Moles and secret diplomacy

As one of the 43 officers who were transferred from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs between May 12 and September 23, 1987, allow me to put my comments to Mr E.V Saliba's two letters (The Sunday Times, September 26 and October 10).

Mr Saliba declared that when he was appointed Secretary at the Ministry after the Nationalist Party's victory in the May 1987 elections he came across many instances when statements in Parliament or in the press by a member of the Labour Opposition were based on documents leaked by moles in the ministry.

Subsequently, 43 officers, including myself, were thrown out of the ministry with incredible speed and under a murky cloud of suspicions and allegations, without being warned or charged with any misconduct.

This purge was not limited to Malta-based officers. Two locally engaged persons, one working at the Maltese embassy in Bonn and the second in Rome, were also discharged. They happened to be closely related to a Labour MP and a senior MLP official.

At that time I was acting head of the Maltese delegation to the CSCE Vienna Meeting and upon my return to Malta I spent less than four minutes at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, just long enough to be informed that I was being transferred across the street for duties at the Post Office. A few months later I was given a second transfer to the Department of Trade.

I had worked with Mr Saliba at our Permanent Mission in Geneva between 1979 and 1982.

I held Mr Saliba in very high regard and trust. However, after he resigned from the service, I was very surprised to see his name as one of the signatories of the Declaration on Malta issued by the International Security Council which was convened in Milan on November 23-25, 1986, to discuss Malta's internal and foreign policy.

The International Security Council was one of the front organisations of Rev. Sun Yung Moon's Unification Church. Among the other signatories one finds a handful of conservative right-wing former diplomats and journalists, including Joseph Churba, president of the Council, and Vice-President Antonio Betancourt, two close collaborators of the Rev. Moon. The Declaration on Malta was published in the Moon-funded Washington Times and copied in other foreign papers on January 26, four months before the May 1987 elections.

May I draw Mr Saliba's and your readers' attention to an article written by Professor Godfrey Pirotta in It-Torca of January 26, 2003. Quoting from British Government documents released after the statutory 30-year ban on publication.

Professor Pirotta revealed how Maltese diplomats in Tripoli passed to their counterparts in the British Embassy information about high-level discussions between the Maltese and Libyan governments during the 1971 negotiations about the future of British and NATO military bases in Malta.

Professor Pirotta unearthed another document which stated that a high-ranking Maltese officer told a British officer in Malta that his first task was going to be a request for a meeting with Major Jalloud to persuade the Libyans to pay the rest of the Lm250,000 they had promised Malta in July.

The Maltese official also gave details of previous payments made by the Libyans and this information was later discussed within NATO. In my book this is the stuff that real moles are made of.