Analysis: Pakistan’s former spy chief sees wider geopolitical games in region
January 5, 2009 Leave a comment
Hamid Gul
Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, the controversial former Director General of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), has expressed the view that Pakistan’s nuclear disarmament is the ultimate aim of the US-Indian alliance. Speaking to reporters in Islamabad, Gul said India’s insistence on charging the ISI with complicity in the 2008 Mumbai attack is “part of a greater conspiracy to discredit the body for being an extension of the Pakistan Army” and eventually questioning the latter’s role as guardian of the country’s nuclear arsenal. “Once the Army and the ISI are demolished [the US and India] will reach out to our nuclear capability saying it is not is safe hands”, said the retired Lieutenant General. In discussing the increasing military and political collaboration between the US and India, Gul noted that “the Americans and Israel [are] hell-bent that India should be given pre-eminence in the region”, acting as the dominant regional power. He described such a scenario as essentially positioning India to the role of overseer of “60 per cent of the world’s trade [which] passes through the Indian Ocean”, including transport routes of “Gulf oil, bound for China and Japan, [which] will be under the shadow of India’s sole nuclear power”. Read more of this post
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Analysis: Former GCHQ director co-authors paper on training analysts
January 10, 2009 by intelNews Leave a comment
Sir Omand
By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
It is not often that a former Director of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Britain’s primary signals intelligence agency, publicly expresses his or her views on intelligence analysis. Yet this is precisely what Sir David B. Omand, GCB –GCHQ Director from 1996 to 1997– has done, by co-authoring a paper for the latest issue of the CIA’s partly declassified journal, Studies in Intelligence. The paper, which Sir Omand co-wrote with King College’s Dr. Michael Goodman, is titled “What Analysts Need to Understand”. It details the ongoing “innovative” revisions currently being implemented in the training of British intelligence analysts, following the 2003 fiasco over Iraq’s purported “weapons of mass destruction”. The analysis, which, among other things, quotes Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (!), focuses on the difficulty of teaching methods to develop the analysts’ “strong professional instincts”. It further points to intelligence analyst trainees’ “exposure to a variety of critical views, including the unorthodox”. The article doesn’t explain whether such “unorthodox” and “critical views” include those of Katharine T. Gun, the former GCHQ employee who in 2003 voluntarily exposed GCHQ’s collaboration with its US counterpart, the National Security Agency, to illegally bug the United Nations offices of Angola, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Chile, Guinea, and Pakistan. By diabolical coincidence, the UN representations of the above six countries had failed to be won over by American and British arguments in support of the invasion of Iraq. Gun was summarily fired by GCHQ and charged under the UK Official Secrets Act (charges were eventually dropped after she threatened to reveal even more information about the case). So much for exposure to “unorthodox views” over at GCHQ.
Filed under Expert news and commentary on intelligence, espionage, spies and spying Tagged with 2003 UN bugging scandal, Analysis, GCHQ, intelligence analysis, intelligence training, Katharine Gun, Michael Goodman, NSA, Official Secrets Act (UK), Sir David Omand, UK