Another war won..

[Pontius Navigator]

John, come off it. We don't spy on our friends, but if we do we don't tell the others. We do know where the submarines are, so we don't bump into each other, and theres in case we need to.

[John Hill]

We don't have any submarines so I cannot see the need for being part of Five Eyes.

[John Hill]

BTWE, I am not convinced so-called 'intelligence' agencies are at all effective in fact most probably don't know much at all. An obvious example was those WMDs that Saddam had and here is another story..

Mullah Akhtar Mansour was a foundation member of the Taleban and was their cabinet minister for Tourism, Civil Aviation, Ariana Airlines and a few other things.

He was a senior member of the Taleban and around about 2007-2010 he was considered to be second to Mohammed Omar. Quite a big cheese and some time after Omar died Mansour became leader of the Taleban.

Sometime in 2010 it was reported Mansour had talks with Afghanistan President Karzai, MI6 had flown him back and forth between Kabul and Quetta and had given him a considerable sum of money.

But the man was not Mansour and Afghan officials had said he was a "lowly shopkeeper" from Quetta.

WTF? You ask, how could he not have been identified when very many people in Kabul must have been familiar with the real Mansour?

I had met Mansour a few times in Kabul when we were doing a project there for IATA, but not only in Kabul.

Back in 2000/2001 the ICAO regional office organized a Director Generals conference for the Asia Pacific region in Wellington NZ. Mullah Mansour attended. Of course our company invited his party for dinner at a restaurant along with the party from the DPRK. So there we were, three Kiwis, three Afghans and three North Koreans out on the town together and the NZ Secret Squirrels should have known about it. But did they? Did they take photographs and share them with the other members of Five Eyes?

You can imagine there were some issues raised when the Afghans applied for the visas to visit NZ and I got dragged in to discussions. The visas were eventually approved. At one time I even had photocopies of their passports.

So, many people in Kabul would have been able to unmask the imposter, the NZ immigration authorities no doubt had images of Mansour, the NZ Secret Squirrels should have had photographs, even I had photographs so how effective was MI6 to be sucked in by the imposter?

Mansour eventually became leader of the Taleban and was killed by a US drone in May 2016.

[Pontius Navigator]

We don't have any submarines so I cannot see the need for being part of Five Eyes.

That is a non squetur if ever there was one. Australia doesn't have any nukes either.

[John Hill]

That is a non squetur if ever there was one. Australia doesn't have any nukes either.

Saddam had nukes but did he have submarines?

[Dushan]

Mansour eventually became leader of the Taleban and was killed by a US drone in May 2016.

A happy ending to a story, after all.