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http://www.observer.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,910657,00.html
UN LAUNCHES INQUIRY INTO AMERICAN SPYING
The Observer (London) Sunday March 9, 2003
Martin Bright, Ed Vulliamy in New York and Peter Beaumont
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.
In 1971, Ellsberg was responsible for leaking a secret history of US
involvement in Vietnam, which became known as 'the Pentagon Papers', while
working as a Defence Department analyst. The papers fed the American
public's hostility to the war.
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.
President Lagos spoke on the telephone with Prime Minister Tony Blair
about the memo last Sunday, immediately after the publication of the
story, and twice again on Wednesday. Chile's Foreign Minister Soledad
Alvear also raised the matter with Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.
Chile's ambassador to Britain Mariano Fernndez told The Observer: 'We
cannot understand why the United States was spying on Chile. We were very
surprised. Relations have been good with America since the time of George
Bush Snr.' He said that the position of the Chilean mission to the UN was
published in regular diplomatic bulletins, which were public documents
openly available.
While the bugging of foreign diplomats at the UN is permissible under the
US Foreign Intelligence Services Act, it is a breach of the Vienna
Convention on Diplomatic Relations, according to one of America's leading
experts on international law, Professor John Quigley of Ohio University.
He says the convention stipulates that: 'The receiving state shall permit
and protect free communication on the part of the mission for all official
purposes... The official correspondence of the mission shall be
inviolable.'
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http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,910755,00.html
THE SPIES AND THE SPINNER
The Observer (London) Sunday March 9, 2003
Peter Beaumont in Baghdad and Gaby Hinsliff examine how Alastair Campbell
and intelligence staff fell out over what the public should be told about
Saddam
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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http://www.observer.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,910453,00.html
OUR SPY STORY SPELT CONSPIRACY TO SOME
The Observer (London) Sunday March 9, 2003
by Stephen Pritchard
Readers' Editor, The Observer,
The everyday use of a piece of simple computer technology placed this
newspaper at the centre of a storm last week, providing the twitchy global
community of conspiracy theorists with enough material for a whole
conference and prompting a record number of visits to our website.
Our exclusive front-page lead reported that a secret document, leaked to
us, showed that the US administration was conducting a secret surveillance
campaign against United Nations Security Council delegates in its battle
to win votes in favour of war on Iraq.
The memorandum, written by a top official at the National Security Agency
(NSA), gave orders to agents to step up surveillance on delegations from
Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria, Guinea and Pakistan.
Trouble began when we reproduced part of the memo on the front page and
the full document on our website. In preparing the story, the memo had
been typed into our computer system and a spell check run against it,
which changed the American spellings of 'favorable', 'emphasize',
'recognize' to UK-style 'favourable', 'emphasise and 'recognise'. The date
on the document was also changed from the US style 2003/01/31 to
31/01/2003.
The story drew a swift and furious reaction from the US.
'Any paper that would change date, spelling and content then call a
document authentic isn't worth fishwrap. Your paper, politics, and
reporting are contemptible...' 'Your paper is full of baloney. You have
never gotten hold of secret emails from our NSA and you never will. All
of you Europeans seem afraid of a measly little dictator. Get some balls
about yourselves. Stand up and face the big bully...'
By 3am on Sunday, only hours after the paper appeared, the Drudge Report,
the US website which shot to fame when it broke the Monica Lewinsky
scandal, was alleging that The Observer had smeared the US government.
A reader wrote: 'I think The Observer has done itself a major disservice
by automatically changing the spellings used - unless, of course, the memo
has been fabricated, as Drudge certainly implies. I don't believe you did;
in the current climate of paranoia and knee-jerk patriotic zeal abroad in
the US, however, such an accusation will find ready believers.' How true.
The American spellings were restored on our website, with an explanation,
but conspiracy theorists were not satisifed.
'You guys have the best comedy running! You try to defend your obvious
fairytale by saying you had to translate a supposed NSA memo so the
British populace would understand it? Face it - you fabricated a story.'
After consulting reporters, our web editor emailed Drudge, putting the
record straight on the spelling and telling him that the paper had spent
three weeks verifying the document and stood by the story. Drudge changed
his piece to read: 'Spelling alterations and typographical slip-ups
notwithstanding, editors of The Observer are standing tough behind the
paper's investigation.'
www.observer.co.uk recorded 964,373 page impressions on Sunday and another
800,000 over the next three days. This was a record. Papers from Chile to
Spain, Australia to Canada picked up on the story after seeing all the
attention on the web.
'What this again shows is just how quickly the web disseminates
information around the world,' says our website editor. 'Immediately we
publish something, it is picked up and commented on in any number of
different forums.'
Just a decade ago, to know how an issue was being covered in different
places around the world would have been very difficult for somebody who
was not a foreign correspondent or media expert. Now, readers can
instantly compare and contrast coverage at home with how a story is being
covered in Britain or Europe, creating a global marketplace for ideas,
news - and, unfortunately, misunderstandings.
Stephen Pritchard, Readers' Editor, The Observer, 119 Farringdon Road,
London EC1R 3ER, tel 0207-713 4656 Mon-Fri, fax 0207-713 4279 or email
rea...@observer.co.uk
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Yours truly also picked up the original leaked "document" from the
Observer and posted it around to a list of unlikely suspects.
The final item in the above menu describes how the Observer fed the
document to its own Spellcheck which changed it from American to English.
Yours truly was hatched in england, noticed the American misspellings and
corrected manually before posting to the "unlikely suspects". I'll bet
none of you complained to the Observer for faking something coming from
an obviously U$ source. Thanks !!
MichaelP