Annie Machon: Ex-MI5 Spy Discusses Surveillance & New Cold War
Geopolitics & Empire
Geopolitics & Empire
4.2 • 570 Ratings
🗓️ 7 October 2016
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Former MI5 Intelligence Officer and whistleblower Annie Machon discusses Western intelligence connections to radical Islam and her greatest fear today, the energy game and proxy war in Syria which could lead to a nuclear confrontation between the US and Russia. She also covers the threat of the surveillance state.
Websites
https://twitter.com/anniemachon
Book
Machon, A. (2005). Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers: MI5 and the David Shayler Affair
Book Guild Ltd. ISBN-10: 185776952X
About Annie Machon
Annie Machon is a former intelligence officer for MI5, the UK Security Service, who resigned in the late 1990s to help blow the whistle on the spies’ incompetence and crimes with her ex-partner, David Shayler.
Drawing on her varied experiences, she is now a public speaker, writer, media pundit, and political campaigner. She is also the European Director of LEAP.
She has a rare perspective both on the inner workings of governments, intelligence agencies and the media, as well as the wider implications for the need for increased openness and accountability in both public and private sectors.
She is also a recognised international public speaker on a variety of issues: security and intelligence, ethics and citizenship, the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on whistleblowers, internet freedoms, press and media freedoms, secrecy legislation, civil liberties, totalitarianism and police states, accountability in government and business, as well as discussing her personal story of being ‘on the run’.
Annie read Classics at Cambridge University. In 1991 she was recruited by MI5 where she was posted to their political and counter-terrorism departments.
*Podcast intro music is from the song “The Queens Jig” by “Musicke & Mirth” from their album “Music for Two Lyra Viols”: http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Annie Meishon is a former British MI5 intelligence officer who is now an author, public speaker, media pundit, political |
| 0:23.0 | campaigner, and the European director of law enforcement against prohibition. |
| 0:27.5 | If there's anything else that I left out, please mention it. |
| 0:30.4 | But thank you for joining us, Ms. Mishan. |
| 0:32.5 | Our first question is regarding the connection between Western intelligence and government with radical |
| 0:40.2 | Islam, starting with Al-Qaeda back in the 1980s. Now, some mainstream academic terrorism experts |
| 0:46.8 | dismiss or severely downplay the connection between Al-Qaeda and the CIA or MI6 where they say the West only supported the |
| 0:55.9 | Mujahideen and not what was later known as al-Qaeda. From your experience which |
| 1:01.2 | you've written about in your book can you briefly tell us what exactly is |
| 1:05.9 | this historical connection between Western governments and |
| 1:09.9 | specifically al-Qaeda? |
| 1:13.0 | I think they're just playing with semantics here because they've always known that there is a |
| 1:21.6 | radical stream of Islam out there. And I think that we need to pedal back a little bit into history, where UK and other Western |
| 1:31.9 | democracies and the US have always had an interest, a growing interest in the Middle East because |
| 1:37.4 | they're energy rich. They have had for decades now. And one of the first manifestations of their |
| 1:43.9 | influence in that area was in |
| 1:45.2 | 1953 with the coup, which was orchestrated by the CIA and MI6. And this has been acknowledged |
| 1:52.8 | by those agencies now, the coup in Iran against the democratically elected President Mossadegh in |
| 1:59.5 | 1953. |
| 2:10.0 | And that replaced a democratically elected president with someone who became the Shah of Iran and was a authoritarian dictator, tortured people. |
| 2:14.8 | But he was basically secular. |
| 2:16.9 | A bit like Colonel Gaddafi of Libya and |
... |
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