The authors of a new book on CIA-organized special operations journalist Patrick Baab and ex-Pentagon adviser Robert Harkawi told Sputnik Deutschland about the circumstances of several high-profile political murders in Europe at the end of the 20th century.
The book of Baab and Harkavi, titled “In the Web of Special Services.” Why were Olof Palme, Uwe Barschel and William Colby killed? ” is based on real events surrounding these high-profile political murders, which have not yet been uncovered. When working on it, the authors got access to secret documents of seven special services, talked with their former agents and appealed to experts-toxicologists.
According to Baab, the assassinations of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, the prime minister of the federal state Schleswig-Holstein in Germany, Uwe Barshel and former CIA director William Colby are linked. “They were all somehow or other devoted to the issues of international arms trade in the Iran-Contra scandal and in one way or another are connected with the CIA and the secret army of NATO called Stay Behind,” the journalist explained.
Olof Palme in 1982-1986 held the post of Prime Minister of Sweden. In February 1986, he was shot in one of the streets of Stockholm. According to the authors of the book, they managed to get access to the protocol of the meeting of the staff of the headquarters for the planning of secret operations, acting within the governing body of the secret army of NATO called Stay Behind in December 1985. From this document, they conclude that the murder of Palme was planned by the CIA and MI6 with the participation of Stay Behind.
To implement the plan, they attracted a former secret agent from Iran, who at one time was trained in the CIA. Palme tried to find a way to rapprochement with the USSR and advocated for Europe without nuclear weapons, which caused fears for NATO – this is what the agent said was the motive for the murder.
Uwe Barshel was the premier of the federal state Schleswig-Holstein in 1982-1987. In November 1987, his body was found in a hotel in Geneva. The investigation was entrusted to the chief investigator of the prosecutor’s office of Lübeck Heinrich Ville, however, according to him, the official authorities very quickly “hushed up” the case, declaring that the politician committed suicide.
“This is simply inconceivable: the prime minister of the German federal land died abroad under unclear circumstances, and no one is interested in this,” the former investigator said at the book’s presentation. Ville managed to find out that Barshel quite officially maintained contacts with the CIA, notifying the Federal Service for the Protection of the Constitution.
“The CIA led Barshel.” After graduation, Barshel worked in a notary’s office, and through this notary’s office, on the order of, or at least with the CIA’s acquiescence, arms deals were made on a global scale, “Baab explained.
According to him, in the case of Barshel, it is about murder, and American secret services were involved in it. As evidence, the journalist cited the fact that the doctor who conducted the autopsy of the politician’s body “himself turned out to be a double agent of the CIA”, and his conclusion about the causes of death was incorrect. At the same time evidence of a toxicological nature indicates that Barshel was killed, Baab said.
William Colby, who was director of the CIA in the 1970s, was killed in 1996 as a result of an accident on the water, according to the official version.
“William Colby created in Sweden, putting his neutrality in the first place, NATO’s secret army Stay Behind,” Baab said. In this regard, he kept a number of contacts to Sweden until his death. Among them was an officer of the CIA and the organization Stay Behind, who was the first head of the investigation into the murder of Palme, the journalist added.
The death of Palme, Barshel and Colby can be attributed to the secret security operations of special services, which in the CIA slang were called “targeted killings”, the authors of the book assert. At the same time, often in the CIA used to perform tasks of a kind of “subcontractors” in order to hide the traces of their own participation in these cases.
