EDITO PIR + LIST 3

EDITO PIR

ARE THE INTELLIGENCE OFFICIALS MENTIONNED ON THE LIST IN DANGER ?

EXTRACTS FROM THE PIR POSTING OF THE EIR LIST
MI6 HOOPLA

British Officials Attack the Internet

On May 12, British officials issued a "D-notice" gagging order to prevent the press from reporting the contents of a list that they said former MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson had posted on the Internet. Tomlinson's Swiss Internet service provider, worldcom.ch, cooperated with the British, as did geocities.com in the U.S., and both sites were closed. Every major newspaper in the world hyped the story. Now Internet surfers were getting interested, and thousands of people were looking for The List.

Enough people already had it so that it was impossible to stuff the cyber genie back into the bottle. Lyndon LaRouche's site posted it for a time, and a site in Denmark is still up as this is written.

The hype was amazing. British foreign secretary Robin Cook called the list "potentially dangerous to the people who have worked in the service." Conservative spook-booster and writer Nigel West (aka Rupert Allason) said that "this is hugely damaging to us, on a scale of Philip Agee." One Foreign Office spokesman worried about Osama bin Laden getting the list, and others said that Britain now faces the difficult task of recruiting and training new agents and restoring confidence in MI6.

"We're aware of the reports that the list is on other web sites, and we're considering what action we need to take, if we can take any action at all," another Foreign Office spokesman said. Scotland Yard was on the case. Unnamed "government officials" were worried that the list had been posted for some 24 hours before it was taken down, enabling enemies of the British secret service to harvest the information for possible retaliation against agents named on the list.

Rear Adm. David Pulvertaft, chief of the committee that browbeats British media on national security issues, said "I don't want to overdramatize, but peoples' lives were put at risk. The Internet poses a unique difficulty. It offers an opportunity to the blackmailer or the person with grievances. Government has to get a grip on it, but I don't have a panacea. I wish I did."

Spies' Lives Are Not in Danger

In the U.S., at least, newspapers lapped up these quotations, and never asked whether something else might be going on.

COMMENTS BY PIR ABOUT CERTAIN NAMES ON THE LIST

Of these 16 names, 8 are of special interest. Seven of these were exposed in 1989, and another in 1990, but what's interesting is that these 8 were given -- and accepted -- additional foreign assignments subsequent to their initial exposure. They weren't worried at all. No one particularly cared, and they knew it!

ASQUITH, RAYMOND B.B.
Kiev 1992
BARRETT, RICHARD MARTIN DONNE
Amman 1997
BOWEN, RUPERT
Windhoek 1990, Tirana 1992
CORDERY, ANDREW
Oslo 1995
DEARLOVE, RICHARD BILLING
Washington 1991
LANGMAN, NICHOLAS
Paris 1994
REGAN, MICHAEL JOHN
Bangkok 1995
WOODS, IAN ALEXANDER
Warsaw 1995

QUESTION: If exposure in the media is so dangerous, such that those exposed feel that they are under increased risk, why did these eight continue to accept foreign assignments after they were exposed ten years ago?

ANSWER: This MI6 hoopla is not about protecting spies at all. It's about protecting unaccountability in high places. Fewer secrets mean more accountability to the citizens of the world, and this is what worries British officials as they consider new measures to regulate the Internet.

And that's the real scoop -- technology vs. government secrecy. First it was the photocopying machine. Then databases on personal computers and desktop publishing. And now the Internet. Perhaps democracy has a chance after all.