Een kijkje nemen bij Echelon

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

De 'spanning' tussen eerlijke en niet eerlijke spionnen, en politieke
meesters :).

http://www.observer.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,910756,00.html

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

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.'

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