Anthony Glees, Philip J. Davies, and John N. L. Morrison
London: The Social Affairs Unit, 2006, £20, h/b
The Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) is a recent addition to the roster of Whitehall bodies; the motives of those who created it, as the authors show, are obscure and its role to some extent remains undefined. Formally it is a creature of the prime minister, to whom it reports and who (formally) appoints its personnel; though how much attention the ISC actually gets from the prime minister is unclear to me. Not a lot, I would guess. These ambiguities leave much room for discussion.
Glees and Davies are academics and run the Brunel Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies. Morrison was a career intelligence officer who was the ISC’s researcher for five years until fired for having the temerity to express minor dissent from the government line on Iraq, and he is now at the Brunel Centre. Between them they have much academic and practical knowledge.
The authors are essentially conservative defenders of the British security and intelligence system. It isn’t that they aren’t critical; it’s just that they don’t want to, or are unable to, deal with the reality of that system. In their view of this country’s recent history there were no Wilson plots; Northern Ireland is ignored; Cathy Massiter was guilty of ‘moralising misrepresentations’; disinformation, I-ops and bureaucratic rivalries are ignored. Intelligence and security organisations are no more or less likely to break the law than any other public bodies, they tell us. (Though how do they know?) All the tales of ‘rogue elephants’ told in the last twenty years are spurious. Their account of the CIA is wilfully inadequate, even for a three page summary. They describe the funding of the Contras without mentioning drugs, even when the CIA itself has admitted getting permission from the US Attorney General to ignore cocaine dealing in return for donations to the Contras. You get the picture.
The ISC has written eight reports since its inception, as well as its annual report to the Prime Minister. One of these, ‘Economic Well-being’, was not published. Another, written in the same year (1996) was not published and even its title remains a secret. (What could the committee have investigated so soon after its creation that was so sensitive that even its title has been suppressed by the government?) The rest have covered Sierra Leone, the Bali bombings, Iraq and WMDs, UK detainees in Guantanamo, the Security Service and organised crime and Metrokhin. The last they were given by the prime minister; the others they picked themselves, though since few of the ordinary members of the committee since its inception have much if any knowledge of their subject, I imagine that the choice of subjects was heavily influenced by the committee’s chairs, two of whom had some experience through being ministers. None of the House of Commons’ handful of MPs with independent knowledge of, or interest, in the subject – e.g. Tam Dalyell, Norman Baker – have been members.
With the possible exception of Iraq and WMDs, the subjects the ISC has chosen to look into would come a long way down the list of topics chosen by readers of this journal. ISC has not spoken to David Shayler and Richard Tomlinson, for example; nor Tony Holland, Richard Symonds and Michael Smith (who writes is this issue), who have recently begun working together;(1) nor John Burnes; (2) nor any from the long list of those who have emerged from the war in Northern Ireland. The committee may be interested in what the security and intelligence services are doing but not, apparently, if it means hearing bad news. When the committee’s researcher, co-author John Morrison, raised his head a fraction above the parapet on Iraq he was immediately fired because the agencies refused to work with him. Which tells us pretty much all we need to know about the power relationship between the committee and the secret servants.
The authors comment:
‘Even if there were improper deeds afoot – something that has been shown to be relatively improbable – then legislative oversight is highly unlikely to detect them.’
This may or may not be so; but it is virtually guaranteed to be so if the legislators refuse to talk to those with knowledge of ‘improper deeds’.
As for the British system: with SIS, the authors tell us:
‘a Foreign Office advisor….runs the rule over proposed operations before they are mounted or – if they are particularly sensitive – submitted to the foreign secretary for approval.’ (p. 68)
Do you believe either the FCO or its minister approved the SIS plans to pay a Libyan Al-Qaeda affiliate to try and assassinate Gadaffi, or to run disinformation into the British media before the attack on Iraq? No? Me neither.
However, despite living in a kind of dream world – or pretending to live in one; Morrison, the former professional, must know better than this – the authors do offer much interesting discussion of the difficult issues surrounding (even notional) oversight of secret servants in a democracy like ours. But since that oversight is notional, does any of this really matter greatly? The authors would say it does; or, at any rate, it could; that the committee’s remit and expertise could grow slowly in the second decade of its existence, especially if it found more courage.(3) (The authors recognise that the ISC flunked the Iraq/WMD issue.) I disagree. It isn’t about having the courage (though that would do no harm). The committee’s difficulty is structural. A committee appointed by the prime minister is never going to manage meaningful oversight – defined weakly or strongly – over the intelligence and security services without explicit instructions from the prime minister to do so; and since any such instructions would be interpreted by the security and intelligence services as hostility, this would require the prime minister to take an oppositional stance towards them – something no prime minister is ever likely to do.
Notes
1 See www.freewebs.com/secretdirt/
2 See his ‘Joseph K and the spooky launderette’ in Lobster 39.
3 Morrison argues this in his ‘Watching over our spies requires more intelligence’, The Sunday Times, 16 July 2006.