« September 2006 |
Main
| November 2006 »
BBC NEWS | UK | Details on vanished 'spy' diver
New evidence has emerged of Britain's attempts to cover up the fate of a diver who vanished in 1956, while apparently spying on a Russian warship.
Lionel "Buster" Crabb disappeared while spying on the Ordzhonikidze - which had brought the Soviet premier to Britain for talks - in Portsmouth Harbour.
Papers released at the National Archives set out his last known hours.
And the Admiralty documents make clear that whoever sent him on his mission, it was not the Royal Navy.
'Negligence' fear
The Russian ship had brought the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev for meetings with the British prime minister Anthony Eden and his ministers.
The newly-released documents show that an officer, who is still unidentified, took Crabb out in a small boat in Portsmouth Docks and stayed onboard as the diver disappeared below the surface.
The moment it became clear that a mishap had occurred (name blanked out) was ordered to return to his ship and take no further part in the affair
Admiral Inglis
The second time Crabb did not come back, and several months later a headless corpse, identified by a friend as Crabb, was found floating along the coast.
At the time Crabb went missing, the Navy tried to say he was feared drowned in Stokes Bay - another location altogether.
The incident wrecked attempts at a rapprochement between Britain and the post-Stalin government in Moscow.
The Russians protested they were being spied upon by their hosts and, in the Commons, the government was asked if the security services were out of control.
The papers make clear that the Royal Navy was embarrassed and appalled by the affair.
It was concerned the anonymous officer would have to tell a story at a subsequent inquest "inconsistent with the impression which we have tried to convey - that this was a naval operation".
I want the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth
Lomond Handley
Crabb's relative
A memo from Rear Admiral JGT Inglis, director of naval intelligence, on 21 June, explained that in a "bona fide" operation, there would have been "immediate and extensive rescue operations".
And the unnamed diving officer would have also taken action.
In fact, there was no rescue operation because "a search could not be carried out beside the Russian warships".
Adm Inglis pointed out that, instead, "the moment it became clear that a mishap had occurred (name blanked out) was ordered to return to his ship and take no further part in the affair".
This could expose naval chiefs and the unidentified officer who accompanied Crabb, to charges of "negligence, lack of humanity and error of judgment", he feared.
'Strictly private'
The secret account of the anonymous officer who assisted Crabb on the day of his disappearance, was also made public for the first time.
His actions until disappearance under the surface were normal, and the conditions for diving were good. He was not seen by me again
Anonymous officer accompanying Crabb
He said he had been asked to assist him "entirely unofficially and in a strictly private capacity".
The officer said: "He carried sufficient oxygen for an absence of a maximum of two hours submerged.
"His actions until disappearance under the surface were normal, and the conditions for diving were good. He was not seen by me again."
'Embarrassing questions'
Navy officials were keen for this officer not to appear in public at a subsequent inquest.
It was decided to dispatch a temporary clerical officer to represent the Admiralty instead.
One of the secret documents explained: "He knows nothing of the background to the story and will not be able to answer any embarrassing questions even if they are asked."
The same document said: "The coroner is aware of the background to the case and is not asking for the appearance of any embarrassing naval witnesses."
The coroner ruled that it was Crabb's body that had been found.
Freedom of Information
Howard Davies, archivist at the National Archives, said the extent of the cover-up suggested there was more about the case to be told.
And Crabb's family demanded the truth.
Lomond Handley, from Poole in Dorset, one of his few living relatives, said: "The people deserve to know what happened to a man who had served his country honourably and with integrity."
The latest revelations come just four months after BBC Radio Solent obtained a report into Crabb's mission with a Freedom of Information application.
The report showed that Crabb's intelligence service handlers did not take proper precautions to protect him or the secrecy of the mission.
October 27, 2006 at 02:16 AM in Cold War | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
TheStar.com - Revolution revisited
Oct. 15, 2006. 07:45 AM
JUDY STOFFMAN
It lasted less than two weeks, from the first euphoric student demonstrations in Budapest on Oct. 23 till its final bloody end on Nov. 4, when it was crushed by Soviet tanks, but the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 left an indelible mark on Cold War politics and continues to resonate today. Thanks to the work of historians rooting through newly released materials, the world's first televised revolution is now seen as a classic case of how the Cold War deformed international relations in ways that are still felt in Iran, Afghanistan and Latin America.
In fact, only now, 17 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is the truth about what happened and why coming into clear focus.
"Since 1990, scholars have found a lot of new material on the revolution," says Géza Jeszenszky, a history professor at Corvinus University in Budapest and Hungary's former ambassador to the U.S., who was recently in Toronto.
"Apart from the opening of the Hungarian archives (particularly the secret files of the Communist Party and the Ministry of the Interior), part of the Soviet records pertaining to the intervention have become available, and much of the American documents, including the activities of the CIA and Radio Free Europe."
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the uprising of the Hungarian people against a brutal communist dictatorship. It is being remembered with commemorative events in Europe, the United States and Canada, where almost 38,000 Hungarian refugees — including this writer and her family — found a new home in the wake of the revolt.
Moved by televised images of brave, young Hungarians fighting for freedom against the Soviet army with rocks, Molotov cocktails, even bare hands, Canada accepted more refugees relative to its population — then only 16 million — than any other country. Immigration minister Jack Pickersgill even arranged free transit and waived the mandatory chest X-rays.
Last month, the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto sponsored a conference at which some of the most distinguished scholars in the field — Istvan Deak of Columbia University, Harvard's Mark Kramer, Nandor Dreisziger of the Royal Military College in Kingston, and a clutch of historians from Hungary such as Jeszenszky, Laszlo Borhi, Attila Pok, Laszlo Ritter — debated the events of 1956. Last week at the University of Ottawa, another conference took place titled "The 1956 Revolution 50 Years Later — Canadian and International Perspectives."
The National Arts Centre in Ottawa is presenting Hungarian music and musicians, as well as a photo exhibition by V. Tony Hauser. On Tuesday there will a gala presentation at the Canadian Museum of Civilization of Hungarian director Istvan Szabo's film Sunshine, with producer Robert Lantos present to discuss the film. Cinematheque Ontario will screen Hungarian films here in November, and the CBC will air a documentary, The Fifty-Sixers Hungarian Revolution, on Oct. 26.
New books about 1956 are rolling off the presses, and memories of those far-off days are being dusted off by those who lived through them or simply watched in horrified fascination. The images on the TV screen showed that democracy is a hardy plant, watered by underground streams, that can't be permanently smothered if people really desire it.
What happened was this: In February 1956 at the 20th Communist Party Congress, Soviet president Nikita Khrushchev made a stunning speech denouncing the crimes of Josef Stalin, who had died three years previously. The contents of this secret speech soon leaked out and kindled the hope that Hungary might free itself from Soviet domination. The country began to seethe with debate, which intensified after a brief uprising in Poznan, Poland, in June of that year. It was put down in a day but resulted in Khrushchev's assent to a more liberal form of communism in Poland under Wladyslaw Gomulka.
In Budapest, a discussion group sprang up within the Young Communists organization, calling itself the Petõfi Circle (after the heroic nationalist poet who was executed following the defeat of the 1848-49 revolt against the Hapsburg dynasty). Its members began to meet semi-openly, attracting many intellectuals who voiced discontent with the climate of repression, jail without trial, and the virtual theft of the country's resources, especially food, which was often bought below cost by the Soviets.
Sandor Kopacsi, then police chief of Budapest, who ended up in exile in Toronto working as a janitor for Ontario Hydro, wrote in his memoirs that plainclothes police were sent to check on the Petõfi Circle and came away deeply affected.
"Suddenly a majority of these `spies' declared that they were in agreement with the points made in the Petofi Circle!" Kopacsi recounted. "Together they issued a statement, which they signed, declaring themselves in solidarity with the ideas put forward by the young reformists of the party."
On Oct. 23, the pent-up discontent exploded. Groups of students and workers gathered to demonstrate at the statue, on the Buda side of the Danube, of the Polish general Józef Bem, who had aided the Hungarians in 1848, to proclaim their demands for government reform. Across the river, demonstrators also assembled around the statue of Petõfi, and the two groups joined up and pushed on to Heroes' Square, where they took hammers and blow torches to the hated statue of Josef Stalin (today the head and boot of the statue are at the National Museum in Budapest). Much to the disgust of Yuri Andropov, the Soviet ambassador to Hungary and the KGB's man in Budapest, the police refused to intervene.
The crowd went to the state-controlled radio station asking to broadcast their demands for change, and shots were fired for the first time by Hungary's hated secret police, the AVH. After that, the fighting become general and the rebels took control of the station.
The chief demand of the demonstrators was the return to power of the popular 60-year-old Imre Nagy, ousted as premier the previous year by Communist hardliners, including the detested First Secretary of the Party, Ernõ Gerõ. Nagy had proposed much needed reforms, including breaking up 700 failed collective farms.
The outgoing premier, Andras Hegedus, handed over power to Nagy on Oct. 24 as Soviet tanks, long stationed in the country at a base near the town of Tököl, rolled into Budapest to try to restore order. The revolutionaries held them off.
Nagy organized a multi-party coalition government, got an undertaking from Moscow to pull out the tanks, and called for a ceasefire. There was a brief respite during which it appeared that the Soviets were leaving and might allow Nagy to become the Hungarian Gomulka, but then the rebels laid siege to Party headquarters and lynched defenders of the building. They also took to executing anyone suspected of being a member of the AVH. The small playground where I used to go with my father was dug up and turned into an impromptu cemetery.
We now know that Khrushchev made the decision on Oct. 31 to go back on his promise of troop withdrawal. He secretly ordered that the revolution be crushed.
According to a new book, Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt by Charles Gati, a historian at Johns Hopkins University, Khrushchev grasped that the Hungarians, unlike the Poles, would not accept a longer leash: They wanted no leash at all. Nagy, Gati argues, did not have the political skill to work out a compromise that could have avoided bloodshed, something Krushchev realized.
At the start of November, some Soviet tanks were leaving while others were rolling across Hungary's eastern border. The revolutionary newspaper Igazsag (meaning Truth) asked in a headline on Nov. 2: "Are they coming or going?" A defiant Nagy announced the reinstatement of the multi-party system, declared Hungary's withdrawal from the Warsaw pact, and its neutrality.
Hungarians, whipped up by the frenzied rhetoric of the U.S.-sponsored Radio Free Europe, fully expected the United States to intervene, but neither the U.S. nor the United Nations was prepared to act. Were they distracted by the unfolding Suez Crisis in the Middle East? Most scholars today think the outcome would have been the same if there had been no Suez Crisis.
In the early hours of Nov. 4, the Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest. Nagy, knowing it was all over, took refuge at the Yugoslav embassy. He was later to be tried, executed and buried in an unmarked grave. His heroic behaviour during his rigged trial — his refusal to recant or apologize or resign his premiership — is beautifully described in Gati's book.
During the fighting 2,700 people died, 230 were executed afterwards — a shockingly high number for a country then of 9 million — and 200,000 crawled under barbed wires at the border to freedom in the west. My own family left behind everything, including a pair of skates — my first — that I had just received for my ninth birthday and never had a chance to use. Four decades later, on a grey February day, I went skating on the city's main rink in the Liget (the city's largest park), trying to put back the pieces of my broken childhood.
After those few heady days of freedom, Moscow set up the puppet government headed by Janos Kadar, once a friend and ally of Nagy. Kadar remained head of the Hungarian Communist Party until 1988 and introduced so-called "goulash communism," which allowed limited private enterprise. It led to Hungary being dubbed the happiest barrack in the prison that was the Soviet bloc, though it also created widespread cynicism, bribery and a thriving black market.
"The real power always rested in Moscow," recalled professor Istvan Deak at the Munk Centre conference. "The people were infantalized. I was on a streetcar in Budapest in the 1980s and noticed women talking baby talk to each other. `We are allowed to take an itsy-bitsy trip to Spain now — isn't it wonderful?'"
Discussion of 1956 — officially referred to as a counter-revolution — was taboo until Hungary's regime change of 1990, in the dying days of the Soviet Union. By then, following the 30-year-rule for classified documents, the U.S. archives were open.
"The first revelation was that the West was not trying to foster this breakout but was trying to find a modus vivendi with the Soviets; our revolution was unexpected and not welcome," says Csaba Békés, a scholar based at the 1956 Institute in Budapest and a co-editor of The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: A History in Documents (2003). The CIA, which had orchestrated the fall of a nationalist government in Iran in 1953 and put the infamous Shah in power, had nothing to do with the revolt, the archives reveal. In October 1956, it had just one Hungarian-speaking operative in the country. The U.S., like Canada, had no embassy in Budapest, only an ineffectual legation.
"The U.S. had a double-faced policy, a non-violent policy," Békés says. "They wanted to keep alive the desire for freedom in the communist bloc until the system failed, which it was bound to do. The message got sent by Radio Free Europe, but there was no promise of help. People didn't know it was just rhetoric. False hopes were created."
Radio Free Europe, staffed by right-wing émigré Hungarians, had slandered Nagy throughout the revolt, portraying him as just another communist — which was how Washington saw him, unable to grasp that the communist world was not monolithic. This simplistic view would subsequently play out in countries around the globe during the Cold War, with the United States toppling leftist regimes (Nicaragua, Guatamala, Chile), and ignoring massive suffering perpetrated by right-wing dictators (the Congo, Iran, Chile, Argentina).
After 1956, Radio Free Europe moderated its tone. "Instead of liberation, they promoted liberalization," says Békés, one of the participating scholars in the conference last week at the University of Ottawa.
"Then came the Soviet revelation, the documents in the 1990s, which showed that they tried at first to find a political solution," Békés says. "They came to the conclusion that no preservation of the communist system was possible without intervention, because by Nov. 3 Hungary was no longer a communist country. It had undergone a social revolution."
There was never a chance that Hungary could defeat the Red Army, but Békés nevertheless calls 1956 an "outstanding moment in world history. The value of historical events is not based on their success. Victorious revolutions are not that many."
Suddenly it was clear that the Soviet bloc was held together by force, and the credibility of its ideology was permanently damaged. In the west, thousands left the Communist Party. In his memoir, Red Diaper Baby, the Canadian political scientist James Laxer has described the disillusionment of his own true-believer communist family after 1956.
In June 1989, the re-burial of Imre Nagy and four other martyrs of the Revolution signalled the peaceful end of Hungary's communist regime. Free elections took place the following year for the first time since 1948; more than half a dozen parties re-emerged as they did in 1956, with the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) winning the largest share of votes.
In the last year of his life, Janos Kadar, the quisling post-revolution Communist leader, suffered a complete mental breakdown. In April 1989, he asked to address a meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. To a stunned audience, recounts Gati, Kadar delivered a confused, convoluted, nonsensical monologue about "a certain man" — evidently Imre Nagy — who was hounding him.
Kadar had given Nagy, his family and his associates a pledge of safe conduct from the Yugoslav embassy, but in reality had conspired with the KGB to have them taken off a bus, sent to house arrest in Romania, and from there to jail and certain death.
Like Lady Macbeth, he could not wash the blood off his hands. Kadar died three weeks after Imre Nagy was re-buried.
The Star's Judy Stoffman is co-translator (with Daniel Stoffman) of In The Name of the Working Class, the memoirs of Sandor Kopacsi.
October 15, 2006 at 04:23 PM in Cold War | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Hacker's delight | thebulletin.org
n testimony to the Senate on May 10, 2006, Lt. Gen. Henry "Trey" Obering, head of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), spoke glowingly about the communications network being established for the system tasked with protecting the U.S. mainland against an intercontinental ballistic missile attack. According to Obering, "The global command and control foundation that we've established is unmatched in the world." But the Defense Department's own Office of Inspector General (IG) would probably disagree. Just three months before Obering's boasts, the IG took the defense system's command and control network to task.
The ground-based midcourse defense (GMD) system is an ambitious long-term project that consists of interceptors in Alaska and California; sensors in California and the Pacific Ocean (and soon in Fylingdales, Britain, and Thule, Greenland); and several command centers across the continental United States, as well as Alaska and Hawaii. Eventually, it will have a dedicated satellite network. The system crosses over 11 time zones, through three combat commands, and includes three branches of the military. The GMD Communications Network (GCN) must link all these elements together--an incredibly complex, and essential, task.
Given that the GCN controls the Bush administration's missile defense system, the flagship of its national security plan, one might think that the network itself would be secure. But indeed just the opposite appears to be true. In its audit, the inspector general revealed that MDA officials "had not fully implemented information assurance controls required to protect the integrity, availability, and confidentiality of the information in the GCN." As a result, "Missile Defense Agency officials may not be able to reduce the risk and extent of harm resulting from misuse or unauthorized access to or modification of information of the GCN and ensure the continuity of the network in case of an interruption." In other words, the system could be hacked--outsiders could enter into the network, change or delete data, and/or share classified information--and MDA would not know about it, be able to respond effectively, or apparently prevent it from happening again.
The report attributes these failings to a cascade of human errors. The GCN was officially intended to be built to meet information security standards dating from 1985. As if aiming for standards created years before the information revolution took place wasn't bad enough, MDA implemented a set of standards from an entirely different directive. Contractors for the GCN told auditors that it would have been too costly to go back and modify the system. To this, the report rather acidly noted, "Security requirements cannot simply be waived based on cost."
Further degrading the stability and security of the network, the GCN's two types of equipment--encrypted and unencrypted--were built by two different contractors who apparently worked at cross-purposes and did not follow a common set of security procedures. "Information assurance" (IA) officers were often unaware of their responsibilities or even that they had special duties. IA officers are charged with making sure that users of the system have the correct level of clearance, that those accessing the system actually have a need to do so, and that the users are aware of network security standards. Curiously, many of the officers were unaware of their IA responsibilities until MDA started developing IA policies in June 2005, after the National Security Agency had completed its own audit of the system, but well after the GCN's creation in January 2001.
The GCN is supposed to have an automated audit of its network--a security feature that most basic office networks have. However, MDA officials told the investigation team that their equipment was incapable of supporting an automated audit. Instead, they claimed that their contractors did weekly manual exams. But the contractors complained that manual audits were so "cumbersome and time-consuming" that they rarely did them--and even then, the contractors acknowledged that such audits were not guaranteed to detect all security violations.
An undated draft version of the IG's audit was far more scathing than the final report, noting that the system had category I deficiencies (defined as problems which "must be corrected before the system can become operational or continue to operate") and category II deficiencies (those which "must be corrected within a specified time period in order to continue system operations"). "MDA officials should immediately cease operations until all category I and category II issues are mitigated," the draft report advised, and prepare a plan of action "to identify the solution, schedule, security actions, and milestones necessary to correct the security weaknesses."
Overall, the two reports came to the same conclusions, but the draft version was more specific in its criticisms and more drastic in its suggested plan of action to deal with the network security vulnerabilities. By contrast, the final version of the report simply warns that hackers could defeat the GCN and that the MDA cannot ensure the sanctity of the GMD information and systems. This is not unexpected, as the draft version may have been deemed a little too sensitive for public consumption. Or perhaps there are those in the Pentagon who would prefer softer criticism of a program already plagued by technical delays and cost overruns. Even so, the final watered-down assessment raised some eyebrows. Federal Computer Weekly ran a story on the report on Thursday, March 16, 2006. By the following Monday, the IG issued a statement: "The Missile Defense Agency requested that we remove this report from our website pending a security review." The report is now back on the IG's website, but its temporary absence speaks to the gravity of the network's security vulnerabilities.
The IG's report, while perhaps embarrassing to the MDA, could not have been much of a surprise. As early as April 2003, the MDA recognized that there were weaknesses in its software network. In a report to the MDA Southeastern Software Engineering Conference, then-Brigadier General Obering briefed the audience about the MDA's experience with excessive schedule pressure, changing requirements, inadequate test specifications, and insufficient engineering. Obering spoke specifically about a limited understanding of the software and the absence of a software architect. He even presented ways in which he said the MDA was fixing the problems. If the MDA had followed through with those fixes, the IG's office might very well have come to a different set of conclusions.
But in the problem-plagued quest for national missile defense, securing the GCN from external meddling is not even the sole issue--or even the most troublesome--facing the MDA. The final IG report underlines the importance of password control in noting that MDA officials believed "the greatest risk to the GCN system was the insider threat." Unfortunately, if the MDA's track record in network security is anything to judge by, it's far from certain that GCN will be secure either from the inside or the outside.
October 12, 2006 at 06:24 PM in US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
British hire anti-Taliban mercenaries - Sunday Times - Times Online
Christina Lamb, Kabul
BRITISH forces holed up in isolated outposts of Helmand province in Afghanistan are to be withdrawn over the next two to three weeks and replaced by newly formed tribal police who will be recruited by paying a higher rate than the Taliban.
The move is the result of deals with war-weary locals and reverses the strategy of sending forces to establish “platoon houses” in the Taliban heartland where soldiers were left under siege and short of supplies because it was too dangerous for helicopters to fly in.
Troops in the four northern districts of Sangin, Musa Qala, Nawzad and Kajaki have engaged in the fiercest fighting since the Korean war, tying up more than half the mission’s available combat force. All 16 British soldiers killed in the conflict died in these areas.
“We were coming under as many as seven attacks a day,” said Captain Alex Mackenzie of the 3rd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, who spent a month in Sangin. “We were firing like mad just to survive. It was deconstruction rather than reconstruction.”
Lieutenant-General David Richards, commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan, has long been critical of tying up troops in static positions, while the British government has grown increasingly concerned that it was affecting public support for the mission.
Since taking command of the British forces at the end of July, Richards has been looking for a way to pull them out without making it look like a victory for the Taliban.
“I am confident that in two to three weeks the securing of the districts will be achieved through a different means,” he said. “Most of the British troops will then be able to be redeployed to tasks which will facilitate rapid and visible reconstruction and development, which we’ve got to do this winter to prove we can not only fight but also deliver what people need.”
The districts will be guarded by new auxiliary police made up of local militiamen. They will initially receive $70 (£37) a month, although it is hoped that this will rise to $120 to compete with the $5 per fighting day believed to be paid by the Taliban. “These are the same people who two weeks ago would have been vulnerable to be recruited as Taliban fighters,” said Richards.
“It’s employment they want and we need to make sure we pay more than the Taliban.”
The withdrawal of the British troops will coincide with the departure of 3 Para, whose six-month deployment is coming to an end. The battalion will be replaced by Royal Marines from 3 Commando Brigade who started arriving last week.
Locals in these districts are fed up with the fighting that has led to the destruction of many homes, bazaars and a school. A delegation of more than 20 elders from Musa Qala met President Hamid Karzai on Wednesday evening and demanded to be allowed to look after their own security. “The British troops brought nothing but fighting,” they complained. They pledged that if allowed to appoint their own police chief and district chief, they would keep out the Taliban.
The other crucial factor has been Nato’s success last month in inflicting the heaviest defeat on the Taliban since their regime fell five years ago. The two-week Operation Medusa in the Panjwayi district of Kandahar province left between 1,100 and 1,500 Taliban dead, many of whom were believed to be committed fighters rather than guns for hire.
“Militarily it was against the odds — it was only because the Taliban were silly enough to take us on in strength when we had superior firepower and because of very, very brave fighting on the part of Americans, Canadians, British and Dutch, as well as the Afghan national army,” said Richards.
The Taliban, emboldened by their successes in Helmand, had changed their strategy from hit-and-run tactics to a frontal attack, apparently intending to try to take the key city of Kandahar. They had taken advantage of a change of command of foreign troops in the south from American to Canadian and eventually Nato to move large amounts of equipment and men into the Panjwayi district southwest of the city. The area was a stronghold of the mujaheddin during the Russian occupation and contains secret tunnels and grape-drying houses amid orchards and vineyards alongside the Argandab River.
After initial setbacks, including the crash of a British Nimrod aircraft in which 14 servicemen died and an incident in which an American A10 bomber strafed Canadian forces, killing one and wounding 35, Nato forces turned the situation around. Wave after wave of Taliban arriving on pick-ups to join the fight were mown down. More than 100 are believed to have been captured and reports from Quetta in neighbouring Pakistan suggest that Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader, has instructed his men to return to their old guerrilla tactics.
The number of daily “contacts” between troops and insurgents has since dropped from a high of 24 in September to just two, although the lull in fighting may be partly because of Ramadan, the fasting month.
Richards believes that the victory has won his forces a six-month window during which the international community must make visible changes for the people of southern Afghanistan or risk losing everything.
“Fighting alone is not the solution,” he warned. “We’ve got to win over the 70% of people in southern Afghanistan who are good peasant stock and basically want security and the means to feed their families. If it’s only fighting they see ahead of them for the next five years, chances are that they will say well, we’d rather have the Taliban and all that comes with it.
“The means to persuade them is not just to show we can win, as we have done, but also that it’s all worth it, which means pretty visible and ready improvements.”
He added: “The military can’t do much more — it’s up to the government and development agencies. At the moment somehow it isn’t happening and we’re beginning to lose time.”
The military is locked in a debate with the Department for International Development (DFID) which has £20m to spend in Helmand but feels that the situation is too insecure for development and believes the focus should be on long-term projects.
Asked last week what reconstruction it had carried out in Helmand so far, a DFID representative could cite only the rebuilding of market stalls in two districts. The official added that the department did not want to draw attention to any improvements because that might make them targets.
The military want the DFID to hand over some of its funds to enable them to carry out work. “We have to prove to the population today that tomorrow is worth waiting for,” said Richards.
He said that in Helmand’s main town of Lashkar Gah last month, only one young man in a group of 20 he met had a job. “If there aren’t any jobs and the Taliban come along and say we’ll offer you $5 a day for taking pot-shots at the Brits then they will,” he said.
“That’s where we should be spending our money — creating jobs. And it really isn’t good enough just doing the long-term stuff.”
Karzai will chair a meeting on reconstruction this week, including ministers and foreign donors, in the hope of kickstarting programmes such as road building and irrigation.
“We’ve got six months to prove to the 70% that it’s all worth it, that we can not only deliver security but the things they really want,” Richards said. “If we do, I think things will be much better and we will have turned the curve. If we don’t, then my prognosis is that next year will be even worse than this year.”
October 8, 2006 at 02:28 AM in Lashkar-e-Taiba | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Death of the woman who shamed Moscow - Sunday Times - Times Online
Mark Franchetti, Moscow
RUSSIA’S most famous investigative reporter, Anna Politkovskaya, was gunned down in the lift of her Moscow apartment block yesterday in an apparent contract killing.
A fearless opponent of Russia’s wars in Chechnya who once described President Vladimir Putin as a “KGB snoop” and compared him to Stalin, she was shot as she returned home from a shopping trip at 4.30pm. A pistol and four bullets were found near her body.
She was the most prominent of dozens of Russian journalists murdered in the past 10 years and her death has dealt a serious blow to the country’s reputation.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the former president, said: “It’s a strike against all the democratic independent press, a terrible crime against the entire country, against all of us.”
Last night police were hunting a young man who was caught on a video camera in the hall of the apartment block wearing a black baseball cap. Officers said the killer, whose face is not visible on the footage, followed Politkovskaya inside as she unloaded the shopping from her car, and killed her with two shots to the chest and head.
Politkovskaya, 48 and divorced with a son and a daughter, was one of the few Russian journalists who dared to write critically about widespread human rights abuses in Chechnya. She won international acclaim for her reports but was hated by many in Russia’s security forces.
I met Politkovskaya on many occasions to discuss Chechnya. Bespectacled and deeply serious, she resembled a strict schoolteacher rather than a glamorous war reporter inured to intimidation and flying bullets.
She was profoundly affected by the victims of war and seemed haunted by their suffering. To her, reporting was far more than a job — she saw it as a moral obligation.
Unlike most reporters, she often crossed the line between journalism and personal involvement. At the height of the bombing of Chechnya, she once bravely negotiated the safe passage of dozens of elderly civilians trapped in Grozny, the Chechen capital.
She had received numerous threats and two years ago was apparently poisoned on her way to Beslan during the school siege that ended with more than 300 deaths.
“I am not on a crusade,” she once told me. “But I feel that someone has to write about what is happening in our country. In Chechnya unspeakable war crimes have been committed but hardly anyone has the guts to write about it. I don’t want my son to grow up in a country which allows such things to happen.”
Vitaly Yaroshevsky, deputy editor of Novaya Gazeta, her newspaper, said there was no doubt she had been killed because of her work. “This is a professional murder,” he said. “Her reporting made her many enemies.”
In an interview two years ago she stated prophetically: “I’m absolutely sure that risk is a usual part of my job — of the job of a Russian journalist — and I cannot stop because it is my duty.”
Politkovskaya, who was born in New York while her Soviet Ukrainian parents were working as diplomats at the United Nations, became renowned for her courageous campaigning after the fall of communism.
Dirty War, her book on the conflict in Chechnya, provoked fury in the security forces. In Dirty Russia, another book, she claimed Putin was rolling back democracy and clamping down on media freedom.
She had been especially critical of his backing of Ramzan Kadyrov, the pro-Russian Chechen prime minister, whose forces she accused of a wave of kidnappings and extra-judicial killings.
Yaroshevsky said Politkovskaya had recently written many articles on Kadyrov, who is widely
expected to become president of Chechnya. She had been due to publish her next story on his regime tomorrow. “She was writing that in Chechnya a bandit state is being created. She wrote that political opponents of the regime are being persecuted,” said her editor.
At the height of the war in Chechnya, Politkovskaya was detained by Russian security forces for three days. She was held in a pit without food and water and endured a mock execution.
In 2001, she fled to Vienna for several months after receiving e-mail threats alleging that a Russian police officer she had accused of committing atrocities against civilians was intent on revenge Oleg Panfilov, director of the Moscow-based Centre for Journalism in Extreme Situations, said that a few months ago unknown assailants had tried to break into a car being driven by her daughter, Vera.
At a time when most of Russia’s press has been muzzled by the Kremlin, Politkovskaya was a relatively rare dissenting voice.
She delivered regular warnings that the country was drifting back to a Soviet-style dictatorship. She also wrote critically about the arrest and trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oil tycoon jailed after falling out with the Kremlin.
Her dedication led to the breakdown of her marriage. She returned home from Chechnya one day to hear her husband tell her: “I can’t take this any more.”
Alexei Malashenko, a political commentator who knew her well, said last night: “This is a political murder. She uncovered the truth no matter how powerful the people she wrote about are. If the state killed her, we don’t need such a state. If someone else silenced her, it’s a matter of honour for the state to track down her killers.”
October 8, 2006 at 01:56 AM in Russia | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
The phoney war on terror - Sunday Times - Times Online
hristina Lamb
So President Musharraf is military dictator turned tease, making us wait for his book launch in New York tomorrow for more details of the Bush administration’s crudely worded threat against Pakistan if it did not support the war on terror.
“Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age,” was the graphic warning from deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, though admittedly it came one day after September 11. Armitage has disputed the wording but the fact that such a threat had to be made (followed by a nice little package of $5 billion of aid) raises the question of whose side Pakistan is really on.
Pakistan’s chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Lieutenant-General Ehsan-ul-Haq, was in London last week talking about how no other nation has suffered so much in the service of the war on terror.
His forces deployed in the badlands that border Afghanistan have lost more than 500 soldiers — “more than the whole of the coalition combined”. Musharraf himself has narrowly escaped three assassination attempts.
Pakistan’s military intelligence, the Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), last month helped foil the alleged Heathrow plot to blow up transatlantic flights and the six most senior Al-Qaeda officials to be caught so far, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, were all arrested in Pakistan.
So far, so impressive. On the other hand, how come those Al-Qaeda leaders were living in Pakistan not in caves but in residential areas, even a military cantonment in Khalid’s case? American special forces searching for Osama Bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri are convinced the ISI tipped off al-Zawahiri on two occasions when they got near.
Why do most would-be suicide bombers regard Pakistan as a finishing school? And while military planners in Washington focus on Tehran’s nuclear programme, remember where the Iranians acquired their uranium enrichment capability.
No country has done more for nuclear proliferation to rogue states than Pakistan through Abdul Qadeer Khan, the godfather of its own bomb. Khan was even using army planes to transport the parts.
In 2003 I spent a week with American troops from the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan at a godforsaken firebase called Shkin on the border with Pakistan. Every day fighters would come and take potshots at the Americans then run back across the invisible border. The soldiers could do nothing because Pakistan refused to allow hot pursuit.
For those of us who have followed Pakistan for some time, it’s a familiar story. Remember General Zia ul-Haq, the short military dictator with the big teeth who seized power in 1977? He, like Musharraf, spent two years as an international pariah. When the Soviet army crossed the Oxus into Afghanistan in 1979, he suddenly became the West’s most crucial ally.
Because US support to the Afghans was a covert operation, it was channelled through the ISI. But what the West ignored then, and again after 9/11, was that the ISI had its own agenda. Under Zia the army had been Islamicised and the ISI made sure most aid and arms went to its favourite fundamentalist warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, even though he openly preached anti-Americanism.
It was the ISI’s idea in the mid-1980s to ship in young Arabs, including Mr Bin Laden, and train them to fight. When the Russians left, and the West overnight abandoned Afghanistan (and slashed aid to Pakistan), the ISI supported the creation of the Taliban.
After 9/11, Musharraf had little option but to join the war on terror. Even if the Pakistani leader was genuinely committed, the ISI saw no reason to stop supporting those same Afghans they had been helping for more than two decades.
Besides, these training camps had become useful for providing militants to fight in Indian-held Kashmir, Pakistan’s single most important policy objective. So whenever Musharraf has come under pressure from Washington, he has banned jihadi groups and watched them reform under new names. Or he has agreed to regulate madrasahs, the Islamist schools, then done nothing.
In almost five years since the fall of the Taliban in Kabul, not a single Taliban leader or commander has been arrested in Pakistan. Yet they operate openly from there, particularly around the town of Quetta, long known as Taliban Central.
“Is Pakistan playing a malevolent role by supplying training?” asked a diplomat involved in drawing up our Afghan policy. “Well, we haven’t found a smoking gun. It seems Musharraf is guilty of the sin of omission.” He pointed out that with 2.5m Afghan refugees still in camps in Pakistan, there is a plentiful source of fighters, and with 650 crossing points, the border is impossible to monitor.
Whether Islamabad is simply turning a blind eye to training and recruitment inside its own borders or actively involved, the West’s failure to see Pakistan as the real battleground of the war on terror is undoubtedly one of the reasons the Taliban have re-emerged as such a threat.
For obvious reasons, most leaders wait till they are no longer in office to release their memoirs. Musharraf’s choice of title is intriguing. In the Line of Fire was a Hollywood movie starring Clint Eastwood as a veteran secret service agent haunted by his failure many years earlier to save President John F Kennedy from assassination.
Is the general trying to tell us something?
October 8, 2006 at 01:43 AM in Lashkar-e-Taiba | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
Britain says Pakistan is hiding Taliban chief - Sunday Times - Times Online
Christina Lamb, Kabul
THE British general commanding Nato troops in Afghanistan is to confront Pakistan’s president over his country’s support for the Taliban.
Among the evidence amassed is the address of the Taliban’s leader in a Pakistani city.
Lieutenant-General David Richards will fly to Islamabad tomorrow to try to persuade Pervez Musharraf to rein in his military intelligence service, which Richards believes is training Taliban fighters to attack British troops. He will request that key Taliban leaders living in Pakistan be arrested.
The evidence compiled by American, Nato and Afghan intelligence includes satellite pictures and videos of training camps for Taliban soldiers and suicide bombers inside Pakistan.
Captured Taliban fighters and failed suicide bombers have confirmed that they were trained by the Pakistani intelligence service, known as the ISI. The information includes an address in Quetta where Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, is said to live.
Musharraf had publicly acknowledged “a Taliban problem on the Pakistan side of the border”, said Richards. “Undoubtedly something has got to happen,” he added.
“We’ve got to accept that the Pakistan government is not omnipotent and it isn’t easy but it has to be done and we’re working very hard on it. I’m very confident that the Pakistan government’s intent is clear and they will be delivering on it.”
The initiative emerged as the commander of British forces in Afghanistan, Brigadier Ed Butler, called for more troop-carrying helicopters. He was responding to a promise by Tony Blair that the forces could have whatever extra resources they needed. But a defence source said it was difficult to see where new British transport helicopters could be found.
Political leaders have been reluctant to put pressure on Musharraf for fear of destabilising a nuclear-armed country in which Islamic fundamentalists are strong.
This week’s intervention comes at a sensitive time for Blair after the ISI apparently helped avert the alleged planned bombing of transatlantic airliners flying from Heathrow. But the Taliban’s re-emergence has coincided with mounting evidence of ISI involvement, prompting frustration in Afghanistan, where 30 British servicemen have been killed.
“I feel real vitriol seeing our boys dying because of Pakistan,” said one British officer.
A senior US commander added: “We just can’t ignore it any more. Musharraf’s got to prove which side he is on.”
Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, has repeatedly complained of Pakistan’s role in providing a haven for Taliban fighters, saying they have openly run camps in Karachi and Quetta. “There is an open campaign by Pakistan against Afghanistan and the presence of coalition troops here,” he said.
In Washington two weeks ago Karzai handed Pakistan the names and addresses of alleged handlers of suicide bombers using a camp near Peshawar that had been infiltrated by an Afghan informer. Last Wednesday a rubbish bag was discovered in the camp containing his body.
October 8, 2006 at 01:36 AM in Al Qaeda | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
The Observer | World | US pushed MI5 into airport terror swoop
Fight over suspect in Pakistan revealed as Musharraf quashes terror claims
Jamie Doward and Mark Townsend
Sunday October 1, 2006
The Observer
The US warned Britain that it was prepared to seize the key suspect in the UK's biggest ever anti-terrorism operation and fly him to a secret detention centre for interrogation by American agents, even if this meant riding roughshod over its closest ally, The Observer can reveal.
American intelligence agents told their British counterparts they were ready to 'render' Rashid Rauf, a British citizen allegedly linked to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and who was under surveillance in Pakistan, unless he was picked up immediately. Rauf is the key suspect in the alleged plot to detonate explosives on up to 10 transatlantic planes that was exposed in August and, according to the police, would have brought 'mass murder on an unimaginable scale'.
The Americans' demand for Rauf's quick arrest dismayed the British intelligence services, which were worried that it could prompt terrorist cells in the UK working on separate plots to bring forward their plans or go underground. In the weeks preceding his arrest it is understood that MI5 and MI6 discussed with their US counterparts the best way to dismantle the alleged plot. Britain wanted more time to monitor Rauf, but the US was adamant that Rauf should be arrested immediately.
The revelation casts new light on the nature of America's relationship with Britain in the war on terrorism and provides further evidence of its suspicions that Pakistan was not fully committed in the war against al-Qaeda.
It comes as Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, today launches a fierce defence of claims that his country has fuelled Islamic terrorism and attacks Britain for failing to integrate Muslims into its society.
US intelligence has harboured fears for many years that Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, has not done enough to combat al-Qaeda and as a result was worried it would allow Rauf to flee. But the British intelligence agencies were concerned that seizing Rauf too soon would compromise further investigations. Although there were allegedly significant amounts of wire-tap evidence, this could not be made use of in a British court, so a decision was taken to continue with Rauf's surveillance.
However, a senior intelligence source has told The Observer that US agents had agreed on a plan to seize Rauf and fly him to an interrogation centre at a secret location if he remained at large.
Immediately following the US's veiled ultimatum that MI6 should 'lift' Rauf, which was communicated to ISI, he was arrested by Pakistani intelligence officials, a move that forced the British police to carry out a series of arrests as they looked to pick up those allegedly linked to him. Rauf's father, Abdel, was arrested in Pakistan. Rauf's brother, Tayib, from Birmingham, was arrested and later released without charge.
The intelligence source said the alleged plot had not been at the advanced planning stage.
Rauf remains in custody in Pakistan. Britain is now looking to extradite him in connection with the murder of his uncle in Birmingham in 2002.
Tellingly, although Britain's Home Secretary, John Reid, was full of praise for the part played by Pakistan in uncovering the alleged plot, the US did not pay tribute to the country's role.
American concerns about Pakistan's role in the war on terror were echoed last week. A leaked document from a Ministry of Defence think-tank, the Defence Academy, suggested that Pakistan was sabotaging British efforts in Afghanistan. The report blamed the ISI for 'indirectly supporting terrorism and extremism, whether in London on 7/7 or in Afghanistan or Iraq'.
Today, Musharraf uses an interview on ITV's Sunday Edition to fiercely reject claims the 7/7 bombers were indoctrinated in his country. 'The main problem is here in your society, which is allowing these youngsters to be indoctrinated and then attack you through suicide bombs,' Musharraf tells the programme.
Musharraf also says he believes Osama bin Laden could be hiding in Pakistan but rules out US forces being allowed to enter the country to hunt for him. 'We are in the hunt for Osama together,' Musharraf says. 'When we locate him, we'll hunt him down.'
Separately, it has emerged that a senior government official has joined a growing list of experts to warn the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have exacerbated the threat from Islamic terrorism.
David Richmond, the director general of Defence and Intelligence at the Foreign Office, states in a paper for the Royal United Services Institute that concerns over foreign policy are used by al-Qaeda to justify attacks and have helped terrorist cells to recruit. According to Richmond, misgivings over foreign policy among elements of the Muslim community are 'exploited by al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups to justify terrorism and ... propagate their message and seek new recruits'.
October 1, 2006 at 10:31 AM in Special Relationship | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home