-Caveat Lector-
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Subject: !b_a_Act: FYI: On spies and leaks and "cabbages and kings."
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"The time has come," the Walrus (Bush) said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."
--"The Walrus (Bush) and the Carpenter( Blair)" by
Lewis Carroll
http://www.observer.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,910657,00.html
Observer. 9 March 2003. UN launches inquiry into American spying.
NEW YORK -- The United Nations has begun a top-level investigation into the
bugging of its delegations by the United States, first revealed in The
Observer last week.
Sources in the office of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan confirmed last night
that the spying operation had already been discussed at the UN's
counter-terrorism committee and will be further investigated.
The news comes as British police confirmed the arrest of a 28-year-old woman
working at the top secret Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) on
suspicion of contravening the Official Secrets Act.
Last week The Observer published details of a memo sent by Frank Koza,
Defence Chief of Staff (Regional Targets) at the US National Security Agency,
which monitors international communications. The memo ordered an intelligence
'surge' directed against Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea with
'extra focus on Pakistan UN matters.'
The 'dirty tricks' operation was designed to win votes in favour of
intervention in Iraq.
The Observer reported that the memo was sent to a friendly foreign
intelligence agency asking for help in the operation. It has been known for
some time that elements within the British security services were unhappy
with the Government's use of intelligence information.
The leak was described as 'more timely and potentially more important than
the Pentagon Papers' by Daniel Ellsberg, the most celebrated whistleblower in
recent American history.
The revelations of the spying operation have caused deep embarrassment to the
Bush administration at a key point in the sensitive diplomatic negotiations
to gain support for a second UN resolution authorising intervention in Iraq.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
were both challenged about the operation last week, but said they could not
comment on security matters.
The operation is thought to have been authorised by US National Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice, but American intelligence experts told The Observer
that a decision of this kind would also have involved Donald Rumsfeld, CIA
director George Tenet and NSA chief General Michael Hayden.
President Bush himself would have been informed at one of the daily
intelligence briefings held every morning at the White House.
Attention has now turned to the foreign intelligence agency responsible for
the leak. It is now believed the memo was sent out via Echelon, an
international surveillance network set up by the NSA with the cooperation of
GCHQ in Britain and similar organisations in Australia, New Zealand and
Canada.
Wayne Madsen, of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre and himself a
former NSA intelligence officer, said the leak demonstrated that there was
deep unhappiness in the intelligence world over attempts to link Iraq to the
terrorist network al-Qaeda.
'My feeling is that this was an authorised leak. I've been hearing for months
of people in the US and British intelligence community who are deeply
concerned about their governments "cooking" intelligence to link Iraq to
al-Qaeda.'
The Observer story caused a political furore in Chile, where President
Ricardo Lagos demanded an immediate explanation of the spying operation.
The Chilean public is extremely sensitive to reports of US 'dirty tricks'
after decades of American secret service involvement in the country's
internal affairs. In 1973 the CIA supported a coup that toppled the
democratically-elected socialist government of Salvador Allende and installed
the dictator General Augusto Pinochet.
===================================================================
Dirty tricks memo: the fallout
------------------------------------------------------------------------
GCHQ arrest over Observer spying report
Martin Bright, home affairs editor
Sunday March 9, 2003
The Observer
An employee at the top-secret Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)
has been arrested following revelations in The Observer last weekend about an
American 'dirty tricks' surveillance operation to win votes at the United
Nations in favour of a tough new resolution on Iraq.
Gloucestershire police confirmed last night that a 28-year-old woman was
arrested last week on suspicion of contravening the Official Secrets Act. The
woman, from the Cheltenham area, has been released on police bail pending
further inquiries. More arrests are expected.
A top-secret memo from the National Security Agency, which monitors
communications around the world, was passed to this newspaper by British
security sources who objected to being asked to aid the American operation.
The leak marks a serious breach between the Blair government and elements of
the intelligence community opposed to using British security resources to
help the US drive towards war.
Officials at GCHQ, the electronic surveillance arm of the British
intelligence service, were asked by the Americans to provide valuable
information from 'product lines', intelligence jargon for phone taps and
e-mail interception. The document was circulated among British intelligence
services before being leaked.
A GCHQ spokesman confirmed last night that the woman was an employee.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
===================================================================
The spies and the spinner
Peter Beaumont in Amman and Gaby Hinsliff examine how Alastair Campbell and
intelligence staff fell out over what the public should be told about Saddam
Peter Beaumont in Amman and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday March 9, 2003
The Observer
In the Cheltenham headquarters of Britain's secret global listening facility,
GCHQ, analysts have access to one of the world's most powerful pieces of
computer software.
They call it Dictionary, and its job is to screen the massive flows of
intercepted data and look for groups of words of significance to whatever the
analysts are seeking.
When those groups come up, the software alerts the analysts who then begin a
review of all the intercepted communication in their search for hard
intelligence.
It is a painstaking and rigorous procedure that is these day shared among
experts across the globe: from Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
On 31 January a memo was sent from the National Security Agency in Maryland
from one Frank Koza at GCHQ's American sister listening operation.
The memo was blunt. It asked the recipients at GCHQ to help with an American
mission: to analyse US intercepts of the homes and offices of certain UN
delegations to the Security Council.
It singled out key members of the UNSC (Angola, Cameroon, Guinea, Bulgaria,
Chile and Pakistan) for special attention, but said the operation should
stretch to all delegations (except Britain and America, of course) if that
proved necessary to give the US an edge.
The United States was looking for any information that could help Koza's
government put pressure on these countries to vote for a US and UK-sponsored
resolution that would authorise a war against Iraq.
What Koza never suspected was that someone outside the NSA would be so
shocked by his request to help with a dirty tricks campaign that they would
leak his memo, or that it would end up in the hands of The Observer. But by
last week that memo had led to the biggest spy-hunt since the David Shayler
affair.
In the Maryland headquarters of the NSA, incredulity at the leak - and the
knowledge that someone in one of its partner intelligence organisations had
deliberately disclosed evidence of the operation at a time designed to cause
severe damage to America's attempts to secure a second Security Council
resolution authorising war against Iraq - turned to fury.
The leak, however, raises as many questions as the number of secrets it
reveals. The most pressing of these remains: why would a career intelligence
officer risk discovery, ignominy and imprisonment to leak it in the first
place?
The answer to that question is to be found not simply in the conscience of
the individual intelligence officer, but in a wider conflict between the
intelligence community on both sides of the Atlantic and their political
masters.
In the imposing glass-fronted riverside headquarters of MI6 in London, as in
the Cheltenham headquarters of GCHQ, the several thousand employees of the
Secret Intelligence Service stick to a view that some may regard as arcane in
the individualism of the modern world.
They hold fast to a credo that they are the real guardians of the UK, that
while politicians may come and go, their work is eternal. 'The intelligence
professionals feel that they stand somewhat above the vagaries of politics,'
said one close observer familiar with their work.
'But what has happened is that they have come into conflict with the
politicians over Iraq. They feel that their long history is in danger of
being undermined by the uses made of the intelligence product by Number 10,
and that the way information has been spun has corroded the public's belief
in what they do.'
This tension has been visible beneath the surface for months, as intelligence
officials have briefed against the more outrageous claims made by the
Government.
The tensions between the intelligence services and the Downing Street spin
operation date back to last summer, when the first so-called secret dossier
on Iraq, detailing Saddam's armoury of weapons of mass destruction, was being
finalised in the autumn.
The team working on it - led by Tony Blair's director of communications
Alastair Campbell, head of homeland security David Omand, Downing Street
foreign policy adviser Sir David Manning, and representatives of MI5, MI6 and
GCHQ - began by deciding what messages derived from intelligence material
should be put across, and then attempting to find publicly available
information backing them up.
The September dossier went through two or three final drafts, with Campbell
writing it off each time, and had already resulted in fairly serious rows
between Campbell, Omand and Stephen Lander, then head of M15.
The essence of the disagreement is said to have been that intelligence
material should be presented 'straight', rather than spiced up to make a
political argument.
The problem with a second dossier on Saddam's record of deception, drawn up
in January when it began to become obvious that Hans Blix's work was not
making an incontrovertible case for war, was that it was completed with far
less time for cross-checking.
The result was the infamous 'dodgy dossier', reliant on a plagiarised PhD
thesis to make its argument that Saddam was a threat, and admissions from
Downing Street that it should have acknowledged its sources.
'The dossier was unhelpful,' said one officer. 'It undermines the very real
message that we are trying to get across - to persuade the public that Saddam
Hussein is a risk, but for many complicated reasons.
'There is a feeling that there is something reckless about some of the people
around Tony Blair - that they are dangerous.
'There is a feeling among many in the intelligence community that they are
being forced to sacrifice their integrity for short-term political gain.'
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
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"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so
long as I'm the dictator."
-GW Bush during a photo-op with Congressional leaders on
12/18/2000. As broadcast on CNN and available in transcript on
their website http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0012/18/nd.01.html
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