Irishman Tony Cascarino is the greatest deceit by the British intelligence service, which is trying in all possible ways to discredit the fugitive General Ante Gotovina. Through certain Croatia, and with the help of rare foreign media, such as the Scottish paper the Sunday Herald, systematic propaganda have been placed for the past year and a half on the alleged Irish mercenary Tony Cascarino, his ties to Ante Gotovina, the Italian mafia and Irish terrorists, all without a single piece of evidence. In certain media, Cascarino, though he was only 19 at the time he arrived in Croatia, has frequently been characterized as an experienced commando with ties to the Italian mafia, and the exaggerated articles about him claim that it was he who fired at the MI6 building in London several years ago, and that he is directly involved in the murder of Željko Ražnjatović Arkan.

The stories about Tony Cascarino as a great Croatian war hero, even though the majority of Croatian citizens have never even heard of him, let alone praise him as a hero, began in the autumn of 2003. On the front page of the weekly magazine Globus of 25 September of that year, it was reported that General Gotovina was hiding out in Sicily, under the protection of the Italian mafia and his great friend and fellow soldier, Tony Cascarino.

In spring 2003, a manuscript appeared on the website www.tonycascarino.com entitled “A Millennium Memory”, in which Tony Cascarino describes his participation in the Patriotic War in Croatia. In sixty pages, Cascarino describes his arrival in Croatia, his participation in some of the units of the former Home Guard, the period he spent in HOS under Dobroslav Paraga. The beginning and end of the manuscript is comprised of a more or less concise description of the Patriotic War and the formation of the Croatian state. In the manuscript, General Ante Gotovina is mentioned only several times, and from the context he is described, it is clear that the two men hardly knew each other, and there is no support of a ‘great friendship’ as portrayed in some of the Croatian media.

On the website and in the media that have investigated the phenomenon of Tony Cascarino, his biography up until 1991 is reconstructed. The media claims that, though he is an Irishman and grandson of the legendary IRA commander Donnchandae MacNiallais, Cascarino was already undergoing special training in the British army at the age of 16, and only one year later he was accepted into regular military service and was posted in a British military base in western Germany. However, as Cascarino himself states on one occasion in the manuscript, an older squad leader, previously known as an abuser, attempted to rape him one evening. Cascarino was to be the prime witness for the prosecution at the court martial of the abuser, however the squad leaders colleagues and friends tried to prevent Cascarino’s testimony in every possible way. During the trial he was abused and beaten and made several trips to the military hospital at Munster with head injuries and internal injuries. The squad leader was convicted in 1989, while Cascarino spent some time in the detention of the military jail Colhester for violent behaviour.

Here it is worthwhile noting that the British agencies and certain media have for some time been speculating as to his true identity, calling him Tony Cascarino and the Striker. If Cascarino truly did experience all he says he did, with the help of the British military authorities, his real name and photograph could be found in a matter of hours and the police, if there are indications that he committed a crime, could issue an international search warrant. However, if these are fabricated events, then all those claims about his military past and experience also fall through, like the credibility of his claims as to his own war credits and his friendship with Ante Gotovina.

In order to determine the credibility and overall war role of Tony Cascarino, who some still suspect to be a fabricated person, over the past ten days, Nacional’s reporter has contacted a large number of Croatian veterans, who fought together with Ante Gotovina, in order to reconstruct the time Tony Cascarino spent in Croatia. Though the manuscript “A Millennium Memory” is filled with exact details such as street names, locations and regions in Croatia, as well as certain real people, it is indicative that not a single date is listed, and there is no information as to when Cascarino arrived in Croatia, nor any information as to how and under what circumstances he left the country. The manuscript itself is a blend of various military actions and events, which are not chronologically ordered, and the role of Tony Cascarino is ultimately exaggerated. If Tony Cascarino is so relevant for the most varying intrigue surrounding the fugitive General Ante Gotovina, then the Croatian police and POA should have long ago investigated Cascarino’s role in the Patriotic War and spoken with witnesses from that time. Considering that this has never been done, for reasons unknown, Nacional attempted to investigate the person and work of this controversial Irishman.

Tony Cascarino arrived in Croatia in the summer of 1991. At that time, adventure hunters wanting to taste battle were arriving from all over the world, and the Croatian military, then in its infancy, took advantage of every man who could hold a gun. And that is how Tony Cascarino, together with a group of foreigners, was sent to Sljeme Mountain above Zagreb, where at that time there was a sort of training centre for foreigners. Among them was a young man who introduced himself as Tony Cascarino. “He was very young, maybe twenty, he looked like your average football fan, a hooligan. We all assumed that he had fled Britain due to some trouble with the law, but he did not want to talk about his past. At that time, different kinds of men were arriving, there were problematic ones as well, and we didn’t know what to do with them. They had absolutely no military knowledge or experience, with the exception of watching Rambo movies. Those were the ones we sent into battle after a short training session,” explained Z.M. (information known to Nacional), one of the Sljeme soldiers who today is a retired veteran in Zagreb. Croatian veteran T.K. (information known to Nacional) had a similar view of Tony Cascarino. “Cascarino was obviously too young for any combat experience, and even at that time, we noticed he was fond of the drink and that he had no solid military knowledge, even though he showed up at Sljeme in a uniform of the British Engineering Regiment and had a dagger of the British Marines. The claims in his book that he was an instructor at Sljeme are ridiculous; he was no instructor. If he had had some kind of a function, many people would know of him, and that fact is that only a handful of us remember him vaguely, and that as an ordinary young man without any experience.”

As one of the experienced soldiers, Ante Gotovina was responsible for filtering out the men in whom he had little trust and who he did not want to keep in his unit, and so after only a few days, he sent those into the 1st Guard Brigade, centred in the Zagreb neighbourhood Vrapče in the former YNA barracks. The majority of those who fought by Gotovina’s side have denied any great friendship between Gotovina and Cascarino, allowing only for the possibility that they met at Sljeme. “Other than the fact that he had little faith in such people, it is also questionable how they could even communicates, considering that Gotovina had only just returned to Croatia and had virtually forgotten Croatian due to his long stay abroad, and he even issued orders in French. Cascarino knew only English.,” said I.M., one of Gotovina’s fellow soldiers.

Cascarino describes his transfer to the Vrapče base in his manuscript, and he claims that he was under the command of “Captain Pavković”. Last week, Nacional’s reporter succeeded in finding the captain, G.P. from Zagreb, who today works in a private company in Zagreb. “Cascarino appeared one evening at the gate of the Vrapče base. I immediately assessed that this was a young man who had most likely run away from home and had come here to make a hero of himself. He was assigned to me, as I was the only officer who spoke English there. Cascarino spent barely two weeks at Vrapče, though his manuscript gives the impression that he was there for months. In that short period, he proved to be a very problematic young man who obviously had a drinking problem, and perhaps psychological problems as well. Once he got very drunk in a nearby bar, where he spent most of his evenings, and he returned to the barracks by jumping over the fence, injuring his arm in the process. When we brought him to his room, he was drunk, depressed, saying that he would kill himself, he took out some kind of dagger, was waving it around and the like. The next morning, he acted as though nothing had happened. In October 1991, he and other foreigners were sent into the field at Novska as part of the 1st company of the 1st Brigade. He spent about two weeks there. One day, he just disappeared,” recalled G.P.

Gotovina’s fellow soldiers deny the claims from the book in which Cascarino describes the headquarters of Ante Gotovina in Lipovljani. As they say, Gotovina’s staff was then headquartered in Novska, while the staff of the 1st Brigade was in Lipovljani. They admit that Gotovina stopped in at Lipovljani once weekly for a short meeting with the commanders of the 1st Brigade, but that was certainly neither the time nor the place for a friendship with young Cascarino to evolve.

In his manuscript, Cascarino claims that he joined HOS under Dobroslav Paraga, which Paraga himself confirmed. “At that time, various volunteers, including foreigners, came to us. One day, Tony Cascarino also showed up. He spent a few weeks with us, of that he spent some time in Vinkovci, and after the fall of Vukovar, he returned to Zagreb where he worked on the security of the HOS building. I last saw him in early December in Zagreb, after which point he just disappeared and I never saw him again.

In his manuscript, Cascarino states that he participated in the defense of Vukovar, which eye witnesses to the war events deny. “According to his description, it appears as though he arrived in Vukovar at the time the city was already under siege and when no one could leave Vukovar. If the Croats could not succeed, those who knew the language, terrain and situation, how could a twenty year old kid who didn’t speak a work of Croatia? Cascarino obviously never even saw Vukovar, let alone fought there. Some of the battles he writes about in his book never even happened, or didn’t happen in the way he described. I recall that I saw that young man on several occasions in Vinkovci, he wore a HOS uniform and he did not at all understand what was going on around him,” stated D.M., a surviving Vukovar veteran.

By his own admission, Cascarino had already left Croatia by mid December 1991. Other than the fact that it is unclear why he left Croatia so quickly in the midst of the war, it turns out that this alleged war hero and volunteer spent only a few months in Croatia – from July or August to December 1991. Also, it is unclear as to why Cascarino never joined the First International Unit as part of the 160th Osijek Brigade, which was comprised of foreigners. Some died during the war, while those who survived were granted Croatian citizenship for their merits. Some still live and work in Croatia today. An interesting story by G.P. captain at the Vrapče base, testifies that Tony Cascarino is a very controversial person, who is no war hero.

“In 1995, Cascarino sent me a letter and occasionally called us, referring to our wartime acquaintance. He explained that he was working somewhere in England at the warehouse of the company UMBRO, producers of football jerseys, and he asked me to send him some photos of the time he spent in Croatia. Considering that I didn’t have any, he asked me to send him some kind of confirmation that he was a war volunteer in Croatia. He claimed that he needed it because he wanted to write a book about his wartime experiences, while to me it seemed more that he needed this confirmation as an alibi, as though the police were after him on something and he needed to prove that he spent much more time in Croatia than he actually did. Considering that I was no longer in the military, I told him to contact the Defense Ministry for someone in the 1st Brigade to write him a confirmation about his service as a solider. This angered him, he cursed me on the phone and I never heard from him again.”

All of the participants of the Patriotic War who read the excerpts from the “Millenium Memory” manuscript, which can be downloaded off the website www.tonycascarino.com claim that this is very suspicious material: while it reminds some of the books by Andy McNab and Chris Ryan, former members of the British SAS, which appeared after Desert Storm in 1991, others who knew Cascarino claim that a person like him is not capable of writing a book. “It was evident that he was poorly educated, fond of the drink, he never wrote anything down and he acted like a typical football hooligan, certainly not a person who was a war hero or who could write three complete sentences.”

Participants of the Patriotic War also claim that the military arsenal that Croatia had at that time did not at all correspond to Cascarino’s description, like many other details. Furthermore, the people Cascarino mentions throughout the manuscript are real, but they deny having any acquaintance or friendship with Cascarino. In recent days, Nacional has spoken with several war veterans who, upon seeing his photograph, admit to having met a young man named Tony Cascarino in late 1991, but that they did not spend any time with him. “He was one of many foreigners who came to Croatia at that time. As soon as they arrived, they asked about their pay and shouted that they wanted to get into the field, to fight, to shoot! Tony Cascarino is certainly not the person he is portrayed to be in this book,” commented A.S., a war volunteer who was injured during the war and was left handicapped.

All in all, it would appear that the controversial Tony Cascarino is one of the phony mysteries the British intelligence circles, with the help of certain Croatian reporters, have placed, in order to discredit the fugitive General Ante Gotovina, without offering up any concrete evidence.

Tony Cascarino on Ante Gotovina

After the recent great bank robbery in Belfast, in which a group of unknown persons, kidnapping two employees of the Northern Bank, ran off with more than 26 million pounds, the Scottish newspaper the Sunday Herald published an article which claimed that one of the suspects war the Striker, or Tony Cascarino – a paid hitman who was in Croatia in 1991 and who is thought to be a friend of the fugitive General Gotovina. The article claims that this Tony Cascarino is a great Croatian national hero, who the majority of Croatian citizens adore due to his work in the Patriotic War. However, the fact of the matter is that the majority of Croatian citizens, as well as participants in the Patriotic War, have never even heard of this man that reporter Neil Mackay claims they adore and view as a war hero. Regardless of the credibility of the Scottish newspaper article, on 11 January, the front page of Jutarnji List carried the story of “Gotovina’s partner who robbed a bank in Belfast”. Later, Globus also wrote about Cascarino, while on Sunday, 23 January, Jutarnji List ran an article claiming that the fugitive General Gotovina was armed by the IRA, and again the controversial Tony Cascarino was mentioned. From today’s perspective, the only unclear in the entire story on Tony Cascarino is the non-professionalism of the Croatian police and intelligence agencies which, instead of looking into the reporter’s claims, take this for granted. This is proven by the POA report from October 2003, which was released one year later on 1 October 2004, in the great Globus dossier on Ante Gotovina: therefore it appears as though the weekly magazine Globus was basing its texts upon POA reports, which were written based on the writings of Globus.