Daily Telegraph, 14 July 2010: For a brief, ecstatic moment, Daniel Houghton, a young man from an unassuming background in rural Devon, thought he was rich. He had pulled off the ultimate hustle, selling secrets he had smuggled out of the MI6 building in Vauxhall Cross for £900,000 in cash, stashed in a suitcase.
As the door of a hotel room in central London slammed behind him and he made his way up the corridor, adrenaline was pumping through his veins. But the moment of triumph was short lived. As he got to the lift he was surrounded by plain clothes officers from the Metropolitan Police Counter-Terrorism Command. He protested his innocence, struggling with officers who had to wrestle him to the ground to handcuff him.
“I haven’t done anything,” he said, still not believing he had been caught, and when they asked him what was in the suitcase, he told them: “I don’t know. You’ve got the wrong man.” But they had not got the wrong man, in fact he was the subject of an elaborate sting operation by MI5 – Britain’s spy-catchers had caught a traitor. . . . .
MI6 computer geek driven to treachery by James Bond fantasy (Daily Telegraph, 14 July 2010)
MI6 face questions over their security procedures after a computer expert was allowed to smuggle top secret files out of their headquarters which he planned to sell to a foreign power for £2m. . . . . Houghton, a computer programmer by training, had helped develop a cutting edge technique for intercepting emails, sources told the Daily Telegraph.
In order to drive up the price of the material he was selling, he also stole staff lists and home and mobile telephone numbers of MI5 and MI6 officers. The information, which Houghton smuggled out of MI6’s Vauxhall Cross headquarters, was labeled “top secret” and “secret.” If leaked, it would have had a “severe impact on operational capabilities and particularly the ability to collect intelligence,” one security source said.
“He knew he had a valuable secret and wanted to make money out of it. His motivation was essentially greed.”
MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, employ IT security measures which stop users copying files and conduct bag searches but their most important line of defence is the vetting of their staff. . . .
Daily Telegraph, 3 July 2010: Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, has accused Russia’s security services of being as active in Britain today as they were during the Cold War. Dame Stella said she believed Russia still possesses “a very large and well-resourced intelligence community” which remains a threat to British economic and security interests. “The successor organisations to the KGB are every bit as active as their predecessor,” she said, “Are the Russians up to the same sort of thing in Britain? You bet they are, if they think they can get away with it.” . . . .
Daily Telegraph, 1 July 2010: MI5 is investigating whether a former KGB agent recruited his daughter, Anna Chapman, to work for the country’s secret services while living in London. Mrs Chapman told her British ex-husband that her father, Vasily Kushchenko, was a “high ranking” officer in the Russian security forces, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
On Wednesday an MI5 officer interviewed Alex Chapman at his home in Bournemouth, Dorset, as part of the Security Service’s investigation into the background of Mrs Chapman, 28, who has been accused of spying in the US. MI5 is trying to discover whether Mrs Chapman, who has British citizenship and a British passport, could have spied on Britain or was recruited here.
Alex Chapman, a 30-year-old trainee psychologist, married the then Anna Kushchenko in Moscow in 2002, five months after they met in a London nightclub. They divorced in 2006 but have remained in touch ever since.
Mr Chapman told The Daily Telegraph: “Anna told me her father had been high up in the ranks of the KGB. She said he had been an agent in ‘old Russia’. “Her father controlled everything in her life, and I felt she would have done anything for her dad. When I saw that she had been arrested on suspicion of spying it didn’t come as much of a surprise to be honest. Towards the end of our marriage she became very secretive, going for meetings on her own with ‘Russian friends’, and I guess it might have been because she was in contact with the Russian government.” . . . .
. . . . Mrs Chapman, who has kept her married name despite being divorced, introduced her new husband to her father during their honeymoon in 2002 in Zimbabwe, where Vasily Kushchenko was serving as a diplomat. “I asked her what her father’s job was and Anna just said he was there to represent the Russian government in certain areas of government,” said Mr Chapman.
“He didn’t trust anyone. He asked me why I had chosen a Russian bride and asked what business I had in Russia, and I said none. He was scary. He would never introduce me to other Russian people who came to the house and he always seemed to have a lot more security than the other diplomats. He had a Land Rover with blacked out windows and there was always one car in front of it and one car behind.” . . . .
Daily Telegraph, 11 June 2010: Young British Muslims are being groomed to carry out terrorist attacks in this country by Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical al-Qaeda preacher based in the Middle East, it can be disclosed. The security services fear that a new generation of British extremists is being radicalised by Awlaki, who recruited the Detroit plane bomber. They are concerned that Awlaki’s followers could unleash a wave of easily planned guerrilla-style terrorist attacks, similar to the massacre in Mumbai. Such small-scale attacks could be carried out cheaply by individuals with little terrorist training and without the need for the support of a large organisation.
The British security services have become so worried about Awlaki’s rising influence that they have alerted ministers to their fears. He is now regarded as one of the world’s most wanted terrorists. A briefing paper, seen by The Daily Telegraph, has been circulated within government, warning that Awlaki has now “cemented his position as one of the leading English-speaking jihadi ideologues”. His growing influence was one of the factors that led to a raised terrorism alert level in Britain earlier this year. . . . .
Daily Telegraph, 18 May 2010: When MI5 received a tip-off about a possible al-Qaeda cell in the north west of England last year, the security service had no inkling it was about to smash a terrorist plot to cause mass murder on both sides of the Atlantic. Over the following weeks and months agents would gather evidence which left no doubt that Muslim fanatics were not only planning to blow up shopping centres in Manchester, but were also connected to a planned attack on New York’s transport network which would have been the worst US atrocity since 9/11.
Operation Pathway, as the investigation was codenamed, began in February last year, when MI5 began looking at a Muslim man in his forties living in the inner-city area of Cheetham Hill, Manchester. The man was working in a hair products company where he had access to bomb making materials, causing instant concern. His roommate, Abid Naseer, had arrived in Britain from Pakistan on a student visa two years earlier, exploiting a system he knew well from working at an office in Pakistan where he handed out advice for John Moores University in Liverpool.
Once in Britain, Naseer, 24, and his co-conspirators dropped out of their courses and began work as a security guard, maintaining their student status by signing up for bogus courses at the Manchester College of Professional Studies. MI5 noted that Naseer and others spent a lot of time at the Cyber Net café in Cheetham Hill, and GCHQ began monitoring their emails. Analysts believed the emails were in code and that Naseer was telling an al-Qaeda contact in Pakistan about the availability of different bomb-making materials, substituting girls’ names for chemicals. . . .
. . . . As part of their raids, police recovered pictures taken of one man outside the Arndale shopping centre in central Manchester on different days, and including a number of different angles to show the street around the shops and the exits.
MI5 and its foreign intelligence counterpart MI6 then set about tracking down who Naseer had been in contact with in Pakistan. After identifying the man they believed had been in email contact with Naseer, their inquiries led them to Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-born suspect living in Aurora, Colorado, who was working as an airport shuttle driver and who had begun hoarding large quantities of hydrogen peroxide, a key ingredient for homemade bombs. US investigators concluded he had been planning an attack on New York on the 2009 anniversary of 9/11 and the US Attorney General Eric Holder said Zazi’s plot was “One of the most serious in the United States since September 11, 2001.”
MI5 believes the al-Qaeda commander behind the plots in Britain and the US was Rashid Rauf, a terrorist from Birmingham who was also behind the plot to blow up airliners over the Atlantic in 2006. He had risen through the ranks of al-Qaeda through his involvement as a link-man in the July 7, July 21 and airlines plots. Increasingly starved of western recruits, Rauf came up with a plan in 2008 to use Pakistani and Afghan-born militants who were to be sent to the West posing as students, sources have told the Daily Telegraph.
Rauf is believed to have been planning a series of attacks on a shopping centre in Manchester, the New York metro and Long Island Railroad. The first element of the plan was uncovered when an American called Bryant Neal Vinas was detained in Peshawar in November 2008. Vinas, a Muslim convert of Latin American origin, had been in Pakistan since 2007 where he admitted receiving training from al-Qaeda, meeting Rashid Rauf and agreeing to become a suicide bomber as part of a plot to blow up a train on the Long Island Railroad. . . . .
