Gli 007 occidentali sono certi che Teheran terminato le scorte
del minerale necessario per un programma nucleare militare

I servizi: “L’Iran ha finito l’uranio”
Un piano per bloccare l’atomica

Stati Uniti, GB e altri paesi europei in missione dipolomatica
per convincere i produttori a non venderne più agli ayatollah
da Repubblica online:

Il presidente iraniano Ahmadinejad alla centrale nucleare di Bushher

The best spy fiction

 

una iniziativa molto bella del Guardian, è di dedicare un’intervista alla stanza dello scrittore, ovvero dove lo scrittore scrive, progetta, cancella, i suoi libri. Ovviamente questa pagina è dedicata agli scrittori in genere, lo scrittore di questa settimana è S.F., ovvero colui che ha avuto l’incarico di continuare il ‘lavoro’ di ian Fleming, l’autore di 007. la foto è ovviamente, sul guardian, ingrandibile. Noi ci siamo limitati a fare una copia francobollo…
Ecco qui l’intervista.
“…I have worked in this room for six years. I wrote novels called Human Traces, Engleby and Devil May Care here, and have nearly finished a new one, provisionally called A Week in December. The room is part of a small flat in Holland Park, in west London. It’s at the top of a building so there’s no noise from above. I come here from home, 15 minutes’ walk away, from roughly 10 till six every weekday. I sometimes stay later or come in at the weekend as well, so I guess I must like it here.

It faces east and overlooks a garden square with a pink horse chestnut. The room is not as seedy as the picture makes it look, though I admit that the decor - if that’s not too strong a word - is the subject of some hilarity to female interviewers. I don’t care what it looks like, only how it works.

The desk belonged to a furniture dealer called Simon Horn. It’s too low to get my knees under, so the middle drawer has gone and the legs are propped up by copies of Charlotte Gray in Danish. The chair I got via the Wellcome Trust; it’s the same as those in their library and very good for someone with a chronically painful back. I inherited the curtains from the previous owner.

On the coffee table are books and notebooks relating to the novel in hand. The buff envelope at the front of the upper in-tray on the desk is the next VAT return. The temperamental phone/fax machine doubles, when it fancies it, as a photocopier.

On the wall I face are a small cameo of Tolstoy that I bought in his house in Moscow and a bronze relief of Dickens, half obscured by the computer screen, that was my mother’s. For each book I invoke a sort of patron saint. For A Week in December it’s Orwell, just visible at two o’clock from Tolstoy. The message of the old wartime poster next to him gives solid advice on a slow day. The bag was a Christmas present from my wife. …”

Ruth Werner

David Childs

RUTH WERNER was one of what the late Peter Wright, of MI5, called “the great illegals” of Soviet intelligence, who included Richard Sorge, Alexander Rado and Leopold Trepper among them.

She was born Ursula Kuczynski into a Jewish middle-class family in Berlin in 1907, the daughter of Dr Robert Rene Kuczynski, a prominent economist and statistician. Her brother, Professor Dr Jurgen Kuczynski, became equally famous, or notorious, as a Soviet intelligence operative. In 1924 Ursula took up an apprenticeship in the book trade, in the same year joining the Communist Youth League of Germany (KJVD). She joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) two years later.

From an early age Ursula Kuczynski’s main aim in life seemed to have been promoting the Soviet Communist cause. She had a model in Rosa Luxemburg, the brilliant Polish-Jewish revolutionary murdered in Berlin by right- wing officers. Many young idealists felt the same as she did. Germany was in turmoil having faced defeat, inflation, mass unemployment and attempted coups from left and right. Nationalism and capitalism were held responsible for the 1914-18 war and Communism preaching international solidarity appeared to some to be the answer.

By 1930 she was working in China for Soviet intelligence with her first husband, Rolf Hamburger. They had probably already worked for the Soviets in Poland. China was at that time a battleground, with the Western powers seeking to hold on to the concessions they had gained, Japan attempting to grab as much as possible, and the Chinese fighting among themselves. Many thought China would go the same way as Russia and Stalin saw it as fertile soil. It was also a place for adventurers of all kinds.

Based in Shanghai, where she met the top Soviet agent and her fellow German, Richard Sorge, Ursula remained there until 1935. There is still a mystery about whether she met Roger Hollis, later head of MI5, and had a liaison with him. Only a few years ago she still claimed not to have known him. From China she went for training in Moscow and from there to Switzerland, a key centre of Soviet intelligence activity.

Neutral Switzerland had become the centre of Soviet intelligence, gathering messages from its agents across occupied Europe, what the Gestapo called “the Red Orchestra”. Ursula was given the code name “Sonia” and worked there as a member of the “Lucy Ring” under the Hungarian Aleksandr Rado. By this time she had divorced her husband Rolf, who had been imprisoned by the Chinese for espionage activities. Having married a British member of the “Lucy Ring”, Ursula arrived in Britain in December 1940.

She lived in Oxford as Ursula Beurton or Brewer, a Jewish refugee. Her brother Jurgen was already well-established and busy on behalf of the Soviet Union. He had been instrumental in introducing Dr Klaus Fuchs, a fellow German Communist refugee, to Soviet intelligence. Fuchs, who was working on the early stages of the atom bomb at Birmingham University, met Ursula at Banbury, roughly midway between Oxford and Birmingham, during 1942, to hand over secrets for transmission to Moscow. She was regarded as a top wireless operator, but also as someone who could give psychological sustenance to a lonely secret agent. It is not clear whether she was sent to Oxford to assist some other agent, as Fuchs had previously been handing over material in London to another controller.

Ursula remained undetected in Britain and returned to Germany in 1950, taking up residence in East Berlin. She held the rank of colonel in Soviet military intelligence (GRU) and worked as a departmental head in the Chamber of Foreign Trade, which was also involved in intelligence gathering. It must have been a difficult time for her. Firstly, almost any office job would have been boring after the exhilaration of undercover work in the field. Secondly, she would have been under suspicion as a Jew and as someone who had passed the war years outside the Soviet Union. This was the time of Stalin’s deadly anti-Semitic mania. Both Trepper and Rado were jailed in 1945 by the Soviets and Sorge had been left in the lurch by Stalin after his arrest by the Japanese. He was subsequently executed. Life became easier after the death of the Soviet dictator in 1953.

In 1956 came the official revelations, at the 20th congress of the Soviet Communist Party, about Stalin’s crimes in the 1930s and 1940s. Did Ursula ever question what she had done? Like many others of her generation and convictions, she remained a believer. She blamed the rise of Stalin on the backwardness of Russia and justified her work as part of the defeat of “Nazi-Fascism”.

A mother of three, she lived in Berlin, probably for security reasons, as Ruth Werner, and engaged in writing and journalism. She was increasingly honoured by the Communist SED (the Socialist Unity Party) regime in East Germany. In 1982 she was awarded the Fatherland Order of Merit (VVO) in gold. In a way, the SED chief Erich Honecker was reminding the Soviets what they owed to such German spies as Ursula Kuczynski. Although she wrote her autobiography, Sonjas Rapport (Sonia’s Report, 1977), many questions about her activities remained unanswered. She remained an SED member until the end, joining the renamed Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), on its formation.

Ursula Kuczynski (Ruth Werner), intelligence agent and writer: born Berlin 15 May 1907; three times married (three children); died Berlin 7 July 2000.

Copyright 2000 Newspaper Publishing PLC
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved

Spy Chief in Britain Opens Door a Bit to Press

So it was front-page news in Britain on Wednesday when MI5’s director general, Jonathan Evans, gave the first interview by a head of the agency, as he marked its centenary.

Mr. Evans gave a small group of British reporters little in the way of fresh insights into the security threats facing Britain. But the fact that he met the reporters at all, at MI5’s now widely known Millbank headquarters on the Thames embankment in central London, and that he spoke on the record, was news in itself.

He underscored the scale of the threat he said Britain faces from plots inspired by Al Qaeda and hatched in Pakistan, using British citizens or residents to mount attacks. The template for such attacks was established by suicide bombings on London’s transit system on July 7, 2005, which killed 56 people, including the four bombers.

In a speech last year, Mr. Evans said MI5 was tracking 2,000 terrorism suspects in Britain, including British Muslims as young as 15. But on Wednesday he seemed eager to temper public concern. He said Britain’s successful prosecution of 86 terrorism cases in the past 18 months, mostly involving Islamic militants, and the guilty pleas of nearly half of those accused had had a “chilling effect on the enthusiasm of the networks” involved.

“They’re keeping their heads down,” he said, because of relentless surveillance and frequent prosecutions. While describing this as very encouraging, he also cautioned that “the networks have not gone away.” MI5 intelligence indicated that militants still intended to attack Britain and that such an attack could occur at any time, despite the agency’s vigilance.

“There could easily be activities we’re not aware of,” he said. “We don’t have anything approaching comprehensive coverage.”

Mr. Evans said that 75 percent of MI5’s investigations involved connections with Pakistan, the ancestral homeland of about three-quarters of Britain’s estimated population of 1.5 million to 2.5 million Muslims. The main threat to Britain, he said, came from Al Qaeda’s core in Pakistan and its “assets in this country.”

Mr. Evans, 50, who took over in 2007, made it clear that he had little taste for the exposure customary for the leaders of American intelligence agencies, with testimony before Congress and other public appearances. Reporters were not allowed to name the floor of the Millbank building where he has his office, and photographers were not invited. MI5 distributed its own photograph of Mr. Evans, showing him as a balding, genial-looking figure in an open-necked shirt.

Statistics he offered reflected changes in an agency known for years as a bastion of white male dominance, with many recruits drawn from Oxford and Cambridge. In the 1950s, the agency had about 850 employees. With an urgent recruitment drive after the attacks against the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, it now has more than 3,000.

More than half of MI5’s officers are now women, Mr. Evans said, and 8 percent are from ethnic minorities. “My staff are on the streets every day trying to keep the nation safe,” he said. But they are dealing with an adaptive enemy that has learned lessons from the increased surveillance.

He said Qaeda suspects in Britain rarely spoke to one another in or near buildings and made increased use of Internet-based telephone services, which are harder to monitor than conventional phone lines.

While the need to set priorities for investigations means there is always the chance of an attack by extremists who have escaped the agency’s surveillance, he said, “I think it’s quite likely that the next attack, or next attempted attack, will involve people of whom we have heard or about whom we know a bit.”