James Adams
Hutchinson, London, 1994.
I first noticed James Adams when he began running some of the MOD’s disinformation lines about Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd in 19867. For a while I collected articles by him which seemed to show the traces of Whitehall briefings. Then I stopped: what was I going to do with such articles?
Mr Adams is a kind of successor to Chapman Pincher. The Whitehall warriors feed him stuff, he writes it up for the paper — the traditional role of the British ‘defence correspondents’, famously the captives of their Whitehall sources.
In fact this is more interesting than I expected. In this instance Adams has persuaded some of the big cheeses from the CIA and the Russian intelligence service to talk to him, as well as SIS and MI5, and the result is a kind of survey of the new world disorder. I’m not very interested in, or knowledgeable about, the current state of the CIA or the Russian service, and skipped through most of that. It might be true; it might all be complete baloney — and I wouldn’t know the difference. (And I’m not sure that Mr Adams would, either.)
On the British end of things Adams tells us, inter alia
- There has been a complete purge of the upper echelons of MI6 in favour of younger people. (So a lot of disgruntled senior people to leak in the future?)
- SIS has got a lot of good sources inside Russia and ‘this has helped keep the British position at the top table of spies’. (p. 80) (No myth like an old myth.)
- SIS and MI5 are now run by democrats who are only to keen to be accountable (up to a point), and ‘SIS has been playing a key role in helping intelligence organizations in countries like Hungary…. to set up new intelligence service with effective oversight.’ (p. 96) Don’t laugh.
- In the post Cold War era it is SIS who are on the defensive — despite their wonderful new 250 million building on the Thames. MI5 are on the bureaucratic offensive and were given ‘overall responsibility for agent-running and analysis worldwide against the IRA’ in Spring 1991 (p. 201); and at the beginning of 1992 Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke received a recommendation that MI5 ‘take control of all counter-terrorist operations in England, Scotland and Wales…. a significant victory for MI5 [which] finally consolidated twenty-five years of ambition.’ (p. 213) This ‘victory’ was achieved chiefly over Special Branch, and the result was ‘a vicious [Special Branch] campaign to undermine MI5’. (p. 214) So bureaucratic warfare as per usual.
There is also a long account of the recent ‘peace moves’ with the IRA which contains information I’ve never seen before, much of it very damaging to the government (if anyone bothered to take it on board), and lots of little fragments of gossip on the past decade’s intelligence comings and goings — in all maybe 40 pages of genuine interest about the British scene, almost none of it verifiable, most of it apparently coming from an MI5 perspective.