By Michael Shrimpton -December 23, 2022

Merry Christmas all ya’ll! It hardly seems credible that another year has passed, but it has.

It’s not been an entirely peaceful year, in fact, it hasn’t been peaceful at all, with a predictable war in Ukraine. Well, I predicted it at any rate! Western governments and central banks also decided to have a cost of living crisis, having printed vast quantities of money to pay for wholly unnecessary lockdowns to deal with China’s Covid bioweapon.

Since it was targeted at our economies rather than our civilian populations that played right into the enemy’s hands. You wouldn’t believe the price of turkey here in Britain! (About $15 a pound, since you ask.) However there was some good news, I even won a Christmas hamper in a raffle.

My winning a raffle was probably the most unexpected development of the year. I only bought the ticket because it was in aid of a children’s charity! Well done Bentley Bristol, who organized it, although it’s a pity they weren’t raffling a Bentley! The last raffle I won was at a Bomber Command Christmas luncheon about 25 years ago. The smoked salmon was delicious and I’m looking forward to sampling the sloe gin and Christmas puddings.

The war

Not only did I get the war right, but I also suspect I’ve got its ending right as well. Of course, no one would dream of giving me credit – I’ve been canceled by the Bad Guys and no one in the MSM has the guts to stand up to them. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard some idiot commentator, if that’s not a tautology with respect, saying that the war could not have been predicted.

Because my warnings that the war was coming were ignored, or rather disregarded, by NATO, to whose intelligence guys I am known, the West failed to re-arm and stocks of smart weapons are running down. As word spreads about the Ukrainian plan to invade the Donbas republics and Ukrainian involvement in the development of Weapons of Mass Destruction political support for Kyiv is waning, prompting President Zelensky’s mad dash to Washington this week, just beating the snow.

Even Rishi ‘von’ Sunak is watering down his support, something he has a lot of practice in, no offense intended! He’s also softening his stance on China. Like dear old Bomber Harris, I have a soft spot for Jerry, although I admit that Bomber had a funny way of showing it. Berlin has shown more sense than most European capitals over the war and has led the retreat.

As predicted in this column I sense that Ukraine will sue for peace come the spring, or possibly the summer. There’s talk of a big Russian offensive, possibly combined with the boys from Belarus, aimed at Kyiv. As winter sets in the ground is becoming firmer, making maneuvers with large armored formations easier. As regular readers will know I have emphasized the importance of ground conditions from the get-go.

I am the last to deny the contribution of the former German states to Western civilization. As the putsch plotters appear to have realized the problems with Germany only came about with Germany itself, in other words with unification. Many of our Christmas traditions come from the old German states. One of my favorite pieces of Christmas music is the old German traditional Es ist ein’ Ros’ entsprungen:

That didn’t come from people who believed in causing world wars, pandemics, genocide, and the European Union. Not all Germans are bad.

World Cup corruption

I am nothing if not fair to Jerry. I may have accused him unfairly in my last column of bribing referees in the recent World Cup. It turns out that the Qataris have got into bed with Moroccan intelligence and have been spraying cash around Brussels. (They’re not the first to have tried it!)

Interestingly Morocco was due to play England had we beaten the French, which we would have done but for the dodgy referee. Moreover, the Qataris wanted a France/Argentina final, featuring the world’s second and third-best soccer players (after Harry Kane!), France’s Kylian Mbappé, and Argentina’s Lionel Messi. This raises the intriguing possibility that it was the Qataris who were buying up referees, not the Germans.

The MSM assumed that it was a sheer coincidence that the Qatari drive to buy up MEPs was blown apart by Belgian intelligence (yes, they do have an intelligence set-up) just after the England/France game. Hmmm. Like most intel analysts I don’t believe in coincidence.

FTX

I was slightly ahead of the news in my last column. Sam Bankman-Fried has now been charged and has been extradited from Nassau. His girlfriend, strictly now his ex-girlfriend, I gather, has shopped him to the Justice Department. Boomps-a-daisy.

The Democrats may now find funding a bit more difficult for their 2024 campaign. If Keri Lake’s lawsuit (another prediction on this column comes true) pans out, as it should, they may find rigging the next election a bit more difficult as well.

Global warming

I do hope that all those global warming nutters haven’t disposed of their winter woollies! They’re going to need them this Christmas! Funny how they come out of the woodwork the minute the temperature rises a degree or two and go to ground when there’s a huge snowstorm.

Since the planet entered a cooling phase around the turn of the century severe winter storms of the sort the US is now experiencing are only to be expected. Wrap up warm!

PanAm 103

I see that the Justice Department is still banging on Libyans. This is going to be one of the bigger stories in 2023. If the Tory Party splits, which it might, with the European Reform Group entering into a coalition agreement with the DUP and the Reform Party we might see honest government in the UK as early as next year. (There’s no great enthusiasm for the Labour Party.) We haven’t had the honest government in the UK for a while!

That would allow the release of our intel on 103, including on those CIA guys who headed north to Scotland before the IED assembled by a PFLP-GC bomb-maker and planted by the Iranians at Heathrow went off. There was a huge panic at Mildenhall and in the CIA’s London Station when it became apparent that the plane had changed course and was going to come down over southwest Scotland.

An intel dump would make misleading the jury more difficult. Good. The Justice boys shouldn’t be trying to blow smoke up a jury in any event.

The Kennedy assassination

2023 will see the 60^th anniversary of the DVD’s assassination of JFK. I’ve now got two guys in Hollywood reaching out to Ollie Stone. I don’t think that the frantic attempts to block me from reaching him are going to succeed. (There’s very obviously a Bad Guy in his camp.)

It is way past time that the American people were told the truth. Of course, no end of crackpots is going to crawl out of the woodwork claiming that Lee Harvey Oswald did it. He didn’t even get a shot off! The crude cover-up of German involvement has succeeded for six decades. The truth usually gets out in the end, however. Only this week we have learned that members of the Warren Commission were being told what to write in their report at a meeting in Langley held several days before the President was shot.

Recent reading

My recent reading has included Operation Mincemeat (Bloomsbury, UK, 2016) by fellow historian Ben Macintyre. The subject is worthy of a column in itself and I plan on revealing the targets of this highly successful counter-intelligence operation next year, one an American general and the other a British admiral, each reporting to Jerry. (The deception plan was never intended to fool the Abwehr and was only a cover story – the clue is in who wrote the fake letters and to whom.)

Ben is a popular historian, which means that he sells lots of books, doesn’t get thrown into prison on trumpery charges, and gets his books made into movies. It’s an easy life, especially as, unlike an intelligent historian, no offense intended, he doesn’t have to think too deeply about what he writes. (I’m going to send a copy of this column to Max Hastings – that comment may raise a chuckle!)

Even a Janet and John version gets close to the truth sometimes, however. On page 30 of the hardback edition Ben, who in fairness is thorough in his research of open sources, reveals that after the defeat of Belgium in 1940 Jerry arranged for the importation of 1,000 Rhesus monkeys from the Belgian Congo. These weren’t for the Berlin Zoo, which wasn’t expanding its collection at the time.

Even more interesting, given the decades-long German development of HIV and their weaponization of Ebola, is that the top German spy in MI5, Victor Rothschild, assured Naval Intelligence that the monkeys were nothing to worry about. The hell they weren’t.

Merry Christmas

Stuff the woke ‘happy holidays’ nonsense! All y’all and your families have a very happy and safe Christmas and a prosperous New Year. I’m hoping work commitments won’t get in the way quite so much next year and plan on resuming weekly publication, starting on January 7^th. (I have no plans whatsoever to be sober on New Year’s Eve and unlike Jeremy Clarkson, I don’t believe in drink-writing.)

Christmas, apart from being party time and a good excuse for a booze-up, is also a great Christian festival. Whatever your beliefs our great Judeo-Christian traditions and moral code are worth celebrating and observing. They lie at the heart of Western civilization. I shall be starting Christmas as I usually do, worshipping at Midnight Mass in the great Anglican cathedral of Salisbury.

Michael Shrimpton

Michael Shrimpton was a barrister from his call to the Bar in London in 1983 until being disbarred in 2019 over a fraudulently obtained conviction. He is a specialist in National Security and Constitutional Law, Strategic Intelligence, and Counter-terrorism. He is a former Adjunct Professor of Intelligence Studies at the American Military University.