Mr Tony was a spook?
Issue 7 of Larry O’Hara’s Note from the Borderland ([1]) includes a section from the Anne Machon and David Shayler book, Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers (reviewed in Lobster 49), which was apparently dropped by the publisher. The key section is this, from an unnamed MI5 officer:
‘Blair was recruited [by MI5] early on in his career, around the time he stood in the Beaconsfield by-election in 1982. He was just the sort of agent MI5 wanted at the time, a man who appeared to be committed to the Labour Party but who in fact was – to use Thatcher’s phrase – “one of us” …..MI5 terminated Blair in the late 1980s when it was downgrading its study of subversion and Blair was rising to the higher ranks of the Labour Party.’
The spook-wise
We’ve got another MP who takes a serious interest in the British secret state. In the past we have had MPs who had been secret servants (mostly Conservative) and a few Labour MPs who took a temporary interest. Almost twenty years ago Ken Livingstone took a sustained interest until the researcher who was generating the questions he was asking in the House of Commons joined the BBC. Now we have Norman Baker, the Liberal-Democrat MP, who has kind of inherited the ‘awkward squad’ mantle from Tam Dalyell. He has had a short Commons debate on MI6 ([2]) and he is now pursuing the death of Dr David Kelly. In July he wrote ‘I believe David Kelly did not commit suicide – and I will prove it’ for The Mail on Sunday, 23 July 2006. The sceptics’ case, bolstered by Baker reinterviewing the key witnesses, is formidable.([3])
How will the state respond to Baker? Some past precedent suggests that the British state is likely to be careful. Dickering about with MPs, especially MPs not afraid to go the media, might be a bureaucratically hazardous step for our secret servants. On the other hand the London free daily paper, Metro, reported on 14 July that Baker claimed that the computers in his offices had been ‘remotely wiped’.([4])
Ricki don’t lose that number
It has been a busy few months for the former MI6 officer, now yacht broker, Richard Tomlinson. He’s been raided again and lost computers etc.; his blog disappeared with the message, ‘Access to the weblog you have requested has been suspended’ when it was accessed; and two large features about him appeared in the British press, in The Independent on Sunday on 3 September 2006 and the Belfast Telegraph.([5]) In both articles he complains about being harassed by the British state; yet he has published his own list of publicly identified MI6 officers on the Net. He appears to believe that he can negotiate with MI6 in some fashion. But as Phillip Knightley says in the Belfast Telegraph piece, they’re the Secret Intelligence Service and they will pursue him to the ends of the earth: pour encourager les autres, if for no other reason.
In a posting at Cryptome Tomlinson wrote of his most recent arrest:
‘I was then taken for interview, and learnt for the first time the charges against me. Apparently, MI6 believe that I am responsible for publishing three lists of MI6 agents on the Internet. These allegedly first appeared on the newsgroup uk.politics.misc in 2005, and then appeared again on www. cryptome.org. The police allowed me to take notes from the interrogation sheet, though I was not allowed to keep a copy…..
I have absolutely nothing to do with the publication of these lists. The British police would not let me see the lists to discuss in detail, but they agreed that the lists were genuine. This in itself is a fairly astonishing admission – the only people who can verify that the lists are genuine are the British authorities themselves. They obviously think that this is worth doing, if it gives them a chance to harass me and take all my computers from me, knowing what difficulty and expense this will cause me.’
In the introduction to his list,([vi]) he discusses moving some Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) names from extant Net lists of MI6 officers to a ‘False Positive’ list and makes the following statement:
‘If any other genuine members of the FCO would like to rectify any misidentification on these lists then please let me know I see no reason why their careers should be potentially negatively effected by their false identification as MI6 agents by Special Branch.’ (emphasis added)
Does he know that SB were responsible for the MI6 lists or is he guessing?
Whose well-being?
The interests – the well-being – of the financial sector have been given priority in the UK’s economic policies for most of the period since 1979:([7])thus we have had unlimited credit formation, higher interest rates than most other competing economies, with the accompanying high exchange rate and minimal –’light touch’ – regulation. Referred to in shorthand by the media as ‘the City’, or ‘the square mile’, the interests of this sector of the UK economy are assumed by virtually all mainstream media and political pundits to be paramount, and those who work in it to be the fount of all economic wisdom. But how big is ‘the financial sector’? Given its utter dominance of British economic policy-making and comment, you might assume it must be rather large. Not so. In September, International Financial Services London published a report([8]) which claimed – no, boasted – that the financial services sector, including retail banking and insurance, was now 8.5% of the UK’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), up from 5.5% five years ago. Further, the report noted that this 8.5% of GDP is produced by only 4% of the UK workforce, half of whom live in and around London. The report also noted that manufacturing’s share of the GDP continued to fall, down to 13.5% (which is still substantially bigger than the financial sector and employing a great many more people).
After 20 years of policies inimical to its interests, it is hardly a surprise that manufacturing continues to shrink; and how a tiny London-based section of the working population has maintained its grip on UK economic policy for so long remains the mystery of post-war British political history.
Getting some rays
I don’t have a mobile phone, partly because I have no desire to be accessible all the time and partly because I’m still not convinced they are safe. Google ‘hits’ in themselves tell us nothing but for a device which is officially safe (though not for children!) the six million plus hits on Google for ‘mobile phones + cancer’ might give one pause for thought. In 1989, when mobile phones were clunky, shoulder-hung boxes with very patchy coverage, Harlan Girard introduced me to a considerable scientific literature on the dangers presented by electromagnetic radiation.([9]) Since when we have had a more or less continuous stream of stories about the dangers of ‘rays’ of one kind of another, usually accompanied by official assurances that there is nothing to worry about. A most striking example was a piece in The Sun, 18 September, reporting that six former BBC cameramen have been found to have brain tumours.([10])Radiation from viewfinders is suggested as the cause.
Fred Holroyd vindicated
In 1988 Ken Livingstone, then in his second year as an MP, was asking questions in the House of Commons about military operations in Northern Ireland on behalf of former British Army Captain Fred Holroyd. Some of the questions he asked concerned a group of SAS men, with whom Holroyd had worked, who were in Northern Ireland under various covers. (This was significant because, officially, the SAS were not then in Northern Ireland.) In reply to Livingstone’s questions the Ministry of Defence confirmed the presence of one of the cover names, 4 Field Survey Troop, Royal Engineers, but denied the presence of the other, Northern Ireland Training and Advisory Team. Other than confirming that 4 Field Survey Troop were in Northern Ireland when and where Holroyd said they were, no further information was forthcoming, the MOD replying, through junior minister Roger Freeman, that ‘Detailed information on this unit, which is not now deployed in the Province, is not available.'([11])
Fast forward to 2006 and researchers in the national archives have discovered a 1974 army briefing paper titled ‘Army Plain Clothes Patrols in Northern Ireland’. The briefing states:
‘Plainclothes teams, initially joint RUC/army patrols, have operated in Northern Ireland since the IRA bombing campaign in Easter 1971. Later in 1971 the teams were reformed and expanded as Military Reaction Forces (MRFs) without RUC participation. In 1972 the operations of the MRF were brought under more centralised control and a higher standard of training achieved([12])by establishing a Special Reconnaissance Unit (SRU) of 130 with all ranks under direct command of HQNI. The term “Special Reconnaissance Unit” and the details of its organisation and mode of operations have been kept secret. The SRU operates in Northern Ireland at present under the cover name Northern Ireland Training and Advisory Teams (Northern Ireland) – NITAT(NI) – ostensibly the equivalent of genuine NITAT teams in UKLF [United Kingdom Land Forces] and BAOR [British Army of the Rhine].([13])
NITAT is the unit which the MOD told Ken Livingstone in 1988 was not stationed at Castledillon in 1974-5. It is possible that the unit was stationed elsewhere and this let the reply, ‘There was no Northern Ireland Training and Advisory Team stationed there’ be given. Or perhaps that Livingstone was asking about NITAT and not NITAT(NI), enabled those clever people at the MOD to give a reply that was both false but technically true. Either way, Holroyd’s account has now been confirmed.
News values
A piece on 2 August in The Washington Post reported that the 9-11 Commission suspected that the Pentagon’s version of events was lies and got as far as debating whether to report this to the Justice Department for criminal investigation.([14])The military lies to legislators about the biggest event since…….Vietnam? This, you might think, was a story. Seen anything since?
A dreadful fate?
The Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, ordered the Ministry of Defence to release the names and details of its 500 arms sales officials but the MoD wants to keep their identities secret, for fear that they could be harassed by pacifists. (David Leigh and Rob Evans, ‘Minister refuses to name 500 arms sales officials’, The Guardian, 7 June 2006)
Notes
[1] Information on Notes from the Borderland is at <www.borderland.co.uk>
[2] <www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmhansrd/cm060719/halltext/60719h0352. htm#06071968000539>
[3] Baker’s article is also at his website <www.normanbaker.org.uk/> Melanie Phillips commented on the Baker article in The Mail on Sunday in ‘Will we ever be told the truth about the death of Dr David Kelly?’ on 24 July, followed, a week later, by Simon Edge, ‘Dr Kelly: The questions that just won’t go away’ in The Daily Express, 31 July.
[4] My problem with the Kelly murder theory is that it has never been clear to me why anyone would think it necessary to kill him. With a senior British civil servant like Kelly there are more subtle threats status, pension that are effective.
[5] <www.belfast telegraph.co.uk/news/ features/story.jsp?story=705124> The two are similar but the Belfast Telegraph feature seemed better to me.
[6] Which was at <http://richardtomlinson.typepad.com/tomlinson_v_mi6/files/060729MI6Directory.xls>. If the site is shut try Cryptome for it.
[7] The Guardian’s economics editor, Larry Elliot, reminded us in ‘How the strong pound killed British industry’ (9 October) that in the years following the UK’s departure from the ERM in 1992, the pound declined to a competitive rate and British manufacturing actually expanded a little. Then came the election of 1997 and Labour, hitherto the party of domestic manufacturing, showed what the ‘new’ bit of ‘New Labour’ meant by doing the City’s bidding, handed over the interest rate to the Bank of England, which promptly put the base rate up, and with it sterling’s international value. Brown and Blair have never understood the basics of the British economy. British manufacturing is so defeated it appears to have even given up appealing for a competitive exchange rate.
[8] At <http://www.ifsl.org.uk/>
[9] See, for example, the huge ‘Bibliography on the psychoactivity of electromagnetic fields’ by Robert C. Beck and Eldon A. Byrd at <www.vxm.com/bib.doc.html>
[10] <www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2006430122,00.html>
[11] House of Commons, written answers, 28 March 1988.
[12] For those two lines read, ‘After the MRF were exposed as driving around shooting at alleged members of the IRA, we had to get some kind of grip on the situation and broke up MRF.’
This is the first official explanation of what the initials MRF stood for that I have seen.
[13] This is at <www.dailyireland.com/>. Search there for ‘Fred Holroyd’.
[14] <www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/01/AR2006080101300.html>