Ten years after the loss of the Bugaled Breizh off the Lizard on 15th January 2004, the case is still in the news in France with the port of Loctudy in Southern Brittany commemorating the disaster next Saturday. Ten years of legal proceedings, accusations against the British Navy, the French military and the US, but still no resoltion with the courts preparing to close the case. However, the regional Breton newspaper Le Télégramme opens the debate again today with a series of articles analysing what went on on that fateful day 10 years ago.
For a former French intelligence officer, Joseph Le Gall, the presence of an American submarine needs to be focused on. He gave the newspaper details of the operation carried out by this submarine, in spite of the Courts rejecting these claims a few months ago. It is known that a military exercice was being carried out in the Channel Approaches at the time of the incident with the Royal Navy preparing for “Thursday War.” However, the US Navy submarine is said to have been in the zone for a very different reason.
A few days later a ship was to leave the nuclear reprocessing plant at La Hague near Cherbourg for Japan with plutonium for military use. The US would be transporting plutonium to the same reprocessing plant a few months later and the submarine was in the zone off the Lizard to observe how the operation was carried out. The Intelligence Officer explains that this was just two years after the Al Qaeda 9/11 attack and that the US authorities were extremely worried about the loss of any nuclear material. Indeed eight kilos of plutonium would have been enough to manufacture a nuclear bomb and the cargo was to contain 140 kg. Under the orders of George W Bush, the US authorities set up an operation to ensure the safe transport of plutonium across the Atlantic with the involvement of the CIA, NSA and the US Navy.
Intelligence reports suggested that al Qaeda had access to 15 vessels that were capable of an attack on the cargo ship and the US officers were working in particular on the idea that a ship could launch a distress call in the English Channel forcing the cargo ship to intervene before being taken over by the crew. The problem with this version provided by the French Intelligence Officer is that the Courts believed it sounded too much like a James Bond story and refused to delve any deeper into these secrets...
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