OF CABBAGES AND KINGS | Of Trump & Iran; And A Flashback To WMDs In Iraq And Sobhraj Saga | Farrukh Dhondy

“Say ‘no’ to everything proposed

Be negative, don’t give a shit

The Positivists have overdosed

The Negativists must use their wit…

Denial is the beginning

Of alternative ways to go

Determination delivering

Newly defiant ways to grow!”

From Kismet Haldy, by Bachchoo

The deranged orange booby President Dump of the United States has threatened to cut off trade with Spain after its Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez denied the US access to use the Spanish air bases of Moron and Ratafor to launch strikes against Iran.

Pedro Sanchez went further, using the example of the Iraq war by George W. Bush and Tony Blair, saying that it was based on the blatant lie that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were a danger to the world as they had vast deposits of “Weapons of Mass Destruction”. This claim, whose targets became known as WMD, were presumed to mean biological, chemical and nuclear arsenals.

After the defeat of Saddam in Iraq, both the US and Britain were forced to concede that the invading forces had not found any evidence of arsenals of WMD -- neither chemical, biological or nuclear.

Of course, the apologists of Mr Bush and Mr Blair resorted to the “conspiratorial” theory that with the impending defeat of Iraq, these arsenals of WMD were destroyed – untraceably so.

That brings me, gentle reader, to the recollection of an episode of my very peripheral involvement in a story about WMD.

You may be aware that from 1997 I have had the acquaintance of the convicted serial murderer Charles Sobhraj. How and why I made his acquaintance is another story, which of course is told in detail in my memoir Hawk and Hyena, which contains the episode in which Charles invited me to get involved in selling arms from the ammunition dumps of the former Soviet republics to organisations all round the world, including the Taliban.

(I’ve warned you before about advertising your stuff --Ed. Not advertising, yaar, just in the interests of truth, if readers want to quote sources --fd).

In 2002 he called me from Paris asking me what “Red Mercury” was. I have a couple of science degrees and I knew and told him that it was a purported Russian invention of a trigger for nuclear weapons, a product of the element Antimony. He didn’t say why he wanted to know, and I didn’t bother to ask. Perhaps he was catching up on his neglected physics studies?

The Iraq war happened in March 2003. Completely unrelatedly, I was, soon after, writing a screenplay which involved Red Mercury and Sobhraj’s query came to mind.

I think I asked his partner Chantal why he wanted to know about Red Mercury and she told me that he had gone to Bahrain to sell it in 2002, before the Iraq invasion. I called Charles and asked him to whom he had sold the Red Mercury. He said he had been to Bahrain to negotiate its sale and purchase with some Arab gentlemen.

I asked him if they could have been Iraqis and he said they were in Western suits and ties and yes, could have been. He added that he had in his possession coded emails from them and had secretly recorded their meeting regarding the negotiation and purchase of this nuclear trigger. He had kept all that evidence.

Much though I regretted it, being an ardent opponent of Mr Bush’s and Mr Blair’s war, I told Sobhraj that he was sitting on a very hot international news story. If Iraqi negotiators were buying nuclear triggers before the Iraq war, then it’s possible that Saddam was stocking, or preparing to stock, WMD! I said, however much I regrated it, the story had to reach the international press. Sobhraj said he’d come over that evening with the emails and recording he had.

I called a Spectator journalist called Peter Oborne with whom I had a vague acquaintance and told him the story. He invited Charles and myself to breakfast early next morning.

Charles and I went, and the then editor of the Spectator, one Boris Johnson, turned up. Boris heard the story from Charles and said it was too big a story for a weekly such as the Spectator and he would call a reporter called Mike from the Daily Telegraph. I left the meeting at that point having made the introductions.

That evening the Telegraph writer Mike called me to say that Sobhraj was demanding exorbitant sums to disclose the evidence and newspapers don’t pay for news. I said it was none of my business and it was up to him and Sobhraj.

Fifteen minutes after that call, Charles phoned to say that he was being offered a paltry £15,000 by the Telegraph and, now that he knew that it was explosive international news, he’d sell it to America -- but first he had business in Kathmandu, and could I take him to St. Pancras?

I did. I was curious to know why he would go to Nepal where he was wanted for a couple of murders. He said he had no worries as he had protection from the CIA. I knew that he had negotiated some deal with the CIA, as it was I who had connected him with a colleague who had written a history of the CIA.

The deal for which he went to Kathmandu fell through, and Sobhraj was jailed for murder there. The Red Mercury story never reached the international press!