Police intelligence officer ‘told to doctor reports’ about terrorism informant

A police intelligence officer fabricated reports about a terrorism informant in a highly classified database after allegedly being instructed to by superiors, The Times has learnt.

The rogue special branch unit, linked with MI5, that the detective constable worked for was disbanded after he retrospectively altered intelligence reports

Phil Moran, a counterterrorism agent handler at British Transport Police (BTP), claimed that he was ordered by his superiors to manipulate information on the National Special Branch Intelligence System to deceive the surveillance watchdog. BTP’s director of intelligence, Detective Superintendent Paul Shrubsole, was dismissed at a secret misconduct hearing and another senior officer retired before disciplinary proceedings were brought. Shrubsole denies any wrongdoing.

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DECLASSIFIED UK Britain’s secret political police

A shocking story of how a special squad of Britain’s Metropolitan Police, in collusion with MI5 – the domestic ‘security’ service – secretly infiltrated hundreds of UK political and campaign groups, and the question of whether the spying continues. As told by Asa Winstanley, who has personal experience.

Blair government’s rendition policy led to rift between UK spy agencies MI5 chief’s complaint over MI6 role in ‘war on terror’ abductions caused prolonged breakdown in relations

British involvement in controversial and clandestine rendition operations provoked an unprecedented row between the UK’s domestic and foreign intelligence services, MI5 and MI6, at the height of the “war on terror”, the Guardian can reveal.

The head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, was so incensed when she discovered the role played by MI6 in abductions that led to suspected extremists being tortured, she threw out a number of her sister agency’s staff and banned them from working at MI5’s headquarters, Thames House.

According to Whitehall sources, she also wrote to the then prime minister, Tony Blair, to complain about the conduct of MI6 officers, saying their actions had threatened Britain’s intelligence gathering and may have compromised the security and safety of MI5 officers and their informants.

The letter caused a serious and prolonged breakdown of trust between Britain’s domestic and foreign spy agencies provoked by the Blair government’s support for rendition.

The letter was discovered by investigators examining whether British intelligence officers should face criminal charges over the rendition of an exiled Libyan opposition leader, Abdul Hakim Belhaj.

A critic of Muammar Gaddafi, the former Libyan dictator, Belhaj was seized in Bangkok in March, 2004 in a joint UK-US operation, and handed over to the CIA. He alleges the CIA tortured him and injected him with “truth serum” before flying him and his family to Tripoli to be interrogated.

Abdul Hakim Belhaj, centre, speaks during a press conference in Tripoli in 2012.
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Abdul Hakim Belhaj, centre, speaks during a press conference in Tripoli in 2012. Photograph: Mahmud Turkia/AFP/Getty Images
According to documents found in Tripoli, five days before he was secretly flown to the Libyan capital, MI6 gave Gaddafi’s intelligence agency the French and Moroccan aliases used by Belhaj.

MI6 also provided the Libyans with the intelligence that allowed the CIA to kidnap him and take him to Tripoli.

Belhaj told the Guardian that British intelligence officers were among the first to interrogate him in Tripoli. He said he was “very surprised that the British got involved in what was a very painful period in my life”.

“I wasn’t allowed a bath for three years and I didn’t see the sun for one year,” he told the Guardian. “They hung me from the wall and kept me in an isolation cell. I was regularly tortured.”

The secret role played by MI6 was revealed after the fall of Gaddafi, when documents were found in ransacked offices of his intelligence chief, Moussa Koussa.

One, dated 18 March 2004 was a note from Sir Mark Allen, then head of counter-terrorism at MI6, to Moussa Koussa. It said: “I congratulate you on the safe arrival of Abu Abd Allah Sadiq [Abdul-Hakim Belhaj]. This was the least we could do for you and for Libya to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built over the years. I am so glad. I was grateful to you for helping the officer we sent out last week.”

Allen added: “[Belhaj’s] information on the situation in this country is of urgent importance to us. Amusingly, we got a request from the Americans to channel requests for information from [Belhaj] through the Americans. I have no intention of doing any such thing. The intelligence on [Belhaj] was British. I know I did not pay for the air cargo [Belhaj]. But I feel I have the right to deal with you direct on this and am very grateful for the help you are giving us.”

Scotland Yard has concluded its investigation into the alleged involvement of intelligence officers and officials in Libyan rendition operations and an announcement about whether or not to prosecute is imminent.

Whitehall sources have told the Guardian that police and prosecutors have been reviewing the issue for months. They say investigators have been frustrated by the way potentially key witnesses have said they were unable to recall who had authorised British involvement in the rendition programme, who else knew about it, and who knew the precise details of the Belhaj abduction.

“This is an extremely difficult area for police and prosecutors,” said one source. “The problem is, the CPS cannot bring a charge against a government policy.”

The letter to Blair sent by Manningham-Buller, who was director general of MI5 from 2002 to 2007, reflected deep divisions within Britain’s intelligence agencies over the methods being used to gather information after the 9/11 attacks on the US.

Though MI5 has been criticised about some of the tactics used, the letter suggests Britain’s security service had serious misgivings about rendition operations and the torture of suspects.

The Guardian has been told the MI5 chief was “shocked and appalled” by the treatment of Belhaj and vented her anger at MI6, which was then run by Sir Richard Dearlove.

“When EMB [Manningham-Buller] found out what had gone on in Libya, she was evidently furious. I have never seen a letter quite like it. There was a serious rift between MI5 and MI6 at the time.”

She has since said the aim of engaging with Gaddafi to persuade him to abandon his chemical and nuclear weapons programme was not “wrong in principle”.

However, she added: “There are clearly questions to be answered about the various relationships that developed afterwards and whether the UK supped with a sufficiently long spoon.”

The police files with the CPS are understood to describe how Belhaj, his pregnant wife, Fatima Bouchar, and children, and Sami al-Saadi and his family were abducted from the far east to Gaddafi’s interrogation and torture cells in Tripoli in 2004.

The British government paid £2.2m to settle a damages claim brought by al-Saadi and his family. Belhaj has refused to settle unless he receives an apology.

Jack Straw, who as foreign secretary was responsible for MI6, and Allen have always denied wrongdoing.

UK government ‘seeking to avoid responsibility’ for renditions
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In December 2005, when the first evidence emerged that Britain was colluding in CIA rendition operations, Straw told MPs: “There is simply no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition full stop.”

When the Libyan renditions came to light, Straw said: “No foreign secretary can know all the details of what its intelligence agencies are doing at any one time.”

He has been interviewed by the police but only as a potential witness. Government officials, insisting on anonymity, said MI6 was following “ministerially authorised government policy”.

Blair said he did not have “any recollection at all” of the Belhaj rendition.

The Blair and Straw denials appeared to be contradicted by Dearlove.

He has said: “It was a political decision, having very significantly disarmed Libya, for the government to cooperate with Libya on Islamist terrorism. The whole relationship was one of serious calculation about where the overall balance of our national interests stood.”

Neither MI5 nor MI6, nor Manningham-Buller, wanted to make any public comment. Whitehall sources insist the relationship between MI5 and MI6 has now been repaired after a difficult period.

Belhaj is demanding an apology and an acceptance of British guilt. He has taken his case to the supreme court, which has yet to hand down a judgment.

Last year, the court was confronted with the prospect of Straw and British intelligence officers deploying the “foreign act of state doctrine” – that is to say, the courts here cannot rule on the case since agents from foreign countries, notably the US and Libya, were involved, and they are granted immunity.

Section 7 of the 1994 Intelligence Services Act, sometimes described as the “James Bond clause”, protects MI6 officers from prosecution for actions anywhere in the world that would otherwise be illegal. They would be protected as long as their actions were authorised in writing by the secretary of state.

However, lawyers for Belhaj say many cases involving deportation or asylum seekers, for example, relate to actions of foreign states and that, in any case, torture overrides all legal loopholes.

An inquiry under Sir Peter Gibson, a retired senior judge, into earlier rendition programmes in which British intelligence was involved, was abandoned because of the new and dramatic evidence about Belhaj’s abduction.

After insisting that the issues were so serious that it needed a judge-led inquiry rather than one carried out by the parliamentary intelligence and security committee, David Cameron reversed his position. After the Gibson inquiry was dropped, he said the issues should be taken up by the committee after all.

Dominic Grieve, the former attorney general and now chair of the committee, said shortly after he was appointed last October: “Our longer-term priority is the substantial inquiry into the role of the UK government and security and intelligence agencies in relation to detainee treatment and rendition, where there are still unanswered questions.”

The Gibson inquiry published a damning interim report before it folded. It concluded that the British government and its intelligence agencies had been involved in rendition operations, in which detainees were kidnapped and flown around the globe, and had interrogated detainees who they knew were being mistreated.

It said MI6 officers were informed they were under no obligation to report breaches of the Geneva conventions; intelligence officers appear to have taken advantage of the abuse of detainees; and Straw, as foreign secretary, had suggested that the law might be amended to allow suspects to be rendered to the UK.

It raised 27 questions they said would need to be answered if the full truth about the way in which Britain waged its “war on terror” was to be established.

The questions include:

• Did UK intelligence officers turn a blind eye to “specific, inappropriate techniques or threats” used by others and use this to their advantage in interrogations?

• If so, was there “a deliberate or agreed policy” between UK officers and overseas intelligence officers?

• Did the government and its agencies become “inappropriately involved in some renditions”?

• Was there a willingness, “at least at some levels within the agencies, to condone, encourage or take advantage of a rendition operation”?

Nick Hopkins and Richard Norton-Taylor
Tuesday 31 May 2016 17.56 BST Last modified on Wednesday 1 June 2016 17.20 BST

Find this story at 31 May 2016

© 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited

‘Jihadi John’ case raises questions about UK counter-terrorism strategy (2015)

Emails released by CAGE revealed how MI5 repeatedly tried to recruit Mohammed Emwazi as an informant and put him on a terror watchlist to stop him leaving Britain

The identifying of “Jihadi John”, a masked militant who has beheaded and tortured hostages held by the Islamic State in Syria, as 26-year-old British national, Mohammed Emwazi, has ignited a debate about the young recruit’s life, identity and path to Islamist militancy.

Observers have pointed to Emwazi’s privileged upbringing – Emwazi came from a “well-to-do family,” growing up in West London and graduating from college with a degree in computer programming, according to the Washington Post – as proof that poverty did not fuel his radicalism.

Jihadi John is middle class & educated, demonstrates again that radicalisation is not necessarily driven by poverty or social deprivation.

— Shiraz Maher (@ShirazMaher) February 26, 2015
Less attention has been paid to the alleged interactions between Emwazi and the British security services and how, if at all, these may have impacted on the young militant.

Emails exchanged between Emwazi and Asim Qureshi, director of CAGE, a group which primarily lobbies on behalf of detainees held on terrorism charges, suggest that, before he travelled to Syria in 2012, Emwazi had several encounters with British authorities.

In Amsterdam in 2009 an officer from MI5, Britain’s domestic security agency, tried to recruit Emwazi after accusing him and two others of trying to reach Somalia, where the militant group al-Shabab is based, according to emails he sent to Qureshi.

“Listen Mohammed: You’ve got the whole world in front of you; you’re 21 years old; you just finished Uni – why don’t you work for us?” Emwazi recalled an MI5 officer asking him in Amsterdam’s airport in a June 2010 email he sent to Qureshi.

CAGE has been accused of sympathising with some of the foreign fighters it is regularly in contact with.

Qureshi, a graduate of the London School of Economics, has taken part in rallies by Islamist groups in the UK who call for “jihad” in Chechyna and Iraq.

He told Middle East Eye he had met with Emwazi in the fall of 2009 shortly after he returned to the UK to discuss what had happened.

“Mohammed was angry about the way he had been treated, he felt they (MI5) had bullied and disrespected him,” Qureshi said.

In 2010 counterterrorism officials in Britain detained Emwazi again – fingerprinting him and searching his belongings – and later preventing him from travelling to Kuwait, his birthplace, where he had landed a job working for a computer company.

“I had a job waiting for me and marriage to get started,” Emwazi wrote in a June 2010 e-mail to Qureshi. But now “I feel like a prisoner, only not in a cage, in London. A person imprisoned & controlled by security service men, stopping me from living my new life in my birthplace & country, Kuwait.”

Qureshi said he last heard from Emwazi in January 2012.

“Mohammed was harassed repeatedly by MI5 from the summer of 2010 until 2013. He told me he was once strangled by an officer at Heathrow airport during interrogation,” said Qureshi.

Qureshi said that Emwazi, who has been described by those who knew him as “polite with a penchant for wearing stylish clothes while adhering to the tenets of his Islamic faith,” had used “every means possible” to try and change his personal situation.

“Suffocating domestic policies aimed at turning a person into an informant but which prevent a person from fulfilling their basic life needs would have left a lasting impression on Emwazi,” said Qureshi.

“When are we going to finally learn that when we treat people as if they’re outsiders they will look for belonging elsewhere?”

We have an entire system of injustice that allows peoples lives to be ruined. Security services create suspect communities #MohammedEmwazi

— CAGE (@UK_CAGE) February 26, 2015
Analysts have dismissed CAGE’s assertion that the security services had a role in Emwazi’s radicalisation.

“I think it’s a bit rich that Jihadi John has decided to go to Syria and participate in this conflict because of some interaction with the security services,” Shiraz Maher, a senior fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, told the Telegraph. “As if he (Jihadi John) is resolved of all responsibility, as if he is not a salient individual capable of making his own decisions.”

Haras Rafiq, managing director of the anti-radicalisation think-tank the Quilliam Foundation, called the claim that Britain was in anyway to blame “rubbish.”

“It’s not the British or Kuwaitis fault. It is his fault and the people who radicalised him. Jihadi John is a cold-hearted killer,” he said.

Moazzam Begg, a British-Pakistani citizen and former Guantanamo Bay detainee, said that British security forces were not to blame but that their increasingly intrusive strategies had contributed to a “climate of fear and alienation” amongst Muslims in Britain.

“It’s not an excuse, it’s part of an explanation why this man must have felt greatly alienated,” said Begg.

“Scores and scores have been harassed, stopped whenever they travel, approached by security services … There are people who feel they are stuck, they have nowhere to turn to, it’s crucial we get this point across, some of us have had our lives completely destroyed.”

Begg said the British government was still refusing to engage with the idea that British policies, foreign and domestic, might be influencing potential jihadists.

“When people get alienated, they feel unwelcome and afraid … I feel that way all the time, I’ve been arrested, I’ve had my house turned upside down, I’ve been prosecuted and made to feel like I don’t belong here. If I was to leave tomorrow for Syria would it be right to say that the security services drove me away?”

Thursday 26 February 2015 22:48 UTC
Last update: Tuesday 3 March 2015 22:30 UTC

Find this story at 26 February 2015

© Middle East Eye 2014

Knowing too much: My disastrous Syria trial (2015)

On the first anniversary since my arrest for Syria-related terrorism I explain just why the trial against me was heading for disaster
It was the early morning of 24 February 2014. The doorbell rang. My wife answered and called my name, sounding scared. I was out of bed and already half-dressed when the police walked into my room. It seemed like they had filled the house. They asked me to confirm my name and then told me I was under arrest for terrorism.

I had been on edge since police seized my passport on my return from South Africa, so I was half expecting this. The police herded all my family into one bedroom. They allowed me to hug them all and say goodbye – unlike the Americans did. I told them to be strong, not to cry and have hope in Allah. I promised I would be back soon.

After dispersing my family between four households, the police scoured every inch of my house and filled 50 large evidence boxes with literally anything they could find. I didn’t know it at the time, but my car had been bugged since September 2012 and my every conversation recorded.

I was taken to a police station and kept there for four days. This was very serious. Over 150 police officers were involved. Additionally, the Home Office, the Treasury, the intelligence services and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had gone to extraordinary lengths to refuse me bail, freeze my assets and classify me as a Category A high-risk prisoner in HMP Belmarsh, five hours away from home.

The Government must have also anticipated the damage my arrest would have done to community relations and predicted allegations that they were doing this to prevent me from exposing British complicity in torture.

And after all that effort – it cost the taxpayers over £1million – they just gave up, apparently because of a meeting I had with MI5? The police claimed that my trial collapsed because they were not aware that I had met with MI5 before I travelled to Syria, but that’s not true because the article in which I mention my meeting was served as evidence by the prosecution. Surely, if the police and CPS truly believed I was involved in terrorism how could MI5 allow me to travel abroad for the purposes of terrorism?

The truth is the case was going to collapse on its own merits and was going to set a precedent that successfully challenged Britain’s policy on Syria and the meaning of terrorism.

I first became aware of the probes during police interrogation and like most people, I was horrified at the idea of having my personal conversations recorded. My reality, however, was that I could have been facing up to 15 years in prison for providing fitness training and a generator to the Syrian rebels, if found guilty.

After arriving at prison, the task of preparing for trial began in earnest. I knew I’d committed no crime and I was ready for a fight. The CPS case, however, was served in a disjointed and inconsistent manner. My lawyers had never seen anything like it in decades of advocacy.

The prosecution tried to create a narrative that didn’t exist because they were missing the key component: mens rea – the guilty mindset. After eight months of this, the desperation of their case coupled with the inability to understand their own evidence became apparent.

One example of this was regarding a train journey home with a military historian friend of mine who’d given a presentation at the CAGE office about the contribution of Indian subjects to the British war effort in both world wars. While we were on the train, unbeknown to us, an ex-British soldier seated opposite overheard us – two Asian-looking men talking about soldiers and war. That was enough for him to secretly photograph us and report it to the police. The incident was served in evidence by the prosecution – which is how I found out.

My copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, an article explaining the difference between jihad and terrorism and my piece entitled Syria: Britain’s new war on terror explaining the UK’s confused Syria policy were all served in evidence against me. The CPS’s 183-page expert witness report by Matthew Wilkinson was scrapped before the trial because it couldn’t show a terrorist mindset.

In November 2013, UK border police were prepared to potentially facilitate my travel to Syria after making me miss my flight to Istanbul where I was to attend a conference. They had wrongly assumed my trip was for onward travel to Syria. They offered to rebook my flight despite the reason they’d stopped me.

Counter Terrorism Unit (CTU) translations of my Arabic conversations were a cause of hilarity:

Me: “nusrat al-mustadhafeen (help the oppressed)”

CTU: Name of a jihadi group

Me: “Free Syrian Army Battalion 313” (number of fighters at historic 7th century Battle of Badr)

CTU: Battle in Syria, 2013, in a town called Badr

Me: “Here is the generator and some [spare] parts”

CTU: Here is the generator. It has many uses.

Me: “He’s gone to Lattakia” [Syrian city]

CTU: He’s gone through the attack list

Me: “Even if you are completely jahil (ignorant)”

CTU: Even when you do jihad

The CPS didn’t care about my beliefs, even though they had recorded them, because they needed the charges to fit their narrative and not the truth. These are just two of numerous examples:

CTU probe, 24/06/2013: “I am telling you…they [ISIS] will commit numerous atrocities in the name of jihad and mujahideen.”

CTU probe, 24/06/2013: These people are very scary…and they all do it in the name of shariah…Where is the mercy in your people? It’s all about killing…with enemies and friends

The night before my arrest I had posted on social media and called ISIS extremists after they had killed a rendition victim I’d met in Syria in 2012. I spent much time responding to one of their supporters who objected to my description. Western media was not particularly concerned with ISIS back then because they were only killing Muslims. But I was very concerned.

This is taken verbatim from my last Facebook conversation before my arrest:

“I saw people who went on to join ISIS beat and torture brothers, with ridiculous allegations. They claimed beating them was from the Sunnah, I challenged them after I heard the brother’s screams.

“I saw muhajireen (foreigners), locked in cages, by Allah worse, than my Guantanamo cell.

“They beat people to make them confess…just like the Arab regimes, there is no difference.

“I have been to many places, Bosnia, Afghan… but never seen this kind of fitnah [turmoil] and such dangerous extremism and readiness for takfeer.

“Syrians on the ground have started to hate foreigners because of them.

“ISIS have even detained and killed aid workers…brothers from UK who have taken convoys [have] been looted by ISIS, guns shoved in faces of brothers who have crossed Europe to bring aid.

“And what’s the basis of detaining the non-Muslim aid worker [Alan Henning] who came in as a guest of Muslims, under their protection? They’ve probably murdered him too, just like many Muslims they’ve done that to.

“You have no idea how dangerous these people are and I will be writing about it in detail.”

That night I changed my Facebook status: “Sometimes knowing too much can be a curse.” Perhaps now it makes sense.

– Moazzam Begg is a former Guantanamo Bay detainee and currently the director of outreach for UK-based campaigning organisation CAGE.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Photo: Protesters demonstrate outside Westminster Magistrates Court in London, on March 1, 2014, as former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg appeared (AFP)

Moazzam Begg
Tuesday 24 February 2015 17:28 UTC

Find this story at 24 February 2015

© Middle East Eye 2014 –

Cooperation between British spies and Gaddafi’s Libya revealed in official papers (2015)

Links between MI5 and Gaddafi’s intelligence during Tony Blair’s government more extensive than previously thought, according to documents

Britain’s intelligence agencies engaged in a series of previously unknown joint operations with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s government and used the information extracted from rendition victims as evidence during partially secret court proceedings in London, according to an analysis of official documents recovered in Tripoli since the Libyan revolution.

The exhaustive study of the papers from the Libyan government archives shows the links between MI5, MI6 and Gaddafi’s security agencies were far more extensive than previously thought and involved a number of joint operations in which Libyan dissidents were unlawfully detained and allegedly tortured.

At one point, Libyan intelligence agents were invited to operate on British soil, where they worked alongside MI5 and allegedly intimidated a number of Gaddafi opponents who had been granted asylum in the UK.

Previously, MI6 was known to have assisted the dictatorship with the kidnap of two Libyan opposition leaders, who were flown to Tripoli along with their families – including a six-year-old girl and a pregnant woman – in 2004.

However, the research suggests that the fruits of a series of joint clandestine operations also underpinned a significant number of court hearings in London between 2002 and 2007, during which the last Labour government unsuccessfully sought to deport Gaddafi’s opponents on the basis of information extracted from people who had been “rendered” to his jails.

Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.
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UK intelligence agencies sent more 1,600 questions to be put to the two opposition leaders.
In addition, the documents show that four men were subjected to control orders in the UK – a form of curfew – on the basis of information extracted from victims of rendition who had been handed over to the Gaddafi regime.

The papers recovered from the dictatorship’s archives include secret correspondence from MI6, MI5 reports on Libyans living in the UK, a British intelligence assessment marked “UK/Libya Eyes Only – Secret” and official Libyan minutes of meetings between the two countries’ intelligence agencies.

They show that:

• UK intelligence agencies sent more than 1,600 questions to be put to the two opposition leaders, Sami al-Saadi and Abdul Hakim Belhaj, despite having reason to suspect they were being tortured.

• British government lawyers allegedly drew upon the answers to those questions when seeking the deportation of Libyans living in the UK

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• Five men were subjected to control orders in the UK, allegedly on the basis of information extracted from two rendition victims.

• Gaddafi’s agents recorded MI5 as warning in September 2006 that the two countries’ agencies should take steps to ensure that their joint operations would never be “discovered by lawyers or human rights organisations and the media”.

In fact, papers that detail the joint UK-Libyan rendition operations were discovered by the New York-based NGO Human Rights Watch in September 2011, at the height of the Libyan revolution, in an abandoned government office building in Tripoli.

Since then, hundreds more documents have been discovered in government files in Tripoli. A team of London-based lawyers has assembled them into an archive that is forming the basis of a claim for damages on behalf of 12 men who were allegedly kidnapped, tortured, subject to control orders or tricked into travelling to Libya where they were detained and mistreated.

An attempt by government lawyers to have that claim struck out was rejected by the high court in London on Thursday , with the judge, Mr Justice Irwin, ruling that the allegations “are of real potential public concern” and should be heard and dealt with by the courts.

The litigation follows earlier proceedings brought on behalf of the two families who were kidnapped in the far east and flown to Tripoli. One claim was settled when the government paid £2.23m in compensation to al-Saadi and his family; the second is ongoing, despite attempts by government lawyers to have it thrown out of court, with Belhaj suing not only the British government, but also Sir Mark Allen, former head of counter-terrorism at MI6, and Jack Straw, who was foreign secretary at the time of his kidnap.

Abdel Hakim Belhaj is suing the British government.
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Abdel Hakim Belhaj is suing the British government.
Belhaj has offered to settle for just £3, providing he and his wife also receive an unreserved apology. This is highly unlikely to happen, however, as the two rendition operations are also the subject of a three-year Scotland Yard investigation code-named Operation Lydd. Straw has been questioned by detectives: his spokesman says he was interviewed “as a witness”.

Last month, detectives passed a final file to the Crown Prosecution Service. No charges are imminent, however. The CPS said: “The police investigation has lasted almost three years and has produced a large amount of material. These are complex allegations that will require careful consideration, but we will aim to complete our decision-making as soon as is practicably possible.”

The volte-face in UK-Libyan relations was always going to be contentious: the Gaddafi regime had not only helped to arm the IRA, bombed Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie with the loss of 270 lives in 1988, and harboured the man who murdered a London policewoman, Yvonne Fletcher, four years earlier; it had been responsible for the bombing of a French airliner and a Berlin nightclub, and for several decades had been sending assassins around the world to murder its opponents.

The Tripoli archives show that the rapprochement, which began with the restoration of diplomatic ties in 1999, gathered pace within weeks of the al-Qaida attacks of 9/11. Sir Richard Dearlove, who was head of MI6 at the time, has said that these links were always authorised by government ministers.

The week after the attacks, British intelligence officers met with Moussa Koussa, the head of Libyan intelligence, who offered to provide intelligence from Islamists held in the regime’s jails.

Two months later, British intelligence officers held a three-day conference with their Libyan counterparts at a hotel at a European airport. German and Austrian intelligence officers also attended.

According to the Libyan minutes, the British explained that they could not arrest anyone in the UK – only the police could do that – and that there could be difficulty in obtaining authorisation for Gaddafi’s intelligence officers to operate in the UK. They also added that impending changes to UK law would give them “more leeway” in the near future.

Other documents released under the Freedom of Information Act detail the way in which diplomatic contacts between London and Tripoli developed, with a British trade minister, Mike O’Brien, visiting Tripoli in August 2002, the same month that the dictator’s son, Saif, was admitted as a post-graduate student at the London School of Economics. Blair and Gaddafi spoke by telephone for the first time, chatting for 30 minutes, and in December 2003 the dictator announced publicly that he was abandoning his programme for the development of weapons of mass destruction.

With the war in Iraq going badly, London and Washington were able to suggest that an invasion that had been justified by a need to dismantle a WMD programme that was subsequently found not to exist had at least resulted in another country’s weapons programme being dismantled.

Three months later, in March 2004, the new relationship was sealed by a meeting between Gaddafi and Blair, during which the British prime minister announced that the two countries had found common cause in the fight against terrorism, and the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell announced that it had signed a £110m deal for gas exploration rights off the Libyan coast.

However, the Tripoli archive shows that beneath the surface of the new alliance, the Blair government was encouraging ever-closer co-operation between the UK’s intelligence agencies and the intelligence agencies of a dictatorship which had been widely condemned for committing the most serious human rights abuses; MI5 and MI6, and the CIA, would begin to work hand-in-glove with the Libyan External Security Organisation.

Eliza Manningham-Buller, who was head of MI5 during most of the period that the UK’s intelligence agencies were working closely with the Libyan dictatorship, has defended the decision to open talks with Gaddafi on the grounds that it helped to deter him from pursuing his WMD programme. However, when delivering the 2011 Reith Lecture, she added: “There are questions to be answered about the various relationships that developed afterwards and whether the UK supped with a sufficiently long spoon.”

The archive clearly shows that Gaddafi hoped that this intelligence co-operation would result in British assistance in his attempts to round up and imprison Libyans who were living in exile in the UK, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Mali. All of these men were members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an Islamist organisation that had attempted to assassinate him three times since its foundation in the early 90s. A largely spent force since the late 90s, many of the members of the LIFG had been living peacefully in the UK for more than a decade, having arrived as refugees. Some had been granted British citizenship. Koussa’s agency asked British intelligence to investigate 79 of these men, whom they described as “Libyan heretics”.

Two weeks before Blair’s visit to Libya, Belhaj and his four-and-a-half-months pregnant wife, Fatima Bouchar, were kidnapped in Thailand and flown to Tripoli. Bouchar says she was taped, head to foot, to a stretcher, for the 17-hour flight.

In a follow-up letter to Koussa, Allen claimed credit for the rendition of Belhaj – referring to him as Abu Abd Allah Sadiq, the name by which he is better known in the jihadi world – saying that although “I did not pay for the air cargo”, the intelligence that led to the couple’s capture was British.

Three days after Blair’s visit, al-Saadi was rendered from Hong Kong to Tripoli, along with his wife and four children, the youngest a girl aged six.

Libya’s foreign minister Moussa Koussa was head of Libyan intelligence.
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Libya’s foreign minister Moussa Koussa was head of Libyan intelligence.
Both men say that while being held at Tajoura prison outside Tripoli they were beaten, whipped, subjected to electric shocks, deprived of sleep and threatened.

Belhaj says he was twice interrogated at Tajoura by British intelligence officers. After gesturing that the session was being recorded, Belhaj says he made a number of gestures to show that he was being beaten and suspended by his arms. One of the British officers, a man, is said to have given a thumbs-up signal, while the second, a woman, is said to have nodded.

Belhaj alleges that following one of these encounters he agreed to sign a statement about his associates in the UK after being threatened with a form of torture called the Honda, which involved being locked in a box-like structure whose ceiling and walls could be shrunk, provoking extreme claustrophobia and fear as well as discomfort.

According to the claim being brought against the British government, the attempt to track down other leading members of the LIFG resulted in the intelligence agencies of Libya and the UK throwing their net still wider.

In late 2005, a British citizen of Somali origin and a Libyan living in Ireland were arrested in Saudi Arabia and allegedly tortured while being questioned by Saudi intelligence officers about associates who were members of the LIFG. The men say they were shackled and beaten. The British citizen says he was also interrogated by two British men who declined to identify themselves and who appeared uninterested in his complaints of mistreatment.

Many of the questions put to the two men concerned the whereabouts of Othman Saleh Khalifa, a long-standing member of the LIFG. Khalifa was detained in Mali a few months later and rendered to Libya. The Tripoli archive shows that summaries of his interrogations were sent to British intelligence, and that both MI5 and MI6 submitted questions that they wished to be put to him. A memorandum from MI6 to Koussa’s deputy, Sadegh Krema, was accompanied by questions “which you kindly agreed to pass to your interview team”.

Khalifa says that he was beaten during interrogations for around six months during the second half of 2006 and that he did not see daylight.

The Tripoli archive shows that during the same week that Khalifa was being rendered to Libya, MI5 and MI6 officers met Libyan intelligence officers in Tripoli and informed them that they were to be invited to the UK to conduct joint intelligence operations. The Libyan minutes of the meeting say that MI5 informed them that “London and Manchester are the two hottest spots” for LIFG activity in the country. The aim was to recruit informants within the Libyan community in the UK.

The Libyan minutes of the meeting also say that the British told them: “With your co-operation we should be able to target specific individuals.” The Libyans, meanwhile, said that potential recruits could be “intimidated” through threats to arrest relatives in Libya.

The following August, senior MI5 and MI6 officers and two Libyan intelligence officers met at MI5’s headquarters in London. According to the Libyan minutes, MI5 warned the Libyans that individuals could complain to the police if they believed they were being harassed by MI5, and could also expose the British-Libyan joint operations to the media.

The minutes also state that the British suggested that Libyan intelligence officers should approach potential recruits in the UK, and that if they refused to cooperate, arrangements could be made for the targets to be arrested under anti-terrorism legislation, accused of associating with those same Libyan intelligence officers, and threatened with deportation.

Sami al-Saadi has been paid £2.23m in compensation.
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Sami al-Saadi has been paid £2.23m in compensation.
One of the targets was a 32-year-old Libyan, associated with the LIFG, who had lived in the UK for 10 years and had been a British citizen for six years. The Libyan intelligence officers repeatedly telephoned him, claiming to be consular officials, and he eventually agreed to meet them at the Landmark hotel in Marylebone, London, on 2 September 2006. According to the Libyan notes of this meeting, the British insisted that two MI5 officers, one calling herself Caroline, should be present, so that the target should know that he was the subject of a joint UK-Libyan approach.

The target was told that he was to be given time to think about the approach. In Libya, meanwhile, the target’s brothers, sisters and mother say they were each detained in turn and told that they should persuade him to return to the country.

The Libyan intelligence officers also visited Manchester, calling at the home of another man targeted for recruitment. According to their notes, MI5 warned them not to enter the house but to persuade him to go with them to a public place where they could be photographed together. As he was not at home, the Libyan spies went instead to a mosque in the Didsbury district, where they told the imam that they were importing and exporting books.

On 5 September, shortly before the two Libyan intelligence officers returned home, they had another meeting with their British counterparts. Their notes show that the British warned that steps should be taken jointly to “avoid being trapped in any sort of legal problem [and] to avoid also that those joint plans be discovered by lawyers or human rights organisations and the media”. The Libyans assured MI5 and MI6: “We have effectively reassured them that we will stick by the joint plan to avoid any blame if the operation fails.”

The target says he was approached by “Caroline” and a second MI5 officer on a number of other occasions, but declined to travel to Libya and still lives in west London.

Six Libyan men, the widow of a seventh, and five British citizens of Libyan and Somali origin are bringing a number of claims, which include allegations of false imprisonment, blackmail, misfeasance in public office and conspiracy to assault.

The case is being brought against MI5 and MI6 as well as the Home Office and Foreign Office. Government departments declined to comment on the grounds that the litigation is ongoing.

When making their unsuccessful bid to have the case struck out, government lawyers admitted no liability. They argued that the five claimants who were subjected to control orders were properly considered to pose a threat to the UK’s national security, and denied that the government relied on information from prisoners held in Libya in making that assessment. They also argued that the LIFG had been a threat to the UK. They are expected to appeal Thursday’s high court decision.

Allen has declined to comment on the rendition operations, while Straw says: “At all times I was scrupulous in seeking to carry out my duties in accordance with the law, and I hope to be able to say more about this at an appropriate stage in the future.”

Thursday 22 January 2015 14.24 GMT Last modified on Saturday 7 May 2016 11.17 BST

Find this story at 22 January 2015

© 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited

The circus: How British intelligence primed both sides of the ‘terror war’ (2015)

‘Jihadi John’ was able to join IS for one simple reason: from Quilliam to al-Muhajiroun, Britain’s loudest extremists have been groomed by the security services
Every time there’s a terrorist attack that makes national headlines, the same talking heads seem to pop up like an obscene game of “whack-a-mole”. Often they appear one after the other across the media circuit, bobbing from celebrity television pundit to erudite newspaper outlet.

A few years ago, BBC Newsnight proudly hosted a “debate” between Maajid Nawaz, director of counter-extremism think-tank, the Quilliam Foundation, and Anjem Choudary, head of the banned Islamist group formerly known as al-Muhajiroun, which has, since its proscription, repeatedly reincarnated itself. One of its more well-known recent incarnations was “Islam4UK”.

Both Nawaz and Choudary have received huge mainstream media attention, generating press headlines, and contributing to major TV news and current affairs shows. But unbeknown to most, they have one thing in common: Britain’s security services. And believe it or not, that bizarre fact explains why the Islamic State’s (IS) celebrity beheader, former west Londoner Mohammed Emwazi – aka “Jihadi John” – got to where he is now.

A tale of two extremists

After renouncing his affiliation with the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), Maajid Nawaz co-founded the Quilliam Foundation with his fellow ex-Hizb member, Ed Husain.

The Quilliam Foundation was set-up by Husain and Nawaz in 2008 with significant British government financial support. Its establishment received a massive PR boost from the release of Ed Husain’s memoirs, The Islamist, which rapidly became an international bestseller, generating hundreds of reviews, interviews and articles.

In Ed Husain’s book – much like Maajid Nawaz’s tome Radical released more recently to similar fanfare – Husain recounts his journey from aggrieved young Muslim into Islamist activist, and eventually his total rejection of Islamist ideology.

Both accounts of their journeys of transformation offer provocative and genuine insights. But the British government has played a much more direct role in crafting those accounts than either they, or the government, officially admit.

Government ghostwriters

In late 2013, I interviewed a former senior researcher at the Home Office who revealed that Husain’s The Islamist was “effectively ghostwritten in Whitehall”.

The official told me that in 2006, he was informed by a government colleague “with close ties” to Jack Straw and Gordon Brown that “the draft was written by Ed but then ‘peppered’ by government input”. The civil servant told him “he had seen ‘at least five drafts of the book, and the last one was dramatically different from the first.’”

The draft had, the source said, been manipulated in an explicitly political, pro-government manner. The committee that had input into Ed Husain’s manuscript prior to its official publication included senior government officials from No. 10 Downing Street, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, the intelligence services, Foreign & Commonwealth Office and the Home Office.

When I put the question, repeatedly, to Ed Husain as to the veracity of these allegations, he did not respond. I also asked Nawaz whether he was aware of the government’s role in “ghostwriting” Husain’s prose, and whether he underwent a similar experience in the production of Radical. He did not respond either.

While Husain was liaising with British government and intelligence officials over The Islamist from 2006 until the book’s publication in May 2007, his friend Nawaz was at first in prison in Egypt. Nawaz was eventually released in March 2006, declaring his departure from HT just a month before the publication of Husain’s book. Husain took credit for being the prime influence on Nawaz’s decision, and by November 2007, had joined with him becoming Quilliam’s director with Husain as his deputy.

Yet according to Husain, Nawaz played a role in determining parts of the text of The Islamist in the same year it was being edited by government officials. “Before publication, I discussed with my friend and brother-in-faith Maajid the passages in the book,” wrote Husain about the need to verify details of their time in HT.

This is where the chronology of Husain’s and Nawaz’s accounts begin to break down. In Radical, and repeatedly in interviews about his own deradicalisation process, Nawaz says that he firmly and decisively rejected HT’s Islamist ideology while in prison in Egypt. Yet upon his release and return to Britain, Nawaz showed no sign of having reached that decision. Instead, he did the opposite. In April 2006, Nawaz told Sarah Montague on BBC Hardtalk that his detention in Egypt had “convinced [him] even more… that there is a need to establish this Caliphate as soon as possible.” From then on, Nawaz, who was now on HT’s executive committee, participated in dozens of talks and interviews in which he vehemently promoted the Hizb.

I first met Nawaz at a conference on 2 December 2006 organised by the Campaign Against Criminalising Communities (CAMPACC) on the theme of “reclaiming our rights”. I had spoken on a panel about the findings of my book, The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry, on how British state collusion with Islamist extremists had facilitated the 7/7 attacks. Nawaz had attended the event as an audience member with two other senior HT activists, and in our brief conversation, he spoke of his ongoing work with HT in glowing terms.

By January 2007, Nawaz was at the front of a HT protest at the US embassy in London, condemning US military operations in Iraq and Somalia. He delivered a rousing speech at the protest, demanding an end to “colonial intervention in the Muslim world,” and calling for the establishment of an Islamic caliphate to stand up to such imperialism and end Western support for dictators.

Yet by his own account, throughout this very public agitation on behalf of HT from mid-2006 onwards, Nawaz had in fact rejected the very ideology he was preaching so adamantly. Indeed, in the same period, he was liaising with his friend, Ed Husain – who at that time was still in Jeddah – and helping him with the text of his anti-HT manifesto, The Islamist, which was also being vetted at the highest levels of government.

The British government’s intimate, and secret, relationship with Husain in the year before the publication of his book in 2007 shows that, contrary to his official biography, the Quilliam Foundation founder was embedded in Whitehall long before he was on the public radar. How did he establish connections at this level?

MI5’s Islamist

According to Dr Noman Hanif, a lecturer in international terrorism and political Islam at Birkbeck College, University of London, and an expert on Hizb ut-Tahrir, the group’s presence in Britain likely provided many opportunities for Western intelligence to “penetrate or influence” the movement.

Dr Hanif, whose doctoral thesis was about the group, points out that Husain’s tenure inside HT by his own account occurred “under the leadership of Omar Bakri Mohammed,” the controversial cleric who left the group in 1996 to found al-Muhajiroun, a militant network which to this day has been linked to every major terrorist plot in Britain.

Bakri’s leadership of HT, said Dr Hanif, formed “the most conceptually deviant period of HT’s existence in the UK, diverting quite sharply away from its core ideas,” due to Bakri’s advocacy of violence and his focus on establishing an Islamic state in the UK, goals contrary to HT doctrines.

When Bakri left HT and set-up al-Muhajiroun in 1996, according to John Loftus, a former US Army intelligence officer and Justice Department prosecutor, Bakri was immediately recruited by MI6 to facilitate Islamist activities in the Balkans. And not just Bakri, but also Abu Hamza al-Masri, who was recently convicted in the US on terrorism charges.

When Bakri founded al-Muhajiroun in 1996 with the blessings of Britain’s security services, his co-founder was Anjem Choudary. Choudary was intimately involved in the programme to train and send Britons to fight abroad, and three years later, would boast to the Sunday Telegraph that “some of the training does involve guns and live ammunition”.

Historian Mark Curtis, in his seminal work, Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam, documents how under this arrangement, Bakri trained hundreds of Britons at camps in the UK and the US, and dispatched them to join al-Qaeda affiliated fighters in Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya.

Shortly before the 2005 London bombings, Ron Suskind, a Wall Street Journal Pulitizer Prize winning investigative reporter, was told by a senior MI5 official that Bakri was a longtime informant for the secret service who “had helped MI5 on several of its investigations”. Bakri, Suskind adds in his book, The Way of the World, reluctantly conceded the relationship in an interview in Beirut – but Suskind gives no indication that the relationship ever ended.

A senior terrorism lawyer in London who has represented clients in several high-profile terrorism cases told me that both Bakri and Choudary had regular meetings with MI5 officers in the 1990s. The lawyer, who works for a leading firm of solicitors and has regularly liaised with MI5 in the administration of closed court hearings involving secret evidence, said: “Omar Bakri had well over 20 meetings with MI5 from around 1993 to the late 1990s. Anjem Choudary apparently participated in such meetings toward the latter part of the decade. This was actually well-known amongst several senior Islamist leaders in Britain at the time.”

According to Dr Hanif of Birkbeck College, Bakri’s relationship with the intelligence services likely began during his “six-year reign as HT leader in Britain,” which would have “provided British intelligence ample opportunity” to “widely infiltrate the group”. HT had already been a subject of MI6 surveillance abroad “because of its core level of support in Jordan and the consistent level of activity in other areas of the Middle East for over five decades.”

At least some HT members appear to have been aware of Bakri’s intelligence connections, including, it seems, Ed Husain himself. In one passage in The Islamist (p. 116), Husain recounts: “We were also concerned about Omar’s application for political asylum… I raised this with Bernie [another HT member] too. ‘Oh no’, he said, ‘On the contrary. The British are like snakes; they manoeuvre carefully. They need Omar in Britain. More likely, Omar will be the ambassador for the khilafah here or leave to reside in the Islamic state. The kuffar know that – allowing Omar to stay in Britain will give them a good start, a diplomatic advantage, when they have to deal with the Islamic state. Having Omar serves them well for the future. MI5 knows exactly what we’re doing, what we’re about, and yet they have in effect, given us the green light to operate in Britain.”

Husain left HT after Bakri in August 1997. According to Faisal Haque, a British government civil servant and former HT member who knew Ed Husain during his time in the group, Husain had a strong “personal relationship” with Bakri. He did not leave HT for “ideological reasons,” said Haque. “It was more to do with his close personal relationship with Omar Bakri (he left when Bakri was kicked out), pressure from his father and other personal reasons which I don’t want to mention.”

Husain later went on to work for the British Council in the Middle East. From 2003 to 2005, he was in Damascus. During that period, by his own admission, he informed on other British members of HT for agitating against Bashar al-Assad’s regime, resulting in them being deported by Syrian authorities back to Britain. At this time, the CIA and MI6 routinely cooperated with Assad on extraordinary rendition programmes.

Husain then worked for the British Council in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, from late 2005 to the end of 2006.

Throughout that year, according to the former Home Office official I spoke to, Husain was in direct contact with senior Whitehall officials who were vetting his manuscript for The Islamist. By November, Husain posted on DeenPort, an online discussion forum, a now deleted comment referring off-hand to the work of “the secret services” inside HT: “Even within HT in Britain today, there is a huge division between modernisers and more radical elements. The secret services are hopeful that the modernisers can tame the radicals… I foresee another split. And God knows best. I have said more than I should on this subject! Henceforth, my lips are sealed!”

Shortly after, Maajid Nawaz would declare his departure from HT, and would eventually be joined at Quilliam by several others from the group, many of whom according to Nawaz had worked with him and Husain as “a team” behind the scenes at this time.

The ‘ex-jihadists’ who weren’t

Perhaps the biggest problem with Husain’s and Nawaz’s claim to expertise on terrorism was that they were never jihadists. Hizb ut-Tahrir is a non-violent movement for the establishment of a global “caliphate” through social struggle, focusing on the need for political activism in the Muslim world. Whatever the demerits of this rigid political ideology, it had no relationship to the phenomenon of al-Qaeda terrorism.

Nevertheless, Husain and Nawaz, along with their government benefactors, were convinced that those personal experiences of “radicalisation” and “deradicalisation” could by transplanted into the ongoing “war on terror” – even though, in reality neither of them had any idea about the dynamics of an actual terrorist network, and the radicalisation process leading to violent extremism. The result was an utterly misguided and evidence-devoid obsession with rejecting non-violent extremist ideologies as the primary means to prevent terrorism.

Through the Quilliam Foundation, Husain’s and Nawaz’s fundamentalist ideas about non-violent extremism went on to heavily influence official counter-terrorism discourses across the Western world. This was thanks to its million pounds worth of government seed-funding, intensive media coverage, as well as the government pushing Quilliam’s directors and staff to provide “deradicalisation training” to government and security officials in the US and Europe.

In the UK, Quilliam’s approach was taken up by various centre-right and right-wing think-tanks, such as the Centre for Social Cohesion (CCS) and Policy Exchange, all of which played a big role in influencing the government’s Preventing Violent Extremism programme (Prevent).

Exactly how bankrupt this approach is, however, can be determined from Prime Minister David Cameron’s efforts to express his understanding of the risk from non-violent extremism, a major feature of the coalition government’s Orwellian new Counter-Terrorism and Security Act. The latter establishes unprecedented powers of electronic surveillance and the basis for the “Prevent duty,” which calls for all public sector institutions to develop “risk-assessment” profiles of individuals deemed to be “at-risk” of being drawn into non-violent extremism.

In his speech at the UN last year, Cameron explained that counter-terrorism measures must target people who may not “encourage violence, but whose worldview can be used as a justification for it.” As examples of dangerous ideas at the “root cause” of terrorism, Cameron pinpointed “conspiracy theories,” and most outrageously, “The idea that Muslims are persecuted all over the world as a deliberate act of Western policy.”

In other words, if you believe, for instance, that US and British forces have deliberately conducted brutal military operations across the Muslim world resulting in the foreseeable deaths of countless innocent civilians, you are a non-violent extremist.

In an eye-opening academic paper published last year, French terrorism expert and Interior Ministry policy officer Dr Claire Arenes, noted that: “By definition, one may know if radicalisation has been violent only once the point of violence has been reached, at the end of the process. Therefore, since the end-term of radicalisation cannot be determined in advance, a policy intended to fight violent radicalisation entails a structural tendency to fight any form of radicalisation.”

It is precisely this moronic obsession with trying to detect and stop “any form of radicalisation,” however non-violent, that is hampering police and security investigations and overloading them with nonsense “risks”.

Double game

At this point, the memorable vision of Nawaz and Choudary facing off on BBC Newsnight appears not just farcical, but emblematic of how today’s national security crisis has been fuelled and exploited by the bowels of the British secret state.

Over the last decade or so – the very same period that the British state was grooming the “former jihadists who weren’t” so they could be paraded around the media-security-industrial complex bigging up the non-threat of “non-violent extremism” – the CIA and MI6 were coordinating Saudi-led funding to al-Qaeda affiliated extremists across the Middle East and Central Asia to counter Iranian Shiite influence.

From 2005 onwards, US and British intelligence services encouraged a range of covert operations to support Islamist opposition groups, including militants linked to al-Qaeda, to undermine regional Iranian and Syrian influence. By 2009, the focus of these operations shifted to Syria.

As I documented in written evidence to a UK Parliamentary inquiry into Prevent in 2010, one of the recipients of such funding was none other than Omar Bakri, who at the time told one journalist: “Today, angry Lebanese Sunnis ask me to organise their jihad against the Shiites… Al-Qaeda in Lebanon… are the only ones who can defeat Hezbollah.” Simultaneously, Bakri was regularly in touch with his deputy, Anjem Choudary, over the internet and even delivered online speeches to his followers in Britain instructing them to join IS and murder civilians. He has now been detained and charged by Lebanese authorities for establishing terror cells in the country.

Bakri was also deeply involved “with training the mujahideen [fighters] in camps on the Syrian borders and also on the Palestine side.” The trainees included four British Islamists “with professional backgrounds” who would go on to join the war in Syria. Bakri also claimed to have trained “many fighters,” including people from Germany and France, since arriving in Lebanon. Was Mohammed Emwazi among them? Last year, Bakri disciple Mizanur Rahman confirmed that at least five European Muslims who had died fighting under IS in Syria had been Bakri acolytes.

Nevertheless in 2013, it was David Cameron who lifted the arms embargo to support Syria’s rebels. We now know that most of our military aid went to al-Qaeda affiliated Islamists, many with links to extremists at home. The British government itself acknowledged that a “substantial number” of Britons were fighting in Syria, who “will seek to carry out attacks against Western interests… or in Western states”.

Yet according to former British counterterrorism intelligence officer Charles Shoebridge, despite this risk, authorities “turned a blind eye to the travelling of its own jihadists to Syria, notwithstanding ample video etc. evidence of their crimes there,” because it “suited the US and UK’s anti-Assad foreign policy”.

This terror-funnel is what enabled people like Emwazi to travel to Syria and join up with IS – despite being on an MI5 terror watch-list. He had been blocked by the security services from traveling to Kuwait in 2010: why not Syria? Shoebridge, who was a British Army officer before joining the Metropolitan Police, told me that although such overseas terrorism has been illegal in the UK since 2006, “it’s notable that only towards the end of 2013 when IS turned against the West’s preferred rebels, and perhaps also when the tipping point between foreign policy usefulness and MI5 fears of domestic terrorist blowback was reached, did the UK authorities begin to take serious steps to tackle the flow of UK jihadists.”

The US-UK direct and tacit support for jihadists, Shoebridge said, had made Syria the safest place for regional terrorists fearing drone strikes “for more than two years”. Syria was “the only place British jihadists could fight without fear of US drones or arrest back home… likely because, unlike if similar numbers of UK jihadists had been travelling to for example Yemen or Afghanistan, this suited the anti-Assad policy.”

Having watched its own self-fulfilling prophecy unfold with horrifying precision in a string of IS-linked terrorist atrocities against Western hostages and targets, the government now exploits the resulting mayhem to vindicate its bankrupt “counter-extremism” narrative, promoted by hand-picked state-groomed “experts” like Husain and Nawaz.

Their prescription, predictably, is to expand the powers of the police state to identify and “deradicalise” anyone who thinks British foreign policy in the Muslim world is callous, self-serving and indifferent to civilian deaths. Government sources confirm that Nawaz’s input played a key role in David Cameron’s thinking on non-violent extremism, and the latest incarnation of the Prevent strategy; while last year, Husain was, ironically, appointed to the Foreign Office advisory group on freedom of religion or belief.

Meanwhile, Bakri’s deputy Choudary continues to inexplicably run around as Britain’s resident “terror cleric” media darling. His passport belatedly confiscated after a recent pointless police arrest that avoided charging him, he remains free to radicalise thick-headed British Muslims into joining IS, in the comfort that his hate speech will be broadcast widely, no doubt fueling widespread generic suspicion of British Muslims.

If only we could round up the Quilliam and al-Muhajiroun fanatics together, shove them onto a boat, and send them all off cruising to the middle of nowhere, they could have all the fun they want “radicalising” and “deradicalising” each other to their hearts content. And we might get a little peace. And perhaps we could send their handlers with them, too.

– Nafeez Ahmed PhD, is an investigative journalist, international security scholar and bestselling author who tracks what he calls the ‘crisis of civilization.’ He is a winner of the Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian reporting on the intersection of global ecological, energy and economic crises with regional geopolitics and conflicts. He has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist. His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Friday 27 February 2015 14:35 UTC

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© Middle East Eye 2014

Lost in translation: Moazzam Begg reveals intelligence blunders (2015)

The case against Begg ‘was going to set a precedent that successfully challenged Britain’s policy on Syria and the meaning of terrorism’

A series of what appears to be translation mistakes and failure to grasp common sense by intelligence services have cost the British government over £1 million and could have landed an innocent man in jail, revealed former Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg.

In an opinion column published in the Middle East Eye on Tuesday, Begg, who is currently the director of outreach for UK-based campaigning organisation CAGE, detailed what appears to be unprofessional methods of investigation by the Counter Terrorism Unit (CTU).

“I could have been facing up to 15 years in prison for providing fitness training and a generator to the Syrian rebels, if found guilty,” he wrote.

Begg was further astonished to learn how serious were the accusations levelled against him, given what seemed to be a lack of credible evidence.

“Over 150 police officers were involved. Additionally, the Home Office, the Treasury, the intelligence services and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had gone to extraordinary lengths to refuse me bail, freeze my assets and classify me as a Category A high-risk prisoner in HMP Belmarsh, five hours away from home,” he wrote.

It remains unclear why the authorities went to so much trouble when Begg posed no threat, nor was he involved in any wrongdoing. But he did hint in the article the reason for his release.

“The truth is the case was going to collapse on its own merits and was going to set a precedent that successfully challenged Britain’s policy on Syria and the meaning of terrorism,” he wrote.

“The CPS didn’t care about my beliefs, even though they had recorded them, because they needed the charges to fit their narrative and not the truth,” he added.

Tuesday 24 February 2015 19:46 UTC
Last update: Wednesday 25 February 2015 9:17 UTC

Find this story at 24 February 2015

© Middle East Eye 2014

Former MI5 head: Torture is ‘wrong and never justified’ (2011)

The use of torture is “wrong and never justified”, the former head of the security service MI5 has insisted.
Eliza Manningham-Buller said it should be “utterly rejected even when it may offer the prospect of saving lives”.
Giving the second of her BBC Radio Reith lectures, she acknowledged recent disclosures about alleged British intelligence operations in Libya would “raise widespread concerns”.
“No-one could justify what went on under Gaddafi’s regime,” she added.
Baroness Manningham-Buller’s lectures examine the issues of terrorism and security on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.
She said that the use of torture had not made the world a safer place, adding that the use of water-boarding by the United States was a “profound mistake” and as a result America lost its “moral authority”.
Allegations have recently emerged that the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) was involved in the rendition of Libyan terror suspects, following the discovery of papers suggesting close ties between MI6, the CIA and the Gaddafi regime.
Find out more

The second of Eliza Manningham-Buller’s Reith Lectures will be broadcast on Tuesday 13 September 2011 at 09:00 BST on BBC Radio 4.
Listen via the Radio 4 website
Download the Reith Lectures podcast
Explore the Reith Lectures archive
Baroness Manningham-Buller, who was director-general of the security service MI5 between 2002 and 2007, stated that she “would like to say more” on the recent allegations.
However, her position made it difficult to do so as she anticipates being called to give evidence to the Gibson Inquiry which will investigate the subject.
Sir Peter Gibson is chair of the ongoing detainee inquiry, which was set up last year by Prime Minister David Cameron to investigate the alleged involvement in torture by UK security agencies.
A statement issued by the inquiry said it would also be considering the new allegations of UK involvement in rendition to Libya. Some of the inquiry will be held in secret to protect intelligence sources and methods.
Following the lecture, which was held in Leeds City Museum, Lady Manningham-Buller answered questions posed by members of the audience.
The Conservative MP, David Davis, asked the former MI5 head if she thought Britain’s resistance to the use of telephone intercept evidence in court had hindered the conviction rate of terrorists in the UK.
Baroness Manningham-Buller replied that MI5 had first suggested the use of intercept evidence in 1988, and she would “still like to see that happen” – but successive British governments have found the idea “procedurally difficult”.
The second of Eliza Manningham-Buller’s Reith Lectures, which is entitled Security, will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday, 13 September.

8 September 2011

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Copyright © 2016 BBC

The circus: How British intelligence primed both sides of the ‘terror war’ (2015)

‘Jihadi John’ was able to join IS for one simple reason: from Quilliam to al-Muhajiroun, Britain’s loudest extremists have been groomed by the security services
Every time there’s a terrorist attack that makes national headlines, the same talking heads seem to pop up like an obscene game of “whack-a-mole”. Often they appear one after the other across the media circuit, bobbing from celebrity television pundit to erudite newspaper outlet.

A few years ago, BBC Newsnight proudly hosted a “debate” between Maajid Nawaz, director of counter-extremism think-tank, the Quilliam Foundation, and Anjem Choudary, head of the banned Islamist group formerly known as al-Muhajiroun, which has, since its proscription, repeatedly reincarnated itself. One of its more well-known recent incarnations was “Islam4UK”.

Both Nawaz and Choudary have received huge mainstream media attention, generating press headlines, and contributing to major TV news and current affairs shows. But unbeknown to most, they have one thing in common: Britain’s security services. And believe it or not, that bizarre fact explains why the Islamic State’s (IS) celebrity beheader, former west Londoner Mohammed Emwazi – aka “Jihadi John” – got to where he is now.

A tale of two extremists

After renouncing his affiliation with the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), Maajid Nawaz co-founded the Quilliam Foundation with his fellow ex-Hizb member, Ed Husain.

The Quilliam Foundation was set-up by Husain and Nawaz in 2008 with significant British government financial support. Its establishment received a massive PR boost from the release of Ed Husain’s memoirs, The Islamist, which rapidly became an international bestseller, generating hundreds of reviews, interviews and articles.

In Ed Husain’s book – much like Maajid Nawaz’s tome Radical released more recently to similar fanfare – Husain recounts his journey from aggrieved young Muslim into Islamist activist, and eventually his total rejection of Islamist ideology.

Both accounts of their journeys of transformation offer provocative and genuine insights. But the British government has played a much more direct role in crafting those accounts than either they, or the government, officially admit.

Government ghostwriters

In late 2013, I interviewed a former senior researcher at the Home Office who revealed that Husain’s The Islamist was “effectively ghostwritten in Whitehall”.

The official told me that in 2006, he was informed by a government colleague “with close ties” to Jack Straw and Gordon Brown that “the draft was written by Ed but then ‘peppered’ by government input”. The civil servant told him “he had seen ‘at least five drafts of the book, and the last one was dramatically different from the first.’”

The draft had, the source said, been manipulated in an explicitly political, pro-government manner. The committee that had input into Ed Husain’s manuscript prior to its official publication included senior government officials from No. 10 Downing Street, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, the intelligence services, Foreign & Commonwealth Office and the Home Office.

When I put the question, repeatedly, to Ed Husain as to the veracity of these allegations, he did not respond. I also asked Nawaz whether he was aware of the government’s role in “ghostwriting” Husain’s prose, and whether he underwent a similar experience in the production of Radical. He did not respond either.

While Husain was liaising with British government and intelligence officials over The Islamist from 2006 until the book’s publication in May 2007, his friend Nawaz was at first in prison in Egypt. Nawaz was eventually released in March 2006, declaring his departure from HT just a month before the publication of Husain’s book. Husain took credit for being the prime influence on Nawaz’s decision, and by November 2007, had joined with him becoming Quilliam’s director with Husain as his deputy.

Yet according to Husain, Nawaz played a role in determining parts of the text of The Islamist in the same year it was being edited by government officials. “Before publication, I discussed with my friend and brother-in-faith Maajid the passages in the book,” wrote Husain about the need to verify details of their time in HT.

This is where the chronology of Husain’s and Nawaz’s accounts begin to break down. In Radical, and repeatedly in interviews about his own deradicalisation process, Nawaz says that he firmly and decisively rejected HT’s Islamist ideology while in prison in Egypt. Yet upon his release and return to Britain, Nawaz showed no sign of having reached that decision. Instead, he did the opposite. In April 2006, Nawaz told Sarah Montague on BBC Hardtalk that his detention in Egypt had “convinced [him] even more… that there is a need to establish this Caliphate as soon as possible.” From then on, Nawaz, who was now on HT’s executive committee, participated in dozens of talks and interviews in which he vehemently promoted the Hizb.

I first met Nawaz at a conference on 2 December 2006 organised by the Campaign Against Criminalising Communities (CAMPACC) on the theme of “reclaiming our rights”. I had spoken on a panel about the findings of my book, The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry, on how British state collusion with Islamist extremists had facilitated the 7/7 attacks. Nawaz had attended the event as an audience member with two other senior HT activists, and in our brief conversation, he spoke of his ongoing work with HT in glowing terms.

By January 2007, Nawaz was at the front of a HT protest at the US embassy in London, condemning US military operations in Iraq and Somalia. He delivered a rousing speech at the protest, demanding an end to “colonial intervention in the Muslim world,” and calling for the establishment of an Islamic caliphate to stand up to such imperialism and end Western support for dictators.

Yet by his own account, throughout this very public agitation on behalf of HT from mid-2006 onwards, Nawaz had in fact rejected the very ideology he was preaching so adamantly. Indeed, in the same period, he was liaising with his friend, Ed Husain – who at that time was still in Jeddah – and helping him with the text of his anti-HT manifesto, The Islamist, which was also being vetted at the highest levels of government.

The British government’s intimate, and secret, relationship with Husain in the year before the publication of his book in 2007 shows that, contrary to his official biography, the Quilliam Foundation founder was embedded in Whitehall long before he was on the public radar. How did he establish connections at this level?

MI5’s Islamist

According to Dr Noman Hanif, a lecturer in international terrorism and political Islam at Birkbeck College, University of London, and an expert on Hizb ut-Tahrir, the group’s presence in Britain likely provided many opportunities for Western intelligence to “penetrate or influence” the movement.

Dr Hanif, whose doctoral thesis was about the group, points out that Husain’s tenure inside HT by his own account occurred “under the leadership of Omar Bakri Mohammed,” the controversial cleric who left the group in 1996 to found al-Muhajiroun, a militant network which to this day has been linked to every major terrorist plot in Britain.

Bakri’s leadership of HT, said Dr Hanif, formed “the most conceptually deviant period of HT’s existence in the UK, diverting quite sharply away from its core ideas,” due to Bakri’s advocacy of violence and his focus on establishing an Islamic state in the UK, goals contrary to HT doctrines.

When Bakri left HT and set-up al-Muhajiroun in 1996, according to John Loftus, a former US Army intelligence officer and Justice Department prosecutor, Bakri was immediately recruited by MI6 to facilitate Islamist activities in the Balkans. And not just Bakri, but also Abu Hamza al-Masri, who was recently convicted in the US on terrorism charges.

When Bakri founded al-Muhajiroun in 1996 with the blessings of Britain’s security services, his co-founder was Anjem Choudary. Choudary was intimately involved in the programme to train and send Britons to fight abroad, and three years later, would boast to the Sunday Telegraph that “some of the training does involve guns and live ammunition”.

Historian Mark Curtis, in his seminal work, Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam, documents how under this arrangement, Bakri trained hundreds of Britons at camps in the UK and the US, and dispatched them to join al-Qaeda affiliated fighters in Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya.

Shortly before the 2005 London bombings, Ron Suskind, a Wall Street Journal Pulitizer Prize winning investigative reporter, was told by a senior MI5 official that Bakri was a longtime informant for the secret service who “had helped MI5 on several of its investigations”. Bakri, Suskind adds in his book, The Way of the World, reluctantly conceded the relationship in an interview in Beirut – but Suskind gives no indication that the relationship ever ended.

A senior terrorism lawyer in London who has represented clients in several high-profile terrorism cases told me that both Bakri and Choudary had regular meetings with MI5 officers in the 1990s. The lawyer, who works for a leading firm of solicitors and has regularly liaised with MI5 in the administration of closed court hearings involving secret evidence, said: “Omar Bakri had well over 20 meetings with MI5 from around 1993 to the late 1990s. Anjem Choudary apparently participated in such meetings toward the latter part of the decade. This was actually well-known amongst several senior Islamist leaders in Britain at the time.”

According to Dr Hanif of Birkbeck College, Bakri’s relationship with the intelligence services likely began during his “six-year reign as HT leader in Britain,” which would have “provided British intelligence ample opportunity” to “widely infiltrate the group”. HT had already been a subject of MI6 surveillance abroad “because of its core level of support in Jordan and the consistent level of activity in other areas of the Middle East for over five decades.”

At least some HT members appear to have been aware of Bakri’s intelligence connections, including, it seems, Ed Husain himself. In one passage in The Islamist (p. 116), Husain recounts: “We were also concerned about Omar’s application for political asylum… I raised this with Bernie [another HT member] too. ‘Oh no’, he said, ‘On the contrary. The British are like snakes; they manoeuvre carefully. They need Omar in Britain. More likely, Omar will be the ambassador for the khilafah here or leave to reside in the Islamic state. The kuffar know that – allowing Omar to stay in Britain will give them a good start, a diplomatic advantage, when they have to deal with the Islamic state. Having Omar serves them well for the future. MI5 knows exactly what we’re doing, what we’re about, and yet they have in effect, given us the green light to operate in Britain.”

Husain left HT after Bakri in August 1997. According to Faisal Haque, a British government civil servant and former HT member who knew Ed Husain during his time in the group, Husain had a strong “personal relationship” with Bakri. He did not leave HT for “ideological reasons,” said Haque. “It was more to do with his close personal relationship with Omar Bakri (he left when Bakri was kicked out), pressure from his father and other personal reasons which I don’t want to mention.”

Husain later went on to work for the British Council in the Middle East. From 2003 to 2005, he was in Damascus. During that period, by his own admission, he informed on other British members of HT for agitating against Bashar al-Assad’s regime, resulting in them being deported by Syrian authorities back to Britain. At this time, the CIA and MI6 routinely cooperated with Assad on extraordinary rendition programmes.

Husain then worked for the British Council in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, from late 2005 to the end of 2006.

Throughout that year, according to the former Home Office official I spoke to, Husain was in direct contact with senior Whitehall officials who were vetting his manuscript for The Islamist. By November, Husain posted on DeenPort, an online discussion forum, a now deleted comment referring off-hand to the work of “the secret services” inside HT: “Even within HT in Britain today, there is a huge division between modernisers and more radical elements. The secret services are hopeful that the modernisers can tame the radicals… I foresee another split. And God knows best. I have said more than I should on this subject! Henceforth, my lips are sealed!”

Shortly after, Maajid Nawaz would declare his departure from HT, and would eventually be joined at Quilliam by several others from the group, many of whom according to Nawaz had worked with him and Husain as “a team” behind the scenes at this time.

The ‘ex-jihadists’ who weren’t

Perhaps the biggest problem with Husain’s and Nawaz’s claim to expertise on terrorism was that they were never jihadists. Hizb ut-Tahrir is a non-violent movement for the establishment of a global “caliphate” through social struggle, focusing on the need for political activism in the Muslim world. Whatever the demerits of this rigid political ideology, it had no relationship to the phenomenon of al-Qaeda terrorism.

Nevertheless, Husain and Nawaz, along with their government benefactors, were convinced that those personal experiences of “radicalisation” and “deradicalisation” could by transplanted into the ongoing “war on terror” – even though, in reality neither of them had any idea about the dynamics of an actual terrorist network, and the radicalisation process leading to violent extremism. The result was an utterly misguided and evidence-devoid obsession with rejecting non-violent extremist ideologies as the primary means to prevent terrorism.

Through the Quilliam Foundation, Husain’s and Nawaz’s fundamentalist ideas about non-violent extremism went on to heavily influence official counter-terrorism discourses across the Western world. This was thanks to its million pounds worth of government seed-funding, intensive media coverage, as well as the government pushing Quilliam’s directors and staff to provide “deradicalisation training” to government and security officials in the US and Europe.

In the UK, Quilliam’s approach was taken up by various centre-right and right-wing think-tanks, such as the Centre for Social Cohesion (CCS) and Policy Exchange, all of which played a big role in influencing the government’s Preventing Violent Extremism programme (Prevent).

Exactly how bankrupt this approach is, however, can be determined from Prime Minister David Cameron’s efforts to express his understanding of the risk from non-violent extremism, a major feature of the coalition government’s Orwellian new Counter-Terrorism and Security Act. The latter establishes unprecedented powers of electronic surveillance and the basis for the “Prevent duty,” which calls for all public sector institutions to develop “risk-assessment” profiles of individuals deemed to be “at-risk” of being drawn into non-violent extremism.

In his speech at the UN last year, Cameron explained that counter-terrorism measures must target people who may not “encourage violence, but whose worldview can be used as a justification for it.” As examples of dangerous ideas at the “root cause” of terrorism, Cameron pinpointed “conspiracy theories,” and most outrageously, “The idea that Muslims are persecuted all over the world as a deliberate act of Western policy.”

In other words, if you believe, for instance, that US and British forces have deliberately conducted brutal military operations across the Muslim world resulting in the foreseeable deaths of countless innocent civilians, you are a non-violent extremist.

In an eye-opening academic paper published last year, French terrorism expert and Interior Ministry policy officer Dr Claire Arenes, noted that: “By definition, one may know if radicalisation has been violent only once the point of violence has been reached, at the end of the process. Therefore, since the end-term of radicalisation cannot be determined in advance, a policy intended to fight violent radicalisation entails a structural tendency to fight any form of radicalisation.”

It is precisely this moronic obsession with trying to detect and stop “any form of radicalisation,” however non-violent, that is hampering police and security investigations and overloading them with nonsense “risks”.

Double game

At this point, the memorable vision of Nawaz and Choudary facing off on BBC Newsnight appears not just farcical, but emblematic of how today’s national security crisis has been fuelled and exploited by the bowels of the British secret state.

Over the last decade or so – the very same period that the British state was grooming the “former jihadists who weren’t” so they could be paraded around the media-security-industrial complex bigging up the non-threat of “non-violent extremism” – the CIA and MI6 were coordinating Saudi-led funding to al-Qaeda affiliated extremists across the Middle East and Central Asia to counter Iranian Shiite influence.

From 2005 onwards, US and British intelligence services encouraged a range of covert operations to support Islamist opposition groups, including militants linked to al-Qaeda, to undermine regional Iranian and Syrian influence. By 2009, the focus of these operations shifted to Syria.

As I documented in written evidence to a UK Parliamentary inquiry into Prevent in 2010, one of the recipients of such funding was none other than Omar Bakri, who at the time told one journalist: “Today, angry Lebanese Sunnis ask me to organise their jihad against the Shiites… Al-Qaeda in Lebanon… are the only ones who can defeat Hezbollah.” Simultaneously, Bakri was regularly in touch with his deputy, Anjem Choudary, over the internet and even delivered online speeches to his followers in Britain instructing them to join IS and murder civilians. He has now been detained and charged by Lebanese authorities for establishing terror cells in the country.

Bakri was also deeply involved “with training the mujahideen [fighters] in camps on the Syrian borders and also on the Palestine side.” The trainees included four British Islamists “with professional backgrounds” who would go on to join the war in Syria. Bakri also claimed to have trained “many fighters,” including people from Germany and France, since arriving in Lebanon. Was Mohammed Emwazi among them? Last year, Bakri disciple Mizanur Rahman confirmed that at least five European Muslims who had died fighting under IS in Syria had been Bakri acolytes.

Nevertheless in 2013, it was David Cameron who lifted the arms embargo to support Syria’s rebels. We now know that most of our military aid went to al-Qaeda affiliated Islamists, many with links to extremists at home. The British government itself acknowledged that a “substantial number” of Britons were fighting in Syria, who “will seek to carry out attacks against Western interests… or in Western states”.

Yet according to former British counterterrorism intelligence officer Charles Shoebridge, despite this risk, authorities “turned a blind eye to the travelling of its own jihadists to Syria, notwithstanding ample video etc. evidence of their crimes there,” because it “suited the US and UK’s anti-Assad foreign policy”.

This terror-funnel is what enabled people like Emwazi to travel to Syria and join up with IS – despite being on an MI5 terror watch-list. He had been blocked by the security services from traveling to Kuwait in 2010: why not Syria? Shoebridge, who was a British Army officer before joining the Metropolitan Police, told me that although such overseas terrorism has been illegal in the UK since 2006, “it’s notable that only towards the end of 2013 when IS turned against the West’s preferred rebels, and perhaps also when the tipping point between foreign policy usefulness and MI5 fears of domestic terrorist blowback was reached, did the UK authorities begin to take serious steps to tackle the flow of UK jihadists.”

The US-UK direct and tacit support for jihadists, Shoebridge said, had made Syria the safest place for regional terrorists fearing drone strikes “for more than two years”. Syria was “the only place British jihadists could fight without fear of US drones or arrest back home… likely because, unlike if similar numbers of UK jihadists had been travelling to for example Yemen or Afghanistan, this suited the anti-Assad policy.”

Having watched its own self-fulfilling prophecy unfold with horrifying precision in a string of IS-linked terrorist atrocities against Western hostages and targets, the government now exploits the resulting mayhem to vindicate its bankrupt “counter-extremism” narrative, promoted by hand-picked state-groomed “experts” like Husain and Nawaz.

Their prescription, predictably, is to expand the powers of the police state to identify and “deradicalise” anyone who thinks British foreign policy in the Muslim world is callous, self-serving and indifferent to civilian deaths. Government sources confirm that Nawaz’s input played a key role in David Cameron’s thinking on non-violent extremism, and the latest incarnation of the Prevent strategy; while last year, Husain was, ironically, appointed to the Foreign Office advisory group on freedom of religion or belief.

Meanwhile, Bakri’s deputy Choudary continues to inexplicably run around as Britain’s resident “terror cleric” media darling. His passport belatedly confiscated after a recent pointless police arrest that avoided charging him, he remains free to radicalise thick-headed British Muslims into joining IS, in the comfort that his hate speech will be broadcast widely, no doubt fueling widespread generic suspicion of British Muslims.

If only we could round up the Quilliam and al-Muhajiroun fanatics together, shove them onto a boat, and send them all off cruising to the middle of nowhere, they could have all the fun they want “radicalising” and “deradicalising” each other to their hearts content. And we might get a little peace. And perhaps we could send their handlers with them, too.

– Nafeez Ahmed PhD, is an investigative journalist, international security scholar and bestselling author who tracks what he calls the ‘crisis of civilization.’ He is a winner of the Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian reporting on the intersection of global ecological, energy and economic crises with regional geopolitics and conflicts. He has also written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist. His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Nafeez Ahmed
Friday 27 February 2015 14:35 GMT

Find this story at 27 February 2015

© Middle East Eye 2014

MI5 says rendition of Libyan opposition leaders strengthened al-Qaida

Intelligence assessment concludes abduction of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi allowed dissident group to be taken over by exponents of al-Qaida
Abdel Hakim Belhaj

A secret UK-Libyan rendition programme in which two Libyan opposition leaders were kidnapped and flown to Tripoli along with their families had the effect of strengthening al-Qaida, according to an assessment by the UK security service, MI5.

Prior to their kidnap, Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi had ensured that their organisation, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), focused on the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi, the classified assessment says. Once handed over to the Gaddafi regime, their places at the head of the LIFG were taken by others who wanted to bring the group closer to al-Qaida.

The two men were seized in Thailand and Hong Kong in March 2004 with the assistance of the UK’s intelligence service MI6, and were “rendered” to Tripoli along with Belhaj’s pregnant wife and Saadi’s wife and four children, the youngest a girl aged six.

In an assessment made 11 months later, MI5 concluded that the capture of the pair had cast the group “into a state of disarray”, adding: “While these senior-ranking members have always jealously guarded the independence of the LIFG, providing it with a clear command structure and set goals, the group is now coming under pressure from outside influences.

“In particular, reporting indicates that members including Abu Laith al-Libi and Abdallah al-Ghaffar may be pushing the group towards a more pan-Islamic agenda inspired by AQ [al-Qaida].”

Two years after MI5 made this assessment, Libi announced the LIFG had formally joined forces with al-Qaida. He became a leading member of the merged organisation and is believed to have orchestrated a series of suicide bomb attacks across Afghanistan, including one in 2007 that killed 23 people at Bagram airfield north of Kabul during a visit by then US vice-president Dick Cheney. Libi was killed in a drone strike the following year.

The classified MI5 intelligence assessment was among hundreds of highly sensitive Libyan and British files that were discovered in official buildings that had been abandoned during the 2011 revolution that led to the overthrow and death of Muammar Gaddafi.

The end of his 42-year dictatorship was hastened by Nato air strikes, and was followed by a period of brief and heady optimism. At a rally in Benghazi in the east of the country in September 2011, the British prime minister, David Cameron, and the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, addressed enormous crowds waving their countries’ flags. “It’s great to be here in free Benghazi and in free Libya,” Cameron told them.

But Libya’s new leadership was already struggling to impose its authority on the country. And since then, the country has descended into violence and economic instability, with rival militias shelling residential areas and destroying infrastructure in their fight for supremacy.

Fears that Islamist militants would fill the yawning power vacuum appeared to be realised on Tuesday when gunmen claiming allegiance to Islamic State said that they were responsible for an attack on a Tripoli hotel in which at least five guards and five foreigners were killed.

The papers that were recovered during the revolution show that Britain’s intelligence agencies engaged in a series of joint operations with Gaddafi’s government and that some of the information extracted from victims of rendition was used as evidence during control-order and deportation proceedings in UK courts.

They also show that in 2006, Libyan intelligence agents were invited to operate on British soil, where they worked alongside MI5 and allegedly intimidated a number of Gaddafi opponents who had been granted asylum in the UK.

Another of the recovered documents is a letter that Tony Blair wrote to Gaddafi in April 2007, and whose existence publicly emerged last week. Addressed “Dear Mu’ammar”, Blair expressed his regret that the British government had failed in its attempts to have a number of Gaddafi’s opponents deported from the UK, and thanked the dictator for his intelligence agencies’ “excellent co-operation” with their British counterparts.

The classified MI5 document was prepared in advance of a five-day visit to Tripoli by senior agency staff in February 2005. Marked “UK/Libya Eyes Only – Secret”, it explains that members of the LIFG had been permitted to settle in the UK in the 1990s. This was at a time when Gaddafi, whom the group was plotting to overthrow, was considered to be an enemy of Britain.

The document adds that MI5 reassessed the LIFG’s UK-based members following the change in the group’s leadership that resulted from the detention of Belhaj and Saadi.

“We are actively investigating key individuals in the UK and are seeking to disrupt their activities,” the document says. This action was part of a new strategy “for countering the threat from the LIFG to the UK and its allies” – allies which, by 2005, included the Libyan dictatorship.

Accompanying the document was a list of questions that MI5 wanted Libyan interrogators to put to Belhaj and Saadi. A total of more than 1,600 questions were sent from the UK to Tripoli, in four batches, with MI6 at one point thanking the Libyan intelligence agents for “kindly agreeing” to pass the questions to their “interview team”.

Belhaj and Saadi both say they were beaten, whipped, subjected to electric shocks, deprived of sleep and threatened while being held at Tajoura prison outside Tripoli.

They say they were also interrogated by British intelligence officers, and Belhaj says he made it clear, by sign language, that he was being tortured.

After one of these encounters, he says, he agreed to sign a statement about his associates in the UK to avoid being subjected to a form of torture called the Honda, which involved being locked in a box-like structure whose ceiling and walls could be shrunk.

The discovery of the documents that exposed the existence of the UK-Libyan rendition operations had caused widespread dismay in Westminster, even before the emergence of the latest report, which makes clear that one consequence of these operations was that the terrorist organisation that posed the greatest threat to the UK at that time was strengthened.

A criminal investigation into the affair was opened in January 2012 after Dominic Grieve, the then attorney general, wrote to the Metropolitan police commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe. After a three-year investigation codenamed Operation Lydd, detectives handed their report to the Crown Prosecution Service last month.

Jack Straw, who was foreign secretary at the time, is among the people who have been questioned by police. His office says he was interviewed as a witness.

The rendition operations also led to damages claims being brought by Saadi – who received £2.2m in compensation from the British government – and by Belhaj. Belhaj is claiming damages on behalf of himself and his wife. She was four-and-a-half months pregnant when the couple were kidnapped, and Belhaj says she was taped, head to foot, to a stretcher for the 17-hour flight to Tripoli, before being jailed for several months.

Belhaj says he would settle his claim for just £3, as long as he and his wife also receive an apology. With the CPS currently considering the police file, this is unlikely to happen.

Ian Cobain
Thursday 29 January 2015 11.27 GMT Last modified on Friday 30 January 2015 00.05 GMT

Find this story at 29 January 2015

© 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited

Cooperation between British spies and Gaddafi’s Libya revealed in official papers (2015)

Links between MI5 and Gaddafi’s intelligence during Tony Blair’s government more extensive than previously thought, according to documents
Blair visit to Africa

Britain’s intelligence agencies engaged in a series of previously unknown joint operations with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s government and used the information extracted from rendition victims as evidence during partially secret court proceedings in London, according to an analysis of official documents recovered in Tripoli since the Libyan revolution.

The exhaustive study of the papers from the Libyan government archives shows the links between MI5, MI6 and Gaddafi’s security agencies were far more extensive than previously thought and involved a number of joint operations in which Libyan dissidents were unlawfully detained and allegedly tortured.

At one point, Libyan intelligence agents were invited to operate on British soil, where they worked alongside MI5 and allegedly intimidated a number of Gaddafi opponents who had been granted asylum in the UK.

Previously, MI6 was known to have assisted the dictatorship with the kidnap of two Libyan opposition leaders, who were flown to Tripoli along with their families – including a six-year-old girl and a pregnant woman – in 2004.

However, the research suggests that the fruits of a series of joint clandestine operations also underpinned a significant number of court hearings in London between 2002 and 2007, during which the last Labour government unsuccessfully sought to deport Gaddafi’s opponents on the basis of information extracted from people who had been “rendered” to his jails.

Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. Facebook Twitter Pinterest
UK intelligence agencies sent more 1,600 questions to be put to the two opposition leaders.
In addition, the documents show that four men were subjected to control orders in the UK – a form of curfew – on the basis of information extracted from victims of rendition who had been handed over to the Gaddafi regime.

The papers recovered from the dictatorship’s archives include secret correspondence from MI6, MI5 reports on Libyans living in the UK, a British intelligence assessment marked “UK/Libya Eyes Only – Secret” and official Libyan minutes of meetings between the two countries’ intelligence agencies.

They show that:

• UK intelligence agencies sent more than 1,600 questions to be put to the two opposition leaders, Sami al-Saadi and Abdul Hakim Belhaj, despite having reason to suspect they were being tortured.

• British government lawyers allegedly drew upon the answers to those questions when seeking the deportation of Libyans living in the UK

• Five men were subjected to control orders in the UK, allegedly on the basis of information extracted from two rendition victims.

• Gaddafi’s agents recorded MI5 as warning in September 2006 that the two countries’ agencies should take steps to ensure that their joint operations would never be “discovered by lawyers or human rights organisations and the media”.

In fact, papers that detail the joint UK-Libyan rendition operations were discovered by the New York-based NGO Human Rights Watch in September 2011, at the height of the Libyan revolution, in an abandoned government office building in Tripoli.

Since then, hundreds more documents have been discovered in government files in Tripoli. A team of London-based lawyers has assembled them into an archive that is forming the basis of a claim for damages on behalf of 12 men who were allegedly kidnapped, tortured, subject to control orders or tricked into travelling to Libya where they were detained and mistreated.

An attempt by government lawyers to have that claim struck out was rejected by the high court in London on Thursday , with the judge, Mr Justice Irwin, ruling that the allegations “are of real potential public concern” and should be heard and dealt with by the courts.

The litigation follows earlier proceedings brought on behalf of the two families who were kidnapped in the far east and flown to Tripoli. One claim was settled when the government paid £2.23m in compensation to al-Saadi and his family; the second is ongoing, despite attempts by government lawyers to have it thrown out of court, with Belhaj suing not only the British government, but also Sir Mark Allen, former head of counter-terrorism at MI6, and Jack Straw, who was foreign secretary at the time of his kidnap.

Abdel Hakim Belhaj is suing the British government. Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Abdel Hakim Belhaj is suing the British government.
Belhaj has offered to settle for just £3, providing he and his wife also receive an unreserved apology. This is highly unlikely to happen, however, as the two rendition operations are also the subject of a three-year Scotland Yard investigation code-named Operation Lydd. Straw has been questioned by detectives: his spokesman says he was interviewed “as a witness”.

Last month, detectives passed a final file to the Crown Prosecution Service. No charges are imminent, however. The CPS said: “The police investigation has lasted almost three years and has produced a large amount of material. These are complex allegations that will require careful consideration, but we will aim to complete our decision-making as soon as is practicably possible.”

The volte-face in UK-Libyan relations was always going to be contentious: the Gaddafi regime had not only helped to arm the IRA, bombed Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie with the loss of 270 lives in 1988, and harboured the man who murdered a London policewoman, Yvonne Fletcher, four years earlier; it had been responsible for the bombing of a French airliner and a Berlin nightclub, and for several decades had been sending assassins around the world to murder its opponents.

The Tripoli archives show that the rapprochement, which began with the restoration of diplomatic ties in 1999, gathered pace within weeks of the al-Qaida attacks of 9/11. Sir Richard Dearlove, who was head of MI6 at the time, has said that these links were always authorised by government ministers.

The week after the attacks, British intelligence officers met with Moussa Koussa, the head of Libyan intelligence, who offered to provide intelligence from Islamists held in the regime’s jails.

Two months later, British intelligence officers held a three-day conference with their Libyan counterparts at a hotel at a European airport. German and Austrian intelligence officers also attended.

According to the Libyan minutes, the British explained that they could not arrest anyone in the UK – only the police could do that – and that there could be difficulty in obtaining authorisation for Gaddafi’s intelligence officers to operate in the UK. They also added that impending changes to UK law would give them “more leeway” in the near future.

Other documents released under the Freedom of Information Act detail the way in which diplomatic contacts between London and Tripoli developed, with a British trade minister, Mike O’Brien, visiting Tripoli in August 2002, the same month that the dictator’s son, Saif, was admitted as a post-graduate student at the London School of Economics. Blair and Gaddafi spoke by telephone for the first time, chatting for 30 minutes, and in December 2003 the dictator announced publicly that he was abandoning his programme for the development of weapons of mass destruction.

With the war in Iraq going badly, London and Washington were able to suggest that an invasion that had been justified by a need to dismantle a WMD programme that was subsequently found not to exist had at least resulted in another country’s weapons programme being dismantled.

Three months later, in March 2004, the new relationship was sealed by a meeting between Gaddafi and Blair, during which the British prime minister announced that the two countries had found common cause in the fight against terrorism, and the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell announced that it had signed a £110m deal for gas exploration rights off the Libyan coast.

However, the Tripoli archive shows that beneath the surface of the new alliance, the Blair government was encouraging ever-closer co-operation between the UK’s intelligence agencies and the intelligence agencies of a dictatorship which had been widely condemned for committing the most serious human rights abuses; MI5 and MI6, and the CIA, would begin to work hand-in-glove with the Libyan External Security Organisation.

Eliza Manningham-Buller, who was head of MI5 during most of the period that the UK’s intelligence agencies were working closely with the Libyan dictatorship, has defended the decision to open talks with Gaddafi on the grounds that it helped to deter him from pursuing his WMD programme. However, when delivering the 2011 Reith Lecture, she added: “There are questions to be answered about the various relationships that developed afterwards and whether the UK supped with a sufficiently long spoon.”

The archive clearly shows that Gaddafi hoped that this intelligence co-operation would result in British assistance in his attempts to round up and imprison Libyans who were living in exile in the UK, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Mali. All of these men were members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an Islamist organisation that had attempted to assassinate him three times since its foundation in the early 90s. A largely spent force since the late 90s, many of the members of the LIFG had been living peacefully in the UK for more than a decade, having arrived as refugees. Some had been granted British citizenship. Koussa’s agency asked British intelligence to investigate 79 of these men, whom they described as “Libyan heretics”.

Two weeks before Blair’s visit to Libya, Belhaj and his four-and-a-half-months pregnant wife, Fatima Bouchar, were kidnapped in Thailand and flown to Tripoli. Bouchar says she was taped, head to foot, to a stretcher, for the 17-hour flight.

In a follow-up letter to Koussa, Allen claimed credit for the rendition of Belhaj – referring to him as Abu Abd Allah Sadiq, the name by which he is better known in the jihadi world – saying that although “I did not pay for the air cargo”, the intelligence that led to the couple’s capture was British.

Three days after Blair’s visit, al-Saadi was rendered from Hong Kong to Tripoli, along with his wife and four children, the youngest a girl aged six.

Libya’s foreign minister Moussa Koussa was head of Libyan intelligence. Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Libya’s foreign minister Moussa Koussa was head of Libyan intelligence.
Both men say that while being held at Tajoura prison outside Tripoli they were beaten, whipped, subjected to electric shocks, deprived of sleep and threatened.

Belhaj says he was twice interrogated at Tajoura by British intelligence officers. After gesturing that the session was being recorded, Belhaj says he made a number of gestures to show that he was being beaten and suspended by his arms. One of the British officers, a man, is said to have given a thumbs-up signal, while the second, a woman, is said to have nodded.

Belhaj alleges that following one of these encounters he agreed to sign a statement about his associates in the UK after being threatened with a form of torture called the Honda, which involved being locked in a box-like structure whose ceiling and walls could be shrunk, provoking extreme claustrophobia and fear as well as discomfort.

According to the claim being brought against the British government, the attempt to track down other leading members of the LIFG resulted in the intelligence agencies of Libya and the UK throwing their net still wider.

In late 2005, a British citizen of Somali origin and a Libyan living in Ireland were arrested in Saudi Arabia and allegedly tortured while being questioned by Saudi intelligence officers about associates who were members of the LIFG. The men say they were shackled and beaten. The British citizen says he was also interrogated by two British men who declined to identify themselves and who appeared uninterested in his complaints of mistreatment.

Many of the questions put to the two men concerned the whereabouts of Othman Saleh Khalifa, a long-standing member of the LIFG. Khalifa was detained in Mali a few months later and rendered to Libya. The Tripoli archive shows that summaries of his interrogations were sent to British intelligence, and that both MI5 and MI6 submitted questions that they wished to be put to him. A memorandum from MI6 to Koussa’s deputy, Sadegh Krema, was accompanied by questions “which you kindly agreed to pass to your interview team”.

Khalifa says that he was beaten during interrogations for around six months during the second half of 2006 and that he did not see daylight.

The Tripoli archive shows that during the same week that Khalifa was being rendered to Libya, MI5 and MI6 officers met Libyan intelligence officers in Tripoli and informed them that they were to be invited to the UK to conduct joint intelligence operations. The Libyan minutes of the meeting say that MI5 informed them that “London and Manchester are the two hottest spots” for LIFG activity in the country. The aim was to recruit informants within the Libyan community in the UK.

The Libyan minutes of the meeting also say that the British told them: “With your co-operation we should be able to target specific individuals.” The Libyans, meanwhile, said that potential recruits could be “intimidated” through threats to arrest relatives in Libya.

The following August, senior MI5 and MI6 officers and two Libyan intelligence officers met at MI5’s headquarters in London. According to the Libyan minutes, MI5 warned the Libyans that individuals could complain to the police if they believed they were being harassed by MI5, and could also expose the British-Libyan joint operations to the media.

The minutes also state that the British suggested that Libyan intelligence officers should approach potential recruits in the UK, and that if they refused to cooperate, arrangements could be made for the targets to be arrested under anti-terrorism legislation, accused of associating with those same Libyan intelligence officers, and threatened with deportation.

Sami al-Saadi has been paid £2.23m in compensation. Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Sami al-Saadi has been paid £2.23m in compensation.
One of the targets was a 32-year-old Libyan, associated with the LIFG, who had lived in the UK for 10 years and had been a British citizen for six years. The Libyan intelligence officers repeatedly telephoned him, claiming to be consular officials, and he eventually agreed to meet them at the Landmark hotel in Marylebone, London, on 2 September 2006. According to the Libyan notes of this meeting, the British insisted that two MI5 officers, one calling herself Caroline, should be present, so that the target should know that he was the subject of a joint UK-Libyan approach.

The target was told that he was to be given time to think about the approach. In Libya, meanwhile, the target’s brothers, sisters and mother say they were each detained in turn and told that they should persuade him to return to the country.

The Libyan intelligence officers also visited Manchester, calling at the home of another man targeted for recruitment. According to their notes, MI5 warned them not to enter the house but to persuade him to go with them to a public place where they could be photographed together. As he was not at home, the Libyan spies went instead to a mosque in the Didsbury district, where they told the imam that they were importing and exporting books.

On 5 September, shortly before the two Libyan intelligence officers returned home, they had another meeting with their British counterparts. Their notes show that the British warned that steps should be taken jointly to “avoid being trapped in any sort of legal problem [and] to avoid also that those joint plans be discovered by lawyers or human rights organisations and the media”. The Libyans assured MI5 and MI6: “We have effectively reassured them that we will stick by the joint plan to avoid any blame if the operation fails.”

The target says he was approached by “Caroline” and a second MI5 officer on a number of other occasions, but declined to travel to Libya and still lives in west London.

Six Libyan men, the widow of a seventh, and five British citizens of Libyan and Somali origin are bringing a number of claims, which include allegations of false imprisonment, blackmail, misfeasance in public office and conspiracy to assault.

The case is being brought against MI5 and MI6 as well as the Home Office and Foreign Office. Government departments declined to comment on the grounds that the litigation is ongoing.

When making their unsuccessful bid to have the case struck out, government lawyers admitted no liability. They argued that the five claimants who were subjected to control orders were properly considered to pose a threat to the UK’s national security, and denied that the government relied on information from prisoners held in Libya in making that assessment. They also argued that the LIFG had been a threat to the UK. They are expected to appeal Thursday’s high court decision.

Allen has declined to comment on the rendition operations, while Straw says: “At all times I was scrupulous in seeking to carry out my duties in accordance with the law, and I hope to be able to say more about this at an appropriate stage in the future.”

Ian Cobain
Thursday 22 January 2015 14.24 GMT Last modified on Monday 26 January 2015 14.03 GMT

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MI5 spied on Libyan torture victims, documents reveal (2011)

BRITAIN’S security service MI5 asked Muammar Gaddafi’s secret services for regular updates on what terrorist suspects were revealing under interrogation in Libyan prisons, where torture was routine.

MI5 also agreed to trade information with Libyan spymasters on 50 British-based Libyans judged to be a threat to Gaddafi’s regime.

The disclosures come from secret intelligence documents left lying around in the ruins of the British embassy in Tripoli for anyone to find.

They include an MI5 paper marked “UK/Libya Eyes Only Secret”, which shows that the service provided Gaddafi’s spies with a trove of intelligence about Libyan dissidents in London, Cardiff, Birmingham and Manchester.

Other documents seen by The Sunday Times in the abandoned offices of British and Libyan officials reveal that:

– The Ministry of Defence invited the dictator’s sons Saadi and Khamis Gaddafi, whose forces have massacred civilians during Libya’s revolution, to a combat display at SAS headquarters in Hereford and a dinner at the Cavalry and Guards Club in Mayfair;

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– Tony Blair helped another son, Saif Gaddafi, with his PhD thesis, beginning a personal letter with the words “Dear Engineer Saif”;

– The Foreign Office planned to use Prince Andrew in a secret strategy to secure the release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, from prison in Scotland and offset the risk of retaliation if he died in jail. In fact, Megrahi was released anyway.

The cache of documents shows how close the British governments of both Blair and Gordon Brown were to a brutal regime that was overthrown last month when pro-democracy rebels seized Tripoli.

Nowhere is this closeness more evident than in the intelligence sphere. The MI5 paper for Gaddafi’s security services contains detailed information about members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), a militant dissident outfit with cells in Britain.

The document, prepared ahead of an MI5 visit to Tripoli in 2005, formally requested that Libyan intelligence should provide access to detainees held by secret police and to “timely debriefs” of interrogations.

It added: “The more timely (the) information the better … Such intelligence is most valuable when it is current. It is notable that LIFG members in the UK become aware of the detention of members overseas within a relatively short period.”

The request was made despite widespread evidence of torture in Libyan prisons and assassinations of dissidents in other countries, including Britain. Torture practices identified by the US State Department included “clubbing, setting dogs on prisoners, electric shocks, suffocation by plastic bags and pouring lemon juice into open wounds”.

The disclosures will reignite the debate on the alleged complicity of British security services in the torture of terrorist suspects abroad. Last year David Cameron announced a judge-led inquiry into separate claims that M15 and MI6 were complicit in the torture of British citizens by foreign interrogators.

Some of those named in the documents found in Tripoli are thought to have been arrested subsequently in Britain and placed on control orders, a form of house arrest that is due to be debated in parliament this week.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights group Liberty, said: “These chilling revelations show just how cosy British authorities became with a regime known for torture. How on earth did they think these timely detainee debriefs were going to be obtained?

“The thought that people [who were] discussed with Gadaffi’s henchmen may have been placed on control orders as a result of ‘detainee debriefs’ should prey on the mind of every MP who votes on the new control order regime tomorrow.”

Other documents that have emerged show how America’s CIA sent terrorism suspects at least eight times for questioning in Libya. One letter from an MI6 officer to his Libyan counterpart reported the release from detention in Britain of a key LIFG member.

The MI5 document makes clear the key area of mutual interest to both countries was the LIFG, the most powerful radical faction waging war against Gadaffi’s regime. The group aimed to replace his dictatorship with a hardline Islamist state. Its main external base was in Britain, where 50 members lived.

MI5 believed the group had growing links to al-Qa’ida. It was suspected of supplying a “pipeline” of finance and false documents for the group’s international operations and of facilitating trips by jihadists from Britain to fight against western forces in Iraq.

MI5 also feared the LIFG might be planning terrorist attacks against the West.

A rider to the report says the information is being sent to the Libyans “for research and analysis purposes only and should not be used for overt, covert or executive action” – an apparent reference to kidnapping or execution.

A senior Whitehall official declined to discuss details of the agreement to share intelligence. He said: “We do not engage in, or encourage others to engage in, or contract out in situations where we knowingly, or have a very strong reason to believe that someone is being maltreated or is at risk of, maltreatment.”

William Hague, the foreign secretary, said intelligence documents emerging in Tripoli “relate to a period under the previous government, so I have no knowledge of those, of what was happening behind the scenes at that time”.

A document found in the office of Saadi Gaddafi, head of Libya’s special forces, showed the Ministry of Defence made elaborate plans for him to visit Britain in 2006 with his brother Khamis, whose commandos killed dozens of detainees before retreating from Tripoli as the regime fell.

The Sunday Times
MILES AMOORE AND DAVID LEPPARD THE SUNDAY TIMES SEPTEMBER 04, 2011 1:13PM

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Libya: Gaddafi regime’s US-UK spy links revealed (2011)

US and UK spy agencies built close ties with their Libyan counterparts during the so-called War on Terror, according to documents discovered at the office of Col Gaddafi’s former spy chief.
The papers suggest the CIA abducted several suspected militants from 2002 to 2004 and handed them to Tripoli.
The UK’s MI6 also apparently gave the Gaddafi regime details of dissidents.
The documents, found by Human Rights Watch workers, have not been seen by the BBC or independently verified.
Meanwhile, the head of Libya’s interim governing body, the National Transitional Council, said its soldiers were laying siege to towns still held by Col Gaddafi’s forces.
Mustafa Abdel Jalil said Sirte, Bani Walid, Jufra and Sabha were being given humanitarian aid, but had one week to surrender.
The BBC’s Jon Leyne in Benghazi says there have been unconfirmed reports that Bani Walid has now been taken by anti-Gaddafi forces.
But witnesses on the edge of Bani Walid say the opposition fighters are still on the outskirts although our correspondent adds that it appears as if Gaddafi loyalists have abandoned many of their outlying positions.
‘Protecting Americans’
Thousands of pieces of correspondence from US and UK officials were uncovered by reporters and activists in an office apparently used by Moussa Koussa, who served for years as Col Gaddafi’s spy chief before becoming foreign minister.
Prime Minister Tony Blair embraces Colonel Muammar Gaddafi after a meeting on May 29, 2007 in Sirte, Libya

He defected in the early part of the rebellion, flying to the UK and then on to Qatar.
Rights groups have long accused him of involvement in atrocities, and had called on the UK to arrest him at the time.
The BBC’s Kevin Connolly in Tripoli says the documents illuminate a short period when the Libyan intelligence agency was a trusted and valued ally of both MI6 and the CIA, with the tone of exchanges between agents breezy and bordering on the chummy.
Human Rights Watch accused the CIA of condoning torture.
“It wasn’t just abducting suspected Islamic militants and handing them over to the Libyan intelligence. The CIA also sent the questions they wanted Libyan intelligence to ask and, from the files, it’s very clear they were present in some of the interrogations themselves,” said Peter Bouckaert of HRW.
The papers outline the rendition of several suspects, including one that Human Rights Watch has identified as Abdel Hakim Belhaj, known in the documents as Abdullah al-Sadiq, who is now the military commander of the anti-Gaddafi forces in Tripoli.
Alleged CIA letter

Text of letter
Dear Musa
I am glad to propose that our services take an additional step in cooperation with the establishment of a permanent CIA presence in Libya. We have talked about this move for quite some time and Libya’s cooperation on WMD and other issues, as well as our recent intelligence cooperation, mean that now is the right moment to move ahead. I am prepared to send [XXX] to Libya to introduce two of my officers to you and your service, arriving in Tripoli on 20 March. These two officers, both of whom are experienced and can speak Arabic, will initially staff our station in Libya. [XXX] will communicate the details via fax. I will call to confirm this with you.
We are also eager to work with you in the questioning of the terrorist we recently rendered to your country. I would like to send to Libya an additional two officers and I would appreciate if they could have direct access to question this individual. Should you agree I would like to send these two officers to Libya on 25 March. Again [XXX] will communicate the details to you.
Steve
The Americans snatched him in South East Asia before flying him to Tripoli in 2004, the documents claim.
Mr Belhaj, who was involved in an Islamist group attempting to overthrow Col Gaddafi in the early 2000s, had told the Associated Press news agency earlier this week that he had been rendered by the Americans, but held no grudge.
The CIA would not comment on the specifics of the allegations.
Spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood said: “It can’t come as a surprise that the Central Intelligence Agency works with foreign governments to help protect our country from terrorism and other deadly threats.”
The documents also reveal details about the UK’s relationship with the Gaddafi regime.
One memo, dated 18 March 2004 and with the address “London SE1”, congratulates Libya on the arrival of Mr Belhaj.
It states “for the urgent personal attention of Musa Kusa” and is headed “following message to Musa in Tripoli from Mark in London”, according to the Financial Times. Its authenticity could not be independently verified.
The UK intelligence agency apparently helped to write a speech for Col Gaddafi in 2004, when the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair was encouraging the colonel to give up his weapons programme.
And British officials also insisted that Mr Blair’s famous 2004 meeting with Col Gaddafi should be in his Bedouin tent, according to the UK’s Independent newspaper, whose journalists also discovered the documents.
“[The prime minister’s office is] keen that the prime minister meet the leader in his tent,” the paper quotes a memo from an MI6 agent as saying.
“I don’t know why the English are fascinated by tents. The plain fact is the journalists would love it.”
In another memo, also seen by the Independent, UK intelligence appeared to give Tripoli details of a Libyan dissident who had been freed from jail in Britain.
UK Foreign Secretary William Hague played down the revelations, telling Sky News that they “relate to a period under the previous government so I have no knowledge of those, of what was happening behind the scenes at that time”.
Mr Blair and US President George W Bush lobbied hard to bring Col Gaddafi out of international isolation in the years after the 9/11 attacks, as Libya moved to normalise relations with former enemies in the West.
Bani Walid
In a press conference in Benghazi, Mr Jalil said four Gaddafi-held towns had one week to surrender “to avoid further bloodshed”.
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Media caption
UN envoy Ian Martin on measuring the “expectations” of Libya
But our correspondent, Jon Leyne, says there are reports Bani Walid has now fallen without a fight, with Gaddafi loyalists either melting away or regrouping further south. However, these reports have not been confirmed.
One anti-Gaddafi commander, Abdulrazzak Naduri, had earlier told AFP that Bani Walid had until just 08:00 on Sunday or face military action.
Col Gaddafi’s whereabouts remain unconfirmed. It was believed that two sons, Saadi and Saif al-Islam, had been in Bani Walid recently.
The NTC is stepping up its efforts at reconstruction, setting up a supreme security council to protect Tripoli.
Ian Martin, a special adviser to the UN secretary general, arrived in Libya’s capital on Saturday to try to boost international efforts in the country’s redevelopment.
The NTC has also said its leadership will not now move from Benghazi to Tripoli until next week, with Mr Jalil the last to go.
Our correspondent says this could mean a delay in the opposition formally assuming the role of the new government and raise fears of a power vacuum in the capital.

4 September 2011

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Copyright © 2015 BBC.

Files Note Close C.I.A. Ties to Qaddafi Spy Unit (2011)

TRIPOLI, Libya — Documents found at the abandoned office of Libya’s former spymaster appear to provide new details of the close relations the Central Intelligence Agency shared with the Libyan intelligence service — most notably suggesting that the Americans sent terrorism suspects at least eight times for questioning in Libya despite that country’s reputation for torture.

Although it has been known that Western intelligence services began cooperating with Libya after it abandoned its program to build unconventional weapons in 2004, the files left behind as Tripoli fell to rebels show that the cooperation was much more extensive than generally known with both the C.I.A. and its British equivalent, MI-6.

Some documents indicate that the British agency was even willing to trace phone numbers for the Libyans, and another appears to be a proposed speech written by the Americans for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi about renouncing unconventional weapons.

The documents were discovered Friday by journalists and Human Rights Watch. There were at least three binders of English-language documents, one marked C.I.A. and the other two marked MI-6, among a larger stash of documents in Arabic.

It was impossible to verify their authenticity, and none of them were written on letterhead. But the binders included some documents that made specific reference to the C.I.A., and their details seem consistent with what is known about the transfer of terrorism suspects abroad for interrogation and with other agency practices.

And although the scope of prisoner transfers to Libya has not been made public, news media reports have sometimes mentioned it as one country that the United States used as part of its much criticized rendition program for terrorism suspects.

A C.I.A. spokeswoman, Jennifer Youngblood, declined to comment on Friday on the documents. But she added: “It can’t come as a surprise that the Central Intelligence Agency works with foreign governments to help protect our country from terrorism and other deadly threats.”

The British Foreign Office said, “It is the longstanding policy of the government not to comment on intelligence matters.”

While most of the renditions referred to in the documents appear to have been C.I.A. operations, at least one was claimed to have been carried out by MI-6.

“The rendition program was all about handing over these significant figures related to Al Qaeda so they could torture them and get the information they wanted,” said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director of Human Rights Watch, who studied the documents in the intelligence headquarters in downtown Tripoli.

The documents cover 2002 to 2007, with many of them concentrated in late 2003 and 2004, when Moussa Koussa was head of the External Security Organization. (Mr. Koussa was most recently Libya’s foreign minister.)

The speech that appears to have been drafted for Colonel Qaddafi was found in the C.I.A. folder and appears to have been sent just before Christmas in 2003. The one-page speech seems intended to depict the Libyan dictator in a positive light. It concluded, using the revolutionary name for the Libyan government: “At a time when the world is celebrating the birth of Jesus, and as a token of our contributions towards a world full of peace, security, stability and compassion, the Great Jamhariya presents its honest call for a W.M.D.-free zone in the Middle East,” referring to weapons of mass destruction.

The flurry of communications about renditions are dated after Libya’s renouncement of its weapons program. In several of the cases, the documents explicitly talked about having a friendly country arrest a suspect, and then suggested aircraft would be sent to pick the suspect up and deliver him to the Libyans for questioning. One document included a list of 89 questions for the Libyans to ask a suspect.

While some of the documents warned Libyan authorities to respect such detainees’ human rights, the C.I.A. nonetheless turned them over for interrogation to a Libyan service with a well-known history of brutality.

One document in the C.I.A. binder said operatives were “in a position to deliver Shaykh Musa to your physical custody, similar to what we have done with other senior L.I.F.G. members in the recent past.” The reference was to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which was dedicated to the overthrow of Colonel Qaddafi, and which American officials believed had ties to Al Qaeda.

When Libyans asked to be sent Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq, another member of the group, a case officer wrote back on March 4, 2004, that “we are committed to developing this relationship for the benefit of both our services,” and promised to do their best to locate him, according to a document in the C.I.A. binder.

Two days later, an officer faxed the Libyans to say that Mr. Sadiq and his pregnant wife were planning to fly into Malaysia, and the authorities there agreed to put them on a British Airways flight to London that would stop in Bangkok. “We are planning to take control of the pair in Bangkok and place them on our aircraft for a flight to your country,” the case officer wrote.

Mr. Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch said he had learned from the documents that Sadiq was a nom de guerre for Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who is now a military leader for the rebels.

In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Belhaj gave a detailed description of his incarceration that matched many of those in the documents. He also said that when he was held in Bangkok he was tortured by two people from the C.I.A.

On one occasion, the Libyans tried to send their own plane to extradite a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, Abu Munthir, and his wife and children, who were being held in Hong Kong because of passport irregularities.

The Libyan aircraft, however, was turned back, apparently because Hong Kong authorities were reluctant to let Libyan planes land. In a document labeled “Secret/ U.S. Only/ Except Libya,” the Libyans were advised to charter an aircraft from a third country. “If payment of a charter aircraft is an issue, our service would be willing to assist financially,” the document said.

While questioning alleged terror group members plainly had value to Western intelligence, the cooperation went beyond that. In one case, for example, the Libyans asked operatives to trace a phone number for them, and a document that was in the MI-6 binder replied that it belonged to the Arab News Network in London. It is unclear why the Libyans sought who the phone number belonged to.

The document also suggested signs of agency rivalries over Libya. In the MI-6 binder, a document boasted of having turned over someone named Abu Abd Alla to the Libyans. “This was the least we could do for you to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built over recent years,” an unsigned fax in 2004 said. “Amusingly, we got a request from the Americans to channel requests for information from Abu Abd through the Americans. I have no intention of doing any such thing.”

By ROD NORDLANDSEPT. 2, 2011

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Documents show ties between Libyan spy head, CIA (2011)

Associated Press= TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) — The CIA and other Western intelligence agencies worked closely with the ousted regime of Moammar Gadhafi, sharing tips and cooperating in handing over terror suspects for interrogation to a regime known to use torture, according to a trove of security documents discovered after the fall of Tripoli.

The revelations provide new details on the West’s efforts to turn Libya’s mercurial leader from foe to ally and provide an embarrassing example of the U.S. administration’s collaboration with authoritarian regimes in the war on terror.

The documents, among tens of thousands found in an External Security building in Tripoli, show an increasingly warm relationship, with CIA agents proposing to set up a permanent Tripoli office, addressing their Libyan counterparts by their first names and giving them advice. In one memo, a British agent even sends Christmas greetings.

The agencies were known to cooperate as the longtime Libyan ruler worked to overcome his pariah status by stopping his quest for weapons of mass destruction and renouncing support for terrorism. But the new details show a more extensive relationship than was previously known, with Western agencies offering lists of questions for specific detainees and apparently the text for a Gadhafi speech.

They also offer a glimpse into the inner workings of the now-defunct CIA program of extraordinary rendition, through which terror suspects were secretly detained, sent to third countries and sometimes underwent the so-called enhanced interrogation tactics like waterboarding.

The documents mention a half dozen names of people targeted for rendition, including Tripoli’s new rebel military commander, Abdel-Hakim Belhaj.

Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch, which helped find the documents, called the ties between Washington and Gadhafi’s regime “A very dark chapter in American intelligence history.”

“It remains a stain on the record of the American intelligence services that they cooperated with these very abusive intelligence services,” he said Saturday.

The findings could cloud relations between the West and Libya’s new leaders, although Belhaj said he holds no grudge. NATO airstrikes have helped the rebels advance throughout the six-month civil war and continue to target regime forces as rebels hunt for Gadhafi.

Belhaj is the former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a now-dissolved militant organization that sought to assassinate Gadhafi.

Belhaj says CIA agents tortured him in a secret prison in Thailand before he was returned to Libya and locked in the notorious Abu Salim prison. He insists he was never a terrorist and believes his arrest was in reaction to what he called the “tragic events of 9/11.”

Two documents from March 2004 show American and Libyan officials arranging Belhaj’s rendition.

Referring to him by his nom de guerre, Abdullah al-Sadiq, the documents said he and his pregnant wife were due to travel to Thailand, where they would be detained.

“We are planning to arrange to take control of the pair in Bangkok and place them on our aircraft for a flight to your country,” they tell the Libyans. The memo also requested that Libya, a country known for decades for torture and ill-treatment of prisoners: “Please be advised that we must be assured that al-Sadiq will be treated humanely and that his human rights will be respected.”

The documents coincide with efforts by the Gadhafi regime over the last decade to emerge from international isolation, even agreeing to pay compensation to relatives of each of the 270 victims of the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jumbo jet over Lockerbie, Scotland.

The documents show the CIA and MI6 advising the regime on how to work to rescind its designation as a state sponsor of terror — a move the Bush administration made in 2006. Both agencies received intelligence benefits in return.

The validity of the documents, not written on official letterhead, could not be independently verified, but their content seems consistent with what has been previously reported about intelligence activities during the period.

Later correspondence deals with technical visits to Libya to track the regime’s progress in dismantling its weapons programs.

In one undated memo, the CIA proposes establishing a permanent presence in Libya.

“I propose that our services take an additional step in cooperation with the establishment of a permanent CIA presence in Libya,” it says. It is signed by hand “Steve.”

Another memo is a follow-up query to an apparent Libyan warning of terror plots against American interests abroad.

One document is a draft statement for Gadhafi about his country’s decision to give up weapons of mass destruction.

“Our belief is that an arms race does not serve the security of Libya or the security of the region and contradicts Libya’s great keenness for world peace and security,” it suggests as wording.

But much of the correspondence deals with arrangements to render terror suspects to Libya from South Africa, Hong Kong and elsewhere. One CIA memo from April 2004 tells Libyan authorities that the agency can deliver a suspect known as “Shaykh Musa.”

“We respectfully request an expression of interest from your service regarding taking custody of Musa,” the memo says.

CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood declined to comment Saturday on specific allegations related to the documents.

“It can’t come as a surprise that the Central Intelligence Agency works with foreign governments to help protect our country from terrorism and other deadly threats,” Youngblood said. “That is exactly what we are expected to do.”

British Foreign Secretary William Hague also declined to comment on intelligence matters.

In Tripoli, Anes Sherif, an aide to Belhaj, said the documents provided little new information: “We have known for a long time that (the British and U.S. governments) had very close relations with Gadhafi’s regime.”

Amid the shared intelligence and names of terror suspects are traces of personal relationships.

In one letter from Dec. 24, 2003, a British official thanks Gadhafi’s spy chief Moussa Koussa — who later became foreign minister and defected early in the uprising — for a “very large quantity of dates and oranges” and encourages him to continue with reforms.

“Your achievement realizing the Leader’s initiative has been enormous and of huge importance,” the British official says. “At this time sacred to peace, I offer you my admiration and every congratulation.

AP foreign, Saturday September 3 2011
BEN HUBBARD

Find this story at 3 September 2011

© 2015 Guardian News

Top-secret MI5 files released online to mark first world war centenary

Spies such as Mata Hari, heroic nurse Edith Cavell, suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst and the Boy Scouts feature in documents

Exotic spies, heroes, and known and suspected communists feature in top-secret MI5 files available online for the first time on Thursday to mark the 100th anniversary of the first world war.

Mata Hari, Edith Cavell, Sir Roger Casement, Arthur Ransome, Sidney Reilly, a leading suffragette and the Boy Scouts were among those MI5 kept under surveillance in its early years as Britain’s Security Service.

Mata Hari, one of history’s most celebrated honey-trap spies, first came to MI5’s attention in December 1915 when she arrived at Folkestone on the Dieppe boat train. She admitted her destination was The Hague to be near her lover Baron Van der Capellen, a colonel in the Dutch Hussars.

The following year, MI5’s informant in The Hague, codenamed “T”, reported: “Mata Hari is a demi-mondaine who is in relation with highly placed people and during her sojourn in France she made the acquaintance of many French and Belgian officers. She is suspected of having been to France on an important mission for the Germans.”

In November 1916, questioned by MI5, Mata Hari claimed that a French consul in Spain had subsequently asked her to go to Austria to spy on that country’s forces.

A renowned dancer, Mata Hari was a Dutch divorcee born Marguerite Gertrude Zelle in the Dutch East Indies. A French intelligence report dated 22 May 1917, shown to a MI5 officer in Paris, noted: “Mata Hari today confessed that she has been engaged by Consul Cremer of Amsterdam for the German Secret Service. She was paid 20,000 francs in advance.”

She was shot by a French firing squad in 1917.

Edith Cavell, a British nurse at a Red Cross hospital in Belgium, was executed by a German firing squad in October 1915 for helping 200 allied soldiers to escape. The files in the National Archives show that British diplomats clung to the hope that Germany would not execute a woman who was regarded as a heroine.

An MI5 agent in Liège said he had been told by a reliable source that “the two spies who denounced Nurse Cavell have both been killed, one by a bullet in the head, the other by a dagger thrust in the chest”.

Sir Roger Casement, a British consul in Africa and South America knighted for his work in exposing the exploitation and slaughter of Africans and South American Indians, and Sidney Reilly, a naturalised Russian Jew dubbed the Ace of Spies, are other victims of espionage who feature among the 150 MI5 files.

Casement was arrested on a beach in Co Kerry, three days before the 1916 Easter rising, after landing in a boat that had picked him up from a German submarine. A trawler accompanying the submarine and carrying 20,000 guns was scuttled after being intercepted.

The MI5 documents show Casement knew the Easter rising was doomed to failure after Germany reneged on its promises to send troops to help the rebels. The UK government used his “black diaries” to smear him and sabotage a campaign to save his life.

“I have done nothing dishonourable, as you will one day learn,” he told Frank Hall, a senior MI5 officer. Casement was hanged in Pentonville prison on 3 August 1916.

Reilly was recruited to work for the British secret intelligence service, MI6. When he died in 1925 the Russians claimed a guard had shot him as he crossed the border with Finland. MI5 documents suggest he was executed by Bolsheviks in 1925.

Reilly had many wives, according to MI5. A Special Branch informer reported that his second wife, actress Pepita Bobadilla, went to the Russian embassy in Paris following his death. As she applied for a visa, she told the Russians her husband had been “spying for the British government”.

Arthur Ransome, author of Swallows and Amazons, caught MI5’s attention as correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in Moscow who married Trotsky’s secretary, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina.

British officials told MI5 that Ransome was “exceedingly clever and interesting fellow – but an out and out Bolshevist”. The British consul and MI6 officer in Moscow, Robert Bruce Lockhart, soon corrected them. Ransome, who was given the codename S76, was a valuable intelligence asset during the chaos of the Russian revolution, he said.

The files include one on the suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, one of MI5’s later targets. MI5 noted that in 1940 she wrote to Viscount Swinton, chairman of a committee investigating Fifth Columnists, sending him a list of active Fascists still at large and of anti-Fascists who had been interned. A copy of the letter includes a note by Swinton, saying: “I should think a most doubtful source of information.”

The files also show how MI5 was concerned that the Boy Scouts were being infiltrated by Communists after the first world war.

The files can be accessed at the National Archives link – First World War 100.

Richard Norton-Taylor
The Guardian, Wednesday 9 April 2014 22.43 BST

Find this story at 9 April 2014

© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Condemned spy Mata Hari glib during final interrogation: MI5 files (2014)

World War I spy Mata Hari refused to fully confess to espionage before facing French firing squad in 1917.

Mata Hari was a wildly-popular Dutch exotic dancer, who was executed as a German spy in 1917.

The spy known as “Mata Hari” was glib in her final prison interrogation before her life ended in front of a French firing squad in the First World War, according to formerly top secret files from the British intelligence agency MI5.
Mata Hari, once a wildly popular Dutch exotic dancer, didn’t appear fazed when an interrogator confronted her with a long list of her lovers, an MI5 report released earlier this month states.
“When faced with her acquaintances with officers of all ranks and all nations, she replied that she loved all officers, and would rather have as her lover a poor officer than a rich banker,” the MI5 files note.
Walking the Western Front:
• Where John McCrae wrote ‘In Flanders Fields’
• The ‘Trench of Death’
Her lovers included a wide range of ages and nationalities, including Germans, French, Russians, Swiss and Spaniards, the files state.
At the time of her execution on Oct. 15, 1917, in a muddy field outside Paris, she was accused of feeding Germany information that cost some 50,000 Allied troops their lives.
But two academics who have studied her case say they don’t believe she provided Germany with any useful information for its war effort.
“She really did not pass on anything that you couldn’t find in the local newspapers in Spain,” said Julie Wheelwright of City University in London, the author of The Fatal Lover: Mata Hari and the Myth of Women in Espionage.
Mata Hari was the stage name for Gertruda Margaretha Zelle, who was born July 8, 1876, in the Dutch East Indies to a Dutch father and a Javanese mother. Wheelwright said she became an exotic dancer after fleeing an abusive marriage.
Wheelwright described her as “an independent woman, a divorcee, a citizen of a neutral country, a courtesan and a dancer, which made her a perfect scapegoat for the French, who were then losing the war.”
“She was kind of held up as an example of what might happen if your morals were too loose,” Wheelwright said.
Wesley Wark, a security, intelligence and terrorism expert at the University of Ottawa, said Mata Hari provided France with a scapegoat when the country wrestled with emerging power for women and fears of losing the war.
“They needed a scapegoat and she was a notable target for scapegoating,” Wark said.
In the MI5 files, an intelligence officer sounds impressed with her attitude during her final days.
“She never made a full confession nor can I find … that she ever gave away anyone as her (accomplice),” the report states.
“She was a ‘femme forte’ and she worked alone,” the report concludes.
The newly released files show Mata Hari was trailed by Allied surveillance officers across France, Spain and England.
The officers noted that on Aug. 4, 1916, she wrote to a Don Diego de Leon and then met a Capt. Vladimir de Masloff, of the Russian army, stationed in France.
“He was very intimate with her from this date and constant letters pass between, he was her favourite lover,” the MI5 files state.
“Same day she met PROFESSOR MARIANI Captain Italian Army.”
While in custody in the ancient Prison de Saint-Lazare outside Paris, she admitted to having spied for the Germans, the MI5 files state.
A file dated May 22, 1917 states: “Matahari today confessed that she has been engaged in Consul CREMER of Amsterdam for the German Secret Service. She was paid 20,000 (francs) in advance and her number was H.21.”
That file also notes her German spymasters gave her vials of invisible ink.
Much of her prison interrogation statement concerns mundane thoughts, not troop movements.
Her MI5 file includes the note: “She had discussed the life led by people in Paris, as regards supply of food etc., had said that the English officers in Paris treated their French Allies badly, although the French went out of their way to treat them ‘like Kings’; that the French nation might live to regret that they had ever allowed the English into the country … .”
Even if she wanted to divulge information, there wasn’t much she could say, Wark said. “Politics wasn’t really part of her world.”
Accounts of her execution say she waved off the offer of a blindfold or the last sacrament. She was reportedly blowing a kiss — at her lawyer, a nun or the firing squad, depending on who’s telling the story — the instant her life ended.
Wheelwright thinks this was likely bravado on the dancer’s part.
“This was going to be her last performance and she was going to go out in style,” she said. “She was playing to the crowd, which is what she always did.”

By: Peter Edwards Star Reporter, Published on Thu Apr 24 2014

Find this story at 24 April 2014

© Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Ltd. 1996-2014

MI5 watched Mata Hari (1999)

Mata Hari: beautiful exotic dancer turned espionage agent
Mata Hari, the glamorous World War I spy shot by the French in 1917, was watched by MI5 for two years, according to the newly released secret government papers.
The former wife of a Dutch army colonel, she was recruited by German intelligence while performing as a stripper in Berlin.

Special Report: Wartime Spies The sultry spy, who was notorious in prewar Paris for her exotic dancing and libidinous lifestyle, was interrogated twice by the British secret service but they could not force her to reveal her activities.

She later confessed all to French authorities and was executed. Her MI5 files note however that there was never any evidence that she passed on anything of military importance.

‘Unfavourable impression’

Mata Hari was born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle in Leeuwarden, The Netherlands.

She first attracted the suspicion of British officials in December 1915 and was arrested at the southern English port of Folkestone attempting to board a boat for France.

Under interrogation, she admitted she was heading for The Hague to live near her lover, a Dutch colonel. But MI5 could not pin anything further on her.

Her interrogator, Captain S S Dillon, noted at the time: “Although she had good answers to every question, she impressed me very unfavourably, but after having her very carefully searched and finding nothing, I considered I hadn’t enough grounds to refuse her embarkation.”

The report also noted that she was “handsome, bold … well and fashionably dressed” in a costume with “raccoon fur trimming and hat to match”.

Suspect

Mata Hari
MI5 decided to keep tabs
MI5 continued to monitored her after she settled in The Hague, and soon an informant revealed she was being paid by the German Embassy.

A February 1916 intelligence report noted that she was “in relation with highly placed people and during her sojourn in France she made the acquaintance of many French and Belgian officers”.

“She is suspected of having been to France on important mission for the Germans,” the report said. The report concluded that the matter was being followed up.

Wrongly suspected

In November 1916, British authorities removed Mata Hari from a steamer at the port of Falmouth en route from Spain to Holland, believing she was another German spy, Clara Benedix.

She was taken, along with her 10 travelling trunks, to be interviewed by MI5 and the police. She told them she had been recruited by a Belgian officer, to work for his country’s intelligence service.

She also alleged that the French consul in Vigo, Spain, had asked her to spy on Russian forces in Austria.

Death by firing squad

Once again there was insufficient evidence to detain her and she was sent back to Spain.

The following year she was arrested by the French authorities, court martialled and sentenced to death by firing squad.

A French intelligence report shown to MI5 noted: “Mata Hari today confessed that she has been engaged by Consul Cremer of Amsterdam for the German Secret Service.”

She admitted sending “general information of every kind procurable,” but mentioned no military secrets, it said.

Tuesday, 26 January, 1999, 23:22 GMT

Find this story at 26 January 1999

© BBC

MI5 and Liberal party allegedly ‘covered up’ MP Cyril Smith’s four decades of abusing children

Police received at least 144 complaints by victims about late Liberal MP Sir Cyril, but MI5 and Special Branch put pressure on officers to drop investigations, new book claims

Politicians, police and M15 covered up former MP Sir Cyril Smith’s sexual abuse of vulnerable boys as young as eight for four decades, it has been claimed.
Police received at least 144 complaints by victims about the late Liberal MP Sir Cyril, but MI5 and Special Branch put pressure on officers to drop investigations, according to a new book.
The 29st MP for Rochdale was able to continue his abuse while the authorities blocked prosecutions, and the Liberal Party even put his name forward for a knighthood in 1988 in spite of the rumours of his activities circulating around Westminster, it has been alleged.
Former Liberal party leader David, now Lord Steel, nominated Sir Cyril for the honour despite knowing of the allegations about the MP, it was reported.
Lord Steel’s involvement only emerged in recent weeks after a Freedom of Information battle.
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The current Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg sent a celebratory message that was read out at Sir Cyril’s 80th birthday party, which said: “You were a beacon for our party in the ’70s and ’80s and continue to be an inspiration to the people of Rochdale.”
A new book, written by one of Sir Cyril’s successors as MP for the Lancashire constituency, Labour’s Simon Danczuk, also reveals that child porn was found in the late MP’s car but police were ordered to release him.
Sir Cyril, who died aged 82 in 2010, was arrested repeatedly for “acts of gross indecency with young lads” in public toilets but no action was taken, according to the book Smile for the Camera: the Double Life of Cyril Smith.
A member of the Liberal party, which later merged with the Social Democratic Party to become the Liberal Democrats, Sir Cyril was also a visitor to the notorious Elm Guest house in South-west London, which is now the focus of a Scotland Yard investigation into an alleged VIP paedophile ring, the Daily Mail reported.
Sir Cyril, who was MP for Rochdale between 1972 and 1992, was governor of almost 30 schools, and in the 1960s he helped to open Cambridge House children’s home, where he abused boys, often subjecting them to spurious medical examinations, according to the book.
But when police launched an investigation, a senior police officer intervened to stop it, it has been claimed.
The book, co-written by Matthew Baker, also claims that senior Labour figures’ support of the Paedophile Information Exchange helped keep Sir Cyril “hidden from scrutiny”.
It claims that police officers were threatened with dismissal and gagged by the Official Secrets Act if they tried to expose the Sir Cyril’s sexual abuse of boys.
Mr Danczuk, Rochdale MP since 2010, first raised Sir Cyril’s case in the House of Commons in 2012 after victims contacted him to tell of their ordeals.
Lord Steel was unavailable for comment. Last year, he said he had asked Cyril Smith about the allegations of child abuse and accepted his denial of wrongdoing, the Daily Mail reported.
A spokesman for Mr Clegg said: “Clearly he would never have paid tribute to Cyril Smith if he had had any idea about these horrible allegations.”
A Liberal Democrat spokesperson said: “Cyril Smith’s acts were vile and repugnant and we have nothing but sympathy for those whose lives he ruined. His actions were not known to or condoned by anyone in the Liberal Party or the Liberal Democrats.”

By Melanie Hall11:22AM BST 12 Apr 2014

Find this story at 12 April 2014

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2014

Monstrous cover-up: How the Liberal party, police and MI5 concealed MP Cyril Smith’s industrial-scale child abuse

For four decades, 29st politician was free to prey on vulnerable children as young as eight
Police received at least 144 complaints from victims yet authorities blocked any prosecution
New book serialised in Daily Mail details how Smith – who died in 2010 aged 82 – was repeatedly protected despite being arrested for sex crimes
MI5 and Special Branch officers put pressure on police to drop investigations
Child porn was found in Smith’s car but police were ordered to release him
Liberal Party put his name forward for knighthood in 1988 in spite of rumours of his sordid activities swirling around Westminster

The shocking scale of the Establishment cover-up of former Liberal MP Cyril Smith’s sickening sex abuse of boys is revealed today

The shocking scale of the Establishment cover-up of former Liberal MP Cyril Smith’s sickening sex abuse of boys is revealed today
The shocking scale of the Establishment cover-up of former Liberal MP Cyril Smith’s sickening sex abuse of boys is revealed today.
For four decades, the depraved 29st politician was free to prey on vulnerable children as young as eight.
Police received at least 144 complaints by victims of the predatory paedophile yet the authorities blocked any prosecution – allowing Smith brazenly to continue his abuse.
The Liberal Party even put his name forward for a knighthood in 1988 in spite of the rumours of his sordid activities swirling around Westminster.
David, now Lord Steel nominated him for the honour despite knowing of the allegations about the bachelor MP for Rochdale, the ex-Liberal leader’s involvement emerging only in recent weeks after a Freedom of Information battle.
At Smith’s 80th birthday party, a gushing message from current Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg was read out, which said: ‘You were a beacon for our party in the ’70s and ’80s and continue to be an inspiration to the people of Rochdale.’
Now, an explosive new book serialised in the Daily Mail details how Smith – who died in 2010 aged 82 – was repeatedly protected despite being arrested for a string of sex crimes.
Written by one of Smith’s successors as MP for the Lancashire constituency, Labour’s Simon Danczuk, the book reveals:
MI5 and Special Branch officers put pressure on police to drop investigations;
child porn was found in Smith’s car but police were ordered to release him;
he was repeatedly arrested for ‘acts of gross indecency with young lads’ in public toilets but no action was taken;
Smith was a visitor to the notorious Elm Guest house in South-west London, now the focus of a Scotland Yard investigation into an alleged VIP paedophile ring;
senior Labour figures’ support of the Paedophile Information Exchange helped keep Smith ‘hidden from scrutiny’.
In his book, Smile for the Camera: the Double Life of Cyril Smith, Mr Danczuk details Smith’s ‘rapacious sexual appetite’ and highlights chilling similarities between the northern MP and fellow paedophile Jimmy Savile.
For four decades, the depraved 29st politician (pictured above in 1972) was free to prey on vulnerable children as young as eight
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For four decades, the depraved 29st politician (pictured above in 1972) was free to prey on vulnerable children as young as eight
David, now Lord Steel (centre) nominated Smith for a knighthood despite knowing of the allegations about the bachelor MP for Rochdale, the ex-Liberal leader’s involvement emerging only in recent weeks after a Freedom of Information battle
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David, now Lord Steel (centre) nominated Smith for a knighthood despite knowing of the allegations about the bachelor MP for Rochdale, the ex-Liberal leader’s involvement emerging only in recent weeks after a Freedom of Information battle
Like the DJ, Smith – who in 1973 appeared on Savile’s Clunk Click TV show – portrayed himself as a charitable man supporting young boys to provide cover for his sordid activities.
But unlike in the Savile scandal, police forces around the country repeatedly investigated sex abuse allegations against Smith yet their efforts to prosecute the MP were constantly blocked.
The book details how police officers were threatened with dismissal and gagged by the Official Secrets Act if they attempted to expose the politician’s sordid activities.

More…
‘I’ve come to examine you’: From bogus medical examinations to punishment beatings, how paedophile Cyril Smith used his powerful public image to abuse boys
The truth about Labour apologists for paedophilia: Police probe child sex group linked to top party officials in wake of Savile
Knighted by Steel and eulogised by Clegg: Cyril Smith and the indelible shame of the Liberal Party
How Cyril Smith evaded the law: Sickening folly of the Left who aided his cause by advocating paedophilia
Mr Danczuk, Rochdale MP since 2010, first raised Smith’s case in the House of Commons in 2012 after victims contacted him to tell of their ordeals at the hands of the ‘29st bully’.
One young Liberal activist was sexually assaulted in Smith’s office in the House of Commons in the 1980s as other MPs, including then Labour leader Michael Foot, walked by.
Days later, the Crown Prosecution Service revealed that his victims’ claims were investigated by police on three separate occasion – in 1970, 1998 and 1999 – but each time files were submitted to prosecutors, they were rejected.
The Liberal Party, bruised by the negative publicity surrounding the 1979 conspiracy to murder trial of its leader Jeremy Thorpe (right) and aware of Smith’s ‘electoral Midas touch’, was eager to sweep the problems under the carpet
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The Liberal Party, bruised by the negative publicity surrounding the 1979 conspiracy to murder trial of its leader Jeremy Thorpe (right) and aware of Smith’s ‘electoral Midas touch’, was eager to sweep the problems under the carpet
The CPS belatedly agreed that Smith should have been prosecuted and Greater Manchester Police publicly acknowledged, amid ‘overwhelming evidence’, that he did sexually and physically abuse young boys.
The book, co-written by Matthew Baker, reveals that as far back as the 1950s, Rochdale police had their suspicions about the politician.
Smith, MP for Rochdale between 1972 and 1992, was governor of almost 30 schools. In the 1960s, he helped to open Cambridge House children’s home, where he abused boys, often subjecting them to spurious medical examinations.
But when police launched an investigation, the chief constable of Lancashire personally intervened to stop it.
In the 1970s Smith was arrested on a number of occasions in public toilets in London’s St James’s Park, a regular haunt for young male prostitutes after dark, but always walked free.
The cover-ups continued in the 1980s when Smith’s car was pulled over on the motorway near Northampton and traffic officers discovered child porn in the boot.
At Smith’s 80th birthday party, a gushing message from current Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg was read out, which said: ‘You were a beacon for our party in the ’70s and ’80s and continue to be an inspiration to the people of Rochdale’
+12
Now, an explosive new book serialised in the Daily Mail details how Smith – who died in 2010 aged 82 – was repeatedly protected despite being arrested for a string of sex crimes
+12
At Cyril Smith’s 80th birthday party, a gushing message from current Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg was read out, which said: ‘You were a beacon for our party in the ’70s and ’80s and continue to be an inspiration to the people of Rochdale’
‘The police were naturally disgusted and wanted to press charges,’ says the book. ‘But then a phone call was made from London and he was released without charge.’
When Rochdale police first started investigating him in 1972 they were threatened by the council’s Liberal leader and, according to Mr Danczuk’s book, rumours of his activities were well known in Westminster for many years.
But the Liberal Party, bruised by the negative publicity surrounding the 1979 conspiracy to murder trial of its leader Jeremy Thorpe and aware of Smith’s ‘electoral Midas touch,’ was eager to sweep the problems under the carpet .
David Steel, who took over from Mr Thorpe as party leader, even recommended Smith for his knighthood despite knowing of the sordid rumours that surfaced in 1979 that the MP had abused young boys.
The Cabinet Office had previously refused to disclose who had put Smith forward – claiming it would breach data protection rules – but the Information Commissioner’s Office ruled earlier this year that there was a ‘legitimate public interest’ in it being disclosed.
Lord Steel was unavailable for comment. Last year, he said he had asked Cyril Smith about the allegations of child abuse and accepted his denial of wrongdoing
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Lord Steel was unavailable for comment. Last year, he said he had asked Cyril Smith about the allegations of child abuse and accepted his denial of wrongdoing
Lord Steel was unavailable for comment. Last year, he said he had asked Cyril Smith about the allegations of child abuse and accepted his denial of wrongdoing.
A spokesman for Mr Clegg said last night: ‘Clearly he would never have paid tribute to Cyril Smith if he had had any idea about these horrible allegations.’
The book also describes how Labour politicians’ support for a notorious paedophile group that campaigned to legalise sex with children helped Smith evade justice for years.
Earlier this year the Mail revealed the extraordinary links between the National Council for Civil Liberties and the Paedophile Information Exchange.
Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman, her MP husband Jack Dromey, and former Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt held key roles in the NCCL, which in 1975 granted ‘affiliate’ status to the group of predatory paedophiles.
Smith was friends with PIE founding member Peter Righton and Mr Danczuk said the NCCL’s backing for PIE helped Smith’s crimes remain secret.
‘Worryingly, it seemed a fair few on the Left, including some who have subsequently become key figures in the Labour Party, were fooled into giving this hideous group shelter.
‘All of which helped Cyril’s cause and kept him hidden from scrutiny.’
Smith was a visitor to Elm Guest House, in Barnes, south west London, which is at the centre of the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Fernbridge.
A Liberal Democrat spokesman said: ‘Cyril Smith’s acts were vile and repugnant and we have nothing but sympathy for those whose lives he ruined. His actions were not known to or condoned by anyone in the Liberal Party or the Liberal Democrats.’

‘I’ve come to examine you’: From bogus medical examinations to punishment beatings, how paedophile Cyril Smith used his powerful public image to abuse boys
By SIMON DANCZUK
The huge man, all of 29st, unlocked the door with his own key and burst into the teenager’s room.
‘Take your clothes off,’ he ordered the orphaned youngster, who was sick with the flu and had taken to his bed in the hostel instead of going to work.
‘I’ve been told you’re ill and I’ve come to examine you,’ the man declared. Yet this was no doctor, but a councillor and businessman, a respected and well-known figure in the local community.
Just like Jimmy Savile – whom he counted as a friend – Cyril Smith used his public image as a shield while manipulating his way into positions of influence over vulnerable young people he then ruthlessly abused. Above, Smith (bottom left) with children outside the House of Commons
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Just like Jimmy Savile – whom he counted as a friend – Cyril Smith used his public image as a shield while manipulating his way into positions of influence over vulnerable young people he then ruthlessly abused. Above, Smith (bottom left) with children outside the House of Commons
‘He was a colossus, more than three times my size,’ the lad recalled years later, in graphic and disturbing testimony. ‘I remember his eyes watching me like a beast sizing up its prey. In the folds of fat around his neck I could see rivulets of sweat.
‘Shaking with fear, I did as I was told. He bent down and clasped me with huge hands like shovels.
Suddenly he grasped my private parts and began to squeeze. I screamed.
‘Violence flashed in his eyes. “Now, now, lad. I’ll have none of your petulance. This is for your own good. I’m checking to see if there’s anything wrong with you,” he said, as he forced his way between my thighs again.
‘I don’t know how long it lasted, but it felt like hours.
‘When he rose there was a faint smile on his features, which twisted into a sneer as he said: “There’s nothing wrong with you, lad. You’re swinging the lead, trying to bunk off work.”
‘ “No,” I stammered. “I’ve never had a day off in my life. I’m sick.”
‘He lunged towards me and in one brutal movement threw me over his knee. Thwack, thwack, thwack.
‘His monstrous hand rained down on my bottom, smacking me until I thought I’d pass out. I cried out in pain, but that only made him hit me harder.
‘When he finished I was trembling and whimpering as he held me down and told me: “It had to be done, lad.”
‘Above his heavy breathing I could smell his rancid body odour. With a wet sponge, he then began to stroke me, rough hands sliding over the welts he had made.
‘He was humming to himself, broken every now and then by strange squeals of pleasure. “There, there,” he kept whispering, his breath bearing down on my neck.
‘When it was over he let me slide to the floor, cleared his throat and adjusted his braces. He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his brow.
‘ “You’ll know better now,” he said, and made his way out.
‘The door clicked shut. For a while the only thought I entertained was death.’
When he calmed down, the shattered youngster pulled his wits together.
‘I dragged my clothes on, gathered my things into a duffle bag and ran. I spent the next night huddled in a bus shelter,’ he said.
‘That winter of 1963 was the coldest in 200 years. But that was nothing compared to the chill left in me for the rest of my life.’
The sadistic bully who administered this beating at Cambridge House, a boys’ hostel in the Lancashire mill town of Rochdale — and in the process tainted this bright young man’s life — was Cyril Smith.
Smith posed as a tireless worker for children – at one point he was governor of 29 local schools and set up a youth charity, Rochdale Childer – using it all as a cover to prowl from classroom to classroom and youth club to youth club
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Smith posed as a tireless worker for children – at one point he was governor of 29 local schools and set up a youth charity, Rochdale Childer – using it all as a cover to prowl from classroom to classroom and youth club to youth club
In 1963, he was already an enormously powerful local figure, a political godfather with fingers in many pies.
Known as Mr Rochdale, he later became the town’s mayor, then its Liberal MP, and for 20 years strutted the national stage.
At Westminster, on television and in the media, Smith was a big man in every sense.
He was one of the most popular faces in politics, using his oversized appearance, humour and in-your‑face northern bluffness to stand out in a world of grey, indistinguishable politicians.
But just like Jimmy Savile — whom he counted as a friend — Smith used his public image as a shield while manipulating his way into positions of influence over vulnerable young people he then ruthlessly abused.
And, like Savile, he deployed his professional success, powerful personality and highly placed contacts to ensure he was never held to account. It was only after his death in 2010 at the age of 82 that men like that victim from Cambridge House felt safe to speak out.
Yet Cyril Smith’s dark side has always been talked about in Rochdale — and the whispers echoed through British politics.
One of the most shocking elements of his story is how the truth was known to the police and in Westminster, yet concealed from the wider public, allowing a paedophile to hide in Parliament.
When I first arrived in Rochdale as its prospective Labour candidate in 2007, I, too, was taken in by him. It was 15 years since he’d stood down as MP but he continued to cast a spell over the town.
Case studies
I’d be woken at 2am by people asking for urgent help on a problem. When I pointed out it was the middle of the night, I’d be told: ‘Cyril would always help us whatever time it was.’
A working-class boy made good, he oozed supreme confidence and had a common touch that broke down barriers, shuffling around Rochdale market in carpet slippers to buy a bag of tripe.
Although he was officially ‘retired’ from politics, he still sat in an armchair on street corners, smiling like some saintly monk while people queued to hear his homilies. Councillors couldn’t get elected without his backing.
At first, I respected him for his homespun politics, his spit-and-sawdust grit and his passion. But in time, the scales fell from my eyes and I was confronted with absolute horror. Once you looked beyond the jolly clown playing for the camera, there was a sickening, dark heart.
‘He’d grope all the boys as he gave out awards’
I saw it in police files that had been hidden for years and I heard it in the desperate voices of grown men Cyril had abused as boys.
As soon as the first victim approached me, there was no turning back. Every email, every phone call, every meeting uncovered more about his double life.
And the more I found out, the more I came to realise that this wasn’t just about abuse, it was about power — and a cover-up that reached from Rochdale all the way to the very top of the Establishment.
Smith posed as a tireless worker for children — at one point he was governor of 29 local schools and set up a youth charity, Rochdale Childer — using it all as a cover to prowl from classroom to classroom and youth club to youth club.
His happiest hunting grounds were Cambridge House, a hostel for ‘working boys’ he helped set up with other politicians, and Knowl View, a residential school for children with learning difficulties, where he was a governor and had his own set of keys, coming and going at will.
To sit before the men he abused there and listen to them recount their ordeals is an experience no one can prepare for. There is anger, confusion and a deep sense of shame as they recall violence, spanking and groping that will never be erased from their memories.
His happiest hunting grounds were Cambridge House, a hostel for ‘working boys’ he helped set up with other politicians, and Knowl View (above), a residential school for children with learning difficulties, where he was a governor and had his own set of keys, coming and going at will
+12
His happiest hunting grounds were Cambridge House, a hostel for ‘working boys’ he helped set up with other politicians, and Knowl View (above), a residential school for children with learning difficulties, where he was a governor and had his own set of keys, coming and going at will
Smith would carry out bogus medical examinations as an excuse to fondle them, or beat them as supposed punishment for breaking the rules — then ‘comfort’ them afterwards.
Those who defied him were hit and smashed against walls. Boys’ teeth were knocked out and their bodies treated like playthings.
Other details of Cyril’s abuse filtered through to me almost casually. The cleaner in my office mentioned in passing how he once played for a football team as a teenager and Smith presented the awards every year.
‘He’d grope all the boys as he was presenting their medals,’ I was told. ‘We complained to the coach, but he said we’d have to put up with it because Cyril was the sponsor and paid for the do.’
I listened, horrified. It was presented as just another everyday story of Cyril abusing boys — as if everyone knew.
I began to wonder how many other public figures over the years had received calls and letters about Cyril and not acted on them. I imagine there were a few.
‘I cried out but it only made him hit me harder’

Certainly, when I started to ask questions after getting elected, a fellow Labour MP approached me and told me to leave Cyril alone. ‘Don’t attack him, steer clear of him,’ he said. ‘It’s not worth it.’
It wasn’t just the words that irritated me, it was the look that followed. It more or less said: ‘Play the game, this is how it works, and if you want to join our club then obey our rules.’
One of the most troubling whispers that repeatedly reached me was that Cyril had been protected by MI5. But, initially at least, no one was prepared to go on the record about it.
A former Labour MP I approached started to talk but went silent after a few sentences. ‘No good will come of this,’ he said nervously. ‘It’s best left.’ And then he shut the door on me.
A former police officer I tracked down to his pub in Cheshire went white when I mentioned Cyril’s name. ‘I can’t talk about that time,’ he said, and again the door was closed.
It was hard not to conclude that powerful forces were still at work to protect Smith’s name. But the voices of the victims could not be silenced, and in the autumn of 2012, in Parliament, I named Cyril as an abuser.
After I spoke publicly, more stories flooded in, and not just from victims.
Many — as I will describe in detail in the coming days of this series — were from police officers saying Smith’s crimes were widely known to them but their superiors refused to act.
I was told of officers who found child pornography in the boot of Smith’s car, only for a mysterious call from London to tell them not to charge him.
It’s now known that on three separate occasions files were passed by Lancashire Police to the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Crown Prosecution Service containing details of Smith’s abuse. Yet on each occasion no prosecution was pursued. It is as though Cyril was untouchable
+12
It’s now known that on three separate occasions files were passed by Lancashire Police to the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Crown Prosecution Service containing details of Smith’s abuse. Yet on each occasion no prosecution was pursued. It is as though Cyril was untouchable
I was told how Smith’s case was used during police training on child abuse, with one instructor admitting there had been 144 complaints against him. Mysteriously, when this became known to her superiors, the instructor was silenced and moved to another job.
I was told how Smith was repeatedly detained for acts of gross indecency in toilets in St James’s Park, London, only for orders to discontinue inquiries in each case.
And I was told how, when other inquiries were completed and revealed compelling and disturbing evidence that Smith was a serial paedophile, they were ignored.
It’s now known that on three separate occasions files were passed by Lancashire Police to the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Crown Prosecution Service containing details of Smith’s abuse. Yet on each occasion no prosecution was pursued. It is as though Cyril was untouchable.
On one now notorious occasion, files of evidence on Smith held by Special Branch were removed by MI5 officers from the safe at police headquarters in Preston and taken to London. They were never seen again. This was just one of several cover-ups which I will reveal in detail later in this series.
Some will no doubt argue that things have changed. The cover-up of Cyril’s abuse was a long time ago. The values of the Seventies are a lot different to the standards expected in public life today. People wouldn’t stand for that now. Awareness of child abuse has improved tenfold. No one would tolerate this kind of behaviour among colleagues, surely?
I would like to believe this view, but all the signs I’ve seen suggest it’s not the case.
Cyril wasn’t the only abuser in Rochdale, and he was influential enough to ensure that other abusers were allowed to hang on to his coat-tails and carry on, undetected by the authorities.
The problem that the town has to face up to, I believe, is that paedophile gangs have been operating there for years.
A leaked report to the local health authority, by a council HIV prevention officer named Phil Shepherd, warned that men from as far away as Sheffield travelled to Rochdale to abuse boys at Knowl View School.
I will tell the full, horrifying story behind this report, and how it became public, later in this series.
But it instantly invites the questions: Who was organising this? Who knew what was happening? Who chose to remain silent?
A number of police officers have told me that Cyril was just the tip of the iceberg and, unfortunately, I expect more stories of his abuse to emerge.
I think in time we’ll hear that there were more abusers in Parliament, more terrible cover-ups.
And it won’t be just one political party that’s guilty of harbouring abusers.

Additional reporting: Matthew Baker.
By MICHAEL SEAMARK and GUY ADAMS and DANIEL MARTIN
PUBLISHED: 21:01 GMT, 11 April 2014 | UPDATED: 20:18 GMT, 12 April 2014

Find this story at 12 April 2014

© Associated Newspapers Ltd

Senior Liberals ‘were aware of Cyril Smith child abuse allegations’ (2013)

Lib Dem candidate Dominic Carman says concerns about late MP’s behaviour were rife within Liberal party in 1970s

Liberal party grandees including the former leader Jeremy Thorpe were aware of allegations that Cyril Smith was a serial abuser of boys throughout the 1970s but failed to launch a formal inquiry, according to a Liberal Democrat candidate who has passed his concerns on to the police.

Dominic Carman, who has represented Nick Clegg’s party in two parliamentary elections, claimed that his father, the barrister George Carman, learned that concerns about the late MP for Rochdale’s behaviour were rife within the party while successfully defending Thorpe in a trial for conspiracy to murder in 1979.

Father and son discussed Liberal concerns about Smith at length in May 1979 as Thorpe prepared to go to trial, Carman said, amid concerns that their disclosure could harm the former leader’s defence.

The claims, which have been passed on to Greater Manchester police, will add to widening concern at institutional responses to allegations of abuse against the MP, who died in 2010. Officers believe that Smith was a prolific abuser of boys and should have been charged with crimes more than 40 years ago, it emerged in November.

They will also increase pressure upon the Liberal Democrats as they are forced to confront allegations of sexual harassment against Lord Rennard, one of the party’s most senior figures. Rennard denies any wrongdoing. There is no suggestion he was aware of the claims about Smith.

The party announced an inquiry last week into how it has handled past complaints of sexual impropriety. Tim Farron, the party’s president, has admitted that the party has “screwed up” inquiries into claims that Rennard groped or propositioned female activists.

Simon Danczuk, the Labour MP who first raised concerns about Smith’s activities in parliament in November, said that there is a pattern whenever allegations of sexual abuse emerge inside the Liberal Democrats. “They bury their heads in the sand and claim to know nothing. For the sake of Rochdale victims, Clegg has to stop stonewalling and now come clean on what his party knew about the sexual abuse carried out by Cyril Smith,” he said.

The Thorpe trial gripped the nation in 1979, amid claims of illicit affairs, greed, murder and revenge.

Thorpe, who led the Liberal party for nine years, was accused of plotting the murder of his alleged former lover, Norman Scott, for threatening to uncover their alleged affair. It was claimed that Thorpe and others had hired a hitman to kill Scott, but that the hitman had shot dead Scott’s dog, Rinka, instead.

George Carman’s reputation as a fearsome counsel was cemented after he cross-examined Scott. His son, Dominic Carman, who stood for the Lib Dems in 2010 in Barking and again at the Barnsley byelection in 2011, said that he discussed the Smith allegations with his father in May 1979 as the trial was about to begin.

These discussions were, he claimed, prompted by the publication in the week before the trial of allegations that Smith had abused boys in a children’s hostel printed in the Rochdale Alternative Press, a small circulation local magazine.

Thorpe’s legal team was concerned that the magazine’s report might be followed up by a national newspaper and have a negative impact upon the trial, Carman said.

“My father was told by Thorpe that senior Liberals knew of the serious nature of the allegations against Smith and that they dated back many years. I approached the police in December with information,” Carman said. A spokesman for Greater Manchester police confirmed that an officer has spoken to Carman.

Thorpe was cleared of plotting to murder Scott but failed to regain his political career.

Another source who also claimed to have spoken to George Carman during the trial said that the barrister was concerned about the possible impact of further revelations in the Thorpe trial.

“The reason that it was a genuine fear was because there were so many allegations against Smith involving boys that one assumed there was no smoke without fire,” the source said.

Smith was named by Danczuk in November on the floor of the House of Commons as a serial abuser of boys. Victims of Smith claim he abused many young boys in a hostel and a school in the late 1960s and continued to abuse others into the 1980s.

Police first investigated the claims in 1968, but the Crown Prosecution Service concluded there was no case to answer.

In November, the Crown Prosecution Service re-examined their files but this time said that, if the same evidence was unearthed today, they would have prosecuted Smith.

Alan Collins, a solicitor who represents 11 men who claim they were abused by Smith, urged the Lib Dems to come clean about what it knew about Smith’s abuse of young boys.

“The fact is a group of sexual abuse victims were cheated of justice and the smell of cover-up hangs in the air and needs one way or the other to be dispersed,” he said.

Thorpe, 83, who has Parkinson’s disease, has been given a list of detailed questions asking what he knew of allegations surrounding Smith, but has not responded.

Alistair Carmichael, the Liberal Democrat chief whip, conducted an internal inquiry into what MPs knew about Smith’s abuse of young boys in December, and concluded that there was no case to answer.

A spokesman for the Liberal Democrats said they would help police in any future inquiries into Smith: “We are a completely different party to the Liberals on 1979 – a different structure and different rules.”

Rajeev Syal
theguardian.com, Tuesday 26 February 2013 17.20 GMT

Find this story at 26 February 2013

© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Cyril Smith MP abused boys, Manchester police find (2012)

Police find ‘overwhelming evidence’ former Rochdale MP attacked vulnerable boys and CPS criticises 1970s decision not to prosecute

Police have acknowledged that the late MP Sir Cyril Smith repeatedly physically and sexually abused children at a Rochdale care home but escaped answering the allegations after prosecutors declined to put him on trial.

Smith, the Liberal and subsequently Liberal Democrat MP for the town, who died in 2010, was the subject of police investigations dating back to the 1960s.

In a statement, Greater Manchester Police said there was “overwhelming evidence” that he attacked boys, six at the Cambridge House children’s home in Rochdale, and two others.

Smith was secretary of the Rochdale Hostel for Boys Association, where he was accused of abusing vulnerable youngsters by spanking and touching them.

The announcement is the first official recognition that Smith went to his grave without answering for his alleged crimes.

In another statement, the Crown Prosecution Service said a decision not to prosecute made in 1970 by the then director of public prosecutions would not have been made today. The CPS said attitudes and the law had changed, but added that one factor that allowed Smith to escape trial was an assessment by the DPP in 1970 that “the characters of some of these young men would be likely to render their evidence suspect”.

The first investigation into Smith uncovered eight youths who alleged that Smith attacked them when they were teenagers, between 1961 and 1966. The descriptions of the attacks were similar and according to the CPS “were allegedly conducted on the pretexts of either a medical examination or punishment for misbehaviour”.

Greater Manchester police said: “The force is now publicly acknowledging that young boys were victims of physical and sexual abuse committed by Smith.”

The statements from police and the prosectors come ahead of new media revelations about Smith and the failure to prosecute him which were expected to surface on Wednesday.

Assistant Chief Constable Steve Heywood said: “If the same evidence was presented to the CPS today, there would have been a very realistic prospect that Smith would have been charged with a number of indecent assaults, and that the case would have been brought to trial.

“Clearly that is a bold statement to make but it is absolutely important for those victims who were abused by Smith that we publicly acknowledge the suffering they endured. Although Smith cannot be charged or convicted posthumously, from the overwhelming evidence we have it is right and proper that we should publicly recognise that young boys were sexually and physically abused.”

Police would pursue allegations that Smith was helped to commit his attack by other people who are still alive, but as yet such claims have not surfaced.

In 1998 and 1999, Greater Manchester Police passed two separate files to the CPS about Smith’s activities at Cambridge House, but on both occasions no further action was recommended.

Simon Danczuk, the Labour MP for Rochdale, who first raised allegations against Smith on the floor of the House of Commons, said the CPS had serious questions to answer over its failure to act in the past.

A Liberal Democrat spokesman said: “These allegations are abhorrent and should be taken very seriously.

“Clearly the party does not endorse any person proved to have been in incidents such as these. All allegations should have been investigated thoroughly with the authorities taking whatever action necessary.

“Any new allegations should be made to the police. The Liberal Democrats are not aware of any allegations being made to the party, and have never been involved in any investigations.

“The alleged incidents and the reported police investigations took place outside of the time Cyril Smith was a Liberal MP.”

Vikram Dodd and Rajeev Syal
The Guardian, Tuesday 27 November 2012 20.16 GMT

Find this story at 27 November 2012

© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

How MI5 and CIA Can Fight the Russian Threat

After years reorienting itself toward counter-terrorism operations and hiring speakers of Urdu and Pashto, MI5, Britain’s domestic security and counterespionage agency, is now looking for Russian-speaking intelligence analysts. Meanwhile, a contact of mine suggested that the Russia desks in several European intelligence agencies are hastily expanding, with agents and analysts being transferred in from other sections. Yesterday, they were reading reports on North African politics and scanning the Chinese press. Now they are poring over YouTube footage of Russian armor on exercises near the Ukrainian border.

All of a sudden, as talk of a new Cold War dominates opinion pages all over the world, Western intelligence and security agencies are rushing to regain capacities lost during the 1990s and 2000s. After all, those were the days of the “peace dividend.” During this period, Russia seemed at best a partner and at worst an irrelevance. But suddenly, the big, bad specter of al-Qaida and jihadi terrorism seemed the greater menace.

I remember talking to a veteran of the U.S. intelligence community, who had experienced two purges. First, as a Russia hand, she had seen her section decimated after the Soviet collapse. Having managed to reinvent herself as a specialist in dealing with transnational organized crime — especially the Russian mob — she then saw the best and brightest of her unit summarily transferred to counter-terrorism work after 9/11.

Now, the West is worried about the Russian threat again, and it is painfully aware of the deficiencies in its intelligence capacities in this region.

Paradoxically, Western security agencies themselves have been warning for years of an upsurge in the scale and aggressiveness of Russian espionage operations.

What’s more, there has been a steady stream of Russian espionage cases. Some were more Austin Powers than James Bond, such as the cell of Foreign Intelligence Service sleeper agents uncovered in the U.S. in 2010, best known for Anna Chapman. But others were very serious breaches of Western security. Jeffrey Delisle, a Canadian naval officer who offered his services to GRU, Russia’s military intelligence, had access to top-secret material from around the world. Herman Simm, a long-time Russian agent, was head of the Estonian Defense Ministry’s security department. And there are others in these categories.

Yet for all this, there seems to have been an unwillingness to take the security breaches seriously. The Chapman case — and how galling it must be for other, more professional members of the cell to have been relegated by posterity into mere extras in her story — was more the grounds for titillation and entertainment than serious consideration. Other incidents tended to be five-day wonders at the most in the media.

Sookut.com
This was not because Western security agencies were not expressing their concerns. Indeed, back in 2010, MI5 issued a statement, saying “the threat from Russian espionage continues to be significant and is similar to the Cold War.” Rather, it reflected their political masters’ determination to classify Russia as a second-rate, has-been state. The other factor was the Western security agencies’ narrow focus on terrorism, as if ragged gangs of religious fanatics dodging drones from cave to cave halfway across the globe represented an existential threat to the Western order.

It has taken the Ukrainian crisis to change attitudes. Last month, I attended the Lennart Meri Conference on Baltic security in Tallinn. There, the mood was tinged with more than a little of the “told you so,” especially among representatives from Central Europe. To them, the “western West” had for years been content to underestimate Russian intentions and capacities and to rely on bromides about “partnerships” and “restarts.” The West is only now realizing its mistake.

Of course, the West has always spied on Russia and tried to counter its intelligence operations. But there is no escaping the damage done by nearly 25 years of neglect. Rebuilding counterintelligence assets, let alone agent networks on the ground and the analytic capacity at home, cannot be done quickly.

Meanwhile, we must remember that democracies in particular have a tendency to lurch from one over-compensation to another. The West was too quick to write Russia off in the miserable 1990s. Will it now go to the other extreme and consider Russia as an existential enemy in the 2010s? If so, this would clearly exacerbate tensions with Moscow even further. It would also likely mean that the West’s spies once again become obsessed with Russian military capacities.

The threat to Europe, though, is not that Russia will send its tanks into the Baltics, Poland or Romania. Even in its current emaciated condition, NATO is capable of delivering a devastating response to any Russian aggression in Europe. Nor is the problem that Russia’s unidentified special forces — aka “little green men” — will suddenly crop up in Estonia’s Russian-speaking city of Narva or among the Russian tourists in Karlovy Vary.

Rather, the problem is that Russia could try to render the West impotent. First, it could divide Western leaders over the issue of how to best deal with the Russian threat. Germany is perhaps the best example of a country already divided over the “Russian problem.” Russia could also infiltrate Western financial institutions through cyberwarfare or dirty money. The question is whether Western security agencies, as they desperately scramble to respond to the new perceived challenge after running down their Cold War capabilities, will simply seek to recreate these again. That would be a mistake. What is needed is not a revival of the old, but the creation of new capabilities to respond to a new era of diffuse, complex asymmetric competition.

Mark Galeotti is professor of global affairs at New York University.

By Mark GaleottiMay. 06 2014 20:45 Last edited 20:46

Find this story at 6 May 2014

© Copyright 1992-2014. The Moscow Times

Thatcher received warning about CIA’s activities in UK, secret file reveals

Paddy Ashdown raised fears in 1984 about clandestine approaches made by US agents but allegations were dismissed

Margaret Thatcher told Paddy Ashdown there was no need for an inquiry and no evidence of improper activity. Photograph: Barbra Walton/Associated Press

Margaret Thatcher was warned that the CIA did not always give sufficient advance notice when it carried out operations in Britain, a secret file released on Friday shows.

Paddy Ashdown, a Liberal MP, complained to Thatcher about the US intelligence organisation’s activities in the UK in November 1984.

Ashdown was worried about clandestine approaches made by US agents to British computer firms in this country and abroad to prevent eastern bloc countries obtaining western computer secrets by stealth.

“My subsequent investigations have led me to conclude that the CIA got the information on the UK companies in the course of an operation which, it seems, is still continuing,” he told Thatcher.

The prime minister sent back a letter dismissing his allegations. “There is no evidence of improper activity by the CIA or that the law has been broken,” she wrote. “As you are aware, there is close co-operation between the British and American authorities on the enforcement of multilateraly agreed exports controls, which is in the national interest.” She said there was no need for an inquiry, but would expect police to investigate if there were any evidence of the law being broken.

The files now make clear that this was not the whole picture. The Foreign Office subsequently asked MI5 to investigate Ashdown’s complaints. Their report back to Downing Street said: “The security service are as confident as they can can be that the CIA are not involved in activities in the UK as alleged by Mr Ashdown.

“There is an agreement between the British and American agencies that neither will undertake clandestine activies in the country of the other without specific agreement.”

But, the FCO note, continued: “The security service have told us that there was a small number of isolated cases in 1983 when the CIA approached British individuals with a view to seeking information about cases in which hostile intelligence services were involved in attempts to acquire illegally western technology, without adequate consultation in advance with the British authorities.

“These cases were brought to the attention of the CIA (and FBI) and the security service are satisfied that such cases are not recurring. They emphasise, however, that such incidents are not relevant to the allegations being made by Mr Ashdown which relate to pressure being put on British companies to divulge information about their trading activies.”

MI5, the FCO added, “do not believe that the CIA are involved in clandestine activities in this field and have no cause for complaint”. But just to be sure, the last letter in the file notes, the CIA had given a specific assurance that they were not involved in in the UK as Ashdown had suggested.

The documents do not make clear what the difference was between the small number of isolated cases identified in 1983 and Ashdown’s concerns.

Owen Bowcott
theguardian.com, Friday 3 January 2014 00.01 GMT

Find this story at 3 January 2014

© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

British spies ‘knew of detainee abuse’

Aborted inquiry found that British spies knew detainees were abused, deprived of sleep and made to wear hoods.

The Obama Administration has repeatedly said it wishes to close the Guantanamo detention facility [AP]

British spies knew about detainee abuse but were told they did not have to intervene because they might damage relations with the US, a senior British judge has found.

The report, from Peter Gibson, comes from an inquiry intended to examine whether Britain was implicated in the mistreatment of detainees following the 9/11 attacks.

But it was scrapped earlier this year after Libya alleged that Britain was complicit in “rendition” – capturing people suspected of terrorism and transferring them to third countries without legal process.

Gibson found evidence that British spies had been aware of physical assault, sleep deprivation and the use of hoods.

“Officers were advised that, faced with apparent breaches of Geneva Convention standards, there was no obligation to
intervene,” he said in the report.

Britain had been reluctant to complain about the ill-treatment of detainees for fear of damaging relations with allies, including the US, the report said.

Allegations of torture

In some cases, British officials failed to raise objections about renditions when they should have, while ministers were unaware of the operations.
Britain’s MI6 linked to Libya torture scandal

After reviewing 20,000 documents, Gibson said he had found 27 issues that needed further investigation, including allegations of torture.

“Documents indicate that in some instances UK intelligence officers were aware of inappropriate interrogation techniques,” the report said.

“(The) government or its agencies may have become inappropriately involved in some cases of rendition.”

In response the British government said on Thursday that a parliamentary committee would take over from Gibson’s role and look at Gibson’s outstanding concerns.

Cabinet minister Ken Clarke said the inquiry’s findings showed Britain’s spy agencies had struggled to come to terms with the threat from armed groups after the 9/11 attacks.

Unprepared and inadequate

“It is now clear that our agencies and their staff were in some respects not prepared for the extreme demands suddenly
placed upon them,” Clarke told parliament.

“Guidance regulating how intelligence officers should act was inadequate, the practices of some of our international partners should have been understood much sooner. Oversight was not robust enough.”

The heads of MI5 and MI6, Britain’s domestic and overseas intelligence agencies, have repeatedly said they would never use, or encourage others to use, torture to gain information.

In November 2010, however, Britain agreed to make payments to 16 former Guantanamo Bay detainees in settlements over claims they were mistreated abroad with the knowledge and in some cases complicity of British spies.

Last updated: 19 Dec 2013 20:22
Source:
AP

Find this story at 19 December 2013

Copyright Aljazeera

True Spies

Finally, three documentaries on MI5 and Special Branch called ‘True Spies’ that were shown on BBC2 in 2002 are now available in their entirety on Youtube. Each of them is nearly one hour long. They are very interesting and in the first one the SDS is discussed and the theft of dead children’s identities is brought up, 10 years before the ‘revelations’ about it in the Guardian!

 

This three-part series was broadcast on BBC Two during October – November 2002.

 

True Spies #1 ‘Subversive My Arse!’ 27 October 2002 

True Spies #2 ‘Something Better Change’ 3 November 2002 

True Spies #3 ‘It Could Happen To You’ 10 November 2002 

There is also a page on the BBC website here:

Spy warned of Omagh bomb weeks before blast

A SECRET email reveals that intelligence chiefs were told that Omagh was a prime target for a terrorist attack – weeks before the Real IRA bomb that devastated the town.
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The communique from FBI spy David Rupert warned that dissident republicans were in the final stages of planning a major attack, and identified Omagh as a likely target.

The confidential memo now forms a key part of a report commissioned by victims’ families who are campaigning for a full public inquiry into the atrocity. Relatives claim the dossier proves that authorities failed to share vital intelligence, which they say could have prevented the bombing.

Although the report was presented to the British and Irish governments more than a year ago, the families have not been told if an inquiry will be held.

The victims’ relatives said they would go to court if their calls are rejected. It is understood that legal action could begin within weeks.

Michael Gallagher (pictured), who lost his son Aidan in the 1998 massacre, said the lack of answers from the governments was prolonging the families’ agony. The families were particularly critical of Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Justice Minister Alan Shatter.

INFORMANT

A spokeswoman for the Department of Justice in Dublin said Mr Shatter is still considering the report, presented to him by the group in July 2012.

The report draws on 4,000 emails from Mr Rupert, an American informant who infiltrated the Real IRA and Continuity IRA, and his MI5 handler. The huge tranche of emails are understood to provide detail on potential planning, locations and personnel for an attack in the weeks leading up to August 1998.

One of the emails identifies Omagh as being one of two likely targets. The note is marked secret and dated April 11, 1998 – four months before the bombing – and was sent by Mr Rupert to his handlers.

“Derry or Omagh would be 2 suspect viable targets,” it states.

Speaking in Omagh yesterday, Mr Gallagher said he was startled by the correspondence.

“We feel there was an enormous amount of intelligence available – that intelligence was not used properly. As a result of that we have had no convictions,” he said. He said that if a decision wasn’t made, or their calls were rejected, the families would launch legal action.

Adrian Rutherford – 09 August 2013

Find this story at 9 August 2013

© Independent.ie

Dark secrets Omagh bomb suspect Seamus McKenna took to the grave Lonely, chronic alcoholic who died penniless felt he was betrayed by Real IRA

In death, Seamus McKenna is an unlikely hero, a man who, according to the dissident Republican Network for Unity, had nobly spent his life “confronting partition and British rule in Ireland” and a man worthy of a paramilitary funeral this month.

In reality, his life was, by McKenna’s own admission, “a largely unhappy existence”. Not only was he very strongly suspected of driving the car bomb into Omagh that led to the deaths of 29 people and two unborn children in 1998, he was also a chronic alcoholic and a lonely, isolated man incapable of holding down work for more than a few weeks at a time.

I got to know him very well over the last two years. As an attorney in New York, I had discussed with some wealthy Irish-Americans the possibility of McKenna giving evidence against one of the accused in the Omagh case – the last-gasp attempt to finally win some convictions in the worst atrocity of the Troubles.

I first tracked him down to Simon Community-supported housing in Dundalk, where he had been living after splitting with his wife Catherine. I left a note under his door and he called me several hours later. In the window, I could see a pair of pants and a crinkled shirt drying in the living room and an empty can of beans and an unwashed plate on the table. Several of the men in nearby accommodation were long-term alcoholics who, like McKenna, would be homeless without subsidised housing.

I met him the next day, New Year’s Day 2011, at a Chinese restaurant in Dundalk.

He was wearing the khaki pants and chequered shirt that had been hanging in his living room and was wearing a smart pair of glasses. He looked nothing like his post-Omagh mugshot, when he was dragged into a police station still dressed in a building site woolly jumper and with unkempt, hopelessly outdated Seventies-style sideburns.

Over a meal, McKenna asked me why I had come all the way from America to see him. I said that I and many other people would be willing to help him out if he was willing to give evidence.

“About what?” “About events 13 years ago,” I said. “Events 13 years ago” needed no further explanation. “Ah … no, I don’t think I could do that,” he said, but added that he was willing to listen.

He was so nervous about any mention of the word “Omagh” that his hand would jitter and he would stumble to take a swig of his drink, so we used alternative phrases like “the thing that happened” or, as he preferred, “the civil action”. (He was the only one not found liable in a civil action taken by victims’ families against five of the bombers – the others included McKenna’s building company boss Colm Murphy and his workmate Seamus Daly.)

He told me that, as a result of the bombing, he had been barred, at least temporarily, from many of the pubs in Dundalk. “But not this one,” he said with pride, referring to the pub to which we had walked after our meal, as he ordered yet another pint of the Dutch lager he loved because, so he claimed, it gave a less severe hangover than Harp.

When he drank, he would open his mouth fully to meet the pint glass and take in a giant mouthful between his lips. If too much went in, he would blow some back into the glass before wiping his mouth and look at me through bleary, worn eyes.

He said that he could not give evidence on Omagh because it had taken him so long to rebuild a relationship with his family. I asked if his concern was security for his family or loss of esteem in their eyes.

“Loss of esteem,” he said bluntly. “I would give everything I have to bring my father back to life, I don’t want to lose my son.”

Although largely isolated, he found company in animals. His neighbour said McKenna left out bread for the wild birds in the winter and took great satisfaction in watching them eat it. “Sure who else would feed them?” McKenna said to me once.

Just when I was starting to enjoy his conversation, the depravity of Omagh would come back to mind. He had a habit of sitting sideways as he drank, and as he lifted his pint, it occurred to me that the hand in front of me is the one that allegedly changed the gears in a stolen Vauxhall that exploded in Omagh, killing the son of my friend Michael Gallagher, destroying three generations of the Grimes family, leaving Liz Gibson without a sister and permanently blinding Claire Gallagher, a talented young pianist.

“What do you think of the Omagh bombing?” I once asked in a pub in Dundalk in May 2011. “Do you think, like Padraig Pearse, that the blood of the people has to flow or do you think it was an atrocity?”

“I think it was a terrible thing,” he said. “But having said that, I would like to see British soldiers shot dead and I’d like to be the one pulling the trigger.”

“To what end?” I asked. “What better society can be created by killing more soldiers?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “but like I say, I’d like to be the one pulling the trigger.”

So much of his limited self-esteem was caught up in the republican cause that it was impossible for him to let go, and after a split in the Continuity IRA, he sided with the more militant Oglaigh na hEireann.

He wasn’t a boaster or a hard man like some IRA members, but he enjoyed a certain menace. “If you had approached me like this 10 years ago, you’d have been shot,” he told me over and over until I told him to shut up and deal with the present reality of his life.

When he was drinking, he made clumsy, pathetic moves on women. At closing time one night, the barmaid opened the door to let us out. “Ah, pet you’re great,” said McKenna, giving her a huge hug and refusing to let go, while pushing his body as close as possible to hers. She looked over her shoulder and grimaced at me. I told him we had to go. “Good girl,” said McKenna. “Good girl,” repeating it until I gripped his arm. “Jesus, great knockers,” he said to me as explanation for this excruciating scene.

The next morning, instead of joining my girlfriend and me at a local cafe for breakfast, he was already in the pub.

“Ye carry on, come over to the pub after,” he said. When we got there at 11am, he was already drunk, and leering all over my girlfriend, breaking off conversation with me to stare at her buttocks when she went up to the bar. He then asked her to come to his house to see “my wee dog. You’d like him. Come to my house any time,” he said, while wiping lager from his lips.

Despite the international outrage over Omagh, he soon got over his six-month-long self-pitying bender and was back building car bombs. In 2003, he was caught red-handed with some of the other suspects building a 1,000lb car bomb – twice the size of the Omagh bomb.

He found himself in Portlaoise jail with his old boss, Colm Murphy, who was in on unrelated charges and whom he found “quiet and very withdrawn, a bit odd really”.

Although he liked Murphy, he had nothing but disdain for Liam Campbell, the officer commanding of the Real IRA and the man who allegedly made the last of the vague warning calls on the day of the Omagh bombing. Campbell blamed McKenna for giving unclear details of the car’s locations to the rest of the bomb team. I asked McKenna directly why he didn’t like Campbell. “Why do you think?” he said bluntly.

Most upsetting for McKenna, and the other disaffected foot soldiers of the dissident terror groups, was the Criminal Assets Bureau investigation into Campbell, which revealed that he had more than €800,000 in the bank, a network of other payments to close associates, and at least five properties. (Not to mention 96 magnums of champagne found in his cow shed.)

“And we had nothing,” said McKenna. He said that he and now deceased Omagh suspect, Kevin ‘Kiddo’ Murray, and even Real IRA leader Michael McKevitt, realised too late that Campbell was using the Provisional IRA, and then the Real IRA, to disrupt security services along the border while he creamed off vast profits from smuggling. Their phoney war, which led to the deaths of so many innocent people, had been a giant scam.

McKenna admitted it one night, when he was preparing to walk to his sad little apartment. He could not afford a taxi and could only stagger home. “Campbell did us all in,” he said through sad eyes. “And we have nothing left. Nothing at all.”

By Sean O’Driscoll – 29 July 2013

Find this story at 29 July 2013

© www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk

Intelligence on Omagh bomb ‘withheld from police’

Security forces had two agents in the Real IRA but did not share that information with Northern Ireland officers, report claims

The Omagh Support and Self Help Group report focuses on the role of two state agents who infiltrated the Real IRA. Photograph: Mike Mahoney/Reuters

MI5, the FBI and Garda special branch “starved” police in Northern Ireland of vital intelligence that could have prevented the Real IRA bomb that killed 29 people at Omagh in 1998, a damning new report on the atrocity concludes.

The investigation, commissioned by families of the Omagh victims, will show evidence that they claim proves that information from two key informers inside the Real IRA – one in the United States, the other in the Irish Republic – was not passed on to the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

The Omagh bomb was the single biggest atrocity of the Northern Ireland Troubles. No one has been convicted in a criminal court in connection with the bombing in the County Tyrone market town.

Ahead of the publication of the report in Omagh, the father of Aidan Gallagher, a young man killed in the blast, said access to new intelligence files proved that the FBI, the security services and the Garda’s crime and security branch (the Republic of Ireland’s main anti-terrorist unit) all withheld vital information.

Michael Gallagher, who has campaigned since the atrocity for a cross-border public inquiry, said: “All good policing is based on intelligence, especially prior intelligence before any criminal act is committed. In the case of the events running up to the Omagh bomb, it is now clear that the police in the north were starved of information. The security forces in America, Britain and the Republic had two key agents inside the Real IRA but did not share the information they were providing to the police in Northern Ireland.”

The Omagh Support and Self Help Group also demanded an inquiry into the explosion.

“There has been no full investigation into the circumstances surrounding the Omagh bomb. The inquest did not inquire into the intelligence, the criminal prosecutions did not lead to any convictions, and the civil action did not deal with the issue of preventability. The police investigation has been heavily criticised and the report highlights such concerns that the states [UK and Ireland] must now establish a full cross-border public inquiry,” a spokesperson for the group said, adding that failure to do so would be a failure to comply with obligations under article 2(1) and article 3 of the European convention on human rights.

“This report is compiled from a significant amount of information some of a sensitive nature which has come into the possession of the families,” the spokesperson said.

The report, compiled by London law firm SBP, aided by several retired security experts, focuses on the role of two state agents who infiltrated the Real IRA. They were David Rupert, an American who was run by the FBI, and Paddy Dixon, a convicted criminal who procured cars in the Irish Republic for the Real IRA for transporting car bombs into Northern Ireland throughout 1998.

Rupert arrived in Ireland in the mid 1990s and offered his services first to the Continuity IRA and later the Real IRA. The 6ft 5in, 20-stone bankrupt businessman with links to Irish Americans had been targeted by the FBI as a potential agent.

By the summer of 1997, Rupert became involved with British intelligence. An FBI agent took him to a hotel in central London, where he was introduced to an MI5 officer who called himself Norman.

Norman advised Rupert not to pass all his information to the Gardai and provided him with a PO box address and a secret contact phone number.

MI5 urged him to offer intelligence to the Continuity IRA about British army and police bases in Northern Ireland. Posing as American tourists awe-struck by the security installations, Rupert and his wife would stop at border crossing points such as Aughnacloy and take pictures and videos of themselves. According to the Omagh Self Help and Support group new intelligence files indicate Rupert was also aiding the Real IRA, including sending bomb component parts from America. It was Rupert’s testimony that helped convict the Real IRA founder Mickey McKevitt of organising acts of terrorism in 2003.

Dixon provided intelligence to a Garda handler on the Real IRA throughout 1998. He had a long-standing connection with a republican in south Co Dublin known as the Long Fellow. His handler suggested – under orders from senior Garda command – that his old agent reactivate his relationship with the Long Fellow, who owned a breaker’s yard in south Dublin where Dixon’s stolen cars were replaced and huge explosive devices were secreted inside the vehicles.

Over the next seven months Dixon would give the Garda vital insight into the Real IRA terror machine. Between February and August 1998 Dixon gave the Irish police force inside information on at least nine separate Real IRA attacks culminating in the bomb at Omagh.

The Omagh families claim the “starving of intelligence” coming from Rupert and Dixon was designed to bolster the pair’s credibility in the Real IRA’s eyes. However, the Omagh campaigners claim the new report will show that this was a lethal error of judgment in relation to the terror group’s final and most catastrophic attack in 1998.

Henry McDonald, Ireland correspondent
The Guardian, Thursday 8 August 2013

Find this story at 8 August 2013

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Skandale, Organisation, Geschichte NSA, Mossad und die verräterische Nackttänzerin – so spionieren die Geheimdienste

Eine Chronik der Geheimdienstarbeit: Von Meisterspionin Mata Hari bis zur Cyber-Spionage der NSA
Geheimdienste wie NSA, Mossad oder BND scheinen tun zu können, was sie wollen: Überwachen, ausspionieren, töten – ihre Methoden sind dabei nicht immer legal. FOCUS Online zeigt die interessantesten Geheimdienste der Welt, ihre Organisation, ihre Geschichte, ihre Skandale.
Die Enthüllungen des ehemaligen Geheimdienstlers Edward Snowden zeigen, wie zügellos und weit verbreitet heute abgehört wird. Dabei richtet sich die Arbeit der Geheimdienste nicht nur gegen Offizielle und Politiker. Auch ganz normale Bürger werden überwacht. Die Öffentlichkeit ist besorgt, Fragen nach der Kontrolle der Behörden drängen sich auf, die Menschen fordern Konsequenzen.

Dabei galten Geheimdienste schon immer als mysteriös und spannend. Doch die Realität ihrer Arbeit hat oft wenig mit den Meisterspionen a la James Bond oder „Mission Impossible“-Held Ethan Hunt zu tun. Die Behörden sammeln Daten, werten sie aus, informieren, desinformieren, verhandeln und tauschen. Ihr Netz haben sie über die ganze Welt ausgeworfen. Das zeigen nicht erst die Enthüllungen von Prism und Edward Snowden.

Eines der ältesten Gewerbe der Welt
„Spionage ist eines der ältesten Gewerbe der Welt“, erklärt der Historiker und Geheimdienstexperte Siegfried Beer im Gespräch mit FOCUS Online. Beer leitet das österreichische Center für „Intelligence, Propaganda & Security Studies“, kurz ACIPSS, in Graz. Das Wissen um den Feind sei für jeden Staat von entscheidender Bedeutung. Schon Alexander der Große, der makedonische Heeresführer, dessen Reich ungeheure Ausmaße annahm, verließ sich auf Spionage.

Das wurde ihm beinahe zum Verhängnis, wie Wolfgang Krieger in seiner „Geschichte der Geheimdienste“ zeigt: 333 v. Christus, bei Issus „berühmter Keilerei“, wurde Alexander falsch informiert. Seine Agenten sagten ihm, der Perserkönig und sein Heer seien noch weit entfernt – Tatsache war, dass sie aneinander vorbeimarschiert waren. Und Alexander so in umgekehrter Schlachtformation kämpfen musste – doch er siegte.

Eine Folge der Industrialisierung
„Organisierte, moderne Spionage gibt es aber erst seit etwa 130 Jahren“, erklärt der Geheimdienst-Experte Beer vom ACIPSS. „Großbritannien nahm eine Vorreiterrolle ein.“ Die Briten begannen in den 1870er-Jahren mit dem Aufbau eines Nachrichtendienstes: aus Angst vor den unterdrückten und rebellischen Iren. Das brachte die anderen Länder unter Zugzwang: Alle europäischen Großmächte des 19. Jahrhunderts gründeten ihrerseits nach und nach Geheimdienste.

„Die moderne Spionage ist eine Folge der Industrialisierung“, sagt Beer. Wegen der verbesserten Kommunikation, den schnellen Transportwegen und der beginnenden Globalisierung mussten die Regierungen umdenken. In den Weltkriegen und dem Kalten Krieg entwickelten sie neue Methoden, um ihre Feinde besser zu überwachen und sich entscheidende Vorteile zu sichern. Heute hat jedes Land eigene Geheimdienste. Nicht nur zur Spionage und Gegenspionage, sondern auch zur Sicherung eigener Daten. Und, vor allem nach 9/11, zur Terrorismusbekämpfung.
Geschichten aus Hunderten Jahren Spionage
Doch die Prism-Enthüllung ist nur eine in einer langen Reihe vergleichbarer Skandale. Seien es Spione, die überliefen, die gefährlichen Methoden des Mossad oder die Meisterspione des KGB. Seitdem es organisierte Spionage gibt, werden die verborgenen Tätigkeiten in regelmäßigen Abständen enthüllt. Und immer bieten sie genug Stoff für spektakuläre Geschichten. FOCUS Online stellt eine Auswahl der aktivsten und gefährlichsten Geheimdienste der Welt und ihre Methoden vor – und zeigt ihre brisantesten Skandale und berühmtesten Spione.
Deutschland – BND, BfV, MAD
Montage/Panther
In Deutschland sammelt unter anderem der Bundesnachrichtendienst Informationen
Organisation der deutschen Nachrichtendienste

Drei Nachrichtendienste teilen sich in Deutschland den Schutz der Bürger: Das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) beobachtet das Inland, der Bundesnachrichtendienst das Ausland (BND), der militärische Abschirmdienst (MAD) kümmert sich um den Schutz der Armee. Die drei Behörden arbeiten großteils getrennt.

Geschichte des BND

Die Alliierten gaben 1949 die Struktur des Geheimdienstes in der Bundesrepublik vor. Dabei zogen sie vor allem die Lehren aus dem System des NS-Regiems: Die Geheime Staatspolizei, kurz Gestapo, hatte dort die Möglichkeit, eigenmächtig Verhaftungen durchzuführen. Das darf der Verfassungsschutz in Deutschland nicht. Die Nachrichtendienste haben generell keine polizeilichen Befugnisse.

Der BND ist als deutscher Auslandsgeheimdienst dem Kanzleramt unterstellt und wurde 1956 gegründet. Zu den Aufgabenbereichen gehört die Beobachtung mutmaßlicher Terroristen, der organisierten Kriminalität, illegaler Finanzströme, des Rauschgifthandels, der Weitergabe von ABC-Waffen und Rüstungsgütern sowie von Krisenregionen wie Afghanistan oder Pakistan. Dazu wertet der BND Informationen von menschlichen Quellen, elektronische Kommunikation sowie Satelliten- und Luftbilder aus. Er zählt etwa 6000 Mitarbeiter – vom Fahrer bis zum Nuklearphysiker. Wie viel Geld der BND für Spionage ausgeben darf, hält die Behörde streng geheim.

1950 wurde in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik wohl einer der bekanntesten Geheimdienste der Welt gegründet: Das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, kurz Stasi. Angegliedert an die Stasi war der Auslandsgeheimdienst Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung, die sich vor allem mit dem westlichen Bruder beschäftigte. Die Stasi mauserte sich zu einem entscheidenden Machtinstrument der sozialistischen Regierung. Sie unterdrückte Andersdenkende, warb sogenannte Spitzel an, inhaftierte Dissidenten – die Bevölkerung hatte Angst vor der Behörde. Das lag daran, dass die Behörde polizeiliche Befugnisse hatte. Bis heute läuft die Aufarbeitung über das Ausmaß der Stasi-Überwachung.

Spektakuläres über den BND

Deutsche Spione à la James Bond? Falsch. Beim BND sind Fremdsprachenexperten, Informatiker, Juristen, Biologen, Ingenieure und Islamwissenschaftler gefragt, keine Superagenten. Sie werden innerhalb von zwei bis drei Jahren zum Agenten ausgebildet – und dann als Tarifbeschäftigte, Soldaten und Beamten angestellt.

2006 erschütterte ein Bericht über die Arbeit des BND die Bundesrepublik: Im großen Stil hörte der Dienst Journalisten ab. Gerade in den Achtzigern war der Bedarf an Informationen besonders hoch, namhafte Autoren bei Zeitungen wie Stern, Spiegel oder FOCUS standen unter Beobachtung.
Welche Rolle spielte der BND im Irak-Krieg 2003? Hartnäckig halten sich Gerüchte, dass der Dienst einen Informanten hatte, der behauptete, dass der Irak Massenvernichtungswaffen und Biolabore besessen haben soll. Weiterhin haben Agenten des BND, so zeigt Alexandra Sgro in ihrem Buch „Geheimdienste der Welt“, angeblich strategische Informationen über irakische Verteidigungsstellungen und Truppenbewegungen an die USA weitergegeben. Die Bundesregierung hatte offiziell verlauten lassen, dass sich Deutschland aus dem Irak-Krieg heraushält – lässt sich dieser Status nach den Enthüllungen noch halten?
Türkei – MIT
Colourbox/Montage
Die Türkei hat nur einen Nachrichtendienst: den „Millî Istihbarat Teşkilâti“
Organisation türkischen Geheimdienstes

Der Millî Istihbarat Teşkilâti (MIT) ist der einzige Nachrichtendienst der Türkei. Er ist für innere Sicherheit und Spionageabwehr zuständig. Außerdem hat er die Pflicht, für den Schutz der Landesgrenzen zu sorgen. Der Geheimdienst untersteht direkt dem Premierminister und ist dafür verantwortlich, bedrohliche Gruppierungen im In- und Ausland zu beobachten. Dabei gibt es häufig gewaltsame Konflikte mit Anhängern der verbotenen Arbeiterpartei Kurdistans PKK. Denn diese kämpfen für die Autonomie der kurdischen Gebiete der Türkei.

Geschichte des MIT

Schon vor der Gründung der Türkei gab es Geheimdienste. 1913 wurde Teşkilât-I Mahsusa als erster zentralisierter und organisierter türkischer Nachrichtendienst gegründet. Er sollte die Aktivitäten von Separatisten eindämmen. Während des Ersten Weltkrieges erlebte die Behörde ihre Blütezeit und war militärisch und paramilitärisch aktiv. Das Ende des Krieges bedeutete auch das Ende des Geheimdienstes.

Sein Nachfolger war Karakol Cemiyeti, der Zivilpersonen und kleine Gruppierungen ab 1919 im türkischen Unabhängigkeitskrieg mit Waffen ausstattete. So gelang es, die Besatzungsmächte zu besiegen. Als die Briten im Jahr 1920 Istanbul besetzten, lösten sie auch den Nachrichtendienst auf. Danach gab es viele verschiedene Geheimdienste, die nie lange Bestand hatten. Bis 1965 der Millî Istihbarat Teşkilâti gegründet wurde.

Spektakuläres über den MIT

Wie Sgro in ihrem Buch „Geheimdienste der Welt“ schreibt, werden beim türkischen Geheimdienst nur schriftliche Bewerbungen angenommen, die per Post eingesendet werden – eine Vorbereitung auf die Spionagetätigkeit? Die frisch gebackenen Agenten bekommen ihren Arbeitsort dann per Losverfahren zugeteilt.

In den Neunzigern machten Berichte die Runde, der türkische Geheimdienst würde militante Separatisten bekämpfen. Allerdings nicht nur im eigenen Land, sondern auch in Deutschland. Dabei schüchterten die Agenten angeblich Oppositionelle ein, bedrohten Asylbewerber und kündigten Repressalien gegen die in der Türkei lebenden Verwandten an.
Ein anderes Ziel hatte laut Spekulationen sogenannter Experten der türkische Geheimdienst Mitte der 2000er-Jahre: Zu diesem Zeitpunkt war gerade die sogenannte Sauerland-Gruppe verhaftet worden. Sie plante offenbar einen Bombenanschlag in Deutschland, unterstützt von dem Türken Mevlüt K. – laut Medienberichten ein Informant des türkischen Geheimdienstes. Fakt ist: Er ist untergetaucht und wird per internationalem Haftbefehl gesucht.
Frankreich – DGSE
Motage/Panther
Frankreichs Geheimdienst DGSE
Organisation des französischen Geheimdienstes

Der französische Geheimdienst nennt sich „Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure“, kurz DGSE. Spezialoperationen des DGSE müssen von oberster Stelle genehmigt werden: Seit 2009 darf sie nur der französische Präsident bewilligen. Wer eingestellt wird, entscheidet das Verteidigungsministerium. Schwerpunkt des Geheimdienstes mit Sitz in Paris: Terrorismusbekämpfung. Außerdem haben die Geheimdienstler ein Auge auf Länder, in denen Massenvernichtungswaffen hergestellt und vertrieben werden.

Geschichte des DGSE

Die Geschichte des DGSE beginnt mit Charles de Gaulle. Der spätere Ministerpräsident Frankreichs ließ 1940 aus dem Exil einen Geheimdienst zusammenstellen. Er sollte für die Widerstandsbewegung „France Libre“ gegen das NS-Regime spionieren. Nach dem Krieg wurde ein neuer Geheimdienst gegründet, der Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE). Seine Aufgaben: ausländische Berichterstattung und Gegenspionage. 1982 löste ihn der DGSE ab.

Die Schwerpunkte des DGSE sind stark von Frankreichs Geschichte als Kolonialmacht geprägt. Denn zu seinen ehemaligen Kolonien pflegt Frankreich auch heute noch wirtschaftliche Beziehungen. Die Regierungen sollten also stabil bleiben. Wo Frankreich Fundamentalismus fürchtete, griff der Geheimdienst ein. So wie Ende der 1980er-Jahre in Algerien. Angeblich ermordete der DGSE 1992 den algerischen Präsidenten Muhammad Boudiaf. Und auch in Syrien könnte sich die Behörde 2012 eingemischt haben, Sgro. Agenten sollen dem syrischen General Manaf Tlass bei der Flucht geholfen haben. Der stand einst Machthaber Assad nahe.

Spektakuläres über den DGSE

Die wohl legendärste Doppelspionin überhaupt war für die Franzosen im Einsatz: Mata Hari. Die Nackttänzerin ließ sich zur Zeit des Ersten Weltkriegs von den Deutschen dafür bezahlen, französischen Militärs Geheimnisse zu entlocken. Gleichzeitig spionierte sie für die Franzosen in den von den Deutschen besetzten Gebieten. Die schöne Niederländerin wurde schließlich von den Franzosen zum Tode verurteilt, weil sie auch an Deutschland Geheimnisse verraten haben soll. Was genau sie wem erzählt hat, ist bis heute nicht bekannt. Erst 2017 wird der französische Staat die Akten freigegeben.

In den 1980er-Jahren kämpfte der französische Geheimdienst gegen Greenpeace. Die französische Regierung testete zu dieser Zeit im Mururoa-Atoll im Pazifik Atomwaffen. Greenpeace-Aktivisten wollten dagegen protestieren. Agenten des DGSE gelang es, auf dem Greenpeace-Schiff Sprengsätze anzubringen. Bei der Explosion starb ein Mensch. Bewilligt wurde die Aktion angeblich vom damaligen Präsidenten François Mitterand. Der Verteidigungsminister rechtfertigte das Vorgehen: Anders hätte man den Protest nicht verhindern können.
Großes Aufsehen erregte auch der Vorgänger des DGSE, der SDECE: 1965 verschwand Ben Barka, ein Marokkaner im französischen Exil – bis heute ist nicht geklärt, wer ihn entführt hat. Im Verdacht stehen französische Agenten. Sie hätten damit dem marokkanischen König geholfen und zugleich den Einfluss Frankreichs auf Marokko gesichtert. Bakra war in Marokko wegen Hochverrats verurteilt worden, weil er den König scharf kritisiert hatte. Er soll vom marokkanischen Innenminister getötet worden sein.
Brasilien – Abin
dpa/Montage
Brasiliens Nachrichtendienst heißt „Agência Brasiliera de Inteligência“
Organisation des brasilianischen Geheimdienstes

Der brasilianische Geheimdienst heißt Agência Brasileira de Inteligência (Abin) und ist dem Präsidenten unterstellt. Die Aufgaben umfassen Spionage- und Terror-Abwehr, Informationsbeschaffung und Schutz der Bürger.

Geschichte der Albin

Schon 1927 wurde die militärische Behörde Conselho de Defesa Nacional gegründet, die sich zunächst mit geheimdienstlichen Aufgaben beschäftigte. Nachdem die Folgeorganisation die Arbeit in den Wirren des Militärputsches von 1964 schon wieder einstellte und durch einen regimehörigen Dienst ersetzt wurde, bestand die Behörde bis 1990. Die Abin wurde 1999 gegründet und übernimmt seitdem die Aufgabe des In- und Auslands-Geheimdienstes – im Gegensatz zu seinem Vorgänger als zivile Behörde.

Spektakuläres über die Albin

Nachwuchsarbeit bei Zehn bis 15-Jährigen? Warum nicht, muss sich die Abin gedacht haben. 2005, so beschreibt es Sgro in ihrem Buch, habe eine Informationsveranstaltung stattgefunden, bei der Jugendlichen die Arbeit von Agenten nahegebracht wurde. Dieses Programm soll weitergeführt werden und sich in Zukunft verstärkt an Schüler und Studenten richten.

Es muss eine skurrile Situation gewesen sein: 1983 entdeckte ein Maler im Büro des damaligen Präsidenten eine Wanze mit aktivem Sender. Brasilianische Zeitungen machten schnell den Schuldigen aus: den Geheimdienst. Der habe sich derartige Abhör-Vergehen schon öfters zuschulden kommen lassen, so die Argumentation. Die wahren Hintergründe bleiben unbekannt.
Im Juli diesen Jahres kam im Zuge des weltweiten Abhörskandals heraus, dass auch Brasilien im Fadenkreuz der NSA stand: Millionen Emails und Telefonate seien abgehört worden. Nach Informationen der Zeitung „O Blobo“ ist Brasilien das am meiste ausgespähte Land Lateinamerikas.
Syrien – Abteilung für militärische Aufklärung
AFP
Syriens Geheimdienst ist in der Hand des Machthabers Baschar al-Assad
Organisation des syrischen Geheimdienstes

Etwas unübersichtlich stellt sich die Situation in Syrien dar: Fünf Behörden teilen die Geheimdienst-Aufgaben unter sich auf. Es gibt einen allgemeinen zivilen Nachrichtendienst, einen Nachrichtendienst der Luftwaffe, das Direktorat für Staatssicherheit sowie das Direktorat für politische Sicherheit im Innenministerium – in den Zeiten des Umbruchs ist aber vor allem eine Behörde wichtig: die Abteilung für Aufklärung. Sie unterstützt die militärischen Truppen und soll Dissidentengruppen zerschlagen – und soll dabei an illegalen Aktionen beteiligt gewesen sein.

Geschichte der Abteilung für Militärische Aufklärung

Die Gründung der Abteilung für Militärische Aufklärung datiert auf das Jahr 1969. In der westlichen Welt wurde der Geheimdienst allerdings erst in den 2000er-Jahren bekannt. Im Kampf gegen die Auswirkungen des arabischen Frühlings in Syrien koordinierte die Abteilung ab 2010 die Niederschlagung von Demonstrationen und die Diskreditierung der Rebellen.

Doch auch in westliche Staaten entsendete der Geheimdienst seine Agenten: So soll ein Deutsch-Libanese über mehrere Jahre hinweg Informationen über syrische Oppositionelle in der Bundesrepublik gesammelt und an den syrischen Geheimdienst weitergegeben haben. Und auch der BND hat offenbar gute Kontakte nach Syrien: Die Tagesschau berichtete im Mai, dass der BND-Präsident an einem Treffen mit syrischen Geheimdienstlern teilgenommen haben soll.

Spektakuläres über die Abteilung für Militärische Aufklärung

Wenig ist über die Arbeit des syrischen Geheimdienstes bekannt. Doch ein Name steht wohl in direktem Zusammenhang mit einer Aktion syrischer Agenten im Jahr 2011: Oberstleutnant Hussein Harmusch. Er rief in einem Internetvideo dazu auf, sich gegen die syrische Regierung zu stellen und setzte sich in die Türkei ab. Kurze Zeit später verschwand er spurlos. Was war passiert? Sgro schildert die Geschichte folgendermaßen: Am Tag seines Verschwindens traf sich Harmusch mit einem türkischen Agenten, der ihn mit dem Auto abholte, aber nach Eigenaussage wenige Minuten später wieder absetzte.

Mehr als zwei Wochen nach dieser Episode strahlte das syrische Staatsfernsehen ein Video aus, in dem Harmusch seinen Aufruf zum Widerstand widerrief. Experten erkennen einen tiefverängstigten Mann, sie gehen davon aus, dass er gezwungen wurde. Harmusch verschwindet daraufhin von der Bildfläche, bis heute weiß niemand, wo er ist. Nur die türkische Regierung äußerte sich noch einmal zu dem Fall: Sie ließ verlauten, dass der angebliche türkische Agent tatsächlich aus Syrien stammte.

Mit welcher Grausamkeit der syrische Geheimdienst beispielsweise gegen Dissidenten vorgeht, zeigen Berichte aus dem Jahr 2012: Menschenrechtsorganisationen sprechen bei den Geheimdienstzentren in Damaskus von der „Hölle auf Erden“. „Human Rights Watch“ erfasste zahlreiche Fälle, in denen Familien ihre vermissten Angehörigen nur noch tot finden konnten: Mit Brandflecken und Blutergüssen übersät. Überlebende berichten von Methoden, die man aus dem europäischen Mittelalter kennt: Sie wurden an den Händen aufgehangen, dann wurden sie geschlagen und geschnitten. Oder sie wurden auf Kreuz-ähnliche Holzbretter geschnallt und von Häschern auf die Fußsohlen geschlagen. Andere berichten von Stromschocks im Genitalbereich und weiteren Foltermethoden.
Die Beobachtergruppe „Violations Documentation Center“ spricht von über 25 000 Syrern, die seit 2011 verhaftet worden sind. Weniger als ein Fünftel sei bislang freigelassen worden. Experten gehen allerdings von weiter höheren Zahlen aus: Sie sprechen von Hunderttausenden Inhaftierten.
Russland – KGB, FSB, SWR, GRU
Colourbox/Montage
Der FSB ist nur einer von Russlands Geheimdiensten
Organisation des russischen Geheimdienstes

Russland verlässt sich seit dem Zerfall der Sowjetunion auf diese Geheimdienst-Behörden: Den Inlandsgeheimdienst FSB, den Auslandsnachrichtendienst SWR, den Schutzdienst FSO und den Militärnachrichtendienst GRU. Die Aufgaben des SWR umfassen dabei Gegenspionage und Fernaufklärung, der Dienst umfasst rund 13 000 Mitarbeiter. Spannend ist aber vor allem der Inlandsgeheimdienst FSB, da er als Nachfolger des berüchtigten KGB gilt.

Geschichte des russischen Geheimdienstes

Die Wirren um die Abdankung des Zaren Nikolaus II. in der Februarrevolution 1917 forderten ein ganzes Land heraus: Eine provisorische Regierung wurde gebildet, die Oktoberrevolution brach aus, schon bald übernahmen kommunistische Bolschewiken die Macht. Der starke Mann Lenin regte die Gründung eines neuen Geheimdienstes an, um die Konterrevolution und Klassenfeinde zu bekämpfen.

Nach einigen Umstrukturierungen und dem Zweiten Weltkrieg entstand 1954 der KGB als eigenständiges Ministerium. Erst 1991, mit dem Ende der Sowjetunion, hörte er auf zu existieren – wobei der Geheimdienst in Weißrussland noch immer KGB heißt. Der sowjetische KGB arbeitete dabei sowohl nach innen als auch nach außen, dazu gehörten Gegenspionage, Auslandsspionage, Bekämpfung von Regimegegnern, Sicherung der Parteimitglieder. SWR und FSB wurden in den 1990-Jahren gegründet und teilen sich wiederum in eigene Büros und Organe auf.

Spektakuläres über den russischen Geheimdienst

Normalerweise sind es Geschichtsbegeisterte, die Geheimdiensten Verschwörungstheorien andichten. In den 80er-Jahren, so schreibt Sgro in ihrem Buch, war es allerdings der KGB selbst, der für Furore sorgte: Tüchtige Sowjet-Agenten setzten das Gerücht in Umlauf, dass die US-Amerikaner den HI-Virus hergestellt und aus Versehen freigesetzt hätten. Der Plan: die USA damit zu diskreditieren. Selbst die deutsche Zeitung „taz“ griff die These auf. 1987 entschuldigte sich der Staatschef Gorbatschow bei US-Diplomaten, die Zeitung brauchte 20 Jahre länger und entschuldigte sich 2010.

Unabhängig davon unterstanden dem KGB einige der berühmtesten Spione des 20. Jahrhunderts: Beispielsweise sorgte der Journalist Richard Sorge dafür, dass sich die Sowjets auf die deutschen und japanischen Angriffspläne einstellen konnten – weil der überzeugte Kommunist Dokumente weitergab. Aldrich Ames dagegen arbeitete eigentlich beim CIA, dort leitete der die Abteilung „Gegenspionage UDSSR“. Was niemand wusste: Ames spionierte für Russland. Er bekam Geld, die Sowjets die Namen von US-Spitzeln. Und dann wären da noch das Spionage-Ehepaar Rosenberg, der Doppel-Agent Heinz Felfe, der Atomwaffen-Physiker Klaus Fuchs und und und.

Wie im Kalten Krieg: Erst im Juli stand ein russisches Agenten-Ehepaar vor dem Gericht in Stuttgart. Das Ehepaar firmierte unter den Decknamen Andreas und Heidrun Anschlag. Auch wenn die beiden nicht als klassische Spione gearbeitet haben sollen, hatten sie wohl als eine Art Briefkasten gedient. Das Paar wurde 2011 von Beamten des BKA und der GSG9 aufgespürt und festgenommen, nachdem sie 20 Jahre lang unentdeckt geblieben waren. Derzeit verhandeln russische und deutsche Behörden über einen Austausch der beiden Russen gegen einen deutschen Agenten.
Dass auch der moderne russische Geheimdienst an traditionellen Methoden festhält, zeigt eine Meldung der russischen Zeitung „Iswestija“. Zum Schutz streng geheimer Informationen schreiben russische Geheimdienste auf Schreibmaschinen, nicht digital, auch handschriftliche Aufzeichnungen seien üblich. Besonders beliebt: das deutsche Modell Triumph-Adler Twen 180. Dabei hat jede Schreibmaschine eine eigene Signatur, so dass jedes Dokument der Maschine zugeordnet werden kann, auf der es geschrieben wurde.
Neuseeland – GCSB
Colourbox/Montage
„Government Communications Security Bureau“ heißt der Geheimdienst Neuseelands
Organisation des neuseeländischen Geheimdienstes

Neuseeland hat zwei Geheimdienstbehörden: Den Security Intelligence Service und das nachgeordnete Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB). Das GCSB kümmert sich um die nationale Sicherheit, überwacht ausländische Datenströme, stellt Sicherheitssysteme für die Regierung zusammen – Einheimische und Zugezogene mit ständigem Wohnsitz dürfen dabei nicht überwacht werden. Die Behörde ist dem Premierminister unterstellt.

Geschichte des GCSB

Im Jahr 1977 wünschte sich der neuseeländische Premierminister einen Geheimdienst – vergleichsweise spät im Vergleich zu anderen Staaten. Schnell wurden Anlagen für die Überwachung in Waihopai und in Tangimoana gebaut. Bis dahin arbeiteten Angestellte des Auslands- und Verteidigungsministeriums an der Nachrichtenbeschaffung. Um besser reagieren zu können, baute die Regierung das GCSB auf.

Vor den Augen der Öffentlichkeit im Verteidigungsministerium versteckt, wurde die Behörde in den Anfang der 80er-Jahren zunächst nur der Politik vorgestellt. 1984 erfuhr die neuseeländische Öffentlichkeit von der Existenz des Geheimdienstes.Bis das GCSB aber eine eigene Behörde wurde, sollten noch mehrere Jahrzehnte vergehen: 2003, durch einen Erlass, wurde das GCSB als öffentliche Dienstleistungsabteilung eingerichtet.

Spektakuläres über das GCSB

Ausgerechnet ein Deutscher mit doppelter Staatsbürgerschaft – er hat auch einen finnischen Pass – wurde zum Politikum in Neuseeland: Kim Schmitz, auch bekannt als Kim Dotcom, geriet aufgrund zwielichtiger Online-Geschäfte in das Fadenkreuz des GCSB. Schmitz wurde im Januar 2012 aufgrund des Verdachts auf Urheberrechtsverletzungen sowie Geldwäsche verhaftet, doch bereits zuvor hörten neuseeländische Agenten Mr Dotcom ab – ohne Einverständnis der Regierung, allerdings im Auftrag der Polizei.
Die Auswertung von Emails und Telefonaten, so zeichnet Sgro in ihrem Buch „Geheimdienste der Welt“ nach, brachte die Behörde auf die Spur der meisten Mitangeklagten. Das Problem: langjährige Bewohner Neuseelands dürfen nicht bespitzelt werden. Das Ergebnis: Die gesammelten Daten waren illegal erworben, der Premierminister entschuldigte sich bei Schmitz und dem neuseeländischen Volk.
Österreich – HNA, HAA, BVT
Motage/Panther
Einer der österreichischen Geheimdienste, das Abwehramt
Organisation des österreichischen Geheimdienstes

In Österreich gibt es drei Geheimdienste: Der Auslandsnachrichtendienst ist das Heeresnachrichtenamt (HNaA oder HNA). Sein Gegenstück ist das Heeres-Abwehramt (HAA oder HabwA) als militärischer Inlandsnachrichtendienst. Beide unterstehen dem Bundesministerium für Landesverteidigung und Sport. Das Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz und Terrorismusbekämpfung (BVT) ist die dritte Behörde.

Geschichte der österreichischen Geheimdienste

Militärische Nachrichtendienste gibt es in Österreich seit den Napoleonischen Kriegen. Napoleon veränderte damals mit seiner „Grande Armée“ die Kriegsführung, die Truppen waren beweglicher und agierten schneller. Die österreichische Monarchie musste darauf reagieren und begann, ein strukturiertes „militärisches Nachrichtenwesen“ aufzubauen. 1850 wurde der erste offizielle Nachrichtendienst in der österreichischen Monarchie eingerichtet: das Evidenzbüro. Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts überwachten dann die ersten „Geheimen Polizeiagenten“ hauptsächlich die öffentliche Sittlichkeit.

Diese Struktur änderte sich bis zum Anschluss Österreichs an das Deutsche Reich im Jahr 1938 kaum. Danach spionierte die Gestapo im Inland, der Sicherheitsdienst war für das Ausland zuständig und die Abwehr für militärische Spionage. Sie galten auch in Österreich als mächtiges Instrument der Nationalsozialisten. Eine der ersten Amtshandlungen nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg war die Gründung einer österreichischen Staatspolizei. Erst 1955 gründete das Bundesheer einen militärischen Geheimdienst.

1972 wurde dieser in das heutige Heeres-Nachrichtenamt (HNaA) umgebaut. Zunächst beschäftigte sich dieses sowohl mit Auslandsaufklärung als auch mit Abwehr. 1985 wurde vom HNaA das Abwehramt abgespalten, weil das Heeresnachrichtenamt zu mächtig geworden war. Heute ist das Heeresnachrichtenamt vor allem im Einsatz gegen Terrorismus, Organisierte Kriminalität und irreguläre Migration.

Spektakuläres über die österreichischen Geheimdienste

Im Parlament ist ein ständiger Unterausschuss des Landesverteidigungsausschuss für die Kontrolle des Heeresnachrichtenamtes zuständig, die Parlamentarier sind aber auf strenge Verschwiegenheit vereidigt. Das HNaA soll eng mit US-amerikanischen Geheimdiensten zusammenarbeiten und vor allem in der Zeit des Kalten Krieges wichtige Informationen über Vorgänge in den Balkanstaaten an die USA weitergegeben haben. 1968 waren es österreichische Agenten des Heeresnachrichtenamtes, die als erste über den Einmarsch der Truppen des Warschauer Pakts in die Tschechoslowakei Bescheid wussten.
Das Stillschweigen rund um die Arbeit des Heeresnachrichtenamtes verlieh dem Nachrichtendienst zwischenzeitlich große Macht. Das ging so weit, dass sogar Verteidigungsminister ausspioniert worden sein sollen. Als Verteidigungsminister Friedhelm Frischenschlager das zufällig erfuhr, soll er so erbost gewesen sein, dass er im Jahr 1985 das Heeresnachrichtenamt reformieren und das Heeres-Abwehramt davon abspalten ließ. Die beiden Nachrichtendienste sind bis heute politisch verfeindet: Das HNaA wird der Österreichischen Volkspartei zugeordnet, das HAA den österreichischen Sozialdemokraten. Diese sollen sich seit ihrem Bestehen immer wieder gegenseitig ausspionieren.
USA – CIA, FBI, NSA, DEA
Montage/Colourbox
Zwei der US-Geheimdienste: FBI und CIA
Organisation des US-amerikanischen Geheimdienstes

Über keinen Geheimdienst gibt es derart viele Informationen wie über den US-amerikanischen. Der Auslandsgeheimdienst CIA, die inländische Spionageabwehr FBI, die weltweit operierende NSA, die amerikanische Bundespolizei, die Drogenbehörde DEA und elf weitere Dienste bilden die sogenannte United States Intelligence Community (IC). Insgesamt sollen dort etwa 200 000 Menschen arbeiten mit einem Gesamtbudget von 30 Milliarden Euro.

Geschichte des CIA und der NSA

Mit Gründung des Amts der Marineaufklärung begann 1882 die offizielle geheimdienstliche Aufklärung der USA. Doch schon unter George Washington hatten Agenten in geheimen Operationen, Aufklärung und Spionage gearbeitet. Die bekannteste Einrichtung, die Central Intelligence Agency, wurde 1947 ins Leben gerufen. Sie ist die Folgeorganisation des Office of Strategic Services, das im Laufe des Zweiten Weltkriegs aufgebaut wurde. Das Ziel: Die Sammlung strategisch wertvoller Informationen, aber auch Sabotage und Spionageabwehr. Mit dem National Security Act übernahm die Behörde Aufgaben, die FBI-Chef J. Edgar Hoover zunächst für seine Agenten vorgesehen hatte. ACIPSS-Experte Siegfried Beer erklärt, dass die USA zwar sehr spät mit der Errichtung eines Auslandsgeheimdienstes begonnen haben, dieser heute aber zu den effizientesten weltweit gehört.

Doch eine andere Behörde macht derzeit Schlagzeilen: Die National Security Agency (NSA). Ihr Aufgabengebiet ist die weltweite, nachrichtliche Aufklärung. Die Wurzeln der Behörde reichen bis in die 40er-Jahre zurück, die offizielle Gründung datiert auf das Jahr 1952. Seitdem hält die NSA mit den technologischen Entwicklungen von Satellit bis Internet Schritt. In den Mittelpunkt einer weltweiten Diskussion über Datenschutz rückte die NSA, weil der Geheimdienstler Edward Snowden brisante Informationen über die weltweite Überwachung und die Kenntnisnahme europäischer Politiker von den Abhör-Programmen der Behörde veröffentlichte.

Spektakuläres über die CIA

„Bis in die frühen Siebziger hinein hatte die CIA weitgehend freie Hand“, sagt Beer. Und das nutzte die Agency voll aus: Waren CIA-Agenten am Attentat an John F. Kennedy beteiligt? Welche Rolle spielte die CIA bei den Anschlägen von 2001? Verdient die Behörde an weltweiten Drogen- und Geldwäschegeschäften? Für Verschwörungstheoretiker ist der US-Geheimdienst eine wahre Pandora-Kiste hanebüchener Geschichten. Dabei gibt es zahlreiche verbriefte Operationen: 1961 war die CIA beispielsweise an der Invasion in der Schweinebucht beteiligt, bei der Exilkubaner auf Kuba landen und die Regierung Castros stürzen wollten – und scheiterte spektakulär.
Viele weitere Operationen mit dem Ziel, Machthaber zu stürzen, wurden von der CIA angeleiert. In Afghanistan warben CIA-Agenten ab 1979 bis zu 100 000 Einheimische an, trainierten sie, unterstützten sie mit Waffen und Geld und schickten sie in den Kampf gegen sowjetische Truppen. Wohl einer der Hauptgründe für die gegenwärtige Stärke der Taliban in dem befreiten Land. Nicht immer nutzt die Agency bei ihren Operationen legale Mittel, Menschenrechtsorganisationen werfen der Behörde Verletzung internationalen Rechts und Folter vor.
Großbritannien – MI5, MI6
Motage/Panther
Großbritanniens MI5 und MI6
Organisation des englischen Geheimdienstes

Neun Behörden kümmern sich in Großbritannien um die Geheimdienstarbeit, organisiert im Secret Service Bureau. Am bekanntesten sind sicherlich der Security Service und der Secret Intelligence Service, kurz: MI5 und SIS oder MI6. Während sich der Blick des MI5 in das eigene Land richtet, kümmert sich der MI6 um das Ausland. Hinlänglich bekannt wurde der MI6 durch die Arbeit des wohl berühmtesten Spions James Bond, auch wenn dieser natürlich nur ein Roman- und Filmheld und kein echter Agent ist.

Geschichte des MI6

Ursprünglich war der MI6 für die Marine zuständig, als er 1909 gegründet wurde. Zunehmend spezialisierte sich der Dienst aber auf das Ausland, im Ersten Weltkrieg sammelten Agenten Informationen über das Deutsche Reich und kämpften gegen den Kommunismus in Russland. Nach der Machtübernahme durch die Nationalsozialisten arbeitete der SIS unter anderem an der Entschlüsselung der Geheim-Codes der Nazis.

Im Kalten Krieg versuchte sich die Behörde in der Anwerbung sowjetischer Offizieller oder an Staatsstreichen, über die Erfolgsrate schweigt sie sich bis heute aus. Seit 1994 sind die Zuständigkeiten im Intelligence Services Act geregelt. Auch die Überwachung von Telefonaten und Internetaktivitäten Verdächtiger gehört zur Aufgabe der Behörde. Könnten Sie ein MI6-Agent sein?

Spektakuläres über den MI6

Eine der bekanntesten und schillerndsten Personen in der Geschichte der Geheimdienste ist Thomas Edward Lawrence, auch bekannt als Lawrence von Arabien. Der studierte Archäologe begab sich 1914 offiziell zur Kartographierung in den Nahen Osten, unter der Hand ging es um militärisches Auskundschaften. Aufgrund seiner Erfolge und Fähigkeiten wurde er schnell vom britischen Geheimdienst angeworben – und integrierte sich derart gut in die einheimischen Beduinenvölker, dass er sie zum Aufstand gegen die Fremdherrschaft durch die Türken führte. Ganz im Sinne seines Heimatlandes. Noch zu Lebzeiten wurde Lawrence zum Mythos – und zu einem beliebten Gesprächsgegenstand der englischen Aristokratie.
Eine spektakuläre Mordtheorie geistert seit dem 3. August 1997 durch Großbritannien: Wurde Prinzessin Diana, die Ex-Frau des britischen Thronfolgers Prinz Charles, vom MI6 beseitigt? Sgro schreibt dazu, dass das britische Königshaus Angst vor einem muslimischen Schwiegervater des zukünftigen Königs gehabt hatte und Lady Di zu allem Überfluss auch noch schwanger gewesen sein soll. Diana war seit kurzem mit Dodi Al-Fayed zusammen, dem Sohn des Harrod-Geschäftsführers Mohamed Al-Fayed. Bis heute ist der Fall nicht aufgeklärt, Gerüchte über vertauschte Blutproben, eine überschnelle Einbalsamierung zur Vertuschung der Schwangerschaft und den Einsatz einer Stroboskop-Lichtkanone zur Blendung des Limousinen-Fahrers machen noch immer die Runde.
Spanien – CNI
panther/Montage
CNI, das Kürzel des spanischen Geheimdienstes, steht für „Centro Nacional de Inteligencia“
Organisation des spanischen Geheimdienstes

In Spanien kümmert sich der Centro Nacional de Inteligencia (CNI) um Spionage-Dinge. Der Geheimdienst ist Teil des spanischen Verteidigungsministeriums. Seine Aufgaben umfassen die Informationsbeschaffung und Abwehr, aber auch wirtschaftliche Analysen und politische Risikobewertungen. Der spanische Ministerrat fungiert einerseits als Kontrollorgan, andererseits bestimmt er jährlich die Ziele der Behörde neu. Der CNI umfasst etwa 600 Mitarbeiter.

Geschichte des CNI

Die Wurzeln der Behörde liegen in der Zeit des spanischen Bürgerkriegs: 1935 gründete die Zweite Republik einen Geheimdienst, der – überrascht vom Beginn des Krieges – allerdings nie seine Arbeit aufnahm. Bis zu acht verschiedene Dienste arbeiteten bis in die 70er-Jahre gleichzeitig, zum Teil beschafften sie sogar dieselben Informationen.

Erst 1972 gründete sich der erste offizielle Geheimdienst in Spanien, der sogenannte Zentrale Dokumentationsdienst – noch unter der Diktatur des Generals Francisco Franco. Hauptzweck war der Schutz der Diktatur und die Aufdeckung von Umsturzplänen. 1977, zwei Jahre nach dem Tod des Diktators, wurde der Geheimdienst reformiert und dem Verteidigungsministerium angegliedert.

Spektakuläres über das CNI

„Sieben spanische Agenten im Irak getötet“ – diese Nachricht ging 2003 um die Welt. Mit einem Schlag verlor der spanische Geheimdienst praktisch alle Experten in dem Land. Und alles nur, weil die Agenten offenbar einem irakischen Doppelagenten zum Opfer fielen. An einem Samstag im November trafen sich vier dort stationierte CNI-Agenten mit ihren Kollegen, die sie ablösen sollten. Mit dabei: ihre Kontaktperson und Informanten – und ein Maulwurf, der die Spanier an Saddams Truppen verriet. Ein tödlich verwundeter Agent rief offenbar noch während des Hinterhalts bei der CNI-Zentrale an und flehte mit letzter Kraft: „Sie bringen uns um. Schickt Hubschrauber herbei!“.
Ein schwieriges Verhältnis hat der CNI zum spanischen Königshaus: Als sich König Juan Carlos in den 2000ern eine Geliebte leistete, musste Spaniens Geheimdienstchef vor dem Parlament antanzen und Auskunft geben – offiziell zum Schutz der Monarchie und des Wohl des Königs. Doch eigentlich ging es um die Frage, ob die „enge Freundin“ des Königs auf Staatskosten ausgehalten wurde. Die Befragung verlief allerdings hinter verschlossenen Türen und ergab nichts Erhellendes. Erst ein Mitarbeiter der Polizeigewerkschaft erhärtete die Gerüchte und so wurde das Verhältnis zum Politikum – ohne Beteiligung des CNI.
Israel – Mossad
AFP/Montage
Israels berüchtigter Geheimdienst Mossad
Organisation des israelischen Geheimdienstes

In Israel gibt es vier Behörden, die sich um nachrichtendienstliche Belange kümmern: Den militärischen Geheimdienst Aman, den wissenschaftlichen Nachrichtendienst Lakam, den Inlandsgeheimdienst Schin Bet und den – sicherlich am bekanntesten – Auslandsgeheimdienst Mossad. Das Hauptquartier des Mossad befindet sich in Tel Aviv, laut Schätzungen arbeiten in der Behörde etwa 1200 Geheimdienstler. Darunter aktive Agenten, die sogenannten Katsas, und freiwillige Helfer, die sogenannten Sjanim – organisiert in einem weltweiten Netz israelischer Spione. Der Mossad kümmert sich um die Sicherheit des Landes und des Militärs, gilt aber auch als operativer Arm der Regierung – Geschichten über Liquidierungen und Entführungen durch Mossad-Agenten gibt es seit jeher.

Geschichte des Mossad

Israel ist ein vergleichsweise junger Staat: 1947 teilte die UN Palästina in einen jüdischen und einen arabischen Staat – um einen Lebensraum für die Überlebenden des Holocausts zu schaffen. Für die arabische Bevölkerung stellten die Pläne jedoch eine Provokation dar: Einer der zentralen Konflikte des 20. Jahrhunderts war geschaffen. Kriegerische Auseinandersetzungen folgten, gleichzeitig arbeiteten inoffizielle Organisationen daran, arabische Aufstände zu vermeiden. 1949 gründete der damalige Premierminister David Ben-Gurion dann den ersten offiziellen Geheimdienst, zunächst dem Außenministerium zugeordnet, später Teil des Büros des Premierministers.

Spektakuläres über den Mossad

Wie Alexandra Sgro in ihrem Buch „Geheimdienste der Welt“ beschreibt, wählte der Mossad seine Bewerber besonders streng aus: Angehende Agenten mussten ihre Geschicklichkeit unter Beweis stellen, indem sie an gut einsehbaren Stellen Bomben platzieren sollten – ohne, dass sie dabei gesehen werden. Wer geschickt genug war, wurde Agent. Heute steht am Beginn lediglich ein medizinischer und psychologischer Check, die Ausbildung dauert drei Jahre – mit einem Stundenplan aus Ausfragen, Leeren toter Briefkästen, Durchführung von Anschlägen und die spezielle israelische Kampfkunst Krav Maga.

Doch das sollte nicht darüber hinwegtäuschen, dass der Mossad einer der effizientesten Geheimdienste weltweit ist, erklärt der Experte Beer. Eine der spektakulärsten – und ersten großen – Operationen des Mossads war die Gefangennahme des nach Argentinien geflohenen Nazis Adolf Eichmann. Er war als Mitglied des Reichsicherheitshauptamtes maßgeblich an der Deportation und Ermordung der Juden im „Dritten Reich“ beteiligt. Er tauchte in Südamerika unter, wurde allerdings vom Mossad aufgespürt und 1960 verhaftet. Nach einem neunmonatigen Prozess wurde er zum Tode verurteilt und 1962 hingerichtet.

Zehn Jahre später kam es bei den Olympischen Spiele in München zur Katastrophe: Eine palästinensische Terror-Gruppe ermordete elf israelische Sportler – die israelische Führung schwor Rache. Die Sonderheinheit „Caesarea“ jagte die acht Mörder über den gesamten Globus und vollendete die Hatz mit dem Mord an dem letzten Attentäter im Jahr 1979. Die Operation „Zorn Gottes“ ging in die Geschichte ein – wohl auch deshalb, weil ein Unschuldiger sterben musste. Mossad-Agenten töteten den Marokkaner Ahmed Bouchiki. Sie verwechselten ihn mit einem der palästinensischen Attentäter.
Und auch heute noch scheint der Mossad sehr aktiv zu sein. 2012 machte ein Medienbericht die Runde, wonach sich israelische Agenten Mitte der 2000er als CIA-Spione ausgegeben haben sollen, um eine Rebellen-Organisation zu Anschlägen im Iran anzustiften. Es war eine der „besonderen“ Methoden im geheimen Atomkrieg. Von 2010 bis 2012 wurden vier iranische Atom-Wissenschaftler ermordet – von Israel, so Beobachter.
China – Ministerium für Staatssicherheit
Colourbox
In China ist das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit als Geheimpolizei tätig
Organisation des chinesischen Geheimdienstes

Der Geheimdienst in der Volksrepublik China teilt sich in das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit und den Militärnachrichtendienst auf. Das Ministerium kümmert sich dabei um in- wie ausländische Belange und gilt als einer der größten Geheimdienste weltweit. Die Methoden wie Netzzensur, Verletzung von Menschenrechten und zum Teil gewalttätige Überwachung von Dissidenten zeigt, dass das Ministerium ein Dienst mit polizeilichen Befugnissen zu sein scheint.

Geschichte des Ministeriums für Staatssicherheit

Dass Geheimdienste nicht erst ein Phänomen der Moderne sind, zeigt das riesige Netzwerk von Geheimdiensten in der Ming-Dynastie. Die Agenten wurden von Eunuchen angeführt, zumeist einfache Männer aus dem Volk. Die Ming-Herrscher sahen sich im 16. Jahrhundert zunehmend bedroht durch die Macht der Geheimtruppen und ihren Führern. Alle Maßnahmen kamen schließlich zu spät, die große Ming-Dynastie zerbrach. Unter anderem wegen des Konflikts zwischen hohen Beamten und den aus niedriger Herkunft stammenden Eunuchen.

Im Jahr 1949 gründete die Kommunistische Partei den Vorläufer des Sicherheitsministeriums. Die Behörde sollte die Granden der Partei über weltweite Vorkommnisse unterrichten, basierend auf Nachrichten der Presseagenturen und einer limitierten Zahl Zeitungen und Bücher. Mit der Konsolidierung der Macht der Kommunistischen Partei wuchs auch die Aufgabe des Geheimdienstes, die jäh durch die Kulturrevolution unterbrochen wurde. In den Siebziger Jahren wurde die Arbeit wieder aufgenommen und die Behörde in kurzer Zeit massiv erweitert, bis sie 1983 in das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit überformt wurde – um alles abzuwehren, was dem sozialistischen System Chinas gefährlich werden könnte.

Spektakuläres über das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit

Die größte Bedrohung geht von Chinas Cyberspionage aus: Erst im Mai hatte eine US-Expertenkommission eine Liste von militärischen Projekten veröffentlicht, die vom chinesischen Geheimdienst über das Internet ausspioniert wurde. Darunter derart wichtige strategische Objekte wie das Patriot-Raketenabwehrsystem, Flugzeuge und Kriegsschiffe. Aber auch das Videosystem für Drohnen, Nanotechnologie, Nachrichtenverbindungen – der Schaden sei kaum absehbar, so die Kommission. Der Hintergrund sind offenbar die Modernisierungsbemühungen der chinesischen Armee.
Doch auch vor Ort scheinen chinesische Spione ihrer subversiven Tätigkeit nachzugehen: Etwa 120 Agenten arbeiten in den USA, Kanada, Japan, West-, Ost- und Nord-Europa als Geschäftsleute, Industrie-Arbeiter, Banker, Wissenschaftler, Journalisten.
Finnland – Supo
Motage/Panther
Der „Supo“, der zivile Nachrichtendienst, ist nur einer von Finnlands Geheimdiensten
Organisation des finnischen Geheimdienstes

In Finnland gibt es zwei offizielle Nachrichtendienste: Zum einen die „Suojelupoliisi“ (Supo), den zivilen Nachrichtendienst, und das „Pääesikunnan tiedusteluosasto“, den militärischen Nachrichtendienst. Die Supo ist ein Teil der finnischen Polizei und untersteht dem Innenminister, ihr Hauptquartier steht in Helsinki. Etwa 220 Geheimdienstler arbeiten dort an Terrorismus-Bekämpfung, Gegenspionage und allgemein der Bekämpfung von Verbrechen, die sich gegen die Regierung und die Politik richten.

Das „Pääesikunnan tiedusteluosasto“ dagegen untersteht dem finnischen Verteidigungsminister. Die Behörde ist mit dem Schutz des finnischen Hoheitsgebiets beauftragt. Ein zentrales Mittel für die Überwachung ist die Funkaufklärung: Sie sitzt in der zentralfinnischen Kleinstadt Tikkakoski.

Geschichte der Supo

Finnland litt schon immer unter seiner exponierten Lage: Über Jahrhunderte hinweg führten Schweden und Russland ihre kriegerischen Konflikte auf dem finnischen Festland aus, erst im 19. Jahrhundert konnten die Finnen die Fremdherrschaft abschütteln und zu einem eigenständigen Staat werden, obgleich eine starke Abhängigkeit zu Russland auch weiterhin bestand. 1917 rief Finnland seine Unabhängigkeit aus, eine tiefe Kluft zwischen rechten und linken politischen Kräften durchzog jedoch das Land.

Darin fußt die Geschichte der Geheimdienste: Rechte Kräfte gründeten eine Vorläufer-Organisation der Supo, um die „Roten“ zu überwachen. Nach dem Ende der Konflikte 1919 wurde die Geheimdienstarbeit dem Innenministerium unterstellt. Ab da lässt sich eine durchgehende Spionage-Tätigkeit bis in die Gegenwart verfolgen. Doch die politische Entzweiung brodelte weiter: 1949 wurde die Supo gegründet, um die mit Kommunisten besetzte Staatspolizei abzulösen. Die Organisation hat kein eigenes Einsatzkommando. Sie kann allerdings auf das „Karhu“-Team zurückgreifen, ähnlich dem amerikanischen Swat-Team.

Spektakuläres über die Supo

Eine der spektakulärsten Einsätze ist sicherlich Operation Stella Polaris: Im Zweiten Weltkrieg wurde Finnland erneut Dreh- und Angelpunkt östlicher und westlicher Machtinteressen. Einerseits verbündete sich Finnland zwar mit Nazi-Deutschland, andererseits fürchtete die Führung sowohl eine Invasion der Wehrmacht als auch der sowjetischen Truppen. Die Lösung war eine geheime Operation mit den Vereinigten Staaten: Mehrere finnische Spione setzten sich in das benachbarte Schweden ab und verkauften Informationen über das „Dritte Reich“ und die Sowjetunion an die USA.
1942, bei einem Besuch Heinrich Himmlers, spionierte der finnische Geheimdienst den damaligen Reichsführer SS aus – und rettete so wohl 2000 Juden das Leben, wie die Historikerin Janne Könönen 2002 herausfand. Die heimlich abfotografierte Liste mit den Namen einheimischer Juden wurde dem damaligen Staatspräsidenten ausgehändigt – dieser sprach sich vehement gegen eine Auslieferung der Juden aus und bewahrte sie so vor der sicheren Deputation in deutsche Lager.
Die schwierige Quellenlage
Das Internet ist voll brisanter Informationen über die Geheimdienste der Welt. Teilweise ist die Quellenlage mysteriös – und oft falsch. Behörden, die im Geheimen agieren, haben es natürlich an sich, zu den wildesten Verschwörungstheorien einzuladen, die Grenzen zwischen Wahrheit und Fiktion verwischen gerne. Doch es gibt auch seriöse und wissenschaftliche Ansätze – eine Übersicht:

Einen pragmatischen und sehr überblicksreichen Ansatz bietet das Buch „Geheimdienste der Welt“ von Alexandra Sgro, 2013 erschienen im Compact Verlag. Sgro fasst die wichtigsten Informationen zu bekannten Geheimdiensten wie MI6, BND, CIA aber auch unbekannteren Behörden wie Schwedens Säkerhetspolisen oder Griechenlands Ethniki Ypiresia Pliroforion zusammen und reichert die Berichte mit Geschichten zu den größten Skandalen und bekanntesten Spionen an.

Auf der wissenschaftlichen Seite schreibt der emeritierte Professor Dr. Wolfgang Krieger in seiner Monographie „Geschichte der Geheimdienste. Von den Pharaonen bis zur CIA“, 2010 in der zweiten Auflage bei C.H. Beck erschienen. Wie der Titel vermuten lässt, beginnt Krieger seine historische Suche nach den Wurzeln der Spionage in der Antike und verfolgt sie bis in die Gegenwart. Die aktuellsten Entwicklungen zu Snowden und der NSA fanden dabei aufgrund des Veröffentlichungszeitpunktes nicht in das Buch. Spannend: Trotz allem schreibt Krieger über Bürgerrechtsverletzungen, versteckte Kooperationen der internationalen Geheimdienste und „Whistleblower“.

Das „Austrian Center for Intelligence, Propaganda & Security Studies“ (ACIPSS) ist eine wissenschaftliche Plattform unter der Ägide von Professor Dr. Siegfried Beer. Das ACIPSS bietet Tagungsberichte, wissenschaftliche Studien und Interviews zu aktuellen Phänomenen – wie beispielsweise zum Abhör-Skandal. Außerdem beschäftigt sich das Center mit der Geschichte der Geheimdienste im europäischen Westen sowie den USA.

Von FOCUS-Online-Redakteur Julian Rohrer , FOCUS-Online-Autor Johannes Ruprecht und FOCUS-Online-Autorin Lisa Kohn

Find this story at Augustus 2013

© FOCUS Online 1996-2013

Spy agencies win millions more to fight terror threat

Britain’s intelligence agencies will emerge as the biggest winners from the Government’s review of public spending, The Telegraph can disclose.
MI6, MI5 and Government Communications Headquarters will see an increase in their combined £1.9 billion budget

MI6, MI5 and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) will see an inflation-busting increase in their combined £1.9 billion budget, underlining the Government’s concern over the growing terrorist threat following the Woolwich attack.

Police spending on counter-terrorism will also be protected and will rise in line with inflation.

The percentage increase in the budgets of the intelligence agencies – at more than three per cent in addition to inflation – will be the largest of any item of government spending including the NHS, schools and international development.

It will lead to the agencies receiving about another £100 million in funding annually from 2015.

Local councils are also expected to emerge as winners with increased funding for elderly social care. Money from the ring-fenced NHS budget is expected to be diverted to help fund care homes and home visits for frail pensioners.
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George Osborne will on Wednesday unveil the Government’s spending plans for the 2015-16 financial year following months of Whitehall wrangling.

The Spending Review, which will cut a further £11.5 billion in public expenditure, is regarded as especially sensitive as the cuts will be implemented just weeks before the next general election.

The biggest losers will include the Business department, the Culture department, the Home Office and the Justice department, which are expected to each lose about eight per cent from their budgets.

The Ministry of Defence will see its budget cut by about £1 billion, although this will not involve further reductions in front-line troops.

Mr Osborne is also expected to set out plans for long-term caps on welfare spending and other areas of government expenditure which are not tightly controlled.

The Chancellor will detail proposals to divert the money saved from Whitehall spending to fund long-term infrastructure projects such as widening major roads.

He is expected to say: “Britain is moving from rescue to recovery. But while the British economy is leaving intensive care, now we need to secure that recovery.

“We’re saving money on welfare and waste to invest in the roads and railways, schooling and science our economy needs to succeed in the future.”

The intelligence agencies have recently faced criticism that they are struggling to deal with emerging threats, amid suggestions that MI5 and MI6 could have done more to prevent the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich. One of the suspects had attempted to travel to Somalia and both were known to the intelligence services.

GCHQ’s activities have also come under scrutiny following accusations that it may be abusing its power in secretive projects with the United States to monitor internet traffic.

The Chancellor is understood to have contacted the heads of the three agencies last Friday to inform them of their spending increases. MI5, MI6 and GCHQ have seen their budgets fall in real terms by more than 10 per cent since 2010 and there were fears that they would face a further round of cuts.

A Whitehall source said: “This has been one of George’s personal priorities. It is vitally important we look after these budgets and they were settled last week with agreement at the very highest level.”

Mr Osborne and the Prime Minister are understood to believe the agencies need more resources to tackle the growing terrorist threat from sub-Saharan Africa and Syria, and the rising problem posed by cyber terrorism.

In the wake of the GCHQ snooping row, William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, praised the agencies’ work and cooperation with US counterparts.

Speaking in America, he said “we should have nothing but pride” in the “intelligence-sharing relationship between Britain and the United States”. He added that both countries’ intelligence work operated “under the rule of law” and “only exists to protect” people’s freedoms.

Mr Osborne confirmed on Tuesday that the NHS and schools budgets would continue to rise.

Money is also expected to be diverted from the health budget to local authorities to fund social care. Norman Lamb, a health minister, recently warned of an impending crisis in social care as councils struggled to fund enough places for ailing pensioners.

Last week, council leaders warned Mr Osborne that street lights may have to be switched off and libraries closed unless NHS funding was diverted to help pay for elderly care.

They said the amount of money spent on social care has been cut by a fifth in less than three years and they were preparing to reduce budgets further.

Mr Osborne agreed for £2 billion to be transferred from the NHS to the social care sector in his previous Spending Review, but councils said much of the money has gone on propping up the system because of the ageing population.

Ministers are also expected to set out the entitlement criteria for state help. The Government has pledged to cap the maximum bill that anyone faces for social care at £72,000 from 2016, and the details of how this will work are to be announced this week.

Earl Howe, a health minister, was asked about the growing problem in social care, with hospitals often forced not to discharge elderly patients who are infirm but not ill because they have nowhere to go. He said there would be “more news” about increased funding for social care on Wednesday and sources confirmed that the social care budget would rise after several years of cuts.

Danny Alexander, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, also hinted that the Government may speed up the introduction of its community budgets programme, which is designed to make public sector services share operations.

He urged MPs to “listen carefully” to the Chancellor’s statement for more news after being asked about the programme’s national implementation.

By Robert Winnett, Political Editor
10:00PM BST 25 Jun 2013

Find this story at 25 June 2013

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2013

MI5 feared GCHQ went ’too far’ over phone and internet monitoring

Amid leaks from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, senior intelligence source reveals worries were voiced in 2008

GCHQ taps can intercept UK and US phone and internet traffic. Photograph: EPA

Senior figures inside British intelligence have been alarmed by GCHQ’s secret decision to tap into transatlantic cables in order to engage in the bulk interception of phone calls and internet traffic.

According to one source who has been directly involved in GCHQ operations, concerns were expressed when the project was being discussed internally in 2008: “We felt we were starting to overstep the mark with some of it. People from MI5 were complaining that they were going too far from a civil liberties perspective … We all had reservations about it, because we all thought: ‘If this was used against us, we wouldn’t stand a chance’.”

The Guardian revealed on Friday that GCHQ has placed more than 200 probes on transatlantic cables and is processing 600m “telephone events” a day as well as up to 39m gigabytes of internet traffic. Using a programme codenamed Tempora, it can store and analyse voice recordings, the content of emails, entries on Facebook, the use of websites as well as the “metadata” which records who has contacted who. The programme is shared with GCHQ’s American partner, the National Security Agency.

Interviews with the UK source and the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden raise questions about whether the programme:

■ Exploits existing law which was passed by parliament without any anticipation that it would be used for this purpose.

■ For the first time allows GCHQ to process bulk internal UK traffic which is routed overseas via these cables.

■ Allows the NSA to engage in bulk intercepts of internal US traffic which would be forbidden in its own territory.

■ Functions with no effective oversight.

The key law is the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, Ripa, which requires the home secretary or foreign secretary to sign warrants for the interception of the communications of defined targets. But the law also allows the foreign secretary to sign certificates that authorise GCHQ to trawl for broad categories of information on condition that one end of the communication is outside the UK.

According to the UK source: “Not so long ago, this was all about attaching crocodile clips to copper wires. And it was all about voice. Now, it’s about the internet – massive scale – but still using the same law that was devised for crocodile clips. Ripa was primarily designed for voice, not for this level of interception. They are going round Ripa. The legislation doesn’t exist for this. They are using old legislation and adapting it.”

The source claimed that even the conventional warrant system has been distorted – whereas police used to ask for a warrant before intercepting a target’s communications, they will now ask GCHQ to intercept the target’s communications and then use that information to seek a warrant.

There is a particular concern that the programme allows GCHQ to break the boundary which stopped it engaging in the bulk interception of internal UK communications. The Ripa requirement that one end of a communication must be outside the UK was a significant restriction when it was applied to phone calls using satellites, but it is no longer effective in the world of fibre-optic cables. “The point is that this is an island,” the source said. “Everything comes and goes – nearly everything – down fibre-optic cables. You make a mobile phone call, it goes to a mast and then down into a fibre-optic cable, under the ground and away. And even if the call is UK to UK, it’s very likely – because of the way the system is structured – to go out of the UK and come back in through these fibre-optic channels.”

Internet traffic is also liable to be routed internationally even if the message is exchanged between two people within the UK. “At one point, I was told that we were getting 85% of all UK domestic traffic – voice, internet, all of it – via these international cables.”

Last year, the government was mired in difficulty when it tried to pass a communications bill that became known as the “snoopers’ charter”, and would have allowed the bulk interception and storage of UK voice calls and internet traffic. The source says this debate was treated with some scepticism inside the intelligence community – “We’re sitting there, watching them debate the snoopers’ charter, thinking: ‘Well, GCHQ have been doing this for years’.”

There are similar concerns about the role of the NSA. It could have chosen to attach probes to the North American end of the cables and documents shown to the Guardian by Edward Snowden suggest that key elements of the Tempora filtering process were designed by the NSA. Instead, the NSA agency has exported its computer programs and 250 of its analysts to operate the system from the UK.

Initial inquiries by the Guardian have failed to explain why this has happened, but US legislators are likely to want to check whether the NSA has sought to bypass legal or policy requirements which restrict its activity in the US. This will be particularly sensitive if it is confirmed that Tempora is also analysing internal US traffic.

The UK source challenges the official justification for the programme; that it is necessary for the fight against terrorism and serious crime: “This is not scoring very high against those targets, because they are wise to the monitoring of their communications. If the terrorists are wise to it, why are we increasing the capability?

“The answer is that you can’t stop it. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more we develop communications technology, the more they develop technology to intercept it. There was MS Chat – easy. Then Yahoo chat – did that, too. Then Facebook. Then Skype. Then Twitter. They keep catching up. It is good for us, but it is bad for us.”

It is clear from internal paperwork that GCHQ has created systems to restrain the use of this powerful tool and to ensure that its use complies not only with Ripa but also with the 1998 Human Rights Act, which requires essentially that the use of the data must be proportional to the crime or threat investigated. Defenders insist that the mass of data is heavily filtered by the programme so that only that relating to legitimate targets is analysed.

However, there are doubts about the effectiveness of this. First, according to the UK source, “written definitions for targeting and filtering are very elastic. They are wide open to interpretation.” The target areas defined by the Ripa certificates are secret.

Second, there is further room for interpretation when human analysts become involved in using the filtered intelligence to produce what are known as “contact chains”. “Here is target A. But who is A talking to? Now we’re into B and C and D.” If analysts believe it is proportional, they can look at all the traffic – content and metadata – relating to all of the target’s contact.” GCHQ audits a sample of its analysts’ work – believed to be 5% every six months – but even the statistical results of these audits are also secret.

Beyond the detail of the operation of the programme, there is a larger, long-term anxiety, clearly expressed by the UK source: “If there was the wrong political change, it could be very dangerous. All you need is to have the wrong government in place. It is capable of abuse because there is no independent scrutiny.”

Nick Davies
The Observer, Saturday 22 June 2013 20.18 BST

Find this story at 22 June 2013
© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Woolwich suspect’s brother ‘harassed and threatened by MI6 and MI5’

The brother of one of the men charged with the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich has claimed he was “harassed and threatened” by the British security services.

Michael Adebolajo’s younger brother, Jeremiah, 26, said he met MI6 intelligence officers numerous times while he was working in Saudia Arabia and was quizzed by MI5 early last year on a trip home to London.

He described a series of meetings, at the British Embassy in Riyadh, at airports and at other locations which he says he felt compelled to attend. At one stage, he claims he was stopped from flying on holiday so he could attend a meeting.

Mr Adebolajo, who cannot discuss his brother’s case for legal reasons, says he was first approached by MI6 early in 2011 when he was teaching English at the University of Ha’il in Nejd.

The approach from the British Embassy asking him to attend a meeting to discuss “life in Saudi Arabia” came a few weeks after his brother had been arrested in Kenya near the Somali border and deported to Britain.

During the meetings he was questioned about his brother-in-law James Thompson and asked about two other men who he was told had travelled to Yemen in advance of a terror attack on the UK.

Mr Adebolajo told The Times: “They were never openly aggressive, but they were always implicitly threatening. There was never the understanding that if I wanted I could stand up and say, that’s enough. There was always the understanding that that I have to co-operate or I would lose my job and I don’t know what else.”

He said the officers, who admitted they were from the security services, were particularly interested in the two men who had travelled to Yemen but denied their claims that he had been in contact with them.

“They were always looking for my knowledge and dealings with the two main indivuals they had shown me. They asked me biographical stuff, what mosques did I go to, do I pray, that sort of thing. Like they were trying to build a profile of me.”

When Drummer Rigby was killed on May 22 in Woolwich, Mr Adebolajo says he recognised his brother from a video posted online. He contacted his parents and said: “My Dad was so upset, distraught.”

Michael Adebolajo will next appear in court alongside co-defendant Michael Adebowale, 22, of Greenwich, south-east London, for a preliminary hearing on June 28.

Justin Davenport, Crime Editor
20 June 2013

Find this story at 20 June 2013

© Evening Standard Limited

Woolwich murder, the MI6 connection: Younger brother of Michael Adebolajo ‘was paid thousands to spy in Middle East’

The younger brother of one of the men accused of murdering Drummer Lee Rigby was paid thousands of pounds by MI6 as part of spying operations in the Middle East, The Mail on Sunday has discovered.

Jeremiah Adebolajo, who uses the name Abul Jaleel, was also asked to help ‘turn’ his brother, Michael, to work for MI5, who were already aware of Michael’s close links to extremist groups.

The claims are made by the Adebolajo family and a well-placed source who contacted The Mail on Sunday.

Jeremiah Adebolajo, 26, who works as an English teacher at a university in Saudi Arabia and returned to Britain this week, is to be questioned about his brother by Scotland Yard counter-terrorism detectives today.

Government sources have already confirmed that Michael Adebolajo was known to MI5. Last week it was alleged that he rebuffed efforts by the security service to recruit him as a spy.

Michael, 28, was discharged from hospital on Friday and was yesterday charged with the murder of Drummer Rigby and attempted murder of two police officers on May 22 in Woolwich, South London.

Now it has emerged that MI5’s sister agency, MI6, had targeted Jeremiah, a married teacher based at the University of Ha’il.

MI5 and MI6 work closely together on counter-terrorism operations. MI5 focuses on home security, while MI6 targets threats from overseas.

A document seen by The Mail on Sunday details concerns raised by Jeremiah’s family about MI6’s alleged harassment in April last year.

In it, Jeremiah’s sister, Blessing Adebolajo, 32, who works as a human resources assistant in London, says her brother was approached by MI6 while he was working at the University of Ha’il – an important strategic location in the Middle East because it takes only one hour by plane to reach 11 Arab capitals.

Jeremiah Adeboljao was working at the University of Ha’il in Saudi Arabia when he was approached by MI6

Complaint: A redacted copy of the allegations made by the Adebolajo family

A friend of Jeremiah has confirmed her account.

The friend said: ‘They asked him about Michael and asked him to help “turn” him to work for MI5.

‘They also told him to go to certain hotels, order a cup of tea and wait for his contact.

‘On these occasions he was handed £300, and was paid to fly first-class and stay in five-star hotels.’

The document, prepared by case workers with the charity Cageprisoners, says Blessing approached the East London charity for help because she was worried about the harassment and intimidation of both her brothers by the security and intelligence services.

She says MI6 bought a ticket so Jeremiah could fly to an Intercontinental hotel in another Middle East country (believed to be the United Arab Emirates) and that he was given local currency worth more than £1,000.

She also alleges Jeremiah told her that he was interrogated about specific people and was shown pictures of himself with named individuals taken in the UK. But Blessing told Cageprisoners that Jeremiah had ‘strongly’ rejected MI6’s offer to work as one of their agents.

Blessing Adebolajo says her brother Jeremiah was approached by MI6 and asked to become an informant

As a result of this rejection, his sister says he was ‘intimidated’ until he was finally told that he would be stopped from leaving the UK.

The friend said that two years ago Jeremiah was approached by UK security officers when he was held at Heathrow on his way back from Saudi Arabia.

During the interview, he was warned about what happens to Muslims who don’t help the Government and was shown documents that confirmed people he knew were being held in prisons throughout the world.

Police and security services are under huge pressure to explain what they know about Adebolajo and his alleged accomplice, Michael Adebowale. Despite warnings stretching back ten years, Michael Adebolajo is said to have been considered ‘low risk’ by MI5. He was photographed at high-profile protests – even standing next to hate preacher Anjem Choudary.

He was arrested in Kenyan 2010 over his alleged plans to travel to Somalia to join terror group Al-Shabaab before being returned to the UK. Jeremiah married Charlotte Patricia Taylor in 2008 at Sutton Register Office in Surrey.

Shortly afterwards the couple are believed to have left for Saudi Arabia where Jeremiah found work teaching. The University of Ha’il is one of Saudi Arabia’s most progressive education establishments and was established by Royal Decree in 2005. It consists of five colleges – Sciences, Medicine and Medical Sciences, Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, and a Community College – and has more than 16,000 students.

By Robert Verkaik
PUBLISHED: 21:02 GMT, 1 June 2013 | UPDATED: 21:03 GMT, 1 June 2013

Find this story at 1 June 2013

© Associated Newspapers Ltd

UK pays price for MI5 courting terror

The brutal murder of an off-duty British soldier in broad daylight in the southeast London district of Woolwich raises new questions about the British government’s national security strategy, at home and abroad. Officials have highlighted the danger of “self-radicalizing” cells inspired by Internet extremism, but this ignores overwhelming evidence that major UK terror plots have been incubated by the banned al-Qaeda-linked group formerly known as Al Muhajiroun.

Equally, it is no surprise that the attackers had been seen earlier on the radar of MI5, the UK’s domestic counter-intelligence and security agency. While Al Muhajiroun’s emir, Syrian cleric Omar

Bakri Mohammed – currently self-exiled to Tripoli in northern Lebanon – has previously claimed “public immunity” due to murky connections with British intelligence, compelling evidence suggests such connections might still be operational in the context of foreign policy imperatives linked to oil and gas interests.

Security services and the Woolwich suspect
Despite being proscribed, Al Muhajiroun has continued to function with impunity in new incarnations, most recently under the banner of Izhar Ud-Deen-il-Haq – run under the tutelage of Bakri’s London-based deputy, British-born Anjem Choudary.

Almost every major terrorist attack and plot in the UK has in some way been linked to Choudary’s extremist network. The Woolwich attack was no exception. Anjem Choudary himself admitted to knowing one of the attackers, Michael “Mujahid” Adebolajo, as someone who “attended our meetings and my lectures”.

Adebolajo was a regular at Al Muhajiroun’s Woolwich High Street dawah (propagation) stall, was “tutored” by Omar Bakri himself, and had attended the group’s meetings between 2005 and 2011.

According to intelligence sources, both attackers were known to MI5 and MI6, which is concerned with foreign intelligene, and had appeared on “intelligence watch lists”, and Adebolajo had “featured in several counter-terrorist investigations” as a “peripheral figure” for the “last eight years” – suggesting his terrorist activities began precisely when he joined Al Muhajiroun.

In particular, credible reports suggest he was high on MI5’s priority for the past three years, with family and friends confirming that he was repeatedly harassed by the agency to become an informant – as late as six months ago.

In this context, the touted “lone wolf” hypothesis is baseless. For instance, while the recently convicted “Birmingham 11”, sentenced last month for their role in a bombing plot in the UK, had access to al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine and Anwar al-Awlaki’s video speeches, they had also attended al-Qaeda terrorist training camps in Pakistan. This could only happen through an established UK-based Islamist network with foreign connections.

Al Muhajiroun is the only organization that fits the profile. One in five terrorist convictions in the UK for more than a decade were for people who were either members of or had links to Al Muhajiroun. Last year, four Al Muhajiroun members were convicted at Woolwich Crown Court of planning to bomb the London Stock Exchange.

Inspired by Awlaki’s teachings, the plotters had also been taught by Choudary’s longtime Al Muhajiroun colleague, ex-terror convict Abu Izzadeen. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

MI6’s terror Network
In 1996, Omar Bakri founded Al Muhajiroun with Anjem Choudary. According to John Loftus, a former US Army Intelligence Officer and Justice Department prosecutor, three senior Al Muhajiroun figures at the time – Bakri, Abu Hamza, and Haroon Rashid Aswat – had been recruited by MI6 that year to facilitate Islamist activities in the Balkans.

The objective was geopolitical expansion – destabilizing former Soviet republics, sidelining Russia and paving the way for the Trans-Balkan oil pipeline protected by incoming North Atlantic Treaty Organization “peacekeeping” bases.

“This is about America’s energy security”, said then US energy secretary Bill Richardson: “It’s also about preventing strategic inroads by those who don’t share our values. We’re trying to move these newly independent countries toward the West. We would like to see them reliant on Western commercial and political interests rather than going another way. We’ve made a substantial political investment in the Caspian, and it’s very important to us that both the pipeline map and the politics come out right.”

On February 10, 1998, Bakri and Choudary issued and signed a “fatwa” – a religious ruling – titled “Muslims in Britain Declare War Against the US and British governments”, which warned that the governments of “non-Muslim countries” must “stay away from Iraq, Palestine, Pakistan, Arabia, etc or face a full scale war of jihad which will be the responsibility of every Muslim around the world to participate in” – “including the Muslims in the USA and in Britain” who should “confront by all means whether verbally, financially, politically or militarily the US and British aggression”.

The same year, Bakri was one of a select few to receive a fax from Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan outlining four objectives for a jihad against the US, including hijacking civilian planes.

Public Immunity
In 2000, Bakri admitted to training British Muslims to fight as jihadists in Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya or South Lebanon. Recruits were “learning firearms and explosives use, surveillance and other skills” and “would be expected to join a jihad being waged in one country or another”. That year, he boasted: “The British government knows who we are. MI5 has interrogated us many times. I think now we have something called public immunity. There is nothing left. You can label us … put us behind bars, but it’s not going to work.”

Labour Party MP Andrew Dismore told parliament the following year about a month after 9/11 that Bakri’s private security firm, Sakina Security Services, “sends people overseas for jihad training with live arms and ammunition”, including training camps “in Pakistan and Afghanistan”, and even at “many different sites in the United Kingdom”.

Hundreds of Britons were being funneled through such training only to return to the UK advocating that Whitehall and Downing Street be attacked as “legitimate targets”. Though Sakina was raided by police and shut down, Bakri and Hamza were not even arrested, let alone charged or prosecuted.

It later emerged that the US’ Federal Bureau of Investigation had flagged up the unusual presence of Al Muhajiroun activists at Arizona flight schools in the US in the summer preceding 9/11, many of whom had terrorist connections, including one described as a close bin Laden associate.

The London bombings
In 2003, two Al Muhajiroun members carried out a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, Israel. That year, authorities began tracking an al-Qaeda ringleader in Britain, Mohammed Quayyum Khan. By 2004, the surveillance operation uncovered a plot to plant fertilizer bombs around the UK, prepared by a cell of 18 people, most of whom were Al Muhajiroun members who had studied under Bakri and Choudary. Quayyum Khan, like the latter, remains free.

The 7/7 bombers, also Al Muhajiroun members, were connected to both terror plots – Mohamed Sidique Khan had been friends with the Tel Aviv bombers, and had even travelled to Israel weeks before their suicide attack. Khan went on to learn to make explosives in a terrorist training camp set up by Al Muhajiroun’s British and American members in northern Pakistan.

A year before 7/7, Bakri warned of a “well-organized group” linked to al-Qaeda “on the verge of launching a big operation” against London. Then just months before the 7/7 bombings, The Times picked up Bakri telling his followers in Internet lectures: “I believe the whole of Britain has become Dar al-Harb [land of war]. The kuffar [non-believer] has no sanctity for their own life or property.” Muslims are “obliged” to “join the jihad… wherever you are”, and suicide bombings are permitted because “Al-Qaeda… have the emir”.

Entrapment gone crazy
The strange reluctance to prosecute Al Muhajiroun activists despite their support for al-Qaeda terrorism seems inexplicable. But has Britain’s support for al-Qaeda affiliated extremists abroad granted their Islamist allies at home “public immunity”?

In early 2005, shortly before the July 7 London bombings, the Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ron Suskind interviewed Bakri after he was told by an MI5 official that the cleric “had helped MI5 on several of its investigations”.

Suskind recounts in his book, The Way of the World, that when asked why, Bakri told him: “Because I like it here. My family’s here. I like the health benefits.” Bakri reiterated this in an interview in early 2007 after his move to Tripoli, Lebanon, claiming, “We were able to control the Muslim youth… The radical preacher that allows a venting of a point of view is preventing violence.”

Suskind observed: “Bakri enjoyed his notoriety and was willing to pay for it with information he passed to the police… It’s a fabric of subtle interlocking needs: the [British authorities] need be in a backchannel conversation with someone working the steam valve of Muslim anger; Bakri needs health insurance”.

Why would MI5 and MI6 retain the services of someone as dangerous as Bakri given the overwhelming evidence of his centrality to the path to violent radicalization? On the one hand, it would seem that, through Al Muhajiroun, MI5 is spawning many of the plots it lays claim to successfully foiling – as the FBI is also doing.

On the other, the strategy aligns conveniently with narrow geopolitical interests rooted in Britain’s unflinching subservience to wider US strategy in the Muslim world.

The not-so-new great game
Little has changed since the Great Game in the Balkans. According to Alastair Crooke, a former MI6 officer and Middle East adviser to EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, the Saudis are mobilizing Islamist extremists to service mutual US-Saudi interests: “US officials speculated as to what might be done to block this vital corridor [from Iran to Syria], but it was Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia who surprised them by saying that the solution was to harness Islamic forces. The Americans were intrigued, but could not deal with such people. Leave that to me, Bandar retorted.”

This region-wide strategy involves sponsorship of Salafi jihadists in Syria, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq. Praising Obama’s appropriation of this policy, John Hannah – former national security advisor to vice president Dick Cheney – rejoiced that the idea was to “weaken the Iranian mullahs; undermine the Assad regime; support a successful transition in Egypt; facilitate Gaddafi’s departure; reintegrate Iraq into the Arab fold; and encourage a negotiated solution in Yemen.”

The strategy’s endgame? Petro-politics, once again, is center-stage, with the US-UK seeking to dominate regional oil and gas pipeline routes designed, in the words of Saudi expert John Bradley “to disrupt and emasculate the awakenings that threaten absolute monarchism” in the Persian Gulf petro-states.

The seeds of this clandestine alliance with Islamists go back more than six years, when Seymour Hersh reported that the George W Bush administration had “cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations” intended to weaken the Shi’ite Hezbollah in Lebanon.

“The US has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria,” wrote Hersh, “a byproduct of which is ’the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups’ hostile to the United States and sympathetic to al-Qaeda”. He also noted that “the Saudi government, with Washington’s approval, would provide funds and logistical aid to weaken the government of President Bashir Assad, of Syria.”

In April 2007, the Lebanese Daily Star reported that the United States had earmarked US$60 million to reinforce Interior Ministry forces and Sunni organizations identified as “jihadists”.

Did Omar Bakri benefit from this? Having settled in Lebanon, Bakri told one journalist at the time, “Today, angry Lebanese Sunnis ask me to organize their jihad against the Shi’ites… Al-Qaeda in Lebanon… are the only ones who can defeat Hezbollah.”

And last year, Bakri boasted, “I’m involved with training the mujahideen [fighters] in camps on the Syrian borders and also on the Palestine side.” The trainees included four British Islamists “with professional backgrounds” who would go on to join the war in Syria. Bakri also claimed to have trained “many fighters”, including people from Germany and France, since arriving in Lebanon.

That Bakri appears to be benefiting from the US strategy to support Islamist extremists in the region is particularly worrying given the British government’s acknowledgement that a “substantial number” of Britons are fighting in Syria, who “will seek to carry out attacks against Western interests… or in Western states”.

With the EU embargo against supplying arms to Syrian rebels lifted this month after UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s pledge to support the rebels – some of whom are al-Qaeda affiliated Islamists with links to extremists at home – the question must be asked whether Britain’s security services remain compromised by short-sighted geopolitical interests rooted in our chronic dependency on fossil fuels.

Unfortunately the British government’s latest proposals to deal with violent radicalization – Internet censorship, a lower threshold for banning “extremist” groups – deal not with the failures of state policy, but with the symptoms of those failures. Perhaps governments have tacitly accepted that terrorism, after all, is the price of business as usual.

Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is an international security expert who writes for The Guardian at his Earth Insight blog. He is the author of The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (2006). His work was used by the Coroner’s Inquiry into the July 7 2005 bombings in London and the 9/11 Commission.

May 30, ’13
By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

Find this story at 30 May 2013

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© Copyright 2013 Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

MI5 allegedly applies for secret court session after informant sues for being denied protection

Former IRA mole accuses Home Office of cover-up and claims he was denied medical treatment after being shot by IRA hit team

MI5 has allegedly applied for a controversial secret court hearing after being sued by a former IRA mole who claims he has been denied medical treatment after being shot in a reprisal attack.

Martin McGartland, originally from west Belfast, has been credited with saving the lives of 50 police officers and soldiers in Northern Ireland as a spy within the IRA providing intelligence to the special branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.

He is suing MI5 and the Home Office for failing to support him after he was attacked and repeatedly shot by an IRA hit team who tracked him to a safe house in North Tyneside in 1999.

Mr McGartland has told The Independent that solicitors acting for the Home Office, the government department responsible for the Security Service, have applied to have the matter dealt with by a Closed Material Procedure (CMP) hearing.

At CMPs, due to come into force shortly with the introduction of the Justice and Security Act 2013, claimants must be represented before the judge by special advocates who have been cleared for security. Such a hearing would mean that neither Mr McGartland or his lawyers were able to attend.

Labour, which says CMPs deviate from the “tradition of open and fair justice”, has called for the use of such closed proceedings to be limited unless a judge agrees a fair verdict cannot be reached by any other means.

The Law Society president, Lucy Scott-Moncrieff, has also raised objections to CMPs on the grounds that they undermine the essential principle of justice that all parties are entitled to see and challenge all the evidence placed before the court.

CMPs are seen by the Government as a way of bringing before a judge information which, for security reasons, cannot be revealed in open court.

Mr McGartland said that funding for treatment he was receiving for the post-traumatic stress disorder he suffered after the assassination attempt had been stopped. He claimed the secret hearing was designed to cover up the Home Office’s failure to meet its duty of care, rather than to protect genuine state secrets.

“This is being done despite my legal case against them being related to their removing funding for my medical treatment, which they were funding after my 1999 shooting,” he told The Independent. “They removed the medical funding even after they were supplied two medical reports stating that I required a further three to five years of treatment. That resulted in a serious deterioration in my condition and it also led to my now requiring round-the-clock care, help and support. In other words MI5 are going to use CMP solely to cover up their own embarrassment and wrongdoing and not, as the Government has been claiming, in cases that relate to ‘National Security’.”

…

Ian Burrell
Monday, 6 May 2013

Find this story at 6 May 2013

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Intelligence chiefs and special forces plot Sahara mission

Action against al-Qa’ida in North Africa could last decades, PM warns

The West faces a decades-long battle to defeat al-Qa’ida in North Africa, David Cameron warned today, as he signalled a dramatic shift in the UK’s fight against terrorism.

The heads of MI5, MI6, GCHQ and the Chief of the Defence Staff will gather on Tuesday to begin planning Britain’s response to the burgeoning terror threat from Saharan Africa.

Britain will offer money, military co-operation and security training to African states to head off the advance of Islamist radicalism.

Special forces are understood to be preparing to hunt down the jihadist leader behind the siege and hostage killings in Algeria, Mokhtar Belmokhtar.

Britain will use its chairmanship of the G8 to focus militarily and diplomatically on the Sahara region, following the hostage crisis which claimed the lives of up to six Britons. One Middle East expert likened the long-term impact of the atrocity in Algeria to the 9/11 attacks.

Following the end of the four-day stand-off at the BP gas plant at In Amenas, Algerian forces discovered 25 more bodies and took five militants alive. The death toll had previously been put at 23 hostages and 32 captors.

Three Britons have been confirmed among the dead and another three are feared to have been killed during the siege, which ended with a shoot-out on Saturday. Tonight 46-year-old Paul Thomas Morgan was the first British victim to be named by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Kenneth Whiteside, an engineer from Glenrothes in Fife, and Garry Barlow, a BP systems supervisor from Merseyside, are also understood to be among the dead. Another UK resident was also believed to have been killed.

Twenty-two other British nationals have arrived home, many with chilling stories of how they evaded capture by jihadists belonging to an al-Qa’ida splinter group styling themselves Those Who Sign In Blood.

Alan Wright, from Aberdeenshire, told of how he hid in an office for 24 hours before joining Algerian workers who cut their way through a perimeter fence and fled.

Mr Cameron will update MPs on the attack today and hold a meeting of Whitehall’s emergency Cobra committee to consider the implications of the attack.

French forces – with support from Britain – are attempting to oust insurgents from northern Mali, amid fears that neighbouring countries including Niger and Mauritania could fall under their influence.

As the French Defence Minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, described the hostage-taking as an “act of war”, Belmokhtar was reported to be “ready to negotiate” in return for an end to the action in Mali.

Last night Mauritanian news website Sahara Media said Belmokhtar had claimed responsibility in the name of al Qa’ida for the hostage-taking in a video. He had said: “We in al Qa’ida announce this blessed operation. We are ready to negotiate with the West and the Algerian government provided they stop their bombing of Mali’s Muslims. We had around 40 jihadists, most of them from Muslim countries and some even from the West.”

A BP spokesman would not comment on reports in Algeria that Belmokhtar’s men had infiltrated the gas plant as drivers, cooks and guards working on short-term contracts.

Mr Cameron spelt out the scale of the challenge posed by al-Qa’ida-affiliated groups operating in the region. “It will require a response that is about years, even decades, rather than months,” he said. “And it requires a response that is painstaking, that is tough but also intelligent, but above all has an absolutely iron resolve. And that is what we will deliver over these coming years.

“What we face is an extremist, Islamist, al-Qa’ida-linked terrorist group. Just as we had to deal with that in Pakistan and in Afghanistan, so the world needs to come together to deal with this threat in North Africa… We need to work with others to defeat the terrorists and to close down the ungoverned spaces where they thrive with all the means that we have.”

The Government has not ruled out giving extra help to the French-led operation in Mali.

However, Whitehall sources said the terrorist threat in the region would ultimately be best tackled by diplomatic means. Britain is to beef up its presence in nations where the UK historically had a limited presence and to liaise more closely with Paris over the challenges faced by the traditionally Francophone area.

Abdelasiem el-Difraoui, an al-Qa’ida expert with the Berlin Institute for Media and Communications Studies, told a French newspaper that the hostage-taking would for France make as “a huge bang as strong as September 11”.

The French Government distanced itself from suggestions among other nations caught up in the hostage crisis that Algeria’s response was “heavy-handed”.

President François Hollande said: “When so many hostages have been taken and when the terrorists are ready to murder them in cold blood, I think the Algerian approach was the best one.”
Britons in the desert

Garry Barlow: Semtex was strapped to his chest

Garry Barlow, 49, was a systems supervisor for BP Exploration Algeria, Statoil and Sonatrach JV. He lived in the Mossley Hill area of Liverpool with his wife Lorraine, and sons Scott, 17, and Paul, 15.

He had been working in In Amenas since October 2011, and had worked previously for Addax Petroleum and Shell EP on the west coast of Central Africa.

He was captured with some of his colleagues including 29-year-old project services contracts administrator Mark Grant, who is believed to have survived the ordeal.

Initial reports suggested Mr Barlow was safe and well and was being repatriated by the Foreign Office, but he is now thought to have died as Algerian troops tried to regain control of the compound.

The last his wife heard from him was a message in which he said: “I’m sitting here at my desk with Semtex strapped to my chest. The local army have already tried and failed to storm the plant and they’ve said that if that happens again they are going to kill us all.”

Paul Morgan: Former soldier died fighting

The first British victim of the Algerian hostage crisis was described last night as a “true gentleman” who “loved life and lived it to the full”.

Paul Morgan, 46, from Liverpool, a former soldier with the French Foreign Legion, reportedly “went down fighting” when the bus he was travelling in was attacked by the kidnappers last Wednesday.

His mother Marianne and partner Emma Steele, 36, paid tribute to him: “Paul died doing the job he loved. We are so proud of him and so proud of what he achieved in his life. He will be truly missed.”

Kenneth Whiteside: Shot as army stormed compound

Kenneth Whiteside had been living in Johannesburg with his wife and two daughters but was originally from Glenrothes in Fife.

An Algerian colleague at the plant is said to have witnessed the BP project services manager “being shot” by his captors as commandos stormed the compound.

The 59-year-old was educated at Auchmuty High School and studied engineering at Glenrothes Technical College between 1970 and 1974.

Friends posted tribute messages on his Facebook account on Saturday. Steward Goodwin in South Africa wrote: “How will we understand this? My heartfelt condolences go to the family and friends who are trying to come to terms with this senseless murder.”

Billy Hunter wrote: “We’ll always remember him and his bagpipes.” “It’s hard to understand such senseless waste of life,” added Joe McMahon.

…

Nigel Morris, John Lichfield
Monday, 21 January 2013

Find this story at 21 January 2013

© independent.co.uk

Royal Navy submariner admits meeting ‘Russian spies’

Petty officer gathered secret coding programs and met two people he thought were Russian agents, court hears

Edward Devenney admitted discussing information relating to the movement of nuclear submarines. Photograph: Gaz Armes/ MoD Crown Copyright/PA

A Royal Navy submariner was caught trying to sell secrets to Russia in a sting operation led by the security services, the Guardian understands.

Edward Devenney, 30, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to collecting secret coding programs used by the British and attempting to pass the classified information on to Moscow.

Devenney, who is formerly from Northern Ireland, was a submariner on HMS Vigilant, a Trident nuclear submarine, when he decided to pass on secrets to the “enemy”, it is understood. The submarine – one of four that make up the UK’s nuclear deterrent – is normally based at Faslane in Scotland but had been refuelling at Devonport dock in Plymouth when Devenney’s activities raised the suspicions of his senior officers.

Devenney’s motivation, it is believed, was unhappiness with his situation and a degree of anger towards his employers after being passed over for promotion, rather than an issue of ideology or money.

A prolific tweeter, his behaviour raised the suspicions of his senior officers and over a period of months an undercover operation was carried out.

This led to Devenney contacting two people he believed were from the Russian secret service and discussing information relating to the movement of nuclear submarines with them. However, he was in fact talking to British agents.

Devenney was arrested and charged under the Official Secrets Act. He appeared at the Old Bailey in London and pleaded guilty to gathering details of encryption programs in breach of the act.

The charge related to collecting information for a purpose prejudicial to the safety of the state between 18 November 2011 and 7 March 2012. The information was described in court as “crypto material” – or codes used to encrypt secret information – which could be useful to an enemy.

Devenney also admitted a charge of misconduct in a public office in relation to a meeting with two people he believed were from the Russian secret service. He admitted meeting the two individuals and discussing the movement of nuclear submarines with them. He denied a further count of communicating information to another person. The Crown Prosecution Service would not pursue this charge, the court heard.

…

Sandra Laville, crime correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 13 November 2012 13.15 GMT

Find this story at 13 November 2012
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Eight years for submariner who took secret photos in ‘disgusting’ betrayal

Threat: Edward Devanney took photographs on board HMS Vigilant

A Royal Navy petty officer was jailed for eight years today after taking mobile phone pictures in the top-secret communications room of a nuclear submarine and planning to pass information to the Russians.

Edward Devanney secretly photographed canisters holding code systems used throughout Britain’s armed forces, which are normally locked in a safe.

Such a security breach could have jeopardised any chance of British submarines operating undetected by the enemy, the Old Bailey heard. Navy chiefs still do not know how he was able to open the safe and take the photos undetected.

Mr Justice Saunders told him: “You were prepared to betray your country and your colleagues. It needs to be understood by those who may be tempted to pass on secrets that long sentences will follow even unsuccessful attempts.”

Devanney rang the Russian embassy 11 times and later made contact with two men called Dimitri and Vladimir he believed to be enemy agents. He told them he was disillusioned with the Navy saying: “I’m just a bit p***** off with them. I know it’s petty but I just want to hurt them.”

…

Paul Cheston

12 December 2012

Find this story at 12 December 2012

© 2012 Evening Standard Limited