Free Republic

MI6 hired Al Qaeda men to kill Gaddafi: ex-official By Martin Bright LONDON: The British government will this week go to unprecedented lengths to stop a renegade counter-intelligence officer, David Shayler, from making his most devastating claim yet : that the Libyan Islamic cell paid by British intelligence agents to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi in February 1996 were members of Al Qaeda. The Libyan cell is believed to have included one of Osama bin Laden's most trusted lieutenants, Anas al-Liby, who remains on the US government's most wanted list with a reward of $25 million for his capture. Al-Liby lived in...

Newly declassified documents show informant Stefan Halper was motivated in part by "monetary compensation" and was paid nearly $1.2 million from FBI over three decades. ********************************************************************** Akey FBI informant in the widely-debunked Russia collusion case was paid nearly $1.2 million over three decades, was motivated in part by "monetary compensation," and continued snitching even after agents concluded he told them an inaccurate story about future Trump National Security Advisor Mike Flynn, newly declassified documents show. The nearly 700 pages of once-secret documents, obtained by Just the News, were recently turned over by FBI Director Kash Patel to House Judiciary Committee...

MI5 lied to three courts while defending its handling of a misogynistic neo-Nazi state agent who attacked his girlfriend with a machete, the BBC can reveal. Arguing for secrecy, the Security Service told judges it had stuck to its policy of not confirming or denying informants' identities. In fact, MI5 had disclosed the man's status in phone calls to me, as it tried to persuade me not to investigate the man - known publicly only as agent X. The service aggressively maintained its position until I produced evidence proving it was untrue, including a recording of one of the calls....

The art in espionage is the ability to hide in plain sight and the greatest of spies are the ones you never learn about. This statement rings true in the case of Anthony Blunt. His life seemed predestined for greatness. A Cambridge graduate with familial ties to the Royal Family, he was the very picture of establishment respectability. His brilliance as a polymath, fluency in multiple languages, and renown as a world-class art historian made him virtually untouchable, and he knew it. Beneath this veneer of aristocratic refinement lurked a secret that would shake Britain to its very foundations. For...

School leavers who did badly in their exams can still have a career as a spy in the secret security services, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. MI5 is looking for potential spies with just one GCSE, providing the qualification is in English and it's a grade 4 or above. Spymasters hope to recruit dozens of school leavers or older adults on a starting salary of £32,000. The role – called a Foundation Analyst – involves examining data, such as audio files, from potential state enemies to see if they are linked to terrorists, extremists or organised crime gangs. Most...

Secret files relating to the disgraced Prince Andrew, the Royal connected to child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, will be locked away until 2065. Unless Prince Andrew lives until 105, he will likely be dead by the time the files are released. The restrictions came to light after historian Andrew Lownie requested access to them for an upcoming biography on the British royal family member. Last year, Andrew paid £12 million (around $15 million) to Virginia Giuffre, who accused him of sexual assault while she was 17 and underage. As The National Post reported, the denial of access forms part of a...

Several of the British government’s intelligence organizations – MI5, MI6, and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) – have banned white people from applying to prized internships, preferring to receive applications from ethnic minorities who grew up poor instead. The MI5 website states that to be eligible for either a 10- or 11-week scholarship at one of the organizations, “you’ll need to be in your penultimate or final year of university, from a Black, Asian or ethnic minority background, and from a socially or economically disadvantaged background.” The organizations also claim that without diversity and inclusion they cannot undertake their main function...

The heads of UK and US security services have made an unprecedented joint appearance to warn of the threat from China. FBI director Christopher Wray said China was the "biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security" and had interfered in politics, including recent elections. MI5 head Ken McCallum said his service had more than doubled its work against Chinese activity in the last three years and would be doubling it again. MI5 is now running seven times as many investigations related to activities of the Chinese Communist Party compared to 2018, he added. He also said China deployed...

MI5 has issued a rare warning that an alleged Chinese agent has infiltrated Parliament to interfere in UK politics. An alert from the security service said Christine Ching Kui Lee "established links" for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) with current and aspiring MPs. She then gave donations to politicians, with funding coming from foreign nationals in China and Hong Kong. It comes after a "significant, long-running" investigation by MI5, Whitehall sources told the BBC. One of the MPs funded by Ms Lee was Labour's Barry Gardiner, who received over £420,000 from her in five years - but he said he...

Global scandals now labeled Russiagate, Spygate, and what President Trump calls “Obamagate” shook the political world, but hit me closer to home. I’m the reason the so-called FBI “spy” at the center of Spygate, Stefan Halper, met Carter Page, the alleged “Russian Asset” in Russiagate’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation. On May 19, 2018, this realization blindsided me in London as I was about to fly out for my wedding. The New York Times, NBC News and other sources had outed my PhD supervisor, Stefan Halper, as a spy known to the UK’s MI6 intelligence service as “The Walrus.” It didn’t seem...

The attorney general has suggested that the Justice Department review of the Russia investigation has uncovered “troubling” findings without going into details. For years, President Trump has complained bitterly about F.B.I. officials who investigated his campaign’s ties to Russia, and about the “rogue bureaucrats of the Deep State” at the intelligence agencies, portraying them as enemies out to delegitimize his presidency. Now, a special Justice Department inquiry investigating those officials has taken on another of Mr. Trump’s irritants: leaks to the news media. Investigators for John H. Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut leading the investigation, have asked witnesses about...

Hillary Clinton is back, and so is Chris Steele, this time in the United Kingdom. They are no less than implying that current Conservative (Tory) Prime Minister Boris Johnson is a Russian plant. And it’s no mistake that these allegations are being made just before a U.K. general election on December 12 that will decide the fate of Brexit. It started last month, when the U.K.’s leftwing Guardian newspaper reported the existence of a secret report that said the Russians spent five years “cultivating leading Tories including Johnson…” The 50-page “dossier” from the U.K.’s intelligence and security committee is “based...

The Federalist has learned that the now-outed CIA and FBI informant Stefan Halper served as a source for Washington Post reporter David Ignatius, providing more evidence that the intelligence community has co-opted the press to push anti-Trump conspiracy theories. In addition, an email recently obtained by The Federalist from the MI5-connected Christopher Andrew bragging that his long-time friend Ignatius has the “‘inside track’ on Flynn” adds further confirmation of this conclusion.Svetlana Lokhova, the Russian-born English citizen and Soviet-era scholar, told The Federalist that she only realized the significance of her communications with and about Ignatius following the filing of attorney...

Vanity , Quillith, just a vanity

Two of the most senior intelligence officials in the US and UK privately shared concerns about “our strange situation” as the FBI launched its 2016 investigation into whether Donald Trump’s campaign was colluding with Russia. Text messages between Andrew McCabe, the deputy director of the FBI at the time, and Jeremy Fleming, his then counterpart at MI5, now the head of GCHQ, also reveal their mutual surprise at the result of the EU referendum, which some US officials regarded as a “wake-up call”, according to a person familiar with the matter. While Russia had previously been viewed as a country...

Two of the most senior intelligence officials in the US and UK privately shared concerns about “our strange situation” as the FBI launched its 2016 investigation into whether Donald Trump’s campaign was colluding with Russia, the Guardian has learned. Text messages between Andrew McCabe, the deputy director of the FBI at the time, and Jeremy Fleming, his then counterpart at MI5, now the head of GCHQ, also reveal their mutual surprise at the result of the EU referendum, which some US officials regarded as a “wake-up call”, according to a person familiar with the matter. While Russia had previously been...

The true story of Count Laszlo Almasy, the Hungarian explorer and hero of the film The English Patient, is told in MI5 files released to the National Archives today. In the film, Almasy, played by Ralph Fiennes, is a disfigured patient in an Italian hospital who had been the handsome young lover of an Englishwoman (Kristin Scott Thomas) in pre-war Cairo. The truth is more prosaic. Although Almasy was a Hungarian explorer and airman who mapped the Libyan and Egyptian deserts and was prominent in pre-war Cairo society, he was no hero. He was a bungling Nazi intelligence officer who,...

DID MI5 DROP THE BALL? The storied and highly respected intelligence agency of the United Kingdom seems to have overlooked a few obvious clues that could have prevented the recent carnage in Manchester. When a popular entertainer’s concert ends, upwards of 20,000 people are going to leave the venue in a crush of humanity, albeit more or less orderly. The predatory fiend, Salman Ramadan Abedi, laid in wait in the foyer of the stadium, knowing that this throng would necessarily have to pass in close proximity to him. These folks would slowly move to train stations, bus terminals, etc., where...

The FBI and MI5 would be more honest if they admitted to American and British populations: When it comes to the horrors of Islamist terrorism, you’re on your own FBI ‘warned MI5 in January that the Manchester bomber was planning an attack on Britain’. So claim the mainstream media. The take-down-Trump-obsessed FBI flagged Britain’s MI5 that Manchester bomber Salman Abedi was planning a terrorist attack on Britain.

Counter-terrorism investigators have made six arrests after disrupting what they believe was a “significant plot” to attack the UK that was influenced by Islamic State. Material recovered from an address raided in Derby has been initially assessed as being consistent with that needed to make homemade explosives, the Guardian understands. The arrests were intelligence led but past cases have shown that initial assumptions among investigators are sometimes incorrect because materials for making homemade explosives can also have innocent uses. It followed an operation by the domestic security service MI5 and counter-terrorism police. Counter-terrorism officials believe they have disrupted three attacks...