Sinister past of anti-English extremist now standing as an SNP candidate
She carried out a hate campaign against ‘white settlers’ and had links to a tartan terror group. As the party furiously denies accusations of racism, why DID they endorse her?
IN the neat suburban street where Sonja Cameron lives, the wheelie bins stand to attention on pavements as if awaiting inspection. The modern houses are pristine – which might explain the restraint she has shown in advertising her politics in just one of her front windows.
In times gone by, Cameron showed rather less decorum in her attempts to convert Scottish minds to her way of thinking.
The SNP activist did it by daubing graffiti on bins and blanketing the area with intimidating posters bearing the name of a sinister extremist group called Settler Watch. Its agenda? To menace English ‘white settlers’ and encourage Scots to despise them.
By the time Grampian Police caught up with Cameron and her accomplice Lynn Conway in Banchory, Aberdeenshire, in 1993, six litter bins and a road sign bore spray-painted Settler Watch slogans while 61 posters had been stapled to trees and telegraph poles.
Another 300 offensive posters were found in the red Vauxhall Nova the pair had borrowed.
At a time when then SNP leader Alex Salmond was determined to consign her malicious brand of ethnic nationalism to history, it certainly left Cameron with some explaining to do to her party.
Her antics were harder still to explain in view of the fact she was not even Scottish herself. She had arrived in Scotland from Dusseldorf and changed her surname from Vathjunker, apparently to blend in.
But the most difficult thing to explain, surely, was her links to the two most notorious Scottish terrorists of the modern age, morally bankrupt criminals intent on securing independence through bombing campaigns.
That may well be why Cameron, 53, has never publicly explained her links to Andrew McIntosh and Adam Busby.
In spite of her alarming history, Cameron had been cleared by her party to stand as an SNP candidate for election to Stirling Council.
It comes as troubling questions over the divide between nationalism and racism were raised by London Mayor Sadiq Khan.
The SNP reacted furiously when he said: ‘There’s no difference between those who try to divide us on the basis of whether we’re English or Scottish and those who try to divide us on the basis of our background, race or religion.’
NoW the party confirms Cameron has passed its vetting process and say she is a reformed character who ‘deeply regrets’ the events which led to her being suspended from the party 23 years ago. Cameron, who lived a short distance from McIntosh’s Aberdeen bedsit in the early 1990s, was certainly friendly enough with him to borrow his car. It was his red Nova that she and Conway were stopped in by police as the two women distributed hatred on Deeside.
When Grampian Police traced the owner, detectives visited his George Street digs and found an arsenal of weapons there. It included a Kalashnikov assault rifle, a sawn-off shotgun, a Walther .22 pistol and CS riot gas cartridges.
Also found was a timetable for the hoax letter bomb campaign that McIntosh had been carrying out across Scotland. The two women’s Settler Watch flyposting campaign had led police directly to a terrorist.
Had Cameron ever been in her friend McIntosh’s flat?
And what of her links to Adam Busby, a terrorist who, even today, is the subject of US extradition proceedings over a series of emailed threats to bomb the University of Pittsburgh?
only ill health prevents him facing trial here in Scotland on accusations of threatening to poison water supplies, bomb bridges and send toxic substances to then Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
It was at the 1995 trial of two men accused of a terrorist conspiracy that Cameron’s links with Busby were aired.
The High Court in Stirling heard Kevin Paton, from Inverurie, Aberdeenshire, had begun corresponding with her and another Settler Watch figure, Louis Mair, and, as a result, had been called by Busby in Ireland and recruited to a group called Flame.
Its infamous poster showed a black hand clutching a lit match. Underneath was a picture of a cottage and the inscription ‘English out of Scotland’. Was Cameron the conduit between Paton and Busby? That, certainly, was the conclusion to which the court evidence pointed.
At the end of the trial Paton was jailed for mailing hoax letter bombs and conspiring to further the aims of the Scottish National Liberation Army (SNLA).
But Busby, the court heard, was the remote mastermind. He had sent Paton Jiffy bags containing a battery, wires, a clothes peg and marzipan to send out to a list of targets who were opposed to militant anti-English campaigns. Paton and co-accused Terence Webber – a convicted rapist – were the Scottish-based extremists recruited to carry out the operation.
There has been no public clarification of Cameron’s reputed interaction in the episode. Indeed, the little she has said suggested more a sense of anger with the media for reporting it than shame for her own actions.
Announcing in September 1993 she had quit her Aberdeen-based job with a Gaelic television production company, she said she had done so because of the publicity after her arrest.
She said: ‘I am not, and have never been, a member of Settler Watch. However, due to the adverse publicity for my employers, Canan, generated by the press coverage to which I have recently been subjected, I have decided to resign.’
Rather less reticent about his links to Settler Watch is Bruce ogilvie, from Montrose, Angus, who claimed to have founded the group to ‘defend [Scotland] from a foreign invasion’.
Now a leading activist in Siol nan Gaidheal, or ‘Seed of the Gaels’, he helped co-ordinate abuse and attacks on Jim Murphy during the former Scottish Secretary’s 100 Towns, 100 Days tour to defend the Union in the weeks before the independence referendum.
ARE he and Cameron in touch? A typical Siol nan Gaidheal poster depicts a rifle-toting Scottish paramilitary in a balaclava and the slogan: ‘So long as 100 of us remain alive we will never submit to English Rule.’
It was during the 1980s that Sonja Vathjunker had arrived in Scotland from Germany and immersed herself in her adopted nation’s culture.
She became fluent in Gaelic and studied Scottish history at Aberdeen University, drinking in the traditions with such fanaticism that she began to see the dilution of the culture – by English settlers in particular – as an insult to Scotland.
She is quoted in an academic paper by historian Eric Zuelow as saying: ‘White settlers are people who come into Scotland, live in Scotland, who basically make no effort to accept the Scottish culture, the Scottish way of life… and try to run things their own way… Basically people that have no respect of the culture and, therefore, are a danger to the culture… which is in danger anyway.’
She took a job based at Grampian Television in Aberdeen, putting English subtitles on Gaelic programmes and, by all accounts, was a valued employee. Yet, away from her job, a friendship was growing with a dangerous and perhaps disturbed extremist.
Andrew McIntosh worked as a courier for the oil industry supply firm Wood Group in the early 1990s and had been known to irritate colleagues from south of the Border by calling them English b ****** s.
But those who dismissed him as harmless were quite wrong. In March 1993 he sent a letter bomb to Anglian Water in Cambridgeshire amid speculation about the privatisation of the Scottish water industry.
Fortunately, clerk Angela Whitcomb, 19, was only slightly injured when she opened it.
other live devices were sent to the Scottish office in Edinburgh
and Dounreay nuclear power station, while unarmed devices were found at several oil company headquarters in Aberdeen.
Telephoned bomb threats were made to Dundee, Glasgow and Edinburgh, bringing the centres of all three cities to a standstill.
McIntosh was the man behind the campaign – a fact which became clear to the police only when they traced the red Nova Cameron was driving to its owner.
When interviewed by police, McIntosh told them: ‘I am a volunteer soldier with the SNLA. I am a cell commander.
‘The actions we have taken are directed at those people who are actively working against the interests of Scotland. Whatever I did, I did in the line of duty.’ He was jailed for 12 years. McIntosh’s story has a bleak ending. On October 9, 2004, the day the Queen opened the new Scottish parliament building, Special Branch detectives stopped McIntosh as he drove towards Edinburgh.
Only a marine flare was found in the car, but a cache of guns and bomb-making equipment were found in his high-rise flat in Aberdeen’s Seaton.
He was placed on remand in the city’s Craiginches prison and was found hanged in his cell several days later.
The prospect of another lengthy spell behind bars, it was thought, horrified him. Over in Dublin, meanwhile, Busby would still wreak havoc for a few more years before illness left him mentally and physically incapacitated. Extradited from Ireland to face several charges – including one under terror laws – Busby has yet to attend a court hearing.
Initially he flitted between a remand cell and a bed at Glasgow Royal Infirmary where he remained under 24-hour armed guard. He now languishes in a care home in the city’s Drumchapel.
HIS QC Gordon Jackson told the High Court in Glasgow: ‘He is never, as far as I can see, coming to trial.’ Describing his mental condition, he added: ‘He really is done.’
And yet attempts to extradite him to face trial for bomb threats which led to the Pittsburgh University campus being evacuated 136 times in 2012 continue.
After fleeing Scotland in 1980 to escape prosecution over alleged terrorist offences, Busby, the selfproclaimed founder of the SNLA, had spent 30 years as one of the nation’s most wanted criminals. He was the man thought to be behind hoaxes involving anthrax weapons and fake bombs and real attacks using incendiary devices in parcels. He has been accused of raising bomb alerts in a bewildering array of locations – from New York-bound aircraft to the Argyll Arcade in Glasgow – and threatening to contaminate drinking water all over England.
The scale and cost of the disruption which he has said to have brought about is by now incalculable – and the zeal of US prosecutor David Hickton to put him on trial in the US palpable. He has said the FBI will never give up its quest to bring him to justice.
So much, then, for Scotland’s most notorious terrorists. Where does the present day find their sometime contact Sonja Cameron?
Active in her local branch of the SNP, certainly. She is organiser and newsletter editor for Bridge of Allan and Logie SNP, a role which has made her a familiar face in Nationalist circles in Stirlingshire.
Those with whom she has posed for publicity pictures include MSP Keith Brown and MPs Steven Paterson and John Nicolson. For a time she was also an honorary research fellow in the history department at Glasgow University, although it says she is no longer on its books.
It was as Dr Sonja Cameron, however, that she made a submission to the Scottish parliament’s education and culture committee on the role of the BBC in Scotland.
Her antipathy for the media shines through, as it did all those years ago. ‘The BBC appears to be serving the Scottish audience only grudgingly, if at all,’ she writes. ‘Its reporting is full of errors and distortions.’ She claims the BBC’s Scottish referendum coverage was ‘shamefully biased’ and that, when presenting Scottish issues to a wider UK audience, its coverage is ‘stereotyped and again distorted’.
Few vocal supporters of Cameron were to be found in Stirling this week in spite of her political rehabilitation. Driving instructor Andy Connolly, 45, said: ‘I voted to stay as part of the United Kingdom in the independence referendum and I wouldn’t vote for the SNP anyway. She doesn’t sound like the type of person who would be able to convert me and I wouldn’t want her representing me.
‘Everyone can change but if you’re so hardcore one way then you’re unlikely to ever really change. She sounds like a wolf in sheep’s clothing to me.’
Retired health worker Dorothy Nimmo, 72, who has previously voted SNP, said: ‘If you have that chequered a past then why should you represent us?
‘I wouldn’t vote for her and will never vote again for the SNP. She’s come from Germany yet wanted to keep English people out of Scotland. It’s shocking. It’s hypocritical.’
OPPOSITION parties’ reaction to Cameron’s success in getting through the SNP’s vetting process is similarly scathing.
‘It beggars belief,’ said a Labour spokesman, while the Tories wonder how the SNP might react if a rival party were planning to field a candidate with links to terrorism. ‘It would be going crazy,’ suggested a Scottish Conservative spokesman.
The SNP insists Cameron’s behaviour today is ‘entirely at odds with’ that of her younger self – although even that behaviour was not deemed serious enough to merit expulsion from the party.
As for the SNP group she seeks to join, former Stirling Provost and veteran councillor Fergus Wood opines: ‘There are nutcases in every party – every party’s got its share of oddballs.’
Can this most shrill of independence campaigners be dismissed merely as an oddball from the SNP’s zany wing? Or is there something more sinister about a person with such a past running for election under the banner of the party of government?
Despite repeated approaches at her home in Bridge of Allan, Cameron has refused to respond to questions about her candidacy. It remains to be seen whether she will be any more forthcoming with voters.