As I said before, yes. Who watches the watchers? 😉

It will take a very long time to fix what Kissinger/Cheney/Rumsfeld etc have done. Possibly generations. Will take some time to fix things here, but probably not so long.

Oh well… I guess we’ll see. 🙂 Good luck to us all!

So… you feel better now knowing we Aussies really understand what you have been going through? 😉 Mind you we blame the USA for all our recent problems! LOL Sorry about that. Ahem. :(Not you personally, and the many like you of course! We do know there are a few good Americans. And not just the dead ones!) LOL

I couldn’t resist! 😀

Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodies, “who polices the police”, is an old and vital question. Whoever takes over from Bush is going to find that a lot of records are missing and a lot of crime was ignored, and these are the people who claim to represent “law and order”.

I should mention BTW, that the department was actually called JIO (Joint Intelligence Organization) when I began with them. During the 80’s, there were many changes, including the addition of Counter-Terrorism, and JIO was groaning under the weight of it all! Eventually MAJGEN John Baker decided to move the core function of strategic level, all-source intelligence assessment to a new agency, DIO. JIO went back to being responsible for geographic, infrastructure, economic intelligence and Counter-Terrorism. You can see an interesting paradigm shift by the fact that JIO was always headed by a civilian, such as my boss Mr. Marshall, but in 1989 it changed to a Military commander MAJGEN Baker, which essentially forced the move to split it into two groups.

Anyway… back to my story! LOL Where was I? Right… Fraser! Another useless PM we really didn’t need! Thankfully, his reign was short-lived and Bob Hawke (ALP) won the next election. He stopped the useless National Crimes Commission and created the National Crime Authority (NCA). The difference was that the NCA had full oversight and was publicly answerable, but the Fraser NCC would have been controlled wholly by the Federal Gov and been a secret organization.

One of the primary reasons for the NCA, was to investigate crimes committed across borders, especially Police corruption which was rife in the ’70’s and 80’s, and the growing Organised and white-collar crimes.

When NCA was tasked to investigate Police Corruption in NSW, I was *loaned* from JIO to help with analysis tasks and strategies. The first thing I recommended was moving the Task Force headquarters from Sydney (in NSW) to SA (Adelaide)! Having the HQ in the same place where Police Corruption was being investigated was stupid at best! Secondly, I recommended that all security be handled by the Military Police. This advice wasn’t taken, and security was given to ASIO, And I went to my superior and offered my resignation. They refused to budge on ASIO, and eventually the HQ was bombed and a Snr Detective killed, and most records of the investigation were destroyed.

If there is ANY possible way to do any task incompetently, ASIO is guaranteed to find it!

When Howard came to power, the first thing he did was disband the successful NCA, and replace it with Fraser’s NCC. THEN, to make his power complete, he also merged the Office of Strategic Crime Assessments (OSCA) and the Australian Bureau of Criminal Investigation (ABCI) into the NCC, and expanded the powers of ASIO. Thus ensuring nothing would get done and nobody had the whole picture on crime in this Country. And ensuring Howard’s friends, the white-collar corporate criminals would stop being thrown into Prison! I hope there is a VERY special Hell for Howard and Bush!

Cops are nosy, but they will help as long as it doesn’t put them in a jamb.

Boring and tedious is the part that never gets into the novels. Three hundred pages on breaking a single source code is not exactly going to fly off the shelves.

I got on very well with the Police, especially the Commonwealth Police. We told them when ASIO were going to do something stupid, and they told us things. 🙂 Whenever we had an op on, it was SOP to liaise with the Police and not tread on their toes. Wasn’t just courtesy, it was their turf and they knew things we didn’t. Sometimes we needed the Police to make sure things stayed quiet in an area for a while, or for possible backup, or to make arrests, etc. I never had any trouble with them. 🙂 My liaison watched too much spy TV and had a wicked sense of humor! So you can imagine the fun we had. 😉 My Russian friend used to call him the Pink Panther, and my police friend liked that and it stuck. LOL

It was all complicated at times. And usually just boring and tedious! Yeah… lot’s of paperwork. 🙂

Don’t underestimate the “humor” of cops. They would know damn well the whole thing was embarrassing, and when in doubt follow the rules to the letter. Following rules is the ultimate revenge of malcontents in a bureaucracy, because nothing can get done if you follow all of the rules. I would do that whenever I felt the management needed a reality check. It usually took two days until they surrendered and stopped whatever it was they were doing to annoy me. In addition to nothing getting done, a mountain of paperwork gets generated and the bosses have to initial it.

If I was working and discovered a major breech, I would certainly want the rest of the world to know if my guys were involved. I would have been royally ticked off if someone had erected all of those barricades in my jurisdiction because the locals would all be annoyed and take it out on my people.

I’ll never forget when the Air Force security people called us in to ask if we knew that the little bar we went to near Rhein-Main was owned by “COMMUNISTS”. As if we could miss the East German flag, the German Communist Party posters, the portraits of Marx and Engels that the place was decorated with.

We went there because they had the right beer on tap at the correct temperature and to harass the owner about capitalizing on the weakness of the working class. He always responded with the proper party slogans about imperialism and oppression, so it was a nice quiet place to get drunk after too many hours in an airplane.

This was the time of the “guest workers” in Germany, so most of the bigger places had Serbs behind the bar, Greeks working restaurants, and Turks doing the manual labor.

We were a little annoyed because we knew the security people had several people they sent to the bar, so we told the briefer that while their people spoke pretty good German, it was with the wrong regional accent and they need to stop wearing American shoes when they were supposed to be undercover. They also needed to learn the proper tipping method. They really were bad and obvious.

I know all too well the problems of agencies stepping on each others operations. We didn’t do it because we were passive, pure intel collectors, but we lost a lot of rich veins to other agencies stumbling in and having our operation discovered in the aftermath. PITA, you have to go back to work.

I learned some Polish and Russian. I’d had a Polish girlfriend many years earlier, and spent a Month with her in Warsaw visiting her family. They taught me to drink (as only a Pole can!) They made their own potato vodka. Thank the stars my Grandfather had taught me to drink (he said it was necessary to be a good soldier!) After a week, I could breath after throwing down a glass… and they stopped laughing at me and saying “Drink! Drink!” all the time! LOL

There was a Restaurant (Rasputin’s) we kept an eye on in Sydney. Was a favorite place for visiting Russians. Was owned by a Russian man & wife. We found out the man used to be GRU. Anyway, we got on well, and I loved the food! I remember the first time in there, the man came over and asked if I would like a drink. And I said ‘Yes please. Pertsovka please.” And he looked surprised, and asked how I liked to drink it. I said “cold in a chilled glass of course.” And smiled and he laughed and brought 2 frosted glasses and a bottle and sat and drank with me. 🙂 Pertsovka is a Russian Pepper Vodka. I liked others too. Now and then, when I would go in on a busy night, one or more people would suddenly leave. And we had a couple people outside to follow them. 🙂 We built up a useful profile on the Russian who’s who that way. That was how I met the Russian Consulate Liaison officer. He asked me if I would stop going there as they were getting complaints. LOL We discussed it and came to an arrangement. 🙂 We understood each other and we often went there for dinner. One day, ASIO raided the place. *sigh* Almost destroyed a years worth of work and effort. DIO is much higher on the pecking order than ASIO. So suffice to say they caught hell! The Liasion looked at me after the dust had settled and said “ASIO, yes?” And I shook my head slowly and sighed and said “yes. You are enjoying this aren’t you?!” And he said “My friend! Never! ” And I said ” Bullshit!” And he laughed and said “We have some like them too.” And I said “Yeah, but you can get rid of yours when they do something stupid. We are civilized here. I envy you. I need a drink!”

The Russians always laugh (At least, the senior ones I met did. The field op’s rarely laughed.) It’s as if they get the joke, and laugh because they know you don’t! I could never shake the feeling that the joke was on me. 🙂

BTW, That liaison ended up working as a senior manager at a large diamond mine here. He was a Geologist and Gemologist before he began his career in *politics* it turned out. 🙂 We kept in touch for awhile, and he said that with the bad economy in Russia, it was a very good job to have. 🙂

I remember being assigned to work at a local college that was host to a traveling Russian high school basketball team on a “good will” tour. Their minder was a KGB officer I had run into in Frankfurt. I thought he was going to have a cat when he saw me. He was playing equipment manager, or some such dubious role. It didn’t occur to him that there really weren’t that many Russian speakers in the US,

I ran into him again in San Diego at a Russian art exhibit. He must not have progressed very rapidly, or he was trusted only on trips to the US. Again, it was just that I was one of the few people around who spoke Russian and got “volunteered” to help. I tired to convince him that it was just a coincidence, as seem to constantly happen in Dr. Zhivago, but he was really rattled. I thought it was funny.

I think part of the Chasers incident was locals ticked off by being told what to do by “Feds”, you get that a lot in the US. Just a few of the lads having a bit of fun at the expense of the “know-it-alls”.

Yeah… I know how bad it can be.

Here, Howard tasked ASIO with the *Russian* problem! *sigh* That was the Com. Police’s job, and they were doing a good job too! They busted up a couple big Russian drug rings here. ASIO have managed to do nada in 4 years! There are only two outcomes possible with ASIO, either they will screw up big, or nothing at all will happen. I refer anyone who doesn’t believe me to the Chasers incident at APEC.

In addition to their intel role, the KGB were the border guards, the political police, and the prison guards.

In a Soviet prison, criminals had higher status than political prisoners. The KGB didn’t arrest them, so they didn’t care, and the criminal class was useful on the outside in dealing with problems where a KGB presence would be embarrassing or cause a problem with the militia.

Russian organized crime is the Soviet criminal class being lead by former KGB officers. They have dossiers on people, so they don’t worry about being caught or prosecuted, it isn’t going to happen. They are as ruthless as any drug gang on the planet, and are much better organized. Essentially the police are fighting black ops, not crime, and most police departments aren’t prepared for it.

They are a valid target for counter-terrorism forces, but they are classified as criminals. The same goes for many drug gangs, but the counter-terrorism people won’t accept the responsibility, so a lot of police the department are militarizing.

The military and the police are two separate entities with distinctly different “rules of engagement”. In the Air Force, for example, there are two separate specialties depending on whether an individual is working in law enforcement or working in security. The security specialty is close to being an infantryman, with law enforcement is like a civilian police force. For years it was easy to tell because law enforcement wore the blue uniform and carried pistols, while security wore fatigues and carried M-16s. The weapons difference is still there, but everyone wears green camo these days.

Too many police departments have forgotten what their primary job, protecting citizens, is and have gone “cowboy”. It isn’t a good thing.