Patriots not sneaks
After a year of New Labour I feel beholden to write something on this subject, but what is there worth saying that isn’t blindingly and depressingly obvious and predictable?
Jack Straw, who took over as Home Secretary, and thus formally as the boss of MI5, is determined to sedate any sleeping dogs he comes across. When former MI5 officer, David Shayler, turned up bearing bad news about MI5, Straw bolted for respectability, proving a worthy inheritor of the Labour tradition of grovelling towards our secret servants exemplified by Merlyn Rees in the Callaghan Government. David Aaronovitch in the Independent on Sunday (9 April 1998) gave us an insight into Cabinet thinking on MI5’s plans to destroy most of its files on ‘subversives’. Aaronovitch talked to ‘Mr X’, who is ‘as high up as you can get in this government and not play flamenco guitar’ – so: a Cabinet member, and my guess would be Straw himself. A left-wing student leader in his youth, Aaronovitch asked when he and others of his ilk could see their MI5 files.
‘ “Never,” was the reply. A few years before, he [Mr X] said, he had been shown (under exceptional circumstances) a part of his file. It dealt with his family’s connection with the CP in the dreary overspill where they then lived, and some of it had been compiled by an informer. “The CP was not big in that area,” said Mr X, “and I soon realised that this chap could only be one or two or three people, some of them were friends of the family….But you see, these informers, no matter how you feel about them, were recruited on the basis that they were doing a job for their country. As far as they were concerned they were patriots, not sneaks. And the condition of their employment was that no one would ever be told about them……[therefore] it would……be better to destroy the files.’
Why didn’t the Stasi think of this line?
Aaronovitch let this guff pass. He didn’t even make the obvious response: why not release the files with the sensitive bits deleted, as they do in the United States?
On the MI5 subversive files there are only two things worth stating. First, I will need a lot of convincing that MI5 have actually destroyed anything. They might destroy the paper but what is to stop them converting it all to disk? They could get their entire subversive collection onto a few CD-roms. Second, the reasons MI5 want the files suppressed has less to do with embarrassing past informers, than revealing the scale of its penetration of British politics. Colin Wallace’s MI5 briefing notes showed that MI5 were monitoring the whole of British politics, not just the British Left and trade unions. While MI5 have been repeatedly portrayed as bumbling incompetents where Soviet subversion was concerned, the evidence we have is clear that their surveillance and penetration of the British labour movement has been far more extensive than the British Left realises. This is why we can’t see our files; and why the word ‘redacted’ – meaning blacked-out – will never enter the political discourse of Britain the way it has in the United States.
Robin Cook’s dilemma
With Robin Cook, nominally in charge of SIS, as Foreign Secretary, the picture is different. I remember Cook in the late 1970s making waves about the activities of Special Branch. Cook is no Blairite. Cook hasn’t bought the globalisation-is-wonderful line, and thus the Blairites have to keep him as far away from domestic politics as possible: hence Foreign Secretary. This means that Blair will be most reluctant to see him removed in disgrace as a result of the Sierra Leone affair – or anything else. As a back-bencher Cook would become the focal point for the Labour MPs who are now starting to face the fact that the Labour Party has been hi-jacked. The Blair faction wants him inside the tent pissing out. Cook in the Foreign Office, manipulated by his officials, sniped at by the media and the Tories, suits the Blair faction nicely.
What is striking about Cook is the apparent naivety with which he has been acting. Neither he nor junior minister Tony Lloyd seem to have had any idea what they were dealing with in the Foreign Office; nor what opposition his talk of an ‘ethical foreign policy’ would arouse, no matter how idiotic the concept is.(1) Ethical foreign policies are not possible when your country is one of the world’s leading arms exporters; when you have military personnel serving in 71 countries, including those champions of democracy and human rights, Bahrain, Brunei, Colombia, Indonesia, Kuwait, Oman, and Saudi Arabia;(2) and when you are very junior partners with the most murderous imperialists since the World War 2.(3) In those circumstances an ‘ethical foreign policy’ is a joke – and a disaster waiting to happen. The last major figure who talked like this in office was Jimmy Carter and he got royally screwed by his foreign service and intelligence people.
The Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee
And what of the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee? It snoozes on. Former MI5 officer David Shayler has offered to talk to it – an offer it declined, as it was obliged to.(4) For the information the Committee receives, and the subjects it discusses, are controlled by the Home Office (MI5) and the Foreign Office (SIS). This was built into the Intelligence Services Bill which established the committee in 1994. Unlike Parliamentary select committees, the Intelligence and Security Committee not only has no power to call for ‘papers and persons’ (as well as no expertise and no staff), it cannot even set its own agenda.
Some time this year we are supposed to be getting the result of the inquiry into the British intelligence and security services, which was touted at the time it was announced as an ‘unprecedent root-and-branch scrutiny’.(5) However, in charge of the inquiry is John Alpass, Whitehall’s security and intelligence co-ordinator and a former MI5 officer;(6) and residents of the Whitehall ‘village’ are not known for rocking the boat.
Way off-message
Meanwhile the really interesting issues in this area flicker on the edge of the political agenda.
The murder of the journalist, Jonathan Moyle, in Santiago, while investigating the Chilean arms dealer Cardoen, lurched briefly back into view with the verdict of the Exmouth coroner that Moyle had been unlawfully killed. The Sunday Times report (1 March 1998) on this managed not to mention the role of British embassy staff in Santiago in spreading smear stories about Moyle’s death being the result of autoerotic asphyxiation. Was Moyle was working for British intelligence, as a part of the SIS investigation of the Iraqi arms program, as his father believes? If he was, was he murdered by the Iraqis, as his father also believes? Why would the British foreign service spread smear stories to exculpate an Iraqi murder?(7)
Another casualty of the Iraqi involvement was Gerald Bull, designer of the so-called ‘supergun’, whose murder remains unsolved. Eleven days after sections of the ‘gun’s’ barrel were found at Teeside docks, Bull was shot in Brussels. Rumours circulated that it was Mossad – but no evidence accompanied them.
For four years the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) has been persecuting Gerald James, former chairman of Astra, and three former directors of the company – but not the Astra director named Stephan Kock – trying get them disqualified as company directors. As a whistle-blower on a variety of covert operations and arms deals with Iraq, Gerald James is also facing an investigation by his professional body, the Institute of Chartered Accountants.(8) At the beginning of April the DTI abandoned the attempt to disqualify the four men after it had been revealed that the prosecution was being undertaken against internal DTI advice: the political fix had been revealed.
A fortnight later the Independent (15 April) reported that the Belgian investigating magistrate in charge of the Gerald Bull murder case had received information – ‘documents’ on Astra notepaper – showing that a trio of British special forces were in Brussels the day before the Bull murder, accompanied by Astra director and SIS agent, Stephan Kock.(9) It was Kock who, having removed James as chair of Astra, began using it to do arms deals with the Iraqis – which had to be covered-up when Iraq became the ‘bad guys’, not an oil-rich Middle Eastern country to whom British companies could sells munitions.
In The Times (27 April 1998), Gerald James said, ‘If the truth came out, Astra would make Matrix Churchill look like Sunday school outing.’ But the truth can no more come out, at least not officially, about Astra than it can about the Lockerbie bombing or the deaths of Moyle and Bull: and for the same reason, the alliance with America. Any arguments put forward by Labour Ministers to do something about these issues – not that this is going to happen – and the Whitehall warriors would begin murmuring about ‘the potential for damage to our relationship with the Americans’. New Labour, old forelocks.
Meanwhile we await the book from David Shayler, which will be published abroad; and we await the book from former MI5 and SIS asset (his description), Anthony Holland, which seems likely to be published in Australia this summer. A glimpse of Mr Holland’s story was given in the Independent (2 March 1998). Holland’s manuscript has been e-mailed to journalists in the UK and a very striking tale it is, even though Holland has not deliberately tried to do the British services damage. Holland’s ire has been raised by what he claims is a wrongful conviction in Bradford in the early 1980s. He believes he was framed by the security services, though why he doesn’t know. (The main witness against him, a mentally handicapped man, was found dead in a police cell. Suicide say the police; murder suspects Holland.) Holland seems to have been sprung from jail at the behest of SIS and sent to Australia. Neither book will be published or distributed in the UK but copies will arrive.
Anthony Holland has a Web site at http://members.ocean. com.au/aholland on which you can read one aspect of his claims: his account of the involvement of Keith Hellawell, now the Labour Government’s ‘drug czar’, in his case when Hellawell was with West Yorkshire Police.
Why did MI5 have it in for Victoria Brittain?
One of the David Shayler revelations about MI5 operations against UK citizens was the account of MI5’s surveillance and investigation of the Guardian journalist Victoria Brittain. She had allowed her bank account to be used to funnel money to an exiled Ghanian politician, Kojo Tsikata, to fund his libel law suit against the Independent. Why the excitement in MI5? The UK version was that they were excited at having a pretext to turn over a Guardian journalist. But an account of the story in CounterPunch (October 16-31 1997)(10) mentioned that while Tsikata was the Ghanian intelligence chief in the Jerry Rawlings regime he had exposed the CIA’s network of agents in Ghana; and that would put him on the West’s intelligence services’ shit list in perpetuity. This piece of information failed to appear in any of the UK versions of the story.
Notes
- An early and enthusiastic Labour ‘moderniser’, (a premature moderniser?) Lloyd has probably been put into the Foreign Office to keep an eye on Cook.
- The Great Deception, Mark Curtis (Pluto 1998; this is reviewed below) p. 60.
- On this there was a brilliant polemical piece in the Independent on Sunday 10 May 1998 by John Carlin.
- Guardian 31 March 1998. See Shayler’s letter on the subject to the Guardian 22 December 1997.
- Guardian 31 October 1997
- Guardian 31 March 1998
- On which see Wesley Clarkson’s The Valkyrie Operation (Blake Publishing, 1998) which is pretty good despite the author’s inclusion of dialogue he made up (!) and an almost complete absence of sources.
- James received notification of the accountants’ investigation on the same day he heard about the DTI’s. See Punch 54, 23 May.
- The co-author of that Brussels story, Kevin Cahill, published a useful summary of the extant public knowledge of Stephan Kock in the Independent on Sunday 26 April.
- CounterPunch, PO Box 18675, Washington, DC 20036, was reviewed in Lobster 33.