Posted on 09/05/2002 9:55:28 PM PDT by Vidalia
Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, today delivers a damning critique of America's response to the September 11 assault on the US and says she was not surprised by the al-Qaida terrorist attack. She makes it clear that, in her view, US intelligence agencies failed to investigate the al-Qaida network properly, and says President Bush's war on terrorism will never be won.
Dame Stella's comments, which are certain to ruffle feathers in Whitehall as well as Washington, are made in a new preface to the paperback edition of her memoirs, Open Secret, published tomorrow. An extract appears exclusively in the Guardian today.
"The biggest surprise in all this for me," she says referring to September 11, "has been not the terrorist act itself but the reaction ... From the political reaction, it was as if the fact of an attack had come as a total surprise to the governments and counter-terrorist authorities of the world."
Referring to the CIA, FBI, and other US intelligence agencies, she writes: "The nature and extent of the al-Qaida network seems to have escaped observation." She adds: "If it is true that the FBI had some intelligence, however vague, that a remarkable number of Islamic students were taking courses at US flying schools amongst other things, security measures at US internal airports should have been reviewed."
President Bush's decision to set up a new department of homeland security will "merely add to the confusion" in the American intelligence community, she writes.
In an interview with the Guardian, she said that foreign agencies - by implication, Britain's MI5 and MI6 - may not trust the US department with their most sensitive intelligence. She suggests it is unfair to blame the US intelligence agencies for not getting precise information about the September 11 attacks, and the al-Qaida network was particularly difficult to penetrate. But she says, in an implicit reference to MI5's successes in Northern Ireland, with old-fashioned patience there is "no doubt at all" intelligence agencies will be able to recruit volunteers.
"A 'war on terrorism' cannot be won unless the causes of terrorism are eradicated by making the world a place free of grievances, something that will not happen," says Dame Stella. She elaborated the point to the Guardian: "Terrorism will always be there because terrorism is ultimately successful in its way. It achieves publicity for the cause terrorists are supporting."
In a further unmistakeable swipe at the Bush administration, Dame Stella says that in their public response to terrorist acts, "politicians should use words of scorn, rather than the rhetoric of revenge. All rhetoric plays into the hands of terrorists but talk of revenge breeds yet more hatred in a never-ending cycle".
If a bunck of smelly diaperheads can take down the WTC, what can China do with US/Soviet technology and Liberals controlling everything in America?
Why don't you hold your fire until after the Iraq phase is over. President Bush said much of the war against terrorism will not be like previous wars and much of it will be fought in secret. Frankly, I prefer much of it to be secret so terrorists won't be tipped off beforehand. Here's the most important portion of President Bush's speach on September 20, 2001.
Now, this war will not be like the war against Iraq a decade ago, with a decisive liberation of territory and a swift conclusion. It will not look like the air war above Kosovo two years ago, where no ground troops were used and not a single American was lost in combat.I think the reason President Bush has not strongly been making the case for attacking Iraq is that he wants to have all the preliminary preparations for an attack made prior to going to Congress and the American people for support. It is much better to keep the enemy guessing than to show our cards.Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes visible on TV and covert operations secret even in success.
We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place until there is no refuge or no rest.
And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.
From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime. Our nation has been put on notice. We're not immune from attack. We will take defensive measures against terrorism to protect Americans.
Finally she gets around to the point. No Israel is not going to disappear. That's the real grievance hidden behind the self-righteous love of the oppressed.
We're going to win this war. Just like we won the war on poverty, the war on illiteracy, and the war on drugs.
Uh, there is a slight logical problem here. Numerically, the 9-11 team doesn't amount to a pimple on a gnat's ass when compared to the total number of Islamic students in US flight schools. Therefore, either we have a huge number of still-unapprehended would-be suicide hijackers in flight training here, or the whole argument is simply a phony talking point. Those are the only two possibilities. Which is it, Stella?
'All this terrorist activity presented a great challenge for governments and their security agencies,' writes Dame Stella Rimington of the new wave of anti-Western violence that emerged in the 1980s. 'It was a puzzle to know how best to deal with it.' Despite the size of the challenge, her steady hand guided MI5 to a leading world role, and she claims responsibility for creating the conditions vital for success - international links with other agencies, and the ability to respond rapidly to new information. She knew the penalty for failure: 'The risk of death of large numbers of members of the public or massive damage to property if the intelligence were inadequate or the assessment wrong.'
MI5's share of the blame for failing to thwart last week's attacks on the United States is relatively small. Nevertheless, a previously undisclosed decision made by Stella Rimington while she was MI5's director-general in 1994 may have been a contributory factor. When groups such as Islamic Jihad began attacking non-Israeli targets in the wake of Israel's invasion of the Lebanon in 1982, a small unit known as G7 was established as a 'joint section' by MI5 and its sister agency, the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.
This made good sense: the Islamic fundamentalist groups, though based abroad (normally MI6 territory), had supporters and infrastructure in Britain, the province of MI5. Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network is typical of this pattern - the fax claiming responsibility for the attacks on US embassies in 1998 came from a shop in north London.
Against the protests of G7's staff, Rimington disbanded it. The consequence, intelligence sources say, was that some known and previously monitored operatives disappeared from view: 'When it became clear just how great the threat posed by bin Laden was, we were in a difficult position. Scrapping G7 was a very foolish move. Instead of having a cadre of experienced case officers, we were virtually starting from scratch.'
Like so much else that might have been of interest, the disbanding of G7 does not appear in Stella Rimington's autobiography. Written, as she states, without reference to letters, diaries or official documents, the content of her book has been selected and weeded twice: first by her own memory, and then by the Whitehall censors.
The result of this second filter is a work bereft of even the most innocuous revelation, which makes few additions to public knowledge about MI5's activities against terrorists, subversives or foreign spies in the 27 years of Rimington's career. This could have been a gripping insider's account of the Cold War's victorious climax, followed by Rimington's strategic assessment of the perilous threats to Western civilisation created since its end. Instead, we get dull reiterations of MI5's legal parameters, padded with quotations from published manuals and Ministers' statements to the House of Commons.
In the past, Rimington avers, MI5 was not always 'sufficiently rigorous' when it came to deciding which UK citizens - members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, say, or trade unionists - were a genuine threat to parliamentary democracy, and so could properly be spied on. But once she was put in charge of counter-subversion in 1983, she writes, 'we gave a great deal of thought to this distinction, and to establishing what we should and should not investigate and report on. I was fortunate that some of the clearest thinkers in the Service, men and women with integrity and open minds, came to join me in this section, because these were not easy issues.' Here, too, there is a total absence of corroborating detail.
Yet she asks us to accept that MI5 didn't spy on CND per se, only on the Communist minority who were trying to undermine the West's defences at the Soviets' behest. Likewise, the miners who were striking in an attempt to stop pit closures were not an MI5 target, only those who wanted to bring down Thatcher's government. What is slightly difficult to see is how MI5's 'clear thinkers' were able to tell these categories apart, until they had all been thoroughly burgled, infiltrated and bugged.
However, it is the first filter, Rimington's own, which is the source of her book's most interesting, and ultimately damaging omissions. There is no mention of the defection to Britain in 1992 of Vasili Mitrokhin, the former KGB chief archivist who arrived with vast files containing details of almost 70 years of Soviet espionage against the West - unquestionably the most important event in counter-espionage in the period when Rimington was DG.
This can't be the fault of the censor: Mitrokhin has been interviewed on television and co-written a book with Professor Christopher Andrew, and it is well known that his information enabled the prosecution of Michael Smith, the Soviet agent who worked for Thorn EMI.
But Rimington may have her reasons for silence in this area. In 1999, Mitrokhin's book triggered the exposure of Melita Norwood, the octogenarian former Soviet atom spy. In the fallout from what became a media sensation, MI5 faced some awkward questions. Why had it never bothered to follow up Mitrokhin's Norwood leads, so making her prosecution impossible? Why had it fallen to a then-BBC journalist (myself) to confront her for the first time - and obtain a full-blown confession within approximately 15 minutes?
When Rimington gave her evidence, in camera, to an inquiry into the affair by the Parliamentary Intelligence Oversight Committee, she said she could not remember what she had been told about Norwood, and could not explain her service's inaction. In fact, she was briefed extensively, six years before the story surfaced. But the effect of her forgetfulness was that her successor, Stephen Lander, took the heat of some searing criticism for decisions for which he had no responsibility.
Similarly, the book describes the attempted treachery of Michael Bettaney, caught trying to pass secrets to the Russians in 1982. Bettaney, Rimington writes, 'had been behaving inappropriately for some time... drinking excessively and behaving in ways which should have sounded warning bells that all was not well. Though some of those who had seen his behaviour alerted the personnel department, it was not thought necessary to move him from his counter-espionage work.' Rimington does not relate that the most cogent warning came personally to her, at a meeting in London with one of Bettaney's IRA agents, two years before his arrest, nor that, afterwards, he continued to work on secret operations in which she was closely involved.
The most puzzling question posed by this memoir is how Stella Rimington ever rose so far, and so relatively fast - from junior agent runner at the start of the 1980s to DG 11 years later. In contrast to many of her intelligence peers, she is, by her own account, no intellectual, and time and again, the voice is that of Mrs Pooter. When her husband, John, is promoted to civil service principal, 'he went out and bought a case of Chateauneuf du Pape to celebrate. He put it on top of the cupboard in the hall and we started having wine with our dinner on Saturday evenings.'
When the couple are posted to India, the voyage is 'a constant wonder... there were breathtaking things to see - flying fish and shooting stars, and as we sailed through the narrow passage of the Suez canal, camels loping along beside the ship.' Once in Delhi, the richer and more adventurous diplomatic wives apparently took off for Kashmir at weekends, 'for a stay in a houseboat and, it was said, the delights of cheap ganga [sic]'. It is no coincidence that the one politician for whom she feels any sympathy is John Major.
To be sure, we do not choose our senior spies for their literary ability. Harder to stomach is the peevish, chip-on-your-shoulder feminism that pervades so much of the book. Rimington claims, more or less singlehandedly, to have transformed a bastion of brutal sexism into one of political correctness. It is an account bitterly disputed by some of her female colleagues, who say they remember a woman principally devoted to personal advancement, who did little to foster other women's careers. While nearly half of MI5's staff are women, there are still very few in senior grades, and their numbers reflect average proportions in Whitehall as a whole.
In the end, Rimington's genius was for office politics. Thus she rose, and thus, having risen, she engineered new roles for MI5, against Irish terrorism and organised crime, at a time when it seemed it might easily wither away as part of the 'peace dividend' from the Cold War. She was also magnificent at claiming credit: although it is true that the last period of IRA campaigns in Britain saw several significant arrests, MI5 sources admit the most significant intelligence came not from the Security Service but from communications intercepts by GCHQ.
Her own assessment of the effect of investigating terrorists is revealing: above all, she writes, it helped foster 'a new style of MI5 officer, quite different from those who had been around when I first entered the service. The modern version was younger, travelled regularly, spoke foreign languages... the new breed was comfortable in Whitehall, sitting on committees and discussing issues with ministers.' Suave, non-sexist, good at presentation. But not very effective at preventing murderous atrocities.
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