Controversial U.K. spy agency could serve as model for U.S.
Posted on 12/26/2002 6:59:31 AM PST by MeekOneGOP
Controversial U.K. spy agency could serve as model for U.S.
MI-5 long accused of abusing power, but it has lost some of secrecy
12/26/2002
LONDON - Britain's controversial domestic spy unit, MI-5, is emerging as a model for a possible U.S. agency that may be created to take over the FBI's role in the expanding fight against terrorism.
U.S. lawmakers look to MI-5 - once so secret that even its director's identity was kept from the public - as proof that an internal spy unit can exist in a democracy without trampling on citizens' right to privacy.
They contend that the FBI is trained in law enforcement, not crime prevention, and is inadequate for the task of intelligence gathering. That's the specialty of MI-5, whose agents enjoy broad powers to eavesdrop on British citizens, even if that means entering their homes to plant a wiretap or other intrusive devices.
| Also Online | ||||
|
Paul Flynn, a Labor Party member of Parliament from Wales, said the British lawmakers who serve on the MI-5 oversight committee are not well-informed about the agency's inner workings.
"The people in the committee only get general reports; they get details about how much is spent on tea and coffee, but they complain they are pretty much in the dark," he said. "MI-5 is still pretty much a world of its own. They can do their own thing. I doubt they do much good at all. They tend to be fighting yesterday's battles."
MI-5 officials declined to discuss the agency, but it has become an article of faith among Labor Party members that in the 1960s, MI-5 acted improperly by trying to undermine the government of Prime Minister Harold Wilson because of suspicions that he was too sympathetic to the Soviet Union.
The allegation was never proved but it received a boost from Mr. Wilson, who said when he left office that he had been spied on.
Mr. Flynn said he believes that Mr. Wilson was placed under improper surveillance by MI-5 because "right-wing nut cases" ran the spy agency at the time. "They were chasing down conspiracies that were figments of their own imagination," he said.
Many union supporters, including Mr. Flynn, also believe that MI-5 acted in concert with former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in her ultimately successful bid to break the power of Britain's many trade unions.
MI-5, now known formally as the Domestic Security Service, operated with wide latitude and without public scrutiny for decades, since its creation in the face of a threat from Germany in 1909. During this period, Britain triumphed in two world wars and became a Cold War battleground in the fight for supremacy between the capitalist and communist worlds.
The agency sought to keep Britain free of Soviet agents, with mixed results, and also played a central role protecting Britons from terrorist attacks launched by the Irish Republican Army - a counterintelligence function now being used against al-Qaeda and other radical groups.
But MI-5's prized operational independence has changed in recent years as the spy agency has been placed under the control of the home secretary, a Cabinet position similar to that of the U.S. interior secretary. The agency was forced to open much of its budgetary and recruitment process to the public.
Today's MI-5 even maintains a Web site stating the agency's strict adherence to the law. In its "frequently asked questions" section, the agency denies that it occasionally assassinates enemies of the state.
The transition from secret to semi-secret began in 1989 with the enactment of the Security Services Act, which established guidelines for MI-5's activities, and speeded up in the 1990s with amendments to govern the use of wiretaps and other procedures.
As a result of this overhaul, the director general of MI-5 is now identified - the post is held by Eliza Manningham-Buller, the second woman known to have filled the top job - partial budgets are now published and Parliament has a formal oversight role.
A spokesman for Home Secretary David Blunkett, whose sprawling department oversees MI-5's operations, said one of Mr. Blunkett's tasks is to ensure that any approved wiretaps are justified.
Before a tap can be used, Mr. Blunkett's office must be convinced that the information gleaned can be vital for the protection of national security, or for the prevention and detection of serious crimes, or to protect the economic well-being of the United Kingdom.
In addition, the home secretary must be convinced that the advantage of using the listening device is "proportionate" to the damage caused by the intrusive nature of the surveillance, the spokesman said.
Another safeguard put in place by legislation in the last decade has established the post of a civilian "intercepts commissioner" charged with reviewing the use of wiretaps to make sure this power is not abused.
Just as the FBI and CIA has occasionally been embarrassed and in some cases compromised by reports published by disaffected former agents, MI-5's reputation has suffered at times from damning books by former insiders.
They traditionally go abroad to publish their accounts because Britain's Official Secrets Act makes it illegal for former agents to write their life stories without having the manuscripts approved by the government.
MI-5's image was damaged when former agent Peter Wright published in his book Spycatcher an account that described MI-5 as out of control during its twilight battle against communism. Mr. Wright said bureaucrats who were supposed to be overseeing MI-5 preferred to turn a blind eye toward the agency's excesses.
"We did have fun," he wrote. "For five years we bugged and burgled our way across London at the State's behest, while pompous bowler-hatted civil servants in Whitehall pretended to look the other way."
Most recently, MI-5 has been embarrassed by the words of former spy David Shayler, who was briefly imprisoned after charging, among other things, that MI-6 - the sister agency that gathers intelligence overseas - had tried to finance a coup to overthrow Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.
Until al-Qaeda's threat intensified with the Sept. 1 terrorist attacks on the United States, the litmus test of the contemporary MI-5 has been its ability to prevent the outlawed IRA and other militant groups in Northern Ireland from launching attacks against civilians there and in mainland Britain.
Experts in the field say that MI-5 has had some success in this decades-old battle, perhaps because of a long-rumored secret source within the IRA high command, along with several catastrophic failures in intelligence gathering.
The failures, said Paul Bew of Queens University in Belfast, included MI-5's failure to uncover and prevent a huge shipment of arms, including lethal Semtex plastic explosives, sent from Mr. Gadhafi to the IRA in the mid-1980s.
At that time, Mr. Bew said, Britain's prime minister and other senior officials were negotiating a planned peace agreement without the knowledge that a vast shipment of highly effective weapons was about to shift the balance of military power.
Mr. Bew said MI-5 has detered a number of IRA attacks and has certainly played an important role in convincing the IRA that a military victory was not feasible.
"A high percentage of IRA operations seem to go wrong, so MI-5 has a high success rate," he said. "Most people believe MI-5 has a senior informant within the IRA leadership, who is code-named Steakknife.
"Either he really exists, or the British invented him and get what they get from electronic surveillance. Either way, it's pretty remarkable."
E-mail gkatz@dallasnews.com
Excerpt:
LONDON - Britain's controversial domestic spy unit, MI-5, is emerging as a model for a possible U.S. agency that may be created to take over the FBI's role in the expanding fight against terrorism.
U.S. lawmakers look to MI-5 - once so secret that even its director's identity was kept from the public - as proof that an internal spy unit can exist in a democracy without trampling on citizens' right to privacy.
They contend that the FBI is trained in law enforcement, not crime prevention, and is inadequate for the task of intelligence gathering. That's the specialty of MI-5, whose agents enjoy broad powers to eavesdrop on British citizens, even if that means entering their homes to plant a wiretap or other intrusive devices.
MI-5 operates under parliamentary oversight. Wiretaps can be installed only if approved by Cabinet-level officials, but some Britons believe that MI-5 still has far too much power to act against British citizens. The agency has also been accused at times of pursuing a political agenda.
Paul Flynn, a Labor Party member of Parliament from Wales, said the British lawmakers who serve on the MI-5 oversight committee are not well-informed about the agency's inner workings.
Please let me know if you want ON or OFF my General Interest ping list!. . .don't be shy. 
Shift would leave FBI in charge of crime, not spies
U.S. panel endorses creation of intelligence agency like Britain's
12/26/2002
WASHINGTON - There's growing attention to the idea of creating a domestic spy agency, which would strip the FBI of an anti-terrorism intelligence role that it has only recently embraced as its top mission.
The concept, which has circulated since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, gained momentum this month when a federal commission recommended establishment of a domestic intelligence agency.
The panel, led by former Virginia Gov. James Gilmore, expressed concern about the nation's top law enforcement agency juggling domestic intelligence along with its historic focus on solving and preventing crime.
| Also Online | ||
|
Mr. Gilmore warned that a dual law enforcement/intelligence mission carried out by an agency with arrest powers could lead to a public perception of the FBI as a "kind of secret police."
The commission proposed creation of a National Counter Terrorism Center that would gather intelligence and conduct domestic surveillance, bringing together analysts currently working for the FBI, the CIA and other agencies.
The suggestion comes on the heels of a recommendation a week earlier by leaders of a House-Senate investigation into the Sept. 11 intelligence failures that Congress carefully consider creation of an agency along the lines of Britain's MI-5.
"We very definitely have to have that debate as a nation," said House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss, R-Fla.
Officials with the Justice Department and the FBI maintain that there is no need for a domestic intelligence agency and that the FBI is well along the way toward remaking itself into a counterterrorism agency.
FBI Director Robert Mueller rejected the idea of a new domestic spy agency in a Dec. 19 speech in New York, offering his first explicit public opposition to the proposal.
"Establishing a new domestic intelligence agency would constitute a step backward in the war on terror, not a step forward," the director said in a speech to the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City, calling the FBI "uniquely situated for the counterterrroism mission."
"Combining law enforcement and intelligence grants us ready access to every weapon in the government's arsenal against terrorists," he said. "We can now make strategic and tactical choices between our law enforcement options of arrest and incarceration and our intelligence options of surveillance and source development."
The comments underscore a growing FBI lobbying campaign against any stripping away of its counterterrorism role.
Mr. Mueller and his aides insist the FBI has remade itself since the Sept. 11 attacks - adding major resources to its counterterrorism division, hiring new intelligence analysts and linguists, and working more closely with the CIA and creating joint terrorism task forces with state and local authorities nationwide.
Still, critics insist that it may be asking too much of the FBI to remake itself into an intelligence agency and steer rank-and-file agents focused on law enforcement into new roles.
"Today we don't have the luxury of trying to turn the FBI into something it's not meant to be. We need to create what we actually need," Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., said in a recent Brookings Institution speech on homeland security.
"FBI agents are very good at law enforcement, but law enforcement is not intelligence," said the potential Democratic presidential contender, who serves on the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees.
While the FBI's performance came under sharp attack during the congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11 failings, Mr. Mueller said his agency has rebounded.
"Over the last year, the FBI has identified, disrupted and neutralized a number of terrorist threats and cells," he said. "We have the personnel, tools and assets needed to do the job."
The FBI is getting some support from unlikely quarters: the American Civil Liberties Union, which noted that the FBI already is performing the domestic counterterrorism role.
"As Americans, we have always rejected an internal spy agency - even when we feared possible nuclear annihilation during the Cold War," ACLU legislative counsel Timothy Edgar said after the Gilmore report came out. "While we strongly agree with Governor Gilmore that the FBI should not become a 'kind of secret police,' that problem is not solved by creating a different agency whose main purpose is to investigate Americans who are not engaged in any criminal wrongdoing."
E-mail mmittelstadt@dallasnews.com
Almost New Year's. Happy New Year !
/sarcasm
Lemme get this straight. The greatest impediment I see in counterterrorism is that the various agencies involved act like a bunch of spoilt children jealously guarding their turf instead of cooperating with each other. And the proposed solution for dealing with this problem is to ... create yet another agency?
Showing a sign of intelligence might get your brains sucked out! Watch out or else you will be packing an empty cranium.
Well, I always wondered what it would be like to be a Democrat...
Yeah, right. You'd still have the NSA, CIA, and other alphabet-soup agencies who aren't about to give up their turf. The FBI managed to generate several good leads about the 9/11 terrorists - but those were stifled by middle-level administrators, over PC concerns. And many times, mixing criminal and counter-terror invesigations is a good idea - because terrorists often break other laws as well.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
