Web Of Deceit: Britain's Real Foreign Policy

by Mark Curtis

  It is clear that the ‘war against terrorism’ is a key part of promoting traditional US foreign policy aims. Its goal is to achieve through military and political intervention what global economic ‘liberalisation’ (see chapter 9) aims to achieve through economic policy – continued US supremacy in the global system, intended to benefit US elites, transnational businesses and allies closest to the US.

  The primary threats to be countered in this strategy are independent forces acting as barriers to US domination. These are mainly radical Islamic groups and enemy governments, in the case of the ‘war against terrorism’; states pursuing economic strategies independently of the US and the multilateral institutions, in the case of the ‘global liberalisation’ project; and also the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement that is mobilising public opinion towards alternatives in the global economy.

  This strategy is all very dangerous, in my view. The ‘war against terrorism’ is already creating new enemies, making the world a more insecure place, and curbing our own rights in democratic societies. And it is a myth that increases in military spending make us more secure; the opposite is the case. As one British Ministry of Defence official has noted, it is ‘because of Western conventional dominance that state adversaries will use unconventional means’.38

  The US and Britain helped to create the globalisation of terrorism in the first place, by funding and training a generation of fighters for action in Afghanistan. The current priorities in US and British foreign policy are surely creating their own future monsters.

  A British parliamentary committee recently noted that ‘the sources of instability that affect our fundamental interests … are often driven more by how we, our allies and partners, choose to react to particular crises, rather than the crises themselves’.39 The major threats to us, the public, come more from our own policy-makers than from the official threat.

  The other face of terrorism

  Huge media attention is being paid to the Al Qaida network and other terrorist groups and their gruesome deeds. But there is one category of terrorism that is excluded from this debate. There is a much simpler way of countering some terrorism, at least, and that is by changing policy closer to home. If we were honest and serious, this is where the ‘war against terrorism’ might begin.

  During the onslaught against Afghanistan, Britain’s Chief of Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, said that the bombing will continue ‘until the people of the country themselves recognise that this is going to go on until they get the leadership changed’. Boyce was echoing Tony Blair during the Kosovo war. Two weeks into the bombing of Yugoslavia in April 1999, Blair said that ‘we will carry on pounding day after day after day, until our objectives are secured’.40

  These comments in two wars fit very well with the British government’s definition of terrorism:

  Terrorism is the use, or threat, of action which is violent, damaging or disrupting and is intended to influence the government or intimidate the public and is for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause.41

  The recent onslaught against Afghanistan, together with the previous strikes against that country and Sudan, and now the bombing of Iraq, shows that the recent phase of US and British global intervention, under the cover of a ‘war against terrorism’, is in effect involving a war of terrorism by those claiming to defend the highest values. There is nothing surprising in this. The US has a long history of practising terrorism and supporting states conducting it.

  US attacks against Nicaragua in the 1980s, condemned by the International Court of Justice, fall into this category, as does CIA training of contra guerillas in terrorist activities. The US currently harbours Cubans attacking Cuba and human rights abusers like Emmanuel Constant, the leader of paramilitary forces in Haiti responsible for thousands of murders in the early 1990s, whose extradition the US is refusing. The notorious US army training school in Fort Benning, Georgia, known best as the School of the Americas, trained dozens of Latin American military officers who went on to become their countries’ worst killers. US training of the mojahidin in a variety of assassination techniques was noted in the previous chapter.

  One of the major terrorist acts of the 1980s was the car bombing in Beirut in March 1985. The bomb was placed outside a mosque timed to explode when worshippers left, and was aimed at killing Sheikh Fadlallah, the Shia leader accused of complicity in terrorism. Around eighty people were killed, including women and children, and over two hundred wounded, while Fadlallah escaped. The bombing was organised by the CIA and Saudi agents with the assistance of Britain’s MI6.42

  The idea that Britain is a supporter of terrorism is an oxymoron in the mainstream political culture, as ridiculous as suggesting that Tony Blair should be indicted for war crimes. Yet state-sponsored terrorism is by far the most serious category of terrorism in the world today, responsible for far more deaths in many more countries than the ‘private’ terrorism of groups like Al Qaida. Many of the worst offenders are key British allies. Indeed, by any rational consideration, Britain is one of the leading supporters of terrorism in the world today. But this simple fact is never mentioned in the mainstream political culture. The official ‘war against terrorism’ is being framed according to elite priorities, excluding a large chunk of reality from public awareness.

  I consider state-sponsored atrocities backed by Britain in several chapters in this book. They include Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, all of whom have escaped significant international censure partly due to British protection of them. Russia – an extraordinarily close British ally under Putin – is worthy of particular note, given not only its gross brutality in Chechnya but also the evidence that its security forces may have been involved in bombing apartment blocks in Moscow, as noted in chapter 7. There is a litany of further examples of past British support for the world’s very worst regimes. For example, Britain was happy to count Iraq under Saddam and Iran under the Shah as allies in the 1980s while they assassinated political opponents in the West, including in Britain itself, not to mention British support for Baghdad during the atrocities committed against Kurds in northern Iraq.

  Britain has also traditionally been the chief apologist for US terrorism around the world. As outlined in the next chapter, Britain consistently supported US violence against Nicaragua and also, contrary to myth, largely in Vietnam. London also offered reflexive support to the US raid on Libya in 1986 as easily as it did for the US strikes against Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998, all acts of terrorism under most definitions of the term.

  Further, a long history has been buried. British government involvement in assassinating foreign leaders is virtually an elite tradition. The best-known assassination attempts were against Egyptian president Nasser in the mid-1950s, an independent nationalist regime that threatened British power in the Middle East. In one attempt, MI6 injected poison into chocolates destined for Nasser, but they failed in the end to reach him. Nerve gas, an SAS hit squad and firing a poisoned dart from a cigarette packet were considered but either rejected or stalled.

  There is also evidence that MI6 planned the assassinations of Indonesian president Sukarno in the 1950s, Ugandan president Milton Obote in 1969, Albanian President Enver Hoxha in 1948 and Cypriot guerilla leader Colonel Grivas in the late 1950s. According to Kenneth Younger, a Foreign Office minister in the Attlee government and a former senior MI5 officer, Britain also gave serious thought to assassinating the Mufti of Jerusalem and Indian nationalist leader, Chandra Bose. These did not proceed to the planning stage because ‘nothing would be gained by making martyrs of such people’.43

  In 1998, Archbishop Desmond Tutu revealed recently uncovered letters from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission that implicated British, US and South African agents in the death of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold in 1961. Hammarskjold died when his plane exploded before landing in Rhodesia on a trip to mediate a peace agreement between Congo and the breakaway province of Katanga. The let
ters described meetings between MI5, the CIA and a South African military front company and plans to place TNT in the wheel bay of the aircraft.44

  Former MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson, revealed that MI6 also planned an assassination attempt against Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic. Conceived in 1992, MI6 put forward three options in a paper entitled ‘The need to assassinate President Milosevic of Serbia’. These were: to train a Serbian paramilitary group to carry out the assassination; to send in an SAS team to kill him with a bomb or sniper ambush; or to kill him in a road crash to be staged during a visit to Geneva, such as by disorienting Milosevic’s chauffeur using a blinding strobe light as the cavalcade passed through one of Geneva’s motorway tunnels. It appears that the plan was not carried out. As noted in chapter 6, NATO aircraft specifically targeted Milosevic for assassination during the Kosovo war.45

  Britain set up pseudo-terrorist ‘counter gangs’ in Palestine in the 1940s and Aden in the 1960s, consisting of former terrorists and loyal tribesmen (in the case of Aden) led by British officers disguised as locals. They were sent out in twos and threes to target those suspected of terrorism against British and local targets. In Palestine the squads were given a free hand to kill Jewish terrorists seeking an end to British rule and were ‘able to adopt methods close to those adopted by the Jewish terrorists, but such methods quickly became a political embarrassment’, Stephen Dorril notes. In the mid 1960s, an MI6 officer noted that his organisation was helping to train local security services in the Middle East to detect threats to their regimes and arranging where required their ‘neutralisation’ by ‘surrogates’. ‘Killer squads’ were also used in the colonial war in Malaya.46

  Former SAS officers have also conducted terrorism. Veterans often maintain contact with the government and unofficially promote British policy, as when former SAS officers trained the Afghan mojahidin with the clearance of the Foreign Office. As one SAS officer once noted, the SAS is ‘the only agency whose job is to go out and zap people’. In the 1950s and 1960s, many former SAS officers were recruited by the racist Rhodesian regime’s Central Intelligence Organisation. Some ran a campaign of bombings and assassinations in Zambia against Rhodesian nationalists in the 1970s, including assassination attempts on Robert Mugabe.47

  The London connection

  The media’s burying of the past and present British role in supporting terrorism is all the more amazing in the light of recent revelations about Libya and Northern Ireland.

  Former MI5 officer David Shayler first alleged in 1998 that there was British support for an assassination attempt against Colonel Qadafi. Then, in February 2000, a secret MI6 cable was leaked and published on the internet. The cable, dated December 1995, revealed MI6’s knowledge of an attempt to overthrow Qadafi in a coup scheduled for February 1996. ‘The coup plotters would launch a direct attack on Qadafi and would either arrest him or kill him’, the cable stated. ‘One officer and twenty men were being trained especially for this attack’ while the coup plotters had obtained 250 British pistols. ‘The coup plotters expected to establish control of Libya at the end of March 1996’, they would form an interim government and ‘would want rapprochement with the West’.

  The cable also recognised that the coup plotters ‘had some limited contact with the fundamentalists, whom a military officer described as a mix of Libyan veterans who served in Afghanistan and Libyan students’. The leader of the coup plotters was Abdal Muhaymeen, ‘a veteran of the Afghan resistance who was possibly trained by MI6 or the CIA’, Dorril comments. A recent book by two French authors, Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth, claims that MI6 was in contact with ‘Osama Bin Laden’s main allies’ in the plot.48

  This coup plot went ahead, but failed to kill Qadafi, instead killing six innocent bystanders. Shayler asserts that the coup plotters were funded by MI6. He states that:

  We need to know how around £100,000 of taxpayers’ money was used to fund the sort of Islamic extremists who have connections to Osama Bin Laden’s al Qaida network … By the time MI6 paid the group in late 1995 or early 1996, US investigators had already established that Bin Laden was implicated in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Given the timing and the close connections between Libyan and Egyptian Islamic extremists, it may even have been used to fund the murder of British citizens in Luxor, Egypt, in 1996.49

  The British establishment has naturally denied all involvement in the coup/assassination. Robin Cook said that the story was ‘pure fantasy’. But the Metropolitan Police appear to believe otherwise, and began an investigation into the case, presumably believing there was sufficient prima facie evidence. Meanwhile, Shayler has been hounded by the authorities and arrested while newspapers have been ordered by the government to hand over any material they have in relation to him.

  Media coverage has been minimal given both the seriousness of the issue and that we are supposedly in the midst of a ‘war against terrorism’. There was a BBC Panorama programme on the Qadafi plot and a spattering of press articles at specific times in 2000 and again in 2002, surrounding Shayler’s court case. Aside from this, the story rarely surfaces and is simply never mentioned in the numerous articles on the ‘war against terrorism’. I searched the parliament database to see if our elected representatives were interested in whether the government had engaged in terrorism, and found just four mentions of the plot to kill Qadafi – all in February 2000, when the leaked MI6 cable was revealed; nothing since.

  Perhaps MPs could look at a speech in the House of Commons by Foreign Office minister Ben Bradshaw in March 2002. He said that ‘there is no moral distinction between an attacker who kills civilians or parliamentarians and a state that wittingly provides the resources that facilitate such a terrorist attack’.50 Quite right, and what could this possibly have to do with Britain?

  Neither have journalists and parliamentarians allowed British involvement in assassinations in Northern Ireland to upset the view that Britain is purely devoted to fighting terrorism. There is a long history of British collusion with loyalist paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland engaging in ‘targeted assassinations’ of suspected IRA members. ‘What we need to do is to use the methods the terrorists use in order to overcome [the IRA]’, Northern Ireland Secretary James Prior said in 1981.51

  The European Court of Justice ruled in May 2001 that Britain had violated ‘the right to life’ of eleven people killed by security forces and one person killed by a paramilitary group between 1982 and 1992. More revelations about the security forces’ involvement in the murder of Belfast lawyer Pat Finucane emerged in the months following September 11th. The British army’s Force Research Unit, the centre of covert collusion with paramilitary groups, is suspected of involvement in up to fifteen murders. These are the modern variants of the British death squads operating in Ireland during the Irish War of Independence. Then, police and soldiers in plain clothes were used to assassinate members and sympathisers of Sinn Fein.52

  If Britain were currently serious about countering terrorism, perhaps it might also have arrested Henry Kissinger while he was visiting Britain in April 2002. French and Spanish judges were asking the British government to allow them to question Kissinger about his role in crimes against humanity in Chile under the Pinochet regime. The government declined. Amnesty International notes that ‘as well as being a violation of the UK’s obligation under the European Convention [on Human Rights], the reported refusal by the Home Office to cooperate with the French and Spanish authorities is inconsistent with its obligations under general principles of law’ recognised by the UN.53

  The Kissinger issue is perhaps a small indication of the government’s strong commitment to avoid fighting terrorism when conducted by our allies. It also highlights the special relationship between London and Washington, to which we now turn.

  4

  BIG BROTHER, OUR FAVOURITE ALLY

  The world should be grateful that the most powerful nation in all history wields its military and economic might so benignly.


  The Financial Times, 30 December 2000

  BRITISH ELITES HAVE many special relationships, often with brutal regimes like those in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Indonesia. Under Blair, London has also cultivated a markedly special relationship with Russia. Common among these relationships is British support for repressive ruling elites and effective backing for their crushing of internal dissent, through arms exports, trade relations, diplomatic support and apologias for human rights abuses. With the US, however, the special relationship with Britain is different in its core and defining principle.

  The essence of this special relationship is British support for US aggression. It dates back to the end of the Second World War when British planners recognised their role of ‘junior partner in an orbit of power predominantly under American aegis’.1 The ‘junior partner’ role was adopted by British elites as a way of preserving some ‘great power’ status and of organising the global economy according to Western interests. The most recent phase under Blair shows the essence of the relationship to be not only alive and well but reaching new, quite extraordinary, depths.

  The Washington–London axis is not only special to the two elites; it has been a pillar of world ‘order’ for over five decades. The two leading Western powers have, since 1945, colluded to shape the global economy and much of international affairs to their interests. The US has clearly led the strategy, which in the early postwar years meant replacing British power with its own, notably in the Middle East; the relationship has been a competitive as well as a collaborative one.

  The British role in helping to shape world order according to US power – essentially imperial power – is usually underestimated. It is Britain that plays the secondary role in supporting the family elites in the Gulf states, which maintains the traditional Middle East order and the global oil regime. It is Britain that is the loudest voice for promoting and deepening economic ‘liberalisation’ in the global economy, in order to benefit Western (in fact, primarily US and British) businesses. And it is Britain that often plays a secondary role to the US in shaping the parameters of action of the UN Security Council. Britain’s role should not be overstated and its world influence has certainly declined over the past decades, but in these key ways Britain’s foreign policies remain important to shaping the global order, essentially in alliance with the US.