Intelligence

Belgium's agents lose their guns

BBC NEWS | Europe | Belgium's agents lose their guns

Belgium's secret service has confiscated guns from its agents following a near miss last year.

Members of the Surete de l'Etat were ordered to disarm after news emerged that an agent only narrowly escaped injury when another opened fire.

Weapons will be issued only if specifically needed, the justice ministry told the BBC News website.

Separately, the work of the state security body may change if a ban on phone tapping is lifted.

Agents could previously take their guns home with them, said Saar Vanderplaetsen, chief spokeswoman for Justice Minister Laurette Onkelinx.

The shooting incident happened in October or November but was only brought to the notice of Surete chief Koen Dassen in February.

A working group is now examining the Surete's internal procedures and Mr Dassen has ordered the confiscation for the period of the study.

Ms Vanderplaetsen said she could not comment on the actual incident, in which the Libre Belgique newspaper reported that an agent who was "without a doubt under the influence of antidepressants" had discharged his weapon.

'Reassurance'

The justice minister's spokeswoman stressed that Surete agents were not involved in normal police work such as making arrests, but in collecting information.

According to Libre Belgique, however, agents prefer to be armed while out on missions as they often find themselves in hostile environments when investigating, for example, organised crime, and like to think they can defend themselves.

"It's a bit of a shame that they should be taking measures now... when there was never any problem before," one unnamed agent told the paper.

Ms Vanderplaetsen told the BBC that a proposal by the minister to change the law to allow telephone taps could take effect within months.

The measure would give Belgium's secret police similar surveillance rights to those enjoyed by European counterparts.

A report in the UK's Daily Telegraph newspaper notes that the Belgian security apparatus has been a source of frustration for other Western agencies.

April 26, 2005 at 02:06 PM in Espionage - general | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Security agencies mushrooming

TheStar.com - Security agencies mushrooming

Hot topic in Ottawa; no current list of spy groups on books

`Obviously more than anyone is aware of,' Arar lawyer says

MICHELLE SHEPHARD
STAFF REPORTER

The acronyms are dizzying.

CSIS, CSE and the RCMP are the big players. But PSEPC is now in the game and don't forget the DND, CBSA or FINTRAC and CATSA.

Together, these federal agencies make up part of Canada's web of security operations. Their roles have been enhanced with little scrutiny over the last three years as various government agencies have beefed up security operations, leading some to now question just who is in the spy game?

"Obviously there are more than anyone is aware of," says Toronto lawyer Lorne Waldman, who represents Maher Arar at the federal inquiry probing the circumstances of his case.

"It has been surprising to discover the extent in which agencies can be involved."

Arar, 33, a Syrian-born Canadian, was detained in the United States in September 2002, deported to Syria and kept for nearly a year before being released.

Waldman said he was alarmed when it was revealed at the inquiry that it wasn't just the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Canadian Security Intelligence Service who were somehow involved in his client's case, but that information was handled by a low-profile division within the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT), called ISI.

Department spokesperson Rodney Moore said ISI is the foreign intelligence division and provides information to the minister, but could not be more specific as to the division's power or responsibilities.

It is also unclear how, or if, the division's responsibilities have changed since 2001.

There is no current list of federal agencies involved in security operations, but the Privy Council Office is in the process of updating their March 2001 list, which was written before the advent of such agencies as Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Canada and the Canadian Border Security Agency.

In a report to the Arar commission last month, Shirley Heafey, the head of the RCMP's complaints commission, raised the issue of too many agencies and too little oversight.

She stressed the need for a new federal watchdog, powerful enough to make not only the Mounties, but all spy agencies, answerable to the public.

"The existing patchwork approach to civilian review of national security activities poses significant risks for rights and freedoms, since these are the principles that may be compromised when national security activities are permitted to go unchecked," she wrote.

It's a hot topic in Ottawa these days and will be the focus of an international conference next month that's co-organized by CSIS's watchdog agency, the Security Intelligence Review Committee and the Canadian Centre of Intelligence and Security Studies.

But there's still much debate and little action, says Wesley Wark, an intelligence specialist at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies.

"We are far from the situation in which we can say that the expanded realm of security and intelligence has met and accepted its counterpart — true democratic accountability."

Wark says that within the security and intelligence community there's a running debate over the best model of organization of intelligence agency — those who argue for centralization and those in the de-centralizer camp.

The American model, following the 9/11 commission report that noted tragic gaps in intelligence sharing, is now centralized.

Canada remains still largely de-centralized Wark argues.

"The Canadian model historically tends towards de-centralization, with weak co-ordination at the centre.

"The model remains intact despite the 9/11 earthquake," says Wark.

"My feeling is that co-ordination and central control remain a problem, and so long as they remain a problem a basically decentralized system, with many security and intelligence fiefdoms, poses the risks of slipshod performance and potential abuse."

April 2, 2005 at 08:55 AM in Espionage - general | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

The spy game

Economist.com | Reforming the intelligence services

Mar 17th 2005
From The Economist print edition

The use and abuse of secret agencies
"AN ARMY without secret agents", Sun Tzu observed 2,500 years ago in "The Art of War", “is exactly like a man without eyes and ears.� From Moses and Caesar to Churchill and Stalin, rulers have made use of spies to ferret out useful information about their opponents, both at home and abroad. Yet even as governments have built up their intelligence services, they have cursed the failings of their spies: their cost, their tendency to break the law and, above all, their habit of getting things wrong.

America's and Britain's spying operations both stand cursed at the moment (see article). Two years after the Iraq war began, both services are guilty first of supplying faulty information about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and then of letting that information be exaggerated, or at least simplified, by their political masters. America's vast security apparatus also failed to prevent the September 11th atrocity. Add in other errors from the not-so-recent past—the failure to foresee the end of the Soviet Union or that India and Pakistan would go nuclear—and these intelligence systems look dangerously accident-prone.

More money, more power, same old faces

On the face of it, the spies have been punished for this failure in a curious way. They have been given vastly more money to spend. Their powers have been increased, particularly in surveillance. And, given the immensity of their failures, remarkably few senior spooks have been removed or punished. George Bush recently awarded the congressional medal of freedom to the CIA director, George Tenet, who reportedly called the evidence of WMD in Iraq “a slam-dunk”.

In fact, both countries have now launched their most thorough intelligence reorganisations since the end of the second world war. In America, the change is more obvious. George Bush has appointed a new intelligence overlord who is supposed to bond together America's unwieldy 15 agencies (and a $40 billion budget): John Negroponte, the current ambassador to Iraq, goes before a Senate confirmation hearing next month. There is to be a new National Counter-Terrorism Centre. Mr Bush has also installed a new director at the CIA, Porter Goss, who has caused a fuss in Langley by booting out a few of the CIA's top brass. And the CIA and the FBI, long reluctant allies, have been told to work together.

Britain's intelligence service is much smaller than America's and heavily reliant on it, especially for high-tech data. But it is one of only three truly global services (the other is Russia's), and for historical reasons is still looked up to in the business. Its reorganisation, on which a report is due to be presented to Parliament soon, has been more subtle than America's. It has its own new counter-terrorism centre, but it has focused largely on setting up double-check systems to see that material is genuine and assessments are challenged.

Do these reorganisations make sense? Or have the two countries just handed over more liberties and cash to bureaucrats skilled in telling politicians what they want to hear?

Two things caution against any rapid judgment. First, it is always hard to work out how good spies are (their main achievements are usually things that do not happen). Second, the main intelligence failures concerning both Iraq and September 11th were less to do with organisational flow-charts and money than with a shortage of rigour and flair. America relied too much on high-tech surveillance. It does not seem to have had any agents in either al-Qaeda or Saddamite Iraq—despite the fact that Saddam Hussein had plenty of enemies and Osama bin Laden was recruiting willy-nilly. September 11th happened largely because nobody at the time could conceive that it would happen; nowadays, the FBI might be more suspicious of young Arab gentlemen taking flying lessons without wanting to know how to land.

Putting those two caveats to one side, the current reorganisation in America still seems flawed. The old system—a mess of competing agencies mainly set up to collect information on other countries, not on shadowy non-state actors like Mr bin Laden—plainly needed changing. But the reforms look half-hearted. For instance, having a single figure in charge of intelligence probably makes sense, but even Mr Negroponte's new power will not give him a real grip on his sprawling empire (much of which is run by the Defence Department). America has also resisted the idea of setting up a domestic intelligence service similar to Britain's MI5; instead, it will persist with the idea of turning the FBI's policemen into spies.

Freedom to snoop but not to imprison

What of the worries about civil liberties and political interference? Most of the new powers granted to the spooks have to do with surveillance and information-sharing. Those seem a regrettable necessity in the light of September 11th. What is important is that these new powers are regularly monitored and assessed. That brings in the question of political oversight, and it is here that the picture starts to cloud over.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the worry persists that the spies are too close to their masters. Mr Goss is a former Republican congressman; the current head of MI6, Sir John Scarlett, was in effect Tony Blair's main witness in the fuss about whether Downing Street “sexed up” its Iraqi dossier. The current reorganisations make too little attempt to clear up these conflicts of interest. This could matter enormously if the politicians once again call on intelligence to justify military action—in Iran, say, or North Korea.

In both Britain and America, the spies remain on watch. The current threats—terrorism and proliferation—have made their work both more important and much harder. Meanwhile, the comforting idea that technology would make spying more of a high-tech science was blown apart by September 11th and the Iraq fiasco; it is now a more risky, more human affair where real eyes and ears matter. So far the spooks have been given much of what they want: more money, more power and a relatively gentle reorganisation. They now need to prove their worth.

March 19, 2005 at 09:06 AM in Espionage - general | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Can spies be made better?

Economist.com | America's intelligence reforms

Mar 17th 2005 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition

In the wake of recent shocks, intelligence-gathering is being reformed on both sides of the Atlantic. The task is daunting. We begin in America

Get article background

“WE TEND to meet any new situation in life by reorganising,� Petronius Arbiter, a 1st-century Roman satirist, is supposed to have remarked. “And what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation.� Wonderful, indeed, for John Negroponte, America's ambassador to Iraq, who will leave Baghdad this month to become America's first director of national intelligence (DNI). Mr Negroponte may come to question which job is the more harrowing. On one side, murder and mayhem; on the other, mayhem and mystery.

The creation of the DNI was a well publicised reform, approved by both Republicans and Democrats, which was intended to improve the performance of America's intelligence agencies in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001. But precisely what power it will confer on Mr Negroponte is, as yet, unknown. So too is what power he will subtract from others within the 15 arcane agencies he will direct. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the best known, accounts for only about a tenth of the intelligence budget; the biggest of all, the National Security Agency (NSA), with 30,000 employees, resides in the Department of Defence (DOD) under the pugnacious Donald Rumsfeld. As Mr Negroponte turns his thoughts away from bombs and gunfire inside the green zone, he may hear a rattle of daggers being drawn in Washington, Arlington and Langley.

America's secret world is inefficient and demoralised, and has been for some time. The CIA in particular is an unreformed, substantially unaccountable bureaucracy, which has almost never sacked anyone, which appears deluded by its own mythology and which, despite some notable successes, is burdened by a miserable run of failures. The entrance-hall at Langley is decorated with a black star for every CIA officer killed fighting the cold war. A more telling record, according to several former spooks, is that the agency in those years did not recruit a single mid-level or high-level Soviet agent. Every significant CIA informant was a volunteer. And the agency was comprehensively infiltrated. At one point, every CIA case-officer working on Cuba was a double agent. All but three CIA officers working on East Germany allegedly worked for the Stasi. As for those brave volunteer agents, Aldrich Ames, a greedy drunkard in the CIA directorate of operations who was bought by the Russians, put paid to many—as did another mole, Robert Hanssen, in the FBI.

When it comes to recruitment and filing intelligence from the field, quantity has often mattered most. In cold-war Africa, American spooks allegedly paid for the same information obtained for nothing by American diplomats over lunch. One recent case-officer, Lindsay Moran, says she was aware that an agent she was running in the Balkans was peddling worthless information, but she was repeatedly refused permission to end the contact. “It gets depressing,” she said. “You start to wonder whether we can do anything good at all.”

More recent events have brought shame on the intelligence agencies as a whole. They failed to predict both the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the Soviet Union's break-up a decade later. In 1998, America's spies were taken by surprise when India tested a nuclear bomb; they then advised Bill Clinton to flatten one of Sudan's few medicine factories, wrongly believing that it made nerve gas. The next year, on the agencies' mistaken advice, an American warplane bombed China's embassy in Belgrade.

The two main prompts to reform, however, have been the September 11th attacks, in which some 3,000 Americans died, and the spooks' hallucinations about Iraq's weapons programmes, which were used to justify a war and bloody peace that have cost tens of thousands of lives. The fallout from Iraq—especially a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee last year, which accused the agencies of “a lack of information-sharing, poor management, and inadequate intelligence collection”—forced George Tenet, the CIA's second-longest-serving boss, to resign in June.

Porter Goss's burdens

Under Mr Tenet's successor, Porter Goss, a former Republican congressman and spy, a dozen senior spooks have been sacked and two dozen have quit in fury. Mr Goss's aides—most of whom have had no previous experience of intelligence work—are said to be thuggish managers. Mr Goss is meanwhile finding his job tough. On March 2nd, he said he was “a little amazed at the workload”, which was “too much for this mortal”. Merely preparing the president's daily intelligence briefing takes him five hours.

It was partly to ease this burden that the DNI was created, in a package of reforms passed in December. These were broadly in line with recommendations made by the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, whose vivid report into the attacks was a deserved, if unlikely, bestseller last year. (The recommendations were not informed by the foul-up on Iraq; a presidential commission into the pre-war Iraq intelligence is due to report later this month.)

The DNI will be charged with co-ordinating all the secret agencies, a job which the CIA's chief—as the director of central intelligence—has performed only in theory hitherto. The DNI will thus be held accountable for the performance of each agency. Alongside a new multi-agency National Counterterrorism Centre (NCTC)—which will have wider powers than its existing equivalent, and may be the prototype for more specialist centres, focused on China and proliferation issues—the DNI represents the biggest organisational change to America's spy world since 1947.

The 9/11 Commission's report told mostly the story of the months and moments leading up to the attacks, with many details of the agencies' bungling. The CIA noticed that two known terrorists had obtained American visas, but failed to inform the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which is responsible for domestic counter-terrorism. Notoriously, certain FBI bosses failed to pick up on a report that a group of Arab men was learning to fly planes, but not to land them. Overall, the commissioners diagnosed a grave reluctance to share information within and among the agencies. Most seriously, they found that the FBI's two main departments, responsible for intelligence and criminal investigations, barely communicated. In part, they were deterred by laws safeguarding Americans from government meddling, though the reach of these laws was often exaggerated.

More generally, the commission observed a “failure of imagination” in the agencies' response to the warning signs they did observe. A CIA report filed in 1998 had warned that al-Qaeda might carry out suicide attacks with hijacked planes; but the report's authors later said they could barely remember having included the detail. The problems were only partly organisational. Indeed, the commission noted that, when tipped off that al-Qaeda was planning a range of horrific attacks to mark the end of the last millennium, the agencies performed well; a number of bomb attacks on embassies in the Middle East were averted.

The commission proposed that a DNI, crudely analogous to the head of the armed forces, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, should be hired to oversee all the agencies and correct what had gone wrong. To lend weight to his admonishments, the DNI was to be given charge of the agencies' combined $40 billion budget, though most of that is controlled by the Pentagon. The DNI would be just what the agencies had not been: vigilant, imaginative and single-minded.

Devilment in the details

Nobody really disputes the idea that America's intelligence system, which was designed in 1947, was out of date, disorganised and had no recognisable chief. Its 15 squabbling baronies, which were set up to deal with conventional enemies, display precious little cohesion (with the Pentagon particularly protective of the agencies it controls). It was thus not surprising that the 9/11 commissioners fastened on the idea of appointing an overall chief to bring the muddle together. The question is whether this new job, without any other structural reform, can actually improve the system.

By the time the commission delivered its recommendations, some of the more useful ones were almost three years out of date. The commission's period under investigation ended on September 11th 2001; the commission's report was delivered 34 months later. In the intervening time, the war on terror was launched and changes were made. First, under the Patriot Act, many of the inter-agency firewalls protecting Americans' civil liberties were broken down. FBI and other agents were obliged to share intelligence on terrorists within and among the agencies. The director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, was required to attend the president's daily intelligence briefing, given by the director of central intelligence (DCI).

Huge resources were shifted to counter-terrorism. In January 2003, a multi-agency counter-terrorism think-tank, the Terrorist Threat Integration Centre, was formed inside the CIA's headquarters. The centre produces a daily briefing on terrorist threats and counter-terrorism operations, which the president hears after the DCI's.

When the 9/11 Commission added its own recommendations to the pile, they were accepted rapidly. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, endorsed the report almost before he could have read it. Bereaved relatives of the hijackers' victims rallied behind its recommendations. Reluctantly, and to Mr Rumsfeld's great annoyance, Mr Bush endorsed it too.

To general surprise, Mr Bush after his re-election made good on that endorsement, signing into law the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act. It was modelled on the commission's recommendations, with a few modifications insisted on by pals of Mr Rumsfeld. For example, in keeping with the commission's demands, the act authorises the DNI to “design and deliver” a unified intelligence budget. But it also says that the authority of the cabinet secretaries should be upheld.

This has created confusion over who will, in fact, control the purse-strings. To extricate the defence intelligence budgets from the wider defence budget could take several years and a staff of several hundred experts. It might not even be desirable. America's generals almost always get first dibs on the intelligence assets, such as spy satellites, that they share with civilian agencies, and in wartime they always do. The law similarly gives the DNI control over the agencies' personnel, but here too there is devilment in the detail: in practice, the DNI can veto the appointment of some second-tier officials, but he will not be able to sack agency chiefs.

To shore up the DNI's putative powers, Mr Bush has suggested that Mr Negroponte, not Mr Goss, will deliver his morning intelligence briefing. In theory, this should allow Mr Goss to concentrate on managing the CIA. In practice, the briefing is likely still to be prepared by the CIA and Mr Goss will still be required to attend the meetings, with Mr Negroponte appearing as an over-qualified court herald. Alternatively, he too could spend half his working day drafting the briefing. He will exert even less control over what goes into the counter-terrorism briefing that follows it, because although the DNI will be in overall charge of the NCTC, the agency chiefs retain control of their operations. Yet Mr Negroponte is to be held accountable for their mistakes.

These uncertainties have fuelled a noisy and ill-tempered debate about the reforms in a country whose spies have traditionally excited fierce passions, and where national security is a national obsession. Left-wingers loathe the CIA, in particular, for its cold-war habit of plotting to murder left-wing leaders, including Patrice Lumumba of Congo and Fidel Castro of Cuba. On the right, the CIA is often considered a nest of liberals, bureaucratic and broken beyond repair, whose salvageable assets should be handed over to the Pentagon. Some hawks justify the policy of pre-emption on the ground that the agencies cannot be trusted to give warning of imminent threats. And, of course, moderate opponents of all the above tend to take the opposite view.

A cornucopia of incompetence

Such passions lie behind the unerring certainty with which America's politicians and pundits speak of a world that remains, after all, secret. For many right-wingers, the DNI office will prove disastrous, adding an unwanted layer of bureaucracy to an already constipated system. At worst, it will go the way of the Office of Homeland Security, which was created after the September 11th attacks with a mandate to co-ordinate agencies such as customs and the coast guard, but which has since proved toothless and wasteful. Others note the few factors in Mr Negroponte's favour. His chosen deputy, Lieut-General Michael Hayden, is a well-respected former head of the NSA. Above all, Mr Negroponte will have daily access to a president who holds him in high regard.

The truth is, no one knows how the reforms will proceed. Mr Negroponte may gain a modicum of control over the agencies. At best, he may ensure that the information channels opened within and between the agencies after the hijack attacks stay open. Yet, on his own at least, he will not be able to fix the agencies' most grievous problems, highlighted by their performance on Iraq.

Last year's Senate report into the Iraq debacle found America's spies—and especially the CIA—negligent and incompetent at every stage of the intelligence-collection and analysis process. The CIA had not a single agent in Iraq after the UN's weapons inspectors were expelled in 1998. They had no fresh intelligence to claim, as they did, that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. Their claim that Iraq was “reconstituting its nuclear programme” was based on the country's import of some aluminium tubes that could have been used for other purposes, and was fiercely contested by most experts across the agencies. They did not, at least, suggest that Iraq was in cahoots with al-Qaeda, although members of the government, notably Dick Cheney, the vice-president, did so often.

The key to the agencies' misapprehensions, the committee found, was a predilection to “group-think”. In other words, they failed to re-examine received truths—for example, the historical fact that Iraq had prohibited weapons. This was made manifest in numerous ways. The CIA's analysis was seldom double-checked; detection of dual-purpose materials, that might possibly be used in weapon programmes, was routinely taken as proof that such programmes existed; and ambiguous scraps of intelligence were compiled to reach an unambiguous conclusion, a process known as “layering”. These problems, said the report, stemmed “from a broken corporate culture and poor management, and will not be solved by additional funding and personnel.”

The spies' friends (and Mr Bush's enemies) rebut this. On chemical and biological weapons, they say, the agencies were not all that wrong—the report acknowledged that Iraq had retained the technology to rebuild its stockpiles—and, moreover, no other western intelligence service thought differently. On Iraq's nuclear programme, they say, the government was to blame: under intense pressure to provide the case for a war that Mr Bush had already decided to fight, doubters were muffled and caveats were cut.

Another defence is that intelligence, whether human or, far more commonly, electronic, rarely yields the smoking-gun proofs that policymakers may wish for. It is an accumulation of indicators, contradictory and unreliable, which intelligence analysts turn into an estimation of a hidden reality—or, even more precariously, use to predict the future. Intelligence is inherently faulty. True: but why then did Mr Tenet—in a phrase quoted by Bob Woodward, which Mr Tenet has not disputed—describe the case for Iraq having banned weapons as “a slam-dunk”?

Mr Negroponte's uses

Despite all the recommendations, the rot may be hard to stop. After a decade of cuts—the CIA's budget was chopped by 23% under Bill Clinton—the agencies are indeed getting more money and more spies. This year, the CIA will graduate its biggest-ever class of case-officers. With only around 1,200 stationed overseas, more case-officers are needed, but only if they are properly equipped for the latest challenges. Around half of all the CIA's case-officers are in Baghdad. But with only a handful of them fluent in Arabic, they are mostly confined to the green zone, condemned to interview Iraqi interpreters and watch endless episodes of “Sex and the City” on DVD.

Further organisational reform would not eliminate the problem. America's spies do not necessarily need shifting; a good few need sacking. Mr Negroponte is in too lofty and exposed a seat to manage such a programme. But if he can shoulder some of the DCI's more onerous duties, including the president's briefing and the intelligence budget, he might free a dynamic CIA director to wield the axe for him. There is no time to waste. In a precarious world, the full range of American intelligence and intelligence-gathering on, for example, China's military build-up and Iran's nuclear ambitions needs urgent re-evaluating. But that dynamic director may not be Mr Goss, who sounds awfully tired.

March 19, 2005 at 08:45 AM in Espionage - general | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

British spy 'fired the shot that finished off Rasputin'

Telegraph | News | British spy 'fired the shot that finished off Rasputin'

Filed: 19/09/2004)
Rasputin, the Russian monk who became the confidant of Alexandra, the Tsarina, and her husband, Tsar Nicholas II, was killed by a British agent, according to a documentary to be broadcast next month.

Oswald Rayner

An investigation into his death in 1916 has concluded that he was murdered not as had been supposed by disaffected Russian aristocrats but by Oswald Rayner, a member of the Secret Intelligence Bureau who was working at the Russian court in St Petersburg.

Richard Cullen, a retired Scotland Yard commander who has been studying the case with Andrew Cook, an intelligence historian, says that a new forensic analysis and an examination of official records helped him to reach his conclusion.

"I am 99.9 per cent certain of this," said Mr Cullen, whose findings will be broadcast in the BBC2 Timewatch programme on October 1. "There is a fair weight of evidence to show that Rayner was the man. We have conclusive proof that the previously accepted versions of events are fabrications."

Rasputin claimed to have "mystical powers", which gained him the confidences of first the Tsarina, Alexandra - who thought that he could cure her haemophiliac son - and Tsar Nicholas. But he was highly unpopular among courtiers and his killers evaded trial, publishing memoirs that described the murder in detail.

Now it is claimed that the SIB wanted to kill Rasputin, who was hoping to broker peace between Russia and Germany, because of his influence over the Tsar. The fear, according to Mr Cullen, was that if such a deal had been agreed in 1916, 350,000 German troops would have been freed to fight the Allies on the Western Front.

According to Timewatch Rayner was known to be in St Petersburg in December 1916 when Rasputin died. A close friend from university was Prince Felix Yusupov, at whose sumptuous palace the murder took place.

Yusupov claimed a prominent role in the death. In his account, until now the accepted version of events, he lured Rasputin to his palace and fed him cyanide-laced cakes. When these did not take effect, he got a gun from the study where his co-conspirators waited, and fired at the monk's heart.

He returned to the murder scene an hour later and was horrified to discover that Rasputin was still alive. The monk leapt to his feet, attacked Yusupov, then fled into the courtyard where he was gunned down by another conspirator, Vladimir Purishkevich.

Yusupov wrote that the next day he dined with Rayner, who "knew of our conspiracy and had come in search of news".

The BBC documentary says that modern forensic evidence contradicts this account. Post-mortem photographs of Rasputin show a mysterious third bullet wound in the centre of his forehead. The precise positioning of this, the fatal shot, suggests that it was the work of a professional killer. It was also fired at close range, yet Purishkevich shot Rasputin from behind, at a distance.

The three bullet holes are of different sizes, and forensic scientists have now determined that the bullets were fired from three different guns.

Mr Cullen concludes that there was a third gunman, and that this was Rayner, who knew about the plot, was at the palace and wanted Rasputin dead.

Photographs of the palace taken after the body was discovered show a long, straight line of blood across the courtyard, ending in a pool of blood near a gate where a car was waiting.

Mr Cullen surmises that after being shot by both Yusupov and Purishkevich, Rasputin was carried across the courtyard but that before they reached the car, which was to have disposed of the body, he showed faint signs of life. Rayner promptly dispatched him with a bullet to the head.

Rayner's involvement was kept secret by his superiors and by the Russian conspirators, who were eager to gain the glory themselves. Further weight to this new version of events is a copy of a memo sent between Rayner's two superiors in St Petersburg, John Scale and Stephen Alley, who were away at the time of the murder. The memo reads: "Although matters have not proceeded entirely to plan, our objective has clearly been achieved. Reaction to the demise of 'Dark Forces' [a codename for Rasputin] has been well received by all, although a few awkward questions have already been asked about wider involvement. Rayner is attending to loose ends and will no doubt brief you on your return."

If Rayner was the killer he never spoke about what he had done. He burnt all his papers and took the secret to his grave in 1961. He left Russia before the end of the war and in 1920 worked for The Daily Telegraph as Finnish correspondent.

He spent his final years in the village of Botley, Oxfordshire, where he was a fund-raiser for his local church. His only son, John Felix Rayner, named after his friend Yusupov, died in 1965.

6 February 2003: Crusade to make Rasputin a saint splits church
14 March 2000: Darling Rasputin: telegrams that reveal Tsarina's love affair with the Mad Monk

Timewatch - BBC

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004.

September 18, 2004 at 11:56 PM in Espionage - general | Permalink | TrackBack (29) | Top of page | Blog Home

UNDERSTANDING POWER THE INDISPENSABLE CHOMSKY

The Footnotes to Understanding Power

Noam Chomsky is universally accepted as one of the preeminent public intellectuals of the modern era. Over the past thirty years, broadly diverse audiences have gathered to attend his sold-out lectures. Now, in Understanding Power, Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel have assembled the best of Chomsky's talks on the past, present, and future of the politics of power.

In a series of enlightening and wide-ranging discussions--published here for the first time--Chomsky radically reinterprets the events of the past three decades, covering topics from foreign policy during the Vietnam War to the decline of welfare under the Clinton administration. And as he elucidates the connection between America's imperialistic foreign policy and social inequalities at home, Chomsky also discerns the necessary steps to take toward social change. With an eye to political activism and the media's role in popular struggle, as well as U.S. foreign and domestic policy, Understanding Power is definitive Chomsky.

Characterized by Chomsky's accessible and informative style, Understanding Power is the ideal book for those new to his work as well as for those who have been listening for years.

Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel are public defenders in New York City.

September 11, 2004 at 04:04 PM in Espionage - general | Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Top of page | Blog Home

Akhmed Zakayev, an aide to Chechen seperatist leader has offered his perspective upon recent events

Chechen Separatists Say “Third Force� Behind Terrorist Attacks

Akhmed Zakayev, a special envoy to Chechen separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov has said that “a third force that brought Russian President Vladimir Putin to power� is behind all the terrorist attacks committed in Russia over the past two weeks. London-based Zakayev said this in an exclusive interview with the Caucasus Times newspaper, printed in Prague, Czech Republic.

Zakayev believes that the twin aircraft crash last week, the blast near Rizhskaya metro station on 31 August and today’s events in North Ossetia are links in the same chain and that “the same power that wants to destabilize the situation in the North Caucasus region” is behind them.

A militant Muslim group called the Islambouli Brigades earlier claimed responsibility for downing two passenger plains and for the bomb blast in Moscow. The legitimacy of the group and the authenticity of such statements have not been verified.

September 6, 2004 at 08:27 PM in Espionage - general | Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Top of page | Blog Home

View to a kill

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | View to a kill

Those who say Russia should have handled the school massacre better are missing the wider point

David Aaronovitch, columnist of year
Sunday September 5, 2004
The Observer

Friday afternoon, and the kids are coming out of school. They emerge in ones or twos, shyly, because they are new and don't yet know each other, spot their parents and smile. My Lily is one of them, and we hold hands on the way home.

Friday afternoon and the kids are coming out of school. They run terrified, half naked, bloodied, towards freedom. They leave behind the bodies of hundreds of their class-mates blown up by home-made explosives or shot down as they fled by gunmen on the school roof. I cannot bear to imagine what the parents of the dead children feel. I won't even try.

Fortunately the Beslan parents will not have seen the Friday evening news on the BBC sum up the day's events by describing them as a 'great embarrassment for President Putin.' Don't we all know that governments can stop this kind of thing either by arranging political settlements so that hostage-taking is unnecessary, or through sufficient military preparation? All terribly 'embarrassing'.

Certainly Russia has had a hard time recently. A week ago two planes were blown-up by suicide bombers. 90 men, women and children obliterated in mid-air. On Tuesday evening eight people were killed in a suicide bombing outside a Moscow metro station. A number of children - who the bomber presumably saw before she pressed the 'on' switch - were among the injured. Last summer two women suicide bombers blew themselves up at an open-air rock festival near, killing 17 people, mostly teenagers.

In the face of this ruthless exploitation of the softest of soft targets, do we (do the Russians) talk, shoot or give in? Which do we do in Iraq, when faced with hostage-taking by what are usually now called 'insurgents'?

Sometimes you aren't given the option, of course. Last week 12 Nepalese workers for a Jordanian construction company were killed by an organisation calling itself the Ansar al-Sunna Army. On video one was beheaded ('The blindfolded man moaned and a shrill wheeze was heard. The masked man then displayed the head to the camera before resting it on the decapitated body.') and the other 11 were shot ('Blood seeped from their bodies onto the sand'). The accompanying statement read, 'The ruling of God was implemented on 12 Nepalese who came to Iraq to fight against Muslims and to serve the Jews and Christians. They are from the Buddhist faith.' Nepal has no troops in Iraq.

In the same week al-Jazeera, which has allowed itself to be co-opted as the publicity arm of such organisations, aired a clip from a Zarqawi video showing three Turkish lorry drivers seated in front of some gunmen. Later the men were found dead near Samarra. Turkey has no troops in Iraq.

There were demands, however, made in the case of Enzo Baldoni, the Italian journalist and Red Cross worker, kidnapped and his driver killed by a group called the Islamic Army in Iraq. When the Italian government refused to withdraw its troops from Iraq, Baldoni was murdered.

The same group has been holding the two French journalists, Georges Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot, whose appeals to the French government to repeal the school hijab ban were broadcast on al-Jazeera. The French have naturally refused to comply with the repeal demand, but they did something else instead. Communications Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres appealed to the kidnappers, arguing that, 'We do not understand why journalists (were taken hostage ... when our country, in terms of Iraq, expressed with immense force in the United Nations the necessity of respecting international law to restore peace.'

I sympathise entirely with the desire to free these two men from the threat of death, but isn't de Vabres's position essentially that he quite understands why these groups kill Italians, murder some miserable Nepalese and execute a few Turks, but that it just isn't fair to do it to the French?

So the Islamic Action Front of Jordan (currently attempting to prevent proper penalties against so-called 'honour killers' in that country) says that the journalists' lives should be spared 'Because of France's distinguished position in rejecting the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq.' Not because you shouldn't murder journalists. A Hamas spokesman in Gaza agreed, arguing that freeing the Frenchmen would increase the isolation of Israel and the US. Not because you shouldn't kill journalists. The French argument, regrettably, amounts to the same thing.

Or, to put it another way, if you leave well alone you should be able to avoid being terrorised. Yesterday, in the wake of the Beslan school horror, the historian Corelli Barnett more or less blamed the crisis on the war against terror itself. His thesis was that, since September 11th, the actions of the West (and particularly the Americans) had made things far, far worse.

The problem with this is the simple one that the war with terror was declared by terror itself. Declared in Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi in 1998, declared in New York on 11 September. It wasn't until 11 September, however, that we began to appreciate the scale of what was already happening. The idea that, had we negotiated with the Taliban, left Saddam in place and put more pressure on Sharon to settle, kids would now be safe in North Ossetia, is just wishful thinking.

In Saturday's Guardian Isabel Hilton gave a more interesting explanation. This is an era, she pointed out, of asymmetric warfare in which - regrettably - outgunned insurgents eventually come after kids, journalists and Nepalese cooks. What else (she implied) are they going to do? But wasn't Gandhi's situation asymmetric? Did he take over schools and kill the kids? Did Mandela? Is it really the case that what we have here are outgunned liberation movements?

On Thursday night Channel Four showed the drama The Hamburg Cell, which attempted to get inside the minds of the young al-Qaeda operatives who carried out the 11 September hijackings. What the film showed was a classic cult in operation, with young men - pampered and envious, frustrated and egotistic - urging each other on to more and more pitiless acts of violence. The film not only explained the Twin Towers, it inadvertently explained Jonestown and the mass suicide in the Guyanese jungle.

It was also interesting to see how they provided intellectual justification for their actions. Everything was read in one direction: how Muslims were forced to suffer. So, for example, the West's inaction in Bosnia was thrown into the balance, but not its intervention on the side of the Muslims of Kosovo.

I finished watching The Hamburg Cell to find an email waiting. It was from a named professional in a British provincial city. He was complaining about a couple of anti-Muslim articles by men called Browne and Cummins, run in The Times and the Sunday Telegraph. Part of it read, 'I presume you are also a Jew because it is Jews who have lost their marbles and shoot themselves in both feet and legs.... You can't escape the conclusion that most of the commentators are Jewish and their primary aim is to get the Christians to beat the hell out of Islam and Muslims. But do not be expecting me to shed tears as the same bullies would turn on Jews again and may be there would be a final holocaust against them, invited by themselves.'

Where do I even begin? By pointing out that Browne and Cummins are not, on the face of it, Jewish names? How do I mollify a man whose every sentence is so flawed, yet so certain? Let alone a man who believes that God has instructed him to kill Nepalese cooks, or will absolve him if he shoots a fleeing child in the back?

I am not saying that the only answer is in security. In the case of Chechnya I take the argument of those who point out that, until five years ago and Moscow's reoccupation of the province, there was no significant terrorism there. It seems to me that an absolutely necessary part of the battle for a safer world consists of cutting away as much as you can of the potential support for terrorists.

The logic of this is not, however, to concede to terrorists. Much of what they want we can never give them, and much of what they want lies in the act of terrorism itself. And it as false a trope to say that there are usually political solutions to terrorism as to say that there are always military ones.

September 5, 2004 at 11:58 AM in Espionage - general | Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Top of page | Blog Home

Are you losing sleep because you don't know what's happening in this world of ours?

WW3 - World War 3 is Here! Learn How To Prepare

Sick of the constant babble spewed forth from almost all network news stations, where they seem to say so much, and yet inform so little about what is clearly the current World War Three?
Desperate in your quest to find the real reason events are transpiring the way they are, and yet not finding any answers?
Want to know when World War Three started? .............

http://www.threeworldwars.com/

July 11, 2004 at 10:56 AM in Espionage - general | Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Top of page | Blog Home

Spies big winners from budget (Australia)

By Max Blenkin
11may04

THE nation's spies are among the big budget winners with the Government allocating more than $750 million over the next five years to boost national security.

The key domestic intelligence agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) will receive $127 million more over the next four years to take on more staff and boost technical capabilities.
Australia's intelligence agencies have faced strident criticism over their reporting of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction plus claims of political interference and errors in their advice to government. Attorney General Philip Ruddock said ASIO would also receive an extra $7.4 million over the next two years to fund security measures for the 2006 Melbourne Commonwealth games.

"The Government is committed to ensuring that our security agencies have the authority and the resources to do their work properly," he said.

ASIO currently has a budget of $89 million and staff of more than 600.

Prime Minister John Howard last week revealed the key elements of the budget spending on security agencies with the overseas intelligence service, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) to receive $45.6 million to strengthen counter-terrorism capabilities while the Office of national Assessment will receive an extra $7.6 million.

Defence will receive $54.5 million over the next four years to employ more analysts in the Defence Intelligence Organisation as well as to enhance the capabilities of the Defence Signals Directorate and the Defence Imagery and Geospatial Organisation.

Defence will also host regional special forces commanders and counter-terrorism policy officials, presumably including members of Indonesia's controversial Kopassus special forces, at a counter-terrorism conference next month.

Mr Ruddock detailed a broad range of measures aimed at enhancing national security.

That includes funding of $36 million to the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC) for ongoing tracking of criminal and terrorist money trails plus $6.2 million to continue the work of the national security hotline.

He said the Government would also provide $36.8 million to enhance the overseas response and investigative capacity of the Australian Federal Police (AFP) which also receives $21.4 million to fund a continuing presence in Melanesia .

Building on the successful joint Indonesian-AFP investigation of the Bali bombing, Australia wil contribute $29.6 million to establish the Jakarta Centre for Law Enforcement Cooperation.

The Government will also spend $19.3 million for improving diplomatic protection and for purchase of new armoured vehicles used for transporting VIPs including the prime minister.

Customs is to receive $2.8 million to enable it to board up to 80 per cent of all vessels at their first port of arrival in Australia – up from the current level of 70 per cent.

May 12, 2004 at 10:40 AM in Espionage - general | Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Top of page | Blog Home

Top German WW2 Spy Gets Posthumous Rehabilitation

Yahoo! News - Top German WW2 Spy Gets Posthumous Rehabilitation

Fri Apr 2,10:34 AM ET

By Erik Kirschbaum
BERLIN (Reuters) - A German bureaucrat the CIA (news - web sites) once called "the most important spy of the Second World War" but was scorned at home as a traitor may soon get belated honors from the government -- three decades after he died as an outcast.

Fritz Kolbe, a Foreign Ministry official who passed on more than 1,600 top secret Nazi documents to U.S. handlers in Switzerland between 1942 and 1945, was hailed for his deeds in Washington after the war but ostracized and forgotten at home.

While army officers executed for a failed 1944 plot to kill Hitler have been idolized by postwar Germany for their futile yet face-saving assassination attempt, Kolbe lost his job, his friends and his reputation at the ministry, where his passing of Nazi secrets to the allies was viewed as treason.

Repeatedly rebuffed in his postwar attempts to get a job at West Germany's Foreign Office, Kolbe left his homeland and ended up a salesman for a U.S. power tools company. He died in 1971 in Switzerland.

Now a new book about Kolbe, based on declassified CIA documents and his private archives, is giving the long-forgotten spy overdue recognition just as Germany prepares to mark the 60th anniversary of the Hitler assassination plot.

"My aim was to help shorten the war for my unfortunate countrymen and to help concentration camp inmates avoid further suffering," Kolbe wrote in a 1965 letter that is included in the book by French journalist Lucas Delattre.

"I don't know if I succeeded," Kolbe is quoted as saying in "Fritz Kolbe, der wichtigste Spion des Zweiten Weltkreigs" (The Most Important Spy of World War II). "But I believe ... it showed there (was) resistance to the hated regime inside Germany."

Kolbe took no money. He aided the enemy because he was a patriot who hated the Nazi regime and wanted to accelerate its demise.

He smuggled top-secret files to the American Office of Strategic Services point man in Switzerland, Allen Dulles. Dulles later said he was at first wary but quickly saw the immense value of the information from inside Berlin. Kolbe was given the code name "George Wood."

"The risks Kolbe took were incalculable," Dulles wrote in a affidavit in 1948 for Kolbe, who was seeking a U.S. visa. "If any envelope had been opened he would, of course, have been lost."

Richard Helms, former head of the CIA, called Kolbe's information as "the most important ever supplied by an agent working for the Allies during the whole of World War II."

REHABILITATED IN GERMANY

A spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry in Berlin said the ministry had assisted Delattre with his research on Kolbe and was looking into an appropriate way to honor to Kolbe and other resistance fighters at the ministry during the Nazi era.

"Paying tribute to Fritz Kolbe is one of a number of considerations we're working on to document and honor the resistance at the Foreign Ministry," the spokeswoman said.

During the war, Kolbe passed on documents on Germany's morale, details on sabotage, notes from high-level meetings in Berlin and reports showing Berlin expected the Allies to land in the Netherlands or Scandinavia, not Normandy. He also provided details on developments with missiles and plans to deport Jews from Hungary and Italy to the death camps.

Kolbe worked directly under Karl Ritter, the Nazis' liaison officer to the armed forces. He handled -- and secretly photographed -- top-secret military documents that crossed his desk. Some of Kolbe's extensive material surfaced four years ago when the CIA first declassified nearly 500,000 documents.

But Delattre, a former Germany correspondent for Le Monde newspaper whose book first appeared in French, went further by drawing on Kolbe's private letters and with interviews.

"I wrote this book because I wanted to read it," Delattre said. "When I realized no book had ever been written about him, I decided to do it myself."

Delattre said he was at first baffled that Germany paid such exalted tribute to the executed July 1944 plotters led by Count Claus von Stauffenberg, an army colonel who planted a briefcase bomb during a staff meeting with Hitler that failed to kill the Nazi leader, but took so little notice of Kolbe.

"I think Kolbe has been neglected by Germany because his case shows that everybody, not just aristocrats like Stauffenberg or a young idealist like Sophie Scholl, could do something against the regime," Delattre said, referring to the executed leader of a student resistance movement.

April 5, 2004 at 09:58 PM in Espionage - general | Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Top of page | Blog Home

Beware! Our friends are bugging us, embassies told

Times Online - Britain

By Daniel McGrory and Andrew Pierce

BRITISH diplomats in Brussels head the list of envoys who are being targeted by foreign intelligence agencies, according to a leaked Foreign and Commonwealth Office document seen by The Times.
Security experts have warned senior diplomats in the Belgian capital that their e-mails may be intercepted and homes may be bugged, and that counter-surveillance “sweeps� are unlikely to succeed.

British diplomats in Bosnia and Pakistan have also been told that they are being spied upon by supposedly friendly governments, according to the document.

Concern is now so great that one of the officials in charge of Foreign Office security has cautioned envoys that the department’s information technology systems are “under attack” and that routine e-mails to and from Whitehall could no longer be regarded as safe. Diplomats have been told that every message they send must be delivered on a secure system after one foreign government took offence at an e-mail that its agents had secretly and illegally intercepted.

The envoys at risk include the three British ambassadors in Brussels who deal respectively with the EU, Nato and the host Belgian Government, and those at the British Embassy in Sarajevo and the High Commission in Islamabad.

The new generation of spies believe they will learn far more secrets from eavesdropping on diplomats’ homes rather than trying to bug formal meetings at embassy buildings.

These security lapses were only discovered after ministers ordered an urgent review following the bomb attack on the British Consulate in Istanbul last November. As well as the threat from terrorist bombers, the investigators found evidence of espionage leaks.

The document seen by The Times details how Peter Millett, the head of the security strategy unit at the Foreign Office, discussed the latest spying operations last month with leaders of the Diplomatic Service Association, which represents 650 of Britain’s senior envoys.

The revelation comes weeks after Clare Short, the former Cabinet minister, claimed Britain was spying on Kofi Annan, the UN SecretaryGeneral, and MI5 was accused of bugging the Pakistani High Commission in London. So far, the Foreign Office has not made any public protest to the three countries named in the report.

The Foreign Office and other departments have secure systems in their buildings but staff often fail to use them when routinely sending e-mails.

There is also evidence of how spies are listening into conversations between senior envoys and visiting ministers, believing British officials and their government guests might speak more freely over dinner or drinks in the residence than they might during formal embassy briefings.

MI5 officers were sent to Brussels to investigate the bugging of offices used by British diplomats in the EU Council of Ministers building.

The Russians and the Israelis were suspected of planting sophisticated bugs in the offices of six EU delegations, including Britain, which were discovered last May.

There were also accusations last summer that the Pakistani authorities tried to bug the British High Commissioner’s office when a stray wire was found trailing from his desk.

The Foreign Office said of these latest spying allegations: “We do not comment on leaked documents.”

The reaction of foreign diplomats in Britain was summed up by one veteran envoy in London, who said: “It would be a bit rich for Britain to take the high moral ground about being spied on by friends after their alleged behaviour at the UN.”

March 24, 2004 at 12:17 AM in Espionage - general | Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Top of page | Blog Home

Psi Block: 300 words That Make CIA, FBI, and NSA to Look at Your Site

Psi Block: 300 words That Make CIA, FBI, and NSA to Look at Your Site - Forums powered by Reason and Principle

Written by William Knowles
I started collecting 'spook words' this after reading about a rumor that the major intelligence agencies would scan all messages floating around on the Internet looking for something interesting, This is why some paranoid folks say the Internet is so slow, The NSA says that they don't, but that's what the NSA would say. Another rumor to the story is that the NSA and all those other three lettered agencies just don't have the bandwidth to look at all those messages, and that its all those people farting around watching Bugs Bunny on Real Audio from work sucking down all that bandwidth. There may be some truth to the rumors... (read more)

...digital wiretaps have been done on the Internet looking for particular words used by criminal hackers and only a few messages that weren't related to the case were captured and dissseminated. The idea here is that if lots of people add suspicious words to their messages, the world's intel agencies will be too busy with spurious input that they will have to give up reading it all.

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Team, MP5k, DREC, DEVGRP, DF, DSD, FDM, GRU, LRTS, SIGDEV, NACSI, PSAC, PTT, RFI, SIGDASYS, TDM. SUKLO, SUSLO, TELINT, TEXTA. ELF, LF, MF, VHF, UHF, SHF, SASP, WANK, Colonel, domestic disruption, smuggle, 15kg, nitrate, Pretoria, M-14, enigma, Bletchley Park, Clandestine, nkvd, argus, afsatcom, CQB, NVD, Counter Terrorism Security, Rapid Reaction, Corporate Security, Police, sniper, PPS, ASIS, ASLET, TSCM, Security Consulting, High Security, Security Evaluation, Electronic Surveillance, MI-17, Counterterrorism, spies, eavesdropping, debugging, interception, COCOT, rhost, rhosts, SETA, Amherst, Broadside, Capricorn, Gamma, Gorizont, Guppy, Ionosphere, Mole, Keyhole, Kilderkin, Artichoke, Badger, Cornflower, Daisy, Egret, Iris, Hollyhock, Jasmine, Juile, Vinnell, B.D.M.,Sphinx, Stephanie, Reflection, Spoke, Talent, Trump, FX, FXR, IMF, POCSAG, Covert Video, Intiso, r00t, lock picking, Beyond Hope, csystems, passwd, 2600 Magazine, Competitor, EO, Chan, Alouette,executive, Event Security, Mace, Cap-Stun, stakeout, ninja, ASIS, ISA, EOD, Oscor, Merlin, NTT, SL-1, Rolm, TIE, Tie-fighter, PBX, SLI, NTT, MSCJ, MIT, 69, RIT, Time, MSEE, Cable & Wireless, CSE, Embassy, ETA, Porno, Fax, finks, Fax encryption, white noise, pink noise, CRA, M.P.R.I., top secret, Mossberg, 50BMG, Macintosh Security, Macintosh Internet Security, Macintosh Firewalls, Unix Security, VIP Protection, SIG, sweep, Medco, TRD, TDR, sweeping, TELINT, Audiotel, Harvard, 1080H, SWS, Asset, Satellite imagery, force, Cypherpunks, Coderpunks, TRW, remailers, replay, redheads, RX-7, explicit, FLAME, Pornstars, AVN, Playboy, Anonymous, Sex, chaining, codes, Nuclear, 20, subversives, SLIP, toad, fish, data havens, unix, c, a, b, d, the, Elvis, quiche, DES, 1*, NATIA, NATOA, sneakers, counterintelligence, industrial espionage, PI, TSCI, industrial intelligence, H.N.P., Juiliett Class Submarine, Locks, loch, Ingram Mac-10, sigvoice, ssa, E.O.D., SEMTEX, penrep, racal, OTP, OSS, Blowpipe, CCS, GSA, Kilo Class, squib, primacord, RSP, Becker, Nerd, fangs, Austin, Comirex, GPMG, Speakeasy, humint, GEODSS, SORO, M5, ANC, zone, SBI, DSS, S.A.I.C., Minox, Keyhole, SAR, Rand Corporation, Wackenhutt, EO, Wackendude, mol, Hillal, GGL, CTU, botux, Virii, CCC, Blacklisted 411, Internet Underground, XS4ALL, Retinal Fetish, Fetish, Yobie, CTP, CATO, Phon-e, Chicago Posse, l0ck, spook keywords, PLA, TDYC, W3, CUD, CdC, Weekly World News, Zen, World Domination, Dead, GRU, M72750, Salsa, 7, Blowfish, Gorelick, Glock, Ft. Meade, press-release, Indigo, wire transfer, e-cash, Bubba the Love Sponge, Digicash, zip, SWAT, Ortega, PPP, crypto-anarchy, AT&T, SGI, SUN, MCI, Blacknet, Middleman, KLM, Blackbird, plutonium, Texas, jihad, SDI, Uzi, Fort Meade, supercomputer, bullion, 3, Blackmednet, Propaganda, ABC, Satellite phones, Planet-1, cryptanalysis, nuclear, FBI, Panama, fissionable, Sears Tower, NORAD, Delta Force, SEAL, virtual, Dolch, secure shell, screws, Black-Ops, Area51, SABC, basement, data-haven, black-bag, TEMPSET, Goodwin, rebels, ID, MD5, IDEA, garbage, market, beef, Stego, unclassified, utopia, orthodox, Alica, SHA, Global, gorilla, Bob, Pseudonyms, MITM, Gray Data, VLSI, mega, Leitrim, Yakima, Sugar Grove, Cowboy, Gist, 8182, Gatt, Platform, 1911, Geraldton, UKUSA, veggie, 3848, Morwenstow, Consul, Oratory, Pine Gap, Menwith, Mantis, DSD, BVD, 1984, Flintlock, cybercash, government, hate, speedbump, illuminati, president, freedom, cocaine, $, Roswell, ESN, COS, E.T., credit card, b9, fraud, assasinate, virus, anarchy, rogue, mailbomb, 888, Chelsea, 1997, Whitewater, MOD, York, plutonium, William Gates, clone, BATF, SGDN, Nike, Atlas, Delta, TWA, Kiwi, PGP 2.6.2., PGP 5.0i, PGP 5.1, siliconpimp, Lynch, 414, Face, Pixar, IRIDF, eternity server, Skytel, Yukon, Templeton, LUK, Cohiba, Soros, Standford, niche, 51, H&K, USP, ^, sardine, bank, EUB, USP, PCS, NRO, Red Cell, Glock 26, snuffle, Patel, package, ISI, INR, INS, IRS, GRU, RUOP, GSS, NSP, SRI, Ronco, Armani, BOSS, Chobetsu, FBIS, BND, SISDE, FSB, BfV, IB, froglegs, JITEM, SADF, advise, TUSA, HoHoCon, SISMI, FIS, MSW, Spyderco, UOP, SSCI, NIMA, MOIS, SVR, SIN, advisors, SAP, OAU, PFS, Aladdin, chameleon man, Hutsul, CESID, Bess, rail gun, Peering, 17, 312, NB, CBM, CTP, Sardine, SBIRS, SGDN, ADIU, DEADBEEF, IDP, IDF, Halibut, SONANGOL, Flu, &, Loin, PGP 5.53, EG&G, AIEWS, AMW, WORM, MP5K-SD, 1071, WINGS, cdi, DynCorp, UXO, Ti, THAAD, package, chosen, PRIME, SURVIAC,UFO.

March 13, 2004 at 09:21 AM in Espionage - general | Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Top of page | Blog Home

Briton's 'bomb link' to Libya and Pakistan

Times Online - Britain

By Dominic Kennedy

A BRITISH businessman accused of helping Colonel Gaddafi’s secret nuclear programme had previously been investigated by British authorities for exporting potential atomic bomb equipment to Pakistan.
Peter Griffin, a 68-year-old grandfather, is accused in a report sent to the International Atomic Energy Agency by Malaysian police of helping Colonel Gaddafi to design an uranium enrichment workshop that could be used for nuclear weapons or nuclear power, as well as training technicians and acquiring components. He denies any wrongdoing.

Mr Griffin, an engineer from Swansea, lives in a £500,000 villa on the French Riviera protected by electronic gates, video cameras, high walls and woodland.

The Times can disclose that he has been known to the British authorities since the late 1970s, when he was investigated as part of a network helping Pakistan’s clandestine efforts to become the Muslim world’s first nuclear power.

According to officials in Islamabad at the time, the secret project was part-funded by Colonel Gaddafi, who sent millions of dollars to Pakistan on condition that he was given access to the country’s atomic weapons capability.

However, there is no evidence that Mr Griffin received any money from Colonel Gaddafi.

Mr Griffin’s name emerged again last month when President Bush denounced a black market in nuclear technology created by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the rogue scientist known as the father of Pakistan’s atom bomb.

Last autumn a ship carrying specialised nuclear centrifuge parts to Libya was intercepted by America after being sent from Malaysia via Dubai.

The Malaysian manufacturer said that the components were made for a Dubai-based company called Gulf Technical Industries, which is owned by Peter Griffin and his 40-year-old son, Paul.

An alleged middleman, Bukhary Syed Abu Tahir, has claimed that the Malaysian company engineered more than 25,000 parts for Gulf Technical Industries, according to the police report.

Mr Griffin was alleged to be working on behalf of the disraced Dr Khan, who was providing sensitive equipment to Libya. Whatever equipment Dr Khan could not get directly to Colonel Gaddafi, the Pakistani scientist helped the dictator to build.

According to the Malaysian police report, Mr Griffin designed a workshop to make centrifuges and arranged for eight Libyan technicians to travel to Spain for training in the use of specialist lathes.

Colonel Gaddafi was acknowledged to be close to developing a nuclear bomb when he agreed publicly in December to drop his weapons of mass destruction programme.

By coincidence, British authorities had seized a computer from Mr Griffin’s home in France last June. It was an episode that brought back memories of how an invoice for equipment capable of building an atom bomb was traced from Pakistan back to a company part-owned by Mr Griffin in August 1978.

British authorities, eager to prevent nuclear proliferation, became concerned by the sale of 30 Swindon-made “inverters” capable of driving ultra-centrifuges in an uranium enrichment plant. The invoice led to Weargate, a company owned by Peter Griffin and Abdus Salam, a British citizen of Pakistani origin.

Tony Benn, then Energy Minister, ordered an investigation which concluded that the shipment was legal. However, Britain tightened up export rules three times in 1978 and 1979 to try to stop Pakistan acquiring the technology.

Simon Henderson, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told The Times last week: “The British Government tried to keep one step ahead by constantly changing export control regulations.” Mr Henderson confronted Mr Griffin at his home in Swansea at the time. “He invited me inside, though hardly welcoming me, and cautiously told me what business he was doing in Pakistan. ‘I am not helping Pakistan make a nuclear bomb, but why shouldn’t Pakistan have a nuclear bomb anyway?’ was, I recall, his line of argument. He told me that he had sold £800,000 worth of equipment.”

Mr Griffin’s partner in Weargate, Mr Salam, later emerged in Dubai, importing inverter components from Canada for Pakistan. After a quarter-century of secretive developments, Pakistan’s first nuclear bomb tests stunned the world in 1998.

At her home in South Wales, Mr Griffin’s former wife, Sheila, maintained that her son Paul had nothing to do with sending equipment to Libya. “I can assure you everything is now resolved and all hell has been let loose. It’s somebody who used his name. Honestly, I’m not telling lies,” she said. She also denied that the family had been involved with Pakistan’s weapons programme. “We didn’t have anything to do with nuclear bombs.”

Peter Griffin remarried in Swansea in 1992 and now lives in the secluded villa on a private road outside the village of Figanières, near Fréjus.

He publicly denounced America’s wars against Saddam Hussein in a letter to a Gulf newspaper last year. “America sent all its bills for billions of dollars to Kuwait for every missile, bomb, toilet roll, etc, used during the (1991) Gulf War,” he wrote.

“America made money from that conflict but there is nobody to pick up the bills for the next one except the American (and British) taxpayer.”

Speaking from his villa, Mr Griffin said that the Malaysian police report had been misinterpreted by all the world’s media, with the exception of the Evening Post in Swansea. “They know me,” he said. “They know that I wouldn’t do anything.”

He threatened to launch defamation actions for “lies, damned lies and statistics” and said he hoped to issue a statement in the coming week.

“I’ve got both feet on the ground,” he said. “I’m not answering questions with the press. I hope one day to be able to give interviews and sell my memoirs and make some money on this.”

There is no suggestion that Mr Griffin or his son were breaking the law. Chris Mills, a solicitor with Clyde & Co, of Dubai, said that Paul Griffin was “obviously quite distressed” since he had “no knowledge at all” of any Libya-bound shipment.

“What Paul thinks is that someone has been using his company name in order to transship goods through Dubai,” Mr Mills said.

When the goods arrived, Gulf Technical Industries had not been contacted. Instead, a so-far unidentified person had paid the freight charges to clear the items through Dubai and out again.

Paul Griffin suspected that he and his company had been “set up . . . to take the fall if this all went wrong, as it has done,” Mr Mills said.

Paul Griffin was seeking documents to show that his company had not been involved.

February 29, 2004 at 11:54 PM in Espionage - general | Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Top of page | Blog Home

Roots of Pakistan Atomic Scandal Traced to Europe

Roots of Pakistan Atomic Scandal Traced to Europe

By CRAIG S. SMITH

Published: February 19, 2004

ARIS, Feb. 18 — The Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan has been demonized in the West for selling atomic secrets and equipment around the world, but the trade began in Europe, not Islamabad, according to court documents and experts who monitor proliferation.
The records show that industry scientists and Western intelligence agencies have known for decades that nuclear technology was pouring out of Europe despite national export control efforts to contain it.

Many of the names that have turned up among lists of suppliers and middlemen who fed equipment, materials and knowledge to nuclear programs in Pakistan and other aspiring nuclear nations are well-known players in Europe's uranium enrichment industry, a critical part of many nuclear weapons programs. Some have been convicted of illegal exports before.

The proliferation has its roots in Europe's own postwar eagerness for nuclear independence from the United States and its lax security over potentially lethal technology. It was abetted, critics say, by competition within Europe for lucrative contracts to bolster state-supported nuclear industries. Even as their own intelligence services warned that Pakistan could not be trusted, some European governments continued to help Pakistan's nuclear program.

"It was an economic consideration," said Paul Stais, a former Belgian member of the European Parliament who lobbied unsuccessfully for tighter export controls.

One name to emerge from the international investigations of Dr. Khan's nuclear trade was that of Urs Tinner, a Swiss engineer who monitored production of centrifuge parts at a factory in Malaysia. The parts were intended for Libya. Mr. Tinner's father, Friedrich Tinner, also an engineer, came under scrutiny by the Defense Department in the 1970's and again by Swiss export control authorities and the International Atomic Energy Agency in the last decade, because he was involved in exports to Pakistan and Iraq of technology used in uranium enrichment.

In the 1970's, Friedrich Tinner was in charge of exports at Vakuum-Apparate-Technik, or VAT, when the company was identified by the Defense Department as shipping items with possible nuclear-related uses to Pakistan, according to documents and VAT company officials. He later set up his own company, now called PhiTec AG, which was investigated by the Swiss in 1996 for trying to ship valves for uranium enrichment centrifuges to Iraq. The Tinners were never found to have broken any laws, Swiss officials said.

"Most of these people were heavily investigated in the 1970's, 80's and 90's," said Mark Hibbs, the European editor of the technical journal Nucleonics Week, published by McGraw-Hill.

The problem began with the 1970 Treaty of Almelo, under which Britain, Germany and the Netherlands agreed to develop centrifuges to enrich uranium jointly, ensuring their nuclear power industry a fuel source independent of the United States. Urenco, or the Uranium Enrichment Company, was established the next year with its primary enrichment plant at Almelo, the Netherlands.

Security at Urenco was by most accounts slipshod. The consortium relied on a network of research centers and subcontractors to build its centrifuges, and top-secret blueprints were passed out to companies bidding on tenders, giving engineers across Europe an opportunity to appropriate designs.

Dr. Khan, who worked for a Urenco Dutch subcontractor, Physics Dynamic Research Laboratory, was given access to the most advanced designs, even though he came from Pakistan, which was already known to harbor nuclear ambitions. A 1980 report by the Dutch government on his activities said he visited the Almelo factory in May 1972 and by late 1974 had an office there.

After Dr. Khan returned to Pakistan with blueprints and supplier lists for uranium enrichment centrifuges at the end of 1975, American intelligence agencies predicted that he would soon be shopping for the items needed to build the centrifuges for Pakistan's bomb. They soon detected a flow of equipment from Europe to Pakistan as Dr. Khan drew on Urenco's network of suppliers using a trusted group of former schoolmates and friends as agents.

The Dutch government report found that in 1976, two Dutch firms exported to Pakistan 6,200 unfinished rotor tubes made of superstrong maraging steel. The tubes are the heart of Urenco's advanced uranium-enriching centrifuges.

In 1983, a Dutch court convicted Dr. Khan in absentia on charges of stealing the designs, though the conviction was later overturned on a technicality. Nonetheless, in the late 1980's, Belgian ministers led delegations of scientists and businessmen to Pakistan, despite warnings from their own experts that they were meeting with people involved in the military application of nuclear technology.

"Every well-informed person knows the inherent danger of an intense collaboration with a country such as Pakistan," wrote René Constant, director of Belgium's National Institute of Radioactive Elements in February 1987, chastising Philippe Maystadt, then the country's minister of economic affairs, after one such visit.

That same year, despite American warnings to Germany that such a sale was imminent, a German firm exported to Pakistan a plant for the recovery of tritium, a volatile gas used to increase the power of nuclear bombs. The company simply called the plant something else to obtain an export license.

"The export control office didn't even inspect the goods," said Reinhard Huebner, the German prosecutor who handled the subsequent trial of the company's chief, Rudolf Ortmayers, and Peter Finke, a German physicist who went to Pakistan to train engineers there to operate the equipment. Both men were sentenced to jail for violating export control laws.

But there were clues that the technology had spread even further: a German intelligence investigation determined that Iraq and possibly Iran and North Korea had obtained uranium-melting expertise stolen from Urenco in 1984, Mr. Hibbs reported in Nucleonics Week several years later.

In 1989, two engineers, Bruno Stemmler and Karl Heinz Schaab, who had worked for Germany's MAN New Technology, another Urenco subcontractor, sold plans for advanced uranium enrichment centrifuges to Iraq. They went to Baghdad to help solve problems in making the equipment work.

In 1991, after the first Iraq war, international inspectors were stunned to discover the extent of Saddam Hussein's hidden program. Mr. Schaab was later convicted of treason but only served a little more than a year in jail. Mr. Stemmler died before he could be tried.

David Albright, a former weapons inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency, said he helped retrieve a full set of the blueprints from Iraq after the major combat operations ended last year. United States inspectors have not found evidence that Mr. Hussein had restarted his nuclear program, but Mr. Albright said there were still drawings unaccounted for.

"It's an unnerving issue," said Mr. Albright, who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security. "A lot of nuclear weapons design stuff could be missing in Iraq."

As recently as last year, German customs agents seized high-tensile-strength aluminum tubes made by a German company and bound for North Korea. The tubes matched the specifications for the housings of Urenco's uranium-enriching centrifuges.

One name on a list of suppliers to Iran that came to light in recent investigations was Henk Slebos, who studied with Dr. Khan at Delft Technological University in Leuven, Belgium, in the late 1960's.

In the early 1980's, Mr. Slebos was arrested for shipping an oscilloscope, used in testing centrifuges, to Dr. Khan in Pakistan. He was convicted and sentenced to a brief prison term in 1985. Mr. Slebos declined to comment for this article.

In 1998, he withdrew five Pakistan-bound shipments that the Dutch authorities had stopped in the Netherlands, Belgium and Austria because they contained "dual use" items, which could be used for uncovventional weapons as well as civilian purposes.

Last September, Mr. Slebos was among the sponsors of an international symposium on advanced materials in Pakistan organized by Dr. Khan. Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who was then the Dutch foreign minister and is now NATO's secretary general, told Dutch members of Parliament that Mr. Slebos was still doing business with Dr. Khan, though he did not elaborate.

February 19, 2004 at 07:23 PM in Espionage - general | Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Top of page | Blog Home

Regional Terrorist Groups Pose Growing Threat, Experts Warn

Regional Terrorist Groups Pose Growing Threat, Experts Warn

By RAYMOND BONNER and DON VAN NATTA Jr.

AKARTA, Indonesia, Feb. 7 — The landscape of the terrorist threat has shifted, many intelligence officials around the world say, with more than a dozen regional militant Islamic groups showing signs of growing strength and broader ambitions, even as the operational power of Al Qaeda appears diminished.
Some of the militant groups, with roots from Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the Caucasus to North Africa and Europe, are believed to be loosely affiliated with Al Qaeda, the officials say. But other groups follow their own agenda, merely drawing inspiration from Osama bin Laden's periodic taped messages calling for attacks against the United States and its allies, the officials say.
The smaller groups have shown resilience in resisting the efforts against terrorism led by the United States, officials said, by establishing terrorist training camps in Kashmir, the Philippines and West Africa, filling the void left by the destruction of Al Qaeda's camps in Afghanistan. But what is also worrisome to counterterrorism officials is evidence that like Al Qaeda, some of them are setting their sights beyond the regional causes that inspired them.

The Islamic militant organization Ansar al-Islam, for example, has largely fled its base in northern Iraq, and elements of the group have moved to several European countries, where they are believed to be actively recruiting suicide bombers for attacks in Iraq and Europe, officials said.

The mutation of the cells was illustrated in October when the authorities in Australia arrested a Caribbean-born French citizen who they believe was sent by a little-known Pakistani group to scout possible targets for attacks. The group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, was previously thought to be focused only on the struggle of Muslims in Kashmir.

The activity of such organizations is one reason intelligence officials believe that the threat of terrorism against the United States and its allies remains high. But the mobility and murky associations of the groups, most of which were operating before the Sept. 11 attacks, makes it difficult for agents to monitor their communications or follow their money.

"They are like little time bombs that have been sent out into the world," said Gwen McClure, an F.B.I. agent and the director of counterterrorism at Interpol, the international police organization based in Lyon, France. "You never know where it might go off."

The deepening concern about the strength of the regional groups comes as Al Qaeda is described by officials as having been hobbled by the capture or killing of its top lieutenants and less capable of mounting an attack like the one on Sept. 11. Evidence of Al Qaeda's activity continues to set off alarms, like the cancellation of several recent trans-Atlantic flights from Britain and France to the United States because of security concerns.

Beyond the recent concerns about Al Qaeda, counterterrorism officials in a dozen counties say they are also occupied by trying to understand the workings of obscure groups that appear capable of carrying out attacks without the financial or logistical support of Mr. bin Laden.

"Al Qaeda's biggest threat is its ability to inspire other groups to launch attacks, usually in their own countries," said a senior intelligence official based in Europe. "I'm most worried about the groups that we don't know anything about."

That view was reflected at a meeting of police officials from the Asia-Pacific region and Europe organized by Interpol last month in Bali, Indonesia. In conversations there and in interviews in Europe, officials voiced concern about the threat of regional terrorist networks, which they said would not be reduced even if Mr. bin Laden was captured or killed.

Many officials said they doubted that Mr. bin Laden was directing operations, although several officials said they believed that he was using couriers to deliver hand-written messages to associates in Pakistan. "From a cave in the mountains, how much can he do?" one official asked.

The officials said their view of Al Qaeda had changed. The terror network today is different from the Qaeda that existed before Sept. 11; a "credible argument can be made that it's finished," a senior Australian official said.

"However," he added, "to talk about it being finished is to ignore what it is." He said it was more accurate to see it as a movement of individuals who view the United States and the West as the enemy. "Every day around the world, we are discovering Al Qaeda members and cells previously unknown," he said.

Most of the members of the regional terror groups trained at the Qaeda camps, counterterrorism officials say. In December, a United Nations monitoring group estimated that there were 30 to 40 terrorist groups affiliated with Al Qaeda.

Most officials say they consider it unlikely that the dozen terror groups that they are most concerned about are capable of pulling off an attack on the scale of Sept. 11. But they said interrogations of captured terror suspects and other intelligence have made it clear that the groups have the training, explosives and money to strike "soft targets," similar to attacks last year in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Indonesia.

Officials said attacks like the bombing in November of the British Consulate in Istanbul illustrated a new phase of terrorism in which secular Islamic governments seen as aiding the United States were chosen as targets.

In recent months, terrorists in Saudi Arabia have tried to assassinate senior government officials. Qaeda operatives are believed to be behind some of the attempted killings, but a previously unidentified group, which calls itself Al Haramain Brigades, or the Two Mosques Brigades, said in a statement in January that it had tried to kill Maj. Gen. Abdelaziz al-Huweirini, Saudi Arabia's top counterterrorism official and the No. 3 official in the Interior Ministry. Senior American officials confirmed that in early December, General Huweirini was the target of a shooting attack in which his brother was wounded.

Several senior counterterrorism officials based in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region said they suspected that local and regional groups were coordinating their activities, but without direct contact with Mr. bin Laden or his lieutenants. They point to the May 12 suicide bombings of three Western housing compounds in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that killed 25 residents, including 8 Americans. Four days later, in Casablanca, Morocco, suicide bombers carried out five simultaneous attacks, killing more than 30 people.

In both cases, local groups, with loose ties to Al Qaeda, carried out the attacks. While investigators have not found solid evidence that the attacks were coordinated, "we don't believe it was mere coincidence," a senior European intelligence official said.

The shifting picture of the terrorist threat flashed before the authorities in Australia last fall when Willie Brigitte, a 35-year-old French citizen, was arrested on terrorism charges. Mr. Brigitte hardly fit the terrorist profile. He was recruited after Sept. 11 and had never trained in the Afghanistan camps, officials said. His name was not on any country's watch list. He entered Australia without being detected, lived for five months in a Sydney suburb and was believed to be selecting targets for attacks, officials said.

But the most unusual part of the case is that the authorities believe that Mr. Brigitte was a low-ranking member of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant Pakistani group that was formed a decade ago with help from Pakistan's intelligence service to fight against India in Kashmir. The group was not known to have operations outside that region.

Before the Taliban were driven from power, Lashkar-e-Taiba trained its men at camps in Afghanistan alongside Qaeda camps. Banned by Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, it continues to exist with training camps in Kashmir, officials said.

Mr. Brigitte had contacts with Lashkar-e-Taiba members in the United States, Canada and Europe, a senior law enforcement official with knowledge of his interrogation said. When Mr. Brigitte was discovered, the Australian authorities had been on the lookout for members of Jemaah Islamiyah — viewed as a Qaeda affiliate in Southeast Asia — trying to slip into the country.

Jemaah Islamiyah has suffered serious reversals since it attacked a nightclub on the Indonesian island of Bali in October 2002, killing 202 people. Scores of suspected members have been rounded up, and its operational mastermind, Riudan Isamuddin, who is better known as Hambali and was a member of Mr. bin Laden's inner circle, was captured by the C.I.A. last August.

Still, regional counterterrorism officials say the group is recruiting and reorganizing and training men in the Philippines. It has a dedicated cadre and access to large caches of explosives, which make it a serious threat, a Western diplomat here said.

It may also be switching tactics, to the assassination of important Westerners and the use of bicycles for suicide attacks, a senior Indonesian intelligence officer said recently.

On the other side of the globe, the story of Ansar al-Islam demonstrates the adaptability and mobility of these groups.

Ansar al-Islam was based for years in northern Iraq, where it opposed the Kurds as well as the rule of Saddam Hussein. The United States, which suspected it had links to Al Qaeda, made the group a target of bombing during the war last spring.

But now, intelligence officials said, the group has re-emerged in Europe as a well-organized terror threat that assists with training and logistical support for terrorist operations and is involved in recruiting terrorists to fight against American military forces in Iraq.

In December, the Italian and German police arrested three men believed to be members of Ansar al-Islam and accused them of helping would-be suicide bombers travel from Europe to Iraq.

Some officials say they suspect that Abu Musam Zarqawi, a Jordanian with close ties to Al Qaeda, is coordinating recruiting efforts in Europe with Ansar al-Islam. He is also suspected of playing a central role in planning car bombings in Turkey, as well as plotting chemical attacks in Europe.

The blurring of boundaries is also the case in Algeria, where the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, better known by its initials as the G.S.P.C., is growing more powerful and expanding its geographical operations, officials said.

A year ago, G.S.P.C. kidnapped a group of European tourists, including nine Germans. The hostages were released after the German government paid a ransom of more than $1 million, a European official said. The money, the official said, has allowed the group to buy weapons, including antiaircraft missiles.

The group has increased its activities in Mali and Niger in recent months, officials from several countries said. They say the group's leaders are suspected of setting up training camps in West Africa and of plotting attacks there.

But a senior Western official said finding the camps would be nearly impossible. "That's no man's land," he said.

Raymond Bonner reported from Jakarta for this article and Don Van Natta Jr. from London. Desmond Butler contributed reporting from Germany.

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February 8, 2004 at 01:31 AM in Espionage - general | Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Top of page | Blog Home

At their masters’ beck & call

The Statesman

Indian intelligence needs
to examine the rot within,
writes BIBHUTI BHUSAN NANDY

THE opening speech of the director, Intelligence Bureau, at the conference of the directors general of police and state intelligence last month revealed the downside of the Indian intelligence leadership. Addressing the Deputy Prime Minister not fewer than four times, the spymaster intoned: “Sir, we are beholden to you�. Whether the DPM relished it or not, this ‘crude display of servility’ has raised disturbing questions regarding intelligence-policy interface.

There is no question that policy makers have to continually project their intelligence requirements to the secret services concerned. But the interplay between the policy community and the intelligence community must not blur their distinct roles and separate functional identities, much less undermine the operational freedom and analytical objectivity of the intelligence agencies. The conduct of the US and British secret services in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq illustrates how an intelligence community “beholden” to policy-makers tailors its output to policy considerations. The CIA and the MI6 had no evidence that Iraq possessed any weapons of mass destruction or that Baghdad had any links with the Al-Qaida. Nonetheless, under unrelenting pressure from Washington’s neo-con warmongers — Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz et al. — the CIA sent doctored reports suggesting Baghdad was guilty on both counts. The MI6, for its part, “cherry-picked” and “sexed up” its product towards boosting the Bush-Blair anti-Saddam disinformation campaign as a prelude to launching the illegal and immoral attack on Iraq.
If the US and the British secret services, operating under well-established norms of accountability and legislative oversight, failed to resist the executive pressures, one can well imagine the vulnerability of their Indian counterparts, run solely on executive fiats, to political manipulations and misuse. The IB and the state Special Branches, willing privy to political cover-ups, provide their respective ruling cliques the tittle-tattles needed in framing political enemies and disciplining party renegades.
For the IB, counter-intelligence — meant to fight back foreign espionage, subversion, and sabotage — is no longer an operational priority.
Instead, the domestic political intelligence brief comprising such questions as whether Mr Karunanidhi has invited Mrs Sonia Gandhi to a political rally in Chennai or who among the Chhattishgarh BJP MPs have come under Mr Ajit Jogi’s seductive spell has become the Bureau’s preferred preoccupation.
To carry out this “onerous task”, the DIB resorts to extensive wire-tapping, violating all statutory norms and safeguards provided under the telecommunication laws and the Pota. Hyper-allergic even to the most constructive criticisms, the IB brass launches technical surveillance on politicians, journalists and media commentators at the slightest provocation, but lack of professional finesse and clumsy use of unsophisticated devices give away the operations. Since the publication of a critical piece of the present writer on Indian intelligence in The Statesman sometime back, he has had direct experience of such monkey business. Interaction between the DIB and the policy bosses in “politically sensitive matters” has inevitably a conspiratorial aura. For the sake of deniability, communications are done strictly by way of personal briefing and through unsigned notes, trusted personal aides on both sides acting as crucial adjuncts. These “special reports”, not counter-intelligence (CI) achievements, constitute the benchmark for performance appraisal in respect of the DIB and other senior IB officers. No wonder, no CI wizard has ever made it to the top slot. The whole system reeks of unmitigated politicisation. The only saving grace is that the IB is an unflappable chameleon. It changes colour with every change of government with supreme alacrity. Intense inter-agency rivalry and intra-agency factional feuds have always been the bane of Indian intelligence.
Tired of the fight between the then IB director MML Hooja and his number two, RN Kao, Indira Gandhi split the IB in 1968 and created the R&AW. The two services have hardly ever seen eye-to-eye on any important issue. In the Eighties, a R&AW operation snapped the fraternal ties the Ulfa, NSCN, PLA and Chin rebels had forged with a leading Myanmarese insurgent outfit that had sheltered, trained and armed them for years. As a result, in 1990, the Indian insurgent groups sought sanctuary and base facilities in Bangladesh. At inter-agency meetings and other government forums, the R&AW repeatedly pressed for tightening the security along the Indo-Bangla border, but the IB persistently rubbished this recommendation. Unsurprisingly, Bangladesh, in tandem with the ISI, soon began harbouring Northeast insurgents.
Recently, the killing of the dreaded Pakistani terrorist Gazi Baba by the BSF at Srinagar sparked off a fierce controversy between the para-military force and the IB. It was a top rate counter-terrorism operation by any standard, ranging from meticulously collecting tactical intelligence on the real-time movements and location of the target to the launching of the pinpointed lethal attack on his hideout.
The killing of Gazi Baba electrified the whole country, but the IB, clueless about his latest whereabouts, insistently questioned the outcome of the encounter, even after the terrorist’s widow had identified her husband’s dead body. Its credibility at stake, the BSF divulged to the electronic media many sensitive details of the operation to prove the bona fides of its claim. The pettifogging by the Bureau ended only after the DG BSF produced clinching evidence that satisfied the DPM that Gazi Baba had indeed been killed.
Time was when for intelligence officials secret fund was a sacred fund. Misappropriating or misusing it in any form was unthinkable. But reports of blatant misuse of SS fund are rampant today, especially in the R&AW. These range from misappropriation of agents’ pay by case officers to pocketing of hefty sums against non-existent “special operations”, often in collusion with superior officers.
Fearing possible cuts in SS budget in the subsequent year, successive R&AW chiefs retained the unspent secret money by giving false certificates of expenditure year after year. As a result millions of dollars piled up in the “Secretary’s Almirah”.
Purloining from this unaccounted kitty has gone on unchecked for long. The worst case was the much talked about diversion of a huge amount by one Secretary (R) that secured him immediately on retirement a cushy constitutional position in the Northeast.
An inept, greedy and spineless leadership, operating in absolute secrecy, is at the root of the ills that afflict the Indian intelligence community.
The decomposition has run too deep into the system to be reversed, surely not until it is restructured, focusing on accountability based on strict parliamentary oversight. Going by the post-Kargil intelligence reforms fiasco, however, neither the government, nor the intelligence community is prepared to accept such a reform.

(The writer is former Additional Secretary, Research and Analysis Wing, Cabinet Secretariat, retired Director General, Indo-Tibetan Border Police and former National Security Adviser, Government of Mauritius)

February 6, 2004 at 10:19 PM in Espionage - general | Permalink | TrackBack (0) | Top of page | Blog Home

A history of the espionage novel

A History of the Espionage Novel

The espionage novel has a major conundrum at its heart: spooks are supposed to keep secrets, not blab them. Furthermore, until WWII the prevailing "gentlemen do not read each other's mail" ethos prevented literary glamor from attaching to espionage. By now, of course, the spy's lonely life has become a metaphor for every type of existential piety -- but until the mid-20th century, spooks were considered seedy, shady stool-pigeons, liars, and traitors. If you know anything interesting about the history of the espionage novel, share the knowledge by sending us e-mail.

YEAR TITLE/NAME ACHIEVEMENT
1907 The Secret Agent
Joseph Conrad Allegedly based on the Siege of Sidney Street, in which small-time informant Verloc and his anarchist cronies plan an act of terrorism.
1928 Ashenden; or the British Agent
W. Somerset Maugham Often termed the first realistic spy novel, this semi-fictional account of Maugham's WWI adventures is actually a collection of loosely linked (and now almost unreadably dull) stories.
1938 Epitaph for a Spy
Eric Ambler Ambler's distinctly unromantic style emerged in this tale of a reluctant spy-hunter.
1941 Above Suspicion
Helen MacInnes An early example of a durable chestnut: the Oxford don recruited for anti-Nazi activities.
1952 Death in Captivity
Michael Gilbert As far as I know, the first example of what would become an espionage classic: the WWII POW novel. In this case, based on the author's own experience in an Italian officer's camp, the plot is more whodunitish.
1958 Our Man in Havana
Graham Greene Although Greene had featured spies before (The Confidential Agent, 1939), his own experience during WWII seems to have pointed up the tragicomic rather than dramatic aspect of the trade -- which he expressed in this tale of a hapless vacuum-cleaner saleman.
1962 The Ipcress File
Len Deighton Espionage becomes a profession for upwardly-mobile working people rather than an upper-class game.
1963 The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
John Le Carré Espionage establishments have become vicious, meaningless bureaucracies in Smiley's world.

February 1, 2004 at 11:21 AM in Espionage - general | Permalin