The Great Game

I started reading Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad by Gordon Thomas but gave up on it. I'd become too depressed by the relentless scheming, deception and treachery employed not just by Mossad but by the intelligence agencies in general. High functioning psychopaths are understandably attracted to work as agents. This article from The New Yorker provides a chilling insight into the extent to which undercover British police have gone in their attempts to infiltrate groups that are identified as hostile to the state. The article details how a British cop slept with four women while undercover, having a long term relationship with two of the women and fathering a child with one. Here is an excerpt:

Last year, after several of the women spoke publicly of their experiences, Bob gave a televised interview to Britain’s Channel 4. He admitted to having slept with a total of four women while undercover. He answered questions in a calm, didactic tone. His affectlessness was confounding—it was difficult to tell whether it sprang from remorse and a desire to accept whatever punishment was due or from a profound lack of empathy. 

It was probably "a profound lack of empathy". Bob is a psychopath. The lesson to be drawn from all of this is that the intelligence agencies continue their attempts to infiltrate supposedly dangerous organisations and damage innocent individuals in the process. To quote again from the article:

The emotional compasses of many of the women have been permanently disoriented by the knowledge that they were unwittingly drawn to undercover spies. While the Met commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe has acknowledged that sexual relationships between undercover officers and citizens are inappropriate, the department has fought in court to have the tactic upheld as legal. 

Bob had been trying to infiltrate two sinister organisations: London Greenpeace and the animals rights movement. Nowadays, the primary focus is radical Islamist groups. Salman Abedi, the Manchester bomber, was known to intelligence services "up to a point". He had been reported to authorities five times during the past five years. To quote from The Telegraph:

The Manchester suicide bomber was repeatedly flagged to the authorities over his extremist views, but was not stopped by officers, it emerged Wednesday night. Counter Terrorism agencies were facing questions after it emerged Salman Abedi told friends that “being a suicide bomber was okay”, prompting them to call the Government’s anti-terrorism hotline. Sources suggest that authorities were informed of the danger posed by Abedi on at least five separate occasions in the five years prior to the attack on Monday night.  

Any radical Islamist group planning to launch suicide bomb attacks would most likely NOT have approached Salman Abedi precisely because of his publicly outspoken views. Agents in the intelligence community however, would have been attracted to him instantly. Here was a likely patsy that could be exploited at the appropriate time if the situation warranted it. Is it possible that Salman was approached by an agent years ago who pretended to be a jihadist, in the same way as psychopath Bob pretended to interested in animal liberation. This agent then became his handler and maintained contact with him over the years. Such handlers work alone, as psychopath Bob did, and would report directly to one person only, a superior. That person would in turn be accountable to another superior, high up in the chain of command. Only three people would know Salman had been hooked.

For his part, Salman would believe that his handler was a genuine jihadist with links to Al Qaeda, ISIS or the like. His handler would be sure to keep the flames of jihad burning in Salman so that he would not baulk when asked to make the ultimate sacrifice. So why would his handler turn Salman loose at the Manchester arena after supplying him with his bomb or seeing that he had the expertise to make one? Clearly he was told to do so by a superior who in turn was told to do so by a superior. The orders came from high up but why? Simply put: more chaos, more control.

The current British government has made no secret of its desire to exercise more control over its citizens. It wants encryption that it can crack, it wants an Internet that it can control, it wants to regulate what can be said online and everywhere else. It can only do this through fear. When citizens are fearful, they are more likely to agree to the abrogation of their freedoms. The suicide bomber is the perfect tool to generate this atmosphere of fear. He or she can strike anywhere and anytime. No one is safe unless the Government is given more control over every aspect of daily life. It needs to know what's being said in emails, on mobile phone networks, on chats, at the water cooler. In the interests of a safe society, privacy must be sacrificed and limits imposed on what type of information can be disseminated and received.

"Theresa May has declared without hesitation that she would order a nuclear strike to kill hundreds of thousands of people if she thought it was necessary", Source. It's not likely she would hesitate at the sacrifice of a mere 22 people at the Manchester Arena. To be fair, she might have had no idea that a suicide bombing was being orchestrated. She does not have her hands on the real levers of power. Like most politicians, she is a puppet and her strings are being pulled by her puppet masters whoever they might be. With an election looming and no possibility of a Government defeat however, the timing of the bombing could not have been more opportune.

Meanwhile, there are plenty more radical Islamists out there who are being primed by their handlers in the intelligence community for possible deployment. The problem is not radical Islam. The problem is the support and encouragement given to it by hypocritical Western governments who exploit it for their own ends. Israel's and the United State's demonstrated support for radical Islamic groups in the Middle East aims to break apart countries like Iraq and Syria so that they can pose no danger to Israel. Cultivation of individuals like Salman Abedi allow terror to be unleashed at will on a defenceless public in order to further political agendas like increased powers of surveillance and limitations on free speech.

Individuals like Salman Abedi, described as very gullible by some who knew him, are easily recruited and become valued assets of the intelligence community because they can be unleashed in terror attacks or set up as patsies to bear the blame when attacks of a more professional nature need to be carried out. This is the reason that such individuals are known "up to a point" by security agencies and why repeated warnings about their radicalism go unheeded. After being assigned their handlers, they become off-limits to the broader intelligence community and what is done with them afterwards is known to only a very few people within that community.

Somebody as young as the Manchester bomber could be rehabilitated but once the intelligence community has recruited the person, it is only intent on exploitation. This can only happen if the person's existing attitudes are reinforced and this is what is done over a period of months or years. It will be interesting to see, in Salman Adedi's case, if the alleged network of co-conspirators proves to be a reality. Most likely, Salman would have been encouraged to express his jihadist plans to others so that some might be drawn in and later targeted as belonging to a quasi-network of co-conspirators. Such a scenario seems unbelievable and there's no hard evidence to support it, nor is any likely to emerge. In any country, it is to be hoped that the government agencies charged with protecting the citizenry from terror attacks are serious about doing so. But what if they're not? What if they are following a completely different agenda?

Once the publicly stated agenda is queried, there are two responses: one is to dismiss the possibility of an alternative agenda as outrageous, the second is to concede that such an alternative agenda might exist. Reading a book like "Gideon's Spies" inclines one toward a response of the second type. While hard evidence may be lacking, incidents like the Manchester Arena bombing conform to a pattern characterised by:

• a drill simulating a similar type of attack precedes the real attack or may even occur at the same time (with Manchester, a simulation was carried out a month earlier)
• the suspect being known to the intelligence community but not being deemed a high risk (Salman had been reported five times in five years to the authorities but this failed to raise a red flag)
• a lack of video coverage of the actual event or any video coverage being quickly confiscated (in Manchester, there seems very little in the way of photographs or video of the actual bomb epicentre; the police did release supposed CCTV images but the backgrounds were completely blacked out to allegedly protect the identities of people in his vicinity)
• odd coincidences (Drake performing "Gyalchester" the night before the attack at the Music Billboard Awards)
• prominence of certain numbers (the attack took place at 22:35 on the 22nd of May and the attacker was 22 years old): 11 and multiples of 11 are popular)

The more such terror events are studied, the more one accepts that intelligence agencies have a hidden agenda that overrides the publicly stated one and that this agenda is not necessarily shared with the politicians who are in power at the time.