In July 1981 a young boy disappeared from Barnes, south-west London, as he made his way home from the crowds gathered to watch the wedding procession of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer.
Months later, a man called the child’s father, claiming to be a prostitute and saying he had information about the young boy’s disappearance.
“He told me he believed (my son) may have been taken by pedophiles in the Elm Guest House near Barnes Common. He said there were very highly placed people there. He talked about judges and politicians who were abusing little boys,” the father later told the Telegraph.
Although he recorded the conversation and passed it to the police, it was apparently never investigated.
“They just pooh-poohed it and I never heard anything about the tape again. The whole thing went cold,” said the father. “At that time I trusted the police. But when nothing happened, I became confused and concerned. Now it is clear to me that there has been a huge cover up.”
In February 1982, parts of the boy’s skeleton were found in a West Sussex woodland.
In February 2015, a judge was appointed to lead an inquiry into claims that senior figures in British public life participated in a violent pedophile ring, and that they were protected by an establishment cover-up spanning more than three decades.
But the new appointee is not the first. The claims reach so far into the heart of the British establishment that two senior legal figures appointed to lead the inquiry were compelled to resign, after it became clear they were linked to people it would need to investigate.
Home Secretary Theresa May eventually decided to look abroad, picking Justice Lowell Goddard, who has a record of investigating police mishandling of child abuse cases in her native New Zealand.
May said Goddard is “as removed as possible from the organizations and institutions that might become the focus of the inquiry.”
Elm House is one of at least three locations where witnesses say they were abused by politicians and other senior establishment figures during the late 70s and early 80s. Another is a block of flats on Dolphin Square in Pimlico, West London. At one time, it was home to at least 80 members of parliament (MPs).
Investigative website Exaro, which has taken a lead in reporting on the scandal, interviewed three men who say they were sexually abused there as children by MPs, and who separately identified a former Conservative cabinet minister as having been present at the time.
One of the men claimed to have witnessed three child murders, one in front of the former minister, during the “abuse parties.” A senior police officer working on the case described the allegations as “credible and true.”
Two of the men said that they were brought to the abuse parties by Peter Righton, who advised the government on child care, but secretly ran pro-pedophilia network the Pedophile Information Exchange. He was convicted of child pornography charges in 1992.
In December, Labor MP John Mann handed a dossier to police naming 22 politicians alleged to have been involved in the Westminster pedophile ring, of whom 14 were Conservative. Six of the accused were reportedly still serving parliamentarians.
What did Margaret Thatcher know?
Claims that senior figures in the British establishment had criminally pursued a sexual interest in young children are understood to have reached Margaret Thatcher when she was prime minister — three times. Yet she reportedly did nothing about them.
Between late 1980 and early 1981, Thatcher was presented with a series of notes on the sexual interest in young children of former diplomat and deputy director of MI6, Peter Hayman. Her own annotations, which came to light in January 2015, suggest she did not want to see Hayman named, and that she considered the allegations a “slur.”
The file says there was no evidence he had ever acted on his “fantasy,” although he has subsequently been identified by a witness as an allegedly active participant in the abuse.
In July 2014, Thatcher’s former bodyguard, also a former police detective chief inspector, claimed that he warned the prime minister over allegations that her adviser and confidant Peter Morrison had participated in sex parties with underage boys. She went on to appoint Morrison deputy chairman of the Conservative party in 1986.
Archie Hamilton, then Thatcher’s parliamentary private secretary, has subsequently said that in his recollection the allegations only concerned sex parties involving adult men.
Thatcher is also alleged to have ignored a third warning. A former Conservative activist, Anthony Gilberthorpe, claimed last July that he had attended sex parties with top Tory parliamentarians at the 1981 and 1984 Conservative party conferences.
“There were several men walking from one room to another and enjoying sex acts with other naked men, including boys who were clearly only about 15 or 16 years old. I saw Keith Joseph (Thatcher’s right-hand man) there and a politician who is now still a serving MP,” he said.
He said he’d also been asked to procure “entertainment” for two cabinet ministers at the 1983 conference.
“I was expected to find the youngest and prettiest boys. It was what those men wanted,” he said.
Gilberthorpe claims he did as he was asked, returning with “two boys who were aged about 15 and no older.”
The party activist says he sent a 40-page dossier to Thatcher in 1989, describing what he had seen. He says he received no response, but was summoned to a meeting with William Hague, now leader of the House of Commons, and a senior civil servant.
According to Gilberthorpe, the civil servant dismissed the claims.
“Why you are writing to the prime minister about these matters is beyond me,” Gilberthorpe recalled the civil servant saying at the meeting. Hague, he claimed, said very little.
Detectives, dossiers and D-notices
It wasn’t that no one had been aware of the far-reaching allegations at the time, or even that no one had tried to do anything.
In 1982, police raided Elm House. Although as many as 12 boys told police that they had been abused there, no charges of child abuse were brought.
After the raid, the press published two series of articles about the goings-on at Elm House. One 1982 article referred to “the murder of one boy and the disappearance of another.”
But several police officers have claimed investigations into prominent pedophiles were shut down.
“It went to Cabinet level,” one former detective wrote on an online forum for serving and ex-members of the Metropolitan police, in a discussion to which several officers contributed.
The former editor of the Sunday Mirror has said he was told by police that after Thatcher’s adviser Peter Morrison was arrested for molesting children in a public toilet, senior officers ordered the case dropped.
Sometime in the early 1980s, Barbara Castle, a former Labor cabinet minister and then a member of the European Parliament, passed a dossier naming 16 politicians who were allegedly supporters of the Pedophile Information Exchange to Don Hale, at the time editor of the Bury Messenger local newspaper. Last July, Hale claimed that his office had then been raided by Special Branch, who seized the dossier. They issued him with what he says appeared to be a D-notice, an official order not to publish information deemed sensitive to national security. Another local newspaper editor was also issued with a similar notice around the same time.
A spokesperson for the D-notice system told the Guardian: “If Don Hale was ‘served’ with anything purporting to be a ‘D-notice’, it was quite obviously a fabrication.”
The late Conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens also appears to have realized that something was badly wrong, and by 1984 had compiled a 40-page dossier naming eight well-known figures.
Dickens told his son that the dossier would “blow the lid off” the case, but he chose to give the file to then Home Secretary, Leon Brittan. It has since disappeared, along with 114 other relevant Home Office documents.
Brittan died on January 21, 2015 and has since been named by the Mirror as the cabinet minister who, according to the witness cited by Exaro, was present during the killing of a child during an “abuse party” at Dolphin Square.
Senior Conservative politicians praised Brittan and denied the claims. Hague called him a “kind, assiduous, and brilliant man.”
The former Home Secretary was buried in an unmarked grave in a discreet ceremony in the last week of January 2015.
As Hames states, the problem is an international one. As this CNN report indicates, the downloading of child pornography by employees of the Pentagon was widespread – and largely ignored (although many of these probably had pornography put on their computers for potential blackmail should anyone consider exposing department corruption):
An even more shocking paedophilia scandal pointing to the involvement of figures at the highest level of American politics was uncovered in the unaired documentary, Conspiracy of Silence.
In Belgium, the case of Marc Dutroux and the ineffectiveness of the prosecutors to uncover the truth led to a mass protest from the Belgian public. Again, allegations of a high-level cover-up were made (which once again reminds us of a time when the corporation was capable of hard-hitting investigative journalism). The “Dutroux Affair” had shades of Satanism, practiced by European elites, in scenes which conjure images of a far more dark and twisted version of the occult orgies depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Peter Conradi, writing in the Sunday Times on December 29, 1996, reported:
“Brussels Satanic sects involved in bizarre rites including human sacrifice are being linked by Belgian police with this summer’s string of grisly pedophile murders in which at least four children died. Five witnesses came forward last week and described how black masses were held, at which children were killed in front of audiences said to have included prominent members of Belgian society. One investigator said it was “like going back to the Middle Ages”. The tentacles of the sects appear to have stretched beyond the borders of Belgium, to Holland, Germany and even America. The witnesses – several of whom claim to have received death threats – say that young babies were handed over by their parents willingly in return for money. In other cases the victims were abducted. The witnesses, who are believed to have identified the sites where the masses took place to the police, said organizers had also photographed participants and threatened to hand over the pictures if they went to the police.”
While most high-ranking pedophiles tend to escape prosecution once the cover-up machine goes into overdrive, there are occasional convictions which further highlight the extent of the problem. Jos Verbeek, the director of Unicef’s Belgian committee, was arrested and charged with inciting minors to debauchery – the case led to the resignation of the head of the United Nations Children’s Fund in Belgium. Unicef would later expose the raping of children in Sudan by UN staff, while the role of UN contractor Dyncorp in human trafficking and forced prostitution was revealed by a UN whistleblower.
The true reach of the tentacles of seemingly intertwining pedophile networks – and the heights they reach in the upper strata of society (who certainly have historical form when it comes to excess and debauchery) – will probably never come to light, despite all the good intentions and hard work of the investigators and crusaders doing their best to expose the systematic abuse of children.
“What you have to understand, John, is that sometimes there are forces and events too big, too powerful, with so much at stake for other people or institutions, that you cannot do anything about them, no matter how evil or wrong they are and no matter how dedicated or sincere you are or how much evidence you have. That is simply one of the hard facts of life you have to face. You have done your part. You have tried to expose the evil and wrongdoing. It has hurt you terribly. But it has not killed you up to this point. I am telling you, get out of this before it does.”
– Former CIA director and Cercle member William Colby giving advice to his friend senator John DeCamp, author of The Franklin Cover-Up.
Sources: Disinfo.com; TheTruthSeeker.co.uk; DailyStar; Infowars, DavidIcke.com
VIDEO: Almost two months on from Exposure’s documentary The Other Side of Jimmy Savile, Mark Williams-Thomas tracks the progress of the police investigation into sexual abuse claims made against the former TV and radio star, asking how he achieved his considerable power and influence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zu5bwJX4uBE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhLfotgl6A4
Recommended Books:
Dan Davies has spent more than a decade on a quest to find the real Jimmy Savile, and interviewed him extensively over a period of seven years before his death. In the course of his quest, he spent days and nights at a time quizzing Savile at his homes in Leeds and Scarborough, lunched with him at venues ranging from humble transport cafes to the Athenaeum club in London and, most memorably, joined him for a short cruise aboard the QE2.
Dan thought his quest had come to an end in October 2011 when Savile’s golden coffin was lowered into a grave dug at a 45-degree angle in a Scarborough cemetery. He was wrong. In the last two and a half years, Dan has been interviewing scores of people, many of them unobtainable while Jimmy was alive. What he has discovered was that his instincts were right all along and behind the mask lay a hideous truth. Jimmy Savile was not only complex, damaged and controlling, but cynical, calculating and predatory. He revelled in his status as a Pied Piper of youth and used his power to abuse the vulnerable and underage, all the while covering his tracks by moving into the innermost circles of the establishment.
Kat Ward was the first victim to speak out about the abuse she suffered at the hands of Jimmy Savile. Her shocking testimony was the catalyst for the uncovering of decades of abuse and cover-ups. Kat Ward’s childhood was marked by physical, emotional and sexual abuse. She was eventually taken into local authority care to a children’s home in Norfolk, and first encountered Savile whilst on a ‘holiday’ with the home on Jersey. Later, she was moved to Duncroft Approved School in Surrey, a secure unit. Amazingly, Savile turned up there too; he would regularly drive up in his Rolls-Royce and offer sweets and cigarettes in return for sexual favours. Kat’s revelations had already appeared in a memoir she’d placed online using Savile’s initials, but she first spoke on camera as part of Newsnight’s infamous shelved Savile expose. However, it was ITV’s Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile (in which Kat did not take part), that led to his unmasking as a serial sex offender and opened the floodgates for hundreds of other victims to come forward, and for many other offenders to be unmasked.Freddie Starr brought a High Court case against her for libel and slander, seeking GBP300,000 in damages, calling her ‘liar’ and ‘nutter’. It failed spectacularly in July 2015, with costs awarded against him. Although the last few years have been trying, they have ultimately brought Kat vindication after years of being labelled an attention-seeker and liar. Her book, which charts her life from the 1960s to the end of Starr’s failed action, is a unique, harrowing and immensely moving perspective on one of the biggest news stories of the last decade.
When Sir Jimmy Savile died in October 2011, he was celebrated as a prolific charity fundraiser who dedicated his time to worthy causes. But on October 3rd, 2012, ITV broadcast an investigation into Savile’s behavior called Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile. In it they revealed the true, predatory, and evil man behind the popular TV persona. In the documentary, several women alleged he sexually abused them when they were underage. This sparked a flurry of allegations in the following days and weeks from other alleged victims. So far police have been called to investigate reports of abuse on young children from as long ago as 1959 and anticipate the number of victims to be in the region of 300. But how Savile was allowed to get away with such monstrous crimes for so long has been the subject of immense debate and has led to the investigations of several British institutions. The BBC has been criticized and is hosting an internal investigation into how Savile’s behavior was never called into question and how abuse allegations during his long career at the corporation failed to be flagged. An investigation is also underway into the canceling of a Newsnight program in 2011. The Department of Health has also said it will investigate its own conduct in appointing Savile to lead a “taskforce” overseeing the management of high security psychiatric hospital Broadmoor in 1998. Abuse is also alleged to have taken place at Stoke Mandeville Hospital and Leeds General Infirmary, where Savile volunteered. This is a well researched and informative look at how a predatory pedophile was allowed to go unnoticed for so long and to breach a nation’s trust is such a cruel and evil way.
