Turning up the Heat: MI5 after the Cold War
Larry O’Hara
Phoenix Press, London, 1994,
£6 (p and p included) from BM Box 4769, London WC1N 3XX; cheques payable to Larry O’Hara.
Since 1945 MI5 has had three main domestic targets: Soviet bloc espionage, the British Left and the IRA. With the Soviet target gone, and the British Left of no consequence for the foreseeable future, all that remains of the old agenda is the IRA. As MI5 Director-General Rimington acknowledged in the agency’s glossy brochure put out last year, about half of MI5’s budget is currently devoted to the IRA. So if permanent peace comes in Northern Ireland, what then for MI5? Will it be scaled down in the Treasury’s perpetual hunt for cuts in public expenditure? Will it acquire part of the crime fighting franchise, as MI5 D-G Rimington seems to be suggesting? Or will MI5 find new threats to replace the old? (1)
Larry O’Hara thinks MI5 will not only find new threats, they will create some, just to make sure.
Are they just faking it?
There are two sides to Larry O’Hara. One is the academic, whose forthcoming PhD thesis on the British fascists will probably be the standard work for a generation. The other is a polemicist, processing at high speed an enormous amount of data and cranking it out in pamphlet form. This is his third pamphlet on the subject of state manipulation of the domestic political scene. The first, A Lie Too Far, was written and produced on the run, unedited, and virtually unintelligible in places. The second, At War With The Truth, was sort of edited, but still very hard work. This latest is better yet. Ninety six A5 pages, typeset and perfect (glue) bound, this is easier to follow than its predecessors but it is still difficult at times. This is partly just the intricate nature of the material, but also poor writing and inadequate editing.
Exactly what is wrong with the O’Hara style is difficult to explain but easy to illustrate. Take this example at the bottom of the first page of the Introduction. Laying out the territory ahead, he notes:
‘Finally, I will attempt to answer the criticisms that may be made of the basic thesis of this short book: which is that MI5 is a highly dangerous organisation not subject to realistic controls. Consequently, MI5 (and Special Branch) need to be resisted to minimise their harmful efects upon the domestic political scene.’
This paragraph jars because, following the colon after ‘short book’, the reader is expecting an account of the criticisms, not the book’s thesis. A decent editor would have spotted this sort of thing.
A decent editor might also have noticed that this is not, in fact, his ‘basic thesis’ at all. His real ‘basic thesis’ appears on page 36 where he summarises the story so far:
‘My basic thesis is that, to job-create at least, MI5 have been intent on pushing all kinds of groups in a “terrorist” direction, on all sides of the spectrum, and if the groups/individuals targetted don’t “play ball”, setting them up anyway.’
He scans for such activities across the Welsh and Scots Nats, Red Action, the Combat 18/BNP/UDA nexus, and the new green/anarchist/eco-freak/ Earth First fringe. This is fascinating but almost none of it is substantiated in my view. He may be right – who would be that surprised if he were? – but too much of it is speculation.
In the course of the first two pages of his chapter on Red Action, for example, the following expressions appear: ‘seems to point to….. reasonably conjecture….. an unlikely story….. the possibility….. same degree of probability….. make it highly likely.’ This trail of conjecture concludes on page 30 with this:
‘That licence was hypothetically given to the two to plant such bombs goes to the heart of just what MI5’s current strategy may be, and the rationale behind it, as well as difficult questions about the extent of MI5 penetration of the IRA itself, and the purposes of such.’ (Emphases added.)
What weight could be placed on a conclusion erected on so much speculation? O’Hara makes the position worse, when, in a section on what I called the Great Polish Arms Find Caper (in Lobster 27), having asked the question, ‘Why did MI5 undertake the endeavour, and why has news of it been allowed to percolate into the public domain?’, he lists no fewer than eight possible answers – none of them highly improbable. But if so many hypotheses can be generated round this incident, why should we go with O’Hara’s speculation around other incidents, when other hypotheses could be generated?
O’Hara has fantastic sources of information and appears completely au fait with the entire milieux of the British far Right and Left. But such familiarity can generate the seductive and dangerous feeling of being able to ‘read’ situations at a distance, perceiving the whole from the fragments, and not needing the normal kinds of evidence. Take this section from page 43.
‘As for the BNP, Searchlight printed an intriguing story in their August 1994 issue boasting of having obtained a local BNP bulletin, Leeds Patriot, after it had been “left in the pub”. (p. 6) It defies belief to think that anti-fascists would deliberately admit to covertly monitoring fascist meetings from within the same premises: such would alert Nazi “counter-intelligence”. This points, therefore, to the state having at least one, or maybe more, operatives inside the local BNP, and them being very confident indeed. ‘(Emphasis added)
No it doesn’t, Larry. All kinds of people leave all kinds of stuff in pubs, on buses, on airplanes, in taxis. There is nothing here to suggest that this bulletin was obtained by ‘covertly monitoring’ of any kind; and even if such covert monitoring was indeed the source of the bulletin, that is still no reason to then conclude that the state has any operatives inside the local BNP. They might have – hell, let’s hope so! – but this isn’t evidence.
Spook spotting in the media
O’Hara believes, as I do, that the media contains journalists who run stories for Whitehall’s clandestine warriors. Our lists of such spook assets certainly overlap in places. But mostly all I have are suspicions based on interpretations of articles, and I would hesitate to make such a serious charge in print on that basis alone. O’Hara is less squeamish. Not only does he conclude his pamphlet with a long list of journalists and the agencies from which he suspects them of receiving material, on p. 37 he proposes renaming the television program World in Action, as MI5 in Action (MI5IA); he sees MI5 ‘pulling its strings’. But he offers no real evidence and, after making such a serious charge, he concludes the paragraph with this: ‘Hard evidence and leads to follow up on MI5IA I’d be grateful to readers for.’ This is inviting ridicule.
Having said all that — this is a riveting read: I whoofed it down in one sitting. If the evidence is too thin and too speculative to sustain the thesis, the text and footnotes are scattered with fascinating fragments.
Suggestive examples
He might be right. There are occasional examples which suggest that the secret state is playing silly buggers with the British political fringes. In recent years there have been some odd goings-on in Welsh Nationalism, with allegations of disinformation and agents provocateurs in Wales; (2) and even the seriously unimportant Scottish Nationalist activist fringe got a double page spread in the Sunday Telegraph of August 24, headed ‘White Settlers Go Home’. (And no doubt an hour with the Times or Guardian Index for the past few years would produce more supporting evidence.)
Gerald Macklin, one of two IRA members convicted recently of conspiracy to cause explosions, made a speech from the dock in which he noted that ‘MI5 claims to have had the alleged IRA active service unit under constant surveillance yet allegedly lost them every time a bomb was planted…..’ – from this concluding that ‘MI5 was willing to allow the devices to go off in London and allow the bombers to escape in order to guarantee for themselves a continued role in British security after the ending of the Cold War.’ (3)
In ‘The Wars Behind Class War’, in the Evening Standard of 12 October, 1994, Gervase Webb told us that ‘Special Branch officers say that Class War may have been infiltrated by elements of the far Right British National Party in an attempt to stir up violence and thus encourage draconian laws banning all public protest.’ (Emphasis added.)
Most significant of all, on the domestic front, is the burgeoning eco-terrorist, animal rights ‘threat’. Take ‘Animal rights activists turn to IRA tactics’ by David Leppard in the Sunday Times, 28 August, 1994. ‘Scotland Yard’, said Leppard, ‘has discovered that animal rights extremists are trying to buy plastic explosives on the black market. They have also infiltrated the Territorial Army to obtain weapons and explosives.’ Leppard has no evidence, of course, simply the word of ”Senior Special Branch detectives [sic: SB again] [who] say the group poses the biggest single threat to security on the mainland after the IRA.’ Or take ‘Green guerillas booby-trap sites’ and ‘Battle cry of the eco-terrorist’ in the Sunday Times of 3 July and 11 September, about a magazine called Terra-ist and one of its alleged producers, Ian Burchall-Wood. In the latter piece, John Harlow, the Sunday Time’s Transport Correspondent, quoted ‘a friend’ at a former employer of Burchall-Wood: ‘He always had an opinion and challenged the management about wearing a shirt and tie so strongly that they changed the rules for him.’ Strewth! Terrorist spotters, please note. (These two pieces are debunked in Green Anarchist No. 36)
All good, classic (and comic) stuff; and perhaps they (who? Special Branch and its journalists?) are simply amplifying or fabricating an eco-terrorist, animal rights ‘threat’. The Sunday Times pieces, in particular, suggest this. Except it isn’t all being fabricated – or even amplified. If anything, the scale of the attacks – terrorism by most lights – by animal rights activists is being under reported. The state and the media appear to me to be colluding, not in the amplification or fabrication of an animal rights ‘threat’, but in denying the animal rights ‘guerillas’ publicity. This is certainly the impression you get if you read – and take literally – the ‘Diary of Actions’ printed in Green Anarchist (Box ZZ,111 Magdalen Rd, Oxford OX4 1RQ). Take the issue of Spring 1994. On page 2 they print half a page of such ‘actions’, ranging from bombs sent, to ‘redecorating’ someone’s house; and claim that there are 1800 of such ‘actions’ annually, offering half a page as a ’round-up’ of some they know about. Little of this reaches the major media.
MI5 has fabricated ‘threats’. As Cathy Massiter revealed, given the absence of a real subversive threat in CND which would provide a legitimate excuse for penetration and surveillance, and unwilling to tell this to its Conservative political masters, MI5 did simply fabricate a communist/subversive role CND didn’t deserve. However, assuming that MI5 will simply fabricate a ‘new threat’ to keep themselves in work, underestimates MI5, as well as skipping over some quite tricky structural problems faced by any such agency, however well (or ill) motivated.
Ambition
We don’t know the scale of MI5’s ambitions. Some of MI5 Director-General Rimington’s comments in her Dimbleby Lecture suggested that MI5 has come to believe it could be, and should be, ubiquitous in its assessment of risk and prevention of subversion and terrorism; that far from being the threat to democracy described by Wallace, Wright, Massiter et al, MI5, as Mrs Rimington put it in, ‘enhances’ democracy.(5) Even if this isn’t rejected out of hand at the outset, we don’t know enough about the extent of MI5’s domestic operations to decide if MI5 has been or could ever be ubiquitous.
After receiving Lobster 27, former BOSS agent Gordon Winter (see Lobster 18) wrote to point out that the MI5 agent and agent provocateur, Pat Daly, was a classic example of the saying of ‘British intelligence’, that ‘if there is a left-wing movement in Britain bigger than a football team our man is the captain or vice-captain, and if not, he is the referee and can send any man off the field and call our man on any time he likes…… ‘ In Daly’s case here was the INLA, presumably one of the hardest of targets to penetrate, and MI5 had its agent, Pat Daly, being offered a place on the organisation’s inner sanctum. (Fred Holroyd says that in his day the British had an agent on the IRA’s Army Council; and assumes they have one now.)
Is Winter’s dictum to be taken literally? It still is not possible to say. In the fall-out from Wallace, Massiter and Peter Wright et al, it appeared that by the late 1970s, after the great F branch expansion against the British left, MI5 was all over the place. In the Guardian (November 19 1994) article, plugging his new book on the miners’ strike, Seamus Milne wrote that, ‘According to one former security service officer “literally hundreds” of trade union officials and activists were signed up in the 1970s as informers’. But only a handful of MI5 agents and officers in the British domestic scene have been identified. (In that article Milne identifies only one of those ‘hundreds’.) There seems to be agreement that the visible few are the tip of an iceberg. But how big is the submerged bit? We still don’t know.
Threats actual and potential
Once MI5 does have domestic agents running there is a fine line between operationally defensible (by their own criteria) investigation of the intentions and potential of groups, and provocation and fabrication. An MI5 officer has an agent in place in, say, a radical eco group opposed to the extension of the roads programme. This bit of dialogue is not implausible.
‘So what are they going to do?’ asks officer. ‘Do you think they’re going to turn to violence and sabotage?’
‘Don’t know,’ says agent. ‘Some of them talk about it but I think it’s just waffle.’
‘You know what it’s like, though,’ says the MI5 officer. ‘Better to be safe than sorry. Maybe you should offer them some explosives and see if they accept them…..’
Don Bateman remarked towards the end of his essay on Pat Daly (in Lobster 27) that, ‘The old maxim still holds good: you find potential terrorists by offering them something to join.’ We might add: or the means with which to be terrorists. The evidence of violence of various kinds presented in Green Anarchist, and the rhetoric of Red Action and Class War, shows that there are people on the British Left and on the eco-animal rights fringe who believe that violence is justified. Larry O’Hara thinks MI5 are pushing them and other groups towards terrorism. He might be right. But some of them appear to need little encouragement from the state; and this new study of his contains little firm evidence of state manipulation. In a way I wish he had the evidence: very little is much more pleasurable than having beliefs confirmed. But he does not.
The future?
The available fragments of evidence suggest that MI5 will continue on its present course, dealing with a mixed bag of domestic threats and various promising, new subjects. (‘Promising’ in the budget-sustaining sense.) There are the ‘foreign terrorists in Britain’, (6) and a variety of new, post Cold War themes emerging out of the general ‘turbulence’ of the New World Disorder. (London’s role as one of the world centres for flight capital is attracting some of the world’s major scumbags.) Some of it even has reassuring Eastern European labels on it. If the former Soviet bloc can no longer be plausibly portrayed as exporting revolution, terrorism, subversion and espionage to Britain, the remnants of the Soviet empire are now (we are told) engaged in money laundering, drug-running, gun-running and – the holy grail – nuclear material smuggling. A ‘senior police officer’ was quoted in the Observer, 6 November 1994: ‘It’s very easy to present drugs and organised crime as a threat to national security particularly because of Eastern Europe. There the threat of armoured divisions has been replaced by the threat of the Russian mafia.’
Then there is the ever-expanding new European Union super state to be policed. The Independent of 9 November 1994, reported that ‘MI5 … and Special Branch are vying to take the lead in representing Britain at Europol’s headquarters in The Hague. MI5 is making an aggressive bid to take over the European Liaison Unit of the Metropolitan Special Branch…….’; and the front page of Computer Weekly of 10 November, 1994, reported that ‘The security service MI5 is to offer advice to government IT managers on nearly all computer security issues further diluting the role of Whitehall’s dedicated computer agency the CCTA’.
The Internecine Project
For the first time in this country the politics of intelligence and security agency budgeting are being acted out – in part – in public. Even the Conservative Party’s paper, the Daily Telegraph, was moved to comment on November 5 on ‘a burst of activity among defence institutions scurrying to identify new roles for themselves to justify their budgets and bureaucracies.’ Unfortunately, the only people who seem equipped to play this game are the professionals; who, among our Opposition politicians, understands this area?
At the time of writing the Security Service had not quite taken over all the areas they have set their minds on. Apparently with the model of the FBI’s franchise in mind – subversion, terrorism, espionage and federal crime – Mrs Rimington is pitching to take over part of the police’s crime franchise. She offers MI5’s ‘distinctive role…..the way in which we use secret sources and techniques to find out what those whom we investigate are at pains to conceal.’ (Guardian, 4 November, 1994)
‘Those whom we investigate are at pains to conceal‘ is terribly correct English, but the rest of it is an attempted sleight of hand. MI5 may have secret sources – but so do the police and Special Branch. Nor do MI5 have any ‘secret techniques’: other agencies bug, spy, bribe, recruit and subvert. MI5’s special little number was the ability of its personnel to remain unidentified: when they do have to appear in courts of law, MI5 officers do so behind screens, with names like ‘Officer A’. Their mystique is their secrecy. But this mystique is a handicap as far as getting the crime franchise under the present legal system which requires the Prosecution to show the Defence what its evidence is. How many confidential sources, moles, snitches and agents are you likely to attract if their identities will be revealed in court? The Sunday Telegraph of 6 November noted that ‘Ministers have already earmarked “disclosure of evidence” as the single most urgent problem facing the criminal justice system…Stella Rimington….warned last week that the duty of prosecution lawyers to disclose evidence to the defence was seriously hampering their investigations.’ (7)
Will MI5 get to rewrite the fundamental legal rules?
Notes
- Rimington’s comments on MI5 and crime fighting in Guardian, November 4 1994. This was apparently trailed in ‘MI5; If peace comes to Northern Island, 1000 Security Service staff could be out of a job. So, will the spies turn to cracking crime?’ by David Rose in the Observer, 18 September 1994. Rose concluded; ‘We will need an agency – possibly a subordinate, domestic wing of MI6 – to deal with foreign spies and terrorists. Whether it will take 2000 staff and 160 million is a very different matter.’ See also Rose’s piece, ‘Drugs police set to spike MI5 guns’ in the Observer, 6 November, 1994.I certainly don’t know enough about the British state to know who would win if the Treasury took on MI5. However, the news at the end of October that the Treasury was going to be slimmed down by about 30% suggests that the locus of ultimate power in Whitehall is in the Cabinet Office, not the Treasury.The IRA ‘threat’ is still being played, albeit in minor keys. The Sunday Express (October 16 1994), one of MI5’s favourite outlets, carried a story ‘Terror on paradise isle’, subtitled ‘mystery deaths and disappearances on a Caribbean island were being blamed last night on an IRA revenge squad.’ There was no evidence of course; and you can just imagine how easy it would be for an IRA squad to hide out on … St. Kitts, a tiny speck in the ocean east of Puerto Rico. By the time its sister paper, the Daily Express, returned to the story on November 17, ”Drug killings bring havoc on paradise isle’, the IRA had vanished from the story.
- I recently received a 14 page, authorless paper, ‘MI5, National Front and the Dirty War in Wales’, discussing events in 1991.
- Guardian, October 22 1994
- The concepts of counter-insurgency and pseudo- gangs are seductive. In Red Action No. 69, reviewing a recent history of the INLA, Sean Reid writes ‘The attempt to wipe out the movement (i.e. Republican Socialist Movement; i.e. INLA, IPLO) in 1987 was a classic case of Kitson’s anti-insurgency tactics being put into operation. At one stroke it removed a dangerous left wing tendency, helped set up a pseudo-gang to be used as the British saw fit (the IPLO) and confirmed the Provisionals as the main protagonists in the struggle.’Which slips down nicely, alright; but is it established that the IPLO was a pseudo-gang? I certainly have seen no evidence; as far as I am aware this allegation comes chiefly from the PIRA who have an axe or two to grind on this issue. Evidence of British state pseudo-gangs is thin on the ground and if anyone has some on the IPLO, I would be interested to see it.
- Her talk that night is available, incidentally, in printed form, from BBC Educational Developments, 201 Wood Lane, London W12 7TS. No price is given on my copy.
- One variant of which is the ‘Kurdish extremist threat’. The Sunday Times 26 June, 1994 reported extortion and killings and beatings by both left and right Kurdish groups based in Britain. (We’ve even had some in Hull.) The Guardian reported on September 5 that, as the headline put it, ‘Universities asked to tip off MI5 about suspect foreign students.’
- In one or two of her reported comments are glimpses of the bureaucratic struggle going on behind the scenes. Why, for example, did she say that she did not agree with ‘suggestions that what is needed in the UK is a single, unified and dedicated counter-terrorist structure’, if not to defend MI5’s current grip on the franchise?
Some things never change
In the Sunday Express of October 9 there is a William Massie sniping at MI6 for his friends in MI5 with a piece which begins
‘Security at MI6’s new £240 million headquarters has been blown apart by the SAS…’
with a very nice photograph taken from the platform of Vauxhall station showing what a lovely target the MI6 building makes from there.