I have a dark sense of humor. It’s what keeps me reasonably sane after thirty-some years of trying to work out why my best mate and political mentor turned up dead in some woods in the UK thirty-seven years ago.
During the last election, before Butler, someone said (and we’ve been hearing similar unworthy sentiments this week), they hoped that someone would assassinate Donald Trump.
I said it would never happen because all the lone, disgruntled nutjobs were gun freaks who already belonged to MAGA.
Forgive the dark humor. But, it’s where I start. And there is a ring of truth.
[UPDATE: on the issue of ‘ring of truth.’ We are now told that the alleged assassin was a conservative Mormon, who regularly posted on right-wing internet sites. So, what is a MAGA person doing shooting Charlie Kirk? I talk later of starting points for unanswered questions/suspicions of something else going on. This is one of my starting points.]
When Hugh Simmonds turned up dead, with $7 million missing from his law firm’s bank account, most people, the entire British establishment, closed the book. Answer found. But, for me, it still did not make sense. There were too many unanswered questions. And I wanted answers for his three young children, aged 11, 8, and 2. And believe me. Without taking away from anyone’s grief, this past week has brought back all those memories (https://tinyurl.com/j9bhhk68).
I started asking all the right questions, in what turned out to be all the wrong places. I stumbled into a roller coaster of intelligence intrigue, covert arms deals, and high stakes and deadly political gamesmanship, that spanned the globe, and all came back to the Eighties, London, and my mate.
I didn’t go looking for it. I have an arm that remains bruised I have pinched it so many times. And I am regularly asked if I am telling the truth, and if I believe what I have been told.
My answer is always the same: even if 99% of what I have uncovered is BS, it is a million miles removed from the establishment story about Hugh, and it paints a picture that is so resonant, that it still explains what is happening in the headlines today — including Israel, Iran, Epstein, Russiagate, and now the Kirk assassination (possibly).
When you have a theory that explains some physical or medical phenomenon, and it can predict what is going to happen, you believe it.
Now, we are at the beginning (not the end) of unraveling the truth about Kirk’s assassination. The question asked in the subject heading of this post is legitimate. and the processes I went through, to try to understand how and why Hugh turned up dead, may well help to explain why Charlie Kirk is dead today, and if the alleged assassin acted alone.
In this regard, as I have explained elsewhere, there remains in my view nothing about the assassination that looks amateurish, and everything that has the hallmark of a professional assassination (https://tinyurl.com/ycyr9xm6). If not professional, the assassination was frighteningly proficient.
With Hugh, when I identified his body in the woods, there was no rosy glow to his skin. My research shows that Carbon Monoxide poisoning (exhaust fumes through a garden hose) causes rosy glow. He left no suicide note. And no one could find the money. If he stole the money to run away, why didn’t he run away? These were the starting points. So, both instances had recognizable starting points.
But, what if all the evidence suggests that Kirk’s assassin really seemed to have acted alone? First, who is presenting the evidence? A year after Butler, we still have questions that are unanswered — and now unanswered by a MAGA government.
Next, one of the primary things I have learned first-hand from my intelligence sources is that most assassinations are not straight-line. They are not black-and-white recruit/execute/getaway, same people, you know who is who, and what is what.
Think Oswald. We thought he was communist. But maybe he was actually sideways recruited by right-wing, anti-communists?
My rollercoaster brought me to my Israeli Intelligence informant, Ari Ben-Menashe, in 1993, when I read one paragraph of his book. In 1989, one of my British Intelligence informants used one-book code to inform me that he believed Hugh had been killed in the woods by the Mafia.
The paragraph in Ari’s book described how he had been tasked by the Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, to put together a team to take out all those senior people in Europe, still involved in selling arms to Iraq, at the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988.
Ari narrated how the team had taken out dozens of people specifically in November 1988. Hugh died on November 15, 1988. Ari had used standard cut-out tradecraft to obscure the involvement of Israeli Intelligence. The team of independent contractors had been hired by a front company, pretending to be an asset of the Mafia.
On the one hand, this was the sort of snippet that I had to use to piece together the circumstances and possible reasons for Hugh’s death. On the other hand, it brought me to Ari, a major source for my eventual book, “Maggie’s Hammer” (https://maggieshammer.com/).
I wrote to Ari’s publisher. Ari then contacted me by phone. And his first words were that Hugh was a name on the list from that November in 1988. Ari then changed his mind about six times over the following years. We did not kill him. The CIA did. Maybe it was suicide after all. Check out his mates in MI6.
The point here is that anyone trying to work out what is behind a strange or significant assassination or death has to deal with gut instinct, double-checking, and sources who lie for a living (spies). Nothing is straightline occurrence or explanation.
When I wrote my piece yesterday about Kirk’s assassination being a professional hit, there were images released through the media. One was a close-up of the alleged assassin’s face, looking very military. That face bears no resemblance to the mugshot issued today. Was it AI? Who distributed it? Why? All of this muddies the water.
We live in an age of intense communication, realistic video games, WhatsApp, internet, and the like. Folks get out. Everyone is more cosmopolitan than they used to be. Everyone is more open to suggestion than they used to be.
Even if it was ever the case, an entity does not need to hire an assassin in a straightforward way. Cut-outs can be used. Fake front companies. It’s not even necessary to have direct communication. Do we seriously believe it is only Muslim jihadists who can radicalize?
What if the alleged assassin was in a WhatsApp group? What if he met folks at a rifle range (see pic). What if he was open to suggestion, and then formulated a plan, on the basis of further suggestions?
All of this could allow for someone looking like a loner, but actually being inspired, directed, manipulated by someone, something else.
More than one of my intelligence sources regularly changed their stories. On one occasion, one of my informants took two shots at me in an underground parking lot in Glasgow, Scotland A few months later, he was feeding me useful information. Then, he told me I was not safe in Europe. In 1998, he told me I was safe in the US, because it would draw too much attention to me for me to turn up dead. Charlie Kirk had been selling the same brand of politics over the previous ten years. Did something change? My article from yesterday suggests, yes. He started opining that Epstein was a creature of Israeli Intelligence.
Getting back to me, was I being manipulated? In order to arrive at the big picture I now believe is true about the Eighties and the decades since, I had regularly to follow where the leads led, by applying common sense to all my analyses (https://tinyurl.com/2xxzkh2f). Still do. And I do it with Kirk.
So, whether recruited directly or indirectly, who might benefit from Kirk’s death? Again, I addressed this in my article from yesterday. The issue that still resonates the most with me is that Kirk had begun to speak out about the possibility that Epstein had been recruited by Israeli Intelligence. Even Greta Van Susteren asked it of Netanyahu in an interview today. I can see that there would be folks who would not want the wider covert activities of Epstein (intelligence, arms, money-laundering, Russian Mafia, etc.) being pursued by someone of Kirk’s visibility.
Should Charlie have feared for his life? Here, I can offer some of my own experiences. I mentioned a few above. I was shot at in 1989. I was told Europe was not safe for me in 1989. I was warned off by the CIA in 1990. I was told I was ok in the US in 1998. I believe my drink was spiked in 1993, after I met with Ari for the first time. I blacked out. Had I not had a further unexpected drink, I would have blacked out in my car. I was warned off by the CIA again in 2016, after “Maggie’s Hammer” was published.
I had three well-known investigative reporters in the UK each take up my story. In all three cases, the journalists came back to me (one very scared), and informed me that they had been told to stop pursuing the story. The scared journalist had had his life threatened.
I met with one of my British Intelligence informants (the one who shot at me) in his apartment in Glasgow. He was so scared, he drank a whole bottle of scotch. When I got onto the topic of lawyers laundering money for the Tory Party from arms deals in one telephone conversation with Ari, his wife must have been listening on another line. She cut in, and said I should stop endangering her husband’s life. She was terrified. What on earth could terrify the wife of an Israeli Intelligence officer?
On the subject of never accepting anything at face value, and to keep asking questions until satisfied, and to set in context whether or not the views that Charlie was beginning to express might have triggered a reaction from people who just didn’t care about consequence or collateral damage, I leave with an excerpt from my book:
“[Mohammed] al-Fayed [Egyptian arms dealer, married to sister of Adnan Khashoggi; owner of Harrods and Ritz Hotel in Paris] was also trumpeting to the press that he would now [Summer of 1997] hammer the nail well and truly into the coffin of the Conservative Party with total exposure of the Tories’ remaining dirty dealings with respect to Al Yamamah [senior Tory politicians taking kickbacks from the Al Yamamah arms deal with Saudi Arabia, which kickbacks Ari told me were laundered by Hugh].
I wrote a letter to al-Fayed, setting out my reasoning, and asking him if he’d happened to come across Hugh in his Hotel, up to no good. Not really expecting al-Fayed to respond, I got a little ‘familiar’ in the letter, and commended him on his courage in speaking out so boldly about [Middle Eastern] arms merchants, who probably wouldn’t be too happy at his threats to expose them, along with right-wing Tories.
Less than a month later, in the middle of the night of August 31st, 1997, his son, Dodi, was killed in mysterious circumstances, in a car crash in Paris, as he was traveling from the Ritz Hotel, back to his apartment, with his girlfriend. The girlfriend was Diana, Princess of Wales.”
To this day, al-Fayed has never again publicly referenced arms deals. At the time, like Charlie and Hugh, he had other young children.
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