gtoal@an-teallach.com (Graham Toal) wrote:
Several years ago lots of British scientists died under mysterious circumstances. They were generally described as 'defence scientists' but what a significant number of them had in common was work in the area of surveillance. Several of them were connected to UK's system X. (One UK govt official was found dead in his hotel room in an arab country while there at a trade fair in an unofficial capacity helping to promotye system X).
For those who want to follow this up a bit more there was a book published in 1990: 'Open Verdict - An Account of 25 mysterious deaths in the defence industry'by Tony Collins ISBN 07474 0146 2 Publisher Sphere Books Well worth reading if you can get hold of it. Collins picked up this story when he was a journo with 'Computer News' in England. He later became Executive Editor of Computer Weekly. It all happened in the mid 80s and most of those involved were computer programmers. 28 cases are dealt with in the book and there may have been more (or less) as much of the evidence is circumstantial and all may not have been connected. Collins reckons it has more to do with Electronic Warfare(EW) or C3i than digital exchange surveillance. Although System X was apparently a key component of IUKADGE (Improved UK Air Defence Ground Environment) an early warning system. The backbone for this was UNITER - a comms system to link over 100 USAF and RAF bases around the world. Many of the people worked for GEC Marconi and GEC Plessey (the main System X contractor). Jonathan Wash, fell from a hotel balcony in Abidjan, capital of the Ivory Coast, West Africa, on 19 November 1985, shortly after expressing a fear for his life. He was working for Telconsult, a subsidiary of BT (the telecoms transnational which is also a major defence contractor). He was helping the government there assess bids for a digital exchange contract. Some of the others that died worked for GCHQ, the junior partner of the NSA.Some of the deaths were very odd, to say the least! and some were not fully investigated as murder was not suspected. It is an inviting field for conspiracy theorists. Hilda Murrell, whose death may be linked to our nuclear power industry was also killed around this time (24 March 1984). System X was delayed for a long time and one rumour was that they had designed the basic exchange OK - the problems lay with doing all the 'other bits' that went into it.