Annie Machon
Lewes (East Sussex): Book Guild, 2005, h/b, £17.95
It is hard to ‘see’ this book because a lot of the material, especially in the first half, is familiar, half-remembered from the press reporting of the Shayler-Machon drama and the book Defending the Realm by Nick Fielding and Mark Hollingsworth. Nonetheless, familiar or not, this is a devastating critique of the British security services and the political system which is nominally in charge of them. The only agencies which come well out of this are regional Special Branches, who are presented as reliable and sensible. The rest are incompetent mind-bogglingly incompetent at times self-serving, venal, or all three. This happens this is allowed to happen because there is virtually no political control over the security organisations: when they fuck-up nothing happens to them. MI5 botch a surveillance of an IRA operation and £300 million’s worth of damage is done to the City of London; and nothing happens, no heads roll. MI6 gets involved in trying to use Muslim fundamentalists to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi; and nothing happens; nothing, that is, other than then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook standing up and reading a brief written for him which makes him look like an idiot. (And, of course, their budgets are increased. )
Everything you need to know about out politicians’ relationship with the security services is expressed by the fact that they the politicians refused to even listen to what Machon and Shayler had to say. As did the Intelligence and Security Committee. Oversight? Overlook, more like it.
As always happens, the system then tries to shoot the messenger bearing the bad news. When it comes to this, the system springs into life and proves to be very competent indeed. The second half of the book is chiefly an account of the persecution and conviction of Shayler.
There are three interesting and surprising sections. Almost alone, as far as I can see, Shayler still believes that the Lockerbie bombing was done by the Libyans; and the account here includes some material, new to me, on the funding of various media activities trying to shift the blame elsewhere. (It is not explained why MI6 were so keen to exculpate the Libyans.) This section could usefully be expanded by someone else.
There are several pages of MI6’s I(Information)/Ops, focusing on the role of The Sunday Telegraph, a useful and quotable section for anyone interested in disinformation and the media.
And there is a section on the death of Princess Diana in which the authors express the opinion that MI6 was involved in it. Proof they don’t have but we should pay attention to the surmises of former intelligence officers.
Machon and Shayler come across as decent, intelligent people who didn’t quite understand just how unwelcome they would be with their tales of incompetence, lawlessness and bureaucratic in-fighting among those employed, at considerable expense, to defend the realm; nor how ruthless their estwhile employers would be in pursuing them.
This is the most important account of MI5 since the Cold War ended that we have; and maybe the best book about MI5, period.