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An ex-spy says MI5 has so few Muslim officers that it considered 'blacking up' agents
Anyway the grass responsible for telling us all this is "Robert Acott," the codename of a former MI5 operative who spoke to Newsnight indicting the service after being drummed out following a breakdown.Other highlights from the interview include him being sad when IRA suspect Dermot O'Neill was shot because he dressed fancy ("I actually felt a bit sad for him. Even though he was a terrorist—he had a lock up in Hornsey with four crate bombs, Kalashnikovs, pistols… but other than that, he was a normal bloke. He was quite fashion conscious. Always had Levi 501 jeans.") and that Abu Qatada's codename was "Dinosaur Egg," but the main bit was how higher ups at the Service intended to deal with the pesky lack of diversity in the force fucking up their attempts to infiltrate UK mosques post-9/11."We weren't used to dealing with the way they acted," Acott told Newsnight. "The good thing about following Irish targets was that they would meet in places like pubs, which you could go into. The Islamic targets would meet either round each other's houses or in mosques or whatever. You can't get away with going in there. And also they would live in mostly ethnic areas. Quite often you would find the only white people in the streets were surveillance officers."How would you deal with that situation? If you said "send a spy intern down to Circus Circus in London Bridge with a pocketful of petty cash and the instruction 'get some of that brown face paint and some plastic pirate scimitars'": congratulations, you just passed spy school. Because that's what happened. With, as Acott estimated, there only being literally one Muslim surveillance officer on the force, one MI5 team leader suggested—and actually tried out, on a training exercise—blacking up as a method of infiltration. Just imagining a load of MI5 opps playing paintball in blackface. Tea towel turbans. Extremely problematic throat singing. Someone gets paint in the eyes and needs to go to the hospital.Anyway, in short: Rachel Dolezal wasn't some cartoonish privilege-as-a-person strawman, she was actually the inspiration for some of the most sophisticated counter-terrorism operations of modern times. Further: the UK is doomed, our spies are shit.Follow Joel on Twitter.Trending on NOISEY: Were There Any Good Remixes For Summer, Or What?