INDEX	Wednesday June 15, 2022
Lies, spies and MIs A very confused story in the Daily Mail suggests a Russian spy has been detained by MI5, trying to fly out of the country. If so, I think this would be the first spy MI5 has ever caught, or one of a vanishingly small group of spies detained by Britain's secret police (who are actually not quite police officers and have to get a real police officer if they want to arrest someone). To explain, MI5 has netted several people described as spies but this was almost invariably down to information obtained from defectors or double agents, commonly defectors who were actually secured by American intelligence. Information obtained this way is dangerous because the Russians (or whoever it is) can send someone posing as a defector who supplies some genuine information and then moves on to disinformation deliberately designed to confuse and mislead. Even on the rare occasions when the defector is genuine almost invariably when he or she runs out of real information he or she continues to spin yarns in order to remain the centre of attention, Real spies are usually people like Michael Bettaney, who worked for MI5 while he was attempting to provide information to the soviets (and subsequently the IRA). MI5 says Bettaney was nabbed by information from a double agent or defector, but many suspect it was his habit of going around saying that when he retired he invited all his colleagues in MI5 to come and visit him at his dacha... Anyway, to return to the Mail. The story associates the alleged spy with hacking, malware and so called zero click software attacks. But the one thing all these techniques have in common is that you don't need to be in the same country, or even in the same continent to mount them. So why have a spy? Spying is very old fashioned partly because of the welter of information that can be obtained quite legitimately on the internet. Hence MI5's anxiety to claim responsibility for arrests in even the most tenuous and dubious circumstances. It needs to make it look like it is doing something to justify its fat budgets. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10917585/Man-accused-working-Kremlin-against-Britain-held-tried-flee-country.html
INDEX Posted by Jonathan Brind.		Wednesday June 15, 2022