-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Today's Lesson from The Laundrymen (1996) by Jeffrey Robinson Private banking still operates in what used to be Yugoslavia, offering incredibly high interest rates. During the height of the war, for example, it reached 10 to 15 percent per month, amounts way out of line with the rest of Europe. ...private banks in the area were known to be using hard currency deposits to finance drug deals--half of Bosnia is said to be covered with fields of cannabis, and ethic Albanians have established a firm hold over the heroin market--which in turn financed weapons. It all worked by means of a typically triangular trade route. An Austrian shell company, whose beneficial owners are unknown, bought arms from Bulgaria and delivered them to Albanians arming the underground in the anti-Serb revolt. The Bulgarians used the money to pay for raw opium in the Middle East, which it sold to the Albanians. In turn, the Albanians refined the opium into heroin and spent their profits buying arms from the Austrian shell. Disguised as a legal business deal and protected by strict banking secrecy, no one caught them breaking UN sanctions. ===== Spy vs. Spy Scotland Yard Detective Was a KGB Agent The Vasili Mitrokhin revelations continue. A SECOND Briton - a former Scotland Yard detective - was identified as a KGB agent by the Soviet defector Vasili Mitrokhin but escaped prosecution, The Telegraph can disclose. Mitrokhin, a former KGB archivist, named John Symonds, now 64, as a spy when he fled to the West in 1992. The list of Soviet spies handed to MI6 also included Melita Norwood, now 87, who passed crucial atomic secrets to the Kremlin under the codename HOLA. Yesterday, a barrage of criticism greeted the revelation that Norwood was not brought to justice but allowed to carry on living quietly in a south London suburb. Senior Conservatives condemned Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, for failing to disclose the treachery unmasked by Mitrokhin. The Telegraph has also learnt of a series of extraordinary revelations made by Mitrokhin which show the extent of KGB operations against Britain and the West. These include disclosures that: �The KGB planned to disrupt the investiture of the Prince of Wales. �A late Labour MP, Raymond Fletcher, was recruited as a Soviet agent. �Moscow plotted to injure the ballet stars Rudolf Nureyev and Natalya Makarova - who had defected - to ruin their careers. �A series of plots were launched against the Pope. Symonds, who left the Yard while facing corruption charges before he began working for the Soviets, has three children and now shares his time between homes in North London and Portugal. Codenamed Scot, he passed on sensitive information and was used as a so-called "Romeo agent" whose task was to sleep with employees of foreign embassies in order to extract secrets. Symonds was a detective sergeant who had served at least 15 years in the Metropolitan Police, and in 1969 was one of three officers charged with corruption following a newspaper investigation into bribery at the Yard. He skipped bail and fled to Morocco, claiming later that he did so because he had been framed in Britain and could not get justice. In Morocco, Symonds served as a mercenary but after a short time allowed himself to be recruited by the KGB. It was his bitterness towards his treatment in Britain, says Mitrokhin, that encouraged him to defect to the Soviets. Between 1973 and 1980 he toured the world on KGB business, staying in five-star hotels. He subsequently claimed to have lured more than 100 women to his bed during this period - largely thanks to seduction techniques taught him by his Soviet spymasters. According to Mitrokhin, he played a crucial part in the downfall of Willy Brandt, the West German chancellor. Symonds returned in 1980 because he was homesick. He stood trial for corruption at the Old Bailey, pleading not guilty, but was convicted and jailed for two years. He told MI5 he was willing to give full details of his espionage career, and offered to supply invaluable details of KGB personnel and structure around the world. He was dismissed as a fantasist. In 1985 he told his story to the Daily Express - but security sources again dismissed it. Only now has the Mitrokhin archive confirmed all its incredible details - thereby demonstrating that British intelligence missed a colossal opportunity. Symonds makes a full confession in BBC2's The Spying Game, to be broadcast on September 19. He said: "I am not proud of what I did - but I was driven to the KGB because I could not get justice." Tom King, the former Defence Secretary and chairman of the Parliamentary committee on security and intelligence warned that there would be a flood of further revelations from the Mitrokhin archive. He said: "We are just beginning a great period of exposure. There's a lot more to come. This is going to reveal a lot. I have seen a brief summary of some of the key areas and I think it's going to be of key interest not only to ourselves but also to the US." Further details of Norwood's 40-year espionage career were learnt last night by this newspaper. During the 1950s she was regarded as the Soviet Union's most important spy, along with George Blake. Later, disgusted by the high-living and womanising of her KGB contact, Konon Molody who was arrested in 1961, she broke contact with her masters altogether for two months. After her retirement, the KGB begged her to restart but she refused. An intense political row was raging last night over why the treachery of Norwood, regarded by the KGB as their most important female British agent, was never revealed. The charge was led by the Conservative home affairs spokesman Ann Widdecombe who said: "Sustained treachery over 40 years is not something that you can overlook." She demanded to know why Mr Straw failed to inform Parliament when he was told of the affair by MI5 and if he had been privy to decisions on whether to prosecute. She said: "When [Sir Anthony] Blunt was unmasked as a Soviet spy, Baroness Thatcher made a full statement to Parliament and now Jack Straw should do exactly the same. "If there are more traitors like this one living freely without being prosecuted then we should be told. Parliament should be told all of the names and the reasons why they were not brought to justice unless there are clear security reasons not to do so. He should not wait for the return of Parliament but give the public the facts they are entitled to, immediately, in a written statement." Norwood lives freely in Bexleyheath, south-east London, in a modest, semi-detached home she bought for a few hundred pounds in the early years of her spying career. Yesterday, she appeared in her garden to read a statement to the press, occasionally stumbling over her words as she explained that she suffered from failing memory. But she admitted she had betrayed her country because she shared the Communist creed and wanted to help the Soviet Union. Asked if she had any regrets, she mumbled: "No, no, no." Mr Straw ordered a full report into the Norwood affair last night as his friends dismissed as "absolutely untrue" reports that he had seen Norwood's file and ordered that no charges be brought because of her age. An insider said: "Jack has never had to make a decision on this case and no Home Secretary ever would. If it has been considered by ministers, it would have been the law officers under the previous Tory Government." However, it was understood that Mr Straw, unlike his Tory predecessors Michael Howard and Kenneth Clarke, was given details recently. A Home Office statement said the decision on whether to prosecute Norwood would have been taken by the law ministers rather than the Home Secretary, principally by John Morris who was Attorney General until the summer reshuffle. He was not available yesterday. The London Telegraph, Sept. 12, 1999 Spy vs. Spy The Bitch Helped Give the Russians the Bomb They were doing such nice things in Russia. FOR 54 years Melita Norwood has kept a terrible secret: in the closing months of the Second World War she gave the Soviet Union vital secrets which enabled it to build the atom bomb. Now 87, and following the public disclosure of her treachery, she is finally explaining why she did it. In an interview at her house in Bexleyheath on the border of London and Kent, where CND and anti-Kosovo war posters in the windows hint at a life-long faith in the virtues of Stalin and the Communist Party of Great Britain, she was unrepentant. She said: "I thought it was an experiment, what they were doing out there - a good experiment and I agreed with it. I did what I did because I expected them to be attacked again once the war was over. Chamberlain had wanted them attacked in 1939: he certainly expected Hitler to go east. "I thought they should somehow be adequately defended because everyone was against them, against this experiment, and they had been through such hardship from the Germans. In the war the Russians were on our side, and it was unfair to them that they shouldn't be able to develop their weaponry." In the post-war world, she said, the Soviet Union would eventually be the "opposition" to international capitalism, and she was unwilling to allow the West to gain an advantage as great as sole possession of nuclear bombs. Supplying the bomb plans was the high-water mark of her espionage career. But she kept at it for another 27 years, passing through numerous Soviet controllers, providing a steady stream of less sensational technological secrets, and eventually receiving the KGB's highest decoration - the Order of the Red Banner. She was, as her KGB file records, an "exceptionally reliable" agent, and recruited at least one more spy, a civil servant still known only by his codename - HUNT. Last month, my BBC colleague Sarah Hann and I became the first people ever to confront Mrs Norwood with the evidence of her secret past. The Security Service, MI5, has known her identity since 1992, when Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin, the former chief archivist of the KGB's foreign intelligence section, defected to Britain with 60 volumes of the KGB's deepest secrets. Yet MI5 had never approached her, not even informally. The reason is a decision, years in the making, considered by successive heads of the Crown Prosecution Service and Attorneys-General, which was only finalised last May: that on account of Mrs Norwood's age, it would not be "in the public interest" to prosecute her. A legal system which had left untouched Anthony Blunt, former Keeper of the Queen's Pictures, and John Cairncross, the fourth and fifth men of the KGB's Cambridge spy ring would not, it was felt, appear fair if it suddenly sought vengeance against an elderly lady - however important her role as a spy. Moreover, two years ago the US authorities decided not to charge Theodore Hall, another newly-disclosed octogenarian atom spy, a retired American scientist who lives by Granchester Meadow in Cambridge. While the Whitehall argument raged, MI5 and the police were compelled to leave her alone. She could not, of course, be arrested unless the authorities were willing to press charges; but while the possibility of prosecution remained, she could not be interviewed informally either - any "unofficial" approach would have breached the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, and so probably wrecked such a prosecution before it got under way. Thus it fell to Sarah and I to telephone her and fix a meeting, which we filmed. It will be broadcast on September 19 as part of a forthcoming BBC2 series, The Spying Game. In 20 years as a reporter, I have not felt so nervous as before meeting Mrs Norwood. Mitrokhin had not brought out her original KGB file: only notes which he made and managed to smuggle past the layers of security at the KGB's Yesenevo headquarters, near the Moscow ring road. If Mrs Norwood denied all accusations, or refused to talk to us at all, we had evidence which was most unlikely to stand up in court in the event of a libel action - and hence no story. Mitrokhin's own book about his files, which he has written with the Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew and is to be published next week, would have had to be pulped. I need not have worried. Mitrokhin's notes were accurate in all respects, and Mrs Norwood seemed concerned only to protect her late husband's memory, insisting that he had always "disagreed with what I did". Hilary, a mathematics teacher whom she married 50 years ago, died in 1986. For her own part, the only signs of fear or reluctance were traces of moisture in the corners of her eyes when we began to talk, and a memory, when we asked about her KGB associates and the methods she used to meet them, which was curiously selective. She ushered us into the dining room of her 1930s semi-detached house with a view of her neat suburban garden, and offered us tea and home-grown apples. The interior of the house, with its fading wallpaper, sparse furnishings and Left-wing literature, can have altered little since she bought it with her husband 50 years ago. Then she began to relate at least a part of the story of her extraordinary life. Melita Sirnis, as she then was, was born in 1912 near Southampton to an English mother and a Latvian father, a bookbinder who had once been part of the utopian egalitarian movement inspired by Leo Tolstoy. Her father died when she was six, but she remembered that he founded a weekly paper to publicise Tolstoyan ideas. By then, she said, the family was living in Pokesdown, "the poor end of Bournemouth". Her mother was a member of the Co-operative Party, and active in the Workers' Educational Association. Politics were in the family's blood: an aunt was one of the first female trade unionists, an official for the Association of Women Clerks and Secretaries - later absorbed into the GMB. They were also internationalists. After the First World War, Mrs Norwood said, "our mother wanted us not to be anti-German, because they had been abused during the war". She took Melita and her sister to Heidelberg for a summer, "until it was time to go back and continue with education". "Ah yes," she mused, "they were anti-war all along, the pair of them, father and mother. I suppose I absorbed some of that too." Later, there were trips to Switzerland where her mother had a half-sister. When she left school her mother, who believed strongly in women's education, urged her to apply to university. She duly attended Southampton University, though only for a year, where she studied Latin and logic. Wildly different as her background was from those of her British KGB contemporaries, Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Cairncross, the Cambridge "magnificent five", she was radicalised by the same experiences - the slump of the early Thirties, when more than three million men were unemployed, "and people were going round knocking on people's doors, begging for food". In search of work, Melita and her family moved to London. Her vague and woolly socialist inclinations were slowly being transformed. Before becoming a Communist, Melita joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP), where she got to know some distinguished figures, including Fenner Brockway, the MP who later founded the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. But in 1936, the ILP split. "Brockway went one way, and some of us went the other," she said - the Communist Party. "You didn't have to agree with everything that was being done in Russia, or of course even know that was being done. But on the whole, it seemed to be a good idea." In retrospect, she said, she could see that "old Joe [Stalin] when he turned up, he wasn't a hundred per cent, but then the people around him might have been making things awkward, as folks do". Nevertheless, the gulag and purges notwithstanding, "they were doing a good job out there. I didn't want them defeated". By 1937 she had taken a job as a secretary at the British non-Ferrous Metals Association in Euston, a trade body which co-ordinated technological research being done both by academics and private firms. Like many believers in the 1930s, she was told to keep her Communist Party membership secret. And then, she agreed, at some point "somebody said that my work might be an interesting source of material". Who this was, Mrs Norwood said she couldn't remember; nor could she recall the names of the various Russians whom she began to meet with increasing frequency as the war progressed: "There weren't that many of them anyway. Ah, no, I can't, never knew their names, if I ever could - forgot them, probably." But they were "pleasant", she said, although she never had time to go for a drink or a meal, because she was usually rushing home to look after her husband and later her daughter, Anita - whom she never told of her clandestine life. Hilary knew she was spying, she said, but disapproved, and so she would explain away her occasional lateness after a secret meeting "by saying it was traffic delays, or something like that. I didn't completely take him in". Had she ever been frightened by the possibility she might be caught? "I suppose so, but I can't remember pondering it." What did she think would have happened if she had? "Well I'd have been sacked to start with, of course. But I don't know. Presumably it would have been serious." And had she taken any precautions to make sure she wasn't? "I can't remember if I did. I was careful. I certainly didn't talk to other people about it." Mitrokhin's files suggest that Mrs Norwood used a miniature camera to photograph documents. Of this she said she had no memory, although she confirmed that she did give the Russians documents in one form or another. As to what these were, the choice "was left to me. There was no pressure of any sort. I'm non-technical. You got to know the chemical symbols, a bit of that business. But I don't think there was anything earth-shattering". But according to Mitrokhin's files, the material she supplied was literally earth-shattering: crucial information which fuelled the Soviet "ENORMOSZ" nuclear espionage programme. By the beginning of 1945, the non-Ferrous Metals Association director, G J Bailey, had joined the co-ordinating committee of the top-secret "tube alloys" project - the British project to design and build an atomic bomb. Most of this research was pooled with the parallel United States project based at Los Alamos. Exactly what, or how much, Mrs Norwood gave the Soviet Union is not clear. But their own documents suggest they regarded her contribution as of the "highest value", and that it played a significant part in enabling the USSR to detonate its own bomb in 1949 - a few months before a CIA assessment claimed it would not be ready to do so until 1954. Mrs Norwood said that Bailey was "my favourite", and confirmed that they worked together closely. But she insisted that she could not recall any of the contents of the documents she gave her handlers. "As to what they were, because they weren't necessarily anything, I can't remember. I wasn't always [working] on the special stuff." Nor could she remember what she supplied during her remaining 27 years as a spy. Mitrokhin's notes on her KGB file, which are not a complete summary, suggest only that it was all technical material of considerable importance, some of which may have had direct military application. After her retirement, Mrs Norwood was free at last to visit the Soviet Union, which she did twice - as an ordinary tourist, she said, although the files claim she was f�ted as a retired star agent by senior officials. But after prompting, she did remember receiving the Order of the Red Banner: "I suppose I was grateful for the recognition." As the years rolled by, she watched her espionage contemporaries uncovered, one by one: Klaus Fuchs, her fellow atom spy; the Cambridge five; George Blake. She found Anthony Blunt's belated public disclosure in 1980 especially sad: "He was a good bloke. But in those days, you see, there were quite a number of blokes who thought they were doing their duty by defending the Soviet Union." She seems to have been blissfully unaware of the clue that might, at any time, have led British intelligence to identify her - two mentions, under one of her several codenames, TINA, in the VENONA traffic, the 1940s signals cables between Moscow Centre and its KGB stations in America, which the West had decrypted. Mrs Norwood thought that, if she were to have her time over again, she would do what she had done again. Even today, she retains her faith in a socialist millennium: "It's a worldwide thing. The various countries of this rotten capitalist system with its unemployment, its wars, and making money - I hope it will come to an end." She paused sadly for a moment. "Mind you, the Communists, they have very few members in this country. It's a rather declining membership on the whole. Then again, there's lots of ordinary blokes in lots of countries who do want change." The London Telegraph, Sept. 12, 1999 Spy vs. Spy The CIA Didn't Want Him So the defecting Vasili Mitrokhin was stuck with MI6. WHEN Vasili Mitrokhin first approached MI6 saying he had material that would interest them, they had no idea how important his information would be. CIA officials in the American Embassy in Latvia, had turned away the Russian on the grounds that they were already overwhelmed by would-be defectors. The consensus was that Mitrokhin was a time-waster. So he went down the street to the British Embassy, where MI6 officers listened to him, and decided that they should do everything to help him. In December 1992, they smuggled Mitrokhin, his family, and six large crates of documents out of Russia and into Britain. Paul Redmond, then the head of CIA counter-intelligence, still rues the day when his colleagues decided to turn Mitrokhin away. He had tried to argue that the organisation should at least listen to what he had to say. The rejection "was, in my view, a breathtakingly stupid thing". "Breathtakingly stupid" sums it up. For Col Mitrokhin was one of the most senior officials in the archives of the KGB's Moscow Centre. He had worked there all his career. Those archives contained a detailed record of every operation the KGB mounted from its inception in 1917 to Mitrokhin's retirement in 1984: who did what, to whom, when, and why. No other individual was in a position to see such a wealth of material. Senior case officers - of whom the most illustrious is Oleg Gordievsky, the acting head of the KGB's British section who spied for MI6 for 10 years before making an escape to the West - could pass on detailed information about specific operations as they happened, allowing MI6 to ensure they failed or at least were rendered harmless. But even Gordievsky was not in a position to see the range of material which was at Mitrokhin's fingertips every day of his working life. Mitrokhin spent 10 years secretly copying out every document. He smuggled these out past KGB security by hiding them in his clothes. He then worked on them over the weekend at his country dacha, hiding them under the floorboards. He amassed an astonishing amount of detail. As one expert on intelligence said: "Even if the head of the KGB had defected, he would not have had as much information as Mitrokhin. The head of the KGB would not have spent 10 years in the archives copying out material. What any human being can remember is necessarily limited. But MI6 managed to get Mitrokhin and his six crates of documents out of Russia." The result was 25,000 pages of material on KGB operations. Those pages constitute a unique insight into the organisation's world spy network. The archive discloses that, according to the KGB's own estimates, more than half of Soviet weapons were based on designs stolen from America. They show that the KGB tapped the telephones of officials such as Henry Kissinger, and had spies in almost all the big defence contractors, such as General Electric and IBM. They show that the KGB planted stories in the United States press with the aim of discrediting Martin Luther King, the black civil rights leader. The KGB disliked King because he believed in constitutional change rather than violent revolution. There was even a plan to break the legs of Rudolf Nureyev, the ballet dancer, after he defected to the West in 1961. Robert Lipka, an employee of the National Security Agency, who spied for the KGB and did immense damage to America as a consequence, has just been convicted and sentenced to 18 years imprisonment as a result of Mitrokhin's material. But it is not only in America that the gradual dispersal of information from Mitrokhin's archive has led to investigations. There have been resignations, arrests, prosecutions and expulsions all over the world. In France, at least 35 senior politicians were shown to have worked for the KGB at the height of the Cold War. In Germany, Mitrokhin's documents showed that the KGB had infiltrated all the main political parties, the judiciary and the police, and that the vast network had been left in place after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The KGB had targeted Oskar Lafontaine, the German finance minister who resigned last spring - although it is unclear whether it succeeded in recruiting him. In Japan, his material led to the unmasking of one of the KGB's most successful spies. And there is more, much more, still to come. Mitrokhin's motive for first collecting the information, then handing it over to MI6, seems to have been purely ideological. He decided that Soviet communism was evil, and had to be opposed. He thought the best way to oppose it was to ensure that the world knew the truth about the way it worked: the lies, deception, and cruelty on which it depended. That was why he devoted 10 years of his life copying KGB documents. He is apparently a difficult man: distrustful and quarrelsome. But he has performed an extraordinary service. The London Telegraph, Sept. 12, 1999 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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