Mood:
specialTopic: peace
We have been doing our best to catch up the press after the frenzy of political wonkiness during the APEC week earlier this month of Sept 07. Our fat file is in the high draw of the filing cabinet on top of another cabinet.
But we had to seek out and link these two unusual contributions, one by Phil Burgess a US expatriate high level Telstra executive with some embarrassing things to say about security protocols, at least apparently because we don't necessarily agree with second guessing the effectiveness of their covert ways. Did they already know it was Phil Burgess, a very distinctive chap in the first place. Here is his piece in The Australian main opinion page and its quite a lark:
Chaser cut to the charade Phil Burgess | September 10, 2007
The other whimsical article well worth clipping was poor Mr Paul O'Sullivan. Not just any citizen but chief of ASIO, possibly offline at page 9 Monday Sept 10 2007 by Sian Powell:
Osama gets in, but not the ASIO chief
"ASIO chief Paul O'Sullivan was refused entry into two venues during APEC leaders' week in Sydney, but an Osama bin Laden lookalike in a fake Canadian motorcade was waved through two police checkpoints.
APEC security was a bizarre combination of the laughably incompetent and the overzealous, critics say.
The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation said Mr O'Sullivan was not inconvenienced by the suspicious officers who blocked his entry into the venues. "It was a minor administrative detail, quickly worked out," a spokesman said yesterday."
We don't second guess effectiveness of what covert operational activities the security agencies are involved in, because we don't by definition know. But we note this book published with the help of our grandfather Eric McLoughlin as a senior journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald back in the mid 1950ies which according to the key spy who brought Petrov over from Stalin's Soviet was none too impressed with the ASIO forerunner called ASO back then.
Reading between the lines fluent Russian speaker Michael Bialoguski thought ASO were thick, culturally unsophisticated, arrogant pseudo Brits, and he was on the same side given demise of his Polish family under the communist heal in the 1940ies. On the ASO side they thought he was a double agent. Tricky stuff.
