Dear Daniel Brandt:

After the Panam 103 Lockerbie bombing disaster in December 1988, when I was based in London as an investigative and radio reporter for ABC News, Pierre Salinger (then London bureau chief for ABC) and I hired Linda Mack, then a grad student at Cambridge to help in the investigation. She claimed to have lost a friend/lover on pan103 and so was anxious to clear up the mystery. ABC News paid for her travel and expenses as well as a salary.

Notable was a trip she made to Damascus (where Salinger and I both touched down, among many other places during our year's investigation), where she wanted to interview Ahmed Jibril of the PFLP-GC, then a prime suspect. He wouldn't talk to her. Later, after we had been working with Jordanian intelligence, she befriended one of their officers who came to London to ferret out Abu Nidal's bank accounts. Once the two Libyan suspects were indicted, she seemed to try to point the investigation in the direction of Qaddafi, although there was plenty of evidence, both before and after the trials of Maghrebi and Fhima in the Netherlands, that others were involved, probably with Iran the commissioning power.

I was no longer based in London when it happened, but in 1991-92, after Salinger had traveled to Tripoli and successfully interviewed the two Libyan suspects (before their move to Netherlands), Special Branch of Scotland Yard demanded all of our tapes (including those not broadcast). Salinger came to believe that Linda was working for MI5 and had been from the beginning; assigned genuinely to investigate Panam 103, but also to infiltrate and monitor us. ABC refused to hand over the tapes and other documents the Brits wanted; Special Branch raided our office and Salinger blamed Linda for this. (At two subsequent trials, ABC lost an expensive court case and had to hand over tapes and documents, none of which contained any conclusive evidence about the Libyans). At this point Salinger fired Linda and locked her out of the office, after she had been spreading some malicious rumors about him.

I never saw her again after leaving London for my new base in Cyrpus in late 1991. I believe she made one phone call to me, but I avoided further communication with her. I don't have any pictures. When I last saw her, Linda was slim, brunette and had a kind of wan beauty, like a heroine in a Charles Adams cartoon or an upgrade horror film. Salinger, of course, has long since gone to the great newsroom in the sky. That's really all I can tell you: other details have faded from my memory. I hope this helps.

Sincerely, John K. Cooley

I think we've hit paydirt here. SV as Morticia?

I continue to maintain that I cannot imagine Linda could have ever made it through any kind of rigorous screening process to become an actual MI5 employee, but once she had been hired by Salinger could easily, easily have been coopted (for the same reason she would not have been hired as an actual agent). Small difference.

Wikipedia's critics are in a position to maintain that the Wikimedia Foundation is harboring an apparent agent of an intelligence service, grants her administrative powers, and protects her identity.

Nah, Morticia was sweet.

I should emphasize that what I sent you all came from Salinger. Since he was my colleague and boss, I gave it weight, but was never able to verify it from any other or independent source. Mack phoned me Wednesday and asked me not to talk to you or help you. I didn't mention that I already had. Please copy me if you publish anything about her--and don't use my name. The one indisputable fact is that Salinger fired her and had her locked out of the office. I don't wish any further involvement in this. Thanks! John Cooley

Do not continue to make personal attacks against me, on or off wiki. You have spread absurd and dangerous gossip, which ended up damaging other people, though your intention was to damage me, no doubt. I have asked you by e-mail and I am asking you again openly, and very seriously: stop gossiping about me (and others), stop your personal attacks, and stop the agggression. [[User:SlimVirgin|SlimVirgin]] 17:27, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

The events of the last few days have shown very clearly that the community, at all levels, has had enough toxicity, and won't support the people who engage in it anymore.

Wow, three "g"'s in "aggression." She must be serious.

And why am I posting this second email from Mr. Cooley? Because the fact that Linda Mack called him means that Linda Mack is SlimVirgin.

MI5 would be more like the British CIA.

blah, blah, blah....

MI5 then might better compare to Homeland Security in the US, though the US counterpart might have a very young intelligence mechanism. Wouldn't the functions of the newly organized Serious Organised Crime Agency, which took over responsilities of the former National Crime Squad and the National Criminal Intelligence Service compare somewhat with those of the FBI?

FBI => Scotland Yard

I have noted that SV zealously guards the Wikipedia article on Baroness Symons.

You might want to take a second look at the "blah, blah, blah" part.

Mr Taylor was acquitted but three associates Lt Col Eric Matson, Mr Harper and Michael Aspin were convicted and served sentences of between two and six years. A fifth defendant, Keith Flatman, a solicitor, was acquitted on the orders of a judge who said that he had no case to answer. All five had denied conspiring to obtain property by deception.

At their trial Mr Taylor, Matson, Harper and Aspin were accused of having fabricated an alleged involvement with Oliver North, the American military commander questioned by Congress over the "Irangate" affair. The prosecution said that the deal fell through because there had never been any missiles to sell and that the operation was a fraud.

In a further twist, documents shown to The Times reveal that another man involved in the Iranians' abortive attempt to aquire anti-tank missiles, Ben Banerjee, was a middle man for the Abu Nidal terrorist group, which had close links with the Iraqis.

He was never charged and died in March, 1991. Documents show that he helped the terrorist group to set up an account at the now collapsed Bank of Credit and Commerce International.

Mr Bannerjee owned two Buckinghamshire companies that regularly supplied arms to Abu Nidal. Documents submitted during the trial of the five men show that one of Mr Bannerjee's companies was involved in the 1985 plan to supply 5,000 TOW missiles to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.

The three convicted defendants claimed that Mr Banerjee was the link between them and Lt Col North, who was said to have initiated the deal to improve relations with Iran. The deal fell through, the men claimed, because Lt Col North backed away from it.

The jury was not told that Mr Taylor, now aged 60, an MI6 agent for ten years, had been told by his handler to proceed with the deal.

But if this all checks out -- and for my part the Oliver North theory is not yet out of the running -- then it goes a long ways to answer why He/She/Ayesha would be so obsessed with having an artificial dissemination device for distributing disinformation, a tool at the ever ready whose propagators do not stop to check their sources.

Could you remind me what the Oliver North theory is? It sounds like it should certainly be factored in to this. Remember that North and his handlers developed the technique of QUANGOs (Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organizations), which were private entities fabricated to covertly carry out activities on the behalf of governments or other agencies that wanted "plausibly deniability". Has SV's involvement transmogrified Wikipedia into some sort of QUANGO?

The next step in deconstructing Linda Mack's career might be to locate one Christopher Elliott, who shared a byline with Linda at least once in 1994.

If Slim's critics are to be credible we have to stay away from fairy tales and fantasy.

To: slimvirgin@gmail.com
Date: Oct. 23, 2005

Would you be interested in selling the slimvirgin.com domain? I think it's a cool name.

Thank you,
Ed McKay

__________________________

Date: Oct. 23, 2005

Hi Edward,
There's a slimvirgin.com? :-) I can only imagine. Sorry, it's not owned by me.
Cheers,
Sarah
__________________________

Date: Oct. 23, 2005

Sorry. Since you wiki from the Calgary, Alberta, Canada area, and slimvirgin.com is registered to someone from the same area, I assumed you were the owner.

-- Ed McKay

_________________________

Date: Oct. 24, 2005

Hi Ed,
Sorry, that's not me either. I think you're getting me mixed up with someone else. If you do a who-is search for the domain name, there may be an e-mail contact for the owner.

You have to admit, though, that the name change from (name redacted) to Sarah (presumably-fake last name redacted) is just a tad suspicious. It's very possible that she's someone's agent. Except for her mistake of using the same email address for the Kings College list and the slimvirgin.com domain registration, we wouldn't have gotten this far. And don't forget, she's a consummate liar. She denied being the owner of the slimvirgin.com domain:

Where do you get (presumably-fake last name redacted) from in any case? It's quite possible that she hasn't actually changed her name and just uses Sarah as a pseudonym.

are you planning to file a lawsuit, take this information to the press, or what?

I find the persistance of that information to be a sign that it was engineered by (first name redacted) to intentionally mislead and buttress some alternate mythology.

But she's still in Canada somewhere, as indicated by the several times we've been able to capture her IP address.

I see no reason to believe that her role as an informant extended beyond Lockerbie and I think Herschell's thesis that her wikipedia activity, particularly in relations to LaRouche, is somehow proof that she is directed by some intelligence agency is not credible and has more to do with LaRouche's conspiratorial cosmology than reality.

If Slim's critics are to be credible we have to stay away from fairy tales and fantasy.

If (name redacted)/Sarah is a spook today it's most likely she informs to the police/security agencies on the animal rights movement. Remember, the Animal Liberation Front is considered a serious security concern by the British authorities.

If she were a spook she'd have better things to do than live in her parents home in the middle of nowhere...

I doubt her career at wikipedia has anything to do with any agency. I think you're just proceeding from a conspiratorial mindset.

Linda Mack's life has been one of unfulfilled promise culiminating in a journalistic career ruined by her own arrogance and betrayal of her friends and coworkers.

Well, please bear in mind that there are many degrees and shades of spookiness -- see the beginning of this thread for Daniel Brandt and Joey expounding on the difference between "officers," "agents" and "assets," and I might add another, overlapping category, "journalists." I have suggested (suggested, mind you, not proven) that SV might be a wannabe, by which I mean that she was trying to cultivate a degree of spookiness because she wanted to find a journalistic niche where she could garner some prestige and be of some service to the real spooky types that she admires (see Cambridge Apostles as a point of reference.)

I'm assuming it from her location. I don't know if she's literally in her parents home but for a Cambridge grad to return to Hickville, Alberta suggests some sort of major failure in London and a need to return to the nest.

I feel kinda silly joining this party -- but Halloween is fast approaching, so what the hex -- don't you think that real spooks can fake any IP they want?

Why is she interested in Duggan and LaRouche? Probably because her main interest seems to be anti-Semitism.

George W. Bush actually wanted to abolish the internet as soon as he was elected, but he soon discovered that there was quite a lot of quite useful information about Spongebob Squarepants on it.