Whistleblower: The German rocket expert who fled to New Zealand & More News Here – Upjobsnews

A retired computer programmer living in Paraparaumu is haunted by the thought that his skills were once used to deadly effect by Saddam Hussein. By Richard Woodd

If James Jones is to be believed, German
intelligence operatives once tried to kill him. He claims to be a former rocket scientist who has been living in New Zealand under a new identity for 24 years.

He says he fled Germany because he feared for his life, after exposing what he believes was the illegal sale of military rocket technology to Iraq. He is writing a book about it.

He agreed to speak to the Listener because he wants to get his past off his chest. He also believes his homeland has a responsibility to own up to its betrayal. For various reasons, we have been unable to independently verify his claims. So here is his story. One day, it may appear in an even more detailed form.

Jones, 66, says he was born in Dusseldorf in 1955, as Gerhard Holger Duennebeil. These days, he lives in a modest house at Paraparaumu, where he has retired. He plays bridge and croquet and goes ballroom dancing with a friend. For a while, he owned a lawn-mowing business but eventually found it too physically demanding.

Before lawn mowing, he worked in various IT jobs. But before that, he was a rocket scientist.

“I designed my first rocket at 13 years,” Duennebeil says. “I was a loner; I had bad double vision and couldn’t play sport with the other boys. My father refused to let me build it. It was designed to fly to only 7.5m but I know now it would have exploded within 3m of lifting. It was to be powered by air pressure mixed with fuel.”

His childhood dreams were inspired by the global race to the moon, which in the United States was being led by the German rocket genius Wernher von Braun. Von Braun was the brains behind Adolf Hitler’s V-2 missiles, which were used against Britain in World War II. After the Allies won the war, von Braun was secretly moved to the US, along with about 1600 other German scientists, engineers, and technicians, as part of Operation Paperclip.

Rocket simulator

After training as a computer programmer in the printing industry, Duennebeil started his own project development consultancy in 1984. Two years later, he worked as a subcontractor to the Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm subsidiary MBB Transtechnica, Germany’s leading aerospace and missile manufacturer, in Taufkirchen, on the outskirts of Munich. According to Duennebeil, at the time he was there MBB was building a rocket simulation centre, which was to be shipped to Egypt.

Testing in such centres is much cheaper and safer than firing actual rockets, and the team Duennebeil worked with did simulated flights with 2D images on the screen. The rockets were intended for military use and were able to carry biological, chemical and, in theory, atomic payloads. It was leading-edge technology at the time, he says.

“It was a two-stage rocket, to which a third stage could be added, so the simulation was for a 10- to 14-m high rocket with a range of about 750km,” Duennebeil says. “The development cost of the centre was said to be about 11 million Deutschmarks [$7.8m], but the total infrastructure for a project like this costs billions, and I wondered how Egypt could afford it.”

He says he understood the purpose of the Egyptian centre was to knock out Libyan airport electronics in case of a war with that country. Egypt was then a peaceful country but was concerned about the motives of Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi.

Duennebeil’s 10-strong team built the centre in a converted residential apartment. But he learned there was another one being secretly built elsewhere for Iraq. He understood the Iraqi centre was able to be adapted for Soviet-built Scud ballistic missiles.

The first Scuds, developed during the Cold War, used technology adapted from von Braun’s V-2 rocket. In the 1980s, Iraq developed modified Scuds at several facilities, including the Saad-16 research centre near Mosul, with help from German and other European firms.

In 1991, during the Gulf War, Scud-B missiles with much-improved accuracy were used by the Iraqis to attack US troops in Saudi Arabia, killing 28 soldiers in one incident, and in multiple strikes on Israel, causing a number of civilian casualties.

Duennebeil believes the technology that he personally developed was vital in such attacks. “There was nothing on those rockets that I had developed, but I helped in the simulation to make them more accurate. The UN weapons inspectors found my name on many documents in Mosul after the Gulf War.”

It motivated him to become a whistle-blower. “I had no problem with helping to build weapons of war, but I could not tolerate attacks on innocent civilians.”

To be specific, Duennebeil helped develop the software behind the control technology. The old Soviet Scuds, he says, could land anywhere in a 2km radius. “My control technology could improve the accuracy to 75-100m. Reading that the attacks on Israeli and Saudi Arabian targets had landed with such accuracy confirmed for me that the Iraqis had acquired this technology.”

Supplying Gaddafi

During the final months of the Cold War, in 1989, there were uncontrolled sales of all manner of weapons and, according to the testimony of Senator Jeff Bingaman to a US Senate committee on May 18, 1989, MBB was a key supplier.

The committee was examining nuclear and missile proliferation and Bingaman told its members the US was “surprised and dismayed” to learn that West German firms built Gaddafi’s chemical weapons complex in Libya. Bingaman described MBB as “a major Nato firm and Germany’s principal munitions company” and said it also helped Argentina develop a missile that could strike the Falkland Islands.

German news magazine Der Spiegel claimed that MBB might also have supplied missile technology to Iraq, Egypt and Romania.

Bingaman told the US Senate committee he was “surprised and distressed to learn that certain unscrupulous citizens and companies of a close ally would ignore their own laws and even their own security interests”. He said if the allegations were true, “West German firms will not only have violated their own export laws, they will have placed their government in a most embarrassing position.”

West Germany, Bingaman noted, was a member of the Missile Technology Control Regime under which it, the US and five other allies agreed there would be a strong presumption to refuse technology transfers used in the design and development of missile systems. As a member of the Co-ordinating Committee for Multi­lateral Export Controls (Cocom), it also had an international obligation to strictly control munitions and dual-use technology exports to Eastern Bloc countries.

“While the West German government should be commended for its current investigation of these firms,” he stated, “for several years it apparently knowingly allowed them to continue supplying chemical and missile technology to unstable and hostile regimes.”

Veiled warnings

Duennebeil says a close friend he worked with, an Egyptian Army major who was being trained by his team, admitted that his suspicions were correct. But at the time he was too afraid to speak out. “I didn’t rock the boat. I just wanted to collect information to cover myself in case anything happened, and it was absolutely the right thing to do. I thought it might come out in public and eventually it did.”

He says he later spoke to officials about his suspicions, but nothing happened as a result. There was an investigation into MBB Transtechnica selling technology illegally, but he wasn’t asked to give evidence.

He believes he did his patriotic duty, but some of his superiors found out about his concerns and were not impressed. His inquiries were met with veiled warnings and he was questioned by intelligence officials. Driving on the autobahn one day, one of his tyres blew out. It appeared to have been deliberately cut. He felt seriously vulnerable and told his co-worker girlfriend about his fears.

He had already written down everything he understood to be true, and copied it to solicitors in three other countries. “I advised Customs and the Ministry of Economy what I had done. I told them about my tyre blowout and warned them if anything happened again to me, the lawyers had instructions to publicly release those papers. Within 24 hours, my contracts were cancelled and people stopped talking to me. This is how they got me. I had to leave and I began planning to do so.”

It was December 1986, but he remained in Germany for another five years, doing defence contract work, mainly for Siemens Computers. His partner, Traute Giese, was employed as his admin and security manager, but he started to become concerned about her safety as well.

In 1992, the couple left the country through an unoccupied border crossing into the Netherlands and caught a flight from Schipol to Johannesburg, where an immigration agent helped them move to New Zealand.

He has a son, now aged 36, from an earlier relationship, who, as far as he knows, is still in Germany. They have had no contact since Duennebeil left the country. “He considers I abandoned him.” His son’s mother is now dead.

Interview canned

In about 1993, Duennebeil sent his notes to Werner Giers, a senior journalist who then worked on the Munich daily Münchner Merkur. Through him they were conveyed to a TV company, MedienKontor, to which Duennebeil granted exclusive film and TV rights for no payment, he says. “They had checked me out and believed my story.”

Giers has since died but in February 1998, another German journalist, Thomas Hillebrand, flew from Munich to Wellington to interview Duennebeil for a TV current affairs show. A local camera and sound crew was used.

As part of the TV interview, Hillebrand wanted Duennebeil to sign a sworn affidavit in front of the then German Ambassador to New Zealand, Eberhard Noldeke. Noldeke agreed, but was clearly unhappy about it. “The ambassador was nearly screaming at me, saying, ‘How dare you insult your country with this!’ And I yelled back: ‘How dare you guys kill innocent people with my work! I don’t support murderers.’ And I just walked out once he had signed.”

Hillebrand wanted Duennebeil to go back with him to Germany for the editing, but he refused, as he still feared reprisals. “The interview was never shown and I was never sure about the reasons why. I suspect they were put under some pressure by powerful people, but that’s only my opinion.”

Duennebeil says he was determined to get his story into the public arena, because he felt the exposure would enhance his safety. He contacted the Dominion newspaper, which sent a reporter to interview him, and an unbylined story ran on December 21, 1998, under the headline “Iraq attacks revive bad memories”.

The story referred to Operation Desert Fox, a four-day missile and bombing attack on Iraq by the US and UK in retaliation for Saddam Hussein’s refusal to co-operate with UN weapons inspectors.

From here to eternity

Duennebeil never applied for political asylum but achieved permanent residency in 1993 and became a New Zealand citizen in 2019. He says his immigration agent advised him not to discuss his previous work when he first got here, and he believed he would be overqualified anyway. “I did later make an inquiry with Rocket Lab, but I was already too old and inexperienced for what they wanted.”

Instead, he got an IT network job in Porirua. He then spent four years with a Telecom network subsidiary until it closed.

He and Giese, who has since died, were married as James and Irene Jones in 1998. He chose the name Jones at random from the phone book, unaware it was also the name of an American author who wrote a best-selling war book, From Here to Eternity. He concedes the choice could be prophetic, as he is unlikely ever to leave this country.

“After years of nightmares, I have come to grips with what has happened. Everybody believes that Germany is a fair country. What I found out proves the opposite, as there were many people involved who covered for the illegal deal.”

He believes enough time has since passed to ensure his safety, but still wants to put the record straight. “I feel a sense of pride when I look back on what I did.”

I have tried to give all kinds of news to all of you latest news today 2022 through this website and you are going to like all this news very much because all the news we always give in this news is always there. It is on trending topic and whatever the latest news was

it was always our effort to reach you that you keep getting the latest news and you always keep getting the information of news through us for free and also tell you people. Give that whatever information related to other types of news will be 

made available to all of you so that you are always connected with the news, stay ahead in the matter and keep getting today news all types of news for free till today so that you can get the news by getting it. Always take two steps forward