On day one, Alistair Crooke popped up in the Guardian’s story in the guise of dispassionate commentator. This certainly raised my own eyebrows at that point. For Crooke is hardly a dispassionate anything on this issue. He is a player. As the Telegraph reports: Mr Crooke worked for MI6 under diplomatic cover in Northern Ireland, South Africa, Columbia and Pakistan before serving as a Middle East adviser to the European Union from 1997 to 2003. His intelligence background was exposed by an Israeli newspaper in 2002. It is unclear what role Palestinian officials suspect Mr Crooke to have played in the leak, although he contributed commentary and analysis of some of the documents on Al Jazeera's website. As he does not work for the Palestinian Authority, it is not thought that the former MI6 officer had any direct access to the documents, suggesting that if he had any role at all it was restricted to brokering their leak. That would figure. Crooke left MI6 under a cloud: there was talk that he gone ‘off piste’ by becoming too sympathetic to Hamas (the fact that elements within the British Foreign Office have themselves become rather more well-disposed towards Hamas since that time is a further twist to the tale). As CiF Watch noted last year: Crooke was sent to Israel, as part of the British consular delegation in Jerusalem, ostensibly to oversee Israeli Palestinian relations on behalf of the UK Government. Sheila Raviv – an Israeli freelance journalist – says that Crooke had relationships with some highly questionable people in and around Jerusalem, people who were not connected to his diplomatic work. She relayed these concerns to the then British Ambassador (2001-3) Sherard Cowper-Coles. The Ambassador was apparently very sympathetic to her information and asked her to prepare a full report. But within ten minutes of sending it by email, Raviv received a frighteningly threatening email warning her off – the Ambassador’s personal computer had been hacked! Concerned for her own safety, Raviv reported her concerns to the Shin Bet. Crooke was investigated and within a short time was packing his bags. But there was no public announcement of an expulsion. The Israeli government had the prerogative of a formal public expulsion, of course – as all governments have for the diplomatic corps whom they host. But it seems that Israel chose to magnanimously offer the UK the chance of a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ that Crooke could go quietly and below the radar, so as not to embarrass an ally. It was later revealed that Crooke was a member of MI6 and the astonishing breadth of his terrorist contacts became known. An Italian magazine, Il Riformista, commented as follows (July 2005): This activity over the past year finished by provoking a growing resentment among Israeli authorities, who a couple of times went so far as to issue “warnings” to Crooke and to present confidential protests about him to the British embassy in Tel Aviv. Further, on 19 May, the deputy chief of information at the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Gideon Meir, referring to the secret British meetings, saw fit to say that “any contact with Hamas on the part of representatives of foreign governments is considered by the Israeli government as encouragement for striking us with terrorist acts.” Crooke, who also worked as Middle East adviser to Javier Solana, the former head foreign policy official of the EU. now runs an outfit called Conflicts Forum. As I wrote about Crooke’s activities here, here and here, this promotes Hamas and Hezbollah in the west and openly supports Islamic ‘resistance’ and radical Islamist thinking. On January 11, less than a fortnight before the Guardian set in train the possible collapse of the Middle East appeasement process, Crooke wrote in the Christian Science Monitor why the demise of the Middle East ‘peace process’ may be a good thing. What a coincidence!
Well there's a surprise...
How fascinating that the Palestinian Authority, possibly holed below the water-line by the Guardian’s ‘Palestine Papers’, now wants the former MI6 officer Alistair Crooke to, ah, help with their inquiries into the leak of these documents. As noted previously, whether or not their core ‘revelation’ that the PA was prepared to give up its core goals was true, distorted or fabricated, the damage done to the PA on the Arab street is immense. Whoever leaked these documents – and my guess is that some of what we have been reading from them is true, some of it untrue – was out to destroy the PA.
Saturday, 29 January 2011
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