The State of Secrecy

ii
The State of Secrecy
Spies and the Media in Britain

Richard Norton-Taylor
 I.B. TAURIS
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‘Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse
in a free and open encounter?’ – John Milton, Areopagitica
vi
 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

I 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

I 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.
x Acknowledgements

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

M 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 long-
running 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.
xii Preface

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
 Preface xiii

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.’

T 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.
 Prologue xv

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’,
xvi Prologue

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-year-
old 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.
 Prologue xvii

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.
xviii Prologue

‘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
 Prologue xix

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.
xx
 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
2 The State of Secrecy

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 whistle-
blowers 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
 Introduction 3

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
4 The State of Secrecy

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.
 Introduction 5

Whitehall’s black arts were spectacularly exposed during the Scott arms-to-
Iraq 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 whistle-
blowers, 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
6 The State of Secrecy

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.
8 The State of Secrecy

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.
10 The State of Secrecy

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.
14 The State of Secrecy

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 self-
deprecating 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,
 Heroes and Hacks 15

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 tit-
bits 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’.
16 The State of Secrecy

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 17

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.
 Heroes and Hacks 21

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’.
22 The State of Secrecy

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.
 Heroes and Hacks 23

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
24 The State of Secrecy

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
 Heroes and Hacks 25

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,
26 The State of Secrecy

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
 Heroes and Hacks 27

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.
28 The State of Secrecy

‘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
 Heroes and Hacks 29

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
30 The State of Secrecy

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
 Heroes and Hacks 31

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.
32 The State of Secrecy

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: ‘Norton-
Taylor 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
 Heroes and Hacks 33

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.
34
 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.
36 The State of Secrecy

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’.
 Poachers and Gamekeepers 37

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.
38 The State of Secrecy

An unpublished draft in the National Archives at Kew of an official

history of the D Notice Committee, which runs a system of voluntary self-
censorship 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
 Poachers and Gamekeepers 39

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’.
40 The State of Secrecy

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
 Poachers and Gamekeepers 41

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
42 The State of Secrecy

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,
 Poachers and Gamekeepers 43

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
44 The State of Secrecy

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
 Poachers and Gamekeepers 45

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.
46 The State of Secrecy

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
 Poachers and Gamekeepers 47

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.
48 The State of Secrecy

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
 Poachers and Gamekeepers 49

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
50 The State of Secrecy

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 Cordy-
Simpson, 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.
 Poachers and Gamekeepers 51

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
52 The State of Secrecy

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
 Poachers and Gamekeepers 53

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.
54 The State of Secrecy

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
 Poachers and Gamekeepers 55

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 counter-
productive. But they were the consequence of excessive official secrecy, of the
56 The State of Secrecy

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,
 Poachers and Gamekeepers 57

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-the-
record, 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.’
58 The State of Secrecy

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 oft-
repeated 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,
 Poachers and Gamekeepers 59

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 spin-
doctors 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
60 The State of Secrecy

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,
 Poachers and Gamekeepers 61

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
62 The State of Secrecy

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.
 Poachers and Gamekeepers 63

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
64 The State of Secrecy

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
 Poachers and Gamekeepers 65

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’.
66 The State of Secrecy

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’.
 Poachers and Gamekeepers 67

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 counter-
productive. ‘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
68 The State of Secrecy

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’.
70 The State of Secrecy

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 short-
term 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
 Brussels, City of Myths and Contradictions 71

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
72 The State of Secrecy

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
 Brussels, City of Myths and Contradictions 73

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 Rolls-
Royce 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
74 The State of Secrecy

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 ‘Anglo-
Saxon 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
 Brussels, City of Myths and Contradictions 75

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
76 The State of Secrecy

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
 Brussels, City of Myths and Contradictions 77

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,
78 The State of Secrecy

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
 Brussels, City of Myths and Contradictions 79

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.
80 The State of Secrecy

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
 Brussels, City of Myths and Contradictions 81

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.
82 The State of Secrecy

That was the way Heath celebrated what he regarded as his biggest achieve-
ment. 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.
 Brussels, City of Myths and Contradictions 83

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
84 The State of Secrecy

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 bad-
tempered 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
 Brussels, City of Myths and Contradictions 85

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 co-
operation 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
86 The State of Secrecy

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 ground-
level 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
 Brussels, City of Myths and Contradictions 87

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 anti-
terrorist 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.
88 The State of Secrecy

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
 Brussels, City of Myths and Contradictions 89

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
90 The State of Secrecy

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.
92 The State of Secrecy

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’.
 The Culture and Language of Secrecy 93

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,
94 The State of Secrecy

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
 The Culture and Language of Secrecy 95

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,
96 The State of Secrecy

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
 The Culture and Language of Secrecy 97

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
98 The State of Secrecy

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
 The Culture and Language of Secrecy 99

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
100 The State of Secrecy

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.
 The Culture and Language of Secrecy 101

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
102 The State of Secrecy

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 time-
honoured 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.
 The Culture and Language of Secrecy 103

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
104 The State of Secrecy

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 AGM-
114N Hellfire missile, have been fired from British and American Apache
helicopters in Afghanistan. The warhead, a mixture of chemicals and a high-
pressure blast system, is described by the Pentagon as ‘more effective’ against
 The Culture and Language of Secrecy 105

‘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.
106 The State of Secrecy

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 Gore-
Booth, 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
 The Culture and Language of Secrecy 107

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
108 The State of Secrecy

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
 The Culture and Language of Secrecy 109

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
110 The State of Secrecy

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,
 The Culture and Language of Secrecy 111

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.
112 The State of Secrecy

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
 The Culture and Language of Secrecy 113

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.
114
 5
Secrecy obsessed

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 Milner-
Barry, 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
116 The State of Secrecy

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
 Secrecy Obsessed 117

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 still-
unexplained 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.
118 The State of Secrecy

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
 Secrecy Obsessed 119

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.
120 The State of Secrecy

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
 Secrecy Obsessed 121

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
122 The State of Secrecy

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 non-
custodial 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 ‘catch-
all’ 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
 Secrecy Obsessed 123

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.
124 The State of Secrecy

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
 Secrecy Obsessed 125

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.’
126 The State of Secrecy

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 Norton-
Taylor 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
 Secrecy Obsessed 127

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.
128 The State of Secrecy

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 whistle-
blower, 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
 Secrecy Obsessed 129

George Bush and Tony Blair in April 2004, a time of growing violence in post-
invasion 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
130 The State of Secrecy

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 post-
war 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
 Secrecy Obsessed 131

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.
132 The State of Secrecy

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
 Secrecy Obsessed 133

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
134 The State of Secrecy

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
 Secrecy Obsessed 135

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,
136 The State of Secrecy

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
 Secrecy Obsessed 137

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 intelligence-
sharing 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
138 The State of Secrecy

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
 Secrecy Obsessed 139

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
140 The State of Secrecy

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.
 Secrecy Obsessed 141

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.
142
 6
History is an official secret

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
144 The State of Secrecy

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
 History Is an Official Secret 145

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
146 The State of Secrecy

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
 History Is an Official Secret 147

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 post-
independence 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
148 The State of Secrecy

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
 History Is an Official Secret 149

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
150 The State of Secrecy

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
 History Is an Official Secret 151

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 ’twenty-
year 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.
152 The State of Secrecy

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
 History Is an Official Secret 153

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’.
154 The State of Secrecy

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
 History Is an Official Secret 155

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
156 The State of Secrecy

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 Joynson-
Hicks (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
 History Is an Official Secret 157

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 twenty-
eight 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
158 The State of Secrecy

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.
 History Is an Official Secret 159

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’
160 The State of Secrecy

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
 History Is an Official Secret 161

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.
162
 7
Spies: Their uses and
abuses

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
164 The State of Secrecy

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,
 Spies: Their Uses and Abuses 165

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.
166 The State of Secrecy

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 cyanide-
coated 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.
 Spies: Their Uses and Abuses 167

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
168 The State of Secrecy

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 one-
sided. 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
 Spies: Their Uses and Abuses 169

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 fibre-
optic 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
170 The State of Secrecy

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
 Spies: Their Uses and Abuses 171

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’ –
172 The State of Secrecy

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.
 Spies: Their Uses and Abuses 173

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
174 The State of Secrecy

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,
 Spies: Their Uses and Abuses 175

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
176 The State of Secrecy

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
 Spies: Their Uses and Abuses 177

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,
178 The State of Secrecy

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
 Spies: Their Uses and Abuses 179

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.
180 The State of Secrecy

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
 Spies: Their Uses and Abuses 181

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.
182 The State of Secrecy

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 Tacchi-
Morris, 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
 Spies: Their Uses and Abuses 183

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 face-
saving 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
184 The State of Secrecy

‘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 single-
issue campaigns like the CND, that it was slow to appreciate the real threat to
national security from Northern Ireland, as both Lander and Manningham-
Buller 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 –
 Spies: Their Uses and Abuses 185

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
186 The State of Secrecy

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.
 Spies: Their Uses and Abuses 187

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
188 The State of Secrecy

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 counter-
productive 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’.
 Spies: Their Uses and Abuses 189

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 intelligence-
gathering 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
190 The State of Secrecy

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
 Spies: Their Uses and Abuses 191

favour of his Sandhurst-educated son, Qaboos, who was still in power forty-
seven 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
192 The State of Secrecy

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
194 The State of Secrecy

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); Eton-
educated 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.
 Spies: More Uses and Abuses 195

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
196 The State of Secrecy

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.’
 Spies: More Uses and Abuses 197

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
198 The State of Secrecy

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,
 Spies: More Uses and Abuses 199

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
200 The State of Secrecy

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
 Spies: More Uses and Abuses 201

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
202 The State of Secrecy

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 French-
born wife, Marcelle. In an extraordinary episode in what was already an
 Spies: More Uses and Abuses 203

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
204 The State of Secrecy

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 twenty-
four 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
 Spies: More Uses and Abuses 205

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
206 The State of Secrecy

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 two-
week trial was relevant, nor were the motivations of the two men on trial. He
 Spies: More Uses and Abuses 207

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
208 The State of Secrecy

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
 Spies: More Uses and Abuses 209

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
210 The State of Secrecy

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,
 Spies: More Uses and Abuses 211

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.
212 The State of Secrecy

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
 Spies: More Uses and Abuses 213

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
214 The State of Secrecy

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.
 Spies: More Uses and Abuses 215

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?’
216 The State of Secrecy

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.
 Spies: More Uses and Abuses 217

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
218 The State of Secrecy

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
 Spies: More Uses and Abuses 219

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
220 The State of Secrecy

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
 Spies: More Uses and Abuses 221

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.
222 The State of Secrecy

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
 Spies: More Uses and Abuses 223

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.
224
 9
Provoking terror

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
226 The State of Secrecy

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
 Provoking Terror 227

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
228 The State of Secrecy

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
 Provoking Terror 229

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
230 The State of Secrecy

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
 Provoking Terror 231

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-
232 The State of Secrecy

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:
 Provoking Terror 233

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],
●● 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.
●● 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.’
234 The State of Secrecy

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
 Provoking Terror 235

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
236 The State of Secrecy

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.’
 Provoking Terror 237

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 British-
based 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
238 The State of Secrecy

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
 Provoking Terror 239

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 ill-
treatment. The judges dismissed claims by Labour’s Foreign Secretary, David
240 The State of Secrecy

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, Manningham-
Buller 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.
 Provoking Terror 241

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
242 The State of Secrecy

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:
 Provoking Terror 243

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
244 The State of Secrecy

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 ...
 Provoking Terror 245

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.
246 The State of Secrecy

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],
 Provoking Terror 247

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
248 The State of Secrecy

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
 Provoking Terror 249

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. (Al-
Saadi 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
250 The State of Secrecy

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
 Provoking Terror 251

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)
252 The State of Secrecy

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
 Provoking Terror 253

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.
254
 10
Chilcot redux

‘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.
256 The State of Secrecy

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
 Chilcot Redux 257

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
258 The State of Secrecy

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
 Chilcot Redux 259

‘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
260 The State of Secrecy

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.
 Chilcot Redux 261

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.
262 The State of Secrecy

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.
 Chilcot Redux 263

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
264 The State of Secrecy

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
 Chilcot Redux 265

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.
266 The State of Secrecy

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.
●● Despite explicit warnings, the consequences of the invasion were
underestimated. The planning and preparations for Iraq after Saddam
Hussein were wholly inadequate.
●● 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
 Chilcot Redux 267

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 mid-
January 2003. Chilcot said: ‘There was little time to prepare three brigades
268 The State of Secrecy

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
 Chilcot Redux 269

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.

●● The strategy of containment could have been adapted and continued
for some time.
●● 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
270 The State of Secrecy

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 post-
conflict 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
272 The State of Secrecy

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
 Defending the Past 273

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.
274 The State of Secrecy

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
 Defending the Past 275

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,
276 The State of Secrecy

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.
 Defending the Past 277

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.
278 The State of Secrecy

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
 Defending the Past 279

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.
280 The State of Secrecy

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.
●● 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.
●● 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
 Defending the Past 281

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

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.’
●● 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.
●● Watchkeeper reconnaissance drones costing £1.2 billion had still not
entered full service twelve years after they were ordered.
●● 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 twenty-
five 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’.
 Defending the Past 283

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’.
284 The State of Secrecy

●● 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
 Defending the Past 285

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
286 The State of Secrecy

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 precision-
strike 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
 Defending the Past 287

“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
288 The State of Secrecy

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 thirty-
year 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 … non-
existent 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
 Defending the Past 289

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 Corbyn-
led 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
290 The State of Secrecy

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
 Defending the Past 291

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
292 The State of Secrecy

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
 Defending the Past 293

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.
294 The State of Secrecy

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.
 Defending the Past 295

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 anti-
government 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 forty-
eight 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
296 The State of Secrecy

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
 Defending the Past 297

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.
298 The State of Secrecy

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 rules-
based 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).
 Defending the Past 299

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.
300 The State of Secrecy

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.
 12
Defending the future

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.
302 The State of Secrecy

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.
 Defending the Future 303

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 ever-
increasing powers.
304 The State of Secrecy

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
 Defending the Future 305

‘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.
306 The State of Secrecy

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
 Defending the Future 307

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
308 The State of Secrecy

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.
●● More than 70 per cent of the population is likely to live in urban areas.
 Defending the Future 309

●● 3.9 billion people are likely to suffer water shortages.

●● Driverless transport is likely to be widespread.
●● Unmanned systems are increasingly likely to replace people in the
workplace, leading to mass unemployment and social unrest.
●● Robots are likely to change the face of warfare, but ‘military decision-
making is likely to remain the remit of humans for ethical reasons, at
least in Western countries’.
●● Individuals may define themselves less by their nationality, with
growing migration and stronger links to virtual communities.
●● 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
310 The State of Secrecy

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.
 Defending the Future 311

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
312 The State of Secrecy

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.
314 Notes

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.
 Notes 315

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​s-
treatmen​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-​under-
thre​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/
 Notes 317

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​ing-
edward​

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​er-
go​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​
 Notes 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-report-
intelligence-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).
322 Notes

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.
 Notes 323

6 Houghton https​://ww​w.gov​.uk/g​overn​ment/​speec​hes/b​uildi​ng-a-​briti​sh-mi​litar​y-
fit​-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​ct-
ho​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​279-
P​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 325

Trident  288 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

Whitehall  108 (CND)  177, 179–80
Blake, George  199–208 Campbell, Alastair  18–19, 50, 256–7
Bletchley Park  105, 115–16, 166–7, 169, Campbell, Duncan (former Guardian
175, 198 journalist)  ix, 15
Blunt, Anthony  194, 196–9, 206 Campbell, Duncan (freelance journalist) 
Bond, James  165–6 116, 132
Bosnia  39 Campbell, Menzies (later Lord)  18
Bourke, Sean  202 Canterbury, King’s School  xvi
Bowen, Lucy  274 Carrington, Lord  154, 307
Boyce, Admiral Sir Michael (later Carter, General Sir Nicholas  304
Lord)  230, 263–4, 271 Casement, Sir Roger  155
BP  73, 111–12, 245, 299 Cavendish, Anthony  125
Braithwaite, Sir Rodric  163, 172, 290 Chagos Islands, see Diego Garcia
Brandt, Willy  83 Chaplin, Charlie  151
Bremer, Paul  271 Chevaline nuclear missile project  130
Brexit  3, 11, 30, 69–71, 74, 76, 78, 80–1, Chilcot, Sir John and
85–90, 110, 113, 255, 287, 310–11 Inquiry  230, 255–70
Bridges, Lord  31–2 Childers, Erskine  118
Bright, Martin  133, China  74, 200, 204, 241–2, 287, 291, 293,
British American Security Information 305, 309, 311
Council (BASIC)  290 Chindits  304
Bronowski, Jacob  152 Chinook, Mull of Kintyre crash and
Brown, George  75 inquiry  282–3
Brown, Gordon  61 Churchill, Clarissa  195
Browne, Des (Later Lord)  58 Churchill, Winston  4, 154
Browne-Wilkinson, Lord CIA  225, 232, 235–6
Nicholas  301–2 Clark, General Wesley  50
Brussels  xiv, 69–90 Cobain, Ian  ix, 15, 135
Bunyan, Tony  ix Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  117
Burgess, Guy  36, 152, 194–7 College of Europe  xv, xviii
Burridge, Air Marshal Sir Brian  53, Colville, John  109
175, 272 Connolly, Cyril  152
Bush, George  19 Cook, Robin  18, 275
Butler, Brigadier Ed  58 Cooper, Sir Frank  45
Butler, Sir Robin (later Lord)  95–6, 229 Corbyn, Jeremy  117, 177
Blair  108 Crabbe, Commander Lionel  195
review into use of intelligence  227, 230 Crete  175
Crider, Cori  ix
Cairncross, John  196–8 Crossman, Richard  119
Callaghan, James  32, 127 Crown Prosecution Service (CPS)  246–7
Cambridge Spy Ring  124, 152, 155, 194 Crozier, Brian  181
Stalin  175 Cumming, Sir Mansfield  120–1
Cameron, David  61–2, 164, 237, 257 Curveball  228
Campaign Against the Arms Trade cyberspace  302, 307
(CAAT)  15 Cyprus  169
326 Index

Dacre (Lord, formerly Hugh Trevor- European institutions  x, 31–2, 71–3, 76–81
Roper)  126, 173 leaks  80–1
Daghir, Ali  99 Evans, Rob  ix, 14, 141
Dahrendorf, Ralf  109
Daily Express  39 Fairlie, Henry  195
Daily Mail  11, 30, 39, 49, 56, 118, Falklands  45–7, 173, 307
144, 178 Finucane, Pat  185
Daily Mirror  39, 178 Five Eyes intelligence allies  74
Daily Telegraph  3, 11, 24, 39, 45, 51, 62, Fletcher, Yvonne  137, 156
78, 87, 124, 177 Foley, Maurice  72
Dalyell, Tam (MP)  18, 46, 92 Foot, Michael  177
Dannatt, General Sir Richard (later Forbes, Sir Thayne  274
Lord)  16, 55–6 Foreign Office (FO)
Danny Boy, battle of  274–5 Brussels  86
data hoarding  301, 303 files in National Archives  146–51
Davies, Nick  182 files withheld  149–50
Dearlove, Sir Richard  8, 87, 177, 245, Information Research
258, 261 Department  39–40
Deepcut barracks  276 Forster, EM  195
Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Fox, Liam  191
Committee  64–8 Frankel, Maurice  ix, 119, 132, 139
de la Billière, General Sir Peter  4 Freedman, Sir Lawrence  47
Delors, Jacques  85 Freedom of Information (FoI) Act  131,
Denman, Sir Roy  82, 84 138, 140
Denmark  78 Freud, Lucian  152
Deutsch, Arnold  36 Fuchs, Klaus  127, 130, 151
De Waal, James  62
Diego Garcia  143–4, 236–7, 308 Gaddafi, Muammar  6, 15, 39, 61–2, 112,
Polaris/US base deal  144 133, 137, 213, 236, 240–7, 253,
Douglas-Home, Sir Alec  70 299, 300
Downing Street memos  229–30 Gage, Sir William  274
Dromey, Jack  179 Gambia  189
drones  4, 104, 106, 139, 304, 306 Garbo (Juan Pujol)  151
Dunk, Reginald  99 Geneva Conventions  230, 237, 274
Geraghty, Tony  132
Echelon spy network  74 Gibraltar  308
Eden, Sir Anthony  146–7, 200, 310 Gibson, Lord (detainee inquiry)  235
Elliott, Nicholas  181, 194 Gillan, Audrey  54
Elwell, Charles  178–9 Gilligan, Andrew  19–22, 101
Eurofighter/Typhoon  278, 281, Goldsmith, Lord  230, 295
294, 297–8 Golitsyn, Anatoli, xvii
Europe  3, 69–70, 73–4, 76, 79–80, Gordievsly, Oleg  159, 176–7, 209–10
82–9, 173 Gore-Booth, Sir David  95–7, 174
1975 referendum  3, 84 Gove, Michael  232
European Court of Human Rights  7, 77, Government Communications
186, 215, 276 Headquarters (GCHQ)  xii, 221–3
 Index 327

computer capacity  302 Herman, Michael  xix, 210

data  222–3 Hertford College, Oxford  xv, xviii
‘information operations’ 40 Heseltine, Michael (later Lord)  26,
leak of internal staff manual  128 91, 147
media  23 Hess, Rudolf  145, 159
origins, staff, budget and tasks  167–70 Hetherington, Alastair  23–4, 83
scrutiny  8, 215, 218–9, 223 Hewitt, Patricia  179
targets  182 Heywood, Sir Jeremy (later Lord)  138
trade union ban  136, 182–4 Hibbert, Reginald  173
Yvonne Fletcher case  127 HMS Endurance  45
Gow, David  ix Hollingworth, Clare  23, 24
Gowing, Margaret  154 Hollis, Sir Roger  123
Grecian, Paul  99 Hong Kong  156, 168, 212, 242
Greene, Graham  173, 193 Hoon, Geoff  54–5, 264
Greengrass, Paul  124 Houghton, General Sir Nicholas
Greenhill, Sir Dennis (later Lord)  80-1 (now Lord)  63, 289, 304
Greenstock, Sir Jeremy  288–9 Howe, Sir Geoffrey  85–6, 97, 174
Grieve, Dominic  141, 218, 251 Huawei  112
Griffin, Ben  136, 238 Human Rights Act  272–3, 275
Grindley, Mike  184 Hurd, Douglas  10, 39, 174
Guantanamo Bay, see rendition Hussein, Saddam  5, 265, 273, 300
Guardian  ix–xii, xiv, xix, 8, 14, 17–18, Kurds and Marsh Arabs  48
22–9, 31, 37, 39, 41–2, 44–6, 48–54, Hutton, John (later Lord)  238
57–8, 65, 71, 76–7, 79–80, 83, 122,
124, 126–7, 133–7, 141, 147, 150–1, Ingham, Sir Bernard  14, 31, 69–70
155, 180, 182, 215–16, 218, 220, Inkster, Nigel  87, 138
226–8, 232, 236, 256, 285, 294 inquiries, public  5, 107
Gulf States  294 Intelligence agencies  2, 171–82
Gun, Katharine  128 Intelligence and Security Committee
Guthrie, Field Marshal Sir Charles (later (ISC)  164–5, 237, 250–2
Lord)  49, 174–5 Intelligence Services Act  72–3, 165, 167
Investigatory Powers Tribunal  164, 222
Haggarty, Gary  185 Irish Republican Army (IRA)  96
Halabja  97 Ireland  80, 125
Hamilton, Neil  26
Hancock, Sir David  93–4 Jackson, General Sir Mike  50–1
Harman, Harriet  179 Jeffrey, Keith  194
Hastings, Sir Max  46, 175–6 Johnson, Boris  3, 78, 108
Hattenstone, Simon  ix Johnson, Paul  27
Hattersley, Roy  121 Johnston, Hewlett (the ‘Red Dean’)  xvi
Healey, Denis  183 Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC)  175,
Heath, Edward  81–3, 169, 178 210, 226
Helm, Sarah  78 journalism
Helmand (Afghanistan)  8, 59–60 leaks  30–3
Henderson, Sir Nicholas  86 Whitehall  16–7
Hennessy, Peter (later Lord)  289 Justice and Security Act  134–5
328 Index

Kane, Jock  156, 212 Maclean, Donald  193–8

Kearns, Sir Freddie  82, 84 Macmillan, Harold  173, 200, 202, 290
Kelly, David  19 Magna Carta  248
Kent, Nicolas  xii, 231 Mail on Sunday  213
Keogh, David  128 Major, Sir John  218
Kershaw, Sir Anthony  92 Malik, Sapna  ix
Keynes Maynard  195 Mandelson, Peter (later Lord)  179
KGB  209 Manningham-Buller, Dame (later Baroness)
King, Cecil  181 Eliza  44, 178, 184, 190, 211, 246
Klugmann, James  197 Europe  87
Kurds  97 Iraq  9, 225, 231, 262–3
terrorism  219–20
Laity, Mark  21–2, 57 torture  240, 253
Lambert, John  xviii–xix, 89 Markham, Felix  xv, xvii–xviii
Lander, Sir Stephen  44, 178, 184, 195 Marlowe, Christopher  xvi, 117
Lansley, Andrew  139 Martin, Mike  60
Law Commission  140 Marychurch, Sir Peter  115–16
Lawrence, DH  155–6 Massiter, Cathy  211
Lawson, Dominic  37–8 Matrix Churchill  xi, xii, 5, 98, 208
Le Carré, John  14, 35, 174 Maugham, Somerset  xvi–xvii, 173, 195
Leigh, David  ix, 39 Mau Mau  147
Leigh Day  ix, 14 May, Theresa  3
Lennon, John  179 Mayes, Ian  ix
Lessing, Doris  152 Mellor, David  174
Lewis, Simon  139 Menwith Hill  168
Liberty, (formerly National Council for Mercer, Lt Col Christopher  273
Civil Liberties)  15, 179 Middle East, demographic trends  309–10
al-Libi  239 MI5 (the Security Service)  xii
Libya  10, 14–16, 61–2, 65, 133, 157, data  222–3
240–6, 252–3, 277–8, 299 George Blake  203, 208
Lloyd, Mark  120 headquarters and budget  170–1
Logan, Donald  147 invasion of Iraq  227
Lownie, Andrew  158 journalists  41–5
Lowry, David  ix Northern Ireland  184–8
Lucas, Caroline  303 regional offices  189
Luxembourg  82 scrutiny  8, 215
Lyne, Sir Rodric  258, 260, 263 staff  164–5
targets ‘subversives’ 178–82
McColl, Sir Colin  126 terrorism  188–9
MacDermot, Niall  181 MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service)  xii
Macdonald, Ian  47 Afghanistan  262
Machon, Annie  182, 213 Africa  190
Mackay, Brigadier Andrew  58 Brexit  87
Mackenzie, Compton  119–21 Brussels  xiv, 71–4
McLaughlin, Steve  273 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 Robertson, George (later Lord)  49

Percy, Lindis  168 Rogers, Sir Ivan  86
Petrie, Sir David  302 Rothermere, Lord  144–5
Philby, Kim  193–6 Rothschild, Victor  124, 155, 195
Pick, Hella  ix, 76 Royal Family
Pincher, Chapman  32–3, 123, 126 files in archives  153, 159–60
Pontecorvo, Brunio  127 Rules restaurant  35
Ponting, Clive  46, 92, 122 Rumsfeld, Donald  272–3
Pottle, Pat  202–8 Rusbridger, Alan  ix, 15, 27–9, 215–16
Pottle, Sue  204 Russia  24, 33, 51, 63, 71, 74, 77, 149, 173,
Powell, Anthony  91, 93 175, 195, 198–9, 201, 205, 208–10,
Powell, Jonathan  108, 256, 311 212–14, 291, 293, 305, 309, 311
Powell, Sir Charles (later Lord)  85
Preston, Peter  ix, 24–8 Al-Saadi, Sami  15, 242–3, 247
Prime, Geoffrey  212 Sands, Philippe  230
Prince Charles  15, 141, 244 Sangin  277
Prince Harry  16 SAS, SBS, see special forces
Princess Diana  27–8 Saudi Arabia  294–8
Private Eye  139, 197 Sawers, Sir John  44, 112, 252
Privy Council  117 Scappaticci, Freddie  185
Public Records Act  6–7, 145, 157 Scargill, Arthur  180
digital records review  160–1 Scarlett, Sir John  8, 21, 87, 175, 226–8, 267
Scott, Sir Richard (later Lord), arms-to-
Qatada, Abu  188–9 Iraq Inquiry  95–9, 128–9
Quinlan, Sir Michael  230–1 Security Service Act  7, 164, 180
Sedwill Mark (later Sir)  192
RAF  60, 62, 100, 130, 150, 167–8, 278, Sellafield, see Windscale
280–4, 286, 294 Shayler, David  133, 212–13
RAF Croughton  168 Shepherd, Richard, MP  18, 26
RAF Typhoon/Eurofighter  281, 295, 298 Shirreff, General Sir Richard  63, 265
Randle, Michael  202–8 Sierra Leone  51–2
Rees, Goronwy  155, 197 Simpson, Emile  60, 304–4, 307
Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act Sixsmith, Martin  93
(RIPA)  220 Smith, Andrew  ix
Reid, John now Lord  56 Smith, General Sir Rupert  278
rendition operations  232–53 Snatch Land Rovers  277
Reprieve  ix, 15, 306 Snowden, Edward  8, 169, 221
Richards, General Sir (later Lord)  10, 51, Sorge, Richard  175
56–8, 62, 67, 287 Southey, Robert  117
Rifkind, Sir Malcolm  182, 237 Special branch  203
Rigby, Fusilier Lee  223 special forces  2, 65–6, 170
Rimington, Dame Stella  44, 67, 178, Falklands  46
180, 219 First Gulf War  48
Rippon, Geoffrey  82 Iraq and Afghanistan  237–8
Roberts, Sir Ivor  49, 231–2 Spectator magazine  37–8
Robertson, Geoffrey  ix, 208 Spender, Stephen  39, 152, 195
 Index 331

Spycatcher  6, 122–5 143–4, 153, 155, 168, 181–3, 190–1,

Stafford Smith, Clive  ix 198, 209, 220, 229–30, 232, 234,
Stanhope, Sir Mark, First Sea Lord  62 248–9, 285, 288, 290–1, 293–4, 296,
Statewatch  ix 302, 305, 309–11
Stone, Dr Richard  107 special relationship  169, 311
Strachan, Sir Huw  63
Straight, Michael  195 Vaz, Keith  215
Strasbourg  76 Verrier, Anthony  187, 190
Straw, Jack  9, 179 Vulliamy, Ed  ix, 37
and rendition operations  13, 15, 218,
236, 250–1 Wallace, Colin  40–1
Suez crisis  104 Waller, Sir Mark  164, 216–17
Sun  11, 30, 45–6, 51, 66, 204 Wang Yam  133–4
Sunday Telegraph  125 Warnock, Mary  152
Sunday Times  14, 36, 39, 136, 177, 203, Waterloo  79
211, 214, 229, 245 Waugh, Evelyn  35, 313 n.1
Al-Sweady inquiry  274 Weidenfeld, George (later Lord)  152
Welchman, Gordon  115
Talleyrand, Charles  103 West, Admiral Lord  112
Taylor, AJP  152 White, Sir Dick  126
Tebbit, Sir Kevin  67, 101 Whitehall
terrorism  220, 223, 302–3 acronyms  104–6
Thatcher, Margaret (later Baroness)  3, Brexit  11, 113
70, 84–5, 156, 297 IT  109–11
Thatcher, Mark  156 Whitmore, Sir Clive  92, 164
Thesiger, Wilfred  187, 191 WikiLeaks  33, 136–7, 144
Thomas, Mark  67 Wilding, Richard  103
Tisdall, Sarah  24–6 Wilkinson, Rear Admiral
Tolstoy, Nicolai  150–1 Nicholas  66–7
Tomalin, Nicholas  14 Williams, Gareth  214
Tomlinson, Richard  73, 213–14 Wilmshurst, Elizabeth  8, 104
torture  xiii, 6, 9, 13–15, 18, 44, 94, 135, Wilson, Harold  3, 83, 130, 144,
137, 147–8, 185, 188, 202, 215, 181–2, 198
218, 230–40, 242–3, 248–9, 251–3, Windscale (later Sellafield)  4
274, 299 Wodehouse, PG  151
Toynbee, Philip  152 Woollacott, Martin  48
Travellers Club  xix, 15, 37, 190, 194 Wren, Simon  54
Trend, Sir Burke  198 Wright, Peter  180–1, see also Spycatcher
Trevor-Roper, Hugh (see Dacre, Lord) Wylde, Nigel  132
Tricycle Theatre  xii, 231
Trident, see nuclear weapons Al-Yamamah  295–7
Tugendhat, Tom  275 Yemen (British bombing)  294
Turnbull, Malcolm  124 Younger, (later Sir) Alex  165–6

United Nations  248, 264 Zinoviev Letter  177–8

United States  1, 8–9, 23, 28, 33, 42, 48, Zircon satellite  116
58–9, 73–4, 82, 106, 108, 139–40, Zuckerman, Solly  154
332