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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

By Jason Lewis, Investigations Editor

9:00PM GMT 09 Mar 2013

Find this story at 9 March 2013

© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2013

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

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

27 August 2006. Thanks to A2.

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

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

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

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

List of MI6 Officers worldwide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find this story at 27 August 2006

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

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

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

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

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

Networks overwhelmed

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

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

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

Denis Keefe

Georgians question un-reality TV

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

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

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

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

…

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

Find this story at 16 March 2010

BBC © 2013

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

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

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

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

Attack ‘victim’

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

Find this story at 28 May 2007

© BBC 2013

Numerous notable journalists working for some of Britain’s most prestigious publications routinely collaborated with British intelligence during the Cold War, according to a BBC investigation. In 1968, Soviet newspaper Izvestia published the contents of an alleged British government memorandum entitled “Liaison Between the BBC and SIS”. SIS, which stands for Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, is Britain’s foremost external intelligence agency. The paper, which was the official organ of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, claimed that the foreign correspondents of most leading British newspapers secretly collaborated with the British intelligence community. It also alleged that the BBC’s world radio service had agreed with MI6 to broadcast preselected sentences or songs at prearranged times. These signals were used by British intelligence officers to demonstrate to foreign recruits in the Eastern Bloc that they were operating on behalf of the UK. At the time, the BBC virulently rejected the Izvestia’s claims, calling them “black propaganda” aimed at distracting world opinion from the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops, which had taken place some months earlier. But an investigation aired this week by the BBC Radio 4’s investigative Document program suggests that the memo published by the Soviet newspaper was probably genuine. The program says it discovered a memorandum in the BBC’s archives, which laments the embarrassment caused to MI6 by the Soviet claims. The memorandum, dated April 24, 1969, describes MI6 as “our friends”. The BBC program, which is available to listen to here, discusses the Soviets’ claims that several notable British journalists were MI6 agents. They include Edward Crankshaw and David Astor of The Observer, Lord Hartwell and Roy Pawley of The Daily Telegraph, Lord Arran of The Daily Mail, Henry Brandon of The Sunday Times, and even Mark Arnold-Foster of the left-leaning Guardian newspaper. Leading veteran security and intelligence correspondent Phillip Knightley told Document that he would not be surprised if Izvestia’s claims turned out to be true.

…

March 5, 2013 by Joseph Fitsanakis 11 Comments

Find this story at 5 March 2013

Jeremy Duns examines leaked documents which suggest close links between MI6 and the British press during the Cold War.

In December 1968, the British media was shaken by a series of secret documents leaked to Soviet state newspapers. The documents claimed a range of key Fleet Street correspondents and news chiefs were working for the intelligence services. Further papers alleged close links between the BBC and MI6.

…

Duration: 28 minutes
First broadcast: Monday 04 March 2013

Find this story at 4 March 2013

BBC © 2013

Cross-Taiwan Strait relations between China and Taiwan have thawed in recent years. China, who until the late 1970s was firing artillery shells toward the island nation, has supposedly taken a softer approach to what it considers a renegade or breakaway Chinese province.

Added to this uptick in recent bilateral relations is current Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou administration’s pro-China stance. However, beneath the surface the Sino-Taiwanese dynamic is more complicated than ever. Beijing, who still has not renounced the use of force to bring Taiwan under Chinese control, is malevolent. The Middle Kingdom has stepped up its espionage efforts in Taiwan, to such an extent that Taiwan’s military defensive capabilities have been compromised and Taiwan’s relations with the US, the supplier of these defense systems, has been damaged.

Just in the last year, events have unfolded, rocking this island nation of nearly 24 million and throwing its military back on its heels. In March 2012, a Taiwanese captain who worked at a regional operations center north of Taipei was detained on suspicion that he gave intelligence to China. He had assistance from an uncle that ran a business on the mainland. Taiwan’s early-warning radar systems were compromised, the country’s air-defence command and control systems and also surveillance aircraft.

On January 4, a retired Taiwanese naval officer, Chian Ching-kuo was indicted for spying for China. Chian had served as chief of the missile section on a naval warship before retiring in 2009. He was accused of passing secret intelligence to China about Taiwan’s 2011 plan to send warships to Somalia to protect Taiwanese fishing boats from pirate attacks. However, the Taiwanese plan was aborted due to political concerns.

On February 5, according to the Taipei Times, Taiwan’s High Court sentenced retired air force Lieutenant Colonel Yuan Hsiao-feng to 12 life sentences for passing classified military information to China over a period of six years. And, last October, Chang Chih-hsin, a former chief officer in charge of the political warfare division at the Naval Meteorological and Oceanography (METOC) office, and two other Taiwanese military officers were arrested on suspicion of espionage. Chang reportedly leaked classified submarine nautical charts and information about waters around Taiwan.

The Chang case could turn out to be one of the biggest spy busts in Taiwan since 2011 when Taiwanese Army Major General Lo Hsien-Che was lured into spying for China during his time in Taiwan’s representative office in Thailand. The general was caught in what Taiwan’s Central News Agency (CNA) called a “honey trap.” In other words, Lo gave up secrets for cash and sex.

Methods and modes

In an interview with me Dr. Joseph Fitsanakis, coordinator of the Security and Intelligence Studies program at King College in the US said that Lo got involved with a young Chinese woman that had an Australian passport.

Fitsanakis who teaches classes on espionage, intelligence, international terrorism, and covert actions, said this was a textbook example of China using real-life spies and sexual entrapment (one of the top methods used by Chinese spies) to gather intelligence.

Lo was sentenced to life in prison and bas been incarcerated since July 2011, however the Chang case is still playing out.

The Chang case intensifies

On February 4, news broke that a Taiwanese rear-admiral was questioned by military prosecutors in connection with an investigation into alleged leaks in the Chang investigation. The Ministry of National Defense (MND) did not disclose the admiral’s identity, however he is still on active duty and until this month served as commander of a fleet. Local media reports quoting military officials claim that the navy has reassigned another officer to take the rear admiral’s position.

Added to the fray is news that broke on February 15 that a Taiwanese army officer had been transferred after one of his relatives was also allegedly involved in the Chang case. This time it was Army Major Gen. Wu Chin-Chun, who originally headed the MND’s legislative liaison office and was an aide to Defense Minister Kao Hua-chu.

All of this brings up some poignant questions. What would motivate a career military officer to betray his country? How much damage has been caused by these recent security breaches? Since the US supplies much of Taiwanese military technology according to Fitsanakis, what fall out has these events had on US-Taiwanese relations? How does China’s spy network operate, why have they intensified its spy ring in Taiwan and what is Taiwan fighting back?

Selling Secrets to the Mainland: Military Espionage in Taiwan (part 2)

The question of why so many Taiwanese military officers would betray their country is a complicated one, as complicated as the six-decade plus relationship between China and Taiwan itself.

Professor Fitsanakis told me that as relations between China and Taiwan warmed in the last 10-15 years, more interaction has taken place. As this plays out, he said, it’s easier for China to find disgruntled employees to influence. In addition, China now has vast amounts of foreign currency at its disposal and finds it increasingly easy to use bribery.

A long-time Chinese watcher based in Taiwan, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me that it was partly Taiwan’s fault.

“They [Taiwan] takes a military officer and basically sticks him in a concrete room or office with low pay and expects him to serve like that for years. It breads discontent, even anger,” he said.

He added that the spying problem in Taiwan is worse than what the media reports and that there are taxi-drivers, teachers and people across all stratum of society that are either gathering information for China or are open to the idea.

If so, it’s a chilling disclosure. The extent of the fall-out from these security breaches in Taiwan’s military apparatus depends on who you ask. Not surprisingly, the Taiwanese military negates the extent of the damage.

However, others disagree. Commenting on the General Lo case, J. Michael Cole, a former intelligence officer at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and deputy news editor at the Taipei Times wrote in October that it was hard to contain the damage, “especially as doubts remained over how much access he [Lo] had to the nation’s Command, Control, Communications, Computer Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems, which Taiwan has been modernizing with US assistance for well over a decade.”

Fitsanakis said that recent military secret leaks in Taiwan, while significant in the short term, are not catastrophic.

“The major casualty of this is the relationship of trust between Taiwan and the US,” he said. “Many in Washington are increasingly hesitant to supply Taiwan with sensitive military technology because they fear penetration by the Chinese.”

Fitsanakis added that while nobody in the State Department would admit it publicaly, it’s subverting US-Taiwanese relations. Yet, to understand the problem that Taiwan is facing, more background information is needed on how China’s spy network began and how it operates. China’s main intelligence gathering agency, the Ministry of State Security (MSS), is the world’s most secret agency according to experts and engages in military intelligence and counterintelligence operations.

According to GlobalSecurity.org, the organizational structure of the MSS reflects the structure of the Russian KGB.

“In terms of personnel, the MSS favors non-professional intelligence agents such as travelers, businessmen, and academics with a special emphasis on the overseas Chinese students and high-tech Chinese professionals working abroad with access to sensitive technological material,” GlobalSecurity states.

Fitsanakis said that the MSS is not as technologically advanced as other intelligence gathering agencies but makes up for it in sheer size. For example, he said that reports indicated that the MSS has around 40,000 agents operating in Germany alone.

As a comparison, though the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) states that neither the number of its employees nor the size of the agency’s budget can be publicly disclosed, the CIA has around 60,000 agents in its ranks according to some analysts.

Going after Mei Guo

All of this beckons the question, if Sino-Taiwanese relations are improving, then why the increase in Chinese spying activity? The answer is simple: America (Mei Guo).

“China has been increasingly aggressive since the early 1990s in recruiting Taiwanese to spy,” Fitsanakis said. “Notably the need to spy on US military systems (early warning systems, missile systems) which are easier to access in Taiwan than in the US.” According to Fitsanakis both have been compromised in recent years.

He added that this would not change in the foreseeable future because weapons systems are the most coveted intel of any country. Beijing has also intensified its spying activities in recent years to confront what is sees as US encirclement in the Asia Pacific region as well as a safeguard to secure energy routes through the East China and South China Seas.

…

By Tim Daiss

Wednesday, 27 February 2013 at 3:29 pm

Find this story at 27 February 2013
And at 28 February 2013

©independent.co.uk

Last week I spoke about the current state of the espionage war between China and Taiwan with Tim Daiss, a Southeast Asia-based American journalist who has been covering the Asia-Pacific region for over a decade. Our discussion formed the basis of a comprehensive piece on the subject, published in British newspaper The Independent, in two parts (part one and part two). It told Daiss that the Ministry of State Security —China’s primary national intelligence agency— is not known for its technological prowess. However, the sheer size of Beijing’s intelligence apparatus is proving a good match for the more advanced automated systems used by its less populous regional rivals, including Taiwan. When it comes to traditional human intelligence, the Chinese have been known to employ time-tested methods such as sexual entrapment or blackmail, as was confirmed most recently in the case of Taiwanese Major-General Lo Hsien-che. Lo, who headed the Taiwanese military’s Office of Communications and Information, was convicted of sharing classified top-secret information with a female Chinese operative in her early 30s, who held an Australian passport. During his trial, which marked the culmination of Taiwan’s biggest spy scandal in over half a century, Lo admitted that the Chinese female spy “cajoled him with sex and money”. In addition to honey-trap techniques, Chinese spies collect intelligence by way of bribery, as do many of their foreign colleagues. In the case of China, however, a notable change in recent years has been the accumulation of unprecedented amounts of foreign currency, which make it easier for Chinese intelligence operatives to entice foreign assets, such as disgruntled or near-bankrupt state employees, to sell classified data.

In the case of Taiwan, China’s primary intelligence targets are weapons systems, especially those originating in the United States. The island-nation possesses export-versions of some of America’s most advanced weaponry, and it is far easier for Beijing to access such weapons in Taiwan than on US soil. Taiwan is both geographically and culturally familiar to Chinese intelligence operatives, who do not have to try too hard to blend into Taiwanese society. I told The Independent that, based on publicly available information about recent espionage cases, it would be safe to assume that Chinese intelligence has gained access to substantial classified information on some of Taiwan’s most advanced US-made defense systems. These include the Lockheed Martin/Raytheon-built Patriot missile defense system deployed on the island, as well as the Po Shen command and control system, which is designed to facilitate critical battlefield communications between Taiwan’s navy, army and air force.

I argue in the interview with the London-based paper that China’s success in penetrating Taiwan’s defense systems is having a significant impact on bilateral relations between Washington and Taipei. On the one hand, the United States is committed on preserving its alliance with Taiwan, for both geostrategic and symbolic purposes. But, on the other hand, American defense planners are weary of the damage caused to US military strategy by the exposure of some of Washington’s most coveted weapons systems to Chinese intelligence by way of Taiwan. As I told Daiss, while nobody at the US Pentagon or State Department would admit it publicly, “many in Washington are increasingly hesitant to supply Taiwan with sensitive military technology because they fear penetration by the Chinese”.

…

March 1, 2013 by Joseph Fitsanakis

Find this story at 1 March 2013

Andrei Lugovoy said he had ‘lost all faith in the opportunity of an unbiased investigation in Britain’

A former KGB officer suspected of murdering Alexander Litvinenko has announced he will not take part in the coroner’s inquest due to take place later this year and attacked the British police and courts as “politically motivated”.

Andrei Lugovoy, now a politician in Russia, told a hastily assembled press conference that he had lost faith in British justice and said he would take no further steps to clear his name.

It emerged last year that at the time of his death in 2006, after being poisoned with radioactive polonium, Mr Litvinenko had been a paid agent for MI6 and was dealt with by a handler known as “Martin”.

The Foreign Secretary, William Hague, has asked for unspecified evidence relating to the case to be heard in secret for national security reasons. The move has been opposed by Mr Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, but last month the coroner, Sir Robert Owen, ruled that he would hold a hearing behind closed doors to see the Government’s evidence. The inquest is due to formally open on 1 May.

Russia has refused to extradite Mr Lugovoy, who is wanted by the Metropolitan Police in connection with the killing of Mr Litvinenko, who died after an agonising ordeal in hospital. Doctors diagnosed his condition as polonium poisoning just before he died.

Mr Lugovoy said: “I lost all faith in the opportunity of an unbiased investigation in Britain. It’s not clear how I can defend myself and oppose arguments that are not going to be made public. Who will evaluate the truthfulness of secret facts?”

During the press conference, he held up a Scotland Yard report to the coroner, which he said had been provided to him by British authorities under a non-disclosure agreement. He said the few facts contained in the report proved his version of events, claiming it established that the polonium trail led from London back to Moscow, rather than the other way round. He said the rest was a mix of “politically motivated rumours and gossip” designed to smear him and Russia.

…

Shaun Walker

Moscow

Tuesday 12 March 2013

Find this story at 12 March 2013

© independent.co.uk

Andrei Lugovoi, who is now an elected official in Russia, says he won’t talk even by video to British investigators about the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London just over six years ago.

During a Tuesday press conference in Moscow, KGB-officer-turned-parliamentarian Andrei Lugovoi holds papers about the 2006 poisoning of former Russian agent turned Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London that he said he got from Scotland Yard,

The murder of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London just over six years ago, using what must be the world’s most exotic poison, radioactive polonium 210, has never been solved and remains the subject of conflicting narratives and still-deepening intrigue over who may have killed him and why.
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Now it appears that a British public inquest that aimed to find definitive answers to those questions, slated to open in May, may have virtually no chance of getting to the bottom of it.

On Tuesday, the main suspect in the case, Russian KGB-officer-turned-parliamentarian Andrei Lugovoi, said he will not travel to Britain to give testimony or even provide evidence via video link.

RECOMMENDED: Do you know anything about Russia? A quiz.

“I have come to the conclusion that the British authorities will not give me an opportunity to prove my innocence and that I will not be able to find justice in Great Britain,” Mr. Lugovoi told a Moscow press conference.

“I have definitely lost my faith in the possibility of an unbiased investigation of this case in Great Britain. I have to state that I am withdrawing from the coroner’s investigation and will no longer participate in it,” he said.

No one denies that Lugovoi and his business partner Dmitry Kovtun met with Litvinenko in a London bar on the day he fell ill. British investigators later established that Litvinenko’s teacup at that meeting was contaminated with polonium-210, and thus was almost certainly the murder weapon. Traces of polonium, a substance that’s almost impossible to obtain except by governments, were later found in Mr. Kovtun’s apartment in Germany and on the clothes of both Kovtun and Lugovoi.

Britain demanded at the time that Lugovoi be returned to London to stand trial for murder. But Russia refused, saying the Russian Constitution prohibits the extradition of Russian citizens. Lugovoi was subsequently elected to the State Duma on the ticket of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, where he is still a member enjoying parliamentary immunity.

The upcoming inquest, where witnesses must testify under oath, has been regarded as the last chance to unravel all the conflicting stories and perhaps arrive at the truth.

But its prospects for success have already been under doubt due to the British government’s efforts to limit access to sensitive materials about the case which some critics claim it is doing as part of a deal with Russia aimed at improving ties between the two countries.

But, until today, Lugovoi had insisted that he was ready to cooperate with the investigation. And Russian authorities have repeatedly said they too want to see the truth revealed.
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The murder of Mr. Litvinenko led to a prolonged chill in Russian-British relations which has only recently begun to abate.

The main suspicion in the West all along has been that Litvinenko was killed on the order of Russian authorities because he had publicly disclosed secrets of the FSB security service and then defected to Britain in 2000, where he continued to make dark and sweeping allegations against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his government.

A good deal of the evidence since dredged up by Western investigative journalists points to Russia — if not the Kremlin directly — as the source of the polonium that killed him and probably the motive for doing so as well.

The Russians have countered with various theories, including that Litvinenko may have been murdered by his sponsor and friend, renegade Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, in a plot to blame Russia for poisoning an outspoken critic and blacken the reputation of Mr. Putin.

Lugovoi has argued that Litvinenko must have obtained the polonium on his own, and either killed himself with it or was murdered by someone else. Last year Lugovoi took a lie detector test in Moscow, widely covered by Russian media, which reportedly upheld his claim of noninvolvement in Litvinenko’s death.

Complicating the picture are persistent allegations that, after receiving asylum in Britain in 2001, Litvinenko went to work for the British intelligence service MI6, providing information about the FSB and the activities of the Russian mafia.

Though Litvinenko’s widow earlier denied that her husband had been working for British secret services, her lawyer recently told the Kremlin-funded RT network that “at the time of his death Litvinenko had been for a number of years a regular and paid agent and employee of MI6 with a dedicated handler whose pseudonym was Martin.”

…

By Fred Weir, Correspondent / March 12, 2013

Find this story at 12 March 2013

© The Christian Science Monitor

Inquest told the victim’s wheelchair was not secured and he died when it tipped over

A double amputee died when his unsecured wheelchair tipped over backwards as he was being transported to hospital in an ambulance operated by under-fire outsourcing firm G4S.

An inquest jury found that the driver and staff of the security firm had not received sufficient training to move patients safely between their homes, hospitals and clinics.

Retired newsagent Palaniappan Thevarayan, 47, suffered fatal head injuries when his wheelchair came loose from the floor clamps in the back of the vehicle taking him to St Helier Hospital, in Sutton, Surrey, from a dialysis centre in Epsom hospital in May 2011.

The jury at Westminster Magistrates Court this week heard that driver John Garner, who had worked for the company since 2005, and fellow G4S staff had not had their manual handling training updated since 2009. G4S, which was heavily criticised for its failure to recruit enough security guards for last year’s Olympic Games, operates public sector contracts in border control, security, prisoner and patient transport worth £350million a year. The global security company continues to work with St Helier along with four other NHS Trusts in the London area carrying out 400,000 patient journeys a year.

Westminster Coroners Court heard that Mr Thevarayan’s wheelchair tipped backwards resulting in a serious head injury. It emerged that the chair had not been attached to the ambulance floor by the necessary ratchet clamps and was not securely restrained. He was being taken to hospital after developing problems with a blocked catheter.

Delivering a narrative verdict, the jury said: “Patient transport service staff were not sufficiently trained in the safe transportation of patients by ambulance.”

Mr Thevarayan, who was originally from India, had previously had both legs amputated after suffering complications with his diabetes. He was undergoing dialysis three times a week for kidney failure and was nearing the top of the transplant list.

The inquest heard that he had to wait for more than six hours for emergency surgery after being transferred to St George’s Hospital, Tooting, following the incident. His wife and full time carer Nirmala said he had been given only a 50:50 chance of survival if operated on immediately.

She told the inquest she wanted answers about his treatment by G4S and wanted to know why it had taken so long for him to receive surgery. ‘I want to know why they didn’t look after him properly’, she said. “And in hospital, why did they take so long to treat him?” she added.

Assistant deputy coroner Kevin McLoughlin said to Mrs Thevarayan and her son and daughter who sat through the four-day inquest: “I pay tribute to the calm dignity which you and your family have conducted yourself through what must have been heart-breaking evidence.”

In a statement G4S said: “We can confirm that the member of staff involved in this tragic incident had received all the mandatory training required at the time.

“Following this incident we immediately installed an additional team of professionals to review our procedures and ensure that training fully covers all points pertinent to this incident. Improvements have been made to our systems for recording training, and the content of our staff training has been reviewed and enhanced to address lessons learned from this incident.”

…

JONATHAN BROWN

Friday 08 March 2013

Find this story at 8 March 2013

© independent.co.uk

The company which failed to meet its Olympics security contract confirms a big fall in profits.

Annual profits fell by a worse than expected 32% at G4S, the firm at the centre of last year’s Olympics security fiasco.

Pre-tax profit for 2012 dropped to £175m from £257m the previous year as a result of a £70m loss on its contract to supply security personnel to the Olympic and Paralympic Games in London.

The Armed Forces had to be called in to cover staff shortfalls when G4S admitted just ahead of the Games that it had failed to hire enough guards to cover its contract.

It had been obliged to provide 10,400 people but managed to fulfil 83% of its contracted shifts.

The failures led to chief operating officer David Taylor-Smith and Ian Horseman Sewell, who was head of global events, to quit their jobs while chief executive Nick Buckles remained in his post.

Mr Buckles told MPs on the Home Affairs Select Committee in July that the staffing failure was a fiasco and a “humiliating shambles”.

A report for G4S by auditors PwC found that monitoring and tracking of the security workforce was inadequate and that management failed to appreciate the scale and exact nature of the project.

…

8:27am UK, Wednesday 13 March 2013

Find this story at 13 March 2013

Copyright ©2013 BSkyB

G4S failed to supply enough personnel for the London 2012 Olympics, forcing the Government to draft in soldiers Getty Images

G4S’s Olympics fiasco drove annual profits down by a third at the security company last year.

The company also announced this morning that its chief financial officer, Trevor Dighton, would retire on April 30. He will be replaced by Ashley Almanza, who held the same position at energy company BG Group.

…

Katherine Griffiths
Last updated at 12:08PM, March 13 2013

Find this story at 13 March 2013

© Times Newspapers Limited 2013

For the first time, 25-year-old U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning has admitted to being the source behind the largest leak of state secrets in U.S. history. More than a thousand days after he was arrested, Manning testified Thursday before a military court. He said he leaked the classified documents to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks in order to show the American public the “true costs of war.” Reading for more than an hour from a 35-page statement, Manning said: “I believed that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information … this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general.” At the pretrial hearing at Fort Meade military base in Maryland, Manning pleaded guilty to reduced charges on 10 counts, which carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. But even if the judge accepts the plea, prosecutors can still pursue a court-martial on the remaining 12 charges. The most serious of those is “aiding the enemy” and carries a possible life sentence. We are joined by Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a lawyer to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. He just returned from attending Manning’s hearing. [includes rush transcript]

Guest:

Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a lawyer to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. He returned last night from attending the pretrial hearing for Bradley Manning.

This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution. Donate >
Transcript

AMY GOODMAN: For the first time, 25-year-old U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning has admitted to being the source behind the largest leak of state secrets in U.S. history. More than a thousand days after he was arrested, Manning testified Thursday before a military court. He said he leaked the classified documents to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks in order to show the American public the “true costs of war.”

Reading for over an hour from a 35-page statement, Manning said, quote, “I believed that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information … this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general.” He added, quote, “I believed that these cables would not damage the United States. However, I believed these cables would be embarrassing.” He said he took the information to WikiLeaks only after he was rebuffed by The Washington Post and The New York Times.

At the pretrial hearing at Fort Meade military base in Maryland, Manning pleaded guilty to reduced charges on 10 counts, which carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. But even if the judge accepts the plea, prosecutors can still pursue a court-martial on the remaining 12 charges. The most serious of those is aiding the enemy and carries a possible life sentence.

Over the course of the hearing, Bradley Manning took responsibility for leaking the so-called “Collateral Murder” video of an Apache helicopter attack in Iraq; some U.S. diplomatic cables, including one of the early WikiLeaks publications, the Reykjavik cable; portions of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs; some of the files on detainees in Guantánamo; and two intelligence memos.

For more, we’re joined by Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, lawyer for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. He has just returned from attending that pretrial hearing last night for Bradley Manning.

Michael Ratner, welcome back to Democracy Now! Well, this is explosive. Bradley Manning stands in court and accepts responsibility for releasing the documents, says he is guilty of doing that.

MICHAEL RATNER: It was one of the more moving days I’ve ever spent in a courtroom. You’ve heard from Bradley Manning once before, which was when he testified about the torture that happened to him. I was crying through that. This was amazing. I mean, he actually didn’t stand; he sat at the defense table. And he read his 35-page statement, which, sadly, we do not have a copy of, even though there’s nothing classified about that statement. And hopefully we’ll get it, because that is something that should be taught in every school in America.

He went through each of the releases that he took responsibility for, that you mentioned on the air, and he told us why he did it. And in each case, you saw a 22-year-old, a 23-year-old, a person of incredible conscience, saying, “What I’m seeing the United States do is utterly wrong. It’s immoral. The way they’re killing people in Iraq, targeting people for death, rather than working with the population, this is wrong.” And in each of these—each of these statements tells you about how he was doing it politically.

AMY GOODMAN: Remind us of how he did this. He was actually serving in Iraq as a soldier.

MICHAEL RATNER: Yes, he was a soldier. He was in—and he goes through that in his statement. He’s an intelligence analyst. And one of the things he worked with, what were called “significant activities reports,” which are the daily logs of what’s happening in Iraq and, attached to it, of course, in Afghanistan. And as he read those, I think he became appalled by what he saw: the killings, the targeted assassinations, the fact that people didn’t want the United States there, the fact that we weren’t really helping the country or helping individuals. And he said he wanted to lift the fog of war from it. And he got in touch with various organizations, including WikiLeaks. And that, he talks about. He talks about that. And—

AMY GOODMAN: Explain. He actually said he didn’t go to WikiLeaks first.

MICHAEL RATNER: No, that’s correct. He first—he had these documents on a disk that he eventually took out of—took out of the special secure room. He actually came to the United States with it. That’s the Iraq war logs and the Afghan war logs. And he tried to get it to The New York Times and The Washington Post. He calls up The Washington Post, has a five-minute discussion with somebody there.

AMY GOODMAN: Does he know who?

MICHAEL RATNER: He doesn’t recall who, or at least didn’t say it. He doesn’t take it—he said they don’t take him seriously, and then he feels he can’t get that. He calls the public editor at The New York Times and leaves a message on the answering machine of the public editor and doesn’t get a call back. He’s then thinking about: “How am I going to get this critical information out? Because I think what the U.S. is doing should be debated in the United States. We’re killing people without cause, essentially.”

And then, he has already known about WikiLeaks, because he was aware of WikiLeaks in part because of their release of the text messages or the SMSes from the World Trade Center phones that were there on 9/11. So he’s aware of WikiLeaks. He’s in some communication, by chat or otherwise, with WikiLeaks. And they point him to a site where he can upload, upload the documents.

One interesting point on that is what he mentions about WikiLeaks. Some papers have reported that he said he believes he was in communication with Julian Assange. He actually says it could have been Julian Assange, it could have been someone he calls “Daniel Schmitt,” which is probably Daniel Domscheit-Berg from Germany. And he says—and it also says it could have been someone high up in WikiLeaks. He really doesn’t know. And he says, “Whatever I did in this case, I did because I wanted to do it. I was not pressured to do it. I made the decision to do it.” So he tries these other media, and ultimately he sees that WikiLeaks has a way of uploading documents that’s anonymous, that he doesn’t know who’s on the other end, and they don’t know who’s on his end.

AMY GOODMAN: He also said he was motivated by the Reuters FOIAs, right? Freedom of the Information Act requests to get the—what came to be known as the “Collateral Murder” video.

MICHAEL RATNER: I mean, when we can get the transcript and put out the quotes of what he said, on that “Collateral Murder” video, which he saw the Reuters journalists killed, then he saw them attack the van that was trying to rescue people, in which children were injured, and he said, “What I heard them say in that helicopter as they were shooting was incredible bloodlust.” “Bloodlust,” that’s what he said.

AMY GOODMAN: During that pretrial hearing on Wednesday, let’s talk about this, Michael. Bradley Manning spoke about the “Collateral Murder” video of an Apache helicopter attack in Iraq and admitted for the first time being the source of the leaked tape. Manning said, quote, “The most alarming aspect of the video to me was the seemingly delightful bloodlust the aerial weapons team happened to have.” He added, the soldiers’ actions, quote, “seemed similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass,” describing the video as “war porn,” saying the crew’s “lack of concern for human life” and “concern for injured children at the scene” greatly bothered him. So, this is the video—it was shot July 12th, 2007—that Manning referenced. It shows U.S. forces killing 12 people, including two Reuters employees. Now, this video is taken by the U.S. military Apache helicopter. It is the camera that’s mounted within the helicopter. You hear the soldiers in the helicopter joking, cursing. And it is showing a target on the men who are walking in an area of Baghdad known as New Baghdad below. Among them, an up-and-coming Reuters videographer named Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver, Saeed Chmagh.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: I have individuals with weapons.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: You’re clear.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: Alright, firing.

U.S. SOLDIER 3: Let me know when you’ve got them.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Let’s shoot. Light ’em all up.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: Come on, fire!

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’.

U.S. SOLDIER 4: Hotel, Bushmaster two-six, Bushmaster two-six, we need to move, time now!

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Alright, we just engaged all eight individuals.

AMY GOODMAN: Reuters driver Saeed Chmagh survived that initial attack. He’s seen trying to crawl away as the helicopter flies overhead. U.S. forces open fire again when they see a van pulling up. The van comes to evacuate the wounded, like Saeed Chmagh.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: The bodies.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: Where’s that van at?

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Right down there by the bodies.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: OK, yeah.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Bushmaster, Crazy Horse. We have individuals going to the scene, looks like possibly picking up bodies and weapons.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: Let me engage. Can I shoot?

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Roger. Break. Crazy Horse one-eight, request permission to engage.

U.S. SOLDIER 3: Picking up the wounded?

U.S. SOLDIER 1: Yeah, we’re trying to get permission to engage. Come on, let us shoot!

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Bushmaster, Crazy Horse one-eight.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: They’re taking him.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Bushmaster, Crazy Horse one-eight.

U.S. SOLDIER 4: This is Bushmaster seven, go ahead.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Roger. We have a black SUV—or Bongo truck picking up the bodies. Request permission to engage.

U.S. SOLDIER 4: Bushmaster seven, roger. This is Bushmaster seven, roger. Engage.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: One-eight, engage. Clear.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: Come on!

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Clear. Clear.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: We’re engaging.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Coming around. Clear.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: Roger. Trying to—

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Clear.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: I hear ’em—I lost ’em in the dust.

U.S. SOLDIER 3: I got ’em.

U.S. SOLDIER 2: Should have a van in the middle of the road with about 12 to 15 bodies.

U.S. SOLDIER 1: Oh yeah, look at that. Right through the windshield! Ha ha!

AMY GOODMAN: That is the video that WikiLeaks, when releasing it, dubbed “Collateral Murder,” of the July 12, 2007, attack. In that van, by the way, were two children who were critically wounded. Saeed Chmagh was killed. That is the video that we played first when it was released and also interviewed Julian Assange at the time here in the United States, interestingly. Michael Ratner with us, who is Julian Assange’s attorney. So this video Bradley Manning got in downloading, because it’s a U.S. military video, that Reuters, which had asked repeatedly for it, never got until WikiLeaks released it, to know the last seconds of their employees’ lives.

MICHAEL RATNER: Not only did Reuters never get it, Amy, CENTCOM, which is I guess the central part of the Army, basically said, “We don’t think we have the video.” And yet, everybody that was in the room with Bradley Manning, everybody knew about the video. It was one of many, many videos. He says in this video—and he said it in court—he said, “What was amazing is, when they—after they hurt these children in the van,” he said, “they showed no remorse for the children. And when they saw someone crawling on the ground, they said, ‘I hope he picks up a gun,’ essentially, ‘because we can kill him then.'” So, these people—this was really here a 22- or 23-year-old man watching this. Most people would have said, “Well, I’ll just get through the Army, and that’ll be it.” He didn’t, and he’s a hero for that, because what he did is he acted on his moral conscience, and he exposed what the—the war crimes the U.S. was doing.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what does this mean right now? Bradley Manning has pleaded guilty to uploading the largest trove of state secrets in U.S. history to WikiLeaks, which then released them. What does he face exactly?

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, he faces a possible 20 years in prison. But the problem here, military is different than our regular courts in the U.S., which is to say that the plea does not have to be accepted by the government or by the judge—

AMY GOODMAN: So why would he have agreed to plead guilty?

MICHAEL RATNER: —or by the prosecutor, really. He did what’s called a “naked plea.” His hope, I think, is that when the government sees this and also the support he’ll get for acknowledging what he did and also the reasons and the moral reasons why he did it and the political reasons he did it, that the government won’t go on and try and prove aiding the enemy and the more serious espionage charges. What he really pleaded to was doing actions that were prejudicial to the good order and discipline of the military, by giving documents to someone not authorized or a group not authorized to get them. So he faces 20 years. I think he did it because he was otherwise facing, and he still could be facing, life imprisonment, if not the death penalty. So they’re trying to figure out—

AMY GOODMAN: Because? Life imprisonment for?

MICHAEL RATNER: For espionage, as well as the death penalty.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, what about this charge, aiding the enemy?

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, that’s the—

AMY GOODMAN: What is the case for it?

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, that’s the craziest. I mean, that’s just saying, because he gave documents to WikiLeaks and they were published by WikiLeaks — and they were published by The New York Times, I should say, and The Guardian and Der Spiegel — that al-Qaeda read those documents, and therefore WikiLeaks was essentially the transmittal means he used to get documents to al-Qaeda. So that the enemy there is al-Qaeda; some would say the enemy is even WikiLeaks, according to the U.S. government. But that’s the claim. It seems like a completely spurious, ridiculous claim. You can go after The New York Times for that every time it publishes and someone from a, quote, “terrorist” group reads those documents. So it’s a nonsensical claim.

But he was facing life. And he made this statement that—you know, I just want to say that whatever people’s images were of Bradley Manning from the newspapers, which have reported on this, you know, disturbed human being, this disturbed individual, this man gave a political statement that should be read, I think, by every American and should certainly be taught in every one of our schools on what the moral obligations are of people in the military to stop, really, a killing machine of the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: And what does this mean for Julian Assange? You’re his attorney. You were just recently there once again in London in the Ecuadorean embassy, where he is holed up and granted political asylum by Ecuador but can’t leave the embassy or Britain, the British authorities, will arrest him. The significance of this, Julian Assange, who believes the grand jury empaneled here could indict him for espionage and is afraid of being extradited here?

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, there are two things that came out. One is, I would say that Bradley Manning’s testimony put WikiLeaks and Julian Assange in the same place that The New York Times would be or The Guardian, which is to say he gave documents or uploaded them to a website that is the equivalent of—you know, with The New York Times getting information about warrantless wiretapping from someone in the U.S. National Security Agency. So I think, in that sense, it tells us that the U.S. should get off his back, that Julian Assange should be getting the support of The New York Times and The Guardian and Der Spiegel, which used all of these—which used all of these documents. So I think it’s actually, in that sense, helpful to Julian Assange.

On the other hand, there were two people who were identified to me as members—as lawyers on the grand jury that’s sitting in—that’s sitting in Virginia. Two of the prosecuting attorneys were there in the court.

AMY GOODMAN: Yesterday, at the pretrial hearing of Bradley Manning.

MICHAEL RATNER: Yes, yes, yes.

AMY GOODMAN: So they’re there, and you’re there, Assange’s attorney.

MICHAEL RATNER: They’re there, and I’m there. I didn’t have a chance to meet them, because they don’t come out and mix with the rest of us. They’re on the government’s side with—surrounded by camouflaged people. But they were there. And so, that tells us that that grand jury is still active and going on, and that they are still after Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. When I say “they,” the U.S. government. But for some reason, they’re thinking they can distinguish that from The New York Times and The Guardian. I don’t think they can. And I think it’s—you know, to me, it’s outrageous that The New York Times and The Guardian have not supported one of the people they worked with in revealing these documents.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Michael Ratner, I want to thank you for being with us, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, lawyer for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, returned last night from attending the pretrial hearing for Bradley Manning, who has been in detention now for more than 1,000 days.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. Stay with us.

Find this story at 1 March 2013

After 1,000 days in pretrial detention, Private Bradley Manning yesterday offered a modified guilty plea for passing classified materials to WikiLeaks. But his case is far from over—not for Manning, and not for the rest of the country. To understand what is still at stake, consider an exchange that took place in a military courtroom in Maryland in January.

The judge, Col. Denise Lind, asked the prosecutors a brief but revealing question: Would you have pressed the same charges if Manning had given the documents not to WikiLeaks but directly to the New York Times?

The prosecutor’s answer was simple: “Yes Ma’am.”

The question was crisp and meaningful, not courtroom banter. The answer, in turn, was dead serious. I should know. I was the expert witness whose prospective testimony they were debating. The judge will apparently allow my testimony, so if the prosecution decides to pursue the more serious charges to which Manning did not plead guilty, I will explain at trial why someone in Manning’s shoes in 2010 would have thought of WikiLeaks as a small, hard-hitting, new media journalism outfit—a journalistic “Little Engine that Could” that, for purposes of press freedom, was no different from the New York Times. The prosecutor’s “Yes Ma’am,” essentially conceded that core point of my testimony in order to keep it out of the trial. That’s not a concession any lawyer makes lightly.

The charge of “aiding the enemy” is vague. But it carries the death penalty—and could apply to civilians as well as soldiers.

But that “Yes Ma’am” does something else: It makes the Manning prosecution a clear and present danger to journalism in the national security arena. The guilty plea Manning offered could subject him to twenty years in prison—more than enough to deter future whistleblowers. But the prosecutors seem bent on using this case to push a novel and aggressive interpretation of the law that would arm the government with a much bigger stick to prosecute vaguely-defined national security leaks, a big stick that could threaten not just members of the military, but civilians too.

A
country’s constitutional culture is made up of the stories we tell each other about the kind of nation we are. When we tell ourselves how strong our commitment to free speech is, we grit our teeth and tell of Nazis marching through Skokie. And when we think of how much we value our watchdog press, we tell the story of Daniel Ellsberg. Decades later, we sometimes forget that Ellsberg was prosecuted, smeared, and harassed. Instead, we express pride in a man’s willingness to brave the odds, a newspaper’s willingness to take the risk of publishing, and a Supreme Court’s ability to tell an overbearing White House that no, you cannot shut up your opponents.

Whistleblowers play a critical constitutional role in our system of government, particularly in the area of national security. And they do so at great personal cost. The executive branch has enormous powers over national security and the exercise of that power is not fully transparent. Judicial doctrines like the “state secrets” doctrine allow an administration to limit judicial oversight. Congress’ oversight committees have also tended to leave the executive relatively free of constraints. Because the materials they see are classified, there remains little public oversight. Consider the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the interrogation torture practices during the immediate post 9/11 years: Its six thousand pages, according to Senator Dianne Feinstein, are “one of the most significant oversight efforts in the history of the United States Senate.” But they are unavailable to the public.

Freedom of the press is anchored in our constitution because it reflects our fundamental belief that no institution can be its own watchdog. The government is full of well-intentioned and quite powerful inspectors general and similar internal accountability mechanisms. But like all big organizations, the national security branches of government include some people who aren’t purely selfless public servants. Secrecy is necessary and justified in many cases. But as hard-earned experience has shown us time and again, it can be—and often is—used to cover up failure, avarice, or actions that simply will not survive that best of disinfectants, sunlight.

That’s where whistleblowers come in. They offer a pressure valve, constrained by the personal risk whistleblowers take, and fueled by whatever moral courage they can muster. Manning’s statement in court yesterday showed that, at least in his motives, he was part of that long-respected tradition. But that’s also where the Manning prosecution comes in, too. The prosecution case seems designed, quite simply, to terrorize future national security whistleblowers. The charges against Manning are different from those that have been brought against other whistleblowers. “Aiding the enemy” is punishable by death. And although the prosecutors in this case are not seeking the death penalty against Manning, the precedent they are seeking to establish does not depend on the penalty. It establishes the act as a capital offense, regardless of whether prosecutors in their discretion decide to seek the death penalty in any particular case.

Hard cases, lawyers have long known, make bad law. The unusual nature of Manning’s case has led some to argue that his leaks are different than those we now celebrate as a bedrock component of accountability journalism: Daniel Ellsberg leaked specific documents that showed massive public deception in the prosecution of the Vietnam War. Deep Throat leaked specific information about presidential corruption during the Watergate investigation. Manning, though, leaked hundreds of thousands of documents, many of which were humdrum affairs; perhaps, some have argued, the sheer scope raises the risks. But in the three years since the leaks began, there has still been no public evidence that they in fact caused significant damage. The prosecutors say they will introduce evidence of harm in secret sessions; one of these bits of evidence is reportedly going to be that they will show that several of the files published were found on Osama Bin Laden’s computer. Does that mean that if the Viet Cong had made copies of the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg would have been guilty of “aiding the enemy?”

If the Viet Cong photocopied the Pentagon Papers, could Daniel Ellsberg have been prosecuted for aiding the enemy?

It is also important to understand that although the number of leaked items was vast, it was not gratuitously so; some of the most important disclosures came precisely from sifting through the large number of items. Certainly, some of the important revelations from the leaks could have been achieved through a single “smoking gun” document, such as the chilling operational video from a U.S. helicopter attack that killed two Reuters’ cameramen, and shot at a van trying to offer relief to the injured, wounding two children who were in the van. But many of the most important insights only arise from careful analysis of the small pieces of evidence. This type of accountability analysis showed that the military had substantially understated the scale of civilian casualties in Iraq; and that U.S. forces were silently complicit in abuses by allied Iraqi government forces; it uncovered repeated abuses by civilian contractors to the military. The war logs have become the most important spin-free source of historical evidence about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The reputation that WikiLeaks has been given by most media outlets over the past two and a half years, though, obscures much of this—it just feels less like “the press” than the New York Times. This is actually the point on which I am expected to testify at the trial, based on research I did over the months following the first WikiLeaks disclosure in April 2010. When you read the hundreds of news stories and other materials published about WikiLeaks before early 2010, what you see is a young, exciting new media organization. The darker stories about Julian Assange and the dangers that the site poses developed only in the latter half of 2010, as the steady release of leaks about the U.S. triggered ever-more hyperbolic denouncements from the Administration (such as Joe Biden’s calling Assange a “high-tech terrorist”), and as relations between Assange and his traditional media partners soured.

In early 2010, when Manning did his leaking, none of that had happened yet. WikiLeaks was still a new media phenom, an outfit originally known for releasing things like a Somali rebel leader’s decision to assassinate government officials in Somalia, or a major story exposing corruption in the government of Daniel Arap Moi in Kenya. Over the years WikiLeaks also exposed documents that shined a light on U.S. government practices, such as operating procedures in Camp Delta in Guantanamo or a draft of a secretly negotiated, highly controversial trade treaty called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. But that was not the primary focus. To name but a few examples, it published documents that sought to expose a Swiss Bank’s use of Cayman accounts to help rich clients avoid paying taxes, oil related corruption in Peru, banking abuses in Iceland, pharmaceutical company influence peddling at the World Health Organization, and extra-judicial killings in Kenya. For its work, WikiLeaks won Amnesty International’s New Media award in 2009 and the Freedom of Expression Award from the British magazine, Index of Censorship, in 2008.

No one would have thought at the time that WikiLeaks had the gravitas of the Times. But if you roll back to the relevant time frame, it is clear that any reasonable person would have seen WikiLeaks as being in the same universe as we today think of the range of new media organizations in the networked investigative journalism ecosystem, closer probably to ProPublica or the Bureau of Investigative Journalism than to Huffington Post or the Daily Beast. If leaking classified materials to a public media outlet can lead to prosecution for aiding the enemy, then it has to be under a rule that judges can apply evenhandedly to the New York Times or the Guardian no less than to ProPublica, the Daily Beast, or WikiLeaks. No court will welcome a rule where culpability for a capital offense like aiding the enemy depends on the judge’s evaluation of the quality of the editorial practices, good faith, or loyalty of the media organization to which the information was leaked. Nor could a court develop such a rule without severely impinging on the freedom of the press. The implications of Manning’s case go well beyond Wikileaks, to the very heart of accountability journalism in a networked age.

T
he prosecution will likely not accept Manning’s guilty plea to lesser offenses as the final word. When the case goes to trial in June, they will try to prove that Manning is guilty of a raft of more serious offenses. Most aggressive and novel among these harsher offenses is the charge that by giving classified materials to WikiLeaks Manning was guilty of “aiding the enemy.” That’s when the judge will have to decide whether handing over classified materials to ProPublica or the New York Times, knowing that Al Qaeda can read these news outlets online, is indeed enough to constitute the capital offense of “aiding the enemy.”

Aiding the enemy is a broad and vague offense. In the past, it was used in hard-core cases where somebody handed over information about troop movements directly to someone the collaborator believed to be “the enemy,” to American POWs collaborating with North Korean captors, or to a German American citizen who was part of a German sabotage team during WWII. But the language of the statute is broad. It prohibits not only actually aiding the enemy, giving intelligence, or protecting the enemy, but also the broader crime of communicating—directly or indirectly—with the enemy without authorization. That’s the prosecution’s theory here: Manning knew that the materials would be made public, and he knew that Al Qaeda or its affiliates could read the publications in which the materials would be published. Therefore, the prosecution argues, by giving the materials to WikiLeaks, Manning was “indirectly” communicating with the enemy. Under this theory, there is no need to show that the defendant wanted or intended to aid the enemy. The prosecution must show only that he communicated the potentially harmful information, knowing that the enemy could read the publications to which he leaked the materials. This would be true whether Al Qaeda searched the WikiLeaks database or the New York Times’. Hence the prosecutor’s “Yes Ma’am.”

This theory is unprecedented in modern American history. The prosecution claims that there is, in fact precedent in Civil War cases, including one from 1863 where a Union officer gave a newspaper in occupied Alexandria rosters of Union units, and was convicted of aiding the enemy and sentenced to three months. But Manning’s defense argues that the Civil War cases involved publishing coded messages in newspapers and personals, not leaking for reporting to the public at large. The other major source that the prosecution uses is a 1920 military law treatise. Even if the prosecutors are correct in their interpretations of these two sources, which is far from obvious, the fact that they need to rely on these old and obscure sources underscores how extreme their position is in the twenty-first century.

In fact, neither side disagrees with this central critique: That for 150 years, well before the rise of the modern First Amendment, the invention of muckraking journalism, or the modern development of the watchdog function of the press in democratic society, no one has been charged with aiding the enemy simply for leaking information to the press for general publication. Perhaps it was possible to bring such a charge before the first amendment developed as it did in the past hundred years, before the Pentagon Papers story had entered our national legend. But before Rosa Parks and Brown vs. Board of Education there was also a time when prosecutors could enforce the segregation laws of Jim Crow. Those times have passed. Read in the context of American constitutional history and the practice of at least a century and a half (if not more) of “aiding the enemy” prosecutions, we should hope and expect that the court will in fact reject the prosecution’s novel and aggressive interpretation of that crime.

But as long as the charge remains live and the case undecided, the risk that a court will accept this expansive and destructive interpretation is very real.

That’s especially true when you consider that “aiding the enemy” could be applied to civilians. Most provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice apply only to military personnel. But Section 104, the “aiding the enemy” section, applies simply to “any person.” To some extent, this makes sense—a German-American civilian in WWII could be tried by military commission for aiding German saboteurs under this provision. There has been some back and forth in military legal handbooks, cases, and commentary about whether and to what extent Section 104 in fact applies to civilians. Most recently, Justice Stevens’ opinion in the Supreme Court case of Hamdan implies that Section 104 may in fact apply to civilians and be tried by military commissions. But this is not completely settled. Because the authorities are unclear, any competent lawyer today would have to tell a prospective civilian whistleblower that she may well be prosecuted for the capital offense of aiding the enemy just for leaking to the press.

…

Yochai Benkler is a professor at Harvard Law School and co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.

BY YOCHAI BENKLER

Find this story at 1 March 2013

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