Telegraph's political editor - MI6 agent of influence?

[TonyGosling]

Telegraph's political editor - MI6 agent of influence?

The journalist who broke the 45 minute WMD story strikes again

Campaign Iran | 30.01.2007 13:42
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/01/361101.html
Daily Telegraph political editor investigated over further misleading articles...

http://www.campaigniran.org/
Press Release – 29th January 2007

The Press Complaints Commission have launched their third investigation of Daily Telegraph political editor, Con Coughlin, in as many months, after a number of high level complaints about his latest ariticle on Iran.
http://www.pcc.org.uk/complaints/process.html
The investigation is looking at an article by Mr Coughlin on 24 January relying on an unnamed “European defence official” alleging that North Korea is helping Iran prepare a nuclear weapons test and follows the recent publication of a report detailing a catalogue of innaccurate and misleading stories about Iran by. The report, put together by Campaign Iran and published last month, revealed that Mr Coughlin, the man who ‘broke the story’ of Iraq’s 45 minute WMD capacity, is behind sixteen articles containing unsubstantiated allegations against Iran over the past twelve months. The PCC will examine whether the stories, all based on unnamed or untraceable sources, are in breach of Clause 1 of their Code of Practice, requiring accuracy.

The veracity of Coughlin’s writing on Iran is already under investigation by the PCC following complaints about a headline article in last month’s Telegraph that claimed that Iran was “grooming Bin Laden’s successor”. The story, universally dismissed by Middle East experts, led the organisation Campaign Iran to conduct a broader analysis of the accuracy of Mr Coughlin’s stories and the journalistic methods he uses. Analysing 44 articles by Mr Coughlin on Iran, the report finds some stark patterns in terms of his journalistic technique:

• Sources are unnamed or untraceable, often “senior Western intelligence officials” or “senior Foreign Office officials”.
• Articles are published at sensitive and delicate times where there has been a relatively positive diplomatic moves towards Iran.
• Articles contain exclusive revelations about Iran combined with eye-catchingly controversial headlines;
• The story upon which the headline is based does not usually exceed one line or at the most one paragraph. The rest of the article focuses on other, often unrelated, information.

The report also reveals that Coughlin has a history of breaking politically important stories that are later shown to be inaccurate. He is the journalist who, discovered “the fact” that Saddam Hussein could launch weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes. He was also the journalist who, in 2003, unearthed “the link” between the 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed Ata, and the Iraqi intelligence.

Professor Abbas Edalat of Campaign Iran said today: “The quoting of unnamed sources has always been an essential aspect of news reporting, but Coughlin is abusing the practice in order to give substance otherwise implausible political stories. These stories are repeated as fact on news outlets and websites across the world. They cannot be easily challenged because the unnamed source can never be revealed. During the build-up to the invasion of Iraq Coughlin was behind two very influential stories that helped pave the path to war. Both were later found to be completely untrue. We must be vigilant against similar inaccuracies being used to prepare the path for intervention against Iran, and we call on the PCC to take action against Coughlin and to safeguard the integrity and accuracy of our press.”

The report, ‘Conning the Nation: An Analysis of Con Coughlin’s Reportage on Iran’ has been compiled by Campaign Iran, based on research led by Dr Majid Tafreshi.

For more information visit http://www.campaigniran.org/

Appendix 1
Sources used by Coughlin’s for his articles published in the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph within the last one year.
10/10/2006: “The West woke up too late to the nuclear threat of rogue states” Source: none.
04/08/2006: “Teheran fund pays war compensation to Hizbollah families” Source: “A senior security official”.
21/07/2006: “Meanwhile, Iran gets on with its bomb”Source: none.
14/07/2006: “Israeli crisis is a smoke screen for Iran's nuclear ambitions” Source: none.
13/07/2006: “Cat and mouse games on border that is 'our front line with Iran’” Source: An Israeli soldier.
12/06/2006: “Iran accused of hiding secret nuclear weapons site” Source: A senior western diplomat”
11/04/2006: “The West can't let Iran have the bomb” Source: “An official closely involved in the IAEA's negotiations with Iran”
07/04/2006: “Iran has missiles to carry nuclear warheads” Source: “A senior US official”
07/04/2006: “UN officials find evidence of secret uranium enrichment plant” Sources: “A diplomat closely involved in the IAEA's negotiations with Teheran” and “A senior diplomat attached to the IAEA headquarters in Vienna”.
04/04/2006: “Iran's spies watching us, says Israel”Sources: “A senior Israeli military commander” and “an officer with Israel's northern command”.
06/03/2006: “Teheran park 'cleansed' of traces from nuclear site” Source: “A senior western official”
11/02/2006: “Iran plant has restarted its nuclear bomb-making equipment” Source: “A senior Western intelligence official”
30/01/2006: “Iran sets up secret team to infiltrate UN nuclear watchdog, say officials” Source: “a senior western intelligence official”
16/01/2006: “Iran could go nuclear within three years” Sources: “A senior western intelligence officer” and “an intelligence official”
27/11/2005: “Teheran secretly trains Chechens to fight in Russia” Source: “a senior intelligence official”
29/10/2005: “Smuggling route [from Iran] opened to supply Iraqi insurgents” Source: “The National Council of Resistance of Iran”

SEE ALSO

Mandelson -MI6 Agent of Influence
http://www.salaam.co.uk/themeofthemonth/january03_index.php?l=45%82%22 =0

The aim of this dossier is to serve as a reference point for information on covert actions by Government agencies that are inconsistent with stated government policy or which infringe civil liberties hence subverting the normal course of decision-making in a participative democracy.
The dossier identifies some of the complicities between these agencies and the media, PR and academic communities, including the outright recruitment of journalists by the security services and the planting or slanting of news to support Government policy.
http://www.salaam.co.uk/themeofthemonth/january03_index.php

[StopThe9/11CoverUp]

Well you know what they say.................

He who wins the propaganda war wins the right to change history. (or summat like that!).

[Mark Gobell]

Britain’s security services and journalists: the secret story

David Leigh

British Journalism Review
Vol. 11, No. 2, 2000, pages 21-26

http://www.bjr.org.uk/data/2000/no2_leigh.htm

British journalists – and British journals – are being manipulated by the secret intelligence agencies, and I think we ought to try and put a stop to it.

The manipulation takes three forms. The first is the attempt to recruit journalists to spy on other people, or for spies to go themselves under journalistic “cover”. This occurs today and it has gone on for years. It is dangerous, not only for the journalist concerned, but for other journalists who get tarred with the espionage brush. Farzad Bazoft was a colleague of mine on the London Observer when he was executed by Saddam Hussein for espionage. It did not, in a sense, matter whether he was really a spy or not. Either way, he ended up dead.

The second form of manipulation that worries me is when intelligence officers are allowed to pose as journalists in order to write tendentious articles under false names. Evidence of this only rarely comes to light, but two examples have surfaced recently – mainly because of the whistleblowing activities of a couple of renegade officers – David Shayler from MI5 and Richard Tomlinson from MI6.

The third sort of manipulation is the most insidious – when intelligence agency propaganda stories are planted on willing journalists, who disguise their origin from their readers. There is – or has been until recently – a very active programme by the secret agencies to colour what appears in the British press, called, if publications by various defectors can be believed, “I/Ops”. That is an abbreviation for Information Operations, and I am – unusually – in a position to provide some information about it.

Let us take that third allegation first. Black propaganda – false material where the source is disguised – has been a tool of British intelligence agencies since the days of the war, when the Special Operations Executive got up to all kinds of tricks with clandestine radio stations, to drip pornography and pessimism into the ears of impressionable German soldiers. Post-war, this unwholesome game mutated into the anti-Soviet Information Research Department. Its task was ostensibly to plant anti-communist stories in the press of the third world, but its lurid tales of Marxist drunkenness and corruption sometimes leaked back to confuse the readers of the British media. A colourful example of the way these techniques expand to meet the exigencies of the hour came in the early 1970s, when the readers of the News of the World found before their eyes – and no doubt to their bewilderment – a front page splash, Russian Sub in IRA plot sensation, complete with aerial photograph of a Soviet conning tower awash off the coast of Donegal. That was the work of Hugh Mooney of the IRD, an organisation which was eventually closed down in 1977. Its spirit did not die, however. Nearly 25 years later, readers of the Sunday Telegraph were regaled with a dramatic story about the son of Col Gadafy of Libya and his alleged connection to a currency counterfeiting plan. The story was written by Con Coughlin, the paper’s then chief foreign correspondent, and it was falsely attributed to a “British banking official”. In fact, it had been given to him by officers of MI6, who, it transpired, had been supplying Coughlin with material for years.

Writ

The origins of that November 1995 Telegraph article only came to light when they were recently disclosed by Mark Hollingsworth, the biographer of renegade security service officer David Shayler. Shayler had worked on MI5’s Libya desk at the time, in liaison with his counterparts in the foreign espionage service, MI6, and had come away with a detailed knowledge of events, and a bundle of secret documents to back them up. The allegations were confirmed from an unexpected direction. The Sunday Telegraph was served with a libel writ by Gadafy’s son. The paper was unable to back up its suggestion that Gadafy junior might have been linked to a fraud, but pleaded, in effect, that it had been supplied with the material by the Government. In a long and detailed statement, which entered the public domain in the course of a judgment given in an interlocutory appeal on 28 October 1998, the paper described how, under Charles Moore’s editorship, a lunch had been arranged with the then Conservative foreign secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, at which Con Coughlin had been present. Told by Rifkind that countries such as Iran were trying to get hold of hard currency to beat sanctions, Coughlin was later briefed by an MI6 man – his regular contact. Some weeks afterward, he was introduced to a second MI6 man, who spent several hours with him and handed over extensive details of the story about Gadafy’s son. Although Coughlin asked for evidence, and was shown purported bank statements, the pleadings make clear that he was dependent on MI6 for the discreditable details about the alleged counterfeiting scam. He was required to keep the source strictly confidential.

Throughout the formal pleadings, the Telegraph preserved the fig-leaf of its sources by referring to a “Western government security agency”. But this veil of coyness was blown away by City solicitor David Hooper in his book on libel published in March, Reputations Under Fire, where he says briskly: “In reality [they were] members of MI6” So, unusually, an MI6 exercise in planting a story has been laid bare. Now, there is no suggestion that Con Coughlin is dishonest in his work. He is a perfectly conscientious journalist who I expect did his best to substantiate his facts and undoubtedly believed in their truth. But nevertheless, those facts may not have been true. And I believe he made a serious mistake in falsely attributing his story to a “British banking official”. His readers ought to know where his material is coming from. When the Sunday Telegraph got into trouble with the libel case, it seems, after all, to have suddenly found it possible to become a lot more specific about its sources.

This was not an isolated example of recent MI6 “I/Ops”. In August 1997, the present foreign editor of the Independent, Leonard Doyle, was also in contact with MI6 while he was at his previous post at the Observer. I know, because I became involved in an MI6-inspired story as a result. Doyle’s MI6 contact supplied him with intelligence information about an Iranian exile who, while running a pizza business in Glasgow, was also attempting to lay hands on a sophisticated mass spectrometer which could be used for measuring uranium enrichment – a key stage in acquiring components for a nuclear bomb. We were supplied with a mass of apparently high quality intelligence from MI6, including surveillance details of an Istanbul hotel meeting between our pizza merchant and men involved in Iranian nuclear procurement.

I should make clear that we did not publish merely on the say-so of MI6. We travelled to Glasgow, confronted the pizza merchant, and only when he admitted that he had been dealing with representatives of the nuclear industry in Iran, did we publish an article. In that story we made it plain that our target had been watched by western intelligence. Nevertheless, I felt uneasy, and vowed never to take part in such an exercise again.

Although all parties, from the foreign editor down, behaved scrupulously, we had been obliged to conceal from our readers the full facts and had ended up, in effect, acting as government agents.

Now, after the Tomlinson/Shayler defections and the subsequent revelation of MI6’s continuing “I/Ops” programme of which my Iranian experience was plainly a part, I think the cause of honest journalism is best served by candour. We all ought to come clean about these approaches, and devise some ethics to deal with them. In our vanity, we imagine that we control these sources. But the truth is that they are very deliberately seeking to control us.

Jigsaw

The second intelligence tactic of manipulation in my list which gives concern, is the habit of allowing spooks to write under false names. It was Tomlinson, I suspect, who, having worked in the area, first blew the whistle on this one. And it was a recently published book – MI6 by Stephen Dorril – which once again added the final piece of the jigsaw. Two articles appeared in the Spectator magazine in early 1994 under the by-line “Kenneth Roberts”. They were datelined Sarajevo, and “Roberts” was described as having been working with the UN in Bosnia as an “advisor”. In fact, he was MI6 officer Keith Robert Craig (the pseudonym was a simple one), whose local cover was as a civilian “attached” to the British military unit’s Balkan secretariat. At the time, Bosnia was the site of attacks and atrocities from neighbouring Serbia, and also the focus of some passionate reporting from British journalists. The British military were there as UN “peacekeepers”, but anyone who read “Roberts’s’’ articles might have begun to wonder whether it was not a better policy for British troops to go home and leave the Serbs a free hand. The first article on 5 February, rehearsed arguments for a UN withdrawal, pointing out that all sides committed atrocities. The second piece complained, baselessly, about “warped” and inaccurate reporting by journalists, including the BBC’s Kate Adie.

It is possible, of course, that Craig was merely overcome with private literary urges whilst marooned in the Balkans, and thought it more politic to express his own opinions under a “nom de plume”. But one of the traditional roles of “I/Ops” is to plant stories. What is not clear is how the introduction to the Spectator was made, or whether Craig confided his real trade to the then editor of the Spectator, Dominic Lawson. In his recent published compilation about MI6, the author Stephen Dorril points out that Dominic Lawson’s brother-in-law at the time, Anthony Monckton, was himself a serving MI6 officer, who was to take over the Zagreb station in the Balkans in 1996. (Rosa Monckton, his sister and Dominic Lawson’s wife, was the late Princess Diana’s close friend.).

These relationships – which the disenchanted Tomlinson knew all about because he had himself served undercover in the Balkans in the same time-frame, and which have only slowly emerged into the public domain – have become the subject of a swirl of rumour. There is no reason to believe the Editor of the Spectator did anything improper at all, and certainly no reason to think, as he has been forced to deny, that he was acting as an agent of MI6, whether paid or unpaid. But, for an editor, it must be a bad idea to end up in a position where an MI6 officer is writing for your publication on matters of political controversy, under a false name. Transparency is better.

The final malpractice which the Tomlinson/Shayler defections have brought to light, is the continuing deliberate blurring by MI6 of the line between journalist and spy. This is an old crime – Kim Philby, former foreign correspondent of The Observer would have had plenty of stories to tell about that. But it should be exposed and stopped. Tomlinson himself, by his own account, spent six months in 1993 travelling around Croatia and Serbia trying to recruit informants, under the guise of a British journalist. Dorril, in his book, further asserts that the Spectator itself was unknowingly used as “cover” by no fewer than three MI6 officers working in Bosnia, Belgrade, and Moldova.

The most dismaying allegation floated by Tomlinson was that he had heard tell within MI6 of a “national newspaper editor” who was used as an agent, and had received up to £100,000 in covert payments, accessed at an offshore bank, via a false passport obligingly supplied by MI6 itself. This claim set off a hue and cry, during which the hapless Dominic Lawson was obliged to issue his denial, and other editors came under suspicious scrutiny. In fact, I believe Tomlinson has been wrongly reported. Those who have talked to him in detail say that he has no first-hand knowledge, but merely knew of something a colleague obliquely mentioned. Hearing the words “editor” and “national newspaper”, Tomlinson jumped to the wrong conclusion, and then started guessing. Spies are, after all, very like journalists in their methods – but merely less reliable. What those in the newspaper business know is that there is all the difference in the world between “the Editor” and “an editor”. Newspapers have, for example, education editors; they have environment editors; they have defence editors (not, I should say, that I have any evidence against any individual members of these categories). And it would be a senior journalist at that level, who could travel, see things, report back, who would be of more practical use in the business of espionage than, say the Editor of The Times. So the hunt is still on for the miscreant. And miscreant he is: for, make no mistake, this kind of behaviour by journalists is dangerous and wrong.

Our first task as practitioners is to document what goes on in this very furtive field. Our second task ought to be to hold an open debate on what the proper relations between the intelligence agencies and the media ought to be. And our final task must then be to find ways of actually behaving more sensibly.

[Mark Gobell]

Blair and MI6

New Labour's obsession with the intelligence services has been a disaster for the government and MI6

Mark Hollingsworth
Wednesday November 5, 2003

Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4790220-103677,00.html

Despite appearances, Tony Blair hates formal international summits and meeting foreign heads of state. Unless the visiting dignatory is from the US, Russia, China, Germany, France or Spain, the prime minister is privately contemptuous of the value of diplomatic protocol. "This is a pleasure, as always," he remarked at one EU summit, his voice dripping with sarcasm. He much prefers an informal talk on the sofa at No 10 with the person who has the real power.

Increasingly, Blair prefers dealing with the intelligence services, notably MI6. He respects the raw power of intelligence and its potential for influencing and driving foreign policy rather than tiresome diplomacy. Mesmerised by its power, Blair has ushered MI6 into the inner tent of policy-making more than any other prime minister. As a consequence, the use of intelligence, notably through the joint intelligence committee (JIC), has been politicised by the culture of New Labour, which is characterised by spin, centralised control and a failure to acknowledge the distinction between party and government interests. Former diplomats say British intelligence has now been subverted. "The integrity of our intelligence system has been battered by the demands of No 10," Sir Harold Walker, former British ambassador to Iraq, observed last month.

The mere fact that Alastair Campbell, a political appointee as Blair's communications director, was involved in discussions over the contents of the infamous September dossier on Iraq with John Scarlett, the JIC chairman and a former MI6 station chief, illustrates the encroachment of New Labour values into the intelligence world. Campbell was not just advising Scarlett (who he described as "a friend of mine") on presentation. He was submitting amendments for the dossier. "Once you have a mix between those responsible for presentation and intelligence, you risk calling into question the authenticity of intelligence reports," said Sir John Stanley, a former Tory defence minister. "Politics ends up driving the intelligence."

In effect, the intelligence community has been seduced by the New Labour project. In government, this began soon after 9/11. Within weeks Sir Richard Dearlove, chief of MI6, was flying to Washington for meetings with Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser to President Bush, for policy discussions on al-Qaida and Iraq, notably on regime change.

An impatient Blair preferred the decisive, Atlanticist approach of MI6 to the Foreign Office view that invading Iraq would upset the balance of power in the Middle East, with Britain losing its independent status and derided as a mere satellite of the US. New Labour's links with both MI5 and MI6 can be traced back to the1980s. One evening in November 1986, Peter Mandelson, who had been Labour's director of communications for barely a year, was seen having a drink with Alan Petty, a senior MI6 officer, at the Museum Tavern, near the British Museum. They were spotted by John Burnes, a researcher who had become friendly with Petty. Burnes recalls that the two were having an "intense, serious discussion", but when he went over to greet him, the MI6 officer "completely blanked me". A year later Petty returned to MI6 and became special assistant to Sir Colin McColl, chief of MI6 in the early 1990s, where he was responsible for opening channels with the media. He now writes novels under the pseudonym of Alan Judd.

In his biography of Mandelson, Paul Routledge claims "some intelligence experts believe he may have been an MI6 'agent of influence' working, perhaps innocently, for the west during a critical period of the cold war". The Blair confidant has certainly long been intrigued by the secret world. He was a member of the Commons committee that scrutinised the 1994 intelligence services bill. That in turn launched the intelligence and security committee (ISC). The ISC was controversial because it was accountible to Downing Street and not to parliament. Mandelson opposed so much power being invested in the prime minister at the time. In office, however, New Labour has declined to make the ISC accountable to parliament.

Once in power, MI6 has been used as part of a favourite New Labour tactic - "burying bad news" by diverting attention. In 1998 Mandelson was accused of planting a story in the Sunday Times that Chris Patten, former governor of Hong Kong, was being investigated by MI6 for leaking classified documents - apparently to divert attention away from Labour scandals involving Robin Cook and Lord Simon. Labour press officers told BBC correspondents that Mandelson would confirm the MI6 investigation if asked to do so in a live interview.

Another important, if less well-known, New Labour figure in the relationship with MI6 is Baroness Meta Ramsay, a senior MI6 officer once tipped as a future head of the service. After leaving MI6, she was foreign policy adviser to the late John Smith. She then became special adviser to John Cunningham, after working closely with him on Labour's response to the intelligence services bill. Labour kept her in the loop by making her a member of the intelligence and security committee. But the main byproduct of the cosy New Labour-MI6 entente cordiale is that intelligence reports are now no longer regarded as objective and that British intelligence is effectively running a parallel foreign policy. Blair's preference for working with Sir Richard Dearlove - "My fate is in your hands, Richard", he reportedly told him late last year - has linked his political future with how MI6 performs. It is a dangerous development.

Mark Hollingsworth is the author, with Nick Fielding, of Defending the Realm: Inside MI5 and the War on Terrorism. A new edition has just been published by André Deutsch