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

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

Find this story at 28 Marz 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

Find this story at 15 October 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Police promises

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Families’ disbelief

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dramatic arrest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

Ian Cobain
The Guardian, Monday 15 October 2012 18.08 BST

Find this story at 15 October 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

Ian Cobain
The Guardian, Monday 15 October 2012 18.06 BST

Find this story at 15 October 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From gangs to the military

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

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

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

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

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

Credit: Courtesy of Harvey Dong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arming the Black Panthers

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

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

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

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

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

Credit: Courtesy of Nancy Park

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit: Josiah Hooper/Center for Investigative Reporting

FBI’s reliance on informants

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit: Courtesy of the Oakland Tribune

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

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

…

Aug 20, 2012
Seth Rosenfeld
Contributor

Find this story at 20 August 2012

© Copyright 2012, Center for Investigative Reporting

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

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

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

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

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

Many lurid details would emerge from the Redlands raid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

By Philip Norman

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

Find this story at 1 October 2012

Published by Associated Newspapers Ltd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But David was caught carrying pot by Customs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

Find this story at 24 October 2010

Published by Associated Newspapers Ltd

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

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr Hunko went on to say:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find this story at 22 August 2012 

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

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

Project ISLE

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

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

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

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

The “workgroup of practitioners” will:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of many

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Global infiltration

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

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

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

Oversight and accountability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find this story at 28 August 2012

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Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

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

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

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

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

AIVD

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

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

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

Geen verlengstuk

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

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

Peking

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

…

Find this story at 22 August 2012

Copyright © 1998-2012 NU.nl is onderdeel van het netwerk van Sanoma Media Netherlands groep

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

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

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

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

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

Deepest Crisis in its History

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

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

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

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

Increasingly Embarrassing

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

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

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

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

…

Find this story at 19 July 2012

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

By Matthias Gebauer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

Find this story at 2 August 2012

AFP/jcw

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Find this story at 26 July 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

Find this story at 08 August 2012

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