Intelligence

Al-Qaeda tells British cells to carry out wave of beheadings

David Leppard

ISLAMIC terror cells in Britain have been instructed to carry out a series of kidnappings and beheadings of the kind allegedly planned by the nine terrorist suspects arrested in Birmingham last week.

The “strategic” assassination instruction was issued by Al-Qaeda’s leaders in Pakistan and Iraq to dozens of their followers in this country. It was uncovered by MI5 last autumn, senior security sources say.

As a result police are on standby for multiple attempts by terrorists to kidnap and then behead people across Britain. MI5 is conducting a counter-terrorism surveillance operation to prevent such an attack.

The alleged attempt to kidnap and behead a Muslim soldier or soldiers in Birmingham was just the first of a series of planned attacks, security sources say.

The revelation explains the recent deployment of a permanent SAS unit to London. The unit has been placed on 24-hour standby to respond to a terrorist attack in the capital. It would aim to carry out a hostage rescue mission within minutes of being alerted.

Muslim police officers serving in London may also be given extra protection. The Association of Muslim Police is in talks with the Met, which is expected to carry out a risk assessment of the dangers.

One well placed source said: “Cells in the UK have been alerted to carry out this type of attack as opposed to the more sophisticated type of bombing in which you place a large number of volunteers at risk. All you need for a beheading is a bit of courage and a sharp knife.”

The order to encourage “low-tech” assassinations is said to follow a review by senior Al-Qaeda planners after an alleged plot to smuggle bombs onto airlines was foiled by police last August.

The order encouraged followers to adopt the tactics used by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former Al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, who was behind the abduction, torture and beheading of Ken Bigley, a British engineer, in Iraq in 2004.

Bigley, 62, was kidnapped and filmed on video begging for Tony Blair to end the war before being beheaded. Footage of his “execution” was later posted on the internet.

After learning of the alleged Birmingham plot to behead a British Muslim soldier returning from Iraq or Afghanistan last autumn, the Ministry of Defence spent several months trying to establish how many soldiers fitted into this category.

After focusing on soldiers in the regular army, the Royal Marines and the Territorial Army, officials whittled the list of potential targets down to fewer than 10.

These soldiers were warned about the potential threat and advised on protection measures, or given the means to protect themselves. Sources said several of the suspects were personally acquainted with the Muslim soldier who was said to have been lined up as their first victim. The soldier, a corporal in military intelligence, is said to be under close protection.

The surveillance operation in Birmingham was stepped up at the beginning of last month when scores of detectives were seconded from the Greater Manchester police to join their colleagues in the West Midlands anti-terrorism unit.

The decision to arrest the nine suspects is said to have been made after one of them was seen buying a video camera in an electronics shop last weekend.

According to another source close to the investigation, those involved in the plot were supplying equipment and computer hardware to Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. One of the suspects had recently returned from a trip to Pakistan.

There were also claims this weekend that several of the arrested men attended the Hamza mosque in the Sparkhill area of Birmingham.

An official at the mosque, who refused to be named, said it was a centre for a group called Tablighi Jamaat, described by western security services as a “conveyor belt to Al-Qaeda”. The group’s British headquarters is in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, where two of the London bombers regularly attended. In a statement, mosque officials said they could not confirm the claims.

Despite intelligence about the new UK strategy security sources say that Al-Qaeda has not entirely dropped more traditional terrorism tactics.

At least two cells are believed to be preparing attacks using cars packed with fertiliser explosives to cause mass casualties.

Armed guards were last month deployed outside the Bacton gas terminal in Norfolk following intelligence that it had been “scouted” by known terrorist suspects. Intelligence suggested the suspects were discussing how to carry out a car bomb attack.

A Whitehall official said MI5 was now monitoring about 280 terror suspects.

Each was suspected of serious intent to carry out an attack. Cells are being closely observed in at least four British towns and cities.

February 4, 2007 at 12:14 PM in Current Terrorism, MI5, UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

New MI5 boss is top expert on Al-Qaeda

New MI5 boss is top expert on Al-Qaeda - Sunday Times - Times Online

David Leppard
A SPYMASTER who has tracked Al-Qaeda’s activities in Britain since the organisation first emerged as a threat to this country is frontrunner to be the next head of MI5.

Sources said Jonathan Evans, senior deputy director-general of the security service, was a “racing certainty” to take over from Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, who surprised Whitehall last week by announcing that she would be stepping down early from the top job.

Sources said she had decided to quit in anticipation that she might be asked to resign over blunders concerning last year’s July 7 bombings.

Evans is a career spy with a background in fighting terror. He served as head of G branch, MI5’s international terrorism section, making him the agency’s then supremo in dealing with the emerging Al-Qaeda threat. Before that he served as a senior officer in Northern Ireland, helping to spearhead the fight against the IRA.

The Home Office maintained last week that there was nothing unusual about Manningham-Buller’s decision to leave after only four years in the job.

In her leaving statement she insisted that she had decided in “early 2005” that it would be time to stand down by April 2007. But Whitehall officials said that the announcement had come as a “surprise”.

Insiders and security experts see it as a “pre-emptive strike” linked to forthcoming revelations concerning how much her agency knew about the intentions of the July 7 suicide bombers in the 18 months before the attacks.

The sources said that the agency was bracing itself for detailed disclosures about its intelligence on Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shezhad Tanweer, the two leading bombers who killed 52 people. The Sunday Times and other media are prevented by court orders from making this evidence public.

The sources said that Manningham-Buller’s decision to step down was unlikely to head off widespread public criticism of the spy agency: “She knows she will be asked to resign over this. She was protected by Charles Clarke (the former home secretary) but some people believe that if things go badly wrong John Reid (his successor) will be happy to slit her throat.”

In his statement on her departure, Reid was fulsome in his praise. “Her contribution to the security of our nation has been invaluable and I pay tribute to her unstinting efforts,” he said.

The Home Office will this week begin circulating advertisements for her replacement. Reid will make the final choice, expected to be announced by the end of next month. However, security sources are already tipping Evans to take over in April. As deputy, he has had daily responsibility for oversight of the service’s operational work.

Evans is highly respected as a spymaster. A source said: “He is very switched on. He’s dynamic, confident, a natural leader. He’s a gifted communicator. He’s very comfortable with himself and is good with ministers and mixing at the top table. But he is also very personable. He’s good at dealing with staff in a hail-fellow-well-met sort of way.”

Evans is also said to have a formidable intellect: “He grasps the material and can make a quick decision. He has gravitas but he’s also got a very relaxed style.”

Former MI5 bosses including Dame Stella Rimington and Sir Stephen Lander have taken on part-time business directorships or public appointments, but Manningham-Buller is understood to want to spend more time on her 70-acre farm with her husband, a university academic.

They keep chickens and alpaca, the llama-like South American animal reared in Britain mainly for its wool. “She’s keen on hens and organic eggs,” said a colleague. “But she’s also very much in love with her husband. They are looking forward to spending more time together.”

December 25, 2006 at 10:25 AM in MI5 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

US 'issued alert' on 7/7 bomber in 2003

US 'issued alert' on 7/7 bomber in 2003 - Britain - Times Online

By Daniel McGrory
Fresh calls for public inquiry into London bombings after publication of American book claiming terrorist was known

THE leader of the July 7 suicide bombers was considered such a dangerous threat that he was banned from flying to America two years before the attack in London, according to a book written by a US intelligence specialist.

Although MI5 has always denied knowing that Mohammad Sidique Khan was a potential danger, the CIA is alleged to have discovered in 2003 that he was planning attacks on American cities.

The disclosures are made in a book by the award-winning author Ron Suskind that is serialised today in The Times.

The claims contradict evidence from Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the Director-General of MI5, to the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee that Khan had never been listed as a terror threat before the attack that killed 52 innocent people.

A senior British security source has told The Times that they were aware of the allegations but said that they were “untrue and one of the many myths that have grown up around Khan”.

However, the disclosures will add to demands for Tony Blair to agree to a full public inquiry into intelligence lapses before the attack on July 7. Families of the victims, preparing to mark the first anniversary, are among those calling for an independent investigation to uncover all that British Intelligence was told about the suicide bombers by international security agencies.

David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, said: “This new information shows that there is an unarguable case for an independent inquiry that will enable us to ensure any weakness in our security and intelligence system are put right before we face any further terrorist threat.”

Ibrahim Mogra, chairman of the mosque and community affairs committee of the Muslim Council of Britain, said that the arguments for a public inquiry were now overwhelming.

“In light of this latest claim the case for a public inquiry becomes even more clear. There are things we are not being told about what our intelligence services knew, and if the US intelligence services knew something they should bear some of the responsibility for the attacks,” he said.

The parliamentary inquiry into 7/7 found that Khan and two of the other suicide bombers were known in some form to MI5. It said that Khan was regarded as a peripheral figure.

However, Suskind, in his book The One Percent Doctrine, says that CIA agents found evidence that Khan was in contact with Islamic extremists in the US about a plot to blow up a number of synagogues on the US East Coast. He alleges that Khan made at least two trips to America to finalise attack plans and that US security officials insisted the CIA’s Counter-Terrorist Centre shared its information with a British intelligence official in London.

The book claims that Dan Coleman, who led the FBI’s investigation into al-Qaeda, had read detailed files of Khan’s many telephone calls and e-mails, beginning in 2002, to a number of US based al-Qaeda-trained militants living in New York and Virginia.

Khan, a primary school teaching mentor from Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, is alleged to have been in contact with a student from Falls Church in Virginia, who in March was sentenced to 30 years for a plot to assassinate George Bush.

E-mail transcripts monitored by the National Security Agency (NSA) show, says Suskind, that Khan, 30, was in direct contact with Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, 24. NSA intercepts also allegedly show that Khan was in touch with the US-based extremists he later met in Pakistan.

Investigations have shown that on his arrival in the US, Khan gave a false address to immigration officials about where he was staying during his visits.

Mr Coleman, known to colleagues as The Professor because of his knowledge of US al-Qaeda sympathisers, said that Khan was “a very dangerous character” who should be closely watched. He says that he does not know if Britain acted on this warning.

The CIA claims that it had only 36 hours’ warning in March 2003 that Khan had booked a flight to New York. The FBI said that it did not have the manpower to follow Khan in the US so it placed his name on a “no-fly list” to stop him from leaving Britain, according to the book.

This year, a leading US Senator, Charles E. Schumer, commenting on newspaper reports in New York that US authorities had tipped off British Intelligence, said: “This is the British version of pre-9/11, where a country receives a generalised warning and ignores it with terrible consequences.”

Suskind told The Times: “British intelligence was certainly told about Khan in March and April 2003.

“This was a significant set of contacts that Khan had, and ones of much less importance were exchanged on a daily basis between the CIA and MI5. British authorities were sent a very detailed file.

“This demonstrates a catastrophic breakdown in communication across the Atlantic.”

The alert on Khan coincided with an order for New York police to be on the lookout for improvised chemical devices on the Subway. Khan was not linked to this alleged plot.

June 19, 2006 at 12:56 AM in MI5 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Shake-up follows London terror reports

ePolitix.com - Shake-up follows London terror reports

Reviews of the events surrounding the July 7 bombings have prompted a series of changes to Britain's intelligence mechanisms.

A report from the intelligence and security committee, drawn up from MPs and peers, suggested there had been misjudgements over the threat posed by 'home-grown' terrorists.

And the government's official analysis concluded that the four suicide bombers - Mohammad Sidique Khan, Hasib Hussain, Shehzad Tanweer and Jermaine Lindsay - carried out their attacks on a budget of less than £8,000.

Home secretary John Reid said that there needed to be an "effective and adequately resourced law enforcement and intelligence effort" to deal with the problem.

Meanwhile, MI5 director general Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller announced that her organisation is halting work on serious crime issues to focus on the terrorist threat.

She said "we are now faced by an unprecedented level of priority casework on international terrorism and I have decided, with the home secretary's agreement, that we need to withdraw from serious crime casework".

"The resources freed up will help to reinforce our work on international terrorism," Dame Eliza added.

According to data on the MI5 website, serious crime accounted for 2.5 per cent of the organisation's resources in December 2005.

Reid has also accepted the need to shake-up the warning system for assessing the terrorist threat.

The home secretary said the government would introduce a "simpler, more flexible and proportionate system" for assessing and categorising threat levels.

The intelligence and security committee report called for reforms, and former home secretary David Blunkett has also expressed his doubts over the way it functions.

The alert was dropped a level just a month before the July attacks, a move Blunkett said he would have objected to.

"When I was home secretary, with the information and advice I was given, I would not have countenanced, I would have said to MI5 'I don't believe this is the correct thing to do'," he told the BBC.

"With the hindsight I have now, I wouldn't do it, but with the advice and information that might may have been available to MI5 and Special Branch at the time, they may have taken an entirely different view.

"The problem we have is that the home secretary isn't in charge of operational matters and you have to be very certain of your facts and very secure and confident in your belief to actually say to them 'I'm terribly sorry but I'm challenging you not to do this'."

May 11, 2006 at 12:00 PM in MI5 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

MI5 and MI6 discover new market for spies like us

MI5 and MI6 discover new market for spies like us - Business - Times Online

By Michael Evans, Defence Editor
HOW vulnerable are Britain’s secret intelligence agencies to the lucrative alternative job offers now being made by private security companies? Spies with foreign travel experience and analysis skills are in big demand in the private sector — and the salaries on offer can be tempting for Crown servants earning relatively low pay.

There is no evidence of a serious exodus of intelligence officers from MI6 and MI5, but in recent years the private security company business has proliferated to such an extent that the secret agencies have lost some of their key staff.

One intelligence official said: “There’s no question that these companies are now providing an attractive alternative for perhaps the more adventurous and entrepreneurial members of the agencies, and they can get double the salary.”

In the same way that the SAS regiment has been looked on as a potential rich source for security company headhunters, MI6 and MI5 have been viewed in the same light. However, to judge by the increasingly successful recruiting campaigns by the two agencies, there are still enough men and women who prefer to serve their country at a lower salary — and a guaranteed pension.

Nevertheless, there is a market for ex-spies. Although television programmes tend to spice up the lives of the average MI6 or MI5 officer, giving the impression of a secret world unaccountable either to the law or to Parliament, the reality is far more mundane, and more bureaucratic. Both these agencies have to account for everything that they do, and that means form-filling. MI6 also works according to requirement guidelines set by Cabinet Office gurus, and any planned operation that might in any way cause political problems for the Government has to be approved by the Foreign Secretary.

So, for the more maverick- inclined spy, the controls and bureaucracy of the agencies might seem unappealing after a period in either Thames House (MI5) or Vauxhall Cross (MI6); and this is where the private security companies can benefit.

Less bureaucracy and more money are potentially attractive options for someone who enjoys the secret world but hankers after a more free- spirited environment.

A number of private security companies now have former MI5 and MI6 officers on their staff. Indeed, some companies have been set up by ex-spies and have retained links to their former government employers.

March 12, 2006 at 11:17 PM in MI5 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Secret files reveal WW2 problem of Nazi nobles

Scotsman.com News - Secret files reveal WW2 problem of Nazi nobles

NICHOLAS CHRISTIAN

NEWLY-RELEASED papers show the scale of suspicion and fear around the British High Command during the Second World War.

It has emerged that intelligence chiefs faced a dilemma over how many aristocrats with Nazi sympathies they should arrest, amid fears that interning too many would inflate their importance.

Documents released today at the National Archives in Kew show MI5 spied on a god-daughter of the late King George V, Dowager Viscountess Dorothy Downe, noting her as a "most fanatical admirer of Hitler" and intercepting her mail.

She was a high-profile British Union of Fascists official, but was not arrested despite concocting a plot to get herself detained which included having a letter written to The Times in 1940 demanding her arrest. However, the security service said there were "indications" she was anxious to become a martyr.

In addition, the intelligence services kept the folk singer Ewan MacColl - father of pop star Kirsty MacColl - under surveillance for years because of his communist sympathies. As a result, MI5 tried to get the BBC to stop using him on their programmes.

Documents also reveal how the sighting of a top German agent led to fears that Britain's "double-cross" strategy to intercept German agents might be compromised.

The sighting prompted a trawl of nightclubs, hotels and bars in a desperate attempt to locate Wilhelm Morz, "one of the cleverest secret agents the Gestapo has". The double-cross system meant MI5 was in a position to monitor and pick up German agents who were then "turned" and began working for Britain. The authorities feared Morz would figure out what was going on.

Unfortunately for MI5, the trail went cold.

March 5, 2006 at 04:40 AM in MI5 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

MI5 rebels expose Tube bomb cover-up

MI5 rebels expose Tube bomb cover-up - Sunday Times - Times Online

David Leppard
MI5 is facing an internal revolt by officers alarmed about intelligence failures and the lack of resources to fight Islamic terrorism.

To illustrate their concern, agents have leaked more topsecret documents to The Sunday Times because they want a public inquiry into the “missed intelligence” leading up to the July attacks in London.

They believe ministers have withheld information from the public about what the security services knew about the suspects before the bombing of July 7 and the abortive attacks of July 21.

The documents include an admission by John Scarlett, head of SIS, the secret intelligence service (also known as MI6), that one of the July 21 suspects was tracked on a trip to Pakistan just months before the attempted bombings.

Until now it was not known that any of the July 21 suspects, who are awaiting trial, were familiar to the intelligence services. It has been disclosed that MI5 had placed two of the July 7 bombers under surveillance before their attack, but judged them not to be a threat.

The new documents show that MI5, which is responsible for national security, allowed the July 21 suspect to travel to Pakistan after he was detained and interviewed at a British airport. Once in Pakistan he was monitored by SIS, which gathers intelligence overseas.

MI5 then conducted what the leaked memo says was “a low-level short-term investigation” into the suspect, who cannot be named for legal reasons.

It stopped monitoring him because it said “the Pakistani authorities assessed that he was doing nothing of significance”.

Scarlett revealed details of the operation to the parliamentary intelligence and security committee (ISC) last November. The committee, comprising MPs and peers picked by Tony Blair, is conducting a secret inquiry into the “lessons learnt” from the July attacks. It is due to be completed in April.

The Scarlett memo — marked top secret — was leaked by the dissident officers who want a public inquiry similar to that undertaken in America after the 9/11 attacks.

They believe it would highlight the need for MI5 and SIS to be given more resources to deal with Al-Qaeda. They are critical of Blair, who has ruled out an inquiry saying it would distract the security services from fighting terrorism.

The leaked memo refers to Scarlett as C — the traditional codename for the head of SIS. It states: “On the events of July itself, and the question of whether intelligence was missed, C noted that SIS had previously been involved in an earlier investigation of one of the July 21 (suspects) in Pakistan.

“This had been at the Security Service (MI5)’s behest and should be discussed with MI5.”

Another document, MI5’s November 2005 memo The July Bombings and the Agencies’ Response, has also been shown to The Sunday Times.

It names the suspect who was the subject of the 2004 investigation and shifts responsibility for the decision to stop monitoring him to the Pakistani intelligence authorities.

“(The suspect) had been the subject of a low-level short-term investigation concerning a visit he made to Pakistan after he was interviewed on departure from the UK,” it states.

“However, the Pakistani authorities assessed that he was doing nothing of significance in a terrorist context.”

The assessment echoes a decision by MI5 to halt surveillance on two of the July 7 bombers 16 months before the attacks. Both were filmed and taped by MI5 agents as they met two men allegedly plotting to carry out a terrorist attack in England.

After making what an official called “a quick assessment”, MI5 concluded Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer were not immediate threats. As the MI5 memo puts it: “Intelligence at the time suggested Khan’s purpose was financial crime rather than terrorist activity.”

David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said: “These leaks show that the need for an independent inquiry is incontrovertible.”

There is a growing consensus in Whitehall that the intelligence services will be seen to have made critical errors in failing to assess adequately the threat from at least three of the July suspects.

Scarlett conceded to the ISC that his agency had reacted too slowly. “Summing up the position before July 2005, C noted SIS were conscious of the size of the target, but equally conscious of what we did not know; we were thinly spread in North and East Africa; we were looking at new ways of increasing our reach; and we had sought funding to grow as fast as we thought feasible.

“Turning to the lessons learnt, C noted that SIS had understood the nature of the threat and that there was a great deal that we did not know. SIS had developed strategies to meet this threat.

“The attacks had shown that our strategies were correct, but needed to be implemented more extensively and more quickly,” the memo noted.

Scarlett said that even before the attacks, SIS had planned to expand overseas. “C concluded by explaining how post-July SIS were speeding up implementation of the pre-July strategy.” He said the agency did not want more money for staff.

The dissident officers believe the buck-passing revealed in the memos demonstrates that there should be closer co-operation between the agencies.

They support calls for a unified department of homeland security, along the lines suggested by Gordon Brown, the chancellor, this month.

February 26, 2006 at 03:58 AM in MI5 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

MI5 fails to throw light on bombers after six months of investigations

News - Yorkshire Post Today: News, Sport, Jobs, Property, Cars, Entertainments & More

Maggie Stratton
BRITAIN'S intelligence services know alarmingly little about the worst terrorist attack on Britain despite more than six months of investigations, it emerged yesterday.
A leaked secret report for Tony Blair and senior Ministers into the July 7 London bombings states: "We know little about what three of the bombers did in Pakistan, when attack planning began, how and when the attackers were recruited, the extent of any external direction or assistance and the extent and role of any wider network."
The eight-page report by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC), a Sunday newspaper reported, admits MI5 still does not know whether the attacks of July 7 and July 21 were linked and whether al-Qaida was behind them.

It has already been reported that spies knew the suspected leader of the July 7 bombings Mohammed Sidique Khan, from Dewsbury, was planning to fight for al-Qaida more than a year before the attacks.
MI5 had originally believed Khan and the three other July 7 suicide bombers – Shehzad Tanweer, from Beeston, Leeds, Hasib Hussain, 18, from Beeston and Jermaine Lindsay, who grew up in Huddersfield – acted alone, but they now think a wider network may have been involved.
And, the report leaked to The Sunday Times reveals, the intelligence services have found "growing evidence of a wider extremist network in West Yorkshire associated with the 7/7 bombers."
It adds: "We still do not know whether we are dealing with an orchestrated campaign or coincidental/ copycat attacks.
"We do not know how, when and with whom the attack planning originated. And we still do not know what degree of external assistance either group had.
"Whilst investigations are progressing, there remain significant gaps in our knowledge."
The report speaks of no insight into the degree of input from al-Qaida, how long the July 7 attacks had been planned, or how the suspects operated.
Tories are calling for an independent inquiry into what the intelligence services knew before the attacks.
And Shadow Homeland Affairs Minister Patrick Mercer said yesterday he was "extremely concerned" about "complacency within the Government" over the terrorist threat to Britain.
He added: "At the moment people think 'We have had our attack and we have got away with it. Fifty-two killed is too many, but it isn't the two or three thousand lost in New York or the 200 in Madrid'. And therefore the tendency for all of these (security) policies to be put on the backburner."
Among the findings presented in the report are that a network of "Iraqi jihadis" is attempting to bring a terrorist campaign to Britain and a group of al-Qaida facilitators in the West Midlands are being investigated.
MI5 believes the main West Midlands suspect directed a second man, an Iraqi, who arranged a trip to a Pakistan training camp for the leader of a separate British terrorist cell.
The camp, which the cell leader visited over three months in early 2005, may have been the same one where former teaching assistant Mohammad Sidique Khan was trained. The report "speculates" both men may have been trained by al-Qaida at the same time.

January 30, 2006 at 10:10 PM in MI5 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Intelligence chiefs resisted backing anti-terrorism Bill

London bombs terror attack The Times and Sunday Times Times Online

By Philip Webster, Political Editor
INTELLIGENCE chiefs resisted government pressure to back controversial aspects of the anti-terror Bill, it was revealed last night.

Ministers wanted to use secret intelligence to impose a ban on a number of radical Islamic groups after the London July 7 bombings, which killed 52 people. Private e-mails from the heads of MI5 and MI6 reveal that they were reluctant to allow a repeat of the run-up to the Iraq conflict, when their assessments were used to justify the case for going to war.

Leaks of official e-mails disclosed by the New Statesman also suggest that Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, and Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, were at odds, with Mr Clarke voicing doubts over the banning of some groups and suggesting that Mr Straw was “isolated” on the issue.

Inquiries by The Times have also revealed severe doubts at the top of the intelligence and security services about allowing their intelligence to be used to justify political decisions.

Senior figures have said that the wounds of the Iraq war run deep and that they should never again be used publicly to vindicate military decisions.

The e-mails suggest that John Scarlett, the head of MI6, and Eliza Manningham-Buller, his opposite number at MI5, declined to throw the weight of their organisations behind a change of policy on Islamist groups, despite pressure.

Tony Blair made the possible banning of groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir and al-Muhajiroun part of a 12-point plan of terror measures in a press conference after the July 7 attacks and the foiled attacks of July 21.

Plans to widen the powers to ban such groups were passed in the Lords last night, although they did not specify the groups. Mr Clarke has told Parliament in a written statement that he intends to do that later.

Mr Scarlett, who was at the centre of claims that the Government “sexed up” the Iraq war intelligence and was called before the Hutton inquiry into the death of David Kelly, the weapons expert, was reported in the e-mails as saying that he “sees this as a political issue and a matter for the Foreign Secretary”.

A separate e-mail summarised the position of the agencies as being: “They do not oppose proscription but oppose reliance on their assessment to justify what they see as a change of policy, not fact.”

The e-mails apparently describe a conversation between Mr Clarke and Mr Straw on August 28. A private secretary in Mr Straw’s office quotes Mr Clarke as describing Mr Straw as isolated in his view that the political wings of the Palestinian group Hamas and Hezbollah should be banned.

The Home Secretary said that he would be “happy in principle” to include them in the overall ban but “only if the Foreign Secretary could square the agencies”. In another e-mail Mr Clarke is reported as suggesting that the Government “would lose the case for proscription”.

Mr Clarke’s apparent doubts about banning Hizb ut-Tahrir were detailed in another e-mail. But the passage that will embarrass the Government says: “There is no apparent case to proscribe HuT because its activities abroad include involvement in terrorism. Indeed, it is not entirely clear whether they would be caught under a future criterion of ‘justifying or condoning violence’.”

January 25, 2006 at 09:41 PM in MI5 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Police 'betrayed' over cash to fight terrorism

London bombs terror attack The Times and Sunday Times Times Online

By Daniel McGrory, Alice Miles and Sean O’Neill
POLICE are warning that without a huge increase in manpower and money they will struggle to combat the threat of suicide bombings.

A senior figure at the centre of the fight against terrorism has told The Times that the Prime Minister and the Government are felt to have reneged on assurances to give police forces everything they need to fight the “war on terrorism”. Scotland Yard chiefs fear that the majority of extra resources for national security, to be allocated next month, will be awarded to the intelligence services, whose failings were exposed by the July London bombings.

Of the £135 million pledged to the war on terrorism at least £85 million will go to MI5 and MI6. The remaining £50 million has to be split between various agencies including the police and GCHQ.

Scotland Yard insists that it needs all that money to recruit more officers by the time new anti-terrorist measures are in place on the streets by April. However, senior police sources told The Times that they expect to be disappointed even though they believe that the nation is entering the most perilous 12 months since the upsurge in Islamist terrorism.

Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, has already indicated that his force is fully stretched but has foiled three credible terrorist plots since the July attacks which killed 52 people in London.

They are understood to be a plan to set off car bombs, a missile attack and an attempt to obtain a cache of weapons. Sir Ian has revealed that the security services now send daily alerts to the police all of which have to be investigated. Before the 7/7 bombing the alerts were issued monthly. Resources will be further stretched when senior anti-terrorist officers leave frontline duties to take part in four major terrorist trials scheduled for 2006.

No arrests have been made in connection with the July 7 bombings and the suspected mastermind behind the plot has never been identified. The inquiry has, however, forced Scotland Yard to throw away the existing intelligence profile of a terrorist because none of the bombers fitted the model.

Senior officers are engaged in trying to draw up “a new topology” of the radicalisation of a young Muslim to attempt to stem the influence of extremists and prevent further attacks.

Scotland Yard also wants an initial £60 million to establish a new Counter Terrorist Command with 2,000 officers — an increase of 33 per cent on the current combined strength of the anti-terrorist branch and Special Branch. However, its case is unlikely to have been helped by the intervention yesterday of Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, who said the terrorist threat came from “fairly disorganised and small groups of disaffected people”.

He added: “This is not a great organised international conspiracy with orders flowing down the chain.”

Overall spending on domestic security will have risen from £1.5 billion in 2004-05 to £2.1 billion by 2007. The security budget has more than doubled since the September 11 attacks in the US.

December 28, 2005 at 01:57 AM in MI5 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Torture valid as it saves lives, says MI5

London bombs terror attack The Times and Sunday Times Times Online

By David Sanderson
TORTURING detainees does help interrogators to obtain evidence that could save lives, according to Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the MI5 Director-General.

Dame Eliza also said it was impossible for agencies in this country to know if information supplied by foreign security services had been obtained by the use of torture. She added that to try to find out would jeopardise future relationships.

In a statement Dame Eliza cited the example of Kamel Bourgass, a failed asylum-seeker jailed this year for killing Detective Constable Stephen Oake and attempting to create ricin in his North London flat.

She wrote in the statement, obtained by Channel 4 News, that information about his intentions first came from an interview conducted by Algerian security services with Mohammed Meguerba, an al-Qaeda terrorist. The statement was submitted to the House of Lords, which is considering an appeal to a Court of Appeal ruling last year that British intelligence services can use information extracted under torture to detain suspected terrorists.

The appellants are foreign nationals, Algerians or other north Africans detained in Belmarsh under the indefinite de- tention of the Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001.

They are challenging the Government’s strategy of by-passing traditional standards of due process and the constraints of human rights law by allowing the executive to deport or detain without proof of wrongdoing.

October 21, 2005 at 06:35 PM in MI5 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

MI5 has hundreds of terror suspects under surveillance, Clarke tells MPs

London bombs terror attack The Times and Sunday Times Times Online

By Richard Ford
The Home Secretary revealed that a massive security operation prevented two attacks on London
HUNDREDS of people are being closely watched by police and the intelligence services in Britain because of the terrorist threat they pose.

Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, disclosed the scale of the huge surveillance operation as he told MPs yesterday that two terrorist attacks on London last year had been thwarted. He also admitted that he had imposed the first control order on a foreign-born British citizen and that more people suspected of involvement in terrorism could be placed under virtual house arrest.

Prisons had also become “hot spots” for radicalising young Muslims, he said. Mr Clarke, along with Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, and Ken Livingstone the Mayor of London, appeared before the Home Affairs Select Committee, which is holding a public inquiry into the July terrorist attacks in London. Sir Ian came face to face with the family of Jean Charles de Menezes, minutes after telling the committee that the policy of shooting to kill suspected suicide bombers would remain.

Sitting only three three rows in front of three cousins of Mr de Menezes, who was shot dead at Stockwell Tube station on July 22, Sir Ian insisted that the tactic for dealing with suspected suicide bombers was “the least worst option”. Later, the cousins refused to meet Sir Ian when he sought to apologise personally to them.

In a statement, Alessandro Pereira, 25, Vivian Figueiredo, 22, and Patricia da Silva Armani, 31, called for the shoot-to-kill policy to be suspended.

Sir Ian said that the policy had been reviewed after the death of Mr de Menezes, 27, who was shot eight times. “We made a small number of administrative changes but the essential thrust of the tactics remains the same. There is no question that a suicide bomber, deadly and determined, who is intent on murder, is perhaps the highest level of threat that we face and we must have an option to deal with it.”

It would have been much worse to come before MPs and admit that the Metropolitan Police had no policy to deal with “suicide bombers on the loose”, he said. Sir Ian disclosed that the policy had been developed after the September 11 attacks in the United States. He said that the events of July meant that a “watershed” had passed and the issues should be publicly debated without disclosing the detail of tactics.

Earlier Mr Clarke told MPs: “There are certainly hundreds of people who we believe need to be very closely surveilled because of the threat they pose.” Home Office evidence added that a further 100 people living abroad had been identified because their behaviour could lead to them being excluded from entering Britain. Mr Clarke told MPs that two plots to mount terrorist attacks in London last year had been thwarted. He would not disclose any further details because of forthcoming trials.

He said there had been a “slight shift” in thinking that there was an international dimension to both the July attacks. “I certainly think the foreign link is a very important link to look at,” he said. “There has marginally been a slight shift of opinion towards there being international links.”

Mr Clarke said that Parliament was to be asked to look at new criteria for banning militant organisations. This is necessary because under the present criteria the Government will find it impossible to meet the Prime Minister’s promise to ban Hizb ut Tahrir and al-Muhajiroun.

He took a much more conciliatory attitude towards the judiciary than the Prime Minister and said he did not think that they operated in an “eccentric” manner in interpreting the Human Rights Act. The committee was also told about concerns of the role that prison was playing in radicalising young Muslims.

The Home Secretary refused to put a time on how long he expected the threat against Britain to continue. He said: “The fact is that we have what I would call a nihilist terrorist threat, something that will only be beaten by demonstrating it cannot succeed. Unlike the IRA, where there was a specific political ambition, we are facing a different kind of threat.”

THE BOMBINGS IN NUMBERS

4 bombs exploded

4 attempted attacks

54 killed in explosions

38,000 exhibits held in two warehouses

80,000 videos seized from CCTV cameras

1,400 fingerprints

160 crime scenes

£60 million cost to Metropolitan Police of which half is overtime and payments to other forces providing additional manpower

44,000 people tried to contact Metropolitan police bureau in hour after July 7 attack

72 faith hate crimes in London in three weeks before July 7

256 faith hate crimes in London in three weeks afterwards

October 2, 2005 at 12:31 AM in MI5 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Defeating terror may mean giving up rights, MI5 warns

the Times

By Michael Evans, Defence Editor
THE head of MI5 has publicly backed Tony Blair’s warning that the rules of how Britain combats the threat of terrorism have to change.

In a break with tradition, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, Director-General of MI5, allowed a confidential speech that she had given to Dutch intelligence officers to be published on the agency’s website yesterday. She gave a warning that an erosion of civil liberties might be necessary to stop more British citizens from being killed by terrorists.

Her intervention will provide ammunition for the Prime Minister and Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, in their battle with the courts over dealing with suspected terrorists. It will also bolster the Government’s struggle to introduce rules to make it easier to deport foreign preachers of hate.

The arrests of radical clerics, promised by Mr Clarke, have been delayed, and European ministers at an anti-terrorism conference in Newcastle this week frustrated his plan to store mobile phone records for a year.

Dame Eliza does not specify which human rights need to be compromised to help the intelligence agencies and police to cope with the threat of attacks, but her intervention is certain to intensify the debate among MPs and human rights groups.

Dame Eliza insisted that MI5 would not be “coerced” into sharing intelligence with friendly agencies.

Mr Clarke faced strong opposition to his call for tougher counter-terrorism laws after the July 7 and July 21 attacks in London, when he addressed the European Parliament in Strasbourg this week.

Dame Eliza, speaking in The Hague on September 1 at a meeting to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service, made it clear that she had serious concerns about trying to counter the terrorist threat without greater powers, even if that meant encroaching on human rights.

Echoing words used by the Prime Minister, Dame Eliza said: “The world has changed and there needs to be a debate on whether some erosion of what we all value may be necessary to improve the chances of our citizens not being blown apart as they go about their daily lives.”

She admitted that the July attacks in London had been “a shock” to MI5 and to the police, but said that intelligence was always going to be fragmentary and incomplete.

She praised the response of the public to the bombings and people’s refusal to be cowed. Most people, she said, understood that the attacks were “on all our citizens, whatever the ethnic origins”.

The central dilemma for MI5 and other agencies, and for the Government, was trying to protect British citizens “within the rule of law when intelligence does not amount to clear-cut evidence and when it’s fragile”.

Dame Eliza said that she wished to do nothing that would damage “hard-fought-for [human] rights”. But trying to contain terrorism in a democratic society was “not straightforward”.

FROM TEACHER TO SPYMASTER
# The Honourable Dame Elizabeth Lydia Manningham-Buller was born on July 14, 1948, the second daughter of former Attorney-General and Lord Chancellor, Reginald Edward Manningham-Buller, 1st Viscount Dilhorne

# Educated at Northampton High School and Benenden School

# Taught at the Queen’s Gate school in London for three years, having read English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, before joining the Security Service

# Senior liaison officer in Washington with the US intelligence community during the first Gulf War, before leading the new Irish counter-terrorism section from 1992

# Appointed Deputy Director-General of MI5 in 1997. Rose to Director-General in 2002, becoming the second woman in the role

# Married with five stepchildren

September 9, 2005 at 11:53 PM in MI5 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Nazi terror campaign unwrapped

Britain, UK news from The Times and The Sunday Times - Times Online

An MI5 officer described this device as "a hand grenade disguised as a slab of chocolate". There is no evidence any were made

Nazi terror campaign unwrapped
By Michael Evans
MI5 files reveal the James Bond-style antics of the Germans in the Second World War

GERMAN saboteurs during the Second World War developed a ruse to hit Britain with exploding chocolate bars and bombs disguised as tins of choice red plums in syrup.

Details of the bizarre assortment of shopping-basket bombs made ready for Hitler’s planned invasion of Britain have emerged in the latest release of MI5 files.

However, the Nazis’ home-made explosives appeared to be about as effective as some of their propaganda. A mock-up Evening Standard front page is identified as the “Late Blighters Final”. The fake London paper, dated February 17, 1940, claimed that the RAF had been massacred and that Parliament had held a secret session to deal with the crisis. An advertisement on the front advised: “Take French laxative — it will keep you on the run.”

Christopher Andrew, a professor of modern and contemporary history at Cambridge University and the official historian for MI5, said yesterday that some of the propaganda pamphlets “looked more like Monty Python”.

However, judging by the extensive use of household items as covers for explosive devices, the German secret service took the sabotage and propaganda business seriously.

According to MI5’s files, the would-be German saboteurs had developed timer bombs to be concealed beneath false bottoms in workmen’s mess tins, complete with sausage, mash and peas. Bombs were also designed for shaving soap, torch batteries, blocks of wood, coal, tins of fruit salad, leather belts, tins of frozen eggs and stuffed dogs. Hitler’s chocolate bombs were given special prominence in the MI5 files, with detailed drawings of how they should work.

Designed as grenades, each “bomb” was made of steel with a thin covering of real chocolate. “When the piece of chocolate at the end is broken off, the canvas is pulled, and after a delay of seven seconds the bomb explodes,” the MI5 file explained.

Professor Andrew said that some versions of the German boobytraps revealed in the newly declassified files, entitled “German camouflage for sabotage equipment”, smacked more of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory than anything else.

“I believe German espionage and sabotage of the UK actually achieved 100 per cent incompetence in the Second World War,” he added.

Leaflets prepared for British eyes included pictures of healthy German babies contrasted with photographs of malnourished British children at death’s door. “Life is good for children in the Third Reich. Jolly, happy children live in Greater Germany,” one pamphlet boasted.

There were also references to Britain’s “economy recipes” to keep the people fed, including providing frogs for breakfast and shooting the deer in Richmond Park to be turned into sausages or pies. The MI5 files had one leaflet purporting to be from Hitler, which said: “You lice, vermin, spawn of prostitutes, how I hate you, Schweinehunde.”

September 4, 2005 at 08:14 PM in MI5 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Ministers' U-turn on phone taps

Times Online - Sunday Times

David Leppard and David Cracknell
MINISTERS are preparing a U-turn over controversial plans for combating the threat of terrorism. The introduction of telephone intercept evidence in court is being considered by Charles Clarke, the home secretary, and the move is backed by MI5, the police and the Tories.

Britain and Ireland are the only countries to ban evidence from telephone taps in court prosecutions but even Liberty, the civil liberties group, has backed its use.

Clarke, who last month said he opposed the move, is now prepared to review the ban and next week is also expected to confirm a U-turn on plans to keep terror suspects under house arrest.

The about-turn on house arrest was agreed by the cabinet on Thursday after Clarke said the police and MI5 opposed the plans, which also faced defeat in the courts and parliament.

The move follows advice from the security services, which said the house arrest plans would create a focus for disaffection with radical protesters drawn to demonstrate outside suspects� homes. They believe the houses could become recruiting centres for Islamic fundamentalists, in the same way that internment without trial in Northern Ireland helped IRA recruitment.

While abandoning house arrest, Clarke is expected to announce that both foreign and British-born terror suspects could be subject to �control orders�, such as electronic tagging, curfews and limits on use of the internet.

Pressure on the home secretary to change his new policy � announced only last month � will continue this week when Lord Carlile of Berriew, the government�s independent adviser on terrorist legislation, will say he wants new laws to allow telephone intercept evidence to be used in court.

Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, has told Tony Blair that, on balance, the spy agency favours the use of telephone tapping evidence. Her views, and those of senior police chiefs, such as Sir Ian Blair, the new Metropolitan police commissioner, are likely to persuade Clarke that the measure could be added as an amendment to government legislation.

This Friday Blair and Clarke will meet Michael Howard, the Tory leader, and David Davis, the shadow home secretary, at a Downing Street �terror summit� in an attempt to secure a cross-party consensus.

The Tories will say they are prepared to support the government if it drops the present house arrest proposals and promises to consider abandoning the ban on phone-tap evidence.

If there is agreement, the Tories will vote with the government to continue the temporary detention of 10 terror suspects in Belmarsh jail and Broadmoor top security hospital.

The law lords have ruled that their detention is illegal and the suspects are due to be released on March 10. o A man arrested at Heathrow on Tuesday has been charged with conspiring to cause an explosion between October 2003 and March last year. Salahuddin Amin, 29, who arrived on a flight from Pakistan, will appear before Bow Street magistrates in London tomorrow.

February 13, 2005 at 01:00 PM in MI5 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

MI5 plants agents in regions to fight terror

Times Online - Britain

By Michael Evans, Frances Gibb and Sean O'Neill

DPP calls for stronger powers to hold suspects without trial

MI5 WILL deploy agents around Britain in a radical reorganisation of the intelligence service aimed at combating the threat of home-grown Islamist terrorists linked to the al-Qaeda network.
Teams of intelligence officers, surveillance experts, analysts and computer specialists will be permanently based in cities in the West Midlands, the North West and other areas where it is feared that extremists are radicalising Muslim youth.

The expansion is likely to be accompanied by the introduction of controversial new powers for police and prosecutors dealing with terrorist suspects. Ken Macdonald, QC, the Director of Public Prosecutions, told The Times that he was seeking the right to hold suspects without charge for longer periods, to question them under compulsion and to enter into plea-bargain deals or to grant immunity from prosecution in return for information.

Mr Macdonald, previously a defence barrister who has represented terrorist suspects, said that there was �a pretty strong case� for giving prosecutors tougher powers.

The move by MI5, the Security Service, to establish a new network of bases outside London reflects fears that the main terrorist danger comes not from abroad but from within the UK.

Omar Sharif, one of two British suicide bombers who attacked a bar in Israel last year, was born and brought up in Derby where he associated with extremist groups. Three of the Britons released from the US detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were young men from Tipton, West Midlands, arrested in Afghanistan.

The only men to have been convicted in the UK of al- Qaeda-linked activity are two Algerians living in Leicester who were accused of raising money through credit card fraud and organising travel for recruits to Afghan training camps. However, hundreds of young Britons are believed to have attended such camps and police and the security services are keen to gather more information about their whereabouts and activities.

The main purpose of the dispersal plan, which is being considered by Eliza Manningham-Buller, the director-general of MI5, is to improve co-operation with regional Special Branch police around the country.

�The scale of the terrorist threat is such that MI5 and the police need to be able to work together even more closely, which means that the Security Service must be dispersed in a different way, to be able to respond rapidly to any particular activity,� a Whitehall official said.

Government sources said that MI5 would set up a pilot scheme for expanding into the regions within a couple of months.

The search will also be on for secure premises to house the MI5 teams. Advances in information technology mean that they will have a guaranteed secure system for passing all intelligence about suspected terrorists back to Thames House, the MI5 headquarters in London, where it will be assessed by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, set up after the attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001.

The expansion of the domestic intelligence network has been made possible after a significant increase in MI5�s budget in the past 12 months. A further increase is expected to be announced by Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, in his statement on government spending today.

MI5 has already begun a recruitment campaign to increase its size by 50 per cent to 3,000 staff and operatives by 2008. That expansion means that the Security Service will outgrow Thames House in London.

At present the budget for MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, the government communications headquarters based in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, is just under �1.3 billion, which includes capital spending amounting to �184 million. MI5�s share of the overall intelligence budget is not published but it is estimated to be around �200 million.

There are Special Branch units in each of the police forces in the UK, ranging in size from just a few officers to several hundred in London. However, MI5 will only be based in areas where there is the highest risk of terrorist activities.

The expansion will leave the Security Service with a similar set up to a number of intelligence agencies overseas. Canada, Australia and New Zealand all have major regional domestic intelligence centres as well as headquarters in their capitals.

July 11, 2004 at 07:58 PM in MI5 | Permalink | TrackBack (1236) | Top of page | Blog Home

Dossier a mistake - Rimington

Telegraph | News | Dossier a mistake - Rimington

By Elizabeth Grice
(Filed: 12/06/2004)

The whole idea of releasing an intelligence dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was misguided and has damaged public confidence in the secret service, the former head of MI5 said yesterday.

"I feel the dossier was a mistake," said Dame Stella Rimington. "Formally putting intelligence into the public domain was not, in my view, a sensible thing to do.

"The whole point about intelligence is that it changes. What you think is the case today may be different tomorrow because of new information. The trouble is, if you put something out as a dossier, it is frozen in time."

She added: "That whole episode has probably damaged the reputation of the intelligence service, at least momentarily, in the eyes of the public, which is a great pity."

The author of the dossier was John Scarlett, then chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. In his report, Lord Hutton said Mr Scarlett - who is now chief of the Secret Intelligence Service - may have been "subconsciously influenced" by the Prime Minister's wish to make a tougher case for going to war.

Asked whether, as director general, she would have resisted Tony Blair's request for a dossier, Dame Stella said: "I can't say, as I don't know the circumstances . . . but I expect I would have thought: no good will come of this."

Dame Stella, MI5's first woman director general, is currently infiltrating the male-dominated genre of spy fiction with her debut thriller, At Risk, which features a female MI5 agent based on her younger self. The book had to have official clearance before publication this month.

June 11, 2004 at 09:10 PM in MI5 | Permalink | TrackBack (125) | Top of page | Blog Home

MI5 to shake-up Commons security

MI5 to shake-up Commons security

The Government has called in MI5 to help tighten security at Westminster.
The move came after two men were charged in connection with Wednesday's purple flour bomb attack on Prime Minister Tony Blair in the House of Commons.

The move came after two men were charged in connection with Wednesday's purple flour bomb attack on Prime Minister Tony Blair in the House of Commons.

Commons leader Peter Hain has met with the deputy head of MI5 and radical new security measures are expected to be introduced following the incident during Prime Minister's Questions

Patrick Ronald Davis, 48, of Vale Avenue, Worthing, Sussex, and Guy Richard Harrison, 36, of Sopers Farm, Peppers Lane, Ashurst, Steyning, West Sussex, will appear at Bow Street Magistrates' Court in central London next Wednesday.

The two men were charged with "using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, likely to cause harassment, alarm, or distress" at the Commons on May 19.

They face a maximum fine of �1,000 each and cannot be jailed for the offence with which they have been charged.

Mr Hain said the "old-fashioned culture of security" in the House would have to be modernised, and told MPs "big modifications in security" were on their way.

But Mr Hain, and MPs from all sides, said the public should still retain access to Parliament.

Mr Hain and MI5's deputy head discussed how a review of security at the Palace of Westminster could be speeded up.

It is widely expected that the security screen which currently encloses all but three rows of the public gallery in the Commons will be extended to block off potential access to the chamber from all sides.

May 20, 2004 at 07:00 PM in MI5 | Permalink | TrackBack (112) | Top of page | Blog Home

MI5 security advice goes online

BBC NEWS | UK | MI5 security advice goes online

The security service MI5 has published its terrorist threat assessment and safety advice for the first time.
The details, available to the public on a new website, were previously given only to a few organisations.

But MI5 director general Eliza Manningham-Buller said it was important to help more people - especially businesses - protect themselves.

The current assessment is that "the threat from international terrorism remains real and serious".

The warning comes as the US released figures which suggest terrorist attacks are at an international 30-year low.

MI5 says the main terrorist danger to the UK and to British interests overseas comes from al-Qaeda and associated groups.

"Osama bin Laden has in several statements publicly named Britain and British interests as a target, and encouraged attacks to be carried out against them," it says.

Al-Qaeda cells and supporters of affiliated groups are known to be active in the UK, MI5 confirms on the site.

It also publishes a top 10 list of safety tips for businesses and other organisations.

Bomb blast net curtains

These include advice to carry out risk assessments, look at mail-handling procedures, and check that staff are who they say they are.

Another section advises organisations on protection against flying glass.

Experts recommend applying transparent polyester anti-shatter film (ASF) to glass, to reduce fragments and splinters.

Timber-framed Georgian-style windows should also have bomb blast net curtains, says MI5.

For new buildings blast resistant laminated glass or secondary glazing should be included in the design.

The new site also lists the methods of attack most likely to be used by international terrorists, with bombings most common for al-Qaeda.

Shootings, abductions and kidnappings have also been used and although no such attacks have yet been unleashed on the UK "al-Qaeda may seek to use chemical, biological or radiological material against the West," said MI5.

Businesses are urged to protect information as terrorists are likely to try to get access to details that would be useful to them, by infiltrating organisations or getting help from an "insider".

Two sections of the website have been translated into Arabic to "build on the co-operation of the Muslim community" said the security service.

'Long overdue'

Additional languages will be added later.

Ms Manningham-Buller said MI5 wanted to share some of its information about the threats.

"For the most part details of our operations must and should remain secret," she said in a statement published on the website.

"But stopping terrorists is only one part of our collective defences against terrorism.

"Another part of our work is to use the knowledge we have about these organisations to provide sensible and practical advice on how best to protect yourself against these threats."

Dr James Hart, commissioner of police for the City of London, said the website would be "an enormous advantage" to the counter-terrorism effort.

Conservative homeland security spokesman Patrick Mercer welcomed the website, but said it was long overdue.

MI5 also lists Northern-Ireland related terrorism, espionage and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as continuing threats to the UK.

May 3, 2004 at 11:48 AM in MI5 | Permalink | TrackBack (216) | Top of page | Blog Home

TERROR ADVICE PUBLISHED

Headline news from Sky News - Witness the event

The MI5 security service has for the first time put information about terror threats on the internet.
Information on the site had previously been confined mainly to government departments and is mainly aimed at business.

It details information on how to prevent against Islamic and Northern Ireland-based terrorism.

MI5 Director General Eliza Manningham-Buller said: "Our aim is to help inform decisions people may need to take about security measures.

"The descriptions of the threats should give people a better feel for the range and nature of security issues we all face and help to place our security advice in context."

The advice featured general guidelines on reducing exposure to security threats and information about how to tackle specific risks, such as bombs and hackers.

In its section on suicide bombs, the MI5 website points out that "any bomber, whether driving a lorry or wearing an exploding body belt, needs physical access in order to achieve their end".

It goes on: "The principle behind protective measures should therefore be denial of access to anyone, or to any thing, that has not been thoroughly searched."

April 30, 2004 at 07:05 PM in MI5 | Permalink | TrackBack (288) | Top of page | Blog Home

Universities spy on foreign students for MI5

Telegraph | Education | Universities spy on foreign students for MI5

By Michael Day and David Bamber
(Filed: 23/03/2004)

Universities are routinely spying on foreign students in Britain in order to help the authorities to keep potential terrorists under surveillance, the Telegraph has learnt.
Students' emails are being intercepted and mobile telephone calls listened to in an attempt to ensure that terrorists do not use universities as cover for their activities. Special Branch and MI5 are running the vetting operation in co-operation with most of the country's universities.

The scheme was quietly set up after the September 11 attacks in America, and goes much further than the controversial voluntary vetting system that was introduced in 1994 to prevent the transfer overseas of technology related to weapons of mass destruction.

Under that scheme, some universities agreed to contact the Government when assessing applications from potential students from certain rogue states. Since September 11, however, the institutions have been asked to go further and secretly gather and assess information on foreigners studying at their institutions. The universities cannot be named for legal reasons.

A close eye is kept on students from the "red flag" countries India, Pakistan, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Israel and North Korea. Applicants from those states are vetted, and asked to list their parents, previous study courses and employment. Those causing suspicion are then flagged for further monitoring.

Details of students' telephone numbers, email and home addresses are being passed by universities to the police, MI5 and the Foreign Office, said an official connected to British and American security. The official, who also has links to a leading university, said: "They are helping the security services look at students from the red flag countries. It's pretty well known that it's happening.

"With all the forms students fill in it is not difficult to get their mobile phone numbers or emails, or find out what kind of activities they are doing or where they hang out."

He said that the dramatic escalation in the terrorist threat since September 11 meant that spying on potential terrorists had become a key consideration. "You've got this situation now where if you're from a certain country you will be under suspicion. And the more Madrid-type incidents there are the more this will be stepped up."

Suspected terrorists who have studied in Britain recently include the lecturers Dr Azahari Husin, 45, who went to Reading University, and Shamsul Bahri Hussein, 36, who read applied mechanics at Dundee. They are wanted in connection with the Bali bombings in October 2002, when 202 people, including 26 Britons, died.

Ramzi Yousef, the al-Qa'eda plotter behind the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing that killed six people, studied engineering at Swansea.

One senior university official said: "Since September 11, we are co-operating with the security services in a much deeper way than before. We take it very seriously."

In many large universities it is official policy to have a senior academic who liaises with the security service and police about students they suspect are carrying out undercover activities. MI5 and MI6 have also used academics to recruit British students.

Now, Scotland Yard Special Branch officers monitor emails and mobile telephones and universities are expected to pass on suspicious meetings, activities or absences.

Several students are believed to have been ordered to leave Britain as a result of such monitoring, after it was discovered that they had links to extremist groups.

The policy has angered some critics. Ian Gibson, the Labour chairman of the Commons science and technology committee, said that his committee had heard evidence that foreign students were being spied on.

"I think there will be a number of universities that are doing this," he said. "It goes absolutely against the principle of freedom in academia and allowing people to associate with whom they like or think what they like."

A Conservative member of the select committee, however, was more pragmatic about the surveillance. Robert Key, the MP for Salisbury, said: "Given the current security situation I wouldn't be against it as long as the Government was in complete control of the situation."

Chris Weavers, a vice-president of the National Union of Students, said: "I think there needs to be very strong justification for any such surveillance. Just assuming that any individual from a certain country might be a risk is utterly unrealistic. However, he admitted: "We've seen many people from the United Kingdom who have been involved in terrorists attacks."

It would not be legal for the police or security service to intercept directly emails or telephone calls without a warrant or permission from the Home Secretary. Both, however, are exempt from the Data Protection Act.

� Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004.

April 5, 2004 at 09:31 PM in MI5 | Permalink | TrackBack (103) | Top of page | Blog Home

Terror suspects to be held for three more days

Times Online - Home

FROM PA NEWS

Anti-terror police have been granted three more days to question eight young Muslims arrested on Tuesday. The extension came as a man was charged in Canada with aiding terrorist activity in London.

As the police investigation continued in London, Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad, the leader of the radical group al-Muhajiroun, said that Muslims could not co-operate with the authorities against other members of the faith.

The remarks came a day after the Muslim Council of Britain called on the Islamic community to play its part in fighting terrorism. Al-Mujiharoun has been accused of trying to recruit Muslim youth and take over the local mosque in Crawley, West Sussex, where at least three of the suspects were arrested.

The men being held in London, all British citizens of Pakistani origin, have been in custody since Tuesday morning when they were arrested during 24 raids across south east England. The arrests came as police found half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertiliser, which they believe could have been used in a devastating blast.

Last night officers were granted an extension to hold the men under the Terrorism Act until Saturday afternoon, Scotland Yard confirmed. The eight suspects, aged 17 to 32, are held on suspicion of "being concerned in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism". Under the Terrorism Act police can apply for extensions to detain suspects up to a maximum of 14 days.

Sheikh Omar, who has denied accusations that his group recruited four young men from Crawley to fight for the Taleban in Afghanistan, told the BBC Radio Today programme: "Muslims have a unique way of life. Co-operating with the authorities against any other Muslims, that is an act of apostasy in Islam.

"Having said that, Muslims in Britain have the right to defend themselves, but without the use of violence. They can gather together, speak with the imams. The imams themselves should lecture the Muslim community, not the Muslim Council of Britain who are all of them a bunch of seculars."

The 44-year-old father of seven also accused Britain and the US of being involved in terrorism.

"I believe the culture of terrorism has become the fashion of the 21st century when the USA and Britain are involved in terrorist activity in Afghanistan and Iraq. Vice versa, al-Qaeda are involved in terrorist activity in Manhattan and Madrid.

"At the end of the day, this is a cycle of violence. You need to look from both sides, you cannot ignore it."

Sheikh Omar, who denounced all violence in the interview, also complained that the media was "demonising" the Muslim community in Britain and that the high-profile arrest of the eight suspects had not helped relations with the Muslim community.

"The British authorities have the right to stop anybody they believe is committing crime. I'm not arguing that. But the way they did it, in very high profile fashion, and giving press details about it, it is clearly sending another message. The British Government is under tremendous pressures from foreign governments to tackle the voice of Islam which remains in the UK."

He also predicted that those arrested would be "released soon".

Shahid Malik, a member of Labour's governing National Executive Committee, told the same programme that the Muslim Council of Britain's actions had been "very appropriate, very responsible".

Mr Malik said: "We cannot live in a fantasy world. Half a ton of ammonium nitrate was found. I think that has been a big wake-up call and a shake-up call, and I think that has been the catalyst for the action of the Muslim Council of Britain."

Computer student Omar Khayam, 22, his brother Shujah Khayam, 17, and cousin Ahmed Khan, 18, from Crawley, Sussex have been named as three of the eight men being questioned at the high security Paddington Green police station in London.

Relatives of Mr Khan and the Khayam brothers have defended the trio, saying that they have done nothing wrong. Mr Khan's father Ansar Khan, 48, a taxi driver who works at Gatwick Airport, claimed that young Muslims were being brainwashed with "wrong" teaching in certain mosques in London but denied that his son and nephews were terrorists.

Anti-terrorist police have said that the alleged London bomb plot was not linked to the March 11 Madrid bombings which killed 191 people.

In Ottawa, Mohammad Momin Khawaja, 29, a software developer who was arrested on Monday is alleged to have participated in or contributed to the activities of a terrorist group and facilitated a terrorist activity between November last year and March 29 in Ottawa and London.

Mr Khawaja, a Canadian of Pakistani descent, recently travelled to London but said that he was meeting a prospective bride. He was remanded in custody until Friday.

April 1, 2004 at 07:58 AM in MI5 | Permalink | TrackBack (152) | Top of page | Blog Home

Canada computer expert linked to British bomb plot

Times Online - Britain

By Richard Cleroux in Ottawa and Stewart Tendler

CANADIAN police have arrested a computer expert alleged to be linked to a plot by al-Qaeda supporters to plant a lorry bomb in the heart of London.

Mohammad Momin Khawaja was held in Ottawa after a raid co-ordinated with Britain's biggest counter- terrorist operation for decades.

Last night Mr Khawaja�s father, Mahboob, an outspoken critic of the United States, was reported to have vanished from his home in Saudi Arabia, where he is the administrator of a college.

His son was taken to court in shackles in Ottawa on Tuesday as 700 British police pounced on 24 homes and address across London and the Home Counties, arresting eight young Britons and seizing half a ton of ammonium nitrate.

The 29-year-old software designer, who was arrested at his office, works for the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and had visited London recently.

He is facing two charges of being involved in terrorist activity in Ottawa and London between November 10 and March 29. He appeared in court wearing a bulletproof vest.

At one stage agents hid in a van parked close to his family�s home in an Ottawa suburb and, after the arrest, they questioned other members of the family and searched for explosives or bomb-making equipment. The house where Mr Khawaja lives in Orleans, just outside Ottawa, was also raided after being placed under surveillance for a month.

Mr Khawaja, who worked on contract for the Canadian Government, is suspected of having travelled to Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as making trips to Britain, where he has family. He was shadowed by undercover agents while he was here.

One of his brothers, Qasim, said that he had come to Britain to find a wife and denied any links to terrorism. The family has a Pakistani background and Mr Khawaja, according to schoolfriends, became increasingly religious as he got older.

Scotland Yard and MI5 refused to comment about Mr Khawaja�s possible role in the alleged lorry bomb plot, but Canadian officers told how, at Britain�s request, they kept him under surveillance for more than a month.

The Globe and Mail newspaper in Canada reported that the dwelling was owned by his father, whose book Muslims and the West: Quest for Change and Resolution was published in 2000.

It examines Islamic fundamentalism, global conflicts and the Western world�s understanding of Islam. Dr Khawaja has also written several essays criticising United States foreign policy and the war on terrorism.

He is said to be a highly respected member of Ottawa�s 10,000-strong Pakistani community and is presently teaching at a university in Saudi Arabia.

Dr Khawaja told the Edmonton Journal that allegations against his son were false. �My children are not involved in this kind of thing. We are Canadian citizens and have lived there for a long, long, time. I don�t know what is the reasoning behind this whole adventure that they are undertaking with the context of international security. This whole thing sounds like a hoax and a very unusual adventure on the part of police.�

Originally from Pakistan�s Kashmir region, Dr Khawaja has lived in Ottawa for about 30 years but has worked extensively abroad, including in the United States and Saudi Arabia.

He received his masters of political science in 1981 and his doctorate in social science in 2001, both from Syracuse University in New York State.

During the 1970s he worked for the Canadian Government as a policy analyst for the Canada Post. Neighbours said Dr Khawaja had been away for about a moth but normally lived at the house with his wife Azra and four adult children.Yesterday his son Qasim said that he and his sister were separated and questioned for seven hours and police from the Mounties� counter-terrorist unit took away computers and software. The Khawaja family moved to Canada in 1967 and all the children were born there.

In London, the eight suspects arrested in Operation Crevice faced a second day of questioning in the high- security wing of Paddington Green police station.

Two of the Britons had planned to leave the country next week.

Their families insisted that MI5 agents wanted to recruit Omar Khayam, 22, and his brother, Shujah, 17, as informants and had suggested that they go to Pakistan to infiltrate Islamic fundamentalist groups.

Ansar Khan, whose son, Ahmed, 18, is another of those being held, said: �They are teenagers. They can�t fix a tyre, they�re Manchester United fans and they�re nothing to do with terrorism.�

April 1, 2004 at 07:57 AM in MI5 | Permalink | TrackBack (119) | Top of page | Blog Home

Family claims MI5 ordered teenagers to go to Pakistan

Times Online - Britain

Daniel McGrory and Christopher Walker

THE family of one of the suspected Islamic terrorists arrested on Tuesday has claimed that MI5 agents had tried to recruit him as a spy.

Omar Khayam, a gifted young cricketer with ambitions to play for England, was arrested in Crawley, West Susex, as part of series of co-ordinated police raids.

His uncle, Sajad Ahmad, said the security services had urged the 22-year-old student to go to Pakistan next month with his younger brother. Mr Ahmad also said he had had three meetings in the past month with an MI5 agent he named as �Mr Goulding�, including a rendezvous in a supermarket car park.

He claimed MI5 knew his nephew had bought airline tickets for flights to Islamabad on April 6 for three of his relatives � all of whom are now in custody. The security services took the unusual step of denying that Mr Khayam was at any time working for them.

It it is claimed that security agents spoke to Mr Khayam when he returned from Pakistan four years ago. They assured him he was in no trouble and left him to pick up his studies. Since that brief introduction in 2000, Mr Khayam has enjoyed what can best be described as an intriguing relationship with the intelligence services.

At that time he appeared to be one of many teenagers who were impressed by followers of the radical al-Muhajiroun group who had set up their own meeting place in an anonymous semi-detached house in a Crawley backstreet.

Local imams fought off a radical group�s attempts to take over the main mosque in the town but say they were powerless to stop at least four young men from Crawley travelling to Afghanistan to fight for the Taleban. At least one of them, Yasir Khan, 26, was reportedly killed in the fighting. Last night the cleric that many in Crawley blame for recruiting their youth, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammad, denied he had any part in sending them to fight abroad. The 44-year-old father-of-seven told The Times he had briefly taught Mr Khayam in 2000. He said the engineering student �was a peaceful young man with family problems who left us because of those and not because of any differences in ideology�.

Senior diplomatic sources said that Mr Bakri�s public pronouncements advocating the training and despatch of young British Muslims to fight abroad had been noticeably watered down since the 2000 Terrorism Act had introduced penalties for such activities on British soil.

His website no longer boasts of the �martyrs� killed in fighting in Chechnya, Bosnia and Afghanistan but Mr Bakri admits he has provoked controversy by �refusing to condemn or condone� Muslims who carry out suicide attacks.

Neighbours said yesterday that Mr Khayam spent long periods abroad, mostly in Pakistan. Mr Ahmad insisted that his nephew was not a security threat. He described him as a normal British youth.

Mr Ahmad said MI5 told his nephew there were people they thought were a threat to national security. �The MI5 agent said they do not have enough resources and asked if his nephews would leave (the country) to make it easier for them,� Mr Ahmed said.

�MI5 are satisfied my nephews wouldn�t do anything to hurt their country or threaten national security. They wanted them out of the way so they could concentrate on other people. They can�t cope with the problem as there are too many people.

�I told Omar and he agreed to go. But my younger nephew didn�t want to go, he became depressed and upset, and so we contacted a solicitor who spoke to MI5 for us. But in the end he had to go. The tickets were bought for April 6 to Islamabad for them to carry on their education for a year.

Mr Ahmad said that MI5 suggested his nephews were associating with the�wrong sort of people� and that a year in Pakistan would help to break that contact.

He showed the name and phone number of the MI5 officer with whom he claimed to have dealt, which were inputed into his mobile phone.

April 1, 2004 at 07:55 AM in MI5 | Permalink | TrackBack (329) | Top of page | Blog Home

How surveillance ensnared enemy within

Times Online - Britain

By Stewart Tendler and Daniel McGrory
Operation Crevice led to anti-terrorist raids across London's suburbs.

ANTI-TERRORIST officers had nervously kept their secret for weeks: how close Britain was to a devastating bomb attack. Only a handful of senior figures were trusted with the knowledge that a group of young Britons from half a dozen suburbs around London were finalising their plans to strike.

Most were living quietly with their parents or their young families. Bemused neighbours of the men said that that they had lived at the same addresses for years and had jobs such as taxi drivers and builders; one was an airport caterer. Another of the teenagers arrested yesterday was a student with ambitions to go to university.

All the young men were described as models of suburban respectability. But counterterrorist officers and MI5 suspected otherwise.

�This was truly the enemy within,� said one senior figure involved in what was named Operation Crevice. �This is proof that it�s not a question of if, it�s the when and the where.�

Even as leading politicians argued on television whether the public should be scared by repeated warnings from police and ministers about the inevitability of a terrorist strike, the plot was fast taking shape.

David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, was informed about it and gave permission for the telephones of some of the suspects to be tapped.

While all the speculation in recent days has been of possible British links to the train bombings in Madrid, the intelligence agencies have been concentrating on a number of terraced houses in locations such as Crawley, Slough and Ilford.

Undercover teams had been closely shadowing some of those arrested yesterday and are reported to have linked them to others in the group through telephone calls and e-mails.

At this stage, the counterterrorist teams said they did not know how any attack was to be carried out. Most of the men picked up yesterday were considered too young to have fought in Afghanistan or to have been schooled in bomb-making at al-Qaeda training camps. Police believe that they were recruited in Britain. Although most of them are of Pakistani origin, all were born in Britain or have spent most of their lives here.

The focus of the inquiry suddenly changed with a string of intercepted telephone calls inquiring about renting space in storage warehouses. These anonymous, prefabricated buildings are the perfect hiding place. They are large enough to store vehicles and, as witnessed yesterday, a builder�s sack full of industrial- strength fertiliser, without anybody paying much attention.

There are a number of Asian-owned building firms that use the Access storage centre in Hanwell where the fertiliser was found, so the sight of young men lugging a 6ft bag of what looked like builders� materials was not out of the ordinary.

The dilemma for the security authorities was when to move in. Operation Crevice differed from previous terrorist surveillance operations in that the men being watched were spread so widely around London and the Home Counties.

Detectives were understandably guarded about why they chose yesterday to make their move. One suggestion is that they intercepted a telephone call which indicated that the half tonne of fertiliser was about to be moved.

In its industrial packaging in the Access storage unit, it was no danger to anyone. Those planning to fashion it into a bomb needed somewhere to mix the fertiliser with fuel oil and the explosive charge, then pack it into a van or lorry to deliver it to the intended destination.

One of the many addresses reported to have been searched yesterday was a warehouse in Slough, half an hour�s drive from where the fertiliser was stored. Police declined to say if it was from here that they suspected the bombmaker was to operate.

After intense discussions, Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, and Assistant Commissioner David Veness, Scotland Yard�s most experienced terrorist expert, chose Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, the head of the Anti-Terrorist Squad, for the early-morning raids. They had to co-ordinate in secret with five separate forces and the intelligence agencies for the biggest raid seen in Britain since the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The 700 or so officers involved were told to gather before dawn at various assembly points around the Home Counties, where they were briefed as to their targets. Most of those involved were not told details of a possible bombing plot. The first raids began at 4.30am and by the end of the morning police and forensic science teams had moved in to 24 premises. Seven of those were in Crawley. One of the properties was in Juniper Close, where the homeowner was said by neighbours to work for a catering firm which prepares inflight meals for airlines at Gatwick airport. The man, of Pakistani origin, was said to live there with two sons and a daughter.

Another of the men taken into custody was arrested at the Holiday Inn at Gatwick, where police sealed off two rooms on the fourth floor while they were searched by explosives experts.

Curious onlookers were kept away from two neat homes in Gossops Green, where one of the neighbours, Martyn Tidd, 46, said that the father and sons who lived there all worked for a minicab firm which operated from Gatwick. Six more addresses raided were in the Bury Park area of Luton.

Bystanders in Overstone Road watched as an elderly Asian couple who had lived in the street for about 15 years were led away by police. Officers also searched a property across the road that the couple were said to have bought for their married daughter. A middle-aged woman and a man in his 20s left the house carrying an overnight bag as police made it clear that none of them had been arrested.

Anthony Pisano was leaving for work when he saw police in riot gear bursting into a flat near his home in Hencroft Street South, Slough, not far from Heathrow.

He could not remember the name of the tall, slightly built man of North African origin who lived in the converted property, but Dr Pisano described him as being in his late 20s.

On the few occasions that the pair chatted, the man had apologised for the noise he was making but explained that he was renovating the flat where he lived with his sister.

Near by, in Warrington Avenue, Slough, neighbours watched as forensic science teams investigated a white, pebble-dashed, semi-detached house.

When Joey Baynham, 19, looked through his bedroom window in Grovelands Road, Reading, and saw police break down the door of a house, he assumed that it was a drugs raid. An Irish woman who lived there, and who is thought to work at a school in the area, did not appear to be at home. Neighbours said she had a young lodger of Pakistani origin staying there.

Senior officers made clear last night this was just the first phase of Operation Crevice. Searches will continue today at all the properties that were raided.

Officers admited that they could not be certain that others involved in any plot may still have access to other homemade explosives. Above all, they do not yet know the targets the men may have had in mind.

March 30, 2004 at 11:03 PM in MI5 | Permalink | TrackBack (164) | Top of page | Blog Home

The truck bombers of suburbia

Times Online - Britain

By Stewart Tendler and Daniel McGrory

Eight young British Muslims questioned

Explosives found in 27 raids around London

A PLOT by al-Qaeda supporters to set off a massive lorry bomb was foiled yesterday after the biggest counterterrorist operation seen in Britain since September 11.

MI5 agents and anti-terrorist officers were questioning eight young Britons last night after the discovery of the ingredients for a half-tonne fertiliser bomb in a storage unit in West London. The bomb would have been five times the size of the devices used in the al-Qaeda attack on Bali, which claimed more than 200 lives.

Seven of the men arrested are 22 and under, including a 17-year-old student who was seized at an address in Slough. The other man is 32 years old.

The police, who believe an al-Qaeda inspired operation is by far the most likely explanation for the intended attack, fear that terrorists were intending to kill hundreds of civilians with an attack on a �soft target� such as a shopping centre. Only last week Sir John Stevens, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, said that terrorists would target crowded bars, nightclubs, pubs and shopping centres in an attempt to cause mass casualties. He was criticised by David Blunkett for saying that an attack was �inevitable�.

Sir John did not mention that MI5 and five forces were involved in Operation Crevice, which culminated in yesterday�s arrests.

Mr Blunkett praised what he called a first-class police and security operation. In a statement yesterday, he said: �I would like to record the Government�s thanks to all those from the police and security services who work so tirelessly and bravely on our behalf.�

At dawn yesterday 700 officers raided 24 homes and businesses across London and the South East. Police marksmen were on standby as arrest teams and search units raided properties in Ilford, East London, and Uxbridge, Colindale and Hanwell in West London. Other addresses around the M25 were in Luton, Crawley in West Sussex, Horley in Surrey, Slough and Reading. Experts say that the explosive was the same type used by al-Qaeda sympathisers last November in their attacks against targets, including the British Consulate, in Istanbul. Police did not identify the suspected target for the bombers here, but a security source said they are confident that they have the ringleader of this plot among those being held in custody.

With the Easter holidays approaching, security will be tight at many civilian targets including football grounds and shopping centres. Security arrangements for this weekend�s Grand National and other sporting events are certain to be reviewed.

All those in custody in the high-security wing at Paddington Green police station are British citizens, and the majority are of Pakistani origin. The biggest discovery in the raids was at the Access storage company in Boston Road, Hanwell, where police found the ammonium nitrate. The fertiliser could easily have been bought on the internet and would have cost about �60.

The supplier of the chemicals has been traced but detectives are concerned at the lack of effective control on the sale of a chemical that is used to make military explosive.

This same mixture has been used regularly by al-Qaeda groups since their 1998 lorry bomb attacks on two US embassies in East Africa and in the bombings of residential compounds in Saudi Arabia, where Western workers live.

The storage unit is a short drive from Heathrow, and at least three of those arrested live close to Gatwick and addresses were raided near Luton airport. Police do not believe that any of the three airports were the intended target.

The man leading yesterday�s operation, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, the head of the Anti-Terrorist Branch, took the unusual step of making a public statement within a few hours of the arrests in an attempt to calm public concerns.

He said the operation was part of �continuing and extensive inquiries by police and the Security Service into alleged international terrorist activity and I must stress that the threat from terrorism remains very real. The public must remain watchful and alert.�

More arrests are expected. The police said they were in contact with Muslim leaders in the areas raided to brief them about the reason for the arrests and to assure them that this was not an attack on the Islamic communities living there.

March 30, 2004 at 11:02 PM in MI5 | Permalink | TrackBack (80) | Top of page | Blog Home

Telling tales: the spy chief�s novel

Times Online - Sunday Times

Richard Brooks, Arts Editor

THE dress is Zilkha, Ronit Zilkha. The car is an Audi quattro, not an Aston Martin, and she is more likely to have a dab of perfume behind her ears than a spy gadget up her sleeve.
Welcome to the secret agent world of Liz Carlyle as created by Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, in her debut novel.

At Risk, to be published this summer, is a fast-paced thriller with a 34-year-old female spook as its heroine. She inhabits a world that Rimington, who retired as MI5�s director-general in 1996, is uniquely qualified to describe.

If Rimington�s brief was to free the spy novel from male bondage, it is mission accomplished. She has said in the past that Ian Fleming�s 007 �had damaged the image of MI5� because he was such a male chauvinist. He fostered the notion that women, except for a few secretaries, do not work in the intelligence services.

Carlyle is a thoroughly modern Smiley, equally at home talking about Afghan guerrillas or the Foo Fighters and ready to discard her married lover, a profile writer for The Guardian newspaper.

Whereas 007 wore Cuban heels concealing espionage devices, Carlyle sports pointed plum-coloured shoes with kitten heels that are apt to get wedged in the cracks between paving stones.

She is more like Zoe, played by Keeley Hawes in BBC1�s drama Spooks. She is intelligent but not overtly so and relaxes by lying in the bath �listening to La Boh�me and trying half-heartedly to make sense of an article in The Economist�.

Her smart dress even draws sarcastic fire from her superiors in the intelligence services. �Ah. You�re running an agent in Harvey Nichols,� says one.

Rimington, who was accused of spilling state secrets when she published her autobiography Open Secret three years ago, plans to write a series of novels featuring Carlyle.

The book is not without humour. Rimington names one of her baddies after Ray Gunter, a minister in Harold Wilson�s government of the 1960s when the secret service became overly suspicious about alleged Soviet sympathies among Labour politicians.

Rimington also gets her revenge on David Shayler, the former MI5 officer who was prosecuted for publishing his concerns about the intelligence service�s alleged abuse of its powers and who called her a hypocrite for penning her memoirs. For the Christmas party at MI5, where staff drink from FBI mugs and store their pencils in Fortnum & Mason jars, 50 agents plan to upset their section head by donning rubber masks bearing Shayler�s face under a Santa hat.

The plot of At Risk concerns an Al-Qaeda-type terrorist who is smuggled into Britain but becomes a far more dangerous threat when he teams up with an �invisible�.

An invisible is CIA talk for a terrorist who, because he or she is an ethnic native of the country, can cross its borders unchecked, move around unquestioned and infiltrate its institutions with ease.

Carlyle is a member of the Joint Counter-Terrorist Group, created by the government immediately after the World Trade Center attacks to share intelligence. As the terrorists move towards their target in East Anglia, only her female intuition can avert disaster.

However, the new heads of MI5 will frown at their former chief�s lengthy description of how terrorists buy explosive materials and make a bomb.

In one scene, a couple of terrorists go into a toy shop and buy children�s �silly putty�.

They then mix up explosives with all the detail of a Delia Smith recipe: �Taking a Pyrex bowl, Faraj brought water to the boil. Adding two packets of clear gelatin, he mixed it with a stainless steel dessert spoon. Handing the woman the gloves, he allowed the mixture to cool, then added a half-cup of cooking oil and stirred.

�As they watched, a thin surface crust of solids began to form. With the spoon, she skimmed these off and placed them in a small Tupperware box, which she then left in the freezer compartment of the fridge. Both worked in silence.�

One other staple ingredient of the Bond novel, however, is missing. There are no steamy sex scenes.

Rimington, who is 69 this year, said: �I have dreamt for years of writing a thriller and have had the main character, Liz, in my mind all that time.

�She has changed and developed as the years have gone by and as I have changed. She is obviously in large part autobiographical but she also draws on a number of other female intelligence officers I have met during my professional career.�

She is still ruffled by the traditional image of the woman�s role in MI5, having joined the service herself as a �5-a-week clerk/typist. �I don�t see many Moneypennys in here,� Carlyle snaps at a male chauvinist colleague at one stage.

In her memoirs, Rimington wrote that �even in the 1980s I was warned against doing counter-terrorist work because I was told a family needs its mother�.

Today, she believes, MI5 still has set ideas on how its operatives should dress. �The accepted look, which most people seemed gradually to fall into, lay somewhere between sombre and invisible,� she writes in At Risk. �Dark trouser suits, neat skirts and jackets, sensible shoes � the sort of stuff you found in John Lewis or Marks & Spencer.�

This remark may draw some sniping when Rimington next attends a board meeting at Marks & Spencer, where she has been a non-executive director since 1997.

March 20, 2004 at 10:04 PM in MI5 | Permalink | TrackBack (148) | Top of page | Blog Home

The spy within

Times Online - Sunday Times

Graham Greene's mistress unravels the mystery of Kim Philby

For more than three decades, Graham Greene discreetly shared his life with a mistress, Yvonne Cloetta. After the novelist’s death in 1991 she maintained their code of silence until — provoked by smears that, among other things, he had been homosexual — she decided to set the record straight.
She began preparing her memoirs with the help of Marie-Fran�oise (“Soizic”) Allain, a confidante of the couple. Cloetta died in 2001 while the book was unfinished, but Allain has now completed it from recordings of their conversations.

It opens up Greene�s complex world from within � including his enduring links to British intelligence and the mystery of his friendship with Kim Philby, the double agent.

This relationship, which has long intrigued Greene�s many fans � and enemies � began when they served together in British intelligence. After Philby fled to Moscow in 1963, Greene controversially wrote the introduction to the traitor�s memoirs. In a spy novel, The Human Factor, he also created a sympathetic double agent who flees to Russia.

When Greene was dying in 1991, his authorised biographer, Norman Sherry, was still pressing him for details of the relationship. Days before his death, Sherry wrote to him: �Wish you felt you could write me last thoughts about Kim Philby and maybe also Yvonne who would have her own response to Kim Philby.�

Sherry�s entreaty has been lingering for more than a decade. The final volume of his biography is still unpublished.

Cloetta�s book now unravels the mystery. Allain�s own inside knowledge � her father, a close friend of Greene, was a senior French intelligence agent assassinated in 1965 � amplifies the story.

Allain says: �What Yvonne told me about Greene and espionage is complex and precious: encounters with Philby in Moscow (she was there); the atmosphere on the Riviera where Graham often met with pals from the �old firm�; hints about his activities in Indochina, etc.

�All these elements may help us towards an understanding of Greene the writer and the many men within, as Yvonne slowly releases her �secrets� and interrogations.�

Soizic Allain: Would you say Graham was an honest man?

Yvonne Cloetta: The word �honest� has so many different meanings. Honest and good with other people, yes; honest with himself, I�m not entirely sure.

SA: He wasn�t a cheat?

YC: No, no. A many-sided character, for sure, but not a cheat. During a period of his life, of course, he had to cheat � unwillingly, I would say � for the sake of others.

SA: You mean in his role as a secret agent during the war?

YC: No, I was thinking of his relationships with women.

SA: As far as cheating or different degrees of reality are concerned, how could he reconcile the Catholic faith with visiting the brothels of Havana?

YC: He was a complex man, who seemed to have different compartments in his head. He could devote himself completely to religion and, indeed, also delve into the mystery of a brothel in Cuba in all its shady aspects.

There�s a link to be made with his fascination for espionage. He always saw a connection between brothels and spying: when he was sent to Africa by MI6 during the war, he had had the idea of opening a �house� where prostitutes would have been agents.

He often said to me: �Don�t think that I went to brothels to do what other men normally do in those places. First, I was intrigued. I wanted to know why those girls had come there. Furthermore, I found their conversations much more interesting than those that one heard in fashionable circles.� He even kept up a correspondence with some of them.

Graham�s secret was his passion for secrecy. Just as he was interested in priests and the power that confession conferred on them: so many secrets to unravel.

SA: Didn�t Graham play a game, particularly where Kim Philby was concerned? Various theses have been advanced lately which put forward a new scenario in which Kim was not simply a double, but a triple agent, with Graham being used as a privileged contact (without necessarily knowing it) so that certain information could be passed to the British secret service. The friendship between him and Philby was therefore secondary to the exigencies of intelligence.

YC: I can only repeat what I was told by Rufina, Kim�s wife: �To suggest that Kim became a triple agent after he came to Moscow is pure nonsense.�

SA: But what do wives know about men like that? She would have been kept out of it.

YC: From what I saw of Kim Philby, he was not going to begin another career over there. His physical state, his health and his age did not allow him to question everything and put his life at risk. What is more, and it is one of the qualities Graham recognised in him, what he did he did out of conviction and not for money, even if he did have a good pension and lived in a well-appointed flat. Money did not interest Kim Philby.

SA: Did Graham ever mention this hypothesis that Philby could be a triple agent?

YC: No, never, because it didn�t occur to him. For him, Kim Philby�s real career came to an end in 1963, when he left for Moscow. And Norman Sherry never had an answer from Graham on this matter.

Graham was worried when he received his letter. He admitted to me: �I�m anxious about what Norman has to say about this affair. God knows what Norman is going to say.�

No, Philby�s real career was over. I learnt later about the way he had been treated in Moscow at the beginning. After all his struggles on their behalf, he expected to be greeted as a hero by the Soviets � the KGB in particular. That was far from being the case. The object of mistrust and suspicion, he felt in some way rejected by his own. He started to drink � drinking as if he was suicidal. He wanted to destroy himself. And it was Rufa who rescued him. She told me this when she came to visit me.

SA: Could all this have been a set-up perhaps, to confuse the issue?

YC: Hardly . . . Not during the Brezhnev period! Once he was in Moscow, he couldn�t even be a �double� any longer. What�s more Philby disliked this term �double agent�. At one of our meetings, at the Georgian restaurant Aragvi in Moscow in September 1987, when the conversation turned to �what we�d do if we had our chance again�, he suddenly said angrily: �I�m always treated as a spy or a traitor. But a traitor to what and to whom? I�ve never belonged to the Establishment. It was up to them to know what I was doing. I never betrayed my true friends � the Russians. The right I have done is greater than the wrong I have done.�

As far as I�m concerned there was Kim the friend and Kim the spy. He had that gentle, hypocritical expression � he looked like the perfect spy.

SA: Should we forget some of the dreadful deeds he was responsible for?

YC: You�d have fallen for his charms, despite everything. And yet when I knew him, in 1986, he was no longer young; just two years younger than Graham, 80 in fact. He suffered from emphysema and he was very ill. But he was a delightful man. He had extraordinary charm. He needed it, for the job he was doing. He took everyone in. Physically he was nothing special: he wasn�t handsome, only average height, but as soon as he started speaking his expression and his smile melted you.

SA: Do you think Graham may have fallen for that charm?

YC: No.

SA: What was it, then?

YC: They used to meet during the war, in the evenings in London during the blitz, at a restaurant. For Graham (who never stopped making a mockery of the secret service afterwards) at that time joining the secret service was a great adventure.

SA: Did Graham suspect the double game Philby was playing, in 1943 or later? He once said to me: �I didn�t know anything then. All I knew was that Philby, like me, was a man of the left . . . He was playing a very dangerous game. He was very brave.�

YC: For him Philby was a charismatic boss who had �all the small loyalties to his colleagues, and, of course, his big loyalty was unknown to us�.

SA: Kim�s defection didn�t seem to have damaged their friendship, did it?

YC: No, on the contrary. And yet between 1963 and 1986 they never met. They corresponded: 12 letters and a postcard from Cuba from Kim. Nine letters from Graham.

SA: Can you try to describe their friendship?

YC: Throughout the time I saw Graham and Kim together in Moscow, after they had not seen each other for so many years, I said to myself: �If they�re friends, then they must hold certain essential ideas in common.�

I had seen what Graham thought of the Soviet regime, and how he disapproved of it completely, as he demonstrated on several occasions. And I wondered how Kim, who had to live in Moscow, and was really trapped there, could endure it.

SA: Did they not share more or less the same ideas or illusions about communism?

YC: No. You have to distinguish between the two men, if only because of the difference in the intensity of their idealism and their convictions. Philby went to the very end. Graham�s interest very soon waned. The story about his becoming a member of the Communist party for four weeks in Oxford in 1923 was simply so that he could make a trip to Russia. Whereas with Philby, it was really deep-rooted. Graham was far less idealistic than him and he lost his enthusiasm once he realised that life in the Soviet Union did not quite correspond with the idea he had of it from Marxist theories.

No, between Graham and Philby, it really was the �human factor�, even if it wasn�t easy to deal with, considering the pressure coming from Britain on the part of the public. So if there was one man for whom Graham committed himself totally, it was Kim Philby. And he really had to be fond of him to do that.

The first meetings between them actually date from 1941. Graham was finishing his military training; Kim at the time was head of a small section of the intelligence service dealing with German and Italian activities in Portugal and west Africa, including Sierra Leone (which Graham knew already), where he was posted.

After a gap of about two years they found themselves in the same section under Philby�s command. In June 1944, Graham turned down Kim�s offer of promotion and decided to stop all official activities in the intelligence service. He�d had enough. This petty bureaucrat work did not correspond at all with the image he had of the secret service. Besides, he had already decided to devote himself to writing. He couldn�t do both.

Graham never allowed himself to be taken in by the �seductiveness� of espionage. His friendship for Kim was to do with the man he was and not because he was a spy. Kim had a fine sense of humour, which Graham appreciated.

You wouldn�t say that Philby was his best friend, but he�s the one he took most risks for. And he never stopped speaking up for him, even to his friends in the �old firm�. I often saw evidence of that. They would explode with rage and hatred. Graham attributed this purely and simply to the feelings of jealousy that foot soldiers have for an important general, and this was only increased by the fact that they knew Philby could have been �C� (head of SIS). When Kim died, someone wrote in an English newspaper: �I hope he died in agony.� Graham was shocked and furious. He said to me: �Those people do more harm than anything Kim Philby could have done.� His colleagues and former colleagues on the C�te d�Azur, naturally, did not agree with Graham and could not understand his friendship for Philby, even if they retained a certain sympathy for the man himself, while disapproving utterly of his activities.

SA: I have often wondered how Graham could have disregarded his activities.

YC: Graham�s loyalty was unshakeable. To a friend.

SA: Was he not drawn a little too far?

YC: I jotted down his words: �Sharing a sense of doubt can bring men together even more than sharing a faith . . .�

SA: Do you think it was this that drew Philby and Graham to one another? I�m thinking of their correspondence about Afghanistan. Could Philby have been a sort of dissident? Did you have the impression that when they met they were tacitly putting on an act?

YC: If Graham were putting on an act with Kim Philby, then he was putting on a terrific one. Because there was nothing in Graham�s behaviour � really nothing � throughout all those years that could have allowed me to think that he was playing a double game, or that he was lying or telling me stories. No, quite simply they were two companions meeting after not seeing each other for a long time.

SA: Was it Philby who had asked to see Graham?

YC: Yes. Before the trip, Graham had said to me: �Since I�m going there, I should like to meet my friend Kim.� When I asked him why, he replied: �First, because he�s a friend, and then because it�s always pleasant to meet a friend you haven�t seen for a very long time; and then, out of curiosity, too. I should like to see how much he has remained an Englishman and how Russian he�s become.�

We went first of all to Moscow, then to Leningrad, and afterwards to Georgia. It was only on our return to Moscow that a meeting with Philby was arranged. Naively, I�d said to Graham: �But why don�t you telephone him?�

�No, he knows I�m here, and if he wants to see me, he�ll make the first move. I�ll leave him alone; I�ll let him come to me. I won�t do a thing.�

Eventually we were asked to dinner with Philby and his wife. It was clear that precautions had been taken. The driver did not drop us at the building where the Philbys lived; he asked us to get out just before we got there. Rufa came to meet us in a small street, behind where he lived.

My eyes were on stalks from the very beginning. It was quite obvious there was a lot of emotion there. First of all, they just stared, petrified, at one another, and then when Kim was able to speak he said: �Well, it�s obvious that much water has flowed by, you�re looking a good deal older!�

Graham replied: �No more than you!�

SA: Had Philby become slightly Russian?

YC: No. Totally English � 100%.

SA: Did you have the impression that he was being watched? That it was as if he was in prison?

YC: No, not in prison, but . . . he was living in a flat that belonged to the KGB, and when we met the following day at a restaurant he had a car with curtains. I would say not so much watched as protected.

One tiny detail I did notice: he spoke a great deal about his mother-in-law, Rufa�s mother, whom he was very fond of. And he said that she was very worried about him, and he didn�t know why. Well, it so happened that I went into the kitchen to talk to Rufa, who was cooking dinner. She said to me: �The telephone is bound to ring, and it�s bound to be my mother calling, for she knows someone is coming to dinner tonight. She�s going to telephone to find out how everything was going, how it all went.� And, sure enough, the telephone did ring. So, was it her mother, or someone else?

The overall atmosphere of the meeting was cautious. Philby�s words to Graham were: �Please, Graham, don�t ask me any questions about the past.�

SA: So their conversation was actually rather banal.

YC: Yes, Graham asked him questions about his life in Moscow. I really did have the impression that the two men were meeting like friends who did not want to hark back to the past any more, and especially that Graham should not ask him questions about what he had actually done.

SA: Do you think that Graham was fascinated by disloyalty, or was he actually appalled by it?

YC: He didn�t speak in those terms. When he spoke of Philby, he was careful not to make judgments about what he did.

SA: I was talking about disloyalty as a constant feature of his work. Did he confront disloyalty head on?

YC: Yes, but it had much more to do with betraying a person. He made a crucial distinction here. It�s the story of Sarah and Maurice Castle in The Human Factor. They are betrayed by the various services.

SA: Wasn�t Graham in some ways close to thinking that it was Philby who had been betrayed? Why was there this similarity between The Human Factor and Philby�s story?

YC: This similarity was a pure coincidence � and I was witness to what happened. It was in 1970. During the winter. It was cold in the flat. I took a stepladder to look on top of the cupboards where the radiators were kept. I found a pile of papers. They included a few pages of a manuscript which he had begun over 10 years before and which he had entitled The Human Factor. He had started to write it in 1959-60, but he had abandoned it because in 1963 Kim disappeared and he said to himself that everyone would think that he just wanted to retell the story of Philby. When we discovered these pages he read them again and said: �Well, now that this affair is over, I may be able to carry on with my research.� He thought that these dozen or so pages were good and could lead to something interesting.

SA: So he had begun the book before Philby escaped to Moscow?

YC: That�s right. Before Kim defected.

SA: So you can see the conclusions that might be drawn. That he had not wanted to publish it at the time, either because his writer�s intuition had helped him to figure out what Philby was up to and he did not want anyone to suspect that he had been in the know; or else that he did not want to betray a friend by giving food for thought to readers and the press.

YC: No, no, these hypotheses are childish.

SA: Don�t you get the feeling that espionage was a bit of a game for him? Espionage was a subject that entertained him.

YC: Yes, he enjoyed making a mockery of it and standing back from it somewhat. Particularly when he was with your father. Once when we had invited your parents to dinner � this must have been in 1959 or shortly afterwards � the two men were like small children and they spent the evening in fits of laughter! Graham loved playing pranks.

SA: He remained an adolescent at heart . . .

YC: Hard to say. On the one hand he was so mature, so tormented. You couldn�t say that he was still childish, but like all men he had a slight puerile side to him. With his friends he may have felt the need to experience what he possibly missed in his childhood.

SA: Going back to �the old spies club� did he see much of former members of the �old firm�?

YC: Yes. There were several who lived in the south of France. They made up a sort of fraternity. They all looked as if they were playing at being spies! Graham lived and breathed in that atmosphere. It was a world he frequented. The greater majority of them were former SIS people.

SA: Do you think Graham could have been disloyal to Britain?

YC: Today, I often wonder how far Graham�s attraction for the Russians extended, what explained the attraction . . . I often ponder what he wrote in the margins of my notebook � as he sometimes did � after he met Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1987. Graham wrote: �To me as we shook hands, he said: �I have known you for some years, Mr Greene�.� He told me that Gorbachev spoke in English, without an interpreter. Gorbachev�s remark is quite enigmatic. Of course, Graham was famous as a writer, and that was a compliment Gorbachev was paying him, but I am wondering . . . Wasn�t Graham leaving a clue in my notebook? That�s why I ask myself how far Graham�s sympathies went. Graham came close to thinking that it was Philby who had made the wisest choice.

SA: However, if what Norman Sherry reports is correct, Graham broke the rule of total loyalty towards Philby: he would pass on Philby�s letters to the Foreign Office.

YC: No, he only gave them the ones he thought would be of any interest to them. He gave them the one on Afghanistan. He told me that. When he left Antibes for England soon afterwards, he casually told me: �I�m taking with me Kim�s letter together with my answer, because it can be information, it can be disinformation, so it�s as well I take it to the Foreign Office.�

SA: Graham, in his last letter to me, also refers to the same letter from Philby: �He wrote to me about the war in Afghanistan, to tell me that he was against it and that he knew no one around him who was for � in other words, he clearly indicated that the KGB had been against that war.� So what is your conclusion?

YC: Graham has left us, taking his secrets with him. But what I can tell you is that, to the very end, he worked with the British services.

� Estate of Yvonne Cloetta and Marie-Fran�oise Allain 2004

� Translation Euan Cameron 2004

Extracted from In Search of a Beginning: My Life with Graham Greene by Yvonne Cloetta as told to Marie-Fran�oise Allain to be published by Bloomsbury on April 8 at �16.99. Copies can be ordered for �13.59 + �2.25 p&p from The Sunday Times Books First on 0870 165 8585 or at www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy

March 20, 2004 at 09:47 PM in MI5 | Permalink | TrackBack (229) | Top of page | Blog Home

Spy world in turmoil over whistle-blower

Times Online - Newspaper Edition

By Michael Evans, Defence Editor and Laura Peek

Court case collapse raises fears on US relations and Secrets Act
THE Government moved last night to shore up relations with American intelligence agencies after a whistle-blower who leaked a top-secret US document walked free from the Old Bailey.

Katharine Gun, a 29-year-old translator at the Government�s GCHQ spy centre in Cheltenham, had admitted leaking a memo on an alleged �dirty tricks� operation by the Americans on the eve of the war with Iraq.

The case against Mrs Gun, who was charged under the Official Secrets Act in November, was dropped yesterday. Experts said that the decision seriously compromised the Official Secrets Act. Washington was given notice of the decision by Lord Goldsmith, QC, the Attorney-General.

Katherine Gun walks away from the Old Bailey. She urged others to "follow their consciences". Photo: Peter Nicholls
The document, leaked to a newspaper in March last year, revealed a request to GCHQ to spy on six United Nations Security Council members whose votes were needed to back taking military action.

The memo, from a leading official at the US National Security Agency (NSA), outlined a plan to eavesdrop on communications to and from UN offices in New York and the homes of the ambassadors of Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria, Guinea and Pakistan � all non-permanent members of the Security Council at the time. It said that the NSA wanted to obtain the �whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals�.

Mrs Gun, who joined the GCHQ staff in 2001, was sacked last June when she revealed her part in the leak and was later charged under the Official Secrets Act 1989.

The prosecution refused to reveal the reasoning behind the decision in court yesterday but it required sensitive co- ordination between London and Washington to prevent damage to the special relationship. US staff work in Cheltenham, and GCHQ specialists are attached to the NSA signals intelligence centre at Menwith Hill, Harrogate.

Since the early 1990s, Britain has had a unique arrangement with the Americans under which the Government has been paying for use of its Magnum intelligence-gathering satellites. The deal was agreed after the decision in 1989 by Margaret Thatcher�s Government to abandon a British spy satellite programme.

American and British officials were adamant yesterday that the intelligence-sharing relationship was �durable and robust� and that it was accepted that occasionally there were bound to be �wrinkles� in the arrangement. The official US line was that this was a matter for the British authorities. But officials admitted that there had been close co-ordination over the case.

It is the first time that a case under section 1 of the Official Secrets Act has been abandoned, raising concerns that other employees of the secret agencies who might sympathise with Mrs Gun�s explanation � that she felt the plan was illegal � could act in a similar way.

When David Shayler, the former MI5 officer, was charged under the Official Secrets Act for leaking information to a newspaper of alleged improper activities by the Security Service, he claimed justification under the Human Rights Act. However, at his Old Bailey trial, this defence was rejected.

Mrs Gun�s lawyers claimed that the case was dropped to prevent the disclosure of the Attorney-General�s advice for the Government on the legality of the Iraq war. Ministers have repeatedly refused to make this advice public.

But Whitehall officials insisted it was for legal and technical reasons, and not out of fear that sensitive documents might have to be disclosed to the court. They said that the CPS knew that sensitive documents might have to be disclosed and still went ahead.

Mrs Gun, from Cheltenham, who had pleaded not guilty, yesterday left court smiling and said: �I�m absolutely delighted and relieved. I have no regrets and I would do it again.� She urged other intelligence workers to leak information if their consciences told them to.

As the repercussions of the abandoned trial were being considered at all the secret agencies, David Pepper, the director of GCHQ, is expected to remind all its 4,500 employees of the importance of remaining loyal to its official secrets code.

Although MI5 is responsible for advising on safeguarding classified documents, GCHQ imposes its own regime for preventing leaks. Random checks are carried out at all exit points but Whitehall officials acknowledge that someone prepared to breach the code would be able to take a document out of the building.

March 2, 2004 at 05:10 PM in MI5, UK | Permalink | TrackBack (126) | Top of page | Blog Home

Idealists rush to join MI5's army of spies

Times Online - Britain

THE race to recruit hundreds more MI5 officers to wage war on terrorism has been boosted by “a wave of patriotism”, according to security chiefs.
Thousands of young people have been flooding to join the agency, turning their backs on higher-paid jobs in their eagerness to defend the country.

The Times has learnt that 3,000 people responded in the first week of MI5�s biggest recruitment drive, which would increase the agency�s manpower to its highest level since the end of the Second World War. MI5 has also been given a 50 per cent rise in its budget, to �300 million a year.

The expansion comes after Eliza Manningham-Buller, the Director-General of MI5, gave several warnings about her fear that a terrorist attack in Britain using crude weapons of mass destruction was inevitable.

Whitehall officials said it was likely that out of the applicants so far, only 30 to 40 would be suitable to become intelligence analysts or surveillance specialists. Among those rejected were the substantial number of foreigners who had applied and those discovered to have lied during the interviewing and vetting process.

Intelligence analysis and surveillance are viewed as two of the areas at the top of MI5�s priorities because of the need to mount covert operations against home-grown Islamic terrorists living in Britain. Whitehall officials said although there was no evidence that al-Qaeda had acquired a chemical, biological or radiological capability, it was known from intercepts and other intelligence-gathering sources that the organisation was trying to get its hands on such devices. It is now accepted in the Security Service that the war in Iraq and the subsequent suicide bomb attacks against coalition forces have boosted al-Qaeda�s recruiting power in Britain.

Whitehall officials said yesterday that, despite the urgent need to train more people to become surveillance specialists, there was little chance of recruiting more than about 300 extra staff a year over the next three years.

None of them can be foreign nationals, despite the fact that some British embassies abroad have been approached by people interested in joining MI5. The rule is that an applicant must be a British citizen who has been resident in this country for ten years, although linguists in Arabic and Urdu can be taken on with a shorter residency status.

The recruits will receive an initial annual salary of around �20,000. Asked yesterday why so many people had applied, one senior official said: �They seem genuinely to want to do something to help this country, instead of going for a job with a much higher salary. They�re doing it out of idealism.�

The planned influx of 1,000 more men and women in MI5 may pose a problem for Thames House, the agency�s London headquarters in Millbank, near Lambeth Bridge, as it is running out of space.

The huge exercise of sifting through the 3,000 applications already received is initially being handled by an outside employment firm. Many applicants will be rejected either because they fail the basic qualifications for entry or because they are perceived to have the wrong idea about what a job in MI5 entails.

After the decision last week by the Crown Prosecution Service to drop Official Secrets Act charges against Katharine Gun, the GCHQ Mandarin translator, all potential candidates in MI5�s record recruiting drive will be reminded of the utmost importance of keeping their work confidential.

Whitehall officials said that MI5 staff, like those employed at GCHQ and MI6, were encouraged to speak to special agency counsellors if they had matters of conscience to raise.

MI5 is to employ more vetting staff to cope with the increase in recruits. Every candidate is positively vetted to receive intelligence up to the highest classification, and each member of staff faces further vetting every five years.

Psychologists are used to help in the appraisal of candidates. All successful recruits are warned against covering up any past misdemeanours, including convictions for minor offences.

March 1, 2004 at 10:35 PM in MI5 | Permalink | TrackBack (346) | Top of page | Blog Home

Blunkett wants big expansion of MI5 and new security laws to counter terror threat

Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Blunkett wants big expansion of MI5 and new security laws to counter terror threat

Alan Travis and Richard Norton-Taylor
Monday February 23, 2004
The Guardian

The home secretary will this week propose a major extension of anti-terrorism powers and the biggest expansion of the security services for nearly 50 years to counter the threat of Islamist extremism in Britain.
David Blunkett will present what officials describe as an "options paper" on Wednesday which will be subjected to six months consultation with legislation expected after the general election.

He is to confirm his desire to introduce legal powers, including lowering the standard of proof, to enable pre-emptive action against British terror suspects, including potential suicide bombers.

He will also announce a huge increase in MI5 officers, from the current 2,000 to 3,000, to be devoted to countering the threat of Islamist extremism. Mr Blunkett has been persuaded by Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, that she does not have sufficient resources to combat what the security and intelligence agencies say is a serious, long-term threat.

"We are facing a very high level of threat. It is a long-term threat which will not go away. That is why it is very important to renew the powers in the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act to be able to detain foreign nationals we think are terrorists," the Home Office minister responsible for counter-terrorism, Beverley Hughes, said yesterday.

The recruitment of the extra MI5 surveillance officers, linguists and technical staff, over the next three years, will herald its biggest expansion since the end of the second world war. The budget for the security services is expected to rise from �1.1bn to �1.5bn.

MPs will be asked on Wednesday to vote to approve the renewal of internment powers in part four of the 2001 terrorism legislation.

The Commons will also debate the outcome of a critical review of the anti-terrorist legislation by the former Tory cabinet minister, Lord Newton, which demanded he find alternatives to the indefinite detention of 14 foreign nationals held without trial as suspected international terrorists.

Mr Blunkett is to publish his "options paper" outlining how similar powers might be incorporated into British criminal law so they can be used against suspected British terrorists even though they involve derogating from key human rights conventions.

The options paper will examine how intelligence information can be used to secure "pre-emptive" convictions in a British criminal court without compromising the security sources involved. Mr Blunkett made clear during his trip to India this month that it could include a lower standard of proof in such cases.

The existing anti-terrorist legislation passed after September 11 contains "sunset clauses" which mean its powers will expire in November 2006 if not replaced by a new anti-terrorism law. Mr Blunkett will confirm that he has no intention of waiting until then to start the debate.

He will also make clear that the existing system of public interest immunity certificates, developed in Irish terrorist cases to protect intelligence sources, is no longer sophisticated enough and will have to be replaced. Since September 11, MI5 has concentrated on suspect Islamist extremists, a far more difficult target, security sources say, than Irish-based terror groups. Islamist extremists, linked in different degrees to the al-Qaida network, are not regimented and their affiliations are much more amorphous, security and intelligence officials say.

They meet informally, use the internet and mobile telephones whose numbers they frequently change. Britain has mainly been a centre for communications and support activities such as funding by credit card and other financial fraud.

Few individuals are judged to be prepared actually to commit terrorist acts in Britain. However, police and security sources, aware of the difficulty of preventing attacks by determined extremists, have been saying in recent months that a suicide bombing in Britain is a matter of when, not if.

MI5 has been seeking informants in the Muslim community through messages on the internet in Arabic. It is also seeking Arabic speakers for its staff. The agency's website is offering careers to "full time Arabic (all dialects including North African)" speakers - as well as speakers of Urdu, Persian, Turkish, Punjabi and Russian, Kurdish, Bengali, and Tamil - with a starting salary of �20,100.

MI5 has won the backing of Tony Blair to allow the product of telephone taps to be used in court cases. By a legal anomaly, covert video surveillance and the product of bugging property can be used in criminal trials but not recordings or transcripts of the taps.

February 23, 2004 at 07:52 AM in MI5 | Permalink | TrackBack (124) | Top of page | Blog Home

MI5 recruitment drive will focus on Asians

News

By Kim Sengupta
23 February 2004
The counter-intelligence agency MI5 is to focus on Britain's Asian community as it recruits 1,000 more staff in a bid to combat Islamic terrorism.
But MI5 chiefs acknowledge that they face intense competition from private companies and other government agencies for Arabic speakers. Last year 9 per cent of MI5's 250 recruits came from ethnic minorities.

The service's starting salary for graduates is between �20,100 and �21,000, with extra for skills such as languages. Private security firms and financial concerns with Middle Eastern interests can offer higher salaries.

Recruits with ethnic backgrounds are also wanted by MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service), the listening post GCHQ, and the armed forces.

MI5 and MI6 need not only Arabic speakers but also those with a command of specific dialects. Terror groups are said to have become increasingly active in rooting out infiltration by government agents.

As well as linguists for G branch, which deals with international terrorism, the new recruits are likely to be earmarked for A4, the surveillance section, and T branch, which provides security.

The director general of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, warned the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, in November that her service was having difficulty coping with the rise in Islamic terrorism as a result of inadequate resources.

The increase in MI5's numbers - due to be announced by Mr Blunkett on Wednesday - will bring staffing up to 3,000, around the level it was at during the Second World War.

Mr Blunkett will tell MPs that Britain remains in a state of emergency because of the continuing threat of attacks, including suicide bombings, from al-Qa'ida. He is also expected to announce plans for new laws to counter terrorism, including the holding of some trials in secret, lowering the burden of proof for the prosecution to obtain convictions and allowing the use in court of evidence obtained from telephone tapping.

The annual budget for MI5 is secret, but is believed to be �200m. MI6 is said to account for �250m and GCHQ �450m.

Patrick Mercer MP, the Conservative homeland security spokesman, welcomed the announcement, but asked: "Why on earth has it taken them so long? We have been asking for extra resources for the intelligence agencies for over two years."

February 22, 2004 at 07:57 PM in MI5 | Permalink | TrackBack (222) | Top of page | Blog Home

MI5 recruits 1,000 spies in terror drive

Times Online - Sunday Times

David Leppard

MI5 is to recruit 1,000 extra spies to bolster Britain’s defences against the growing threat of Islamic terrorism.
The move, to be announced this week by David Blunkett, the home secretary, will boost the agency’s staff to 3,000. They will be deployed to improve the surveillance of terrorist suspects and the protection of high-profile targets.

Security officials believe that cells of Islamic militants are still operating in Britain. Last November Eliza Manningham-Buller, the director-general of MI5, warned Blunkett that her agency did not have the resources to cope with the existing terrorist threat.

The expansion of MI5, disclosed by a senior home office official, will be announced in the Commons on Wednesday. Blunkett will say Britain remains in a state of national emergency because of the continued threat from suicide terrorists working under Al-Qaeda.

Although MI5�s budget remains secret, it is thought to have accounted for some �200m of the estimated �1 billion spent on the three main intelligence agencies last year. The lion�s share goes to GCHQ, the government�s eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham, with about �250m for MI6, the overseas intelligence service.

Nearly 60% of MI5�s budget is devoted to counterterrorism. The rest is dedicated to monitoring spies from hostile intelligence agencies and to countering nuclear, chemical and biological proliferation.

Many of the new staff will work for A4, the surveillance section dubbed as �the lamplighters� in John le Carr�s novels. They specialise in following and watching terrorist suspects 24 hours a day.

Other recruits will become analysts in G branch, the international terrorist section dealing with Islamic suspects. There will be huge increases in A branch with the recruitment of dozens of linguists who speak Arabic, French and Farsi.

Dozens more officers will be drafted into T branch, responsible for protective security, which also helps to improve protection for possible Al-Qaeda targets such as the Queen.

�This new money marks a step change in our capacity to undertake resource-intensive investigations,� said one official.

This week the Home Office will outline possible new laws on terrorism. These include allowing some trials of terrorist suspects in secret, lowering the burden of proof required to convict a terrorist and letting evidence from phone-tapping be used in court.

British Airways plans to change the number of flight 223, the London-to-Washington route hit by cancellations after security warnings, to BA293 from March 28.

February 21, 2004 at 11:38 PM in MI5 | Permalink | TrackBack (158) | Top of page | Blog Home

MI5 expands to meet terror threat

BBC NEWS | UK | MI5 expands to meet terror threat

The home security service MI5 is to expand by 50% in response to the terrorist threat to the UK, the BBC has learned.
The home secretary will announce the move in parliament next week.
At least 1,000 extra people will be recruited, bringing MI5 back to World War II staffing levels.
The agency says it will take several years to find and vet the staff, principally to carry out surveillance and intelligence gathering work.

The agency says it will take several years to find and vet the staff, principally to carry out surveillance and intelligence gathering work.

Previously focused largely on Cold War and IRA suspects, the move highlights MI5's shift to recruit many more Arabic speakers and focus on the threat from al Qaeda.

The agency believe there are thousands of young people moving in and out of Britain with links to groups close to the terrorist network.

MI5 has been criticised in the past for failing to penetrate radical Islamic groups.

Home Secretary David Blunkett is to make the announcement in the House of Commons during next week's debate on controversial terrorism laws introduced after 11 September 2001.

He will be trying to persuade MPs to renew the legislation allowing foreign terrorist suspects to be detained without trial.

MI5 currently employs around 1,900 people, with graduates starting on a salary of �20,100 a year.

The details of the new positions have already been posted on the agency's website.

Recruits would have to undergo a 60-day intensive training and assessment period, with no guarantee of a job at the end of it.

MI5, which was founded in 1909, has recently embarked on a campaign to recruit more widely, as only 4% of staff are black or Asian at present.

February 21, 2004 at 12:45 PM in MI5 | Permalink | TrackBack (107) | Top of page | Blog Home

Britain: Revelations on US spying compared to Pentagon Papers

Britain: Revelations on US spying compared to Pentagon Papers

By Paul Mitchell
24 January 2004

The leak of a top-secret memo by Katharine Gun, an intelligence officer at the British government’s secret surveillance headquarters, has been compared to the publication of the Pentagon Papers.
Special Branch police arrested Gun in March 2003 under the Official Secrets Act after she admitted leaking a secret memo to a British newspaper about joint United States and British government spying operations at the United Nations before the war in Iraq. On January 19, magistrates ordered Gun to appear for a pre-trial hearing next month in preparation for a full trial at Britain's Central Criminal Court at the end of the year.

The comparison with the Pentagon Papers was made by the former US Defence Department official Daniel Ellsberg, who was responsible for leaking the documents in 1971 to the New York Times. Ellsberg said Gun�s memo was �more timely and potentially more important than the Pentagon Papers� and �had the potential to block the invasion of Iraq before it began.�

The Pentagon Papers were a classified 7,000-page study of American involvement in Vietnam and southeast Asia. They revealed President John F Kennedy�s support for a coup that ousted South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem and led to Diem�s assassination, and how President Lyndon Johnson planned privately to escalate US forces from 17,000 to 185,000 whilst publicly denying he would increase them. A week after the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the US Senate voted on a timetable to withdraw from Vietnam. The Watergate scandal and the subsequent resignation of President Richard Nixon resulted from the attempt by White House officials to cover up a break-in at a psychiatrist�s office to obtain damaging material against Ellsberg.

Ellsberg, actor Sean Penn, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, president of the Newspaper Guild Linda Foley and the American Civil Liberties Union have issued a statement supporting Gun, saying, �We honour Katharine Gun as a whistleblower who bravely risked her career and her very liberty to inform the public about illegal spying in support of a war based on deception. In a democracy, she should not be made a scapegoat for exposing the transgressions of others.�

Gun has justified leaking the secret memo by citing the unusual plea of �defence of necessity.� She told reporters, �I worked for GCHQ [the government�s spy headquarters] as a translator until June 2003. I have been charged with offences under the Official Secrets Act. Any disclosures that may have been made were justified on the following grounds because they exposed serious illegality and wrongdoing on the part of the US Government who attempted to subvert our own security services and to prevent wide-scale death and casualties among ordinary Iraqi people and UK forces in the course of an illegal war. No one has suggested (nor could they), that any payment was sought or given for any alleged disclosures. I have only ever followed my conscience.�

A potential witness at Gun�s trial is Elizabeth Wilmshurst, deputy legal adviser at the Foreign Office, who is believed to have resigned in March 2003 after disagreeing with the advice given to the Labour government of Prime Minister Tony Blair by the attorney general Lord Goldsmith. Goldsmith suggested that United Nations Resolution 678, which authorised force to remove Iraqi troops from Kuwait in 1990, could be used to justify a new war against Iraq. The British government has insisted that it will not publish Goldsmith�s legal advice �in view of a long-standing convention, adhered to by successive governments, that advice of law officers is not publicly disclosed.�

Wilmshurst was amongst those in the British ruling elite, including the security services, who were concerned that a too close identification with the war aims of the Bush administration and the Blair government�s readiness to manipulate intelligence were threatening Britain�s own strategic interests. Before her disagreements emerged, she served British imperialism loyally in the Foreign Office for 30 years. In 1999, she suggested that the British government claim �sovereign immunity� to stop relatives of the 33 people killed in bomb blasts in Dublin and Monaghan in 1974 from suing it in the Irish courts. The bombings were blamed on Loyalist terrorists, but there have been persistent rumours that the British intelligence services were involved. Described as the �United Kingdom�s veteran negotiator,� she opposed plans by European countries to unite against Washington�s demand for Americans to be exempted from the International Criminal Court.

Within days of the memo appearing in the Observer, Gun was arrested. The event was subject to a near blackout by the US media. The publisher of the Pentagon Papers�the New York Times�did not even cover the story, and other newspapers downplayed its significance. The Los Angeles Times said it was �nothing to get worked up about.� According to Observer journalist Martin Bright, interviews arranged with the major news networks such as NBC, Fox TV and CNN were abandoned at the last minute.

It was not until last December that an article by the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, Norman Solomon, was reproduced in the Baltimore Sun, the Boston Globe and a few other newspapers. On January 19, the day Gun appeared in court, the New York Times finally published an op-ed column entitled �A Single Conscience v. the State� by Bob Herbert.

In the article, Herbert congratulates Gun for her �much better grasp of the true spirit of democracy than Tony Blair� and compares her case to the Pentagon Papers��perhaps the most extraordinary leak of classified documents in the history of governments.� Herbert also interviewed Ellsberg, who said, �What I�ve been saying since a year ago last October was that I hoped that people who knew that we were being lied into a wrongful war would do what I wish I had done in 1964 or 1965. And that was to go to Congress and the press with documents. Current documents. Don�t do what I did. Don�t wait years until the bombs are falling and then put out history.�

Herbert does not draw the obvious distinction between the role of the Times in the 1970s and its role today.

In his memoirs, Richard Nixon claimed that the Times�s decision to publish the Pentagon Papers was �clearly the product of the paper�s antiwar policy.� When Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger was warned that publication would undermine foreign governments� confidence in the US, he replied, �Oh that�s a lot of baloney, I mean, really� and claimed the First Amendment covered his right to publish. Nixon describes how Ellsberg was �lionised by the media� and that �CBS devoted a large segment of the network news to a respectful interview with him even while he was still a fugitive from the FBI.�

Thirty years later, the Times did its best to conceal mass opposition to the war in Iraq. Its chief foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman went as far as to publish proposals on how best to provoke an invasion and seize Iraq�s oil wealth, and Judith Miller, another of its reporters, was a major channel for false charges about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

The silence over the Gun case demonstrates that a broad consensus exists within the US ruling elite behind the Bush administration�s policy of global conquest and colonial-style subjugation of peoples and regions considered to be of strategic importance.

February 6, 2004 at 10:14 PM in MI5 | Permalink | TrackBack (426) | Top of page | Blog Home

So stupid of me to fall for MI5 lies, says teacher

Times Online - Newspaper Edition

By Michael Horsnell

THE first picture of Robert Hendy-Freegard, the alleged bogus MI5 agent who conned students into believing their lives were in danger from an IRA cell, has been released.
It was taken during the summer of 1995 after he allegedly kidnapped three agriculture students and conned them and their parents out of �600,000 during their lives on the run.

Yesterday one of his alleged victims told how Mr Hendy-Freegard ordered him to pretend he was gay as part of a secret mission to beat the IRA gang.

John Atkinson, who claims his �coming out� was one of several bizarre precursors to his flight from the imaginary terrorists, accepted that he had not displayed a great deal of intelligence. �I was the most stupid person going at the time,� he admitted at Blackfriars Crown Court in London.

Mr Atkinson, 34, now a teacher, has alleged that Mr Hendy-Freegard pretended he was working undercover to bring the cell to justice, and then recruited him to help. He became �scared and paranoid� and agreed to a series of tests to toughen him up and give him the skills he would need for the task ahead.

Mr Atkinson told the jury the tests included a number of blindfolded beatings by the defendant, wearing a woman�s dress in a pub, sporting a �ridiculous� haircut, punching a fellow student and then hunting for another one to kiss.

The court has heard that he and two women students at Harper Adams Agricultural College in Newport, Shropshire, were to spend years moving around the country in a bid to stay one step ahead of the killers said to be on their trail.

Mr Hendy-Freegard, 32, from Blyth, Nottinghamshire, a former barman, denies 21 counts of kidnapping, theft, deception, assaults and threats to kill between 1993 and last year, when he was arrested.

Spending his third day giving evidence behind screens to shield him from his alleged tormentor, the teacher insisted that he was heterosexual and said that it was quite wrong for Martin Hicks, QC, for the defence, to suggest his apparent confession to gay tendencies was evidence of a �sexuality crisis�. Mr Hicks also accused him of being the real source of the IRA storyline.

The teacher retorted: �I did not go through four years of hell from that man and then go through seven years of studying and working my hardest to rebuild my life to then come back to this court and humiliate myself and disgrace my family and take that kind of nonsense from anybody. How dare you insult me?�

The trial continues.

January 15, 2004 at 09:13 PM in MI5 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Ted Heath's plan to spy on workers

Scotsman.com News - Top Stories - Ted Heath's plan to spy on workers

WILLIAM LYONS

OFFICIAL documents released today reveal how Edward Heath, the prime minister, secretly ordered MI5 to brief senior industrialists about "subversive" organisations trying to infiltrate their workplaces.

The revelation is one in a series that cast Mr Heath as a controlling and interventionist prime minister. The documents, released under the 30-year rule, also show:

� Mr Heath twice intervened to prevent the Queen making any mention of the economic crisis gripping Britain in her 1973 Christmas broadcast;

� Mr Heath was furious at Richard Nixon over the United States president�s failure to tell him he was putting his country�s forces on worldwide alert during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war;

� The government was bitterly divided over how to deal with the miners� industrial action which finally brought about Mr Heath�s downfall.

The Tory prime minister�s decision to employ MI5 followed a request from Tim Powell, the chairman of the tractor-builders Massey-Ferguson, who complained they had no way of knowing if they were recruiting "troublemakers" who could then prove impossible to sack.

He asked Mr Heath�s political secretary, Douglas (now Lord) Hurd, if he could be supplied with "a list of organisations they should watch out for" when recruiting staff.

The request was blocked by Sir John Hunt, the Cabinet secretary, who warned: "Anything in the nature of an official blacklist might both hamper the work of the Security Service [MI5] and put the government of the day at risk of attack for interfering in the employment field." He suggested Mr Powell be referred to "unofficial sources" such as the right-wing Economic League.

But Mr Heath, whose premiership was dogged by strikes and industrial unrest, ordered Robert Armstrong, his private secretary, to write back to Sir John telling him Mr Powell was "too serious a person to be dismissed with a reference to the Economic League" and suggesting he should be given "some degree of oral briefing".

Mr Heath�s controlling nature was also revealed in another paper describing how the prime minister vetoed the Queen�s suggestion in the winter of 1973 to add a "few sentences" about the dire economic situation at the end of her Christmas address.

He objected on the grounds that whatever the Queen said would be judged in the climate of the day.

After his alternative suggestion was rejected by the Palace, Mr Heath ordered Mr Armstrong to write to the Queen saying that it would only be right for her to alter the broadcast in "altogether exceptional circumstances".

Towards the end of his government, Mr Heath faced a damaging split over how to deal with the miners� industrial action. In an extraordinary memo, Mr Armstrong warned the prime minister he faced charges of "governmental blindness and inaction" if he tried to go on with "business as usual".

The memo was written as Anthony Barber, the chancellor, was preparing a �1.2 billion package of emergency spending cuts in a desperate attempt to head off a fresh sterling crisis.

Mr Armstrong said Mr Heath had to act to "change the psychology of public opinion" if the cuts were to succeed.

Around the Cabinet table, some ministers were concerned the cuts did not go far enough, fearing the miners were bound to exploit the situation once they realised how low coal stocks had fallen.

Mr Heath acknowledged the measures would have a "serious effect" on the economy, but were essential if the government was to have "any chance of surviving until the end of March".

In the event, it did not even get that far. Amid widespread public discontent, Mr Heath called a general election in February and, after no party secured an overall a majority, finally bowed to the inevitable. On 4 March, he announced his resignation.

Dr Paul Addison, a lecturer in modern history at the University of Edinburgh, said Mr Heath�s behaviour was at odds with his reputation as a moderate on industrial relations.

"Heath went beyond any other post-war prime minister in trying to control things but I didn�t think he would go quite so far in collaborating with the employers against strikers or against trade union activists," he said.

January 2, 2004 at 12:07 AM in MI5 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Bids are in for spies �100m IT network

By Nic Hopkins

THE Cabinet Office has selected a shortlist of bidders for a top-secret �100 million contract to improve the lines of communication between intelligence agencies fighting terrorism and organised crime.
The Cabinet Office has selected Syntegra, the computer services arm of BT, Japan's Fujitsu, America's IBM and Electronic Data Systems to progress to the next stage of the project, dubbed Scope.

Scope is being co-ordinated by the Cabinet Office Intelligence and Security Secretariat and is intended to create a pool of information from nine different branches of government, including the Home Office, the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6.

The so-called �knowledge network� that will be created will also be accessible to security forces such as the Metropolitan Police. Despite the wider accessibility of the information, Scope will also tighten controls for accessing it.

The controls are expected to help the Government to avoid the embarrassment of sensitive information falling into the wrong hands.

MI5 officers committed a series of security blunders in 2000, including one who left a briefcase full of secrets on a train and another whose laptop was stolen at a station.

Sources close to the Government said that the Scope project would ensure that if such incidents occurred the information on laptop computers would be secure.

Unlike most public sector tenders, the Government did not publicly advertise the Scope contract because of its sensitive nature.

An original list of ten companies, which included Britain�s LogicaCMG and Unisys of the US, were invited to put forward submissions in May. Those that progressed into the tender process were required to sign non-disclosure agreements.

The next stage of the project will see the number of bidders cut to three in the next few months and a contract is expected to be awarded by summer.

The contract comes at one of the most active times for public sector outsourcing of computer services, with the Ministry of Defence weighing up bids for a �5 billion contract over ten years to handle the IT systems of the Armed Forces.

Separately, the Department of Health is in the process of awarding several contracts for the modernisation of the National Health Service.

This week the National Program for IT in the NHS is expected to name the winners of three separate �1 billion contracts to introduce services such as electronic bookings and digital prescriptions.

December 25, 2003 at 11:39 AM in MI5, MI6, UK | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Times Online - MI5 hunts two Al-Qaeda cells in Britain

Times Online - Sunday Times

David Leppard



SECURITY services are hunting two cells of Al-Qaeda terrorists whom they believe are preparing to carry out “spectacular” terrorist attacks in Britain.
Up to 10 terrorists from north Africa and Saudi Arabia have mounted surveillance operations on vulnerable commercial targets such as big banks and shopping centres, according to security sources.

They have also received intelligence that some of the suspects have already made “dummy runs” in preparation for possible suicide car bombings.

Warnings of a prospective attack by Al-Qaeda have been given to ministers by Eliza Manningham-Buller, MI5’s director-general. She has also told MPs and peers on the parliamentary intelligence and security committee of the Al-Qaeda “sleepers” conducting surveillance.

Many are integrated so deeply into the Muslim community that they are proving almost impossible to detect. Some are believed to be British citizens.

The disclosure came as David Blunkett, the home secretary, yesterday admitted for the first time that attempts to carry out violent attacks against Britain had been foiled. “These are the kind of things that counter-terrorist (operations) are designed to foil and (the security services) are doing this all the time,” he said.

The Al-Qaeda units, thought to be based in the Midlands and the north of England, have investigated the scale of security at synagogues and Jewish schools and community centres. However, intelligence on their plans is sketchy because MI5 has so far failed to penetrate the units.

Last week Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan police commissioner, confirmed that Britain was on its highest state of alert since the September 11 attacks in 2001. Security was heightened after MI5 received warnings of an imminent terrorist attack 10 days ago.

At least 18 more people died in attacks on two Iraqi police stations yesterday. Amid the surge of deadly bombings in Iraq and Turkey, the US government issued a fresh warning on Friday about possible terrorist violence to mark the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan this week.

At the same time detectives from Scotland Yard’s anti- terrorist branch have started to sift through the wreckage of the British consulate and the HSBC bank in Istanbul for clues to the bombers behind last Thursday’s synchronised suicide attacks.

The death toll rose to 30 yesterday. It includes 10 consulate staff, of which three were British. This brings to more than 50 the number who have died in Istanbul following last weekend’s two synagogue blasts in the city.

Among the three Britons were Roger Short, the 58- year-old consul-general and a father of three, and his personal assistant Lisa Hallworth, 38. Hallworth’s mother Sylvia said she had been advised it was not safe to travel to Turkey where she wants to recover Lisa’s body.

The 27-year-old fiancée of Graeme Carter, a British tourist, is brain dead and will not recover, doctors at Istanbul’s Taksim hospital said last night. The couple were both pulled alive from the consulate ruins.

At first Carter thought Hulya Donmez had been blown to pieces. Then he was told she had survived. Yesterday doctors said she was still on a life-support machine but they had no hope of her surviving.

Security officials now believe the attack was carried out by local Islamists under the control of Al-Qaeda trainers. Turkish police were yesterday interviewing several people about their links to the suicide bombers.

The Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan said the four bombers who carried out last week’s attacks were all Turkish citizens. He said it was a matter of “shame” for Turkey that its own citizens had murdered so many.

As security was tightened at British embassies across the world, a senior committee of MPs and peers was preparing to attack the government’s plans to protect Britain from terrorist attack. In a report to be published on Friday, the committee will say that the proposed Civil Contingencies Bill has “potentially dangerous flaws”. MPs on the committee say the bill is “too little, too late”.

The committee’s chairman, the former Labour defence minister Dr Lewis Moonie, will criticise the bill for failing to provide any new money to pay for counter-terrorist and emergency planning. Also, the committee believes that absence of information about the new emergency powers ministers will get after a terrorist attack makes it “impossible for local authorities and other bodies to estimate the cost of the responsibilities they would expect to undertake”.

One of the most serious flaws, it says, is the absence of any new funds to help local authorities prepare to cope with an attack in which hundreds or even thousands of people could be killed.

It says the Cabinet Office is providing just £19m for emergency planning which, from next year, can be plundered by councils to pay for other services. The committee believes this money should be at least doubled and that it should continue to be “ring-fenced” so that councils cannot raid it.

Under the plans, ministers will have powers to cordon off and forcibly evacuate large areas. They will also be able to close down the internet and telephone systems.

November 23, 2003 at 12:42 AM in MI5 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Times Online - Ernest Bond - obituary

Times Online - Comment

Founder member of the SAS who went on to combat terrorism with the Bomb Squad of the Metropolitan Police



It would be wrong to say that Ernie Bond first made his name as commander of the Metropolitan Police Bomb Squad, since in its early days the press knew him simply as “Commander X”. But he had played a leading role in forming the squad in response to the threat posed by the self-styled Angry Brigade in the 1960s. Although anarchical and chaotic, this group unintentionally rendered the country a service by providing the Bomb Squad with useful forensic experience before the IRA mainland bombing campaigns that followed.
Few, if any, of Bond’s colleagues in the Met knew that he belonged to that tiny handful of men known as “the originals” — recruited by Colonel David Stirling to form “L” Detachment of the Special Service Brigade in Egypt in 1941, the founding group of the SAS Regiment. There was no great secret about this matter — it was just that Bond didn’t talk about it.

He was serving with the Scots Guards on the outbreak of war, and in 1940 accompanied the 1st Battalion on the ill-judged Allied intervention in Norway intended to forestall the German invasion which in the event it precipitated.

On his return to England, he volunteered to join No 8 (Guards) Commando. This unit formed part of the Layforce brigade of special service units sent to the Middle East under the command of Colonel (later Major-General Sir) Robert Laycock in 1941. When No 8 Commando was disbanded, Sergeant Bond joined 2nd Scots Guards with the Eighth Army confronting Rommel’s Afrika Korps in the Western Desert.

It was there that he and other members of the “originals” were recruited by Stirling for parachute training at Kabrit in Egypt in anticipation of his first operation. This was launched during atrocious weather conditions against the Axis airfields of Gazala and Tmimi on November 16, 1941. The aircraft flying Bond’s group to their objective crash-landed in the desert. At this point, Bond was captured and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner.

Demobilised on his release, he joined the Metropolitan Police in 1946 and served for two years on the beat until he was transferred to the CID. Promoted to detective sergeant in 1957, he began to develop a reputation for his discerning skill as a detective and progressed quickly through the Fraud Squad and Flying Squad to the Murder Squad. The early activities of the Angry Brigade, beginning in 1967, led to his attachment to the newly formed Bomb Squad.

Insofar as the anger of the Angry Brigade was susceptible to analysis, it appeared to centre on a rejection of what was judged “the good life” of the 1960s. It was not that its members lacked the financial means to join in — some came from upper-middle-class families and had education and intellect enough to earn good salaries — but they did not like what they saw of that lifestyle and resented its manifestations.

Their protest took many forms, including living in absolute squalor, disparagement of men (it was thought that more than three quarters of their estimated strength of 200 were women), social security fraud and straightforward theft. Early intelligence indicated that they planned to kidnap either a prominent politician or a foreign diplomat in order to oblige the Government to repeal legislation which they identified no more precisely than as being “imperialist”.

Two developments gave Bond the leads to track down and arrest key suspects. Unwisely, the Angry Brigade began to associate with professional criminals and to undertake attacks on property in the Metropolitan area using plastic explosives. The attacks on property, together with a number of stray shots fired at London embassies, were judged pointless by the professional criminal element, which encouraged the police informers among them to cash in their information.

Bond also discovered that the plastic explosive used came from France, which had its own Angry Brigade.

The breakthrough came when four key Angries were arrested in early 1972, shortly before Bond left the Bomb Squad, and were jailed for ten years for plotting explosions. Before moving to take charge of the Met’s Regional Crime Squad, Bond had identified a range of further suspects in the United Kingdom, the Irish Republic and in continental Europe. Co-operation between the Met and relevant foreign police services quickly threw the Angry Brigade on to the defensive.

Bond’s work with the Bomb Squad, which later became the Anti-Terrorist Branch of the Met, had been exclusively in the forensic science field of tracking down suspects rather than dealing with explosive devices. His success was rewarded by the Queen’s Police Medal in 1972 and his further promotion to Deputy Assistant Commissioner (Operations) at the end of that year.

It was while in this post that he masterminded the handling of the Balcombe Street siege in December 1975. After shots had been fired into Scott’s restaurant in Mayfair, four men from an active service unit of the Provisional IRA were chased and trapped in a flat in Balcombe Street, Marylebone. They took hostage an elderly man and woman as the flat was surrounded by hundreds of police.

The stand-off lasted six days while the terrorists demanded safe passage to Heathrow and a plane to Ireland. Working under Bond’s directions, two Special Branch officers resolutely made clear that the IRA men’s only option was surrender with the hostages unharmed. The negotiators were Peter Imbert, later Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and now Lord Imbert, and Jim Nevill, who later headed the Anti-Terrorist Branch. Their tough line was successful. The IRA men surrendered on the evening of the sixth day, having previously released the hostages.

Bond remained Deputy Assistant Commissioner (Operations) until his retirement in 1976, when he was appointed OBE.

Ernest Radcliffe Bond was born into a close-knit Cumbrian community in Barrow-in-Furness and served as an apprentice French polisher before enlisting in the Scots Guards in 1935 at the age of 17. It had been his intention to serve only a short regular engagement before joining the police, but the outbreak of war intervened. When he finally achieved that objective, his work absorbed him completely, and he received no fewer than 12 Commissioner’s Commendations during his service.

His wife Mabel predeceased him. He is survived by two sons and two daughters.

Ernest Bond, OBE, QPM, Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police 1972-76, was born on March 1, 1919. He died on November 20, 2003, aged 84.

November 21, 2003 at 07:24 PM in MI5 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Diana Mosley taught children Nazi salute, new MI5 files reveal

By Michael Evans
Files released by the National Archives reveal odd traitors and spies



DIANA MOSLEY, who died in August this year aged 93, was a “most dangerous character” who instructed her children how to do “Heil Hitler” salutes, according to MI5, which kept a file on her in the build-up to the Second World War.
Many of Lady Mosley’s most outrageous remarks in support of her “friend” Hitler were revealed secretly to MI5 by her governess, who faithfully relayed conversations in the family home to her security service handlers. However, it was Lady Mosley’s former father-in-law, Lord Moyne, who finally persuaded the authorities that she needed to be locked away, writing a character-assassination letter to MI5. She was detained in Holloway prison for much of the war.

Previously secret information about Lady Mosley, who was married to Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the “blackshirt” Fascists in Britain more than 70 years ago, were revealed yesterday among nearly 200 MI5 files declassified and released by the National Archives (formerly the Public Record Office) at Kew, Surrey.

The description of her as a dangerous woman was provided by Lord Moyne, the father of Bryan Guinness of the brewery family, to whom Lady Mosley was previously married.

In his letter he wrote: “When the situation was most perilous in Belgium, Lady Mosley said triumphantly to the governess that the British Army was now in a wedge and could not possibly be extricated. She added that it was perfectly obvious that the British Army would be caught in a pincer movement and made no secret of her delight in what was happening.”

Lady Mosley, one of the notorious and glamorous Mitford sisters, had other epithets: newspapers referred to her as a “dumb blonde”, and one MI5 file said she was “someone of no great brains”. But she was widely thought of as the most beautiful woman of her day, more lovely than Botticelli’s Venus, as she was once described. Christopher Andrew, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Cambridge University and now also official historian of MI5, said yesterday that she was a classic example of “a celebrity behaving badly”.

The governess told MI5 that Lady Mosley had once said: “We are revolutionaries and we would kill.” She always referred to her new husband, Sir Oswald, as “the leader”, but when she was in Holloway trying to gain her release, her solicitor, Oswald Hickson, rebuked her for using such a term.

“You must say my husband,” he said. Their conversation was being bugged by MI5. At one point Mr Hickson “jokingly remarked that when Mosley was Queen of England, there would be a number of people whom she would like to imprison”. She agreed.

Before her detention, MI5 had been monitoring her frequent trips to Germany — at least seven times in 1938 — where it was known that she was meeting Hitler. She had planned to take her two sons from her first marriage to meet Hitler but it was cancelled at the last moment because of the imminence of war. Her governess told MI5: “The children would have known how to greet the Führer, for they had been taught to give the Nazi salute and to say ‘Heil Hitler ’.”

It was “our man in Berlin” (MI6 station chief) who in April 1937 tipped off MI5 that “Mrs Bryan Guinness” had married Sir Oswald Mosley “in the presence of Hitler”.

She and Sir Oswald were released in November 1943.

November 13, 2003 at 11:37 PM in MI5 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

New Zealand News - Dialogue - Beatrix Campbell: The curse of a disappointed wife

New Zealand News - Dialogue - Beatrix Campbell: The curse of a disappointed wife

11.11.2003
COMMENT
Last week's battle of the injunctions between a royal favourite and the press was less about the privacy of the royals and their staff than about the nature of knowledge and power.

It was to do with who is allowed to know what about the most powerful people in the land. And, of course, it concerned sex and corruption.

Prince Charles has unprecedentedly denied an allegation that cannot be published or broadcast in the British media.

Some salute his vigour for that. Others lament his breach of the royal mantra: never complain, never explain.

Ever since the "floral revolution" ignited by Diana's death, the royals have been unable to avoid our curiosity and our criticism. This is despite the protection given them by our craven, royalist, party-political system.

Power, sex, secrets and lies are the stuff of the royals' present troubles. The first revelations were that Charles duped Diana and the 750 million people who watched his wedding.

While she, on the one hand, expected a candid, companionable and exclusive partnership, he thought otherwise. The droit de seigneur enjoyed by princes would, he believed, prevail.

Charles may have expected her to suffer like Alexandra, Edward VII's sad and silent wife who, according to Rebecca West, provided him with a "torrent of children". For the Windsors assumed that Charles' marriage - just like those of previous Princes of Wales - was an institutional rite in which the future was to be secured.

It was definitely not an alliance or a commitment that might interfere with his life, his family, friends, his lovers or his staff.

Many of the rest of us recognised Diana's expectations of the more democratic deal won by women in the 20th century.

The ingenue knew more about how the world works than her husband did. In death, she has been as disturbing - as much of a nuisance to his family - as she ever was in life.

Her butler, Paul Burrell, took it on himself to safeguard her secrets. His trial was supposed to discredit the uppity presumptions of pantry people like him, while simultaneously silencing a source.

Instead, it put Charles' household at serious risk of exposure. No wonder the Queen was encouraged to call a halt to the trial.

Burrell knew Diana had taped an alleged victim. That he might be able to point to sexual crime and corruption around the son and heir was a potential Exocet missile. He knew, too, about allegations of bullying and impropriety by Charles' favourite, Michael Fawcett.

He also knew the rumours about a royal person engaged in sexual activity with a servant. And he knew about Diana's inlaid mahogany box of dangerous secrets.

So serious were the suspicions released by the trial that there had to be an investigation by someone, somehow. The royal family conceded that they would have an in-house inquiry by Sir Michael Peat, Charles' private secretary.

This scandal is not so much about libertinism in royal households, nor about whether a member of the royal family was involved in sexual activity with a servant, witnessed by another person.

Rather, it is about whether the Prince of Wales allowed a suspected sexual predator to work in his children's household; whether he neglected his duty of care and his duty as an employer to protect his other servants.

Diana, says Burrell, was alarmed that the perpetrator of an alleged homosexual rape of the valet George Smith "was still at large, working for her husband". She went further, "begged" Charles, "trembling with exasperation", to sack the man.

We are entitled to wonder whether Diana also suspected that her husband used his power to protect the alleged attacker from the criminal justice system.

Peat's inquiry has already criticised Prince Charles for not calling in the police to investigate the rape allegation.

Now, out of all these simmering scandals and the injunctions used to try to keep them out of the press, we are seeing the development of an historic collision between democracy and autocracy.

This is a battle over what can be seen and known about the institution that presides over British society. The monarchy's success, indeed the survival of its sovereignty, depends on it being seen. Being visible and spectacular is the performance of its supremacy. The monarchy is most at risk from republicanism when it sulks in the shadows, scared of its own secrets.

That was the lesson learned by Georges I, II, III and IV, and by Queen Victoria. It was then bequeathed to the modern monarchy.

Today, there is a sense that the Windsors are Jacobeans, busy with horses, dogs and sex. Burrell reports coyly that palaces are jolly party places, where the royal family - however stupid, dutiful and emotionally deprived - retain power, borne out of money and sex.

We in Britain have been duped by the aura of our great Queens. From Elizabeth I to Anne, Victoria and this second Elizabeth, they have been royalty's redeemers.

These women have reigned over an unreconstructed patriarchal system with sex at the centre. Patriarchy - paradoxically - requires the monarchy to be (mostly) male, although neither monogamous nor necessarily heterosexual.

It also requires that the heir to the throne is not just a private person but a public institution. All royal relationships are inscribed in the public performance of power, from squeezing paste on to the toothbrush, attending the Cenotaph, opening Parliament and indulging in sex.

Despite democracy, despite the erosion of deference, the royal system has prevailed. Now it is under threat from the legacy of a disappointed wife and from vengeful servants.

What is it about servants? Royal bodies are both omnipotent and dependent. An army of servants feeds them, walks their dogs, holds their pee bottles, and - Burrell's book tells us - fastens their seat belts for them, too. They know everything.

Charles reckoned he could manage without everyone except his personal assistant, Fawcett. As the Queen told Burrell in their tete-a-tete after Diana's death, he knew more about her family than anyone did.

Any relationship with a servant, whether it be sexual like Queen Victoria's romances, or emotional like Diana's adhesion to Burrell - her "rock" - are prisms that refract the truth of all royal relationships: they're predicated on power.

Charles is a grown man who has to submit to his mother. He makes other grown men submit to him. Just as a princess could be excited by "the normality" of a cup of Nescafe with her butler, so a prince may get pleasure from submission to a servant. Sado-masochism is inherent, it seems.

Royals have lived neo-polygamous lives with their servants. The proximity of those servants produces intimacy, and their craft demands self-effacement and huge empathy.

Burrell is eloquent about the servants' agency in this relationship: royals are totally dependent on others to function, the "need to be needed and the knowledge that you control can be almost addictive", he says. The royals' only experience of equality is in their addictive neediness.

All of this was endangered by the intrusion of Diana into their world. The posh ingenue plucked from the fields of England to provide the son with heirs, brought a sense of society - however slight - that seems to escape the self-absorbed royals.

It took Diana to stand up for gay people with Aids, despite the fact that gays were serving in the palaces. Now gay rumours swirl about those very palaces, threatening the people whom those servants are meant to protect.

Today Charles, a pointless prince who has loitered so long on the threshold of absolute personal power, must surely know that he can't have the prize for which he, poor man, was made. He cannot be king.

And six years on from her death, much of the cause lies with the woman who famously declared that she would never be Queen.

- INDEPENDENT

November 13, 2003 at 11:01 PM in MI5 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Bugs and nervous breakdowns in MI5 bungled embassy job

Nicholas Rufford
November 02, 2003

ON a freezing winter day last year, four workmen were admitted to a foreign embassy in central London. It belonged to a country described by the Foreign Office as a friendly power and a close ally. In a secure room on the top floor, past a thick metal door, the visitors found what they had come for: a large cipher machine used by diplomats to send home confidential messages without prying by British spies.
However, the workmen were themselves on an espionage mission for the British government. Their task was to give MI5 access to the embassy’s secrets.

It was intended as a crucial blow in the war on terrorism. Nothing could be allowed to go wrong. In the end, however, almost everything did. One of the “workmen”, a key intelligence asset, was on the brink of a nervous breakdown triggered by what he saw as the bungling and carelessness of his MI5 handlers.

The removal men criss-crossed the room carefully examining the machine, a hefty piece of equipment the size of a coffee table. Members of the embassy staff stood politely to one side. As far as they were concerned, the men were specialists who were deciding the easiest way to shift it to the basement.

The head of chancery, who stood holding the key to the door of the secure office, wondered why it took so many men such a long time. They assured him that moving the heavy machine to a secure bunker in the basement was no easy job.

What they did not tell him was that they had already copied down the secret codes for the machine from a yellow Post-it note on the wall. Now they were working out how, accidentally on purpose, to break the machine so they could send in one of their own repair teams to tamper with it.

After two hours the men left the white-stuccoed building and headed to a nearby luxury hotel. In the foyer they were greeted by a young woman in a business suit — the MI5 officer in charge of the operation. “It went brilliantly,” said one of the men. “Let’s go and celebrate.”

This was one of MI5’s most sensitive missions: a spying operation against an ostensibly friendly embassy to garner valuable information for the war against terror. The Sunday Times knows which embassy was involved but it is withholding this information for obvious security reasons.

The plan was to bug the building’s communications systems from roof to basement, from the radio transmitter to the telephone switchboard. MI5 also hoped surreptitiously to obtain the embassy’s archives of visa applications, a potentially valuable database that could be cross-referenced with other intelligence to help to identify possible terrorists.

Spying on diplomatic missions in London is part of MI5’s job. Officially sanctioned as “counter-espionage”, this usually involves keeping the staff of the diplomatic mission under surveillance and, during the cold war, occasionally expelling them for activities not consistent with their diplomatic duties (“PNGed”, from persona non grata, as such expulsions are known in officialese).

Sometimes, but not often, a rare opportunity arises that allows MI5 to get inside an embassy building and plant transmitting devices. In his book Spycatcher, the former MI5 officer Peter Wright claimed that British agents planted a bug inside the cipher room of the Egyptian embassy in London, enabling MI5 to read secret Egyptian messages throughout the Suez crisis, even though the codes were changed on a daily basis.

On this cold day last year, MI5 was attempting to do precisely the same again.

The entree to this embassy lay through a west London building firm that had answered an invitation to tender for restoration work at the building. The embassy enjoyed a prime site in central London, close to fashionable department stores and parks. But it was in an almost ruinous state. Paint peeled from some of the walls. Old visa applications were packed into the basement. The telephone system was out of date and the electrical system was old.

The building contractor was surprised by the lack of security as he surveyed the ageing carpets and overloaded shelves. Several rooms were stacked with documents marked “confidential”, but a security pass was not even required to enter the building. When he became the preferred bidder for the contract he began to examine the contents of the embassy even more closely.

In one room in the basement, visa applications had been untidily stacked. It was just after the September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington. Could some of the faces staring out of the visa photographs belong to terrorists? At the very least the visa applications would provide a treasure trove of names. And what could all the documents marked “confidential” reveal about the activities of the diplomats and their own intelligence services? The building contractor decided to contact the British security services, although he soon found it was not easily done. He tried MI5’s caller hotline, set up to receive tips from informants, but no one returned his calls Exasperated, he looked up the number of the CIA and called the agency’s headquarters in the United States. A few days later he was contacted by a man called Rick.

He was invited to the American embassy in Grosvenor Square, since September 11 a fortress of concrete blocks and barricades. The contractor was escorted through the security cordons and up a flight of stairs. Presented with a Starbucks coffee, he told his story to Rick.

He handed over copies of plans of the embassy and was told that the information would have to be shared with the British security services.

He was subsequently contacted by an officer of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist branch. A meeting was arranged at the contractor’s home in southwest London.

The Scotland Yard officer arrived with a woman in her thirties who introduced herself as Claire. She presented him with a white business card that carried only her name and telephone number.

“I work for the government,” she told him. Within days he had an MI5 handler and a code name — Notation.

MI5 wanted a complete audit of the building. It needed to establish the internal layout and find out where sensitive communications equipment was located. Who kept the codes and the keys? Where were safes, locked filing cabinets and other secure storage facilities?

It wanted to know the level of security, how easy it would be to remove materials or take photographs undetected. Were there rooms where the military, naval and air attachés discussed sensitive matters? Could those rooms be bugged?

Claire asked Notation to pinpoint on a floor plan the seating position of every member of staff. When he completed the job she praised him as a “natural” and asked for more. He furnished lists of names, addresses and telephone numbers for embassy staff, internal phone books for the foreign ministry and other government departments back home.

The next stage was trickier. Could Notation get agents into the building? “No problem,” he said. Security at the embassy consisted only of signing an entry log. MI5 was delighted.

On the last day of September Notation met Claire and a second MI5 officer called Graham at a hotel near the embassy. Notation suggested Graham should pose as a contractor carrying out a survey to see whether the building contained any dangerous materials.

Their cover agreed, Notation showed Graham around the building. The MI5 man’s reconnaissance produced numerous photographs of the embassy’s interior. The offices of the naval attaché were on the top floor. Nearby were the army and air attachés’ offices.

Inside the military offices were filing cabinets containing secret purchase orders from the foreign ministry and other branches of the foreign government for components and equipment, with destinations for the goods once they were shipped.

Unbelievably, the drawers to many of the filing cabinets were left open, offering the opportunity for the contents to be rifled and photographed.

MI5 was gung-ho, but Notation was beginning to have doubts about its standards of tradecraft. On several occasions he feared that his cover would be blown.

Once, when he was being debriefed in a restaurant, an MI5 officer had used a standard police notebook — a careless giveaway in a public place, Notation thought. On another occasion an MI5 officer had arrived for a meeting in the street still wearing her MI5 identity badge on the outside of her clothing.

Nevertheless, the first stage of the operation was a success and MI5 was keen to press on. If Notation was willing to provide continuing access for MI5 — and other help — he would be paid a monthly salary in cash. He was told not to pay it into a bank account to avoid alerting the Inland Revenue.

One of his first tasks on his new salary was to identify embassy staff. He was taken to a drab MI5 flat in central London and introduced to a woman who was described as an expert in Islamic extremists.

Notation was shown a series of photographs and identified two men who worked at the embassy. Once again, Claire seemed well pleased.

The MI5 officers and Notation also hatched a plan to remove the visa documentation from the embassy basement. The embassy staff were keeping this huge mass of paperwork because they were not convinced that it could be securely disposed of.

Notation told them he could arrange for it to be destroyed by a reputable company. Furthermore, they could earn money from the paper by sending it to be pulped. The real destination of the documents, however, would be the offices of MI5.

The embassy agreed but insisted on a certificate of destruction and also on sending a member of staff in a car that would follow behind the lorry carrying the documents.

Undeterred, MI5 hatched a plan to take the paper to a pulp mill on the south coast. The journey from London would provide ample opportunity for the lorry to get separated from the diplomat’s car. On the way they would switch lorries and a fake consignment of paper would be delivered for pulping.

The diplomats were even promised payment for the recycled paper pulp from the documents they assumed were being sent for destruction.

A contractor — in reality a front for MI5 — submitted an estimate to the embassy for destroying the documents.

MI5 became more ambitious. It wanted Notation to tell embassy staff that their telephone system had been broken while it was being moved during restoration work. The system could then be “repaired” — by MI5.

The embassy staff apparently did not suspect they were the target of an espionage operation and assumed the teams of workmen entering and leaving the building were involved in restoration work.

Notation was beginning to suffer from the stress of being involved in the undercover operation and it was beginning to show.

He was worried about the possibility of getting caught. Would MI5 protect him or would its agents vanish, leaving Notation to explain the stolen documents and the broken telephone system? He also had a secret that he had kept from his MI5 handlers. Years before he had been sectioned under the Mental Health Act because of stress and had spent a year in the Priory clinic.

Outwardly, he was getting on with Claire. She would tell him about her diet, her marriage and problems with her relatives. She even asked him to video-tape Enterprise, a new adaptation of the Star Trek television series, because he had access to the Sky channels.

Privately, however, his misgivings were growing. When he asked for reassurances, Claire told him the operation had been cleared by David Blunkett, the home secretary. She added: “All the necessary warrants were in place. You are in no immediate physical danger.”

Until then, Notation had never even considered himself in physical danger. He panicked. Claire did not help matters when she told him that failure was not an option. The political and diplomatic consequences of discovery would be “cataclysmic”, she warned.

The turning point came when Notation and three MI5 operatives gained access to the embassy cipher machine. While they were walking towards the building, one of the three bulky operatives — who called himself John — told Notation that he had infiltrated it once before on a previous spying mission.

Notation was aghast. He was terrified that one of the embassy staff would recognise John and their cover would be blown. He feared that the espionage operation would soon be uncovered and he would be blamed. He made contact with The Sunday Times and told his story.

“It got to the stage where I feared for my safety. If I had been caught I was convinced MI5 would have disappeared and denied everything, leaving me to take the blame,” he said.

A fortnight later Notation told Claire that he was no longer prepared to work for MI5. A meeting was arranged with a man described as the “boss” at a hotel in Victoria.

The meeting was terse. The “boss”, a thin balding man in his fifties, tossed him an envelope. It contained a thick bundle of cash. “He told me that he could never imagine any circumstance where I would have to contact Claire or MI5 again,” said Notation.

As far as Notation is aware, MI5 activity at the embassy came to a halt. Today the refurbishment of the building is almost complete. Had MI5’s plans succeeded, it would not only be a beautiful building once more but would it also be full of bugs from roof to basement.

TOP SPY SPATS

“Notation” was not the first agent to fall out with his handlers. Other former British spies who fell foul of the espionage establishment include:

David Shayler, a former MI5 officer who revealed in his book Defending the Realm that MI5 kept files on senior Labour figures, including Jack Straw, Peter Mandelson and Harriet Harman, plus the Sex Pistols. He fled to France to escape prosecution but on return was jailed for six months. The prosecution alleged he potentially risked the lives of secret agents. He claimed to be a whistleblower rather than a traitor.

Richard Tomlinson, former MI6 officer sacked without explanation and later jailed for a year after writing The Big Breach. He caused huge embarrassment to MI6 by publishing in Moscow. After a court case the book was released in the UK. It told many MI6 tradecraft secrets — including how a specially trained mouse called Mickey penetrated an embassy in Lisbon.

Peter Wright, a former assistant director of MI5 who claimed in his controversial book Spycatcher that he and colleagues “bugged and burgled our way across London”. The book was banned in the UK when it appeared in 1986 but after a landmark court case, fought by The Sunday Times, it was eventually cleared for publication.

Michael Bettaney, an MI5 officer jailed for 23 years in 1984 for attempting to sell secrets to Russia. He was freed on parole in 1998.

November 1, 2003 at 09:57 PM in MI5 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Sunday Times - MI5 caught bugging allys UK embassy

Times Online - Sunday Times

Nicholas Rufford



A FORMER MI5 agent has exposed a bungled attempt by the security service to bug the London embassy of one of Britain’s key allies in the war on terror.

MI5 infiltrated the embassy, stole codes used by embassy staff for sending secret messages and planned to plant listening devices and remove documents.

The spying operation took place under the cover of restoration work that was carried out at the embassy last year.

The agent, who was given the codename Notation, has confessed his role in the operation to the embassy. It is likely that the Foreign Office will now have the embarrassing task of explaining the espionage operation to its ally.

The Official Secrets Act prevents The Sunday Times from identifying the country concerned, but its leader has visited Tony Blair in Downing Street and Britain has declared it a staunch ally.

Notation arranged for MI5 to have unrestricted access to the embassy, where he was in charge of the restoration project which began in 2001.

MI5 took detailed plans and photographs of the building and worked out how to plant bugs in the internal telephone system and inside a closed-circuit television camera in the office of a diplomat. One MI5 officer pretended to be carrying out a search for hazardous materials to gain access to secure areas.

Notation received tens of thousands of pounds in cash in brown envelopes from MI5 in return for his help. He was told not to bank the money to avoid arousing Inland Revenue’s curiosity.

He was given instructions by an MI5 handler called Claire, who told him the spying operation had been authorised at “the highest level” and warrants had been signed by David Blunkett, the home secretary.

Notation eventually quit the job, saying he was concerned that the operation was badly run and feared he could be in danger. He said he could not cope with the stress.

The Sunday Times has established he was once sectioned under the Mental Health Act and spent a year in the Priory clinic, a fact that MI5 had overlooked when vetting him.

Notation has now written to Ann Taylor, chairman of the parliamentary intelligence and security committee, drawing her attention to what he says was MI5’s bad tradecraft, which he alleges jeopardised the operation. He has delivered the same letter to the American embassy in London and to the embassy that was the target of the spying.

In the letter, he claims the ineptitude included an MI5 employee going into the foreign embassy using two different identities; an MI5 officer wearing her security service badge in the street; and another taking notes in public in a police notebook.

Even his initial approach to MI5 nearly failed because the service did not return his call to its informants’ hotline.

Notation was prompted to contact the security service when he realised he could get it access to archives of documents inside the embassy, including some marked “confidential”.

When his approach to MI5 failed he called the CIA headquarters in the United States, which put him in touch with Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorist branch.

At one stage, after infiltrating MI5 agents into the building, and being asked to “break” the embassy telephone system so that it could be “repaired”, Notation was asked to arrange for the confidential documents to be taken away under the pretence that they were being pulped.

MI5 also planned to plant listening devices in the offices of the army, navy and air attachés and in rooms they used for secret conferences.

Notation began to suffer from the stress of the deception, which was made worse when his MI5 handler told him that failure was not an option.

The political and diplomatic consequences of the discovery of the spying mission would be “cataclysmic”, he was told. “You are in no immediate physical danger,” his MI5 handler told him.

“It got to the stage where I feared for my safety,” he said. “If I had been caught I was convinced MI5 would have disappeared and denied everything, leaving me to take the blame.”

November 1, 2003 at 09:52 PM in MI5 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Tinker, tailor, soldier, stooge

The Spectator.co.uk

The Spectator.co.uk

Bruce Anderson reveals the steps by which the intelligence services succumbed to the magnetic charm of Tony Blair THE conventions of secrecy were maintained. Only Richard Dearlove’s disembodied voice appeared in front of the Hutton inquiry. But, irrespective of the effect on individuals’ reputations, there are fears that recent events have compromised the Secret Intelligence Service. Its operating procedures have been subjected to too much daylight, and it has been used for purposes that were never intended. One former intelligence officer has described this as the Icarus syndrome; SIS has flown too close to the sun. In this case, the sun is Tony Blair.

There is a piquancy in Mr Blair’s developing such a close and indeed affectionate relationship with SIS. About a year before he became Prime Minister, he was invited to lunch at the service’s Vauxhall Cross HQ. Those present hoped to dispel any suggestion that they were a bunch of right-wing fascists and to assure the Labour leader that SIS would work as hard and loyally for his government as it had for previous Labour governments. Tony Blair seemed unimpressed. He appeared to take little notice of what was said to him. The lunch was a stilted affair; it was one of the rare occasions when Mr Blair’s charm had deserted him. He came across as graceless, edgy and uninterested. After his departure, his hosts scratched their heads over his attitude. They wondered if his mind had been poisoned against them and, if so, whether the damage was redeemable. No one present at that lunch — least of all Mr Blair himself — would have predicted that within four years the new PM would have at least as good a working relationship with SIS as any of his predecessors.

This was partly a result of changed circumstances. Back in 1996, Tony Blair expected to be a domestically focused PM, with only one major foreign-policy priority: Europe, where SIS had little contribution to make. Events developed otherwise, and as they did, Mr Blair became more and more involved with defence and intelligence. Like many of his predecessors, he was struck by the contrast between the cheerful efficiency with which soldiers and intelligence officers set about their tasks and the committee-burdened procrastination of the home Civil Service.

There was a further factor. Although SIS has always recruited able officers, the group that was rising to the top by the late 1990s was exceptionally talented. They were also formidable personalities. Since the war, despite its cloak-and-dagger image, SIS has recruited a lot of officers with an academic temperament: very suitable for the close, cautious analysis of complex intelligence material. The characters who now hold the key posts are at least as academically gifted as their predecessors, but there seem to be more big-scale figures.

Richard Dearlove is an obvious example. He has always been outstanding behind a desk, but, as one would expect of someone who, as a young officer, went trekking with Wilfred Thesiger, his personality could never be confined to a desk. The same is true of his board of directors. Even a prime minister would find it hard to see such men at work without being impressed. The chilly luncheon at Vauxhall Cross was quickly forgotten.

Mr Blair was also influenced by SIS’s worldview. Well before 9/11, he had been persuaded of the danger that terrorist groups would get hold of WMD. Post-9/11, he got religion on the subject. This inevitably heightened the role of SIS, as did Afghanistan.

After 20 years of virtually no contact with the country, the Foreign Office had little to add to Afghan discussions. SIS did, as did the SAS. But SIS’s role quickly crossed the frontier between operations and policy. Afghanistan earned it a seat at the top table, which it retained for Iraq. There were a number of reasons for this. In the first place, conventional diplomacy had little role to play in the build-up to the conflict. From the outset it was clear there would not be another grand coalition as in 1990–91; this would be an Anglo–American enterprise.

Equally, a large section of the Foreign Office was unhappy about the venture. The Arabists felt that the balance of Middle Eastern policy would be undermined, with the UK losing its independence and becoming an Israeli–American client. The Europeans, who had placed such faith in the Blair government, were horrified to see their hopes of entente sabotaged by a PM who seemed determined to out-Thatcher Mrs Thatcher in his closeness to America and his willingness to disregard European sensitivities.

If Jack Straw had been a more assertive Foreign Secretary, those institutional doubts would have been more forcefully expressed. Even so, the PM was aware of them, which strengthened his determination to run policy from No. 10. Richard Dearlove played a key role in that. For many months, he was a regular sight on transatlantic aircraft, liaising closely and effectively with the US intelligence world. As one American, saluting the closeness, described the outcome, ‘We don’t ask ourselves what we can show you Brits; we show you everything.’

Sir Richard also had dealings with Condi Rice. In one meeting in early 1992, she told him that the Bush administration was determined to bring about regime change in Iraq. Richard Dearlove said that this could cause difficulties for his boss; there might be a problem with legality. ‘Forget legality, Richard,’ came the reply. ‘This is policy.’ It is not clear that Tony Blair would have disagreed; Sir Richard was almost certainly being more cautious than his Prime Minister. By Easter 2002 at the latest, Tony Blair not only understood the sweeping nature of George Bush’s plans for the Middle East. He endorsed them. In that respect, Mr Blair had become a neoconservative.

As such, he had a political problem at home, especially with the Labour party. He decided to resolve it by using WMD as cover. This is not to say that he lied. In the autumn of 2002 Tony Blair’s overestimate of Iraq’s WMD was widely shared in other capitals. But, as is clear from repeated testimony to the Hutton inquiry, No. 10 was constantly pushing the intelligence material to the limits of accuracy and beyond. In late 2002, SIS officers from Washington joined Richard Dearlove for an evening meeting in No. 10. As it broke up, Tony Blair addressed C, ‘My fate is in your hands, Richard.’ The PM said it laughingly, but it was not a joke.

Nor did it incite any breach of propriety on SIS’s part. No document in the world is crafted more meticulously than a joint intelligence committee dossier. It can take up to a month to draft a three-page report, with every syllable weighed on troy scales of scrupulousness. Cerberus did not guard the gates of Hell more diligently than John Scarlett protected the ‘ownership’ of his paperwork.

Usage is another matter. Here, SIS was sympathetic to the PM’s needs; this was encouraged by the atmosphere in No. 10. Tony Blair’s magnetism is attested to by almost everyone who has worked for him. This helps to ensure easy working relations among the men who are running foreign policy in Downing Street, the Cabinet Office and Vauxhall Cross. Everyone knew that the PM had taken the big policy decisions; it was now only a matter of implementation. If this required political skulduggery, well, Tony Blair was the politician. That was a matter for him.

It did mean, however, that SIS was being drawn into public diplomacy, increasingly replacing a marginalised Foreign Office. There was an obvious risk. Such a publicised role could compromise SIS’s ability to return to the shadows, where so much of its work must take place. It probably does not matter that everyone now knows what a JIC dossier is. It does matter that a senior Iraqi officer’s role in providing information has been identified. Even though the officer’s name remains secret, this may not encourage other senior officers in unpleasant regimes to collaborate with British intelligence.

Until about ten years ago, SIS was surrounded by an unnecessary degree of secrecy. In 1956, just before the Suez landings, Anthony Eden sent Nicholas Elliott of SIS to Israel to pass on our intelligence about the Egyptian forces. Nick Elliott was also asked to assess the calibre of Israel’s forces; were they as good as they were cracked up to be? After asking if he could see some action, he was told that, though there was no room for tourist trips, Israel could use good men. Nick was assigned to the Gaza front, which was useless for his purposes, as the Egyptians ran away so fast that his unit reached the Mediterranean in about ten minutes. Nick’s fellow soldiers promptly tore off their clothes and rushed into the sea. He was busily following their example when the Colonel, who knew who he was, sprinted up to him gesturing at his groin. ‘Before you take your trousers off, remember who and what you’re supposed to be.’ ‘That’s all right, Colonel.’ ‘My God! Your lot aren’t half thorough when it comes to cover.’

By the time Nick Elliott published the first volume of his memoirs, in which he did not refer to his career, that was a well- known story, so I included it in a review. Nick was mildly cross. But when he published a second volume, shortly afterwards, the atmosphere had changed. He was able to acknowledge his role in SIS, as did other members of the service whom one met socially. There is no harm in that: anyone with enough curiosity and a copy of the diplomatic list can quickly work out who is in SIS. That said, it must remain a secret service. The boundaries between secrecy and publicity now need to be readjusted in the former direction.

Equally, the intelligence process needs to be depoliticised. In his admirable work on the JIC, Know Your Enemy, Percy Cradock reaches the following conclusion: ‘The analyst needs to be close enough to ministers to know the questions troubling them... [but] too close a link and policy begins to play back on estimates, producing the answers the policymakers would like ...the best arrangement is intelligence and policy in separate but adjoining rooms, with communicating doors and thin partition walls, as in cheap hotels.’

Tony Blair is not running a cheap hotel at No. 10. It may be that the excessively comfortable atmosphere has created problems for SIS, which will not quickly be resolved and which will require a return to Sir Percy’s more basic accommodation.

September 21, 2003 at 10:09 AM in MI5 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home