OHMSS - On His Macedonian Secret Service - George “Lazenby” Lazarevski
by Sasha Uzunov
EARLIER SERB SPY STORY casts doubts over new spy claims? - can Borjan Jovanovski / George Lazarevski’s claims be believed?
Former Macedonian intelligence officer George Lazarevski says he was one of the spies who leaked the secret recordings which brought down the Macedonian government of Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, implying that he was acting on his own rather on the orders of a foreign intelligence service, according to a USAID funded news website, OCCRP.
USAID is the official US government run international aid agency. see link here for its recent operations in Macedonia…
The leaked wiretaps were later used by Macedonian Opposition leader Zoran Zaev to bring down the Gruevski government in 2016 and eventually take-over as Prime Minister during what became know as the Colour Revolution movement, largely funded by the West.
The OCCRP story:
"Lazarevski was one of the three Macedonian intelligence agents who helped topple the allegedly corrupt and authoritarian regime of the then-Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski by leaking hundreds of thousands of audio files. The recordings had been made by regime loyalists from his agency while illegally wiretapping thousands of Macedonians over three years.
"Lazarevski had known about the massive interception of conversations -- which took place without court orders -- since 2008. But when he saw special forces raiding A1 TV, a station that had been critical of the government, he finally had enough.
"“It was a shock for us,” Lazarevski remembered.
““I did not expect to experience such a thing in Macedonia,” he told OCCRP.”
Surprisingly, in all the claims of corruption against Gruevski, probably true in some or most cases, his coalition partner from the Albanian nationalist party DUI, Ali Ahmeti, ended up smelling like a bouquet of roses. It beggars belief that somehow Ahmeti, a former terrorist who started the 2001 war in Macedonia, wasn’t involved in any of the action or taking a piece of the pie. It has been a very selective look at corruption, bypassing Ahmeti, the other Albanian parties as well as SDSM, the Social Democrats of Macedonia, Zaev’s party. Ahmeti has a powerful patron in the United States. That’s his trump card.
The author of the OCCRP article is Borjan Jovanovski, a prominent Macedonian journalist of Serb background, who was part of Serb-Macedonian “collective team” involving Serb journalist Stevan Dojcinovic of KRIK, an affiliate of OCCRP based in Belgrade which “broke” a Serbian spy scandal story alleging Russian-Serb interference in Macedonia, allegedly inciting the 27 April 2017 attack in the Macedonian Parliament on Zaev and his deputy Radmila Sekerinska., who was violently assaulted by having her hair yanked. The culprit has since been quite rightly jailed (see photo below):
But the whole story smelled right from the start. Team Uzunov acting on a tip from a British source that something was being cooked in Macedonia, contacted Jovanovski about two weeks before the parliamentary attack asking if he was aware of possible Russian-Serb interference in Macedonia. He aggressively denied such a scenario. See link here
Jovanovski is also known for his aggressive anti Macedonian and pro Serb-Yugoslavist views, which the US Embassy in Skopje, the Macedonian capital, has not denied. see link here and here
A fortnight passed then all hell broke loose and Jovanovski was claiming Serb-Russian interference in Macedonia. How and why did he change his view so quickly? How was it possible to put together the story so quickly if only weeks before he was denying such a possibility?
However, he refuses to back up his claims by holding or calling for a protest outside the Serb Embassy in Skopje, Macedonia, even though he has called for protests against all Hungarian Embassies in Europe over Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s tough stance on illegal migrants.
FRENEMIES? Zaev-Vucic
But the story gets more interesting… the Zaev government has endorsed the man allegedly at the centre of the parliamentary attack, Serb President Alexander Vucic, whose embassy and whose intelligence officer are implicated. This remains very strange, almost sounds like collusion.
It’s no coincidence that this fear of “Russian interference” in Macedonia via Serbia was used as a pretext by incoming Macedonian Foreign Minister Nikola Dimtrov to get into NATO as quickly as possible, even if it meant changing Macedonia’s name to appease Greek nationalist demands; give in to the Albanian nationalist bloc in Macedonia over bilingualism which would mean federalisation and eventually partition; and giving up its ethnic minorities in neighbouring countries such Bulgaria with a so called but one-sided “Good Neighbourly Agreement.”
LAZAREVSKI CLAIMS?
If the whole basis for the Serb Spy story is dodgy then it places a large question mark over the credibility of Lazarevski and his claims; that he hasn’t been put up to it by a foreign intelligence service to cover its tracks. Consider this: who would be the most likely candidate as the foreign intelligence service behind Lazarevski and the whole wiretapping scandal in Macedonia?
CLUES? - RENDITION OF EL MASRY- close US-Macedonian intelligence cooperation…
Macedonia is firmly in the Western camp. You might recall the Khaled El Masri rendition / torture scandal from 2003.
The innocent German Lebanese man arrested in Macedonia at the behest of the United States and handed over to the CIA. El Masri was taken to Afghanistan and “rendered" on the mistaken belief he was an Islamic terrorist.
The European Court of Human Rights later awarded El Masri compensation when he sued the Republic of Macedonia and was scathing in its judgment of El Masri’s mistreatment. link here
UBK is Macedonian intelligence and it regularly consults on counter-terrorism with the United States, namely the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
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