05 October 2021 13:56
In a bygone era, they asked me to write a television series about the world secret services. I refused in no uncertain terms. Mainly because I had the feeling that the whole intelligence world was actually hiding a lot of things. The next thirty years have only confirmed that judgment.
Today a prime example is the recent revelations about the Central intelligence agency (CIA) of the United States. In 2017, the CIA apparently toyed with the idea of kidnapping or killing Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeakes, in his shelter at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
WikiLeaks embarrassed the CIA in 2010 when it posted a large number of secret US documents relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan online. Fearing extradition to the United States, Assange (who is an Australian citizen) had sought asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012.
The intentions became more serious in 2017, when Donald Trump became president of the United States and named Mike Pompeo head of the CIA. Pompeo was quickly convinced that the Russians would try to move Assange out of the UK to have him at their disposal.
The similarities with Khashoggi’s murder
For this reason the CIA was prepared to anticipate the Russians, with the idea of kidnapping Assange from the embassy and taking him to the United States or, if that didn’t work, to kill him. Emergency plans were also discussed to neutralize a possible Russian attempt to make Assange escape, by attacking the vehicle used for the escape, shooting at the tires of the plane used for the escape or, again, killing him.
The Russians had realized all these plans and had begun to activate their men in the surroundings of the embassy. “Comical is an understatement,” said a former senior Trump administration official. “We had gotten to the point where every human being within three blocks (of the embassy) was working for some intelligence service: they could be garbage collectors, police officers or security officers.”
The real point of the matter is that none of Assange’s revelations have harmed anyone
Comic and unlikely, but this is probably how the plan to kidnap or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Riyadh consulate in Istanbul, the city where he was in voluntary exile, was conceived. At least the senior officials surrounding Trump proved grown-up enough to realize the insanity of the idea and abandon it. The same did not happen for Muhammad bin Salman’s collaborators.
Then the government changed in Ecuador and, in 2019, Assange was expelled from the London embassy and then made the subject of an extradition request from the United States. A British court rejected the petition in early 2021, but Assange remains in prison, pending the outcome of the US appeal.
In exile and in prison
But the real point of the matter is that none of Assange’s revelations harmed anyone, and many of them were sacrosanct, such as those about war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and government surveillance of tens of millions of US citizens. The CIA did all of this in secret. Simply because it was free to do so, not because it was necessary or justifiable.
These behaviors are not only typical of US intelligence agencies, of course, and they don’t always think about killing those who reveal their precious secrets. For this reason, the Israeli Mordechai Vanunu, who confirmed the existence of Israeli nuclear weapons in 1986, was simply kidnapped in Italy and imprisoned in Israel for 18 years (eleven of which were spent in strict isolation).
Vanunu’s revelations changed nothing: everyone already knew that Israel possessed nuclear weapons, although it will never confirm this publicly. Thirty-five years after his kidnapping, however, Vanunu is still not allowed to leave Israel. If he spoke to foreigners, he would be arrested, and sometimes he ends up in a cell for a few months.
And then there’s Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee who revealed vast amounts of information about the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) global surveillance programs in 2013. Revealing that Washington was hacking the phones of allied foreign leaders, such as Germany’s Angela Merkel, was the right thing to do. But Snowden will never be able to return to his country again.
The US government trapped him in Moscow, canceling his passport while he was traveling from Hong Kong to Latin America, where he had applied for political asylum. Eight years later he is still stuck in Russia. His partner joined him in Moscow in 2014 and today the two are married and have a three-year-old son. But returning to his country would mean life in prison for Snowden. The punishments never end.
These people are not “helping terrorists” or betraying their countries. The “intelligence services” (the old expression “secret services” was less misleading) spontaneously generate bureaucratic empires and do not stop expanding their scope, because that is what bureaucracies do. They may be useful in times of war. But what they do in peacetime is, for the vast majority, useless.
In 1990, when the Cold War was about to end, I only suspected it. Now the thing is a blinding truth. All of the above cases are victimless “crimes”, where information that should have been known – about the illegal, counterproductive and even criminal behavior of states – has finally been revealed. And in which, then, the intelligence services ruthlessly persecute the deep throats. To scare others and force them to silence.
(Translation by Federico Ferrone)
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