Toulouse gunman: French ‘stopped tracking’ Mohamed Merah

French secret services stopped tracking Toulouse gunman Mohamed Merah, despite evidence of his extensive links to jihadists, including in the UK, leaked documents suggest.

Le Monde newspaper says it has seen notes from the domestic intelligence agency DCRI describing his successful efforts to conceal his movements.

The judge investigating the case said he was perplexed by the DCRI decision.

Merah killed seven people in March before being shot dead by police.

The victims included three soldiers and four Jewish people.

The leaked papers suggest there was more than just suspicion on the part of the French intelligence services, says the BBC’s Christian Fraser in Paris.

Merah had been tracked by the security services since 2006.
Profile issue

The report prepared for the French government and leaked to Le Monde cites a DCRI officer raising concerns about the man in March 2011.

The officer said Merah rarely left his home and was paranoid and suspicious. He had no internet in his flat, did not appear to have a mobile phone and always used public telephone booths.

Another note, on 26 April 2011, reported that Merah was violent to women for having shown disrespect to a Muslim.

The note said he glorified the murder of “Western infidels” in songs he composed, and he was photographed with a knife and Koran. He travelled frequently to the Middle East.

He had a long list of contacts to Islamist movements in the UK, the same leaked document says.

According to Le Monde, Merah was last questioned in November 2011 and had great difficulty explaining a visit to Pakistan where he had been training with militants.

Abel Chennouf was one of Merah’s victims

Just a week later, the DCRI suddenly stopped monitoring him.

Judge Christophe Teissier said he was surprised by the move.

The judge said Merah’s profile was typical of a home-grown threat – he was independent, radicalised quickly, and did everything possible to conceal the support and training he was receiving.

In August, Le Monde said other documents it had seen showed Merah had made more than 1,800 calls to over 180 contacts in 20 different countries.

Merah was shot dead on 22 March after a huge manhunt culminated in a 32-hour stand-off with police at an apartment in Toulouse.

The Jewish victims included three children murdered at a school.

Merah’s rampage, from 11 to 19 March, terrorised the region.

19 October 2012 Last updated at 11:50 GMT

Find this story at 19 October 2012

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Scooter terrorist Mohamed Merah ‘was not a lone wolf’: Secret files reveal killer’s sister had been watched by the French security services since 2008

The older sister of the Toulouse scooter killer, Mohamed Merah, had been under surveillance as a possible Islamist activist since 2008, it emerged yesterday. Souad Merah, 34, provided money, mobile phones and internet addresses to her brother in the months before his murderous attacks in the Toulouse area in March, the French radio station RTL reported.

Security files, made available to prosecutors last month, also reveal that Ms Merah had been under surveillance long before the killer was, RTL said. She was identified by French internal security services as a possible threat in 2008 – at the same time as another brother, Abdelkader, who has been in custody for six months.

Families of Merah’s seven victims called yesterday for Souad Merah to be arrested and questioned. Although she was briefly interviewed after the murders, the inquiry has concentrated on the possible role of Abdelkader, Merah’s older brother, in inspiring and assisting the killings.

Mohamed Merah, 23, died when police stormed his flat in Toulouse on 22 March after a 32-hour siege. In previous days, he had murdered three off-duty French paratroopers and three children and a teacher outside a Jewish school.

Merah, who filmed his murders, claimed to be working on behalf of al-Qa’ida. Security services believe he was a “lone wolf”, inspired by extremist Islamist teaching but acting independently or with the help of his brother. According to the files of the French internal security service, the DCRI, seen by RTL, his sister may have played, at the very least, a role in his conversion to radical Islam.

Souad Merah was under surveillance from 2008 as a follower of an extremist Salafist Islamic movement in Toulouse. She also visited Koranic schools in Cairo. She appears in French security service files in 2008 as a “follower of radical Islam” and in June 2011 she is listed as being “known for her links” to radical Salafists. In the months before the Toulouse killings, she provided Mohamed Merah with cash, mobile phones and the use of her internet address on several occasions, according to the files seen by RTL.

…

 

John Lichfield
Tuesday, 4 September 2012

Find This story at 4 September 2012

© independent.co.uk

 

 

Mohamed Merah, un loup pas si solitaire

Mohamed Merah n’avait pas de téléphone à son nom. Pour échapper aux surveillances de la police, l’auteur des tueries perpétrées les 11, 15 et 19 mars à Toulouse et à Montauban s’en était procuré un à celui de sa mère, Mme Aziri. La liste des appels fait partie des documents confidentiels de la Direction centrale du renseignement intérieur (DCRI) transmis le 3 août aux trois juges de Paris chargés d’instruire le dossier.

Ces notes permettent de se faire une idée des liens que le djihadiste de 24 ans avait tissés à travers le monde, et elles mettent à mal l’argument avancé par l’ex-patron de la DCRI, Bernard Squarcini, selon lequel Mohamed Merah se serait “radicalisé seul” et qu’il n’appartenait “à aucun réseau” (Le Monde du 24 mars). Il semble que la police française n’ignorait quasiment rien du parcours du jeune djihadiste toulousain.

DES CORRESPONDANTS AU KENYA, EN CROATIE, EN BOLIVIE, AU BHOUTAN

Ainsi, l’une des 23 notes partiellement déclassifiées et dont Le Monde a eu connaissance, datée du 26 avril 2011, fait état de “1 863 communications relevées entre le 1er septembre 2010 et le 20 février 2011”. Durant cette période, celui qui n’est encore qu’un apprenti terroriste effectue un voyage dans plusieurs pays du Moyen-Orient et en Afghanistan. Il passe notamment 186 appels à des correspondants installés hors de France, dans 20 pays différents.

Le détail montre que Mohamed Merah a joint vocalement ou par SMS 94 numéros de téléphones localisés en Egypte, où se trouvait son frère Abdelkader, en Algérie, où demeurent son père et une partie de sa famille, mais aussi au Maroc, en Grande-Bretagne, en Espagne, en Côte d’Ivoire, au Kenya, en Croatie, en Roumanie, en Bolivie, en Thaïlande, en Russie, au Kazhastan, au Laos, à Taïwan, en Turquie, en Arabie saoudite, aux Emirats arabes unis, en Israël, et pour finir au Bhoutan, minuscule royaume enclavé en plein cœur du massif himalayen, où Mohamed Merah appelle neuf numéros.

Avec qui le petit voyou de la cité des Izards de Toulouse correspond-il à travers ces nombreux appels dans ces multiples pays ? Les enquêteurs de la DCRI ont sûrement identifié quelques-uns de ces interlocuteurs, mais les pièces transmises aux magistrats instructeurs, qui n’ont été que très partiellement déclassifiées par le ministre de l’intérieur, Manuel Valls, n’en disent rien.

UN “COMPORTEMENT INQUIÉTANT”

Ces notes attestent également que le renseignement intérieur connaissait Mohamed Merah au moins depuis 2009, après s’être intéressé à son frère Abdelkader dès 2008. Abdelkader, 29 ans, mis en examen pour “complicité” et en détention provisoire à Fresnes depuis le 25 mars, mais aussi sa sœur Souad, 34 ans, étaient surveillés par les services. Les déplacements du premier en Egypte, où il suit des cours dans les écoles coraniques d’obédience salafistes, sont suivis à la trace. Ainsi, le 23 février 2011, les services allemands alertent leurs collègues français de son passage à l’aéroport de Francfort, en provenance du Caire et à destination de Toulouse. Même chose pour Souad, dont le départ pour Le Caire prévu le 30 novembre 2010 de l’aéroport Charles-de-Gaulle à Roissy est signalé à la DCRI.

Et, à cette occasion, Mohamed apparaît aussi sur les radars du renseignement intérieur. Mais ce n’est qu’en mars 2011, après son long voyage jusqu’en Afghanistan, qu’un dispositif plus serré est mis en place autour du jeune homme. Un fonctionnaire fait état d’une “surveillance au domicile de Mohamed Merah, 17, rue du Sergent-Vigné, appartement numéro 2, volets toujours fermés”. Dans son compte rendu, le policier souligne que la mission a réussi : “Il a été possible d’identifier formellement la présence de l’objectif.”

Durant cette période, les policiers ne lâchent pas leur “objectif”. Ils le prennent en filature et prêtent une attention soutenue à sa téléphonie. Mohamed Merah a un “comportement inquiétant”, estime l’un d’eux. “Le changement fréquent de boîtiers et de cartes SIM attribués à Mme Aziri (…) laisse supposer que la famille Merah souhaite brouiller les pistes”, suggère un autre.

Visiblement, les fonctionnaires de police qui se sont collés aux basques de Mohamed Merah pendant plusieurs semaines ne doutent guère des orientations de leur client. “Le comportement prudent et suspicieux de Mohamed Merah influe sur sa famille”, écrivent-ils, avant de préciser : “Le dispositif de surveillance dynamique engagé sur Mohamed Merah démontre qu’après une période de latence et d’observation, l’objectif amorce un rapprochement avec la mouvance salafiste toulousaine, en particulier avec [ici le nom est noirci pour préserver sa confidentialité] mais également et plus intéressant encore avec [là, deux noms sont noircis pour les mêmes raisons] tous deux partis récemment en Mauritanie.” Cet extrait d’une note d’avril 2011 nuance la thèse défendue par la DCRI et son ex-directeur Bernard Squarcini au lendemain de l’assaut contre le terroriste, selon laquelle Mohamed Merah se serait “autoradicalisé en prison [en 2009], tout seul, en lisant le Coran” (Le Monde du 24 mars).

…

LE MONDE | 23.08.2012 à 10h55 • Mis à jour le 23.08.2012 à 16h57

Par Yves Bordenave

Find this story at 23 August 2012

© Le Monde.fr

Toulouse gunman Mohamed Merah ‘no lone wolf’

France’s Le Monde newspaper says it has seen confidential documents of the police investigation into Toulouse gunman Mohamed Merah that suggest he was not working alone.

The papers showed he had made more than 1,800 calls to over 180 contacts in 20 different countries, Le Monde said.

Merah had also made several trips to the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Merah, 24, killed three soldiers and four Jewish people in March before being shot dead by police.
SIM cards

Le Monde’s article cites confidential papers from the DCRI intelligence agency.

The BBC’s Christian Fraser in Paris says the papers obtained by Le Monde cast light on a young man who was much more than an angry petty criminal that had “radicalised himself” – as suggested by the DCRI earlier in the investigation.

Between September 2010 and February 2011 the former garage mechanic made hundreds of calls to countries including Egypt, Morocco, Kenya, Kazhakstan, Saudi Arabia, Bhutan and the UK.

Merah had become known to the intelligence services as early as 2009, after they had been following his sister, Souad, and his brother, Abdelkhadar, who are now both in police custody.

The papers show that intelligence services recorded a trip to a Salafist, or ultraconservative Sunni Islamist, school of obedience in Egypt.

In February 2011, German officials alerted French colleagues that Merah had travelled from Cairo, via Frankfurt, to Toulouse.

It was only in March 2011, after a long trip to Afghanistan, that Merah was placed under tighter surveillance.

One official quoted in the papers said Merah changed SIM cards, registered under his mother’s name, frequently, and suggested the family was trying to protect him.

Merah, who himself claimed to have al-Qaeda affiliation, was also reported to have contacted one known Salafist in Toulouse and two others who recently left for Mauritania.

Merah was shot dead on 22 March after a huge manhunt culminated in a 32-hour stand-off with police at an apartment in Toulouse.

The Jewish victims included three children murdered at a school.

23 August 2012 Last updated at 16:12 GMT

Find this story at 23 August 2012

BBC © 2012 The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read more.

‘Everything we could have missed, we missed’

“Everything that we could have missed, we missed”. A former French intelligence agent admits they should have caught Mohamed Merah before his Toulouse shooting spree which left seven people dead, including three children. Merah was killed after a bloody stand-off with police. His older brother Abdelkader is in custody facing charges of complicity to murder. But two months on and with no official documentation from authorities, many questions remain unanswered.

 

Latest update: 08/06/2012
Find this story at 08 June 2012

 

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Mohamed Merah: secret service informant?

Was Mohamed Merah a French secret service informant? So says a former head of an intelligence agency here in France. Also, an Italian paper says Merah travelled to Israel in 2010 – with the support of French spy agencies.

MEDIAWATCH FRANCE, Tues. 27/3/2012:
Latest update: 28/03/2012
By James CREEDON

Find this story at 28 Marz 2012

© 2006 – 2012 Copyright FRANCE 24. All rights reserved – FRANCE 24 is not responsible for the content of external websites.

UDA: Murdered chief was spy

Murdered loyalist Alan McCullough was a military intelligence spy who double-crossed both factions of a feuding terror organisation, his killers claimed.

As detectives continued to question a man about the murder, the Ulster Defence Association also accused McCullough of being heavily involved in four assassinations.

The paramilitary grouping provoked a wave of revulsion for killing McCullough, a former ally of ousted loyalist Johnny Adair, after apparently agreeing to lift a death sentence against him.

The 21-year-old fled to England after the UDA drove supporters of Adair’s ruthless C Company unit out of Northern Ireland at the height of the internecine war.

But in a statement issued the UDA claimed it wanted to set the record straight “once and for all”.

It said: “Alan McCullough was an MI5 agent who “Judased” both the UDA and his murdering mates in C Company who were exiled from Northern Ireland.

“McCullough was military commander of the notorious, now defunct, C Company who gave the orders for four murders, numerous gun and bomb attacks and death threats throughout Northern Ireland.”

A brutal power-struggle between Adair and his rival UDA commanders saw four men shot dead either side of the New Year.

Among those killed were the organisation’s hardline South-East Antrim brigadier John “Grug” Gregg and his associate Robert Carson near Belfast docks.

…

Find this story at 15 October 2012

Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday & Metro Media Group
© Associated Newspapers Ltd

Northern Ireland loyalist shootings: one night of carnage, 18 years of silence

 

In 1994 six men were shot dead in a bar at Loughinisland – but no one was charged. Ian Cobain follows the supply of arms used in the massacre and investigates allegations of state collusion

Aidan O’Toole, a survivor of the Loyalist attack on the Heights Bar in Loughinisland, County Down, in 1994, and Emma Rogan, daughter of one of the six dead, in the room as it is today. Photograph: Paul McErlane for the Guardian

Shortly after 10pm on 18 June 1994, Ireland were 1-0 up against Italy in the opening match of the 1994 World Cup. at the Giants Stadium in New Jersey. The second half had just kicked off, and inside the Heights Bar at Loughinisland, 21 miles south of Belfast, all eyes were on the television. The bar is tiny: there were 15 men inside, and it was packed.

Aidan O’Toole, the owner’s 23-year-old son, was serving. “I heard the door open and then I just heard crack, crack, crack and felt a stabbing pain inside me,” he recalls. “I just ran. It was instinctive. I didn’t know what was happening but I knew I had to get away.”

Others inside the bar turned when the door opened and saw two men in boiler suits, their faces hidden by balaclavas. One of the intruders dropped to one knee and fired three bursts from an automatic rifle. Barney Green was sitting with his back to the door, close enough for the gunmen to reach out and tap his shoulder had they wished. He took the first blast, with around nine rounds passing through him before striking other men. Green, a retired farmer, was 87.

Green’s nephew, Dan McCreanor, 59, another farmer, died alongside him. A second burst killed Malcolm Jenkinson, 53, who was at the bar, and Adrian Rogan, 34, who was trying to escape to the lavatory. A third burst aimed at a table to the right of the door missed Willie O’Hare but killed his son-in-law, Eamon Byrne, 39. O’Hare’s son Patsy, 35, was also shot and died en route to hospital. Five men were injured: one, who lost part of a foot, would spend nine months in hospital.

O’Toole returned to the bar from a back room after hearing the killers’ car screech away. A bullet was lodged in his left kidney and a haze of gun smoke filled the room. But he could see clearly enough. “There were bodies piled on top of each other. It was like a dream; a nightmare.”

Most of the victims had been hit several times. Thirty rounds were fired, and some had passed through one man, ricocheted around the tiny room, then struck a second. Adrian Rogan’s father pushed his way into the bar and whispered a short prayer in his son’s ear, knowing he was not going to survive.

Loughinisland had been scarcely touched by the Troubles. A village of 600 or so people, where Catholics and Protestants had lived side by side for generations, none of its sons or daughters had been killed or hurt before, and none had been accused of terrorist offences. It is not a republican area – many of its Catholic inhabitants were so uninterested in politics that they did not vote even for the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour party (SDLP) – and Protestants often drank at the Heights. Only by chance were no Protestants killed or wounded that night.

Ninety minutes after the attack, a loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), telephoned a radio station to claim responsibility.

Police promises

Despite years of death and destruction in Northern Ireland, people around the world were shocked by the slaughter at the Heights. The Queen, Pope John Paul II and Bill Clinton sent messages of sympathy. Local Protestant families visited their injured and traumatised neighbours in hospital, expressing shock and disgust.

The police told the victims’ families they would leave no stone unturned in their efforts to catch the killers and bring them to justice.

The morning after the killings, the gunmen’s getaway car, a red Triumph Acclaim, was found abandoned in a field seven miles from Loughinisland. The farmer who spotted it called the police at 10.04am. The recovery of such a vehicle was quite rare during the Troubles – paramilitaries often torched them to destroy forensic evidence – and police were soon at the scene to take possession. There was no forensic examination of the area around the car, however.

A few weeks later, workmen found a holdall under a bridge a couple of miles from where the car had been found. Inside were three boiler suits, three balaclavas, three pairs of surgical gloves, three handguns, ammunition and a magazine. Not far from the bridge, police found a Czech-made VZ-58 assault rifle, which scientists confirmed was the weapon used to kill the men at the Heights.

The same weapon had been used the previous October in a UVF attack on a van carrying Catholic painters to work at Shorts aircraft and missile factory in Belfast, in which one man died and five others were wounded.

In the months that followed the Loughinisland shootings, nine people were arrested and questioned. All nine were released without charge. A 10th was arrested and released the following year, and two more suspects were arrested for questioning a year after that, all released without charge. The police repeatedly assured the families that no stone would be left unturned.

Emma Rogan was eight years old when her father, Adrian, was killed at the Heights. “I was told that these bad men came into the bar, and that my daddy was dead. I didn’t really know what they meant.”

As she grew up, she had no reason to doubt the police when they said they were doing everything in their power to catch the killers. “We didn’t question the police: that’s what this area is like. If they said they would leave no stone unturned, you took that at face value.”

By the time the 10th anniversary of the killings came around, Rogan was anxious to learn more about her father’s death, and hear of any progress the police had made. A series of meetings was organised between senior investigators of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the victims’ relatives, and later more information emerged when the police ombudsman for Northern Ireland published a report in 2011 on the investigation. Relatives of the dead men came to the conclusion, as Rogan puts it, that “they had treated us like mushrooms, keeping us in the dark for years and feeding us whatnot”.
A memorial plaque in the room where six men were murdered in a 1994 Loyalist attack on the Heights Bar in Loughinisland, County Down, Northern Ireland. Photograph: Paul McErlane for the Guardian

The getaway car had passed through four owners in the eight weeks before it was used in the shooting, changing hands so quickly that the first person in the chain remained the registered owner. The morning after the killings, a Belfast police officer was asked to call at this person’s home. The officer did so, but found the man was out. The officer then recorded the time of his visit as 9.30am – 34 minutes before the farmer had rung police to tell them he had discovered the car.

Some time between 11am and noon, a second police officer – a detective with no connection to the murder inquiry – telephoned the second person in the ownership chain, and asked him to come to the local police station to give a statement. How this detective came to know that the car had passed through this man’s hands is unclear. What is known, however, is that a statement was given, and that a note was attached to it, saying that the individual who gave it could be contacted only through the detective who took it.

The Loughinisland families argue this amounts to evidence that the person who gave this statement – one of the people involved in supplying the car used by the killers – was a police informer.

The Guardian has interviewed this man. He is Terry Fairfield, and today he runs a pub in the south of England. Fairfield confirms that he was a member of the UVF at the time, but denies he was a police informer. He says he did subsequently receive several thousand pounds from the detective, for helping him take a firearm and some explosives out of circulation. He accepts that being invited to attend a police station, rather than being arrested, was highly unorthodox. The detective says he had known Fairfield for years and contacted him after hearing of the Loughinisland shooting, but that only members of the murder inquiry could decide whether to arrest him.

A second man, who is widely suspected locally of having been in the getaway car, and who is also alleged to have been an informer, has also told the Guardian that he has never been arrested.

The families also question the failure to take samples from some of the people arrested for questioning. The Guardian understands that at least five of the men arrested in the months after the shootings were not fingerprinted before being released without charge. No DNA swabs were taken from either of the two people arrested in 1996.

One man, Gorman McMullan, who has been named as a suspect in a Northern Ireland newspaper, was arrested the month after the shootings and released without charge. He was one of the people who were released without being fingerprinted and no DNA swab was taken. McMullan firmly denies that he has ever been to Loughinisland or that he was ever in the getaway car, and no further action was taken against him in connection with the shootings. He acknowledges however that he was “involved in the conflict”.

The police admitted to the families at one of their meetings that they had handed the getaway car to a scrap metal firm to be crushed and baled. They said this had been done because the vehicle was taking up too much space in a police station yard. That decision means it can never again be tested for comparison with samples taken from any new suspects.

Families’ disbelief

Emma Rogan and Aidan O’Toole cannot believe that the destruction of the car or other failings in the investigation were an accident. They believe that this is evidence of police collusion. “They knew exactly what they were doing,” Rogan says.

The families lodged a complaint with the police ombudsman for Northern Ireland. When the ombudsman, Al Hutchinson, published his report, it contained mild criticism of an investigation that displayed “a lack of cohesive and focused effort”. To the anger of the families, it refused to state whether or not police informants were suspected of involvement and appeared to gloss over the forensic failures. It concluded that the destruction of the car was “inappropriate”, rather than evidence of corruption or collusion.

The report was widely condemned in Northern Ireland. Hutchinson agreed to leave his post, and his successor is now reviewing the report. There will be no examination of the arms shipment, however, as the ombudsman’s remit extends only to the police, not the army.

Much of the suspicion about British involvement in the 1987 arms shipment revolves around Brian Nelson, a former soldier who joined the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) in the early 70s. In 1985, Nelson offered himself as an informant to the Force Research Unit (FRU), a covert unit within the army’s intelligence corps that recruited and ran agents in Northern Ireland. He quit the UDA the following year and moved to Germany with his wife and children. The FRU, operating with the approval of MI5, approached Nelson in Germany and persuaded him to return to Belfast to rejoin the UDA as an army agent.

For the next three years, Nelson was paid £200 a week by the government while operating as the UDA’s intelligence officer, helping to select targets for assassination. He informed his army handlers in advance of attacks: only two were halted, while at least three people were killed and attempts were made on the lives of at least eight more.

A detailed account of this extraordinary operation appears in a report on the loyalist killing of the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane that Peter Cory, a retired Canadian supreme court judge, prepared at the request of the government in 2004. An FRU report from July 1985 discloses that the army paid Nelson’s travel expenses when he travelled to Durban in South Africa that year to make initial contact with an arms dealer. “The [British] army appears to have at least encouraged Nelson in his attempt to purchase arms in South Africa for the UDA,” Cory concludes. “Nelson certainly went to South Africa in 1985 to meet an arms dealer. His expenses were paid by FRU. The army appears to have been committed to facilitating Nelson’s acquisition of weapons, with the intention that they would be intercepted at some point en route to Northern Ireland.”

Nelson is said to have told the FRU that the UDA possessed insufficient funds at that time to purchase any arms. “The evidence with regard to the completion of the arms transaction is frail and contradictory,” Cory says. As a result, “whether the transaction was consummated remains an open question”.

In July 1987, the funds to purchase a large consignment of weapons were secured with the robbery of more than £325,000 from a branch of Northern Bank in Portadown, 30 miles south-west of Belfast. The proceeds of the robbery were to be used to purchase weapons that were to be split three ways between the UDA, the UVF and Ulster Resistance (UR), a paramilitary organisation set up by unionists in response to the 1985 Anglo-Irish agreement.

What happened next is described by a former senior employee with South Africa’s Armscor, a man who was intimately involved in the plot to smuggle the weapons into Northern Ireland. According to this source, officials in South Africa introduced a senior figure within UR to one of the corporation’s representatives in Europe, an American arms dealer called Douglas Bernhardt.

In October 1987, Bernhardt is said to have flown to Gatwick airport for a face-to-face meeting with a senior UDA commander, John McMichael, after which couriers carried money from the bank raid, in cash, to Bernhardt’s office in Geneva.

Bernhardt was not told where the money had come from, according to the Armscor source. “When you get that sort of dirty banknote, you don’t ask,” the source says. Bernhardt obtained a bank draft which was then sent to an arms dealer in Beirut, who had obtained the weapons from a Lebanese militia.

As the operation progressed, according to the Armscor source, Bernhardt would regularly call his UR contact at his place of work. This man would then call back from a payphone, and they would talk in a simple code, referring to the weapons as “the parcel of fruit”. At each stage, Bernhardt is said to have been told that the arrangements needed to be agreed by McMichael and by his intelligence officer – Brian Nelson. “Everything had to be run by the head of intelligence.”

Bernhardt is said then to have travelled by ship to Beirut, where arrangements were made to pack the weapons into a shipping container labelled as a consignment of ceramic floor tiles. Bills of lading and a certificate of origin were organised, and the weapons were shipped to Belfast docks via Liverpool.

“There were at least a couple of hundred Czech-made AKs – the VZ-58,” the Armscor source recalls. “And 90-plus Browning-type handguns: Hungarian-made P9Ms. About 30,000 rounds of 7.62 x 39mm ammunition, not the 51mm Nato rounds. Plus a dozen or so RPGs, and a few hundred fragmentation grenades.”

Sources within both the police and the UVF have confirmed that one of the VZ-58s was used at Loughinisland.

According to the Armscor source, the UR member who dealt with Bernhardt was Noel Little, a civil servant and former British soldier. Now in his mid-60s and living quietly in an affluent Belfast suburb, Little denies this. “My position is that I wasn’t involved,” Little says. But he adds: “I would deny it even if I was.”

Little confirms, however, that he was a founder member of UR, and a central figure within the organisation at the time that the weapons arrived in Belfast. He also appears to possess detailed knowledge of the way in which the arms were smuggled and distributed.

The weapons arrived in Belfast in December 1987, a few days before McMichael was killed by an IRA car bomb. Early in the new year, they were split three ways at a farmhouse in County Armagh. The UDA lost its entire slice of the pie within minutes: its share of about 100 weapons was loaded into the boot of two hire cars that were stopped a few minutes later at a police roadblock near Portadown. The three occupants were later jailed, with their leader, Davy Payne, receiving a 19-year sentence.

The following month, police recovered around half the UVF’s weapons after a tip-off led them to an outhouse on the outskirts of north Belfast. Fairfield says he recalls being shown what remained of the UVF’s new arsenal, in storage at a house in the city that was being renovated. “I made the mistake of touching one,” he says, adding that this could result in him being linked to the October 1993 killing outside the Shorts factory.

Little was also arrested, after his telephone number was found written on the back of Payne’s hand. “John McMichael had given it to him, in case he got into any trouble in Armagh,” Little says. “I lost three-quarters of a stone [4.75kg] during the seven days I was questioned. The police put me under extreme psychological pressure.” Eventually, he was released without charge.

Little says that while UR redistributed a few of its weapons – “there were some deals around the edges” – most of its consignment was kept intact.

“They were never used. They were for the eventuality of the British just walking away – doing an Algeria – after the Anglo-Irish agreement was signed.” As far as he is aware, the consignment has never been decommissioned.

Dramatic arrest

The following year saw Little arrested again, this time in France, in dramatic fashion. He had travelled to Paris with two fellow loyalists, James King and Samuel Quinn, to meet Bernhardt and a South African intelligence officer operating under the name Daniel Storm. Officers of the French security agency, Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), seized the three Ulstermen and the South African in a raid on a room at the Hilton International, at the same moment that Bernhardt was being grabbed in the foyer of the Hôtel George-V, and lifted bodily, according to one witness, out of the building and into a waiting car.

The five had been caught red-handed attempting to trade stolen parts from the sighting system of a ground-to-air missile that was under development at the Shorts factory. The apartheid regime wanted to use the parts in the development of its own missile for use in Angola, where its ground forces were vulnerable to attack by Cuban-piloted MiGs. “This deal was about speed,” says the Armscor source. “If you’ve got Cuban-piloted jets whacking your troops in border wars, you don’t have the luxury of saying: ‘We’ll have a research programme over time.’ You’ve got to speed up the R&D.”

Storm was set free after claiming diplomatic immunity, while the others were interrogated in the basement of the DST’s headquarters in the 15th arrondissement. “I was slapped about a little,” says Little. “But not too much.” The DST told Bernhardt it had listened in on a meeting the previous night, through a bug in the chandelier of the room at the George-V where the men had gathered. “They knew all about the fruit code used in 1987,” the Armscor source says. “They thought the talk about pineapples was a huge joke. They must have been monitoring the phone calls. And they knew all about Lebanon.

“My guess is that the British were intercepting those phone calls. But the British didn’t get all the weapons. How much did they know in advance? Why didn’t they move more quickly? Maybe they were perfectly happy to have that material … sort of ‘arrive’, and put into the hands of the loyalists. Christ knows, the IRA had had enough of their own shipments, everywhere from Boston to Tripoli.”

Noel Little also suspects the British turned a blind eye to the 1987 arms shipment. “It is a theory I can’t discount,” he says. “Brian Nelson was inserted into the UDA as an agent, he wasn’t a recruited member. Ho w could he know about it and not tell his handler?”

Little believes that his attempt to hand over stolen missile technology to Armscor in Paris – straying into “secrets and commerce”, as he puts it – would have been a step too far for the British authorities, obliging them to tip off the French.

After eight months on remand, the four men were brought to court charged with arms trafficking, handling stolen goods and terrorism-related conspiracy. Bernhardt told the court that he had helped arrange the Lebanese arms deal for loyalist paramilitaries in 1987. The four were sentenced to time served and fined between 20,000 and 100,000 francs (£2,000-£10,000 then).

Brian Nelson was finally arrested in January 1990 after John Stevens, then deputy chief constable of Cambridgeshire, had been brought in to investigate collusion between the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. While awaiting trial, Nelson wrote a journal in which he recounted his time as an army agent inside the UDA. “I was bitten by a bug … hooked is probably a more appropriate word. One becomes enmeshed in a web of intrigue, conspiracies, confidences, dangers …”

After flying to Durban in 1985, he wrote, his South African contacts had asked whether he would be able to obtain a missile from Shorts. Two years later, while talking about the South African connection with “Ronnie”, his FRU handler, he had been told that “because of the deep suspicion a seizure would have aroused, to protect me it had been decided to let the first shipment into the country untouched”. Nelson added that “Ronnie” assured him that the arms consignment would be under surveillance.

In 1993, an intelligence source told the BBC that this had happened: the consignment had indeed been under surveillance by a number of agencies, but the wrong port was watched, with the result that the weapons slipped through.At Nelson’s eventual court appearance, a plea deal resulted in Nelson being jailed for 10 years after he admitted 20 offences, including conspiracy to murder. Murder charges were dropped. More than 40 other people were also convicted of terrorism offences as a result of the Stevens investigation. They did not include any of the intelligence officers for whom Nelson worked.

Stevens’ investigation team was well aware of concerns surrounding the importation of the weapons. Members of the team talked to former Armscor officials in South Africa, but concluded that an investigation into the matter was so unlikely to produce any results as to be fruitless. However, a senior member of the inquiry team says he believes it feasible that the UK authorities could have been involved in bringing the weapons into Belfast – or at least turned a blind eye. “It’s not at all far-fetched,” he says.

By the time of the Loughinisland massacre, loyalist gunmen with access to the Armscor arsenal were killing at least as many people as the IRA. Czech-made VZ-58 assault rifles were used in many of the killings. A few weeks after the shootings at the Heights Bar, the IRA announced a ceasefire.

Many in Northern Ireland are convinced that the importation of the Armscor weapons, and the large numbers of killings that followed, contributed greatly to the IRA’s decision. Among them is Noel Little, who says: “There’s no doubt that that shipment did change things.”

Increasingly, the IRA was forced to defend itself against attacks by loyalists, it was diverted into targeting loyalist paramilitaries rather than police officers or soldiers, and it came under pressure from nationalists as more and more Catholic people were slaughtered. To Little’s way of thinking, the Armscor weapons “tipped the balance against the IRA and eventually forced them to sue for peace”. And while he accepts – and says he deplores – the slaughter of innocent people at Loughinisland and elsewhere, he adds: “Innocent bystanders are killed in every war.”

Six weeks after the IRA’s announcement, loyalist paramilitaries announced their own ceasefire.

With the Loughinisland families no nearer to discovering the truth about the deaths of their loved ones following publication of the ombudsman’s report, they embarked on their civil actions against the Ministry of Defence and the police in January this year. A letter of claim sent to the MoD says the claim is based in part on “the army’s knowledge of and facilitation of the shipment”, while one sent to the Police Service of Northern Ireland says the claim arises from a series of failings, including “closing off investigative opportunities” and “the destruction of vital evidence”.

…

Ian Cobain
The Guardian, Monday 15 October 2012 18.08 BST

Find this story at 15 October 2012

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

UK accused of helping to supply arms for Northern Ireland loyalist killings

Relatives of Catholics killed in 1994 claim compensation, alleging security service complicity in arming UDA

The bloodstained interior of the Heights Bar at Loughinisland, the morning after six Catholic men had been killed and five others injured in a loyalist gun attack. Photograph: Pacemaker

Allegations that the government helped to arm loyalist gangs with a large arsenal of weapons at the height of Northern Ireland’s Troubles are to surface in court proceedings arising from one of the most notorious massacres of the 30-year conflict.

The Ministry of Defence and the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) are being sued by relatives of six men murdered by a loyalist gunman who opened fire inside a bar crowded with people watching football on television in Loughinisland, County Down, in June 1994. While the families are claiming compensation, they say their aim is to uncover the truth about the killings.

The authorities are alleged to have assisted – or at least turned a blind eye – as about 300 automatic rifles and pistols, hundreds of grenades and an estimated 30,000 rounds of ammunition were smuggled into Belfast in 1987. One of the rifles, a Czech-made VZ-58 assault rifle, was used in the attack in the village.

According to a number of those involved in the shipment, the weapons were provided by Armscor, the arms sales and procurement corporation of apartheid-era South Africa. A deal was struck between Armscor and leading loyalists after a British agent, who infiltrated the paramilitary Ulster Defence Association (UDA) for the army and MI5, visited South Africa in 1985.

The agent was shopping for arms for the UDA. But the MoD has conceded that the trip was funded by the taxpayer, with an army intelligence unit paying his expenses.

There is no conclusive proof that the agent’s South Africa trip led directly to the arsenal being smuggled into Belfast two years later. But Niall Murphy, lawyer for the families, said: “We are confident that evidence of British involvement does exist, and we look forward to applying to the high court for its disclosure.”

A number of people in South Africa and Belfast who were involved in the talks after the agent’s visit told the Guardian they believe the government must have been aware that an arms deal was being arranged, and took no action to prevent the weapons from being smuggled into Northern Ireland, where they were divided between three paramilitary groups.

Within weeks of the consignment arriving in Northern Ireland, loyalist gunman Michael Stone was hurling several of the grenades and firing one of the pistols in an attack that claimed the lives of three people at the funeral of three IRA members at Milltown cemetery in west Belfast. From then on, the number of killings by loyalists rose sharply: during the six years before the weapons were landed, loyalists had killed about 70 people; in the six years that followed, they killed about 230.

Many of the victims were Catholics who had no involvement with the conflict, and as the death toll mounted the IRA came under increasing pressure to call a ceasefire.

There is reason to believe that a number of the paramilitaries connected to the attack were police informers.

There are serious concerns about the way the Loughinisland killings were investigated, with a subsequent inquiry by the police ombudsman establishing that police failed to take some suspects’ fingerprints or DNA samples. Police have admitted that one key piece of evidence – the getaway car – was destroyed. There is no evidence that any officer sought or gave permission for this to be done.

The families of the dead men are also bringing civil proceedings against the PSNI after the police ombudsman in Belfast examined the initial investigation and then produced a report which was widely criticised for refusing to acknowledge whether police informers were involved in the massacre. Murphy said: “The experience of these six families demonstrates that the current mechanisms for truth recovery do not work.”

…

Ian Cobain
The Guardian, Monday 15 October 2012 18.06 BST

Find this story at 15 October 2012

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Man who armed Black Panthers was FBI informant, records show

The man who gave the Black Panther Party some of its first firearms and weapons training – which preceded fatal shootouts with Oakland police in the turbulent 1960s – was an undercover FBI informer, according to a former bureau agent and an FBI report.

One of the Bay Area’s most prominent radical activists of the era, Richard Masato Aoki was known as a fierce militant who touted his street-fighting abilities. He was a member of several radical groups before joining and arming the Panthers, whose members received international notoriety for brandishing weapons during patrols of the Oakland police and a protest at the state Legislature.

Aoki went on to work for 25 years as a teacher, counselor and administrator at the Peralta Community College District, and after his suicide in 2009, he was revered as a fearless radical.

But unbeknownst to his fellow activists, Aoki had served as an FBI intelligence informant, covertly filing reports on a wide range of Bay Area political groups, according to the bureau agent who recruited him.

That agent, Burney Threadgill Jr., recalled that he approached Aoki in the late 1950s, about the time Aoki was graduating from Berkeley High School. He asked Aoki if he would join left-wing groups and report to the FBI.

Aoki is listed in an FBI report on the Black Panther Party as an “informant” with the code number “T-2.”

“He was my informant. I developed him,” Threadgill said in an interview. “He was one of the best sources we had.”

The former agent said he asked Aoki how he felt about the Soviet Union, and the young man replied that he had no interest in communism.

“I said, ‘Well, why don’t you just go to some of the meetings and tell me who’s there and what they talked about?’ Very pleasant little guy. He always wore dark glasses,” Threadgill recalled.

Aoki’s work for the FBI, which has never been reported, was uncovered and verified during research for the book, “Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power.” The book, based on research spanning three decades, will be published tomorrow by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

In a tape-recorded interview for the book in 2007, two years before he committed suicide, Aoki was asked if he had been an FBI informant. Aoki’s first response was a long silence. He then replied, “ ‘Oh,’ is all I can say.”

Later during the same interview, Aoki contended the information wasn’t true.

Asked if this reporter was mistaken that Aoki had been an informant, Aoki said, “I think you are,” but added: “People change. It is complex. Layer upon layer.”

However, the FBI later released records about Aoki in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. A Nov. 16, 1967, intelligence report on the Black Panthers lists Aoki as an “informant” with the code number “T-2.”

An FBI spokesman declined to comment on Aoki, citing litigation seeking additional records about him under the Freedom of Information Act.

Since his death – Aoki shot himself at his Berkeley home after a long illness – his legend has grown. In a 2009 feature-length documentary film, “Aoki,” and a 2012 biography, “Samurai Among Panthers,” he is portrayed as a militant radical leader. Neither mentions that he had worked with the FBI.

Harvey Dong, who was a fellow activist and close friend, said last week that he had never heard that Aoki was an informant.

“It’s definitely something that is shocking to hear,” said Dong, who was the executor of Aoki’s estate. “I mean, that’s a big surprise to me.”

Dong recalled that Aoki tended to “compartmentalize” the different parts of his life. Before he shot himself, Dong said, Aoki had laid out in his apartment two neatly pressed uniforms: One was the black leather jacket, beret and dark trousers of the Black Panthers. The other was his U.S. Army regimental.

In Berkeley in the late 1960s, Aoki wore slicked-back hair, sported sunglasses even at night and spoke with a ghetto patois. His fierce demeanor intimidated even his fellow radicals, several of them have said.

“He had swagger up to the moon,” former Berkeley activist Victoria Wong recalled at his memorial.

From gangs to the military

Aoki was born in San Leandro in 1938, the first of two sons. He was 4 when his family was interned at Topaz, Utah, with thousands of other Japanese Americans during World War II.

After the war, Aoki grew up in West Oakland, in an area that had been known as Little Yokohama before becoming a low-income black community. He joined a gang and became a tough street fighter who as an adult would boast, “I was the baddest Oriental come out of West Oakland.”

He shoplifted, burgled homes and stole car parts for “the midnight auto supply business,” he told Berkeley’s KPFA radio in a 2006 interview. Oakland police repeatedly arrested him for “mostly petty-type stuff,” he said in the 2007 interview. Still, he graduated from Herbert Hoover Junior High School as co-valedictorian.

But the internment during World War II had shattered his family, Aoki had said. His father became a gangster and abandoned his family, and his mother won custody of her sons and moved them to Berkeley. Aoki did well academically at Berkeley High School and became president of the Stamp and Coin Club. However, he assaulted another student in the hallway and, as he recalled, “beat him half to death.”

Aoki was an avid firearms collector and military enthusiast. After high school, he joined the Army and later was a reservist.

Credit: Courtesy of Harvey Dong

Three days after graduating from high school in January 1957, Aoki reported for duty at Fort Ord, near Monterey. He had enlisted in the U.S. Army the prior year, at age 17. He acknowledged in the 2007 interview that he had “cut a deal” in which military authorities arranged for his criminal record to be sealed.

Aoki said he had hoped to become the army’s first Asian American general, but he served only about a year on active duty and seven more in the reserves before being honorably discharged as a sergeant.

Although he saw no combat, he became a firearms expert. “I got to play with all the toys I wanted to play with when I was growing up,” he told KPFA. “Pistols, rifles, machine guns, mortars, rocket launchers.”

Being in the reserves left Aoki a lot of free time, and he became deeply involved in left-wing political organizations at the behest of the FBI, retired FBI agent Threadgill said during a series of interviews before his death in 2005.

“The activities that he got involved in was because of us using him as an informant,” he said.

Threadgill recalled that he first approached Aoki after a bureau wiretap on the home phone of Saul and Billie Wachter, local members of the Communist Party, picked up Aoki talking to fellow Berkeley High classmate Doug Wachter.

At first, Aoki gathered information about the Communist Party, Threadgill said. But Aoki soon focused on the Socialist Workers Party and its youth affiliate, the Young Socialist Alliance, also targets of an intensive FBI domestic security investigation.

By spring 1962, Aoki had been elected to the Berkeley Young Socialist Alliance’s executive council, FBI records show. That December, he became a member of the Oakland-Berkeley branch of the Socialist Workers Party, where he served as the representative to Bay Area civil rights groups. He also was on the steering committee of the Committee to Uphold the Right to Travel.

In 1965, Aoki joined the Vietnam Day Committee, an influential anti-war group based in Berkeley, and worked on its international committee as liaison to foreign anti-war activists.

All along, Aoki met regularly with his FBI handler. Aoki also filed reports by phone, Threadgill said.

“I’d call him and say, ‘When do you want to get together?’ ” Threadgill recalled. “I’d say, ‘I’ll meet you on the street corner at so-and-so and so on.’ I would park a couple of blocks away and get out and go and sit down and talk to him.”

Arming the Black Panthers

Threadgill worked with Aoki through mid-1965, when he moved to another FBI office and turned Aoki over to a fellow agent. Aoki was well positioned to inform on a wide range of political activists.

Aoki attended Merritt College in Oakland, where he met Huey Newton, a pre-law student, and Bobby Seale, an engineering student, who were in a political group called the Soul Students Advisory Council.

In fall 1966, Aoki transferred to UC Berkeley as a junior in sociology. That October, Seale and Newton took a draft of their 10-point program for what would become the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense to Aoki’s Berkeley apartment and discussed it over drinks. The platform called for improved housing, education, full employment, the release of incarcerated black men, a halt to “the robbery by the capitalists of our black community” and an “immediate end to police brutality.”

Soon after, Aoki gave the Panthers some of their first guns. As Seale recalled in his memoir, “Seize the Time:”

Aoki (left) represented the UC Berkeley Asian American community as part of the Third World Liberation Front.

Credit: Courtesy of Nancy Park

“Late in November 1966, we went to a Third World brother we knew, a Japanese radical cat. He had guns … .357 Magnums, 22’s, 9mm’s, what have you. … We told him that if he was a real revolutionary he better go on and give them up to us because we needed them now to begin educating the people to wage a revolutionary struggle. So he gave us an M-1 and a 9mm.”

In early 1967, Aoki joined the Black Panther Party and gave them more guns, Seale wrote. Aoki also gave Panther recruits weapons training, he said in the 2007 interview.

“I had a little collection, and Bobby and Huey knew about it, and so when the party was formed, I decided to turn it over to the group,” Aoki said in the interview. “And so when you see the guys out there marching and everything, I’m somewhat responsible for the military slant to the organization’s public image.”

In early 1967, the Panthers displayed guns during their “community patrols” of Oakland police and also that May 2, when they visited the state Legislature to protest a bill.

Although carrying weapons was legal at the time, there is little doubt their presence contributed to fatal confrontations between the Panthers and the police.

On Oct. 28, 1967, Newton was in a shootout that wounded Oakland Officer Herbert Heanes and killed Officer John Frey. On April 6, 1968, Eldridge Cleaver and five other Panthers were involved in a firefight with Oakland police. Cleaver and two officers were wounded, and Panther Bobby Hutton was killed.

During the period Aoki was arming the Panthers, he also was informing for the FBI. The FBI report that lists him as informant T-2 says that in May 1967, he reported on the Panthers.

None of the released FBI reports mention that Aoki gave guns to the Panthers.

Retired FBI agent Wes Swearingen worked closely on counterintelligence operations and surveillance of radical groups, including the Black Panthers.

Credit: Josiah Hooper/Center for Investigative Reporting

FBI’s reliance on informants

M. Wesley Swearingen, a retired FBI agent who has criticized unlawful bureau surveillance activities under the late Director J. Edgar Hoover, reviewed some of the FBI’s records. He concluded in a sworn declaration – filed in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking records on Aoki – that Aoki had been an informant.

Swearingen served in the FBI from 1951 to 1977, and worked on a squad that investigated the Panthers.

“Someone like Aoki is perfect to be in a Black Panther Party, because I understand he is Japanese,” he said. “Hey, nobody is going to guess – he’s in the Black Panther Party; nobody is going to guess that he might be an informant.”

Swearingen also said the FBI certainly must have additional records concerning Aoki, including special informant files.

“Aoki wouldn’t even have to be a member of the party. If he just knew Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, if he went out to lunch with them every day, they would have a main file,” he said. “But to say they don’t have a main file is ludicrous.”

In the 1990s, testimony from Swearingen helped to vacate the murder conviction of Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt, a Black Panther leader in Los Angeles. Evidence showed that the FBI and Los Angeles Police Department had failed to disclose that a key witness against Pratt was a longtime FBI informant named Julius C. Butler. Pratt later won a civil suit for wrongful imprisonment, with the City of Los Angeles paying Pratt $2.75 million and the FBI paying him $1.75 million.

During the late ’60s and early ’70s, the FBI sought to disrupt and “neutralize” the Black Panthers under COINTELPRO, the bureau’s secret counterintelligence program to stifle dissent, according to reports by the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities.

As part of COINTELPRO, the committee found, the FBI used informants to gather intelligence leading to the weapons arrests of Panthers in Chicago, Detroit, San Diego and Washington. By the end of 1969, at least 28 Panthers had been killed in gunfights with police and many more arrested on weapons charges, according to news accounts.

Hoover declared in late 1968 that the Panthers, who by now had chapters across the nation, posed “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” He cited their radical philosophy and armed confrontations with police.

A young Richard Aoki is involved in a 1969 protest at Telegraph Avenue and Bancroft Way near the UC Berkeley campus.

Credit: Courtesy of the Oakland Tribune

Although Aoki later would boast of his role with the Panthers, he was secretive about his relations with them at the time, explaining in the 2007 interview that he feared being expelled from UC Berkeley if his activities were known.

In early 1969, Aoki emerged as a leader of the Third World Liberation Front strike at UC Berkeley, which demanded more ethnic studies courses. He advocated violent tactics, according to interviews with him and Manuel Delgado, another strike leader.

…

Aug 20, 2012
Seth Rosenfeld
Contributor

Find this story at 20 August 2012

© Copyright 2012, Center for Investigative Reporting

How MI5 plotted to destroy The Stones: The astonishing truth behind the drug raid that saw Jagger jailed – and lumbered Marianne Faithfull for life with the tale of THAT Mars Bar

 

Taken on the beach at West Wittering, a small seaside resort in Sussex, the photograph shows a young Keith Richards giving a friendly hug to a man he knew only as ‘Acid King David’.

As his nickname suggested, the Rolling Stones’ mysterious new hanger-on possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of all the newest strains of LSD, combined with an almost magical ability to procure them.

For Richards, that was reason enough to embrace anybody, but the friendly smile of the ‘Acid King’ in that picture, taken on a cold Sunday afternoon in February 1967, belied the intent of a man who was far from all he seemed.

He had joined Richards, Mick Jagger and various of their entourage for a weekend at Redlands, Richards’s pretty half-timbered cottage, just a few miles away from West Wittering.

This chocolate-box country residence seemed bizarrely at odds with Richards’s hard-living vagabond image, but its name was about to become synonymous with one of the most notorious drugs busts in rock ’n’ roll history.

Many lurid details would emerge from the Redlands raid.

Most famously, there were reports that the police had discovered Mick Jagger’s then girlfriend Marianne Faithfull in a compromising position with a Mars Bar.

This story, pure invention as it turned out, has overshadowed a far more intriguing detail of the case.

As I have discovered, while researching a new biography of Mick Jagger, the Redlands raid was part of an extraordinary plot, orchestrated by our own MI5 and the FBI and designed to put an early end to the Rolling Stones’ career.

The details were revealed to me by Maggie Abbott, a British film agent based in Los Angeles.

During the Eighties, she befriended an eccentric figure named David Jove, producer of one of the earliest cable television shows, and the host of numerous fancy-dress ‘happenings’ at his cave-like studio in West Hollywood.

After swearing her to secrecy, Jove confided that his real name was David Snyderman and that he was the man known to the Rolling Stones as ‘Acid King David’.

And any doubt about this is dispelled by photographs of him in various of his strange avant-garde productions.

Although he is camouflaged by facepaint, his short curly hair and sensitive cheekbones are unquestionably those of the weekend guest photographed with Keith Richards on West Wittering beach a few hours before the bust.

In January 1967, according to the account he gave Maggie Abbott, Snyderman was a failed TV actor, drifting around Europe in the American hippie throng with Swinging London as his final destination.

At Heathrow Airport he was caught with drugs in his luggage and expected to be thrown into jail and instantly deported.

Instead, British Customs handed him over to some ‘heavy people’ who hinted they belonged to MI5 and told him there was ‘a way out’ of his predicament. This was to infiltrate the Rolling Stones, supply Mick Jagger and Keith Richard with drugs, and then get them busted.

According to Snyderman, MI5 were operating on behalf of an FBI offshoot known as COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) set up by the FBI’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, in the Twenties to protect national security and maintain the existing social and political order.

By 1967, COINTELPRO was focusing on the subversive effect of rock music on America’s young, particularly the kind coming from Britain, and most particularly the kind played by the Rolling Stones.

That they were such a target for the intelligence services had much to do with the machinations of their first manager, Andrew Loog Oldham.

As Beatlemania swept the nation, and the Fab Four appeared on the Royal Variety Show, respectfully ducking their mop-tops before the Queen Mother, he realised that The Beatles’ original fans felt let down by their mainstream success. Where was the excitement, the rebellion, in liking the same band your parents, or even grandparents did?

Oldham set about marketing the Rolling Stones as the anti-Beatles, the scowling flip side of the coin being minted by the Liverpudlians’ manager Brian Epstein like some modern-day Midas. ‘They don’t wash much and they aren’t all that keen on clothes,’ Oldham told the Press. From then on, the word that went ahead of them was ‘dirty’.

Nothing was further from the truth. Mick was utterly fastidious about personal cleanliness and Brian Jones washed his eye-obscuring blond helmet so religiously each day that the others nicknamed him ‘Mister Shampoo’.
Rolling Stones first manager Andrew Loog Oldham set about marketing the band as the anti-Beatles… ‘They don’t wash much and they aren’t all that keen on clothes,’ Oldham told the Press. From then on, the word that went ahead of them was ‘dirty’

The Stones were also fashion-mad but Oldham always insisted they should go onstage in the same Carnaby Street gear in which they’d arrived at the theatre. In an era when pop bands invariably wore matching suits, this appalled the parents of their young fans, but it was as nothing compared to the scandal caused by the Stones’ hair.

When they burst on to the music scene in 1963 it was in a Britain that still equated masculinity with the Army recruit’s stringent ‘short back and sides’. Curling over ears and brushing collars, the Stones’ long locks were almost as much as an affront to polite society as Mick Jagger’s unusually large mouth and vivid red lips. These seemed to have an indecency all of their own, even before they snarled out the Stones’ highly provocative lyrics.

In June 1965, their single Satisfaction created the greatest scandal in America since Elvis Presley first swivelled his hips exactly a decade earlier. With the line ‘tryin’ to make some girl’, it contained the first direct reference to sex in any pop song, an outrage compounded 18 months later when the Stones released Let’s Spend The Night Together.

There had been innumerable songs about nocturnal trysts but never one with so barefaced an invitation to get between the sheets. The furore was such that, when the Stones previewed the song on America’s Ed Sullivan television show in January 1967, Mick was forced to change the crucial phrase to Let’s Spend Some Time Together.

He agreed to do so, but only with much pointed eye-rolling every time he reached the newly-neutered line.

All this was bad enough, but then came a truly unforgivable incident. A week after that appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, and just three weeks before the Redlands drugs bust, the Stones were invited to top the bill on Sunday Night At The London Palladium, the much-loved TV variety show which had been the making of The Beatles.

During rehearsals they announced that they would not take part in the hallowed tradition of acts waving goodbye to viewers from a revolving podium during the grand finale.

In the end they compromised — standing off the podium and waving, with clear sarcasm and disrespect. This highly rebellious act won them few friends.
The cumulative effect of the band’s many ‘outrages’ became clear when the FBI asked for MI5’s co-operation in getting Mick Jagger and Keith Richards charged with drug possession, thus ensuring that they would be denied visas for the U.S. tours which were essential if they were to remain at the top in the music business’

The cumulative effect of all these outrages became clear when the FBI asked for MI5’s co-operation in getting Mick Jagger and Keith Richards charged with drug possession, thus ensuring that they would be denied visas for the U.S. tours which were essential if they were to remain at the top in the music business.

By now MI5 was more than happy to assist in the thwarting of these public menaces, and the detention of David Snyderman at Heathrow Airport presented an opportunity too good to miss. Within a couple of weeks of agreeing to help the secret services, he had somehow become friendly with all the front-line Stones, although he was to prove far from an ideal agent provocateur.

The bait with which he had piqued Keith’s interest in particular was a new Californian-made variety of LSD known as ‘Sunshine’, said to provide a more tranquil and relaxing kind of trip. He duly arrived for that weekend at Redlands with a business-like attaché case containing quantities of the new drug, excessive consumption of which appears to have lowered his own guard.

He kept his cover throughout the Saturday but the following day he almost gave the game away, talking enigmatically to Stones’ photographer Michael Cooper about spying and espionage. ‘He was into the James Bond thing,’ recalls Cooper. ‘You know, the whole CIA bit.’

Fortunately for the Acid King, this was interpreted by the others as so much drug-induced rambling and all remained set for the trap to go ahead.

At around 5pm on the same Sunday afternoon which had found them all on West Wittering beach, a Detective Constable John Challen answered the telephone at West Sussex Police Headquarters in nearby Chichester.

An anonymous male voice, never since identified, informed him that a ‘riotous party’ was going on at Redlands and that drugs were being used.

Like most other regional forces, West Sussex did not have a dedicated drugs squad. The nearest they had to a narcotics expert was a Detective Sergeant Stanley Cudmore, who had recently been diagnosed with a brain tumour and given light office duties while he underwent outpatient treatment.

He had used the time well, reading up on the various illegal substances then said to be circulating in Britain, and was now summoned to join a task force of 18 officers descending on Redlands.
Detective Constable John Challen recalled being momentarily disoriented by the scene in Keith’s living room – the rubble of bottles, ashtrays, guitars, flickering candles and smouldering joss sticks, among which long-haired, long-robed figures of not instantly determinable gender reclined on large Moroccan floor cushions

The occupants did not hear the seven police vehicles draw up outside, or notice anything amiss, until a female detective’s face appeared at the leaded window of the big, high-raftered living room where they all happened to have gathered.

Even then, she was thought to be a Stones fan who, like many before, had got on to Keith’s property without difficulty and would be appeased by a friendly word and an autograph.

After thunderous knocking, the front door was opened to reveal the impressive figure of a Chief Inspector Gordon Dineley.

This was West Sussex’s first drugs raid and he had marked the occasion by wearing his full dress uniform, complete with white-braided peaked cap and military-style cane.

If Mick and the others felt shock and disbelief at the subsequent surge of police officers into the house, the raiders themselves were equally at a loss. None had ever been inside a rock star’s home before.

DC Challen recalled being momentarily disoriented by the scene in Keith’s living room – the rubble of bottles, ashtrays, guitars, flickering candles and smouldering joss sticks, among which long-haired, long-robed figures of not instantly determinable gender reclined on outsize Moroccan floor cushions.

Even Keith’s choice of paintwork to set off the old oak beams, not healthy-minded white or cream distemper but dark matte shades of purple, brown and orange, struck DC Challen as incriminatingly ‘strange’.

But one decorative detail above all mesmerised constable and chief inspector alike.

On returning from the afternoon’s walk to the beach, Marianne Faithfull had gone upstairs for a bath and rejoined the others swathed only in a fur rug pulled from one of the beds.

It was left to Detective Sergeant Cudmore, West Sussex Constabulary’s nearest approach to a sniffer dog, to inhale the air around Marianne for what he alone could recognise as the tell-tale odour of cannabis.

While this was going on, her behaviour was almost tantamount to obstructing a police officer in the course of his duty. From time to time she deliberately let her fur rug slip down around her shoulders, showing ‘portions of her nude body’.

Each of the plain-clothes officers collared an individual house-guest to search while the uniformed element guarded the exits. There was some initial confusion when woman detective constable Evelyn Fuller approached a King’s Road flower child named Nicky Cramer, who wore makeup as well as exotic silk pyjamas, and mistook him for a female.

The first finds were made on Acid King David: a small tin box and an envelope containing what DS Cudmore recognised as cannabis. Yet as the police executed their search warrant to the utmost, rummaging minutely through every cupboard and drawer, the incriminating attaché case somehow lay undisturbed in the middle of the room.

…

By Philip Norman

PUBLISHED: 21:07 GMT, 30 September 2012 | UPDATED: 14:42 GMT, 1 October 2012

Find this story at 1 October 2012

Published by Associated Newspapers Ltd

Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday & Metro Media Group
© Associated Newspapers Ltd

The FBI and MI5 Tried to Crush The Rolling Stones and Rock ‘N’ Roll

Take a trip back in time to when two governments(who once hated each other) teamed up in an attempt to assassinate the Rolling Stones‘ career. They attempted to do so before The Rolling Stones could fill the minds of the youth with rock & roll.

The Rolling Stones are celebrating 50 years of rocking, and now Philip Norman writes in his book ‘Mick Jagger’, that the FBI and MI5 plotted against the band. The author alleges the two agencies teamed up after Acid King Dave cooperated in lieu of going to jail. The failing actor, after being busted at Heathrow Airport with drugs, cut a deal with MI5.

Phillip says that led to dealing drugs to the Rolling Stones which turned into the infamous Redlands bust. The idea he claims was all the FBI’s who wanted to keep Keith and Mick off of American soil. Both did jail time, Keith Richards was convicted for allowing marijuana to be smoked at his estate and Mick Jagger for amphetamines.

They still couldn’t keep the Rolling Stones from rocking the U.S., but then guitarist Brian Jones did until his ‘misadventure’ death in 1969.

 

By: Kain | Yesterday
Find this story at 2 October 2012

How the Acid King confessed he DID set up Rolling Stones drug bust for MI5 and FBI

It is one of the most intriguing chapters in the history of the Rolling Stones.

The drugs raid on a party at guitarist Keith Richards’s Sussex home, Redlands, more than 40 years ago very nearly destroyed the band.

And one of the 1967 episode’s unexplained mysteries was the identity of the man blamed by Richards and Mick Jagger for setting them up, a young drug dealer known as the Acid King.

He was a guest at the party – and supplied the drugs – but vanished after the raid, never to be seen or heard of again.

Jagger and Richards were arrested and jailed for possession of cannabis and amphetamines, though later acquitted on appeal.

Richards claimed last week in his autobiography, Life, that the Acid King was a police informant called David Sniderman.

The truth appears to confirm Richards’s long-held belief that the band was targeted by an Establishment fearful of its influence over the nation’s youth.

The Mail on Sunday can reveal that Sniderman was a Toronto-born failed actor who told his family and friends he was recruited by British and American intelligence as part of a plot to discredit the group.

After the Redlands bust, he slipped out of Britain and moved to the States where he changed his name to David Jove, and lived in Hollywood, later working as a small-time producer and film-maker.

Maggie Abbott, a Sixties talent agent, met him in Los Angeles in 1983 and became his lover. He told her how he infiltrated the group but said he was now ‘on the run’.

She said: ‘David was a heavy drug user but had a quick wit. He was the perfect choice to infiltrate the Stones.

‘He never showed any remorse for what he did. It was all about how he had been “the victim”. He was a totally selfish person.

‘Mick had been my friend as well as a client and I thought about trying to persuade David to come clean publicly.

‘But he was always armed with a handgun and I feared that if I gave him away, he’d shoot me.’

His identity was confirmed by a scion of a family of American philanthropists,
James Weinstock.

Two years after the Redlands raid, ‘Dave Jove’ married Mr Weinstock’s sister, Lotus, in Britain.

‘They’d come up with some new way to make acid and decided to go to the UK and sell it,’ Miss Abbott said.

But David was caught carrying pot by Customs.

‘Some other guys turned up – he implied they were MI5 or MI6 – and they gave him an ultimatum: he’d get out of prison time if he set up the Stones.’

The British agents were in cahoots, he told Miss Abbott, with the FBI’s notorious Counterintelligence division, known as Cointelpro, which specialised in discrediting American groups deemed to be ‘subversive’.

On Christmas Day in 1969, ‘Jove’s’ new wife, Lotus, gave birth to a daughter, Lili. Their marriage lasted 18 years, though they never lived together.

‘I first met David when I returned to California from Bali, where I had gone searching for God,’ said James Weinstock, Lotus’s brother.

‘One New Year’s Eve, he showed me a gun and said he’d just killed a man who was messing with his car.’ Later he was rumoured to have murdered a TV personality, Peter Ivers, the presenter of a TV show that ‘Jove’ produced.

Miss Abbott said: ‘There was talk that Peter had decided to leave the show and David was angry. ‘I discovered “Jove” wasn’t David’s real name when he shot himself through his heel with his gun.

‘When we checked him into hospital, he used a made-up name and later I found out his real name was Sniderman.’

His first half-hearted admission was to Mr Weinstock: ‘He told me he was tight with the Rolling Stones in England, but had a falling-out with them,’ he said.

‘He was arrested for some serious offence, but managed to extricate himself, and he said it all looked very suspicious when the police busted the Rolling Stones. They froze him out after that.’

In 1985, Miss Abbott and an old friend, Marianne Faithfull, went out for dinner in Los Angeles.

Miss Abbott introduced her to ‘Jove’ – but Ms Faithfull soon told her she wanted to leave.

Miss Abbott says: ‘When we got into my car, she said, “It’s him, the Acid King. He set up the Redlands bust. Don’t ever see him again”. ’

Miss Abbott added: ‘Two months after the evening with Marianne, I finally had it out with him.
‘To my amazement, he told me everything. He said, “It’s a relief to be able to talk about it”. ’

…

By Sharon Churcher and Peter Sheridan
UPDATED: 13:46 GMT, 24 October 2010

Find this story at 24 October 2010

Published by Associated Newspapers Ltd

Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday & Metro Media Group
© Associated Newspapers Ltd

Secret police networks must be relentlessly exposed

“When police forces and intelligence services engage in international cooperation, parliamentary oversight is the loser. The increasing significance of undercover police networks is making this situation far more critical.” These comments were made by Bundestag Member Andrej Hunko in response to the Federal Government’s answer, which is now available in English (see below), to his Minor Interpellation.

The purpose of the interpellation, a written parliamentary question, was to heighten awareness of the following little-known police structures:

•    the Cross-Border Surveillance Working Group (CSW), comprising mobile task forces on surveillance techniques, drawn from 12 EU Member States and Europol;

•    Europol’s analysis work file entitled Dolphin, which entails the surveillance of left-wing activists in areas such as animal rights and anarchism;

•    the Remote Forensic Software User Group, which was created by the Bundeskriminalamt, the German Federal Criminal Police Office, to promote sales of German Trojan software abroad.

•    the European Cooperation Group on Undercover Activities (ECG), comprising spy chiefs from Member States of the EU and from countries such as Russia, Switzerland, Turkey and Ukraine;

•    the International Working Group on Undercover Policing (IWG), comprising spy chiefs from European countries as well as from countries such as the United States, Israel, New Zealand and Australia;

Mr Hunko went on to say:

“One of the main parts of the interpellation focused on the undercover activity of British police officer Mark Kennedy, whose infiltration of European leftist movements exemplifies police cooperation conducted beyond the bounds of parliamentary oversight. It remains unclear under whose orders the undercover investigator was operating during the years of his activity.

Kennedy used his infiltration of the Icelandic environmental movement to worm his way into leftist circles from Finland to Portugal through the information events he staged. The Icelandic police are stubbornly rejecting requests from the Minister of Justice to release full details of his activity into the public domain, claiming that disclosure would prejudice British security interests. Even though Members of the Icelandic Parliament have a right to ask questions on police matters, they are not being given any information.

The exposure of the British police officer, by contrast, has been the focus of deliberations in the European Cooperation Group on Undercover Activities (ECG), of which Iceland is not a member. The Federal Government has not revealed the substance of German and British contributions to this discussion. The remit of the ECG, which meets behind closed doors, includes the creation of false identities and the examination of legal frameworks in the countries that send and host undercover agents.

Foreign police officers must obtain authorisation before entering the territory of a sovereign state. They must not commit any criminal offences during their stay. Kennedy, however, sought to impress activists in Berlin by setting fire to a refuse container. Arrested by the police, he even concealed his true identity from the public prosecutor. This is illegal, as the Federal Government has indicated now.

Last year, Germany, together with Britain, urged the European Commission to exempt cross-border undercover activities from a planned new directive establishing a European Investigation Order. This would also make parliamentary oversight of such activities even more difficult.

The necessity of this parliamentary oversight is illustrated by the government use of software to hack into personal computers. In 2008, the German Federal Criminal Police Office established a cross-border Remote Forensic Software User Group with a view to helping police forces in other countries to introduce German spyware.

The Federal Criminal Police Office has also sent delegations to Canada, Israel, the United States and other countries to discuss Trojan programs with police forces and intelligence services. Although the German supreme court had imposed rigid limits in 2007 on the widespread practice of searching entire computer systems, representatives of the Criminal Police Office travelled to the United Kingdom and other destinations to ‘share experience’ on that practice.

Even in the national context it is difficult to detect illegal practices on the part of police forces and intelligence services. Securing judicial convictions for criminal offences is even harder. How much more, then, must the increasingly cross-border nature of police cooperation muddy these waters.

This is why the activity of undercover police networks must be relentlessly exposed. This applies especially to cooperation with the private business sector, which became just as blatant in the case of spyware as it had been in the criminalisation of animal-rights activism, to the benefit of British companies such as Gamma International, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca.

I call on the UK Government to disclose all information regarding the activity of Mark Kennedy in Germany and to inform all interested parties retrospectively of his activity. This is the only way in which key questions can be answered, such as whether he had sexual relations on false pretences with targets or contacts in Germany, as he did in the UK.

I must assume in any case that the use of British undercover agents to infiltrate left-wing movements was unlawful, because no police officer is allowed to spend years investigating activists in the absence of any specific grounds for suspicion or any other defined investigative objective.”

Download the answer to the parliamentary question concerning secretly operating international networks of police forces (in English): http://www.andrej-hunko.de/start/download/doc_download/236-concerning-secretly-operating-international-networks-of-police-forces

Download the answer in German (International im Verborgenen agierende Netzwerke von Polizeien): http://dipbt.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/17/098/1709844.pdf

Find this story at 22 August 2012 

 

Another secretive European police working group revealed as governments remain tight-lipped on other police networks and the activities of Mark Kennedy

Statewatch can reveal the existence of a previously unknown international police working group geared towards discussing and developing covert investigative techniques. At the same time parliamentary questions in Germany have seen further details of other police networks emerge – although many questions remain unanswered – in particular on the work and activities of former policy infiltrator Mark Kennedy.

Project ISLE

Recent research by Statewatch has led to the discovery of an EU-funded project known as ISLE (International Specialist Law Enforcement), a project initiated with the aim of building “a network of [EU] Member State organisations that may develop coordination, cooperation and mutual understanding amongst law enforcement agencies using ‘specialist techniques’.” [1]

Project ISLE has its origins in a “pilot seminar consisting of twenty-six ‘specialist technique’ practitioners” held in London in 2006, and was created to increase cooperation and coordination amongst EU law enforcement authorities utilising “specialist techniques”: “covert entry into premises or vehicles and the facilitation of covert searches of property, covert forensic capabilities and covertly installed technical devices.” [2]

In 2010, as part of its programme “Prevention of and Fight against Crime”, the EU awarded €115,614 for the project to the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA). SOCA is one of three main “project partners”, alongside Belgium’s Commissariaat-Generaal Special Units (CGSU), and Germany’s Bundeskriminalamt (BKA).

SOCA provides a project manager and administration, and as part of the steering group with the CGSU and BKA has a mandate to “create a larger Working Group” consisting of “full-time practitioners from organisations where their countries [sic] legislation supports ‘specialist techniques’.”

The “workgroup of practitioners” will:

– “Expand on existing partnerships and create new ones, including developing Member States, to promote and develop coordination, cooperation and mutual understanding of ‘specialist techniques'”;
– “Broaden the range of ‘specialist techniques’ by sharing knowledge on capability, identifying common standards and jointly developing new technologies”; and
– “Implement an agreed control strategy with shared responsibility and engagement in achieving a long-term program of activity toward the development of ‘specialist techniques'”

A document outlining the group’s terms of reference states that:

“Participants and their organisations must be prepared to promote and encourage international, inter-agency cooperation in ‘specialist techniques’ and contribute to the establishment of a long-term program.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, secrecy is clearly the order of the day:

“Organisations with diplomatic/political responsibilities may find it difficult to participate openly during information exchanges and due consideration should be given to their role in the project.”

Europol provides a secure database and communication channels in order to permit secure communication and information exchange between participants.

ISLE’s official starting date as an EU-funded project was 9 November 2009, with one document stating that the project “will take no more than 36 months, including three months for the production and submission of the final report.”

The group should currently be moving into the phase of producing this final report. The financing, participants, practices, and accountability of the group are currently the subject of further research.

One of many

Project ISLE is the latest addition to a growing list of publicly-known but highly secretive international police networks concerned with infiltration and surveillance. They include:

– The Cross-Border Surveillance Working Group, made up of “mobile task forces on surveillance techniques, drawn from 12 EU Member States and Europol”;
– The Remote Forensic Software User Group, created “to promote the sale of German Trojan software abroad”;
– The International Working Group on Undercover Policing (IWG), made up of “spy chiefs from European countries as well as from countries such as the US, Israel, New Zealand and Australia”; and
– The European Cooperation Group on Undercover Activities (ECG)

In May this year, the German MP for Die Linke, Andrej Hunko, received a lengthy response to a number of parliamentary questions that have now been translated into English. The answers to some of his questions reveal further details of these the composition and practices of these groups, although many of the government’s responses cite “reasons of confidentiality” for refusing public access to information. [3]

The Cross-Border Surveillance Working Group (CSW) first met in 2005, and its meetings have included representatives from thirteen states (Germany, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, the UK) and Europol, whose representative contributes “Europol’s technical perspective.”

The German government has refused to say on whose initiative the group first met and what “operative and tactical options” were raised by the German delegation at CSW meetings. It has also refused to disclose what contributions Europol has made to the group in the last five years. In nine of his thirteen questions about the CSW Hunko was told that for “reasons of confidentiality” the government could not make their answer publically available.

However, there is more transparency over meetings concerned with surveillance software used for telecommunications interception and the remote searching of individuals’ computers – products that German police forces have in the past used to “surveil people’s internet activity beyond what is allowed by the law.” [4]

Details are provided in the German government’s answers at ten different meetings held since 2008, with law enforcement agencies from a number of different states attending, including France, the Netherlands, Canada, the USA and Israel.

Their answers reveal that a meeting in October 2010 was devoted to discussion of the software package FinSpy, produced by the German company Gamma International. Assessment of the product by the BKA was “fundamentally positive” from a technical point of view and they “purchased a licence for the FinSpy software for a limited period of time for test purposes in early 2011.”

Gamma has also offered its products to the authorities of countries such as Oman, Turkmenistan, Egypt, and Bahrain, and in 2012 received a Big Brother Award for its willingness to cooperate with “government agencies of countries where human rights are respected to a far lesser degree than here in Germany.” [5]

In April, the European Parliament called for the introduction of strict rules on the export of tools that could be used to block websites and monitor communications, although no new legislation has yet been drafted. [6]

The German government’s answers also confirm that the International Working Group on Undercover Activities (IWG) was established in 1989, when the BKA joined. The German Customs Investigation Service (Zollkriminalamt) began participating in 2000. Once again, however, the government declined to answer the majority of questions publicly for “reasons of confidentiality.”

The European Cooperation Group on Undercover Activities was also the subject of a number of questions from Hunko, and the German government has stated the group was established for:

“The promotion of international cooperation by law enforcement agencies at the European level with respect to the deployment of undercover investigators to combat organised crime.”

It is unclear why the “covert deployment of the British police officer Mark Kennedy” was discussed at the group’s meeting in 2011, considering its apparent concern with organised crime. Despite seven years undercover, there is no clear evidence that his work succeeded in preventing or exposing any specific incidents that would amount to serious or organised crime.

Global infiltration

Kennedy was exposed as a police spy following the collapse of a prosecution against environmental activists in the UK in early 2011, sparking a public outcry and the subsequent outing of a number of other infiltrators in protest movements. [7]

Whilst deployed undercover, Kennedy visited “11 countries on more than 40 occasions,” feeding back information to the UK’s National Public Order Intelligence Unit (now the National Domestic Extremism Unit) and subsequently police intelligence units from other countries. [8]

Outside of the UK and Northern Ireland, he visited the Republic of Ireland, Germany, Spain, Denmark, the USA, Poland, France, Italy, and Iceland, and according to the ruling of the UK Court of Appeal in the case that finally led to him being exposed, “Kennedy was involved in activities which went much further than the authorisation he was given,” and was “arguably, an agent provocateur.” [9]

Oversight and accountability

Despite fairly detailed knowledge of some of Kennedy’s movements and activities [10] national parliaments are still being denied information on his work, as noted by Andrej Hunko:

“The Icelandic police are stubbornly rejecting requests from the Minister of Justice to release full details of his activity into the public domain, claiming that disclosure would prejudice British security interests. Even though Members of the Iceland Parliament have a right to ask questions on police matters, they are not being given any information.”

Invoking “British security interests” would seem to suggest that there is clearly still much more information on the deployment by British authorities of police infiltrators overseas to come to light.

A report published earlier this year by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary on “national police units which provide intelligence on criminality associated with protest” was condemned by one police monitoring group, Fitwatch, as “a farce” that “fails to address any of the concerns addressed by activists.” [11]

Those concerns include the matter of sexual relations between infiltrators and activists, an issue also raised by Hunko, who has called for the British government to:

“Disclose all information regarding the activity of Mark Kennedy in Germany and to inform all interested parties retrospectively of his activity. This is the only way in which key questions can be answered, such as whether he had sexual relations on false pretences with targets or contacts in Germany, as he did in the UK.”

Numerous examples of infiltrators entering relationships with activists have come to light, and eight women are currently engaged in a lawsuit against the Metropolitan Police alleging that they “were deceived into having long term intimate relationships with undercover police officers.” [12]

Yet despite one chief police officer stating that it would be “morally wrong” and “grossly unprofessional” for infiltrators to sleep with activists, the UK’s policing minister, Nick Herbert, has endorsed the practice, saying that a ban: “would provide a ready-made test for the targeted criminal group to find out whether an undercover officer was deployed among them.” [13]

Kennedy is now reported to be working for the Densus Group, “a US company that targets anti-capitalist demonstrators” run by Sam Rosenfeld, a “former British Army officer who toured Northern Ireland.” Kennedy “provides ‘risk and threat assessments’ to companies that suspect they might fall victim to ‘direct action’,” according to London’s Evening Standard [14] in an article seemingly based largely on reports originally posted on Indymedia UK. [15]

It remains unclear whether the full details of what happened during Kennedy’s seven years of undercover work will ever come to light or be comprehensively addressed by the authorities. As admitted by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary: “no single authorising officer appears to have been fully aware either of the complete intelligence picture in relation to Mark Kennedy or the NPOIU’s activities overall,” and “the full extent of his activity remains unknown.” [16]

Information currently in the public domain makes up only a small piece of a global puzzle of police working groups and networks dealing with infiltration, intrusion and surveillance not just of criminal groups, but political activists.

That there is a pan-European effort to collect and collate information and intelligence on left-wing activists is clear from the existence of Europol’s Analysis Working File Dolphin, which contains information on the No Borders network and “attacks against railway transports,” taken by some to cover either protests against trains carrying nuclear waste, or the No TAV (Treno Alta Velocità) movement in Italy that opposes the construction of a high-speed railway line. [17]

The legal implications of the deployment of undercover officers and intrusive surveillance techniques are significant, as is their impact on individuals. According to Hunko, the internationalisation of police work means that “parliamentary oversight is the loser.” He has called for secret international police networks to be “relentlessly exposed”, stating that:

“Even in the national context it is difficult to detect illegal practices on the part of police forces and intelligence services. Securing judicial convictions for criminal offences is even harder. How much more, then, must the increasingly cross-border nature of police cooperation muddy these waters?” [18]

Note: This article was amended on 28 August 2012 to show the correct amount of money awarded by the EU to SOCA. This was originally published as being €70,000.

Sources
[1] ‘International Specialist Law Enforcement’, Document 1, 2009
[2] ‘International Specialist Law Enforcement’, Document 2, 2009
[3] German Bundestag, ‘Answer of the Federal Government to the Minor Interpellation tabled by the Members of the Bundestag Andrej Hunko, Jan Korte, Christine Buchholz, other Members of the Bundestag and the Left Party parliamentary group’, 31 May 2012, in English and in German
[4] Statewatch Analysis: ‘State Trojans: Germany exports “spyware with a badge”‘ by Kees Hudig, March 2012
[5] ‘Category Technology’, Big Brother Awards, April 2012; Vernon Silver, ‘Cyber attacks on activists traced to FinFisher spyware of Gamma’, Bloomberg, 25 July 2012
[6] ‘Parliament wants EU rules for firms exporting internet censorship tools’, European Parliament, 18 April 2012
[7] Paul Lewis, Matthew Taylor and Rajeev Syal, ‘Third undercover police spy unmasked as scale of network emerges’, The Guardian, 15 January 2011
[8] HMIC, ‘A review of national police units which provide intelligence on criminality associated with protest’, February 2012; Statewatch Analysis: ‘Using false documents against “Euro-anarchists”: the exchange of Anglo-German undercover police highlights controversial police operations’, June 2012; ‘Mark Kennedy: A mole in Tarnac’, Monitoring European Police!, 17 April 2012
[9] Eveline Lubbers, ‘HMIC’s ‘empty’ review leaves little hope for robust scrutiny of undercover cops’, SpinWatch, 28 March 2012
[10] ‘Mark Kennedy: A chronology of his activities’, PowerBase
[11] HMIC, ‘A review of national police units which provide intelligence on criminality associated with protest’; ‘HMIC report into domestic extremism – disgusting and farcical’, Netpol, 2 February 2012
[12] Rob Evans, ‘Women start legal action against police chiefs over emotional trauma – their statement’, The Guardian, 16 December 2011
[13] Tom Whitehead, ‘Undercover police not banned from sleeping with targets’, The Telegraph, 2 February 2012; Martin Beckford, ‘Undercover police must be allowed to have sex with activists’, The Telegraph, 14 June 2012
[14] Tom Harper, ‘EXCLUSIVE: Undercover detective in eco trial fiasco now works for US firm that spies on activists’, London Evening Standard, 21 June 2012
[15] ‘Ex-police spy Mark Kennedy’s current business activities’, Indymedia UK, 1 June 2012
[16] ‘A review of national police units which provide intelligence on criminality associated with protest’, p.24
[17] Andrej Hunko, ‘Abolish international databases on anarchy!’, 5 June 2012; ‘Europol boosts its reach, scope and information-gathering’, Statewatch News Online, 1 June 2012
[18] Andrej Hunko, ‘Secret police networks must be relentlessly exposed’, 22 August 2012

 

Find this story at 28 August 2012

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Politie ronselde opnieuw journalist

AMSTERDAM – Eind juli is een journaliste benaderd door ’twee personen die zich bekendmaakten als agenten’, die haar vroegen om tegen betaling foto’s te maken voor de politie.

Daarvan heeft de Nederlandse Vereniging van Fotojournalisten (NVF) dinsdagavond melding gemaakt.

De 26-jarige studente/fotojournaliste werd op haar privéadres benaderd door twee agenten die zich bekendmaakten als politie. Ze zeiden haar foto’s op Facebook te hebben gezien.

De journaliste gaf ondanks herhaaldelijk verzoek te kennen niet te willen meewerken. Ze voelde zich geïntimideerd, toen de agenten maar bleven aandringen.

 

AIVD

Ze maakt regelmatig foto’s in de kraakscéne. Enkele weken eerder was haar camera gestolen. In het onderzoek daarnaar had de politie Amsterdam de geheugenkaart bekeken om strafrechtelijk materiaal te verzamelen, bevestigt een woordvoerder van de politie aan de NVF.

Maar de politie Amsterdam weet niets van het voorval, het bezoek staat daar niet geregistreerd. De woordvoerder denkt dat het ‘andere mensen’ zijn geweest.

De NVF heeft de AIVD benaderd, maar die kunnen niks over dit specifieke voorval zeggen. Wel laat een woordvoerster aan de NVF weten dat de AIVD ‘geen politie’ is.

 

Geen verlengstuk

De NVF is onderdeel van de Nederlandse Vereniging van Journalisten (NVJ), die eerder al te kennen gaf het ronselen van journalisten sterk te veroordelen. “Journalisten zijn geen verlengstuk van justitie.”

NVJ-secretaris Rosa García López van de sectie NVF geeft toe dat de agenten strikt juridisch ‘niets illegaals’ hebben gedaan. “Het enige dat we nu kunnen doen is het signaleren en hopen dat er een waarschuwing van de NVJ vanuit gaat”, zegt ze tegen NU.nl. “Daarom hopen we dat meer journalisten bij wie dit gebeurd is zich melden.”

 

Peking

In juni werd bekend dat de AIVD tijdens de Olympische Spelen in Peking in 2008 sportjournalisten zou hebben benaderd tegen betaling foto’s te maken van Chinese officials.

…

 

Find this story at 22 August 2012

 

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Interior Ministry Ordered Destruction of Intelligence Files

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has admitted to destroying even more files relating to the right-wing extremist scene — this time on orders from the Interior Ministry in Berlin. The ministry denies the files contained any clues about the murderous National Socialist Underground trio.

Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), the country’s domestic intelligence agency, has admitted to destroying additional files related to investigations on the right-wing extremist scene. A new agency report discloses that six files from secret wiretapping operations were destroyed in response to a Nov. 14, 2011 order from the Federal Interior Ministry in Berlin. The order came just days after revelations that the right-wing terror cell known as the National Socialist Underground (NSU) was responsible for the murders of nine small businessmen of Turkish and Greek origin.

The new incident once again exposes the seemingly chaotic state of the investigation into the murderous right-wing trio. For weeks, the BfV has been under public scrutiny after it became known that a senior agency official had shredded several files on his own initiative relating to informants in the right-wing scene just days after the NSU cell was discovered. The episode, referred to in the German press as the “Confetti Affair,” has cost agency head Heinz Fromm his job.

The BfV says that the two incidents are unrelated and that the deleted files were of no great importance. According to three agency reports, all of which have been obtained by SPIEGEL ONLINE, none of the lost data contained information relating to the NSU trio. The reports say that the files concerned separate investigations into the right-wing scene. Still, the admission and the timing of the deletions are likely to raise new questions about the agency’s professionalism and the effectiveness of its leaders.

Germany’s Interior Ministry, which oversees the BfV, claims that the destructions of the files were routine and justified the act as being in adherence to rules governing the length of time that surveillance files are allowed to be kept. That the files were destroyed so soon after the NSU trio was uncovered, the Ministry says, is mere coincidence — a claim seemingly substantiated by the fact that the Interior Ministry informed the parliamentary committee investigating the Confetti Affair about the deletions of its own accord at the beginning of this week.

Deepest Crisis in its History

The new agency reports are to be discussed at a special session of the parliamentary committee on Thursday morning. Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich is scheduled to brief the committee on the destroyed files. Friedrich repeated on Wednesday his commitment to an extensive investigation into the BfV’s handling of the right-wing terror case. Months of revelations uncovering serious BfV errors during its investigation of the murder spree — which lasted from 2000 to 2007 — have plunged the agency into the deepest crisis in its history.

According to agency documents, the destroyed files related to six surveillance operations in the right-wing scene. One had to do with the formation of a right-wing group to target political opponents in the eastern state of Brandenburg. Another focused on a separate group established to distribute right-wing propaganda. And still another related to a possible presentation by right-wing extremist talking head Horst Mahler, who planned to read from a manifesto at the former concentration camp in Auschwitz in the summer of 2003. The NSU trio did not play a part in any of the surveillance operations.

BfV research also sheds light on the circumstances surrounding last week’s sudden resignation of Reinhard Boos, head of domestic intelligence in the eastern state of Saxony. Boos had asked to be replaced by August 1 after it emerged that transcripts of telephone conversations within the right-wing scene wiretapped by his agency in 1998 had recently come to light. The transcripts put enormous pressure on Boos, who had previously guaranteed Saxony’s state parliament that the responsible state investigative committee had been provided with all relevant documents.

The documents in Saxony include 163 pages of transcripts from BfV wiretaps of conversations between suspected members of the neo-Nazi rock bank “Landser,” the first band to ever be classified as a criminal organization by Germany’s Federal Court of Justice. The conversations were recorded between June 1998 and April 1999. But, for six months, surveillance activities also focused on Jan W., who was briefly suspected of having provided the terror trio with weapons. However, BfV officials said that they hadn’t found any evidence pointing toward involvement with the NSU and that they were only able to determine that W. had been selling outlawed Landser CDs.

Increasingly Embarrassing

As part of their eavesdropping operations, investigators were interested in gathering information on the underground NSU trio, which would later go on its murder spree across Germany. After receiving an informant’s tip from their intelligence colleagues in the state of Brandenburg that Jan W., a Chemnitz-based neo-Nazi, might be in contact with the three extremists who had slipped off the radar, officials in Saxony decided they wanted to eavesdrop on W. as well.

Then, however, they learned from BfV officials that W. was already under surveillance because of his affiliation with Landser as part of an operation known as “AO 774.” Federal officials supplied their colleagues in Saxony with several transcripts of their eavesdropping activities.

For intelligence officials, investigations into the files have become increasingly embarrassing. The documents make clear just how chaotic the situation related to purging and exchanging files had become. This has resulted, for example, in discrepancies between the list of files that BfV officials sent to Saxony and the list of those that have now turned up there.

These new reports might very well lead the parliamentarians on the investigative committee to wonder whether additional files with possible relevance to the NSU trio have also been destroyed. One list itemizing the deleted files indicates that a comparatively large number of dossiers related to right-wing extremism were destroyed after the terror cell had resurfaced. The itemization says that there were seven cases of document destruction in November 2011, 12 for December and seven more in early 2012.

…

Find this story at 19 July 2012

07/19/2012 12:14 PM
Neo-Nazi Terror

By Matthias Gebauer

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2012
All Rights Reserved
Reproduction only allowed with the permission of SPIEGELnet GmbH

Stasi spy pastor leaves church in disgrace

A pastor admitted in a newspaper interview Wednesday to spying for East Germany’s Stasi secret police for 20 years and said he was leaving his ministry with the Lutheran Church of Sweden.

“I renounce my ministry,” Aleksander Radler, 68, told Swedish daily Dagen. “My work for God, on the one hand, and the dark memories, on the other, are of course incompatible with the Christian message.”

Radler, an Austrian, arrived in Sweden in the late 1960s after studying theology in East Germany, where he says he was recruited by the Stasi.

His confession comes six days after a lawyer for a Lutheran parish said a church investigation had found Radler was a Stasi agent. The probe found that Radler had, among other things, denounced students planning to escape from East Germany in 1968.

The investigation followed a 2011 book on the Stasi by Swedish researcher Birgitta Almgren that named Radler as an agent.

Dagen reported that the church had obtained East German archives that named Radler as an “elite spy”, the highest rank given to Stasi informers working abroad.

“I should have listened to my internal moral compass and broken my ties with the forces of destruction, even if the social and academic cost would have been high,” Radler said.

“Instead, I let the collaboration continue until the end of the 1980s.”

…

Find this story at 2 August 2012

AFP/jcw

Russian Spy Ring Aimed to Make Children Agents

A Russian spy ring busted in the U.S. two years ago planned to recruit members’ children to become agents, and one had already agreed to his parents’ request, according to current and former U.S. officials.

When the suspects were arrested in 2010 with much fanfare, official accounts suggested they were largely ineffectual. New details about their time in the U.S., however, suggest their work was more sophisticated and sometimes more successful than previously known.

One of them infiltrated a well-connected consulting firm with offices in Manhattan and Washington, D.C., by working as the company’s in-house computer expert, according to people familiar with the long-running U.S. investigation of the spy ring.

The effort to bring children into the family business suggests the ring was thinking long term: Children born or reared in America were potentially more valuable espionage assets than their parents because when they grew up they would be more likely to pass a U.S. government background check.
Cast of Characters in Russian Spy Ring

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A spokesman at the Russian embassy in Washington declined to comment. Officials in Moscow have previously acknowledged the spy ring but haven’t commented further. All the captured suspects eventually pleaded guilty to acting as secret agents for the Russian government.

Tim Foley was among the children most extensively groomed for a future spy career, officials say. Though he wasn’t American-born, his parents lived in the U.S. for more than a decade, under the assumed names Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley. Mr. Foley was 20 when his parents were arrested and had just finished his sophomore year at George Washington University in the nation’s capital.

His parents revealed their double life to him well before their arrest, according to current and former officials, whose knowledge of the discussion was based on surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that included bugging suspects’ homes. The officials said the parents also told their son they wanted him to follow in their footsteps.

He agreed, said the officials. At the end of the discussion with his parents, according to one person familiar with the surveillance, the young man stood up and saluted “Mother Russia.” He also agreed to travel to Russia to begin formal espionage training, officials said.

Officials wouldn’t say where or when the conversation between Mr. Foley and his parents took place or whether he made it to Russia before the spy group was arrested, though they said he eventually went there. Many details of the investigation remain classified.

Peter Krupp, a Boston lawyer, provided a statement from Tim Foley’s parents calling the U.S. officials’ accounts “crap.” The lawyer said it would have been too risky for the parents to reveal the operation to their son.

Mr. Krupp said that since the summer of the spy roundup, Mr. Foley—who wasn’t accused of any wrongdoing—has tried to return to the U.S., but unspecified obstacles have prevented him from doing so, and he remains in Russia. Efforts to find him there were unsuccessful. A lawyer who represented Mr. Foley’s mother during the U.S. case didn’t return calls seeking comment.

Based on their extensive surveillance of the secret agents and their messages to handlers back in Moscow, U.S. counterintelligence officials believe the grooming of Mr. Foley was part of a long-term goal for some of the group’s children to become spies when they got older.

At the time of their arrests, the spies had seven children ranging in age from 1 to 20, most U.S.-born, and one agent also had an older son from a relationship before she joined the espionage network. Anna Chapman, the spy who garnered the most attention because of her glamorous looks, didn’t have children.

Though U.S. officials believe the ring planned to recruit some members’ children, not every child was set along this path. One child, a teenager, was allowed to stay in the U.S. after his parents were arrested, and officials said the son isn’t viewed as a risk to national security. His father, who went by the name Juan Lazaro, wanted his son to become a concert pianist, according to a former colleague of the father. A lawyer for the family declined to comment.

Most members of the ring were what are known in espionage parlance as “illegals”—agents who go to a country using a false identity and without official cover such as a diplomatic position. If caught, illegals have to assume their home country won’t come to their rescue.

Ring members were trained agents of the SVR, a successor agency to the KGB, according to court documents filed by federal prosecutors in New York. U.S. authorities say they worked under the direction of SVR headquarters, known in the West as “Moscow Center.”

Besides the plans to recruit children, the new details about the spy ring show more about what its members were up to.

U.S. officials say one of them, Richard Murphy—whose real name was Vladimir Guryev—worked for several years as the in-house computer technician at a U.S. consultancy called the G7 Group, which advised clients on how government decisions might affect global markets. The firm’s experts included its chief executive, Jane Hartley, an active Democratic fundraiser, and Alan Blinder, a former Federal Reserve vice chairman.

The infiltration is further evidence the spying focused on economic secrets as well as military and political information.

Mr. Murphy came to the G7 Group through a temporary-help agency in the early 2000s and stayed about three years, according to Ms. Hartley, who said she eventually concluded he didn’t have the technical sophistication the firm required. She said she didn’t believe he used his position to steal information.

Mr. Blinder said he didn’t believe he knew or even had heard of Mr. Murphy. “My reaction, of course, is surprise. The G7 Group wasn’t the sort of place a Russian spy would find interesting,” said Mr. Blinder, who is a professor at Princeton University.

A lawyer who represented Mr. Murphy after his arrest said she wasn’t aware he had worked for a firm in Manhattan. After Mr. Murphy left the G7 Group, Ms. Hartley sold it, and many of its principals later reformed under a different name.

The spies’ false identities, also called “legends,” were good enough for them to get jobs and mortgages and start families in America, but they weren’t airtight. A background check for a job with the U.S. government or a government contractor might have exposed them. The spies were careful not to try to get too close to the heart of U.S. government, according to interviews and court documents.

Mr. Murphy spoke with an accent and didn’t socialize well with his co-workers, according to Ms. Hartley. Difficulties he had blending in at the G7 Group underscore the value agents’ children might have had to Moscow, being fully Americanized with flawless English.

One purpose of having such agents in the U.S. was to act as go-betweens for other operatives who might have been more closely monitored by U.S. counterintelligence, the current and former U.S. officials said.

“There was much more to this than just trying to make friends with important people,” said one official. “This was a very long-term operation.”

After the parents were arrested, the children became an important part of the negotiations between the Russian and U.S. governments.

The admitted secret agents were eventually flown to Austria, where, in a scene reminiscent of a Cold War spy drama, they were swapped on a Vienna airport tarmac for four men who had been imprisoned in Russia, most on charges of spying for the West.

Write to Devlin Barrett at devlin.barrett@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications
Peter Krupp, a lawyer for Russian spy known as Donald Heathfield, was relaying a statement from Mr. Heathfield and his wife on U.S. allegations that they had intended to recruit their son into the spy ring. An earlier version of this article attributed the statement that such allegations were “crap” directly to Mr. Krupp.

A Russian spy ring busted in the U.S. two years ago planned to recruit members’ children to become agents, and one had already agreed to his parents’ request, according to current and former U.S. officials.

When the suspects were arrested in 2010 with much fanfare, official accounts suggested they were largely ineffectual. New details about their time in the U.S., however, suggest their work was more sophisticated and sometimes more successful than previously known.

One of them infiltrated a well-connected consulting firm with offices in Manhattan and Washington, D.C., by working as the company’s in-house computer expert, according to people familiar with the long-running U.S. investigation of the spy ring.

The effort to bring children into the family business suggests the ring was thinking long term: Children born or reared in America were potentially more valuable espionage assets than their parents because when they grew up they would be more likely to pass a U.S. government background check.

A spokesman at the Russian embassy in Washington declined to comment. Officials in Moscow have previously acknowledged the spy ring but haven’t commented further. All the captured suspects eventually pleaded guilty to acting as secret agents for the Russian government.

Tim Foley was among the children most extensively groomed for a future spy career, officials say. Though he wasn’t American-born, his parents lived in the U.S. for more than a decade, under the assumed names Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley. Mr. Foley was 20 when his parents were arrested and had just finished his sophomore year at George Washington University in the nation’s capital.

His parents revealed their double life to him well before their arrest, according to current and former officials, whose knowledge of the discussion was based on surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that included bugging suspects’ homes. The officials said the parents also told their son they wanted him to follow in their footsteps.

He agreed, said the officials. At the end of the discussion with his parents, according to one person familiar with the surveillance, the young man stood up and saluted “Mother Russia.” He also agreed to travel to Russia to begin formal espionage training, officials said.

Officials wouldn’t say where or when the conversation between Mr. Foley and his parents took place or whether he made it to Russia before the spy group was arrested, though they said he eventually went there. Many details of the investigation remain classified.

Peter Krupp, a Boston lawyer, provided a statement from Tim Foley’s parents calling the U.S. officials’ accounts “crap.” The lawyer said it would have been too risky for the parents to reveal the operation to their son.

Mr. Krupp said that since the summer of the spy roundup, Mr. Foley—who wasn’t accused of any wrongdoing—has tried to return to the U.S., but unspecified obstacles have prevented him from doing so, and he remains in Russia. Efforts to find him there were unsuccessful. A lawyer who represented Mr. Foley’s mother during the U.S. case didn’t return calls seeking comment.

Based on their extensive surveillance of the secret agents and their messages to handlers back in Moscow, U.S. counterintelligence officials believe the grooming of Mr. Foley was part of a long-term goal for some of the group’s children to become spies when they got older.

At the time of their arrests, the spies had seven children ranging in age from 1 to 20, most U.S.-born, and one agent also had an older son from a relationship before she joined the espionage network. Anna Chapman, the spy who garnered the most attention because of her glamorous looks, didn’t have children.

Though U.S. officials believe the ring planned to recruit some members’ children, not every child was set along this path. One child, a teenager, was allowed to stay in the U.S. after his parents were arrested, and officials said the son isn’t viewed as a risk to national security. His father, who went by the name Juan Lazaro, wanted his son to become a concert pianist, according to a former colleague of the father. A lawyer for the family declined to comment.

Most members of the ring were what are known in espionage parlance as “illegals”—agents who go to a country using a false identity and without official cover such as a diplomatic position. If caught, illegals have to assume their home country won’t come to their rescue.

Ring members were trained agents of the SVR, a successor agency to the KGB, according to court documents filed by federal prosecutors in New York. U.S. authorities say they worked under the direction of SVR headquarters, known in the West as “Moscow Center.”

Besides the plans to recruit children, the new details about the spy ring show more about what its members were up to.

U.S. officials say one of them, Richard Murphy—whose real name was Vladimir Guryev—worked for several years as the in-house computer technician at a U.S. consultancy called the G7 Group, which advised clients on how government decisions might affect global markets. The firm’s experts included its chief executive, Jane Hartley, an active Democratic fundraiser, and Alan Blinder, a former Federal Reserve vice chairman.

The infiltration is further evidence the spying focused on economic secrets as well as military and political information.

Mr. Murphy came to the G7 Group through a temporary-help agency in the early 2000s and stayed about three years, according to Ms. Hartley, who said she eventually concluded he didn’t have the technical sophistication the firm required. She said she didn’t believe he used his position to steal information.

Mr. Blinder said he didn’t believe he knew or even had heard of Mr. Murphy. “My reaction, of course, is surprise. The G7 Group wasn’t the sort of place a Russian spy would find interesting,” said Mr. Blinder, who is a professor at Princeton University.

A lawyer who represented Mr. Murphy after his arrest said she wasn’t aware he had worked for a firm in Manhattan. After Mr. Murphy left the G7 Group, Ms. Hartley sold it, and many of its principals later reformed under a different name.

The spies’ false identities, also called “legends,” were good enough for them to get jobs and mortgages and start families in America, but they weren’t airtight. A background check for a job with the U.S. government or a government contractor might have exposed them. The spies were careful not to try to get too close to the heart of U.S. government, according to interviews and court documents.

…

Find this story at 26 July 2012

Write to Devlin Barrett at devlin.barrett@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications
Peter Krupp, a lawyer for Russian spy known as Donald Heathfield, was relaying a statement from Mr. Heathfield and his wife on U.S. allegations that they had intended to recruit their son into the spy ring. An earlier version of this article attributed the statement that such allegations were “crap” directly to Mr. Krupp.

Copyright ©2012 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Why a Young American Wants to Be a Russian Spy

The notion that several children of the sleeper spies arrested in 2010 in the United States were groomed by Russian authorities to become foreign spies as adults is more evidence of the absurdity of the whole operation.

Tim Foley, 20, is the eldest son of Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley, whose real names are Andrei Bezrukov and Yelena Vavilova. Tim became a problem for U.S. authorities from the outset of the spy scandal. He had already finished his sophomore year at George Washington University when his parents were arrested by U.S. authorities. Following the deportation of the Russian agents from the United States, Foley informed the university that he still planned to continue his studies there. But since Foley reportedly knew sensitive details about his parents’ activities, Russian authorities have not allowed him to return to the United States.

On July 31, The Wall Street Journal reported that the FBI had determined Tim Foley’s desire to serve Russia’s intelligence services after bugging the Foleys’ home. According to FBI officials, Tim’s parents told their son they wanted him to follow in their footsteps, after which Tim stood up and swore allegiance to “Mother Russia,” the Journal said.

As a result of this article, many journalists concluded that the Russian spies could have posed a greater threat to U.S. national security than was thought two years ago because their children grew up in that country and could better integrate into American life and one day infiltrate U.S. government agencies.

In 2010, the United States and Russia interpreted the spy scandal differently. Washington saw it as proof of the failure and backwardness of Russian intelligence, while Moscow claimed it was a proud achievement that it could infiltrate U.S. society. Russian leaders believed the Foreign Intelligence Service had finally restored the prestigious status that it lost after the end of the Cold War.

At the time, I explained to U.S. journalists that Russia’s secret operation was a complete failure. After all, the spies had been working undercover for years and had failed to obtain a single government secret. What’s more, the Russian side considered the operation a success only because the agents had managed to initially fool U.S. authorities with fake passports. But the agents did absolutely nothing of importance while in the United States, so their accomplishment of securing fake passports was negligible at best.

This notion that a spy operation is successful by simply establishing a physical presence in a foreign country was inherited by the Foreign Intelligence Service from its predecessor, the KGB. It is worth noting that the Foreign Intelligence Service is the only intelligence agency in Russia that was not subjected to post-Soviet reforms. It was simply spun off into a separate agency after the Soviet collapse. As a result, the agency kept all of the outdated traditions and practices of the KGB without understanding that they have no relevance to today’s environment.

One of the largest anachronisms of this Soviet legacy was the practice of sending Russian citizens to live in the West undercover. This emerged in the late 1940s when new secret agents were needed to replace a decreasing supply of Communist sympathizers in the West. In reality, the practice of using Communist sympathizers was never really successful anyway because they did not have professional intelligence backgrounds, nor did they have the social connections needed to secure sensitive government posts. Faced with a shortage of foreign agents, Russian intelligence came up with the idea of sending sleeper agents that Moscow hoped would be able to strike from within Western society at the needed moment — that is, if the Cold War turned hot.

Why has this outdated practice continued in Russia when almost every other country gave it up many years ago?

One of the biggest problems is that the Foreign Intelligence Service answers directly to President Vladimir Putin, not to the parliament or the public. It was therefore a relatively easy task to convince Putin of the wisdom of continuing the old tradition of supporting sleeper agents in foreign countries. What’s more, the opportunity to plant Russian agents in the United States appealed to Putin’s ongoing desire to outdo Russia’s former Cold War enemy any way he could. Still stuck in the past, Putin views this superpower rivalry much in the same way he wants Russian athletes to get more medals than the Americans at the Olympic Games.

…

Find this story at 08 August 2012

Andrei Soldatov is an intelligence analyst at Agentura.ru and co-author of “The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State” and “The Enduring Legacy of the KGB.”
© Copyright 2012. The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.

Rücktritt von Verfassungsschutzchef: Sachsens rätselhafte Geheimakten

 

Sieben Monate lang hortete das sächsische Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz Geheimakten – ohne dass ein Verantwortlicher davon erfuhr. Das hat jetzt den Präsidenten der Behörde, Reinhard Boos, zum Rücktritt gezwungen. Er ist der dritte hochrangige Verfassungsschützer, den die NSU-Affäre das Amt kostet.

Seine Ladung für eine Anhörung im Untersuchungsausschuss des Sächsischen Landtags zum “Nationalsozialistischen Untergrund” (NSU) war längst beantragt: Jetzt gewinnt der für September geplante Auftritt von Reinhard Boos vor dem Gremium besondere Brisanz. Sachsens Innenminister Markus Ulbig (CDU) gab am Mittwoch vor dem Landtag in Dresden bekannt, dass Boos um 23 Uhr am Abend zuvor von seinem Amt des Präsidenten des sächsischen Landesamtes für Verfassungsschutz (LfV) zurückgetreten sei.

Es ist der dritte Rücktritt eines Verfassungsschutzchefs im Zusammenhang mit dem Neonazi-Terror: Zuvor musste Heinz Fromm, Präsident des Bundesamtes für Verfassungsschutz, gehen. Thüringen schickte seinen Verfassungsschutzchef Thomas Sippel in den vorläufigen Ruhestand. Nordrhein-Westfalens Verfassungsschutzchefin Mathilde Koller hatte aus persönlichen Gründen, wie sie sagte, um ihre Versetzung in den Ruhestand gebeten.

Es gehe um eklatantes Fehlverhalten einzelner Mitarbeiter des sächsischen Verfassungsschutzes, sagte Ulbig. Und um einen “überaus peinlichen Vorgang”, wie es die SPD-Innenexpertin Sabine Friedel formulierte.

Seit sieben Monaten läuft die Aufklärung eines beispiellosen Verbrechens in Deutschland – rechtsextremistische Terroristen haben zehn Menschen getötet – und der Verfassungsschutz in Dresden hortete offenbar Geheimakten, die für die Aufklärung dringend notwendig sein können.

Erst jetzt seien Protokolle des Bundesamtes für Verfassungsschutz zu einer Überwachung von Ende 1998 aufgetaucht, sagte Ulbig – Unterlagen zum rechtsterroristischen NSU-Komplex also, die längst als verloren galten und nicht in die parlamentarische Kontrolle miteinbezogen wurden. Es geht um Protokolle einer Telefonüberwachung, die das Landesamt im Auftrag des Bundesamtes angefertigt hat. Gerüchten zufolge soll es sich um Akten handeln, die das Bundesamt bereits geschreddert hat.

Was genau in den Protokollen festgehalten wurde, ist noch unklar. Die Telefonüberwachung selbst sei zwar in Berichten an die Parlamentarische Kontrollkommission (PKK) Sachsens berücksichtigt worden. Neu sei aber, dass im Landesamt noch Protokolle dieser Überwachung existierten, hieß es.

Welche Brisanz haben die Akten? “Schwer zu sagen – immerhin lösen sie den Rücktritt des Präsidenten aus”, sagt Kerstin Köditz, Landtagsabgeordnete der Linken. Man könnte meinen, der Fund der Akten sei positiv: Die aufgetauchten Informationen könnten die Arbeit der Untersuchungsausschüsse und die NSU-Ermittlungen insgesamt voranbringen. Wäre dies der Fall, bleibt die Frage, warum Boos dennoch umgehend zurücktrat. Nur weil seine Behörde Unterlagen zurückhielt? Unter Abgeordneten hält sich der Verdacht, es könnten noch größere Versäumnisse dahinterstecken.

Gegen Mitarbeiter des sächsischen Verfassungsschutzes seien unverzüglich disziplinarische Schritte eingeleitet worden, sagte Ulbig, der wiederholt beteuert hatte, dass Sachsen alle Dokumente veröffentlicht habe.

Bauernopfer Boos

Somit kann man Boos auch als Bauernopfer sehen. Dieser bedaure diesen Vorfall zutiefst und sei tief enttäuscht, berichtete der Minister. Unter diesen Umständen könne er das Amt nicht mehr mit dem gebotenen Vertrauen weiter führen, habe Boos ihm gesagt. Ulbig betonte aber, dass Boos als Präsident des LfV die Aufklärung zum Fallkomplex NSU “von Beginn an unterstützt und sein Ehrenwort für eine umfassende Aufklärung” gegeben habe.

Boos, 55, geboren in Iserlohn, ist seit August 1992 in Sachsen im Öffentlichen Dienst. Von 1999 bis 2002 war er schon einmal Präsident des sächsischen Verfassungsschutzes, wechselte dann ins Dresdner Innenministerium, 2007 kehrte er als Präsident des LfV zurück. Vor wenigen Wochen hatte er einem Journalisten auf die Frage, ob er sich nach den Abgängen seiner Amtskollegen im Bund und in Thüringen einsam fühle, geantwortet: “Wie ich mich fühle? Wunderbar.”

Anfang Juli – mitten in der Debatte um das Versagen deutscher Sicherheitsbehörden im Fall des NSU-Terrortrios – hatte sich Innenminister Ulbig bei der Präsentation des Jahresberichts 2011 noch hinter seinen Verfassungsschutzchef gestellt – und erneut dem Verfassungsschutz des Nachbarlandes Thüringen die Schuld in die Schuhe geschoben. Dieser habe bei der Zielfahndung nach den Rechtsterroristen die Federführung innegehabt, nicht die Sachsen. Den einzigen Vorwurf, den Ulbig damals gelten ließ: Man habe sich auf die Kollegen verlassen – und das leider unkritisch.

Immer wieder hatte Boos beteuert, dass seine Behörde keine Erkenntnisse im Ermittlungsverfahren gegen die Zwickauer Terrorzelle zurückgehalten habe, alle Anfragen des Bundeskriminalamtes (BKA) seien “umfassend beantwortet worden”. Diese Fragen bezogen sich auf André E., der nach Aufdeckung der NSU-Morde am 24. November kurzzeitig festgenommen worden war.

“Ein überaus peinlicher Vorgang”

Es gab Gerüchte, dass der sächsische Verfassungsschutz einen Informanten geschützt habe, Boos dementierte vehement. Weder André E. noch weiter im Ermittlungsverfahren beschuldigte Personen seien V-Männer oder Informanten des Landesamtes in Sachsen gewesen. André E. sei dem Amt lediglich als Teilnehmer eines rechtsextremen Konzerts im Mai 2011 in Mecklenburg bekannt gewesen, mehr Angaben zu ihm habe man nicht.

Tatsächlich aber gilt André E. aus Johanngeorgenstadt als wichtige Figur in der sächsischen Neonazi-Szene, sein Zwillingsbruder Maik taucht im brandenburgischen Verfassungsschutzbericht von 2010 als “Stützpunkt”-Vertreter der NPD-Jugendorganisation auf.

Beide galten in der Szene als gefährlich und gewaltbereit. In den Resten des abgebrannten Wohnmobils der NSU-Zelle fanden Ermittler BahnCards auf André E.s Namen und den seiner Frau Susann, die von Beate Zschäpe und Uwe Böhnhardt benutzt und von E. selbst bezahlt worden sein sollen. Laut “Berliner Zeitung” soll der Verfassungsschutz dreimal versucht haben, André E. als V-Mann anzuwerben.

“Der ganze Vorgang beweist, dass Sachsen sieben Monate lang keine wirkliche Aufklärung betrieben hat, und diese Akten nicht in die Untersuchung miteinbezogen wurden”, sagt SPD-Innenexpertin Friedel.

…

Find this story at 11 July 2012

11. Juli 2012, 15:30 Uhr

Von Julia Jüttner

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Thüringer Neonazi-Ausschuss: Wein, Weib und Verfassungsschutz

 

Seine Aussagen lassen erahnen, wie anstrengend Helmut Roewer sein kann. Der Ex-Chef des Thüringer Verfassungsschutzes lobt sich vor dem Neonazi-Untersuchungsausschuss in den höchsten Tönen, gibt sich bockig, will von Fehlern nichts wissen. Ex-Mitarbeiter sprechen von “menschenverachtendem” Umgang.

Helmut Roewer trägt himbeerrote Schuhe. Und wenn man seinen ehemaligen Untergebenen Glauben schenken mag, kann man froh sein, dass er überhaupt welche trägt, als er am Montag im Untersuchungsausschuss des Thüringer Landtags zum “Nationalsozialistischen Untergrund” (NSU) in Erfurt den Saal betritt.

Mehr als sieben Stunden lang hatten zuvor zwei ehemalige Verfassungsschützer Einblick in das Chaos gegeben, über das Roewer in seiner Zeit als Präsident des Landesamtes für Verfassungsschutz (LfV) herrschte. Roewer war von 1994 bis 2000 Chef der Behörde, dann wurde er wegen einer Reihe von Affären suspendiert.

Wie ein “balzender Auerhahn” habe Roewer eines Abends in seinem Büro mit sechs Mitarbeiterinnen an drei zusammengeschobenen Schreibtischen gesessen, die Jalousien unten, bei Kerzenschein, Rotwein und Käse, berichtet Karl Friedrich Schrader, einst Referatsleiter 22, Abteilung Rechtsextremismus. “Sie lachen darüber”, ruft Schrader den Landtagsabgeordneten zu, “heute lache ich auch darüber, aber damals war das nicht zum Lachen!”

Schrader, 67, ist ein braungebrannter, redseliger Mann mit schneeweißem Schnauzer, dunklen Augenbrauen und Janker. 37 Jahre lang war er bei der Polizei, als Roewer ihn zum Verfassungsschutz holte, ihn neben dem Referatsleiter zum Personalratsvorsitzenden machte, und ihm versprach, er könne dort vor der Rente noch einmal richtig Karriere machen. So erzählt es Schrader vor dem Untersuchungsausschuss. Die Zusammenarbeit der beiden endete mit einem Hausverbot für Schrader, der inzwischen zwei Monate im Jahr als Jäger- und Farmverwalter in Namibia weilt.

Beschwerden über Roewers Führungsstil

Schrader beschreibt Roewer als unberechenbaren Vorgesetzten, der in “menschenverachtender Form” über seine Mitarbeiter geherrscht habe. Er selbst sei aus dem Urlaub zurückgekehrt und seine Stelle war gestrichen. Wenn es Ärger mit einem Referatsleiter gegeben habe, habe Roewer das Referat aufgelöst und Kritik mit demselben Satz abgebügelt: “Ich führe das Amt!”

Es sei auch vorgekommen, dass Roewer ihn empfangen habe, die nackten Füße auf dem Tisch, verdreckt vom Barfußlaufen, sagt Schrader. Ein anderes Mal sei Roewer mit dem Fahrrad durch den sechsten Stock geradelt. “Da dachte man: In welchem Laden arbeitet man da?”

Wie anstrengend Roewer sein kann, kann man erahnen, als er am Montag um halb sieben vor den Untersuchungsausschuss tritt. Er ist der wichtigste Zeuge. Ein schmächtiges Männchen, die dunklen Haare über die Glatze am Hinterkopf gekämmt. Mehr als vier Stunden hat er auf seine Befragung warten müssen, die Stimmung ist entsprechend. Trotz mürrischer Miene wirkt es so, als würde er das Blitzlichtgewitter und die Aufmerksamkeit der vielen Kameras genießen.

Er sei 63 Jahre alt, ledig, Schriftsteller und wohne in Weimar, sagt Roewer. Und ihm wäre es lieb, wenn man ihm Fragen stellen würde, auf einen abendfüllenden Vortrag sei er nämlich nicht vorbereitet. Klare Ansage. Und das ist auch schon die längste Passage, die Roewer am Stück spricht, meist gibt er Ein-Wort-Antworten. Seine bockige, widerspenstige Art bei der Anhörung verlangt den Befragern, aber auch den Zuschauern reichlich Geduld ab. Es geht konkret um den Zeitraum zwischen 1994 und 1998, also bevor die Neonazis Uwe Böhnhardt, Uwe Mundlos und Beate Zschäpe in den Untergrund abtauchten. Die Zeit nach 1998 wird der Ausschuss im Herbst bearbeiten.

“Ich galt als Spitzenkraft. So ist das”

Der Rechtsextremismus war bereits ein Problem, als Roewer im April 1994 vom Bundesinnenministerium in Bonn nach Thüringen kam. Und noch mehr das Amt selbst. Keine einzige Person dort habe die erforderlichen Voraussetzungen erfüllt – “außer mir”, behauptet Roewer. Es ist eine gnadenlose Abrechnung mit seinen ehemaligen Mitarbeitern. “Ein Teil wurde fortgebildet, der andere Teil war nicht fortbildungsfähig. Das waren die hartnäckigsten. Denn gute Leute finden immer einen Job, dumme nicht.”

Eine Weisheit folgt auf die andere. Er habe nach Anweisung des Innenministeriums das Amt neu strukturieren müssen, sagt er. “Aber gute Leute können in jeder Gliederung arbeiten, nicht so gute in keiner.” Sich selbst lobt Roewer in höchsten Tönen. “Ich hatte Erfahrung auf dem Gebiet des Verfassungsschutzes, ich galt als Spitzenkraft. So ist das.”

Von Versäumnissen, Fehlern, Pannen will der ehemalige Präsident des Thüringer Verfassungsschutzes nichts hören. Den Verdacht, seine Behörde habe damals V-Leute vor Polizeimaßnahmen gewarnt, weist er empört von sich. Dabei war es ausgerechnet Tino Brandt, ein angeblich von Roewer angeworbener V-Mann, der bei einer Durchsuchung um 6 Uhr morgens die Beamten erwartete – mit einem Computer, bei dem gerade die Festplatte ausgebaut worden war, wie die Ausschussvorsitzende Dorothea Marx (SPD) ihm vorhält.

V-Mann mit Narrenfreiheit

Immer wieder landet das Gremium bei Brandt, der in den Akten als V-Mann 2045, Deckname “Otto”, geführt wird: Er war der wichtigste V-Mann, den der Thüringer Verfassungsschutz damals in der Szene hatte, wenn nicht sogar der einzige. Ein weiterer ehemaliger Verfassungsschützer, Norbert Wiesner, berichtet am Montag von den Schwierigkeiten beim Anwerben von Spitzeln, meist sei die Zusammenarbeit an der Unzuverlässigkeit der potentiellen Kandidaten gescheitert. Gerade im Skinhead-Bereich habe man fortwährend das gleiche Problem gehabt: “Die besaufen sich und können sich dann am nächsten Tag an nichts mehr erinnern.”

Brandt, der Neonazi aus Rudolstadt, genoss Narrenfreiheit unter Roewer. Mehrfach sei er massiv darauf hingewiesen worden, sein Engagement bei der NPD herunterzufahren, berichtet am Montag Wiesner. Brandt aber ignorierte die Ansagen.

Im Gegenteil: Nach seiner Enttarnung prahlte er damit, wie er die Behörde ausgetrickst und mit den 100.000 Euro, die er kassiert hatte, die Szene aufbaute. Vor dem Neonazi-Ausschuss in Erfurt erklärt Wiesner, Brandt habe ständig neue Handys und Computer gefordert und Ersatz für die Autos, die er zu Schrott fuhr.

Über Brandt reden alle an diesem Montag – nur Roewer nicht. Die Behörde habe 1994 “überhaupt nicht” über eigene Erkenntnisse verfügt, sagt er stattdessen. Um dies abzustellen, habe man ihn geholt. “Eine führungsstarke und durchsetzungskräftige Persönlichkeit war gesucht – ich.” An Selbstbewusstsein fehlt es dem kleinen Mann nicht im Geringsten, stolz betet er seine Vita herunter, spricht von “sehr guten Noten” im ersten und zweiten Jura-Staatsexamen.

Amnesie-Schub bei Roewer

Kurz nach Roewers Dienstantritt in Erfurt kam es zum Buchenwald-Skandal: Böhnhardt und Mundlos marschierten in braunen SA-Uniformen durch die Gedenkstätte. Niemand ahnte damals, dass die beiden in den folgenden Jahren neun Migranten und eine Polizistin töten werden, eine beispiellose Mordserie in der Geschichte Deutschlands.

Umso schlimmer, dass Roewer – wenn es stimmt, was er sagt – die Situation damals richtig einschätzte: Er sieht die Anti-Antifa als Zentrum der rechtsextremen Bewegung, die Gründung des Thüringer Heimatschutzes (THS) beobachtet er argwöhnisch, hält sie für “die militanteste Organisation von allen Kameradschaften in Thüringen”, wie er am Montag behauptet. Erst recht, weil THS-Mitglieder die NPD unterwandern. Er habe sich im Mai 2000 für ein Verbot des Heimatschutzes eingesetzt, sagt er, angeblich vergeblich.

Befragt zur “Operation Rennsteig”, bei der das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz ab 1997 gemeinsam mit den Thüringer Kollegen zwölf V-Leute im THS gewinnen konnte, befällt Roewer ein Amnesie-Schub. “Ich habe keine konkreten Erinnerungen”, redet er sich heraus. Auch an den ominösen V-Mann Günther, den keiner in der Behörde kannte außer ihm und der 40.800 Mark kassierte, will sich Roewer nicht wirklich erinnern.

Roewers Auftritt am Montag ist mühselig: Wie er sich feiert und auf Erinnerungslücken beruft, wenn ihn die beiden Linken-Abgeordneten Martina Renner und Katharina König in die Mangel nehmen. Candle-Light-Dinner und Radausflüge im Büro streitet er ebenso ab wie willkürliche Personalentscheidungen. Wer lügt? “Einer sagt die Unwahrheit”, konstatiert König und beantragt Vereidigung.

…

Find this story at 10 July 2012

10. Juli 2012, 07:28 Uhr

Von Julia Jüttner, Erfurt

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Third official resigns over neo-Nazi intel gaffes

A scandal over a botched probe of ten murders blamed on German neo-Nazis felled the third top official this month as the head of a state intelligence service stepped down Wednesday.
Mystery deepens – did agent aid murder? – National (5 Jul 12)
File shredding scandal leads to security reform – National (4 Jul 12)
Intelligence chief resigns over mistakes – National (2 Jul 12)

Reinhard Boos, the head of the secret service bureau in the eastern state of Saxony, resigned in an affair that last week claimed Germany’s domestic intelligence chief after his office admitted to shredding key files.

Heinz Fromm, president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), resigned last week after 12 years in charge while the leader of Thuringia’ bureau, Thomas Sippel, was also dismissed.

The Thuringia bureau has been branded the “chaos office” by German media this week, following testimony from Sippel’s predecessor Helmut Roewer, who was reportedly prone to revealing confidential information in his office during impromptu wine and cheese parties.

A colleague also testified that during his tenure from 1994 to 2000, Roewer wandered around the office barefoot, chatted about top secret sources in the kitchen, and once rode a bike around the sixth floor of the building.

Roewer himself testified he was too drunk to remember who handed him the envelope that contained his own appointment in 1994.

Roewer was still in charge when the neo-Nazi terror trio Uwe Mundlos, Uwe Böhnhardt und Beate Zschäpe disappeared in the late 1990s before their murder series began.

Saxony’s Interior Minister Markus Ulbig said that the state security services had only recently learned that they had transcripts from wiretapped telephone calls related to the neo-Nazi probe dating from 1998.

“The reason this fact only came to light now is apparently linked to the gross misconduct of individual staff members,” Ulbig told the state legislature.

“The president (of the Saxony state intelligence service) deeply regrets this occurrence which is why he has asked me to give him another post from August 1 of this year.”

Ulbig said he had ordered the transcripts to be reviewed and sent to federal prosecutors to aid their ongoing investigation of the murders, mainly of Turkish-born shopkeepers throughout Germany between 2000 and 2007. Boos had led the office since 2007 and also between 1999 and 2002.

It emerged in November that a far-right trio calling itself the National Socialist Underground (NSU) was likely behind the murder spree.

The case broke open only when two members of the NSU were found dead in an apparent suicide pact and the other, a woman, turned herself in.

Investigators initially suspected criminal elements from the Turkish community were behind the rash of killings in a probe marked by repeated missteps and allegations of a cover-up.

A parliamentary committee is investigating the affair and the German government has pledged a root-and-branch reform of the security services.

Find this story at 11 July 2012

Published: 11 Jul 12 15:23 CET
Online: http://www.thelocal.de/national/20120711-43699.html

AFP/The Local/bk

Did police cover up murder of ‘informant’?

Family accuses Met Police of whitewash and racism and awaits result of a third inquiry

Scotland Yard has been accused of a “cover up” after it emerged that its own review into the controversial death of a man believed to be an informant did not address key evidence which suggested officers bungled the investigation.

Kester David, 53, was found burned to death under railway arches in north London two years ago. Police concluded that he had committed suicide, but his family claim that he was murdered, possibly connected to him being a police informant, and that detectives failed to carry out a proper investigation because he was black.

In response, Inspector Brian Casson conducted an internal inquiry into the initial investigation. He found that officers had made a “catalogue of errors” that amounted to “a failing in duty”.

However, The Independent has established that the Met then ordered another review, carried out in March this year by DSI Keith Dobson, which did not address Casson’s findings.

Dobson’s report, obtained by The Independent, says: “I have not discovered anything which would have altered the ‘course and direction’ of the original investigation or alter the conclusions and findings which are documented by the investigators and experts involved…Based on all the information supplied to me I concur with that conclusion.”

Last night Mr David’s brother Roger Griffith described the Dobson report as an attempted “whitewash” by the Met and part of a sustained attempt to cover up the failings of the original detectives, whom he believes were motivated by racism.

He said: “The Dobson report was a cover up which ignored everything Casson found and concluded that the original investigation was a good job. It was a complete whitewash.”

He added: “How is it right that two police officers who failed us so tragically are still on the streets? They seemed hell bent on not investigating and putting forward that it was suicide…The two officers should be suspended now, so that no other mother has to go through what our mum has been put through.”

An inquest into Mr David’s death recorded an open verdict in January 2011 amid unanswered questions and a missing DNA report. After the critical Casson report was leaked to the press, Met Commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe ordered a new inquiry, which is still ongoing.

Inspector Casson, who was investigating the family’s complaints, found two key witnesses who had called 999 with evidence that pointed to foul play, but were never interviewed by the detectives.

One man, who was awake feeding his baby daughter, reported hearing two screams of ‘no’ by a man who sounded panicked, frightened and in pain at 4.20am. He was first interviewed by the Inspector Casson – almost 18 months after the incident.

The second caller was a Morrisson’s supermarket night shift worker who had seen a white Mercedes van in the car park, which borders the Travis Perkin yard where Mr David was found, and two men walking towards the yard at 3.45am. He had never before seen a vehicle in the car park at that time of night. The CCTV footage was never recovered.

Mr David’s burnt body was found without shoes but there was a pair of white Reebok trainers found close-by, which his family said did not belong to him. The detectives concluded that they were his because, they told the coroner, DNA taken from the shoes “would have” belonged to a close relative. This was not true; there is no mention of a close relative in the excerpt of the DNA report quoted by Casson, the same report apparently lost by the detectives so never seen by the coroner or family.

The forensic scientist actually found two DNA profiles, one was dominant so most likely belonged to regular wearer of the shoes, but this was not run against the police DNA database. Casson’s inquiry found that it was perfect match to a white man from the travelling community.

At the inquest, Detective Kirk told the coroner that the CCTV footage showing Mr David buying a canister of petrol a few hour before he is believed to have died, pointed to a planned suicide. The inquest was not shown footage from a few minutes later which showed an RAC van attend as Mr David’s car had broken down because it was out of fuel. This footage was “not discovered” by the original investigation.

Casson also found that crucial mobile phone analysis was not done.

The Casson report recommended “a severity assessment” be conducted in light of his findings. Even the Dobson report recommends they are “considered for local management action” because of the insensitivities shown to the family and the inaccurate information they passed on. But both still remain on full duty.

They family do not understand why the IPCC, which is currently investigating five alleged cases of racism, decided not to get involved pending the outcome of the criminal investigation. The IPCC said it was reviewing this decision following the family’s request not to delay the investigation.

The Met did not comment on Mr Griffith’s view that the Dobson report was a whitewash and an attempt to cover up the actions of racist officers but said: “There is a fresh on-going investigation into the death of Kester David by the Specialist Crime and Operations Directorate (SC&O1)… detectives retain an open mind about the circumstances surrounding the incident.

“An investigation into an unexplained death of this nature is reviewed as a matter of course after 28 days, usually internally, but in this case by an external police force ensure Mr David’s family is as reassured as they can be about the effectiveness of our investigative process.”

She added: “The investigation into this complaint has not been completed… the Directorate of Professional Standards awaits the outcome of the [criminal] investigation. No action has been taken against any officer at this stage. No disciplinary action can be considered until SC&O1 have finalised their investigation.”

Timeline: Kester David Case

7 July 2010 Kester David dies around 4am. His burnt body is found under railway arches of Palmers Green station, north London, at 11am.

…

 

Find this story at 7 July 2012 

Nina Lakhani
Saturday, 7 July 2012

© independent.co.uk

Weitere Aktenvernichtung im Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz

Im Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) sind nicht nur am 11.11.2011 V-Mann Akten mit Bezug zur rechtsextremen Szene vernichtet worden, sondern auch noch einige Tage danach. Das geht nach MONITOR-Informationen aus einem aktualisierten Schreiben des Bundesamts für Verfassungsschutz an das Bundesministerium des Inneren hervor. Deshalb wurde das Disziplinarverfahren gegen den zuständigen Referatsleiter ausgedehnt mit dem so wörtlich „Vorwurf, eine zweite rechtswidrige Aktenvernichtung ( ohne vorherige Prüfung der Akten) vorsätzlich veranlasst zu haben (..)“ Dazu erklärt das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz gegenüber „Monitor“: Es seien 7 Operativakten in zwei zeitlich voneinander getrennten Schritten vernichtet worden.“

Dass es eine zweite Aktenvernichtung gegeben hat, hatte dem Schreiben zufolge ein BfV Mitarbeiter ausgesagt: Danach habe er „einige Tage nach dem 11.11. einen weiteren Aktenordner zufällig in der Aktenverwaltung gefunden.“ Der damit konfrontierte vorgesetzte Beamte habe „nach kurzem Durchblättern“, so der Zeuge, „sogleich dessen Vernichtung angeordnet.“

Über die anstehende Vernichtung von Akten waren offensichtlich viele Mitarbeiter im Verfassungsschutz informiert. Der zuständige Referatsleiter hatte per E-Mail nicht nur alle Mitarbeiter des Referats 2B unterrichtet, sondern auch seinen vorgesetzten Gruppenleiter, heißt es in dem Bericht. Der inzwischen zurückgetretene Verfassungsschutzpräsident Fromm hatte am 8.11. 2011 angeordnet, alle Unterlagen auf einen Zusammenhang mit den mutmaßlichen NSU–Terroristen Bönhardt, Zschäpe und Mundlos zu untersuchen.

Find this story at 12 July 2012

Find the program at 12 July 2012

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Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz

NSU-Terroristen überfielen schon 1998 Supermarkt

Die Ermittler gingen zunächst davon aus, dass die Zwickauer Terrorzelle im Herbst 1999 mit ihrer Serie von Raubüberfällen begann. Doch laut einem Untersuchungsbericht des sächsischen Innenministeriums steht nun fest: Bereits 1998 erbeuteten Uwe Böhnhardt und Uwe Mundlos 30.000 Mark.

Dresden – Die Überfallserie der Neonazi-Terroristen Uwe Böhnhardt und Uwe Mundlos hat noch im Jahr ihres Untertauchens 1998 begonnen. Das sächsische Innenministerium bestätigte in seinem am Mittwoch bekannt gewordenen Abschlussbericht an den Innenausschuss des Landtags erstmals, dass auch ein Raubüberfall am 18. Dezember 1998 auf einen Edeka-Markt in Chemnitz auf das Konto der Rechtsterroristen geht. Dies habe ein Spurenabgleich ergeben. Über die Vermutung, der Raub gehe auf das Konto von Böhnhardt und Mundlos, hatte der SPIEGEL bereits Ende April berichtet.

Zuvor waren die Ermittler davon ausgegangen, dass Böhnhardt und Mundlos erst im Oktober 1999 den ersten mehrerer Raubüberfälle begingen, um mit der Beute ihr Leben im Untergrund zu finanzieren. Nach Angaben von LKA-Präsident Jörg Michaelis betrug die Beute seinerzeit rund 30.000 D-Mark. Es seien zwei Schüsse abgefeuert worden, dem “Nationalsozialistischen Untergrund” (NSU) habe die Tat durch später gefundene Patronenhülsen zugeordnet werden können.

Böhnhardt und Mundlos sind inzwischen tot. Gemeinsam mit ihrer Komplizin Beate Zschäpe – alle stammen aus Jena – sollen sie die Terrorgruppe NSU gebildet haben, die für zehn Morde verantwortlich gemacht wird. Opfer waren neun Menschen mit ausländischen Wurzeln und eine Polizistin. Gut 13 Jahre lang konnten die Rechtsterroristen unerkannt in Deutschland leben – vor allem in Sachsen.

Sachsen sieht keine eigenen Versäumnisse bei NSU-Ermittlungen

Die Schuld dafür sieht der Freistaat aber nicht bei sich. Nach heutigem Wissen seien “keine Versäumnisse innerhalb des polizeilichen Handelns zu erkennen”, heißt es in dem Bericht des Innenministeriums. Dem Verfassungsschutz wird darin attestiert, dass er von den Thüringer Behörden “nur unvollständig informiert” wurde. Es sei “nicht ersichtlich”, dass er “erfolgversprechende Maßnahmen” unterlassen habe.

…

 

Find this story at 27. Juni 2012, 17:36 Uhr

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NSU-Affäre und Verfassungsschutz Italiener sollen Deutsche auf Neonazi-Netz hingewiesen haben

Der italienische Geheimdienst hat den deutschen Verfassungsschutz laut einem Zeitungsbericht schon 2003 auf ein Netzwerk rechter Terrorzellen hingewiesen. Demnach pflegten deutsche Nazis intensive Kontakte ins Ausland.

Hamburg – Das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) soll laut “Berliner Zeitung” bereits vor Jahren konkrete Hinweise auf ein Netz rechter Terrorzellen in Deutschland erhalten haben. Das gehe aus einem Schreiben des italienischen Staatsschutzes AISI an das BfV vom 14. Dezember 2011 hervor.

In dem Schreiben verweise der italienische Dienst auf eine Information, die dem Kölner Bundesamt am 21. März 2003 übermittelt worden sein soll. Darin sei es um ein Treffen europäischer Neonazis im belgischen Waasmunster im November 2002 gegangen, bei dem italienische Rechtsextremisten “bei vertraulichen Gesprächen von der Existenz eines Netzwerks militanter europäischer Neonazis erfahren” hätten.

Aus dem AISI-Schreiben geht dem Bericht zufolge auch hervor, dass deutsche Neonazis insbesondere aus Bayern und Thüringen seit Jahren enge Beziehungen nach Italien pflegen. So habe etwa Ralf Wohlleben, der als mutmaßlicher Unterstützer der Zwickauer Terrorzelle in U-Haft sitzt, mehrfach an Treffen mit Gruppen wie “Skinhead Tirol – Sektion Meran” und “Veneto Fronte Skinheads” in Italien teilgenommen und Geld übergeben “für die Unterstützung von Kameraden, die sich in Schwierigkeiten befinden”.

2008 hätten zudem Südtiroler Skinhead-Gruppen dem AISI-Bericht zufolge bei einem Treffen mit deutschen Neonazis aus Bayern und Franken “über die Möglichkeit der Durchführung fremdenfeindlicher ‘exemplarischer Aktionen’ diskutiert und eine detaillierte Kartenauswertung vorgenommen, um Geschäfte ausfindig zu machen, die von außereuropäischen Staatsangehörigen geführt werden”.

…

hut/Reuters
NSU-Affäre: Verfassungsschützer manipulierten Dateien (01.07.2012)
NSU-Akten: Im Reißwolf des Verfassungsschutzes (28.06.2012)
Kampf gegen Rechts: Bundestag beschließt zentrale Neonazi-Datei (28.06.2012)
Zwickauer Zelle: Bundesanwalt übernahm – Verfassungsschutz löschte Akten (28.06.2012)
Untersuchungsbericht: NSU-Terroristen überfielen schon 1998 Supermarkt (27.06.2012)
Rechtsextremismus: Verfassungsschützer hatten zwölf Spitzel beim “Thüringer Heimatschutz” (23.06.2012)

Find this story at 2 July 2012

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Neonazi-Mordserie „V-Mann ‘Tarif’ – vernichtet“

Die vom Verfassungsschutz geschredderten V-Mann-Akten waren brisanter als zugeben. Einer der Spitzel war in die Suche nach dem NSU-Trio eingebunden.

BERLIN taz | Manchmal können Verfassungsschützer richtig kreativ sein. Eine groß angelegte Geheimdienstaktion tauften sie nach einem der schönsten Wanderwege Deutschlands im Thüringer Wald, dem 170 Kilometer langen Rennsteig.

Noch kreativer waren die Geheimdienstler aber bei der Wahl der Namen ihrer bezahlten Spitzel, die sie im Rahmen jener „Operation Rennsteig“ in der rechtsextremen Szene anwarben. Die Vorgabe war offenbar, dass die Decknamen all dieser V-Leute mit einem T beginnen müssen. Und deshalb bekamen sie Namen wie diese: „VM Treppe“, „VM Tonfarbe“, „VM Tinte“ oder „VM Tobago“.

Doch Kreativität bei der Namensfindung ist nicht das, was man von Behörden zuallererst erwartet, sondern vielmehr das, womit das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz in Köln selbst auf seiner Internetseite wirbt: „Mit Vertrauen, Sicherheit.“

Das Vertrauen in die Sicherheitsbehörde aber war nach einer in den vergangenen Tagen bekannt gewordenen Vernichtung brisanter Akten auf einen Tiefstand gesunken. Weshalb Verfassungsschutzchef Heinz Fromm am Montag keine andere Wahl blieb als zurückzutreten.
Verbindung zum abgetauchten Terror-Trio

Den Verdacht, dass ausgerechnet am Tag des Auffliegens des Nationalsozialistischen Untergrunds (NSU) in seinem Amt potenziell relevante Informationen zu der rechten Terrorzelle vernichtet wurden, konnte Fromm nicht entkräften.

Informationen der taz belegen vielmehr, dass mindestens in einem Fall Akten zu einem V-Mann vernichtet wurden, der in die Suche nach dem 1998 abgetauchten Trio Uwe Mundlos, Uwe Böhnhardt und Beate Zschäpe eingebunden war – denjenigen also, die zehn Morde auf dem Gewissen haben.

Ein Referatsleiter des Bundesamts für Verfassungsschutz hatte im November 2011 sieben Akten zur „Operation Rennsteig“ vernichten lassen. Deren Inhalt betraf eine am 17. Juli 1996 gestartete konzertierte Aktion des Bundesamts für Verfassungsschutz, des Thüringer Landesamts und des Bundeswehrgeheimdiensts MAD.

Ziel der bis 2003 andauernden Operation war es, V-Leute in der Anti-Antifa-Ostthüringen und deren braunen Nachfolgetruppe „Thüringer Heimatschutz“ anzuwerben – in jenem Kameradschaftszusammenschluss also, dem die späteren NSU-Terroristen bis zu ihrem Untertauchen angehörten.

Acht V-Leute konnte das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz anwerben, allesamt bekamen sie einen Tarnnamen, der mit einem T beginnt. Wichtige Teile dieser Akten wurden, wie nun bekannt geworden ist, am 11. November 2011 geschreddert – ausgerechnet an dem Tag, an dem der Generalbundesanwalt öffentlich bekannt gab, dass er die Ermittlungen gegen die Terrorzelle übernommen hat.
Geknickt und aufklärungsbereit

Gegenüber Verfassungsschutzchef Fromm soll der zuständige Referatsleiter die Aktenvernichtung, die er mit angeblich abgelaufenen Aufbewahrungsfristen begründete, aber erst vergangenen Mittwoch eingeräumt haben – fast acht Monate später.

Fromm wusste um die Brisanz des Vorgangs, leitete ein Disziplinarverfahren gegen den Mitarbeiter ein und versetzte ihn intern. Nach außen hin versuchte er die Wogen zu glätten, gab sich geknickt und aufklärungsbereit. „Nach meinem derzeitigen Kenntnisstand handelt es sich um einen Vorgang, wie es ihn in meiner Amtszeit bisher nicht gegeben hat“, ließ er sich am Wochenende zitieren. „Hierdurch ist ein erheblicher Vertrauensverlust und eine gravierende Beschädigung des Ansehens des Amtes eingetreten.“

Gleichzeitig versuchte Fromm aber die Bedeutung des Vorfalls hinter den Kulissen herunterzuspielen. „Keiner dieser V-Leute hatte eine Führungsfunktion im ’Thüringer Heimatschutz‘, die Quellen waren ausschließlich Randpersonen oder Mitläufer“, schrieb er dem Staatssekretär im Bundesinnenministerium, Klaus-Dieter Fritsche. Zugänge zu den drei späteren NSU-Mitgliedern seien „nicht erlangt“ worden.

Man wolle nun versuchen, aus anderen Akten den Inhalt der geschredderten Dokumente nachzuvollziehen, hieß es. Gleichwohl musste Fromm aber in seinem Schreiben eingestehen: „Die vernichteten Akten können voraussichtlich nicht mehr in vollem Umfang rekonstruiert werden.“
Mehr Brisanz als zunächst angenommen

Zunächst schien es noch, als wolle Verfassungsschutzchef Fromm im Amt bleiben. Doch am Wochenende wurde die Kritik immer lauter. Von einem „unglaublichen Vorgang“ sprach die FDP, von einem „Skandal“ redeten SPD und Linke. Die CSU forderte indirekt Fromms Rücktritt, und Grünen-Chef Cem Özdemir sagte: „Der Fisch stinkt vom Kopf her.“ Die Affäre einfach auf den Referatsleiter abzuwälzen war nicht mehr möglich. Am Montag schmiss der bald 64-jährige Heinz Fromm, der nächstes Jahr ohnehin in den Ruhestand gehen sollte, vorzeitig hin.

Sein Rücktritt erfolgte womöglich auch, weil in der Affäre noch viel mehr Brisanz steckt. Nach Informationen der taz spielte mindestens einer der V-Leute, dessen Akten nun geschreddert wurden, entgegen den Behauptungen Fromms durchaus eine Rolle bei der Suche nach dem mordenden Neonazi-Trio Mundlos, Böhnhardt und Zschäpe: Es handelt sich um den V-Mann, den das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz unter dem Namen „Tarif“ führte.

Wer sich hinter dem Decknamen verbirgt, ist unbekannt. Doch wie aus streng geheimen Verfassungsschutzakten hervorgeht, war V-Mann „Tarif“ im Jahr 1999 in die Suche nach der NSU-Truppe eingebunden. Damals war den Diensten das Gerücht zu Ohren gekommen, dass die drei Gesuchten bei einem Neonazi in Niedersachsen unterkommen könnten oder dass dieser Mann den dreien die Flucht ins Ausland ermöglichen könnte.

…

 Find this story at 2 July 2012

von Wolf Schmidt

Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Für Fragen zu Rechten oder Genehmigungen wenden Sie sich bitte an lizenzen@taz.de

 

 

Mystery deepens – did agent aid murder?

 

A German intelligence agent was suspected of being involved in one of the immigrant murders attributed to the neo-Nazi terrorist group, a newspaper has claimed. All attempts to figure out his story have failed.

File shredding scandal leads to security reform – National (4 Jul 12)
Intelligence chief resigns over mistakes – National (2 Jul 12)
Intel ‘destroyed as Nazi terror group exposed’ – National (28 Jun 12)

The agent, named only as Andreas T., was in the internet cafe when the last victim of the National Socialist Underground (NSU) was shot – yet investigators have been unable to work out if he was involved.

Weekly paper Die Zeit says police suspected at the time he was involved in the murder of Halit Yozgat, a Kassel internet café worker, on April 6, 2006, but that the investigation was obstructed by the Hesse Office for the Protection of the Constitution – the state’s intelligence agency.

Andreas T. was in the café at the time of the murder and police later found three guns, shotgun shells, and a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf in his various homes.

Die Zeit reports that one Hesse investigator believed at the time that “a Hessian intelligence agent could have shot the young Yozgat.” Andreas T. was subsequently “intensively interrogated” and was “constantly caught contradicting himself.”

It was previously known that Andreas T. was in the internet café at the time of the murder. He claimed that Yozgat was shot behind his counter while he was in the back room, and that had he left the café without noticing anything untoward.

Investigators were reportedly puzzled by how Andreas T., who is over 6 feet 2 inches tall, could have overlooked the body and the blood on the counter.

Die Zeit also said that on the day of the killing Andreas T. held several phone calls with a far-right informant who had contact with the NSU’s network of sympathizers and helpers.

Andreas T.’s employer, the Hesse state intelligence agency, also reportedly obstructed the police investigation by failing to provide any information. He now works at the headquarters of the state government in Kassel, the paper said.

The latest revelations come after German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich promised a wholesale reform of Germany’s security services following the botched investigations into the NSU murders.

These led on Monday to the resignation of Heinz Fromm, president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), after 12 years in charge.

The Die Zeit article was written by Stefan Aust, former editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel, best known for “The Baader Meinhof Complex,” his history of the left-wing terrorist organization the RAF.

Find this story at 5 July 2012

The Local/bk

Published: 5 Jul 12 10:44 CET
Updated: 5 Jul 12 12:20 CET
Online: http://www.thelocal.de/national/20120705-43575.html

Neonazi-Mordserie „Der Fisch stinkt vom Kopf her“

Einem Medienbericht zufolge hat der italienische Geheimdienst den Bundesverfassungsschutz bereits 2003 auf ein Netz rechtsextremer Terrorzellen hingewiesen. Wegen der Vernichtung von Akten im Zusammenhang mit der „NSU“-Mordserie steht Verfassungsschutz-Präsident Fromm weiter in der Kritik.

Erklärungsbedarf: Der Präsident des Bundesamtes für Verfassungsschutz, Heinz Fromm (r.), und Thüringens Verfassungsschutzpräsident Thomas Sippel

Der Bundesverfassungsschutz hat einem Medienbericht zufolge offenbar im März 2003 Hinweise auf ein Netz rechtsextremer Terrorzellen in Deutschland erhalten. Die „Berliner Zeitung“ berichtete am Montag über ein Schreiben des italienischen Inlandsgeheimdienstes AISI an den Verfassungsschutz vom Dezember 2011, in dem auf ein Schreiben von März 2003 verwiesen werde.

Darin sei über ein Treffen europäischer Neonazis berichtet worden, auf dem italienische Rechtsextremisten „bei vertraulichen Gesprächen von der Existenz eines Netzwerks militanter europäischer Neonazis erfahren“ hätten. Dieses Netzwerk bilde eine „halb im Untergrund befindliche autonome Basis“ und sei in der Lage, „mittels spontan gebildeter Zellen kriminellen Aktivitäten nachzugehen“, zitierte die Zeitung aus dem Schreiben. In einem vertraulichen Zusammenhang seien in diesem Zusammenhang die Namen mehrerer ranghoher deutscher Rechtsextremisten genannt worden.

Aus dem Schreiben geht der „Berliner Zeitung“ zufolge außerdem hervor, dass deutsche Neonazis insbesondere aus Bayern und Thüringen seit Jahren enge Beziehungen nach Italien pflegen. Der rechtsextremen Zelle „Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund“ (NSU) werden in Deutschland neun Morde an Migranten sowie an einer Polizistin vorgeworfen.
Fromm weiter in der Kritik

Wegen der Aktenvernichtung im Zusammenhang mit der Mordserie durch die NSU haben Politiker nicht nur der Opposition unterdessen weitere Aufklärung sowie teils Konsequenzen an der Spitze des Verfassungsschutzes gefordert. Bundestagsvizepräsidentin Pau, für die Linkspartei Mitglied im NSU-Untersuchungsausschuss, äußerte am Sonntag in einer Mitteilung die Fragen: „Galt die Aktenschredderei im Verfassungsschutz als das kleinere Übel? Wenn ja, was wäre dann das größere?“ Dies sei offenbar der Inhalt der Akten gewesen.

Frau Pau sagte: „Möglicherweise waren Verfassungsschützer näher und länger am NSU-Mord-Trio dran, als bislang eingestanden wird. Das wäre ein Skandal sondergleichen.“ Auch der Parteivorsitzende der Grünen Cem Özdemir sagte: „Da kommen viele Fragezeichen auf, die dringend aufgearbeitet werden müssen.“ Özdemir befand, es reiche nicht aus, nur Beamte zu versetzen. „Der Fisch stinkt vom Kopf her.“

Der Zwickauer Neonazi-Zelle werden zehn Morde in ganz Deutschland angelastet

Der CDU-Innenpolitiker Clemens Binninger verlangte eine Offenlegung der Klarnamen von V-Leuten des Verfassungsschutzes. „Neben einer Rekonstruktion der Inhalte über andere Akten und einer Befragung von Zeugen muss der Untersuchungsausschuss in geeigneter Form Einblick in die Klarnamendatei der V-Leute ermöglicht werden“, erklärte der Unions-Obmann im NSU-Untersuchungsausschuss des Bundestages: „Wir müssen unbedingt eine Vorstellung bekommen, wer die V-Leute tatsächlich waren, die in den Akten beschrieben wurden.“

Der CSU-Innenpolitiker Stephan Mayer griff direkt den Präsidenten des Bundesamts für Verfassungsschutz, Heinz Fromm, an. Er sagte in der „Bild“-Zeitung: „Die Affäre wirft die Frage auf, ob Fromm den Verfassungsschutz noch im Griff hat. Das muss Konsequenzen haben.“ Der FDP-Obmann im NSU-Untersuchungsausschuss des Bundestags, Hartfrid Wolff, nannte den Vorgang im Südwestrundfunk (SWR) „sehr, sehr gravierend“.
Fromme: „Erheblicher Vertrauensverlust“

Fromm sagte der Zeitschrift „Der Spiegel“: „Nach meinem derzeitigen Erkenntnisstand handelt es sich um einen Vorgang, wie es ihn in meiner Amtszeit bisher nicht gegeben hat. Hierdurch ist ein erheblicher Vertrauensverlust und eine gravierende Beschädigung des Ansehens des Amtes eingetreten.“

…

Find this story at 01 July 2012  

Quelle: FAZ.NET mit AFP/dpa/löw.

© Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH 2012
Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Kooperation mit Neonazis: Verfassungsschutz wollte Geld an Terroristen zahlen

Der Thüringer Verfassungsschutz gerät immer stärker in die Kritik. Das Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz räumte nun ein, eine Geldzahlung an die Zwickauer Terroristen eingeleitet zu haben. Wie die Behörde unter Berufung auf einen ehemaligen Mitarbeiter mitteilte, habe ein V-Mann in den Jahren 1998 oder 1999 dem Trio über einen Mittelsmann 2000 D-Mark übergeben sollen, um Erkenntnisse über deren Tarnidentitäten zu erlangen.

Ziel sei es gewesen, die untergetauchten Jenaer Neonazis Uwe Böhnhardt, Uwe Mundlos und Beate Zschäpe verhaften zu können. Das Vorhaben sei jedoch gescheitert, weil der Mittelsmann das Geld selbst eingesteckt habe.

Geld für neue Pässe

Damit bestätigt sich ein Bericht der “Bild am Sonntag”, wonach ein Mitarbeiter des Verfassungsschutzes diese Information am 6. Dezember 2011 vor der geheim tagenden Kontrollkommission des Thüringer Landtages berichtet habe. Nach Aussagen dieses Verfassungsschützers wusste seine Behörde demnach aus abgehörten Telefonaten, dass die Neonazi-Gruppe damals dringend Geld für neue Pässe brauchte, berichtete das Blatt weiter.

Daher habe der Verfassungsschutz dem V-Mann “Otto” das Geld übergeben, es handelte sich demnach um den damaligen NPD-Funktionär Tino Brandt.

Die Neonazis besorgten sich daraufhin laut “BamS” tatsächlich neue Pässe. Da der Thüringer Verfassungsschutz aber die Meldeämter in Sachsen nicht eingeweiht gehabt hätte, flogen Zschäpe, Mundlos und Böhnhardt nicht auf.
Verfassungsschutz kaufte angeblich Hetzspiel

Der Thüringer Verfassungsschutz finanzierte dem Bericht zufolge das Neonazi-Trio indirekt auch durch den Ankauf des antisemitischen Brettspiels “Pogromly” für jeweils 100 Mark. Mindestens drei Exemplare des Hetz-Spiels, dessen Verkaufserlös an die Nazi-Zelle floss, wurde dem Zeitungsbericht zufolge an Mitarbeiter des Verfassungsschutzes verkauft.

Die Grünen reagierten schockiert auf die Erkenntnisse. Dies sei ein “Skandal erschreckenden Ausmaßes”, sagte Grünen-Chefin Claudia Roth. “Aufgabe des Verfassungsschutzes ist es, die Demokratie gegen Rechtsterrorismus und Rechtsextremismus wirkungsvoll zu schützen und bestimmt nicht, diesen auch noch finanziell zu fördern.”
Verfassungsschutz kannte Aufenthaltsort angeblich

Laut “Focus”-Informationen war den Verfassungsschützern zumindest Mitte 2000 das Versteck der Neonazis in Chemnitz bekannt. Das belege ein Observationsfoto des Trios vom 15. Mai 2000, das in die Akten des Thüringer Landeskriminalamtes gelangte und ursprünglich von den Thüringer Verfassungsschützern stammen soll.

Im Herbst wurden DVDs verschickt, in denen sich der “Nationalsozialistische Untergrund” (NSU) zu Morden und Anschlägen bekennt.
Die Staatsanwaltschaft Erfurt führt derzeit nach eigenen Angaben Ermittlungsverfahren wegen des Verdachts der Strafvereitelung im Amt “gegen mehrere Personen”. Doch könnten die Vorwürfe verjährt sein.
CDU prüft Ausschluss von umstrittenen Anwalt

Unterdessen gerät in Baden-Württemberg ein CDU-Mitglied zunehmend unter Druck. Klaus Harsch von der Anwaltskanzlei Harsch & Kollegen wurde schon seit Jahren immer wieder vorgeworfen, keine klare Abgrenzung zu Rechtsradikalen vorzunehmen. In der Kanzlei von Harsch arbeitet auch Nicole Schneiders, die aus Thüringen kommt, Mitglied der NPD war und nun den mutmaßlichen NSU-Unterstützer Ralf Wohlleben verteidigt. Die Anwälte aus der Kanzlei verteidigten bereits zahlreiche Neonazis vor Gericht. Zudem arbeitet der Sänger der mittlerweile aufgelösten Rechtsrock-Band “Noie Werte”, der auch Anwalt ist, mit einem Kollegen aus der Kanzlei Harsch zusammen. Auf den rekonstruierten Bekennervideos des NSU wurde Musik von der Band aus Baden-Württemberg benutzt.

Nach SWR-Angaben prüft die CDU nun ein Ausschlussverfahren gegen Harsch. Es gehe dabei um mögliche Verbindungen in die rechtsextreme Szene, hieß es aus der Partei. Allerdings brauche die Partei handfeste Beweise, dass es bei Harsch rechtsextreme Tendenzen gebe. Presseberichten zufolge soll sich Harsch inzwischen von Kollegen mit rechtsextremer Vergangenheit distanziert haben. Demzufolge soll er eine Bürogemeinschaft mit ihnen in Stuttgart gekündigt haben.

Find this story at 18 december 2011

Geschredderte NSU-Akten „Der Skandal ist systembedingt“

Geheimdienstexperte Rolf Gössner findet den Verfassungsschutz „demokratieunverträglich“. Stattdessen sollten offen arbeitende Stellen die Neonaziszene durchleuchten.

taz: Herr Gössner, was ging Ihnen durch den Kopf, als Sie erfahren haben, dass der Bundesverfassungsschutz wichtige Akten geschreddert hat?

Rolf Gössner: Ich habe erwartet, dass wir es bei der Aufarbeitung rund um die Taten der NSU-Zelle auch mit Beweismittelunterdrückung zu tun haben würden. Andererseits hat es mich jetzt doch schockiert, dass ein geheimes Sicherheitsorgan in einem Fall von zehnfachem Mord Akten vernichtet. Es geht dabei schließlich um V-Leute und verdeckte Operationen im Umfeld des Thüringer Heimatschutzes, jener Neonazi-Truppe, aus der der NSU entstanden ist.

Der schreddernde Beamte argumentierte offenbar mit Datenschutz. Die Löschungsfrist sei bei den betreffenden Akten überschritten gewesen.

Das halte ich für sehr unglaubwürdig. Auch wenn tatsächlich die Löschungsfristen nicht eingehalten worden sind: Wenn die Akten noch existieren zu einem Zeitpunkt, in dem die Bundesanwaltschaft die Ermittlungen übernimmt, ist eine Vernichtung ungeheuerlich und meines Erachtens auch illegal.

Wurde hier versucht, etwas zu vertuschen?

Der Zeitpunkt deutet darauf hin. Ich kenne die Akten nicht, aber was man daraus weiß, ist so wichtig und gravierend, weil es einen unmittelbaren Bezug zu den mutmaßlichen Tätern des NSU hat.

ROLF GÖSSNER

64, Vizepräsident der Internationalen Liga für Menschenrechte. Von 1970 bis 2008 wurde er selbst vom Bundesverfassungsschutz beobachtet – rechtswidrig.
Foto: Heide Schneider-Sonnemann

Ein Referatsleiter soll die Aktenvernichtung eigenmächtig angeordnet haben. Halten Sie das für möglich?

Fachlich und politisch verantwortlich sind der Verfassungsschutzpräsident Heinz Fromm und letztlich auch der Bundesinnenminister Hans-Peter Friedrich (CSU). Von Fromms Auftritt vor dem Untersuchungsausschuss kommende Woche erwarte ich mir aber nicht viel. Eine lückenlose Aufklärung wäre von einem Verfassungsschutzpräsidenten auch zu viel verlangt. Da etwa der Schutz von V-Leuten auch von Fromm selbst als so überragend eingeschätzt wird, ist eine rücksichtslose Aufklärung gar nicht möglich.

Sollte Fromm zurücktreten?

Ich halte hier nicht viel von personellen Konsequenzen, denn das Geheimdienstsystem würde uns erhalten bleiben. Der Skandal ist systembedingt, an den Strukturen muss angesetzt werden. Denn die Geheimdienststrukturen führen zwangsläufig zu amtlichen Verdunkelungsstrategien. Der Inlandsgeheimdienst mit dem euphemistischen Tarnnamen Verfassungsschutz ist demokratieunverträglich, weil er den demokratischen Prinzipien der Transparenz und Kontrollierbarkeit widerspricht. Und mit seinen kriminellen V-Leute-System ist er Teil des Nazi-Problems geworden.

In der Politik ist die Empörung jetzt groß. Meinen Sie, dass das Ihrer Forderung nach Abschaffung des Verfassungsschutzes Rückenwind gibt?

…

Find this story at 29 June 2012

Interview: Sebastian Erb

29.06.20128 Kommentare

Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Für Fragen zu Rechten oder Genehmigungen wenden Sie sich bitte an lizenzen@taz.de

De spiegel van ‘Das Leben der Anderen’ in Duitsland: Rolf Gössner zelf 38 jaar getapt door de Verfassungsschutz

38 jaar getapt door de Duitse inlichtingendienst

Nut en noodzaak van inlichtingendiensten wordt alleen zichtbaar als feiten over het werk van die diensten aan het licht komen. Succes verhalen over operaties worden beschreven door loyale onderzoekers en ‘deskundigen.’ Rob de Wijk stelde het boek ‘Doelwit Europa’ samen om te laten zien hoeveel aanslagen voorkomen waren door veiligheidsdiensten. Bij die succesverhalen zijn kanttekeningen te zetten. Er is bijvoorbeeld de voorkennis over aanslagen van de inlichtingendiensten waar niets is mee gedaan. De gevolgen van dat inadequate optreden is duidelijk geworden op 11 maart 2004 in Madrid en de 5 juli 2005 in London. Ook de betrokkenheid van informanten en infiltranten van inlichtingendiensten bij ernstige strafbare feiten roept vragen op over nut en noodzaak.
Rolf Gössner schreef over die strafbare feiten van informanten het boek “Geheime Informanten, V-Leute des Verfassungsschützes: Kriminelle im Dienst des Staates.” Het boek beschrijft de infiltratie van de Duitse extreem rechtse partij de NPD (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands) door de Duitse geheime dienst in het begin van de eenentwintigste eeuw. De Duitse regering overwoog de partij te verbieden, maar als de verhalen over de infiltratie van de partij opduiken is het mis. De verspreiding en vermenigvuldiging van fascistisch propaganda materiaal door betaalde informanten van de dienst is de eerste smet. Vervolgens volgen getuigenissen over mishandelingen en pogingen tot doodslag. Het verbod van de NPD is van de baan. Even is de betrokkenheid van NPD informanten bij strafbare feiten een groot schandaal. Gössner documenteert de feiten in “Geheime Informanten.” De consequenties voor de Verfassungsschütz zijn echter minimaal.
Voor Gössner zelf is het echter niet afgelopen. De inlichtingendienst zal hem tot 18 november 2008 in de gaten blijven houden. Op die dag heeft de staat de vice-president van de internationale liga voor de rechten van de mens, publicist en advocaat ruim 38 jaar in de gaten gehouden. Het Bundesamt für Verfassungsschütz deelt de rechtbank dan mee dat zij de observatie van Gössner stopzetten, “ … daß die Beobachtung des Klägers – nach aktuell erfolgter Prüfung durch das Bundesministerium des Innern und das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz – eingestellt worden ist.” De dienst is net op tijd omdat op 20 november 2009 de rechtzaak van Gössner tegen de staat begint. Een zaak die de dienst naar alle waarschijnlijkheid verloren had, gezien recente uitspraken over de observatie van fractievoorzitter van de politieke partij Die Linke, Bodo Ramelow.

Gössner had een rechtzaak tegen de staat aangespannen met betrekking tot die observatie en de mogelijke vernietiging van de verzamelde gegevens over hem door de inlichtingendienst. Deze procedure loopt al sinds februari 2006. De geheime dienst merkt op dat zij de gegevens die over Gössner verzameld zijn in afwachting van een gerechtelijke uitspraak bewaren. “Die hier zum Kläger erfaßten Daten werden ab sofort gesperrt. Von der Löschung der Daten wird – trotz ihrer Löschungsreife – insbesondere wegen der anhängigen Auskunftsklageverfahren bis zum rechtskräftigen Abschluß der Verfahren abgesehen.”

Rolf Gössner werd in de gaten gehouden omdat hij contacten had met mensen en organisaties die door het Bundesamt für Verfassungsschütz worden bestempeld als links extremistisch of beïnvloed door het links extremisme. De observatie vindt plaats op grond van het feit dat hij zou samenwerken met deze groepen. “Zusammenarbeit mit linksextremistischen bzw. linksextremistisch beeinflussten Personenzusammenschlüssen,” wordt hem eind jaren negentig door de inlichtingendienst meegedeeld. Onder de groepen, bevindt zich ook de Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes“ (VVN), de vereniging van slachtoffers van het nazi regime. De inlichtingendienst beschuldigt Rolf Gössner zelf niet van staatsgevaarlijke activiteiten. Hij wordt “nicht vorgeworfen, selbst verfassungsfeindliche Ziele zu verfolgen oder sich entsprechend geäußert zu haben.” Hij is slachtoffer geworden van de stelselmatige observatie door de inlichtingendienst omdat hij de ‘verkeerde’ contacten zou hebben als publicist en advocaat, zegt hij in de media. “Eine Art Kontaktschuld ist mir zur Last gelegt, nicht etwa eigene verfassungswidrige Beiträge oder Bestrebungen,” vertelt Gössner aan de Stuttgarter Zeitung.

In1996 deed het tijdschrift ‘Geheim” een inzage verzoek bij de Verfassungsschütz. Uit de stukken die naar aanleiding van dat verzoek werden geopenbaard werd duidelijk dat het blad al sinds 1970 in de gaten werd gehouden. De inlichtingendienst bestempelde het blad als links extremistisch. Gössner schreef regelmatig voor het blad en kwam ook in de stukken voor. Daarnaast heeft hij in de 38 jaar dat hij is geobserveerd, gewerkt als advocaat voor verschillende instellingen en individuen. Ook was hij actief als burgerrechten en mensenrechten activist. In de jaren negentig werkte hij als een adviseur voor de politieke partij de Grünen in Hannover. De inlichtingendienst heeft al die contacten van Gössner geobserveerd en afgeluisterd.

Een bron binnen het Bundesamt für Verfassungsschütz vertelde het tijdschrift Stern dat het aantal artikelen, recensies van Gössners boeken, voordrachten, interviews en andere informatie die over Gössner verzameld zijn niet meer te overzien is. Onder de documenten bevinden zich interviews van de advocaat in de Weserkurier en de Frankfurter Rundschau. De Bundesdatenschutzbeauftragten, het Duitse College Bescherming Persoonsgegevens, vond het niet te bevatten wat er over Gössner verzameld was. De Bundesdatenschutzbeauftragten mochten de documenten echter niet inzien. Zij werden door ambtenaren van de inlichtingendienst voorgelezen omdat volgens de dienst bronnen moeten worden beschermd.

Geheime bronnen doet vermoeden dat er informanten tegen Gössner zijn ingezet ook bijvoorbeeld in zijn tijd dat hij voor de Grünen werkte. De inlichtingendienst beweert echter dat er geen agenten zijn ingezet om specifiek de mensenrechtenactivist te observeren, maar Gössner kan dat zelf niet controleren. Hij heeft in eerste instantie een deel, ongeveer 500 pagina’s, van zijn persoonsdossier gekregen. Grote delen zijn zwart gemaakt. Zijn dossier over alleen de periode 2000 tot 2008 telt ruim 2000 pagina’s. Uit de gekregen stukken kan Gössner opmaken dat een deel van de zwart gemaakte teksten commentaren van de inlichtingendienst zijn op de lezingen en teksten van de publicist.
Over de geheimhouding verklaart de dienst dat deze in het belang is van informanten, ter bescherming van de bronnen van de dienst. Gössner moet de dienst op het woord geloven dat er geen informanten tegen hem persoonlijk zijn ingezet, maar dat is onmogelijk nadat je 38 jaar bent afgeluisterd door diezelfde dienst. Hij gaat er vanuit dat de dienst al zijn gesprekken met de klanten van zijn advocatenpraktijk en zijn mensenrechten werk heeft afgeluisterd.
De rechtbank heeft de dienst opgedragen het dossier van Gössner van 1970 tot 2000 en de niet vrijgegeven stukken van 2000 tot 2008 ter inzage aan de rechtbank over te dragen. Deze gaat dan beoordelen wat geheim mag blijven en wat niet.

Het niet vrijgeven van bepaalde documenten valt onder een verordening van de minister van Binnenlandse Zaken. Gössner vecht echter ook deze akte van geheimhouding aan. In een vraaggesprek met het blad de Neue Kriminalpolitik draait de advocaat de bescherming van de informanten van de overheid om. Als werknemers of betrokkenen uit de gelederen van de politie of de inlichtingendienst zich bij Gössner melden om misstanden openbaar te maken of te bespreken wordt de geheimhouding van die gesprekken geschonden. In zijn boek “Geheime Informanten” komen verhalen over zulke misstanden voor. Als de inlichtingendienst de advocaat/publicist in de gaten hield dan liepen de klokkenluiders gevaar. Door zich op haar bronbescherming te beroepen, maar tegelijkertijd de geheimhouding van de advocaat te schenden, erkent de inlichtingendienst dat het haar slechts om het eigen lijfbehoud gaat. Niet het behoud van de rechtstaat, maar dat van de dienst is haar doel. “Meine bereits über 30 Jahre währende Langzeitüberwachung kann gravierende Folgen in allen drei Berufen zeitigen. In meinem publizistischen Tätigkeitsbereich müssen Informanten etwa aus dem Polizei- oder Geheimdienst-Apparat, die sich wegen Mißständen an mich wenden, damit rechnen, daß ihr Kontakt zu mir überwacht wird. Insofern ist der eigentlich gesetzlich garantierte Informantenschutz nicht mehr gewährleistet. Genau so wenig wie das Mandatsgeheimnis bei meiner Tätigkeit als Rechtsanwalt. Kein Mandant kann mehr sicher sein, daß das, was er mir vertraulich mitteilt, tatsächlich auch vertraulich bleibt – es sei denn, die Unterredung erfolgt in Wald und Flur. Wenn ich meiner Tätigkeit als parlamentarischer Berater nachgehe, dann ist der Schutz jener gewählten Abgeordneten vor geheimdienstlicher Ausforschung nicht mehr gewährleistet, die ich persönlich berate. Ein wirklich unhaltbarer Zustand.”

Gössner was kritisch over het veiligheidsapparaat en over het werk van inlichtingendiensten. Het boek ‘Geheime Informanten’ is daarvan een voorbeeld. Dit kan een motief van de inlichtingendienst zijn geweest om hem veertig jaar in de gaten te houden ondanks protesten van vooraanstaande journalisten, schrijvers, juristen, maar ook de Duitse Bundestag (parlement) en de Duitse regering. Zelfs een regering van SPD en de Grünen weerhield de inlichtingendienst er niet van om Gössner te observeren.

Critici hun leven lang in de gaten houden is iets dat alleen de Stasi deed, lijkt de algemene stelling. De archieven van de Stasi zijn daar het levende bewijs van. De observatie van de mensenrechten activist door de Duitse inlichtingendienst en de duizenden pagina’s die over zijn leven zijn verzameld maken duidelijk dat dit niet alleen in het Oost Duitsland van Erich Honecker gebeurde.

Find this story at 1 June 2012

Geen blinde staat, maar Im Dienst des Staates: Geheime Informanten boek van Rolf Gössner

Rolf Gössner kritisiert in »Geheime Informanten« Symbiose zwischen Neonazis und Verfassungsschutz

Nicht erst seit den Enthüllungen über das Zusammenspiel der bundesdeutschen Inlandsgeheimdienste mit dem militanten Neonazinetzwerk, welches sich rund um die Terroristen des »Nationalsozialistischen Untergrundes« (NSU) gruppiert hat, wurde deutlich, welche Gefahr von den Schlapphutbehörden tatsächlich ausgeht. Schließlich sind die fälschlicherweise als »Verfassungsschutz« bezeichneten Dienste weder durch die kritische Öffentlichkeit noch durch geheim tagende parlamentarische Kontrollgremien kontrollierbar.

Einer, der bereits seit Jahrzehnten vor dem gefährlichen Treiben der Inlandsgeheimdienste warnt, ist der Rechtsanwalt und Publizist Dr. Rolf Gössner, der zugleich Vizepräsident der Internationalen Liga für Menschenrechte und stellvertretender Richter am Staatsgerichtshof in Bremen ist. Im Gegensatz zu manchen selbsternannten Geheimdienstexperten weiß Gössner sehr genau, wovon er spricht. Schließlich wurde der Bürgerrechtler selbst satte 38 Jahre überwacht und bespitzelt. Nun hat Gössner sein bereits 2003 erschienenes Buch »Geheime Informanten« aktualisiert und als E-Book zum Herunterladen im Internet neu aufgelegt. Der Band dokumentiert die langjährige Symbiose zwischen Verfassungsfeinden und »Verfassungsschützern« und legt ein brisantes Dossier der kriminellen Karrieren zahlreicher V-Männer vor. Über sein unkontrollierbares Netz bezahlter und krimineller V-Leute hat sich der Verfassungsschutz Gössner zufolge fast zwangsläufig in kriminelle Machenschaften verstrickt, wobei Straftaten geduldet bzw. indirekt gefördert wurden. Brandstiftung, Totschlag, Mordaufrufe und Waffenhandel, das sind nur einige der kriminellen Machenschaften, denen sich V-Leute in der Vergangenheit schuldig gemacht haben, so der Rechtsanwalt.

»Das vielleicht Erschreckendste, was ich bei den Recherchen zu meinem Buch erfahren mußte, ist, daß der ›Verfassungsschutz‹ seine kriminell gewordenen V-Leute oft genug deckt, systematisch gegen polizeiliche Ermittlungen abschirmt, um sie weiter abschöpfen zu können – anstatt sie unverzüglich abzuschalten«, konstatiert Gössner.

Seine Kritik an den staatlichen Spitzelbehörden äußert der engagierte Bürgerrechtler indes nicht nur auf theoretischer Ebene. Vielmehr untermalt er diese durch Enthüllungen über das kriminelle Treiben mancher V-Leute. Ebenso rechnet der Rechtsanwalt mit der Extremismusdoktrin ab, mittels derer Antifaschisten mit Neonazis gleichgesetzt werden.

Gössners Buch ist indes auch als Mahnung vor einem weiteren Abbau von Grund- und Freiheitsrechten zu verstehen. »Es besteht die Gefahr, daß der Rechtsruck, den wir in Deutschland nicht erst seit gestern zu verzeichnen haben, auf staatlicher Ebene mit weiteren autoritären ›Lösungen‹ verstärkt und gefestigt wird«, warnt er.

Trotz der offenkundigen Verstrickung der Geheimdienste in die militante Naziszene kommt es in der Bundesrepublik erstaunlicher Weise zu keiner dauerhaften und breiten gesellschaftlichen Debatte. Gössner hingegen nimmt deutlich Stellung und votiert für eine Abschaffung der Schlapphutbehörden.

Am Dienstag wird dem Autor für seine »Bücher und Vorträge, aktuell aber auch als Anerkennung für seinen Doppelsieg über die NRW-Verfassungsschutzbehörde und das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, das ihn seit 1970 ununterbrochen – so das Urteil des Verwaltungsgerichts Köln–‚unverhältnismäßig und grundrechtswidrig‘ überwachen ließ«, von der Neuen Rheinischen Zeitung (NRhZ) der »Kölner Karls-Preis für engagierte Literatur und Publizistik« verliehen.

Rolf Gössner: Geheime Informanten. V-Leute des Verfassungsschutzes: Neonazis im Dienst des Staates. Knaur eBook, München 2012, 320 Seiten; Link zum Download für 6,99 Euro: bit.ly/J8XWNC

Find this story at14 Mai 2012

 

 

Rolf Gössner publiceerde in 2003 een boek over de verwevenheind van de inlichtingendiensten en extreem rechts in Duitsland

Provocateurs and criminals in the employ of the Brandenburg intelligence service

German undercover agents known as “V-men” have been regularly recruited or infiltrated by the intelligence services on a state and national level into groups and organisations the secret services regard as politically dubious. The official function of such agents is to acquire firsthand information about the groups.

In practice, however, they have not limited their activities to merely passively gathering information. On occasion they have carried out major illegal and violent acts, and often play a leading role in the organisations under observation. They are, according to author Rolf Gössner’s apt description in his recently published book Geheime Informanten (Secret Informants), “criminals in the service of the state” [1].

In the few brief years of its activity, since its foundation after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the Brandenburg intelligence service has gained notoriety for its use of provocateurs and criminals.

Particular public attention was aroused by the cases of Carsten Szczepanski and Toni Stadler—two neo-Nazis who worked as undercover agents for the Brandenburg intelligence service in the milieu of extreme right-wing and neo-fascist organisations. Both men were active in building up the groups they were associated with and took part in illegal activities, which the intelligence services are ostensibly supposed to prevent.

Carsten Szczepanski had already gained a reputation as a neo-Nazi at the beginning of the 1990s. He was part of the right-wing extremist skinhead milieu and had contact with the leadership of the National Front. He was also instrumental in establishing an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan in Germany.

In 1992, police raided an apartment rented by Szczepanski and found four pipe bombs, explosive material and detonators. The police then undertook a preliminary inquiry on the suspicion that he was involved in founding a terrorist organisation. However, Szczepanski was never charged or sentenced for these crimes—indicating that he was at this point already being employed and receiving cover from the intelligence service.

According to the Brandenburg intelligence service, it first began to work with Szczepanski in 1994, after he had begun a long prison sentence for attempting to murder a Nigerian, Steve Erenhi. Despite the gravity of his crime, Szczepanski was already a free man in 1997, and renewed his activities in the neo-fascist milieu as V-man “Piato.”

After his release from jail, Szczepanski/Piato opened a shop in a small east German town, Königs Wusterhausen, where he sold books and music with neo-fascist text and lyrics. He was the publisher of an extreme right magazine, United Skins, and played a leading role in building up the neo-fascist milieu that he was supposed to spy on for the intelligence service. He became chairman of the local branch of the NPD (German National Party), a member of the regional leadership of the NPD in Spreewald, and the organisational head and committee member of the NPD for the state of Brandenburg-Berlin.

V-man “Piato” took over a leading role in the party he was sent to spy on for the Brandenburg intelligence service—and his is not the only case. Over the past three years, the German government has been attempting to ban the NPD, but in the spring of this year the German constitutional court threw out the entire case after it became clear during investigations that the party has been heavily infiltrated by the intelligence service. Because every seventh member of the NPD was an operative of the intelligence service, the court was forced to confront the fact that agents working for the intelligence services inside the NPD had possibly been responsible for acts and behaviour that the state had sought to use as evidence to ban the party.

In the case of Toni Stadler, the responsibility of the Brandenburg intelligence service for crimes carried out by neo-Nazis, including the dissemination of extreme right-wing material, is much more directly evident.

Stadler ran a neo-fascist shop with specialist music and literature. He took part in the production and distribution of the CD “Notes of Hatred,” which featured lyrics by the “White Aryan Rebels” calling for the abuse of children and the rape and murder of foreigners, Jews and anti-Nazis.

Shortly after Stadler received the commission for the production of the liner notes and cover for the CD, the Brandenburg intelligence service recruited him as an undercover agent. Stadler’s acquaintance, Mirko Hesse, who established contact with a foreign-based CD publishing company, was in the meantime working for the national intelligence agency. With the knowledge and backing of both intelligence authorities, the two neo-Nazis distributed the CDs, including lyrics calling for murder, with a circulation of 3,000 copies. Following the sell-out of the CD, the couple organised a further printing—entirely under the eyes of the intelligence services.

The undercover agents were finally exposed when the Berlin police, who knew nothing about the undercover activities of Stadler and Hesse, took action against their neo-Nazi music distribution. Previously, the intelligence services had done everything imaginable to protect Stadler from the police: his intelligence service handler warned him of imminent house searches, provided him with a “clean” computer, and advised him to establish a “bunker” for the illegal goods stored in Stadler’s shop.

In the trial against Stadler, Berlin state attorney Jürgen Heinke concluded: “Without the help of the Brandenburg intelligence service, the production of the CD by the neo-Nazi band White Aryan Rebels would not have been possible.” The presiding judge, Hans-Jürgen Brüning, declared in his judgment that the crimes of the accused were carried out “under the eyes and with the knowledge of state authorities” and that the intelligence service had been in a position “to nip the crime in the bud.” He concluded his judgement with the unusual demand by a judge for a parliamentary inquiry.

Both cases from Brandenburg cast light on the methods and characters of those who collaborate with the intelligence service. In Brandenburg, there are no regulations governing the activities of undercover agents. State interior minister, former general Jörg Schönbohm (Christian Democratic Union—CDU), has openly defended these practices and argued that his agents have to be allowed room to manoeuvre to avoid exposure.

Following criticisms of Schönbohm, the prime minister for the state of Brandenburg, Matthias Platzeck (German Social Democratic Party—SPD), demonstratively backed his controversial interior minister in the case of Stadler. He declared that Brandenburg required an “effective” rather than a “transparent” intelligence service. In similar manner, the state parliament commission overseeing the activities of the intelligence service backed the authority’s work in the cases of Szczepanski und Stadler. In fact, it emerged that the parliamentary commission had been regularly informed of the collaboration with agent “Piato.” This amounted to a de facto legitimisation of the intelligence service’s relations with Stadler. The commission went on to criticise the Berlin police for taking action against distribution of the racist CD without informing the commission or the intelligence service.

There has been little exposure in past years of the work of the Brandenburg intelligence service in the so-called milieu of “left-wing extremism.” Bearing in mind that Interior Minister Schönbohm never misses an opportunity to emphasise the potential threat from left-wing extremism, it is entirely plausible that the intelligence service has employed provocateurs in such circles. Attempts by the intelligence service to recruit spies in left-wing circles have regularly come to light when those approached have turned down an offer and publicised what had transpired.

In March of this year, a local Brandenburg newspaper, the Märkischen Allgemeinen Zeitung, featured an advertisement by the “Working Group—Knowledge and Progress” offering part-time employment for “politically interested young people—18 years and older.” A student who followed up the advertisement and met with a contact person reported that, in exchange for cash, he had been asked to provide information about the “left-wing milieu… for example, the peace movement.” Additional research revealed that the “Working Group—Knowledge and Progress” was a fiction. Just a few months before this incident, the Berlin intelligence service had also sought to recruit students for espionage purposes in left-wing groups under the cover name “Team Base Research.”

The results of these attempts at recruitment are not known. It would be the height of naiveté, however, to discount the use of agents and provocations in the milieu of “left-wing extremism” in a manner similar to that employed by the intelligence services in neo-Nazi groups.

[1] Rolf Gössner, Geheime Informanten, ISBN 3-4267-7684-7, 315 Seiten, € 12,90.

 

 Find this story at 17 november 2003

 

By Lena Sokoll
17 November 2003

Mark Kennedy hired as consultant by US security firm

Former police spy provides ‘investigative services, risk and threat assessments’ for Densus Group
Mark Kennedy posed as Mark Stone, a long-haired, tattooed campaigner, and took part in many demonstrations between 2003 and 2010. Photograph: Guardian

A former police spy who infiltrated the environmental movement for seven years has been hired by a private security firm in the US to give advice on how to deal with political activists.

Mark Kennedy has become a consultant to the Densus Group, providing “investigative services, risk and threat assessments”, according to an entry on his LinkedIn profile.

He says he has given lectures to firms and government bodies drawing on his experiences “as a covert operative working within extreme left political and animal rights groups throughout the UK, Europe and the US”.

Kennedy, 42, went to live in Cleveland, Ohio, after he was unmasked by activists in late 2010. He has claimed to have developed sympathies for the activists while undercover, although many campaigners have scorned this claim.

The disclosure of his clandestine deployment has led to a series of revelations over the past 18 months about the 40-year police operation to penetrate and disrupt political groups. The convictions of one group of protesters were quashed after it was revealed that prosecutors and police had withheld key evidence – Kennedy’s covert recording of campaigners – from their trial. A second trial of activists collapsed after it emerged that Kennedy had infiltrated them.

Kennedy was one of a long line of undercover officers since 1968 sent to spy on political activists under a fake identity. He posed as Mark Stone, a long-haired, tattooed campaigner, and took part in many demonstrations between 2003 and 2010. He has admitted sleeping with activists he was spying on, even though police chiefs say this is strictly forbidden.

Even after the police ended his deployment, he continued to pretend he was a campaigner and to fraternise with activists he had known while undercover. In particular, Kennedy developed a sudden interest in animal rights campaigns, according to activists.

After he was exposed, he sold his story to the Mail on Sunday which reported that soon after he left the police he worked for Global Open, a security firm that advises corporations on how to thwart campaigners promoting animal rights and other causes. He denied this in a later interview.

A month before he left the police he set up the first of three commercial firms whose work has not been described. For the past four months he has been working for the Texas-based Densus Group, which advises firms on “countering current and developing threats” from protesters.

…

 

Find this story at 21 June 2012

Rob Evans and Paul Lewis
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 21 June 2012 17.29 BST
© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

 

 

Criminele drugsinfiltrant VS jarenlang actief in Nederland

’Inzet burgerinfiltranten in Nederland strikt verboden’

 

De Amerikaanse drugsbestrijdingsorganisatie DEA heeft een criminele burgerinfiltrant ingezet in Nederland. Het AD heeft de hand weten te leggen op geheime rapporten van de DEA.

 

De burgerinfiltrant speelde een hoofdrol bij de gecontroleerde doorvoer van een grote hoeveelheid drugs in Europa. Doel was het in de val lokken van drugscriminelen. Op de partij kwamen meerdere Nederlanders af. Infiltrant ‘Mono’ werkte maandenlang vanuit Amsterdam.

 

De rol van de DEA-infiltrant ligt gevoelig, omdat het een bom kan leggen onder het proces tegen de potentiële kopers die momenteel in Haarlem terechtstaan. De verdachten vermoeden dat de DEA in Nederland buiten haar boekje is gegaan en eisen inzage in de operatie. De Amerikanen weigeren dat.

 

Justitie claimt dat ze eind 2009 voor het eerst hoorde dat Mono voor de DEA werkte. Een artikel uit de Poolse krant Gazeta Wyborcza zet vraagtekens bij die verklaring. Nederland zou namelijk al op 11 februari 2009 een bemiddelende rol hebben gespeeld tussen de DEA en de Poolse geheime dienst ABW.

 

…

Vindt dit verhaal op 16 juni 2012

 

Bewerkt door: Leonie Francien Sellies

16-6-12 – 08:23  bron: ANP

De infiltrant was maandenlang actief in Amsterdam. © ANP.

 

De Persgroep Digital. Alle rechten voorbehouden.

Undercover policeman planted bomb in 1987 Debenhams blast that caused millions of pounds worth of damage to ‘prove worth’ to animal rights group he was infiltrating, claims Green Party MP

News revealed as minister said undercover officers CAN have sex with environmental activists to maintain their cover

Bob Lambert planted a bomb in Debenhams inHarrowin 1987, MP says using parliamentary privilege

Three bombs planted during the coordinated attacks

Two bombers were caught and jailed, but the third one was never traced

An undercover policeman planted a bomb in a department store to prove his commitment to animal rights extremists, an MP claimed yesterday.

Bob Lambert is accused of leaving an incendiary device in a Debenhams inLondon– one of three set off in a coordinated attack in 1987.

Caroline Lucas, leader of the Green Party, used parliamentary privilege to claim that Mr Lambert – who went under the alias Bob Robinson – carried out the attack after infiltrating the Animal Liberation Front.

The group planted the devices in protest at the store’s decision to sell fur products.

The attacks caused £8million of damage and led Debenhams to stop selling fur.

The claims were strongly denied by Mr Lambert, who is now a leading academic and expert in terrorism and Islamophobia at St Andrew’s University.

Following the July 1987 attacks on Debenhams, two activists – Geoff Sheppard and Andrew Clarke – were jailed for planting devices in theLutonand Romford stores.

Sheppard received a sentence of four years and four months, while Clarke was jailed for more than three years. The third activist involved was never caught.

Miss Lucas yesterday said she had seen a witness statement from Sheppard claiming the third man was Mr Lambert and that he targeted a store inHarrow.

She told MPs that Sheppard was not there when the bomb was planted. She read from his statement, which said: ‘I straightaway knew that Bob had carried out his part of the plan.

‘There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind whatsoever that Bob Lambert placed the incendiary device at the Debenhams store inHarrow.

‘I specifically remember him giving an explanation to me about how he had been able to place one of the devices in that store, but how he had not been able to place the second device.’

Miss Lucas alleged that when Sheppard’s flat was raided two months later while he was making four more fire-bombs, the intelligence was so accurate it ‘came from Bob Lambert’.

Calling for an inquiry into the activities of undercover officers, Miss Lucas told MPs: ‘It would seem that planting the third incendiary device was perhaps a move designed to bolster Lambert’s credibility and reinforce the impression of a genuine and dedicated activist.

 

‘There is no doubt in my mind that anyone planting an incendiary device in a department store is guilty of a very serious crime and should have charges brought against them.’

 

Mr Lambert said: ‘It was necessary to create the false impression that I was a committed animal rights extremist to gain intelligence so as to disrupt serious criminal conspiracies.

 

‘However, I did not commit serious crime such as planting an incendiary device at the Debenhams Harrow store.’

 

Mr Lambert infiltrated the Animal Liberation Front in the late 1980s and his evidence was used to convict Sheppard and Clarke.

 

He went on to become a police spymaster who led a network of undercover officers who infiltrated radical groups.

…

 

Find this story at 13 june 2012

By Kirsty Walker and Chris Greenwood

PUBLISHED: 14:27 GMT, 13 June 2012  | UPDATED: 00:45 GMT, 14 June 2012

Published by Associated Newspapers Ltd

Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday & Metro Media Group

© Associated Newspapers Ltd

Tappen en infiltreren

De telefoontap is een veelvuldig ingezet opsporingsmiddel. Nu de inzet van telefoontap steeds minder effectief blijkt en de internettap nog in de kinderschoenen staat, lijkt het voor de hand te liggen dat er in de opsporing meer aandacht zal komen voor andere bijzondere opsporingsmethoden, zoals observatie (stelselmatig volgen), infiltratie, pseudokoop en -dienstverlening, undercover stelselmatig informatie inwinnen, inkijken, direct afluisteren en bijstand en opsporing door burgers (informanten en infiltranten). In dit themanummer wordt daarnaast aandacht besteed aan het fenomeen exfiltratie, ofwel meewerkende criminele getuige.

Inhoudsopgave:
Voorwoord
Wie belt er nou nog? De veranderende opbrengst van de telefoontap – G. Odinot en D. de Jong
Mogelijkheden en beperkingen van de internettap – J.J. Oerlemans
Opsporingsbevoegdheden en privacy; een internationale vergelijking – J.B.J. van der Leij
Undercoveroperaties: een noodzaakelijk kwaad? Heden, verleden en toekomst van een omstreden opsporingsmiddel – E.W. Kruisbergen en D. de Jong
De exfiltratie van verdachte en veroordeelde criminelen; over de onmisbaarheid van een effectieve regeling voor coöperatieve criminele getuigen – C. Fijnaut
Summaries

Organisatie: WODC
Plaats uitgave: Den Haag

Document te vinden bij

Voorwoord te vinden bij

Summaries at

 

Undercover Policing

Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion, Green)

It is a pleasure to hold this debate under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I am very grateful for the opportunity to raise the issue of the rules governing undercover police infiltrators and informers.

I am sure the House will agree that when it comes to the deployment of undercover police officers, transparency and accountability are of the utmost importance. In recent months, however, a number of cases have come to light that seem to expose serious abuses of any guidelines that we might reasonably assume inform what police officers working undercover can and cannot do. The cases raise important questions about whether such guidelines are ever enforced, whether individuals who breach them are properly held to account, and the extent to which infiltration of campaign groups is a legitimate, or even effective, tactic. Also, I have details of new allegations relating to the behaviour of one undercover officer that I believe require immediate investigation and raise questions about the convictions of two individuals.

Since at least the 1968 protests against the Vietnam war, police chiefs, backed by successive Governments, have used the tactic of infiltration to secure more reliable intelligence about political demonstrations than could be provided by informants. Undercover police officers pose as political activists over several years, to gather reliable intelligence and perhaps disrupt campaigners’ activities. In the early days, such officers were part of a super-secret unit within special branch, called the special demonstration squad; more recently they have been under a second unit, the national public order intelligence unit.

Up to nine undercover officers have been unmasked following the exposure of Mark Kennedy in late 2010. I will say a bit more about his case later, but the officers include Bob Lambert, know by the alias Bob Robinson. That officer pretended to be a committed environmental and animal rights campaigner between 1984 and 1988. By the summer of 1987, he had successfully infiltrated the Animal Liberation Front, a group that operated through a tightly organised underground network of small cells of activists, making it difficult to penetrate. In October 2011, after he was exposed as an undercover officer, Bob Lambert admitted:

“In the 1980s I was deployed as an undercover Met special branch officer to identify and prosecute members of Animal Liberation Front who were then engaged in incendiary device and explosive device campaigns against targets in the vivisection, meat and fur trades.”

Lambert has also admitted that part of his mission was to identify and prosecute specific ALF activists:

“I succeeded in my task and that success included the arrest and imprisonment of Geoff Sheppard and Andrew Clarke.”

The men Lambert referred to were ALF activists who were found guilty of planting incendiary devices in two Debenhams stores. Allegations about exactly what kind of role Lambert might have played in their convictions have come to light only recently.

In July 1987, three branches of Debenhams, in Luton, Romford and Harrow, were targeted by the ALF in co-ordinated, simultaneous incendiary attacks, because

the shops sold fur products. Sheppard and Clarke were tried and found guilty, but the culprit who planted the incendiary device in the Harrow store was never caught. Bob Lambert’s exposure as an undercover police officer has prompted Geoff Sheppard to speak out about the Harrow attack. He alleges that Lambert was the one who planted the third device and that he was involved in the ALF’s co-ordinated campaign. Sheppard has made a statement, which I have seen, in which he says:

“Obviously I was not there when he targeted that store because we all headed off in our separate directions but I was lying in bed that night, and the news came over on the World Service that three Debenhams stores had had arson attacks on them and that included the Harrow store as well. So obviously I straightaway knew that Bob had carried out his part of the plan. There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind whatsoever that Bob Lambert placed the incendiary device at the Debenhams store in Harrow. I specifically remember him giving an explanation to me about how he had been able to place one of the devices in that store, but how he had not been able to place the second device.”

In the same interview, Sheppard says that two months after the three Debenhams store were set on fire, he and another person were in his flat making four more fire bombs when they were raided by police. Sheppard alleges that the intelligence for the raid was so precise that it is now obvious that it “came from Bob Lambert”. Lambert knew that the pair were going to be there making another set of incendiary devices.

Sheppard was jailed for four years and four months, and Clarke for more than three years. For Lambert, it was a case of job done—in fact, so well had he manipulated the situation that he even visited Sheppard in prison, to give him support before disappearing abroad. Until recently Sheppard had no reason whatsoever to suspect the man he knew as Bob Robinson—he assumed that Robinson had got away with it, fled the country and built a new life.

It seems that planting the third incendiary device might have been a move designed to bolster Lambert’s credibility and reinforce the impression of a genuine and dedicated activist. He successfully went on to gain the precise intelligence that led to the arrest of Sheppard and Clarke, without anyone suspecting that the tip-off came from him, but is that really the way we want our police officers to behave?

The case raises new questions about the rules governing undercover police infiltrators and informers, particularly when it comes to those officers committing a crime—an area in which the law is especially grey. Police chiefs can authorise undercover officers to participate in criminal acts to gain the trust of the groups they are trying to infiltrate and, in theory, to detect or prevent a more serious crime, but usually they are not allowed to be involved in planning or instigating the crime. As I understand it, the specific law on that is the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, and that before its enactment, at the time of the Debenhams attacks, the rules were vague. They have not so far been made public.

If Sheppard’s allegations are true, someone must have authorised Lambert to plant incendiary devices at the Harrow store, and presumably that same person may also have given the officer guidance on just how far he needed to go to establish his credibility with the ALF. We simply do not know, and in the absence of any

proper framework or rules, the task of holding Lambert to account is very difficult. Even if strict protocols are in place to try to control the actions of undercover officers, who decides what the protocols say, and how can we hold those people to account, given the secrecy that surrounds such activities?
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Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood, Conservative)

Will the hon. Lady give way?
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Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion, Green)

Yes, but very briefly, as I am short of time.
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Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood, Conservative)

Is not an alternative explanation that there were no protocols in place and that decisions were taken at the discretion of this officer, who was not properly controlled? To the extent that there were protocols, is it not clear that the guidance for undercover officers was coming from the Association of Chief Police Officers, which is an entirely unaccountable organisation?
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Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion, Green)

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. The truth is that we simply do not know, and that is the problem. We need clarity, which is what I hope the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice can help us with later.

There is no doubt in my mind that anyone planting an incendiary device in a department store is guilty of a very serious crime and should have charges brought against them. That means absolutely anyone, including, if the evidence is there, Bob Lambert or, indeed, the people who were supervising him.

Ironically, as we have seen, the use of undercover police infiltrators can make it much more difficult to secure successful convictions. Three Court of Appeal judges have overturned the convictions of 20 environmental protestors, ruling that crucial evidence recorded by an undercover officer, Mark Kennedy, operating under the false name of Mark Stone, was withheld from the original trial. The judges said that they had seen evidence that appeared to show that Kennedy was

“involved in activities that went further than the authorisation he was given”,

and that he was “arguably, an agent provocateur.” The latest allegations concerning Bob Lambert and the planting of incendiary devices prompt us to ask: has another undercover police officer crossed the line into acting as an agent provocateur, and how many other police spies have been encouraging protestors to commit crimes?

Mark Kennedy’s exposure in 2010 has shone a light on how officers behave when they go undercover, and especially on the rules governing whether they are permitted to form intimate relationships with those on whom they are spying. Jon Murphy, Chief Constable of Merseyside and the police chiefs’ spokesman on the issue, claims that that is “grossly unprofessional” and “never acceptable”, yet one undercover police officer, Pete Black, claims that superiors knew officers had developed sexual relationships with protestors to give credibility to their cover stories and help gather evidence.

Eight women who say that they were duped into forming long-term loving relationships with undercover policemen have started a legal action against the police. They have a copy of a letter from a Metropolitan police solicitor that asserts that the forming of personal and other relationships by a “covert human intelligence

source” to obtain information is permitted and lawful under RIPA; so either rogue undercover officers have been breaking the rules set by senior officers, or senior officers have misled the public by saying that such relationships are forbidden. We need to know what the truth is, and we need any rules of engagement to be published and open to public and parliamentary scrutiny or challenge.

The eight women allege that the men’s actions constitute a breach of articles 3 and 8 of the European convention on human rights. Article 3 asserts that no one shall be subject to inhuman or degrading treatment, and article 8 grants respect for private and family life, including the right to form relationships without unjustified interference by the state. The women go on to allege that the actions amount to common law tortious acts of deceit, misfeasance in public office and assault.

Bob Lambert is one of the five men named in the legal action, as is Mark Kennedy. The Guardian has also reported that Bob Lambert secretly fathered a child with a political campaigner whom he had been sent to spy on, and later disappeared completely from the life of the child, concealing his true identity from the child’s mother for many years. Lambert has admitted having had a long-term relationship with a second woman to bolster his credibility as a committed campaigner, and he subsequently went on to head the special demonstration squad and mentor other undercover officers who formed deceitful relationships with women.

The police authorities have made virtually no attempt to hold those or other men to account, or to examine whether they have broken any rules on relationships when undercover. The solicitors instructed by the Metropolitan police have taken a totally obstructive approach to the litigation, threatening to strike out the claims as having no foundation. Furthermore, police solicitors argue that cases can be heard only by the investigatory powers tribunal, in secret—a move that would prevent the women, whose privacy was invaded in the most intrusive manner imaginable, from hearing the evidence, such as the extent to which intimate moments were reported back to police chiefs. It seems that the police do not want anyone to be able to challenge their version of events or to scrutinise their actions. To paraphrase one of the women involved, it is incredible that in most circumstances the police need permission to search someone’s house, but if they want to send in an agent who may sleep and live with activists in their homes, that can happen without any apparent oversight.

The rules governing undercover police infiltrators and informers are also remarkably deficient when it comes to giving false evidence in court to protect a secret identity. For example, Jim Boyling, who was exposed last year for infiltrating groups such as Reclaim the Streets using the pseudonym Jim Sutton, concealed his true identity from a court when he was prosecuted alongside a group of protestors for occupying a Government building during a demonstration. It is alleged that from the moment Boyling was arrested, he gave a false name and occupation, maintaining this fiction throughout the entire prosecution, even when he gave evidence to barristers under oath.

Boyling was reported to have been present at sensitive discussions between other activists and their lawyers to decide how they would defend themselves in court, undermining the fundamental right of the activists to

hold legally protected consultations with a lawyer and illicitly obtaining details of private discussions. A lawyer representing activists who were charged alongside Jim Boyling has noted:

“This case raises the most fundamental constitutional issues about the limits of acceptable policing, the sanctity of lawyer-client confidentiality, and the integrity of the criminal justice system. At first sight, it seems that the police have wildly overstepped all recognised boundaries.”

Yet Boyling’s actions may well have been authorised. Pete Black, who worked with Boyling in the same covert unit penetrating political campaigns, said that the case was not unique and that, from time to time, prosecutions were allowed to go ahead in order to build up credibility with the activists being infiltrated.

The Metropolitan commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe, has defended undercover officers’ use of fake identities in court, claiming that there is no specific law that forbids it. However, I echo the concerns of Lord Macdonald, the former Director of Public Prosecutions, who said that Hogan-Howe’s defence was “stunning and worrying”. He commented that

“at the very least, the senior officers who are sending these undercover PCs into court to give evidence in this way are putting them at serious risk of straying into perjury.”

Bob Lambert, Mark Kennedy and Jim Boyling, as well as two other officers named in current legal actions against the police, John Barker and Mark Cassidy, have all crossed a line. Similarly, other undercover police officers may well have crossed such a line. The assumption is that they have been authorised and instructed to do so or at least, if that is not specifically the case, that a blind eye has been turned to some of their actions.

Activists who have been infiltrated have called for one overarching, full public inquiry to examine what has gone on. Lord Macdonald has also called for such an inquiry to consider how we should control undercover operations, but the Government have ignored calls to set one up. Instead, the authorities have set up 12 different inquiries since January 2011, each held in secret and looking at only one small aspect of an undercover operation. Those inquiries have not been particularly thorough and have not resulted in follow-up action. For example, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, ordered an investigation and report into allegations that the Crown Prosecution Service suppressed vital evidence in the case of the Ratcliffe-on-Soar environmental protestors. A key criticism of the CPS in that report is of the

“failures, over many months and at more than one level, by the police and the CPS.”

Nick Paul, the senior CPS lawyer who specialises in cases involving police misconduct, was not even interviewed as part of the investigation, and senior CPS staff have evaded disciplinary action. The CPS shows an ongoing reluctance to investigate past possible miscarriages of justice, and Keir Starmer is among those resisting calls for a more far-reaching inquiry.

The new allegations that I have raised today make the case for a public inquiry even more compelling. So many questions remain unanswered, including whether Bob Lambert planted the third incendiary device and, if he did, who authorised him to do so and why. More widely, the public have a right to know why money is being spent on infiltrating campaign groups, with no apparent external oversight of the decision to infiltrate

or of whether the methods used are necessary or proportionate. Why are the rules on such practices open to such abuse? Why are high-ranking police officers and, presumably, politicians sanctioning operations that put police officers at risk and undermine basic human rights?

We need to have faith that police officers are beyond reproach, that robust procedures are in place to deal with any transgressions and that those making decisions about the deployment of police officers are accountable and subject to proper scrutiny. I hope the Minister will take this opportunity to review the various concerns I have raised, and that he can tell us that the Government will agree to set up a far-reaching public inquiry into undercover police infiltrators and informers, which will look back over past practices as well as look forward.
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11:16 am

Nick Herbert (Minister of State, Justice; Arundel and South Downs, Conservative)

May I say what a surprise, but nevertheless what a great pleasure, it is to see you in the Chair, Mr Davies? I congratulate Caroline Lucas on securing the debate. I am grateful to her for raising some of these issues, because it gives me an opportunity to set out the Government’s response. I recognise that the issues she has raised are serious.

Undercover operations are sometimes necessary to protect the public and to prevent or detect crime. We should commend the difficult and often dangerous job performed by undercover officers. However, in the light of recent cases and concerns, including those raised by the hon. Lady, it is right to ask two principal questions that we must be able to answer with confidence. First, is there a system for ensuring that the use of police undercover deployment is consistent with human rights legislation, particularly the right to privacy and the right to a fair trial? Secondly, is the system working sufficiently well for the particular type of undercover deployment that has led to concerns, or do we need to take action to improve it and ensure that it provides the required assurance?

Before I consider those two fundamental questions, it is important to point out that the deployment of Bob Lambert, a case raised by the hon. Lady, took place in the 1990s, before the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000—or RIPA, as it is known—was implemented. RIPA is the legislative framework that enables police and other public authorities using covert human intelligence sources, such as undercover officers, to ensure that they act in compliance with their duties under the Human Rights Act. A “covert human intelligence source” is the label used by the legislation to describe anyone who establishes or maintains a relationship for a covert purpose. That applies to a member of the public who comes forward to volunteer information about someone and who is asked by a public authority to find out more. It applies to a public authority test purchaser who engages the confidence of a supplier to buy illicit goods. It also applies to a member of a law enforcement agency who goes undercover to infiltrate and to pass intelligence back to that agency about an organisation planning disruption or criminal acts.
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Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood, Conservative)

Could the Minister clarify whether RIPA also applies to ACPO’s responsibility for an undercover officer and its status as a private company? Moreover, did ACPO have any involvement in the Lambert case, or did it become involved only in later operations?
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Nick Herbert (Minister of State, Justice; Arundel and South Downs, Conservative)

I will clarify that point later, but my understanding is that the accountability lies with chief constables, not ACPO. I am aware of and share my hon. Friend’s concern about ACPO and its status. I hope and believe that it will be addressed, but if there is anything further to say about the matter, I will write to him.
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Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood, Conservative)

I am thinking in particular of the environmental protests at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, where it emerged that ACPO was responsible for the management of undercover officers. I am delighted that since then, Ministers have ensured the transfer of the powers involved to the Metropolitan police.
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Nick Herbert (Minister of State, Justice; Arundel and South Downs, Conservative)

My hon. Friend is correct about the responsible unit, and that important change has enhanced accountability.

RIPA applies to each of the instances that I have mentioned, because the true nature of the relationship, which involves reporting back covertly to a public authority what has been said or done, is hidden from the other person or people being talked to. In every case, RIPA requires that authorisation is only given if it is necessary and proportionate. RIPA sets out who can make a decision to deploy a covert source and for what purpose the deployment might be made. RIPA codes of practice provide practical guidance on how best to apply the regulatory framework and how to observe the human rights principles behind authorisations. External oversight and inspection is provided by the chief surveillance commissioner, and independent right of redress is provided by an investigatory tribunal for anyone who believes that they have been treated unlawfully.

That is the current system, which was not in place when Lambert was deployed, but does it work? The published annual reports of the chief surveillance commissioner indicate that, in the main, it does, but that has not always been the case. That was shown graphically by the independent report produced by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary earlier this year on the deployment of undercover police officer Mark Kennedy. It showed that there had been failings in the application of the existing system and safeguards, but it went further by making a number of recommendations for ACPO to strengthen both internal review and external quality assurance of undercover officers deployed against domestic extremism. It also invited the Home Secretary to consider the arrangements for authorising the undercover police operations that present the most significant risks of intrusion. In particular, it proposed raising the internal level of police authorisations for the long-term deployments of undercover police officers under RIPA, and establishing independent, external prior approval by the chief surveillance commissioner for long-term deployments of undercover police officers.

The Home Secretary welcomed the HMIC report, and since its publication the Home Office has been working with the inspectorate, ACPO, the chief surveillance commissioner and others on how best to implement its recommendations.
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Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion, Green)

I am grateful to the Minister for setting out the situation as he sees it, but does RIPA allow undercover police to have sexual relationships with those they are trying to infiltrate? That is one of the points at issue: some say that it does and some say that it does not.
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Nick Herbert (Minister of State, Justice; Arundel and South Downs, Conservative)

I will try to respond to the hon. Lady’s question before the end of my speech.

One factor is how we target the type of deployment that causes concern, without imposing an unnecessary or burdensome bureaucracy across a much wider field where the current regime may be said to be working as Parliament intended. We need to ensure that we do not deter members of the public from coming forward to help the police in what can be difficult work. We also need to make sure that officers charged with sensitive, intrusive and dangerous policing in the community are given the support and protection they require. Above all, we need to avoid the mistakes identified in the HMIC report being made again. Our response, when we make it, will have that uppermost in mind.

On the hon. Lady’s call for a public inquiry, the independent HMIC review looked at the broad issues raised by the Kennedy case, and made clear recommendations as to how the current system should be strengthened—a system that was not, in any case, in place when Lambert was deployed. We are considering our precise response to those recommendations. I do not think that it is necessary to conduct a public inquiry.

The hon. Lady raised a number of specific issues, one of which was whether RIPA can be used to authorise a covert human intelligence source to break the law. In a very limited range of circumstances, an authorisation under RIPA part II may render lawful conduct that would otherwise be criminal, if it is incidental to any conduct falling within the Act that the source is authorised to undertake. That depends, however, on the circumstances of each individual case, and consideration should always be given to seeking advice from the legal adviser of the relevant public authority when such activity is contemplated. A covert human intelligence source who acts beyond the limits recognised by the law will be at risk of prosecution, and the need to protect the covert human intelligence source cannot alter that principle.

The RIPA statutory guidance does not explicitly cover the matter of sexual relationships, but it does make it clear that close management and control should

be exercised by the undercover officer’s management team. That will be a relevant factor. The absence of such management gave rise to concern in the Kennedy case.
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Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion, Green)

Does the Minister agree that that sort of fudged, grey area means that for women who have had such an experience, and for women and, indeed, men who might have such an experience in the future, this is incredibly unsatisfactory? We simply do not have clear guidelines on whether the action and going that far is legitimate, and that undermines confidence in the system. The Minister has referred to other inquiries that have been conducted, but what has not been conducted is a public, overarching inquiry to consider all the relevant areas.

Moreover, the Minister’s response to the case of Bob Lambert is extraordinarily complacent. Yes, RIPA was not in place at that point, so there can be no criticism that its guidance was not followed, but what is the Minister going to do now, given that the issue is in the public domain and that there could have been serious miscarriages of justice? How will the Minister follow up on that case in particular?
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Nick Herbert (Minister of State, Justice; Arundel and South Downs, Conservative)

I would be happy to pursue the matter further with the hon. Lady, if she likes, but I am not persuaded that it would be appropriate to issue specific statutory guidance under RIPA about sexual relationships. What matters is that there is a general structure and system of proper oversight and control, rather than specific directions on behaviour that may or may not be permitted. Moreover, to ban such actions would provide a ready-made test for the targeted criminal group to find out whether an undercover officer was deployed among them. Specifically forbidding the action would put the issue in the public domain and such groups would know that it could be tested.

The Government are certainly not complacent about the Lambert case. We were keen for an independent, wider review of the deployment of undercover officers by HMIC, which is now independent of the Government and reports to Parliament. We are satisfied that its recommendations will further strengthen the proper system of safeguards for the deployment of undercover officers that did not operate when Lambert was deployed.

Sitting s uspended.

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