The Herald, 7 July 2010: . . . . Peace’s husband, Walter Clayton, was tracked by ASIO for 50 years until his death in 1997, but no proof has aired of him doing anything illegal, until now. Mr Clayton never wilted under ASIO’s watch, but a new book says a friend taped him admitting that he sent lists of potential Australian Soviet agents to Moscow. The Family File
Talk of Mr Clayton’s past in Melbourne as a communist organiser in the 1930s had circulated around Port Stephens for years, but the book has brought it into focus. Mr Clayton lived most of his life accused of being Klod, a shadowy figure who relayed state secrets to the Kremlin after WWII until the rouse was uncovered by Britain and the United States.
The US government was so angry about Klod’s leaks that it banished Australia from sharing western secrets until it set up a counterintelligence unit. So it appears Mr Clayton was the reason for ASIO. . . .
Washington Post, 5 July 2010: . . . . In one such example, Mikhail Fridman, a Russian oligarch who owned the financial consortium Alfa Group, wanted possibly incriminating information on his rival, Leonid Reiman, and his conglomerate, IPOC. To get the data, Fridman’s Washington lobbyists hired Diligence, an intelligence firm, to investigate Reiman.
The dispute traveled to Bermuda, where the government had hired the local office of the KPMG accounting firm to investigate IPOC’s ownership and infrastructure. Diligence agents sought KPMG staffers who would leak information. They targeted a couple of personality profiles: a partying, young male or an insecure, frumpy female. Ultimately, though, they co-opted British accountant Guy Enright, who did not fit their profiles.
Instead of simply asking him to give or sell them data, Diligence’s operatives appealed to his patriotism. Posing as British intelligence officers, they told Enright that the secret documents he was providing were crucial to national security. The lobbying firm paid Diligence $25,000 a month plus costs for its trickery. Enright dutifully turned over the data, and Diligence rewarded him with a Rolex. He didn’t realize he’d been duped until the secret sting later became public. . . .
Guardian, 19 June 2010: In the opening sentence of his important though curiously subtitled book, the historian Richard Aldrich writes: “‘GCHQ’ is the last great British secret.” Yet as he records, its cover was blown by Time Out in 1976, a disclosure that led to the celebrated ABC trial and failed prosecution of a soldier and two journalists who revealed the true purpose of GCHQ as a huge electronic eavesdropping centre linked to the US National Security Agency. It was officially “avowed” in 1982 when large amounts of spying equipment were found in the house of Geoffrey Prime, a former linguist at GCHQ, first arrested for paedophilia. Two years later, Margaret Thatcher ensured GCHQ hit the headlines by banning trade unions there.
Large road signs now direct you to GCHQ’s “doughnut”, its dramatic new headquarters on the outskirts of Cheltenham which is already proving too small for its 5,500-plus staff just seven years after it was completed. But it is true that behind the facade, GCHQ (Gloucestershire’s biggest employer) remains extremely secretive compared even to MI5 and MI6, though it accounts for the bulk of the £2.4bn officially spent each year by Britain’s three intelligence agencies.
GCHQ grew out of Bletchley Park, where a brilliant collection of chess players, linguists and mathematicians made a unique contribution to the second world war, notably to the battle of Britain and the battle of the Atlantic, by decoding Germany’s Enigma machines. (It was in answer to their plea for more resources that Churchill famously ordered: “Action this day”.) . . . .
Express, 14 June 2010: In the heyday of the Cold War, espionage was so rife that a pamphlet appeared, warning of the dangers. In the early Sixties, the government was preoccupied with combating what it saw as the growing threat to Britain from Cold War spies.
To this end a confidential booklet entitled “Their Trade Is Treachery” was produced for civil servants and the armed forces. Its aim was to warn them how to spot attempts at recruitment and it provided vivid case histories showing the lengths to which the Russians would go to recruit agents. . . . .
. . . . Before they can obtain the secret information they seek, the enemy intelligence services must first find people who can get it. This process is known as talent spotting. Their victims, willing or otherwise, fall into three categories: the ideological spy, the mercenary spy and the spy under pressure. The ideological one is the hardest to uncover. He believes communism is the best political system for Britain. There are no limits to the labyrinthine arguments he may employ to justify his actions.
His principal characteristic is intellectual arrogance. The mercenary spy is motivated by greed. Unlike his ideological comrade, who often receives little or no money, he may call attention to himself because he lives above his ostensible income.
The spy under pressure is a person who has been blackmailed. He is usually a person of weak moral fibre who sinks deeper into the mire because he lacks the courage to face up to the consequences of some past crime or indiscretion.
Sometimes hostile intelligence services employ unorthodox recruiting methods which at first sight have a hit-or-miss appearance. The danger of such methods lies in the very fact that they seem so divorced from calculated Secret Service machinations. James Howard was a young civilian clerk in an establishment connected with the armed forces in the West Country . . . . .
Powerline, 2 June 2010: Andrew McCarthy is the former Assistant United States Attorney who prosecuted the Blind Sheikh and his friends for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. After he secured convictions, he recounted what he had learned along the way in Willful Blindness: Memoir of the Jihad
. . . . AM: “The problem is that those who say Islam is the problem have the better case. I was first struck by this sad fact during our terrorism trial in 1995, when I had to get ready to cross-examine the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman. Though he ended up opting not to testify, I still had to prepare. Back then I thought that if what we were saying as a government were true – if these terrorists were lying about Islam and perverting its doctrine in order to justify mass-murder attacks – then surely I should be able to locate three or four places where the Blind Sheikh had misstated the Koran and the other species of Muslim scripture. I searched high and low, but there were none.
To be sure, Islamic scriptures say a lot of things, and some of them are admirable. Good faith contentions can surely be made that passages terrorists cite need to be considered in conjunction with other passages they omit. (That’s a weak argument, by the way, but not a risible one.) But the point is that where the Blind Sheikh cited scripture, he did it quite accurately. Moreover, he is not, as we’d like to have it, a lunatic; he is a renowned doctor of Islamic jurisprudence graduated from al-Azhar University in Egypt – the seat of Sunni learning and one of the oldest and most respected academic institutions in the world. His construction of Islam, however frightening, was literal and cogent.
Islam is not a religion of peace and Islamic doctrine is not moderate. There is, for those willing to pierce political correctness and grapple with fact, an undeniable connection between Islamic doctrine’s commands to violence and domination, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the often savage acts and the civilizational campaign carried out by Muslims against the West. For that reason, Islam is very problematic. There is, however, the other side of the coin: there are hundreds of millions of Muslims who, quite clearly, are moderate, tolerant people. These Muslims either reject terrorism (at least in the form of sneak attacks that kill civilians in the U.S.) or they don’t see terrorism as having anything to do with them. Thus, people who don’t want to grapple with Islamic doctrine point to these tolerant, moderate Muslim individuals and demand that we deduce that Islam, too, must be moderate and tolerant – regardless of what its scriptures say. . . . .
