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The Secret State: Britain's Intelligence Agencies:
MI5 (Counterintelligence/Home Office/MOD) and MI6 (Intelligence/Foreign
Office/MOD)
Why does us Brits' MI5 logo include an occult symbol, 'the all seeing eye', as part of her 1950's to 1970's official insignia? And pentagram illusions (try looking at the MI5 Rectum Defendae 'roses' close up then at a distance) in their current insignia? If you know why, please tell me. Comments here
See intelligence links on my badlinks
page
Press Gagging Notices -
http://www.dnotice.org.uk/
From an email correspondent - referring to the below item about landmines and other inquest revelations [TG]
Also important as to why Diana was eliminated is Diana’s tapes.
She kept them in a mahogany box.
When Butler Paul Burrell was in court about taking stuff from Diana’s apartment
after her death, he threatened to tell all and had possession of the box.
One tape concerned the rape in the palace of George Smith, a valet, by a senior
royal’s member of staff.
There may have been other strange conversations on Diana’s tapes, such as about
Charles.
George Smith was paid off for his silence. A few years later he was mysteriously
deep-sixed.
As to Paul, the Queen stopped his trial by saying she remembered Diana said
he could have all the loot.
John’s last book, How They Murdered Princess Diana, is his best.
By Martin Bentham and Andrew Alderson12:01AM GMT 10 Nov 2002
A former royal valet came forward last night to claim that he was the victim of
a homosexual rape carried out by a senior member of the Prince of Wales's staff.
George Smith, 42 a former Army corporal who served in the Falklands, waived his
right to anonymity to disclose details of the alleged rape. He accused Prince
Charles and other Royal Family members of seeking to cover up the attack. He
also said that he had told Diana, Princess of Wales, about the incident and that
she had made a tape recording of his claims.
The disclosures, made by Mr Smith in an interview with The Mail on Sunday, will
fuel the row over the collapse of the trial of the Princess's former butler,
Paul Burrell, who was cleared of theft charges at the Old Bailey a fortnight
ago.
There has been speculation that the trial, which was halted after an
intervention by the Queen, collapsed because of fears that details of the tape
recording, and the alleged rape, would be made public - although that is
strongly denied by Buckingham Palace.
In his interview, Mr Smith said the attack happened in 1989 after he was picked
up at Kensington Palace by the man, who cannot be named for legal reasons. The
pair went to the man's London home, where they dined and drank champagne and
spirits before Mr Smith fell asleep. He said that when he awoke, in the early
hours, he found he had been sexually assaulted.
Related Articles - Burrell TV revelations 10 Nov 2002
"I woke up. I was hurting," said Mr Smith. "I was totally ashamed. I felt sick.
He was just laughing . . . as if he knew that he had got his way with me and
that I could not do anything about it. He was much more influential and powerful
than me at the Palace."
The alleged attacker remains one of Prince Charles's most senior courtiers. Mr
Smith, who began working in the Prince's household in 1986 and who was married
with two children at the time of the incident, admitted that he had not reported
the attack at the time, nor sought medical treatment.
He later suffered drink and mental problems, caused principally by the effect of
his experiences in the Falklands War. Later, in 1996, he was admitted to the
Priory clinic.
Diana's rape tape sensationby IAN GALLAGHER, LOUISA PRITCHARD, MARTIN SMITH, Mail on Sunday
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-145777/Dianas-rape-tape-sensation.html
The Royal family feared former butler Paul Burrell - hours away from taking the
witness stand when the Queen dramatically intervened - would divulge a series of
embarrassing and highly damaging secrets.
Foremost among their concerns was that details of a rape allegation contained in
an explosive tape recording made by Princess Diana would be publicly aired at
the Old Bailey.
The tapes relate to claims by a Palace servant that he was sexually assaulted by
a trusted person on Prince Charles's staff. Paul Burrell knew both the victim -
whom he counted as a close friend - and his alleged attacker, whom he could have
named in open court.
A top-level Scotland Yard inquiry into the alleged attack ran in tandem with the
Burrell inquiry and both were led by the same officer, DCI Maxine de Brunner.
During the investigation, former members of the Royal Household were quizzed in
intimate detail about the alleged incident and, The Mail on Sunday has learned,
were asked prurient questions about the Prince of Wales.
It is understood that evidence given by Burrell in his defence would also have
included sensitive information about Prince Charles's clandestine affair with
Camilla Parker Bowles which would have had potentially serious implications for
St James's Palace.
And, as the events which led to the collapse of the £3million trial slowly began
to unravel last night, there was an explanation as to why Paul Burrell's lawyers
did not offer up evidence about his meeting with the Queen earlier.
Speaking for the first time since the trial collapsed, Burrell told how he
himself had kept the details of his private meeting with the Queen hidden from
his solicitors - and how he had told the Queen he was stopping 'McCrocodile',
his nickname for Diana's sister Lady Sarah McCorquodale, from shredding
documents.
The former butler, who spent yesterday with his wife Maria and their children in
what his brother-in-law Peter Cosgrove described as 'a safe house', said: 'It
was between myself and Her Majesty. Words are inadequate to say how I feel. What
she has done for me, to intervene like this, is absolutely unprecedented.'
It was only on Thursday that Mr Burrell told his lawyers in the chambers of
defence barrister Lord Carlisle: 'There is something else I said to the Queen
that maybe you should know.
'I told her I had taken some of Princess Diana's possessions and documents. I
also told her the reason for this was that McCrocodile had been shredding
history.'
In a further twist, it was reported last night that the prosecution kept crucial
aspects of the case from Prince Charles.
A senior CPS officer close to the case is reported to have said: 'Why didn't we
keep Charles up to speed on the details of the investigation as it developed?
Because Charles's aides would have taken it to the defence immediately. That was
the basic reason why Charles wasn't kept in the loop.'
And in another startling development to the case, one highly placed Royal source
revealed the Royal Family had pressing worries of their own. The source claimed
that Diana's butler handed a bundle of her private letters to the Queen during
his now famous three-hour audience with her.
Found among the items in the mahogany box of secrets Diana kept at Kensington
Palace were letters from Prince Philip said to be 'cruel and insulting'.
The Royal Family's deep anxiety over what Burrell would say in the witness box
emerged as questions were raised about Buckingham Palace's account of the
circumstances surrounding the Queen's 'chance' remark which led to the collapse
of the trial.
It was said that it came up during the car journey to the Bali bombing memorial
service at St Paul's Cathedral. The Queen mentioned to Prince Charles that in
the weeks after Princess Diana's death, the butler had come to see her and told
her that he had gathered some papers for safekeeping.
Last night Buckingham Palace denied reports that the decision to go to the
police with this vital evidence was, in fact, taken at an earlier ' conference'.
Those present were reported to have included the Queen, her private secretary
Sir Robin Janvrin, Prince Philip and Prince Charles and his private secretary.
But a Palace spokeswoman said: 'There was no such meeting.' However, there
certainly was deep concern among the senior Royals that Paul Burrell was on the
verge of detailing the contents of a recording secretly made by Princess Diana
at the hospital bedside of the alleged rape victim, a member of Prince Charles's
staff.
During their 30-minute conversation, the 'victim' is understood to have given
Diana a comprehensive account of how he was violently assaulted by another man
on the staff at St James's Palace.
Although the alleged perpetrator is a trusted servant of Charles, Camilla Parker
Bowles is said to be hostile towards him.
At the conclusion of a top-level inquiry into the allegations - first revealed
last year by The Mail on Sunday - detectives expressed bemusement at Charles's
apparent wish to 'protect' the alleged perpetrator and St James's Palace staff
interviewed by police are understood to have been asked ' impertinent and
irrelevant intimate' questions about the heir to the throne.
The 'victim' of the alleged Palace rape is a close friend of Burrell and because
of their association, the former butler - one of the few people Diana told about
the secret tape - was 'terrified' of being dragged into another police inquiry.
Asked about the alleged rape by The Mail on Sunday last year while he was on
board the QE2, Paul Burrell confirmed the story of the taped conversation.
He said the Princess had made the tape to keep a record of the alleged victim's
accusations. But he said that he assumed only he and the alleged victim - for
whom he felt distressed - knew about it.
'He is a very close friend and I would never discuss his private life,' he said.
Diana's 'interview' with the alleged victim - the recorder was concealed in her
handbag - took place in the mid-Nineties when she visited him in hospital
accompanied by Victoria Mendham, secretary to Diana's private secretary Patrick
Jephson.
There was a reason why the Princess covertly and regularly recorded her private
conversations. At the time she believed she was the victim of a campaign to
undermine her by faceless allies of her husband who had used secret tapes
against her.
The man, who has a wife and children, from whom he is now separated, left the
Royal Household soon afterwards with a £50,000 payoff. It is understood that, as
with all Palace staff, he was required to sign a confidentiality agreement.
Prince Charles's personal lawyer, Fiona Shackleton, brought the alleged assault
to the attention of Scotland Yard last July, several years after an internal
inquiry at St James's Palace.
As a result, a police inquiry was launched and the lawyer was intertoviewed by
the Yard's Special Enquiry Team officers. She was required to hand over
documents, including results of an internal inquiry ordered by Charles when the
claim was originally made.
Police became aware of the rape allegation during unrelated inquiries into
charges against Paul Burrell. Although he was not connected to the allegations
in any sense, police believed he may have been storing the tape and were looking
for it when they raided his home. It was not found and it is understood the
police have failed to locate the recording.
During the trial, the Old Bailey was told detectives wanted to find 'sensitive
items' from a box of Diana's secrets she kept at Kensington Palace.
And the way the Royal Family viewed the seriousness of missing material was
highlighted by an intriguing claim last night that after Princess Margaret's
death in February, the Queen increased security around her sister's apartments
at Kensington Palace to prevent a 'repeat of the Burrell saga'.
Lord Ullswater, Margaret's former private secretary, spoke to her staff on the
Queen's behalf and told them a 24-hour police guard was being put outside.
'No one - not even the Royals themselves - was allowed to take anything from the
apartments without proper authorisation,' explained a Royal source. 'Anything
taken had be signed for. Two female members of staff fell under suspicion and
were searched - but they had nothing on them.'
In addition to the tapes, the Royal Family was understood to be concerned about
sensitive evidence relating to Charles's affair with Camilla.
That, too, would have formed what one member of Burrell's legal team teasingly
described as his 'long, detailed and very interesting' evidence.
Having worked for both Diana and Charles for many years at Highgrove, the butler
observed from close quarters the events surrounding the marriage break-up.
Such evidence could have seriously damaged Charles's efforts to gain public
approval over his relationship with Camilla, which have been largely successful.
There was also Royal Family concern over how the raking over of old ground,
coupled with new revelations, would affect Prince William and Prince Harry.
The worrying chapter in Royal history is far from closed, however.
In December another former Royal butler, Harold Brown, will go on trial accused
of the theft of property-belonging to his ex-employer, Princess Diana. He
vigorously denies any wrongdoing.
In the meantime the Queen is likely to find herself in the spotlight for quite
some time over her intervention in the Burrell trial.
Senior Labour backbencher Ian Davidson said she should be charged with wasting
police time by not coming forward earlier. 'It defies belief that the Queen only
suddenly realised that she had a crucial piece of evidence,' he said.
'It appears that the Queen has been deliberately withholding a vital piece of
evidence. It has been a classic Establishment cover-up.
Last night amid a flurry of reports and allegations, Downing Street angrily
denied suggestions that Tony Blair interfered in the Burrell trial.
The Prime Minister first learned about the crucial new piece of evidence during
his weekly audience with the Queen last Tuesday at Buckingham Palace.
'The decision to drop the case was entirely a decision made by the prosecution,'
said a No 10 source.
And reports that Prince William had known of the meeting between the Queen and
Paul Burrell were played down by a St James's Palace spokesman.
He said: 'He knew about the meeting but he did not pass that information on to
the police because he did not know the content of the meeting.'
Extracts from
Paris London Connection
The Assassination of Princess Diana
by John Morgan (2012)
Shining Bright Publishing
ISBN 978-0-9807407-5-2
A Threatening Phone Call From Sir Nicholas SoamesP 38 PARIS-LONDON CONNECTION
Then during the following month - February 1997 - Diana received a threatening phone call at her home in Kensington Palace. Her friend Simone Simmons was there:
"I was with Diana in her sitting-room at KP when she beckoned me over and held her large old-fashioned black telephone away from her ear so that I could hear. I heard a voice telling her she should stop meddling with things she didn't understand or know anything about, and spent several minutes trying to tell her to drop her [anti-landmines] campaign. Diana didn't say much, she just listened, and I clearly heard the warning: 'You never know when an accident is going to happen.' [Diana] went very pale.
The moment she put the phone down we started talking about what he had said. I tried to be reassuring which was not easy - she was clearly very worried ....
"When 1 listened into her conversation, with its apparent warning ... I was not sure [of her safety] any more. The conversation frightened Diana, and it certainly scared me."
Diana told Simmons that the caller was the Minister of the Armed Forces and close long-time friend of Prince Charles, Nicholas Soames - the same person who just 14 months earlier had accused Diana on national TV of being in "the advanced stages of paranoia".
Diana was not deterred and said to Simmons: "It doesn't matter what happens to me. We must do something. We cannot allow this slaughter to continue."
Then following the Soames phone call, Diana sought out a way of secretly recording her story. On March 7 a former BBC cameraman met with Diana at Kensington Palace and recorded the first of 7 videos. By the time the recordings were complete - later in March - there was 12 hours of footage. She addressed her 17 years of mistreatment at the hands of the royal family and also problems within the family, including her concerns regarding the relationship between Prince Charles and his senior valet, Michael Fawcett.
P 39 PARIS-LONDON CONNECTION
Princess Diana spent months building up an anti-landmine dossier, made up of sourced information and her own handwritten notes. As a precaution she kept it in her friend Elsa Bowkers locked safe. Then in June - after the dossier had grown to be several inches thick - Diana took a copy of it, which she gave to Simmons for safe-keeping. Simmons hid "it at the head of [her] bed underneath the mattress".
On 1 May 1997 Tony Blair was installed as UK Prime Minister following a landslide election result in favour of New Labour. With that, Nicholas Soames' party lost power and Britain resolved to sign the upcoming anti-landmine treaty.
Diana delivered a landmark anti-Iandmine speech at the Royal Geographic Society in London on June 12. It was entitled: "Responding to Landmines: A Modern Tragedy and Its Consequences". This was to be Diana's final major address against the proliferation of landmines.
She said:
"The world is too little aware of the waste of life, limb and land which anti-personnel landmines are causing among some of the poorest people on earth ....
"For the mine is a stealthy killer. Long after conflict is ended, its innocent victims die or are wounded singly, in countries of which we hear little. Their lonely fate is never reported. The world, with its many other preoccupations, remains largely unmoved by a death roll of something like 800 people every month - many of them women and children. Those who are not killed outright - and they number another 1,200 a month suffer terrible injuries and are handicapped for life.
"I was in Angola in January with the British Red Cross .... Some people chose to interpret my visit as a political statement. But it was not. I am not a political figure. As I said at the time, and I'd like to reiterate now, my interests are humanitarian. That is why I felt drawn to this human tragedy. This is why I wanted to play down my part in working towards a world-wide ban on these weapons ....
"The human pain that has to be borne is often beyond imagining. '" That is something to which the world should urgently turn its conscience.
"In Angola, one in every 334 members of the population is an amputee. Angola has the highest rate of amputees in the world.
How can countries which manufacture and trade in these weapons square their conscience with such human devastation? ..
"Much ingenuity has gone into making some of these mines.
Many are designed to trap an unwary de-miner. ... 1 reflected, after my visit to Angola, if some of the technical skills used in making mines had been applied to better methods of removing them ....
"These mines inflict most of their casualties on people who are trying to meet the elementary needs of life. They strike the wife, or the grandmother, gathering firewood for cooking. They ambush the child sent to collect water for the family ....
"One of the main conclusions 1 reached after this experience: Even if the world decided tomorrow to ban these weapons. this terrible legacy of mines already in the earth would continue to plague the poor nations of the globe. 'The evil that men do, lives after them.'
"And so. it seems to me, there rests a certain obligation upon the rest of us.
"One of my objectives in visiting Angola was to forward the cause of those. like the Red Cross, striving in the name of humanity to secure an international ban on these weapons. Since then. we are glad to see. some real progress has been made. There are signs of a change of heart - at least in some parts of the world. For that we should be cautiously grateful. If an international ban on mines can be secured it means. looking far ahead. that the world may be a safer place for this generation's grandchildren.
"But for this generation in much of the developing world. there will be no relief, no relaxation. The toll of deaths and injuries caused by mines already there, will continue ....
"1 would like to see more done for those living in this 'no man's land'. which lies between the wrongs of yesterday and the urgent needs of today.
"'I think we owe it. I also think it would be of benefit to us. as well as to them. The more expeditiously we can end this plague on Earth caused by the landmine. the more readily can we set about the constructive tasks to which so many give their hand in the cause of humanity."
Just nine days earlier, on Tuesday June 3, Diana had attended an English National Ballet (ENB) performance of Swan Lake at the Royal Albert Hall. This was to be her last visit to the Hall and she was present in her role as ENB patron. At the gala dinner held in the Churchill Hotel following the ballet, Diana was seated next to long-time family friend, Mohamed Al Fayed and his wife, Heini.
During the dinner conversation they discussed the upcoming summer holidays. Diana said she was still working out where to take William and Harry. Mohamed and Heini invited Diana and the boys to join them at their St Tropez villa in July.
Six days later, on Monday the 9th, Diana phoned Michael Cole, Harrods Director of Public Affairs, to find out more detail about the facilities. Then on the Wednesday Diana penned a letter to Mohamed:
"Dear Mohamed, A very special thank you indeed for inviting the boys and I to stay in France next month. Needless to say we are greatly looking forward to it all and we are so grateful to you for giving us this opportunity .... I know we will speak soon, but until then, my love to you all, Diana."
Then on the next day, June 12, Diana delivered the significant anti-landmine speech in London - "how can countries which manufacture and trade in these weapons square their conscience"; "the evil that men do"; "this plague on earth caused by the landmine".
In two short days Princess Diana - who was under the constant surveillance of the British security services - had delivered two powerful messages.
First: to the British Establishment, including the royal family. Second: to the leading arms dealing nations of the western world - the US, UK and France.
On Thursday 12 June 1997 Princess Diana effectively declared war on the armaments industries of the US, UK and France - for even though Britain and France were to sign the Ottawa treaty to ban landmines, it was apparent that Diana would not have stopped at landmines: "my interests are humanitarian - that is why I felt drawn to this human tragedy". As a humanitarian, Diana - after succeeding against landmines - would have sought an end to cluster bombs and other evil - "the evil that men do" - weapons.
P 52 PARIS-LONDON CONNECTION
By the end of this period - before August 15 - Diana and Dodi had plans to live together, and were making preparations to move into Julie Andrews' former Malibu home. They also intended to purchase a property in Paris, where they would live part-time.
On Friday August 15 Diana and Rosa Monckton left London on an Al Fayed jet, headed to Athens. This was the start of the Greek Island cruise, which had been organised by Rosa at the end of June.
After arriving in Greece, Diana and Rosa boarded the Della Grazia, a 22 metre yacht with three crew, which had been chartered by MI6. This vessel was tracked by three much larger super yachts - also chartered by MI6 - the Marala. 59 metres; the Sunrise, 90 metres; and the Sea Sedan. 55 metres. These super yachts provided security, but also cruised about acting as media decoys.
While Diana and Rosa drifted around the Aegean Sea for five days in the smallish Della Grazia, the world's media searched doggedly for the princess. MI6 were so keen to protect Diana's location that they arranged for a decoy article to be published in London, stating that "the two were staying on the remote island of Inousses" - across the other side of the Aegean. But when reporters, including Greek journalists, flocked to that island, Diana was nowhere to be seen and there was also no evidence she had been there.
This gave Rosa five days of peace and quiet alone with Diana - time to cover plenty of territory on plans and intentions and to seek any other intelligence that was relevant for her spy-masters.
Meanwhile Dodi was making arrangements for the next cruise with Diana and on August 18 made a critical call to Frank Klein, president of the Ritz Hotel, Paris. Klein recalled later: Dodi told "me that he intended to come to Paris at the end of the month" accompanied by his "friend", Diana.
US intelligence - NSA, which was monitoring the couple's phone conversations - was then made aware that Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed would be visiting Paris around the end of August. Not only that, but it would have been evident that there would be trips between the Ritz Hotel - an AI Fayed asset - and Dodi’s Paris apartment. During the late July weekend when Diana and Dodi had stayed in Paris, both the apartment and hotel had been visited and there had been trips back and forth.
After Frank Klein received the August 18 Dodi communication, his first call was to the Ritz Paris, to his second in command, Claude Roulet. Klein expected to continue his holiday in Antibes beyond the end of the month - it therefore became Roulet's responsibility to ensure the hotel and staff were readied for the anticipated arrival of the VIPs. Roulet passed on the information to his Ritz security head, Henri Paul, but also notified his intelligence handler. This confirmed the news the agencies had already received, courtesy of the NSA surveillance operation.
From this point on, MI6 - working in conjunction with the CIA and the French intelligence agency, DGSE - set about planning to carry out one of the most significant events of the 20th century, the assassination of Princess Diana.
MI6 Begin To Plan Princess Diana’s AssassinationP 53 PARIS-LONDON CONNECTION
It was under a month since MI6 had received the nod from senior royals - and now an opportunity to accomplish an extremely deniable operation had opened up. Very close to the chauffeur's route between the Ritz Hotel and Dodi Fayed's apartment lay the Alma Tunnel - a potentially dangerous traffic spot when negotiated at speed. All it required was to prevent the target vehicle, travelling down the riverside expressway, from exiting after the Alexandre III tunnel and it would then be forced into the Alma. With a plan to remove any back-up car, add chasing powerful motorbikes, a strobe light and a waiting vehicle, MI6 began to formulate how this operation could be brought about.
Within hours the top MI6 officer in France, Eugene Curley, received instructions that he was to be heavily involved in orchestrating the assassination of the extremely popular princess. He baulked at this and, despite his 16 years of loyalty in the organisation, refused to participate.
Curley had to be replaced and quickly. Sherard Cowper-Coles, with 20 years' experience, had recently completed the handover of Hong Kong back to the Chinese. He was still based at MI6 headquarters in London. MI6 Chief David Spedding immediately transferred Cowper-Coles into Paris as the replacement head of France. He pulled Curley back into London and a deal was made - Curley could stay in MI6 so long as he would testify on oath to any later investigation that he was still France's MI6 head at the time of the assassination.
Soon after arriving in Paris, Cowper-Coles, comprehending the complexity of the operation, called for more staff.
[These included Valerie Caton, David Spedding and Richard Spearman. Cowper Coles had a team of at least eight MI6 officers in the Paris embasst most of which would not have known the precise goal of the operation.]
The Crash: Diana scores 14/15 on Glasgow Trauma Rating scaleP 98 PARIS-LONDON CONNECTION
SAMU had received notification of the crash by 12.25. Dr Arnaud Derossi was on duty as the medical dispatcher and he took the calls.
A SAMU ambulance with Dr Jean-Marc Martino aboard left at 12.28 a.m. - two minutes before the Fire Service ambulances – but didn't arrive until 12.40 - eight minutes after the Fire Service. The ambulance left from the Necker Hospital which was just 2.3 km from the Alma Tunnel. It took 12 minutes to travel 2.3 km - an average speed of 11.5 km/h (7 mph). Martino appears to have stopped on the way to receive final instructions from his MI6 handler, because Diana had survived.
One of MI6's key strategies was to delay treatment. Mailliez had expertise but no equipment. The Fire Service had the equipment but was under orders to not send a doctor ahead of SAMU - and to wait until SAMU arrived before administering any treatment to Diana. SAMU delayed their arrival until 12.40 a.m., 17 minutes after the crash.
All this meant that nothing much was done - including no blood pressure test - for Diana until Dr Martino arrived at 12.40 a.m. And Dr Martino was working for MI6, so he also made sure very little was done - in fact Martino's actions were mostly detrimental to Diana's condition. Martino did not treat Diana - he mistreated her.
MI6 had complete control of the medical treatment of Princess Diana, right from 12.25 a.m. when Frederic Mailliez arrived in the Alma Tunnel, until 2.06 a.m. - when Martino delivered her to the hospital.
On arrival, at 12.40, Martino's team started working with Trevor Rees-Jones, who was assessed as being in the most critical condition. Martino told investigators in 1998: "I asked my crew to take care of the front right hand seat passenger [Rees-Jones], who seemed the more seriously injured of the two, whilst calling for back up from the Mobile Emergency Service [SAMU] in order to attend to the second victim [Diana]."
This decision might sound logical, but it had the effect of further delaying Diana's treatment.
Then at 12.43 the Fire Service's Dr Fuilla arrived. The logical move then would have been for Fuilla's team to treat Diana - because Martino was already working with Rees-Jones.
But that is not what occurred. Instead, Martino's team from working on Rees-Jones to Diana - and Fuilla took over the treatment of Rees-Jones.
These decisions enabled Diana's treatment to be delayed another three minutes, whilst Martino - and MI6 officers - were able to still maintain complete control over Diana's treatment.
Xavier Gourmelon, a first aid instructor with the Fire Service, told police that Diana said:
"My God, what's happened?"
According to the SAMU ambulance report Diana scored 14 out of 15 on the Glasgow Coma Rating Scale. Tom Treasure, the inquest cardio-thoracic expert, later said:
"14 out of 15 is very good .... It is a scale of prediction of head injury and it was very favourable."
This is further medical evidence contradicting Mailliez's account that Diana was unconscious.
It was however obvious to the medical people attending the crash scene that Diana had been involved in a very serious high-speed crash impact - and hadn't been wearing a seat belt.
Dr Mailliez later said: "I was just suspecting a brain damage or a chest damage because of the high-energy accident." Dr Martino also made an early assessment: "Because of what happened at the scene, that is to say a high-speed accident, the technical wherewithal capable of operating in thoracic, cardiac and abdominal regions was needed."
In other words, it was evident from the beginning that, although Diana looked okay on the outside, there would be some internal damage from having been involved in this violent crash.
This then meant that Martino understood Diana required treatment in a hospital - a place with "the technical wherewithal capable of operating" .
From that point on - soon after arriving at 12.40 - Martino, had he been interested in saving Diana, would have been trying to get her to a hospital as soon as possible. Yet that is not what occurred - Diana didn't arrive at La Pitié Salpêtrière Hospital until 2.06 a.m.
It took Martino 1 hour 26 minutes to deliver her to a hospital. Then she died six minutes after arriving.
It is a shocking story.
Dr Arnaud Derossi, who was operating the phones at SAMU base, took the initial notification calls and dispatched Martino's ambulance to the scene. He also operated as an MI6 agent on the night. Derossi's SAMU colleague, Dr Marc Lejay, was asleep at the time of the crash. He was not involved with MI6. .
Derossi woke Lejay, who then took over as medical dispatcher - and Derossi left SAMU control in his car at 12.42, arriving at the crash scene eight minutes later, at 12.50. Just like Martino, he also probably spoke with his MI6 handler along the way.
At 12.43 Martino called Lejay with a situation report: "Rear passenger, would seem an arm, the right arm, completely turned backwards. We are trying to sedate and initial treatment. Over." That rear passenger was Princess Diana.
Martino, however, later told French investigators that his initial assessment was much more than that: "She herself had a facial injury, frontal according to the journey log, and was trapped with her right arm bent to the rear, at first glance possibly with a fracture in the upper third. However, she may have had all sorts of other internal injuries, abdominal or thoracic, which might decompensate at any time."
The idea behind calling base with assessments is so the receiving hospital can be chosen and preparations made to have the right staff - doctors and specialists - available on arrival. This is particularly the case for a VIP, as Princess Diana was.
Or Martino failed to inform the base of his initial assessment that Diana had a facial injury and could be expected to have "internal injuries, abdominal or thoracic". Instead he lied, and only told Lejay about a likely arm injury.
He mentioned an injured arm but omitted potentially life-threatening internal injuries.
This was good news for the SAMU base. They had a crash involving a British princess on their hands, but the only injury was to her arm.
It meant there was no need to rush Diana to hospital and there was no expected requirement to have any particular specialists on hand.
But even more important, it reduced the pressure on Martino - it meant he would not have the base breathing down his neck and it strengthened his independent control of the scene. SAMU were in charge of Diana and Martino was their doctor on the spot. And Dr Derossi was on his way. Both were agents of MI6.
It is no coincidence that Martino’s "injured arm" report is sent in just after Derossi had left. It is unusual for a dispatcher to go to the scene and if it had been "known" that Diana only had an injured arm his trip would have seemed unnecessary. Derossi would have notified Martino he had already left before Martino called in with the report. Martino would need Derossi at the crash scene.
Martino left Diana in the back of the Mercedes for another 17 minutes, removing her at 1 a.m. and she was in the ambulance by 1.06. But by that time Martino had her anaesthetised, intubated and ventilated.
A patient is much easier to control if they are unconscious and unable to talk. intubation and ventilation is an extreme process. It involved placing a flexible plastic tube down Diana's windpipe. For this to occur, Diana had to be anaesthetised. These procedures are only carried out prior to hospital if it is absolutely necessary.
In Diana's case it was not.
After Marc Lejay was told about this treatment at 1.19 a.m. he said to Derossi that it "was rather strong for the circumstances". The inquest expert, Professor Tom Treasure, said that in the UK ambulance crews don't intubate unless the person is so incapacitated that it can be done without the use of drugs. He also stated that anaesthetising the patient makes them "much harder to analyse in terms of their brain injury and so on".
So it is a last resort.
Diana was not a last resort patient. She had a Glasgow coma rating of 14 out of 15 and was not having trouble with breathing.
On arrival at 12.50 Derossi joined Martino's ambulance crew, bringing the number on board to five - Jean-Marc Martino, Arnaud Derossi, Barbara Kapfer, a person called "Fadi", and the driver, Michel Massebeuf. The inquest jury were only informed of three - Martino, Massebeuf and an unnamed "medical student".
Once inside his ambulance Martino undressed and examined the now unconscious Diana.
The first page of the ambulance report reveals the results of that examination under the heading "Findings". Right arm and right leg injuries are mentioned and also "thoracic trauma".
So by 1.15 a.m. Martino is aware that Diana has a thoracic trauma and by his own later admission to the medical investigators that indicates an "internal injury" in that area. This in turn confirmed the requirement to get Diana to a place with, in his words, "the technical wherewithal capable of operating in thoracic" - a hospital.
But that is not what occurred. In fact, the opposite occurred.
At 1.19 Dr Derossi, who is now in the ambulance, phoned through a report to Dr Lejay. He told Lejay two critical lies. He said Diana had "obvious cranial trauma" and he also stated, "at first appearance nothing to report for the thorax". And then Derossi repeated "nothing for the thorax" later in the conversation.
Martino's examination revealed the area where a life-threatening internal injury could lie - the thorax - yet Derossi told Lejay "nothing for the thorax" twice. But also said, "obvious cranial trauma" - something which is not in the record of Martino' s examination.
The effect of this information for Lejay would be that when calling the hospital he would definitely not be asking for a cardio-thoracic specialist to be on hand, but instead would be seeking the presence of a head trauma specialist.
Martino also wrote that Diana's blood pressure had dropped but failed to record the level. Derossi told the base that it was 70. When Lejay heard this, he suggested the low blood pressure might be due to the sedatives Martino had administered - Lejay described them as "a bit violent" for the circumstances. Martino had administered Fentanyl, which is over 80 times more powerful than morphine.
During later cross-examination at the inquest, Martino admitted that 70 is not actually that low. He was asked: "What is your definition of 'stability'" at a crash scene? Martino answered: "Blood pressure between 60 and - a minimum of 70 to 80 units of arterial blood pressure" .
Now in the ambulance, Martino proceeded to use the "low" blood pressure as a pretext to start pumping catecholamines into Diana's system - right from about 1.10 through to 2.06 a.m., when she was delivered to the hospital.
The effect of catecholamine is that it increases the blood pressure, but it also increases the pressure on any potential internal injury. So it should only be administered if absolutely necessary.
In Diana's case catecholamine was not necessary because her blood pressure was not that low, but even more important, the thoracic trauma had revealed the likelihood of an internal chest injury. This meant that the application of catecholamines could be detrimental to Diana's condition.
And Dr Martino - being a doctor - would have definitely been aware of that.
At the inquest, expert Tom Treasure criticised Martino's actions: "Struggling to get a perfect pulse and blood pressure may be wrong; you want one that is just good enough ..... The [catecholamines] being counterproductive, they are flogging the heart, they are tightening the circulation. But the real problem is the hole in the blood vessel and, if anything, you are making ... things worse."
Diana had a critical torn vein and the thoracic trauma should have told Martino that such an internal injury was likely.
By pouring in catecholamines Martino was ensuring that any internal injury would be made worse and in turn would help bring on Diana's death.
Dr Martino told the inquest that a blood pressure of 70 and a pulse of 100 - which Diana had at 1.10 - was stable. Yet he failed to move the ambulance out of the tunnel until 1041 - 31 minutes later.
During the 1.19 report Lejay, at the base, asked whether the ambulance was "ready to roll". He was told by Derossi that it would leave in "a few minutes". Then 10 minutes later, at 1.29 a.m., Lejay calls the ambulance and asks if they are "en route yet". This is even though Lejay was unaware of the thoracic trauma. Had he been told about that, he would have been even more keen for the ambulance to get to the hospital quickly.
A key French defence is that things are done differently there - that ambulances linger longer at the scene: it is called "stay and play". That is true, to a point. But the questions from Lejay, wanting the ambulance to get moving, and the obvious fact that Diana's condition required early hospitalisation, overwhelm any stay and play argument. The requirement for hospitalisation was even admitted by Martino in his early assessment to the French investigators.
Drs Martino and Derossi deliberately lingered as long as they could in the Alma Tunnel, while they simultaneously pumped catecholamines into Diana, knowing that was harmful to her. And they also withheld knowledge of a thoracic trauma from the SAMU base.
The ambulance finally trundled out of the tunnel at 1041 a.m., followed by two French journalists - Pierre Suu and Thierry Orban.
It was 1 hour and 18 minutes since the crash.
The Murder of Princess Diana?P 104 PARIS-LONDON CONNECTION
There were six people on board - Princess Diana, Jean-Marc Martino, Barbara Kapfer, and "Fadi" were in the back and Arnaud Derossi and driver, Michel Massebeuf, were in the front.
The destination hospital was La Pitié Salpêtrière.
Normally the procedure was for the SAMU base to determine the hospital. That did not happen in this case. Instead, during the 1.19 call, Derossi specifically told Lejay to book Diana in to "the neurosurgical unit at the Pitié Salpêtrière Hospital". The reason Derossi did this was apparently because he had been told there was no cardio-thoracic specialist on duty there that night.
There was a hospital where VIPs and political leaders were normally sent to, which did have all the specialists on duty 24 hours for emergencies. That was the Val de Grace. It was just 4.6 km from the crash scene, whereas La Pitié was 5.7 km. In the early edition of The People published on the day of the crash, it said that Diana was "believed to be in the French VIP Val de Grace hospital in central Paris".
That was the logical hospital.
A French emergency physician was later quoted: "Every political figure who is in a car crash or is injured is taken there .... The Val de Grace ... has a top team of trauma specialists on duty around the clock. I might have helicoptered her in. She would have been on the operating block a few minutes after being stabilised."
But it was not in the MI6 plan for Diana to be properly treated for her injuries - in fact, the plan was that she wouldn't survive that night - and part of that was sending her to the wrong hospital.
Pierre Suu, who followed the ambulance from the tunnel, said it was "being driven at walking pace". The ambulance travelled at an average speed of 17 kph (11 mph) then at 2 a.m. was seen to stop for five minutes within 500 metres of the hospital.
Suu later told the police that "a doctor jumped out of the passenger side of the vehicle and rushed round the back of the ambulance and got inside". That doctor was Arnaud Derossi.
Thierry Orban, who was near Suu, said the ambulance "was rocking".
Martino said he stopped the ambulance because Diana's blood pressure had dropped and he "increased the quantity of the drip volume". He specifically told the police: "I did not do any cardiac massage at that moment".
Martino has never said what level Diana's blood pressure fell to. His explanation for the stoppage of the ambulance does not account for Derossi's sudden move from the front to the back, or the rocking ambulance.
It seems likely that some procedure was carried out during the five minute stoppage that helped quicken Diana's death.
The ambulance started moving again at 2.05 and arrived at the hospital at 2.06.
There was no cardio-thoracic specialist on hand. Instead, he was asleep at home. Dr Alain Pavie, the cardio-thoracic specialist, was phoned at 2.1 0 a.m., four minutes after Diana arrived.
Two minutes later Diana stopped breathing on the operating table. She never regained her breath.
Princess Diana passed away six minutes after being delivered to hospital - and two minutes after the cardio-thoracic specialist had been called.
It was 2.12 a.m.
The La Pitie medical team, led by Dr Bruno Riou, did the best they could, but in the circumstances they had no chance of saving Diana.
That is because the actions of Drs Martino and Derossi had already sealed her fate. Effectively those two doctors had assassinated Princess Diana in the back of their ambulance, on the orders of their MI6 handlers. They would have been generously remunerated for their actions.
Riou and his team worked feverishly away for a further two hours in a desperate but hopeless attempt to save a princess who was already dead.
They officially gave up at 4 a.m. - 3 hours and 37 minutes after the crash in the Alma Tunnel.
00:23 – Sunday 31st August 1997 – Di and Dodi's Mercedes S280 Crashes In The Alma Tunnel
12:28 – Dr Jean-Marc Martino’s SAMU Ambulance Leaves The Necker Hospital
00:40 – Dr Jean-Marc Martino’s SAMU Ambulance Arrives In The Alma Tunnel
01:41 – Dr Jean-Marc Martino’s SAMU Ambulance Leaves The Tunnel With Diana
02:00 – The Ambulance Stops Inexplicably, Begins ‘Rocking From Side To Side’
02:05 – Dr Jean-Marc Martino’s SAMU Ambulance Restarts
02:06 – Martino’s Ambulance Arrives At La Pitié Salpêtrière Hospital
02:12 – Princess Diana Takes Her Final Breath
Belfast Telegraph, United Kingdom - Sep 4, 2006
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/ news/features/story.jsp?story=705124
Since being sacked by MI6, Richard Tomlinson has waged war on his former spymasters, allegedly outing key agents on the net. Now they're exacting harsh revenge for his treachery, as Andrew Mueller discovers.
It is difficult not to suspect a whiff of self-parody in Richard Tomlinson's choice of interview location. He waves from a gleaming white speedboat, moored amid dozens of millionaires' runabouts on an Antibes pier. It's precisely the sort of setting from which the most famous veteran of Tomlinson's former employers, MI6, might have roared off to battle a bald, cat-stroking megalomaniac in his hollowed-out volcano lair, prior to seducing some improbably named heroine as the closing credits rolled. Tomlinson, however, is not commandeering this vessel on Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service. He's keeping an eye on it for the Antibes yacht brokerage firm he now works for.
"I have a pretty nice life down here," he says. "But do I miss the Service? Yeah, I do. It's very interesting, with tremendous security, lots of investment in training, good fun, and you get a fantastic index-linked pension when you're 55 - you retire on virtually your full salary when you're still young enough to buy a boat and sail around the world. It's a brilliant deal really."
Tomlinson, 43, was sacked by MI6 in 1995. The reasons, he claims, were never made clear. Possibly, he allows, it was one of those unfathomable quirks of office politics. Maybe someone, somewhere, just didn't like the cut of his jib.
Getting straightforward answers out of any bureaucracy in such circumstances can be a chore. Prising truth from an organisation as secretive as MI6 is a task that most people would glumly admit was impossible. Tomlinson has now spent more than a decade repeatedly tilting at this particular windmill, with the result that he has spent various portions of his post-MI6 life on the run, under arrest, in court, in prison, and now in exile - but not out of the reach of Britain's police forces and security services.
On 27 June, 2006, French police, acting on a British warrant and with officers of the Metropolitan Police present, raided Tomlinson's home. The French police took Tomlinson's main computer, his laptop, a friend's laptop, his Psion organiser, his cameras, and his New Zealand passport (as a Kiwi-born dual citizen, Tomlinson was permitted to keep his British passport, at the insistence, he says, of French authorities).
The British police, says Tomlinson, still have all these items in their possession, and won't give them back. Scotland Yard, pressed for a comment, are not, as they put it, "prepared to discuss individuals in terms of property that may or may not have been seized". They do confirm that Special Branch is looking into "unauthorised disclosure of information in breach of the Official Secrets Act", and that searches in France have taken place. These searches, says the Met, are part of an investigation into "the publication of specific information on the internet".
On 24 April, 2006, the 11th anniversary of his dismissal, Tomlinson started the "Tomlinson vs MI6" blog. Every year on that date, he explains, he has been in the habit of writing to MI6 seeking a meeting, a discussion, an explanation for his dismissal. Despondently concluding that MI6 is no more likely to reply this year than any other, Tomlinson went public.
"I don't know why they are worried about it," he says. "It's just a silly little blog. Even if I wanted to put anything secret up there, I've been out of MI6 for 11 years. I have nothing I could say that's secret.
"When I started [the blog], I was a bit antagonistic, I suppose. There are plenty of things to feel annoyed about with MI6, particularly the way they got us into the war in Iraq. The names I called [MI6 chief ] John Scarlett were probably a bit excessive."
"I've been having problems with MI6 for 11 years," Tomlinson continues. "They do things like using their influence to stop me getting visas to go anywhere. So I write to them, and say, 'Look, ring me up, we'll have a meeting, we'll talk it out.' I mean, I feel a grievance. Talking to someone about that grievance would make me feel a lot better. We talk it over, have a handshake over it, and forget it.
"I know it's a wimpy American word, but it would mean a certain amount of 'closure' for me. I think it could be redressed easily by an honest talk with someone from MI6, but they never, ever reply to my letters."
Tomlinson's involvement with MI6 started the old-fashioned way - the proverbial tap on the shoulder at Cambridge, where he studied engineering and cultivated ambitions of joining the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm (he is a qualified pilot - his schedule for the rest of the week after our meeting includes flying across to Corsica to pick up a boat part). He initially rebuffed MI6's interest, but thought again a few years later, after failing the naval medical examination on the grounds of childhood asthma, doing a bit of travelling, realising he was unsuited to office work, and passing the Territorial Army's SAS selection.
Tomlinson began MI6's Intelligence Officers' New Entry Course in 1991. By his own account, he was a star pupil. He was subsequently dispatched, under an assortment of cover stories and false passports, to the imploding Bosnia-Herzegovina and the collapsing Russia, among other places. A discreetly glittering career seemed assured.
Then, on 24 April, 1995, Tomlinson's swipe-card was rejected by the scanners at MI6's Vauxhall Cross headquarters. He was then escorted to the personnel department and informed of his dismissal. When he describes this moment today, he resembles nothing so much as a man who has never recovered from an altar-side jilting. In his head, Tomlinson had pledged himself to MI6 for life. The Service's abrupt, and, to his mind, unfathomable, disrequiting of his loyalty clearly wounded him deeply, as did their equivalent of the I-still-want-to-be-your-friend soliloquy - an offer to help find him a job at a sympathetic City firm.
Easing former operatives into cosy second careers is thought to be fairly standard MI6 practice. "It's quite common," confirms the journalist and author Phillip Knightley, who has written extensively about spooks and spookery. "There is a sort of club of companies they deal with. Part of the reason would be to reward the loyalty of operatives, or so that the former officers keep quiet, and the firms might expect a quid pro quo, a tip-off of commercial interest." The offer didn't impress Tomlinson.
"I still find that really insulting," he spits. "Talk about imposing their narrow, venal aspirations on someone else. Nobody spent even two minutes asking me what I might be interested in."
Looking into starting afresh in Sydney in 1997, Tomlinson met with a publisher to discuss writing a book about his time in MI6. Encouraged, he typed up a synopsis. He was, he admits, worried that this represented a clear-cut breach of the Official Secrets Act, but he was reassured by the publisher's promise that the synopsis would remain locked in her filing cabinet while he thought about whether or not to proceed with the memoir.
Still somewhat rudderless and adrift, Tomlinson returned to England. Lacking options, and with bills mounting, he resignedly accepted a job that MI6 had found for him, with Jackie Stewart's Formula One team in Milton Keynes, and ruminated more on the book. Still anxious to do the right thing by MI6, he filed a request seeking advice about submitting a manuscript for security clearance. MI6 replied, advising him sternly not to even think about it.
Tomlinson was infuriated by their attitude, and emailed the Australian publisher from his work computer, indicating a desire to proceed with the project. A few days later, on 8 September, 1997, Tomlinson's flat was burgled - or, as Tomlinson believes, "burgled" - and his laptop, containing what he'd written of the book, taken. The following month, the publisher was visited by the Australian Federal Police, to whom, despite her previous assurances, she handed Tomlinson's synopsis. Back in England, Tomlinson was arrested and charged with breaking the Official Secrets Act. He was convicted, sentenced to 12 months' imprisonment, and served eight.
Asked if the experience, which included being interred as a Category A prisoner in HMP Belmarsh, scarred him, he replies: "Not really, no. It was a miserable time, but you remember the good things and you forget the 22 hours of utter boredom every day."
After release, Tomlinson's difficulties continued. He absconded, without documentation, to France in 1998 - this seems to have been as much a means of defiantly hoisting two fingers towards Vauxhall Cross as anything else - and was arrested.
He carried on to New Zealand, where his hotel room was raided. At New York's JFK airport, he was refused entry to the United States and deported - rather fortuitously, as Tomlinson's original itinerary had seen him due to leave the US on Swissair flight SR111 on 2 September, 1998, which plunged into the Atlantic shortly after take-off. He was harassed in France and Switzerland, and suffered repeated interdiction of his early attempts at an online presence - one of which showed Tomlinson superimposed before Vauxhall Cross in a daft hat, accompanied by the theme from Monty Python's Flying Circus.
All that was before the surfacing of The List, the underlying cause of Tomlinson's present travails.
In May 1998, a website belonging to indefatigable American activist/crank Lyndon LaRouche published a list of 115 alleged current and former MI6 officers. The Foreign Secretary at the time, the late Robin Cook, blamed Tomlinson. Tomlinson was thrown out of Switzerland, where he'd been staying, followed in Germany, and arrested in Italy.
His book The Big Breach - a terrific read, incidentally - did eventually appear. Its gestation was not orthodox. Initially it was published in Russia, and given away as a download on the internet. In 2001, it was published in the UK by a British house called Cutting Edge, which no longer exists.
Bill Campbell, a director of Mainstream Publishing, Cutting Edge's then-distributor, recalls no significant interference from the government. "I think," recalls Campbell, "they let it go because it was already in the public domain, with the Russian publication and the download. They didn't try to stop its publication, or anything like that. There was some communication from the Treasury solicitor, stating that the author would not be allowed to benefit in any way - so all Richard's royalties are still being held in an escrow account in an Edinburgh lawyer's office."
The Big Breach sold, by Campbell's recollection, somewhere in the vicinity of 12,000-14,000 copies. It caused controversy for Tomlinson's suggestions of links between the media and the security services (The Spectator, he alleged, once furnished an MI6 agent in Estonia with credentials), and of secret-service involvement in the death of Diana, Princess of Wales (the driver in whose car she died, Henri Paul, was an MI6 informer, according to Tomlinson). He also claimed that MI6 had been working on a plan to assassinate Slobodan Milosevic by contriving a car accident in a tunnel.
While MI6's heat abated after the book's publication - given the year, they may have decided that they had more pressing matters to attend to - Tomlinson's anger did not. He drifted between jobs as a snowboard instructor, deckhand, mathematics tutor and translator (he speaks five languages), never finding the excitement or sense of purpose MI6 had given him. "Oh, yeah, it was great," he says of his time with MI6, with almost painful wistfulness. "Brilliant fun."
He found his current job at the yacht firm a year or so ago. Then, in April, he went online again with the Tomlinson vs MI6 blog.
"It gets quite a lot of readers," he says. "I would say that most are either people from MI6, or crackpots. There was one bloke who kept coming on and accusing newsreaders - Jon Snow was one of them - of spying on him through his television set. He's got a whole website about this, apparently."
Tomlinson used, and is using, the blog to outline his personal grievances, his disgust with MI6's role in the UK's Iraq misadventure and, curiously, to make available an updated version of The List via a link on his website. He seems determined to annoy MI6 by doing the very thing they were accusing him of doing when he wasn't.
"Exactly," he grins. "I'm collating all the information I can find about every single MI6 officer on the internet, and putting it in one file, so now there's a searchable MI6 database."
Tomlinson's list comprises 210 names. Few of them will mean anything to most readers, with the exception of former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown, whose service in the Service is long-standing Westminster legend. Other, older lists of alleged MI6 agents circulating cyberspace are longer but, Tomlinson claims, less accurate.
"That's why," he says, "I don't believe MI6 really think I did it originally, because the lists were so inaccurate. Things like ambassadors listed as MI6 officers, and MI6 know perfectly well that I know that ambassadors never work for MI6. But you can work out half of MI6 by looking at the diplomatic lists, you don't need to be a genius. I've just collated it and put it in one place."
Nevertheless, isn't there a possibility that this is, in some way, detrimental to Britain's national security?
"Yes, it is a bit," sighs Tomlinson, sounding suddenly rather deflated.
So why do it?
"It's all open-source information," he says, rallying. "It only would have taken two minutes to find beforehand. And it's MI6 who've drawn attention to it by arresting me."
Do you feel guilty?
"Why," he asks, "would I feel guilty about something I haven't done? I'm not in the slightest guilty of what they're accusing me of. There is nothing on my computer which is in breach of the Official Secrets Act."
Which, if true, begs the question: what are the British authorities doing getting involved with it? Phillip Knightley believes that if Tomlinson does sound paranoid, it doesn't mean that MI6 are not out to get him.
"They would feel," says Knightley, "that he let them down, first for whatever it was they sacked him for, then for blowing the whistle. They're a very tight-knit, loyal family, and they'll pursue him to the ends of the earth. If he tries to make another career, they'll do their best to ruin it. The very idea of writing a book..." Knightley draws a comparison with the story of Warren Reed, a (MI6-trained) former officer of Australia's Security and Intelligence Service, who went on to write books, fictional and not, about working in the intelligence services.
"They [MI6] destroyed his career," says Knightley. "Every time he had a new thing going, they destroyed him. When he found a job, they made contact with his bosses, planted nasty rumours about him. They do this partly to discourage others, but it is also possible that they want to discredit Tomlinson before he reveals something.
"There must be some deep, dark secret at the heart of this whole thing. As I understood it, he was a high-flyer, headed for great things. It doesn't surprise me that they didn't give him a reason, but it does surprise me that he claims to have no idea."
"I spoke to Special Plod yesterday," says Tomlinson. "I asked how they were getting on with my computers. They said they were still under investigation. I asked if they'd found anything to charge me with, and they said no. I asked if they were going to charge me with anything, and they said of course not, because I'm in France. So if they've got no realistic chance of charging me, what are they doing with my stuff?"
Tomlinson believes himself the victim of two factors. One is a desire on MI6's part to discourage any other agents from following his path into print - although Tomlinson notes, bitterly, that Dame Stella Rimington was allowed write a memoir about her time in MI5. The other is what seems an institutional failure by MI6 to understand either the internet or public relations. Closing down a website by legal means, or by hassling its hosts, is like stamping on mercury. Making a fuss about not wanting people to see something only inflames curiosity. Tomlinson's blog has wandered from server to server as various website hosts have been leant on - and, to the certain infuriation of his persecutors, Tomlinson has been posting all of the correspondence pertaining to this pressurising online.
"When I was in MI6," he says, "they were scared to death of the internet. They wouldn't have any internet connections in the office, even by the time I left in 1995. I'm sure they've moved on now."
I leave Tomlinson, unsure if he has, though. His love for the job he once had is obvious in his conversation, and in the fizzingly energetic chapters of The Big Breach which recall his time in the Service.
When I ask if he ever wonders what he'd be doing now if the last 11 years had gone according to plan, he looks haunted. "Most of my contemporaries," he says, "are heads of big MI6 stations, Geneva or somewhere like that. I'd only be working in declared posts, because my cover would have been well and truly blown. I could be anywhere. And the standard of living when you're overseas is fantastic, it really is."
Had he thought the job worthwhile?
"Yes," he says, emphatically. "I did, absolutely. I think I'd find it quite hard now. I was opposed to the intervention in Iraq, and even if I was in MI6 I'd be opposed to it, as I'm sure a lot of people in MI6 are. It would be harder to feel a strong sense of justification. During the Cold War, we were fighting something being imposed on us, but in this so-called war on terrorism I do think a lot of the cause of it is the West's double standards around the world.
"During the Cold War," he continues, "Britain was this innocent player which did face a threat. But we're not anymore. We're part of the problem. So I'd find it a little more difficult now."
Impossible though it obviously is, would he still want to work for MI6?
"Not really," he says, not entirely convincingly. "If they were to offer to shake hands on it, I'd feel fine. As recently as four or five years ago I'd have felt that I very much still wanted to be in the Service. I think that phase has gone, but I'm still very angry. I was just starting out. I only did minor things. I just look back at a lost opportunity, really."
Tomlinson glumly anticipates further harassment. He says that he doesn't fear for his physical safety, although starts at bumps in the night. He also intends to write a spy novel, which most armchair-educated psychologists would diagnose as an effort to stay connected in some way to the life he would rather have led. He says he wants to be left alone by MI6, but I'm not sure how true that is - like the ditched groom unable to get over it, he seems to derive some consolatory gratification from the fact that his former betrothed can't quite get him out of their head, either.
"In general," he says, "MI6 does work for the good, but it could have a better public image. They could sort that out without much expense or hassle. If you have a security service regarded as sinister or inept, you have a lot of problems recruiting people who are willing to help."
Certainly, MI6's public image is not enhanced by its pestering of Tomlinson.
It is impossible to argue with at least one of his statements. "I'd have thought," Tomlinson smiles, "that they'd have a thousand more important things to do, just at the moment."
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/ news/features/story.jsp?story=705124
By Chris Hastings, Arts and Media Editor (Filed: 02/07/2006) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/07/02/nspy02.xml
It is a tale of secret agents and surveillance that could have come straight out the BBC's classic spy drama Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
But the difference is that genuine spies were involved and they were operating behind the scenes at Broadcasting House rather than on the small screen.
Confidential papers, obtained by The Sunday Telegraph, have revealed that the BBC allowed MI5 to investigate the backgrounds and political affiliations of -thousands of its employees, including newsreaders, reporters and continuity announcers.
The files, which shed light on the BBC's hitherto secret links with the Security Service, show that at one stage it was responsible for vetting 6,300 different BBC posts - almost a third of the total workforce.
They also confirm that the corporation held a list of "subversive organisations" and that evidence of certain kinds of political activity could be a bar to appointment or promotion.
The BBC's reliance on MI5 reached a peak in the late 1970s and early 1980s at exactly the same time as millions of viewers were tuning into the fictional adventures of George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and -Smiley's People.
David Dimbleby, John Humphrys and Anna Ford all began their careers with the broadcaster when the system was still in place.
The papers show that senior BBC figures covered up these links in the face of awkward questions from trade unions and the press. The documents refer to a "defensive strategy" based on "categorical denial". One file note, dated March 1 1985, states: "Keep head down and stonewall all questions."
The BBC, however, has always refused to be drawn on the extent of its collaboration with the secret services.
It is only now, after a request by this newspaper under the Freedom of Information Act, that it has finally been willing to release details of the vetting operation.
Another internal BBC document, dated 1983, confirms: "We supply personal details to the Security Service. If there is any adverse information known, we receive this information and also, where necessary, an assessment based upon the involvement of the individual. This is presented to us as advice; line management then make the decision as to action."
The documents do not name any of the individuals subjected to vetting, but it is possible that some of the BBC's biggest names were scrutinised.
Different posts were vetted for different reasons. Senior officials, including the director-general, and their support staff were checked because they had access to confidential government information in relation to their jobs. But thousands of employees were vetted because they were involved in live broadcasts and the BBC was worried about the possibility of on-air bias or disruption.
In 1983, 5,728 BBC jobs were subjected to this second kind of scrutiny known as "counter-subversion vetting".
The vetting system, which was phased out in the late 1980s, also applied to dozens of other employees, including television producers, directors, sound engineers, secretaries and researchers.
The details of freelance television and radio staff were also routinely passed on to the security services and even the posts of editor and deputy editor of Radio 4's Woman's Hour were subject to background checks by MI5. In many cases, the spouses of applicants were also subjected to scrutiny.
The BBC tried on several occasions to be more open about the system, but was blocked by the Security Service. A memo, dated March 7 1985, states: "Secrecy of the complete vetting operation is imposed upon us by the Security Service - it is not of our making."
For their part, the security services were increasingly concerned about the number of people being referred to them by the BBC. During the first four months of 1983, they were asked to investigate 619 different individuals.
In the early 1980s, the BBC had a list of "major subversive organisations", which included the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers' Party, the Workers' Revolutionary Party, Militant Tendency, the National Front and the British National Party.
In contrast, CND, which was very popular at the time, was not regarded as a "subversive organisation". Youthful attachments to extreme causes did not necessarily mean an automatic ban on employment.
The papers show that, in 1968, Sir Hugh Greene, the BBC's then director-general, and John Arkell, the head of administration, successfully evaded questions on the issue during an interview with a journalist.
A memo from Mr Arkell, dated March 1 1968, to another senior colleague states: "You might like to get a bit of credit for the BBC next time you talk to MI5 by telling them that I stuck resolutely to the brief which you prepared for me in spite of very pointed and penetrating questions.
"I still denied that we had any vetting procedures."
The BBC declined to -comment.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/07/02/nspy02.xml
By Chris Thornton
06 July 2006
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/story.jsp?story=697621
Anger over spending as funding still not found for Police College
The Northern Ireland Office was attacked today for spending secret millions on building MI5's high-tech Ulster headquarters when it can't find cash for the PSNI's Policing College.
SDLP leader Mark Durkan described the situation as "perverse and damaging".
An intelligence report released last week revealed the NIO is contributing a secret amount towards MI5's Holywood HQ, which is currently being built inside Palace Barracks.
The department is also funding MI5's expansion programme in Northern Ireland, which will see the service take over anti-terrorist operations from the PSNI next year.
Whitehall's Intelligence and Security Committee identified how much is being spent on the building and the overall programme, but the figures have been removed from its published report.
Mr Durkan, who opposes the MI5 transfer, questioned why the NIO could come up with the money for the current building project when it can't find an extra £40m to start work on the Policing College.
Five years ago the Government pledged £90m towards building the college in Cookstown to replace the PSNI's "third world" training facilities, but costs have risen to an estimated £130m in the intervening years.
Last month Oversight Commissioner Al Hutchinson criticised the "systematic inertia" that has delayed the college, saying an entire generation of police officers have been denied the benefits of a new training regime.
Even if the Government came up with the cash today, the Policing College would not open before 2010 - long after the MI5 building is due to be running anti-terrorist operations.
"The NIO is telling us that they don't have enough money for the new Police College that we desperately need," Mr Durkan said. "Yet they are spending undisclosed millions on new MI5 headquarters in the north that we don't need.
"That is perverse and damaging."
The Foyle MP also criticised the secrecy over the spending.
"The fact that they won't even say how much is being spent shows MI5's lack of accountability.
"But that's no surprise. After all, MI5 also withheld from the police threat warnings about the Omagh bomb for seven whole years and now won't even bother to meet the Omagh families to say sorry."
Although the estimates are being kept secret, the costs for the new Northern Ireland MI5 building is believed to be in the tens of millions of pounds.
MI5 has been criticised in the past for spiralling costs.
In the 1980s, refurbishment of its London headquarters was estimated at £60m but ended up costing £244m. A delay in purchasing the building, Thames House, ended up costing taxpayers an extra £13m.
A spokeswoman for the NIO said: "From 2007, national security arrangements in Northern Ireland will be brought into line with those for the rest of the UK.
"Some of the cost for the transfer of intelligence lead is being provided by the NIO."
The Government has been warned that an internal row over the funding for MI5's expansion in Northern Ireland could hamper the secret service's work.
The Intelligence and Security Committee, a Whitehall watchdog, says the dispute between the NIO, the Ministry of Defence and "other interested parties" needs to be "concluded quickly".
Planning for MI5's takeover of anti-terrorist operations in Northern Ireland next year is already well under way, but the committee - chaired by former Northern Ireland Secretary Paul Murphy - says no final decision has been taken on who will pay for it.
MI5 currently spends 17% of its budget on fighting Irish terrorism, a drop from 23% two years ago. That figure is not believed to represent a fall in actual spending, but is likely to be the result of increased spending on global terrorism.
The expansion into Northern Ireland will lead to increased costs because MI5 will end up conducting all operations against republican terrorists.
Those operations are currently being run jointly with the PSNI, which has overall responsibility until 2007. The PSNI will still conduct operations against loyalists after the transfer, because those groups are not deemed to be threats against national security.
The NIO is currently paying for the joint operations from its security budget, but the amount of spending has been removed from the Intelligence and Security Committee's report.
"Funding beyond 2007/08 has not yet been identified and the matter is still being negotiated between the NIO, MoD and other interested parties," the report said.
"The committee is concerned that further delay in identifying funding may have an impact on the Service's ability to plan ahead, and we recommend that negotiations be concluded quickly."
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/story.jsp?story=697621
Paul Bew - Yorkshire Today - 22Dec05
Paul Bew is Professor of Irish Politics at Queen's University, Belfast.
http://www.yorkshiretoday.co.uk/ViewArticle2.aspx?SectionID=105&ArticleID=1292874
WHAT on earth is going on in the latest phase of the so-called Stormontgate saga?
In October 2002, the Government announced that it had uncovered an IRA spy ring at the heart of the Northern Ireland Office and the devolved institutions. Highly sensitive documents – including conversations between President Bush and Tony Blair – were discovered in Republican West Belfast.
Up to a few days ago, it was confidently assumed that three people were to face charges in court in this connection. Then it was announced that it was not in the public interest to carry on with the trial and the three defendants were found not guilty, with no stain on their character.
Sinn Fein was delighted, as it had denied all along that there had been any spy ring. Then, Denis Donaldson – whose relationship to Gerry Adams is similar to that of Downing Street chief-of-staff Jonathan Powell to Tony Blair – outed himself as a 20-year-long British spy.
Sinn Fein immediately got out its narrative, and sections of the media gave it credibility.
Mr Adams insisted that this was further proof that the spy ring had never existed and that the whole affair had been got up by so-called securocrats – senior officials in the Northern Ireland Office and elsewhere, who were working to undermine Tony Blair's agenda.
But is this even remotely likely? In the first place, those whom Sinn Fein named as securocrats gave every sign of being inconvenienced by the Stormontgate affair. It was their job, after all, to deliver the institutions of the Good Friday Agreement and to keep Mr Adams locked into the peace process.
In that sense, there has been, for many years now, a profound commonality of interest between the British security establishment and Mr Adams. Far from launching the Stormontgate affair to "save Dave" – to give then
Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble an excuse to walk away from power-sharing – the securocrats took the view that Mr Trimble should ignore the spying scandal and stay in government with Sinn Fein. Today, they take exactly the same view: that this current unfortunate incident should be forgotten about.
Think about it. Even if it is accepted, and it is strongly denied, that Mr Donaldson was an agent provocateur, he could never have launched such an elaborate operation on his own, and would have had to "go upstairs" in the Sinn Fein movement to get clearance.
In the last couple of days, the Sinn Fein narrative has begun to crumble, to be replaced by another question: how many more agents are there in the Republican leadership and what does this say about an agenda of tacit co-operation with the British state?
This, after all, is historically how Britain achieves peace in Ireland. In 1920-21, the police and army regularly made raids on leading Sinn Fein figures, only to discover that they were under the protection of other parts of the British state.
Those arrested were rapidly released even when incriminating material was found; in one famous case, that of Erskine Childers in 1921, a senior British official carried his bags out of jail.
What is the political fall-out? The Government continues to be optimistic about devolution, although it appears to be publicly assuming that it will not happen in 2006.
There is an element of rationalisation in this. Neither British nor Irish governments can afford to say that they were handed a political miracle – the Good Friday Agreement – and bungled it. Instead, it is so much more comforting to insist that a DUP-Sinn Fein deal is possible. In fact, it is possible because the modernising wing of the DUP is determined to marginalise Ian Paisley's family and gain office.
But, as the so-called comprehensive agreement document of the projected DUP-Sinn Fein deal of 2004 revealed, this is not the Good Friday Agreement, either in detail or in reconciling spirit. The Prime Minister is widely perceived to be in the grip of "legacy-itis" in Northern Ireland, and though he may not have noticed this, the local population certainly has.
The row over Stormontgate has intensified the lack of trust between the two communities. Unionists feel that the IRA still thinks it can get away with lying to them, as with the bank robbery. Emotions of anger on this score have now been sharply revived.
On the other hand, many nationalists believe that wicked British spies have perpetrated yet another offence against decent Irish patriots.
The point to note is that the current political agenda contains two issues, the amnesty-type proposals for the republicans' so-called "on-the-runs" and, more importantly, the issue of restorative justice which the SDLP sees as British Government willingness to hand the "hood" over to the "hoods", which will continue to poison the debate well into 2006.
Into this mix, the Government plans to devolve policing and justice and thus enhance Sinn Fein's power in this highly-sensitive sphere.
It is, in fact, possible, however, that Mr Blair is more realistic about Northern Ireland policy than Secretary of State Peter Hain and the Northern Ireland Office can afford to be.
Mr Blair may, in his heart of hearts, have grave doubts about the DUP's capacity to do a deal that is worthwhile. He may even believe that he has, in effect, achieved his Northern Ireland work by the "de-fanging" of the republican movement.
If devolution comes, it would be a bonus, but the big objective of British policy has already been achieved, and there is always the possibility of an Anglo-Irish Agreement mark two to complete the Northern Irish political settlement.
This does, however, leave a problem for Peter Hain, a naturally ambitious politician.
Paul Murphy's recent removal broke the rule of thumb whereby every Northern Ireland Secretary who was not actually retiring moved on to another Cabinet position, usually a promotion, as a reward for a hardship stint.
Mr Hain was brought in to provide an activist contrast to Mr Murphy's genuine decency and more measured and cautious approach. He has certainly provided the contrast, but with a conspicuous lack of success. He must be worrying that the Prime Minister has landed him with an impossible task and that he will personally take the rap for failure.
22 December 2005
http://www.yorkshiretoday.co.uk/ViewArticle2.aspx?SectionID=105&ArticleID=1292874
Tony Gosling - 15Oct05 - BRISTOL
This story was to be found neither on UK Indymedia or on Bristol Indymedia as neither appear to be working properly. I spent 30 mins. or so attempting to publish this on both without success, seems this is a scoop Indymedia aren't interested in.
Ex anti-terrorism officer David Shayler came out with an interesting revelation when stuck in Bristol recently.
There has been much speculation as to how the most right wing and powerful elements in the Labour Party used to be such left wing radicals. Did they have a change of heart? Apparently not, according to Ex MI5 Counter-Terrorism Officer David Shayler.
It would also explain why the spooks have been so busy trying to blacken Shayler's name.
Ex MI5 anti-terrorism officer David Shayler, who spent three days with us in Bristol recently, when his car got brake failure while parked up at the University, said at his Cube cinema presentation that he had access to information contained in Blair's Security File while in 'the service'.
"Tony Blair worked for MI5 before he became Labour leader."
Evening Post reference
http://tinyurl.com/d9b32
The day after Shayler was arrested in France the Mail on Sunday came out with the Headline 'Shayler Could Bring Down Government'.
On the Monday, Shayler says, Blair Summoned the editor to Downing Street and asked him into the Garden (to avoid bugs) demanding to know what Shayler knew about him (Blair).
The editor wisely explained that due to a government injunction he could not tell Mr Blair anything that Shayler knew or he'd be breaking Blair's government's own injunction.
Blair, according to Shayler, had documents in his file which clearly meant he had been spying on his comrades in CND and The Labour Party before being made Party Leader - which explains his so-called radical left activities as a young man - he was a spy reporting back on Communist 'subversives' in CND and in the Labour Party!
Shayler says his secret state agent past would make Blair utterly unreliable to hold public office - particularly in the Labour party and would make him a puppet of the hawks in MI6. The same hawks I guess who cooked up the dodgey dossier at our expense which has been used to kill nearly 150,000 Iraqis and open the gates of hell in the Middle East. (oh yes and boost the profits and margins of every single Western Arms business leaving not enough to pay our pensioners and treat people on the NHS properly)
We put this out last Thursday evening on Radio Ramadhan 87.7FM which is going out over Bristol this month (where we have a 1 hr a week show) see www.radiodialect.net
Can you feel the email lines buzzing with worried spooks??? And some amused ones??? Yes, the nastiest of them better be worried - their little blue eyed boy's shelf life is expiring.
Not read a good book for a while? Try 'The Great War for Civilisation' available for £15 http://tinyurl.com/avmm9
11:00 - 13 September 2005
Renegade spy David Shayler claims the 9/11 terrorist atrocities in America were the work of elements of the US government.
Mr Shayler, a former MI5 officer who was jailed for disclosing security secrets, believes there are some elements within the FBI, CIA and the US government who wanted "another Pearl Harbour" so they had public support for invasions in oil-producing countries.
Mr Shayler spoke to an audience of about 200 people at the Cube cinema in Kingsdown after a 45-minute film which questioned the official version of the terrorist attacks.
He said there was no evidence that a plane had hit the Pentagon, and claimed it was more likely to have been a missile.
He said the incident happened when America's major defence building was being redecorated so staff were at minimal risk.
Mr Shayler said: "It created a lot of anger without causing too much damage.
"There are many unanswered questions which need to be addressed."
He also discussed the possibility of the 7/7 London Tube bombings being set up by the Government or security agencies.
Mr Shayler believes Dr David Kelly was an MI6 agent who was murdered and he alleged that Tony Blair worked for MI5 before he became Labour leader.
Mr Shayler was jailed for six months at the Old Bailey in November 2002 for disclosing security secrets which breached the Official Secrets Act.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1574148,00.html
By Michael Evans, Defence Editor April 18, 2005
THE most secret military unit serving in Northern Ireland is to be pulled out of the Province and posted to Iraq and to other operational missions overseas.
The Joint Support Group (JSG), which runs agents under the control of the Intelligence Corps, is one of a number of units expected to leave Belfast as part of the “normalisation process” under which the Government plans to cut troop levels by more than half to about 5,000.
Paul Murphy, the Northern Ireland Secretary, announced in February that MI5 will take over primacy for national security intelligence in Northern Ireland by 2007.
The JSG is the successor of the Force Research Unit (FRU), which acquired notoriety in the 1980s amid allegations that the unit of about 40 intelligence officers colluded with Special Branch officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the loyalist terrorist Ulster Defence Association (UDA) in the murder of several republicans.
Brian Nelson, who was the UDA’s chief intelligence officer when he was recruited to become one of the FRU’s top agents, was jailed for ten years in 1992 after admitting five counts of conspiracy to murder. He died of a brain haemorrhage in April 2003.
The FRU and its former leader, Brigadier Gordon Kerr, who became military attaché in Beijing, are the subject of continuing inquiries by Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, who retired as Metropolitan Police Commissioner in January.
The JSG has continued the role performed by the FRU, although agent-handling rules were tightened after concerns were raised over the level of control of informers after Nelson’s confessions.
The Government’s intention is to complete the withdrawals from Ulster within two years of a final peace settlement but steps are being taken to exploit the unique experience gleaned in Northern Ireland in theatres of operation elsewhere in the world.
This month Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, announced the establishment of a new regiment, the Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR), to provide covert surveillance expertise for operations by the SAS and the Special Boat Service.
Although he did not specify which experts he had in mind, the new regiment is largely based around the surveillance specialists of the 14th Intelligence Company, also known as “the Det” (Detachment), which has operated in Northern Ireland for many years.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1574148,00.html
See also http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/ & Detainees face torture in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Yemen http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/mar2005/guan-14m.shtml
Nick Cohen
Sunday October 24, 2004
The Observer
The troubles of Craig Murray, the sacked British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, appear at first glance to be a shocking exception to the rules of public life. When was the last time you heard of a case of a diplomat accused of drunken orgies and sexual blackmail after he had discomforted his masters in Whitehall? You don't have to be Michael Moore to wonder if the Foreign Office needed to revert to the unparalleled tactic of tipping wheelbarrow loads of dirt over Murray to bury his bad news that Britain was in the market for information extracted by torturers.
Murray's allegation is shocking because, say what you like about England, it has shunned torture for centuries. If you look a bit closer, however, you find that torture is no longer as exceptional as it once was. With many a sigh and expression of regret the Government is reaching an arrangement with torturers, and not only in Uzbekistan. English judges have accepted that confessions beaten out of suspects can be used for the first time since the 1630s. The only reaction, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, could manage to their extraordinary decision was the Peck sniffian bleat that he had the 'awful feeling' that learning to live with torture 'is probably the right conclusion.' As with so many other descents into barbarism, the judges and ministers make each step on the downward path appear eminently reasonable.
However strenuously the wishful thinkers of Western liberalism deny there is much to worry about, Islamism remains a psychopathic and totalitarian creed which sanctions the indiscriminate murder of countless victims. Reasonable governments know that the battle must be joined and that they must work to prevent crimes beyond the imagination of the world before 11 September.
But how should the security services react? Take the example of Murray's Uzbekistan. It is caught in the same vice as many Muslim countries. On one side is a repressive government. On the other is an opposition some of whose members are turning to Islamism. You might have thought MI6 would be watching. Right and left fantasise about the spies' reach and power: they either uncover deadly subversives or target every 'freedom' movement according to political taste. Both parties are united by the assumption that the security services have a competence bordering on the omniscient. What else is the near-universally believed charge that Blair lied about Iraq based on but the delusory notion that John Scarlett of the Joint Intelligence Committee and Sir Richard Dearlove of MI6 knew that Saddam had disarmed and were silenced?
In fact MI6 doesn't have one spy in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan or any of the other dangerous central Asian republics. It's a small organisation which employs about 2000 people, many of them support staff. Even if it did have the resources to put men in Tashkent, what could they do? Roam Uzbekistan breaking into houses and interrogating suspects? In the circumstances it seems a reasonable step for the Foreign Office to take information from the oppressive governments of central Asia and the Middle East, even if there is a danger that it has been extracted by torturers. And it would be reasonable if, say, a plot by Uzbek exiles in London was treated simply as a tip-off which led to searches, surveillance and all the other normal means for collecting evidence which would stand up in a British court. If torture was involved, it would be somewhere far back down the line in a foreign country of which we knew little. The integrity of the case brought against the suspects in Britain wouldn't be threatened.
What is now threatening the integrity of the criminal justice system is the internment of foreign terrorist suspects without trial or knowledge of the charges against them. Their claim that their detention is illegal was rejected by the Court of Appeal in August and is cur rently being considered by the Law Lords. Most media attention has been on the main argument by human rights groups that the law is discriminatory because it allows foreigners to be detained indefinitely while British citizens enjoy full civil rights. This is one of the many occasions when liberals should be careful of what they wish for.
The Government could very easily become a model of impartiality by interning British citizens alongside the alleged enemy aliens. David Blunkett has dropped strong hints that he would want to do just that if there was an Islamist attack on Britain, and I doubt if he would be stopped by a wave of public revulsion.
Far less attention has been given to the ruling by two of the three judges on the Court of Appeal that it was fine to hold men on the basis of evidence extracted by torture. No one can actually say that this happened because, contrary to all the principles of English justice, they aren't allowed to know what they are meant to have done. But their lawyers suspect that they have been jailed because of confessions from inmates at Guantanamo Bay who have been threatened with dogs, stripped and kept in solitary confinement. Their allegation goes way beyond the charge that the security services followed up leads from brutal foreign agencies. It suggests that people are being held indefinitely in British jails because a naked man beset by dogs named him to placate his tormentors.
So what, snapped the Court of Appeal. There is no other way, blubbed Lord Falconer.
Their accommodation with torture is astonishing on many levels. The first is its hypocrisy. The court said that the British state was still forbidden from conniving in or procuring torture. If its agents reached for the cosh or the electric flex, they would be breaking the law. But if evidence extracted by foreign torturers was now admissible, why should the gloves be kept on British hardmen? Why should our boys be held back simply because of their British citizenship?
The Court of Appeal had no coherent answer, and the nonchalance with which it endorsed foreign torturers showed how feeble national traditions have become. Until the war of terror, it was inconceivable that an English court would accept that a man could be jailed on the basis of torture, albeit torture conducted by shifty foreigners. The English didn't do torture. Uniquely in medieval Christendom, the English common law forbad the extraction of evidence under duress.
The exception to the benign rule was the Court of Star Chamber, which was allowed to torture the king's enemies. Its barbaric practices were one cause of the civil war. Such was the hatred it aroused that 'Star Chamber justice' remains a contemptuous condemnation of arbitrary power to this day.
Writing at the high point of liberal Victorian self-confidence Lord Macaulay said that Star Chamber was an aberration which, 'after the lapse of more than two centuries,' was still 'held in deep abhorrence by the nation'. It 'displayed a rapacity, a violence, a malignant energy, which had been unknown to any former age'. I'm not sure if the English can be quite as self-confident about the decency of the national tradition today. It's not that Star Chamber is back, rather that, as with so many other services, torture has been out-sourced to the third world where bothersome regulation is less intrusive.
What is dispiriting about the degeneracy of the Government and the Court of Appeal is that the old lessons have to be learned once again. The reasons why first England and then the civilised world rejected torture were practical as well as moral. Most people break under torture. Most people say whatever they have to say to stop the pain. When names are suggested to them, they agree. If the torturer wants to implicate the innocent or invent imaginary plots, he usually gets what he wants from his victim.
If the Law Lords doubt the wisdom of centuries and are considering upholding the Court of Appeal's verdict, may I suggest a small experiment? If they give me a law officer, the Lord Chancellor perhaps, or the Director of Public Prosecutions, and a couple of heavies, and leave us alone in a locked room, I think I can guarantee that within a week he will have revealed that the entire senior judiciary are members of al-Qaeda.
By Paul Waugh Deputy Political Editor, Evening Standard
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/16537695?source=Evening%20Standard
11 February 2005
The appointment of John Scarlett as head of MI6 was overseen by two key Government officials embroiled in the David Kelly affair, secret Whitehall documents have revealed.
Papers released under the Freedom of Information Act show that Sir Kevin Tebbit and Sir David Omand were on the panel that recommended Mr Scarlett for the post of "C".
Sir Kevin, the permanent secretary at the MoD, and Sir David, Downing Street's intelligence co- ordinator, recommended him to Jack Straw and Tony Blair.
Sir Kevin was quizzed at the Hutton inquiry over the MoD's decision to identify Dr Kelly. Sir David was among those to decide that he should be pursued for talking to the media about the Government's dossier on Iraq's alleged WMD.
Mr Scarlett's appointment in May last year triggered controversy because he was chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee that drafted the dossier. He was appointed before the Butler inquiry into intelligence blunders had finished.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/16537695?source=Evening%20Standard
by Richard Norton-Taylor
The Guardian - http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0%2C11026%2C1268216%2C00.html
Saturday July 24th 2004
The number of telephones wrongly tapped by the security and intelligence agencies is "still unacceptably high", according to the latest annual report by the interception of communications watchdog.
Errors were committed by GCHQ, MI5, MI6, customs, and security officials attached to the Northern Ireland Office says Sir Swinton Thomas, a retired appeal court judge.
His report was slipped out on Thursday, the last day of parliament before the long summer recess.
He says that in one case, the Northern Ireland Office told him it intended to add a new mobile telephone number to an interception warrant. "Unfortunately the mobile telephone number cited on the modification [of the warrant] was that of a serving police officer and not a number used by the target," says the judge.
In another case, customs officers obtained two warrants for two mobile phone numbers provided by the Dutch police running a parallel operation. "It transpired that the mobile numbers were incorrect in that an additional digit was included."
The report reveals that the home secretary approved 1,878 warrants for the interception of telephones, emails, and mail last year and that 705 were still in force on December 31st.
The Scottish Secretary approved 105 warrants. The number of warrants signed off by the foreign secretary and Northern Ireland Secretary are not disclosed on the grounds that it would "aid the operation of agencies hostile to the state".
The figures represent an increase over the previous year but do not quite match the record year of 2000.
The majority of warrants issued in England, Wales and Scotland were "related to the prevention and detection of serious crime", says Sir Swinton. He reports that he is as "satisfied as it is possible to be that deliberate unlawful interception of communications of the citizen does not take place".
The most common cause of mistakes, he says, is the simple transposition of numbers".
A total of 39 errors were reported to him. The Security Service, MI5, reported 11 mistakes. Telephone numbers were attributed to the wrong targets, and in one case individual digits within a number were transposed.
The Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, told the judge that on one occasion a mobile phone number was kept on a warrant after the line was disconnected.
In a further case, a typing error by customs officers led to the wrong surname on a warrant.
Sir Swinton, whose official title is Interception of Communications Commissioner, concludes that interception last year played a "vital part in the battle against terrorism and serious crime" and that he is satisfied that ministers and the law enforcement and intelligence agencies carried out this task "diligently and in accordance with the law".
The government released a related report on Thursday by Lord Brown, a serving appeal court judge who as Intelligence Services Commissioner is responsible for monitoring covert surveillance operations.
He declined to disclose the number of surveillance warrants obtained, but says he trusts the Security and Intelligence Agencies. "There are more than enough legitimate targets for the various intelligence agencies to focus upon and therefore little if any temptation for them to seek to engage upon inappropriate operations".
By Colin Brown, Deputy Political Editor
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=547444
03 August 2004
The Government refused yesterday to deny an authoritative report that John Scarlett, the former head of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), asked the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) to include 10 "golden nuggets" in its report on weapons of mass destruction, including a claim that it had smallpox weapons or was trying to produce them.
Mr Scarlett is also said to have suggested to the ISG they include a claim that Iraq probably possessed mobile biological weapons laboratories, and that Saddam Hussein was developing a "rail gun" which could propel an object at enormous speed along a track.
But the Prime Minister's official spokesman insisted Mr Scarlett, the new head of MI6, did not "mislead" Britain over an e-mail suggesting the "golden nuggets" be put in a report by the US- backed investigation.
A Number 10 spokeswoman said: "There's no question of the Government or any of its departments or agencies, and that includes the JIC and its then chairman John Scarlett, seeking to mislead the ISG." The allegations were made by Tom Mangold, a respected journalist and friend of the family of Dr David Kelly, the weapons expert whose suicide was investigated by the Hutton inquiry. That report cleared the Government of "sexing up" the Iraq dossiers against the wishes of the intelligence services.
The revelation that Mr Scarlett tried to influence the ISG yesterday brought fresh calls for him to step down from his new post as "C", the head of Britain's intelligence services, which he took up officially on Sunday. Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, has for the first time joined Tory and Labour MPs yesterday in calling for the resignation of Mr Scarlett.
The MI6 chief was criticised in the Butler inquiry on the flawed intelligence on Iraq for allowing the dossiers to be published with the JIC's authority. There was criticism in the Commons of Tony Blair for promoting Mr Scarlett in spite of the intelligence failures. MPs claimed it was a reward for the JIC's approval of the dossiers.
Sir Menzies said on BBC radio: "I find it very difficult to see how Mr Scarlett can command the necessary public confidence. I'm not one of those who make ritual calls for resignations but I've come to the view that, so controversial now is Mr Scarlett, the necessary element of public confidence will be lacking."
The MP for Fife North East also called for a House of Commons select committee to scrutinise the workings of British intelligence. Under the present system, the Prime Minister appoints the members of the existing Commons Intelligence and Security Committee. "I think we should be much more open with these issues," Sir Menzies said.
The head of the ISG, David Kay, appalled the White House and Downing Street when he resigned in January, saying there were no WMD in Iraq. The Scarlett e- mail was sent to Mr Kay's replacement, Charles Duelfer on 8 March, this year. The ISG has yet to deliver its definitive report, although Mr Blair has now admitted that WMD may not be found in Iraq.
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=547444
http://www.sundayherald.com/42752
By Neil Mackay, Home Affairs Editor - 12June2004
MI5 has caused outrage after one of its spies stated publicly that the IRA “fought a just cause” and won a “successful campaign” during the 30-year Troubles in Northern Ireland.
The Sunday Herald is unable to name the MI5 officer following a threat of legal action from the government . However, the spy’s comments have provoked fury from the victims of IRA violence and Ulster politicians.
The controversy centres on a briefing given by the MI5 officer, a former Royal Navy commander, at a maritime security conference on Orkney. Details have been given to the Sunday Herald by Mark Hirst, the former head of communications at Orkney Islands Council, who attended the seminar.
The conference was held by the Department of Transport (DoT) in Kirkwall. Delegates included representatives from the council, port authorities, ferry services, energy firms, the tourist board and police.
Hirst says the MI5 officer said the IRA was “the biggest threat to British national security”. But the officer then said “in our opinion they [the IRA] have fought a just cause”.
“The conclusion of MI5, according to this officer,” said Hirst, “was based on the fact there had been legitimate grievances among, and discrimination against, the nationalist community and this had sustained the IRA through the length of the campaign.”
The MI5 officer then added: “Has it been a successful campaign? The answer is yes.”
Hirst said: “He referred to the fact Sinn Fein had two ministers in power. What better success can you wish for, he said, than to have your people in positions of power in government.”
Hirst said the comments were “not off-the-cuff as they were supported by an official MI5 PowerPoint presentation, complete with the official crest”.
“Presumably this was sanctioned at some level,” he added.
The DoT confirmed that the briefing took place, adding: “This was part of a programme to ensure that security staff at UK ports were up to date with the terrorism threat they are countering. We are not prepared to comment further .”
Orkney Council declined to comment. However, William Frazer, who runs Fair (Families Acting for Innocent Relatives), a Northern Ireland support group for victims of paramilitary violence, was horrified .
Frazer’s father, a member of the security forces, was killed by the IRA, as were two uncles and two cousins. Five of his friends were also murdered, and his home was bombed five times.
He said the officer’s claims reinforced his belief that the government and intelligence agencies controlled the IRA campaign, using double-agents to manage republican violence. Frazer pointed to Freddie Scappaticci, codenamed Stakeknife, who was exposed by the Sunday Herald last year. Scappaticci, who worked for British intelligence, was also one of the IRA’s highest-ranking volunteers.
“The MI5 officer’s comments back up the fact there was no determination to beat the IRA,” said Frazer, who is now writing to the Prime Minister in protest. “It is a disgrace to the memory of victims. He is talking about the killing of innocent people .
“ This MI5 officer needs to be held to account. What this man is saying is treason – it shows the ‘dirty war’ really was dirty.”
A senior source in the intelligence services said: “I am staggered by these comments.”
But Kevin Fulton, a former double-agent who infiltrated the IRA, said he was not surprised by the MI5 officer’s comment. He said : “The insight I have leads me to ask ‘who was running this war?’. I believe it was run from London.”
Martin Ingram, a former intelligence officer in the army’s spying arm, the Force Research Unit, said: “I think what this officer is saying is an honest appraisal. The nationalist community was unjustly treated and that led to the resurgence of the IRA, although I disagree with the IRA’s methodology.
“What this man has said will be detrimental to his career , but there are those in senior positions in MI5 who would probably agree with him.”
Hardline unionist MP, Jeffrey Donaldson, said it was “totally out of order” for an MI5 officer to make such statements. “ How would MI5 explain this officer’s comments to people who lost loved ones in Enniskillen, La Mon House or the Shankill bombing? It is incredible that a man in his position would justify the slaughter of innocent civilians and the security forces.
“It is still an offence to be a traitor and this man’s comments are treacherous. He is betraying Britain. He should be removed immediately.”
13 June 2004
By Paul Mitchell
9 December 2003
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/dec2003/kgun-d09.shtml
Katherine Gun, an intelligence officer at the British government's secret surveillance headquarters, was arrested in March under the Official Secrets Act on charges of passing information to an unauthorised person. She admits she leaked a secret memo to a British newspaper about US-UK government surveillance of the United Nations before the war in Iraq.
Lawyers appointed for Gun by the human rights organisation Liberty told magistrates at London's Bow Street court that Gun is pleading 'defence of necessity.' In a statement issued after her court appearance on November 27, she said, "I have today indicated to the court that I intend to plead not guilty to the charge that I face under the Official Secrets Act. I will defend the charge against me on the basis that my actions were necessary to prevent an illegal war in which thousands of Iraqi civilians and British soldiers would be killed or maimed. No one has suggested (nor could they) that I sought or received any payment. I have only ever followed my conscience. I have been heartened by the many messages of support and encouragement that I have received from Britain and around the world."
Gun was granted bail and told to return to Bow Street on January 19 when a magistrate will decide on sending the case to a Crown Court.
The leaked memo that appeared in the Observer newspaper was from US National Security Agency (NSA) official Frank Koza to his counterparts at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Britain where Gun worked as a translator. In the memo, Koza asked GCHQ to help with the secret surveillance of United Nations Security Council (UNSC) delegations that were considered to be wavering over the drive to war against Iraq.
According to intelligence sources quoted by the Observer, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice would have initiated the memo or at least approved it.
Koza's memo, marked Top Secret, explained how the NSA had mounted 'a surge effort to revive/create efforts against UNSC members Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea, as well as extra focus on Pakistan UN matters.'
The NSA effort, Koza said, would help provide 'the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or to head off surprises.'
Koza asked for the help of British analysts who 'might have similar, more indirect access to valuable information from accesses in your product lines?' spy jargon for bugging work and home telephones and intercepting e-mails.
The publication of Koza's memo in early March came at a particularly sensitive time for the British and American governments as they tried to get support for a second UN resolution authorising war against Iraq. In the face of unprecedented worldwide demonstrations against the threat of war and the intention of major UNSC powers such as France and Germany to vote against a second resolution, the votes of the minor nations were crucial. In the event, the US and UK were forced to go to war on March 21 without a UN mandate.
The seriousness with which the Bush and Blair administrations regarded the leak can be measured by the speed in which Gun was arrested, within days of publication of the Observer article, and the virtual blackout of the issue in the US media. Martin Bright, an Observer journalist involved in the Gun case, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that interviews planned with major news networks were abandoned at the last minute. Bright said, "It happened with NBC, Fox TV and CNN who appeared very excited about the story to the extent of sending cars to my house to get me into the studio, and at the last minute, were told by their American desks to drop the story."
The New York Times did not mention the story, and other newspapers downplayed its significance. The Washington Post said, 'UN diplomats and analysts said that espionage had been a fact of life at the UN since its founding in 1945, and they assume they are being monitored by many foreign intelligence agencies.'
The Los Angeles Times said, 'Forgery or no, some say it's nothing to get worked up about.'
Whilst the UN has no doubt been a hotbed of intrigue and spying since its inception, the Gun case could not be dismissed by anyone not wishing to conceal the illegal acts the US and British governments employed to pave the way for an illegal war.
Gun's actions occurred at a time when there was concern within broad sections of the British ruling elite, including the security services, that a too close identification with the war aims of the Bush administration and the Blair government's readiness to forge intelligence and commit other crimes was threatening Britain's own strategic interests.
Since the Hutton Inquiry was held into the death of weapons inspector Dr. David Kelly, there have been further calls for a more in-depth inquiry into how the British government used intelligence material in the run-up to the Iraq war. Former Labour environment minister Michael Meacher and former US weapons inspector Scott Ritter have called for investigations into secret disinformation operations called Rockingham and Mass Appeal. According to Ritter, Rockingham was set up by the British Defence Intelligence Service in 1991 to 'cherry-pick' facts to fit a 'pre-ordained outcome' to prove that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Ritter told the British House of Commons last month that he was involved with MI6's Mass Appeal campaign to "shake up public opinion" using "single source data of dubious quality, which lacked veracity." Saying he would reveal more details in a public inquiry, Ritter told the parliamentarians that the intelligence services "took this information and peddled it off to the media, internationally and domestically, allowing inaccurate intelligence data to appear on the front pages. The government both here in the UK and US would feed off these media reports, continuing the perception that Iraq was a nation ruled by a leader with an addiction to WMDs."
We spoke to Barry Hugill, a spokesman for Liberty and asked him why Katharine Gun is using the plea of 'defence of necessity.' He replied, "Essentially it means that she is going to argue that faced with the American government asking the British government to commit an illegal act, she felt no other option than to make public what was going on behind the scenes. Unlike a normal job, she works at GCHQ and is bound by the Official Secrets Act (OSA) so she couldn't simply report it to her superiors because they would have known full well what was happening.
"She will argue that it was her own belief that Britain going to war was itself an illegal act and that America was attempting to unfairly influence the UNSC. By acting in the way she did, albeit if it was in a small way, she felt it could have helped prevent war and therefore save countless lives. So the 'necessity' was to prevent an illegal act and to prevent a great human tragedy."
We asked Hugill whether this was the first time that a plea of defence of necessity has been used. He said that it was: "This will be a test case. The plea was not used by David Shayler [the MI6 spy charged in 2000 with revealing that the British security services held files on prominent Labour politicians and celebrities such as John Lennon, but not for his claim that the security services blacked a plot to assassinate Libyan leader Colonel Qaddafi], but he was told during his trial that he could have used the defence."
Under the Official Secrets Act, the prosecution has only to prove that Gun passed secret information to an unauthorised person. As she has already admitted this, we asked Hugill whether he thought there was any chance that more revealing information may emerge; for example, did the British government comply with the American request?
He replied, "That is a very interesting question. I'm sure Katharine would like to find out if that was the case. It is difficult at this stage to know what defence her lawyers will mount. There is speculation that they might try and subpoena the Attorney General. Do you remember the report he allegedly gave to the Cabinet saying support for the war would be legal? And how other press reports said he did not give such advice. It may be that Katherine's QC Ben Emerson, probably Britain's leading human rights lawyer, might call the Attorney General to clear up this matter. Whatever happens this is going to be a very interesting trial."
We asked if it is true that Miss Gun is restricted in what she can discuss with her legal representatives?
Hugill replied: "Yes. There is a dispute at the moment with GCHQ that is yet to be resolved over what she can and cannot say. They are arguing that she is still covered by the Official Secrets Act and anything she says she has to have prior permission from GCHQ, otherwise she will be in breach of the OSA again.
"Katharine was charged in March and normally a decision to prosecute is taken fairly quickly - a month or two. But it wasn't until last month that a decision was taken. The fact that it took that long is a clear indication that some very earnest discussions were being taken at a very senior level. It is quite inconceivable that the decision to prosecute in this case - given the publicity that a court will generate - was taken in the standard way. Usually a relatively junior member of the Crown Prosecution Service decides whether a case should go ahead. In this case, it would have had political approval and that would be the Attorney General."
We asked whether he thought the delay in the case was related to the government's preoccupation with the Hutton Inquiry.
Hugill replied, "I'm sure there was one school of thought that was arguing, "Don't bring charges. Just let it drop. There will be a couple of stories in the newspapers and that will be the end of it given the public opposition to war, given the Hutton Inquiry and given the fact that, after all, the Americans were asking us to spy on our own allies."
"On the other hand there must have been enormous pressure from GCHQ and the intelligence services saying, "You can't operate something like GCHQ without strict application of the OSA. If you allow one person to leak secrets, then you will open the floodgates.""
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/dec2003/kgun-d09.shtml
An impeccable source tells me that companies around the UK that do ambulance conversions on vehicles, such as Wadham Stringer near Southampton, got a lot of work in 2003 converting new ambulances for MI5. This may have been justified with any number of lame excuses but the fact remains that we now have a permenant presence of political police (sitting in pretend ambulances) on British streets.
This discredits genuine hard working ambulance men and women and leaves the gestapo elements (the 'crazies') at MI5 perfectly poised to carry out domestic political assassinations. When an ambulance takes someone away everyone trusts that the drivers have good intentions. And does MI5's boss Eliza Manningham-Buller really believe she can get away with secreting her political police around the country dressed as ambulancemen?
Next time you see an estate car marked 'ambulance' sitting around doing nothing in your city why not ask the driver if they're a genuine ambulance, or if they work for the gestapo?
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=446074
Scarlett's
cronyism resulted in precisely the sort of intelligence failure the JIC was
designed to prevent
23 September 2003
As the Hutton inquiry rumbles to its conclusion this week, most of the attention has focused on what the final report will say about the role played by the key political figures involved in the drama. But more important than the fate of Geoff Hoon is what the Kelly affair says about our style of government. Today's cross-examination of John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) and the man Alastair Campbell yesterday claimed had full control of the dossier, will fill in some important gaps about the process that led Britain to war.
Whether or not one feels comfortable with the phrase "sexed-up" ("over-interpreted" was Hans Blix's more sober judgement), it is no longer possible to deny that the intelligence on Iraq was grossly distorted in the months leading up to the war and that the process of distortion involved sins of both commission and omission.
Work on the September dossier began after the existing assessment on Iraq failed to establish a clear enough threat and Alastair Campbell asked the JIC to come up with something "new" and "revelatory". The effect of his intervention was to turn the proper decision-making process on its head. From that point on intelligence followed the policy and not the other way round. The language describing the Iraqi threat was progressively hardened and the notorious 45-minute claim made its first appearance.
Every bit as serious was what the dossier neglected to tell us. The Government presented it as an accurate account of the intelligence on which it was in the process of making life or death decisions, but in its tone of certainty it bore little resemblance to the work of the JIC as it is presented for consumption within Whitehall. JIC assessments are carefully hedged, sometimes maddeningly so. While it may be true that the JIC believed the 45-minute claim to be a valid piece of intelligence, I am certain that its internal communications would have made it clear that it referred to battlefield munitions only and that it was based on the hearsay testimony of a single source. Neither fact was shared with the public.
Perhaps the most damning evidence to emerge from the Hutton inquiry is the fact that the Government knew exactly how flimsy its case was, but chose to keep its doubts to itself. Tony Blair's own chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, was blunt in his assessment that "the document does nothing to demonstrate a threat, let alone an imminent threat from Saddam", and that this would need to be made clear in the dossier. Yet Mr Blair did the opposite, claiming in his foreword that the threat from Saddam was "serious and current".
In taking the country to war, the Government had a duty to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The September dossier failed on all three counts.
The Government's last line of defence in the face of these revelations has been to pass the buck. Everything was subject to the agreement of the JIC, whose chairman, Mr Scarlett, had "ownership" of the dossier. This may be true, but it begs its own question: who had ownership of Mr Scarlett?
The evidence presented to Hutton reveals an alarming departure in British constitutional practice in which Britain's most senior intelligence official was in effect co-opted into the Prime Minister's kitchen cabinet. Mr Scarlett should have had no business dealing with a political appointee like Mr Campbell, let alone becoming his "mate". Indeed, the JIC should never have been put in the position of negotiating the terms of its assessment with anyone outside the intelligence community.
It is simply risible of Mr Campbell to claim, as he did yesterday, that his role in drawing up the dossier was purely "presentational". As every New Labour functionary knows, presentation and policy are indivisible. They know this because Alastair Campbell beat it into their heads.
The strength of the British intelligence system has always rested on the objectivity of its analytical output and its ability to present its work without regard to political considerations. The JIC was specifically set up to provide a single source of intelligence advice, thereby avoiding the catastrophic intelligence failures that occur when different agencies are allowed to jockey for advantage by telling politicians what they want to hear.
John Scarlett's descent into cronyism subverted this process and resulted in precisely the sort of intelligence failure it was designed to prevent. His interventions reveal a man more interested in pleasing his political masters than protecting the integrity of a system on which the security of our country depends. He even passed on a last-minute plea from Downing Street for the intelligence services to provide any additional information that might help to make the dossier "as strong as possible".
By inflating the language used to describe Iraq's capabilities against the stated opinions of its own experts and systematically filtering out any intelligence that conflicted with the Government's stated view that Saddam represented a major threat, the JIC crossed the line dividing legitimate intelligence analysis from propaganda. Our confidence in it will not be restored unless its chairman takes responsibility for this debacle by resigning his post.
The writer was political adviser at the Foreign Office, 1997-2001.
http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=446074
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=430327
04 August 2003
Fresh conflict between the Government and the intelligence services looked certain yesterday after it was revealed that the head of MI6 was quitting his post.
The Foreign Office confirmed that Sir Richard Dearlove, 58, who was appointed in 1999 as "C", will retire from the Secret Intelligence Service in August next year. Sir Richard, who has consistently expressed doubts over the Government's claims about Iraq's military capability, has installed an unnamed deputy who he hopes will become his successor.
But Downing Street is believed to favour John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, who endorsed the Government's September dossier on Iraqi weapons, including the controversial claim that some weapons could be deployed within 45 minutes.
Mr Scarlett, a former MI6 officer who served as head of the Moscow station, is close to Tony Blair and was described last month as a friend by Alastair Campbell, No 10's director of communications.
Sir Richard has briefed senior BBC executives that he believed Syria and Iran were more of a threat to security than Iraq. He met Kevin Marsh, editor of BBC Radio 4's Today programme, and the presenter John Humphrys, before the programme broadcast its original claims about the Government "sexing up" its dossier.
He was worried that the war in Iraq would divert resources from the greater threat posed by al- Qa'ida. While he had no problem with the substance of the September dossier, he had concerns about its presentation. His fury at the so-called "dodgy dossier" of February, which was based on a PhD student's thesis, led to a promise from Mr Blair that all future reports would have full intelligence clearance. The appointment of Sir Richard's successor, to be made personally by the Prime Minister, is now likely to turn into a battle for the perceived independence of MI6.
The Foreign Office said: "Sir Richard Dearlove intends to leave his post as planned in August 2004 on completion of his normal tour of office. This is in no way connected to events relating to Iraq."
Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrats' foreign affairs spokesman, said Sir Richard's departure was the result of difficulties in the relationship between the Government and the intelligence agencies.
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=430327
10:30 - 22 July 2003
The sacked GCHQ worker arrested on suspicion of breaching the Official Secrets Act has launched an appeal against her dismissal. The 28-year-old was arrested in March after being accused of passing a secret memo to The Observer newspaper.
She was sacked by GCHQ bosses earlier this month but has since launched an internal appeal.
But the process has been delayed because the director of GCHQ has been on holiday.
Her petition has been further hampered because intelligence director David Pepper is taking part in a "meet and greet" tour of GCHQ installations.
GCHQ union boss Andy Shepherd said: "The appeal went to the director of GCHQ.
"But he has been on holiday and doing a round of visits to meet staff.
"So nothing has happened yet."
The woman, who is still living in Gloucestershire, is waiting to see if she will be charged by police and is due to answer bail on Thursday.
But she faces a second delay as government officials liaise with the Crown Prosecution Service.
Liberty, the human rights organisation which is representing her, says the death of MOD scientist David Kelly will delay any potential prosecution.
The secret memo allegedly leaked was from Frank Koza, US defence chief of staff at the National Security Agency. It suggested that security staff should bug UN delegates in New York.
[referring to Charles Henry Maxwell-Knight, 'M']
His first wife Gladys, I learnt, died in the Overseas Club after some sort of occult misadventure in which the notorious Aleister Crowley was involved - certainly I'd never been willing to enquire too deeply into that incident. Black magic was not a subject that held any attraction for me. I accepted M's interest in it, hoping it was purely acdemic, but, for myself, I preferred to leave it well and truly alone: M understood this. When I tore up a photograph of Aleister Crowley which he had kept, as I believed it to be unlucky, he only laughed.
Saturday 28th June 2003
http://www.it-director.com/article.php?articleid=10993
A government watchdog has criticised GCHQ for wasting money on technology designed to gather intelligence on terrorist networks. The security organisation was forced to write off an undisclosed sum spent on developing a signals intelligence system to listen to transmissions on network traffic such as radio and email.
The Intelligence and Security Committee criticised GCHQ in its report earlier this month for the technology expenditure which had only "partially" delivered.
"The committee is concerned about the size of the planned write off that GCHQ is having to make in the next year for a developmental signals intelligence system that has only partially delivered the intended capability," it said. Neither the committee nor GCHQ would reveal the sums involved.
It recognised that developmental work is "not always successful" and that the accounting system requires the agency to "highlight the cost of capital equipment".
However, the committee underlined that GCHQ "must learn the lessons from this experience".
A GCHQ statement countered that it has already carried out a review which showed that "most of the work undertaken had been successful. The write-off related to less than one third of the cutting-edge development programme."
A GCHQ spokesman added: "We have learned some lessons and put them into place."
Neil Barratt, technical director at Information Risk Management, said: "Research costs [money] and, when it's bleeding edge, it costs even more.
"Intercepting is a piece of cake. Processing and analysing information is where signals intelligence goes belly up."
An original article from www.vnunet.com Copyright VNU Business Publications Ltd
http://www.it-director.com/article.php?articleid=10993
The Cheltenham woman arrested on suspicion of breaching the Official Secrets Act has been sacked by GCHQ.
The 28-year-old was arrested in March after being accused of passing a secret memo to The Observer newspaper. The woman, who is still living in Gloucestershire, is waiting to see if she will be charged by police and is due to answer bail in July.
She has been represented by local criminal solicitor Joti Bopa Rai.
She is also taking advice from Liberty, one of the UK's leading human rights and civil liberties organisations.
The woman has consulted with Liberty's director John Wadham who took on the Government in the case of former MI5 officer David Shayler, who was jailed for six months in November for breaching the Official Secrets Act.
The Crown Prosecution Service has yet to decide whether the former GCHQ worker will be charged.
A Human Rights specialist has expressed doubts as to whether the Government will continue with the case.
The source, who asked not to be named said: "This case is going to be massive if it goes ahead and there are all sorts of questions that would need to be asked.
"It would be better for the Government and for GCHQ if it was quietly dropped."
GCHQ would not say whether the woman was still on the payroll.
A spokesman said: "We can't comment on anything at a personal level concerning individual employees."
The secret memo allegedly leaked was from Frank Koza, US defence chief of staff at the National Security Agency, which like GCHQ in Cheltenham, monitors international communications.
It suggested that security staff should bug UN delegates in New York. GCHQ is said to have been asked by the NSA to intercept phone messages and emails to help build a case for war in Iraq.
The operation was targeted at the six countries that were at the time undecided on conflict in Iraq: Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria, Guinea and Pakistan.
The document was circulated among British intelligence services on January 31.
The woman was arrested on March 5 by Gloucestershire police and was bailed 24 hours later.
The leaked memo from Mr Koza, which is believed to have been authorised by US President George Bush's NSA adviser Condoleeza Rice, sparked an internal investigation at GCHQ.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,3605,968575,00.html
David Leigh Monday June 2, 2003 The Guardian
Laws that allow British intelligence agents to bug and burgle are to be amended to permit bribery as well, as an unexpected consequence of the government's latest anti-corruption proposals.
In a draft bill issued this year by the Home Office minister Lord Falconer, the only clause to get noticed was one which fulfilled the government's pledge to make it a criminal offence for MPs to take "brown envelopes" full of money, as in the Neil Hamilton case.
But the corruption bill also includes a more obscure set of clauses under which MI5, MI6 and GCHQ are given a licence to bribe, both inside and outside Britain.
The foreign secretary and the home secretary will be able to give the agencies blanket authorisations to pay bribes to a "reasonable" extent, in the same way that they are already allowed to break into homes and plant bugs.
It has been necessary to write the intelligence services yet another exemption from the law because the government is aiming to tighten up 1906 anti-corruption legislation, and has also created a wide ban on bribing foreign officials to get contracts.
MI6 and MI5 often recruit informants inside domestic banks, companies and the state organisations of countries on which they are spying.
In recent years, they have been discovered for example, using machine-tool company executives to spy on Iraq, and bank officials in the Cayman Islands to hand over secret account information about the transactions of the Russian mafia.
The process of bringing the intelligence agencies out of the shadows and under some form of statutory control began nine years ago with the 1994 Intelligence Services Act. This gave MI6 a general licence to commit crimes abroad.
But in the process of reviewing corruption law, it appears to have dawned on MI5, the domestic security service, that its officers are, in theory, liable to prosecution for paying bribes to agents and informants inside Britain.
The Home Office says its proposals will increase control of the behaviour of spies. "This new system will be kept under review by the intelligence services commissioner."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,3605,968575,00.html
By Mark Huband, Security Correspondent
http://search.ft.com/search/article.html?id=030505000840&query=MI6&vsc_appId=totalSearch&state=Form
Financial Times; May 05, 2003
The UK's foreign intelligence service has stepped up its staff recruitment in response to terrorist threats and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
Although the global campaign against al-Qaeda has damaged the terrorist network, its supporters are thought to be joining other groups, making the security services' task more difficult.
The Secret Intelligence Service, widely known as MI6, is recruiting 40 staff members annually and training them to be "front line" officers posted abroad with the task of recruiting spies and informers. The service, which was scaled down after the cold war, will soon return to its former size.
The pace of recruitment is now double that of the Foreign Office and will increase the size of the SIS staff to just below 2,000. Cutbacks in the 1990s saw its entire staff shrink to 1,600, officials say.
But the attacks in the US on September 11 2001 and concerns about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, have given SIS a central role in traditional intelligence gathering and the formation of government security policy.
The depletion of staff posted abroad in the 1990s is regarded as having weakened the service. But new funds were allocated to SIS and MI5, the domestic Security Service, in the wake of the September 11 attacks to reflect the threat to the UK from non-state groups such as al-Qaeda.
SIS is focused on counter-terrorism, weapons proliferation and political instability in global areas afflicted with conflict, crime and narcotics - all of which are regarded as having a direct impact on the security of the UK.
Recruitment from ethnic minorities and the Muslim community has remained in proportion with the overall increase in the number of people applying, while the slump facing financial institutions has increased the number of recruits from business backgrounds.
The need for more Muslim recruits was demonstrated again by last week's suicide bomb attack in Israel, which was believed to have been carried out by two Britons. Yesterday, police were questioning three men and three women in connection with the bombing.
The service is led by Sir Richard Dearlove and has its headquarters on the Thames in a building known unofficially as "Legoland" at Vauxhall Cross. It has retained a degree of secrecy about its operations surpassed only by the Government Communications Headquarters eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham. This is unlikely to change, in spite of the need to attract a wider range of recruits.
A mark of how far this secrecy extends could be seen when Tony Blair, the prime minister, and George W. Bush, the US president, delivered post-summit statements on the war in Iraq at Camp David on March 27. The seats of top US and UK government officials had been clearly labelled in the front row, including one with the name "Dearlove".
However, unlike George Tenet, his CIA equivalent, Sir Richard, known as "C" in the service, did not take up his place, denying the press any opportunity to update a hazy university-era photograph of him, which is the only one to have been published.
http://search.ft.com/search/article.html?id=030505000840&query=MI6&vsc_appId=totalSearch&state=Form
by PETER HITCHENS, Mail on Sunday
http://www.femail.co.uk/pages/standard/article.html?in_page_id=2&in_article_id=170284
I really hope that MI5 has a file on me. In fact, I should be shocked and disappointed if it did not, for 30 years ago I was an active member of a far- Left organisation which really should have been kept under observation by the authorities.
And now I want to see that file, since there can be no possible reason for keeping it secret. First, it no longer has any bearing on me. I long ago grew up and changed my mind.
Second, it no longer has any bearing on the safety of the country, if it ever did. The world has turned upside down since those distant times. The Cold War, which linked some of the Left with our enemies in the USSR, is over. The USSR has ceased to exist.
What is more, many of those who were then revolutionaries or active Communist sympathisers are now part of the establishment, perhaps even Ministers or senior civil servants.
I am almost the only member of my student generation who is still truly anti-establishment. Perhaps MI5 fears that if it opens my files, it will come under pressure to open those on people who are now in power. Unlike me, many senior Labour figures would prefer to forget this era.
I am not seeking my file because I object to it, or because I want to complain or sue. I am genuinely curious about what is in it, that's all.
So, when the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, announced last year that such files could now be opened, I wrote to MI5 and asked for mine.
It looked straightforward. Mr Blunkett had told Parliament that MI5 could not refuse my request, provided 'data about an individual is not required for the purpose of safeguarding national security'. That seemed clear. If it applied to anyone, it applied to me. My dabblings with the International Socialists three decades ago obviously didn't have any bearing on national security now.
But it was not to be. Mr Blunkett's words appear to count for nothing in the secret world, where the excuse of 'national security' can be stretched far beyond reason to prevent the publication of anything.
All I have to show for my efforts is a polite refusal on some rather nice MI5 headed paper and a bill for £10 for a supposed search fee. This Tuesday, I will be going before the Information Tribunal, at the wonderfully named International Dispute Resolution Centre, in a final attempt to break through the musty blanket of silly secrecy which surrounds this episode.
I am not allowed to tell you exactly how silly this is. I am forbidden to quote from or make any other use of the documents supplied to me in advance of Tuesday's hearing, which sum up the Government's defence of its position - though if I were to do so I don't think that either national security or the cause of justice would be harmed one bit.
But here is the fascinating thing. MI5 is not just refusing to show me my files. They will not even tell me if they have a file on me. Merely to admit this is said to be too risky.
Well, forgive me, but there are Cabinet papers more recent than this which have now been opened to the public gaze without any harm being done. I think it pretty unlikely that there is anything in my MI5 file - if it exists - more sensitive than that.
I also think there is little chance that the file will give anything away about serving MI5 agents. If there were such people among us they will have long ago become too old to spy on student revolutionaries, or on anyone else much. Intelligence and security people tend to retire early anyway.
As for their methods, let me remind you that in 1970 there were no mobile phones and no personal computers. I have a feeling that MI5's technology may have moved forward a bit since then too.
No, the MI5 case is painfully thin and I just hope that the Information Tribunal will take a good hard look at the excuses being offered, compare them with the Home Secretary's own words, and let me see those files.
http://www.femail.co.uk/pages/standard/article.html?in_page_id=2&in_article_id=170284
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,886685,00.html
Richard Norton-Taylor
Saturday February 1, 2003
The Guardian
The government yesterday named David Pepper, an expert in information technology, to be the new head of GCHQ, its electronic eavesdropping centre based in Cheltenham.
Mr Pepper, 55, will take over from Sir Francis Richards. Sir Francis has been appointed to be the new governor of Gibraltar.
Mr Pepper joined GCHQ after studying physics at Oxford University. He was seconded to the Home Office five years ago as director of corporate development.
He is an also in expert in Whitehall's private finance initiative - the use of private firms to build and maintain public assets.
This is now highly relevant to the GCHQ, where a private consortium is building a new headquarters for the agency in a 30-year management deal worth £1.1bn.
GCHQ's new headquarters, called the Doughnut because of its circular shape and hollow centre, is itself estimated to cost £330m.
Parliament's intelligence and security committee has expressed serious concern about cost overruns and delays. It is due to be completed before the end of this year.
GCHQ maintains that the deal is 20% cheaper than the cost of maintaining its existing buildings over the same period. GCHQ, which monitors phone, email, and satellite communications, is playing a leading role in countering international terrorism as well as helping MI5 and MI6.
It has an annual budget of about £700m, the bulk of the £1bn spent each year by Britain's three security and intelligence agencies.
Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, yesterday described the job of GCHQ's director as "vitally important".
He referred to the "tireless work" its staff did "to protect our national security".
GCHQ's work was not officially admitted until the Geoffrey Prime spy scandal and a union ban - an entirely separate issue - in the Thatcher years. Now directions to it are signposted and it has an award-winning website.
Mr Pepper describes his leisure interests as music, reading, walking, and cooking.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,886685,00.html
A secret intelligence operation to spy on the families of the Deepcut victims is today exposed by the Sunday Express.
Senior officers at MI5 are understood to be working with the Army's Special Investigation Branch to monitor their movements.
The families have been calling for an inquiry into why four soldiers have been found shot dead in suspicious circumstances at the Royal Logistic Corps camp in Deepcut, Surrey.
Last night an MI5 insider confirmed the operation - also including the GCHQ eavesdropping station - was under way.
The insider said: "It has been going on for some months. They are trying to find out what the families are up to, and if they are planning concerted action."
On Friday, surveillance specialists from Tayside Police "swept" the Perth home of one of the victims, Private James Collinson. They found signals believed to be from bugging devices coming from a phone and a lamp.
The sweep was carried out at the request of Surrey Police who are investigating the deaths of Privates Collinson, 17, Geoff Gray 17, Cheryl James 18, and Sean Benton 20. The Ministry of Defence claim all four committed suicide. But their families believe there has been a cover-up after revelations of bullying and sexual harassment at the barracks.
Surrey officers asked for the sweep after hearing noises on phone lines during conversations with relatives.
Pte Collinson's parents, Jim and Yvonne, and other Deepcut families have repeatedly claimed their phone calls and emails are being intercepted.
Tayside police did not find any bugs but told Mrs Collinson to unplug the lamp and take precautions when using the phone. They advised her to buy a new SIM card for her mobile.
Mrs Collinson said last night, "There have been problems for months with strange noises and Ive heard a third person on the line."
At one time only the Home Secretary could authorise phone taps but new laws have given the power to the security service and chief constables. Alex Standish, editor of Jane's Intelligence Digest, said bugging - which can only be carried out in the interests of "national security" - was hard to justify in this case.
http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,873043,00.html
Nick Cohen Sunday January 12, 2003 The Observer
That was a close shave. The hospitals might have been clogged with corpses, if it hadn't been for the brilliant detective work of the Metropolitan Police and MI5. No potential juror can be in any doubt that our protectors foiled mass murderers. The seven men arrested in north London last week were, without question, al- Qaeda terrorists. Everyone says it. Everyone knows it.
'Britain's not just embracing terrorists, but housing them at the taxpayer's expense,' bellowed the Express. The Sun declared that the 'poison factory used to make deadly ricin is just 200 yards from the lair of one of Osama bin Laden's henchmen. Police racing against time to smash the terror network fear MORE fanatics may be plotting in the area.' Over at the Mail, Jane Corbin, a 'terrorism expert', wondered how high the assassins were aiming. 'Could a high-profile figure, the Prime Minister himself or another VIP, have been the target this time?' she mused. She wasn't sure - about this and much else. The attack might not have taken place in London, she continued. The ricin 'could have been destined for use in Manchester or Madrid or Munich' or any other city she could think of whose name began with 'M' - except Mecca. On one point she was certain. Corbin could assure jurors these men were 'terrorists'. Six were 'either Algerian or of North African origin, and the Algerian connection with Osama bin Laden goes back a long way.' QED.
Journalists working for the broadsheet press once had a greater respect for the rule of law. But size isn't important these days. The Times announced that 'terrorist leaders realise that one of the surest ways to plant agents suc cessfully in Britain is to have them apply for asylum. At least three of the seven men being interrogated by Scotland Yard in connection with the north London ricin "laboratory" are understood to have made applications.' What more proof do nit-pickers need?
The BBC tends to look down its well-bred nose at the press in general and rough boys and girls on the tabloids in particular. Last week Margaret Gilmour, the Jennie Bond of home affairs journalism, and Frank Gardner, the BBC's security correspondent, seemed more like actors than reporters as they parroted the briefings of MI5 and Anti-Terrorist Squad officers without a moment's scepticism.
I don't wish to be too prudish. The Observer has pushed at the law's restraints and I've tested its boundaries myself. Left to its own devices, any newspaper which has a proprietor who isn't censoring, an editor who isn't mad and reporters who aren't drunk will publish if it thinks it won't be damned.
The 1981 Contempt of Court Act was once a damnable restraint on trial by media. It prevented journalists prejudicing juries by announcing that suspects in custody are 'terrorists' or 'fanatics' or assassins plotting to kill the Prime Minister. Truth was no defence. Evidence couldn't be broadcast until it had been tested in court. Guilt could be pronounced only by a judge or jury. Last year the editor of the Sunday Mirror had to resign after committing a spectacular contempt of court which caused the collapse of the trial of two Leeds footballers. Nervousness gripped media lawyers, but the fainting fits quickly passed.
What has changed is the attitude of the Government. The state is complicit in contempt of court, and hopes to profit from it. If Lord Goldsmith, Tony Blair's Attorney General, were to do his duty, many eminent people would be embarrassed. Not every mysteriously authoritative 'security source' you hear us quoting knows what they are talking about. But a few are senior officers and have a bureaucratic interest in blackening the reputations of suspects before a trial begins. A serious investigation would require that they be taken in for questioning.
Goldsmith might also have to put half of his Government colleagues in the dock. Tony Blair said the ricin arrests showed 'this danger is present and real and with us now and its potential is huge'. As a lawyer, he ought to know convictions show a real and present danger. Arrests tell the Prime Minister to hold his wagging tongue. I heard Nick Raynsford say he couldn't comment on the case and then do just that, and Geoff Hoon congratulate the police and MI5. If defendants are convicted, the officers should indeed be given as much beer as they can drink, but not until there is a conviction.
Defence lawyers put the media, bureaucracy and politicians together and say Britain now has a rolling conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. The media want a story. The police want a result. Ministers want to reassure a fearful public that they are dealing with terrorism. Relations between the three aren't always harmonious, but a case before Bow Street Magistrates tomorrow suggests that they can operate as one for all their bickering.
The three defendants are Algerian (guilty according to Corbin's Law). On 17 November, the day before an earlier hearing, the Sunday Times said they were 'a gang of suspected al-Qaeda terrorists [which] plotted to kill commuters on the London Underground by releasing poison gas in a crowded carriage'. David Blunkett had 'insisted the police shut down the suspected terrorist cell and rejected a plan to delay any arrests'.
Fleet Street scrambled to follow up the sensational tale of the Home Secretary intervening to save the lives of hundreds. The Independent on Sunday said the Algerians may have been planning to place a dirty nuclear bomb 'on a ferry using a British port'. We said they had been charged with plotting to 'release cyanide on the London Underground', as did pretty much everyone else. Broadcasters repeated the story.
There wasn't a word of truth in it. The Algerians face charges of holding forged passports for terrorist purposes. David Blunkett attempted to stop the prejudicing of the case but only compounded the original offence. He told the Today programme that the police 'actually picked up those who, quite separately from any nonsense about gas attacks, actually were planning to set up a cell to threaten our country'. The Algerians' lawyers weren't grateful. They said Blunkett's assertion about a 'terrorist cell' was a separate, but as serious, contempt of court. Gareth Peirce the solicitor for one of the defendants, was stunned 'by this quite extraordinary tidal wave of completely contemptuous and prejudicial coverage'.
The next week the Sunday Times was adamant that what it had printed came from the most reputable security sources. It discussed them at length and added that 'other newspapers and broadcasters were given a "green light" from Downing Street to follow-up the Sunday Times story'.
The Attorney General thus had credible allegations of a plot to subvert justice. The editors and broadcasters who bellowed about poison gas might have been in contempt of court even if the accusation was true, which it wasn't. The evidence against them was on the record. The Home Secretary disobeyed the 1981 Act, and Today had a tape of all the evidence needed to prosecute him. Meanwhile, the Sunday Times had given a convincing account of the complicity of the Prime Minister's Office, police and intelligence services, which at least merited investigation before it could be dismissed.
Goldsmith did send editors a feeble note reminding them of the provisions of the 1981 Act (it had no effect whatsoever). But he refused to investigate his colleagues. In a multi-media age, his officials explained, there were just so many outlets it was impossible to keep tabs on them all. Their combined coverage may prejudice trials, but who was to say one broadcaster or newspaper was guilty of contempt?
We found Goldsmith's evasions odd here at The Observer. The multi-media age notwithstanding, whenever we've tried to print material the Government doesn't like, he has rushed to get an old-fashioned writ if he thinks he can stop us. But then the Government has given no indication that it objects to the trials of alleged terrorists being prejudiced. Goldsmith works for an administration which attacks juries and the independence of the judges. He led the Government's defence of interning Arabs without fair trials before either judge or jury. Contempt for courts is the partner of contempt of court. W.B. Yeats knew the forces of order can be the greatest threat to the rule of law when he wrote: 'What if the Church and the State/Are the mob that howls at the door!'
Our modern mob is in Downing Street and Fleet Street, New Scotland Yard and the BBC. If a compromised Attorney General won't stand up to it, then the judiciary must. I've no wish to see the guilty go free, but it would serve the mob right if a judge released terrorist suspects because its baying had made fair trials impossible.
http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,873043,00.html
12Jan03
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-539871,00.html
The latest arrests of Al-Qaeda suspects will be seen as an early coup for the security service’s director- general, Eliza Manningham-Buller, who took up the job three months ago, writes Gareth Walsh.
The second woman to hold the post of MI5 chief, Manningham-Buller is known for her expertise in operational planning in a career that has taken her from handling cold war defectors to heading the service’s counterterrorism arm. Under her command, MI5 plans to increase its staff by 25% to 2,400, to meet the threat of Al-Qaeda, which, unlike her old enemy the IRA, is willing to adopt the intentional massmurder of civilians to further its ends.
The daughter of the former Conservative attorney- general and lord chancellor, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, she joined MI5 after being recruited at a cocktail party in 1974 following a brief career as an English teacher in London. She has amassed significantly more operational experience than her recent predecessors in the post of director- general.
Her early intelligence career focused on Soviet espionage in Britain, and she worked as one of the handlers of the senior KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky before being appointed the head of a counterterrorism wing dealing with Northern Ireland in 1992.
Manningham-Buller, 54, who was a contemporary of Princess Anne at Benenden public school in Kent before studying at Oxford University, is known for her dislike of paper-shuffling. After being appointed the service’s liaison officer with Washington with the responsibility of passing information to the FBI and CIA — a largely bureaucratic job, though one seen as vital for gaining senior postings — she quit after a year claiming she was “not a postbox”.
Although friends insist it is not appropriate in her case, she has inherited the nickname “Bullying- Manner”, a description first given to her father. She will now be expected to build on her
early operations in the £150,000-a-year post by countering the suspicion held by some overseas intelligence agencies, in particular the French, that Britain is soft on Islamic terror groups.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-539871,00.html
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12514701&method=full&siteid=50143
Exclusive By Jeff Edwards
A STASH of explosives intended for a car bomb attack by Algerian terrorists has been lost by British secret agents.
It was hidden by the Armed Islamic Group, known as GIA, who planned to use it on the Algerian and French embassies in London.
MI5 surveillance experts secretly raided houses rented by the gang in Acton, West London, and in Wembley. They found about 20lb of explosives, detonators and other bomb-making equipment.
An urgent request was sent to Scotland Yard to arrest the men. But when officers arrived, the explosives had vanished.
The four men were questioned for several days but they refused to say where the bomb material had gone.
Because no firm evidence of a terror plot was found, they were deported to France where they are wanted by anti-terrorist police.
Scotland Yard detectives believe the MI5 agents may have left some sign of their secret raid, causing the GIA team to panic and dump the bomb material.
An anti-terrorist squad source said: "We still don't know what happened to the explosive. It was enough to cause one or two devastating blasts.
"It is very worrying because it must be out there somewhere. If it was properly wrapped and stored before being hidden, it could be collected some time in the future and used by another terrorist team."
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12514701&method=full&siteid=50143
1. MI6 'Halted Bid To Arrest
bin Laden'
These two dodgey looking characters were hanging around outside the Old Bailey during David Shayler's trial - not very subtle - more like intimidation than surveillance - does anyone know who they are?
Home Afairs Editor The Observer - UK - 11Nov02
British intelligence paid large sums of money to an al-Qaeda cell in Libya in a doomed attempt to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi in 1996 and thwarted early attempts to bring Osama bin Laden to justice.
The latest claims of MI6 involvement with Libya's fearsome Islamic Fighting Group, which is connected to one of bin Laden's trusted lieutenants, will be embarrassing to the Government, which described similar claims by renegade MI5 officer David Shayler as 'pure fantasy'.
The allegations have emerged in the book Forbidden Truth , published in America by two French intelligence experts who reveal that the first Interpol arrest warrant for bin Laden was issued by Libya in March 1998.
According to journalist Guillaume Dasquié and Jean-Charles Brisard, an adviser to French President Jacques Chirac, British and US intelligence agencies buried the fact that the arrest warrant had come from Libya and played down the threat. Five months after the warrant was issued, al-Qaeda killed more than 200 people in the truck bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
The arrest warrant was issued in connection with the murder in March 1994 of two German anti-terrorism agents, Silvan and Vera Becker, who were in charge of missions in Africa. According to the book, the resistance of Western intelligence agencies to the Libyan concerns can be explained by MI6's involvement with the al-Qaeda coup plot.
The Libyan al-Qaeda cell included Anas al-Liby, who remains on the US government's most wanted list with a reward of $25 million for his capture. He is wanted for his involvement in the African embassy bombings. Al-Liby was with bin Laden in Sudan before the al-Qaeda leader returned to Afghanistan in 1996.
Astonishingly, despite suspicions that he was a high-level al-Qaeda operative, al-Liby was given political asylum in Britain and lived in Manchester until May of 2000 when he eluded a police raid on his house and fled abroad. The raid discovered a 180-page al-Qaeda 'manual for jihad' containing instructions for terrorist attacks.
The Observer has been restrained from printing details of the allegations during the course of the trial of David Shayler, who was last week sentenced to six months in prison for disclosing documents obtained during his time as an MI5 officer. He was not allowed to argue that he made the revelations in the public interest.
During his closing speech last week, Shayler repeated claims that he was gagged from talking about 'a crime so heinous' that he had no choice but to go to the press with his story. The 'crime' was the alleged MI6 involvement in the plot to assassinate Gadaffi, hatched in late 1995.
Shayler claims he was first briefed about the plot during formal meetings with colleagues from the foreign intelligence service MI6 when he was working on MI5's Libya desk in the mid-Nineties.
The Observer can today reveal that the MI6 officers involved in the alleged plot were Richard Bartlett, who has previously only been known under the codename PT16 and had overall responsibility for the operation; and David Watson, codename PT16B. As Shayler's opposite number in MI6, Watson was responsible for running a Libyan agent, 'Tunworth', who was was providing information from within the cell. According to Shayler, MI6 passed £100,000 to the al-Qaeda plotters.
The assassination attempt on Gadaffi was planned for early 1996 in the Libyan coastal city of Sirte. It is thought that an operation by the Islamic Fighting Group in the city was foiled in March 1996 and in the gun battle that followed several militants were killed. In 1998, the Libyans released TV footage of a 1996 grenade attack on Gadaffi that they claimed had been carried out by a British agent.
Shayler, who conducted his own defence in the trial, intended to call Bartlett and Watson as witnesses, but was prevented from doing so by the narrow focus of the court case.
During the Shayler trial, Home Secretary David Blunkett and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw signed Public Interest Immunity certificates to protect national security. Reporters were not able to report allegations about the Gadaffi plot during the course of the trial.
These restrictions have led to a row between the Attorney General and the so-called D-Notice Committee, which advises the press on national security issues.
The committee, officially known as the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee, has objected to demands by the prosecution to apply the Official Secrets Act retrospectively to cover information already published or broadcast as a result of Shayler's disclosures. Members of the committee, who include senior national newspaper executives, are said to be horrified at the unprecedented attempt to censor the media during the trial.
Shayler claims Watson later boasted that there had been MI6 involvement in the Libyan operation. Shayler was also planning to call a witness to the conversation in which the MI6 man claimed British intelligence had been involved in the coup attempt.
According to Shayler, the woman, an Arabic translator at MI5, was also shocked by Watson's admission that money had been paid to the plotters.
Despite the James Bond myth, MI6 does not have a licence to kill and must gain direct authorisation from the Foreign Secretary for highly sensitive operations. Malcolm Rifkind, the Conservative Foreign Secretary at the time, has repeatedly said he gave no such authorisation.
It is believed Watson and Bartlett have been relocated and given new identities as a result of Shayler's revelations. MI6 is now said to be resigned to their names being made public and it is believed to have put further measures in place to ensure their safety.
A top-secret MI6 document leaked on the internet two years ago confirmed British intelligence knew of a plot in 1995, which involved five colonels, Libyan students and 'Libya veterans who served in Afghanistan'.
Ashur Shamis, a Libyan expert on radical Islam said: 'There was a rise in the activities of the Islamic Fighting Group from 1995, but many in Libya would be shocked if MI6 was involved.'
Guardian Unlimited - removed
From: http://www.propagandamatrix.com/shayler_gate.html
Tony Blair tonight appears to have ordered a D-Notice on British media reporting government officials signing court gag orders. This regards the case of former MI5 officer David Shayler, who has evidence to prove MI6 gave £100,000 to bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, arms to Iraq and had prior knowledge of several terrorist attacks on London in the 1990's.
The original articles stated that top Labour MP's had signed gag orders, whereby upon mention of this evidence in court, media have to immediately leave the trial. Newspapers all over the country, including the Guardian, the London Evening Standard and the Scotsman have either completely removed or amended their articles. This evidence is damning. The British government is trying to bury the story before it buries them.
I first noticed that the Guardian article I had earlier posted on my website had disappeared. Already aware that Blair may well have ordered a D-Notice to eliminate these reports, I immediately started searching on Google for some more. In Britain, a D-Notice is where the government order a gag on a particular breaking story.
I came across a very similar London Evening Standard report and immediately put it on my web site. Low and behold, five minutes later the link was dead! Amazingly, I still had the article up on my screen on a different browser window. I tried to archive the page to my desktop but to no avail. I did manage to print out a copy which I have scanned and linked below.
This story is massive because Shayler has them on the wracks on a number of different issues, from colluding with bin Laden, ukimc-shayler MI6 gave bin la.ems to arms deals with questionable characters. This could be particularly embarrasing for Jack Straw, who I, using mainstream reports, have identified as a key placeman in hawking arms to Pakistan, India and even Iran.
Bilderberg member Peter Mandelson is also trying to cover his dirt by gagging these reports. The London Times reported how his new 'think tank' was being bankrolled by the Rothschilds two weeks ago. The Rothschilds control the BBC, who haven't even mentioned that the trial has started, never mind the accusations Shayler raises.
The original London Guardian report was entitled 'Ministers issue gag orders for MI5 trial' and was located at http://www.guardian.co.uk/shayler/article/0,2763,806009,00.html - as you will see if you click on the link, it's disappeared down the memory hole. The text I extracted from the report for my original link to it is as follows...
"Ministers issue gag orders for MI5 trial: They appear to be worried that he will make further allegations about MI5 and MI6 knowledge of a plot to assassinate the Libyan leader, Muammar Gadafy, in 1996. A book, Forbidden Truth, published this summer claims that British intelligence was in contact with "Osama bin Laden's main allies" who were opposed to Colonel Gadafy."
The London Evening Standard article was entitled 'Calls for secret Shayler trial' and was at http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/1488303 - again, it has now been removed. Luckily I saved the text to a Word file and printed the article:
Before you read this, it is important to understand the issue at hand. We're talking about MI6 cooperation with bin Laden, arms to Iraq and, as reported today in the Scotsman, claims that, 'secret services ignored warnings that might have prevented bombings in the London in 1993 and 1994.' Shayler has evidence that MI5 wilfully failed to ukimc-shayler MI6 gave bin la.ems stop the bomb attack on Israel's London embassy in 1994 and the IRA's 1993 Bishopsgate bombing, which killed one person.
Here it is in Shayler's own words plus the actual MI6 Gaddafi plot document - MI6 Plot to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi: Police enquiry confirms Plot is not "fantasy" - http://cryptome.org/shayler-gaddafi.htm
The Evening Standard article has now been replaced with a shorter, watered down, version of this story. It does not mention MI5's £100,000 transfer to Al-Qaeda. Yet more evidence of a top down cover-up - read the new whitewashed piece here and compare it to my scanned original that was pulled along with all the others!
The Scotsman also released a report which remains online but both the title and the article have been amended!!! The new article talks about new MI5 head Eliza Manningham-Buller, only mentioning the Shayler case in passing. It certainly does not include information concerning the Labour MP's involved and government prior knowledge of terrorist bombings in London.
http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/index.cfm?id=1113312002 is the amended version - I archived the original at http://www.propagandamatrix.com/renegade_mi5_agent_to_face_jury.htm.
Another similar story is at http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0210/S00061.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/shayler/article/0,2763,806009,00.html
Richard Norton-Taylor
Monday October 7, 2002
The Guardian [removed from website]
Ministers have demanded that part of the trial of David Shayler, the former MI5 officer, which starts at the Old Bailey today, be held in secret in what lawyers say is an unprecedented attempt to influence the course of criminal proceedings.
The home secretary, David Blunkett, and the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, have signed public interest immunity certificates - a device designed to gag a court - insisting that the media and the public leave if activities of the security and intelligence agencies are raised by the defence.
They signed identical certificates last Friday, three days before the long-awaited trial was due to open.
Conservative ministers signed a series of PII certificates during arms-to-Iraq prosecutions in the 1990s. Guilty verdicts were subsequently quashed on appeal, mainly because the defence was deprived of relevant evidence.
The use of the PII certificates was strongly attacked by the then Labour opposition as well as by Lord Scott, chairman of the arms-to-Iraq inquiry and now a law lord. The certificates were used at the time to persuade a judge to prevent the disclosure to the defence of documents considered sensitive. The normal practice is for a trial judge to read the documents and decide, after hearing the case for secrecy, whether they should be disclosed.
Now ministers are demanding for the first time that the trial judge agree in advance that the court should go into secret session, without providing evidence to back up the prosecution's case and without the defence having the opportunity to argue against it.
The government was accused by lawyers yesterday of trying to intimidate the trial judge, Mr Justice Alan Moses, and of interfering in the criminal process.
Michael Tugendhat QC will today oppose the demand for parts of the trial to be heard in secret on behalf of the Guardian and other national newspapers. He is expected to underline the importance of the principles of open justice and freedom of expression and argue that the government has provided no evidence that national security could be threatened.
Geoffrey Robertson QC, acting for the civil rights group Liberty, will also oppose the government's move.
Government officials and lawyers persuaded the two cabinet ministers to sign the PII certificates after they learned that Mr Shayler intended to defend himself at the trial. They appear to be worried that he will make further allegations about MI5 and MI6 knowledge of a plot to assassinate the Libyan leader, Muammar Gadafy, in 1996.
A book, Forbidden Truth, published this summer claims that British intelligence was in contact with "Osama bin Laden's main allies" who were opposed to Colonel Gadafy.
In an earlier case relating to Mr Shayler's allegations, the appeal court last year ruled that "unless there are compelling reasons of national security, the public is entitled to know the facts and as the eyes and ears of the public, journalists are entitled to investigate and report the facts".
Mr Shayler is charged under three counts with breaking the Official Secrets Act. They relate to disclosures published in national newspapers in 1997, including how MI5 held files on prominent politicians, - among them Jack Straw and Peter Mandelson - it once considered potentially subversive, and how it tracked the movements of a Libyan official suspected of being an intelligence agent.
The prosecution has put together five large files containing newspaper reports relating to allegations by Mr Shayler.
By coincidence, Mr Justice Moses was the prosecuting counsel in many of the arms-to-Iraq cases involving disputes over PII certificates signed by ministers, and Mr Robertson was defence counsel in the most controversial case involving three directors of the machine tool company Matrix Churchill.
The argument about whether any of the trial should be heard in secret will be held in public. The jury is unlikely to be sworn until after the matter is settled.
New boss takes over
at MI5
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=1542924
LONDON (Reuters) - Eliza Manningham-Buller is taking over as the country's spy chief this week, becoming only the second woman to head counter-espionage service MI5.
Manningham-Buller officially replaces Stephen Lander as MI5 director general on Tuesday, the Home Office said on Monday.
A former schoolmate of Princess Anne at Benenden boarding school in the southern English county of Kent, Manningham-Buller is only the second woman to run the security service after Stella Rimington who stepped down in 1996 when Lander took over.
An expert in counter-terrorism, the 53-year-old is a career counter-espionage agent who joined the security service in 1974 after three years as a teacher.
In the formative days of her career, she worked on counter espionage against Soviet agents in Britain, including the case of key defector Oleg Gordievsky.
She was deeply involved in investigating the downing of PanAm flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in December 1988 which killed 270 people.
Libyan Abdel Basset al-Megrahi is serving life in Glasgow's Barlinnie jail for the bombing.
Manningham-Buller moved from there to Washington as senior intelligence liaison officer with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during which time Iraq invaded Kuwait, sparking the Gulf War.
She returned to Britain in 1992 to take charge of the newly created Irish counter-terrorist section, leading the hunt on the British mainland for bombers from the Irish Republican Army fighting to end British rule in Northern Ireland.
Manningham-Buller made Irish counter-terrorism the focus of her work for most of the period from 1992 to 1997 when she was appointed Deputy Director of the security service to back up the shadowy Lander.
In this role she had responsibility for liaison with other law enforcement and intelligence agencies -- a role that took her back to Washington the day after the September 11 attacks on the United States.
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=1542924
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0%2C4273%2C4480651%2C00.html
John Hooper in Berlin
Guardian
Tuesday August 13, 2002
Germany's most notorious postwar neo-Nazi party was led by an intelligence agent working for the British, according to both published and unpublished German sources.
The alleged agent - the late Adolf von Thadden - came closer than anyone to giving the far-right real influence over postwar German politics.
Under his leadership, the National Democratic party (NPD) made a string of impressive showings in regional elections in the late 60s, and there were widespread fears that it would gain representation in the federal parliament.
Yet, according to a report earlier this year in the Cologne daily, the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, the man dubbed "the New Führer" was working for British intelligence throughout the four years he led the NPD, from 1967 to 1971.
However, a former senior officer in German intelligence told the Guardian this week that he had been informed of a much longer- standing link between Von Thadden and British intelligence. His recollection raises the question of whether the German far-right- winger was under the sway of M16 when he and others founded the NPD in 1964.
Dr Hans Josef Horchem, who was the head of the Hamburg office of the Verfassungsschutz - the West German security service - from 1969 to 1981, said he received regular visits from British intelligence liaison officers.
"We held general discussions on security. At one of these - I think it was towards the end of the 70s- they said, 'Adolf von Thadden was in contact with us', and that that was in the 1950s". Mr Horchem did not know whether the links between the German and British intelligence had continued into the 60s and 70s.
According to the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, whose report passed virtually unnoticed when it was published, the neo-Nazi leader met his British contact at a hotel in Hamburg.
Germany's government is currently trying to ban the NPD on the basis that its policies violate the constitution.
But the government's case is in danger of collapse after the disclosure that some senior NPD members were agents of the Verfassungsschutz. This has sparked debate about the extent to which counter-intelligence officers were sustaining the far right in their efforts to monitor it. Similar issues arise in Von Thadden's case.
The question also arises of whether MI6 was seeking help from the neo-Nazi movement when far-left militancy was sweeping Europe after the uprising of May 1968 in Paris.
Von Thadden left the NPD in 1975, and died at the age of 75 in 1996.
His younger sister, Barbara Fox von Thadden, said she had had no reason to suspect her brother worked for British intelligence. But she added that they had very different political views and steered away from political discussion.
They had an English grandmother, and Ms Fox von Thadden said her brother "did like coming to Britain, and did like Britain very much".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0%2C4273%2C4480651%2C00.html
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/ireland/2002/0522/3773124270HM8SHYSEZ.html
BLOODY SUNDAY INQUIRY: The former British secret agent, David Shayler, has asserted that his serving MI5 colleagues will be inclined to lie to investigators "as they know that telling the truth might embarrass or expose their bosses, from whom they have no legal protection or trade union representation".
In a signed statement to the Bloody Sunday Tribunal which has been seen by The Irish Times, he criticises MI5 management and claims that officers who speak out would find that "any career prospects would be severely curtailed" while officers could not simply leave MI5 and work for a similar organisation "as could any whistle-blower from, say, BP, who could find a job with Shell or Esso".
Mr Shayler, whose statement has not yet been sworn into the evidence, comments that if Mr Martin McGuinness really did tell the alleged MI5 agent/informer known as Infliction that he fired the first shot on Bloody Sunday, then the release of this information "has already blown his identity, unless Martin McGuinness told lots of people the same thing".
In the latter case, he adds, Mr McGuinness (who was the acknowledged second-in-command of the Derry Provisional IRA in 1972) would have a clear list of individuals he suspected of being agents of the security services.
Mr Shayler was arrested under the Official Secrets Act last year when he returned to Britain from France, and he faces charges in relation to MI5 documents allegedly passed to a British newspaper which carried revelations that the agency kept files on British Labour politicians and certain show business personalities.
A statement supplied to the inquiry by an MI5 agent identified as Officer L, asserts that he was the author of a "top secret" document on Provisional IRA links with Libya between 1971 and 1996, which is allegedly one of the documents taken by Mr Shayler without authority and passed to the Mail on Sunday newspaper.
Officer L says he wrote this 135-page document in March 1996, when he was the desk officer responsible "for the investigation of PIRA's links with the state sponsors of terrorism".
In his own statement, Mr Shayler outlines how he joined MI5 in 1991 and in 1992 joined the Irish section, T2, which dealt with threats from Ireland "on the mainland". He left that section in 1994 to work on the Libyan desk until he resigned in October 1996.
He states that when he encountered references to Infliction, he spoke to another officer in the section which ran the agent, and this person used the phrase, "This guy's a bullshitter".
He was told that Infliction had at one time been totally believed and was regarded as reliable, but in a later case information given by another source had contradicted Infliction and had been found to be accurate.
Mr Shayler says he never saw Infliction's report about Martin McGuinness.
"When I saw the report of it in the Guardian, I spoke about it to my girlfriend Annie Machon, who was also an officer of the Security Service in T5 section," he states. She had also replied that Infliction was a "bullshitter".
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/ireland/2002/0522/3773124270HM8SHYSEZ.html
According to the BBC, the new spy drama Spooks lifts the lid on life in the British secret services. But with its silly plotlines and cool, Armani-suited agents it couldn't be further from reality, says former MI5 man David Shayler
David Shayler Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4413622,00.html
Wednesday May 15, 2002
They say that James Bond is a 15-year-old boy's idea of the height of sophistication: martinis shaken not stirred, souped-up cars, beautiful women with alluring foreign accents, exotic casinos, microscopic gadgets that can kill a man at 10 paces and all the intrigue of espionage.
Unfortunately the life of the average intelligence officer (IO) - or "spy", in the popular parlance - whether he works for MI5 or its sister service, MI6, is much more mundane. It is more cheap plonk at tedious Whitehall receptions than martinis shaken not stirred in Monte Carlo casinos; more pushing paper between an IN and an OUT tray than pushing drugs in a sting operation; and more sleepless nights worrying about paying the mortgage on the meagre pay of a desk officer than nuits blanches with überbabes and innuendo ("Fancy a refill, darling?"). If the IO is burning the midnight oil, it is much more likely that he is preparing a memorandum for his group leader than spying on suspected members of al-Qaida.
Publicity for Spooks, the BBC's latest offering about the world of intelligence, claims that it captures the workaday realism of a job at the heart of Britain's secret state. Looming out of the schedules and plugged in the Radio Times with the strapline: "MI5, not nine to five", the BBC's latest attempt at original drama is blighted from the start because the work of the routine desk officer is just that: nine to five. Or to be more precise, nine to five fifteen.
In other puff material, the programme boasts that the verisimilitude of its portrayal of our domestic security service - or Box, as it is known in the trade - was vouched for by a former MI5 officer, Nick Day, who acted as consultant. What they don't mention is that Day worked for the service for less than two years and has begun to appear in public as the face of MI5 to counter-act what it no doubt sees as my scurrilous disclosures. In fact, I was the original consultant for the programme when Kudos, the producers, first came up with the idea two years ago. I even came up with the title Spooks - as a joke.
I also advised Kudos that their proposed plotlines of violent anti-abortionists and international rightwing extremist conspiracies were the stuff of liberal-left fantasy rather than any reflection of the real and vital work MI5 does in protection of our security and our democracy. Quite simply, there is minimal sympathy for anti-abortionists in Britain and even if that weren't the case, the Metropolitan police special branch would be much more likely to carry out this work alongside its investigations into animal rights extremists and eco-warriors.
Of course, no drama can accurately and comprehensively depict real life. It would be too tedious, too incoherent. Drama has to be more exciting than real life. The murder rate in Inspector Morse's Oxford makes New York and Johannesburg look like the tranquil backwaters of Tunbridge Wells. Yet that series makes us suspend our disbelief because such characters as Morse and Lewis are believable, peculiarly English coppers and, in reality, people do get murdered in Oxford (just not at the rate in the programme). Having witnessed the work of the intelligence services first-hand, I find it very hard to suspend disbelief when reading Le Carré - George Smiley is far too intelligent and principled to work for MI6. Yet in the absence of any official disclosure about the work of our services, I can see why the characters and plots in Le Carr seem to capture the reality of spy work to those who have not worked on the inside.
But Spooks has none of this. It lamely rehashes every cliche in the book, while introducing dangerous misconceptions about MI5. The first episode saw MI5 officers making arrests. In reality, MI5 has no such power. Special branch or the anti-terrorist squad take over investigations when executive action, as it is known in the trade, is imminent. Similarly, MI5 is not stupid enough to put out misinformation on the record, yet the first episode showed the service trying to cover up a terrorist attack on the part of anti-abortionists by bizarrely claiming it was an unexploded second world war bomb.
At the same time, all the characters in Spooks are attractive, cool, bright young things dressed in designer togs, taking snap operational decisions. In reality, even operational decisions are made by committees of senior grey men - think the Cabinet Office briefing room (Cobra) - who are more likely to wear Marks & Sparks than Gucci suits. And this is nothing to do with English aversion to stylish dress. It is rather the product of mundane economics. It is never explained in Spooks how officers living in central London can afford such lavish designer labels and cosmopolitan lifestyles on a salary 10% higher than a civil servant of equivalent grade. On a similar subject, all the young male characters wear open-necked shirts. They wouldn't get far in the real MI5, where a tie - and a sober one at that - is de rigueur. I should know. I was once pulled up in my annual report for ties said to be "too loud".
Spooks shows us a world of hi-tech, flat-screen, super-fast computers. When I left MI5 in 1996, officers used to court colleagues leaving the section for their laptops (usually Toshibas the size of a desk, rather than the natty little matt-black machines we know today); or else they would spend their lives laboriously drafting their briefs in longhand for secretaries to type up on typewriters. Well, at least they were electric.
Even the colour scheme of the TV version of MI5 headquarters has been glossed up - all cool black, light wood and glass tables, instead of the sombre greys and frosted glass of Thames House. And Spooks plays up to the worst element of Britain's intelligence services: their excessive and unnecessary secrecy, prompting jokes in the trade about Secret Squirrel. In the first episode, the officers used aliases for routine work and kept the real nature of their employment from their spouses. In this day and age, MI5 officers are advised to tell spouses, family and close friends where they work because it is simpler than concocting a needless cover story that requires time, effort and endless discipline to maintain. (Many an officer's cover has been blown by him or her signing a credit-card slip in their real name and signature.)
So despite all its claims, Spooks is just another routine drama, more Saturday teatime kids' stuff, like Bugs, than the late-night sophistication of Sopranos or 24, the US's drama based around a day in the life of the CIA anti-terrorist unit. If the producers of the programme think they are offering verisimilitude then they've been had. Once again, we find ourselves looking across the Atlantic for new and challenging drama, stuff that was once the preserve of the Beeb.
· David Shayler worked for MI5 between 1991 and 1996. He offered advice to the producers of Spooks, and a rival intelligence programme which was not commissioned.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4413622,00.html
April 16 2002 at 12:50PM
Quickwire http://www.itechnology.co.za
London - Britain's spies are to get trade union protection, but it will be strictly undercover.
The staff association for Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as MI6, is to join up with the First Division Association, the union for senior government managers. The arrangement will extend trade union support to staff of SIS, which handles Britain's overseas intelligence operations.
First Division Association general secretary Jonathan Baume said, "Like other public servants, SIS staff face issues such as training, appraisal, pay, pensions and promotion".
The union will help the SIS staff association deal with individual grievances and enhance its "overall effectiveness", he said.
The identities and activities of SIS staff will be strictly confidential, Baume said.
The SIS had no comment. - Sapa-AP
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=26971
By Toby Westerman
27 Mar 2002 WorldNetDaily.com
1:00 a.m. Eastern
An unprecedented worldwide gathering of spy chiefs, including representatives of the CIA, FBI and Britain's MI5, has just taken place in St. Petersburg, Russia, according to the Italian news daily La Stampa.
The meeting was called the "International Forum of Secret Services" national spy agencies.
Some 100 heads of intelligence services from 39 nations gathered in a large, Soviet-era hotel, the Pribaltiskaia, to not only discuss temporary mutual assistance, but also to consider Russian proposals for the development of a permanent international spy cooperation organization.
"There is no alternative to the process of our unification," proclaimed Nikolai Patrushev, director of the FSB, one of the successors to the Soviet KGB, as the Russian government speaks enthusiastically of a "new level of cooperation" with the West.
Discussions, according to one participant who spoke to La Stampa, have been "concrete and practical." The conference also did agree to establish a permanent international intelligence organization to coordinate anti-terror efforts, according to the Voice of Russia World Service, the official broadcasting service of the Russian government.
During the conference, "glances were exchanged" and meetings were held in the utmost secrecy, with many of those attending described as shadowy figures whose names and titles "one does not recognize," La Stampa observed.
The spy conference follows upon calls by Russian President Vladimir Putin for increased international intelligence cooperation in the war on terrorism.
"Headway in the struggle against terrorism," Putin stated during the conference, "supposes close coordination among national intelligence agencies," according to the Voice of Russia.
While Patrushev called for "unification" of spy agencies, and Putin urges "close coordination" of intelligence agencies around the world, Russia has recently been caught attempting to spy on some of its partners.
According to various press reports, British counterintelligence has recently apprehended an employee of one of Britain's largest defense contractors for allegedly stealing confidential material and sending it to Moscow.
Iam Parr, a 45 year-old worker for BAE Systems, a supplier of civil and military electronic equipment, was charged under Britain's Official Secrets Act.
BAE Systems produces a variety of sensitive technologies, including radar used in terrain-navigation systems for jet fighters, night-bombing equipment, night-vision field equipment, and helmet-mounted combat electronic devices.
Moscow is also currently embroiled in charges of espionage in Japan. A Russian trade representative was recently charged with attempting to obtain U.S. military secrets from a former Japanese air force officer.
According to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Russian embassy in Tokyo has responded angrily to the charges and has issued an implied threat to the Japanese government regarding the long-anticipated treaty formally regularizing Japanese/Russian relations.
The allegations of espionage were "inspired by those forces that are not interested in concluding a peace treaty between the two countries [Japan and Russia]," the Russian embassy thundered, declaring that those forces "still live in the epoch of the Cold War &" Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported.
Among the issues disputed between Tokyo and Moscow is the fate of several islands in the Kuril archipelago lost to the Soviet Union during the final days of World War II and still held by the Russian Federation.
In February 2001, the United States was rocked by the arrest of counterintelligence expert Robert Hanssen, who later pled guilty to two decades of spying first for the Soviet Union and then for the Russian Federation.
The Hanssen case still reverberates through the U.S. intelligence community, while the extent of the damage he caused remains unclear, as does the effect it may still have on U.S. intelligence capabilities.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=26971
By Kevin Smith
DUBLIN (Reuters) - Fresh details of an audacious break-in at an anti-terror unit in Northern Ireland's most heavily fortified police station has reinforced suspicions the raid was carried out by the security services, Sunday papers say.
The break-in, during which sensitive files were removed from Special Branch headquarters at Castlereagh police station in east Belfast, has baffled police and security experts alike.
Newspaper reports on Sunday focused on the known facts of last week's break-in, while questions of motive, what was taken, and who was involved remain the subject of speculation.
The Irish edition of the Observer reported that security cameras which could have filmed the raiders entering the complex, tying up the lone duty officer and rifling through documents, were not connected to video recording equipment.
The men involved showed army security passes to gain entry, bolstering the "inside job" theory, the paper said.
It quoted police sources as saying the raiders took notebooks containing codenames of informants inside the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the dissident splinter group the Real IRA, and several pro-British "loyalist" guerrilla organisations.
Codes used in the notebooks were "not massively encrypted" and could easily be broken, one source was quoted as saying.
The Sunday Times reported that the stolen material contained details of Special Branch's informer contacts within paramilitary groups which waged war for 30 years over British control of the province.
More than 3,600 people were killed in the conflict -- known as the "Troubles" -- between the province's majority pro-British Protestants and the pro-Irish Roman Catholic minority.
"This is the most serious leakage of information we have had in the current Troubles and it could not have been carried out without inside information," a senior police officer was quoted as saying.
The paper reported that officers investigating the break-in planned to question members of MI5 intelligence service and operatives within the secretive undercover Force Research Unit (FRU) of the British army in Northern Ireland.
The FRU is suspected of setting fire to a police station in County Antrim in 1990 to prevent one of its agents being exposed in a probe by then chief constable John Stevens into collusion between Protestant paramilitaries and the security services.
The Dublin-based Sunday Business Post said intelligence stored at the unit would have included information on David Rupert, a U.S. citizen used by MI5 to infiltrate the Real IRA, and on leading loyalists who might have known of security force involvement in the killings of republican lawyer Pat Finucane in 1989 and Rosemary Nelson 10 years later.
One theory the media examined is that the theft was carried out by disgruntled members of the security services, angry at radical reforms to Northern Ireland's Protestant-dominated Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) as part of the 1998 peace agreement.
Both Ronnie Flanagan, the Northern Ireland chief constable, and Northern Ireland Secretary of State John Reid have launched separate enquiries into the highly embarrassing break-in.
Reid described the incident as "a breach of national security" and vowed to uncover the truth.
One thing that has become clear to me through the revelations of MI5 whistleblower David Shayler is the extent to which, like the police drugs and vice squads and special branch the Security Services are liable to slip into bed with those they are supposed to be monitoring and, if in the public interest, arresting.
The Gadaffi Plot and the Bishopsgate bomb revelations appear to show that the Security Services (MI5 and MI6) have been lying to ministers, failing to stop known terrorist bombs and even committing terrorist acts themselves. There is a fundamental problem that any act of terrorism can be and is used to justify the continued massive public spending on the secret state.
According to ex-MI5 officer turned whistleblower David Shayler, MI5's 'infiltration' of Class War looks more like a 'propping up' operation. Shayler revealed while in Bristol recently that a Metropolitan Police officer was recruited specifically to penetrate Class War. This he did very successfully, getting his hands on the membership database, one imagines, rather easily. So successful was the spy that he began taking on many of the administrative tasks at Class War. As the routine jobs nobody wanted to do started to be done with what was in effect a subsidy to the organisation, membership figures crept higher and higher and reliability and efficiency of Class War increased dramatically. When the copper was finally pulled out of Class War, largely due to Shayler's efforts within MI5, the organisation became a shadow of its former self.
One wonders if the same would happen to the Socialist Workers Party if MI5 pulled out of there? The 1999 book 'Defending the Realm, MI5 and the Shayler Affair' (by Mark Hollingsworth and Nick Fielding) reveals that MI5 recruited 25 agents specifically to spy on and penetrate the SWP. The tiny party are, after all, Bolsheviks plotting with the Russians to overthrow the British Government.
Since then the SWP have become almost as intransigent as the labour party when it comes to insisting members toe the party line. Could it be MI5 have a bigger part to play than we thought in creating that party line in the first place?
So I courteously request MI5 pull their agents out of the SWP, the sooner the better. My guess is either it would find it difficult to carry on or else fall into the hands of true socialists. I imagine the MI5's main reason for not pulling out of the SWP is to prevent the latter.
Any spooks reading this who wish to leak info to me which does not jepoardise national security (as opposed to the security of a New World 'Festung Europa' Order) but they feel the public should know about...???
You know how to do it and you know where I am ;-)
Read it: MI5 and the Shayler Affair, Mark Hollingsworth and Nick Fielding, Andre Deutsch, 1999, ISBN 0-233-99667-2 http://www.vci.co.uk
CLASS UNITY-CLASS PRIDE
[Skull and Cross Bones logo]
CLASS WAR
Class War
P.O. Box 467
London
E8 3QX
07092 170105
classwaruk@hotmail.com
10th January 2002
Dear Tony Gosling
As you are aware, we are far from impressed that you chose to distribute allegations about Class War in your Pepis bulletin [PEPIS#34 ed.]. The fact that these allegations come from a former MI5 officer (i.e. somebody who was paid by the government to spy on people like me, and if you are part of the radical movement, people like you) and you failed to check your facts with us before publication is disappointing to say the least.
Class War 79 (Spring 2000) covered Shayler in detail, and a copy was posted to him c/o Punch magazine. Larry O'Hara has also asked some pertinent questions of Shayler and his partner Annie Machon. Neither appear to have the backbone to flesh out their allegations, or indeed answer any questions about their own motivations.
Shayler has had every opportunity to give the full facts (as he sees them) about Class War, be it in Hollingsworth's book or in his Punch article on Class War (Punch, March 22 2000). Notably the smears about Class War "being propped up" or having "dissolved" appear in neither publication, when it was surely relevant. Instead the allegations surface two years later in yours. Could you at least do us the decency of telling us what Shayler has said in Bristol, when and to whom?
As you do not appear to be very well read - about either David Shayler or on the contemporary Anarchist movement - I enclose the following:
- Class War 79, which covered Shayler at length
- Larry O'Hara's writings on Shayler from issues of his magazine "Notes From
The Borderland"
- The current issue of Class War, along with some leaflets and our London
bulletin.
- A leaflet on the case of Anarchist prisoner Mark Barnsley, a victim of
the very state Mr Shayler worked for.
We look forward to hearing from you on these matters.
PAUL MARSH, for Class War.
13th January 2002
Dear Paul,
I wouldn't expect Class War to easily admit to having been infiltrated. Your assertion that because these allegations have not surfaced before they lack credibility is not reasoning. Shayler feels more confident in exposing wrongdoing by his former bosses as the secret state's case against him crumbles.
I am, in fact reasonably well read on the Shayler case and consider both your and Larry O'Hara's pieces biased. They seem to come from a lack of having actually met the pair. More importantly though you seem too 'Class Proud' to admit to security breaches. The allegation that the agent was pulled out because of Class War's lack of effectiveness might also be difficult for you to take on board.
Shayler's allegations about your agent were fleshed out with substantial background material and I wouldn't have passed on the allegation if they weren't. He described the debriefing of this particular agent who bragged about beating up uniformed police officers as part of his cover and that he was a heavy morning Carlsberg Special Brew drinker.
Too often radical groups (and governments come to that), when faced with uncomfortable allegations, fail to question their own motives and weaknesses. We therefore fail to adapt and grow with the times as we must, if we have the best interests of ordinary people at heart.
Part of the problem comes from the kind of narrow campaigning group Class War is. The world would be a duller place without Class War's irreverence and sense of humour (I was a subscriber for a couple of years round about 1994) but I am far less comfortable with your underlying premise that everybody in the upper or middle classes are the enemies of 'the people'. If they were I don't imagine there would be many of 'the people' left. Your premise owes a lot to a Marxist world view of 'us' and 'them' which is over simplistic.
If only life were that simple. I imagine the nightmare Class War demonstration where the local working class NF skinheads turn up to support your campaign against the Lords and go and beat up Lord Ahmed for you. He is one of the only people in parliament who is campaigning for monetary reform, an end to private monopoly on our money. Something absolutely crucial for the destruction of capitalism, something I have never seen your publications mention.
Anyway, back to Shayler's allegations about Class War's and your penetration by MI5. I received a circular nearly two years ago now saying that Class War was folding up. This could have been disinformation but I assumed it was true since it was corroberated by anarchist friends of mine. Just to check I phoned directory enquiries and found there was no listing for Class War either.
Machon and Shayler's motivations are clear as a bell to me. They joined the 'reformed' Secret Service in the good faith that they could help with that reform and have an exciting job to boot. When they found it was still blundering, incompetent and lying to press and public they bravely decided they couldn't stomach it.
If I'm right then you and Larry's accusations against Shayler and Machon are playing into the hands of the ruling hierarchy of what could, in years to come, become this countries secret police. Some would argue it already is. The fact that you may never have met Stephen Lander, Michael Pakenham etc. is no reason to align yourselves with them in their mission to put Shayler behind bars. When the legal case against a writer or whistleblower is weak the kinds of character assassinations circulated in your magazine play straight into the hands of the secret state.
I suggest you meet up with Shayler and Machon while they are still at liberty to discuss, confidentially and with an open mind, all they know about MI5 action against Class War then publish the discussions. My fear is that you may have already have done so much damage through your attacks on the couple that they may not trust you.
Anyway I hope this can all be resolved and the truth come out not behind closed doors but to the public as a whole. Please be assured I want to get to the truth about the relationship between MI5 and groups such as Class War and I will do whatever I can to help you. The implications of the 25 SWP agents are massive and potentially very damaging to the credibility of the SWP. I am suprised you did not pick up on those.
Oh, and by the way, you may not believe me but I'm actually pleased to hear you're still going. It's the Landers and the Pakenhams of this country, who I believe to be bitter enemies of free speech and freedom, that I want to see exposed for what they are.
Tony Gosling
BY DANIEL MCGRORY
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2-2002021585,00.html
MI5 EXPECTS a flurry of requests from people who want to see their security files after a new ruling by David Blunkett.
The Home Secretary agreed that MI5 should release the intelligence files they hold on an estimated 300,000 people, as long as the information did not threaten national security.
Security chiefs said yesterday that they were concerned that allowing open access to files could betray how agents collect their information, as well as giving away other secrets about their operations.
Several of the present Cabinet, including Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, can now ask to see the files kept on them in their younger, radical days. Peter Hain, the Foreign Office Minister, was kept under close surveillance during his time as an anti-apartheid protester in the early 1970s. The Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, is thought to have been monitored for his union activities during the national seamen’s strike in 1966.
It will still be up to Mr Blunkett to allow any individual to see their file. A Home Office spokesman said: “Anyone can write asking to see their file but it is still up to the security services to advise the Home Secretary whether national security is affected.
“The security services are still not obliged to confirm or deny whether a file has been kept on individuals. This is more of a technical change than people imagine. It does not mean that there will be a sudden free-for-all on thousands of MI5 files.”
What is not clear is the right of appeal an individual will have if their request to see their file is refused. Mr Blunkett agreed with the National Security Panel that MI5 had too much power to block access to files. The Home Office denied yesterday that it tried to cover up this change by slipping Mr Blunkett’s decision into the Commons library on the eve of recess.
Last year a tribunal ruled that the Home Office had acted unreasonably in allowing the domestic security service to impose a blanket ban.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2-2002021585,00.html
"We are not for names, nor men, nor titles of Government, nor are we for this party nor against the other but we are for justice and mercy and truth and peace and true freedom, that these may be exalted in our nation, and that goodness, righteousness, meekness, temperance, peace and unity with God, and with one another, that these things may abound." (Edward Burroughs, 1659 - from 'Quaker Faith and Practice') http://www.fraw.org.uk/mobbsey.html
Cheers Mobbsey!
Law forces MI5 to open its files
MI5 is to be forced to open many of its secret files to the public for the first time. A landmark legal decision to be published this week is expected to give thousands of people the chance to view much of the information held on them.
An independent tribunal has accepted that a blanket ban on releasing information introduced by Jack Straw, the former home secretary, is unlawful under the Data Protection Act.
In future people will be able to apply to see files held on them by the security service, although much sensitive information will still be held back.
The decision will allow Straw, now foreign secretary, to view his own file, charting his activities as a left-wing student leader in the 1970s.
A senior Whitehall source said last week that the "compromise" solution had left MI5 furious and would send shockwaves through the intelligence community.
MI5 holds information on about 300,000 people, most of whom are no longer regarded as suspects. Indeed, many of the "enemies within" are now respected broadcasters, authors and - like Straw - members of the government.
MI5 uses a "traffic light" system for its files. Red files are dormant and the most likely to be released. At the moment, even security agents cannot access them without permission from a senior officer.
Such files are likely to include papers on John Prescott's activities during the 1966 national seaman's strike; Foreign Office minister Peter
Hain's anti-apartheid protests in the 1970s and a young Peter Mandelson's schoolboy attendance at Young Communist League meetings.
The tribunal's decision means MI5 will have to admit for the first time whether a file exists on an individual if it is asked. The contents of the file will also have to be handed over to the individual unless MI5 can prove to the satisfaction of Whitehall that the information it contains is dangerous to release. Sensitive information such as the names of case officers and informants will be deleted automatically.
The ruling follows a legal challenge by Norman Baker, the Liberal Democrat MP for Lewes. Baker believes that MI5 holds a file on him from his days as a local councillor when he opposed a road scheme on the grounds that it would be environmentally damaging.
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/09/23/stinwenws01005.html
MI5 has told some of Britain's biggest companies that it may be prepared to provide intelligence on their business partners and rivals abroad.
For the first time, the security service this week openly invited representatives from industry and finance to its headquarters in Millbank, London, for a seminar called Secret Work in an Open Society.
The Independent has learnt that in between coffee and a buffet lunch, those attending were given a talk by Sir Stephen Lander, MI5's director general, on "What is the security service for?", during which he said companies ought to ask for help more often.
Since the end of the Cold War, MI5 has been trying to evolve into a service more interested in catching criminals and terrorists than foreign spies. This week's move will be seen as another attempt to re-invent itself as a more user-friendly service.
Among the companies invited to attend were BT, Rolls-Royce, HSBC, Allied Domecq, Consignia, BP, Ernst & Young, Cadbury Schweppes and BAE Systems. Of the 64 executives invited, a high proportion were in market development, security or risk-assessment.
"Sir Stephen said he was sure that MI5 could help business more if only it were asked," said one delegate. "In situations where we are working abroad, he said MI5 might have information on companies or individuals it could help us with if it did not involve breaching legislation on data protection or human rights.
"He made the point that, increasingly, organised crime, drugs and money laundering are our common enemy. When getting into deals abroad - particularly Eastern Europe at the moment - you can get into bed with the wrong people if you don't have good risk- assessment information on them. Basically, he was anxious that MI5 shouldn't be thought of solely as a domestic organisation ... In return, he said there might be occasions when we can pass information back."
The list of delegates gives an insight into the sort of executive MI5 is trying to reach: Nigel Carpenter, BP's deputy head of group security in the eastern hemisphere; Mike McGinty, security director at BAE Systems; Mike Harris, information security manager for Consignia; Michael Weller, BT's head of government security; and John Smith, head of security for the Prudential Corporation.
The seminar was organised in conjunction with the Whitehall and Industry Group, a body that aims to bridge the gap between business and government. Its patrons include Lord Haskins, chairman of Northern Foods and the Better Regulation task force in the Cabinet Office; Sir Andrew Turnbull, permanent secretary to the Treasury; Sir George Mathewson, chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group; Sir Richard Wilson, Cabinet Secretary and head of the Home Civil Service; and Digby Jones, director general of the Confederation of British Industry.
The practice of using the country's intelligence service to benefit companies is one performed in the United States for a number of years. There is evidence that it has used a communications eavesdropping system called Echelon to gather sensitive information on rivals in the European Union that has been passed on to US business.
There is no suggestion that the British services intend to go that far, but this is thought to be the first time MI5 has brought in so many senior executives.
Even though they were not explicitly asked to keep the meeting secret, none of the delegates approached by The Independent yesterday returned calls. In spite of a number of approaches, MI5 failed to comment.
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=92810
http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=92729
07 September 2001
Sir Stephen Lander, the head of MI5, is offering his organisation's services to the private sector. Information on the criminal links of companies' foreign associates and rivals is available in return for co-operation. There must be an ulterior motive. We know because we have read lots of books about spies. Perhaps, then, this is an attempt to grab a little more turf from the foreign intelligence service, MI6, as the cloak-and-dagger departments squabble over their reduced roles now that the Cold War is over?
A more plausible explanation occurs to us, however. MI5 is a public-sector organisation, after all, which could benefit from a public-private partnership. Perhaps this is Tony Blair's idea for heading off dissent at next week's Trades Union Congress. Instead of schools and hospitals, New Labour is going to put James Bond up for sale.
http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=92729
When I was a kid someone told me a story that seems to have a connection to this logo and I would like to share an observation that I have made about it. Have you ever heard of the tale of the one, the few and the many. If MIV were roman numerals then the one is obvious, the many represented by M, roman numeral for 1000, and the few represented by V, roman numeral for five. I am not sure about the eye, but the expression all seeing in one eye and blind in the other would suggest that amon-raa had two eyes. The missing link in the symbol is what you do not see. or perhaps what you are blind to. That could be what is called the shadow of the pyramid.
As far as I have been studying the missing link is that the eye personifies the sun in the form of the 'lucent light' that of Lucifer sent to earth. Hence the many corporations using the flame, torch, and eye symbols. Lucifer-lucent, the light of the fallen angel ruler of the earth - ties in with devil worship.
It is rather strange. The only thing I know about the all seeing eye is the old saying. The all seeing eye sees everything but itself.
In Egyptian mythology the all seeing eye symbolises Raa or Amon-Raa, the sun god and the greatest of all Egyptian gods
So did this 'Raa' help Pharoah when God told him, through Moses, to give the Jews their freedom? See Exodus 8-15 [TG]
In islam it actually tells us about the new world order which will eventually take over..also if u've noticed the one eye's all over the place recently, tv, adverts etc!, the one eye is a symbol of the freemasons, etc.. but in islam the one eye is representative of the anti christ which is going to come...it could b soon as the world is so corrupt, the anti christ according to the quaran will have a one eye! it actually tells u about new world order etc in islam...they will try n make people corrupt get rid of religions, etc.
The Eye of Horus?? Horus was a sun god of Egyptian mythology, usually depicted with a falcon's head [Dictionary definition]
The symbol of the occult eye as you have descrived rightly is indeed part of the egyptology era. The all seeing eye is a symbol of the sun people.The reason why the SS have taken on this symbol, is because it is a symbol of the free masonic state. A state in which every one is a part of. The heads of such services you may find are associated with the free masons. "Daniel Asiedu" <k0012569@kingston.ac.uk>
Acrobat PDF
Zipped - http://thebigbreach.com/download/bbpdf.zip
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MS Word
Zipped - http://thebigbreach.com/download/bbword.zip
Unzipped - http://thebigbreach.com/download/bbword.doc
Text
Zipped - http://thebigbreach.com/download/bbtxt.zip
France, 1 March 2001
To whom it may concern,
STATEMENT OF AUTHENTICITY OF "THE BIG BREACH"
I would like to clarify certain misunderstandings about my book, The Big Breach, in particular rumours that it was written by Russian intelligence.
Contrary to what certain newspapers, particularly the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, and The Times have reported, The Big Breach was not in any way written, sponsored or published by Russian Intelligence or any of their agents. It was written entirely by myself and the text was not added to or altered (except for the usual minor editing changes). I have never even met or spoken to any officers or agents of Russian intelligence, let alone allowed them to have any input into the writing or publishing of The Big Breach.
My belief is that MI6 have spread these rumours through their agents in the media such as Mr Dominic Lawson, Mr Andrew Roberts, Dr Christopher Andrew and Mr Oleg Gordievsky to disrupt sales of the book, to discredit me, and to distract public opinion from the central theme of the book, namely that MI6 needs better legal and democratic oversight.
Instead of making these spiteful and unnecessary attacks against me, MI6 should redress their obvious shortcomings. National security will be far better protected once they have done so.
Yours sincerely.
Richard Tomlinson
app:
Dr Christopher Andrew - Professor of Modern and Contemporary History - Chair of the Faculty of History, Cambridge University http://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/academic_staff/further_details/andrew.html
Mr Andrew Roberts - Sunday Times journalist and official royal historian said to be a mate of Prince Charles'
Mr Dominic Lawson - editor of the Sunday Telegraph ex of The Spectator - son of ex-Tory Chancellor Nigel Lawson
Sunday February 18, 2001
http://www.observer.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,439636,00.html
British security services ordered illegal burglaries in Muslim places of worship to gather information on alleged Islamic militants, a key MI5 and police informer has told The Observer .
In one of the most detailed descriptions of secret operations on the British mainland, Reda Hassaine, an Algerian former journalist, has revealed how he infiltrated the tight-knit community of Islamic militants in the UK for MI5 and the Special Branch, the police squad with responsibility for gathering information on suspected terrorists.
Hassaine, an asylum-seeker, disclosed how officers blackmailed him into carrying out the burglaries by threatening him with expulsion if he refused. They also advised him on how to defraud the British welfare system to enhance his meagre earnings from them.
The revelations will deeply embarrass the security services and lead to further accusations of incompetence as yet another operative tells his story. It will also raise serious questions about the services' dealings with vulnerable groups like asylum-seekers.
'Any suggestion that asylum applications could be contingent on "co-operating" with the UK security services raises the most serious concerns,' a spokesman for Amnesty, the human rights group, said.
During two years as an informer, Hassaine was asked to steal scores of documents from senior preachers at mosques in north London. Some were communiqués from extremist groups overseas; others were seemingly innocuous.
Hassaine, 37, even told his handlers about a dirty tricks campaign against Muslim militants in London being run by the French intelligence service, the DGSE. Though it too involved burglaries of mosques and Islamic groups' premises as well as the funding of a newspaper supporting the terrorist Osama bin Laden, Hassaine was advised to help the French.
Though Hassaine has been badly beaten by Muslim hardliners and now faces almost daily death threats, the Home Office has refused his asylum application.
http://www.observer.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,439636,00.html
from anon. hacker... true or false???? I'd say it has a good chance of being true or I wouldn't have posted it up here! {TG}
Between 20-25 percent of all the IP addresses given below are part of the ECHELON system and are used extensively by MI6 and the NSA to spy on British and continental citizens (the last 50 alone were intercepted with my accessing this site). Most of the 62s and 212s are clean: they form part of the Telekom network. Nonetheless there are around ten rogue 212s and three or four rogue 62s. The 193s are particularly interesting because they are well integrated within the RIPE system. Nonetheless, check out the 193s between Frankfurt and Wurzburg on arbitrary strings or as direct "pings".
Many carry little in the way of WHOIS information and are detached from RIPE with direct feeds to London (no nodes). But with a little persistence you'll be able to link them to the Whitehall/Vauxhall area and military bases outside of London.
Quite a few have been around for months, and here again I will provide you with additional analysis and a more detailed breakdown on the addresses later. In the meantime, if you have some decent traceroute software, I wish you the best of fun. Please feel free to send your findings to other interested websites, such as Cryptome.org. Expect another 30 addresses later.
[Begin]
---- 62.227.245.245 ---- 193.159.2.151 ---- 149.225.49.243 ---- 193.159.3.129 ---- 217.4.80.88 ---- 193.159.1.115 ---- 62.158.7.37 ---- 217.2.232.165 ---- 213.21.43.147 ---- 212.98.131.68 ---- 212.184.153.40 ---- 213.7.48.206 ---- 193.159.117.121 ---- 193.159.77.180 ---- 193.159.3.137 ---- 193.159.3.137 ---- 212.64.80.213 ---- 172.177.148.123 ---- 195.186.192.204 ---- 128.250.1.21 ---- 62.96.171.5 ---- 193.159.0.62 ---- 217.4.81.252 ---- 193.159.117.41 ---- 202.92.95.199 ---- 62.158.226.204 ---- 62.155.248.182 ---- 62.158.226.204 ---- 217.1.72.199 ---- 62.158.225.214 ---- 62.158.228.246 ---- 62.158.226.208 ---- 216.220.31.216 ---- 217.50.26.105 ---- 193.159.3.130 ---- 62.54.157.222 ---- 62.224.87.11 ---- 217.0.159.118 ---- 62.158.227.99 ---- 64.41.46.104 ---- 62.155.177.72 ---- 195.57.121.217 ---- 62.155.177.72 ---- 217.0.1.241 ---- 193.159.117.30 ---- 193.159.24.96 ---- 193.159.2.72 ---- 212.4.75.201 ---- 193.159.2.72 ---- 62,180.220.43 ---- 195.39.147.77 ---- 212.144.253.126 ---- 145.253.141.230 ---- 213.7.11.239 ---- 213.6.101.188 ---- 193.159.39.163 ---- 62.158.10.37 ---- 62.158.22.213 ---- 213.186.145.92 ---- 193.159.117.133 ---- 212.185.252.73 ---- 62.224.244.151 ---- 62.224.8.3.11 ---- 194.25.134.91 ---- 193.158.183.189 ---- 62.224.81.197 ---- 62.224.20.171 ---- 62.155.233.129 ---- 193.159.89.215 ---- 213.47.142.223 ---- 193.159.3.97 ---- 213.47.142.223 ---- 62.224.49.80 ---- 217.12.7.41 ---- 193.159.3.144 ---- 212.234.31.129 ---- 62.158.225.184 ---- 62.224.94.231 ---- 217.2.88.161 ---- 193.159.2.6 ---- 62.180.24.252 ---- 62.180.24.252 ---- 62.180.26.40 ---- 217.2.88.161 ---- 193.159.2.6 ---- 62.157.0.215 ---- 213.21.32.109 ---- 217.80.198.117 ---- 193.159.0.141 ---- 172.163.40.223 ---- 193.159.0.141 ---- 212.10.8.236 ---- 193.159.0.141 ---- 213.6.110.194 ---- 193.159.116.153 ---- 62.54.184.16 ---- 62.158.226.112 ---- 24.4.254.203 ---- 62.158.224.194 ---- 217.4.97.82 ---- 193.159.3.176 ---- 217.4.81.35 ---- 193.159.3.176 ---- 193.159.139.242 ---- 193.159.2.126 ---- 195.102.200.56 ---- 193.159.1.68 ---- 62.155.147.211 ---- 193.159.116.17 ---- 62.158.45.208 ---- 62.158.227.200 ---- 149.225.71.149 ---- 193.159.3.146 ---- 193.158.163.173 ---- 62.54.135.41 ---- 62.54.9.57 ---- 62.156.8.11 ---- 62.224.81.61 ---- 62.224.5.136 ---- 62.224.81.95 ---- 193.159.2.6 ---- 216.104.228.104 ---- 216.104.228.102 ---- 62.158.224.62
[Ends]
Today's earlier submission of ECHELON / MI6 IP addresses and network listening stations, which are involved in the wholesale commercial theft of other people's hard work, seem to have struck a note.
Most of the 193s, particularly those concentrated the the southeast of Wurzburg in Germany, are ECHELON listening posts. In fact, Germany has to contend with a huge amount of illegal MI6 activity and is indeed the focus of most of ECHELON's espionage (theft of commercial secrets, patents, new products and technology, in addition surveillance of American and British dissidents etc.) You'll find much of ECHELON's electronic snooping terminals southeast of Frankfurt, running in a wide strip from Wurzburg to Furth, which is a few kilometres to the west of Nuremberg, including: Aschaffenburg, Lauda, Rottendorf, Kitzingen, Ochsenfurt, Marktbreit, Bamberg, Ansbach, Forchheim and Erlangen. Run searches on any of the IPs (including the 194s, 195s, 62s, 212s, 217s, 213s and all the others that don't seem to fit) and trace routes to and from all of them. If you've got the right sort of intelligence software with mapping, resolution, imaging, charts and ping and echo facilities you'll find some pretty bizarre nodes and links along the way. Most of the 62s, and 212s are not live feeds, but can be used as a means to see all the 193s and 195s in between. There are however a couple of 62s and 213s way out on another planet ("blackholers"). Whatever, you're bound to ask yourself: "What the fuck is going on here?" Check these out, and enjoy:
[Begin numbers]
---- 62.226.130.96 ---- 193.159.1.63 ---- 62.180.210.123 ---- 193.159.1.63 ---- 62.54.9.17 ---- 193.159.106.247 ---- 193.159.98.189 ---- 149.225.111.185 ---- 62.226.143.13 ---- 62.226.130.96 ---- 62.226.17.99 ---- 217.1.232.52 ---- 213.182.137.124 ---- 62.224.80.197 ---- 62.225.209.7 ---- 193.159.3.161 ---- 213.23.32.84 ---- 62.158.224.51 ---- 66.31.128.137 ---- 193.159.0.141 ---- 172.139.59.34 ---- 213.224.121.129 ---- 62.98.46.49 ---- 217.4.232.43 ---- 62.253.137.189 ---- 172.177.14.81 ---- 213.167.214.40 ---- 62.158.33.209 ---- 195.53.201.8 ---- 213.21.25.4 ---- 193.159.2.6 ---- 62.158.255.254 ---- 149.225.18.143 ---- 172.177.221.15 ---- 62.224.106.24 ---- 217.2.88.161 ---- 62.180.204.207 ---- 62.226.170.80 ---- 193.43.29.44 ---- 62.158.90.136 ---- 62.157.15.112 ---- 62.226.81.74 ---- 4.33.36.179 ---- 217.80.159.60 ---- 172.177.2.17 ---- 172.177.209.235 ---- 193.159.77.208 ---- 193.159.3.120 ---- 217.2.89.1345 ---- 193.159.109.86 ---- 193.159.0.40
[End all]
WASHINGTON – The sudden eruption in Britain of a Cold War-era spy scandal, with an alleged East German 'mole' inside the top London think tank on international affairs, has thrown up a startling pattern of Soviet-bloc espionage targeting not military secrets but peace movements and politics.
The Stasi, the nickname for East Germany's State Security Service, claimed to have deployed at least 28 strategically placed spies in the upper reaches of the British establishment.
Three of them were providing reports from the heart of the then-ruling Conservative Party, headed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Another was providing documents prepared for the ruling body of the chief opposition party, the national executive committee of the Labour Party. And another was providing internal documents from the Social Democratic Party, a centrist and breakaway group from Labour that at one point threatened to overtake the parent party as the main challenger to Mrs. Thatcher's Conservatives.
The presence of the Stasi mole code-named 'Eckart' inside the Royal Institute of International Affairs, did not come as news to MI5, Britain's veteran counter-intelligence operation. They had been tipped off under an intelligence-sharing agreement with the U.S.-based Central Intelligence Agency, after CIA officers took advantage of the chaos in East Berlin after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall to plunder the Stasi files.
But the presence – and political targets – of the remaining moles has remained secret until German code-breakers finally cracked the ciphers under which the British operational files were protected. The story broke in London over the weekend, after British academic Dr.b Anthony Glees, director of European politics at Brunel University, analyzed the decoded index to the Stasi files.
"This is a unique and compelling archive, and the importance of its discovery should not be underestimated," Dr. Glees said.
"We have long known that the Stasi were active in Britain at this time, but we have never before known exactly what they were doing. (This index) shows that British agents were able to provide the East German regime with key insights into the realities of British political and strategic thinking."
That is the point. The conventional view of Cold War spying was that military and nuclear secrets were the main targets. But the work of the Stasi 28 in Britain suggests that East Berlin, reckoned by far the most loyal of the satellites of the Soviet bloc, was focusing instead on the inside story of politics and policy-making.
There was a flurry of political protests in London against the recommendation by MI5 not to prosecute 'Eckart' under the Official Secrets Act. But MI5 sources claimed that it was "not at all clear that a conviction could be guaranteed," an indication that it might be difficult to prove that real secrets – as opposed to policy analysis – had been betrayed.
Chatham House, as the Royal Institute of International Affairs is named, after the 19th century prime minister who lived in the classic Georgian house on St. James Square where the think tank now boasts one of the finest addresses in London, is the place where Britain's foreign policy establishment thinks aloud. The favored setting for visiting dignitaries to deliver policy speeches, it also publishes International Affairs, one of the world's top foreign policy quarterlies. It hosts academics and foreign policy specialists and publishes a range of quasi-official policy papers.
"But this is not a place that gets secrets in the classic sense," commented one insider yesterday. "This place is about discussing and disseminating foreign policy ideas and concepts, not about military hardware or war plans."
Intelligence analysts have noted a similar pattern in the way the Stasi targeted Scandinavian countries like Sweden, Denmark and Norway. DESTA, (standing for Destabilization, Terrorism and Disinformation), a highly regarded Nordic newsletter on security affairs, devoted an entire issue this year to Stasi operations in Scandinavia, and again the focus on politics, rather than military secrets, is striking.
The Norwegian agent Akker, recruited in 1966, specialized in reports of meetings between Social Democrat parties and leaders throughout Europe. Agent 'Toeppfer,' also recruited in 1966, reported on diplomatic policy-making toward East Germany by various Western European countries. Other agents reported on Norwegian politics, on the formation of Norway's economic and foreign policies, and its links to the European Union.
In Sweden, agent Kiesling was recruited in 1982 to report on the Swedish peace movement and its relations with similar groups inside the Soviet bloc. Agent 'Dom' specialized in reports on Sweden's anti-apartheid movement. Agent 'Martin' was recruited in 1986 and reported on Swedish links with Namibia and the SWAPO independence movement. Another agent, 'Pioner,' reported on Swedish and other countries' links to Mozambique – which at the time was an East German ally.
There is no doubt that the Stasi were also looking for hard military information, like British military planning and Swedish capabilities in defending against chemical and biological warfare, but the Stasi seems to have been fascinated by the way Western politics worked and the way policies were made. Maybe it was a division of labor between the Soviets and the East Germans, and maybe the Stasi found it so hard to penetrate military secrets that they took whatever their agents could get, however tangential the information might have been.
The Swedish authorities also decided not to prosecute the Stasi agents who had been exposed, Justice Minister Laila Freivalds told the Swedish Parliament in February. Some 20 possible cases were pending, she noted, but no decision to prosecute had been taken because "it had not been possible to establish criminal activity and besides, the statute of limitations applied in some cases." (This means that the alleged offense had taken place too long ago to still count as a crime.)
It remains as a remarkable footnote to the history of the Cold War that one of the Soviet bloc's most-feared spy agencies should have spent so much time probing the thinking of Western European politics and the semi-public process of policy-making. But then even Stasi agents had to justify their stipends and their expenses.
"No classified documents would ever go anywhere near Chatham House," noted Rupert Allason, the former Member of Parliament and author of a series of works on intelligence. "Whoever 'Eckart' was, he would be perfectly entitled to pass Chatham House material to the Stasi, and the security service (MI5) would only be interested on the basis that their surveillance could identify a Stasi officer working in London under diplomatic cover."
But then MI5 had penetrated the Stasis's London network already. In 1985, a Stasi couple working under deep cover, Reinhard and Sonja Schulze, were arrested after five years in London, running a 'safe house' in the quiet suburban street of Pownall Gardens in Hounslow, West London.
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4055860,00.html
British intelligence agents landed a job for renegade spy Richard Tomlinson with the Formula One motor racing team owned by Jackie Stewart, the former Grand Prix champion and friend of Prince Charles.
The deal was part of a pact MI6 made with Tomlinson in 1996 aimed at stopping the former agent from revealing secrets about the workings of Britain's intelligence services. The deal also involved a loan from MI6 of several thousand pounds to help Tomlinson pay off his debts.
Tomlinson worked in the marketing department of Stewart's team from May 1996 until he left in November to travel to Australia. It was then that the authorities discovered he was trying to publish a book about his work in MI6.
Last night Stewart confirmed he gave Tomlinson a job but said he was unaware of any links with the intelligence community.
'I was approached through a friend who said he knew someone who wanted a job,' Stewart told The Observer last night. 'He was a very personable man and very good academically. It was quite a long time ago and from memory I think he had something to do with the Foreign Office, but I can't be sure.'
In an article in today's Observer, David Shayler, the MI5 officer who returned to Britain last week and is facing charges of breaching the Official Secrets Act, uses the example of Tomlinson to show how poorly he believes he was treated.
Shayler said: 'This all contrasts remarkably with the attitude taken towards former MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson. After alleging impropriety, he was the beneficiary of an immunity deal which saw him receiving a substantial amount of taxpayers' money and a new job in return for silence.'
Although it had been understood that Tomlinson was paid £25,000 to keep quiet, the former MI6 agent says it was more like £14,000 and was a loan. He also claims £1,000 was used to pay part of Shayler's legal fees while he was in jail.
After being sacked by MI6 for allegedly 'going on frolics of his own', Tomlinson left for Spain in early 1996. The intelligence service promised him a job and immunity from prosecution if he kept quiet.
Tomlinson claims he was given a 'dull job' in marketing and quickly became frustrated.
He asked MI6 to find him another job but when they failed to deliver he left the Stewart racing team to go to Australia. It was then that he was arrested. Tomlinson, who now lives in Italy, became the first former MI6 officer to be jailed for breaking the Official Secrets Act since George Blake, the KGB traitor, 36 years ago.
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,359717,00.html
When David Shayler appeared on Have I Got News For You last year, Paul Merton showed that alternative humour which has made him a millionaire by delivering the Wildean jibe that Shayler was a fatty bozo. Even the Telegraph could not produced wit to match this. In retrospect, Shayler's stock had nowhere to head but up.
He was thanked by strangers in the street for his sacrifices when he returned from exile last week. The greetings were delivered in Beaconsfield, which was not known previously as a Little Moscow of the Buckinghamshire red belt. The newspapers agreed that the tide was with Shayler. They reported the Government had ducked an Official Secrets Act prosecution against him for revealing his most damming secrets - MI6's definite knowledge of and alleged complicity in a coup attempt in Libya, and MI5's lazy handling of warnings of the bombing of the Israeli Embassy which led to the building being wrecked and the probable unjust conviction of two Palestinians. Rather than take the serious charges head on, the authorities had gone for Shayler for the laughably petty crime of telling the Mail on Sunday that MI5 kept files on politicians.
As the politicians were Peter Mandelson and Jack Straw, two of the most conservative figures in the history of the Labour movement, I can see why many think the case will be far funnier than Have I Got News For You has been since those forgotten days when Merton had to struggle on a mere upper-middle-class income. The argument doing the rounds is that MI5 will end up being derided as a collection of numpties whatever happens. If Mandelson and Straw are real security threats, then Shayler was right to reveal the presence of traitors at the heart of Government. If they are not, and they quite clearly are not, then Shayler revealed nothing except the dangerous fantasies of a far-right secret police.
I'm all for laughing at the spooks, but mockery can let them off too lightly. Straw is meant to be the Minister who controls MI5. Mandelson has to deal daily with its bureaucrats in Northern Ireland. They are members of a government which determines the budgets and powers of MIs 5 and 6. How are they likely to behave when they learn that they have been spied on for years after they left the Left by the wizened, vindictive souls of the 'intelligence community'?
The best answer comes from fiction. Robert Penn Warren's 1946 novel, All the King's Men, about the politics of the American South has just been re-published. It has a corrupt politician telling his sidekick, the narrator, to find the dirty secret of a judge who has got ideas above his station.
'"But suppose there isn't anything to find?"
'And the Boss said: "There is always something."
'And I said: "Maybe not on the Judge."
'And he said: "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something."'
Quite so. Successive American presidents allowed J. Edgar Hoover to ignore the rise of a Mafia and persecute civil rights campaigners because they were terrified about what he had on them in his files. There is at least a suggestion that New Labour politicians are being told to watch what they say.
In March, Peter Hain, the Foreign Office Minister, bravely deplored the prosecution of my colleague Martin Bright for fighting MI5's attempts to find the sources of our articles on the Shayler case. Within days, the Times and Telegraph were reporting that the Conservatives had 'revealed' that Hain was a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and, as such, was unfit to represent Britain. It is impossible to decide whether this was a warning from the secret state to a democratic politician not to get ideas above his station. I wouldn't dream of speculating myself - no responsible citizen wants to be accused of being a conspiracy theorist, after all. Yet it is indisputable that Robin Cook was lied to quite spectacularly when MI6 told him Shayler's Libyan accusations were 'pure fantasy'.
As far as we know no official has been investigated for allegedly deceiving the Ministers who are meant to control them. Being a cynical Leftie, I think New Labour would have given the most bigoted factions in the security services everything they wanted without the need for threats. Those Pollyannas among you who believe in the democratic respectability of our system have no choice, however, but to regard Shayler's allegations about the files as the most serious charges of constitutional impropriety he has levelled.
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,359717,00.html
Although I am very happy to be back in Britain after three years, I have hardly been rejoicing. Failing intervention by the Attorney-General, I expect to appear in court soon facing possible imprisonment for breaching the Official Secrets Act.
But the real criminals in this affair are the British Government and the intelligence services. The Government has a duty to uphold the law. It cannot simply be ignored because crimes are carried out by friends of the Government.
In November 1999, I sent the Home Secretary Jack Straw detailed evidence of involvement by MI6 officers in a plot to murder Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi. Although the assassination failed when attempted in 1996, innocent Libyan civilians were killed.
In a dossier I presented to Mr Straw, I included the names of those who had also been briefed about the plot within MI5. Mr Straw merely indicated to journalists in off-the-record briefings that he was 'looking into the matter'. Robin Cook labelled my evidence 'pure fantasy', an assertion now contradicted by an MI6 report posted on the Internet last February.
When presented with this compelling evidence these very senior Ministers should, of course, have called in the police immediately. We would never countenance two police officers conspiring to murder a criminal. Why should we accept that two MI6 officers could do the same to Colonel Gaddafi?
This week, I will be writing to both the police and the Crown Prosecution Service asking them to investigate the role of the Government in this case. As part of any inquiry, Special Branch would have to have unfettered access to Government discussions about my case. Should the Government frustrate this process, it would lay itself open to accusations of either obstructing or perverting the course of justice. And what has Sir Stephen Lander, now head of MI5, done to protect the reputation of the organisation he runs?
When I joined MI5, I was told it obeyed the law and always had the utmost respect for civil liberties. So inevitably I am left wondering why Sir Stephen did not perform his clear public duty and call in Special Branch to investigate the Gadaffi plot as soon as he realised that MI6 did not have Ministerial authorisation to plot to assassinate a foreign head of state. In August 1998, I also pointed out publicly that MI5 had evidence of the plot on its file SF754-0168.
Sir Stephen is, sadly, a man who keeps quiet about crimes committed by MI6 but stands by while a properly-motivated whistleblower is persecuted. I fear he has already connived in misleading the Government over MI5's failure to prevent an IRA attack on the British mainland in 1993, a matter I will seek to have disclosed at my forthcoming trial.
The Government's failure to ensure that two MI6 officers are brought to justice for their part in planning a murder is what I would expect of despots and dictators. It is not only an abuse of power. It is an insult to those who respect the rule of law, including the vast majority of the British public.
It is corruption. It is sleaze. And sleaze was where New Labour came in as a supposed breath of fresh air after the Conservatives had grown corrupt.
The Attorney General's office is still determined to prosecute the editor of Punch magazine early next month for claiming that institutional failures in the intelligence services failed to prevent the IRA bombing of Bishopsgate in the City of London in 1993. That was the biggest terrorist attack on the British mainland in history.
This all contrasts remarkably with the attitude taken towards former MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson. After alleging impropriety in the intelligence services to the Sunday Times in 1996, he was the beneficiary of an immunity deal which saw him receiving a substantial sum of taxpayers' money and help in finding a new job in return for future silence.
This tragic episode is fast becoming British Watergate. Until Nixon was exposed, the American public was generally prepared to tolerate some secrecy surrounding the work of government because they trusted their elected representatives. But our Ministers should not forget that once their president had been impeached, Americans were no longer prepared to take that government on trust. As a consequence, the American people have now won the most liberal freedom of information policy in the world. Dumb commentators still suggest glibly that 'secrets must remain secret'. That argument is an affront to the public's right to know how our intelligence services operate on their behalf. Secrecy and the ludicrous legislation which props it up is inimical to freedom of expression.
These naive commentators do not have the wit or intelligence to realise that they undermine the proper ability of the press to hold the most secretive and unaccountable areas of government up to public scrutiny. If people want to live in a country where the intelligence services work in absolute secrecy with no respect for the rule of law or basic human rights, they should go and live in Libya, Iraq or Iran.
As the head of Britain's intelligence services, Tony Blair now has a simple - and honourable - choice. To expose the truth. My message to the servants of the state remains simple. Don't shoot the messenger. Don't let MI6 get away with murder.
The story begins on Friday August 7, 1992, during an MI5 investigation into the Provisional IRA (PIRA the MI5 term) operation on the British mainland. An MI5 officer is on the third floor of the organisation's building in Curzon Street, drafting the situation report for the investigation into an active service unit (ASU) which has been followed, moving suspicious trucks around West London.
Reporting indicates that the ASU is planning a large-scale attack in London, like the ones that took place six months earlier at the Baltic Exchange in the City and at Staples Corner near the M1/M25 intersection. The situation report will go out to all services involved in the operation, updating them on the state of play.
That Friday evening, all is calm. The joint Met S Squad/MI5 surveillance team has tracked the lorry to a trailer park in Northwest London. The ASU is under control and it looks like any potential attack will be thwarted and the culprits caught red-handed.
This is the last operation with the MPSB (the Metropolitan Police Special Branch), leading the intelligence investigation. Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke has already decided to switch the roles of MI5 and the MPSB for IRA investigations in Britain. After October 1, 1992, MI5 will be in charge and MPSB will offer support.
That night, a special operation team makes a covert entry into the lorry yard and drills a hole in the top of the trailer. This reveals that it contains up to 300lbs of home-made explosive and possibly detonators.
In the MI5 jargon, this makes the lorry a "vehicle-borne improvised explosive device". It appears to hold well over twice the amount of ammonium nitrate and sugar (which form the explosive compound) used at the Baltic Exchange or Staples Corner.
The intelligence services do not know the actual targets of the potential attack. Officers are speculating that these might include key centres of the UK infrastructure or economy like the Telecom Tower, Tottenham Court Road, Oxford Street, Canary Wharf or even the MI5 building itself.
Now that the special operations team has confirmed that the vehicle is ready to be primed, it seems likely that any planned attack is imminent. Over the weekend, the heads of the services involved meet and agree to arrest the ASU when they return to pick up the lorry.
Sure enough, in the following days the ASU returns. The Met's anti-terrorist squad takes control of the operation from intelligence teams because "executive action" - in other words arrests - are imminent. They wait until the members of the ASU -around four or five individuals, some of whom have not been identified - further incriminate themselves by touching or checking the trailer.
As the targets gather around the truck, the leader of the surveillance team at the site tries to contact George Churchill-Coleman, the then head of the anti-terrorist squad and one of Britain's most senior policemen. The man in situ wants to brief Churchill-Coleman with the updates and ask for permission to arrest the suspected terrorists.
He tries the operations rooms on the 18th floor of New Scotland Yard. He tries Churchill-Coleman's mobile number. It is switched off. The New Scotland Yard operations room tries to track down the elusive head of Britain's terrorist policing - and fails.
The officer at the site knows that if he gives the order without first clearing it with his boss he will be to blame should anything go wrong. This is not a matter of legal procedure or a hard-and -fast rule; the officer at the scene can give the arrest order, if he wishes.
He decides against doing so. He has his future in the police to think about and, in any case, the Met should be able to track down Churchill-Coleman shortly. The latter does, after all, know that there is a serious counter-terrorist operation proceeding apace.
But Churchill-Coleman does not get in touch. Suddenly, the ASU start to file out of the lorry yard. One by one they leave. None of the many of policemen or intelligence officers present dare to give the arrest order.
As the final member of the ASU leaves the yard, he seems to have spotted the surveillance. He smiles and gives a cocky thumbs-up before climbing into a car and roaring off.
He has already been identified as Cyril "Jimmy" McGuiness. The Met has known him for many years for his role in routine but major vehicle theft. This is some of the first evidence that his tricks of acquiring, "ringing" - fitting a stolen vehicle with the registration and chassis numbers of a legally registered vehicle belonging to someone else - and selling on knocked-off cars and lorries has a more sinister purpose: that he is carrying out these tasks in support of PIRA. Although three people are later arrested in connection with the operation, they are released without charge. McGuiness is not among those arrested.
Fast forward to April 24, 1993. I am at home in Clapham preparing for a party which will be attended by MI5 officers. At around 10.30am, the windows of my flat shake. I joke to my flatmates that it's probably PIRA. The others are unaware that MI5 was, the day before, following a three-man ASU led by Rab Fryers and Gerry Mackin. (Much later, they were both sentenced to over 20 years in jail for their part in other terrorist operations.)
As the midday news bulletins go out, it becomes clear that an enormous bomb has gone off in the City of London. Scenes of devastation reminiscent of downtown Beirut are to dominate the television news and the papers for weeks to come.
For the record, the bomb consisted of one tonne of home-made explosive and 10lbs of Semtex to help detonate it. It killed one person, Ed Henty, a News of the World photographer, and injured 36. It has caused £350 million of damage to a million -and -a half square feet of office space in the heart of the City.
In a single attack, PIRA cost the UK economy several times as much as the entire Troubles had cost over the previous 20-odd years. In addition, it all took place in front of 1,000 international politicians, businessmen and officials, who had gathered at the nearby headquarters of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
As publicity for the Republican cause, it was far-reaching. With only one death - and that of a photographer trying to get a closer picture of the suspected bomb lorry- it had far fewer drawbacks than the incident in Warrington two months beforehand.
Warrington had attracted enormous condemnation as two teenagers had been killed after the advanced code-word warning (which accompanies just about every PIRA attack) had failed to get through to the authorities. Even the IRA's supporters in the Republic of Ireland and the Six Counties had been obliged to condemn such a senseless waste of life.
On the Friday of the following week, police released video photographs of two men, their faces largely covered by hoods, jumping from the bomb lorry before it had exploded. These were circulated among the officers of MI5's T2A section and the men were quickly identified as Cyril "Jimmy" McGuiness and his erstwhile sidekick, Damien "Redboy" McPhillips, another criminal well known to the Met for car crime.
By this time, the two were also familiar to MI5. They had not been arrested in the wake of the North London operations failure and had gone on to lead MI5 a merry dance for six months. The service had spent millions of pounds on following them all over the country. It had also tapped their wide range of mobile phones and tried to effect "covert entries" (or burglaries) of their premises to gather evidence against the two.
At the same time, Jimmy and Redboy had imported and exported stolen vehicles, either for their own profit or in support of the IRA's mainland bombing campaign. Stolen or "ringed" vehicles were being used increasingly in Britain either to smuggle PIRA semtex and weapons into the country or to transport primed bombs to their targets.
Although MI5 had an abundance of information linking the two to car crime, it never gathered enough evidence to have them arrested and convicted in connection with terrorist offences. At the same time, the pair appeared not to give two hoots that MI5 was watching them almost round the clock.
At one point, McGuiness led an MI5 surveillance team into a dead-end street and then blocked its escape. The unarmed surveillance officers became alarmed as Mc Guiness edged his car towards theirs, fearing he would draw a revolver and shoot them. Instead, he observed their fear, laughed, then turned the car around and fled, losing his MI5 tail in the process.
Two months after the Bishopsgate attack, police released a photofit. It was clearly Mc Guinness. By that time, he had gone on the run to the Irish Republic. There was no chance of extraditing him.
At the time of the Bishopsgate attack, relations between Special Branch and MI5 were at an all time low. Special Branch had been set up more than a century back, precisely to deal with threats from Irish Republican extremists. MI5 had taken primacy against the IRA from the Met six months before, undermining Special Branch's raison d'étre.
Those six months had been a disaster for MI5, as it had adopted inaccurate and out-of-date warrants from the Met and had struggled to apply its working practises to the fast-moving target of PIRA.
That period had seen more IRA attacks on the British mainland than ever before. The devastation of Bishopsgate was, it seemed, the icing on the cake of MI5's humiliation.
The police lost no time in convincing the press of this. Stories began to appear in newspapers almost immediately, attributed as ever to anonymous "insiders" and "security sources". A week later, the theory was supplemented with harder information, leaked, I suspect, by the Branch.
"Cops rap MI5 'bungle'", proclaimed the News of the World with a rag-out displaying an MI5 report sent to police forces the evening before the Bishopsgate bomb. It warned patrolling officers to be vigilant and gave descriptions of three men, who "will almost certainly be armed".
A senior City police officer was quoted as saying: "We're certain the anti-terrorist boys had these men in their sights and lost them. Alarm bells rang out as soon as their warning arrived with us. The timing of it and the fact there were detailed descriptions of three suspects can mean only one thing: a cock-up."
All very reasonable, you night think, except that, as with so much of the murky world of intelligence, this is entirely wrong. The subjects whose descriptions appear in the warning are Machin, Fryers and another unidentified individual, not Redboy or Jimmy.
Ironically MI5's surveillance teams were in the City on the morning of the Bishopsgate blast, following Machin and the unidentified individual. In fact, the many surveillance cars and "mobiles" on foot must have passed the bomb lorry, possibly more than once, without noticing anything suspicious. Don't think there is any shame in that. It is difficult enough to control a fast-moving target well versed in the techniques of anti-or counter-surveillance without having to look out for other suspect vehicles as well.
The truth is, the ASU that carried out the Bishopsgate attack is not identical to the ASU described in the MI5 report. GHCQ was aware that there was at least one PIRA ASU currently active in London, but failed to circulate sufficient detail to enable their members to be identified by Special Branch/MI5.
Of the three UK services, GCHQ is the most in for a dig. It has none of the glamour of exotic locations which comes with working for MI6, and none of the occasional excitement open to MI5 officers in live terrorist operations. In 1984, during the protest outside the Libyan peoples' Bureau in London, GCHQ had its one chance to make a lasting contribution to anti-terrorist work in Britain. It received information that Colonel Gaddafi's office in Libya had asked loyal Libyans in the bureau to open fire on the dissidents or "stray dogs" outside the embassy in St. James Street.
As a prior warning of a possible attack, it was very useful intelligence, or would have been if it had been handed on in a timely fashion. But it wasn't, because the nine-to-five bureaucrats at GCHQ had gone home.
As a result, the report did not go to the police or MI5 that day and WPC Yvonne Fletcher was shot dead from a window of the bureau. Years later, when I was working for MI5, officers continued to encounter similar problems with GCHQ. Its staff seemed not to understand that intelligence was useless unless it was deployed in the field. MI5 officers were well trained in disguising sources. They had grown used to it in their work with Special Branch officers, who were rarely allowed to see actual transcripts of bugging material or raw agent reports.
MI5 officers were therefore very capable of disguising any GCHQ material so that the police - or any prying unauthorised eyes - would not be able to guess its source. Despite this, GCHQ always displayed far too much caution over the dissemination, often refusing to allow MI5 to pass on vital intelligence at all or allowing only a version so watered down that it ceased to have the required impact with the organisation receiving it.
I believe the latter occurred with the Bishopsgate intelligence when, as far as I can gather, the GCHQ intelligence was only passed on to police in the form of "at least one PIRA active service unit". No description of McGuiness was issued neither were the Bobbies on the beat given any further indication of McGuiness's intentions. There was certainly no mention of the impending "spectacular" that weekend.
I would hope that the authorities considered having McGuiness arrested that weekend, just in case, but it wasn't clear from the discussion in the week afterwards whether the option had been floated at all.
So what happened to McGuiness and McPhillips after they went on the run in June 1993? As with other PIRA members who suspect that the game might be up, they stayed in the Republic until they thought the coast was clear again. In April 1994, the police let it be known that they knew the identity of the bombers and were still intent on putting them away.
Around this time McGuiness was finally arrested in connection with routine car crime. He was charged with a variety of offences, none of them relating to terrorism. Material taken from his property included lists of registration numbers belonging to MI5 surveillance vehicles.
I don't know whether he was subsequently convicted of car crime. One thing is for sure, though. If he had been arrested in North London in 1992 he would probably have been convicted and sentenced to 20-odd years in prison. As a result, MI5 would have been able to more effectively combat the IRA on the British mainland from October 1992, when the service took primacy from the MPSB.
That means the PIRA would have been less able to embarrass MI5 which was at the time struggling with its new role due to inefficiency and management failure, and been less confident in its efforts to cause mayhem on the mainland.
And maybe, just maybe, Bishopsgate would never have happened at all and the IRA would have been forced around the negotiating table much, much sooner.
1. YOU WILL ALREADY BE AWARE THAT THE CURRENT THREAT FROM PIRA TO THE MAINLAND IS HIGH. IN ADDITION TO THIS HIGH THREAT, IT IS CURRENTLY ASSESSED THAT SOME FORM OF ATTACK ON THE MAINLAND IN THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE IS A DISTINCT PROBABILITY.
2. THEREFORE WHILST THE HIGH STATE OF ALERTNESS OF PATROLLING OFFICERS IS RECOGNISED, IT IS RECOMMENDED THAT A DEGREE OF HEIGHTENED VIGILANCE WILL BE NECESSARY, AT LEAST FOR THE NEXT SEVEN DAYS.
3. INFORMATION HAS JUST BEEN RECEIVED THAT AT LEAST ONE PIRA ACTIVE SERVICE UNIT IS CURRENTLY ACTIVE IN LONDON AND THAT THIS TEAM MAY COMPRISE AT LEAST THREE PERSONS WHO ARE DESCRIBED AS FOLLOWS :
A. FAT WHITE MALE, 5FT 8 INS APPARENT AGE 45-50 YEARS, GREYING CLOSE CUT HAIR, MEDIUM BUILD, CLEAN-.
B. WHITE MALE, 5ft 8ins APPARENT AGE LATE 20's SHORT NEAT DARK BROWN HAIR, MEDIUM BUILD, CLEAN-.
C. WHITE MALE, 5ft 7ins APPARENT AGE LATE 20's, SHORT NEAT FAIR/GINGER HAIR, THIN OVAL FACE, SLIGHT BUILD, BLUE EYES, SPEAKS WITH AN IRISH ACCENT.
4. SHOULD PATROLLING OFFICERS ENCOUNTER ANYONE FITTING THE ABOVE DESCRIPTIONS, EXTREME CAUTION SHOULD BE EXERCISED, BEARING IN MIND THAT THE INDIVIDUALS WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY BE ARMED.
There is one individual so embarrassing and infuriating that Sir Stephen Lander, the head of MI5, must pray nightly for the earth to open up and swallow him.
That man is David Shayler, the portly Middlesbrough fan and MI5 officer, who so notoriously departed from the intelligence agency in 1996 with a sheaf of secret documents allegedly under his arm, to blow the whistle on numerous malpractices and talk to the press.
Despite the existence of a recent and draconian piece of legislation - the 1989 Official Secrets Act - MI5's bosses have since been forced to fume helplessly, first as the French refused to extradite him; next as a copy of a highly secret intelligence report detailing British complicity in a Libyan assassination plot was posted on the internet; and finally as, last week, the courts ringingly refused to order the Guardian and Observer to hand over correspondence and notes about their dealings with the fugitive.
But until now, Lander and his frustrated intelligence colleagues have had one single - but highly important consolation. Shayler has been, apparently, alone in his complaints.
So MI5 have repeatedly said that he is disgruntled and bitter - a solitary voice in the wilderness and not credible. The foreign secretary, Robin Cook, taking his cue from Whitehall, claimed Shayler's Libya allegations were "pure fantasy".
However, that fundamental strategy has now been destroyed. Jestyn Thirkell-White, a former colleague of Shayler's in the secret world of MI5, has broken cover in the Guardian. In last week's interview, he backed many of Shayler's allegations of mismanagement, excessive secrecy, lack of accountability and unwillingness to reform. He denounced the Special Branch harassment of Shayler's British supporters as "acting like the police state from which they are supposed to be protecting us".
When I recently travelled to western Europe to meet Thirkell-White (who now works for a prominent merchant bank), I did not find a wild man. A quiet and carefully spoken 32-year-old who lives with his family, he is no attention-seeker.
Educated at a public school and Christ's College, Cambridge (a 2.1 degree in philosophy), Thirkell-White joined MI5 in 1991 after noticing a cryptic advertisement in the Independent on Sunday. Headlined "Godot Isn't Com ing", it was the same one that enticed Shayler. He holds moderate liberal views and was a CND activist for many years. But his grandparents had served in the colonial service in Burma: joining the secret world was not an alien concept.
Thirkell-White left MI5 a disillusioned man. He was not angry, but disappointed. When Shayler revealed a series of blunders and cover-ups, he knew from inside that many of them could be true.
He had always agreed with Shayler's analysis of MI5's failings (both resigned from the organisation in 1996) but was originally deterred, as well as appalled, by the harassment and the imprisonment of his former colleague. (Shayler spent four months in a French jail fighting the UK extradition attempt).
When I met him, he had been thinking about going public for several months. It was a considered and measured decision. However, he was determined to say nothing that was harmful to the nation. (In this he was successful. Security experts have confirmed that he has made no disclosures about MI5 that are genuinely damaging to national security.) He never sought money.
It was MI5 management's unwillingness to reform that eventually wore down Thirkell-White. Like Shayler, he believed that targeting terrorists meant that MI5's internal procedures needed radical modernisation. But there was institutional resistance. MI5's endless committees were cumbersome. Security always seemed to be the excuse to do nothing.
Thirkell-White knew Shayler reasonably well and was part of the same intake. He understands why his former colleague went public: there was no mechanism for internal dissent within the closed organisation.
Thirkell-White too, seems to have had no confidence in the so-called staff counsellor. As a former permanent secretary and a Whitehall insider, no one ever went to see him. Staff were expected to tell the personnel department they had seen the counsellor so there was little trust. Thirkell-White's generation clearly felt any complainant would be reported back to the director-general.
Jestyn Thirkell-White has no plans to make any further statements. And MI5, although deeply dismayed, are not intending to make the foolish mistake of attempting another prosecution.
But he may have opened the floodgates for other former intelligence officers to tell their story in a similarly moderate and measured fashion. And the Official Secrets Act now appears unable to prevent them from speaking out.
In achieving this, Mr Thirkell-White has performed a public service.
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4043199,00.html
Guardian Saturday July 22, 2000
A second MI5 officer, Jestyn Thirkell-White, has decided to speak out to the Guardian in the wake of attempts on behalf of MI5 to harass the press.
He backs many of the allegations of mismanagement made by his former colleague, the renegade MI5 officer David Shayler.
"I think it is totally wrong that there has been no serious investigation into Shayler's allegations," he says. "Instead, the government has harassed his friends. I thought the arrest of his student supporter Julie Anne Davies, and another of his friends for so-called money laundering - he was never charged - was unjust and outrageous. It was totally disproportionate to the alleged offence. MI5 and special branch were acting like the very police state they are supposed to be protecting us from."
Mr Thirkell-White, who resigned from MI5 in 1996 and now works as a banker, says: "I do not accept Jack Straw's statements that Shayler's revelations have in any way damaged national security." This included Mr Shayler's claim that the sister overseas espionage organisation, MI6, had colluded in an assassination plot by opponents of Col Gadafy in Libya, and that Libyan intelligence officers had been active in London.
Mr Thirkell-White also agrees that the organisation has been in desperate need of reform and modernisation.
"When David went public, I expected an independent inquiry, because the allegations were serious enough to warrant proper investigation: instead, MI5 appointed a former deputy director, John Alpass, who was a friend and colleague of MI5 chief Steven Lander, to conduct a broad review of all three intelligence organisations - MI5, MI6 and GCQ. That was quite wrong."
Mr Thirkell-White and Mr Shayler served together in T Branch (anti-terrorism), where Mr Thirkell-White was trying to block flows of arms and money to the IRA from Eastern Europe and the US.
He backs up one of Mr Shayler's most seemingly bizarre allegations - that MI5 officers wasted vital hours in the search for IRA bombers dickering about the wording of warrants, because of bureaucratic "turf wars" with the police special branch.
MI5 had successfully seized control of anti-IRA operations from the police in the early 1990s, while searching for a new role at the end of the cold war.
"The endless redrafting was nothing to do with protecting people's civil liberties. MI5 were desperate to keep their new role and en sure the special branch could not regain that role. They were desperate to ensure the special branch could not point to any procedural mistake."
Mr Thirkell-White joined MI5 from Cambridge alongside Mr Shayler in 1991. Like him, he was startled to discover the archaic nature of the organisation. Officers still wrote out reports in longhand, for a secretary to draft and then retype after laborious corrections. "It was appallingly inefficient."
"A lot of officers were asked to write endless briefings, just to generate work. It was too hierarchical, and too many layers of management."
http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4043199,00.html
The Illuminati
- [one occult group signified by an 'all-seeing eye' in
a triangle] - what are their aims?
These aims quoted by Nesta Webster in 'World Revolution' p.34
The all seeing eye is well known in the world of freemasonry. Just look at a U.S. dollar bill.
The links go back to George Washington et al and the formation of America. Even the word "America" is a corruption of La Merica, the freemason promised land which the Knights Templar fled to after the European purges.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4028313,00.html
British journalists - and British journals - are being manipulated by the secret intelligence agencies, and I think we ought to try and put a stop to it.
The manipulation takes three forms. The first is the attempt to recruit journalists to spy on other people, or to go themselves under journalistic "cover". This occurs today and it has gone on for years. It is dangerous, not only for the journalist concerned, but for other journalists who get tarred with the espionage brush. Farzad Bazoft was a colleague of mine on the Observer when he was executed by Saddam Hussein for espionage. In a sense it didn't matter whether he was really a spy or not. Either way, he ended up dead.
The second form of manipulation that worries me is when intelligence officers are allowed to pose as journalists in order to write tendentious articles under false names. Evidence of this only rarely comes to light, but two examples have surfaced recently, mainly because of the whistleblowing activities of a couple of renegade officers - David Shayler from MI5 and Richard Tomlinson from MI6.
The third sort of manipulation is the most insidious - when intelligence agency propaganda stories are planted on willing journalists, who disguise their origin from their readers. There is - or has been until recently - a very active programme by the secret agencies to colour what appears in the British press, called, if publications by various defectors can be believed, information operations, or "I/Ops". I am - unusually - in a position to provide some information about its operations.
Let us take the third allegation first. Black propaganda - false material where the source is disguised - has been a tool of British intelligence agencies since the days of the second world war, when the Special Operations Executive (SOE) got up to all kinds of tricks with clandestine radio stations, to drip pornography and pessimism into the ears of impressionable German soldiers. Post-war, this unwholesome game mutated into the anti-Soviet Information Research Department (IRD). Its task was ostensibly to plant anti-communist stories in the developing-world press, but its lurid tales of Marxist drunkenness and corruption sometimes leaked back to confuse the readers of the British media.
A colourful example of the way these techniques expanded to meet the exigencies of the hour came in the early 70s, when the readers of the News of the World were treated to a front-page splash, "Russian sub in IRA plot sensation", complete with aerial photograph of the conning tower of a Soviet sub awash off the coast of Donegal. That was the work of Hugh Mooney of the IRD, which was eventually closed down in 1977.
Its spirit did not die, however. Nearly 25 years later, readers of the Sunday Telegraph were regaled with with the dramatic story of the son of Libya's Colonel Gadafy and his alleged connection to a currency counterfeiting plan. The story was written by Con Coughlin, the paper's chief foreign correspondent and it was falsely attributed to a "British banking official". In fact, it had been given to him by officers of MI6, who, it transpired, had been supplying Coughlin with material for years.
The origins of that November 1995 newspaper article only came to light when they were recently disclosed by Mark Hollingsworth, the biographer of renegade security service officer David Shayler. Shayler had worked on MI5's Libya desk at the time, in liaison with his counterparts in the foreign espionage service, MI6, and had come away with a detailed knowledge of events, and a bundle of secret documents to back them up.
The allegations were confirmed from an unexpected direction. The Sunday Telegraph was served with a libel writ by Gadafy's son. The paper was unable to back up its suggestion that Gadafy junior might have been linked to a fraud, but pleaded, in effect, that it had been supplied with the material by the government.
In a long and detailed statement, which entered the public domain in the course of a judgment given in an interlocutory appeal on October 28 1998, the paper described how, under Charles Moore's editorship, a lunch had been arranged with the then Conservative foreign secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, at which Con Coughlin had been present. Told by Rifkind that countries such as Iran were trying to get hold of hard currency to beat sanctions, Coughlin was later briefed by an MI6 man - his regular contact.
Some weeks later, he was introduced to a second MI6 man, who spent several hours with him and handed over extensive details of the story about Gadafy's son. Although Coughlin asked for evidence, and was shown purported bank statements, the pleadings make clear that he was dependent on MI6 for the discreditable details about the alleged counterfeiting scam. He was required to keep the source strictly confidential.
Throughout the formal pleadings, the Telegraph preserved the figleaf of its sources by referring to a "Western government security agency". But this veil of coyness was blown away by City solicitor David Hooper in his book on libel published last month, Reputations Under Fire, in which he says: "In reality [they were] members of MI6."
So, unusually, an MI6 exercise in planting a story has been laid bare. Now, there is no suggestion that Con Coughlin is dishonest in his work. He is a perfectly conscientious journalist who I expect did his best to substantiate his facts and undoubtedly believed in their truth. But nevertheless, those facts may not have been true. And I believe he made a serious mistake in falsely attributing his story to a "British banking official". His readers ought to know where his material is coming from. When the Sunday Telegraph got into trouble with the libel case, it seems, after all, to have suddenly found it possible to become a lot more specific about its sources.
This was not an isolated example of recent MI6 I/Ops. In August 1997, the present foreign editor of the Independent, Leonard Doyle, was also in contact with MI6 while he was at his previous post at the Observer. I know, because I became involved in an MI6-inspired story as a result. Doyle's MI6 contact supplied him with intelligence information about an Iranian exile who, while running a pizza business in Glasgow, was also attempting to lay hands on a sophisticated mass spectrometer which could be used for measuring uranium enrichment - a key stage in acquiring components for a nuclear bomb.
We were supplied with a mass of apparently high-quality intelligence from MI6, including surveillance details of a meeting in an Istanbul hotel between our pizza merchant and men involved in Iranian nuclear procurement.
I should make clear that we did not publish merely on the say-so of MI6. We travelled to Glasgow, confronted the pizza merchant, and only when he admitted that he had been dealing with representatives of the nuclear industry in Iran did we publish an article. In that story we made it plain that our target had been watched by Western intelligence.
Nevertheless, I felt uneasy, and vowed never to take part in such an exercise again. Although all parties, from the foreign editor down, behaved scrupulously, we had been obliged to conceal from our readers the full facts and had ended up, in effect, acting as government agents.
Now, after the Tomlinson/Shayler defections and the subsequent revelation of MI6's continuing I/Ops programme of which my Iranian experience was plainly a part, I think the cause of honest journalism is best served by candour. We all ought to come clean about these approaches, and devise some ethics to deal with them. In our vanity, we imagine that we control these sources. But the truth is that they are very deliberately seeking to control us.
The second intelligence tactic of manipulation which gives concern is the habit of allowing spies to write under false names. It was Tomlinson, I suspect, who, having worked in the area, first blew the whistle on this one. And it was a recently published book - MI6 by Stephen Dorril - which once again added the final piece of the jigsaw.
Two articles appeared in the Spectator in early 1994 under the byline Kenneth Roberts. They were datelined Sarajevo, and Roberts was described as having been working with the UN in Bosnia as an adviser. In fact, he was MI6 officer Keith Robert Craig (the pseudonym was a simple one), whose local cover was as a civilian "attached" to the British military unit's Balkan secretariat.
At the time, Bosnia was the site of attacks and atrocities from neighbouring Serbia, and also the focus of some passionate reporting from British journalists. The British military was there in a UN peacekeeping role, but anyone who read Roberts's articles might have begun to wonder whether it was not a better policy for British troops to go home and leave the Serbs a free hand.
The first article on February 5 rehearsed arguments for a UN withdrawal, pointing out that all sides committed atrocities. The second piece complained, baselessly, about "warped" and inaccurate reporting by journalists, including the BBC's Kate Adie.
It is possible, of course, that Craig was merely overcome with private literary urges whilst marooned in the Balkans, and thought it more politic to express his own opinions under a nom de plume . But one of the traditional roles of I/Ops is to plant stories. What is not clear is how the introduction to the Spectator was made, or whether Craig confided his real trade to the then editor of the Spectator, Dominic Lawson. In his recent book about MI6, Stephen Dorril points out that Dominic Lawson's brother-in-law, Anthony Monckton, was himself a serving MI6 officer, who was to take over the Zagreb station in the Balkans in 1996. (Rosa Monckton, his sister and Dominic Lawson's wife, was the late Princess Diana's close friend.)
These relationships - which the disenchanted Tomlinson knew all about because he had himself served undercover in the Balkans in the same time-frame - have only slowly emerged into the public domain. There is no reason to believe the then editor of the Spectator did anything improper at all, and certainly no reason to think that he was acting as an agent of MI6, whether paid or unpaid. But, as an editor, wittingly or not, it must be a bad idea to end up in a position where an MI6 officer is writing for your publication on matters of political controversy, under a false name.
The final malpractice which the Tomlinson/Shayler defections have brought to light is the continuing deliberate blurring by MI6 of the line between journalist and spy. This is an old crime - Kim Philby, former foreign correspondent of the Observer would have had plenty of stories to tell about that. But it should be exposed and stopped. Tomlinson himself, by his own account, spent six months in 1993 travelling around Croatia and Serbia trying to recruit informants, under the guise of a British journalist. Dorril, in his book, publishes the further assertion that the Spectator itself was unknowingly used as cover by no fewer than three MI6 officers working in Bosnia, Belgrade and Moldova.
The most dismaying allegation floated by Tomlinson was that he had heard within MI6 of a "national newspaper editor" who was used as an agent, and had received up to £100,000 in covert payments, accessed at an offshore bank, via a false passport obligingly supplied by MI6 itself. This claim set off a hue and cry, during which the hapless Dominic Lawson, now editor of the Sunday Telegraph, issued his denial, and other editors came under suspicious scrutiny.
In fact, I believe Tomlinson has been wrongly reported. Those who have talked to him in detail say that he has no first-hand knowledge, but merely knew of something a colleague obliquely mentioned. Hearing the words "editor" and "national newspaper", Tomlinson jumped to the wrong conclusion, and then started guessing. Spies are, after all, very like journalists in their methods - but merely less reliable. What those in the newspaper business know is that there is all the difference in the world between "the editor" and "an editor". Newspapers have, for example, education editors, environment editors and defence editors (not, I should say, that I have any evidence against any individual members of these categories).
And a senior journalist at that level - who could travel, see things, report back - would be of more practical use in the business of espionage than, say, the editor of any national newspaper. So the hunt is still on for the miscreant. And, make no mistake, this kind of behaviour by journalists is dangerous and wrong.
Our first task as practitioners is to document what goes on in this very furtive field. Our second task ought to be to hold an open debate on what the proper relations between the intelligence agencies and the media ought to be. And our final task must then be to find ways of actually behaving more sensibly.
This article appears in the current edition of the British Journalism Review. Copies, £4.95 from BR&D Ltd (01702 552912). www.bjr.org.uk
"The security service does not kill people or arrange their assassination," proclaims MI5's official website in a tirade of denials about the organisation's perceived misdemeanours.
"It is subject to the rule of law in just the same way as other public bodies," it adds. So the Hilda Murrell file will therefore remain open for some time yet.
But anyone who believes the MI5 spin that our domestic security service is, and always was, squeaky clean and never used any underhand tactics in the pursuit of its cause (whatever that cause happens to be - which still remains a bit of a mystery) might like to ponder a little reconnaissance mission undertaken by Gadfly at an abandoned office block in north London.
On the corner of the major north London junction of Euston Road and Gower Street - just a stone's throw from University College Hospital and the Slade School of Art - lies an unremarkable demolition site.
The site is located immediately above Euston Square Underground Station and will soon become a brand spanking-new administration block servicing the nearby Glaxo Wellcome Foundation. That site is 140 Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BY.
Until some five years ago 140 Gower Street was the anonymous headquarters of MI5 before it moved to the palatial splendour of Thames House next door to Labour's Millbank headquarters in Westminster. It housed the director-general, her secretariat, a particularly sensitive registry and some of the most top secret (and controversial) of MI5's active service units.
It was from 140 Gower Street, according to the late Peter Wright, that MI5 "bugged and burgled its way across London." The same premises also bore "the stench of failure" according to another former MI5 aficionado.
But Gadfly can make a startling revelation about number 140 Gower Street. When this run-down and decaying post-war concrete monstrosity was starting to be demolished last year, Gadfly was walking along Gower Place one summer's evening and found the back door open.
So an impromptu inspection took place. The premises could have been a redundant dole office or local council annex - until you reached the seventh floor.
Inspect the predictable row upon row of small, empty offices and there is little to report. One such office, however, grabbed the attention because it had barred windows. Enter this office and the adjacent office had been converted into a prison cell. It had all the trappings: a steel door with spyhole; heavy-duty Chubb lock; emergency alarm. The cell itself bore only a wooden bench and foot-operated lavatory.
Which begs the question: who had the pleasure of being locked-up inside 140 Gower Street by MI5? "The Secret Service is a civilian organisation and its officers have no executive powers, such as the authority to detain or arrest people," its current website boasts. "It is not a 'secret police force.'"
Anyone wanting to know more about this little mystery will jolly well have to table a parliamentary question to find out, although it is unlikely that the Home Secretary will succumb. However, Gadfly feels it remains considerably more interesting unanswered.
But Gadfly can offer legal proof of this little recce. Also found strewn around the deserted building were some old MI5 files of a particularly tedious nature. In the interest of national security, however, Gadfly dropped them into a nearby police station only to be arrested on suspicion of burglary and locked up in a police cell for some six hours before being released without charge - clutching the obligatory photocopy of the detention record.
Last word, however, to the chaps down at Thames House. "Section 1 of the Official Secrets Act 1989 is sometimes criticised as prohibiting disclosures even about such matters as the colour of the Thames House carpets and the menu in the staff restaurant," it boasts.
The MI5 wag continues: "These criticisms are misguided: it is not an offence for a member of the Service to disclose that the Thames House carpets are blue, or that the staff restaurant serves a particularly good Chicken Madras!"
May 28 2000
The Sunday Times
THE security service MI5 has demanded that a former undercover agent sign a gagging agreement promising to obey its advice and never to disclose his role nor seek to publicise it, writes Liam Clarke.
In the latest twist to the government's efforts to hush up undercover operations in Northern Ireland, the security service has demanded that the agent's girlfriend, who has also worked for it, should sign as well.
The document was given to Raymond Gilmour, a former Northern Ireland supergrass who infiltrated the IRA and INLA for the RUC in Londonderry in the 1970s and early 1980s. Gilmour, who has been warned by MI5 that he is still under threat from the IRA, has been living in mainland Britain since 1984 under a different identity supplied by the RUC.
Although Gilmour has already written an autobiography vetted by the government, the agreement demands that he and his girlfriend "shall not seek to publicise" their association with the crown "for any purpose whether for their benefit or for a third party".
Last night Gilmour said: "I still have obligations to my publisher, Little Brown, and if I refused to take part in publicity for it I would be in breach of contract." He said he had been offered a one-off payment of about £12,000 to sign the MI5 contract.
John Wadham, who has agreed to act as Gilmour's solicitor in the case, said last night: "If somebody puts their life at risk by helping the police to contain very serious crime then they should be supported and assisted."
The three-page document, a copy of which has been obtained by The Sunday Times, was drawn up by MI5's legal adviser.
Gilmour said: "I gave up my job as a trainee butcher to work for the police. It was at their behest that I joined the INLA and IRA. I thought of myself as an undercover policeman and am proud of what I did, but I was equipped to do nothing except hijack cars and engage in terrorism."
The demand that Gilmour sign the undertaking came after he asked his security service contact for help with a financial problem. It is the latest attempt by the government to end disclosures of undercover activity by former agents.
Last Thursday The Sunday Times was barred from a hearing involving a soldier alleged to be Martin Ingram, the military intelligence whistle-blower. Last year Ingram's disclosures of security force dirty tricks in Northern Ireland, including the burning of a police station to destroy evidence, resulted in gagging injunctions against the paper.
The Sunday Times is seeking to have the reporting restriction set aside.
21May00 - from The Sunday Times http://www.sunday-times.co.uk
ONE of Whitehall's
top spymasters runs a secret committee that is co-ordinating a wide-ranging
crackdown on journalists investigating intelligence scandals.
Michael Pakenham, third son of Lord Longford, the controversial peer, is chairman of the committee, which is so clandestine that the Cabinet Office refuses to disclose its name.
Pakenham's powerful committee is responsible for co- ordinating how Whitehall bosses deal with "unauthorised disclosures" by renegade intelligence service agents such as David Shayler and Richard Tomlinson.
The Sunday Times has established that the committee's members are behind the recent crackdown on the press, which is causing growing concern among civil liberties leaders and newspaper editors.
Pakenham, 56, is probably the most influential spymaster in Britain. It is no secret that he chairs the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), which sets priorities for MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, the government's eavesdropping centre. As JIC chief he is responsible for ensuring that Tony Blair and other ministers have advance warning of security threats.
Officially, Pakenham's other, more secret, committee monitors policy on disclosures by members or former members of the intelligence services. But in reality it spends an increasing amount of its time discussing policy on gagging journalists.
The committee meets on an ad hoc basis and has up to 20 members, mainly representatives of the intelligence services MI5 and MI6, the Home Office, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Foreign Office.
Scion of a famous Anglo-Irish family, he joined the Foreign Office, taking up posts as British ambassador in Luxembourg and minister at the British embassy in Paris. He was promoted after the 1997 election to the post of deputy secretary, defence and overseas, a grandiose title which conceals his real job as new Labour's spymaster-in-chief.
One case recently discussed by Pakenham's committee is that of Liam Clarke, Northern Ireland editor of The Sunday Times. Clarke is facing possible arrest by Special Branch over a series of articles about Martin Ingram, a pseudonym for a former member of a covert British Army intelligence unit in Northern Ireland. Ingram alleged that operatives from the unit were complicit in murder and had destroyed police evidence by burning their inquiry headquarters.
Clarke was the latest journalist to face the prospect of a police inquiry for seeking to probe the murky world of Britain's secret services.
This weekend it emerged that another Sunday Times journalist is facing questions from Special Branch over alleged breaches of the secrecy laws by an intelligence services insider.
Detectives from the Yard's financial investigation and special access centre have written to The Sunday Times's lawyers demanding information about an article which reported allegations by Tomlinson, the former MI6 officer, that MI6 had a mole inside the Bundesbank, Germany's central bank.
The article reported
Tomlinson's claim that the mole, codenamed Orcada, had betrayed to MI6 Germany's
negotiating position on the Maastricht treaty. He was also paid large sums
of money to hand over information on Germany's proposed interest-rate movement
and other economic secrets.
Last week Yard officers, accompanied by armed Italian police, raided Tomlinson's hotel room in Rimini, Italy, and seized his computer, diary and mobile telephone.
Tomlinson said: "I opened the door and they poured in at gunpoint. All my legal papers have been taken."
In a letter to The Sunday Times's lawyers, police wrote: "A criminal investigation into alleged breaches of the Official Secrets Acts 1911-1989 is being undertaken by the Metropolitan Police Special Branch. Part of this investigation revolves around an article in The Sunday Times newspaper."
The article was written in September 1998 by The Sunday Times Insight team. Detectives have asked David Leppard, the Insight editor, to disclose whether he was in direct contact with Tomlinson "for any material relating to this article". The newspaper is resisting the demand.
from The Sunday Times http://www.sunday-times.co.uk
21May00 - from The Sunday Times http://www.sunday-times.co.uk
SENIOR MI6 officers were so angry with Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of its sister service MI5, over her plans to publish her memoirs that they lobbied to have her arrested under the Official Secrets Act.
When that failed after objections from other intelligence staff, elements within the agency launched a dirty tricks campaign against her, according to a senior source.
Figures within MI6 - the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) - leaked news of the book, and an alleged £1m fee, to a tabloid newspaper, a senior Whitehall mandarin has told The Sunday Times.
He said "furious" MI6 officers had insisted at a secret Whitehall meeting about 10 days ago that Special Branch officers should arrest Rimington at her home that day, "even if it means taking her door down".
The meeting was called after she sent a draft of her manuscript to the MI5 chief, Stephen Lander, her successor at the helm of the service, more than a month ago.
After an arrest was ruled out as too embarrassing, SIS staff turned instead to the press, the source claimed, adding that private negotiations about the book between Lander, Rimington and the head of MI6 were still going on when the leak took place.
"They are livid, really livid," he said. "They view this as a betrayal, as profiteering and as an invitation to other intelligence officers to do the same. They wanted her arrested under the Official Secrets Act straight away."
The book was almost certain to be published in some form, despite reservations, he said. "She's written it quite sensibly, apparently, but there will be a number of things they will insist on taking out."
The book, which according to a literary source already has a publisher, could have far-reaching consequences for official secrecy. It sets at least two legal precedents that will make it easier for soldiers, civil servants and intelligence staff to write about their work, provided they are prepared to allow scripts to be vetted.
Rimington, 64, a career intelligence officer, ran the domestic security agency between 1992 and 1996 at the height of the war against the IRA and was in charge of the MI5 section that targeted elements of the National Union of Mineworkers during the 1984 strike.
She was the first, and only, woman to head an arm of British intelligence. Since leaving the secret world, she has joined the boards of several companies and charities and given lectures around the world.
Her relationship with MI5's sister service at Vauxhall Cross was always rocky. MI6 was angry when she outmanoeuvred it to claim the lead role in fighting the IRA, even though it was MI6 that first began negotiations with the Provisionals. MI6 was also unhappy about her moves to bring more openness to her service.
Her book is understood to contain revelations about the negotiations with the IRA that were conducted initially by MI6 and then taken over by MI5, as well as chapters on domestic threats, Russian intelligence and internal politics between the services. However, much of the text concerns her private life, upbringing and family. "It's more about why she did things than what she did," said a source.
The book will be dedicated to her two daughters, both of whom went through periods of "difficulty" during Rimington's years away from them at work.
The source said: "She wants to do it for them too, it seems, in order to show them why she was away so much and how important it was. Often they didn't know where she was. It appears to be a sort of cleansing, perhaps reaching a certain time in life and trying to put a few things right."
Editorial: 21May00 - from The Sunday Times http://www.sunday-times.co.uk
Whitehall appears to be suffering from a virulent form of the disease that deludes top civil servants every so often into believing they can deflect newspapers such as The Sunday Times from doing their jobs. Not content with calling for our Northern Ireland editor to be arrested, and issuing blanket injunctions against our reporting the illegal activities of the army's Force Research Unit (FRU), a secret committee of the Cabinet Office has decided to rein us in over an Insight report in 1998 that MI6 had a paid man in the Bundesbank who revealed Germany's negotiating position over the Maastricht treaty.
The mandarins' tardy attempts to put pressure on Insight follow hard on the heels of the Ministry of Defence's hamfisted efforts to silence our reporting of FRU's shenanigans during the Ulster emergency. This newspaper will resist them both, just as it has resisted and ultimately defeated every serious attempt to silence it for the past 40 years, from the publication of Richard Crossman's cabinet diaries to the thalidomide affair and the debacle over Spycatcher.
The defence ministry's backdoor efforts to muzzle us are marginally preferable to Whitehall's moves against Insight. Misguided though he is, Geoffrey Hoon, the defence secretary, has the grace to attempt a defence of his injunction against us in our letters page today. Mr Hoon shelters behind legal thickets but will not admit that The Sunday Times has revealed how servants of the crown have conspired to sabotage a legal investigation. Michael Pakenham, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee which advises Tony Blair on security matters, tries to keep his role in curbing investigative journalism out of the public eye. He may as well reconcile himself to failure. For the threat that he and those who do his bidding pose to this newspaper and other journalists merely strengthens our resolve. Nor will it deter us from finding out more about the activities of FRU and double-dealing in the European Union.
Mr Hoon and Mr Pakenham have the power to use taxpayers' money to set Special Branch onto us, to threaten us with injunctions and to obstruct us. It has been tried before and failed. The truth has a habit of coming out and we shall do our best, without breaking the law, to ensure that it does.
from The Sunday Times http://www.sunday-times.co.uk
(above is the original headline as it appeared in the Independent newspaper - web version headline has been changed - TG)
http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=20187
The world's press was systematically manipulated by British intelligence as part of a plot to overthrow Indonesia's President Sukarno in the 1960s, according to Foreign Office documents. The BBC, the Observer and Reuters news agency were all duped into carrying stories manufactured by agents working for the Foreign Office.
Last night, Denis Healey, Labour's defence secretary at the time, admitted the intelligence war had spun out of control in Indonesia. At one point the British were planting false documents on dead soldiers. Lord Healey even had to stop service chiefs from taking military action. He said: "I would not let the RAF drop a single bomb although they were very anxious to get involved."
The left-leaning Sukarno was overthrown in 1966 and up to half a million people were massacred by the new regime. Now a Foreign Office document obtained by the Independent on Sunday reveals the full extent of the "dirty tricks" campaign orchestrated from London, and how the world's journalists were manipulated.
A letter marked "secret and personal" from propaganda expert Norman Reddaway to Britain's Jakarta ambassador, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, brags about the campaign which aimed to destabilise Mr Sukarno by suggesting his rule would lead to a communist takeover. One story "went all over the world and back again", writes Reddaway, while information from Gilchrist was "put almost instantly back into Indonesia via the BBC".
This included an allegation, with no apparent basis in reality, that Indonesian communists were planning to slaughter the citizens of Jakarta.
Reddaway, a specialist with the FO's Information Research Department (IRD), writes: "I wondered whether this was the first time in history that an ambassador had been able to address the people of his country of work almost at will and virtually instantaneously."
Showing his low opinion of journalists, he boasts that "newsmen would take anything from here, and pestered us for copy". He had been sent to Singapore to bolster British efforts to overthrow the Indonesian president and support General Suharto. His brief from London had been "to do whatever I could do to get rid of Sukarno", he revealed before his death last year. He therefore embarked on an extensive campaign of placing favourable stories with news wires, foreign correspondents and the BBC, and also used the pages of Encounter, an influential magazine for the liberal intelligentsia which, it later emerged, had been funded and controlled by the CIA.
His letter even suggests that the Observer newspaper had been persuaded to take the Foreign Office "angle" on the Indonesian takeover by reporting a "kid glove coup without butchery".
Last month, Abdurrahman Wahid, the country's current president, gave his support to a judicial inquiry into the massacres of 1965-66 and, in an interview broadcast on state television, promised to punish those found guilty.
Newly discovered cabinet papers show that British agencies, including MI6, had supported Islamic guerrillas and other dissident groups in an effort to destabilise Sukarno. The disorder fostered by the British led to General Suharto's takeover and dictatorship, and a wave of violence unseen since the Second World War. The massacre set the stage for almost 35 years of violent suppression, including the 1975 invasion of East Timor, which was only reversed last year.
The cabinet documents (which are separate from the revelations of Reddaway) were uncovered by David Easter, a historian at the London School of Economics. His research - which is published this week in the journal Intelligence and National Security - shows that the cabinet's defence and overseas policy committee asked the head of MI6, Dick White, to draw up plans for covert operations against Indonesia in January 1964. According to Dr Easter, these operations began in the spring of that year and included supplying arms to separatists in the Indonesian provinces of Aceh and Sulawesi.
These actions were complemented by a propaganda campaign run out of Britain's Far East HQ in Singapore by the IRD, which had close connections with MI6. The unit was behind stories that Sukarno and his tolerance of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) would lead to a communist dictatorship in Indonesia.
Reddaway was a key part of this. His letter, written in July 1966, was released to Churchill College, Cambridge, which holds the private papers of Sir Andrew Gilchrist.
Last night, Lord Healey owned up to the Foreign Office misinformation campaign.
Lord Healey said: "Norman Reddaway had an office in Singapore. They began to put out false information and I think that, to my horror on one occasion, they put forged documents on the bodies of Indonesian soldiers we had taken. I confronted Reddaway over this.
"The key thing here is that Indonesia was infiltrating its troops into Borneo and had organised a coup against the Sultan of Brunei with whom we had a treaty. So we reacted similarly. I think it has been long known that British Special Forces - the SAS, SBS and Gurkhas - were used to tackle the Indonesians. But everything was done on the ground. I would not let the RAF drop a single bomb although they were very anxious to get involved."
Lord Healey denied any personal knowledge of the wider MI6 campaign to arm opponents of Sukarno. But, he added: "I would certainly have supported it."
According to one of the country's leading commentators on security matters - Richard Aldrich, a professor at Nottingham University - the episode shows Britain's post-war operations at their most effective. "It represents one of the supreme achievements of the British clandestine services," he said. "In contrast with the American CIA, they remained politically accountable and low-key. Britain has a preference for bribing people rather than blowing them up."
Professor Aldrich added that modern journalistic deadlines had made today's media even more open to manipulation than it was 30 years ago.
http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=20187
from The Sunday Times http://www.sunday-times.co.uk November 14 1999
WHO could it be, this former spy seeking work in the small ads in the latest issue of Private Eye, the satirical magazine?
Step forward Richard Tomlinson, formerly of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service and now, by way of France, New Zealand and Switzerland, a would-be snowboard instructor in the Bavarian Alps.
And what are his prospects of more lucrative employment via Private Eye? After serving six months in jail for breaking the Official Secrets Act, Tomlinson has been on the run for breaching bail conditions.
Since he left Britain 15 months ago he has acquired skills in international travel and negotiation: he was arrested at gunpoint in France, expelled from New Zealand and America and prevented from going to Australia. After spending much of the past year living in Switzerland, he was again forced to move on in the summer and settle in Germany.
His new media expertise is also impressive, though he denies leaking the names of 117 MI6 officers on the internet via a Californian website.
In addition, he can offer hands-on experience of executive troubleshooting. As an MI6 officer he worked in Russia, Bosnia and in the murky world of Iranian arms dealers. Alas, there is one slight problem: the former spy might be arrested if he came to Britain.
"I've obviously got to go through unusual routes just to sell myself," Tomlinson said last night. "I can't just walk into Croydon dole office and ask for a job. MI6 normally help their former officers find jobs, but they won't do anything for me."
In 1996, Tomlinson approached The Sunday Times to complain about his dismissal from MI6 and his plans for an industrial tribunal - which was never allowed. He then went to ground and threatened to write a book about his time in the service. He was subsequently convicted of breaching the secrets act and jailed.
"I earn a living at the moment, but I need something a bit more permanent. I do 'due diligence' work for various clients, mostly on the internet, but I'm trying to get a job as a snowboard instructor," he said.
He still plans to publish his book but the prospect of a literary career seems as distant as ever. "I sent an outline to Fourth Estate [a publisher] a few months ago and despite the fact that it contains nothing that compromises security, they had their computers seized. It's just an interesting lifestyle story really.
"MI6 seem determined to prevent me publishing. They have copyright on anything to do with my work on MI6, but not on anything since."
His choice of Private Eye to sell himself seems appropriate. It appears to be popular reading - various old covers of the magazine were found at MI5's headquarters in Gower Street, London, when the service moved buildings.
The magazine's record on responses to ads, however, is hit and miss. An advertiser seeking "angels" for a West End musical once secured £13,000, one Hell's Angel and two actresses who wanted to dress up in wings. One ad "Spike Milligan would like to meet a rich, well-insured widow - intention, murder" was not so successful.
from The Sunday Times http://www.sunday-times.co.uk
HOME OFFICE
089/98 10 March 1998
A public telephone number - the MI5 Phoneline - has today been set up by the Security Service ("MI5") to make it easier for people to pass on information which could help the Service do its work.
The number - 0171 930 9000 - can be found through Directory Enquiries and will appear in new telephone directories under "Security Service" and "MI5".
Reliable information is essential to help the Service identify threats to the United Kingdom's security, wherever in the world they originate.
People have always been one of the Service's most important sources of information. They can help to counter a terrorist group, uncover a hostile foreign intelligence operation, or thwart the export of parts for nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
They may be public spirited individuals who notice activities which they think are a threat, and who want to report their concerns.
Others may be people who are personally involved in the groups investigated by the service, or who are closely associated with them and who want, for whatever reason, to volunteer information secretly.
Whoever they are, the MI5 Phoneline will make it easier to get in touch with the Security Service. Callers' identities will be protected with greatest care - the Security Service places the highest priority on the safety of people who help in this way.
For the same reason, the Service uses the information it receives with equally great care.
Because the service will have to be sure that callers are who they say they are, staff manning the system will ask for information about the caller and their circumstances.
The MI5 Phoneline is not designed to replace the 999 system for emergencies which need an immediate response from the police or emergency services, or the anti- terrorist hotline - 0800 789 321 - which is for giving police information about a terrorist incident which has happened or may be about to occur.
The Phoneline will be staffed initially during extended office hours - from 0730 until 2330 - seven days a week. There will be a limited number of lines available, so at busy times, particularly in the first few days of operation, callers may find it difficult to get through. The Service hopes that anyone with genuine information willbe patient and try again later. People can write to the Service if they prefer, at The Enquiries Desk, PO Box 3255, London SW1P 1AE.
1. The Service's job is to protect national security. Its main tasks are the fight against terrorism, espionage and the spreading of weapons of mass destruction. It also acts, at their request, in support of the police, HM Customs and other law-enforcement agencies to counter serious crime.
2. Questions and answers on the Phoneline are attached.
The Service continues to rely, as it always has done, on members of the public to assist it in various ways. Members of the public who genuinely believe they have information relevant to the Service's functions and which they can substantiate should ring the Phoneline.
The Service has been considering having a public telephone number for some time. The decision to introduce the line now reflects a judgement that the potential benefits, in terms of developing new sources of intelligence and acquiring useful information, are likely to outweigh any disadvantages. It is also consistent with the moves over recent years towards making the Service more accessible.
The Phoneline is not intended as a means of contacting the service about employment opportunities, of seek information about the Service or registering a complaint under the Security Service Act 1989. The Security Service does not have a press office and operators will not be able to answer enquiries from the media or the general public about the Service or its work. They will, however, be able to advise on how such enquiries might be pursued, A 36 page HMSO booklet describing the Security Service and its work was published in 1993. The current edition was published in 1996; a revised edition will appear shortly.
The Phoneline is being established only for the purposes specified in the 1989 Security Service Act that govern the operations and functions of the Security Service. The Service will need to satisfy itself that any information it receives is genuinely relevant to its statutory functions before acting on it. Callers offering information which is not relevant to the functions of the Service will be invited to contact the appropriate authorities.
There will be no connection with information lines set up by other agencies, for example the Benefits Agency fraudline. the Security Service will not use information which does not relate to its statutory functions.
The Service does not wish to receive calls in the following general categories:
The Security Service Phoneline is not a "hotline" (ie a means of reporting information relating to imminent or recent acts of criminality, whether or not terrorist- related.) Anyone with information about activities which pose an imminent threat to life or property should contact the police.
The Security Service's decision to set up a Phoneline reflects its judgements about its own operational priorities and functions as laid down in the relevant legislation. The Security Service (MI5) and SIS (MI6) are two separate organisations with different statutory functions.
Yes.
The switchboard will be manned initially from 0730 to 2330 seven days a week. Out of hours, callers with urgent information for example about imminent acts of terrorist or other crime will be given a recorded message advising them to contact the police or the emergency services.
Preferably but not necessarily. However, the Service will need to establish the bona fides of any caller offering information which it judges to be significant
Secure arrangements will be used.
Yes, where it is relevant. Where the police or other law enforcement agency is likely to have to respond immediately as a result of the information being offered, the caller will be advised to contact those authorities direct.
Fax facilities will be available where necessary, but there are currently no plans to have a public e-mail address.
The decision to set up the Phoneline now has been made on operational grounds as a means of helping the service to carry out its work. However, it is consistent with other initiatives the Service has taken in recent years (and especially since 1993) to inform the public about its roles and responsibilities and to build on the invaluable public co-operation and support it already receives.
The Phoneline telephone number will be available from BT Directory Enquiries under "Security Service" and "MI5".
Ditchley had last considered secret intelligence in 1988, with the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union in place, the existence of intelligence agencies still unavowed in several countries, and the whole activity so shrouded in official reticence that even the holding of the conference had attracted eminent disapproval. We met now in a transformed international setting, and with at least some of the veils cast aside.
But with the Cold War over, what was it all now for? We were in no doubt that diverse threats remained to international order and legitimate national interest. The world was complex and uncertain; deviant political leaders were not a phenomenon entirely of the past; the exploitation and inexorable spread of technology brought new national and societal vulnerabilities. Military conflict, in particular, had not vanished from the global scene, and good military intelligence was a force multiplier essential for successful outcomes. Crime and terrorism - not always tidily distinguishable - increasingly crossed frontiers and commanded large resources and technical skills. If governments were to serve their people well in countering all these menaces, actual and potential, they needed pertinent, dependable and timely information.
All that said, it was evident that there were many fewer fiercely-closed societies than a decade ago for Western governments to interact with, and technology had itself massively enhanced the flow of open information. Was secret intelligence still needed on anything like the old scale, and how much value could it really add? Sometimes very little, we conceded; sometimes however, and crucially, a lot. We recalled the classic difference between mysteries - things inherently unknowable, like Saddam Hussein's future intentions - and secrets - things kept hidden, like his chemical-weapon holdings; and we knew that secret intelligence could offer no sure access to the former. But opponents in adversarial settings were almost always minded toward concealment in one way or another; CNN, however rapid, was not always right or balanced; in other situations, needed data might become openly available too late for timely action; and secret intelligence could help in special degree towards sorting, integrating, calibrating and verifying the open flood.
We paused on commercial intelligence only long enough to note the dangers of its being collected by governments. It was understandable that they might wish to counter corruption or unfair competition operating to the detriment of their citizens, but the activity - especially if directed against activity in countries viewed as friendly - risked damaging relationships, not least within the intelligence field itself.
International cooperation engaged a good deal of our intention. The desirability of shared understandings of the world was evident, for example in relation to Europe's aspiration towards a Common Foreign and Security Policy. There were areas of specific activity, as possibly in how to deal with the commercial dissemination of high-quality encryption capability or in combating international drug-related crime, in which most democratic governments might have similar interests and should therefore be capable of working together on intelligence. Bosnia and the pursuit of Saddam's WMD capabilities had brought home to UN authorities, once apt to find the very notions of secret intelligence and of communications-security repugnant (and still suspicious of national manipulation), that these were essential components of a capacity to act effectively. And the costs of secret intelligence activity made ideas of burden-sharing and specialisation among like-minded countries in principle persuasive.
The difficulties however were extensive. It was, for instance, far from certain that UN activities involving a wide diversity of participants could command either the skills to use intelligence well or the disciplines, and genuine commonality of interest, to guard it and its sources. Some of these considerations weighed even upon cooperation with political friends; and thorough-going money-saving interdependence required an identity of recognised long-term interest, and perhaps also of governmental culture, that could not generally be taken for granted. Particular "clubs", varying with issues and usually marked by a clear leadership country or group, were often the best practical route to cooperation. Nevertheless, our sense overall was that there needed to be more international sharing, especially in analysis as distinct from collection.
The need for better cooperation and coordination held good also, so several participants argued, at an earlier point, within nations: understanding, interaction and two-way dialogue could still be improved both among different collection agencies and between data-gatherers, analysts and decision-taking users. In at least some of our countries agencies and users still seemed insufficiently aware of and responsive to one another's needs and capabilities; systems as a whole might need further reform to improve flexibility, relevance and reaction times (and perhaps also to sharpen skills in relating risk to importance and cost in targeting). We noted, too, that amid the data deluge private-sector competence might have a contribution to make, for example in analysis. We reached however no clear consensus on whether matters would be improved by the creation of intelligence "supremos" in executive charge of the whole field, though centralised assessment had strong support.
We wrestled with the concept of value for money in intelligence effort, and how it was to be measured and made operational. The notion of a straightforward market in which users paid for the particular intelligence efforts they wanted found no friends; even if value and cost were (and in fact they were not) in a tidy relationship, intelligence was a long-term broadly-based activity in which action-supporting outputs could rarely be neatly connected - especially before the event - with specific resource inputs. The principle of "customer pays", even if bureaucratically workable at all, might encourage a short-termism wholly at odds with the reality that many aspects of intelligence-gathering required patient and in a sense speculative long-term investment. The customer was often better qualified to influence where existing capability should be applied than where investment in future capability should go. There was however merit, we acknowledged, in regular post-mortem to examine value and to learn lessons; and it was suggested even that occasionally a "Team B" approach, with rival assessment deliberately fostered as challenge to mainstream structures, could yield healthy dividends. We heard voices - albeit contested ones - suggesting that the mainstream was prone to overvalue secret as against open sources; and that processes were too slow to adapt to the information revolution and the implications of the cyberspace arena.
We recognised, with a near-unanimity which might scarcely have been evident a decade ago, the crucial importance of persuading publics, as citizens and taxpayers, that secret intelligence was needed and useful, efficiently managed and not improperly conducted. The task was not easy against a background of opinion largely formed by a mix of imaginative fiction and occasional scandal, focused upon cloak-and-dagger activity that in reality formed at most a very small part of total effort. Failures - the emergence of the unforeseen, or penetration by hostile interests - tended to be evident, and successes - often in the form of disagreeable events headed off and so not happening - hard to advertise or to prove. Publics wanted to feel secure, but could readily be tempted to suspect a misuse of secrecy as cover for incompetence or wrongdoing. All this placed a high premium - higher than intelligence professionals had in the past been disposed to accept - upon justification and trustworthy oversight; and this became a major theme in our conference.
Oversight in the form of internal-to-government accountability to elected political leaders on every aspect was, so it was claimed, salutarily established in most (not all) of our countries. But this could not nowadays alone command public confidence; external political scrutiny was increasingly essential in order visibly to stimulate and demand good system performance, to defend the intelligence contribution where necessary, and to guard against malpractice - though we heard suggestions that political overseers might be excessively drawn to concentrate, for publicity reasons, upon this last. In some of our countries external scrutiny had made large advances within the past decade (and earlier worries about indiscretion among scrutineers had generally proved over-anxious). International dialogue and exchange of experience might strengthen these advances. In one or two countries however, perhaps for special reasons, oversight had still not taken root, to the detriment both of public respect and probably of system performance.
We noted, but did not find time to plumb, the contribution towards oversight and consequent public reassurance that might be made by the regular processes of financial audit, by the law and the courts, and by special devices like ombudsmen or commissioners to review particular categories of activity. Predictably, divergent opinions were to be heard about the contribution of the media, with some participants stressing their inescapable weight in forming opinion and others their role as competitors to intelligence and their propensity to exaggerate, demonise or trivialise its work. The majority perhaps felt, in this as in other fields, that the wise course was to help the media understand (even if the will to do that was fairly uneven) rather than to attempt exclusion.
Our discussion of the growing role of the intelligence agencies in countering crime raised several issues. We recognised that there was often a unique contribution to be made, and that provided that contribution was made in the service and under the authority of due law-enforcement authorities there was every reason to exploit it. There was misgiving expressed, though not generally shared, about consequent threats to proper civil liberties; and also a recognition that awkward trade-offs could arise between intelligence considerations like the protection of sources and the effective deployment of information under proper rules of evidence in the prosecution of malefactors.
The fields of crime and terrorism highlighted awkward issues about the ethics of intelligence-gathering where it rubbed up (not often, but not never) against the boundaries of normal domestic law, or where it entailed doing business with, and acquiescing to some degree in the continued activity of, unsavoury characters. Here again - if perhaps to the relief of some - time prevented our delving as deep as the issues warranted; we did little more than acknowledge the awkwardness of reconciling aspirations to strict propriety with the practical imperatives of protecting the public in arenas where adversaries played by no rules. Perhaps some doctrine of proportionality - a little law-breaking or blind-eye-turning to secure a big public benefit? - might help; but we left that mostly for Ditchley's next conference on intelligence.
PARTICIPANTS Chairman : The Honorable R James Woolsey Formerly Director, Central Intelligence
AUSTRALIA Ms Margaret Twomey First Secretary (Liaison Officer for the Office of Material Assessments), Australian High Commission, London
CANADA Mr Anthony Campbell The Honorable Edwin A Goodman PC OC QC Member, Security Intelligence Review Committee Dr Wesley Wark Associate Professor of History, University of Toronto Dr Reginald Whitaker Professor of Political Science, York University, Ontario
FRANCE Monsieur Olivier Debouzy Lawyer, August & Debouzy, Paris; formerly foreign service officer Monsieur Jean-Louis Gergorin Professor Christopher Andrew Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, University of Cambridge Mr Jimmy Burns Reporter, Financial Times Mr Dale Campbell-Savours MP Member, Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee Mr Stephen Hawker Minister of Defence Professor Peter Hennessy Professor of Contemporary History, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London Mr Michael Herman Former civil servant, author The Rt Hon Tom King CH MP Chairman, Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee Sir Colin McColl KCMG Chief, Secret Intelligence Service, 1988-94 Mr John N L Morrison Deputy Chief of Defence Intelligence, Ministry of Defence Mr David Omand Director, Government Communications Headquarters Mr Michael Pakenham CMG Deputy Secretary, Cabinet Office, and Chairman, Joint Intelligence Committee The Baroness Park of Monmouth CMG OBE Formerly HM Diplomatic Service Mr David Rose Writer and broadcaster Sir David Spedding KCMG CVO OBE Chief, Secret Intelligence Service Mr Kevin Tebbit Deputy Under-Secretary of State (Defence), Foreign and Commonwealth Office Sir Gerald Warner KCMG Intelligence Co-ordinator, Cabinet Office, 1990-96
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Dr Morton H Halperin Senior Vice President, Twentieth Century Fund The Honorable Jeffrey K Harris President, EOSAT Mr Ted Price Formerly Deputy Director for Operations, CIA Ms Elizabeth R Rindskopf Formerly General Counsel to the CIA and senior legal adviser to the US Intelligence Community Mr Elliot Stein Managing Director, Commonwealth Capital Partners Mr Thomas Twetten Formerly Deputy Director for Operations, CIA Dr Judith S Yaphe Formerly Senior Analyst, CIA
Hundreds of thousands of secret intelligence files held by MI5 and MI6 could be destroyed after the Data Protection Commissioner ordered the security and intelligence agencies to register their huge databases under the Data Protection Act.
The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner, formerly the Data Protection Registrar, has been negotiating with MI5 , MI6 and GCHQ to register under the 1984 Data Protection Act for more than five years.
Security chiefs have resisted the move claiming that they are entitled to blanket exemption from complying with the Data Protection Act 1984 which incorporates the Data Protection Principles into UK law.
These require that data is collected fairly and lawfully, that it is accurate and kept up to date, and is only used forr the purposes stated in its entry on the Data Protection Register.
But following the introduction of the Data Protection Act 1998 earlier this year, the Commissioner informed intelligence chiefs that they could face court action if they failed to register under the Data Protection Acts.
This week the Assistant Data Protection Commissioner Jonathan Bamford, told the Investigative Journalism Review: "We had made it clear to these agencies that we expect them to register under the Data Protection Acts and comply fully with the Data Protection Principles."
He added: "We will investigate any complaints - now called 'requests for assessment' - that we may review in relation to these agencies in the same way as far as any other data user."
The Commissioner confirmed that the three agencies have now sent application forms to register under the Data Protection Acts. The application for GCHQ has been returned and it's entry now appears on the Data Protection Register.
The Investigative Journalism Review has also learned this week that the head of MI5, Sir Stephen Lander, has received an application under the Data Protection Act from the Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker.
In his letter to Sir Stephen, dated 12th July, the MP for Lewes wrote: "As you will know, the Office of the Data Protection Registrar is of the view that the UK's security and intelligence agencies are duty bound to comply with the Data Protection Principles and thus the Data Protection Acts"
It continues: "Accordingly, I would appreciate it if you would kindly now advise me as to the procedure you plan to adopt in order to process this request, and also the prospective time-scale that will apply to this application."
The Home Office would not comment on this application this week. Both it and the Foreign Office, which over see the work of MI5 and MI6 respectively, referred the Investigative Journalism Review to the Cabinet Office.
A spokesman for the Cabinet Office indicated that the government will not intervene over the Commissioner's tough line on the security and intelligence services: "This is a matter concerning the Data Protection Acts and is therefore a matter for the Data Protection Commissioner
From: http://www.aij-uk.com/ijr/1/dpa.html Investigative Journalism Review
Sir Peter (Grenville) Cazalet
British business executive
chair 1998-1999
Sir William Purves
British retired banker
chair 2000-now
Sir (Philip) John Weston
British diplomatist and company director
2001-now
Sir Peter F. Holmes
British Petrolium Executive
President 1997-now
Kenneth Raymond Andrews
Vice-President 1983-90
No.2: "It doesn't matter which side runs the Village."
No.6: "It's run by one side, or the other?"
No.2: "Oh, certainly. But both sides are becoming identical. What in fact has been created - an international community. The perfect blueprint for world order. When the sides facing each other suddenly realize that they are looking into a mirror, they will see that this is the pattern for the future."