A recent interview on BBC Radio Bristol to publicise the screening of an award-winning new documentary called “The Elephant in the Room”, made by talented director Dean Puckett.
I had the chance to explore the mechanisms by which the UK media is controlled by the spies and the government, including the section in MI6 called I/Ops, which plants false stories in the media to the benefit of MI5 and MI6.
David Shayler’s former partner reveals: How the bullying State crushed him
By ANNIE MACHON
Link to daily mail original — link to Daily Mail comments
Ten years ago this month former MI5 officer David Shayler made shocking revelations in this newspaper about how Britain’s spies were unable to deal with the growing threat of global terrorism.
He disclosed how MI5’s peculiar obsession with bureaucracy and secrecy prevented crucial information being used to stop bombings. And he told how insufficient agents and inept decision-making meant that terrorist groups were not properly monitored.
None of his original disclosures was shown to be wrong. Indeed, in 2005 the bombings in London proved the whistleblower correct: MI5 was not equipped to counter terror on our streets.
The Government response to David’s disclosures was to place a gagging order on The Mail on Sunday and launch a six-year campaign to discredit and persecute Shayler. Alastair Campbell threatened to ‘send in the heavies’ and the whistleblower was forced into exile abroad, jailed twice and sued for damages; his friends and family were harassed and some arrested.
He faced a bleak, uncertain future and for many years he was under intense stress and pressure, often isolated and always under surveillance. I had a ringside seat for the ‘Get Shayler’ operation because I was an MI5 officer at the same time (1991−96) and also his girlfriend and co-campaigner until last year when I ended my relationship with a broken man.
I witnessed first-hand the extraordinary psychological, physical and emotional burden of being a whistleblower when the full power of the secret State is launched against you. A decade on the results of that pernicious campaign became clear when I heard that David had proclaimed himself as “The Messiah” and “God” and could predict the weather. I was saddened but not shocked. The story of David Shayler is not just one of a whistleblower but also an indictment of the lack of democracy and accountability in Britain.
I first met David when we were both working in F2, the counter-subversion section of MI5, where we were repeatedly reassured that MI5 had to work within the law. We were young and keen to help protect our country. I noticed David immediately, as he was very bright, and always asked the difficult questions. Over a period of a year we became friends, and then we fell in love.
In the run-up to the 1992 General Election we were involved in assessing any parliamentary candidate and potential MP. This meant that they all had their names cross-referenced with MI5’s database. If any candidates had a file, this was reviewed. We saw files on most of the top politicians of the past decade, from Tony Blair down, something that gave us concerns.
We then both moved to G Branch, the international counter-terrorist division, with David heading the Libyan section. It was here that he witnessed a catalogue of errors and crimes: the illegal phone-tapping of a prominent Guardian journalist, the failure of MI5 to prevent the bombing of the Israeli embassy in London in July 1994, which resulted in the wrongful conviction of two innocent Palestinians, and the attempted assassination of Colonel Gaddafi of Libya.
David raised this with his bosses at the time but they showed no interest. So we resigned from MI5 after deciding to go public to force an inquiry into the Gaddafi plot.
After The Mail on Sunday revelations we decamped to France while David tried to get the Government to take his evidence and investigate MI5’s crimes, something, to this day, it has refused to do. Rather than addressing the problem, the Intelligence Services tried to shoot the messenger. They planted stories claiming David was a fantasist, overlooked for promotion, and was too junior to know what he was talking about. These are classic tactics used against whistleblowers and were wheeled out again when Dr David Kelly took his life.
We eventually returned home in 2000, by which time David felt isolated and angry. He began to distrust friends and thought that many of them might be reporting on him. He was convinced he was constantly followed and began to take photographs of people in the street. When the trial started, and with David effectively gagged, the jury had no choice but to convict.
He received a six-month sentence but the judgment exonerated him of placing agents’ lives at risk, conceding that he had spoken out in what he thought to be the public interest. David had blown the whistle with the best of motives. He had exposed heinous State crimes up to and including murder, yet he was the one in prison with his reputation in tatters. His release from jail saw a changed man. David was full of anger, frustration and bitterness and became depressed and withdrawn. He was drawn to the spiritual teachings of kabbalah, and became obsessed with the subject instead of focusing on what we should do to survive. Last summer, I went away for a weekend. When I returned, David had shaved off all his hair and his eyebrows as part of his spiritual evolution. He knew that I had always loved his long, thick hair, so it felt like a personal slap in the face. He was in trouble. He was quick to anger if anyone questioned him. He became obsessive about little details, espoused wacky theories and shunned his family and old friends. His paranoia also escalated. His experience of being hounded and vilified for a decade had left a deep persecution complex. Eventually the strain was too much and I ended the relationship.
It was difficult as we had shared so much over the 14 years we had been together, but it felt that we were no longer a team – David was focusing only on esoteric issues. Looking back, I am still proud of what we did. I believe that if you witness the crimes that we did, you have to take action. But the price for taking that stand against a bully State can be high. It is tragic to see an honourable and brave man crushed in this way. The British Establishment is ruthless in protecting its own interests rather than those of our country. Today David Shayler is living testimony to that.
This is an interview I recorded for Resonance FM with We Are Change UK, a rapidly-growing activist group in the USA and Europe, in which I get the chance to discuss the spies, their crimes, cover-ups, the media, the war on terror and the erosion of our freedoms, amongst many other issues:
As the writer, G K Chesterton said:
“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
The Guardian today reported that the United Nations Committee on Human Rights had issued a damning indictment of the British government’s use of legislation to suppress a right that is fundamental to all functioning democracies: freedom of expression.
This is not news to me. But it’s interesting that freedom of expression is now being curtailed in so many varied, interesting and imaginative ways: libel laws, terrorism laws and official secrecy. That’s quite an arsenal.
Britain is now infamous for being the “libel capital” of the world. Wealthy individuals can use our courts to suppress publication of critical books and articles anywhere in the world, if they can prove that the book has been sold in the UK – even if it’s just one, second-hand copy on Amazon. The magazine, Private Eye, has been commenting on this extensively over the last year.
Then, under the slew of new counter-terrorism legislation that the Labour government has introduced since 2001, it is now an offence to say anything that might “encourage” terrorism. That definition is so broad that, say, you or I made an innocent comment about the Palestinian or Iraqi situation, and this could be misconstrued by another person as encouraging them to violence, this could be assessed subjectively as a criminal offence by the prosecuting authorities. This is third party thought-crime.
These sort of laws have a negative impact on free speech, as publishers, editors and journalists begin to self-censor rather than run informed risks for the public good.
But it’s the third area of law that resonates most with me, for obvious reasons: the 1989 Official Secrets Act, which criminalises any unauthorised disclosure by serving or former intelligence officers, notified persons, and other crown servants and officials. These people are the most likely to witness high crimes and misdemeanors on the part of government, police and the intelligence services, and yet they are the most criminalised in this country for speaking out. Whistleblowers in other areas of work are specifically protected by the law under the Public Interest Disclosure Act (1998).
How did this happen? Ever since the 1911 Official Secrets Act came into force, there has been legislation to protect this nation’s genuine secrets against the actions of traitors. Under this law, crown servants face 14 years in prison if they betray information to hostile powers. Of course we need to protect genuine secrets, and this is certainly safeguard enough.
The change in this law was specifically designed to gag genuine whistleblowers in sensitive areas, not protect national security. This came about in the 1980s after the notorious failed prosecution of Ministry of Defense civil servant, Clive Ponting. In 1984 he blew the whistle on the fact the British government knew that the Argentinian warship, the General Belgrano, was sailing away from the exclusion zone during the Falklands War in 1982. Despite this, the order was still given to attack it, and many were killed. Ponting was rightly outraged by this, and went public. His actions were manifestly in the public interest, and this was precisely the successful defense he ran in court. Furious, the Conservative government of the time re-wrote the secrecy laws, removing the public interest defense to deter such principled whistleblowers in the future. And this is the current Official Secrets Act criticised so strongly by the UN.
Interestingly, at the time the Labour party strongly opposed this change, rightly thinking that this would curtail crucial information reaching the public domain. At this point, of course, many of them correctly suspected that they were on the receiving end of illegal investigations by MI5.
The roll call of Labour MPs who voted against the proposed Act as it passed through Parliament in 1988 includes such luminaries as Tony Blair, Jack Straw and the former Attorney General John Morris. All these people went on to use the 1989 OSA to threaten and prosecute the intelligence whistleblowers of the last decade.
The blanket ban on freedom of expression for intelligence personnel appears to be illegal under the terms of the European Convention of Human Rights. Sure, Article 10(2) does give nations the limited right to curtail freedom of expression in a proportionate way to protect national security. However, the term “national security” has never been defined for legal purposes in this country and is used as a catch-all phrase to prevent disclosure of anything embarrassing to the government and the intelligence agencies. Plus, during these cases, lawyers and judges have consistently confused the notion of the national interest with national security – two very different beasts. And freedom of expression cannot be legally curtailed under the Convention merely for reasons of “the national interest”.
So I was heartened to read the UN’s verdict on this legal mess: “Powers under the Official Secrets Act have been “exercised to frustrate former employees of the crown from bringing into the public domain issues of genuine public interest, and can be exercised to prevent the media from publishing such matters”.”
Let’s hope this leads to the reinstatement of the public interest defence at the very least. During this time of the unending “war on terror”, governments lying to take us into illegal wars, and the use of torture and internment, whistleblowers play an important role in upholding and defending our democratic values. We need to protect them, not prosecute them.
Stephen Armstrong published an interesting article in today’s New Statesman magazine. Based on his new book War plc: the Rise of the New Corporate Mercenary, it examines the rise of the corporate security consultant. Or in basic English – mercenaries.
I met Stephen when I was invited by James Whale to review the book on Press TV. I was impressed with his research and depth of knowledge on this subject. It was an unusually harmonious talk show — rather than arguing, we all took a broadly similar approach to the issue of mercenaries, oversight and accountability.
The increasing privatisation of intelligence is an insidious development in the world of espionage and war. For many decades there have existed on the fringes of the official intelligence world a few private security companies; think Kroll, Blackwater, Aegis. These companies are often the last refuge of .….. former intelligence officers of the western spook organisations.
These people, often frustrated at the overly bureaucratic nature of the governmental spy organisations, resign and are gently steered towards these corporations. That, or the relocation officers get them nice juicy jobs at merchant banks, arms companies or international quangos. It’s always useful to have reliable chaps in useful places, after all.
In the last decade, however, we have seen an explosion in the number of these companies. One of my former colleagues is a founder of Diligence, which is going from strength to strength. These kinds of companies specialise in corporate spying, the neutralisation of opposition and protest groups, and security. The latter usually boils down to providing military muscle in hot spots like Iraq. While I can see the attraction for soldiers leaving crack regiments and wondering what on earth they can do with their specialised expertise, and who then decide that earning £10,000 a week risking their lives in Baghdad is a good bet, this has worrying implications for the rule of law.
Leaving aside the small matter that, under international and domestic UK law, all wars of aggression are illegal, our official British military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq is at least to a certain degree accountable. The most egregious war crimes have resulted in court martials. But the new mercenaries live in a legal no-man’s land, and in this territory anything goes. Or can at least be covered up.
This is the same principle that has guided these unofficial spook companies over the years – plausible deniability. What little democratic oversight there is in the UK of the intelligence community still does give them limited pause for thought: what if the media hears about it? What if an MP asks an awkward question? By using former colleagues in the corporate intelligence world, MI5, MI6 et al can out source the risk.
The oversight and accountability for the official spooks and the army are bad enough. The privatisation of intelligence and military might makes a further mockery of the feeble oversight provisions in place in this country. This is a worrying development in legal and democratic terms; more importantly, it has a direct, daily impact on the rights of innocent men, women and children around the world. We need to ensure that the official and unofficial spooks and military are accountable under the law.
The lack of any meaningful oversight of the UK’s intelligence community was highlighted again last week, when The Daily Mail reported that a crucial fax was lost in the run-up to the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005.
There has yet to be an official enquiry into the worst terrorist atrocity on the UK mainland, despite the call for one from traumatised families and survivors and the legitimate concerns of the British public. To date, we have had to make do with an “official narrative” written by a faceless bureaucrat and published in May 2006. As soon as it was published, the then Home Secretary, John Reid, had to correct egregious factual errors when presenting it to Parliament.
The Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) also did a shoddy first job, when it cleared the security forces of all wrong-doing in its initial report published at the same time. It claimed a lack of resources had hampered MI5’s counter-terrorism efforts.
However, following a useful leak, it emerged that MI5 had not only been aware of at least two of the alleged bombers before the attack, it had been concerned enough to send a fax up to West Yorkshire Police Special Branch asking them to investigate Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer. This fax was never acted upon.
So the ISC has been forced to produce another report, this time apparently admitting that, yes, there had been intelligence failures, most notably the lost fax. West Yorkshire SB should have acted on it. But the intelligence officer in MI5 responsible for this investigation should have chased it up when no response was forthcoming.
This second ISC report, which has been sitting on the Prime Minister’s desk for weeks already, is said to be “devastating”. However, I’m willing to bet that if/when it sees the light of day, it will be anything but.
The ISC is at best an oversight fig leaf. It was formed in 1994, when MI6 and GCHQ were put on a statutory footing for the first time with the Intelligence Services Act. At the time the press welcomed this as a great step forward towards democratic accountability for the intelligence community. Well, it could not have been worse than the previous set-up, when MI5, MI6 and GCHQ did not officially exist. They were not required to obey the laws of the land, and no MP was allowed to ask a question in Parliament about their activities. As 1980s whistleblower Peter Wright so succinctly put it, the spies could bug and burgle their way around with impunity.
So the establishment of the ISC was a (very) limited step in the right direction. However, it is not a Parliamentary Committee. Its members are selected by the Prime Minister, and it is answerable only to the PM, who can vet its findings. The remit of the ISC only covers matters of spy policy, administration and finance. It is not empowered to investigate allegations of operational incompetence nor crimes committed by the spies. And its annual report has become a joke within the media, as there are usually more redactions than coherent sentences.
The ISC’s first big test came in the 1990s following the Shayler and Tomlinson disclosures. These involved detailed allegations of illegal investigations, bungled operations and assassination attempts against foreign heads of state. It is difficult to conceive of more heinous crimes committed by our shadowy spies.
But how did the ISC react? If one reads the reports from the relevant years, the only aspect that exercised the ISC was Shayler’s information that MI5 had on many MPs and government ministers. The ISC was reassured by MI5 that would no longer be able to use these files. That’s it.
Forget about files being illegally held on hundreds of thousands of innocent UK citizens; forget about the illegal phone taps, the preventable deaths on UK streets from IRA bombs, innocent people being thrown in prison, and the assassination attempt against Colonel Gaddafi of Libya. The fearless and eternally vigilant ISC MPs were primarily concerned about receiving reassurance that their files would no longer be vetted by MI5 officers on the basis of membership to “subversive” organisations. What were they afraid of – that shameful evidence of early left-wing activity from their fiery youth might emerge? Heaven forbid under New Labour.
Barely a day goes by when newspaper headlines do not remind us of terrible threats to our national security. Only in the last week, the UK media has reported that the threat of espionage from Russia and China is at its highest since the days of the Cold War; that resurgent Republican terror groups in Northern Ireland pose a graver danger to us even than Al Qaeda; that radicalised British Muslim youth are returning from fighting with the Taliban to wage war on the streets of the UK. We have to take all this on trust, despite the intelligence community’s appalling track record of bending the truth to gain more powers and resources. This is why meaningful oversight is so vitally important for the health of our democracy. The ISC is a long way from providing that.
I keep returning to this subject, but it is troubling me deeply. Reading the runes, all things point to the fact that we are being actively groomed for yet another Middle Eastern war.
As I’ve said before, the picture is clearly being drawn for those who wish to join the dots. At the end of last year the entire US intelligence infrastructure formally assessed that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons programme in 2003. This, of course, did not suit the hawkish neo-con agenda in the States.
Then Mossad, the Israeli intelligence outfit, conveniently pops up claiming that it has new, shit-hot intelligence that disproves the US assessment. Mossad passes this on to the heads of MI6 and the CIA, and shortly afterwards the Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, visits George Bush on a state visit to America to discuss his “concerns” about Iran.
The third part of the equation fell into place this week. Con Coughlin, writing in the right-wing UK national newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, unquestioningly regurgitates information from anonymous intelligence sources who state that Iran is now developing weapons grade uranium.
Coughlin has form. For many years he worked for The Sunday Telegraph, otherwise known as the in-house journal of MI6. Readers of this site will know that MI6 has a section called Information Operations (I/Ops), which manipulates the media either by planting false stories or massaging the facts to suit MI6’s interests. Well, rather embarrassingly, Coughlin’s involvement in one such operation was exposed a few years ago.
In 1995 he was shown “information” by an MI6 officer whom he described as “a senior banking official” proving that Colonel Gadaffi’s son, Saif Al Islam, was involved in a money-laundering scam with Iran. Coughlin dutifully reported this, and this story was used by the Foreign Office to deny Al Islam a visa to live in the UK.
What Coughlin, and his then editor Dominic Lawson (whose brother-in-law was a senior MI6 officer), didn’t appear to know as he took this story down in shorthand, was the MI6 officer was from I/Ops, and that he was planting this story in the press to ensure that the son of a then Priority 1 Joint Intelligence Committee target could not come over the UK and live high on the hog. Too politically embarrassing, old bean.
Al Islam naturally sued, and The Sunday Torygraph duly settled out of court once it realised that intelligence whistleblower David Shayler knew the inside track on this libellous story and was prepared to give evidence in court.
Coughlin was also instrumental in getting stories linking Saddam Hussein to WMD and Al Qaeda into the national UK media in the run-up to the Iraq war, although the vigilent reader will notice these stories often contradict themselves. So it’s interesting that he’s now breaking more “news” suggesting precisely what Mossad and governments of the UK and the USA would have us believe: that Iran is a real, developing nuclear threat, and that there is a sound case for war.
The UK mainstream media has made much this week of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s assertion that MI5 had not requested the government’s proposed extension of the imprisonment without charge of terrorist suspects from 28 to 42 days.
This statement has caused a furore in the UK, and there is a chance that the PM may lose the key vote in Parliament on this amendment tomorrow.
In fact, such has been the uproar that the Director General of MI5, Jonathan Evans, is reported by Reuters to have made a rare public statement:
“Since the security service is neither a prosecuting authority nor responsible for criminal investigations, we are not, and never have been, the appropriate body to advise the government on pre-charge detention time limits,” he said in a statement on the MI5 website.
“We have not, therefore, sought to comment publicly or privately on the current proposals, except to say that we recognise the challenge posed for the police service by the increasingly complex and international character of some recent terrorist cases.”
What particularly strikes me about this is an apparently insignificant phrase, “raised publicly or privately”.
In contrast to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, who admitted to “unintentionally misleading” the parliamentary Joint Committee charged with assessing the need to increase the detention limit, Evans had refused to give evidence about the 42 day issue. So he has certainly not raised this in a publicly accountable way.
It’s the word “private” that intrigues me. It reeks of sotto voce discussions between old school chums at the grander gentlemen’s clubs in London: of unattributable briefings between anonymous MI5 officers and chosen journalists; and of cosy lunches with Fleet Street editors in the DG’s dining room at Thames House, MI5’s London HQ.
While Evans denies using this methodology around the 42 day issue, his statement confirms that such private discussions do indeed play a part in influencing policy decisions and media perception.
I saw this approach first-hand in the 1990s during the whistleblowing years. In fact, it was then that MI5 stepped up its charm offensive with politicians and journalists. It was during one of the first of these cosy media lunches in Thames House, hosted by the then DG Stephen Lander, that the respected BBC Diplomatic Editor Mark Urban asked a fateful question about the Gaddafi Plot and was reportedly told by Lander that “he was not here to answer half-baked questions from smart-arse journalists”. So there were certain shortfalls in the charm, even if the lack of accountability held up well.
But there are other, more sinister ways for the spies to manipulate public opinion. MI6 has a sensitive section called Information Operations (I/Ops), which exists purely to set the news agenda for the spies. I/Ops manages this either by massaging the facts, spinning the tone of the story or, more worryingly, planting false stories in a quiescent press.
In the 1990s there was a famous case. Colonel Gaddafi’s son, Saif Al Islam, applied for a visa to come to Britain. I/Ops planted a completely false story in The Sunday Telegraph that he was involved in money laundering with Iran and, lo and behold, MI5 had the perfect excuse to deny him a visa. Al Islam subsequently sued the newspaper which, faced with Shayler’s evidence, settled out of court.
A few months ago the ex-head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, gave a talk at the LSE about the intelligence agencies and the media. I went along to have a laugh, and was graciously allowed to ask a question. Naturally I raised the issue of I/Ops, its relationship with the media, and whether such a role was acceptable in a modern democracy.
In the context of the talk, what could have been more pertinent? However, Dearlove declined to answer. In fact, he went so far as to say that such a matter was “within the ring of secrecy”. At which point a journalist from a prestigious national newspaper who was sitting next to me, turned and said gleefully that this at last proved that I/Ops existed. Gratifying as this was, I shall reiterate my question: is the role of I/Ops acceptable in a modern democracy, where we are supposed to enjoy freedom of information, transparency and accountability from the powers-that-be?
An MI5 A4 surveillance officer has had to resign because his wife sold a story to The News of the World newspaper that the Formula One boss, Max Mosley, son of notorious fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, had indulged in a Nazi-inspired orgy with her and four other prostitutes in a cellar in Chelsea, one of the swankiest areas of London.
This raises an interesting question. Either the A4 officer, reportedly a former Royal Marine, had no idea that his wife was working as a prostitute, in which case, what the hell was he doing working for the surveillance unit of MI5? Not quite the sharpest knife in the block, then. Or he knew, but chose to keep it quiet – a serious vetting offence. Which was it?
The move against Mosley certainly seems to have been a “honeytrap” of sorts – at least on the part of The News of the Screws, which reportedly equipped “Mrs Bond” with the cameras. But beyond that? The Screws and its sister paper The Sunday Times asserted that the MI5 connection was just a coincidence, as did The Sunday Telegraph, known in spook circles as the in-house magazine of MI6.
The Mosley case does have historical echoes. A similar, and notorious case, occurred in the 1970s. Lord Lambton, at the time the RAF Minister in Edward Heath’s government, was caught in flagrente with a call girl and, even worse, was caught on film smoking a joint. Lambton had to resign in disgrace.
But there was more to it. The News of the Screws photographer lurking in the wardrobe had been lent the night-vision camera by an MI6 agent to obtain nice, clear images.
Why did MI6, the foreign intelligence gathering agency, target Lord Lambton? Well, according to the agent in question, Lee Tracey who first came to the public’s attention in the Profumo Affair, MI6 was motivated by a desire to embarrass MI5, which it deemed not to be up to scratch in its domestic spying work.
So the “honeytrap” is a tried and tested method to compromise your opponents and score political points. But, unless there is some private feud with the spies, it does seem unlikely in this case. Mosley may enjoy an exotic sex life, but does the F1 boss really look like he poses a legitimate threat to national security? .
The more fundamental issue is surely the effectiveness of MI5’s in-house vetting section. How did the A4 officer’s marriage to a prostitute escape their notice? The section responsible, C4, checks the backgrounds of employees to the nth degree – a system called “Developed Vetting”. Any character “defects” must be picked up via an extensive series of checks.
In the wake of this scandal, an inevitable unnamed senior Whitehall source was quoted as saying “I cannot talk about individual cases, but we do expect high standards of behaviour from all staff at all times, both professionally and privately”.
Well, sort of….
When I was recruited in 1991, MI5’s primary concern was that unknown transgressions could lead to blackmail. If the misdemeanours were minor but admitted, MI5 tended to turn a blind eye.
In the 1990s MI5 still had an official policy of not employing homosexuals. As late as the 1980s, homosexuality had been deemed by the service to be a “character defect”, as well as a potential source of blackmail. As you sign away your employment rights when you join MI5, there was no point in anyone crying “discrimination”. The position changed in 1995, and one brave soul did step out of the closet at the time. Also, when I worked there, dope-smoking was commonplace amongst young officers – and some coughed (if you’ll pardon the pun) to this during their vetting interviews. No action was taken. Similarly, infidelity was a vetting offense, but many (married) officers were at it like the proverbial rabbits.
Perhaps it has tightened up since my day. However, this seems unlikely given the recent scandal. How can we expect MI5 to adequately protect this country when it can’t even police its own staff?
A worrying article in today’s Guardian by the indefatigable Duncan Campbell, in which he reports that police are using the Terrorism Act (2000) to try to force a journalist to hand over information from a source.
This issue is the scared cow of journalism – that they never reveal their sources. To do so would immediately deter whistleblowers from speaking in confidence to the media, and government crimes and lies would remain secret. The protection of journalistic sources contributes to safeguarding our democracy, as legislation such as the Freedom of Information Act (2000) is effectively toothless when up against the inner workings of the state.
Because of this, journalists with integrity in this country and abroad are willing to risk prison rather than hand over their notes. As Campbell remarks, this happened to Martin Bright in 2000 when he was Home Affairs Editor at The Observer. The Metropolitan Police Special Branch went crashing into the offices on Farringdon Road, demanding that he hand over all his notes on the Shayler case. More bizarrely, they also demanded a letter Shayler had sent to The Guardian, even though it had already been published in the newspaper. Thankfully for Martin, the National Union of Journalists supported him, and the police eventually backed off.
The fact that the police are using the Terrorism Act as is a worrying new development. But it’s not just production orders from the police that journalists and newspapers have to be worried about. The authorities have a range of weapons in their arsenal if they choose to suppress information emanating from inner government circles or the intelligence world. And yet it is within these very circles that the most heinous crimes and violations are committed, and whence the most significant whistleblowers tend to emerge. Think Dr David Kelly, David Shayler, Katherine Gun.
So, what else can the authorities use to suppress valid criticism? Well, firstly and most notoriously, we have the Official Secrets Act in the UK. This does not just prevent intelligence officers and notified government officials from ever speaking to anyone outside the agency about anything, ever (Section 1(1)). Slightly less well known is Section 5, which makes it a crime for any journalist to receive or elicit information from these whistleblowers that damages “national security” (the term to this day remains undefined). Of course, as we saw in the Shayler case, the government is always extremely reluctant to cross the media and enforce this, so it is usually just the unfortunate whistleblower who is hung out to dry.
If the threat of the OSA fails, the government can always find a tame judge to issue an emergency injunction. Again, this happened in the Shayler case, when an injunction was taken out both against him and the UK’s national media. Needless to say, the injunction against the media was dropped (even this government quailed at the prospect of taking on News International and the Mail group), but remains in place to this day against the hapless whistleblower.
This injunction is no small thing. The government’s lawyers have used it to frighten off publishers from even looking at a novel (that’s right – a work of fiction) that Shayler wrote in 1998. Letters winged their way from government lawyers to UK publishers in London in 1999. And when Shayler built a website, hosted by Tabnet in California, the government wrote to them pointing out that there was an injunction in place and asking for the site to be taken down. Tabnet gently pointed out that perhaps the British government had forgotten about 1776, and continued to host the site.
If the OSA and injunctions are not enough, we also have the notorious D Notice Committee (now rebranded as the Defence Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee), a body that can block publication of a story by issuing a notice at the say-so of the government. Very appropriate in a so-called democracy. What makes it worse is that the Committee is made up of volunteers from amongst the great and the good from the media world, as well as representatives from government departments. These guys, senior editors and TV executives, enter the charmed inner circle and start to police their own industry. It’s amazing how quickly new appointees go native and fight the government’s corner.
So there you have it – a whole battery of laws to protect the British Establishment from the scrutiny and constructive criticism of the media. When a journalist of integrity stands up to the authorities, we should all support them. They are providing a crucial service of ventilation and accountability for our retreating democracy. I wish Shiv Malik, the freelancer at the eye of the current storm, the very best.
I support and work with a number of organisations that share my concerns about accountability and transparency in areas such as intelligence and security, the failed war on drugs, freedom of information, human rights, privacy issues, civil liberties, and the war on terror.
The Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, which does what it says on the tin! One of the campaign organisers, Barry White, is currently on the NEC of the UK National Union of Journalists, and writes a great blog: www.fromthenecup.org.uk. Here’s a link to a piece I’ve just written on my website.
Pirate Party (NL). Affiliated to the Pirate Parties International, this group campaigns around issues such (digital) civil liberties, transparency, privacy and copyright. PPNL fielded candidates in the Dutch general election in 2010. Shortly before the election, I was invited to provide some media training to the candidates.
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP).
Prohibition has never worked, as proven throughout history. And now around the world many judges,lawyers, prison governors, and officers from police, customs, and intelligence organisations, as well as many other experts, are challenging the failed concept of the “war on drugs”. This policy, in place for decades now in many countries despite its manifest, abject and repeated failure, criminalises great swathes of our populations, causes health problems, social problems and untold suffering, and funds organised crime and terrorist groups. It is time for a mature, calm debate about the issue, rather than hysterical, tabloid headlines.
I am honoured to be one of this group speaking out, and now to be working as the Director of LEAP, Europe.
Make Wars History is a non-profit peace group that aims to end war by upholding the international and national laws that make warfare illegal under any condition except self-defense. It specifically seeks accountability for the illegal and disastrous invasion of Iraq and a formal investigation of the people who were instrumental in starting it. Here’s the launch of the campaign in the Houses of Parliament in January 2008.
The text of my article for e‑International Relations, March 2008:
The UK Intelligence Community: Ineffective, Unethical and Unaccountable
The USA and the UK are enmeshed in an apparently unending war of attrition – sorry peacekeeping — in Iraq. Why? Well, we may remember that the UK was assured by former Prime Minister Tony Blair, in sincere terms, that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction which could be deployed again British interests within 45 minutes. Indeed the press was awash with “45 minutes from Armageddon” headlines on 18th March 2003, the day of the crucial war debate in the British parliament. The implication was that Britain was directly at threat from the evil Iraqis.
The US varied the diet. George Bush, in his State of the Union address before the war, assured his nation that Iraq had been attempting to buy material to make nuclear weapons from Niger. The American media and public fell for this claim, hook, line and sinker.
What do these two erroneous claims have in common? Well, both were “sexed up” for public consumption.
We all know now that there never were any WMDs to be found in Iraq. After 10 years of punitive sanctions, the country simply didn’t have the capability, even if it had the will, to develop them. The Niger claim is even more tenuous. This was based on an intelligence report emanating from the British Secret Intelligence Service (commonly know as SIS or MI6), which was based on forgeries.
We have had headline after screaming headline stating that yet another terrorist cell has been rounded up in Britain. The Ricin plot? The beheading of a British Muslim serviceman? The liquid bombs on airplanes? Yet, if one reads the newspapers carefully, one finds that charges are dropped quietly after a few months.
So, why is this happening? I can hazard a few guesses. In the 1990s I worked for 6 years as an intelligence officer for MI5, investigating political “subversives”, Irish terrorists, and Middle Eastern terrorism. In late 1996 I, with my then partner and colleague David Shayler, left the service in disgust at the incompetent and corrupt culture to blow the whistle on the UK intelligence establishment. This was not a case of sour grapes – we were both competent officers who regularly received performance related bonuses.
However, we had grown increasingly concerned about breaches of the law; ineptitude (which led to bombs going off that could and should have been prevented); files on politicians; the jailing of innocent people; illegal phone taps; and the illegal sponsoring of terrorism abroad, funded by UK tax-payers.
The key reason that we left and went public is probably one of the most heinous crimes – SIS funded an Islamic extremist group in Libya to try to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi in 1996. The attack failed, but killed innocent people. The attack was also illegal under British law. The 1994 intelligence Services Act, which put SIS on a legal footing for the first time in its 80 year history, stated that its officers were immune from prosecution in the UK for illegal acts committed abroad, if they had the prior written permission of its political master – ie the Foreign Secretary. In this case they did not.
So, the assassination attempt was not only immoral, unethical and highly reckless in a volatile area of the world, but also illegal under British law.
In August 1997 we went public in a national British newspaper about our concerns. We hoped that the newly-elected Labour government would take our evidence and begin an investigation of the intelligence agencies. After all, many Labour MPs had been on the receiving end of spook investigations in their radical youth. Many had also opposed the draconian UK law, the Official Secrets Act (OSA 1989), which deprived an intelligence whistleblower of a public interest defence.
However, it was not to be. I have no proof, but I can speculate that the Labour government did the spies’ bidding for fear of what might be on their MI5 files. They issued an injunction against David and the national press. They failed to extradite him from France in 1998 but, when he returned voluntarily to face trail in the UK in 2000, they lynched him in the media. They also ensured that, through a series of pre-trial legal hearings, he was not allowed to say anything in his own defence and was not able to freely question his accusers. Indeed the judge ordered the jury to convict.
The whole sorry saga of the Shayler affair shows in detail how the British establishment will always shoot the messenger to protect its own interests. If the British government had taken Shayler’s evidence, investigated his disclosures, and reformed the services so that they were subject to effective oversight and had to obey the law, they may well be working more efficiently to protect us from threats to our national’s security. After all, the focus of their work is now counter-terrorism, and they use the same resources and techniques as the police. Why should they not be subject to the same checks and balances?
Instead, MI5 and SIS continue to operate outside meaningful democratic control. Their cultures are self-perpetuating oligarchies, where mistakes are glossed over and repeated, and where questions and independent thought are discouraged. We deserve better.
My book about the Shayler affair (including the MI6 plot to assasinate Col. Gaddafi) and my experiences as an Intelligence Officer in MI5.
I was invited on to “The Richard and Judy Show” in 2005 to talk about my book, and it is featured on the show’s website.
William Podmore was kind enough to review my work:
In this remarkable book, Annie Machon makes serious allegations against the British state’s intelligence services, MI5 and MI6. Ms Machon and her partner David Shayler are former high-ranking MI5 officers, both now retired from the service. The book’s allegations derive from their experiences and deserve at least to be the subject of inquiry.
She asserts that MI5 has illegally investigated thousands of British citizens for their political views; that there was collusion between the Army Forces Research Unit and loyalist terrorists; that MI5 failed to stop four major terrorist attacks in Britain, even though it had reliable evidence; and that MI5 and MI6 let a known Libyan terrorist into Britain and let him set up a terrorist network here.
She alleges that MI6’s counter-Iranian section used the Sunday Telegraph (and the journalists Con Coughlin, John Simpson and Dominic Lawson) to try to blame Iran for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, the destruction of flight PA103. MI6 was trying to deflect attention from the fact that it was actually a Libyan retaliation for the US bombing of Tripoli (backed by Thatcher) in 1986.
The book’s most significant allegation is that MI6 illegally paid tens of thousands of pounds to Al-Qa’ida in 1995–96 to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi and seize power in Libya. In the attempted coup, several innocent civilians and security police were killed. If this is true, MI6, a British state agency, sponsored our terrorist enemies in a conspiracy to murder, which resulted in the killing of innocent civilians.
But Blair refuses to hear any evidence against the intelligence services, and prosecutes and harasses critics and whistleblowers. The Intelligence and Security Committee, set up under the 1994 Intelligence Services Act to oversee the services, is no use, because it is appointed by and reports only to the Prime Minister.
The intelligence services should work under the rule of law and respect democratic rights. Terrorist suspects should be arrested and brought to trial under criminal law, not detained, or executed, without trial, as has happened in Northern Ireland and elsewhere.
The intelligence services are supposed to protect us, but it would appear that they have instead connived in terrorism, putting us at greater risk of terrorist attack.
The Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom (CPBF) also highlighted it.
The book can be ordered through Amazon.