How perceptions have changed! In Leveller 51, March 1981, there was this snippet:
‘Why all the fuss about the Panorama programme on British Intelligence? Eventually there was just one cut — Gordon Winter, BOSS agent, former freelance journalist, in a pre-title sequence: “British intelligence has a saying that if there is a left-wing movement in Britain bigger than a football team our man is the captain or the vice captain, and if not, he is the referee and he can send any man off the field and call our man on at any time he likes.”
Dangerous stuff, eh?’
Which missed the point. If this was the one thing the spooks did not want broadcast, we had better pay attention to it. And if we don’t see it as important, it is we who are mistaken. In 1981 I agreed with the anonymous columnist in the Leveller, but now I see exactly why they wanted this bit cut: the covert role of the intelligence and security services in British politics is the big secret.
The spook in politics
That covert role is one of the things fleetingly glimpsed in MI5’s pamphlet The Security Service (36 pages, £4.95 from HMSO). In the page and a half long ‘Outline history of the Security Service’ we find this:
‘The atmosphere of Cold War allegations also lay behind the highly publicised claims of the former officer Peter Wright that the Service had plotted to undermine the former Prime Minister Harold Wilson. A vigorous internal enquiry failed to produce any evidence to substantiate these claims, and Wright himself subsequently admitted that they were false.’
This is a nice illustration of the drafting skill which is so valued in Whitehall. In the first place, Wright never did allege that the Service plotted against the Wilson government. He alleged that certain members of the Service did so conspire. Secondly, notice MI5 does not actually deny that the Service had plotted to undermine Wilson: not finding any evidence is not a denial; and thirdly, there is no mention of Colin Wallace, his documents and the other evidence.
Here comes the line
There does appear to be some kind of corporate ‘line’ here. Rupert Allason MP, a man with his snout in the Whitehall trough, offered this paragraph in a piece in the Evening Standard (13 May, 1993), ‘Why Windsors aren’t tapped by Her Majesty’s secret service’:
‘The post-war Labour government was so determined to ensure that MI5 could never become a Gestapo that it proved wholly ineffective at monitoring the growth of domestic subversion, or of checking the penetration of Whitehall by Soviet moles. Subsequent charges — most notably by former MI5 insiders Peter Wright and Cathy Massiter — that MI5 had conspired in politically-motivated campaigns, were proved to be groundless. Under cross-examination by the formidable (and sceptical) TV reporter John Ware, Spycatcher’s author sheepishly admitted that he had invented his tale of a Machiavellian plot to undermine Harold Wilson. And an independent investigation by a respected judge rejected Ms Massiter’s assertions of illegal telephone tapping of innocent trade unionists.’
This is astonishing crap. So it was all the fault of the 1945 Labour government after all? There is not a shred of evidence to support this view. Such evidence as there is, suggests that on the contrary, the Labour appointee, former policeman Sir Percy Sillitoe, was given the runaround by MI5 and was completely ineffective. Did Cathy Massiter actually allege that MI5 ‘had conspired in politically-motivated campaigns’ and done ‘illegal telephone tapping of innocent trade unionists?’ I have been through all my material on Cathy Masssiter’s allegations, including two affidavits she prepared for court actions, and this just isn’t there. Allason appears to be conflating Massiter’s allegations with those of an anonymous former MI5 clerk who was included in some of the reporting of the Massiter allegations. (See, for example, ‘The spymasters who broke their own rules’, in the Guardian, 1 March, 1985.) And I have no idea who this ‘respected judge’ is.
We are being further assured by Philip Zeigler, the ‘official’ biographer of Harold Wilson, that there was no plot. The diarist in the Observer Magazine (10 October, 1993), Francis Wheen, quotes a footnote attributed to MI5 Director-General, Mrs Rimmington, in the Zeigler biography to the effect that ‘after long experience in the service [she] is… convinced that the bureaucratic machinery of the department would have made it impossible for any significant skullduggery to have taken place, even at the lowest level.’ (Emphasis added.) Depends what you count as ‘significant’….
Nice one, John 1
Interesting also to see Allason reminding us of the debt the British secret state owes to the TV journalist John Ware. Not only did Ware help rubbish Colin Wallace in the infamous Independent smear job, it was Ware who got Wright to retract on camera. Nice job, John: no flies on you, my son, eh? (Are journalists in the British Higher Media cynical? Yes, but usually about the wrong things.)
Nice one, John 2
The precise roles played by the espionage novelist, John Le Carre, in the real spook world have been a source of much speculation. In a U.S. TV interview on July 1 this year, Le Carre gave out another dribble of information. Asked to characterize his own espionage experience, Le Carre replied, ‘Well, I was caught up in it very young and so I had several years of being what you would call a field agent. That was working for somebody in the field. And I can’t describe what I did, except it was pretty yukky, but it felt like doing something terribly important in a very important cause. I mean, the perception among students in those days, or the perception of students was that they were likely to be talent spotted and recruited by the KGB, for instance. And therefore some students were put through a kind of sheep-dip to see if the KGB approached them. They were dressed up to look attractive, and that’s ……but it was all terribly low level…’ (Source, WNET-TV (13), The Charlie Rose Show. Thanks to Harlan Girard for the transcript.)
So, another little piece of the jig-saw of post-war MI5 operations falls into place: MI5 were running students who pretended to be left-wing to attract recruiters – and presumably without success, since not a whisper of this has hitherto appeared.
No more communist threat?
If the MI5 brochure offers a very thing version of the organisation’s history, it does answer the question, ‘How have they responded to the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the British Left?’ S’easy-peasy, mate; nothing to it. The subversive hunters and the spy-watchers have become anti-terrorists. The brochure tells us that an astonishing 70% of MI5’s resources are now devoted to terrorism. So that’s the end of the IRA then, right? Probably not; in any case, with or without the IRA, if 70% of MI5’s resources are engaged in ‘anti-terrorism’, it means expanding the number of ‘terrorists’.
There are a number of ways of achieving this. The simplest is to copy the moves which were made when MI5’s chief target was so-called subversives. It was not just your actual subversives who were monitored, but people who knew or associated with, and might support or be influenced by subversives. Organisations had to be be ‘checked out’ to make sure they didn’t contain subversives or supporters of subversives. For all of the above delete ‘subversives’ and replace with ‘terrorists’.
Another way is simply to generate some terrorism. I don’t mean that someone will consciously set out to fake terrorists to keep themselves in a job. It doesn’t need to be that crude. There are all kinds of good reasons why it might be operationally sensible to set up a little pseudo gang or encourage an organisation that exists already — in the hope, say, of sniffing out who its supporters are. You find the potential terrorists by offering them a terrorist organisation to join. (Lee Harvey Oswald was probably doing something similar for the FBI in New Orleans with his one-man Fair Play for Cuba Committee.) Or informants, paid by results, elaborate, expand and exaggerate their activities. (Bits of all of this seems to have been happening in Wales over the last couple of years.)
Whatever. If you divert that amount of resources into an area then something will be generated. The one thing you can guarantee that MI5’s now vastly expanded anti-terrorism function will not do is find no terrorists and declare itself redundant.