Shaker Aamer, 44, has been a prisoner for more than 11 years
He has been cleared twice for freedom but still not released
The US says he can only leave Guantanamo for Saudi Arabia
Aamer says he witnessed torture that led to bogus intelligence for Iraq

Guantanamo prisoner: Shaker Aamer with two of his children

The last UK prisoner at America’s infamous terror jail camp at Guantanamo Bay is guarding a devastating secret: he witnessed the torture of another detainee in an Afghan interrogation unit which led to the crucial, bogus ‘intelligence’ that sparked Britain and America’s invasion of Iraq.

Shaker Aamer, 44, a father of five from Battersea, South London, has been a prisoner for more than 11 years even though he has never been charged – and has twice been cleared for freedom by the US.

The Mail on Sunday can reveal that America wants to silence him permanently by saying he can only leave Guantanamo for Saudi Arabia, the country he left at the age of 17. But his lawyers say if he goes there he would be forbidden from speaking in public or seeing his British wife and children – and would end up in another jail.

Aamer’s case is so explosive the Commons is set to hold an emergency debate on his case on Wednesday. A Mail on Sunday investigation has revealed:
Aamer has told his lawyer how British MI6 officers were present when he was brutally assaulted and interrogated at Bagram air base in Afghanistan – where he was known as ‘Prisoner No  5’.
He said MI6 officers were also in attendance when similar treatment was meted out to Ibn Shaikh al-Libi – who was then ‘rendered’ to Egypt and tortured into claiming Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was training Al Qaeda terrorists how to use chemical weapons. That was the vital confession used by President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell to justify war – and which persuaded Tony Blair that Saddam had to be toppled. If Aamer’s allegation that British officials witnessed Al-Libi’s ill-treatment is true, it would imply MI6 either knew about or was directly involved in his rendition to Egypt – one of the darkest episodes of the so-called ‘war on terror’.

Imprisoned: A US Army MP holds down the head of a detainee at Guantanamo so he is not identified
The Guantanamo detention facility is close to meltdown. Last week dozens of soldiers in riot gear stormed its minimum-security section, Camp 6. They fired on inmates with rubber bullets because mutineers had blocked the lenses of CCTV cameras with towels, sprayed guards with urine, and refused to allow their cells to be searched. The inmates involved are now all in solitary confinement.
A hunger strike started before the action has now spread through the entire jail. Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Todd Breasseale said 63 of Guantanamo’s 166 prisoners are now refusing food, up from 45 on Tuesday.

Aamer joined the strike in early February and has already lost several stone. Fifteen men are being force- fed through tubes inserted into their stomachs via their nostrils and four have been hospitalised.

Aamer’s back story is similar to those of many of the other nine British citizens and eight British residents who ended up at Guantanamo. Like them, he was caught in the chaos which followed the fall of the Taliban government in Afghanistan. Like them, he has paid a heavy price.

But there is a difference. All the others were released years ago, the first batch in March 2004.

Born in Medina, Saudi Arabia, Aamer studied in America and worked as a US Army translator during the first Gulf War. He moved to London where he continued translating and met and married Zin Siddique, a British Muslim woman.

They had already had four children and Zin was pregnant with their fifth when they went to Afghanistan – where Aamer worked for a charity – in the summer of 2001.

Prison life: Detainees at Camp Delta exercising. Shaker Aamer claims he has been abused by US soldiers during his detention at Guantanamo bay

Like other British Guantanamo detainees, he was captured by the Afghan Northern Alliance and handed over to the Americans – who were paying thousands of pounds in bounties for supposed Al Qaeda members.

After a short time at Bagram and Kandahar, he reached Guantanamo on February 14, 2002.

He has since become a high- profile figure – partly because of his fluent English – and he acts as a spokesman for the prisoners and led earlier protests and hunger strikes.

His lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, of human rights organisation Reprieve, says his actions as a figurehead cannot account for his failure to be released. Other such prisoners have been freed – including Ahmed Errachidi, a former chef in London. Errachidi was even dubbed ‘the General’ by his captors because of how he organised protests and resistance at the camp.

And the second of two tribunals which cleared Aamer was exhaustive. Established soon after Barack Obama became US President in 2009, its remit was to review all remaining Guantanamo cases. It involved not only extensive interviews between Aamer and officials from Washington, but input from all the US intelligence and security agencies as to whether he might be dangerous.

Mr Stafford Smith said their conclusion was unequivocal – he wasn’t a danger.

Yet neither Aamer nor his lawyers were told he had been cleared for release only to Saudi Arabia. Official disclosure of this critical fact emerged only six weeks ago when, after further talks with the Americans, Foreign Secretary William Hague wrote to Mr Stafford Smith.

Detainees wear orange jump suits at Guantanamo Bay in 2002, the year after Aamer was detained there. They cannot hear, see or smell anything

‘We remain committed to securing Mr Aamer’s release and return to the UK,’ he said. ‘However, it is our understanding Mr Aamer has only ever been cleared for transfer to Saudi Arabia.’

Even before the current wave of hunger strikes and protests, Aamer’s situation was wretched. In the high-security wing known as Camp 5, inmates spend 23 hours a day in cells measuring 6 ft by 10 ft, containing nothing but a toilet with a small built-in sink, a metal shelf bed with a thin mattress, and a few possessions such as a Koran and toothbrush.

Their recreation takes place in isolation – in a small unroofed area in the middle of the block. There is no association between prisoners: the only way they can communicate is by yelling down the corridor.

Now, however, conditions are much worse, with 24-hour solitary confinement. When Aamer asks for anything – even a bottle of water – he becomes a victim of what is known as ‘the Forcible Cell Extraction team’.

The team of six soldiers shackle his feet and arms behind his back and then lift him ‘like a potato sack’ – so that he cannot cause any trouble. It is a process Aamer finds ‘excruciatingly painful’ because of a long-term back injury.

Prisoner: Shaker Aamer has been a prisoner at Guantanamo for more than 11 years even though he has twice been cleared for freedom by the US

Jane Ellison – the Aamer family’s Conservative MP in Battersea who has been instrumental in securing this week’s Commons debate – said the US insistence on sending him to Saudi Arabia was ‘completely illogical’.

She said: ‘It would be disastrous for his family if he were sent to Saudi Arabia. Obama may not have been able to close Guantanamo, but I don’t understand why he can’t at least solve one small part of a very big problem by letting Shaker return to Britain.

‘It just doesn’t stack up. My feeling is they won’t let him go because he knows too much and if he spoke out it would just be too embarrassing – for some people in America, and perhaps also in Britain.’

So what does Aamer know that other prisoners don’t? Mr Stafford Smith believes it is linked to what was happening in Bagram in January 2002, just before Al-Libi was taken away by CIA agents from military custody and sent to Egypt. Aamer’s lawyer’s notes record he arrived in Bagram on Christmas Eve, 2001, and from the beginning, ‘British intelligence officers were complicit in my torture’.

There were, he has said, always at least two UK agents based there, and they witnessed the abuse he suffered: ‘I was walled – meaning that someone grabbed my head and slammed it into a wall. Further, they beat my head. I was also beaten with an axe handle. I was threatened with other kinds of abuse. People were shouting that they would kill me or I would die.’

Aamer told Mr Stafford Smith: ‘I was a witness to the torture of Ibn Shaikh al-Libi in Bagram. His case seems to me to be particularly important, and my witnessing of it particularly relevant to my ongoing detention  .  .  .  He was there being abused at the same time I was.

‘He was there being abused when the British came there. Indeed, I was taken into the room in the Bagram detention facility where he was being held. There were a number of interrogators in the room.’
GRIM REGIME OF US TERROR JAIL – AND KAFKAESQUE TIMELINE THAT DOOMED SHAKER AAMER

The Guantanamo prison in Cuba today bears little resemblance to the collection of open cages – known as Camp X-Ray – where prisoners were held when it opened in 2002.

Both they and their successor, Camp Delta, a collection of prefabricated sheds with hard roofs, have long been disused.

Instead, prisoners are held in three large, concrete two-storey buildings – each ringed by concentric security fences, along Recreation Road, which leads along the Cuban coast to a beach.
Camp 5 and Camp 6 are for ‘ordinary’ prisoners, guarded by the US military.

The super-secret Camp 7 is run by the CIA and reserved for prisoners formerly held in its ‘black site’ jails in countries such as Poland and Thailand. They include some of the world’s most notorious terrorists – including Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who face military trial as the alleged architects of 9/11.

Most of the remaining 166 detainees are said to be much less dangerous.

According to a survey by US lawyers, more than three-quarters of them were not captured ‘on the battlefield’ by Americans – but sold for huge bounty payments by the Afghan Northern Alliance or Pakistani tribesmen.

1996 – US-educated Saudi translator Shaker Aamer settles in London, marries Briton Zin Siddique.

Summer 2001 – Aamer takes family to Kabul and works for Saudi charity.

September 11, 2001 – Al Qaeda terrorists attack America.

November 2001 – Taliban regime falls.

December 18, 2001 – Ibn Shaikh al-Libi captured, taken to Bagram.

December 24, 2001 – Aamer handed to US troops by Northern Alliance; taken to Bagram.
Early January 2002 – Aamer allegedly abused with UK officials present and witnesses abuse of Al-Libi.

Mid January 2002 – Al-Libi sent by CIA to Egypt for torture.

February 14, 2002 – Aamer flown to Guantanamo.

October 2002-February 2003 – Bogus claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda in WMD, based on Al-Libi’s tortured confessions, made by Bush and Powell.

2004–09 – All 17 other UK-based Guantanamo detainees freed – but Aamer kept at camp.
October 2006 – Al-Libi flown to Libya and jailed.

November 2008 – Obama pledges to close Guantanamo.

July 2009 – Al-Libi allegedly murdered in Libyan jail.

2007 and 2009 – Aamer cleared by US tribunals as safe to release but he is not freed.

February 2013 – Foreign Secretary reveals US will only allow Aamer’s transfer to Saudi Arabia, not UK.

April 2013 – Guantanamo close to meltdown with mass hunger strike and riot.

…

By David Rose

PUBLISHED: 00:04 GMT, 21 April 2013 | UPDATED: 10:24 GMT, 21 April 2013

Find this story at 21 April 2013

© Associated Newspapers Ltd

In late January, Conservative MP and Minister for Security James Brokenshire led a delegation of nearly 25 “homeland security” firms to India on a trip which, in sharp contrast to the trade mission to India undertaken by David Cameron in February, received no coverage in the press whatsoever.

From 20 to 25 January multinational giants such as Agusta Westland, BAE Systems, G4S and Thales were taken to a number of Indian cities: Delhi, “for the government perspective”; Hyderabad, “the centre of the vast Naxal terrorism-troubled region and the home of a growing high tech industry base” where there was a “round table discussion with local security forces”; and Mumbai, “the focus of safer cities and coastal security initiatives” where attendees were treated to “a conference and round table discussion with local government security agencies and business.” [1]

A number of lesser-known firms were present alongside the major corporations. Evidence Talks attended, which was founded in 1993 and describes itself as “one of the most highly regarded digital forensic consultancies in the UK.” The company supplies tools for the extraction and analysis of data from digital devices and boasts that its SPEKTOR tool is “used worldwide by police, military, government and commercial customers…[and] enables users with minimal skills to safely, quickly and forensicly [sic] review the contents of computers, removable media and even cell phones.” [2]

Cunning Running also went on UKTI’s trip, and claims to provide “threat visualisation for the real world.” The firm say that they “develop high quality software solutions for the defence and homeland security markets,” supplying “direct to governments, law enforcement agencies, and militaries in the UK, USA, Europe and Australia.” [3]

“The security sector in India is vast and desperate to modernise,” said UKTI’s flyer for the mission. “India has approximately 1.2 million police and 1.3 million paramilitary forces personnel. With this, the Central Reserve Police Force, at 350,000, is the largest paramilitary force in the world” – a vast number of personnel who could be equipped with the latest “homeland security” gadgets and expertise.

The flyer for the mission seems to highlight the fact that backing the security industry as it moves into developing economies is seen as a national endeavour. “The [Indian] market is the subject of stiff competition from international competitors such as the US, Israel and France,” UKTI said, “but is simply too big to ignore.”

UKTI highlighted that “the on-the-ground costs of this mission (receptions, ground transport, conference facilities, promotional literature) are being wholly subsidised on behalf of UK companies by UKTI and its partners/sponsors” (emphasis in original). Those partners and sponsors included the Indian Home Ministry and the Confederation of Indian Industries.

Furthermore, companies were “able to avail a government-negotiated rate at the hotels being used throughout the programme.”

The “only charge to companies” was for the UKTI Overseas Market Introduction Service (OMIS) – a “flexible business tool, letting you use the services of our trade teams, located in our embassies, high commissions and consulates across the world, to benefit your business.” [4]

The government has recently made additional funding available in order to encourage wider use of OMIS by UK firms, with a 50% discount (up to a maximum of £750) available to “all eligible companies commissioning an order linked to a UKTI, Scottish Development International (SDI), Welsh Government (WG) or Invest Northern Ireland (INI) supported outward mission or Market Visit Support (MVS).” [5]

While UKTI has clawed back some money from the firms who went on the trade mission to India, the department – described by Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) as “a taxpayer-funded arms sales unit” [6] – initially spent over £35,000 subsidising companies. In its response to a freedom of information (FOI) request from Statewatch, UKTI said that “we have also generated income of £13,485 with another £1,170 expected. Therefore the net cost minus the expenses still to come is £20,997.98.”

This amount pales in comparison to the total amount of subsidies it is estimated are awarded to defence and security firms by the UK government every year, but it also highlights the breadth of support given to a highly controversial industry.

Research by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimated that, between 2007 and 2010, total government subsidies for UK arms exports (including both defence and security firms) totalled at its highest £751.2 million, and at its lowest £668.3 million. [7]

A spokesperson for CAAT criticised the mission to India, saying that: “Unfortunately the UK government continues to prioritise promoting corporate interests over promoting human rights and real security – and expects the UK public to subsidise this.”

David Cameron’s February trade mission to India received heavy press coverage and saw the Prime Minister accompanied by a number of CEOs from defence and security firms, including Dick Oliver, the chairman of BAE Systems; Robin Southwell, the CEO of EADS UK; Steve Wadley, the UK managing director of the missile firm MBDA; and Victor Chavez, the chief executive of Thales UK. [8]

…

Sources
[1] UKTI DSO, UKTI homeland security trade mission to India
[2] Evidence Talks, Company Profile
[3] Cunning Running website
[4] UKTI, OMIS – Overseas Market Introduction Service, 25 January 2012
[5] UKTI, Response to FOI request, 22 March 2013
[6] Campaign Against Arms Trade, UKTI: Armed & Dangerous, 8 July 2011
[7] Susan T. Jackson, SIPRI assessment of UK arms export subsidies, 25 May 2011
[8] Kaye Stearman, Cameron’s Indian odyssey – brickbats and cricket bats, fighter jets and on-message execs, CAATblog, 22 February 2013
[9] Global Day of Action on Military Spending

15.4.2013

Find this story at 15 April 2013

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G4S chief executive Nick Buckles paid £1.19m, up £170,000 on last year
Company lost £88m in Olympics fiasco when they failed to provide security

The chief executive of the company behind the security-scandal at the London Olympics last summer received a record pay packet in 2012, following million pound losses during the Games.

G4S boss Nick Buckles was paid a total £1.19million in 2012, up £170,000 on his 2011 paycheck, despite the company nursing an £88million loss on the London 2012 contract.

The security giant failed to provide the 10,400 guards needed during this summer’s main event and the military was forced to step in.

Big Bucks: Nick Buckles, pictured defending his company in the Commons after G4S’s Olympics blunder, was paid an extra £170,000 in 2012 compared to the previous year

As well as an £830,000 salary, Mr Buckles’ 2012 pay packet included £23,500 in benefits and £332,000 in payments in lieu of pension. Mr Buckles 2012 pay packet was boosted by bigger pension payments.

However, neither he nor other executive directors earned a performance-related bonus.

G4S said in its annual report Mr Buckles’ and other executives’ salaries were frozen in 2012 and will not increase this year – the fourth time in five years their salaries have been frozen.

But it revealed plans to increase potential long-term share bonuses this year to ‘ensure that the directors continue to be incentivised and motivated’.

Mr Buckles’ maximum shares bonus could rise to 2.5 times his salary from a maximum of two times in 2012 – meaning a potential £2.1 million in shares if he hits targets.

Loss: G4S lost £88m in the London Olympics Games contract after they failed to provide all the security guards needed for the Games

Performance-related bonuses will also now depend on factors including organic growth, cash generation, strategic execution and organisation, instead of being tied purely to profits.

G4S’s Olympics failure saw Mr Buckles hauled before MPs, during which he admitted it was a ‘humiliating shambles for the company’. Extra military personnel had to be called in to fill the gap left by G4S’s failure to supply enough staff for the £284 million contract.

Mr Buckles said in the annual report it marked ‘one of the toughest periods in the group’s history’.

…

By Daily Mail Reporter

PUBLISHED: 18:12 GMT, 15 April 2013 | UPDATED: 06:42 GMT, 16 April 2013

Find this story at 15 April 2013

© Associated Newspapers Ltd

Former detective Christian Plowman writes book claiming that unit targeted low-level criminals rather than criminals at top of chain

Christian Plowman claims that he often found himself targeting crack addicts instead of dealers and spying on ordinary people. Photograph: Toby Melville/PA

Heroin and crack cocaine bought with taxpayers’ money was routinely given to drug dealers in return for information, a former Scotland Yard undercover officer has alleged.

Christian Plowman, 39, claims that officers from SO10, the elite covert operations unit of the Metropolitan police, would allow dealers to take amounts of class-A drugs as a form of bribe.

Although not illegal, the practice of officers handing over illicit drugs in return for leads is likely to reignite the debate over the ethics of undercover policing and bring fresh accusations of a lack of control over covert operatives.

“We were treading a line. Often we’d buy some drugs off somebody who would be a junkie and he would promise to take us directly to the dealer the next time, but in return for that he’d want some of the drugs he’d bought for us. We had to be careful that if we agreed to that, he took the drugs himself so he couldn’t say that we supplied him,” said Plowman.

But Plowman said they never sold drugs, unlike detective constable Nicholas McFadden of West Yorkshire police, who was jailed for 23 years last Thursday after stealing more than £1.2m-worth of drugs seized in police raids and selling them back onto the streets.

Speaking publicly for the first time about his experiences as a covert operative since leaving the Met in 2011, Plowman also accused the undercover unit of targeting “low-hanging fruit” instead of individuals at the top of the criminal chain. He said some covert operations became focused upon getting “heads on sticks”, which Plowman said meant “let’s bag as many as people as possible for whatever offence we can”.

As a result, the full-time undercover officer claims he often found himself targeting crack addicts instead of dealers and spying on ordinary people.

Plowman spent 16 years in the Met and was one of around 10 full-time covert operatives. He was a close friend of Mark Kennedy, 43, the undercover officer who had at least one sexual relationship with a woman while infiltrating eco-activists. Plowman has written a book about his experiences, Crossing the Line, which is published next month.

Although he praises his colleagues, the former officer describes the culture of SO10 as riven with machismo, to the extent that undercover officers who requested psychological help were seen as not fit for the job.

“You need a culture where you can go and see a shrink and you won’t be blacklisted, but there was a proper locker-room culture,” said Plowman, who now lives abroad and works as a security manager for a fashion firm. Unable to ask for support and struggling to balance his aliases with his own identity, Plowman admits he contemplated suicide.

He reveals that some former colleagues have threatened him since he left. “One of them said ‘next time you’re in London, I’m gonna headbutt you’, but who’d do that anyway? You’re a policeman for starters.”

Plowman’s last job was working at a north London pawnshop called TJ’s Trading Post that was set up by Scotland Yard to trade in stolen goods, but which he believes operated as a “honey trap” that lured people to commit crime. More than 100 people are believed to have been convicted, many for illegally trading their own passports and driving licences.

Plowman claims the store encouraged people in a poor area to commit offences by giving the impression that they could make easy money by trading ID documents. “They were not people whose arrest would make any visible impact on the community. If TJ’s had never opened, those people would not have been in prison for any offence,” he said.

…

The Met declined to comment.

Mark Townsend
The Observer, Saturday 6 April 2013 15.40 BST

Find this story at 6 April 2013

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

Mark Kennedy, a British police officer who spent seven years infiltrating environmental and activist groups while working undercover for the Metropolitan Police force in London, may have monitored an American computer scientist and spied on others while in the United States.

The computer scientist, Harry Halpin, said that he was at a gathering of activists and academics in Manhattan in January 2008 that Mr. Kennedy — then using the pseudonym Mark Stone — also attended. He said Mr. Kennedy collected information about him and about a man and a woman who were accused later that year of associating with “a terrorist enterprise” and sabotaging high-speed train lines in France.

In addition to Mr. Halpin’s assertions, documents connected to the case indicate that prosecutors in Paris looked to American officials to provide evidence about a handful of people in the United States and events that took place in New York in 2008.

“Mark Kennedy spied upon myself on United States soil, as well as Julien Coupat and Yildune Levy,” Mr. Halpin wrote in an e-mail, naming two defendants in the group known in France as the Tarnac 10, after the small mountain village where several of them had lived in a commune.

Mr. Halpin added that Mr. Coupat introduced him to Mr. Kennedy in the fall of 2007. “It appears that Mark Kennedy also passed information to the F.B.I. that I knew Julian Coupat,” he added.

Reached via e-mail on Thursday, Mr. Kennedy, who now works with The Densus Group, a security consulting firm based in the United States, declined to comment on Mr. Halpin’s statements.

In 2010, Mr. Halpin said that F.B.I. agents detained him for five hours after he arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport from Europe, seizing his computer and threatening put him in jail if he did not agree to provide information about Mr. Coupat. Mr. Halpin said that he refused but the agents let him go when they were asked to explain the charges against him.

A spokesman for the F.B.I. in New York, James Margolin, declined to comment on the encounter described by Mr. Halpin.

The accounts of events in New York provided by Mr. Halpin and others added a new twist to two dramas that have received widespread attention in Europe, where they have slowly unraveled over the past few years.

Mr. Kennedy’s actions while spying on political activists in Britain have brought embarrassment to Scotland Yard, as officials there have been forced to confront allegations of inappropriate behavior by some undercover operatives.

As reported in The Guardian newspaper, Mr. Kennedy was said to have had sexual relationships with a number of women connected to groups he had infiltrated.

In 2011, the trial of six people accused of planning to take over a coal-fired power plant collapsed amid claims, denied by Mr. Kennedy, that he had acted as an agent provocateur. Mr. Kennedy was also shown to have worked undercover in more than 20 other countries, including Iceland, Spain and Germany, where members of parliament have raised questions about his role.

Eventually, 10 women, including three who said they had intimate relationships with Mr. Kennedy, sued the police in London saying that they had formed strong personal ties with undercover officers. Later, it was reported in British papers that Mr. Kennedy sued the police, saying that his superiors had failed to prevent him from sleeping with an activist and falling in love.

In France, l’affaire de Tarnac, as it is known, has become a cause célèbre among civil libertarians who have criticized the use of terrorism statutes against people suspected of sabotage but not accused of harming anyone. The defendants have denied wrongdoing, but the authorities have portrayed them as dangerous subversives who plotted attacks against the state then “refused to answer questions, or gave whimsical answers” about their activities.

An unusual element of the case involves a book called “The Coming Insurrection” by an anonymous group of authors called the Invisible Committee. The book advocates rebellion against capitalist culture, encourages readers to form self-sufficient communes and calls for “a diffuse, efficient guerrilla war to give us back our ungovernableness.” Prosecutors have said that Mr. Coupat and his comrades wrote the volume. The suspects denied authorship but Mr. Coupat told journalists in France that the book had merit.

While the Tarnac case has moved slowly through the French legal system, documents have emerged showing that F.B.I. agents were posted outside the Manhattan building where the activists gathered in 2008, videotaping the arrival and departure of Mr. Halpin, Mr. Coupat and Ms. Levy, among others. Those tapes were later given to French prosecutors along with a detailed log compiled by the F.B.I. agents.

As the French investigation continued, documents show that prosecutors in Paris asked officials in the United States about a “meeting of anarchists” in New York and about several people who could be connected to Mr. Coupat. They also asked for information about a low-grade explosive attack in March 2008 that damaged an armed forces recruitment center in Times Square.

In 2012, letters show that Justice Department officials said they had not identified any connection between the people at the Manhattan gathering and the attack on the recruitment center. The officials also gave French prosecutors background information on some American citizens who appeared to have visited the commune in Tarnac and records of an interview that F.B.I. agents had conducted with an assistant professor and French philosophist at New York University who had translated “The Coming Insurrection.”

The professor, Alexander Galloway, told the agents that he had taught the books in a class on political theory and French philosophy, but had never met Mr. Coupat.

Official documents do not mention Mr. Kennedy but several people from New York said that he spent about a week there in early 2008 on his way to visit a brother in Cleveland. During that period, witnesses said Mr. Kennedy attended several informal gatherings, sometimes with Mr. Coupat and Ms. Levy.

…

March 15, 2013, 3:06 pm
By COLIN MOYNIHAN

Find this story at 15 March 2013

Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

boek van Bob Drogin
Ook verschenen in het Nederland als Codenaam Curveball

Erg Amerikaans boek, de tekst schreeuwt je tegemoet wat gaandeweg begint tegen te staan. Toch is het een verdienstelijk boek. Minutieus brengt Drogin het functioneren van geheime diensten in beeld tegen het licht van een menselijke bron. Curveball is de man die de bron was van de informatie over de chemische fabrieken op wielen van Saddam Hussein. De hele wereld kreeg ze te zien toen Colin Powell beelden van deze diepladers tijdens een praatje bij de Veiligheidsraad vertoonde. Ze bleken echter niet te bestaan. De informant of beter gezegd overloper, Curveball, wordt afgeschilderd als een leugenaar, maar eigenlijk is hij een klokkenluider. Geheime diensten deugen niet doordat alles geheim is en daarmee ook te manipuleren. Het boek van Drogin geeft inzicht in het gebrek aan samenwerking tussen diverse geheime diensten zowel nationaal als internationaal, de politieke sturing van diensten, de tunnelvisie en het wishful thinking.
Curveball is een voormalig taxichauffeur uit Irak die in Duitsland asiel aanvraagt. Hij presenteert zich als een politiek vluchteling die aan een super geheim biologisch wapenprogramma in Irak heeft meegewerkt. Bij zijn asielaanvraag zegt hij niet direct dat hij dat werk deed, maar in de loop der tijd spint hij een verhaal met behulp van informatie die hij vindt op het internet. De BND, de Duitse geheime dienst voor buitenlandse aangelegenheden, wordt volledig om de tuin geleid, hoewel zij twijfels blijven houden omdat ze zijn verhaal niet kunnen checken. De Engelsen voegen er wat feiten aan toe en een van de vele inlichtingen en veiligheidsdiensten in de Verenigde Staten denken de bron te hebben gevonden voor het bestaan van het biologische en chemische wapenprogramma van Saddam Hussein. De stunt van Curveball is hilarisch, maar ook tragisch. De oorlog in Irak was er misschien ook zonder hem wel gekomen, maar hij heeft het een schijn van legitimatie gegeven. Men dacht dat Irak chemische en biologische wapen had, wat ook logisch was, want ongeveer alle apparatuur en grondstoffen waren door het Westen geleverd en Saddam Hussein had ze tot twee keer toe gebruikt. Na de eerste wapeninspectie ronde, waarbij een groot deel van deze wapens waren vernietigd begin jaren negentig, bleef vooral de Verenigde Staten, maar ook andere staten Irak hardnekkig beschuldigen van de productie van biologische en chemische wapens. Het bewijs ontbrak echter. Curveball stapte begin 1999 in deze status quo en reconstrueerde met behulp van de rapporten van de wapeninspecties van Verenigde Naties die hij van het internet plukte een verhaal van mobiele laboratoria. Bij zijn verhaal gebruikte hij zowel feiten als fictie, maar doordat het verhaal aansloot bij de veronderstelling van veel diensten dat Irak over faciliteiten beschikte, kon het wortel schieten in de inlichtingen gemeenschap. Alle feiten die zijn verhaal tegenspraken werden gaandeweg weggemoffeld en het bestaan van mobiele laboratoria was een vaststaand feit. Zoals bij de Schiedammer parkmoord tunnelvisie leidde tot de veroordeling van een onschuldige werd mede door toedoen van Curveball Irak in een tunnelvisie ervan beticht chemische en biologische wapens te produceren. Niet dat het Irakese regime nu een stel lieverdjes waren, maar de beschuldigingen waren ongegrond. Er moest worden ingegrepen. Een tunnelvisie die leidde tot een straf, maar niet alleen voor Hussein en zijn staf. Het gehele Irakese volk moest boeten. De oorlog heeft op dit moment het leven gekost van tussen de 80.000 en de 400.000 Irakezen en een ware exodus ontketend. En zullen de schuldigen van dit drama terecht staan? Nee, dat past niet in een rechtstaat die beweert het altijd bij het rechte eind te hebben. Saddam Hussein was een wrede dictator die hoe dan ook een keer weg moest. Met of zonder Curveball.

Find this story at 2 April 2008

BBC’s Panorama reveals fresh evidence that agencies dismissed intelligence from Iraqi foreign minister and spy chief

Tony Blair’s claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction are challenged again in Monday’s Panorama. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/PA

Fresh evidence has been revealed about how MI6 and the CIA were told through secret channels by Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister and his head of intelligence that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction.

Tony Blair told parliament before the war that intelligence showed Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programme was “active”, “growing” and “up and running”.

A special BBC Panorama programme aired on Monday night details how British and US intelligence agencies were informed by top sources months before the invasion that Iraq had no active WMD programme, and that the information was not passed to subsequent inquiries.

It describes how Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, told the CIA’s station chief in Paris at the time, Bill Murray, through an intermediary that Iraq had “virtually nothing” in terms of WMD.

Sabri said in a statement that the Panorama story was “totally fabricated”.

However, Panorama confirms that three months before the war an MI6 officer met Iraq’s head of intelligence, Tahir Habbush al-Tikriti, who also said that Saddam had no active WMD. The meeting in the Jordanian capital, Amman, took place days before the British government published its now widely discredited Iraqi weapons dossier in September 2002.

Lord Butler, the former cabinet secretary who led an inquiry into the use of intelligence in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, tells the programme that he was not told about Sabri’s comments, and that he should have been.

Butler says of the use of intelligence: “There were ways in which people were misled or misled themselves at all stages.”

When it was suggested to him that the body that probably felt most misled of all was the British public, Butler replied: “Yes, I think they’re, they’re, they got every reason think that.”

The programme shows how the then chief of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, responded to information from Iraqi sources later acknowledged to be unreliable.

…

• The Spies Who Fooled the World, BBC Panorama Special, BBC1, Monday, 18 March, 10.35pm

Richard Norton-Taylor
guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 March 2013 06.00 GMT

Find this story at 18 March 2013 
© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

The lies of two Iraqi spies were central to the claim – at the heart of the UK and US decision to go to war in Iraq – that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. But even before the fighting started, intelligence from highly-placed sources was available suggesting he did not, Panorama has learned.

Six months before the invasion, the then Prime Minister Tony Blair warned the country about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

“The programme is not shut down,” he said. “It is up and running now.” Mr Blair used the intelligence on WMD to justify the war.

That same day, 24 September 2002, the government published its controversial dossier on the former Iraqi leader’s WMD.

The BBC has learned that two key pieces of intelligence, which could have prevented the Iraq war, were either dismissed or used selectively

Designed for public consumption, it had a personal foreword by Mr Blair, who assured readers Saddam Hussein had continued to produce WMD “beyond doubt”.

But, while it was never mentioned in the dossier, there was doubt. The original intelligence from MI6 and other agencies, on which the dossier was based, was clearly qualified.

The intelligence was, as the Joint Intelligence Committee noted in its original assessments, “sporadic and patchy” and “remains limited”.

The exclusion of these qualifications gave the dossier a certainty that was never warranted.
Intelligence failure

Much of the key intelligence used by Downing Street and the White House was based on fabrication, wishful thinking and lies.

Lord Butler says he was unaware of some intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have WMD

As Gen Sir Mike Jackson, then head of the British Army, says, “what appeared to be gold in terms of intelligence turned out to be fool’s gold, because it looked like gold, but it wasn’t”.

There was other intelligence, but it was less alarming.

Lord Butler, who after the war, conducted the first government inquiry into WMD intelligence, says Mr Blair and the intelligence community “misled themselves”.

Lord Butler and Sir Mike agree Mr Blair did not lie, because they say he genuinely believed Saddam Hussein had WMD.

The most notorious spy who fooled the world was the Iraqi defector, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi.

His fabrications and lies were a crucial part of the intelligence used to justify one of the most divisive wars in recent history. And they contributed to one of the biggest intelligence failures in living memory.

He became known as Curveball, the codename given to him by US intelligence that turned out to be all too appropriate.
Continue reading the main story
“
Start Quote

I thought we’d produced probably the best intelligence that anybody produced in the pre-war period”
Bill Murray
Former CIA Paris station head

Mr Janabi arrived as an Iraqi asylum seeker at a German refugee centre in 1999 and said he was a chemical engineer, thus attracting the attention of the German intelligence service, the BND.

He told them he had seen mobile biological laboratories mounted on trucks to evade detection.

The Germans had doubts about Mr Janabi which they shared with the Americans and the British.

MI6 had doubts too, which they expressed in a secret cable to the CIA: “Elements of [his] behaviour strike us as typical of individuals we would normally assess as fabricators [but we are] inclined to believe that a significant part of [Curveball’s] reporting is true.”

The British decided to stick with Curveball, as did the Americans. He later admitted being a fabricator and liar.

There appeared to be corroborative intelligence from another spy who fooled the world.
Continue reading the main story
Panorama: Find out more
Peter Taylor presents Panorama: The Spies Who Fooled the World
BBC One, Monday 18 March at 22:35 GMT
Then available in the UK on the BBC iPlayer

He was an Iraqi former intelligence officer, called Maj Muhammad Harith, who said it had been his idea to develop mobile biological laboratories and claimed he had ordered seven Renault trucks to put them on.

He made his way to Jordan and then talked to the Americans.

Muhammad Harith apparently made up his story because he wanted a new home. His intelligence was dismissed as fabrication 10 months before the war.

MI6 also thought they had further corroboration of Curveball’s story, when a trusted source – codenamed Red River – revealed he had been in touch with a secondary source who said he had seen fermenters on trucks. But he never claimed the fermenters had anything to do with biological agents.

After the war, MI6 decided that Red River was unreliable as a source.
Handmade suit

But not all the intelligence was wrong. Information from two highly-placed sources close to Saddam Hussein was correct.

Both said Iraq did not have any active WMD.

The CIA’s source was Iraq’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri.

Tahir Jalil Habbush Al-Tikriti said Saddam Hussein had no active WMD

Former CIA man Bill Murray – then head of the agency’s station in Paris – dealt with him via an intermediary, an Arab journalist, to whom he gave $200,000 (£132,000) in cash as a down payment.

He said Naji Sabri “looked like a person of real interest – someone who we really should be talking to”.

Murray put together a list of questions to put to the minister, with WMD at the top.

The intermediary met Naji Sabri in New York in September 2002 when he was about to address the UN – six months before the start of the war and just a week before the British dossier was published.

The intermediary bought the minister a handmade suit which the minister wore at the UN, a sign Mr Murray took to mean that Naji Sabri was on board.

Mr Murray says the upshot was intelligence that Saddam Hussein “had some chemical weapons left over from the early 90s, [and] had taken the stocks and given them to various tribes that were loyal to him. [He] had intentions to have weapons of mass destruction – chemical, biological and nuclear – but at that point in time he virtually had nothing”.

The CIA insists the intelligence report from the “source” indicated the former Iraqi president did have WMD programmes because, the agency says, it mentioned that, “Iraq was currently producing and stockpiling chemical weapons” and “as a last resort had mobile launchers armed with chemical weapons”.

Mr Murray disputes this account.

The second highly-placed source was Iraq’s head of intelligence, Tahir Jalil Habbush Al-Tikriti – the jack of diamonds in America’s “most wanted” deck of cards which rated members of Saddam Hussein’s government.

A senior MI6 officer met him in Jordan in January 2003 – two months before the war.

Bill Murray says the “best intelligence” was not used

It was thought Habbush wanted to negotiate a deal that would stop the imminent invasion. He also said Saddam Hussein had no active WMD.

Surprisingly, Lord Butler – who says Britons have “every right” to feel misled by their prime minister – only became aware of the information from Habbush after his report was published.

“I can’t explain that,” says Lord Butler.

“This was something which I think our review did miss. But when we asked about it, we were told that it wasn’t a very significant fact, because SIS [MI6] discounted it as something designed by Saddam to mislead.”

Lord Butler says he also knew nothing about the intelligence from Naji Sabri.

Ex-CIA man Bill Murray was not happy with the way the intelligence from these two highly-placed sources had been used.

“I thought we’d produced probably the best intelligence that anybody produced in the pre-war period, all of which came out – in the long run – to be accurate. The information was discarded and not used.”

Panorama: The Spies Who Fooled the World, BBC One, Monday 18 March at 22:35 GMT and then available in the UK on the BBC iPlayer.

18 March 2013 Last updated at 00:43 GMT
By Peter Taylor
BBC News

Find this story at 18 March 2013

Watch the episode online

BBC © 2013

Smart technology and the sort of big data available to social networking sites are helping police target crime before it happens. But is this ethical?

Companies such as Facebook have begun using algorithms and historical data to predict which of their users might commit crimes. Illustration: Noma Bar

The police have a very bright future ahead of them – and not just because they can now look up potential suspects on Google. As they embrace the latest technologies, their work is bound to become easier and more effective, raising thorny questions about privacy, civil liberties, and due process.

For one, policing is in a good position to profit from “big data”. As the costs of recording devices keep falling, it’s now possible to spot and react to crimes in real time. Consider a city like Oakland in California. Like many other American cities, today it is covered with hundreds of hidden microphones and sensors, part of a system known as ShotSpotter, which not only alerts the police to the sound of gunshots but also triangulates their location. On verifying that the noises are actual gunshots, a human operator then informs the police.

It’s not hard to imagine ways to improve a system like ShotSpotter. Gunshot-detection systems are, in principle, reactive; they might help to thwart or quickly respond to crime, but they won’t root it out. The decreasing costs of computing, considerable advances in sensor technology, and the ability to tap into vast online databases allow us to move from identifying crime as it happens – which is what the ShotSpotter does now – to predicting it before it happens.

Instead of detecting gunshots, new and smarter systems can focus on detecting the sounds that have preceded gunshots in the past. This is where the techniques and ideologies of big data make another appearance, promising that a greater, deeper analysis of data about past crimes, combined with sophisticated algorithms, can predict – and prevent – future ones. This is a practice known as “predictive policing”, and even though it’s just a few years old, many tout it as a revolution in how police work is done. It’s the epitome of solutionism; there is hardly a better example of how technology and big data can be put to work to solve the problem of crime by simply eliminating crime altogether. It all seems too easy and logical; who wouldn’t want to prevent crime before it happens?

Police in America are particularly excited about what predictive policing – one of Time magazine’s best inventions of 2011 – has to offer; Europeans are slowly catching up as well, with Britain in the lead. Take the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), which is using software called PredPol. The software analyses years of previously published statistics about property crimes such as burglary and automobile theft, breaks the patrol map into 500 sq ft zones, calculates the historical distribution and frequency of actual crimes across them, and then tells officers which zones to police more vigorously.

It’s much better – and potentially cheaper – to prevent a crime before it happens than to come late and investigate it. So while patrolling officers might not catch a criminal in action, their presence in the right place at the right time still helps to deter criminal activity. Occasionally, though, the police might indeed disrupt an ongoing crime. In June 2012 the Associated Press reported on an LAPD captain who wasn’t so sure that sending officers into a grid zone on the edge of his coverage area – following PredPol’s recommendation – was such a good idea. His officers, as the captain expected, found nothing; however, when they returned several nights later, they caught someone breaking a window. Score one for PredPol?

Trials of PredPol and similar software began too recently to speak of any conclusive results. Still, the intermediate results look quite impressive. In Los Angeles, five LAPD divisions that use it in patrolling territory populated by roughly 1.3m people have seen crime decline by 13%. The city of Santa Cruz, which now also uses PredPol, has seen its burglaries decline by nearly 30%. Similar uplifting statistics can be found in many other police departments across America.

Other powerful systems that are currently being built can also be easily reconfigured to suit more predictive demands. Consider the New York Police Department’s latest innovation – the so-called Domain Awareness System – which syncs the city’s 3,000 closed-circuit camera feeds with arrest records, 911 calls, licence plate recognition technology, and radiation detectors. It can monitor a situation in real time and draw on a lot of data to understand what’s happening. The leap from here to predicting what might happen is not so great.

If PredPol’s “prediction” sounds familiar, that’s because its methods were inspired by those of prominent internet companies. Writing in The Police Chief magazine in 2009, a senior LAPD officer lauded Amazon’s ability to “understand the unique groups in their customer base and to characterise their purchasing patterns”, which allows the company “not only to anticipate but also to promote or otherwise shape future behaviour”. Thus, just as Amazon’s algorithms make it possible to predict what books you are likely to buy next, similar algorithms might tell the police how often – and where – certain crimes might happen again. Ever stolen a bicycle? Then you might also be interested in robbing a grocery store.

Here we run into the perennial problem of algorithms: their presumed objectivity and quite real lack of transparency. We can’t examine Amazon’s algorithms; they are completely opaque and have not been subject to outside scrutiny. Amazon claims, perhaps correctly, that secrecy allows it to stay competitive. But can the same logic be applied to policing? If no one can examine the algorithms – which is likely to be the case as predictive-policing software will be built by private companies – we won’t know what biases and discriminatory practices are built into them. And algorithms increasingly dominate many other parts of our legal system; for example, they are also used to predict how likely a certain criminal, once on parole or probation, is to kill or be killed. Developed by a University of Pennsylvania professor, this algorithm has been tested in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington DC. Such probabilistic information can then influence sentencing recommendations and bail amounts, so it’s hardly trivial.
Los Angeles police arrest a man. The force is using predictive software to direct its patrols. Photograph: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

But how do we know that the algorithms used for prediction do not reflect the biases of their authors? For example, crime tends to happen in poor and racially diverse areas. Might algorithms – with their presumed objectivity – sanction even greater racial profiling? In most democratic regimes today, police need probable cause – some evidence and not just guesswork – to stop people in the street and search them. But armed with such software, can the police simply say that the algorithms told them to do it? And if so, how will the algorithms testify in court? Techno-utopians will probably overlook such questions and focus on the abstract benefits that algorithmic policing has to offer; techno-sceptics, who start with some basic knowledge of the problems, constraints and biases that already pervade modern policing, will likely be more critical.

Legal scholar Andrew Guthrie Ferguson has studied predictive policing in detail. Ferguson cautions against putting too much faith in the algorithms and succumbing to information reductionism. “Predictive algorithms are not magic boxes that divine future crime, but instead probability models of future events based on current environmental vulnerabilities,” he notes.

But why do they work? Ferguson points out that there will be future crime not because there was past crime but because “the environmental vulnerability that encouraged the first crime is still unaddressed”. When the police, having read their gloomy forecast about yet another planned car theft, see an individual carrying a screwdriver in one of the predicted zones, this might provide reasonable suspicion for a stop. But, as Ferguson notes, if the police arrested the gang responsible for prior crimes the day before, but the model does not yet reflect this information, then prediction should be irrelevant, and the police will need some other reasonable ground for stopping the individual. If they do make the stop, then they shouldn’t be able to say in court, “The model told us to.” This, however, may not be obvious to the person they have stopped, who has no familiarity with the software and its algorithms.

Then there’s the problem of under-reported crimes. While most homicides are reported, many rapes and home break-ins are not. Even in the absence of such reports, local police still develop ways of knowing when something odd is happening in their neighbourhoods. Predictive policing, on the other hand, might replace such intuitive knowledge with a naive belief in the comprehensive power of statistics. If only data about reported crimes are used to predict future crimes and guide police work, some types of crime might be left unstudied – and thus unpursued.

What to do about the algorithms then? It is a rare thing to say these days but there is much to learn from the financial sector in this regard. For example, after a couple of disasters caused by algorithmic trading in August 2012, financial authorities in Hong Kong and Australia drafted proposals to establish regular independent audits of the design, development and modification of the computer systems used for algorithmic trading. Thus, just as financial auditors could attest to a company’s balance sheet, algorithmic auditors could verify if its algorithms are in order.

As algorithms are further incorporated into our daily lives – from Google’s Autocomplete to PredPol – it seems prudent to subject them to regular investigations by qualified and ideally public-spirited third parties. One advantage of the auditing solution is that it won’t require the audited companies publicly to disclose their trade secrets, which has been the principal objection – voiced, of course, by software companies – to increasing the transparency of their algorithms.

The police are also finding powerful allies in Silicon Valley. Companies such as Facebook have begun using algorithms and historical data to predict which of their users might commit crimes using their services. Here is how it works: Facebook’s own predictive systems can flag certain users as suspicious by studying certain behavioural cues: the user only writes messages to others under 18; most of the user’s contacts are female; the user is typing keywords like “sex” or “date.” Staffers can then examine each case and report users to the police as necessary. Facebook’s concern with its own brand here is straightforward: no one should think that the platform is harbouring criminals.

In 2011 Facebook began using PhotoDNA, a Microsoft service that allows it to scan every uploaded picture and compare it with child-porn images from the FBI’s National Crime Information Centre. Since then it has expanded its analysis beyond pictures as well. In mid-2012 Reuters reported on how Facebook, armed with its predictive algorithms, apprehended a middle-aged man chatting about sex with a 13-year-old girl, arranging to meet her the day after. The police contacted the teen, took over her computer, and caught the man.

Facebook is at the cutting edge of algorithmic surveillance here: just like police departments that draw on earlier crime statistics, Facebook draws on archives of real chats that preceded real sex assaults. Curiously, Facebook justifies its use of algorithms by claiming that they tend to be less intrusive than humans. “We’ve never wanted to set up an environment where we have employees looking at private communications, so it’s really important that we use technology that has a very low false-positive rate,” Facebook’s chief of security told Reuters.

It’s difficult to question the application of such methods to catching sexual predators who prey on children (not to mention that Facebook may have little choice here, as current US child-protection laws require online platforms used by teens to be vigilant about predators). But should Facebook be allowed to predict any other crimes? After all, it can easily engage in many other kinds of similar police work: detecting potential drug dealers, identifying potential copyright violators (Facebook already prevents its users from sharing links to many file-sharing sites), and, especially in the wake of the 2011 riots in the UK, predicting the next generation of troublemakers. And as such data becomes available, the temptation to use it becomes almost irresistible.

That temptation was on full display following the rampage in a Colorado movie theatre in June 2012, when an isolated gunman went on a killing spree, murdering 12 people. A headline that appeared in the Wall Street Journal soon after the shooting says it all: “Can Data Mining Stop the Killing?” It won’t take long for this question to be answered in the affirmative.

In many respects, internet companies are in a much better position to predict crime than police. Where the latter need a warrant to assess someone’s private data, the likes of Facebook can look up their users’ data whenever they want. From the perspective of police, it might actually be advantageous to have Facebook do all this dirty work, because Facebook’s own investigations don’t have to go through the court system.

While Facebook probably feels too financially secure to turn this into a business – it would rather play up its role as a good citizen – smaller companies might not resist the temptation to make a quick buck. In 2011 TomTom, a Dutch satellite-navigation company that has now licensed some of its almighty technology to Apple, found itself in the middle of a privacy scandal when it emerged that it had been selling GPS driving data collected from customers to the police. Privacy advocate Chris Soghoian has likewise documented the easy-to-use “pay-and-wiretap” interfaces that various internet and mobile companies have established for law enforcement agencies.

Publicly available information is up for grabs too. Thus, police are already studying social-networking sites for signs of unrest, often with the help of private companies. The title of a recent brochure from Accenture urges law enforcement agencies to “tap the power of social media to drive better policing outcomes”. Plenty of companies are eager to help. ECM Universe, a start-up from Virginia, US, touts its system, called Rapid Content Analysis for Law Enforcement, which is described as “a social media surveillance solution providing real-time monitoring of Twitter, Facebook, Google groups, and many other communities where users express themselves freely”.

“The solution,” notes the ECM brochure, “employs text analytics to correlate threatening language to surveillance subjects, and alert investigators of warning signs.” What kind of warning signs? A recent article in the Washington Post notes that ECM Universe helped authorities in Fort Lupton, Colorado, identify a man who was tweeting such menacing things as “kill people” and “burn [expletive] school”. This seems straightforward enough but what if it was just “harm people” or “police suck”?

As companies like ECM Universe accumulate extensive archives of tweets and Facebook updates sent by actual criminals, they will also be able to predict the kinds of non-threatening verbal cues that tend to precede criminal acts. Thus, even tweeting that you don’t like your yoghurt might bring police to your door, especially if someone who tweeted the same thing three years before ended up shooting someone in the face later in the day.

However, unlike Facebook, neither police nor outside companies see the whole picture of what users do on social media platforms: private communications and “silent” actions – clicking links and opening pages – are invisible to them. But Facebook, Twitter, Google and similar companies surely know all of this – so their predictive power is much greater than the police’s. They can even rank users based on how likely they are to commit certain acts.

An apt illustration of how such a system can be abused comes from The Silicon Jungle, ostensibly a work of fiction written by a Google data-mining engineer and published by Princeton University Press – not usually a fiction publisher – in 2010. The novel is set in the data-mining operation of Ubatoo – a search engine that bears a striking resemblance to Google – where a summer intern develops Terrorist-o-Meter, a sort of universal score of terrorism aptitude that the company could assign to all its users. Those unhappy with their scores would, of course, get a chance to correct them – by submitting even more details about themselves. This might seem like a crazy idea but – in perhaps another allusion to Google – Ubatoo’s corporate culture is so obsessed with innovation that its interns are allowed to roam free, so the project goes ahead.

To build Terrorist-o-Meter, the intern takes a list of “interesting” books that indicate a potential interest in subversive activities and looks up the names of the customers who have bought them from one of Ubatoo’s online shops. Then he finds the websites that those customers frequent and uses the URLs to find even more people – and so on until he hits the magic number of 5,000. The intern soon finds himself pursued by both an al-Qaida-like terrorist group that wants those 5,000 names to boost its recruitment campaign, as well as various defence and intelligence agencies that can’t wait to preemptively ship those 5,000 people to Guantánamo.

…

Evgeny Morozov
The Observer, Saturday 9 March 2013 19.20 GMT

Find this story at 9 March 2013

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

John Catt, who has no criminal record, wins legal action to have records deleted from police database of suspected extremists

An 88-year-old campaigner has won a landmark lawsuit against police chiefs who labelled him a “domestic extremist” and logged his political activities on a secret database.

The ruling by three senior judges puts pressure on the police, already heavily criticised for running undercover operatives in political groups, to curtail their surveillance of law-abiding protesters.

The judges decided police chiefs acted unlawfully by secretly keeping a detailed record of John Catt’s presence at more than 55 protests over a four-year period.

The entries described Catt’s habit of drawing sketches of the demonstrations. Details of the surveillance, which recorded details of his appearance such as “clean-shaven” and slogans on his clothes, were revealed by the Guardian in 2010.

The pensioner, who has no criminal record, is among thousands of political campaigners recorded on the database by the same covert unit that has been embedding spies such as Mark Kennedy – a police officer who infiltrated environmental protest groups – in political movements for more than a decade.

On Thursday Lord Dyson, who is the Master of the Rolls, and two other appeal court judges ordered Bernard Hogan-Howe, the commissioner of the Metropolitan police, to delete Catt’s file from the database, ruling that the surveillance had significantly violated his human rights.

The judges noted that the police could not explain why it was necessary to record Catt’s political activities in minute detail.

Lawyers for the police had argued that the anti-war activist regularly attended demonstrations against a Brighton arms factory near his home, which had at times descended into disorder.

The judges dismissed arguments from Adrian Tudway, the police chief then in charge of the covert unit, that police needed to monitor Catt because he “associates closely with violent” campaigners against the factory of the EDO arms firm.

They said it was “striking” that Tudway had not said the records held on the pensioner had helped police in any way.

“Mr Tudway states, in general terms, that it is valuable to have information about Mr Catt’s attendance at protests because he associates with those who have a propensity to violence and crime, but he does not explain why that is so, given that Mr Catt has been attending similar protests for many years without it being suggested that he indulges in criminal activity or actively encourages those that do.”

The judges added that it appeared that officers had been recording “the names of any persons they can identify, regardless of the particular nature of their participation”.

Catt said: “I hope this judgment will bring an end to the abusive and intimidatory monitoring of peaceful protesters by police forces nationwide.

“Police surveillance of this kind only serves to undermine our democracy and deter lawful protest.”

A similar court of appeal ruling four years ago forced the Met to remove 40% of photographs of campaigners held on another database.

In a separate ruling, which also challenged the police’s practice of storing the public’s personal data on databases, the three judges ordered the Met to erase a warning that had been issued against an unnamed woman.

Three years ago officers had warned the woman for allegedly making a homophobic comment about a neighbour. But she argued that police had treated her unfairly as she had not been given an opportunity to respond to the allegation.

She took legal action to prevent the Met keeping a copy of the warning notice on their files for 12 years. She feared it could be disclosed to employers when they checked her criminal record.

…

Rob Evans, Paul Lewis and Owen Bowcott
The Guardian, Thursday 14 March 2013 16.46 GMT

Find this story at 14 March 2013
© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

KGB’s former spy chief in Britain says he has no regrets about betraying the Soviet Union as he likens Putin to Mussolini

Oleg Gordievsky says he is the only agent to defect from the KGB in the 1980s to survive. ‘I was supposed to die,’ he says. Photograph: Steve Pyke

Three decades ago, Oleg Gordievsky was dramatically smuggled out of the Soviet Union in the boot of a diplomatic car. A strident figure of a man, he passed to the British vital details of Moscow’s espionage operation in London.

These days, Gordievsky is a shadow of his former self. He walks with a stick and is stooped, following an episode five years ago in which he says he was poisoned. But though diminished, Gordievsky remains combative and critical of his homeland.

Intriguingly, as Britain and Russia embark on something of a mini-thaw this week with top-level bilateral talks in London, Gordievsky warned that Moscow was operating just as many spies in the UK as it did during the cold war.

Gordievsky, 74, claims a large number of Vladimir Putin’s agents are based at the Russian embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens. As well as career officers, the embassy runs a network of “informers”, who are not officially employed, Gordievsky said, but regularly pass on useful information. They include a famous oligarch.

“There are 37 KGB men in London at the moment. Another 14 work for GRU [Russian military intelligence],” Gordievsky told the Guardian. How did he know? “From my contacts,” he said enigmatically, hinting at sources inside British intelligence.

Gordievsky began helping British intelligence in 1974. From 1982-85 he was stationed at the Soviet embassy in London. He was even designated rezident, the KGB’s chief in Britain. Back then, the KGB’s goal was to cultivate leftwing and trade union contacts, and to acquire British military and Nato secrets. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the KGB was divided into the SVR and FSB, Russia’s foreign and domestic intelligence agencies. Vladimir Putin is the FSB’s former boss.

According to Gordievsky, Putin’s foreign intelligence field officers fulfil similar roles to their KGB predecessors. In these days of capitalism, however, they also want sensitive commercial information of use to Moscow. And they keep tabs on the growing band of Russian dissidents and businessmen who fall out with the Kremlin and decamp to London – a source of continuing Anglo-Russian tension.

Former KGB agents, including Putin, now occupy senior roles in Russia’s murky power structures. Many are now billionaires. Gordievsky, meanwhile, was sentenced to death in absentia; the order has never been rescinded. (Under the KGB’s unforgiving code, a traitor is always a traitor, and deserves the ultimate punishment.) Gordievsky noted wryly: “I’m the only KGB defector from the 1980s who has survived. I was supposed to die.”

In 2008, however, Gordievsky claims he was poisoned in the UK. He declined to say precisely what happened. But the alleged incident has taken a visible toll on his health. Physically, he is a shadow of the once-vigorous man who briefed Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan on the Soviet leadership. Mentally, he is sharp and often acerbic.

Gordievsky said he had no regrets about betraying the KGB. He remains a passionate fan of Britain; he reads the Spectator and writes for the Literary Review. “Everything here is divine, compared to Russia,” he said. In 2007 the Queen awarded him the CMG “for services to the security of the UK”.

Gordievsky says he first “dreamed” of living in London after the 20th party congress in 1956, when Khrushchev launched his famous denunciation of Stalin. There is, he insists, nothing in Russia that he misses.

Gordievsky has little contact with his two grown-up daughters, Maria and Anna, or his ex-wife Leila. When he escaped to Britain his family remained behind in Russia, and were only allowed to join him six years later following lobbying from Thatcher. The marriage did not survive this long separation. Gordievsky’s long-term companion is a British woman, whom he met in the 1990s.

A bright pupil, with a flair for languages, Gordievsky joined the KGB because it offered a rare chance to live abroad. In 1961 Gordievsky – then a student – was in East Berlin when the wall went up. “It was an open secret in the Soviet embassy. I was lying in my bed and heard the tanks going past in the street outside,” he recalls.

In 1968, when he was working as a KGB spy in Copenhagen, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. Gordievsky was already disillusioned with the Soviet system; from this point he decided to conspire against it.

It was not until 1974 that he began his career as a double agent in Denmark. Gordievsky met “Dick”, a British agent. After Denmark Gordievsky was sent to Britain, to the delight of MI5. In London he warned that the politburo erroneously believed the west was planning a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. In 1985, the KGB grew suspicious and summoned him home. He was interrogated, drugged and accused of being a traitor. He managed to get word to his British handlers, who smuggled him across the Finnish border in the boot of a diplomatic car, an incident recalled in his gripping autobiography, Next Stop Execution.

Gordievsky is scathing about the Soviet Union’s leadership. “Leonid Brezhnev was nothing special. Gorbachev was uneducated and not especially intelligent,” he sniffed. What about Putin?

“Abscheulich,” he replied, using the German word for abominable and loathsome. (Gordievsky speaks fluent German, as well as Swedish, Danish and English, which he learned last.) By contrast, he praises William Hague. “I used to like him a lot. He was sharp.”

Asked whether he thought there was any prospect of democratic change in Russia – an idea nurtured by anti-Kremlin street protests in 2010 and 2011 – he replied: “What a naive question!”

He added gloomily: “Everything that has happened indicates the opposite direction.” He likens post-communist Russia under Putin to Mussolini’s Italy. Theoretically, he suggested, he might return to Moscow if there were a democratic government – but there is little prospect of that.

It is an open question how effective Russia’s modern spying operation really is. In 2010, 10 Russian agents, including the glamorous Anna Chapman, were caught in the US, and swapped for a Russian scientist convicted of working for Washington. Gordievsky is familiar with these kind of “deep-cover” operations. He began his espionage career in the KGB’s second directorate, which was responsible for running “illegals” – agents with false biographies planted abroad. Many felt Russia’s blundering espionage ring was more of a joke than a threat to US security.

Gordievsky, however, said it would be unwise to be complacent about Moscow’s intelligence activities. He mentions George Blake – a British spy who was a double agent for Moscow. In 1966 Blake escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison and defected to the Soviet Union. Blake’s and Gordievsky’s careers mirror each other: Gordievsky lives on a civil service pension in the home counties; Blake on a KGB pension in Moscow. Reaching for a sip of his beer, Gordievsky described the treacherous Blake as “effective”. He added: “You only need one spy to be effective.”

Gordievsky said he was convinced that Putin was behind the 2006 assassination of his friend Alexander Litvinenko, who had defected to Britain in 2000. In December it emerged that Litvinenko had been working for the British and Spanish secret services at the time of his death. An inquest into Litvinenko’s murder will take place later this year.

Controversially, the foreign secretary, William Hague, wants to keep the government’s Litvinenko files secret – to appease Moscow, according to critics.

…

Luke Harding
guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 March 2013 17.07 GMT

Find this story at 11 March 2013
© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

As William Hague and Philip Hammond prepare to meet their Russian counterparts in London this week, Jason Lewis reveals how a very suspicious spying slur is threatening to derail the reconciliation.
Denis Keefe, right, in the Caucasus, at Black Cliff Lake

To the outside world he is the epitome of diplomatic decorum: polite, softly spoken, with razor-sharp intellect. He has friends all over eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, where he has a record of distinguished service on behalf of Britain, and is known for his keen ear for choral music and love of sailing.

Having joined the Foreign Office 30 years ago, straight out of Cambridge, he has earned a reputation for his brilliant mind and as an unfailingly safe pair of hands.

And yet to the astonishment of those who know him, Denis Keefe, the respected deputy ambassador to Russia, has for the past few months been trailed by a bizarre cloud of rumours and intrigue straight out of a Jason Bourne film.

Wherever Mr Keefe goes outside Moscow, he runs the risk of being accosted by Russian journalists and accused of being a spy.

Regional news reports froth with insinuations that he is something far more subversive than a diplomat, and has been sent by Britain to ferret out information and undermine the government of President Vladimir Putin.
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British officials have tried to play down official anger at the hounding of Mr Keefe, which The Sunday Telegraph is reporting for the first time in Britain.

But the accusations, described by diplomatic sources as “an unprecedented attack on a very senior diplomat”, threaten to cast a shadow over a meeting this week in London designed to “reset” the thorny relationship between Britain and Russia.

William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, and Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, will meet their Russian counterparts for a “strategic dialogue” intended to look beyond a series of angry rows that have hampered cooperation between the two countries.

They include the recent decision to grant asylum in Britain to Andrei Borodin, a billionaire former Russian banker accused by Moscow of fraud, Russia’s attempts to hinder investigations into the poisoning in London of the former spy Alexander Litvinenko, and the beginning this week of the posthumous “show trial” of the late Sergei Magnitsky.

Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who worked for a London-based hedge fund, uncovered what is thought to be the largest tax fraud ever committed in Russia, but on reporting it was himself imprisoned, and later died in custody, aged 37.

The allegations against Mr Keefe are being seen in some circles as a deliberate attempt to discredit British officials in Moscow and to undermine efforts to improve relations with Russia.

Last month, the career diplomat, who speaks six languages including fluent Russian, was confronted by a Russian journalist, who demanded: “They say you are a spy for MI6 – tell us, does James Bond exist?”

Evidently irritated, Mr Keefe, 54, replied: “I don’t think this is a serious matter or that it has anything to do with me.”

Another reporter pressed him on his alleged MI6 status: “Can you give a straightforward answer to this question? Do you confirm or deny it?” He was quoted as replying: “Please. This is not a serious question. Please …”

Mr Keefe, a father of six who lists his interests as singing, sailing, walking and learning languages, was also questioned about his links to Russian opposition figures.

One of his first diplomatic postings, on joining the Foreign Office in 1982, was to Prague. Before the 1989 Velvet Revolution, he made friends with opponents of the one-party state, including Vaclav Havel. He later returned to help the newly democratic Czech Republic prepare to join Nato and the European Union.

He was also ambassador to Georgia during the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, and several reports used that against him – accusing him of becoming involved in the dispute over the breakaway region of South Ossetia. One report said he “actively advocated Georgia’s accession to Nato and urged speedy modernisation of its army, presenting Russia as a direct threat to the former Soviet republic”.

Neither episode endeared him to hardliners in the Putin regime and the incidents appear calculated to undermine him. A Siberian television channel, NTN-4, devoted a two-and-a-half minute slot to alleging that a former spy had listed Mr Keefe “as an officer of the secret intelligence service”. It stated that “in MI6, like in our intelligence services, there is no such thing as a former officer”.

The presenter questioned whether it was wise to invite Mr Keefe — “an intelligence service officer of a foreign country” — to Akademgorodok, a university town which is the hub of Russia’s cutting edge science and nuclear research.

In December, Mr Keefe faced a similar attack on a visit to the Ural Mountains to award diplomas to Open University graduates. One report bluntly stated: “Denis Keefe can be described as an undercover spy with his diplomatic position serving as a smoke screen.”

A news website warned students, officials and teachers to be wary in case Mr Keefe tried to “recruit” them. “A person well-versed in recruiting agents like Denis Keefe, bearing in mind his serious diplomatic experience, could easily catch in his net the immature soul of a graduate or a participant in Britain’s Open University programme,” it said.

“And you don’t need a codebreaker to work out what that could lead to.”

Diplomatic sources have told The Sunday Telegraph that the continuing allegations, which appeared to stem from a discredited list of MI6 agents posted online in 2005, were “ridiculous”.

They come after painstaking efforts to rebuild Anglo-Russian relations, following the Litvinenko poisoning in London in 2006.

An inquest into his death will open on May 1, but his murder led to a series of tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions. The then British ambassador, Anthony Brenton, was subjected to a four-month campaign of harassment, with members of a pro-Kremlin youth group interrupting his speeches, stalking him at weekends and banging fists on his diplomatic Jaguar.

In an embarrassing revelation, British agents were caught red-handed using a transmitter hidden inside a fake rock, planted on a Moscow street, so spies could pass them secrets.

At the same time, Russian police raided offices of the British Council, claiming that the body – which promotes British culture abroad – had violated Russian laws, including tax regulation.

“It is a cultural, not a political institution and we strongly reject any attempt to link it to Russia’s failure to cooperate with our efforts to bring the murderer of Alexander Litvinenko to justice,” said a Foreign Office spokesman at the time.

Leading British companies, including BP, faced problems operating in Russia, which had a negative effect on trade for both countries. More than 600 UK companies are active in Russia and Russian firms account for about a quarter of foreign share flotations on the London Stock Exchange.

Two years ago, David Cameron signed a series of trade deals and a symbolic memorandum on cooperation, and this week’s meeting in London was seen as an important “incremental step” towards restoring relations with the Russians.

But the timing of the attacks on Mr Keefe, coupled with continuing pressure to extradite the main suspects in the murder of Mr Litvinenko, a British citizen, provide an uncomfortable backdrop. On Saturday night Whitehall sources insisted that difficult issues, including the murder, would “not be left outside the room” at this week’s meeting.

Nataliya Magnitskaya, mother of Sergei Magnitsky, grieves over her son ‘s body

But MI6 was again accused last week of being at the centre of another anti-Russian conspiracy – this time in connection with Monday’s opening of the trial of Magnitsky.

He is charged with defrauding the Russian state, along with the British-based millionaire businessman Bill Browder, the head of Hermitage Capital Management, which employed Magnitsky. Mr Browder has declined to go to Moscow for the trial.

A widely viewed television documentary in Russia last week accused the two men of being part of an MI6 conspiracy to undermine the Russian government.

An investment fund auditor, Magnitsky said he had uncovered a £150 million tax fraud involving Russian government officials, but was then arrested himself on accusations of fraud.

He died in prison in 2009, having been denied visits from his family, forced into increasingly squalid cells, and ultimately contracting pancreatitis. Despite repeated requests, he was refused medical assistance and died, having been put in a straitjacket and showing signs of beatings. The case has become a rallying call for critics of Mr Putin’s regime, who accuse the state of a campaign of intimidation against political opponents.

German Gorbuntsov was gunned down, Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned, Andrei Borodin was granted asylum

…

By Jason Lewis, Investigations Editor

9:00PM GMT 09 Mar 2013

Find this story at 9 March 2013

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2013

13 October 2005. Fourth list provides 29 new names of MI6 officers:
http://cryptome.org/mi6-list4.htm

28 August 2005. See full list of 276 unique names of MI6 officers:
http://cryptome.org/mi6-list-276.htm

27 August 2006. Thanks to A2.

See also:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.politics.british/browse_frm/thread/82c48e38b3fdca75/
3bf294a25a6e6d25?lnk=st&q=%22Ian+Nicholas+Anthony%22&rnum=1&hl=en#
3bf294a25a6e6d25

Previous lists of MI6 officers:
http://cryptome.org/mi6-list2.htm (21 August 2005)

http://cryptome.org/mi6-list.htm (13 May 1999)

See also HM Diplomatic Service Overseas Reference List, August 2005, which lists many of these persons and shows that their 2005 positions and stations match those listed here (*):
http://www.fco.gov.uk/Files/KFile/OverseasRefListJulyAug05.pdf (PDF) [Now dead]
http://www.fco.gov.uk/Files/KFile/OverseasRefListJulyAug05.doc (Word DOC) [Now dead]

List of MI6 Officers worldwide

Ian Nicholas Anthony: dob 1960; 88 Lisbon, 93 Brasilia, 97 London.*

Peter James Aron: dob 1946; 68 Bonn, 84 Singapore, 86 Washington, 97 Seoul,00 London.

Nigel Anthony Richard Backhouse: dob 1956; 84 Kabul,85 Kath-mandu, 89 Madrid,98 Paris, 01 London.

Nicholas Hilary Bates: dob 1949; 79 Geneva, 84 Cairo, 89 Muscat, 96 Kingston, 98 Kampala, 01 London.

Nicholas James Gilbert Beer: dob 1947; 77 Nairobi, 82 Madrid, 92 Hague, 99 Buenos Aires, 02 London.

Julliette Winsome Bird: dob 1963; 92 New Delhi, 01 Brussels, 03 London.

Timothy Gavin Bradley: dob 1959; 86 Kuwait, 96 Belgrade, 99 London.

Julian Nicholas Braithwaite: dob 1968; 95 Zagreb, 96 Belgrade, 02 Sarajevo, 04 Washington (Cllr).*

Jonathan Andrew Brewer: dob 1955; 86 Luanda, 91 Mexico, 98 Moscow, 02 London.

Richard Philip Bridge: dob 1959; 86 Warsaw, 89 Moscow, 98 New Delhi, 04 Geneva (Cllr).*

George Benedict Joseph Pascal Busby: dob 1960; 89 Bonn, 92 Belgrade, 00 Vienna, 04 London.

Nicholas Geoffrey Coombs: dob 1961; 87 Riyadh, 93 Amman, 00 Riyadh, 03 London.

Andrew George Tyndale Cooper: dob 1953; 84 Canberra, 88 Geneva, 95 Stockholm, 99 London.

John de Carteret Copleston: dob 1952; 75 Paris, 80 Islamabad, 87 Jakarta, 93 Lagos, 97 Canberra, 00 London.*

Anthony Evelyn Comrie Cowan: dob 1953; 78 Hong Kong, 80 Peking, 87 Brussels, 96 Hong Kong, 03 Hague (Cllr).*

Michael James Crawford: dob 1954; 83 Cairo, 85 Sanaa, 86 Riyadh, 92 Warsaw, 99 Islamabad, 01 London.

John Martin Jamie Darke: dob 1953; 88 Cairo, 96 Dubai, 03 Lisbon (Cllr).*

Nigel Kim Darroch: dob 1954; 80 Tokyo, 89 Rome, 97 Brussels, 03 London.

Elved Richard Malcolm Davies: dob 1951; 77 Jakarta, 84 Athens, 89 Nairobi, 91 Oslo, 00 Hong Kong, 04 London.

John Howard Davies: dob 1957; 83 Riyadh, 87 Damascus, 93 Riga, 99 Sofia, 03 London.

Peter Brian Davies: dob 1954; 80 Hong Kong, 83 Rome, 88 Peking, 96 Jakarta,03 Madrid (Cllr).*

John Paul Davison: dob 1950; 77 Abu Dhabi, 86 Dubai, 89 London.

Geoffrey Deane: dob 1950; 80 Nairobi, 88 East Berlin, 01 Munich (Consul).

Hugh Stephen Murray Elliot: dob 1965; 91 Madrid, 99 Buenos Aires, 02 Paris (Cllr).*

Julian Ascott Evans: dob 1957; 82 Moscow, 85 Zurich, 91 New York, 02 Islamabad, 03 Ottawa (DHC).*

Charles Blanford Farr: dob 1959; 87 Pretoria, 92 Amman, 95 London.

Robert Dominic Russell Fenn: dob 1962; 85 Hague, 88 Lagos, 92 New York, 97 Rome, 04 Nicosia (DHM).*

John Fisher: dob 1948; 76 Ankara, 82 Vienna, 93 Santiago, 99 Jakarta, 03 London.

Tarquin Simon Archer Folliss: dob 1957; 89 Jakarta, 95 Bucharest, 01 Copenhagen (Cllr).*

Nicholas John Foster: dob 1957; 86 Nicosia, 92 Moscow, 98 Athens, 03 London.

Cortland Lucas Fransella: dob 1948; 73 Hong Kong, 80 Kuala Lumpur, 82 Santiago, 91 Rome, 95 London.*

Steven Alan Frost: dob 1964; 92 Islamabad, 99 Stockholm, 02 London.

Michael Adrian Fulcher: dob 1958; 85 Athens, 93 Sofia, 99 Rome, 03 London.

Stephen Peter Garner-Winship: dob 1956; 91 Rio, 93 Lisbon, 94 London.

Kevin Andrew Garvey: dob 1960; 81 Bangkok, 85 Hanoi, 92 Phnom Penh, 93 Grand Turks, 01 Guatemala City (DHM).*

Roger James Adam Golland: dob 1955; 79 Ankara, 84 Budapest, 89 Buenos Aires, 98 Brussells, 01 London.

Paul Haggle: dob 1949; 76 Bangkok, 82 Islamabad, 89 Pretoria, 98 Bangkok, 01 London.

James William David Hall: dob 1965; 89 Lusaka, 91 New Delhi, 99 Vienna, 02 Pristina, 03 London.

William Alistair Harrison: dob 1954; 79 Warsaw, 87 New York, 95 Warsaw, 00 New York, 03 London.(* Possibly Alistair Harrison, HC, Lusaka, Zambia)

Dora Claire Sarah Healy: dob 1952; 87 Addis Ababa, 95 Nairobi, 98 London.

Steven John Hill: dob 1962, 88 Vienna, 96 New-York, 01 Washington (1 Sec).

Nigel Norman Inkster: dob 1952; 76 Kuala Lumpur, 79 Bangkok, 83 Peking, 85 Buenos Aires, 92 Athens, 94 Hong Kong, 98 London.

Anthony John Godwin Insall: dob 1949; 75 Lagos, 82 Hong Kong, 85 Peking, 92 Kuala Lumpur, 99 Oslo, 04 London.

Andrew Michael Jackson: dob 1958; 87 Bonn, 01 Rome (1 Sec).

William Lester Jackson-Houlston: dob 1952; 80 Brussels, 82 Buenos Aires, 90 Belgrade, 99 Hague, 03 Berne (Cllr).*

Neil Marius Jacobsen: dob 1957; 86 Athens, 92 Madrid, 00 Santiago, 03 London.

Denis Edward Peter Paul Keefe: dob 1958; 84 Prague, 92 Nairobi, 98 Prague, 04 London.

Sarah-Jill Lennard Kilroy: dob 1956; 82 Montevideo, 83 Brussels, 94 Budapest, 98 London.

Richard Jonathan Knowlton: dob 1950; 78 Helsinki, 84 Harare, 91 Dubai, 97 Bridgetown, 02 Caracas, 03 Helsinki (Cllr).

Michael Anthony Kyle: dob 1948; 72 Saigon, 78 Washington, 84 Accra, 88 Dar es Salaam, 95 Berlin, 98 London.

Ian Francis Millar Lancaster: dob 1947; 75 Hanoi, 78 Prague, 83 Brussels, 91 Ankara, 95 London.(* Algiers 05)

Jeremy John Legge: dob 1961; 87 Lusaka, 94 Vienna, 01 Paris (1 Sec).

Graham John Ley: dob 1961; 87 Cairo, 94 Nicosia, 99 Cairo, 03 London.

Gareth Geoffrey Lungley: dob 1971; 97 Tehran, 02 Zagreb (1 Sec).

Fiona MacCallum: dob 1962; 89 Moscow, 95 Riga, 00 Kiev, 04 Tallinn (1 Sec).

Kenneth John Alexander MacKenzie: dob 1949; 75 Brussels, 81 Buenos Aires,85 Bucharest, 92 Vienna, 97 Munich, 01 London.

John Bannerman Macpherson: dob 1951; 79 Khartoum, 80 Sanaa, 87 Sofia, 93 Cairo, 03 Stockholm (Cllr).*

Christine Ann MacQueen: dob 1959; 84 Brasilia, 89 New York, 90 Paris, 02 Brussels (Cllr).*

Keith Ian Malin: dob 1953; 78 Brussels, 84 Geneva, 90 Sofia, 96 Peking, 99 London.(* Helsinki 05)

Nicholas Marden: dob 1950; 77 Nicosia, 82 Warsaw, 88 Paris, 98 Tel-Aviv, 02 London.

Nicholas Jonathan Leigh Martin: dob 1948; 81 Nairobi, 87 Rome, 93 Jakarta, 00 Bridgetown (Cllr).

Patrick Joseph McGuinness: dob 1963; 88 Sanaa, 94 Abu Dhabi, 96 Cairo, 03 Rome (Cllr).*

Alasdair Morrell McNeill: dob 1967; 92 Istanbul, 97 Moscow, 99 London.

Peter James McQuibban: dob 1955; 82 Brasilia, 88 Warsaw, 96 Copenhagen,04 Paris (Cllr).*

Jonathan Kenneth Milton Mitchel: dob 1959; 89 Amman, 91 Harare, 98 Bucharest, 02 London.

Anthony Leopold Colyer Monckton: dob 1960; 90 Geneva, 96 Zagreb, 98 Banja Luka, 01 Belgrade, 04 London. (See: http://cryptome.org/mi6-monckton.htm)

Richard John Moon: dob 1959; 85 Jakarta, 93 Rome, 99 New York, 03 London.*

Mark Scott Thomas Morgan: dob 1958; 84 Geneva, 88 Aden, 94 Valletta, 01 Budapest (1 Sec).

Philip Raymond Nelson: dob 1950; 74 Budapest, 76 Paris, 80 Rome, 89 Manila, 91 Budapest, 94 London.

Clive Dare Newell: dob 1953; 79 Tehran, 82 Kabul, 86 Addis Ababa, 94 Ankara, 01 Moscow, 03 Ottawa (Cllr).*

Stephen Martin Noakes: dob 1957; 90 Luanda, 96 New York, 00 London.

Peter James Norris: dob 1955; 85 Lagos, 90 Guatemala City, 97 Jakarta, 00 London.

John Matthew O’Callaghan: dob 1966; 92 Santiago, 98 Moscow, 03 Stockholm,04 Belgrade (Cllr).*

Paul Vincent O’Connor: dob 1956; 77 Jedda, 80 Washington, 87 Istanbul, 91 Maseru, 99 St.Petersburg, 03 Berlin (1 Sec).

Stephen John O’Flaherty: dob 1951; 78 New Delhi, 81 Prague, 88 Vienna, 92 London.

Richard Lloyd Owen: dob 1948; 78 Abu Dhabi, 80 Beirut, 83 San Jose, 86 Berlin, 93 Copenhagen, 98 London.

Simon Graham Page: dob 1961; 83 Kuala Lumpur, 88 Dublin, 92 New Delhi, 98 Riyadh, 01 London.(* 1 Sec, Bahrain, 05)

Charles William Parton: dob 1956; 85 Peking, 90 Hong Kong, 03 Nicosia (Cllr).*

Hugh William Grant Patterson: dob 1950; 80 Berlin, 87 Guatemala City, 92 Caracas, 00 Berne, 04 London.

Martin Eric Penton-Voak: dob 1965; 95 Moscow, 01 Vienna (1 Sec).

Tom Richard Vaughan Phillips: dob 1950; 85 Harare, 90 Tel Aviv, 93 Washington, 00 Kampala, 02 London.

David Herbert Powell: dob 1952; 88 Tokyo, 97 Brussels, 02 London.

Timothy Ian Priest: dob 1947; 75 Vienna, 81 Helsinki, 89 Athens, 99 Helsinki, 03 London.

Clare Louise Rickitt: dob 1964; 93 Brasilia, 96 London.

Paul John Ritchie: dob 1962; 86 Nicosia, 91 New York, 99 Nicosia, 03 London.

David George Roberts: dob 1955; 77 Jakarta, 81 Havana, 88 Madrid, 91 Paris, 96 Santiago, 00 Berne (DHM, CG).

Philip John Barclay Roberts: dob 1949; 77 Islamabad, 82 Hanoi, 84 Tokyo,91 Lisbon, 94 Bogota, 97 Vienna, 99 London.

Elizabeth Carol Robson: dob 1955; 84 Moscow, 88 Geneva, 96 Stockholm, 02 Copenhagen (DHM).

Michael John Sanderson: dob 1948; 72 Cairo, 79 New York, 84 Oslo, 93 Hong Kong, 95 London.

John Donald William Saville: dob 1960; 83 Jakarta, 88 Warsaw, 95 Vienna, 00 Havana, 03 London. (* HC, Brunei, 05)

Michael William Seaman: dob 1955; 77 Jakarta, 81 Bombay, 88 Hague, 99 Athens, 02 Tbilisi (1 Sec). (* Cllr, Kabul, 05)

Paul Raymond Sizeland: dob 1952; 81 Brussels, 85 Doha, 88 Lagos, 96 Bangkok, 00 Shanghai, 03 London.

Patrick William Sprunt: dob 1952; 78 Tokyo, 82 Brussels, 83 Bonn, 87 Tokyo, 92 New York, 99 Tokyo, 04 London.

Andrew Jeremy Stafford: dob 1953; 77 Stockholm, 79 Accra, 84 Prague, 91 Brussels, 99 Stockholm, 03 London.

Arthur David Tandy: dob 1949; 87 Riyadh, 89 London.

Anthony James Nicholas Tansley: dob 1962; 88 Riyadh, 89 Baghdad, 94 Dublin,98 Muscat, 01 London.

Duncan John Rushworth Taylor: dob 1958; 83 Havana, 92 Budapest, 00 New York (DCG).

Owen John Traylor: dob 1955; 81 Tokyo, 90 Berlin, 00 Istanbul, 04 London.

Stuart Graham Turvill: dob 1971; 95 Islamabad, 00 Accra, 03 London.

Eric Simon Charles Wall: dob 1957; 88 Geneva, 94 Kampala, 98 Harare, 01 London.

Michael John Ward: dob 1958; 85 Istanbul, 88 Paris, 97 Brussels, 02 Budapest (DHM).*

Jonathan Michael Weldin: dob 1959; 86 Sanaa, 90 Tunis, 96 Athens, 01 London.

Andrew Ronald Whitecross: dob 1949; 81 Sanaa, 85 Baghdad, 98 Muscat, 01 London.

Andrew John Whiteside: dob 1968; 95 Budapest, 02 Rome (1 Sec).*

Timothy Andrew Willasey-Wilsey: dob 1953; 83 Luanda, 86 San Jose, 93 Islamabad, 99 Geneva, 02 London.

Simon Jules Wilson: dob 1966; 91 Athens, 93 Zagreb, 99 New York, 02 Budapest (1 Sec).*

David John Woods: dob 1951; 78 Vienna, 81 Bucharest, 92 Harare, 97 Pretoria, 02 Berlin (Cllr).*

Ian Alexander Woods: dob 1951; 77 New York, 84 Berlin, 86 Bonn, 95 Warsaw, 03 Sofia (Cllr).*
MI6 Officers – Her Majesty’s Ambassadors

Jeremy John Durham Ashdown (Paddy Ashdown): dob 1941; 74 Geneva (1 Sec).

Brian Maurice Bennett: dob 1948; 73 Prague, 77 Helsinki, 83 Bridgetown, 86 Vienna, 88 Hague, 97 Tunis, 03 Minsk.*

David Graeme Blunt: dob 1953; 79 Vienna, 83 Peking, 89 Canberra, 97 Oslo,02 Gibraltar (Dep.Gov.)

Robert Edward Brinkley: dob 1954; 78 Geneva, 79 Moscow, 88 Bonn, 96 Moscow, 02 Kiev.*

Peter Salmon Collecott: dob 1950; 85 Khartoum, 82 Canberra, 89 Jakarta, 94 Bonn, 04 Brasilia.*

Charles Graham Crawford: dob 1954; 81 Belgrade, 87 Cape Town, 93 Moscow, 96 Sarajevo, 01 Belgrade, 03 Warsaw. (* Warsaw, 05)

Richard Hugh Francis Jones: dob 1962; 86 Abu Dhabi, 94 Brussels, 03 Tirana.*

Hugh Roger Mortimer: dob 1949; 75 Rome, 78 Singapore, 83 New York, 91 Berlin, 97 Ankara, 01 Ljubljana. (* DHM, Berlin, 05)

Colin Andrew Munro: dob 1946; 71 Bonn, 73 Kuala Lumpur, 81 Bucharest, 87 East Berlin,90 Frankfurt, 97 Zagreb, 01 Mostar, 03 Vienna (OSCE, Head of UK Delegation).*

John Charles Josslyn Ramsden: dob 1950; 76 Dakar, 79 Vienna, 80 Hanoi, 90 Berlin, 96 Geneva, 04 Zagreb.*

Colin Roberts: dob 1959; 90 Tokyo, 97 Paris, 01 Tokyo, 04 Vilnius.*

Damian Roderic Todd: dob 1959; 81 Pretoria, 87 Prague, 91 Bonn, 01 Bratislava.

Bernard Gerrard Whiteside: dob 1954; 83 Moscow, 86 Geneva, 91 Bogota, 02 Chisinau.*

Find this story at 27 August 2006

The British ambassador to Georgia has complained about footage of him used in a TV hoax about a Russian invasion.

There was panic in Georgia on Saturday after a TV report that Russian tanks had invaded the capital and the country’s president was dead.

It included footage of ambassador Denis Keefe, which was edited to make it look like he was talking about the invasion.

Mr Keefe has asked the TV station to make it clear he knew nothing about the “irresponsible” programme.

The TV station – pro-government Imedi TV – said the aim had been to show how events might unfold if the president were killed. It later apologised.

Networks overwhelmed

It used archive footage of the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia and imagined how opposition figures might seize power after an assassination of President Mikhail Saakashvili.

But many Georgians believed it to be a real news report – mobile phone networks were overwhelmed with calls and many people rushed on to the streets.

Mr Keefe, footage of whom was included in the report, has complained about the programme on the British Embassy in Georgia’s website.
I consider Imedi TV’s misuse of this footage to be a discourtesy to me as ambassador of the United Kingdom in Georgia

Denis Keefe

Georgians question un-reality TV

He said the use of archive footage of him speaking about “real events completely unrelated to the subject of the programme was deeply misleading”.

He also complained that there had been a suggestion that the president of Georgia and the British prime minister had spoken about the “non-existent events described”.

“I wish to make clear that neither I, nor the UK government had any involvement in or foreknowledge of an irresponsible programme that unnecessarily caused deep concern amongst the Georgian public,” Mr Keefe said.

“I consider Imedi TV’s misuse of this footage to be a discourtesy to me as ambassador of the United Kingdom in Georgia, reflecting badly on Georgia’s reputation for responsible and independent media.”

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Page last updated at 14:03 GMT, Tuesday, 16 March 2010

Find this story at 16 March 2010

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It follows the recommendation by the UK director of public prosecutions that Andrei Lugovoi be tried for the crime.

Mr Lugovoi denies the charges, and the Kremlin says Russia’s constitution does not allow it to hand him over.

Former KGB officer Mr Litvinenko died in London in 2006 after exposure to the radioactive isotope polonium-210.

The British embassy in Moscow has confirmed that the formal extradition request has been handed over, and the Russian prosecutor’s office has confirmed that the documents have been received.

Attack ‘victim’

Mr Lugovoi maintained last week that he was innocent and described himself as a “victim not a perpetrator of a radiation attack” while in London. He has called the charges “politically motivated”.

Mr Lugovoi met Mr Litvinenko on the day he fell ill.

Polonium-210 was found in a string of places Mr Lugovoi visited in London, but he has insisted he is a witness not a suspect.

The UK’s director of public prosecutions Sir Ken Macdonald said Mr Lugovoi should be extradited to stand trial for the murder of Mr Litvinenko by “deliberate poisoning”.

But the Kremlin maintains Russia’s constitution does not allow it to hand over Mr Lugovoi, a position reaffirmed by the country’s justice minister Vladimir Ustinov last week.

“The Russian constitution will stay inviolable and it will be observed to the full,” the news agency Itar-Tass quoted him as saying.

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Published: 2007/05/28 15:56:55 GMT

Find this story at 28 May 2007

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