| |
Assassination and the license to
kill
By Richard M Bennett
The
world of counter-terrorism is certain to take a further
step into the downward spiral of hit-teams and
assassination as Western intelligence services try to
find the means to defeat al-Qaeda and its myriad
extremist offshoots. The US Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) and Britain's MI6 (the secret service branch
dealing with matters outside the British Islands), freed
of many of the political and legal shackles imposed in
the latter years of the Cold War, are expanding their
covert capability and the means to use "executive
action", a euphemism for assassination, to defeat the
greatest threat to democracy since the collapse of
communism. The main source of the experience and
influence on operational tactics is perhaps one of the
more surprising aspects of these developments.
Israel has played a significant and largely
secret role within the dark world of Britain's covert
operations against terrorist groups. As long ago as the
early 1970s Rafael Eitan, the then head of the Israeli
hit-squad known as the "Kidon" toured Northern Ireland
and later the Special Air Services (SAS) base in
Hereford, England. Rumor has it that Eitan was less than
impressed with British training, tactics or their "kill"
rate. Within months of his visit there began a number of
fundamental changes in security policy and operations in
the county. More SAS were to be there and a number of
specialized anti-terrorist groups would eventually be
formed, ranging from the 14th Intelligence and Security
Company, once described as the "thinking man's SAS" to
the Mobile Reconnaissance Force or MRF which would later
become the Force Reconnaissance Unit (FRU) . The FRU was
to be later involved in the targeting of suspected
Republicans for assassination by the infamous Loyalist
death squads in Northern Island.
Indeed,
Britain's overall counter-terror organization was held
in such poor esteem by the experienced Israelis that
Israel's intelligence service Mossad's Kidon hit-team
took the law into its own hands by assassinating two of
the Palestinian terrorists suspected of involvement in
the Black September Massacre at the 1972 Munich
Olympics. One was found dead in his London hotel room,
while the second fell under the wheels of a car in High
Holborn, much to the annoyance of MI5 (the security
service dealing with counter espionage against British
organizations by foreign powers, including
counter-terrorism) and the fury of Whitehall. The 1988
killing of three Irish Republican Army (IRA) members in
Gibraltar by the SAS was reportedly viewed as a bungled
operation by Mossad who had originally tracked the Irish
terrorists who they suspected of running guns from
Lebanon. Wishing to avoid further problems with London
by not attempting to kill or capture them on British
soil, the surveillance operation was handed over to MI5,
and of course later to the SAS, whose heavy-handed
approach finally prevented interrogation of the
suspects.
Britain's tough new approach owes
much to Israel
Under Prime Minister Tony Blair,
Britain's official approach is far more cooperative and
Mossad have apparently met with little opposition to
their clandestine center operating in London with some
15 intelligence officers and two or three members of the
Kidon. The Israelis are thought to have a hit list of
around 50 Islamic and Palestinian terrorists believed to
be currently living in Britain. Most of these radicals
are, to use Israeli parlance, to be "disposed of" and it
is believed that a number have either fled the country
or have gone under deep cover in consequence. According
to Gordon Thomas, one of the world's leading experts on
Israeli and British intelligence in particular, the
highly effective Kidon is directly controlled by Mossad.
It has some 38-40 highly trained assassins and includes
at least four women. They operate throughout the world
and wherever a potential or actual threat exists to the
interests of Israel or its people. David Kimche, a
30-year veteran of Mossad and its deputy until his
resignation in 1980, was largely responsible for the
formulation of the Kidon philosophy that it must be
"Israel first, last and always".
It is this
deadly capability that both the CIA and now MI6 are
apparently seeking to emulate as they face the growing
menace of Islamic terrorism. Though the CIA has a long
track record of assassinations, its claws were drawn by
successive US administrations with their fear of
damaging publicity and international anger, ending with
a legal ban on such action which has only recently been
lifted. Britain on the other hand has no such legal
complications as long as the killing takes place on
foreign soil. Under the Intelligence Services Act of
1994, MI6 officers have immunity from prosecution for
crimes committed outside Great Britain. Although The
Criminal Justice Bill of 1998 makes it illegal for any
organization in Great Britain to conspire to commit
offenses abroad, Crown agents still have immunity. With
the end of World War II the SOE's (Special Operations
Executive) undoubted ability in both subversion and
assassination was absorbed into the Secret Intelligence
Service (SIS), and for many years afterwards Britain is
believed to have made regular, if sparing use of
assassination to further its foreign policy aims.
A return to old ways for Secret Intelligence
Service?
George Young in 1956, at the time the
deputy chief of MI6, quite openly advocated the killing
of the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, and in
September 1960 a senior Foreign Office official, Howard
Smith, who was later to become the director general of
MI5, argued in an official document for the
assassination of the young Congolese leader Patrice
Lumumba. "I see only two possible solutions to the
[Lumumba] problem. The first is the simple one of
ensuring [his] removal from the scene by killing him."
Closer to home, the Littlejohn brothers were
recruited in 1972 by John Wyman of MI6, who handled a
number of agents in Northern Ireland and paid them
substantial sums of taxpayers' money to infiltrate the
IRA and to act as agent provocateurs, organizing and
conducting bank robberies and bomb attacks in the
Republic of Ireland. Wyman told them that there was
"going to be a policy of political assassination" for
which they were to make themselves available. "If I was
told about any illegal act before it happened, I would
always discuss it with London. I was always told to go
ahead," said Kenneth Littlejohn, who went on to claim
that the MI6 officer told him, "If there is any
shooting, do what you've got to do." Wyman indeed gave
the Littlejohns a list of IRA leaders to assassinate;
these included Seamus Costello, Sean Qarland and Sean
McStiofain. After Littlejohn passed on the name of Joe
McCann, a leading Republican, to his MI6 handler, McCann
was shot dead by British paratroopers a few days later
as he walked, apparently unarmed, through the Belfast
market area.
In more recent times, the maverick
former MI5 officer David Shayler and Richard Tomlinson
of MI6 have both vigorously argued that Britain's
intelligence services had attempted to assassinate
Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in February 1996 and had
planned a similar fate for both the Iraqi dictator
Saddam Hussein in 1991 and Serbia's Slobodan Milosovic
in 1992. Whatever one may think of such claims, there is
now at least official confirmation from the Steven's
Inquiry into the "Shoot to Kill" policy in Northern
Ireland that British security officials were indeed
deeply involved in the assassination of a number of
Catholics in the province.
The Guardian on April
28, 2001 headlined its article "Sinister role of secret
army unit: Police investigate claims of collusion with
paramilitaries" describes the organizations involved in
covert British operations in Ireland. "The FRU was one
of three army-sponsored undercover intelligence squads
in Northern Ireland. The others were 22 Squadron SAS and
14 Company. The FRU, which was set up in Northern
Ireland in 1980, dealt with recruiting and handling
agents in paramilitary organizations." 14 Company
specialized in surveillance while 22 SAS undertook
"executive actions". "That means they killed people,"
said an army source. Many outside observers remain
convinced that this is merely the tip of an iceberg and
much is still being hidden by an ongoing official
coverup.
The SAS can provide the
skills
Another in-built advantage for the SIS is
that they have a number of SAS personnel trained to work
with the intelligence service and always available for
any of its needs. This group is known as the "Increment"
and is used for assassinations, sabotage or other
dangerous jobs, such as arresting war criminals in the
Balkans, says James Dunnigan, the renowned author of
How to Make War (now in its fourth edition),
adding that every SIS station chief has a direct line to
the SAS headquarters at the Duke of York's Barracks in
West London and a good working relationship with these
covert action experts. The "Increment" also works
closely with yet another shadowy SIS group called the
UKN, a highly specialist surveillance team. Ex-SAS
mercenaries have also been blamed for several
assassinations on the African continent and a purported
former member of the regiment, Tyrone Chadwick, was
imprisoned in South Africa after admitting to a
London-based journalist his and other former SAS
mercenaries' leading role in several murders during the
apartheid era, according to a commentary on the Strategy
Page in June 2003.
The SIS has developed a
reputation for going outside the agency and its military
executive arm to hit some targets. Friendly foreign
intelligence agencies have been used on a number of
occasions and MI6 has shown a willingness to
"sub-contract it to Mossad", according to a former
British agent quoted by Peter Hillmore and Ed Vulliamy
in "Spies: the Beautiful and the damned" (The Observer,
October 12, 1997), adding that the assassination in
Belgium of the British inventor of the Iraqi "Supergun",
Gerald Bull, is widely believed to have been just such
an act. And speculation still surrounds the "suicide" of
Jonathan Moyle, the 28-year-old editor of the British
trade journal Defence Helicopter World in March 1990 -
he was found hanging in a closet in a hotel room in
Santiago, Chile. Intelligence sources have long
suggested that there was a, so far unproven, SIS
involvement in Moyle's death as his "Iraqgate"
investigations were believed to be uncovering highly
embarrassing facts for the senior management at Century
House, then the headquarters for MI6 and the
Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher.
British spooks regain a license to kill
Last year Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
appointed General Meir Dagan, his friend and close
colleague, to head Mossad. Security sources confirm that
Dagan, a noted hawk, had served in the 1970s as head of
the "Rimon" undercover anti-terrorist unit which is
widely suspected of killing militants wanted by Israel.
Following his retirement from the army in 1995, Dagan
became Mossad's deputy chief. His appointment and past
track record suggest that while the Sharon government
may be publicly willing to sign up to President George W
Bush's road map for Middle East peace, it will be allied
to a deadly new secret campaign to destroy the terrorist
infrastructure and eliminate its leadership. Leading
Israeli politician Moshe Arens says, "Dagan is one of
the old Sharon's assets. They got to know each other 33
years ago when Sharon, then head of Southern Command,
cleared Gaza of 'terrorists'. Dagan led a commando unit
called 'Rimon' which was known, how shall I put it, for
its unconventional methods." Dagan is known to be keen
to promote the Israeli way of dealing with terrorism,
and quickly paid an official visit to the CIA director
George Tenet in September last year before his promotion
had even been confirmed. According to usually reliable
intelligence sources, it can be taken as highly
significant that the CIA formally established an
assassination team in November, less than two months
later. This may be seen as not only a positive US
response to the sharing of Israeli experience and
expertise, but also as a direct result of the recent
lifting of the US presidential ban on "executive action"
following the al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001.
Dagan and Mossad's growing influence on the
Western intelligence community was further strengthened
by meetings held in Britain in January of this year with
Eliza Manningham Buller, the director general of MI5 and
more importantly with Richard Dearlove, chief of the
Secret Intelligence Service. It now seems likely that in
the wake of these discussions Britain's MI6 was further
encouraged to rebuild its muscle power through the
expansion of its Special Operations Directorate to
include a genuine anti-terrorist "Hunter-Killer"
capability.
Though "C", the head of the MI5 has
been traditionally able to call on the services of the
SAS and the "Increment", a small special forces unit
dedicated to secret intelligence, an ever increasing
number of covert and potentially politically explosive
operations required the use of contracted "retired"
officers operating within commercial paramilitary
companies; organized crime assets or even "friendly"
foreign intelligence agencies such as Mossad. The SIS
has now apparently decided, presumably with full
approval of the Joint Intelligence Committee and the
Cabinet Office, that it must have its own operatives to
do much of the "dirty work" in future. In common with
their colleagues at the CIA, the senior management at
Vauxhall Cross are now busily returning the service to
the bad old days of "political action" and assassination
as the official, though of course deniable, policy for
dealing with external threats.
Contacts within
the Intelligence communities both in the UK and the US
strongly advised AFI Research not to run this piece on
assassination. However, we consider that such a response
merely gave added credence to the suggestion that in the
future the British authorities may indeed be prepared to
use more "positive" methods, under certain
circumstances, in dealing with both external and very
probably, internal "enemies of the state". It now seem
almost certain, therefore, that a limited number of
selected and highly trained MI6 officers have once again
been given a "license to kill", and perhaps very largely
because of the experience and influence of the Israeli
secret service.
(AFI Research, a leading source
of specialist intelligence, defense, terrorism, conflict
and political analysis)
(C) Richard Bennett
Media 2003, rbmedia@supanet.com
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
