Robin Ramsey
Brit Security Agency Sagas
Thu Mar 4 12:04:20 2004
142.163.11.8


http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/articles/security.htm

THE SECURITY AGENCIES IN MODERN SOCIETY
By Robin Ramsay

“ Lobster has had its moments. It has been denounced in the House of Commons... ”
“ Where were the shouts of derision... when MI5 and MI6... overspent the budgets
on their new builings by £200 million... why do MPs take no notice... The Labour Party's
passivity... is a more compled phenomenon... ”
“ A member of [Neil Kinnock's] personal staff actually phoned 'Spycatcher' Peter Wright
in Australia... every phone within a mile of Wright and his legal team was tapped
of course... the information about the call from Kinnock's office was duly passed --
presumably from the NSA via GCHQ -- to the Tories. Mrs Thatcher then stood up in
the Commons and denounced Kinnock for talking to a traitor... [Kinnock] should have
asked how she knew the contents of the phone call... ”
“ Peter Mandelson... has been around MI6 since his early 20s... Four the the Blair
cabinet are alumni of the Anglo-American elite group the British American Project;
three of the Blair cabinet have passed muster at Bildeberg meetings... ”
“ Meanwhile MI6 have returned to planting disinformation in the British Media -- most of it...
going into the Sunday Telegraph... ”



The topic was suggested to me by Kevin O'Brien [of ICSA]. It wasn't clear to me if it was simply that I was being played out a very long piece of rope with which to hang myself. At any rate, given such a wide title - and a title to which I cannot possibly actually do justice - and given my complete lack of knowledge about the audience to whom I was delivering the talk, I decided to chuck out a bunch of ideas in the hope of providing some-thing juicy for you to have a go at. Incidentally, I do actually respond briefly to the stated title at the end of the piece.
A preface: in what follows I use the terms security agencies and secret state to stand for the intelligence and security services - it saves time and endless repetition of a mouthful. Or should I say: I use the term security agencies in place of the intelligence, security and surveillance services, MI6, MI5, GCHQ. Or should I say: I use the term security agencies to stand for the intelligence, security, surveillance and disinformation services? Because disinforming the British citizen is certainly a current aim of at last two of those bodies. Or should it be the intelligence, security, surveillance, disinformation and fucking-up-the-lives-of-certain-people-the-state-finds-awkward-or-irritating services? Because that, too, is an aim of at least one of the 'security agencies'. To that last category I will return.

I am a generalist not a specialist. I could say that my main interest is in the interface between the political and the intelligence worlds; between secret and authoritarian; between open and democratic. But really I'm just interested in the nature of political and historical reality. I've read Professor Freedman's excellent book on the U.S. intelligence estimating process; (2) but I also read books about UFOs. Both are part of political reality as I see it. Indeed both overlap: the CIA is certainly interested in UFOs. A loose alliance of intelligence officers in America, led by a CIA officer named Ron Pandolphi, has spent the last 20 years running disinformation at the American UFO buffs. If you have watched the X Files TV programme you have been watching themes first invented by Pandolphi and his crew.

Which is an oblique way into this: the security agencies, the intelligence agencies, are a part of political reality; and maybe a big part - certainly a bigger part than orthodox historians and political scientists would have us believe.


Denounced by a former IRD head
I'm here because I have been publishing a little magazine called Lobster for 17 years, part of whose content has been information about, and critical commentaries on, the activities of the British and American - mostly British - security agencies. To intelligence professionals, no doubt, the little I have managed to learn and publish is laughable, both in content and quantity. Even so, Lobster has had its moments. It has been denounced in the House of Commons by Ray Whitney, former head of the Information Research Department, IRD, the state's official, anti-left, psy-war outfit. Oddly enough this was something he omitted to tell the Commons before denouncing me; not that one MP in 50 would know what IRD was had he referred to it.
That I am aware of, I have had two agents of the British secret state - from MI5, I presume - sicced onto me to pick my brains. This happened in 1987/8 when I was deeply embroiled with Colin Wallace and his story about anti-Labour hanky panky in Northern Ireland. I was on the phone to him every day and was talking to lots of journalists who were trying to understand his story. Wallace and I assumed our phones were tapped - though we never had any evidence of this; none of the noises, interference and fragments of recorded conversation played back other people were reporting at that time. Being essentially a one-man band even then - my erstwhile partner Stephen Dorril had abandoned Lobster to write a book - Lobster must have presented a peculiar problem to an organisation like MI5. How do you penetrate a one man band? After you have the phonetaps on and the mail intercept, what else is there to do? In the case of something like CND it's easy: someone is sent to join and then volunteer to work at head office. Incidentally, the talk of MI5 'penetrating' CND is a joke: any member could work in head office. It was an open organisation, it ran on volunteers and it had no secrets.

So here we were in 1987: MI5 contemplating what to do about Lobster.

What they did was really quite subtle. I was a fairly serious runner than and used to regularly run round the grass perimeter of the University of Hull playing fields. There were three of us running round this field at lunch-times and eventually we got to talking in the changing rooms, and then went for a beer afterwards; and I became friends with one of them, a post-doc researcher, a man called... let's call him John. Nice guy: on a similar wavelength to me politically; interesting life; good stories; good drinking companion - and, of course, he was really interested in the little magazine I was publishing and what I was working on. At that point nobody in Hull was interested in what I was doing and I was happy to talk to him. I had no secrets.

About 6 months after I met him I got a call from an American journalist I know called Jim Hougan. Hougan had been chatting to a friend, who had a contact in the FBI and somehow this little magazine produced in Hull, England, came up. Don't worry about Lobster, was the message, Lobster has been penetrated. That seemed absolutely hilarious to Hougan and me. Typical spook bullshit, we thought, claiming to have penetrated an organisation consisting of one man. We had a good laugh down the transatlantic phone line and I forgot about it.

About a month later, as I was cycling through Hull city centre, out of a clear blue sky, without any conscious musings on my part, I thought: 'It must be John' - and about six months experience suddenly reorganised itself in my head. Yes, it was my new running, drinking, talking, buddy John. He'd been pretty clever about it but I knew it was him. Through his girlfriend I let him know I had sussed him and I never saw him again.

That, you might think, would be the end of it. Not so. A few weeks went by and another person tried to attach himself to me, this time claiming to be to be a former MI5 agent who would spill the beans. But he was ill, so ill, and the NHS in London was so bad.....This goes on for some weeks and I initially take him seriously and begin badgering doctors in London.... Then one day he says, 'What's the NHS like in Hull?' Maybe he could move to Hull and get treatment..... then he would tell me wonderful tales of MI5.....

At 'moving to Hull' I put the phone down on him. He called himself Sammy. He had been an actor and claimed that MI5 and Special Branches used him to penetrate left organisations.

Somewhere in Whitehall there must still be files on that operation - a brilliant example of the way our secret state wastes money. Because there was nothing to find out. I had no secret sources: with my mail opened and my phone tapped they knew as much as there was to know.



Running Soviet themes?
I have been accused of running Soviet disinformation by Herb Rommerstein, a big cheese in the United States Information Service during the Reagan years. In fact in all the years I have been doing this I have never seen a piece of Soviet disinformation. I have seen lots of British and some American disinformation; but even the few examples of Soviet disinformation described by Oleg Gordievsky never came my way. And no-one on the Rommerstein side of things has produced a critique showing me how I had - wittingly or unwittingly - been running Soviet themes through Lobster. Perhaps I have; I would be interested to be shown how and where. More recently I have been accused a couple of times of being a front for MI6 by American conspiracy theory nutters. But that's about par for the course in these fields.
The examples of Soviet disinformation offered by Gordi-evsky from the 1980s in his book KGB were laughably incompetent, forgeries which would fool no-one and which had zero distribution as far as I know on this country's left. And their incompetence brings me to the first point I want to make today.

In the last decade of the the cold war the Soviet Union - the Soviet state - was portrayed in the West as a vast chaotic shambles in which nothing worked, all was cheap and second rate; a state which never managed to produce a decent refrigerator, and whose chosen motor car was the Lada, built on the cast-off assembly line from the Fiat factories. Oddly enough though, in the midst of this ocean of mediocrity there were apparently exceptions - oases of excellence. Somehow the Soviet military - and the Soviet intelligence services - had escaped the bureaucratic nightmare which was the Soviet command economy and had become the exception which proved the rule: they were efficient and a deadly threat to us. This never seemed likely to me and I was delighted to read the book by the pseudonymous Soviet defector Viktor Suvorov, called The Liberators: inside the Soviet Army. In The Liberators, published in London in 1981, Suvorov portrayed the Soviet armed forces I expected to find: a brutal, inefficient, cynical, farcical army of conscripts, skiving off at the first opportunity and doing their best to stay permanently smashed on anything they could smoke, drink or inject - the mirror image of wider Soviet society, in short; and about as threatening to NATO as the girl guides.

Alas for Suvorov, his handlers in the British (?) state did not seem happy with this portrayal of the Soviet armed forces and the next year he published - or put his name to - another book whose main title was the subtitle of his previous book: Inside the Soviet Army. In the year since The Liberators Mr Suvorov had experienced a dramatic change of memory and his second book presented the efficient, menacing, Red Army required by Western intelligence and military budgets. Suvorov subsequently wrote - or put his name to - a whole slew of books amplifying the Soviet menace in the 1980s. The range of his expertise was astonishing for a relatively junior officer............. Flipping through some of those recently I was reminded of Derek Draper's immortal response to the question, 'Did you actually write your book New Labour's First 100 Days?' 'Write it?' said Draper. 'I didn't even read it.'

File the Suvorov episode away as a dramatic example of the way host countries manipulate defectors; and remember his name the next time you read about the new 'threats' facing NATO.

Looking at the West from the position of the free market right, the state - the public sector - is by definition the quin-tessence of inefficiency: states are neither rational nor efficient distributors of resources. But where are the free market critics of the security agencies? Where were the shouts of derision from stage right when the MI5 and MI6 - so I read - overspent the budgets on their new buildings by £200 million?


Taking the piss
What was that £200 million overspend? What did it mean? First, it was hardly an overspend. I might overspend on my weekly budget; you don't overspend by £200 million. It's the wrong term: but I'm not sure what the correct term would be in bureaucratic language. The £200 million was a big 'fuck you' to the rest of Whitehall - and the politicians. Whitehall couldn't stop them and didn't bother telling the politicians until it had happened. There was the tiniest squeak of outrage from the House of Commons and the whole thing has been buried. Now MI6 sit on the Thames, in all their architectural, post-modern pomp. Think of the contrast between the days of Menzies - even Oldfield - between the willing embrace of anonymity in the service of the state and nation so beautifully and apparently accurately described by John Le Carré, and today's flashy display. If Menzies and Oldfield thought they were playing the master game at some level, they had the good taste not to flaunt it the way today's MI6 are doing. That building is taking the piss; that building is asking to have a grenade fired at it. And the politicians are too afraid to say so.
I mentioned that the so-called overspend of £200 million by our secret servants produced a squeak of outrage from the House of Commons. That squeak came from the the Public Accounts Committee. The committee nominally dealing with our secret servants, the Intelligence and Security Committee, said nothing; and said nothing because it is not allowed to say anything not vetted by the FCO - sorry Foreign and Common-wealth Office - and the Home Office. The ISC is invited to do x or y. (3)

For example, on the opening page of the ISC report on the Mitrokhin Inquiry, there is the formal letter from ISC chair Tom King which begins:


Dear Prime Minister, on 13th September 1999 you and the Home Secretary invited the Intelligence and Security committee to examine the policies and procedures....
On p 10 we read,
'The home Secretary wrote to the ISC Chairman on 8th October establishing the inquiry's terms of reference....'
This what you are allowed to do........
While the ISC were being invited to look at Mitrokhin and the way he was handled by MI6, messrs Shayler and Tomlinson, the two most important defectors from the British security agencies since Philby, were in exile in one case and in jail in the other. While Shayler was sitting in a French jail the House of Commons had its first debate on the work of the ISC which had produced its first report that summer: neither report nor debate mentioned Shayler.

To my knowledge no Labour politicians have met either of them; not one. None of the ISC members of course; they are forbidden to talk to either Tomlinson or Shayler unless invited to do so by higher authorities. Yes, while Tomlinson and Shayler talked of assassination plots by employees of HMG, our politicians were sitting in the sand pit, given 50 year-old allegations about Melita Norwood to play with - allegations which, even if true, mattered little in 1950 and mean nothing today.

This is taking the piss.


Why are our politicians so passive?
Which brings me to another of the recurring questions of the past 15 years: why are our politicians so passive in this field? Why do MPs sit on the ISC doing degrading, keep-em-busy, shit-work? Why do MPs take no notice of a £200 million overspend? From a Conservative government we would expect nothing else, of course. The security agencies simply are not on their agenda. The Tories are historically the Queen and country party, after all; they have had institutional links with the security agencies for the past 100 years. And while the Tories accept that in general terms the

 

• Continued — Robin Ramsey, Thu Mar 4 12:06
• Continued - to end of article — Robin Ramsey, Thu Mar 4 12:09