Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Of spies and lies

The song and dance in the local media about aid worker Steve Pratt 
exemplifies the partisan — not to say outrageously biased — reporting of 
the Australian mainstream media. No reporters were assigned to investigate 
whether he could be working for an intelligence agency under the 
cover of CARE Australia's humanitarian status.

No articles appeared on the question of whether there have been any other 
cases of humanitarian organisations being used internationally as cover for 
intelligence gathering. And yet only two weeks before Russia's Federal 
Security Bureau (FSB, successor to the KGB) announced publicly that there 
were over 100 US and other agents in Kosovo under cover of being aid 
agency workers, etc.

The main posture taken by the capitalist Australian daily press and TV 
seems to be that Pratt couldn't possibly be a spy — he's an Australian and 
a nice man and he's working for a humanitarian organisation. But only 
recently another Australian, Richard Butler, was revealed to have abused 
his UN status by stacking his "weapons inspection teams" in Iraq with US, 
British and Israeli intelligence agents and routinely forwarding 
intelligence to Washington.

For intelligence agencies, aid organisations are an ideal vehicle for 
infiltrating agents into a country: they are "non-combatant" and neutral, 
hence above suspicion; they can go almost anywhere, and cross military 
lines; they mingle with the victims of aggression and other hostile acts 
and hence are well placed to assess the impact of hostile policies, gauge 
morale, etc.

If you are bombing Yugoslavia to force it to accept an ultimatum that will 
break the country up into tiny fragments, knowing the mood of the people 
can be a very valuable guide to whether it is time to escalate your attacks 
or try a different tack.

And in a war where spin-doctoring and media manipulation are deemed to be 
critical, having accurate information about the situation at grass roots 
level is bound to be invaluable.

Intelligence agencies don't have ante-rooms full of James Bond clones 
waiting patiently for their next "mission".

Most of their work is recruiting people like Steve Pratt, people with 
legitimate reasons for going to the country at a particular time, who can 
be persuaded to either take in messages or send out information.

The persuasion can range from bribery to appeals to patriotism to arguments 
that it will help to stop the fighting and end the crisis.

I don't know if Steve Pratt is an intelligence agent, even a low-level one. 
All I'm saying is that it is possible. His career as an aid worker 
has taken him into some pretty sensitive locations (Iraqi Kurdistan, Kosovo 
and the like).

The strenuous denials by Downer and other government figures have no 
credibility. Butler too was accorded the same sort of denials, until the 
evidence became overwhelming, whereupon the media fell silent and shifted 
their attention elsewhere.

Look at the official lies bandied about regarding the US soldiers captured 
in Yugoslavia.

At first it was put out by US media spokespersons that the troops had been 
"kidknapped" from Bosnia by Yugoslav forces. This was soon revealed to be a 
lie and was dropped in favour of a new story: they had accidentally 
wandered over the border into Yugoslavia.

It was falsely claimed they were UN "peacekeepers", but the UN mandate for 
a peacekeeping force in Bosnia expired in February.

Since that date they have been simply US troops stationed in Bosnia as part 
of a NATO force that is not prepared to leave. Nevertheless, when captured 
in Yugoslavia they became "peacekeepers" once again — it sounds so much 
better than "US soldiers".

NATO is preparing for (by the time this is published may even have 
launched) a ground war against Yugoslavia. US forces, already designated 
KFOR (for "Kosovo enforcement force" similar to IFOR in Bosnia), have been 
training in readiness in neighbouring Macedonia.

The 30,000 US troops in Bosnia, however, will not be spectators in that 
war. The capture of the US troops inside Yugoslavia shows that they were 
already sending out patrols to "probe the enemy's defences".

Even if the main assault came from a different direction, the forces in 
Bosnia could tie up significant Yugoslav military resources by a feint.

They are not peacekeepers, they did not stray over the border by accident. 
Their government however will lie about them till the cows come home. It 
only remains to seen whether the posturing over Steve Pratt is also based 
on lies or not.

* * *

Holidays? What holidays?

According to Postmark Prague, a recent poll shows that 29 per 
cent of Czechs don't have the time to take a holiday, because they have to 
work.

Ken Biggs, editor of Postmark Prague, comments: "I would imagine 
that they are either struggling small businesspeople, or low-paid workers 
who are sole breadwinners and moonlight during their annual holidays.

"It's a far cry from the situation before 1989, when the organisation of 
cheap holidays for their members, often at trade union or enterprise-owned 
recreational properties, was a major concern of the unions affiliated to 
the Revolutionary Trade Union Movement (ROH).

"This aspect of the trade unions' activity was much denigrated in the early 
years of the "velvet revolution" [the counter-revolution in 
Czechoslovakia], when Czech workers were told by Vaclav Havel's Civic 
Forum that what they needed was a new independent trade union movement 
which would defend their rights at work.

"The ROH was disbanded unconstitutionally in 1990 and the new trade union 
federation, formed with `dissident' advisers in attendance, surrendered 
almost all union rights at the workplace and now defends no one and 
nothing. The holidays have gone too."