(Or: I’m not paranoid, they really are out to get me)
Armen Victorian
On June 23, this year, after returning home with my children from their school, I noticed a red car parked in front of our house with two passengers, male and female, in it. After we entered, the male passenger, who was very well dressed, got out, walked up to our front window, gazed in, then went back to the car. A few minutes later he returned with his female companion and rang the bell. He addressed me by one of my old pen names, in a very friendly voice, as though he had known me for a long time. I told him I was not the person he had addressed. He then produced an identity card, held it in his hand in such a way that I could not read it, and asked if they could come in. I refused. He looked at his colleague, and they returned to their car and drove off. Three weeks after this bizarre episode our house was raided by the police in the early morning. At the time of writing this article my wife and I face criminal charges of obtaining telephone lines by deception and the non-payment of telephone bills. These false charges are the climax to a bizarre series of events.
As a researcher in politics and intelligence I have many times been the target of various intelligence agencies. On two occasions I was asked indirectly to join, or co-operate with, the clan. I refused.
I was first aware that our house had been broken into in 1988, when our family financial files were perused, and some of my papers and computer disks taken. In the second half of 1989 I was involved in the investigation of an alleged UFO event which had taken place in South Africa. (The case later proved to be a cover story for another event which involved the American and South African governments.) At the time I stumbled across a three-page document issued by the South African intelligence service, in which my name was mentioned as a target to be kept under surveillance.
On January 18, 1990, in the course of a letter of complaint to Mr P.R. Killen, the South African Ambassador to the UK, I asked for an explantion and enclosed copies of the document. I never received a reply. A few weeks after my letter our premises were broken into again and a large number of my papers, including the three-page document, were taken. To date there have been eight break-ins, the last two being on July 31 and September 12.
Mail tampering
My mail is being tampered with. Some air mail letters to the US are taking a month to arrive. Some incoming and outgoing mail fails to reach its destination. For example, in a letter of 18 October, 1994, a US researcher informed me that a package sent to me was returned marked ‘Gone away’. Incoming mail, in sealed envelopes, is frequently open or damaged. My repeated letters of complaint to the Royal Mail, and their promises of investigation, produce no results.
In three years my car has been broken into three times, and once, when it was tampered with, I narrowly avoided a serious accident while driving with my children. The last time the car was broken into was on August 4, 1994.
Phoney BT bills and phoney BT engineers
In the years when we had a British Telecom telephone our quarterly bills grew until they reached a size a multinational company would be hard pushed to match. Twice we were sent quarterly bills for £5,000 – and this when my wife and I were always out during working hours and our children were too young to use the line. Furthermore, there were unrecognisable numbers in the bills, and the sums for the actual dialled numbers were ridiculously inflated.
We began getting frequent visits from alleged BT engineers to repair our ‘faulty’ line. One classic event took place in the summer of 1990. At 4.30 pm a BT van pulled up in front of our house. The driver rang the bell, introduced himself as Mr Smith and asked to come in and repair a fault on the line. Since there was no fault on the line as far as I was aware, I asked him to wait outside while I made an inquiry. As I was having it confirmed by the engineering division of BT that no fault on our line had been reported, ‘Mr Smith’ drove away.
Through 1992 we had a BT ‘engineer’ calling in to check the line almost every three months. One ‘engineer’ let into the house by wife in my absence, left after I asked him for some ID. Once again BT told me that no fault had been reported and no engineer sent. For a while things were quiet then we started getting music on the line, sometimes loud enough to drown out the conversation. On other occasions the line would go dead in the middle of conversations – especially if serious research matters were being discussed. And my fax was also affected. The machine would ‘OK’ the transmission but no fax would arrive at the other end. (And people would report sending me faxes which never arrived.) This happened so often I gave up and began using a commercial fax.
One afternoon in the summer of 1993, at around 3.15 pm, I went to collect my children from school. A few hundred yards from our house there is a BT junction box. I noticed a civilian working at the box. Parked next to the junction was a hired van with both back doors open. I parked my car and approached him. When I inquired if he was a BT employee, he became abusive. I returned home, picked up my camera and took a few shots of him. Once again, when I raised this with BT I was told that there was no engineer assigned to work at that junction box, nor could they recognise the name of the company printed on the van. (In the course of a follow-up break-in these photographs were stolen. Fortunately the negatives survived and are now stored elsewhere.)
Birds of a feather
The situation deteriorated when I started to investigate the role of members of the intelligence and disinformation network, ‘the Aviary’ (see Lobster 25). Howard Blum of the New York Times, the author of Out There, warned me to be careful; others advised me to leave the matter alone. My two papers on the lesser known Aviary members brought a backlash of threats. After the publication of my essay on Aviary member, Colonel John Alexander, in Lobster 25, I was immediately informed by my colleagues in the US about his anger at the contents of my article. This was confirmed by the release of Alexander’s ‘Memorandum In Confidence’ of September 28, 1993, in which he stated:
‘Previously, I have considered going to the State Department and having them ask the British government to intervene. I have learned that the CIA has asked the British intelligence and the Police to assist in resolving problems with Victorian.’
US military intelligence
It is not only John Alexander and his Aviary colleagues who are uneasy about my investigations. The intelligence component of the office of the US Air Force Secretary, in December 1992, telexed a memorandum to ‘All Major Commands’ ordering them to direct all my pending and future Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to their office for ‘action and advice’. (Ordinarily, each component within the USAF has the jurisdiction to process FOIA requests independently without further consultation or direction from the Secretary’s office.) Despite my repeated correspondence, requesting the justification for their directive under the regulations of the FOIA, the USAF has refused to provide its reasons.
National Reconnaissance Office
Equally bizarre is the US National Reconnaissance Office’s (NRO) reactions to my FOIA requests. Almost every document NRO has compiled in the process of my FOIA requests have been classified Secret or Top Secret. These are not records I have requested, but records NRO has created in the process of handling my FOIA requests. In response to my latest FOIA request, asking for the release of records they have compiled in the process of my requests, including my own FOIA requests, the NRO wrote:
‘The NRO has determined that the fact of the existence or non-existence of information pertaining to your request is classified in accordance with Executive Order 12356. Your request is denied pursuant to 5 U.S.C. 552 (b)(1). By this statement, the NRO neither confirms nor denies that such records may or may not exist.’
And the CIA
In response to the Privacy Act request for copies of records they have compiled on me, the Central Intelligence Agency wrote on July 15 1994:
‘Your request for records indexed to your name has been received. To ensure that you receive the maximum amount of releasable information, if indeed there is any, your request will be processed under both the Privacy Act and the Freedom of Information Act’.
What is interesting about this is the hint that they have records compiled under FOIA on me. This appears to mean that these records contain information not about me, but about my research interests and activities. In my experience, some of this information will have been compiled by other intelligence agencies. I am waiting for their response. Some of my FOIA requests with the CIA have been pending for three years.
Back in Whitehall
After my letter of August 18, 1994 to the Security Service Tribunal requesting an investigation of the continuous harassment my family and I have suffered, the Tribunal Secretary wrote on August 24, ‘I will arrange for your complaint to be investigated by the Tribunal at the earliest opportunity and will let you know the outcome as soon as possible thereafter.’ A few weeks after their letter our house was broken into yet again.
On September 19, 1994, Mr Graham Allen MP also wrote to them mentioning that I was a ‘researcher into sensitive matters such as the Intelligence Services’ and that I felt my work was ‘being hampered and obstructed by the break-ins, mail tampering and phone-tapping.’ To date I have had no response. Nor do I have high hopes. Never before have the security services admitted any liability for such activities.
My repeated inquiries to the Home Office as to which section is in charge of breaking and entering have gone unanswered. In response to a question about the legality of any electronic surveillance, telephone tapping, or other means of interception carried out by the intelligence services of other, friendly, countries in the UK, a Home Office civil servant, whose signature is unreadable, wrote on May 16, 1994, that,
‘Illegal activities by a foreign intelligence service in the United Kingdom would be regarded as unacceptable by Her Majesty’s government.’
It might depend on what you mean by illegal. The US Army Intelligence Regulation 381-10, effective 1 August, 1984, authorises:
- electronic surveillance of non-US citizens abroad;
- concealed monitoring for foreign intelligence and counter-intelligence of non-US persons;
- searches and examinations of mail.
None of these activities requires the permission of the host country. They only need the authorisation by their own commanders stationed in the host country, and the Commanding General of the US Army Intelligence and Security Command; and where electronic surveillance is required, the co-operation of the NSA. I am assured that similar regulations are in place for the US Air Force and Navy. (What the CIA and NSA does in these areas seems to be a separate matter.)
There is nothing in the Interception of Communications Act (1985) about the activities of friendly, foreign, intelligence services in the UK; and the Security Service Tribunal will certainly not cover similar activities conducted by an ally intelligence service on a British citizen. In effect, US Army Intelligence (and others) have a licence to do what they will – and can rely on the British state and justice system not to investigate.
Given the wide array of allied intelligence interests active in Britain, plus our own; given the thick curtain of secrecy surrounding their activities and the lack of accountability; and given the absence of freedom of information legislation, any researcher, at any time, could be the target of these agencies.