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Chasing Diego - again by Jimmy Burns

Wed, 5 May 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

An abridged version of this article appeared in the Dutch magazine Hard Gras in April 2010

Buenos Aires, January 2010, the start of World Cup Year. Superficially Maradona is a man transformed, his latest act of irresponsible behaviour-a foul-mouthed rant against some journalists when Argentina quialified- led to a dip in his poll ratings but is turning into a mere blip on a road to redemption in his role as coach of the national team. In the final preparatory stage for the Cup, Argentina beat Germany in a friendly! His past infidelities have been forgiven and he lives openly with his latest girlfriend while his ex-wife Claudia manages his financial affairs. He has reconciled himself with his daughters- doting grandfather to the child of Gianina, the youngest of them, a footballer’s (Kum Aguero of Atletico de Madrid) wife, supportive Dad to the other, Dalma, the eldest, a successful young actress.

I saw Dalma in a three-woman play in Buenos Aires just after Christmas. It was the first night after the opening, and the small theatre was still packed with Maradona’s family and friends. It was gathering of face-lifts, and ostentatious jewellery, and tight-fitting Italian suits and dresses. It was like a scene from the Godfather although there is no suggestion that the Mafia was present. Some of the men, nonetheless, had forgotten to take off their dark-glasses. Some of the women looked as if they had walked in from some high class brothel. The play iwas no Skaespeare. Called ‘Fire of Women’ , it is a tough satire about the generational gaps between a grandmother, mother , and daughter (played by Dalma). The three spent most of the play shouting personal abuse at each other, only stopping occasionally when they hear the music of Sandro, Argentina’s legendary pop star-the Latin American Elvis- who died just as the play was about to be premiered.

Dalma has the dark somewhat demonic eyes of her father and seems to fit quite naturally into the role of a spoilt little bitch, mouthing bad language. She is overweight, and wears a permament expression of an adolescent pout, which makes her perfect for the role of a bulimic teenager, obsessed about her weight, her mother’s lesbianism, and her grandmother’s endless facelifts. The play ends with the grandmother tricking daughter and granddaughter into a enclosed room, and setting light to the gas, so that all presumably perish. It is nihilistic end to a terrible play which shows Argentina at its worst. On the first night Maradona came along with his ex-wife, Claudia, and posed for snappy family snaps with Dalma clutching his gift of a large teddy bear. Maradona was on his best behaviour, charming with the media, and playing the part of a doting Dad almost to perfection.

Such is the public persona. And yet dig beneath the surface and Maradona remains the same unpredictable, erratic genius I first encountered as his biographer. His occasional descent into violence- of word or deed-is the product as much of his environment as of his inner demons-his upbringing in the lawless lands of the shanty town, his long-term drug abuse , the hangers-on and opportunists who have made their own habit of making use of him.

Argentina is Latin America’s failed state,for ever falling short of its huge economic potential. It is noted for the corruption prevalent among its politicians and businessmen, and the wheeler dealers that pervade the football industry, from top to bottom. It is a world Maradona moves in and out of with ease, the vested interests ensuring that despite his human failings and his wasted brilliance he is allowed to give more of himself. For all his public raging against the establishment, Maradona has spent most of his adult life being nourished as much by the powerful as by the hard-core fans that venerate him from Buenos Aires to Baghdad. His arrogance and natural vindictiveness have dented his popularity around the world. But among his loyal fans, the collective memory hangs on the moments of sheer magic he produced as a player, a natural talent that learnt to control a ball in the dust before becoming rich.

It is in the southern Buenos Aires neighbourhood of La Boca, where the myth of Maradona as the people’s idol has endured the longest. It’s January, the height of summer in the capital city, and bus loads of tourists converge on the area. Amidst the tango dancers and pavement painters, the no less mercenary Maradona-look-alikes –dressed in the Argentina national colours- balance a football on their feet for less than a minute and charge ten dollars. Nearby a statue of Maradona looks out from teh second floor of a brightly coloured house once inhabited by a fisherman. There is either a statue or a mural dedicated to Maradona almost on every corner of la Boca. The most solid remembrance is a large dark metal statue at the entrance to the museum at La Bombonera, the Boca Juniors stadium. It is self-consciously heroic, like that of a Roman general or Rocky Balboa,less work of art than movie prop.

Boca Juniors is the club Maradona has always claimed closest to his soul. Boca likes to see itself as the home of the marginalised, drawing to its bosom to the dark-skinned Maradona look alikes. Murals and sculptures have immortalised Maradona in and around La Bombonera, the stadium that has received him as player and fanatical fan. The museum is dedicated to a litany of eccentric legends from Rattin the ‘Rat’ to Gatti ‘the madman’, although Maradona retains pride of place as the undisputed greatest of them all.

******

But rewind this story to an evening in September 1996 when Maradona sat facing me across a table of an Italian restaurant in London, looking at the first edition of this book which the author had just handed him. After months of chasing him around the world, I hoped this would be a defining moment by which I could measure his willingness to come to terms with himself.

And yet this was destined not to be a night of revelations. Maradona was flanked by his then agent Guillermo Coppola, and Giancula Vialli. They collectively conveyed an image of threatened conspiracy-although I could only guess at the nature of the conversation I had interrupted. I imagined it might have something to do with the rumour that Maradona wanted to play for Chelsea. Whatever it was he wasn’t going to talk more about it there, and soon I watched him depart into the night, in the direction of one of the capital’s hot nightspots.

Maradona saved his reaction to my book for a few days later while he was visiting the southern Spanish resort of Alicante for a ‘health cure.’ Pouring out his latest confession about his drug addiction, Maradona slammed all those who had helped me, accusing them of betrayal. ‘Burns has pissed all over me, ‘he declared on Spanish radio.

In Alicante, Maradona went on a bender. In the early hours he returned to his hotel in a state of mind one eye-witness described as ‘very strange and disturbed’. Maradona then got stuck in the left when the electrics failed. He kicked the doors of the lift until his foot bled. After the fire brigade rescued him, he went on kicking out at tables and chairs, screaming until daybreak when the hotel management presented him with a bill for the damage. Approaching the age of 37, past his sell-by date as a player and staring into the abyss, it seemed that this might be the start of the final chapter of Maradona’s turbulent life. But he had fallen from the stars to the shit before, only to get up again. This turned out to be far from the latest twist in his helter-skelter life.

A few weeks earlier Maradona had announced he was quitting Boca Juniors after missing five penalties in a crucial phase of the local league championship. The man who had invoked a benign deity in justifying his cheat goal against the English in Mexico 1986, now blamed ‘witches’ for casting a negative spell on him. Maradona was continuing to struggle with a drug problem for which he was seeking help from an array of doctors Senior officials of Boca Juniors privately warned that they feared Maradona might fatally collapse in the middle of a match, his heart simply giving up under the strain of his drug abuse. In one of his characteristic spontaneous outbursts on national TV, he declared: “Maradona the football player is dead.” He went on playing for Boca until October 1997 but even then news reports that he had finally hung up his boots and beat a dignified retreat from the headlines of world football proved premature.

******

In January 2000 Maradona stared death in the face. Grossly overweight and over-dosed and suffering from a heart condition that he had inherited from his father, he collapsed while on vacation in the Uruguayan resort of Punta Del Este. He was admitted into hospital suffering from hypertension and an irregular heartbeat. Coppola was on hand to tell the media that it had nothing to do with drugs, while Maradona’s friend, the Argentine president at the time Carlos Menem put it all down to a ‘stress attack.’ Later the Uruguayan police revealed that analysis of Maradona’s blood and urine showed ‘excessive consumption of cocaine.’

The exclusive bedside TV images which Coppola negotiated on his client’s behalf showed Maradona recovering. But he had put on four stones since he had last quit playing some three years earlier. He was bloated and puffy-eyed, and was hanging on. If it had been almost anybody else, Maradona would have died that day. But then his resilience or mere good fortune have always baffled his doctors. The phone-call informing the author that Maradona would go on living in the new millennium caught me in conversation with some of his fans on the worldwide net. Micky from Liverpool said that Maradona was wanted by more clubs than Michael Owen would ever be. Charly from San Jose, California, said that Maradona was greater than Pele. Someone in Kathmandu insisted that Maradona was the king of football, while an Argentine doctor recalled being freed after being held at gunpoint by Afghan tribesmen and shouting Maradona’s name. He was still adored by the universal fan for the player he was once.

It was about that time that Jon Smith, the international football agent that had represented Maradona between 1987-1993- had concluded that the footballer had ceased to be the internationally marketable product he once was. Smith told me that towards the end of the 20th century he had approached three English Premiership clubs with an offer of Maradona as coach, and was promptly told to get lost.

But nothing with Maradona ever turned out quite like others would have it, and within days of his collapse in Uruguay, he was residing in Havana, Cuba, courtesy of his friend Fidel Castro with the financial support system in overdrive as Maradona’s agent touted more exclusive interviews and photographs to a hungry world media. Maradona himself spoke of himself in the third person, mocking the self-delusion of those who had predicted his imminent demise. ‘Diego Maradona will only ascend to heaven when all four Beatles are waiting to meet him, ‘he declared. From Havana, British journalist David Jones suggested that the man a worldwide FIFA poll of fans had found the greatest footballer of the 20th century, ‘isn’t merely suffering delusions of grandeur, but is also stark raving bonkers.’

Maradona’s latest existence at the La Pradera health spa-come-holiday complex verged on farce. He rose late each morning, somewhat groggily from Valium-induced slumbers, before brunching on fruit and juice brought to him by two white-hatted chefs on a silver service trolley. Occasionally Maradona made his way into a small gym where four sets of ten press-ups, four sets of ten leg-raises and a few half-hearted rolls of the shoulders, left him ‘panting like an asthmatic walrus.’ Maradona, with a shock of died orange hair, a tattoo of Che Guevara on his flabby arm and a heart monitor round his ample girth, also looked like a wasted clown, an inflated Harpo Marx. In his early days in Havana Maradona punched the windscreen of a reporter’s car.

None of this seemed to worry Castro who found ways of making political capital out of Maradona’s presence on the island. The local media portrayed him as the good leader of the people, in contrast to the Goliath of the North (the United States) who had refused to give Maradona a visa since the 1994 World Cup doping scandal. ‘With meetings like the one I have just had with Fidel, my heart will hold out, and this Diego will be around for a while,’ Maradona declared after meeting with the Cuban leader, with whom he shared an apparent air of immortality.

Within a year, in 2001, Maradona-not for the first or last time in his life-was shedding public tears. He was crying with the emotion of knowing there were still enough Argentines around who respected him so much that they couldn’t accept anybody else taking his Number 10 shirt, even at this point in his life when he was really saying goodbye, again. The shirt, signed by Argentina’s class of 2001-the likes not just of Saviola, but of Batitusta, Zanetti, Hernan Crespo, Juan Roman Riquelme, Andrew D’Alessandro, Marcelo Gallardo, Pablo Aimar, and Veron- was handed to Maradona at a testimonial match between an Argentine X1 led by himself and a Rest of the World X1, part of which seemed like a rogue’s gallery- bad boys, gifted players, legends of the past- men like Carlos Valderrama, Hristo Stoichkov, Eric Cantona, and Rene Higuita.

It was November in Buenos Aires-late Spring/early summer, warm and sunny and sweetly smelling of faded jacaranda. Prior to the match, Maradona, wearing a turban, had paid a visit to his friend, now ex-President Menem who was under house arrest for alleged corruption. It was later reported that in the Buenos Aires Hilton, where he and his entourage had set up camp, Maradona had stalked the corridors in a bin Laden mask which he had purchased after 9/11 and worn at fancy dress parties in Havana.

The day of the testimonial Maradona wore his Number 10 shirt, and waited until a local rock group called ‘The Paranoid Rats’ finished their dedicatory verse: ‘I want Diego to play for ever’, they sang. He then walked out into La Bombonera, his beloved coliseum, just as he had done on countless occasions before, to the roar of 60,000 fanatical fans, gladiator of the people, sacrificed on the altar of popular adulation, with his two young daughters at his side. The stadium was as steamy and frenetic as a caravan caught up in a desert storm, draped with the blue and yellow Boca, and blue and white, Argentine colours. The barras bravas packed the terraces. They bounced with joy, chanting Maradoo, Maradoo, unfurling a giant banner with the words, ‘Thank You, Diego’. It was a sign of their indebtedness to the eternal memory of the genius in the midst of the worst political and economic crisis afflicting Argentina in years. That the event had been sold as Maradona’s definitive farewell appearance in the midst of such a national mess was an achievement akin to Don King’s staging of the Ali-Foreman fight in Mobutu’s Zaire. This was Maradona’s version of a global people’s sporting event, his very own rumble in the jungle.

And yet there was no championship at stake this time in La Bombonera. Maradona’s enduring self-belief was focused on the uncontested crown as the greatest player that ever graced the turf. The reality check showed that the man trotting across the pitch looked a trifle overweight for his forty years, at 84 kilos.

There remained in Maradona a desperate unfulfilled need to find a meaning t his life, to recover a sense of purpose, to harness his talent and genius for the game. Back in 1997, just before another decent into drugs, overeating, and over drinking, Diego had not only promised to help Boca become great again. He also pledged to help Argentina qualify for the 1998 World Cup in France, with him playing in the national team. It didn’t turn our quite that way at the time. The fulfilment of the dream was postponed for another day although the urge for self-justification persisted.

In Yo Diego, his autobiography, published in 2000, Maradona talked about his natural talent: his ability, to rotate his ankles was one factor that enabled him to do things with his left foot most mortals struggled to do with their right hand. The extreme rotation of the ankle was accompanied by his panoramic field of vision on the pitch, with an ability to see the outcome of a move as it developed. Jorge Valdano famously liked to tell the story that after that second goal against England in 1986, Maradona said to him: ‘I could see you running along, but I didn’t pass because I thought I could do it.” Valdano said: ‘Son a of a bitch, on top of everything he was doing he could see me!’

But only Maradona himself could really describe the second goal as the kind that you dream of as child, dribbling down the right of the field, beating Beardsley, Reid and Butcher, seeing Valdano unmarked to the left but deciding to go it alone, shaking off Fenwick by feinting inside and going outside, pulling Shilton out of position, then scoring, leaving Butcher to pick up the pieces as a late arrival. Maradona recalled: ‘Everytime I see it again, it seems almost a lie that I achieved it. It’s almost a dream...but I scored the best goal in my life.’

For Maradona, his performance and Argentina’s victory that summer of 1986 was a slap in the face for all those who had criticised the team coached by Carlos Bilardo in the final weeks leading to the tournament. “Once we had the cup in our hands, we went back into the changing room and started singing the rudest chants from the terraces, ‘ he remembered, ‘We were directing them at everybody...we were all standing on the benches, screaming like madmen: “ And this one is for all you motherfuckers out there!”’

While admitting to his own drugs addiction, he put at least two dope tests down to fabrication, part of an unspecified conspiracy, and denied he had ever taken drugs to enhance his performance. As for that game with England in the Aztec stadium, he admitted using his hand in the first goal against the English only to feel no regret or need to apologise. The goal he said was sweet revenge after all the Argentine chicos who were killed like ‘little birds’ in the Falklands War. It made him feel, an Argentine version of the artful dodger, stealing an Englishman’s wallet.

Maradona hit out at referees, FIFA, money-grabbing players, and corrupt politicians, and placed himself, predictably, on the side of the genuine fan, the true believer of the beautiful game. ‘I am the voice of those who have no voice, the voice of many people who feel represented by me because I always have a microphone in front of me while they’ll never get the chance to have one in their godforsaken lives.’ He felt no need to justify the fact that he remained remarkably silent during the military regime that cost the lives of between 9,000-30,000 disappeared. After playing not far from the killing fields (Maradona’s flat at that time was one street away from one of the junta’s notorious detention camps), Maradona was happy to have his picture taken with leading members of the local Mafia in Naples, the Camorra, not because he was in their pay, but because he felt entertained. He ended his autobiography by insisting that having reached the age of forty he could will all honesty claims he had harmed no one but himself and owed nothing to anyone but his family.

In 2001 when he returned to La Bombonera for his testimonial he did so after another tortured struggle to get fit again, submitting himself to surgery on his knee in a clinic in Colombia. The irony of getting into shape in the land of white powder seemed lost on Maradona’s most fanatical fans. Only when the game got under way did one realise the extent to which Maradona had been sacrificed on the altar of collective self-delusion. From the outset it is clear that Maradona was not fit enough to play much more than a small part of the full 90 minutes at a competitive pace. So the game was choreographed to accommodate him as he was then. The other players slowed their pace, took the sting out of their tackles, and made sure that Maradona got the ball as often as possible. Maradona himself seemed so slow in mind and body that he barely tackled and let passes go awry. There seemed something deeply sad about the best player the world had ever known being shown the kind of charity a kind teacher shows a child with learning difficulties-only at Maradona’s age other players could still play keep their end up in competitive football. .But to say that the pathos was resolved in pantomime was to belittle the emotion that swelled up around Maradona to protect his dignity, and the complicity of players to ensure that it was so.

In his condition, everyone knew that Maradona was incapable of scoring a goal on his own merit. So with the Argentina X1 ahead on goals, scored by others, a penalty was created so that Maradona could take it. He strode forward, chest puffed out and legs moving like tree trunks, and kicked the ball into the back of the net, with a little help from Higuita the goalkeeper who barely made any attempt to save. Later, when presented with another opportunity in front of the goal, Maradona tried to chip Higuita from thirty meters. This time Higuita turned the failing missile into a moment of brilliant riposte, gesturing to Maradona with a scorpion kick similar to the one the Columbian employed against England at Wembley.

By then the match was well into its second half and Maradona could hardly walk, let alone trot. He was limping badly and drenched in sweat. He looked wasted. Only a cold bastard did not feel for the man, reduced to a fractured prop in the game that he loved so much, acted out in his honour but not played as he knew it should be. But Maradona had been there before, struggling to reconcile his love of football with the personal wreck he had become he carried within, and yet always surviving. Looking dangerously out of breath, he took a bottle of water, and emptied it over his head. It was a ritual baptism, the hand of God touching Maradona’s testimonial just when the match seemed to be deflating like a punctured balloon. Temporarily refreshed, Maradona delivered himself to the home crowd, ripping off his Argentine shirt and revealing the Boca Juniors one below. It was as if his whole life was being played out in slow motion, tears welling up in his eyes again, giving two fingers to the celebrities and politicians and football executives who had paid for comfortable VIP seats, and gesturing in solidarity to the stands where the dark-skinned and the unemployed, the thugs and the thiefs, the sharp brutal edge to Argentina’s failings as a nation was looking itself the mirror.

And it was at that precise point that Maradona’s most loyal fans, the wild, lawless, shirtless ones of the standing-only packed terrace known as La Doce , ‘the Twelve’ (because the passion is equivalent to having a twelfth player), already pogoing their tribal dance and vibrating La Bombonera, let off a stream of firecrackers like a battle offensive, so that the whole stadium was enveloped with the smell and reverberation of gunpowder. The cacophony of song and chant gained such frenzy and energy that it broke through the stadium, across the country, and across the globe, leaving TV commentators worldwide speechless or repeating inanities like, ‘This is incredible’. And Maradona like a true spirit amidst the smoke was carried on his team-mates’ shoulders, eyes to the heaven, arms outstretched in supplication, crying as he’d never done before for his failures and his victories, for times past and passing, and the sheer mesmerising seduction of immortality.

*****

Beyond the stadium, Argentina as a nation sunk into its deepest crisis in living memory under the presidency of Fernando de La Rua, of the centrist Radical party. A crisis of confidence in the government’s ability to tackle a souring public sector deficit and high unemployment led to a run on bank deposits which in turn led to the highly unpopular corralito , an official ban on withdrawals of savings. Riots ensued in Buenos Aires and other parts of Argentina. In the capital, shops and banks were looted and the Congress building set on fire. Clashes between protestors and riot police left twenty-seven civilians dead and hundreds injured in the worst outbreak of political violence since the end of the Falklands War.

The Argentine national football team were preparing themselves for the 2002 World Cup finals in Japan and South Korea, hoping that a win raise the nation’s morale, as it had done in 1978. In a climate of political disintegration, there was loose talk of Maradona standing for the Argentine vice-presidency, on a joint ticket with his friend, the former Peronist president Carlos Menem who had escaped being sent to jail. There were football fans who imagined that Maradona havingto hide his fleet of luxury cars and the other riches he had accumulated over many years. Cretainly, for a while, Maradona must have felt safer in Cuba.

After de La Rua was forced to resign, Argentina entered a period of political limbo as a series of interim presidents struggled to keep a measure of control. Protestors and sectors of the media publicly blamed the political class with the slogan que se vayan todos ("away with them all"). In January 2002 a new interim president Eduardo Duhalde, the former Peronist governor of Buenos Aires abolished a fixed exchange rate which had been in place since 1991 and allowed the Argentine peso to devalue by more than two-thirds of its value, throwing over half the population into deepening poverty. The following year fresh elections were brought forward, and Nestor Kirchner, another Peronist was sworn in as president on May 25, 2003. Argentina, a country that had once surpassed Europe in terms of prosperity and was supposed to be self-sufficient in food and oil , found itself with a depleted middle-class and growing signs of malnutrition across significant swathes of the population.

In a political language that echoed the populism of General Juan Peron and Evita, Kirchner promised to tackle his country’s social problems, embarked on a radical renegotiation of the country’s massive debt, and announced a realignment of foreign policy away from the United Sates and towards other emerging nationalist Latin American leaders like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Despite moving quickly to pursue outstanding cases of human rights violations by the military, and curbing the judiciary of alleged corrupt judges, Kirschner’s style of politics reflected that of his past as a governor of the oil rich province of Santa Cruz. He began to rule Argentina as a personal fiefdom, handing out favours, including lucrative business contracts, to friends, and building power blocks beyond congress, in local authorities, sectors of the trade union movement and a disenfranchised social underclass.

Maradona began to warm to the new political environment, finding that it suited his own personal interests. In 2004, Maradona and his child-hood fiancée and long suffering wife Claudia Villafane divorced after proceedings during which he admitted being the father of an Italian boy called Diego Sinagra, conceived while he had a player in Naples. Maradona eventually moved to a new house in the expanding luxury residential neighbourhood of Ezeiza near to acres of land owned by the Argentine National Football Association where the national squad had its impressive training quarters.. In 2004 the area was a strong Peronist fiefdom, allied with the government. It was rumoured that Maradona’s house purchase had been facilitated by the local mayor Alejandro Granados whose son owned a local football club- flush with funds- and other similarly shadowy business interests.. Only later would it emerge how Maradona had followed up his move into high value real estate by an alliance with Granados, his friends, the ruling Kirchners and the Peronist party that had dominated Argentine politics since General Peron’s coming to power in 1945.In April 2008, Granados announced that Maradona had become a member of the Peronist Party, and registered with the number 10, the figure with which he had become a legend as a footballer. In August 2009, Maradona, enthusiastically backed the government in its efforts to win back state control over the financially lucrative TV football coverage.

Four years before officially being signed up as a Peronist, on the 18th April 2004 Maradona was admitted into the intensive care unit of a Buenos Aires hospital suffering a suspected heart attack following a cocaine overdose, the latest in a series of near-death heaths. And yet reports of Maradona’s death once again proved exaggerated. Within a year, looking obese and unfit, he submitted himself in Colombia, to a gastric bypass surgery in order to deflate his stomach and reduce his appetite. In its aftermath he was put on a strict diet of lightly mashed easily-digestible foods and no alcohol. One of the stories circulated in the past suggested that one of Maradona’s blow-outs had involved the ingestion of seven pizzas, several cakes, and champagne by the gallon. And yet within weeks of having his stomach stapled by a Columbian doctor, Maradona was looking notably thinner as he embarked on a brief and yet financially lucrative career as a TV celebrity presenter.

During a thirty-episode chat show, called La Noche del Diez (The Night of the Number 10) Maradona enticed a range of international sports stars –from Pele to Mike Tyson-musicians-from Robbie Wiliams to Julio Iglesias- and his favourite politician Fidel Castro to play, say a few words, or serenade. In the opening show, Maradona and Pele exchanged personally autographed national shirts, headed a ball to each other for nearly a minute, and played a tango song-with Pele on guitar, and Maradona singing. Pele praised Maradona as an example of how to beat addiction, calling him an inspiration for his son, who had been jailed on a drugs-related charge.Maradona, shed tears as he publicly thanked his family and friends for rebuilding his life after a series of relapses. The performance pushed the TV show to the top of the ratings list although not everyone was convinced. A spoof episode posted days later on YouTube had a puppet Maradona, with some real-life girls in en English pub making a series of indecent proposals before ending his show in a state of debauched abandon, snorting large quantities of cocaine from a sugar bowl.

When Robbie Williams was interviewed by Maradona, the audience was treated to another mutual admiration session with both men agreeing that Argentine women were the world’s sexiest, and that George W. Bush was an ‘idiot and a murderer.’ The political theme persisted when Maradona interviewed Castro for his programme. Maradona told his audience that interviewing the Cuban leader had been his dream although in fact both men had met on several occasions over the years. Maradona’s publicity conscious alliance with the Latin America leader sprung from an instinctive rebellious streak he had carried within him since his childhood days of survival in the shanty town of Villa Fiorito. “For me he is a god,” Maradona said of the veteran communist leader prior to arriving in Havana with his TV crew. The pre-recorded five hour interview (heavily cut for the final programme of the series) showed Castro praising Maradona for his solidarity with the latest Latin America campaign against US imperialism. “We have struggled for various years against the United States, ‘said the Cuba leader, seemingly happy to show the world that contrary to rumour neither he nor Maradona were at death’s door.

Ratings for the final ‘The Night of the Number Ten’ were lower that the series’ start suggesting that Maradona’s popularity remained, as it always had been, based more on football than politics . Viewers were getting tired of a program me that was such a blatant exercise in self-promotion and seemed to get Maradona no nearer to another come-back, away from the studio lights, and on the pitch where he was most loved. And yet the following days saw Maradona stepping into a more crowded stadium of street demonstrators. The latest TV images to accompany him drew the attention of the rest of the world to and an otherwise lackluster and politically sterile conference of talking heads from north and south of the Rio Grande. They showed Maradona leading a colorful trainload of protestors to Mar de Plata to join thousands who had converged on the coastal town in a ‘say no to Bush’ demonstration. The train was temporarily named the Alba Express as a tribute to the ‘Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas’ (Alba was the regional trade pact being promoted by Castro and the Venezuelan President Chavez.) When Chavez took the podium before a 40,000 anti-globalization and anti-Bush demonstration at a nearby stadium, Maradona was at his side. Not everyone was best pleased. Mexican president Vicente Fox, a close ally of Washington, described Maradona as being ideologically confused. “He (Maradona) has a good foot for kicking, but he does not have a good brain for talking,’ Mr Fox told journalists. In the end, Maradona became a conversation issue for the presidents attending the summit. He was again in the limelight.

While still working on his TV show, Maradona returned to his old club Boca Juniors as a sports vice president. His decision to hire Alfio Basile as the new coach, while himself keeping a close relationship with the players, resulted in a marked improvement in the first team’s performance after a disappointing season. Boca went on to win the Argentine league championship and the Copa and Recopa Sudamericana, a success story that prompted the first stage in a drawn-put campaign by Maradona to realize his ambition of coaching the national team.

But before this got under way in earnest, the wheels of global publicity of Maradona Inc received a fresh oiling when BBC TV made a successful bid to have the player agree to an interview with Gary Lineker, the former English international turned sports celebrity. Unless you were prepared to pay huge sums, getting an interview with Maradona had become an increasingly difficult assignment for most journalists since his retirement from full-time football. Lineker himself had the frustrating experience of travelling all the way to Argentina for a TV documentary in 1997 his producers believed they had negotiated with Maradona only for the Argentine star to fail to turn up. This time the BBC calculated that they were dealing with a more predictable subject given his reported success in tackling his weight and drug problems, and the new incentive to his life he had had found as a TV star and back at Boca. The project was timed to coincide with the run-up to the World Cup, an event that ever since 1986 had seen it’s most exemplary moment of football played at its best personified by Maradona.

An advance production team led by BBC sports director Jason Bernard and a ‘fixer’- arrived in Buenos Aires 6 March at the tail end of the local sweltering summer and had an early meeting with Claudia Villafane, Maradona ex-wife who was now his manager. Her biggest initial concern was whether the BBC has brought a along handbag catalogue for her from London, as promised. Lineker flew in within two days after Bernard has established a rapport with Maradona over a dinner he was having with Matias Almeyda, Junior Baino and Careca ahead of a big Masters five-a-side match between Argentina and Brazil.

Over the next five days, the BBC team struck lucky, filming Maradona with his family and friends, playing football, being a TV star, celebrating goals from his box in La Bombonera and talking to Gary as if to a long-lost friend. The two met while Maradona was changing for the Masters game, an event attended by a large contingent of barras bravas who all had free tickets. As Bernard reported later, it was the first time Maradona and Linker had met since a Centenary game at Wembley in 1987, unsurprisingly Gary was apprehensive. But what followed could have almost been scripted. The two hugged and Maradona said, ‘Nice to meet you old friend.’ When they shook hands, Gary joked, ‘was that the hand/’ referring to the infamous ‘Hand of God’. Maradona replied, ‘no-it was the left.’

Lineker, in the words of the sports writer Jim White, looked a ‘paradigm of good health: slim , elegant, prosperously arrived in pink shirt and black suit”, in potential contrast to his interview subject who had spent the past decade ‘pursued by devils to whom he must have pledged his soul in exchange for World Cup triumph.’ White was a skilled reporter with an experienced eye for all kinds of footballers. The last time had looked at Maradona for any length of time on a TV screen, he seemed ‘plagued by drink, drugs and fast food’, as if he was attempting ‘some mad David Blayne-style stunt, seeing how long he could live while attached to a mechanical tyre: the former genius of the game had been transformed into an almost spherical blimp.’ But White was pleasantly surprised by Maradona’s seemingly healthy appearance. And what in other times might have been a cruel exercise of public humiliation turned into a riveting piece of TV sports journalism, with a polite Spanish-speaking Lineker engaging with a seemingly relaxed, gracious, and good-humored Maradona, supported by his family despite his divorce, and reserving the full gambit of his emotions for the Boca goals and, irony of ironies, the moment when a referee failed to spot an opposition hand ball.

For British viewers, there were other treats in store-not least an entertaining if provocative account by the man himself of his two legendary goals in the Aztec stadium in 1986. ‘The other guys seemed reluctant to join in the celebrations, ‘ Maradona commented over the archive footage of him running alone into the corner of the Aztec stadium after the hand of God, ‘I was saying, “Come on guys, let’s do it properly, let’s go the whole hog”.’

Months later, hopes of Argentina repeating their World Cup success in 1976 and 1986 were dashed when they were beaten 2-4 by Germany in a tense quarter-final shoot-out in Berlin. The match brought back memories of the 1990 final in Rome when Argentina lost the defence of their championship crown to Germany 0-1 after a controversial penalty award, and players and officials from both sides traded punches on the pitch. Argentina’s national honor was restored when its football team clinched the Olympic men’s ‘gold’ title at the Beijing Olympics. The campaign to victory was notable on two fronts: confirmation of the extraordinary talent of the FC Barcelona youngster Lionel Messi and the looming presence of Maradona.

When the first football was kicked in these Olympics, a large majority of the fans watching the event locally supported China. But as one commentator put it, “things settled down when pictures of a relaxed looking Diego Maradona filled the big screens.’ The sight of Maradona, up in the commentary box or in the stands, hinted at celebrity, and the chants of China soon morphed into support for Argentina. It was hard to gauge the precise reason. Was it the memory of Maradona as a star player or his support for Castro and other revolutions? But the popularity of the Argentine team personified in Maradona in the most populated and fastest growing economy in the world was not lost on sponsors, PR firms, and TV rights people for whom the beautiful game was synonymous with big money.

It was during the Olympics that Maradona took a further step towards realizing his dream of managing the national squad, his personal life seemingly stabilized and his public profile demonstrating a marketing pull that could not easily by ignored by those who stood to profit by his renewed celebrity status, not least Maradona himself and the close coterie of family and trusted friends that surrounded him. When Argentina won its Gold medal, Maradona rushed down into the changing rooms and joined in a high profile celebration with the players as if he was already their coach even though the hero of the hour, according to the mass circulation Clarin newspaper, was Sergio Batista, the manager of the Olympic squad.

And yet in Batista, a veteran of the 1986 World Cup, Maradona had not so much a potential rival, as a useful ally and scout as a result of him taking over responsibility for the youth divisions of the Argentine Football Association. In the aftermath of the Olympics, while Batista faded into the background, Maradona who kept in touch with several of players that secured the gold , thanks to his friendship with Gabriel Heinze and his personal ties with Sergio ‘Kun’ Aguero, his youngest daughter Giannina’s partner and father to her child. The opportunity to make a fresh move came later that summer as Argentina’s struggling attempt to qualify for the World Cup put increasing pressure on the manager Alfio Basile, less than a year after his appointment as national coach. Basile was forced out in October 2008 after securing only four wins in nine matches. The crunch point came when Argentina was defeated 1-0 by Chile, the first time it had lost to its Andean neighbor in thirty-five years.

After the match, a complex network of vested interests contributed to intense lobbying in support of Maradona’s appointment as national coach despite fears that his personality was ill suited to the demands of the job. The exercise is thought to have included personal phone calls to the President of the Argentine Football Association Julio Grondona from three Latin American President, Chaves of Venezuela, Morales of Bolivia, and Argentina’s own head of state Nestor Kirschner, all of whom had been seen to politically ally themselves with Maradona during his latest anti-US phase. Grondona and other AFA officials were also made aware of the extent to which the commercial value of the Argentina national squad would be boosted with Maradona at the helm. For example The Renova Group, owned by Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg which had brought the rights to 24 Argentine team exhibition matches for $18m in 2006 forecast a doubling of profits as interest soared round Maradona’s latest redemption. Within the football world, Heinze and Aguero had already led the equivalent of a dressing-room revolt against Basile, persuading other players of the Argentine squad to vote with their feet, in favor of Maradona, in what one AFA insider described as the equivalent of a ‘palace coup.’

While much of the maneuverings took place behind the scenes, it was only too evident to Riquelme, a key player in Basile’s squad who was the only member of the team to take a public stand against Maradona. In truth ego was mixed with principle. This was in part because Riquelme, a proud individual feared losing his influence in the team under Maradona’s tutelage. However Riquelme is also genuinely objected to the underhand way Basile’s removal had been orchestrated and which he believed was unjustified in football terms. Riquelme quit from the national squad saying of Maradona: “We don't think the same way. We don't share the same codes of ethics. While he is the coach of the national team, we can't work together."

Riquelme’s was admired for his elegant, unhurried style, his ability to prise open defences with slide-rule passes and well placed free-kicks. Since returning from a long stint in Europe to play for Boca, he had become something of a local hero. But critics, some of whom were close to Maradona, argued that Riquelme’s strong personality on the pitch was too often a curse rather than a blessing, dragging a whole team down when he underperformed and making it difficult to change systems. The Boca Juniors playmaker, who has made more than 50 appearances for Argentina scoring 17 goals, missed Maradona's first two games in charge officially because of club commitments. However his decision to quit followed Maradona’s publicly veiled suggestion that the national squad could work better without him. Maradona said in an interview, that he got up at four o’clock every morning to think about team selection and much of his deliberating had been how to introduce Riquelme without disrupting the team.

Without Riquelme, and with Maradona as coach, the previously lackluster Argentina began playing well beating Scotland and France, and Venezuela in a World Cup qualifying match. But the controversy which had never been far from Maradona’s life resurfaced as Argentina stumbled in subsequent games, beginning with a humiliating 1-6 defeat away to Bolivia in what Bolivian fans would celebrate on Youtube as just revenge for the racial discrimination shown to their families and friends living in Argentina as immigrants. A succession of four defeats in five games left Argentina relying in the play-off position in the South American qualifying zone. Argentina and Maradona’s reputation were thrown a lifeline when a dramatic 93rd minute goal from the Boca Juniors veteran Martin Palermo secured a 2-1 victory over Peru. Celebration, the midst of a biblical thunderstorm, came in the form of Maradona, in raptures, aquaplaning across the rain drenched turf. Divine intervention or at least a saintly one was later invoked. The winning goal was, Maradona insisted, another miracle from San Palermo.

Days later, Argentina faced Uruguay in a match they needed to win to be guaranteed of a place in the World Cup. Argentina’s roller-coaster progress through the qualifying round until then had been widely seen as a product of Maradona’s eccentricity as a manager. Maradona’s campaign to control and direct the national squad involved him in a much publicized rolling brawl with manager Carlos Bilardo and a dispute with the Argentine Football Association over the appointment of other assistants. In his first year at the helm ,Maradona capped over 70 players and experimented with back fours, midfield sixes and four pronged attacks, preceded by as a training regime which accommodated Maradona’s enduring habit of waking late. The regime-if one could call it that- confused stars like Messi, Higuain and Tevez who had been molded by the discipline of the European teams they played for. Only weeks before Maradona had taken over as national coach, Messi- his proclaimed successor- had been warned by the FC Barcelona incoming manager Pep Guardiola that he faced being sacked if he continued to arrive tired for training after being discovered on too many nights out with Ronaldinho. At the time Messi’s form had dipped at the Catalan club. I wa told by a senior club insider that the ensuing conversation went something along these lines.

“What is you dream?” Guardiola asked of Messi in a crisis meeting.

“Well,’ answered the young player, ‘I would like to be to the greatest in the world one day, like Diego.’

‘Well then- you have two options: you go on partying, and you will be out of here within days. Or you start eating properly , cut out alcohol, go go to bed early, and get up on time for training and then you might become one of the best in the world.’

Days later Ronaldinho was on his way out of Barcelona, and Messi had buckled down to Guardiola’s regime which in many ways was planet’s apart from Maradona’s. In the following months Messi, like Teves, would suffer sustained criticism from Argentine fans who accused him of not playing his best. But the players struggled to come to terms with Maradona’s style of management, forever switching teams and strategies..Maradona called up mire 78 players, leaving even the most experienced football commentators struggling to see a method in the madness. Martin Samuel of the Mail on Sunday noted

that Maradona had approached the job of coaching Argentina like a little boy given the new FIFA 2010 game on Playstation and a bucket of smarties.

Argentina beat Uruguay 1-0. The victory was overshadowed by Maradona’s sexually explicit, foul-mouthed rant at his growing army of media critics. ‘There were those who did not believe in this team and who treated me as less than nothing, ‘a wild eyed Maradona declared, clutching his crotch “Today we are in the World Cup finals with help from nobody but honor. To all of you who did not believe in us, and I apologize to all the women here, you can suck my dick and keep sucking it. I am black or white, I’ll never be grey in my life. You can take it up your ass.”

Victim, knight, defiant rebel, foul-mouthed sexist thug-only Diego Maradona could claim to be all four in one statement, and get away with it. Two months later, Maradona emerged from a Fifa ban and flew to Pretoria to check out Argentina squad’s facilities, having lined up a series of lucrative appearances in the run-up to the World Cup. The tournament, that promised success as much as threatened disaster, was just over 100 days away.Argentina prepared for it with a squad that included some of the world’s most gifted players- Higuain, Mascherano, Diego Milito- and yes, Messi, still younger than when Maradona reached his prime, and yet carrying a huge weight of expectation on his shoulders.

THE DEFENCE OF THE REALM by Christopher Andrew

Wed, 5 May 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

(Allen Lane) 1031 pages (£30.00)

Review for The Tablet submitted 16/11/2010

I approached this authorised history of the British secret service MI5 with a degree of scepticism. Is one dealing here with history researched by an independent historian or an apologia for a government organisation whose hundred years of existence has drawn its lifeblood from secrecy and varying economies of truth?

Christopher Andrew is a refreshingly unstuffy professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Cambridge, whose insights into the complex world of espionage and ability to convey them in comprehensible language has earned him, quite justifiably, huge international respect.

And yet by agreeing to the Official Secrets Act and becoming a member of MI5’s staff as a pre-condition for researching and writing In Defence of the Realm, he risks fuelling a reputation as a “court historian”- too close to the spies to be impartial- which his critics have held against him since his authorised collaboration with MI6 and soviet defectors on histories of the KGB.

Andrew has skilfully packed a great deal of information within the 1,000 page without letting the narrative become turgid or impenetrable at any point. From its early reference to the Secret Service Bureau-as it was called in 1909- and its offices rented from a retired private detective called Edward ‘Tricky” Drew to its concluding paragraph pointing-disconcertingly- to the unpredictable threat of Al Qaida, this is a cracking good read however much one might occasionally still question the impartiality of Andrew’s judgements.

M15 has come a long way since its early beginnings when it was staffed by two military officers who “had a yarn over the future and agreed to work together for the success of the cause.” It grew as an organisation in two world wars, the subsequent Cold War, and the ongoing war on terrorism. Andrew is enthusiastic about celebrating MI5’s achievements, while too often excusing its morally questionable activities and operational failings. He uses up too much space, in challenging the conspiracy theories that he believes have unfairly damaged MI5’s reputation, while not acknowledging generously enough much diligent investigative journalistic probing hitherto into the secret world.

Historical perspective-and availability of additional sources- makes the first fourty years of MI5 the more convincing part of this book, with the overwhelming evidence firmly showing how British spies comprehensively defeated the counterpart operations of Kaiser Wilhelm 11 and Hitler.

MI5 senior officers shared concerns about the perils of appeasement under Chamberlain, before contributing to the eventual defeat of the Nazi war machine with an extraordinary strategy of deceptions carried out by a colourful cast of disreputable double agents from the politically ambiguous Spanish Civil war veteran Juan Pujol ‘Garbo’ to the ex-con Eddie Chapman alias Agent Zig Zag.

By contrast MI5 was slow off the mark in assessing the broader impact of the Bolshevik Revolution outside Russia, with Andrew judging that that not until the mass expulsion of KGB and GRU (Soviet military intelligence) officers from the UK in 1971 did the UK gain the upper hand.

The so-called Cambridge Five spy ring -Philby, Burgess, Blunt, Maclean, and Cairncross-was one of the biggest identified blunders of UK intelligence history although Andrew struggles to present a convincing case against those who continue to believe that the soviet penetration was even more widespread.

We will probably never know whether some senior MI5 officers were as innocent of treachery as secret internal enquiries belatedly found them-but what is is clear just from the information that this book contains is that several would have been sacked in any other organisation for sheer incompetence.

When MI5 identified enemy agents or sympathisers and prepared files on them, it did so often on information provided by double-agents or defectors, a species Andrew rates as credible witnesses. By contrast the author too easily describes as rogue elements within MI5 those who plotted against Harold Wilson, after the service had allowed a secret file to be built up on the prime-minister.

Gripped as I was, and mostly in awe of this brave exercise in authorised intelligence history, I still found myself in the end questioning the credibility of some of the information, much of it selectively extracted from within the inclusive world of smokes and mirrors that the spies inhabit, where nothing is quite what it seems, and the distortion of the truth is all too often an essential tool of the trade. And I don’t blame Andrew for that, but the spies. ENDS

Note on the reviewer: Jimmy Burns’s new book Papa Spy: Love Faith & Betrayal in Wartime Spain is published by Bloomsbury.

A CUBAN DIARY by Jimmy Burns 21/3/2008

Wed, 5 May 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

A version of this article was published in The Tablet

Just a small group of Cubans are with us on the Air France from Paris to Havana, and they are the only non-tourists on the plane, apart from the Chinese Olympic volley ball team. They are members of the national judo team, and have just been on a pre-Olympic warm-up tour of northern Europe. While the Chinese spend the flight playing computer claims, like automats, the Cubans crack jokes, eat, and play music. Their physiotherapist has bought a Zorro suit for his young boy. He says that while it was fun being abroad, he is longing to be back on the island, with his family and friends. He offers one piece of advice: “You must meet with Cubans, learn how they live.”

Cuban sportsmen, like ballet dancers, and musicians, can afford to travel for their tickets and expenses have been subsidised by the state. They are Cuba’s cultural exports. During my week long stay on the island, I was to meet many Cubans who would have also liked to travel, but couldn’t afford to. All men are equal but some are more equal than others.

We fly in at dusk, the last of the sun’s rays and a light warm breeze catching the leaves of the palm trees. Our first romantic glimpse of Cuba in temporaily interrupted by an intruder however-one that authoritarian regimes of widely different ideologies have thrown up throughout history. The policewoman at Havana airport may not have her holster made out of human skin-like the Captain Segura in Graham Greene’s Man in Havana-but she looks as if she might have had one. With a face chiselled in a dark menacing frown, Inspector Number 15685 looks up at my face and down at my passport at least a dozen times, before finally pushing a button and unlocking the door that separates me from the island.

Minutes later our first Cuban taxi drive involves negotiating the pitfalls of a crowded unmarked poorly lit road, with its chaotic assortment of Cubans seemingly going nowhere in a hurry, in an array of veteran cars, bicycles, open-roofed lorries, and rusty buses. The lights of one of Havana’s central squares remain dimmed by the time we reach the hotel. Cuba is trying to save on electricity, the taxi man explains, before we are ushered into the startling brightness of the main lobby and the multi-dialled luxury of our room.

On our first night we drift though the streets of Old Havana-its one-time single occupancy colonial buildings packed with subsidised poor tenants as part of the government’s social housing programme. With its walls cracked and peeling, and door frames and widows unhinged, this part of the city had bee crumbling as long as any resident could remember. There are streets where the government is slowly but steadily restoring swathes of a city Spain once considered the jewel in her Empire. The miracle is that some of the older untouched buildings are still standing and that there is laughter and music from their residents within and without. On one semi-derelict street corner, a band of elderly musicians are playing some salsa not for money but for their friends. It is a small impromptu party where the octogerians of the barrio have gathered. One of the women, slightly drunk on rum, dances with her dog. Another with her grandchild. Others stand around and clap rhythmically, occasionally shouting encouragement. They are joined by a young policewoman. No severity here, just a huge complicit smile and a hand that shares out cigarettes to the dancers. Neighbourhood policing Cuban style.

I am reminded, as I shall be on several similar occasions during my stay, of something that the American musician Ry Cooder has written on the sleeve notes to the Buena Vista Social Club CD - “In Cuba the music flows like a river. It takes care of you, and rebuilds you from the inside out.” There may be a shortage of CD’s in Cuban shops, but live music on this island is as generous as the song of mocking birds and parakeets.

Sunday Mass at the Jesuit church of the Sacred Heart. The priest takes the story of Lazarus’s resurrection as an example of liberation and hope, beyond the materialism of our daily existence. At the end of his sermon he asks that any new visitors identity themselves so that they can be well received. My wife and I lift our hands as do four Cubans distributed around the Church. The congregation turns to face us, as one, before breaking into spontaneous applause. I notice that the doors of the Church are opened wide onto the busy street, a gesture of encouragement as well as self-confidence one would find difficult to find in most capital cities in the world these days.

The amiable Jesuit priest Fr Alberto recalls that the turning point in Church-State relations came with the visit of Pope John Paul 11nd in 1998 when Castro and other senior party officials attended mass. Suddenly Cubans who had backed the Revolution while wanting to keep their Faith saw the reconciliation they had been praying for. “It allowed people to come out of themselves, to express their religiosity.”

A few days earlier an envoy from Pope John Paul 11’s successor had visited Havana and had asked that the regime allow greater access of the Church to the media and to the education system. “We are still waiting, “ says Fr Albertobefore adding: “The government hereknews it has three priorities it has to deal with, improve-housng, transport, and food. The question is how?”

The Church may be considered too collaborationist by its critics-there are no priests or bishops currently in Cuban jails - but it is positioning itself as potentially a key player in whatever reform process lies ahead.

Every embassy in town is obsessed with trying to predict what will happen next now Raul Castro has formally taken over the post of president from the ailing Fidel. A dedicated communist long before his old brother became one, Raul is nevertheless thought of as a pragmatist who sees the need to steer the island through some kind of economic and political renewal . One experienced diplomat I share a mojito with was sceptical there would be any real process of change until Fidel was long dead and buried. Another suggested that one of the problems Cuba faces is its lack of a structured opposition within the island capable of helping pave the way for a post-Franco style transition from the current one-party state to a parliamentary democracy. At present there are no signs of any major political shift although there are discreet diploamtic moves ging on behind the scenes in the spirit of a constructive dialogue. Despite George W.Bush demonsing Cuba as part of the ‘axis of evil’, the island has no serious drugs or terrorist, and is investing in life-saving pharmaceutcals not weapons ofmass destructin.

There are expectations that the election of a Democratic president of the United States may lead to the lifting of the US embargo that has helped Fidel fuel the mythology of a courageous island under siege from the world’s big bad oppressor. However the regime fears the example of the Soviet Union where economic liberalisation was accompanied by a period of political disintegration. It looks to China not as only one of its current major trading partners, but as an example of a regime that has brought about economic growth without sacrificing its political system. Cuban solidarity does not extend to the plight of Tibet it seems . Instead it counts Chavez’s Venezuela as its greatest friend and ally. Cuba provides Caracas with doctors in return for cheap oil.

A four hour drive across the island to Trinidad, early Spanish colonial settlements which, with its cobbled streets and wrought-iron grated windows has been preserved as one of Cuba’s most picturesque towns. It is linked to Havana by the Autopista Nacional the island’s main ‘motorway’ which the Soviet Union began building but never completed before the collapse of Berlin Wall. It survives poorly paved and unmarked much as the sugar plantations that once fed Russians lie covered in weeds.

While tourists have access to reasonably modern fleets of self-drive or chauffer driven cars, a majority of Cubans have to share their vehicles which range from battered reconstructed old Chryslers to small bicycle taxis-Cuba’s answer to the rickshaw, The clusters of Cubans waiting along the road, sometimes for hours, before they are picked up by a car or a bus is evidence that transport is one sector that the Revolucion has failed to deliver on.

Our driver Gustavo is one of thousands of Cubans who work for the tourist industry because it is the one sector that had can assure them something approaching a decent wage. The average Cuba salary of 400 pesos is worth about $16 dollars a month. But under the dual currency system, tourism and foreign businesses trade in a convertible peso which has a greater purchasing power. Gustavo believes that Cuba has an education and heath system it can be proud of, and none he knows knows has gone hung hungry since the late 1990’s when the colapse of the Soviet Union forced Cubans to eat cats. But he thinks that the economy should become strong enough to pay his countrymen better, allow them market their goods properly, and give them the freedom to travel where and when they like.

In Trinidad we walk up a steep hill to astatue commemorating Bartolome de Las Casas, the Spanish Franciscan friar who defended the rights of the native Indians after the Conquest. It is believed that that this early champion of human rights in Latin America celebrated his first mass here under a Calabash tree in the early 16th century. One of Trinidad’s most beautiful colonial churches –and there are several-is next to the main school. At the start and end of their day, the school kids-impeccably kitted out in starched white shirts and pale green uniforms- run through the church’s open doors, many of them stopping off to pray along the way. Cuba seems full of young happy school kids, many of them seemingly inheriting from their parents a sense that there is no contradiction between their political and religious faith but a potential symbiosis between the best aspects of each.

The high attendance of church goers, the discreet engagement of priests and catechists with social work, and the official authorisation of street processions underlines the extent to which Cuban Catholicism has revived since the hard-line Soviet days of the 1970’s and 1980’s .

Another long (seven hours) and bumpy road journey across the island, backtracking to Havana and then heading inland to the extraordinary beautiful national park of Vinales (note ed cedila accent over the n). Bulbous limestone knolls covered in lush vegetation border a valley of some 15,000 hectares of red earth where small farming communities grow an array of crops from tobacco and coffee to bananas, avocados, oranges, and sugar cane. While attracting a growing tourist trade, the area perseveres as an example of both the potential and limitations of Cuban agriculture. The Cuban regime’s enduring commitment to a planned economy has brought about some agricultural reform while at the same stifling productivity and enterprise. Cuban farmers are allowed to sell some of their surplus produce to private consumers, but the state takes the bulk of what is sown and grown, tying up financial transactions in bureaucratic bottlenecks and fuelling a parallel economy of moonlighting and middlemen.

With his greying moustache, and weathered face Vicente, is a veteran fighter of the Revolution, and now the patriarch of an extended family. As we smoke a couple of his cigars-hand-rolled and soaked, before drying, in rum and honey-he tells me how he fears his artisanship may be a dying trade as the 21st century creeps in on the island.“The young are no longer interested in my cigars or helping me work the land. They want to go to the towns and try and make more money.”

I thought about Vicente and men and women of his generation as we drive around an island. It is filled with iconic posters of Che Guevara and anti-imperialist murals, in contrast to the total absence of commercial advertising hoardings. In contrast to those who have over the years fled to Miami or Europe, there are those who chose to stay behind and have persevered in their belief that thanks to the Revolution of 1959 Cuba became and still is a better place than the corrupt and exploited US dominated whore-house that had existed before, and that there is now, thanks to Fidel, less poverty and social injustice than elsewhere in Latin America. It is also true that a majority of Cubans on the island have grown up knowing no other system but the socialism Fidel has imposed contributing to the sense outsiders get of Cuba living in a time-warp, out of step with the cruel reality that is the rest of the world.

My perspective is of a system that despite its poor wages and shortages, has managed to produce one of the most integrated multiracial and relatively crime-free societies anywhere in the developing world. While the system has undoubtedly some underlying problems, it has saved Cubans from the consumerism and personal debt that is the source so much social and financial stress in free market communities.

Cuba still has too many exiles (an estimated two million anti-Castro Cubans live in the US alone)and too many prisoners of conscience (some 69 according to Amnesty). And yet, as one western diplomat conceded, it makes those committed to the system Fidel has forged over five decades feel part of a collective enterprise with a social cohesion that would be the envy of most inner cities in the UK. How to shed the worst aspects of Fidelismo while preserving his more noble achievements and not losing control to a politically destabalising free-for-all is the challenge now facing Raul and the new generation of socialist Cubans that hope to follow him.

Secrets of Salamanca By Jimmy Burns

Wed, 5 May 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Published by The Financial Times: November 20 2009

Madrid has always exercised a curious hold on me. I blame it on the fact that I was born there, only to be whisked off by my Anglo-Spanish parents to England. I have spent more than a half a century making up for my early displacement from the Spanish capital by returning to it as often as possible.

Recently, research for a book about my late father’s espionage activities there in the second world war has given me the perfect excuse to step up visits to a city that, despite its past as the administrative centre of the dictator Francisco Franco, appeals to liberal and creative minds.

Tom Burns in Madrid, 1941

My father first arrived in Madrid in 1940 on a secret assignment when half of Spain was paying the price for being on the wrong side in a bloody civil war, and the other side was enjoying the fruits of victory. He had driven from England, across France and over the Pyrenees. The Spanish landscape was devastated. The road from Burgos to Madrid was pockmarked with bomb craters, fields disfigured with trenches and the villages torn and broken, as if an earthquake had shaken the heart of Spain.

As he motored through the mountain passes towards the capital, he glimpsed the clear outline of Madrid on the horizon ahead of him, as I did when I was child, not as a great metropolis but as a provincial town. In the aftermath of the civil war, the city’s central artery, the Paseo de la Castellana, was lined with empty or boarded-up shops, its pavements inhabited by women dressed in black and by skeletal street urchins; its trees mutilated for firewood.

In the early 1950s, during which we flew back and forth from London to Madrid, I used to wake up to the rattle and neighing of the old horse-drawn gypsy carts as they carried rubbish from the richer neighbourhoods out to shanty villages in the nearby countryside.

It is hard to imagine this now. One flies in over skyscrapers and new residential developments on the sprawling outskirts, and into Madrid’s expanded international airport. The modern metro system goes to all points of the city.

Although large swathes of the Spanish capital have embraced modernity, some of the older neighbourhoods have, thankfully, been renovated rather than laid waste. The sophisticated Barrio de Salamanca, in particular, retains a character not much different from when my father arrived here on his posting to the British embassy in Madrid. This is an urban landscape I can recognise from my childhood, bounded to the south by Atocha station, to the north by the Bernabéu football stadium – home of Real Madrid – and to the east by the Retiro park and Las Ventas bullring.

Salamanca is, as it was when it was built in the 19th century for the aristocrats and emerging middle classes, a neighbourhood where leisure is more apparent than industry, and where shops, cafés, bars and restaurants offer a delightful mix between the traditional and experimental, from old stores and open markets selling dusty wine bottles, hams and cheeses to organic breakfast venues and clothes and jewellery boutiques.

It was here – in one of the tasteful 19th-century apartment blocks that line the Calle de Serrano – that my father rented a flat during the 1940s, making his way each morning on foot across the Paseo de la Castellana to the old palace that housed the British embassy. (The Foreign Office has recently moved its staff to a tower block nearer to the outskirts.)
Retracing my father’s steps, I can still enjoy a cocktail at the Ritz or Palace Hotel, in whose bars and dining rooms the diplomats and spies of wartime Madrid plotted and where the elegant decoration and service has survived management and ownership changes.

Similarly enduring is the Embassy tea-room whose private quarters British agents used as a safe house to hide Jews and PoWs making their way, via neutral Spain, to Lisbon and Gibraltar after the fall of France. Embassy’s wartime owner, Mrs Taylor, has long since died and the tea-room has a new frontage of a Fortnum-style delicatessen. But its convivial restaurant and bar still draw well-heeled madrileños and resident, mainly Anglo expatriates, the wartime intrigue replaced by the social and political gossip of the day.
By way of historical contrast, and paying off a debt to an old friend in the Spanish police force, I lunched recently at the German Horcher. This is Salamanca’s (and probably Madrid’s) most expensive restaurant, just by the majestic Retiro park. Established in the early 1940s, after transferring from Berlin, Horcher’s civilised luxury was used as the German embassy’s unofficial quarters, its private dining room used by visiting high-ranking Nazis.

While facing strong competition from the new wave of Spanish cuisine, Horcher is still going strong, providing traditional luxury with its heavy draped curtains, velvet-covered walls and dinner-jacketed waiters. The mainly business clientele are happy to indulge in seafood and game dishes, and an impeccable vintage wine list. I was well received here: my late uncle Gregorio was a Falangist who used to entertain here often. Unsurprisingly, I did not engage the staff, still less the management, in talking about the war but my partridge stew was worth every minute of my covert intrusion.

Old animosities are not so easily resolved elsewhere in Madrid. Whenever I go to a match at Bernabéu, I do so for the love of the game and the atmosphere – not unlike that of a bullring – but hiding the fact that I am a fan of archrivals FC Barcelona.

Of late I have taken to withdrawing from the pro-Madrid Salamanca just for the occasional evening and watching a Barca home match on TV in an anonymous bar across the Castellana, where territory is less defined and the tapas almost as good as at Serrano’s long-standing gentleman’s bar, José Luis.

My dad never liked football but had different choices to make in his time, and greater risks. Once, during the early months of his posting in Madrid, he went to Las Ventas to see a bullfight, and was arrested for refusing to stand for the German national anthem. Herr Himmler was in town.

Jimmy Burns interviews actress Katie Darling

Wed, 5 May 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Published in Friends of Battersea Park review April 2010

Katie Darling swoops into Il Molino bang on the appointed time of 2.45 pm, dressed in a stunning scarlet red trouser suit and boots. Ordering her umpteenth coffee of the day in a loud clear voice, she settles down easily to conversation, clearly warming to the relaxed atmosphere of Battersea’s a la mode cafe, a popular gathering place for people with time on their hands and tales to tell.

Together with her husband, three children, and two dogs-the not so young Pluto (White Labrador) and youthful Mickie (Daschund/Scottie), the engaging Katie has recently moved to Battersea after a long stint of living as an expat in Paris, and has become one of the Friends newest members. Educated at Francis Holland school, Katie has worked in a variety of jobs, including advertising and sponsorship, although her life-long profession is that of an actress. Her principal acting credits include the title role of Mary in the BBC series ‘The Crocodile’, a theatrical role in a bi-lingual production (she is fluent in French) in PG Wodehouse’s ‘Summer Lighting’, and-as Mrs Darling- in a pantomime of Peter Pan . During her ten years in Paris, roles in three French films, ‘Le Refuge’, ‘ Notre Universe Impitoyable’, ‘Haut et Court’, and ‘Les Deux Freres’. She sipped a large Americano while talking to the Review’s editor, Jimmy Burns.

JB: Early memories of Battersea?

KD: In my early twenties, before Paris, I had a bit part as an extra in a film shot in the park. I had to play a jogger. All I remember was I fell and cut my leg. My sister had her first flat in the area and there were several boyfriends who lived round here. I always thought of it as quite a lively neighbourhood.

JB. Parisian parks- best features?

KD: The French spend a fortune on their parks. They are heavily subsidised by the state and each local elected mayor invests a lot of political capital in being seen to be taking care of the green spaces in his area. They plant a lot, keep their lakes clean, stage varied and imaginative events, rather like New Yorkers do in Central park- and most French parks are open and unfenced. I like that, it makes them feel more a part of the neighbourhood.

JB I can imagine the food is pretty good too...

KD: Yes, there are restaurants and cafes which are decently priced and have good food-from barbecued meat over large open fires to delicious pates and excellent cheeses, and all with good service and comfortable design...

JB: And negative features?

KD: I suppose the French have a tendency to overregulated with their bureaucracy. For example playing football in public parks is not allowed, and you have to keep your dog on a lead. The French and their dogs in parks are not so friendly. They reflect each other in their neurosis. Owners walk with sticks to fend off other dogs from their own.

JB: Good food, decent prices, comfortable seating.... I wonder what you think of our very own cafe by the lake?

KD: I find the seating uncomfortable, the cafe itself architecturally ugly, and the food very ordinary, if not unappetising. It reminds me of some of the old cafes there used to be in some of London’s Royals parks before they got knocked down and replaced.

JB: What do you like about Battersea Park?

KD: I think it’s a park with a strong identity. It’s a gathering place for a variety of people united in wanting to go there for the right reasons. I get an incredibly positive feeling from all the activity going on -whether its children playing, or dogs being walked, or people jogging, or simply enjoying this wonderful open space. There is a unity in this enjoyment and an absence of the negativity you might find beyond the park gates. If it wasn’t for Pluto who has arthritis in his legs, I’d walk round more. But I do cycle and am discovering other wonderful parts of the park like the Tropical Garden which I like because of its colour and how pretty it looks even when it’s cold. I’m looking forward to the main planting in the Winter Garden

JB: In an ideal world, how would you like Battersea Park to be run? Differently to the way it is now?

KD: I’d like it to be taken out of the hands of Wandsworth Council, see it owned and run by a well funded Trust set up, and have the Friends become more involved as they love it so much.

JB: Your own future?

KD: I’d like to go back to acting, do something in the park...

JB: A People’s theatre?

KD Yes, something like that.....

PARK PEOPLE - Jimmy Burns interviews Jean Barker, Baroness Trumpington

Wed, 5 May 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Published in Friends of Battersea Park Review January 2010

Told by a mutual friend to expect “ a very lovely personality”, I approached my first ever interview with Lady Trumpington with a huge sense of anticipation , somewhat overawed with the task of engaging with one of the most formidable personalities living in Battersea.

Consider this skeleton CV: One of Lloyd George’s landgirls before serving in naval intelligence at the WW2 codebreaking Bletchley Park, a one-time councillor and Mayor of Cambridge, a minister of state and now , aged 87 year an assiduous House of Lords backbencher – in the words of one political commentator, “a mighty monument”.

Lady Trumpington, was far from stationary when I visited her in her groundfoor flat Prince of Wales Drive just before Christmas. Parliament which she dutifuly attends every working day, had just gone into recess and she was busily making up for lost time, wrapping Christmas presents and arranging an outing for dinner and bridge. Her beautifully decorated flat showed no signs of the fire that nearly destroyed it some four years ago, and she was happy to focus on the better memories of living by the Park over more than two decades.

“While they were repairing my flat, a neighbour lent me hers, with a better view of the Park. I have always loved looking out of the window at the people, and the dogs, and the children playing ” she recalls. “I can’t do much walking these days but I still think I am frightfully lucky having a park like this, and I love the flowers and am looking forward to the planting of the new winter garden which the Friends are helping with.”

She has a small ground floor garden she lovingly looks after. “I have a small busy Robin who visits me and s small little Wren which is why I feel very strongly they should do something about the number of crows and magpies there are in the park. I want the little birds to survive.”

I had heard that Lady Trumpington had told a packed debate of the House of Lords not long ago that Canada geese had to be dealt with too. Could she elaborate? She was quick to. “They are the most disgusting birds that I know: they eat the younger birds, shit all over the place and make a even game of golf degrading and unattractive. Once I thought I’d try to cook a Canada goose to see what it tasted like. It came out all little and black. Quite horrible! They should be persuaded to leave the country or face being shot!”

I had also heard her during a session of Desert Island Discs choosing the Crown jewels as her one luxury “in order to maximise my chance of being rescued.” So I stretched the analogy and suggested a scenario where she suddenly found herself locked in Battersea Park in the middle of the night. What I asked her would her one luxury be then?
“Oh, no doubt, a bonfire to keep the furry creepy-crawlies from getting anywhere near me. You see I’m scared by things like, mice, and rats, and bats.”

In fairness, it’s hard to think of Lady Trumpington of being anything but a bastion of good sense and manners. While touched with a mild eccentricity, and gifted with a generous sense of humour, she retains a serious respect for tradition and her country’s great institutions. She misses the parades in the Park of the old brewery horse and carriages ,and bemoans the fact that has to shop in supermarkets because the local fishmonger, greengrocer, and butcher she frequented ij the 1980’s have long gone. She is is worried about the disease that seemed to be killing the old chestnut nearby, and is vocal in her criticism of local traffic arrangements (the lack of adequate public transport forces her to take a cab each day to teh Lords), and sceptical about the pledges made by developers.

“The development of Battersea Power Station only makes sense if you build another bridge and a tube station but I won’t be around to see that.”

As I thanked her for having me round, I asked her if she didn’t mind of I kept in touch with her. There seemed so much to talk about. “Delighted,” she answered with a big smile ,”only tell me you like having a drink. I’m not a tea person myself, definitely not.” I planned to be back.

The brave women of Buenos Aires By Jimmy Burns

Wed, 5 May 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Published by The Financial Times March 13 2010

The Cabildo building, a seat of government in colonial times and now a museum, in the Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires, Argentina

In the Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires, around the central pyramid that commemorates the overthrow of colonial Spain, a neat circle of painted white bandannas marks the spot where Las Madres de Mayo – some of the bravest women in the world – protested in the last decades of the 20th century against Argentina’s bloody military junta.

When I was in the square earlier this year the only protest was, ironically enough, that of a makeshift camping site set up by Malvinas, or Falkland Islands war veterans, who claimed to be more concerned by the unemployment benefits their own government had failed to pay them than they were about any newspaper reports of oil exploration by the piratas ingleses. Near them a group of children danced in the fountains, as if this were Rome, and a woman sold some flowers. It was as if a war that should never had happened had been consigned to history.

Just how much Buenos Aires has changed became apparent one weekend soon after my arrival. I recalled my early Buenos Aires days, when Las Madres de Mayo – female relatives of “the disappeared” – had conducted ritual protests in memory of their loved ones, who had been kidnapped and killed by the military regime. It was in April 1982 at the Plaza de Mayo, too, that Argentines had gathered in their thousands to celebrate the junta’s invasion of the UK-controlled but disputed Falkland Islands, just weeks after my posting to Argentina for the FT.

Now, a couple of decades later, I found myself following a group of Brazilian women tourists through the front gates of the presidential Casa Rosada. It seemed only yesterday that I had watched protesters being beaten to death a few steps from here before finding myself frisked and detained for alleged spying activities by heavily armed police. On this visit, however, we were welcomed by a smiling palace guard, or granadero, dressed in 19th-century uniform, declaring himself a multilinguist, said that he was our guide for the morning. The Brazilians wanted to have their pictures taken with him dancing an impromptu samba, while an American lady asked: “Is this where Evita sang ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’?” Our guide was tolerant. He informed us that, though it was Madonna who had sung the song, it was, indeed, here that Eva had lived, as had her husband General Perón, who would soon be immortalised with a large statue near to the palace.

Two large halls housed photographic exhibitions: one showed a succession of Argentine women who had stood up against tyranny of one form or another. These icons of the persecuted and downtrodden seemed at odds with the luxury of the palace, home during the week to elected president Cristina Kirchner – a populist whose passion for speaking to crowds has more than a touch of Evita about it.

Much of the palace was as the military had left it. There was a chapel to the Virgin where the junta had prayed, convinced that God was on the side of repression. Nearby, a hand-carved, wood-panelled lift connected two floors decorated with chandeliers, mahogany furniture and a plethora of ivory, silver and gold artefacts.

Up a marble staircase and through Renaissance-style salons, I followed the guide out on to the main balcony overlooking the plaza and, in blazing sunshine, savoured the moment. I stood on the same spot where the defining moments of Argentina’s history had been played out before the crowd below – Evita giving her final speech before her death from cancer, Galtieri insisting that Mrs Thatcher had been militarily defeated, Diego Maradona holding up the 1986 football World Cup.

The 15-odd blocks of the San Telmo quarter are still for walking and discovering. I stumbled on a superb ice-cream parlour, a shoemaker who works marvels with leather, and countless bars and cafés where you can as comfortably eat breakfast as drown some soothing draft beer, while watching the world go by.

The military has been forced to retreat from whole areas they once occupied: the modernised docklands of Puerto Madero, for instance, are now the setting for riverside restaurants, hotels and luxury apartments and a stunning footbridge designed by Ricardo Calatrava. Along the road, some of the more traditional super-rich still inhabit La Recoleta, the super-elegant quarter in the style of Paris and Madrid that filled the writer VS Naipaul with such disgust so many years ago.

The neighbourhood these days struggles to keep its clientele amid a fear of crime. Residents claim that dangerous muggers have taken to hiding at night in the tentacles of Recoleta Park’s magnificent old ombu tree, a native evergreen, but elderly tourists still crowd the quarter’s sophisticated outdoor cafés in daytime. It’s an area that Naipaul found the epitome of Buenos Aires at its worst – pretentious and amoral. It still is, and some people still love it.

But the city elsewhere has been opening up, renewing itself. The middle-classes have been moving further north. The Palermo area has tastefully designed new apartment blocks and shops blending with the old. Its tree-lined cobbled streets have been restored, and once abandoned buildings gentrified. It is popular at night with a young well-heeled crowd that keeps talking into the early hours of the morning, when not setting off to dance somewhere.

Some of the new restaurants and boutiques that have opened in the barrios of Palermo Soho and Palermo Hollywood struck me as being as imitative as their names: I could have been in New York rather than South America. So instead I made my way to Las Cañitas, a less-hyped neighbourhood with its Argentine “village” pastimes of pavement chat and timeless lingering, where I ate pampas-reared steak in a small restaurant.

My most culturally interesting evening came with the invitation from an Argentine girlfriend to the Canning, an old dance hall where she and a crowd of locals and foreigners danced tango. Since her divorce, she explained, she had become addicted to La Milonga – as the tango night is called locally. She owned up to enjoying the frisson of making eye contact with a stranger and being led to the dance floor, finding herself firmly clasped, and knowing that he had the expertise to guide her. Away from the tourist haunts, this genuine tango hall is not unlike a somewhat theatrical equivalent of a singles club, where city loners find temporary comfort or escape in the artifice of the tango.
And yet the traditional male dominance that seemed to be on display – my old friend, her eyes shut, allowing her partner to lead her across the dance floor – is deceptive. My friend is not the only woman who regards these tango nights as a kind of affirmation, as she makes her own decisions about who to dance with and what to do with him afterwards. Evita would have approved.

A new edition of Jimmy Burns’s book ‘The Hand of God: The Life of Diego Maradona’ is published in April (Bloomsbury)

Cemetery of La Recoleta

Museums, Maradona and the inevitable Evita

Argentina’s bicentenary celebrations this year will include the reopening of the iconic opera house the Teatro Colón, the highlight of a varied programme of cultural activities.

Visit the Museo de Arte Decorativo (www.mnad.org.ar), in the elegant Errázuriz palace, and the permament collections at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano . You can walk among the dead at the Cemetery of La Recoleta (www.recoleta cemetery.com), extravagant home to hundreds of illustrious corpses, including Evita Perón’s.

Buenos Aires is not short of boutique hotels. Home Hotel (www.homebuenosaires.com) in Palermo district is a good place to chill in some style. It has an infinity pool, a holistic spa and good cocktails. Also very reasonable is the Art Hotel (www.arthotel.com.ar) near Recoleta.

Galerias Pacifico on Cordoba Avenue and Florida Street is one of the most stylish and beautifully designed of the downtown shopping malls. Check out the leather goods. For the more adventurous, San Telmo district is where you will find delicious ice-cream, curious bric-a-brac and quirky artisan shoeshops (my favourite is on Defensa and Brazil).

This is not a city for vegetarians. Argentine meat is the best in the world. You will find excellent steaks at Jackie O (Palermo) and El Mirasol (Puerto Madero). For the less carnivorous, try the fish and pasta at Oviedo (Barrio Norte) For breakfast or tea, I’d suggest the Café Richmond (Calle Florida), where Graham Greene set a scene of The Honorary Consul.

Leave consumerism behind and take a walk or a jog in the Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur, the peaceful ecological park a stone’s throw from the modernised docklands.
La Bombonera stadium and museum are a must for football fans in the year that Diego Maradona will make a make or break appearance, as national team coach, in the World Cup in South Africa.

Feature Article THE TABLET

Wed, 5 May 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Latest issue: 6 March 2010

Is the sun setting on the Spanish Church?

Catholicism in Spain

Jimmy Burns

It was announced this week that the Pope will visit Spain in November. The news comes during a tense phase in Church-State relations after the Spanish Senate approved a new abortion law on 25 February. It is the latest round in a battle that the secularising government seems to be winning
Last year an estimated one million people demonstrated in Madrid when the proposals to liberalise the abortion law became public. Now that it looks set to become law, the Spanish bishops’ conference has approved a new campaign of protest marches by pro-lifers – describing the proposals as a “licence to kill” children, and an attack on the institution of the family. “This law gives a sealed envelope to a woman to sort herself out, and frees the father of any responsibility,” declared the conference’s spokesman, Bishop Juan Antonio Martínez Camino

In a country where a majority of the population still identifies itself more or less as Catholic, one would have thought that this is one issue Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero would be advised not to pick a fight over. In fact, Zapatero appears to have taken on the bishops over an issue that alone is unlikely to threaten his political survival.

he law allows the procedure without restrictions up to 14 weeks of a pregnancy, and up to 22 weeks if two doctors certify that there is a serious threat to the health of the mother, or if there is foetal malformation. Beyond 22 weeks, abortion will be allowed if doctors certify foetal malformation deemed “incompatible with life” or if the foetus is diagnosed with an extremely serious or incurable disease. An amendment was passed requiring 16- and 17-year-olds to inform their families if they decide to have an abortion unless they face “a clear risk of family violence, threats, pressure or mistreatment”.

It was an earlier socialist government that in 1985 legalised abortion in Spain, restricting access to termination to cases of rape, foetal malformation or when the mother’s physical or mental health is at risk. From the socialist Government’s perspective, the abortion act has strengthened women’s rights, offering them a choice and bringing an end to the anomaly of the “mental health” loophole under which 100,000 women obtained abortions yearly across a network of often poorly regulated private clinics. Politicians who voted for the new law – they include a small number of “moral rebels” in the main opposition pro-Catholic Partido Popular, and some Catholic Basque and Catalan nationalist party politicians who had a free vote – have put themselves in an “objective state of sin”. While the situation lasts, they will not be “admitted to Holy Communion”.

Pro-lifers have meanwhile urged King Juan Carlos not to sign the act into law. Hopes of provoking a constitutional crisis over the abortion issue, however, appear to be wishful thinking. Bishop Martínez Camino drew a distinction between the King’s constitutional duty to sign laws approved by the democratically elected parliament, and the politicians’ freedom to vote.

tors have interpreted this as a political rather than a moral distinction even though the bishops are shying away from admitting to this in public. Since being enthroned as head of state in 1975, following the death of the dictator Francisco Franco, King Juan Carlos intervened forcefully only once, when Spanish democracy was threatened by a military coup in 1981. His popularity has nonetheless largely rested on his reputation as a bastion of stability against the dark, divisive forces that in years past threw Spain into a bloody Civil War. In practice this has meant legitimising the country’s transition from a dictatorship to a modern state, including signing in other liberal laws on gay marriages and divorce.

The King’s position reflects perhaps sensitivity to the changing cultural context of modern Spain. The religious map of Spain has been altered thanks to the huge increase in immigration in recent years (Muslims form the largest minority faith), and the separation of Church and State.

The percentage of the Spanish population declaring itself Catholic has fallen from 83.5 per cent in 1998 to under 75 per cent last year. Only 50 per cent of these “Catholics” admit to ever going to church other than for events such as a funeral or wedding. There is also a crisis in vocations, with the average age of priests put at 67.

A recent visit to Madrid confirmed the extent to which the Catholic Church appears to be losing influence particularly among the young and middle-aged groups. “The bishops here are out of touch with what a majority of Spaniards who have grown up after Franco feel should be part of modern life,” said Carlos Oppe, an Anglo-Spanish Ampleforth-educated ecologist and married father of young twins.

A Sunday Mass I attended in the outskirts of Madrid was half empty, with the congregation largely made up of rather well-heeled old pensioners. There was a striking absence of youth, apart from a young priest, whose hellfire sermon denouncing the alleged unbelievers outside the Church made no attempt to engage with any earthly, still less spiritual, sense of the common good. Across the hills I could see clearly the huge cross at the memorial known as the Valley of the Fallen, built by Republican prisoners after the Civil War for the eternal glory of National Catholicism Spain as personified by Franco. It was another reminder of how much Spain had changed.

Elsewhere, left-wing priests have provoked tensions with a hierarchy increasingly bending to the wishes of a doctrinally conservative Pope. For example, in the working-class Madrileño suburb of Vallecas, the so-called “red” church of San Carlos Borromeo has been threatened with closure by the local bishop because of its alleged lack of liturgical rigour. The church welcomes non-Catholics, including Muslims, who were allowed to share their readings of the Qur’an.

According to the Hispanist historian Henry Kamen, Spanish identity based on a seemingly indelible Catholic legacy can no longer be taken for granted in modern Spain, with its changing political, social and cultural landscape. In his book Imagining Spain, Kamen argues that the “myth” of Catholic Spain was fuelled by the triumphalist writings of the nineteenth-century scholar Menéndez Pelayo. “One faith, one baptism, one flock, one shepherd, one Church … the hammer of heretics, the light of Trent, the sword of Rome,” wrote Menéndez Pelayo of his country.

Certainly in the lead-up to Easter in Spain, the Holy Week processions will draw large crowds of enthusiastic devotees in villages and towns across Spain, a reminder of the mysticism that endures in Spanish society, and the rituals involved.

And yet today’s Prime Minister Zapatero is a self-proclaimed agnostic, whose presidency of the EU makes no mention of his country’s evangelising mission but rather focuses on issues which the Spanish socialist Government claims as the preserve of a liberated secular society, such as gender equality in all its manifestations from gay rights to abortion.

By contrast there appears to be a crisis of faith in Spain, not just in a fall-off in practice but also at an intellectual level, with a majority of Spaniards lacking a coherent view of what they really believe in and why. And this in a notionally Catholic country where the scandal of sexual abuse is thought widely to have been as covered up as it was in Ireland and could, according to local diplomats, similarly surface, belatedly, any time.

Such sexual scandals have until now only been hinted at by film directors like Almodóvar and relate to the Franco era. But in the same week as the abortion bill was being debated with minimum media interest, newspapers and TV went to town over a very recent case of a priest in Toledo who had worked as a male prostitute and spent church funds on telephone sex and internet pornography.

As things are, the Spanish bishops appear to be fighting a losing battle to wield greater influence on the State as the Government pushes its “modernising” agenda in education, removing crucifixes from classrooms as well as from some public places.

Most Spanish political commentators believe that Zapatero’s Achilles heel is not his lack of faith but his mismanagement of the economic crisis, with Spain’s four million unemployed, negative growth and spiralling budget deficit causing growing unrest among believers and unbelievers alike.

Tribute to Michael Richey

Wed, 5 May 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

This Obituary by Jimmy Burns appeared in The Tablet on the 21/1/2010

Mike Richey’s death at the age of 92, three days before Christmas Day ,marks the passing into history of the last of a group of English Catholics who left an enduring mark on the 20th century.

On the day of Mike’s birth , his father George , a distinguished British officer who had fought in the Matabele War, the Mashona rebellion and the Boer War, wrote to Mike’s mother Adelaide,from the western front: “We are busy preparing for the biggest show of the war.”

The stoicism and bravery reflected in George’s letters before he was wounded at Ypres, would have a lasting influence on Mike and his older brother Paul , both of whom were also destined for distinguished wartime service.

Mike was educated at Downside and spent a short time with the Trappists at Caldey island where his admiration for the contemplative life struggled against a creative urge that had been stimulated by reading Eric Gill’s essays on art and life.

Mike learnt stone carving and lettering while living in Gill’s community at Pigott’s, later working on the huge panels at the League of Nations building in Geneva , and the Oxford playhouse where his lettering still exists above the main door.

He later recalled his good fortune in forming four important friendships, thanks to Gill, each friendship “of course particular, but at the same time interdependent, as they might be in a family or indeed a conspiracy”.

The four friends were David Jones, the poet and painter, Tom Burns, the Catholic publisher and future editor of The Tablet, who in WW2 became involved in espionage and propaganda Rene Hague printer and scholar and husband of Gill’s daughter Joan, and the BBC’s Harman Grisewood .

At the outbreak of WW2, Burns convinced Mike that the best way to reconcile his pacifism with his sense of patriotic duty was to serve on a minesweeper HMS Goodwill. Within the first year of the war, HMS Goodwill was hit by a German torpedo, and Mike penned a moving account of those killed or badly injured .

‘Sunk by a Mine: A Survivor’s Story’ was published in the New York Times magazine after Mike’s mother had submitted it for the Llevellyn Rhys memorial Prize for Literature along with her older son Paul’s RAF diary. Mike won the prize, while Paul’s diary was published later as a book Fighter Pilot.

The article survives as the most striking example of Mike’s understated and unexploited literary talent for it brought him neither fame nor fortune even if his insightful letters and other writings have found a distinguished home in Georgetown University library in the US, courtesy of the archivist Nicholas Scheetz.

Mike’s wartime service also took him from the Falklands to South Africa and eventually the French coast off Normandy in the D-day landings, where his acquired specialist knowledge as a navigator was put to good use in tracking German U-boats.

Once peace had been declared, old naval contacts asked him to form the Institute of Navigation (renamed the Royal Institute in 1972) where he served as director for 35 years.

It was a post that provided Mike in public at least with the independence he always craved for, although the Institute grew in international stature , with a membership of astronomers, oceanographers, radio engineers and others.

In 1965, encouraged by his friend Francis Chichester, Mike bought a 26ft engineless junk-rigged boat called Jester, and began to participate single-handedly in transatlantic races. Mike was always among the last to make it across the Atlantic -but make it he did, sustained by a diet of red wine, and pasta, and readings of Proust, and the Gospels.

His eventual landings at Newport, Rhode Island fuelled a growing constituency of American friends who looked on him as extraordinary brave while refreshingly uncompetitive.

It was at sea where Mike found the perfect balance to his life.The long periods of solitude , amidst the ocean’s great creatures, and the battling with the elements got him in touch with himself and closer to God. In 1988,Mike lost Jester in a major storm. He would carry the remembrance of his favourite boat for the rest of his life in a cross made for him from part of Jester’s surviving wreckage by the captain of the ship that rescued him.

A replica Jester was later built with money raised by a group of Mike’s fellow-sailors.In 1992, aged 75, Richey crossed the Atlantic and back again, as he did five years later aged 80, by now well established as an example for young sailors with a taste for the sheer adventure of the sea.

While Mike lived most of his life with the simplicity of a hermit, he was no island. His humour and beautiful turn of phrase, the dedicated books and religious artefacts that occupied his otherwise cell-like living quarters, his never pious but deep sense of God in all things, attracted a growing following.

Two weeks before he died, Mike and I met for our periodical lengthy lunch at Sams his favourite bistro in Brighton where he lived.I was reminded of how much he considered his faith a matter of conscience,a personal relationship between oneself and one’s God. Our conversation had a drawing in feel about it, as if Mike wanted to turn the unresolved chapters of his life into a coherent whole.

His last days were characterised by the sharing of bread and wine, his last hours by his sudden instinctive embrace of his neighbour and dear friend the university lecturer Kai Easton who had so lovingly arranged his life and cared for him once his last boat Ballerina and his battered 2CV –a resurrected Jester on wheels –had been sold.

Mike died, to quote from his favourite Joyce lines “in the full glory of some passion” rather than “fading and withering dismally”, and inwardly echoing the words he himself uttered when delivering a eulogy to his friend Harman Grisewood, father to his beloved goddaughter Sabina Bailey.

“We here in the church believe that this is not the end. But,for all the metaphors and theological abstractions, we know absolutely nothing about the after-life. This perhaps allows some innocent speculation and I like to think now of my friends in paradise. It would be a fine house party.”

Counter-terrorism spy to take over as MI5 director-general

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Counter-terrorism spy to take over as MI5 director-general

By Jimmy Burns

Published: March 8 2007 02:00

A career spy with a track-record in international -counter-terrorism is to take over as the new head of MI5, the Home Office announced yesterday.

Jonathan Evans, the security service's deputy director-general, will next month succeed Dame Manningham-Buller who announced in December that she was retiring after serving four-and-half years.

Mr Evans, aged 49, joined MI5 in 1980, working on counter-espionage operations during the last stages of the cold war. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, he worked as a senior MI5 officer in Irish-related counter-terrorism, interspersed with a senior management post at MI5's headquarters in London and a secondment to the Home Office.

In 2001, 10 days before the September 11 attacks on the US, he was appointed head of MI5's international -counter-terrorism section.

Mr Evans was selected as head of MI5 by a group of senior civil servants. His appointment was endorsed by John Reid, the home secretary, with the agreement of Tony Blair, the prime minister.
The choice of Mr Evans was welcomed by the intelligence community, which had feared ministerial plans to shake up counter-terrorist strategy and organisation might have involved bringing in an outsider with a brief to drive through reform. According to close allies, Mr Evans offers a safe pair of hands when MI5 is focused on countering the threat of terrorist attacks on the UK.
The new director-general takes over as the intelligence community faces reform, with an outgoing prime minister and a resurgent Conservative party.

Yesterday, his photograph was published with official approval for the first time, but without details of his professional and personal life - a reminder that moves towards greater transparency have limits.
MI5 was unavailable to comment on similarities in character between Mr Evans and Harry Pearce, the head of counter-terrorism in the BBC's spy fiction series Spooks.

Diplomats to the core - how Oxford continues to 'inoculate the world with Balliol'.

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Diplomats to the core - how Oxford continues to 'inoculate the world with Balliol'.

By Jimmy Burns

5 July 1997

It is 6pm and a group of young men and women are filing in orderly fashion into one of Oxford's more discreet academic buildings for a lecture on the global politics of environment by a former UK ambassador to the UN.

Well groomed, well dressed, and soft spoken, these students from around the world cut a very different image to those who have been crowding into the university's most popular pub, The King's Arms, to celebrate the end of their finals.

For these are no ordinary students. They are young diplomats from around the world - or "members" as they and their tutors like to refer to each other - of the Foreign Service Programme (FSP), courtesy of their own governments and the UK's Foreign Office.

The Programme has its roots in Britain's imperialist tradition and has, over the years, developed as one of the more subtle and less trumpeted attempts by Her Majesty's Government to assure itself of a measure of continuing global influence.

Its earliest precursor was a specialist programme for new entrants to the Indian Civil Service, promoted in the late 19th century by Benjamin Jowett, a senior tutor who became Master of Balliol College - "To inoculate the world with Balliol," pledged Jowett.

With the fall of Empire, an Overseas Service Course was adapted to train members of Commonwealth states achieving independence.

In more recent years, a renamed FSP has extended its intake of diplomats to practically any country in the world.

A marketing campaign aimed at governments able to finance their own has drawn students from the Middle East and Latin America, and to a lesser extent Asia, plus the former Communist countries. With the exception of Austria, European countries choose to train their own diplomats.

A group of Oxford academics is responsible for three main areas of study - international trade and finance, international economics and finance, and international law. But the administrative spirit of the foreign office is stamped all over the fourth course, unsurprisingly titled "diplomacy".
The man entrusted with teaching diplomatic skills is Sir Robin Fearn, who successfully applied for the job of programme director last year following his retirement from the Foreign Office.
"Continuity with change" is how Sir Robin describes his latest challenge.

In the reassuring environment of the senior common room of his old Oxford college, Sir Robin seemed coolly unruffled by some of the realities of modern times: the Chinese back in Hong Kong, Labour's foreign minister talking of the need to think of human rights first.

He performed his national service in the Intelligence Corps before joining the diplomatic ladder. Having served Queen and Country around the world for more than 30 years - from Islamabad to the Falklands and most recently as ambassador to Madrid - Sir Robin remains firmly cast in the Jowett mould, convinced that British influence can still extend universally, thanks to the spirit England's most eminent university.

So how does academic excellence apply to teaching foreign diplomats?
"What I am trying to do with these people is to make them think, have ideas, make their own judgments, and argue them convincingly. I want them articulate, argumentative, persuasive, treat facts not as knowledge but as the basis for creating opinions," Sir Robin enthused.
Sensitive to any charge that he is engaged in propaganda, Sir Robin insists that the prime objective of the programme is universal - although "propagandising Britain is one of the elements".
"Let's not get too focused on selling Britain. The main object is to give those on the course a global understanding of the complexities of the world, and better to understand the techniques of diplomacy," says Sir Robin.

"We are always oversubscribed, and that speaks for the reputation of the programme and the value that foreign ministries around the world attach to it. It's significant that governments are prepared to sacrifice time and money on some of their diplomats to come here for a year."
Or it could be that some "diplomats" have hit on a convenient way of getting themselves a quick - and free - Oxford education (75% of the students are funded by Foreign Office scholarships).
The programme organisers make much of the global network of "old boys and girls" developed over the years.
Less explicit is the extent to which some former members may also become unofficial "moles" that might, if called upon, repay a favour or two to the local UK mission.
Thus the official programme brochure records the following innocuous story: "A senior former member of the programme tells of how he went into a bilateral conference to negotiate a knotty problem and noticed, to his pleasure and relief, that his opposite number was sporting the same distinctive FSP tie."
It concludes, without even a hint of self-mockery: "The meeting was over in an unexpectedly short time. The non-Oxford diplomats on both sides are said to be still puzzled by how quickly agreement was reached on such an apparent sticking point."

The record of members, once they leave the cosy environment of Oxford to return to their own countries, is mixed: several old boys promoted to ambassadorships in countries of dubious democratic credentials, and one old girl - Benazir Bhutto - to a presidency.

As for Zheng Xiaosong, this year's member from China, he quit well before the programme's end. He had been appointed to his country's new administration in Hong Kong.
The remaining members on this year's course certainly seemed in convivial mood as their joined Sir Robin and me for their final meal together.

It was hard to find any among them prepared to utter a word of criticism of the programme itself. But they were, after all, trained diplomats.

Trusted mastermind of UK cold war spycraft

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Trusted mastermind of UK cold war spycraft

By Jimmy Burns

Published: October 24 2008

A cursory look at Sir Arthur Temple Franks’ entry in Who’s Who would suggest a somewhat unremarkable life of wartime military service and foreign office postings spanning some 40 years.
Yet his life was anything but ordinary. Franks, who has died at the age of 88, was for four years chief of the Secret Intelligence Service – MI6. Known as Dickie, he started out by earning a reputation for daring military exploits against Nazi Germany before pursuing a fruitful career on Her Majesty’s secret service – not without controversy.

Appointed in 1978 as “C”, the code letter under which British intelligence chiefs were known, he is seen in some ways as the first modern head of the service. Unlike his aloof, top-down predecessors who had kept even insiders in the dark, Franks introduced a more collegiate style, trying to ensure that everyone knew what was happening and listening to their views. “He showed that you don’t have to be a bastard,” says Sir Colin McColl, himself a former head of MI6. “He was extremely effective yet also sensitive, intelligent and a most delightful man.”

Franks understood what it was like to work in the field and what kind of problems could arise. Born of middle-class parents in 1920, he received a private education at Rugby school before taking a law degree at Queen’s College Oxford. In 1940, during the second world war, he enlisted in the Royal Corps of Signals, gained a commission with the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment, and was posted to the Middle East as an intelligence officer. He then joined the Special Operations Executive.
The SOE’s mission was to facilitate espionage and sabotage behind enemy lines and to co-operate with local resistance movements. Its agents were trained in dirty tricks and dirty methods, from forging documents and surviving interrogation techniques to knowing how to kill.

In 1944, Franks was with the SOE in Cairo, before being parachuted into the Danube area of Serbia. There he commanded a small group of naval saboteurs, conducting guerrilla operations against German shipping.

When the second world war ended, he was drafted into the Control Commission for Germany, headquartered in Berlin, with tasks that ranged from rooting out Nazis to tracking the creeping influence of the Soviet Union on Eastern Europe. His wartime experience proved invaluable in Franks’ development as a professional spy. He had a brief postwar period in journalism at the Daily Mirror, and SIS, which liked to take on people who had had some experience in the normal world, recruited him in 1949.

The Berlin blockade had began months earlier, in June 1948, marking the first major international crisis of the cold war between the US and the Soviet Union. Although viewed by Washington as the junior partner, SIS was drawn in to new areas of covert operations to protect western interests. Franks’ first posting overseas was to the British Middle East Office in Cyprus where he became involved in Operation Boot, a joint CIA/SIS plot to oust the nationalist Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mossadeq, and restore the Shah.

Franks was posted to Tehran to reopen the SIS station there after Mossadeq’s overthrow and he stayed, with British diplomatic relations with Iran fully restored, until 1956. In 1979, a year after Franks had taken over as SIS chief, the Shah himself was overthrown by Ayatollah Khomeini.
The failure of the Americans to acknowledge what SIS considered to be the greater role played by the British in Operation Boot rankled for years. There was less argument over the intelligence co-operation that informed President John F. Kennedy’s response to the installation of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962.

Much of that intelligence was gleaned from a serving Soviet military intelligence officer, Oleg Penkovsky. He passed his secrets to London thanks to an operation in which Franks and the British agent and “courier”, the businessman Greville Wynne, were involved. Franks was then running the so-called frequent travellers programme as the head of SIS’s directorate of production and research.
Wynne and Penkovsky were arrested by the Russians. The British government initially insisted that Wynne was an innocent businessmen but in 1964 he was exchanged for a KGB spy, Gordon Lonsdale, after serving one year of an eight-year prison sentence. Penkovsky was executed.
In contrast to Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, the reality of the world of espionage was less gung-ho adventurism than the murky stage of tradecraft and moles that would inspire the creativity of John le Carré.

The enduring official secrecy that protects postwar SIS files, partly reserved for future official histories, and the death of many key players, means that the true scope and scale of the organisation’s infiltration by Soviet agents such as the Cambridge Five and George Blake is unclear. What is certain is that Franks’ promotion within SIS remained unaffected by such betrayals.

His time as chief saw new challenges for the service behind the Iron Curtain – including competing for double agents – and in Northern Ireland, where SIS developed contacts with the IRA, arguably helping lay the foundations for the peace process. Months after he retired as “C”, Argentina’s military junta invaded the Falklands, and a foreign secretary was forced to take the blame for not acting on intelligence. Remembered as an organised and focused individual who inspired trust within the organisation, Franks was always energetically supported socially by his wife, Rachel, whom he married in 1945.

He enjoyed his twilight years between the Travellers Club in London and the golf club in Aldeburgh, Suffolk. His wife died in 2004. He is survived by their son and two daughters.

The spy who talked too much - The renegade MI6 agent is an unconvincing advocate of ...

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

The spy who talked too much - The renegade MI6 agent is an unconvincing advocate of ...

By Jimmy Burns

Published: 31 March 2001

The spy who talked too much - The renegade MI6 agent is an unconvincing advocate of free speech, argues Jimmy Burns.

The Big Breach: From Top Secret to Maximum Security by Richard Tomlinson
One wonders what the one-time spy and author Graham Greene would have made of Richard Tomlinson, the renegade MI6 officer who defied Whitehall's long-standing obsession with secrecy by publishing his memoirs while still a fugitive from British law.

Thirty-three years ago Greene wrote a glowing comment on Kim Philby's book My Silent War, soon after one of British intelligence's brightest employees had defected to the Soviet Union. Not only was Philby's book honest, well written, and often amusing, but, in Greene's view, its betrayal of king and country was justified by belief in a higher ideal. "In Philby's own eyes, he was working for a shape of things to come from which his country would benefit," wrote Greene.

Richard Tomlinson was recruited in the early 1990s, when MI6 was adapting to the realities of the end of the Cold War. In the global village of open frontiers and cyberspace, the world was no longer divided along neat ideological lines. New challenges emerged, such as money laundering by drug barons, nuclear proliferation by rogue states, international terrorism, hackers.

Tomlinson, like Philby, went to Cambridge. He was clever and projected a certain joie de vivre, but the recruiting panel must have been blind not to recognise his utter unsuitability for the real world of spying. The first part of this book has Tomlinson trying to blow up a railway bridge as a schoolboy, and afterwards, having gained a First in aeronautical engineering, toughing it out with the Territorial Army, doing a lot of travelling, and losing his patience with a desk-bound consultancy job. If MI6 were made up of James Bonds, Tomlinson might have prospered. But the reality of MI6, as one of its employees once admitted to me, is that it is not really any different from any other Whitehall department, with its bureaucracies and duty-bound management structures, and demanding unquestioning loyalty from its employees. But as this book makes abundantly clear, MI6 is also obsessional about secrecy.
For a while, the aspirational 007-Tomlinson clearly had fun. His assignments included infiltrating an Iranian arms-dealing network and running some agents in the Balkans. Along the way he encountered the cynicism of the modern world: MI6 spying on the French; MI6 ignoring information suggesting that John Major's Tory party was being funded from Serbia; MI6 (in the guise of Tomlinson himself) watching a civilian in Bosnia being blown to bits and being able to do nothing about it.

Yet Tomlinson's defection, unlike Philby's, was not motivated by what affects the world, but by what suddenly brought his personal enjoyment to a halt: the personnel manager - alias Poison Dwarf - who called him in one day and told him he'd got the sack for not being a team player, and for proving too much of a wild card.

From this point on, Tomlinson underwent a sudden conversion from James Bond to human rights activist, as he fought for the right to appeal against his unfair dismissal, with his employers refusing an employment tribunal. He tries to engage our sympathy by alleging that his only "off-day" while on duty was when he secretly mourned the death from cancer of a girlfriend.

Equally plausible, however, is the possibility that MI6's senior management realised they had made a terrible mistake in recruiting someone who thought that espionage was just one big adventure.
But whatever the truth behind his dismissal, Tomlinson has made some money from his subsequent "cause", courtesy of cheque-book journalism. MI6 has also spent a significant amount of taxpayers' money in trying to suppress him.

Both sides have contributed to hyping a story that, in terms of secrets, tells us very little that we did not already know. Tomlinson thoughtfully changes the names of former colleagues, while the operations he describes, although sometimes politically embarrassing, are not always credible. For example, his suggestion that MI6 may have had some involvement in the death of Princess Diana seems to be based solely on his claim that he once stumbled on a file with the name of an agent employed at the Paris Ritz. Moreover, having made the suggestion, Tomlinson makes no attempt to suggest a motive. Just as well.

Tomlinson is at his most convincing when appealing directly to the liberal conscience by asking whether his hounding by his former management, leading to imprisonment in one of the UK's top security jails and subsequent police harassment, before a final frustrated attempt to ban his book, was morally justified. But there is a nasty undercurrent running through the final chapters of this book, where Tomlinson reveals himself using the secrets he was once prepared to keep as a bargaining chip against his former employers.

Perhaps moral judgments have always been out of place in the world of espionage, as Greene suggested. From the perspective of MI6 and Tomlinson, the ends have always justified the means. As more recently shown to us by John le Carre, those in the business of sowing distrust should expect to be betrayed.

MI6's raison d'etre remains its ability to keep secrets, and to disrupt those of others: this book shows it is actually doing quite a good job. Tomlinson is an unconvincing advocate of change, when he concludes that the job of protecting our democracies can be done just as easily and more effectively by police, customs and diplomacy. However, his book is a useful contribution to the ongoing debate about the future of the intelligence services and freedom of information. It left me with the feeling that the spooks in Whitehall could have avoided a great deal of adverse publicity by agreeing to Tomlinson's original proposal: an employment tribunal held in camera. Greene, I'm sure, would have drunk to that.

Trusted mastermind of UK cold war spycraft

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Trusted mastermind of UK cold war spycraft

By Jimmy Burns

Published: October 24 2008

A cursory look at Sir Arthur Temple Franks’ entry in Who’s Who?would suggest a somewhat unremarkable life of wartime military service and foreign office postings spanning some 40 years.
Yet his life was anything but ordinary. Franks, who has died at the age of 88, was for four years chief of the Secret Intelligence Service – MI6. Known as Dickie, he started out by earning a reputation for daring military exploits against Nazi Germany before pursuing a fruitful career on Her Majesty’s secret service – not without controversy.

He enjoyed his twilight years between the Travellers Club in London and the golf club in Aldeburgh, Suffolk. His wife died in 2004. He is survived by their son and two daughters.

Olympic flame

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Olympic flame

By Jimmy Burns

Published: April 9 2008

Back in 1978, Argentina was preparing to host the World Cup. The fact that the military junta had by then purged the nation of thousands of dissidents and that one of the biggest torture and death camps was a few hundreds yards away from the River Plate stadium mattered not a jot to Fifa, the world governing body, the participating nations and the fans.

But 30 years on, China has a problem on its hands, unless it smartens up its human rights image. When you have global internet and rolling 24-hour satellite TV, the phrase, the "whole world's watching you" takes on a different meaning.

As the FT exclusively revealed last week, the Chinese have enlisted the support of a PR company to limit the damage to its reputation of its brutal record in Tibet and elsewhere.

They should receive a simple world of advice. Start loosening the political straitjacket and engage constructively with the Dalai Lama, while reminding the world of China's status as a major political and economic power - one the world cannot afford to boycott.

George Best, Un futbolista genial

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

George Best, Un futbolista genial

El Manchester United le captó con sólo 15 años. Tenía 17 cuando debutó con el primer equipo en la final de la Copa de Inglaterra. Fue internacional por primera vez con la Selección de Irlanda del Norte (1964). Cuatro años después ganó la Copa de Europa y fue elegido "Mejor Futbolista de Europa". A partir de ese momento comenzó su declive.

Comparable a otros maestros del siglo XX como Johan Cruyff y Pelé, su figura se aproxima más a la de Diego Armando Maradona, debido a la trágica combinación de brillantez y autodestrucción que siempre acompañó al futbolista británico más sobresaliente de su generación.

Nació el 22 de mayo de 1946, en Belfast, en una Irlanda del Norte donde la guerra civil no había llegado al punto máximo de intolerancia religiosa. Fue el mayor de los seis hijos del matrimonio formado por un trabajador portuario y la empleada de una fábrica de tabaco. De su padre heredó el amor por el fútbol y de su madre, el alcoholismo. Cuenta la leyenda que aprendió a jugar en Cregagh —un barrio obrero y protestante— golpeando una pelota de tenis contra una pared.

De baja estatura y delgado, no parecía un deportista, aunque la agilidad de sus piernas prometía maravillas. Tenía 15 años cuando un ojeador del Manchester United le fichó para la sección juvenil del club y en menos de dos años ya estaba en el primer equipo. Cuando en 1963 jugó su primer partido como profesional, Reino Unido se encontraba en una encrucijada social y cultural, los nostálgicos del Viejo Imperio debían dar paso a una nueva generación confiada y atrevida. Con su melena larga —como los Beatles—, gran energía y una técnica mágica, Best encarnaba el espíritu de los nuevos tiempos.

Por sus orígenes y circunstancias, el Manchester United y el joven eran tal para cual. El club había resurgido —bajo el mandato inspirador de su manager, Matt Busby— de entre las cenizas del desastre aéreo de Múnich, que en 1958 se cobró la vida de más de la mitad del equipo. Así que en los años 60 Best se perfilaba como el mejor de un grupo de jóvenes que llevaría al Manchester a ser uno de los equipos más brillantes. Bobby Charlton, Denis Law, Nobby Stiles y Paddy Crerand estaban en sus filas. Eran los mejores, aunque Best —que jugaba con la Selección de Irlanda del Norte— no disputó el Mundial que Inglaterra ganó en 1966.

Entre los nostálgicos aún sigue abierto el debate sobre si los jugadores del Manchester de los años 50 —los legendarios Busby Babes— habrían arrebatado la corona a la máquina blanca [el Real Madrid] si el accidente de Múnich no les hubiera diezmado. Pero la venganza llegó 10 años después, cuando ambos clubes volvieron a enfrentarse. El Manchester derrotó al Madrid —por cuatro goles a tres—, eliminándole de la Copa de Europa de 1968, que el equipo británico consiguió tras una victoria espectacular sobre el Benfica, de Lisboa.

Cabeza y piernas. A los 22 años, fue elegido el Mejor Futbolista de Europa (1968). Durante seis temporadas consecutivas fue uno de los máximos goleadores del mundo. El veterano comentarista del Sunday Times Hugh McIlvanney decía de él: "A veces, los milagros hablan más que las palabras, y no hay duda de que, en términos de técnica, atletismo y belleza, Best fue milagroso. Su juego con el balón hipnotizaba. Tenía el equilibrio de un acróbata, una imaginación sin límites, una confianza total y una rapidez devastadora que dejaba a los defensas sin poder reaccionar".

Esta imagen ayuda a entender su talento en un tiempo en el que los defensas usaban sus botas como hachas y los delanteros no teatralizaban —con saltos y caídas exageradas— las entradas. Era único toreando zancadillas y cuando le cazaban se levantaba con el balón en los pies y volvía a correr sin quejarse jamás.

No tenía 30 años y ya era un fenómeno mediático, quizá el primer galáctico del siglo XX. Perseguido por las prensas amarilla y rosa, los tabloides ingleses seguían cada paso que daba Best, bautizado como el quinto Beatle, quien empezaba a ser más célebre fuera del campo que dentro.

Una vez jubilado sir Matt Busby, el futbolista se sintió medio huérfano al perder al único hombre que supo dirigirle. Dejó de ir a los entrenamientos, empezó a emborracharse las vísperas de los partidos. A los 28, tras pelearse con el manager Tommy Docherty, se marchó del Manchester para siempre. A partir de ese momento, protagonizó una lenta bajada al infierno. Cayó de lleno en el abismo del alcohol, aunque intentó seguir jugando. Estuvo en la Liga Norte Americana, primero con Los Ángeles Aztecas y luego con San José. Volvió a Reino Unido y jugó para el Fulham, el Stockport y el Hibernian. Pero sus colegas eran mediocres, y él ya no podía dominar los diablos que llevaba dentro. Engordaba porque comía mal y bebía demasiado, aunque su leyenda de seductor seguía creciendo. Cazaba misses, a las señoras de sus abogados, a las hermanas de sus novias... A sus esposas les pegaba cuando no les hacía el amor. Cuentan que en sólo una noche llegó a acostarse con media docena de mujeres...

Con el hígado destrozado y la sangre envenenada, Best tardó en morirse. Millones de británicos siguieron sus últimos días como si se tratara de la llama de un santo que se extingue poco a poco. Recordaban la alegría de sus mejores goles, mientras que admiraban la humanidad con la que él, su familia, sus amigos y hasta sus mujeres compartían la tragedia de su sufrimiento.

El m�s t�mido de Los Beatles

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

El más tímido de Los Beatles

Cuando a principios del verano del 2000, se supo que George Harrison se encontraba en una clínica suiza sometido a un tratamiento de radioterapia para combatir un tumor en el cerebro, poco tiempo después de que se le hubiera extirpado un pulmón, millones de personas de todo el mundo se quedaron sin apenas respiración. Posteriormente, su hospitalización en una clínica de Nueva York para someterse a un tratamiento a manos del prestigioso doctor Gil Lederman ha desencadenado un movimiento universal de solidaridad y preocupación. En 1997, le diagnosticaron al cantante un cáncer de garganta que él achacó a su hábito de fumar, que precisamente por aquel entonces estaba intentando abandonar. Pero tras un tratamiento a base de radiaciones, los médicos le dieron de alta y sus admiradores pudieron suspirar con alivio. En diciembre de 1999 casi consigue asesinarle un enfermo mental llamado Michael Abram, que consiguió entrar en la mansión de la estrella del pop y le apuñaló repetidamente en el pecho. La pasada primavera, el vía crucis de Harrison se incrementó aún más con la aparición del mencionado cáncer de pulmón. Con la inestimable ayuda de sus rentas anuales, procedentes principalmente de los derechos de autor de los Beatles, estimadas en unos 1.355 millones de pesetas, y la información que obtenía vía Internet, comenzó a buscar el mejor tratamiento, tal y como ya lo habían hecho las familias de otros miembros del grupo: Linda McCartney, que murió a consecuencia de un cáncer de mama, y la hija de Ringo Starr, Lee Starkey, que recibe tratamiento por un tumor cerebral. Starkey, de 31 años, fue operada con éxito en 1995, pero el cáncer ha vuelto a aparecer. La investigación llevó a Harrison a Estados Unidos, el país donde todo lo mejor está disponible mientras uno pueda pagarlo. Una vez allí, le fue extirpado el pulmón en Minnesota, a lo que siguió un período de radioterapia en una clínica de Suiza. Posteriormente volvió a EEUU para hacerse un chequeo en una unidad oncológica del Hospital de la Universidad de Staten Island, en Nueva York. Allí está siendo tratado por Gil Lederman, considerado como uno de los mejores médicos del mundo en la aplicación de un nuevo procedimiento, que consiste en dirigir haces de radiaciones procedentes de cientos de ángulos diferentes hasta hacerlos converger en el tumor. Dado que el objetivo es sólo el tumor en cuestión, sin que las células sanas de alrededor sufran el menor daño, se pueden emplear cantidades de radiaciones muy superiores a las de los métodos tradicionales. Lederman asegura que ha logrado tener éxito en un 90% de los casos. El porcentaje exacto de posibilidades que tiene el músico de sobrevivir es algo que permanece en el más hermético de los silencios. Familiares y amigos suyos se esfuerzan en defender el derecho a la intimidad del más tímido de los cuatro beatles. En cierto sentido, ni siquiera importó que se escondiera bajo un nombre supuesto (Jorge Arias) ni que su habitación en el hospital estuviera custodiada, día y noche, por dos guardias de seguridad de rostros pétreos y gafas oscuras, ni tampoco que pasara esos días en compañía de su mujer, Olivia, y su hijo Dhani, saliendo del santuario de su habitación solamente para someterse a sesiones de radiocirugía. Porque, le guste o no a este beatle, el que menos autopublicidad se ha hecho, el mundo todavía le quiere y siente que tiene derecho a saberlo todo de él.

Harrison nació en 1943 en el seno de una familia humilde, en el barrio de Wavertree -predominantemente habitado por gente de la clase trabajadora- de la ciudad de Liverpool, en el norte de Inglaterra. Su padre era conductor de autobús y George, su cuarto hijo, fue bautizado así en homenaje al Rey Jorge VI. Fue un gesto muy típico de lealtad y orgullo patriótico de aquella gente que tan severos bombardeos había sufrido por parte de los nazis. NIÑO ABURRIDO. La infancia de George fue normal. Sus profesores le recuerdan como un niño bastante tranquilo e introvertido que no hablaba casi con nadie. Poco impresionado y escasamente conmovido por el Antiguo Testamento, a la vez que aburrido por aquellas lecciones de Geografía que trataban de asuntos tan raros como las vías fluviales en la Europa del Este, el chico empezó a visitar el music hall del barrio y a comprar discos de rock and roll. Elvis Presley se convirtió en uno de sus primeros héroes. Se compró una guitarra y, junto con otros tres compañeros de colegio, formó el grupo The Rebels. Aún era un adolescente cuando conoció a Paul McCartney, un alumno de su misma escuela que estaba un curso por delante de él. Y a través de McCartney conoció a John Lennon, que había formado por su parte una banda llamada Quarry Men.

e los tres, Lennon era el que tenía la personalidad más dominante. Poseía un ingenio muy agudo y ya había logrado desarrollar un gran talento, tanto artístico como musical; además, le gustaba pasar el tiempo garabateando versos sin sentido y caricaturas enloquecidas. Harrison, bastante más que McCartney, comenzó a vivir bajo la extravertida sombra de Lennon. Mientras que Harrison era relativamente inocente, Lennon ya parecía saberlo todo sobre la vida. Era un rockero hecho y derecho que sabía lo que era tener relaciones sexuales con chicas y que demostraba un extraordinario dominio de la situación cuando se encontraba en escena. "Tanto en lo bueno como en lo malo", escribiría Harrison a Lennon más adelante, "siempre te admiré". Los Quarry Men cambiaron su nombre por el de Johnny (Lennon) y The Moon Dogs antes de presentarse por primera vez al concurso A la busca de estrellas, que se celebraba en la ciudad de Manchester. Superaron en semifinales a un individuo que lanzaba cuchillos con los ojos vendados, pero en la final perdieron frente a un dúo llamado Ricky y Dani, del que nunca más se volvería a oír hablar. Pero el trío perdedor había logrado desarrollar a esas alturas una determinada alquimia que les dotaba de personalidad musical y que iba a caracterizar a sus integrantes. Se trataba de una estructura de poder en la que Harrison se subordinaba a Lennon y McCartney, como vocalistas principales y compositores de sus canciones, pero en la que los tres trabajaban conjuntamente hasta lograr una creación única. Al trío se unió como guitarra un colega de la misma escuela artística de Lennon llamado Stuart Sutcliffe y, como batería, un conductor de máquinas elevadoras llamado Tommy Moore, a quien reemplazaría Peter Best al cabo de poco tiempo. El grupo cambió de nombre, pasando primero a llamarse The Silver Beatles y, después, The Beatles, según la tendencia que otros iconos del rock seguían a la hora de adoptar sus nombres artísticos, como era el caso de Buddy Holly y The Crickets o de Gene Vincent y los Beat Boys.

a primera aventura extranjera del grupo les llevó a algunos clubes de bajo nivel de la ciudad alemana de Hamburgo. Al poco tiempo, Sutcliffe y Best abandonarían el grupo facilitando, así, la entrada al cuarto beatle, Ringo Starr, el menos dotado de talento de los cuatro. Los Beatles definitivos volvieron juntos a Liverpool y comenzaron a tocar en un abigarrado y sudoroso club situado en un sótano, The Cavern, "el sitio más sucio del mundo", como lo rebautizó uno de sus clientes habituales, el jugador de fútbol local Tommy Smith. Influidos tanto por las corrientes musicales que venían de Estados Unidos como por la local mersey beat, los chicos comenzaron a tocar un rock and roll puro y sin más pretensiones, pero lleno de energía y vitalidad. Sus respectivas personalidades permitían distinguir a uno de otro en escena. Mientras que Lennon y McCartney ponían a competir sus egos en la parte frontal del escenario, Ringo permanecía en la parte posterior moviendo la cabeza de un lado a otro y tocando la batería de manera tan competente como escasa de imaginación. Harrison, por su parte, desarrolló un estilo más introvertido, centrándose en su papel de guitarra principal y poniendo la música por delante de todo lo demás. Si los otros cometían errores de vez en cuando y se dedicaban a hacer tonterías con sus instrumentos, él jamás se lo permitía. Y era precisamente de George de quien primero se enamoraban locamente las fans adolescentes, atraídas por su timidez, su aspecto melancólico y sus pómulos pronunciados, que le daban una apariencia muy poética. Y fue precisamente en The Cavern donde un hombre de negocios local, Brian Epstein, descubrió el talento de los Beatles y se convirtió en su manager. Se dejaron crecer el pelo, algo tan emblemático como los tacones, las chaquetas abotonadas hasta arriba y los pantalones estrechos. Aunque nunca se vieron sometidos a la insípida uniformidad que sufrían otros grupos de música pop. A principio de los años 60, el grupo grababa Love me do, un título que formaría parte de su larga lista de éxitos.

Tras aparecer en la televisión, las adolescentes les perseguían a cientos, chillando por la calle. Los padres de éstas, sentados en sus cuartos de estar, mascullaban que el mundo estaba llegando a su fin. Pero sus retoños no tenían la menor duda de que lo que realmente ocurría era que estaba empezando. Un periodista muy listo que surgió de la nada acuñó el término beatlemanía, es decir, la histeria pop llevada a su máxima intensidad, fenómeno que se instaló a ambos lados del Atlántico. Mientras que Paul y John componían fervorosamente, Harrison se dedicaba a tocar y, ocasionalmente, contribuía con alguna canción suya cantada por él mismo. Tenía, a pesar de todo, mejor voz que Ringo, y las canciones que él interpretó nunca fueron olvidadas. Uno de los primeros hits de los Beatles fue Roll over Beethoven, cantada por el propio Harrison. MODESTO. Mientras el grupo intentaba asimilar toda la adulación que crecía a su alrededor, Harrison fue, desde el principio, el beatle que menos se vio afectado por la inestabilidad emocional. Siempre se quedaba por detrás de los demás tanto por la ropa que vestía como por la escasa cantidad de palabras que pronunciaba ante los medios de comunicación. "Mi posición dentro de los Beatles", confesaría, "era que yo nunca quería ser el que estuviera al frente del grupo". Un guitarrista principal más egocéntrico que él hubiera propiciado, sin duda, una disolución mucho más precoz del grupo. Pero él no era así. Sin duda, sabía cómo divertirse tanto como el resto de sus compañeros, y compartió con ellos las payasadas que tanta risa y excitación les produjeron mientras viajaban alrededor del mundo. Estando en Madrid en 1965, recibieron al famoso bailarín Rudolf Nureyev en trajes de baño que se habían puesto por la cabeza. Después de la locura colectiva que se desató durante su primera gira por Estados Unidos y de la que aún continuaba produciéndose en Europa, George empezó a buscar su propio camino.

Más indiferente que contento ante el gran éxito obtenido, él, según sus propias palabras, "intentaba parar aquella ola, calmarla, hacer de mí mismo un pequeño remanso". Si los demás, y especialmente McCartney, parecían disfrutar de la fama, Harrison fue el primero en hacerse colocar puertas electrónicas en su casa, con el propósito de mantener alejado a cualquier intruso de su hogar, a las afueras de Londres, y disfrutar allí de la luna de miel con la primera de sus dos esposas, la modelo Pattie Boyd. Sus primeras exploraciones en la composición de canciones fueron de menor valor para el grupo que su contribución a ese sonido único de los Beatles, la potencia que dio con su guitarra y sus armonías a los acordes y a las rimas de Lennon y McCartney, desde la guitarra acústica de And I Love Her hasta el poderoso rasgueo rítmico que aparece al principio de A Hard Day's Night. Pero él solía emplear su soledad en desarrollar su propia capacidad de escribir música, utilizando a Lennon como audiencia siempre que creía haber dado con algo de valor. Ya desde su adolescencia, Harrison había profesado un respeto reverencial por Lennon. Y no sólo admiraba su genio, sino que también compartía con él su irónico sentido del humor. Como contraste, no le gustaba la tendencia de McCartney a tratarle como a un hermano pequeño. La trayectoria personal de Harrison, que le llevó de la simple cantinela del yeah, yeah, yeah a la chaqueta de algodón, el pelo largo y enredado y a la barba, comenzó gracias a la intervención de un dentista hippie, en 1966. Fue cuando éste le hizo probar LSD, una noche que se marchó de juerga con John y su primera mujer, Cynthia. "La primera vez que la tomé sentí cómo desaparecía todo lo que me rodeaba. Experimenté entonces una sensación de bienestar tan extraordinaria que creí que había un Dios y que yo le podía ver en cada brizna de hierba. Era algo así como adquirir cientos de años de experiencia en doce horas", aseguraría más adelante.

Él, que siempre pensó que la vida discurría demasiado deprisa, empezó a pensar en su existencia de una forma más amplia. Se interesó por La India, por la música de cítara, por Ravi Shankar, por el misticismo y, finalmente, por la meditación trascendental. Y durante un tiempo comenzó a ejercer una gran influencia sobre los Beatles, dotando al grupo de un nuevo estilo de conducta tanto en las relaciones entre los integrantes del grupo como hacia el exterior, forjando simultáneamente una nueva tendencia para su producción musical. Por ejemplo, introdujo en sus canciones la cítara. El tema más famoso donde sonó este instrumento fue Norwegian Wood de Lennon. Y más adelante en Within You, Without You, canción compuesta por él mismo y que figura en el LP Sargeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Hizo de La India y de las drogas compañeras inseparables de su cultura hippie y llevó a John, Paul y Ringo, acompañados de sus mujeres, a meditar al Himalaya, postrados todos ellos a los pies de Mahararishi, un gurú hindú. La capacidad de componer canciones de Harrison, durante tanto tiempo contenida por la presencia de John y Paul, acabó por manifestarse. De vuelta de la India, compuso My Guitar Gently Weeps, que tocó a dúo con otro virtuoso de la guitarra, Eric Clapton, y que apareció en el Beatles' White Album. Más adelante escribió Something, como tributo a la belleza de Pattie Boyd, un tema que, según Frank Sinatra, era "la mejor canción de amor de los últimos 50 años".

ere Comes The Sun, canción perteneciente al LP Abbey Road, logró un reconocimiento similar porque era un tipo de melodía tan revitalizante que hubiera levantado de su tumba al maníaco depresivo más irrecuperable. Pero, aunque la confianza de Harrison en su capacidad para componer seguía incrementándose, él no deseaba compartir la atención pública con Lennon y McCartney, por quienes se sentía utilizado. En lugar de eso, prefirió no resistirse a la desbandada del grupo, cuyas tensiones personales internas le había llevado, a finales de los años 60, a un punto de ruptura total, propiciado por la aparición de la artista Yoko Ono, amante de John Lennon y sobre quien ejercía una influencia dominante. Además, el propio matrimonio de Harrison con Pattie se encontraba en plena crisis, debido al affaire de ésta con Eric Clapton, quien le había dedicado una canción, Layla, en la que a duras penas se podía ocultar la pasión que sentía por la esposa de su rival, además de mejor amigo. NUEVO AMOR. Una vez que Pattie le abandonó, Harrison volvió a contraer matrimonio, esta vez con Olivia Arias, una norteamericana de origen mexicano que trabajaba como secretaria en una compañía discográfica y que era cinco años menor que él. Olivia compartía desde hacía mucho tiempo el amor que George sentía por el misticismo hindú. Ambos se habían conocido un año antes en una fiesta en Los Ángeles, mientras Harrison se encontraba en aquella ciudad grabando un nuevo LP postbeatles, Thirty-Three and a Third. La pareja acabó enamorándose en el transcurso de un viaje que ambos hicieron al sur de La India, con el doble objetivo de asistir a la boda de Kumar Shankar, sobrino de Ravi Shankar, y a un festival hindú. Harrison, que por aquel entoces andaba recuperándose de la faena que le había hecho Eric Clapton, se sentía fuertemente atraído por aquella californiana de ascendencia mexicana, tan segura de sí misma y que tenía una sonrisa tan encantadora. Se casaron en Inglaterra en una ceremonia privada, sin la menor publicidad. Entre los pocos invitados que asistieron a la boda se encontraba su hijo Dhani, que había nacido un mes antes en un hospital infantil cerca del castillo de Windsor. Al niño le pusieron ese nombre tanto por las notas dha y ni de la escala musical hindú como por su proximidad fonética al nombre inglés de Danny, un sonido que gustaba mucho a la pareja. Los tres se mudaron a una nueva residencia, una enorme mansión en Henley, cerca de Oxford, que Harrison convirtió en uno de los más fantásticos jardines privados de toda Inglaterra. Entre sus elementos figuraba un conjunto rocoso alpino, que incluía una réplica de 30 metros del Cervino, y un lago en el que unas piedras situadas inmediatamente debajo de su superficie proporcionaban la ilusión de caminar sobre las aguas. Desde su infancia se apartó a Dhani de la vista del público hasta tal punto que, siendo ya mayor, podía pasearse por Henley con toda tranquilidad y pasar desapercibido, tanto para los residentes de la ciudad como para los ojos fisgones de los medios de comunicación. Muy al contrario que los hijos abandonados a su suerte de otras estrellas del pop, Dhani fue enviado a un innovador centro Montessori y, después, a un exclusivo colegio privado. Así llegó a convertirse en un magnífico guitarrista. Este año ha intervenido en la grabación de algunas de las antiguas canciones de su padre. ÉXITOS. Mientras que las propuestas musicales postbeatles que ofrecían Lennon y McCartney carecían de inspiración, Harrison sacó a la luz grandes melodías que había mantenido enterradas. Publicó un álbum triple, All Things Must Pass, que fue enormemente elogiado. En él se incluía la inspiradísima My Sweet Lord. Tanto el LP como el sencillo llegaron al número uno en las listas de ventas de todo el mundo.

Un año después ayudó a organizar un concierto benéfico en el Madison Square Garden de Nueva York, plagado de estrellas, con el fin de recaudar fondos para los refugiados de Bangladesh. El espectáculo fomentó la momentánea esperanza de que el idealismo de los años 60 se podría reavivar de nuevo. De hecho, la década que había comenzado con la ruptura de los Beatles finalizaría con la brutalidad nihilista del movimiento punk y el asesinato de Lennon a manos de un maníaco obsesivo. Durante los años 90 se produjo una cierta reconciliación -algo que parecía imposible en vida de Lennon y mientras éste vivía con Yoko- entre Harrison y los dos beatles restantes, Paul y Ringo. Se reunieron para la producción de una ambiciosa antología de música, letras y fotografías, incluyendo material no publicado hasta entonces, todo lo cual se convirtió en un best-seller . Ya por separado, y mientras Paul parecía continuar su producción musical, de la que obtenía una renta anual de 1.626 millones de pesetas, Ringo aparecía en ocasiones con un grupo formado por algunos amigos, llamado All Star Band. De los tres beatles, el batería parecía el más contento con la vida sencilla que llevaba, disfrutando de su buena salud, apareciendo de vez en cuando en estrenos cinematogáficos en compañía de su mujer, actriz, y viviendo en su enorme mansión de Guilford, cerca de Londres. Por lo que se refiere a McCartney, el compositor de Yesterday y Let It Be se las fue arreglando para volver a las más altas esferas del estrellato en el mundo del rock, por la mucha publicidad que se le dio a la muerte de Linda, su mujer, y por una continua producción de melodías memorables que parecen atraer a todas las generaciones. El asesinato de su ex compañero en 1980 exacerbó la inclinación de Harrison por mantenerse apartado de la publicidad. Fue, por tanto, horriblemente irónico que, justo cuando finalizaba un milenio y comenzaba otro, en diciembre de 1999, él mismo se viera atacado por un asesino potencial y dentro de su propia mansión, el lugar donde más seguro se sentía. En aquel infausto día, Harrison se puso a entonar a voz en cuello una de sus viejas canciones místicas, el Hare Krishna, en un intento de salvarse. Sin embargo, el que le atacaba con un cuchillo, un jovenzuelo trastornado que jamás había estado en La India, pensó que el mal se había encarnado en su víctima y se encolerizó más aún. Se salvó de una muerte cierta gracias a la intervención de su mujer, Olivia, que utilizó una lámpara de mesa como arma defensiva. Mientras que este incidente tenía todas las características de una farsa de mala calidad de la época victoriana, el asesinato de Lennon tuvo todo el realismo de una película policíaca actual. Así pues, tanto en la vida como en la muerte, Lennon oscurecía la figura de Harrison. El más joven y tranquilo de los cuatro beatles (a los que se podrá ver de nuevo en acción a partir del 21 de diciembre con la resposición de Qué noche la de aquel día), y que tanto creyó en los cánticos de paz de los gurús, ha escrito la que podría ser su canción final. Dedicada a su hijo Dhani, la letra refleja su lucha personal para ponerse a bien con la propia muerte y con Dios. En ella canta a "un amigo mío que se encuentra en un estado penoso, porque mientras mucha gente navega por la vida, él ha encallado en un arrecife". Harrison continúa escribiendo: "Un pastor de por ahí me advierte sobre Satán y yo le digo: 'Pero hombre, hablemos del conocimiento de Dios para variar'".

Así, Brainwashed sería el albúm que tanto Dhani como Jeff Lyne terminarián después del fallecimiento de George Harrison el 29 de noviembre del 2001.Queda su obra discografica y su filosofia por descubrir como un legado para la Humanidad.

Discretion paramount in court of Whitehall's ultimate insider

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Discretion paramount in court of Whitehall's ultimate insider

By Jimmy Burns

Published: Jul 10, 2004

In his time as the most senior United Nations weapons inspector, Hans Blix became familiar with the glare of publicity and how to avoid it.

But even he was taken aback by the discretion shown by Lord Butler when they met last month. The former mandarin had invited the Swede to visit him in a security-swept office used by the joint intelligence committee in Whitehall.

Mr Blix was the latest witness to be questioned behind closed doors by the former mandarin and his colleagues. "It was all quite informal really," he said. "We sat around a table - the inquiry team and I - and they asked questions. I haven't been given a transcript of our conversation."
The names of some of those who have given evidence have entered the public domain in spite of the reticence of the Cabinet Office. Some of the witnesses, including Mr Blix, chose to become known because they believe the war in Iraq to be an issue that needs to be aired openly.
The manner in which Lord Butler has chosen to conduct his inquiry contrasts with the highly visible investigation by Sir Richard Scott into the arms-to-Iraq affair during the 1990s when officials and ministers were questioned by lawyers in open hearings.

It also stands in contrast to the more recent Hutton inquiry, in which witness statements and documentary evidence were released in real time through technological wizardry that did not exist at the time of the Scott inquiry.

The manner in which the Scott and Hutton inquiries were conducted rattled Whitehall to such an extent that the First Division Association, the union representing civil servants, was called upon to offer discreet legal advice and counselling.

That the association has not been called upon to offer similar services to any of the witnesses to the Butler inquiry provides perhaps the most telling pointer to how the former head of the civil service is working to his remit.

A Whitehall source said: "There may be some ministers who are nervous but individual civil servants are pretty relaxed about it on a personal level. We've felt from early on in the inquiry that Butler is concentrating on systems rather than individuals."

Professor Peter Hennessy, the authoritative Whitehall analyst, said it would be simplistic to portray Lord Butler as the quintessentially establishment figure who defended government secrecy during the Scott inquiry by declaring "half the picture can be true".

"In many ways, Butler is an admirable choice for the job," Prof Hennessy wrote in February in The Tablet, the Roman Catholic newspaper, after other commentators had dismissed the post-Hutton inquiry as another whitewash in the making.

Describing him as a Whitehall lifer who had served five prime ministers - Harold Wilson, Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher as a No 10 private secretary, Mrs Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair as cabinet secretary with responsibility for intelligence - Prof Hennessy said it was "not so much that he knows where the bodies are buried in Whitehall, he was the body".

Confirmation that the Butler committee is concentrating on intelligence systems rather than individuals might have served to reinforce minimal expectations.
But there is evidence Lord Butler and his team have taken on the role not simply as systems analysts but as serious investigators, delving more deeply than any previous inquiry into how intelligence was gathered and disseminated.

Documents requested by the Butler team have included raw intelligence and a JIC report dating back to the first Gulf war of 1991, in addition to personal material that might have been conveyed to Mr Blair at a senior level by MI6.

Some who have given evidence to the inquiry expect Lord Butler to lay bare the inherent weaknesses of what Prof Hennessy has described as "the most supine cabinet since the war", and to insist that accountability be restored to a system of government that failed when it came to justifying a bloody war to the people.

As one insider put it: "Butler is a hugely experienced and politically independent former mandarin who can afford to be robust in his conclusions."

MI5 chief says 2,000 people in UK are security risks

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

MI5 chief says 2,000 people in UK are security risks

By Jimmy Burns

Published: November 6 2007 02:00

More than 2,000 people in the UK pose a threat to national security because of their active support for terrorism, Jonathan Evans, the head of Britain's domestic intelligence service MI5, said yesterday.
Warning that al-Qaeda was conducting a "deliberate campaign" against the UK, he said that Britain as a country was "rightly concerned" about international terrorism radicalising and indoctrinating young people.

In an attempt to counter likely accusations that MI5 is pursuing a political agenda, the Home Office insisted Mr Evans' decision to speak at the Society of Editors' conference was "unrelated" to the Queen's Speech today, when the government is set to unveil plans for tougher anti-terror legislation. According to government officials, Mr Evans' speech in Manchester was written some days ago but was delivered after being shown to Jacqui Smith, home secretary.

Ministers are likely to use Mr Evans' warning as support for a strategy that includes plans to increase the number of days suspects can be held without charge, and a bid to counter the influence of radical Islam in Britain's 1.9m-strong Muslim community.

MI5's current threat level has remained unchanged since early July, with a warning that further terrorists attacks are likely, although there is no intelligence to suggest that they are imminent.
The estimate of 2,000 is controversial as it includes individuals who are being monitored by police and the security services but against whom there is not sufficient evidence to bring terrorist charges provable in court.

According to government figures published earlier this year, of almost 1,200 arrests under current anti-terrorism laws since the September 11 attacks six years ago, only 40 have led to convictions. More than half of the suspects held have been released without charge.

But the figure, which may give the government much-needed political ammunition for new legislation, compares with the last estimate of 1,600 made by Mr Evans' predecessor, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, last November. The increase, he said, was partly driven by "more thorough" intelligence on extremist networks, as well as an increase in new recruits to the extremist cause.
The Queen's Speech, announcing the main planks of the legislative agenda of Gordon Brown, the prime minister, will include a controversial anti-terrorism bill lengthening the time a terror suspect can be held without charge from 28 to 50 days.

Mr Evans also used his speech to criticise Russian and Chinese spying activities in the UK, which he said were diverting British intelligence and security resources which could otherwise be used to counter the threat of terrorism. He said Russian espionage was on a par with cold war levels.

MI5 feared militant left could destabilise Britain

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

MI5 feared militant left could destabilise Britain

By Jimmy Burns

Published: December 29 2006

The security service MI5 forecast that the stability of the British state could be severely threatened by a developing economic crisis and the growing militancy of the left during the 1970s, according to documents released to the public today.

In the final days of the Wilson era, MI5 drafted a contingency paper based on a scenario in which a Labour government, acceding to trade union and other militant demands, radicalised its policies against the private sector and the UK's Nato commitments.

The incidents built into MI5's futuristic vision include a deliberate fire at one of London's main water treatment plants, an attempted terrorist attack by frogmen on the Isle of Grain oil refinery, a vehicle bomb attack on a radar station, and a suitcase bomb without warning on the London Underground.
The paper was presented to a meeting of officials of Whitehall's Joint Intelligence Committee on April 9 1976, just over a week after James Callaghan had succeeded Harold Wilson as prime minister.
It appears to give some credibility to claims made by Mr Wilson, following his resignation, that MI5 contained a group of rightwing officers who were incapable of distinguishing between socialism and communism, and were plotting against the government.

The paper suggests that MI5 believed the security of the state was under threat from the political pressures building up during the 1970s, and was preparing plans to deal with such a threat, which it saw as mainly coming from the left.

The paper states: "Throughout the seventies there has been a growth in the general public uneasiness about the current aims of government due primarily to the harm done to the moral standing of the western democracies by Watergate and CIA activity . . . the ultra-left have been quick to capitalise on the discontent and sensationalised reports against the security establishment and in particular the police, the intelligence services, and the armed forces."

Together with a corresponding increase in the popularity of British fascists and quasi-fascist organisations, the paper predicts an increase of "enemy propaganda" by the "subversive" left targeting universities, the civil service, and the armed forces. This would be followed by incidents of sabotage "complicated by a revival of the IRA".

A resolute spy who prefers to stay out in the cold

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

A resolute spy who prefers to stay out in the cold

By James Blitz and Jimmy Burns

Published: 11 January 2003

COMMENT & ANALYSIS - A resolute spy who prefers to stay out in the cold - WOMAN IN THE NEWS ELIZA MANNINGHAM-BULLER - The MI5 chief maintains a low profile but has 30 years' experience to draw on in the war against al-Qaeda, say James Blitz and Jimmy Burns.

This has been a good week for Eliza Manningham-Buller, the director-general of Britain's internal security service, MI5. Since taking over as Britain's first lady of espionage barely three months ago, Ms Manningham-Buller has been keen to maintain an extremely low public profile. But this week she scored an important success in Britain's life-and-death war against the lethal forces of al-Qaeda terrorism.

Last Sunday, MI5 officers working in conjunction with the British police broke into a flat in Wood Green in north London. There, they arrested six men of north African origin who are alleged to have been developing a lethal toxic substance called ricin. The police and intelligence operation is far from over. Tiny traces of ricin were found at the flat. MI5 and the police are now looking for the remaining members of this al-Qaeda cell who could still have ricin. But last weekend's operation suggests MI5's new chief is making a mark in the war against terror.

At 54, Ms Manningham-Buller is a figure who might easily have been dreamt up by Agatha Christie. She is the daughter of Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, the former attorney-general and Lord Chancellor, and was educated at Benenden school and then Oxford university. Before recruitment to MI5 in 1974, she spent three years as an English teacher at a private girls' school in London that served as a conveyor belt for young, upper class women making their first formal appearance in society. To add a touch of eccentricity, she breeds chickens at home.

But Ms Manningham-Buller - she uses her maiden name professionally although she is married - is hardly Miss Marple. Although she has a relaxed and unpretentious manner, she is determined and opinionated. Despite the fact that many MI5 officers admire her strength of leadership, some have nicknamed her Bullying Manner. And while she makes a point of keeping her opinions to herself on controversial subjects so as not to offend her political masters, she clearly has them.

Ms Manningham-Buller's 30-year career countering espionage and terrorism has few rivals in western intelligence agencies. She began at MI5 tackling the Soviet Union's spy network in Britain. She led MI5's operations against IRA terrorism in Northern Ireland and on the British mainland in the 1990s. Today, she has regular access to Tony Blair, the prime minister, who has made the war on terror his top priority. Senior US politicians and intelligence figures - who lack Britain's experience countering terrorism at home - are regular visitors to MI5's headquarters in Westminster.

Despite this week's arrests, MI5's director-general knows that she and her staff of some 2,000 are merely at the outset of a long and bloody war against the forces of al-Qaeda. Throughout its 30-year war with the IRA, MI5 has always had a reasonable grip on the identities and movements of the main terror suspects. "Twenty-four hours after the bomb explosion at the 1984 Conservative conference in Brighton, we knew who the culprits were," says a senior officer. "The only problem we had was proving it."

Al-Qaeda is different. The organisation, based around terrorists trained in Osama bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan, has infiltrated deep into British society. Ms Manningham-Buller has told ministers that she cannot be sure that she knows the identities of more than 50 per cent of the people in the UK who might carry out a terrorist attack linked to the Islamic network. "She likens al-Qaeda to a piece of knitting," says one MI5 officer. "It is complex, interwoven, at times impenetrable. You think you've got a grip of one bit of it - then suddenly the whole thing unravels."

Nor is there any complacency at MI5 about al-Qaeda's potential to cause an atrocity. During the years in the terrorist training camps of Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden's acolytes gained considerable access to Pakistani nuclear know-how, say MI5 officers. They also made a lot of headway working on anthrax. Ms Manningham-Buller has told ministers she believes there will be a substantial radiological, biological or chemical attack in a western city in the next few years.

That belief may help explain why MI5's director-general is approaching her job with such determination. She is said to be calm under pressure. Even so, during the application for her current job she was forced to undergo a three-hour psychological examination in which she apparently lost her temper with the examiner. Unlike the only other female head of MI5, Dame Stella Rimington, she displays little interest in self-publicity. "Eliza is completely different from Stella," says a friend. "She'll do a bit of public speaking if the home secretary wants her to. Otherwise, she'd sooner get on with the job."

In some respects, running MI5 is a good deal easier than it once was. Al-Qaeda has triggered a huge boost in co-operation between western intelligence agencies. MI5 works closely with the French secret services, which have provided information about north African suspects living in the UK. Relations between MI5 and US intelligence chiefs are also good. MI5 believes it is being fully briefed about intelligence extracted from al-Qaeda terrorists held in Guantanamo Bay.

There remains a gulf in cultures between MI5 and US counter-terrorism methods. MI5 prides itself on being able to gain co-operation from Muslims in building up networks of informers and agents. "The Americans tend to take a somewhat more aggressive and bullying approach in the field," says one officer. "We feel you can get a lot more information out of contacts if you use gentler methods."

At home, MI5's standing has also improved. Last year's three-year settlement of UK public spending saw MI5 get a bigger increase in its budget than any other area of government after transport, health and overseas aid. The organisation is now seeking to recruit 300 agents as quickly as possible. Applications for jobs at MI5 are flooding in, say insiders. But identifying those who have the genuine potential - and above all the language ability - to infiltrate Islamic terrorist groups is hard.

And there is still some tension between MI5 and ministers. The government's recent decision to publish an intelligence-based dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction caused huge irritation inside the security services. Officers believed it would compromise secret service sources without having any great impact on public opinion. And there is anxiety within intelligence circles about the prospect of a war on Iraq. The fear is that war would radicalise Britain's Muslim community, frustrating MI5's progress in cracking down on al-Qaeda.

None of this will deter Ms Manning-ham-Buller, who has five years in the job before mandatory retirement. They will be spent in the forefront of one of the toughest battles to have confronted MI5. After that, she insists to friends, she will not try to emulate Dame Stella by becoming a non-executive director and remaining a public figure. She would prefer to do something different, and tend to her chickens.

Criticism focused on machinery of government

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Criticism focused on machinery of government

By Jimmt Burns

Published: Jul 15, 2004

How good was the intelligence? After the departure of United Nations inspectors in December 1998, says the Butler report, information sources used in assessing the status of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were "sparse", particularly on chemical and biological weapons programme. The number of "primary human intelligence sources" remained few. While other intelligence sources pointed to overseas procurement activity, the reliability of these sources and of their reports, and the quality of the intelligence assessment received by ministers and officials in the run-up to war had been thrown into doubt. Over-reliance on "dissident and émigré sources" was not a big cause of weaknesses in the intelligence. However, Secret Intelligence Service sources identified as unreliable had been with- drawn since the war. Also, reports from a "liaison service" on production of biological agents were "seriously flawed". According to a March 15 2002 report by the joint intelligence committee on the status of Iraqi WMD programmes, published by Butler: intelligence on Iraq's WMD and ballistic missile programmes was "sporadic and patchy". It was difficult to obtain reliable human intelligence in the repressive climate of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. However, one reason for the unreliability of a high proportion of human intelligence reports arose from weaknesses in the "effective application by SIS of its validation procedures and in their proper resourcing". An inter- departmental Whitehall meeting advised ministers that for the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and the majority of the full 15 members to take the view that Iraq was in breach of its obligations under UN Resolution 687, they would need to be convinced that Iraq was in breach of its obligations on WMD. However, their view was that the "current intelligence is insufficiently robust" to meet the criterion that such proof was "incontrovertible" and of large-scale activity.

Was intelligence processed in the right way? Lord Butler says that while "strenuous efforts" were made to ensure that no individual statements made in the September 2002 dossier went beyond the judgments made by the JIC, there were insufficient caveats in the dossier about the limited intelligence on which some judgments were being made. "Language in the dossier may have left readers with the impression that there was fuller and firmer intelligence behind the judgments than was the case. It was a serious weakness that the JIC's warnings on the limitations of the intelligence underlying its judgments were not made sufficiently clear in the dossier," it says.

The JIC, which claimed "ownership" of the dossier, is criticised for allowing the government to include the claim - subsequently reflected in some media reports - that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes of the order to use them. The claim should not have been included without making clear that the original intelligence on which it was based was "vague and ambiguous". The 45-minute claim should not have been included without stating exactly to what it referred, the report says. It was the reference in the dossier that led to suspicions that "it had been included because of its eye-catching character".

Was there any political pressure on the system that meant quality control was not what it should have been? After examining JIC assessments to see whether judgments had been "systematically distorted by non-intelligence factors", Lord Butler says no evidence was found of them being "pulled in any particular direction to meet the policy concerns of senior JIC officials". However, the report argues that the publication of the September dossier in the name and with the authority of the JIC had the result that "more weight was placed on the intelligence than it could bear". The consequences were to put the JIC and John Scarlett, its chairman, into an area of public controversy. "If intelligence is to be used more widely by governments in public debate in future, those doing so must be careful to explain its uses and limitations. It will be essential, too, that clearer and more effective dividing lines between assessment and advocacy are established when doing so."

Did British intelligence take adequate account of the UN weapons inspectors as a source on information, and modify its assessments accordingly? Lord Butler says: "We are surprised that neither policymakers nor the intelligence community, as the generally negative results of UNMOVIC inspections became increasingly apparent, conducted a formal re-evaluation of the quality of the intelligence and hence of the assessments made on it . . . those involved appeared to have operated on the presumption the in-telligence was right, and that it was because of the combination of Iraqi con-cealment and deception activities and perceived UNMOVIC weaknesses such evidence was not found." What intelligence flowed into the attorney-general's office before he gave his opinion that the war was legal without another UN resolution? Did he weigh up the intelligence against the legal advice? The attorney-general was briefed on "relevant intelligence issues" in September 2002 and February 2003. Having read the legal advice, Lord Butler says it was based on the "legal interpretation of relevant UN Security Council" resolutions and the history of UN negotiations, and not on WMD-related intelligence. "It did, however, require the prime minister, in the absence of a further UN Security Council resolution, to be satisfied that there were strong factual grounds for con-cluding that Iraq had failed to take the final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations."

So which weapons have been found? The evidence was that Iraq "did not have significant, if any, stocks of chemical or biological weapons in a state fit for deployment, or developed plans for using them".
Who is to blame? While accepting that his report might provoke calls for Mr Scarlett to resign from his new appointment as head of SIS, Lord Butler says: "We greatly hope he will not do so . . . wehave a high regard for his abilities and his record." The conclusion: "It was a mistaken judgment for the dossier to be so closely associated with the JIC but it was a collective one for which the chairman of the JIC should not bear personal responsibility." No further names are mentioned. The machinery of government under Tony Blair is criticised: "We are concerned that the informality and circumscribed character of the government's procedures, which we saw in the context of policymaking towards Iraq, risks reducing the scope for informed collective political judgment."

MI5 goes on the Tube to find new spies

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

MI5 goes on the Tube to find new spies

By Jimmy Burns

Published: May 15 2007 03:00

M15 is to target London's commuters in a new recruitment advertising campaign aimed at meeting the demands of the internal security service's expansion programme.

Over the next week posters will appear on London buses and the London Underground with an image of an apparently abandoned car in an anonymous urban setting. One version asks the question:

"Parked?", while another asks "Stalled?".

"As part of our team, you'll help decide," comes back the answer.

The intelligence to decide whether the car is simply abandoned or part of some bigger terrorist plot seems to be the suggested human quality the security service is looking for, as is the ability to work in a team.

The very used-looking hatchback could also dissuade would-be James Bonds - dreaming of missile-firing amphibious Aston Martins - from applying, even if MI5's current popularity has been boosted by the image of one particular courageous team of spooks presented in the popular BBC TV series of the same name.

As former whistleblowers have discovered, the organisation is weary of potential loose cannons. However the advertising campaign, the most public so far, shows an organisation trying to balance the operational need for secrecy with a determination to grow and recruit talent in a competitive and open labour market.

The Home Office says the advertising campaign, which includes radio spots, has been designed to "highlight the wide variety of career opportunities with MI5", offering jobs "not traditionally associated with the security service such as mechanics and IT professionals". As the official handout put it yesterday, the campaign "will raise the organisation's profile as a potential employer of choice for a broader range of people".

According to a recent FT survey, MI5 is knocking on a door that is already half open. It is now the top prospective employer among British male students, and the third among women.
In Gordon Brown's last Budget as chancellor in March, the security and intelligence agencies got an extra £86.4m to help accelerate the ongoing development of their counter-terrorism capabilities. Since September 11 2001, MI5 has expanded significantly, and is seeking 450 to 500 new staff in each of the next two years, bringing its total workforce up to 3,500.

As an MI5 "vehicle body repair technician", the successful candidate stands to earn £25,284, working in a "state-of-the-art garage using the most up-to-date equipment". Discretion remains an integral part of being a spook, however. At a starting salary of £22,750 plus benefits, an applicant for intelligence officer "should only discuss the application with his or her partner or immediate family".

MI5 recruits union to help staff relations

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

MI5 recruits union to help staff relations

By Jimmy Burns

Published: September 12 2008

The Security Service, MI5, embarrassed in the past by the damaging betrayals of disgruntled employees, has taken a small step towards greater workplace democracy by bringing in a trade union to provide "professional industrial relations support".

Under the deal, the FDA, the civil service union, will provide MI5's secretive in-house staff association with advice on training, mediation of internal disputes and pay and conditions.
The strictly non-strike agreement falls well short of full union representation, with the FDA agreeing to having its consulting officers vetted, and signing up to other secrecy clauses, such as restricted access to the names and addresses of MI5 staff.

Nevertheless, such a move contrasts with the mutual distrust MI5 and trade unions have shown in the past, particularly during the cold war era when the service monitored the activities of militant strikers and drafted contingency plans to tackle labour discontent.

While MI5 was reticent about commenting in detail, senior FDA officials said the deal would benefit both management and staff, improving the way the organisation worked internally.
"This arrangement is really good news for the service and its staff. This vital public service needs to recruit and retain the best people and will only do so by offering competitive remuneration packages as well as providing staff with the confidence that the organisation values and respects their contribution," said Jonathan Baume, the FDA's general secretary.

According to Whitehall and union officials the agreement builds on arrangements in place in other sensitive areas of government including in the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.
The FDA's earlier deal with MI6 was facilitated because of the union's long-established involvement in representing Foreign Office staff. MI5's more belated and cautious engagement with the FDA has come in res-ponse to the emergence of a bigger and more complex organisation.

The FT has learnt the deal follows an unusual consultancy agreement whereby industrial relations advice has been provided to senior MI5 management by Work Foundation, the employment think-tank. The advice was sought by spy chiefs as a way of adapting internal management-employee relations to the demands of an accelerated growth in staff numbers, ongoing recruitment campaign and regionalisation of MI5's operations since September 11, 2001.

"The service has longestablished and good staff relations but as an organisation has got bigger and recognised that it had to have new arrangements that were fit for purpose," said a Whitehall official.
One of the first steps taken by Labour when it returned to power in 1997 was to try to defuse the traditional animosity between the spies and the unions, which reached a crisis point at GCHQ, the government's secretive communications centre, during Margaret Thatcher's first term in office in 1984.
Under pressure from the US government, which provides and draws intelligence from the centre, the Thatcher government withdrew unions rights from GCHQ staff, provoking a national civil service strike and a long dispute with the Trades Union Congress.

For services rendered - Industrial sleuths spend more time searching databases than in secret surveillance operations.

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

For services rendered - Industrial sleuths spend more time searching databases than in secret surveillance operations.

By Jimmy Burns

Published: 24 December 1997

Ambrose Carey and his team of associates have just awarded themselves an expensive Christmas lunch at a London restaurant until recently owned by one of their victims.

Having dug up the corporate dirt on their target, they ensured the payment of a large debt he owed to their client. In the process they secured a not inconsiderable sum for services rendered. For Asmara, as their company is known, 1997 ended with a job well done.

Flushed with seasonal festivity, the 33-year-old Mr Carey, Asmara's founder and chief executive, declares: "This job is fun if you have a sense of irony."

Mr Carey belongs to a fast-growing tribe of corporate sleuths. They are employed by businesses to do a variety of tasks - everything from ferreting out useful information on markets and products to discovering the sort of information that recalcitrant debtors or hostile takeover bidders would prefer to keep quiet.
This tribe is growing fast partly because of increased demand, partly thanks to increased supply. The demand comes from the growth of business in parts of the world where - how to put it politely? - the majesty of the law lacks a certain something (as it does in, for example, Russia, or South Africa, or Manhattan). On the supply side, the end of the cold war has made lots of spies redundant, sending them in search of new careers in which they can exercise their skills.

Hence, the tribe of business sleuths is far removed from that old archetype of the wise-cracking gumshoe, Philip Marlowe - dirty-mackintoshed and half-drunk on bourbon. Mr Carey himself is an upper-crust Brit, although, in jeans, T-shirt and trainers, he bears little resemblance to James Bond.
For very different specimens of the breed, consider those who work at one of Asmara's competitors, Control Risks, a big corporate security firm that claims to have worked for more than 3,000 clients in 100 countries over its 20-plus years of existence. In a rare newspaper interview, one of its staff members, former Moscow-based journalist Toby Latta, outlined the company's modus operandi.
"We're not spying on people's boyfriends or girlfriends, or involved in things like that. We're at the upper end, providing clients with sophisticated strategic investment advice on the risks they are going to encounter."

This year, Control Risks was part of an investigation into City whizz-kid Andrew Regan, who was videoed holding a secret meeting with executives from the Co-operative Wholesale Society, the company he was attempting to acquire. The taped evidence of an exchange of confidential documents, provided by Control Risks, helped scupper Mr Regan's takeover plans.

Control Risks is a fairly secretive business and most leading staff members keep a low profile. By contrast, As-mara's open-plan offices in Soho Square have the breezy transparency of a public relations company: no secret files under lock and key, no large shredding machines, no suspicious wires dangling from desks.

Asmara's Mr Carey comes neither from an intelligence nor law enforcement background. He claims that the growing sophistication of private investigators is making the official spooks redundant and says that "ex-spooks have a short shelf-life once they're disconnected from HQ".

Many big corporate security agencies think differently. They have for a long time had former CIA and MI6 employees on their staff registers. One long-serving MI6 officer-turned-corporate-investigator is Michael Oatley.

Far from having a short shelf-life, Mr Oatley, now 62, has reinvented himself in retirement. In 1991, he helped broker a secret negotiation with Irish republicans in a freelance assignment for the British government. Soon after, he joined one of the largest companies in the business, Kroll Associates (at about that time engaged on one of its most famous cases, tracing Saddam Hussein's global assets). Three years ago, Mr Oatley left Kroll to set up his own business, CIEX, also in the field of corporate investigations. "My clients like to be kept out of the news, and so do I, although I don't mind you mentioning our existence," he says.

Corporate investigators still occasionally rummage through dustbins for discarded secrets, but much of their work is done by technological remote control. Corporate spies have two main tools: a large computer terminal behind which they spend much of their time investigating leads, and an array of shadowy freelancers who help follow them up. Miniature cameras and bugging devices come a distant second to patient cross-referencing.

"We focus on obtaining accurate, substantive and legally admissible information on people and companies," says Mr Carey. "The answer often lies in some very obscure database. It is remarkable how much you can find out about what's going on in Los Angeles by just sitting at your desk in London."
Accessing certain data systems is not free, and the phrase "legally admissible information" understates the extent to which deception may be required. Mr Carey, like most of his kind, insists the methods used to obtain information must never fall outside the law. Nevertheless the tribe is adept at finding loopholes in legislation ranging from privacy law to data protection.
"We spend thousands of pounds a year paying for favours secured by freelancers. It's not a slush fund. We call it resource development," says Mr Carey.

"Having a network of freelancers around the world - combined with access to data - and not having to deal with government bureaucracies is what gives this business its cutting edge." It is freelancers who often provide the surveillance (following targets) and the use of long-range photography and telephone bugging. Within companies, the network extends from members of staff who want to blow the whistle to embittered former employees.

"We like to have incredibly good contacts at the highest and lowest level of an organisation," says Mr Carey. "Sometimes it is more useful to know the man in the basement than in the boardroom."

Spies uneasy over public exposure.

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Spies uneasy over public exposure.

By Jimmy Burns

5 September 2003

It was George Young, MI6's director of Middle East operations during the 1950s, who claimed the role of the British spy was to remedy situations created by the "deficiencies of ministers, diplomats, generals and priests".

He said the intelligence community's strength lay in remaining relatively free of the Whitehall departmental attitudes which "create the official cast of mind". Nor did the professional spy have to develop the politician's "ready phrase, smart reply, and flashing smile".

With his unprecedented appearance before the Hutton inquiry last month John Scarlett, pictured, head of the joint intelligence committee, confirmed the extent to which intelligence chiefs have not only been thrust to the heart of the machinery of government, but also held to account - in part at least - for the alleged sins of ministers and their advisers.

Within Whitehall both developments remain the subject of an unresolved controversy about how far the intelligence community should embroil itself in politics, and come out of the cold.
It has had to come to terms with having to be more publicly accountable in the post cold-war years. But as Mr Scarlett admitted, his fellow spies remain worried about the precedent set by the dossier for publishing intelligence material that would normally remain secret.

They regard with horror the publication of interdepartmental correspondence in the form of e-mails which, they insist, not so long ago would have taken at least 30 years to air publicly. "I am absolutely appalled that it is thought in the public interest to let it all hang out," a former mandarin said.
He was echoed by another former member of the JIC during the Thatcher years. This individual argued that such publicity threatened to undermine the efficient and democratic working of Whitehall by making officials far more cautious about what they were prepared to account for in writing, and tell ministers.
Drawing from his own experience, the former official remained unconvinced by Mr Scarlett's insistence that he was "absolutely in charge" and his denial that the government had inserted claims against the wishes of the intelligence services.

In the ex-official's view, the relationship between Alastair Campbell and the workings of the JIC had been uncomfortably close, justifying continuing suspicions that the intelligence community had been drawn, deeper that many of its members would have liked, into politics.

"The fact remains that Mr Campbell was a uniquely powerful figure and that never before have we seen intelligence being used by a British government so publicly to justify an act of war," he said.
Those adopting a more sanguine attitude include David Bickford, a former legal adviser to the security and intelligence services. He points to much closer links between the spies and ministers and their advisers as an inevitable imperative of the war on terrorism since the attacks of September 11 2001.
While admitting spies are recruited on the basis of their skills to deceive, he does not believe any senior intelligence official would have risked his "p rofessional integrity" by knowingly signing up to a false analysis and reporting on Iraq.

Nevertheless, Stephen Day, a former senior Foreign Office official with a special responsibility for Middle East, believes the Hutton inquiry has managed to deflect attention from the poor quality of human intelligence that was gathered on the Iraqi regime in the lead up to Britain's participation in the occupation.

Such thinking ties in with the views of some in the intelligence community who dismiss predictions that the Hutton inquiry will sound the death knell for the next generation of spies by deterring potential recruits from coming forward.

Charities bid to help build prisons

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Charities bid to help build prisons

By Jimmy Burns

Published: September 3 2008

Charities are bidding jointly with the private sector for the construction and running of new prisons in a significant expansion of the voluntary sector's involvement in the criminal justice system, it emerged yesterday.

The penal reform charity Nacro has formed a consortium with the private security company G4S, also known as Group 4 Securicor, in a bid for contracts to be awarded early next year for new 600-bed prisons in Mag-hull, Merseyside, and Belmarsh, south-east London.

The crime reduction charity Rainer Crime Concern is also teaming up with the private security company Serco to make a similar prison bid, together with the social care charity Turning Point.
Although charities and private sector security companies were "odd bedfellows", involvement of the voluntary sector at an early stage in design and management of new jails would help improve conditions and effective resettlement of inmates, said Nacro's chief executive Paul Cavadino. "If you are involved in the planning and design of the prison, it makes it more likely that it will provide high-quality resettlement and rehabilitation."

The partnerships represent a first in terms of voluntary sector involvement in prospective private finance initiatives, and areseen in Whitehall as a significant political step in government reform of public services.

Until now voluntary sector involvement with business in the criminal justice system has kicked in only after contracts have been awarded to private security companies, with the subcontracting of services such as resettlement and drug rehabilitation. Similar public/private partnerships exist in sectors such as health, welfare reform and education.

Commercial discussions on the two new prisons, with a total capacity of about 1,200 inmates, are not being made public, a Ministry of Justice official said.
Ministers are thought to be considering such partnerships as a model for the next, more ambitious stage of the government's expansion of prisons, with the planned building of three super-prisons, or "titans", each with a capacity of 2,500.

The new spirit of co-operation shows a shift in policy for leading charities, which have been critical of private sector management of prisons. This may pave the way for greater political consensus around the government's prison-building programme.

David Cameron, the Conservative leader, has also called for a bigger role for the private and voluntary sectors as the key to improving public services.
The Ministry of Justice is looking to give private companies and charities an even greater role as it develops its plans for super-prisons, the FT has learnt.

Aides at the MoJ stressed yesterday that controversy over the titans was largely based on a misunderstanding of what kind of prisons would be built. "We are not talking about huge warehouses but units within a perimeter providing a variety of services," one said.

Submissions to the government by private companies in recent weeks include proposals for PFI contracts with more involvement of the voluntary sector. Ministers believe that such building and operational models will make it politically easier to push ahead with the prison-building programme.
MoJ insiders privately admit the programme should have been better presented and explained, in order to generate broader support from the voluntary sector.

Opening the gates
*The private sector runs 11 of the 149 prisons in England and Wales
*Main companies involved: G4S, Serco, Kalyx (formerly UK Detention Services)
*Total estimated payments to private-sector prison operators between 2002-03 and 2006-07: £843m
*Charities involved with private-sector bids for new prisons: Nacro, Rainer Crime Concern, Turning Point
*New prison contracts due to be awarded next year: Maghull (Merseyside) and Belmarsh West (south-east London), each to house 600 prisoners
*Super-prisons planned: Three 'Titans' to house 2,500 inmates each
*Projected building cost of super-prisons: £450m each
*Projected rise in prison population: from 81,000 in 2007 to 96,000 by 2012
*The government announced earlier this year a doubling of capital investment from £1.5bn to £2.7bn to help fund prison expansion

Source: Ministry of Justice/Prison Reform Trust

Thinking man's police chief falls at final hurdle

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Thinking man’s police chief falls at final hurdle

By Jimmy Burns

Published: October 2 2008

Sir Ian Blair once likened the Metropolitan Police to a FTSE 100 company – equally big and complex.
That his resignation comes in the middle of a huge economic crisis may inject a note of irony into events. In recent weeks, however, it had become a matter of when, not if, the beleaguered police chief would go.

Pressure on him to quit began building as long ago as the summer of 2005. Yet the announcement brings to a bleak end a tenure that had seemed to promise much when he was appointed commissioner in February of that year.

He came to the post with a proven track record as one of his profession’s more intellectually enlightened high flyers.
As deputy to Sir John Stevens, the previous commissioner, he had gained a reputation as a thinking man’s cop.

He was seen as having the ability to work behind the scenes on tough organisational challenges such as tackling the Met’s “canteen culture” of sexism and racism, and overhauling its unreconstructed and costly working practices.

Several allies, including Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, lauded the reform agenda he pursued. It included rolling out a new generation of community-based civilian officers and developing the voter-friendly concept of neighbourhood policing to better tackle crime and anti-social behaviour.
But Sir Ian’s leadership abilities were seriously questioned following the death of the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, who was shot dead by police in July 2005 after being mistaken for a terrorist suspect.

He resigned in the midst of a high-profile inquest into the death of de Menezes.
It is the latest in a number of official inquiries which have shown the Met to be a seriously dysfunctional organisation.

In a separate court case, the force has already been found guilty of endangering public safety. Although no officer was found personally culpable, 19 specific failures were catalogued, painting a picture of a procedural fiasco. Critics ranging from the relatives of the de Menezes family to opposition Conservatives claimed that responsibility lay with Sir Ian.
In a comment that came back to haunt him, he said 24 hours after the killing that his force was “playing out of its socks”.

Only later did he claim his own officers had not kept him in the picture about what was going on – a statement that was widely seen as buck passing.
Sir Ian appeared to have forfeited public confidence but he held on to his post because he had supporters where it counted.

A succession of Labour home secretaries, a Labour-dominated Metropolitan Police Authority and Ken Livingstone, the former mayor, all saw Sir Ian as a political ally.
They credited him with improving London’s crime figures and helping to thwart further terrorist attacks after the July 2005 bombings.
With Labour’s political fortunes in decline, however, the alliance has increasingly proved a liability for Sir Ian.

The tensions were emphasised, when Boris Johnson, the Tory mayoral candidate, this year launched his ultimately successful challenge to Mr Livingtone.
During his campaign Mr Johnson made clear his unease at the prospect of having to work alongside a policeman criticised by the Conservatives as a Labour stooge.
Once elected, Mr Johnson agreed to a temporary truce, in effect marking time before assuming greater power to dictate Sir Ian’s future, once he had taken over as chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority.

The pressure has intensified during the past few weeks. The Met’s most senior Asian officer, Tarique Ghaffur, accused him of race discrimination and an inquiry continues into his alleged links with a businessman who has been awarded Scotland Yard contracts.

Matters had reached the point where even some of his closest allies believed that the air of controversy surrounding him was damaging the Met and threatening to jeopardise the police’s drive to win the confidence of Londoners on issues of safety and security.

But his resignation, under pressure from Mr Johnson, means the Met is entering uncharted political territory. There is the potential now for the force to be caught in the middle of an unprecedented battle between the mayor and the home secretary about who should control it, and set its strategy.

Blair's crackdown on thugs marks end of liberal consensus

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Blair's crackdown on thugs marks end of liberal consensus

By Jimmy Burns

Published: Jul 19, 2004

Tony Blair will today put his personal stamp on the government's five-year anti-crime strategy by declaring that it marks the formal closure of the "liberal consensus" of the 1960s on law and order.
In a speech aimed at justifying a tough approach to "anti-social behaviour", Mr Blair will argue that while the 1960s saw a breakthrough in freedom of expression and people's rights, most people now wanted greater security.

"People do not want to return to old prejudices and to ugly discrimination. But they do want rules . . . proper behaviour . . . where those who play by the rules are those who don't get punished," he is expected to say.

According to officials, the strategy does not represent a rejection of New Labour's policy "tough on crime and tight on its causes", which Mr Blair adopted in his day as shadow home affairs spokesman, but rather "its development to meet current realities".

The speech, with its tough emphasis on the "law-abiding citizen", will cause unease among human rights lawyers and certain communities that feel themselves already alienated by the encroaching "Big Brother" of increased police powers and anti-terrorism legislation.

But it is consistent with the advice of Labour party strategists who have identified the rise of violent crime as a significant issue of concern among voters across the political divide, and one on which they remain vulnerable to attack from the Tories.

David Davies, the shadow home affairs spokesman, yesterday claimed the government had "lost its grip on fighting crime" ahead of the publication later this week of figures expected to show a sharp rise in violence against the person.

Today's strategy paper, which will be incorporated in the Labour manifesto, will claim to be building on the community-based partnerships for fighting crime put in place by the government.

It will seek to extend throughout the country the experience of 10 "trail-blazing" neighbourhood areas where police and local authorities have been using restrictive anti-social behaviour orders against those involved in thuggery and intimidation. Local authorities will be encouraged to identify a minimum of 50 cases of anti-social behaviour per area, as the government boosts visible policing with a roll-out of 15,000 extra community support officers.

In his speech, Mr Blair will claim that the strategy marks a shift from the offence to the offender, giving local communities and police the powers they need to enforce "respect in the street". The strategy will pledge increased support to victims of crime, while monitoring more closely prolific offenders through the use of technological tracking devices and DNA.

It will claim to be addressing the causes of crime by offering extended drug rehabilitation programmes and youth programmes in socially deprived areas.

Paddick turns on Met police chief

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Paddick turns on Met police chief

By Jimmy Burns

Published: December 8 2007

It has been another bad week for the Metropolitan police service, with allegations of sleaze forcing the resignation of Andy Hayman its head of anti-terrorism, and the bungling of the Stockwell shooting still haunting commissioner Sir Ian Blair.

And yet Brian Paddick, former Met deputy assistant commissioner, seemed only slighty peeved at being excluded for the first time in years from his organisation’s Christmas party and happy

“My personal opinion is that the Met would be better off without Sir Ian Blair. He’s lost a lot of his authority through the gaffes he’s made. If the Stockwell shooting had been handled differently, it would not have turned into the own goal that it has turned out to be,” Mr Paddick told the Financial Times.
Mr Paddick has been an increasingly outspoken critic of his former boss since retiring from the Met in May after 31 years of service, even if he claims to retain an enduring respect for some of his former colleagues. “The Met is full of dedicated and talented people, which is why it is heartbreaking to see the organisation that I love in the mess that it appears to be,” he said.

This week, just a month after being declared as the Liberal Democrat candidate for next year’s London mayoral elections and a few weeks away from the publication of his much trailed autobiography, Mr Paddick was stepping up a gear with a series of photo opportunities, TV appearances, and newspaper interviews.

Policing is one of the mayor of London’s primary and most high-profile responsibilities, so it is perhaps no surprise that this former policeman is putting much emphasis on restoring the compact he believes has been lost between Londoners and the Met, not least because of what he sees as the close political alliance between Ken Livingstone and Sir Ian.

In spite of the Lib Dems’ securing 15 per cent of the vote of Londoners in past mayoral elections, and his own lack of campaigning experience or political training, Mr Paddick is already targeting future votes.
He believes many Londoners are fed up with Mr Livingstone on issues such as the congestion charge, and that Boris Johnson, the Tory candidate, will make a joke too many and self-destruct. But his main target will be a majority of Londoners who have never bothered to vote for a mayor, among them young people, ethnic minorities and gays. “I am hoping to convince people that are fed up with politics to vote for me since I am untainted by the label ‘career politician’,” Mr Paddick says.

And yet Mr Paddick, a defender of cannabis decriminalisation and the Met’s first self-confessed senior homosexual officer, is no Ray Mallon, the Cleveland police officer elected as mayor of Middlesbrough in 2002. Mr Mallon stood as an independent after shooting to fame in the late 1990s as the pioneer of “zero tolerance policing” in the UK.

Mr Paddick insists he is a loyal member of the Liberal Democrat party and has resisted openly backing one or other of the contenders for the party leadership. However his views on Nick Clegg suggest he believes, as the other contender Chris Huhne has claimed, that Mr Clegg is a clone of David Cameron.
“Clegg is very similar in presentation to Cameron who is a reincarnation of Tony Blair ... it was unfortunate or maybe deliberate when Clegg declared his candidacy he was pictured in his back garden with his wife in a similar shot to when Cameron declared he was running,” Mr Paddick said.

A politician who embodied traditional Labour values

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

A politician who embodied traditional Labour values

By Jimmy Burns

Published: April 19 2008

In a House of Commons tainted in recent times with allegations of sleaze and political opportunism, Gwyneth Dunwoody, who died this week, stood out as an honest campaigner who stuck to what she believed in, even in her final hours.

Ms Dunwoody, who was the longest-serving female MP, joined the Labour party in 1946 and entered the Commons in 1966. She was born into a politically active family - both her grandmothers were suffragettes and her father, the late Morgan Phillips, was Labour party general secretary.
Her political apprenticeship was served during the postwar government of Clement Attlee, regarded by Labour stalwarts as an historic benchmark for social justice and equality. These were beliefs Ms Dunwoody maintained throughout her political career.

She served her party as a councillor in Totnes, South Devon, before being selected as MP for Exeter and setting off on a combative and colourful parliamentary career.
From 1967-70 she was in government as a minister on the Board of Trade during Harold Wilson's first administration. Subsequent positions included frontbench opposition spokesman on foreign and commonwealth affairs, and on health and transport.

Membership of the European parliament from 1974 to 1979 sowed the seeds of her increasingly strident anti-European views. But with her political identity forged from childhood around traditional Labour values, she was destined to be sidelined by the modernising tendencies within her party - although remaining a formidable presence on the backbenches. In 1983 she stood unsuccessfully as a eurosceptic candidate for Labour's deputy leadership.

The reputation she retained was of a principled rather than a frivolous MP who was not easily seduced by the trappings of power. She was never happy with New Labour nor the values it represented, believing that the party suffered from a "crisis of identity". In 2001 she scored a famous victory over the Blairite hierarchy when backbench Labour MPs backed her reinstatement as chair of the powerful Commons transport select committee.

An old-fashioned political bruiser to the end, Dunwoody only last week hit out at the Lisbon reform treaty and the cynical tactics the Brown government used to get it through.

Her death leaves Labour potentially struggling to hold Crewe and Nantwich in a future by-election.
Among the many tributes to Ms Dunwoody, one that could return to haunt Labour came from Harriet Harman, the current Commons leader, who said: "We shall not see her like again."

Wealthy fixer has attracted swirl of allegations

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Wealthy fixer has attracted swirl of allegations

By Jimmy Burns and David White

Published: August 25

British politicians over the years have not been short of apparently wayward children fuelling uncomfortable headlines. But Margaret Thatcher's son Mark has sparked more controversy than most.
His arrest in South Africa yesterday in connection with an attempted coup attempt is only the latest of his exploits to come under media scrutiny. Sir Mark, 51, who inherited his late father Denis's title last year, left Harrow, one of Britain's leading private schools, in 1971 after an undistinguished academic career. He did not go to university and failed his accountancy exams three times.

In 1977 he set up Mark Thatcher Racing, a car racing company that developed cash problems. His association with motor racing and his ambition to become a racing driver raised his profile in 1982, the year he disappeared in the Sahara desert while taking part in the Paris-Dakar rally. Media interest in Sir Mark's business activities gathered momentum when parliamentary questions were asked about his role in helping Cementation, a British company, win a multi-million-pound contract to build a university in Oman. Some parliamentarians claimed there was a conflict of interest as he was a consultant to the company.

He subsequently left the UK to pursue business interests in Dallas, Texas, where he promoted Lotus cars and met his future wife, millionairess Diana Burgdorf.

In 1992, Ken Livingstone, then a Labour MP and now mayor of London, alleged in parliament that Sir Mark had acted as a middle-man in separate arms deals involving Iraq's Saddam Hussein, and Armscor, the South African state arms manufacturer. The media image of Sir Mark as a wealthy arms industry fixer who exploited his position as the only son of the world's most powerful woman sprang from rumour and speculation rather than fact.

This was in part because he had refused to comment in detail on the allegations.
The UK parliament's public accounts committee decided against investigating allegations that he benefited from the mammoth UK-Saudi Al Yamamah arms deal secured by Mrs Thatcher's government in the 1980s.

An FT investigation in 1994 showed that Sir Mark had exploited his mother's connections, although he insisted that everything he did would have been achievable even if his mother had not been prime minister.

He told the FT at the time: “The whole idea that I have had tremendous success is just a myth. If I had tremendous success I would not be running around trying to do the things that I am doing. I would be sitting on my own private island in the South Pacific, but I am not.”
The following year Sir Mark moved to the affluent Cape Town suburb of Constantia, where he was subsequently investigated in connection with a money-lending business. The allegations were never proved.

His name was linked to the alleged Equatorial Guinea coup plot after Simon Mann, the former British special forces soldier accused of leading the bizarre operation, smuggled a letter out of prison in Zimbabwe calling for help from “Smelly” and “Scratcher”.

“Scratcher” looked like a nickname for Sir Mark, who has acknowledged his friendship with Mr Mann but has refused to talk about the affair. Teodoro Obiang Nguema, Equatorial Guinea's autocratic president, cited Sir Mark in a French magazine interview this month and said an unnamed former minister of Mrs Thatcher's government might also have been involved.

Spending at the European bank - Reconstructing and developing a new working environment

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Spending at the European bank - Reconstructing and developing a new working environment

By Jimmy Burns

13 April 1993

'WE KNEW we didn't like it. It didn't give us the right feeling. It was too complicated.' Pierre Pissaloux, EBRD's director in charge of planning and budget, was speaking of the marble which used to grace the bank's main lobby.

This was Travertine marble, similar to that installed in other neighbouring buildings in the Broadgate complex, but it was removed and replaced with some hewn slabs of very high-quality statuary marble specially imported from Forte di Marmi in Tuscany. It cost $750,000.

The new marble is set out in a sequence or gradation that would not look out of a place in a museum of Modern sculpture. The creamy white pieces, reflected by a mirrored ceiling, range from rough rock to polished marble.

The marble is only one of several distinctive features of a building that was developed by Mr Stuart Lipton, of Rosehaugh Stanhope, and fitted out by Bovis Construction according to a brief given by the bank's president to an Anglo-French design team. Other features include:

An entrance hall designed less to keep out predators than to impress visitors. The internal security barrier looks like a prop from the film Star Wars. It is a horizontal wooden slab with a mock marble painted finish. Activated by remote control, it slides to one side before slotting back into place. Nearby video screens project the national flags of the EBRD's member countries

The construction of a large auditorium on the first floor of the building to house 300 people. This will cost about $1m but has yet to be completed because the complex engineering involves removal of two massive structural columns to make room for the seating.

The main staff dining room (there are nine dining rooms) called the 'Mozart'. Apart from posters and paintings of the great composer it is fitted with wall-to-wall multi-coloured carpets and sycamore-lined walls. Its laminated tables and linen-covered chairs were specially designed for the architects, the Anglo-French group Berthet, Pochy, Sidell and Gibson. Mr Jean Louis Berthet, said: 'Our brief was to make people working in the bank happy. We didn't want a cafeteria that was uncomfortable and noisy.' Hence a very modern and chic restaurant designed for people either with many hours to spend in the bank or with time on their hands.

Works of art in the building are, in the words of bank officials, aimed at reflecting Europe in its 'full cultural and intellectual diversity'. Some of the more prestigious items, such as a set of Piranese engravings, were donated by the Italian government. In addition, the bank has commissioned artists, mainly from eastern Europe, to display their works on site. The boldest example is a giant fresco by a group of French and Russian painters which depicts Europe's great thinkers beneath a giant globe. Mr Pissaloux says the bank has spent about $250,000 in purchasing works of art.

Among items expected to come in the next few weeks is a large segment of the Berlin Wall donated by the German authorities. The plan, according to Mr Pissaloux, is to place the segment outside the bank's headquarters facing a large sculpture of a fat lady.

The faceless crime boss who is all to real

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

The faceless crime boss who is all to real

By Jimmy Burns

21 November 1994

While officials and ministers from more than 120 countries meet today in Naples at the start of a UN conference on organised international crime, many a big-time crook will be laughing all the way to the bank.

As Liliano Ferraro, a senior official with Italy's ministry of justice, commented last week: 'The organised crime syndicates have already held this kind of meeting ... they just meet in a hotel in eastern Europe and divide the profits.'

It has taken the Italians more than five years to generate sufficient interest among UN member states even to talk about the subject. And that, according to the organisers, is probably all they'll do in the Palazzo Real.

Attempts at improving international co-operation on law enforcement remain hampered by a combination of political rivalries, jealously guarded national legal systems, official corruption - and rank inefficiency.

In contrast, the organised international criminal fraternity has become increasingly sophisticated; it is adept at extending its operations across frontiers, establishing areas of common interest, and manipulating the world's economic system for hugely lucrative ends.
'International organised criminals have learnt to outwit law enforcement agencies,' says James Wyburd, an investigator with MRC Business Information Group.

In the words of John Kerry, a US senator, these global mobsters cause so much trouble that they are 'the new communism, the new monolithic threat'.

Who are they?

The really big boys are pretty far removed from his-tory's, and Hollywood's, gangster self-publicist: Alphonse Capone, better known as Al - the man whom the American crime writer Jay Robert Nash describes as 'a near illiterate who acquired millions and knew not where to spend a dime of it'. Capone died of syphilis and paresis of the brain. In the words of one of his gang: 'Al's brain just exploded.'
Times have changed. Eduardo Vetere, a former professor in law who heads the UN's anti-crime branch, based in Vienna, says: 'Today's big-time criminals are more serious and dangerous than Capone ever was. The world has become smaller, while the criminals have become bigger. It's a global village, in which crime in one country is easily transferred to others.'

There is no one better to ask about old-and new-time crooks than Mike Cherkasky. An employee of Kroll Associates, one of the world's leading private corporate spook agencies, Cherkasky is a former New York attorney's investigator who helped convict John Gotti, boss of the American mafia, in 1992, and was a prominent investigator in the BCCI case. Cherkasky now helps supervise one of New York's garbage collection services, once the preserve of the mob.

'The mob - blue-collar criminals like Gotti - may have worn Armani suits and cashmere coats, but they used their fists to get to the top,' he says. 'They had no choice. There's a different kind of corporate criminal around now. He is a cosmopolitan businessman, well-educated, well-spoken, who knows how to move among politicians and transfer his money from Wall Street to London to Paris and onwards if he wants to. He has plenty of opportunities, but greed makes him take the criminal route.'
The world's leading organised criminals do not give interviews bragging about their activities, as Capone did, daily, to the Chicago press. The meanest use journalists for target practice if they get anywhere near. Behind today's organised criminal lies a veritable machine of hardware and hard men which makes Capone's hoods look like chocolate soldiers.

Perhaps the most colourful prototype of the new international gangster was Pablo Escobar, a collector of giraffes, camels, beautiful women and classic cars, including Capone's Pontiac. Colombia's drug baron turned the smuggling of cocaine into the world's biggest money-spinning bootleg operation. His ability to bribe and corrupt officials went far beyond his home town of Medellin, where he is believed to have authorised payments of $1m per day to keep himself out of jail.

Escobar had a private army of 1,000 armed with state-of-the-art military hardware, and an A-team of lawyers well-versed in the art of laundering his ill-gotten gains through the world's (mainly off-shore) financial centres.

Escobar was shot dead almost a year ago by the Colombian army, supported by the CIA, the US air force and the US drug enforcement agency. Yet he might have escaped had it not been for rival drug barons turning against him.

Next to the Colombian boys, it is the emerging criminal fraternity in eastern Europe which is likely to cause most worry at this week's conference. In a background paper to the conference, the UN's anti-crime division does not mince words when it comes to the new Russian mafia.

'Roubles as well as smuggled arms and valuable metals worth billions of dollars leave the country in an unregulated fashion each month, while there is a substantial inflow of black and grey money,' the anti-crime squad states.

The criminal fraternity includes blue-collar villains not so different from the one-time Chicago mobsters. But at his most sophisticated, the eastern European criminal bribes officials, terrorises western businessman, manipulates the banking system, launders money around the west with front companies and exchange control fiddles, and engages in such transnational activities as prostitution, drugs smuggling and arms trading.

Only last week a nuclear power plant was temporarily shut in Lithuania because of 'terrorist' threats.
The Naples conference is a gesture fitting in a city of magic and death. But that is all it is: a symbol.

UN drug agency head criticised

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

UN drug agency head criticised.

By Jimmy Burns

19 January 2001

When Pino Arlacchi was given the job of heading the hitherto ineffective UN International Drug Control Programme in 1997, it was viewed as an opportunity to turn the tide in an increasingly desperate global struggle against illicit drugs. Mr Arlacchi came to the job with impeccable credentials as a former Italian parliamentarian and leading criminologist who had taken a courageous stand against the Italian Mafia.
But 3l years on, Mr Arlacchi is having to defend his reputation amid questions about his leadership that threaten to overshadow the planned high-profile launch in London on Monday of the organisation's Global Drug Report.

Mr Arlacchi is executive director of the UN's Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (ODCCP), which brings together the UNDCP and the UN's Centre for International Crime Prevention to co-ordinate international efforts to curb drug production, trafficking and consumption.

He and his regime have been bitterly criticised by former senior staff members who resigned out of frustration. They include Michael von der Schulenburg, the widely respected director of operations, in effect Mr Arlacchi's number two.

Mr von der Schulenburg's criticism came in the form of a resignation letter before he left the UN drugs agency late last year.

He wrote that the ODCCP had become "an organisation that has increased its international visibility while at the same time [it] is crumbling under the weight of promises that it is unable to meet and under a management style that had demoralised, intimidated and paralysed staff".

Mr Arlacchi has strongly rebutted the criticism. "The people who are working with me are not 'yes men'. They are experienced, talented, accomplished professionals who do not share Mr von der Schulenburg's views. They feel a common ownership with the strategy of the drugs programme which is also strongly supported by member states," he said in an interview this week.

On Friday night he released a copy of an internal letter he wrote to Mr von der Schulenburg in which he accused him of "blatantly attempting to damage the image of the Organisation and my reputation."
But according to Mr von der Schulenburg and other senior officials, those questioning Mr Arlacchi's leadership have been sidelined within the organisation, not had their contracts renewed and been forced to quit.

Other critics of Mr Arlacchi include Jean-Francois Thony, a French magistrate who was in charge of the organisation's Global Programme Against Money Laundering. He quit after claiming that material submitted to him by an Italian consultant appointed by Mr Arlacchi - for which the UN was supposed to pay $10,000 - was not original.

Another critic is Tony White, a former Scotland Yard officer who headed the UN agency's law enforcement and alternative development unit between March 1997 and May 2000.

"Mr Arlacchi's appetite for secrecy and his wish to control everything has resulted in programmes and functions that were previously executed within a structured and logical organisational framework being sucked into the ever-expanding black hole of his private office," said Mr White in an interview. "He has reduced local human resource policies and programmes to the level of a sham."
Mr White claimed that a pattern of promotion had developed within the organisation, with individuals being given preference for certain posts on the basis of personal association rather than merit.
When Mr Arlacchi took over, the UN drugs programme and its Vienna-based agency had a reputation as one of the most under-funded and ineffective within the UN, with international drug policy characterised by division and lack of purpose. "When I came to the UN, it was a big bureaucracy, a difficult place to work. Very rigid. My intention was to change things," he said.

His term in office has involved a staff shake-out at all levels, with offices being streamlined and critical employees not having their contracts renewed or being forced to leave.
"When you undertake a difficult process of change in a rigid organisation with a very strong traditional culture, you make some persons disappointed, some persons unhappy. I call it the price of reform," says Mr Arlacchi.

The von der Schulenburg memo and the opinions of other disgruntled staff appear to have reached donor governments on which the UN agency relies for more than 90 per cent of its core funding. The memo led to several European Vienna-based ambassadors to the UN criticising Mr Arlacchi's style of management at a meeting last month.

One Vienna-based diplomat said that British, German, French and Swedish officials were among those who were losing their patience with what they regarded as Mr Arlacchi's excessive "grandstanding" - a tendency to make promises for new programmes without the agreement and often without the knowledge of donor governments.

As a result funds had failed to materialise and programmes that had been announced with much fanfare had quietly slipped into oblivion.

Mr Arlacchi, who makes no apology for what he regards as bold leadership, insists that his term in office has resulted in solid achievements, including much greater visibility for the UN programme internationally and an increase in funding from donor governments since 1997.
But on Monday, when he presents his global report, Mr Arlacchi will come under close questioning about his leadership. He has already indicated that he intends to put up a robust defence

Spies who came in from the cold - Times are hard for secret agents, finds Jimmy Burns, but MI6

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Spies who came in from the cold - Times are hard for secret agents, finds Jimmy Burns, but MI6

By Jimmy Burns

Published: 15 April 2000

Stephen Dorril has earned a reputation as the investigative journalist's indispensable mole. For two decades he has been gathering every scrap of information about the assortment of rogues, cowboys, and dedicated servants of the state that make up the British intelligence service. Much of it has featured in The Lobster, his excellent journal of limited circulation, or else provided the life-blood of a number of radio and television programmes. It forms the raw material of Dorril's book, somewhat misleadingly described in the blurb as the first ever published on the operational history of MI6's activities and attitudes in action.

To say that Dorril draws heavily on published sources is not to belittle his achievement. As he points out in his preface, there is far more in the public domain about spies than anyone has realised - least of all the secret agencies themselves. He has provided a coherent and intelligently analysed account of an arm of government that has paradoxically tried to turn secrecy into a virtue - or an end in itself.
At one level, the book reads like an On Her Majesty's Service Who's Who. Few individuals who have played an important role in the decisions of MI6 or been connected to its activities escape Dorril's notice. The extent to which the agency has over time drawn into its web a network of "friends" from the media, business and the military, and straddled diplomacy and subversion, is neither conspiracy nor cock-up, but an unsettling statement of fact. At a deeper level, Dorril examines whether the money spent and the lives corrupted or lost in this covert war have been a price worth paying, in the name of what one senior spy described as the guardianship of intellectual integrity.

It was George Young, MI6's director of Middle East operations during the 1950s, who claimed, famously, that the spy has been called upon to remedy situations created "by deficiencies of ministers, diplomats, generals and priests". The spy is relatively free of the departmental attitudes which "create the official cast of mind". And he does not have to develop the politician's "ready phrase, the smart reply and the flashing smile". Yet, throughout most of the 50-year post-war period that Dorril focuses on, spooks have tended to shun questions of morality and accountability.

I have met many a contemporary spy who insists that the world they inhabit bears no resemblance to that sketched by Ian Fleming and Graham Greene, and expanded upon by Le Carre, even though, as one of them put it, "it does no harm to our credibility if foreigners still believe we really are like James Bond". The assassination capability of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) was apparently closed down at the end of the second world war, but elements of it were subsequently subsumed within MI6, and the concept of covert means to kill an enemy target using agents or third parties was never totally abandoned.

MI6, or the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) as it is officially called, emerged from the second world war with its own world view: profoundly anti-communist, and with an underlying dose of nostalgia for the British Empire. The service both fuelled and drew sustenance from the Cold War years, and did its damnedest to oppose and subvert third world nationalist leaders, like Nasser, who emerged to challenge traditional spheres of British colonial influence.

But the author is no apologist for the excesses of Stalinism, and he argues provocatively - and not without supporting evidence - that the moral high ground of SIS was lost when the tactics used by the west became no different from those used by Soviet propagandists. Before the second world war had even ended, MI6 officers were making contact with pro-fascist elements among the central and eastern European groups. And while the British Army was forcibly repatriating thousands of soldiers to the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, MI6 was simultaneously recruiting a number of Nazi war-crime suspects for their own anti-communist operations, when not using various exile movements to foment revolts doomed to failure, and thereby sending hundreds of emigre agents needlessly to their deaths.
The Cold War was easy for the spies to the extent that they had clear targets, defined in an agreed political context. In this world divided between communists and anti-communists, MI6 could justifiably lay claim to some outstanding intelligence-gathering successes. Information provided by turn-coat Soviet agents like Oleg Penkovsky helped Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis, and kept the west informed about Soviet nuclear intentions.

Yet MI6 backed the Shah of Iran's rise to power, only to fail in predicting his downfall. The organisation was taken by surprise by the Hungarian uprising in 1956, and there were later failures regarding Iraq and the Falklands. Furthermore, British turn-coats like Philby and George Blake did their bit for the KGB, at times ripping apart the organisation of MI6, and souring the UK's relations with the US at a time when the latter was transforming itself into the leading partner in the intelligence relationship. Dorril, I believe, also dismisses too lightly Kim Philby's responsibility for the deaths of British agents after he betrayed MI6.

Given these failures, the resilience of the organisation in avoiding disbandment was remarkable. MI6 has survived thanks to its capacity to reinvent itself in a changing world. The reality of the 21st century is that there are ever fewer curtains behind which intelligence agencies can hide their failures. As the author puts it, at the risk of having to redefine his own mole-ish inclinations: "the reality is that secrets are increasingly difficult to protect, and it would not be an exaggeration to suggest that there are no real secrets any more." Today's spies have turned their efforts to dealing with Russian mafias, nuclear rogue states, and international drug traffickers. To some extent they maintain their own world view, seemingly believing that a special relationship with the US is more worthwhile than winning the trust of their German and French counterparts by agreeing to a single European intelligence service.

Dorril's book is a welcome contribution to the intelligence library at a time when parliamentary calls for greater accountability, and the indiscreet public revelations of ex-spies Tomlinson and Shayler have put pressure on the agencies to justify their existence. It may be too much to hope that current intelligence chiefs may read this book, and draw some positive lessons for the future.

The Big Lie - Inside the Maxwell's Empire: Questions raised by Maxwell's last hours

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

The Big Lie - Inside the Maxwell's Empire: Questions raised by Maxwell's last hours

By Jimmy Burns

Published: 19 June 1992

IN THE larger-than-life story of Robert Maxwell, the manner of his death remains the greatest mystery.
Did he fall overboard accidentally or did he commit suicide? Could he conceivably have been murdered?

The lack of witnesses between the time of his last phone call to the crew on board his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, and the discovery that he was missing has proved a major problem for investigators trying to get at the truth.

Another obstacle has been the inconclusive nature of forensic evidence. Two autopsies were conducted on Maxwell's remains. One suggests death by accident or natural causes. The other leaves open the possibility of suicide or murder.

The evidence of the last 12 hours of Maxwell's life as he cruised, apparently without purpose, around the Canaries, is often confused and contradictory. The official investigations by the Spanish authorities was less than rigorous.

At stake is a Pounds 20m insurance claim. For Maxwell's family and his companies to receive that money they have to prove that he died as a result of an accident or he had been murdered.
The Financial Times has retraced Maxwell's last hours. We have interviewed key witnesses, including the Lady Ghislaine's crew. We have had access to hitherto unpublished documentation including the Spanish police investigation. We have conducted a careful examination of the yacht. The two autopsy reports conducted in Spain and Israel have been made available to the FT. What happened?
Why did Maxwell leave for the Canaries alone on October 31?

Maxwell flew to Gibraltar that morning as his empire was collapsing to meet the Lady Ghislaine. He went without his butler and ****his personal secretary. He had never done this before. He did not even take a tin of caviar which always accompanied him on his cruises. Before leaving London he made the unusual step of thanking Bob Cole, his press officer and confident 31 years, for his services.
He had been told by the Lady Ghislaine's captain, Gus Rankin that the boat was not ready for the kind of cruise Maxwell was accustomed to. Two of its crew members - a housekeeper and a steward - were on leave, the storm covers were up, and there were no provisions on board.

Maxwell told Rankin not to worry. He would bring the provisions with him or else 'rough it'.
Maxwell left his London staff in the dark as to where he was going and why. He told Rankin he planned to take a few days off to recover from a cold. He wanted to be dropped off in Madeira where his private plane would be waiting to take him to New York or London. He arrived in Gibraltar carrying some files and a limited supply of provisions.

Rankin, in his first interview, told the FT that he was sceptical about Maxwell's motives. It did not strike him that his employer had a particularly bad cold. 'He seemed healthy. He ate well throughout the crossing.' He did no work on this trip, which was almost unheard of.
What was Maxwell's state of mind on the crossing?

Untroubled, according to those who talked to him during the crossing.

The Lady Ghislaine had the technical capacity to control his empire with a push of a button. He almost invariably made use of it. In addition to a fully equipped office - it included computers, copiers, shredder, crytophone and fax machines - a satellite phone by his bedside identified his priorities.

he organisations and buildings featured on the short-code dial of his telephone included Headington Hall, Maxwell House, the Daily Mirror's newsdesk, the New York Daily News, Macmillan, Rothschilds in New York, his family, including Kevin and Ian Maxwell, and Eric Sheinberg, one of the senior traders at Goldman Sachs, who carried out some of Robert Maxwell's stock market deals.
Rankin said: 'I now feel we were being drawn into a game in which we had no control.'
On November 2 he called his two sons Ian and Kevin to a meeting in Madeira, then rescinded the order 10 minutes later. He then changed his earlier plan to fly out from Madeira and chose to cruise towards the Canaries instead.

Maxwell rang his son on November 3 to cancel a speech he was meant to have made to an Anglo-Israeli dinner in London.

One female crew member recalls that at one point she entered Maxwell's office and found the floor covered in documents. She asked him if he wanted them tidied up. He just kicked them under the table - as if he was no longer interested in them. Maxwell may no longer have been interested in his documents. But his family was. One day after his death, according to Maxwell's chief pilot Brian Hull, his daughter, Ghislaine, and Betty Maxwell, asked him to pick up some cases from the boat. Hull says he was handed six hard-backed leather cases by Betty Maxwell who told him that the documents had to be in London by noon.

Hull flew out at 7.15 next morning reaching the Mirror building in London just before twelve.
Why would anyone want to kill him?

Maxwell made many enemies in his business career. In the last month of his life he was accused of arms dealing and having close links with Mossad, the Israeli Secret Service. His son Philip told Spanish officials on hearing of his father's disappearance that he thought Maxwell had been kidnapped but subsequently changed his mind. One Israeli minister still thinks, on the basis of the second autopsy, that Maxwell may have been murdered. Could

anyone have boarded the ship that night?

All boats in the area on the night of his death have now been accounted for by the Spanish authorities. Throughout the night of Maxwell's disappearance the Lady Ghislaine had its radar and other equipment on. It picked up no suspicious vessels. Rankin says: 'I was on the bridge most of the night. We were doing 14 knots. It was impossible.'

Where were the crew?

At the time Maxwell died, Captain Rankin and two other crew members were on the bridge. An engineer was in the engine room. The bridge is sound-proof and the deck is out of ear-shot of the engine room. All other members of the crew were sleeping and heard nothing that drew their attention to Mr Maxwell's movements that night.

Along with other witnesses, the 11 crew members were extensively interviewed by the police, by insurance investigators and Interpol.

Why did the Lady Ghislaine take such a circuitous route on Maxwell's final overnight voyage?
Rankin was first told by Maxwell that he wanted to be taken to Los Cristianos, the southern port of Tenerife, where he would fly out on his private jet. Maxwell changed his mind. Rankin came under orders from his employer to 'cruise all night' because it would help him sleep. The log of the Lady Ghislaine shows that after leaving Santa Cruz it set a course for the coast of Gran Canaria.
Rankin discovered that Maxwell was missing around 11.00am - an hour and a half after the boat had docked at Los Cristianos. He did not alert the international Rescue Co-ordination centre, in Stavanger, Norway, until 12.15pm. The Spanish authorities did not learn of Maxwell's disappearance until 12.20pm. Why did Rankin take such a long time to contact the Spanish authorities?
'We had to carry out extensive searches of the boat and the immediate area around the port.' He also claims that the Spanish authorities failed to record that he sent a crew member ashore at Los Cristianos soon after the ship-board search had been completed to alert the local maritime police. 'I can't remember exactly when that was - around 11.45.'

At one point they spotted a swimmer they thought might have been Maxwell. Rankin also says he had difficulty in making radio contact with the local authorities.

Why were the inner, sliding doors to Maxwell's state room locked after he went missing?
On the evening of November 4, Maxwell ordered a stewardess to lock the main sliding doors to his quarters from within, leave the key with him and make her exit through the outer bathroom door, leaving it unlocked behind her.

On the morning Maxwell died, the main sliding doors were found locked from without, the bathroom door was locked from within, and the heavy steel framed doors leading to the deck were closed. Maxwell's key was missing. Rankin had to use a master key to get in.
Maxwell could not have left through the bathroom which had access to the outer deck. It could not be opened from the outside. While it was not unusual for Maxwell to go out on deck in the middle of the night, to take fresh air or relieve himself, the crew cannot remember an occasion when he closed let alone locked the doors behind him.

The locking of the doors was a preconceived act and yet it has emerged that the Spanish police chose not to consider in their inquiry.

Could he have fallen overboard?

Conditions were good and the sea was calm on the night of November 4/5. The Lady Ghislaine made no sudden movements throughout the night, according to Rankin, cruising at a constant speed of between 14 and 15 knots. The Spanish police concluded that he lent against a wire on the main deck. The wire is 3ft 6ins, reaching Maxwell's waist. They suggest this had a 'trampoline' effect throwing him into the sea. No evidence was found of the wire being disturbed or even dislodged from its hinges as it might well have been by a man of Maxwell's weight and size. Maxwell was 6ft 2in tall and weighed more than 20 stone.

It would have been possible for him to fall over the guard rail on the main deck, which is three inches lower than the wire, although he would have had to lean well over it to lose his balance.
Had he been drinking excessively or taking sleeping pills?

No evidence was found of significant quantities of alcohol or drugs in his body. His widow said his sleeping pills had remained untouched.

Why were there two autopsies?

The insurers were dissatisfied with the autopsy carried out in in Spain.

Did the second autopsy find anything new?

Yes. The post mortem carried out in Israel by Dr Iain West, head of forensic medicine at Guy's hospital, and two Israeli pathologists with the family's approval, found serious muscle tear and injuries to the left hand and left shoulder. The pathologists believe this suggests that Maxwell hung on to something before falling into the water. These crucial findings were not discovered by the earlier Spanish autopsy.
Maxwell could have sustained such an injury by holding on to prevent himself from falling by accident or by trying to hoist himself back again.

But West suggests that Maxwell could have also sustained such an injury as he deliberately took his own life.

West believes such an injury could have been incurred by climbing over the rail and slipping while still holding the rail. But it could also be a crucial clue pointing to suicide. 'One sees this pattern of injury on occasions in individuals who kill themselves as a result of falling from high buildings. While some will jump or let themselves topple over a baclony or out of a window others will actually will ease themselves over the edge and hold on for a time with one or both hands before letting go.'
Could he have died of a heart attack?

Maxwell had been suffering for years from fluid and respiratory problems. He was overweight and had been under some pressure. However, one of his leading doctors maintains that he was 'healthy' before leaving on his final cruise.

Tests carried out by Spanish pathologists showed some evidence of ischemic myocardial damage - in layman's terms, his heart muscles were damaged due to lack of blood.
The Spanish doctors therefore reached the conclusion that he could have died of a heart attack in the water having fallen following an accident possibly provoked by breathing difficulties.
Dr West found difficulty in performing his examination because of the poor state in which the body reached him. It had been poorly embalmed. Some parts of the body were in an advanced state of decomposition. Others were missing having been sent to Madrid for separate analysis by the Spanish pathologist. But Dr West was unconvinced of the theory that Maxwell had suffered a big enough heart attack while on board to send him toppling overboard.

He concluded that, while Maxwell had undoubtedly suffered' a degree of heart damage' there was no evidence of a massive coronary.

Dr West, on the other hand, concedes that Maxwell could have suffered a heart attack while in the water. In this, at least, the pathologists concur.

The other crucial finding by both autopsies was that there was no conclusive evidence that the sole cause of death was by drowning, following tests on Maxwel's lungs and samples taken from the sea water.

Dr West concludes that Maxwell's injuries do not point to a clearly defined cause of death. The most likely conclusion that can be drawn from both autopsies is that the physical cause of death was, most probably, a combination of a heart attack and drowning while struggling in the water.
So how did Maxwell die? On the evidence available both murder - for which there is no physical evidence - and a heart attack as a single cause of death can probably be ruled out.
This leaves one of two possibilities. Maxwell either fell into the water by accident or he committed suicide. Neither can be ruled out on the basis of the forensic evidence.
Rankin told Maxwell's widow, Betty, on her arrival in the Canaries, that he thought her husband had killed himself.

The verdict probably rests on Maxwell's behaviour, his state of mind, and the looming catastrophe he would have to face if he returned.

CINCO A�OS SIN LADY DI

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

CINCO AÑOS SIN LADY DI

Los turistas que este verano visiten Londres por primera vez quizá no caigan en la cuenta de un cambio importante en el paisaje de la capital inglesa, un cambio que es representativo de cómo han quedado arrumbados los recuerdos de una legendaria princesa que, tiempo atrás, cautivó la imaginación del mundo.

Una tienda que hace esquina, a unos pocos metros del palacio de Buckingham, sustituyó, no hace mucho tiempo, las viejas reproducciones de jarros y postales de Diana, princesa de Gales, por un surtido de recuerdos exclusivamente dedicados a su majestad la reina Isabel II.

Los últimos meses han demostrado la extraordinaria capacidad de una de las familias reales más antiguas para salvarse cuando estaba al borde de la extinción y seguir arraigados en el sentimiento colectivo de los ingleses con la categoría de «entidad admirada».La bien entrenada maquinaria de consejeros que rodean a la real familia se las ha ingeniado para no naufragar en las procelosas aguas de la polémica y el escándalo y para salir de ellas con renovada firmeza.

Dos hechos, la muerte de la centenaria reina madre y las celebraciones de las bodas de oro de la coronación de su hija como reina, han demostrado que perduran unas masas populares que todavía creen que la monarquía -aun sin la legendaria princesa- no sólo tiene que existir sino que debe desempeñar un importante papel como catalizador de un sentimiento de cohesión social y política en un nuevo siglo plagado de incertidumbres.

TRAS SU MUERTE

Ahora Buckingham ha aceptado a Camilla

Camilla Parker-Bowles, la mujer que contribuyó a destruir el matrimonio de Diana y Carlos hace gala ahora, abiertamente, de su relación con el heredero designado. Se habla de boda y la invitan al palacio de Buckingham. ¿Se estará revolviendo Diana en su tumba? Yo espero, sinceramente, que haya encontrado la auténtica felicidad en el cielo.

Con todo, el quinto aniversario de la muerte de la princesa Diana en un espeluznante accidente de automóvil en París va a causar mella, transitoriamente, en este renovado sentimiento de seguridad y quizá sirva para recordar al pueblo lo poco que ha cambiado la casa de los Windsor desde que les responsabilizaron, en parte, de haber contribuido a la trágica muerte de una persona que se había atrevido a desafiar una serie de reglas divinas y antiguas tradiciones.

No soy yo el único inglés que recuerda con exactitud dónde se encontraba y qué estaba haciendo cuando oyó las primeras noticias de aquel suceso a primera hora de aquella mañana de agosto de 1997. Acababa de saltar de la cama para ver un programa de televisión cuando, todavía de manera un poco confusa, me di cuenta de que uno de los más conocidos presentadores de informativos del país tenía los ojos humedecidos.

Al cabo de unos minutos, desperté a mi mujer y a mis dos hijas para comunicarles que no sólo la nación sino todo el mundo había sufrido una pérdida irreparable. La última vez que se había expresado un sentimiento semejante en el seno de mi familia fue cuando mi difunto padre había anunciado la muerte de Churchill. Mis pequeñas hijas tendrían que estudiar a Churchill en el colegio, pero ya lo sabían todo sobre Diana y en la intimidad profunda y secreta de su ser lloraron también.
Al cabo de unas horas, habíamos dado por terminado precipitadamente nuestro fin de semana y habíamos regresado a Londres en coche, para expresar nuestra tristeza de la única manera que creíamos poder hacerlo. Nos sumamos a una creciente muchedumbre de miles y miles de personas que visitaban la casa de la princesa, junto a Kensington Gardens, antes de depositar un gran ramo de flores y una tarjeta de condolencia a las puertas del palacio de Buckingham.

FLORES Y LAGRIMAS

Sus súbditos la querían porque les hizo soñar.

Depositamos las flores y la tarjeta consciente y deliberadamente donde lo hicimos. Las dejamos tanto como un acto simbólico, como en un gesto cargado de significado, con el objetivo de mostrar nuestro respeto hacia Diana, no porque se hubiera convertido en una excéntrica marginada, sino porque era una auténtica princesa que había cumplido con su responsabilidad y había dado vida a nuestros sueños.

Cinco años después, la verdadera historia de Diana es la que nos pinta el retrato de una persona mucho más compleja que la condición de icono a la que fue elevada en su multitudinario funeral. Más allá de la imagen de una belleza desafiante y radiante queda la realidad de una neurótica vulnerable, mártir de los medios de comunicación en la misma medida que su musa preferida, que se vio perjudicada por su educación mucho antes de sufrir la humillación de que la casaran con un futuro rey que quería a otra.

No resulta, pues, sorprendente que en las semanas que han precedido al quinto aniversario de su muerte, el inquieto espíritu de Diana se haya seguido dejando sentir. Su manifestación más visible ha sido la división pública que ha salido a la luz sobre la mejor forma de recordarla. Un comité responsable de escoger el diseño del monumento se ha mostrado profundamente dividido entre las dos propuestas que competían para la realización de un campo de recreo, un paseo y una fuente en Kensington Gardens. Lo más llamativo es que se haya tardado tanto tiempo en considerar la posibilidad de levantarle un monumento.

«Desde que Trotsky fue expulsado de la Unión Soviética en 1929, ninguna otra figura prominente ha sido borrada de la vida pública de una nación hasta tales extremos. Rara vez leemos nada de ella.Rara vez vemos alguna imagen de ella. La señora ha desaparecido», afirma Robert Harris, periodista y autor de libros de éxito.

Entre los que se han sumado al coro de las censuras figura el hermano de Diana, Charles, conde de Spencer, que, en una polémica entrevista concedida a primeros de julio, ha acusado públicamente a la familia real de tratar de limitar los contactos entre sus sobrinos, los príncipes Guillermo y Enrique, y la familia de Diana. Se da la paradoja de que Lady Di lo nombró guardián de sus hijos en su testamento.

OLVIDADA POR LA HISTORIA

La quieren borrar, pero su espíritu ha renacido

Con todo, esta aparente desaparición de Diana tiene que valorarse en relación con el hecho de que una parte de la renovada imagen pública de la casa de los Windsor parece que refleja la perdurable influencia de aquella princesa que llegaron a marginar.

Sin duda, las bodas de oro de la coronación fueron un triunfo personal de la reina, cuya popularidad entre el pueblo llano, al igual que la de la reina madre, raramente se ha visto amenazada de manera directa. Sin embargo, a pesar de toda la pompa y solemnidad que rodeó tanto las celebraciones de las bodas de oro como el funeral de la reina madre, fueron la ruptura de la tradición y los destellos de sentimentalismo colectivo los que nos hicieron evocar el carisma populista de Diana.
Algunas escenas, como los ramos de flores que se tiraban al paso del carruaje mortuorio de la reina madre por las calles de Londres y la forma en que la reina se mezcló en los jardines del palacio de Buckingham con estrellas de la canción como Elton John, habrían resultado inimaginables sin el ejemplo de Diana.

Entre tanto, no se puede negar que Guillermo y Enrique han aportado de manera cada vez más importante su propio toque populista a la monarquía en el comienzo del nuevo milenio, con lo que demuestran muy cumplidamente que son auténticos hijos de su madre.
En 1967, Diana Spencer, con seis años, se sentó al pie de las escaleras de su casa solariega y se agarró a la barandilla mientras su familia se desintegraba a su alrededor. Aquel instante iba a perseguirla durante el resto de la vida.

Lágrimas, gritos, el ruido de unos pasos apresurados por la grava del patio de entrada, el cierre violento de la puerta de un coche y luego el sonido de un motor que sube de revoluciones antes de que el automóvil se desvanezca repentinamente, como el eco de un disparo. Frances, la madre de Diana, había salido del hogar de la familia Spencer para no regresar jamás.
Diana Spencer había nacido el 1 de julio de 1961, con un buen peso de tres kilos y medio, en un mundo de privilegios y de lujo que en nada se correspondía con las soterradas tensiones que estaban ya conduciendo a sus padres a una separación irrevocable.

Era la tercera hija del vizconde y la vizcondesa de Althorp, y una única mancha afeaba su horizonte: el hecho de que su padre era incapaz de ocultar el disgusto ante el hecho de que su mujer había dado a luz a otra niña en lugar del esperado varón. Cuando por fin llegó el niño, Charles, tres años más tarde, tuvo un bautizo mucho más especial que el de Diana, con la reina como madrina.
Los Althorp no andaban faltos de dinero. Habían acumulado un patrimonio que se remontaba al siglo XV, cuando los Spencer hicieron fortuna comerciando con ovejas. Carlos I les concedió el título nobiliario en el siglo XVII.

La familia se construyó una residencia palaciega en el campo, en Northamptonshire, no lejos de Oxford. Los Althorp amasaron una destacada colección de obras de arte y muebles antiguos y adoptaron para su escudo de armas un lema con un absurdo punto de arrogancia: God defends the right (Dios defienda al justo).

Desde entonces, los Spencer nunca han andado demasiado lejos de los fastos de la aristocracia, y su compromiso con la nobleza quedó ratificado por varios de los antepasados de Diana, unidos mediante lazos de sangre a los duques de Marlborough, uno de cuyos descendientes fue Winston Churchill.

Por su rama materna, la familia de Diana provenía de los Fermoy, una dinastía más o menos igual de bien conectada, con ricas raíces en Irlanda y en EEUU y con propiedades en Inglaterra concedidas por la familia real.

En sus años de infancia, Diana disfrutó de todas las comodidades de una vida entre algodones, como correspondía a un ambiente privilegiado, prácticamente invariable desde los años victorianos: equitación, una colección de perritos y gatitos, los baños en la piscina privada, horarios fijos para las comidas y una primera educación con institutriz, además de esporádicos encuentros con miembros de la familia real.

El traslado de las dos hermanas de Diana, Sarah y Jane, a un internado privado cuando ella era pequeña, coincidió con la ruptura de los 14 años de matrimonio de sus padres, lo que alimentó en ella un sentimiento de abandono e inseguridad. Diana fue enviada a otro colegio, más cercano a su casa, en el que, sin embargo, siguió albergando esa sensación de desamparo.
Era la única niña de aquella escuela cuyos padres estaban divorciados.Su madre y su padre llevaban cada uno su vida por su cuenta, pero no cesaban de pelearse por sus hijos, por lo que uno y otra inundaban literalmente a sus hijas y a su hijo con una enormidad de regalos con ocasión de navidades y cumpleaños.

Sin embargo, lo que brillaba por su ausencia era la armonía y el calor de hogar que tanto ansiaba Diana. A los nueve años, enviaron a Diana a un internado diferente al de sus hermanas y, en esta ocasión, más lejos de su casa. Su sentimiento de rechazo se hizo más profundo. Una vez, cuando su padre la llevaba al colegio tras unas vacaciones, se plantó en las escaleras y le gritó: «¡Si me abandonas aquí es que no me quieres!».

Pasó mucho tiempo antes de que el círculo de íntimos de Diana llegara a darse cuenta de que los esfuerzos que ella hacía, en vano, por consolarse a base de atracarse a comer. Lo hacía por motivos puramente emocionales, que hundían sus raíces en aquella infancia desdichada.
En el colegio, a Diana se le daban mejor las actividades teatrales y al aire libre que concentrarse en los estudios. No obstante, allí le enseñaron a interesarse por el trabajo social con ancianos, enfermos y retrasados mentales. Estas tareas, le dijeron, contribuirían a hacer de ella «una buena ciudadana».
Su padre, Johnnie, se había casado por segunda vez, convirtiendo en esposa a su amante, Raine, condesa de Dartmouth, una dama bien conocida de la alta sociedad, tan excéntrica en el vestir y en sus tocados como su madre, la autora de novelitas de amor Barbara Cartland. Johnnie sentía por ella auténtica adoración.Al principio, Diana trataba a su madrastra como si aquello fuera una broma, pero con el tiempo, poco a poco, empezó a mostrarle todo su desprecio y se refería a ella como «la perversa madrastra».

En el año 1977 hubo grandes transformaciones en la vida de Diana.Johnnie y Raine se casaron en una discreta ceremonia civil a la que no la invitaron ni a ella ni al resto de sus hijos. Poco después, Diana, aparentemente una jovencita segura de sí misma, si bien un punto rebelde, que estaba ansiosa por salir de casa, se empeñó en que le permitieran dejar el colegio después de haber recibido clases de labores del hogar, corte, confección y cocina en Gstaad (Suiiza).
Tenía 16 años y unas ansias infinitas de descubrir Londres. Quizá fue aún más decisivo el hecho de que, aquel año, conoció a Carlos Windsor, príncipe de Gales, el todavía soltero heredero al trono de Inglaterra, Escocia y Gales.

El primer encuentro con el hombre con quien un día llegaría a casarse no dejó entrever nada. Se conocieron a finales de otoño, en el curso de una cacería de faisanes en la residencia campestre de la familia de ella.

La invitación a Carlos había partido de la hermana mayor de Diana, Sarah. Esta era por aquel entonces una de las muchas jovencitas amigas del príncipe. A pesar de que los columnistas de la prensa rosa las señalaban como posibles candidatas a futura reina, para el propio Carlos no eran más que relaciones pasajeras.

DE CAZA

Entre faisanes, Carlos la vio 'alegre y bulliciosa'

Durante la cacería, Diana se fijó en un personaje que más bien tenía poco encanto, embutido en un anorak que le venía grande y calzado con botas de campo, y no le prestó mayor atención.La primera impresión que ella produjo en Carlos fue la de una mujer más bien inmadura, pero sin ninguna extravagancia y cariñosa.«Alegre y bulliciosa», comentó Carlos a sus íntimos. En privado, Diana pensaba que Carlos estaba completamente fuera de su alcance, un hombre más mayor y algo tristón que, si tenía que emparejarse con alguien de su familia, lo haría con su hermana.

Pasaron otros tres años antes de que Diana y Carlos volvieran a coincidir. Por entonces, Diana tenía 19 años, compartía un apartamento en Londres con tres amigas y ejercía una profesión que se adaptaba muy bien a su sentido de la independencia y a su instinto por cuidar de los demás.
Tenía un trabajo de jornada reducida en una guardería, en la que enseñaba a los niños pinturas, bailes y juegos. Entre sus amistades había chicos, pero con ninguno de ellos llegó a mantener relaciones. Parecía que el destino, inconscientemente, le empujaba a llegar virgen al matrimonio.
Por el contrario, el príncipe Carlos, con casi 33 años, había mantenido toda serie de relaciones sexuales pasajeras, aunque se había enamorado en secreto de la mujer destinada al papel de amante real, Camilla Parker-Bowles.

AMOR O DEBER?

La razón de Estado doblegó al príncipe

Hombre de arraigadas costumbres, educado en las rígidas tradiciones de la casa de Windsor, Carlos se consumía en su interior en un debate emocional, puesto que ya sentía las tensiones entre lo que le demandaba su corazón y su sentido de la responsabilidad monárquica.

El más íntimo confidente de Carlos, su tío lord Mountbatten, había facilitado desde el primer momento de su relación el emparejamiento de Carlos y Camilla a cubierto de los ojos de la opinión pública, pero al mismo tiempo había aconsejado al príncipe que buscara una esposa que se adaptara mejor a las exigencias de una familia real: una novia que fuera también de buena cuna, pero que no tuviera la reputación de Camilla, de promiscuidad sexual y de infidelidad matrimonial.

No deja de ser una ironía que fuera la muerte de Mountbatten, asesinado por terroristas del IRA en 1979, la circunstancia que sirvió en bandeja que Diana entrara en la vida de Carlos.
En el verano de 1980, Diana se encontró con Carlos durante un partido de polo y, mientras mantenían una conversación a solas, ella despertó en él la emoción con sus expresiones de condolencia.Ella le dijo que le había visto en el funeral de su tío y que había tenido la sensación de que se encontraba muy solo y de que necesitaba que alguien se ocupara de él.

Apenas si habían transcurrido unas semanas cuando Carlos sorprendió a uno de sus más íntimos amigos con la insinuación de que había conocido a la que había de ser su esposa. Le habló de la buena educación que Diana había recibido, de sus modales nada afectados y naturales, de su afabilidad y de su aparente inclinación a la vida en el campo.

Diana comentó con sus amigos que se sentía halagada, aturrullada y desconcertada ante la entusiasta atención que había empezado a generar en el príncipe, 12 años mayor que ella. Su corazón se puso a latir mucho más rápido de lo habitual cuando Carlos la invitó en el otoño de 1980 al refugio escocés de la familia real en el castillo de Balmoral.

La visita de Diana fue del todo inocente, sin sombra del arrojo que Camilla desplegaba en sus encuentros con Carlos. En lugar de compartir cama bajo el mismo techo, Carlos se quedó en la mansión principal, mientras que Diana pasó las noches en una casa aneja, acompañada de su hermana Jane y del marido de ésta, Robert, miembro de la familia real. Con todo, lo que Diana recordaba tiempo después como unos «maravillosos» días en Balmoral se vieron interrumpidos por el inquisitivo teleobjetivo de un fotógrafo, que la obligó a taparse el rostro con un pañuelo y a ocultar su identidad cuando paseaba.

El incidente representó el punto de partida de una persecución implacable desatada por la prensa sensacionalista a la caza de lo que los periodistas populacheros consideraban que era propiedad nacional.

Para todos -y eran muchos- los que todavía no tenían ni idea de la naturaleza de las relaciones de Carlos y Camilla, la historia les parecía de lo más natural en aquel momento: el futuro rey de Inglaterra conoce por fin a su princesa de cuento de hadas.Aquella era la noticia ideal que los periodistas especializados en la familia real llevaban años esperando.

Después del episodio de Balmoral, Diana dejó de tener vida privada a todos los efectos. Los reporteros la esperaban a la puerta de su apartamento, la sometieron a asedio día y noche y la siguieron hasta la guardería en la que trabajaba. Durante mucho tiempo, Diana fue un ejemplo de discreción y de modestia, sin soltar palabra ni realizar ningún gesto que perjudicara su imagen de mejor amiga del príncipe.

Tan solo una vez cometió un error involuntario, en la confianza de que la prensa sensacionalista la dejaría en paz, cuando se avino a posar para una fotografía con un grupo de niños de los que era profesora. Desgraciadamente, la luz le daba por detrás e hizo que se le transparentara la falda de algodón y que enseñara las piernas más de lo que debía.
La fotografía se distribuyó por todo el mundo. La instantánea le daba un aire de erotismo soterrado que contrastaba con su imagen virginal. «Sabía que tenías unas buenas piernas, pero no me había dado cuenta de que eran espectaculares [le comentó el príncipe Carlos]. En fin, ¿por qué tenías que enseñárselas a todo el mundo?».

Este comentario debería haber servido de advertencia de que Carlos había dibujado una nítida línea de separación entre Diana y Camilla en sus afectos, y que, en su fuero interno, sólo profesaba una auténtica pasión sexual por la segunda. Sin embargo, en aquel momento, Diana se lo tomó simplemente como una manifestación del sentido del humor de él.
Tendría que pasar aún un tiempo hasta que Diana empezara a darse cuenta de la realidad de la relación de Camilla con Carlos, lo que exacerbó la tensión mental que ella había empezado a sentir como consecuencia de estar permanentemente en el centro de atención de los medios.
Prácticamente no había nada en su vida que la hubiera preparado para las tortuosas circunstancias en las que se iba a encontrar.Desde Balmoral, ella no tenía ninguna duda de que quería casarse con Carlos y de que su principal obligación consistía en no hacer nada que pudiera perjudicar a la realeza. Sin embargo, al mismo tiempo volvía a surgir en ella la profunda inseguridad que llevaba arrastrando desde su infancia.

POBRE INOCENTE

Los amigos de Carlos no creían que él la eligiera

Algunos amigos de Carlos y determinados miembros del personal de la casa real, que estaban al tanto de su pasión por Camilla y que creían que Diana era una pobre inocente, tenían la sensación de que se estaba mascando la tragedia, pero creyeron que su obligación era mantenerse en silencio. El propio Carlos, sin embargo, se vio sometido a la presión de la única persona a la que debía hacer caso, su padre, el príncipe Felipe, duque de Edimburgo.

El duque advirtió a su hijo de que no podía seguir retrasando su decisión: Carlos debía poner fin inmediatamente a la relación con Diana o casarse con ella. Poco después, en una conversación con uno de sus íntimos amigos, Carlos confesó que estaba nervioso y confuso, pero parecía resignado. «No es cuestión más que de decidirse a dar un paso, no muy habitual, hacia una situación bastante desconocida... Espero que al final salga todo bien», confesó Carlos.

En febrero, le pidió a Diana que se casara con él. A ella le entró la risa tonta. No era sino la reacción espontánea de una jovencita inocente que veía cómo se cumplían sus sueños.
Por la noche, cuando comunicó la noticia de su compromiso a familiares y amigos, Diana parecía estar subida en una nube, con el aspecto de ser más feliz que nunca.

En las semanas anteriores a la boda, Diana se trasladó al palacio de Buckingham, donde igual que a Cenicienta, se le separó de sus amigos, de la mayoría de su familia y del mundo exterior.Fue entonces cuando empezaron a asomar las lágrimas, cuando Diana trató con todas sus fuerzas de imponerse, sin conseguirlo, al aislamiento y a las presiones.

Sus ánimos flaquearon por completo cuando su prometido se fue a Australia y Nueva Zelanda en visita oficial por un periodo de cinco semanas. Cayó por primera vez en la bulimia, pasando deliberadamente de darse grandes atracones al ayuno más extremo.
Las angustias de Diana estaban directamente relacionadas con el descubrimiento gradual de que había otra mujer en la vida de Carlos. Una joya desparejada por aquí, una carta por allá, conversaciones telefónicas indiscretas... habían puesto de manifiesto que su identidad era la de Camilla Parker-Bowles.

Cuando Diana le planteó este tema a Carlos, a su regreso a Inglaterra, el príncipe confesó únicamente que Camilla había sido en otros tiempos una de sus más íntimas amigas y prometió repetidamente que, en adelante, Diana sería la única destinataria de su amor.

Se trataba de una mentira que él difícilmente iba a ser capaz de ocultar. Diana no acababa de creérselo, pero se tranquilizó, aunque una voz en su interior le decía que nada en la vida era para siempre. Ella hizo un esfuerzo por convencerse de que así sería si se lo prometía su príncipe.
Pocos días antes de la boda, Diana descubrió un brazalete que Carlos había comprado para regalárselo a Camilla. Una vez más, ella le pidió explicaciones. Una vez más, él negó que hubiera hecho algo incorrecto, y le dijo que estaba histérica sin motivo.Diana, que por encima de todo quería agarrarse desesperadamente a sus sueños, alejó de sí sus más siniestros temores.
Carlos, siempre sumido en la duda permanente, sopesó la posibilidad de echarse atrás hasta que se dio cuenta de que los preparativos de la boda estaban ya tan avanzados que suspenderlos en aquel momento iba a suponer una humillación nacional. Se convenció a sí mismo de que su responsabilidad le obligaba a representar el papel que las masas exigían: ser el príncipe azul de una princesa de cuento de hadas.

Arms to Iraq: A fatal attraction - Under the nose of the White House, kickbacks and illegal deals funded Saddam

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Arms to Iraq: A fatal attraction - Under the nose of the White House, kickbacks and illegal deals funded Saddam

By Lionel Barber and Alan Friedman

Additional reporting by Richard Donkin and Jimmy Burns in London and Eric Reguly in Washington

Published: 3 May 1991

A joint investigation by the Financial Times and ABC News/Nightline has uncovered fresh evidence that the Bush administration's indulgent attitude towards Iraq made it easy for Baghdad to fund its illegal arms network virtually unhindered in the run-up to the invasion of Kuwait. Lionel Barber and Alan Friedman report from Washington

SIX WEEKS ago a Jordanian middleman received an order from Baghdad for a sophisticated type of hot rolled steel. According to copies of the order, the purchaser specified dimensions of 115mm x 115mm, the kind used in the manufacture of heavy industrial equipment. It is also the kind used in the manufacture of long-barrelled artillery guns.

The order, placed in March 1991, came from Chaled Makhzoumi, working through the Iraqi commercial centre in Amman, Jordan.

Traffic along the dusty road from Amman to Baghdad, one of the main conduits in the past for the transhipment of arms to Iraq, is beginning to build up again.

To defence intelligence officials in Washington this suggests one thing: President Saddam Hussein is still in the business of building up his considerable arsenal.

According to US intelligence sources and Iraqi opposition leaders the Iraqi leader dispatched agents across the border into Jordan - under the direction from Baghdad of his son Uday - in search of spare parts for his remaining tanks, machine guns and artillery, just weeks after his costly expulsion from Kuwait by the US-led coalition.

The revival of the Jordan connection, in violation of the United Nations embargo against Iraq, is a reminder of how resourceful and determined President Saddam had been in building up hundreds of millions of dollars of western technology and weaponry, his aggressive use of which led the US to send more than 500,000 troops to deal with the consequences.

A retired senior US diplomat with extensive experience in the Middle East says the world 'has never seen anything as sophisticated as the Iraqi procurement network' - a web of front companies, purchasing agents and money laundering specialists who operated through more than 50 undercover outlets in Europe and the US.

Their collective mission throughout the 1980s, as Iraq exploited the west's (and in particular Washington's) fear of Islamic fundamentalism in Iran, was this: to help Saddam Hussein build the weapons of mass destruction needed to attain his goal of military supremacy in the Gulf.
Starved of commercial credit by the middle of 1989 because of Baghdad's huge and growing volume of unserviceable debt, the Iraqi agents' chief source of finance was an obscure Italian-owned bank branch in Atlanta, Georgia.

The parent bank's name was Banca Nazionale del Lavoro. BNL may be Italy's biggest bank with Dollars 100bn (Pounds 59bn) of assets but the Atlanta branch from which this extraordinary supply effort was largely funded had just 16 employees and authorisation to lend no more than Dollars 500,000 without approval from its head office in Rome.

Between 1987 and 1989, BNL Atlanta - now the subject of criminal proceedings and congressional investigations - made Dollars 3bn of Iraqi loan commitments.

These loans were kept off the official books and were used to supply not only legitimate exporters to Iraq but also some of the Iraqi front companies and procurement agents that were covertly channelling equipment ordered by Baghdad for Mr Saddam's nuclear, chemical and ballistic missile projects.
A joint investigation by the Financial Times and ABC News/Nightline, has uncovered fresh evidence showing that the Bush administration's indulgent attitude towards Iraq in effect allowed the arms network to operated virtually unhindered.

The FT/ABC investigation has also discovered that, on the financial front, the Bush administration treated Iraq with remarkable leniency, brushing aside evidence of abuse by US companies and by Baghdad of government-guaranteed Iraqi farm credits.

Among the abuses were 'kickbacks' or 'extras' such as the supply of armoured vehicles to Iraqi officials supplementing the legitimate grain shipments.

The first warnings about the Iraqi loan programme appeared in 1987 when US grain companies complained to the US Agriculture Department (USDA) about Iraqi demands for tyres, air-conditioning equipment, spare parts, trucks and even cash - so-called 'after-sales services'.
Yet in November 1989, the White House pressed successfully for approval of Dollars 1bn of fresh guaranteed loans requested by the Department of Agriculture's Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC).
Then, in January 1990, President Bush declared it to be in the national interest to allow the US Export-Import Bank to guarantee further loans, despite government studies showing that Iraq was no longer creditworthy.

There were also widespread concerns at the time among US Customs officials and Treasury, Federal Reserve and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) officials that some of the US government loans ostensibly for agricultural commodities were, in fact, diverted by Iraq's Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialisation for the purchase of military goods.

In the light of Mr Saddam's increasingly brutal and unpredictable behaviour and the subsequent invasion of Kuwait the administration's actions raise questions about its judgment and the advice it was receiving.

Some of the answers to these questions may lie in a key White House meeting held on November 8 1989 under the aegis of the National Advisory Council (NAC), a sub-cabinet-level group that reviews government-guaranteed foreign loans that raise political issues.
The meeting was called to resolve an inter-agency dispute over an Agriculture Department proposal to offer Dollars 1bn of fresh CCC Iraqi loan guarantees. As one senior official admitted this week, there were 'enough yellow flags (signals of foul play) to make us worry about BNL'.

Several features of the meeting were unusual: A number of agencies were represented at a high level. It was also attended by a White House representative, which underscored the high political stakes involved.
The meeting's minutes were deemed sensitive enough to be classified, the first time this has occurred since the late 1970s, according to a US government lawyer.
A month earlier, a Federal Reserve official had told a previous NAC meeting that Iraq's use of the CCC programme amounted to a 'Ponzi scheme' - an American term which means that Iraq would default on its CCC loans unless it continued to receive ever-larger CCC allocations. The Fed official also said that Iraq was 'probably not creditworthy'.

One participant at the White House meeting recalled that the BNL Atlanta scam was uppermost in the minds of several officials. 'We had a lot on BNL. We knew the thing was stinking. I think we all understood this was not a happy situation,' he said.

Another participant said he tabled numerous concerns about the abuse of the CCC programme, Iraq's creditworthiness and the BNL affair.

According to a number of documents, including reports from the meeting, and interviews with a number of officials, the meeting was told by Mr John Robson, deputy Treasury secretary, that it was important to ensure that the final decision on the Dollars 1bn guarantee would 'pass the sniff test for hostile congressional committees and press'.

Mr Robert Kimmitt, under-secretary of state, followed up by declaring that Iraq was 'very important to US interests in the Middle East'; it was 'influential in the peace process' and was 'a key to maintaining stability in the region, offering great trade opportunities for US companies'.
Mr Kimmitt added that abruptly terminating the Dollars 1bn in guarantees for Iraq was 'contrary to the president's intentions' and would most likely further damage US-Iraqi relations.
This assessment seemed all the more curious since just a few weeks before that meeting, the State Department had told the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, the regulatory bank probing the BNL affair, that, far from being a 'rogue operation', BNL-Atlanta was in effect part of official Iraqi policy.
According to a September 1989 Italian intelligence report to Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, and the findings of US investigators, unauthorised BNL funds were being used to finance Iraq's Condor II missile project - despite efforts by the US, Britain and five other countries to halt the spread of missile technology in the developing world.

All this was serious enough to warrant Mr James Baker, US secretary of state, raising the matter with a senior Iraqi official, believed to be Mr Tariq Aziz, Iraq's foreign minister, at their meeting in Washington on October 6 1989 - the Bush administration's first high-level meeting with Iraq.

At the NAC meeting a month later, Mr Kimmitt nevertheless came out in favour of continuing the CCC programme as a political tool for influencing Iraqi behaviour - and he had the backing of the Department of Agriculture, which appeared to be pursuing its own, narrower interests.

Seven days before the meeting, a senior Agriculture Department official wrote a letter to the Treasury in which he dismissed allegations about the BNL affair and said the charges 'lead us to conclude that there is not sufficient reason to delay a program for Iraq any longer'.
Mr Kimmitt's intervention appeared decisive, since Mr Robson summed up that foreign policy and trade considerations overrode 'concerns raised by the BNL scandal'.

There were other disturbing signs about the extent of knowledge in the administration and the banking system about BNL's activities:BNL Atlanta regularly had Dollars 700m to Dollars 1bn outstanding in short-term credits at JP Morgan, a large amount for a small bank even considering the fact that its parent in Rome was a triple-A rated bank. Most of BNL's funds after 1987 were channelled through Morgan Guaranty Trust in New York.

The New York Federal Reserve was later to raise questions with JP Morgan about the ease with which the funds transfer took place. In August 1989 Mr Gerald Corrigan, president of the New York Fed, told Mr Lewis Preston, chairman of Morgan Guaranty, that the operation involved amounts of money which started at 'fairly modest levels' and over a fairly lengthy period built up to 'a pretty goddamn good size'.
Mr Corrigan noted that the unusual flow of funds through BNL Atlanta stretched back for more than two years and expressed surprise that the flow had occurred with such ease - given the sums involved and the single destination.

Both Morgan and the New York Fed declined to be interviewed about the Morgan link. Morgan has maintained that the sheer volume of funds in its clearing system in the US makes it difficult to detect anything suspicious about BNL-type transfers. Morgan clears Dollars 250bn a day.
The FBI-led raid on BNL's Atlanta branch took place on August 4 1989 - but the Federal Reserve inspectors had already compiled a detailed picture of hundreds of millions of dollars of hidden off-book money market transactions in which BNL Atlanta used brokers to borrow interbank funds from big Wall Street and international banks.

These included National Westminster, Mitsui Trust and Banque Nationale de Paris (BNP). Records show that these were some of the funds BNL Atlanta then passed to Baghdad by way of Morgan in New York. Between 1987 and 1989, several thousand telexes criss-crossed between Atlanta and the Iraqi central bank, the state-owned Rafidain Bank, Iraq's Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialisation and other official Iraqi agencies.

Congressional investigators and US officials maintain that the National Security Agency (NSA), the US code-breaking and surveillance service which can track telex traffic and money flows, ought to have picked up the tell-tale sums of money.

Mr Norm Bailey, a White House aide at the time who started a follow-the-money computer programme that used NSA intercepts, says it is inconceivable that the BNL Atlanta-Baghdad telex traffic was not made available to the administration.

'The only explanation I can think of is that the authorities knew all about it and approved it,' he claimed in an interview. 'They were using this as a channel for the financing of certain activities.'
This is a serious allegation that raises questions about whether the administration sanctioned the bank transfers in pursuit of a foreign policy goal. However, both federal regulatory authorities and US officials deny knowledge of what was going on in Atlanta.

Whatever the case, the funds proved crucial to President Saddam's war effort for a while.
'BNL,' says Mr Achmed Chalabi, a prominent Jordanian banker and Iraqi opposition adviser, 'became Iraq's surrogate lender of last resort.'

Many BNL-backed US companies were supplying equipment such as electronics, special metals, chemicals and machinery which could be defended as destined for civil rather than military projects. The same was true of BNL-funded British, French, and German companies, all of which were crowding into the Iraqi market.

It is true that the Soviet Union was by far the largest supplier to gnificant about the western shipments was that they involved high technology and other materials which Baghdad required to accelerate its unconventional weapons and missile programmes.

In the UK, the best-known member of the Iraqi network was Matrix Churchill, a loss-making Coventry machine tools maker whose fortunes were revived through BNL finance. Matrix (which was later bought by Automation Investments) regularly shipped equipment to Iraq; its Ohio sister, Matrix Churchill Inc, was recently seized by US Customs and held up as an example of an Iraqi front company engaged in illicit military procurement activities.

It was only after the end of the Gulf war last February that Mr Richard Thornburgh, US attorney-general, announced the indictments of BNL Atlanta employees and four top Iraqi government officials on charges of money laundering, fraud and conspiracy.

Two lone Democratic congressmen - Mr Henry Gonzalez, a stubborn, unpredictable Texan who heads the House banking committee, and Mr Charlie Rose, a North Carolina specialist in peanuts, tobacco and Tibetan human rights - have grappled with its complexities.

They alone have challenged the Bush administration's adamant claim that it was unaware of what was going on inside the BNL's Atlanta branch.

Yet even if one assumes that BNL's activities were carried out without the knowledge of the US government, questions remain about the White House's persistent flirtation with Mr Saddam at the time.
'Iraq was a natural ally of moderate Arab states; it was allied with Egypt; it was being constructive in the Middle East peace process,' says Mr Peter Rodman, who served in the Reagan and Bush administrations as a senior National Security Council official. 'The fact that Saddam was a murderous thug did not change this.'

The Iran-Contra scandal, which paralysed the Reagan administration for most of 1987, had two big results: official overtures to Iran, whether public or private, became taboo; this pushed Washington further toward favouring Baghdad.

Even after the unauthorised BNL credit pipeline was exposed and shut off, Mr Bush signed the January 1990 order allowing Eximbank to offer fresh guarantees to Iraqi loans. Intended or not, the Eximbank decision helped to plug part of the gap left by the absence of BNL money.

It all appeared to make little impression on Mr Saddam, however. Mr Bush was rewarded with a searing burst of anti-Americanism by the Iraqi leader in front of the Arab Co-operation Council on February 22.
At that same meeting, Mr Saddam issued an ominous warning in front of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, King Hussein of Jordan and President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen. The Iraqi leader wanted Dollars 30bn he had been lent by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait during the war with Iran to be written off and a further Dollars 30bn put on the table. According to officials present, the Iraqi leader astonished his colleagues by saying he would 'know how to go and get the money' if it was not forthcoming.
On March 28 a 'sting' operation by British customs ended with the seizure of a number of US-made electronic 'Krytrons' which could have been used as detonators for nuclear weapons. Again, a BNL-funded company - Euromac - played a role in the nuclear trigger case. Days later - on April 2 - President Saddam threatened to ' scorch' Israel with chemical weapons.

Yet the US administration's accommodation of Iraq continued into the following months. In April, May and June 1990, three high-level inter-agency group meetings at the White House rejected the idea of introducing economic sanctions against Baghdad.

As late as last July, just one week before the invasion, US officials both in Washington and in Baghdad were still seeking to find ways of persuading him to play the moderate role he had long since discarded.

This culminated in the now infamous meeting between Ms April Glaspie, then US ambassador to Baghdad, and Mr Saddam in which the American diplomat failed, according to congressional critics, to warn the Iraqi leader in sufficiently strong terms to keep his hands off Kuwait.
Ms Glaspie has served as a convenient scapegoat for the Bush administration. But a fairer interpretation of events would place that meeting in the broader context of US dealings with Iraq - a pattern which suggests either misguided indulgence or a calculated effort to bolster Mr Saddam.

SURVEY - EGYPT - Rooms at the bottom - POVERTY - A large chunk of the population still lives in or at the margins of poverty.

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

SURVEY - EGYPT - Rooms at the bottom - POVERTY - A large chunk of the population still lives in or at the margins of poverty.

By Jimmy Burns.

Published: 11 May 1999

Abu Zabal is not a name featured on the tourist map, nor indeed one that slips easily from the lips of government officials or company directors.

Situated well off the main highway, on the edge of the desert, 60km north of Cairo, Abu Zabal is the location of a leprosarium. There, in an area made almost picturesque with flower beds and fruit trees, government doctors and voluntary aid workers with the charity Caritas look after several hundred men, women and children affected by a disease thought to have had its first incidence in 2nd century Egypt.
Leprosy - a disease associated with poor hygiene and diet - may not be widely acknowledged but its existence is a stark reminder of the social problems facing the country as it enters a new millennium.
Multidrug therapy of the kind administered at Abu Zabal has reduced the prevalance of the disease. According to the World Health Organisation, the prevalence of cases in Egypt last year was 0.5 per 10,000, well below the WHO's target level of less than one case per 10,000 globally by the year 2000. According to local NGOs the 3,263 cases in Egypt registered with WHO last year compared with 30,000 cases 20 years ago.

Nevertheless, cases of the disease continue to be reported in under-developed rural villages. Moreover, many of those living in Abu Zabal are there because they remain ostracised by the wider community, regardless of whether they have been cured or not.

The government has pledged to alleviate the kind of poverty that makes havens such as Abu Zabal necessary. Its flagship programme, the Social Fund for Development, has acquired semi-permament status since being launched in 1991. The SFD now draws from the proceeds of privatisation as well as from external donors. Phase two of the programme which began in October 1997 and runs to December 2001, has a budget of $775m.

The SFD's main objective is to cushion the social consequences of economic reform and structural adjustment. Working with NGOs and community groups, its employment and retraining programmes cover public sector workers displaced by privatisation. The SFD's responsibilities include improving social services and developing labour-intensive work projects in low-income areas.

The SFD prides itself in being a semi-autonomous agency, operating with fewer bureaucratic restraints than other government departments. However, some NGOs complain that administrative and legal restrictions limit them from building an effective advocacy on behalf of the poor.

A report last year, prepared by two leading Egyptian academics for the Ford Foundation, found that despite the government's commitment to free healthcare and free education, at least one quarter of Egypt's population was poor by any standards and another quarter lived on the margins of poverty.
The report noted that 54 per cent of births in Egypt are unattended by a physician or a midwife, with the figure rising to 67 per cent in rural areas. Meanwhile, the high rate rates of drop outs (51 per cent) of pupils in basic education is attributed both to "their own poverty as well as the poor educational services they receive". The study also found that the illiteracy rate was highest among women, at 76 per cent in rural areas, and 45 per cent in urban areas.

Hania Sholkamy, an anthropologist working for the Population Council, believes the most disturbing aspect of being poor in Egypt is not just a low standard of living but the lack of channels through which to demand better services. "The poor cannot dent a system that is being more and more geared to serve the super-rich," says Ms Sholkamy.

One of the most startling symbols of social inequality is the estimated 1m squatters that have been forced - through lack of affordable housing - to turn the burial grounds of the rich into their living quarters.

Tourists are unlikely to notice the inhabitants of the City of the Dead as they are whisked by bus or car from hotel to Citadel in the heart of Cairo's medieval Islamic quarter. But to anyone who cares to listen, those who have built precarious dwellings next to the mausoleums provide a telling tale of the limited capacity of government institutions to reach the poor at local level.

Long-term residents who have no cars are unimpressed by a new paved road, claiming that it simply serves to connect Cairo's ring roads and those with the money to escape from the city. There is greater access to electricity and running water than there once was, but the complaint focuses on poor health and educational services, and the new housing that is constantly advertised on TV but rarely materialises in an affordable way.

The living conditions of many of the squatters would undoubtedly be far worse were it not for the charity extended by local mosques and the informal self-support mechanisms developed in the area. Meanwhile, the fact that an area of Cairo known as Imbaba appears today to receive greatest help, say local NGOs, reflects not so much the government's social conscience as its obsession with security.
For it was the poverty and alienation of Imbaba that fuelled the Islamic militancy in the early 1990s, turning the area virtually into a state within a state. The government's initial response was to lay siege to the area, purging the neighbourhood of suspected militants with massive security clampdown.
It subsequently moved to alleviate the social hardship in the area, diverting funds into local schools, hospitals, and housing, and improved infrastructure.

Local inhabitants still remember the brutality with which the government dealt with the "uprising" and a sense of fear rather than gratitude pervades the area.
Social disgruntlement among some families would be even greater were it not for the employment projects organised by NGOs.

An example is the community action programme funded by several western governments and a Swiss-based Catholic charity, and managed by the Ibn Khaldun Centre for Development Studies.
The organisation makes available low interest loans for the setting up of small businesses by residents of Imbaba, including former prisoners. It also provides a literacy programme - "empowerment classes" - to young Egyptian women who have traditionally had less access to education than men.
In the least developed areas of Imbaba, as in other areas of Egypt, some families scrape a living from the garbage, feeding their animals and sometimes themselves on discarded food waste. Loaves of bread are carried on donkey led carts. Children, poorly dressed and unwashed, inhabit the streets rather than the schoolroom.

These images, like those of the disfigured men and women that shuffle between the mud brick huts and landscape gardens of Abu Zabal, are persistent reminders of social disparity and displacement.

Survey of India - Sleeping giant stirs.

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Survey of India - Sleeping giant stirs.

By Jimmy Burns

Published: 8 November 1994

The rural masses show their consumer power, writes Jimmy Burns.

Kherala, in the state of Haryana, some 50km south of Delhi, fits the image of the age-old village whose traditional values Mahatma Gandhi sought to preserve. But take a closer look and you'll discover the modern age tentatively knocking on many a front door.

Set well back from the main highway to the capital, the bulk of Kherala's population of 4,000 live in squat huts made of crude cane and cattle dung. But most of the huts have TVs, electrical kitchen gadgets and an assortment of mass-marketed toiletries. Oxen plough the nearby fields, but tractors spray the fertilisers and transport the labourers, and piped water is gradually replacing the village well. Scooters and mopeds are also disturbing the rural idyll, rivalling the ox as a status symbol.

India's villages, where 80% of the population live, retain much of their immemorial quality. But the agrarian reforms of the last two decades together with the migration to the cities of many villagers has brought about a significant rise in agrarian purchasing power and a change in consumer patterns. Cultural change is also being hastened by the spread of TV.

According to research undertaken in recent years by India's National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER), the importance of rural markets for manufactured consumer goods is increasing and will increase further as a result of the government's liberalisation programme.
Although most of India's lowest income families live in the villages, they are an important market for some specific consumer goods which are anything but traditional.

The most recent extensive survey carried out in 1992-93 show that 75% of bicycles and portable radios, and 60% of table fans, sewing machines, and wrist watches, sold in India were bought in rural areas. Rural markets also accounted for a 72% share in national sales of washing cake.

The NCAER survey found that the rural share of other consumer sales has been rising in relation to sales in the cities. In a sample study over a four year period between 1989-93, the percentage of black and white TVs bought in rural India rose from 44 to 47%; of colour TVs from 19 to 31%; cassette recorders from 42 to 49%; video recorders from 5 to 8%; toothpastes from 30 to 38%; washing powders from 48% to 52%; and electric bulbs from 30 to 32%.

But perhaps the most revealing statistic, since it suggests the amount of spare cash in farmers' pockets, is that while in 1960 the average rural household spent 81% of its income on food, today it spends less than 70 per cent.

During the 1980s, companies and advertisers devised their strategies for rural markets on the assumption that consumer preferences in the average Indian village would be not much different from urban centres. In recent years a geater effort has been made to understand the particular cultural, social, and economic conditions that exist within the villages.

Pradeep Kashyap, a marketing consultant, who has organised workshops on rural markets for the Asian Centre for Organisation Research and Development (ACORD), says: 'Having been trained in a westernised culture, we tend to approach even the rural market with certain urban mindsets. That doesn't always work. To effectively market a product, we have to get off our high horses and understand rural ways.'

To illustrate the idiosyncracies of the rural mind, Indian advertisers like to recall the following anecdote regarding sales of hair dye in the villages of Gujarat. A few years ago it was discovered that sales of the dye had shot up to three bottles per consumer a month. It was subsequently discovered that far from being used for the villagers' hair, the dye had been used on the local cattle. It was felt that the shinier the cow's coat, the better the chance of getting a good price at the local market.

In Kherala, rural ways are exemplified by the family of Mr Lackhan Singh Sarapanach, a 45 year-old farmer who has served for several years as the elected head of the village body. His wife Subhebra recalls that when she first came to the village as a teenage bride, women rarely ventured from their huts, and spent their time either grinding corn or washing clothes.

Today the mill stone lies abandoned in the Sarpanach larder, and a machine is used for the task. Subhebra cooks over an electric stove instead of firewood. She still washes the clothes by hand. But her clothes are no longer home spun, and she uses commercial washing powder.
Her daughter Neelan, 16, likes to buy make up and ready-made clothes in the town market. Her ambition is to buy a car. Jaisingh, her 23 year-old brother, wears jeans and gym shoes and likes to ride motor scooters. He plans to leave for Saudi Arabia as a construction worker in the hoping of earning enough money there to increase his family's limited supply of electrical gadgetry.

And yet the Sarapanach family are neither spendthrift nor uncritical of modern life. The family tailors its bigger purchases according to what it can afford and is without a refigerator or a gas stove.
Subhebra is not convinced that the shampoo she now uses is superior to the mixture of mud and tree extract with which she washed her hair as a young girl. 'I notice that people's hair in the village is not as thick and strong as it used to be,' she says. The shampoo is, however, affordable and saves her time.
There are no Body Shops in Kherala. The local store reflects the modesty of disposable incomes and the complex nature of consumer aspirations. There are unmarked bags of rice and bottles of vegetable oil, indicating that on staple foods at least the villager remains product loyal rather than brand conscious.

On the shelves there are several different brands of washing soap, toothpaste and combs prominently displayed while the only available brand of bras are kept modestly in boxes. There are also a variety of biscuits and two different brands of light bulbs. But the most popular confectionery remains a local sweet made of sugar cane, herbs, and butter milk.

The Sarapanachs do much of their shopping in the town market, where there is a wider range of products. However the head of the family insists: 'I don't buy something simply because someone tells me I should buy it. It needs to be worth it price wise and accessible. And what matters to me is not the packaging but whether it really makes my life easier.'

Market research done on other villages in India suggests that consumption patterns of rural consumers generally remain distinct from those of urban consumers. While many villagers are earning their wages in the towns, caste and religion continue to play a dominant role in their villages, insuring a high degree of social conformity and respect for tradition. Status symbols remain important, as do strong personal relationships.

These factors are likely to put an increasing onus on companies developing marketing strategies which are sensitive to the peculiar needs of rural communities. Already advertisers have had to accept that sexual innuendo and images of boys and girls frolicking over a can of fruit juice jars with village tradition. And companies find that using long-standing dealer networks (often using extended families and internal village hierarchies) can prove more useful than sending in outsiders.
This marketing will be watched closely by government officials. While anxious to promote economic development in rural communities, officials realise the need to protect more positive aspects of traditional life such as artisan crafts.

Several non-government agencies are promoting traditional weaving and wood working in some villages with an eye on exports. But the days when villagers themselves buy what they make may have gone forever.

In the tracks of Quixote across a land of fantasy

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

In the tracks of Quixote across a land of fantasy

By Jimmy Burns

Published: 30 April 1994

As Jimmy Burns crosses La Mancha in search of a hero, reality and fiction begin to merge.
With a name of a conquistador and the bearing of a well-nourished Castilian peasant, Jose Diaz Pintado Carreton struck me as just the person I was looking for in my quest for Don Quixote.
He ran a small electronics shop in the central square of Argamasilla del Alba, specialising in Japanese organs, but it was not because of his dedication to new technology that I had been guided to him.
Don Jose, plump, moustachioed, and with a boisterous laugh that made his organs rattle, was an Academico de Argamasilla, with a life-long hobby of dedication to Spain's most universal literary hero.
We shared a bottle of wine and a large piece of chorizo. He erupted with laughter when I asked him what university he taught at. 'I am not an academic. I'm an eternal fan, an aficionado dedicated to supposition, speculation, and pure faith.'

Don Quixote sets off on his travels from an unnamed 'place in La Mancha', that region of Spain's central plain which lies between Madrid and Andalucia. Consequently, each little town for 200 kilometres south of the capital claims Don Quixote as its own.

But Jose was insistent that Argamasilla - today a dusty agricultural town filled with olive pickers and vine diggers - was the place where it all began and where it ended. Here was the library where his hero had studied his books of chivalry. Here was the prison where he had languished. 'I've spent my life trying to find out why. Was it because he didn't pay his taxes or because he wolf-whistled a noble lady; either thesis is possible.'

No use arguing with Jose that Don Quixote never existed, and that the man imprisoned in Argamasilla was Miguel Cervantes, his hero's inventor. I had been travelling long enough in La Mancha to understand that this is the kind of region in which one can easily believe in anything.
A few days earlier I had flown to Madrid, seeking out Europe's self-proclaimed cultural capital. The Prado, as always, was a joy, but before getting to the now-permanent Thyssen exhibition, I had already sought escape from the frenetic traffic, the pollution and the sense of collective malaise which my Spanish friends say is a symptom of recession.

I left armed with Cervantes' masterpiece in my bag, and the thoughts of the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset in my head: 'Castille, felt as visual unreality,' wrote Ortega some 70 year ago, 'is one of the most beautiful things in the Universe.'

After the office blocks and the traffic jams came the open plains of La Mancha, not green, certainly, but not barren or uncompromising either: Castille here is a kaleidoscope of changing shapes and colours. First comes the reddish earth where the vines are lined one behind the other; then the mountains of the south looming on the horizon like sea monsters washed on to some hugely distant shore.
Along the way there is an extraordinary sense of space, broken occasionally by a flock of sheep or a clump of olive trees where the vines leave off. Not since motoring through Patagonia had I felt a similar sense of anguish mixed with heightened expectation. I was hungry and thirsty, too.

Deliverance from the motorway came in the form of the first necessary port of call on my literary journey: Puerto Lapice. It was into this village that Don Quixote had ridden 'weary and dying of hunger ... looking in all directions to see if he could discover any castle or shepherd's hut' where he could take shelter.
Having parked the car, we wandered on foot through the streets of brilliant whitewash, where fruit was being pressed and horseshoes forged in inner courtyards, but where otherwise nothing seemed to be happening under the sun. My companion stopped to cash a traveller's cheque in the bank, and was told by a young clerk that she had never handled such an instrument.

It was lunchtime, though, and it was not hard to find a local inhabitant with a sense of priorities. 'The Venta de Don Quixote,' said a woman in black, pointing down an avenue of white.

In the venta, or inn, a rusty set of armour lay abandoned next to a stone trough, and a group of waiters in starched shirts stood by empty tables in an open courtyard lined with blue tiles.

' ... Now there chanced to be standing at the inn two young women of easy virtue who were on their way to Seville with some water carriers ... As everything that our adventurer thought, saw or imagined seemed to follow the fashion of his reading, ... he convinced himself that it was a fortress with its four towers and pinnacles of silver ...'

The only female strangers I saw - one with a mass of black curls, the other with stunning blue eyes - were cleaning the kitchen floor and seemed in a hurry, not to move on to Seville but to get back to Madrid, from where they had reluctantly emigrated.

I shadow boxed with the armour before allowing myself to be led to a table in the spirit of Sancho Panza. We drank a litre of Valdepenas wine, and guzzled beans, chorizo and bits of smoked ham served in an earthenware bowl. The stew, or olla, has been La Mancha's peasant fare for many centuries, and no amount of fast food chains - of increasing prominence in metropolitan Spain - has managed to eradicate it.

Beyond the venta, up in the hills, above another glittering village of whitewash and blue tiles - Campo Criptana - were the windmills. That afternoon they stood defiantly as a wind gathered and whistled across the prairie, picking up dust. A young Dutch couple sat leaning against their rucksacks, staring at a red sun. When they saw me, the man asked: 'Do those windmills make bread?'
I told him: 'Those you see there are giants with long arms; some of them have them six miles long.'
The Dutchman smiled: 'Well it makes a change from looking at cathedrals.' He had recently been in Toledo.

For a long time we stood there, saying nothing else, just listening to the wind and watching our children dance between the 'giants'. With their black hair and wild gestures and laughter, they seemed caught in a dream of gypsies which my hero on occasions stumbled on.
Beyond us a madman, his trousers half-way down to his ankles, was gesticulating at one of the giant's arms with a walking stick. His expletives were almost incomprehensible, but I gathered he had been abandoned by his wife.

Later that afternoon I stopped for the night at the next village on the Quixote trail, El Toboso. Here the house of Dulcinea, the rough peasant cook my hero took for a princess, has been preserved as a museum, next to a convent where the nuns intersperse their prayer sessions with biscuit-baking.
We took a room above an inn, where the largely male clientele seemed either tall, bearded and very thin, or short and stocky - Quixotes or Sanchos almost to a man. We were fed on gachas, a quite indigestible dish also of long-standing tradition in Castilian peasant kitchens: bits of pork fat fried with garlic and hot peppers.

I was conscious that Don Quixote had searched for his princess after midnight, so, restored with a large brandy, I set off into the night. The tall tower of El Toboso's 16th century parish church stood out above the narrow streets, its pale stone illuminated and turned golden in the sea of black. Except for those in the inn, the whole population appeared to have retired. The only beings were a dog distantly barking and a ginger cat that followed me for an hour, purring and sliding his back along the whitewash. Near the local convent, Dulcinea's house was closed for the evening.

The next day, armed with a map provided by the parish priest, Don Nicolas - another Quixote expert - I went looking for the Cave of Montesinos - scene of Don Quixote's mostly demented dream - in the lake district of La Mancha. The lakes are small lagoons which have gathered mirage-like and somewhat miraculously in an area surrounded by arid lands.

The cave was well off the main road, across a countryside of petrified trees and loose bramble. Luckily the crippled vegetation was not too overgrown so I did not need to use a sword, as my hero had done, to cut my way through the cave's mouth. But neither did I have a rope and Sancho to lower me in. I stepped forward cautiously, using a torch.

For many centuries the wizard Montesinos had waited for Don Quixote deep in this cave. Thanks to him, the mad knight discovered enchanted castles and Dulcinea del Toboso, and re-emerged a better man, his courage proved, his dream fulfilled.

I was frightened out of my wits by a large bat. It was the the only other living creature I encountered before chasing my own shadow and running out, back into the sunlight. All around me the plains of La Mancha were melting to the sound of crickets.

Spain: A Literary Companion, by Jimmy Burns, was recently published by John Murray, London (#16.99).

Atrocity would signal sea-change for Eta

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Atrocity would signal sea-change for Eta

By Jimmy Burns in Madrid and Mark Huband in London, FT.com site

Published: Mar 11, 2004

While Spanish politicians and security officials on Thursday held the Basque separatist group Eta responsible for the Madrid bomb attacks, counter-terrorism officials in other European countries cautioned that the style of the attack was so out of character with the group that more evidence was needed.

"Clearly there is intense suspicion, but it's too early to say who might be behind it," said a senior European counter-terrorism official.

Officials in Spain and several European countries said that there was substantial evidence that Eta had been procuring explosives outside Spain. Spanish police have seized three hauls of explosives this year, and security and intelligence officers had become convinced that the group had been planning an attack.

However, senior counter-terrorism officials in several European countries in which Eta is known to have had links, said that the scale of the attack and the readiness to inflict mass casualties marked a major shift from previously smaller scale attacks on specific targets.

"If the attack was Eta, it would mean that a fair amount of the modus operandi of al-Qaeda is being copied," a senior European police officer leading counter-terrorist efforts said yesterday.
Madrid had been on a heightened state of alert in anticipation that Eta might carry out a attack in advance of Sunday's election.

At the end of February, the paramilitary civil guard detained two people transporting half a tonne of explosives in a van. The suspects confessed they belonged to Eta and said they had been instructed to blow up two conservative newspapers in Madrid.

Two months earlier, on Christmas eve, police detained Eta suspects as they boarded a train in the northern Basque city of San Sebastian, carrying rucksacks packed with explosives. Police said they had confessed they were planning to set off bombs in Chamartin, a major rail terminal in Madrid, on Christmas day.

Last night, Eta had not claimed responsibility for yesterday's attacks. But government officials were adamant no other group could have been responsible.

The broadly held view among Spanish security and intelligence sources was that until now Eta had never been so weak. The government had used more effective international counter-terrorist co-operation since the September 11, 2001 attacks in the US, and tougher laws to crack down on its support network.

According to a European terrorism analyst, there have been about 200 arrests of Eta suspects in the past year. Last year it killed three people in Spain - the country's lowest terrorist-related death count in more than 30 years. A senior European counter-terrorism official said on Thursday that police action against Eta might have been the reason for the uncharacteristically devastating bombing. "Eta has taken such knocks recently, and there has been a certain amount of crowing by the Spanish authorities about it being crippled. This attack may have been the result, to prove they are not finished," the official said.

Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at St Andrews university in Scotland, added the attack was "a giant leap for Eta, in terms of organisation, if indeed it was them. If it is Eta, this is a real sea change", he said.

Spanish police sources said an initial forensic examination at the scene of the carnage suggested the explosives were part of a batch stolen in eastern France last year.

Spanish and French police had recovered substantial amounts of the stolen material, a commercial plastic explosive called Titadine which was meant to be used to provoke movement of unstable snow and in assorted commercial mining activities.

Spanish police had come round to believing that the remaining undiscovered stolen material might not be used because it had aged and was thought to have become too unstable to handle.
There was also intelligence that Eta did not have the technological knowhow to mount a successful bombing campaign.

The planting of 10 bombs placed in four trains, in addition to three booby trapped bombs at the height of the Spanish capital's commuter rush hour, however suggest that at least two unidentified cells of up to three people with a support network may have been involved, according to Spanish police sources.

Intelligence officers lacked training in handling detainees, MPs say

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Intelligence officers lacked training in handling detainees, MPs say

By Jimmy Burns

Published: March 11 2005

Intelligence officers deployed abroad after the September 11, 2001 attacks were insufficiently trained in international obligations governing the treatment of prisoners, according to a parliamentary report published yesterday.

The report by the intelligence and security committee concerned the handling of detainees in Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay and Iraq.

It concluded that an unspecified number of MI5 and MI6 officers had operated in ignorance of the Geneva convention that prohibits violence to life and person and "outrages upon personal dignity".
Intelligence officers claimed in evidence to the committee that they were unaware the UK had prohibited the "hooding" of detainees for more than 30 years after MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, admitted two officers had twice used the method in Iraq.

Hooding and other "in-depth" interrogation methods were banned by the Conservative government in 1972 following a row over the mistreatment of IRA suspects.

The report, by MPs drawn from all three main parties, broadly exonerates the spying community of any suggestion of widespread human rights violations.

It also avoids judgment on the alleged use by spies of information obtained from prisoners who had been tortured by foreign governments.

Intelligence personnel from MI6, MI5 - the Security Service - and the Ministry of Defence's intelligence staff had "conducted or witnessed just over 2,000 interviews of prisoners" in Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and Iraq since the US-led attack on the Taliban government.

"Our investigations have indicated that there were fewer than 15 occasions when UK intelligence personnel reported actual or potential breaches of UK policy or the international conventions. We have asked for assurances and have been told that there were no other occasions," the report states.
On a"number of occasions", intelligence officials voiced concerns to US officials about the ill-treatment of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay and in Iraq. However, not all of their concerns were reported to the US authorities.

The report found the intelligence community kept ministers in the dark initially about some of these reports. Spies were themselves not told by their US counterparts about the techniques they considered as "acceptable aids to interrogation".

Met adopted secret shoot-to-kill policy in the face of a new and deadly threat

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Met adopted secret shoot-to-kill policy in the face of a new and deadly threat

By Jimmy Burns

Published: July 25 2005

How long have the police been operating a shoot-to-kill policy on the British mainland, how was the policy framed, and how widely known was it?

The questions are central to the row that has followed the killing by police of Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian electrician without any link to terrorism.

Lord Stevens, former head of the Metropolitan police, said publicly yesterday for the first time that he had brought in what was in effect a shoot-to-kill policy when he led Scotland Yard.

Senior police officers said guidelines giving armed officers specific instructions on how to deal with suspected suicide bombers were circulated secretly for the first time, though never published, in 2003. A Met team had visited Israel and Sri Lanka and produced a confidential report on tackling an al-Qaeda threat in the UK. Instructions, to be followed only with approval from an operational senior officer, are thought to have covered disabling the nervous system with a shot to the head and firing on the driver of an approaching vehicle thought to contain a bomb.

The material was shared with anti-terrorist officers, linked protection and surveillance units and a small group of senior commanders but kept from the wider force. To this day, such instructions do not form part of the training of recruits.

They were also kept secret from a key Whitehall committee of Muslim community leaders, called the Muslim Advisory Group, in all the meetings it had with the police to build up trust and co-operation after the September 11 attacks in the US.

Senior anti-terrorist officers were asked by the MAG after media reports emerged of a Met visit to Israel in 2002 for assurances the same shoot-to-kill tactics would not be adopted in the UK.
According to minutes of a meeting that have been made available to the FT, David Veness, then head of anti-terrorist operations, told the MAG his officers were facing a very different threat from suicide bombers than they had faced from the IRA.

"The usual tactic of Irish terrorist groups has been to bomb high-profile venues and give warnings to police about the presence of the bomb. Police tactics at bomb scenes have become well honed, and have kept casualties to a minimum," Mr Veness told the meeting.

He added: "Suicide bombing is an entirely different proposition. The bomber intends to cause death and injury on a large scale. There is no warning. Traditional British police responses are ineffective against the threat."

Crucially, while Mr Veness admitted the Israel visit had gone ahead, and that it would be "foolish not to try to draw on their experience", he told the MAG: "Clearly, the experience of Israel and some of its responses to suicide bombings would not be suitable as a response to the UK. However, the Metropolitan Police Service must look for tactics that might be effective against a suicide bombing, wherever it comes from."

Representatives of the MAG said the police had never made clear, as Lord Stevens has now done, that they had operationally given officers greater freedom to shoot to kill.

"No one told us the police had been given effective carte-blanche to shoot dead on suspicion," said Massoud Shadareh of the Islamic Human Rights Commission.

The only published document on the use of guns in any circumstances by police - the Association of Chief Police Officers Manual on Police Use of Fireams - was last updated in February.

The manual states: "You open fire against a person only when absolutely necessary after traditional methods have tried and failed, or must, by the very nature of circumstances, be unlikely to succeed if tried ... a police officer should not decide to open fire unless satisfied that nothing short of opening fire could protect the officer or another person from imminent danger to life or serious injury."
The manual makes no reference to shoot to kill, or targeting the head, and sets out the operational and legal framework within which all officers should operate.

The FT has learnt that in the aftermath of the July 7 attacks, an internal e-mail went out to specialised police units, including armed officers, reminding them of separate secret instructions for dealing with suspect suicide bombers.

A police source said: "The e-mail reminded armed officers they could shoot to the head if the criteria for suspecting a suicide bomber was fulfilled. It [the action] had to be based on intelligence."
Acpo said details of such tactics remained secret "for operational reasons". "The tactics are intended to be used on an intelligence-led basis. They are not implemented at random but as a result of intelligence and backed up by senior decision-making.

"They include specialised tactics for both responses to the sudden appearance of a suspect where intelligence suggests they may be about to commit a deadly attack, and for surveillance of suspects identified through intelligence."

Acpo said that by their very nature the tactics required "very positive action to prevent any detonation or other type of attack".

It added, however: "The tactics cannot be described as shoot to kill as the police must still apply the principle of using reasonable force, and they will be held accountable for their decision-making."

Ministers pressed on 'rendition'

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Ministers pressed on 'rendition'

By Jimmy Burns

Published: October 4 2006

The government is under renewed pressure over its alleged complicity in the transport, secret detention and mistreatment by the US of terrorist suspects.

A European parliament committee investigating the CIA's alleged use of European countries for what is known as rendition arrives in London today for meetings with MPs, alleged victims and their lawyers and organisations that are campaigning for a public inquiry.

The MEPs have secured a meeting tomorrow with Geoff Hoon, minister for Europe and former defence secretary, at which Ministry of Defence, Home Office and Department for Transport officials will be present.

Baroness Ludford, head of the delegation, said ministers and officials would be pressed on the arrangements for the use of UK airports by the CIA, and the extent to which intelligence and security personnel had been involved in the transport and interrogation of terrorist suspects in possible violation of the UK's human rights obligations.

"We want to find out more about UK co-operation or complicity in the unlawful act of rendition. Terrorist suspects should be subject to a proper trial and criminal prosecution under existing European laws. They should not be dealt with in a grey legal zone," said Ms Ludford, a justice and the home affairs spokeswoman for the Liberal Democrats in the European parliament.

Baroness Ludford told the Financial Times she believed the "united wall of denial" among EU members states over rendition had begun to unravel after President George W. Bush's public acknowledgement that the CIA had been holding and interrogating "high-value" al-Qaeda suspects in secret detention facilities.

The Foreign Office has told MPs that after "an extensive review" of records from May 1997, it could confirm four cases in 1998 - during Bill Clinton's administration - when the US requested permission to "render" detainees through the UK or British overseas territories. According to the Foreign Office, the government granted the US request in only two cases, and these were of detainees transferred via the UK to stand trial.

MPs campaigning for greater transparency have accused ministers of not coming clean on some of the more controversial aspects of the counterterrorism relationship with the US, including complicity in the mistreatment of prisoners some of whom continue to be detained in Guantánamo.
The Commons intelligence and security committee, the only parliamentary group allowed to take evidence from serving members of the intelligence community, is preparing a report on renditions. Meanwhile, Andrew Tyrie, Tory MP and head of the all-party Parliamentary Group on Rendition, yesterday wrote to Foreign Office ministers urging them to give more details about UK involvement in the cross-border transfer of prisoners.

Argentina's failed crusade

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Argentina’s failed crusade

By Jimmy Burns

Publuished: 6 April 2002

TWENTY years ago this week, a military junta in Argentina invoked a 150-year-old territorial claim and invaded the British-ruled Falkland Islands, some 300 miles off the South American mainland.
The self-delusion of a corrupt military dictatorship combined with the hurt nationalistic pride of Thatcher’s Britain contributed to transforming a diplomatic crisis into a war which cost the lives of 255 British soldiers and 746 Argentines.

The sending of more than 1,000 men to their deaths in order to enable 1,200 British citizens to keep the government of their choice raised an issue of proportionality.
Nevertheless, there was a convincing argument accepted by democratic nations worldwide that a de facto British territory was attacked on 2 April 1982 and that therefore a prima facie right existed to a military response under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which provides for the inherent right of individual and collective self-defence if armed attack occurs?.

Over the years the euphoria of victory has given way to a more questioning account by some of the soldiers who fought and survived of what they did and how they did it. But as one Falklands veteran put it to me, thinking of Afghanistan and the war on terrorism, it was at least a clearly defined conflict that had a beginning, a middle and an end, and a positive outcome.

In Argentina, the war led to the collapse of the military regime. In Britain and elsewhere, lessons of principle outlasted Margaret Thatcher’s revived premiership. Out of it emerged a new world order struggling to reconcile security, freedom and self-determination.

Around this twentieth anniversary much has and will no doubt continue to be written. For those of us who lived the conflict at close quarters, perhaps one of the most interesting and under-reported aspects of it was the extent to which God and the Virgin Mary were used to justify the war, and to bring it to an end.

The military regime which decided to invade the islands did so in the knowledge that it counted on a powerful body of opinion within the Argentine Church to give it its blessing. The attitude of the Argentine Episcopal Conference to the regime that came to power in the 1976 coup had been equivocal. Pastoral letters had held back from public condemnation of human rights violations, and suggested that the common good could be served by dealing with the moral and social disintegration that had characterised the previous civilian government of Isabelita Peron.

Only a minority of bishops, priests and nuns condemned the thousands of disappeared, and the complicity of those who pandered to national Catholicism. Those who survived the repression, like Bishop Jaime de Nevares of Neuquen, Bishop Miguel Hesayne of Viedma, and Bishop Jorge Novak of Quilmes, distanced themselves from the nationalistic fervour which surrounded the reconquest of Las Malvinas.

They remained, however, in a minority. From the outset of the Falklands War, the partnership between Church and State gave the Argentine soldiers and their generals a sense of a moral crusade, and the junta the certainty of political cohesion. History was revisited and revised to provide justification for the equation between Argentine sovereignty and holy conversion.

Memories were revived of the first Spanish missionaries to the Falkland Islands, the priests portrayed as picture-book saints laying the sacramental rock on the heathen land. The subsequent British colonialism was reduced to a caricature of spiritual emptiness when, in fact, both the Anglican and Catholic faiths had retained an enduring presence on the islands.

The mixing of nationalistic and religious mythology was prevalent in the first crucial hours of the Falklands conflict. On the eve of the invasion, Argentine commanders agreed that the military operation to take Las Malvinas, initially planned under the codename Azul, should be renamed Rosario, in honour of the Virgin of Rosario. According to Argentine cultural tradition, the Virgin had brought her graces to the population of Buenos Aires in the early nineteenth century before an invasion by British troops was successfully repulsed. She has been venerated passionately ever since.

On 7 April, the new Argentine military governor of Las Malvinas, General Mario Menendez, was sworn in during a ceremony at which Archbishop Desiderio Elso Collino, the chaplain general of the armed forces, officiated. The gaucho Virgin is Mother of all men, but is in a very special way the Mother of all Argentines, and has come to take possession of this land, which is also her land, stated Collino.
For the rest of the war a succession of military chaplains ensured that the crusading spirit of the Argentine troops was kept alive in language reminiscent of the speeches delivered to Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War. In the fight against the English heathen no Argentine churchman was more fanatical than Fr Jorge Piccinalli.

The young priest rode through the troops encampments on a motorcycle and shared the trenches, comforting his Argentine heroes by blessing their redemption in death. “We the Argentine people who are Catholic...have ensured the reconquest of a piece of territory on behalf of a nation that has Christianity in its origins?”, he said in one of his sermons.

From that moment on, Argentine pilots hung rosaries round their sights before shooting missiles at the British task force, bits of Harrier jets were dedicated to the Virgin of Lujan, and soldiers carried Bibles to protect themselves from bullets.

The sanctification of the Argentine military enterprise was pursued with equal vigour in Buenos Aires by publications such as the Catholic weekly Equi?. One editorial written by Bishop Manuel Menendez of San Martin claimed the Fourth Commandment was telling us to love our country and, if necessary, give up our lives for it?. He added: “In the present circumstances, the commandment is quite clear: if they [the British] attack us, we have to defend ourselves.?

In common with the bulk of the Argentine political class and trade union movement, the Argentine Episcopal Conference exonerated their country from charges that the military invasion of 2 April was a flagrant violation of the island population’s right to self-determination, and international rules of law. The cause of Las Malvinas was a just one, the bishops insisted, involving the necessary recovery of sovereignty after nearly 150 years.

During Sunday Masses, priests dedicated their sermons to a call for a generous contribution to the Patriotic Fund, which was collected by the military for their war effort, although never publicly accounted for. In their only major joint statement during the war, the Argentine bishops expressed their fear of a war of unforeseeable consequences, and referred to papal condemnation of military conflict. But by their emphasis on defence of Argentina’s sovereignty claims, the bishops implicitly gave the green light to the junta to prolong its warmongering if it saw fit.

The few Argentines who spoke out against the war, such as Adolfo Perez Esquivel, a committed Catholic layman and the 1990 winner of the Nobel prize for peace, was ostracised by the military regime and had little impact on domestic public opinion.

By contrast, the local English Catholic chaplain, Mgr Daniel Spraggon, proved a tower of strength among the islanders, offering them encouragement and acting as a mediator with the Argentine authorities. Although Catholics were in a minority among the island population, his Sunday Masses, with the church doors always open to uniformed Argentines as much as local civilians, became a symbol of Christian reconciliation.

A resident of the islands for ten years, the straight-talking Tyneside-born Spraggon was a hugely popular figure among the islanders. He also happened to be directly appointed by the Pope, with the title of prefect apostolic of the Falkland Islands. He was thus a key local influence and the Argentine military had little option but to engage with him if only to ensure they did not provoke an excommunication from the Pope.

Spraggon was, unsurprisingly, not universally liked by the Argentines. Intelligence officers suspected him of mounting a potential resistance and some of the more fanatical military chaplains considered him something of a heretic for condemning the invasion.

For his part, Spraggon never hid his dislike of the politically charged nature of the Argentine chaplains’ religion and considered at one point complaining to the papal nuncio in Buenos Aires, even though he did respect some of the Argentine priests who comforted young conscript soldiers traumatised by the war.

There is no evidence that Spraggon ever encouraged the islanders to take up arms against the Argentine forces. But he did devote much of his time to defending their interests, complaining to the authorities whenever they were mistreated by Argentine soldiers. Spraggon’s reputation as a courageous individual, who brought hope where there was despair, grew as the conflict reached its conclusion.

The role of the Vatican in a Falklands War that had Catholics fighting on both sides was a complex one. It began disastrously, on the eve of the invasion, with the papal nuncio in Buenos Aires, Archbishop Ubaldo Calabresi, failing to heed a desperate last-minute request from President Ronald Reagan to urge the Argentine President General Galtieri to call off further military action.

The nuncio was in bed when he received the call from Washington. Calabresi agreed to ring up the Argentine foreign minister, Nicanor Costa Mendez. When he was told by the minister’s secretary that Costa Mendez was at a meeting and unavailable, the nuncio went back to bed. Within hours Argentine troops had invaded the islands.

The Vatican subsequently found itself in a quandary over the Falklands which no amount of diplomatic skill seemed for a time able to resolve. An historic visit to Britain by the Pope had been planned before the Falklands War had become even a remote possibility.

There was now the risk of progress towards ecumenical dialogue being undermined by the heavily charged political atmosphere in Britain. At the same time the Vatican had to maintain its links with the Argentine military regime for fear that any direct criticism of Argentina’s claim to sovereignty would undermine the peace treaty the Pope had mediated in the country’s territorial dispute with Chile over the Beagle Channel.

When war broke out over the Falklands, the Vatican sent word to the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Basil Hume, that the Pope was postponing his visit. Hume, along with many other Catholics in Britain, was bitterly disappointed, regarding the Pope’s journey as of enormous importance for efforts aimed at building bridges with the Church of England.

Rather than accepting the Pope’s decision as final, Hume set out secretly to change his mind, consulting a small group of individuals whose views he admired as how best to do it. The advice from a group that included Derek Worlock, the late Archbishop of Liverpool, and Tom Burns, the then editor of The Tablet, was that the Pope should not only visit Britain but also Argentina, and that a Mass should be jointly celebrated by British and Argentine bishops in Rome.

The idea was transformed into reality, and the Pope’s visit to Argentina proved a decisive spiritual chapter in the final stages of the Falklands War. The papal visit was, for me, one of the most memorable collective occasions I have ever witnessed as a journalist, with Argentines in their millions accepting what the Pope had come to tell them.

For the first time since the 1976 coup, the slogans of death and war gave way to messages of consolation, hope, and peace. In Lujan, the Pope paid tribute to the Virgin not as a warrior queen, but as a messenger in troubled times. He meditated on the cross, on the themes of sacrifice, suffering, and love that united mankind.

As an Argentine commentator remarked at the time, the Pope spoke from a position of serene authority to a people who for three months in 1982 had lost all sense of serenity. In Argentina, at that moment in history, the papal visit meant not only the end of the war, but also the collapse of the military regime that had proclaimed it as holy.

Simply a pencil in God's hands.

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Simply a pencil in God's hands.

By Jimmy Burns

Published: 11 October 1997

Unless your target audience is limited to some very traditional Catholics, it's not easy writing a book about a saint. The Oxford dictionary definition - "holy or officially recognised by the Church as having won by exceptional holiness a high place in heaven and veneration on earth" - understates the problems faced by an author struggling to make sense of an icon in the contemporary world.

The early life of Mother Teresa - born Agnes Bojaxhiu in Alabania in 1910 - has the makings of picture-book beatitude: loving parents, family at prayer each night, regular visits to the local Marian shrine followed by that instant of spiritual enlightenment when the saint-to-be feels herself called to a life of service to God.

The myth, as recorded uncritically by earlier biographers, is that Teresa's turning point came on a train to Darjeeling. It was then that she heard the "call within the call", an experience that made her absolutely sure that God was speaking to her in the depths of her soul-a command to serve the Lord among the poorest of the poor which she had no option but to obey.

And yet it is precisely in that instant of definition that Anne Sebba, the author of this latest and very modern biography of Mother Teresa, makes her pitch for relevance. To Sebba, that moment is of crucial significance: for if Teresa, as she was to maintain for the rest of her life, was "simply a pencil in God's hands", she was "at once both more humble than an ordinary nun and yet also more powerful than any world leader."

Sebba traces the growth of Teresa's process of beatification from 1969. It was in that year that British journalist and writer Malcolm Muggeridge claimed that a miracle had taken place while filming her home for the dying in Calcutta. Although the home was so dimly lit as to make Muggeridge's producer doubt his capacity to capture it on film, the final cut showed it with extraordinary clarity. "It's divine light!", exclaimed the hitherto unbelieving Muggeridge.

His own conversion not only inspired a best-selling book - Something Beautiful for God - but also set the agenda for the next 20 years. The assumption slowly grew not only that God's hand was directing Teresa, but also that to question anything she did was unacceptable: that to challenge or doubt her was to confront a much-higher Authority.

It is unfortunate that the most publicised break in this trend took the form of another kind of absolutism - an article, later extended in a TV documentary and book, entitled Ghoul of Calcutta, which the British journalist Christopher Hitchens wrote in 1992 for the left-wing US magazine, The Nation.
Hitchens' uncompromising and venomous attack on Mother Teresa focused on her outspoken attacks on contraception and abortion, the financial mismanagement of her Missionaries of Charity, and the way she allowed herself to be seen with and take the money from a range of international crooks, ranging from the Duvaliers to Robert Maxwell.

It was unfortunate in that Hitchens seemed to mock the concept of journalistic objectivity. Unfortunate, too, in that it drew in Mother Teresa's defence a predictable streak of religious fanaticism that in some instances verged on the hysterical.

Thankfully, Sebba has written a rigorously objective book that is the product of extensive interviews with supporters and detractors who have worked closely with Teresa. Reflecting on their views, and drawing on her own meeting with the subject and her experience of India, Sebba conducts a fascinating debate around key issues of politics and society which were inextricably linked to Teresa's life. In so doing Sebba pulls few punches, while never losing an underlying sympathy for her extraordinary subject.
Sebba is at her most critical - from a feminist as well as socio-economic point of view - in her account of Teresa's refusal to countenance abortion and artificial forms of contraception under any circumstances.
She questions, too, the haphazard nature of the medical treatment in the homes for the dying, the children, and the diseased run by Teresa's Missionaries of Charity. What is the point, she asks, of bringing people off the streets if the highest level of care society can provide is not on offer? Sebba, however, finds it difficult to condemn Teresa's inherent pragmatism in taking from the crooks to give to the poor, and the sense of justice that often prevailed in her life - such as when she rescued a group of abandoned children in Beirut in 1982. Such a sense of justice clearly did not extend to Margaret Thatcher in 1988 who, as prime minister, refused Teresa's request for government help to set up a hospice for the homeless in London.

Throughout, Sebba gives necessary emphasis to the driving force behind Teresa's personality, and the dynamic at the heart of her work: her complete and utter belief in God and the power of love as a force of healing and redemption.

Beyond the Image is a timely book for those of us tired of icons created by TV images. Forget about the military state funeral she was given. When Teresa died last month, her personal belongings were no more than those of all her Missionaries of Charity: two saris and a bucket to wash in.

Intelligence services in the information world

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Intelligence services in the information world

Why the spy game is up.

By Michael Herman

5 January 2002

For an intelligence professional who served a succession of British governments loyally over a 35-year career, Michael Herman is disarmingly, and perhaps unwittingly revealing about the self-perpetuating and inclusive nature of spies.

Intelligence culture, he reminds us, is based on secrecy and a sense of embattlement. The media like to tease out its secrets, making it that much more defensive. What makes spies feel special is their claim to know what others do not. Their power base within the machinery of government rests on a "need to know" basis, and politicians ignore them at their peril.

Herman, a former employee of Britain's secretive Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), should if nothing else help us understand the rich potential for political fiction verging on magic realism that was so successfully exploited by writers from Greene to le Carre.

In this collection of academic papers, Herman also provides an incisive commentary on the organisation and politics of the intelligence world, moving effortlessly from theory to practice, from history to the current day, ending up with a timely afterword on the world as it is developing post-September 11.

As a Catholic whose own late father delved in the world of secrets many years ago, I was amused to read that the first "identifiable British intelligence chief" was not "M" or "C" but Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth I's Secretary of State. He "ran" agents to penetrate Catholic threats to the monarchy at home and abroad.

And yet it was only in the 20th century that intelligence really came into its own in the modern sense of permanent, professional institutions, separate from diplomacy and yet an integral part of government and political culture.

Churchill understood Hitler's ambitions rather sooner than most, thanks to his close relationship with spies, so that intelligence, particularly in the breaking of secret codes at Bletchley Park, came to play a hugely significant role in the second world war.

Then the cold war came, and spy chiefs took to playing with each other, operating with mutually agreed codes of conduct that left embassies in quarantine, but agents and their "controllers" free to develop intelligence on a quite unprecedented peacetime scale - a freedom enhanced by the introduction of US and Soviet satellite intelligence.

Herman refrains from a triumphalist interpretation of history. He argues, rightly in my view, that Margaret Thatcher's decision in 1984 to ban national trade union activity at GCHQ was taken in asomewhat unedifying, adversarial context which distracted the centre from the job of spying and fuelled liberal distrust of the intelligence world as a whole.

By contrast, I don't think Herman would seriously expect a liberal reader to agree that the western intelligence community was, as he puts it, "being as objective as possible" in its interpretations of Soviet movements. In rather more challenging fashion, he asks whether the cold war spies informed governments, or simply echoed their prejudices.

Whatever the answer - and Herman cheekily leaves it to "future historians" to decide - there is no doubt that intelligence became so extensive and institutionalised that, when the Berlin Wall collapsed, many spies on both sides of the iron curtain shared a collective crisis of identity.

I remember bumping into one of them some years back in his new job in the City of London. When I asked him why he had moved into the private sector, he replied he had done so partly because the money was better but mainly because he was no longer sure in which world he was living.
That clearly has never been Herman's problem. For all his occasional irreverence, the author has no doubt that spies - British and American at least - are not a bad thing, not just to help protect democracy but also as a contribution to more stable international relations, in the fight against illegal drugs, organised crime, nuclear proliferation, and terrorism.

In analysing what should be the response to September 11, Herman makes a strong argument for a scaling-down of intelligence operations based on narrow national interests (the spy games of the past), and the development of collective international action based on shared intelligence and common assessments of a global terrorist threat.

And yet, for all Herman's enthusiasms, his book serves to underline the limitations, as much as the potential, of intelligence. The jury remains out as to whether spies genuinely contribute to a notion of an international good, or are simply part of the problem, and not the solution.

Power, Macbeth-style - Jimmy Burns on General Pinochet and the seamier side of Chilean politics.

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Power, Macbeth-style - Jimmy Burns on General Pinochet and the seamier side of Chilean politics.

By Jimmy Burns

Published: 4 December 1999

For nearly four decades, Hugh O'Shaughnessy has reported on the politics of Latin America with an intuition and commitment few colleagues have been able to equal. So it should have surprised no one that on October 15 1998 it fell to him to turn up with one of his more memorable scoops just when the eyes of the world seemed distracted by other things.

In a hard-hitting column in the Guardian entitled "A Murderer among us", O'Shaughnessy denounced the presence in Britain of General Augusto Pinochet and predicted that the retired dictator's latest shopping spree in London was about to be dramatically interrupted by Scotland Yard on the orders of a Spanish judge. "It was written somewhat tongue in cheek and I had no ex-pectation whatsoever that the course I advocated would be adopted within hours," O'Shaughnessy now writes mischievously.

More recently, the old General was forced for the second year running to mark his birthday in exile and detention. O'Shaughnessy chose the day to celebrate the launch of his book, an occasion bubbling with unrepressed irony. Twenty-six years ago, O'Shaughnessy - then living in Chile - was forced to duck and parry censors, torturers and assassins, filing furious copy on a military coup in Santiago that elevated Pinochet to the presidency after the overthrow of the only democratically elected marxist government in history.

Time has not moderated O'Shaughnessy's outrage at an event that was initially supported by Chileans ranging from moderate Christian Democrats to the extreme right, as well as Nixon's US administration, and which subsequently was relegated to the back pages of the world media. This is an angry book, laced with the acerbic wit of a pamphleteer. However, the unrelenting prosecution of a man and the system of government he engendered never degenerates into mere propaganda.

Drawing on his personal experiences, and the testi-monies of some of the key protagonists, O'Shaughnessy paints a vivid picture of Pinochet's rise to power and its aftermath. The portrait is neither that of an eccentric nor an obsessive, but of a calculating opportunist, devoid of any ideology other than a crude anti-communism.

Pinochet jumped only when others jumped before him, betraying friends, politicians and fellow generals in a Macbeth-style progress to power, encouraged by a domineering wife. O'Shaughnessy somewhat understates the economic mismanagement and the divisions and excesses of the left during the Allende years, but he rightly points to the US-financed subversive activities of the right which made a mockery of any notion of democratic mandate.

In a section called "Banking on torture", O'Shaughnessy gives an account of the economic reforms which made Pinochet's regime so admired by the international banking community in the 1980s and early 1990s, but juxtaposes the wealth enjoyed by the more affluent classes of Chile with the suffering of the socially dispossessed and the endemic corruption of government.

In the midst of this prosperity, repression and torture continued until the very end of the dictatorship. The Politics of Torture covers an extensive canvas - from the harrowing tale of a 17-year-old humiliated with a cattle prod and repeatedly raped, to the development of a foreign policy marked by the assassination abroad of political opponents; the sale of arms to fellow dictators such as Saddam; and international drug trafficking. Against this background, Lady Thatcher's defence of her old friend and ally Augusto for his help during the 1982 Falklands War seems an insult to humanity.

My only disappointment is that O'Shaughnessy has not put his knowledge into a weightier biography of Pinochet just as Paul Preston has done with Pinochet's role model, Franco. But then O'Shaughnessy is a journalist, not an academic. Reading his book one is reminded of the resolution that the Spanish Civil War provoked: as Auden put it, it made "action and its nature clear."

No smoking gun.

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

No smoking gun.

By Mark Huband and Stephen Fidler.

Published: 3 June 2003

For three straight nights, Colin Powell huddled with officials piecing together a presentation he hoped would swing the divided United Nations behind the US and Britain in support of military action against Iraq.

The US secretary of state and up to two dozen officials had gathered at the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, refining an intelligence dossier that was to be the basis for his February 5 speech. A smaller group later moved to New York. Mr Powell wanted, he said last week, to make sure everything in his presentation was solid. His own credibility, that of President George W. Bush and of George Tenet, director of US central intelligence, was on the line.

The original dossier had come from vice-president Dick Cheney's office. According to officials who saw it, it contained information that had been filtered through civilian officials in the Pentagon and the White House National Security Council office dealing with non-proliferation strategy.

Some of the people examining the dossier felt that a large proportion was unreliable and speculative, much of it based on information from defectors. Some also felt it had been tailored to fit the views of the hawks in administration who had long been pushing for war with Iraq. "It was clear to me that we had people in the administration with an agenda," recalls one official who attended the meeting.

Tony Blair, UK prime minister

24 September 2002, address to House of Commons:

'... Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, ... Saddam has continued to produce them ... he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated in 45 minutes.'
"We spent the entire time throwing things away, some of which had been previously used in public statements. There were 45 to 50 pages that we pared down to maybe 18."

The group, he says, sought further evidence for the assertions they did consider credible, rejecting claims emanating from one source alone. Out went, for example, the claim previously made by the administration that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from Niger.

Mr Powell's premonition that his credibility would be challenged proved prescient. The lack of any substantial finds of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has become awkward for him and the Bush administration. But it has been far more damaging for Tony Blair, the British prime minister who went to war in spite of the opposition of most of his countrymen.

Today Mr Blair is likely to face further hostile questions in parliament, in a campaign led by former loyal acolytes. One is Robin Cook, a former foreign secretary who resigned from the cabinet in protest at the war, who has said: "The war was sold on the basis of what was described as a pre-emptive strike - hit Saddam before he hits us. It is now quite clear that Saddam did not have anything with which to hit us in the first place." Clare Short, another former minister, alleges that the government added "spin" to its dossier to suggest Iraq had weapons ready to launch because Mr Blair made a "secret commitment" with Mr Bush to go to war. Mr Blair strongly denies the claim.

In the US, the criticism has been more muted. The Republican-dominated Congress has chosen to focus on the quality of the underlying data - and on whether the intelligence services shaped the data into a message their political masters wanted to hear. A joint hearing of the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence committees will examine whether the substance of the information gathered by the CIA was accurate.

While these arguments about the use of intelligence for political ends are almost unprecedented, they are likely not to be the last. Since September 11 2001, the perceived threats faced by governments around the world have drawn intelligence agencies out of the shadows. "I think it's inevitable that more intelligence information will be used publicly, because of the nature of the threats we face: WMD and terrorism," says one Whitehall official.

That is problematic, to say the least, because most intelligence is not easy to explain to the public. At one point in the meetings at the CIA, Mr Tenet, chewing one of the cigars he is now forbidden by doctors to smoke, leaned back and said: "Everyone thinks we're Tom Cruise." But if Hollywood deals in certainties, the real world of intelligence is one of probabilities and incomplete scraps of evidence that have to be pieced together.

Though increasingly unlikely, it is still possible that the "smoking gun" that convinces everybody of Saddam Hussein's WMD capabilities - and that they were a threat beyond Iraq's borders - will be found. Assuming it is not, there are four possible explanations as to why the threat was exaggerated. The underlying intelligence may have been poor; it may have been innocently misinterpreted; or it was wilfully manipulated. The fourth possibility, less discussed except among intelligence insiders, is that the publication of the intelligence changed Saddam Hussein's behaviour.

There is a large volume of evidence over which there is little disagreement. Iraq has had and admitted, usually under duress, to having extensive programmes to build biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. Unmovic, the United Nations chemical, biological and missile inspection commission, maintains it simply does not know what weapons Iraq retained, what it had destroyed before the war, and what its intentions were. In a 173-page document published on March 6, the inspectors left few doubts as to their abiding suspicions, and pointed to a continued failure by Iraq to account for materials - such as 10,000 litres of anthrax - that had been produced.

Paul Wolfowitz, US deputy defence secretary

2 December 2002:

'President Bush's determination to use force if necessary is because of the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.'

It is the further claims made mostly by the US and UK governments that are the source of controversy.
Intelligence agencies cannot be blamed for one big mistake made by the Blair government: the use of plagiarised material in a January document issued by Downing Street and meant to highlight Iraq's efforts to deceive weapons inspectors. Though popularly described as a PhD thesis, the document on which part of the report was based was written by a leading US-based expert on the Iraqi security services. He was not however given any credit as a source, and the Downing Street document contained elementary cut-and-paste errors.

More recent criticism has focused on two lines by Mr Blair in the preface to an intelligence briefing on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, published on September 24. "I am in no doubt that the threat is serious and current," he wrote. He stated that Mr Hussein's "military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them".

Both points are drawn from the body of the report, where they are repeated several times. Their use was approved by the Joint Intelligence Committee, which groups together the heads of the UK intelligence and security services, as well as senior Whitehall officials. All had agreed on these phrases being used, security sources say.

This is doubted by some officials with personal experience of intelligence. "I wasn't convinced by the information that was being published by the government on WMD at any point, because it seemed to me it was stated in a much too definite way," says a former senior Foreign Office official.

There are two types of information in those two statements: one is a "fact", the other an assessment.
The Iraqi regime's attitude to the inspectors, its known efforts at concealment of weapons programmes, as well as its history of brutality, provided a context for assessments suggesting Iraq was still a "current" threat. As one senior US official says: "The overall history of denial and concealment is very important. The suspicion was, and is, a factor. Was this taken too far? It's too early to say."
Yet another senior US official who has reviewed the US intelligence doubts whether the evidence he has seen suggested that Mr Hussein's regime really was a "serious and current" threat. Asked whether he believed there to be an imminent threat from Iraq, he said: "Not in my view. At the present time, February 2003, No."

But he said he and his team were convinced that the Iraqi leader was intent on retaining a capability in all three weapons categories. "Sanctions were falling apart; inspections were dwindling. The question was where would we be if sanctions were lifted."

George W. Bush, US president

18 March 2003, address to the nation:

'Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.'

On the 45-minute trigger claim, UK security officials say they were no less certain about this than other statements contained in the report. Yet, weeks before the current controversy, they had made no secret of the fact that they only had one source for the claim. That source was a defector debriefed by the US, though the US never used the claim in its own public output.

"If you believe that they had weapons of mass destruction, then the fact that it takes 45 minutes for an order to get through is a pretty ordinary fact," says a senior UK official.

The CIA, MI6 and the US State Department sought to avoid over-reliance on the statements of defectors, particularly those associated with the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group led by former banker Ahmad Chalabi. Yet material from these defectors was embraced by some US officials and regularly found its way into US internal intelligence briefings, including the dossier that was the basis for Mr Powell's February 5 presentation, and was the source for the 45-minute claim.

When Mr Powell laid out his case to the UN Security Council, he gave details of sources, saying that information on mobile biological weapons production laboratories had come from four Iraqis, one of whom - though Mr Powell did not name him - was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri. (The US says it has now found two vans similar to those described by Mr Powell, though even this is open to interpretation.)
The INC had arranged for Mr al-Haideri to give an interview to The New York Times in December 2001, in which he had detailed his role as supervisor of a biological weapons facility.

Heavy US reliance on INC sources has remained. In a recent exchange of e-mails between an influential New York Times reporter who interviewed Mr al-Haideri and one of her colleagues, the reporter stated that the INC's information on Iraq's WMD was now being used by the US-led teams searching for the weapons in Iraq, and that it had also "provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper".

Glen Rangwala, of Cambridge university, who has analysed the claims and counter-claims regarding Iraq's WMD arsenal, said: "The INC found itself in a position after 1999 where it had no political goods. More people were leaving it than were leaving Saddam's regime. They had to be able to provide information to their political backers in Washington if they were to retain their ties to the US administration."

Donald Rumsfeld

27 May 2003, speech to the Council on Foreign Relations:

'[Iraq is] a country the size of California. It is not as though we've managed to look everyplace. There are hundreds and hundreds of suspect chemical or biological or nuclear sites that have not been investigated as yet. It'll take time.'

Defectors also influenced the US decision to focus on Iraq's alleged nuclear programme to a much greater extent than intelligence information and assessments by UN inspectors appeared to warrant.
The CIA said in October 2002 that "most analysts assess Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons programme". Mr Powell told the UN Security Council on February 5: "Since 1998 [Saddam's] efforts to reconstitute his nuclear programme have been focused on acquiring ... sufficient fissile material to produce a nuclear explosion."

But on March 17 2003, the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) concluded that there was no "evidence of the revival of a nuclear programme prohibited under [UN] resolutions", though UK officials say that the programme was more advanced than the IAEA claimed. One senior US official now says: "Saddam had done away with the hardware. He only had the software. It was reconstitutable at any point."

Initial suspicion that Iraq was developing its nuclear programme after the 1991 Gulf war rested in large part on the revelations of Khidir Hamza, a scientist who had been involved in the programme in 1972-94. Mr Hamza's claims were rejected by David Albright, author of numerous studies of nuclear issues, who said in September 2002 that his claims were "often inaccurate ... He sculpts his message to get the message across ... [He] wants regime change [in Iraq] and what interferes with that is just ignored."
Experts familiar with the nuclear inspections in Iraq are convinced that the nuclear issue was highlighted because it would strongly influence public opinion. However, one intelligence official justified this focus by saying it was "because nuclear fundamentally matters".

Some documents, which were reportedly provided to the US and UK by Italian intelligence concerning Iraq's alleged attempts to obtain uranium from Niger, were proved to be forgeries. On March 7 Mohamed ElBaradei, IAEA director general, told the UN Security Council: "Based on thorough analysis, the IAEA has concluded ... that these documents ... are in fact not authentic."

Mr ElBaradei also rejected US assertions - repeated by Mr Powell on February 5 - that aluminium tubes Iraq had sought to buy were destined for use in its nuclear programme. US officials said the assessment that they were wanted for centrifuges required for uranium enrichment came from a CIA analyst - encouraging the claim that the CIA was bending to political pressure. But, in a disclosure that underlines how intelligence agencies share information, they said that assessment was supported by a foreign intelligence agency. "He wasn't the only source. There was another very strong source: French intelligence," says one official.

French intelligence had seized a separate shipment of tubes to the US, and tested their tolerance by spinning them to 98,000 revolutions per minute, concluding they were too sophisticated to have alternative uses. But Mr Powell could not cite his supporting evidence on February 5. "The French political authorities refused us permission to use that information at the last minute," the official says.
A senior Whitehall official with extensive knowledge of the UK intelligence service thinks it inconceivable that UK intelligence regarding Iraq was deliberately fabricated, but argues that US intelligence was heavily influenced by the political pressure to justify a decision to invade. "If there is a fault in British intelligence it is that it took too much of what their US intelligence counterparts were telling them on trust, without cross-questioning the evidence," he says.

The suggestion that intelligence analysts were guided by political pressure is an assertion that Mr Tenet denies. "Our role is to call it like we see it - to tell policymakers what we know, what we don't know, what we think, and what we base it on. That is exactly what was done and continues to be done on intelligence issues related to Iraq."

Tony Blair, UK prime minister

2 June 2003, comments to reporters after accusations the government had duped parliament and the public:

'I stand absolutely 100 per cent behind the evidence based on intelligence that we presented to people. The idea that we doctored intelligence reports in order to invent some notion about 45-minute capability of delivering weapons of mass destruction...is completely and totally false.'

But Mr Tenet's position has been undermined, say some sceptics, by contradictory comments coming from the administration. Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary, said on April 17: "I don't think we'll discover anything, myself". Then on May 29 he said: "My personal view is we're going to find them." Paul Wolfowitz, US deputy defence secretary, told Vanity Fair WMD had dominated the agenda "for bureaucratic reasons".

The intense debate that has now been joined on both sides of the Atlantic has largely obscured the issue of whether the deposed regime's intentions were understood in Washington. The course of the month-long war suggests they were not.

UK and US military planners were depending on Mr Hussein's regime using its WMD during the war, thereby providing proof that they existed. US military planners also suggested that a "red line" existed around Baghdad, which if crossed would unleash Iraq's WMD arsenal. UK officials were sceptical of this and in the event the "red line" apparently did not exist.

Such clear evidence that Iraq's real military strategy was unknown, can only cast doubt on claims to certain knowledge about what constituted the most menacing elements of that strategy - the WMD arsenal itself.

Yet if the intelligence estimates were wrong, and Mr Hussein had nothing to hide, why did he not let the weapons inspectors untrammelled access to his country? "It's a mystery," says an American official. "That's the one thing that convinces me that they may find something."

Additional reporting by Jimmy Burns, Mark Turner and Guy Dinmore

Playing dirty was all part of 'big boy games'.

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Playing dirty was all part of 'big boy games'.

By Jimmy Burns and John Murray Brown

Published: 17 April 2003

Loyalist assassination squads were used by a secretive unit of the British state to target Roman Catholics during Margaret Thatcher's war on IRA terrorism during the 1980s and early 1990s.

The scale of activity will be highlighted in a report due out on Thursday, at a time when Northern Ireland politicians are struggling to restore power-sharing government, will provide an unsettling reminder of a much uglier period of the province's troubled history.

After three separate police inquiries, spanning 14 years, during which his investigators faced official obfuscation and obstruction, Sir John Stevens, commissioner of London's Metropolitan police, travels to Belfast to deliver his long-awaited report into the dirty war fought by British intelligence against the IRA.
The investigation was originally set up to re-examine the circumstances of the murder of Patrick Finucane, a Belfast solicitor shot dead in his home in 1989. It was widened into a probe into allegations that the security services colluded with loyalist terrorists in setting up suspected IRA members for assassination in the 1980s and early 1990s.

In particular, it focused on a secret army unit called the Force Research Unit that was set up to recruit and run agents inside the paramilitary organisations - both loyalist and republican.
Sir John calls this 3,000-page document an "interim" report, emphasising this is work in progress and more still has to be done.

But the suspicions of those close to the Finucane family, which has refused to co-operate with Sir John, is that the investigation is being deliberately strung out to undermine their calls for a full public inquiry.
Sir John is known to be against the holding of a public inquiry. Officials point out the costly example of Lord Saville's tribunal into the Bloody Sunday killings of 1972.

Moreover, Sir John believes the public interest is not served by exposing all areas of intelligence activity to scrutiny. On a more practical note, senior officers point out that many key witnesses are now dead.
Brian Nelson, the FRU's agent inside the Ulster Defence Association, died last week of natural causes. William Stobie, the only man charged in connection with Mr Finucane's murder, was shot dead in Belfast two years ago, just a couple of weeks after his trial collapsed when the key prosecution witness was deemed to be not well enough to give evidence.

Many of the intelligence personnel were among those killed in the Chinook helicopter crash in the Mull of Kintyre in June 1994.

Sir John's work is unlikely to have the political ramifications of the probe into Spain's "dirty war" against Eta, where the revelations of the activities of the Anti-Terrorist Liberation Group (GAL) in the 1980s contributed to the electoral defeat in 1996 of Felipe Gonzalez, the leader of the Spanish socialist party.
But officials concede that the main lesson for politicians today is that at a time of a global fight against terrorism, the reputations of even the most robust democracies can be tainted.

Sir John has said he does not believe there was "institutionalised collusion". Nonetheless his report, which will be handed over to Hugh Orde, chief constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, will make difficult reading for parts of the security services. It will offer a challenging critique of the way intelligence is handled - in particular the use of informers inside terrorist organisations.

Sir John's team has submitted a number of files on individual members, both serving and retired, of the security services to the director of public prosecutions in Northern Ireland.

In February, Sir John confirmed a file had been delivered on Brigadier Gordon Kerr, the current defence attache at the British embassy in Beijing, who ran the FRU at the time. The Ministry of Defence said this week that Brigadier Kerr was remaining in his post in China.

Today's 15-page summary is not expected to name individuals, but instead will concentrate on the structures, practices and the inadequacy of the controls of the various security agencies.
One former member of the FRU who agreed to talk to the FT on condition of anonymity said this week: "It wasn't all clean. You would say it was a dirty business we were in, but we were saving lives of potential victims of the IRA. In the late 1980s, if you had identified a terrorist and allowed him to get away with it, the chances are that he would go and kill people."

Another source familiar with the workings of the FRU admitted that it had made "mistakes", including allying itself with sectors of the locally employed police and security forces who were biased against Catholics.

But the source argued that whatever the FRU did was the inevitable consequence of a necessarily lethal war on terrorism that drew on a range of agents, often acting for largely mercenary motives, where terror had to be met with terror.

The favourite saying among veterans of Ulster's dirty war, used in self-justification, is that they were involved in "big boy games where big boy rules prevailed".

In addition to the role of the FRU, Sir John's team has probed police special branch in Northern Ireland which, as Chris Patten observed when he conducted his review of policing in 1999, is seen as a "force within a force" in the former Royal Ulster Constabulary.

Human rights lawyers believe the report will skirt over the role played by MI5, the intelligence service, which, according to informed sources, had an official assigned to the FRU throughout the period.
Sir John's team has not interviewed Baroness Thatcher, who was prime minister for much of the period. However, officers did speak to Tom King, a former Northern Ireland secretary and also chairman of the Commons intelligence committee.

It is understood that the team has found no evidence that the joint intelligence committee, which reports to Number 10, had oversight or knowledge of what the FRU was doing.
However, one former FRU source claimed that while there was no paper trail directly linking the unit's activities to a higher political level, it was always assumed by those who belonged to it that the government was turning a blind eye to the means used to disrupt and neutralise what was seen as the main enemy - the IRA.

Some observers believe the timing of this interim publication is designed to give Mr Orde, who was previously the Met officer in day-to-day charge of the Stevens investigation, ammunition to downsize the special branch, a key demand of nationalist political parties.

Within the army there is still a view that what happened should be seen within the broader context of a covert military and intelligence strategy that largely succeeded in containing the IRA, saving lives and eventually creating the conditions for political talks.

As one former SAS officer said: "This focus on the activities of the FRU suggests that there was a botched job when in fact there were many other operations going on that helped us stop the IRA from winning the war."

There is evidence that an attempted assassination attempt against Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader, may have been thwarted by the FRU's intervention.

Sir John's team was more struck by the low level of arrests of leading loyalists during this time, despite the extent of the intelligence penetration of their organisations. Many human rights activists believe the FRU, far from being an agency of the peace process, was set up to re-direct the murderous instincts of loyalist gangs to kill suspected IRA members.

Sir John's report is expected to make clear that, of the people named and targeted according to FRU files, most were innocent Catholics.

Survey - Northern Ireland - Community peacemakers - The Voluntary sector

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Survey – Northern Ireland - Community peacemakers – The Voluntary sector

By Jimmy Burns

Published: 21 March 2000

Many have admired these peoples' work, but now the future of EU funding threatens to cast a dark cloud.

Since the outbreak of the troubles in the early 1970s, the voluntary and community sector in Northern Ireland has grown to be not just a significant employer but also a key political player.

t now considers itself under threat from a reallocation of funds under a controversial EU programme from which it has drawn its strength over the past five years.

Total employment, including those who work for voluntary and community organisations and who are on government employment schemes, is just over 33,000, equivalent to 5 per cent of the workforce. The sector thus employs more people than agriculture, construction, and catering.

Politically, voluntary organisations and community workers have played a critical role in making up for the failures of politicians and civil servants - acting as a bridge between divided communities and developing a semblance of civic society in the midst of terrorism.

Future histories of the province are likely to devote lengthy chapters to debating the contribution the sector made towards defusing violence, and the discreet role which some of its representatives played in forging a dialogue between the men of violence and government.

The sector has grown throughout the troubles, with social and community workers attempting to deal with the divisive and destructive impact on civil life of sectarianism, unemployment and terrorist violence.

Its development was encouraged by the setting up of the influential umbrella funding organisation, the Northern Ireland Voluntary Trust in 1979 and the Department of Economic Development's Action for Community Employment (Ace), which enabled groups to employ staff and increase the capacity of local organisation to engage in various community-based organisations.

The failure of the Anglo-Irish agreement in 1985 to forge a lasting political consensus between the warring parties of Northern Ireland fuelled a sense of frustration within government circles. But, at the same, ministers and officials grasped at the few rays of hope that were being shone from within the voluntary sector, and took a conscious decision to strengthen their support for it.

By the early 1990s, the voluntary sector was fully engaged in government-backed initiatives aimed at social and urban regeneration, such as the Making Belfast Work and Londonderry initiatives, and other projects which co-ordinated funds on both sides of the border from across the US.

At the same time, the Community Relations Council was established, specifically tasked with promoting contact between Protestants and Catholics and accepting cultural differences - that is, parity of esteem.

As a senior civil servant recalls: "During this period, if there was a sense of power being devolved it was not to politicians but to the voluntary sector. By building up this sector, the government didn't necessarily believe it was bringing about a solution to the troubles. But it did believe it was creating a context of hope in what had hitherto seemed a hopeless situation. Some of the work done at community level acted as a ballast, stabilising a dysfunctional society."

Undoubtedly, the single most important factor influencing the growth of the voluntary sector has been the substantial amount of EU funds that have been channelled through it since the second half of the 1980s, and which in recent years have made up for the ending of UK-government schemes such as Ace.

As noted in a report on the sector by the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Section (Nicva), many voluntary and community groups found themselves in receipt of European funding for the first time. Overall "the voluntary and community sector has been given the opportunity to influence government policy on the spending of European resources in an unprecedented way".

The EU's special support programme for peace and reconciliation earmarked Ecu500m between 1995 and 1999. It was established following the paramilitary ceasefires declared in the autumn of 1994. According to Jim Dougal, the EU's spokesman in Belfast, the programme "allowed communities to help themselves and to lift the cloud of despair that had descended on them". The highly-mobilised voluntary and community sector strongly influenced the final shape of the programme.

The EU received 29,000 applications for funding from various community groups, of which 12,000 were approved. A typical example was the Special Partners for Reconciliation and Investment in New Generations (Spring) in Armagh, where community work focused on women and the young unemployed in a strongly republican neighbourhood.

By contrast, the Taughmonagh Community Forum in Belfast aimed to create new businesses and training opportunities in a poor neighbourhood previously dominated by loyalist paramilitaries.
But funds also went on other more questionable projects, such as yoga lessons for IRA prisoners, stud farms on the Irish border, and meetings between Scottish and Irish travellers.

The overall programme involved 25 main funding measures, 12 sub-measures, nine intermediate funding bodies, five second-tier funding bodies, 15 government departments, six local authorities, four state agencies, and - perhaps most important, politically - 26 district partnerships in which representatives of the voluntary sector found themselves with as much, if not more, political clout as locally-elected politicians to distribute and oversee funding. Many politicians at regional level resented this.

According to the conclusions of a study of the programme commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust in 1997, the strengths of the programme included its impact on community development; the work done with women, children, and young people; its outreach to prisoners; and the development of community infrastructure in neglected areas.

A separate, medium-term study carried out by three Northern Ireland MEPs - Ian Paisley, John Hume, and Jim Nicholson - noted that the programme had also gained the strongest EU identification of any European programme hitherto carried out in Northern Ireland, and was perceived as "having an impact on the marginalised society in a completely new way, particularly through its emphasis on social inclusiveness".

Among those playing a key role in the implementation of the programme was the Northern Ireland Voluntary Trust. Its director - undoubtedly one of the unsung heroines of the peace process - is Avila Kilmurray.

According to Ms Kilmurray, the programme "created a neutral space for dialogue in terms of the hopes and needs of the community". She accepts that the programme had tried to achieve too much in too short a time, forcing the pace of development when many organisations and community groups were not ready for it. "What we have realised is, it takes as long to heal the divisions of a war as to fight one," she says.

By early this year, civil servants and politicians on the one hand, and the voluntary sector and some Brussels officials on the other, appeared to be at loggerheads over proposals for a radical shift in the way EU funds should be used.

Of the #314m earmarked by the EU for the peace programme between 2000 and 2006, civil servants and members of the suspended executive were suggesting that #187m should be spent on "economic renewal", and #127m on "social integration, inclusion, and reconciliation". The figures mean that the projects in which the voluntary sector was involved would go down from 30.8 per cent of the programme to 19 per cent.

Quite apart from the impact on jobs among community workers, the fear in the voluntary sector, is that the plans would risk fuelling political and social instability by clawing back funds in marginalised neighbourhoods.

"The danger is that if you don't invest in social inclusion you are going to develop an underclass of those who may engage in violence," warns Ms Kilmurray.

Yet critics of the previous programme, such as Dennis Kennedy, lecturer at the Institute of European Studies, Queen's University, and Graham Gudgin, an economics adviser to David Trimble, the Ulster Unionist leader, argue that too much of EU funds in the first programme was misspent on projects which not only lacked economic justification, but also barely matched the criteria of peace and reconciliation.

"I suspect the resistance of the voluntary sector is self-serving unhappiness at being left out of the loop. The best means of social inclusion is giving people jobs by creating a stronger economy," says Mr Gudgin.

The jury is still out on the true meaning of peace and reconciliation.

Europe's last Wall still stands in a city divided

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Europe's last Wall still stands in a city divided

Jimmy Burns reports from the front line of Belfast's sectarian divide where Catholics and Protestants are split by barriers mental and physical

By Jimmy burns

Published: 31 March 1990

THE 20 ft-high barrier of concrete and reinforced steel zig zags its way through housing estates, churches, factories, dividing whole communities. Smeared with slogans, monitored by the security forces, it is the last solid wall in a Europe of crumbling divides.

No-one tries to escape from this wall, no-one is in a hurry to pull it down; indeed, parts of it are still being built. There is no place here near it for souvenir hunters. This is the Belfast Wall. It is a less well-known piece of political masonry than Berlin's, but in the closing decade of the 20th century the Belfast Wall shows no sign of meeting the same fate as its Cold War parent.

Cupar Street, West Belfast: the 20 ft wall, topped by a steel palisade, rises above a plot of wasteland. On one side the wall is smudged red with paint bombs, the names 'Kid, Stevie, and Joe,' and IRA slogans. On the other it bears the legend: 'This is a loyalist controlled area,' the names 'Darren, Janine, Glenn.' A Union Jack is flying from the roof of a three-storey council house. In the wall is a single iron door where the concrete has been blackened by fire. It is firmly bolted.

Whole areas of Belfast - mainly populated by low-income families and small shop keepers - live under the shadow of walls such as this. The Cupar Street interface is particularly striking because of its size and length. Twelve other, smaller barriers have been built around the city. They include brick walls, barbed wire and iron fences, and they affect up to a quarter of the 300,000-strong population. Such an image may seem out of step with the the Europe of the 1990s. But as the season of Belfast political marches gets under way with the traditional Easter parade, this urban mosaic of 'peace lines' remains the most poignant symbol of Northern Ireland's tragic, seemingly insoluble divisions.

Sectarianism is not a recent phenomenon in Belfast. History - of which the people of Northern Ireland are extremely conscious - records instances of inter-community violence between Catholics and Protestants throughout the 19th and the early 20th century.

Marie Logan, a Belfast community assistant who lives on the Protestant side of Cupar Street's 'peace-line,' just off the Shankill Road, recalls how her life changed the day sectarian violence broke out again 21 years ago. 'I remember when the first shots were fired from the direction of Cupar Street. It was a Thursday. At that stage, I thought it would be over in a couple of days. Then the soldiers started putting up the corrugated iron and fencing. I was stunned then. But now, with all the killings, barriers are necessary.'

Marie, who was born on the Shankill Road, remembers only a brief childhood in which 'every street had its own social worker or midwife, everyone lived as neighbours and for a while no-one bothered to ask about your religion.' Now, Marie never dares venture into the Catholic quarter. 'That wall is a reminder that we are in a no-win situation. If it was brought down, we would have easier access to the other side, but then the killings would be stepped up again,' she says.

Her 15 year-old daughter Nina is even more sceptical, pointing out that while the wall may have reduced the number of sectarian killings, it has not stopped stones and paint bombs being thrown by Catholics at her neighbourhood, nor the underlying prejudice her community feels against the other. 'I'm not bigoted. But there are people round here who don't want me to bring back a Catholic friend from school because they think she might try and ram her views down our throats.'

A few doors down the street and on the same side of the wall, Mina Wardle is taking a day's rest which she feels she has to take periodically for the sake of her sanity. Even by the standards of Northern Ireland. Mina Wardle's personal history has been painful. Her nightmare began in January 1975 when she was assaulted and injured by armed robbers. A month later her local supermarket was bombed by terrorists. In 1978 her house was burgled once, and her shop three times. In October 1979, a taxi driver was murdered outside her front door. She treated six injured passengers and tended the dying driver before the ambulance arrived. That night she received a death threat from the IRA.

In 1980, she took a new job as a shop manager only to fall victim to another armed robbery. Since then she has suffered a third armed robbery and two car burglaries. Once a week now now she attends a group therapy session with 50 other local women suffering from severe stress and agrophobia. In her view, the existence of walls in Belfast has become a 'state of mind.'

Wardle works as a counsellor with the Shankill Road Activity Centre, where local volunteers are trying to reconcile the warring communities through the use of 'mixed workshops.'

'Some people get excited about the impact 1992 will have on this area. But I don't think there is going to be much movement . . . we're starting to get to know each other, but it is still going to take hard work and a lot of heartbreak. Every time someone is murdered, another person drops out of the workshop,' she says.

Wardle's work colleague is Augustus 'Gusty' Spence, another personification of the limits of change in Northern Ireland. Spence was released from prison in 1984 after serving 18 1/2 years of a life sentence in connection with the shooting of a young Catholic barman at a nearby pub. He admits he was a member of the UVF, the illegal paramilitary group, but still denies strongly that he murdered the barman and says he is now publicly opposed to violence.

Sitting in his cramped offices in the Shankill road - the same area where the barman was shot - Spence explains why so many people in Belfast still choose to live behind walls: 'In a society of fear, people stay with their own sort. We are living in a society which has never been normal.'

Ten blocks away, Colette McFerran believes she has already paid the price of being a Catholic in Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland. In March her local councillor, Mary Muldoon, of the non-violent SDLP party, was questioned on her doorstep by a heavily-armed British soldier, while a second crouched and pointed his gun in the direction of the two women.

This was not the first time this particular Catholic neighbourhood considered itself unjustly harassed by the British army. For Colette the memory of British soldiers being welcomed with cups of tea on the Falls Road soon after the troubles broke out in 1969 has been overshadowed by more recent experiences.

'Six months ago, we were all in bed when there was this banging on the door . . . there were three soldiers . . . they were either drunk or high on something . . . they pulled out the flowers in our garden, smashed two pots, and pulled stones from the rockery . . . they called us Irish sluts. In the 19 years we've lived here, no-one has ever wrecked the garden.'

Colette - who votes for the SDLP and not for Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA - lives with her mother and young daughter in Cupar Street. The wall is visible at the end of two lines of recently-built terraced houses which have replaced those bulldozed by developers or burnt in riots. There is a segment of the wall just outside Colette's kitchen window. It blocks out all natural light. There are no Union Jacks here, only statues of Christ and the Virgin Mary. Colette remembers watching with a sense of awe the TV newsreel images of the Berlin wall being broken down last year - it was a 'beautiful thing to watch happen.' And yet she not only doesn't want the Belfast wall to come down, she wants another one put up in the adjoining street.

A few days before we met in early March, a Catholic man was shot dead by loyalist gunmen as he worked on his car in a nearby street. The gunmen eluded a security check by driving round the block and up an adjoining street known as Lanark Way before abandoning their car and escaping into the Protestant Shankill area.

This was the fifth such sectarian killing in the area in as many years. Colette belongs to a local Catholic residents association which has been pressing the authorities to put up a new 'peace line' across Lanark Way. 'What we want is either gates or a wall right across the road. We don't want the road as it is any more. We want these killings stopped.'

While the Catholics in the area demand another barrier, Protestants insist that Lanark Way is the one road in the area that should remain open so as to allow ambulances and fire engines easy access to the loyalist heartland of the Shankill in the event of an emergency. There has been no meeting of minds.
The only certainty is that the Northern Ireland troubles have spurned a political and socio-economic logic that, in the context of Europe, seems increasingly idiosyncratic.

Questioned about the 'peace lines,' one senior officer of the Royal Ulster Constabulary said that they would remain 'as long as the community wanted them to.' In Lanark Way, the introduction of temporary security barriers has not been ruled out. Among the local councillors the only common statement of opinion was that the 'peace lines' were a 'necessary evil.'

Ivan Maginnis is an official with Northern Ireland's Housing Executive, which has a statutory obligation to help improve housing conditions in the province. However, as Maginnis is the first to admit, the political situation in Belfast - which has seen the biggest internal migration of any community since the Second World War - has ridden roughshod over any contemporary notions of urban development.
'This is a city in which territoriality impinges on the urban renewal process . . . both sides have aspirations to hang on to their territory or expand. What neither side wants to do is cede their ground.' Maginnis believes that the 'peace lines' that straddle the Protestant and Catholic enclaves of West and North Belfast are a contradiction in terms. As testified by residents, these barriers are often characterised not by peace and harmony between neighbours, but by conflict and continuing instability.
Recently, new 'environment-friendly' peace lines have been introduced around Belfast. Instead of the concrete and steel palisades, some streets now have ornately patterned brick walls lined with landscaped gardens. In other areas the Executive is creating an 'environmental barrier' - a fenced off 'green buffer zone' on which neither Catholics nor Protestants will be allowed to tread.

Prisoners of the past at Ulster's Orange weekend

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Prisoners of the past at Ulster's Orange weekend

By Jimmy Burns

Published: 1 October 1990

IT SAYS something about Northern Ireland today that the focus of popular attention this weekend was not bombs and assassinations but a small group of Mohawk Indians at the parade in Belfast to commemorate the Battle of the Boyne, at which the forces of the Roman Catholic king James II were defeated.

The parade was organised by the Orange Order, a bastion of Protestant resolve and political refuseniks. But among its members and those watching the parade the main consideration appeared to be to have as good and as peaceful a time as possible. After years of violence, a sense of bruised exhaustion and a need for escape have filtered into the collective psyche.

The Mohawks were there because their ancestors had become Orangemen after fighting alongside the forces of the Crown in the American War of Independence. The current Mohawk Orange leader, Mr Melville Hill, declared himself honoured to be in Belfast, although somewhat confused by some of the things he saw on this, his first visit.

'I was in the war, all right, so I guess I know what it's like to be a soldier,' said Mr Hill, aged 74, 'but when you're in a civilian life and there's no war but there are soldiers all over - well, that's kind of different.'
It was Saturday morning and the group of six Indians, having flown in from Ontario, had answered the call of the march gathering outside the Orange Hall near the Shankhill Road.

Just three blocks away detachments from the 3rd Parachute Regiment, backed by members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, had positioned themselves around Unity Walk and set up giant trampoline-like protective shields.

The tight security net thrown around Unity Walk - a group of dismal council flats - may have perplexed the man from the Tyendinaga reservation. The flats represent a small Roman Catholic enclave in a large Protestant neighbourhood and are thus a poignant symbol in local politics.

It was here that in July 1969 Orangemen and Catholics fought during a season of widespread sectarian violence. Twenty-one years later, Northern Ireland no longer produces the extensive scenes of mayhem it once did. Violence, however, is never far away and, as events proved this weekend, it remains unpredictable as to its precise scope and scale.

On the eve of the parade, Belfast was subjected to 20 bomb scares, a tactic clearly designed to cause widespread disruption. While the security forces were dealing with them, an Irish League football match played locally was abandoned after a supporter carrying a Republican flag sparked off a riot.
The big parade, like the dozens of marches that take place in Northern Ireland over the summer, epitomised once again the extent to which the local community is imprisoned by its past. Sombrely suited, sashed and crowned with a bowler hat as is the tradition, the Rev William Martin Smyth, Grand Master of the Orange Order and Unionist MP for South Belfast, summarised 300 years of local history in these words: 'We now firmly restate that the resolve which characterised our forebears is still resolute with us.

'Despite the terror and the tears, the bullet and the bomb, the murder and the maiming, we remain bloodied but unbowed.'

The parade by an estimated 50,000 Orangemen had at its front a replica model of the Mountjoy. This was the ship whose crew, after some hesitance, finally mustered up enough courage to break through the Catholic encirclement of Londonderry to bring crucial supplies to the besieged Protestants.
The raising of the siege led to the defeat of James II in the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, with the victor being the future king William III.

A conductor of one of the hundreds of bands involved in the parade spoke only of commemorating a Protestant victory which 'ensured civil and religious liberties'. A bandsman spoke critically of what he saw as the government's inability to declare a no-holds-barred war on the IRA and the attempt by Dublin to intrude into Northern Ireland politics.

The battle is seen by many Unionists as an irreversible victory of Protestant over Catholic, Orange over Green, which has been immortalised as part of a political creed.

As things turned out, the Orange bands paraded past Unity Walk and back again without serious incidents. Only a drunken woman provocatively waving a union flag generated a string of expletives from some Catholic children.

In the city centre, what violence did occur was confined to a drunken Orangeman angry at being denied another drink and to two pubs having their windows smashed and their furniture damaged. By Northern Ireland standards, it was a trouble-free weekend.

Perspectives - Troubled love that awaits it's release

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Perspectives – Troubled love that awaits it’s release

By Jimmy Burns

Published: 9 September 1995

Mary's fiancee went to prison when she was 16. Their love has lasted through 11 years of political violence. Can it survive the peace, asks Jimmy Burns.

Had Mary lived anywhere else but Northern Ireland, she might now, at the age of 27, have had a very different life. But then not every woman falls in love at the age of 16 with a convicted IRA terrorist.
Mary's is no picture book love story. It still might not have a happy ending. While her political prisoner lover Kevin is among the IRA 'volunteers' who stand to benefit from the peace process, he may not find Mary waiting when he is released.

Mary's beauty has matured over the last 11 years, as has her self-assurance and sense of independence. She no longer expects to be taken for granted. While Kevin served his sentence, she became a working woman.

I met her by chance when I first visited Belfast as a correspondent. She was working behind a hotel bar serving Guinness and lukewarm Irish stew to visiting businessmen. She delivered a good joke with a lovely smile, and a friendship developed.

Each time I returned I would look her up. In our early encounters she restricted her conversation to comments on the wider political scene. Only more recently has she opened up about her own life. It struck me as a cathartic exercise released by the ceasefire, and made all the more necessary by years of self-imposed discipline, fear, and mistrust. I listened and took notes afterwards because I knew that Mary's story told me something about love and change in Northern Ireland.

Mary was only three when the Troubles touched her for the first time. The year was 1971 - the year of internment, widespread rioting and increasing animosity towards British troops. Her father, a Catholic and a Republican sympathiser was a vigilante in their poor West Belfast neighbourhood.
'One day there was this welshie (Welsh Guards soldier) standing outside our house. I had some stickers, one of Mickey Mouse and one of Donald Duck. He asked me if I could give them to him. I said I wouldn't and then said to him, pointing at his rifle: 'Well, my daddy's got a bigger one than that.' He asked me: 'Where would that be?' I giggled and then said: 'You'll never find out, it's hidden in my house ...' Well, that's how we got raided by the Brits for the first time.'

Mary went to a convent school run on strictly denominational lines. She remembers the day the headmistress, Sister Genevieve, tackled an important break in tradition: the incorporation of six boys into the sixth form.

'Now girls, you have to think of it like this. These boys are the Adams, and you are the Eves, and they want your apples,' she said.

'Well, when I heard Sister Genevieve,' said Mary. 'I thought, I wonder where my apple is? I signed up for physics class because I knew that is where the Adams were.'

There might have been more time for romance if this had not been Northern Ireland. Violence intervened. Mary and two friends witnessed the cold blooded killing of a British soldier by the IRA.
The girls were walking to the corner shop to buy some cakes when they saw the terrorists ambush two soldiers driving through West Belfast. One was shot dead, the other struggled out of the car. 'It was like Bonnie and Clyde, they just kept shooting and shooting, riddling the car with bullets.
'I just remember the one that survived. They left him for dead but somehow he managed to run away. I still wonder to this day whatever happened to him.'

Those memories became been overshadowed by an event that was to confirm her in her Republican sympathies. In the Hunger Strikes of 1981, IRA prisoners showed themselves prepared to suffer for their cause.

'We marched and they used water cannon and rubber bullets against us. I hated them for that,' she recalls.

Mary is secretive about the circumstances in which she met Kevin but now is open about identifying him as a member of the IRA. She was 16 when he was arrested and charged with possession of weapons and the attempted murder of a British soldier. Her father disapproves of the relationship. 'I take my engagement ring off whenever he's around,' says Mary.

Kevin was out on parole last October. He is the kind of political prisoner who could look forward to an early release if the peace process enters a chapter of real negotiation and compromise deals.
Mary does not enter easily into such speculation. She knows too much about the fragility of peace. Her only certainty is that loving a political prisoner in absentia is difficult to explain.

'They censor my letters to him so I never write anything personal ... when he comes out on parole he spends time buried in magazines, or walking in the street looking at the ground. I say to him 'Why don't you look at life.' He can't'

She recalls her first and only holiday, in Mallorca. She stayed one night before returning on the first available flight to Dublin.

'It was just full of Brits just seeing how many girls they could bonk during the holiday.'
On another trip she went to Lourdes. She remembers the baths being too cold and being forced too kiss a statue of the Virgin Mary.

'Much later when my mum was dying in Belfast, I found the holy water she had collected in our shed. It was in huge five-litre cans. They were pretty stale by then.'

She went just once to confession. 'I went to a priest once and he asked me how long it was since my last confession. I said 100 years father. He said it can't be that long. So I said 'Fine, make it four.' '
In one of our more recent meetings, I offered to buy her supper for the first time. Mary insisted on a salami sandwich and a drink as we had always done. I asked what she felt for him, her IRA hero. 'When we see each other it's nothing physical. I just know we like the same things, eat the same things.'
Mary is conscious that what bound her and Kevin is coming under strain. She may think of him, wait for him in her own sentimental way, but she has also got on with her life without him.

ince taking an early job as a bar maid she has graduated to canteen manager. Her job prospects depend on peace and stability. Her heart is no longer in militancy, but in economic survival. She has a stake in the system Kevin tried to overturn.

Mary is as loyal to Kevin as any separated lover can be. She hopes they will live together when he is released, but suspects there may be tensions ahead: 'He may want to pursue a life in politics when he comes out of prison, but I'm not following him any more. I shall carry on with my life too.'
(The names of Mary and Kevin have been changed.)

war 1

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

An invasion planned as a military coup

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

An invasion planned as a military coup

Published: April 1 2007

For a military operation which its commanders felt was blessed by God and the Virgin Mary, the conquest of ‘Las Malvinas’ by the Argentine junta got off to an inauspicious start.

Around midday on 2 April 1982, the official raising of the blue and white national Argentine colours outside the Governor’s residence was interrupted when the flag got stuck halfway up the pole, snapped, and slid downwards.

Two smaller flags - representing the Argentine navy and the 25th Infantry Regiment that had formed the main invasionary force - were quickly raised in their place. But the embarrassing incident turned to farce when one of the commanding officers, General Osvaldo Garcia, ordered a young soldier to climb up the pole and rather clumsily restore the fallen emblem of national pride, having clung to the wood like a koala bear.

The British Governor of the Falklands Sir Rex Hunt and a small group of British marines had surrendered after three hours of intermittent fighting with some of the 3,000 Argentine troops who had landed as part of an advance occupation force of over 12,000.

Operation Azul - as the invasion was codenamed - had been planned with clinical precision by a military that had never fought a contemporary war but was practiced in carrying out military coups. The Junta believed that it would take over the islands as effortlessly as it had come to power in 1976. It proved a huge mislcalculation.

Then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s decision to send a taskforce to win back the islands won UN backing. By contrast Argentina lacked the military, political, and economic clout to secure its position through diplomatic means.

On the eve of the invasion, the Argentine president General Leopoldo Galtieri received a telephone call from US president Ronald Reagan urging restraint. Galtieri told Reagan that only if Britain agreed to recognise Argentine sovereignty over the islands immediately would he pull back his troops. “I failed to budge him,” Reagan later recalled. The US subsequently helped Britain as a Nato partner with the support of the US base on Ascension Island, military supplies and secret intelligence.

And yet despite the reality of Argentina’s diplomatic isolation, the junta used a mixture of censorship and repression to keep control of domestic opinion, organising mass rallies to intimidate its opponents and fuel nationalistic fervour. It also used elements of the Argentine Catholic church to give the occupation forces on the islands a sense of being on a moral crusade.

Operation Azul was renamed Operation Rosario. The feat of the Virgin of Rosario was established in 1573 by Pope Gregory XIII to commemorate the crushing defeat of the Turks by the troops led by Don Juan of Austria. The Argentine junta pledged that the British would suffer an equally Virgin-sent defeat.
From the moment war was declared, Argentine pilots hung rosaries round their sights before shooting their missiles at the British Task Force. Bits of Harrier jets were dedicated to another icon, the Virgin of Lujan, soldiers carried bibles to protect themselves from bullets, and military chaplains broadcast regularly to the Argentine mainland proclaiming their troops as heroes and martyrs.

Among the few Argentine dissidents to speak out was the author Jorge Luis Borges. He described Britain and Argentina fighting over a group of remote islands in the South Atlantic as being like “two bald men fighting over a comb”. Other critics, such as the human rights organisation the Mothers of May, received death threats from the junta and were accused of betraying the Argentine nation. The Mothers, parents of the thousands of Argentines who had disappeared following the 1976 coup, went on demonstrating regardless, issuing a statement at the height of the war which aimed to remind their fellow countrymen of the importance of memory: “The Malvinas are Argentine and so are the disappeared,” it said.

In 74 days the islands were liberated by the British, much to the joy of the local inhabitants. The war had cost the deaths of 255 British and 746 Argentine military, as well of three islanders, killed by ‘friendly fire’. In Buenos Aires there were riots at the gates of the presidential palace, before the military regime of General Galtieri was forced out of power, paving the way for a democratically elected government.

Reflections on a British conflict that ended honourably

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Reflections on a British conflict that ended honourably

Published: March 29 2007

On April 2 1982, Argentina’s military regime, responsible for the murder of more than 9,000 “disappeared”, invoked a 150-year old territorial claim and occupied the British-administered Falkland Islands.

Margaret Thatcher’s government had ignored the warning signs of imminent Argentine military action. But once this had taken place, prime minister Thatcher acted with extraordinary resolve in defending the right to self-determination by the 1,200 islanders who wished to be British. The biggest naval task force since the second world war, with 20,000 ground troops and naval and air personnel, was sent 8,000 miles from home. In 74 days, the islands were liberated. Twenty-five years on, it is too easy to look back on the Falklands conflict as the last battle-cry of British imperialism which, combined with the self-delusion of a corrupt military regime, turned an avoidable diplomatic crisis into an unnecessary war over islands that had no political, strategic or economic interest.

From another perspective, as one Falklands veteran put it to me, it was a cleanly defined war by a Nato partner against a rogue state in the potentially oil-rich waters of the south Atlantic that had a “beginning, a middle, an end and a positive outcome”. The British decision to force a withdrawal of the Argentine military from the islands was rooted in the argument – accepted by democratic nations worldwide – that a de facto British territory had been attacked. There was, therefore, a prima facie right to a military response under Article 51 of the United Nations charter, which provided for the “inherent right of individual and collective self-defence if armed attack occurs”. British troops landed on the islands with full UN support behind them.

Given the issues at stake, it was a remarkably contained war in terms of lives lost: 255 British and 746 Argentine military. That only three islanders were killed underlined the fact that both sides generally fought within the spirit and intentions of humanitarian law. Yet it was the last war not subject to immediate scrutiny. Twenty-four-hour and internet-based “real time” news was yet to come. Nevertheless, the sinking of an Argentine battle-cruiser, the General Belgrano, by a conventional torpedo from a British nuclear submarine and the devastating impact on British/Nato ships of Exocet missiles underlined both the effectiveness and the human cost of technological warfare. The sending of more than 1,000 men to their deaths to enable 1,200 British citizens to keep the government of their choice raised an issue of proportionality.

On balance, Britain won an honourable victory. Faith in the British military was rekindled, paving the way for their participation in the Gulf, the Balkans and later Afghanistan and Iraq under multiple flags. Mrs, now Lady, Thatcher’s position as prime minister was reinforced, while Argentina’s military junta collapsed, paving the way for new democracies across Latin America. The islanders, lest we forget them, emerged from the war with new investment and their rights to self-determination guaranteed by a more caring colonial master.

The lessons of principle emerging from the Falklands war outlasted its main protagonists, even if the new world order emerging from the end of the cold war struggled to reconcile security, freedom and minority rights.

Later this summer, the 25th anniversary of the British Falklands campaign will be marked by pomp and circumstance in London. Tony Blair, prime minister, has said that he would have done the same thing in Margaret Thatcher’s shoes because it was the “right thing to do”.

The fact is that when the Falklands war broke out, a younger Mr Blair was equivocal, suggesting the need for compromise that did not necessarily give priority to the wishes of the islanders. As Mr Blair’s biographer John Rentoul later remarked: “His balanced position looked anaemic both against Thatcher’s ‘we fought to show that aggression does not pay’ and against the moral absolutism Mr Blair first asserted as prime minister in Kosovo.”

Mr Blair’s latest tribute to Lady Thatcher – “the war took a lot of courage” – had his own legacy in mind, hoping to be remembered as another prime minister who took risks not because they were popular but because they were right. Sadly for Mr Blair, this 25th anniversary follows the fourth anniversary of a war in Iraq more lamented than celebrated.

Argentina puts Its Former Leaders In The Dock

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Argentina puts Its Former Leaders In The Dock

19 April 1985

'This is a political trial in which the outcome is already known. The accused will be condenmed not because they are the most guilty but because it is a political necessity.'

Thus a prominent local lawyer describes the trial, beginning on Monday, of former Presidents Jorge Videla, Roberto Viola and Leopoldo Galtieri, three admirals, and three brigadier generals who formed the military Juntas which ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1982.

The trial will be a court matial. The charges are of illegal detention, torture, robbery, murder, breaking and entry, and falsification of public documents. The defendants' are facing sentences of 25 years to life.

The trial's political ramifications appear limitless. Prosecution witnesses will include relatives and junior officers, but evidence will also be provided by such foreign governments as France, Sweden and the US, which have been closely involved with Argentine human rights.

The defence, meanwhile, will produce tape recordings exposing the collaboration of politicions, bishops, trade unionists and newspaper editors. It will also point to the activity of Dr Julio Strassera, the main prosecutor, as a judge during the former military regime when, like most of his profession, he refused to investigate cases of alledged disappearances.

If the trial had to do only with procedures, there is little doubt that it would run as speedily as other courts martial, and as certain of fair judgement as any other case going before the courts.
However, for the first time in Argentine history, the court martial's six-man jury will comprise not military men but civilians. Those in the dock, moreover, belong to a sector of Argentine society which has enjoyed virtually unassailable status since the 1930 military coup first entrenched the armed forces in politics.

The fact that senior members of the armed forces are being prosecuted on charges previously applied only to civilians hints at the heart of the matter. The upcoming trial will undoubtedly highlight two completely different concepts of Argentine society.

For the upholders of democracy, the Juntas are responsible for having ordered and approved the repression that led to the 'disappearance' of over 8,000 Argentines following the 1976 coup. They say that, in their disregard for life and property, and their convition that the end justified the means, the Juntas behaved like common criminals or terrorists and thus deserve to be punished accordingly.
The military and civilian right-wing extremists believe the Juntas behaved like true patriots, defending Western, Christian values from the threat of Marxist revolution by veiled anti-Christs posing as terrorists. They insist that it was they, not President Paul Alfonsin, who ensured an eventual return to democratic rule.

These opposing concepts first entered public debate in Argentina thanks to President Alfonsin's election victory in December 1983. Sr Alfonson, himself an active human rights campaigner during the military regime, took less than a week to set in motion one of his key electoral pledges by ordering the court martial of the Juntas. He subsequently endorsed the Sabato Commissions official investigation into the fate of the 'desaperecidos,' those who vanished, presumed killed, during the Junta's rule.
The President was conscious of the need to curb demands for vengeance and to deal with the military in a way which would not provoke serious unrest. But he miscalculated in believing that the Falklands debacle and his own convincing election victory would nudge the military towards an early public act of contrition.

The divide between those who condemn the Juntas and those convinced that the nation is in the military's debt, has become more acute in recent weeks. On Wednesday, the ruling Radical Party took the unprecedented step of publishing a full-page communique in all the national newspapers denouncing an alleged campaign of destabilisation.

Dr Strassera has vehemently denied that he wants to turn the court into a political theatre, but his public outbursts against the Juntas have earned him little respect as a professional seeker after objective truth and justice. The defence has similary expressed its conviction that the trials have no real legal basis, charging the Government and its 'left-wing allies' for having the case brought at all.
Dr Strassera plans to concentrate on 700 cases - a cross-section of the 8,000-odd already processed by the Sabato Commission, human rights groups and civilian courts. They represent Argentina both geographically and socially, with victims ranging from journalists to priests, from the Andes to Tierra del Fuego.

Dr Strassera admits he has no specific evidence that the Juntas actually ordered, let alone participated in, torture, looting, and murder. But he will agrue that the coincidence of the cases presented with decrees ordering the stamping out of 'subversion' makes the former military leaders responsible.
The defence will present captured pamphlets and confessions suggesting that politically motivated violence both before and after the coup was promoted as part of a conscious attempt by international terrorism to subvert Western democracies.

Government officials insist that the fact that Monday's trial is taking place shows the extent to which Argentine society has changed. Not only are civilians acting out their atonement, but the military high command is allowing them to do so.

This, however, understates the complexity of the matter. The military chiefs, whom the Government likes to consider politically moderate, appear to have accepted to trial less out of conviction than out of political expediency.

They have reluctantly accepted that the Juntas are necessary scapegoats if the human rights issue is to be defused. Neither the present chiefs nor the more hardline junior officers seem to be any nearer to accepting that what occurred after 1976 was morally wrong. On the contrary, they expect President Alfonsin to desist from futher show trials against an estimated 600 other officers whom human rights groups claim should also bear responsibility.

Monday's trial may yet turn out to be one of the most severe judgements of any society since Nuremburg. It is unlikely to be as conclusive, but it is as politically crucial, none the less.