Until fairly recently, if a bomb had gone off in the building above, the news reports would have identified it merely as “a government building”.
It’s the headquarters of SIS, aka MI6, aka the UK equivalent of the CIA. So ludicrous was the government veil of secrecy over their spook activities that they wouldn’t even acknowledge that MI6 existed. We all knew they were there and what they did, largely because of the sterling investigative work of John le Carré (particularly his seminal study “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”), but the government steadfastly maintained the fiction that they didn’t exist. No reference to them was permitted in official documents — much like the situation vis-a-vis climate change in Florida.
The spook community is the same all over the world — they don’t want anyone talking about them if they can help it, and they certainly don’t want official documents mentioning anything connected with their sensitive operations to be bandied about in public.
You’ll have noticed that there is an awful lot of noise about the fact that Hillary Clinton’s private emails contain things which are now being classified Top Secret but which weren’t at the time. But, since they’re being suppressed now, we don’t now know what’s in them.
Even the most bone-headed Hillary supporter would probably concede that if the Secretary of State was busy leaking the technical specs of America’s latest weaponry to Al-Qaeda, it would need quite a lot of explaining away, and certainly that’s what the Republicans and the Hillary-haters (sets which are not quite coterminous) would like people to think emailgate is about.
But it does seem rather unlikely. It was reported that some of the stuff in the previous batch of emails which was now deemed to be secret includes references to public newspaper reports of drone strikes which the US government would like to pretend don’t happen, in much the same way as the Brits tried to hide MI6. In other words, it’s spook paranoia that gives rise to the retrospective re-classification.
And then there’s this:
To: Oliver Lacon
From: George Smiley
Subject: Bobo
Oliver,
Could you have a word with our cousins? It’s quite likely that Granny’s letters make some references to Bobo, and we would obviously prefer it if those could be hidden.
George
I know we’re not supposed to talk about CTs on DK, but when discussing spooks it’s just about inevitable.
I’m willing to bet that there’s an email in the Clinton haystack saying something like “Farooq, I enjoyed meeting you at last night’s dinner. We should talk further. Hillary” which various people do not now want published.
The story behind that email is that Farooq, who is now the top civil servant in Iran’s equivalent of the DoD, did meet with the Secretary of State at an official banquet and had a couple of further informal chats, which led to him later being recruited by the Brits as an agent of influence. It would probably be better if that initial fleeting contact with a US public official was quietly forgotten about: you don’t want someone in Iran noticing the date of the email and remembering that it was soon after that that Farooq (then a mid-level official) had “discovered” the plans for Operation Crazy Geezer, an alleged CIA/MI6 plot to discredit the number two Imam on the Supreme Council, a discovery which led to Farooq’s rapid ascent in the hierarchy.
If you don’t want people to look closely at stuff, the thing to do is to get them to look somewhere else. The more dust you can kick up, the better.
It’s worth remembering what’s actually going on at State. It’s very embarrassing that this email server has become a thing and that now they’ve got to hand over everything in it. They need to do what they can to minimize the risks to people like Farooq.
Simply publish a list of emails which includes entries of the form “2745 withheld on grounds of national security” and some people may start wondering about what’s in email 2745.
Luckily, this whole fuss is being caused by people who are obsessed with “getting the Hildebeast”, and they’re easily led by the nose. Since everyone who really knows what’s going on knows that Clinton did absolutely nothing wrong, it only does her temporary reputational damage if you get the rabid hordes to chase her rather than ask awkward questions about the Farooqs. It’s definitely in their interests to get people to focus on process rather than content, so it’s very sensible to have shadowy people from the FBI murmur things into gullible journalists’ ears and float the succulent prospect of Hillary being indicted for all sorts of offenses up to and including high treason.
Keep the “Is she guilty?” pot at a rolling boil and soon that’s all anyone will care about. After a suitable period. the DoJ can come out with a very detailed statement which totally exonerates HRC on all the charges while commenting that they are very pleased that Secretaries of State are no longer allowed to follow the practice of Secretaries Rice, Powell and Clinton in maintaining private email servers which has led to all this unfortunate confusion.
Yeah, OK. It is all CT and wild speculation. But that’s also what most of the people still gnawing on this particular bone actually have.
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