C.I.A. ‘mole’ confesses

Press, 23 April 1984, Page 6

C.I.A. ‘mole’ confesses

NZPA-AFP The Hague

A Canadian who spent five months campaigning with a group of Dutch antinuclear protesters has confessed that he was a United States Intelligence agent sent to spy on them. John Paul Gardiner, aged 42, told journalists in The Hague at the week-end that he had been an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency for more than 20 years. But after living with protesters in a peace camp near the Woensdrecht base in the south-west Netherlands, where 48 nuclear missiles may be deployed by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, he felt that he could not go on betraying them.

He said that he wanted “to undo all the damage I have done to these people — now I will disappear if I can.”

He said that he was tired of being nothing but a name on a passport, and wanted to live his own life for as long as possible. “It might be difficult, other things can happen.” He could be arrested for

desertion, or for violating a C.I.A. secrecy oath, he said. “Or I may become a statistic like ending up in a boat in Amsterdam with an overdose of heroin, or I might get killed in a car accident.” He said that he had been sent to Woensdrecht in December, posing as an anti-nuclear activist who had been expelled from West Germany, to spy on the group and report back to a C.LA. agent in the United States Embassy at The Hague. He had been told particularly to check if there were links between the Dutch group and the Soviet Union, he said. Information he had passed on about a planned mass invasion of the base by protesters at night on April 7 had enabled the police and the Dutch Army to stake out the base and arrest 120 protesters, Mr Gardiner said.

A spokesman for the United States Embassy in The Hague, said, “It is a long-standing policy of the United States Government not to give any comment on allegations involving any Intelligence matter.”