The Snowden story just keeps giving

It would not be possible to cover all the ramifications of the Snowden/Greenwald/Miranda story on this blog and, in any case, numerous hacks, some with very little knowledge or understanding, have been holding forth on the subject. Suffice it to say that the original "poor little David Miranda, being held merely because he is that courageous Greenwald's partner" story has been somewhat tarnished and opinion now is more divided than ever.

I do have a few observations to make. Firstly, I do hope Edward Snowden, wherever in Russia he happens to be, has no intention of following Bradley Manning's example and announcing that he will live the rest of his life as a woman. The Russian authorities will not take kindly to that.

Secondly, I note that the Council of Europe has made shocked statements and demanded answers.

Council of Europe Secretary General Thorbjørn Jagland has asked UK Home Secretary Theresa May to explain the pressure that Downing Street had put on the Guardian newspaper over the Snowden case, warning of the potentially "chilling effect" on media freedom.

In the letter sent yesterday (21 August), Jagland, a Norwegian politician, laid out his concerns over two recent events in the United Kingdom – the detention by police at the Heathrow airport of David Miranda, the partner of the Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, and the destruction of hard drives at the Guardian’s headquarters, which he said was “apparently under instructions of government officials”.

Unless, of course, we are talking about media freedom against which the Grauniad with the bold Alan Rusbridger have been campaigning for some time. Readers will recall that the Grauniad was one of the leaders of the pack against various tabloid newspapers whose journos ... ahem ... acquired information in various nefarious ways. The Grauniad's own methods of investigation were somewhat dubious and involved inaccurate stories as well as nefariously acquired information. All that was deemed to be satisfactory as it was done in the name of honour and decency or, in other words, by left-wing journalists. A number of journalists and other employees of newspapers have been arrested, some already released with no charges preferred, some still awaiting trial. The Grauniad not only cheered all that on but was a stalwart supporter of the Leveson report, which proposed what would, in effect, be a form of state regulation of the media. Brendan O'Neill's piece on the subject is as cogent as his articles usually are.

One new item has come out as a result of the Snowden saga and, possibly, as a result of Greenwald's hissy fit at "England" because of his partner and courier's detention:

Britain has a secret base in the Middle East where it conducts massive internet and telephone surveillance operations as part of its larger Tempora programme, reports the Independent. The base sweeps up data traffic by tapping into underwater fibre optic cables. The data is shared with the US intelligence agency.

Well, I am delighted to hear that our security services are doing what they are paid to do. I doubt if all that many people will be shocked by this news item. But, let us not forget, by collecting and possibly releasing data of this kind the Snowden/Greenwald/Miranda story is no longer about governments spying on their own citizens but about revealing information about governments fighting terrorism through intelligence and endangering the lives of those who do the fighting.

ADDENDUM: Information I was given on another thread by someone whose knowledge of these matters is greater than mine. I am reproducing it with his permission:

Before leaving Palestine in May, 1948, the British in 1947 moved their Sigint operation to Cyprus, with their then 2 Wireless Regt at Ayios Nikolaos, West of Famagusta.

It became 9 Signals Regt from 1959 and from April, 1999, on amalgamating with 33 Signals, RAF, was JSSU. It has 3 Squadrons, is commanded by a LTC, and the site has both [a] HF [high frequency ] Antennae to intercept regional communications of security interest, and [b] a HF DF [ direction finder ] which locates traffic flow across a large region, as well as [c] satellite dishes to intercept traffic on geo-stationary comms satellites.

The latter role has been diminished by the growing use of fibre-optic cables in recent years, and interception of that traffic would be vital. The various Jihadi gangs now rampant from Syria to Sinai make such interception in that unstable region all the more vital.

Does not sound unreasonable.

You couldn't make it up

But then you wouldn't need to. After all, we have known for some time that there were many ... ahem ... sources of information that the Communist states used when trying to winkle secrets out of Britain. Some of them were on the left and some on the right; some did it for money and some out of loyalty to one of the most evil systems in history (though, to be fair to the Soviets, they always preferred go "give presents" even to the most devoted servants, considering that to be safer). Many passed on information to agents of the East European People's Democracies, presumably understanding where it all ended up eventually. Or maybe they did not know or care.

The news that a little known Conservative MP of the 1960s, Raymond Mawby, was so anxious to get money that he sold information to some Czechoslovak agent made me laugh out loud. The whole tale is so preposterous. Don't get me wrong. I am aware of the damage Communist agents did to this country and the West in general throughout those and previous decades; I am also aware of the fact that there is still much to come out about people who were considerably higher up or in better position to pass on information than Mr Mawbey and that is not to mention agents of influence.

However, a glance at what Mr Mawby had to trade is enough to make one laugh:

In time Mawby would be paid directly for political information - normally £100 per time. One file in the archives has a receipt signed by Mawby himself for that sum.

Mawby later handed over lists of parliamentary committees, details of fellow Tories and a supposedly confidential parliamentary investigation into a Conservative peer. "Mawby has also promised to carry out tasks such as asking questions in Parliament according to our needs," the Czech handler wrote in a plan on how to use him in 1962.

That plan involved asking him to supply more confidential material from Parliament "gradually deepening the compromising of his position".

He also drew a floor plan of the Prime Minister's office. As the Czechs were not going to bomb the place, the only reason they might have wanted a plan would be to decide where to put bugs. Did they do so, one wonders. Did they use the information he passed on about some of his colleagues or officials in the party for blackmail?

Mr Mawby did not lose his seat till 1983 but it is unclear whether he went on passing information about his colleagues and officials in the Conservative Party to the end or not.

Meanwhile, let us not forget that brilliant episode of Yes, Prime Minister in which it transpires (among the world-shaking events concerning Benjy the dog) that a previous Director General of MI5, who had been cleared by an investigation conducted by Sir Humphrey Appleby, was, in fact, a Soviet spy.

From memory, a conversation went something like this:

Hacker: But if two of us are ... two of them then ... errm ... all of us are ....

Appleby: All of them?

The Avengers would have loved this

As a matter of fact, the notion of Russia using existing and new links in the countries of Eastern Europe who are all now in NATO and the EU to intensify her efforts to get military secrets (not that the EU has all that many) is no laughing matter. Nevertheless, this story, as reported in the Irish Times, did make me think about Steed and Mrs Peel.

THREE TOP Czech generals have been forced to leave the military after one of their aides was compromised by contact with a Russian spy, amid intelligence agency warnings that Moscow is intensifying efforts to steal Prague’s secrets.

The officers stepped down after serving as the head of president Vaclav Klaus’s military office, the Czech Nato representative in Europe, and as deputy general for the military chief-of-staff, according to leading Czech newspaper Mlada Fronta Dnes .

The generals’ departure was prompted by the discovery last year that a female major who had worked in each of their offices had become close to a state-employed psychologist named as Robert R, who was spying for the Kremlin.

It is not clear whether the female major was involved in anything nefarious but, clearly, the Czech authorities are very worried about developments.

That spy swap

It has left too many questions unanswered. For example, how was it arranged so quickly? More to the point, why was it arranged so quickly? Whom did the Russians want back so badly as to go for what appears to be an unequal arrangement? Whom did the Americans want of the four alleged agents (in particular Sutyagin is alleged without any real proof despite the trial)? Was it just a form of White House PR and if so, who was the target audience?

Hot Air reports that the White House has now explained that they started arranging the exchange before the FBI actually swooped. In other words, the FBI informed the White House of its intentions and the latter immediately informed the Russian security services in order to reset those famous and somewhat troublesome Russo-American relations.

Why not just arrest the spies first? After all, even if Barack Obama wants to perform a “reset” on US-Russian relations, the Russians were spying on us, and subject to arrest. The four people the US wanted in the trade certainly weren’t given that kind of consideration, after all.

If the sleepers really had acquired no damaging information, the point is probably academic. However, tipping off the Russians more or less made that conclusion certain. The FBI cannot be so naive as to think that Moscow didn’t instruct their agents to destroy anything incriminating that would prove a crime more serious than the failure to register as a foreign agent, a felony that carries a five-year sentence but is far less serious than actual espionage.

Indeed. Superficially, the Americans have got rather higher calibre individuals than the ten would-be spies who allegedly had not even started working. Not that we shall find out exactly what they were up to.

In terms of actual impact, the[se] four would seem to have much more value than the professed failure of the Russian sleeper agents. For the Russians to give up even one of these people would be significant — and four seems too good to believe. And that also has me wondering why the US felt the need to give the Russians a heads-up on the arrests first, and why the Russians were willing to swap arguable traitors for ten supposed failures.

Ron Radosh, an expert in Soviet penetration of the United States in the thirties and forties had been following the case and is also dubious about the outcome. A number of them were in a position to recruit other people in various political and academic establishments.

Clearly, both the Russian and American governments hope that with the exchange a done deal, and the spies back in their native Russia, the arrests and the drama will quickly be forgotten. In another week, it will simply be yesterday’s news. Only time will tell whether years from now, we will suddenly learn that the ten were more successful than we imagined, and had recruited others who managed to do actual damage.

Just exactly what did President Obama hope to achieve and what did he achieve in reality?

UPDATE: According to this report, the scientist Igor Sutyagin and, possibly, Sergei Skripal, a former colonel with Russian military intelligence GRU convicted of spying for Britain, are now in Britain, somewhere "near London", with Sutyagin still in his prison clothes.

The Sunday Times and Kim Philby

In the News Review section of the Sunday Times today there is an extract from that newspaper's erstwhile editor's memoirs. Sir Harold Evans's My Paper Chase may well be very interesting, especially for people who can put up with the self-importance of hacks.

The extract in today's is genuinely fascinating, as it deals with the long and complicated saga of the Sunday Times publishing in 1967 the real story, or as much as they could find out, about Kim Philby who had by then been living in Moscow for some years.

So much is known about Philby's treachery and the incompetence at best and treachery at worst that allowed him not only to operate but to rise to an extremely high position in the security services that it is hard to recall the sensation the story caused and even harder to comprehend the difficulties placed in the path of Harold Evans and Bruce Page by the various authorities, secret and open.

What were they covering up? Probably just extreme incompetence but it is not hard to understand how various theories could have sprung up about many more men and women in the security services who were really working for the Soviet Union.

Incidentally, I know of only one person who in my hearing has wondered about the role played by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan who exonerated Philby in the House of Commons in 1955. What did the old buffer really know?