Retired spies group claims scalps

Retired spies group claims scalps

LONDON, England (Reuters) — It says its members brought about the conviction of radical Egyptian-born cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, uncovered insurgent tactics in Iraq and are now working to provide intelligence from North Korea.

The organization is not the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency or Britain’s security agency MI6 but “Vigil”, a shadowy network of retired spies, senior military personnel, anti-terrorism specialists and banking experts.

The group’s director Dominic Whiteman said he set up Vigil with two other businessmen last year to act as an interface between retired spies who were still party to good, raw intelligence, and the police and security services.

“This evidence was just getting lost in the system,” Whiteman told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Vigil numbers more than 30 members and is spread across the globe from India to the United States, working with contacts ranging from a maid in Bangkok and a Mumbai train driver to senior intelligence figures.

“We just recruited a guy who’s a senior figure in police training in Iraq,” Whiteman said.

Sixty percent of Vigil’s work involves gaining information via the Internet, by infiltrating online chatrooms, while the remainder is face-to-face or telephone work.

The information gleaned is passed on to authorities like the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, the New York Intelligence Unit and British police’s Counter Terrorism Command (CTC).

A CTC spokeswoman said the group was treated seriously.

“The CTC is working closely with Vigil and in particular its director and spokesman who has made officers aware of chatroom material,” she said.

Whiteman said: “We generally don’t drop stuff off until it’s pretty well formed and ready for them to use.

“It’s quite a faceless relationship. You can never really tell if some of the evidence you hand over is behind some of the arrests that have been security service-inspired.”

‘Miss Marple‘
One member of Vigil is credited with helping bring about the conviction of cleric Hamza, jailed in London in February for inciting racial hatred and soliciting murder, and wanted in the United States on terrorism charges.

Glen Jenvey said he tricked Hamza into handing over videos and audio tapes which were used by U.S. authorities in their case against James Ujaama who pleaded guilty in 2004 to trying to help al Qaeda militants.

Ujaama’s conviction led to an arrest warrant for Hamza and ultimately the discovery of the material that led to his trial.

Jenvey said he previously worked for Sri Lanka’s intelligence service infiltrating the London base of the Tamil Tigers. He describes himself as an amateur spy “like Miss Marple,” the elderly sleuth created by author Agatha Christie.

“It sounds more insulting to the terrorists,” he told Reuters.

His latest undercover work has involved another hardline Muslim cleric, Omar Bakri Mohammed, banned from Britain in August as part of a crackdown on so-called “preachers of hate”.

Jenvey’s revelation that Bakri had been delivering nightly sermons via an Internet chatroom from his exile in Lebanon was reported prominently in Britain’s media this week.

“What he wasn’t aware of is we recorded everything for the last six months and then handed it over to the anti-terrorist squad and MI5 (the UK domestic spy agency),” he said.

“When you listen to a whole lecture … it’s a pretty fair assessment he’s inciting terrorism, calling for terrorism, supporting terrorism and he’s Mr Terrorism himself.”

Jenvey said one of the chatroom’s regular participants, a man since convicted of inciting racist hatred, had also called for the killing of Queen Elizabeth. Others had targeted U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Anjem Choudary, a close friend of Bakri, denied there was anything sinister about the sermons and said the talks in “no way encourage or incite” British Muslims.

Muslim extremists.
London, where four British Islamists blew themselves up on the city’s transport network last year, remained a focal point, Whiteman said.

MI5’s chief Eliza Manningham-Buller said recently Muslim extremists were plotting at least 30 attacks and there were some 1,600 suspects being monitored.

Whiteman said a very trusted contact who had a “key security role in the UK” had revealed that 70 percent of information given in a daily briefing to President Bush by U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte centred on the British capital.

Vigil has now turned its sights on two groups prominent in Britain: Tablighi Jamaat, a missionary organization that is planning to build Britain’s largest mosque in east London, and Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), an organization Britain announced it would ban after the July 7, 2005 London bomb attacks.

Both groups say they do not have links to militants and say they promote peace. Media reports have often linked them to terrorism investigations.

“We wanted to find out more,” Whiteman said, adding that his group had already infiltrated the organizations. “There’s nothing to suggest that they will be banned, but there are definitely a few rotten apples that need to be looked at.”

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Egeland: ‘Meltdown’ in Darfur

Egeland: ‘Meltdown’ in Darfur

UNITED NATIONS (CNN) — Citing a “dramatic deterioration” of the situation in Darfur, the top U.N. humanitarian official said a crisis is approaching for the region in Sudan that could cost millions of lives.

“I was there in 2004 when there was 1 million people in need,” Jan Egeland, the U.N. emergency relief coordinator, told reporters. “2005, 2 million … in the spring, 3 million. And now there are 4 million in desperate need of humanitarian assistance.”

Egeland briefed the U.N. Security Council Wednesday on Darfur.

In a report from Reuters, Egeland also accused Sudan of deliberately hindering relief aid in Darfur, attacking villages and arming brutal militia to combat rebels and bandits.

Egeland told the Security Council that international relief operations were threatened by government obstruction and members needed to talk to Sudanese officials immediately as well as put pressure on those sending arms to rebels.

“The next weeks may be make or break for our lifeline to more than 3 million people,” Egeland said in the Reuters report. “This period may well be the last opportunity for this Council, the government of Sudan, the African Union, the rebels, and all of us to avert a humanitarian disaster of much larger proportions than even the one we so far have witnessed in Darfur.”

Part of the problem, Egeland said, is a “meltdown in security. The humanitarians are confined to the towns. We cannot even reach many of the camps.”

Meanwhile, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Wednesday that negotiations continue on whether Sudan will allow U.N. peacekeepers to be stationed in Darfur, and that he is waiting to hear from Sudanese President Omer Hassan Al-Bashir.

“I spoke to President Bashir today,” Annan said, “and he indicated that he will be writing to me shortly. And I think I should wait for his letter.” (Full story)

Last week, the United Nations said Sudan had agreed “in principle” to a plan that would station U.N. peacekeepers and African Union troops as a hybrid operation in Darfur. But Sudanese officials denied that, saying they would only accept technical and logistics support from the United Nations.

U.N. officials say at least 200,000 people have been slain in Darfur from fighting between government-backed troops, militias and rebels. Millions of others have been displaced.

The attacks by militias who support the Arab government against blacks in Darfur have been characterized as a genocide.

In late August, the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 1706, which expands the mandate of the U.N. mission in Sudan to include its deployment to Darfur.

“The failure is one of the government not being willing to protect its own citizens, rather fueling the conflict; of rebels not wanting to join the cease-fire; and of the international community, which is not living up to the responsibility to protect, which was solemnly sworn in this building one year ago,” Egeland said.

The 4 million he mentioned, Egeland said, “are dependent on international assistance to survive the future. There is no economy. There are no nomadic roots anymore. There is nothing to sustain them except the international lifeline.

“Up until August, we were able to — against all odds — to reach up to 3 million of these people,” he said. “Most of the people got assistance, and mortality decreased because of this — the best-funded operation on Earth … all of that is now at risk,” he said.

“Ninety-five percent of the roads in west Darfur are no-go at the moment. We cannot go by road, except with massive military escort, and there will be hundreds of thousands who are beyond our reach and where we seem to have little hope of resuming activities unless we see a dramatic change for the better. But the reality is that the change is for the worse.”

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U.S. moves to ‘Plan B’ on Sudan conflict

U.S. moves to ‘Plan B’ on Sudan conflict

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States may move to “Plan B” if the Sudanese government cannot reach an agreement on allowing peacekeepers in the region by January 1, U.S. presidential envoy Andrew Natsios said.

What exactly “Plan B” entails is unclear, however.

“We need to put a time limit on where this is going,” Natsios said Monday, declining to specify consequences for Sudan if the deadline is not met.

“Making threats is not a wise thing to do,” he added.

After years of low-level clashes over water and land in the vast, arid Darfur region, rebels from ethnic African tribes took up arms against Sudan’s Arab-dominated central government in 2003.

Khartoum is accused of unleashing the janjaweed pro-government militia force in return. The militiamen are accused of atrocities in a conflict that has killed some 200,000 people and forced 2.5 million from their homes.

The mandate for the 7,000-member African Union peacekeeping troops in Darfur expires January 1.

Natsios noted that U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who has made peace in Darfur a top priority, is stepping down on the same day.

Optimism about a final settlement and approval to send in troops has risen somewhat since the Sudanese government joined with the United Nations and the African Union in a framework agreement last Thursday at a meeting in Ethiopia. The agreement included some concessions by the Sudanese, including support for U.N. assistance proposals.

Although the Sudanese government agreed in principle last week to allow U.N. peacekeepers into the region as part of a joint peacekeeping mission with the African Union, they immediately began backpedaling.

There has been no final agreement on the proposed “hybrid” force of 20,000 U.N. and African Union peacekeepers and police officers.

But Natsios remains resolute, saying of the Sudanese, “You frequently will take two steps forward and one step back.”

“Our goal here is to get the Sudanese government to negotiate an agreement that they will then carry out with the United Nations that will result in a force, a hybrid force, going to Darfur,” Natsios said.

One issue not subject to negotiation is alleged Sudanese government participation in atrocities in Darfur, Natsios said.

“Human rights abuses are not negotiable,” he said. “There is no compromise on that.”

Susan Rice, a top Africa aide in former President Bill Clinton’s administration, has assailed the U.N.-AU plan as a “colossal sellout.”

“We have a fig leaf here that won’t solve the problem,” Rice said in comments last week. She added that it was unseemly for the international community to be “negotiating with the perpetrators of genocide.”

Sudanese refusal to accept a “robust” international force should be met with a U.S.- and European-led bombing campaign against Sudanese airfields and other targets, Rice said.

Natsios said he was especially pleased by the “very helpful” role played by Chinese Ambassador Wang Guangya in Ethiopia. Since the United Nations first became involved in the Darfur crisis in 2004, China has been widely seen as an advocate for the Sudanese government position on Darfur because of commercial ties.

Natsios, who attended the meeting in Ethiopia, also said Arab League delegates and Egyptian Foreign minister Abul Geit made positive contributions.

A former chief of the U.S. foreign aid program, Natsios has remained relatively silent about his Darfur duties since his appointment by President Bush in September.

On Monday, however, he was very much in the spotlight, appearing at a two-hour think tank forum in the morning, meeting with reporters in the afternoon and presiding at the official opening of an exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in the evening.

The museum planned to project wall-sized images of what it described as the “escalating genocide.”

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