Robin Ramsey
Continued
Thu Mar 4 12:06:54 2004
142.163.11.8

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 state is often the problem and should be reduced if possible, they also believe that the security agencies are a miraculous exception to the general incompetence of public organisations; are, indeed, paragons of efficiency and virtue which need no supervision. They are splendid chaps, doing a wonderful job. I can hear ISC chair, former Tory Minister of Defence and Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Tom King saying that: 'splendid chaps doing a wonderful job.' Tom King, as they say, isn't the sharpest knife in the kitchen drawer. This may explain why Mr Blair left him in the job when Labour won the election in 1997.
The Labour Party's passivity in face of the secret state is a more complex phenomenon. Partly it is simply a reflection of wider passivity in the face of the state per se. The idea that the British state is a problem has never really been part of the culture of the Labour Party. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the idea - the myth - of civil service neutrality is believed by the upper echelons of the Labour Party. And there is a distant folk memory of Harold Wilson's attempt to challenge the power of the Treasury in his first government - and his defeat by them. In practice the idea that the state is a problem is too difficult, has too many awkward ramifications, for Labour politicians. And if, say, the power of the civil service in an ordinary government department looks too difficult to challenge, the secret state is simply off the agenda at the parliamentary Labour Party level.

In the 1980s doing something about the secret state was on the Labour Party's formal agenda - right at the bottom, it is true, but it was on there. It was there because of pressure from ordinary members of the left-wing of the Labour Party - people like me who had read a few books. In those days it was possible for members to actually do things; these days members are just people who fill in standing order forms and work to elect the candidates picked by head office.

There was no real intent by the leadership group around Neil Kinnock, however. To them it was all just noises off stage, rantings from the left. This changed a little in 1986/87 after the series of revelations from Peter Wright, Colin Wallace and Cathy Massiter which confirmed all but the most paranoid lefty's view of the security agencies' institutional hostility to the Labour Party and Labour movement.

For a few moments there Neil Kinnock even threatened to do something. A member of his personal staff actually phoned 'Spycatcher' Peter Wright in Australia in the run-up to the attempt by the British government to stop the publication of Wright's book. It does not seem to have occurred to Kinnock and co. that every phone within a mile of Wright and his legal team was tapped of course, and the NSA had their resources on the case. 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. It was one of those moments when a little more wit or bottle might changed things.

Kinnock and his team flunked it
He should have laughed at her - but he didn't. He should have asked her how she knew the content of the phone call - but he didn't. He should have derided her talk of treason and pointed out that Wright, a senior member of MI5, was saying that parts of MI5 had been plotting against his party. He should have raised the cry of treason. But he didn't. In the event, taunted by Mrs Thatcher, Neil Kinnock panicked, rushed to wrap himself in the flag and declare himself a loyal patriotic Brit; and the whole subject of the security agencies was wiped off the Kinnock team's blackboard. And it has never returned.
Neil Kinnock panicked, and Labour MPs walk away from this field, because they don't know anything. A Neil Kinnock - even an averagely conscientious MP - has so much to do, so much paper to process, that he or she is never going to be able to read enough to master this field. And this field looks uniquely dangerous to MPs, especially on the left. Nobody with an ounce of career-mindedness is going to take a critical interest in the security agencies. For MPs believe - whether this is a rational belief or not - that the security agencies can destroy them. And in a subject so dangerous no MP is going to be advised what to say. I spent years sending out such advice to Labour MPs: not a word of it was acted on. So: as they don't know what to say or do, they say and do nothing.

It is unclear to me how rational is the belief of MPs that the security agencies could destroy them. It is clear from Colin Wallace's documents that in 1973/4 MI5 was trawling through MPs' private lives gathering dirt. But evidence of security agency-gathered material wrecking MPs careers is thin. There are some cases in the Wilson period of MPs who wanted to become Ministers having their careers blocked by bad references from MI5. But the MP who has done the most attacking of the security agencies, Ken Livingstone, survived and is now Mayor of London.

On the other hand there is the case of Tom Spencer MEP, who until last year was the leader of the Tory group of MEPs in the European Parliament. I remember getting a call from an MEP's researcher in Brussels asking me who Spencer was. 'Never heard of him,' I replied. 'Why?' It turned out Spencer had been asking questions about a rather sensitive American project whose initials are HAARP which links to various mind control and weather modification projects. This was about the only time I made a correct prediction. I said to the researcher something to the effect that Spencer better watch out, because the Yanks would go for him if he continued poking around in that field. And lo and behold, about six months later, Customs just happened to pick his bags to search and just happened to find some cocaine and some porno mags in them. Cue media interest; cue end of Tom Spencer's political career. There is one MP in the Commons who is having a go at the secret state, a Liberal-Democrat called Norman Baker. If you see smear stories about him you will know whence the stories came.

However, the 'Wilson plots' story of the 1986-9 period, the biggest source of information on the activities of the security agencies in this country in the post-war era came and went; and, despite file drawers full of cuttings, it had virtually no effect on the political system. Nobody was fired; no meaningful structural changes were made to the security agencies. It is said that they were persuaded to broaden the base of their recruitment and rely less on the old boy public school network; but no meaningful political oversight, let alone political control, was introduced.

You can tell that nothing has changed because MI5 and MI6 can spend £200 million more than they should have and get away with it. Indeed they must be thinking: why didn't we spend more? They said nothing about £200 million, maybe we could have had £400! The security agencies must love having this lot in office. Utterly ignorant of their activities - and determined to remain ignorant.

For the leadership of the Labour Party the process of becoming respectable, becoming electable, not only meant not challenging the power of the City of London, it also means not challenging - not even talking about - the secret state.

Of course the subject was never on the agenda of the Blair faction. Within his inner group we have Peter Mandelson who has been around MI6 since his early 20s, and Jonathan Powell, ex-FCO in Washington and, it has been alleged, the MI6 man there, before joining Blair. (For this latter charge there is no evidence, to my knowledge; and I suspect that if it were true Mr Tomlinson would have found a way to let us know by now.) Four of the Blair cabinet are alumni of the Anglo-American elite group the British American Project; three of the Blair cabinet have passed muster at Bilderberg meetings; and the entire Defence team in Blair's first Cabinet in 1997 were members or associates of the Trade Union Committee for European and Transatlantic Unity, created by the Americans in the 1970s - probably though not yet provably created by the CIA - and currently funded by NATO.

Blair, like his Conservative Party counterparts, believes - or pretends to believe - that the security agencies are splendid chaps doing a splendid job who need no supervision from mere politicians...

As the publisher of a little magazine interested in this field I have met a number of whistle-blowers and victims of HMG's secret organisations; and in all the cases of which I have knowledge the same pattern emerges: honest, decent, loyal, patriotic members of this society get screwed because they know something the secret state would rather the rest of us didn't now. The secret state's response to Fred Holroyd, Colin Wallace, John Burnes, Harold Smith, and most recently Shayler and Tomlinson, is always the same: never mind the content of what they are saying; never mind their previous service to the state, fuck up their lives. Fred Holroyd was put in a mental hospital. Colin Wallace was framed for manslaughter. Less well known, John Burnes was persecuted by MI5. Persons unknown tried to get him killed by the INLA, then tried to frame him for robbery. A post-grad student at the time, he had his grant withdrawn; and, after training as a teacher, he was blocked by MI5 from teaching. His offence? He had the temerity to fall in love with and marry the wife of Sir Thomas Legg, at the time the Lord Chancellor's Department's liaison with MI5. It was Legg who appointed the judge who oversaw the framing of Colin Wallace. The crazy conspiracy theorists in MI5 concluded that Burnes was a KGB agent who had targeted Legg. Burnes discovered that his wife, Legg's ex, had been using accounts in Burnes' name to launder money for MI6. At one point Burnes sought political asylum in Holland.

And there is Shayler and Tomlinson...

The really stupid thing is that none of these people wanted to blow the whistle, wanted to make trouble. All have been pushed into the role by the incompetent personnel manage-ment of our secret servants.

It amazes me that anyone would work for them, so awful are they to work for. Take Jonathan Moyle, a not very bright, gung-ho Queen and country man. Young Moyle, while at University at Aberystwyth, was a Special Branch snitch who thought it his patriotic duty to tell the local SB who was smoking dope. On graduating he became an agent for - well, MI6 probably, though who knows? Moyle ended up being murdered in Chile. According to the book about him, Moyle wasn't very subtle as an intelligence asset and was poking around the Chilean arms dealer Cardoen - one of Mark Thatcher's friends - while Cardoen was doing a big helicopter deal with the Iraqis. This was in the run-up to the American attack on Iraq. Moyle ended up dead in a wardrobe in Chile and what does the local FCO guy do? Tells the media that Moyle was the victim of an auto-erotic accident: strangled himself while having a wank.

There is lot of this about, apparently. James Rusbridger, the writer on intelligence, apparently died this way; and so, appar-ently, did Tory MP Stephen Milligan, PPS to Jonathan Aitken. Does my nose wrinkle at this? Just a bit, I have to confess.

Maybe there are people here thinking of working for the secret departments of HMG. My advice would be consider the experience of Moyle, John Burnes and Colin Wallace before you do.

One of the major themes of Colin Wallace was the internecine conflicts in Northern Ireland between MI5, MI6, the RUC Special Branch and the Army. These conflicts are still going on. There was a major outbreak of leaks - ie of official secrets - to the press in the early 1990s when the Special Branch was trying to resist MI5's take-over of the anti-terrorism franchise. MI5 won. Part of the reason for MI5's hatred of David Shayler is his revelation of just how incompetent MI5 were in dealing with the IRA in the UK having won that franchise.

Currently there is a major struggle going on between the RUC Special Branch and the Army, with the RUC leaking to the Sunday Times the details of the campaign of assassinations in Northern Ireland by the Army's Force Research Unit, the FRU. A barrow-load of official secrets have been exposed in this one. We have the extraordinary situation in which one arm of the British secret state is trying to bust the journalist concerned, Liam Clarke, for leaking information given to him by another of the state's secret arms.

Telling lies in the Torygraph
Meanwhile MI6 have returned to planting disinformation in the British media - most of it that I can see is going into the Sunday Telegraph. Tomlinson told us about the 20-strong I/Ops - Information Operations - unit in that shiny building on the Thames. But its existence had been visible for a long time. It is increasingly difficult to take the talk of official secrets seriously. The Sunday Telegraph of 24 September carried two pieces from MI6. There was a puff piece by former MI6 officer Alan Petty, using his nom de plume Alan Judd, on the MI6 building in the wake of the IRA attack on it; and there was the latest in the long line of anti-Gaddafi pieces, this one claiming that Libya now has some North Korean ballistic missiles. The only stated source for the allegation was a 'Western intelligence official'.
But four months before, on 28 May 2000, the Sunday Times article 'IRA investors make 300% profit out of Gaddafi cash donations', sourced back to 'MI5 documents seen by The Sunday Times', concluded by telling us that Swiss police were 'investigating the supply to Libya from Taiwan of plans and parts for Scud missiles.' Well, does Gaddafi have Taiwanese Scuds (MI5 story planted in the Sunday Times) or North Korean missiles (MI6 story planted in the Sunday Telegraph)?

Sometimes these MI6 planted stories are really laughable. The Sunday Telegraph of 30 July carried a story by Christina Lamb, 'Diplomatic Correspondent' which claimed that Saddam Hussein had sent belly dancing assassins to London to murder his opponents there. Lamb sourced this to 'a Foreign Office official', the traditional euphemism for MI6.

This may seem comic, frivolous even - at worst a waste of public money. But it's more serious than that. The Sunday Times was a serious, respectable newspaper until Andrew Neil became its editor in the mid-1980s and turned it into a mouth-piece for MI5 and the MOD to run their rubbish through. The Sunday Telegraph shows all the signs of going down the same dangerous path. But then I'm an old-fashioned kind of a person who thinks the quality and independence of our mass media is important.

If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, secrecy is the first refuge of the incompetent - or the illegal. Because this is the issue. The suspicion of people like me is that the security agencies want secrecy to cover their incompetence and their feather-bedding; and also to conceal activities they would rather we didn't know - activities they shouldn't be engaged in. MI6 is not supposed to be in the business of assassinating foreign leaders, even if that leader is on the Americans' shit list like Milosevic. MI5 is not supposed to be in the business of collecting and distributing the dirt on British MPs - which is what they were doing in the 1970s. What else have they been doing, free from the gaze of politicians and journa

 

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