DAVID M.

DASTYCH
Journalist, media agency owner
Warsaw, Poland (EU)
Phone: +48-22-408 27 87
Cell Phone: +48 514 270 639
david.dastych@aster.pl
Skype: davids.media.agency (for Skype users)
My Blog: "David's Den"
www.canadafreepress.com/davidsden/
www.canadafreepress.com

Dienstag, 24. März 2009

Nachrichten Heute, Bern, Switzerland
http://oraclesyndicate.twoday.net/stories/5604129/

Secret Wars. One Hundred Years of British Intelligence Inside MI5 and MI6 100 years
of a spy-empire
David Dastych - When Sir Winston Churchill resigned from the office of the Prime
Minister of Great Britain, in 1955, he was quoted as saying "I will not preside over the
dismembering" of what was previously The British Empire. But as the Empire shrank
quickly to the size of the United Kingdom, the "Spy-Empire" of MI5 and Mi6, founded
in 1909, never receded but expanded world-wide and turned high-tech. On the eve of
its 100th Anniversary, one of the best and most popular British writers, specializing in
intelligence, pays a tribute to many generations of British spies and their spy-
masters, who have influenced the history of Great Britain and of the world.

His book,"Secret Wars. One Hundred Years of British Intelligence Inside MI5 and
MI6" (St.Martin's Press, March 2009), is a fascinating read for everybody, and for
intelligence operatives and young secret service recruits, in particular it should be a
must. This book is not a history text or a mere chronicle of events, and it's not a
panegyric either. "The great advantage of being a writer" - Graham Greene once said
- "is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you
is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest
and most boring of luncheon parties." For a greater part of his 75-year-long life,
Gordon Thomas was doing just that: meeting spies and spy-masters, not only British
but also American, Israeli, Russian, Chinese, Polish, German and many others and
listening to their insider's stories. The best and undisputable value of his book is the
author's encounters with real flesh and blood intelligence people, including some of
them that turned the tide of history.

The best and undisputable value of his book is the author's encounters with real flesh
and blood intelligence people, including some of them that turned the tide of history.

The research for this book took the author almost 50 years, since the Suez Crisis in
1956, which he had witnessed as a foreign correspondent based in Egypt. From his
contacts there he learned about President Naser's plan to nationalize the Canal and
he warned the Foreign Office about that - only to be told that if he missed the truth he
better forget about his journalist career. He was right. But it was the British
Government to fail in their insane plans to assassinate Naser (described in the book)
and then to abort a British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt, secretly conceived not to
inform the Americans. Later on Gordon Thomas covered many other events, which
had been planned, provoked or carried out with the participation of secret intelligence
services. He was introduced to the world of spying by his late father-in-law and life-
time friend, a former British covert agent, Joachim Kraner, to whom he later paid a
tribute in his writings.

"Secret Wars" is a story of the British Intelligence over the span of a hundred years,
since 1909, when MI5 and MI6 (code-names for the military counter-intelligence and
intelligence) were founded to prevent an expected German attack on Great Britain.
The over-400 page book is not a systematic, chronologically arranged tale. Each of
its 20 chapters is a purposeful mixture of past and present events, sometimes with
projections into future. For a reader, this book is a fascinating, perfectly composed
thriller, which The New York Times described as "Literally impossible to put down."

Mark Twain was quoted as saying: "Get your facts first, then you can distort them as
you please." He had writing fiction on his mind but his words could just as well be
attributed to the distortion of intelligence by politicians. James Angleton, a famous
CIA spy-master and spy-catcher, whom Gordon Thomas had interviewed,
summarized this unhealthy relationship between intelligence and politics by these
words, quoted in the book: "Secrecy from public scrutiny leads to often uncheckable
and different accounts of the same events, which are often contradictory and
distorted."

Thomas' book gives innumerable examples of such misuse of the honest fact-finding
by intelligence services, of which a recent one could be a "sexed-up" report about
alleged Saddam's WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) that Prime Minister Blair
and President Bush used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The Great Game often recalled in "Secret Wars" as the never-ending deception war
waged by national intelligence agencies was played over the last hundred years by
MI5 and MI6 continues. "The color of truth is gray" (Andre Gide), because truth is
evasive and often hidden from the public by purposeful cover-up. Generations of
British spies, as well as their controllers and masters, contributed to the security of
their country, at times preventing national disasters and saving many thousand of
lives during wars. But the British (and also American) intelligence services have
been, for decades, deeply penetrated and harmed by Soviet "moles," recruited at the
best universities, such as Cambridge and Oxford. Gordon Thomas writes about
treason within the British services and about a complete failure of the counter-
intelligence to detect it. The cases of Kim Philby (a high-ranking British counter-
intelligence officer and a long-time Soviet spy) and of nuclear scientists, Klaus Fuchs,
Alan Nunn May and Bruno Pontecorvo, who passed top atomic weapons secrets of
the West to the Soviets, are perhaps the most significant. The author describes these
treason cases with passion and talent and warns that "splendid isolation" of some
British heads of The Services and their failure to put together and check simple facts,
led to a disaster inside MI5 and MI6 and to a long-term lack of confidence between
the British and American intelligence.
As the motivation of the Communist spies inside MI5 and MI6 was mainly ideological,
the CIA and FBI suffered even bigger losses due to simple "commercial" motivations
of their own traitors, like Ames and Hansen. Greed for money was their only reason
to betray the services and the country. Aldrich "Rick" Ames destroyed the American
spy network in the Soviet Union in the 1980s and caused the deaths of many
Russian CIA agents for a reward of some $ 2.7 million from the KGB. Caught, he
admitted with sarcastic grin that "The human spy, in terms of the American espionage
effort, had never been terribly pertinent."

Yet the British SIS (MI6) could also score big success with their top spy in the Soviet
Russia, Oleg Gordievski, who's brave exfiltration from USSR by a diplomatic car to
Finland in 1985 had proven the efficiency of the British intelligence. A former MI6
covert agent, Richard Tomlinson, told the author, referring to SIS chief Collin McColl
who worked in Russia and Poland: "Being in SovBlock meant you lived on the
tightrope every moment of every day. Someone who could do that had to be very
special."

With the collapse of the Soviet Block in the early 1990s, the very nature of the Great
Game has changed. The exceptionally high value of Gordon Thomas' book is his
factual description and professional assessment of the substantial changes in the
intelligence community, caused by new political and military situation of the world at
large.

The times of the absolute domination of the two super-powers, the United States and
the Soviet Union, have passed forever. For some years, in the 1990s, the U.S.
leadership naively believed America could become the only world's super-power to
dictate its policy and to promote the democratic values of the West to the rest of the
globe. But soon new threats appeared and the United States (and also Britain as
their main ally) realized that the world was too complicated to rule and that the
peaceful victory in the Cold War was but a temporary success.

"Secret Wars" is a perfect book to prove that. Once again, Gordon Thomas
demonstrated his unique talent in grasping of new trends in the Great Game and in
the intelligence community. For no one knows how long a time, the world will be a
very dangerous place, with many global and regional centers of power, and with
growing problems. Terrorism, which was seen by MI5 and MI6 as mainly a local (IRA)
problem or as an offspring of the Communist diversion, had developed into a global
monster (al-Qaeda) and its main ideological motivation had become radical Islam, or
Islamism.

The negligence of this phenomenon by American and British intelligence agencies

led to their ineptitude to prevent 9/11 in America in 2001, and the London bombings
of 2005. In spite of many efforts to disrupt al-Qaeda, to defeat the Taliban in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, the Islamist radical
network is still developing and posing a deadly threat to the West and to Asia and
Africa.

Two extremely dangerous developments added to the threat of international

terrorism: bio-terrorism and nuclear-terrorism. Both have been described in "Secret
Wars" with utmost accuracy and a powerful vision. The arsenals of bio-weapons,
deadly viruses and bacteria, originally developed in the Soviet Union and also in the
West, penetrated to rogue countries, from where they might be distributed to non-
state terrorist organizations.

On the other hand, nuclear materials and even weapons could be bought up on black
markets by envoys of al-Qaeda to be used against the "Infidels" and were also
offered by a Pakistani Dr. A.Q.Khan "commercial" network. Dr. Khan described
himself as "world's nuclear bomb peacemaker." Nuclear scare embraced America
and Britain following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on U.S. soil (2001) and the suicide
bombings in London (2005). The author pays much attention to these tragic events
and to the inability of the powerful secret services to predict and prevent them.

"There's a new world out there. Adjust or die," Gordon Thomas quotes former chief of
the CIA, Bob Gates. But fortunately for the Western intelligence, people from the
"other side" decide to "walk-in" and offer their help. One of these people was (the
late) Vladimir Pasechnik from Russia, who contacted the British service to report
about his KGB enterprise Biopreparat developing mass-killing toxins, viruses and
bacteria. Asked why he did that, he replied: "I want the West to know. There must be
a way to stop this madness." Dr. David Kelly (also late by now), a top British
microbiology and bio-weapons expert, told the author after his interrogation of
Pasechnik: "The really terrifying thing was that I knew Vladimir was telling the truth."

Thomas dedicated more than one chapter of his book to the tragic plight of Dr. Kelly,
whose more than 30 trips to Iraq in search of bio-weapons ended by a conclusion
that there weren't any. In spite of that, a "sexed-up" intelligence report to the British
PM had been used as an excuse for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In the same year, Dr.
Kelly, disgraced and left alone by MI6 and MI5, died, or rather was murdered in
strange circumstances. Before his death, a number of bacteriologists from several
countries, including Britain, Russia and the U.S.A., were killed by unknown
perpetrators, allegedly for refusing to share their knowledge with North Korean,
Iranian and probably Chinese intelligence.

New threats and at the same challenges to the intelligence services of Britain and the
West, described in detail by Gordon Thomas in "Secret Wars", could be summed up
as: international terrorism, rogue regimes (North Korea, Iran in particular) and a
technological diversion, including professional cyber-attacks, led and developed by
some states (Russia and China) and even by members of the Western alliance
(Israel). It started in early 1980s with the theft of a powerful tracking software system,
PROMIS, invented by a former NSA expert William L. Hamilton and produced by his
small Washington D.C.-based company Inslaw Inc.

Of PROMIS a former Mossad operative, Ari Ben Menashe, quoted by the author,
said: "PROMIS changed the thinking of the entire intelligence world." And Charles
Foster Bass added: "Like any good spy novel, the Cox Report alleges that Chinese
spies penetrated four U.S. weapons research labs and stole important information on
seven nuclear warhead designs." Only an American citizen and Israel's spy, Jonathan
Pollard (still in American top security prison) could do more. Pollard transmitted over
360 cubic feet of U.S. secret documents to Tel Aviv and some were also sold to
Russia. A former CIA chief, the late William Casey complained about that to the
author: "It was a double blow. It had cost us every worthwhile secret we had. And it
had been stolen by a country supposed to be our ally."

But God perhaps rewarded the West and MI6 with a voluntary service of a high-
ranking Iranian intelligence general, Ali Reza Asgari from VEVAK, code-named
"Falcon", who informed the British intelligence about the nuclear program of Iran and
was successfully exfiltrated via Turkey and Bulgaria to the U.K. His motivations were
personal and perhaps also monetary, but his services were of top importance to the
West.

The spying Great Game goes on undisturbed by moments of failure and agony. The
British services, closely cooperating with the American ones, own a big share of the
most sophisticated spying technology, including satellite surveillance systems,
ECHELON eavesdropping network and the fastest computers in the world. A former
CIA chief, William Colby, quoted by the author on the NSA computers, said: "makes
lightening look slow. One time there was a program that could translate seven
languages at five hundred words per minute. Next time I checked, a month later, it
had doubled its capacity and halved its translation time." The various spying
technologies like ELINT, SIGINT, IMINT and missile trajectory tracking systems are
well described in the book. But all these marvelous inventions are still short of
tracking Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Pakistan or Afghanistan and to follow,
like PROMIS, the passage of money to terrorists by an ancient Muslim "hawala"
human contact network, based on full confidence of the sender, the receiver and the
"hawaladar", the money handler.

As Mark Twain once remarked, "It is wiser to find out than to suppose." This phrase
might be the best description of what the intelligence services always did and do.
Their mission is to discover and transmit secret information to help the governments
in their decision making. Michael Smith, a defense analyst, quoted by Gordon
Thomas in his Personal Notes closing the book, had captured the inner sense of
proper spying: "Intelligence will need to be untainted and unlike the notorious (sexed-
up) dossier on Iraq, both genuine and accurate."

"For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where
the subconscious of each nation is confessed" (John LeCarre).

Gordon Thomas is well placed on this "couch" to observe what the services do and
how Britain and the world benefit or lose from their work. The Great Game will never
end and "Secret Wars" is a great book to read and learn of the 100 years of MI5 and
MI6 and much more.

This article was first published on Canada Free Press

David Dastych is a veteran journalist who served both in the Polish intelligence and
the CIA; jailed in Poland by the Communist regime he spent several years in special
prison wards; released in early 1990’s he joined international efforts to monitor illegal
nuclear trade in Europe and Asia; handicapped for lifetime in a mountain accident in
France, in 1994; now he returned to active life and runs his own media agency in
Warsaw.
sfux - 24. Mrz, 19:22 Article 208x read
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http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-rutten25-2009mar25,0,4895742.story

From the Los Angeles Times

BOOK REVIEW
'Secret Wars: One Hundred Years of British Intelligence Inside MI5 and MI6' by
Gordon Thomas
This captivating study of secret British intelligence over the last century draws its
power from rich anecdotes and interviews.
By Tim Rutten

March 25, 2009

The experience of empire seems to leave a people with at least a taste, if not a
particular talent, for conspiracy. Certainly, that's true of the Russians for whom the
one place at which the history of czarism and Bolshevism most clearly conjoins is in
a lasting predilection for plots and plotting. It's true as well for the British, who
transmuted the gifted amateurism of Kipling's "great game" into the modern world's
first recognizable professional intelligence agencies.

It's not for nothing that Bill Haydon -- the Kim Philby-like English double agent in John
le Carré's classic "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" -- informs his interrogator and betrayed
friend, George Smiley, that he'd "always regarded the secret services as the only true
expression of a nation's character."

In fact, as Gordon Thomas points out in his rollicking, readable new history of
Britain's famous spy organizations -- "Secret Wars: One Hundred Years of British
Intelligence Inside MI5 and MI6" -- when the future head of OSS, William Donovan,
sought to convince President Franklin D. Roosevelt that America required equivalent
services, he argued, "These are organizations that helped rule an empire."

MI6 is Britain's external spy service -- like our CIA -- and reports to the foreign
secretary, the British equivalent of our secretary of State. MI5 is responsible for
internal security -- rather like our FBI, but without its power to make arrests -- and is
responsible to the home secretary, roughly our attorney general. Both will mark their
100th anniversaries this August. A longtime reporter and commentator on intelligence
affairs, Thomas is the author of more than 40 nonfiction books and novels, along with
a clutch of screenplays.

Revealing tales

It takes nothing away from this new book to describe it as a popular history, though
the quality of the storytelling is such that even many specialists are likely to find new
nuggets of insight. Thomas takes a novelist's approach: We're told where on Savile
Row the head of MI6 has his suits tailored and that he wears a Travellers Club tie,
sits at a desk once used by Adm. Lord Horatio Nelson and writes his most important
communications with a Parker pen filled with green ink from a Victorian desk well.
(He also has a desk console that links him instantly to the prime minister, the heads
of the Central Intelligence Agency and Israel's Mossad.)

Thomas builds one fast-paced anecdote upon another, often yielding surprising
insights, such as the fact that Allen Dulles, who ran the OSS' European operations for
Donovan out of a base in Switzerland, was, unlike his overwhelmingly Anglophilic Ivy
League colleagues in the early CIA, profoundly anti-English. He'd acquired an
antipathy for imperialism and the English class system while working as a
schoolteacher in India before beginning his celebrated career as a Wall Street lawyer.
(He also was carefully monitored and manipulated by Philby during those early days
with OSS.)

The author's anecdotal account of Philby's ultimate unmasking by Dulles and other
CIA officials is quite good, as is his rendering of the class system's role in the failure
of MI6 and MI5 to uncover not only their deep penetration by the Soviets' KGB but
also by atomic spies -- Klaus Fuchs, Alan Nunn and Bruno Pontecorvo -- all of whom
were vetted into the Manhattan Project by British intelligence. Thomas is equally
strong on American double agents, particularly Aldrich H. Ames, who betrayed for
money rather than ideology and, ultimately, did even more damage than Philby,
virtually closing down U.S. human intelligence in the Eastern Bloc.

For all its narrative vigor, one of the strengths of "Secret Wars" is the clarity of its
attribution. Anecdotes are studded not only with novelistic details but also with direct
quotations. Thomas provides a lengthy list of his on-the-record sources, who include
several former CIA and Mossad directors; the legendary chief of East Germany's
Stasi, Marcus Wolff; and the one-time consulting psychiatrist to MI5 and MI6.

While the author's eye and ear for the nuances of British society and politics are
keen, he sometimes fumbles with American details. Whatever Jimmy Carter's
presidential peculiarities, emulating John F. Kennedy's accent and hairstyle was not
among them. Gen. Walter Bedell Smith did not idolize Gen. George S. Patton. In fact,
while Smith served as Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower's chief of staff during World War II,
he and Patton came to loathe each other.

Thomas is particularly good at picking anecdotes that demonstrate the cooperative

power of the democracies' intelligence agencies -- when they chose to employ them.
For example, the Provisional IRA's increasing links to the Eastern Bloc during the
1970s and, through the KGB, to international terrorists like George Habash and his
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, were developed in Belfast by the
Mossad's director of operations, Rafi Eitan. The first advice to the British government
that it could contain, but never defeat, violent Irish nationalism in Ulster -- a critical
insight that was the first step on London's journey to the Good Friday Agreement that
brought peace to the province -- was delivered by an MI6 agent on the ground. Key
information on Pakistan's renegade nuclear proliferation racket came early from MI6
and Mossad.
About Bin Laden . . .

Looking ahead to the ongoing struggle with jihadi terrorists -- whom Thomas and his
sources, more than many American analysts, seem to believe are much more
crucially linked to Osama bin Laden's continued physical well-being -- the author
misses a point that's well worth making. The West and its democratic allies, relying in
larger part on their intelligence agencies, already have waged two successful
campaigns against international terrorism: containment and pacification of the IRA
and the defeat and destruction of the terrorist international the KGB attempted to
construct in the 1970s out of groups like the PLF, the German Red Army faction,
Italy's Red Brigades and Spain's ETA. (Only the latter group of Basque separatists
limps along in shadow form, though under increasing pressure from Spanish and
French authorities.)

Though Thomas believes that Bin Laden presents a uniquely threatening case -- he
judges him more personally aberrant than either Hitler or Stalin, which seems rather
dubious -- he does think that Islamist radicalism can be defeated through more
openness among the democratic intelligence agencies. The larger challenge, he
argues, is for Britain's MI5 and MI6 to fully cooperate with the 25 spy agencies
working within the European Union without sacrificing their "special relationship" with
America's CIA and NSA. "If global terrorism is to be defeated," Thomas writes, "then
British, European and U.S. intelligence services must be more open-handed in
sharing their secrets with services that would never have featured on their distribution
list prior to 9/11." That will require, he realistically concludes, a concomitant degree of
new political transparency. Thomas argues that while the protection of sources "must
remain paramount," we no longer can neglect an insight that comes from -- of all
unlikely places -- that most implacable of all CIA Cold Warriors, James Angleton:
"Secrecy from public scrutiny leads to often uncheckable and different accounts of
the same events, which are often contradictory and distorted."

There are thousands upon thousands of dead Iraqis, Americans and Britons whose
fresh graves are mute testimony to the old spy's tragic wisdom.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com

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