Pakistan ISI: The Bogeyman of Afghanistan?

[Riaz Haq]

British Afghan war veteran Major Robert Gallimore says he saw no presence of Pakistan's intelligence service ISI in Afghanistan. The Afghan Army saw the " imagined nefarious hand" and "bogeyman" of Pakistan everywhere but he never saw it. He "saw not one piece of evidence" of it. It was all in their minds.

British Army Major Gallimore in Afghanistan

British Army Major Robert Gallimore with Afghan Soldiers

During his three tours of duty in Afghanistan, he could hear all the radio conversations going on but never heard any Pakistani accent. He did, however, see "buckets and buckets of money" and rising Indian influence in Afghan Army that blamed Pakistan for all their problems. Pakistan is their bogeyman.

The Afghan Army says they'll feel good when they can "invade Pakistan". They do not blame the British but the Pakistanis for Durand Line that they do not recognize.

Major Gallimore sees the emergence of an India-Pakistan 21st century "Great Game" similar to its British-Russian predecessor. Many Afghans support creation of Pashtunistan by annexing northern part of Pakistan into Afghanistan. They blame Pakistan for the Durand Line, not the British or their own leaders who agreed to it. As a result, Maj Gallimore warns that Afghanistan has become much more volatile and dangerous than ever before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUyCTJI_f-A

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[Riaz Haq]

Two new books on Pakistan’s ISI and its ‘War for National Survival’

by BY THOMAS E. RICKS OCTOBER 4, 2017

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/10/04/two-new-books-on-pakistans-isi-...

Former DIA Senior Intelligence Analyst Owen L. Sirrs’ Pakistan’s Inter-services Intelligence Directorate: Covert Action and Internal Operations is the strongest of the pair. Sirrs traces ISI’s “existential war for national survival” to the trauma of Partition, highlighting how many of Pakistan’s early military and intelligence leaders survived the dangerous trek to the new country. The ISI, a “start-up operation born out of a collapsed empire,” leveraged its ties with the CIA to build the capabilities it used to support covert action operations in neighboring India and Afghanistan. Sirrs’ discussion of the transformational role of the Afghan Program — from the early support to Islamists in 1973 through the 1991 creation of the Taliban — is strong, as are his descriptions of how Islamization undermined ISI internal discipline.

Sirrs works to “puncturing the myth of ISI as a ‘rogue’ agency operating beyond the knowledge and consent of national authorities.” He makes a convincing case that ISI operates under firm GCHQ (General Headquarters) control. I suspect, though, that Sirrs overestimates civilian leaders’ access and influence over ISI operations. Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif, and others tried to harness ISI against their enemies, but these attempts to manipulate the service fall far short of reliable control. With so little transparency into Pakistan’s civil-military relations, we are forced into a form of Kremlinology, weighing competing claims by players with every reason to spin.

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The other book, Hein G. Kiessling’s Faith, Unity, Discipline: The ISI of Pakistan, could have been extraordinary. Kiessling lived in Pakistan for nearly two decades and had direct access to most former ISI Director Generals. He covers the same history as Sirrs (also dismissing allegations that the “strictly led and managed” service conducts rogue operations). In contrast to Sirrs’ chronological march through ISI’s development, Kiessling’s narrative veers between ISI’s organization, historical controversies, and personality clashes among military and civilian leaders. His on-the-record interviews of former ISI Directors, including the reclusive General Mahmood Ahmed, highlight service leaders’ continuing suspicions over civilian leaders’ competence and goodwill.

Unfortunately, Kiessling undermines his account with unsourced judgments and a low threshold for conspiracy theories. He dismisses accounts of ISI kidnappings and assassinations as political propaganda, proposes an unusually low estimate of ISI personnel strength, and asserts that “all fingers point towards the Americans” in the unsolved mystery of the 1988 plane crash that killed Pakistani President Zia-ul-Haq and U.S. Ambassador Arnold Raphel. Kiessling’s stated premise is that ISI is the unjustified target of “frenzied and often ill-informed discussion” and conspiracy theory, while the rival Indian Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) is “largely let off the hook.”

In attempting to address this perceived imbalance, Kiessling allows his sources’ whoppers to go unchallenged. Thus, he republishes an ISI statement that the well-documented civilian disappearances in Baluchistan are either (a) nonexistent; (b) terrorists KIA, their bodies hidden by partners-in-crime; or (c) “mentally retarded individuals, who leave their homes and move to other parts of the country.” Elsewhere he cites claims that 9/11 was “an inside job.” The result is an unfocused narrative with some new insights, but one I would hesitate to consider reliable.

[Riaz Haq]

THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE > OPINION
Pakistan has friends in Kabul
By Taimur ShamilPublished: January 25, 2018

https://tribune.com.pk/story/1617144/6-pakistan-friends-kabul/

After returning from my recent trip to Kabul, many people that I met back home were concerned about Pakistan’s image in Kabul — opportunities for cooperation and the intensity of anti-Pakistan sentiment in Afghanistan. My answer to them was simple. Pakistan, socially and politically, has friends in Kabul and the opportunities for Pakistan are many, if we try.

Here are the facts: in terms of social relations, every day between 2,000 to 3,000 visas are issued from Kabul alone to Pakistan. The numbers of visas issued from the rest of Pakistani consulates are additional, that may vary from 800 to 1,000 as per Pakistani officials. The Afghans who travel on these visas are usually travelling for health and educational reasons. The patients who travel to Pakistan feel more comfortable in Pakistan than any other country. The reasons being obvious, most of them share the same culture, language, religion and most of the times clans and tribes as well. Also that many of them have been frequently travelling to Pakistan for the last many years. Majority of them have their families in Pakistan that either migrated during the Soviet-Afghan war or later during the last decade. These Afghans who come to Pakistan also find Pakistan economically affordable as compared to other countries in the region. It is to be kept in mind that most of the Afghans live in abject poverty and lack basic health facilities. Therefore, Pakistan is the logical and economical option.

Interestingly almost every third person that I met, Dari (Persian spoken in Afghanistan) dominated, Kabul could speak and understand Urdu. Most of the people who could speak Urdu were young Afghans. They had either been educated or had spent considerable time doing jobs in Pakistan. They have good memories attached to the neighbouring country which welcomed and hosted them.

After meeting the young Afghans, I realised that when it comes to Pakistan-Afghanistan relations, higher education is Pakistan’s strength. While Pakistan has itself improved the quality of higher education, it has worked on giving scholarships to Afghan students who want to pursue their academic ambitions. Islamabad is generally multi-linguistic city and multi-ethnic as well. One can find Hazaras, Persian speaking, and Pakhtuns in large numbers in different universities of the capital. This naturally gives the Afghan students a conducive environment to blend in.

Last year the Higher Education Commission announced scholarships to 3,000 Afghan students and a large number of those are females. These young students are the bridges and ambassadors of peace between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and a huge potential for the future of democracy and peace in Afghanistan. The tapping of this potential needs the Foreign Office’s attention now more than ever.

A lot of Pakistanis are concerned about anti-Pakistan sentiments brewing in Kabul. The concerns are, no doubt, justified and show Pakistan’s concern and urge to improve its relations with the people of Afghanistan. After all, Pakistan has hosted millions of Afghan refugees over the decades and expects that the refugees become the ambassadors of goodwill between the two countries when they return to their home country. For that Pakistan too needs consideration on smooth transition of refugees from Pakistani soil to Afghanistan. It doesn’t need to be rough and loaded with blame. That ruins the very spirit with which Pakistan hosted them for decades.

[Riaz Haq]

Directorate S by Steve Coll review – the US v al-Qaida and the Taliban
This sequel to Ghost Wars might well become the definitive account of the CIA and America’s secret wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan

by Rafia Zakaria

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/24/directorate-s-steve-c...

Directorate S, from which the book gets its title, lies buried deep in the bureaucracy of the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), Pakistan’s spy agency. Ensconced thus, the directorate works to “enlarge Pakistan’s sphere of influence in Afghanistan”. It goes about this task, Coll explains, by supplying, arming, training and generally seeking to legitimise the Taliban, the AK-47 toting terrorists who took over Afghanistan in 1992, stringing up decapitated corpses in town squares and shoving women into the confines of their homes. Nobody paid much attention then, and perhaps never would have, had the Taliban not become host to Osama bin Laden.

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Directorate S takes readers deep into the malevolent intrigues of spycraft with its cast of colourful characters: there is the Dunhill smoking spy chief Ashfaq Kayani; the fitness-obsessed, water-guzzling General David Petraeus; special envoy Richard Holbrooke, who calls his diplomacy “jazz improvisation”; not to mention such Taliban commanders as Omar, who makes off over the Pakistan border on a motorbike. The latter’s escape, Coll astutely notes, was a “lost opportunity”; had he been caught, it could have changed everything. The more notorious missed opportunity is the escape of Bin Laden from the Tora Bora cave complex a few months later. Coll recounts that, too, with fascinating details. For instance, just as General Tommy Franks is setting up a plan to get Bin Laden, a demanding Donald Rumsfeld calls and asks to see within the week war plans for the invasion of Iraq. For the Americans, it seems, Afghanistan was both a constant and an afterthought.

Directorate S provides telling background descriptions with just as much skill. When US soldiers run into an abandoned school for al-Qaida suicide bombers, they find that “the recruits studied in concrete rooms” the walls of which “were painted with murals of the afterlife”, in one “channels of milk and honey” and in another “paintings of virgin girls”. At the CIA, the Counter-Terrorism Center analysts hunt terrorists huddled over “low-grade industrial carpeting, cookie-cutter Government cubicles” in large rooms that are “poorly lit and smell sour”. In an attempt at relief, “someone had mounted fake windows looking out on beaches and palm trees”. Fantasy, it seems, is the fuel of both endeavours.

Then there are the absurdities: the supposedly indelible ink that washed off when Afghans went to vote in their first postwar election; the drone operators who hope dogs jump off the trucks at which they are about to fire missiles; and the mass of blunders that has killed 140,000 people but that US Isaf (International Security Assistance Force) commanders still describe as “a war to give people a chance”. In the 15-year story that Directorate S tells, Afghanistan has been built a bit and bombed a lot, the Taliban have been fought with and then courted, the Pakistanis embraced then abandoned. What the British tried to document in Curzon’s day the Americans refused to learn; there is indeed trouble on the Frontier again, and in Directorate S we have the definitive account of it.

[Riaz Haq]

CIA's Ex Officer Michael Scheuer Talks About Pakistan's ISI



There continues to be a concerted effort by some western and Indian governments and the mainstream media to demonize the ISI, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency of Pakistan. Some Pakistanis, particularly Pakistani liberals, are also part of this anti-ISI campaign.

To put unrelenting attacks on the ISI in perspective, let's read some excerpts from an interview of ex CIA officer and chief Bin Laden hunter Michael Scheuer on ISI, and watch the following video:

1. ISI is like all other intelligence services--like the Australian service or the American service.

2. ISI works for the interest of their country, not to help other countries.

3. The idea that ISI is a rogue organization is very popular--and even the Pakistanis promote it---but having worked with ISI for the better part of 20 years, I know the ISI is very disciplined and very able intelligence agency.

4. Pakistanis can not leave the area (AfPak) when we (Americans) do. They have to try and stabilize Afghanistan with a favorable Islamic government so they can move their 100,000 troops from their western border to the eastern border with India which---whether we like it or not, they see as a bigger threat.

5. We (US) have created the mess in South Asia and the Pakistanis have to sort it out. Our (US) problems in Afghanistan are of our own making.

6. Al Qaeda has grown from just one platform (Afghanistan in 2001) to six platforms now.

https://youtu.be/-ncg9ks-MQE

http://www.riazhaq.com/2015/03/cias-ex-officer-michael-scheuer-talk...

[Riaz Haq]

#Tajik, #Uzbek say #IamnotAfghan. #Afghanistan #eTazkira

https://www.thenational.ae/world/asia/afghanistan-s-identity-crisis...

It is a single word that outsiders commonly use to refer to nationals of Afghanistan. Its formal placement on the country's long-planned electronic identity card, however, has inspired a hashtag and arguments that reflect a national divide: #IAmNotAfghan.

President Ashraf Ghani and First Lady Rula Ghani became the first citizens to apply for the new card last week. But the proposed use of the word Afghan on its face may scupper the entire multi-million dollar project.

"I am from Afghanistan, but I am not Afghan," Aslam Niazy, a young citizen from Jowzjan province, wrote in a Facebook post, in three different national languages, on Monday. His post ignited a debate about ethnicity and identity among his friends on the social network, which has since spread across the country, reflecting a schism that continues to threaten Afghanistan’s unity.

Despite its initially apparent accuracy, members of minority ethnic groups equate "Afghan" as a synonymous and historic reference of Pashtun ethnicity, a group that makes up more than a third of the population.

"Those who oppose consider that the word Afghan is a reference to one community of Afghanistan and so cannot represent the identity of all citizens," said Ghulam Ali Danishgar, a sociologist in the capital Kabul. "However, geographically we are Afghans."

Across the world, citizens of Afghanistan are also largely and commonly referred to as Afghans. The nation's full name - The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan - also appears along the top of the card.

Although the country is riven by suicide attacks from the Taliban and ISIL insurgents the cards were primarily devised to help provide better access to public services rather than as a means to improve security.

Known locally as eTazkira, a reference to the existing paper identity document - needed to get water, electricity, education or housing - the electronic card's introduction has been delayed for years because of ethnic sensitivities.

"It's not just about the word, but about the appeasement of the Pashtun nationalists' groups," says Tahir Qadiry, head of Mitra TV and a senior adviser to Atta Noor, the recently ousted governor of Balkh province, who is an ethnic Tajik and opponent of the identity card scheme.

"Even though Ghani is a Pashtun himself, he has always showed himself to be democratic and not a nationalist. But now when he finds himself losing the Pashtun support, he is using the politics of identity to regain the Pashtun majority," added Mr Qadiry.

Other opponents include the infamous warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, who despite reputedly being in exile in Turkey retains the title of vice president, and Mohammad Mohaqeq, another anti-Soviet era fighter turned politician. Both them and Noor are planning to boycott the identity card scheme in their constituencies.

And Afghanistan's chief executive Dr Abdullah Abdullah, while not outright critical of the new cards, had called on the government to postpone the launch, pending further consultation.

There is also a broader political interest as the cards should help reduce voter fraud which is rampant in elections. The election commission lacks accurate data and fair voting and ballot counting is a subject of regular dispute, with "ghost votes" a major problem. The electronic cards would also help create a census; the last full one was in 1979 and several attempts since have fallen short.

In an attempt to avoid discord it was proposed near the end of 2017 that the ethnicity of the cardholder would be featured alongside the nationality reference. However, that amendment was also opposed and rejected by several parliamentarians.

[Riaz Haq]

The US intel agencies do influence internal American politics to help or hurt politicians and political parties 

The most common way is to leak intelligence and plant stories in the media 

That’s why Trump and Democrats both fear them 

https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/privacy-and-surveillanc...

An example of what I’m talking about emerged when Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer was asked by Rachel Maddow about Trump’s spurning of the agencies’ findings. Trump is “taking these shots, this antagonism, this taunting to the intelligence community,” Maddow pointed out. The response by Schumer—who has been in Congress since 1980, and in the Senate leadership for ten years, and presumably knows his way around Washington—should send a chill through the heart of every American:

Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you. So, even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.

Some may argue that Trump is not serving his country well by not giving more respect to the intelligence community. But whether or not that is true, if it’s really the case that dissing the intelligence community might result in retaliation by that community against a politician, then the lines of power in our political system have become dangerously distorted.

It’s not clear what the “six ways from Sunday” are that Schumer has in mind. Presumably they could range from antagonistic leaks, to concrete actions overseas to undermine a president’s foreign policy, to darker forms of sabotage and blackmail. Certainly we have seen some of these behaviors in our nation’s history. And it’s worth remembering that our spy agencies are professionals at manipulating and interfering with governments—though all such activities are clearly illegal if applied within the United States or to U.S. persons.

It’s possible that Schumer was being flippant or over-dramatic. He may have meant simply that they might continue to try to make Trump look bad by releasing their intelligence findings to the public—something they ought to do more regularly. But this is not the first time we’ve seen suggestions that our spy agencies are becoming an independent political force. In January 2014, for example, in the middle of a steady drumbeat of Snowden revelations, President Obama was preparing a speech to address the subject. The New York Times, in a story on the upcoming speech, wrote the following:

The emerging approach, described by current and former government officials who insisted on anonymity in advance of Mr. Obama’s widely anticipated speech, suggested a president trying to straddle a difficult line in hopes of placating foreign leaders and advocates of civil liberties without a backlash from national security agencies.

To me this was a deeply disturbing piece of reporting. Naturally Obama, like all presidents and indeed all politicians, had to navigate among competing interests. As America’s foreign policy leader, he had to worry about the opinions of foreign leaders and nations. As a politician, he naturally had to weigh the concerns of liberal civil libertarians, who were a part of his core political constituency in the Democratic Party, as well as conservative civil libertarians, who were part of his citizenry, and the Congress.

But, the Times reported, he was also concerned about a “backlash from national security agencies.”

Similarly, in a 2009 story published shortly before Obama was inaugurated, the Times reported that Obama was “reluctant” to authorize investigations into torture under the Bush administration. His administration, the paper noted,

will face competing demands: pressure from liberals who want wide-ranging criminal investigations, and the need to establish trust among the country’s intelligence agencies. At the Central Intelligence Agency, in particular, many officers flatly oppose any further review and may protest the prospect of a broad inquiry into their past conduct.

[Riaz Haq]

Jason Chaffetz: The Deep State is real – I've seen it up close and it's far worse than you can imagine

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/09/18/jason-chaffetz-deep-state...

With each successive batch of text messages released between then-FBI agent Peter Strzok and then-FBI lawyer Lisa Page, the evidence supporting a politically motivated Deep State within the federal government spills out into the open.

Based on my own experience, this particular set of text messages is the tip of the iceberg. While serving on the House Oversight Committee, I saw firsthand how those in control of our bureaucracy brazenly abuse their power – spying, manipulating and misleading – in an effort to perpetuate their stranglehold on the government.

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My first run-in with the Deep State happened weeks after the Benghazi terrorist attacks of September 11, 2012. In an encounter highlighted in my book, I went face-to-face with a lawyer sent to Libya by Hillary Clinton’s State Department to act as a spy and ensure I did not ever get to the truth of what happened on that tragic night.

When I refused to allow this State Department lawyer to participate in a briefing for which his security clearance was insufficient, he immediately called Clinton Chief of Staff and fixer Cheryl Mills to demand entrance to the meeting. His real purpose was to intimidate witnesses from being candid with a congressman.

I won that battle and got the information I sought. But the effort to speak to witnesses, review documents, and debunk the ridiculous and false narratives told by political appointees and perpetuated by their Deep State allies was an uphill battle.

Even with a select congressional committee empaneled to investigate, Congress was never able to pry from the Deep State many of the documents that would have confirmed or refuted the damning testimony of Benghazi’s heroes.

Spying is just one trick up the sleeves of politicized bureaucrats. Powerful senior staffers with authority to classify, resist disclosure, and subvert oversight have perfected other strategies to avoid transparency and accountability.

The Deep State manipulates congressional investigations by pretending to cooperate with document subpoenas. Those who are part of the Deep State bury congressional committees in piles of paper ostensibly responsive to the investigation, and then brag to the media about the number of pages they have turned over.

In reality, many of those pages will either be fully redacted, duplicates of other pages, or irrelevant to the investigation.

The media then dutifully report that the agency has turned over thousands of pages – yet the public gets no answers. Meanwhile, the documents that would actually tell the American people the truth never see the light of day.

Misleading the public about the nature of documents sought either by Congress or through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests is another art the Deep State has perfected. Agencies employ lawyers specifically to find reasons to withhold documents.

In one May 2014 hearing, a TSA sensitive security information director testified that upon being hired, attorneys and FOIA processors trained him to hide information.

The director testified that he was told: “If you come across embarrassing information or whatever, (the chief counsel) will just hide it and come up with an exemption; because if you cover it with a FOIA exemption it’s so hard for the other person to challenge it, and it will be costly and difficult for them to challenge it, and they’re probably never going to see it anyway, so you just get away with it. That’s the way it’s done.”

There are solutions, which I outline in my book. But before we can address solutions, we have to acknowledge the problem.

The Deep State is not just a conspiracy theory. No less than our very system of separation of powers and checks and balances is at stake.

[Riaz Haq]

Bob Woodward quotes Dr. Peter Lavoy, staffer in charge of South Asia for Obama's NSC, in his book "Fear" as follows:

"There are literally thousands of sub-tribes in Afghanistan. Each has a grievance. If the Taliban cease to exist you would still have an insurgency in Afghanistan".

https://books.google.com/books?id=wKRkDwAAQBAJ&q=subtribes#v=sn...

[Riaz Haq]

British PM Margaret Thatcher banned "Spycatcher" book by a retired MI5 officer talking about how British intelligence manipulated elections and domestic politics in UK 

https://www.csmonitor.com/1987/0807/bspy.html

Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer, by Peter Wright. New York: Viking Penguin. 392 pp. $19.95. CAN the Western democracies, committed to open governance and the citizen's right to know, learn to rein in their intelligence services, whose watchwords are secrecy, aggressiveness, and unaccountability?

The answer thus far is no. Consider the revelations about the abuses of power that have characterized the frequent CIA scandals, from the Bay of Pigs in 1961 to the Iran-contra operation.

Consider also the uproar in Britain caused by the Thatcher government's injunction against Peter Wright's ``Spycatcher.'' The book contains a three-page bombshell: the accusation that fully 30 of his fellow MI5 (domestic counterintelligence) officers were plotting in 1974 to topple Harold Wilson's Labour government by leaking allegations to the Conservatives regarding Mr. Wilson's - purported - pro-communist sympathies and associates.

This charge against MI5 is not new: Wilson, having resigned, made it openly in 1977. Nor is intelligence manipulation of elections entirely new: The Conservative landslide in 1924 owed much to a Red-baiting intelligence leak to the press of the so-called ``Zinoviev letter'' from Moscow. Wright, however, is attacking from the inside and the far right, while offering leads regarding ``the Gang of Thirty'' that British journalists are now pursuing. Mrs. Thatcher blocked press publication of excerpts from ``Spycatcher'' until she won the general election: A dozen lawsuits and countersuits were filed. While the book is being peddled in London unofficially, the House of Lords moved last week against the British Court of Appeal, which had lifted the injunction, and major newspapers are still forbidden to report on the book in any detail.

By asserting that an MI5 cabal intended to subvert the political process, Wright is mocking at ``fair play'' and ``the gentlemanly consensus'' of British life. Forget the myths, he insists: Hardball is MI5's favorite sport. Witness the important details he adds to our scanty knowledge of British plots to assassinate Nasser during the 1956 Suez crisis. And witness MI5's readiness in early 1959 to hunt down and kill Colonel Grivas, the greek Cypriot guerrilla leader. Though Wright suggests that MI5 quit the assassination business after 1960, the charges against it in Northern Ireland now cannot be ignored.

Abuse of power, that supremely American theme that excites attention and sales, is marginal, however, to ``Spycatcher.'' Wright's heart is in the Great Mole Hunt. The search for Soviet spies in British intelligence has boiled and simmered since Burgess and Maclean - forewarned - fled to Moscow in 1951.

The defection of Kim Philby in 1963, the uncovering of Anthony Blunt in 1964, various intelligence failures of that decade, all shocked many MI5 officers, Peter Wright very much included. There was jeering from the CIA and the FBI, which the British for so long had patronized. Wright and his dissident friends began their hunt, questioning hundreds of people over the years, and concluding that Roger Hollis, the director of MI5 from 1956 to 1965, was a Soviet spy, the much-celebrated ``fifth man,'' who had helped bring British intelligence - perhaps Britain itself - to its sorry state.

[Riaz Haq]

From Spycatcher to prime minister: the Malcolm Turnbull I knew
This article is more than 3 years old
Richard Norton-Taylor reported for the Guardian on the UK government’s 1987 attempt to ban a former MI5 officer’s memoirs in Australia. Here he recalls a young lawyer in the case

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/sep/14/malcolm-turn...

We knew Malcolm Turnbull as the cocky pom basher. Or rather, the bright young lawyer who humiliated the British establishment.

For the best part of six weeks in a Sydney courtroom 30 years ago, he ran rings around witnesses struggling, at Margaret Thatcher’s behest, to ban the publication of Spycatcher, the memoirs of the former MI5 officer Peter Wright.

Encouraged by the trial judge, Philip Powell, Turnbull played to the gallery, giving him the taste of an appreciative audience and certainly the confidence to pursue a career in public life.

In an exchange that will remain in the annals of Westminster as much as the Australian courts, Turnbull asked Sir Robert (now Lord) Armstrong, Thatcher’s cabinet secretary, why he had written to the publishers Sidgwick & Jackson saying Thatcher wanted a copy of a book by Chapman Pincher (which covered much of the same ground as Wright’s memoirs) when he was already in possession of the manuscript.

The letter “contains a lie”, Turnbull suggested. Armstrong replied: “It was a misleading impression, it does not contain a lie. I don’t think.”

Turnbull: “What is the difference between a misleading impression and a lie?

Armstrong: “A lie is a straight untruth.”

Turnbull: “What’s a misleading impression, a kind of bent untruth?”

Armstrong: “As one person said, it is perhaps being economical with the truth.”

Armstrong quickly pointed out that the phrase was not his own – it was first used by the political philosopher Edmund Burke, he told the court. But it was too late.

In 2009, the former Australian prime minister Paul Keating told the then incumbent, Kevin Rudd, that there were three things he should know about Turnbull: he was brilliant, utterly fearless, but he had no judgment.

At one point in the Spycatcher trial, Armstrong turned to Turnbull and said: “Don’t worry about me, Mr Turnbull, I am just a fall guy.”

He may have been the first fall guy, but he was not the last to confront the man who is now Australia’s prime minister.