Intelligence

After Hamas’s bloody triumph, showdown with Israel looms

The Palestinian civil war is about to become a wider conflict
Uzi Mahnaimi

THROUGH the heat haze, the sounds of shots and screams carried to the desperate men holed up inside a great white building in Gaza City.

This was the American-built headquarters of the Office of General Security, a “moderate” Palestinian intelligence service charged with tracking and curbing the activities of Hamas extremists in an attempt to bring stability to Gaza and pave the way to peace.

Sweating, terrified, gabbling into their dying mobile phones to the outside world, the hunters were now the besieged.

Nearby, neighbours cowered in their high-rise flats overlooking the deceptive calm of the Mediterranean. They cringed at the din of mortar shells and blasts of machinegun fire. They could tell, after years of grim experience, that these were not the usual amateurish volleys let off by teenage gunmen. It was regular, disciplined shooting.

A meticulous plan, drawn up by Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, with tactical guidance from their Iranian mentors, was being put into action, and to devastating effect.

It was designed to defeat, once and for all, Fatah, the secular Palestinian nationalist party that talked peace with Israel. And it worked with lightning speed in a fratricidal three-day war in which at least 116 people died.

Inside the security headquarters, Abu Fadi, a Fatah intelligence officer, could hear what was happening to his colleagues. Their masked attackers had sprinted in, heedless of casualties. Their doors had been kicked down and they had been dragged outside, their arms flailing in gestures imploring mercy.

Then the black-masked gunmen bowed their heads to the dust in prayer and separated those of their foes who might live from those about to die.

The victims were killed immediately, some in front of their wives and children, said a Palestinian witness hiding in a building overlooking the scene.

The witness, who gave his name only as Amjad, got on the phone to a local reporter in Gaza and told him: “They are executing them one by one.”

As he watched, he described what was happening. “They are carrying one of them on their shoulders . . . putting him on a sand dune . . . turning him around - and shooting.”

The testimony, direct from an Arab source, is crucial to refuting Hamas claims that its fighters killed only in hot blood.

Now those zealots - many just back, armed and trained, from Iran, were at Fadi’s door to wreak vengeance on him.

It was when he heard the Hamas battle cry - Allahu akbar! (God is the greatest!) - that Fadi realised it was all over. He grabbed his service handgun and escaped through a secret exit door. He ran for his life to the beach. A fisherman’s boat was waiting for him.

Not all his colleagues were so lucky. Minutes later the first Hamas hand grenade exploded in Fadi’s office. Dozens of fighters, with gleaming new weapons, ran wild through the building.

Amid the chaos, a Hamas man grabbed a laptop computer and ran a name search while the grenades were still exploding. When he found the people he was looking for they were handcuffed and taken away.

Soon after, bursts of AK47 fire were heard. The officials were shot dead at point blank range and thrown into an alley. Several hours later their families found their bodies - some mutilated - in the nearby morgue.

By late on Thursday, the green flag of Hamas flew from the building that had once been visited regularly by liaison officers from MI6 and the CIA.

As dusk fell over the Gaza Strip, its teeming refugee camps and its tenements housing 1.4m Palestinians, Hamas’s spokesman, Islam Shahawan, proclaimed: “The era of justice and Islamic rule has arrived.”

For the Palestinians, the “two-state solution”, so often talked of as a solution to their entanglement with Israel, had arrived in brutally unexpected form.

Gaza was always poorer, more radical, more pious and more violent than the West Bank, where Fatah’s leader, President Mah-moud Abbas, has taken refuge amid 2m of his people and where Hamas members are being rounded up.

Although both sides still cling to a belief in a single Palestinian state, they are now irredeemably divided by soil and ideology, one pinning its hopes to compromise and peace, the other infused with a mission to conquer Jerusalem, expel the Jews and rejoin the lands of Islam in a holy union.

It was the most significant moment for Palestinians since the death of Yasser Arafat three years ago.

ACROSS the heavily guarded border in Israel, a fighting general who had tried and failed to make peace with Arafat woke up to the news that the Jewish state faced an implacable new reality in the south: Hamastan.

Ehud Barak, 65, is the classic Israeli man of action turned politician. After years in the wilderness - after his own unpopular spell as prime minister - he had just taken back the helm of Israel’s Labour party.

It was Friday morning when Barak talked to Ehud Olmert, the Kadima prime minister. They agreed the crisis in Gaza was so grave that they would rush through his appointment as defence minister in Olmert’s coalition government.

Olmert, whose conduct of Israel’s fight in Lebanon last summer against another Islamic guerrilla movement, Hezbollah, had been bitterly criticised, needed Barak’s support. Morale in the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) had taken a blow.

The IDF, for all its history of rapid victories over Arab armies, found Hezbollah’s martyrdom-seeking fighters hard to defeat.

Now the fragile Lebanese state was beset by Islamic militants and undermined by the hardline regime in Syria. Hezbollah might see an ally and a second front in the south - so there could be worse to come.

Barak, the decorated veteran, and Olmert, the smooth civilian operator, quickly agreed a two-pronged strategy. They would help Abbas with cash and intelligence to shore up his power in the West Bank.

Israel had never wanted to get enmeshed in Gaza anyway. It had withdrawn, pulled down its settlements and tried to fence in the problem in 2005.

This could be an opportunity for Israel to divide and bargain, they reasoned. On the other hand, there stood Hamas, exultant, fired with victory and poised on Israel’s southern doorstep with its crude rockets, its growing arsenal of weapons from Iran and Syria and a legion of would-be suicide bombers at its command.

Barak, according to close sources, argued that Israel could not avoid a fight. It must go in to shatter the military mystique of the fundamentalists; after that, perhaps, the Israelis could agree to a United Nations peacekeeping force including Arab units.

As Israel’s best military brains got to work analysing the flow of information on the uprising - almost every minute of it had been monitored by drones and signals intelligence - there was growing unease.

For not only had Hamas displayed superb tactical skills, allied with ruthless determination; its engineers, bomb makers and planners, some who devised Iranian trench and bunker systems in the Gulf war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, had turned Gaza into a Middle Eastern Stalingrad.

THE Israelis sealed Gaza’s gates last Monday. Tension was crackling in the air, though after months of feuding, that was nothing new. On Fatah’s radio station, a commander named Samih al-Madhun boasted: “I swear I’ll kill all Hamas, civilian or not. I’ll kill them all!”

Coming from one of Abbas’s chief lieutenants, it was a declaration of war that Hamas was happy to accept. By Tuesday morning, Gaza’s on-off skirmishes had turned deadly serious.

Fatah fired rocket-propelled grenades at the home of Ismail Haniya, a Hamas leader who served as Palestinian prime minister in the “unity government”.

An hour later, Hamas landed mortar shells around the presidential compound of Abbas. This seems to have been the start of the Hamas offensive.

On Wednesday, its fighters consolidated control of the north and seized the south of Gaza. Then they tightened a vice around Gaza City and Fatah’s four command centres. A huge bomb, planted in a tunnel under the General Security building, shattered the morale of its defenders and started a battle that raged overnight.

By Thursday morning, fast-moving Hamas squads were deployed to attack all four Fatah posts. As they did so, 200 Hamas men surrounded the house where the loudmouthed al-Madhun was cornered.

Witnesses told how the mob shouted at him to get out of his house. He must have known he was doomed as he was dragged out, already wounded in the stomach from a single shot.

The mob was now all but hysterical. A Hamas television crew recorded what happened next. Al-Madhun begged for his life, crawling in the dirt, bleeding, surrounded. He was beaten and thrown to the ground. Then at least five gunmen riddled him with bullets.

That night, all Gaza saw al-Madhun’s killing on Al-Aqsa TV, which intersperses its war coverage with breaks for the call to prayer.

Victory was assured after Hamas took the main road that runs from north to south through the territory. Fatah soldiers, who fought poorly, ran or were easily outmanoeuvred.

On Friday morning, Hamas announced the “liberation” of Gaza and began changing well known place names into Islamic ones. The Tal-al Hawa, or the Hill of Winds, as it was known for hundreds of years, is now officially Tal al-Islam.

While his people were being slaughtered in Gaza, the Palestinian president was sitting in his well protected compound in Ramallah on the West Bank. The co-founder of Fatah, Abbas, Arafat’s heir, saw part of his movement crushed.

In Gaza, looters swarmed through his offices and a laughing gunman sat in his chair, picked up his phone and pretended to call Condoleezza Rice, the American secretary of state. Abbas was being humiliated.

Israel and the US moved fast to prop him up. Abbas, who was choosing a new government yesterday, immediately denounced by Hamas, was boosted by an announcement that Washington was prepared to lift its embargo on aid, clearing the way for Israel and Europe to follow suit. But a cash infusion may be too little too late. His defeat has greatly diminished his authority.

Matti Steinberg, an Israeli analyst, claimed Israel itself was partly to blame. “Israel systematically destroyed the Palestinian Authority’s institutions,” he said. “Those who didn’t want to deal with Arafat and said he was irrelevant have now got Hamas. And, if they don’t help Abbas, they’ll get Al-Qaeda.”

“GOING into Gaza is inevitable,” said Brigadier-General Moshe Yaalon, a former chief of staff of the Israeli army. “No one will do the job for us, we should prepare for a land attack in Gaza, and the question is not if but how and when.”

Yaalon said he was aware of the heavy price Israel might pay for a major land incursion into Gaza. But that was the army’s job, he insisted.

Military sources said three Israeli divisions amounting to 20,000 soldiers stood ready for an onslaught. An attack is not imminent, but the troops are on standby for a possible incursion later this summer.

Earlier this year, in the remote Negev desert, the army rehearsed a full-scale offensive into Gaza. A giant Palestinian “refugee camp” was built to help troops practice assault methods in the tightly packed camps.

Since its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, Israel has lost control of the southern border separating Gaza from Egypt. As a result, tons of explosives and arms have been smuggled in. “We even know about Iranian instructors who’ve arrived in Gaza,” said the commander of the southern sector, Brigadier-General Aluf Yoav Galant.

Palestinian security sources claim that hundreds of Hamas militants returned recently from weeks of training in Iran. “They left Gaza for Cairo, then flew to Tehran without anyone to stop them,” said a Palestinian official.

A warren of tenement flats, camps and shanty towns strung among the desert sands along the coast, Gaza is a perfect laboratory for the street fighting skills that Iran perfected in the ruins of Khorramshahr and Abadan during its own war against Iraq.

Israeli military intelligence says Gaza’s 115 square miles have been turned into a giant arms warehouse, honeycombed with strongpoints, booby traps and tunnels.

Having learnt from last summer’s conflict in Lebanon, the Israelis will go for a quick onslaught, aimed at killing as many militants as possible in a matter of days. Hamas will try to bog down the Israeli army in close-quarter fighting.

“We won’t have more than a week for the fighting,” said an Israeli source familiar with the plan. “We’ve been instructed to cause as little damage as possible to the local population.”

So enormous are the political and diplomatic sensitivities that Israel’s prime minister is flying to Washington this weekend to outline his plan at the White House.

America does not want another summer of gruesome television pictures showing its ally at war with an elusive Muslim foe in a landscape of shattered homes and dead civilians. It also knows that if Gaza is to remain cut off, short of food and denied money from overseas, this could prompt a humanitarian crisis that will be quickly exploited for propaganda throughout the Middle East.

Israel move swiftly yesterday to announce it would allow food and humanitarian aid into Gaza, and in London Gordon Brown promised new investment.

Tel Aviv knows it will have to show it has been goaded beyond endurance - perhaps by an esca-lated Hamas campaign of rocket attacks or, worse, a resumption of suicide bombings - before it can show it has no alternative but to storm Gaza.

The US will urge caution. Officials close to Rice fear a raid on Gaza could deal another blow to American influence. Against this, the Israelis will argue that Hamas will only get stronger with every passing day unless it is defeated.

Among Palestinians, of whom Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state, remarked that they never lost an opportunity to lose an opportunity, many will complain of another self-inflicted wound in Gaza.

Long wedded to the dream of unity, Palestinians are confronted with the truth that their society is fractured by clan, by religion, by ideology and by political loyalty.

Last week, witnesses in Gaza told of celebrating Hamas fighters who sent small boys to distribute sweets to passers-by. Previously, it was a gesture made only when Israelis were killed by a suicide bomb. This time the sweets were offered to celebrate the killing of Fatah men.

Down on the Gaza shore, the fleeing intelligence man, Fadi, jumped into his waiting boat. An Israeli gunboat signalled to the crew as he and his men scrambled aboard – Palestinian fugitives on an Israeli vessel saving them from the Hamas hit squads.

There are many strange allies in wartime, and, if Hamas has anything to do with it, the covert British and American alliance with Palestinian “moderates” is about to be made embarrassingly public.

Ransacking Fadi’s office, the masked gunmen will have found a treasure trove of intelligence files. “We’ve discovered documents that will shock the world when published,” the movement proclaimed. The propaganda war, at least, has already started.

June 16, 2007 at 10:49 PM in MI6 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

McGuinness was an agent for MI6, former spy claims

McGuinness was agent for MI6, former officer claims - Britain - Times Online

By David Sharrock, Ireland Correspondent
Mick Smith weblog

A FORMER army intelligence officer’s claims that Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein’s chief negotiator and a former Provisional IRA chief-of-staff, was a British agent were dismissed by his party yesterday.

The Sunday World, a tabloid newspaper based in Dublin, quoted a former member of the Army’s controversial Force Research Unit, running paramilitary agents in Northern Ireland, as saying: “McGuinness was working for MI6.”

A number of other Irish newspapers made the same allegation but did not name Mr McGuinness, referring instead to “a senior member of the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein” and “a leading Sinn Fein member”.

All the newspaper allegations, however, were based on the transcript of an alleged conversation between an MI6 handler and an agent known as “J118”. The provenance of the transcript document was explained by only one newspaper, the Sunday Tribune, which said that the intelligence officer, who uses the pseudonym Martin Ingram, was “circulating” it.

The document records a brief conversation which, according to Mr Ingram, alludes to an imminent Provisional IRA attack, which took place on the Coshquin checkpoint on the Irish border between Londonderry and Donegal on October 24, 1990.

Five soldiers and Patsy Gillespie, a civilian who was forced to drive a van containing a bomb, died in the explosion. According to the reports, the MI6 agent encouraged his handler to “push this along as quickly as possible”.

Mr Ingram told the Sunday World: “It has been confirmed to me that J118 is Martin McGuinness. The most significant thing for me . . . is the fact that McGuinness’s handler is the driving force between the human bomb campaign.”

Mr McGuinness refused to comment on the reports yesterday, but a Sinn Fein spokesman dismissed them out of hand. “We have heard this all before,” he said. “It is rubbish. It is nonsense. Anybody with half a wit will treat it with the contempt it rightly deserves.”

Two years ago Mr Ingram claimed that Freddie Scapp- aticci, a Belfast republican, had been an army agent at the highest levels within the IRA who was codenamed Stakeknife. Mr Scappaticci denied the allegation before fleeing his home in the west of the city.

Last month Denis Donaldson, a senior Sinn Fein member and convicted IRA bomber, was murdered in Co Donegal after admitting last year that he had worked as a spy for British Intelligence and Special Branch for more than 20 years.

May 30, 2006 at 11:37 PM in MI6 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

I was no secret agent for MI6, says McGuinness

I was no secret agent for MI6, says McGuinness - Britain - Times Online

By David Sharrock, Ireland Correspondent
ACCUSATIONS that Martin McGuinness was an MI6 agent were part of a plot within Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to prevent political progress in Northern Ireland, the Sinn Fein MP said yesterday.

In his first comments since a Dublin Sunday newspaper named him as a British agent, Mr McGuinness told reporters at Stormont that the allegations were “hooey” and that he was “a million per cent” certain that nothing would ever be proved against him.

The former Stormont Education Minister and Provisional IRA commander sounded at moments as if his voice was about to break with emotion as he rejected the accusations.

The claims were based on the verification, by a former Army intelligence officer, of an alleged transcript of a conversation between an IRA member and his MI6 handler.

Mr McGuinness was flanked by fellow Sinn Fein members of the Northern Ireland Assembly. But a notable absence was Gerry Adams, the party’s president. Mr McGuinness said: “I am a million per cent confident no one will ever produce anything against me. I have worked all of my adult life as an Irish republican.

“Many of my comrades have been killed. Many IRA volunteers have been killed and I, of course, knew many of them as many of you well know.

“Under no circumstances will I ever be concerned about anybody throwing anything up at me which will strike against me. It is not even a remote possibility.”

The allegations against Mr McGuinness were made by a former army intelligence officer who uses the pseudonym Martin Ingram.

The former member of the Army’s controversial Force Research Unit, that ran agents inside paramilitary groups, is credited with exposing Freddie Scappaticci, a senior Belfast republican, as an agent whose codename was Stakeknife, and who operated at the heart of the Provisional IRA.

Mr Scappaticci denied the allegations but later fled his West Belfast home. Mr Ingram’s claim, which was published in the Sunday World, also followed hard on the unmasking by the Sinn Fein leader, Gerry Adams, last December, of the party’s head of administration at Stormont, Denis Donaldson, as a spy. Donaldson admitted that he had spied for British Intelligence and Special Branch in a confession broadcast on Irish television and then went into hiding. Last month he was murdered at his hideaway, a remote cottage in Glenties, Co Donegal.

Mr McGuinness added: “The allegations are a load of rubbish. They are total and absolute nonsense and they are hooey of the worst kind.

“Now you would need to have nerves of steel to be part of a Sinn Fein leadership which has had to take the sort of muck and abuse thrown at us over the course of many years, but we are in positions of leadership. If you don’t like the heat, you get out of the kitchen. We have never jumped out of the kitchen. We will stay in this process to the bitter end.”

He said that he had known for some time that elements within the DUP were behind attempts to spread claims that he was working for British intelligence.

He said that Willie McCrea, the DUP MP for South Antrim, had “raised these unfounded allegations” in the House of Commons in February. “No one paid them any attention.”

He added: “I have to say given all that we went through in 2004, it was quite clear then that there were elements within the DUP who were out to sabotage any prospect of an agreement between Sinn Fein and the DUP.

“Here we are at a very critical stage of the process and elements of the DUP are doing their damnedest to try and undermine the prospect of trying to get these institutions up.”

May 30, 2006 at 11:34 PM in MI6 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Classified French DGSE intelligence report: Al Qaeda Training Camp passed from Control of CIA to Bin Laden in 1995

Classified French DGSE intelligence report: Al Qaeda Training Camp passed from Control of CIA to Bin Laden in 1995

y Wayne Madsen

May 27, 2006
Wayne Madsen Report - 2006-05-23

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WASHINGTON, D.C. -- WMR has obtained a confidential "France Only" report of the French intelligence service, Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure (DGSE), that states that the CIA and Britain's MI-6 maintained effective control of an important Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan as late as 1995, fully two years after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, an attack that was launched with the help of Sudanese intelligence officers loyal to Osama Bin Laden. The CIA and MI6 permitted control of training operations at Darunta, an "Arab Afghan" base located near the camp of Osama Bin Laden and used to manufacture explosives and chemical weapons and train in their use, to pass to the control of Ibn Cheikh, a Libyan leader of Al Qaeda.

The DGSE report, dated January 9, 2001, is classified "Defense Confidential" and "National (French) Use Only" states, "Besides the Maghreb enclave, the training at Darunta, which, for approximately 2 months, mainly involved the manufacture and the use of the explosives by terrorists. This training, initially provided at the camp of Khalden, in Paktia, was transferred during 1995, on the order of Ibn Cheikh, to Darunta, in order to slide [the training] from the control of the security services of certain countries, in particular the United States and the United Kingdom."

The report continues by stating that in 1998, the training was expanded to include the use of C-4 plastic explosives and different types of detonators (electric, acid, etc.). Training also included the use of homemade explosives (like improvised explosive devices killing so many in Iraq today) and poisons such as arsenic, cyanide, gas, diamond powder, nicotine, and ricin. After Al Qaeda took control of Darunta from the CIA and MI6, the camp was used to train Al Qaeda operatives to launch a series of deadly attacks, including the November 19, 1995 attack on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, the 1998 attacks on the US embassy in Nairobi, the abortive Dec. 31, 1999 "Millennium" attack on Los Angeles International Airport by Algerian Ahmed Ressam, and the attack on the USS Cole.

In 1995, James Woolsey left as CIA Director and was replaced by John Deutch. Deutch's deputy was George Tenet, who previously served in Bill Clinton's National Security Council. The National Security Adviser was Tony Lake. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) was chaired by Larry Combest of Lubbock, Texas and 1995 was the year Porter Goss joined the CIA oversight committee. On November 12, 2002, only a week after winning his 10th term, Combest suddenly announced his resignation from the House. Goss took over the HPSCI gavel from Combest in 1997, after serving only two years on the committee. In 1995, the Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was Arlen Specter, a person whose fingerprints, like those of Goss, have been all over shady intelligence operations since the early 1960s. CIA intelligence analyst Michael Scheuer formed the CIA's Bin Laden Unit in 1996.

Two significant items emerge from the DGSE report. One is the fact that the CIA and MI6 were dealing with a Libyan Al Qaeda member at the same time Libyan leader Muammar el Qaddafi had declared war on Al Qaeda. Unlike the United States, Libya issued an Interpol arrest warrant for Bin Laden on March 16, 1998. With this treasure trove of proof of U.S. (and British) support for Al Qaeda, Qaddafi had the U.S. and the neo-cons over the barrel. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Bush administration now considers Qaddafi (once branded as terrorist number one) to be a good friend.

The other item is the training of Ahmed Ressam at Darunta. Bill Clinton's National Security Adviser Sandy Berger was charged with removing classified documents from the National Archives concerning the Ressam bombing plot. The question remains -- what were in these documents and did they have anything to do with the CIA's fingerprints on the Darunta camp?
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

May 27, 2006 at 08:06 PM in MI6 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Spies collect more toys as cold war turns to hot peace

Spies collect more toys as cold war turns to hot peace - World - Times Online

From Jeremy Page in Moscow
SOMEWHERE in the depths of the Lubyanka, the curator of the FSB museum must be rubbing his hands with glee.

Until the British “rock” was exposed this week, the Federal Security Service, the KGB’s successor agency, had not had many new toys for its collection of Cold War spy gadgets — including glasses with suicide poison in the frames and a radio receiver disguised as a tree. However, if intelligence experts are correct, it can expect more trophies as Western spy agencies step up their operations in Russia to a level not seen since the Soviet collapse.

Western intelligence services said last year that Russia had aggressively escalated its spying on their patches since President Putin — a former KGB spy — took power in 2000.

It is now considered second only to China in terms of how aggressively it is seeking Western technological, commercial and military secrets.

What is less widely publicised is that US and British intelligence have also been actively recruiting Russian-speaking agents in tandem with Russia’s growing economic and political clout, intelligence experts say.

“The Cold War has ended; now we have the hot peace,” Oleg Nechiporenko, a prominent former KGB spy, told The Times. Once called “the best KGB agent in Latin America” by the CIA, he was thrown out of Mexico in 1971 for plotting to overthrow the government.

He said that he was not surprised by the FSB’s allegation that it had caught four British Embassy employees spying. “These days, you see leaders hugging and smiling, but everyone still has their own geopolitical interests — that’s where the special services come in,” he said.

John Scarlett, the MI6 chief, is also no stranger to the rivalry between British and Russian spooks. He was expelled from Moscow in 1994 after being exposed as the MI6 desk officer at the British Embassy.

The FSB offered no definitive figures for the number of Western spies operating in Russia. but Nikolai Patrushev, the FSB chief, has said that his agents caught 26 foreign intelligence officers and 67 of their agents in 2005. The FSB apprehended 18 foreign spies in 2004 and 13 in 2003. “Reconnaissance is not only not waning,” Mr Patrushev said in November, “it is strengthening.”

In the past two years the West has again started to see Russia as a security threat, as President Putin re-asserts the Kremlin’s authority at home and in the former Soviet Union. Russia is sitting on a vast nuclear arsenal as well as poorly guarded stockpiles of nuclear material. It has close ties to governments deemed hostile to the West, particularly Iran, Syria and North Korea; and it sells billions of dollars of weaponry to China every year.

Perhaps most importantly, the West is becoming increasingly dependent on Russian energy. “An informant within Gazprom would be priceless,” said one Moscow-based diplomat, referring to the Russian gas monopoly.

Western intelligence agencies are also having to channel ever more resources into combating Russian agents. A British security source said: “The UK is a high-priority espionage target and of greatest concern are the Russians and Chinese.”

Sergey Lebedev, the director of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, denies an escalation of operations in the West. “Russian intelligence has reduced its presence overseas and substantially restructured its activities,” he said last month.

Oleg Gordievsky, a former KGB officer who was a double agent, said, though, that 34 Russians at the Russian Embassy and various international organisations in Britain were spies. The security services were unable to confirm the figure, but Mr Gordievsky, who has lived in Britain since his defection in 1985, keeps close ties with MI6 and MI5. “I know the figure is accurate,” he said.

January 24, 2006 at 08:41 PM in MI6 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Greeks name MI6 chief over 'torture of terror suspects'

London bombs terror attack The Times and Sunday Times Times Online

From John Carr in Athens and Daniel McGrory
THE Government tried last night to block the naming of an MI6 officer alleged to have orchestrated the torture of terrorist suspects in Greece.

It issued a warning to media organisations after a leading Athens newspaper identified the British intelligence officer and 15 Greek agents, alleging that they took part in the arrest and abuse of 28 Pakistan-born detainees who were held in connection with the July 7 bombings in London.

The disclosures sparked a row in Athens, with opposition leaders and human rights groups demanding to know why British agents were allowed to operate in Greece.

There are mounting calls for a parliamentary investigation, and George Voulgarakis, the Public Order Minister, faced demands last night to appear before the parliament.

Proto Thema named the British official as the MI6 station chief in Athens. It said that he and a second, unnamed, British agent took part in the interrogation of some suspects, who said that they were hooded and held in secret. One of the migrant workers claims to have had a gun forced into his mouth.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office last night refused to confirm or deny whether the person named in the Greek press works at the British Embassy in Athens.

British ministers have until now denied that British officials played any part in this counter-terror operation, which allegedly took place days after the July attacks on three Tube trains and a bus in which 52 passengers died. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, told MPs last week that the reports were “complete nonsense”.

Last night Mr Voulgarakis condemned the naming of Greek intelligence officers as “illegal and endangering the safety of our agents in the field”. He said that two of the named agents had been withdrawn from postings in Kosovo. When the allegations emerged a fortnight ago, Mr Voulgarakis also denied that the arrests had taken place.

The migrant workers said that they were questioned by British investigators about mobile telephone calls linked to the four suicide bombers. They said they were also asked about calls made to a suspect in Pakistan whom the British officials apparently wanted to question about the London attacks.

If the Greek Government bows to demands for an investigation, British ministers may have to defend the behaviour of MI6 agents abroad.

Makis Triantafyllopoulos, publisher of Proto Thema, said last night: “The Greek and British governments have been lying from the start.”

Some of the detainees have now given evidence to a magistrate about their treatment. One, Muhammad Munir, claims he was held incommunicado for six days and “hit very hard on the head”. He and others said that they were sure the figures questioning them were British, yet all of them spoke fluent Greek. They described “a black British case officer” as taking part in their interrogation.

Most of the 28 men are too frightened to complain about their treatment, saying that they were threatened by the British officers that their families in Pakistan and Britain would suffer if they spoke about the interrogation.

Those who have been persuaded by Pakistani community leaders to give evidence claim they were seized at the homes at night, hooded and driven to secret locations. Some are alleged to have been held at EYP, the headquarters of Greek intelligence.

Gul Nawaz, who has lived in Athens for three years, said in his deposition: “Twice a policeman hit me while I was on the floor. I asked him for some water and he punched me in the face. They took my mobile phone. They wanted to know about my friends in London and relatives and phone calls.”

He was asked if he had any links to al-Qaeda. “I said I didn’t know. I said I’m just a Muslim and I work to send money to my wife and three children in Pakistan. I never called anybody in London.”

The Greek newspaper claims that Costas Karamanlis, the Prime Minister, sanctioned the British-led operation. It names two officials working in his office as taking part in negotiations over this incident. Anastasis Papaligouras, the Greek Justice Minister, has ordered an investigation into the affair.

# The US Embassy in London has clarified remarks by Robert Tuttle, the Ambassador, after he told the Radio 4 Today programme that there was no evidence that terrorist suspects were taken to Syria under the process of “special rendition”. The embassy acknowledged that there had been reports of a rendition to Syria, but refused to comment further.

December 27, 2005 at 10:00 AM in MI6 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

SIS OR MI6. WHAT'S IN A NAME?

The origins of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) also known as MI6

The origins of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) are to be found in the Foreign Section of the Secret Service Bureau, established by the Committee of Imperial Defence in October 1909. The Secret Service Bureau was soon abbreviated to 'Secret Service', 'SS Bureau' or even 'SS'. The first head of the Foreign Section, Captain Sir Mansfield Cumming RN, signed himself 'MC' or 'C' in green ink. Thus began the long tradition of the head of the Service adopting the initial 'C' as his symbol.

Cumming sought to ensure that the Foreign Section of the Secret Service Bureau maintained a degree of autonomy but the War Office, in particular, managed to exercise extensive control over his actions. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 brought a need for even closer cooperation with military intelligence organisations within the War Office. The most significant manifestation of this was the virtual integration of the Foreign Section within the Military Intelligence Directorate. Thus, for much of the war, Cumming's organisation was known as MI1(c). This arrangement did not sit well with Cumming who regretted this diminution of his independence. As a naval officer he was less than pleased at appearing under the auspices of the War Office.

The debate over the future structure of British Intelligence continued at length after the end of hostilities but Cumming managed to engineer the return of the Service to Foreign Office control. At this time the organisation was known in Whitehall by a variety of titles including the 'Foreign Intelligence Service', the 'Secret Service', 'MI1(c)', the 'Special Intelligence Service' and even 'C's organisation'. Around 1920, it began increasingly to be referred to as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), a title that it has continued to use to the present day and which was enshrined in statute in the Intelligence Services Act 1994.

'MI6' has become an almost interchangeable title for SIS, at least in the minds of those outside the Service. The origins of the use of this other title are to be found in the late 1930s when it was adopted as a flag of convenience for SIS. It was used extensively during the Second World War, especially if an organisational link needed to be made with MI5 (the Security Service). Although 'MI6' fell into official disuse years ago, many writers and journalists continue to use it to describe SIS.

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SIS (?) Korean

네이버

SIS's tasking and dissemination architecture evolved originally out of the first Secret Service Committee review of intelligence needs and facilities in the wake of the First World War. When the Cabinet convened the first of a series of Secret Service Committees in 1919 to review post-war intelligence needs, the Committee was confronted with the dual problems of a failure to fulfil consumer intelligence requirements on one hand, and operational hazards from poor interorganizational co-ordination in the field on the other.

One of the conclusions of the 1919 Committee was that the SIS should act as a central human intelligence organization, acting on behalf of the Foreign Office, the Admiralty, the War Office, the Colonial Office, the Home Office and the Air Ministry, in other words giving the SIS a monopoly on foreign intelligence production for the UK government.

However, while this resolved the operational control problem it did not address what might be called 'consumer satisfaction', and a quid pro quo for SIS's central control of operations took shape:
in order to 'safeguard the interests' of the agency's major consumers, 'the intelligence branch in each of the three Services came to house one of its sections in the SIS, where it formed a part of the HQ staff' in a scheme the official history terms the '1921 arrangement' (Hinsley et al. 1979, pp. 17-18).

각 군. 부서별 연락, 소요부문( C 부문- Circulating Sections 구성)

The Admiralty and the War Office attached their secondments first, in 1919,

with the Foreign Office following later in 1921,

with Air Ministry intelligence following a decade later and

(Sir) Desmond Morton's Industrial Intelligence Centre setting up a similar arrangement to handle economic and industrial intelligence shortly before the Second World War.

Initially, the individual 'consumer liaison sections' were originally simply referred to as the 'political section' or 'air section' and so forth (Andrew 1987, p. 408).
However, by 1932 they had been designated 'Circulating Sections', or 'C Sections', and awarded Roman numerals (Special Operations Executive 1932).
This designation scheme almost certainly post-dated their original attachment to SIS HQ since it in no way conformed to the actual sequence in which the C Sections appeared.

Under this designation scheme, (각 해당 부서.군 서 파견된 인원으로 구성)

the Foreign Office liaison was Section I 외무성 파견 연락.소요-1과
the Air Ministry liaison Section II 공군성 파견 -2과
Admiralty was Section III 해군성 파견-3과
the War Office Section IV and 육군성 파견-4과
eventually the Ministry of Economic Warfare had its own Section VI (there is some debate concerning the designation of the Air and War Office Sections, see Davies 1995, pp. 120, 130). 후 경제선 성 파견.연락-6과

The other side of the organization consisted of a
small staff of 'G Sections' responsible for overseeing and directing the operational work of SIS stations abroad. ( G 부서-해외 공작 감독.지시. 수행)

However, matters became somewhat entangled during the interwar period because several sections which did not perform the consumer liaison function were bundled with the C Sections on an ad hoc basis.

These were: C 부서(대상 소비자 연락.수요 부처가 없는 부서들)

Section V (Counter-Espionage); 5과-방첩
Section VII (Finance) and 재정 7과- 재정
Section VIII (a section handling SIS ciphers and clandestine radio) 8과- 암호.통신

The result was a pattern in which the seconded consumer liaison sections possessed a variety of dual administrative identity in Whitheall. 각 연락.소요 부서 는 SIS내의 연락부서를 구성하면서도 동시에 모 성.군 (정보 부서)의 연락부서로도 지정.

The Military Section, for example, existed simultaneously as SIS's Section IV at the same time as it appears in War Office lists of the period as MI 1c (inheriting the First World War designation held by the SIS prior to its move from the War Office to the Foreign Office).
육군연락과- SIS 4과/(육군) 정보국 1과 C

Under the 1920-1924 reorganization of the Directorate of Naval Intelligence, the Naval Section at SIS was simultaneously SIS's Section III and designated NID 3 at the Admiralty (Admiralty 1923).

해군연락과-SIS 3과/해군정보부 3과

Similarly, the Air Section after its establishment in 1929 1930 carried both the SIS designation Section II and the Air Intelligence title AI 1c (Winterbotham 1978, pp. 15-19).
공군연락과-SIS 2과/공군정보부 1과 C

In 1938, when Desmond Morton was invited to lay down plans for an 'economic warfare intelligence branch' his proposals included a Liaison Intelligence Section that would receive information from other branches of government. 경제전 부서 하 연락정보과( 타 부처, 군과의 정보 교환)

That LI Section included a 'Secret Sources' sub-section consisting of two officers 'supplied by SIS' who were to act as liaison with that agency (Board of Trade 1938). Those officers also carried the SIS identity as Section VI (Johns 1979, p. 48; Special Operations Executive 1939; i-15).
해당 정보연락과 산하 비밀기관(SIS) 연락 담당 관-SIS 6과

Only the Foreign Office or 'Political' Section was purely a staff secondment and held no parallel status in its home department

The Circulating Sections did more that simply set requirements for raw intelligence in the form of wish lists, and evaluate the content of agent reports from field stations abroad.
C Sections (not to be confused with the designation of the Chief of Service as 'C') also originated operations which the operational G Sections were required to execute.

With the outbreak of war, the Service Branch directorates of intelligence began programmes of expansion and reorganization leading in turn to the expansion and reorganization of their liaison sections attached to SIS HQ. The programme of expansion reflected two different sorts of process: on the one hand, Service intelligence departments were gearing up for an anticipated increased volume of information, while on the other new functions were being set up and installed in the home departments, and a number of these had implications for the SIS. Air Intelligence and Naval intelligence both began their expansion programmes before the actual outbreak of war, while the War Office reorganization did not take place until 1940. SIS also had to mobilize, bring in new recruits to handle its wartime operations (see, for example, Trevor-Roper 1968, pp. 38-9).

By May 1941, under the new reorganization, the Admiralty liaison to SIS and GC&CS came under

a new Co-ordination and Liaison Section, NID 17. 해군 정보부 조정.연락과( SIS.GC&CS 등 타 정보기관 연락 담당)
NID 17 included the NID attachments to the Joint Intelligence Committee, the Interservice Security Board, and the Joint Planning Committee, as well as 'Special Liaison Duties' which meant GC&CS (sometimes referred to as the Government Communications Bureau, or GCB), SIS, and to the SOE (given in 1940 papers as SO 2) (Admiralty 1941).

As the range of NID liaisons multiplied through the war, adding the Joint Intelligence Staff and the interdepartmental Intelligence Section (Operations) (IS(O)) to the Division's commitments, the liaison duties were broken up between two different NID sections. 해군 정보부 각 연락 부문 에는 특임 연락 부문들( GC&CS/GCB, SIS, SOE 과의 연락담당부서들) 외에도 합동정보위원회, 기관?군? 간 안보 위원회, 합동 기획 위원회에 대한 파견우너들도 포함.
전 시 연락활동이 증대하고 합동정보참모부, 기관/군 간 정보부?과 (작전)담당 부문도 새로 분화 되면서 연락.파견 업무는 두 개 부서로 분할

The GC&CS and SIS liaison sections were excised from NID 17 in November 1944,
and placed in their own section, NID 12a, as 'Naval Section, Government Communications Bureau' and 'Naval Section, London' respectively, an arrangement which prevailed until October 1945 at least.

정보통신교 .SIS연락 부서는 17에서 떨어져서 12a에 배치 (각기 해군과, 정보통신국 해군과,런던 )

September of 1939, Section II made a major innovation in the field of intelligence and one with a lasting influence through the creation of a scientific intelligence sub-section
1939년 이후 2과(공군 정보 연락) 산하 과학.기술 정보 관계 하위 부서 창설

The scientist in question, R.V. Jones, was attached to Winterbotham's AI 1c (Jones 1978, pp. 92-3) or Section II, in which capacity Jones bore the title IId (i-03).
AI 1c/Section II (공군 정보부 1c/ SIS 2과 ) 산하 d (공군 정보 연락과 산하 과기 정보 부서)

The 1940 reorganization of Military Intelligence took the form of not only an expansion of the SIS HQ secondment staff, but also an upgrading of the War Office status of that staff.
In 1939, the Military Circulating Section was still known within the War Office as MI 1c, a single officer (still Menzies) manning the 'Special Duties' sub-section of MI 1, the Military Intelligence section responsible for 'Organisation and Co-ordination of Military Intelligence, League of Nations Questions' (War Office List 1939, p. 97).

1940년 육군 정보부 조직 개편 SIS파견 연락 부문(SIS본부 조직)의 확장 및 정보부 의 동 지정 부서의 지위 승격

39년까지 SIS 육군 연락과(4과 )/MI 1c 육군 정보부 1과(육군.군사 정보 조직 조정. 국제연맹 문제 과) C부과?(Special Duties' sub-section 특임 부과?)

Under the 1940 reorganization, a greatly expanded MI Division was divided up between three deputy directors, one for 'Organisation' (DDMI(O)) another for 'Information' (DDMI(I)), and another handling security, (DDMI(S)).
1940년 조직 개편으로 정보부 산하 세 명 차장?부국장? 신설
조직 담당 차장/부국장, 정보 담당 차장/부국장, 보안 담당 차장/부국장

The DDMI(O) title was not particularly representative of that officer's functions, which encompassed not just the organization and co-ordination section MI 1, but also a number of intelligence collections and liaison sections.
These included communications security and interception through the War Office signals intelligence organization MI 8, the escape and evasion organization MI 9,
MIL which handled military attaches, liaison with home departments of government and liaison with and from allied forces, and
finally as 'Special Duties', the War Office liaison to SIS, now under the new designation

MI 6

조직 담당 차장부국장 하
조직 조정 (담당)과 (MI 1)외에 많은 정보 연락 부문 포괄
육군성 내 통신 정보 보안, 도청 관계 부문 MI 8
피난.소개 관련 업무 MI 9
무관 업무, 정부 모 부처? home departments of government ,연합군 및 연합군 내부 연락 MI L(Liason?)
SIS 연락부문 (종전의 MI 1c 특임 부과) 승격 MI 6

WW 2 이 후 제조직

In early 1945 a JIC sub-committee on the future of the SIS was convened under the Chairmanship of Victor Cavendish-Bentinck (later Duke of Portland). The results of their considerations were submitted to the Chiefs of Staff (COS) on 5 June 1945, although the conclusions of the committee have yet to be disclosed, apart from the suggestion that Menzies("C") 'hoard all the money he could before the war ended because ... the Treasury wouldn't give a penny if it didn't have to' (Howarth 1986, p. 199). SIS responded to the pressure to reform and confront the new era by convening its own internal Committee on SIS Reorganization in September of 1945 (Philby 1983, p. 124). Much has been written about the decisions of this committee which has been variously intensely critical or even deceptive, as often as not intentionally or unintentionally misleading.
However, what essentially happened was that what one-time Deputy Chief of Service Valentine Vivian had described as 'the present collection of independent units, known as SIS' (Cecil 1986, p. 186) was streamlined into a coherent system of five Directorates under 'C'.
Under this arrangement,

the operational 'P' Sections (as in Production, formerly the G Sections) were grouped under a Director of Production and

the C sections, relabeled Requirements or 'R Sections' were gathered under a Director of Requirements.

Finance and administration were bundled into another single directorate, as were technical research and staff training.

A short-lived Directorate of War Planning was also set up to absorb the functions of the now defunct Special Operations Executive, that is to say, sabotage, subversion and clandestine support for resistance movements in enemy occupied territory (Cavendish 1990, pp. 40-41; Philby 1983, p. 124; Smiley 1988, p. 188; i-008; i-010; i-015; i-009, i-011, i-019 and i-022).

As noted above,

Requirements Directorate consolidated the old C Sections (now R Sections) together under a single senior officer responsible for overseeing the evaluation and circulating of the production side's intelligence 'take', and the agency's overall relations with its consumers.

For the most part their numerical designations remained more or less unchanged.

R1 continued to be Political Intelligence working on behalf of the Foreign Office, R1 정치 정보(외무성 의거)

R2 was the Air Section R 2(공군 정보)

R3 Navy, and R4 the Military. 3(해군) 4 (육군)

Section VI would outlive its original consumer, the Ministry of Economic Warfare, and continue to produce industrial and commercial intelligence for a wide range of departments as R6.

Jones's lid was hived off from the Air Section to become R7. (R7 과기 정보)

Section VIII, now R8, was stripped of its Radio Section at Hanslope Park (hived off in turn to become the Foreign Office's Diplomatic Wireless Service), and reduced to a single officer handling liaison with the signals intelligence service Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ; formerly GC&CS)

Under these arrangements, like R6, R7 officers were not to be drawn from external consumer departments, but to be career SIS scientists

R8's function was, as one former officer described it, to 'act as GCHQ's man at SIS.' R8's function was as a two-way channel. R8's work routine consisted of a weekly meeting on Tuesdays at GCHQ's London offices on Palmer Street, with a monthly meeting at GCHQ's headquarters (in due course in Cheltenham). On the one hand, GCHQ used it to issue requirements for SIS to target individuals with access to information about cryptosystems GCHQ wished to penetrate, such as code books and one-time pads, encryption algorithms and their keys, information about communications security procedures, facilities and so forth. On the other hand, R8 also served as a conduit for signal intercepts which might be of value in SIS's work, such as identifying likely candidates for recruitment on the basis of their telecommunications traffic (i-10; i-15; Cavendish 1990, p. 41).

One recurrent item of confusion in the literature on the SIS deals with the supposed designation of the agency as 'DI 6' rather than MI 6 (see, for example, Bunyan 1977, p. 3; McDermott 1973, p. 137), and this results from a change in the Whitheall designations for R2, R3 and R4 following the 1963/4 consolidation of the Service intelligence branches with the JIB under the general amalgamation of the Service Departments with the Ministry of Defence.

1963~64년 각 군성 국방성으로 통합, 각 군 정보부 +합동정보참모부=국방정보참모부 탄생

The Services had been amalgamated with the Ministry of Defence chiefly on the grounds that there were administrative scale economies to be had combining the civilian civil service machineries of the War Office, Admiralty and the Air Ministry. In the process, the three Service intelligence branches were consolidated with the JIB. Far from immediately benefiting from scale economies in administration, the process of amalgamation proved fairly chaotic; although under a common command, a lot of the various NID, MID, AI and JIB sections retained their original designations or a joint DIS/Service Branch designation, DI(MI), DI(NI) or DI(AI) followed by the Section number, for example DI(AI) 7 (Ministry of Defence 1964).

이 통합에도 불구하고 각 군 정보부 는 종래의 부서명을 별도로 유지하며 이를 합동정보부에 병기 (일레로 국방정보(공군정보) 7은 국방정보참모부 하에 과거 공군 정보부 7과를 의미)
중복 업무 부서도 당근 등장

However, in 1966, a scheme was adopted in which the analogous or related Service intelligence sections were combined into single joint DI sections with Army, (A), Navy (N) or Air (Air) sub-designations, for example the Soviet geographical section of the Directorate of Service Intelligence (DS Int) became DI 3, subdivided into DI 3(A), DI 3(N) and DI 3(Air) (Ministry of Defence 1966b). 1966년 구 각 군 정보 부서들 중 연관되거나 중복되는 부서들은 통합하고 해당 기능별(혹은 지역별) 부서에 각 군 관련되던 부서들을 하위부문으로 두도록 변경

일례로 과거 육,해공군 정보부 산하에 모두 각기 소련 정보 부서가 있었고 통합이후에도 이 소련 정보부서들은 종래의 부서를 유지하며 앞에 국방정보 표기를 병기하며 , 종전의 표기를 유지( 과거 육군 정보부의 대소부서가 MI -?라면 통합 후에도
DI (MI) ?하는 식으로 표시 )하였는 데 새로운 체제 하에서는 군종 정보국의 소련 부서는 DI 3가 되고 각 산하에 DI 3(A), DI 3(N) and DI 3(Air) 와 같은 육군, 해군,공군 별 하위부문을 두도록 변경.

Under the consolidation of the Service intelligence branches, the Service branch liaisons with the Security and Secret Intelligence Services were consolidated under DI 5 and DI 6. Within DI 6, therefore, the designations of R2 (Air Intelligence liaison), R3 (NID 17) and R4 (MI 6) became DI 6(Air), DI 6(N) and DI 6(A) respectively (i-30; these section headings are excised from the Ministry of Defence papers on the DIS consolidation in the PRO, with the numbering scheme skipping from DI 4 to DI 7 (see Ministry of Defence 1966b)).

이 체제 하에서 각 군 정보부의 SIS ,SS 기능은 DI 5 and DI 6.로 통합
따라서 과거 각 군 정보부의 연락부문은 다음 과 같이 로 변경(이중지정은 여전히 유지)

R2 (Air Intelligence liaison),-DI 6(Air)
R3 (NID 17) -DI 6(N)
R4 (MI 6) -DI 6(A)

For the most part, the Requirements Sections changed relatively little throughout the following two decades, although a series of changes began to accumulate in the SIS' governmental environment which would eventually contribute to the comprehensive reform and reorganization of Requirements during the 1970s. In 1957, the external processes of tasking, dissemination and analysis underwent another change which had fairly profound implications for the process on the work of Requirements side of the SIS, and the Requirements/Production relationship.

In 1946, the increased post-war centrality of the JIC as an assessment as well as administrative entity, and the creation of the JIB, shifted the emphasis in requirements from strictly partisan representation to a concern for disinterested 'objective' evaluation (a shift further emphasized by the fact the R1, R6 and R7 all served multiple consumers). However, at this point the JIC was still essentially one consumer amongst many, albeit primus inter pares, and so the majority of intelligence requirements issued to the SIS were matters of departmental demand.
In 1957, according to the official account 'as a reflection of the broadened scope and role of intelligence,
the JIC was brought within the Cabinet as part of the interdepartmental committee structure under the authority of the Secretary of the Cabinet' (Cabinet Office 1993, p. 11). This represented a profound change in the role of the JIC as the body formulating national intelligence requirements in support of a national assessments process, that is, one working at the level of the Cabinet Office on behalf of ministers and departmental Permanent and Under-Secretaries.

The JIC was also now responsible for co-ordinating all the requirements and priorities which could be laid upon the 'Security and Intelligence Agencies' by their consumers in Whitheall.
The result was an annual review of intelligence requirements, leading to an annual national intelligence requirements list, through a process consisting of 'rigorous analysis of the requirements for secret intelligence with extensive consultation with consumer departments and consideration of the financial and other resources required' (which, although modified through the 1968 appointment of the Co-ordinator of Intelligence, has remained substantially the same since the 1950s.) (Cabinet Office 1993, p. 13).

The resulting National Intelligence Requirements Document (i-28) therefore involved not only a shopping list for intelligence, but one which assigned priorities to potentially competing demands, in other words, it put individual departmental demands in the context of both national requirements and limited operational resources.

The role of partisan representation had been steadily decreased throughout the previous two decades, while joint- rather than single-Service all-source analysis had been increased both by the increased centrality and power of the Joint Intelligence Committee and the 1964 consolidation of the Service departments under the Ministry of Defence. Consolidation of the armed services had also involved placing the individual armed services under separate, junior Defence ministers who were without seats in Cabinet. The Service customers were, therefore, politically weaker, as well as subject to strengthened pressures towards inter-Service and inter-departmental jointery.

The combined effect was to weaken very considerably any outside partisan pressure which served as a justification for a functional organization to (departmental) requirements.
The trend towards a geographical reorganization of Requirements was also given a push in 1968 by the replacement of the JIC's Joint Intelligence Staff with the Joint Assessments Staff (JAS).
The JIS had been composed of a constellation of ad hoc interdepartmental groups, some geographical but others such as JS/TIC were functional.
In 1968 these were reorganized or replaced with the more formal but still essentially collegial, geographically organized Current Intelligence Groups (CIGs) making up the JAS (Cabinet Office 1993, p. 11; Herman 1996, p. 262; Urban 1996, p. 29).

Requirements Directorate was the first point of contact with the JIC.
Its R Section officers sat on the JIC subcommittees which their R Sections served (i-15; i-28; Cabinet Office 1983, p. 95). With such profound changes in the governmental side aspect, SIS's environment made adaptation of Requirements Directorate to suit the new tasking and dissemination conditions all but inevitable. Perhaps one of the main indications of the reportedly moribund state of the SIS under Sir John Rennie's term as 'C' was the delay of nearly five years before that adaptation took place under his successor

Environmental changes in the UK government's intelligence machinery converged with
reductions in staff size in the specialist R Sections such as R6 (Economic/Industrial) and R7 (Scientific) which had resulted in a large part from another financial pressure upon the SIS.
In the early 1970s, the SIS experienced sizeable staff-cuts across the board, but this was felt particularly keenly in Requirements which, despite its centrality in SIS structure and process, was a relatively small directorate.
Although R2, R3, and R4 had been reduced to single officers in 1964, and
R8 had been more or less a single officer since 1947,
technically specialized sections like R6 and R7 were still relatively small compared with R1 which had at least four geographical sub-sections as well as the SIS's covert action Special Political Action under its ambit (i-08, i-20, i-28).

The Service Department and GCHQ liaison sections couldn't get any smaller and still exist independently, and they still individually served four powerful outside consumers with very particular requirements.
R6 and R7, however, did dwindle to a point where their independent existence could be challenged.

As one officer put it, there were very few economic intelligence requirements at all, and what requirements did exist were essentially 'political-economic'. One did not, he noted, send an officer abroad to study the economy of the country to which they were stationed.
Moreover, 'there was a matter of inclination: very few SIS officers are economists while the typical SIS officer is a political animal' (i28). It was, therefore, a relatively minor change to
absorb R6's regional functions under the political requirements section, R1. And, since most scientific intelligence requirements concerned the USSR, a greatly reduced

R7 was eventually absorbed under the Soviet sub-section of R1 (i-28).

In principle, all that would have been left from the diminution and demise of R6 and R7 would have been the Service liaison sections, R8, and a considerably expanded R1.
As a result, when Maurice Oldfield (Rennie's successor as 'C') undertook his 'streamlining' of the SIS after 1973, the predominantly political requirements sections were reorganized along geographical lines as:

Requirements, Soviet Bloc (R/Sovbloc);

Requirements, Far East (R/FE); Requirements,

Middle East (R/ME); Requirements,

Europe (R/EUR); Requirements

Western Hemisphere (R/WH, including the Americas and Caribbean);

Requirements, Africa (R/AF), more closely approximating the JIC's CIGs,

while R8, the GCHQ liaison, remained as R/GC (Requirements, Government Communications) (i-20; i-28).

As the political and surviving economic aspects of Requirements Directorate were being broken up along geographical lines,
the Service Branch liaisons, formerly R2 (Air), R3 (Navy) and R4 (Army), were carved out of the Directorate to become a Defence Liaison Staff.

In this capacity, they were retitled 'MODA's, standing for Ministry of Defence Advisor, with
R4 (DI 6(A)) redesignated as MODA/Army,
R3 (DI 6(N)) as MODA/Navy and
R2 (DI 6(Air)) as MODA/Air (Campbell 1982; i-20).

By 1978/79, Requirements Directorate, 'already felt in some quarters to be too small to warrant a full Director' (i-28) ceased to be an independent Directorate, and
Production and Requirements were merged under a combined Director of Requirements and Production who also doubled as Deputy Chief (i-20; i-28; Campbell 1982; Bloch and Fitzgerald 1983, p. 34; Smith 1996, p. 155).

The Requirements process, however, retained a measure of independence under a Deputy Director, Requirements (DD/R) who carried on the responsibilities that DR had done, but in a junior capacity in the SIS (i-20, i-28).

Although the separate Director of Requirements was a thing of the past, the functions of the R Sections continued to be overseen by DD/R, who was responsible overall for the quality of the reports produced by the R Sections, and the day-to-day relations between SIS and its consumers in Whitheall.

These arrangements have continued to provide the basic core structure to SIS even after the Cold War with, however, some modification to take into account emerging security concerns such as transnational terrorism and serious crime, environmental concerns and the potentials of the new information technology

Within the SIS, communications between Requirements Officers and the operational Production side were similarly mundane. The Production side would, through its network of field stations, generate the basic 'source reports' which were circulated to the R Sections and thence to SIS consumers in Whitheall. Former Iberian area P Officer (P1) Desmond Bristow has recounted how 'the report would be digested by its recipients and then returned to me marked with an A, B, C or D according to its importance, usually accompanied by a request for further information ... every six months my colleagues in [P1] would evaluate each agent in collaboration with the recipient departments of his or her reports [i.e. the R Sections] and the Head of Station supplying the reports' (Bristow 1993, p. 176).

The process was not confined to intelligence collection alone, and special political actions and paramilitary special operations were likewise tasked through the requirements machinery. For example, the unsuccessful 1949 resistance programme in Albania (betrayed by H.A.R. 'Kim' Philby to his Soviet controllers during his term as SIS intelligence liaison in Washington) resulted initially from a requirement formulated by the Foreign Office's 'Russia Committee' (Foreign Office 1948), while the successful 1953 coup in Iran (operation BOOT) originated with a requirement issued by the Foreign Office after the failure of its own subversion attempts between 1951 and 1952 (Woodhouse 1983, pp. 111-112). This relationship was reinforced when a new Special Political Action Section was created in the wake of BOOT to handle covert political actions and was placed under the auspices of the Foreign Office liaison section R1 (i-08, i-11).

Before the emergence of JIC as the central and final arbiter of intelligence requirements and priorities, SIS's demand-driven architecture could run the risk of overwhelming the SIS's limited resources. Prior to the Second World War, the SIS was flooded with demands for information on the German armed forces and economy through the Service intelligence branch liaisons and IIC. The volume of requirements coming from Section II, III, IV and VI was so great that the agency could not fulfil any single requirement completely, and as a relatively junior organization within the civil service chain of being, it was in no position to reject consumer demands. Of this stage in the organization's history, the official history concludes that

the SIS was not a strong enough organization to settle priorities between the requests that were made of it, or even able to resist demands which went beyond its resources. When those demands became insistent and conflicting, as they did in the 1930s, it was overstretched by user departments (Hinsley et al. 1979, p. 18)

The increased centrality of the JIC mechanism, however, acted as a filter on the inflow of requirements by basing them not on a monologue of demands but on a dialogue between producer and consumer, formulated ultimately in the annual National Intelligence Requirements Document, within the SIS in the form of its 'Red Book'. The impact of the post-war JIC and JIB structure and process was that the tasking process, or requirements, now began to reflect not merely partisan interests but the need for balanced 'objective' inputs to a joint, all-source assessment process at both the strategic and tactical levels. The work of tasking and dissemination was increasingly to become one of detached intermediary. On the one hand, the Requirements officer was there to make sure that the information received by consumers was, as one officer put it, 'not influenced by the imperatives of the Production side, i.e. making poor agents look good or good agents look better', the relationship of case officer to source, noted this officer, being 'something of a partnership ... a bond of loyalty [which] tends to make sheep out of goats, and Requirements Sections are supposed to ensure that goats remain goats.' On the other hand, he or she was also required to ensure that intelligence reporting was not distorted by 'political influence from customers in Whitheall' (i-28).

Regardless of the successive changes and reforms in structure and process, for nearly eighty years the consumer liaison architecture of SIS's Requirements side has permitted that very covert agency's infrastucture and inner workings to interweave with the machinery of overt British government, below and beyond the lofty centrality of bodies like the Cabinet Office and its Central Intelligence Machinery. That process of interweaving means that the SIS does not exist in a governmental and conceptual realm at some distance removed from the more visible, 'overt' machinery of British government. Rather, it is in fact very much part and parcel with that larger machinery. Such an interweaving means that secret intelligence is not just the esoteric preserve of a few departments and officials but something affected by, and playing a role in, the wider processes of British government and policy. It also means that secret intelligence and secret services should not be treated as something apart from the larger study of government and politics; they are part and parcel with that as well.

October 2, 2005 at 02:11 AM in MI6 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

MI6 drops secrecy over spy jobs

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

By Michael Evans
Service is to modify recruiting practices because of interest from Muslims after the London bombs


THE Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, is to break with nearly a century of tradition and recruit openly for spies.

The decision comes after what has been perceived as a remarkable development since the suicide bombings in London on July 7.

According to intelligence sources a significant number of applications for jobs through existing methods of recruiting had come from Muslim graduates, who said that they wanted to do something for their country.

They had applied through the only available outlet, a PO Box address on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office website. The unexpected rise in interest encouraged the hierarchy at Vauxhall Cross, the headquarters of the service by the Thames, to change its longstanding methods of recruiting and to tap into what appeared to be a rich vein of eager patriots.

Although there is no decision yet on how the service intends to make itself more open to those interested in a spying career, intelligence sources say that it aims to advertise in a way that would make it obvious that it was MI6 offering a job.

It will be a significant break from traditional recruiting practice, which has largely depended on talent-spotting by trusted university dons.

The only advertising deployed by MI6 until now has been so opaque that applicants arriving for initial interviews have had no idea who their potential employers might be.

They get an inkling only after they have been through several interviewing hoops, perceived to be necessary to ensure that only suitable applicants reach the stage where the details of a potential spying career are revealed.

Too much secrecy at the recruiting end of the game is now seen to be counterproductive. MI6’s sister service, MI5, across the Thames, has for many years been more transparent and runs its own website which includes job application forms.

However, MI6 has always treasured its secretiveness, arguing that as the focus of its work involves covert intelligence-gathering overseas, it has an obligation to its agents to remain in the shadows.

The development towards open advertising is expected to lead to a surge in applications from ethnic minorities and women, although the numbers are already high: in 2004-05, 9 per cent of new entrants were from ethnic minorities and 41 per cent were women.

Since the London bombings, the number of people applying to join MI6 through the PO Box number has risen by a fifth, many of whom referred to the attacks.

MI6 created the number — PO Box 1300 — in 1992 but started using it as a recruiting tool only in 2001. That in itself was a break in tradition, but only those who were aware of the existence of the number or found it by chance on the Foreign Office website applied by that route.

So the talent-spotting method, familiar to readers of the George Smiley spy novels of John Le Carré, reigned supreme.

It has not always had beneficial results. During and after the Second World War, a top talent scout of a different kind, at Cambridge University, recruited the infamous spy ring of undergraduates, including Harold “Kim” Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean who worked as double agents for the Soviet KGB.

IN THE SHADOWS
# The core of MI6’s operational or agent-running cadre is drawn from “high-calibre graduates with a commitment to public service who exhibit integrity, strong intellectual skills, strength of character and an interest in international affairs”
# Those with analytical skills, able to map out terrorist networks, linguists, particularly Arabic speakers, and computer specialists are also wanted
# All graduate entrants are expected to serve abroad as intelligence officers during their careers
# The starting salary for a 23-year-old agent is about £24,000
# Non-graduate entrants with two A levels work in support roles, but also serve abroad
# Candidates, who should be in their early 20s to early 30s, may include those bored with other careers
# About a quarter of the 2,000 staff serve as undercover intelligence officers in British embassies
# It can take up to six months to complete the vetting process
# Famous MI6 spies: David John Moore Cornwell (or John Le Carré), Graham Greene and Malcolm Muggeridge
# The model for James Bond: Sir Fitzroy Maclean

August 9, 2005 at 12:17 AM in MI6 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

MI6 chief told PM: Americans �fixed� case for war

MI6 chief told PM: Americans ‘fixed’ case for war - Sunday Times - Times Online

Nick Fielding
THE HEAD of MI6 told Tony Blair that the case for war against Iraq was being “fixed�� by the Americans to suit the policy, according to a BBC documentary that will reignite its battle with the government.

Blair followed the US lead by failing to reveal publicly doubts about the quality of intelligence that he had requested to support the case for war, the programme claims.

Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, briefed Blair and a select group of ministers on America�s determination to press ahead with the war nine months before hostilities began.

After attending a briefing in Washington, he told the meeting that war was �inevitable�. Dearlove said �the facts and intelligence� were being �fixed round the policy� by George W Bush�s administration.

The allegations against Blair just weeks before a general election are likely to reopen the feud between the government and the BBC that came to a head over the death of Dr David Kelly, the former weapons inspector. It led to the resignations of Gavyn Davies, its chairman, and Greg Dyke, its director-general.

The documentary � to be shown on BBC1�s Panorama tonight � reveals that Britain and America were anxious to present a united front on Iraq despite a paucity of new data on Saddam Hussein�s weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

It quotes from a leaked memo on the presentation of intelligence sent by Peter Ricketts, political director of the Foreign Office, to Jack Straw, foreign secretary, in March 2002.

The memo says: �There is more work to ensure that the figures are accurate and consistent with the US. But even the best survey of Iraq�s WMD programmes will not show much advance in recent years.�

The programme argues that Blair had signed up to follow Bush�s plans for regime change in Iraq as early as April 2002. It quotes Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary who resigned as leader of the Commons over Iraq, arguing that the threat of WMD was not Blair�s true reason for going to war.

Cook says: �What was propelling the prime minister was a determination that he would be the closest ally to George Bush and they would prove to the United States administration that Britain was their closest ally. His problem is that George Bush�s motivation was regime change. It was not disarmament. Tony Blair knew perfectly well what he was doing.

�His problem was that he could not be honest about that with either the British people or Labour MPs, hence the stress on disarmament.�

The intelligence services had little evidence to show that Iraq was a serious threat. At the meeting with Dearlove in July, Straw was still not entirely convinced. But, the programme claims, Blair had to keep talking up the threat posed by Iraq to justify his policy of supporting Bush. MI6 was then tasked to seek new information from its limited Iraqi network to make the case for war.

The little intelligence that could be gathered was seized upon by Alastair Campbell, Blair�s press secretary, and John Scarlett, the official leading a team drawing up the now notorious intelligence dossier.

The new material came mostly from two sources. The first, who was new and untried, reported that Iraq had restarted chemical agent production. The second, who had never previously provided details on WMD, was the source of the claim that Iraq was able to deploy WMD within 45 minutes.

When Dearlove briefed Blair on the first source, only days before he presented his dossier to parliament, the MI6 chief told him �the case is developmental and the source remains unproven�. Nonetheless, Blair told MPs two weeks later on September 24, 2002: �The intelligence picture they paint is one accumulated over the past four years. It is extensive, detailed and authoritative.�

The evidence was vital in reducing parliamentary opposition to the decision to go to war. Only much later, after the fall of Saddam and the dawning realisation that Iraq possessed no WMD, was it revealed that the intelligence from both agents had been withdrawn.

However, Blair�s immediate problem of justifying the war against Iraq had been solved. He went on a diplomatic offensive to swing the United Nations behind a vote for war.

Panorama interviewed Adolfo Zinser, former Mexican ambassador to the UN, who recalls a briefing with MI6 as Britain was trying to shore up support in the security council for the second resolution on Iraq.

Zinser says: �I asked them, �Do you have full proof of the existence of these weapons, at any one of these particular sites that you are referring to?� The MI6 officers told me, �No, we don�t�.�

The programme says Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, was not convinced the invasion would be lawful without a second UN resolution. It was not until two days before the war that Goldsmith told the cabinet that this, after all, was not absolutely necessary. This was after Britain had failed to secure a second resolution.

�We stretched the legal argument to breaking point and the fact that we didn�t have that authority does set a dangerous precedent,� says Sir Stephen Wall, Blair�s former European affairs adviser.

The programme also reveals Blair deliberately misrepresented the views of Jacques Chirac, the French president, to strengthen support in parliament. When Chirac said on the eve of war in March 2003 that France would veto a second UN resolution, Blair seized on it. He claimed Chirac was planning a veto �no matter what� and failed to make clear that France would in fact back an invasion if Iraq impeded the efforts of UN weapons inspectors.

Senior civil servants became alarmed by Blair�s rhetoric. Carne Ross, the diplomat responsible for Iraq policy at the British mission to the UN from 1998 to 2002, tells the programme he can no longer trust Blair: �I�m afraid that the government did not tell the whole truth about the alleged threat that Iraq posed, that�s why I think it�s a tawdry story.�

The programme will be seen as an attempt by the BBC to reassert its editorial independence after it was criticised by the Hutton report into Kelly�s death. The BBC row with ministers was ignited by a report by Andrew Gilligan claiming the government dossier on Iraq�s weapons had been �sexed up�.

Kelly was revealed as the source for the story and committed suicide two years ago. oThousands of protesters marched in London yesterday on the second anniversary of the start of the war. Police put the number on the Bring the Troops Home march at 45,000, organisers put it at nearer 100,000.

March 19, 2005 at 11:43 PM in MI6 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Revealed: Britain's role in Guantanamo abduction

The Observer | UK News | Revealed: Britain's role in Guantanamo abduction

Freed detainee tells of horrors in US terror camp

David Rose
Sunday February 6, 2005
The Observer

British intelligence officials played a crucial part in the secret abduction of UK citizen Martin Mubanga to Guantanamo Bay. There, he reveals today in an exclusive interview, he endured 33 months of ill-treatment and often abusive interrogation.

Documents seen by The Observer disclose that even the Pentagon's own lawyers now accept that the intelligence that consigned him to Guantanamo may have been deeply flawed. Mubanga, who was released without charge after his return to Britain on 25 January, now plans to sue the British government.

In his interview today, the first by any of the four Britons who returned from Guantanamo last month, Mubanga, 32, describes a horrifying catalogue of abuse:

� In one interrogation session, he was forced to urinate in the corner of the interview room while chained hand and foot.

� He was treated to a regime known as 'BI [basic item] loss'. This meant his thin mattress, trousers, shirts, towel, blankets, and flipflops were all taken away, leaving him naked except for boxer shorts in an empty metal box.

� Last autumn, while Pentagon lawyers were writing memos suggesting that Mubanga may not have had any involvement in terrorism at all and may not have been given a fair hearing, the Guantanamo authorities subjected him to the harshest treatment in his 33 months in Guantanamo, with three brutal assaults by the 'Instant Reaction Force' riot squad for trivial violations of the camp rules.

� Mubanga's worst moment came last March, when the first five British detainees were sent home. He had at first been told he would be joining them, but was instead confined in a block with prisoners he could not communicate with, and told he would be held there for many more years.

The disclosure that British intelligence was instrumental in consigning Mubanga to Guantanamo raises serious questions about the consistency of British policy towards the controversial US camp. In public, ministers, led by Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney-General, negotiated for months with the Pentagon for the release of British detainees.

Mubanga's solicitor, Louise Christian, said yesterday that she planned to take legal action against the government. His arrest, detention and transfer had clearly breached British, Zambian and international law, she said. 'We are hoping to issue proceedings for the misfeasance of officials who colluded with the Americans in effectively kidnapping him and taking him to Guantanamo.'

Mubanga, a former motorcycle courier, says he went to Afghanistan at the end of 2001 to study Islam. He was never, he insists, a sympathiser with al-Qaeda, and he condemned the 9/11 attacks. 'I do not approve of the killing of innocent men, women and children,' he said.

He says he fled to Pakistan after the beginning of the war against the Taliban, but says that someone stole his passport. A dual British-Zambian national, he phoned his family from Karachi and asked them to post him his Zambian passport. He says he used this in February 2002 to go to Zambia, where he was joined by his sister and stayed with other relatives.

However, on 2 March the Sunday Times claimed Mubanga had been arrested in Afghanistan, fighting with the Taliban - presumably this referred to the man who stole or was handed his passport. Soon afterwards, he was seized by Zambian security men.

He was held in a series of guarded motels, where he was interrogated for days by a female American official and a Briton who called himself Martin and said he worked for MI6. 'Martin' produced Mubanga's British passport, together with a list of Jewish organisations in New York and a military training manual that he claimed Mubanga had handwritten. They had been found with the passport in a cave in Afghanistan, he said. Mubanga pointed out that his handwriting was nothing like that in the manual, and said he had never seen the documents before, or been to any caves.

A few days later, Mubanga was loaded on to a plane by men in balaclavas and flown to Guantanamo. For more than two years, the claims made by the MI6 man - that he had been on a mission to reconnoitre targets in New York and had travelled to Zambia on false documents - were the main grounds for his detention.

Last October, this was confirmed by a Guantanamo Combatant Status Review Tribunal, a panel of military officers. Later, however, this decision was reviewed by a US military lawyer, who found it deeply flawed. His report shows that Mubanga had asked to call members of his family in his defence, saying they prove that he had not travelled to Zambia on false documents for a terrorist mission, but to visit relatives on his own passport.

Last night a Foreign Office spokesman said he could not comment on the activities of British intelligence or security agencies. He said Mubanga's 'transfer to Guantanamo Bay is a matter for the Zambian and American authorities'.

February 6, 2005 at 05:52 PM in MI6 | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

US was told of Thatcher �coup plot�

Times Online

Nicholas Rufford, Tom Walker and Dean Nelson
Cape Town
THE Pentagon and MI6 were warned in advance about the prospect of the African coup attempt which led to the arrest of Sir Mark Thatcher.

The American defence department was tipped off by Greg Wales, a British businessman named in legal papers as one of the ringleaders behind the plot.
Two weeks before the plan swung into action, he met a senior Pentagon official in Washington and told her that the situation in Equatorial Guinea had become �dangerous� and to expect trouble.
This weekend the official confirmed that the conversation had taken place, and the subsequent coup attempt tallied with the warning. The alleged plot failed when a group of mercenary soldiers were arrested in Zimbabwe while trying to collect a cargo of machineguns, mortars and other weapons at Harare airport in March.
Those at the centre of the affair say Washington wanted the overthrow of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, who has been blamed for human rights abuses.
During earlier trips to the American capital, Wales, who worked for Simon Mann, the alleged coup leader, met a CIA analyst and representatives from the Africa section of the US State Department. Wales participated with government officials in private think tanks that had discussed the possibility that Obiang could be arrested for money laundering or human rights violations.
�The State Department was under increasing pressure because of Obiang�s reputation to impose penalties on Equatorial Guinea which would have damaged American oil interests,� Wales said.
Earlier this year the State Department put Equatorial Guinea on notice of sanctions after it was named in an official report as one of the world�s worst offenders for human trafficking.
MI6 also knew in advance of a conspiracy to overthrow Obiang �through diplomatic channels�, according to a British official. However, the Foreign Office said publicly that it had no advance knowledge of any coup attempt.
Mann was found guilty last Friday by a magistrate in Zimbabwe of attempting to buy weapons illegally. Mann�s coaccused, a group of 66 men he recruited for the operation, were acquitted of weapons charges under Zimbabwe�s tough security laws. Two of the men who returned yesterday to South Africa said they had been tortured while imprisoned.
Thatcher was arrested last Wednesday by South African police. Prosecutors claim they have receipts from Thatcher to show that he invested $275,000 to fund the logistics of the coup attempt and that he had bought a helicopter gunship. Thatcher has denied the charges.
Sipho Ngwema, spokesman for the Scorpions unit of the police, said: �Thatcher definitely knew the money was for a coup. There was $275,000 in two payments. There were specific instructions and specific meetings which led to the purchase of logistical material they needed for the coup. It is not a vague connection.
�Some of the material we picked up in the raid has assisted us in this. There are invoices from various transactions to him and receipts. It�s clear that there is a direct link. We took his computer and are downloading it now. There is also written material above and beyond the receipts.

�There is no doubt about his connection with Simon Mann. He is not a passive investor, he was an active participant and he was in constant contact with what was happening. He was a direct investor in a short-termproject. His correspondence was with the coup organisers.�
Had the coup succeeded, the plotters would have become rich through Equatorial Guinea�s �black gold�. Each would have stood to have made millions of pounds, industry analysts say.
Since the botched coup, the Pentagon has announced plans for a show of naval strength in the Gulf of Guinea. A US navy battle group may be sent to waters near Equatorial Guinea as part of a wider military exercise.
Equatorial Guinea is of increasing strategic interest to the United States. The country is sub-Saharan Africa�s third biggest oil producer, pumping 330,000 barrels a day, and with oil prices topping the political agenda in Washington, officials are anxious to increase sources of supply outside the Middle East.
Severo Moto, 60, the opposition leader in exile who has been linked to the coup plot, flew to Washington in 2002 where his backers had hired a lobbying firm to promote him as the future leader of the government in exile. Moto is said to have met Charles Snyder, a senior official in the African affairs bureau at the State Department, and other senior officials.
A State Department official said he had not been briefed and had no comment on whether a warning of the coup had been received. Wales denies involvement in the coup plot.
There are other indications that the plot � which has been widely portrayed as a hamfisted attempt by a band of mercenaries to seize power in an oil-rich state � had wider backing. Moto had contacts with the government of Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar, according to Spanish media reports. Sources say that Spain was planning to issue an international warrant for Obiang�s arrest.
According to one account, Obiang was to have been detained at the request of Spanish authorities while he was travelling. Had the plan succeeded it would have been an almost carbon copy of the arrest of General Pinochet, the former Chilean leader. Pinochet was arrested while in London for medical treatment on a warrant issued by a Spanish judge. Pinochet was accused of presiding over political killings and torture while he was head of state.
Obiang flew frequently to Rabat in Morocco where he is said to have been receiving treatment for cancer. One trip that he made to Morocco in April coincided with the timing of the intended coup, had the mercenaries not been intercepted.
Ronnie Kasrils, South Africa�s intelligence minister, is reported as having said that the alleged conspiracy to overthrow Obiang was infiltrated at an early stage by South African intelligence. Three agents were reported to have been among those held when Mann�s USregistered plane landed at Harare to pick up weapons.

August 29, 2004 at 10:31 PM in MI6 | Permalink | TrackBack (103) | Top of page | Blog Home

Nato risks MI6 lives by naming agents on website

Telegraph | News | Nato risks MI6 lives by naming agents on website

By David Bamber and Guy Dennis
(Filed: 29/08/2004)

Nato has exposed the identities of four MI6 intelligence officers working in the Balkans, sparking intense anger from Britain.

The four were named on the alliance's website in a summary of news, translated into English, from the former Yugoslavia.

The site identified the men eight weeks ago, on July 9, and their names remained there until yesterday, when The Telegraph alerted Nato to its blunder.

Within hours of being told of the error, embarrassed officials removed the web page yesterday afternoon. Their prompt action did not appease senior intelligence officials in London, who last night expressed fury at Nato's mistake and warned that the men's lives had potentially been placed in danger.

The names of the four officers had originally been published in Nacional, a weekly news magazine in Croatia which sells just 35,000 copies. By having the article translated into English and put on its website, www.nato.int, the alliance circulated their names worldwide.

The naming of the men followed the recent unmasking by the Nedeljni Telegraf, a newspaper in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, of a man who was allegedly the chief MI6 officer in Serbia.

The four people named by Nato all allegedly work for MI6, the secret intelligence service, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. One is said to be the director of the information sector and Nato even names his wife.

A second man is named as head of British intelligence in Bosnia and the third is an intelligence officer - the website also names his fiancee. The fourth man is allegedly a spy in the office of Donald Hays, an American who is the principal deputy high representative of the international community in Bosnia.

Officials said that it would be embarrassing for the Government if Britain has been caught spying on a key ally.

Last night a senior intelligence officer confirmed that the names published by Nato seemed accurate and described the mistake as a "major breach of security". He said that the men would have to be withdrawn from the Balkans and be re-deployed elsewhere.

Patrick Mercer, the Conservative shadow homeland security minister, said: "With friends like these we really don't need enemies.

"This is a terrible breach of security. MI6 works abroad to make sure terrorists do not reach these shores and it is unbelievable their identities would be revealed by Nato."

Mr Mercer, who served in Bosnia in 1997 with distinction as a colonel in the Sherwood Foresters Regiment, added: "There must be a full inquiry into how this happened and serious consequences must follow."

Gerald Moor, a former senior military intelligence officer in the Ministry of Defence, who is now chief executive of Inkerman, a private intelligence and security firm, said Nato had committed a serious "cock-up".

He added: "If these people have been exposed it would have interfered with operations and could endanger people working alongside them."

MI6 has a large presence in the Balkans and works closely with Sfor, the Nato-led peacekeeping force which includes 1,000 British troops, to track down wanted war criminals.

August 29, 2004 at 07:00 PM in MI6 | Permalink | TrackBack (13) | Top of page | Blog Home

Focus: The inside story of spies, lies and a prime minister bent on war

Butler report

David Leppard, Adam Nathan, David Cracknell and David Smith of The Sunday Times

It was an immaculately dressed Sir Richard Dearlove who hurried through the door of 10 Downing Street to meet Tony Blair on September 12, 2002. The Iraq crisis was building and the chief of MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, had vital news for the prime minister.

Senior officers in MI6�s Middle East directorate had told him that a �new source� had emerged in Iraq and delivered a bombshell. The shadowy informant was claiming that Saddam Hussein was �accelerating� the production of biological and chemical agents and that new laboratories were spreading out across the country.

Within hours of receiving initial reports of this intelligence two days previously, Dearlove had alerted Sir David Manning, Blair�s foreign affairs adviser. As opposition to the war rose, the new information could prove pivotal for the government�s position. Now Dearlove was at No 10 to brief Blair in person.

The spymaster explained in characteristically measured tones how the new source appeared to have good �access� to Saddam�s inner circle. The informer had indicated to his MI6 handler that he would be able to provide substantial further intelligence in the near future.

Dearlove hoped that the informant would become an important asset, although he emphasised that the source was still �on trial�. The agent�s credibility, he added prophetically, remained �unproven�.

To Blair�s closest advisers it was like the cavalry coming to the rescue. Jonathan Powell, his chief of staff, and Alastair Campbell, his communications director, were in the midst of reviewing the now notorious dossier on Saddam�s weapons of mass destruction. They and John Scarlett, head of the joint intelligence committee (JIC) who had formal responsibility for the dossier, were all struggling to find convincing evidence of the existence of Iraq�s weapons, let alone anything which showed that the threat was growing worse.

For the Downing Street insiders it was no time to worry about an agent�s �credibility�.

Twelve days later the dossier was signed off by Scarlett and published. In its foreword Blair claimed that Saddam �is continuing to develop� weapons of mass destruction and in the House of Commons he declared that the intelligence was �extensive, detailed and authoritative�. The truth was that the intelligence was patchy, inconsistent and hedged with caveats.

Dearlove�s �new source� was, in fact, deeply flawed. The information had come via an MI6 agent in Iraq from a �sub-source� in the country � and that person, when tracked down after the invasion, denied ever having provided the sort of intelligence that had been relayed to Blair.

Worse, this was far from the only instance of �intelligence� being ephemeral. As an official report into the affair published last week revealed, MI6 only ever had a handful of key sources on Iraq�s weapons. Three are now discredited; two were always largely irrelevant.

Far from Iraq being a �real� and �current� threat, Lord Butler, author of the report, concluded that it �did not have significant � if any � stocks of chemical or biological weapons in a state fit for deployment�.

Britain had been persuaded into war on thin, patchy �intelligence� that proved to be no more believable than a James Bond plot. The chairman of the JIC and the head of MI6 knew the limitations. But Blair never told the country.

Behind the mandarin language of Butler�s report, the bottom line is that Blair took the country to war on a false prospectus. There can be no more serious failure in politics. How could it ever have happened?

ONE of the key spy deceivers surfaced first in Germany in 2000. A dissident Iraqi, apparently a chemical engineer, sought political asylum and came to the attention of the German intelligence services.

He revealed that Saddam had commissioned a series of mobile germ warfare laboratories to build up his �stockpile� of biological weapons. Such a startling claim could not be ignored and was passed on to MI6, apparently by the BND, its German equivalent.

However, there were problems. MI6, with no direct control over the source, had limited opportunity to check his credibility.

The claims were also confusing. The dissident scientist seemed to be saying that the mobile laboratories were designed to produce biological agents in the form of slurry, which has a much shorter lifespan than dried material. Yet slurry, although useful for short-term operations, was not suitable for �stockpiling�. MI6 wondered whether the BND had misunderstood what its informant had been saying.

In fact, as Butler would later conclude, all the reports that came in from the refugee were open to �some doubts� or were �seriously flawed�.

Another informer, also delivering claims about weapons, was codenamed Red River. He, too, presented problems: according to American sources he failed a lie- detector test.

However, at the time the dissident Iraqis were telling western intelligence agencies and politicians what they wanted to hear. Ever since Saddam had driven out the United Nations weapons inspectors in 1998, a momentum had been gathering in the West that the Iraqi dictator was hiding something. And that something, everyone thought, had to be weapons of mass destruction.

America�s Senate intelligence committee now describes this attitude as �collective groupthink� � a prevailing belief in the CIA and in the secret services of other countries, that Saddam had dangerous quantities of chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons, and was prepared to use them.

That �groupthink� was brutally reinforced by the terrorist attacks in America on September 11, 2001.

�What changed for me with September 11 was that I thought then you have to change your mind-set,� Blair told Butler�s inquiry team. �You have to deal with this because otherwise the threat will grow. You have to say, �Right: we are not going to allow the development of WMD in breach of the will of the international community to continue�.�

In Washington the same thought process was occurring and President George W Bush subsequently put it more straightforwardly. �Keeping Saddam in a box looked less and less feasible to me,� he said. That November, Bush asked Donald Rumsfeld, his defence secretary, to dust off the American military�s invasion plans for Iraq.

Two months later, in January 2002, Saddam was put on notice in Bush�s state of the union address when he named Iraq, along with Iran and North Korea, as the �axis of evil�. In private the president was blunter, telling Condoleezza Rice, his national security adviser, �F*** Saddam. We�re taking him out.�

Although Blair was far more restrained in public, he too was reaching some stark conclusions in private. In early March 2002, the Butler report only now reveals, Whitehall officials delivered a briefing note to Blair and key ministers. It argued that the government had two policy options with Iraq: to tighten the sanctions that had contained Saddam since the first Gulf war, or to get rid of his regime by military force.

The paper advised that regime change would be contrary to international law, especially since the JIC had recently judged that there was, as Butler records, �no recent evidence of Iraqi complicity in international terrorism�.

Offensive military action, the paper said, could be justified only if Iraq was shown to be in breach of UN resolutions � and that meant showing incontrovertible proof of �large-scale activity� in weapons of mass destruction.

In short, if Blair wanted to invade legally, he had to have evidence that Saddam had the weapons. The stage was set for what would become the greatest British intelligence fiasco for 20 years.

Blair took the briefing paper with him when he visited Bush in April at the president�s ranch in Crawford, Texas. Dressed in jeans, they discussed a possible invasion in the spring of 2003 although, say Blair�s supporters, no firm decisions were taken.

At the closing press conference Bush made his position clear: �I explained to the prime minister that the policy of my government is the removal of Saddam,� he said. �We support regime change.�

The Americans wanted political support � and Britain�s intelligence expertise. When Dick Cheney, the American vice-president, visited CIA headquarters for a briefing on Iraq, he was told by a former covert operations officer known as Saul how limited the CIA�s resources in Iraq were. They were �thin�, said Saul. �How thin?�, asked Cheney. �I can count them on one hand,� Saul said, pausing for effect, �and I can still pick my nose.�

In fact, as a Senate committee report revealed this month, the CIA had �no human intelligence resources inside Iraq� delivering information on weapons after the UN inspectors were forced out in 1998.

By comparison, MI6 was seen to be the last word in Middle East spying; Britain had, after all, created Iraq.

The Crawford summit seems to have been the point of no return on Iraq. For Blair, pledged to stand �shoulder to shoulder� with Bush, the urgent task now was for the JIC to come up with the intelligence needed to convince a sceptical public and House of Commons of the need for war. In the spring of 2002 that task began with the search for evidence to harden up the case for war.

OVER the following months the JIC prepared various assessments of Iraq�s progress in developing weapons. Information supplied by the handful of key informers was more prized than ever.

All along the line, however, there were problems. A second agent had been judged by MI6 as reliable in early 2002. Although his previous intelligence had not been about chemical or biological weapons, he suddenly provided � in August � a dramatic new claim.

In a series of reports for his MI6 handler this man claimed he had a �sub-source� of his own, an Iraqi military officer, who had told him that Saddam�s army would be able to deploy chemical or biological agents �within 45 minutes� of the order to fire them.

The warning was fed straight into the JIC and from then on to the Downing Street team who were considering the weapons dossier. Again, caveats were dropped. Blair stated as fact that Saddam�s �military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them�. When the dossier was published, Downing Street did nothing to counter newspaper headlines that Saddam�s weapons posed a direct threat to British bases in Cyprus.

However, even MI6 did not fully understand what this information meant. The original intelligence did not even state that the weapons to be deployed actually existed.

Neither Blair nor Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, knew that the claim referred only to short-range weapons. Apparently nobody in the intelligence community, including Scarlett and Dearlove, thought to tell them.

The disquiet went much deeper than such omissions. MI6 had decided, given the sensitive nature of its source, to withhold information about the 45-minute claim from scientists at the defence intelligence staff (DIS), an arm of the Ministry of Defence.

The DIS liked to see itself as a counterbalance to Dearlove�s agency, where cutbacks had reduced the rigour of checking the reliability of intelligence.

In an attempt to economise, Sir David Spedding, Dearlove�s predecessor, had merged MI6�s �production department�, which was responsible for generating reports from agents on the ground, with the �requirements department�, which assessed their credibility and value. The �requirements officers� had become subject to pressure from team leaders to produce results. Safeguards were weakened.

At the same time, the budget and staffing of MI6�s Middle East section, as well as the section dealing with counter-proliferation, were run down.

One outspoken MI6 officer who gave evidence to Butler under the cloak of anonymity said he believed that the assessment of sources � especially on Iraq � had suffered. Agents with dubious motivation were being rated as more reliable than they really were.

That was certainly the view of experts at DIS when they found out about the 45-minute claim. They were incredulous. They concluded that it had probably originated from an old Soviet artillery manual and added nothing to the intelligence picture on the threat from Saddam.

�I know of nobody in DIS who took it seriously,� one of those involved in DIS work said last week. Nor did the CIA. George Tenet, the CIA director, is said to have referred to the agent�s claim as the �they-can-attack-us-in-45- minutes shit�.

Even MI6 had some doubts. It knew that the �sub-source� responsible for the warning had links to Iraqi opposition groups, which might colour the source�s motives.

Quite properly MI6 included this note of caution in its reports to the JIC. But after Scarlett passed the information on to Downing Street, the caveat disappeared. The claim transmuted into a bald truth. Only after the war did Butler conclude that there were �serious doubts� about the reliability of the informant�s reports.

There were two other MI6 �main sources� who were also regarded as reliable. Since the war their credibility has not been challenged. But they never made any worrying claims about Saddam�s possession of weapons.

Nor was it only with human intelligence that mistakes were made. Such was the �groupthink� assuming that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that analysts studying spy satellite pictures saw chemical weapons trucks where there were only water tankers. American analysts repeatedly suspected that the long half-cylindrical sheds used by Iraqis to house chickens were stores for Scud missiles. Some weapons inspectors, fed up with being sent on wild chicken chases, are reported to have had T-shirts printed with the slogan �Ballistic Chicken Farm Inspection Team�.

In the end the reason for MI6�s failure is simple enough. In his conclusions Butler put it diplomatically: �SIS did not generally have agents with first-hand inside knowledge of Iraq�s nuclear, chemical, biological or ballistic missile programmes. As a result, intelligence reports were mainly inferential.�

Who was responsible for those inferences and their presentation? In the first instance it was Scarlett, who drew up the judgments of the JIC. Beyond that the responsibility lay with Downing Street insiders and Blair.

A cabal of Blair�s closest advisers controlled events. Cabinet members were briefed orally by Blair, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, or Hoon. They received no proper papers, Butler said, on which they could make their own judgments about the intelligence. �Excellent quality papers were written by officials,� concluded Butler, �but these were not discussed in cabinet or in cabinet committee.�

Yet the caveats and doubts about the intelligence were vital to understanding the full picture. As one old DIS officer said of MI6 last week: �They failed to penetrate the highest levels of government in Iraq. In fact they failed to achieve an adequate penetration at any level. The quality of their sourcing would shame a rotten journalist. I think the word that would best describe it is crap.�

Why did Blair, a lawyer, fall for such stuff? For the prime minister there was a huge dilemma. Once he had embarked on a strategy of standing up to Iraq and backing America in the wider war on terrorism, there could be no turning back.

He could not justify an invasion of Iraq on moral grounds. He could not justify it on the basis of links between Saddam and Al-Qaeda, for which there was no reliable evidence. He could not argue it with the public solely on the basis of Iraq�s flouting of UN resolutions. He needed the proof that Iraq represented a �clear and present danger� to the West in general and Britain in particular.

Anthony Seldon, the prime minister�s biographer, puts it thus: �He believed the intelligence because he wanted to believe it. He neither had the time nor the independence of intellect to question it. He was willingly gullible.�

THE September dossier appears to have wrung even the �limited� and �patchy� intelligence dry. After that, when Blair needed further evidence to bolster the case for war, Downing Street looked elsewhere.

In late January 2003 it published another document, cobbled together by Campbell and his Downing Street staff on the basis of information freely available in the internet, including a PhD thesis written years before.

It was instantly derided as a �dodgy dossier� and was deemed to contain no new evidence of a threat posed by Saddam�s weapons. The author of the PhD thesis complained of plagiarism.

In fact the indications were growing that Saddam had destroyed his weapons. Inspectors had returned to Iraq and drawn a blank. Why did Blair, Scarlett and the intelligence community not conduct a reassessment? In his report Butler confessed to being mystified by this. Perhaps there is one telling aside buried in his diplomatic language. At one point Butler�s report states: �What a leader truly believes, or what his reaction would be in certain circumstances, cannot be known, but can only be judged.�

The obvious reference is to Saddam; but some observers suspect it may also be a covert message about Blair.

The truth was that the momentum towards war was now so great that the last thing Blair wanted was a reassessment by British intelligence saying that the threat from Saddam might, after all, be diminishing or minimal.

The same mood prevailed in America where other warnings about the shoddy, unreliable intelligence also went unheeded.

Among the Americans a source who had supplied information on mobile laboratories in Iraq � probably the same man as the German BND informant � was codenamed Curveball. His information was disseminated through senior circles, but no American intelligence officer had spoken directly to Curveball, except one Pentagon analyst.

He recalled that Curveball had shown up for their only meeting nursing a �terrible hangover�. He had suspected that the man was an alcoholic and unreliable.

Curveball was also reported to be