John R. Schindler – Croatia, the War, and the Future

Croatian Six – suffer yet another disgraceful hit from the justice system

The Croatian Six Photo:ABC

In his announced book on Balkan intelligence intrigue (Agents Provocateurs: Terrorism, Espionage and the Secret Struggle for Yugoslavia 1945 – 1990), the former US National Security Agency expert, John R Schindler, now a professor at the US Naval War College, said former top UDBA (Yugoslav Secret Police) officials cited the Croatian Six case as their most successful example of agent provocateur operations.

A year ago it seemed that Ellis Peters’ words from The Potter’s Field, “… But God’s justice, if it makes no haste, makes no mistakes”, would finally apply to decades old criminal verdicts for the Australian Croatia Six, in that the verdicts would be investigated in light of new revelations about corrupt police at the time and the very likely scenario that evidence in their case was fabricated and/or tampered with.

But this it seems is not yet to be as far as exonerating the Croatian Six might be concerned. For now it seems that “justice” smiles upon unwillingness to delve officially into the history of Secret Services laundry, especially any dirty one.

In August 2012, Australia’s Attorney-General (now ex-Attorney-General) Nicola Roxon had decided not to start an inquiry into allegations by a former senior federal government lawyer that Canberra intelligence and police officials suppressed information that would have resulted in a not guilty verdict in what became known as the Croatian Six case.

Three of the five surviving men from Croatian Six had also applied to the NSW Chief Justice, Tom Bathurst, for a judicial review of their convictions in 1982 (a judicial review of the same case was refused in 1994!), which resulted in 15-year jail terms that all served, with remissions for good behaviour. They lodged this application as the Sydney Morning Herald (Hamish McDonald) investigation turned up new material supporting long-held suspicions that the former Yugoslav intelligence agency UDBA set up the six Croatian-Australian activists in a faked plot to plant bombs around Sydney in February 1979. Tom Bathurst then appointed Acting Justice Graham Barr of NSW Supreme Court to advise him on whether a judicial review should go ahead.

This week in NSW Supreme Court – the curtain has been shut, once again to a judicial review – to justice!

“… Like the appeal court in 1982, Barr thus comes back to the police evidence. But he sees only the same partial view as did the jury, complaining that the transcripts of the trial and arguments over admissibility of evidence are ‘presumably now lost’. They are not. The Supreme Court registry can get them out for him, and they are illuminating”, writes Hamish McDonald in his article – an absolute MUST READ!

What is most frightening in this case, where Justice Barr acted as a court, is that he actually went ahead and gave Roger Rogerson’s words unquestionable “credibility”. Yes, you read right: it’s the same Roger Rogerson who had led one of the Sydney raids and arrested three of the Croatian Six. It’s the same Roger Rogerson who was dismissed from the police force. The same Roger Rogerson who is also known for his association with other NSW detectives who are reputed to have been corrupt. The same Roger Rogerson heavily present as a subject in the 1996 Wood royal commission (in Australia), which found ”systemic” corruption in the NSW Police and led to disbandment of the squads involved in the Croatian Six raids. The same Roger Rogerson who was convicted of perverting the course of justice and lying to the 1999 NSW Police Integrity Commission.

So, where are we now with any prospect for the testing independently (and meaningfully) of the new discoveries that strongly suggest Croatian Six were set up by the Yugoslav Secret Police (UDBA), working in concert with individuals from the Australian Secret Service (ASIO) and police? Justice Barr’s decision to shut that door remains a final administrative decision on the matter. But given that the new discoveries include a statement by a former senior legal officer in the Department of Australia’s Prime Minister and Cabinet, Ian Cunliffe, that intelligence material which would have led to ”not guilty” verdicts had been withheld by Canberra officials in a virtual ”conspiracy to pervert the course of justice”, an inquiry could certainly be initiated by Australia’s Attorney-General or the head of ASIO.

A political pressure from Croatia (acting in the interests of its ex-patriots on issues that affect not only justice but also the reputation of Croatians) and the Croatian community for a review the Croatian Six legal case could perhaps bring positive results – at least for the world to see that when there are grave, objective, concerns for a miscarriage of justice, there are also those in power willing to investigate the matter in a deserved and fair fashion rather than raising more suspicion and disgrace of the justice system by leaning heavily on what a convicted criminal, involved with the case originally, has to say.

As Martin Luther King Jr. once said: “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals”.

Ina Vukic, Prof. (Zgb); B.A., M.A.Ps. (Syd)

Spies for Tito and murderous Communist Yugoslavia infiltrated the BBC

Mitja Mersol 1974 Photo:njena.sl

According to Jack Grimston of the Sunday Times (25 March), and The Australian, newly released secret files in Slovenia (a former Yugoslav state) revealed that BBC World Service was infiltrated by a ring of informants run by the secret police of Communist Yugoslavia (UDBA).

The spies had the task of briefing Yugoslav Marshall Tito and his secret service on their Yugoslav and British colleagues and on dissident émigrés living in Britain.

One of the informants unmasked is Mitja Mersol, currently an MP in Slovenia, who worked as an announcer for the BBC World Service during 1970’s. His UDBA codename: “Linguist”

The secret files portray London as a fertile and active ground for covert cold war operations and maneuvering between Yugoslav agents and anti-Communist émigrés,

Jure Brankovic from the Slovenian Pop TV station reported on the secret papers as showing that UDBA received a stream of information from the spies at BBC from 1950’s to 1980’s.

The secret papers show that before Mersol started at the BBC in 1971, he was issued with a special camera by the UDBA to photograph documents and he was instructed in the use of a secret writing system.

“Mersol gained the confidence of colleagues and émigrés, reporting back on topics such as their anti-Communist plotting, their love lives and who was in the pay of Scotland Yard.

The Sunday Times reports that last week Mersol said that he had worked in a way that had ‘harmed no one’.

Adding, “a man does many things in his life. Every man is a judge of his own actions and I have long ago drawn a line under what happened 40 years ago. We at that time lived in a different country, with a different system and in different circumstances.”

Mersol may not have physically harmed anyone but as a spy for one of the most murderous secret services in Europe (more murderous than the Soviet bloc’s one, as claimed by Dr. John R. Schindler, author of book: “Agents Provocateurs: Terrorism, Espionage, and the Secret Struggle for Yugoslavia, 1945 – 1990” )

It stands to logic and reason that he contributed to the information needed by UDBA to plan and execute assassinations, whether her knew what UDBA was up to or not. But in any case, the fact that UDBA was on a killing spree of Croatians and other anti-Communists living abroad was public knowledge and public suspicion so it would seem highly unlikely that he himself did not know anything about UDBA’s operations.

Dr Schindler asserts that Tito was useful to the West, so UDBA crimes were mostly ignored, even when Yugoslav agents killed abroad, frequently.

The former communist regime in Yugoslavia has a terrible history of assassinations directed against its opponents. Between 1946 and 1991 the many UDBA assassinations and assassination attempts victims were mostly Croatian émigrés, although others were targeted. The attacks were usually carried out by small teams consisting of a trigger-man supported by a spotter and were always carefully planned. The attacks were often made as targets entered or left their homes since this was the point at which they were most vulnerable and where a case of mistaken identity was least likely.

The last known UDBA hit in Britain took place on 20 October 1988 when Nikola Stedul, a 51-year-old Croatian émigré, was gunned down outside his home in Kirkcaldy, Scotland. For various reasons, the attack did not go smoothly. Stedul survived it although he was severely wounded in the head. His assailant was arrested a few hours later at Heathrow airport and identified as one Vinko Sindicic—a Yugoslav known to Western intelligence services.

The entire incident demonstrated the bankruptcy of the Yugoslav system, Brian Gallagher wrote in 2003. Furthermore, the article written by Gallagher points to the fact that Sindicic made his way back to Croatia in 1998 and that charges against him for the murder of Croatian dissident Bruno Busic in Paris was thrown out in 2000 for lack of evidence.

No surprise there. In 2000, former Communists (Social Democrats) were in government and former communist Stjepan Mesic was the president. They weren’t going to bend over backwards to look for or produce evidence they may have known about as former high-ranking communists.

One can say that while many Croatian people won independence under Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) slogan “Everything for Croatia” the antifascists within it (aka communists) operated under the slogan that came very close to “Everything against Croatia”.

Who knows what new documents and evidence of such Communist crimes will also see light of day and whether they will be processed in courts as they should. Whatever comes out of these revelations one thing is for sure: another flag of truth about why Croatians had no alternative but to free themselves from the oppression and prison that was Yugoslavia for them. One can only hope that Mersol, having said that under Yugoslavia people lived under a different system and different circumstances, will take the matter further and enlighten the world some more about those circumstances. Ina Vukic, Prof. (Zgb); B.A., M.A.Ps. (Syd)

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