Memorandum from Dr Martha Mundy
I should like to bring to your attention the
article inserted below and attached from Asia Times. The following
questions must be considered with regard to the intelligence concerning
weapons of mass destruction on the basis of which the UK government
decided to go to war against Iraq.
(1) What part of this intelligence resulted
from work of intelligence agencies/agents of HM Government?
(2) What part of this intelligence resulted
from work of intelligence agents/agencies of the US Government?
(3) What part of this intelligence resulted
from work of intelligence agents/agencies of the Israeli Government?
In short what was the division of labour between
these agencies and to what extent does the UK retain sufficient
independence from the interests/institutions of these two powerful
countries in the Middle East to make independent decisions based
on its own intelligence?
The attached article raises a series of major
issues about the relation between HM intelligence services and
the Israeli intelligence services.
Dr Martha Mundy
Senior Lecturer in Anthropology (Specialist in the
countries of the Arab East) London School of Economics
June 2003
Annex
ASSASSINATION AND
THE LICENSE
TO KILL,
ASIA TIMES,
13 JUNE 2003
The world of counter-terrorism is certain to
take a further step into the downward spiral of hit-teams and
assassination as Western intelligence services try to find the
means to defeat al-Qaeda and its myriad extremist offshoots. The
US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Britain's M16 (the secret
service branch dealing with matters outside the British Islands),
freed of many of the political and legal shackles imposed in the
latter years of the Cold War, are expanding their covert capability
and the means to use "executive action", a euphemism
for assassination, to defeat the greatest threat to democracy
since the collapse of communism. The main source of the experience
and influence on operational tactics is perhaps one of the more
surprising aspects of these developments.
Israel has played a significant and largely
secret role within the dark world of Britain's covert operations
against terrorist groups. As long ago as the early 1970s Rafael
Eitan, the then head of the Israeli hit-squad known as the "Kidon"
toured Northern Ireland and later the Special Air Services (SAS)
base in Hereford, England. Rumor has it that Eitan was less than
impressed with British training, tactics or their "kill"
rate. Within months of his visit there began a number of fundamental
changes in security policy and operations in the county. More
SAS were to be there and a number of specialized anti-terrorist
groups would eventually be formed, ranging from the 14th Intelligence
and Security Company, once described as the "thinking man's
SAS" to the Mobile Reconnaissance Force or MRF which would
later become the Force Reconnaissance Unit (FRU). The FRU was
to be later involved in the targeting of suspected Republicans
for assassination by the infamous Loyalist death squads in Northern
Island.
Indeed, Britain's overall counter-terror organization
was held in such poor esteem by the experienced Israelis that
Israel's intelligence service Mossad's Kidon hit-team took the
law into its own hands by assassinating two of the Palestinian
terrorists suspected of involvement in the Black September Massacre
at the 1972 Munich Olympics. One was found dead in his London
hotel room, while the second fell under the wheels of a car in
High Holborn, much to the annoyance of MIS (the security service
dealing with counter espionage against British organizations by
foreign powers, including counter-terrorism) and the fury of Whitehall.
The 1988 killing of three Irish Republican Army (IRA) members
in Gibraltar by the SAS was reportedly viewed as a bungled operation
by Mossad who had originally tracked the Irish terrorists who
they suspected of running guns from Lebanon. Wishing to avoid
further problems with London by not attempting to kill or capture
them on British soil, the surveillance operation was handed over
to MIS, and of course later to the SAS, whose heavy-handed approach
finally prevented interrogation of the suspects.
Britain's tough new approach owes much to Israel
Under Prime Minister Tony Blair, Britain's official approach is
far more cooperative and Mossad have apparently met with little
opposition to their clandestine center operating in London with
some 15 intelligence officers and two or three members of the
Kidon. The Israelis are thought to have a hit list of around 50
Islamic and Palestinian terrorists believed to be currently living
in Britain. Most of these radicals are, to use Israeli parlance,
to be "disposed of" and it is believed that a number
have either fled the country or have gone under deep cover in
consequence. According to Gordon Thomas, one of the world's leading
experts on Israeli and British intelligence in particular, the
highly effective Kidon is directly controlled by Mossad. It has
some 38-40 highly trained assassins and includes at least four
women. They operate throughout the world and wherever a potential
or actual threat exists to the interests of Israel or its people.
David Kimche, a 30-year veteran of Mossad and its deputy until
his resignation in 1980, was largely responsible for the formulation
of the Kidon philosophy that it must be "Israel first, last
and always".
It is this deadly capability that both the CIA
and now M16 are apparently seeking to emulate as they face the
growing menace of Islamic terrorism. Though the CIA has a long
track record of assassinations, its claws were drawn by successive
US administrations with their fear of damaging publicity and international
anger, ending with a legal ban on such action which has only recently
been lifted. Britain on the other hand has no such legal complications
as long as the killing takes place on foreign soil. Under the
Intelligence Services Act of 1994, M16 officers have immunity
from prosecution for crimes committed outside Great Britain. Although
The Criminal Justice Bill of 1998 makes it illegal for any organization
in Great Britain to conspire to commit offences abroad, Crown
agents still have immunity. With the end of World War II the SOEs
(Special Operations Executive) undoubted ability in both subversion
and assassination was absorbed into the Secret Intelligence Service
(SIS), and for many years afterwards Britain is believed to have
made regular, if sparing use of assassination to further its foreign
policy aims.
A return to old ways for Secret Intelligence Service?
George Young in 1956, at the time the deputy
chief of M16, quite openly advocated the killing of the Egyptian
leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, and in September 1960 a senior Foreign
Office official, Howard Smith, who was later to become the director
general of MIS, argued in an official document for the assassination
of the young Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. "I see only
two possible solutions to the (Lumumba) problem. The first is
the simple one of ensuring (his) removal from the scene by killing
him."
Closer to home, the Littlejohn brothers were
recruited in 1972 by John Wyman of MI6, who handled a number of
agents in Northern Ireland and paid them substantial sums of taxpayers'
money to infiltrate the IRA and to act as agent provocateurs,
organizing and conducting bank robberies and bomb attacks in the
Republic of Ireland. Wyman told them that there was "going
to be a policy of political assassination" for which they
were to make themselves available. "If I was told about any
illegal act before it happened, I would always discuss it with
London. I was always told to go ahead," said Kenneth Littlejohn,
who went on to claim that the MI6 officer told him, "If there
is any shooting, do what you've got to do." Wyman indeed
gave the Littlejohns a list of IRA leaders to assassinate; these
included Seamus Costello, Sean Qarland and Sean McStiofain. After
Littlejohn passed on the name of Joe McCann, a leading Republican,
to his MI6 handler, McCann was shot dead by British paratroopers
a few days later as he walked, apparently unarmed, through the
Belfast market area.
In more recent times, the maverick former MIS
officer David Shayler and Richard Tomlinson of MI6 have both vigorously
argued that Britain's intelligence services had attempted to assassinate
Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in February 1996 and had planned
a similar fate for both the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 1991
and Serbia's Slobodan Milosovic in 1992. Whatever one may think
of such claims, there is now at least official confirmation from
the Steven's Inquiry into the "Shoot to Kill" policy
in Northern Ireland that British security officials were indeed
deeply involved in the assassination of a number of Catholics
in the province.
The Guardian on April 28, 2001 headlined its
article "Sinister role of secret army unit: Police investigate
claims of collusion with paramilitaries" describes the organizations
involved in covert British operations in Ireland. "The FRU
was one of three army-sponsored undercover intelligence squads
in Northern Ireland. The others were 22 Squadron SAS and 14 Company.
The FRU, which was set up in Northern Ireland in 1980, dealt with
recruiting and handling agents in paramilitary organizations."
14 Company specialized in surveillance while 22 SAS undertook
"executive actions". "That means they killed people,"
said an army source. Many outside observers remain convinced that
this is merely the tip of an iceberg and much is still being hidden
by an ongoing official coverup.
The SAS can provide the skills
Another in-built advantage for the SIS is that
they have a number of SAS personnel trained to work with the intelligence
service and always available for any of its needs. This group
is known as the "Increment" and is used for assassinations,
sabotage or other dangerous jobs, such as arresting war criminals
in the Balkans, says James Dunnigan, the renowned author of How
to Make War (now in its fourth edition), adding that every SIS
station chief has a direct line to the SAS headquarters at the
Duke of York's Barracks in West London and a good working relationship
with these covert action experts. The "Increment" also
works closely with yet another shadowy SIS group called the UKN,
a highly specialist surveillance team. Ex-SAS mercenaries have
also been blamed for several assassinations on the African continent
and a purported former member of the regiment, Tyrone Chadwick,
was imprisoned in South Africa after admitting to a London-based
journalist his and other former SAS mercenaries' leading role
in several murders during the apartheid era, according to a commentary
on the Strategy Page in June 2003.
The SIS has developed a reputation for going
outside the agency and its military executive arm to hit some
targets. Friendly foreign intelligence agencies have been used
on a number of occasions and MI6 has shown a willingness to "sub-contract
it to Mossad", according to a former British agent quoted
by Peter Hillmore and Ed Vulliamy in "Spies: the Beautiful
and the damned" (The Observer, October 12, 1997), adding
that the assassination in Belgium of the British inventor of the
Iraqi "Supergun", Gerald Bull, is widely believed to
have been just such an act. And speculation still surrounds the
"suicide" of Jonathan Moyle, the 28-year-old editor
of the British trade journal Defence Helicopter World in March
1990—he was found hanging in a closet in a hotel room in
Santiago, Chile. Intelligence sources have long suggested that
there was a, so far unproven, SIS involvement in Moyle's death
as his "Iraqgate" investigations were believed to be
uncovering highly embarrassing facts for the senior management
at Century House, then the headquarters for M16 and the Conservative
government of Margaret Thatcher.
British spooks regain a license to kill
Last year Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
appointed General Meir Dagan, his friend and close colleague,
to head Mossad. Security sources confirm that Dagan, a noted hawk,
had served in the 1970s as head of the "Rimon" undercover
anti-terrorist unit which is widely suspected of killing militants
wanted by Israel. Following his retirement from the army in 1995,
Dagan became Mossad's deputy chief. His appointment and past track
record suggest that while the Sharon government may be publicly
willing to sign up to President George W Bush's road map for Middle
East peace, it will be allied to a deadly new secret campaign
to destroy the terrorist infrastructure and eliminate its leadership.
Leading Israeli politician Moshe Arens says, "Dagan is one
of the old Sharon's assets. They got to know each other 33 years
ago when Sharon, then head of Southern Command, cleared Gaza of
`terrorists'. Dagan led a commando unit called `Rimon' which was
known, how shall I put it, for its unconventional methods."
Dagan is known to be keen to promote the Israeli way of dealing
with terrorism, and quickly paid an official visit to the CIA
director George Tenet in September last year before his promotion
had even been confirmed. According to usually reliable intelligence
sources, it can be taken as highly significant that the CIA formally
established an assassination team in November, less than two months
later. This may be seen as not only a positive US response to
the sharing of Israeli experience and expertise, but also as a
direct result of the recent lifting of the US presidential ban
on "executive action" following the al-Qaeda attacks
of September 11, 2001.
Dagan and Mossad's growing influence on the
Western intelligence community was further strengthened by meetings
held in Britain in January of this year with Eliza Manningham
Buller, the director general of MI5 and more importantly with
Richard Dearlove, chief of the Secret Intelligence Service. It
now seems likely that in the wake of these discussions Britain's
MI6 was further encouraged to rebuild its muscle power through
the expansion of its Special Operations Directorate to include
a genuine anti-terrorist "Hunter-Killer" capability.
Though "C", the head of the MI5 has
been traditionally able to call on the services of the SAS and
the "Increment", a small special forces unit dedicated
to secret intelligence, an ever increasing number of covert and
potentially politically explosive operations required the use
of contracted "retired" officers operating within commercial
paramilitary companies; organized crime assets or even "friendly"
foreign intelligence agencies such as Mossad. The SIS has now
apparently decided, presumably with full approval of the Joint
Intelligence Committee and the Cabinet Office, that it must have
its own operatives to do much of the "dirty work" in
future. In common with their colleagues at the CIA, the senior
management at Vauxhall Cross are now busily returning the service
to the bad old days of "political action" and assassination
as the official, though of course deniable, policy for dealing
with external threats.
Contacts within the Intelligence communities
both in the UK and the US strongly advised AFI Research not to
run this piece on assassination. However, we consider that such
a response merely gave added credence to the suggestion that in
the future the British authorities may indeed be prepared to use
more "positive" methods, under certain circumstances,
in dealing with both external and very probably, internal "enemies
of the state". It now seem almost certain, therefore, that
a limited number of selected and highly trained M16 officers have
once again been given a "license to kill", and perhaps
very largely because of the experience and influence of the Israeli
secret service.
(AFI Research, a leading source of specialist
intelligence, defence, terrorism, conflict and political analysis)
Richard M Bennett
Asia Times
13 June 2003
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