OTTAWA, Jan 13 (Reuters) – The five nations that make up the world’s leading intelligence-sharing network will meet in London next month to confer on strategies to fight terrorism in the wake of the Paris attacks, Canada said on Tuesday.

Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney said the so-called Five Eyes – the United States, Australia, Canada, Britain and New Zealand – had scheduled a meeting for Jan 22.

A Canadian government official later said the five would actually meet in London some time in February.

Blaney’s comments were unusual, since members of the Five Eyes network rarely talk about its activity.

“We’re going to have a meeting with our Five Eyes allies in London … and this is serious stuff. Terrorism will be there” on the agenda, he told CTV television.

U.S. intelligence officials have shared with their French counterparts information related to the travel history of those suspected of involvement in the Paris attacks, in which a total of 17 people died, a White House spokesman said on Tuesday.

Blaney gave no more details of the London meeting, save to say that U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson would be present.

Separately, the Canadian government official said the London event had been scheduled before the Paris attacks.

“The Five Eyes regularly meet to discuss shared concerns and approaches,” he said.

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, added that the fight against terrorism would be “a major focus” of the meeting but declined to give more details.

The five nations that comprise the group divide the world into eavesdropping target sectors and share the results. (Reporting by David Ljunggren; Editing by Grant McCool and Lisa Shumaker)

Source: Reuters – Wed, 14 Jan 2015 01:37 GMT
By David Ljunggren

Find this story at 17 January 2015

Copyright © 2015 Thomson Reuters Foundation

The best war inquiry was into the Charge of the Light Brigade. It was conducted by the poet Alfred Tennyson in eight weeks, and reached a one-line conclusion, “Someone had blunder’d.” It has never been bettered.

Everyone knows who blundered in Iraq. It was Tony Blair. Mild interest may still attach to the question, why? But no one is sitting in an agony of suspense. No great issue turns on the verdict. Even the Labour party, whose cringing submission to the whim of Blair must mean it carries a share of blame, has purged itself of guilt. The Iraq war is yesterday. It is history.

So why the shocked headlines about “Chilcot verdict delayed”? History is always late. We do not read “Mantel’s delayed verdict on Boleyn execution”; we do not read “Starkey late with verdict on Magna Carta”. The Chilcot inquiry was a ploy of Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, somehow to get his own back. At the time, in 2009, David Cameron said it was “an establishment stitch-up”. He little imagined it would be still be there when he was the establishment, and had to defend it.

The writing of Chilcot – its hearings ended in 2011 – has become a ghostly whodunnit. It has taken longer to write than War and Peace, and at a rumoured million words is near double the length. A post-edit, called Maxwellisation, grants a right of reply to those criticised, not just before publication but, it appears, before the conclusions are written. This mechanism is a victims’ racket for delay. It compares ill with the US Congress’s laudably savage report on the CIA and Iraq, published last month with no right-of-reply nonsense. (Will Chilcot, I wonder, disclose his Maxwellisation exchanges under freedom of information?)

The chief victim, Blair, has furiously protested that he is not playing a delaying game. He now seems to regard Iraq as a personal matter between him and God. More serious objection has come from the security service. Its addiction to prying into other people’s secrets is not reciprocated when others want to pry into its own. In addition, the American friends are apparently coy about Anglo-American relations in 2002-3. In particular, the disclosure of private chats between Blair and George Bush at Camp David would mean such chats would end, for ever.

I have some sympathy with the Americans (and the Brits) on this confidentiality. But Chilcot has already said he will redact such minutes and convey only the gist of them. Besides, what is new? Bob Woodward’s book Plan of Attack, published back in 2004, was based on interviews with Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and 74 others, with access to “personal notes, calendars, official and unofficial records, phone transcripts and memos”. It contains verbatim calls with Blair. With that and the witness evidence from the Chilcot hearings, notably from the then attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, it is hard to believe there are still “lessons to learn”.

Chilcot is a mountain made from a molehill. No recent event has been so scrutinised as the Iraq war, with the standard bibliography running to some 200 entries. It was always an American fiasco, with Britain as a bit player. Blair’s role was summed up in the excruciating “cojones” exchanges with Bush. The truth is that Chilcot should really be investigating a personal infatuation, not an invasion.

At some stage the concept of blame and responsibility has to pass from politicians and lawyers to historians. Some people feel that as long as there are victims, such as families of dead soldiers and civilians, there must be a quasi-judicial closure. I disagree. Like the current craze for “historical” sex prosecutions and repeated Hillsborough inquests, the cost of deflecting police and court resources must be prohibitive.

Chilcot can only be a work of history. The Iraq war was a tragedy for all concerned, apart from defence contractors, and one from which that country is suffering more than ever. There was no shortage of prior warnings. Like Vietnam, Iraq was a classic folly as described by the historian, Barbara Tuchman: “one perceived as counterproductive in its own time … recognised by contemporaries.”

Inquiries into such follies are political acts, conforming to the mood of the day, usually to exonerate or whitewash those in power at the expense of their enemies. The war in Afghanistan was every bit as foolish as Iraq, but it was regarded as a “good” intervention, and one that could hardly be pinned on Blair. No inquiry is in the offing.

The Franks report on the causes of the Falklands war was meant to expiate Thatcher’s guilt for leaving the islands undefended, and thus enable her to revel in her victory. Franks was shameless in confining any guilt to the body of his report, leaving Thatcher the joy of a final exoneration. He later attributed his whitewash to “the mood of the day”.

In the case of Bloody Sunday, “guilt” was erased by the mind-numbing delay of the Saville report, eventually published 38 years after the event, at a cost of £400m. Chilcot is a peccadillo against this shocker. Each of these inquiries gets longer. Between the world wars, they took an average of two months. By the 1960s, this had stretched to 11 months; since then the average is 20 months, not counting Saville and Chilcot. This has to be dreadful governance. Legal process obliterates clarity. “Fairness to all” is code for fees. The years roll by and guilt dissolves into tedium.

A public inquiry is a lantern on the stern, not a searchlight on the bow. The longer it takes, the less it is visible and the less people care. The ideal inquiry is immediate and quick, whatever the risk of unfairness. Better still would be Alice in Wonderland: “Inquiry first, decision afterwards.” Why was there no inquiry before Andrew Lansley’s reform to the NHS? Why none today into Trident renewal, or HS2, or last year’s “return to Iraq”, or those many government decisions of which, one day, someone will ask: who was the idiot? It is reminiscent of Orwell’s Crimestop, “the faculty of protective stupidity”.

David Davis MP calls the delay to Chilcot “incomprehensible”. The SNP’s Angus Robertson calls it “an absolute scandal”. But surely it is just a very expensive history book. I can see the old timers shrugging and switching the television to Wolf Hall. That is their sort of inquiry.

Simon Jenkins
Wednesday 21 January 2015 19.22 GMT Last modified on Thursday 22 January 2015 00.04 GMT

Find this story at 22 January 2015

© 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited

Outcry at yet another postponement to findings of inquiry, which stopped taking evidence in 2011

The six-year-longBritish inquiry into the 2003 Iraq invasion and its aftermath will not be published before the general election, prompting an outcry from those demanding that the long overdue reckoning should be put before the voters.

Sir John Chilcot, the chairman of the inquiry, will set out his reasons for the further postponement in an exchange of letters with David Cameron on Wednesday. The inquiry was set up in 2009 and took public evidence from its last witness in 2011.

The prime minister has already expressed his personal frustration at the repeated delays, and a cross-party group of backbenchers had been due to stage a debate and vote in parliament on 29 January, demanding publication before the election.

Tony Blair, the prime minister at the time of the war, has insisted he is not the culprit behind the delay in publication; his allies have suggested the blame lies with the civil service and sensitivities about the relations between the UK and US intelligence agencies.

There has been a stand-off between those demanding that the personal exchange of messages between the former US president George W Bush and Blair in the run-up to the war be published, and those saying such a move would represent an unprecedented breach of confidence concerning one of the most sensitive episodes in British foreign relations.

It is understood the publication date of the inquiry was discussed by the UK and American delegations when Cameron met Barack Obama at the White House last week. But the threat of a Commons vote will have added urgency to the issue.

In June last year Chilcot announced he was satisfied that the “gist” of talks between Blair and Bush could be made public, removing a big obstacle to publication of his report. Chilcot is understood to have sent “Salmon letters” to those who were to be criticised to give them an opportunity to respond before the report’s publication, which will have led to further delays following objections from those criticised.

The deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, reacted furiously, saying the public, soldiers and families affected needed closure after six years of delay, adding that the public will think the findings are being “sexed down” to meet the needs of the establishment.

In a letter to Chilcot, he said: “I welcome your efforts to ensure the inquiry has been methodical, rigorous and fair in its approach. I also support your efforts to allow individuals criticised in the report to see the draft criticism and make representations to the inquiry before publication.

“However, neither administrative processes nor a constant back and forth between the inquiry and witnesses criticised should frustrate an independent report so important to the country’s future from being published as soon as possible.

“The public have waited long enough and will find it incomprehensible that the report is not being published more rapidly than the open-ended timetable you have now set out.

“We need to see a much clearer and more defined timetable, known publicly, with strict deadlines and a firm date for publication.

“If the findings are not published with a sense of immediacy, there is a real danger the public will assume the report is being ‘sexed down’ by individuals rebutting criticisms put to them by the inquiry, whether that is the case or not.”

Angus Robertson, the SNP’s Westminster leader said: “If Chilcot is to be delayed again it would be an absolute scandal.”

Blair previously said he wanted the Chilcot report to be published as soon as possible and that he resented claims he was to blame for its slow progress.

He has made repeated attempts to justify the highly controversial invasion, but has conceded that, for a variety of reasons, including disputes in the Bush administration, the detail and quality of post-war planning was inadequate.

Blair is determined to rebut the argument that he lied to parliament over the intelligence he had been given over the likelihood that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. The basis of this claim and the key informants have emerged and been discredited. Ministers have conceded that if the final report were not completed by the end of February, it would be wrong to release it in the heat of a closely fought election campaign.

Although Ed Miliband was not in parliament at the time of the invasion, and has said he would have opposed the war, Labour probably has least to gain from the reopening of the debate about the basis of the invasion and its continuing consequences, including the rise of Islamic State, or Isis.

The Conservatives, including an agonised Cameron, backed the invasion at the time, but the Tories subsequently said they had been misled about the intelligence. Although Cameron pushed through military action in Libya, and, in principle, air strikes to punish Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria, the prime minister has generally been a sceptic about humanitarian military action. The Liberal Democrats opposed the war and probably would gain most politically from publication.

David Davis, the former shadow home secretary who has been a leading voice in calling for the report to be published before the election, said it was incomprehensible that the report was being delayed until after the election.

Davis told the Guardian: “Frankly this is not good enough. It is more than five years since it started. It is incomprehensible as to why this is [being delayed]. We need to know why. This is not simply some formality. This is for the whole country to understand why we made a terrible mistake in Iraq. Simply putting it off is not good enough.

“Why has this taken so long? What is going on that is preventing this? The report was created in the first place by a Labour government in order to get an understanding of what went wrong. I can think of no reason why this should be deferred.”

Davis has been a driving force behind the backbench Commons vote next week that would call on Chilcot to publish in a few weeks. He said the vote would not bind Chilcot in case there was complex legal justification for the delay. But Chilcot would have been expected to explain to MPs the delay. “We are getting neither. We are getting neither the report nor the explanation,” he said.

Patrick Wintour and Nicholas Watt
Wednesday 21 January 2015 00.21 GMT Last modified on Wednesday 21 January 2015 09.17 GMT

Find this story at 21 January 2015

© 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She was shot by a French firing squad in 1917.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find this story at 9 April 2014

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

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

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

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

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

Find this story at 24 April 2014

© Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Ltd. 1996-2014

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

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

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

‘Unfavourable impression’

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

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

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

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

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

Suspect

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

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

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

Wrongly suspected

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

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

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

Death by firing squad

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

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

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

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

Tuesday, 26 January, 1999, 23:22 GMT

Find this story at 26 January 1999

© BBC

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

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

By Melanie Hall11:22AM BST 12 Apr 2014

Find this story at 12 April 2014

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2014

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

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

The shocking scale of the Establishment cover-up of former Liberal MP Cyril Smith’s sickening sex abuse of boys is revealed today
The shocking scale of the Establishment cover-up of former Liberal MP Cyril Smith’s sickening sex abuse of boys is revealed today.
For four decades, the depraved 29st politician was free to prey on vulnerable children as young as eight.
Police received at least 144 complaints by victims of the predatory paedophile yet the authorities blocked any prosecution – allowing Smith brazenly to continue his abuse.
The Liberal Party even put his name forward for a knighthood in 1988 in spite of the rumours of his sordid activities swirling around Westminster.
David, now Lord Steel nominated him for the honour despite knowing of the allegations about the bachelor MP for Rochdale, the ex-Liberal leader’s involvement emerging only in recent weeks after a Freedom of Information battle.
At Smith’s 80th birthday party, a gushing message from current Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg was read out, which said: ‘You were a beacon for our party in the ’70s and ’80s and continue to be an inspiration to the people of Rochdale.’
Now, an explosive new book serialised in the Daily Mail details how Smith – who died in 2010 aged 82 – was repeatedly protected despite being arrested for a string of sex crimes.
Written by one of Smith’s successors as MP for the Lancashire constituency, Labour’s Simon Danczuk, the book reveals:
MI5 and Special Branch officers put pressure on police to drop investigations;
child porn was found in Smith’s car but police were ordered to release him;
he was repeatedly arrested for ‘acts of gross indecency with young lads’ in public toilets but no action was taken;
Smith was a visitor to the notorious Elm Guest house in South-west London, now the focus of a Scotland Yard investigation into an alleged VIP paedophile ring;
senior Labour figures’ support of the Paedophile Information Exchange helped keep Smith ‘hidden from scrutiny’.
In his book, Smile for the Camera: the Double Life of Cyril Smith, Mr Danczuk details Smith’s ‘rapacious sexual appetite’ and highlights chilling similarities between the northern MP and fellow paedophile Jimmy Savile.
For four decades, the depraved 29st politician (pictured above in 1972) was free to prey on vulnerable children as young as eight
+12
For four decades, the depraved 29st politician (pictured above in 1972) was free to prey on vulnerable children as young as eight
David, now Lord Steel (centre) nominated Smith for a knighthood despite knowing of the allegations about the bachelor MP for Rochdale, the ex-Liberal leader’s involvement emerging only in recent weeks after a Freedom of Information battle
+12
David, now Lord Steel (centre) nominated Smith for a knighthood despite knowing of the allegations about the bachelor MP for Rochdale, the ex-Liberal leader’s involvement emerging only in recent weeks after a Freedom of Information battle
Like the DJ, Smith – who in 1973 appeared on Savile’s Clunk Click TV show – portrayed himself as a charitable man supporting young boys to provide cover for his sordid activities.
But unlike in the Savile scandal, police forces around the country repeatedly investigated sex abuse allegations against Smith yet their efforts to prosecute the MP were constantly blocked.
The book details how police officers were threatened with dismissal and gagged by the Official Secrets Act if they attempted to expose the politician’s sordid activities.

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

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

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

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

Find this story at 12 April 2014

© Associated Newspapers Ltd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find this story at 26 February 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find this story at 27 November 2012

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

Court to conduct preliminary examination of around 60 alleged cases of unlawful killing and claims of mistreatment

The ICC will examine separate allegations, mostly from former detainees held in British miltiary custody in Iraq. Photograph: Ian Waldie/Getty Images
Allegations that British troops were responsible for a series of war crimes after the invasion of Iraq are to be examined by the international criminal court (ICC) at The Hague, the specialist tribunal has announced.

The court is to conduct a preliminary examination of what have been estimated to be 60 alleged cases of unlawful killing and claims that more than 170 Iraqis were mistreated while in British military custody during the conflict.

British defence officials are confident that the ICC will not move to the next stage and announce a formal investigation, largely because the UK has the capacity to investigate the allegations itself.

However, the announcement is a blow to the prestige of the armed forces as the UK is the only western state that has faced a preliminary investigation at the ICC. The court’s decision places the UK in the company of countries such as the Central African Republic, Colombia and Afghanistan.

In a statement released on Tuesday, the ICC said: “The new information received by the office alleges the responsibility of officials of the United Kingdom for war crimes involving systematic detainee abuse in Iraq from 2003 until 2008.

“The reopened preliminary examination will analyse, in particular, alleged crimes attributed to the armed forces of the United Kingdom deployed in Iraq between 2003 and 2008.”

But Dominic Grieve, the attorney general, said the government rejected any allegation that there was systematic abuse carried out by the British armed forces in Iraq.

“British troops are some of the best in the world and we expect them to operate to the highest standards, in line with both domestic and international law,” he said. “In my experience, the vast majority of our armed forces meet those expectations.”

Grieve added that, although the allegations were already being “comprehensively investigated” in Britain, “the UK government has been, and remains, a strong supporter of the ICC and I will provide the office of the prosecutor with whatever is necessary to demonstrate that British justice is following its proper course”.

The investigation means there will be a degree of scrutiny from The Hague of the British police team responsible for investigating the allegations, as well as the Service Prosecuting Authority (SPA), which is responsible for bringing courts martial cases, and Grieve, who must make the final decision on war crimes prosecutions in the UK.

The decision by the ICC chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, was made after a complaint was lodged in January by the Berlin-based human rights NGO the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights and a Birmingham law firm, Public Interest Lawyers (PIL) – which represented the family of Baha Mousa, the Iraqi hotel receptionist tortured to death by British troops in 2003 – and has since represented scores of other men and women who were detained and allegedly mistreated.

The process of a preliminary examination can take several years.

The newly appointed head of the SPA, Andrew Cayley QC, who has 20 years’ experience of prosecuting at war crimes tribunals in Cambodia and at The Hague, said he was confident that the ICC would eventually conclude that the UK should continue to investigate the allegations. Cayley said the SPA “will not flinch” from bringing prosecutions if the evidence justified it.

He added that he did not expect any civilians – officials or government ministers – would end up facing prosecution.

Any war crime committed by British servicemen or servicewomen is an offence under English law by virtue of the International Criminal Court Act 2001.

The ICC has already seen evidence suggesting that British troops did commit war crimes in Iraq, concluding after receiving a previous complaint in 2006: “There was a reasonable basis to believe that crimes within the jurisdiction of the court had been committed, namely wilful killing and inhuman treatment.”

At that point, the court concluded that it should take no action, as there were fewer than 20 allegations.

Many more cases have emerged in recent years. Currently, the Iraq Historic Allegations Team, the body set up by the Ministry of Defence to investigate complaints arising from the five-year British military occupation of the south-east of the country, is examining 52 complaints of unlawful killing involving 63 deaths and 93 allegations of mistreatment involving 179 people.

The alleged unlawful killings include a number of deaths in custody and the complaints of mistreatment range from relatively minor abuse to torture.

PIL withdrew allegations of unlawful killings arising out of one incident, a firefight in May 2004 known as the battle of Danny Boy, although an inquiry continues to examine allegations that a number of insurgents taken prisoner at that time were mistreated.

The ICC will examine separate allegations, mostly from former detainees held in Iraq. Following the death of Baha Mousa, one soldier, Corporal Donald Payne, admitted being guilty of inhumane treatment of detainees and was jailed for one year. He became the first and only British soldier to admit a war crime.

Six other soldiers were acquitted. The judge found that Mousa and several other men had been subjected to a series of assaults over 36 hours, but a number of charges had been dropped because of “a more or less obvious closing of ranks”.

The MoD admitted to the Guardian four years ago that at least seven further Iraqi civilians had died in UK military custody. Since then, no one has been charged or prosecuted.

• This article was amended on Tuesday 13 May 2014 to reflect the fact that the ICC is not an EU institution, and to remove a reference to the forthcoming European elections.

Ian Cobain
The Guardian, Tuesday 13 May 2014 18.34 BST

Find this story at 13 May 2014

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

Human rights group representing Gaddafi opponent rendered to Libya via Diego Garcia says Britain must ‘come clean’ over role
Jamie Doward

The government is under mounting pressure to “come clean” about the role of an overseas UK territory leased to the US and allegedly used as a secret “black site” detention centre.

An opponent of Colonel Gaddafi who was rendered in a joint MI6-CIA operation, and a leading human rights group representing him, have demanded that the foreign secretary, William Hague, clarify the UK’s position on Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean leased to the US until 2016. The Senate’s intelligence security committee is preparing to declassify a file that reportedly confirms that the CIA detained “high-value suspects on Diego Garcia” and that “the black site arrangement on the atoll was made with the ‘full cooperation’ of the British government”.

The revelations are hugely troubling for the government and threaten to raise awkward questions about the UK’s relationship with the US, its closest security ally. They strengthen claims made by Abdel-Hakim Belhaj, a rebel military commander and opponent of Gaddafi, who was arrested in Malaysia and rendered with his pregnant wife to Libya, allegedly via Diego Garcia, in a joint US-UK intelligence operation.

Papers discovered in Tripoli in 2011 show that the British security services were instrumental in helping Libya to seize Belhaj, who says he was tortured during his rendition and during his subsequent four-and-a-half-year incarceration by the Gaddafi regime. A flight plan confirmed the CIA had intended to render him via Diego Garcia.

Belhaj, who unsuccessfully tried to bring a case against former foreign secretary Jack Straw, former senior MI6 official Sir Mark Allen, the security services and the Foreign Office, told the Observer that the Senate report raised new questions about the role played by the British overseas territory in facilitating the CIA’s extraordinary rendition programme.

“The first time I heard that I had gone through a place called Diego Garcia was when I was told by the head of the Libyan intelligence, Moussa Koussa, during my first interrogation session in a prison outside Tripoli,” Belhaj said.

“He was running the interrogation and was angry that it had taken a long time for me to arrive in Libya. I told him that the plane had stopped somewhere on the way from Bangkok. He told me that he knew, and that the plane had landed on an island in the Indian Ocean called Diego Garcia.

“Perhaps he was showing off, or perhaps he had been given wrong information, I don’t know. I just know that the flight stopped somewhere. I was chained up in a very painful position and had no means to know where I was, or even whether my pregnant wife – who had been kidnapped at the same time – was with me.”

Although the British government admitted in 2008 that two rendition flights carrying detainees had stopped for refuelling on Diego Garcia in 2002, it has consistently denied that detainees were held on it.

“Each year the US government reaffirms to us during our official political-military discussions that all previous assurances since 2008 on this subject remain correct,” Mark Simmonds, the minister for overseas territories, wrote in a letter last month to Richard Ottaway, the chairman of parliament’s foreign affairs select committee. “Namely that, apart from two instances in Diego Garcia during 2002, there have been no other instances in which US intelligence flights landed in the United Kingdom, UK overseas territories or crown dependencies, with a detainee on board since 11 September 2001.”

Polly Rossdale, deputy director at human rights group Reprieve, which has acted for Belhaj, said: “The government must come clean about the UK’s role in this dirty affair.”

A spokesman for the Foreign Office declined to add any comment to what ministers had already told parliament.

The Observer, Sunday 13 April 2014

Find this story at 13 April 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find this story at 6 May 2014

© Copyright 1992-2014. The Moscow Times

World View: New claims say Ankara worked with the US and Britain to smuggle Gaddafi’s guns to rebel groups

The US’s Secretary of State John Kerry and its UN ambassador, Samantha Power have been pushing for more assistance to be given to the Syrian rebels. This is despite strong evidence that the Syrian armed opposition are, more than ever, dominated by jihadi fighters similar in their beliefs and methods to al-Qa’ida. The recent attack by rebel forces around Latakia, northern Syria, which initially had a measure of success, was led by Chechen and Moroccan jihadis.
America has done its best to keep secret its role in supplying the Syrian armed opposition, operating through proxies and front companies. It is this which makes Seymour Hersh’s article “The Red Line and The Rat Line: Obama, Erdogan and the Syrian rebels” published last week in the London Review of Books, so interesting.

Attention has focussed on whether the Syrian jihadi group, Jabhat al-Nusra, aided by Turkish intelligence, could have been behind the sarin gas attacks in Damascus last 21 August, in an attempt to provoke the US into full-scale military intervention to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad. “We now know it was a covert action planned by [Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdogan’s people to push Obama over the red line,” a former senior US intelligence officer is quoted as saying.

Critics vehemently respond that all the evidence points to the Syrian government launching the chemical attack and that even with Turkish assistance, Jabhat al-Nusra did not have the capacity to use sarin.

A second and little-regarded theme of Hersh’s article is what the CIA called the rat line, the supply chain for the Syrian rebels overseen by the US in covert cooperation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The information about this comes from a highly classified and hitherto secret annex to the report by the US Senate Intelligence Committee on the attack by Libyan militiamen on the US consulate in Benghazi on 11 September 2012 in which US ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed. The annex deals with an operation in which the CIA, in cooperation with MI6, arranged the dispatch of arms from Mu’ammer Gaddafi’s arsenals to Turkey and then across the 500-mile long Turkish southern frontier with Syria. The annex refers to an agreement reached in early 2012 between Obama and Erdogan with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar supplying funding. Front companies, purporting to be Australian, were set up, employing former US soldiers who were in charge of obtaining and transporting the weapons. According to Hersh, the MI6 presence enabled the CIA to avoid reporting the operation to Congress, as required by law, since it could be presented as a liaison mission.

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The US involvement in the rat line ended unhappily when its consulate was stormed by Libyan militiamen. The US diplomatic presence in Benghazi had been dwarfed by that of the CIA and, when US personnel were airlifted out of the city in the aftermath of the attack, only seven were reportedly from the State Department and 23 were CIA officers. The disaster in Benghazi, which soon ballooned into a political battle between Republicans and Democrats in Washington, severely loosened US control of what arms were going to which rebel movements in Syria.

This happened at the moment when Assad’s forces were starting to gain the upper hand and al-Qa’ida-type groups were becoming the cutting edge of the rebel military.

The failure of the rebels to win in 2012 left their foreign backers with a problem. At the time of the fall of Gaddafi they had all become over-confident, demanding the removal of Assad when he still held all Syria’s 14 provincial capitals. “They were too far up the tree to get down,” according to one observer. To accept anything other than the departure of Assad would have looked like a humiliating defeat.

Saudi Arabia and Qatar went on supplying money while Sunni states turned a blind eye to the recruitment of jihadis and to preachers stirring up sectarian hatred against the Shia. But for Turkey the situation was worse. Efforts to project its power were faltering and all its chosen proxies – from Egypt to Iraq – were in trouble. It was evident that al-Qa’ida-type fighters, including Jahat al-Nusra, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) and Ahrar al-Sham were highly dependent on Turkish border crossings for supplies, recruits and the ability to reach safety. The heaviest intra-rebel battles were for control of these crossings. Turkey’s military intelligence, MIT, and the paramilitary Gendarmerie played a growing role in directing and training jihadis and Jabhat al-Nusra in particular.

The Hersh article alleges that the MIT went further and instructed Jabhat al-Nusra on how to stage a sarin gas attack in Damascus that would cross Obama’s red line and lead to the US launching an all-out air attack. Vehement arguments rage over whether this happened. That a senior US intelligence officer is quoted by America’s leading investigative journalist as believing that it did, is already damaging Turkey.

Part of the US intelligence community is deeply suspicious of Erdogan’s actions in Syria. It may also be starting to strike home in the US and Europe that aid to the armed rebellion in Syria means destabilising Iraq. When Isis brings suicide bombers from across the Turkish border into Syria it can as easily direct them to Baghdad as Aleppo.

The Pentagon is much more cautious than the State Department about the risks of putting greater military pressure on Assad, seeing it as the first step in a military entanglement along the lines of Iraq and Afghanistan. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey and Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel are the main opponents of a greater US military role. Both sides in the US have agreed to a programme under which 600 Syrian rebels would be trained every month and jihadis would be weeded out. A problem here is that the secular moderate faction of committed Syrian opposition fighters does not really exist. As always, there is a dispute over what weapons should be supplied, with the rebels, Saudis and Qataris insisting that portable anti-aircraft missiles would make all the difference. This is largely fantasy, the main problem being that the rebel military forces are fragmented into hundreds of war bands.

It is curious that the US military has been so much quicker to learn the lessons of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya than civilians like Kerry and Power. The killing of Ambassador Stevens shows what happens when the US gets even peripherally involved in a violent, messy crisis like Syria where it does not control many of the players or much of the field.

Meanwhile, a telling argument against Turkey having orchestrated the sarin gas attacks in Damascus is that to do so would have required a level of competence out of keeping with its shambolic interventions in Syria over the past three years.

PATRICK COCKBURN
Sunday 13 April 2014

Find this story at 13 April 2014

© independent.co.uk

Prime Minister John Key says he has no details on briefings that documents released by US whistleblower Edward Snowden show were given to Kiwi spooks.

Key would not confirm or deny the briefings, which were revealed overnight by author and journalist Glenn Greenwald, who worked with MSNBC to reveal the documents.

“The law states very clearly that for SIS or GCSB [Government Communications Security Bureau] to undertake surveillance against New Zealanders it has to be with warranted authority,” Key said this afternoon.

“In my view that will involve a very small group of New Zealanders from time to time.”

The Government is bracing itself for more leaks from the Snowden archive.

“I don’t know what Snowden has … what they chose to release and when, who knows?” Key said.

“They are of no great consequence, I don’t think.”

The documents show Kiwi spooks were briefed on setting honey traps and internet “dirty tricks” to “control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp” online discourse.

GCSB agents – part of the Five Eyes intelligence network – were briefed by counterparts from the ultra-secret Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group.

A slide-show presentation, called The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations, was given at a top secret spy conference in 2012.

It outlined sex and dirty tricks cyber operations used by JTRIG, a unit of the British signals intelligence agency GCHQ, which focused on cyber forensics, espionage and covert operations. GCHQ described the purpose of the unit as “using online techniques to make something happen in the real or cyber world”, including “information ops (influence or disruption)”.

According to the slides, JTRIG conducted “honey traps”, sent computer viruses, deleted the online presence of targets and engaged in cyber-attacks on the “hacktivist” collective Anonymous.

One carried the title “Cyber offensive session: pushing the boundaries and action against hacktivism” revealing the agency was going after online political activists.

The presentation outlined tactics to destroy the reputation of targets online. It detailed how agents could get another country to “believe a secret” by placing information on a compromised computer or making it visible on networks under surveillance.

A JTRIG tool, called AMBASSADORS RECEPTION, involved sending a virus to someone’s computer to stop it functioning. It would delete emails, encrypt files, make the screen shake, deny service or stop logins.

Other methods were deployed to “stop someone communicating”, bombarding their phone with text messages and calls – in some cases every 10 seconds, deleting their online presence and blocking up their fax machines.

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According to the presentation these tactics were used in Afghanistan, “significantly disrupting Taliban operations”.

Changing a profile photo on social networking sites “can take paranoia to a whole new level”.

A honey trap was described as “a great option” and “very successful when it works”. Writing false blogs, pretending to be a “victim” of a target worked in “serious crime ops” and in Iran, the conference was told.

The presentation also outlined “info ops” to discredit a company by leaking confidential information to rival firms and the press, posting negative information to online forums and stopping deals or ruining business relationships.

The documents were presented to the GCSB, NSA and agents from Australia and Canada.

Greenwald wrote on The Intercept website that the agencies were “attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate and warp online discourse, and in doing so are compromising the integrity of the internet itself”.

Greenwald called the tactics “extremist” and pointed out they do not only target hostile nations or spy agencies, terrorists or nation security threats, but also “people suspected (but not charged or convicted) of ordinary crimes or … those who use online protest activity for political ends”.

He added: “It is not difficult to see how dangerous it is to have secret government agencies being able to target any individuals they want – who have never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crimes.”

ANDREA VANCE
Last updated 15:14 26/02/2014

Find this story at 26 February 2014

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