Checking my stats, I discovered a major falloff in the last week or so in the percentage of people reaching this site through google. So I tried some google searches, and we seem to have almost vanished. This site used to appear, for example, on the front page for searches on “Uzbekistan” and the second for “Jack Straw”. It is now not on the first twenty or so pages. We only hit the front page on a very specific search, like “Craig Murray” or “Murder in Samarkand”. Broadly the same thing is true on Yahoo.

Yet a random check shows links to this site from other sites still working, and Technorati’s “Authority” ranking continues to mount, now to 499. This search engine drop does seem to have been caused by a sudden event, not a gradual decline. Can anybody offer an explanation?

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Found this on web. Photographer named Matt – hope you don’t mind my posting.

I am having a lot of communications problems lately. A number of conversations in the last three days led me to work out that, although I appear to be receiving a fair number of emails, the vast majority of emails I am sending are not getting through. I have sent 78 individual emails in the last three days, and received just two replies. Meanwhile people have been chasing me for replies which I had in fact sent.

The strange thing is that my mail.ru and tiscali.co.uk email addresses are equally affected.

At the same time, people are repeatedly telling me that they are phoning my mobile phone, and leaving messages, when it is not ringing, or showing any missed calls, nor are there any messages.

Finally, five different cheques sent to me in the last two months have not arrived in the post. Because they are cheques, I had chased up. I do not know how much other mail is not getting through. Interestingly no attempt was made to pay in any of the missing cheques anywhere before the issuers could cancel them, and I have switched to BACS payments.

All of this can happen to anyone through technical faults with phones and emails. Sadly the Post Office does not have the Royal Mail culture of public service. I feel downright stupid even blogging about it. But, as the old joke goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

I have been both snowed under and travelling like a madman lately, and therefore rather absent from this blog. Apologies.

The piece by me below appeared in The Mail on Sunday two days ago.

I would like to introduce it with the following thought. There are those who denounce any criticism of Russia, particularly over human rights, as a neo-con plot. That is plainly stupid.

On the blogosphere it is not hard to bump into the view that, on the international stage, anyone opposed to George Bush must be a good man, and any attack on anyone opposed to George Bush must be malicious. A much more probable scenario is that George Bush is a powerful and bad man, perhaps primus inter pares but nonetheless among many other powerful and bad men. Russia is in fact in the grip of vicious gangsters, ripping off the country with a freedom even the most ardent deregulatory neo-con in Washington could not conceive.

Investigative report: The Kremlin Killings

19.05.07

After a series of brutal murders of dissident journalists in Russia, Craig Murray, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, went to investigate.

His disturbing report reveals how deeply the cancer of criminality has infected Putin’s society

One Friday two months ago, Ivan Safronov, defence correspondent of the authoritative Kommersant newspaper in Moscow, made his way home from work.

After a mild winter, Moscow had turned cold in March and Safronov held a bag of groceries in one hand while keeping his coat closed against the snow with his other.

Arriving at the entrance to his grim Soviet-era apartment block, Safronov punched in the security code which opened the grey metal door at the entrance to the gloomy hallway.

So far this is a perfectly normal Moscow scene. But then ‘ and this is the official version of events ‘ Ivan Safronov apparently did something extraordinary.

He walked up the communal stairs, past his second-floor apartment to the top landing between the third and fourth floors.

Then, placing his groceries on the floor, he opened a window, climbed on to the sill and leapt to his death, becoming around the 160th (nobody can be certain of precise numbers) journalist to meet a violent end in post-communist Russia.

In the West, the cases of journalist Anna Politkovskaya, shot dead in her apartment block, and ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned by polonium in London last year, hit the headlines.

But in Russia, there was nothing exceptional about those killings. It’s long been understood that if you publish material that embarrasses or annoys those in power, you’re likely to come to a sticky end.

Continue reading

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23397248-details/Investigative+report:+The+Kremlin+Killings/article.do

As always, the unedited original was rather better; I may post it if I can work out how to prevent its length taking over the entire page. A follow-up article will appear this Sunday.

Sorry for the recent silence. I have been terribly busy with anti-war meetings in Edinburgh and Glasgow at the weekend, and then to Dundee for a University Court meeting on Monday, with lots of pre- and post-consultations. Got back home at 1.30am Tuesday (because the University values its Rector so highly it insists he travels Easyjet). Then quite literally up all night dealing with correspondence, and an 08.55 flight from Heathrow. Now blogging from Moscow.

Couldn’t resist the chance to mingle with the crowds at Yeltsin’s funeral. Astonished by how pinched and old Clinton looks – George Bush senior appears hale. The UK sends the Z team – Prince Andrew and John Major. Not so much damning with faint praise, as faint greys.

I am impressed by the many thousands of Muscovites, filing past the coffin all night and lining the short funeral route. I vox pop the funeral crowds, who are of course a self-selecting biased sample, but the Western media seems rather too glibly to accept the line from the state controlled Russian media that Yeltsin’s mistakes are remembered more than his achievements. At night I wander down to the White House and look at the cars whizzing past, over the spot where he climbed on the armoured vehicle (not actually a tank) to save Russian democracy and prevent the restoration of Soviet dictatorship. John Major is not really inappropriate as a mourner, because he had been speaking to Yeltsin from London moments before he did that. It is worth remembering that the troops had opened fire. Major says Yeltsin genuinely thought he would die then.

The media talk of Yeltsin as Russia’s first democratic President. I fear “only” might be a better word than first. Certainly mistakes were made in the uncontrolled rush to capitalism, as Abramovich and his like looted the country. It was done much better in Central Europe, with voucher schemes and other ways to get some immediate benefit to ordinary people. But hindsight is a wonderful thing, and it must not be forgotten how fragile the new Russian revolution was, and how real at first was the fear of Soviet reurgence. There was reason to hurry.

That does not excuse the ensuing creation of robber barons or Yeltsin’s decline into a drunken, jovial tool of corruption. But he had many decent human qualities, one of which was a lack of arrogance. Nobody noticed his resignation as President because it was the Millenium and we were all getting pissed. But he apologised to the Russian people for his mistakes, and especially the Chechen war. Do not expect Blair to follow.

Outside the White House is a girl with short blonde hair carrying two red roses. She too is looking at the road and thnking of Yeltsin. I point out that with today’s traffic, the army would never have got there. She has tears in her eyes – “He gave us our freedom”. She is bitterly amused that the only other person who thought to go to the White House on this evening is a passing Scot. I tell her she looks too young to remember all this. She says she was in her first year at Unversity when he resigned. But she remembers the White House, as a child. “He used to be handsome”.

We go for a pizza – thus adding a new tactic to my range of pick-up techniques. In the “Golden Drum” pub, the consensus is that at least Yeltsin ended Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol drive. His memory fades in a night of beer and vodka. Perhaps he wouldn’t mind that.

There have been a series of American commentators popping up on the TV, explaining that the right to bear arms is necessary to guard against an over-mighty executive. The strange thing is that the US now has an over-mighty executive, which has completely unbalanced the famous separation of powers. As yet I see no sign of the NRA forming up to march on the White House.

I am irresistibly reminded of Borat asking what the best gun was to use against a Jew, and the unblinking reply “9mm or a .45”. I wonder what answer he would have got if he had said “Student” not “Jew”?

Yet more grieving families. Margaret Beckett shows up on screen, sending her commiserations. Thank God she doesn’t send commiserations every time thirty people are killed in Iraq. We would have to see her whine on self-importantly several times a day.

I thought I would stun everyone this morning by saying something in partial defence of Paul Wolfowitz.

The big surprise about the current scandal is that the man has a girlfriend. If he used his position to lever pay increases for her, he should resign. Let him pay for his own sex.

This undermines his hypocrisy in launching a drive aganst corruption at the World Bank. The irony is he was actually right about corruption. Corruption in the World Bank is massive. I recall in the 1980’s in Nigeria watching billions of dollars poured into inappropriate agricultural programmes, the whole design of which was intended to be capital intensive, to provide the maximum flows to skim. We estimated that 30% of the money was lost to corruption. And yes, the World Bank staff were up to their neck in it. Things have changed a little since then, but not much.

In Nigeria the problem was a combination of a massively corrupt local political structre, and World Bank staff largely drawn from the corrupt elite of the Indian sub-continent. Add into that mix Western contractors and suppliers willing to pay huge bribes, and their governments willing to turn a blind eye.

All of those aspects of the problem need to be tackled. Wolfowitz was not focusing on the Western elements, of course. But that does not make him wrong about the culture of corruption. It is good the issue was forced, and our own loathing of Wolfowitz should not blind us to the fact that the opposition to him of many World Bank staff is from the worst of motives.

I seem to be one of those people fated to have strange things happen to them, more often than they generally happen to people.

I haven’t been blogging because at 11 pm on Wednesday there was a tremendous hammering at the door of our flat. When I opened it a fireman burst in, wearing full breathing gear, and yelled “Get out! Get out, now!” So we did.

Nadira was particularly disappointed as she had hoped at first it was a stripogram.

An underground gas main was ruptured, and our flats had been slowly filling with gas which had reached explosive levels. Our neighbour Sonia had been in her hall when the gas there exploded and brought the hall crashing down around her. Sonia is an improbably beautiful young Spanish film director, and she emerged from a cloud of plaster dust not only unscathed, but without a speck of dust having settled on her. She is one of those kind of people.

The whole of Sinclair Gardens was evacuated and the residents herded up the street, some in their pyjamas, some clutching pets. I had that afternoon received a large bundle of documents couriered from a third country for safekeeping from an Uzbek claiming asylum. I picked this up as I left. As the hours were to pass, I was to have some difficulty persuading my family that it was a good thing that their father’s first thought was for a poor refugee, rather than something more practical like picking up my wallet and credit cards.

We immediately took refuge in the foyer of the K West hotel. This is a very unlikely but very popular celebrity haunt. You are more likely to run into Noel Gallagher or Girls Aloud there than at Nobu Berkeley St. Which is why, despite living just round the corner, I never go in.

Sinclair Gardens is a street best described as Bohemian. The residents are strongly multi-cultural with distinct artistic and eccentric tendencies. Even so, and in their nightwear, they looked much better dressed than the average denizen of the K-West hotel. I should say that the staff were perfectly charming and helpful, as exploited East Europeans generally are, but the management were most upset at this irruption of the real world into their celebrity spot and started to pressurise the police to kick us out. As we had pretty well all by this stage bought drinks at the bar, this gave the police (of whom there were now scores) something of a headache.

Hammersmith and Fulham Council’s emergency plan was swung into action and three double decker buses arrived, on which we were ordered to sit and register. But nobody wanted to. We had a bar, and the great fun of annoying the hotel management. Besides which, I rather suspect that many of the inhabitants of the street are not conscientious Council Tax payers, and were disinclined to register.

About 2am it was announced we were definitely not going to be allowed back in to our homes, and we were being chucked out of the hotel. Of the inhabitants of about 200 evacuated flats, some 80 people went on the buses to Hammersmith Town Hall, where about sixty single inflatable mattresses were provided between them. We used up the money I chanced to have in my pocket on a taxi to my brother’s flat in Leyton, and slept on the floor.

After an uncomfortable night, and re-dressing in dirty clothes, we started to get a bit grumpy. We phoned the Council who said they could not predict if the evacuation would last several hours or several days.

I had a few months ago taken out home contents insurance from Tesco (after the trauma of splitting up with my wife, I had given her the house and not got round to organising that sort of thing for my little flat). I seemed to recall something on alternative accommodation, so I looked up the policy on the internet. Indeed there it was – up to 20% of the value of Contents cover for alternative accommodation.

So I phoned to make a claim. After being put on hold for an age, I was told I was not covered because this event was not one of the insured risks, which were fire, theft, vandalism, explosion…

Hang on, I interrupted. This was an explosion. It is insured. Back on hold, more silly music. Then I was told that I was not insured because the explosion had not taken place in my own flat. I was getting angry by now and pointed out that I had been forced by the police and fire services to leave my home because of an explosion. Nowhere in the policy did it specify the explosion had to be in your own home. I was put on hold again.

This time I was put through to the Technical department. A patronising young man told me that this was a contents policy, and therefore the alternative accommodation provision only came in to force if it was needed because of damage to the contents of my home.

As it happens, the first “proper” job I ever had was as an underwriting clerk at Guardian Royal Exchange insurance in Edinburgh. I pointed out to him that very plainly the policy was not written that way. Damage to contents and alternative accommodation were separate and equal sections. He replied that they were not accepting the claim, and I could write and complain if I wished. He refused to put me through to anybody senior to him.

I am furious about this. I have no doubt that Tesco were simply refusing a claim without good cause. In the event, we got back into our home late that evening, many hours after the rest of the street, as ours and the house next door were the worst affected. So I did not incur further accommodation costs. But this offhand system of refusing claims is a disgrace. I strongly suggest, if you are insured with Tesco, you change now before you have to make a claim.

Which brings another thought. The old national grid for gas distribution is now privatised. Transco is a profit making company with shareholders, dividends, and fat executive bonuses. In the old days when it was a service provided to the public by the government, I would take this kind of incident as just one of those things. But I can see no reason why, having disrupted my life, caused great discomfort to my family and I, and caused me to lose a day’s work, Transco should not pay compensation. I shall pursue this, but strongly suspect that we will find that in privatisation the government granted them protection from liability for the consequences of their cash-reaping activities.

Life sometimes throws up connections which take us aback. Yesterday I was blogging about Bob Woolmer, and about the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea as it covers the current spat in the Gulf over the Iranian detention of British marines.

I spent three successive Februaries of my life – three months in all – representing the UK at the annual UN Conference on the Law of the Sea, which was aiming to break a twenty year deadlock and get the Convention into force. This was viewed, rightly, as a major British priority, with both navigation and continental shelf provisions being essential national interests. A major aim was to prevent just the kind of gratuitous interference in shipping in which we have ourselves been indulging lately in the Persian Gulf. It doesn’t take too much thought to understand why it is in the UK interest that shipping should not be subject in general to armed interference.

Where was that conference every February? Jamaica. Where did I live all those months? The Pegasus hotel, in which Bob Woolmer has now been murdered. I know it intimately. So do generations of cricketers. The conference always coincided with the Kingston test, and the teams usually used the Pegasus. I once had the honour of being knocked flat in the lift by a boisterous Merv Hughes mock fighting with Alan Border. I also got to speak with Clive Lloyd over breakfast. I will never forget the impression he gave of incredible latent power, not just physical, like nobody else I ever met.

The Convention on the Law of the Sea had been stalled for decades, unable to enter into force because of a dispute between the developed and developing worlds over the ownership of minerals on the deep seabed, beyond continental shelves. In particular, the dispute was driven by over-optimistic estimates of the future value of Manganese nodules found around deep volcanic vents. The Convention proposed that companies exploiting the deep seabed should pay a levy to an international authority, which would apply it to international developmental purposes. The developing countries, represented by the G77, were for huge levies and great regulation. The US were totally against the whole principle. The Europeans were prepared to go along if levies were small and regulation light.

The negotiation had become completely hidebound as each group entrenched its position over twenty years of these meetings in Jamaica. I was able to play a key role in breaking down these barriers, simply by not accepting the position as hopeless and by reaching out to the G77. The fall of the iron curtain removed the hardline Soviet position behind the G77, and the coming of Clinton to replace Bush was going to make the US more flexible. At the key moment, the UK had the chairmanship of WEOG, the Western negotiating group, and I happened to be leading the UK delegation for ten days prior to the arrival of our very senior and greatly respected international legal expert.

I had gained the trust of the G77 group by the simple expedient of drinking with them over weeks and treating them as colleagues not opponents. The fact I was an Africanist helped. The key drafting of what became the Protocol amending the Convention was put down on paper by UN Deputy Secretary General Satya Nandan, G77 chair Dolliver Nelson and WEOG chair me, late one balmy Jamaican evening as we sat with our legs dangling in the Hotel Pegasus swimming pool, rum punches in hand. And that wording stuck through the next eighteen months of negotiation that resulted in the Convention entering into force.

I went today to speak to a national conference of the Society of Friends, or Quakers. I was delighted to be invited because I have always had a huge amount of respect for them and the good work they do. When the followers of George Bush or Osama Bin Laden make me despair of religion, I think of the Quakers as an antidote.

I was talking at 11.15, so I got up in Shepherds Bush at 6.45 to get there by train. The journey was complicated by weekend engineering works, but I made it to Swanwick at 11am. Alarm bells started to ring when the taxi driver had not heard of the Hayes conference centre. Nor had the guard at the Marina, the girl in the pub, or the man in the Post Office. It turned out I was at Swanwick in Hampshire, and the conference was at Swanwick in Derbyshire, several hundred miles away.

The Hampshire Swanwick has a railway station. Swanwick in Derbyshire doesn’t, so when I bought a ticket nobody asked me which one I wanted. But when I looked through my agenda it did in fact say Swanwick, Derbyshire. So it was entirely my fault.

I had clerical and other assistance from day 1 of my working life, and subsequently PAs and drivers, and servants at home. I was always very aware just how reliant I was on this assistance. I think this comes over in my book. I may be bright, but I am not at all practical. Get me to a meeting and I will have complete command of the brief and the meeting, but without help I will never get there. In many ways I am the archetypal absent-minded bumbler, brain always on a knotty question while I lose my spectacles. I have lost four mobile phones this year. I really feel quite depressed about it; now I face the every day problems of self management that everyone has to deal with, I simply cannot cope. Despite trying very hard indeed.

Like many cricket fans, I am greatly saddened by the extraordinary death of Bob Woolmer.

I remember warm summer Saturday afternoons in Norfolk where I would sit with my grandfather before the television, watching the Test match, the slightly sickly ripe fruit smells from the orchard wafting through the open window.

I could easily google to check, but what follows is memory; accuracy is not the point.

English cricket was at a low ebb. We were regularly getting blasted out by the sheer pace and skill of the Australian and West Indian bowlers, and had little with which to reply. John Snow and Bob Willis were not quite in the same league, and after that Chris Old, Geoff Arnold, Paul Lever were from an altogether lesser world, much as I loved and cheered their straining efforts.

Now Bob Woolmer was never much more than military medium. Heavily built, even in his prime he always looked a bit like he had on a sweater under his shirt. He could wobble the ball about a bit, but his selection was a sign of England’s bowling paucity.

At Kent, in a team outrageously endowed with batting talent, he wasn’t particularly regarded for his batting. In his first Test, I believe he came in at number 10.

What followed was truly remarkable. As England’s premier batsmen dangled their bats listlessly outside off stump apparently longing to give an edge, Woolmer was compact, deft and organised. Not aggressive, but not a nurdler either – he could play meaty drives that looked classical, foot advancing to meet the pitch of the ball and without room for a wafer between bat and pad.

Thus he began a climb up the batting order that represented one of the more extraordinary careers in Test cricket, from tail-ender to middle and top order and ultimately opener. His Test career was all too brief, but he established himself firmly in the pantheon of my adolescent heroes. He went on to pioneer modern cricket management, with great success in South Africa.

Now this murky end. The Irish defeat of Pakistan was glorious fun; a shadow will now hang as to whether it really was too good to be true. The extraordinary world of massive betting on cricket and match-fixing again seems to surface before us. It is impossible not to remember that Woolmer was Hansie Cronje’s coach when he was throwing matches, and wonder again at Cronje’s own violent end.

I do hope Woolmer was an innocent victim in all of this. When I remember him now I recall his courage as a batsman, the warm sun and my grandfather. Let it stay that way.

Virtual relationships have their pitfalls. In acknowledging the team who keep this website going, I credited Tim, Richard, Andrew and Wibbler but not Clive. That is because I have been happily communicating for two years under the impression that Clive and Wibbler are the same person. I now learn they are not! Great embarassment.

In a sense, this is my first blog entry. That may seem strange for a blog with almost a thousand entries and on the receiving end of over 600 weblinks. But this is the first entry I have actually tried to enter and post myself, like a real blogger. It will therefore possibly appear upside down, or screw up the formatting of the entire blog. But at least I am trying.

Previously I wrote entries, or selected articles, and emailed them to the team to post. Andrew and Richard also came to select and post stuff themselves. None of this would have been possible without day to day support from Tim and Wibbler. We will continue to function as something of a collective. But there will be much more day to day blogging from me.

That may also bring something of a change in tone, as I will be blogging not only when I have something heavyweight to say. Expect to see a lot about the frustrations of travelling the country on ailing public transport, and about the running of Dundee University. I hope again to do more on Uzbekistan than we had recently, and keep up the commentary on the increasingly mad “War on Terror”. And I hope that we will increase the level of comment and interaction from you.

Anyway, if this posts, I shall feel like a real blogger at last!

Several links to radio and tv interviews had gone astray during a previous site crash. These have now been repaired and updated. Thanks for your patience and please leave a comment if you come across any that we missed.

Christian Hayes article is an important dissection of the issues around theories of false flag terrorism, and the very real over-hypeing of the terrorist threat. I strongly recommend this balanced but incisive analysis.

Craig

By Christopher Hayes in The Nation

According to a July poll conducted by Scripps News Service, one-third of Americans think the government either carried out the 9/11 attacks or intentionally allowed them to happen in order to provide a pretext for war in the Middle East. This is at once alarming and unsurprising. Alarming, because if tens of millions of Americans really believe their government was complicit in the murder of 3,000 of their fellow citizens, they seem remarkably sanguine about this fact. By and large, life continues as before, even though tens of millions of people apparently believe they are being governed by mass murderers. Unsurprising, because the government these Americans suspect of complicity in 9/11 has acquired a justified reputation for deception: weapons of mass destruction, secret prisons, illegal wiretapping. What else are they hiding?

This pattern of deception has not only fed diffuse public cynicism but has provided an opening for alternate theories of 9/11 to flourish. As these theories–propounded by the so-called 9/11 Truth Movement–seep toward the edges of the mainstream, they have raised the specter of the return (if it ever left) of what Richard Hofstadter famously described as “the paranoid style in American politics.” But the real danger posed by the Truth Movement isn’t paranoia. Rather, the danger is that it will discredit and deform the salutary skepticism Americans increasingly show toward their leaders.

The Truth Movement’s recent growth can be largely attributed to the Internet-distributed documentary Loose Change. A low-budget film produced by two 20-somethings that purports to debunk the official story of 9/11, it’s been viewed over the Internet millions of times. Complementing Loose Change are the more highbrow offerings of a handful of writers and scholars, many of whom are associated with Scholars for 9/11 Truth. Two of these academics, retired theologian David Ray Griffin and retired Brigham Young University physics professor Steven Jones, have written books and articles that serve as the movement’s canon. Videos of their lectures circulate among the burgeoning portions of the Internet devoted to the cause of the “truthers.” A variety of groups have chapters across the country and organize conferences that draw hundreds. In the last election cycle, the website www.911truth.org even produced a questionnaire with pointed inquiries for candidates, just like the US Chamber of Commerce or the Sierra Club. The Truth Movement’s relationship to the truth may be tenuous, but that it is a movement is no longer in doubt.

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Congratulations to Laura Perna, the 87 year old winner of the Premio Alta Qualit’ 2006, whose volunteer work in Congo secured her first place in this prestigious award. Craig also received recognition for his work against torture, winning the online popular vote and being awarded the Premio Alta Qualit’ delle Citta? from the Municipality of Bologna.

By Neil Mackay in the Sunday Herald

Murray reported what he calls “this blatant attempt to recruit me” to British security officers at the embassy….To this day, Murray is unsure whether the offer of sex with the Russian girls was an attempt to bribe him into working for the Kremlin or whether it was the set-up for a blackmail sting which would have coerced him into working for Russian intelligence.

TO DISSIDENT Russian intelligence officers now in exile or in hiding around the world and British intelligence operatives, July 9 this year was a seismic date. On that day legislators in the Duma – the Russian state parliament – unanimously approved new laws which allowed Russia’s Federal Security Service to hunt down and kill enemies of the state anywhere on the face of the Earth.

One British intelligence source said: “This marked a blatant return to the bad old days of the cold war when the KGB thought it could act with impunity anywhere it pleased.”

These so-called “Hunter-Killer” powers also curtailed the right of the Russian media – already cowed and under the control of the Kremlin – to report on these operations. However, the enactment of these new laws only put on a legal footing powers which Russian intelligence had been using extra-judicially for years.

In Chechnya, the assassination of enemies of Russia is now so common that it scarcely bears comment, and in 2004 two Russian agents were arrested and sentenced to death in Qatar for the killing of exiled Chechen separatist leader Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev. The Russian team hunted him down and planted a bomb in his car. The Qatari court ruled that the killing was sanctioned by “the Russian leadership”. The men were not executed but sent back to Russia following promises from the Kremlin that they would be imprisoned. Rumour has it that they were decorated for the assassination operation.

Akhmed Zakayev, a friend of Alexander Litvinenko and a former field commander in the first Chechen war who later became the deputy prime minister of Chechnya, says the killing of Litvinenko proved to the British people that Putin was “destroying democratic freedoms in Russia and beyond”.

Zakayev, who beat an attempt by Russia to extradite him from the UK, added: “Putin is exporting his terror tactics in Chechnya to the UK and to London streets.” Pointing out that Litvinenko had recently been granted British citizenship following his flight from Moscow after exposing criminal activities by Russian intelligence, Zakayev said: “Putin is now carrying out acts of terror against British citizens. Britain should see this as an act of terrorism against this nation.”

British intelligence estimates that at least 30 Russian spies are operating in the UK. Most are from the GRU, Russian military intelligence, and the SVR, the overseas intelligence service equivalent to MI6. Most are based at the Russian embassy and have diplomatic status. As well as carrying out “traditional” espionage activities such as gathering military, political and industrial secrets, they are also believed to be focusing on Russian dissidents and Chechen rebels who are living in exile in the UK.

British intelligence sources are fearful of the UK’s ability to tackle the gathering threat from the Kremlin. Counter-espionage – monitoring the actions of foreign spies in the UK – now accounts for just 6% of MI5’s budget. This drastic reduction in resources since the days of the cold war is down to MI5 being recalibrated to tackle the al-Qaeda franchise. The director of MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, told parliament’s intelligence and security committee that “there’s not less of it foreign espionage about, but we are doing less work on it”.

MI5 has stated that at least 20 foreign intelligence services are “operating against the interests of Britain … and the greatest concern is aroused by the Russians”. MI5 has also said that the number of Russian intelligence operatives in the UK has not declined since the Soviet era.

Putin has put spying at the heart of his foreign policy since his rise to power in 2000. The UK is a key target because of the country’s status as “American ally number one”, Britain’s role as a key leading member of Nato and due to the fact that so many of Putin’s enemies are now living in exile in the UK.

MI5 has issued bulletins to staff and other security and intelligence services asking them to keep track of the movement of Russian diplomats thought to be engaged in spying. One bulletin said that Russian intelligence posed a “substantial” threat to the UK. It also told recipients to keep a look out for Russian diplomatic car licence plates.

Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, has had first-hand experience of the continuing attempts by Russia to spy on Britain. In 1996-97, he was first secretary to the British embassy in Warsaw, Poland, when Russian intelligence made a clumsy attempt to recruit him using sex as the lure.

He was due to attend a friend’s stag night at an Irish bar in the centre of Warsaw but because of work commitments arrived two hours late. The barman informed him that his friends had moved on to a strip joint nearby. “When I arrived at the strip club,” says Murray, “this Russian guy jumps up and calls me by my name and says I know you drink malt whisky, can I get you a Glenfiddich?’. With him were two beautiful Russian girls dressed in their underwear. He told me he was with a Russian trade delegation and said there was a limo outside and that I could take the girls to a house in the suburbs. I declined, made some small talk, finished my drink and then left.”

Murray reported what he calls “this blatant attempt to recruit me” to British security officers at the embassy. They showed him a photo album of known Russian spies in Warsaw. “Unsurprisingly, my friend from the trade delegation’ was in the book,” Murray adds. “It was an astonishingly up-front and unsubtle approach.” To this day, Murray is unsure whether the offer of sex with the Russian girls was an attempt to bribe him into working for the Kremlin or whether it was the set-up for a blackmail sting which would have coerced him into working for Russian intelligence.

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I am in Italy all next week where I have been kindly nominated for an award – I don’t expect to win it, but I have to admit it is very pleasant to have some recognition for my efforts against torture.

You can see the website of the award here, and you can even vote between the finalists. Laura Perna seems like a wonderful woman. As you navigate around the site, unless you speak Italian you have to keep clicking the “English” button in the top left hand corner.

Craig

World Can’t Wait…..

The final verdict of the INTERNATIONAL COMMISSION OF INQUIRY ON CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY COMMITTED BY THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION OF THE UNITED STATES has now been published and can be downloaded from here

An extract from the introduction is posted below:

The extraordinary Commission of Inquiry convened to consider charges that the President George W. Bush and his administration have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity has now reached a verdict: Guilty.

On wars of aggression, illegal detention and torture, suppression of science and catastrophic policies on global warming, potentially genocidal abstinence-only policies imposed on HIV/AIDS prevention programs in the Third World, and the abandonment of New Orleans before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina, President George W. Bush and his administration have been found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

This verdict comes at crucial moment. As Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, emphasized at the Commission hearings: ‘We want this trial to be a step in the building of mass resistance to war, to torture, to the destruction of earth and its people. It’s a serious moment. . . . We still have a chance, an opportunity to stop this slide into chaos. But it is up to us. We must not sit with our arms folded, and we must be as radical as the reality we are facing.’

Acts of the Bush Administration have continued to reinforce this assessment. The crimes cited in the indictments have continued. We have witnessed a continuing onslaught of horrors in Iraq from the massacres in Haditha and Mahmudiya to the exposure of rapes and murders by U.S. forces. Torture continues at secret overseas sites. New Orleans still lies in ruins, much of its Black population ‘resettled.’ New evidence concerning the deadly impact of U.S. AIDS policy in Africa has come to light. New crimes have been committed such as the destruction of Lebanon with U.S. weapons and backing. And now even more serious crimes loom with open threats to launch a new war of aggression on Iran. This administration has flouted and defied the Geneva Conventions. It has arrogated to itself the right to suspend habeas corpus, engage in mass warrantless searches, and defines the powers of the ‘commander-in-chief’ to be above the law. Bush’s Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, has sought to legitimize torture and exempt those who employ torture from prosecution.