Bill Sykes' Newsletter
from America.
(February 2005)
An ex-Brit gives his views - (without
fear or favor) - of the American Scene
Intelligence,
or lack of intelligence:
 The
United States Intelligence community has taken a beating
since the eleventh of September 2001 terrorist actions
upon American soil and many senior members have departed
the fold - but in all fairness the Central Intelligence
Agency’s ability to gather on-the-ground information
has been hampered by budget cuts, restrictions, and the
close to the vest desire to retain information that possibly
should have been shared with other members of the intelligence
community.
Of course the CIA is not the only intelligence agency
operating internally and externally under United States
financing, and it has been reported that the boundaries
of power have become somewhat blurred and in a number
of instances the competitive establishments have overlapped
to such an extent that the ability of several intelligence
gathering operators, working in apparent competition
with each other, has been impaired and severely curtailed
by the generation of smokescreen misinformation.
 It has been reported that secret United States Special
Forces units, operating out of the Pentagon since 2002,
under the direct command of the Secretary of Defence
Donald Rumsfeld, have infiltrated the Sovereign Nation
of Iran to seek out strategic targets should the United
States contemplate going to war with Iran to prevent,
in their words, nuclear proliferation.
Iran states that their nuclear work is associated with power station systems
and is not applicable to the development of nuclear missile weapon systems.
Vice President Cheney stated that he places Iran at
the top of his list of world trouble spots. I wonder
if the Vice President thinks that he knows something
that the rest of the world does not know.
Attempts by Congress to place several intelligence gathering
operations under one directorship met with opposition
from several sources and to my knowledge the proposal
has never fully been implemented, and I cannot remember
if it has been disclosed as to whether the accepted Intelligence
Tsar was given the authority needed to integrate and
control the Intelligence community. A further  issue providing
what some consider to be a possible answer to waging
outright war surfaced in a recent report published by
media sources suggesting that so-called United States
Death Squads, some of them utilising executive type jet
aircraft made available to deep cover operatives, have
been formed and are operating clandestinely in several
parts of the world under an authorization covered by
a Presidential finding.
Comments:
All secret service agencies have their problems, and
today’s cloak and
dagger American spooks are no exception, even if they have the latest advanced
electronic surveillance technology and equipment, but looking back in retrospect
 to the late 1940s and early 1950s they are not alone as I seem to remember
that in those days so long ago that the British Security
Service MI5, (which handled internal affairs), and
MI6, (which handled foreign intelligence), had their
problems. Two specific highly publicised embarrassing
incidents come to mind, one involving Messrs, Philby,
Burgess, Maclean, Blunt and Blake, (who British intelligence
services recruited from top British educational establishments), went astray
and defected to Russia and became associated with the KGB.
I’ve never
yet been able to reconcile in my mind as to whether this was a defection, or
a very clever deception and infiltration tactic. Then there was the internal
political scandal in 1963 when the Secretary of War, British Conservative Cabinet
Minister John Profumo, had a relationship with a showgirl named Christine Keeler
- who at the time was also involved with Russian attaché Yevgeny "Eugene"
Ivanov. The Secretary claimed that there was no impropriety in the relationship
but later admitted that he had misled the House of Commons and resigned.
Could the so-called "Death Squads" title
mentioned previously be misconstrued to mean "Assassination
Squads", where the United States
could remove whomsoever they consider to be an undesirable head of state
and try to avoid the expense and loss of life in declaring
an all out war. If that is the case, then one must remember
what happened when Arch-Duke Ferdinand was assassinated
just prior to World War One, and of course on a different
note  nearer to home the removal of Saddam Hussein from
his despotic regime of power in Iraq doesn’t appear
to have made the slightest difference and the killing
of Iraqi civilians continued as though he had never existed.
I don’t know if there is any degree of accuracy to this story, (and in
general I’m loath to report on items which I cannot confirm), but obviously
I or the rest of the people in this world not privy to such information will
never know if this information is for real or just a figment of some ones imagination.
We welcome feedback about any of the contents of these
newsletters. Please send all correspondence to bill_sykes@huddersfield1.co.uk
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