Aangirfan

This was reported by the UK's Independent newspaper, 16 April 2000.

(http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=20187 / http://www.bilderberg.org/sis.htm)

Foreign Office documents show that the world's media was used by British intelligence as part of a plot to overthrow Indonesia's President Sukarno in the 1960s.

The BBC, the Observer and Reuters carried 'fake stories'manufactured by agents working for the Foreign Office.

Propaganda expert Norman Reddaway noted, in a letter to Britain's Jakarta ambassador Sir Andrew Gilchrist, that Gilchrist's stories were broadcast via the BBC.

This included an invented story that Indonesian communists were planning to slaughter the citizens of Jakarta.

Reddaway's letter suggests that the Observer newspaper was persuaded to take the Foreign Office "angle" on the Indonesian takeover by reporting a "kid glove coup without butchery".


An Indonesian institution for children

Cabinet papers show that British spies, including MI6, supported Islamic guerrillas in order to destabilise Sukarno.

Former government minister Lord Healey said: "Norman Reddaway had an office in Singapore. They began to put out false information and I think that, to my horror on one occasion, they put forged documents on the bodies of Indonesian soldiers we had taken."

Lord Healey denied any personal knowledge of the MI6 campaign to arm opponents of Sukarno. But, he added: "I would certainly have supported it."



The sources for the following are: http://www.counterpunch.org/miller03142005.html
http://spinwatch.server101.com/

DAVID MILLER, at Spinwatch, writes that journalists working for the Services Sound and Vision Corporation (SSVC) have provided news reports to the BBC.

The SSVC is funded by the Ministry of Defence as a propaganda operation.

Spinwatch reveals that Britain has fake journalists.

The government pays for their wages and they provide news as if they were normal journalists rather than paid propagandists.

Normally they work for British Forces Broadcasting Service, which is run by the SSVC.

In the case of Iraq, the BBC promoted the lie that the army (in illegal ocupation) was a 'peacekeeping' force.

BBC World Service is reportedly funded by the Foreign Office.

Their journalists are employed by the SSVC, the Services Sound and Vision Corporation.

The UK Foreign Office reportedly runs a network of fake news operations.

One of these is allegedly British Satellite News.

BSN is broadcast over the Reuters World News Service.



Former UK cabinet minister Michael Meacher wrote in the Guardian, November 21, 2003, about the UK government's Operation Rockingham, which was used to spread lies about Iraq.

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1089931,00.html)

David Kelly, giving evidence to the prime minister's intelligence and security committee, said: "Within the defence intelligence services I liaise with the Rockingham cell."

Former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, Scott Ritter, was a US military intelligence officer.

He declared, before the Iraq war, that almost all of Iraq's WMD had been destroyed as a result of inspections, and the rest either used or destroyed in the first Gulf war.

In the Scottish Sunday Herald in June 2003, Ritter said: "Operation Rockingham (set up by defence intelligence staff in 1991) cherry-picked intelligence.

"They had to sustain the allegation that Iraq had WMD [when] Unscom was showing the opposite...

"Rockingham staff were ... selectively culling [picking out] reports that sustained the [WMD] claims. They ignored the vast majority of the data which mitigated against such claims."

According to Michael Meacher: "Within the UK intelligence establishment... Rockingham clearly had a central, though covert, role in seeking to prove an active Iraqi WMD programme.

Ritter said: "Rockingham was the source of some very controversial information which led to inspections of a suspected ballistic missile site. We ... found nothing. However, our act of searching allowed the US and UK to say that the missiles existed."

Ritter says that Rockingham officers were acting on political orders "from the very highest levels".



It was revealed by sections of the Scottish press that the deputy director of the Lockerbie trial briefing unit at Glasgow University, Professor Andrew Fulton, was an MI6 intelligence officer.

The unit was supposed to provide "impartial and objective" legal information about the trial and was much used by the TV news programmes.

24/05/00 THE SCOTSMAN:

"Prof Fulton has been 'on holiday' since it was revealed that during his 30 year diplomatic career he was a key memberof the MI6 secret service in Europe, Asia and America."



Allegedly, Dominic Lawson, who has worked for the BBC, and who once edited the Sunday Telegraph, has links to MI6 and Princess Diana. (He now works for the Mail)

Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services?

Roy Greenslade, media specialist at the Telegraph (formerly at the Guardian), has written that most media outlets "are playthings of MI5."

Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report that the editor of “one of Britain’s most distinguished journals” believed that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll.

And in 1991, Richard Norton-Taylor revealed in the Guardian that 500 prominent Britons paid by the CIA and the now defunct Bank of Commerce and Credit International, included 90 journalists.


The BBC's Alvar Lidell served with the RAF as an intelligence officer

The following extracts are from an article at the excellent Medialens

http://www.medialens.org/alerts/06/060303_hacks_and_spooks.php

March 3, 2006

HACKS AND SPOOKS - By Professor Richard Keeble

In their analysis of the contemporary secret state, Dorril and Ramsay gave the media a crucial role...

Going as far back as 1945, George Orwell no less became a war correspondent for the Observer - probably as a cover for intelligence work.

Significantly most of the men he met in Paris on his assignment, Freddie Ayer, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ernest Hemingway were either working for the intelligence services or had close links to them.

Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of MI6, reports that Orwell attended a meeting in Paris of resistance fighters on behalf of David Astor, his editor at the Observer and leader of the intelligence service’s unit liasing with the French resistance.

The release of Public Record Office documents in 1995 about some of the operations of the MI6-financed propaganda unit, the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office, threw light on this secret body - which even Orwell aided by sending them a list of “crypto-communists”.

Set up by the Labour government in 1948, it 'ran' dozens of Fleet Street journalists and a vast array of news agencies across the globe until it was closed down by Foreign Secretary David Owen in 1977.

According to John Pilger in the anti-colonial struggles in Kenya, Malaya and Cyprus, IRD was so successful that the journalism served up as a record of those episodes was a cocktail of the distorted and false in which the real aims and often atrocious behaviour of the British intelligence agencies was hidden.




And spy novelist John le Carré, who worked for MI6 between 1960 and 1964, has made the amazing statement that the British secret service then controlled large parts of the press – just as they may do today.

In 1975, following Senate hearings on the CIA, the reports of the Senate’s Church Committee and the House of Representatives’ Pike Committee highlighted the extent of agency recruitment of both British and US journalists.

And sources revealed that half the foreign staff of a British daily were on the MI6 payroll.

David Leigh, in The Wilson Plot, his seminal study of the way in which the secret service smeared through the mainstream media and destabilised the Government of Harold Wilson before his sudden resignation in 1976, quotes an MI5 officer: “We have somebody in every office in Fleet Street”

And the most famous whistleblower of all, Peter (Spycatcher) Wright, revealed that MI5 had agents in newspapers and publishing companies whose main role was to warn them of any forthcoming “embarrassing publications”.

Wright also disclosed that the Daily Mirror tycoon, Cecil King, “was a longstanding agent of ours” who “made it clear he would publish anything MI5 might care to leak in his direction”.



Selective details about Wilson and his secretary, Marcia Falkender, were leaked by the intelligence services to sympathetic Fleet Street journalists.

Wright comments: “No wonder Wilson was later to claim that he was the victim of a plot”. King was also closely involved in a scheme in 1968 to oust Prime Minister Harold Wilson and replace him with a coalition headed by Lord Mountbatten.

Hugh Cudlipp, editorial director of the Mirror from 1952 to 1974, was also closely linked to intelligence, according to Chris Horrie, in his recently published history of the newspaper.

David Walker, the Mirror’s foreign correspondent in the 1950s, was named as an MI6 agent following a security scandal while another Mirror journalist, Stanley Bonnet, admitted working for MI5 in the 1980s investigating the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.


Mossad's Robert Maxwell (left) 

According to Stephen Dorril, intelligence gathering during the miners’ strike of 1984-85 was helped by the fact that during the 1970s MI5’s F Branch had made a special effort to recruit industrial correspondents – with great success.

In 1991, just before his mysterious death, Mirror proprietor Robert Maxwell was accused by the US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh of acting for Mossad, the Israeli secret service, though Dorril suggests his links with MI6 were equally as strong.



Following the resignation from the Guardian of Richard Gott, its literary editor in December 1994 in the wake of allegations that he was a paid agent of the KGB, the role of journalists as spies suddenly came under the media spotlight – and many of the leaks were fascinating.

For instance, according to The Times editorial of 16 December 1994: “Many British journalists benefited from CIA or MI6 largesse during the Cold War.”

The intimate links between journalists and the secret services were highlighted in the autobiography of the eminent newscaster Sandy Gall.

He reports without any qualms how, after returning from one of his reporting assignments to Afghanistan, he was asked to lunch by the head of MI6.

And in January 2001, the renegade MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson, claimed Dominic Lawson, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph and son of the former Tory chancellor, Nigel Lawson, provided journalistic cover for an MI6 officer on a mission to the Baltic to handle and debrief a young Russian diplomat who was spying for Britain.


Lynn de Rothschild.

Since 9/11 all of Fleet Street has been awash in warnings by anonymous intelligence sources of terrorist threats.

According to former Labour minister Michael Meacher, much of this disinformation was spread via sympathetic journalists by the Rockingham cell within the MoD.

A parallel exercise, through the office of Special Plans, was set up by Donald Rumsfeld in the US.

Thus, to take just one example, Michael Evans, The Times defence correspondent, reported on 29 November 2002: “Saddam Hussein has ordered hundred of his officials to conceal weapons of mass destruction components in their homes to evade the prying eyes of the United Nations inspectors.”

The source of these 'revelations' was said to be 'intelligence'...