Spooks

Gecas and Special Branch

A wonderful example of the reach and power of intelligence connections was provided in January. Why did the British state refuse to extradite Anton Gecas, the WW2 Lithuanian war criminal, to the Soviet Union in 1976? Turns out not only had Gecas worked for SIS at the end of WW2, he’d worked for Special Branch in the 1970s, snitching on the miners during the miners’ strike of 1974!

A report in the Edinburgh daily paper, The Scotsman (15 January), said:

‘Although Gecas was named by the Nazi-hunting organisation the Simon Wiesenthal Centre as the most wanted Nazi war criminal alive, a two-year investigation by the Special War Crimes Unit concluded that there was insufficient evidence. The decision, announced by the Crown Office in February 1994 caused many people to suspect that Gecas was enjoying protection. According to a source close to the inquiry, investigators were perturbed to discover that witnesses who had freely given evidence against Gecas in the defamation trial [brought by Gecas in 1992], were reluctant to testify in a criminal trial or claimed they had forgotten much of the detail of the alleged atrocities. The source said: “I have absolutely no doubt that someone or something got to them before we did“‘ (emphasis added).

MI5 miscellany

Shayler backs Peter Wright

David Shayler’s piece in The Observer on 14 January, ‘Why I blew the gaff’, illustrated why he has been received with reserve in some circles which would normally have embraced an MI5 whistle-blower with enthusiasm. He began it by revealing that the MI5 source who had claimed that Martin McGuinness had fired the first shot at the ‘Bloody Sunday’ event in 1972 was not believed inside MI5. Although the only people who purported to believe that particular story were certain sections of the right wing press and the security establishment, his insider information was very useful. But a few paragraphs further on he wrote this:

‘Not all whistle blowers are motivated by a desire to expose corruption, crimes or wrongdoing. In Spycatcher, Peter Wright famously exposed the cabal of MI5 officers who had plotted to destabilise Harold Wilson’s Labour Government. He was motivated by a personal dispute with the service over his pension rights. Not long before his death, he admitted on national television that he had made up the Wilson Plot. By then, though, it was too late because the authorities had naïvely tried to ban the book rather than hold an independent inquiry, which would have vindicated MI5 at the expense of Wright. As a result of not investigating the claims to refute them, many people, including many journalists, still believe Wright was telling the truth.’

This is the David Shayler who has been blithely telling the world that the Libyans did the Lockerbie bombing because while at the Libyan desk he had seen documents from his American colleagues claiming so.

I do not propose to rehearse yet again the story of the various tales of the ‘plot’ told by Wright; nor why this final version – told to John Ware – should be ignored; nor why this matters so little in our wider knowledge of the machinations of the 1970s.(1) But it is striking that Shayler is so badly informed about this period. Considering what he has been through, it may sound weird to say this, but it is David Shayler, rather than ‘the authorities’, who is naive in this instance.

The right stuff

Brian Nicholson, former president of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, admitted passing information on strike tactics to MI5 during a national docks stoppage in 1970.

Brian Nicholson, a London dockers’ leader at the time who became a close ally of Neil Kinnock in the late 1980s, told the Guardian: ‘They used to play games with me and I used to play games with them. What I told them was not significant, unless to tell them things to let the other side know.’

Mr Nicholson said MI5 agents ‘flitted around the docks posing as left wing activists and do-gooders during the industrial upheavals of the early 1970s, although others were associated with right-wing groups such as Catholic Action and Moral Rearmament.’ (Guardian 1 January 1, 2001)

Two responses to that. It is interesting to see MI5 linked with Catholic Action and Moral Rearmament; I had assumed such a connection but never seen any evidence.(2) Secondly, given that MI5 always claim that concealing the identity of their agents is the reason they won’t open their files, why did they reveal Nicholson’s identity?

Twitchers or traitors?

In ‘Did twitchy MI5 spy on bird lovers?’ (Sunday Times 11 March 2001) Nick Fielding reported what appeared to be evidence from within MI5 of an MI5 investigation of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds done at the behest of the supermarket chain Tesco. ‘The rationale given to the investigating officers was that the RSPB’s “political” campaigns were posing a threat to the “economic well being of British companies” and that there was concern the campaigns were being aided by “foreign agents.”‘

The foreign agent stuff is obvious baloney – or wishful thinking; but economic well-being is now an official reason for MI5 to take action. But how very New Labour/New World Order: the supermarket chain – big donor to the Dome – gets the British state’s security service to investigate a bird lobby.

From the CPGB to the RSPB in only a decade or so.

A week later MI5 tried to lay the blame on a Special Branch officer with a grudge (‘MI5 blames rogue police in RSPB row,’ Sunday Times 18 March).

That Sunday Times piece also included comments from an earlier letter, apparently also from within MI5, sent to the radical Liberal-Democrat MP Norman Baker. This included the following on Baker’s request to see his MI5 file:

‘….there is information [in that file] from the late 1980s. Not only would it be madness to admit that you have a file, but the nature of the file and the reason for its creation would create a political issue they [MI5 managers] could not contain.’

David Shayler talks of the existence within MI5 of a thick layer of disgruntled younger officers. Sounds like one of them is having some fun……..

Moscow Gold

I have published hundreds of thousands of words and while most of them disappear into the Big Empty, there is an occasional, gratifying echo. I got one back from Ken Coates, former Labour MEP. On 30 March Coates offered readers of Tribune a version of my thesis that MI5 let the CPGB survive after 1956 when they could have destroyed it. Unfortunately Coates attributes this act – or non act – of MI5’s to simple job creation: no CPGB, no enemy, no jobs.

Coates is mistaken, I’m sure: the CPGB was never more than a minor target compared to the activities – real or imagined – of MI5’s Soviet equivalents. MI5 left the CPGB running as a honey trap through which to view and contaminate the wider British left – rather a clever thing to do.

Huh?

The most startling story I have seen recently is the following. It appeared in the Sunday edition of the generally highly reliable Glasgow Herald. ‘Undercover soldiers trapped in IRA’ by Neil Mackay, Home Affairs Editor, Sunday Herald, 28 January 2001, began thus:

‘At least 16 British Army officers, who are currently working undercover as spies within the ranks of the IRA, carried out a series of terrorist bombings and shootings to preserve their cover as leading Provos. The British government is thwarting all efforts by the agents to come in from the cold and has abandoned the soldiers because of the offences they carried out while army agents. The MoD is refusing to pull them out of Northern Ireland and give them new identities to protect them from republican reprisals.’

Sixteen Army officers inside the IRA?

Is that FRU as in frug?

On 3 February John Young’s Cryptome website posted an anonymous article ‘Enquiry: the killing years in Ireland’.(3) This is a very interesting account of recent events in the struggle over the British Army’s Force Research Unit (FRU) which was directing the assassination of republicans in Northern Ireland by members of the Ulster Defence Association. Information about the FRU has been leaked all over the place, notably to Liam Clarke of the Sunday Times. The government – that is to say the legal end of the security establishment in Whitehall – has been trying to stop the leaks. The anonymous Cryptome article is another move in this game between played out in the media. For the article gave the alleged name of the member of the FRU who was the handler for Brian Nelson, the Army agent inside the UDA. At that point things got complicated.

Six days after the initial FRU posting, on 9 February at 2:35 PM Eastern Standard Time, Cryptome announced the following:

‘Cryptome has just received word that the British government is telling UK newspapers that an arrangement has been reached with Cryptome’s ISP, Verio, to yank “Enquiry: The Killing Years in Ireland”. We have not heard from Verio. The British government is threatening to injunct any UK publisher intending to reveal information in the file. And that publication on Cryptome does not mean the information is widely available thus justifying British publication. Cryptome will not remove the file except in response to a U.S. court order because it is our belief that nothing in the file is illegal under US law and does not violate Verio’s terms of acceptable use. See prior instance when British intelligence futilely attempted to bamboozle Verio about Cryptome files: http://cryptome.org/mi5-verio.htm’

At 5.50 on the same day Cryptome announced:

Cryptome has learned that the British government has illegally been given access to Cryptome’s log files, or Verio has illegally provided logfile data, or British spooks/cousins illegally hacked our system and violated our privacy promises to visitors. An exact number of 233 downloads of ‘Enquiry: The Killing Years in Ireland’ is being quoted to British newspapers to show that the file has not been widely published. Problem with that is the number is wrong, it is only for part of one day, not for the full time the file has been up because we delete log files daily, and twice daily when traffic is heavy, as it has been since the file was posted because an unrelated file got slashdotted. Unless Verio made backups of our logfiles it does not know how many downloads there have been and the logfile doesn’t show, now about 3,000; and starting to climb rapidly. Thanks very much, HMG. The file is available elsewhere; the URL(s) will be distributed if Verio or US courts yank it here.’

Between 3 and 9 February a number of British newspapers were made aware of the story on the Cryptome site giving the alleged name of Brian Nelson’s handler. Two of them, the Glasgow Herald and the Sunday Times, contacted the Secretary of the D-notice Committee, Rear-Admiral Nick Wilkinson, who told the newspapers that he believed they were free to publish the soldier’s name if it was agreed that it was widely available in the public domain. He told The Sunday Times: ‘My advice at the minute is that it seems to be widely in the public domain and therefore can be published.’ (Liam Clarke, ‘MoD gags press after army suspect is named on net’, Sunday Times 11 February. )

Having either been given access to Cryptome’s logfiles or hacked into them, the MoD then changed its mind and, quoting the spurious 233 figure, declared this not widely in the public domain, and threatened the newspapers with an injunction if they published the name. To date no newspapers have done so.

The Glasgow Herald (12 February) commented that having been given an apparent OK by the D-notice Committee Secretary) the MoD was back in touch with them via Treasury Solicitor Roland Phillips.

‘He made it clear that, unless we issued him with an undertaking that we would not publish her name, he was instructed to seek an immediate interdict to prevent us naming her. He said the MoD did not consider M’s identity to be in the public domain since only 230 people had read the Internet document. However, John Young, who runs the intelligence website based in New York, said that at least 3000 people had visited the FRU page by Friday afternoon. He accused British intelligence of illegally hacking into his site to find out who was accessing the material.’ (4)

This raises this very curious question: if 233 downloads of the file concerned doesn’t count as being ‘widely in the public domain’, what does? Many books are published – the epitome of ‘being in the public domain’ in one sense – which sell fewer than 233 copies; and many academic books are published with print runs not much bigger than that.

I thought about printing the name of this woman and decided not to. If you are interested it is on Cryptome. I am conscious of the fate of Matthew Williams, publisher of the conspiracy theory-oriented magazine Truthseekers’ Review (5) In November he was arrested and convicted for the ‘offence’ of making a crop circle in a field. As part of their ‘investigation’ (of a ‘crime’ already solved: Williams confessed immediately; he thought he had permission from a farmer) the police confiscated Williams’ computer and all the copies of his magazine. The computer was held for 3 months……

The name is chiefly of interest in showing that Nelson’s handler was a woman – another example of sex equality being practised by the armed forces. See also, for example, the memoir of a female member of the ‘det’, another undercover Army unit in Northern Ireland: Sarah Ford (pseudonym) One Up: A Woman in Action with the SAS (London: HarperCollins, 1997). The top brass in the British armed forces may be debating whether women should be allowed in the front line but they are there already.

Lockerbie side bar

In ‘How MI6 was told of Stasi spy’ (Glasgow Herald 1 February), Paul Harris reported that the man who allegedly supplied the timer for the bomb, Edwin Bollier, had been known by the West’s intelligence services since 1971. How did Harris know this? Because Harris told them. Harris has a wonderful tale of Bollier’s role in Radio North Sea, a ‘pirate’ radio station which in 1970 was running anti-Labour propaganda.

‘It came on the air on January 23 1970. Its conventional medium wave transmitter was more powerful than any other pirate radio ship, and most European national radio stations. Surprisingly it also broadcast on two short wave bands and on VHF. It was difficult to discern any commercial rationale behind the operation.’

Its role in the June 1970 general election was extraordinary. It mounted a campaign against the Labour government, which lost the election, and was, in turn, jammed by the post office, and the military.

……In May 1971, Radio North Sea was sabotaged by frogmen who attached plastic explosives to the hull in a botched job by the BVD Dutch secret service. In January 1977 it sailed from Rotterdam for Libya…….

The world’s intelligence community knew all about Edwin Bollier. The enduring question must be why his activities were tolerated.’

Harris, who now writes for Jane’s Intelligence Review, was then working for a rival ‘pirate’ radio station, and implies rather than demonstrates that Radio North Sea was being run by the Soviet bloc. But why would the Soviet bloc be running anti-Labour propaganda during an election campaign?

Notes

1. The most detailed account of this in the book I wrote with Stephen Dorril, Smear:Wilson and the Secret State, (London: Fourth Estate, 1991).
2. I discussed these groups and their role in anti-left activities briefly in the Special Issue, The Clandestine Caucus.
3. http://cryptome.org/fru-walshaw.htm
4. http://www.sundayherald.com/news/newsi.htssection =News &story_id=14272
5. www.truthseekers.freeserve.co.uk