The State of Secrecy: Spies and the Media in Britain 178831218X, 9781788312189

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The State of Secrecy

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The State of Secrecy Spies and the Media in Britain Richard Norton-Taylor

I.B. TAURIS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, I.B. TAURIS and the I.B. Tauris logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Richard Norton-Taylor, 2020 Richard Norton-Taylor has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Namkwan Cho, nam-design.co.uk All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-7883-1218-9 ePDF: 978-1-8386-0743-2 eBook: 978-1-8386-0742-5 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

‘Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?’ – John Milton, Areopagitica

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Contents Author’s note  viii Acknowledgements  ix Preface  xi Prologue  xiv

Introduction 1 1 Heroes and hacks 13 2 Poachers and gamekeepers 35 3 Brussels, city of myths and contradictions 69 4 The culture and language of secrecy 91 5 Secrecy obsessed 115 6 History is an official secret 143 7 Spies: Their uses and abuses 163 8 Spies: More uses and abuses 193 9 Provoking terror 225 10 Chilcot redux 255 11 Defending the past 271 12 Defending the future 301 Notes 313 Index 324

Author’s note

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describe as the ‘Common Market’ and the European Economic Community (EEC), and occasionally the ‘European Community’, what later became

the European Union. I also follow common practice in calling the Security Service, MI5, and the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.

Acknowledgements

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would like especially to thank Iradj Bagherzade who first suggested I write an account of more than fifty years of journalism. He steered me through

this book’s journey as it changed shape from a personal memoir to a study of official secrecy, albeit illustrated and I hope illuminated by personal anecdotes. I thank, too, Joanna Godfrey formerly of I.B. Tauris, whose patience and suggestions were crucial, and her colleagues, especially Olivia Dellow and all those at I.B. Tauris and Bloomsbury who contributed to the publication of this book. I owe a big debt to my first Guardian editor, Peter Preston, who set me off on my career as a journalist in Brussels, and to his successor, Alan Rusbridger, who showed the world what committed, brave journalism can achieve. I also have to thank a succession of news editors despite the critical asides I have directed at them here. Among former colleagues at the Guardian I want to thank in particular Ian Cobain, Duncan Campbell, Rob Evans, David Gow, Simon Hattenstone, David Leigh, Ian Mayes, Hella Pick and Ed Vulliamy, for their comradeship and outstanding journalism. For years I have been helped and encouraged by Maurice Frankel, director of the Freedom of Information Campaign, Andrew Smith of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT), the committed staff of the law charity Reprieve, and in particular Clive Stafford Smith and Cori Crider, by the law firm Leigh Day and especially Sapna Malik, by Gareth Peirce, the indefatigable pursuer of abuse by state agencies, Geoffrey Robertson QC, staff at the National Archives and the National Audit Office responsible for monitoring the activities of the Ministry of Defence, Tony Bunyan of Statewatch, and by David Lowry, an encyclopedic source of information about British defence policy and nuclear weapons.

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The staff of the human rights group, Liberty, have shown just how much a small, committed, organisation can achieve. I have been privately encouraged, too, by a number of MI5 and MI6 officers, Ministry of Defence officials and military sources who would not appreciate being publicly identified. I had the fortune to start my career in journalism in Brussels at a time when the headquarters of the European institutions and NATO attracted high-flying diplomats and officials from Britain and other European countries. They remained good contacts even when they moved seamlessly up Whitehall’s greasy pole, and talking to journalists, however discreetly, was increasingly risky. Since this book is based on my experience as a journalist, of course much of the material I first gathered and reported on for the Guardian. I thank Claire Armistead and Linda Risso for permission to use material, respectively, from Spooks in Tales of Two Londons (OR Books, 2018) and Forty Years’ Personal Experience, Media, War and Conflict (SAGE journals, 2017). Finally and above all, I could not have written this, or my past books and plays, without the loving support and tolerance of my family and most of all my wife, Anna, who has been a rock throughout.

Preface

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y experiences as a journalist mostly reporting for the Guardian on Whitehall and Britain’s security and intelligence agencies now span

more than fifty years. During that time, I have been trying to break what Christopher Andrew, the doyen of the subject and official historian of MI5, once called the ‘last taboo’ of British politics. As the years went by, the imbalance between what I learned and what I could report as a journalist became greater. My growing frustration was compounded by the way news editors were forced to cater to the perceived increasingly short attention spans of their readers. They became even shorter with the proliferation of social media and as websites became increasingly attractive alternatives to daily newspapers. Antipathy increased over the years towards consistent coverage of longrunning stories – important trials, public inquiries or the British government’s collusion in rendition and torture – that were time-consuming and appeared to have no end in sight. In fact, I believe editors underestimated the appetite among readers of newspapers – as well as among viewers, listeners and consumers of social media – for consistent treatment of important stories involving the security and intelligence agencies. Some terrorist trials and miscarriages of justice – wrongdoing by the forces of law and order as well as by the criminals – have as a result not received the treatment they deserved. It became increasingly difficult, for example, to place news stories about how the directors of the Coventry-based Matrix Churchill machine tools firm were prosecuted for selling military equipment to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, despite an unprecedented release of internal MI5 and MI6 reports describing in detail how these agencies operated and met informants.

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It was when the trial collapsed after it emerged that MI5 and MI6 had encouraged Matrix Churchill to trade with Baghdad so they could spy on what Saddam Hussein was up to that it dawned on me just how much of a ‘state of secrecy’ Britain’s political and civil service establishment had created and how much they tried to cover up. One by-product of my frustration at the public and media’s apparent apathy towards the creeping development of Britain into a secrecy state was to express myself through the theatre. Nicolas Kent, then artistic director of the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, North London, shared my frustration at the difficulty in reporting on the Matrix Churchill case, a trial that in an unprecedented way revealed the secret workings of government, and how individuals who spied for Britain at great personal risk ended up in an Old Bailey witness box and a criminal prosecution. I edited transcripts from the Scott arms to Iraq inquiry for a play, Half the Picture – a phrase taken from the evidence of senior government officials attempting to offer a definition of truth while defending the need for secrecy. The play struck deep chords with audiences and demonstrated there was a huge appetite for ‘verbatim’ theatre with the words taken from evidence, comments and the observations of real, identified people. The success of Half the Picture and the recognition of the theatre as a platform for communicating information and insights that would normally be the task of journalists encouraged me, with Kent’s enthusiastic support, to explore other topics, with plays on the black teenager Stephen Lawrence’s murder inquiry (The Colour of Justice), the Nuremberg Tribunals (Nuremberg), the killing of civil rights marchers in Northern Ireland (Bloody Sunday), and different aspects of the Iraq war and its aftermath (Justifying War, Called to Account, Tactical Questioning, Chilcot). I mention these plays only to underline the limits of conventional journalism. Like those plays, I hope a book like this more effectively than most journalism can expose wrongdoing by agents of the state, and the growing power of security and intelligence agencies which neither Parliament nor MPs nor much of the media have had an interest in scrutinizing effectively. This was particularly in the case of the complicity of MI5 and MI6, with the passive

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or active collusion of ministers, in the abduction and abuse – including torture – of detainees seized and jailed without trial in the so-called war on terror. I include the Ministry of Defence among my targets because of the increasingly close cooperation between the armed forces, and Britain’s Special Forces in particular, and the intelligence agencies, notably GCHQ and MI6, and the dangerous blurring of the boundaries between protecting ‘national security’ and armed conflict, indeed between peace and war. In short, what I have set out to do here is to expose the mindset which encourages the fetishization of official secrecy. To repeat a sentence which appears towards the end of this book: ‘We may need the security and intelligence agencies more than ever. But more than ever we need to know that they are not abusing their ever-increasing powers.’

Prologue Brussels, September 1972. S--- telephoned me. ‘Would you like to have lunch? Come to my flat on the Grand Place.’

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he caller directed me to the top of one of the magnificent buildings overlooking the medieval square in the heart of Brussels. It was an

exotic location, not one expected of a conventional diplomat, I thought. More suitable, perhaps, for an ambitious young officer in Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service. After proudly showing me around his flat overlooking the Grand Place and as his cook was preparing a light lunch, S--- said rather coyly: ‘I report, not to the Foreign Office, but separately to the Cabinet Office’. I knew what he meant. It was an oblique reference to MI6 and Whitehall’s Joint Intelligence Committee, the ‘JIC’. His next words – or rather his casual tone – were odd: ‘I would be interested in how you think Norway will vote.’ I was flattered that he thought my opinion might be valuable, and at the same time concerned about the assumption behind it. What exactly had those in Carlton Gardens said about me in their files? That I could always be relied upon to help MI6. That’s what it seemed. I made it quite clear I was not going to get involved with MI6. Anything I might have told him about my view on how the Norwegians would vote in their forthcoming referendum on membership of the Common Market, as we then called it, I would have already shared with Guardian readers. My lunch with S--- in 1972 was not my first encounter with MI6, as Britain’s foreign intelligence-gathering agency is commonly called, and would not be the last. For nearly fifty years, I followed the secret world in a constant game of cat and mouse. For a journalist, it was both exhilarating and deeply frustrating.

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It all began at Oxford. I used to watch the crumpled figure of Felix Markham, my history tutor, shuffle across the Hertford College1 quad to perform his ablutions in one of the few toilets and washing facilities available then. They were situated under my rooms by the college’s ‘Bridge of Sighs’. Immediately above was the study of my other history tutor, John Armstrong, a medieval scholar of some note. I did not know then that these two rather eccentric individuals would set me on a path, via interviews with MI6 and the College of Europe in Bruges, to Brussels and a career in journalism. Armstrong was not the kind of tutor I needed for a good degree. One year, my hour a week with him was 12 noon to 1. He was invariably late. His excuse was that he had bumped into the college bursar who had offered him a sherry. ‘I was brought up not to accept a drink before midday’, Armstrong explained. After we exchanged a few desultory remarks about Britain in the Dark Ages, his stockbroker would telephone to discuss the current state of the market. There was little time to consider the significance of events that took place in Britain hundreds of years earlier. Armstrong was particularly enthusiastic about twelfth-century Cistercian monasteries and their contribution to European agriculture. Unfortunately, the subject never came up in my final examinations. I was awarded a third class degree. It proved decisive. Had I got a first or even a good second, I might have applied to join the Foreign Office or some international institution. ‘What would you like to do?’, Markham asked sympathetically. I think he was mildly surprised that I had not done better in my finals, and mildly irritated since my achievement did not help to lift Hertford’s lowly position on the university college league table. I shrugged. I did not know he was one of the network of Oxbridge dons who were talent spotters for MI6. Felix Markham clearly thought I had potential there. From a military family, with a father, grandfather and earlier ancestors who had fought with the British Army and Royal Navy in many wars, I would have had little trouble, presumably, in passing the vetting process. My father, a professional soldier, was one of the thousands stranded at Dunkirk in May 1940. He was rescued by the minesweeper HMS Halcyon, suffered severe shell shock and for several months could barely speak. When he did recover from the experience, stranded on a beach, of being a potential prey to German Stuka dive-bombers, he decided to become a pilot. ‘Flying’,

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he told me decades later, ‘was my antidote to agoraphobia’. He joined Monty’s Seventh Army in North Africa tasked with spotting Rommel’s tanks. His father, my paternal grandfather, had fought in three wars. He signed up with the Florida Yeomanry (he was visiting his parents who had retired to Orlando) in 1898 during the Spanish-American War in Cuba. He then crossed the Atlantic to join the Imperial Light Horse fighting the Boers in South Africa and escaping from the Siege of Ladysmith. He described how he crossed the Crocodile River on a pitch-black night, ‘I swam with the horses, a nasty business, river full of crocs, and horses’ heels’. Both his legs were amputated after a shell exploded in a trench in Ypres in 1915. Despite continuing pain, in the Second World War, he volunteered as an air raid warden where he lived, in Birchington on the Kent coast near Margate. He revelled in it, wearing a tin hat, waving his stick furiously at the German bombers flying overhead on the way to London. Nature was helped by nurture as I was sent to boarding schools steeped in the establishment of Britain’s military and colonial past. The preparatory school, Milner Court, the Junior King’s School, Canterbury, was the former home of Lord Milner, Britain’s high commissioner in South Africa at the time of the Boer Wars and later a member of Lloyd George’s war cabinet. His circle included Rudyard Kipling, who laid the foundation stone when the school expanded in Sturry, a village near Canterbury, in 1929. The school was meant to promote a kind of muscular Christianity as well as admiration of the British Empire. When I move up to the main King’s School, I came across a rather different approach. From my dormitory, I looked across a quad towards the Deanery of Canterbury Cathedral. The incumbent was Hewlett Johnston, known as the ‘Red Dean’ on account of his belief that the Soviet Union leaders genuinely shared his aim of world disarmament. Johnston had erected a large and garish poster on the front of the old flintstone Deanery. ‘Christians ban nuclear weapons’, it said. There was no exclamation mark, no punctuation at all. As an unquestioning thirteen-yearold I thought it was a simple expression of fact – all Christians banned nuclear weapons – rather than an exclamatory appeal. One of King’s illustrious alumni was Christopher Marlowe, playwright and spy. Another was the author and one-time intelligence officer Somerset Maugham.

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Many years later, I found an old paperback of his novel Ashenden or The British Agent, inspired by his experience working for British intelligence during the First World War. ‘This book is a work of fiction’, he wrote in the preface, adding waspishly, ‘Though I should say not much more so than several of the books on the same subject … that purport to be truthful memoirs.’2 Maugham continued: ‘The work of an agent in the Intelligence Department is on the whole extremely monotonous. A lot of it is uncommonly useless.’ I was to take his point. A few days after Felix Markham asked me what career I wanted to pursue, I received a telegram summoning me to a meeting with the ‘Ministry of Defence’. I was told to turn up at 3 Carlton Gardens, a grand structure opposite the foreign secretary’s official residence off the Mall. I was to discover it was MI6’s front office, through whose portals many spies had passed, including double agents – the KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn, and the MI6 defector, George Blake, among them. I arrived for the interview early. I was told to wait in a first floor room. It had broad window seats. I noticed a thin wire across the seat, close to the window. It reminded me of the alarmed wire art galleries install to prevent people getting too close to the exhibits, but here, perhaps, designed to prevent people from escaping in a hurry. When I went to the toilet, I noticed the skylight was protected by barbed wire from the inside. You could indeed not get out of that building quickly. I was eventually summoned to a room on a higher floor. ‘Don’t tell anyone you have come here’, was the first thing I was told by a figure with a thick mop of swept back, jet black hair and a military bearing in a sharp pinstripe suit. With no hint of a smile, he made it clear a third class degree might be an advantage for a spy. It was evidence, he suggested correctly, that I had occupied myself with other things at university besides studying for exams. After reminding me not to discuss our meeting with anyone outside, an instruction I quickly ignored, he ended the interview. ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you’, was his message. Not long after, MI6 got in touch again. A letter, with a bold copper-plated italic script saying it was from the ‘Co-ordination Staff ’, asked me to return to Carlton Gardens. I was met by a different officer, a large man, very different in shape and manner to my first interviewer.

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‘Do you think the government was right not to send troops in to quell Ian Smith’s rebellion?’, he asked seemingly out of the blue. ‘No’, I replied, assuming (correctly, I was told later) that MI6’s view, rejected by the then Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, was to deploy British paratroopers to Salisbury, then capital of Southern Rhodesia, against their ‘kith and kin’. I guess the reason I was asked the question in the first place was to test whether I was the kind of person who would not be afraid to offer frank advice to an elected head of government. But MI6 was not for me. I could not be bound to a government agency. As far as I was concerned, secrets, except for deeply personal ones, were for sharing. And I didn’t think I would be very motivated, and therefore effective, trying to persuade foreigners to betray their country. In addition to his links to MI6, Markham was on good terms with the Oxford University contact responsible for recruiting students to the then little-known postgraduate College of Europe in Bruges.3 I waxed as lyrical at that interview as I had at Hertford’s scholarship interview more than three years earlier. I was offered a place at Bruges’ subject, because of my third class degree, to my providing the fee. My father coughed up the £2,000 I needed. As my year at Bruges was ending in the summer of 1967, I still had no idea what career I should try and pursue. Many of the older students there were already members of their countries’ national foreign service. Most of the younger ones were keen to take on jobs in the European Commission or other international institutions. By chance, a British student at Bruges the year before me, John Lambert, had decided to set up an office in Brussels as a freelance journalist. He asked whether I would join him. General de Gaulle might have said No to British membership of what we then called the Common Market, but Harold Wilson had responded by saying he would not take No for an answer. British editors and readers would develop a growing appetite for news from Brussels. That was Lambert’s take. It proved to be correct. Journalism was already in my blood. Duncan Norton-Taylor, my father’s cousin, a reporter for Time magazine, had followed the D-Day landings on 6 June 1944, the day I was born. ‘The ground was littered with the debris of battle – tanks, jeeps, rifles, ration tins, bulldozers, first-aid kits, canteens,’ he wrote. ‘Everywhere lay the dead – weltering in the waves along the shore, lying

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heaped in ditches, sprawling on the beaches.’ Duncan later covered the war in the Pacific and wrote a book with the straightforward title I Went to See for Myself.4 I eagerly accepted Lambert’s offer. It was the beginning of more than fifty years in journalism, an occupation which, like spying, involves, among others things, gathering secret information. The difference is that a journalist’s job is to reveal them. I was not short of opportunities in Brussels, a most leaky capital where journalists are effectively out of reach of the Official Secrets Act and all the other sanctions British governments put in the way of open reporting. I joined the Guardian staff a few years later, on 1 January 1973, the day Britain joined the Common Market (or the European Community, a term used by political leaders, including Margaret Thatcher, when they wanted to emphasize its potential benefits). Two years later, I returned to London, where I renewed contact with MI6, and for the first time met officers from MI5 and Britain’s military hierarchy. I shamelessly used my family connections to impress on them that I understood where they were coming from rather more than they might have assumed. I milked my background whenever I thought it would help me and my newspaper to report on the world of spooks. It helped me get elected to the Travellers Club, an establishment in London’s Pall Mall frequented by spies. I was proposed and seconded by enthusiastic former MI6 officers. I left the Guardian in July 2016, a few weeks after a small majority of the British people voted for Brexit. In between, I learned a lot about Britain’s perpetually strained relations with Europe, about journalism and about the secret world. I was told that successive cabinet secretaries compiled private notes on individuals for the benefit of ministers or senior government officials (including those in MI6). One official who read them told me I was marked down as ‘astute’, not nearly as left wing as I appeared. More to the point was the comment by Michael Herman, a former senior GCHQ official: ‘Norton-Taylor of the Guardian is a former Freedom of Information Journalist of the Year, and long-term thorn in the flesh of the intelligence establishment.’5 I hope this book explains why.

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Introduction

London, 6 October 1993. ‘Truth’, said the senior Ministry of Defence official giving evidence to the Scott arms-to-Iraq inquiry ‘is a very difficult concept’. It took a few seconds before I realized he was not merely indulging in supercilious Whitehall banter. The comment was an ultimate justification of official secrecy. The culture of secrecy is the root cause of many, perhaps most, of Britain’s deep-seated ills. It has prevented a coherent debate about the state of British democracy, how we are governed and about the country’s role – in the past, now and in the future. It has prevented a mature debate about the real meaning and interests of ‘national security’, a phrase regularly trotted out by successive governments to dismiss the public’s right to know. Official secrecy has allowed the intelligence agencies to commit such serious mistakes and indulge in such wrongdoing that far from protecting national security, it has had the perverse effect of undermining it. The damage inflicted by secrecy, the failure to tell the truth and especially tell the truth to power, is a central theme of this book. I have witnessed over many years how it has prevented MPs and journalists from holding to account the Whitehall establishment and the security and intelligence agencies at the heart of it. With the help of personal anecdotes spanning five decades, I recall my struggles with Whitehall, Britain’s unaccountable ‘permanent government’, what in the United States they call the ‘deep state’. Some were profoundly significant, some unintentionally hilarious. They all shed light on how we are governed and manipulated. A book can place events in context, something that is difficult in journalism, constrained by the pressures of time and space. Official secrecy is the thread connecting the unremitting sources of conflict during my long career as a

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journalist confronting spies, the armed forces, cover-ups, leaks, suppressed history, the abuse of human rights, hidden warfare, Europe and an enormous waste of taxpayers’ money. I confronted them in the face of hostility from ministers, Whitehall mandarins, judges, military chiefs and even MPs, and less surprisingly from the security and intelligence agencies. I have seen how the role and powers of these agencies have been allowed quietly to increase, unchecked. They will continue to do so as the boundaries between war and peace get blurred, and the intelligence services become more and more intertwined with the armed forces. Britain’s Special Forces – the SAS and SBS – are playing an increasingly significant role, yet they are protected by a wall of official secrecy greater even than that enjoyed by MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. The role of the media in a struggle that goes to the heart of Britain’s parliamentary democracy is crucial, given the reluctance of MPs to subject the intelligence agencies to effective scrutiny. Well aware of the potential influence of the media, these agencies, MI6 in particular, seduce or smear journalists, give a heavy spin to news events and even plant false stories in the media. It is an easy task, given the willingness of journalists to be flattered, believing they are privileged to be invited into the secret world of spooks. They convince their editors that security and intelligence sources are so special and exotic, they must be telling the truth. Too many journalists have persuaded themselves that questioning what these sources tell them will end their ‘special access’. My view has always been that you may not be fed government-inspired ‘scoops’ by being critical, but you would get better, authentic, ones from whistleblowers or as a result of your own independent investigations. In the end, the intelligence agencies need journalists more than we need them, a lesson MI5, MI6 and GCHQ are finally admitting, implicitly at least. This is not an autobiography, not even a personal memoir. I have briefly described my family background only to show how it has been relevant to my relations with Britain’s security and intelligence establishment and the military hierarchy as I pursued my career in journalism. Journalism can be exhilarating. I revelled in victories over the Whitehall establishment, not least when it came to exposing the hypocrisy behind its secrecy. Journalism can also be profoundly frustrating, not least when the

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government concedes, after years of denials and dissembling, that you were telling the truth all along. I fell into journalism in Europe, more specifically Brussels. It was a wonderful baptism for a young, untested correspondent, a place to observe Britain in an entirely new context, one country among equals in a new and strange institution. The Westminster and Whitehall establishments found it hard to swallow. But they wanted to make sure that once in, they would seize the opportunities membership of the Common Market offered. The entry negotiations had barely concluded before the Foreign Office, encouraged by MI6, placed Britons in strategic positions in the Commission. The aim was to ensure that British interests were looked after while at the same time gather first-hand intelligence about what common European policies, on foreign trade and aid, for example, were being developed. Yet it was not long before a prime minister faced with a divided party plumped for a referendum over Britain’s relationship with Europe, a move with echoes that would reverberate more than forty years later, though with very different results. There was another significant difference. The referendum called by the Labour leader, Harold Wilson, in 1975 followed a renegotiation of the original British entry terms; that the one called by David Cameron preceded negotiations for Britain’s future relationship with Brussels. And in 1975, Margaret Thatcher, Leader of the Opposition, was an enthusiastic supporter of what she warmly embraced as the ‘European Community’. She later became a chief advocate of the single market, in stark contrast to Theresa May, who was a ‘remainer’, though careful not to expose herself as an enthusiastic one during the 2016 referendum campaign. Brussels was a paradise for journalists, not least because they could manufacture stories (there is nothing new about fake news) about an institution few editors and MPs let alone readers of newspapers knew much about. It was already a target for prejudice and myth. Some journalists, notably Boris Johnson, when Brussels correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, had a field day writing stories about what the Eurocrats were allegedly up to. The main attraction for me was that British journalists did not have to rely on British officials for information as they had to do back in London. My task was made easier by diplomats from

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other members of the EEC who relished leaking, especially when it would embarrass what they regarded as overpowering and arrogant British ministers and officials. I describe the culture shock when I came to Britain years later to confront official secrecy. I began to learn just how many weapons there were in Whitehall’s arsenal. They are still there. One powerful but unrecognized weapon is language, the manipulation and clever use of carefully chosen phrases. The art of dissembling is an effective weapon in a country where deference remains the overwhelming default response to claims made by any public authority, but Whitehall officials in particular. The use of language by Whitehall mandarins can be subtle. It can also be crude, for example, by resorting to the simple device of changing a name. Windscale became Sellafield after a fire seriously damaged the image as well as the infrastructure of the nuclear fuel and reprocessing plant in Cumbria. After the Ministry of Defence bought the US Predator drone for Britain’s armed forces, it renamed it ‘Protector’ in an attempt to improve the image of a controversial weapon whose use continues to raise serious legal and ethical questions. I look back, unsettled, at the amount of times I was lied to. Whitehall officials would not use the word, of course. They choose alternatives from its large collection of euphemisms. Churchill, who became a past master of the art, famously used the phrase ‘terminological inexactitude’. Many years later that supreme mandarin Robert Armstrong would confess to having been ‘economical with the truth’. Euphemism is a barrier to honesty. It also betrays a sense of nonchalant arrogance, patronizing putdowns posing as wit. The brazen use of language with which Whitehall officials have protected themselves from scrutiny has deceived the public and Parliament alike. Whitehall officials have developed the practice of avoiding embarrassing or damaging revelations in answers to unwelcome parliamentary questions into an art form. Another weapon in their pursuit of official secrecy is the power of delay, putting off decisions or choosing the most self-serving, least damaging moment to announce an initiative or admit an error. Weapons available to the government include well-timed leaks and flying kites to divert attention from unpopular measures or dilute their impact.

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Whitehall’s black arts were spectacularly exposed during the Scott arms-toIraq inquiry which revealed the extent to which officials covered up breaches of export controls by British companies whose directors were MI5 and MI6 informants. Public inquiries provide illuminating insights into the dark recesses of Whitehall, with ministers and officials revealing much more than they would to Parliament. The senior Ministry of Defence official whose comment to the Scott inquiry about truth I quoted at the opening of this introduction had been the department’s spokesman during the Falklands conflict a decade earlier. He was responding to a remark by a senior Foreign Office diplomat that ‘half the picture can be true’. Local authorities and private companies can be as secretive as the central government, of course. But the Whitehall establishment is particularly adept at devising ways of withholding the truth. Its task is made so much easier by a peculiarly British willingness to put up with official secrecy, the result of a deeply ingrained belief: the British State is a force for good. I trace the development of official secrecy, how it has been defended and how it has been challenged through the courts as well as at public inquiries forced on reluctant governments. While there have been some remarkable successes thanks to the persistence of some journalists and courageous whistleblowers, among the most rewarding and entertaining experiences in my career have been dramatic and unforeseen triumphs of defendants in criminal trials. They include the unanimous acquittal by a vetted Old Bailey jury of the MoD official Clive Ponting, prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act for supplying an MP with the truth behind the circumstances leading to the sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano during the Falklands war. One Old Bailey triumph I relished was the failed Customs prosecution of the directors of Matrix Churchill, a Coventry-based machine tool firm. They were charged with breaching export controls even though MI5 and MI6 had asked them to spy on Saddam Hussein’s arms programme during their sales trips to Iraq. Evidence Whitehall was forced to disclose at the subsequent Scott inquiry led to the quashing of convictions of other British businessmen found guilty of exporting arms to Saddam Hussein. MI5, MI6, and Ministry of Defence and Foreign Office officials had secretly encouraged the export of goods to the

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Iraqi dictator who became an enemy only after he invaded Iraq. Greed and the pursuit of short-term British interests later encouraged the government secretly to make up with another dictator. Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi, once treated as a villain, was enthusiastically embraced before becoming an arch enemy again. The way relations with these and other dictators were conducted, initially in great secrecy, undermined Britain’s national security as well as the country’s standing and role in the world. Two trials I reported were hugely embarrassing to the security and intelligence establishment. Thatcher’s attempt to ban Spycatcher, the memoirs of the former MI5 officer Peter Wright, failed spectacularly in the Sydney courts. A few years later, two peace activists, non-violent campaigners against war and dictatorship, were unanimously acquitted by an Old Bailey jury of helping George Blake, the MI6 officer turned Soviet spy, escape from prison even though they had admitted it. I describe how official secrecy extends even to the distant past, including Britain’s colonial history. Only recently has Whitehall’s secret hoarding of documents exposed the torture of Mau Mau rebels in Kenya, the killing of unarmed Malays and the abuse of Cypriot detainees. Evidence of these and other episodes from Britain’s imperial history has seen the light of day only as a result of pressure from journalists and the courts. A visit to the National Archives in Kew provides abundant evidence of how Whitehall departments withhold, and sometimes withdraw, documents from the archives at will. Under the inappropriately named Public Records Act, Whitehall departments can keep documents under wraps indefinitely without having to give a reason why. Such secrecy has prevented ministers from doing their job and learning from the mistakes of their predecessors, making them have to continue reinventing the wheel. Control over archives held by government departments further empowers the Whitehall establishment in its relations with ministers, depriving their political masters of knowledge that would have helped them perform their democratic functions more effectively in the interests of the public. The overriding culture of secrecy and the complacency it breeds has meant that ministers and their Whitehall advisers have been slow to recognize new threats, whether from extreme and violent Islamism or cyberwarfare. It has made them

Introduction

7

blind to the opportunities and potential impact of technological developments, ignorance that has contributed to the expensive failure of IT systems, not least in the security and intelligence agencies and the Ministry of Defence, that have damaged national security as well as wasting huge amounts of taxpayers’ money. Documents released at the National Archives show how successive governments have been obsessed, preoccupied and at times paranoid, about leaks, and how they have devoted a huge amount of energy and resources in failed attempts to find the culprit. Of four official files where I saw my name, three are about leak inquiries into something I had reported. Secrecy encourages leaks. It is also expensive. Whitehall officials spend large amounts of time and money weeding documents from the archives and blocking Freedom of Information Act requests in tribunals and court hearings, then using expense as a reason for refusing demands from journalists and the general public. Incoming governments promise greater openness and transparency, but are quickly seduced by siren calls from Whitehall counselling secrecy, whatever the cost. Greater transparency over the security and intelligence agencies, was forced on governments. The 1989 Security Service Act and the 1985 Interception of Communications Act were introduced only after the European Court of Human Rights ruled that phone tapping and the activities of MI5 must be placed on a legal footing. The discredited ‘catch-all’ secrets law was repealed by the 1989 Official Secrets Act introduced after the fiascos of the Ponting and Spycatcher trials. The one measure introduced voluntarily, albeit under pressure from campaigners, was the 2000 Freedom of Information Act, later described by Tony Blair in his memoir as a terrible mistake. A government’s most common defence of official secrecy is that it is needed to protect ‘national security’ or ‘the public interest’, phrases that cover a multitude of sins. They are deployed to protect governments from political embarrassment and to cover up wrongdoing. The flag of ‘national security’ is hoisted immediately the security and intelligence agencies come into view. The record of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, their failures and successes, and their uses and abuses needs to be examined. After decades spent closely following these agencies, I believe I have the measure of them. They must be taken down from their pedestal, brought down to earth and opened up.

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8

I describe individual cases including spies and double agents I have met, those who caused real damage to British security, and those who had their uses, not least in calming the Kremlin’s perpetual paranoia. Spies who caused serious damage were protected by the Whitehall establishment. Others were victims of disastrous mismanagement. Bodies set up to scrutinize MI5, MI6 and GCHQ have proved inadequate, incapable of investigating wrongdoing. I learned from experience that no statute or outside body, MP or cabinet minister can ensure they behave ethically and within the law. Edward Snowden revealed how through developments, notably in surveillance technology, GCHQ, with its US partner the National Security Agency, can easily evade restraints laid down by legislation. They have done it for a very long time. I see from the few Guardian cuttings I have kept that as far back as 1986, nearly thirty years before Snowden’s disclosures, I wrote a piece with the headline, ‘GCHQ Guilty Secrets’ with the sub-heading, ‘Indiscriminate eavesdropping may harm the innocent’. In the end, as members of the security and intelligence agencies have privately acknowledged, it is the ethos that matters and that can only be determined by the staff themselves. The 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001 that led to the invasion of Iraq and to the so-called war on terror were deeply frustrating for critical journalists to report. Week after week in the run-up to the invasion, I wrote columns in the Guardian describing how the government’s top legal advisers, senior officials in the Foreign Office, MI5 and at least half of MI6 opposed an invasion of Iraq. Other than the FO’s legal adviser, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, no official resigned in protest. The invasion was an unprecedented abuse of intelligence for which Sir Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6, and Sir John Scarlett, chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, should bear some responsibility. They backed away from telling truth to power. So did the heads of the armed forces, as the Chilcot inquiry so devastatingly revealed. They failed to warn their political masters about the dangers of invading Iraq. Three years later, in 2006, after a humiliating fiasco in Basra, military commanders failed to tell ministers that they were hopelessly unprepared to take on the job of restoring law and order in Helmand, the centre of Afghanistan’s opium poppy cultivation and haven of warlords. The failure of cabinet ministers and their most senior

Introduction

9

official, intelligence and military advisers to face up to their most serious responsibilities contributed to the deaths of more than 400 British soldiers in Afghanistan. The trigger for Britain’s disastrous military interventions which have left such a bloody legacy was fired before the 2003 invasion of Iraq when Tony Blair, helped by the shameful Iraq weapons dossier based on MI6 misinformation, convinced himself that Saddam Hussein was developing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and that it was in Britain’s interest to stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with President George Bush. ‘I will be with you whatever’, Blair told Bush. He ignored warnings from the Joint Intelligence Committee that terror was a much bigger threat to Britain than Saddam Hussein and that an invasion of Iraq would increase that threat, something, we discovered later, that deeply concerned Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5. We also now know MI5 and MI6, despite persistent denials, were colluding with the United States in rendition operations – the abduction of terror suspects seized and secretly transferred to prisons around the world where they were subsequently tortured. For six years, ministers, notably Jack Straw, Blair’s foreign secretary, denied any British involvement in the rendition and abuse of detainees. When clear evidence emerged, the Crown Prosecution Service took no action. The government spent a further six years in the courts refusing to disclose MI5 and MI6 involvement in the abuse of detainees before finally admitting it and apologizing to MPs in May 2018. Unashamedly, I devote a chapter to the Chilcot inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the Blair government’s decision to join the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The impact of the Chilcot report was muted by long delays as a result of Whitehall obstruction. Attention when it was finally published in July 2016, seven years after it was set up, and less than two weeks after the European Union (EU) referendum, concentrated on its devastating criticism of Blair and MI6 officers and the way intelligence was abused in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Largely ignored was its blistering criticism of the Ministry of Defence. A senior, unidentified, official observing that the ‘MoD is good at identifying lessons, but less good at learning them’, is one of the many internal Whitehall documents passed to the Chilcot inquiry that should be cherished for a long time.

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The MoD is a constant villain in my story. It has become a sclerotic, secretive and wasteful institution that by any objective test is not fit for purpose. The MoD has failed under successive governments to ensure that Britain’s armed forces are equipped with what they actually need while continuing to devote ever-increasing sums to expensive projects, notably two large aircraft carriers and the Dreadnought fleet of Trident nuclear missile submarines (of little use, in the opinion of this author – and of many senior military figures – in combatting the real threats facing the country). The former foreign secretary Douglas Hurd’s familiar claim that Britain punches above its weight was fast becoming a myth even before the disasters of Iraq, Afghanistan and later Libya, fiascos that led to a popular backlash and widespread opposition to future military operations by British forces. These defeats highlighted a growing mismatch between the reality and the rhetoric. The former chief of the defence staff, General (later Lord) David Richards, was reminded of the former US president Theodore Roosevelt’s proverb: ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.’ Richards told me: ‘We are doing the opposite’. The army, he noted, was smaller than at any time since the Napoleonic wars and the RAF never had so few combat aircraft, and the Navy so few ships. As I write this book, the British army seems to be facing an existential crisis. Whitehall has tried to close off debate about the future of Britain’s armed forces just at a time when the country’s role and influence in the world should be placed under unprecedented scrutiny. As ministers, with the help of reluctant Whitehall officials, prepared to take Britain out of the EU, they placed even greater emphasis on the importance of the ‘special relationship’ with the US, a relationship that became more fragile and even more one-sided with the election of Donald Trump. Britain is forging a separate special relationship, one with despotic rulers of Saudi Arabia and Gulf states, the most lucrative markets for British arms, making a mockery of claims that Britain is a committed defender of human rights around the world. Breaches of human rights, yet another excuse for official secrecy, will become a growing source of conflict, among many others, including environmental and economic pressures, identified in a study by a little-known group inside the MoD. It has warned that one source of conflict will be demographic pressures

Introduction

11

in countries of the Middle East where, at the time of writing, half or more of the populations are under thirty years of age. Back home, the media, notably the Daily Mail, the Sun and the Daily Telegraph, demonstrated the extent of its influence – on the Conservative government as much as on public opinion – during the Brexit debate. It became a battle between populism and the ‘liberal elite’. Though Brexit was also a challenge to Westminster and other traditional centres of power as well as Brussels, there was little sign that the secret state kept in place by my protagonist, the Whitehall establishment, was being eroded. Far from it. The government’s preparations for Brexit were shrouded in secrecy. There was little sign, too, that Brexit would strengthen ‘parliamentary sovereignty’ or that the British people would be able to ‘take back control’ or that the country would become a credible ‘global power’, as government ministers promised. Far from restoring more powers to Parliament, thousands more civil servants were hired to cope with Brexit and ‘nationalize’ hundreds of EU regulations and directives embedded in British law. Theresa May trumpeted the return to a blue British passport as an example of independence, of taking back control. Symbolism seemed to matter far more than harsh reality. For Whitehall, which has taken so much comfort from clinging to precedence and the past, ‘need to know’ is the foundation of official secrecy, the principle that only a discreet few directly involved in making and implementing decisions need to be told. The opposite is the case. It is the public that needs to know, not least because far from protecting the security of their nation, the Whitehall establishment and its most secret parts have subverted it. There was one ray of light: the security and intelligence agencies were under increasing scrutiny. They have been caught out, as I hope this book demonstrates, and unless they open themselves up more than they have so far been willing to do, they risk being in danger of being caught out again.

12

1 Heroes and hacks

London, 13 December 2005. ‘There is simply no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition full stop, because we never have been’ pronounced Jack Straw, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, in evidence to the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. ‘We were opposed to any use of torture. Not only did we not agree with it, we were not complicit in it and nor did we turn a blind eye to it.’ For years, Straw and his fellow ministers denied that Britain had been involved in the US practice of ‘rendering’ terror suspects – abducting them and secretly flying them to prisons, including Guantanamo Bay, where they were abused and tortured. They could not have been more wrong. Pursuing the government over its collusion in torture was one of the most dispiriting experiences I encountered as a journalist. It certainly tested the resilience of the few of us who pursued the story. It epitomized the ups and downs of journalism, the depths of frustration that can drag you down when confronting ministers and officials protected by the wall of official secrecy. You keep going because of the potential rewards, that eventually you will succeed getting nearer to the truth – if not collapsing the wall, at least making holes in it. Journalism is a curious profession, or trade or craft. It is actually all three. You cannot be taught it behind a desk at university. It has pathways that can be diametrically opposed. You can spend all the time banging your head against a brick wall of secrecy and lies.

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You can follow the dictum of Denis Diderot, the philosopher of the French Enlightenment: ‘Scepticism is the first step towards truth.’ Or you can be credulous and wallow in byline splendour as a receptacle for ministers, intelligence agencies, lobby groups or anyone else who wants to get their message across to the public. You can indulge in hyperbole, feasting on adverbs and adjectives, offering the writer immediate gratification. And there are the calm and patient investigations of ‘slow journalism’. Journalists can be heroes or, as many of them call themselves in a selfdeprecating way, mere hacks. Nicholas Tomalin, the respected Sunday Times journalist, famously said there were three requisites for a journalist: ‘rat-like cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability’. I would add other ingredients: a photographic memory, a mischievous delight in questioning authority, any authority and resilience – the refusal to take no for an answer. The Libyan rendition story, which I will refer to later, more than once with no apologies, is a prime example of a case where resilience was the key. Bernard Ingham, Thatcher’s gruff, straight-talking spokesman from Yorkshire (and former Guardian Labour Correspondent), divided journalists into three types: the Harry Carpenter school of journalism, which he named after the BBC’s veteran boxing correspondent whose reporting consisted of breathless, prolonged high-pitched, commentary; the John le Carré school of journalism of what he called conspiracy theorists; and those who suffered from what he called ‘columnar pox’, individuals he regarded as pontificating columnists. I was among those accused of being a conspiracy theorist, not least by fellow journalists, by consistently questioning ministerial statements, claims and denials about the activities of MI5 and MI6, including collusion in torture. Little did those journalists who advised me to abandon that story realize that while members of the government, notably Straw, accused me of chasing hares, I was privately encouraged to pursue them by serving and former senior government officials deeply concerned about what Britain’s intelligence agencies had been up to, sometimes, but not always, with the knowledge of ministers. At the Guardian, I was in good company, supported by a few fellow resilient and committed searchers after the truth, including David Leigh, Rob Evans,

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Duncan Campbell and Ian Cobain, fitfully by the editor Peter Preston and enthusiastically by his successor, Alan Rusbridger. I was helped by those indefatigable human rights groups Reprieve, Liberty, Amnesty International and the Campaign Against the Arms Trade. Denials by Straw and obfuscations by ministers and officials alike might have been the end of the MI6 collusion in torture story had an unlikely ally not come to our aid. In 2011, NATO air strikes destroyed the offices of Moussa Koussa, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s intelligence chief. Files containing his official papers fluttered in the Tripoli breeze. Journalists could not believe their luck. The papers included a letter, dated 18 March 2004, to Moussa Koussa from Sir Mark Allen, head of counterterrorism at MI6. It revealed how Britain was directly involved in the rendition of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi, two Libyan dissidents opposed to Gaddafi, to Tripoli. The Libyan dictator, who had provided the IRA with weapons and whose intelligence officers had bombed the Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie and murdered the British police officer Yvonne Fletcher, had become Britain’s great friend. So much so that in December 2003, after Gaddafi promised to give up his nuclear weapons programme, Allen hosted a lunch for Moussa Koussa in a private room at the Travellers Club in London’s Pall Mall where they sealed the new friendship. As we shall see later in the chapter Provoking Terror, relations between Gaddafi and the British government became so close, and for Blair so important, that he got Prince Charles to write an ingratiating letter to the Libyan dictator. A significant obstacle to rigorous independent journalism is the lobby system, where political and specialist correspondents operate in packs, fed by official Whitehall spokespeople or ministerial advisers armed with titbits and spin supplied off-the-record, that is, to be used on condition the source is not identified. The most prominent and influential group is the ‘Westminster lobby’, usually referred to simply as ‘the lobby’, the primus inter pares of media lobbies. Its members are journalists officially accredited to cover Parliament and obliged to obey strict rules and protocols. Woe betide a journalist who breaks them. The lobby correspondents receive two or more daily briefings from someone normally identified only as ‘the prime minister’s official spokesperson’.

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All Whitehall departments, notably the Foreign Office (FO), the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Treasury, as well as Scotland Yard, have their groups of specialist correspondents, each with their own ‘lobby’ or association. They form their own cartels, some more closed than others. There is the crime correspondents association, for example, and a defence correspondents association. There was just one occasion when I thought self-censorship was acceptable and went along with it. Prince Harry, an officer in the Army Air Corps, was desperate – as he himself later admitted – to join his comrades in Afghanistan. In 2008, General Sir Richard Dannatt, then head of the army, called us into his office at the MoD for a private chat. He told us Harry was planning to go to Afghanistan as an Apache attack helicopter crew and asked us to keep it quiet. Ministry officials made it clear that any defence correspondent who disclosed the mission would be banned forever from any future facility, as would the media organization they worked for. Harry’s presence in Afghanistan where he was responsible for targeting Taliban-led insurgents remained under wraps until it was revealed by an Australian magazine, New Idea, whose editors said they had no idea about the British media’s voluntary censorship. Harry, or Captain Wales as the army called him, was quickly spirited out of Afghanistan. He returned in 2012 as an Apache pilot. This time, it was considered to be sufficiently safe for his deployment to be reported openly. Official spokespeople in government departments like to deal exclusively with the journalists’ lobby groups assuming their members could be trusted not to rock the boat. They assume journalists prefer to operate in cartels so that they are not scooped. I was frequently reminded of the epigrammatic ditty composed in the 1920s by Humbert Wolfe, the Italian born British poet and civil servant: You cannot hope/To bribe or twist,/Thank God! The British journalist./But seeing what/That man will do/Unbribed, there’s no occasion to. Some journalists plough their own furrow with an exclusive story. Whitehall departments attempt to undermine them, particularly if they are critical. On occasion, when I reluctantly approached them for a response to a story I had to myself, officials spokespeople immediately alerted one of its favoured correspondents from another media organization, offering their own spin to

Heroes and Hacks

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the story, thereby sabotaging mine. When I wrote stories that displeased the FO – one I remember was about how Britain was secretly arming Pinochet’s Chile – official spokespeople told other journalists, British and foreign, that I was not an accredited ‘diplomatic correspondent’, the implication being that I was unreliable. Officials breached that crucial commodity, namely trust. Under pressure from senior officials or ministers, Whitehall spokesmen and women increasingly resorted to asking journalists who approached departments for an official response to divulge – in the interests of fairness – what article they were planning to write and when it would be published. Despite the best efforts of its spin-doctors, one department – the MoD – laid itself open to hostile media stories, not surprisingly, given the frequency of its attempted cover-ups, waste of taxpayers’ money and, perhaps not least, the rivalry between different branches of the armed forces. The security and intelligence agencies enjoy much more, indeed unique, protection from the media. GCHQ have official, albeit not publicly named, spokespeople – a legacy of the spy agency being by far the biggest employer in Cheltenham and having to deal with the local media about such matters as building works and charity events. MI5 and MI6 do not have official spokespeople. They rely, instead, on a more personal, cosier, relationship between their officers responsible for liaising with the media and individual journalists specializing in security and intelligence stories. The arrangement suits both sides – the agencies are usually treated with kid gloves, while the journalists impress their editors by their special relationship. We will see in the following chapter how these relationships can be abused. That editors are more likely to be criticized than praised by others for exposing excesses or wrongdoing by MI5, MI6 or GCHQ was most clearly demonstrated by the way the Guardian and its editor, Alan Rusbridger, was accused of undermining Britain and threatening the nation’s security for praising the US whistle-blower Edward Snowden. I was surprised when Chris Blackhurst, a former editor of the Independent newspaper, wrote during the controversy over the Snowden revelations: ‘If the security services insist something is contrary to the public interest, and might harm their operations, who am I (despite my grounding from Watergate onwards) to disbelieve them?’

18

The State of Secrecy

Much of the media seemed to revel in seizing every opportunity to embarrass fellow journalists than the government. Never more than in the media does dog eat dog. Newspapers delighted in reporting how a group of backbench Tory MPs tabled a Commons motion calling on the Leader of the Opposition (Neil Kinnock) ‘to disclose the fullest details of his lengthy telephone conversation with Mr Richard Norton-Taylor, a Guardian journalist now in Australia’. It was December 1986, at the height of the Spycatcher trial that was proving highly embarrassing to the Thatcher government (as well as providing unwelcome publicity to MI5). The MPs’ intelligence was faulty. My telephone conversation with Kinnock was a myth. I did approach individual MPs from time to time on particular issues I thought were scandals that needed pursuing. Tam Dalyell was one such MP, though he did not need any encouragement. I helped backbench MPs question ministers. A notable case was the Commons debate on the Scott arms-to-Iraq inquiry when I alerted Richard Shepherd, the fiercely independent-minded Tory backbencher and freedom of information (FoI) campaigner, to key passages in the judge’s voluminous report which a sympathetic member of Scott’s staff tipped me off about. It helped Shepherd land a heavy punch on the government front bench. Crucial passages hidden in the dense report attacked the government for obsessive secrecy and deliberately misleading Parliament about how it changed guidelines on the export of arms-related equipment to Iraq. The Major government survived the debate on the report by one vote. I had tipped off Robin Cook, Labour’s spokesman, on Scott-related matters, about what I gleaned as a regular attender of the inquiry hearings, and I helped other committed backbenchers, including Menzies Campbell, Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, draft written parliamentary questions in the perennial, frustrating and mostly unsuccessful struggle to extract information from ministers, particularly about the plans to invade Iraq and the detention, abduction and rendering of terror suspects to ‘black prisons’ where they risked being tortured. The Blair government went to extraordinary lengths to try and convince those few editors who opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq (and the even fewer who pursued the government’s collusion in torture). Blair invited a group of senior Guardian journalists to lunch in Downing Street. It was just two months

Heroes and Hacks

19

after the invasion. There was no hint of the violence that was to come. Alastair Campbell, Blair’s chief spin-doctor, must have thought it was a good time for his boss to confront the sceptics, to get one back on those of us who opposed the invasion, confident that all would be well in Iraq. Later that day in Belfast, Blair was going to meet George Bush who had just declared the invasion a ‘mission accomplished’. The president’s visit to Northern Ireland was a small token of thanks to Blair for his enthusiastic support. As we waited for the prime minister to come to the table, Campbell asked those who supported the invasion to put their hands up. Just two did so; both were political reporters, long-time members of the Westminster lobby. I sat immediately opposite Blair at the narrow lunch table, detecting a sense he was worried that all might not turn out to be quite as well as it seemed. ‘I believe we did the right thing’, Blair insisted more than once. It was as though he needed to convince himself as he looked out of the Downing Street window, as if he was clinging to the righteousness of his cause, appealing to some distant figure who would judge him in the end. There were echoes of this, perhaps, when he told the Labour Party conference the following year referring to the invasion of Iraq: ‘I know this issue has divided the country. I’m like any other human being – fallible. Instinct is not science. I only know what I believe.’ It was not long after the Downing Street lunch and its veneer of smug complacency that Blair and Campbell received a brutal shock. David Kelly, Whitehall’s leading expert on Saddam Hussein’s weapons programme, committed suicide.1 He had been the source of a devastating critique of the government’s Iraqi weapons dossier – the report that claimed Saddam had a deadly stockpile of biological and chemical weapons and was intent on Iraq becoming a nuclear power. He was the source of Andrew Gilligan, a reporter on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme who claimed that the dossier had been ‘sexed up’ at the behest of Downing Street. Campbell was incensed, all the more so as the BBC denied that Gilligan had exaggerated Downing Street’s role, escalating the long-running running dispute between Campbell and the BBC over the corporation’s even-handed – but to Campbell, biased – reporting of the invasion of Iraq. Kelly’s suicide provoked even more panic in Downing Street, not least because of the way he had been outed.

20

The State of Secrecy

It was engineered by a pre-planned MoD exercise consisting of hints to journalists encouraging them to identify Kelly – one suggestion was that Gilligan’s source had been one of the very few Britons in a team of UN weapons inspectors – without actually naming him. Such helpful guidance given by the MoD press office, which had got ministerial cover for the exercise, was unprecedented in my experience. The press office was always there to do their ministers’ bidding, but at the same time had always protected an individual official from exposure. As one of those who named Kelly, I was asked to give evidence to the public inquiry chaired by Lord Hutton, a former chief justice of Northern Ireland, set up in an attempt to defuse what was in danger of escalating into a full-blown crisis for the government. Asked by Jeremy Gompertz QC, the Kelly family’s counsel, about the underhand tactics employed by officials in the MoD’s press office, I replied, truthfully, that they had certainly ‘whetted my appetite.’ Kelly’s death and the subsequent Hutton inquiry led to the resignation of the BBC’s charismatic director general, Greg Dyke, and its chairman, Gavyn Davies. They also led to an unusual alliance. Right and the left in the media joined forces in defence of the BBC against a common enemy, namely 10 Downing Street and Alastair Campbell in particular. All of us who followed the Hutton inquiry, without exception, were puzzled, though having heard the former judge’s interventions not entirely surprised, by the conclusions of his 740-page report. Hutton sharply criticized the BBC, absolving the government, and the MoD in particular, from any serious blame. In a passage whose crafting would have made any Whitehall mandarin extremely proud, Hutton referred to the charge that the government had ‘sexed up’ the dossier on Iraq’s WMD programme. He concluded: The term ‘sexed up’ is a slang expression, the meaning of which lacks clarity in the context of the discussion of the dossier. It is capable of two different meanings. It could mean that the dossier was embellished with items of intelligence known or believed to be false or unreliable to make the case against Saddam Hussein stronger, or it could mean that whilst the intelligence contained in the dossier was believed to be reliable, the dossier was drafted in such a way as to make the case against Saddam Hussein as strong as the intelligence contained in it permitted.

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Hutton continued: If the term is used in this latter sense, then because of the drafting suggestions made by 10 Downing Street for the purpose of making a strong case against Saddam Hussein, it could be said that the Government ‘sexed-up’ the dossier. However, in the context of the broadcasts in which the ‘sexing-up’ allegation was reported and having regard to the other allegations reported in those broadcasts, I consider that the allegation was unfounded as it would have been understood by those who heard the broadcasts to mean that the dossier had been embellished with intelligence known or believed to be false or unreliable, which was not the case. There was one faint hint of criticism. After absolving Blair’s Downing Street of improper interference in drawing up the dossier, Hutton added: However I consider that the possibility cannot be completely ruled out that the desire of the Prime Minister to have a dossier which, whilst consistent with the available intelligence, was as strong as possible in relation to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s WMD, may have subconsciously [my emphasis] influenced Mr Scarlett and the other members of the JIC to make the wording of the dossier somewhat stronger than it would have been if it had been contained in a normal JIC assessment.2 The episode was a wonderful example of traditional British establishment circumlocution, how it has managed to defuse, fend off, potentially very damaging criticism. Gilligan had been hired by Rod Liddle, editor of BBC Radio 4’s flagship Today programme, to report on defence matters as an alternative to the BBC’s accredited defence correspondent, Mark Laity, who was regarded by some as being too close to the MoD. Laity went on to become special adviser to the former Labour defence secretary, George Robertson, who had been appointed NATO secretary general. Laity reacted angrily to comments made to the Hutton inquiry by Richard Sambrook, Director of BBC News. He wrote to Sambrook saying he was ‘seeking clarification of remarks you made to the Hutton Inquiry’.

The State of Secrecy

22

He continued: I was shocked to read in the media that you said Andrew Gilligan had been employed, ‘because for many years the BBC Defence Correspondent had simply reflected the Ministry of Defence’s point of view ... we needed a correspondent who would ask questions and hold to account as well’. The fact I was not named is irrelevant because, given I was well-known as Defence Correspondent for 11 years, it will be assumed to refer to me. As such it is a damaging and totally inaccurate remark, all the more distressing because when I was Defence Correspondent no such imputation was ever made by anyone in BBC News or its management – indeed quite the contrary … . However I do know that Rod Liddle, the former Editor of Today, was the person who recruited Mr Gilligan, with what he has publicly acknowledged was a particular agenda in mind. … I therefore seek a clarification of exactly what you did mean. Sambrook replied: ‘Thank you for your letter. I am sorry if you believe my remarks at the Hutton Inquiry might be interpreted as criticism of you. As you know I was reflecting what I understood to be part of the rationale for Andrew Gilligan being recruited by the Today Programme.’ On the defensive, in an increasingly febrile atmosphere, Sambrook added: ‘I am happy to place on record that you were highly regarded as the BBC’s Defence Correspondent both for your expert knowledge and your analytical skills. There was never any suggestion that you did not meet the high standards of impartiality and editorial rigour that the BBC expects.’ Sambrook had already become a Campbell target. One day Campbell asked Roy Greenslade, the Guardian’s veteran media commentator, to come and see him. Greenslade, a long-time friend of Campbell, thought it would be better if he were accompanied by a colleague. He invited me to come along. The three of us met at Campbell’s office at the back of 10 Downing Street. With a glint in his eye, Campbell pointed to a pile of papers, over two feet high. They consisted of increasingly heated exchanges with Sambrook. I was astonished how both sides had allowed the dispute to escalate so much. As Campbell went through the correspondence with growing enthusiasm, I became increasingly bemused, and said very little.

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The episode had its origins in the traditional Whitehall and Downing Street assumption that the media, especially the BBC, must unquestioningly accept the word of the intelligence agencies, in this case MI6. All of them – MI5, MI6 and GCHQ – choose carefully what media outlet to place a particular story, sometimes pushing out the same story but with a different spin, depending on the politics and general outlook of the target publication, its editor and its audience. In a notorious example, GCHQ shamelessly invited the Times inside ‘the doughnut’, its spectacular Cheltenham headquarters, just as the government was preparing to give it new statutory powers in the wake of the revelations of Edward Snowden, the US whistle-blower. It was a brazen attempt to paint GCHQ in a favourable light. Though more and more information about Britain’s intelligence agencies appeared on a growing number of sites on the internet, as well as through disclosures in the United States, a network of individual contacts remained important when reporting their activities. Yet you have to be on your guard. Official secrecy may be the enemy, but fighting it requires trust, a different kind of personal secrecy between journalists and their contacts, and their editor. My first editor at the Guardian was Alastair Hetherington, a Scot and an instinctively cautious man, a characteristic that frustrated many of his journalists, most notably on one occasion, the Guardian’s brilliant foreign correspondent, Clare Hollingworth. Many of her scoops involved spies and double agents. So accurate was her reporting that MI5 once suspected her of being a spy. One of her earlier editors asked Clare if she was working for MI5. The Poles accused her of being an agent for MI6. Her remarkable career began in 1939 in Poland. She had borrowed the British consul-general’s car to drive into Germany across the border where she received a salute from impressionable German soldiers. The car was flying the diplomat’s official flag which they clearly did not recognize. On the way back to Poland, she noticed a large hessian screen set up to block the view over a valley. At that moment, a strong gust of wind blew the screen from its scaffolding support, revealing a line of German tanks preparing to invade Poland. She raced back to Warsaw. At first, the consul-general did not believe her story. He was convinced only after she showed him some local produce she had bought in Germany. As she telephoned her sensational report to the Daily

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Telegraph, he sent a parallel, officially ‘secret’, message to the FO in London. The journalist’s story and the diplomat’s cable signalled the outbreak of the Second World War. Her great scoop under Hetherington’s reign concerned the Cambridge spy, Kim Philby. Hollingworth and Philby were journalist colleagues in Beirut – she writing for the Guardian, he for the Observer and Economist magazine – when he suddenly disappeared. After exhaustive detective work, including seeking out Beirut dockers, she was certain Philby had boarded a Soviet ship which had been moored on the quayside. She immediately filed what would have been a spectacular exclusive story for the Guardian. Hetherington spiked it on the grounds, he said, that if it turned out to be untrue, the newspaper could face ‘colossal’ libel damages. It was not until late April 1963, three months after she filed the story, when she was in the London office and Hetherington was away, that she finally persuaded a deputy editor to run it. It was buried on page seven, under the headline: ‘Riddle of Philby’s disappearance – Journalist missing 3 months’. The story caused a sensation, not least in Fleet Street. ‘For the first time in history’, the veteran journalist William ‘Trilby’ Ewer told her, ‘the Daily Express is leading with what the Guardian said yesterday.’ Soon afterwards, the government reluctantly admitted that it believed Philby had indeed fled to Russia. ‘Altogether’, wrote Hetherington in his memoir, Guardian Years, ‘security matters were like dealing with a slippery octopus. There was little satisfaction in them’. He added that ‘few were worth the space they occupied in the paper – though readers often seemed intrigued by them’. He agreed they could not be neglected, but he seemed bored by them. It was an easy way out, hardly appropriate for an editor of the Guardian. Hetherington retired soon after I joined the paper. For the rest of my time there, the Guardian had just two editors, Peter Preston, PP as he was widely known, and Alan Rusbridger. Both were editors for twenty years. PP was withdrawn and enigmatic, a stoic, partly the result of being struck down by polio as a boy. One blight on his editorship was the Official Secrets Act prosecution and conviction in 1984 of Sarah Tisdall, an FO clerk jailed for six months for sending to the Guardian photocopies of two documents in which

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Michael Heseltine, the defence secretary, described how he planned to keep secret the arrival in British bases of US cruise missiles. One evening, close to the newspaper’s first edition deadline, Tisdall delivered anonymously to the Guardian a large brown envelope containing the copied documents. The story of how Heseltine was planning to avoid publicity over the hugely controversial plan to base the missiles at two US bases – one of them Greenham Common, for long the scene of clashes between women protesters and the police – was splashed across the Guardian’s front page. The story created even more waves than it might otherwise have done as it appeared on the day of a large CND protest march in central London. Not surprisingly, the MoD, via the Treasury Solicitor, demanded that the Guardian immediately hand over the copied documents. After weeks of agonizing, late one Friday morning in the Guardian building on London’s Farringdon Road, PP asked the small number of staff who were at their desks at that time to come into his room. He spelt out the situation and the options open to the newspaper. It was clear he had already made a decision, however reluctantly. The Guardian’s lawyers, Lovell, White & King, had strongly advised that once the MoD had demanded the return of the documents, withholding or destroying them would have been unlawful. In the fraught meeting where much went unsaid, PP referred to a previous comment by Peter Jenkins, the respected columnist, that the Guardian’s editorial line had always been that the newspaper should always obey the law, however oppressive. I regret I did not challenge PP’s argument. PP might have been jailed for defying a court order to hand back the documents. More likely, the Guardian would have been quite heavily fined. Either way, PP would have been trumpeted as a principled, even heroic, defender of the press. I believe the government would have backed off and would not have been able to withstand public outcry at either course of action, especially since the documents described a plot by Heseltine to ensure that the US missiles would arrive in Britain shielded in secrecy. Tisdall was soon identified as the leaker by incriminating marks that revealed what FO photocopier the leaker had used and when. She confessed and was charged under the Official Secrets Act. Desperate to prevent the young whistle-blower from going to jail, and avoid the Guardian’s further humiliation,

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the paper hired Anthony Rawlinson, a former Tory attorney general, to defend her. The gambit failed. The Guardian’s editors learned a lesson the hard way: Get rid of leaked official documents immediately after you have copied the contents. If asked, they could then say, truthfully, that they have not got them. Certainly do not flaunt them or triumphantly tell the readers that they are still in your possession, as the Guardian had done. It was a bad time for the Guardian, all the more so because of the calm and dignified way Tisdall took her punishment. The Tisdall affair encouraged Heseltine to recommend Clive Ponting’s prosecution the following year. He would have been heavily criticized, certainly by Tory MPs, if so soon after the jailing of a junior MoD official, a much more senior official had got away with anything less. PP had an excellent eye and ear for a good story, and he was mischievous. He began the pursuit of the Tory MP Neil Hamilton, who sued the Guardian for libel over its reporting of his involvement in cash-for-questions and sleaze, and of Jonathan Aitken. The swashbuckling Tory MP was jailed for perjury after he sued the newspaper for libel over reports, which he had emphatically denied, that aides to the Saudi royal family had paid his Paris hotel bill at a time he was defence procurement minister with the responsibility for promoting British arms exports. With the encouragement of Mohamed Al-Fayed, owner of the Paris Ritz, PP sent what he later described as a ‘cod fax’ – on doctored House of Commons notepaper, purporting to come from Aitken’s private office – to obtain a copy of the Ritz bill the newspaper needed in its pursuit of Aitken. The fax served its purpose, though Preston later apologized to the Commons Privileges Committee saying that sending it had been a ‘stupid and discourteous thing to have done’. I had got to know Aitken when he was a backbencher. With his friend, fellow Tory MP Richard Shepherd, Aitken had campaigned for more open government after being prosecuted, unsuccessfully, for breaching the Official Secrets Act. He had published a document showing that, contrary to its claims in public, Harold Wilson’s Labour government was arming the federal Nigerian government in its civil a war against the breakaway province of Biafra. As what he described as ‘a fellow watcher of the intelligence community’, Aitken, when

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a backbench MP, encouraged my journalistic endeavours. He changed his tune as soon as he joined John Major’s government. He wrote to me saying he was ‘likely to be the most clam-like of Ministers because my job covers responsibility for nuclear issues and defence procurement a field in which commercial confidentiality is de rigueur’. Years later Aitken replied to a message I sent him after he was jailed. ‘Prison may be bad for the reputation’, he replied, ‘but it is good for the soul. I have no feelings of resentment towards anyone at the Guardian. It is forgive and forget time on my side of yesterday’s barricades.’ PP was strangely unworldly. He quietly revelled in the Hamilton and Aitken cases and in the Spycatcher trial. I benefitted from his delight in challenging Britain’s spy agencies. Yet he never seemed to have the confidence to engage directly with those in power, whether ministers, Whitehall mandarins, or the security and intelligence agencies. He was wary of them and seemed worried that he might be tainted or unwittingly influenced if he came into close contact with them. It was a pity, and it meant that the Guardian on occasion did miss a significant story. By 1990, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, senior MI5 officers had come to the conclusion it was time the agency came out of the closet – up to a point. The then director general, Sir Patrick Walker, invited editors for a series of background, off-the-record briefings. PP went along, but kept his journalists, including me, his specialist reporter covering MI5, in the dark. Other editors brought along a reporter who wrote articles about MI5 at last getting out of the cold – without, of course, mentioning their meetings with Walker. Paul Johnson, the Guardian’s news editor, was about to scold me asking why we did not have the story. I told him that PP had just sheepishly told me, after the event, about his meeting with Walker. PP’s transition to his successor, Alan Rusbridger, were happier times, beginning with the successful pursuit of Hamilton and Aitken and their final disgrace. Despite, or perhaps because of, his faintly anti-monarchist views – the Guardian came out in favour of a Republic, though not entirely convincingly – Princess Diana visited the newspaper’s officers in Farringdon Road. As Rusbridger escorted her through the newsroom, she remarked on the untidy state of my desk with its unsteady piles of papers and books.

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‘It is a mark of a creative mind’, I said, wondering how she would respond. Quick as a flash, fluttering her eyes encased in indigo-blue contact lenses, she replied: ‘I thought reporters were not supposed to be creative’. Rusbridger explained that I wrote about the security and intelligence agencies. ‘I could tell you a lot about them’, she said before turning briskly on her way. Unlike PP, who I never bonded with, my relationship with Rusbridger was close, at least to begin with. I encouraged him when he first joined the Guardian. He was a supremely gifted writer and had original, ambitious, thoughts about the newspaper’s future. He quickly understood both the threats and opportunities of new technology and the internet, well before members of the Guardian Media Group’s board of directors and the Scott Trust which owned the paper. They should have been much more alert. Mild on the outside, and soft-spoken, Rusbridger had a steely centre. This was manifest during the denouement of the Aitken case and most clearly during the Edward Snowden affair. I cannot think of any other editor who would have so carefully planned his tactics, standing firm in the face of huge pressure from the security and intelligence establishment and the then cabinet secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood. He withstood blandishments and heavy threats, including the prospect of a criminal prosecution. Once he decided to go ahead and publish Snowden’s material about how GCHQ and its US partner, the National Security Agency (NSA), were secretly intercepting vast amounts of personal communication, and had done so for years, Rusbridger took evasive action to thwart any attempt by the government to obtain a court injunction banning publication of the Snowden material. He sent a copy of Snowden’s treasure trove to US repositories, including the New York Times. He made it clear to the government’s security chiefs that preventing the Guardian from publishing the material would not stop it from being released in the United States, with the rest of the world then free to follow suit. The US government, he correctly assumed, would not risk provoking a constitutional and political storm by trying to suppress Snowden’s material. After tense and nerve-wracking exchanges with Whitehall, Rusbridger suggested that the Guardian would destroy its computer hard drives containing the Snowden material. Furthermore, he invited GCHQ technicians to witness the destruction. This could save face all round. I wondered what the Whitehall

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establishment privately thought when Rusbridger, regarded as a traitor by some members of the security and intelligence establishment as well as Tory MPs, was later appointed Principal of Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford University. Rusbridger had quietly persuaded the Scott Trust and Guardian board to go along with ambitious – and often expensive – projects at a time mainstream newspapers faced new and unforeseen threats from Facebook, Google and online publishers that began to take a growing share of the advertising market, compounding the threat of a growing drift away from newspapers as more and more readers, especially the young, remained loyal to the Guardian’s journalism via its free website. The Guardian’s board and trustees did not object to Alan’s determination not to set up paywalls following the practise of most other media groups. The very same people who agreed to them, and praised Rusbridger’s initiatives that had earned the Guardian many plaudits and awards, including the famed Pulitzer Prize (for the reporting of Snowden’s revelations) criticized him for being profligate, mainly though anonymous comments as soon as he stepped down from the editorship. It was not a good way to treat a hugely successful editor who had achieved so much for the Guardian and its reputation worldwide. The plethora of open sources, coupled with social media, has increased exponentially the quantity of information available to journalists and the public. But we are faced with increased pressures in the other direction. Individuals and private corporations will use new data protection laws to make unjustified privacy claims to stop legitimate investigations. The ‘right to be forgotten’ – to demand the erasure of information from websites – is enshrined in the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which has been adopted by Britain. I will return to how new laws, introduced under the guise of combatting terrorism and organized crime and controlling immigration, have given the security and intelligence agencies more and more powers to keep track of more and more individuals with the help of what they call ‘bulk collection’, that is, the mass hoarding of personal data shared between other government departments, including those responsible for health, taxes and welfare benefits. The use of algorithms by data-hoarding government agencies and private

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companies pose a fast-growing threat to personal privacy and civil liberties that citizens have been slow to recognize. Meanwhile, Britain continued to produce the most polarized newspapers in the democratic world, with the journalism of ‘redtops’, the traditional tabloids, hardly conducive to calm and rational debate. Brexit demonstrated that the influence of the media, notably the Daily Mail and the Murdoch titles, was as great as ever, perhaps unprecedentedly so. ‘Enemies of the People’ screamed the Daily Mail’s front-page splash headline when the high court ruled that it was for Parliament, not the prime minister using prerogative powers originally established for monarchs, to trigger legislation leading to Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, a decision of huge constitutional significance. ‘Dirty rats’, cried the Sun attacking EU leaders after they argued with Theresa May at a summit in Salzburg in September 2018. Their enemies were not only British judges, Brussels Eurocrats and foreign governments. They were also the mandarins of Whitehall, the personification of the deep state, even though it was precisely those mandarins who had been in charge of the Brexit negotiations, taking decisions over how laws repatriated from the EU and thousands of rules and regulations would affect us all in the future. ‘Take back control’ may have been the Brexiteers’ cry, but control from and to whom? Something else has not changed despite the revolution in journalism triggered by the development of digital technology and smarter, quicker and global communications. British governments will continue to protect themselves by a wall of official secrecy, blind to just how counter-productive that is in protecting genuine national security. Governments will also continue to use the fear of leaks as an excuse for secrecy, just as they will use leaks as a weapon. But the greater the secrecy, the greater the number of unauthorized leaks – that is, leaks designed to embarrass the government or sabotage its policies. Blair said fear of leaks was the reason why he did not tell his cabinet about his plans to invade Iraq in secret assurances to George Bush. All governments, as any casual search through documents at the National Archives will show you, have been obsessed by leaks to the media. Breaching the Whitehall blockade has been an enjoyable challenge, with an added piquancy when you are leaked

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documents on leaks. Bernard Ingham was an entertaining opponent. I was leaked a note, dated 21 July 1980 and marked confidential, in which Ingham referred to a ‘leak inquiry report’. Its conclusion was there was ‘no evidence at all of any kind of subversive plot’. Ingham disagreed. ‘There is the sustained leakage of MIO (Meetings of Information Officers) discussions, and in one proven case a paper, to the Guardian, mostly appearing under the name of Richard Norton-Taylor.’ The time and energy ministers and officials spent on leak inquiries, and the panic they cause, was illustrated by an episode which gave me a particular frisson after I read an official document in the National Archives at Kew. On 22 June 1974, the Guardian published a short front-page story about the government’s secret economic forecasts, including a 14.5 per cent increase in consumer prices. As my source rattled out the data in a Yugoslav restaurant near the European Commission building in Brussels, I tried to appear nonchalant, desperately trying to prevent the rather rough red wine from blotting out the figures in my mind before I had the chance to write them down in a notebook. I remained unaware of the commotion the story had triggered until I saw the file, thirty years after the event. After the story appeared, Harold Wilson, the prime minister, ordered Lord Bridges, his private secretary, to find out how it was leaked. ‘We have hitherto been able to rely on an impeccable record of security,’ Steve Robson, a top Treasury official, told Bridges four days later. Wilson commented in a handwritten note: ‘Of course it came from the commission.’ The following day, David Hancock, the Treasury’s man in Brussels, wrote a two-page letter to Alan Budd (a rising star at the Treasury back in London), describing the leak as ‘most serious’. ‘Nothing like it had ever happened’ he insisted nervously. Hancock explained: ‘Because British governments were … very restrictive about the amount of information on economic forecasts released to the press, the entire British journalistic profession regarded it as a matter of pride to obtain as much information … as they could.’ He went on: ‘Norton-Taylor’s report … would undoubtedly be regarded as a feather in his cap.’ Hancock had privately admitted what Whitehall never learned – the more secretive it was, the greater the incitement to earn more feathers.

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Hancock indulged in detailed textual analysis of my article. ‘I think’, he told Budd, ‘there may be significance in the phrase “according to the EEC”. This suggests to me a national delegation, other than the UK delegation, and not the commission.’ Little did he know. The EEC, the common acronym for the European Economic Community, was a convenient term for journalists to disguise contacts within the European institutions or diplomats from member states accredited to them. On 5 July 1974, Michael Alexander, permanent secretary at the FO, told Bridges that Sir Michael Palliser, our ambassador to the EEC, would investigate the matter of the leak. Four days later, Palliser wrote a long letter to the FO. He explained that the Treasury had instructed him to leave the Commission ‘in no doubt of the embarrassment which such leaks cause to HMG (Her Majesty’s Government)’. On this occasion, said Palliser, the source was obviously present at the meeting of national delegates because the article pointed out that the forecast rise in consumer prices was ‘on the optimistic side’. That statement was made ‘orally’ at the meeting, not on paper. Flatteringly, he continued: ‘NortonTaylor is a particularly well-connected journalist and I should not exclude the possibility that he obtained his information from one of the national delegates present at the meeting.’ ‘Most other countries do not regard economic forecasts as being as sensitive as we do’, Palliser concluded the leak was the result of ‘careless talk’ rather than malice. In a handwritten note on the last document in the twelve-page file, Bridges told Wilson: ‘The investigation … has not led to any conclusive result.’ Wilson commented: ‘I guess I know what happened.’ I don’t think he did. But ministers have been the biggest leakers of all. The former Labour prime minister, Jim Callaghan, is famously said to have told his officials: ‘You leak, I brief.’ With his habitual frankness, with this crisp phrase, he summed up the hypocrisy of successive governments. The veteran defence and security journalist, Chapman Pincher, was for decades Whitehall’s main receptacle for leaks, mainly by the MoD and by elements in the security services, as he proudly recites in his autobiography, Dangerous to Know,3 in which he calls one chapter ‘Momentous Lunches’. He once wrote a front-page article claiming that British H-bomb tests in the

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Pacific were being postponed because of bad weather. It was untrue – the story was designed to deceive Japanese protesters. Pincher was shamelessly used by ministers and officials, and he enjoyed it. He knew how ministers and official used and manipulated official secrecy for their own ends. Giving evidence in 1971 to the Franks committee on secrecy – one of many failed attempts to reform the Official Secrets Act – Pincher remarked: ‘Politically embarrassing is a higher security classification than top secret.’ WikiLeaks has demonstrated how thousands of official documents can be released on the internet at one stroke. It has also showed how, with the direct or indirect cooperation of a hostile government, they can interfere in democratic elections. While all governments have used leaks to further their cause and embarrass their enemies, Russia has made it clear that leaks will be used as a weapon. As tensions between the West and Russia grew over the conflict in Ukraine in early 2014, and the United States and the EU were discussing the shape of a new government in Ukraine, an aide to the Russian deputy prime minister tweeted part of an intercepted conversation, soon posted on YouTube, between Victoria Nuland, a US assistant secretary of state, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador in Ukraine. Nuland can be heard saying ‘Fuck the EU’4– an aside Moscow hoped when leaked would cause tensions between the Americans and the Europeans. Moscow was right. The US State Department called the leak ‘a new low in Russian tradecraft’. It was a new low in the dark art of leaking.

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2 Poachers and gamekeepers

London, an evening in the mid-1990s. The MI6 officer said he would be downstairs at The Coal Hole pub near the Savoy Hotel in central London. When I arrived, the officer glanced casually around the room, then carefully took out a document from a brown envelope. It was my first face-to-face contact in London with an MI6 officer tasked specifically with communicating, ever so gingerly, with journalists. The document turned out to be a thirty-nine-page summary of the history of ‘Secret Operations’ from shortly before the 1789 French Revolution to 1909, the year MI6 was established. That was more than eighty years before our meeting in the Coal Hole. For our next rendezvous, he went upmarket. He asked me to join him for a drink at the American Bar at the Savoy. That may be how MI6 officers arranged their first contacts with a prospective foreign agent, I thought, though here it was about sizing up a British journalist whose job was to write articles about his agency for publication. At about the same time, the MI5 officer whose task was to liaise with journalists chose lunch at Rules for our first meeting. Established in 1798, it describes itself as London’s oldest restaurant ‘serving classic British food (especially game) in Edwardian surrounds’. It has appeared in novels by Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and John Le Carré, among others.

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I turned up on time; the MI5 officer was already ensconced, with his back to the wall, facing the room and looking rather nervous. His anxiety seemed to me rather curious at the time. He was an experienced spy, as were all the MI5 and MI6 officers I met who were responsible for liaising with the journalists. They had all run agents and undertaken dangerous missions, especially in Northern Ireland. The only explanation for his anxiety that I could think of was that dealing with journalists was an altogether novel experiment, and for this reason alone risky. It had been imposed on him by his bosses in an attempt to give the security and intelligence agencies a better press. He was unsure about how I would respond to MI5’s overture. I was on my guard. There had been a long tradition of journalists willingly cooperating with the security and intelligence, in particular with MI6 in the Cold War. David Astor, the editor of the Observer, appointed Philby the newspaper’s Beirut correspondent after a plea from MI6 to help after the spy was dismissed following Burgess and Maclean’s escape. In the 1930s, Philby joined the Times at the suggestion of his Russian handler, Arnold Deutsch, and his reporting on Franco’s national side during the Spanish Civil War was praised by his editors. Three distinguished Observer foreign correspondents had close links with British intelligence – Mark Frankland left MI6 to join the newspaper, Gavin Young was an MI6 officer for a time and Edward Crankshaw was a wartime MI6 officer. When after the war he was appointed the Observer’s man in Moscow, Crankshaw used the British embassy as a base. He regarded the British ambassador, Sir Patrick Reilly, ‘as a friend’ for whom he filed, among other pieces, a 2,000-word memorandum on Burgess (who had once done a stint as a sub-editor on the Times). Sefton Delmer, the Daily Express correspondent in Berlin before the war, spied for MI6. Ian Fleming worked for the Times before joining naval intelligence during the war. He returned to journalism becoming foreign managing editor at the Sunday Times. The Observer’s Robert McCrum later commented: ‘In a world of nods and winks across Whitehall and St James’s, the line between the fourth estate and the defence of the realm was indistinct. An extraordinary amount of British journalism was still conducted in London’s clubland’.

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I have mentioned how I used to meet former MI6 officers, notably the ‘Arabist’ gang, at the Travellers Club. Once or twice, an MI6 officer asked me to lunch at the Travellers or the neighbouring Reform Club in Pall Mall. But a new generation of serving MI5 and MI6 officers avoided clubland and cultivated contacts in more discreet surroundings. My colleague, the Guardian and Observer journalist, Ed Vulliamy, recalled how he was summoned to hear ‘information’ gathered by British spooks about the war in Bosnia. MI6 was peddling an agenda: an apparent attempt, on behalf of the FO, to prevent NATO or the UN from intervening to stop Serbia’s ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Muslims. Ed wrote: ‘British “UN officials” or “diplomatic sources” – usually coy – suddenly offered eager briefings to obfuscate that which was simple: the carnage that was taking place at the time in Sarajevo’s marketplace and bread queue. Their "information" was that the Muslim-led government was massacring its own people in Sarajevo to win sympathy and ultimately help from outside. Sarajevo’s defenders were dumb with disbelief; if there was any evidence for this satanic notion, the spooks never produced it.’1 The MI6 scheme worked beautifully, Ed reported. ‘The allegation – off the record, on the QT, hush-hush, old boy – became a clamour, started by the London Independent, and appearing in British, then American, then German and other papers.’ That year, 1998, I discovered that articles written by an alleged MI6 officer under a false name were published in The Spectator magazine while Dominic Lawson was editor. The articles, which included a bitter attack on British journalists, were written under a Sarajevo dateline under the name of Kenneth Roberts, during the civil war in Bosnia. The Spectator said the author’s name ‘has been changed at his request’.2 Roberts was described in the magazine as having ‘been working for the UN in Bosnia for over a year’. Roberts was later identified in the media, including the British Journalism Review, as Keith Craig, an MI6 officer.3 When I pointed this out to Lawson, he told me: ‘I have no means of knowing if you are right and, if you are, it is news to me.’ There is no suggestion that Lawson knew either that Roberts was a pseudonym or that Roberts was an MI6 officer.

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An unpublished draft in the National Archives at Kew of an official history of the D Notice Committee, which runs a system of voluntary selfcensorship in cooperation with the media (see further), is redacted. However, one passage says that it was alleged in Parliament that Lawson was ‘on the SIS [MI6] payroll’, adding that Lawson ‘denied he himself had ever been an SIS agent.’ The articles appeared to be part of an attempt by MI6 to influence public opinion during the Bosnian crisis by suggesting that atrocities were being carried out by all sides – and not just Bosnian Serb troops. Two articles under the name of Kenneth Roberts were published in early 1994 – at the height of the civil war. In one article, under the headline ‘Salving Consciences in Hampstead’, Roberts argued that the UN ‘should pull out now’. A month later, in March 1994, Roberts wrote a second article under the heading, ‘Glamour Without Responsibility’. Referring to Kate Adie, one of the BBC’s most respected foreign correspondents, the author stated: ‘The power of the modern journalist, especially the television journalist, is nowhere more apparent than in Bosnia.’ Roberts added: ‘Emotion rather than political or practical interest drives the public opinion that steels Western governments to send troops. … Unlike those governments, the press has no proper accountability for the consequences of its actions.’ In an aside rich in irony, The Spectator noted: ‘Kenneth Roberts, who works with the UN forces in Bosnia, says that journalists there should be held accountable for their actions.’ Roberts referred to two particularly controversial incidents during the Bosnian war: the attack on a bread queue in Sarajevo in 1992 and the attack on a Sarajevo market in 1994. ‘For some time now’, he told Spectator readers, ‘there have been UN mutterings about the Muslims shelling their own people in bread queues or markets.’ Journalists were accused of failing to investigate claims by the Bosnia Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, later convicted of war crimes, that the sixty-six deaths at the market were in fact due to a Muslim attack. The suggestion was that the Muslims had fired on their own people to provoke NATO into taking tougher action against the Serbs. Officers from MI6 and intelligence agencies of other countries shared information with the UN. The Spectator articles were written at a time the

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British government, concerned about a Muslim backlash in Bosnia, believed Serbia was a force for stability in the region and when UN commanders were opposed to Western air strikes, arguing they would make it impossible to carry out humanitarian missions. Both the UN and the Tory government in Britain were desperate to counter reports in the British and US media of attacks on civilians by Bosnian Serbs. Atrocities, they insisted, were being carried out by all sides, by Muslims and Croats as well as Serbs. Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, was deeply concerned about the prospect of an independent Bosnia becoming ‘the first Muslim state in Europe’. In an article entitled ‘Tinker, tailor, soldier, journalist’, my Guardian colleague, David Leigh, described different sorts of manipulation, the most insidious of which was the way intelligence agencies planted stories on willing journalists who made no mention of their source in their reports. Leigh referred to a secret information operations section in the security and intelligence agencies called ‘I/Ops’ and an MI6-inspired article alleging that Colonel Gaddafi’s son was connected to a currency counterfeiting plan (this was at a time Gaddafi was considered an enemy of Britain).4 ‘I/Ops’ stood for Information/Operations, covert measures designed to influence journalists. MI6 had set up its own publications during the Cold War. The magazine, Flamingo, targeted African and West Indian communities, feeding them with anti-Communist propaganda.5 MI6 jointly sponsored with the CIA the literary magazine Encounter, which the poet Stephen Spender helped to found. Spender resigned when the magazine’s links to the CIA and MI6 was exposed in 1967. Attlee’s post-war Labour government established an Information Research Department (commonly known as the IRD) to spread anti-Communist propaganda during the Cold War. It fed material to journalists well aware of the origin as well as the jejune and to those who did not bother to ask. One file in the IRD archives, dated March 1966, showed how MI5 told the Cabinet Office it had been given ‘suitable material by our friends (a reference to MI6) from their student contacts’. The IRD, it added, ‘are ready to help place articles in newspapers which are widely read by students in particular – the Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, Daily Express, Observer and Sunday Times’.

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Archives released thirty years later, in 1996, revealed that George Orwell warned the IRD about writers whom he regarded as fellow travellers. The IRD became increasingly aggressive, bullying the BBC over its struggles to defend the World Service whose reputation depended precisely on its independence from government. The IRD was finally disbanded by David Owen when he was appointed foreign secretary in 1977. It was inimical, he said, to Britain’s ‘national interest’. Similar operations have been revived as part of the government’s attempt to counter the radicalization of British Muslims. GCHQ has also run an ‘information ops (influence or disruption)’ programme, intended to achieve ‘the 4D’s: Deny/Disrupt/Degrade/Deceive.’6 The Soviet Union of course mounted extensive propaganda campaigns, with varying degrees of sophistication, directed at the West as well as developing countries in Africa and throughout the world. At least one, and sometimes more, Russians journalists posted in major capital cities worked for the KGB, directly or indirectly. Mounting their own undeclared and secret campaigns of their own, they made it harder for Western democracies to claim they had clean hands. Some British journalists may have done the KGB’s bidding, wittingly or not. But British journalists and writers muddying the waters by going along with MI6 or MI5 disinformation schemes did not help. One particular infamous case continued for many years. Colin Wallace, an information officer based at the British army headquarters in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, blew the whistle on a dirty tricks campaign involving MI5 and the MoD, code-named Clockwork Orange. It involved the planting of hoax bombs, fake CIA identity cards, the smearing of Edward Heath and leading Labour and Liberal politicians, and establishing covert links with ‘loyalist’ paramilitaries. Among the notes Wallace drew up in 1974 was a list of politicians under the heading ‘vulnerabilities’, and three columns marked, ‘finance’, ‘moral’ and ‘political’. Against Harold Wilson’s name, there was a tick under each column: for Heath, a tick under ‘moral’ and political’; and under Ian Paisley, ‘finance’ and ‘moral’. Labour was the chief target of the smear campaign. A forged document from the ‘American Congress for Irish Freedom’ was purportedly sent to Merlyn Rees, then Northern Ireland Secretary, thanking him for his ‘generous donation on

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behalf of the British Labour Party for the Occupied Six Counties of Ireland’. A genuine leaflet advertising a demonstration to commemorate Bloody Sunday added the names of Rees, Tony Benn and David Owen. Intriguingly, shortly after he left his job, Wallace was approached by Airey Neave, one of Thatcher’s closest associates, later killed by a car bomb at the House of Commons, about a forged document entitled ‘Ulster – a State of Subversion’, purporting to be an analysis of Soviet influence in the Labour Party. It alleged that at least twenty Labour MPs were active Communists. Neave wrote to Wallace: ‘I read your material with great interest and wonder if it could be updated.’ Wallace blew the whistle after he was dismissed for leaking a restricted document to Robert Fisk, then the Times correspondent based in Belfast. He had apparently adopted a rather too cavalier approach to his job. An embarrassed MoD immediately turned on Wallace, accusing him of being a ‘Walter Mitty’ figure. He was subsequently framed, charged and convicted of manslaughter, a conviction that was later quashed. It was in this murky world in Northern Ireland, where the security and intelligence agencies, the police and the army engaged in bitter and dangerous rivalry, that Maurice Oldfield, the former head of MI6 appointed by Thatcher in 1979 to coordinate security in Northern Ireland in the wake of the fatal attack that year on Lord Mountbatten and other bloody IRA attacks, was smeared by elements of the security services as a homosexual involved in rough trade. A story planted in the media by elements of the security services claimed Oldfield had spent an afternoon in a pub on the outskirts of Belfast, followed a man into the toilets and propositioned him for sex. The story seemed implausible, if only because Oldfield was always accompanied by police special branch bodyguards. A victim of out-of-control agencies he had tried to rein in, he was summoned back to London and hung out to dry. He died of cancer soon afterwards. I had to be on my guard as MI5 and MI6, and later GCHQ, decided to develop contacts with the editors and the security and defence correspondents of national newspapers and broadcasters. The Guardian was a special potential catch for them, given its left-of-centre editorial line and a readership they would be delighted to catch. I have mentioned that the intelligence agencies had no official spokesperson. It was something I welcomed for the selfish

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reason that it meant I could not share my ‘point of contact’ in MI5 and the other agencies with my Guardian colleagues. I was in a ‘privileged position’ – an official spokesperson available to all-comers would be more restricted in what s/he could say than a senior officer whose role was to contact chosen journalists and editors more discreetly. It was a relationship based on off-the-record, and therefore deniable, discussions. It was based on trust, a principle not easily associated with journalism. But I believed we had the upper hand. If MI5, MI6 or GCHQ deceived us, we would know we could not trust them. That was not in their interest. Equally, if they refused to guide us at all about the nature of a particular terror plot or the implications of a particular incident, then we could merely speculate, or get more information elsewhere, often and most easily from US sources. This view was not shared by all British journalists. On a number of occasions, I was invited with a small group of journalists to unattributable briefings at MI5’s headquarters in Thames House on Millbank, not far from the Houses of Parliament, and to MI6’s HQ, Vauxhall Cross, on the south bank of the Thames opposite Tate Britain. The security arrangements were elaborate even though we were known personally to our hosts. We were asked, ever so politely, to hand in our mobile phones, empty our pockets and pass through single-person enclosed cabins that identified suspicious items. The interior of Thames House was much lighter and much more modern than the grey exterior of the Edwardian block suggested. The interior of Vauxhall Cross is much duller – with the exception of the Chief ’s dining room overlooking the river – than its extravagant exterior suggests. Inside, the corridors and offices are surprisingly conventional. Doors that were open revealed bland, simple rooms with desks and desktop computers. But behind this surprisingly bland interior that belied the building’s eye-catching exterior lay a certain nervousness. I was told that after the 9/11 attacks on the United States and the Bond films with shots of attacks on Vauxhall Cross, some MI6 officers revealed an (unprofessional) anxiety – ducked, metaphorically – when helicopters flew over to their port in nearby Battersea. On one occasion, we were greeted by a senior MI6 officer accompanied by a specialist sitting at a round table to discuss Afghanistan. They were clearly frustrated at the failure by the NATO-led coalition to attract hearts and minds,

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despite the attempts to bribe war lords and tribal leaders. There was little sense of excitement or frisson about being in a room with people who spent millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money trying to persuade warlords and other potential influential or powerful individuals to fight or spy for Britain and keep on doing so. On another occasion, at the time of the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’, I went to Vauxhall Cross for a background briefing I had sought. I went through the same procedure as I had before – after being questioned why I wanted to enter the building. I was directed to a scanning machine and reception area where I was asked to hand over my mobile phone. I was asked to wait for an escort. It was all very polite. Then I was summoned to the main entrance. I was directed to a scanning booth whose door opened after I touched an individual plastic pass on to a pad. I was asked to wait until the officer chosen to see me arrived. He directed me to a small room just big enough for a round table and two chairs. This was the procedure, I thought, for one-to-one interviews, ensuring that the visitor was not entirely welcome, that he or she was being indulged by busy spymasters and intelligence analysts for a very limited time. It was very different to the occasions when I was one of a group of journalists and the invited guest of ‘C’ or an MI6 director anxious to get their message across. My one-to-one ‘Arab Spring’ briefing, with one of MI6’s Middle East experts – soon to be promoted to a senior security position in the Cabinet Office – was short but illuminating. I asked about the likely impact and consequences of the popular protests in Middle East capitals. The clear message was that given the strength of authoritarian governments in the region and their security apparatus – one was compared by Western intelligence agencies to ‘titanium’ – it would all end in tears. It was a correct assumption. This time MI6 intelligence was correct. The Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, had been toppled, only to be replaced after a brief interregnum by the Muslim Brotherhood with the hard-line head of the armed forces, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. These were civilized discussions. One went away understanding the challenges MI6 officers faced, but did not have to altogether sympathize with them just because they were being pretty open. The important thing for us

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journalists was mutual trust – a relationship that led to more openness, less secrecy. Up to a point. A few days later, after one briefing, I contributed to an article for the Guardian and referred to the views of ‘Western intelligence sources’. An MI6 officer responsible for protecting the agency from leaks and at the same time liaising with journalists was furious. He angrily summoned me with a colleague to a meeting at the Crowne Plaza hotel, on the south bank of the Thames not far from Vauxhall Cross. We pointed out that the New York Times that very day had written a similar article to ours on the same subject, but with much more specific information all attributed to ‘Western intelligence sources’. The MI6 man, whose career did not progress, was suitably silenced. Before the confrontation at the Crowne Plaza hotel, I phoned a Guardian colleague who was in Jordan explaining how the MI6 officer had hit the roof over our story and had summoned us to a meeting. The following day, an MI6 officer called, warning me not to talk about sensitive matters or refer to MI6 on phone calls to the Middle East. Our conversation had clearly been intercepted. I had civilized briefings with MI5 officers, though these became rarer. MI5 was more on the defensive than MI6 because of the increasing number of terrorist attacks on British soil. MI6 operated abroad, further away from prying eyes and less immediately responsible for Britain’s security. There were a few, self-confident MI5 officers prepared to be open with journalists they grew to trust. One was Eliza (later Baroness) Manningham-Buller. She was a prime example of how an individual could influence my perception of MI5, albeit temporarily. Unfortunately for MI5, she was succeeded by Jonathan Evans, as reserved as Manningham-Buller was extrovert, and someone who as far as I was concerned undid much of the good work achieved by his predecessors, including both Stella Rimington and Stephen Lander. Across the river at Vauxhall Cross, Sir John Sawers wanted to open up MI6, but he soon fell victim to the revelations about his agency’s previous collusion in the abduction of terror suspects who were secretly detained, and in some cases tortured. I have mentioned that the view that the security and intelligence agencies needed us in the media was not shared by all of my colleagues. Too many

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journalists reporting on the activities of the agencies remain on the defensive, too ready to believe they have to rely on the goodwill of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, and the official spokespeople of the agencies’ sponsoring departments, the Home Office and the FO. Reporting on Britain’s armed forces is much more straightforward than covering the spooks.7 Britain’s soldiers, sailors and air force personnel routinely score a high rating in opinion polls. In most controversies, the default position of the media, and especially the tabloid press, is to empathize with the armed forces, in particular squaddies, the lower ranks. In disputes with other Whitehall departments, the Treasury in particular, the military – though not civil servants in the MoD – are overwhelmingly supported by the media. Compared to civil servants and ministers, the military in my experience are also relatively honest and straightforward. And the lower you go down the food chain, the more open and direct they tend to be. Members of the armed forces have been a refreshing counterforce to the dissembling and secretiveness of Whitehall. The military also delight in using and manipulating the media, passing self-serving stories to The Sun or The Telegraph in particular. The Sun is the squaddies’ favourite; The Telegraph is most popular in the officers’ messes. However, the military are often caught between wanting to blow their own trumpet and avoid embarrassing their political masters. The first war I covered after I left Brussels and joined the Guardian’s office in London was the 1982 Falklands conflict. The Argentinian invasion of the islands was a gift horse for the Royal Navy, coming at a time the defence secretary, John Nott, was pushing through heavy cuts in its budget. They included the withdrawal from the South Atlantic of HMS Endurance, a survey ship used for spying on what the Argentinians were up to. The plan to withdraw Endurance was interpreted in Buenos Aires as a signal that Britain was no longer seriously interested in the Falklands. As the British task force was on its way to evict the Argentinian forces from the islands, we soon became the victim of a classic, misleading, Whitehall briefing. The British counter-invasion would be nothing like the D-Day Normandy landings of 1944, briefed the top MoD official, Sir Frank Cooper. Defence correspondents faithfully recorded his comments which turned out to be thoroughly misleading. British forces established a beachhead at San Carlos in an operation echoing the Normandy landings.

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Journalists covering the Falkands conflict were almost entirely dependent on MoD censors. They were thousands of miles away, cut off from independent means of communications. It was before the age of mobile phones and the internet. The MoD had asked editors of all main newspapers and broadcasters to name a correspondent who would be embedded with the British forces (the BBC had two: one for radio, the other for television). Once in the Falklands, they would send their copy via official minders to the MoD in London where the reports would be vetted. I was based in London, arguing with the censors over the unjustified suppression of information. There were disputes among journalists covering the conflict. While Max Hastings of the London Evening Standard famously entered Port Stanley ahead of British troops, the Guardian’s Gareth Parry was marooned on an ammunition ship extremely vulnerable to Argentine air strikes. This just might have been the result of bad luck rather than a deliberate ploy by the MoD. Hugh McManners, a Special Forces officer in the Falklands war, later accused the MoD of treating the media as an enemy to be thwarted.8 Embarrassing incidents, including friendly fire and the circumstances surrounding a fatal helicopter crash, were kept under wraps. McManners described how he asked David Ramsbotham (the officer in charge of vetting copy in London during the Falklands conflict, later promoted to the rank of General) if he could write a book despite the official ban. ‘If only you would’, replied Ramsbotham. ‘I’d love to see something by a soldier to counter all these books being rushed out by the journalists. … Give it to me and I will get it cleared.’ The lengths to which ministers took to cover up the movements of the Argentine cruiser, the General Belgrano, sunk by the submarine HMS Conqueror with the loss of 323 lives prompted MoD official Clive Ponting to leak the cruiser’s movements to the Labour MP, Tam Dalyell, leading to a celebrated official secrets case. The Belgrano was sailing away from the Falklands the moment it was attacked by the Conqueror’s torpedoes, though it was still regarded as a potential threat. The Sun famously celebrated the sinking with the headline, ‘GOTCHA’, and dismissed peace proposals with such headlines as ‘STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA’. Some journalists on the front line adopted ways to get round the censors. The BBC’s Brian Hanrahan reported: ‘I’m not allowed to say how many planes

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joined the raid, but I counted them all out, and I counted them all back.’ Presumably the Argentinians would have been the first to tell the British public if they had shot down a British Harrier. If their claims were false, the MoD would have said so. Perhaps the MoD did not think anyone would believe it. While the military were controlling the media on the islands, the MoD tried to avoid accusations that it was exaggerating successes or minimizing defeats through the deadpan utterances of its official spokesman. Ian Macdonald was brought in at the last minute after the ministry’s chief press officer at the time fell ill. (This was the very same Macdonald who, in his role responsible for promoting British arms exports, was later to tell the Scott inquiry: ‘Truth is a very difficult concept’.) The attitude of MoD officials was eloquently reflected in Sir Lawrence Freedman’s official history of the Falklands conflict. ‘The crassest example of censorship cited’, he wrote, ‘was of a military PR officer, faced with the sentence “Only the weather can hold us back now”, and aware that the weather had been identified as an operational factor, deleted it and suggested as a substitute “politicians”’.9 A perceived need for a propaganda victory to boost morale led to the attack on Goose Green, with the deaths of up to fifty-five Argentinian and eighteen British troops. The Battle of Goose Green, the first major land engagement of the Falklands war, was dictated by public and political pressure rather than military necessity, Freedman makes clear. British troops had been diverted to Goose Green under pressure from London and despite serious misgivings expressed by their commander, Brigadier Julian Thompson. The government was impatient for a successful operation after a week in May 1982 when Argentinian aircraft attacked a number of British warships. ‘Delay’, Freedman noted, ‘would add to the political risks – a decline in support at home … and pressure for a ceasefire internationally, which could leave Britain in occupation of nothing more than a patch of the Falklands.’10 The 1991 Gulf War following Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait (itself a consequence, partly at least, of poor intelligence and mixed messages) was swift, though forty-seven British troops were killed in the conflict. The MoD revelled in the publicity the conflict gave to the armed forces, including the tanks of the Desert Rats and frontline reports of the British media, the BBC’s Kate Adie among them.

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That conflict was not free from controversy either. Hundreds of fleeing Iraqi troops and civilians were attacked by US-led coalition aircraft in what became known as a ‘shooting gallery on the Highway of Death’. In the United States, editors backed away from publishing a graphic photograph of the charred head of an Iraqi burnt alive as he was trying to get out of his truck. In Britain, the photo was printed on the front page of the Observer. General Sir Peter de la Billière, a British commander during the conflict and former head of Britain’s Special Forces, subsequently wrote a memoir, Storm Command,11 in which he trumpeted the exploits of SAS troops. The MoD and the director of Special Forces, which had been engaged in an uphill struggle to impose a ban on publishing anything at all about the SAS, were furious, so much so that de la Billière resigned his position as chairman of the SAS regimental association. Officials in the MoD accused him of encouraging a spate of books by former SAS soldiers who took the line if that if de la Billière could write about their exploits, then so could they. The first and most successful of a series of books was Bravo Two Zero12 by an SAS soldier using the pseudonym, Andy McNab. It quickly became a bestseller. Still the SAS hierarchy continued to impose its official blanket ban on first-hand accounts by special forces soldiers. Journalists, notably the Guardian’s Martin Woollacott, helped to persuade Britain and the United States to operate a ‘no-fly zone’ to protect the Kurds in the mountains of northern Iraq. The air strikes were justified on the grounds that Saddam Hussein was in breach of his post-1991 Gulf War disarmament obligations. While the Kurds were protected, beneficiaries of the media reports, Saddam remained free to attack the forgotten Marsh Arabs. The ‘no-fly zone’ there covered only fixed wing aircraft. Saddam’s helicopters fired on the largely Shia population of southern Iraq at will. The legality of the US-UK bombing campaign, later described as a useful ‘softening up’ operations prior to the full-scale invasion of Iraq in 2003, was dubious, an early manifestation of how the distinction between peace and war was becoming blurred. The media was more decisive in what was to be NATO’s first armed conflict. War between Croatia and Serbia following the break-up of Yugoslavia left the Serbs in control of about a third of Croatia’s territory. ‘The propaganda war was won decisively by the Croats as pictures of the Serb and Montenegrin

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bombardment and shelling of Vukovar and Dubrovnik filled television screens and brought to the attention of western public opinion the reality of a major war on European soil for the first time since the end of the Second World War’, noted Sir Ivor Roberts, Britain’s former ambassador to Belgrade. The FO did not release Conversations with Milosevic, Roberts’ observations on the conflict, for publication until 2016.13 Graphic television reports of the victims of Slobodan Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing, ridding Kosovars and ethnic Albanians from Serbia, aroused public opinion throughout the West. The British and other Western governments hesitated, demonstrating their pro-Serb bias. As we have seen, Whitehall secretly used MI6 to get one of its officers, writing under a pseudonym, to attack the British media for reporting on attacks on Bosnian Muslims. Fresh from a resounding election victory, Tony Blair pressed the case for military intervention, eventually persuading President Clinton. (It was to whet his appetite for intervening in future conflicts.) In 1999, about a thousand NATO aircraft engaged in a bombing campaign that lasted more than eleven weeks. Gareth Williams, attorney general in the Blair government, privately warned that the bombing of Serbia was a breach of international law. It had not been sanctioned by any UN Security Council Resolution. But it did not matter. Thanks to the media, the objective of the bombing was uncontroversial: the protection of Kosovo’s Muslim population. In marked contrast to the invasion of Iraq three years later, few questioned what was widely seen as a humanitarian necessity. I wrote a piece in The Guardian (later re-published in the Daily Mail) saying NATO was fighting a ‘coward’s war’.14 I was summoned by George Robertson, the defence secretary. He asked Alan Rusbridger, my editor, to accompany me to his office in the MoD’s HQ in Whitehall. Robertson brought along General Charles Guthrie, chief of the defence staff. He was sitting at a round table tightly hugging a red ring file marked SECRET with both hands for all the world as though we would try and run away with it. Robertson and Guthrie put on a show of sorrow rather than anger. They explained the need to keep the coalition of NATO countries together and the

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widespread opposition to sending in ground troops. Alan and I were less than sympathetic; their efforts did not change the Guardian’s sceptical editorial line. Evidence that NATO pilots were running out of targets mounted. Factories and bridges and even a Serbian TV station were described by NATO spokespersons as legitimate targets. The Chinese embassy was bombed on the grounds that it was helping Serbian intelligence, though NATO at first blamed the strikes on the CIA’s outdated maps of Belgrade. Meanwhile, Alastair Campbell, Blair’s spin-doctor, became increasingly frustrated by the British media’s coverage of the war. After returning from Brussels where he attempted to shake up the way NATO officials were trying to conduct the information war, Campbell accused journalists of lacking the ‘daredevil spirit’ required to force their way in to Kosovo and to find out what was actually happening on the ground.15 Had they done so, they would have discovered that the bombs of the world’s most powerful military alliance had destroyed just thirteen tanks. Such was the Serbs’ success in hiding their real weapons and erecting mock tanks and artillery, a skill they had mastered in exercises during the Cold War. The real story was not accidental attacks on civilian targets, Campbell insisted, but Milosevic’s ‘war crimes and atrocities’. He said broadcasters had fallen into the habit of thinking if there were ‘no pictures’ then there was ‘no news’. The situation was more complicated than that. Lt Gen. Sir Roddy CordySimpson, a NATO commander in earlier operations in Bosnia, observed: ‘There is considerable discrepancy between what the NATO spokesmen were claiming and the reality on the ground of the damage being done to Milosevic’s war machine’.16 I joined Robertson on a visit to British troops billeted in an old shoe factory on Macedonia’s border with Kosovo. The factory’s owner made a small fortune selling his battered but extensive building to troops of the world’s most powerful alliance. It was June and stifling. That did not stop British squaddies from eating hearty breakfasts of sausages, bacon, eggs and even black pudding, as they watched Sky News on television screens set up in the cavernous building. The night was spent drinking with General Mike Jackson, the commander of NATO’s ground forces. He had just prevented the supreme commander of the alliance, General Wesley Clark, from starting Third World War, as he put it later.

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Clark had wanted Jackson to stop a small detachment of Russian troops from landing at Kosovo’s main airport at Pristina. Moscow simply wanted to make the point that it had much an interest in what was going on in Southeast Europe as NATO. As the night wore on, I met a group of army medics. When they heard what newspaper I wrote for, they burst into song: ‘We want the Guardian, we want the Guardian!’ The only papers flown in from London were the Telegraph and the Sun. I was drinking with Jackson until the early hours of the morning, witness to his legendary constitution. He was up at dawn the next day, preparing to continue negotiating a peace deal with commanders of the Yugoslav Army in a huge tent close to Kosovo’s border with Macedonia. Blair’s enthusiasm for military intervention was boosted by the popular acclaim he received in Kosovo after the war was over. It was encouraged further a year later, in 2000, by what was supposed to be a simple humanitarian intervention off Sierra Leone. The mission, code-named Operation Palliser, was originally set up to evacuate British and other Westerners from this former British colony of West Africa that was immersed in a violent civil war. It became a much more significant mission, thanks largely to its highly political, risk-taking commander, Brigadier David Richards. In his memoirs, Taking Command,17 Richards says he remembers thinking, ‘bugger the orders’. He deployed guns and British troops from the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious, and with the help of a Russian helicopter flown by a South African mercenary, mounted what turned out to be a highly successful operation. Had he failed, Richards could well have been for the chop, his army career over. ‘I used the media whenever I could to help the chain of command in London and more importantly my political masters, understand that things were going better than they realised,’ Richards wrote. He described how James Robbins, the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent, reported that the government was tolerating ‘the liberal interpretation of the mandate that the Brigadier had taken… . Hearing about Robbins’ report from friends in PJHQ (the MoD’s permanent joint headquarters based in Northwood, Northwest London), I quietly chuckled to myself. My intentions were filtering through remarkably effectively’. Richards also described his relations with the BBC’s correspondent

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in Sierra Leone, Allan Little. Richards said Little asked him, ‘Are you telling me … that you used people like me in order to persuade the British government that you could do what you wanted to do?’ Richards added: ‘As he was framing the question, I was thinking, “What on earth can I say except the truth?” “Well, I suppose that’s how it might be interpreted”, I replied.’ Richards concluded: ‘Attending the media was time-consuming, but I learnt then, and benefitted from doing so many times later on in my career, that it was essential to work with the press during a campaign. I regarded it as another vital arm of activity to go alongside the military, political and humanitarian work we were doing’. The Guardian carried a headline for an article a colleague and I wrote about the Sierra Leone, with the words ‘A Good Man in Africa’.18 Richards never forgot it, frequently referring it to me in later conversations. He was popular with the media, not least because he liked chewing the cud with journalists, something that was to provoke growing suspicion among his peers and political masters. Widespread opposition in Whitehall, notably in the FO, to the planned invasion of Iraq was reflected in countless conversations I had with government officials. Alas, the conversations were all off-the-record, and so I could not name the officials. MI6 officers were split down the middle, but again my contacts would only talk to me if I promised not to name them in public. One MI6 officer was the source of my report that many MI6 officers were furious about attempts by the Pentagon – meekly supported by the CIA – to link Saddam Hussein to Al-Qaeda. The day the article appeared in the Guardian, my source received a phone call from a furious FO official. He was desperately worried that the article would upset Washington. ‘But the story was true,’ my source insisted. ‘Yes’, replied the FO official. He did not need to elucidate. The FO did not have the guts publicly to question the CIA claims. Some experienced journalists who should have known better accepted the claims that were also enthusiastically peddled by Iraqi exiles, notably the Iraqi National Congress. The Observer’s David Rose wrote a series of reports claiming that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had close links with Al-Qaeda, despite the inherent implausibility of such an alliance between a secular dictatorship and an extreme Islamist group. Rose’s reporting strongly influenced his newspaper’s editorial line. The paper which had famously attacked the invasion of Egypt

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during the Suez crisis in 1956, supported military action widely accepted as being even more disastrous. A year after the invasion of Iraq, Rose confessed in the Evening Standard that his enthusiasm for it had been ‘misplaced and naive’. He added: ‘I look back with shame and disbelief ’. He later accepted in a piece for the Observer that he had been part of ‘a calculated set-up, devised to foster the propaganda case for war’. We have all been victims, at one time or another, of official propaganda. A few days before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, my Times colleague, Mike Evans, and I were given an on-the-record interview by Air Marshal Sir Brian Burridge, commander of UK forces, at his headquarters at Al Udeid airfield near Doha, the capital of Qatar. He told us Saddam Hussein was preparing for the Battle of Baghdad comparable to Stalingrad, deploying tactics bolstered by the capture of prisoners of war and the use of chemical weapons against civilians. Iraq’s military doctrine, he told us, was based on the Soviet model of defence in depth. ‘[Saddam] is going for a Stalingrad siege. He wants to entice us into urban warfare.’ When I asked if it turned out he did not have any such weapons, Burridge replied: ‘Come on, trust me. None of us are suggesting he doesn’t have them. He has chemical and biological weapons, that’s for sure.’19 Evans and I dutifully wrote up his words for the next day’s Times and Guardian. In the event, it could not have been more unlike Stalingrad. Saddam fled, his army vanished into the countryside – with its guns – and the US-led coalition forces quickly took over the Iraqi capital. The violence, mainly in the form of roadside bombs, came later. I am not sure how far Burridge was ‘doing a Frank Cooper’, adopting the tactics of the senior MoD official on the eve of the Falklands landings. It may have simply been professional caution, to imagine the worst and sharing it with the media. Better that than being too cocky. Burridge did not mince his words about the invasion when I interviewed him ten years later. He pointed to the failure to gather any useful intelligence, after more than a decade, ever since the first Gulf War in 1991, even overflying Iraq at will. ‘It was a national disgrace that, having flown over much of the country for thirteen years, you could have not done better in building up a proper intelligence picture’, Burridge told me.

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It had been a clever move by Simon Wren, the MoD’s chief press officer, before the invasion to flatter the Guardian by offering it special access to Burridge. I stayed at the Doha Sheraton, which reflected Qatar’s pragmatic approach to Western culture. Wine and beer were openly available in the hotel lobby, but the hard stuff could be consumed only in a bar discreetly positioned off the mezzanine floor. Inside, the air was thick with cigarette smoke. Pint glasses of beer and Guinness, and the voices of semi-inebriated ex-pats, reminded me that similar establishments can be found almost anywhere in the world. The MoD organized ‘embeds’, attaching British journalists to units of the invading British troops. The army hierarchy was less arrogant than the navy’s and less chippy than the RAF’s. Brigadier Matthew Sykes was then the senior military figure responsible for the army’s PR. He was bold enough to recommend that the Guardian – not the MoD establishment’s favourite media organization – should go to the front line with the scouts of the Household Cavalry. They accepted Audrey Gillan, whose graphic reporting came to be appreciated as much by the army as by the readers of the Guardian. She was made an honorary member of the Household Cavalry’s mess at their Windsor headquarters. But this example of creative access was an honourable exception. The MoD’s media minders in Iraq became increasingly nervous and restrictive, much more so than their US counterparts, as the Guardian’s James Meek discovered when he wisely attached himself to American forces in Iraq. Relations between the MoD and the media seriously deteriorated after the initial military success of the invasion of Iraq. Irritated by a series of reports recording the military’s frustration with inadequate equipment, Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, who had always adopted a niggling, hostile attitude towards journalists, demolished the MoD’s traditional media set-up in which senior officers from the three branches of the armed services operated alongside civilians. Hoon thought the military was getting a much better press than ministers in the MoD. He was right. Already bitter about the media’s reporting of the David Kelly affair and the bad press he had received during the Hutton inquiry, Hoon downgraded the military’s presence in the ministry’s press office by getting rid of all the ‘one stars’ – the Army brigadier and the

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Royal Navy and RAF commodores. The petty move angered military chiefs and defence correspondents alike. Hoon’s determination to gag the military, shared later by David Cameron, suppressed debate and imposed even greater secrecy at a time when open discussion was desperately needed, in everyone’s interests, including the government’s. It was a prime cause of disillusionment, as much in the armed forces as among the general public, about Britain’s role in military operations. The lack of candour and transparency and the fear of open debate had unhealthy and damaging consequences that are still being felt. Frustration among military commanders was already building up over the cavalier way Blair took decisions without proper consultation, not least over the deployment of thousands of British troops to Helmand in Afghanistan in 2006, and how under-resourced British troops were being hounded out of Basra. It burst open with the appointment of a new head of the army that year. General Richard (later Lord) Dannatt, who succeeded Sir Mike Jackson, first heard about the Helmand decision when he was on a visit to Germany. Dannatt, temperamentally very different to the extrovert Jackson, gave me his first interview after taking up his new post. He criticized, but only tentatively, the way the government had handled the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, and how it was putting immense on the military, the army in particular. Dannatt warned: ‘We are running hot, certainly running hot’, adding: ‘Can we cope? I pause. I say “just”.’ I should have pushed him further. My interview with him did not get the attention I thought it deserved for that very day a Nimrod reconnaissance aircraft crashed over Afghanistan, causing the death of fourteen military personnel. It was the result, an inquiry later concluded, of incompetence and complacency on the part of BAE Systems, the plane’s manufacturer, and senior RAF officers. A few days later, Dannatt questioned the decision to invade Iraq in more forthright terms. He told Sarah Sands of the Daily Mail that the military campaign in 2003 ‘effectively kicked the door in. That is a fact. I don’t say the difficulties we are experiencing around the world are caused by our presence in Iraq, but undoubtedly our presence in Iraq exacerbates them.’20 Dannatt’s comments were hugely provocative and, in the end, probably counterproductive. But they were the consequence of excessive official secrecy, of the

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inability of the government’s most senior military advisers to discuss their concerns freely, first with ministers, then with MPs, and then with the media and the outside world. A deeply religious man, Dannatt told Sands that Britain’s military presence in Iraq was ‘making things worse’ and that ‘moral vacuum at home breeds Islamic extremism’. He describes in his autobiography, Leading from the Front, how he discovered one evening that the BBC ten o’clock news was leading its bulletin with the headline: ‘We must quit says new head of the army’. He blamed the Daily Mail for what he called ‘journalistic weighting and interpretation’ that was ‘distorting’. Des Browne, who had taken over from Hoon as defence secretary, was not best pleased. The episode further aggravated relations between the country’s most senior military figures and their political masters, leading to even greater mistrust and, its bedfellow, secrecy. Britain did not deploy enough troops in Iraq; would it make the same mistake in Afghanistan? The answer is a resounding Yes. Military commanders did not have the courage to tell their political masters they needed more troops and money. Afraid to express their concerns, they played down the difficulties they would face in Afghanistan. Britain’s armed forces turned out to be even less prepared for Afghanistan than they were for Iraq. John Reid, Browne’s predecessor as defence secretary, had suggested that the troops could accomplish their mission without a shot being fired. It was a suggestion he was not allowed to forget. When his apparent optimism was repeatedly fed back to him as casualties mounted, Reid said he was being repeatedly misquoted. What he had actually said as he landed in Afghanistan on his first visit was that British troops would be ‘perfectly happy’ to leave ‘without firing a shot’. NATO governments were desperately anxious to avoid any suggestion that British and other allied troops faced the prospect of coming under attack. I experienced this first-hand at a big NATO exercise held in Germany to prepare for the deployment to Afghanistan. I was talking to the ever-friendly David Richards, who was about go to Kabul to head the NATO-led international force. We were discussing the possibility of Western troops confronting Al-Qaeda fighters. Richards said he did not discount the possibility. An anxious Mark Laity, now special adviser to George Robertson, NATO’s secretary general,

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urged Richards not to talk to journalists about the potential threats facing NATO troops; such was the extent of the concern and sensitivity at NATO headquarters about public and political opposition to the deployment. But NATO, and the British government, could not keep the lid on the growing problems their troops were facing for long. In July 2006, Richards gave a speech at RUSI at a time when he was clearly frustrated by the lack of a coherent peace and stability strategy in Afghanistan. The speech was off-therecord, but I was told the general could be quoted if I checked with him. ‘No problem’, Richards told me. Richards wrote in his diary for 22 July: I received an email from Terry McNamee of RUSI … apologising for the Guardian misquoting my speech yesterday. The headline above my story referred to a state of ‘near anarchy’ in Afghanistan. It was an exaggeration, perhaps, but one common in headline writing. What I actually wrote [in his speech] was that the way some international organisations, PSCs [private security companies] and NGOs [non-governmental organisations] operated was ‘close to anarchy and that they needed to pull together and work to common aims’. Richards added: ‘My concern is that the Guardian article will appear to Karzai [Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president] as if I am saying that he has no grip and authority. … It could damage my relationship with him at a crucial juncture in the operation.’ In his diary entry for the following Monday, 24 July, Richards noted that NATO’s supreme commander, US General James Jones, had called him from Washington saying that NATO’s secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, had returned from his office from his ‘habitual weekend off ’, read my Guardian article and was ‘very angry about it’. Mark Laity had the temerity to phone Richards, to quote the general’s diary, ‘warning me that things were bad in Brussels and that I was on a “yellow card”’. Richards diary note read: ‘From the tone of his voice I sensed that he [Laity] was enjoying this little drama, especially when he made the mistake of telling me that if he had seen the speech before I had given it, he would have removed the offending sentence. No doubt this is what he had told his mischief-making pals in Brussels.’

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Richards told nervous NATO officials that the Guardian had misquoted him. The headline may have been a bit strong, but it was the prominence of the story on the front page that irritated him and angered Brussels. The incident did not affect my personal relations with Richards. Far from it. It probably helped to shake up NATO’s relationships with private security companies and NGOs in Kabul. The episode was significant because it demonstrated the extreme nervousness in NATO and the MoD about the whole Afghan operation, nervousness suppressed by public assurances that everything was hunky-dory. This was reflected in another episode sparked by a story I wrote for the Guardian later that year.21 Brigadier Ed Butler, commander of 3 Para Battlegroup (and grandson of the prominent former Tory cabinet minister, RAB Butler) had just returned from Helmand after six months in which British troops, far from not firing a shot as Reid said he had hoped, fired more bullets and shells, estimated to be more than a million, than at any time since the Korean War. Butler suggested that the invasion of Iraq three years earlier had prevented British forces from helping to secure Afghanistan, and left a dangerous vacuum in the country. As a result, British soldiers faced a much tougher task. Asked whether the invasion and its aftermath had led to Britain and the United States taking their eye off the ball, Butler replied that the question was ‘probably best answered by politicians’. He added that British forces could also have attacked the Taliban more effectively and more quickly if they had had more resources, including helicopters – something that was to become an oftrepeated refrain from British commanders. Butler’s implicit criticisms of the Blair government gave me a front-page splash in the Guardian. It coincided with a lunch Guardian editors had planned that day for the defence secretary, Des Browne. His press office cancelled the lunch because they thought, mistakenly in my view, that Browne would have been embarrassed to confront us. Browne was not the kind of person to shun criticism. He would have relished a conversation over lunch. British commanders continued to vent their frustrations about the lack of appropriate equipment, notably helicopters and armoured vehicles, capable of withstanding the growing threat from IEDs. They did so in briefings to journalists embedded for short visits to Helmand. Brigadier Andrew Mackay,

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one of Butler’s successors as commander of Britain’s ‘Task Force Helmand’, described his troops as repeatedly ‘mowing the lawn’. What he meant was that after they ‘liberated’ villages from Taliban control, they immediately had to be deployed elsewhere because they were so thin on the ground. The Taliban soon retook the villages only for British troops having to return to ‘liberate’ them once more. Mackay said he had felt like a student in Afghanistan, thinking about counter insurgency doctrine and the principles of managing a large organization. He was struck by the lack of clear direction from above. There was a sense of ‘making it up as we go along’, he said. Mackay signed what he called a ‘ground truth’ memo, which he sent to London. It included a list of serious problems with his soldiers’ equipment. Many of the engines of the Household Cavalry’s ageing Scimitar reconnaissance tanks did not work. Tanks labelled ‘working’ could not even get into reverse gear without the driver first having to restart the engine, a limitation ‘not helpful in combat’, the leaked memo noted. A quarter of the new Mastiff armoured vehicles were out of action for weeks because of suspension problems, and many of the new Vector armoured vehicles in Helmand were not being used because ‘the wheels just kept falling off ’. Heavy machine guns and reinforced Land Rovers were also in short supply, the memo added.22 Other military commanders infuriated defence ministers and MoD spindoctors on their return to Britain by telling us the truth, namely that the Afghan army and security forces were in a poor state and that delays in getting paid demoralizing them further. Many did not return to their units after going on leave. Absenteeism was rife. Blair had told other countries with troops in Afghanistan that Britain would be responsible for the opium problem. Afghanistan’s poppies were the source of most of the heroin which ended up on British (and other European) streets, and Helmand was where most of them were grown. Yet British troops knew that attempts to eradicate the poppy harvest would merely antagonize the local population whose livelihood depended on the crop. The situation was aggravated by US plans to kill the poppies by spraying them with chemicals from aircraft, the means the United States had used in South America against coca plantations. I asked NATO’s top civilian

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representative in Kabul, who went on to become a very senior FO official, how the opium problem could be dealt with. ‘It is very difficult’, was all he could say. In 2007, a year after Blair sent in British troops to Helmand province, there was a record opium harvest. Ten years later, it had increased further. Meanwhile, Richards always found time to respond to my emails asking him about his personal take on the situation. He normally replied late at night. ‘I will now go to bed , knackered but feeling better for doing this’, he ended one email to me in November 2011. ‘There is a growing feeling of optimism here’, he added. I am not sure he shared it. Ministers and military commanders alike became increasingly fraught as casualties in Afghanistan mounted. There was no sign that the efforts of British troops, sometimes ending in deaths or terrible injury, were sustaining a stable country. At MoD briefings, military spokesmen resorted to increasingly desperate attempts, mainly by selecting facts and figures to advance their case, to increasingly incredulous defence correspondents. The briefings eventually dried up. The best analysis of what went wrong came from young officers who left the army soon after their deployment in Helmand. They included Emile Simpson, whose book, War from the Ground Up,23 is a brilliant expose of British ignorance of Afghan society and tribal structure (even after three disastrous wars in the nineteenth century), and Mike Martin, whose highly critical account, An Intimate War,24 was initially banned by the MoD – a move that merely served to stimulate interest in his withering critique of Britain’s approach to the conflict. The MoD dropped its ban after Martin resigned his Territorial Army commission. As casualties increased, first in Iraq then in Afghanistan, television pictures regularly showed pictures of flag-draped coffins being slowly driven through Wootton Bassett, the town, now with the moniker ‘Royal’ attached to its name, closest to the RAF base at Lyneham in Wiltshire, where aircraft carrying the dead from Iraq and Afghanistan landed. Morale within the armed forces was falling as more and more in the media, public opinion, and (privately) within the army, questioned the conduct and purpose of the military operations. Dannatt, with half-hearted support from ministers and the MoD, promoted the ‘military covenant’ – the notion that the unique,

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indeed ultimate, sacrifice made by members of the armed forces and their families should be recognized through better treatment from the State, including in housing and health care. Responding to growing concerns among the military chiefs of staff about plummeting morale, the prime minister, Gordon Brown, in 2008 set up an inquiry into ‘National Recognition of Our Armed Forces’. Among its recommendations was the ‘relaxation’ of contacts between commanding officers and the media, particularly journalists based in towns with military bases. The proposed reforms made no difference. Senior officers did not believe senior civil servants or ministers would in practice accept such relaxed rules. They suspected they would still be in trouble if they spoke out. They were right. It was not long before relations between military and government deteriorated once again. It started with the chaotic 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR), including a last-minute decision to scrap the aircraft carrier, HMS Ark Royal, the iconic fleet of Harrier jump jets, and the destruction of half-built Nimrod maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft. Defence correspondents were phoned up by angry naval officers, anxious for us to report their fierce opposition to cuts that had been so chaotically imposed. We duly obliged. David Cameron helped us on our way when his advisers let it be known he was deeply frustrated that the MoD had agreed a deal with BAE Systems, whereby the taxpayer would face huge penalties if the plan to construct the two large aircraft carriers planned for the navy was scrapped. A significant number of senior officers in all three branches of the armed forces, in the army in particular, made it clear in private conversations that they believed the carriers – and Trident too for that matter – were a huge waste of money. Fierce arguments broke out into the open in 2011, prompted by Cameron’s decision, which exasperated the chiefs of staff, to attack Libya. Just when they thought the era of ill-thought through military interventions was over, Cameron, egged on by the French president, Nikolai Sarkozy, called for a NATO-backed campaign of air strikes to stop the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi from slaughtering his domestic opponents protesting in Benghazi. Stung by complaints from senior military figures, Cameron told them: ‘There are moments when I wake up and read the newspapers and think: “I

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tell you what, you do the fighting and I’ll do the talking”.’25 The military were severely chastened. In briefing notes leaked to The Telegraph newspaper, Air Chief Marshal Sir Simon Bryant, Commander-in-Chief of the RAF’s Air Command, had complained that ‘huge’ demands were being placed on equipment and personnel. He added that morale among personnel was ‘fragile’ and their fighting spirit was being threatened by overwork. The RAF was already severely stretched by intense air operations in Afghanistan and the Middle East. According to the briefing paper, Bryant had warned MPs that many areas of the RAF were ‘running hot’, while service personnel’s sense that the nation valued their efforts was being undermined by the government’s defence cuts. He said: ‘The true strength is in our people in continuing to deliver, despite all that’s asked of them, adding that it was time to listen to military advice, review the [defence] review and provide our forces with capabilities which match our foreign policy ambitions.’26 Meanwhile, the First Sea Lord, Sir Mark Stanhope, warned that continuing operations in Libya beyond September 2011 would mean taking ships away from other tasks. Concern among military commanders was compounded by Cameron’s suggestion that Gaddafi himself was a target and regime change the aim – objectives which were legally highly dubious, as the invasion of Iraq had demonstrated eight years earlier. David Richards, now promoted to the post of chief of the defence staff, made it plain he was deeply concerned about the statements by Cameron and other ministers implying that Gaddafi personally was the target of NATO’s bombs. According to a paper published by the Chatham House think tank, entitled Depending on the Right People: British Political-Military Relations 2001–2010, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were concerned about the close relations between senior military figures and the media. That, the paper’s author, James de Waal, claimed, helped to explain how decisions about defence policy, and also military tactics, were made. ‘The battles are fought as much in Fleet Street as in Iraq or Afghanistan’, he wrote. Brown’s Downing Street was not convinced of the military need to send reinforcements to Afghanistan in 2009 but had agreed to do so only because it wanted to prevent hostile briefings by the military.

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That may have been true. However, many British officers repeatedly told me that the real problem was that military commanders did not ‘tell truth to power’, a point later highlighted in the Chilcot report. These [junior] officers told me that the generals and brigadiers were reluctant to demand more resources and better equipment out of concern that, if they did so, ministers would respond by suggesting that if military commanders were so reluctant to participate in operations, the answer was to slash their budgets. There was a curious stand-off where ministers were apparently jealous of the close relations between the military and the media, while the military were worried about the consequences of telling ministers about their concerns. The MoD, meanwhile, blocked the publication of essays by senior serving officers in a book, British Generals in Blair’s Wars,27 including those of General Sir Nick Houghton, chief of the defence staff, and General Sir Richard Shirreff, NATO’s deputy supreme allied commander. Sir Huw Strachan, then Chichele Professor of the History of War at Oxford University and long-time independent adviser to military chiefs, went so far as to accuse the MoD of endangering the lives of British soldiers by stifling debate and preventing serving generals from publicly expressing their views on the conduct of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Houghton had already raised eyebrows in Downing Street in 2013, in his first major speech as CDS, as he warned of the need to fund the military adequately in face of the danger of what he called ‘hollowed-out’ armed forces, with ‘exquisite’ equipment – expensive jets and ships – but not enough people to operate them.28 Early in 2015, Cameron went on the warpath again preventing Houghton from speaking at a Chatham House conference on the theme ‘Rising Powers and the Future of Defence’.29 The gagging came after Downing Street saw an early draft of Houghton’s speech. Cameron had already let it be known he was annoyed by remarks by Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, who warned that NATO must be ready for Russian aggression in ‘whatever form it takes’. A few days later, General Sir Adrian Bradshaw, NATO’s deputy supreme commander, talked out of turn about ‘an era of constant competition with Russia’. Shirreff angered Cameron by claiming that his failure to be at the forefront of talks

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over Ukraine had turned the British prime minister into a ‘bit player’ on the international scene. Cocooned in their closed mindset, top officials in the MoD included journalists in their annual threat assessments. Among those it warned were threats to the state were ‘subversive or terrorist organizations, and investigative journalists’. Worried about persistent leaks and the failure to get across their message that was all was sweetness and light, MoD mandarins in 2012 appointed Stephen Jolly, an expert in black propaganda and a former member of the army reserve’s Psychological Operations group, a former instructor at the Defence Intelligence and Security Centre at Chicksands in Bedfordshire, and a former visiting fellow in psychological warfare at King’s College, London, as its chief spin-doctor responsible for strategic communications. Such efforts to counter leaks and critical comments in the media about the state of the armed forces served only to make military commanders and defence officials less likely to speak truth unto power, thereby bolstering official secrecy by allowing those in power – ministers supported by Whitehall mandarins – to control the channels of communications with the public, the voters. Yet they did not stop leaks or criticism and so long as the MoD remains so secretive and loath to encourage open debate, they never will. There is a strange and uniquely British institution which journalists writing about defence, security and intelligence matters have to cope with. The Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee, commonly referred to simply as the D Notice Committee after its original title, consists of top officials from the MoD and the Home Office and senior editors and executives from the major media organizations. They engage in a system of voluntary self-censorship. A list of ‘DA [Defence Advisory] Notices’ are published on the committee’s website as guidance for editors. They cover the activities of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ and of new weapons being developed for Britain’s armed forces. They also cover the activities of the Special Forces – the SAS and SBS. Editors and reporters are supposed to contact the committee’s secretary when they are planning to write articles on such matters. The committee has no legal status. However, clearance by its secretary – a post traditionally occupied by a recently retired senior military officer – on a particular story might make Whitehall think twice before recommending

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any Official Secrets Act prosecution or court injunction to prevent or delay publication of a particular article. Guardian editors, who previously paid little attention to the DA Notice system, thought it a good idea to embrace it in the wake of the Edward Snowden affair. The move was designed to show that the Guardian was responsible and at least understood how to ‘play the game’. A senior member of the Guardian’s editorial staff was appointed to the committee. There is no certainty that clearance from the committee’ secretary for a particular story would prevent the security and intelligence agencies or ministers from seeking the intervention of the courts. There is also the very real possibility of the Whitehall members of the committee tipping off the cabinet secretary or ministers about an editor’s intention to publish politically unwelcome or embarrassing stories. The DA Notice system became increasingly discredited over its failure to lift the blanket of official secrecy covering the activities of the Special Forces, an official ban undermined by the discreet authority given by military chiefs to senior MoD spokespeople to confirm details of Special Forces operations unattributably by nods and winks to trusted defence correspondents. Even though the SAS and SBS are taking on increasingly significant roles, the government routinely insists in answers to questions from MPs that they do not comment on any Special Forces operation. A bland ‘no comment’ is the official response despite more and reports in the world’s media about the activities of British Special Forces in Syria, Iraq and Libya. Such official secrecy is unacceptable at a time when even the Commons defence committee has pointed to ‘significant legal obstacles to targeted killings’ by drones and Special Forces and the absence of detention facilities where the interrogation of terrorist suspects could be monitored.30 The official ban increasingly is honoured more in the breach than in the observance. To take one example, in the ITV ‘Kill List’ programme31 broadcast in 2015, Richard Williams, a former SAS commander, referred to a bunker called ‘the Death Star’. He recalled: ‘It was known as the death star because of the impression of a Star Wars type-technical facility that would … designate those targets for kill or capture missions. Its purpose was obviously the destruction of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and did deliver from it quite a lot of death’.

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The SAS was keen to be part of the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). When it was suggested that it had been described as ‘an industrial scale counter-terrorist killing machine’, Williams replied: ‘Well it was’. If targets on the kill list could not be engaged in combat or captured by any other means, they would be killed, remotely, by a bomb. A spectacular example of the hypocrisy of the official secrecy surrounding the Special Forces demonstrated just how weak and ineffective the DA Notice system is. The minutes of the committee’s meeting on 6 November 2014 recorded that the naming of a former SAS officer by The Sun was discussed. ‘The journalist appeared to have been given the information by a briefer at No 10’, the minutes noted. They added: ‘It seemed that the release of the name was deliberate in order to make a political point’ – namely that David Cameron took military operations seriously. The committee chairman ‘accepted that, as this was not the first time that No 10 had shown a lack of understanding of the DA Notice System, the problem might be systemic and should be addressed.’ How did the committee address the problem? So anxious was it about not being seen to criticize 10 Downing Street, it simply removed the offending passages in the minutes from the record. In his official history of the DA Committee, Rear Admiral Nicholas Wilkinson, its former secretary, observed: ‘Almost all the publicity which the UKSF (UK Special Forces) has attracted has been inspired directly by UKSF leakers or through ex-SF leakers.’32 Some passages in Wilkinson’s were initially censored for by the MoD even though they were cleared by MI5, MI6, GCHQ and the FO. They included passages revealing how details about the role of UKSF, in an operation to free captured British soldiers held by rebels in Sierra Leone, were leaked in 2000 ‘to the fury of the Ministry of Defence’. British paratroopers involved in the Sierra Leone mission ‘felt under no inhibition about talking frankly about their part in a SF-led [Special Forces] operation’, Wilkinson noted. He added that ‘even The Officer magazine, supported by the MoD’, had carried an article on the SAS role in the operation, prompting the MoD to consider impounding’ the offending publication. Referring to an unidentified incident in the Iraq war, Wilkinson noted that ‘the inability of the MoD to say anything about the incident caused additional speculation and inaccuracy’.

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Wilkinson also referred to the decision of Stella Rimington, the former MI5 director general, to publish her memoirs. ‘Senior officials had known this for some months and had been trying to dissuade her,’ Wilkinson wrote. ‘When it became apparent that this heavy collective (male) pressure was making her even more determined to publish, she was widely, and unattributably, briefed against.’ Sir Kevin Tebbit, then the MoD’s most senior civil servant, was described as being most opposed to the memoirs on grounds that his ministry was blocking SAS memoirs at the time. SAS commanders were furious. Their anger was to no avail. Rimington’s book, Open Secret, was published in 2001. Bizarrely, some passages in Wilkinson’s original manuscript relating to the BBC’s entirely fictional spy drama, Spooks, were suppressed. One passage later cleared for publication reads: ‘The security service [MI5] was not only relaxed about the series, its members were very much hoping that Armani suits, plush offices and fast cars, as shown in the series, would somehow become a feature of their considerably less glamorous work, and that its recruitment would benefit (applications did temporarily increase, but those from women dropped, possibly because of the unrealistic level of violence).’ Mark Thomas, the comedian and political activist, exposed the absurdity of so much official secrecy by asking the committee why ‘well-known defence and security establishments’, including the early warning radar at Fylingdales in North Yorkshire, and the nuclear warhead plant at Burghfield, Berkshire, were absent from Ordnance Survey maps since they can be seen from any aircraft or, indeed, by a passing walker. The official blanket ban on disclosing the activities of the Special Forces was increasingly ignored by the most senior military figures. ‘I’ve broken that rule’, David Richards told me, making it clear that in his view the ban was counterproductive. ‘The very knowledge of the special forces is a huge weapons system in itself ’, he said. War reporters and defence correspondents are not always at odds with the military or the government. They should be sensitive to any genuine need for operational security and to protect lives. Tension between the media and the military establishment may be healthy. Journalists cannot be expected to have the same perspective and share the same priorities as members of the SAS. But

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without greater transparency and a more enlightened approach such tension is in danger of turning into growing suspicion, even open hostility, as military operations become more hidden, when the boundaries between war and peace are becoming increasingly blurred and where traditional interpretations of the law and ethics relating to violent conflicts are breaking down. Scrutiny by the media will be even more necessary in the age of drones, robots and increasingly sophisticated weapons systems, and where media access to battlefields will be more and more difficult, if not impossible.

3 Brussels, city of myths and contradictions

London, July 1980. ‘Plaques could be placed on completed buildings, press notices released on their inauguration, and in particular the opening ceremony could be exploited – Whitehall briefing note on how to publicize Margaret Thatcher’s success in securing a deal reducing Britain’s net contributions to the Brussels budget.’ In what seemed impossible to imagine only a few years later, Thatcher’s Conservative government was primed to ‘provide opportunities for obtaining favourable publicity for the Government’s policy towards the EC [European Community] and for the Community itself ’. The idea was to place plaques celebrating Britain’s membership of the European Community on projects in Britain’s declining industrial regions in particular, those built with the proceeds of refunds from the Brussels budget, precisely those regions that were to vote heavily in favour of Brexit in the 2016 referendum. The strategy, drawn up in a confidential document leaked to me by a mischievous civil servant, was devised by Bernard Ingham, Mrs Thatcher’s press secretary and general amanuensis. He called for the ‘Europeanization’ of the British public, and a ‘properly co-ordinated campaign with all the instruments of the orchestra, not only central government, reading the same tune and coming in on cue’.

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In light of Thatcher’s subsequent hostility towards the whole European project and growing hostility to Europe, it is difficult to imagine that such a message had come from one of her closest aides, a Yorkshireman known for his blunt speaking. Ingham’s call for the ‘Europeanization’ of the British public served a shortterm political purpose and was destined to fail. It was false, forced openness. It was certainly not an attempt to combat official secrecy. The seeds had already been sown for Brexit, watered by fake news, Whitehall arrogance and secrecy, deepening unease and uncertainty about Britain’s role in the world, and, perhaps above all, the refusal of successive governments to come clean about what joining the Common Market, a supranational institution from its inception, actually meant. Britain joined it on 1 January 1973, the day I joined the Guardian staff as its first correspondent based in Brussels. I had a ringside seat from the beginning. And from the beginning it did not look good. Ingham’s initiative over the budget deal was an exception, and one that was to remain unprecedented. A hostile approach to Brussels was the norm, conducted through a mixture of prejudice and bluster that bolstered official secrecy and Whitehall’s success in blocking any calm and rational debate about the pros and cons of Britain’s relationship with Europe. That set the tone. It was personified at the start by Mohsin Ali, Reuters news agency’s indefatigable diplomatic correspondent. Indian-born Ali, a wartime Hurricane fighter pilot who proudly wore his RAF tie every day, would accompany British ministers on their frequent trips to Brussels for meetings with their European partners. Happy to do the government’s bidding, he began each story with an identical phrase – ‘Britain today’ – followed by warlike threats along the lines of ‘warned the French’, or ‘attacked the Germans’, depending which country was in London’s firing line at any particular time. The attitude that Britain was doing continental Europeans a favour by joining the Common Market spilled over during one of the first meetings in Brussels British ministers attended. Heath had appointed Sir Alec Douglas-Home, a Scottish aristocrat and Neville Chamberlain’s parliamentary aide at the time of Munich in 1938, to the post of foreign secretary. In the course of heated exchanges over Common Market expenditure, Douglas-Home reminded the

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deputy German foreign minister, Hans Apel, who won the Second World War. Apel, who was born in 1932, replied that he was a child when that war ended. Every issue, every item on the agenda, was a battle between ‘them’, the continentals, and ‘us’, the British. Ali was mild-mannered, with an old-fashioned courtesy. But he was a mouthpiece for Whitehall, enthusiastically cheered on by most MPs at Westminster and faithfully passing on their message. As the headquarters of the Common Market (later the EU) and NATO, Brussels was a great listening post, full of spies – spies from Russia and Asia trying to find out what the Western military alliance was up to, and West European spies spying on each other. The European External Action Service (EEAS) – the EU’s ‘FO’ – alerted member states’ embassies in February 2018 to the activities of some 250 Chinese and 200 Russian spies in Brussels, suggesting that its officials avoid a popular steakhouse and cafe close to the Commission, according to a report in the German newspaper Die Welt, enthusiastically picked up by other media, including the Guardian. Claims that MI6 bugged EU meetings during the Brexit negotiations appeared regularly in the media. I can only report that Brussels-based spies included a succession of MI6 officers who rather crudely spent too much time approaching journalists and making it pretty clear who they really were. One Saturday morning, as a group of British journalists were engaged in usual banter, a familiar figure walked in. He was about to give us a hearty greeting when one of our number yelled: ‘Here’s N--- the spy!’ The embarrassed MI6 officer, attached to Britain’s mission to the European institutions, rushed out. He was immediately summoned back to London, never to be seen again. Not in Brussels anyway. The experience did not do his career any harm. He was soon appointed MI6’s man in an important and sensitive post. British ministers might have indulged in xenophobic rhetoric, but British intelligence officers had quickly seized the opportunities presented by British membership of the Common Market. As Britain prepared to join in January 1973, Whitehall departments, egged on by MI6, were determined to place as many British officials in as many influential posts as possible in the European institutions. They also wanted to keep an eye on what Britain’s fellow members were up to. They could point out that among their responsibilities was the protection and pursuance of the country’s ‘economic well-being’, a task

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established in law by the 1994 Intelligence Services Act. That statute simply confirmed what MI6 had been doing since it was first set up in 1909 under the Crown prerogative. It gives MI6 extremely broad functions not only to operate in the interests of Britain’s ‘economic well-being’, a phrase vague enough in itself, but also to operate ‘in the interests of national security, with particular reference to the [government’s] defence and foreign policies’. European Commissioners and their officials swear and sign an oath promising to act ‘completely independent’ of their nation state and ‘neither to seek nor to take instructions’ from any government, especially their own of course. That is easier said than done. There is no effective way to police the oath. French officials in the Commission in particular were past masters at giving priority to their own country’s interests, especially when it came to foreign aid. They used EU funds to keep sweet their former colonies in West and Central Africa, including Niger, the source of uranium vital for France’s nuclear weapons. Britain followed the French example. Maurice Oldfield, then MI6’s deputy chief, visited Brussels incognito to check that a number of his ‘Century House boys’, named after the damp and crumbling tower block then housing the MI6 headquarters in Lambeth, South London, would be safely ensconced in new ‘European’ roles.1 The objective was to influence policy making and ensure that British national interests were being pursued as vigorously as possible in the European institutions. Maurice Foley, a former Labour FO minister with close links to British intelligence, landed a plum job in the Commission as deputy director general responsible for relations with developing countries. British officials were appointed to key positions in the Commission responsible for relations with countries in Asia and the Pacific region, ‘internal coordination’ and information policy. All Foley and his colleagues needed was the support of Whitehall back home. Spies operated with varying degrees of discretion. I once had to warn the Times correspondent in Brussels who was in danger of succumbing to large quantities of hard liquor plied by two young female Czech intelligence agents hovering over him on a sofa with cameras at the ready. It was at a reception on Czechoslovakia’s national day soon after the country was invaded by Soviet forces crushing the 1968 Prague Spring. The women were clearly about to

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engage in a bit of ‘sexpionage’, a crude attempt at old-fashioned Cold War espionage and entrapment. Just as they did, indeed still do, in other cities that are the home of international organizations, notably New York and Geneva, friends and enemies in Brussels spied on each other. The British practice of spying on allies is in effect authorized by the 1994 Intelligence Services Act which covers GCHQ as well as MI6. Lord Mackay, then Lord Chancellor, made the point quite openly in a little-noticed speech during the Act’s passage through Parliament. MI6’s task, he told peers, was to keep ‘a particular eye on Britain’s access to key commodities, like oil or metals’ as well as ‘the profits of Britain’s myriad of international business interests’. He added that ‘the jobs of a great many British people are dependent on the ability to plan, to invest, and to trade effectively without worry and danger’. GCHQ passes on useful intelligence to large British companies. The relationship between Britain’s intelligence agencies and big companies such as BP, Shell and RollsRoyce is close, reflected in the number of former spymasters who join the companies’ boards. The ‘economic well-being’ criterion gives MI6 pretty much carte blanche in Europe to indulge in industrial espionage. MI6 officers regularly spied on the latest French warships being constructed, including the latest submarines and the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle. MI6 was, and no doubt still is, engaged in gathering intelligence on the arms export deals of Britain’s European competitors and on European financial and commercial centres. The renegade MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson, revealed that the agency had a spy, code-named Orcadia, in the German Bundesbank as part of an operation code-named Jetstream.2 One MI6 officer once based in Paris told me he had little trouble in attracting informants, some seemingly motivated by resentment about recent history, including the role of collaborators and the Vichy regime in the Second World War. The French in turn have spied on their commercial and economic competitors, including the United States. Edward Snowden disclosed not only that the United States were spying on its European allies – including tapping into Angela Merkel’s personal telephone – but that

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European intelligence agencies including the French and German were spying on each other’s citizens. MI6’s secret work behind the scenes has upset British diplomats and the foreign policy goal of being on the best possible terms with everyone. Diplomats in the FO do not like ‘spy scandals’ which cause them embarrassment and upset the smooth pursuit of conventional diplomacy. It was only in the 1970s that British ambassadors abroad had the right to see the secret telegrams their MI6 station chiefs, embedded in their embassies (including those in major European capitals), sent back to their headquarters in London. The FO has at times even resented MI5 or MI6 creating waves by objecting to actions, including cyberattacks, by China, Russia and others. It is perhaps not surprising that the FO is often regarded as a soft touch, not just by the security and intelligence agencies but across Whitehall. The FO was also soon tarred with the brush of being seduced by the European institutions in Brussels, a view that gained currency at the time of the Brexit negotiations. Britain does have one significant advantage: the secret UK-US Treaty, an intelligence-gathering agreement between Britain and the United States signed in 1946, a year after the end of the Second World War. Three years later, the two governments expanded the secret deal to include Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The so-called ‘Five Eyes’ agreement between the trusted ‘AngloSaxon allies’, continues to cover listening stations around the world, including Ascension Island in the middle of the Atlantic and Pine Gap in the middle of the Australian desert. Members of the club have a mutual vested interest in solidarity. It gives them a privileged status and is resented in Europe. It is regarded by some, notably Gaullist France, as a Trojan horse. Years of resentment and suspicion, much of it manufactured, came to a head in 2001 when the European Parliament produced a report on an eavesdropping network code-named Echelon. Operated by the ‘Five Eyes’, it had the capacity to intercept many more personal and commercial communications than previously believed. France claimed that Echelon cost the European aircraft manufacturer Airbus an £8 billion contract with Saudi Arabia, though the European Parliament found no conclusive proof of industrial espionage. The sprawling single-floor NATO headquarters near Brussels airport was a target for spies from the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact satellites. But its

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importance as a source of genuine secrets was grossly exaggerated. Almost every meeting of the military alliance’s defence chiefs, diplomats or ministers consisted of dire warnings, mainly based on puffed-up claims by US intelligence agencies, about how the Soviet Union and its allies were promoting an arms race and how much more money NATO armed forces would need to catch up. Only after the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union did Western governments begin to admit that the Soviet Union had had no intention of attacking the West and that Warsaw Pact forces were very badly equipped and thoroughly demoralized. Fearful after the fall of the Soviet Union that their budgets would be slashed, it was not long before NATO, enthusiastically encouraged by arms companies, warned that the world was actually a more dangerous place than it had been during the certainties of the Cold War. There were occasions that provided light relief. One of my first summons to NATO’s headquarters came in December 1967. It was to meet George Brown, foreign secretary in Wilson’s Labour government. It was to Brown that Private Eye magazine first attributed the phrase ‘tired and emotional’. I soon understood why. He lived up to his reputation that day as fog prevented his plane from taking him back to London. He was in danger of missing a crucial cabinet meeting about a long-running dispute within the Labour Party over the sale of arms to apartheid South Africa. He was strongly in favour of the move, but he was in a minority in the government. He was desperate to argue his case in cabinet. As we waited and waited to interview him in an overheated room at the British delegation to NATO, embarrassed FO diplomats tried to shield us from their boss who was becoming increasingly worse for wear. They eventually persuaded Brown to come and speak to us. He managed to give us a few incoherent words about what was on the NATO ministers’ – rather than the British cabinet’s – agenda. In his autobiography, In My Way, Brown described with feeling how as he was sitting in the NATO building ‘having coffee’, he heard his plane coming in, ‘going round and round, round and round’ but unable to land. The only way he got back to London was by the night boat train from Belgium. He lost the argument over arms to South Africa at the following morning’s cabinet. He resigned shortly afterwards.3

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I was appointed to the Guardian’s staff, with an annual salary of £4,000, because Hella Pick, who had covered Europe from Geneva, said she did not welcome the prospect of living in the Belgian capital, widely regarded as an unattractive provincial city. As European editor and much senior to me, she decided to cover Europe from London. I was delighted to stay in Brussels, a comfortable place to live – relatively small; no parking problems; low income tax; bars serving an astonishing selection of beers; and good steaks, mussels and even lobsters served with the best chips in Europe, available twenty-four hours a day. Brussels was on the face of it a contradiction. It aspired to be the capital of a united Europe, yet it was, and remains, an officially bilingual enclave just above an east–west line dividing Belgium’s Flemish-speaking Flanders to the north and the country’s French-speaking Wallonia to the south. Both regions have their own parliaments (which had the power to block a post-Brexit deal with Britain) as well as electing MPs to Belgium’s national – federal – parliament. Brussels consists of nineteen separate communes, or boroughs, each with their own police force extremely jealous of their own identity and local budgets. It helped to explain why the country’s security forces were so slow in picking up the terrorist cell which killed 130 people in a series of coordinated attacks in Paris in 2015. But it might also be argued that it is entirely appropriate that Brussels and Belgium is divided on federal lines, that Europe’s HQ is the capital of a nation that does not really exist. Those working in the European institutions – the Commission, Council and Parliament, and their many committees – occupy extravagant buildings in what is now called the city’s European Quarter. The interior walls of a new building for the Parliament built when I was there was made out of calf skin. No expense was spared in getting the Eurocrats and their travelling circus regularly out of Brussels either. Every month, some 1,000 parliamentarians, officials and secretaries travelled to Strasbourg for a four-day session, an exercise estimated to cost more than £100 million a year. It was the result of a deal insisted on by France which demanded that the ancient city with the nearby ‘Bridge of Europe’ over the Rhine connecting France and Germany, a symbol of reconciliation, should be home to the European Parliament. Strasbourg was already the seat of the Council of Europe, whose members

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included more countries than the EU. It is also home of the European Court of Human Rights whose Convention Britain had played a big role in drafting. Britain was its first signatory. Officials, parliamentarians and journalists alike enjoy the trips to Strasbourg, with fine Alsatian wines adding to the city’s gastronomic delights. Luxembourg, with its own gastronomic treats, insisted it must get into the act and is the seat of the European Court of Justice. The European Council of Ministers meets there two months of the year. Journalists following the activities of the European institutions, like the Eurocrats themselves, live in a curiously unreal world. But food and agriculture did play a big part. Throughout my time in Brussels, they consumed a lion’s share of the Common Market’s budget. As a young journalist in Brussels eager to make a mark, I was guilty of pitching up stories to catch the editors’ attention. I delighted in writing about butter mountains and wine lakes, the latter a description I claim credit for being the first to record. In one article for the Guardian about disputes over the CAP, as the common agricultural policy was known, I described: Many thousands of tonnes of fruit and vegetables have been crushed by EC bulldozers in that time; thousands of tonnes of butter have been exported at cut price to the Russians or stored in refrigerated ships off the French and Irish coasts; surplus EEC cereals have been stored in rented barns in Czechoslovakia; milk powder has been forced on dairy cows whence it came in the first place … the gap between rich and poor Community farmers has increased … the poor in the Third World are as hungry as ever, while food consumption in the West is reaching saturation point … . Ireland sends as much as 45% of its total beef production into EEC-approved intervention storehouses.4 Farmers had a field day recycling pigs across the border between Ireland, whose currency was not fixed to sterling, and Northern Ireland. They picked up subsidies day after day for the same animal (a ‘hard’ border even then was an invitation for fraud and smuggling). The farming lobby was powerful, politically as well as commercially in most members of the Common Market, in Germany as much as in France,

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but least of all in Britain. Yet there seemed no end to the fantasies, encouraged by Eurocrats’ gratuitous meddling, that were written about alleged threats to British favourites – the British banger, the pint of beer, the pint of milk and the bent banana – all fuelling hostility to the ‘Brussels bureaucrats’. Sarah Helm, the Independent’s correspondent based in Brussels, described how in the mid-1990s, she was asked to follow up stories written by her colleague, Boris Johnson, then the Telegraph’s correspondent. ‘At that time learning about Euro-myths – smaller condoms, square strawberries, fishermen forced to wear hairnets – took up more time than explaining treaty changes,’ she recalled.5 The Danish rejection in a referendum of the Maastricht treaty was attributed to thoroughly misleading articles written by Johnson in 1992. ‘The biggest whopper of all’ was the claim that Delors planned ‘to rule Europe’. The Danes voted Yes to the treaty in a second referendum a year later after they secured four opt-outs. Aggressive and fictitious articles in the British press became the established, though phoney, truth. The proportion of the Brussels budget spent on agriculture gradually fell as more was spent on infrastructure and industrial regeneration projects in the EU’s poor areas. (This was not reflected in the vote in Britain’s EU referendum when Ebbw Vale and Merthyr Tydfil, two big beneficiaries of EU funds, voted heavily in favour of Brexit. Given the reluctance of British public bodies, including local authorities directly benefitting from them to advertise EU grants, it is unlikely that many of the inhabitants were aware of them. Bernard Ingham’s former pleas had been discarded long ago.) European Commission officials not involved in agriculture were idly waiting for the member governments to show some interest in other potential common policies. I once interviewed a Commission official responsible for shipping policy for a magazine article. His office consisted of a pile of tennis rackets and a catalogue of fine art sales. He had a pencil on his desk, in quiet anticipation, he said, of future work. Many Commission officials were left to their own devices, tempted to draw up plans to harmonize anything that came to mind. The British media, egged on by a growing number of backbench MPs, criticized a ‘bloated Brussels bureaucracy’. Yet even at the time of writing in 2018, there were fewer staff in the Commission, some 30,000, than the

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total number employed by many English boroughs. The trouble was that enthusiastic Commission officials could not stop announcing initiatives without explaining what it was trying to do and why. Frustrated officials with time on their hands came up with endless proposals to harmonize more and more products and policies. Eurocrats even came up with the idea of a ‘common European’ history text book. I wrote a piece for the Guardian wondering how the Battle of Waterloo could be given such treatment – concluding that the battle was a draw, perhaps. It was not entirely fanciful since the French always insisted there were in fact two battles: the first won was by Napoleon; the second the Duke of Wellington won thanks only to the late intervention of the Prussian, Marshal Blucher. Waterloo – ‘the sacred water wood’ in Flemish – is a few miles south of Brussels. Visitors were bemused then by the number of cafes and chip stalls named after Napoleon with just one, run-down, snack bar named after Wellington. In many ways, Brussels was a journalist’s paradise. For a budding journalist, there was no shortage of stories. Every story was, and would remain, both ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’, that is, important in terms of British politics, both domestically and internationally. Brussels was full, not only, we thought, of the brightest journalists but also of the brightest diplomats – and spies – from many nations, advancing their careers in the home of both the Common Market and NATO. Some remained good and trusted contacts for many years as they reached to the top of their profession. For British journalists flying into Brussels for European ministers’ meetings and summits, it was an uncomfortable experience. Their attitude seemed to be that Westminster, let alone Britain, was the centre of the universe. For British ministers and officials, used to compliant, even craven, journalists at home, Brussels was a culture shock. When he was foreign secretary, David Owen complained to me about the hostility, as he saw it, of Brussels-based British journalists towards the British government. He compared us unfavourably with what he regarded as the more ‘patriotic’ (i.e. compliant) approach adopted by journalists from other Common Market member states and London-based British journalists towards their governments. British ministers and officials could not control the European agenda and how to spin it. They could not impose official secrecy. It was not in their hands.

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That was a significant cause of the growing antipathy between Westminster and Brussels. Whitehall’s assumption that we would always toe the line, as our Westminster or Whitehall-based colleagues invariably did, was counter-productive. If British ministers or official spokespeople would not tell you what was going on, then a Dutch, French or German one would, with their own country’s spin and interpretation of events. The Irish, who had been in hock to Britain and the British market for so long, now revelled in embarrassing their dominant neighbour. Ireland enjoyed having new European partners with similar interests, agriculture in particular. Irish officials – together with those from other small countries – did not at all mind embarrassing what they regarded as their haughty British opposite numbers through judicious leaks to the British media. For decades, Ireland had been an unequal partner in trade in farm products vital to the Irish economy. Now the terms of trade were decided in Brussels where Ireland was, in principle, an equal partner to Britain. Encouraged by the confidence Common Market membership gave their country, Irish diplomats relished in adopting a policy of openness, especially when it was at the expense of British secretiveness. (Ireland’s attachment to Europe was to become an emotional as well as practical issue in Britain’s Brexit negotiations.) A few British officials based in Brussels eventually got the message and began to give their own unauthorized off-the-record, unattributable (and therefore deniable) briefings. They were less likely to be found out in the Brussels’ Tower of Babel. One senior British official warned: ‘I won’t be briefing you like this when I get posted back to London.’ British officials are more open, he told me, the further away they are from Whitehall. He was right. The Common Market’s member states were permanently engaged in often-heated negotiations, both with each other and with the Commission. To promote their case, or simply to embarrass their European partners, they leaked. One FO document recounts how in 1972, when I was freelancing for the Guardian, FO officials ‘were surprised and irritated by the unauthorized leaking (of a British document about Eastern European attitudes towards detente in the Cold War) to Mr R. Norton-Taylor of the Guardian’. My foreign editor, Ian Wright, phoned me to say that Sir Dennis Greenhill, the top FO

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official responsible for liaising with MI6 (Lord Greenhill of Far Away we called him), wanted to know who the leaker was. I was perturbed about his tone and the suggestion, in my mind, that he would pass on the name of my contact to Greenhill. I sent my hunters, including Wright, on a wild goose chase, pointing out that I had recently been in Luxembourg following some European ministers’ meeting there. That might have been true, but it was irrelevant to their search for the culprit. I suppose I was being misleading. Leaks poured out of national delegations to the European institutions, and sometimes from the NATO headquarters, especially during long lunches. Leaks helped to counter the European institutions’ ‘democratic deficit’ – the difficulty in scrutinizing the European Council in particular, the place where decisions and laws were made without effective scrutiny by national parliaments or the European Parliament, though the latter has become much more effective since it gained more powers. The unelected Commission, always frustrated by the failure of member governments to do what it wanted, used leaks as a weapon to goad them into acting or stop ‘un-European’ activities. Theresa May’s government was a victim of one spectacular Commission leak even before the Brexit negotiations, which the prime minister vainly hoped would be secret, had started.6 Leaks, as well as open opposition, helped to sabotage Theresa May’s Brexit strategy. She wanted it to be conducted behind closed doors, between officials in London and in Brussels. Far from official secrecy coming to her defence, she became a victim of it. Secrecy, and the hopes presumptuous ministers and Whitehall officials placed in it, was a major factor behind the shambles Brexit became. The lead-up to British entry into the Common Market had been pretty harmonious. Robert Armstrong, Edward Heath’s principal private secretary, recalled years later how on the evening of 28 October 1971, after securing a surprisingly healthy Commons majority vote in favour of joining the Common Market, the prime minister returned to Downing Street. After briefly acknowledging his staff, he went straight upstairs to his clavichord to play for his father and his brother and a few close friends the first prelude in C major from the first book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.

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That was the way Heath celebrated what he regarded as his biggest achievement. The following year, Parliament passed the European Communities Act – a short, twelve-clause, measure that gave EU law supremacy over UK national law in what was to become a colossal hostage to fortune. It was one that would deeply divide his Conservative Party and subsequently the country at large. The 1972 Act was the culmination of months of working out transitional arrangements for Britain across a wide range of European policies. Britain’s two chief negotiators were two remarkable Whitehall knights: Sir Freddie Kearns, from the Ministry of Agriculture, and Sir Roy Denman, at the Department of Trade. They had sharp intellects and strong physical constitutions to match. Their negotiations took place in Brussels and Luxembourg. Journalists and negotiators stayed at the Metropole Hotel in Brussels and the Holiday Inn in Luxembourg. I remember the latter sessions particularly well. Every evening, we reported the disputes, arguments which were mainly manufactured for the benefit of public opinion, back home. We wound down at the Café du Commerce in the Place d’Armes in the centre of the grand ducal capital. ‘A bottle of Moselle, an ash tray, and the menu, in that order’. The waiters got used to our priorities. The two Whitehall knights, Kearns and Denman prepared for late-night drinking sessions in their Brussels and Luxembourg hotels. Heath’s chief political negotiator was the cigar-smoking, brandy-drinking MP, Geoffrey Rippon. Tired and impatient after a long day of negotiations, he predicted that arguments over food prices, imports of butter and lamb from New Zealand, the European budget, fishing quotas and all the other issues then dividing Britain from the Common Market would soon be consigned to the ‘ashcan of history’. Little did he know. I have described these episodes to illustrate the almost offhand, even frivolous, background to Britain’s early relations with Brussels. It was far away from the real world. If Whitehall mandarins and MI6 had their doubts and misgivings about potential conflicts – including the underlying tension between Britain’s relations with Europe and the United States – they kept them to themselves. There was no genuine or consistent open debate. Any official doubts were kept secret.

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Less than a year after Britain joined the Common Market, Europe faced a serious energy crisis, the consequence of an oil embargo imposed on Arab oil producers following the 1973 Yom Kipper war. At a European summit meeting in Copenhagen in December that year, the notoriously short-tempered Edward Heath clashed with the German chancellor, Willy Brandt, over what should have been a pretty insignificant matter – how much Britain should get from a new, enlarged European Regional Development Fund. The idea was to reduce the proportion of the European budget devoted to agriculture. Because Britain benefitted relatively little from the agricultural budget, the Heath government thought it should get a bigger share of the new regional aid fund. Brandt argued that the money should go to the poorest regions in the Common Market’s poorest countries. So fractious had been the atmosphere at the Copenhagen summit, so unnecessary was the Heath–Brandt clash in the face of the serious problems confronting European economies, that a senior Treasury official reacted with a rather un-Whitehall expletive. Sir Derek Mitchell, seconded to Downing Street at the time, reflected Whitehall’s frustration with Britain’s fellow Europeans. On the plane back to London, he described the summit as ‘Eurocrap’. The comment appeared across the front page in the following day’s Guardian. The splash headline was all the more surprising given the ostensibly puritanical proclivities of the Scottish editor, Alastair Hetherington. In 1974, Heath narrowly lost the general election. His successor, Labour’s Harold Wilson, demanded a ‘re-negotiation’ of Britain’s entry terms. In what appeared, looking back years later, like a practice run for David Cameron’s attempt in 2016 to avoid a split in the Conservative Party, Wilson decided to hold a referendum on Britain’s future in Europe to avoid a split in Labour. He had formed a minority government after an election dominated by the impact of the three-day week triggered by the miners’ strike and overshadowed by the question, ‘Who Runs Britain?’ Many years later, it might have been a question of Brussels or Westminster; in 1974, it was the trade unions or the government. Wilson had a majority of three in a second general election held in October that year. The subsequent ‘re-negotiations’ of Britain’s entry terms consisted of arcane discussions, dressed up as hugely significant, on financing the Common Market budget and reforming the common agricultural policy. Like

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the original entry talks, they were led by Kearns and Denman. Ministers stayed very much in the background. Fred Peart, Labour’s jovial Geordie agricultural minister, seemed more interested in playing snooker and singing ‘The Blaydon Races’ during late-night drinking sessions than in reforming the European farm subsidy system or renegotiating fishing quotas. Complicated formulae were eventually agreed on in a succession of badtempered European summit meetings. Wilson was a craftier politician and a more effective showman than Cameron proved to be forty-two years later. He made a big deal out of insignificant concessions. He claimed it was a triumph that Britain’s European partners had agreed not to harmonize VAT tax rates. In 2018, they were still not harmonized. Wilson told the Commons: ‘As for EMU (Economic and Monetary Union) remaining as a long-term Community objective, its realisation in the foreseeable future … is as likely as the ideal of general and complete disarmament which we all support and assert.’ His assertion seemed convincing enough at the time. What Whitehall really thought at the time, we did not know. The media, including those editors who already harboured grave doubts, did not ask. In June 1975, faced with the referendum question, ‘Do you think the UK should stay in the European Community (Common Market)?’, Britons voted ‘yes’ in the large majority of the nation’s sixty-eight administrative counties. Only Shetland and the Western Isles voted against it. Just over 67 per cent of voters supported the Labour government’s campaign to stay in the EEC, despite a number of cabinet ministers coming out in favour of British withdrawal. Margaret Thatcher sang praises of what she called the European Community. The result was hailed by Wilson as a ‘historic decision’. The subsequent Commons vote was also comfortably won by the government, by 396 votes to 170. Thatcher’s apparent enthusiasm for Europe, orchestrated as we have seen by Ingham behind the scenes when it suited the government, enabled her to claim triumphs over Britain’s partners. It did not last long. A steady drumbeat of hostile stories and speeches soon encouraged the latent, widespread hostility towards almost everything emanating from Brussels. In 1988, she chose a speech to my alma mater, the College of Europe in Bruges, to denounce the European Commission and all its talk of supranationalism and federalism. As

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she put it, ‘It must seem rather like inviting Genghis Khan to speak on the virtues of peaceful coexistence!’. She called instead for ‘willing and active cooperation between independent sovereign states’. Her speech was not as hostile as commentators have since claimed. In a passage with sentiments never uttered since by a Conservative leader, Thatcher told her audience in Bruges’ magnificent medieval town hall: ‘Britain does not dream of some cosy, isolated existence on the fringes of the European Community. Our destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community.’7 Thatcher became a robust supporter of the Single European Act, a significant merging of national sovereignty. It became a central issue many years later in the disputes over Brexit and the EU’s ‘four freedoms’ – of goods, capital, services and labour. I was reminded about Thatcher’s remarks and her enthusiastic support for a European single market when Charles Powell, her foreign policy adviser who had seemed to make a virtue out of Euroscepticism, went out of his way during the 2016 EU referendum campaign to say that his former boss would have voted Remain. Thatcher insisted in her Bruges speech that it would still be necessary to keep national measures ‘to protect our citizens and stop the movement of drugs, of terrorists, of illegal immigrants’. But her speech led to the setting up of the Bruges Group of increasingly aggressive Eurosceptic Conservative MPs, and their supporters owed a lot to ill-judged and ultimately self-defeating rhetoric by the then president of the European Commission, the French socialist, Jacques Delors, an excessively self-regarding politician. In a statement in the Commons on 30 October 1990, the culmination of increasingly hostile rhetoric that prompted the resignation of Sir Geoffrey Howe, and her own fall from power, she told MPs: ‘The President of the Commission, Mr. Delors, said at a press conference the other day that he wanted the European Parliament to be the democratic body of the Community, he wanted the Commission to be the Executive and he wanted the Council of Ministers to be the Senate. No. No. No.’ In a devastating resignation speech by the deputy prime minister, Sir Geoffrey Howe, who she had already unceremoniously sacked from his post of foreign secretary, he told the Commons, ‘We commit a serious error if we think always in terms of “surrendering” sovereignty and seek to stand pat for

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all time on a given deal … by proclaiming, as the prime minister did two weeks ago, that we have “surrendered enough”’. He added: ‘The European enterprise is not and should not be seen like that – as some kind of zero-sum game’. And in a devastating passage, Howe told MPs: ‘It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.’ Ministers and Whitehall officials alike, especially in the FO, wanted to stay in the Common Market, but on their own terms. Having joined an influential club, they wanted to change the rules, having their cake and eating it. In the end, they did not succeed, yet for top diplomats in the FO, the Whitehall department which became tied to Brussels more than any other, staying in the club was essential. Sir Nicholas Henderson, who had been British ambassador in Bonn, Paris and Washington, wrote in his autobiography8: ‘Suez imposed a severe strain upon the code of loyal service to political masters. The same would, I think, apply if a future government was to adopt an extremely radical policy, such as withdrawal from the European Community or Nato.’ Sir Michael Palliser, the head of the British mission to the Community in Brussels, said publicly during the 1975 referendum campaign that he would resign if the vote went against continued British membership. Brexiteers seized on the resignation of Sir Ivan Rogers, one of Palliser’s successors who resigned in early 2017 in protest, it seemed, at the government’s handling of the Brexit process, as evidence that the knights of the FO had sold out to Brussels. The FO was closest to Brussels, but it was furthest away from groundlevel back home in Britain. FO diplomats suffered from a kind of Stockholm syndrome – they could have persuaded Britain’s twenty-seven partners to be more generous and accommodating about EU reform before the 2016 referendum, and persuaded David Cameron to be tougher rather than warning him to be cautious in what he demanded. Had the French been in Cameron’s position, they would have got away with being much more confident and demanding, as de Gaulle had so clearly demonstrated in the past. The FO was not alone in wanting Britain to remain in the EU. Western intelligence agencies competed against each other and had very different views about the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In Britain, senior MI5 officers strongly opposed

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the invasion believing, as we shall see, that it would increase the terror threat in Britain. This did not prevent them from cooperating ever closer to confront terrorism and, belatedly, cyberattacks. With the single exception of Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 during the disastrous invasion of Iraq, they were united in their strong opposition to Brexit. British security and intelligence agencies, including GCHQ, had a lot to offer their European counterparts about antiterrorist operations. MI5 and British police forces were better in appreciating the need to engage with communities, notably the congregations of mosques and their imams, than their counterparts in other EU countries, especially France. At the same time, MI5 and the Met police’s counterterrorism command, also relied on the EU’s joint intelligence-gathering bodies, including Europol. The former head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, told Daily Telegraph readers during the 2016 EU referendum campaign that as a ‘lifelong patriot’, he would vote Remain.9 His predecessor, Sir John Scarlett, agreed, telling readers of the Times that Britain should stay in the EU. ‘I do know’, said Nigel Inkster, a former director of MI6 ‘that the intelligence community places enormous value on exchanges’ with intelligence agencies of other EU countries, notably over information on suspected terrorists or violent extremists. Existing EU agreements on sharing datasets would have to be renegotiated on a bilateral basis, he said.10 Inkster acknowledged that European countries would share vital intelligence in the event of a major security threat. He warned: ‘You cannot predict which of the allies have a crucial [piece of information]’. Sir David Omand, Whitehall’s former chief security and intelligence coordinator, pointed out that after the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2014, the British government had actually agreed actually to step up cooperation in the EU by signing the Prüm Convention – sometimes called Schengen III – covering data exchanges on DNA and vehicle registrations. MI5 and MI6 chiefs acknowledge privately that Europol, which holds huge amounts of data on convicted and suspected criminals and their activities, is an extremely valuable EU agency with which a post-Brexit Britain would need to maintain the same links as it had before. Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, said that claims by Eurosceptics that the UK would be safer outside the EU were ‘nonsensical and spurious’. ‘To leave would present real risks to our security and safety,’ she said.

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Britain’s last European commissioner, Sir Julian King, a former ambassador to France and to Ireland, was made responsible for the ‘security union’. It was a sensible appointment by the commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, given Britain’s experience in the field. In a speech in early 2017, King emphasized how crucial it was for all European countries to cooperate effectively. ‘The terrorist who murdered twelve people at a Christmas market in Berlin a few weeks ago was on the radar of both German and Italian security’, he said. ‘We now know he was using as many as fourteen different identities. What if information sharing had been better in early December? One of the main perpetrators of the Bataclan Theatre attack in Paris was stopped at police checkpoints but allowed to go free because the officers examining his papers did not know about his terrorist links. What if those officers had been directed to check not just one database but several – would the subsequent attacks in Brussels have been thwarted?’ Referring to British moves after the Brexit referendum, King continued: ‘We have stepped up our fight against cybercrime with a new specialist unit at Europol which has already scored a number of successes in dismantling international crime networks. … The UK’s decision late last year to opt-in to Europol’s new regulation was, I believe, good for the UK and good for everybody.’11 King later warned that European arrest warrants and cooperation with Europol were integral parts of the EU with implications for Britain when it left.12 It said a lot about the mood in the country, and the nature of the debate during the EU referendum campaign in 2016 that a majority of voters – and editors of national newspapers – ignored the warnings of the heads of the security and intelligence agencies. Leading Brexiteers and their grass roots supporters around Britain were so hostile and distrustful of the establishment that they were prepared to ignore warnings even from agencies they might normally be expected to strongly support. In her government’s Article 50 letter to the EU triggering Brexit, Theresa May said ominously: ‘In security terms the failure to reach agreement would mean our cooperation in the fight against crime and terrorism would be weakened. In this kind of scenario, both the United Kingdom and the EU would of course cope with the change, but it is not the outcome that either

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side should seek’. With a hint of blackmail, the government milked Britain’s contribution to European security and defence. The reality was that Britain needed the cooperation of EU members, as much as they needed ours. British entry was meant to shake up the whole European project, give a new lease of life to the European institutions and inject them with a dose of traditional Anglo-Saxon no-nonsense pragmatism. The European Parliament took the message by introducing a Question Time, including written questions to individual commissioners, modelled on the House of Commons. It is deeply ironic that as the Commons struggled to play a proper role during Brexit negotiations – despite the Brexiteers’ slogan about ‘bringing back control’ – the European Parliament, dismissed by British MPs as a talking shop, increased its powers, including the right to veto a final Brexit settlement. For too long, complacent diplomats and Eurocrats were allowed to arrange deals and propose new common policies without being held to account by anyone. In 2013, many years after I left Brussels, I heard the US political scientist and former presidential national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski tell an international conference in Bratislava: ‘The European Union is a Union more of banks rather than of people, more of commercial convenience than an emotional commitment of the European peoples.’ I knew what he meant. Many good things have come out of Brussels. They included measures to protect the environment, consumer rights, human rights, the break-up of multinational company price-fixing cartels, cooperation in research and development, and the Erasmus programme promoting student exchanges across universities throughout the EU. In 1968, John Lambert, my first journalist colleague and fellow College of Europe alumnus, wrote a book with what now seems a most provocative title, Britain in a Federal Europe. He concluded: ‘The younger generation is open to Europe and its possibilities. The hitch-hikers of all kinds who spend their university vacations travelling, or go looking for work elsewhere in Europe, are no longer thinking in terms of war which was not theirs and of which they remember nothing. The older generation, the war generation, has to adapt itself to them and their world.’13 There was little sign of that in Britain when it turned away and moved towards Brexit. So much of the Brexit debate was spent looking back to a past that seemed so much more comfortable. Sceptical Whitehall civil servants

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responsible for negotiating future trade deals were reported to refer to the notion of ‘Empire 2.0’. As we shall see, much of that past is being hidden by Whitehall with disclosures only the result of court cases rather any concession to open government. So much of the Brexit debate was about looking back to claims that Brussels was ordering Britain about. Or as the Brexiteer Conservative MP Peter Bone whipped up one rally: ‘We didn’t fight two world wars to be subservient’. Britain’s security and intelligence chiefs – the securocracy – wanted the country to remain in the EU, as we have seen, to make the country more secure, not more subservient. The trouble was they were no longer held in the regard they once were, not least because of the false intelligence trumpeted by ministers before the invasion of Iraq, and the wall of official secrecy preventing any proper debate about their role and responsibilities.

4 The culture and language of secrecy

The Old Bailey, 30 January 1985. ‘In highly charged political matters, one person’s ambiguity may be another person’s truth’ – Richard Mottram, private secretary to the defence secretary, Michael Heseltine. Sir Ian (later Lord) Bancroft, Head of the Civil Service in the 1970s, once described how much he enjoyed Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. ‘I actually believe as I get older that life is very much like the Anthony Powell novels in that you keep meeting the same people over and over again but under different circumstances’. Mottram (later Sir Richard) may have been honest enough to admit to Whitehall foibles but he could well have been one of many private secretaries Bancroft might have had in mind. The extent to which senior civil servants spend time, money and energy avoiding the truth was perfectly demonstrated in the way the Thatcher government dissembled over the circumstances surrounding the sinking of the Argentine cruiser, the General Belgrano, during the 1982 Falklands conflict. A senior MoD civil servant, Clive Ponting, was tried at the Old Bailey with breaking the Official Secrets Act. Mottram was summoned by the prosecution to give evidence.

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Troubled by the way ministers were withholding the truth about the attack on the Belgrano – essentially that it was steaming away from the Falklands at the time and that British ships could have saved some of the Argentine sailors who drowned – Ponting sent a note to the Labour backbencher Tam Dalyell. The ever-persistent Dalyell had been asking questions in Parliament about the circumstances surrounding the torpedoing of the cruiser by the British submarine HMS Conqueror. In his note, Ponting encouraged the Labour MP to continue tabling questions to ministers and suggested how to draft them. Dalyell passed Ponting’s note to Sir Anthony Kershaw, Conservative MP and chairman of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, the appropriate body, he believed, to investigate the matter. In a move that quintessentially demonstrated Parliament’s deference to the executive on anything remotely to do with security matters, Kershaw responded to what he considered disloyal action by a civil servant by immediately passing Dalyell’s note to the MoD. Kershaw’s priority was not to get to the truth, but to identify the official who tried to blow the whistle on Whitehall’s cover-up. The assumption that backbench MPs will protect Whitehall whistle-blowers is misplaced. I show in the following chapter how in a later official secrets case, a Labour MP responded in a very similar way to Kershaw. Among the many examples of Whitehall wordplay that emerged during Ponting’s trial was the unashamed assurance by Sir Clive Whitmore, the MoD’s most senior official at the time and formerly Thatcher’s private secretary, that a misleading letter to the opposition defence secretary, Denzil Davies, about the attack on the Belgrano did not contain ‘a direct lie’. The quote at the beginning of this chapter was a particularly colourful example of Whitehall’s approach to the art. During the trial, Bruce Laughland QC, Ponting’s defence counsel, questioned Mottram about answers to parliamentary questions: ‘It has long been the constitutional practice that the answer is a truthful one?’, asked Laughland. Mottram: ‘Yes’. Laughland: ‘And not deliberately ambiguous or misleading?’ Mottram (pause): ‘In highly-charged political matters, one person’s ambiguity may be another person’s truth’.

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Mottram subsequently enjoyed an illustrious career in Whitehall, ending up as chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee. He had been appointed permanent secretary – the department’s top official – at the MoD before moving on to the Department for the Environment, Transport and the Regions. While there, he was embroiled in a controversy which might have ended the career of a less able and confident civil servant. On 11 September 2001, the day of the Al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New York and on the Pentagon, Jo Moore, special adviser to the transport secretary, Stephen Byers, sent an email to the department’s press office headed by Martin Sixsmith. ‘It’s now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury’, she advised. In the ensuing row, Sixsmith and Moore resigned. Sixsmith revealed that Mottram commented to a colleague at the time: ‘We’re all fucked. I’m fucked. You’re fucked. The whole department is fucked. It’s the biggest cock-up ever. We’re all completely fucked.’ Such frankness didn’t do Mottram any harm. Whitehall culture may be changing, slowly. In my time it was a bastion of privilege. It was not based on class or on money. But it remains a club. Its doors are firmly locked, from the inside. Outsiders, including MPs and journalists, have to bang very hard to enter, even for a brief visit. Those inside – the mandarins of the permanent government – have many weapons to protect their privileges and power. One that is seriously underestimated is language. It is used to cover up, delay, obfuscate, stall, avoid commitment and bolster official secrecy. In his observation on the novels of Anthony Powell, Bancroft was referring to Whitehall’s high-flyers who start their careers in ministers’ private offices, a perfect vantage point from which to launch a successful career. They are the eyes and ears of ministers gathering vital intelligence and telling their political masters what is going in the Whitehall village. They form an elite network, privately communicating with each other about what their ministers are up to. They can subvert their elected bosses, not least by deciding what official papers go the bottom of a busy minister’s red box at night, and what is placed at the top of the pile. They decide what information to pass on to ministers, and what to withhold. Though they pay homage to parliamentary democracy, many do not respect it. Indeed, they do their best quietly to subvert it. Sir David Hancock,

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a senior Treasury official (later appointed permanent secretary – the most senior official – at the Department of Education) was just one Whitehall mandarin I heard strongly opposed to devolution before the Scottish Parliament and Welsh and Northern Ireland Assemblies were set up on the grounds that ‘the fewer elections the better’ – meaning the less interference, the fewer challenges to Whitehall’s quietly ordered life, with as many decisions as possible taken in secret, the better. Permanent civil servants, transient ministers, and their special political advisers – ‘spads’ – share the same interest in withholding information from Parliament, the media and the public. One of the worst examples I encountered, I repeat, concerned evidence that MI5, MI6 and Britain’s Special Forces were involved in the secret rendition, and subsequent torture, of terror suspects in cooperation with the CIA. Officials were determined to conceal from ministers how British security and intelligence agencies were breaking British and international law, and they succeeded. Sir Patrick Nairne was a Whitehall mandarin I respected for his intellectual honesty. He went straight to the point. ‘The secrecy culture of Whitehall’, he acknowledged, ‘is essentially a product of British parliamentary democracy; economy with the truth is the essence of a professional reply to a parliamentary answer.’ Answering parliamentary questions, a senior civil servant, Eric Beston, told the Scott inquiry was ‘an art form’. It is an expensive one, too, since it takes longer to draft a form of words which gives away as little as possible (without actually directly lying) than to tell the truth. Officials use the concept of parliamentary sovereignty as a way to impose secrecy. The government must tell MPs before it tells the public. But the government controls both the parliamentary timetable (Brexit was an exception) and how much information should be released to MPs. One trick is for ministers, encouraged by their officials, to slip out parliamentary answers or written statements on controversial issues on the eve of parliamentary recesses, known as ‘take out the trash’ day. It is not as crude as the Jo Moore case, rather a routine and unashamed attempt to honour their obligations to publish statements and answer parliamentary questions, but doing so at a time when MPs would not have the opportunity to scrutinize them. On the eve of the Commons summer recess in July 2017, to take one

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example, ministers slipped out a string of written statements. They included the FO’s annual human rights report that was critical of Saudi Arabia (with the clear inference the government was breaking its own guidelines by selling warplanes and bombs to the country), the scope of new anti-terrorism and immigration laws, and a further round of cuts in the number of police officers and soldiers in the British army. The art of answering parliamentary questions, and how not to, was brilliantly exposed during the Scott arms-to-Iraq inquiry. Presiley Baxendale QC, counsel to the inquiry – described at the time as possessing the most mellifluous name in the Bar – questioned David Gore-Booth, a top diplomat summoned to give evidence from Saudi Arabia where he was Britain’s ambassador. ‘Can I ask you’, Baxendale asked, ‘about asking questions in parliament? If there is a question, it should be fully answered, should it not? The answer should be sufficiently full to give a true meaning?’ Gore-Booth: ‘Questions should be answered so as to give the maximum degree of satisfaction possible to the questioner.’ Baxendale: ‘I am not sure you really mean that, because that is rather like people just giving you the answer you want to hear…. I do not think you quite mean that.’ Gore-Booth: ‘No, it might be the answer you do not want to hear.’ Baxendale: ‘That does not give you much satisfaction. Should the answer be accurate?’ Gore-Booth: ‘Of course.’ Baxendale: ‘And they should not be half the picture?’ Gore-Booth: ‘They might be half the picture. You said: “Should they be accurate? And I said: “Yes, they should.”’ Baxendale: ‘Do you think that half the picture is accurate?’ Gore-Booth: ‘Of course half the picture can be accurate.’ The bit between her teeth, Baxendale pursued her line of questioning when the cabinet secretary, Sir Robin (now Lord) Butler, was called to give evidence. She reminded him that in a written statement to the inquiry he had asserted: ‘The government should always give as full information to Parliament as possible and should take care, save in the most exceptional circumstances,

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not to give a false or misleading answer. Answers should also be sufficiently full to avoid giving a misleading account of an issue’. Baxendale asked whether this covered a ‘half answer’. Butler replied: ‘What I am saying is, if you are asked a question about a particular subject, you can never give, in an answer, all there is to know about that subject. You have to be selective about the facts’. There were circumstances when it was justified to give ‘half an answer’, although, he added, ‘you should try not to mislead’. Butler offered as an example, government denials in 1993 that it had ‘negotiated’ with the IRA. What it had done was approve ‘informal contacts’ with IRA and Sinn Fein leaders, including Martin McGuinness. That, agreed, Butler, did not give ‘a complete picture’ but given the sensitivities surrounding the issue, most MPs indicated that it was a reasonable answer. He added: ‘I would have thought that an answer that there had been no negotiations with the IRA would have been an answer which was half the truth. I was really thinking of the David Gore-Booth instance … . Half the picture. Half the picture can be true’. Scott intervened. ‘A tenth of the picture can be true if it does not matter that the whole picture is being perceived in a sense that it is different from the truth. The percentage of the picture that you give is immaterial.’ Butler replied: ‘These are difficult lines to draw. It is not justified to mislead, but very often one is finding oneself in a position where you have to give an answer that is not the whole truth, but falls short of misleading’. It may have been a surprise to Butler, but not to the outside world, that journalists described his evidence in less than flattering terms. He responded by describing the media coverage as ‘distorted, wild, prejudiced’. We later used these words in a motif on a tie we presented to the leading characters involved, including Butler, when the Scott inquiry was all over. It was at the inquiry and in what seemed like the last word not on the media but on moral philosophy that Ian McDonald, who had been the MoD’s spokesman during the Falklands conflict and was now a top official responsible for arms sales, explained: ‘Truth is a very difficult concept.’ After Scott suggested that secrecy from a government’s point of view was simply a matter of convenience, Butler replied: ‘You can call it a matter of convenience if you like. I would call it a matter of being in the interests of good

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government’. It depends, of course, what is meant by ‘good government’, and who makes the claim. Gore-Booth gave the game away when he explained why the Thatcher government did not want to reveal it had relaxed its guidelines on exports of military and other goods to Saddam’s Iraq. There were all sorts of reasons why the Iraqis were not very popular, he said, adding: ‘Kurds, chemical warfare, and so on.’ Among the documents the government disclosed to Scott was a memo written in 1988 by one of Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe’s private secretaries. He warned about the danger of revealing the government’s change of policy towards Saddam Hussein at the very time it had publicly criticized the chemical weapons attack by Iraqi planes on the Kurdish town of Halabja killing an estimated 5,000 civilians. ‘It could look very cynical’, advised Howe’s private secretary, ‘if, so soon after expressing outrage over the Iraqi treatment of the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales.’ Scott asked Howe if he thought that would appear cynical. ‘I do not think so, no’, replied the foreign secretary. He added: ‘The fact is that, as soon as you are embarked upon the necessary policy, in competition with other nations, of enhancing a commercial position … any attempt to enlarge that base is capable of being criticized by others’. Howe suggested that other countries were selling more equipment to Iraq than Britain Scott: ‘Can this not be explained to the public in a manner that the public would understand?’ Howe: ‘Not easily. Not if you visualize the emotional way in which such debates are conducted in public.’ In common with officials in Whitehall and in local government, ministers use secrecy as a weapon to avoid embarrassment and to cover up mistakes. Secrecy, as Howe suggested, also makes for an easy life. What made Scott and other inquiries so entertaining as well as revealing was the way officials, unused to speaking in public, unwittingly expose a mindset completely oblivious of their effect on the outside world. It was evident during the Macpherson inquiry into the murder of the black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, that such a casual attitude extended even to senior police officers. Asked if it was correct that he had no surviving evidence

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on the case, Inspector Groves, a Metropolitan Police officer involved in the bungled and shameful murder investigation, replied: ‘I still have the clipboard. I don’t have any notes.’ At the Scott inquiry, Christopher Sandars, a senior MoD official, had told the judge: ‘I don’t think we should wish to encourage debate ourselves as officials.’ Eric Beston, an official in the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), explained: ‘I think there was an element of mutual reinforcement of belief or misunderstanding … . I quite simply misled myself on what I thought the situation was.’ Butler echoed Beston’s explanation years later when he said Blair and the intelligence community had ‘misled themselves’ over Saddam Hussein’s weapons programme. The phrase soon entered the Whitehall lexicon. After Beston, it was the turn of another hapless official – Andrew Leithead, also of the DTI. Scott asked him who regarded it as damaging to the public interest to have any Whitehall decision-making process revealed. ‘I think it is the general view of people who deal with this subject’. Scott continued: ‘Is this approach bred of a desire for convenient administration?’ Leithead: ‘I think so, yes.’ Scott then asked about ‘public interest immunity’ (PII) certificates – strongly worded, sometimes even threatening, demands by ministers and officials for trial judges to impose gagging orders. It became clear during the Scott inquiry that ministers in successive administrations had signed these certificates as a matter of course on the dotted line whenever they were asked to do by their officials. As Leithead put it: ‘The minister either agrees or is brought to agree with the policy.’1 In one entertaining exchange, the FO minister Tristan Garel-Jones told the inquiry that disclosing information about what MI5 had been up to would cause ‘unquantifiable damage’. Should that be taken as covering ‘both unquantifiably great and also miniscule’, Scott asked. ‘Yes’, replied the unabashed minister. The Matrix Churchill trial was not the only arms-to-Iraq prosecution whose collapse provided me with good stories with the added appeal of overturning miscarriages of justice and embarrassing Whitehall. Evidence of improper

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withholding of information that emerged during the Scott inquiry led directors of Ordtec, among whom was Paul Grecian, to appeal against their conviction for selling military equipment to Iraq in breach of export controls. Given the code name Raven, Grecian had provided MI5 and MI6 with information about Iraq’s weapons programme, including attempts to build a supergun. ‘I was told that I was the source of 50% of the security services’ information about Iraq,’ Grecian said. ‘The hypocrisy is staggering, but nothing surprises me now. The people to blame are the officials behind them – the faceless people advising ministers. He wrote me a letter thanking me for my support. Without, it, he said, his successful appeal ‘could easily have been different’. Grecian’s letter was evidence of how the media can indeed make a difference. It was a lesson to editors and reporters who succumb to pressure from Whitehall or to professional cynicism. I also received appreciative letters from Ali Daghir, managing director of an international trading company called Euromac, who was convicted after a US customs sting operation of selling alleged ‘nuclear trigger’ devices to Iraq. His conviction was overturned after the court of appeal ruled that the trial judge had misdirected the jury. The conviction of Reginal Dunk, an arms dealer, was quashed after documents disclosed to the Scott inquiry revealed that senior FO officials had asked potential witnesses not to appear for the defence. One FO official, Patrick Nixon, had told a colleague: ‘I confess to innocent reluctance to connive at impeding the course of justice’. Asked by Scott whether he agreed with the adjective ‘disgraceful’ to describe Whitehall’s antics, Sir Stephen Egerton, a former senior FO Middle East expert and ambassador to Saudi Arabia, replied: ‘I would say it was a bad show.’ Customs officers gave their view about the way their prosecutions were overturned by sending a 1990 greeting card to Whitehall departments involved. Under the message ‘Happy Christmas Wishes’ there was a drawing of body lying on the floor with a knife in the back. The truth, or rather a version of it, had earlier captured headlines around the world and made Sir Robert Armstrong, Butler’s predecessor as cabinet secretary, a household name. In 1986, Armstrong was sent by Thatcher to stop a Sydney court from allowing Peter Wright, a former MI5 officer, to publish his

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memoirs, Spycatcher. It was huge mistake. On the press benches in the Sydney courtroom we could not believe our luck. In one of the most celebrated of exchanges in the annals of court cases, Armstrong was asked by Malcolm Turnbull, Wright’s pommy-bashing lawyer (and later prime minister of Australia), why he had written to the publishers, Sidgwick & Jackson, saying Thatcher wanted a copy of a book2 by Chapman Pincher, when Armstrong was already in possession of the manuscript. The letter, Turnbull suggested, ‘contains a lie’. Armstrong replied: ‘It was a misleading impression, it does not contain a lie. I don’t think.’ Turnbull: ‘What is the difference between a misleading impression and a lie?’ Armstrong: ‘A lie is a straight untruth.’ Turnbull: ‘What’s a misleading impression, a kind of bent untruth?’ Armstrong: ‘As one person said, it is perhaps being economical with the truth.’ Armstrong quickly pointed out that the phrase was not his own.3 A classic example of how ministers, carefully advised by Whitehall officials, get round answering the question occurred in July 2015. The MoD denied that Britain was bombing ISIS targets in Syria, something that would have been in breach of a Commons vote conducted two years earlier. What eventually emerged, through an FoI Act request by the human rights group Reprieve, was that though RAF planes had not been involved, British pilots had been – they were embedded with US and Canadian forces and were flying in the aircraft of those two countries. Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, tried to extricate himself from serious political embarrassment by adopting the time-honoured Whitehall tactic of counter-attack. It was ‘absolutely standard practice’ to exchange personnel with allied forces, and had been ‘since the end of World War Two’, he insisted. There was ‘no mystery about that’, and ‘most people have known.’ The MoD explained: ‘When embedded, UK personnel are effectively operating as foreign troops.’ The truth is that British armed forces personnel never regard themselves as foreign troops; they are always subject to British law and rules of engagement, and constitutionally are servants of the British Crown.

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MoD officials are past masters at responding to criticism or hostile media reports by making claims that sound extremely robust but completely avoid the question. When the BBC reported in September 2017 that the Army’s new fleet of Foxhound armoured cars – costing £1 million apiece and belatedly ordered to replace vulnerable Snatch Land Rovers in Iraq and Afghanistan – kept breaking down in the heat, the MoD replied: ‘They are keeping our soldiers safe.’ Some of them were, but how efficiently and at what cost? One well-worn attempt to counter criticism is to bombard critics with statistics. The spokesperson simply states that the Whitehall department in question was spending x billions of pounds or ‘a record’ (fill in the appropriate figure) on whatever programme or project being debated. Such answers conveniently ignore any increase in the demand for a service for example, or whether the extra money had to be spent on avoidable and wasteful mistakes. Cherry-picking statistics is a common practice, not confined to Whitehall of course. The suicide of David Kelly, the British weapons inspector outed as the source of the BBC’s story that the Iraqi weapons dossier had been ‘sexed up’, caused panic in the MoD, FO and Downing Street. Officials and ministers desperately tried to distance themselves from suggestions they were responsible for exposing him. Blair was asked by journalists: ‘Did you authorize anyone in Downing Street or in the Ministry of Defence to release David Kelly’s name?’ ‘Emphatically not’, Blair replied. ‘Nobody was authorised to name David Kelly. I believe we have acted properly throughout’.4 Evidence that Blair was personally involved in some way in the decision which led to Kelly’s unmasking as the source of the BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan’s report questioning the government’s Iraq weapons dossier came from Kevin Tebbit, top official at the MoD at the time. He told Hutton that no policy decision on how to deal with the scientist had been taken until Blair chaired a meeting in Downing Street. ‘It was only after that that any of the press people had an authoritative basis on which to proceed,’ said Tebbit. Tebbit’s testimony, in his second appearance before Hutton, was largely ignored – it emerged at a special late session of the inquiry. The Scott and Hutton inquiries and the Spycatcher case exposed Whitehall dissembling and cover-ups, with officials having to resort to a tortuous defence of their decisions – or lack of them. One central characteristic of Whitehall

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language and culture is never to commit yourself. Thus, the classic response to a general, all-embracing, question about government policy is to say that decisions are taken ‘on a case-by-case basis’. Such is the way ministers and officials have avoided answering questions about the government’s policy on arms sales, for example. The case-by-case argument sits uneasily with their sweeping generalizations, often backed up by references to carefully selected sums and statistics. Ministers and officials may refer to broad guidelines, or ‘codes of practice’, drawn up by officials who are past masters in the art of drafting loopholes. I always liked the old Whitehall gag, not at all apocryphal: an FO diplomat, faced with a delicate problem, is asked how he was going to play it. ‘By ear’, he replies. Officials train new ministers, whenever they need to avoid answering a question, to say that the matter was being kept ‘under review’. Do not commit yourself, do not tell a direct lie – these are two important rules. Whitehall mandarins are trained to have a way with words. The TV programmes Yes, Minister and its successor, Yes, Prime Minister, struck chords because they targeted the very nature of Whitehall’s unaccountable power – the ability of intellectually confident, effortlessly arrogant members of the permanent government to bamboozle, flatter and persuade ministers to come round to their way of thinking and to abandon radical proposals, including, in one notable episode, getting rid of Britain’s nuclear weapons arsenal. Whitehall officials’ deep reluctance to commit themselves is reflected in their pet phrases. ‘I hear what you say’, is a favourite. It combines the absence of commitment with the unsaid message to shut up – that there is no point in continuing the discussion, a bit like the ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you’, the timehonoured phrase attributed to theatre auditioning. When Whitehall officials describe or ‘dismiss’ a media story as ‘speculation’, you can be sure it is correct. ‘Speculation’ in effect means ‘confirmation’. Another common response is: ‘We don’t recognise’ those figures/claims/suggestions/ whatever it is Whitehall is asked to comment on. You can regularly hear the phrase from the mouths of ministers and their spokespeople. Sometimes, when the government is caught out denying something that turned out to be true, officials claim their denial was based on a ‘misunderstanding’. That is another of Whitehall’s useful catch-all phrases.

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I once asked a Whitehall spokesman to confirm what I had heard on the grapevine – namely that Sir Robert Armstrong was going to stay on as Cabinet Secretary beyond his allotted time in order to manage the handover from a Conservative government which had been in power for eighteen years to a Labour government led by a prime minister, Blair, who had never held office. It was a trivial matter really, but Armstrong’s spokespeople denied it. The following day, 10 Downing Street released a statement confirming my story. The initial denial was based on a ‘misunderstanding’, I was told. This reluctance to commit was championed by a senior Whitehall official I knew, Richard Wilding. In an article in 1979 entitled ‘The Professional Ethic of the Administrator’, he quoted the celebrated French nineteenth-century diplomat and aristocrat Charles Talleyrand. ‘Insufferable Talleyrand was, as so often, insufferably right with his “surtout pas de zèle”’ (above all, one should avoid too much zeal), wrote Wilding who added: ‘We must, I think, distinguish energy from commitment. It is absolutely necessary to pursue today’s policy with energy; it is almost equally necessary, in order to survive, to withhold from it the last ounce of commitment … and to invest that commitment in our particular institution, the Civil Service itself, with all its manifest imperfections’.5 This was anathema to his boss, Margaret Thatcher, who prided herself on being a politician ‘of convicton’. Wilding was distinctly ‘old school’ with an academic hinterland. He wrote a standard Latin grammar with his wife, and ended his career on the fringes of Whitehall at the then Office of Arts and Libraries. Wilding’s sentiments were echoed by another mandarin I came across. Sir Anthony Part, former permanent secretary at the Department of Industry, explaining his view that the Civil Service always hoped to influence ministers towards the common ground, elaborated: ‘I didn’t say towards the centre. I said towards the common ground and there’s a very important difference between the two, because the centre is literally half-way between the two poles while the common ground is the ground on which, or to which, the majority of the people can be persuaded to move.’6 While there may be few in Whitehall who have the temerity now to express their views publicly in the confident way Wilding did, the reluctance to commit remains rooted in the Whitehall culture. Whether out of personal

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ambition or that principle of detachment defended so strongly by Wilding, they are fearful of saying too much, of taking risks. For a rising Whitehall high-flyer, taking risks remains dangerous whatever your (temporary) political boss might say. You would be in danger of being marked down by your seniors as ‘not sound’. I have known many people, contemporaries, who when they first joined the Civil Service were refreshingly frank, only to become more and more secretive, increasingly wary about talking to journalists. As they climbed up the Whitehall ladder, they would choose their words more and more carefully. On matters of principle, or faced with such serious matters as going to war, they also kept quiet. When under pressure to explain themselves, they reverted to the argument that Britain was after all a democracy and it was not for unelected officials to question government policy, not in public anyway. It is for the people to decide in the next general election whether they should punish the incumbent administration. That was the argument put forward during the 1956 Suez crisis by William Armstrong, a senior Treasury official who became head of the Civil Service. William Armstrong’s protest against the invasion of Egypt following secret collusion between the British, French and Israeli governments was to wear a black tie every day. Years later, just one official – Elizabeth Wilmshurst, deputy chief legal adviser at the FO – resigned in protest against the 2003 invasion of Iraq despite widespread opposition in Whitehall. Euphemisms are a weapon widely used in Whitehall, an instrument to wield a kind of soft power. They are also used to describe real weapons. Drones are ‘remotely piloted air systems’ or RPAS the MoD insists as it tries to distance Britain from the controversies over American drone attacks – notably in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. ‘Precision weapons’ may be more accurate than traditional bombs but they still lead to what the MoD calls ‘collateral damage’ – the killing of civilians, including women and children. The MoD denied that the UK had thermobaric weapons after Iraqi forces asked Britain to supply them. The weapons, a variant of the AGM114N Hellfire missile, have been fired from British and American Apache helicopters in Afghanistan. The warhead, a mixture of chemicals and a highpressure blast system, is described by the Pentagon as ‘more effective’ against

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‘non-traditional targets; multi-room structures expected in military operations in urban terrain operations, caves, and fortified bunkers’. The MoD does not call then ‘thermobaric’ weapons – a description that clearly sounds too brutal. Instead, it calls them missiles with an ‘enhanced blast’. ‘Neutralized’, in military parlance, means ‘killed’. A ‘defensive suite’, or ‘defensive aids system’, is a mix of weapons and electronic countermeasures aircraft and warships are equipped with. Acronyms and abbreviations are also deployed. They have an added advantage of reinforcing euphemisms. They are a subcultural weapon that helps to promote a sense of exclusiveness. And they fit neatly into Whitehall’s world of departments and hierarchies. Since hierarchy and ranks are a particular feature of the military, they are most prevalent in the MoD. Thus papers there are sent to ‘C-in-C, cc ADC and PS to the S/S’, referring, respectively, to the Commander-in-Chief, with copies to the aides de camp (senior staff officers), and the Private Secretary to the Secretary of State. The MoD’s official list of acronyms and abbreviations runs to more than 400. I would not at all be surprised if officials in the ministry are tested on them as they aspire to climb up their bureaucratic hierarchy. Shorthand and codewords have been used to disguise the identity of the security and intelligence agencies. Thus, MI5 and MI6 were for years referred to as Box 500 and Box 650 – the number of their boxes at the former Post Office at 1 Parliament Street – in Whitehall, but are now more often than not simply called ‘the agencies’. MI5’s telegraphic address was ‘snuffbox’. GCHQ is sometimes referred to less cryptically as ‘Cheltenham’, its hometown. While the letters, MI, stand for ‘military intelligence’ and the number referred originally to a particular section, GCHQ stands for the Government Communications Headquarters, a wonderfully imprecise description of the powerful worldwide electronic eavesdropping agency. It grew out of the wartime Government Code & Cypher School, based at Bletchley Park, whose stunning achievements were protected by the utmost secrecy though its name made it pretty clear what its task was. The organization which ran agents in occupied Europe was first disguised by the innocuous-sounding Inter-Services Research Bureau, and only later named the more straightforward (and as far as the enemy was concerned, perhaps more exotic and threatening) Special Operations Executive.

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Alert officials have been quick to see dangers ahead when conjuring up titles. New Labour’s Department of Constitutional Affairs might have been named the Constitutional Affairs Department, or CAD. The order of words was reversed. Similarly, officials warned that the Northern Ireland Police Service – the proposed new name for the Royal Ulster Constabulary – might not be a good idea. Headlines along the lines of ‘Caught by the NIPS’ might not go down well. So we have, instead, the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Privately, officials have revelled in the delights that acronyms can bring. John Major’s Policy of Non-Cooperation in Europe in the mid-1990s was given the acronym PONCE by the FO whose diplomats suffered most from it. Civil servants sometimes go for the straightforward option of simply changing a name. I have mentioned how Windscale, the nuclear reactor and reprocessing plant in Cumbria whose image was permanently damaged by a serious fire, became Sellafield and how the MoD changed the name of the drones it bought from the United States from Predator to Protector. On other occasions, among all the euphemisms, semantics and acronyms, Whitehall officials (rather like barristers who are described, inappropriately, as ‘briefs’) rely on prolixity – as many words as possible to get themselves out of a corner. They might have learned from the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit, described by Dickens as a ‘school for gentlemen’. Thus, David GoreBooth, albeit with tongue in cheek (or perhaps not) defended changes in the guidelines for arms exports to Iraq by describing them as a ‘very vigorous implementation of a flexible interpretation’. Certainly, writing ‘briefs’, of any length, for ministers is an essential requirement for a successful Whitehall mandarin. A Whitehall draft travels all the way up through the hierarchy, getting blander and blander as the officials avoid taking risks or upsetting their rivals elsewhere in their department, or their political masters. Briefs often betray a class – for example officials may ask their correspondent to reply to a note or memo by ‘close of play’, or even COP, sporting references familiar only to those who play or follow cricket. Many in the Whitehall village traditionally have done. Those who have not soon learn at least about references to the game. Delay is another powerful weapon in the hands of Whitehall. The simple device of not returning telephone calls can sabotage an attempt to get an

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answer to an embarrassing or unwelcome attempt in time for media deadlines, as journalists know only too well. ‘They never ring back!’ was a wise prompt to fix prominently on a journalist’s desk. The Chilcot inquiry into the invasion of Iraq is a striking example of how Whitehall can use delay and obstruction to sabotage independent inquiries and investigations – with the craven support of the prime minister. It was only after persistent pressure from sections of the media and a few MPs that Gordon Brown finally agreed to an inquiry into the invasion of Iraq. Whitehall advised him it should be conducted in private. The outcry this provoked, stimulated by open hearings in investigations by the US Congress on the way Bush had led his country to war, ensured that the vast majority of the evidence sessions were heard in public. Brown had relented, but Whitehall succeeded in getting one of its former own to chair the inquiry. Sir John Chilcot, a former Whitehall insider who ended his career as permanent secretary at the Northern Ireland, accepted stringent ‘protocols’ preventing the inquiry from disclosing information that ‘would, or would be likely to cause harm or damage to the public interest.’ The protocols were an invitation to sweep under the carpet any information that might be embarrassing politically or diplomatically. Crucially, Whitehall had the last word. Paragraph 15 of the protocols contained this key passage: ‘Where no agreement is reached about a form in which the information can be published, the inquiry shall not release that information into the public domain. In such circumstances, it would remain open to the inquiry to refer, in its report, to the fact that material it would have wishes to publish has been withheld.’ Chilcot in the end surprised observers by his tenacity. He clearly was anxious to leave a positive legacy behind him. The uncomfortable experience of public inquiries, including those investigating the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the sale of arms-related goods to Iraq, encouraged Whitehall officials to persuade ministers to rein them in. The 2005 Inquiries Act gave ministers a greater say over the setting up of public inquiries, who would chair them, their terms of reference and how long they should last. Dr Richard Stone, a panel member on the Macpherson inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s murder has described how the Home Office withheld evidence. ’For me, the most frustrating story which cries out for an explanation

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is the absence from public scrutiny of the transcripts, the correspondence files, and the rest of the archive for more than five years’, he recalled.7 Britain’s top civil servants pride themselves on being non-partisan, politically neutral. They point to other countries, and notably the United States, where a change of administration leads to a mass changeover of officials. But the contrast is not quite so clear-cut. Since Thatcher first attempted to shake up Whitehall, there has been a steady increase in the number of special advisers as ministers have sought an alternative source of advice. The issue came to a head in July 2019 with Boris Johnson’s appointment of Dominic Cummings, the outspoken former director of Vote Leave during the 2016 EU referendum campaign, as his senior adviser. But controversies over special advisers in Downing Street were not new. Despite his huge Commons majority, Tony Blair was so anxious about the apparent threat Whitehall posed to his administration when he came to power in 1997 that he drew up ‘Orders in Council’, based on ancient Crown prerogative, allowing two of his closest political advisers – Alastair Campbell, his chief spin-doctor, and Jonathan Powell, his chief of staff – the authority to tell professional career civil servants what to do. Sir Robin Butler, the cabinet secretary, made it clear he was deeply unhappy about the move. Butler told me that the trouble with Blair and his small coterie of trusted advisers is that they behaved as though they were still in opposition, despite the government’s resounding election victory. Butler blocked Blair’s original suggestion that Powell should become the prime minister’s principal private secretary, thereby preventing Powell, officially at least, from getting access to intelligence reports. In 1999, just two years after becoming prime minister, Blair had complained about ‘scars on my back’ from civil servants who stood in his way. His complaint pointed to his own great weakness as a leader – his failure to ensure that the decisions he took on the domestic front were actually implemented and, as in the case of the invasion of Iraq, his failure to think through the consequences of his decisions. The six surviving holders of the post of Cabinet Secretary met on 30 November 2016 to mark the hundredth anniversary of the creation of the role. ‘Like their fictional counterpart, Sir Humphrey Appleby, they kept the wheels of government spinning, channeling the will of the Prime Minister down to the

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Civil Service and the advice of the Civil Service back up’, wrote John Colville, editor of the website CapX. ‘If there were a collective noun for them, it would surely be “an Establishment”.’ Colville concluded: ‘It is as if one of the unwritten rules of the British constitution is that every Prime Minister will end up with their own Sergeant Wilson (a reference to a character in the long-running BBC TV show Dad’s Army) – a polite, competent and perhaps faintly patronizing figure, whispering sage advice in their ear. But is the fact that this model of government has – despite occasional tinkering – gone essentially unchanged for all those decades a sign that the system is working? Or just that it’s very good at looking after itself?’8 Cabinet secretaries have been, and are likely to remain, the chief gatekeeper of the nation’s official secrets. They were also supposed to be defenders of proper, recorded, collective cabinet decision-making. That is why Butler and his contemporaries objected to Blair’s style of what came to be known as ‘sofa government’, with key decisions taken informally by a group of political advisers rather than through formal meetings with official minute-takers. Blair wanted to take decisions with a bunch of close and trusted advisers accountable to no one but himself. When he was cabinet secretary and head of the Civil Service, Butler was asked by a student what the British constitution was. He replied: ‘It is something we make up as we go along.’9 I watched the Whitehall establishment, in its cosy world, blissfully ignorant of scientific and technological developments, information technology (IT) in particular. This was true even of MI5 and MI6, and inevitably of the MoD which, as we shall see, have wasted billions of pounds on ill-conceived projects. If they and the Whitehall mandarins did not understand technology, ministers understood it even less. Many years ago, in the early 1970s, Ralf Dahrendorf, European Commissioner responsible for education and research and a pioneering German post-war political scientist, told me that the inability of elected politicians to understand technology was one of the most important problems facing modern democracies. A decade later, the Council for Science and Society warned about the consequences of this ignorance for education in

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general and civil liberties in particular. The dangers were compounded, it said, by Whitehall’s culture of secrecy and the rapid turnover of ministers. ‘The more technical or esoteric the policy area’, the CSS warned, ‘the more likely ministers are to take refuge in the support which officials can offer.’10 Many years later, in 2018, the Institute for Government spelt out the consequences of the frequency with which ministers changed jobs, the way it delayed legislation and affected its quality, encouraged official secrecy and wasted money (and disrupted preparations for Brexit).11 Special interest groups, and the nuclear weapons lobby is a very good example, have been able to bamboozle officials and ministers with science. Government departments, notably the MoD, have resorted to paying huge amounts of taxpayers’ money on private sector consultants to advise them on projects, including weapons programmes, and why they were delayed so often. The armed forces and security and intelligence agencies clearly had to rely on private companies to make the equipment they needed. The trouble was – and at the time of writing still is – that they resort to private consultants as ‘outsourced’ advisers, project managers and companies that charge a lot of money for their services, but in the end often prove to be no more effective than civil servants. The MoD has spent hundreds of millions of pounds on outside special help under Whitehall’s FATs scheme. The acronym stands for Framework Agreement for Technical Support. The MoD paid an IT consultant from the private firm, Capita the equivalent of £2,000 a day to run it. Capita has been regularly castigated by the Commons Defence Committee for its abysmal record running the army’s recruitment campaign. The MoD announced that Yvonne Ferguson, hired to organize its maze of IT systems, had been appointed as a ‘chief information officer’ to ‘transform and modernize our information systems in both the military and business environments’. A ministry spokesman explained: ‘The MoD has for many years been criticised for its inability to track information, run a proper inventory management system and integrate its information systems.’12 The MoD had to renegotiate an IT scheme called ATLAS which was years behind schedule and cost taxpayers over £6 billion, more than double the original estimate. A multimillion-pound project, code-named SCOPE,

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designed to improve Britain’s security by giving key government officials speedy access to secret intelligence on terrorism and other threats had to be shelved at an unknown cost to the taxpayer. The lack of modern, relevant skills, especially in the field of IT, oils the revolving doors syndrome – the uninterrupted movement of retired Whitehall mandarins and military top brass to the private sector – and perpetuates the culture and vested interests of the establishment, further undermining Britain’s interests and long-term security. When they leave government service, Whitehall officials are obliged to inform a body called the Advisory Council on Business Appointments (ACOBA) what jobs in the private sector they have been offered. Waiting periods, including a two-year ban on lobbying the department in which the individual served, are supposed to prevent a conflict of interest and profiteering. But the system is full of loopholes. The council has no effective power to enforce the rules, and Whitehall departments do not always bother to check that they are being obeyed. Individuals do not have to accept the council’s advice. The system is biased in favour of approval – the council’s board consisted of representatives of the three main political parties plus a civil servant, diplomat, military representative and business executives, approved by the prime minister. They are drawn from the very elites that they are supposed to regulate, the High Pay Centre, an independent non-party think tank, noted. It reported in 2015 that 1,000 business appointments had been taken up by ministers and civil servants between 2000 and 2014. It warned of their potential to use their knowledge of government to exert ‘undue influence’ on behalf of their private sector employers. Public trust is undermined by the perception that ministers and civil servants put personal gain over the public interest, the centre concluded. One loophole retired officials and ministers can pass through is to setting up a private consultancy. It is the consultancy, not the individual, which would then deal with the private client not the individual. Private Eye magazine has regularly provided a guide illustrating how the system operates. The names of board members of large oil corporations and arms companies reveal how the ‘revolving door’ works. Oil giants, notably Shell and BP, are companies with global interests for which experience in international diplomacy are obviously important assets.

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Sir Mark Allen, MI6’s head of counterterrorism who had long and close ties to Arab countries, resigned shortly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq and joined BP helping to negotiate a £15 billion oil drilling contract with Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator embraced by the Blair government. Sir John Sawers joined BP five months after retiring as head of MI6 at the end of 2014. BP’s chairman, Carl-Henric Svanberg, noted that the former spy chief ‘brings extensive experience of international affairs and geopolitics’. Most large arms companies, both British and foreign, appoint recently retired chiefs of the defence staff and top officers in the army, navy and air force to their boards where their presence is invaluable. Civil servants and armed forces personnel have a symbiotic relationship with arms companies in particular because they rely on each other so much. Admiral Lord West, the former sea lord, told the Commons Public Administration Committee in 2012: ‘What I found, on leaving government service, is that you get paid wheelbarrows of cash by people who employ you.’ After West retired in 2006, he joined the advisory board of the military equipment company QinetiQ. He told MPs he left the firm because as a former defence chief he would ‘much rather have the freedom to speak with my knowledge of defence on a broader basis than be constrained by it’.13 An intriguing example was the appointment of John Suffolk, a former chief information officer in Whitehall, to Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications company with extensive investments in Britain. He described how he accepted temporary restrictions placed on some contacts with his former employers to a Commons committee: ‘There was this paragraph stating that I needed to talk to members of the Security Service, which ended up being a coffee in Caffe Nero on Trafalgar Square.’ MI5 presumably wanted to alert him to potential Chinese spying activities and to warn Suffolk to be on his guard. All this puts the Civil Service Code into perspective. The code is included in a document with the wonderful title Guidance on Guidance, subtitled, ‘An index to useful documents’. It says that civil servants should conduct themselves with ‘integrity, impartiality, and honesty’. They ‘should not misuse their official position or information acquired in the course of their official duties to further their private interests or those of others.’ The code goes

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on to say officials should report ‘illegal, improper, or unethical’ acts to the appropriate authorities. But despite all the talk of ethics and professionalism, whistle-blowers are not welcome in Whitehall. If civil servants remain unhappy about how their concerns have been handled, then they have no option but to resign. Yet the code insists in its conclusion that civil servants ‘should continue to observe their duties of confidentiality after they have left Crown employment.’ Whitehall, meanwhile, may have been as much an enemy of the British Brexiteers as the Brussels Eurocrats. It was ironic that Whitehall’s new Brexit department, the Department for Exiting the EU, or DExEU, set up after the referendum in 2016, had to recruit more than 30,000 officials, more than the total number employed by all the EU’s institutions put together. Britain’s future relations with the EU, and the huge implications for the UK economy and the country’s role in the world, were placed in the hands of unelected civil servants. The Brexit negotiations were in danger of making a mockery of the claims that leaving the EU would ‘bring back control’ and restore ‘parliamentary sovereignty’. The government wanted to seize the opportunity to grab more powers for the executive – harking back to the time of Henry VIII – as MPs from right and left warned. The device was the use of ‘statutory instruments’ or ‘secondary legislation’ that bypass proper parliamentary scrutiny. At stake were thousands of EU regulations, statutory instruments and Acts of Parliament covering 80,000 matters – known as the EU’s ‘acquis’ – which had to be either abolished or ‘repatriated’. Against this background, it is dangerous to underestimate the resilience, as well as the complacency, of those inhabiting the Whitehall fortress. The culture, even the language, may have changed a little in recent years in the face of outside pressures and influences. But it remains a solid bastion with most of its traditional weapons intact. And official secrecy is the main weapon in the armoury.

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Cheltenham, 12 July 1985. ‘Each time a person like yourself of obviously deep knowledge and high repute, publishes inside information about the inner secrets of our work there is more temptation and more cause for others to follow suit.’ – Sir Peter Marychurch, director of GCHQ1 Marychurch’s rebuke was addressed to Gordon Welchman, whose work at the Government Code & Cypher School at Bletchley Park saved many lives and helped shorten the war, as he was dying of cancer. Welchman’s sin, in the view of Marychurch, was writing an article in a specialist journal, Intelligence and National Security, to correct significant errors in Sir Harry Hinsley’s official history of British intelligence in the Second World War, including its failure to give proper credit to the crucial role played by the Poles in cracking German Enigma codes. Marychurch was not amused. The article, he said, had caused ‘direct damage to security’, a claim that prompted a blistering response from Welchman’s successor at Bletchley’s celebrated Hut 6, Sir Stuart Milner-Barry. He described Marychurch’s attitude as a ‘prime example of the lengths to which GCHQ’s paranoia about the preservation of ancient secrets will carry them’. To speak of ‘direct damage to security’ was ‘surely absurd’, said MilnerBarry, who continued: ‘To suppose that the battles which we had to wage before the birth of the first computer (which must seem to present-day cryptanalysts

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rather like fighting with bows and arrows) could be relevant to security now is just not credible’.2 Here was an unexpected voice in the struggle against excessive secrecy, a distinguished wartime codebreaker. Milner-Barry’s intervention was a huge moral boost for those of us who over the years had been battling what they considered to be Britain’s fetish for state secrecy. His intervention was all the more welcome since the 1984 ban on trade union membership at GCHQ (Bletchley Park’s post-war successor) when Marychurch was director of the agency. So obsessive was Marychurch about secrecy that he forbade his staff from appearing as extras in the film The Whistle Blower, a 1986 thriller whose central character was a GCHQ officer. Marychurch was embroiled in a further controversy the following year when the journalist Duncan Campbell revealed that the government was planning to build a British signals intelligence satellite, code-named Zircon. In an affidavit supporting a court injunction, Marychurch claimed that a planned BBC programme on the project would cause serious damage. The reason, Marychurch explained, was that ‘it could cause the US to lose confidence in the United Kingdom’s ability to protect the highly classified information involved and to reduce or withdraw their co-operation (which is essential to the UK) in this and related fields of great importance to the country’s security’. If alerted to the existence and purpose of the Zircon project, hostile intelligence services could take protective countermeasures, he claimed. The affidavit was too late to prevent the New Statesman magazine from publishing an article by Campbell about the project. It soon emerged that the Treasury was itself strongly opposed to Zircon because of its soaring cost. The project was cancelled. The threat of an Official Secrets Act prosecution evaporated. Criminal law combined with an ingrained culture of secrecy suppresses information which the government decides should not be disclosed to outsiders, including MPs and journalists who alert MPs to corruption, waste and dishonesty. The time-honoured default position of all governments, whatever their colour, is to insist that secrecy is needed ‘in the public interest’, by which they often mean their self-serving, political interest. MPs, meanwhile, claim the public is not interested in more openness. ‘I never hear my constituents going up and down the street demanding more freedom of

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information’. How often I heard that refrain from government ministers, and even backbench MPs? The first building blocks of the wall of official secrecy were erected around the year 1250 in the Privy Councillors’ Oath. Before they take up office, members of the Privy Council swear to ‘keep secret all matters committed and revealed unto you’. The aura and mystique surrounding the oath has been enthusiastically preserved by cabinet ministers (as well as leaders of Her Majesty’s Official Opposition) who exploit it to this day. It has a profound, almost mystical, effect, even on supposedly progressive individuals. The solemn oath is brought into play whenever the prime minister wants to share sensitive information with senior MPs, peers and judges, on what are called ‘Privy Council terms’. Such meetings are designed to impress on the prime minister’s interlocutors the need for absolute secrecy, especially about anything to do with ‘intelligence’. That includes spy scandals. (It was a reason why Jeremy Corbyn’s apparent initial reluctance to take the oath and ‘bow to the Queen’ provided so much ammunition for his opponents.) All five members of the Chilcot inquiry panel were appointed to the Privy Council, a condition of having access to highly classified documents relating to the invasion of Iraq. All members of the prime minister’s Intelligence and Security Committee (the ISC) of Peers and MPs are made privy councillors before they take up their posts. Official secrecy became a matter of the highest priority in Elizabethan England amid plots, many of which were instigated by Catholics opposed to Protestant England and were disrupted by the Queen’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham. Christopher Marlowe was one of those in Walsingham’s network, tasked in particular with spying on Catholics (a role that may have played a part in his stillunexplained death in a Deptford pub). The government fed fears of subversive plots during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars and the social unrest that marked the beginning of the industrial revolution. The government sent spies to watch what the romantic poets Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were up to as they admired the beauty of the Somerset and Devon coastline. In its paranoia, the government suspected they were looking for a suitable spot for French revolutionaries to land and promote mayhem in Britain.

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Spy paranoia returned with a vengeance a hundred years later amid fears of the Kaiser’s German agents. It was stimulated by The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers, a hugely influential spy novel published in 1903. The plot is built around an FO official who on a yachting holiday came across a German plan to invade Britain. The book quickly became a classic, helping to whip up anti-German fever, already encouraged by politicians and a self-serving Royal Navy top brass enthusiastically pointing to a significant increase in the size of the German fleet.3 Paranoia was egged on by more lurid spy fiction written by William Le Queux, an unscrupulous thriller-writer who fed on public fantasies at a time it was difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction. His book, The Invasion of 1910, was serialized in the Daily Mail, further spreading alarm. With the enthusiastic backing of the security and defence establishment, the government took full advantage. One hot afternoon in August 1911, with many MPs away on the grouse moors or fly fishing in the country’s rivers, a measure that was to stay on the statute book until the end of the twentieth century despite widespread criticism and repeated promises of repeal, passed through all its parliamentary stages to become law. Ministers claimed that the 1911 Official Secrets Act was essential to combat the threat of espionage from German spies. It also claimed, dishonestly, that the measure would in no way undermine the liberties of the country’s loyal subjects. Under Section 2 of the Act, which became known as its ‘catch-all’ provision, the unauthorized disclosure of any information by any government official, whether or not that information was officially classified, was a criminal offence. So, too, was simply receiving such information. It became a cliché that even disclosing the number of paper clips in a Whitehall department, or the staff canteen menu, could be a breach of the act. It covered any information a Whitehall immune to mockery wanted to keep secret. Penalties were two years’ imprisonment and an unlimited fine. Years later, after retiring with the rank of General, Colonel Jack Seely, Undersecretary of War at the time, described in his memoirs the atmosphere in the Commons that August afternoon in 1911. ‘I got up and proposed that the Bill be read a second time, explaining in two sentences only, that it was desirable in the public interest that the measure should be passed’. Hardly a word was passed, Seely recalled. During the Bill’s committee stage, two men

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got up to speak, but were ‘forcibly pulled down by their neighbours after they had uttered a few sentences.’ Two or three members were ‘pulled down’ as they were speaking in the report stage. ‘My heart beat fast’, Seely continued, as the Speaker announced the third, and final reading of the Bill. It was up to any MP to get up and say that no Bill ‘had ever yet been passed through all its stages in one day without a word of explanation from the minister in charge’. Looking back, Seely offered his grateful thanks to the members of the Commons, who passed the measure by 107 votes to 10, ‘on behalf of that and all succeeding governments’. The 1911 Act became the chief carrier of that virus Richard Crossman, the Labour cabinet minister who successfully overcame fierce Whitehall opposition to the publication of his diaries, called the ‘real English disease’. By that he meant official secrecy, not strikes by trade unions, which at the time Crossman was writing in the early 1970s earned the country the sobriquet the ‘Sick Man of Europe’. Thanks to the indefatigable Maurice Frankel, director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information, I was able to point to extraordinary examples where the Official Secrets Act was used to suppress information, including the work of every official body the government relied on for expert advice. They included the Advisory Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation and the Environment, and more than forty others. ‘When a minister announces in Parliament that the Official Secrets Act applies to the Leprosy Opinion Panel, something has gone wrong’, a doctor from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Diseases wrote in a letter to the British Medical Journal in 1986. An early victim of the Official Secrets Act was Compton Mackenzie, the author of more than ninety books, including Whisky Galore. In 1932, he was prosecuted for writing Greek Memories, an account of his First World War escapades in MI6. He was charged with identifying wartime intelligence officers and revealing that passport control and visa sections of UK embassies were often used as cover for the British spies. Mackenzie did not spare his former employer. He described ‘scores of under-employed generals surrounded by a dense cloud of intelligence officers sleuthing each other’, and disclosed that MI5 had drawn up a ‘blacklist’ of supposed threats to the realm.

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He also revealed that a department in the War Office called MII(c) was in fact the Secret Intelligence Service (now MI6). Worst of all, Mackenzie disclosed that the first head of MI6, the one-legged Captain Sir Mansfield Cumming, and his successors were officially referred to as C, a title kept to this day, standing for ‘Chief ’. He (there has yet to be a female head of MI6) still signs his correspondence ‘C’, in green ink. Worried about the embarrassing publicity a secrets trial would provoke, MI6 and MI5 persuaded Mackenzie to do a deal: if he pleaded guilty, he would avoid jail and instead fined a sum ‘not exceeding £500 and £500 costs’. Mackenzie’s lawyers had already managed to persuade an FO official to admit that although the book included information protected by the Official Secrets Act, the author did not believe the public interest had been prejudiced by publication. It emerged that one intelligence officer named in the book, Colonel Sir Eric Holt-Wilson of MI5, had encouraged Mackenzie to write it. (This was not the last time, as we shall see, authors were privately encouraged to write books on matters prohibited by the Official Secrets Act.) Under pressure from MI6 and MI5, the publisher Cassell agreed to withhold Greek Memories from publication. The clue behind the government’s concern was revealed in a memo sent to the government’s law officers by Valentine Vivian, then head of MI6’s counter-espionage section. ‘The keynote of this book is authenticity’, he warned. A censored version was published with the government insisting the unexpurgated version could not be read without the permission of MI6. Although it was not catalogued in the British Library, the Bodleian Library in Oxford kept it in its ‘suppressed books’ section. They readily made it available when, with a friend from Channel 4 News, Mark Lloyd, I asked to read it. It was not republished until 2011. Mackenzie took his revenge with Water on The Brain, a satire about the antics of what he called a Directorate of Extraordinary Intelligence, MQ 99(E), run by N. The organization’s headquarters, Pomona Lodge in North London, became a lunatic asylum, wrote Mackenzie, ‘for the servants of bureaucracy who have been driven mad in the service of their country’. Cumming carried a swordstick, wore a gold-rimmed monocle and had a wooden leg, the consequence of crashing his Rolls-Royce in France in 1914. He did not, as legend has it, cut off his own leg to extract himself from the

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vehicle. Rather, he is said to have tested the story on prospective MI6 recruits by stabbing his wooden leg through his trousers with a paper knife. If the applicant winced, Cumming told them: ‘I’m afraid you won’t do.’ He is said to have charged around Whitehall on a child’s scooter. Cumming tried to persuade Mackenzie to stay on after the author’s fracas with the law. He once told Mackenzie: ‘Here, take this swordstick. Always took it with me on spying expeditions before the war. That’s when this business was really amusing. After the war is over we’ll do some amusing secret service work together. It’s capital sport’. Mackenzie was not seduced. On 25 January 1989, more than seventy years after Cumming’s death, Roy Hattersley, then shadow home secretary, referred in the House of Commons to a logbook Cummings’ family had asked to have a look at for sentimental reasons. ‘They were told they could not see any of it or obtain the information they sought – the name of the theatrical costumier from whom Cumming bought his disguises. How would it be detrimental to the state if that information were given a wider audience?’ asked Hattersley. For John Patten, Home Office minister at the time, it was no joke. ‘I will not comment on operational decisions taken by the service in the past’, he said. ‘That is a tradition followed by governments of all political colours in respect of major and minor operational decisions. I hope it will continue.’ It does. A biography of Cumming, The Quest for C, was published in 1999, written by Alan Judd, described in the book’s dust jacket as having ‘recently retired from the FO’. Alan Judd is the pseudonym of Alan Petty, a former MI6 officer. He dedicated his work ‘to all who have served and remained silent’, acknowledging many who had helped him, ‘some of whose names have to be withheld’. Petty describes Cumming in January 1911 ‘going to Clarksons to be made up’ – a reference to William Berry Clarkson’s theatrical shop in Soho’s Wardour Street. So that official secret was finally out. The exchanges between Hattersley and Patten took place during a debate on the government’s plan to reform the Official Secrets Act in 1989, a move pressed on ministers by senior MI5 and MI6 staff worried that the 1911 Act was becoming increasingly discredited following a series of high profile and failed prosecutions. In 1976, an article exposing the extent of GCHQ eavesdropping

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operations, including against British citizens, appeared in London’s Time Out magazine, a rather more subversive and hard-hitting publication than the free entertainment weekly it later became. The blowing of GCHQ’s cover led to the ABC trial the following year: the criminal prosecution of a soldier, John Berry, and two journalists, Duncan Campbell and Crispin Aubrey. The three were charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act, convicted but given noncustodial sentences after an Old Bailey trial which revealed that the information deemed secret was in the public domain if people wanted to find it. Parts of Clive Ponting’s trial at the Old Bailey were held in secret, a move designed to impress on the jury and the general public just how sensitive was the information the MoD official disclosed. The trial judge, Mr Justice McCowan, in effect instructed the MI5-vetted jury to convict, insisting that the interests of the State were synonymous with the interests of the government of the day. In other words, Ponting could not appeal to a higher authority – not even to Parliament – to justify what he had done. If the government said information should be kept secret, then it must be kept secret. The jury stunned the judge and the government by unanimously returning a verdict of not guilty. Ponting’s acquittal was a big nail in the coffin of the 1911 ‘catch-all’ Official Secrets Act. Still few MPs called for its reform. Ponting had said before his trial: ‘My conscience is clear. In my view, a civil servant must ultimately place his loyalty to Parliament and the public interest above his obligation to the interests of the government of the day’. A new questioning attitude seemed to be on its way. After the trial, Lord Scarman, a senior law lord, stated: ‘A doctrine of accountability going beyond mere service to the Crown is now seen by the public to be what they require.’ The ‘catchall’ section of the 1911 Act should be repealed ‘lock, stock, and barrel’, said Scarman who added: ‘Parliament, politicians in power, and civil servants have established among themselves a tightly knit, secretive system for the efficient creation and fulfillment of consistent nationwide policy … . The Civil Service, as we know it, fits snugly in this cosy system.’ In 1986, a year after Ponting’s dramatic acquittal, I wrote a modest piece for the Guardian, and my Observer colleague, David Leigh, wrote an article for his newspaper, setting out the main allegations the former MI5 officer Peter Wright planned to make in Spycatcher, his unpublished memoirs which the

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Thatcher government was desperately trying to suppress in the Australian courts. In one of the book’s now celebrated passages, Wright described how MI5 officers ‘bugged and burgled our way across London at the State’s behest, while pompous, bowler-hatted civil servants in Whitehall pretended to look the other way.’ John Bailey, the Treasury Solicitor, as the government’s chief in-house lawyer is called, immediately served us, and our respective editors, with an injunction banning us from writing any further reports about the contents of Wright’s book. It was an invitation to pursue the case with even greater vigour than we might otherwise have done. Leigh and I were dispatched to Sydney to cover what turned out to be a six-week trial, all expenses paid. It took place in the New South Wales Supreme Court because Wright’s publisher, Heinemann Australia, was based there. Wright had retired with his wife, Lois, to a smallholding in Tasmania. Thatcher’s attempt to stop the publication of Spycatcher was doomed from the start. I subsequently learned that the attorney general, Sir Michael Havers, had privately expressed his personal misgivings about her determination to sue Wright for breaching an absolute – and worldwide – lifelong duty of confidentiality imposed on former members of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. The Australian courts were never likely to sympathize with the British establishment’s attitude towards official secrecy and the Thatcher government’s determination to impose a blanket ban on matters that had embroiled MI5 so many years previously. Wright’s central allegations had already been laid out in Their Trade is Treachery, a potboiler written – with the help of a number of former MI5 officers with axes to grind – by the veteran spywriter and journalist Chapman Pincher, and published in 1981. Wright, like Pincher before him, claimed that MI5 had been the object of deep penetration by the Soviet Union and Sir Roger Hollis, a former head of MI5, was a Soviet agent. Moreover, as we have seen, it emerged during the trial, to the great discomfort of the government’s chief witness, Sir Robert Armstrong, that the government had secretly seen a manuscript of Pincher’s book before its publication and raised no objection. Why the government had not taken steps to disabuse Pincher about the Hollis allegations or leak stories rubbishing Wright’s claims remains a puzzle.

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To the delight of the journalists following the trial’s twists and turns, it emerged that none other than Victor Rothschild, a wartime MI5 officer, eminent scientist and member of the prestigious banking family, had put Wright in touch with Pincher and encouraged him to write up the whole conspiracy and the hunts for undiscovered moles inside MI5. Rothschild did so partly to deflect claims that he was the ‘fifth man’ in the Cambridge spy ring. Indeed, as the trial progressed with prominent newspaper coverage day after day, Rothschild wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph calling on the government to confirm that MI5 had ‘unequivocal, repeat unequivocal’ evidence that he had never been a Soviet agent. The next day, 5 December 1986, Thatcher released a one-line statement that fell well short of what Rothschild demanded. ‘I am advised’, she said, ‘that we have no evidence that he ever was a Soviet agent.’ Thatcher was never comfortable in the world of spies. She needed certainty. The Spycatcher trial was hugely entertaining. It was ‘an enormous lark and I enjoyed every minute of it’, wrote Malcolm Turnbull, Wright’s lawyer (and later Australia’s prime minister).4 It also made ministers and government lawyers think twice in future before trying to suppress information by reaching for the criminal statute book. As Turnbull commented, the case raised serious issues about official secrets, the rule of law and democracy. Every day, Wright, who soon learned how to ham it up, sported an Aussie bushman’s hat. He knew his photograph was being shown across the world. He was playing to the gallery as he cocked a snook at the British establishment. Wright and Turnbull were egged on by the trial judge, Philip Powell, who enjoyed baiting the British prosecution team, and through them the British establishment, just as much as us journalists in the court. Powell even waited for the British journalists to turn up late from their lunches of freshly caught fish washed down by the best Australian Chardonnay before starting the court’s afternoon session. Because of the time difference with Britain, I could go out with Turnbull and his team, which included the TV reporter and later film director Paul Greengrass. After we mulled over the day’s testimony, I returned to my hotel room to top and tail my copy. There was even time the following morning to update the running story from the Sydney courtroom for the Guardian’s later

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editions. Writing ‘this morning’ in copy to be read over breakfast on that same morning in Britain, added bite to what was already a spicy tale. It emerged during the Sydney trial that Wright’s decision to write his memoirs was triggered by resentment over his pension. It had been reduced because Wright had at some point taken time out of his MI5 career. The trial heard that Sir Michael Hanley, the former head of MI5, wrote to Wright referring to MI5 management’s ‘appalling mistakes’. If it had not been for MI5 and the Treasury’s penny-pinching attitude over Wright’s pension, the disgruntled former MI5 officer might never have written Spycatcher. Those mistakes led to one of the most enjoyable and secrecy-busting episodes in the history of British criminal trials. The mockery the government faced over the Spycatcher saga encouraged others to publish their memoirs in provocative challenges both to the duty of lifelong confidentiality that the government had unsuccessfully imposed on Wright and to the increasingly discredited 1911 Official Secrets Act. Former MI6 officer Anthony Cavendish privately produced Inside Intelligence, later published by HarperCollins. The autobiography of Joan Miller, One Girl’s War, Personal Exploits in MI5’s Most Secret Station, was published in Ireland. The government’s attempts to suppress the books were in vain. The government’s lawyers advised ministers not to invite further humiliation. One backbencher who took a keen interest in the debates on the government’s proposed reform of the secrets act was Jonathan Aitken, the Tory MP for Thanet South. He had been prosecuted under the act for disclosing in The Sunday Telegraph a classified report revealing how Harold Wilson had deceived Parliament and the public during the Biafra War by supplying arms to the Nigerian government. Aitken was acquitted by an Old Bailey jury in 1970. In the Commons debate in 1989, he questioned the government’s argument that former members of the security and intelligence agencies were bound for life by a duty of confidentiality, something the government was to enshrine in the new Official Secrets Act. ‘The doctrine is new to the secret service’, Aitken told MPs. ‘Mr George Young, a vice-chief of the Secret Intelligence Service in former years, gave an interview to Mr Richard Norton-Taylor some months ago, in which he said that during his years of service he had never known of an absolute doctrine of a lifelong confidentiality and that it was new.’

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In one of many occasions when the 1911 Act was mocked, Robin Corbett, a mischievous Labour MP and former journalist, tabled a parliamentary question to the then attorney general, Sir Patrick Mayhew. He asked Mayhew ‘what consideration he has given to the possible prosecution of Mr Richard NortonTaylor of The Guardian, and of its editor Mr Peter Preston, arising from the publication on 4th January 1989 of the name and background of the new head of the Secret Intelligence Service?’ ‘Sufficient’, replied the urbane Mayhew. I had been leaked the name, Sir Colin McColl by subversive Whitehall contacts. There were a number of telling interventions when the government’s proposed new Official Secrets Act was debated in the House of Lords. Lord Dacre, better known as Hugh Trevor-Roper, the eminent historian and wartime intelligence officer, was one of those who spoke in favour of an amendment allowing members or former members of MI6 to speak out ‘in the public interest’, an amendment opposed by the Thatcher government. ‘In the last resort one may go public under this amendment if he is satisfied that crime has been committed’, Dacre told his fellow peers. He continued: ‘Well, hang it all, what argument did we use in Nuremburg? We argued that criminality is not excused by superior orders.’ Dacre went on: ‘There is the argument that those who go into the secret services go in with their eyes open; they go in with special rules, etc. I do not want to make invidious comparisons, but simply looking at it as an abstract theory that is precisely the argument used by the SS. They said that they had a completely different set of rules. They went in with their eyes open. They did not obey the laws of the land. They were under different laws.’ Dacre said he was in favour of secrecy. ‘I want to protect the secret services. I want them to be secret, but I want their secrecy to be rational and rationally defensible.’5 Another historian, Lord Bethell, who had exposed the forced repatriation of more than two million Cossacks and White Russians to Stalin after the end of the Second World War, intervened in the debate. He said there had been ‘hundreds and maybe even thousands of books and publications’ based on disclosures by former members of the security and intelligence agencies, and many of them had been cleared officially or unofficially. One, as the Spycatcher trial heard, was Chapman Pincher’s Their Trade is Treachery. Sir Dick White, the former head of both MI5 and MI6, told me

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how Clement Attlee had encouraged the former war correspondent Alan Moorehead to write an account of three scientists who passed secrets to Moscow – Klaus Fuchs, Bruno Pontecorvo and Nunn May. The government wanted to advertise the fate facing potential spies and MI5’s success in catching them. Moorehead’s book The Traitors was published in 1952. It was just one example of James Callaghan’s dictum to his officials: ‘You leak, I brief ’. A Lords amendment introducing a ‘public interest defence’ in the new Official Secrets Act in 1989 was withdrawn by its proposers after government assurances that disputes would be dealt with on a ‘case by case’ basis. There was therefore no need for a statutory ‘public interest defence’, ministers insisted. Though such a defence was eventually included, with qualifications, in the Blair government’s FoI Act passed in 2000, in common with that ubiquitous concept, ‘national security’, the notion of ‘the public interest’ continued to be used as an excuse to defend secrecy. ‘An essay in openness’ was how Douglas Hurd, home secretary at the time, described the new secrets act. But as the example of Cumming’s theatrical costumier demonstrated, the government could continue to go to extreme lengths to impose secrecy. The new statute enabled ministers to claim that its scope was much narrower than the 1911 Act. That was not difficult. The discretion it gave to the government remained very broad. For example, Section 5 of the 1989 Act, highly controversial even at the time of its passing, allows individuals to be prosecuted for passing or receiving ‘damaging’ information leaked to them by government officials or Crown servants. Attempts by the Metropolitan Police to secure a court order to force Guardian reporters to disclose their confidential sources about the later phone-hacking scandal showed how it was potentially open to abuse. Section 5 has been used to try and prevent the media from publishing articles merely critical of the government. The 1989 act, like its predecessors, is a political weapon designed to frighten officials and journalists, a perpetual shadow hovering over their shoulders. Whether it was deployed or not would depend entirely on how much more embarrassing information the government feared would be disclosed in a criminal trial as well as its concern about the jurors becoming increasingly sceptical about Whitehall’s claims about damage to the nation’s security.

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GCHQ considered prosecuting me for reporting on the agency’s internal staff manual that disclosed the extent of the close relationship between the electronic eavesdropping agency and the US NSA. Ministers thought better of it, Peter Preston told me. They were anxious not to advertise in any criminal trial just how one-sided the relationship was between GCHQ and the NSA. The Blair government belatedly woke up to the embarrassing prospect of publicity by dropping the prosecution of a young GCHQ whistleblower, a case later the subject of a film, Official Secrets, starring Keira Knightley. In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Katharine Gun, a GCHQ translator, was charged with leaking a secret email from the NSA requesting GCHQ for help in a dirty tricks campaign – the bugging of offices and homes in New York belonging to UN diplomats from the six ‘swing states’. These were countries, undecided how to vote on a UN Security Council Resolution authorizing military action for an invasion of Iraq backed by Washington and London. Gun was arrested and charged under the Official Secrets Act. Gun was defended by Liberty, the human rights group. The government suddenly dropped the case after her lawyers demanded the disclosure of sensitive information, including, I was reliably told, evidence that GCHQ’s own lawyers privately warned that there was a case for claiming that an invasion would be illegal. Had that evidence been published, it would have caused huge embarrassment both to the security and intelligence establishment and to Tony Blair, and would almost certainly have led to the collapse of the prosecution. Secrecy is imposed to cover up wrongdoing and prevent embarrassment, and to close down debate and allow Whitehall officials and ministers to enjoy a quiet life. Successive governments have rejected criticism of official secrecy claiming that only they can judge what information should be disclosed and what should be kept secret in the ‘public interest’ or on grounds of ‘national security’ because only they are in possession of the full facts and context. It is rather like Kafka meeting Alice in Wonderland. In 2007, David Keogh, a Cabinet Office official, and Leo O’Connor, a researcher for the then Labour MP for Northampton South, Tony Clarke, were charged with leaking a written record of a meeting in Washington between

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George Bush and Tony Blair in April 2004, a time of growing violence in postinvasion Iraq. The memo is believed to refer to Bush’s alleged proposal to bomb the Arabic TV channel Al Jazeera and to reveal how Blair criticized US military action in Iraq, specifically the bombardment of Falluja. Keogh had passed the document to O’Connor who in turn passed it on to Clarke. The MP forwarded it to 10 Downing Street. The two whistle-blowers were quickly identified and arrested. Much of their subsequent trial at the Old Bailey was held behind closed doors. Ministers and Whitehall officials claimed that disclosure of the memo to the outside world ‘could have a serious impact upon the international relations’ of the UK. That was despite widespread speculation in the media about the contents of the document. The trial judge was confronted with a situation where the media could not comment on the contents of the memo because they were the subject of a secrecy and contempt of court order even though they been disclosed well before the trial had begun and even though the gag order could not prevent the media throughout the world (but not in England or Wales) from publishing the material. So the judge, Mr Justice Aikens, ruled that journalists could comment on allegations already in the public domain so long as we did not explicitly link them to the document that was the subject of the secrets trial. Such reports, said the judge, could only be printed on a separate page to a report on the trial itself. We were also prevented by the judge from reporting what Keogh said after reading the document. But we could report that Keogh had been reported, in the US media, as saying he thought the contents of the document ‘abhorrent’ and ‘illegal’ and that he believed the document revealed Bush to be a ‘mad man’. The prosecution conceded during the trial that the leak had not caused any ‘actual damage’. Sir Richard Scott observed more than a decade earlier after listening to the evidence of ministers and Whitehall officials throughout his arms-to-Iraq inquiry: ’Some may think, and I myself think, that an acceptance from time to time of ill-informed or captious public or political criticism is part of the price that has to be paid for a democratic and open system of government’. Scott had continued: ‘If government insists on secrecy for the “inner workings of the government machine” is it in a position to be surprised if

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criticism is ill-informed? Public and political criticism is what every democratic government must expect. Criticism is captious if one disagrees with it. Those who agree with it no doubt regard it as a wise and justifiable. But as to criticism being “ill-informed”, government should, in my opinion, make it its business to do what it can to ensure that its critics are not ill-informed.’ Scott pointed to how governments chose to surround themselves with secrecy, ‘with light cast only by designer leaks and investigative journalists.’ That was a powerful observation from a senior judicial figure. A year after the new secrets act was passed in 1989, the MoD for the first time pronounced that figures about a threat from Soviet to Britain were ‘classified’ and could not be disclosed. It had regularly published the figures over the previous nine years, giving the weekly average number of interceptions of Soviet military aircraft by the RAF. The disclosures were used to help justify increased spending by the MoD. Future disclosures would have revealed a decline in the threat as the Soviet Union was collapsing, a message the RAF did not want publicized. Secrecy has prevented Parliament and the public from knowing about some of the most important decisions a British government has taken. The postwar Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, kept his decision to develop the British nuclear weapons programme from most of his cabinet, providing a precedence seized on with alacrity by his successors. (While ministers, MPs and the British public were kept in the dark, the ‘atom spies’, notably Klaus Fuchs, were telling Moscow all along.) Harold Wilson did not disclose his government’s decision to expand the Polaris nuclear missile programme in a project code-named Chevaline. It was a vanity project. Chevaline, whose costs escalated, provided the missiles with multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles (MIRV) – that is, a number of different warheads. The project was originally designed as a threat to Moscow’s anti-ballistic missile shield. I was told by officials from other Whitehall departments, angry at what they regarded as a waste of money, that the missiles never posed a credible threat – they could never have pieced the shield around Moscow. I was criticized by some defence correspondents for reporting the story. They were concerned that their contacts in the MoD would be angered and

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that would somehow damage their relations with the ministry. The MoD greeted my story with stony silence. The Labour leaders’ record of secrecy later encouraged Sir Robert Armstrong, Thatcher’s cabinet secretary, to tell her she need not worry about hiding from her ministers let alone Parliament decisions about nuclear weapons. She need only follow the example of her predecessors. One excuse the government and in particular the MoD deploys to suppress information about nuclear – or indeed any weapons project – is to claim that it is ‘commercially sensitive’. The argument is deployed even though usually only a single defence company is in the running for British arms contracts, and therefore there is no risk of interfering with competitive tenders, and even though large amounts of taxpayers’ money are involved. New Labour promised more open government. Blair honoured the pledge he made in opposition to introduce an FoI Act. Such an act, he said, would ‘signal a new relationship between government and people: a relationship which sees the public as legitimate stakeholders in the running of the country’. The FoI Act was not passed until 2000, a three-year delay caused by objections from a terrified Whitehall which insisted on a host of obstacles in the way of disclosure including blanket exemptions for the security and intelligence agencies and information relating to ‘national security’. Despite these loopholes and exemptions, the act did enable journalists and members of the public to challenge official secrecy and after the experience of power, Blair concluded it was a terrible mistake. This is how he put it in his memoirs, A Journey: ‘Freedom of Information: ‘Three harmless words. I look at those words as I write them, and feel like shaking my head ‘til it drops off. You idiot. You naive, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop. There is really no description of stupidity, no matter how vivid, that is adequate. I quake at the imbecility of it. ‘Once I appreciated the full enormity of the blunder, I used to say – more than a little unfairly – to any civil servant who would listen: Where was Sir Humphrey when I needed him? We had legislated in the first throes of power. How could you, knowing what you know have allowed us to do such a thing so utterly undermining of sensible government?’ The apparently shocked former prime minister added that for the most part, the FoI act was not used, by ‘the people’, as he put it, but by journalists.

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He continued: ‘For political leaders, it’s like saying to someone who is hitting you over the head with a stick, ‘Hey, try this instead’, and handing them a mallet.’ Maurice Frankel quickly responded to Blair’s autobiographical outburst: ‘Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One boss, had secretly donated £1 million to Labour just before the 1997 election. After the election he held private talks about a further donation. At the same time, he successfully lobbied Mr Blair to exempt motor racing from the proposed ban on tobacco advertising in sport. The affair led to allegations that Blair had lied to Parliament and to calls for his resignation. It was Labour’s – and Tony Blair’s – first scandal, deeply damaging to the new prime minister.’6 Attempts to gag the media through the criminal law continued. In 1998, the year after New Labour came to power, Tony Geraghty became the first journalist to be arrested under the 1989 Official Secrets Act. He was charged with receiving information from Lieutenant Colonel Nigel Wylde, a holder of the Queen’s Gallantry Medal for defusing unexploded bombs in Northern Ireland. Wylde was charged with providing the information, used in Geraghty’s book, The Irish War, which describes the growing use of computers by military intelligence in identifying targets. In Northern Ireland, he wrote, ‘at least 1m names are now on some security agency’s computer’. Two other computer systems provided ‘total cover of a largely innocent population’. The book also referred to a new electronic vehicle automatic number plate recognition system, a system now used and widely publicized by the police, and central and local government to deter potential wrongdoers. Evidence in the Wylde/Geraghty case that the MoD insisted had to be heard behind closed doors included ‘damage assessments’ arising from the book’s publication. Later the MoD privately admitted the book would not endanger any operations. The MoD simply wanted to intimidate journalists and publishers. In 2000, the Crown Prosecution Service decided to abandon the case by offering no evidence to the court. Duncan Campbell of the ABC secrets case fame, who enthusiastically maintained his expertise in surveillance technology, demonstrated that all the material Wylde was accused of passing to Geraghty was already in the public

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domain. Details had been in a briefcase mislaid by an intelligence officer earlier in 1998 and published in the Sinn Fein weekly, Republican News. Meanwhile, the Guardian and Observer newspapers successfully resisted an attempt by the police to force them to hand over documents relating to claims by the former MI5 officer David Shayler, including that MI6 had been involved in a failed assassination attempt against Colonel Gaddafi in the Libyan port city of Sirte in 1996. Whitehall’s security establishment suggested the Observer’s Martin Bright should also be charged under the Official Secrets Act for receiving documents from Shayler. Lord Justice Igor Judge ruled that the newspapers were right to resist the attempts to gag them by resorting to the criminal law. Summoning the spirit of Voltaire and Pitt the Elder, the judge gave the most ringing defence of freedom of expression heard in an English courtroom for many years. Freedom of expression was ‘bred in the bone’ of English common law, he said. He added: ‘Inconvenient or embarrassing revelations, whether for the security services or for public authorities, should not be suppressed’. Otherwise, ‘legitimate inquiry and discussion’ and the ‘safety valve of effective investigative journalism’ would be ‘discouraged, perhaps stifled’. However, such endorsements have not prevented judges from imposing gag orders demanded by Downing Street and the security and intelligence agencies. As we have seen, journalists were prevented from reporting the trial of David Keogh and Leo O’Connor. Not long afterwards, I was prevented with my Guardian colleague, Duncan Campbell (not the ABC defendant with the same name), from reporting on the trial of Wang Yam, a Chinese dissident and one-time MI6 informant who was convicted at the Old Bailey in 2009 of killing the reclusive author Allan Chappelow, 86, in his home in Hampstead, North London. Unprecedented in a criminal case, the entire defence case was heard in secret on the grounds of national security. Jacqui Smith, the then Labour home secretary, and subsequently William Hague, then foreign secretary, signed PII certificates – demands, rarely questioned by judges, for gagging orders. Hague claimed there would be ‘a real risk of serious harm to an important public interest’ if Yam was allowed to disclose evidence heard in secret. Before the PIIs were granted, it was reported that MI6 had requested secrecy, that Yam was a ‘low-level informant’ for the

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intelligence services and that ‘part of his defence rested on his activities in that role’. Wang’s murder conviction was later referred to the court of Appeal as a result of new evidence passed to Duncan that we reported in the Guardian but which the police had not disclosed to the defence. The Criminal Cases Review Commission pursed the case but to no avail. Second guessing a jury, the Court of Appeal ruled that the new evidence would not have altered the verdict and there had been no miscarriage of justice. Significant parts of more and more criminal trials, particularly but not only those related to terrorism, are being held in secret with journalists and jurors threatened with jail if they disclosed what they heard in court. Experience has shown that the reasons have less to do with national security than protecting MI5, MI6 and GCHQ from embarrassment or evidence they had acted improperly. Under pressure from the security and intelligence agencies, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government erected a new barrier to openness. They persuaded ministers that the surest way to prevent judges from ordering MI5 and MI6 to reveal in court what they had been up to was to set up a system of secret courts. Instead of just certain parts of a court case being heard behind closed doors, a new statute would be introduced to ensure that the entire hearing in civil cases involving MI5 and MI6 would be heard in secret. A complainant’s own lawyers would not be allowed to hear the arguments presented by the security and intelligence agencies. The Justice and Security Act was passed in 2013. Ministers argued that the measure was needed to protect national security and save taxpayers’ money by avoiding lengthy trials and arguments about disclosure. The government admitted that the new act would allow it to shield itself from charges that Britain had been complicit in the abuse of detainees abroad. The admissions were made in ‘impact assessments’ drawn up by Whitehall officials. They said the act would reduce ‘reputational and political costs to the UK’ and the government to defend itself ‘from the serious charges of complicity in false imprisonment and mistreatment of individuals overseas’. The government also admitted that the potentially adverse effects of the act were ‘likely to fall on black and Asian Muslim men by virtue of their over-representation

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in civil cases involving national security where sensitive information is being considered’. Many recent court cases, the government noted, ‘involve claimants who are men from the following racial groups: Asian, Middle Eastern, north African, and from the following religion: Islam’. The act was prompted by a civil suit brought by British citizens and residents captured and rendered to Guantanamo Bay. The detainees demanded that MI5, MI6 and ministers should admit their role in open court, apologize and offer compensation for their part in the renditions. Terrified of the damning evidence that would emerge, the government had pulled out of the case and paid out an estimated £9 million to the detainees in out-of-court settlements. The Justice and Security Act was first used by the government after the Supreme Court dismissed its attempt to prevent Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a Libyan dissident, from suing Mark Allen, a senior MI6 officer, and the former foreign secretary, Jack Straw, over his seizure and rendition to Tripoli in 2004. The government insisted that any hearing must be held in secret. It even insisted that the reasons why the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to go ahead with a criminal trial should be secret. Amid growing demands by the security and intelligence agencies for new weapons in their defence of official secrecy, stimulated by Edward Snowden’s disclosures, my Guardian colleague, Ian Cobain, and I recalled a number of examples where over several decades the British security establishment had used ‘national security’ as an excuse when to suppress evidence of information relating to a wide range of subjects, including British involvement in torture. We described how the practice of the government’s routine and secret interception of communications was first exposed in 1967 by Chapman Pincher, then defence correspondent of the Daily Express. The disclosure enraged the prime minister, Harold Wilson, who claimed that it breached the terms of the D notice system designed to protect national security. An independent inquiry by a senior judge, Lord Radcliffe, rejected Wilson’s claim. National security was said to be under threat in 1972, when Railway Gazette journalists were bugged and blackmailed by police, and threatened with prosecution under the Official Secrets Act, for disclosing that ministers were secretly considering the closure of 4,600 miles of railway lines – almost half the nation’s network. If that secret was disclosed, Whitehall reasoned,

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what else would be exposed? Police raided the Railway Gazette offices. They then questioned Harold Evans, editor of the Sunday Times, which had also published a story about the planned railway closures. Evans was warned that two of his reporters were facing prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. The police threatened to expose one of the Railway Gazette’s journalists as being gay, unless he named his source. The following year, the attorney general decided there was insufficient evidence to bring charges, and the government announced that the cuts were no longer being considered. The government never did discover the mole. He was Reg Dawson, a senior civil servant and lifelong railways buff, who died alongside his wife Betty at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland. In 1984, the Thatcher government banned trade unions at GCHQ, describing the move as ‘essential in order to safeguard national security’. Geoffrey Howe, the foreign secretary, claimed that industrial action a few years earlier had threatened national security, threatened intelligence-gathering during the 1982 Falklands conflict, and could have endangered lives. None of these claims was true. Asked by the BBC after the ban was imposed how the action had affected national security, Howe replied: ‘We cannot prove a single example.’ The defence secretary, John Nott, admitted the dispute with trade unions had not ‘in any way affected operational capability in any area’. It emerged that GCHQ staff had been praised for their work during the Falklands crisis. When Ben Griffin, a former SAS soldier, disclosed he had witnessed US servicemen torturing prisoners in Iraq, the MoD obtained a court injunction to silence him. The MoD argued that Griffin had breached the contract he had signed when he joined the SAS which was intended to protect national security and that his disclosures had not been ‘required in the public interest’. The court granted the injunction. Unidentified US security officials claimed that WikiLeaks disclosures, published in the Guardian, ‘could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security’. The British government warned that British citizens in Pakistan, Iraq, Iran and other parts of the Muslim world could also be at risk if there were a violent backlash over ‘anti-Islamic’ views expressed in some of the cables. However, later in 2010, Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, described official concerns about the leaks as ‘fairly

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significantly overwrought’. He added: ‘So other nations will continue to deal with us. They will continue to work with us. We will continue to share sensitive information with one another. Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for US foreign policy? I think fairly modest.’ At the trial of Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, convicted of leaking the documents, the Pentagon’s chief investigator into the impact of the leaks admitted he could find no evidence of a single person losing their life as a result. In the case of Binyam Mohamed, the British resident rendered to Guantanamo Bay and tortured, lawyers representing David Miliband, then foreign secretary, battled for more than a year to prevent the high court from publishing seven paragraphs of one of its own judgments, on the grounds that they contained a summary of intelligence passed to MI5 by the CIA, and their disclosure would cause immense damage to the US–UK intelligencesharing relationship. Miliband’s counsel told the court of appeal that the paragraphs ‘are unquestionably a summary of intelligence material provided to the [UK] under confidential intelligence-sharing arrangements’. Two judges, Lord Justice Thomas (later appointed Lord Chief Justice) and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones (now a Supreme Court judge), said that the seven paragraphs ‘could never properly be described in a democracy as “a secret” or an “intelligence secret” or a “summary of classified intelligence”’. Miliband, they noted, ‘was not prepared either to produce evidence or address argument to us’. In May 2017, the police dropped their investigation into a man named in the Guardian as Dr Saleh Ibrahim Mabrouk, a former minister in Gaddafi’s government, who had been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to murder over the killing of policewoman Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan People’s Bureau in London in 1984. ‘Key material has not been made available for use in court in evidential form for reasons of national security’, the police said. ‘National security’ was almost certainly used as an excuse to cover up the existence of a message about the demonstration from Tripoli referring to the option ‘to fire on them from within the Bureau’. The message had been intercepted by GCHQ the previous day, but not passed on to Scotland Yard and MI5 until the day after the shooting.7 Three months after Snowden’s disclosures were splashed over the front pages of The Guardian, The New York Times and Washington Post, I reported

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how Nigel Inkster, MI6’s former director of intelligence and operations and now a director at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) had downplayed their significance. He described the leaks as ‘very embarrassing, uncomfortable, and unfortunate’. He added: ‘I sense that those most interested in the activities of the NSA and GCHQ have not been told very much they didn’t know already or could have inferred.’ Al-Qaeda leaders in the tribal areas of Pakistan had been ‘in the dark’ for some time, Inkster said, in the sense that they had not used any form of electronic media that would ‘illuminate’ their whereabouts. He was referring to counter-measures they would have taken to avoid detection by Western intelligence agencies. Other ‘serious actors’ were equally aware of the risks to their own security from NSA and GCHQ eavesdroppers. Inkster’s initial comments were not welcome in the security establishment. The former senior MI6 officer later adopted a much more critical view of Snowden. He told BBC Radio that Snowden’s leaks were ‘comparable’ to those by the Cambridge spies ‘only worse’. ‘National security’ is a moveable feast, covering a multitude of sins, used and abused by ministers and the security and intelligence agencies as an unanswerable defence of secrecy. As evidence mounts up that such claims are fraudulent, Whitehall might have taken the view that excessive secrecy is actually undermining national security rather than defending it since it is merely encouraging unhealthy cynical attitudes. Far from it. Whitehall was determined to impose even greater secrecy in defence of the ever-widening definition of ‘national security’. It also embarked on a mission to minimize the impact of the FoI Act claimed by then Cabinet Secretary, the late Jeremy Heywood, as having had a ‘chilling effect’ on Whitehall officials. In a crafty move, Heywood, taking the cue from Tony Blair perhaps, grabbed responsibility for FoI policy away from the Ministry of Justice and placed it firmly in the hands of his Cabinet Office, the ultimate bastion of official secrecy. With the help of ministers, their willing accomplices, Whitehall imposed limits on the time and money that they could spend on FoI requests. But it is secrecy that costs money, whether it is time spent drafting answers to parliamentary questions giving away as little information as possible, or time spent opposing the requests. Officials know this perfectly well of course and impose tough caps on costs that includes the time spent redacting passages

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from any documents they do agree to release. Specially trained and vetted weeders inspect every page of many hundreds of files due for release at the National Archives every year. Frankel worked out that Whitehall spent more than £30,000 of taxpayers’ money in legal fees over a four-and-a-half year battle in an ultimately failed attempt to block the release to a journalist, Simon Lewis, the appointments diaries of the former health secretary Andrew Lansley. Whitehall argued it would be damaging and embarrassing if it revealed there had been gaps in his diaries. Officials in future would have to fill up their diaries with pointless and unnecessary meetings, it argued. Exposing how civil servants seem prepared to waste even more time and money was another reason why ministers’ diaries should be disclosed, said the Information Tribunal dealing with the case. The government, rejecting the point the tribunal was trying to make, spent more money by taking the case to the court of appeal. The court dismissed its case. An exemption from disclosure in the FoI allows Whitehall to withhold documents if the intention is to publish them in the future. Government departments do not have to say when they would be published. It’s a Catch-22. In one case, the MoD refused a FoI request by Private Eye magazine to explain why it changed the name of the drone it was buying from the United States from ‘Predator’ to ‘Protector. It refused to do so on the grounds that disclosing the reasons would ‘prejudice the effective conduct of public affairs and that to release this information … would be counter to the public interest’. Disclosing discussions about how the ministry handled information for the media would be likely to have a ‘chilling effect’ on future plans, it added. One weapon in Whitehall’s arsenal is deployed when questions are asked specifically about the activities of the security and intelligence agencies. This is the ‘neither confirm nor deny’ response, or ‘NCND’ as it is known. The formula is resorted to even when it is quite plain what the agencies had been up to. In 2013, the CIA released documents that officially revealed what had been widely known for many years – namely, that, at MI6’s request, in 1953, it had helped plan a coup to overthrow Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s nationalist, democratically elected, prime minister. Whitehall tried to stop Washington from releasing the documents on the grounds they would be ‘very embarrassing’ to Britain. One described how Mossadegh ‘and

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millions of Iranians believed that for centuries Britain had manipulated their country for British ends’. In 2017, further documents Whitehall had tried to suppress, but which were discovered by US scholars revealed that the British government had repeatedly urged Washington to help topple Mossadegh and succeeded in persuading the United States that a coup was needed to combat ‘communism in Iran’. The FO in London said it could neither confirm nor deny Britain’s involvement in the coup. That response, I suggest, merely deepens the widespread distrust of Britain among Iranians. The 1953 coup still features prominently in school books in Iran, though not in Britain. Just as there seemed to be room for optimism that Whitehall had seen the light and accepted the need for greater openness, it emerged early in 2017 that the government had asked the Law Commission to come up with plans to reverse previous moves to more open government and impose greater secrecy through a new criminal statute. Its proposals in 2017 included increasing jail terms for whistle-blowers and leakers of official information from two to fourteen years. The new measures would cover a wide range of information including ‘sensitive economic information’, and all ‘information given to the government by an individual or business’. There would be no statutory public interest defence, so someone revealing danger to the public, abuse of power or serious misconduct would not be able to argue that they acted in the public interest. The proposals, as well as the threats to whistle-blowers and journalists alike, were mocked in a withering report by the FoI Campaign and the Article 19 group which campaigns against worldwide threats to freedom of expression. The Law Commission’s proposals, they pointed out, could lead to the jailing of civil servants and journalists even for disclosing information that would be available to anyone asking for it under the FoI Act.8 British governments have not been able to come to terms with a much more open culture in the United States, Commonwealth countries and in continental Europe. They have tried to put pressure on Washington to prevent disclosure on matters which could embarrass the British government but has rarely succeeded. The Thatcher government could not prevent the publication of Spycatcher in the United States or Australia. The government will find it an increasingly uphill struggle trying to suppress information in an increasingly globalized and digital information age.

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In a uniquely British case, one that became a cause célèbre, ministers and senior Whitehall officials fought for more than five years in a failed and costly battle against the Guardian’s Rob Evans to prevent the publication of letters Prince Charles had sent to government ministers. Pressure from the royal family led government ministers to enforce a blanket ban on the disclosure of Prince Charles’s lobbying campaigns. It successfully pressed the government to tighten up the FoI Act to prevent the future King’s letters and lobbying of the government from being made public until at least five years after his death. Charles was accused of abusing his privileged position over the last four decades to influence government policies on subjects as diverse as the Human Rights Act, hunting and alternative medicine. Under the terms of the FoI act, the letters were disclosable ‘in the public interest’. The government spent more than £400,000 on legal costs in its attempt to prevent them from seeing the light of day. In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that the government’s attempt to block the release of the letters was unlawful. Under strong pressure from the Whitehall establishment which strongly backed Charles, the then attorney general, Dominic Grieve, set aside his liberal instincts and vetoed the Information Tribunal’s decision to order the letters release. He warned that they ‘contain remarks about public affairs which would in my view, if revealed, have had a material effect upon the willingness of the government to engage in correspondence with the Prince of Wales, and would potentially have undermined his position of political neutrality’. Official secrecy covers up what the government is up to now. If Whitehall gets its way, in the future it will cover up even more what governments are up to. Meanwhile, it is still covering up what Whitehall departments and the intelligence agencies have been up to in the past. One example sums up Whitehall’s obsession with secrecy quite tellingly. When the London Eye, the observation wheel on London’s south bank was erected, senior officials in the MoD across the river warned officials not to read or leave open classified documents on their desks – in case someone posing as an innocent tourist with a long lens camera photographed them.

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London 1966. ‘The object of the exercise was to get some rocks which will remain ours; there will be no indigenous population except seagulls who have not yet got a Committee …’ . ‘Unfortunately along with the Birds go some few Tarzans or Men Fridays whose origins are obscure, and who are being hopefully wished on to Mauritius etc.’ – Foreign Office mandarins’ musings about leasing the British Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia to the US as an American bomber base.1 As a result of Harold Wilson’s Labour government agreement to lease Diego Garcia to the United States, the Chagos Islands’ indigenous population were forced off their lands. Most went to Mauritius. To stifle criticism of its decision, the British mission to the UN in New York, sent a telegram to the FO in London. ‘We must surely be very tough about this’, adding that the UN’s Status of Women Committee ‘does not cover the rights of Birds’. The reference above to Tarzans and Men Fridays came in a response by Dennis Greenhill, a senior FO diplomat based in London, later Baron Greenhill of Harrow. The exchanges might be dismissed as unreconstructed mid-twentieth century British diplomats communicating to each other in the public school banter of a different era. That would be a mistake. In 2009, Colin Roberts, a senior FO diplomat, told US officials that according to the government’s current thinking [my emphasis] ‘there would be no “human footprints” or “Man Fridays” on the islands’. The public school wit (Roberts was educated at Winchester College – on the supposedly more cerebral end of the public school

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spectrum – and later appointed Governor of the Falklands) had survived well into the twenty-first century. He asserted that establishing a marine park would ‘in effect, put paid to resettlement claims of the archipelago’s former residents’. Roberts’ comments, revealed in one of the large number of US diplomatic cables revealed by WikiLeaks, exposed the ulterior motive behind the British government’s apparently altruistic plan to establish a marine reserve around the islands. Archives revealing the Greenhill exchanges also included an FO file, dated September 1966 and marked ‘Secret and Guard’. The idea, it said, was to build ‘defence facilities’ on the islands, ‘without hindrance or political agitation’. British diplomats, it added, should tell the UN that the islanders were ‘contract labourers’ engaged to work on coconut plantations. ‘The merit of this line’, the FO noted, was that it was ‘strictly factual’. It was, up to a point. The point FO did not want to make explicit was that the islanders were also the indigenous inhabitants.2 Most of the islanders – about 1,500 in total, of whom 500 lived on Diego Garcia – were deported, mainly to Mauritius and Seychelles. Wilson had secretly agreed to expel them and hand over Diego Garcia, the biggest island in what had been named the British Indian Ocean Territory, to the United States. In return, his government obtained a reported £11 million discount on the Polaris nuclear missile system – a deal that was never disclosed to Parliament. The most illuminating Chagos archives were released to lawyers for a group of islanders who brought a court case against the British government. Other files were subsequently released at the National Archives in Kew, Southwest London. Without the court case and the WikiLeaks material, the files would not have been disclosed, not for many more years anyway and perhaps never. Files are released at the National Archives seemingly at random. One, as darkly entertaining as the Chagos documents, consisted of supportive and congratulatory telegrams sent by Lord Rothermere, the proprietor of the Daily Mail, to the Nazi leadership, including Hitler, just months before the Second World War. In the summer of 1939, Rothermere was still appealing to Hitler not to provoke a war, saying that Britain and Nazi Germany must remain at peace. ‘Our two great Nordic countries should pursue resolutely a policy of appeasement for, whatever anyone may say, our two great countries should

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be the leaders of the world’, he told Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, on 7 July 1939. Ten days earlier, Rothermere had written to Hitler: ‘My Dear Führer, I have watched with understanding and interest the progress of your great and superhuman work in regenerating your country.’ He added: ‘The British people, now like Germany strongly rearmed, regard the German people with admiration as valorous adversaries in the past, but I am sure that there is no problem between our two countries which cannot be settled by consultation and negotiation’. On 6 July 1939, Rothermere appealed to Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, to help settle ‘all outstanding problems’ by organizing an international conference. ‘Could I ask you to use your influence in this direction. There is really no cleavage between the interests of Germany and Britain. This great world of ours is big enough for both countries.’3 Archives relating to Hess were still being withheld in 2019. As we approach the century mark since the events of the 1930s and 1940s, the embarrassing attempts by elements of the British establishment to cosy up to Hitler are still worthy of state secret status. What other gems are in the official documents held notionally on behalf of us all at the National Archives or in the basements of Whitehall departments, we do not know. We may never know. Documents are chosen for release at the whim of unaccountable officials painstakingly weeding their department’s voluminous historical records. Documents covered by the 1958 Public Records Act are made ‘public’ only at the behest of Whitehall departments. And the act contains more loopholes than the FoI Act. Whitehall officials are past masters at searching out exemptions and loopholes in the statutes. Whitehall can withhold files in their archives on the grounds they contain ‘sensitive’ material relating to national security, defence, international relations or information supplied in confidence whose disclosure would constitute a ‘breach of good faith’. Papers can be withheld if their disclosure would cause ‘substantial distress’ to ‘persons affected by disclosure or their descendants’. There is one extraordinary provision. Section 3(4) of the Public Records Act states that files can be withheld ‘if, in the opinion of the person who is responsible for them, they are required for administrative purposes or ought to be retained for any other special reason’. The official, minister or any other

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unidentified individual who wants to retain the file does not have to explain what ‘administrative purposes’ they may be required for or the nature of any ‘special reason’ for their continued retention. The National Archives (TNA) have an Advisory Council, chaired by the Master of the Rolls, Britain’s top civil law judge. Its members are appointed by the government’s Culture Secretary. They include former top MoD officials and rarely challenge Whitehall demands for secrecy. When I began visiting the archives regularly in the 1970s, staff at was then the Public Record Office enthusiastically helped journalists in their battles to get Whitehall departments to release more files. Frustrated TNA staff seem to have given up the struggle against Whitehall secrecy. The archives seem now to be a part of the Whitehall bureaucracy, with little interest in promoting genuine openness. Popular history and guides on how to find your ancestors seem to be the priorities. Whitehall departments have absolute discretion in which documents are released, what are withheld, and what destroyed. Units with the Orwellian title of ‘Knowledge Management Teams’ have been set up in Whitehall departments to control the release of historical records. In 2018, there were still about 600,000 FO files in a ‘special collection’ waiting to be weeded, vetted and transferred to Kew, a task that is estimated to take seventy-five years. The FO, in common with all other government departments, regularly destroys documents that officials consider to be not ‘historically significant’. It has declined to say whether or not it has a list of documents it has destroyed though under an official code of conduct it is obliged to do so. Its reluctance to publish a list was a clear indication it had made questionable decisions it does not want to defend in public. When challenged, the FO responds with brush-offs, no comments or deathly silence. Investigating journalists get little support from the academic world, partly, I suspect, because many academics do not want to run foul of the Whitehall establishment. The approach of successive governments perhaps can be illustrated best through examples and anecdotes. In a notorious case that came to light long afterwards, Sir Anthony Eden, the prime minister, ordered the cabinet secretary, Sir Norman Brook, to destroy his copy of the secret plan whereby Britain colluded with Israel and France to invade Egypt agreed during the 1956 Suez crisis. As they passed each other in a Whitehall corridor, Brook brushed passed Edward Heath. He told the future prime minister, then the

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government’s chief whip: ‘He’s told me to destroy all the relevant documents. I must go and get it done.’4 Eden had pressed Israel to launch a sweeping attack on Egypt in an attempt to give some credibility to Eden’s pretext for invading Egypt – namely, Britain and France had to intervene to stop the two ‘belligerents’ Israel and Egypt. My Guardian colleague, Ian Black and I met Donald Logan who had been private secretary to the then foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd. He was present at the meeting at Sevres, outside Paris, which agreed on the details of the collusion plan on 22 and 23 October 1956. A few days later, a panic-stricken Eden told Logan to return to Paris and tell Christian Pineau, the French foreign minister, to destroy his copies of the agreement as well. Pineau declined to do so. The Israelis also kept their copy. According to Whitehall sources who did not want to be identified official papers were also destroyed during the 1985 Westland crisis when Thatcher clashed with her defence secretary, Michael Heseltine, over the future of the once famous helicopter company. When Britain’s colonies became independent, official files were ‘migrated’, as the FO euphemistically put it, to Britain. They were taken to a huge depository at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire where most of them remain beyond the reach of historians and members of the public and in breach of legal obligations for them to be transferred into the public domain. Thousands of documents describing some of the most shameful acts and crimes committed during the final years of the British empire were systematically destroyed to prevent them falling into the hands of the newly independent governments. Instructions for their destruction were issued in 1961 after Iain Macleod, the colonial secretary, ordered that postindependence governments should not get their hands on any material that ‘might embarrass Her Majesty’s government’, or ‘embarrass members of the police, military forces, public servants or others e.g. police informers’, that might compromise intelligence sources, or that might ‘be used unethically by ministers in the successor government’.5 The destruction policy was exposed when defence lawyers were seeking evidence to prepare a court case. The case was brought by descendants of Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya who were rounded up and tortured – as the government came to admit – by British

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colonial security forces. Files released fifty years after the event revealed that prisoners who ministers and officials said at the time had died after drinking contaminated water, had been beaten to death. In a separate case, the withholding of evidence and suspected destruction of official documents meant the families of twenty-four unarmed Malayan villagers killed by a British army patrol could not pursue their case in the courts because the atrocity occurred too long ago, the Supreme Court ruled. The villagers were shot by soldiers of the Scots Guards at Batang Kali on 11 and 12 December 1948. Some of the soldiers later revealed they had been told by the army to lie and claim the villagers had been shot while trying to escape. The police investigation ran into FO objections and was eventually stopped. Lord Kerr, one of the Supreme Court judges, said the ‘overwhelming preponderance of currently available evidence’ showed that ‘wholly innocent men were mercilessly murdered and the failure of the authorities of this state to conduct an effective inquiry into their deaths’. He added: ‘The law has proved itself unable to respond positively to the demand that there be redress for the historical wrong that the appellants so passionately believe has been perpetrated on them and their relatives. That may reflect a deficiency in our system of law. It certainly does not represent any discredit on the honourable crusade that the appellants have pursued.’ In a memo, ‘Why Batang Kali still matters’, John Halford, solicitor for the Malaysian families wrote later: ‘Most student textbooks, and not a few judgments, will instruct the reader that judicial review cases are about law not facts – that the search is only for legal truth’. Halford added that the courts had ‘steadfastly refused to be complicit in the suppression of the truth’ which the FO had ‘so effectively perpetrated for six decades’.6 Yet the courts ruled that though a war crime may well have been committed, the incident had taken place such a long time ago that it would be impossible to gather sufficient evidence. As well as Kenyan and Malayan colonial records, files that appear to have been destroyed include documents kept by colonial authorities in Aden, where the army’s Intelligence Corps operated a secret torture centre for several years in the 1960s; every sensitive document kept by the authorities in British Guiana, a colony whose policies were heavily influenced by successive US governments

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and whose post-independence leader was toppled in a coup orchestrated by the CIA; and evidence of brutal treatment meted out by British forces against opponents of colonial rule in Cyprus. Documents that were not destroyed were kept secret not only to protect the UK’s reputation but also to shield the government from litigation. Firm instructions were issued that only colonial administrators could be involved in the document-weeding process. For example, in the case of Kenya, only an individual who was ‘a servant of the Kenya government who is a British subject of European descent’ could take part. Despite the rule that once an official file has been shown to one person, it should be available to all, the security and intelligence agencies have given privileged access to documents to writers they approve of, a practice to which the National Archives appear to have turned a blind eye. In Iron Maze, his account of how Western secret services attempted to topple the Bolsheviks in post-revolutionary Russia, Gordon Brook-Shepherd produced a copy of an MI6 CX report, raw intelligence which even senior ministers rarely see.7 The author, a wartime military intelligence officer, had privately been given privileged access to MI6 records. From time to time, files of the wartime Special Operations Executive, and of MI5 have been released at the National Archives. At the time of writing in 2019 MI6 had still not released any of its own archives at Kew. Though MI6 – identified as SIS (the Secret Intelligence Service) – is on occasion referred to in FO or MI5 files, the agency has adopted an uncompromising approach. In his preface to his official history of MI6, Keith Jeffery wrote: ‘SIS have acknowledged that I may include names of officers already released in official histories and through the transfer to The National Archives of papers from other government departments with whom SIS officers naturally liaised.’ Jeffery added: ‘But I have been unable to name a number of other Service [SIS] officers on national security grounds (which in some instances have overridden the imperatives of historical scholarship), including some who have previously been identified in reliable and scholarly works.’ Documents originally transferred to the National Archives were subsequently removed when Whitehall was worried they could contain embarrassing admissions at a time they had contemporary resonances, when

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long-running disputes flared up. They included files on Spanish sovereignty claims over Gibraltar – with British diplomats suggesting a possible deal with Franco over The Rock during the Second World War–and Argentinian claims over the Falklands which, the FO, admitted, were far weaker than the government publicly asserted. Files that went missing included documents describing how British forces were ordered to use gas against Iraqi dissidents, including Kurds, after the First World War. A document entitled ‘Gas: use in Iraq’ was originally released in 1969, but later removed from the then Public Record Office. Their disappearance was discovered by Clive Ponting when he was writing a biography of Churchill. The secretary for War and Colonial Secretary at the time, Churchill had encouraged the RAF to use mustard gas bombs in Iraq as an alternative to deploying the army. Documents relating to one of the most controversial and shameful episodes in modern British history – the forced handover of tens of thousands of Cossacks and Yugoslavs to the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War – were removed from the archives to help a Tory peer prepare for a trial in which he was awarded £1.5 million, a record sum for libel. The documents were taken in 1987 shortly after Lord Aldington sued over a pamphlet written by Nicolai Tolstoy, distant cousin of the author of War and Peace. The libel trial focused on Aldington’s role as chief of staff in Austria in 1945 when British troops were ordered to participate in what the FO later described a ‘ghastly mistake.’ Cossacks and Yugoslavs opposed to communism were handed over as part of the Yalta agreement and were massacred or imprisoned. The FO admitted it removed a file from the Public Record Office. I later learned that officials were ordered to do so by ministers. The file related to a central issue raised at the trial: the argument that the British Army, threatened by Tito’s forces, was under pressure to ‘clear the decks’ and simply carry out orders to repatriate Cossacks and Yugoslavs under their control. Tolstoy and his lawyers were prevented from seeing the document, while Aldington and his team had privileged access to it. Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, said later that the document had been ‘misfiled’. Soon after my articles on the case were published in the Guardian, I was sent, anonymously, a note from the FO’s Historical Branch to the department’s

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News Department. Headed, ‘Mislaid FO File: Article in the Guardian by Richard Norton-Taylor, 28 May 1992, it read: ‘The Guardian story is substantially correct’. However, the note continued, the article did contain ‘one or two inaccuracies’. These related to how long the file was ‘accidentally lost’ after it had been ‘previously requisitioned for Lord Aldington’. In another strange case, Mike Rossiter, author of The Spy Who Changed the World, discovered a file in the National Archives in 2013 entitled ‘Fuchs Notes on The Superbomb’. When he returned to Kew a few months later, the file was missing. Rossiter was told that Whitehall departments were ‘permitted to loan documents back for business purposes’.8 Klaus Fuchs was arrested on 2 February 1950, confessed and, after a short trial in which very little was said about his spying, was sentenced to fourteen years in jail. Remitted for good behaviour, he was released in 1959 and went to live in East Germany where he died in 1988. The question was: Why did Fuchs confess? He knew that without his confession he probably would not have been prosecuted. Was he told, implicitly or explicitly, that if he cooperated he would be able to stay at Harwell where the nuclear scientists made it clear they still needed him? Sir John Cockcroft, the head of Harwell, seemed to have suggested that he would be offered immunity from prosecution, though he may not have known the full extent of Fuchs’s spying activities. Gems are released, albeit with no apparent rhyme or reason, at the National Archives every year. They include cabinet and prime ministers’ papers released under a ‘thirty-year rule’ that is slowly moving to a ’twentyyear rule’. MI5 documents are released at special ‘press events’. By their very nature, they provoked frissons of excitement as they revealed personal details of agents such as Mata Hari or the antics of Juan Pujol, code-named Garbo, a Spaniard disillusioned with Franco turned through the Double Cross (XX) System during the Second World War – probably MI5’s finest hours. There are MI5 files on PG Wodehouse, questioned by MI5 for broadcasting from Hitler’s Berlin, and on individuals, including Charlie Chaplin, hounded by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI for his alleged communist sympathies and targeted by MI5 during the Cold War. The movements and private communications of hundreds of household names were closely watched on MI5’s behalf by police Special Branch officers.

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The files available at the Kew archives reveal the extraordinary amount of time and resources police Special Branch officers spent on behalf of MI5 following the movements, and transcribing and analysing telephone conversations of individuals who though sympathetic to communism at some stage or simply sharing left-wing views were far from being any threat to national security. Such files provide easy meat and drink for hungry journalists. MI5 has opened files on the Oxford historian AJP Taylor, popular through his broadcasts, the writer Iris Murdoch, and the moral philosopher Mary Warnock, after they signed a letter supporting a march against nuclear bombs in 1959.9 She told me: ‘I’d love to see the file, or anybody’s file come to that, to see what was/is regarded as suspicious … . I am completely taken aback and even faintly flattered.’ MI5 targeted the Nobel prize-winning author Doris Lessing for twenty years, closely monitoring her movements.10 It spied on the writer, her friends and her associates, long after she abandoned communism, disgusted by the crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956. The files show that MI5 was concerned about her continuing fierce opposition to colonialism. In 1956, the Special Branch informed MI5 that Lessing, whom it described as ‘of plump build’, had moved into a flat in Warwick Road, London SW5. ‘Her flat is frequently visited by persons of various nationality’, it reported, ‘including Americans, Indians, Chinese and Negroes.’ The report added: ‘It is possible that the flat is being used for immoral purposes.’ Archives released more than fifty years after the events include transcripts from phone taps from the London flat of journalist and author Philip Toynbee, compiled shortly after his friend Donald Maclean fled to Moscow with Guy Burgess, a fellow member of the notorious Cambridge spy ring.11 MI5 recorded conversations in which the poet Stephen Spender, publisher George (later Lord) Weidenfeld, poet WH Auden, painter Lucian Freud and philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, all came up in conversation. Files from the early 1950s suggest MI5 was particularly interested in Cyril Connolly, editor of the literary magazine Horizon, who lived in Toynbee’s Paddington flat, and was keen to discover what Connolly and his friends knew about Burgess and Maclean. It carefully annotated newspaper articles that Connolly had written about his former acquaintances. MI5 also drew

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up voluminous reports on the scientist Dr Jacob Bronowski, author of The Ascent of Man, who became a popular broadcaster, in surveillance operations described by his daughter, Lisa Jardine, as ‘shocking … just like a Stasi file’. He first came to MI5’s notice in October 1939 when a ‘casual informant’ in Hull, where Bronowski was a university lecturer, claimed he held ‘extreme left and anti-British opinions’.12 A series of subsequent Special Branch reports warned MI5 that Bronowski had spoken at a Left Book Club meeting about the ‘alarming growth of fascism’. One report described him as a ‘skilful speaker and agitator of the “communist intellectual” type’, another as a ‘red intellectual’. His expertise on the impact of bombing led the government to give him, in 1943, a job in the research and experiments department of the Ministry of Home Security. He was later appointed a member of an official investigation into the effects of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. However, after the war, the BBC told MI5 it had ‘abandoned’ a series of planned broadcasts by Bronowski on atomic power. The scientist turned down the offer of a job in Harold Wilson’s Labour government and later emigrated to the United States, because he could not get a sufficiently rewarding post in Britain, Jardine said. But he never suspected that MI5 had a file on him. The tight control on files relating to the royal family did not prevent the release in 2013 out of documents revealing how, seventy-seven year earlier, ministers ordered the bugging of Edward VIII’s telephones in Buckingham Palace and Fort Belvedere, his bolt hole in Windsor Great Park at the height of the 1936 abdication crisis.13 Edward’s mistress, the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, was staying with friends in the south of France at the time. The Queen’s advisers at Buckingham Palace were consulted about the decision to release the file. I can only assume she had no objection to the release of files that showed Edward and Simpson – no friends of the Queen’s mother – in a bad light. It would have been a different matter had the files affected the reputation of more esteemed royals. The files had been gathering dust for decades in a Cabinet Office basement. Lord Wilson, cabinet secretary at the time, described how he visited what he called a strongroom beneath his old office where he found ‘heaps of paper … my eyes swivelled’.

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Other MI5 files among the tranche released at the time reveal how a male MI6 officer was arrested in Madrid wearing women’s clothes, how MI6 paid huge amounts of money to agents to keep Spain out of the Second World War and how MI6 was prepared to ‘liquidate’ selected individuals in Germany after the war. Files that have been released include a first-hand account of how Churchill spent a night drinking with Stalin in Moscow in August 1942. Sir Alexander Cadogan, top official at the FO, wrote of being summoned to Stalin’s room. ‘There I found Winston and Stalin … sitting with a heavily laden board between them: food of all kinds crowned by a suckling pig, and innumerable bottles. What Stalin made me drink seemed pretty savage: Winston, who by that time was complaining of a slight headache, seemed wisely to be confining himself to a comparatively innocuous effervescent Caucasian red wine.’ Everything seemed to be ‘as merry as a marriage-bell’, added Cadogan, as Stalin went on about the benefits of the Soviet system. The party broke up at 3 am.14 Scepticism and opposition to British possession of nuclear weapons is a particular theme running through the files over many decades. I read, for example, how Solly Zuckerman, chief scientific adviser to the MoD, told the Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson: ‘Nuclear weapons can be regarded as having a greater political than military significance.’15 In 1981, two-thirds of the cabinet were opposed to Britain buying the US Trident nuclear missile system, according to the defence secretary at the time, John Nott. The scale of cabinet opposition is revealed in a note from a 10 February 1981 meeting in Downing Street at which only Nott and Lord Carrington, the foreign secretary, were present. Nott told Thatcher that a full debate on nuclear defence policy was essential ‘since two-thirds of the party and two-thirds of the cabinet were opposed to the procurement of Trident. Even the chiefs of staff were not unanimous.’16 One person who encouraged me, inspired me really, to delve into the archives and question government secrecy was Margaret Gowing, author of the first official history of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, a two-volume Independence and Deterrence. It was Gowing who alerted me to Churchill’s comment on the bomb in 1951 that Britain should have ‘the art but not the article’. After he returned to power Churchill discovered he was

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too late. He told the Commons on 6 December that his government had taken over ‘the very costly [atom bomb] production programme of the Socialist Government ‘. Attlee had refused to reveal his decision to go ahead with a British bomb or the conditions which US aircraft based on East Anglia could drop them. To do so, Attlee argued, would ‘do harm by unnecessary discussion and pressure for the disclosure of existing arrangements and future intentions’, the archives show. Gowing was not afraid to confront controversial issues, including the early links between Britain’s civil and military nuclear programme, something governments had always denied. She made it clear that though Calder Hall in Sellafield, Cumbria, was heralded in 1956 as the world’s first nuclear plant to produce electricity for peaceful purposes – the national grid – it also produced plutonium for nuclear warheads. She also revealed that the 1957 fire at Windscale (now Sellafield) – the world’s worst nuclear accident until Chernobyl – occurred despite specific warnings from the United States. Gowing consistently fought for a more open approach to the release of public records, and chided decision-makers for not learning from the past – for reinventing the wheel. However official secrecy prevented her from writing about the atom spies or the Cambridge spy ring and there was no sign, at the time I write, of a third volume of the official history of Britain and the Bomb. Files on the Cambridge spies began to be filtered out more than fifty years after the events they describe. But in 2018 many were still being withheld, and more than 20 per cent of files listed as referring to British spies remained closed. They included files on Goronwy Rees, Victor Rothschild and Harold Nicolson, acquaintances of the Cambridge ring, and a report sent to George VI. Other files have been under lock and key for many more years beyond the time the ‘thirty-year rule’ should have come into play. No explanation is given; we can only guess. A file entitled ‘Informers Statements 1896–1914’ was released only after names were redacted. However, another file, ‘Irish Political Societies, 1892–1910’, remained closed beyond the year 2000. Files on Sir Roger Casement, hanged in 1916 for seeking German help for Irish independence, were released only in 1999. That year I reported in the Guardian how a file about the banning of D. H. Lawrence’s last collection of poems, Pansies, remained closed, while all the Lady Chatterley’s Lover case

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papers had been opened. The file was released soon afterwards. They showed that the Pansies manuscript was seized after Lawrence’s post from Italy was intercepted. They also reveal that the home secretary, Sir William JoynsonHicks (known as ‘Jix’) never told the Commons that the DPP, Sir Archibald Bodkin, did not share his view that the book was ‘grossly indecent’. In his foreword to Pansies, Lawrence wrote: ‘Some of the poems are perforce omitted – about a dozen from the bunch. When Scotland Yard seized the MS in the post, at the order of the Home Secretary, no doubt there was a rush of detectives, postmen, and Home Office clerks and heads, to pick out the most lurid blossoms … . I can only grin once more to think of the nanny-goat, nanny-goat-in-a-white-petticoat silliness of it all.’17 Censorship is secrecy’s handmaiden. The examples I refer to here demonstrate the sheer breadth of subjects – from nuclear bombs to poetry, to friends of friends of suspected communists – caught in Whitehall’s huge net marked ‘official secrets’. One-line titles of documents withheld are listed by the National Archives every year along with those that are released. Over the past few years, files kept secret include papers, dated 1985 or earlier, on UK nuclear tests; on GCHQ funding, on the ban on trade unions there; on Jock Kane, the GCHQ radio operator who blew the whistle on security breaches at the centre’s listening post at Little Sai Wan in Hong Kong; on government policy on intercepting communications; and files marked ‘Falkland Islands: political’, ‘Gibraltar: political’ and ‘USSR: military’. Other files retained include those relating to ‘Anglo-Libyan relations’ after the shooting of WPC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan People’s Bureau in St James Square on 17 April 1984, and one titled ‘Representation of political parties at ceremonial occasions – Cenotaph and state banquets’. Withheld from a recent release of cabinet papers from the 1980s at Kew are files entitled: ‘Cementation contract: Mark Thatcher and the Omanis’; ‘Mark Thatcher and the Omanis; other allegations against Mark Thatcher’. These are ‘retained’ until 2053. Sir Mark Thatcher was a consultant for Cementation International, a subsidiary of the construction and engineering conglomerate Trafalgar House. Details of a deal to build a new university in Oman emerged in the 1980s prompted allegations that Thatcher had used her influence with

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the Sultan to secure the contract for her son’s firm. The Cabinet Office made it pretty clear why the papers were being withheld. They not only contained ‘personal data about individuals’ it said, but also ‘sensitive information relating to other countries.’ This, it added, was ‘in line with the requirements of the Public Records Act’. Documents still being withheld in 2018 included those relating to the 1963 Profumo inquiry; the Peter Wright Spycatcher case; ‘Sponsored visits from Saudi Arabia to the UK’; ‘North Korean Nuclear Activity’; ‘Coverage of India by journalists’; ‘Relations between the USA and the UK’; ‘The Curragh Incident, March 1914’; ‘Relations between Libya and the UK’ ‘Relations between Israel and the UK’; and, intriguingly, ‘UK Defence sales to Syria’. Some are marked ‘T’, that is to say, ‘temporarily retained’ though there is no date fixed for their release. In 2018 they included files relating to ‘public opinion and public debate on nuclear weapons issues’ (a probable reference to how the MoD used MI5 to monitor CND campaigners); the ‘situation in the Middle East’; files on Britain’s relations with Oman and Gibraltar; and twentyeight files relating to a visit by Prince Charles and Princess Diana on a visit to the Middle East in 1986. Documents due for release on 1 January 2018 but withheld include files relating to the Scott arms-to-Iraq inquiry, a file on allegations of sexual abuse at the Kincora boys’ home in Belfast which the former army intelligence officer, Colin Wallace, says were covered up by MI5, and a file on Brian Nelson, a British army informer in Northern Ireland eventually jailed for life for conspiring to kill Catholics. One file that was released referred to questions I had asked many years earlier about Thatcher’s suppression of two volumes of the official history of British intelligence during the war. Thatcher relented only after she was advised that MI5 wanted to publish the histories, which described its wartime triumphs, at a time the agency was suffering from bad publicity surrounding the Spycatcher affair and other embarrassing episodes. Sir Robert Armstrong, the cabinet secretary, assured her that accounts of what went on at Camp 020, MI5’s interrogation centre in Lachmere House, West London, would be ‘sanitized out’ of the official history. The file also reveals that Thatcher and her successor, John Major, were concerned that a planned history of the army’s

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Intelligence Corps would reveal what the regiment had been up to in Northern Ireland. The MoD told them not to worry as it would ensure that any reference to Northern Ireland would be ‘particularly anodyne’.18 One person’s experience provides eloquent testimony to a particular problem confronting authors, researchers and journalists. Early in 2015, the author and literary agent, Andrew Lownie, asked the archives to release an FO file marked: ‘Closed extract: Folio 1 from Defectors to and from the Soviet Union, including Kim Philby’. At first, the archives said the information was exempt under Section 27 of the FoI Act, whereby disclosure would be refused if it ‘prejudices Britain’s relations with another state’ or ‘the interests of the United Kingdom abroad’. The National Archives then told him that the information was exempt under Section 40 (2) of the act, covering ‘personal information’. The Information Tribunal upheld the decision to suppress the files. ‘Having looked at the closed material’, it said, ‘there is no reason whatsoever to suppose that, in the particular circumstances of the case with which we are concerned, the fact the defector had defected would be known to the government ...or, in any event, to all the defector’s friends, family, neighbours and colleagues. There is also no reason to suppose that the individual who may have had an involvement with the defection has informed friends or family.’ The Tribunal went on: ‘We do not consider that the appellant can, in the circumstances, successfully contend that the passage of time since the end of the Cold War would have greatly reduced the sensitivity of the information. On the contrary, having regard to the matters we have just mentioned, there is a strong expectation on the part of the individuals concerned that the withheld information would be kept confidential and not disclosed to the public as a whole.’ It continued: ‘We agree that there is some public interest in information relating to defectors in general during the Cold War. However, the risk to these living individuals of disclosure, even at this remove, cannot be underestimated. It is quite possible that the personal relationships of each of them with family, friends and colleagues could be jeopardized. A precautionary approach is, accordingly, fully justified.’ If it is unsure whether a particular individual is alive or dead, Whitehall assumes the latter after 100 years of the person’s birth.

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The Tribunal’s approach cannot be applied consistently of course. Some defectors, and the former KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky is a prime example, have relished exposure. Others, notably Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal, were exposed after they were the targets of poisoning attacks that could not have been kept under wraps. When writing about the mysterious circumstances surrounding Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, who flew to Scotland in 1941 with what he called a peace plan, I asked to see any papers the royal family might have on the strange episode. I was told that the Royal Archive was open only to bona fide researchers and historians. A mere journalist could not see them. The case of a missing letter from the Queen Mother, weeded from hundreds of personal papers belonging to Walter Monckton, the Duke of Windsor’s private lawyer and confidant, released in 2000 provided a good example of how access to state archives is governed by a peculiarly British mixture of privilege, secrecy and self-censorship. The release of the papers at Oxford University’s Bodleian library provoked an argument over whether what was described as the ‘crown jewels’ in the Monckton collection had been removed. It was said to be a letter containing unflattering comments about the Duchess of Windsor. Buckingham Palace confirmed the document was given to the Royal Archive at Windsor by the Monckton papers’ trustees when his literary estate was wound up in 1977. Among those allowed to see the papers are authors of officially sanctioned biographies. One was Philip Ziegler, author of the official biography of Edward VIII, published in 1990. Ziegler was reported as saying that he had seen a letter from the then Queen, written in August 1940 in response to the Windsors’ preoccupation with retrieving possessions from their house in occupied France at a time when Britain was fighting for its survival. ‘For sheer vulgarity it is hard to beat’, she wrote, ‘and though it made us laugh, one’s mind went automatically from pink sheets to our poor people spending nights in little tin shelters, and then going to work in the morning.’ The contents of the letter were first revealed by the historian Andrew Roberts, who said he obtained it from a friend who copied it from another private archive which he declined to identify. The Queen Mother’s letter is not the only document missing from the Monckton papers. An unknown number of what Helen Langley, a senior Bodleian librarian, described as ‘government papers’

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were withheld, only recently weeded out from the Monckton collection. They included fifty documents relating to the British fascist leader, Oswald Mosley. Mosley’s friends and relations – some of them known as the ‘King’s Party’ – had put pressure on Monckton to have Mosley released from internment. The Royal Archives, created in 1914, to be personal property, private, family and documents, even those papers relating to government matters. Official papers, including letters to and from prime ministers, Governors General of Commonwealth countries, and international leaders and prominent individuals, are locked away in Windsor Castle. The royal family can keep the papers under lock and key or destroy them at will. Thousands of documents from the 1930 and 1940s, including those relating to the monarchy and Nazi Germany, are believed to have been destroyed. We do not know whether they include the papers found in Germany in 1945 by Sir Anthony Blunt (whose wartime spying activities for the Soviet Union had yet to be discovered) sent by George VI to retrieve any correspondence that would have been damaging to the monarchy. Meanwhile, the nation’s archives face a new and unprecedented threat. Internal government communications are increasingly held on computer or exchanged via email. A strike on a single key can destroy a single file, however significant. Post-it notes with important, first-hand, comments can so easily be thrown away by officials and ministers worried about being identified, even for posterity. There is a danger that decisions recorded on paper and personal comments, and handwritten notes by prime ministers which help to bring the documents alive, may be on their way out. The government recognized the problem when it commented on a 2015 report by Sir Alex Allan, a former senior official and chairman of the JIC, entitled ‘Review of Government Digital Records’.19 Early in 2017, the Cabinet Office responded with its own report entitled ‘Better Information for Better Government’.20 It said: ‘Managing information is critical for good government. Internally, information is the foundation of effective analysis and policy making. It provides the evidence to support decision making and it is a critical enabler of efficiency. Externally, it supports accountability of both civil servants and ministers through publications, audit, parliamentary scrutiny, FoI and

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ultimately through open public records. Information is one of the core assets of government. Like other assets, it needs to be managed well if we are to get best value from it.’ It continued: ‘The transition from paper-based working to email and electronic documents undermined the rigour of information management across much of government. While little information has been lost altogether, much of what has accumulated over the past fifteen to twenty years is poorly organized, scattered across different systems and almost impossible to search effectively. This not only undermines government’s ability to structure and preserve long-term records, it also creates real and immediate risks for accounting officers, who may be unable to provide evidence for past decisions and actions or to meet their statutory obligations for public records and FoI. ‘Holding on to large volumes of digital material that has accumulated over time in an unstructured way poses a serious compliance risk. … It is vital that departments understand the information that they possess and handle it appropriately.’ In a passage echoing Gowing, headed: ‘Preventing “re-inventing the wheel”’, the Cabinet Office noted that wasted effort re-creating old work might cost taxpayers nearly £500 million every year. When it comes to the nation’s archives, we do not know what we are missing, and what we do know we are missing we don’t know when we will be able to see it. I have shown that there are always enough files released at regular intervals to keep journalists and their news editors entertained. We do not know how many have been kept back and why, and when, if ever, they will be released. What we do know is that the British obsession with secrecy has a long historical tail. It is part of a historical continuum that has evolved and remains embedded in the culture of government and governance in Britain. Greater transparency and priority given to official records and archives would contribute hugely to more efficient government, not least helping ministers learn from past mistakes – including those made in the second oldest profession, spying.

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London, November 1999. ‘Secrets are like sex. We all suspect that others get more than we do … .Then there is the enchantment of simple things, the gadgetry of espionage: secret inks, dead letter boxes, microdot cameras. … The security and intelligence agencies are not beyond exploiting their mantle of secrecy – it helps to impress their opponents and was good for recruitment. It also makes it harder for the Treasury to demand value for money’ – Sir Rodric Braithwaite, former British ambassador to Moscow and chairman of Whitehall’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC).1

What are Britain’s main security and intelligence agencies? MI5 and MI6 have their origins in an atmosphere of hysteria and spy mania which, as we have seen, was directed in particular against Germany in the early years of the twentieth century. In 1909, the Cabinet set up the Committee of Imperial Defence in response to what was perceived to be the growing threat, both military and from spying, from the Kaiser. A Secret Service Bureau was established and divided into two Military Intelligence sections, MI5 and MI6. The Security Service, commonly known as MI5, is responsible for protecting ‘national security’ – a concept that has never been defined, but in practice

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means protecting the British people and the country’s national infrastructure and institutions. I once heard Sir Clive Whitmore, a former permanent secretary at both the MoD and the Home Office, describe ‘national security’ as a ‘moveable feast’, depending on what was considered to be the most important threats facing Britain at any particular time. The 1989 Security Service Act gives MI5 far-reaching powers including monitoring the political activities of individuals considered ‘subversive’. MI5 is officially responsible to the Home Secretary. The act describes MI5’s functions as ‘the protection of national security and, in particular, its protection against threats from espionage, terrorism and sabotage, from the activities of agents of foreign powers and from actions intended to overthrow or undermine parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means [my emphasis].’ It thus allowed MI5 to argue that it had the statutory right to monitor the activities and communications of miners and their leaders – described by Thatcher as the ‘enemy within’ – during the strikes in 1984 and 1985. The government admitted in 2018 that MI5 used agents ‘who participate in criminality’. A heavily redacted document produced during a case brought before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal revealed that MI5 sought to give its agents greater freedom to commit criminal offences than that usually given to police informers. ‘The service has established its own procedure for authorizing the use of agents participating in crime’, it states. Sir Mark Waller, a retired judge appointed to oversee the policy, was instructed in 2012 by the prime minister at the time, David Cameron, not to comment on its legality. Guidelines about to what extent and in what circumstances MI5’s informers are authorized to commit crimes remain secret. The act adds: ‘It shall also be the function of the Service to safeguard the economic well-being of the United Kingdom against threats posed by the actions or intentions of persons outside the British Islands.’ This gives the green light to industrial and commercial espionage as well as fraud. By 2020, according to evidence it has given to Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, MI5 is expected to have nearly 5,000 officers, an increase of more than 20 per cent in four years and more than twice the number of staff it had at the time of the September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington,

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according to evidence it has given to the ISC. In 2018, about a quarter of senior MI5 posts were held by women, but none was recorded as coming from Black, Asian or minority-ethnic (BAME) backgrounds. In newspaper advertisements revealing its attempt to appeal to minority groups, MI5 in 2018 advertised explicitly for ‘female black male Asian school leaver university graduate disabled gay’ recruits. MI5 has presented itself as a new model employer, proudly flying the rainbow flag above Thames House to mark the accolade of being top of Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index which measures an organization’s work in tackling discrimination and creating an inclusive workplace for lesbian, gay, bi and trans (LGBT) people. The Secret Intelligence Service, commonly known as MI6, recruits foreigners to spy for Britain and is officially responsible to the foreign secretary. Although its officers brush aside comparisons with James Bond, they have never entirely wanted to shake off the association, secretly enjoying shots in the later Bond films of their exotic headquarters facing the Tate Britain Gallery on the banks of the Thames. MI6 was unable to resist referring to Bond on its website. ‘James Bond, as Ian Fleming originally conceived him, was based on reality’, it said, adding: ‘But any author needs to inject a level of glamour and excitement beyond reality in order to sell.’ Alex Younger, head of MI6, told journalists in a rare outing in 2016: ‘I’m conflicted about Bond. He has created a powerful brand for MI6: as C, the real-life version of M, there are few people who will not come to lunch if I invite them. Many of our counterparts envy the sheer global recognition of our acronym.’ Younger continued: ‘And to be fair, there are a few aspects of the genre that do resonate in real life: fierce dedication to the defence of Britain, for example. The real life ‘Q’ would want me to say that we too enjoy – and, indeed, need – a deep grasp of gadgetry. But’s that’s pretty much where the similarity ends. And, were Bond to apply to join MI6 now, he would have to change his ways.’2 Not quite as much, perhaps, as he would like the public to think. Though MI6 officers do not have the ‘license to kill’ enjoyed by Bond, the 1994 Intelligence Services Act protects them from liability resulting from actions in foreign countries, which if carried out in Britain, would be illegal. Section 7 of the Act, sometimes described as the ‘James Bond clause’, protects MI6 officers from prosecution for such activities anywhere in the world.

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Younger later toned down comparisons between MI6 and Bond. ‘I should make it clear that, despite bridling at the implication of a moral equivalence between us and our opponents that runs through novels, I’ll take the quiet courage and integrity of George Smiley over the brash antics of 007, any day’, he said. He was responding to a column in the Economist magazine which suggested MI6 agents consisted of ‘mavericks and misfits who break every rule but are tolerated because they are part of the British establishment club.’ Younger continued: ‘We break the rules, certainly; we do not break the law.’ He continued: ‘Despite inevitable tensions between the secret and published world, the relationship has generally been of mutual benefit. Literature gains an edgy genre. We are painted in the minds of a global audience as some form of ubiquitous intelligence presence. This can be quite a force multiplier, even if it means we are blamed for an astonishing range of phenomena in which we have no involvement at all.’ MI6 is due to have some 3,200 officers by March 2020, an increase of more than a third in six years. None of its senior officers were from ethnic minorities, according to official figures available at the end of 2017, though not all staff declared their ethnicity. In an attempt to recruit more women and people from ethnic minority backgrounds, in May 2018, MI6 launched a TV advertisement. After an opening shot in which a shark circles accompanied by threatening music, the shot widens showing a worried child comforted by his mother in an aquarium. ‘We are intelligence officers, but we don’t do what you think’, the voiceover says. It adds: ‘It is not keeping your cool in the shark tank. It is picking up the silent cues that matter … . MI6 – secretly, we are just like you.’ Cultural shifts even found their way into fiction. James Bond, the most highly charged heterosexual of spies, was confronted in Skyfall with a flirtatious gay scene when villain Raoul Silva, played by Javier Bardem, undoing Bond’s shirt and stroking his chest while Bond is tied to a chair. ‘First time for everything?’ he asks. Daniel Craig’s Bond, replies: ‘What makes you think this is my first time?’ It was a very different world from the past – in 1954, Alan Turing, the code-breaking genius at wartime Bletchley Park, died after eating a cyanidecoated apple in an apparent suicide after battling with his sexuality and being sentenced to chemical castration. He was given a posthumous royal pardon many years later, in 2013.

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The Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, Britain’s electronic eavesdropping and signals intelligence agency, is in the front line of cyber warfare, and responsible, like MI6, to the foreign secretary. Traditionally, the most secretive of Britain’s intelligence agencies, it quickly became well-known, not least because of a new Cheltenham headquarters, as eye-catching as MI6’s Vauxhall Cross. The initial cost of the ‘doughnut’, as it soon became known, amounted to more than £1 billion. It was too small to accommodate its rapidly expanding staff even before it was completed in 2004. From being initials that would be whispered in the Gloucestershire town, ‘GCHQ’ was soon highlighted as a main stop on the local bus routes. The way GCHQ came out of the shadows – first in the ABC case, then more widely – was a huge culture shock for many GCHQ staff so indoctrinated into official secrecy that they were told they must not even tell their wives (or husbands) what they were up to. GCHQ grew out of the Government Code & Cypher School at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire at the end of the Second World War. It was set up in Cheltenham, mainly because there were spare government buildings in the town. For the elite group of scientists, linguists and mathematicians that made up the senior staff, it was also a convenient distance away from the prying eyes of ministers. Other attractions were the surrounding countryside – Cheltenham prided itself on being the ‘Gateway to the Cotswolds’ – and race meetings, including the Gold Cup. Curiously, Robin Cook, a keen tipster, never visited it when he was a foreign secretary. The 1994 Intelligence Services Act applies to GCHQ as well as MI6, but specifies that GCHQ’s tasks include ‘to monitor or interfere with electromagnetic, acoustic and other emissions and any equipment producing such emissions and to obtain and provide information derived from or related to such emissions or equipment and from encrypted material (and) to provide advice and assistance … to the armed forces ... or to any other organization which is determined for the purposes of this section in such manner as may be specified by the Prime Minister.’ GCHQ’s global intelligence network includes Royal Navy submarines and surface ships which it can use to receive and send signals (HMS Endurance, the survey ship based in the Falklands was used for spying), and RAF

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reconnaissance aircraft, flying listening posts from which it can send messages to British troops on the ground and eavesdrop on an enemy’s internet and mobile phone communications. GCHQ is at the centre of the special relationship. Unlike nuclear weapons, in the field of code-breaking and signals intelligence, it is not entirely onesided. The United States does get something extra from Britain. That was clear from the leak of the 1994 internal GCHQ staff manual. It told GCHQ staff that the agency’s operations must be ‘of sufficient scale and of the right kind to make a continuation of the Sigint [signals intelligence] alliance worthwhile to our partners’. Significantly, it added: ‘This may entail on occasion the applying of UK resources to the meeting of US requirements’. Intelligence gathered from GCHQ’s former base at Little Sai Wan in Hong Kong provided valuable information to the United States, notably during the Vietnam War. The GCHQ base on Ascension Island in the Atlantic helped to provide valuable intelligence for the United States. (The base was closed down shortly before the Falklands conflict in 1982. As a result, Britain had to ask the United States to shift the ‘footprint’ of one of its satellites to cover the Falklands.) GCHQ had scores of listening posts, mainly in its former colonies. Developments in satellite technology have made many of GCHQ’s ground stations redundant. But not the base at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire, described misleadingly (in common with all US air force bases in Britain) as an RAF station. It is the US NSA’s largest eavesdropping post outside the United States. It intercepts and distributes intelligence gleaned from satellites. It is also plugged into Britain’s telecommunications network. Lindis Percy, the tireless founder of the Campaign for the Accountability of American bases who has been in an out of prison over many years for protesting inside the Menwith Hill base, was the first to expose another US intelligence and military communications centre – ‘RAF Croughton’ in Northamptonshire. Croughton is a large hub distributing US military communications in Europe. It is also the command centre for the US base in Djibouti on the Red Sea, from where armed drones strike targets in Yemen and Somalia. British satellite ground stations which gather intelligence for the United States include the GCHQ listening station at Ayos Nikolaos in Dhekelia, one of

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Britain’s sovereign base areas on Cyprus. There has been the occasional bust-up between the close intelligence allies. Irritated by the priority Heath was giving to Britain’s new European partners over the traditional ‘special relationship’ and the Atlantic alliance, Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, told the NSA to limit its supply of intelligence to GCHQ. In October 1973, the Yom Kippur war offered Heath the opportunity to retaliate – which he relished. He restricted US intelligence activities and over-flights from bases in Britain and Cyprus.3 Edward Snowden revealed how America’s worldwide eavesdropping organization, the NSA came to enjoy a truly symbiotic relationship with Britain’s GCHQ. The NSA paid to upgrade the GCHQ station in Bude on the north coast of Cornwall, an increasingly important hub to intercept international communications traffic passing through transatlantic fibreoptic cables. Globalization of the internet and the integration of US–British electronic eavesdropping render meaningless the principle originally laid down for GCHQ and the NSA that neither agency would intercept the communications of their own citizens. GCHQ’s budget has been increasing by nearly 20 per cent a year to combat the growing threat of terrorism and cyberattacks. It had a staff of nearly 6,000 in 2016, with women accounting for just 18 per cent of senior officers. Between 2 per cent and 3 per cent were from ethnic minorities. The agency expects to increase its staff total to more than 6,500 by 2020, but it is facing intense competition from private companies who can offer higher financial rewards to individuals (especially youngsters) skilled in the arts of mastering the opportunities and threats of the internet and cyber space. GCHQ is so short of the modern skills it needs that it began to appeal to school students to join a special apprentice schemes to catch potential computer whizz kids before they went to university. Once the most secretive of Britain’s security and intelligence agencies, it became much more open, in its own interests. GCHQ officials privately admitted it had been too secretive, implying that had it been more transparent about its activities in the past the impact of Snowden’s disclosures would not have been so great. GCHQ Puzzle Books became prominently displayed in bookshops. It organized a CyberFirst Girls Competition and summer camps

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for youngsters. It needs people, especially young people skilled in hacking, to help to counter the growing number of cyberattacks. The Special Forces, the SAS (the Special Air Service) and its naval equivalent, the SBS (the Special Boat Service) should be included as members of Britain’s security and intelligence agencies. They have in effect become their armed wing. MI6 and GCHQ in particular have developed a very close relationship with them. Ever since the Second World War, British governments have used covert action and Special Forces to plug the ‘gap between ambition and ability’.4 Closing that gap has become urgent as Britain’s defence budget is under growing pressure and Special Forces take on an increasingly important role. The combined budget of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ amounted to about £3 billion in 2017. The individual budgets of the three agencies remain secret despite objections from a slightly more assertive ISC. That sum does not include all counter cyber or counterterrorism operations, or the cost of hiring outside contractors and the cost of their buildings. The figure also does not include the cost of paying agents whose use the ISC describes as ‘highly controversial’. MI5 and MI6, the committee has warned, ‘are handing significant amounts of money to people who may have close links to terrorism or serious crime, or who may work for foreign governments. Furthermore, the agents and the information provided by them are not necessarily reliable: in 2015 it was reported in the media that an MI5 agent was allegedly recruited by a terrorist in Syria and sent back to Britain to launch an attack.’ MI6 told the committee that ‘the amounts that agents receive will range from hundreds of thousands of pounds to zero’.5 MI5’s headquarters is Thames House, an Edwardian listed building on Millbank and former HQ of the country’s once celebrated chemicals company, ICI. Britain’s most secret service, MI6, has the most spectacularly eye-catching headquarters – Vauxhall Cross, sometimes referred to as a ‘Babylonian Palace’ complete with what some officers have delighted in described as ‘Islamic green’ glass curtains. It became familiar to watchers of Bond films where it has been blown up, more than once. As the Terry Farrell-designed building was being constructed, I repeatedly asked Whitehall officials who the tenants were going to be. I had been tipped off by a member of Lambeth Council which had to

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give planning permission and approve the intended occupants. Only when the building was completed, well over a year later, was MI6 officially named as the occupier. From an upper floor of Thames House, the office of MI5’s director responsible for counterterrorism, you can just see on the south bank of the Thames, MI6’s headquarters Vauxhall Cross. They can still keep an eye on each other, and there remains residual class and social snobbery dividing them. (MI6 was traditionally said to look down on MI5, which in turn looked down on the police Special Branch, which looked down on those officers responsible for the basic tasks of maintaining law and order, and fighting crime.) But MI5 and MI6 have put an end to their damaging turf wars – and even conspire together when it suits them. For years, for example, they covered up a huge overspend on new headquarters which they moved into in 1994. The National Audit Office (NAO), Parliament’s financial watchdog, in 2000 disclosed how MI5 and MI6, with the help of the Treasury and Cabinet Secretary, kept ministers in the dark about huge increases in the cost of the two buildings. When ministers questioned the rising costs after they were eventually told about them, MI5 and MI6 claimed that without the extra money their activities and the safety of their staff would be put at risk. The NAO made it clear that the secrecy surrounding the projects was used to cover up incompetence rather than for genuine security needs. Thames House and Vauxhall Cross together cost £547 million, more than twice the original estimate. In addition, MI5 spent more than £200 million, four times the estimate, refurbishing Thames House while MI6 spent £75 million, more than three times the first estimates, fitting up its new headquarters. Thatcher castigated Sir Robin Butler, her cabinet secretary, for not keeping her informed about rocketing costs. Consultancy and management fees for the building alone amounted to £37 million. ‘Ministers were kept in the dark and secrecy was allowed to cover incompetence’ said David Davis, Conservative chair of the Commons cross-party Public Accounts Committee at the time. Intelligence agencies are no different from other organizations in that they have a vested interest in the status quo. They suffer from ‘cognitive dissonance’ –

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they do not believe what they don’t want to believe. The difficulty is finding out what they are up to, what they believe and why. Far from needing the protection of an ever higher wall of secrecy, they should be subjected to more rigorous independent scrutiny, including by journalists. MPs and Peers of all parties continue to adopt a deferential attitude towards them. And the law cannot keep up with the increasingly sophisticated and intrusive technology the security and intelligence agencies, notably GCHQ, can exploit. In this chapter and the following one, I will examine the record of Britain’s security and intelligence agencies and the oddballs they have attracted, spies’ uses and abuses, and how they have been allowed to get away with breaking the law. They may have helped to protect the public and the security of the British state. Their activities have sometimes also eroded it. With piercing irony, Sir Rodric Braithwaite has observed that the security and intelligence ‘have access to arcane knowledge which is closed even to their political masters’. Writing years before the JIC drew up the disastrous and discredited Iraq weapons dossier, Braithwaite pointed to a major, but inevitably neglected problem. ‘The sensationalism with which the newspapers in Britain treat anything to do with secret intelligence’, he observed, ‘makes rational discussion almost impossible’6. In Britain, spies are depicted, in fact and fiction alike, as an exotic breed. Ministers protect the country’s intelligence agencies with the cover of ‘national security’. They answer questions from MPs and journalists with the mantra: ‘It has long been the practice of successive governments not comment on intelligence matters.’ Yet they break their own stated rule, leaking secret intelligence for their own ends and publicly distancing themselves from MI5 or MI6 to protect themselves from embarrassment, after a terrorist attack for example. There is no such a thing as complete security. MI6 and MI5 intelligence is not infallible. Far from it. Known terrorists have slipped through their net, events which could have been foreseen have come as a shock, because of a lack of resources, but also a failure to join the dots, being drowned by too much information, a failure to see the wood from the trees – vulnerabilities identified in the inquiries and inquests into both the Manchester Arena suicide bombing in May 2017 and the London Bridge terrorist attack the following month.

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On occasion intelligence failures have been the result of an overwhelming desire to satisfy their political masters – the dossier on Saddam Hussein’s weapons programme is a prime example. A root cause is an obsession with secrecy. Reginald Hibbert, a senior FO official responsible for liaising with MI6, warned of the risk of what he described as ‘ministers and leaders and top officials becoming absorbed into a culture where secrecy comes to be confused with truth and where, after a time, contact is lost with earthly awkwardness.’ He added: ‘British official thinking about the Soviet Union and eastern Europe has been taken more by surprise by perestroika than it needed to have been. Britain’s excessively NATO-first and Europe second attitude has been partly conditioned by over-emphasis on the threats from the east revealed by secret sources and under-emphasis on economic and political trends which enjoyed no classification.’7 The Franks committee report on the events leading up to the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands in 1982 noted: ‘The changes in the Argentine position were, we believe, more evident on the diplomatic front and in the associated press campaign than in the intelligence reports’.8 The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, looking back on his wartime experience in MI6, said the agency valued information in proportion to its secrecy rather than its accuracy. It would prefer something ‘smuggled out of Sofia in the fly-buttons of a vagabond Rumanian pimp’ to what could be learned ‘from a prudent reading of the foreign press’. Neither MI6 nor the CIA foresaw the 1979 Iranian revolution, or the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and subsequent break-up of the Soviet Union. Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 came as a complete surprise to NATO. Officials have privately admitted that GCHQ, MI5, MI6 and the MoD were all slow to recognize the potential and significance of cyberattacks. Lord Egremont, private secretary to the former prime minister, Harold Macmillan, considered intelligence agencies a waste of time and money. ‘Much better if the Russians saw the cabinet minutes twice a week’, he remarked. ‘Prevent all that fucking dangerous guesswork.’ Compton Mackenzie was not the only writer whose personal experience led them to mock Britain’s intelligence agencies. Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene and Malcolm

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Muggeridge have all done so. More recently, John le Carré has questioned their values and the morality of a profession older than all bar prostitution. Ministers have also been prepared to dismiss the agencies when it suited them, as was made plain in their evidence to the Scott arms-to-Iraq inquiry. The former FO minister David Mellor observed in evidence to the Scott ‘arms to Iraq’ inquiry that intelligence reports did not contain ‘shattering information about who was doing what to whom… . They were significantly less riveting than the novels would have you believe. They weren’t as interesting as the metal boxes marked “Eat after reading”. They didn’t tell you all you wanted to know about life.’ The former foreign secretary, Geoffrey Howe, recalled: ‘In my early days I was naive enough to get excited about intelligence reports. Many … look, at first sight, to be important and interesting, and significant and then when we check them, they are not even straws in the wind. They are cornflakes in the wind.’ David Gore-Booth, then British ambassador to Saudi Arabia, put it this way this in his effortless lofty manner: ‘Intelligence’, he told Scott, ‘is a very imprecise art as a matter of fact.’ Douglas Hurd, Howe’s successor, told Scott: ‘There is nothing particularly truthful abut a report simply because it is a secret one. People sometimes get excited because a report is secret and think that, therefore, it has some particular validity. It is not always so in my experience.’ I heard Hurd in one of his more frivolous moods, saying journalists would get excited by a blank piece of paper if it was stamped ‘secret’. Ministers are only too well aware of how the media can be manipulated. If journalists are blinded by information classified as ‘secret’, they are even more so when they are told it comes from spies. That is why, with a few honourable exceptions, the media laps it up. MI6’s ‘secret intelligence’ in the discredited Iraqi weapons dossiers. Ignorance rather than intelligence was the fundamental cause of the fiascos of the US-led and UK-backed military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. In one of many conversations, Lord Guthrie, the former chief of the defence staff, described British commanders’ ignorance of tribal structures and warlords before they were deployed to Afghanistan as disastrous. The information was readily available from open sources and the Afghans themselves. ‘It was a national disgrace that, having flown over much of the country for 13 years,

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you could have not done better in building up a proper intelligence picture’, Air Marshal Sir Brian Burridge, commander of British forces in Iraq, told me. ‘We just didn’t have any intelligence.’ That was the job of Whitehall’s JIC then chaired by Sir John Scarlett, a senior officer of MI6, the very agency that concocted the mendacious Iraqi weapons dossier. The JIC has not had a good record. By the time raw intelligence is filtered and members of the committee from the different agencies cover their backs, the reports are mainly bland and unenlightening, with much of the material available from open sources (Saddam’s weapons programme was an exception). Yet as bad intelligence can be treated as gospel, so can good intelligence be ignored. The historian Max Hastings describes in The Secret War9 how the JIC rejected warnings, not least from Stafford Cripps, Britain’s ambassador in Moscow, that Hitler was planning to attack the Soviet Union in 1941. The JIC was guilty of the ‘foremost sin in intelligence analysis … the JIC reached conclusions founded upon British and not Nazi logic.’ Stalin, paranoid as ever, rejected warnings from his agents in Germany, and from his prime agent in MI6, Kim Philby, of an imminent German attack on Russian in 1941. He suspected that the intelligence reports from Philby and other members of the Cambridge spy ring, were planted, a plot to weaken the Soviet Union at the expense of the West, and evidence that Britain was planning a secret deal with Hitler. Stalin ignored warnings from Moscow’s supremely well-placed agent, Richard Sorge, of Germany’s imminent attack on Russia in June 1941. Stalin called Sorge a ‘bastard who set up factories and brothels’. He took a different view when Moscow’s master spy proved to be correct. Security chiefs were desperate to protect the secrets of Bletchley Park. British codebreakers could not be explicit about their sources. The German invasion of Crete in 1941 was the first big test of how Bletchley’s ultra intercepts could be used by British commanders in the field. Ultra provided accurate details on German plans but references to unidentified ‘most secret sources’ were misread by the unimaginative allied commander on the island, General Bernard Freyberg. One question that remains unanswered is whether through information obtained from 1941 by Bletchley decrypts, Churchill’s wartime government

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could have told the world about the extermination of Jews. It did not do so, officials said, because of the need to protect intelligence sources. In August 1941, Churchill referred in a BBC broadcast to specific numbers of Jews killed by the SS in Eastern Europe. ‘One consequence of Churchill’s slip’, notes Hastings, ‘was that when in October 1942 the Foreign Office compiled a report on known German atrocities, especially those committed against Jews, this was not publicly released, to avoid any new risk of compromising intelligence sources.’10 If it is difficult to know the foibles and intentions of leaders of democracies, it is even more difficult to imagine, let alone know, what is going on in the minds of a dictator. Saddam Hussein was a case in point. Even his closest, and apparently trusted, advisers did not dare to tell their leader what they thought. They did not know that he had abandoned, temporarily at least, his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programme. Stephen Lander, the former head of MI5, pointed to the difficulties in getting inside the mind of a dictator. ‘Saddam wanted everyone to believe he had them. He thought they would not attack him. It was a catastrophic misjudgment’, he told me. As Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB defector recruited by MI6, admitted, ‘secret intelligence’ can simply be made up to impress the bosses. In his book Instructions from the Centre Gordievsky described how Moscow ‘was certainly unaware … how frequently the London Residency sought to pass off information from open sources as coming from confidential contacts or agents in order to disguise its failure to obtain secret intelligence.’ The book, with photographs of dead letter drops in London parks and churches, described how he and fellow KGB officers conned Moscow headquarters into believing their intelligence reports were the result of expensive lunches with valuable British contacts. They supplied Moscow with information masquerading as secret intelligence, but simply gleaned from reports from open sources including the think tanks Chatham House, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) and the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).11 The files of the KGB and former Soviet bloc agencies, including the East German Stasi after the fall of the Berlin Wall, presented journalists, academics and other chasers after reds under the beds with a field day. Some of those named may, wittingly or otherwise, have done the Soviet Union’s bidding

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and revealed very bad judgment, but their significance as ‘spies’ has been so exaggerated that the motives of those making the claims can only be suspected. In claims coinciding with the publication of his autobiography, Gordievsky reported that the KGB regarded Michael Foot, the future Labour leader as an ‘actual agent’ and made regular payments to the source they called ‘Agent Boot’. The claims Gordievsky passed on about Foot, which he said MI6 believed, were inconsistent, however, and sit oddly with Foot’s long record of consistently opposing the Soviet Union and its policies. After the Sunday Times published allegations that he was a Soviet ‘agent of influence’, Foot sued for libel and was awarded substantial damages. Gordievsky said he saw a number of names in the KGB files, including the Labour MP Bob Edwards, the trade union leader Jack Jones, and CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Left wing MPs, trade union leaders and CND featured in both the KGB and MI5 files. A former Czech intelligence officer disclosed that one of Foot’s left-wing successors Jeremy Corbyn, was described in the former Czechoslovakian secret service files as agent COB, a claims seized on by those with their own agendas. Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 at the time of the invasion of Iraq, told the Daily Telegraph on the day of the general election on 8 June 2017: ‘Frankly, I’m shocked that no one has stood up and said, unambiguously, how profoundly dangerous it would be for the nation if Jeremy Corbyn becomes Prime Minister … let me be clear, the leader of the Labour Party is an old-fashioned international socialist who has forged links with those quite ready to use terror when they haven’t got their way: the IRA, Hizbollah, Hamas. As a result he is completely unfit to govern and Britain would be less safe with him in No 10’. Dearlove intervened again in February 2018 during the unsubstantiated claims about agent COB saying ‘questions to answer’ over his contact with a Communist spy and could not simply ‘laugh off ’ the ‘disclosures’. Even in the days of counter-subversion paranoia in the 1970s and 1980s, former leaders of MI5 and MI6 did not go that far, in public at any rate. The Zinoviev letter is a notorious example of how intelligence can be manufactured – made up – and used for political ends. The letter, purported to be from Grigori Zinoviev, president of the Comintern, the international organization founded by Lenin to promote communism throughout the world,

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was almost certainly forged by a MI6 source and leaked by MI6 officers to the Conservative Party.12 Leaked then to the Daily Mail, it was designed to ensure that Labour would lose the 1924 general election. The letter called on British communists to mobilize ‘sympathetic forces’ in the Labour Party to support an Anglo-Soviet treaty (including a loan to the Bolshevik government) and to encourage ‘agitation-propaganda’ in the armed forces. On 25 October 1924, four days before the election, the Daily Mail splashed headlines across its front-page claiming: ‘Civil War Plot by Socialists’ Masters: Moscow Orders to Our Reds; Great Plot Disclosed.’ Labour lost by a landslide. MI5 was obsessed throughout the Cold War with countering what it called ‘domestic subversion’ targeting prominent left-wing individuals as well as campaigning groups ignoring real threats, notably terrorism by Northern Irish paramilitaries and later from extreme Islamists. Three successive heads of MI5 – Stella Rimington, Stephen Lander and Eliza Manningham-Buller – told me that the agency’s anti-subversion campaign got out of hand. Manningham-Buller described MI5’s anti-subversive role as ‘something sordid … slightly tacky’. She was in a peculiarly male world, with, as she put it, former members of the Colonial Service ‘coming out of the sun worrying about the Communist party in Woking … . There was a lot of drinking. One of the problems was the service was too isolated and too insulated. It was extraordinarily unhealthy.’ The former prime minister Edward Heath publicly mocked MI5, telling MPs he had met ‘people in the security services who talked the most ridiculous nonsense and whose whole philosophy was ridiculous nonsense. If some of them were on a tube and saw someone reading the Daily Mirror, they would say, “get after him, that is dangerous. We must find out where he bought it.”’13 Whitehall annual assessments have continued to list ‘subversive or terrorist organizations and investigative journalists’ as among those considered to be threats to the state.14 As though to deflect attention away from genuine scandals, including the Cambridge spy ring and the atom spies as well as allegations of Soviet penetration, MI5 indulged in a spying spree on ‘subversives’. Leading the pursuit was Charles Elwell, a former Colditz prisoner of war and head of MI5’s F branch responsible for countering ‘domestic subversion’. He had played a

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key role in discovering the Portland spy ring run by Konon Molody, the Soviet agent who used the name Gordon Lonsdale. But his spy-catching days and tendency to believe anything Soviet defectors told him made him totally unsuitable for the task of chasing domestic targets. He saw dangers where there were none. Elwell’s skewed priorities and poor judgment led an MI5 officer Cathy Massiter to blow the whistle on MI5’s activities. She described how MI5 had cast its net to catch 300 members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty), including two of its senior officers later to become Labour cabinet ministers, Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman. Files were opened on Jack Straw, then president of the National Union of Students and later foreign and home secretaries in Blair’s government, Peter (now Lord) Mandelson who was briefly a member of the Young Communist League, and the Beatle John Lennon. MI5 opened a file on Jack Dromey, a trade union organizer during the Grunwick industrial dispute (where he met Harman, his future wife, on the picket line). Trade union leaders on whom Elwell and his MI5 team kept files included Jack Jones of the transport workers and Hugh Scanlon, president of the engineers’ union, the AUEW. ‘Fact sheets’ on the two trade union leaders were regularly distributed to 10 Downing Street and selected ministers. In 1977, Scanlon was prevented from becoming chairman of British Shipbuilding because MI5 advised that he should not be allowed to see confidential documents. After Elwell left MI5, he edited a clandestine newsletter, British Briefing, which consisted of ill-founded claims about Labour and trade union activists, pressure groups, charities and writers. I was sent copies by a Tory MP unhappy about its ill-founded claims. Among those it accused of helping the communist cause were Chris Mullin, former Labour MP and successful campaigner against the conviction of the Birmingham Six. British Briefing’s targets included the housing charity Shelter, Lord Gifford QC – a leading defence barrister – and the playwright Howard Brenton. Even his former MI5 colleagues distanced themselves from his exaggerated view of the threat from subversives. MI5 declined Elwell’s suggestion that it should be the custodian of British Briefing’s archive when it ceased production in 1990.

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Under the heading ‘Myths and Misunderstandings’, MI5 explained on its website: ‘It has often been alleged that, in the past, we systematically investigated trade unions and various pressure groups. We have never investigated people simply because they were members of trade unions or campaigning organizations. But’, MI5 added, ‘subversive groups have in the past sought to infiltrate … such organizations as a way of exerting political influence.’ MI5’s argument was that CND had to be monitored because one of its prominent members, John Cox, was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain; that Hewitt’s partner, Bill Birtles, was a communist; and that the leader of the Scottish miners, Mick McGahey, was a communist. So you did not have be a communist to have your communications intercepted. That was the justification, for MI5 bugging conversations between the Labour MP Joan Ruddock, and Cox. The broad definition of MI5’s role in the 1989 Security Service Act – to protect national security ‘from actions intended to overthrow or undermine parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means’ – gave it a green light, as I have noted, to target miners’ leaders during the 1984–85 miners’ strike. GCHQ technology supported MI5 and advised police special branches about how to intercept the communications of the National Union of Mineworkers. Stella Rimington, the leading MI5 officer responsible for targeting the miners’ leaders, was encouraged by Thatcher’s repeated reference to miners’ leaders as ‘the enemy within’. ‘If the strike is led by people who say they are trying to bring down the government, our role [is] to assess [them].’, she told me. A legitimate role for MI5, I asked? ‘Yes’, she replied emphatically. I saw first-hand that Arthur Scargill was one of MI5’s chief targets when, with my Guardian colleague, Seumas Milne (later one of Jeremy Corbyn’s chief aides), I visited the building on the corner of Gower Street and Euston Road in Central London which MI5 had just vacated to move en bloc to Thames House, its new headquarters on Millbank. There stuck on the wall was a large photograph of the miners’ leader looking very much as though it had been used as a dart board. Like Elwell, Peter Wright saw threats to Britain’s security where there were none. Wright was part of a clique inside MI5 which mounted their own conspiracies in an attempt to combat them and whose obsession with Soviet

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penetration was compounded by their hostility to Labour governments and trade unions. Though the size of the clique has been exaggerated, MI5 did open a file on Harold Wilson, the Labour leader, to whom they gave the cover-name Henry Worthington, amid suspicious of his businessmen friends who conducted dealings with Communist countries. MI5 had already vetoed the appointment of Labour ministers it suspected of having potentially subversive associations. One was Niall MacDermot, a candidate for the post of Solicitor General in 1966 in Wilson’s Labour government. I asked MacDermot what he thought of it. ‘It is correct’, he replied, ‘that my promotion was blocked on the advice of MI5 on the grounds that they thought my wife was a security risk.’ He added: ‘She was never a member of the Italian or any other Communist Party. During the war she worked in an underground movement in Italy helping allies prisoners of war to escape, including Russian prisoners. There were people of all political views, except fascist, in this organisation.’ This was the time when retired generals, Cecil King, the newspaper magnate and Louis Mountbatten were named as plotting a coup against the Labour government.15 Right-wing elements in both MI5 and MI6 were supported by ‘alongsiders’ – individuals who helped their cause through varying degrees of back propaganda. One of these ‘alongsiders’ was Brian Crozier, a friend of Elwell’s, who was one of those people whose charm belies intolerant and class-ridden views. One of Crozier’s fundraisers was the former senior MI6 officer and friend of Philby’s, Nicholas Elliott. In 1966, with the help of CIA funds, Crozier set up a British-based agency, Forum World Features, and later founded the Institute for the Study of Conflict. He also contributed to the FO’s secret propaganda unit, the Information Research Department. So febrile was the atmosphere at the time that I was accused of being influenced by Communists, even directly by the Soviet Union, for reporting on the dangers of the chemical defoliant 2,4,5-T, known as ‘Agent Orange’ by the United States during the Vietnam War. The accusations were levelled at me – by leading farmers as well as senior government officials – when I reported on a campaign by the National Union of Farmworkers to ban its use on agricultural land. They argued that Moscow and its allies were behind the campaign in order to sabotage Britain’s food industry and hence the country’s security.

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Just how far MI5 and MI6 officers went to destabilize the Labour government remains an official secret. The Defence of the Realm, MI5’s official history, by Christopher Andrew, was published in 2009 by Penguin to commemorate the agency’s centenary. The preface contains an intriguing paragraph. Andrew wrote that the most difficult part of the clearance process – that is, what was officially cleared for publication – concerned the ‘requirements of other government departments’, that is, not MI5 or the Home Office. One ‘significant excision as a result of those requirements’ and one that was ‘hard to justify’, he said, related to Chapter E4. The chapter is headed ‘The Wilson Plot’, a reference to allegations – made by Wright among others – that the Labour prime minister was alleged to have been a security risk and MI5 had a secret file on him. That excision, added Andrew, merited consideration by the Intelligence and Security Committee. I asked Sir Malcolm Rifkind, then chairman of the ISC, if he would pursue the matter. He told me it was not the committee’s role to do so. I made a FoI request to the Cabinet Office. It replied that since the information related to security and intelligence it was exempted from the FoI Act. The temptation to abuse privileged access to intrusive technology against targets that bear no relationship with national security has been too great. Working on a documentary in 1991 for the Guardian and Granada’s World in Action programme, Nick Davies and I discovered that GCHQ had intercepted the communications of a far wider group of targets than those who could even remotely be regarded as potential threats. They included Kathleen TacchiMorris, a ninety-three-year-old peace campaigner who had been honoured by the UN, formal exchanges of greetings from East European trade union organizations to Campbell Christie, general secretary of the Scottish Trade Union Congress, and the private and diplomatic conversations of the Pope. For decades, MI5, supported by the police Special Branch, deployed twenty-four undercover officers (including Annie Machon, partner of the MI5 renegade David Shayler) to infiltrate the small and hardly threatening Socialist Workers party. In 1984, two years after GCHQ failed to catch a genuine spy, Geoffrey Prime, in a move that appeased the United States, Margaret Thatcher implied that thousands of innocent members in the intelligence-gathering agency

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could not be trusted by imposing a ban on trade union membership at GCHQ. Thatcher claimed there was a ‘conflict of loyalties’ between union membership and employment at the eavesdropping agency and referred to a protest action taken by union members during a drawn-out strike by civil service unions three years earlier. The union ban provoked an outrage – a conflict not of loyalties but of principle. Staff were in tears as the deadline approached when they had to choose between abandoning their right to join a trade union or lose their job. The union ban was privately welcomed by the United States though senior GCHQ officials insisted it was not imposed at Washington’s specific request. Sir John Nott, the defence secretary, told the Commons that the industrial dispute had ‘in no way affected operational capability in any area’ during the Falklands conflict. Indeed, GCHQ staff had been praised by ministers for their efforts. In a passionate speech in the Commons shortly after the ban was announced, Denis Healey, Labour’s shadow foreign secretary, rounded on Sir Geoffrey Howe, the foreign secretary, calling him the ‘fall guy’. Healey continued: ‘Those of us with long memories will feel that he is rather like poor van der Lubbe in the Reichstag fire trial … who is the Mephistopheles behind this shabby Faust? The answer to that is clear. The handling of this decision by – I quote her own backbenchers – the great she-elephant, she who must be obeyed, the Catherine the Great of Finchley, the Prime Minister herself, has drawn sympathetic trade unionists, such as Len Murray, into open revolt. Her pig-headed bigotry has prevented her closest colleagues and Sir Robert Armstrong [the Cabinet Secretary] from offering and accepting a compromise.’16 Trade union membership at GCHQ was restored, as Labour in opposition promised it would be, soon after Blair became prime minister in 1997. In a facesaving arrangement, the staff accepted a non-strike deal and the management the principle of union membership. There was little doubt that GCHQ management was bugging the communications of the bunch of committed officers who resigned rather than abandoning the right to join a trade union. I talked to them regularly, mainly on the phone, and in particular to the leading light of the ‘refuseniks’, Mike Grindley. He was a cheerful, energetic man who became a familiar face at countrywide rallies carrying his trademark plastic bag with the logo of

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‘GCHQ Trade Unions’. One day I arranged to have an early lunchtime pint at a Cheltenham pub known for its good quality beer, the Cotswold Inn. The pub was quite empty. Soon after I met Mike, a man dressed in a smart but sombre suit entered. After ordering half a pint he sat down on a corner table. From time to time he looked pointedly in our direction. I asked Mike, who had his back to the man, who he was. ‘Oh’, said Mike in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘that is one of GCHQ’s security officers.’ Our telephone conversation arranging our meeting was clearly bugged, no doubt at Mike’s end, though I was reliably told that GCHQ had already put a bug on my home phone. In Mike’s case, it was because GCHQ security could not believe those protesting against the trade union ban could be trusted not to give away secrets. It was an absurd assumption, the protesters for obvious reasons went out of their way not to reveal anything that would help Thatcher prove her point about a ‘conflict of loyalties’. My phone was bugged, I am told, simply because I wrote regularly about GCHQ and Britain’s other security and intelligence agencies. MI5, meanwhile, was so preoccupied with left-wing groups and singleissue campaigns like the CND, that it was slow to appreciate the real threat to national security from Northern Ireland, as both Lander and ManninghamBuller made clear to me. In 1979, ten years after the start of the Troubles, Louis Mountbatten, the Queen’s cousin, was killed by an IRA bomb placed on a fishing boat off County Sligo. Later the same day, eighteen paratroopers were killed in an ambush near Warrenpoint in County Down. Thatcher brought in the former head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield, to shake up the security forces in Northern Ireland. He was forced to leave his post soon after, victim of a smear campaign about his sexuality orchestrated by elements of the security forces and police resentful of his position. MI5 quickly seized the opportunity to be the lead agency responsible for security in Northern Ireland, taking over from the police Special Branch. It was determined to make up for lost time. Patrick Walker, a senior MI5 officer in Northern Ireland (a former colonial administrator in Uganda who was to be appointed head of the agency) told the Royal Ulster Constabulary to put spying ahead of solving crimes. As a result of Walker’s report – drawn up in 1980 but only made public through an FoI Act request nearly forty years later –

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detectives were ordered never to charge a suspected terrorist without first consulting the Special Branch, their intelligence-gathering unit which worked closely with MI5. That enabled anyone who was arrested to be recruited as an informer rather than charged with a criminal offence. British agents – who became known in police circles as ‘protected species’ – continued to be involved in murders and bombings, while passing on information about their fellow terrorists. MI5, military intelligence, and the RUC special branch, recruited informers, both Catholic and Loyalist, sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing with each other. They turned a blind eye to murders, some of which were the result of British informers shopping other British informers. Such practices, the argument went, served to increase the credibility of informers and protect them from suspicion. One British informer was Gary Haggarty, a member of the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force, jailed for six-and-a-half years in 2017 after admitting to more than five hundred crimes including five murders, five conspiracies to murder, arson, kidnap and dozens of assaults over a sixteen-year period. One alleged informer was Freddie Scappaticci, allegedly code-named Stakeknife, who allegedly commanded the IRA’s internal security unit, known as the ‘Nutting Squad’, tasked with rooting out and frequently killing suspected informers within the organization. He was arrested in 2018 relating to murder, torture and kidnap by detectives investigating British intelligence handlers. Scappaticci has always denied he is Stakeknife and that he was involved in any such offences. Pat Finucane, a Belfast human rights lawyer and defender of IRA prisoners, was killed in 1989 after being targeted by Brian Nelson who passed information about him to his killer. Nelson was a paid agent of British military intelligence. The man who supplied the weapon used to kill Finucane was a Special Branch informer, and when the getaway driver was arrested he, too, was recruited and was not prosecuted. According to police evidence to the limited inquiry into Finucane’s murder by Sir Desmond de Silva: ‘The Military allowed him [Nelson] to continue his work even though he had clearly reached a point of involvement which was undoubtedly criminal’. In February 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that inquiries into the lawyer’s murder had not been

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effective. It referred to an agreement by Dublin and London in 2001 for a full public inquiry into the murder. That agreement was later reneged on by the British government. The RUC and MI5 also covered up ‘shoot to kill’ attacks by the SAS as well as the police. In one notorious incident covered up by the RUC and MI5 in 1982, an unarmed seventeen-year-old Michael Tighe, was shot and killed in a hayshed. A report into Tighe’s death drawn up by John Stalker, chief constable of Greater Manchester police, was suppressed, and Stalker became the victim of a smear campaign. A second report, by Colin Sampson, then chief constable of West Yorkshire, released years later, described MI5’s conduct in destroying vital evidence, including an audio tape, as ‘reprehensible’ and ‘patently dishonest’. A number of British undercover military units were set up, included the 14th Intelligence Company and the Force Research Unit. But it was the SAS that was at the centre of ‘shoot to kill’ operations. In one notorious incident in May 1987 in Loughgall in Co Armagh, a small village where the Orange Order was founded in 1795, the SAS ambushed and killed eight members of an IRA active service unit were killed. An innocent civilian passerby, Anthony Hughes, was also shot dead in the operation in which 678 rounds were fired, just 78 of them by from IRA guns. In 1996 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that SAS soldiers used more force than necessary when they killed three unarmed members of an IRA active service unit killed in Gibraltar in 1988. One of the three, Sean Savage, was shot by as many as six times by an (unnamed) SAS soldier. The European court did not blame the soldiers; rather, it ruled that the way the operation was controlled breached Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights covering the right to life. British officials involved told me that in briefings in London MI5 officers fired up the SAS soldiers saying the IRA unit was uniquely dangerous. The SAS pumped up at the best of times, needed little encouragement. The IRA was planning an attack on British troops in Gibraltar. The question was: Should the SAS have seized the suspects before killing them? Initial claims by the MoD and ministers’ comments that the IRA team was armed when they were shot and that a bomb had been placed in a car were false.

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Since the IRA was a highly structured organization befitting an army that it insisted it was, MI5 found it relatively easy to infiltrate – much easier than the Islamist terrorist groups its officers had to confront later. And despite the pride they took in counter-intelligence operations – avoiding detection by discussing targets on the top of buses, for example – members of IRA active service units could not resist trumpeting the success of a particular operation on an open telephone line with their commanders. Yet it was truly a dirty war, with cover-ups protecting unlawful killings by British forces and their informers, some of which were the result of conflicts between competing British agencies – MI5, the RUC special branch and military intelligence. The most controversial operations in Northern Ireland do not appear in Andrew’s official history of MI5. MI6 had a better record in Northern Ireland than MI5. MI6 officers, used to talking to individuals in the ‘enemy camps’ around the world, believed there was nothing to lose, and potential gains, by making discreet contacts with leaders of the IRA. They appreciated that this was going to be a long war. Michael Oatley, an experienced, soft-spoken, intelligence officer succeeded Frank Steele, a former colonial official and one of Wilfred Thesiger’s travelling companions in Arabia, as MI6’s senior representative in Belfast. With the support of an Irish Catholic priest, he opened a back channel to Martin McGuinness. Few ministers knew about the secret talks (though Oatley told the then top official at the Northern Ireland Office, Sir John Chilcot). Anthony Verrier, an MI6 ‘alongsider’ (who had done some work on the Gulf for the agency) described how British officials ‘played a crucial, covert role in the formation of a democratic political party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, which they saw as an acceptable alternative to the Provisionals.’17 The SDLP did not make much headway, however, and the view of the intelligence establishment changed. In the early 1990s, with the prospect of a ceasefire on the horizon, a member of the JIC told me that the only way forward was to talk not to the SDLP or Ulster Unionists but to those who had been considered ‘extremists’ but had the real clout – the DUP and Sinn Fein. But looking forward was a minority occupation and came very late. British soldiers were initially welcomed by both sides in the sectarian divide, especially the Catholic minority when they were first deployed in Northern Ireland

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in 1969. It was not long before they were seen as the enemy, defenders of Protestant ‘Loyalists’. Bloody Sunday in 1972 provoked more violence on both sides with elements in MI5, and military intelligence, resorting increasingly to a policy of peremptory violence – ‘shoot first, ask questions later’, or ‘shoot to kill’ as it came to be called – that would be considered unacceptable had they been subjected to proper independent scrutiny. They assumed – correctly – they would be protected by such a degree of official secrecy that it was almost inevitable they would commit excesses – excesses that in the end were counterproductive and undermined the very security they were supposed to protect. It also meant they become complacent, blind to new threats. Whitehall officials privately admit that Britain’s security, intelligence and defence agencies were extremely slow to recognize a new threat, namely cyberattacks. MI5 officers were also slow to recognize the threat posed by radical preachers seeking refuge in Britain. The French authorities thought the British too were accommodating to Algerian militants. The trouble was that given their treatment by the French security agencies, when they came to Britain, Algerian asylum seekers argued that if they were deported to France they would be sent back to Algeria where they would be tortured. MI5 divided radical Islamic preachers into those they considered ‘mouth’ – full of rhetoric but not really dangerous – and ‘trousers’ – those suspected of plotting terror attacks. The trouble was that rhetoric could turn to violence. Such was the case with the preacher at the Finsbury Park mosque in North London, Abu Hamsa. The case which frustrated Theresa May for years when she was home secretary was that of Abu Qatada, a cleric who quickly became a hate figure in the tabloid press. The government and MI5 never explained why more pressure was not put on Qatada. The Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) noted in 2007 that Qatada claimed that MI5 ‘knew the sort of views which he was expressing and took no steps to stop or warn him, to prosecute him or prevent his fundraising for groups which are regarded as terrorist groups … or for training in Afghanistan’. MI5’s attitude, according to SIAC, was based upon ‘an erroneous assessment of the damage which the preaching and propagating of radical views could do within this country and elsewhere’.

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When Qatada (born Omar Othman) came to the UK in 1994 as a refugee, MI5 believed he was not dangerous. ‘All mouth’ was how officials described him privately. Comments by the leading anti-terrorist Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón, describing Qatada as the ‘spiritual head of the mujahedin in Britain’ were dismissed by British security and intelligence sources as overblown rhetoric. One reason why MI5 might not have welcomed a trial lay in the circumstances surrounding the seizure by the CIA of two British residents – Jamil el-Banna, a Jordanian national, and Bisher al-Rawi, an Iraqi – in Gambia in 2002 and their subsequent rendition to Guantanamo Bay. MI5 documents disclosed in court describe the attempt by MI5 and anti-terrorist police to recruit Banna as an informer eight days before he flew to Gambia for what he called a business trip. Court documents disclosed during a case by brought by the two men’s lawyers showed that MI5 had passed to the CIA misleading information about Banna’s alleged links to an attempt to smuggle parts for a bomb through Heathrow. Rawi had also helped MI5 to obtain information about Qatada. Banna had prayed in the same mosque as Qatada when they lived in Peshawar, Pakistan. Banna, Rawi and Qatada later prayed in the same mosque in London. Whitehall officials privately admitted that MI5 should have told ministers about the seizure of the two men in Gambia. They were captured despite specific instructions from MI5 and MI6 to the US and Gambian authorities that they should not be arrested. Questions about the effectiveness and relevance of MI5 intelligencegathering inevitably following the 7/7 underground attacks in London on 7 July 2005. MI5’s defence was that they could not place all terror suspects under surveillance; it was a question of how to use limited resources and of priorities in light of judgments about who presented the greatest risk. However, an inquest and subsequent inquiry by the ISC did throw up avoidable mistakes, notably a stunning lack of cooperation between MI5 and the West Yorkshire police. The attacks hastened MI5’s plans to set up regional offices in Liverpool, Glasgow, Bristol, Manchester, Leeds and Cardiff. It was a belated admission that the professional relationship between police forces and MI5 was far from satisfactory, the result at least partly of mutual resentment. Though the existence of ‘homegrown’ radical Muslims who were prepared to be suicide

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bombers had shocked MI5, Manningham-Buller said of the attack that she ‘half expected it’. It did not stop her, when she returned home late that night, from becoming, as she recalled, ‘very emotional’. While MI5 was busy in Britain, MI6 was involved in dirty tricks abroad. It played an indirect role in the circumstances leading to the murder of the newly independent Congo’s first prime minster, Patrice Lumumba, in 1961. The formidable Daphne Park (later appointed a Governor of the BBC) was MI6 station chief in the country. In his biography, Queen of Spies, Paddy Hayes writes: ‘One element in the plot, twice removed because its direct role was mainly to support the CIA’s undermining campaign of sabotage, bribery, conspiracy and cajolement, was Britain and its lead executive on the ground, Daphne M D Park.’ Hayes says that as the United States began actively to plan Lumumba’s death, ‘one of the first things the US did was to ensure that Britain was onside with whatever it was it planned. It didn’t need physical assistance from Britain; it was more that Britain, then as now, was useful in providing political cover.’18 MI6 was more successful in the emerging independent countries of British colonial Africa. While the CIA regarded all nationalist leaders as dangerous communists, MI6 officers had the wit to cultivate them. According to Verrier , it ‘virtually recruited’ Tom Mboya, Julius Nyerere, Hastings Banda, Kenneth Kaunda and Joshua Nkomo, said the author who was close to British intelligence.19 MI6 has traditionally regarded the Middle East as its own backyard, reinforcing the renowned ‘Arabists’ in the FO. Over lunch at the Travellers, former MI6 officers waxed lyrical about their times in the desert kingdoms, emirates and sultanates, as apparently blind, as they are still, to the authoritarian nature of their regimes and abuse of human rights as their political masters, Labour and Conservative, back home. MI6 had adopted a proprietorial attitude towards Iran as well as to the new Arab states carved out of the desert after the First World War. In a coup carried out in 1953 with the CIA, MI6 toppled the elected anti-British prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh. The Shah was placed back on the Peacock throne. It was a coup Iranians have not forgotten. In 1970, MI6 engineered the removal of the ailing and ineffective Sultan of Oman, Said bin Taimur, in

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favour of his Sandhurst-educated son, Qaboos, who was still in power fortyseven years later. MI6 warned that the longer the old Sultan stayed the greater the likelihood of a palace coup with unpredictable consequences. This was a coup the Omanis welcomed. MI6 officers were deeply attached to Kuwait and Oman, where Britain for long had especially close relationships of the kind it was to develop with Saudi Arabia. Oil and protection of the ‘passage to India’ were key interests of the British state. One senior MI6 officer had been a Special Forces officer fighting Dhofar rebels in Oman. Other MI6 officers developed a personal, even cultural, attachment to the Arabs. Sir Mark Allen who became head of counterterrorism at MI6, is a classic example. He is the author of Falconry in Arabia, which has a foreword by Thesiger, and he is an expert on Islamic calligraphy. MI6 was later forced to switch its attention to other countries. After the 2001 attacks on the United States, an MI6 officer I knew was posted to Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, where he oversaw the expansion of what became his agency’s biggest foreign station. Whatever its intelligence-gathering and agent-running might have achieved was sabotaged from the start by the increasingly violent conflict between British troops, Taliban fighters and other insurgents supported by the local population, opium farmers and warlords. MI6 officers should have learned from the many accounts of the ‘Great Game’, and Kipling’s classic novel, Kim. Their task in Afghanistan in the years following the 2001 attacks was made more difficult because of the confused, and changing, raison d’être of the British presence there. It was not to get rid of the opium harvest, despite Blair’s claims. (Poppy cultivation in Afghanistan in 2018 was four times what it had been in 2002,) British soldiers were not being killed to enable more Afghan women to be liberated, or Afghan children to go to school. Liam Fox, the former defence secretary, might not have endeared himself to the Afghans when he said soon after he was appointed defence secretary in 2010: ‘We are not in Afghanistan for the sake of the education policy in a broken, thirteenth-century country. We are there so the people of Britain and our global interests are not threatened.’ Yet even that claim became increasingly threadbare. There was ‘no intellectual input’ into Britain’s interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the government’s

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national security adviser, Mark Sedwill, admitted years later.20 Claims about what British forces could achieve was ‘slightly starry-eyed rhetoric’, he told RUSI’s Land Warfare conference in the summer of 2017, with an honesty senior Whitehall figures and their military advisers have so desperately lacked. Ministers and the Whitehall establishment have allowed the armed forces, as well as the security and intelligence agencies, to mount operations without bothering to find out how effective they would be. Misinformation can be masqueraded as intelligence, and information – described as ‘intelligence’ if it is held by the security and intelligence agencies – can be used and abused to smear politicians, trade unionists and others targeted by these agencies. And by keeping such ‘intelligence’ to themselves, not even telling ministers, the agencies and British troops can commit wrongdoing, even unlawful, acts. All the cards are in their hands.

8 Spies: More uses and abuses

Donald Maclean, perhaps the most productive member of the notorious Cambridge spy ring compared espionage to being a lavatory attendant. ‘It stinks,’ he is reported to have said, ‘but someone has to do it’.1 The media, MPs and ministers – when it suits them – treat intelligence agencies as very special, almost untouchable, certainly a cut above the rest of government. Spying is dangerous. It can also be a dirty business. The world of spies, spooks, as they are now commonly called, attracts oddballs, adventurers and the vulnerable – as well as committed ideologues. In his foreword to Kim Philby’s autobiography, My Silent War, Graham Greene, a wartime MI6 officer and convert to Catholicism, compared the Cambridge spy to Catholics in Elizabethan England. ‘Like many Catholics who, in the reign of Elizabeth, worked for the victory of Spain’, Greene wrote, ‘Philby has a chilling certainty in the correctness of his judgment, the logical fanaticism of a man who, having once found a faith, is not going to lose it because of the injustices or cruelties inflicted by erring human instruments.’ If not exactly excusing Philby’s betrayal, Greene was trying to explain it. In Philby’s case, as with other members of the Cambridge spy ring, class was the key to how they got it away with it for so long. Once again, Britain’s national security was undermined by an establishment protected by secrecy. There was an odd one out, but class as well as secrecy protected four of what

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the KGB called its ‘Magnificent Five’: Philby, whose father had been a senior intelligence officer in Palestine (who converted to Islam and undermined British oil interests as adviser to Ibn Saud, the first king of Saudi Arabia); Etoneducated Guy Burgess; Donald Maclean, son of a knighted Liberal cabinet minister; and Sir Anthony Blunt, the Queen’s adviser on paintings. One official who vetted Philby explained: ‘I was asked about him, and I said I knew his people.’ Keith Jeffrey, author of the official history of MI6, described Philby as ‘part of the charmed circle.’ MI6 protected Philby from MI5, which had long suspected him of being a Soviet agent and had wanted to send its hard-nosed interrogator, Arthur Martin, to question Philby in Beirut in 1963 as evidence pointing to his spying became impossible to ignore. MI6 convinced MI5 that Nicholas Elliott, an MI6 officer who had been particularly close to Philby, was a better man to extract a confession in return for immunity from prosecution. Elliott left Philby alone in Beirut for a few days to think over the offer of immunity from prosecution if he returned to London and confess. It is plausible that Elliott gave Philby the opportunity to flee rather than return to Britain where he would remain under suspicion and attract even more unwelcome publicity to MI6. ‘If we want to avoid embarrassment, the best course would be to let him slip away,’ Sir William Strang, the FO’s top mandarin had told his Whitehall colleagues when Philby was suspected of being the ‘third man’ who had tipped off Burgess and Maclean before the two fled in 1951. Philby escaped, twelve years later, on a Soviet freighter which was docked in the port of Beirut. Elliott, Cambridge-educated, like Philby, and son of an Eton headmaster, told me over lunch at the Travellers Club that he could not believe until after his defection that Philby (a member of the neighbouring Athenaeum Club) really had been a Soviet spy. Elliott continued to speak fondly of Philby. So, too, did Anthony Cavendish, Philby’s former MI6 colleague. I think I understood what they were getting at. They were reluctant to admit they had been personally betrayed by such a convivial colleague. Philby had known full well that class made embarrassment an effective weapon for the Cambridge spy ring. Guy Burgess acted as though he did too. His outrageous behaviour was indulged because of his wide circle of friends.

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Soon after Burgess and Maclean escaped, Philby tried to unnerve MI5 officers by telling them that Burgess had an ‘incredibly wide range of acquaintances’. They included Maynard Keynes, Victor Rothschild, E. M. Forster, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Somerset Maugham. They also included Clarissa Churchill, the wartime prime minister’s niece and future wife of the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, who knew Burgess when they both worked in the FO. The government’s 1955 White Paper on the circumstances surrounding the Burgess and Maclean escape went out of the way to excuse the FO and the security and intelligence agencies for their mishandling of the two spies. It prompted the journalist Henry Fairlie to come up with a new definition of ‘the Establishment’. He described it in The Spectator magazine as ‘a whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised’2. Fairlie added: ‘No one whose job it was to be interested in the Burgess- Maclean affair from the very beginning will forget the subtle but powerful pressures which were brought to bear by those who belonged to the same stratum as the two missing men … the representatives of the “Establishment” moved in.’ He included as part of the Establishment, the Times and the Observer newspapers. Looking back to that turbulent period, Stephen Lander, who had recently left his post as head of MI5, said Britain’s security and intelligence agencies ‘lost hands down’ to the Russians in the early years of the Cold War through Soviet penetration and what he called ‘an ambiguity in intellectual circles’. Sir Dick White, the head of MI5 who in 1956 was moved to clean out the Augean stables at MI6 in the wake of the Commander Crabbe affair, told me the reason why the Cambridge spies were readily accepted by MI5 and MI6 was that against the backdrop of the rise of fascism in Europe, and appeasement at home, the overwhelming political empathies and convictions were left-wing. White enthusiastically referred to a book he was reading – Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein, the philosopher and Cambridge contemporary of the spy ring. Its message was it was only natural to be left wing; strange, indeed suspicious, to be right wing. Entertaining files on the spies are released at the National Archives in dribs and drabs with no context, and no rhyme or reason, as we have seen. Files released fifty years or more after the events showed how MI5 and MI6, backed up by senior FO officials, engaged in frantic attempts to prevent any

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information about Philby, Burgess and Maclean – and later Blunt and John Cairncross – from being disclosed to the British public and even in private to the US government. ‘We certainly don’t want either [Burgess and Maclean] to return’, an FO official told his boss, Sir Harold Caccia, in 1962 when Burgess and Maclean were living in Moscow, apparently very unhappy. One problem welcomed by the FO was the lack of hard evidence and the difficulties in prosecuting them if they returned to Britain. The FO told Sir Patrick Reilly, the British ambassador in Moscow: ‘Defection is not, of course, a crime in English law.’ A clearly anxious but unidentified member of the cabinet said Burgess should be warned that if he returned to the UK ‘he might face a prosecution for homosexuality’. In what with hindsight was a move rich in irony, MI5 turned to Blunt for help. It asked him to write to Burgess pleading with him not to return to Britain. Burgess was anxious to visit his ailing mother. MI5 told FO officials worried because of the lack of hard evidence against Burgess: ‘We have taken steps to have the idea conveyed to Burgess that if he thinks he could come to this country with impunity he is gravely misinformed.’ The plan served Blunt’s interest. Blunt did not want Burgess to come back to England. The risk that Burgess would reveal their friendship and past activities was just too great. In his letter, dated 27 February 1959, Blunt warned Burgess: ‘What the outcome of the trial would be is of course a matter of speculation, but on the way the whole story would be raked up again and many of your friends would certainly be called as witnesses, and mud slung in all directions.’ He added: ‘As regards myself, I should certainly have to resign one of my jobs and might well lose the other.’ In a covering note, an FO official wrote: ‘The job from which Blunt would have to resign is presumably that of surveyor of the Queen’s pictures, the other of course refers to his position as director of Courtaulds Institute.’3 In an act of dissembling perfected by years of betrayal, Philby distanced himself from Burgess, even suggesting that Burgess had indeed been a spy. Philby told his MI6 superiors he remembered that Burgess ‘possessed a sunlamp, which he used seldom, if ever, for its normal purpose.’ He added: ‘On one occasion Burgess mentioned to me that he possessed a camera.’

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What would have caused a sensation was the discovery that Blunt, a member of the Royal household as Surveyor of the King’s (subsequently the Queen’s) Pictures, had spied for Moscow during the war. He confessed in 1964 after a tip-off from Michael Straight, an American and fellow member of the Cambridge Apostles – an elitist, exclusive university society. When he was being vetted for a job in the Kennedy administration, Straight revealed that Blunt had recruited him into the Communist Party. In return for a confession – and to protect the establishment, not least the Queen, from embarrassment – Blunt was offered immunity from prosecution. He was publicly exposed in 1979 after the publication of Anthony Boyle’s book Climate of Treason. Boyle had interviewed Goronwy Rees, a friend of Blunt as he lay in hospital dying of cancer. Though Rees had named Blunt, fear of libel led Boyle to disguise him as Maurice, the title of E. M. Forster’s novel about homosexual love. After Blunt was named in Private Eye magazine and despite widespread opposition in Whitehall where senior officials were aghast at the prospect of being blamed for a cover-up, Blunt was identified as the ‘fourth man’ in the Commons by the new prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. It was an early signal that she was prepared to reject establishment cover-ups, at least when it came to people she regarded as traitors. John Cairncross, the ‘fifth man’ and the last member of the KGB’s Cambridge spy ring to be identified, was from a very different background to the others. He was definitely not a member of the establishment – his father was manager of an ironmonger’s shop in Lanarkshire. A brilliant scholar and linguist, he was cultivated by Burgess at Cambridge. After a spell at the Sorbonne in Paris, he passed top of the FO entrance examination, an achievement which, together with his left-wing views, made him a potentially valuable KGB target. One spring evening in 1937, Cairncross accompanied James Klugmann, a Cambridge University acquaintance and prominent member of the Communist Party, for a walk in London’s Regent Park. Suddenly, Arnold Deutsch, the Soviet intelligence agent and recruiter code-named Otto, jumped out from behind the trees. Klugmann slipped away. The naïve and unworldly Cairncross was trapped. He was forced to resign from the Treasury after notes were discovered in Burgess’s London flat. Blunt had not seen them in his hurried search for incriminating evidence after the flight of Burgess and

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Maclean in 1951. Cairncross confessed to passing information to the Russians when he was questioned in 1964 by MI5’s Arthur Martin in the United States where he had been offered a job at the University of Cleveland. Like Blunt and Philby, Cairncross was offered immunity from prosecution. The last thing MI5 and MI6 wanted was yet another spy scandal. An additional cause of embarrassment in his case was that Cairncross’s brother, Sir Alec Cairncross, happened to be chief economic adviser to the government. On 6 March 1964. Sir Burke Trend, the cabinet secretary, warned Harold Wilson, the newly elected Labour prime minister, of the ‘distress and embarrassment’ any public mention of the case ‘would inflict on an individual we have no reason to question’. Stamping his memo ‘Top Secret and Strictly Personal’, Trend added: ‘We have to ask ourselves what would be the probable result, in terms of public policy in the widest sense if it became known that the Government were employing, as their Chief Economic Adviser, a man who was the brother of a self-confessed Communist spy.’4 Cairncross confessed to handing secret information to Moscow during the Second World War, including Bletchley Park decrypts revealing valuable intelligence about German Luftwaffe formations before the Battle of Kursk in 1943. Soviet forces destroyed 500 German bombers before the biggest tank battle in history, one that greatly helped the Red Army on its way to Berlin. Cairncross always insisted he believed it was his duty to help Britain’s wartime ally. After he was forced to resign, he quietly left Britain, writing for the Economist magazine before taking on a job at the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) based in Rome. He also translated Racine and Corneille plays for Penguin’s classic paperback French literature series and wrote three books on Molière that were acclaimed in France, a remarkable accolade given how the French jealously protected scholarship surrounding their cultural heroes. ‘I have been stamped (such is the power of stereotypes) as a leftist,’ Cairncross told me when I first met him in 1991 in his modest rented house in Provence. ‘Patriotism and defence of democracy are obviously not sufficient grounds for helping an ally against Hitler.’ He continued: ‘My contribution to the Russians was pro-allied and not anti-British.’ All he could be accused of,

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he suggested, was ‘recklessness, arrogance and naiveté’. Sir Alec described his brother as ‘fundamentally … a man of letters, a scholar and a poet, not a man of affairs.’5 George Blake, whose father was Jewish, born in Istanbul, and his mother Dutch, was never accepted by Britain’s intelligence establishment. Indeed, the parents of his first serious girlfriend, Iris Peake, an MI6 secretary, thought her daughter could do much better than marry Blake. She broke off the relationship. Unlike Philby and Blunt, Blake was not offered immunity from prosecution when he confessed to spying. Instead, he was sentenced to an unprecedented forty-two years in jail.6 He escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison in West London in an extraordinary episode, part farce, part fraught with danger. Years later, as we walked in the garden of a Russian Orthodox monastery on the outskirts of Moscow, Blake told me that when he was a young man, he considered becoming a priest. In his early days in the Netherlands, he had been strongly influenced by Calvinism. His belief in the predetermination of events was later strengthened by Marxism. ‘Free will’, he said, was ‘pure illusion’. In an interview for the Guardian, he described communism as ‘a very noble experiment. It deserved to succeed and it is an experiment to which humanity will return time and time again because it lives and is a dream which lives inside all of us’. He compared communism to religious creeds, particularly early Christianity. The problem was that the wrong people had held power. The lesson of the post-war years was that communism could not be created by force. Communism might reappear again somewhere, even if it took 500 years. But it would never have succeeded in the Soviet Union. ‘As I see it … . Communist society is indeed the highest form of society imaginable in this world, but to build the highest form of society, the people who build it must possess the highest moral qualities’, he told me. Blake’s father, Albert Behar, had set up business in Egypt, where he became a naturalized British subject. After serving with the British Army in the First World War, he settled in the Netherlands where he married a Dutch woman, Catherine Beijderwellen, a fervent Protestant. When Albert died in 1936, George – named, he said, after King George V – was sent to join his

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father’s relatives in Cairo where he was educated at the English school and became close to his cousin, a committed Communist. After the outbreak of the Second World War, Blake returned to the Netherlands. He was interned but released on account of his age; he was just seventeen. He joined the Dutch Resistance as a courier. Alerted that the Gestapo was beginning to suspect him, he fled to Britain via Belgium, France, Spain and Gibraltar. He joined his mother in London. Scouting around for a job, he was attached to the Special Operations Executive (SOE) sending agents and supplies behind enemy lines in support of resistance movements in Nazi-occupied Europe. After the war, Blake worked for naval intelligence. A fluent German speaker, he interrogated German U-Boat commanders in Hamburg before he was recruited by MI6. In 1948, under the cover of the post of British vice consul, he was sent to head a new station in Seoul with instructions, according to MI6’s official history, to target northeast China and the Communist in Korea. He was captured in 1950 after the outbreak of the Korean war. He was released two years later and given a hero’s welcome on his return to Britain. Blake claimed later that his conversion to communism had been a gradual process. He had read a good deal of Russian and Marxist literature at Cambridge, where was sent by MI6 to learn Russian. When prisoner of the North Koreans, he read Das Kapital to Vyvyan Holt, the British consul-general at Seoul and a fellow captive who had lost his glasses. ‘This was the period’, Blake recalled, ‘when 10,000 were dying on my right and 10,000 were dying on my left. It was a period of violent conflict and I was in the middle of it. I saw the Korean war with my own eyes, young American PoWs dying and enormous American Flying Fortresses bombing small defenceless villages. And when you saw that, you don’t feel particularly proud to be on the western side.’ He added: ‘If I had read Marx in a different setting if I had been living comfortably in a flat in London, maybe I would have come to the same conclusions. But I might not have taken such drastic steps.’ I visited Blake in Moscow in 1990 as the Soviet Union was collapsing. His flat was lined with books, including the fifty-five volumes of Lenin’s complete works, and the library Donald Maclean bequeathed him. It included works by Trollope, Macaulay’s History of England, Morley’s Life of Gladstone, and the memoirs of the British prime ministers, Harold Macmillan and Anthony

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Eden. Blake said he had got on well with Maclean, but distanced himself from the alcohol-fuelled Philby. In 1961, tipped off by Michael Goleniewski, a Polish intelligence officer and double agent, MI6 summoned Blake to Britain from Lebanon where he was studying at the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies, Britain’s well-known spy school for Westerners. Spying for the Soviet Union, Blake had used a Minox camera to take some 200 exposures a month of classified documents which he passed to his KGB controller, according to Christopher Andrew, MI5’s official historian.7 One operation on which he passed information to his Soviet controller – on the top of a London bus in January 1954 – was a tunnel constructed by the CIA and MI6 under the Berlin Wall. Code-named Operation Gold, it was designed to intercept Soviet and East German military communications. The CIA and MI6 claimed it as a great coup as they tapped the communications for eleven months in 1955 and 1956. Thanks to Blake, Soviet and East German secretly fed the CIA and MI6 large quantities of false information, carefully mixed with a spattering of genuine material. Blake wrote in his autobiography, No Other Choice, that the number of MI6 agents he betrayed was ‘nearer 400’ than forty-two. No figure was mentioned at his trial and he claimed later he did not know the number of agents whose identities he had passed to the Russians. He had ‘never added them up’, he bragged. ‘These people’, he insisted, ‘were not innocent, they were agents working willingly and knowingly against their own governments’. Blake told the jury at his Old Bailey trial that he had an assurance from his KGB handlers that every MI6 agent he exposed ‘should not be arrested and the only use the Russians should make of this information was to protect themselves from the activities of these agents’. Files of the East German state security agency, the Stasi, discovered after the fall of the Berlin Wall include the names of six MI6 agents who Blake is believed to have identified to the KGB. They were imprisoned for up to seventeen years. At least one may have been taken to Moscow and executed. Blake explained how he was driven to confessing by his MI6 interrogator, the canny Harry Shergold. On the third day of his interrogation, Shergold provoked Blake by saying he could understand why he agreed to spy for the

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KGB while he was imprisoned in North Korea. You would have been tortured, you were blackmailed and had no choice, said Shergold. ‘At that particular moment something happened inside me and to this day I find it difficult to explain’, Blake told me. ‘I suddenly said I had not been tortured or blackmailed and went to the KGB on my own accord and offered my services. Shergold’s question had touched a raw nerve’. An exchange, which came to light much later,8 helps to explain the severity of the sentence. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Parker, telephoned Harold Macmillan, the prime minister, to consult him before passing sentence. The implication is that Macmillan encouraged Parker to give Blake a long term in jail. Yet even Macmillan expressed surprise, noting in his diary the next day: ‘The LCJ has passed a savage sentence – 42 years!’ Whatever the number of agents he betrayed and secrets he exposed, some in MI6 were unhappy with the severity of the sentence, believing it would discourage any future spy from confessing. The length of his sentence and apparent stoicism brought Blake considerable sympathy from fellow prisoners in Wormwood Scrubs. He escaped after five years, in 1966, not as a result of a well-planned KGB stratagem, as was widely assumed at the time, but with the help of two radical anti-nuclear campaigners, Michael Randle and Pat Pottle – who were fellow prisoners, but released from Wormwood Scrubs where they had been jailed for demonstrating inside a US nuclear bomber base – and a petty Irish criminal, Sean Bourke. They said later they believed Blake’s forty-two-year sentence was ‘inhuman’. Blake was popular among the prisoners, teaching them foreign languages, including Arabic. Bourke, on probation at the time, smuggled a walkie-talkie into the prison to enable Blake to communicate with the outside world. On the appointed day, Blake broke a window at the end of the corridor where his cell was situated. While most of the other inmates and guards were at the weekly evening film show, Blake climbed out, slid down a porch and ran to the perimeter wall. Bourke threw a rope ladder made of knitting needles over the wall enabling Blake to climb over. Blake managed to do so but broke his arm in the process. It was put into a splint by a sympathetic doctor. Blake was hidden in a number of different flats. One was the home of a radical priest, John Papworth, and his Frenchborn wife, Marcelle. In an extraordinary episode in what was already an

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extraordinary saga, Papworth’s wife told a therapist she was consulting that she had seen in her flat the man whose face was frequently appearing on television as the escaped spy. The therapist, who had previously told his patient always to be totally honest, dismissed her claim as the imagination of a disordered mind, that she must be hallucinating, and should forget all about it. When the police Special Branch finally realized who was really behind the escape, Britain’s security establishment was so embarrassed that it kept quiet. Randle and Pottle’s role in the escape was publicly revealed only after they were thinly disguised, with the pseudonyms Pat Porter and Michael Reynolds, in George Blake Superspy by Montgomery Hyde, author, former Ulster Unionist MP and wartime intelligence officer, published in 1987. It was not long before they were identified in the Observer and Sunday Times. More than a hundred Tory MPs signed a Commons motion demanding their prosecution. The government, and the Crown Prosecution Service, conceded. Randle and Pottle by now had admitted their role in their own book. They decided to defend themselves after sympathetic lawyers said it would be difficult for them to honour their professional code by arguing in court that the two men had not committed a crime which they had confessed to. Randle and Pottle were greatly helped by evidence that emerged in long drawn-out pretrial hearings. As government lawyers were about to assure the two men that all relevant documents had been disclosed, MI5 produced what it called a ‘note for file’. It revealed that in 1970 a senior special branch officer, Rollo Watts, told an MI5 officer, known only as Miss A, that he had identified Randle and Pottle many years before. He had done so after Bourke wrote a book, The Springing of George Blake, in 1970 in which he had also called the two men, Michael Reynolds and Pat Porter. To prosecute them now, noted Miss A, might be considered persecution – ‘a big fish had got away so they were taking it out on the little fish’. The Old Bailey jury heard that on the night of the escape, 22 October 1966, the deputy governor of Wormwood Scrubs telephoned Shepherd’s Bush police station in West London. ‘I have just been informed by my chief that we have lost one of our chaps over the wall,’ he said. ‘We think it’s Blake.’ ‘Blake?’ asked the duty constable. ‘Yes’, came the reply, ‘the one doing 42 years. He went over the east wall. He’s probably in prison grey. Look, I’m a bit

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tucked up at the moment, I’m in the middle of releasing a man. I’ll ring you back when I get more information.’ United in their opposition to nuclear weapons and a shared commitment to non-violent direct action, Randle and Pottle could scarcely have been more different. Randle an ascetic Quaker, is a fit, wiry, man who was still rowing on the river Aire near Bradford when he was well into his eighties. Pat, who died in 2000, was a stocky bon viveur. He had defended himself in 1961 against charges under the Official Secrets Act after organizing, with Randle, the sit-in at the US air force base at Wethersfield, Essex. Transcripts of the trial include the following exchange between the judge, Mr Justice Havers, and the chief prosecution witness. Pottle: ‘Air Commodore, do you agree with this statement: “We must not forget that by creating atomic bases in East Anglia we have made ourselves the target and perhaps the bullseye of a Soviet attack”?’ Havers: ‘Don’t answer that. I rule it out.’ Pottle: ‘That was a statement of Sir Winston Churchill.’ Pat’s wife, Sue, the adopted daughter of Harold Abraham, the celebrated Olympic runner and a hero of the film, Chariots of Fire, recalled how Abraham, and his close friends, the McWhirter brothers, politically on the right, had no idea that she was marrying an anarchic anti-establishment activist. Pottle and Randle, among other defendants, were jailed for eighteen months for the Wethersfield sit-in, and it was while in Wormwood Scrubs that they met George Blake. After he was released, Pottle became secretary to the philosopher and disarmament campaigner, Bertrand Russell. In 1964, he was tried and deported from China for ‘inciting the Chinese people to overthrow the state’. It was before the Blake escape trial that I travelled with Pottle to Moscow to meet the British spy in 1990. It was soon after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, but before the collapse of the Soviet Union. We left Berlin East railway station at night, equipped with whisky, gin and cigarettes, hoping, naively it turned out, to have an early meal on the train. We soon discovered that no food would be forthcoming for nearly twentyfour hours. But help was at hand. Soon after we left Berlin, a young Russian knocked on our cabin. A Moscow theatre director, he had attended a Berlin arts festival. He was very keen to chat. He ushered us in to his cabin next door

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where he proudly pointed to his young ‘Adonis’, as he called him, asleep under crisp white sheets. We invited him to have a drink in our cabin. After a few gins, we made it clear we were pretty hungry. He went back to his cabin and quickly returned with a large tin of German smoked ham, part of a food supply he was taking to a chaotic Russian capital. The train carriage was policed by a pair of fierce women – one from the Soviet railway company, the other from what was left of the KGB. For most of the journey, they stood guard at the end of the carriage standing by a baroque radiator, full of pipes and valves, that also functioned as a heater for samovars. From time to time, they patrolled the carriage, policing a strict no smoking policy. We were finally summoned to the restaurant car where we were offered bowls of thin soup accompanied by stacks of dark brown bread. We placed our packets of Marlboro on the table. The cook, quick to spot them, immediately took a large round tin of the best caviar from his top shelf. It would have been worth a lot in a Western market, perhaps as much as a hundred pounds. It was ours for two packets of cigarettes. The following day, the porter at our terminus, Moscow’s Belorussky station, reflected the state of the ailing Russian economy. ‘Wallpaper, wallpaper!’ he exclaimed when we offered him roubles. He was more than satisfied with a couple of dollars. The chef and the porter had eloquently demonstrated the state of the Russian economy at the time. Blake was an enthusiastic guide to Moscow, celebrating Russia’s long Christian history as much as its recent Communist past, more so really. His flat in a run-down block was full of icons. His wife, Ida, complained about the serious shortage of paper in Russia, yet the Communist Party was continuing to print thick volumes of official speeches and accounts of meetings and committees which no one wanted to read. In London the following summer, the trial of Randle and Pottle opened at the Old Bailey, in Court 1, the very same court where Blake had been found guilty nearly thirty years earlier. The signs were not good. The young man the jury chose at its foreman came to court every day sporting a leather jacket and the Sun newspaper stuffed into his pocket. The judge, Mr Justice Alliott, tried his best not to encourage sympathy for the two defendants and avoid

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accusations of bullying the two defendants, by allowing them some leeway about what they could argue from the dock. Randle urged the jurors to consult their own consciences. The two men had acted out of humanitarian motives. Pottle urged them to ‘let common sense champion over legal technicalities’. The whole purpose of the jury system, he said, was ‘to look at the whole case, not just legal mumbo-jumbo’. In a powerful speech, he told the jury: ‘Our task would be a lot easier if this were a simple case of guilt or innocence, but it is not. It is a case of right and wrong. It is a case of politics, a case of how governments lie, cheat and manipulate, and then cover their tracks in a smokescreen of official secrecy.’ Pottle continued: What George did for British intelligence and the KGB was wrong – we have never tried to justify it nor whitewash it. But espionage is a dirty business, where rumour becomes fact and fact becomes fiction. The individuals involved in it are exploiters and in turn exploited. Even when caught they can still be used as international pawns in a game, some to be swapped, some to be given immunity, and the unlucky ones left to rot in prison. No one who supports this kind of thing can hold their heads up high. What did George do that sets him apart from other spies uncovered at that time? He was not really British, was he? Not of the old school, not one of us. Deep down, he was a foreigner, and half-Jewish to boot. He was never part of that privileged undergraduate set at Cambridge in the 1930s. Not like dear old Kim [Philby] … or dear old Anthony [Blunt]. Witnesses who sympathized with the two defendants included a former prison officer from Wormwood Scrubs who gave Randle and Pottle the thumbs-up in full view of the jury. The jury had all been given a copy of The Blake Escape. They had read how Randle had hidden Blake, with an empty hot water bottle to relieve himself, under the bunks of his Dormobile on a hastily arranged family Christmas holiday in 1966. Accompanied by his wife, Anne, and their two young sons, Sean and Gavin, he dropped Blake off on the roadside in East Germany on their way to their supposed vacation in Berlin. As far as the judge was concerned, none of the evidence heard over the twoweek trial was relevant, nor were the motivations of the two men on trial. He

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gave the jury a clear direction – the two defendants had broken the law and must be found guilty. They may have argued that their action in helping Blake to escape was morally justified and politically motivated. The judge insisted: ‘I have ruled that defence is not open to them on the admitted facts. You must honour my ruling loyally. You must honour it’. Within three hours, the jury returned a unanimous verdict of not guilty on all three counts on which Randle and Pottle had been charged: helping Blake escape, harbouring him and smuggling him out of the country. Some lawyers called it ‘a perverse verdict’. Others said it showed that ordinary men and women ‘smelt oppression’ – they regarded the prosecution as politically motivated. It was a stunning response, with resonances of the way a vetted Old Bailey jury had ignored the judge’s direction and interpretation of the law at the Ponting trial six years earlier. Pat and Michael and their wives were convinced the jury would find them guilty and the judge would hand down custodial sentences, perhaps eighteen months in jail. Most convicted prisoners could bring one item of their choice with them. Pat chose a tin of roll-your-own tobacco – you get more tobacco that way than if you bring ready-made cigarettes, he said. Michael, who was staying with us in North London with his wife for the duration of the trial, borrowed my copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Blake had argued that intelligence services cancelled each other out in peacetime and made little difference to the course of history. Yet he also strongly defended the spying profession. You cannot start organizing an intelligence network on the day war is declared, and in war intelligence services could be decisive, he said. ‘It is much nicer to be the captain of a ship than to be the stoker in the hold who has to shovel the dirty coal into the furnace’, he told me when we talked in Moscow. ‘But both are necessary to keep the ship moving.’ As far as he was concerned, intelligence services were the stokers. He always disputed the word traitor. ‘To betray, you first have to belong. I never belonged,’ he stressed. He certainly never belonged to the British establishment. His unsettled background, with no real roots, could not have been more different to those of the Cambridge spy ring. It is clear MI6 did not know how to handle him. They did not attempt to bring him into the fold (the spies in the Cambridge ring

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were already well ensconced before they began spying for the Soviet Union). This may have made him more susceptible to approaches from the Russians after he was captured in North Korea. What also stands out from other spy cases is that he was not offered immunity from prosecution. Indeed, he was given a record prison sentence. And it was unlikely he would have escaped had he not shared Wormwood Scrubs jail with a couple of anti-nuclear protesters convicted under the Official Secrets Act and who sympathized him precisely because of the length of his sentence. The story of Blake’s escape is not only an entertaining episode in the annals of British spies. It demonstrated how differently a British spy who did not go to the right school or university – or even worse a foreigner with a Jewish father – was treated compared to others who were members of the establishment or enjoyed close personal relations with them. MI6 may have been embarrassed when it was eventually revealed that Blake had been one of its front line officers spying for Moscow for years. MI5 and the police Special Branch were definitely embarrassed when they realized that the Blake escape was nothing to with the KGB but with a couple of CND supporters. They hid behind a wall of official secrecy to cover up security failures. MI5, MI6 and the Special Branch cold only watch as Randle and Pottle faced a criminal prosecution as a result of political pressure just as they later looked on when directors of the Matrix Churchill machine tools firm were arraigned on criminal charges. In both cases, official secrecy and ‘national security’ claims were deployed to suppress information about the collusion of the security and intelligence agencies in the criminal prosecution of individuals. In these two cases, the defendants were fortunate – in the Blake escape trial, the jury was prepared to stand up to what amounted to persecution. In the Matrix Churchill case, they were helped by lawyers, notably Geoffrey Robertson, prepared to demand the disclosure of all relevant evidence in the hands of MI5 and MI6 and Whitehall departments. Double agents – traitors, defectors – have had their uses, for both sides. Maclean passed secrets about US–UK atom bomb cooperation when he was posted to the British embassy in Washington in the 1940s. But as his biographer, Robert Cecil, observed, during the crisis provoked by the Berlin blockade imposed by

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Moscow: ‘It is highly probable that Maclean’s reports that the US government, despite its monopoly of the atom bomb, was determined to exercise restraint may have contributed to preventing a cataclysm.’9 Oleg Gordievsky, the senior KGB officer who defected to Britain, played a crucial role when a big NATO exercise could have triggered, in the words of a Western intelligence officer, ‘the ultimate unintended catastrophe’.10 Gordievsky had earlier alerted the United Kingdom and United States to Operation Ryan, launched by the paranoid KGB chief, Yuri Andropov, in 1981 to detect and pre-empt a Western ‘surprise nuclear missile attack’. The Kremlin may have been paranoid, but Gordievsky warned Western leaders that its fears of a Western attack were genuine. KGB officers in London were ordered to find out whether NHS hospitals were stocking up supplies of blood and to watch the windows of the MoD and other Whitehall departments to see if the lights were burning through the night. In 1983, by which time Andropov had become general secretary of the Communist party, the leader of the Soviet Union, NATO launched its annual exercise, code-named Able Archer. It involved 40,000 troops. It took place amid heightened international tension. In September, the Russians had shot down a Korean Airlines Boeing 747, killing all 269 people on board, after the plane had mistakenly strayed into their airspace. The Russians believed the Boeing was an American spy plane. Earlier in the same year the US president, Ronald Reagan, made a high-profile speech describing the Soviet Union as ‘the evil empire’. One US document describes how US-Soviet relations were on ‘hair-trigger’ alert with Reagan calling the situation ‘really scary’. Margaret Thatcher, then prime minister, was said to have instructed officials to ‘urgently consider how to approach the Americans on the question of possible Soviet misapprehensions about a surprise NATO attack’. A classified JIC report written shortly afterwards noted: ‘We cannot discount the possibility that at least some Soviet officials/officers may have misinterpreted Able Archer 83 and possibly other nuclear CPXs [command post exercises] as posing a real threat.’ The Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, warned Thatcher that the Soviets’ response did not appear to be an exercise because it ‘took place over a major Soviet holiday, it had the form

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of actual military activity and alerts, not just war-gaming, and it was limited geographically to the area, Central Europe, covered by the NATO exercise which the Soviet Union was monitoring’. Armstrong advised Thatcher that Moscow’s response ‘shows the concern of the Soviet Union over a possible NATO surprise attack mounted under cover of exercises’. The intelligence for Armstrong’s briefings to Thatcher came from Gordievsky, who in turn reassured the Kremlin that NATO had no intention of launching nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union. Whitehall officials blocked the release of a JIC report, ‘The Detection of Soviet Preparations for War Against NATO’, ‘on grounds of national security’. One of those calling for the release of the report was Michael Herman, former head of GCHQ’s Soviet division. He noted: ‘A weakness in the UK was that the [intelligence] assessors didn’t know the extent of US confrontation/provocation in Reagan’s first administration. The Russians were quite right to be frightened. Just how big was the crisis? Until all the evidence is declassified how do we judge?’11 Gordievsky’s also played a valuable role assuring Western leaders, notably Thatcher, that the new Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, was a genuine reformer who should be taken seriously. Gordievsky was not the only Russian spy whose intelligence helped to make the world a safer place. Oleg Penkovsky, a senior Soviet military intelligence officer, code-named HERO, passed valuable secrets to MI6 (the CIA had brushed him aside suspecting him of being a Soviet plant) about the true state of the Soviet Union’s missiles during the 1962 Cuban crisis. His information showed that Soviet missile technology was not as advanced and its nuclear arsenal not as big as US intelligence and military officials claimed (or genuinely believed). Penkovsky gave President Kennedy the confidence to adopt a tough line during the Cuban crisis. It was Gordievsky who also tipped off MI5 about an attempt in 1982 by one of their officers, Michael Bettaney, to hand over highly sensitive classified documents to the Russians. Bettaney was a victim of appalling MI5 management. His story vindicated much of what I, with some others, was writing about MI5 at that time. By doing so, I was accused of being irresponsible, even a threat to Britain’s security. As a student at Oxford University, he was notorious for goose-stepping around his college quad and playing recordings of Hitler’s speeches. A Catholic,

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Bettaney was sent to Northern Ireland where he suffered the trauma of being injured by a car bomb and hearing IRA gunmen breaking the kneecaps of one of his informants as he hid in a cupboard. He was posted to Northern Ireland shortly after the death of both of his parents and after he had himself expressed doubts about whether he should be sent there. He subsequently indulged in heavy drinking bouts during which he would chide his colleagues commenting, ‘I’m sure the East Germans would look after me much better.’ His former colleagues told me he was in effect suffering a breakdown. He was once found drunk in a gutter. He was convicted for drunken behaviour in October 1982. But his offer to resign was rejected and he was assigned to MI5’s counter-espionage section. Confused and embittered, at midnight on 12 June 1983, Bettaney stuffed a batch of MI5 documents containing the agency’s ‘order of battle’ – details of its organization including the names of senior officers – into the letter box of 42 Holland Park, West London, the house of the KGB resident, Arkady Guk. Suspecting a trap, Guk consulted his deputy, Gordievsky. The double agent calmly told Guk that he was clearly the victim of a set-up, before informing, as quickly he could, his MI5 controllers. Bettaney was arrested the following September as he was about to fly to Vienna. He was the first MI5 officer to face trial under the Official Secrets Act. Aged thirty-four, he was found guilty of ten breaches of the act after an Old Bailey trial held mainly in camera and sentenced to twenty-three years in jail. Thatcher ordered an investigation by the Security Commission. Bettaney’s heavy drinking, the commission noted, should have provided the ‘most significant pointer to his instability of character’ years earlier, and his security clearance should have been withdrawn. It was ‘a disaster waiting to happen’ Manningham-Buller told me. The Bettaney case prompted Cathy Massiter, an MI5 officer, to publicly criticise the way the agency was run. The affair was traumatic for MI5. Turmoil within the agency persuaded Thatcher to bring in Sir Antony Duff, a former diplomat and Cabinet Office security and intelligence coordinator, to shake it up. Sir John Jones, head of MI5 at the time, had suggested it might have been better for the agency’s reputation if Bettaney had not been arrested and the scandal had been swept under the carpet. Jones took early retirement.

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Bettaney is one of a number of high-profile cases where the neglect of senior managers in the security and intelligence agencies, protected by a wall of secrecy and subjected to no effective independent scrutiny, had damaging consequences. One case involved GCHQ. GCHQ’s eavesdropping activities were not officially ‘avowed’ until 1982 with the prosecution of a former employee, Geoffrey Prime. The government had to explain why most of his trial had to be held behind closed doors. Prime was charged with passing GCHQ secrets to the Soviet Union, but his spying was discovered only after he was arrested by the West Mercia police for paedophilic attacks on young girls. He had confessed to spying to his wife only after she discovered equipment Prime had hidden under the floorboards of their house. He had copied 500 classified documents for Moscow, including details of a joint GCHQ/NSA operation code-named SAMBO, tracking the radio signals of Soviet submarines. Prime had access to GCHQ buildings even after he had left the agency and worked as a local Cheltenham taxi firm. At his trial Prime said he had spied partly ‘as a result of a misplaced idealistic view of Soviet socialism which was compounded by basic psychological problems within myself ’. He was sentenced in 1982 to thirty-eight years in jail – thirty-five for selling secrets to the Russians and three for sex offences against children. While Prime was busy spying for Moscow, the government was suppressing GCHQ – A Negative Asset written by Jock Kane. Kane had campaigned for many years against what he called a ‘disgusting network of corruption, inefficiency and security betrayal’ at GCHQ’s eavesdropping station at Little Sai Wan in Hong Kong. Though his complaints eventually led to the conviction of a senior MoD official in the then British colony, Kane resigned after an internal GCHQ investigation into his claims was pigeon-holed. In 1984, Special Branch officers seized Kane’s manuscript on the orders of government lawyers who obtained a court injunction suppressing it. David Shayler should never have been recruited to MI5. While a student at Dundee university, Shayler edited the student newspaper, Annasach, publishing extracts from Peter Wright’s memoir, Spycatcher, officially banned in Britain at the time. After leaving university, he worked at The Sunday Times, though his employment there was terminated after six months. He joined MI5

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after responding to a cryptic job advertisement in The Observer under the heading, ‘Godot isn’t coming’. It suggested only that applicants should have an interest in current affairs, common sense and an ability to write. Thinking it was an offer for a job in the media, Shayler applied. Thus he became an officer in Britain’s Security Service. He relished bugging people’s phones, including those of journalists. Some of his claims appeared to be true, and backed up by documentary evidence. They included MI6 reports of an Al-Qaeda-inspired plot in 1995 to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi and seize power in Libya. In the attempted coup, several innocent civilians were killed. What exactly MI6 did with the intelligence it received about the attempted coup and claims MI6 paid tens of thousands of pounds to some of the plotters remains unclear. Shayler said he had no other way of expressing his concerns before he blew the whistle on MI5’s activities. As a deterrent to other potential whistle-blowers but not before debates within MI5 about whether a trial would lead to even more unwelcome publicity, Shayler was charged and prosecuted in 2002 for breaching the Official Secrets Act and sentenced to six months in jail. After he was released, he became increasingly disoriented indulging in fantasies, describing himself as a ‘new messiah’. MI5 officers claimed privately they were not surprised Shayler acted the way he did, begging the question why he had not been sacked earlier. MI5 contrasted Shayler with his partner, Annie Machon, who they described as ‘a good officer’. They said were surprised she had such a boyfriend as Shayler. Machon left MI5 together with Shayler, and they fled to France together after he had sold stories about MI5 operations to the Mail on Sunday. Machon later recalled that one of her major tasks at the agency was to disguise herself as a member of the Socialist Workers party at one of its summer schools. Richard Tomlinson was one of the high-flyers in MI6, a promising recruit who was soon engaged in dangerous operations, including smuggling military vehicles out of Russia and sabotaging Iran’s nuclear programme. He became embittered with his managers at a time his long-term girlfriend was dying of cancer. At the end of an extended probation period, MI6 dismissed him, claiming he was ‘not a team player’. It later admitted there was a ‘personality clash’ between Tomlinson and with his boss. He was prevented from seeking

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redress at an independent employment tribunal. Angry about the way he had been treated and his personal grievances ignored, he decided to reveal some of his MI6 operations with journalists, notably the Sunday Times. He was arrested, convicted and sentenced to twelve months in jail in 1997 for breaching the Official Secrets Act. He subsequently left Britain and wrote The Big Breach, a book the government could not ban as it was published in Russia. It was subsequently published in Edinburgh.12 He painted a picture of an exotic and hazardous life as an MI6 officer, with a hint of James Bond. Tomlinson had been approached by a tutor at his Cambridge college, Gonville and Caius, who was an MI6 talent spotter. He was classic MI6 material – an enthusiastic member of the university’s air squadron, physically fit, adventurous and with a first class degree in aeronautical engineering. He won a scholarship to Massachusetts Institute of Technology and passed a rigorous test to become a member of the territorial SAS before finally agreeing to join MI6. Robin Cook, foreign secretary at the time, described Tomlinson as nursing a ‘deep-seated and irrational grievance’ against his former employers. I had no doubts, in the course of many conversations with him, that Tomlinson bitterly resented the way he had been treated. After Tomlinson left MI6, the agency agreed to something he had long been fighting for. It allowed its officers in future to take their case to an employment tribunal if they had problems that were unresolved internally. It was not long before MI6 management faced another crisis involving an individual to whom it owed a duty of care. In 2010, Gareth Williams, a brilliant young GCHQ officer seconded to MI6 to test the security of its computer systems, was found dead in a hold-all bag. It seemed to be the result of a tragic accident. Dr Fiona Cox, the coroner, at the inquest delivered a blistering attack on MI6 management for failing for seven days to take steps to find out why Williams was not turning up to work. Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism branch was also severely criticized for failing to insist that MI6 officers responsible for Williams’ well-being should have provided formal statements about the case. Sir John Sawers, head of MI6 at the time, publicly apologized for what he called the ‘failure to act more swiftly’ over Williams’ unexplained absence.

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The past record of Britain’s security and intelligence agencies’, and their growing role in the future, makes Juvenal’s familiar question more pertinent than ever. ‘Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ asked Juvenal, the Roman poet and satirist: ‘But who will guard the guardians themselves?’ It is a question some of us had been asking for decades. At first, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ shrugged. When they were subjected to more and more unwelcome comment, embarrassing and damaging disclosures, they obtained court injunctions and threatened criminal prosecutions under the Official Secrets Act. Under pressure from the European Court of Human Rights, first telephone tapping, then MI5, and later MI6 and GCHQ were belatedly placed on a legal footing – everything they had done in the past was on the basis of ‘Crown prerogative’, that is to say, through the absolute, unaccountable, power of the executive, ministers and their Whitehall advisers. Superannuated judges were appointed as part-time Commissioners to monitor the work of the agencies. They had neither the mindset nor the capability to adopt a sufficiently robust and independent approach to their task. They had little or no credibility, as the heads of the agencies privately admitted to me. The Intelligence and Security Committee of MPs and Peers was set up. But it meets in private, and its members are vetted and appointed by the prime minister. At first, they could only request information from MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. When it emerged that the agencies hid from the committee their collusion with CIA counter-terror operations – the seizure of suspects, their secret rendering to jails, including Guantanamo Bay, their detention and torture – the committee was given the authority to demand, rather than simply request, intelligence information. It is still prevented from questioning MI5 and MI6 officers even about evidence of serious wrongdoing, as we shall see in the following chapter. The deferential attitude towards the security and intelligence agencies has prevailed, not least among MPs. This was quite evident when, amid the continuing storm provoked by Edward Snowden’s revelations, the Commons home affairs committee summoned Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian’s editor. Keith Vaz, Labour chair of the committee asked: ‘Some of the criticism against you and the Guardian have been very personal, you and I were both born outside this country, but I love this country. Do you love this country?’

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Rusbridger (who was born in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, where his father was a colonial civil servant) replied: ‘We live in a democracy. Most of the people working on this story are British people who have families in this country who love this country. I am slightly surprised to be asked the question. But, yes, we are patriots and one of the things we are patriotic about is the nature of the democracy and the nature of a free press and the fact that one can in this country discuss and report these things.’ Far from defending the principle of freedom of the press and the privacy of personal communications, Tory MPs on the committee came close to suggesting that Rusbridger had broken anti-terrorism laws. Michael Ellis asked: Mr Rusbridger, it is not only about what you have published. It is about what you have communicated. That is what amounts or can amount to a criminal offence. You have caused the communication of secret documents. We classify things as secret and top secret in this country for a reason-not to hide them from the Guardian, but to hide them from those who are out to harm us. You have communicated those documents … . If you had known about the Enigma Code during World War II would you have transmitted that information to the Nazis? Rusbridger: That is a well-worn red herring, if you don’t mind me saying so, Mr Ellis. I think most journalists can make a distinction between the kind of thing that you are talking about and the Enigma Code … . This is very well-worn material that has been dealt with by the Supreme Court and that you learn when you do your NCTJ (National Council for the Training of Journalists) course. I can make those distinctions, Mr Ellis, thank you. Compare these exchanges with the home affairs committee’s session with Sir Mark Waller, a retired appeal court judge and Intelligence Services Commissioner responsible for scrutinizing the way MI5, MI6 and GCHQ use thousands of surveillance and search warrants. Weller’s staff consisted of one personal assistant.

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Chair (Labour MP, Keith Vaz): In respect of the Snowden issue, you made a comment in your report. You said, ‘I have discussed matters fully with senior officials within GCHQ and I am satisfied that they are not circumventing the legal framework under which they operate.’ Is that the way in which you satisfied yourself that there were no problems with what Snowden had said, by having a discussion? Waller: I just thought it was absolutely wrong to publish my report without going down to GCHQ in order to see whether there was anything in the allegation that was being made. The allegation that was being made at that time was that GCHQ were taking no notice of UK law. They were doing it all through America and they were behaving unlawfully. Chair: ‘You went down to GCHQ.’ Waller: ‘Yes.’ Chair: ‘You went to see who there?’ Waller: ‘I saw the second head of the agency, in fact.’ Chair: ‘How did you satisfy yourself? It seems, from your comment, that what you did was you had a discussion with them, you heard what they had to say and you have accepted what they had to say.’ Waller: ‘Certainly.’ Chair: ‘Is that it?’ Waller: ‘Certainly’ Chair: ‘Just a discussion?’ Waller: ‘Certainly.’ Chair: ‘Nothing else?’ Waller: ‘Certainly.’13 Such cursory monitoring of the security and intelligence agencies is reflected in the attitude of cabinet ministers to whom MI5, MI6 and GCHQ are nominally accountable. They have traditionally had an uneasy relationship with the security and intelligence agencies. Roy Jenkins, Labour’s Home Secretary in the 1960s, later a member of the House of Lords, told his fellow peers : ‘My

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advice to any new minister in a sensitive department would be never to sign automatically anything coming up from the security services, and to be pretty cautious about signing it at all.’14 He believed talking to MI5 ‘was somehow dirtying his hands’, one of his close advisers told me. Jack Straw, home secretary and foreign secretary in Tony Blair’s New Labour government, also distanced himself from MI5 and MI6. We shall see how after it emerged that MI6 was colluding in CIA rendition operations and torture, he said that ministers could not know everything their security and intelligence agencies were up to. John Major, when prime minister, pointed to a different – and growing – hazard: information overload. He told the Scott inquiry: ‘The total number of intelligence reports is indeed huge. The amount of intelligence reports reaching the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, for example, would be around 40,000 a year, and that would … probably … be GCHQ and SIS (MI6). Split down: about two-thirds GCHQ and one-third SIS.’ Major added: ‘It is clearly absurd that ministers should read 40,000 pieces of intelligence.’ What was given to ministers to see was always a ‘value judgment’, he said. If ministers do not question the security and intelligence agencies properly, what hope is there for MPs? Most, as we have seen, adopt a deferential attitude and the ISC has not got the resources to monitor the agencies effectively. Although under the chairmanship of the former attorney general, Dominic Grieve, it begun to gain some credibility after being hoodwinked over Britain’s collusion in CIA operations, the government can ignore its recommendations and demands, just as does with all cross-party parliamentary committees. Scandals, wrongdoing and unlawful activities have been exposed not by Parliament but by a few whistle-blowers and journalists. No law can keep up with the developments of surveillance technology, and the ability of the security and intelligence agencies to exploit them. Whatever the rules and the laws governing the security and intelligence agencies, it is the individual who matters, the individual’s ethics and moral compass. One particularly conscientious senior GCHQ official made the point forcefully. Dennis Mitchell, a senior GCHQ official who resigned in protest against the ban on trade unions there, told me, and later wrote in the Guardian: ‘GCHQ is an industrial complex. Its product is intelligence. Intelligence

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imparts power; power which may be used to withstand a threat, or to apply one; to avert an ill, to bestow a benefit – or to exploit.’15 Mitchell, a leading cryptanalyst, continued: ‘GCHQ provides power to the British government, and governments with which it is allied. GCHQ staff have a moral responsibility, both corporate and individual, for the use to which that power is put.’ The only watchdog, Mitchell added, was the workforce. ‘It is they on whom the general public must rely if errors of judgment, excessive zeal or malpractices are to be averted in a department which has considerable discretion.’ He warned of a ‘cowed and supine workforce’, all paying homage to the ‘inscrutable idol of “national security”’. A few years after the trade union ban, Mitchell told the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong: ‘I have arrived at the point at which I either make my concerns public, which means breaking the Official Secrets Act, or I fail to discharge my responsibilities to account for actions which I believe would be considered unacceptable by the general public were it aware of them.’ Mitchell was gagged. He was served with a court injunction banning him from explaining why he was so concerned. It is a matter of ethos, ethics and, as David (now Lord) Anderson, the government’s former independent reviewer of terrorism laws, agrees, a question of trust.16 It is the individual who matters, and two who mattered most in my experience were women. Stella Rimington, then Eliza Manningham-Buller, succeeded not only in the much-needed task of improving the image of MI5. They shook up the place, spoke in public about their concerns and priorities, at a time the perceived threat from terrorist attacks increased dramatically. They kept in check fearful and nervous ministers worried they would be blamed by MPs and the media for any terrorist attack. The ethos and ethics of the security and intelligence agencies are vital. That is determined by those at the top. That is what made Rimington and Manningham-Buller so valuable. Their relative openness meant their role and activities were better understood. Britain’s security benefitted. After she retired, Rimington accused the Blair government of wanting the British people to ‘live in fear under a police state’, passing laws that restricted civil liberties and played into the hands of terrorists.17 Manningham-Buller stunned ministers in her maiden speech in the House of Lords by delivering a scathing attack on the Blair government’s plan to detain terror suspects

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without charge for forty-two days. ‘I have weighed up the balance between the right to life – the most important civil liberty – the fact there is no such thing as complete security, and the importance of our hard-won civil liberties,’ she said.18 ‘Rushing to legislate in the wake of a terrorist atrocity is often a mistake,’ she said, adding: ‘We compound the problem of terrorism if we use it to erode the freedom of us all.’ It was a point some of us at the Guardian had been warning about, and were persistently criticized by ministers and Whitehall’s security establishment for our pains. The law gives the security and intelligence agencies enormous discretion. Terrorism is defined under the 2000 Terrorism Act as ‘the use or threat of action where … the use or threat is designed to influence the government or an international governmental organization or to intimidate the public or a section of the public, and (where) the use or threat is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause.’ Schedule 7 of the act gives the police, on behalf of MI5, the power to stop and search individuals without prior authorization or reasonable suspicion ostensibly to find out if they are guilty of possible terrorism offences. They have no automatic right to legal advice and it is a criminal offence to refuse to cooperate and answer questions. In August 2013, David Miranda, the partner of the Glenn Greenwald, who had written a series of stories about Edward Snowden’s revelations, was stopped and searched at Heathrow airport under the act’s Schedule 7. Snowden revealed how easy it is to get round existing laws, not least because no distinction can be made now between what are domestic, British-based communications and what are foreign. Communications in the internet and elsewhere hurtle around the world in and out of what are now merely notional national boundaries in and out of the NSA and GCHQ’s notional ‘national’ orbits. Snowden revealed the way GCHQ and the NSA were involved in the mass scooping up of private communications. Senior Whitehall officials say privately that the British government was angry not so much because of what Snowden actually revealed, but out of concern about how the United States might respond to his disclosures appearing in the British media – that

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Washington might limit intelligence-sharing on the grounds that Britain could not be trusted to keep American secrets. The Cameron government insisted everything GCHQ did was within the law. But the law cannot keep up with new technology. GCHQ applied old law to new technology. The 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) required the tapping of defined targets to be authorized by a warrant signed by the home secretary or foreign secretary. However, an obscure clause in the Act allowed the foreign secretary to sign a certificate for the interception of broad categories of material, including those of British citizens, so long as one end of the monitored communications was not in Britain. The Snowden documents reveal that a minister’s certificate authorizes GCHQ to search for material under a number of themes, including intelligence on the political intentions of foreign governments; military postures of foreign countries; terrorism, international drug trafficking and fraud – ‘the entire range of GCHQ’s intelligence production’. GCHQ admitted a certificate signed by the foreign secretary, ‘sets out [the] class of work we can do under it … cannot list numbers or individuals as this would be an infinite list which we couldn’t manage.’19 Snowden revealed how, in an operation code-named Tempora, GCHQ tapped into fibre-optic cables carrying the world’s phone calls and internet traffic which came ashore near Bude. By 2012, GCHQ was handling 600 million ‘telephone events’ a day, tapping more than 200 cables. Fibre-optic communications do not recognize national, boundaries. Domestic UK traffic is often relayed abroad and returned through the cables back to the UK. In addition, there is no effective way British ministers can control the way GCHQ uses personal information offered by the NSA as opposed to having been actively sought by GCHQ. GCHQ have exploited loopholes for a long time. In its former office in Palmer Street in central London, GCHQ arranged for its interception equipment to be used by British Telecom (BT) workers rather its own staff. GCHQ and the NSA – and with their help, MI6 and MI5 – trawl through the airwaves and the internet, harvesting a huge amount of data consisting of both the content of conversations, and the numbers, addresses, and websites, used by individuals on the telephone, in emails or on social media.

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Evidence revealed in a case by Privacy International at an Investigatory Powers Tribunal hearing in 2016, showed that Britain’s intelligence agencies have been secretly collecting bulk personal data since the late 1990s and have privately admitted they have gathered information on people who are ‘unlikely to be of intelligence or security interest’. The documents offered a unique insight into the way MI5, MI6 and GCHQ go about collecting and storing bulk data on individuals as well as authorizing discovery of journalists’ sources. Bulk personal data includes information extracted from passports, travel records, financial data, telephone calls, emails and many other open or covert sources. Often they are ‘fused’ together to help pinpoint suspects. An internal MI6 in 2011 cautioned staff: ‘We’ve seen a few instances recently of individuals crossing the line with their database use … looking up addresses in order to send birthday cards, checking passport details to organize personal travel, checking details of family members for personal convenience.’ It added: ‘Another area of concern is the use of the database as a “convenient way” to check the personal details of colleagues when filling out service forms on their behalf. Please remember that every search has the potential to invade the privacy of individuals, including individuals who are not the main subject of your search, so please make sure you always have a business need to conduct that search and that the search is proportionate to the level of intrusion involved.’ An MI5 file noted that datasets ‘contain personal data about individuals, the majority of whom are unlikely to be of intelligence or security interest’. By 1955, MI5 had retained 600,000 ‘PFs’, or personal files, on index cards carefully cross-referenced. PF1, I was told, is Éamon de Valera, the Irish nationalist leader, later the country’s prime minister and president. It suggests MI5 believed he posed more of an immediate threat to Britain than Lenin, PF2 in the files. (Shayler said he had seen five volumes of files on me though I suspect many of them consist merely of cuttings from articles I had written about MI5 with attached comments, some no doubt referring to the product of phone taps.) Among the top secret documents disclosed by Snowden, many originated in GCHQ. One said: ‘Knowing what we have – Guiding light’ and underneath it reads: ‘GCHQ has massive access to international internet communications.’ The New York Times reported that GCHQ’s surveillance targets included financial institutions and ‘heads of international aid organizations, foreign

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energy companies and a European Union official involved in antitrust battles with American technology businesses’. Amassing information on individuals – what intelligence agencies call ‘bulk collection’, a term they prefer to ‘mass surveillance’ – erodes basic human rights, specifically the right to privacy. Far from making the agencies more effective, it leads to information overload compounding turf wars and simple bureaucratic inefficiency that in their case has fatal consequences. The prime example is the failure of the CIA to provide the FBI and other agencies with intelligence that could prevented the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. GCHQ failed to report to MI5 ‘an item of intelligence’ revealing a ‘significant’ contact between one the killers of Fusilier Lee Rigby in Woolwich on 22 May 2013 and an Al-Qaeda extremist. When one of the killers, Michael Adebolajo, was arrested in Kenya, MI6’s actions were ‘deeply unsatisfactory’, the Intelligence and Security Committee reported. Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, two of the suicide bombers in the 7/7 attacks on London in 2005, were known to MI5. Khalid Masoon, who killed four people on London’s Westminster Bridge on 22 March 2017, and Khuram Butt, leader of the attack on London Bridge and Borough Market on 3 June 2017, were both known to MI5. ‘The vast majority of terrorist attacks on the West – 29 out of 37 since 2001 – involved people who had already been identified as posing a possible threat’, notes the Andrew Fowler in Shooting the Messenger, Criminalising Journalism.20 Yet over the previous eighteen years, successive governments had introduced thirteen separate statutes to combat terrorism – and more are to come. As a 2017 UN report on the Right to Privacy pointed out, intelligence agencies would have been more effective devoting more money on human resources and targeted surveillance and less on electronic surveillance. ‘Trying to appear tough on security by legitimizing largely useless, hugely expensive and totally disproportionate measures which are intrusive to so many people’s privacy – and other rights – is patently not the way governments should go.’ More effective machinery must be set up to scrutinize the security and intelligence agencies, balancing a genuine need for secrecy against the need to protect personal privacy. Far more robust scrutiny and less secrecy might have prevented disastrous mistakes and errors of judgement during the so-called war on terror.

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12 September, 2001, flying over New York. ‘I wondered how the Americans would react. It never occurred to me they would go into Iraq’. Later, she asked, ‘Why now? I said it as explicitly as I could. I said something like, “the threat to us will increase because of Iraq”’ – Eliza Manningham-Buller, then deputy head of MI5, seeing the smoke amid the ruins of the World Trade Center. Manningham-Buller was one of three intelligence chiefs Tony Blair ordered to fly to Washington the day after the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon. She was responsible for liaising with allied security services. She was accompanied by Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, and Sir Francis Richards, director of GCHQ. They were driven to RAF Brize Norton, where the station commander told them no flying was permitted. The three replied that they were acting on the personal instructions of the prime minister. The CIA director George Tenet wrote in his autobiography that he still didn’t know ‘how they got flight clearance into the country’. At the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, they talked over supper. Tyler Drumheller, chief of the CIA’s European Division, recalled Sir David Manning, UK ambassador in Washington, who also attended the meeting, saying: ‘I hope we can all agree we should concentrate on Afghanistan and not be tempted to launch any attacks on Iraq,’ and Tenet replying: ‘Absolutely, we all agree on that. Some might want to link the issues, but none of us wants to go that route.’1

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While MI6 knew Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, MI5 was worried that invading Iraq would provoke strong hostility among Britain’s large Muslim community. Even Whitehall’s JIC, chaired by Sir John Scarlett and responsible for putting together the discredited Iraqi weapons dossier, warned a month before the invasion that international terrorism posed by far the biggest threat to Britain’s national security, much more than Saddam Hussein. But Tony Blair did President Bush’s bidding from the start. We now know, thanks to documents reluctantly provided to the Chilcot inquiry, that in July 2002, as he was preparing the misleading dossier, Blair promised Bush in July 2002, ‘I will be with you, whatever.’ A well-placed British general told me shortly after the weapons dossier was published: ‘The US did not need anyone else. The question of British involvement is a political matter. Britain has a choice; it is a risk/benefit analysis for the PM’. Blair needed all the help he could get to convince parliamentary and public opinion to support an invasion. He psyched himself up for the battle ahead. One day a senior FO diplomat found Blair in his ‘den’ in Downing Street reading ‘Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War’, co-authored by the New York Times journalist Judith Miller. Miller, the target of a fake anthrax letter in 2001, subsequently became mired in a controversy over her sources and inaccurate claims about Iraq’s WMD programme. Many of her articles were based on claims by the later disgraced Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi – a source also relied on by a number of British journalists who enthusiastically supported the invasion. The Guardian had headlined a review of Miller’s book, Weapons of Mass Hysteria. The newspaper published an article stating: ‘When the full history of the Iraq war is written, the most scandalous chapter may be about how American journalists, in particular those at the New York Times, allowed themselves to be so easily manipulated by both Ahmad Chalabi, an Iraqi exile with his own virulently pro-war agenda, and the Bush White House.’ Chalabi’s claims reinforced Blair’s willingness to believe that Saddam was vigorously pursuing a WMD programme. I seemed to be merely preaching to the converted, writing column after column in the Guardian reporting that senior government law officers, most

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diplomats in the FO, most MI5 officers and many MI6 officers were opposed to the invasion. They encouraged me to write the articles. The trouble was that none of them agreed to be identified in public. None (Wilmshurst excepted) was prepared to resign. I wrote one piece saying MI6 officers strongly disagreed with the Bush administration’s claim that Saddam was linked to Al-Qaeda, the line peddled by neo-cons and the Israeli government. It was preposterous: Saddam was a secular dictator, no friend of extreme Islamists. The British government and the CIA went along with the fiction because neither wanted to upset the White House. The day after the Guardian published the article, my MI6 source telephoned me. ‘I’ve just had the Foreign Office on the phone’, he said. ‘What did they say?’, I asked. ‘They suspected that I was behind the article and were furious,’ my source replied. ‘But it was accurate, wasn’t it?’, I said. ‘Yes, completely,’ came the reply. By 2004, public and parliamentary pressure for an inquiry persuaded Blair to set up a review under the former Cabinet Secretary, Lord Butler, with the narrow remit of looking at the use of intelligence in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. His fellow reviewers included Lord Inge, a former chief of the defence staff, and the ubiquitous Chilcot. They met in private and published their report a year later. Their conclusion was a masterpiece of Whitehall mandarin drafting. There were ‘weaknesses’ in the way MI6 carried out its checks on sources; there was an ‘over-reliance’ on dissident Iraqi sources; and ‘judgments in the dossier (on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, WMD) went to (although not beyond) the outer limits of the intelligence available’. The Butler Committee added that ‘the publication of such a document in the name and with the authority of the JIC had the result that more weight was placed on the intelligence than it could bear.’ Judgments, it continued, had stretched available intelligence ‘to the outer limits’. It found no evidence of ‘deliberate distortion’ of intelligence or of ‘culpable negligence’. In language reminiscent of Lord Hutton’s report into the death of David Kelly, the Butler panel chose its words very carefully. It went out of its way to absolve Scarlett from blame stating: ‘We realise that our conclusions may provoke calls for the current Chairman of the JIC, Mr Scarlett, to withdraw from his appointment as the next Chief of SIS [MI6]. We greatly

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hope that he will not do so. We have a high regard for his abilities and his record’. Scarlett was soon awarded a knighthood and appointed to succeed Sir Richard Dearlove as head of MI6. However, the Butler review demonstrated, albeit in most euphemistic language, that some MI6 officers, including Dearlove, believed claims made by Iraqi informants including leaders of Iraqi exile groups who, they should have known, were unreliable and had a vested interest in pushing the implausible claim that Saddam was in league with Al-Qaeda. One Iraqi defector, known as Curveball, claimed that Saddam had a network of mobile chemical weapon laboratories. He initially contacted Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, who passed on his claims to MI6 and the CIA. His claims were seized on by Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, in a speech to the UN as evidence that Saddam had to be overthrown. Curveball later admitted he made up the entire story. In devastating passages, the Chilcot report (see the following chapter) revealed that MI6 became suspicious about a covert source only after his description of an Iraqi chemical weapons project – specifically references to spherical glass containers – appeared remarkably similar to one that featured in a Hollywood film, The Rock. The source’s claims were fed into the government’s weapons dossier published with great fanfare in September 2002, seven months before the invasion of Iraq. MI6 did not withdraw the claims until September 2004. Chilcot noted that MI6 did not inform Downing Street ‘or others’ that the source of claims about Iraqi chemical and biological weapons ‘had been lying’. He revealed that Dearlove was selective about who received MI6 reports, in one case denying access to the head of GCHQ and the deputy head of defence intelligence. In their earlier report on the use of intelligence, Butler and his panel took the easy way out by reserving their strongest criticism for Blair’s style of ‘sofa government’, bypassing proper constitutional processes and failing to consult his cabinet. Blair got off lightly, but he might not have done. My Guardian colleague, Jonathan Freedland, and I had primed ourselves to ask Butler at the press conference launching his report how much responsibility Blair personally should take for the intelligence failures. However, we were not

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called by the Cabinet Office press officer choreographing the proceedings. It was claimed later, and Butler did not deny it, that had the question been asked, he would have pointed the finger at Blair, seriously undermining the prime minister’s position. It was not until much later that Butler took the opportunity to be rather more forthright. When he launched the discredited Iraqi weapons dossier in the Commons on 24 September 2002, Blair described the intelligence picture accumulated on Iraq as ‘extensive, detailed, and authoritative’. Butler told the Lords on 22 February 2007: ‘Neither the United Kingdom nor the United States had the intelligence that proved conclusively that Iraq had those weapons. The Prime Minister was disingenuous about that.’ Butler reminded the Lords that the JIC had told Blair on 23 August 2002 that it had known ‘little about Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons work since late 1988’. Yet Blair told Parliament a little over a month later that the picture painted by the intelligence services was ‘extensive, detailed and authoritative’. Butler added: ‘Those words could simply not have been justified by the material that the intelligence community provided to him.’ Butler waited for the Chilcot report before delivering another blistering attack on Blair. ‘Plans were not shared with senior ministers for fear that they would leak’, he said. ‘The full legal reasoning of the attorney general was not made available to the cabinet. Official papers were not circulated. With hindsight, the Blair government’s disregard for the machinery of government looks not like modernization but like irresponsibility.’ From the mouth of a former Cabinet Secretary, these words were indeed damning criticism. Someone with access to some of the most sensitive classified documents given to the Butler panel by Whitehall, but which it chose to keep secret, was sufficiently appalled about what they revealed to arrange a spectacular leak. What became known as the ‘Downing Street Memos’, painted a devastating picture of how Blair and a small group of political advisers and officials secretly took Britain to war. They were leaked to the respected journalist, Michael Smith, then of the Sunday Times.2 The documents included minutes of a meeting at 10 Downing Street chaired by Blair on 23 July 2002, at a time ministers were being warned by their officials, including the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, that an invasion to topple

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Saddam would be unlawful. The minutes reveal that Dearlove, reporting on his recent visit to Washington, warned that ‘the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy’. In response to the leak, Butler said he and his fellow panellists had seen the memo, but did not refer to its explosive contents because they related to the use of intelligence by the United States, not by the British government and therefore it was outside his review’s terms of reference. Neither Butler nor the Chilcot inquiry confronted the key issue of the legality of the invasion of Iraq. Revelations by Philippe Sands QC, professor of international law at University College, London, and author of Lawless World and Torture Team, and leaks to the media forced Blair to publish Goldsmith’s legal advice on the invasion, albeit after the event. The Chilcot inquiry subsequently heard how Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, changed his mind about the legality of an invasion of after he made a hurried visit to Washington to meet Bush’s legal advisers in February 2003. After Goldsmith told Blair on 7 March that an invasion would be lawful after all, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, chief of the defence staff, demanded an ‘unequivocal’ assurance that an invasion would indeed be lawful – an assurance he needed to provide cover for the British forces engaged in the operation. Goldsmith asked Blair to confirm that. Downing Street duly obliged. Boyce received a one-sentence note back presenting him with an ‘unequivocal’ assurance that an invasion would indeed be lawful. It was a dubious and curious process – akin, as concerned officials privately pointed out, to defence lawyers asking their clients whether their actions were lawful, rather than the lawyer telling them what the law was. Under the Geneva Conventions, an occupying power is under a legal obligation to protect the civilian population. The MoD ignored it. Blair did too, probably unwittingly. A most senior military figure told me that among all the possible breaches of international law incurred by the invasion of Iraq, that was the clearest breach, the one where Blair would have been most vulnerable – that was his failure to meet its obligations as an occupying power. One respected former Whitehall mandarin was prepared publicly to attack the invasion of Iraq. Sir Michael Quinlan, a Jesuit-educated former top MoD official, had earned the sobriquet, ‘high priest’ of nuclear deterrence – he was the government’s foremost defender of nuclear weapons. He opposed the

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invasion of Iraq in 2003 because it was a pre-emptive and unwarranted strike, contradicting the whole notion of deterrence. The invasion, he said, was an ‘unnecessary and precarious gamble’. In a stinging rebuke to Blair and his coterie of aides, Quinlan stated: ‘I think it is not necessary, not prudent, and not right’. Quinlan agreed to take part in Called to Account, an inquest into the invasion of Iraq which Nick Kent and I put on at the Tricycle Theatre. Quinlan spoke of the ‘just war’ principle, the question of proportionality, the option of the last resort. ‘A balancing of matters of high principle, both high constitutional principle and policy principle?’, he was asked. ‘That’s right’, he responded, ‘I would add moral principle.’ Blair persistently denied that the invasion of Iraq or indeed any aspect of his foreign policy increased the threat of terrorism in Britain or helped to radicalize Muslim youth in the country. Officials in the FO and the Home Office as well as officers in MI5 and MI6, made it quite clear in private correspondence to each other, some of which were leaked, that Britain’s military intervention in Iraq – and later Afghanistan – contributed to growing radicalism among sections of Britain’s Muslim population, as Manningham-Buller told the Chilcot inquiry. Blair dismissed those who argued that his decisions to send British forces to Iraq and Afghanistan, and the rhetoric directed at Muslims, contributed to the terrorist threat. The concerns were widely shared in the FO as well as MI5. They were expressed privately, of course. Unsurprisingly, they were leaked. In January 2008, secrets charges against an FO official, Derek Pasquill, collapsed after it emerged that documents disclosed to the court revealed that his senior colleagues admitted that, far from damaging British interests, his actions had actually helped to promote a constructive debate. Pasquill had been charged with leaking documents about what the British government knew of the US practice of secretly rendering terror suspects to jails where they risked being tortured, about secret FO warnings that the Iraq war was fuelling Muslim extremism in Britain, and about which Muslim organizations, including the Muslim Brotherhood, the government should consult. During an off-the-record weekend convened by an Italian think tank Sir Ivor Roberts, Britain’s ambassador to Italy, described George Bush as ‘Al-

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Qaeda’s best recruiting sergeant’. It didn’t seem to do him any harm. He was later elected president of Trinity College, Oxford.3 Officials throughout Whitehall made it abundantly clear in private conversations that in their view one effective recruiting sergeant was Guantanamo Bay. British officials were aghast when they saw pictures broadcast worldwide of prisoners in bright orange jumpsuits bound and shackled. Before the 9/11 attacks on the United States, MI6 and FO officials and military officers had made it clear – privately – how concerned they were about the Bush administration’s policy towards the Middle East. Two days after the attacks, I reported in the Guardian: ‘Not long ago, I bumped into a very senior British military officer at a conference in Europe on international security. The more the US demonised Osama bin Laden, he said, the more support he will attract in the Arab world, particularly among the younger generation.’ The article was given the headline ‘This is Britain’s Moment’, with the sub-heading: ‘Whitehall officials have long been sceptical of the US’s line on the Middle East. Now is the time to say so openly.’ Two days later, in his Times column under the headline, ‘Willing Guardian of the Designer Terrorist’, Michael Gove, later MP and Conservative cabinet minister, wrote that he was ‘shocked by Richard Norton-Taylor’s satisfaction that a chastened America will now drop its “nonchalant arrogance”.’ I was part of what he called ‘a Prada-Meinhof gang’, a member of a ‘journalistic fan club’ of the likes of Gerry Adams, Edward Said ‘and even the Zapatista fighters’. After the 9/11 attacks on the United States, the Blair government was quick to cooperate closely with the CIA in operations that included abducting and secretly transporting British citizens and residents to Guantanamo Bay. One of the first problems to confront British intelligence officers and troops was what to do with the detainees they captured in Afghanistan and Iraq – suspects the Bush administration described as ‘enemy combatants’ who were treated as terrorists whether or not there was any evidence to support the claim. As early as January 2002, FO officials wrote a ‘memorandum on UK detainees’. It read: ‘Transfer of UK nationals held by US forces in Afghanistan to the US base in Guantanamo is the best way to meet our counter-terrorism objective ensuring that they are securely held.’ The FO added:

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The security services are currently in Afghanistan interviewing detainees with a UK connection. If British nationals are to remain in US custody, we will need to continue to meet our consular obligations. In agreeing to this plan, we would need a number of reassurances from the Americans, notably: ●●

full information on who is being detained and who will be transferred [to Guantanamo],

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if they plan to prosecute, full information on the procedure to be used (i.e. whether they will use military tribunals and details of how they would operate) including reassurances that any trial will conform with international standards and that no UK national will be sentenced to death.

If those assurances were given, they were ignored, by both US and British officials. FO officials noted they had received many inquiries about UK detainees. They advised ministers: Transfer of UK nationals to Guantanamo will quickly raise in the mind of the press the issue which we have so far been able to avoid publicly: are these British nationals to be tried in US military tribunals and be subject, possibly, to the death penalty. Our line – that we are seeking information and reassurances and that the US is aware of our opposition to the death penalty – is not strong, but a stronger line is difficult until policy is clear. If asked about transfer to Guantanamo we can say: ●●

the issue of how these prisoners are handled is a matter for the US authorities. They have told us they would be treated humanely.

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we are asking for consular access and reassurances that any trial will conform to international standards.

That month, January 2002, the FO told Downing Street that MI5 officers were in Guantanamo and would be interviewing detainees. It added: ‘The team will report back to Ministers after their visit; they will not speak to the press. This will continue to be a difficult issue to handle, both in procedural and legal terms with US and in handling Parliament and the media here.’

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A worried senior Home Office official noted that a meeting at the Cabinet Office had agreed that the UK ‘should not be in any hurry to take back the detainees… . If the difficulties we face steers the Americans to make more use of military tribunals the Foreign Office will have some obvious problems of public presentation.’ While MI5 officers were in Guantanamo Bay, MI6 officers had been dispatched to Pakistan and Afghanistan. On 11 January 2002, they sent ‘guidance’ to those interrogating terror suspects linked to Britain. It read: Thank you for making such a good and determined start on interviewing Al-Qaida detainees. We can see all sorts of likely benefits. You have commented on their treatment. It appears from your description that they may not be being treated in accordance with the appropriate standards. Given that they are not within our custody or control, the law does not require you to intervene to prevent this [author’s emphasis]. That said, [the British government’s] stated commitment to human rights makes it important that the Americans understand that we cannot be party to such ill treatment, nor can we be seen to condone it [author’s emphasis]. In no case should they be coerced during or in conjunction with an [MI6] interview of them. ... It is important that you do not engage in any activity yourself [author’s emphasis] that involved inhumane or degrading treatment of prisoners. As representative of a UK public authority, you are obliged to act in accordance with the Human Rights Act 2000 which prohibits torture, or inhumane or degrading treatment ... your actions incur criminal liability in the same way as if you were carrying out those acts in the UK. Blair himself expressed concern. In a handwritten aside on a memo he received from the FO, he wrote: The key is to find out how they are being treated. Though I was initially sceptical about claims of torture, we must make it clear to the US that any such action would be totally unacceptable and very quickly establish that it is not happening. But what would he actually do if British officials told him the United States was engaged in torture? Blair’s attitude had been equivocal. In 1999, Blair

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repeatedly intervened in a bid to deport asylum seekers to Egypt, despite being told that they might be tortured and sentenced to death. When he was warned by Jack Straw, then home secretary, that there was ‘ample evidence from a range of sources of serious human rights abuses in Egypt’, and that there was ‘little scope for pushing deportations any further’, Blair replied: ‘This is crazy. Why can’t we press on?’4 MI5 and MI6 officers later conceded to the Intelligence and Security Committee that they were slow to appreciate what the United States was up to and about the Bush administration’s view that extreme interrogation methods were lawful. Yet the government was warned as early as January 2002 that British citizens were ‘possibly being tortured’ after capture by US forces in Afghanistan, that the United States was planning to hold some indefinitely without trial, and that British military lawyers were complaining about breaches of the Geneva conventions. A judge-led inquiry panel reported in 2013 that ‘faced with apparent breaches of Geneva convention standards’, MI6 officers appeared to be under no obligation to report breaches of the Geneva conventions and ‘may have turned a blind eye to the use of specific, inappropriate techniques or threats used by others, and used this to their advantage when resuming an interview session with a now compliant detainee’. Even when individual MI6 and MI5 officers expressed concerns about the abuse of detainees, they did not pass on their thoughts for fear of offending the United States, Britain’s closest intelligence partner. They were reluctant to question sleep deprivation, hooding, and waterboarding for ‘fear of damaging liaison relationships’ – an unmistakable reference to the CIA – the report by Sir Peter Gibson a retired senior judge appointed to investigate the treatment of detainees concluded.5,6 It questioned whether MI5 and MI6 told ministers about their ‘growing awareness’ of the CIA’s rendition operations, whether they became ‘inappropriately involved’, ‘condoned’, and ‘took advantage’ of them, and continued to cooperate with the CIA, ‘feeding in questions and receiving intelligence’ about detainees. Gibson obtained documentary evidence identifying 200 reported cases of the UK’s alleged involvement in the mistreatment of detainees. The Gibson inquiry was set up by the coalition government in 2010 following growing evidence of British complicity in CIA-led operations involving UK

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citizens and residents who ended up incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay. It was cut short in 2012 amid dramatic, first-hand evidence of MI6 involvement in the rendition of two prominent Libyan dissidents, Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi, who were flown to Tripoli where they were tortured by Gaddafi’s secret police (see further). It was a struggle initially to convince the Guardian news desk that British complicity in the CIA’s rendition operations was an important story. Ministers told one of my colleagues that I would be seriously embarrassed if I continued trying to promote the story, implying that there was nothing in it. But the operations concerned some officials in Whitehall and they strongly encouraged me to pursue it. One well-informed diplomat said he had noticed that the number of CIA flights into British airfields, notably RAF Northolt, in the west of London, had been exceptionally high in the months after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Some CIA planes involved in rendition operations refuelled at Prestwick airport in Scotland. Straw continued to deny any British involvement in the abduction of suspected Islamist extremists or terrorists. He told the Commons foreign affairs committee on 13 December 2005: Unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories and that the officials are lying, that I am lying, that behind this there is some kind of secret state which is in league with some dark forces in the United States. … There is simply no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition full stop, because we never have been. As I have already noted Straw added: ‘We were opposed to any use of torture. Not only did we not agree to it, were not compliant in it and nor did we turn a blind eye to it.’ He could not have been more wrong. Ministers, meanwhile, were misleading Parliament over the CIA’s use of Diego Garcia as a refuelling stop transporting detainees to the US military base at Guantanamo Bay. Straw had told the Commons on 21 June 2004 that ‘the United States authorities have repeatedly assured us that no detainees have at any time passed in transit through Diego Garcia or its territorial waters or have disembarked there and that the allegations to that effect are totally without foundation. The government are satisfied that their assurances are correct.’

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He repeated that line in statements to the Commons in 2005 and again in 2006. The assurances were echoed by other ministers. Then in February 2008, Straw’s successor, David Miliband, apologized to MPs. Contrary to what he called ‘earlier explicit assurances’, US aircraft carrying detainees had twice landed at Diego Garcia to refuel. The Commons foreign affairs committee said it was ‘unacceptable’ that the government had not taken steps to obtain the full details of the detainees rendered through Diego Garcia, and described as ‘deplorable’ that US assurances had turned out to be false. In Iraq and Afghanistan, SAS and SBS troops were capturing suspected ‘terrorists’ and insurgents and handing them over to US and Afghan security forces. The Intelligence and Security Committee revealed in a special report in 2005 that officials did not tell ministers what they knew about Britishbased detainees captured by the United States or turned over to the CIA by British agents or Special Forces.7 The committee added that ‘prior to their deployment to Afghanistan, the SIS (MI6) officers were not given specific training on the rights of detainees and the Geneva Conventions, nor were they aware of the 1972 announcement (by the Heath government) banning certain interrogation techniques’. In a later report, the ISC stated that there was ‘no evidence that the UK agencies (MI5, MI6, GCHQ) were complicit in any extraordinary rendition operations.’8 It too could not have been more wrong. Extraordinary rendition is the term, first used in the United States, referring to the secret abduction of detainees, notably terror suspects, to prisons where they were likely to be tortured. In 2014, seven years after the ISC published its inaccurate report, Andrew Tyrie, Tory MP and chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition, reminded the ISC’s then chair, Sir Malcom Rifkind, how the committee had come to such an ‘erroneous conclusion’. Tyrie added: ‘It is essential, both to give the public greater confidence that Britain is no longer involved in such practices, as well as for the credibility of your Committee, that the ISC gets to the truth on rendition.’ Meanwhile, David Cameron reneged on his promise that the UK’s involvement in rendition would be investigated post Gibson by another judge. He passed the task to the under-staffed and the less than rigorous committee of Peers and MPs approved

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by the prime minister. (One of the last acts of Theresa May’s government in July 2019 was to announce that ‘it was not necessary to establish a further inquiry’ into the growing evidence that Britain had been colluding in unlawful acts, including torture. The decision was widely condemned, including by two senior Tories, Ken Clarke and David Davis.) Misleading and inaccurate claims by Whitehall continued. The then defence secretary, John Hutton, admitted in 2009 that MPs were given wrong information about British troops handing over detainees to US forces in Iraq. Two Pakistanis had been handed over and were being held in Afghanistan, Hutton said, claiming that they were members of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a banned organization which he said was linked to Al-Qaeda. The government had previously denied having any knowledge of British troops handing over prisoners to US forces. Hutton had now confirmed what was first disclosed by a former SAS soldier a year earlier. Ben Griffin was silenced by a high court order obtained by the MoD after revealing how British Special Forces handed over terror suspects who ended up in secret interrogation centres in Iraq and Afghanistan and transported to Guantanamo Bay. One unidentified British Special Forces commander was reported to have expressed concern that his squadron was becoming ‘the secret police of Baghdad’.9 Years later, the MoD admitted it had paid large sums in compensation to Iraqis allegedly abused by British soldiers, including undercover British SAS troops. By 2016, the MoD had paid out £20 million in 326 cases of abuse by British forces in Iraq. Hutton had told MPs that references to the case of two prisoners had been made in ‘lengthy papers’ sent in 2006 to Jack Straw and Charles Clarke, the then foreign and home secretaries. ‘It is clear that the context provided did not highlight its significance at that point to the ministers concerned,’ Hutton explained. The United States had taken the two men to Afghanistan because of a ‘lack of relevant linguists necessary to interrogate them effectively in Iraq’. The two men were Yunus Rahmatullah and Amanatullah Ali, who had been captured by British Special Forces in Iraq. Rahmatullah gave a horrific account of how he had been tortured. Both men were held by the United States for ten years before being released, and all charges against them dropped. The Supreme Court dismissed the MoD’s argument that the men should not be

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given a hearing pointing out that what was being alleged were very serious crimes and included torture. Two other cases that became notorious, thanks mainly to a handful of committed lawyers backed by a handful of committed journalists, demonstrated that the government’s persistent claims that Britain had nothing to with the rendition of detainees to Guantanamo Bay and ‘black’ prisons around the world was a myth. One concerned Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born British resident, who was seized in Pakistan allegedly with a false passport. He was held incognito in Pakistan in 2002 before being secretly rendered to Morocco. He was subsequently flown to Afghanistan before being sent to Guantanamo. Mohamed described how he was ‘horribly tortured’ in Morocco where he had ‘a razor blade taken to my genitals’. He suspected that witness B – an unidentified MI5 officer who interrogated him in Pakistan in 2002 – was being used as a scapegoat. ‘The main responsibility lies with those who established the policy of abuse, not with the functionaries who carried out their orders,’ he said. The US Pentagon claimed Mohamed was involved in a ‘dirty bomb’ plot. It was nonsense. The accusation was based on the claims, since retracted, by a fellow detainee, Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian, who had been subjected to torture. He was waterboarded at least eighty-three times by CIA agents. He began to tell the truth only when the torture stopped. MI6 officers were aware of the treatment meted out to him. An MI6 officer was also aware of the torture of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who was placed in a sealed box by CIA agents in Afghanistan. MI6 fed questions to CIA agents interrogating al-Libi who under torture made the entirely false claim that Saddam Hussein had approached Al-Qaeda about his nuclear weapons programme, a claim used by Blair to help justify the invasion of Iraq. After a long court battle – and the disclosure of documents, including FO telegrams quoted earlier in this chapter that the government tried to block – a number of Britain’s most senior judges, including John Thomas, later appointed Lord Chief Justice, his predecessor, Igor Judge and Lord Neuberger, later appointed president of the Supreme Court, overruled the Labour government’s attempts to suppress evidence of British collusion in Binyam’s illtreatment. The judges dismissed claims by Labour’s Foreign Secretary, David

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Miliband, that if the evidence was disclosed, the CIA would cease sharing vital intelligence with Britain. In a stinging rebuke to Miliband’s claims, the court of appeal stated that the case raised issues of ‘fundamental importance’ to ‘democratic accountability and ultimately the rule of law itself ’. Publication of the material Miliband wanted to suppress was ‘compelling’, the court added, since it concerned the involvement of wrongdoing by agents of the state in the ‘abhorrent practice of torture’. The material helped to ‘vindicate Mr Mohamed’s assertion that UK authorities had been involved in and facilitated the ill- treatment and torture to which he was subjected while under the control of USA authorities’. The court continued: ‘In principle a real risk of serious damage to national security, of whatever degree, should not automatically trump a public interest in open justice which may concern a degree of facilitation by UK officials of interrogation using unlawful techniques which may amount to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.’ In evidence later to the Intelligence and Security Committee, ManninghamBuller admitted: ‘This is a case where, with hindsight, we would regret not seeking proper full assurances at the time.’10 It was not the only occasion, we shall see, when she expressed concern about British complicity in torture. She seemed to be a lone voice. The second case, after the treatment of Binyam Mohamed was exposed in the courts, came to light in 2011 as a result of NATO’s air strikes on the Libyan capital, Tripoli. And the central role played by MI6 was discovered by journalists among the shattered remains of Gaddafi’s intelligence chief, Moussa Koussa. One of the many documents discovered in files that lay scattered on the ground was a letter from Sir Mark Allen, MI6’s counterterrorism chief, and Moussa Koussa, dated 18 March 2004. Allen wrote: I am so grateful to you for your help in sorting out this visit to the Leader by our Prime Minister. The diplomats had failed to get organised. What you did made a great impression at No 10. They are grateful too. No 10 have asked me to put to you their request that there be no publicity for the Prime Minister’s visit now or over the next few days.

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In No 10 the present thinking is that there should not (NOT) be a press conference for the Leader and the Prime Minister. After reading the British press in recent weeks this seems to me only sensible. The Prime Minister will have 60 journalists with him. No 10 are however keen that the Prime Minister meet the Leader in his tent. I don’t know why the English are fascinated by tents. The plain fact is that the journalists would love it. My own view is that it would give a good impression of the Leader’s preference for simplicity which I know is important to him. ... Anyway, if this is possible, No 10 would be very grateful. Allen then referred, in thinly disguised code, to the abduction. ‘Most importantly,’ he told Moussa Koussa, I congratulate you on the safe arrival of [Abdel Hakim Belhaj]. This was the least we could do for you and for Libya to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built over the years. I am so glad. I was grateful to you for helping the officer we sent out last week. [Belhaj’s] information on the situation in this country is of urgent importance to us. Amusingly, we got a request from the Americans to channel requests for information from [Belhaj] through the Americans. I have no intention of doing any such thing. The intelligence on [Belhaj] was British. I know I did not pay for the air cargo. But I feel I have the right to deal with you direct on this and am very grateful for the help you are giving us. M. Belhaj had become involved in the Libyan movement opposing the Gaddafi dictatorship. He helped set up a Libyan opposition group, which became known as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). Its aim was to overthrow Gaddafi. Its attempted uprising was quashed in 1998, and Belhaj fled to Afghanistan. He then travelled to Turkey, Pakistan and Iran, before moving to China in 2003, with his new wife Fatima Boudchar to evade detection by Libyan intelligence agents. He became worried that he was no longer safe in China and that the Libyans were still after him, and he sought asylum in Britain. However, as they

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tried to leave China, they were detained and deported to Malaysia. Belhaj was contacted there by a Libyan in Britain with whom he had been in touch about getting asylum. It is likely that Belhaj’s contact was also an informer for MI5 and MI6. What is clear is that the British security and intelligence agencies, and, through them, the CIA, knew about Belhaj’s movements. On 1 March 2004, MI6 sent a fax to Gaddafi’s intelligence services telling them where the couple were being held. MI6 and the CIA together drew up a plan to abduct them. Once they were on the plane to Malaysia – ostensibly on their way to Britain, Malaysian security officials would seize them in Kuala Lumpur before transferring them to Libyan security officials. Belhaj says he was told by Malaysian agents; ‘If it was just between us, we’d let you go, but other countries are involved. This is bigger than just us.’ This was a clear reference to the Britain, the United States and Libya. At Kuala Lumpur, Belhaj and his now pregnant wife were forced on to a plane bound for Bangkok. There they were handed over to US officials who took them to a secret prison. Belhaj says he was hung by his wrists in a cell for long periods. Boudchar was taped tightly to a stretcher. The couple were then rendered by the United States to Libya. Belhaj was hooded and shackled to the floor in a stress position, unable to sit or lie down during the seventeen-hour flight. According to the flight plan, the plane was to land to refuel at the US base on the British Indian Ocean Territory of Diego Garcia, further evidence of direct British complicity in the abduction. The British and US governments refuse to say whether the CIA aircraft did in fact land on Diego Garcia. Belhaj described to his British lawyers the horrific ordeal endured by he and his wife – in his case, hung from hooks – and blindfolded, hooded, and shackled in the aircraft owned by a CIA front company with the tail number N313P, that took them to Tripoli. Sami al-Saadi was also a member of the LIFG. In March 2004, he was seized with his wife, Ait Baaziz, and four young children in Hong Kong at the behest of British intelligence officials. Al Saadi later described how they were flown to Tripoli via Bangkok, handcuffed, and their legs were tied together with plastic zip-ties. Belhaj and Al Saadi were incarcerated in Tripoli’s Tajoura jail where they say they were kept in isolation and tortured. Al Saadi recalled:

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When I arrived at Tajoura prison, I was met by Moussa Koussa. He told me I would die in prison and that my wife was also in prison. When I pleaded with the Libyans to release her, I was told that if they did ‘everyone will know that the Americans and British gave you to us’.... . Now, all I have to do is pick up the phone and call MI6, or the CIA, and they give me everything they have on you. Belhaj and Al Saadi said they were interrogated there by British intelligence officers who later sent list of further questions to ask the detainees. Belhaj said that before the British officers came, ‘I was brought prepared reports implicating Libyans who were in the UK. I was told the British would deliver my UK associates and that the Libyans would pull from them every detail I withheld. I was given a script of things I should say to the British interrogators. I was given names of people who I was told to say I was associated with and had planned terrorist operations with. It was made clear that if I did not comply my treatment would worsen. Immediately before meeting the British agents I was told to have a shower and given a formal Libyan costume – a white thobe (robe) and an embroidered waistcoat. I was then brought into a more pleasant room, known as the VIP room, where I met the British agents. The British team was led by a woman of average build with blond hair in her late thirties or early forties. She was accompanied by a man who was chubby, quite bald, with a thick, speckled grey, beard. They asked general questions about the LIFG, including members in the UK’. Among the documents discovered in Tripoli after the NATO bombing campaign in 2011 were descriptions of how Gaddafi’s secret agents were supplied by MI5 with intelligence, mobile phones and a safe house in London’s fashionable Knightsbridge. MI5 wanted to turn the refugees into spies, arguing that the body to which many of them belonged – Belhaj’s LIFG – was linked to Al-Qaeda and therefore a threat to Britain’s security. Torture was endemic in Gaddafi’s Libya at the time, as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the US State Department and Britain’s Home Office, all emphasized. It was meted out especially to those perceived to be opponents of his regime. Three years later, in 2007, the US State Department

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singled out Libya’s authoritarian regime and its poor human rights record. Numerous and serious abuses, it said, included poor prison conditions, arbitrary arrest, prisoners held incommunicado, and political prisoners held for many years without charge or trial. The judiciary, it added, was controlled by the government, and there was no right to a fair public trial. Yet on 7 June that year, Prince Charles wrote a personal letter to Gaddafi from his official residence, Clarence House. It read: Dear Excellency, I have been briefed on the positive way in which relations between Libya and the United Kingdom are developing. Your Excellency’s recent decision, through the World Islamic Call Society, to restore the Church of St Mary of the Angels to members of the Anglican communion for Christian worship is deeply appreciated. I have also been briefed on the Prime Minister’s moving meeting with the representatives of the Benghazi families, whose children are tragically afflicted with HIV/Aids. Knowing of Your Excellency’s interest in promoting dialogue and understanding between different faiths, I hope you will forgive me for enclosing a copy of the short speech I gave earlier this week to open a conference called ‘Islam and Muslins in the World Today’, which I thought you might possibly find of some interest. Yours most sincerely, Charles Tony Blair followed up the letter two weeks later: 10 Downing Street, 20 June 2007 Dear Mu’ammar, I very much enjoyed meeting you against last month at the start of our African tour. You have led a genuine transformation in relations between our two countries in recent years, from which both our peoples stand to benefit ...

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I am also pleased that BP were able to sign a major investment contract during my visit. BP’s return to Libya is a sign of the huge potential of the growing economic partnership between the UK and Libya. Shell’s contract to explore for gas and to refurbish Libya’s LNG [liquid natural gas] plant at Marsa Brega was a key first step in this process. Please accept my warm wishes to you and your family Best wishes, yours ever, Tony Responding to reports on the Belhaj and Al-Saadi cases, Jack Straw said: ‘No foreign secretary can know all the details of what its intelligence agencies are doing at any one time.’ Well-placed government officials told me that MI6 was following ‘ministerially authorised government policy.’ Quoting Whitehall sources, The Sunday Times later reported that Straw had ‘signed off ’ on the operation. Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 at the time, said: ‘It was a political decision, having very significantly disarmed Libya, for the government to cooperate with Libya on Islamist terrorism. The whole relationship was one of serious calculation about where the overall balance of our national interests stood.’ Addressing the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado in July 2006, Dearlove suggested the Libyan rendition ‘would have been illegal under British common law’. Questioned about what policies he was referring to, he replied: ‘the whole Guantanamo operation’ and the CIA’s practice of ‘rendition.’ Court documents subsequently obtained by Belhaj’s lawyers revealed that Dearlove led a high-powered MI6 delegation to discuss close cooperation with Gaddafi and his security chiefs shortly before the rendition of the two Libyan dissidents. They noted that Gaddafi’s External Security Organisation (ESO) had complained about the lack of cooperation with the British on extradition because of legal problems. They said that ‘in or around October 2003, Colonel Gaddafi wrote Tony Blair a letter making five specific demands of Britain in exchange for disarmament’. This was at the time Gaddafi agreed to end his nuclear and chemical weapons programme. The documents do not spell out what his specific demands were.

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Blair said he had ‘no recollection’ of the Libyan abductions, though according to impeccable sources that Manningham-Buller wrote to Blair complaining about the conduct of MI6 officers in Libya, saying their actions had threatened Britain’s intelligence-gathering, and may have compromised the security and safety of MI5 officers and their informants. She was so incensed when she discovered the role played by MI6 in the abductions that she banned its officers from working at MI5’s headquarters, Thames House.11 The former MI5 chief did not respond publicly to questions about the episode, but she was said by official sources to have been ‘shocked and appalled’ by the treatment of Belhaj and Al Saadi. She had previously taken the view that engaging with Gaddafi to persuade him to abandon his chemical and nuclear weapons programme was not wrong ‘in principle’. However, she had added: ‘There are clearly questions to be answered about the various relationships that developed afterwards and whether the UK supped with a sufficiently long spoon.’ In January 2012, soon after MI6’s role in the renditions came to light, the Metropolitan Police issued a statement. ‘The allegations raised in the two specific cases concerning the alleged rendition of named individuals to Libya and the alleged ill-treatment of them in Libya are so serious that it is in the public interest for them to be investigated now’, it said. Scotland Yard investigators accumulated evidence on the cases for four years. It handed a large file of nearly 30,000 pages to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). It provoked huge argument among the agency’s lawyers. Some were convinced there should be a prosecution; most backed off. The problem was the CPS cannot bring a charge against a ‘government policy.’ The CPS did not say whether it had consulted the attorney general (then Jeremy Wright) – the normal practice in cases, including those involving the Official Secrets Act, likely to provoke public controversy. In the summer of 2016, the CPS announced that neither Straw nor Allen would face charges because of insufficient evidence, although, it said, Allen had ‘sought political authority for some of his actions albeit not within a formal written process nor in detail’. In a carefully worded statement the CPS continued: ‘In what has been a thorough and painstaking investigation, evidence and information was obtained from a large number of records, individuals and organisations including the Secret Intelligence Service [MI6],

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the Security Service [MI5], other government departments and authorities in other countries.’ The statement went on: ‘The CPS has concluded that there is sufficient evidence to support the contention that the suspect had been in communication with individuals from the foreign countries responsible for the detention and transfer of the Belhaj and Al Saadi families; disclosed aspects of what was occurring to others within this country; and sought political authority for some of his actions albeit not within a formal written process nor in detail which covered all his communications and conduct.’ However, the CPS went out of its way to explain: ‘Officials from the UK did not physically detain, transfer or ill-treat the alleged victims directly, nor did the suspect have any connection to the initial physical detention of either man or their families.’ [Author’s emphasis] The CPS said that while Allen had: ‘Disclosed aspects of what was occurring to others within this country … after additional investigation and careful consideration, it remains unclear what impact or influence the communications and conduct of the suspect had on the actions of decision makers abroad.’ The CPS continued: ‘It is also impossible to reconcile conflicting evidence about what happened at the time and shortly afterwards or to prove each element of the offences to the required criminal standard.’ That the police believed they had sufficient evidence for a criminal prosecution in what they called Operation Lydd is clear from a little-noticed answer to a question put to the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, in October 2016. ‘Did the Metropolitan Police make a charging recommendation to the CPS with regard to Operation Lydd, and if so what was that recommendation?’, he was asked. The mayor responded: ‘The Metropolitan Police submitted a comprehensive file of evidence (in excess of 28,000 pages) to the Crown Prosecution Service seeking to demonstrate that the conduct of a British official amounted to Misconduct in Public Office.’ Belhaj and Al Saadi were released from jail in Tripoli in 2010 under a reconciliation deal by Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam. Their wives and children had already been freed. Al Saadi and his family settled for £2.2 million in damages paid by the British government. Belhaj, however, refused to settle. He said he did not want the money – he would settle for £1 in damages. What he wanted

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was an apology, for the government to accept responsibility for his abduction and subsequent ill-treatment. The government resisted. In protracted hearings in the High Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court, its lawyers deployed the ‘foreign act of state doctrine’ – that is to say, British courts could not rule on the case since agents from foreign countries, that is, the United States and Libya, were involved. Lawyers for Belhaj argued that many cases, involving deportation or asylum seekers, for example, relate to actions by agents of foreign states. The Supreme Court agreed. It unanimously rejected the arguments made by government lawyers on behalf of Straw and Allen on the grounds that the case involved allegations of the most serious abuses, including torture. ‘The critical point in my view’, ruled Lord Mance, in the lead judgment, ‘is the nature and seriousness of the misconduct alleged.’ He added: ‘English law recognises the existence of fundamental rights.’ Mance quoted Magna Carta, the medieval agreement between King John and English barons protecting the rights of the individual – ‘No free-man shall be taken, or imprisoned, or dispossessed, of his … Liberties … or be outlawed, or exiled, or in any way destroyed … except by the legal judgment of his peers, or by the laws of the land.’ The judge continued: ‘Further, torture has long been regarded as abhorrent by English law … and individuals are unquestionably entitled to be free of deliberate physical mistreatment while in the custody of state authorities … . In so far as what is alleged amounts to complicity on torture, the United Nations Convention against Torture … obliges states to provide a universal civil remedy in respect of torture wherever committed in the world, at least when (allegedly) committed by or with the connivance of United Kingdom citizens.’ The Supreme Court added: ‘The principle that there is no general defence of state necessity to a claim of wrongdoing by state officials has been established since the 18th century.’ Dismissing the argument that British judges had no role to play in the case, the court ruled: ‘Bearing in mind the nature and seriousness of the infringements of individual fundamental rights involved, this constitutes no basis for a domestic court to abstain or refrain from adjudicating upon the claims.’ The government had gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent evidence of MI6’s wrongdoing from being heard in court, arguing even that the reasons why

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the CPS decided not to prosecute must kept secret. It lost that argument, too, but in the end, no court was to hear the claims. In May 2018, the government announced that it had reached a ‘full and final settlement’ out of court with Belhaj and his family, including £500,000 in compensation for Boudchar. (AlSaadi had already accepted £2.2 million from the government. Belhaj had always said he was interested in an apology and acceptance of wrongdoing by the British state, not money.) While the government apologized ‘unreservedly and unequivocally’ for its role in what it called the ‘deeply troubling and appalling treatment’ of Belhaj and his pregnant wife, the attorney general, Jeremy Wright QC, told the Commons that the settlement included ‘no admission of liability’. Wright told MPs that ‘cultural’ and behavioural’ changes in MI5 and MI6 were needed, as though the security and intelligence agencies still had not learned from their past misdeeds. Wright also pointed to ‘unacceptable practices of some of our international partners’ – a reference to the United States – should have been understood much sooner. Yet we have seen that MI6 and MI5 were well aware in early 2002 of the Bush administration’s attitude towards torture and rendition. Indeed, the FO under Straw actively cooperated in the rendering of British citizens and residents to Guantanamo Bay. Following Wright’s statement to MPs, Straw issued a statement of his own. It read: ‘On 1 March 2004 my approval was sought for some information to be shared with international partners. In almost every case such approvals were made by me in writing, on the basis of written submissions to me. However in rare cases of great urgency, oral submissions could be made and oral approvals given by me. This is what happened on this occasion.’ No one explained why the case was ‘of great urgency’. Blair again distanced himself from the Belhaj rendition. ‘I did not know about the case until after I left office in 2007, he said. ‘It was not brought to my attention. It was not something I dealt with in government’. Wright told the Commons that it was important ‘we should act in line with our values and in accordance with the rule of law’. But it seemed that no one would be found responsible for what the government in effect admitted was an unlawful operation. The case was passed to the Intelligence and Security Committee, the body that had been misled so much in the past by MI6 and MI5, specifically

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about their role colluding with the CIA and others in the secret abduction and rendering of terror suspects. The ISC finally published a report on Britain’s role in counter-terror rendition operations in June 2018. It found 232 cases where British security and intelligence officers continued to help their counterparts abroad even after they knew or suspected mistreatment. In 198 cases they received intelligence from foreign agencies which had been obtained from detainees who they knew had been mistreated or should have suspected mistreatment. In twenty-two cases, MI6 or MI5 provided intelligence to enable a rendition operation to take place, and in twenty-three cases, they failed to take action to prevent a rendition – including instances where there were opportunities to intervene and prevent the rendition of a British national or resident. In a devastating passage, the ISC said that immediately after 9/11, the heads of deputies of MI6 and MI5 were briefed by the CIA. It added: ‘These briefings clearly showed US intent but were not taken seriously.’ There were at least thirty-eight cases in 2002 when they were told their officers witnessed or heard about mistreatment. The ISC continued: The agencies argue that these were ‘isolated incidents’: they may have been isolated incidents to the individual officer witnessing them, but they cannot be considered ‘isolated’ to those in Head Office. It is difficult to comprehend how those at the top of the office did not recognise the pattern of mistreatment by the US. That the US, and others, were mistreating detainees is beyond doubt, as is the fact that the Agencies and Defence Intelligence were aware of this at an early point. The ISC went on: ‘The same is true of rendition: there was no attempt to identify the risks involved and formulate the UK’s response. There was no understanding in HMG of rendition and no clear policy – or even recognition of the need for one.’ The British government ‘tolerated actions, and took others, that we regard as inexcusable’, the Committee concluded. A footnote in the ISC report reveals that three British intelligence officers were deployed to Abu Ghraib, the notorious US jail in Iraq. Jack Straw responded by saying. ‘Although I was formally responsible for both SIS [MI6] and GCHQ during my period as foreign secretary [June 2001

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to May 2006], I have … learned much about the activities and the approach of these agencies of which I was not aware before’. He did not reply to a request for comment about a passage which stated that in September 2004 MI6 ‘sought and obtained authorisation from the foreign secretary [Straw] to pay a large share’ of the costs of funding an aircraft to render a detainee from a secret location to another secret location the following month. In a second report on ‘current issues’ the ISC concluded: ‘There is no clear policy and not even agreement as to who has responsibility for preventing UK complicity in unlawful rendition. We find it astonishing that, given the intense focus on this issue ten years ago, the Government has still failed to take action’. The committee’s chairman, Dominic Grieve, revealed that Theresa May had blocked his request to hear from four MI6 officers whom he described as ‘central to events’. The ISC reluctantly concluded that it had to ‘draw a line’ under the inquiry, Grieve said. If the inquiry had continued, the committee would have called on Straw and the former Home Secretary David Blunkett to give evidence. Yet the committee could have demanded to hear evidence from Straw, Blunkett and Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 at a critical time, but failed to do so. It did not explain why not. For sixteen years, ministers and officials denied Britain had any involvement in the unlawful rendering of terror suspects to secret prisons where they were mistreated and in some cases tortured. For seven years, they tried every means to prevent details of MI5 and in particular MI6 involvement in the capture and torture of Belhaj and his wife. This was more than turning a blind eye; it was actual collusion. The few journalists, lawyers and MPs who pursued the security and intelligence agencies, Whitehall mandarins and ministers of successive governments – all protected by a brick wall of official secrecy – were proved right, in the end. In October 2018, ISC concluded that Britain’s ‘anti torture policy’ was still not fit for purpose. It was ‘insufficient to prevent a repeat of UK involvement in rendition and torture’, it said. The group also called for much better protection for whistle-blowers reporting cases of torture or mistreatment. Its report continued: Astonishingly, the Guidance [to the security and intelligence agencies] lacks a clear prohibition on action (and ministerial authorisation of action)

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carrying a real risk of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment (CIDT). Furthermore, it fails to cover extraordinary rendition at all – an astonishing omission given the government’s repeated condemnation of this practice and recent apology to Mr Belhaj and Ms Boudchar for the UK’s role in their rendition to Libya. These flaws mean the UK and its officials risk action that is both morally wrong and illegal, putting officials at risk of prosecution.12 The all-party group noted that the ISC asked Amber Rudd, when she was Home Secretary, whether she would have been able to authorize action where there was ‘a serious risk of torture’ and whether she thought that was ‘appropriate’. Rudd replied: ‘I think it is the right balance, yes. Where there is a serious risk … you know, we need to consider each case individually.’ Internal guidelines drawn up by the Ministry of Defence and obtained through an FoI request in May 2019 stated that while Britain would not share information with allies when there was a ‘serious risk’ of torture, this could be overridden ‘if ministers agree that the potential benefits justify accepting the risk and the legal consequences that may follow’. Ministers and the successive heads of MI5 and MI6 repeated the mantra that they did not indulge in torture and that torture was unacceptable and unlawful. It is not quite like that. In his first speech after he was appointed Chief of MI6 and before his agency’s direct complicity in rendition had become publicly known, Sir John Sawers had said: ‘Torture is illegal and abhorrent under any circumstances, and we have nothing whatsoever to do with it … . If we know or believe action by us will lead to torture taking place, we’re required by UK and international law to avoid that action. And we do, even though that allows the terrorist activity to go ahead.’ Sawers gave these assurances before the cases of Binyam Mohamad and Belhaj came to light. He was not in charge of MI6 at the time. But he added this in his lecture: ‘Suppose we receive credible intelligence that might save lives, here or abroad’, he said. We have a professional and moral duty to act on it. … If we hold back, and don’t pass that intelligence out of concern that a suspect terrorist may be badly treated, innocent lives may be lost that we could have saved. These are

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not abstract questions just for philosophy courses or searching editorials. They are real, constant, operational dilemmas. Sometimes there is no clear way forward. The more finely-balanced judgments have to be made by ministers themselves. The question I was often asked, including when I gave evidence to an Intelligence and Security Committee inquiry into rendition: ‘Would you ignore warnings of an imminent and violent terrorist attack on Britain because they came from someone who had been tortured?’ I responded by asking: ‘Can you give me any example where failure to act on information obtained by torture has cost lives?’ That question was never answered. Perhaps Manningham-Buller has given the best response: ‘Torture is illegal in our national law and in international law. It is wrong and never justified … . Torture should be utterly rejected even when it may offer the prospect of saving lives… . I am confident that I know the answer to the question of whether torture has made the world a safer place. It hasn’t.’ Nor did the invasion of Iraq. The truth about that, like Britain’s involvement in the unlawful treatment of terror suspects, did not emerge for many years. Lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan, and increasing pressure on armed forces chiefs, led the country’s most senior military figures to question David Cameron’s decision to bomb Libya after Gaddafi had turned from best friend to worst enemy again when he threatened to attack protesters in Benghazi who had got caught up in the ‘Arab Spring’. Cameron told his defence chiefs that their job was to keep quiet and obey his orders. Secrecy once again was disaster’s handmaiden. Though it did not include Britain’s military interventions in Afghanistan and Libya, the long-delayed Chilcot inquiry exposed what some had suspected and feared much earlier, but were prevented from making their case because of the government’s determination to build a wall of secrecy surrounding the invasion of Iraq.

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‘Actually our knowledge of Iraq was very, very superficial’, Sir Mark Allen, MI6 officer responsible for countering terrorism, told Chilcot. ‘We were small animals in a dark wood with the wind getting up and changing direction the whole time. These were very, very difficult days. None of us had experience of our work being so critical to major policy dramas, and I venture in an ignorant kind of way to suggest you would have to go back to the Cuban missile crisis to find something similar. We all knew perfectly well what a disaster for countless people a war was going to be. So there was no appetite. But there was a strong sense that that’s the way we were heading.’1 ‘What was astonishing was that so few people knew what was going on’, commented a source in the heart of government pointing to the evidence the Chilcot inquiry had heard about the way Tony Blair dragged Britain into the invasion of Iraq, the most damaging decision by a British government had taken in modern times. It was worse than Suez was the overwhelming view in Whitehall and, belatedly, in Westminster. (This was before Brexit.) The report of the public inquiry,2 forced on a government which first opposed it and then tried to insist it should be conducted behind closed doors, was a searing indictment of Tony Blair, MI6 and the MoD. Though its content and conclusions were devastating, the report was published so long after the invasion of Iraq, and so soon after the unexpected result of the EU referendum in June 2016 that it did not have the impact it needed and deserved.

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The inquiry was delayed for years by Chilcot’s disputes with Whitehall – specifically, with two cabinet secretaries, Sir Gus (now Lord) O’Donnell and his successor, Sir Jeremy Heywood.3 These guardians of Whitehall’s permanent government persistently prevented Chilcot from releasing into the public domain key documents they had reluctantly agreed to pass, little by little, to the five-member inquiry panel. Chilcot realized his credibility, reputation and indeed his legacy as a veteran public servant was on the line. In a series of sharply worded letters, he repeatedly demanded that notes of conversations between Tony Blair and George Bush in the run-up to the invasion should be published. ‘The material requested provides important, and often unique, insights into Mr Blair’s thinking and the commitments he made to President Bush, which are not reflected in other papers’, Chilcot insisted in one of his many exchanges with Whitehall’s top official. In a third letter within less than a month to O’Donnell, he wrote: ‘The question when and how the prime minister made commitments to the US about the UK’s involvement in military action in Iraq and subsequent decisions on the UK’s continuing involvement, is central to its considerations.’ Referring to passages in Blair’s autobiography, A Journey, and the writings of Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, and Alastair Campbell, his former head of communications, Chilcot observed bitterly that ‘individuals may disclose privileged information (without sanction) whilst a committee of privy counsellors established by a former prime minister to review the issues, cannot’. Documents Chilcot said he wanted to publish included Blair’s notes to Bush, more than 130 records of conversations between the two leaders, and records of 200 cabinet discussions. The content of documents Whitehall wanted to suppress were ‘vital to the public understanding of the inquiry’s conclusions’, Chilcot emphasized. He finally agreed to a deal whereby a ‘small number of extracts’ or the ‘gist’ of the documents’ contents would be published by the inquiry. None of the published material would ‘reflect’ Bush’s views. Chilcot’s determination was rewarded. He persuaded Whitehall to release, in an unprecedented move, a British prime minister’s highly classified correspondence, including what was to become the inquiry report’s most

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quoted phrase: Blair’s private promise to George Bush in July 2002, eight months before the invasion: ‘I will be with you, whatever.’ The disputes between Chilcot and the Cabinet Office further delayed the inquiry’s report because Chilcot understandably said he needed to know what documents could be published before embarking on the so-called ‘Maxwellization’ process, named after a court case concerning the late Robert Maxwell, whereby individuals an inquiry intended publicly to criticize would be given an opportunity to see relevant draft passages and given a chance to respond to the proposed criticisms before a final report is published. Chilcot took the view that he could not criticize individuals on the basis of documentary evidence which the public was prevented from seeing. While David Cameron chided Chilcot for taking so long, senior officials in Whitehall kept on sending new documents to former officials who had already given evidence to the inquiry, leading to further delays. Though the Chilcot inquiry had a legal adviser, Dame Rosalyn Higgins, a former British member of the International Court of Justice, it had no judge on its panel and did not pronounce on the legality of the invasion. Chairmen of other public inquiries, including the Scott inquiry, had been judges and independent figures who could publish whatever they considered relevant and necessary. The Chilcot report was not published until 6 July 2016, seven years after it was set up and two weeks after the EU referendum. It is a resounding indictment of a British government in modern times and must not be forgotten. It heard the head of MI5 contradict Blair’s claim that his foreign policy had no effect on British Muslims and accused the Blair government of undermining the authority of the UN Security Council. It showed that the invasion left Britain at greater risk of a terror attack. Downing Street called on Sir Mark Allen for urgent advice when Blair first began seriously to contemplate supporting a US-led invasion of Iraq. Allen told Chilcot how in November 2001, out of the blue, he was asked by Sir David Manning, Blair’s foreign policy adviser, to draw up a paper on what he described as ‘key issues that we need to bear in mind to keep our balance and our perspective in considering Iraq as a rapidly expanding threat.’ In evidence heard in private and released in part only later, Allen told Chilcot: ‘I do remember very clearly, about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, getting

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a telephone call from Number 10, “David Manning wants to speak to you”, and David coming on the line and saying, “look, this Iraq stuff is building up apace. Can you just do me a quick paper, a sort of Anglican thirty-nine articles or whatever it’s called, just bullet points, of key issues that we need to bear in mind to keep our balance and our perspective in considering Iraq as a rapidly expanding threat”. So he wanted a sort of sedative paper, and he wanted it by 6 o’clock. So I had to cancel everything else I was doing and knock that up in about an hour. It was sent off. The quickest communications between us and Number 10 would have been the Chief ’s driver. So yes, it would have gone through the Chief [Sir Richard Dearlove].’ Sir Rodric Lyne, a former British ambassador to Moscow and the most effective interrogator on the Chilcot panel, noted that Allen had begun his paper with the question: ‘What can be done about Iraq? If the US heads for direct action, have we ideas which could divert them to an alternative course?’ Allen responded: ‘I think what I was trying to bring out was the hazards, the experience to date with Iraq, something about the nature of Iraq as a country. I wanted to arm David with background reminders that this is not going to be simple or straightforward. I don’t think I had in my mind particular wheezes, schemes or policy programmes which could be followed up, simply to argue for caution and awareness of what a heavy matter Iraq could prove to be because it had been in the past.’ Lyne then asked Allen about one issue he had raised which the Chilcot panel considered to be extremely important. ‘You state that the government law officers are going to have to provide assurances of legality, and you say there has been a serious problem here. What problems had there already been with regard to legality of these concepts?’, asked Lyne. In a reply likely to have provoked anguish in Whitehall and one that would have provoked a hostile response in the wider public had it been reported at the time, Allen told Lyne: ‘This was a considerable point of concern, not because we aimed to do something we knew was illegal, though of course, by definition, all MI6 activity was illegal, but because we didn’t want to put our feet in the wrong place or get snagged.’ In December 2001, Allen wrote further memos which his boss, Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, passed on to Downing Street. Allen noted that

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‘the removal of Saddam remains a prize because it could give new security to oil supplies.’ However, he also warned that an attack on Iraq would mean ‘increased distrust of US motives throughout the Islamic world. Confidence in HMG (the UK government), as a close US ally, also damaged’. Allen further warned in a hurried note: ‘Terrorists’ motives and grievances reinforced … . Anger and resentment in the Arab Street. The bombings will be seen as an attack on ordinary Arabs, rather than Saddam’. There would be ‘accusations of double standards (one law for the Israelis; another for the Arabs).’ Lyne then asked Allen what were the ‘attractions’ of removing Saddam Hussein? ‘What was the case that you were making here for regime change?’ Allen replied: I remember saying to somebody at that time that the lack of our response to the re-emergence of Iraq as a serious regional power was like having tea with some very proper people in the drawing room and noticing that there was a python getting out of a box in one corner. I was very alarmed at the way that Iraq was eroding the sanctions regime and evading it. The idea of putting an end to this problem was not something that I would advocate, but I could see the force of the desire to do it, to be decisive. The Foreign Office position, well into 2002, was ‘there’s not going to be a war because there had been no second [UN] resolution, and the international community won’t stand for it’. Allen said a possible invasion of Iraq ‘came out of the ground like a mist following the change of temperature on 9/11’. He added: ‘I think it became clear to all of us that nothing short of decisive intervention in Iraq was going to satisfy the Americans.’ Allen’s comments quoted at the opening of this chapter came when he was asked about his personal assessment of the government’s pre-invasion knowledge of life in Iraq under Saddam, for example the country’s cultural and ethnic divisions. There was a sense, he said, that Britain was heading towards a tough war that was not something that anybody welcomed. It was tantalizing evidence. In common with the evidence by all MI6 officers, it was given in private with the transcripts released later. They were heavily redacted, and the MI6 witnesses were identified only as SIS1-SIS6. Allen was first identified as SIS4 by a number of clues, notably his

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confident manner and elegant, and at times pointed, turn of phrase. The Chilcot inquiry never confirmed that SIS4 was Allen. Nor did it deny it. In their evidence to the inquiry, witnesses painted a picture of an MI6 in turmoil. In a comment all the more devastating since it came from a former director of GCHQ, Sir David Omand told the inquiry: ‘There was a sense in which, SIS [MI6] overpromised and under-delivered.’ A senior MI6 officer identified as SIS2, said: ‘I absolutely agreed with that judgment. It’s precisely what we did’. Other MI6 officers said Omand had been unfair. SIS2 described how MI6’s board of directors faced ‘a fait accompli in terms of some decisions that were made, rather than having the opportunity fully to debate them before they were made.’ Asked by Lyne what sort of decisions he meant, SIS2 replied: ‘I’m talking predominantly about conversations that the then Chief of the Service [Dearlove] had with the prime minister and others in Number 10.’ The MI6 officer replied that he did not want to criticize his then boss. However, he told the inquiry: ‘It did mean that occasionally we would find ourselves being told, well, I have spoken to the prime minister and this has happened or that has happened, we are going to do this, we are going to do that.’ SIS2 spoke of ‘undue haste’ in making intelligence reports available to policy makers. Referring to discussion in 10 Downing Street, he described MI6 as ‘flying too close to the sun … a fair criticism would be that we were probably too eager to please’. Another MI6 officer, SIS1, described one of the agency’s Iraqi informants as ‘a chap who promised the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow’. He explained: ‘SIS was under quite extraordinary pressure to try and get a better view of Iraq’s WMD programme, and I think we marketed that intelligence – I think this is not original comment – before it was fully validated.’ The MI6 witness identified only as SIS3 told Chilcot that MI6 officers were ‘genuinely annoyed and concerned’, about the way trying to get intelligence on Iraq was handled. He added: ‘It soon became an issue that there was a public portrayal, if you like, of senior intelligence officers, a public portrayal of them as Whitehall courtiers’. The FO, meanwhile, ‘to all intends and purposes elected to sit things out’, SIS2 told the inquiry.

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The FO has a lot to answer for. So does Dearlove. SIS1 told the Chilcot inquiry: ‘I think the relationships with Number 10 had become quite personalised.’ ‘You mean SIS’s relationships at the top?’ asked Sir Roderic Lyne, a member of the Chilcot panel. ‘Yes’, SIS1 replied. Allen did not entirely agree. Asked if he thought MI6 got ‘too close to the policy making, too involved in Number 10?’, he replied: ‘I think that we may not have been as wise as we would like to have been in retrospect, collectively. I don’t think … that we got too close to the sun. The Icarus metaphor is used time and again. It has limited applicability because Tony Blair was not the sun and Dearlove was not a child with wax wings. They were consenting adults, wrestling with unprecedented policy riddles.’ Allen distanced himself from his then boss, however. ‘This is something which individuals manage in a very individual way. I would have done it differently’, he told the Chilcot inquiry. Referring to Vauxhall Cross, MI6’s headquarters, he added: ‘I believe in a Chief who stays south of the river and is not so easy to get hold of.’ Dearlove, who had been subjected to criticism in the media as well as at the inquiry for being too eager to please Blair, was on the defensive. ‘I’m well aware of the criticisms of me, that I had too close a relationship with the Prime Minister and all this. This is complete rubbish.’ He went on: ‘SIS generally doesn’t “do ministers”. If you are looking up from underneath, you have no idea what the job of Chief is like, particularly when the world is in crisis, which it was, and you are cast in a role where you become a key interlocutor with ministers.’ The following passage in the transcript is deleted. MI6 officers were also questioned about a claim that Saddam was trying to buy uranium yellowcake from the West African state of Niger for his nuclear weapon programme. The claim was based on forged documents and encouraged by mistaken accounting by a Niger company that supplied uranium to the French nuclear industry. ‘I think the Niger uranium thing was pretty unfortunate really, and I think if desk officers in the Service had had their way, probably would never have seen the light of day’, an MI6 officer told Chilcot, further pointing the finger at Dearlove.

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Another MI6 officer told the inquiry that after the invasion ministers were not given ‘the accurate harsh ground truth’. Asked whether ‘we were robbing Iraq to pay Afghanistan’ – British troops were deployed in southern Afghanistan while they were still heavily engaged in Basra – yet another MI6 officer replied: ‘Certainly.’ In devastating, but largely ignored evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, the former head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, said the invasion of Iraq had confirmed her agency’s worst fears. Asked whether, in her judgment, the effect of the invasion was ‘to substantially increase the terrorist threat to the United Kingdom?’ she replied: ‘I think because of evidence of the number of plots, the number of leads, the number of people identified, and statements of people as to why they were involved, I think the answer to your question [is] yes.’ She continued: ‘We regarded the threat, the direct threat, from Iraq as low but we did not believe he [Saddam Hussein] had the capability to do anything much in the UK. That turned out to be the right judgment.’ Manningham-Buller added: ‘To my mind Iraq, Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 and I have never seen anything to make me change my mind.’ She was then asked how significant a factor Iraq was compared with other situations that were used by ‘extremists, terrorists, to justify their actions’, Manningham-Buller replied: I think it is highly significant … . By 2003/2004 we were receiving an increasing number of leads to terrorist activity from within the UK and the – our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people – some British citizens – saw our involvement in Iraq as being an attack on Islam. So although the media has suggested that in July 2005, the attacks on 7/7, that we were surprised these were British citizens, that is not the case because really there had been an increasing number of British-born individuals living and brought up in this country, some of them third generation, who were attracted to the ideology of Osama bin Laden and saw the West’s activities in Iraq and Afghanistan as threatening their fellow religionists and the Muslim world. So it undoubtedly increased the threat.

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Lyne asked her whether there were other attacks or planned attacks in which she had evidence that Iraq was a motivating factor. Manningham-Buller said: Yes. I mean, if you take the videos that were retrieved on various occasions after various plots, where terrorists who had expected to be dead explained why they had done what they did, it features. It is part of what we call the single narrative, which is the view of some that everything the west was doing was part of a fundamental hostility to Islam, which pre-dated 9/11, but it was enhanced by those events. Arguably we gave Osama bin laden his Iraqi jihad so that he was able to move into Iraq in a way that he wasn’t before. Lyne pursued his line of questioning. ‘To what extent’, he asked, ‘did the conflict in Iraq exacerbate the overall threat that your Service and your fellow services were having to deal with from international terrorism?’ The reply was clear: ‘Substantially’, said Manningham-Buller. She continued: ‘The fact is that the threat increased, was exacerbated by Iraq, and caused not only my Service but many other services round the world to have to have a major increase in resources to deal with it.’ Sir Lawrence Freedman, military historian and member of the Chilcot panel, asked whether her view was that a war in Iraq ‘would aggravate the threat from whatever source to the United Kingdom?’ ‘Yes,’ she replied. Parliament and the public were never made aware of MI5’s concerns. It remains unclear how forcefully its officers warned ministers though Home Office, and FO reports that were later leaked showed they shared MI5’s anxieties. The view from the MoD was different, the Chilcot inquiry heard. The prospect of the army having a significant role in the invasion was described in a note to Blair, hidden in the depths of the Chilcot report, as ‘militarily mouth-watering’. Yet British soldiers were deployed to Iraq with thin-skinned, vulnerable ‘Snatch’ Land Rovers designed for the conflict in Northern Ireland, without appropriate boots, without tanks adapted for desert conditions, without enough body armour and without enough helicopters. Describing the mindset in the highest reaches of the government, Admiral Boyce, chief of the defence staff at the time of the invasion, told Chilcot: ‘What

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we lacked was any sense of being at war. I suspect if I asked half the Cabinet were we at war, they wouldn’t know what we were talking about. So there was a lack of political cohesion at the very top. In Iraq’s case, possibly because some people were not happy about what we were doing anyway.’ The problem before the invasion was compounded because Blair and his closest advisers did not want military preparations to be revealed because it would have alerted parliamentary and public opinion that he was committed to military action even though UN talks designed to avoid a conflict were continuing. Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, admitted as much. He told the Chilcot inquiry how he went with Boyce ‘to meetings in Downing Street saying, “Look, you have got to get on with this”’. Hoon continued: ‘Equally we were told in a sense, “Calm down, we can’t get on with it whilst the diplomatic process is underway” – we were both made very well aware of the attitude in Downing Street towards the requirement for minimizing publicity and for avoiding the visibility of preparations. So there was no doubt of the fact that we could not go out, either of us, and overtly prepare.’ Boyce told Chilcot: ‘It is important to realise that I was not allowed to speak, for example, to the Chief of Defence Logistics – I was prevented from doing that by the secretary of state for defence because of the concern about it becoming public knowledge that we were planning for a military contribution which might have derailed the activity going on in the United Nations. Why is that important? Because if you are doing an armed operation, you are going to have to take up ships from trade to get your forces out there, you’re going to have a huge amount of logistic planning and to start buying in equipment, which the armed forces didn’t have because they weren’t funded to have ourselves the right level of preparation. Drawing money out of the Treasury is like getting blood out of a stone anyway. That just provided another impediment to fast process.’ Yet Boyce told the Chilcot inquiry he was ‘confident’ that by the time of the invasion, his troops were ‘properly equipped’. Many disagreed. An study led by brigadier Ben Barry sent to the Chilcot inquiry concluded that there were not enough troops, armoured vehicles, helicopters or drones in southern Iraq, the area which Britain was responsible for stabilising. More than three years after

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the invasion of Iraq, the MoD was still ‘incapable’ of delivering equipment badly needed by UK troops there, Major General Sir Richard Shirreff, commander of British forces in southern Iraq in late 2006, told Chilcot. The failure to provide troops with the resources they needed, specifically, unmanned drones ‘beggars belief ’, he said. In a further damning passage the Chicot report states: ‘It was not sufficiently clear which person or department within the MoD had responsibility for identifying and articulating capability gaps.’ An internal MoD document passed to the Chilcot inquiry bluntly stated: ‘In comparison with the US, the UK military was complacent and slow in recognising and adopting to changing circumstances. It took too long to update our thinking on how to counter the type of insurgency encountered in Iraq, following a relatively benign decade of peacekeeping in Northern Ireland and the Balkans’. The document concluded: ‘MoD is good at identifying lessons, but less good at learning them.’ The Chilcot panel deliberated at length about how they should launch the report. They knew that Blair would respond immediately to criticism laid at his door. The Chilcot team was canny, however. It would be difficult for Blair to get his retaliation in first because of the blanket embargo imposed on the report preventing anyone, including the protagonists, from commenting on it. Curiously, Blair decided to give a long briefing as soon as the report was released on the morning of 6 July 2016. It did not attract the attention he wanted because it coincided with Chilcot’s televised statement. Perhaps Blair wanted to avoid a shouting match. The statement by the former Whitehall mandarin made it abundantly clear that his inquiry’s report was far from the whitewash that was so widely predicted. He had carefully prepared the statement with his fellow inquiry panellists. Chilcot did not mince his words. He began: ‘For the first time since the Second World War, the United Kingdom took part in an invasion and full-scale occupation of a sovereign State. That was a decision of the utmost gravity.’ Saddam Hussein was ‘undoubtedly a brutal dictator who had attacked Iraq’s neighbours, repressed and killed many of his own people, and was in violation of obligations imposed by the UN Security Council’, Chilcot said.

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But he added: ‘We have concluded that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time was not a last resort.’ The inquiry, he said, had also concluded that: ●●

‘The judgements about the severity of the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction – WMD – were presented with a certainty that was not justified.

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Despite explicit warnings, the consequences of the invasion were underestimated. The planning and preparations for Iraq after Saddam Hussein were wholly inadequate.

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The Government failed to achieve its stated objectives.’

Chilcot then singled out Blair’s note to Bush on 28 July 2002, containing the assurance that he would be with Bush ‘whatever’. He added that Blair and Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, blamed France for the ‘impasse’ in the UN and claimed that Britain had acting on behalf of the international community ‘to uphold the authority of the Security Council’. But there was no majority there in support of military action and it was Britain which was ‘in fact, undermining the Security Council’s authority’. Chilcot said the Inquiry had not expressed a view on whether military action was legal. ‘That could, of course, only be resolved by a properly constituted and internationally recognised Court’, he said. The Chilcot panel cloaked their concern in their report by concluding only that ‘the circumstances in which it was decided that there was a legal basis for UK military action were far from satisfactory.’ Chilcot went a little further in his statement launching the inquiry’s report. ‘The precise basis on which Mr Blair made that decision (that an invasion was lawful) is not clear’, he said. ‘Given the gravity of the decision, Lord Goldsmith should have been asked to provide written advice explaining how, in the absence of a majority in the Security Council, Mr Blair could take that decision.’ That was just one of the occasions when decisions and policy should have been considered by the Cabinet, Chilcot said. Judgments about Iraq’s weapons programme and capabilities in Blair’s statement to the House of Commons on 24 September 2002 and in the dossier

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published the same day, ‘were presented with a certainty that was not justified’, Chilcot added. As late as 17 March 2003, Blair was being advised by the chairman of JIC (John Scarlett) that ‘Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, the means to deliver them and the capacity to produce them. He was also told that the evidence pointed to Saddam Hussein’s view that the capability was militarily significant and to his determination – left to his own devices – to build it up further.’ Chilcot stated: ‘It is now clear that policy on Iraq was made on the basis of flawed intelligence and assessments. They were not challenged, and they should have been.’ The Blair government’s denial that the weapons dossier was drawn to ‘make the case for war’ had been directly challenged in written evidence to the inquiry by a senior member of the Defence Intelligence Staff. Major General Michael Laurie wrote: ‘We knew at the time that the purpose of the dossier was precisely to make a case for war, rather than setting out the available intelligence, and that to make the best out of sparse and inconclusive intelligence the wording was developed with care.’ Laurie, who was director general in the Defence Intelligence Staff responsible for analysing raw intelligence reports, explained: ‘I am writing to comment on the position taken by Alastair Campbell [Blair’s chief spokesman] during his evidence to you … when he stated that the purpose of the dossier was not to make a case for war; I and those involved in its production saw it exactly as that, and that was the direction we were given.’ Laurie continued: ‘Alastair Campbell said to the inquiry that the purpose of the dossier was not “to make a case for war”. I had no doubt at that time this was exactly its purpose and these very words were used.’ More than a year after the invasion, in October 2004, Blair had conceded in the Commons that though Iraq ‘might not have had stockpiles of actually deployable weapons’, Saddam Hussein ‘retained the intent and the capability’. In the statement launching his report Chilcot said pointedly: ‘That was not, however, the explanation for military action he had given before the conflict.’ Britain’s military contribution to the invasion was not settled until midJanuary 2003. Chilcot said: ‘There was little time to prepare three brigades

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and the risks were neither properly identified nor fully exposed to ministers. Despite promises that Cabinet would discuss the military contribution, it did not discuss the military options or their implications.’ Blair had told the Inquiry that the difficulties encountered in Iraq after the invasion could not have been known in advance. Chilcot said: ‘We do not agree that hindsight is required. The risks of internal strife in Iraq, active Iranian pursuit of its interests, regional instability, and Al-Qaeda activity in Iraq, were each explicitly identified before the invasion.’ Chilcot continued: ‘Ministers were aware of the inadequacy of US plans, and concerned about the inability to exert significant influence on US planning. Mr Blair did not establish clear Ministerial oversight of UK planning and preparation. He did not ensure that there was a flexible, realistic and fully resourced plan that integrated UK military and civilian contributions, and addressed the known risks. The failures in the planning and preparations continued to have an effect after the invasion.’ Chilcot’s statement added: More than 200 British citizens died as a result of the conflict in Iraq. Many more were injured. The invasion and subsequent instability in Iraq had, by July 2009, also resulted in the deaths of at least 150,000 Iraqis – and probably many more – most of them civilians. More than a million people were displaced. The people of Iraq have suffered greatly … . The Government’s preparations failed to take account of the magnitude of the task of stabilising, administering and reconstructing Iraq, and of the responsibilities which were likely to fall to the UK. The UK took particular responsibility for four provinces in the South East of Iraq, Chilcot’s statement noted. It did so without a formal ministerial decision and without ensuring that it had the necessary military and civilian capabilities to discharge its obligations, including, crucially, to provide security … . Whitehall departments and their Ministers failed to put collective weight behind the task. In practice, the UK’s most consistent strategic objective in relation to Iraq was to reduce the level of its deployed forces … . We have found that the

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Ministry of Defence was slow in responding to the threat from Improvised Explosive Devices and that delays in providing adequate medium weight protected patrol vehicles should not have been tolerated. With withering criticism, Chilcot went on: It was not clear which person or department within the Ministry of Defence was responsible for identifying and articulating such capability gaps. But it should have been. From 2006, the UK military was conducting two enduring campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. It did not have sufficient resources to do so. Decisions on resources for Iraq were affected by the demands of the operation in Afghanistan. For example, the deployment to Afghanistan had a material impact on the availability of essential equipment in Iraq, particularly helicopters and equipment for surveillance and intelligence collection. By 2007 militia dominance in Basra, which UK military commanders were unable to challenge, led to the UK exchanging detainee releases for an end to the targeting of its forces. ‘It was humiliating that the UK reached a position in which an agreement with a militia group which had been actively targeting UK forces was considered the best option available. The UK military role in Iraq ended a very long way from success. We have sought to set out the government’s actions on Iraq fully and impartially. The evidence is there for all to see. It is an account of an intervention which went badly wrong, with consequences to this day. The Inquiry Report is the Committee’s unanimous view. Military action in Iraq might have been necessary at some point. But in March 2003: ●●

There was no imminent threat from Saddam Hussein.

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The strategy of containment could have been adapted and continued for some time.

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The majority of the Security Council supported continuing UN inspections and monitoring.

Military intervention elsewhere may be required in the future. A vital purpose of the Inquiry is to identify what lessons should be learned from experience in Iraq. There are many lessons set out in the Report. Some are about the

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management of relations with allies, especially the US. Mr Blair overestimated his ability to influence US decisions on Iraq. The UK’s relationship with the US has proved strong enough over time to bear the weight of honest disagreement. It does not require unconditional support where our interests or judgements differ.’ The Chilcot report said the misleading weapons dossier had produced ‘a damaging legacy, including undermining trust and confidence in government statements, particularly those that rely on intelligence that cannot be independently verified’. The Commons cross-party Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee drove the point home. ‘The decision to invade Iraq has left an indelible scar on British politics’, it said, adding: ‘The consequences of that decision remain profound for the domestic politics of the UK and the US, and for our relations with other countries, as well as for the stability of the region. The continuing loss of life of Iraqis underlines the failure of the postconflict strategy.’ The chaotic, truly irresponsible and ultimately disastrous way successive governments over many decades conducted British security and defence policy was brutally exposed on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. The causes and symptoms had been evident for a long time before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but wilfully ignored by a Cabinet unwilling to challenge its prime minister. Blair imposed absolute secrecy in the run-up to the invasion. He suggested he did not want to tell the Cabinet about the preparations for war for fear of leaks. Secrecy and closing down debate were the root causes of Britain’s military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and their huge cost in lives and money. The repercussions of these military adventures, which all fed on the fetish for secrecy in running the British state, are still being felt across Europe as well as the Middle East.

11 Defending the past

London, early March 2003, a few days before the invasion of Iraq ‘British brigadiers will be alongside Iraqi brigadiers making sure Iraqi troops behave themselves after Saddam has gone. The Iraqi armed forces will remain in one piece. We will change the way the Republican Guard is used, under civil control. We are looking for a political outcome, not primarily a military outcome, to a stable Iraq in one piece, at peace with itself and with its neighbours’ – a senior British army commander to the author. That may have been a forlorn hope in any event. It was shattered by the decision of Paul Bremer, US head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, two months after the invasion, to disband the Iraqi army and sack the entire upper ranks of the Iraq civil service, some 50,000 experienced officials, on the grounds they were all Ba’athists. About 250,000 soldiers went home and took their weapons with them. Some were to form the core of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and later ISIS. Criticism of the US-led war in Afghanistan, after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, had already been colourfully expressed by Admiral Sir Michael Boyce soon after he was appointed chief of the defence staff in 2001. In his first major speech, the annual defence chief ’s lecture to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), Boyce had described US forces in Afghanistan as a ‘hi-tech twenty-first century posse’ fighting in what Washington seemed to regard as a ‘new Wild West’. After Bremer’s coup in Iraq, British and US military commanders were presented with a disastrous fait accompli. As the well-armed insurgency

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erupted, British generals lectured their US counterparts on how to cope with it. After all, they said, they had all the experience of Northern Ireland, colonial uprisings and worldwide peacekeeping operations. But secrecy surrounding the build-up to the invasion and tight control of the media afterwards meant that they were both ill-prepared and unaccountable for their actions. The confidence British commanders displayed in public was seriously misleading. US commanders were quicker to learn than the British about the harsh realities in Iraq and how to respond to a much bigger and more violent insurgency than they had expected. The British mindset was reflected in the erroneous claim by MoD lawyers that Britain’s Human Rights Act obligations did not extend to Iraq or Afghanistan. The Army’s most senior officers did not warn inexperienced young soldiers about interrogation techniques that had been banned thirty years previously. It was unnecessary; they thought it was going to be all too easy. British commanders kept quiet at the time but did not mince their words after the event. Burridge described the assumption that the Iraqi army was ‘disaffected’ and would support the US-led coalition as a massive intelligence failure. Referring to the Bush administration’s description of the initial bombing of Iraq as ‘shock and awe’, Burridge told me: ‘We all knew that this was bollocks, all rhetoric.’ Bremer’s decision to disband the Iraqi army and sack Iraq’s cadre of senior administrators was ‘the final nail in the painful coffin of success’, he added. Burridge accused Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, of treating Iraq as though it was a private company. ‘One enormous vacuum developed. If you allow vacuums to develop, organised crime takes over.’ Burridge then made two key observations. With the invasion of Iraq, ‘military intervention became more controversial than ever before’. It was ‘using military intervention for purposes other than [combatting] a threat to vital national interests.’ Second, for Blair, ‘solidarity with the US was deeply embedded in his psyche.’ Young British soldiers explained to me how they had to cope with a huge range of tasks after they embarked on the Fao peninsular on the way to Basra. While the first troops to reach Basra were fighting pockets of Saddam’s forces, those behind them were bogged down in peacekeeping operations. Those in the rear were confronted by Iraqis demanding water and electricity, basics of

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which the Shia-dominated region had been deprived for years by Saddam. What was left was being looted. (Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, was referring to looting when he made his notorious comment: ‘Stuff happens’.) I received an email out of the blue. It was from a former Royal Green Jackets soldier, Steve McLaughlin, who had just written a book, Squaddie, a Soldier’s Story,1 on his experience in Iraq. He described how British soldiers were confronted in Basra with ‘ice-cold hostility and barely concealed hatred of all things American and British’. He continued: ‘Many of the old hands in the regiment remarked that it felt like Northern Ireland back in the bad old days, but that, unlike then, the threat and likely outcome would be on an epic and tragic scale – far worse than the occasional localized terrorist bombing that the IRA indulged in. For myself, I can say only this: It seemed to me that the entire region resembled a slowly boiling kettle on a stove and that once it blew, as it surely would, the country would dissolve into outright anarchy and bloody siege warfare. It gives me no pleasure to say that I was proven right.’ (He explained that he had wanted to thank me for having the ‘professional integrity to cover the topic of Iraq in a mature and practical manner’!) The failure to provide a secure environment and give Iraqis hope that life would be better after Saddam unleashed sectarian divisions between his favoured Sunnis and Iraq’s suppressed Shia majority. Violence was fuelled further by the mistreatment and killing of Iraqis detained by British troops. The death of the Basra hotel receptionist, Baha Mousa, was the most notorious, but far from being the only, case. Lieutenant Colonel Nicholas Mercer, later ordained as an Anglican priest and now Rector of Bolton Abbey, was the army’s chief legal adviser in southern Iraq. He described the attitude of the MoD as one of ‘moral ambivalence’, of a cultural resistance to human rights that allowed British troops to abuse Iraqis they had detained. His advice about how British soldiers should treat prisoners was repeatedly ignored. He described how he was ‘sent into the wilderness’ as the MoD resisted the demands of the Human Rights Act ‘at every twist and turn’. Days after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Mercer saw some forty Iraqi detainees lined up with sandbags on their heads. It was ‘a bit like seeing pictures of Guantanamo Bay for the first time’, he said.

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Sir William Gage, the retired appeal court judge who conducted a public inquiry into Baha Mousa’s death, said soldiers continued with interrogation techniques even though the MoD admitted they were ‘prohibited and unlawful in warfare by reason of the Geneva Convention’. He accused the MoD of a ‘corporate’ and ‘systemic’ failure to provide clear and consistent guidelines on how to treat prisoners or detainees. The MoD’s reluctance to respond to the initial allegations that British troops murdered and tortured Iraqis after what became known as the Battle of Danny Boy, named after a British checkpoint north of Basra, in May 2004, led to another public inquiry. The al-Sweady inquiry, named after one of the Iraqi families involved, cost the taxpayer more than £25 million. It was entirely unnecessary. Lucy Bowen, a military police officer, told the inquiry how senior army officers had ‘slammed the door’ to block an earlier investigation into the treatment of prisoners captured after the battle. The MoD had obtained a gagging order, later overturned by the appeal court, preventing the media repeating allegations of abuse of Iraqis by British soldiers during and after the battle. The high court described the refusal of the MoD to conduct its own proper inquiry – as required under the Human Rights Act – as ‘lamentable’. The MoD claimed that information that ministers had previously disclosed was secret. In the appeal court, Lord Justice Moses described the time it took the Royal Military Police to investigate the case as ‘balmy’. Though the inquiry, chaired by the former senior judge Sir Thayne Forbes, found that some soldiers had committed ‘gross violations of the Geneva conventions’, including mock executions, it described allegations made by lawyers representing the Iraqis and their families that soldiers had murdered, mutilated and tortured Iraqi insurgents as ‘the product of lies’ and that evidence was ‘deliberately fabricated’ – criticism that was heavily milked by the MoD. The exaggerated claims diverted attention from the real abuses committed by British troops and their commanders and provided a gift horse for the MoD, providing ammunition for its argument that the armed forces should not be subjected in future to the obligations of Human Rights Act. The act requires that allegations against officials acting on behalf of the state them must be

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confronted speedily. If the national authorities failed to do so, they would be subjected to an independent investigation. Conservative MPs, notably Tom Tugendhat, a former army officer (and at the time of writing chair of the Commons foreign affairs committee), complained of ‘lawfare’ – commanders in the field were being hamstrung by human rights legislation, he alleged. Years earlier, the heads of the armed forces had failed to persuade Robin Cook, Blair’s first foreign secretary, to exclude British forces from the new International Criminal Court. After years lobbying behind the scenes they succeeded in persuading Theresa May to exclude the armed forces from the obligations under the Human Rights Act. Had the MoD explained why Iraqis were being detained after the battle of Danny Boy, the inquiry need not have happened. Iraqis killed and wounded in the battle were taken to the nearby British camp by the soldiers rather than made accessible to their families. It was an unprecedented move ordered by British commanders who wanted to investigate whether any of the Iraqis were involved in the massacre of six British military police officers in nearby Majar al-Kabir a year earlier. Instead of being open about it, something that would have won the support of an understanding and sympathetic public, the MoD hid behind its habitual wall of secrecy, protected and cocooned from the world outside. A report commissioned by the MoD had concluded in 2008 that serious failings in army leadership, planning and training had led to the death and abuse of Iraqi detainees. Soldiers were not told about their obligations under international law or about a specific ban on hooding imposed by the government many years before, said the report by Brigadier Robert Aitken, the army’s director of army personnel strategy. Troops were given ‘scant’ information on how to treat civilian detainees and needed ‘a better understanding between right and wrong’. British soldiers, like their US counterparts, subjected Iraqi detainees to ‘five techniques’ – wall standing, hooding, subjection to noise, sleep deprivation and deprivation of food and drink. These were banned under international law, yet still not proscribed in the army’s military doctrine manuals. (Inhuman and degrading treatment are banned by the Geneva conventions as well as the European Human Rights Convention.) Edward Heath, then prime minister,

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banned hooding in 1972 after Britain was taken to the European Court of Human Rights over abuses in Northern Ireland. ‘Somewhere between then and 2003 that directive got lost,’ Aitken observed. In a telling passage directed at ministers as much as military leaders, His report referred to the ‘lack of awareness of the operational context by those responsible for preparing our people for that operation [the invasion of Iraq]’. The last time the British army had occupied a country was Germany in 1945, the brigadier noted. The MoD argued that the claims of abuse were exaggerated or motivated by greed and resentment. It did not explain why it paid out more than £20 million in compensation to more than 300 Iraqis detained by British forces. The MoD also avoided the uncomfortable fact that successful cases against the MoD had been won in British courts by families of British soldiers killed or injured in Iraq. The courts have found the MoD guilty of negligence and the duty of care (in common law as well as by the Human Rights Act). There was an ingrained belief, shared between the military top brass and senior civil servants and lawyers in the MoD, that they should not be accountable to any independent body, whether over the treatment of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan or in the treatment of their own soldiers. It reflects a broader, ingrained, problem. Successive heads of the armed forces, and the army in particular, have repeatedly insisted they do not put up with bullying, sexism and racism; that the policy is one of zero tolerance. Yet the culture has not changed. At home, one of the worst examples was the treatment of cadets at the army’s Deepcut barracks in Surrey where four young recruits died between 1995 and 2002. The MoD, to cover up the circumstances surrounding the deaths and the initial inquests, concluded they were all suicides. The civil rights group, Liberty, with the help of the Human Rights Act, secured new inquests which heard damning criticism of the MoD from coroners. Official secrecy, and the mindset it encourages, led to unnecessary and expensive inquiries, inadequate preparations for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and poor training of young soldiers – failures that proved costly in terms of lives as well as money. Secrecy has led to a culture among even the most senior military officers, as well as civil servants in the MoD, not brave enough to tell the truth to their political masters. It contributed to serious shortcomings, some fatal, in how the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan were conducted.

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Unsuitable equipment caused avoidable deaths. British soldiers singled out vulnerable Snatch Land Rovers designed for the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Thirty-seven soldiers were killed in what came to be called ‘mobile coffins’. Major Sebastian Morley, commander of the SAS’s 23 reserve squadron, who resigned when the Snatch Land Rover carrying four of his troops was blown up by a roadside bomb, described the government’s failure to replace it with a more robust vehicle as ‘cavalier at best, criminal at worst’.2 It was not just a matter of inadequate and inappropriate equipment. The government did not deploy enough troops. American and Iraqi forces had to relieve British soldiers who could not cope with the Shia insurgency in Basra in 2007. Two years later, US marines took over from under-resourced and unprepared British forces in the Afghan province of Helmand. British military planners appeared not to have learned from the Anglo-Afghan wars of the nineteenth century, from Afghan tenacity and distrust of Westerners, whatever the stated objectives of their armed interventions. Brigadiers gave us briefings at the end of their six-month tours of duty commanding the British Helmand Task Force. They painted an increasingly pessimistic picture of the security situation in Afghanistan, and the low morale among the Afghan police and army. More and more of the Afghan recruits British soldiers were spending time and millions of pounds trying to train were going AWOL partly because so many were being killed, partly because they were not getting paid on time. But back in London, the MoD was in denial and eventually stopped the briefings. Sangin, a centre of the opium trade, was one of the first major engagements the second Anglo-Afghan wars in 1878. Over a century later, over the four years between 2006 and 2010, over a hundred British soldiers were killed there, more than in any other place where they were deployed in Afghanistan. Seventy American marines were killed in Sangin after the British left. By 2017, Sangin was overrun by the Taliban, which by the autumn of 2018 was in control of more of Afghanistan than at any time since the US-led invasion at the end of 2001. A total of 179 British armed forces personnel were killed in Iraq, and 456 were killed in Afghanistan. Less than a year after British forces abandoned Helmand, the Cameron government ignored the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan by bombing Libya.

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Echoing the blistering criticism made by senior military figures looking back on those two conflicts after they had retired, the Commons foreign affairs committee noted blithely that Britain’s intervention in Libya was ‘not informed by accurate intelligence’. You cannot ‘drop democracy from 14,000 ft’, David Cameron had said just weeks before asking the RAF to do precisely that in Libya. The limits of air power had been comprehensively exposed more than a decade year earlier by General Sir Rupert Smith, the former UN commander in Bosnia, in what he called ‘war amongst the people’. In his seminal book The Utility of Force, Smith wrote of ‘the reality in which the people … are the battlefield’. He added: ‘Military engagements can take place anywhere, with civilians around, against civilians, in defence of civilians. Civilians are the targets … as much as an opposing force.’3 Anxious to avoid casualties among their own forces if not civilian targets, Britain’s military chiefs enthusiastically joined the US-led campaign of air strikes by high-flying bombers or remotely piloted drones attacking ISIS in northern Iraq and Syria. Between September 2014 and March 2018, the RAF had conducted over 1,700 airstrikes against distant, small, targets in northern Iraq and Syria at an estimated cost of £1.75 billion. Tornado and Typhoon jets and Reaper drones attacked targets described as ‘machine gun positions’, ‘command posts’ and ‘defensive positions’ with Brimstone missiles costing £100,000 apiece and Paveway IV bombs costing £30,000. The RAF’s most modern weapons were used to attack the crudest of targets – an enemy on trucks and armed with AK47 rifles and rocket propelled grenades. As the experience after the 2003 invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and later the conflict in Yemen, demonstrated, air strikes kill civilians and rarely end violent conflict. For that, you need presence on the ground. Meanwhile, secrecy, the lack of effective scrutiny, and indulgence by successive governments – both Conservative and Labour – have allowed the MoD, more even than MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, to wallow in profligacy. British taxpayers have spent many billions of pounds on weapons systems and military platforms that were ill-conceived, vulnerable and irrelevant to any foreseeable conflict. Projects have been delayed, not least because armed forces’ chiefs keep on asking for the latest design and technology

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in the never-ending race for the most modern ones. Arms companies are delighted. The costs rocket. According to official figures, the cost of British military operations between 1990 and 2014 – the bulk in Iraq and Afghanistan – amounted to £34.7 billion. The estimated long-term cost of the conflicts in veteran care could cost an additional £30 billion, leaving a total of nearly £65 billion. An independent but critical study has estimated the cost to Britain of the war in Afghanistan alone has amounted to least £37 billion and the figure would rise to a sum equivalent to more than £2,000 for every taxpaying household.4 The equivalent of £25,000 will have been spent for every one of Helmand’s 1.5 million inhabitants, more than most of them will earn in a lifetime, it says. By 2020, British taxpayers, the study suggests, will have spent at least £40 billion on its Afghan campaigns, enough to recruit over 5,000 police officers or nurses and pay for them throughout their careers. It could fund free tuition for all students in British higher education for ten years. The costs of military operations in Iraq are estimated to have amounted to about £8.5 billion. £100 million has been spent on legal costs, including compensation covering 326 cases of mistreatment or wrongful detention of individual Iraqis. £4 billion has been spent on the destruction of a fleet of new Nimrod reconnaissance aircraft and more than £4 billion wasted on privatizing housing for the armed forces and their families. The Trident nuclear weapons arsenal is estimated to cost more than £200 billion over a thirty-year lifespan, including the decommissioning of nuclear material. The navy’s two aircraft carriers, widely criticized as being vulnerable white elephants by leading military figures (privately when they were in office, publicly after they retired) have cost more than £6 billion, significantly more than the initial estimates. These are some of the examples, totalling at least £278.8 billion, according to calculations, spent on questionable military decisions, including what even the most conservative of commentators call the ‘strategic failures’ of Iraq and Afghanistan. The MoD has been the constant target of damning criticism from the NAO, Parliament’s financial watchdog. The MoD brushes them aside, claiming that the criticism is out of date or exaggerated. Sometimes, it promises to do better in future.

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So frequent have been devastating attacks from the NAO they are no longer considered newsworthy. MPs and editors get bored; they have heard it all before. It became increasingly difficult to report more than a few paragraphs on damning studies by the NAO. Here are a few examples of MoD waste and mismanagement identified by the NAO and which I did manage to report. They were all the consequence of obsessive secrecy and lack of accountability ●●

In 2002, the MoD spent £259 million on eight Chinooks destined for the SAS and SBS. Because they did not meet British safety standards, including the need for pilots to see all the instruments in the cockpit, they were only allowed to fly above 500 feet, and then only in clear weather. The helicopters were eight years late and cost £127 million more than first estimated.

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The RAF’s Nimrod reconnaissance aircraft, which played a key role as the eyes and ears of troops on the ground, has had an unhappy a history as the Chinook. A fleet of new Nimrods was scrapped in the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review because of delays and cost overruns, wasting £4 billion of taxpayers’ money and leaving a capability gap threatening Britain’s ability to track potentially hostile submarines and ships around Scotland, including the Trident base. At huge cost, the MoD had to buy US Poseidon spy planes to replace the Nimrods.

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A Nimrod exploded over Kandahar in September 2006 soon after a mid-air refuelling, causing the single biggest loss of life suffered by Britain’s armed forces since the Falklands war. In a report into the crash, Charles Haddon-Cave QC delivered a withering account of what be called systemic and ‘lamentable’ failings by the ministry and Britain’s biggest arms company, BAE Systems. He said the crash could have been avoided if those in charge of ensuring the safety of RAF aircraft had been more responsible. He described a litany of failings, including a culture at the MoD where safety had become secondary to cost. Haddon-Cave, an expert in aviation safety, questioned whether BAE Systems was yet committed to ‘safety and ethical conduct’. It was

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‘in breach of its contractual obligations … in failing to use reasonable skill and care’, he said, adding: ‘The responsibility for this must lie with the leadership of the company. Throughout my review BAE Systems has been a company in denial.’5 The Nimrod was described as a ‘story of incompetence, complacency, and cynicism’. Among those sharply criticized in Haddon-Cave’s report was a senior RAF officer who was later promoted. The Nimrod was lost because of a ‘systemic breach’ of the military covenant brought about by significant failings by all those involved, his report concluded. ●●

The Eurofighter, later named the Typhoon to attract buyers further afield, notably the Gulf states, was hit by lengthy and costly delays. The saga began in 1985 when Britain got together with Germany, Spain and Italy to develop a warplane principally to engage in dogfights with Soviet pilots over the plains of northern Europe. In 1988, ministers said the aircraft would cost Britain ‘about £7 billion’.

By 1997, the estimated cost had risen to £17 billion. By 2003, the Eurofighter/ Typhoon project was fifty-four months behind schedule and its cost estimated at £20 billion, though the MoD refused to release updated figures on the grounds of commercial sensitivity. Contractual and technical problems led to a shortage of spares, with planes being cannibalized and pilots grounded. In 2011, the NAO reported: ‘Our examination has shown that key investment decisions were taken on an over-optimistic basis’. Amyas Morse, head of the NAO, noted that the estimated cost of each aircraft had increased by 75 per cent. ●●

A new secure radio system for the army, called Bowman, cost £2.5 billion, many hundreds of millions of pounds more than the original estimate. It was deployed for the first time in 2005 in Iraq, twenty-five years late and too heavy for the Land Rovers that were supposed to carry them. The delays ‘have resulted in our troops continuing to use out-dated and insecure communications … during current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan’, said the NAO.

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The navy described its new fleet of Type 45 Daring class destroyers as ‘state of the art’ vessels equipped with highly efficient engines of

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revolutionary design. The trouble was the Rolls-Royce engines could not cope with the energy consumed by the ships, and the wide range of temperatures, notably in the Gulf, where they were deployed. They broke down with catastrophic propulsion and electrical failures. The destroyer programme was two years’ late and £1.5 billion over budget. The original plan was to build twelve ships. The number was cut to eight, then to just six. its report on the project in 2009, the NAO said it was a ‘disgrace’ that HMS Daring entered service without a test firing of its main anti-aircraft missile system. ●●

Edward Leigh MP, then chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee described in 2008 how the MoD conducted the privatization of the defence research agency Qinetiq ‘like an innocent at a table of cardsharps, with the taxpayer the fall guy losing out on nearly £100m’, he said. He continued: ‘The senior public servants managing Qinetiq behaved dishonourably. They sold the idea to the MoD of privatising the business without explaining they stood to benefit, a serious conflict of interest, and later negotiated their own incentive scheme.’

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The army’s new Ajax reconnaissance tank costing £3.5 billion was too big to fit into the RAF’s new fleet of A-400 transport aircraft.

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Watchkeeper reconnaissance drones costing £1.2 billion had still not entered full service twelve years after they were ordered.

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Desert Hawk, a £15 million drone manufactured the giant US company, Lockheed Martin, for the British Army was grounded by rain. More than 1 mm of rain over an hour blocked the instruments. The army had to hire alternative drones from a private company.

It is more than a question of money and technical problems. A case I pursued despite brickbats hurled by the MoD was the crash of an RAF Chinook into the Mull of Kintyre in June 1994, killing all on board, including the twentyfive most senior security and intelligence officers in Northern Ireland. It was seventeen years before the MoD apologized for blaming the pilots, Jonathan Tapper and Richard Cook, after an independent review accused the ministry of intransigence and failing to understand its own regulations. Two RAF air marshals had accused Tapper and Cook of being ‘negligent to a gross degree’.

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MoD officials and senior RAF officers ferociously attacked anyone who questioned their judgement. I received a particularly abusive letter from Sir William Wratten, one of the two air marshals who had damned the dead pilots, an angry email from a retired British Airways captain and a public dressing down from Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, who said he found the articles I wrote about the case ‘irritating’. Then in 2011, Liam Fox, defence secretary in Cameron’s coalition government, revealed that Wratten and Sir John Day, his fellow air marshal, had been given wrong legal advice. A finding of negligence could only have been made if there was ‘absolutely no doubt whatsoever’ about the circumstances surrounding an incident. Fox, who had for long harboured doubts about the original finding, asked Lord Philip, a retired Scottish judge, to review the case along with three privy counsellors. In a devastating statement, the judge stated: ‘Since 1995 the department [the MoD] have rebuffed all public and private representations that the finding should be reconsidered.’ He continued: ‘We find it regrettable that the department should have taken such an intransigent stance on the basis of an inadequate understanding of the RAF’s own regulations in a matter which involved the reputation of men who died on active service.’ The Philip report revealed that Tapper had called his commander on the eve of the flight saying he ‘felt unprepared to fly the aircraft’. Tapper, an experienced pilot and one of the few cleared to fly Special Forces operations, attempted to persuade the RAF to split up the group of passengers so they did not fly together in one helicopter. The judge concluded that the decision to blame the pilots was unsustainable and had to be set aside. As a result of this long-running, and disturbing, controversy, RAF boards of inquiry no longer ascribe blame to those involved, and RAF Chinooks are equipped with black boxes to help investigators find the cause of any accident. ●●

Within a few days early in 2018, the audit office revealed that the MoD was up to £4.2 billion worse off for selling married quarters to a company managed by the Guernsey-based Terra Firma group while at the same time facing a £40 billion black hole in its military equipment budget. The Commons defence committee described the ministry’s record on housing as ‘lamentable’.

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As I write in the summer of 2019, reports of MoD mismanagement come rolling in: a £1.6 billion contract to upgrade the army’s Warrior vehicle, more than three years later, is described as ‘unachievable’; £4.5 million in overpaid salaries and expenses for the armed forces has been written off; £4.3 million on ‘unused travel bookings’ had been wasted; flight simulators worth £15 million for RAF Tornado aircraft were being paid for though the planes had all been taken out of service.

All these examples are the consequence of secrecy – official secrecy that has protected the MoD from effective scrutiny. Secrecy has led to a lazy mindset; a mindset that has led to buck-passing, to dangerous – even fatal – incidents, to a ‘no matter’ attitude if projects are delayed or cost much more than first estimated or simply have to be scrapped. The NAO, meanwhile, has estimated that the ‘affordability gap’ – the difference between the cost of the weapons the armed forces want and the money available – could be as much as £14.8 billion by 2028. The spending gap in Britain’s nuclear weapons programme alone had reached nearly £3 billion by 2018. The NAO described the MoD as suffering from ‘optimism bias’. Plans to upgrade the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) in Berkshire where British nuclear warheads are made behind a cloak of secrecy have been delayed at huge extra costs. The estimated cost of Mensa, a facility to assemble and dismantle nuclear warheads at nearby Burghfield, increased from £734 million to £1.8 billion. Its completion date, originally 2017, was put back to 2023. Details of the delayed schemes have been withheld on ‘national security’ grounds. AWE has been criticized for its health and safety records, and it was fined £1 million in 2018 after an electrician there suffered burns. Meanwhile, shareholders in AWEs management – comprising the US combat aircraft manufacturer Lockheed Martin, the US company Jacobs, and the British company Serco – have reaped millions of pounds in dividends.6 At least £51 billion will be spent on Britain’s nuclear weapons programme between 2018 and 2028, a quarter of the entire defence equipment budget. Much of the rest will be spent equipping and maintaining Britain’s two new aircraft carriers – the largest ships ever to be built for the navy – with American F35s, or Lightning II as the RAF has named them. The carriers will

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have to be protected by submarines and by a dwindling number of the navy’s surface ships. The carrier ‘strike force’ and the new fleet of Dreadnought-class submarines equipped with Trident nuclear missiles are Britain’s two most expensive military projects. Neither, it could be argued, are relevant to the real threats facing Britain – terrorism, cyberattacks, and other forms of ‘asymmetric warfare’. Both Trident and the carriers are the result of political decisions, not objective consideration of what Britain’s armed forces really need. This is not a partisan ‘left wing view’. Far from it. Trade union leaders are among the strongest supporters of Trident and the aircraft carrier projects. For them, jobs are the issue, not Britain’s real strategic defence needs. Gordon Brown championed the carriers which were built in Rosyth, neighbouring his parliamentary constituency. David Cameron, his Tory successor, was opposed to the two-carrier project but could do little about it. When Tony Blair signed off on the carriers – HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales – they were estimated to cost £3.9 billion. When the deal was first mooted in 2006, I wrote a piece for the Guardian, egged on privately by officials in the MoD worried that the ships would be a waste of money, an extravagance that would put huge pressure on an already stretched defence budget. The ships could cost at least £4 billion, I wrote. I turned out to be far too conservative. The story I wrote in 2006, to my surprise, was the Guardian’s front-page splash. What did not surprise me was the flack I received from defence ministers, MoD officials and the navy’s top brass. ‘A gross exaggeration’, they insisted. In the event, I was far too conservative. Two years later, in 2008, the cost of the carriers had increased to £6.2 billion. The navy’s top brass said the carriers would ‘transform the Royal Navy’s ability to project our influence overseas’. They posted on the navy’s website what for them was a rhetorical question: ‘When all is said and done how does a country show it is serious about its plans and ambitions?’ In other words, the carriers will be deployed to ‘fly the flag’. They are a very expensive way to demonstrate soft power. The F35s, the world’s most expensive warplane manufactured in the United States by Lockheed Martin, have been beset with software and design problems. US commentators described the

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costs as being ‘out of control’ as the estimated price of each plane escalated to more than £100 million. The ships are designed to carry thirty-six of these aircraft, but the navy may not be able to afford to base more than twelve on them. In 2018, the MoD had contracted to buy a total of forty-eight – some land-based and flown by the RAF – at a total cost of more than £13 billion over thirty years. Asked about the estimated cost of the overall F35 project and whether the MoD would buy 138 aircraft as originally suggested, Stephen Lovegrove, the ministry’s top official, told the Commons Public Accounts Committee: ‘It would be imprudent to put a number in the public domain which would inevitably be wrong.’ To avoid the embarrassment of having two large carriers with so few aircraft flying from them, the US Marine Corps offered to provide some of their own for the British ships. The navy said the carriers could always be used as platforms for other flying machines including pilotless drones or helicopters. Meanwhile, shortage of recruits meant that the navy was unlikely to have enough qualified sailors to crew both carriers. David Cameron questioned the need for the two large carriers when he came into office in 2010. He was told that under the terms of the contract with the builders, BAE Systems, it would cost more to cancel the order than to go ahead with it. The MoD then abandoned its original plan to order aircraft carriers with catapults and arrester gear – ‘cats and traps’ – on grounds of cost even though that would have made them compatible with French and US carriers. Instead, the ministry chose the alternative short takeoff and vertical landing (STOVL) ‘jump jet’ version though it had itself admitted that the alternative ‘cats and traps’ aircraft had a ‘longer range and greater payload’, something it had earlier described as ‘the critical requirement for precisionstrike operations in the future’. A senior former naval officer got in touch with me. He described the two carriers as a ‘combination of naval vanity and pork barrel politics’. The navy, he said, was ‘moving in the direction absolutely contrary to strategic developments of our time’. Aircraft carriers, with large radar signatures would be increasingly vulnerable to long-range missiles as well as drones, small submarines, mines and cyberattacks. My contact pointed me to a critical article in a specialist American publication. ‘The famed Adm[iral], Horatio Nelson observed that

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“a ship’s a fool to fight a fort”, noted the author, David Wise. He added: ‘In the new age that is dawning, the “fort” is an increasingly sophisticated range of over-the-horizon anti-ship missiles that render surface ships vulnerable – a reference to long-range anti-ship missiles, the DF-21D, with a range of more than 1,500 nautical miles, China was developing at a fraction of the cost of an aircraft carrier. ‘Emerging anti-ship technology … places the aircraft carrier on the wrong side of basic arithmetic.’7 In a hostile environment, an aircraft carrier would need protection from destroyers, anti-submarine frigates, a nuclear-powered submarine armed with conventional missiles, a tanker and a supply ship. This would be a huge commitment for a navy with just nineteen destroyers and frigates and six available submarines. David Richards, one of many defence chiefs to question the relevance and suitability of such expensive equipment being procured by successive governments described the aircraft carriers as ‘behemoths’. They were ‘unaffordable vulnerable metal cans’, he told me. He added: ‘We have £1 billion destroyers trying to sort out pirates in a little dhow with RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] costing $50, with an outboard motor [costing] $100’. Referring to the government’s oft-repeated description of a post-Brexit British ‘global power’, Richards commented: ‘There’s a growing mismatch between the reality and the aspirational’. He recalled former US president Theodore Roosevelt’s advice: ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick’. Richards said: ‘We are at risk of doing the opposite. What worries me is that the armed forces are in an increasingly fragile state.’ He warned of the prospect of British soldiers dying in ‘some ill-conceived operation’. Richards was also honest enough to question the value of investing in a new nuclear missile submarine fleet. ‘It is more and more difficult to be persuaded we require it’, he said cautiously, reflecting the significance of Britain abandoning nuclear weapons. Some day other choices would have to be made, Richards suggested, and replacing Trident would no longer be justified – if, for example, Britain’s conventional forces were cut so much that the country would become a ‘Belgium with nukes’. He had a point. By 2018 the army had shrunk so much, to below 80,000, the size it was in Cromwell’s day, or the time of the Napoleon Wars, or the Boer

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War. Commentators took their pick. The army was facing a recruitment, even an existential, crisis. While Britain’s armed forces have been deprived of weapons and resources they actually need, more and more will be spent not only on vulnerable carriers fleet with the world’s most expensive aircraft but on nuclear weapons, described as the ‘strategic deterrent’. The cost of the new fleet of four nuclear missile submarines, the Dreadnought class – named after the large battleships built for the navy before the First World War – to replace Trident over a thirtyyear lifespan is widely estimated at more than £200 billion, a figure the MoD does not dispute. Tony Blair himself questioned Trident’s use and purpose. In his memoir, A Journey, he wrote about Trident: ‘The expense is huge and the utility … nonexistent in terms of military use.’ In the end he thought giving it up would be ‘too big a downgrading of our status as a nation’. As far as ministers and the MoD are concerned, as well as most MPs, Labour and Conservative, it is all about status, and fear of perceived public opinion. ‘France is the real enemy’ an official opposed to Trident told me. It was more than a joke. What he meant was that the prospect of France being Europe’s sole nuclear power was too much for any British government to contemplate. Asked what the consequences would be if Britain got rid of Trident, senior military figures do not say it would weaken the country’s defences. The first thing they say is that the United States would be extremely angry. For Labour MPs it is all about perceived voter credibility. They have backed Trident renewal not so much because their members believed nuclear weapons had any practical use or were a credible deterrent, but because of an automatic assumption that opposing Trident would simply cost them votes. During the debates in 2016 over Trident renewal, a senior Labour figure, Andy Burnham, said voting against Trident was incompatible with Britain’s permanent membership of the UN Security Council. Yet every permanent member of the council has a veto, including over any proposal to push Britain off it. Does possessing nuclear weapons really mean you have more influence in world affairs? Influence in the modern world, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, former UK ambassador to the UN, observed, was composed of many things, notably a

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strong economy. ‘Nuclear weapons was one of the least relevant’, he has said.8 The notion that North Korea or Pakistan’s possession of nuclear weapons would somehow make them more likely to become a permanent UN Security Council member is of course absurd. Nuclear weapons are described as the ‘ultimate insurance’ in the event of an existential threat to Britain. Yet no one suggests the government should build hundreds more hospitals as insurance against some possible future pandemic, for example, or have armed police at every corner in case of a terrorist attack. So concerned was the defence establishment at the prospect of a Corbynled Labour government that the then defence secretary, Michael Fallon, claimed during the 2015 general election campaign that the future of Britain’s nuclear arsenal was the ‘most important issue facing the country’. He added: ‘The nuclear deterrent has never been needed more than it is today’. General Sir Nicholas Houghton stated at the end of his tenure as chief of the defence staff: ‘The whole thing about deterrence rests on the credibility of its use. When people say “you are never going to use the deterrent”, what I say is you use the deterrent every second, of every minute, of every day. The purpose of the deterrent is that you don’t have to use it because you successfully deter.’9 Houghton’s suggestion that the point about possessing nuclear weapons is that a nation has them to prevent them ever having to be used seems quixotic but is perhaps the only argument in defence of the principle of ‘nuclear deterrence’. He was responding to Jeremy Corbyn’s admission that, if he were prime minister, he would never order the commander of a Trident submarine to fire a nuclear weapon. Breaching the convention that senior military figures do not intervene publicly on matters of political controversy – and contradicting previous insistence by armed forces chiefs that whether or not Britain possessed nuclear weapons was entirely a political matter – Houghton said of Corbyn’s admission: ‘Well, it would worry me if that thought was translated into power.’ He accused Corbyn of undermining ‘the credibility of deterrence’. One of the first demands the permanent government makes on a new prime minister is to write in their own hand and sign what is known as the Letter of Last Resort. It is to be opened in the event of Armageddon by commanders of the nuclear missile submarine on patrol somewhere near the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. The options, according to the historian, Peter Hennessy, are

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said to include the orders, ‘Put yourself under the command of the US, if it is still there’; ‘Go to Australia’; ‘Retaliate’; or ‘Use your own judgment’. Tony Blair, when asked to write and sign the letter, immediately went white, said onlookers. James Callaghan said he authorized retaliation. When it was John Major’s turn to make the decision, he cancelled a weekend at Chequers and went to Huntingdon to think about it in the comfort of his own home. The nuclear weapons debate, as I have suggested, does not divide opinion on predictable left-right wing lines. Michael Portillo, the former Conservative defence secretary, made the point robustly: ‘Our independent deterrent is not independent and doesn’t constitute a deterrent.’ When Harold Macmillan, the prime minister, was negotiating a deal with the United States on Polaris, Trident’s predecessor, in the early 1960s, official documents show that his private secretary, Philip de Zulueta, noted in a secret memo: ‘The United Kingdom independent is “fully integrated” with the American … an independent British plan does not exist’. That may no longer be the case, and Britain (and France) may have separate targeting plans. The MoD insists that Britain’s nuclear arsenal is ‘operationally independent’. That begs a number of questions. A cross-party Trident Commission set up by the British American Security Information Council (BASIC) concluded in 2014 that the life expectancy of the UK’s nuclear capability without US support could be measured in months.10 The authors of The Silent Deep,11 a history of the role of the navy's submarines, were told by David Young, a former British nuclear weapons policy official, that he ‘would be very surprised’ if the US president had the capacity to prevent the launch of a Royal Navy missile. Young added: ‘But they could do slow starvation. Ingenuity couldn’t get you round the bend. It would be finito.’ The navy also relies on US know-how to deploy and fire Tomahawk cruise missiles on its submarines. ‘The systems which guide them and the intelligence on which their targeting depends are all American’, Sir Rodric Braithwaite has noted. We could sink the Belgrano on our own. But we cannot fire a cruise missile except as part of an American operation.’ He added referring to US bases in Britain: ‘The British have never questioned the purposes for which the Americans use these bases. The agreements which govern them leave us little scope to do so. It is yet another derogation from British sovereignty.’12

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Britain and the United States are cooperating closely on nuclear warhead design and the exchange of material crucial in the manufacture and stockpiling of nuclear weapons under the framework of the 1958 mutual defence agreement (MDA) between the two countries. The pact is renewed every ten years in a discreet ceremony in Washington. It does not have to be debated or voted on in Parliament. Though it is incorporated in US law, it has no legal status in Britain. A top official at the MoD described Trident as what most kept him awake at night. ‘It’s the single biggest future financial risk we face. The project is a monster,’ he said. The MoD told Reuters news agency: ‘The government needs a safe space away from the public gaze to allow it to consider policy options for delivering the deterrent in the most cost-effective way, unfettered from public comment about the affordability of particular policy options.’13 The United States is designing a new generation of small, relatively low yield nuclear weapons, estimated to cost $1 trillion (£716 billion at the time of writing) over thirty years – weapons whose use, some argue, would be less likely because of the real threat they could pose. Others argue that more accurate targeting and more limited impact would make them more tempting to use. Putin says Russia is developing all sorts of new nuclear weapons, including a missile with fifteen separate nuclear warheads called RS-28 Sarmat (or Satan 2 as NATO dubs it). He has called it ‘invincible’. Whether it is or not, given the huge gaps in the MoD’s equipment budget, it would be difficult for Britain to keep up with the huge cost of developing new nuclear weapons systems. More and more questions are being raised about the vulnerability of Britain’s ageing nuclear armed missiles in particular from cyberattacks and of its submarines from attack by underwater drones. The silence of the British government after the failure of the Trident missile test when the missile veered off course in an exercise in 2016 shortly before a Commons vote on Trident renewal was eloquent. So was the way it attempted to play down the significance of the accident when it finally came to light thanks to a whistle-blower. Britain’s expensive arsenal of long-range intercontinental ballistic missiles is not a credible threat – or deterrent – to terrorists. Its use would not be an acceptable response to any realistic threat posed by Russia, China, or North

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Korea. British defence officials have suggested that nuclear weapons are the only alternative to cyberattacks. ‘If they [the Russians] sank our aircraft carrier with a nuclear-tipped torpedo, what is our response? There’s nothing between sinking their submarine and dropping a nuclear weapon on northern Kamchatka, a defence source was quoted as saying in 2018, adding: ‘This is why cyber is so important; you can go on the offensive and turn off the lights in Moscow to tell them that they are not doing the right things.’14 For trade union leaders safeguarding jobs is the priority. But the highly skilled work which might be lost if the Trident programme is not renewed could be redeployed to other military projects, including Britain’s more useful fleet of Astute class submarines, or civil projects. It is ironic that Britain has not the skilled workforce to build nuclear power stations but has to rely on French know-how and Chinese cash. Safeguarding jobs – and political influence – is the argument successive governments have given to justify promoting arms exports with large amounts of taxpayers’ money – and with the enthusiastic support of the royal family – to repressive, authoritarian regimes. Raw figures about the scale of British weapons sales are available, but they do not give the whole story, for example, any conditions attached, for example, and any commission that has been paid. The arms trade is another area shrouded in secrecy, with the government claiming the need for commercial confidentiality or the need to respect the sensitivities of those countries buying the weapons. Britain sold nearly £6 billion worth of weapons in 2016, according to official figures; £5 billion of these were exported to countries whose governments are serious human rights abusers. The figures remain pretty constant. More than a hundred officials in the government’s Defence and Security Organisation (DSO) promote the export of weapons by companies employing a total of some 55,000 people. A joint 2016 study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) suggests that the contribution to the British economy from arms sales is grossly exaggerated.15 It concluded that the British government provided a total of £104–142 million in direct and indirect subsidies to UK arms exports, and that arms sales constituted 0.004 per cent of total revenue to the Treasury in that year. In 2010/2011, the

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defence industrial sector (manufacturing and service provision) comprised just over 1 per cent of UK economic output, and 0.6 per cent of employment. Despite taxpayers’ support – much greater than that given to any other sector of the economy – Britain’s share of the global arms market has oscillated over the past few decades. By 2017 it had dropped to sixth place after the United States, Russia, France, Germany and China. Its 4.8 per cent share of the market is predicted to fall further though, according to official figures, British arms exports amounted to a record £14 billion in 2018, with Gulf states accounting for about 80 per cent. Arms are of course also used to influence or cement relations with foreign countries. For Britain, this means authoritarian regimes in unstable areas of the world, notably the Gulf. It makes a mockery of the official ‘criteria’ that say Britain will not export arms which would exacerbate regional tension or be used for internal repression, and claims by successive British governments that they promote human rights and abhor their abuse. Robin Cook announced when New Labour came to power in 1997 that in future there would be ‘an ethical dimension’ to Britain’s foreign policy. It was well-meaning but naïve. It should have been clear to him, not least from the Scott arms-to Iraq inquiry, that a country that is a significant arms exporter, to authoritarian regimes, with aspirations to be an even bigger one, could never be a credible defender of human rights. In 2010, the government in effect dropped any pretence about its true commitment to human rights. Five years later, Sir Simon McDonald, the most senior official at the FO, told the Commons foreign affairs committee that human rights was not ‘not one of our top priorities’. Human rights no longer had the ‘profile’ within his department that they had ‘in the past’, he said.16 British arms sales to authoritarian regimes undermine claims made by successive governments that the Arms Trade Treaty, which Britain signed and came into force in 2014 ‘puts international law and human rights at the heart of the global arms trade’. Of thirty countries deemed to be of priority concern’ by the FO because of their human rights’ abuses, twenty have been major customers of British arms exports. The export of weapons became more and more of a priority. Half the outsiders brought into Whitehall’s trade department were executives of arms companies.

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In the ten years up to 2017, Britain approved arms export licences worth £38 billion with a further £37 billion for ‘dual use’ goods – equipment that could have both civil and military uses. The Gulf accounts for the bulk of British arms exports and has done for many years. And for many years, Saudi Arabia has been by far the biggest and most lucrative single market for British weapons. It was top of the list taking more than £10 billion worth of British weapons in the five years up to 2017. Oman was Britain’s second biggest arms market and the UAE were close behind. Britain’s relationships with Gulf states go back a long way, from the First World War. They were reinvigorated after the 9/11 attacks on the United States which themselves had their origins in Osama bin Laden’s response to the presence of Western armies in Saudi Arabia, the Guardian of the Holy Places (Mecca and Medina). Saudi Arabia produced most of the hijackers. It is a country whose clerics were responsible more than any other for spreading Wahhabism, an extreme interpretation of Islam, where prisoners are stoned and dissidents beheaded. Britain exported more than £5 billion worth of military equipment and bombs to Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s worst human rights’ abusers – an increase of 11,000 per cent – in the four years after the country began its air strikes on Yemen in March 2015. The sales continued after the UN found the strikes had killed and maimed hundreds of civilians, including children, and destroyed schools and hospitals, and warned that Britain could be complicit in war crimes. So anxious was the MoD and British-based arms companies to oblige the Saudi regime that it diverted 500 lb Paveway IV guided bombs originally earmarked for the RAF to Saudi Arabia to enable it to continue striking targets in Yemen and Syria. Tornado GR4 ground attack fighters and Typhoons were playing a major role in Saudi bombing strikes on Yemen against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. It subsequently emerged that the arms included British cluster bombs, banned by Britain since 2008. In response to questions about Britain’s role in the air strikes, the MoD obfuscated, denying that it was advising the Saudis about specific targets but adding that after bombing raids British military officials in Saudi Arabia could give advice in future targeting policy.

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While the Saudi foreign minister insisted that his country picked the targets, he added that British officials ‘know what the target list is and they have a sense of what it is that we are doing and what we are not doing’. Amid a string of corrections to the parliamentary record in response to questions about whether Saudi Arabia’s bombing was in breach of International Humanitarian Law Philip Hammond, then defence secretary, stated: ‘We have assessed that there has not been a breach of IHL by the coalition’. He stated later: ‘We have not assessed that there has been a breach of IHL by the coalition’. The court of appeal ruled in June 2019 that ministers had acted unlawfully by agreeing to arms sales to Saudi Arabia without assessing the risk to civilians. The government, meanwhile, refused to release an official report on the foreign funding and support of jihadi groups. The widespread assumption was the government refused to release the report because it pointed the finger at Saudi Arabia. The then defence secretary, Michael Fallon, made the government’s priorities quite clear when he urged MPs in October 2017 not to criticize Saudi Arabia on the grounds that it might jeopardize a prospective sale of more Typhoon fighter-bombers to the country.17 British ministers and the country’s royal family were embracing the Saudi royal family as more people were being executed in Saudi Arabia than for many years. The British government in 2013 secretly conducted vote trading deals with Saudi Arabia to ensure both states were elected to the UN human rights council despite continuing repression in the country. The previous year, a Shia activist, Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, aged seventeen, was arrested. He faced death by crucifixion after being convicted of joining an antigovernment demonstration. The special relationship between Britain and Saudi Arabia was nurtured by Margaret Thatcher at a time Whitehall was concerned that France might persuade the Saudis to buy Mirage jets instead of British Tornados. In 1985, she signed the Al-Yamamah (‘dove’ in Arabic) £43 billion arms-for-oil deal with Riyadh. In the deal’s first phase, Britain sold the Saudis seventy-two BAE Tornado planes, thirty BAE Hawk trainer aircraft. A further batch of fortyeight Tornados was sold in a second phase of the deal agreed in 1993. An inquiry by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) into payments connected to the deal was blocked after the intervention of Tony Blair. Blair told Lord Goldsmith, his attorney general, there was a ‘real and immediate risk’ of a

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collapse in UK-Saudi security, intelligence and diplomatic cooperation, if the fraud investigation continued. The Saudis claimed they would stop supplying vital intelligence about Al-Qaeda terrorists to Britain if the fraud investigation was allowed to continue. The SFO was told they faced ‘another 7/7’ and the loss of ‘British lives on British streets’ if they continued its investigation. The government in 2010 said Saudi Arabia had tipped off British and US intelligence that led to a tip-off that a bomb was hidden in a printer cartridge on a UPS cargo plane timed to blow up over the United States. The plane was searched at East Midlands airport. Naming an intelligence source is exceptional and its purpose in that case was to demonstrate the importance of Saudi Arabia as an ‘intelligence ally.’ But we have no way of knowing how significant that intelligence alliance really is and to suggest, as the British government continues to do, that Saudi Arabia would stop passing information about terror plots that could save lives is bizarre. If there is any semblance of truth in the suggestion, then it tells us more about the Saudi mindset than the efficiency of their intelligence agencies. In the Court of Appeal, Lord Justice Moses observed that the government appeared to have ‘rolled over’ after the Saudi threats. It was ‘just as if a gun had been held to the head’ of the government, adding: ‘If that happened in our jurisdiction [the UK], they would have been guilty of a criminal offence.’ BAE admitted wrongdoing, not to the British authorities but to the US Department of Justice which filed an indictment to which BAE agreed to plead guilty. It said BAE ‘used intermediaries and shell entities to conceal payments to certain advisers who were assisting in the … [Saudi] fighter deals’. The US indictment continued: ‘BAE agreed to transfer sums totalling more than £10m and more than $9m to a bank account in Switzerland controlled by an intermediary. BAE was aware that there was a high probability that the intermediary would transfer part of these payments to the [Saudi] official.’ The extent to which Thatcher had personally lobbied the Saudi royal family, flattering them at every opportunity to secure Britain’s biggest arms deal, is revealed in official documents released in 2015. They show how anxious British ministers and diplomats pursued the Saudis to buy Tornado and Hawk aircraft in what became Al-Yamamah. Many documents have been withheld, but one refers to a meeting between British officials and Prince Sultan, the Saudi defence minister, in September

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1985. It reads: ‘At the meeting, the prince indicated that, particularly in view of our willingness … there might be further UK orders in connection with construction work.’ A number of pages have been removed after a document refers to ‘offset’ arrangements and ‘payment methods’. The papers refer to a press report that £600 million backhanders were passed to arms dealers known as the four cavaliers. The papers reveal that Thatcher apologized to King Fahd for hostile comments about Saudi Arabia in the British press. ‘I am particularly encouraged by Your Majesty’s welcome assurance that British press reporting on Saudi Arabia will not be allowed to influence our bilateral relations’, she told the Saudi king. On 23 August 1985, as the Al-Yamamah deal was close to being finalized, Thatcher conveyed to the king her ‘warmest respects’. She wrote: ‘Your Majesty proposed that the contract agreement should be between our two governments. I warmly support this proposal which I see as offering the opportunity to develop still closer relations between our two countries at government level.’ Intriguingly, the letter was redacted just before a passage in which Thatcher says she agrees that ‘no publicity whatever’ should be given to the negotiations over the arms deal. Thatcher bowed to the Saudi demands for secrecy. ‘You may be confident of our complete discretion’, Thatcher told King Fahd. Officials in the FO and the MoD wrote: ‘The prime minister has instructed that there are to be no (no) leaks from the British side.’ The full extent of any commissions on the deal and any other features of it remain secret. They are the subject of a NAO report that remains under lock and key. In 2014, after years of tough negotiations, BAE Systems agreed on new price terms relating to a multibillion pound deal to sell seventy-two Typhoons aircraft to Saudi Arabia. The deal on the Salam contract, successor to Al-Yamamah, was announced the day after Prince Charles donned traditional robes and joined Saudi princes in a sword dance during a visit to the kingdom. Ian King, BAE’s chief executive, said the public was ‘never going to know’ how much the Saudis would pay for the planes. The Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman held out the prospect of buying Saudi Arabia buying a further forty-eight Typhoon during an official visit to Britain in March 2018.

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A report by researchers at King’s College London concluded: ‘There is little evidence, based on publicly available information, that the UK exerts either influence or leverage over Saudi Arabia.18 In fact, there is greater evidence that Saudi Arabia exerts influence over the UK. There is a contradiction between the UK presenting itself as a progressive, liberal country and defender the international rules-based order, while at the same time providing diplomatic cover for a regime, which, based on our analysis, is undermining that rulesbased order. The UK appears to be incurring reputational costs as a result of its relationship with Saudi Arabia, while the economic benefits to the UK are questionable’. The report estimated that exports to Saudi Arabia are worth a mere 1 per cent of the UK’s total exports in value in 2016. The revenue generated for the Treasury from arms sales to Saudi Arabia was estimated to amount to just £30 million in 2016 when government subsidies were taken into account. Despite the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, British officials continued high-level discussions with the Saudi government expanding ‘the horizons of political, security, military and commercial cooperation’. The discussions were held behind closed doors. The British government was particularly keen at the time to sell more Typhoon combat aircraft to the Saudis. The whole relationship with authoritarian Gulf states, and Saudi Arabia in particular, has been overshadowed by the argument that Britain has a ‘strategic relationship’ with them, and that intelligence-sharing and arms sales demand secrecy and discretion, including over the murder of a journalist. The British government, meanwhile, intensified its relationships with Qatar despite that state’s conflict with Saudi Arabia – the former accusing the Saudis of persecuting political opponents, the latter accusing Qatar of supporting jihadists. Britain agreed to supply Qatar with intelligence gathered by GCHQ, and Qatar agreed to buy twenty-four Typhoon jets at an estimated cost of £5 billion in a move that safeguarded jobs, in the short term at least, for the BAE Systems factory in Warton in Lancashire. The government declined to comment on a leaked document in which the Treasury warned that the deal would require ‘unprecedented’ support from British taxpayers and ‘billions of Exchequer funding’ (understood to amount to £5 billion in financing and insurance support).

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Bahrain paid for a British naval base in the Gulf state. In return, Britain funded and trained Bahraini security forces which continued to torture opponents of the country’s monarch – a frequent visitor to Britain and guest of the Queen at the Royal Windsor Horse Show – amid a new wave of executions. Britain is increasing both military and intelligence cooperation with the Gulf states, including Oman where GCHQ has long-established listening posts. Leading British defence and security think tanks have also established financial relationships with them – the IISS with Bahrain and the RUSI with Qatar. One figure stands out in the attempts by British governments to deal with authoritarian leaders in return for lucrative deals. As we have seen, Gaddafi was embraced by the Blair government and Whitehall after promising to give up his nuclear, chemical and biological warfare programme in 2003 when a ship taking banned material to Libya was intercepted, the result of a successful Western intelligence operation. Gaddafi had apologized for arming the IRA, promised to pursue the murderer of the British police woman Yvonne Fletcher, killed while monitoring an anti-Libyan demonstration outside the Libyan ‘People’s Bureau’ in St James’ Square, London, and paid compensation for the victims of the Lockerbie bombing. That Gaddafi continued to torture his opponents was conveniently ignored. Lucrative arms and oil deals beckoned. The new relationship forged by MI6 and delighting Blair, was a green light for potentially huge and lucrative British trade deals Libya. BP, the company with traditionally close relations with MI6, was set to benefit in particular. Shortly after Sir Mark Allen, head of MI6’s counterterrorism operations left the agency in 2004, he joined BP. Soon after that BP signed a large oil drilling contract with Libya, ‘The Deal in the Desert’. Seven years later, British (and French) aircraft bombed Libya and Gaddafi was killed. The prospect of valuable arms deals attracted a new prime minister to an authoritarian figure in the process of destroying existing democratic institutions. A few days after Theresa May became the first foreign leader to visit the new US president, Donald Trump, she flew to Ankara for talks with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. She signed a £100m-plus deal for BAE Systems to build Turkey’s first home-made fighter jets. Britain’s growing reliance on authoritarian rulers did not augur well for the future.

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Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi revealed the dangers of dealing with dictators, of being seduced by the lucrative markets they offer, notably in weapons. British governments should take heed of those experiences that were to be hugely damaging to Britain’s reputation. Successive governments have insisted, in replies to questions from MPs and journalists, that Britain operates ‘one of the most thorough and robust export control systems in the world’. They have said that export licences would not be granted where to do so would be inconsistent with national and EU criteria ‘which include an assessment of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the country of final destination.’ All the evidence is that this is manifestly not the case. The lengths to which Whitehall has gone to maintain secrecy surrounding the granting arms of export licences shows that British governments have had a lot to hide, far beyond any genuine claims about the need to respect commercial confidentiality. Secrecy once again was once again imposed to hide embarrassment and hypocrisy under the guise of ‘national security’. Just as official secrecy has allowed the MoD to get away with inefficiency and waste and unnecessary deaths by depriving the armed forces of proper training and equipment, so it has allowed arms companies to spend huge amounts of taxpayers’ money on projects approved in Whitehall without any proper scrutiny. Questioning military programmes, especially nuclear weapons, have been kept off limits by powerful interest groups and government agencies in the alleged interest of ‘national security’. When MPs do challenge the established assumptions, debates are relegated to a late-night Commons session or a fringe meeting, events that are not designed to attract the interest of the media.

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London, 1992. ‘If the information obtained by the police, the Inland Revenue, the social security offices, the health service and other agencies were to be gathered together in one file, the freedom of the individual would be gravely at risk. … The dossier of private information is the badge of the totalitarian state – Court of Appeal, Lord Brown-Wilkinson, later Britain’s senior law lord.’1 Data hoarding and data matching had already become the security and intelligence agencies’ meat and drink. It was many years before the agencies unquenchable appetite was fed by technological developments that made it easier and easier for them to collect bulk personal datasets (PSDs) of information. It was many years, too, before the emergence of tech giants – Google, Facebook and others – began to amass personal information, often in cahoots with state security agencies, in secret, unbeknown to the individuals concerned, well before the development of artificial intelligence and algorithms. Government agencies, like private companies, cannot resist the temptation to collect and store information when given any opportunity to do so. Gathering intelligence on individuals becomes an end in itself, an easy way to increase their power. Thus they collect images and intercept the communications of people who by no stretch of the imagination are potential threats to Britain’s security. If they collected so much information by laborious methods before the development of powerful computers, how much more are they collecting now, with the help of algorithms and artificial intelligence? There is no sure way of knowing.

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The heads of GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 say their job fighting terrorism and serious crime is getting more and more difficult because of the amount of data swirling around in cyberspace. They compare their task to finding a needle in a haystack. Yet by amassing so much information, with no idea of its potential relevance to their legitimate role combatting criminals and genuine threats to national security, they are making these tasks even more difficult. They are making more haystacks. They may not be able to find a needle; they cannot see the wood from the trees. Bill Binney, a former NSA official, resigned a month after the 9/11 attacks on the United States because he believed they could have been prevented but for the sheer quantity of bulk surveillance being collected and the failure to share relevant data on Al-Qaeda with the FBI.2 The danger had been identified many decades before. Sir David Petrie, the perspicacious head of MI5 during the Second World War, was fully aware of the danger. ‘Superfluous information impedes work rather than assists it’, he warned.3 His warning, like Browne-Wilkinson’s, has been ignored. GCHQ’s computers have the capacity to tap every single mobile phone in Britain.4 But it does not have the human capacity and resources to respond to each potentially suspicious communication its eavesdroppers listen to, any more than MI5 did in the case of the London 7/7 suicide bombers. The climate of fear and insecurity fostered by panicking ministers by that and other terrorist attacks and plots led to the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act, widely referred to as the Snoopers’ Charter. It gives the government the power to monitor everybody’s web history and email, text and phone records, and to hack computers, phones and tablets, regardless of whether their users are suspected of involvement in crime. Government agencies will be able to monitor who you bank with, where your children go to school, your sexual preferences, health worries, and religious and political beliefs. I have described how the 2000 Terrorism Act allows police and border control officers to question an individual for up to six hours ‘whether or not he has grounds for suspecting’ the person has been involved in any terrorist activity. The person detained has no right to remain silent or have access to a lawyer, must supply all the information s/he is asked to supply, including passwords for a mobile phone and computer, which can be taken away for up to a week. The person’s DNA and fingerprints can also be taken.

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As we have seen, the majority of terrorist attacks in the West, including Britain – that is, twenty-nine out of thirty-seven between 2001 and 2018 – involved individuals who had already been identified as potential threats,5 raising further serious questions about mass surveillance and reliance on increasingly intrusive technology. Old-fashioned intelligence-gathering and police work and careful attention to information already obtained by security and intelligence agencies could have prevented terrorist attacks. Yet between 2000 and 2018, successive governments introduced thirteen separate statutes designed to combat terrorism. A new law passed in 2018 could jail for up to fifteen years anybody who views information as well as collecting or making a record of information ‘of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism’. The plan was attacked by the government’s own independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Max Hill, QC (now Director of Public Prosecutions) on the grounds, as he put it, that ‘we should not criminalise thought without action or preparation for action ... . Thought without action or preparation for action may be extremism, but it is not terrorism’. The government ignored his concerns. The law already defines terrorism extremely broadly, so broadly that it could criminalize people speaking out against repressive regimes anywhere in the world. Encouraged by ministers, the security and intelligence agencies and the police confuse terrorism with crime, and suggest it is synonymous with extremism. And extremism is also defined extremely broadly. Ministers even talk about ‘non-violent extremism’. To take one example: a police officer training teachers on the government’s Prevent strategy designed to stop radicalization among individuals described as an example of extremism the behaviour of the Green Party MP Caroline Lucas – arrested in 2018 for her part in blocking a road at an anti-fracking demonstration. As a surfeit of data prevents good judgment, decision-making and clear thinking, so does too much secrecy. It has given Britain’s spymasters and the security and intelligence agencies far too much protection and allowed them easily to get round any safeguards introduced in legislation. We may need the security and intelligence agencies more than ever. But more than ever, we need to know that they are not abusing their everincreasing powers.

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MI5, MI6 and GCHQ must be subjected to much more rigorous and independent scrutiny. More effective scrutiny of these agencies will be essential as machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) play an ever greater role, not least in determining what they are getting up to with the forces of law and order. AI and algorithms have serious implications for the armed forces, most seriously over the targeting of weapons. This is a further reason why the MoD also needs to be subjected to much more rigorous cross-party parliamentary scrutiny. Officially, Britain’s Special Forces, as we have seen, remain protected by blanket secrecy despite the growing role they have in armed conflict. Increasingly sophisticated surveillance and data-gathering technology combined with artificial intelligence compounds one deeply troubling phenomenon – the blurring of war and peace. Referring to the changing nature of violent conflict involving both non-state terrorist groups and state forces, General Houghton warned in one of his first speeches as chief of the defence staff: ‘There is no longer a simple distinction between war and peace’.6 The point was echoed by the new head of the army, General Sir Nick Carter. ‘The pervasiveness of information is changing the character of conflict opening new ways for state and non-state adversaries to exploit ambiguity, blurring the boundaries of peace and war’, he warned. He referred to ‘information warfare’,7 what the security and intelligence agencies call ‘headspace’ – a new area of conflict after land, sea, air and (outer) space. Carter set up the army’s 77th Brigade, inspired by the Chindits, the guerrilla unit which operated behind enemy lines during the Burma campaign against the Japanese during the Second World War. The emphasis would not be on military force but psychological operations (psyops), deception and media operations. Emile Simpson was one of the army’s bright young officers who learned the hard way in Afghanistan. He has warned that Britain and other liberal democracies face the prospect of sleepwalking into endless conflicts as the traditional distinctions between war and peace get blurred. In War from the Ground Up, which should be essential reading for every Sandhurst cadet, he describes a ‘fusion of war and routine international politics’, of force being used for political rather than military, outcomes. The result, he writes, has been a

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‘proliferation of violence in the world which has the potential to drag the West into endless conflicts that go beyond political utility, not least in terms of their human and financial cost’.8 Simpson continued: ‘The question of whether to commit to a “generational war”, to accept an era of “persistent conflict”, without a clear end-state, or conversely, not to engage in countries in which there are genuine security concerns, should surely be an issue of public discussion, as the West seems to be sleepwalking into such a period of global generational conflict.’ This growing lack of distinction between conflict and concord is fuelled by the development of weapons that not long ago belonged to the realm of science fiction. Drones will get cheaper and cheaper, an easy weapon for any group out to survey or terrorize, one that could be armed with chemical or even biological weapons. The US Pentagon is reported to be preparing for a ‘terminator conundrum’ – ‘swarms ‘of automated small drones that could ‘kill on their own’, and even ‘decide on their own who to kill’. Britain’s armed forces have tested high altitude surveillance drones that can patrol for weeks on end to spy on targets far below. Its new drone, called Zephyr 8, is designed to fly at such an altitude and for so long that military commanders call it a ‘pseudo satellite’. These, not nuclear armed intercontinental ballistic missiles or large aircraft carriers, are the weapons of the future. New weapons systems developed for Britain’s armed forces are shrouded in secrecy, much more so than such developments in the United States. With private companies, the Royal Navy is said to be developing underwater weapons systems, including fish-shaped swarming torpedoes, flying fish drones and ‘unmanned eel-like vessels equipped with sensor pods which dissolve on demand to avoid enemy detection’ with a crewed mothership shaped like a manta ray. ‘It’s predicted that in 50 years’ time there will be more competition between nations to live and work at sea or under it’, says the Royal Navy’s enthusiastic ‘fleet robotics officer’.9 The MoD is also developing robotic weapons programmed to ‘self-select’ targets. Developments in nanotechnology will lead to new weapons systems that will be very easy to transport and hide. The United States, Russia and China are researching and developing underwater drones and weapons that could destroy satellites in space.

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Warfare will increasingly be hidden not just from TV screens but from the political and military leaders of opposing sides. It may be carried out by drones in the air, cyberattacks in space and groups of Special Forces on the ground. They each raise serious new questions of law and ethics. Key to these are rules of engagement – What is an imminent attack, what is a proportionate response, and what constitutes self-defence? Whitehall officials talk about ‘new circumstances’ and ‘new threats’. They add: ‘It must be right that states are able to act in self-defence in circumstances where there is evidence of further imminent attacks by terrorist groups even if there is no specific evidence of where such an attack will take place or the precise nature of the attack’ (my emphasis).10 The officials continue: Combating an enemy which may have covertly infiltrated our country, and can control attacks from abroad with sophisticated communications technology means that it will be a rare case in which the government will know in advance with precision exactly where, when and how an attack will take place. An effective concept of imminence cannot therefore be limited to be assessed solely on temporal factors. The government must take a view on a broader range of indicators of the likelihood of an attack, whilst also applying the twin requirements of proportionality and necessity. As the human rights group Reprieve has observed, the British government argued that its security, military and intelligence agencies should be able to use force in response to threatened attacks ‘even if there is no specific evidence of where … an attack will take place or of the precise nature of the attack.’11 British Special Forces and pilotless drones, like their US counterparts, have ‘kill lists’. They assassinate individuals in operations conducted in secret outside the law, by definition outside any known body of rules. The British government refused to give the ISC key information relating to the drone strike that killed British-born Reyaad Khan in Syria in August 2015. ‘Oversight depends on primary evidence’, said the committee, ‘the government should open up the ministerial decision-making process to scrutiny on matters of such seriousness. ... The government should be more transparent about these matters and permit proper scrutiny of them.’12

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Signals intelligence may be able to track drones and even hyper-fast weapons, but only after an attack. Cyber attacks occur in a space where it may be impossible in the short term to know where they have come from. (Sir John Sawers, the former head of MI6, has suggested that vulnerability to cyberattacks should make us return to more basic means of communication. ‘The stubby pencil and piece of paper is more secure than anything electronic’, he said referring in particular to voting systems.)13 I have lost count of the number of times Britain’s most senior military officers have insisted conflicts cannot be solved by force. ‘The outcome of an action’, Simpson observed after his deployment to Afghanistan, ‘is usually better gauged by the chat at the bazaar the next day, and its equivalent higher up the political food chain, than body counts’. Army commanders talked almost whimsically after the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan about the need for ‘hearts and minds’ operations, a notion whose importance was first understood (but apparently since forgotten) countering communist guerrillas in Malaya back in the 1950s. The legacy of colonial conflicts and conquests is still with us. I have often wondered what a Martian might think seeing a Union Jack still flying on islands in the South Atlantic nearly 8,000 miles away from Britain, and on a large limestone rock on the southern tip of Spain. One solution, privately supported by the FO for many years, would be a joint sovereignty agreement reconciling the two principles of territorial integrity and self-determination. With his habitual candour, in private at least, Lord Carrington, foreign secretary at the time of the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands in 1982, described British policy as one of neglect and hoping for the best. ‘We did not have any cards in our hands’.14 The public would not have known from the public rhetoric, but compromise plans had been placed on the table only to be hastily locked away at the first sound of ‘betrayal’ from indulgent commentators (and the Labour leader Michael Foot) thousands of miles away in Westminster. The Thatcher government offered to hand over sovereignty of the Falkland Islands at a clandestine meeting with Argentinian officials less than two years before the Argentine invasion. The FO drew up a proposal, approved by the cabinet’s defence committee, whereby Britain would hand Argentina titular sovereignty over the islands, which would then be leased back by Britain for ninety-nine years. The British and Argentinian flags would be flown side by side on public

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buildings on the islands, and the islanders and their descendants would be guaranteed ‘uninterrupted enjoyment of their way of life’.15 A similar arrangement could be agreed for Gibraltar (where in the EU referendum, just 4 per cent voted to leave). The British government and Parliament ignored this, as well as the majority in Northern Ireland who voted to remain in the EU, just as it had ignored the wishes of the majority of Chagos islanders who wanted to return to their home. It seemed that the principle of self-determination and notions of sovereignty were respected only when it was convenient to Whitehall. Such territorial disputes may seem absurd when people’s security and way of life face real threats, including from cyberspace, that make national boundaries entirely irrelevant. Some were foreseen by the Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre, a branch of the MoD which deserves to be much better known. In a study, ‘Global Strategic Trends – Out to 2045’,16 it foresees large multinational corporations developing their own capable security forces, and criminals and terrorists having access to increasingly cheap unmanned drones and space satellites. Sophisticated environmental warfare could spread plant and human diseases by insects, it warns. It paints a picture of a world in which the authority of states diminishes in the face of powerful private multinational companies, and national loyalties are weakened by increasing migration. Future weapons were likely to include long-range lasers capable of producing a beam of electromagnetic energy or atomic radiation that could destroy equipment and infrastructure or cause non-lethal damage to human targets. ‘As access to technology increases, we will face new risks to our security both at home and abroad. In the West in particular, a rise of individualism and … a growing sense of disconnection from long-established governing structures will challenge traditional systems’, said Rear Admiral John Kingwell, then director of the centre. The study says that by 2045: ●●

The world population could reach 10.4 billion, compared with about 7.2 billion in 2018.

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More than 70 per cent of the population is likely to live in urban areas.

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3.9 billion people are likely to suffer water shortages.

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Driverless transport is likely to be widespread.

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Unmanned systems are increasingly likely to replace people in the

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workplace, leading to mass unemployment and social unrest. ●●

Robots are likely to change the face of warfare, but ‘military decisionmaking is likely to remain the remit of humans for ethical reasons, at least in Western countries’.

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Individuals may define themselves less by their nationality, with growing migration and stronger links to virtual communities.

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Chinese defence expenditure was likely to rival that of the United States, but Russia’s would not match that of China, the United States or India.

The study warns that the pressure of globalization will make it more difficult for individual countries to act unilaterally. ‘As the cost of sequencing an individual’s DNA continues to fall, targeting an individual using their DNA may be possible by 2045,’ the study adds. ‘We could also see sophisticated environmental warfare capable of spreading plant and human disease by insects or insect-machine hybrids. Crops and cattle could be destroyed, as well as people being incapacitated or killed.’ By 2020, more than 500 small satellites, sometimes called CubeSats, would join the 1,000 already operating in orbit around the planet, according to the study. They would be increasingly vulnerable to attack – and collision. By 2045 or earlier, ‘criminal organisations could secure payload space on rockets operated by private companies – this would allow them to launch their own surveillance satellites, potentially threatening individual and corporate privacy’. Another underestimated source of future conflict is the demographics of the Middle East where Western intervention (and alliances with autocratic rulers) will not be forgotten among the fast-growing, educated but jobless young populations. At the time of writing, about 60 per cent of the population of Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, is under twenty-five years old. Fifty per cent of Iranians are under thirty-years old and 40 per cent of those are

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jobless. The population of countries in the Middle East is estimated to double over the next thirty years. Secrecy, in the minds of the Whitehall establishment, bolsters security. It can also achieve the opposite. Official secrecy can give an entirely false sense of security by covering up insecurity. And insecurity (fed by the EU referendum and the debate around Brexit) encourages that residual British, particularly English, custom of clinging to the past and ignoring the lessons of history. British leaders took strange comfort by looking backwards. Anthony Eden compared Egypt’s President Nasser with Hitler. Blair compared Saddam Hussein with Hitler. Ministers and the deep state of Whitehall’s permanent government sought assurance from a special relationship with the United States and possession of nuclear weapons. Ironically, it was Washington’s reluctance to share nuclear know-how with Britain that helped to persuade the post-war Attlee Labour government to go ahead and build a British bomb, a project described by the historian Correlli Barnett as the supreme example of technological and strategic overstretch, stemming from folie de grandeur.17 Yet nuclear weapons, and privileged access to US know-how – as well as intelligence – became for Britain a key ingredient of the increasingly one-sided special relationship feeding the suspicion, fostered by General de Gaulle, that Britain was an Anglo-Saxon ‘Trojan horse’ in Europe. Whether as the supposed beneficiary of a special relationship or as a Trojan horse, the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan was a disaster for the reputation of Britain’s intelligence agencies. It was also a disaster for Britain’s reputation abroad, including in the United States. The ‘warrior nation’ was no longer punching above its weight. A British government is unlikely again to get political and public support to commit thousands of troops in a military operation abroad. It is unlikely to have the resources to do so. The MoD lurches from year to year from one budgetary crisis to another. Britain’s defence budget is hopelessly skewed, with a huge slice earmarked for two expensive platforms – the new Dreadnought class submarines with their Trident nuclear missiles, and large aircraft carriers – that have no practical role in protecting Britain’s security in a foreseeable conflict.

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The future of the special relationship is more precarious than ever. Britain may have offered America’s an ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’, but the United States no longer needs it. It was anyway worth little in the Suez crisis as President Eisenhower refused to prop up sterling unless the British government agreed to withdraw its forces from Egypt. Yet nearly fifty years later, Christopher Meyer, the Britain’s ambassador to the United States, disclosed that he was instructed by Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s chief of staff: ‘We want you to get up the arse of the White House and stay there.’18 Whitehall’s mandarins claim Blair had no alternative but to go along with President Bush’s mission to invade Iraq. ‘Can you imagine a British prime minister saying No to an American President on such an important issue?’, a former chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, asked me rhetorically. Far from being a ‘global power’, as the government insisted Britain would be post-Brexit, it risked being deprived of any real influence on the world stage. Washington will pay ever more attention to Russia, China, the Pacific and Latin America, or on occasion, reluctantly to the EU rather than to Britain alone. With weaker international links – save perhaps with the authoritarian regimes of the Gulf – Britain’s security and intelligence agencies will need even more support and understanding at home. For that, they will have to be much more transparent. These agencies might ignore the lessons of the past and cling to excessive secrecy but – in contrast to MPs and much of the media – at least they understood that the traditional notion of ‘national sovereignty’ was out of date when it came to protecting Britain’s real security. That is why the large majority of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ officers were opposed to Brexit, fearing that would undermine the international fight against terrorism and serious crime. What was remarkable was that so many people were so hostile to the established ‘elite’ that they ignored even them and supported Brexit nevertheless. Yet there was nothing to suggest that Brexit would weaken the powers of the Whitehall’s establishment. Quite the contrary, ministers relied even more on unelected civil servants and, in a move compared to Henry VIII, tightened their grip as the executive seized those powers ceded to Brussels many decades before. The think tank, the Institution for Government, warned in

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2018 that political tensions were driving inordinate levels of secrecy, where key documents – even in relation to necessary planning – were over-classified and locked away cupboards in Whitehall. Important information was not even being shared properly between government departments, and those outside government with a legitimate reason to be kept informed, such as Parliament and business, were shut out.19 Meanwhile, there was little evidence that the ministers and the permanent government in Whitehall knew or really cared that the security and intelligence agencies were gaining more and more powers and that profound changes were happening in the nature of conflict. We have seen how Britain’s top security, intelligence and military, figures have failed to tell truth to power for reasons of cowardice as well as convenience. As a result even their political bosses and those elected to monitor and question their activities are kept in the dark. That is all the more reason for the media to mount a sustained battle against an excess of official secrecy in the real interests, however perverse it may seem, of national security and of those agencies charged with protecting it.

Notes Prologue 1 Hertford College, Oxford, was a much less well-endowed establishment in the 1960s than it has since become. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it had just one or two fellows who were said to be mad. But the college, and its predecessor, Hart Hall, has many illustrious alumni. They include William Tyndale, John Donne, Jonathan Swift, Thomas Hobbes, Charles James Fox and Evelyn Waugh. More recent alumni include a future head of MI6, David Spedding, who also read history under Felix Markham, and former Cabinet Secretary, Jeremy Heywood. My ground floor rooms were very close to Hertford’s ‘Bridge of Sighs’, inspired by Contino’s bridge in Venice and completed in 1914. 2 W Somerset Maugham, Ashenden or The British Agent (Pan 1952). 3 College of Europe alumni include two prominent Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg and Sir Simon Hughes, and Andrew Tyrie, former Tory MP and chair of the Commons Treasury committee and a formidable pursuer of successive governments over their role in secretly transporting terror suspects to jails where they were tortured. 4 William Heinemann (1945). 5 Review, GCHQ De-Unionisation 1984, Public Policy and Administration Volume 8, No.2 Summer 1993.

Chapter 1 1 The decision not to hold a formal inquest into Kelly’s death, with the government arguing that the Hutton inquiry in effect replaced it, encouraged claims that Kelly was murdered. But there was no motive for killing him. By the time of his death, the government had managed to tarnish his reputation so much that his credibility was seriously damaged. 2 Report of the Inquiry into the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Dr David Kelly, CMG, by Lord Hutton (The Stationery Office, 2004). 153.

Notes

314 3 Biteback Publishing, 2014

4 https​://ww​w.bbc​.co.u​k/new​s/wor​ld-eu​rope-​26079​957

Chapter 2 1 https://cryptome.org/mi6-disinfo.htm and Ed Vulliamy, Anthrax Follies, the Guardian, 25 March, 1998 2 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/po​litic​s/200​1/jan​/24/f​reedo​mofin​forma​tion.​uk, and https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/me​dia/2​001/j​an/26​/sund​aytel​egrap​h.pre​ssand​publi​ shing​, and https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/me​dia/2​000/j​un/12​/pres​sandp​ublis​hing.​ monda​ymedi​asect​ion and The story of the spy and the Spectator, the Guardian, December 12, 1998 3 http:​//med​ia.le​eds.a​c.uk/​paper​s/pmt​/exhi​bits/​206/l​eigh.​htm 4 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/me​dia/2​000/j​un/12​/pres​sandp​ublis​hing.​monda​ymedi​ asect​ion 5 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/wo​rld/2​019/j​an/26​/west​-indi​ans-f​l amin​go-ma​gazin​ e-m6-​anti-​commu​nist-​missi​on 6 Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide (Penguin Books, 2014), 190. 7 Many of the examples I cite here I first reported in an article, Forty years’ personal experience, in Volume 10, Issue 1, April 2017, Media, War & Conflict, SAGE journals. 8 Hugh McManners, Falklands Commando (HarperCollins, 2002). 9 Lawrence Freedman, The Official History of the Falklands Campaign, Routledge, 2005, Chapter 28, The Information War. 10 Freedman, op.cit, Chapter 37, Goose Green 11 Storm Command, HarperCollins, 1992 12 Bravo Two Zero (Bantom Press, 1993) 13 Why Yugoslavia Died, Lecture to the UN Association, Oxford, 2 February 1999. Conversations with Milosevic, Syracuse University Press, 2016) 14 Conduct of the allies, Guardian, 4 May 1999. 15 Kosovo: Communications Lessons for NATO, the Military and the Media, Royal United Services Institute, 9 July 1999. 16 UK Politics: Media attacked over Kosovo campaign http:​//new​s.bbc​.co.u​k/1/h​i/uk_​ polit​ics/3​89910​.stm 17 General David Richards, Taking Command (Headline 2014), Chapter 8, Operation Palliser.

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18 A Good Man in Africa, The Guardian, 17 May 2000, https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/ wo​rld/2​000/m​ay/17​/sier​raleo​ne4 19 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/uk​/2003​/mar/​11/ir​aq.mi​litar​y 20 http:​//www​.dail​ymail​.co.u​k/new​s/art​icle-​41017​5/Sir​-Rich​ard-D​annat​t--A-​hones​t-Gen​ eral.​html 21 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/uk​/2006​/oct/​18/mi​litar​y.ira​q 22 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/uk​/2009​/sep/​24/ar​my-ch​ief-q​uits-​over-​troop​streatmen​t 23 Emile Simpson, War from the Ground Up (Hurst 2012). 24 Mike Martin, An Intimate War (Hurst, 2014). 25 Cameron irritated over military chiefs’ Libya comments, BBC News, 21 June 2011. 26 Future RAF missions under threat if Libyan operations continue, Telegraph, http:​// www​.tele​graph​.co.u​k/new​s/ukn​ews/d​efenc​e/858​8125/​Futur​e-RAF​-miss​ions-​underthre​at-if​-Liby​an-in​terve​ntion​-cont​inues​.html​ 27 British Generals in Blair’s Wars (Ashgate, 2013). Conclusions. 28 Annual Chief of the Defence Staff lecture, RUSI, 18 December 2013 https​://ru​si.or​g/ eve​nt/an​nual-​chief​-defe​nce-s​taff-​lectu​re-20​13 29 David Cameron gags Top Brass, Guardian, 23 February 2015 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ ian.c​om/ne​ws/de​fence​-and-​secur​ity-b​log/2​015/f​eb/23​/davi​d-cam​eron-​gags-​top-b​rass 30 https​://ww​w.pub​licat​ions.​parli​ament​.uk/p​a/cm2​01415​/cmse​lect/​cmdfe​nce/6​90/690. pdf​ 31 http:​//www​.itv.​com/n​ews/2​015-0​2-08/​expos​ure-g​hkfsh​fsjkd​fn/ 32 Nicholas Wilkinson, Secrecy and the Media (Routledge, 2009).

Chapter 3 1 See Stephen Dorril, MI6, Fifty Years of Special Operations (Fourth Estate 2000), 474. 2 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/co​mment​/stor​y/0,,​18183​6,00.​html 3 George Brown, In My Way (Penguin 1972), 165. 4 Geoffrey Taylor, Changing Faces (Fourth Estate 1993), 265. 5 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/co​mment​isfre​e/201​6/feb​/26/b​oris-​johns​on-la​test-​euro-​ myth-​brexi​t 6 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/co​mment​isfre​e/201​7/may​/01/t​he-gu​ardia​n-vie​w-on-​ the-m​ay-ju​ncker​-dinn​er-on​e-con​tinen​t-not​-two-​galax​ies

316

Notes

7 http:​//www​.marg​arett​hatch​er.or​g/doc​ument​/1073​32 8 The Private Office (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984). 9 Telegraph, 16 June 2016, http:​//www​.tele​graph​.co.u​k/new​s/201​6/06/​16/wh​y-thi​s-lif​ elong​-patr​iot-i​s-vot​ing-r​emain​/ 10 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/ne​ws/de​fence​-and-​secur​ity-b​log/2​016/j​un/20​/rema​ in-in​-http​s://w​ww.go​ogle.​co.uk​/webh​p?sou​rceid​=chro​me-in​stant​&ion=​1&esp​v=2&i​ e=UTF​-8#q=​twitt​er+%4​0Nort​onTay​loreu​-say-​forme​r-uk-​secur​ity-a​nd-in​telli​gence​ -chie​fs 11 https​://ec​.euro​pa.eu​/comm​issio​n/com​missi​oners​/2014​-2019​/king​/anno​uncem​ents/​ commi​ssion​er-ju​lian-​king-​provi​des-k​eynot​e-add​ress-​manag​ing-i​nsecu​rity-​centr​e-eur​ opean​-refo​rm-lo​ndon_​en 12 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/uk​-news​/2017​/apr/​30/br​exit-​uk-ma​y-hav​e-to-​recog​ nise-​ecj-c​ourt-​rulin​gs-to​-keep​-secu​rity-​coope​ratio​n 13 John Lambert, Britain in a Federal Europe (Chatto and Windus 1968).

Chapter 4 1 In the arms-to-Iraq case, Heseltine was the only cabinet minister who questioned the need to signed PII certificates. 2 Their Trade is Treachery, 1981. 3 The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations notes that Burke used the phrase in his Letters on a Regicide Peace published in 1796. ‘Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever’, he wrote. ‘But, as in exercise of all the virtues, there is an economy of truth. It is a sort of temperance, by which a man speaks truth with measure that he may speak it the longer.’ 4 http:​//www​.tele​graph​.co.u​k/new​s/ukn​ews/1​43683​6/Bla​ir-pu​ts-Ho​on-on​-spot​-with​ -Kell​y-den​ial.h​tml 5 https​://bo​oks.g​oogle​.co.u​k/boo​ks?id​=W2ig​BAAAQ​BAJ&p​g=PA4​0&lpg​=PA40​&dq=w​ ildin​g+tal​leyra​nd+su​rtout​+civi​l+ser​vice&​sourc​e=bl&​ots=A​4KZRp​5Rya&​sig=u​L0Eb0​ zmkJG​a2GNF​7cp_N​AEVue​s&hl=​en&sa​=X&ve​d=0ah​UKEwj​8186v​gdbTA​hUDSh​ QKHXi​BC6YQ​6AEII​zAA#v​=onep​age&q​=wild​ing%2​0tall​eyran​d%20s​urtou​t%20c​ ivil%​20ser​vice&​f=fal​se 6 ‘How the mandarins find themselves in the middle ground’, Guardian 6 May 1983. 7 Richard Stone, Hidden Stories of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, Personal Reflections (The Policy Press 2015), Introduction. 8 https​://ca​px.co​/meet​-the-​men-w​ho-re​ally-​ruled​-brit​ain/

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9 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/co​mment​isfre​e/201​6/nov​/30/w​hy-br​itain​-need​s-wri​ tten-​const​ituti​on 10 Richard Norton-Taylor, Blinded by the Light of Technology, Guardian, 6 June 1990. 11 https​://ww​w.ins​titut​eforg​overn​ment.​org.u​k/pub​licat​ions/​white​hall-​monit​or-20​18 12 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/uk​-news​/2014​/feb/​11/mo​d-it-​consu​ltant​-paid​-2000​ -day-​cover​-civi​l-ser​vant-​job 13 Evidence to the Commons Public Administration Committee, 20 March 2012.

Chapter 5 1 Letter from Marychurch to Gordon Welchman, see Intelligence and National Security, Vol 1, No 2, May 1986. 2 ‘Codebreaker breaks ranks’, Guardian, 15 October 1985. 3 In July 1914, shortly before the start of the First World War, Childers smuggled German arms to nationalists in Ireland. Though he fought for the British in the war and was decorated, he was opposed to the deal with Britain agreed by the provisional Free State government under Michael Collins. Childers was convicted by a Free State military court and executed by a firing squad in 1922. 4 Malcolm Turnbull, The Spycatcher Trial (Heinemann, 1988). 5 House of Lords, 17 April 1989. 6 https​://ww​w.ope​ndemo​cracy​.net/​ourki​ngdom​/maur​ice-f​ranke​l/roo​ts-of​-blai​rs-ho​stili​ ty-to​-free​dom-o​f-inf​ormat​ion 7 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/uk​-news​/2013​/oct/​16/na​tiona​l-sec​urity​-leak​s-gch​q-nsa​ -inte​llige​nce-a​genci​es 8 https://www.cfoi.org.uk/latest-news/

Chapter 6 1 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/uk​/2000​/jul/​18/ri​chard​norto​ntayl​or 2 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/uk​/2012​/apr/​18/ar​chive​s-die​go-ga​rcia.​ The UN early in 2019 told the UK to abandon its claims on the Chagos islands. 3 The National Archives, Piece No: FO 1093/87 4 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/uk​/2006​/jul/​11/eg​ypt.p​ast

318

Notes

5 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/uk​/2012​/apr/​18/br​itain​-dest​royed​-reco​rds-c​oloni​al-cr​ imes 6 https​://ba​tangk​alima​ssacr​e.wor​dpres​s.com​/2016​/04/2​7/sev​en-re​asons​-why-​batan​g-kal​ i-sti​ll-ma​tters​/ 7 Gordon Brooke-Shepherd, Iron Maze (Macmillan 1998). 8 Mike Rossiter, The Spy Who Changed the World (Headline 2004). https​://ww​w.the​ guard​ian.c​om/bo​oks/2​014/j​un/13​/the-​spy-w​ho-ch​anged​-the-​world​-mike​-ross​iter-​ revie​w 9 TNA, KV2/3980-3987 10 TNA, KV2/4054-4058 11 TNA, KV2/3456 12 TNA, KV2/3523-3524 13 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/uk​/2013​/may/​23/mi​niste​rs-or​dered​-bugg​ing-k​ingedward​ 14 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/uk​/2013​/may/​23/wi​nston​-chur​chill​-josp​eh-st​alin-​night​ -drin​king 15 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/po​litic​s/200​1/jan​/05/f​reedo​mofin​forma​tion.​uk 16 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/uk​/2011​/dec/​30/th​atche​r-cab​inet-​oppos​ed-tr​ident​ -purc​hase.​The former head of the Army, General Lord Dannatt, described Trident in a BBC interview on 1 February 2019 as Britain’s ‘independent so-called nuclear deterrent’. 17 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/uk​/1999​/apr/​10/2 18 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/co​mment​isfre​e/201​7/dec​/29/s​ecret​-stor​ies-m​inist​ers-n​ ation​al-ar​chive​s-los​t-whi​tehal​l 19 https​://ww​w.gov​.uk/g​overn​ment/​publi​catio​ns/go​vernm​ent-d​igita​l-rec​ords-​and-a​rchiv​ es-re​view-​by-si​r-ale​x-all​an 20 https​://ww​w.gov​.uk/g​overn​ment/​publi​catio​ns/be​tter-​infor​matio​n-for​-bett​ergo​vernment

Chapter 7 1 Secret sensations, Prospect, November 1999 2 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/uk​-news​/2016​/dec/​08/ja​mes-b​ond-w​ould-​not-g​et-jo​ b-wit​h-rea​l-mi6​-says​-spy-​chief​

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319

3 Richard Aldrich, GCHQ (HarperPress, 2010) Trouble with Henry. 4 A Modern-Day Requirement for Co-ordinated Covert Action, RUSI Journal, April/ May 2016, Volume 161, No 2. 5 Intelligence and Security Committee, annual report, 2016–2017. 6 Prospect, ibid. 7 Intelligence and National Security, Volume 5, Number 1, Intelligence and Policy. 8 Falkland Islands Review, HMSO, Cmd 8787, 1983. 9 Max Hastings, The Secret War (William Collins, 2016). 10 ibid. 11 Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, Instructions from the Centre (Hodder & Stoughton, 1991). 124. 12 Zinoviev letter was dirty trick by MI6, Guardian, 4 February 1999, History Notes, The Zinoviev Letter of 1924, Historians, LRD, Foreign & Commonwealth Office, February 1999. 13 House of Commons, 15 January 1988, Column 612. 14 Andrew Fowler, Shooting the Messenger (Routledge, 2018), 189. 15 David Leigh, The Wilson Plot (Heinemann, 1988), and https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/ po​litic​s/201​2/aug​/09/b​rian-​crozi​er 16 see https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/po​litic​s/201​5/oct​/03/l​ord-h​ealey​ 17 Through the Looking Glass: British Foreign Policy in an Age of Illusions, Anthony Verrier (Jonathan Cape, 1983). 18 Paddy Hayes, Queen of Spies (Duckworth, 2015). 19 Anthony Verrier, The Road to Zimbabwe (Jonathan Cape, 1986). 20 Speech to RUSI Land Warfare Conference, 27 June, 2017.

Chapter 8 1 See Richard Norton-Taylor, The Lying Classes, Guardian, 16 December, 1988. 2 The Spectator, 23 September 1955. 3 For TNA files on the Cambridge spies, see the KV2 and KV4 series, the latter includes the diaries of Guy Liddell, then deputy director general of MI5 (KV4/466- 475). The disappearance of Burgess and Maclean and the frantic investigations in Whitehall also feature in the FCO158 and CAB 301 series.

320

Notes

4 TNA, FCO158/178, and see Geoff Andrews, Agent Moliere, (I.B.Tauris, 2019). 5 John Cairncross, The Enigma Spy (Century, 1997). 6 See George Blake, No Other Choice (Jonathan Cape, 1990), and Michael Randle & Pat Pottle, The Blake Escape (Harrap, 1989). 7 Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm (Penguin, 2010). 489. 8 Thomas Grant, Jeremy Hutchinson’s Case Histories, paperback edition (John Murray, 2016). 9 Robert Cecil, A Divided life: A Biography of Donald Maclean (Bodley Head, 1988). 10 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/po​litic​s/201​5/dec​/07/s​ecuri​ty-ch​iefs-​block​-rele​ase-r​ eport​-1983​-sovi​et-nu​clear​-scar​e 11 Michael Herman, 16 May 2014, Conference on the Able Archer crisis, 1983 12 Richard Tomlinson, The Big Breach (Cutting Edge, 2001). 13 vhttp​s://w​ww.pu​blica​tions​.parl​iamen​t.uk/​pa/cm​20131​4/cms​elect​/cmha​ff/23​1/140​318. h​tm 14 House of Lords, 2 December, 1992, Column 1341. 15 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/ne​ws/de​fence​-and-​secur​ity-b​log/2​015/m​ar/12​/brit​ ains-​spy-a​genci​es-th​e-onl​y-wat​chdog​-is-t​he-wo​rkfor​ce 16 https​://te​rrori​smleg​islat​ionre​viewe​r.ind​epend​ent.g​ov.uk​/wp-c​onten​t/upl​oads/​2015/​ 06/IP​R-Rep​ort-P​rint-​Versi​on.pd​f 17 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/uk​/2009​/feb/​17/go​vernm​ent-e​xploi​ting-​terro​rism-​fear 18 https​://pu​blica​tions​.parl​iamen​t.uk/​pa/ld​20070​8/ldh​ansrd​/text​/8070​8-000​4.htm​ 19 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/uk​/2013​/jun/​21/le​gal-l​oopho​les-g​chq-s​py-wo​rld 20 Andrew Fowler, Shooting The Messenger (Routledge, 2018).

Chapter 9 1 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/uk​/2009​/jul/​11/mi​5-int​ervie​ws-uk​-secu​rity-​terro​rism 2 http:​//www​.mich​aelsm​ithau​thor.​com/t​he-do​wning​-stre​et-me​mos.h​tml 3 Sir Ivor Roberts created more waves as he was about to retire in 2006. By tradition, British ambassadors wrote a personal and frank Valedictory Despatch that would be circulated throughout the FO. Ivor’s was remarkably frank, describing the latest agenda written in what he called ‘Wall Street management-speak which is already tired and discredited by the time it is introduced. He referred ‘a game of bullshit bingo’ an explosion of the use of consultants many of whose recommendations did

Notes

321

little more than reverse the conclusions of the previous consultants. His dispatch was the last one of its kind. Ministers and the FO establishment had enough of such frankness. 4 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/uk​/2004​/nov/​16/im​migra​tiona​ndpub​licse​rvice​s.pol​itics​ 5 https://www.theguardian.com/law/2013/nov/14/torture-inquiry-gibson-reportintelligence-detainees 6 Intelligence and Security Committee, The Handling of Detainees by UK Intelligence Personnel in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and Iraq (Cm6469, 2005). 7 Intelligence and Security Committee, Rendition (Cm7171, 2007). 8 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/wo​rld/2​012/f​eb/07​/iraq​-deat​h-sec​ret-d​etent​ion-c​amp 9 https​://ww​w.ind​epend​ent.c​o.uk/​news/​uk/ho​me-ne​ws/le​gal-g​loves​-come​-off-​in-ro​ w-ove​r-tor​ture-​18981​41.ht​ml 10 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/uk​-news​/2016​/may/​31/re​veale​d-bri​tain-​rendi​tion-​ polic​y-rif​t -bet​ween-​spy-a​genci​es-mi​6-mi5​ 11 https​://ww​w.ext​raord​inary​rendi​tion.​org/c​ompon​ent/j​downl​oads/​send/​2-all​-othe​ r-doc​ument​s/381​-appg​-resp​onse-​to-co​nsoli​dated​-guid​ance-​consu​ltati​on-oc​tober​ -2018​.html​ 12 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/co​mment​isfre​e/201​2/sep​/04/t​ruth-​tortu​re-te​rrori​sm-se​ crecy​-mann​ingha​m-bul​ler

Chapter 10 1 Allen gave evidence to the Chilcot inquiry in private. Passages were later released and he was identified only as SIS4. He was subsequently identified as this witness. 2 http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/. The website contains consumer-friendly search engines. 3 Heywood was made a peer shortly before he died of cancer in November 2018.

Chapter 11 1 Mainstream Publishing (2006). 2 https​://ww​w.tel​egrap​h.co.​uk/ne​ws/ne​wstop​ics/o​nthef​rontl​ine/3​33241​7/Exc​lusiv​e-SAS​ -chie​f-qui​ts-ov​er-ne​glige​nce-t​hat-k​illed​-his-​troop​s.htm​l 3 General Sir Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force (Allen Lane, 2005).

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322

4 Frank Ledwidge, Investment in Blood (Yale, 2013). 5 https​://ww​w.gov​.uk/g​overn​ment/​publi​catio​ns/th​e-nim​rod-r​eview​ 6 See Sunday Times, The Bomb factory starts to implode (27 January 2019). 7 https​://me​dium.​com/w​ar-is​-bori​ng/th​e-u-s​-navy​-s-bi​g-mis​take-​build​ing-t​ons-o​f-sup​ ercar​riers​-79cb​42029​b8 8 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/uk​/defe​nce-a​nd-se​curit​y-blo​g/201​3/mar​/15/t​riden​ t-nuc​lear-​disar​mamen​t 9 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/co​mment​isfre​e/201​5/nov​/09/h​ought​on-tr​ident​-mili​ tary-​corby​n-uk-​armed​-forc​es 10 http:​//www​.basi​cint.​org/p​ublic​ation​s/tri​dent-​commi​ssion​/2014​/trid​ent-c​ommis​sion-​ concl​uding​-repo​rt 11 Penguin, 2016. 12 https​://ww​w.pro​spect​magaz​ine.c​o.uk/​magaz​ine/e​nd-of​-spec​ial-r​elati​onshi​p-ame​rica-​ brita​in 13 http:​//uk.​reute​rs.co​m/art​icle/​uk-br​itain​-defe​nce-t​riden​t-exc​lusiv​e-idU​KKCN0​SJ0ER​ 20151​025 14 https​://qz​.com/​14163​62/th​e-uk-​war-g​ames-​cyber​attac​ks-th​at-co​uld-b​lack-​out-m​ oscow​/ 15 https​://ww​w.sip​ri.or​g/pub​licat​ions/​2016/​other​-publ​icati​ons/s​pecia​l-tre​atmen​t-uk-​ gover​nment​-supp​ort-a​rms-i​ndust​ry-an​d-tra​de 16 https​://ww​w.pub​licat​ions.​parli​ament​.uk/p​a/cm2​01516​/cmse​lect/​cmfaf​f /860​/8600​ 5.htm​ 17 https​://ww​w.caa​t.org​.uk/m​edia/​press​-rele​ases/​2017-​10-25​ 18 https​://ww​w.kcl​.ac.u​k/ssp​p/pol​icy-i​nstit​ute/r​esear​ch-an​alysi​s/the​-uk-s​audi-​arabi​a-sec​ urity​-rela​tions​hip.a​spx

Chapter 12 1 Marcel v The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, 1992 1All ER 72, Ch225. 2 http:​//www​.comp​uterw​eekly​.com/​featu​re/In​tervi​ew-th​e-ori​ginal​-NSA-​whist​leblo​wer 3 https://www.mi5.gov.uk/ru/node/410 4 Private information. 5 Fowler, op.cit.

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323

6 Houghton https​://ww​w.gov​.uk/g​overn​ment/​speec​hes/b​uildi​ng-a-​briti​sh-mi​litar​yfit​-for-​ 7 https​://ru​si.or​g/ann​ual-c​onfer​ence/​rusi-​land-​warfa​re-co​nfere​nce/2​017-p​resen​tatio​ns 8 Emile Simpson, op.cit. 9 https​://ww​w.roy​alnav​y.mod​.uk/n​ews-a​nd-la​test-​activ​ity/n​ews/2​016/o​ctobe​r/14/​16101​ 4-roy​al-na​vy-te​sts-u​nmann​ed-fl​eet-o​f-the​-futu​re 10 The government’s policy on the use of drones for targeted killing: Government Response to the Committee’s Second Report of Session 2015-16, 18 October, 2016. 11 Reprieve, press release, 19 October, 2016. 12 Intelligence and Security Committee, UK Lethal Drone Strikes in Syria, 26 April 2017. 13 http:​//www​.bbc.​co.uk​/news​/uk-p​oliti​cs-38​40829​6 14 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/uk​/2012​/dec/​28/br​itish​-appr​oach-​falkl​ands-​negle​ctho​pe 15 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/uk​/2005​/jun/​28/fa​lklan​ds.pa​st 16 Ministry of Defence, Strategic Trends Programme, Fifth Edition. 17 Correlli Barnett, seminar on Overstretch, Churchill College, Cambridge, 25 October 2007. 18 https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian.c​om/bo​oks/2​005/n​ov/13​/biog​raphy​.poli​tical​books​ 19 https​://ww​w.ins​titut​eforg​overn​ment.​org.u​k/sit​es/de​fault​/file​s/pub​licat​ions/​IFGJ6​279P​repar​ing-B​rexit​-Whit​ehall​-Repo​rt-18​0607-​FINAL​-3b-W​EB.pd​f

Index ABC case  122, 132–3, 167 Able Archer  209–10 Abu Qatada  188 Abu Zubaydah  239 Adie, Kate  37 Afghanistan  191 Africa  xvi, 40, 51–2, 72, 75, 135, 190, 244, 261 AI and algorithms  304 aircraft carriers  10, 51, 61, 285–7, 305 air strikes  15, 39, 46, 48, 50, 61, 240, 278, 294 Aitken, Brigadier Robert  275 Aitken, Jonathan  27, 125 Ali, Mohsin  70 Al Jazeera  129 Allan, Sir Alex  160 Allen, Sir Mark  15, 112, 191, 240–1 Chilcot evidence  257–9 Al-Qaeda  213, 227–8, 268 Al-Rawi, Bisher  189 Amnesty International  15 Anderson, David (later Lord)  219 Andrew, Christopher  xi, 182 arms sales  292–4, 298 Armstrong, John  xv Armstrong, Sir Robert (later Lord)  4, 81, 99–100, 209–10, 219 Armstrong, Sir William  104 Army, British  10, 16, 40–1, 51, 54–6, 60–1, 64, 95, 101, 110, 112, 148, 150, 157, 187, 198–9, 263–4, 271–6, 281–2, 284, 287–8, 304, 307 Ascension Island  74, 168 Astor, David  36 Atomic Weapons Establishment  284

Attlee, Clement  127, 130 Auden, WH  152, 195 BAE Systems  55, 61, 286, 295–9 Baha Mousa  274 Bahrain  299 Bancroft, Sir Ian (later Lord)  91 El-Banna, Jamil  189 Barry, Brigadier Ben  264 Batang Kali (Malaya)  148 Baxendale, Presiley  95 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)  14, 38, 40, 46–7, 51, 53, 56, 67, 101, 109, 116, 136, 138, 176, 190 Hutton Inquiry  19–23 Belgium  76 Belgrano, The General  46 Belhaj, Abdel Hakim  15, 241–2, 247–9 Berlin, Isaiah  152 Bethell, Lord  126 Bettaney, Michael  210–12 Biafra  125 Binney, Bill (NSA)  302 Binyam Mohamed  137, 239 Black, Ian  147 Blair, Tony  108–9 Chilcot evidence  256, 266 David Kelly  101 Freedom of Information Act  7, 131–2 Gaddafi  15, 112 Guardian  18 invasion of Iraq  9, 18, 49, 129, 226, 229–32, 255, 257, 266–8 military intervention  51, 55, 59–60 rendition  246–7

Index Trident  288 Whitehall  108 Blake, George  199–208 Bletchley Park  105, 115–16, 166–7, 169, 175, 198 Blunt, Anthony  194, 196–9, 206 Bond, James  165–6 Bosnia  39 Bourke, Sean  202 Bowen, Lucy  274 Boyce, Admiral Sir Michael (later Lord)  230, 263–4, 271 BP  73, 111–12, 245, 299 Braithwaite, Sir Rodric  163, 172, 290 Brandt, Willy  83 Bremer, Paul  271 Brexit  3, 11, 30, 69–71, 74, 76, 78, 80–1, 85–90, 110, 113, 255, 287, 310–11 Bridges, Lord  31–2 Bright, Martin  133, British American Security Information Council (BASIC)  290 Bronowski, Jacob  152 Brown, George  75 Brown, Gordon  61 Browne, Des (Later Lord)  58 Browne-Wilkinson, Lord Nicholas  301–2 Brussels  xiv, 69–90 Bunyan, Tony  ix Burgess, Guy  36, 152, 194–7 Burridge, Air Marshal Sir Brian  53, 175, 272 Bush, George  19 Butler, Brigadier Ed  58 Butler, Sir Robin (later Lord)  95–6, 229 Blair  108 review into use of intelligence  227, 230 Cairncross, John  196–8 Callaghan, James  32, 127 Cambridge Spy Ring  124, 152, 155, 194 Stalin  175 Cameron, David  61–2, 164, 237, 257 Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT)  15

325

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND)  177, 179–80 Campbell, Alastair  18–19, 50, 256–7 Campbell, Duncan (former Guardian journalist)  ix, 15 Campbell, Duncan (freelance journalist)  116, 132 Campbell, Menzies (later Lord)  18 Canterbury, King’s School  xvi Carrington, Lord  154, 307 Carter, General Sir Nicholas  304 Casement, Sir Roger  155 Cavendish, Anthony  125 Chagos Islands, see Diego Garcia Chaplin, Charlie  151 Chevaline nuclear missile project  130 Chilcot, Sir John and Inquiry  230, 255–70 Childers, Erskine  118 China  74, 200, 204, 241–2, 287, 291, 293, 305, 309, 311 Chindits  304 Chinook, Mull of Kintyre crash and inquiry  282–3 Churchill, Clarissa  195 Churchill, Winston  4, 154 CIA  225, 232, 235–6 Clark, General Wesley  50 Cobain, Ian  ix, 15, 135 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  117 College of Europe  xv, xviii Colville, John  109 Connolly, Cyril  152 Cook, Robin  18, 275 Cooper, Sir Frank  45 Corbyn, Jeremy  117, 177 Crabbe, Commander Lionel  195 Crete  175 Crider, Cori  ix Crossman, Richard  119 Crown Prosecution Service (CPS)  246–7 Crozier, Brian  181 Cumming, Sir Mansfield  120–1 Curveball  228 cyberspace  302, 307 Cyprus  169

326 Dacre (Lord, formerly Hugh TrevorRoper)  126, 173 Daghir, Ali  99 Dahrendorf, Ralf  109 Daily Express  39 Daily Mail  11, 30, 39, 49, 56, 118, 144, 178 Daily Mirror  39, 178 Daily Telegraph  3, 11, 24, 39, 45, 51, 62, 78, 87, 124, 177 Dalyell, Tam (MP)  18, 46, 92 Dannatt, General Sir Richard (later Lord)  16, 55–6 Danny Boy, battle of  274–5 data hoarding  301, 303 Davies, Nick  182 Dearlove, Sir Richard  8, 87, 177, 245, 258, 261 Deepcut barracks  276 Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee  64–8 de la Billière, General Sir Peter  4 Delors, Jacques  85 Denman, Sir Roy  82, 84 Denmark  78 Deutsch, Arnold  36 De Waal, James  62 Diego Garcia  143–4, 236–7, 308 Polaris/US base deal  144 Douglas-Home, Sir Alec  70 Downing Street memos  229–30 Dromey, Jack  179 drones  4, 104, 106, 139, 304, 306 Dunk, Reginald  99 Echelon spy network  74 Eden, Sir Anthony  146–7, 200, 310 Elliott, Nicholas  181, 194 Elwell, Charles  178–9 Eurofighter/Typhoon  278, 281, 294, 297–8 Europe  3, 69–70, 73–4, 76, 79–80, 82–9, 173 1975 referendum  3, 84 European Court of Human Rights  7, 77, 186, 215, 276

Index European institutions  x, 31–2, 71–3, 76–81 leaks  80–1 Evans, Rob  ix, 14, 141 Fairlie, Henry  195 Falklands  45–7, 173, 307 Finucane, Pat  185 Five Eyes intelligence allies  74 Fletcher, Yvonne  137, 156 Foley, Maurice  72 Foot, Michael  177 Forbes, Sir Thayne  274 Foreign Office (FO) Brussels  86 files in National Archives  146–51 files withheld  149–50 Information Research Department  39–40 Forster, EM  195 Fox, Liam  191 Frankel, Maurice  ix, 119, 132, 139 Freedman, Sir Lawrence  47 Freedom of Information (FoI) Act  131, 138, 140 Freud, Lucian  152 Fuchs, Klaus  127, 130, 151 Gaddafi, Muammar  6, 15, 39, 61–2, 112, 133, 137, 213, 236, 240–7, 253, 299, 300 Gage, Sir William  274 Gambia  189 Garbo (Juan Pujol)  151 Geneva Conventions  230, 237, 274 Geraghty, Tony  132 Gibraltar  308 Gibson, Lord (detainee inquiry)  235 Gillan, Audrey  54 Gilligan, Andrew  19–22, 101 Goldsmith, Lord  230, 295 Golitsyn, Anatoli, xvii Gordievsly, Oleg  159, 176–7, 209–10 Gore-Booth, Sir David  95–7, 174 Gove, Michael  232 Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)  xii, 221–3

Index computer capacity  302 data  222–3 ‘information operations’ 40 leak of internal staff manual  128 media  23 origins, staff, budget and tasks  167–70 scrutiny  8, 215, 218–9, 223 targets  182 trade union ban  136, 182–4 Yvonne Fletcher case  127 Gow, David  ix Gowing, Margaret  154 Grecian, Paul  99 Greene, Graham  173, 193 Greengrass, Paul  124 Greenhill, Sir Dennis (later Lord)  80-1 Greenstock, Sir Jeremy  288–9 Grieve, Dominic  141, 218, 251 Griffin, Ben  136, 238 Grindley, Mike  184 Guantanamo Bay, see rendition Guardian  ix–xii, xiv, xix, 8, 14, 17–18, 22–9, 31, 37, 39, 41–2, 44–6, 48–54, 57–8, 65, 71, 76–7, 79–80, 83, 122, 124, 126–7, 133–7, 141, 147, 150–1, 155, 180, 182, 215–16, 218, 220, 226–8, 232, 236, 256, 285, 294 Gulf States  294 Gun, Katharine  128 Guthrie, Field Marshal Sir Charles (later Lord)  49, 174–5 Haggarty, Gary  185 Halabja  97 Hamilton, Neil  26 Hancock, Sir David  93–4 Harman, Harriet  179 Hastings, Sir Max  46, 175–6 Hattenstone, Simon  ix Hattersley, Roy  121 Healey, Denis  183 Heath, Edward  81–3, 169, 178 Helm, Sarah  78 Helmand (Afghanistan)  8, 59–60 Henderson, Sir Nicholas  86 Hennessy, Peter (later Lord)  289

327

Herman, Michael  xix, 210 Hertford College, Oxford  xv, xviii Heseltine, Michael (later Lord)  26, 91, 147 Hess, Rudolf  145, 159 Hetherington, Alastair  23–4, 83 Hewitt, Patricia  179 Heywood, Sir Jeremy (later Lord)  138 Hibbert, Reginald  173 HMS Endurance  45 Hollingworth, Clare  23, 24 Hollis, Sir Roger  123 Hong Kong  156, 168, 212, 242 Hoon, Geoff  54–5, 264 Houghton, General Sir Nicholas (now Lord)  63, 289, 304 Howe, Sir Geoffrey  85–6, 97, 174 Huawei  112 Human Rights Act  272–3, 275 Hurd, Douglas  10, 39, 174 Hussein, Saddam  5, 265, 273, 300 Kurds and Marsh Arabs  48 Hutton, John (later Lord)  238 Ingham, Sir Bernard  14, 31, 69–70 Inkster, Nigel  87, 138 inquiries, public  5, 107 Intelligence agencies  2, 171–82 Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC)  164–5, 237, 250–2 Intelligence Services Act  72–3, 165, 167 Investigatory Powers Tribunal  164, 222 Irish Republican Army (IRA)  96 Ireland  80, 125 Jackson, General Sir Mike  50–1 Jeffrey, Keith  194 Johnson, Boris  3, 78, 108 Johnson, Paul  27 Johnston, Hewlett (the ‘Red Dean’)  xvi Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC)  175, 210, 226 journalism leaks  30–3 Whitehall  16–7 Justice and Security Act  134–5

328 Kane, Jock  156, 212 Kearns, Sir Freddie  82, 84 Kelly, David  19 Kent, Nicolas  xii, 231 Keogh, David  128 Kershaw, Sir Anthony  92 Keynes Maynard  195 KGB  209 King, Cecil  181 Klugmann, James  197 Kurds  97 Laity, Mark  21–2, 57 Lambert, John  xviii–xix, 89 Lander, Sir Stephen  44, 178, 184, 195 Lansley, Andrew  139 Law Commission  140 Lawrence, DH  155–6 Lawson, Dominic  37–8 Le Carré, John  14, 35, 174 Leigh, David  ix, 39 Leigh Day  ix, 14 Lennon, John  179 Lessing, Doris  152 Lewis, Simon  139 Liberty, (formerly National Council for Civil Liberties)  15, 179 al-Libi  239 Libya  10, 14–16, 61–2, 65, 133, 157, 240–6, 252–3, 277–8, 299 Lloyd, Mark  120 Logan, Donald  147 Lownie, Andrew  158 Lowry, David  ix Lucas, Caroline  303 Luxembourg  82 Lyne, Sir Rodric  258, 260, 263 McColl, Sir Colin  126 MacDermot, Niall  181 Macdonald, Ian  47 Machon, Annie  182, 213 Mackay, Brigadier Andrew  58 Mackenzie, Compton  119–21 McLaughlin, Steve  273

Index Maclean, Donald  193–8 Macmillan, Harold  173, 200, 202, 290 Magna Carta  248 Mail on Sunday  213 Major, Sir John  218 Malik, Sapna  ix Mandelson, Peter (later Lord)  179 Manningham-Buller, Dame (later Baroness) Eliza  44, 178, 184, 190, 211, 246 Europe  87 Iraq  9, 225, 231, 262–3 terrorism  219–20 torture  240, 253 Markham, Felix  xv, xvii–xviii Marlowe, Christopher  xvi, 117 Martin, Mike  60 Marychurch, Sir Peter  115–16 Massiter, Cathy  211 Matrix Churchill  xi, xii, 5, 98, 208 Maugham, Somerset  xvi–xvii, 173, 195 Mau Mau  147 May, Theresa  3 Mayes, Ian  ix Mellor, David  174 Menwith Hill  168 Mercer, Lt Col Christopher  273 Middle East, demographic trends  309–10 MI5 (the Security Service)  xii data  222–3 George Blake  203, 208 headquarters and budget  170–1 invasion of Iraq  227 journalists  41–5 Northern Ireland  184–8 regional offices  189 scrutiny  8, 215 staff  164–5 targets ‘subversives’ 178–82 terrorism  188–9 MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service)  xii Afghanistan  262 Africa  190 Brexit  87 Brussels  xiv, 71–4 Carlton Gardens  xvii–xviii

Index Chilcot evidence  260–1 Congo  189 files in National Archives  149–54 George Blake  208 headquarters and budget  170–1 invasion of Iraq  227 Iraq invasion  52 journalists  35–45 Middle East  190–1 1994 Intelligence Services Act  73 Northern Ireland  187 scrutiny  8, 215 staff  165–7 Miliband, David  237, 239–40 military operations, cost  279 Miller, Joan  125 Miller, Judith  226 Milne, Seumas  180 Milner-Barry, Sir Stuart  115–16 Milner Court  xvi Ministry of Defence budget  284 Chilcot evidence  263, 265 Chilcot Inquiry  9 equipment failures  280–4 future strategic trends  308–9 journalists  45–68 outing of David Kelly  19–22, 101 targeting  104–5 Mitchell, Sir Derek  83 Moore, Jo  93 Mossadegh, Mohammad  139–40, 190 Mottram, Sir Richard  91–3 Mountbatten, Lord  181 Moussa Koussa  15, 240 Muggeridge, Malcolm  174 Murdoch, Iris  152 Nairne, Sir Patrick  94 National Archives (The)  ix, 6, 143–61, 195 National Audit Office (NA0)  ix, 171 National Security Agency (US)  169 National Union of Mineworkers (NUM)  180

329

NATO Balkans War  48–51 Brussels HQ  74–6 Navy, Royal  xv, 10, 45, 54–5, 61, 112, 118, 167, 279, 281, 284–8, 290, 305 Neave, Airey  41 Nelson, Brian  157, 185 new weapons systems  305 Nicolson, Harold  155 Nimrod aircraft  280–1 Northern Ireland  xii, 19, 36, 40–1, 77, 94, 106–7, 132, 157–8, 184, 187, 211, 265, 272–3, 276–7, 282, 308, 317 n.3 Norton-Taylor, Duncan  xviii Norton-Taylor, Richard, father  xv Grandfather  xvi nuclear weapons  10, 130–1, 144, 154, 285, 287–92, 310 Nunn May  127 Oatley, Michael  187 Observer  13, 24, 36–7, 39, 48, 52–3, 122, 195, 203, 213 O’Connor, Leo  128 O’Donnell, Sir Gus (now Lord)  256 official history  157–8 Official Secrets Act  118–19, 121, 127–9, 132, 164 Oldfield, Sir Maurice  41, 72, 184 Oman  156–7, 190–1, 294, 299 Omand, Sir David  87, 260 Operation Ryan  209 Owen, David (now Lord)  40 Oxford University  xv Palliser, Sir Michael  32, 86 Palmer, John  ix Papworth, John  202 Park, Daphne (Later Baroness)  189–90 Part, Sir Anthony  103 Pasquill, Derek  230 Patten, John  121 Peart, Fred  84 Peirce, Gareth  ix

330

Index

Penkovsky, Oleg  210 Percy, Lindis  168 Petrie, Sir David  302 Philby, Kim  193–6 Pick, Hella  ix, 76 Pincher, Chapman  32–3, 123, 126 Pontecorvo, Brunio  127 Ponting, Clive  46, 92, 122 Pottle, Pat  202–8 Pottle, Sue  204 Powell, Anthony  91, 93 Powell, Jonathan  108, 256, 311 Powell, Sir Charles (later Lord)  85 Preston, Peter  ix, 24–8 Prime, Geoffrey  212 Prince Charles  15, 141, 244 Prince Harry  16 Princess Diana  27–8 Private Eye  139, 197 Privy Council  117 Public Records Act  6–7, 145, 157 digital records review  160–1 Qatada, Abu  188–9 Quinlan, Sir Michael  230–1 RAF  60, 62, 100, 130, 150, 167–8, 278, 280–4, 286, 294 RAF Croughton  168 RAF Typhoon/Eurofighter  281, 295, 298 Randle, Michael  202–8 Rees, Goronwy  155, 197 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA)  220 Reid, John now Lord  56 rendition operations  232–53 Reprieve  ix, 15, 306 Richards, General Sir (later Lord)  10, 51, 56–8, 62, 67, 287 Rifkind, Sir Malcolm  182, 237 Rigby, Fusilier Lee  223 Rimington, Dame Stella  44, 67, 178, 180, 219 Rippon, Geoffrey  82 Roberts, Sir Ivor  49, 231–2 Robertson, Geoffrey  ix, 208

Robertson, George (later Lord)  49 Rogers, Sir Ivan  86 Rothermere, Lord  144–5 Rothschild, Victor  124, 155, 195 Royal Family files in archives  153, 159–60 Rules restaurant  35 Rumsfeld, Donald  272–3 Rusbridger, Alan  ix, 15, 27–9, 215–16 Russia  24, 33, 51, 63, 71, 74, 77, 149, 173, 175, 195, 198–9, 201, 205, 208–10, 212–14, 291, 293, 305, 309, 311 Al-Saadi, Sami  15, 242–3, 247 Sands, Philippe  230 Sangin  277 SAS, SBS, see special forces Saudi Arabia  294–8 Sawers, Sir John  44, 112, 252 Scappaticci, Freddie  185 Scargill, Arthur  180 Scarlett, Sir John  8, 21, 87, 175, 226–8, 267 Scott, Sir Richard (later Lord), arms-toIraq Inquiry  95–9, 128–9 Security Service Act  7, 164, 180 Sedwill Mark (later Sir)  192 Sellafield, see Windscale Shayler, David  133, 212–13 Shepherd, Richard, MP  18, 26 Shirreff, General Sir Richard  63, 265 Sierra Leone  51–2 Simpson, Emile  60, 304–4, 307 Sixsmith, Martin  93 Smith, Andrew  ix Smith, General Sir Rupert  278 Snatch Land Rovers  277 Snowden, Edward  8, 169, 221 Sorge, Richard  175 Southey, Robert  117 Special branch  203 special forces  2, 65–6, 170 Falklands  46 First Gulf War  48 Iraq and Afghanistan  237–8 Spectator magazine  37–8 Spender, Stephen  39, 152, 195

Index Spycatcher  6, 122–5 Stafford Smith, Clive  ix Stanhope, Sir Mark, First Sea Lord  62 Statewatch  ix Stone, Dr Richard  107 Strachan, Sir Huw  63 Straight, Michael  195 Strasbourg  76 Straw, Jack  9, 179 and rendition operations  13, 15, 218, 236, 250–1 Suez crisis  104 Sun  11, 30, 45–6, 51, 66, 204 Sunday Telegraph  125 Sunday Times  14, 36, 39, 136, 177, 203, 211, 214, 229, 245 Al-Sweady inquiry  274 Talleyrand, Charles  103 Taylor, AJP  152 Tebbit, Sir Kevin  67, 101 terrorism  220, 223, 302–3 Thatcher, Margaret (later Baroness)  3, 70, 84–5, 156, 297 Thatcher, Mark  156 Thesiger, Wilfred  187, 191 Thomas, Mark  67 Tisdall, Sarah  24–6 Tolstoy, Nicolai  150–1 Tomalin, Nicholas  14 Tomlinson, Richard  73, 213–14 torture  xiii, 6, 9, 13–15, 18, 44, 94, 135, 137, 147–8, 185, 188, 202, 215, 218, 230–40, 242–3, 248–9, 251–3, 274, 299 Toynbee, Philip  152 Travellers Club  xix, 15, 37, 190, 194 Trend, Sir Burke  198 Trevor-Roper, Hugh (see Dacre, Lord) Tricycle Theatre  xii, 231 Trident, see nuclear weapons Tugendhat, Tom  275 Turnbull, Malcolm  124 United Nations  248, 264 United States  1, 8–9, 23, 28, 33, 42, 48, 58–9, 73–4, 82, 106, 108, 139–40,

331 143–4, 153, 155, 168, 181–3, 190–1, 198, 209, 220, 229–30, 232, 234, 248–9, 285, 288, 290–1, 293–4, 296, 302, 305, 309–11 special relationship  169, 311

Vaz, Keith  215 Verrier, Anthony  187, 190 Vulliamy, Ed  ix, 37 Wallace, Colin  40–1 Waller, Sir Mark  164, 216–17 Wang Yam  133–4 Warnock, Mary  152 Waterloo  79 Waugh, Evelyn  35, 313 n.1 Weidenfeld, George (later Lord)  152 Welchman, Gordon  115 West, Admiral Lord  112 White, Sir Dick  126 Whitehall acronyms  104–6 Brexit  11, 113 IT  109–11 Whitmore, Sir Clive  92, 164 WikiLeaks  33, 136–7, 144 Wilding, Richard  103 Wilkinson, Rear Admiral Nicholas  66–7 Williams, Gareth  214 Wilmshurst, Elizabeth  8, 104 Wilson, Harold  3, 83, 130, 144, 181–2, 198 Windscale (later Sellafield)  4 Wodehouse, PG  151 Woollacott, Martin  48 Wren, Simon  54 Wright, Peter  180–1, see also Spycatcher Wylde, Nigel  132 Al-Yamamah  295–7 Yemen (British bombing)  294 Younger, (later Sir) Alex  165–6 Zinoviev Letter  177–8 Zircon satellite  116 Zuckerman, Solly  154

332