SOVEREIGNTY AND STRATEGIC SECURITY

Why does Argentina have much to develop in its strategic defence?

 

By Sir Charlattam

An innocent cruise ship, the “Costa Victoria” arrived from Montevideo to the port of Buenos Aires in the spring of 2007, and on it, two thousand three hundred and ninety-two tourists, mostly Europeans and Americans, who before continuing on to Patagonia would disembark for a few days to get to know the “Reina del Plata” (Queen of the River Plate). At first sight, one of the many foreigners who arrive to visit and spend their dollars in the gastronomy and hotels of the country.

In short, one of the many visits that cruise companies organise to the region, one of the ways in which MI-6 enters your backyard without invitation.

But on this visit came a peculiar young female couple, one of many who disembarked from that cruise ship. With an apparent American accent, wearing colourful clothes and infectious laughter, they strolled through the mythical neighbourhood of “La Boca” and “San Telmo” like any tourist arriving in Buenos Aires. In reality, they were two MI-6 assets on a field mission. They did not enter through any windows, nor did they dress in black or climb over walls to penetrate any government building or carelessly enter the military sites of the Navy or the Ministry of Defence. Sitting in a cafe in “Retiro” and each with a laptop like any other internet user, they were actually maintaining encrypted communication with the GCHQ station at Mount Pleasant (in the Falklands) to corroborate the range and clarity of the signal with which they would intercept and listen in on communications from the main government buildings in the city. This was a combined HUMINT-SIGINT online operation that the Argentines never imagined could happen, demonstrating intolerable security vulnerabilities.

According to an old friend who still walks the corridors of the so-called “dirty tricks” department in the building you know on the banks of the Thames, one of those ladies was an Irishwoman in the service of MI-5 who, by those miraculous things in life, moved into the foreign service.

For years before and after the 1982 war, intelligence had been intercepting communications from camouflaged fishing and commercial vessels flying EU flags that calmly sailed the Atlantic a few miles off the coast. Obviously the Argentines had no chance of detecting these operations, although if they had noticed them they could have done nothing. But all the credit for this did not go to the ISI (MI-6). They had (and still have) the assistance of the NSA's electronic intelligence satellite and antenna system “Echelon”, which collected and collated information for NATO.

The British bureaucrats have their own electronic intelligence called Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) through which the Foreign Office has been operating since the end of the war and with a base in the South Atlantic against the sovereign integrity of Argentina's communications, much more so since the installation in 2012 of the P.R. China base in the province of Neuquén. In reality, the intrusion and intelligence gathering activities go beyond Argentina and reach the whole region. Once again, I would ask what measures and counter-measures Argentina developed to protect its sovereignty in the face of these intrusions that affected and continue to invade its political sovereignty?

The answer is trite and it is none. Both the post-1982 and Kirchnerist governments, especially during the period when agents under orders from the Foreign Office were operating at full fury, left the Armed Forces and their intelligence agencies without resources, objectives or clear policies to deal with this problem.

The conditioning agreed in the Madrid treaties of 1989 and 1990, in which the Argentine representatives handed over operational control of the Armed Forces and intelligence to London, was compounded by the “stupidity” and false “humanism” that masked itself behind the human rights organisations with ideology (i.e.., right for some only) and which formed part of the “human rights” agenda, The absence of an updated defence policy and the lack of a new and updated intelligence policy, which was the core of the government at the time, favoured the free operation of the intelligence agencies under the noses of the officials of the Casa Rosada, so much so that at times some in the intelligence commissions of the Parliament have asked themselves: “Don't they really work for us?”

The absence of an updated defence and strategic security policy was a fact, to which was added the lack of technological advances of our own to develop cyber intelligence and counterintelligence activities, a spectrum that the Anglo-American departments and agencies had already been exercising since the Cold War era through the multinational intelligence agency “Five-Eyes”.

Among the most important operations that are carried out through cyberspace (intruding the internet) and that go beyond simple espionage, they pursue various strategic objectives such as “creating mistrust”, “discrediting”, “deceiving”, “setting false flags”, “shocking”, “degrading”, “dissuading”, briefly, any form of subverting the political and social situation of the target country, in this case Argentina and focused on the entire period of the Kirchnerist populist government.

When, in 2017, the sinking of the “San Juan” submarine occurred, which revealed classified and unmentionable manoeuvres and therefore had to be kept quiet, these dirty resources were used with the internal support of the Argentine government itself, which for reasons of sympathy and political adherence had a direct line to Cameron.

Today many of these resources are being used intensively in Eastern Europe and in particular in Ukraine, especially by the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the SBU intelligence. Unlike in Argentina, JTRIG's dirty tricks and attempts to hack into Russian computer systems have been fruitless and only in some cases have they penetrated, with poor results.

As of today, Argentine defence resources are still behind the recommended level and beyond having some systems and software of Israeli origin, this is not enough to cover the cyber defence gap they have exposed and they should also know that the backdoors of these systems are shared with London.