A report from the Intelligence and Security Committee (ICI) about Russian interference with British democracy has just been released. ‘In brief’, it declares:
“Russian influence in the UK is ‘the new normal’, and there are a lot of Russians with very close links to Putin who are well integrated into the UK business and social scene, and accepted because of their wealth”.
Worse still:
“This level of integration… means that any measures now being taken by the government are not preventative but rather constitute damage limitation”.
Significantly, the report reveals that the various intelligence and security ‘Agencies’ which include MI5, the UK’s internal intelligence service, felt the issue of Russian interference in British politics was too much of a “hot potato” to investigate. According to the report, the spies:
“appeared determined to distance themselves from any suggestion that they might have a prominent role in relation to the democratic process itself, noting the caution which had to be applied in relation to intrusive powers in the context of democratic process.”
The ‘Agencies’ then attempted to suggest that other government departments were responsible. According to the report they:
“informed us that the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) holds primary responsibility for disinformation campaigns, and that the Electoral Commission has responsibility for the overall security of democratic processes.” (Paragraph 31 page 18)
This led to MI5 and the others to take “their eye off the ball”.
In addition, they were allegedly too absorbed by monitoring Islamic militants to do anything about the threat from Moscow.
There is a lot more – a hell of a lot more – to this than meets the eye.
MI5 has actually perpetrated crimes against Britain which were far worse than anything the ICI report or the UK media is now placing at the feet of the Russians.
Infamously, MI5 officers like Peter Wright tried to topple the Labour government of Harold Wilson.
Moreover, MI5, MI6 and a little known – and now defunct – black propaganda department called the Information Research Department (IRD), spent decades meddling with British, European and Irish political affairs. See Her Majesty’s Smearmeisters: how MI5 and MI6 vilified Haughey, Hume and Paisley
See also Licence to deceive.http://deceive
Books have been written about the MI5 plots against Wilson. A useful summary of it can be found at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/mar/15/comment.labour1
MI5 and to a lesser extent MI6 had to stomach years of harsh criticism in the 1980s as a result of ‘Spycatcher’, the book written by Peter Wright, a senior former MI5 officer, and revelations of Colin Wallace, a psychological operations officer with the British Army in Northern Ireland. Both of these men exposed intelligence agency treachery against the British government. Put simply, MI5’s treacherous history has made it reluctant to do its job in the present era in case it might put a foot wrong and attract criticism that it is following in Peter Wright’s cloven footsteps.
Put simply, MI5’s treacherous history has made it reluctant to do its job in the present era in case it might put a foot wrong and attract criticism that it is following in Peter Wright’s cloven footsteps.
If the Russians swung the Brexit vote, it would mean that the UK left the EU due – in part – to MI5 fears about it shameful past.
But did the Russians actually swing the Brexit vote? It is certainly a possibility in circumstances where the Brexit victory was achieved by a whisker.
Predictably, Boris Johnson rejects the notion. “Remainers have seized on this report to try to give the impression that the Russian interference was somehow responsible for Brexit. The people of this country didn’t vote to leave the EU because of pressure from Russia or Russian interference,” Johnson said. “They voted because they wanted to take back control of our money, of our trade policy, of our laws.”
It is probably better to let the contentious issue of the victory for Brexit in the context of Russian interference as an issue for debate and focus instead on something more concrete: the failure of MI5 to even attempt to prevent it.
Dame Stella Rimmington, a former director-general of MI5, is typical of those who have created this mess. Rather than face up to MI5’s perfidious past, condemn it and then consign it to the history books, she has denied all wrongdoing. But then Rimmington, now a successful spy fiction author, is a dab hand at transforming fact into fiction – whether at a conscious or sub-conscious level is best left to the experts. More specifically, she asserts that no one in MI5 ever lifted a finger to thwart the Labour PM Harold Wilson. This, despite the fact back that no less a figure than Lord John Hunt, the mighty and all-powerful Cabinet Secretary, 1973-79, acknowledged that it had indeed happened. In August 1996 Hunt told a Channel 4 documentary that, “There is no doubt at all that a few, a very few, malcontents in MI5, people who should not have been there in the first place, a lot of them like Peter Wright who were right-wing, malicious and had serious personal grudges, gave vent to these and spread damaging malicious stories about that Labour government.” See also Dial MI5 for Murder
There are other lamentable reasons for MI5’s failure to protect British democracy during Brexit.
MI5 is meant to devote all of its energies to legitimate purposes such as the protection of Britain from terrorism, hostile cyber punks (in tandem with the technoboffins at GCHQ) and other malefactors. Instead, MI5 has diverted some of its precious energy on reprehensible and entirely wasteful endeavours. MI5 routinely opens the post of whistle blowers like Fred Holroyd, a former military intelligence officer. Holroyd exposed a litany of MI5 dirty tricks in Ireland in the 1980s such as the control by MI5 of the loyalist gang which murdered hundreds of people including the 33 slaughtered during the Dublin and Monaghan bomb massacres in 1974. To date, MI5 interferes with any post he gets from Ireland (a sure sign they have something to fear from him). Not only is the post intercepted, it is opened and then copied. Thereafter, reports are generated and sent for analysis at MI5’s HQ. The resources wasted on him and others like him can only be imagined
MI5 also has a lamentable record of eavesdropping on trade unionists, left-wing politicians and civil rights groups in the UK. One of those placed under the microscope was Jeremy Corbyn.
It’s anyone’s guess how much of this nonsense is still going on at the expense of British taxpayers while ISIS terrorists gambol back-and-forth from the Middle east. Indeed, MI5 excused its failure to prevent the Manchester terror bombing in May of 2017 and other disasters on a lack of resources.
On an even more sinister level, MI5 and its associates have spent much time and energy cloaking their nauseating role in the protection and exploitation of the Anglo-Irish Vice Ring of which Kincora Boys’ Home in Belfast was a small part. In recent times this has involved the creation of committees established to deal with the Hart Inquiry in Northern Ireland (which reported in 2017) and the ongoing Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in London, not to mention the manipulation of the British press and the suppression of stories, for example, by the issue of D Notices.
Village wrote about MI5’s propagate waste of its resources on these sordid activities. See Gross Neglect: MI5’s fatal waste of resources
MI5 has boasted a new Director-General, Ken McCallum, since last April. It will be interesting to see if he puts an end to these distasteful activities.
Sadly, if he is like most of the senior people employed by MI5 in the recent past, there is little or no chance that he will do anything of the sort. For a start, Her Majesty is hardly likely to knight him if he rocks the boat by, for example, exposing a child rapist such as Lord Mountbatten who abused children ensnared by the Anglo-Irish Vice Ring which was manipulated by MI5. In the feudal world in which they exist, British intelligence officers seem obsessed with securing knighthoods no matter what the cost. While they might not sell their own children for one, some individuals in MI5 did let orphans and abandoned waifs fall into the clutches of VIP paedophiles to accrue ‘compromat’. They and their successors in MI5/6 have covered up the scandal ever since. By not rocking the boat, a lot of them received the traditional reward of a knighthood for services rendered to the Crown. On the other hand whistle blowers like Fred Holroyd and Colin Wallace received nothing but abuse and character assassination. Over and beyond, Wallace was framed for manslaughter with the help of a corrupt Home Office pathologist who committed perjury during his trial.
For those interested in the truth this vile paedophile underworld, Village has published a full-length online book. You can start reading it here: The Anglo-Irish Vice Ring. Chapters 1 – 3.
Insofar as the ICI report is concerned, the British media is in high dudgeon about Russia highlighting the GRU’s attempt to murder Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018. Fine, but what about the murder of the Irish solicitor Patrick Finucane in Belfast in 1989. Finucane was a solicitor who represented Loyalist and Republican defendants in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. All accused are entitled to legal representation in a democratic state. None of the accused terrorists could have been tried, convicted and sentenced without such representation. There is hardly a British judge presiding over a criminal trial this week who has not represented someone found guilty of a crime at some stage in his/her career. It would be preposterous and absurd to suggest a single one of them is tainted with criminality because of this. Yet, MI5 had Finucane murdered with cabinet level connivance for performing his part in the process. You can read about the Finucane assassination (and more) at Thatcher’s Murder Machine, the British State assassination of Patrick Finucane
One former MI6 officer, Christopher Steele, cited as an ‘expert’ witness to the ICI moaned that Putin’s Russia posed “potentially the most significant threat” to the UK’s democracy and way of life. MI6 is attached to the Foreign Office and conducts overseas intelligence activities.
It seems lost on Steele that MI6 has rampaged around the world like the political equivalent of a gang of soccer hooligans over the last century. Most of the trouble in the Middle East can be traced back to MI6’s plot to topple a secular democratically elected government in Iran. According to its own official history, MI6 officers placed bombs in boats carrying Jewish survivors of the holocaust from Europe to Palestine. Along with the CIA, it was involved in a string of coups and coup attempts against foreign governments. Closer to home, it has spied on its former EU colleagues and vilified British and Irish politicians such as Harold Wilson and John Hume. MI6’s skill set includes, defamation, theft, blackmail, bribery, torture and murder.
MI5 and MI6 officers often lie to their children about who they work for. Can you blame them?
