okay
foreign
welcome to sputnik orbiting the world
with me george galloway and me kayatri
the role of intelligence agencies is a
vexed one in any democracy we do need
secrets and spies the problem is when we
get secret spies and lies
just last week moazembeig a man who'd
already been unjustly incarcerated in
guantanamo bay walked from belmarsh
prison yet again an innocent man though
having been held for months on serious
terrorist charges which the state then
abandoned without explanation these
things have been happening again and
again
politicians have to take the rep but
they're usually acting on the advice of
our spies so who are our spies are they
james bonds or austin powers our first
guest was one of our spies in mi5 she
can't tell us everything she did or else
she'd have to kill us but she still
might be helpful and she comes in peace
on board the sputnik she's annie mashon
annie let me start if i may with the
moazembeg
story a man unjustly incarcerated in
guantanamo bay and now in our own
sort of mini guantanamo bay in belmarsh
the state abandoning the case even
though it would have been a case
warranting 15 years of imprisonment if
he'd been found guilty
without a word of explanation can you
shed any light i know you're not of
course operational uh but you do know
how these agencies work what might have
happened
i think to me it seems that it's
probably some sort of let's try and
avoid embarrassing court cases uh which
would bring in the security angle and
the political angle so we have a
situation where he would have claimed
quite rightly moral equivalence with
what our spies and our armies get up to
our military gets up to in
illegal invasions illegal occupations
and all that sort of thing
the justification that if you are an
oppressed people or an occupied people
you have a right in fact even a social
duty to push back against those
occupiers is a very well recognized one
very strong historic um trend and i
think that's all he would be able to
argue but that would have been effective
yeah i don't agree with what he says he
did do
but he's right when he says what he did
do was exactly what the british
government was itself doing and
encouraging namely uh strengthening the
opposition including armed opposition uh
fighting in syria yes and they have a
long and ignoble history of doing this
right across the middle east right
across the world and every time they do
it it seems to go wrong and every time
they do it they create more blowback we
have a long history now
of
huge errors and blunders they almost
always fail
almost
always have the opposite effect
as was claimed
for them when they were embarked upon
who should we blame for that is it the
agencies is it their political masters
who are setting them the wrong tasks
uh or is it a systemic thing does it
flow from secrecy too much secrecy it is
systemic it does come from too much
secrecy and the fact that they can get
away with whatever they want to get away
with so at the one
there is a long list of scandals we know
that but those are only the ones that
have come out there are many many other
mistakes and cock-ups and things like
that that go on which they can then lie
to to their political masters and they
do it time and time again and in fact
most of the former heads of the
intelligence agencies and former top
cops have said quite publicly they
blench because they didn't tell the
whole truth to the intelligence and
security committee in parliament or they
lied in fact they have been caught out
lying mi5 when they said originally they
were not involved in torture and then
the last boss but one i think had to
admit he had lied
it you know had been involved in torture
and that's why they've been having to
pay out compensation to the torture
victims of the british state but i do
think it is systemic as well we have a
situation a very sort of british model
where our intelligence agencies have
evolved over 100 years and they've never
been properly controlled they've never
been properly overseen in fact they
didn't officially exist until 1989
um so they have got very used to working
with complete secrecy and anyone inside
who rocks the boat and asks ethical
questions or says should we really be
doing this is told to just shut up and
not follow orders so the ones who are
the yes men tend to progress and get to
the top positions and you get this sort
of very um closed group thing um and i
think this also contributes the moral
slide the moral degeneracy that we see
where mi5 for example can get
re-involved in torture when it had
avoided it during the 1990s
just one other aspect around this i
think mi5 is a bit of a historic
throwback i'm not quite sure what its
role is in a modern democracy because we
have a situation we have the the
listening post the government
communications headquarters in
cheltenham allied to the nsa um we have
mi6 which is like the ciar for an
intelligence gathering organization and
what's our equivalent for the fbi for
example it's the national crime agency
with police powers to arrest and carry
out executive action mi5 does not have
that mi5 seems to be duplicating what
the national crime agency does but with
fewer powers and greater secrecy and
more money very much so yes yeah
so what is its role in modern democracy
i mean to
to spend so much time just hoovering up
all our information and watching the
population it's beginning to remind me
much more of the stasi in east germany
my active involvement in these matters
goes back to the early 1980s i became
friends with the late lord wilson as
harold wilson four times the prime
minister of britain i sat many times in
his rather gloomy flat in victoria and
he regaled me with the destabilization
of him as a suspected communist
by british
intel nothing could be further from the
truth of course uh by uh british
intelligence then i was swiftly into the
minor strike uh in which i was deeply
involved virtually every single day of
the whole year
of strike and the
penetration of that strike by british
intelligence mi5
and of course
as a prominent opponent of the iraq war
here we were back again with the
intelligence services
either at the behest of the political
leadership or just to please them
feeding false information fake
information into the policy making
process
so i'm wondering if the time hasn't come
and you alluded to it there in your
previous answer to actually abolish mi5
uh that will probably get me
some difficulties later on when this is
broadcast but really i'm wondering what
is their role and an agency with so many
mistakes uh to its discredit
surely at one point or other four feet's
the right to continue to receive vast
sums of public money well not only
receive vast sums of public money but
also abuse our basic freedoms throughout
this country um it's a very good
question i can't see what they bring to
the intelligence table which is unique
in the old days of course they started
out as a counter espionage agency
particularly in the so against the
soviet union the cold war and as a sort
of uh knock-on effect of that they then
really built up this vast
counter-subversion section which
investigated uk citizens purely for
their political beliefs and this this
covered hundreds of thousands up to a
million uk citizens for their
involvement mainly in left-wing politics
and then the cold war ended what were
they to do suddenly it looked like they
lost a great
chunk of their work yeah so this is when
there was very clever maneuvering behind
the scenes where the um head of the time
dame stellar rimington seized control of
the investigation of the provisional ira
and other northern ireland terrorist
groups in the uk mainland and they took
it from the metropolitan police which
caused huge eruptions behind the scenes
by the way because all these different
agencies are competing for the same
powers and resources so we have a
situation where um a counter espionage
intelligence agency used to working
against very slow moving targets you
know going and bugging the soviet
embassy or following a few political
activities i know that sort of thing
suddenly they were put in charge of
these really fast-paced terrorist
investigations which in those days you
had to gather the information gather the
intelligence and of course crucially
gather the evidence so that if you could
you could put a terrorist suspect on
trial in front of a jury of their peers
now we've lost that i mean if we have a
terrorist suspect we just bang them out
with that without two presidents like
mozambique but in those days that was
the key point now mi5 officers had no
training in evidence gathering they had
no training in that whole due process
and i think that also led to a number of
massive mistakes that i saw along with
david shayla back in the 1990s of course
the crucial difference between the
police and the mi5
is that
obviously not perfectly but the police
are accountable they can be held to
account for mistakes that they make mi5
cannot
the money that's voted to them uh is not
questionable in the house their mistakes
are not
questionable ministers say we never
comment on on intelligence matters at
least you can have the commissioner of
the metropolitan police in front of a
select committee you can grill him
parliamentary questions can be asked of
the home secretary about him
uh or her as uh might uh soon be the the
case that's a key point isn't it and
you're a transparency
campaigner
that's one of the key reasons why we
must raise this question absolutely our
intelligence agencies are the least
accountable and most legally protected
of any western country although it looks
like america is rapidly beginning to
catch up on that front um they're hedged
around by a whole series of laws to
protect them against disclosure and to
protect them from accountability so in
1994 we had the intelligence services
act put in place to govern mi6 and gchq
which crucially put into parliament as
well the intelligence and security
committee in parliament which is
actually appointed by or for a long time
was only appointed by the prime minister
and its findings were vetted by the
prime minister and it was only there to
look at policy finance and
administration it had no powers
whatsoever to investigate
allegations of misconduct now this has
been beefed up in the last year yeah but
it's still filled with trustees it's
filled with placement and it's chaired
by malcolm rifkind um who as soon as the
whole snowden um stuff started coming
out especially about gchq and how
they're running rampant um against the
privacy of 500 million europeans then
somali rivkin says oh i've asked them
and they say they're operating within
law it's all hunky-dory don't worry i
know what's going on and yet i know from
the inside and it was part of the
whistleblowing i did with david shayla
in the 1990s quite how easily they can
lie to the intelligence and security
committee how they can lie to their
political master the foreign secretary
and they do repeatedly
it is uh an extraordinary situation uh
and it's not that we're without perils
there are terrorists there are plots
uh there are dangerous people uh
operating in our country so it's not
just that
because we're
liberals as a matter of fact i'm not a
liberal
that we are making this critique it's
not just about the ethics it's about the
efficiency and the competence of these
agencies
yes
and because they are so secret they can
get away with being incompetent and by
making mistakes because they can lie
about those mistakes so they don't learn
the lessons so they continue to make
those mistakes and they continue to put
our safety at risk now all this war on
terror stuff of course started with 9 11
and it started with the american
hysterical over response globally and
brutally to this terrorist threat this
evil tude
and yet of course in the uk we have far
more experience of a realistic threat on
a daily basis from irish terrorism for
example and i remember all the same
debates about civil liberties and things
going on in the 1980s and at that point
we did not give away all our basic
freedoms we did not give all these new
powers and new resources to create this
massive spy infrastructure what we did
was targeted often human-led proper
intelligence investigations to gather
evidence and then put these people on
trial if necessary you don't just have
this dragnet surveillance of everybody
and kill all notions of privacy and
democracy by so doing
so i think you need to to get that
balance we've sound so far out so far
into the pocket of america and their
over
indulgence and over reliance on tech as
well that suddenly we're living in this
sort of endemic surveillance state well
almost police state if you want to
believe theresa
theresa may well have announced an
impending police state in her speech in
birmingham
the tory party conference animation
thanks that's been fascinating we must
continue another time
coming up after the break on the 47th
anniversary of the murder of the man of
the century rob miller on che guevara
you don't want to miss it
welcome back to sputnik he was not cuban
but he risked his life many times in the
cause of their liberation he was not
african but he fought alongside the
greatest of all african leaders patrice
lumumba in the congo he was neither
asian but he fought u.s imperialism in
vietnam and he was not bolivian but he
gave the last of his lives blood making
revolution against fascism there he was
the most inspiring man of the century
and in my view he still is joining us
now to discuss commandante che guevara
on the anniversary of his mother by u.s
imperialism is cuba solidarity campaign
director rob miller but first gayatri
dressed for the part took the microphone
to central london to hear the voice of
the people
i'm sorry i don't know who he is
i don't know thank you fun i can't say i
know much about him unfortunately che
guevara
no i know nothing about him oh no of him
i know nothing about him yeah i just
know he's
somehow iconic and that everybody tags
buying you know he stands for so many
good things although he's a romantic
figure i suppose obviously he was
against capitalism so if i'm completely
honest
i'm not especially impressed by people
who wear shay guevara t-shirts because i
think they're just buying into
capitalism which is exactly what he's
against a friend of mine went to cuba
two years ago and she brought me a cigar
with his face
on on on the case of of the cigar but i
don't smoke so i keep it as a you know
as a souvenir
i think he was really uh
an hero for a lot of people and an
example for other people unlike many
revolutionaries who pursued power and
nothing else i think che guevara was
very genuine
rob miller mixed uh
vox pops there a surprising number of
people didn't know anything about him
but those who did
kind of got it right
uh how do you account for
this global phenomenon
this picture the famous picture which
you were i know deeply involved in
getting justice for the photographer on
this picture must have been reproduced
more than
any picture of any person in history how
do you account for it all but i think
che
was a beautiful man he was incredibly
handsome that image
really sells him as that man a man deep
in thought but with a purpose and i
personally think it's more than the
image it's about his beliefs and it's
about what he achieved as a person and i
think people around the world
know about che through his image but
then when they find out about him he
actually signifies something about
change and about possibilities for the
future che believes in a better world as
we know a better world is possible and
che believed in it wrote about it and
fought for it and ultimately died for it
he has become a symbol of change a
symbol of revolution an anti-imperialist
symbol and that's where you see chase
figure most in the anti-vietnam wars in
chile across latin america in the middle
east where people are actually trying to
persevere and work for their own
national identities for their own
progress for their peoples normally
against an imperialist aggression that's
where you see che's uh figure chase
image coming out he stands there in
front of everybody as a symbol of an
anti-imperial struggle and one that can
be won
the famous picture uh has a big story
attached to it tell us it absolutely i
mean we we in uh after in 1997 after on
the 30th anniversary of the death of che
guevara
we organized a very big exhibition about
jay and we we contacted all the
photographers salas perfecto romero
alberto corder to get images of jay and
uh
alberto corda gave some wonderful images
some of the first images that were seen
over here of chae with his daughter a
lady as a baby
playing golf with fidel uh in in havana
some of those images which are now
iconic were shown at this exhibition for
the first time a couple of years later
smirnoff the vodka company decided to
use the image to advertise vodka and
billboards went up across britain
railway the image of che was there
revolutions revolutionary spirit
advertising vodka now
che was was t-total he was asthmatic
and we were in touch with cord and we
said how come you're allowing your image
to be used for this smyrnal fever he was
outraged but of course his image had
been used across the world for a
multivarious
number of advertising opportunities so
we said would you like us to explore the
possibilities
and we did and the case went to all the
way up through the high court in fact we
didn't through smirnoff but we
we sued lolintas the advertising agency
we sued rex features the photographic
agency that had provided the the case
and we went all the way to high court
and won
a huge settlement
and the the the proceeds from the
settlement were actually donated to a
children's hospital in havana for asthma
patients for children with asthma but
the case revolved around whether corder
had been an employee of the newspaper
revolution when he took the original
photo or whether he owned the actual
copyright because he took the photo with
his negative revolution didn't exist
anymore and we
clarified the situation that the
photograph was owned by him and could
not be abused
by anybody across the globe sadly it
still is in many places and to police
these images is very difficult but it
was the first time that he received
anything for that photograph and in a
way it's kind of donated
particularly no he didn't take it for
personal benefit the money was donated
to a children's hospital in havana since
then the family and the estate try and
police the use of the image and
particularly the abuse of the image how
important
in cuba
is the legacy of che guevara he wasn't
cuban
he left the
uh
cubans
uh long time ago in the
mid-1960s
uh is he still remembered there still
revered there chai crops up at every
point in in the cuban psyche in the
cuban history you don't see che
everywhere it's not uh you know he's not
uh there in front of you all the time
but he crops up you know his body was
returned to cuba in in 97 where it's now
in the museum in santa clara where he
won his most famous battle against the
troops of batista at the time of the
revolution
and he's referred to by children uh in
the streets by uh people working as a
model of how we should strive as a
nation to be we should be like che and
that's something that i think is
terribly important for the cuban people
to know that che is this symbol and they
can be like jay in terms of their
internationalism and their love for
humanity which for us we believe very
much the cuban revolution is all about
he's a good example of how you can win
even whilst losing uh he lost his life
in bolivia
the
putative revolution that he was trying
to spark in bolivia failed
but now we have
one of the best and most progressive
governments in the world in power
in bolivia
and
the united states by murdering him
actually made a very grave mistake they
even took pictures of the dead chai but
quickly realized they must suppress them
because the christ-like figure of jay
lying there dead would have been even
more potent actually than corda's
pictures
um
what happened to
if you know
the people who took the decisions and
who fired the
bullets into che guevara so is very
interesting story the specific story i
mean che was murdered and he was
murdered by the cia what is fascinating
and it came out a few years ago
the guy who shot che guevara was a
bolivian sergeant called mario taran
and he was the one who was ordered by by
the bolivians
by the cia to kill jay
and uh
in 2000
he
cropped up
i think it was two thousand possible
2007 i think he cropped up because the
cubans were running their international
missions and one of their international
missions was operacion milagro which is
the restoration of site for people with
cataracts and had cuban doctors right up
in the hills of bolivia a little old guy
comes in virtually blind
from his cataracts
and he's treated
by the cubans as they treat everyone
free of charge in the operation milagro
which is a joint enterprise with with
the venezuelans and the ecuadorians and
the oblivions
a few months later mario the son of the
guy writes a letter thanking these
doctors
it turns out he's the son of mario taran
the guy that killed che guevara and the
guy who had the treatment was mario
taran and you talk about turning chai
into victory because of course the cuban
newspapers published the fact that there
you are
cuban doctors free of charge no
bitterness whatsoever actually restored
the sight
of the very man who had been the person
who'd shot the bullets that killed che
guevara so you have venezuela you have
bolivia you have cuba you have the
united states it also shows the sort of
integration of the of the whole
bolivarian dream the dream that che
guevara followed for a personified
personified it for latin america united
and there it was in the hills and that
they gave generously it was no
bitterness about this fact
and the cuban government saw that as
another example
of what we as a nation can do for people
around the world no matter who they are
we're about people not about old battles
or anything like that
cuba solidarity campaign by far and away
the best solidarity campaign in britain
that i've ever worked with
how do people help you how can they get
involved well specifically on this
question uh 29th of november i know
you're coming along we've got a big
conference in london the latin america
conference and the daughter
of che guevara alaida his oldest
daughter elena guevara will be in london
at that conference talking about the
legacy of che but also about the
blockade against cuba about the struggle
for freedom for the cuban five the miami
five who are locked up in u.s jails so
that would be a wonderful opportunity
for people who are particularly
interested in che but obviously contact
us at any time with the cuba solidarity
campaign on the web you can get us by
looking online and getting in touch with
a membership organization and we
campaign primarily against the blockade
for better relations between britain
europe and cuba and obviously for the
question of sovereignty for cuba free
from outside aggression and particularly
from the united states
and now it's your turn to tell us what
you think through the portals of social
media what's rattling gayatri on the
subject of spies joker warns us that
taxi drivers are all spies so never ever
actually tell them where you really want
to go they'll screw them up for sure
and alpha renegade tells us that
actually britain's spy agencies are
neither james bond nor austin power it's
more journey english on che guevara
commandant
amin says that i had it on my wall in
paris when i was a student there the
poster boy for a less materialistic
generation
and hamid sharokni says it's an image of
a courageous visionary who indeed was
the most complete human being of our age
i think there's no uh doubt about that
and i think neither is there a doubt
that 100 years from now 200 years from
now
this image will still be
rallying and inspiring people he really
was the man of the 20th century for me
so well that's all that we have for this
week which alas means that's the end of
the show you can keep in touch with us
on twitter at rt underscore sputnik and
on facebook you can like us on sputnik
on russia today it's goodbye from me
kayatri and from me george galloway it's
been marvelous
foreign