Finding Madeleine, Chapter 4 (Part 1)

Chapter 4, The Partners (Part 1)

“Deception is a state of mind and the mind of the State”

James Jesus Angleton, CIA Counterintelligence Chief, 1954 to 1975

“We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented. It’s as simple as that.”

The character Christof in “The Truman Show”

 

ABOUT A YEAR after Madeleine vanished, Madeleine’s Fund had produced nothing useful. It was around then when two gentlemen with intelligence connections partnered up to pitch Madeleine’s Fund. e Fund had money and BK was hiring. The two partners were Henri’ Exton and Kevin Halligen. Exton was the more senior of the pair, however the contract was awarded to Oakley International, the rm of the junior partner.

According to a Sunday Times article on November 2, 2009,

“Madeleine had been missing for a year when Brian Kennedy, the millionaire philanthropist who had invested heavily in a fund to find the little girl, contacted Halligen’s firm via Exton.”

 

Brian Kennedy knew of Exton and contacted him. Exton referred Kennedy to Halligen. Kennedy hired Halligen’s firm to work for Madeleine’s Fund. Halligen brought Exton along.

Exton is the real deal. He’s the former head of undercover operations for MI5; he ran undercover operations, in infiltrators, agents and cut-outs.

During the “troubles” in Northern Ireland, Exton ran what are called “supergrasses”. Supergrasses (the term may derive from “snakes in the grass”) are turncoats, informers, provocateurs and operatives who MI5 recruited from among, and used against, the Northern Irish paramilitaries.

Exton was also responsible for penetrating organized crime rings and gangs; he became the leader of one particularly notorious gang organized around Manchester City. According to an article in the Daily Mail on August 23, 2008 (the article is no longer available online), Exton’s leadership position with the gang involved planning, directing and committing various criminal acts.

Kevin Halligen was also known as Kevin Halligan, Richard Hall, and a number of other aliases. We’ll go with Halligen. Halligen’s background is murky; he reportedly worked for the British Atomic Energy Agency. After leaving their employ, he claimed to work (variously) for MI5, MI6, the CIA and the British GCHQ. According to a late August 2009 article in the Evening Standard (since retracted), “very little of that is true”. Halligen was born in Dublin and also claimed to have “operational experience” in Northern Ireland.

Exton and Halligen reportedly met in 2007 at the Special Forces Club in London’s Knightsbridge neighborhood. The Club’s members are from Britain’s secret services and special forces. A Sunday Times article from November 22, 2009 reports Halligen was invited to become a Club member by its then chairman, Major Donald Palmer, and by Major General John Holmes, a former commander of the SAS. The SAS is the British Army’s elite military unit, equivalent to the Delta Force or Navy Seals in the U.S.

It was at the Special Forces Club that Exton reportedly met Halligen. Exton and Halligen may have met at the Special Forces Club in 2007, but it is more likely they met up at the Club they both frequented. In any event, Exton and Halligen swam in the same pond; they were both welcome at the Special Forces Club.

Irrespective of when or where they met, Exton had not just fallen off the turnip lorry; he is as experienced an undercover operator as anyone might imagine. According to the Sunday Times, Exton is the former National Head of undercover operations for MI5. MI5 is the British domestic intelligence service; it can be thought of as the equivalent of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) unconstrained by the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution. Exton worked undercover for MI5 and came to run its undercover operations. Exton was decorated by the Queen and awarded a coveted Order of the British Empire medal.

Exton and Halligen secured an appointment with Madeleine’s Fund to make their pitch: they would conduct an extensive and sophisticated investigation and search; they would leave no stone unturned; they would set up their own undercover operations and a surveillance operation in Portugal; they would re-interview witnesses; they would extend their investigation to include pedophile networks elsewhere in Europe; Halligen would travel to Washington, DC to obtain satellite surveillance data from his intelligence contacts there. They would set up a call center. That’s the short list.

Team Mccann bit, agreeing to pay the pair £100,000 monthly for five months work, plus expenses according to the redacted Evening Standard article published in late August 2009. The two partners were not extending their charity rate.

The partner’s credentials might have seemed well suited for the assignment. That finding missing people wasn’t something the pair had done much of did not dissuade BK and Team Mccann; the Fund was at an impasse with nothing to show for their efforts. The pair might get results where others failed.

Unfortunately, the Fund’s new hot-shot investigators had a few problems.

Exton had been apprehended about five years earlier for nicking a bottle of perfume from a duty-free store at the Manchester airport while he was on an undercover assignment for MI5.

Nicking the perfume seems like a silly thing for Exton to have done. Maybe he was stressed. Whether a momentary lapse of judgment, or something else, when the local police showed up his cover was blown. Exton reportedly agreed to a “caution”, effectively admitting the shoplifting charge, after which he was let go by MI5. About a year later Exton’s caution was rescinded and he seems to have been allowed to retire. Looks like he was going to keep his pension. At some point Exton reportedly claimed and received compensation for PTSD.

The bottle of perfume turned out to be the least of the pair’s problems. According to the November 22, 2009 Sunday Times article, Halligen had an inauspicious start in the private security business.

“His first entry into the private security business was as technical director for the Inkerman Group, a company set up by Gerald Moor, an ex-army intelligence officer. The job ended abruptly in 2003 after Halligen drank Moor’s stocks of champagne and “irreplaceable” burgundy while house-sitting for a couple of weeks.”

It seems Halligen had already acquired much of the skills that would further his career. A few years later, just before he and Exton partnered up for the Madeleine’s Fund job, Halligen defrauded a large multi-national company named Trafigura. As a result, Halligen was indicted in the U.S. and subsequently convicted for fraud in 2009.

Halligen’s contributions to find Madeleine included supplying a single google earth image, hiring an actor to pretend to be a ‘drunken priest’ to seek confessions among the patrons of bars in Praia da Luz, and setting up a hot line from which he never bothered to collect the messages. To the extent Oakley International accomplished any real investigative work on behalf of Madeleine’s Fund it wasn’t Halligen who got it done.

One of the highest priorities for Brian Kennedy was to obtain a facial image of a man an Irish family had observed carrying a sleeping, young, white girl in the vicinity around the time Madeleine disappeared. Kennedy had been unsuccessful in getting a facial reconstruction of this man. The job was assigned to Exton. It took a bit of doing, but Exton pulled it off. Exton delivered the photo-fit facial images of a man dubbed “Smithman” to Madeleine’s Fund in late 2008.

Despite Exton’s success in obtaining the long-sought facial image of Smithman, things did not go well. Four months into their engagement with the Fund, Exton and Halligen were let go. They were paid most or all their £500,000 fee. Exton submitted his report to the Fund with the Smithman images around November 2008 and went on his way. As we shall see, Halligen was attending to another matter.

If Madeleine was to be found, it wasn’t going to be by Exton or Halligen. And, for all his trouble, Exton also wound up being scammed by Halligen. After the two partners went their separate ways Exton claimed Halligen owed him £100,000 for his work on the Madeleine account.

Halligen Defrauds Trafigura

About a year after being retained by Madeleine’s Fund Halligen was indicted in the U.S. for money laundering and wire fraud of $2.1 million related to a $12 million contract he had with Trafigura. Trafigura is a multi-national Nederlands-based oil and commodities trading firm. Trafigura thought Halligen might be of help in extracting some of their corporate executives from the Ivory Coast. The execs were being detained by the Ivoirans over a matter related to illegal dumping of toxic waste.

According to an investigation commissioned by the United Nations (the “Minton Report”), the Ivoirans were right. Trafigura’s dumping poisoned over 100,000 people near Abidjan making it the largest mass contamination incident since Union Carbide poisoned Bhopal, India in 1984. The Trafigura incident resulted in a super-injunction being issued to the Guardian newspaper in September 2009 that prevented the paper from reporting on the Trafigura incident.

Halligen did little if anything for Trafigura.

Halligen was convicted in 2013 of the wire fraud count. He was ordered to repay $2.1 million in restitution and received a 41-month sentence for which he was credited with time served. He was then voluntarily “removed” from the U.S. despite other allegations of unpaid bills. The U.S. govern- ment seems to have not wanted Halligen to stick around.

According to the U.S. prosecutors, Halligen ran the Trafigura job through his London-based company, Red Defence, International. His questionable if not fraudulent acts were not  confined to the U.S.

No one in Britain seems concerned over the rest of the $10 million (or more) Trafigura paid Halligen. Perhaps they came to a private understanding.

 

It wasn’t just Exton who got scammed by Halligen on the Madeleine account. According to an article in the Daily Mail,

“…perhaps of most concern is the lack of attention paid to the hundreds of phone calls received by the Madeleine hotline. Halligen and Oakley International, based in Washington, failed to listen to a single call received on the hotline set up for potential informants by Kate and Gerry McCann last year.

Johan Selle, the director of operations at iJet, the US firm that managed the Find Madeleine phone line, revealed that for a year nobody even asked his company if they could listen to any of the calls received. Mr Selle said his operators, in Annapolis, Virginia (sic, Annapolis is in Maryland), had answered ‘hundreds of calls’, but the information seemed wasted – possibly squandering valuable leads. He said: ‘We delivered Oakley a report with a summary of the calls and said if they wanted to come back they could listen to the recording, but nobody did’.

‘For someone with an understanding of the case it would be very easy for some to say that maybe 80 or 90 per cent of the calls were hogwash, but there may be a percentage where one would say maybe we should listen to this one or listen to that one. But our understanding is that this never took place.’

The firm says it was not paid for its services by Halligen or Oakley International.”

Not only did Halligen stiff Ijet, he was uninterested in what callers to the Find Madeleine hotline he set up had to say.

A Sunday Times article dated November 22, 2009 showed Halligen to have made a career pretending to be an intelligence operative. Who knows, maybe he wasn’t pretending, at least not all the time. Tra gura hired him, and he had that U.S. Department of Defense ID, so there is that.

Halligen’s Big Wedding

“One of the guests was Andre Hollis, a lobbyist who became chief executive of Halligen’s Washington company. ‘It was like a global intelligence debutante ball,’ he said. ‘And nobody knew it was fake.’

Not even the best man, Colonel John Garrett, a defence lobbyist for the blue-chip Washington law rm Patton Boggs, was let in on the secret. Nor was the most powerful guest in the room, Noel Koch, a security expert who has now become a deputy undersecretary in the defence department.

He said: ‘We found out later that it was not a real wedding. The priest was an actor.’

Koch says Halligen was a curious character: ‘He used to be difficult to understand because many of the conversa-tions were sotto voce. It was like we’re all spies together and the walls were listening.’

Also on the guest list from England were Palmer, Aspinall and Henri Exton, a former national head of undercover operations for the police.”

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Trafigura’s money paid for the wedding.

Maybe Halligen really was an agent. Maybe he started out pretending to be an agent, a real agent needed a wannabe like him as a cut-out for a job or two, and he became a real agent because someone wanted him to be perceived as a real agent.

If Halligen was a wannabe, he was a good wannabe; he fooled a number of people. At the time he was defrauding Trafigura Halligen established himself in the Washington, DC area. It was there he became engaged to a lovely young woman and his roving ways were to come to an end. Halligen showered his love with gifts and attention and gave her $1.7 million to buy a manse in the leafy DC suburb of Great Falls, Virginia. e money came from the Trafigura scam Halligen pulled just before he secured the Madeleine’s Fund contract.

Two days before their wedding in April 2007, Halligen had to deliver some bad news to his betrothed. It seemed his spymasters in London would not permit his name to appear on a wedding license. It was a pity. There was nothing he could do. The caterer, wine and the luxurious Evermay estate in Georgetown had already been paid for and dozens of high-pro le guests were coming, including Exton from London. Why not make the best of it?

Halligen’s beloved agreed to go through with a sham wedding ceremony.

A good number of Washington’s spymaster corps was in attendance. The caterer was talented; he acted at one of the local theaters. Halligen convinced the caterer to pull double-duty as the officiating priest for which he was paid an extra $300, cash. The caterer managed to pull off both the fake ceremony and serve up a memorable lobster and lamb dinner.

Halligen was apprehended in Oxford in late November 2009 for extradition to the U.S. where he was to stand trial for the Trafigura charges. When he was apprehended he was staying with a new girlfriend at the tony Old Bank hotel. His unpaid bar bill amounted to £14,000.

By then, Halligen’s “work” on behalf of Madeleine’s Fund had been well reported by the British press. Nevertheless, the Brits didn’t seem interested in charging Halligen for what he did to Madeleine’s Fund, or for the Trafigura scam. The Irish Times, citing the Mirror, reported in May 2013,

“’It is understood that Kate and Gerry McCann are now considering suing Halligen for allegedly eecing their fund’. He could also be arrested if the couple make a formal complaint.”

They may have considered suing Halligen but there is no report of a civil or criminal complaint against Halligen by the Mccann’s or Madeleine’s Fund. It seems they let it go. After Halligen pled guilty to fraud in the U.S., his former sponsor at the Special Forces Club remarked:

“’He’s clearly done the honorable thing by pleading guilty,’ said John Holmes, a retired British army general and former head of the British military’s special forces. Holmes said Halligen conned him out of thousands of dollars. ‘However, there is still the outstanding question of where all his money has gone.’”

Precisely.

Halligen’s total contract with Trafigura was for $12 million of which Halligen made restitution of $2.1 million he defrauded through his U.S. accounts. It’s difficult to know how much Halligen pocketed from the Trafigura scam because we don’t know if there were other contractors involved he may have stiffed. If he stiffed his contractors on the Trafigura job, as he did on the Madeleine’s Fund job, he could have pocketed several millions….

 

Visit findingmadeleine.com where you can also purchase “Finding Madeleine” as an ebook. The ebook contains complete references and images.

Author: Centinel

Just a guy from the neighborhood.

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Reading this makes me feel like I am Frodo lost in the land of Mordor.

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