14 July 2000. Thanks to Frederico Duarte.
TAL&QUAL, Lisbon weekly newspaper
Friday, 14 July 2000
Translated from the original Portuguese article by the author, Frederico
Duarte
The European Parliament has chosen the Portuguese European Parliament Member MP Carlos Coelho to lead the investigation on "Echelon,", the worldwide eavesdropping system. The Portuguese is going to be the man that, for a year, will be under the most stringent surveillance of the world of espionage
The Portuguese European Parliament Member, Carlos Coelho, of PSD (Partido Social Democrata, Social-Democrat Party, member of the Christian Democrat group in the European Parlament-EP), newly-appointed president of the investigation committee of the EP that, starting in September, will investigate the Echelon spy system, will be the most watched man in the world during the next year.
"My telephones, faxes and e-mails might already be under surveillance," he told a Tal&Qual reporter this week with a shrug of shoulders that shows his perfect awareness of the situation.
Originally from Lisbon, where he was born 40 years ago, Carlos Coelho was president of the Young Social-Democrats and became the youngest MP in Europe at the age of 19 when he replaced the late MP Natália Correia in the Portuguese national parliament. His personality is marked by a very peculiar sense of humour that makes him, for instance, wear ties with rabbit images (in Portuguese Coelho = rabbit), which is enough to break with protocol rules in the most serious situations.
Carlos Coelho was also one of the youngest Portuguese government member when he was the under-secretary to the minister of Education Manuela Ferreira Leite. Now, his election for "first-vigilant" of Echelon is due to the fact that he¹s a member of the Committe on Citizen¹s Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs at the EP.
On the other hand, if our man in Strasbourg faces any difficulty penetrating the complex world of espionage, he can always hope for advice from his colleague and leader of the PSD MP¹s at the EP, Pacheco Pereira, the author of the introductory text of the Portuguese version of the most polemical espionage book since the end of the Cold War: The Mitrokhin Archive, which will be published next November in Portugal.
Industrial espionage
Carlos Coelho is going to co-ordinate a group of 36 MPs for a year, starting next September. "There's a system which is organized and controlled by the American secret services which has the capacity to intercept practically all forms of communication of voice and data at a planetary scale," Carlos Coelho said last March to the European Committee, in Brussels.
After the Berlin Wall fell and the end of Cold War between the United States and the former USSR, this powerful surveillance system known as Echelon "was directed not with purely military and defence intentions, but with commercial, industrial and tecnological goals," the Portuguese MP also said.
Several journalistic investigations about Echelon, the most recent made by Duncan Campbell, shows well how information gathered by the spy satellites from the USA ruined important business of European companies. In 1994, for instance, the system intercepted telephone calls between the French company Thomson-CSF and the Brasilian SIVAM to negotiate a surveillance system in the Amazon jungle. After those telephone interceptions, bribe allegations were raised that the French had tried to buy over a member of the Brasilian governmental board. In the end, the business went to the American company Raytheon, the same that is in charge of the maintenance and engineering services of the American Echelon base in Sugar Grove, Virginia, in the US.
A year later it was the turn of the aviation company Airbus, also French, to be the victim of the action of the US spies.
According to the Duncan Campbell report the American satellites got access to every fax and telephone call between Airbus, the government and members of the air force of Saudi Arabia. The agents found that the French were offering a bribe to a Saudi official. Thanks to this information, the Americans won the 6 billion dollar business that went to Boeing and McDonnell Douglas.
Allies
One additional problem for Carlos Coelho is that one of the partners of the Americans on this spy system is the United Kingdom, also a member of the European Union. "If France tells us that we can't have acess to certain information because they consider it to be a state secret, we are not going to insist on the request. As for UK, the case might be different...," explained Carlos Coelho this week to Tal&Qual.
"In September, I will start co-ordinating the group, first asking the nations involved on Echelon for the necessary co-operation. Only afterwards will I see what can be done in face of the answers that we will get from those countries," added the same Euro MP.
The origins of Echelon date to 1947, when the secret services of the UK and USA created the UKUSA agreement. The intention was to watch the movements of the nations that after Word War II were left behind the iron curtain raised by the communists from Moscow.
As years went by, the antennas of the UKUSA agreement spread to the allied countries of Canada, Australia and New Zeland, creating a privileged net of Anglo-Saxon information. Excluded from this group are the other powerful European nations such as France, Italy and Germany.
Abbreviations
For the study about Echelon it's better to forget CIA. The name to remember for this information net is NSA -- National Security Agency. Created in 1952, NSA's main goal is just to gather information. It has no agents like CIA, and doesn¹t make international operations able to inspire espionage romances like the mythical John Le Carré. But, in order to get an idea about how effective they are, let's just state the fact that it was the NSA which found the exact location of the Argentinian guerrilla Che Guevara when he was in Bolivia, information that led to his death.
For the most part members at NSA are recruited from the Air Force, Navy and Army. Only a small number are the civilian.
As for the English, forget the lesser and lesser secret services of MI5 and James Bond's MI6. Now the abbreviation is GCHQ -- Government Communications Headquarters. But, let's not assume that on this game there's any kind of loyalty. One example: the NSA men at the American embassy in London do spy on the diplomatic talks of their allies at UKUSA. It's a spy world.
Well informed sources
In order to know more about the world of espionage, and in particular about Echelon, the best place where Carlos Coelho might start looking is the internet site www.cryptome.org. This place is managed by John Young, a New York architect that, without geting a penny for it, publishes every day documents that arrive to him from every part of the world. His archive is large and has the most diverse information on cryptography, news, articles and documents about actions made by several "intelligence" services of several nations. The archive is available on-line and can be very precious to our Euro MP.
On the other side, in case Carlos Coelho think it might be necessary, he can always call to testify on his committtee the former British secret agent of MI5, David Shayler, that now lives in a farm near Paris and that can not return to the UK. The former agent, in case he returns home, faces the risk of being arrested because he revealed less than correct actions of the secret services while he worked there. David Shayler will also be able to explain to the committee how easy it is for the British services to spy inside and, mainly, outside their borders.
Frederico Duarte is a 27-year-old journalist at Tal&Qual since 1996. Mr. Duarte is preparing a book on Michael John Smith who was convicted in 1993 of charges by the British Government that he was a spy for the KGB. Mr. John Smith was sentenced to 25 years and is now in Full Sutton Prison, York.
Mr. Duarte has researched and written on intelligence and espionage since 1992, when his interest was stimulated by the John Smith case that had connections with Oporto, Portugal, Mr. Duarte's hometown. Mr. Duarte has found information on the John Smith case not presented during the trial which supports Mr. John Smith's claims of innocence. He welcomes additional information on the case. Send to: fredericoduarte@lycos.com