EMT
Platinum Member
- Jan 13, 2010
- 14,483
- 15,308
Intelligence agencies thrive on impressing politicians and the public with their mystique, exploits real or imagined, and possession of information that supposedly gives them a unique understanding of the world.
The reality is often bureaucratic and banal, the information unreliable, uncheckable or available in open sources and their judgments frequently politicised and self-serving. All of those elements can be found throughout the recent South Africa's spy cables leaked to al-Jazeera and the Guardian.
Take the story about an Israeli plot to use water-gobbling plants to sabotage Egypt. The alleged scheme is mentioned in a 56-page report compiled by South African intelligence on the Israeli spy agency Mossad. Israel has been trying for decades, the report says, to undermine Egypt's vital Nile water source so that it becomes preoccupied with water shortages rather than the Arab-Israeli conflict.
"Towards this end Israel's Ministry of Science and Technology conducted extensive experiments, and eventually created a type of plant that flourishes on the surface or the banks of the Nile and that absorbs such large quantities of water as to significantly reduce the volume of water that reaches Egypt."
Intelligence agencies such as Mossad have a long history of conducting sabotage operations. There are shrubs, such as the tamarisk, that absorb vast amounts of water and can exacerbate drought.
Advocates of removing the tamarisk claim that a full-grown tamarisk can consume more than 200 gallons of water a day. The tamarisk, though originally from Asia and the Middle East, can now be found in the American west.
The allegation against Mossad could be true or preposterous. Either way it offers an insight into the thinking of intelligence agencies. If true, then Mossad is guilty of reprehensible tactics. If untrue, the South Africans are guilty of naivety in presenting this as fact.
Then there's the claim in a 2011 Russian FSB [Federal Security Service] document that "according to intelligence reports" al-Qaida in the Maghreb was "seeking a way of developing its own biological weapons" and had set up a biological weapons laboratory in eastern Algeria.
The facility was then abandoned after about 40 militants were supposedly killed by the pathogenic culture of pneumonic plague as a result of "improper hermetic conditions".
Quite what these "intelligence reports" amounted to is unclear. But there were stories in the British and US press in 2009, including the Sun, about al-Qaida militants dying from just such an experiment in biological weapons.
They were denied by the Algerian government and al-Qaida, but were encouraged by a "senior US intelligence source". A couple of years later they had wound up in a confidential FSB briefing to South African intelligence.
But in the world of espionage, today as in the past, spies peppering reports with half-truths, rumours, the outlandish and the downright ridiculous is par for the course, the secret cables show – and not that remote from the lucrative fantasies and inventions of Graham Greene's fictional MI6 agent in Our Man In Havana.
Many of the reports, in spite of being marked "confidential", "secret" and "top secret", contain information openly available elsewhere, often written by journalists. One South African intelligence report on Israel's Mossad quotes Chris McGreal, the Guardian's former correspondent in Johannesburg and Jerusalem, who is now based in the US. "Chris McGREAL has claimed that ‘Israel provided expertise and technology that was central to South Africa's development of its nuclear bomb'," the report says.
Not that Mossad is itself above passing off easily available material as secret intelligence. In a report on Russia's internal politics headed "secret", Mossad gives an account of anti-government protests that could have been lifted straight out of mainstream media reports of the time.
The intelligence agency concludes: "In our assessment, the bottom line is that the Kremlin will … rush through measures to limit the opposition even further" – an assessment common inside and outside Russia at the time.
So much of the spies' work is banal, dominated by mundane liaison meetings with counterparts from other intelligence agencies. Far from swapping factual information or carefully analysed data, the agencies often supply one another with little more than their government's political line.
Much of the rest of the time is taken up with watching one another, tracking movements through airports, logging phone calls, keeping tabs on their car registration and checking credit card transactions – or storming out of meetings and commenting acerbically on each other's weaknesses and "arrogance".
When Morocco's intelligence representative in South Africa was "hijacked at gunpoint close to the Moroccan embassy, beaten up and kidnapped for five hours, after which he was dumped in the outskirts of Pretoria" in 2012, South African intelligence officers explain that "violent hijacking very common in SA". The South African intelligence agency report on the incident comments: "The Moroccans tend to be a bit paranoid because of the Sahara issue."
Almost every embassy has at least one intelligence officer claiming to be a diplomat and some have many more. One Middle East embassy had a man listed as the ambassador's driver.
South African intelligence expressed concern when the "driver" returned to the country later claiming to be a businessman with $700,000 (£450,000) to invest.The South Africans wrote wryly: "It seems strange that a former Embassy VIP-driver could have 700,000 US Dollar to his avail to invest."
Souce: Spies, lies and fantasies: leaked cables lift lid on work of intelligence agencies | World news | The Guardian
The reality is often bureaucratic and banal, the information unreliable, uncheckable or available in open sources and their judgments frequently politicised and self-serving. All of those elements can be found throughout the recent South Africa's spy cables leaked to al-Jazeera and the Guardian.
Take the story about an Israeli plot to use water-gobbling plants to sabotage Egypt. The alleged scheme is mentioned in a 56-page report compiled by South African intelligence on the Israeli spy agency Mossad. Israel has been trying for decades, the report says, to undermine Egypt's vital Nile water source so that it becomes preoccupied with water shortages rather than the Arab-Israeli conflict.
"Towards this end Israel's Ministry of Science and Technology conducted extensive experiments, and eventually created a type of plant that flourishes on the surface or the banks of the Nile and that absorbs such large quantities of water as to significantly reduce the volume of water that reaches Egypt."
Intelligence agencies such as Mossad have a long history of conducting sabotage operations. There are shrubs, such as the tamarisk, that absorb vast amounts of water and can exacerbate drought.
Advocates of removing the tamarisk claim that a full-grown tamarisk can consume more than 200 gallons of water a day. The tamarisk, though originally from Asia and the Middle East, can now be found in the American west.
The allegation against Mossad could be true or preposterous. Either way it offers an insight into the thinking of intelligence agencies. If true, then Mossad is guilty of reprehensible tactics. If untrue, the South Africans are guilty of naivety in presenting this as fact.
Then there's the claim in a 2011 Russian FSB [Federal Security Service] document that "according to intelligence reports" al-Qaida in the Maghreb was "seeking a way of developing its own biological weapons" and had set up a biological weapons laboratory in eastern Algeria.
The facility was then abandoned after about 40 militants were supposedly killed by the pathogenic culture of pneumonic plague as a result of "improper hermetic conditions".
Quite what these "intelligence reports" amounted to is unclear. But there were stories in the British and US press in 2009, including the Sun, about al-Qaida militants dying from just such an experiment in biological weapons.
They were denied by the Algerian government and al-Qaida, but were encouraged by a "senior US intelligence source". A couple of years later they had wound up in a confidential FSB briefing to South African intelligence.
But in the world of espionage, today as in the past, spies peppering reports with half-truths, rumours, the outlandish and the downright ridiculous is par for the course, the secret cables show – and not that remote from the lucrative fantasies and inventions of Graham Greene's fictional MI6 agent in Our Man In Havana.
Many of the reports, in spite of being marked "confidential", "secret" and "top secret", contain information openly available elsewhere, often written by journalists. One South African intelligence report on Israel's Mossad quotes Chris McGreal, the Guardian's former correspondent in Johannesburg and Jerusalem, who is now based in the US. "Chris McGREAL has claimed that ‘Israel provided expertise and technology that was central to South Africa's development of its nuclear bomb'," the report says.
Not that Mossad is itself above passing off easily available material as secret intelligence. In a report on Russia's internal politics headed "secret", Mossad gives an account of anti-government protests that could have been lifted straight out of mainstream media reports of the time.
The intelligence agency concludes: "In our assessment, the bottom line is that the Kremlin will … rush through measures to limit the opposition even further" – an assessment common inside and outside Russia at the time.
So much of the spies' work is banal, dominated by mundane liaison meetings with counterparts from other intelligence agencies. Far from swapping factual information or carefully analysed data, the agencies often supply one another with little more than their government's political line.
Much of the rest of the time is taken up with watching one another, tracking movements through airports, logging phone calls, keeping tabs on their car registration and checking credit card transactions – or storming out of meetings and commenting acerbically on each other's weaknesses and "arrogance".
When Morocco's intelligence representative in South Africa was "hijacked at gunpoint close to the Moroccan embassy, beaten up and kidnapped for five hours, after which he was dumped in the outskirts of Pretoria" in 2012, South African intelligence officers explain that "violent hijacking very common in SA". The South African intelligence agency report on the incident comments: "The Moroccans tend to be a bit paranoid because of the Sahara issue."
Almost every embassy has at least one intelligence officer claiming to be a diplomat and some have many more. One Middle East embassy had a man listed as the ambassador's driver.
South African intelligence expressed concern when the "driver" returned to the country later claiming to be a businessman with $700,000 (£450,000) to invest.The South Africans wrote wryly: "It seems strange that a former Embassy VIP-driver could have 700,000 US Dollar to his avail to invest."
Souce: Spies, lies and fantasies: leaked cables lift lid on work of intelligence agencies | World news | The Guardian
