie, Tubman and Nasser could
not have been any starker. The Black American newspaper the New York
Amsterdam News opined that “three skillful elders cornered a bristling
stallion (and) tamed him.”
Ankrah
had no alternative other than to order the immediate release from detention of
the Guinean hostages. Thus, ended a saga which some observers felt had the
potential for destroying the organisation.
Toure
had emerged victorious but remained dissatisfied with the OAU. Despite
President Nasser sending a special aircraft to Conakry to bring him to Addis
Ababa, Toure refused to attend the OAU conference in person because he asserted
that the “insult” to Guinea was “not wiped out” because Ankrah and the Ghanaian
delegation had not been barred from attending the summit. Instead, he sent an
observation team led by Leon Maka, the President of the Guinean National Assembly
to enlighten what he described as “friendly delegations” about the poor
treatment suffered by the Guinean “hostages” while they were in Ghana.
Toure’s
indignation at the Americans was not satiated. Earlier on November 2nd,
Edward M. Korry, the U.S. Ambassador to Ethiopia handed a letter to Diallo
Telli, the OAU Secretary General, which expressed disapproval of Ghana’s
action. It had, Korry admitted, been “contrary to accepted international
practice”. It also protested Guinea’s reprisals directed at the United States.
But
Toure was not finished with the Americans.
On
November 8th, he announced that he was expelling the contingent of
U.S. Peace Corps from Guinea. The 64 corpsmen, staff and their dependents were
given one week to leave. Personnel of the U.S. Information Service were also
instructed to depart Guinea. The Guinean government also declared Pan-American
Airlines “off-limits” in the country, in other words, the airliner’s landing
rights were revoked.
The
action, taken against peace corps, an organisation created by President John F.
Kennedy, a man whom Toure respected and admired, took many by surprise. It was
the final measure taken in expression of Guinean disapproval of what Toure
believed to have been American connivance with Ghana’s detention of its
diplomats and students.
However,
another incident involving his hardline attitude had at some point during the
height of the crisis, but which was only brought to public attention after it had
ended. A few days after the Conakry demonstrations, Guinean troops seized an
American cargo ship, the De Mundo, soon after it berthed at Conakry
port. The ship’s radio room was shut down, and the crew was prevented from
going ashore. The incident occurred around the time that another ship carrying
500 tons of U.S. aid for Guinea unloaded its cargo in Dakar, Senegal. The
sequence of action and reaction remained uncertain, but an American source
claimed that the unloading of Guinea-bound cargo at Dakar had been in reaction
to the conduct of the Guinean army in Conakry. The State Department is said to
have insisted that it reload and proceed to Conakry after the withdrawal of the
Guinean troops from the seized ship.
The
question of American aid to Guinea unsurprisingly became an issue. Why,
American columnists asked, should the Toure, now viewed as a Marxist-believing
ingrate, be allowed to benefit from such assistance? They reported that since
1962, Guinea had received up to $60 million in economic help from the United
States with half of it consisting of surplus farm products.
This
had been an issue for some long before the events of late 1966. In a syndicated
column written which appeared in the Columbus Ledger Enquirer in June
1962, Fulton Lewis jr. excoriated the Kennedy administration for sending
millions of dollars in aid that included the provision of “American experts and
modern radio equipment”, as well as funding to schools respectively for “one
for African administrators” and “the other for vocational students”. All of
this, Lewis noted, was being done to win Toure over from the Soviet camp.
But
what was not mentioned by Lewis and most of the others who criticised the
Johnson administration was continuing such aid was what Guinea was giving to
the United States. This was the granting of bauxite mining rights to U.S.
companies in the lucrative Boke region.
The
American government, which in August of 1966 had announced that it was
contemplating a drastic reduction of aid commitments to Guinea, announced on
November 2nd that it was suspending aid to Guinea. This may have
been the trigger for the Guinean authorities to send in the army to secure what
they assumed would be the last batch of aid the country would receive. But aid
to Guinea would continue while it was gradually wound down. The activities of
the American mining companies would remain unaffected.
The
state of relations between Guinea and Ghana would remain fraught for a good
number of years. A major step towards the thawing of relations occurred after
the death of Kwame Nkrumah in April 1972. President Toure, who gave his friend
a state funeral the following month
in Conakry, had initially fended off the entreaties of the Ghanaian military
regime led by Colonel Ignatius
Acheampong to have Nkrumah’s body returned to his homeland. However, after
negotiations, Nkrumah’s body was released to the Ghanaian authorities and he
was buried in his hometown of
Nkroful. And four years later, fully a decade after he had been detained on the
orders of the junta led by Lieutenant General Ankrah, Louis Lansana Beavogui,
by then Toure’s Prime Minister, visited Accra where he held talks with Acheampong
aimed at solidifying bilateral and regional relations.
As
a current affairs obsessed-child, I did often laugh in amusement when listening
on shortwave radio to the strident, unyielding tones of the voices of Soviet
newscasters when announcing the USSR's triumphs in heavy industry and crop
harvesting. I knew that they were perennially jamming radio signals emanating
from "enemy capitalist states".
But
fast-forward to the contemporary situation.
Why
does the U.S.-led West seek to do what the USSR did? It bans channels such as
RT and Press TV from the Internet and TV platforms.
The
EU for its part enforces draconian measures on the likes of retired army
Colonel Jacques Baud, a former Swiss intelligence officer who worked for NATO,
simply because his analysis of the Russia-Ukraine does not conform with the
Western political class and the mainstream media? Baud was sanctioned even
though his books only used Ukrainian and Western originated source material and
he declined repeated offers to appear on various Russian media outlets.
NathalieYamb, the Cameroonian-Swiss activist, has also been sanctioned for
"spreading" so-called "Kremlin narratives" and calling for
Francophone African states to reject France's shadow empire on the continent.
She also asserts that her specific criticisms of French President Emmanuel
Macron played a major part in the decision to have her sanctioned.
The
imposition of sanctions means that persons such as Baud and Yamb are not
allowed to travel within the EU member states. Apart from travel bans, their
assets are frozen and third parties who help them are subject to punishment.
The
banning of media platforms and sanctioning of individuals are redolent of the
sort of actions typified by the "authoritarian" and
"totalitarian" regimes to which the EU professes to be opposed.
Western
governments and the EU are in effect acting in the mannerof an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth’.
Rewind
back to the little boy who chuckled at Soviet broadcasting style and Soviet
clamp downs on the information space:
It
would have been inconceivable to him that decades later he would only be able
to tell certain truths as he saw it on Russian media.
I was alerted to the publication of this book about
France’s premier foreign intelligence agency, the DGSE (Direction générale de
la sécurité extérieure), after stumbling upon an interview with
the author at a YouTube channel concerned with spying and terrorism. The book claims
to trace “the agency's history from its early failures to its sweeping reforms
and modern-day successes”. But given the brevity of the interview and the
“concise history” of the book, I wonder how much of the book covers the
homicidal history of its organisational ancestor, the SDECE (Service de
documentation extérieure et de contre-espionnage), and, given the author’s
mentioning of the DGSE’s role in blaming the Assad government for chemical
attacks during the conflict in Syria, the extent to which France’s involvement
in what was a “dirty war” is considered a success.
The DGSE traces its roots back to the Second World War
with the creation in 1940 of the BCRA (Bureau Central de Renseignements et
d'Action) in London. Its objective was to gather intelligence and
coordinate the French Resistance. It was after two evolutions, first as the DGSS
(Direction Générale des Services Spéciaux), 1943, and then as the DGER (Direction
Générale des Études et Recherches), late 1944) that the SDECE was formed in
1947.
This was the same year that the U.S. National Security Act
created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which fully replaced the Office
of Strategic Services (OSS) that had been disbanded in 1945. An interim group
named the Central Intelligence Group (CIG) had been established by President
Harry Truman in 1946.
It is interesting to note that while the National Security
Act did not explicitly provide the CIA with a paramilitary or covert action
component, the SDECE merged components of existing military and civilian
intelligence bodies. This meant that it would be charged not only with
intelligence gathering duties but was legally enabled to use forceful means to
attain its objectives.
Thus, the history of the SDECE is replete with involvement
in the physical elimination of those designated as enemies of France. One of
its victims was Felix-Roland Moumie, the Cameroonian anti-colonial
revolutionary, who was assassinated in Geneva in 1960 by William Bechtel. Posing
as a journalist, Bechtel poisoned Moumie with a lethal dose of thallium during
dinner. Evidence gathered by the Swiss police and the issuance of an
international arrest warrant did not lead to his extradition to face trial for
murder. Bechtel died in Paris in 1988.
The SDECE also created "La
Main Rouge", a covert paramilitary organisation which
assassinated Algerian nationalists associated with the FLN (Front de
libération nationale) and West German arms dealers who supplied the FLN
with weapons during la guerre d'Algérie.
An offshoot of that war was creation of the OAS -organisation
de l’armee secrete- after the failed putsch des genereaux of April
1961. The OAS sought to keep Algeria French, an objective they believed would
be accomplished by assassinating
President Charles de Gaulle. The SDECE’s elite paramilitary unit, Service
Action, had been active during the Algerian war and its efforts were later
directed at the OAS.
A turning point for the SDECE came in 1965 when it was
discovered to have been involved in the kidnapping and disappearance of the
Moroccan dissident Mehdi Ben Barka in Paris. The remarkable level of
operational freedom it had developed was curtailed by subordinating it to the
Ministry of Defence.
However, the level of state control came into question in
the light of what came to be known as the Markovic Affair. Stevan Markovic, the
Yugoslav-born associate of film star Alain Delon whose corpse was found in a
garbage dump in the outskirts of Paris in October 1968. A salacious aspect to
the scandal was a claim that Markovic had organised sex parties for the French
elite and filmed them.
Rumours spread that one of those who engaged in these
orgies was Claude Pompidou, the wife of Georges Pompidou who had served as de
Gaulle’s Prime Minister between 1962 and 1968. Pompidou was the front-runner to
succeed de Gaulle as president, and it is claimed that the rumours were spread
by rogue elements within the SDECE who were bent on revenge for what they
perceived to have been his clampdown on the SDECE after the Ben Barka Affair.
The plot to derail Pompidou’s bid for the presidency
ultimately failed as he was elected as President in June 1969. Pompidou appointed
Alexandre de Marenches to the role of director of the SDECE. The ex-army
colonel was tasked to reform and purge it of corrupt and criminal elements. The
idea was to steer the organisation away from its predilection for political
meddling and state sanctioned executions into one dedicated to intelligence
gathering, geopolitical analysis and counterespionage.
It would be interesting to know how many pages van Puyvelde
devotes to this torrid history in opening chapter “Foundations”.
The SDECE was formally transformed into the DGSE by the
administration of President Francois Mitterrand in April 1982. But this “fresh
start” did not eradicate the old ways of dealing with those who presented a
nuisance to the interests of the French state.
In October 1983, a suicide truck bombing of a barracks housing
French military personnel on peacekeeping duties in Beirut took the lives of 58
French paratroopers. Service Action decided to take a retaliatory measure
against Iran, the sponsors of the Lebanese Shia actors who were responsible for
the bombing. A jeep packed with 1,100 pounds of explosives was parked outside
of the Iranian embassy in Beirut.
However, the suspicious embassy guards caused the French
operatives to abandon the vehicle, although soon afterwards, they fired a
rocket from 100 yards in a failed attempt to detonate it. The incident harked
back to the earlier uncompromisingly violent missions undertaken by Service
Action during the SDECE “wars” against the FLN and OAS during the Algerian
crisis. The Iranians identified France as the instigators of the attempted
bombing and the head of Service Action was subsequently removed from his
position.
But worse was to come.
In July 1985,while in pursuance of what was codenamed
“Operation Satanique”, agents of the DGSE blew up of the Rainbow Warrior,
a Greenpeace-owned sea vessel which had been protesting French nuclear tests in
the South Pacific. A photographer who was covering the protest died. Feigning
ignorance, President Mitterrand dismissed the DGSE’s director-general Admiral
Pierre Lacoste, although Lacoste would later state that he had been given
explicit permission to carry out the attack by Mitterrand himself.
This was a low point for the DGSE which could count the
extradition back to France of Klaus Barbie - the “Butcher of Lyon”- as one of
its early successes.
The profound and rewarding reforms of the DGSE to which
Van Puyvelde emphasises came after the appointment on March 23rd,
1989, of Claude Silberzahn as the organisation’s director-general. Mitterrand
broke with the longstanding tradition of appointing military officers by opting
for a career civil servant whom Van Puyvelde attributes as bringing “stability
and modernisation” to France’s approach to external intelligence.
One major focus of this change in approach which the
author appraises as having been successful was French intelligence’s contrary
position to those of the United States and Britain on the question of whether
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was in possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction. While Richard
Dearlove, the Head of MI6 -the British equivalent of the DGSE- privately
admitted to his Prime Minister that the evidence of weapons of mass destruction
was “thin” but told him that this would be no problem because “intelligence and
facts were being fixed (by the US) around the policy”, the DGSE advised President
Jaques Chirac that no concrete evidence confirmed their existence. Chirac
refused to participate in the military action, a move that was subsequently vindicated.
But while the refusal to go along with the Anglo-Saxon powers
may have brought back memories of French independent action during the era of
de Gaulle, events would later develop to the point where France and its
intelligence service would fall in line with the geopolitical agenda set by the
United States. A key step in this direction came in March of 2009 when President
Nicolas Sarkozy reintegrated France into NATO’s military command structure, a
reversal of de Gaulle’s decision to withdraw from it in 1966.
While Van Puyvelde appears to argue that the DGSE’s focus
on anti-terrorism since the 1990s has been successful, the evidence indicates
that this is strictly not the case.
Consider for instance the action taken by NATO in Libya
against the government of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Early suspicions that this
had been initiated by France were confirmed through subsequently released
public records and parliamentary investigations which were undertaken after his
overthrow.
There is evidence that the warnings provided by the DGSE to
France’s political and military leadership of the consequent chaos that would
inevitably ensue in the event of Gaddafi’s removal went unheeded. Far from stifling
terrorism, Libya’s destruction led to the empowerment of terrorist actors in
the service of the West. The destruction of Libya, then a secular state, while NATO
effectively served as the air force of militias such as the al-Qaeda-orientated
Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) was hugely ironic given its effect of enabling
the spread of Salafist insurgent groups in the Maghreb, the Sahelian region and
the Lake Chad Basin.
The ineffectiveness of “Operation Barkhane”, the anti-jihadist
counterinsurgency conducted across the Sahel in cooperation with various states,
was one of the key reasons given by those Sahelian states whose military
regimes have expelled the French military as part of the wider agenda of breaking
out of France’s shadow empire in Francophone Africa.
So far as the DGSE's role in Syria is concerned, Van
Puyvelde references the DGSE’s exfiltration of a range of sample materials from
the scene of a chemical attack allegedly carried out by the then Syrian state.
But the claim that the Ba'athist government utilised chemical warfare against
its own people is highly contested by
journalists in the independent media.
Also contested is the framing by the Western mainstream
media of the Syrian conflict as a product of the so-called “Arab Spring”. Far
from being a grass roots rebellion by a groundswell of people wishing to
overthrow a dictator to make way for a new democratic order, the Syria “dirty
war” was in fact, as Roland Dumas, a former foreign minister of France, revealed
in 2013 “prepared, conceived and organized” at least two years in advance of
what became an insurgency.
And this insurgency, a concerted effort by the United
States and its regional allies -The Gulf monarchies, Turkey and Israel- to
overthrow Ba’athist Syria, was undertaken with home grown and imported Sunni
Islamists bearing the ideology of al Qaeda.
Foreign intelligence agencies work towards promoting the
interests of their countries, but they must work within the parameters of
national foreign policy as set by their governments.
De Gaulle set out France’s traditional interests with
great clarity. His words and actions indicated that France could not be a truly
sovereign state if it was integrated into NATO’s military command structure. He
acknowledged Russia -the word he used to describe the Soviet Union- as a
civilisational state with which it was important to dialogue with and develop
trade.
Again, it is difficult to see how he, unlike France’s
contemporary political leaders, would have constrained French sovereignty by
going along with the American project of seeking to destroy Russia and
dismember it to control its natural resources. De Gaulle considered Red China,
as he did Soviet Russia, to be a civilisational entity in relation to which
France needed to deal with realistic pragmatism and not in the adversarial manner
by which the United States and the collective EU insist it be treated.
The usefulness of the DGSE is thus constricted if the unique
interests of state which it serves are undermined by the allegiance of France’s
political leaders to an American-dominated supra-national military structure
and to geopolitical policies which are geared toward preserving U.S. global
hegemony, and in West Asia, U.S. insistence on the primacy of the interests of
the State of Israel.
Interestingly, Van Puyvelde states that the DGSE maintains
a mysterious level of cooperation with its Chinese counterparts, which
apparently has managed to turn a number of DGSE officers over the years. That
failing aside, it is perhaps a useful reminder of Reinhard Gehlen’s words that
it “is the duty of every sophisticated intelligence service to keep open a
channel of communication with the enemy”. Foreign intelligence agencies can be
useful tools in repairing and promoting relations between ostensibly hostile
nations. They offer a channel through which back-channel diplomacy may be
conducted and they can cooperate when facing common threats.
This, arguably, should be the most important role the DGSE
should play in the present circumstances during which the French political
class, has willingly gone along with the post-Cold War American policy
-encapsulated in the so-called Wolfowitz Doctrine- of seeking to prevent the
rise of a global competitor capable of filling the vacuum left by the withered
Soviet Union.
The resultant anti-Russian and anti-China agenda has only
succeeded in uniting the Eurasian
landmass leaving Europe, including the French, more dependent on the declining
U.S. empire and delimiting the French foreign intelligence service to a role
which includes aiding a Ukrainian proxy tasked with weakening Russia and indirectly
supporting Islamist terror proxies including the militia which has taken power
in Syria after the fall of the Assad government in 2024.
Christian Craighead -the pseudonym of a former
special forces soldier of the British Army- was decorated for bravery for his
part in rescuing many people during a terrorist attack by Islamists in Kenya in
2019. However, his attempt to have a book about the incident published in
Britain was opposed by the government on the grounds of a confidentiality
clause in his contract of employment. Craighead lost a legal challenge to the
decision and in subsequent interviews has claimed that the state’s opposition
to his memoir is predicated on the mentality of a self-hating British elite who
favour Muslims over the indigenous British population, an outlandish claim that
does not stand up to scrutiny.
On January 15th, 2019, gunmen of the Somalian
terror militia al-Shabab stormed the DusitD2 hotel complex in Nairobi, the capital
city of Kenya. The operation began with a bomb explosion after which the
intruders began hurling grenades and firing rounds at civilians.
Craighead, who was in the country on a training mission,
heard the commotion and entered the complex and along with a Slovenian member
of the Diplomatic Protective Services Tactical began clearing the floors of the
office and car park buildings. He is claimed to have saved up to 700 people
including Kenyans, Americans and Europeans. He also killed 2 of the terrorists.
A Catholic, Craighead recalls saying a “Hail Mary” prayer before entering the
complex. In all 21 people died and around 30 were left critically injured with
one dying almost a year later.
Craighead was awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross for
his actions. The medal is awarded to members of the British armed forces for
bravery and ranks directly below the Victoria Cross and the George Cross which
are the highest awards. He later sought to record his experience of the incident
in a book. To do this, Craighead needed what is called an EPAW -Express Prior
Authority in Writing- from the British Ministry of Defence to have his book
cleared for publication.
His request was refused.
Craighead nonetheless persisted with the intention of
publishing his manuscript and the British government put him on notice that it
would seek to prevent its publication in the UK on the grounds that publication
would breach the confidentiality clause he and others involved in sensitive
work with national security implications. This includes special forces soldiers
and operatives of the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Service (MI6).
He argued that since his action during the Nairobi siege was
voluntarily undertaken and not conducted as part of an official SAS mission, his
efforts on the day did not come under his government employment confidentiality
agreement. Nor did it infringe the Official Secrets Act.
In 2023, Craighead sought to challenge the government’s
decision not to grant him an EPAW by means of a judicial review, claiming that
his freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Court of Human
Rights was infringed. This is not an "absolute right" but a
"qualified right" which can be denied in many circumstances.
The government's rationale was that publication of
Craighead’s book could harm the "operational effectiveness" of the United
Kingdom’s Special Forces (UKSF), harm morale in the military and damage
relations between the UKSF and other states.
The substantive hearing was heard in private
because "any public discussion of the lawfulness of the Defendant’s
national security assessment would reveal the information which the refusal of
EPAW was designed to protect, thereby defeating the object of the
hearing."
Craighead lost the High Court
action and was denied leave to appeal.
He has gone ahead to have the book
published in the United States by Simon & Shuster. Although the government
have stated that they will take action in the American courts which would mean
that he would be barred from obtaining royalties from book sales.
Incredibly, part of Craighead's response in interviews
undertaken since the loss of his case has been to frame government opposition
to his publication as an example of wokeness gone mad. In oneinterview he
claimed that his case represents the persecution by the ‘woke Establishment’ of
a White, Christian, working-class Briton who killed Muslim terrorists.
He also believes that his association with President
Donald Trump has played a part in this. Craighead now lives in America where he
is a signed-up adherent to the MAGA movement. Trump heard of his exploits in
Nairobi and invited him to become part of his security team in 2024.
Craighead has expressed the belief that the self-hating
elite in Britain which are seeking to destroy their country tolerate Muslim
rape gangs in Britain but have no tolerance for those such as him who kill
Muslims.
But his arguments, designed to fit into the White
identitarian narrative which pervades the MAGA and British patriots’ movements,
are decidedly overly emotional and incoherent.
For one, the British government's clandestine support of
extremist Islamist which have been tasked to overthrow a range of mostly
secular Arab governments in West Asia and North Africa have caused much mayhem
in Muslim countries. These unending "regime change" wars in countries
such as Syria and Libya have cost millions of Muslim lives.
Craighead appears to be unaware that his magus, Trump,
invited the self-proclaimed President of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, to the White
House where Trump made a
gift of Trump cologne to al-Sharra and perfume for al-Sharaa’s spouse. Al-Sharaa,
a deputy Emir of ISIS in Iraq and then the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria
shares the same Salafist-Jihadist ideology with the terrorists of al-Shabab who
carried out the Nairobi attack.
To be specific both are al-Qaeda.
The claim that the re-branding of al-Nusra as HTS
signified a shift from terrorism to democracy belies the fact that al-Sharaa,
whose nom de guerre is "Mohamed al Jolani", remained on the list of
terrorist wanted by the US until just after his militia emerged to fill the
vacuum left by the collapse of the sanctions-stricken Syrian state.
Trump referred to al-Sharaa, a man involved in the killing
of American soldiers in Iraq as a “young, attractive guy. Tough guy. Strong
past. Very strong past. Fighter.”
To his discredit, Craighead has resorted to denying the
commission of war crimes in Afghanistan even though the Independent Inquiry relating to
Afghanistan has determined that the SAS were responsible for unlawful
killings between 2010 and 2013. Testimony and evidence presented to the inquiry
alleged that the killings of unarmed Afghan civilians -including women and
children- were covered up.
His assertion that the governing elites of the UK have
"destroyed Britain" has the ring of truth. But it appears to be founded
on the belief by those within the identitarian crowd who blame Muslim and
non-White immigration for the maladies of the Western world.
If so, Craighead should be reminded that Muslim and
non-White migrants did not create the deleterious financialised economic system
which exported manufacturing abroad and has encouraged rising levels of
personal debt. Neither are they responsible for low birth rates among White
Britons. They are also not responsible for the endless wars embarked upon by
NATO which has contributed to the migration of Muslims to the West. These wars
have also contributed immensely to the huge levels of sovereign debt.
A final word.
It is worth noting that while Craighead speaks about the
initial suppression of information related to Muslim rape gangs in the UK, he
must surely be aware of the same British government's decades long suppression of
rapes committed by British troops against Kenyan women while stationed in
that country.
There is also the case of the
murder of a Kenyan woman named Agnes Wanjiru in 2012. It was only after a
decade of foot-dragging by the British authorities that the suspected soldier,
Robert James Purkiss, was arrested in 2025 and faces extradition which
he is presently contesting.
The UK Ministry of Defence has announced that British Army
Major Paul Wilks has died "in a tragic road traffic accident in Ukraine,
away from the frontlines, on 12 September (2026)."
One must wonder about the veracity of the official cause of his death.
The MoD also claimed towards the end of 2025 that Lance
Corporal George Hooley of the British Army had died in Ukraine while
"observing Ukrainian forces test a new defensive capability away from the
front line."
But one must speculate about whether both died from
Russian missile attacks or drone strikes aimed at, for instance, at one of the
command centres in Ukraine. The Ukrainians depend on American and British
intelligence capacities to target locations in Russia. The Franco-British Storm
Shadow, a long-range, air-launched cruise missile, doubtlessly requires British
assistance in training Ukrainian personnel to use them and in setting up
precision targeting.
NATO is knee deep in helping Ukraine prosecute what is in
effect a proxy war against Russia.
Back in 2024, a high-ranking Polish army officer,
Brigadier General Adam Marczak, died in Ukraine with his obituary stating that
his death was caused by "unexplained natural causes". Other reports
related that he was apparently killed by a Russian strike on a Ukrainian
military command centre in Chasiv Yar.
Perhaps we will get to know the truth after this tragic
war is over.
Recent media reports of the AES state of
Burkina Faso exporting a$10 billion worth of gold in 2025 have marvelled at a
feat which could have vey positive effect on the Sahelian nation’s economic
development. However, while many have commented on the opportunities for making
vast improvements to the country’s infrastructure, none have mentioned the fact
that maximising the extraction and exporting of a range of minerals can form
the basis of financing Burkina Faso’s a route to achieving industrialisation
and a transformation from the resource rental economic model to that of a
productive and independent economy.
The military leaders of Burkina Faso need to understand
that earning billions if you continue to utilise a resource rental economy will
get you nowhere in the long run.
Maximising the mining of Burkina Faso's minerals which
include Zinc and Lithium would collectively bring in billions of dollars (or
Yuan) which must be used as a first step to financing a plan for industrialising
Burkina Faso's economy.
No incurring of usurious Western Bretton
Woods-institutional debt or debt from Chinese loans.
The income from mining these minerals would form the basis
of developing an industrial plan for payment of electrical generation capacity,
steel capacity, and non-ferrous smelting capacity.
Concomitant to this would be the cost of mechanising
agricultural production and a programme of mass education. The agricultural
revolution must aspire way beyond peasant farming and the educational
revolution must go beyond basic goals in literacy so as to encompass
vocational-technical training and university and post-graduate level education.
Also, given that Burkina Faso like other Sahelian states
face problems related to water scarcity, the programme ought to invest in the
creation of a Great Man River project as accomplished in Libya under the
leadership of Colonel Muamar Gaddafi.
If this were accomplished, Burkina Faso would be on its
way to transforming itself from a rent resource economy into a productive one
with the advantage of being in a position of being able to extract their own
raw materials and convert them into global standard products under one currency
regime.
The USSR and South Korea accomplished this respectively
under Stalin and Park Chung Hee.
Traore and his co-leaders need to learn from the mistakes
of the economic programmes of Nkrumah in Ghana and Nyerere in Tanzania. The
former relied on international finance loans which created a state of
indebtedness and the latter's peasant-is-king ideology was not only unambitious
in scope but also created a cycle of debt with the Bretton Woods institutions.
In retirement Nyerere would complain that Tanzania did
EVERYTHING that he was advised to do and yet the country ended up spending whatever
meagre income it had on servicing debt which of course is the intent of the
Bretton Woods institutions.
It is time for African leaders to move beyond the resource
rental model and for their populations to demand that they do so. An important
consequence of building an industrial society would be to put Burkina Faso in a
position to be militarily self-sufficient. This is important considering the
jihadist insurgency bedevilling the Sahelian region and the threat of
recolonisation. The rulers during Japan's Meiji era understood this through
their slogan Fukoku Kyohei: "Rich country, strong army".
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