Britain Expells Two Mossad Agents
September 19, 1999 - 0:0
BAIT-UL-MOQADDAS -- A renegade British spy claims Britain has been expelling agents from Israel's Mossad secret service for operating there without authorization, the Zionist Haaretz newspaper reported Friday. According to AFP, David Shayler, a former MI5 agent who faces charges in Britain after exposing a series of bungled operations, said London had repeatedly denied Israeli requests for permission to station a Mossad representative on its territory.
"The Mossad secretly sent agent operators to Britain to gather information on Arab targets. MI5 exposed these undeclared Mossad officers and quietly instructed them to leave the country," Shayler said. Shayler also said he "could not rule out" the possibility that Mossad itself carried out the bombing of the Israeli embassy in London in 1994 "to draw the British authorities' attention to the faulty security arrangements," Haaretz reported.
The Zionist foreign ministry described Shayler's allegations as "completely baseless," the paper said. The British government is seeking to extradite Shayler from France where he fled after revealing information about MI5, the counter-intelligence agency that was his employer for five years. He first sparked controversy with a claim that MI5's sister service MI6 hatched a plot to assassinate Libyan Leader Moamer Kadhafi. In the meantime, the Swiss Federal Prosecutor's Office said on Wednesday it filed charges against a suspected Israeli Mossad agent for a bungled phone-tap of a Lebanese car dealer believed to have links with Lebanese groups.
The suspect admitted to some of the charges, Reuters quoted the prosecutor as saying in a statement. "In particular, he admitted to often using an authentic Israeli passport, but with erroneous information, to enter Switzerland." He also admitted to "activities to install a listening and transmission device in an apartment house in Koeniz," which was the home of a suspected Hezbollah supporter.
Meanwhile, a British academic was Friday unmasked as a spy who worked for 12 years for the former East German secret police, the Stasi, the BBC reported. The BBC said Robin Pearson, an economic historian at Hull University in northern England, began working for the Stasi in 1977 under the code name "Armin". It said Pearson betrayed friends and colleagues, some of whom worked for international organizations such as NATO. The British intelligence agency MI5 has known of Armin's identity since 1994 but no action has been taken against Pearson, the BBC says.
Meanwhile, the British government has came under increasing pressure Saturday to explain why a number of Britons unmasked as spies for the former Soviet bloc went unpunished. The opposition Conservative party's Home Affairs Spokeswoman Ann Widdecombe called on Home Secretary Jack Straw to say how many people the security services had unmasked and why they had not been prosecuted. "Every day there has been another development to this farce," she said.
"Is Jack Straw going to finally make a statement or is he going to let the press do his job for him? That is the question." Widdecombe spoke out the day after the latest in a series of media revelations identifying spies that Britain's MI5 caught but never prosecuted. Britain's third largest party, the Liberal Democrats called for the affair to be given to a senior judge to decide whether the secret service and civil servants had not been too soft on spies it had unmasked in recent years.
Pressure has been building on the government in a week of spy allegations after the publication of a book based on information supplied by former KGB archivist Vasily Mitrokhin, who defected to Britain in 1992. Mitrokhin's files contain hundreds of names, including those of Soviet agents and their contacts in Britain and elsewhere.
"The Mossad secretly sent agent operators to Britain to gather information on Arab targets. MI5 exposed these undeclared Mossad officers and quietly instructed them to leave the country," Shayler said. Shayler also said he "could not rule out" the possibility that Mossad itself carried out the bombing of the Israeli embassy in London in 1994 "to draw the British authorities' attention to the faulty security arrangements," Haaretz reported.
The Zionist foreign ministry described Shayler's allegations as "completely baseless," the paper said. The British government is seeking to extradite Shayler from France where he fled after revealing information about MI5, the counter-intelligence agency that was his employer for five years. He first sparked controversy with a claim that MI5's sister service MI6 hatched a plot to assassinate Libyan Leader Moamer Kadhafi. In the meantime, the Swiss Federal Prosecutor's Office said on Wednesday it filed charges against a suspected Israeli Mossad agent for a bungled phone-tap of a Lebanese car dealer believed to have links with Lebanese groups.
The suspect admitted to some of the charges, Reuters quoted the prosecutor as saying in a statement. "In particular, he admitted to often using an authentic Israeli passport, but with erroneous information, to enter Switzerland." He also admitted to "activities to install a listening and transmission device in an apartment house in Koeniz," which was the home of a suspected Hezbollah supporter.
Meanwhile, a British academic was Friday unmasked as a spy who worked for 12 years for the former East German secret police, the Stasi, the BBC reported. The BBC said Robin Pearson, an economic historian at Hull University in northern England, began working for the Stasi in 1977 under the code name "Armin". It said Pearson betrayed friends and colleagues, some of whom worked for international organizations such as NATO. The British intelligence agency MI5 has known of Armin's identity since 1994 but no action has been taken against Pearson, the BBC says.
Meanwhile, the British government has came under increasing pressure Saturday to explain why a number of Britons unmasked as spies for the former Soviet bloc went unpunished. The opposition Conservative party's Home Affairs Spokeswoman Ann Widdecombe called on Home Secretary Jack Straw to say how many people the security services had unmasked and why they had not been prosecuted. "Every day there has been another development to this farce," she said.
"Is Jack Straw going to finally make a statement or is he going to let the press do his job for him? That is the question." Widdecombe spoke out the day after the latest in a series of media revelations identifying spies that Britain's MI5 caught but never prosecuted. Britain's third largest party, the Liberal Democrats called for the affair to be given to a senior judge to decide whether the secret service and civil servants had not been too soft on spies it had unmasked in recent years.
Pressure has been building on the government in a week of spy allegations after the publication of a book based on information supplied by former KGB archivist Vasily Mitrokhin, who defected to Britain in 1992. Mitrokhin's files contain hundreds of names, including those of Soviet agents and their contacts in Britain and elsewhere.