INTELLIGENCE ISSN 1245-2122 N. 370 (n. 120 former series), 10 July 2000 Every Two to Three Weeks Next Issue on 11 September 2000 Publishing since 1980 HAVE A NICE SUMMER VACATION! Editor Olivier Schmidt (email intelligence-adi@wanadoo.fr; web http://www.blythe.org/Intelligence) TABLE OF CONTENTS, N. 370 (n. 120 former series), 10 July 2000 FRONT PAGE WORLD-WIDE - ORWELLIAN INTERNET EXPERIMENT IN BRITAIN p.1 TECHNOLOGY AND TECHNIQUES PLAGUE AND OTHER BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS p.2 US NAVY'S HIGH-TECH TO FIGHT WARS & SLEEP BETTER p.3 TECHNICAL ANALYSIS OF ULSTER "BLOODY SUNDAY" SOUNDS p.4 INTERPOL - The Ultimate in Network Security. p.5 HACKING - Russia; 1, NATO; 0. p.6 NEW RUSSIAN MILITARY TECH UP FOR SALE p.7 PEOPLE USA - THEODORE POSTOL p.8 - JOHN MCLAUGHLIN p.9 GREAT BRITAIN - DAVID SHAYLER p.10 NORTHERN IRELAND - "OBSERVER B" p.11 FRANCE - Claude Ascenci. p.12 SWITZERLAND/GERMANY - Edwin Bollier/Irwin Meister. p.13 TAIWAN/CHINA - Pan Hsi-hsien. p.14 AGENDA COMING EVENTS THROUGH 30 SEPTEMBER 2000 p.15 INTELLIGENCE AROUND THE WORLD USA - CIA'S "HONORABLE MEN" INTO BUSINESS p.16 - NSA HOLDS ITS PLACE IN THE HEADLINES p.17 CANADA - CSIS REPORT & RCMP BILL "TO BREAK THE LAW" p.18 GREAT BRITAIN - MI6 USED THE "OBSERVER" TO PLACE A STORY p.19 - HELP WANTED ON SECRET C/W TESTS INQUIRY p.20 - NDS & THE ROLE OF US BASES p.21 NORTHERN IRELAND - 40-DAY SUMMARY OF DERRY EVIDENCE ENDS p.22 - ARMS INSPECTION & RUC ANNUAL REPORT p.23 FRANCE - LINES DRAWN FOR A BATTLE OVER ECHELON p.24 GERMANY - THE RIGHT STUFF p.25 SWITZERLAND - MOSSAD Agent Tried, Condemned & Released. p.26 EU - No FBI Academy but an European One. p.27 EASTERN EUROPE - FINALLY SOME SPECIFICS ON CRIME p.28 ANGOLA - UNITA's "Blood Diamonds". p.29 IRAQ - Saddam Redistributes Military Cards. p.30 FIJI - FROM SOUTH ARMAGH TO SUVA p.31 AUSTRALIA - THE USUAL PRE-GAMES "TERROR PARADE" p.32 - Mitrokhin Files Strike Again. p.33 --------------------------------------------- FRONT PAGE Intelligence, N. 370 (n.120 former series), 10 July 2000, p. 1 WORLD-WIDE ORWELLIAN INTERNET EXPERIMENT IN BRITAIN As the world watches, the British government's proposed new law on covert investigations -- with the unwieldy title of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Bill -- has almost completed its Parliamentary passage and is on course to receive Royal Assent later this year. However, the Bill, whose measures cover Internet surveillance and controls over use of public cryptography, is meeting last-ditch resistance in the House of Lords. Backed by a strong IT industry lobby, their lordships have tabled over 200 amendments in an attempt to force the government to modify some of the Bill's more repressive aspects. Several world-wide factors lie behind the RIP Bill's introduction. The most important of these is to ensure compliance with the conditions of a new American-sponsored international regime of communications interception, whereby law enforcement agencies in one country can quickly arrange for selective monitoring of another country's telecoms traffic in the course of a criminal or intelligence investigation. Known under the even more unwieldy title of "International User Requirements for Lawful Interception of Communications", these came into force secretly within the European Union in 1995. In total, 19 countries -- the 15 EU states plus the United States, Australia, Canada and New Zealand -- have signed the plan. In short, the EU and the members of the NSA-led world-wide UKUSA electronic eavesdropping system, of which Echelon is an integral part, have all signed up. ...(cut)... --------------------------------------------- Intelligence, N. 370 (n.120 former series), 10 July 2000, p. 6 HACKING - Russia: 1, NATO: 0. In late April, "Sergey Petrov" (pseudonym), a 30-year-old computer expert and graduate of the St. Petersburg Electrotechnical Communications Institute, developed a device that allows the use of an ordinary personal computer, a modified modem and a diskette with the program to eavesdrop on telephone conversations at any point on the planet. He has sold sets for $5,000 and business was growing ... until he was retained recently by the police which are trying to find out who bought the devices. Petrov remembers a certain US citizen who bought 30 sets at once. According to the police, the world's telephone network would have to be redesigned to counter Petrov's invention. While back at NATO, scientists created a virus called Anti-Smyser 1 at NATO's KFOR peacekeeping force headquarters in Pristina, Kosovo. They were seeking protection from virus attacks launched at NATO by the Serbs during the Kosovo conflict. But the experiment went wrong, and scientists accidentally unleashed the virus on themselves. It plucks documents from the hard drives of computers and sends invisible attachments to e-mails, causing military secrets to find their way onto the Internet. It recently surfaced on Czech ministry of defense computers: Welcome to NATO! --------------------------------------------- Intelligence, N. 370 (n.120 former series), 10 July 2000, p. 12 FRANCE - Claude Ascenci. Three-star army general, Claude Ascenci, head of the Direction de la Protection et de la Securite de la Defense (DPSP), formerly the Securite Militaire (SM), since August 1997, is being "kicked upstairs" to four- star general and replaced by Dominique Conort, controller general of the army's inspector general office. Gen. Ascenci's replacement is considered a direct consequence of the DPSP's unjustified operation against Gendarmerie Colonel Jean-Michel Mechain. A DPSP surveillance team tailing Col. Mechain was arrested by police and later got in a street fight with him (INT, n.364 22). Col. Mechain has been released by a Paris court and the DPSP could produce no evidence against him or justify its operation. --------------------------------------------- Intelligence, N. 370 (n.120 former series), 10 July 2000, p. 16 USA CIA'S "HONORABLE MEN" INTO BUSINESS When former CIA director, William Colby, used the expression "honorable men" in the title of his book on the CIA -- a book for which he was fined by the CIA for not respecting its censorship recommendations ... by error -- he probably didn't have in mind the Agency's current batch of "successful" ex- agents. Moreover, the one he personally spent considerable time and a lot of Agency resources "hounding out of the Western world", leading CIA dissident Philip Agee, seems to have been the most successful. Just as the Clinton administration is getting around to letting other US businessmen have their way and sell medicine and food to Cuba, Agee already has the only American business enterprise up and running on the island. In February, "Intelligence" presented Agee's Cubalinda.com Inter- Active Travel for Americans who want to visit Cuba, when it was first launched (INT, n. n.362 10), but it has finally been "discovered" by the major media due to recent CNN and AP reports and a CNN interview with Philip Agee which have put Agee's web site into orbit. Business seems so hot that Agee may well earn more money from e-business than from his famous 1975 best-seller, "Inside the Company - A CIA Diary", which has sold several million copies and been translated to more than a 30 languages. Although Colby would surely disapprove, that does seem like a "successful reconversion" for a former spook. ...(cut)... --------------------------------------------- Intelligence, N. 370 (n.120 former series), 10 July 2000, p. 19 GREAT BRITAIN MI6 USED THE "OBSERVER" TO PLACE A STORY Two years ago, a report in the London-based magazine, "Private Eye", suggested that Leonard Doyle, the foreign editor of the "Observer", was "rather too close to British Intelligence for comfort". The response was what the magazine described as "an indignant letter" from "Observer" journalists describing Mr. Doyle as a "highly-regarded journalist and innuendo about his lack of impartiality does him a grave injustice". Since then, Mr. Doyle has moved to the "Independent" as foreign editor, providing the opportunity for a former colleague at the "Observer", David Leigh, to confirm, in an article on the "hidden network of spooks at the heart of the British press", published in the June issue of the "British Journalism Review", that Doyle was "in contact with MI6" during his time at the Sunday newspaper. David Leigh (who once worked for former Northern Ireland Secretary, William Whitelaw, at the Northern Ireland Office, Belfast, in the early 1970s) admits to being part of an MI6 I/Op (information operation) in August 1997 when Doyle's intelligence contact supplied "high quality" information about an Iranian-born, Glasgow-based businessman, Hoessein Jafari, who was attempting to buy a Model 45 Mass Spectrometer for the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI), an instrument used to analyze scientific efforts to upgrade natural uranium from 0.7 per cent of fissionable uranium 235 isotope to weapon-grade 90 percent plus quality. ...(cut)... --------------------------------------------- Intelligence, N. 370 (n.120 former series), 10 July 2000, p. 24 FRANCE LINES DRAWN FOR A BATTLE OVER ECHELON "To get the ball rolling" in the European Union, it's often France that "sticks its neck out", particularly when it involves criticizing the US, and sometime Great Britain. So, as the EU gets ready to investigate NSA world-wide eavesdropping and the Echelon system, it's almost "natural" that a French state prosecutor launch a preliminary judicial investigation into Echelon, which the prosecutor's office spokesman, Jean- Pierre Dintilhac, announced on 30 June. The next day in Strasbourg, the European Parliament decided to set up a "temporary commission" to investigate Echelon in response to a letter by a French center-right MEP, Jean-Pierre Thierry, who alleged that Echelon was potentially prejudicial to French nationals and to France's economic interests. Dintilhac ordered the state internal security service, the DST, to find out whether Echelon's activities could be qualified under French law as "harmful to the vital interests of the (French) nation". Specialists know the DST will find that Echelon is a "national security risk", and they doubt the DST can or will be able to produce any "hard facts" against the NSA and its Echelon system in public. On the legal side, confirmation would lead to legal proceedings, though it is difficult to see how a US government agency could be sued in a French court. Perhaps there will be another Coca-Cola scandal or more trouble at MacDonald fast- foods. To give some weight to Dintilhac's otherwise naive statement of intent, the armed forces association, "France-Armee-Nation", added its voice to the anti-Echelon chorus. Its "Second Statement", on 7 July, goes well beyond Echelon and concerns all of French intelligence, confirming once more than anti- Echelon activity is probably closely associated with setting up a "Frenchelon" at a European level. "As the debate concerning the Echelon eavesdropping network is reopened and Mr. Cousseran, director of the DGSE [French foreign intelligence], is finishing his intelligence reorganization, it is the right time for those involved in national defense and for all French citizens concerned by the independence and sovereignty of our country, to calmly consider the problems brought up by this affair." Sounds almost like war. ...(cut)... --------------------------------------------- Intelligence, N. 370 (n.120 former series), 10 July 2000, p. 25 GERMANY THE RIGHT STUFF Members of the German Special Forces have been invited to join the British Special Air Service (SAS) because of a shortage of suitable recruits among British service personnel, according to a 2 July report in the "Sunday Times". Volunteers from "mainstream" army regiments, the RAF and the Royal Navy, trying to join the SAS "don't seem to have the attributes they once had", according to a former British commander in Bosnia, Colonel Bob Stewart, and are failing to get through what the Ministry of Defence describes as the "toughest training course" in the world. That assessment is disputed by military sources in Washington and Berlin, who confirmed that members of Grenzschutzgruppe-9 (GSG-9), Kommandos Spezialkraefte (KSK), the Green Berets and the US Navy Seals have been offered two- year contracts with the SAS instead of the standard six-month overseas-exchange program, because they are "the right stuff" and haven't been "softened by society". ...(cut)... --------------------------------------------- Intelligence, N. 370 (n.120 former series), 10 July 2000, p. 33 AUSTRALIA - Mitrokhin Files Strike Again. Former KGB archivist and colonel, Vasili Mitrokhin, who defected to Britain and MI6 in 1992 with copies of a good part of his archives and the names of thousands of Russian spies and agents around the world, has revealed another KGB agent, this time a former member of the the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO). The KGB agent worked undetected for the ASIO for a decade and is reportedly still living in Australia. The agent rose to a senior position and was unmasked only when Mitrokhin headed West. The fact that the government did not attempt to prosecute him would tend to imply that either he "cooperated" after being "blown", or that political embarrassment would have cost too much, ... or perhaps both. ---------------------------------------------