• Smith admits London street fear. The Home Secretary has only herself and previous Labour government Home Secretaries to blame for this problem. The government itself has turned the streets into fearful, no go areas at night in my direct experience during the past decade since assuming power in May 1997.

• The Whistleblower. See this splendid 1986 film about GCHQ if you can on Sunday 20 January, 11:10pm - 12:50am, BBC1 London & South East. See what happens to those who are even thought to be a threat from whistleblowing where GCHQ is concerned.

• "The Target is Destroyed". "What really happened to Flight KAL007 and what America knew about it" by Seymour Hersh, Vintage Books, New York, 1986. Seymour Hersh exposes the manipulation of Communications Intelligence (COMINT) for political purposes.

1. Smith admits London street fear. This Labour government has created streets of fear with antisocial and criminal behaviour becoming the standards in my direct experience by providing surveillance technology to the criminals to use against those like me who report the problems.

Instead of dealing with the problems this government has tried to eliminate their reporting for image management purposes, i.e., no reporting, no problems. Now the Home Secretary admits she's afraid of London streets in dodgy areas which she allows to remain so by continuing to permit the criminals to use surveillance technology against the honest, decent and antisocial and crime reporting people like me indefinitely.

"So how can you tell me you're lonely,
And say for you that the sun don't shine?
Let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of London
I'll show you something to make you change your mind."

Ralph McTell Streets of London

Perhaps the Home Secretary needs a Ralph McTell tour of the Streets of London starting with the Lancaster West Estate.

Home secretary Jacqui Smith scared of walking London alone

"In an interview on BBC One's Andrew Marr Show Ms Smith said: "What I actually said was I have walked on my own, not now of course because I am not allowed to because of my police protection. But both in London and my constituency I have in the recent past been willing to do that."

""What I also said ... was that you don't walk in areas you don't know in any circumstances and I never have in my life. I also said, and it is the case, that I am much less likely to be a victim of crime now than I would have been ten years ago." "

Smith criticised over 'safe' remark

BBC News Saturday, 19 January 2008, 23:47 GMT

Smith admits London street fear

Ms Smith says she did walk around her Redditch constituency

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has admitted she would not feel safe walking around London after dark.

Ms Smith told the Sunday Times that she would not be comfortable alone at night in deprived parts of the capital, as well as more affluent areas.

Asked if she would feel safe walking alone in the Hackney neighbourhood, Ms Smith replied: "Well, no, but I don't think I'd have ever have done."

Labour says crime is down compared to the Tories' time in power in the 1990s.

Smith admits London street fear

2. The Whistleblower. This excellent film will be broadcast again on Sunday 20 January, 11:10pm - 12:50am, BBC1 London & South East. This 1986 film about GCHQ features Michael Caine, Nigel Havers, James Fox, Sir John Gielgud and Gordon Jackson. This shows what happens to someone who is even suspected of being a whistleblower at the likes of GCHQ. I also recommend reading John Hale's 1983 book The Whistleblower upon which the film is based. Although a work of fiction, it reveals many truths about attitude and power for this supersecret intelligence organisation.

More recently we've seen what happened to Katharine Gun who did the world a big favour by disclosing the spying attempt against UN diplomats surrounding the UN Security Council vote about Iraq before its invasion. In today's world she survived and was even let off. I recall that as late as the end of the 1970s it was an offence against the Official Secrets Act to even mention the initials "GCHQ" or so I read at that time.

Also, the death of Alan Turing remains a mystery concerning how the cyanide got into his nightly apple the remains of which disappeared at the time of his death in the 1950s. Read Andrew Hodges book Alan Turing: the enigma for an outstanding biography of this incredible person who did as much as any to save the UK and western civilisation from the Nazis. Unlike today where even NSA has a Gay and Lesbian Club, being homosexual in the 1950s was suspect in the extreme. One might say that Alan Turing made GCHQ what it has become after WWII.

3. "The Target is Destroyed". Seymour Hersh first published "The Target is Destroyed" in September 1986 after some two years of investigation and writing. (Vintage Books, New York, 1987

In the summer of 1986 he was contacted directly by CIA Director William J Casey in an effort that he along with others at Random House and The Washington Post who had also been contacted by Casey and an official claiming to be from NSA for one reason or another determined that the call was intended to censor and prevent the publication of the book and any COMINT information about the shooting down of the Korean airliner flight 007 over Sakhalin Island on 1st September 1983. He writes about this contact in his preface to the Vintage paperback edition. Chilling it is, but he describes it as worse than chilling. Read this preface and his book.

I am interested in what Seymour Hersh has written about SIGINT (Signals Intelligence of which COMINT is a subset) in the Far East:

"Men and women who have worked at Misawa and elsewhere are forbidden to write about or discuss what they do. Virtually nothing is known about the operational procedures of the [USAF] Electronic Security Command [formerly the Security Service or USAFSS] or its sister units in the Navy [Naval Security Group (NSG)] or Army [Army Security Agency (ASA)] There are, for example, no novels whose protagonists spend their duty hours at work inside an NSA field station. [emphasis added] [Evidently he was not aware of John Hale's The Whistleblower or the film which came out in 1986.] It is difficult for an outside to comprehend the kind of work carried out in such facilities: technicians and linguists spend hour after tedious hour trying to isolate valid signals intelligence from the seemingly endless barrage of chatter on the airwaves; others are constantly hunched over oscilloscope, looking for the distinctive electrical emanations of radar activity.

"Those who have worked at such facilities describe their jobs as nerve-wracking and crisis-oriented: as one former Air Force man put it, "days of boredom and seconds of terror." Hundreds of men and women, perhaps as many as three hundred, are on duty at Misawa in three shifts--day, swing and mid (overnight)--monitoring raw traffic primarily from the Soviet Union and China. They are the best the Air Force has to offer. More than 90 percent of the enlisted Air Force men and women with college degrees work for the Electronic Security Command (ESC) [formerly the USAF Security Service]; their IQs average in the top 10 percent of all Air Force personnel. To get to Misawa, or any other of the other ESC floor station, the men and women--there is a higher percentage of women in communications intelligence than any other Air Force field--endure a minimum of eighteen months of intensive training in languages (including Russian and Chinese) and electronics, at a cost, so the Electronic Security Command has told its recruits, of more than $250,000 per person. Merely getting the high-level security clearances needed for the handling of NSA materials takes six to eight months and costs upward of $75,000 per investigation. Many ESC recruits commit themselves to a six-year enlistment.

"For all of its travails, the work is uniformly described as fascinating. Those in the ESC and similar units in the Navy and Army become the ultimate insiders [emphasis added]." (Seymour Hersh, "The Target is Destroyed": what really happened to Flight 007 and what America knew about it, Vintage Books, New York, pps 86-7.)

When I was in the USAF Security Service (prior to its being renamed the Electronic Security Command), I trained for six months as a Radio Intercept Analyst whose Air Force Speciality Code (AFSC) was 202x0 or just commonly a "202" or analyst. To "202" something meant to "analyse" it. Those who studied languages went to places like Syracuse University for nine months before being sent on to other training. They were called "203s" referring to their AFSC. The cryptanalysts were 201s. Radio Intercept Operators also called "dit chasers" or "ditty bops" were 291s (Johnny Cash was a "dit chaser" in Germany in the 1950s) while those who watched the oscilloscopes for electronic signals (ELINT (electronic intelligence)) were 292s.

The USAFSS training for me followed after basic training and started just after the Berlin Wall went up in August 1961. When we marched off to class at 5:30 am, we used to sing "Medic, medic don't be blue/You can be a two-oh-two" to the tune of Sound Off as we passed the medics' barracks. Word came back eventually to knock off the singing because we were waking them too early in the morning. We used to get up each morning at 4:30 am, eat breakfast and fall in by 5:30 am to march off to class which was on the flight line at "Goodbuddy Air Plane Patch" a former fighter training base during WWII.

After I finished my six months (25 weeks) of training (classes were from 6:00 am to noon) in March 1963 at Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas, I was sent to HQ USAFSS in San Antonio, Texas, where I was assigned to do final analysis and reporting. My area of expertise was the Far East. I did the final analysis of the information supplied from Misawa and other locations in the Far East along with several others in our group. Our final reports were forwarded to NSA and GCHQ.

The politicisation of communications intelligence as occurred in the aftermath of the shooting down of KAL007 was an anathema to anyone who ever served in communications intelligence. All the effort to keep this information and the fact of even carrying out this work was destroyed by such politicisation. Admiral Bobby Inman who had been DIRNSA (Director NSA) before this incident had taken NSA public in the 1970s. Apparently, this enabled those in political positions to use communications intelligence to their own advantage at a later date. By this time Congress had opened up the intelligence services as well.

James Bamford's book about NSA The Puzzle Palace: inside the National Security Agency America's most secret intelligence organization came out originally in 1982 with the Penguin paperback edition published in 1983. When KAL007 was shot down on 1st September 1983, James Bamford's book about NSA had been out for awhile.