Flight149: a case history. How unseen hands used disinformation in an attempt to disrupt an investigation.
Background to my book Operation Trojan Horse/Flight149……
During the course of a long investigation into the fate of British Airways flight 149, whose passengers and crew were delivered into the hands of the dictator Saddam Hussein in August 1990, I was targeted with very skilfully produced disinformation.
The use of disinformation to muddy the waters, to divert suspicion in another direction, or to discredit investigators is a classic tool. I do not know whether I was the victim of a government sponsored effort or simply a private initiative by someone acting out of malice. But like most successful disinformation, it blended together facts with falsehoods.
At the centre of any investigation involving government secrets is a crucial relationship – that between a reporter and his source. A reporter needs sources inside the secret world and needs to be able to trust them. The source needs to trust that the reporter will do his job and protect their identity – spies and special forces soldiers talking about secret missions are committing a crime for which they can be sent to prison.
Trust is the key – an investigative reporter’s reputation relies on it. The sources that I have used for my stories have been developed over a large number of years.
I trust them and they trust me.
Then there is Nigel Appleby, alias Niall Arden, alias Niall Adams.
I still do not know his real name – so for the purposes of this story I will call him Nigel.
There is one fact about the man called Nigel Appleby that I can be sure of. He is or was a military artist and his work included paintings of missions of the SAS, the Special Air Service. You can still buy prints online. His work was known in the special forces community and so he clearly had contacts in that area.
I had no reason to doubt his bona fides when I met him through an introduction from the respected publisher Andrew Lownie. He was also a contact of the well known author Damien Lewis.
It was not Nigel himself who I was interested in but to use him as an intermediary to find members of the secret, deniable intelligence/special forces team who were on board BA149 – they were the reason the plane was flown into a war zone. I already had two first hand sources – I was looking for other sources to fill in details of the mission.
Nigel subsequently introduced me to a number of people, either in person or via email, who said they had information about the mission. Like any investigative reporter, I checked new information against what I already knew.
The holy grail would be some sort of official documentation about the mission. One contact led to another then another, over a period of a year.
Then one day I received an email with attached documents from a man calling himself Malcolm Anthony Pettit, who I had been communicating with about the Inc team and what happened to them.
I had never met him – our contact was all via email – and I had no idea whether that was his real name but the documents he sent were stunning.
There were four of them and they looked like after action reports of the BA149 mission: an example is shown above
I showed the documents to another contact, a retired SAS man of unimpeachable reputation, and he said they were real.
It was exhilarating – you can spend your whole journalistic career and never see original documentation like this.
My excitement increased as I cross checked some of the details outlined in the documents with facts I already knew about the mission, facts that were not publicly available.
It all seemed to check out.
Then one day I was sitting at my dining table at home re reading a history of Operation Desert Storm and going through the timeline.
The air war had started on January 17 1991 but the ground war did not start until a month later and Kuwait City was not liberated by Allied troops until February 27. 27/2/91.
With a sickening feeling I re-read the dates in the documents which said that “Bullford’’ and “Hallet” had been extracted after US troops entered Kuwait City on February 11. The official approved stamp date on the documents was 15- 02- 91.
Both dates were clearly wrong. American troops were not in the city on those dates, they arrived later.
I had the documents re-examined by a number of experts and the consensus was that they were written by someone with inside knowledge but who had made a number of errors, deliberate or otherwise.
One of the call signs Tango Hotel Sunray Six, for instance, should have been Tango Hotel Sierra Six.
They would have been using military batteries so its unlikely that they could have obtained new ones while in hiding in Kuwait.
It seemed to be disinformation but what was the motive ? To discredit me and the investigation ? Plain malice ? Or some other reason I was unaware of ?
It wasn’t plain and simple fraud – no one helping me had or ever has asked for money, nor would I ever pay for information.
The incident caused me immense difficulty with the production company and agent I was working with at the time so as an exercise in disruption it certainly worked.
Later one of my contacts told me:
´We had some people above us who actively wanted you to complete your book and documentary so that it could then be deliberately trashed and your credibility ruined and the whole story swept under the carpet once and for all. You must have realised you have opened a hornets nest on this story and no one up the chain wanted it out in its complete entirety.”
As for Nigel Appleby, he had under the names Niall Arden and Adams claimed to be himself a special forces solider and he had written a book called Desert Fire about a mission to Iraq.
Niall/ Nigel was subsequently discredited and his book was alleged to be either a hoax, or a mixture of fact and fiction. His own claims of a military career were challenged by members of the special forces community and he was unable to prove he was who he claimed to be.
There was a claim – unverified – that he had been put up as a front man to write the book by other secret soldiers.
He disappeared from view. The publishers announced they had withdrawn Desert Fire but at least some copies were actually published – you can still buy the book today – with a glowing blurb written by Damien Lewis, who has written many serious books about special forces and who has an unimpeachable reputation.
So nagging questions still remained.
What was real and what was not ?
My investigation carried on. Later, when I developed other sources on the mission, they were able to verify some of the key details in these documents. So my best guess was this was classic disinformation – mixing facts and falsehoods.
Last year, after my book Operation Trojan Horse came out, new sources came forward to confirm the mission.
The perils of identifying special forces soldiers:
Despite the proliferation of books and movies, soldiers who work in the elite special forces units of the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are a discreet bunch. I have met many of them during the course of my career. They seldom discuss their missions with their fellow soldiers. Their wives and girlfriends are generally kept in the dark. Very few of them will ever speak to journalists and then only after a relationship of trust is established. You get to know one and he might, just might, after a long period of time, introduce you to someone else.
The secrecy is there for operational reasons, of course, but also out of genuine concern for their personal safety. Men who have gone up against the IRA, or the Taliban, are high value propaganda targets for terrorists.
The secrecy is an opportunity for wannabees and fraudsters. Pubs in Hereford in the UK, home of the Special Air Service, attract pretty girls from the Welsh valleys who are, as one young woman who married an SAS man put it to me, looking for “a man with a tan.” It is an easy chat up line for someone to pretend they are SAS.
Telling the real soldiers from the fakers is made harder by the fact that SF operatives, of course, don’t go round disclosing their real names to outsiders.
I once had correspondence from a contact who said his name was Grahame Bennet. I was thinking of using him as a source so I asked for his real name, service details and photo.
They promptly arrived:
Leonard A. Chaganis
Army service No: 522299
7 Light Infantry
23 Special Air Service Regiment (V)
32 Armoured Engineer Regiment
26 Armoured Engineer Squadron
105 Royal Engineers Regiment
72 Royal Engineers Regiment
Kings Troop
Major
1977
2000
As a double check, I looked up Leonard Chaganis and tracked him down.
No he said it wasn’t me and I have no idea why someone is using my name and no that’s not my picture.
To complicate matters the photo I was sent of Bennet/ Chaganis was the spitting image of a Facebook friend of the Chaganis who was now telling me he knew nothing about all this.
Was this another attempt at disinformation or just someone messing around ? It was impossible to say.
The only sure fired way to avoid such diverting mysteries is to rely on trusted contacts who have proved their bonafides over a number of years. And its extremely useful if your sources have been threatened with prosecution. Then you know they are the real deal.
One consequence of these mysteries is that I developed a lifelong interest in the uses of misinformation and disinformation. I have researched it intensively and now teach a university course on the subject.
..And more from my battles with fake news, misinformation and disinformation…
Expert: KGB group with Putin spread false rumors about Estonia
This was the headline to a story about my investigation into the sinking of the ferry Estonia, highlighting my reporting on the Russian disinformation campaign following the tragedy that cost 852 lives.
It was part of a brilliant piece of work by a team of Norwegian and Swedish journalists who produced a five party documentary series that completely demolished the official version of events.
The story was published 12 Oct 2020 at 14.19 by the Expressen newspaper, Sweden:
“A group of Russian KGB officers, including Vladimir Putin, spread conspiracy theories about the sinking of Estonia.
This is to hide alleged Russian interference, claims Stephen Davis, who worked as a consultant for the new documentary about Estonia.
It was a successful fake news operation, several of these people are still close to Putin today, he says.”
https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/expert-kgb-grupp-med-putin-spred-falska-rykten-om-estonia/
In 2019 I developed a new course for the University of Otago – Journalism Now: seeking truth in a world of disinformation and fake news. The next course, MFCO231, starts in January 2022, and is available to students worldwide.
More courses….
