UK: MI6 'Firm' Spied on Green Groups

A private intelligence firm with close links to MI6 spied on environmental
campaign groups to collect information for oil companies, including Shell
and BP.

MPs are to demand an inquiry by Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, into
whether the secret intelligence service used the firm as a front to spy on
green activists.

The firm's agent, who posed as a left-wing sympathizer and film maker, was
asked to betray plans of Greenpeace's activities against oil giants.

He also tried to dupe Anita Roddick's Body Shop group to pass on
information about its opposition to Shell drilling for oil in a Nigerian
tribal land.

The Sunday Times has seen documents which show that the spy, German-born Manfred Schlickenrieder, was hired by Hakluyt, an agency that operates from
offices in London's West End.

Schlickenrieder was known by the code name Camus and had worked for the
German foreign intelligence service gathering information about terrorist
groups, including the Red Army Faction.

He fronted a film production company called Gruppe 2, based in Munich, but
he also worked in London and Zurich. His company was a one-man band with a
video camera making rarely seen documentaries. He had been making an
unfinished film about Italy's Red Brigade since 1985. Another of his
alleged guises was as a civil servant of the Bavarian conservation agency
in charge of listed buildings and monuments.

One of his assignments from Hakluyt was to gather information about the
movements of the motor vessel Greenpeace in the north Atlantic. Greenpeace
claims the scandal has echoes of the Rainbow Warrior affair, when its ship
protesting against nuclear testing in the South Pacific was blown up by the
French secret service in 1985. A Dutch photographer died in the explosion.

Both BP and Shell admit hiring Hakluyt, but say they were unaware of the
tactics used. Shell said it had wanted to protect its employees against
possible attack.

Schlickenrieder was hired by Mike Reynolds, a director of Hakluyt and MI6's
former head of station in Germany. His cover was blown by a female
colleague who had worked with him. Last night he refused to comment.

Reynolds and other MI6 executives left the intelligence service after the
cold war ended to form Hakluyt in 1995. It was set up with the blessing of
Sir David Spedding, the then chief of MI6, who died last week. Christopher
James, the managing director, had been head of the MI6 section that liaised
with British firms.

The firm, which takes its name from Richard Hakluyt, the Elizabethan
geographer, assembled a foundation board of directors from the
Establishment to oversee its activities, including Sir Fitzroy Maclean, Ian
Fleming's model for James Bond. Baroness Smith, the widow of John Smith,
the late Labour leader, was a director until the end of last year.

The company has close links to the oil industry through Sir Peter Cazalet,
the former deputy chairman of BP, who helped to establish Hakluyt before he
retired, last year, and Sir Peter Holmes, former chairman of Shell, who is
president of its foundation.

MPs believe the affair poses serious questions about the blurring of the
divisions between the secret service, a private intelligence company and
the interests of big companies. Hakluyt refutes claims by some in the
intelligence community that it was started by MI6 officers to carry out
"deniable" operations.

Norman Baker, home affairs spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, called on
Straw to make a statement. "The fact that this organization [Hakluyt] is
staffed by people with close ties to MI6 suggests this was semi-official,"
he said.

Rod Macrae, communications director of Greenpeace International, said: "We
are aware of the budgets these big companies have at their disposal to get
information. The use of a friendly film maker may sound bizarre but if you
go back to when Rainbow Warrior was sunk, one of the French agents appeared
in our New Zealand office as a volunteer."

Hakluyt was reluctant to discuss its activities. Michael Maclay, one of the
agency's directors and a former special adviser to Douglas Hurd when he was
Conservative foreign minister, said: "We don't ever talk about anything we
do. We never go into any details of what we may or what we may not be
doing."

How Agent Camus Sank Greenpeace Oil Protests

With his shoulder-length hair tumbling over the collar of a leather jacket
and clutching a video camera, Manfred Schlickenrieder cut a familiar figure
among left-wing political parties and environmental groups across Europe
for almost 20 years.

Whenever there was a campaign being organized, he was there to make a
"sympathetic" documentary.

His political credentials seemed impeccable: he had once been chairman of
the Munich branch of the German Communist party and the bookshelves of his
office held the works of Bertolt Brecht, the Marxist playwright and poet.

Behind the facade, however, Schlickenrieder was a spy working for both the
German secret service and for Hakluyt, a private intelligence agency based
in London's West End and set up by former officers of MI6, the secret
intelligence service. His codename was Camus after Albert Camus, the
existentialist author of L'Etranger.

Hakluyt paid him thousands of pounds to inform on the activities of
Greenpeace, Anita Roddick's Body Shop and other environmental campaigners.
The BND, the German equivalent of MI6, allegedly paid him 3,125 a month
living expenses.

The rewards of espionage brought him a spacious flat overlooking a park in
Munich and a BMW Z3, the sports car driven by Pierce Brosnan in GoldenEye.

The spying operation for Hakluyt began in April 1996, when Mike Reynolds,
one of the agency's directors and a former MI6 head of station in Germany,
was asked by Shell to find out who was orchestrating threats against its
petrol forecourts across Europe.

The threats followed an outcry over the oil giant's attempts in 1995 to
dump the disused Brent Spar oil platform at sea and allegations of
environmental damage caused by its oil drilling in Ogoniland, Nigeria.

Schlickenrieder approached environmental groups and far-left organizations
including Revolutionrer Aufbau, a Zurich-based communist group. He was
finally betrayed to the group by a female colleague.

Last week Shell confirmed it was Hakluyt's client until December 1996. The
company said that some of its petrol stations in Germany had been
firebombed or shot at. "We did talk to Hakluyt about what intelligence they
could gather," said Mike Hogan, director of media relations at Shell UK.

In May 1997, Reynolds asked the German spy for information on whether there
were legal moves within Greenpeace to protect its assets against
sequestration in the event of it being sued by an oil company. Two months
later, Greenpeace occupied BP's Stena Dee oil installation off the Shetland
islands in an unsuccessful publicity stunt to stop oil drilling in a new
part of the Atlantic. Schlickenrieder sent a report saying that Greenpeace
was disappointed with its campaign.

He sent an invoice to Hakluyt on June 6, 1997, billing the agency for
DM20,000 (6,250) for "Greenpeace research".

BP confirmed it had hired Hakluyt, but said it had asked the company to
compile a report based only on published sources of information. BP has
longstanding links with MI6. John Gerson, BP's director of government and
public affairs, was at one time a leading candidate to succeed Sir David
Spedding as head of MI6.

Schlickenrieder continued working for Hakluyt until 1999. He made a film on
Shell in Nigeria called Business as Usual: the Arrogance of Power, during
which he interviewed friends of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nobel prize nominee, who
was hanged by the military regime in 1995 after leading a campaign against
oil exploration.

Schlickenrieder sent a letter to a Body Shop executive saying he had been
researching the activities of Shell in Nigeria, and asked about plans for
further activities. Greenpeace said yesterday that Schlickenrieder's
activities had effectively sunk its campaign against BP's oil exploration
in the Atlantic.

Fouad Hamdan, communications director of Greenpeace Germany, said: "The
bastard was good, I have to admit.

"He got information about our planned Atlantic Frontier campaign to focus
on the climate change issue and the responsibility of BP. BP knew
everything. They were not taken by surprise." He added: "Manfred filmed and
interviewed all the time, but now we realize we never saw anything."

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