The Washington Connection: Madeleine McCann, Ernie Allen, Kevin Halligen, iJet and the WePROTECT Global Alliance
by the Madeleine McCann Research Group, February 2021
Within less than 12 weeks of reporting his daughter Madeleine missing, Gerry McCann jet-setted to Washington D.C. on Monday 23 July 2007. As we have documented elsewhere in detail, he spent nearly the whole time in discussions and meetings with Ernie Allen, the boss of the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC).
Ernie Allen resigned as the President & CEO of NCMEC in 2012 and from ICMEC in 2014. But today he strides the international field of child protection as the boss of a new world-wide organisation set up in 2016 to co-ordinate international child protection: the ‘WePROTECT Global Alliance’ (WPGA) (Link: https://www.weprotect.org/)
Allen is the Chairman of the WPGA’s Advisory Board and heads the organisation along with its Founder, Baroness Joanna Shields OBE. Shields was previously British Minister for Internet Safety and Security, and Adviser on the Digital Economy to Prime Minister David Cameron. In 2016, she was appointed the Prime Minster’s Special Representative for Internet Crime and Harms at the Department for Digital, Culture Media and Sport.
WPGA is backed and funded by most of the world’s major corporations and by over 100 national governments.
The logo of WePROTECT
Gerry McCann’s blog
When we look back at Gerry McCann’s blog for that week, we get a feeling of how much he was beginning to feel under pressure:
QUOTE
“Spent the whole day travelling from the Algarve to Washington where I will be visiting the National and International Centres for Missing and Exploited Children and meeting politicians involved in recent legislation on missing children. The flights for our campaign manager and myself were kindly donated by an airline.
“There is a very upsetting story on the front page of a British National Newspaper today. The headline suggests that Kate and I face prosecution for neglecting our children by dining 50 yards away and checking on them regularly. We know that there has been criticism in some quarters of our actions but at the time, we felt our actions were responsible. We were essentially performing our own baby listening service although we have talked of the guilt we felt at not being there at the moment Madeleine was taken.
“We have been advised that legally our behaviour was well within the bounds of responsible parenting and subsequently been assured that no action will be taken. These types of criticism, particularly at this stage, as well as being hurtful are extremely unhelpful in the search for Madeleine. From the moment we discovered Madeleine missing Kate and I have done everything in our power to try and help get her back.
Our opinion now is completely clouded by what has happened to us and of course has sent shock waves through thousands of families. The real issue is that we should not have a constant fear of abduction of our children from their bedrooms, gardens or streets for that matter.
“What Kate and I did was at worst naïve and no one should forget that the real criminal is the predator who has taken a completely innocent child in such a premeditated fashion. It is this act that has wreaked havoc on our family and affected millions of other people”.
UNQUOTE
Jim Gamble
In 2007, Jim Gamble was the boss of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP). When Madeleine was reported missing on 3 May 2007, he immediately became involved, urging the public to send him holiday photographs they may have taken during the fortnight leading up to 3 May. According to some, there is evidence from the ‘Wayback Machine’ that he set up a dummy page titled ‘Madeleine McCann’ on the CEOP website on Monday, 30 April. That would suggest that something serious had happened to Madeleine on or before that date.
He subsequently wholeheartedly backed the McCanns, appearing with them numerous times on TV and at conferences - and even fronted a promotional video for them which backed their ongoing ‘search for Madeleine’.
It was no surprise, then, when both Ernie Allen and Jim Gamble appeared in the extraordinary 8-part ‘documentary’ on Madeleine McCann by Netflix in 2019, a series that simply used every device possible to promote the abduction narrative, with no alternative views allowed.
Netflix
As the Sun reported on 15 March 2019, under the headline: “MISSING Madeleine McCann is still alive, a sensational new Netflix documentary has claimed”, the 8-part series “suggests that people traffickers abducted the three-year-old in Portugal in 2007 - as a top child protection cop insists the 12-year mystery will be solved”.
The ‘top cop’ was Jim Gamble. As the Sun reported, ‘The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann’ features 40 experts and key figures in the case, some of whom argue she was taken to another foreign country. Jim Gamble, the top child protection cop in the UK’s first Maddie investigation, says: “I absolutely believe that in my lifetime we will find out what has happened to Madeleine McCann. There’s huge hope to be had with the advances in technology. Year on year DNA is getting better. Year on year other techniques, including facial recognition, are getting better. And as we use that technology to revisit and review that which we captured in the past, there’s every likelihood that something we already know will slip into position”.
Actually, Gamble wasn’t officially ‘involved’ in the first investigation, but he certainly played a very significant role in the McCanns propaganda campaign.
Netflix also wheeled in the Washington-based Ernie Allen into their lengthy documentary. The Sun said: “There was also fresh optimism from child abduction experts, including Ernie Allen, Head of the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in the US”. [Note: he had resigned from NCMEC seven years before the Netflix show - MMRG].
There is an interesting connection between NCMEC and the current media obsession with the latest suspect abductor in the Madeleine McCann case: Christian Brueckner. In 2013, a one-hour TV documentary: BBC Crimewatch McCann Special was screened, attracting a huge audience of 7.1 million. It featured two highly questionable efits of dubious origin, supposedly drawn up by Irishman Martin Smith. Many thought the efits looked like Gerry McCann.
A similar programme, also featuring the two efits, was shown in Germany. The public has been told that a number of people 'phoned in and said that they resembled Christian Brueckner. We know that NCMEC has supplied information about Brueckner to the current German police investigation (carried out by the BKG, Germany's top criminal intelligence unit), as to whether Brueckner could have abducted/murdered Madeleine, an absurd claim to anyone who is familiar with the main lines of evidence in this case. NCMEC is and has been the main source of intelligence to the BKG about the online activity of paedophiles, including in the case of Brueckner. NCMEC, for obvious reasons, has close contact with the main BigTech internet companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft, who constantly scan their data using state-of-the-art filtering technologies for images of child sexual abuse. The detected files are directly transmitted to NCMEC.
The Sun gave further information about Gerry McCann's series of meetings with Ernie Allen: “Allen helped the McCanns in their search by creating an age-progressed image of Maddie, who would now be 15-years-old, and tells how he has assisted in returning many other abducted youngsters to their families in similar circumstances. In the documentary Ernie says: ‘There are many, many cases we can point to in which children have been found, have come home alive, after months, after years. There have been cases in the United States in which witnesses, people who have information haven’t come forward for decades, and then one day provide information that helps lead to the resolution of the case’.”
The way in which these two heads of some of the world’s largest child protection agencies rushed to support the McCanns - and were still doing so 12 years later despite evidence of corpse scent almost certainly belonging to her found in the McCanns’ holiday apartment and on their clothes - is a source of great wonder.
Producer of the Netflix series, Emma Leach, made an interesting comment to the Sun: “Keeping any search for what happened to Madeleine in the consciousness - particularly globally - is something that’s so important”.
Kevin Halligen
We turn now to another significant Washington connection in this case, namely the decision by Brian Kennedy, the McCanns and the Find Madeleine Fund to award a $1 million (£750,000), six-month, contract to Washington-based Kevin Halligen - to search for Madeleine.
How did Halligen, who was a British resident, end up in Washington? This is a brief outline.
After being involved in a number of companies close to the defence and security industries, Halligen on 17 March 2005 founded, together with Tim Craig-Harvey, a company, Red Defence International Ltd. Craig-Harvey and Halligen had founded companies before. On this occasion, Craig-Harvey acted as the Company Secretary.
Somehow, Halligen was able to persuade the Dutch-owned company, Trafigura, to award him and his company a fee of $12 million (£9 million) to mount a rescue operation for two of its Directors who were being held by the government of Ivory Coast - after one of its tankers dumped a load of toxic waste on its coast. Many people died or became seriously ill as a result of inhaling the dangerous cocktail of illegally-dumped chemicals. The two Directors were eventually freed by diplomatic means. Halligen’s Red Defence Ltd had nothing to do with the mens’ release. But by then, Halligen had apparently been paid the sum of $12 million for whatever undercover operations he had been mounting in Ivory Coast. By the way, the British lawyers who acted for Trafigura were Carter-Ruck.
Though we are not aware of the exact timeline, and we do not know if Halligen had previously been maintaining a home in Washington DC, it is clear that by early 2007 he had set up a base and a home there, buying his new, Virginia home for around $1.75 million (£1.3million). Those who worked with Halligen on the Madeleine McCann investigation confirm that during 2007, he:
* bought himself a lavish office suite in downtown Washington
* bought a mansion in nearby Virginia which cost him a reputed $1.75 million, and spent more money tarting it up
* began living a luxuriant lifestyle of eating out in posh, expensive restaurants
* went through a lavish, expensive but fake marriage ceremony and wedding celebration with Maria Dybczak
* allegedly had an affair with the glamorous Dr Shirin Trachiotis, wife of Dr Gregory Trachiotis (both still practise in Washington to this day).
Kevin Halligen went through a fake marriage with Maria Dybczak at this Georgetown Hotel in the summer of 2007
The founding of Oakley Investigations Group
In November 2007, Colonel Ken Irish III, an American, founded a company called Oakley Strategic Services LLC. Kevin Halligen later became a Director of that company in 2008. The company was one of several national security specialists to contribute to a workshop entitled, ‘Shariah Law and ‘Financial Jihad: How Should America Respond?' It was co-sponsored by The McCormick Foundation and The Centre for Security Policy. Nickolas Abramo (Director of Operations) and Ken Irish (registered owner) attended. One aspect of the company’s work was to assess the risks and dangers posed by Shariah-Compliant Finance (SCF) and the indirect impact the phenomenon might have on human rights.
Between December 2007 and February 2008, a company called Oakley International Group LLC. was also being formed. It was formally registered on 12 February 2008 - around a month before the very same company was employed by Brian Kennedy, the McCanns and the Find Madeleine Fund to search for Madeleine. All the founders of the company lived and worked around Washington. They were:
* Andre Hollis (then Vice President of Van Sycoyoc and a regular Fox News commentator), who became its Chief Executive Officer
* Tim Unruh (a lawyer from top legal firm Patton Boggs)
* Colonel John Garrett (another lawyer from Patton Boggs).
It is understood that Kevin Halligen was also a co-founder. It was set up as a ‘Foreign Limited Liability Company’, allegedly trading in defence & aeronautical search and navigations systems and equipment.
We know from the Mark Hollingsworth article in the Evening Standard (August 2009) that relations between Brian Kennedy, the McCann Team and Kevin Halligen broke down and he was sacked, having pocketed an alleged sum of £537,000, presumably paid in dollars as per the contract. It seems that it may have been at this time that he fled Washington, allegedly flying to Italy with Shirin Trachiotis, and then returning to live in England, where he was tracked down to the Bank Hotel, Oxford in November 2009.
It seems he sold his Virginia house in the autumn of 2008 for a sum of around $1.5 million (£1.15 million). His connections with Washington D.C. and the U.S probably ceased at this point...
