Moles

Your readers might be wondering what the title of this correspondence, as evinced by the letter of Mr Vincent Camilleri (The Sunday Times, December 5) has with its contents. The relevant facts are the following.

1. Mr Camilleri has chosen to involve himself in a correspondence between me and Mr Leo Brincat, even though I never made a direct or indirect reference to him.

2. Since Mr Camilleri was one of the persons transferred from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when I was Secretary, he may have felt that the specific reference to moles who passed documents to outsiders referred to him. He was not justified in this assumption, since he was serving abroad at the time. In my letters I made it very clear that there were other reasons justifying the transfers.

3. Mr Camilleri now says that he left under a cloud. As I have maintained all along, transfers within the General Service are routine. I did not initiate any disciplinary action against Mr Camilleri, and I do not see where the dark cloud comes in. If Mr Camilleri feels that he has been tarnished by my confidential draft of a memorandum submitted to Cabinet, may I remind him that the contents of that document, which made no reference to him, were made public by the Labour government. He should address himself to them.

4. Mr Camilleri claims that he and others were transferred simply on the grounds that they were MLP supporters. I have denied this, and I would ask Mr Camilleri why other officers who never hid their allegance to the MLP, even in my presence, were retained in the ministry, given posts of responsibility in Malta and abroad, and given promotions up to the rank of ambassador.

5. Mr Camilleri had the opportunity to appeal to the Tribunal against Injustices to prove that he was transferred simply because he was an MLP supporter. He chose not to do so. Had he appealed, and I was given the opportunity to give evidence under oath, that would not have bothered me in the least.

6. In a typical convenient lapse of memory he dismisses an incident where he spied on me. Of course a minister has the right to know what his officers are doing, and I challenge Mr Camilleri, or anyone else, to quote one instance where my minister, whoever he was, had reason to believe that I hid anything from him in the course of my duties.

Only the above is relevant to the issue of moles and secret diplomacy as far as Mr Camilleri and myself are concerned, and I rest my case.

However, let me reply to irrelevant subjects, as far as I am concerned, which Mr Camilleri introduced, and which, intentionally or otherwise, gave the impression to readers who do not know the facts that I could have indulged in activity related to moles or secret diplomacy.

He chose to refer to a meeting which I attended on "Malta and Security in the Mediterranean", mentioning that foreign diplomats attended this meeting also. He followed this immediately by referring to two cases where Maltese diplomats passed on information to foreigners on secret financial transactions that were being carried on between the governmnets of Malta and Libya. I have challenged him to point out what wrong information - or confidential one for that matter - my contribution to that meeting and its final resolution may have contained. I also challenged him to say clearly whether he meant to implicate me in the other cases.

In his last letter Mr Camilleri was not gentleman enough to address himself to these two points. Is this another case of convenient selective amnesia, or is there a more sinister intention behind it?

The other point is that he accuses me of bringing in the killing of Raymond Caruana out of context, and on taking on the role of judge and jury by blaming this crime on MLP supporters. If Mr Camilleri cannot see the connection between the outcome of the Milan meeting, where - among other things - I spoke of the erosion of democracy in Malta, and the death of Caruana, which confirmed my contention in the most cruel way, then he must be wearing very thick political blinkers.

As for blaming MLP supporters, Mr Camilleri falls again into convenient selective amnesia. Is he not aware that there is evidence that the weapon which was used to kill Caruana was also used when shots were fired at another Nationalist Party club a few days earlier, or that that weapon mysteriously finished in the hands of the police who did not use it to trace the cuplrit, but to frame the innocent Peter Paul Busuttil and accuse him of the murder of Raymond Caruana?

Mr Camilleri has done a very good job at destroying the esteem in which I held him decades ago when he was a member of my staff in Geneva.