Five bullets from behind at point blank range on March 22, 1990, in Brussels, Belgium, left Gerald Bull, a rocket scientist and arms dealer, lying in a pool of blood at his apartment door.

The death ended the life of the onetime Northeast Kingdom business man, the former operator of Space Research Cooperation, an employer that during the 1970s did business on a several thousand acre tract that straddles the border at Jay, Vermont, and Highwater, Quebec. Bull was also accused of arming one of America’s most recognized enemies — Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

 Even as the drumbeat of war against Iraq grew louder, there were many people in the Northeast Kingdom who had no idea that a man who once walked and worked in our midst, and employed hundreds of local people on both sides of the border, was accused by some of helping arm a country that America once saw as an ally against the ruthless government of Iran. That ally was the country of Iraq — a country that last year President George W. Bush called a part of an Axis of Evil.

 However not everybody has forgotten Bull. There was an article in the January 3, 2003 National Post, a Canadian newspaper, titled, “Mossad linked to 1990 death of Canadian scientist Supergun inventor: Jewel taken from Gerald Bull said to implicate Israel.” The article reports that new evidence now provides strong evidence that the Israeli Intelligence Agency, the Mossad, killed Bull.

 The movie Dooms Day Gun, a movie filmed in 1994 is about Bull’s supergun, a gun that could have allowed the Iraqi military to easily drop bombs into the heart of Israel and their other Middle Eastern neighbors. The movie also tells the story of the life and death of the brilliant scientist. However, the movie left watchers wondering who killed Bull.

 For those who, over the years, have followed the life of Gerald Bull, the speculation that the Mossad killed him comes as no surprise. There have been numerous news accounts of the Mossad not only taking responsibility for the scientist’s death, but also even boasting about it.

 The former Northeast Kingdom businessman led a dangerous life, especially in the yearsafter his departure from the U.S. Along the way, Bull was a man who could, and most likely did, create a lot of enemies, some who would have liked to see him dead. It has been reported that his travels brought him into contact with the likes of Saddam Hussein and the Chinese government. Most likely his life also brought him into contact with renegade, often unscrupulous, arms dealers, many willing to sell arms to any bidder with the highest dollars.

Bull’s original plan was to use the huge guns to shoot satellites into orbit around the earth, something that had never been done before using a gun. He argued that this method would be much cheaper to help satellites reach orbit than the use of rockets, the traditional method.

 However, some governments, such as that of Israel, feared that these huge guns could easily be used to wage war on their countries, giving a neighboring country, such as Iraq, the ability to launch rockets deep into Israel.

 Even before Bull’s body had cooled, speculations about his killers were already swirling with the arms community and back home here in the Northeast Kingdom. There were many people who had reason to want Bull dead. A suspicious eye was cast at Iran, which had grown weary of the bombardment by Iraqi weaponry during Iran’s war with Iraq; some has been reported to have been designed or redesigned by Bull.

 Other people suspected the Iraqi government itself, while others blamed the American Central Intelligence Agency. But the strongest suspicions fell on the Israeli Mossad. In the years following Bull’s death, much has been written about Israel’s concerns about the scientist’s involvement with Iraq.

 The National Post quoted a Frontline commentary in which a senior member of the Mossad boasted of the agency’s involvement in Bull’s death.

 “Yes, we did it. And you know what? I’m not ashamed of what we have done,” the Frontline commentary quoted the Mossad official. “Whoever reaches such a point, whoever volunteers to destroy us, to serve those who have sworn to destroy us, should know in advance that we will be after him wherever he goes, where he runs to. I hope the message had an echo, and the echo got far enough to warn others.”

 The article in the National Post quotes an unnamed Belgian police official in making this connection.

 “The clue is reportedly a piece of jewelry taken off the victim’s body and seen on the killer years later,” the article is quoted. The article makes no mention of the name of the man who is believed to have killed Bull.

 The article also goes on to state, “Until recently, there has been no hard evidence that the Israelis had anything to do with Mr. Bull’s demise. But the Brussels newspaper La Dernier Heure reported yesterday that Belgian authorities had obtained information originating from a former British possession in Central America, possibly Belize — that pointed the finger at the Mossad hit man.”

 The newspaper quoted Estell Aripgny, a spokeswoman for the Brussels’ public prosecutor’s office, as saying the source had identified an “elite” Mossad assassin as one of the killers.

 There is little doubt, even amongst the people who despised him, that Gerald Bull was a brilliant man. Fascinated with rockets from an early age, Bull, at 22 years old, was the youngest person to ever earn a doctorate degree from the University of Tornoto. In 1967 he helped Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont, establish an aerospace program. Plans for this Northeast Kingdom complex with entrances in Vermont and Highwater, Quebec, began to take shape in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The American government was so interested in Bull and his technological ideas that in 1973, through an act of Congress, with the help of then U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater, Bull was allowed to become an American citizen.

 However, by the mid-1970s, Bull and some of his associates found themselves under the scrutiny of the U.S. government for illegally shipping arms to Southern Africa in violation of a U.S. embargo on such activities. Bull’s life in the U.S. began to crumble.

 As the noose began to tighten around Bull he insisted that he’d been given the approval of the U.S. government to violate this embargo. Bull looked to his adopted country for help, but those within the U.S. government denied any involvement in giving him approval to ignore the embargo. In March 1980 Bull and an associate plead guilty in U.S. District Court in Rutland to charges relating to shipping the arms and technology to South Africa. Both men were sentenced to one year in jail, half of which was suspended.

 After his stint in jail, many say Bull became a very bitter man. He felt he’d been stabbed in the back by the American government. The scientist renounced his U.S. citizenship and vowed never to return to the country he obviously felt had used him, then turned its back on him. Bull eventually settled in Brussels, Belgium, a city known as the home to many freelance arms dealers.

 When Bull’s body was found in the hallway of his apartment complex in Brussels, he still had $20,000 in his pockets, leading investigators to believe that his death was not the result of a robbery, but a hit. For that matter, it has been reported that Bull received a number of death threats leading up to his death, warning him he needed to watch who he did business with, especially the Iraqi movement.

 Apparently the unearthing of this piece of jewelry that Bull was wearing at the time of his death reinforces the idea that the talk of the senior Mossad officials could have been more than a mere boast, claiming responsibility for taking the life of a man many others may have had reason to want dead.