INDEX	February 9, 2024
Spook story straight from the pages of fiction (but your taxes pay for it)
The motto or strap line on the web site of the Washington Post is "Democracy Dies in Darkness". This seems quite ironic for the story told on February 9 this year since it was about MI5, and MI5's foremost aim is to be secret, in other words in the darkness. Irony on irony is the fact that it is bylined by William Booth, who may be a real person (there's a picture) but if so he was clearly named after William Boot, the inept journalist who stumbles across sensational stories when sent to be a war correspondent, a role that nothing in life had equipped him for. William Booth must have been named after the Evelyn Waugh character in the sense that the book was published in 1938. The Washington Post story is just as fantastical as anything Waugh wrote yet anyone who knows anything about MI5 will recognise it as all too plausible. The location for Booth's story is a semi secret court in a basement somewhere in Britain. The court is known in the quaint alphabet soup used by these people as SIAC, or the Special Immigration Appeals Commission. The plaintive or perhaps accused (who knows what language to use to describe events in such a fantastical place?) is a one time Afghan refugee who according to MI5 burrowed deep into British intelligence. He burrowed deep because MI5 let him. The Washington Post is quite coy about what he is alleged to have done, except saying he gained access to secret documents and met with Prime Ministers. No blame can be attached to the Americans for failing to name the PMs since Britain has had such a bewildering retinue of people in the job in recent years that no foreigner could be expected to keep up. In court (if that is what SIAC is) the Afghan was known as C2. The British security services (presumably MI5) allege that he "probably" worked for GRU, the Russian intelligence agency. The main evidence, if you can call such tittle tattle evidence, against him was that he went out for drinks with Boris and Dimitri in Kabul. The British spooks could not even say for certain that Boris and Dimitri were spies, but they may have been. They have names that make them sound like spies. C2 claimed asylum in the UK in 2000 as an Afghan refugee. His citizenship was revoked in 2019. He went to SIAC to get it back. He claimed that he served the British state with honour. Describing it as dangerous work. He said he survived "several assassination attempts". William Booth writes: "Britain's assertion that C2 may have been a Russian spy is embarrassing to the government and its intelligence services. Either he was a spy who worked at the heart of British intelligence, or they have misread the evidence and gotten the wrong mole." Why you may ask is C2 not up in court on spying charges? Why is he the one bringing the action and not MI5? Well MI5 doesn't do things like prosecute spies. How many of the Cambridge five were prosecuted? None at all.
INDEX Jonathan Brind	February 9, 2024