Talk:VIGIL
Hobart Mercury (Australia)
November 25, 2006 Saturday
Old spooks not retiring kind
BYLINE: MICHAEL HOLDEN
SECTION: TALKING POINT; Pg. 43
LENGTH: 580 words
IT says its members brought about the conviction of radical Egyptian-born cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, uncovered insurgent tactics in Iraq and are now working to provide intelligence from North Korea.
The organisation is not the US Central Intelligence Agency or Britain's security agency MI6 but Vigil, a shadowy network of retired spies, senior military personnel, anti-terrorism specialists and banking experts.
Director Dominic Whiteman said he set up Vigil with two other businessmen last year to act as an interface between retired spies who were still party to good, raw intelligence, and the police and security services.
This evidence was just getting lost in the system, Whiteman said.
Vigil numbers more than 30 members and is spread across the globe from India to the United States, working with contacts ranging from a maid in Bangkok and a Mumbai train driver to senior intelligence figures.
We just recruited a guy who's a senior figure in police training in Iraq, Whiteman said.
Sixty per cent of Vigil's work involves gaining information via the internet by infiltrating online chatrooms, while the remainder is face-to-face or telephone work.
The information gleaned is passed on to authorities like the US FBI, the New York Intelligence Unit and British police's Counter Terrorism Command -- the CTC.
A CTC spokeswoman said the group was treated seriously.
The CTC is working closely with Vigil and in particular its director and spokesman who has made officers aware of chatroom material, she said.
One member of Vigil, Glen Jenvey, is credited with helping bring about the conviction of cleric Hamza, jailed in London in February for inciting racial hatred and soliciting murder, and wanted in the United States on terrorism charges.
Jenvey describes himself as an amateur spy like Miss Marple, the elderly sleuth created by author Agatha Christie.
It sounds more insulting to the terrorists, he said.
His latest undercover work has involved another hardline Muslim cleric, Omar Bakri Mohammed, banned from Britain in August as part of a crackdown on so-called preachers of hate.
Jenvey's revelation that Bakri had been delivering nightly sermons via an internet chatroom from his exile in Lebanon was reported prominently in Britain's media this week.
Jenvey said one of the chatroom's regular participants, a man since convicted of inciting racist hatred, had also called for the killing of the Queen.
Others had targeted US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Whiteman said London, where four British Islamists blew themselves up on the city's transport network last year, remained a focal point.
MI5's chief Eliza Manningham-Buller said recently Muslim extremists were plotting at least 30 attacks and there were some 1600 suspects being monitored.
Whiteman said a very trusted contact who had a key security role in the UK had revealed that 70 per cent of information given in a daily briefing to President Bush by US intelligence chief John Negroponte centred on the British capital.
Vigil has now turned its sights on two groups prominent in Britain: Tablighi Jamaat, a missionary organisation that is planning to build Britain's largest mosque in east London, and Hizb ut-Tahrir, an organisation Britain announced it would ban after the July 7, 2005, London bomb attacks.
Both groups say they do not have links to militants and say they promote peace, but media reports have often linked them to terrorism investigations.
