Chapter IV The Terror Drills That Became Real: 9/11, the London Bombings & the Sinking of Estonia: Solving 9/11 The Deception That Changed The World by Christopher Bollyn

Chapter IV

The Terror Drills That Became Real: 
9/11, the London Bombings & the Sinking of Estonia

The easiest way to carry out a false flag attack is by setting up a military exercise that simulates the very attack you want to carry out.
- Captain Eric H. May, former U.S. Army military intelligence officer

The past two decades have been marked by a large number of man-made terror events which remain unsolved to this day. Several of these events involved heinous crimes of mass murder and are similar in a remarkable way. These are the disasters which occurred during security drills or military exercises in which the scenario was incredibly similar, if not identical to the real-life terror attack.   Understanding the nature of the exercises that created the background and framework for these attacks is essential to understanding how the attacks were carried out. The fact that these real-life terror events occurred within the context of virtually identical terrorism/security exercises has been completely ignored by the media -- as if the exercises had never happened. Of the major terror events that occurred during such exercises, we will look at three specific examples: the aerial attacks of 9/11, the bombings of the London Underground and a bus in 2005, and the sinking of the Baltic ferry Estonia in 1994.

While there certainly have been other major disasters that occurred within the context of military exercises, the sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk in 2000, for example, and the 1988 downing of Iran Air Flight 655 by the USS Vincennes in the Persian Gulf, the three events being discussed here involved attacks on civilian transportation systems far from any war zone.  The three disasters were all handled in the same way by their respective governments and media. In each case, before a real investigation could begin to establish the facts and examine the evidence, a politically acceptable explanation was put forward by government officials and repeated, without question, by the mass media. Evidence and facts that contradict the "official" version of events have been confiscated, destroyed, or simply ignored.

The extremely hasty and improper destruction of the steel from the World Trade Center, for example, must rank as the most egregious case of destruction of evidence from a crime scene in American history.  In late September 2001, officials uncovered a criminal scheme to divert metal to dumps in Long Island and New Jersey.  Some 250 tons of scrap metal were found at unofficial dump sites.  In November 2001 every truck carrying steel from the World Trade Center was outfitted with a GPS (Global Positioning System) device monitored by an Israeli named Yoram Shalmon of PowerLoc Technologies of Toronto, Ontario, a subcontractor on the clean-up project.  Shalmon tracked nearly 200 trucks in New York City in real time using PowerLoc's Vehicle Location Device (VLD). Each VLD unit cost about $1,000.

“We were able to start identifying patterns of behavior. If a driver arrived late, the traffic analyst would look at why. Maybe the driver stopped for lunch, or maybe he ran into traffic,” Shalmon told Jacqueline Emigh of SecuritySolutions.com.  “Ninety-nine percent of the drivers were extremely driven to do their jobs. But there were big concerns, because the loads consisted of highly sensitive material. One driver, for example, took an extended lunch break of an hour and a half. There was nothing criminal about that, but he was dismissed.  There were also cases where trucks did little detours from their routes,” Shalmon said.

 
SELLING THE EVIDENCE - The steel from the World Trade Center, critical evidence from the crime scene, was destroyed before it could be examined by experts.  Alan D. Ratner of Metal Management and Hugo Neu Schnitzer East of Jersey City profited from this criminal destruction of evidence.  The steel was quickly cut into small pieces and sold to Asian steel companies to prevent it from becoming forensic evidence.

Likewise, during the official dive for evidence to the wreck of Estonia, on which more than 852 people are known to have died, the crucial locking bolt from the bow visor, which officials blame for having caused the catastrophe, was thrown back into the sea. The bolt had been removed by divers and brought to the surface for investigation only to be thrown back by Börje Stenström, the Swedish navy commander who was the head of the technical group of the international investigation commission. According to German investigators, Stenström threw away the bolt, which according to his own scenario of the sinking, was "one of the most important pieces of evidence."

Estonia's bow visor was blamed by corrupt investigators for causing the sinking. The crucial piece of evidence, however, was thrown back into the sea. The Swedish government's effort to support the "official lie" with a computer simulation of the sinking failed because the vessel simply won't sink unless there is a hole below the waterline.

The first rule in maintaining a cover-up is to control access to the evidence. The second rule is to destroy any and all evidence that contradicts the official version of events.

The fact that these three disasters occurred during very similar terror scenarios being staged as part of an exercise has been ignored by the mass media, which has treated these extremely uncanny coincidences as complete non-issues.

Information about the exercises has been kept from the public. The government cover-ups have been greatly facilitated by the compliant mass media which has consistently ignored the fact that these disasters occurred within the context of strikingly similar terrorism exercises.

The terrorist attacks, for example, that struck New York and Washington on 9/11, and the London bombings of July 7, 2005, were the realization (i.e. the making real) of computer-based scenarios that were being staged in the same place at the same time. Would a truly free press ignore the fact that these terror atrocities occurred within the context of very similar terror exercises?

"The easiest way to carry out a false flag attack is by setting up a military exercise that simulates the very attack you want to carry out," Captain Eric H. May, a former military intelligence officer from the U.S. Army wrote in an article entitled "False Flag Prospects, 2008 - Top Three U.S. Target Cities."

"This is exactly how government perpetrators in the US and UK handled the 9/11 and 7/7 'terror' attacks," May writes, "which were in reality government attacks blamed on 'terrorists'."

THE 9/11 FAIRY TALE – The alleged hijackers, according to the government and media version. Why has the mass media shown no interest in interviewing the families of these men in order to support the official story? How can it be than several of them are reported to be alive and the media doesn't investigate?

False flag terror attacks are designed and carried out with the intention of having a targeted foe wrongly blamed in order to manipulate public opinion and foment war.

Captain May, a Texan from Houston, certainly knows what he is talking about. He is an expert in military exercises involving simulations. May completed advanced courses at the U.S. Army's school for military intelligence officers at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, and served five years with the U.S. Army's 75th Division as an Opposing Forces Controller, where he ran "contrarian scenarios."

May's aim, he says, as a former military intelligence officer who spent five years conducting war games, is to warn the public that the "'next 9/11' -- constantly promised by officials and the media -- is likely to be carried out under the guise of future military exercises.

"If the American people are aware of pending exercises and the danger they represent," May says, "then the exercises cannot 'go live' and effect the very terror events that they are supposed to be rehearsing against."

9/11 and the July 7, 2005 bombings in London "have smoking guns proving that the mass murderers were not foreign terrorists but domestic tyrants," May writes. The "smoking guns," he says, are the terror exercises that simulated the attacks that actually occurred.

While the terrorism/security drills created the "contrarian scenario" framework within which the real terror attacks occurred, it does not necessarily follow that the agency running the exercise is the actual terrorist.  The true culprit is much more likely to be a foreign agency, who is covertly, but intimately aware of the planning of the exercise. By having access to the critical computer networks involved in the exercise this outside agency has the ability to hijack the drill and make it "go live."

While the real terrorists could be from any agency that is involved in the drill, they could also be from a foreign intelligence organization that has gained "back door" access to the computer networks on which the exercise is planned and carried out.

Israeli military intelligence, for example, which has long been engaged in supplying enterprise software, such as Ptech, and network security personnel and programs to the U.S. government and military, undoubtedly has "back door" access to these most sensitive computer networks.

As May says, the "smoking gun" terror drills disprove the official fairy tale that "Islamic terrorists" are responsible for these false flag terror attacks. The Arabs and Muslims who have been wrongly blamed for 9/11 and the London bombings have simply been framed, like Lee Harvey Oswald, as part of the deception.

KILLING THE PATSY – Jacob Rubinstein, a.k.a. Jack Ruby, a violent Jew from Chicago with close ties to the Jewish crime network, shoots the patsy of the Kennedy assassination, Lee Harvey Oswald, in Dallas. Ruby's father, an alcoholic carpenter and deserter from the Russian army, came to America from Sokolov, a Zionist hotbed near Warsaw with his brother, Abraham. Rubinstein's mother, Fannie, was a Yiddish-speaking illiterate who was unable to learn to even sign her own name after 35 years in the United States. The Rubinstein children lived in foster homes while Fannie spent time in the mental hospital in Elgin, Illinois.

THE CHICAGO CONNECTION

Itzhak Rabin, a senior Israeli military officer and ally of Shimon Peres, also happened to be in Dallas on the day President John F. Kennedy was killed.  The question might be asked, what business did Itzhak Rabin of the Israeli military have in Dallas on November 22, 1963?  On January 1, 1964, Rabin was promoted to Chief of Staff after returning from Dallas.

Rabin's father, Nehemiah, had lived some thirteen years in Chicago's Yiddish-speaking Jewish community on the West Side, some of that time at 2734 Crystal Street with a Solomon Turovlin of the Jewish Daily Forward, the Yiddish language paper. The elder Rabin (reportedly born Rubitzov) was involved in Chicago's Yiddish-speaking Zionist community, of which the Rubinstein family was also a part, before migrating to Palestine as a member of the Jewish Legion sometime after September 1918. Rabin's father from Chicago became one of the founders of the underground Zionist militia, the Haganah, in Jerusalem in 1920. 

LONDON - JULY 7, 2005

At the exact time of the terror bombings of the London Underground and a bus at Tavistock Square, a man named Peter Power was, with his crisis management company, Visor Consultants Ltd., conducting a terrorism drill for a mysterious un-named client. The Visor exercise was precisely identical to the bombings that occurred. Just how likely is such a coincidence?

Peter Power had previously worked at Scotland Yard, the Anti Terrorist Branch, and as a police superintendent in West Dorset, England. In 1993, Power was himself the subject of a criminal investigation which, in April 1993, led to his suspension and retirement from the police.

Superintendent Power was suspended following an internal police inquiry, which resulted in a file being submitted to the Director of Public Prosecution. Oddly, the details of the Power investigation have been kept classified. After a five-month investigation, Power retired from the police force in September 1993, at the age of forty-two, "on health grounds."

PETER POWER - The July Seventh Truth Campaign in Britain has revealed Power's troubled past and his links with previous terror incidents in Britain. But the details of the criminal investigation into Peter Power have been kept secret since 1993. What did he do in Dorset and who was the mysterious un-named company with whom he planned and conducted the terror exercise on July 7?

"THIS IS THE REAL ONE"

Just hours after the London bombings, Power explained the incredible coincidences with the drill his company was conducting in a radio interview with Peter Allen on BBC 5:

Power: At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now.

Peter Allen: To get this quite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this and it happened while you were running the exercise?

Power: Precisely, and it was about half past nine this morning, we planned this for a company and for obvious reasons I don't want to reveal their name but they're listening and they'll know it. And we had a room full of crisis managers, for the first time they'd met, and so within five minutes we made a pretty rapid decision, "this is the real one" and so we went through the correct drills of activating crisis management procedures to jump from slow time to quick time thinking and so on.

"WE CHOSE A SCENARIO"

Peter Power appeared in a television interview on ITV News on the day of the bombings and revealed more details about the terror drill he was involved in:

Power: Today we were running an exercise for a company - bearing in mind I'm now in the private sector - and we sat everybody down, in the city - 1,000 people involved in the whole organization - but the crisis team. And the most peculiar thing was we based our scenario on the simultaneous attacks on an underground and mainline station. So we had to suddenly switch an exercise from 'fictional' to 'real'. And one of the first things is, get that bureau number, when you have a list of people missing, tell them. And it took a long time.

ITV Host: Just to get this right, you were actually working today on an exercise that envisioned virtually this scenario?

Power: Er, almost precisely. I was up to 2 o'clock this morning, because it's our job, my own company Visor Consultants, we specialize in helping people to get their crisis management response. How do you jump from 'slow time' thinking to 'quick time' doing? And we chose a scenario - with their assistance - which is based on a terrorist attack because they're very close to, er, a property occupied by Jewish businessmen, they're in the city, and there are more American banks in the city than there are in the whole of New York - a logical thing to do. And it, I've still got the hair....

One would think that such astounding revelations of a British terrorism expert about how the terror bombings were "almost precisely" like the exercise he had been conducting for a mysterious company would be of great interest to the media. That has, however, not been the case.

There has been virtually no discussion in the "mainstream" media that the London bombings, or other terror atrocities and disasters like 9/11 and the sinking of Estonia, occurred within the context of security drills that were very similar to what actually happened. Why has this crucial background information been censored?

Astonishing first-hand accounts, like Peter Power's, from people engaged in these exercises were reported shortly after the events occurred, yet these important stories were confined to local news outlets and not reported in the major national and international news outlets, in newspapers like the New York Times, for example, whose motto is: "All the news that's fit to print."

BBC - "SERIES OF EXPLOSIONS" AT WORLD TRADE CENTER

Power's comments about the amazing coincidences with his security drill were censored by the BBC in the same way as the eyewitness report of Stephen Evans, their reporter at the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Evans was on the ground floor of the South Tower when planes struck the complex. When he appeared on BBC World television shortly after the collapse of the twin towers, Evans repeatedly described a "series of explosions" he had seen and felt at the base of the tower before it was demolished.

 
STEPHEN EVANS - The BBC reporter and eyewitness to the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11. When Evans went on BBC television shortly after the collapses all he talked about was the "series of explosions" he had witnessed. The producers in London were clearly not interested in discussing that subject.  How did the BBC editors know that explosions were something that should not be discussed? Why did they censor Evans' eyewitness account?

From the first minute Evans spoke, however, it was quite obvious that his eyewitness report was being censored by the higher powers at the BBC. When the BBC later revisited the events of 9/11 with Evans, there was absolutely no mention of the "series of explosions" he had witnessed and talked about on the morning of the attacks. How can that be? Such blatant and intentional omissions are properly defined as censorship.  Evans' astonishing eyewitness account from 9/11 was evidently dropped into the "memory hole" at the BBC. Peter Power's revealing comments about the London bombings met the same fate.

The BBC has a very peculiar history regarding the events of 9/11.  Not only did the British network censor Evans' reports of explosions at the World Trade Center, but it also reported that the building known as WTC 7 collapsed about 30 minutes before the 47-story tower fell straight down into its foundation.  Jane Standley, a BBC World television reporter in New York City on 9/11 reported at about 4:54 p.m. (21:54 GMT) that the Salomon Brother's building owned by Larry Silverstein (WTC 7) had collapsed. Silverstein's building, however (which he later admitted had been "pulled"), did not collapse until 5:20 p.m. (22:20 GMT).

BBC news editor Richard Porter subsequently wrote on the BBC website in February 2007:  "We no longer have the original tapes of our 9/11 coverage (for reasons of cock-up, not conspiracy)."  But, why would the BBC destroy its original tapes of 9/11?  (This is exactly the same excuse provided by the corrupt Hoffman Estates (Illinois) police who said they had destroyed the video tapes they had made of their three-man undercover tactical squad assaulting me at my house in August 2006.)

The BBC's Jane Standley reported that Larry Silverstein's Salomon Brothers building (WTC 7) had collapsed 30 minutes before it fell straight into its foundation.  The BBC later said it had destroyed all of its original tapes of 9/11 broadcasts.  Why would they do that?

For independent journalists to question the controlled-media's version of events, from which such significant first-hand accounts have been censored, is to risk being branded a "conspiracy theorist."

The public is now told that eyewitness accounts cannot be trusted – at least when they differ from the official version. Eyewitness reports from people who were in the disaster or who saw it with their own eyes can not be considered as reliable testimony, we are told.  How very odd.

Such was the case with the downing of TWA Flight 800 off Long Island, New York in 1996, when more than a hundred eyewitnesses reported seeing what appeared to be a missile streak from the surface of the ocean, strike the aircraft, and cause an explosive fireball.

I attended the final presentation of the official TWA 800 report by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in 2000, when David Mayer, whose only credential as a panel member was a Ph.D. in Applied Experimental Psychology from Rice University, audaciously dismissed the reports of more than one hundred eyewitnesses as the collective hallucinations of intoxicated New Yorkers, based solely on the fact that it was a summer evening!

At that point, it was abundantly clear that there was something seriously wrong with the NTSB and their investigation of the downing of TWA 800. The cover-up could hardly have been more obvious.

THE "PLANE-INTO-BUILDING" DRILL OF 9/11

On 9/11, an agency of the Department of Defense and the CIA was conducting a terror scenario in which an imaginary airplane from Washington's Dulles International Airport was to crash into one of the four towers of the suburban campus of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in Chantilly, Virginia, just a few miles from the Pentagon. The plane that allegedly crashed into the Pentagon, American Airlines Flight 77, departed from the same airport at 8:20 a.m. on 9/11.

When the terror scenario became real in New York and at the Pentagon, the NRO exercise was cancelled and nearly all its three thousand employees, the people who operate the nation's "eye in the sky," were sent home.

"BIZARRE COINCIDENCE"

The government said it was a "bizarre coincidence" that the NRO, a military intelligence agency working under the Department of Defense and the CIA, had planned a simulated exercise with a mock "plane-into-building" crash on the morning of 9/11.  "It was just an incredible coincidence that this happened to involve an aircraft crashing into our facility," spokesman Art Haubold told the Associated Press in August 2002. "As soon as the real world events began, we canceled the exercise."

As the agency that operates the nation's spy satellites, the NRO personnel come from the military and the CIA. When the attacks occurred, however, most of the three thousand people who work at the agency were sent home. Why would they do that?

The fact that the spy agency had planned such a drill was casually leaked in an announcement for a Homeland Security conference in Chicago in 2002.  In a promotion for speaker John Fulton, a CIA officer assigned as chief of NRO's strategic gaming division, the announcement said:

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Mr. Fulton and his team ... were running a pre-planned simulation to explore the emergency response issues that would be created if a plane were to strike a building. Little did they know that the scenario would come true in a dramatic way that day.

CRITICAL FAILURES

The most pressing questions about why the U.S. military air defense system failed to intercept the four hijacked planes on 9/11 are obviously of crucial importance. Captain May writes that "even official apologists call [9/11] the greatest defense failure in American history."  How could the most modern and expensive air force in the world fail to intercept four airliners, three of which roamed wild for hundreds of miles before striking landmark buildings in New York and Washington?  Why was the U.S. air defense system unable to intercept several large, slow-moving planes before they struck the nation's largest city and its capital? If the U.S. Air Force couldn't intercept lumbering civilian planes, how could they possibly stop a hostile invasion of fighter jets or missiles?

These crucial questions have never been raised by the government-appointed commissions or the media, which have all avoided discussing the military exercises of 9/11.  It's not that these drills were not reported, but rather that their connection to the disasters has not been openly discussed and investigated.

Four months after 9/11, the Post-Standard of Syracuse, New York, published an article by Hart Seely that featured first-hand accounts of the military radar operators of the Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) at the former Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York. These radar operators were the eyes of the U.S. air defense system for the eastern part of the nation on 9/11.  In Seely's article, the NEADS personnel explained how a North American Aerospace Defense (NORAD) exercise called Vigilant Guardian, which they were participating in, had caused systemic confusion which prevented an effective military response to the real emergency.

The confusion at NEADS was evident from the moment Boston Flight Control informed them that a plane had been hijacked. At 8:38 a.m. an air traffic controller telephoned Sergeant Jeremy Powell at NEADS to inform him that one of their planes had been hijacked and was headed to New York:

"Is this real-world or exercise?" Powell asked.

"No. This is not an exercise; not a test," Powell was told, according to the transcripts of the 9/11 Commission report.

"IT MUST BE PART OF THE EXERCISE"

Seely's article described the context -- and the confusion -- at NEADS:

6 a.m.: WAR GAMES

Lt. Col. Dawne Deskins figured it would be a long day.

Sept. 11 was Day 2 of "Vigilant Guardian," an exercise that would pose an imaginary crisis to North American Air Defense outposts nationwide. The simulation would run all week, and Deskins, starting her 12-hour shift in the Operations Center as the NORAD unit's airborne control and warning officer, might find herself on the spot.  Day 1 of the simulation had moved slowly. She hoped the exercise gathered steam. It made a long day go faster.

8:40 a.m.: REAL WORLD

In the Ops Center, three rows of radar scopes face a high wall of wide-screen monitors. Supervisors pace behind technicians who peer at the instruments. Here it is always quiet, always dark, except for the green radar glow.  At 8:40, Deskins noticed senior technician Jeremy Powell waving his hand. Boston Center was on the line, he said. It had a hijacked airplane.  "It must be part of the exercise," Deskins thought. At first, everybody did. Then Deskins saw the glowing direct phone line to the Federal Aviation Administration.  On the phone she heard the voice of a military liaison for the FAA's Boston Center.  "I have a hijacked aircraft," he told her.  American Airlines Flight 11, headed to Los Angeles, had veered off course, apparently toward New York. The liaison said to get "some F-16s or something" airborne.

Forty-one minutes earlier, Flight 11 had left Logan Airport with 81 passengers. For the last 27 minutes, it had not responded to ground control. Deskins requested Flight 11's latest position, which an operator put up on the screen. Flight 11 wasn't there.  Someone had turned off its transponder, the device that identifies the plane to ground control. Boston Center could still track it on primary radar, but the operators in Rome would be hard-pressed to find it amid the jumble of blips on their screens.  We'll direct the intercept, the liaison told Deskins. Just get something up there.  Deskins ran up a short flight of stairs to the Battle Cab and reported the hijacked plane - real world, not a simulation.

NEADS RADAR OPERATORS – These were the military radar systems and personnel who were confused on 9/11 because of the Vigilant Guardian simulation. Did Osama bin Laden, in a cave in Afghanistan, and the nineteen flight school drop outs know about the simulation and hack into the military's computer systems and manipulate the radar systems in order to increase the confusion?  The real perpetrators of 9/11 did.

NOT A SIMULATION

What is most peculiar is that Seely's informative article about the confusion among the critical military radar operators at NEADS was never published or referenced by any national newspaper in the United States. The New York Times, for example, has never even mentioned "Vigilant Guardian," the air defense exercise that contributed to the confusion behind the military's failure to protect New York City on 9/11.

Oddly, among the national newspapers and news magazines of the United States, Vigilant Guardian was only mentioned once, very briefly, in a Washington Post book review of the 9/11 Commission report.  The review began: "If the 9/11 report had been written as a novel, nobody would believe it. The story is too far-fetched."

The Post mentioned Vigilant Guardian when it quoted "a little-noticed footnote" from the report:

When FAA officials realize (late) that planes are being hijacked, they can't monitor them - or decide what to do. The vice president thinks he has issued orders to shoot down civilian planes, but the pilots in the air don't get the word. The military's air-defense command isn't sure whether it's dealing with an exercise or a real event. Incredibly, according to a little-noticed footnote in the report, "On 9/11, NORAD was scheduled to conduct a military exercise, Vigilant Guardian, which postulated a bomber attack from the former Soviet Union."

Vigilant Guardian obviously confused the military because simulated hijackings and false "injects," which are radar indications of non-existent planes, were reportedly part of the exercise. This is why Deskins and others were initially uncertain whether the reports of hijacked planes were "real world" or simulation.

"First thing that went through my mind was, 'Is this part of the exercise?" Air Force Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold, who was at a command center at the Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, told ABC News. "Is this some kind of a screw-up?'"

The military's inability to respond effectively to the rogue aircraft of 9/11 was evidently caused, at least in part, by the NORAD exercise. The fact that a similar exercise, involving a plane striking a military facility near the Pentagon, was being staged on the morning of 9/11, indicates that the computer-based exercises played key roles in the actual terror attacks that occurred.

What role the military exercises played in the 9/11 terror attacks and how they could have been hijacked, and by whom, are questions that need to be answered and will be addressed in a subsequent chapter.

THE ESTONIA CATASTROPHE

The unexplained sinking of the Baltic ferry Estonia on its way to Stockholm from Tallinn in late September 1994 is the third mega-disaster (albeit not chronologically) that occurred within the framework of a military exercise. The day before it sank, Estonia had also been the scene of a terrorism exercise in which the scenario was a terror bombing of the ferry. Looking at the NATO military assets that were assembled nearby and the terrorism drill that had just been conducted on the ship, the stage was set and the actors were in place for what turned out to be a real disaster. The Estonia catastrophe is Europe's worst maritime disaster since World War II.

Tragically, 852 people are known to have died when Estonia sank in the early hours of September 28, 1994, but more than 1,000 may have perished, if, as reported, some 150 Iraqi Kurds were being smuggled to Sweden in one of the trucks on its car deck.  Scores of people died in the frigid water of the Baltic Sea waiting for rescue boats and helicopters that came too late. More than ninety bodies were retrieved from the life rafts.

THE TOLL - The bodies of some of the Estonia victims retrieved from the Baltic Sea.

NATO'S "SEARCH & RESCUE" EXERCISE

Although it is seldom mentioned, the Estonia catastrophe occurred on the first day of a 10-day NATO naval exercise called Cooperative Venture 94, in which more than fifteen ships and "a number of maritime aircraft" were prepared to conduct "humanitarian and search and rescue operations" in nearby waters.  The NATO exercise, which involved ten NATO member states and the Baltic "partner" nations of Russia, Sweden, Poland, and Lithuania, was to be staged in the Skagerrak, between Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, and the Norwegian Sea, according to the NATO press release about the exercise from September 16, 1994.

The NATO nations who participated in the exercise were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, United Kingdom, and the United States. Many other allies and partners sent observers to the exercise, according to the NATO press release.

The fact that Estonia sank as the submarines, ships, planes, personnel, and satellites from the navies of fourteen nations were preparing to begin their ten-day "search and rescue operations" exercise off the coast of Sweden raises several obvious questions that deserve to be answered:

If NATO had fifteen ships and a number of aircraft assembled and prepared to conduct "search and rescue operations," why didn't NATO assist in the early morning rescue operation for the victims from the Estonia  catastrophe? The Swedish rescue helicopters were ill-prepared and ill-equipped, which resulted in a fatal delay for those waiting to be rescued.

Many Estonia victims died of exposure due to the delayed rescue.  Of the 852 lives lost only 94 bodies were recovered.  A complete list of the dead is here.

"Were there specially-equipped rescue helicopters or other aircraft that could have assisted?" Drew Wilson, author of The Hole (2006), a book about the Estonia catastrophe, wrote. "Survivors who didn't die from hypothermia while floating on upturned boats or flotsam in the biting water waited four-six hours for rescue.  NATO search-and-rescue personnel and equipment could have saved some lives. Flying time was under 1 hour. Why didn't they respond to the distress traffic? What happened?"

The evidence also indicates that the Mayday signals from Estonia had been jammed, as were all radio communications in the area.  "A series of comprehensive malfunctions in regional communication systems all at once, and all at the exact time the ferry had sunk suggest involvement by a military or intelligence services," Wilson writes in The Hole. "Was a distress call intentionally blocked?  If so, why?

"Communications throughout the Northern Baltic Sea were disrupted during the time of the accident." As Wilson documents, VHF Channel 16, the international Mayday channel, and Channel 2182 were blocked.  "Signal jamming of all radio communications apparently occurred on the Southern coastline of Finland as the accident unfolded.

"Werner Hummel, the German investigator, said that his Group had documentation showing that the regional telephone network servicing the catastrophe site failed just as it was needed most. The malfunction was truly a startling coincidence. The telephone company stated its entire radio communications network, for unknown reasons, had been down from 1:03 to 1:58 a.m. – almost exactly the time the Estonia first encountered trouble until the time it disappeared from radar."

Didn't the NATO communications units prepared for the "search and rescue" exercise overhear the distress calls coming from Estonia?  NATO, with state-of-the-art satellite and airborne surveillance assets in place over the Baltic Sea certainly must know who was blocking the SOS calls. Why has this information been kept secret since 1994?

Blocking SOS calls and jamming distress signals is a violation of international law. Why has this crime not been investigated? The intentional blocking of the Mayday signals from Estonia points to complicity in mass murder.

"Naval exercises are meant to be as realistic as possible," Olivier Schmidt, author of The Intelligence Files: Today's Secrets, Tomorrow's Scandals, writes. What was the "search and rescue" scenario of NATO's Cooperative Venture 94 exercise, which was commanded at sea by the Dutch submarine commander Gijsbert Goofert Hooft?

I sent a series of pertinent questions to Robert Pszczel, NATO's press officer for Baltic issues, about NATO's response to the Estonia catastrophe:

Did NATO have any naval assets in the Baltic Sea on the night of September 27-28, 1994 and what actions did NATO take in the immediate aftermath of the Estonia disaster?

Did NATO pick up the Mayday signals being sent (and jammed) from Estonia?

Why didn't NATO assist, given the urgent need to retrieve hundreds of freezing people from life rafts?

What was the scenario of NATO's search and recovery exercise?

Despite telephone calls and email exchanges with the press office at NATO headquarters, Robert Pszczel failed to respond to a single question about NATO's response to the Estonia catastrophe. Drew Wilson met the same wall of silence at NATO when he asked questions about Estonia for his book The Hole.  If NATO has a reasonable explanation for its failure to respond to Europe's worst maritime disaster since World War II, why is it unwilling to provide it?

NATO AWAC Planes in Norway
NATO had fourteen ships, submarines, aircraft, and personnel from the United States, Europe, Sweden, and Russia assembled near the scene of the sinking of Estonia, Europe's worst maritime disaster since World War II. The purpose of the NATO exercise included "search and rescue" operations, yet when disaster struck, NATO did nothing to help. Why? What was NATO doing that was more important than saving the lives of their citizens? Why won't they talk about it?

ESTONIA'S BOMB DRILLS

The Estonia ferry had been the object of bomb threats and had participated in at least two terror bomb exercises in 1994, one in February and another just the day before it sank.

On February 2, 1994, Estonia was the subject of a major mock bomb exercise conducted with RITS, Sweden's maritime fire and rescue agency, and the Stockholm police. The Stockholm police had requested to take part in the exercise and used bomb-sniffing dogs to find explosives. The terror simulation involved a scenario in which "bombs" had been placed in the sauna and swimming pool area on the lowest deck, below the waterline in the bow of the ship. A second "bomb" was placed in the sleeping quarters on the first deck, also below the waterline.

In the Estonia terror scenario, the explosives in the sauna were to be found by the dogs, while the second "bomb" was to explode. The purpose of this terrorism drill was to train with the ship's crew and include shore-based terrorism experts and police with bomb-sniffing dogs, brought to the ship by helicopter. In the simulation, the "bombs" were set to explode about halfway between the Estonian and Swedish coasts, which is where the ship actually sank in September 1994 after a similar mock bomb threat exercise.

When Estonia sank, another mock bomb exercise on the ship had just been concluded. Survivors from the sinking actually reported hearing two huge explosions immediately before the ship listed to starboard. Several crew members testified to having heard the coded fire alarm "Mr. Skylight to No. 1 and 2" over the ferry's public address system at about 1:02 a.m. after the vessel had listed severely. This is the message for the crew that was used during the previous bomb drill in February 1994. "Mr. Skylight" was a signal for the fire fighters to proceed to their fire stations 1 and 2 and prepare for damage control. The fact that this coded alarm was given indicates that there was damage caused by a fire or explosion that required immediate attention. The ferry sank within thirty minutes.

Eyewitness testimony from survivors plus the fact that the ship sank extremely quickly strongly suggest that explosives were used to tear a large hole in the hull below the waterline. Swedish policemen who had just conducted training involving a mock bomb threat on the ferry were returning home when Estonia sank. Of the seventy policemen, only seven survived.

The trans-Baltic ferry Estonia sank in less than 30 minutes after two explosions rocked the ship in the middle of the night.  A mock terror drill of a bombing scenario had just been completed on the ship the day before.  The passenger ferry was being used to transport Soviet military contraband when she sank. The highest officials in Swedish customs, the government, and military were aware of the sensitive and illegal shipments that put the ferry at risk.  Is this why they are so dedicated to protecting the lies about the sinking?

Sources and Recommended Reading

ABC News, "Terror Hits the Towers: How Government Officials Reacted to Sept. 11 Attacks," September 14, 2002.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/911timeline/2002/abcnews091402.html

Bollyn, Christopher, "Mysterious Middle Eastern Connection with Weapons Smuggling on Estonia," December 2, 2005

Bollyn, Christopher, "Seismic Evidence of Underground Explosions Causing WTC Collapse," August 28, 2002
http://www.bollyn.com/index/?id=10095

Bollyn, Christopher, "Was the NRO's 9/11 Drill Just a Coincidence?" November 1, 2002
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?read=25255

Emigh, Jacqueline, "GPS on the Job in Massive World Trade Center Clean-Up," July 1, 2002, SecuritySolutions.com
http://securitysolutions.com/ar/security_gps_job_massive/index1.html

Holtappels, Dr. Peter and Hummel, Capt. Werner, The Group of German Experts Estonia Investigation Report, Chapter 27, "The Diving Investigation," 1999
http://www.estonia.xprimo.de/estonia%20final%20report/chapter27.htm

Holtappels and Hummel, Section 7.3, "Safety Organisation," especially 7.3.4, "Training and Drills" and the summary of the RITS Exercise on Estonia, February 2, 1994
http://www.estonia.xprimo.de/estonia%20final%20report/7.3.htm

J7: The July 7th Truth Campaign, "Peter Power Dorset Police Suspension & the DPP File," February 7, 2008
http://www.julyseventh.co.uk/j7-exclusive-peter-power-dorset-police-suspension.html

J7: The July 7th Truth Campaign, "The 7/7 Terror Rehearsal"
http://www.julyseventh.co.uk/july-7-terror-rehearsal.html

Kaskel, Helje, M/S Estonia - List of the Dead and Missing, Estonia Litigation Association
http://elaestonia.org/sea/index.php

May, Capt. Eric H., "False Flag Prospects, 2008 - Top Three US Target Cities," February 23, 2008
http://www.thepriceofliberty.org/08/02/25/may.htm

National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 9/11 Commission Staff Statement No. 17, June 17, 2004
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5233007

NATO Press Release (94)82, "Exercise Cooperative Venture 94," September 16, 1994
http://www.nato.int/docu/pr/1994/p94-082.htm

Schmidt, Olivier, The Intelligence Files: Today's Secrets, Tomorrow's Scandals, Chapter 9, "The Sinking of the Kursk and 'Retired' US Navy Spy Edmond Pope," ADI, 2005

Seely, Hart, "Untold Stories: 'We were suddenly no kidding under attack,'" Post-Standard, Syracuse, NY, January 20, 2002 and The Patriot-News, Harrisburg, Penn., February 3, 2002
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?noframes;read=117242

Wilson, Drew, The Hole – Another Look at the Sinking of the Estonia Ferry on September 28, 1994, Diggory Press, Cornwall, UK, 2006

Original - March 11, 2008
Latest Edit - June 17, 2011