Gary Murray
Simon and Schuster, London, 1993
For twenty five years Gary Murray worked as an RAF policeman and private investigator. In the early 1970s Murray ‘unexpectedly’ (invitation?) joined the Operations Intelligence cadre of 21 SAS, and this led to close contact with people from MI6, Army SIB, the Royal Military Police and the Parachute Regiment. In 1980 Murray became increasingly involved in investigating the activities of journalists, TV producers, MPs and former military officers. At that point MI5 expressed an interest in his range of contacts and invited him to become an asset.
But after just two years he became disillusioned and resigned from MI5. Since then (1982) he has continued to work as an investigator, but describing himself as ‘broadcaster and author’ (this is his first book). His range of contacts — listed in the Acknowledgements — now include Capt. Fred Holroyd, Tam Dalyell MP, Duncan Campbell, Paul Foot, Mark Hollingsworth and Gerry Gable.
The reader is invited to accept that Murray has undergone a political conversion and we are offered, as evidence, ‘a sensational expose of the security services’. Unfortunately, most of the book is a rehash of stories researched by others, and the rest is oddly coy over naming names. Murray reworks published material, without proper acknowledgement, around a number of well-known case studies. These include the unsolved Willie McRae case; the brothers Littlejohn; the plan to return Mancham to power in the Seychelles; and the Barry Quartermain affair. He includes a reference to Cathy Massiter’s revelation that the phone of Dagenham convenor Sid Harraway (not Harrow, as Murray calls him) was tapped during the 1978 Ford pay dispute, but does not even mention the more interesting activities of Harry Newton. He discusses at length the involvement of his company, EuroTec, in spying on the ‘Pentonville Five’ during the 1972 dock strike. But this was revealed at the time and an account can be found in Bunyan’s The Political Police in Britain.
In an ‘expose’ we can surely expect to learn much that is new. On the contrary, Murray is both coy and vague. Who were the British industrialists who established a trade union monitoring service in 1972? Where did the illegal arms deals, involving both police and army, take place in 1987? Why not name the ‘man closely linked to intelligence circles’? The late G.K. Young is unlikely to object. Why not name Duncan Campbell, the person MI5 asked him to murder? Why recount the fascist activities and intelligence connections of ‘Lutz’ and ‘the Major’ without telling us that they are Column 88 leader Les Vaughan and Ian Souter-Clarence respectively? Finally, why spend two chapters on the Hilda Murrell affair without naming or exploring the background of her niece’s boyfriend, ‘Malcolm’, also referred to as ‘LM’?
The book hangs crucially upon the Murrell section and contains an affidavit signed by her niece, Catriona Guthrie. Unfortunately, both the affidavit and Murray’s account are clumsily phrased on the intelligence connections of ‘Malcolm’. Nevertheless, it does state plainly that both of them were ‘totally overlooked’ during the original police inquiry, even though they were constant companions of Murrell at that time. The reopened investigation by Chief Inspector Herbert may, belatedly, add their names to the 3,600 people originally researched.
It turns out that the new material on Murrell is based on a prison whisper. Murray is convinced that ‘the person in charge of the attack was a former MI5 agent who has left the service to run a private detective agency’ (Staines and Egham News, 12 August 1993), and works five minutes from Marble Arch (Outlook, July/August 1993). Again, why not put this interesting assertion in the book?
As to the Murrell murder ‘team’, I smell a rat. The names and backgrounds are easy enough to research and Chief Inspector Herbert will have tracked them down by now. I strongly suspect that this prison whisper is meant to muddy the waters and confuse the investigations of two quite separate but still unsolved events.
Finally, Murray offers us a jumbled but fascinating story about Searchlight editor Gerry Gable. We are told that in 1986 there was evidence of an attempt to abduct and kill Gable, who then spoke to ‘a friend in Special Branch who decided to arrange armed bodyguards to watch over him’. This murder attempt involved a private security firm (who, I kid you not, codenamed Gable ‘Horse’!) and a Tory MP. The outcome was a police report which ‘was given to Mrs Thatcher at a meeting in Downing Street and to Lord Bridge, then Chairman of the Security Commission’. Murray leaves this extraordinary episode thus: What happened from that point on is unknown but what is certain is that the conspiracy against Gerry Gable was brought to an abrupt halt’. Armed bodyguards, arranged by Special Branch to protect the editor of an anti-fascist magazine, after a telephone warning from a Daily Mirror reporter! And it goes to the PM and Security Commission! Now that is worth investigating.
Peter Smith