3. INTELLIGENCE GATHERING

INTELLIGENCE GATHERING

INTELLIGENCE GATHERING on the ordinary people of this country is a ‘State Secret.’ Most of the Establishment will try to say that it is just a loony ‘conspiracy theory.’ The problem is almost every British Telecom engineer knows about it and when questioned will often say: ‘Yes I’ve heard about Echelon, but I have signed the Official Secrets Act.’ The Russians know about ECHELON, most Arab States are perfectly aware of what ECHELON is. Most diplomatic posts will employ highly sophisticated and well-encrypted communication systems to circumvent ECHELON.

So ECHELON is not much of a ‘State Secret,’ unless of course one would prefer the ordinary citizen to remain unaware of how easy it is to monitor their growing unrest and to target possible leaders, opposed to the neo con corruption of the State, before those individuals know they are on the way to becoming activists. It is clear that it is also being subverted to ‘stitch up’ those who wish to alter the status quo, sending email messages, posting material of a questionable nature or even ensuring that home computers are fraudulently said to have been used for the use of child pornography. Katherine Gunn who blew the whistle on intelligence gathering at GCHQ appeared on Radio 4’s On The Ropes and testified to her inability to find work and continuing problems. Whistle blowers are severely discouraged.

Those who seek power often know that they have to play the ball game in accordance with rules others have set, because by failing to do so all power will elude them. What they fail to grasp is that power attained on these terms leads not only their own enslavement, but to the enslavement of the people they represent.

‘Blair told his inner circle he was one of the few world leaders who understood the “new realities” of the global order, post 9/11. “The Prime Minister has an extremely acute sense of American power,” says one of his entourage. “Very few people understand just what that means. He does. He understood that the Americans can bring to bear a capability of a different order to anything the world has seen. There is no historical precedent. America’s reach is everywhere. …”’

page 152 - BLAIR’S WARS – by John Kampfner, published by The Free Press in paperback 2004. – ISBN 0-7432-4830-9

ECHELON is a product of our ‘special relationship’ with the USA. Under the American Constitution the American Government is in contravention of the US Constitution if it monitors citizens within the USA. So at Menwith Hill and GCHQ the Americans have devolved much of the administration to the British – although a large number of US servicemen and women are involved. The range of ECHELON is not limited to citizens of the USA. It is capable of downloading every email, telephone and fax transmission made almost anywhere in the world. There are a few exceptions I am told – island states like Kiribati are apparently incapable of being monitored by ECHELON.

No – there are no warehouses of tapes, technology has moved on. Intelligence gathering methods digitally records and automatically flags up key phrases. Intelligence gathering has voice recognition techniques, so that if a person becomes a threat ten years’ down the line all their communication traffic can be retrospectively monitored. Intelligence gathering and those that administer it are capable of corrupting emails.

Sending and receiving emails from an MI6 renegade, Richard Tomlinson, on the run in Switzerland, I was struck by how mad his emails appeared to be and when he wrote back saying how mad my own emails were I realised how easy it is to corrupt email traffic.

An ex Security Services, now academic don at Magdalene College, Cambridge still refuses to have an email address.

Mobile phone records trace one to a particular location. At the risk of being called a ‘conspiracy theorist’ one has to allow for the possibility that ‘Big Brother’ really is listening to everything one says and does and perhaps even changing what one says and does to try to ensure convicted criminality of the would be revolutionary. Most intercept recordings are never listened to, most phone calls and emails do not threaten national security.

However those who believe in freedom and would work to regaining that freedom may now be deemed a ‘national threat’ and all too easily monitored and their means of communication hijacked. Once monitored it is all too simple to ensure that they are rendered impotent.

Who are their contacts, to which groups do they belong? How easy would it be to undermine their efforts at raising public awareness of forces within the State who are out of control?

If organising a peaceful demonstration, with no criminal intent whatsoever, knowledge of the telephone calls and emails sent to and received by the organisers of such an event would allow infiltrators with a violent agenda, seeking to undermine the political effectiveness of that event, to provide excellent media footage of property being trashed, small children trampled and say police horses stabbed. Animal lovers, those who believe in the sanctity of life and those who respect property above all would all be revolted. What more effective means of undermining a peaceful demonstration could be employed?

However we now no longer have the freedom to organise spontaneous demonstrations. If a protest is organised proper permission has to be sought from the police. One can’t even leaflet the queues of tourists and observers who wish to observe the debates in Parliament without contravening our new laws. Those who control the neo con establishment, which has deprived us of our pensions, is rapidly reducing our currency to a worthless piece of paper and trashed the once highly respected banking system in this country, also control the mechanisms whereby the population can express discontent. The comedian, Mark Thomas, ably demonstrated these ludicrous legal inroads on our freedoms in a Radio 4 broadcast. Mark Thomas holds the record for the greatest number of demonstrations within the ‘designated area’ of London now carrying stringent controls on those who wish to demonstrate.

If one thinks a free press still exists think again. Every broadcaster is vetted by means of making those who gain the broadcasting contracts bid for their franchise and stick to their stated aims.

Journalists are themselves very easily duped into thinking they are essential to national security and playing with the big boys. Those who report on ‘Security’ are briefed by the MoD (Ministry of Defence), often off the record, but given a sufficiently plausible ‘inside line’ to make their reporting credible. Whilst those who are excluded from the charmed laager of the Security Services are often fed rubbish and their credibility all too easily undermined.

Piers Morgan, as editor of the Mirror, published pictures of supposed Iraqi’s being maltreated. He submitted the pictures to the Ministry of Defence (MoD) prior to publication and was met with a stony silence. Taking the silence to signify corroboration of the pictures he published them. Only then did the MoD weigh in to rubbish his story and thereby prevent any other, more credible, stories of human rights abuses being perpetrated by British and American troops at Abu Ghraib being published. Every other Fleet Street editor became chary of becoming the same butt of a Piers Morgan joke. A joke which still hangs over Piers Morgan to this day, despite the evidence that such abuses did occur.

So your phone calls can be retrieved, as can your emails, faxes etc. to ascertain whether or not you were in touch with anyone at all before your demonstration. On balance the Security Services have resisted the urge to make evidence gathered by intercepts admissible in a court of law. They fear that making intercept recordings admissible in Courts of Law might open a can of worms. Those who treasure our freedoms would then be able to turn the tables on the neo cons who have conspired to erode those freedoms and, under a freedom of information appeal, request those recordings be produced in any Court of Law.

The police, Special Branch, the Security Services, the ‘Stay-Behind’ secret groups can so very easily drum
see – NATO’s Secret Armies by Daniel Ganser. The Imperial War Museum has evidence of the history of the group who are still in existence today. They are largely made up of ex military and police, predominantly drawn from the red neck stock of ex MoD police and Royal Military Police as well as a smattering of ex Special Branch and SAS / SBS types. None of these groups have much respect for the rule of law and order and many within their ranks firmly believe in their right to subvert justice in order to obtain a sort of rough justice outside the rule of law. Stay-Behind groups have caches of guns, C4 and other weaponry hidden in woods and on ‘safe’ farmland. Initially set up as the final line of defence to thwart a Russian invasion, during the Cold War, they have now turned their neo con attentions to defeating those who seek to ensure we retain Human Rights, Civil Liberties and a modicum of freedom in our political and judicial processes. Since they are not even acknowledged to exist by the State they remain unaccountable to those in Parliament and to the people of this country. This group are generally called ‘STAY BEHIND’ in the UK, Sheepskin in Greece, Gladio in Italy. These ‘Stay-Behind’ groups appear to have proven links to Secret Societies, including the Masonic P2 (Propaganda Due) and Mafia links. Giulio Adnreotti, Italy’s Prime Minister revealed the existence of Gladio around the time of the first Gulf War on 3 August 1990.

Shortly after that admission in Italy, the ex-Greek Prime Minister, Papandreou, confirmed to a Greek newspaper (October 1990 Ta Nea) that he had discovered a secret NATO army operating in Greece whilst he was Prime Minister in the 1980’s. A German newspaper, TAZ , began to report that a similar organisation existed in Germany. A German television channel then reported that ex-Schutzstaffel (SS) personnel had been recruited to this NATO movement and questions were asked in the German Parliament. Over the course of the next few months’ revelations rolled out over Europe. The Belgians, having linked the existence of a ‘Stay-Behind’ group, who had wreaked mayhem and slaughter on the Belgian people, purportedly closed down the force a year after a Special Committee published its report into the scandal. The French publicly declared that such a force had been in existence but had also been disbanded after Stalin’s death in 1953. However Prime Minister, Andreotti, in Italy then revealed that the French had been represented at a meeting of this clandestine NATO Group on 23 October 1990 in Belgium. Sarkozy the current Prime Minister of France announced on 11 March 2009, that France would be rejoining the NATO Military Command Structure Alliance, of which the Stay-Behind projects figure prominently. A lack of public curiosity of Britain’s role in the debacle, both in the media and in Parliament led to an article in the Observer newspaper on 7th June 1992, going pretty much unremarked.

The British Security Services decline to comment and it seems MP’s were too busy taking cash for questions to pursue unsettling questions of national security and the circumstances in which national security had been compromised by unscrupulous and unaccountable clandestine neo con organisations.

In Holland it was admitted that such a secret organisation did exist, but the then Netherlands Prime Minister, Ruud Lubbers, added the caveat that their own ‘Stay Behind’ army was supervised by NATO. There followed admissions, or questionable denials in Luxemburg, Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Turkey. The European Parliament discussed the scandal affecting all twelve of its member States on 22nd November 1990. Out of control ‘stay-behind’ security personnel are now facing an enquiry in Turkey, following revelations that hundreds of Kurds remain ‘missing.’

A public enquiry into the actions of Gladio in Italy revealed that their Stay-Behind Group, Gladio, had indulged in ‘false flag’ acts of terrorism, booby-trapping one vehicle to kill a policeman and injuring another. The GLADIO mistake of using C4 – an explosive favoured by NATO, as opposed to alternative explosives favoured by Communist agitators, proved to be their undoing. Gladio has not repeated the mistake of using C4 again and now makes stringent efforts to reproduce explosives of the type favoured by the groups it aims to blame for false flag terrorist acts. The blame for this act of terrorism was incorrectly laid at the feet of the Communist movement in Italy, so allowing the authorities to round up over 300 Italian Communist sympathisers. This act of terrorism was eventually proven to be the result of the increasingly fascist Stay-Behind Group, GLADIO.

These ‘Stay-Behind secret armies operate under different code names, but all were generally referred to by the Italian name Gladio, in the press, in the absence of a willingness to expand on these admissions by member countries of their own secret armies’ cooperation in the affair. Eventually it would be revealed that the code names differed - Absalon in Denmark, P26 or Projekt 26 in Switzerland (a non NATO country), Rocambole (ROC) in Sweden, Sheepskin in Greece. However the British Security Services, the CIA and NATO universally refer to these groups as S/B or ‘Stay-Behind’ projects.



up stooges who cannot be traced back to covert Security Services, or privatised Security Companies, who remain largely unregulated and who willingly subvert peaceful demonstrations in order to excuse brutal clamp downs and provide the basis for further legislation to limit our freedoms. It is now evident that Andy Coulson was not so innocent in his claims of innocence when the News of the World bugged politicians. Coulson has committed the cardinal sin, his credibility as to his ignorance has been shot down. So Coulson has had to leave the inner sanctum and protection of the Conservative Party. Even the politicians are joining the ranks of the disaffected and it is Coulson who is in their sights rather than the privatised and deniable intercept industry which has grown exponentially.

Since those working toward a more transparent State are not given access to intercept information, in order to hunt down these right wing neo con subversives, it is difficult to prove the extent of the collusion by forces within the State intent on disrupting much needed reform. The stooges themselves will escape prosecution, but those who seek a peaceful demonstration will be deemed responsible for the violent actions of agent provocateurs in their midst. Agent provocateurs who are protected by the State.