Keenie Meenie by Miller Phil;

Author:Miller, Phil;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

Holworthy confirmed everything he had written in the files 30 years ago. KMS’s protégées were involved in systematic war crimes in Sri Lanka’s Eastern Province. And worse was to come.

* * *

Amid the spiralling violence in Sri Lanka, KMS began to do much more than merely train the STF. The company reviewed the Sri Lankan military’s command structure in the summer of 1985, to probe it for any weaknesses. In an attempt to shore it up, the firm provided two former SAS warrant officers, one as an operations room adviser and the other as a psychological operations adviser.51 These would have been highly experienced special forces veterans who gave strategic advice to Sinhalese commanders as well as delving into the murky world of propaganda. The company was also increasingly involved with surveillance, and had an advisor assigned to Sri Lanka’s National Intelligence Bureau, which operated in parallel to the STF. The British embassy’s Alasdair MacDermott found that this KMS advisor was busily suggesting ‘ways and means of improving the acquisition, collation and dissemination of information’ and was ‘confident that this, at least, is now slowly improving’.

As the war went on, nothing seemed off limits to the company. They were trying to persuade the army chief, Lieutenant General Weeratunga, to establish a tactical headquarters to control operations in the Northern Province and Jaffna. Reflecting on the company’s growing role, MacDermott commented: ‘KMS have been drawn yet further into direct control of and participation in operations’, something that he warned Whitehall was ‘disturbing’. He said that there was ‘a real danger’ if peace talks broke down and the militants launched a ‘concerted push’, then ‘it could be they, the KMS advisers, who would provide the backbone of the resistance rather than the Sri Lankans themselves. This would inevitably become known and would cause us considerable embarrassment.’52

MacDermott’s colleague, Richard Holworthy, had intimate access to the head of KMS in Sri Lanka, the mysterious ‘Baron’ – Brian Baty, alias Ken Whyte. The defence attaché was able to visit him one afternoon in August 1985, and received a thorough briefing on every aspect of the Sri Lankan security forces.53 Baty revealed that a joint army/police jungle warfare school was being set up in the Eastern Province at Amparai, and he would draw up its syllabus and advise on training, based on his own experience running the SAS jungle wing. The pair also discussed the STF, with Holworthy receiving an overview of its camps. Locations like Batticaloa, Akkaraipattu and Komari were specifically mentioned, although there is no evidence from the records of this meeting that Holworthy made any attempt to tackle the KMS commander about what the STF was alleged to have done at these locations – the mass arrests, disappearances and fanning of intercommunal violence. This was despite Holworthy noting a ‘hardening of attitudes in recent days towards Tamils’. He specifically cited the commander of the STF, Zerni Wijesuria, ‘who has come in for some stick in the past for the alleged excesses of his men, was told at a recent conference that he was not being tough enough’.

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