The few English language documents in the cache of secret intelligence documents liberated as a result of the (British ?) bombing of one of the Libyan dictator Gaddafi's intelligence agency buildings, has already caused the abandonment / cover up of the Detainee Inquiry into allegations of MI6 the Secret Intelligence Service and the British government involvement in torture.
The Mail on Sunday seems to have access to some of the other ones, now translated from Arabic, which seem to implicate the MI5 Security Service as being in cahoots with the same murderous Libyan torturers, in London in 2006.
Will these allegations result in Yet Another Police / Crown Prosecution Service investigation, which like the previous ones, will dither for 2 or 3 years, thereby further delaying the promised replacement Inquiry into Torture complicity by the British government ?
- British spies supplied the Libyan dictator's secret agents with intelligence, mobile phones and an upmarket London safe house
- Experts say the explosive documents suggest breaches of the Geneva Conventions, the Human Rights Act and criminal law
By Robert Verkaik, Barbara Jones and David RosePUBLISHED: 23:00, 21 April 2012 | UPDATED: 02:52, 22 April 2012
MI5 betrayed enemies of Colonel Gaddafi given refuge in Britain in a covert joint operation with Libyan spies working on UK soil, documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday reveal.
Gaddafi's secret agents were supplied by MI5 with intelligence, secure mobile phones and a luxurious safe house in the heart of London's Knightsbridge.
The extraordinary revelations emerge from hundreds of secret documents unearthed from Libyan spymasters' archives after the Gaddafi regime was toppled - with British military help - last year.
Shockingly, they reveal tactics of intimidation and coercion - and expose the British agents' specific fears that their actions might be reported by the press in the UK.
[...]
A senior former intelligence officer said it was 'difficult to imagine' that the joint operations were not sanctioned by Ministers and it was likely that the Home and Foreign Secretaries were involved, as well as the Prime Minister - at the time, Tony Blair.
But the then Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett, said: 'I don't think I knew anything about this. I certainly have no recollection of it.' She thought that as an 'operational matter' it would not have needed ministerial authorisation.
Lord Reid, who was Home Secretary, failed to return phone calls asking for comment. A spokesman for Mr Blair said he had 'no recollection' of the operations.
The documents reveal meetings between the British and Libyan services in both Tripoli and London, and visits by the Libyan agents to make 'approaches' to their targets in London and Manchester in August and October 2006.
It does not matter whether these notoriously authoritarian Labour politicians now choose not to remember sanctioning such reprehensible betrayals on British soil. They were the elected politicians who bear the political responsibility for the actions of their Security Service MI5 and Secret Intelligence Service MI6 minions at the time.
If this was an unsanctioned operation, then that is also their fault, for allowing such things to go undetected and unpunished.
N.B. the warrants signed by Secretaries of State under the Intelligence Services Act 1994, apply to things like property interference (burglary to plant bugging devices).
They do not specifically sanction the use of blackmail threats to force the cooperation of Confidential Human Intelligence Sources, especially not in collaboration with the foreign intelligence service of a dictatorship.
Such warrants, even if they do actually exist, do not absolve MI5 officers or politicians from prosecution for misconduct in public office
[...]
According to the minutes, one of the MI5 staff said: 'The target person has the right to make a complaint or seek police protection. British intelligence must be careful how they approach a target because this individual could call on human rights or the press and cause a security scandal that exposes the co-operation between British and Libyan secret services.'
Note how, according to the blinkered MI5 mindset, it is the victim of the blackmail and betrayal who would somehow seen to be "causing" the scandal, if they complained to the police or the press, not the Labour government's Security Service MI5 and the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi's External Security Organisation.
Mi5 always has and always should keep a close eye on foreign dissident groups which have sought refuge in the UK from evil foreign regimes. They used to keep the foreign intelligence agencies of such regimes, who prey on and (as was the case with the Libyans) assassinate such political refugees, under even tighter surveillance.
Moussa Koussa, the then head of the Libyan intelligence agencies, with whom MI6 and MI5 were so friendly with, had been expelled from London earlier in his career in 1980, precisely for threatening to murder ex-patriot Libyan dissidents in London.
It is appalling that MI5 actually cooperated with the Libyan dictatorship, in London and used their surveillance powers and blackmail threats of arrest and deportation, against refugees people who are not terrorists themselves, whilst fully aware that what they were doing was morally wrong and illegal in the UK.
How many other such joint intelligence agency operations with the foreign intelligence agencies of dictatorships, aimed at foreign refugees / dissidents, supposedly under asylum protection in the UK were there under the Labour government ?
How many of these operations have continued under the Coalition government ?
Were there, or are there still, similar arrangements in place with, say the Egyptian or Saudi Arabian or Indonesian governments ?
This time, the plan was to set up further meetings with the target in Didsbury, with the hope of introducing him to MI5. The Libyans were not to stay at the safe house, however, but at the five-star City Inn Hotel, which conveniently is next to MI5's headquarters on the Thames.
The Thorney Street rear entrances / emergency exits to the Thames House buildings are all very well, but their comings and goings are presumably observed and remotely monitored by other domestic and foreign intelligence agencies 24/7 from the neighbouring Millbank and other office buildings which overlook Thorney Street.
Spy Blog has often wondered if there is a secret tunnel underground entrance to the MI5 Thames House HQ from this nearby City Inn Hotel, underneath Thorney Street.
Presumably the City Inn CCTV systems, hotel rooms, suites and telephones are electronically bugged by MI5 (they have been doing that sort of thing in London hotels for over a hundred years).
The Sunday Telegraph reports on a joint MI6 / Libyan "sting" operation to set up a fake radical Mosque
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/9218655/Western-allies-of-MI6-kept-in-dark-over-mosque-sting-plan.html