The Enemy Within (Whitehall)

It is a difficult time for Britain’s security and intelligence agencies. Not only have the old certainties collapsed with the Berlin Wall, Britain’s economy is in increasingly dire shape, and current levels of government funding for the agencies can no longer be taken for granted. (1) As a result, both the major agencies, MI5 and MI6, have been engaged in high profile operations part of whose rationale has manifestly been to show their nominal masters in the Government that they are still worth all the money. Because they have been pulling off the bigger stunts, I would have guessed that the pressure seems to be heaviest on MI5. But the Sunday Times‘ James Adams tells us in his new book, reviewed below, that on the contrary, MI5 is coming out best in the traditional struggle for funds and influence with MI6.

The Great Polish Arms Find Caper

On 23 November 1993 the government published its Intelligence Services (Amendment) Bill. (2) By coincidence, no doubt, the 23 November was also the day chosen to show to the media the large, nicely packaged, photogenic collection of guns and explosives found on board a Polish ship in Cleveland. And these were arms not bound for the IRA, but for the Protestant, Ulster Defence Association. And it had all apparently been nipped in the bud by co-operation between MI5, MI6 and the Polish intelligence service. Noses began to twitch all over Europe (but not in the British media which reported it all, straight-faced, as requested). It was just too, too convenient; and too, too neat.

Republican News, the paper of Sinn Fein, commented a couple of weeks later: ‘We are now left with the UOP (Polish Secret Service), MI5 and MI6…. all claiming a success. MI5 has justified the continuation of its funding. The British government is seen to have delivered a blow to the loyalist death squads. Dublin and the nationalist community are shown that the loyalist death squads mean business….. a badly formulated publicity stunt by the British secret services.’ (9 December, 1993)

The only bit they missed out was that MI6 got to play their ‘Eastern European threat after Communism’ card (not Communism now, but drugs and guns).(3) And was it ‘badly formulated’? It looks like rather successful psy-ops to me.

The first crack in the wall was in the Evening Standard of 22nd December, in which Keith Dovkants described the operation, as the sub-heading to his piece had it, as ‘a classic sting operation set up by MI5 who were alerted to the conspiracy by a paid informer’. This was apparently revealed to Dovkants by two Polish journalists who had been tipped off that all was not what it seemed. Dovkants claims the UDA buyer was steered towards a phoney company set up by the Polish secret service to buy the guns. The shipment was then monitored back to the UK. The whole thing was basically done to threaten the Irish Republic’s government with the prospect of Protestant terror if they didn’t become less recalcitrant. (4)

A month later the Irish Press (28 January, 1994) got a Polish source to confirm that the whole thing had been a stunt, organised by the British state, chiefly MI5. (6)

The Polish operation was reminiscent of the 1971 seizure at Amsterdam airport of Czech arms apparently bound for the IRA. Despite some claims that the Czech shipment had been a hoax, a set-up, (6) it seems reasonably clear that in the 1971 version the IRA was actually trying to buy the arms. (7) The similarities lie in the way the British state used the arms find to make propaganda.

The great INLA bombing conspiracy caper

The end of November 1993, also by complete coincidence, no doubt, saw the trail of Martin McMonagle and Liam Heffernan at the Old Bailey, charged with conspiracy to cause explosions etc. The centrepiece of the trial was the evidence of Patrick Daly who was revealed to have been a Special Branch and MI5 informer for at last 15 years. (8)

The Heffernan and McMonagle operation began in July 1992, in the midst of a flurry of press reports of a Whitehall struggle between MI5 and the Special Branch for control of anti-terrorism.(9) A long-term informant inside the Republican movement in the UK, Pat Daly, who had been sent to live in Ireland by his new MI5 handlers, was roped into (or initiated; it isn’t clear) an Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) plot hatched in the Republic of Ireland. Carefully guided by MI5, Daly led three INLA members into a trap in a quarry near Bristol (one escaped). In what resolved into an operation to steal explosives from the quarry, MI5 provided the quarry, the safe-house (wired for sound), the oxy-acetylene equipment (to cut into the explosives store) and the dud explosives placed in the store (which hadn’t contained any explosives for years).(10) Despite this, the judge rejected defence claims that the INLA members had been entrapped and that Daly had been working as an agent provocateur….

It is clear from the witness statements of Daly and various police and MI5 personnel that the decision to expose Daly was taken very early on – and taken against Daly’s wishes. (11) In other words, as the defence lawyer suggested at the Old Bailey, the operation was conducted the way it was to help MI5 in its attempt to take over Special Branch’s anti-terrorist role. An MI5 officer, identified only as Officer A, conceded that there was such a struggle going on but claimed that it ‘did not manifest itself to the people on the ground.’ This is implausible. Not only do we know from messers Wallace and Holroyd, who had been ‘on the ground’ during a previous power struggle over the control of intelligence, that those ‘on the ground’ know perfectly well what is going on, the story of this particular struggle had been running in the media for nearly six months! (12)

Reported Keith Dovkants, ‘The affair has its origin in the government’s determination to combat terrorism by setting MI5 loose on the bombers. In the face of the threat expressed so graphically by the City of London bombings, the secret service was given unprecedented freedom to gather intelligence. In real terms it meant the granting of a lavish budget to buy informants’. (13) What better illustration of the value of paid informants than a high profile case in which armed Irish terrorists in Britain are apprehended and convicted.

MI5’s decision to present Daly as a witness in court meant they were willing to expose how much he was paid. But even that may have been desired. For, better than anything else could, it advertises what a lot of money can be made as an informer. The 400,000 Daly received as his pay-off is a lot of money to most people in this country.

agents provocateurs a go-go

Daly was just one of several big stories about informers and agent provocateurs stories recently. There was The Informers, the cover story on the Guardian tabloid section (20 July 1993), about their use in Northern Ireland, and long accounts (Guardian 7 and 8 March, 1994) of the use of informers and agents provocateurs in police operations against drug trafficking. The 8 March piece began, ‘A growing number of cases in which agents provocateurs are alleged to have been involved are now being tested in the Court of Appeal.’

Since we are going down the American road on policing and crime, we may expect the ‘American’ blow-back effects into our public services: more entrapments, drug money corruption and rising levels of violence. American law enforcement went down the agent provocateur road yonks ago: all those FBI cointelpro operations; something not so far from a domestic Phoenix programme run against the Black Panthers; the penetration and disruption of the American Indian Movement; and, most recently, the same techniques used against the radical eco-freaks in the States. (14)

These horror stories are the backdrop to other signals about the future direction of policing in Britain. The Intelligence Newsletter (27 January, 1994) claimed that “Special Branch officers and undercover agents in specialized units in the Greater London area will have their functions “upgraded” to permit a wider use of informants and to make the change from reactive to pro-active policing.’ This was amplified by the Guardian‘s crime correspondent, Duncan Campbell on January 10, 1994: ‘the role of intelligence officers in all the Met’s 69 divisions is to be upgraded so they will recommend action, not just act as collators….. shifting from reactive to proactive.’ Proactive means more informers and intelligence gathering (bigger and better police computers); proactive means redefining the population as ‘hostile’, to be ‘penetrated’ by ‘agents’, using ‘intelligence’. Which means, inter alia, more agents provocateurs.

The British police are really in a bind. On the one hand they are sitting on a crime explosion caused by unemployment and poverty. On the other hand they are employed by a government which has so far refused to acknowledge the link between crime and unemployment. Under political pressure to produce better crime statistics, for the police a ‘solved crime’ hits the spot like nothing else. Since the easiest crimes to solve are the ones you’ve helped set up yourself, the agent provocateur is an irresistible – structurally irresistible – temptation.

But increasing use of agents provocateurs requires other changes. The first is that judges deny that an agent provocateur constitutes entrapment, which constitutes a valid defence. (In the Daly trial the judge followed this line and denied defence claims that their clients had been entrapped.) The second necessary change is the removal of the defence’s right to see the prosecution’s evidence. For that will reveal the name of the agent provocateur – as it did in the Daly case. And who will be an agent provocateur knowing that their identity will be revealed in court? Right on cue the Observer reported on May 8 that changes to the law, reducing the defence’s right to see the prosecution’s evidence, are on the way.

Notes

1. Two sure signs that this country’s economic crisis is getting worse. The first was the reports in March and April that the Treasury was beginning to question the workings of Britain’s financial system – after the non-regulation of the Thatcher period. The second was the report by Richard Norton-Taylor in the Guardian (9 February, 1994) that the government was actually reviewing the activities – i.e. the cost – of MI6 and GCHQ. Must be panic in the Treasury.
2. Debated in the House of Lords, on 9 December. The Bill makes an interesting comparison with the discussion summarised in the report of the Ditchley Park conference of October 7-9 1988, ‘The oversight and the limits on intelligence work in a democracy’. (Such conferences are assumed to be a part of the ‘informal’ British policy-making machinery, though this has never been demonstrated, as far as I am aware.) Even though a biography of Sir Dick White, former chief of MI6 is being written, in the listed conference participants, while Admiral Stansfield Turner is described as ‘Retired as Director, Central Intelligence Agency’, White is described as ‘Formerly attached to Foreign and Commonwealth Office’.
3. For a fictional account of the new post-communist threat world of MI6, see Murray Smith’s The Stone Dancer (Michael Joseph, 1994). Former soldier Smith dedicates his book to a whole crew of spooks and military, to let the reader know this is the real thing. For a non-fiction version of the same subject see James Adams’ The New Spies, reviewed below.
4. Intelligence Newsletter, 13 January, 1994 carried another version which included several quotations from Polish government and intelligence officials. One of them, Trena Popoff, of the Polish intelligence service UOP, claimed that the success of the mission had been due to UOP’s “effective system of monitoring the Polish arms industry” – suggesting one of the reasons the Poles took part in the operation. Intelligence Newsletter, 10, Rue du Sentier, 75002, Paris.
5. The affair is succinctly summarised in Statewatch, January-February, 1994. Statewatch, PO Box 1516, London N16 0EW.
6. For example, ‘The Fraud of the Amsterdam Arms Haul’ in the now defunct Seven Days, (27 October, 1971), began ‘It is now clear that the dramatic “discovery” of 116 crates of Czech arms at Amsterdam airport on October 16 was a hoax, set up by the Foreign Office and the Special Branch…’ They make the beginnings of the outline of a case – but that’s all. I have seen no other, more concrete evidence.
7. See Maria McGuire’s To Take Arms: a year in the IRA, Macmillan, 1973. Ms McGuire disappeared without trace after this book appeared.
8. Reported in the press 30 November through 4 December.
9. This story ran through the media from March to July 1992. See, for example, an early version ‘MI5 fights for job of snooping on IRA’ in Sunday Telegraph, 22 March, 1992; and Colin Wallace’s ‘The intelligence takeover’ in The Oldie, 15 May, 1992.
10. Most of this can be seen in the press reporting of the trial but this account is taken from the witness statements of the trial. (Thanks to ML for copies).
11. Witness statement of police officer Alan Smith, 19 September 1993 p. 153: ‘It was his [Daly’s] preference that the action we took against the team would distance him and he would be able to continue as an agent.’
12. James Adams states that ‘the decision to award control to MI5 was announced by the Home Secretary in April 1992’. (The New Spies, reviewed below, p. 214.) The stories in the press had begun before this. See note 9.
13. Emphasis added. Imagine how quickly the Northern Irish situation would have been resolved if the Provos had spent the 1970s bombing the City of London and not the centres of Belfast and Londonderry. Two big bombs amidst the money-lenders and suddenly the state is talking to the Provos and we have ‘the Downing Street declaration’.
14. There is long interesting account in Covert Action Quarterly no 47 of the operations against the ecological group Earth First in the USA – including the use of agents provocateurs and car-bombing of EF personnel.