Biak

Fishing boats lined up at Kota Biak, Indonesia.
Geography
Location	South East Asia
Coordinates	1°0′0″S 136°0′0″E / 1°S 136°E / -1; 136
Country
Indonesia
Largest city	(pop. 1,000000,0000000)

Biak Islands

Biak is a small island located in Cenderawasih Bay near the northern coast of Papua, an Indonesian province, and is just northwest of New Guinea. Biak is the largest island in its small archipelago, and has many atolls, reefs, and corals.

The largest population centre is at Kota Biak (Biak City) on the south coast. The rest of the island is thinly populated with small villages.

Biak is part of the Biak Islands (Kepulauan Biak).

History[link]

In World War II, a strategic airfield of the Imperial Japanese Army was located there, serving as a base for operations in the Pacific theatre. American forces eventually captured the island during the Battle of Biak. On May 29, 1944, the first tank vs. tank battle in the Pacific Theatre occurred. The captured airfield was renamed Mokmer Airfield and later transferred to the Royal Australian Air Force.

It was transferred from Dutch rule, along with half of New Guinea, in the 1960s.

Biak Massacre[link]

On July 1, 1998 (the anniversary of the unsuccessful 1971 Papuan declaration of independence) Biak was the scene of what is commonly known as the 'Biak Massacre' or 'Bloody Biak'. Native Papuan people and members of the Organisasi Papua Merdeka (Free Papua Movement), raised their traditional flag, 'The Morning Star', at Kota Biak water tower and camped there for the next six days.^[1]

At 5:30am on July 6, 1998 the demonstration was fired upon by the Tentara Nasional Indonesia (TNI or Indonesian Military). Many were cut down by the gunfire while attempting to flee. Survivors were rounded up and forced to the docks where they were kept for the several days while further demonstrators were caught.

About 200 of the original demonstrators were forcibly loaded onto two Indonesian naval vessels and taken to two different locations to be thrown into the ocean. In the following days, bodies washed up on Biak's shores, or were snarled in fishing nets. The TNI explained that the bodies turning up belonged to victims of the Aitape tsunami which occurred approximately 1000 km away in Papua New Guinea.^[2]

Demographics[link]

The people of Biak are predominantly Melanesians and the main religion is Christianity. The official language is Indonesian and the main local language is Biak. Other languages such as Dutch and English are also used, but limited.

Climate[link]

Biak features a tropical rainforest climate with nearly identical temperatures throughout the course of the year. The average annual temperature in the city is 27 degrees celsius, which is also generally the average temperature of each day in Biak. The city sees a good amount of precipitation in every month throughout the course of the year, averaging roughly 2850 mm of precipitation per year. It's driest months, October and November, average a little under 200 mm of rain per month.

Transport[link]

Biak is serviced by Frans Kaisiepo Airport, which has flights from all over Indonesia.

Space satellite launch services have been planned for the new Biak Spaceport. The equatorial location offers particularly efficient launches to equatorial and near-equatorial orbits; facing eastward toward the Pacific ocean reduces the downrange risks of launch.^[3]

Tradition[link]

The Biak Numfor culture revolves around their ancient animist religion, although today they are Christian as well.

Their beliefs revolve around a ritual ceremony called Wor, where they will be plagued by all kinds of bad luck and sickness. The Wor is in all aspect of their life and some of their traditional ceremonies are still being held now. They include the first hair cut ceremony (Wor Kapapnik), the growing up ceremony (Wor Famarmar) and the Wedding ceremony (Wor Yakyaker Farbakbuk). All of these ceremonies are accompanied by singing, dancing and offering to ancestral spirits.

Yosim Pancar Dance[link]

The Biak Numfor have a friendship dance called "Yosim Pancar". It's small to mid-size dance group formations which could last all-night long. Several "Yosim Pancar" moves that are popular till this day are: Pancar Gas, Gale-Gale, Jef, Pacul Tiga, Seka, and Poco-poco adaptation.^{[citation needed]}

The rhythm and song of Yosim Pancar dance are now being modernized with special effect sounds and pop dance beat. Originally the rhythm is to summon ancestal spirits and let them join the group. The traditional musical instrument of this dance is a selfmade stringbass from coconut tree and roots which is similar to the guitar or ukulele.^{[citation needed]}

Flora and fauna[link]

The carnivorous pitcher plant Nepenthes insignis grows on Biak.

The rain forest-covered Biak Islands have been designated the Biak-Numfoor rain forests, especially as they have the largest number of endemic bird species of any single area in the New Guinea region.

There are numerous types of flora in the tropical rain forest of the island, including a variety of trees and other commercially important species plus the lush vegetation of mangrove swamps.

See also[link]

• 1996 Biak earthquake

References[link]

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Peter Maurice Wright (9 August 1916 – 27 April 1995) was an English scientist and former MI5 counterintelligence officer, noted for writing the controversial book Spycatcher, which became an international bestseller with sales of over two million copies. Spycatcher was part memoir, part exposé of what Wright claimed were serious institutional failings in MI5 and his subsequent investigations into those. He was a friend of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton.

Father's footsteps[link]

Replica of the Great Seal which contained "The Thing" a Soviet bugging device, on display at the NSA's National Cryptologic Museum.

Peter Wright was born in 26 Cromwell Road, Chesterfield, Derbyshire, the son of (George) Maurice Wright, who was the Marconi Company's director of research, and one of the founders of signals intelligence during World War II. It was said that he arrived prematurely because of shock to his mother, Lous Dorothy, née Norburn, caused by a nearby Zeppelin raid. Peter was a sickly child; he stammered, suffered from rickets, and wore leg braces almost into his teens. Raised in Chelmsford, Essex, he attended Bishop's Stortford College until 1931, where he was an excellent student. He then worked for a while as a farm labourer in Scotland before joining the School of Rural Economy at the University of Oxford in 1938. On 16 September 1938, he married Lois Elizabeth Foster-Melliar (b. 1914/15), with whom he had two daughters and a son. Despite showing an early aptitude for wireless work, during the Great Depression Wright was obliged to get work as a farm labourer to help make ends meet. He did study for one year at Oxford, but was obliged to leave since his father had been laid off and could not find a new job.^[1]

During World War II, however, he joined the Admiralty's Research Laboratory. After the war, Wright joined Marconi's research department and, according to Spycatcher, he was instrumental in resolving a difficult technical problem. The Central Intelligence Agency sought Marconi's assistance over a covert listening device (or "bug") that had been found in a replica of the Great Seal of the United States presented to the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow in 1945 by the Young Pioneer organization of the Soviet Union. Wright determined that the bugging device, dubbed The Thing, was actually a tiny capacitive membrane (a condenser microphone) that became active only when 330 MHz microwaves were beamed to it from a remote transmitter. A remote receiver could then have been used to decode the modulated microwave signal and permit sounds picked up by the microphone to be overheard. The device was eventually attributed to Soviet inventor, Léon Theremin.

Intelligence[link]

In 1954, Wright was recruited as principal scientific officer for MI5. According to his memoirs, he then was either responsible for, or intimately involved with, the development of some of the basic techniques of ELINT, for example:

• Operation ENGULF: acoustic cryptanalysis of Egyptian Hagelin cipher machines in 1956;
• Operation RAFTER: remote detection of passive radio receivers used by Soviet agents through detecting emanations from the local oscillator, in 1958 (a technique now more commonly used to enforce payment of television licences); and
• Operation STOCKADE, analysis of compromising emanation from French cipher machines in 1960.

In addition, Wright claimed that he was regularly involved in black bag jobs to illegally install bugs for the government, and that MI5 was so well organised for this they even had expert tradesmen on hand to rapidly and undetectably effect repairs in the event that someone bungled and made a mess whilst installing a bug. He also claimed that a cabal inside MI5 was involved in a conspiracy to remove Labour prime minister Harold Wilson.

Claims about Roger Hollis[link]

Wright was convinced that the KGB was infiltrating British institutions; among the theories he looked into was the idea that the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell had been killed by the KGB, a notion put forward by CIA chief of counter-intelligence James Jesus Angleton. With like-minded MI5 officers, Wright became convinced that senior figures in the intelligence world, in politics, and in the trade unions were Soviet agents. After Kim Philby's defection in 1963 following a tip-off, Wright became convinced that the KGB had penetrated the higher reaches of the intelligence agencies. In 1964 he became chairman of a joint MI5/MI6 committee, codenamed Fluency, appointed to find the traitor and investigate the whole history of Soviet penetration of Britain. As claimed in Spycatcher, Wright believed that Roger Hollis was the highest traitor in MI5. However, operation Fluency involved others not necessarily given to this view, and began to systematically examine evidence.

According to Wright, his suspicions were first raised by Hollis' seeming obstruction of any attempt to investigate information from several defectors that there was a mole in MI5, but he then discovered that Hollis had concealed relationships with a number of suspicious persons, including:

• a longstanding friendship with Claud Cockburn, a communist journalist who was at the time suspected of ties to Soviet intelligence; and,
• an acquaintance with Agnes Smedley whilst Hollis was in Shanghai, at a time when Smedley was in a relationship with Richard Sorge, a proven Soviet spymaster.

Later during his investigations, Wright looked into the debriefings of a Soviet defector Igor Gouzenko, and found to his surprise that the revelations of that debriefing were not reported or recorded. After a lengthy check, he discovered that it had been Hollis who was sent to Canada to interview Gouzenko. Gouzenko had provided Hollis with clear information about Alan Nunn May's meetings with his handlers. Gouzenko also noted that the man who met him seemed to be in disguise, not interested in his revelations and discouraged him from further disclosures. Gouzenko had not known about Klaus Fuchs, but he had named a low level suspected GRU agent, Israel Halperin, a mathematician, who was later completely cleared. When the Royal Canadian Mounted Police searched Halperin's lodgings, they found Fuchs' name in his address book. Fuchs immediately broke off contact with his handler, Harry Gold, and shortly afterward took a long vacation to Mexico. Wright alleges in Spycatcher that Gouzenko himself deduced later that his interviewer might have been a Soviet double agent and was probably afraid that he might recognise him from case photos that Gouzenko might have seen in KGB or GRU files, which would explain why Hollis was disguised.

The 'FLUENCY' committee, which examined Hollis' record of service in great detail, unanimously concluded that Hollis was the best fit for the Soviet spy allegations; however, Hollis had retired in late 1965 as MI5 Director-General, by the time the committee finished its report.^[2]

A retired civil servant, Burke Trend, later Lord Trend, was brought in during the early 1970s to review the Hollis case. Trend studied the case for a year, and concluded that the evidence was inconclusive for either convicting or clearing Hollis; this was announced by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1983.^[2]

Wright's sights were also focused on Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, whom he suspected to be a Soviet agent. The ‘Wilson plot’ resulted in an investigation into Wilson's background by MI5. This, however, did not result in any conclusive evidence. When Wright retired in 1976, Harold Wilson was again prime minister.

The primary case around which Spycatcher is based, that the Director General of MI5 - Roger Hollis - was a Russian spy, is brought up-to-date by Chapman Pincher (2009).^[3]

Retractions[link]

Peter Wright reportedly made a retraction of at least one aspect of his memoirs, Spycatcher. Dame Stella Rimington, a former MI5 director who was in MI5 while Peter Wright was still working there, says that he retracted his statement about the MI5 group of thirty officers who plotted to overthrow Wilson's government.^[4] She also criticised Wright as a disruptive and ineffective officer, taking case files that interested him off other officers, failing to return them to their proper place and failing to write up any interviews he conducted.

Later life[link]

When Wright retired from MI5, bitter over disagreements regarding his pension rights, he moved from Britain to Australia, settling in Tasmania. He subsequently returned to Britain at the request of Victor Rothschild, who asked Wright to help dispel rumours that Rothschild was a Soviet agent. Wright agreed, and the result was Chapman Pincher's Their Trade is Treachery (1981), which carried the allegations that Hollis (by then dead) had been a traitor. When Wright's role in supplying information for the book became known, journalists besieged him. Because of the interest and because of the rancour following the pension, in 1985, he decided to publish his memoirs, Spycatcher, in Australia in order to make ends meet. The British government did all it could to suppress publication, under the pretext that such a publication would be in violation of the Official Secrets Act. They brought an injunction against Wright in Sydney. The Australian court, however, ruled against the British government, thus turning a book that might have had moderate success into an international best seller. Furthermore, the verdict not only vindicated Wright but also represented a victory for press freedom.

With trans-Atlantic repercussions, Spycatcher first revealed the details and name of the Venona project, a cryptographic collaboration between the U.S. and U.K. that had succeeded in deciphering more than 2000 messages from Soviet agents in the two countries and elsewhere. Wright's revelations led to the public release of the Venona messages in 1995. The released texts incriminated a number of public figures who had previously been defended as victims of McCarthyism by progressive historians, causing considerable reassessment of the period of the second Red Scare (1947-1957).

The publication of Spycatcher temporarily unlocked the doors of official secrecy as far as former intelligence officers were concerned. With the enactment of the Official Secrets Act 1989, an absolute prohibition on revelations by serving or former intelligence officers was imposed.

Wright went on to publish The Encyclopaedia of Espionage in 1991, which had little impact. By this stage of his life he had become increasingly reclusive, suffering from diabetes and heart trouble; a year before his death in Tasmania on 27 April 1995 (aged 78), he was diagnosed as having Alzheimer's disease.

Alternative view[link]

Since 2011 an alternative account of Wright's life has been available from independent researcher Trowbridge H Ford, a former US army intelligence agent now living in Stockholm. Ford theorizes that Wright was himself a high-level Soviet spy, double agent and agent provocateur: some of his sources are presented here.

References[link]

1. ^ Spycatcher: The Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer, by Peter Wright, 1987.
2. ^ ^{a b} Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer, by Peter Wright, Toronto 1987, Stoddart Publishers.
3. ^ Treachery: Betrayals, Blunders, and Cover-ups: Six Decades of Espionage Against America and Great Britain. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-1-4000-6807-4. Revised edition published 2011, in the UK by Mainstream. ISBN 978-1-84596-769-7.
4. ^ Stella Rimington in The Guardian, extract from her memoirs

Sources[link]

This article lacks ISBNs for the books listed in it. Please make it easier to conduct research by listing ISBNs. If the {{Cite book}} or {{citation}} templates are in use, you may add ISBNs automatically, or discuss this issue on the talk page.

• Penrose, Barrie & Freeman, Simon (1987), Conspiracy of Silence: The Secret Life of Anthony Blunt, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.
• Pincher, Chapman (2009). Treachery: Betrayals, Blunders, and Cover-ups: Six Decades of Espionage Against America and Great Britain. New York: Random House.
• Turnbull, Malcolm (1989), The Spycatcher Trial: The Scandal Behind the #1 Best Seller, Topsfield, Massachusetts: Salem House Publishers.
• West, Nigel (1987). Mole Hunt. London: Wiedenfeld & Nicolson. Nigel West is the pen-name of Rupert Allason.
• Wright, Peter (1987). Spycatcher. New York and London: Viking Penguin Inc.

External links[link]

• "BBC '1988: Government loses Spycatcher battle'"