Category Archives: Interviews
BBC Radio Bristol Interview
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.
Resonance FM Interview
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:
New Statesman Article, August 2008
The new spies
When
the Cold War ended, it didn’t spell curtains for the secret agent.
Private espionage is a booming industry and environmental protest
groups are its prime target
As you hunker down for the last few days of the Camp for Climate
Action, discussing how to force your way into Kingsnorth power station
in an attempt to prevent the construction of a new coal facility, cast
your eyes around your fellow protesters. Do they look entirely bona
fide to you? And don’t look for the old-school special branch officers
— Kent Police are a tiny force. It’s the corporate spies hired by
private companies you need to watch out for.
According to the private espionage industry itself, roughly one in four of your comrades is on a multinational’s payroll.
Russell Corn, managing director of Diligence, one of a growing
number of “corporate intelligence agencies”, with offices high in the
Canary Wharf glass tower, says private spies make up 25 per cent of
every activist camp. “If you stuck an intercept up near one of those
camps, you wouldn’t believe the amount of outgoing calls after every
meeting saying, ‘Tomorrow we’re going to cut the fence’,” he smiles.
“Easily one in four of the people there are taking the corporate
shilling.”
In April this year, for instance, the anti-aviation campaign network
Plane Stupid, one of the main organisers of the eco-camp built to
protest against the expansion of Heathrow Airport, announced that one
of its activists, Ken Tobias, was actually called Toby Kendall, was
working for a corporate espionage firm called C2i, and had been leaking
information about the group to paying clients and the media. He had
been hired by an as yet unknown private company to provide information
and disrupt the group’s campaigning.
When Tobias first turned up at Plane Stupid’s meetings in July 2007,
he seemed a committed former Oxford student dedicated to reducing
aircraft emissions. The group gradually became suspicious because he
showed up early at meetings, constantly pushed for increasingly drama
tic direct action and — the ultimate giveaway — dressed a little too
well for an ecowarrior. When they showed his picture around Oxford they
found an old college pal who identified him as Toby Kendall. A quick
Google search revealed his Bebo page with a link to a corporate
networking site, where his job as an “analyst” at C2i International,
working in “security and investigations”, was pasted in full public
view.
Just a month earlier, a woman called Cara Schaffer had contacted the
Student/Farmworker Alliance, an idealistic bunch of American college
students who lobby fast-food companies to help migrant workers in
Florida who harvest tomatoes. Like the cockle-pickers of Morecambe Bay,
many of these workers are smuggled into the US by gangs which then take
their passports and force them to work without pay to clear often
fictitious debts to regain their papers.
Digging up dirt
Again, Schaffer’s excessive eagerness aroused suspicion, and again,
the internet revealed her true identity. She owned Diplomatic Tactical
Services, a private espionage firm which had pre viously hired as a
subcontractor one Guillermo Zara bozo, today facing murder charges in
Miami for his role in allegedly executing four crew members of a
chartered fishing boat, an allegation he denies. Schaffer turned out to
be working for Burger King — the home, perhaps appropriately, of the
Whopper.
The cute thing about these two bozos is that they got caught pretty
early on, but that was because they were young and had no background in
espionage.
The real market is in proper, old-school spies who are suddenly
entering the private sector. For professional spooks, the 1990s were no
fun at all. The Cold War was over, defence spending was down and a
detailed knowledge of cold-drop techniques in central Berlin was
useless to governments looking for Arabic speakers who knew the Quran.
From New York and London to Moscow and Beijing, any decent-sized
corporation can now hire former agents from the CIA, FBI, MI5, MI6 and
the KGB. The ex-spooks are selling their old skills and contacts to
multinationals, hedge funds and oligarchs, digging up dirt on
competitors, uncovering the secrets of boardroom rivals and exposing
investment targets. They are also keeping tabs on journalists,
protesters and even potential employees.
“MI5 and MI6 in particular have always guided ex-employees into
security companies,” explains Annie Machon, the former MI5 agent who
helped David Shayler blow the whistle on the security services back in
1997. “It’s always useful to them to have friends they can tap for info
or recruit for a job that requires plausible deniability. The big
change in recent years has been the huge growth in these companies.
Where before it was a handful of private detective agencies, now there
are hundreds of multinational security organisations, which operate
with less regulation than the spooks themselves,” she says.
Corn’s company Diligence, for instance, was set up in 2000 by Nick
Day, a former MI5 spy, and an ex-CIA agent, Mike Baker. Before long,
the duo had built up a roster of high-paying clients including Enron,
oil and pharmaceutical companies, as well as law firms and hedge funds.
In 2001, a small investment by the Washington lobbying company Barbour
Griffith & Rogers propelled their growth. However, BGR and Baker
sold their stakes in 2005, shortly before a scandal shook Diligence.
KPMG, the global professional services firm, accused Diligence staff of
impersonating British spies to gain information on a corporate takeover
for a Russian telecoms client called Alfa Group. Diligence settled the
lawsuit without admitting liability.
Since then, it has recruited the former Conservative Party leader
Michael Howard as chairman of its European operations. And it is that
sort of respectability and lobbying power that big players are after.
In 2007, the parent company of the US private military firm Blackwater,
which hit the headlines for gunning down Iraqi civilians in Baghdad
last September, entered this market through Total Intelligence
Solutions (TIS), a new CIA-type private operation, to provide
intelligence services to commercial clients.
Discreet investigations
Blackwater’s vice-chairman, J Cofer Black, who runs TIS, spent three
decades in the CIA and the state department, becoming director of the
Counterterrorist Centre and co-ordinator for counter terrorism, a job
with ambassadorial rank. He describes the new company as bringing “the
intelligence-gathering methodology and analytical skills traditionally
honed by CIA operatives directly to the boardroom. With a service like
this, CEOs and their security personnel will be able to respond to
threats quickly and confidently — whether it’s determining which city
is safest to open a new plant in or working to keep employees out of
harm’s way after a terrorist attack.”
Black also says TIS will operate a “24/7 intelligence fusion and
warning centre” that will monitor civil unrest, terrorism, economic
stability, environmental and health concerns, and information
technology security around the world.
The established firms already operating in this area include Kroll,
Aegis, Garda, Control Risks, GPW and Hakluyt & Co. More firms are
opening every day and there is little regulation of the sector.
Hakluyt & Co was founded in 1995 by former British MI6 officers,
with a reputation for discreet and effective investigations. The
company butler, a former gurkha, greets visitors to its London HQ, a
town house off Park Lane. In winter, meetings can be conducted beside
the fire. Computers are rarely in sight. Hakluyt’s advisory board has
become an exit chamber for captains of industry and former government
officials. Members have included Sir Rod Eddington, a former BA CEO,
and Sir Christopher Gent, former chief executive of Vodafone.
“It is hard to work well for an oil company without knowing who all
the key decision-makers in a government are and having the right
contacts to reach them,” explains Stéphane Gérardin, who runs the
French private security company Géos. “We have an intelligence section
where we employ some investigative journalists, people from the finance
sector, from equity banks and some from security backgrounds.
“It is an important part of image protection for our clients as
well. We have our own tracking and monitoring centre, with analysts
doing risk mapping and preparing our clients for every potential
problem. It could be about alerting them to local sensitivities. Or, in
this globalised internet age, it can be a group of students in
Cambridge who have launched a protest website, who may be sending out a
petition.
“So we need to be able to understand and prepare our own propaganda
to counter such attacks. This is work we do to protect our clients.”
Trusted friend
Like the state security services, which ended up running Class War
in the 1990s after a hugely successful penetration, these spies work to
become reliable members of any protest movement. In April 2007, the
Campaign Against Arms Trade called in the police after court documents
showed that the weapons manufacturer BAE Systems had paid a private
agency to spy on the peace group.
BAE admitted that it had paid £2,500 a month to LigneDeux
Associates, whose agent Paul Mercer — accepted as a trusted member of
the campaign — passed information, including a legally privileged
document, to BAE’s director of security, Mike McGinty.
Unlike the security services, however, these services don’t bother
with penetrating the far left or anti-fascist groups. Their clients are
only interested in the protest movements that threaten corporations.
And as that is the nature of much protest in these times, it is a wide
field, but with a particular impact on environmental groups.
At any of this summer’s green protests the corporate spies will be
there, out-of-work MI5 agents tapping green activists’ mobile phones to
sell the information on to interested companies.
Russell Corn knows of incidents where a spook at a meeting has
suggested a high-street bank as a target, then left the meeting to
phone the officers of said bank, telling them that he has penetrated an
activist camp planning an attack and offering to sell the details. Corn
has no time for such behaviour, however.
“The thing about a really good private spy,” he tells me, “is that you’ll never know he’s around and he’ll never get caught.
“The fact you can’t see them … it means nothing at all.”
Emel Magazine, November 2007
Interview in Emel Magazine, November 2007
Table Talk
Espionage, intrigue and life-on-the-run are all part and parcel of Annie Machon’s history. Sadia Chowdhury speaks to the former MI5 agent about the consequences of exposing what goes on behind the scenes at one of the world’s most renowned secret
services.
It was the Saturday night of the August bank-holiday weekend in 1997 when Annie Machon and her boyfriend packed their bags and took the first two seats they could find out of Britain. They had spent the last ten months of
their lives trying to settle into their new jobs knowing that a day would come when they would blow the whistle on their former employer
and turn their lives upside down.
Machon had turned her back on a six-year career as a spy to stand by the man she loved. Her boyfriend was David Shayler, a high-flying MI5 officer who exposed, what he said, was the Intelligence Service’s plot to assassinate the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi.
The two are no longer together but as we meet for coffee in a London hotel, Machon shows no regret at the way things took shape. Dressed entirely in black, it’s her sunshine blonde hair that lights up an otherwise dull background to the city’s scaffold-clad landscape.
Her life as an MI5 officer was no James Bond film, but you can still see that Machon is the perfect spy. With an unsuspecting face and a handshake that feels like you have known her all your life, the 39 year old campaigner rescinds the myth of the glamorous, martini-sipping spy world. “No, it’s much, much more mundane”, she laments before telling me that much of the job can constitute mind numbing behind-the-desk work.
But unknown to Machon at the time, a career that started off as a simple application to work for the Foreign Office, soon developed into a plot fit for a blockbuster Hollywood movie.
“My first reaction was ‘It’s MI5!’ I was really quite frightened”, she says, recalling a letter from the Ministry of Defence which offered her alternative jobs with the Intelligence Services. “My father was with me when I opened the latter and he just said ‘let’s see what happens’. ”
What ‘happened’ was ten months of intensive application processes for the Cambridge Classics student to undergo at the establishment. Recovering from a post-Cold War reputation marred with embarrassing revelations and intelligence failures, Machon says her recruiters insisted they were aiming to work within the legal framework for the
first time.
It was 1990, only one year after the Security Service Act placed the Service on a statutory
basis: a fact that helped Machon believe what she was being told. “They were saying ‘we obey the law, we work within the law; we don’t do all the political stuff like we used to’. But unfortunately my first posting was in the political section so I learnt quite quickly that they had lied to me.”
Machon confesses a sceptical attitude soon developed after she was instructed to uncover “old communists” summarising files on anybody who stood for parliament in the 1992 elections. Sharing her strong concerns was one David Shayler, a former Sunday Times journalist who had worked with her in F2, the counter-subversion section of MI5.
Within a year, the two fell in love — a bond that was to see them stand together against what she describes as a catalogue of errors and crimes committed by MI5. “There was a lot of concern about how MI5 wasn’t obeying the law and how it was getting its priorities wrong,” Machon says, hastening to add that other officers had approached management with their concerns only to be told to shut up. “Most organisations are pyramid shaped and MI5 has this bulge in the middle, full of managers who aren’t going anywhere because they’re not very good at their jobs. But they don’t get sacked and they were the ones blocking a lot of the new ideas that were coming in.”
One consequence of this incompetence, Machon explains, left MI5 with blood on its hands. Machon and Shayler were moved to T Branch, where they worked on countering Irish terrorist threats. Shayler was to claim later that MI5 could have prevented the 1993 IRA bombing of Bishopsgate in the City of London, which left one dead and 44 injured.
“You’re in the firing line,” Machon tells me plainly, pausing a moment as the waitress brings coffee to our table. She goes on to describe the events that lead her to leave MI5 before slowly pushing down on the filter. It was still the early 1990s and Machon’s partner Shayler was now head of the Libyan desk, responsible for ‘Middle Eastern terrorism’.
He was allegedly briefed by his MI6 counterpart about a plot to assassinate the Libyan leader. It is thought the plan involved funding and equipping a Libyan opposition group which Machon describes as an “Islamic extremist network” to carry out the deed. In March 1996, a bomb exploded in the coastal city of Sirte, missing Gaddafi’s motorcade but killing several civilians. Shayler claimed that MI6 had been involved in the failed assassination attack without the authorisation of the then foreign secretary — as
required under English and international law. The Intelligence Services denied any involvement in this, or several other cases that Shayler accuses the Service of being complicit in. One of those incidents took place in July 1994, when a car bomb exploded outside the Israeli embassy in London injuring 20 people: an attack Shayler says had prior knowledge of and could have prevented.
Half-way through her coffee, Machon goes back to the events of 1996 when she and Shayler decided to leave. “It was incremental because you got posted every two years to a new section and you think ‘okay, that section was wrong but the new section has different managers and is going to be better’. But we moved three times and every time we saw the same mistakes happen. Then the Gaddafi plot pushed our decision to leave.” Nor was it just Shayler and Machon who quit the Intelligence Service that year. Fourteen other officers who had all been recruited around the same time left MI5 in the same year — up from an average of two or three departures a year.
“It took about a year to get the whole thing working. After about ten months, we got this
phone call — David was called by The Mail on Sunday to meet the editor and we were given three days notice that our lives were going to be turned upside down.” Machon recalls how the Mail’s editor offered Shayler cash to leave the country and avoid arrest.
“At that stage after a year of build-up, we just packed up and left.
The couple flew out to Holland, then on to France, spending the next month on the run moving from hotel to hotel almost every night. Machon then decided to return to the UK, and doesn’t hesitate as she relates the story — one she’s probably told a thousand times but one that still brings a look of amusement to her face. “I flew back with my lawyer John
Wadham, head of Liberty, the human rights organisation. He had already told the police that I was coming back — on which flight, at what time, and that I was going to hand myself in. So it was a bit of a shock to be met at immigration by six Special Branch officers who pulled me off to a counter-terrorism suite in Charing Cross police station!”
Machon was released after a day of questioning and a week later joined Shayler back in
France. “We had ten months holed up in this freezing cold, really remote farm house. And during that time we tried to negotiate with the government saying ‘look, we have all this other evidence to give you so you can build an enquiry’, but they just strung it out, kept us quiet, and did nothing.”
It was a particularly stressful time for both Shayler and Machon; as whistleblowers they had depended on support from the press, but with Diana’s death just a week after their story broke, Machon says they lost the support that had been building amongst the media. “We didn’t know what to do. We had no chance of getting another job because once you blow the whistle, other big organisations don’t trust you.” But does she regret what she did? “No. You can’t regret anything in life. I am still proud of what David and I did. Someone has got to take a stand sometimes.”
The question is of course, whether she will have trouble taking that stand now: especially as after a decade since The Mail on Sunday article was released and after having spent years on the run together, Machon and Shayler split up last year. David Shayler now lives in Devon and frequents the media over a different revelation: his recent conviction that he is the Messiah. In a recent television appearance he said “As the Holy Spirit is God incarnate as essence, I am God incarnated as spirit and man.” Machon takes a moment to contemplate and in reaction to my question simply says, “The stress just got to him.” Her answers now become shorter and shorter. “We separated last year”, before adding, “I’m sure eventually we’ll regain our friendship.”
But doesn’t Machon think her former partner’s claims will ruin their credibility? “I think yes, it has destroyed his credibility and I think that’s tragic. It’s a gift for the intelligence agency — they can turn around and say ‘oh, well, he always was mad — he’s a fantasist’,
which is unfortunate because what we were talking about was so important in terms of where our democracy is and who really runs this country.”
A final sip of coffee concludes our meeting as Machon prepares to leave the grey cityscape backdrop for yet another appointment. Though scorn of recent revelations seeks to undermine what the two ex-spies were fighting for, when it comes to struggling to unveil the truth, Annie Machon for one cannot be as easily dismissed.
November 2006 — Independent Interview
Forget Bond: MI5 wants cat-loving twentysomethings
Britain’s spymasters are looking for a new kind of recruit to tackle a different threat. The Independent’s Sophie Goodchild and Lauren Veevers ask an ex-agent about the job.
They seek her here; they seek her there; that damned elusive cosmetic-buying, weepy-watching, cat-owning, Italian food-loving, female couch potato with a mind like a spring trap. That is the new quarry of Britain’s spymasters.
An advertisement specifying these characteristics has been placed in magazines by that hitherto shadowy employer, the security service. It shows the back view of an Afro-haired, twenty-something woman in a T‑shirt.
Those seeking work in the domestic secret intelligence service, MI5, are referred to: mi5careers.gov.uk/surveillance, where the invisible ink brigade says: “We particularly welcome applications from women and ethnic minorities.”
Salaries for a mobile surveillance officer start at £24,121 for what MI5 describes as: “A
remarkable job, undertaken by remarkable people. But you would never know to look at them. Because they need to blend into the background, officers are of average height, build and general appearance.” The selection process can take up to eight months and consists of intense interviews and rigorous aptitude tests.
For the post of intelligence officer, hopefuls receive a lengthy application form which
asks for examples of how you have worked co-operatively, used initiative and judgement, and shown “drive and resilience”. Applicants who pass interview stages will, of course, be required to sign the Official Secrets Act.
One woman who did fulfil the role for real is Annie Machon. Ms Machon, 38, joined MI5’s political and counter-terrorism department in 1991 on general duties. Annie was so
disgusted by the security service’s failings that she and her agent partner, David Shayler, went on the record, breaking the Official Secrets Act. They spent two years on the run and David was jailed six months in 2002 for breaking the Official Secrets Act.
Her advice for new recruits? “Don’t do it! When I started, there were quite a few women that worked there but many of them were admin based. The main problem the security services have is retaining agents. When David and I left, lots more did too — just not so publicly.”
The BBC’s popular Spooks and the American equivalent, 24, have raised the profile
of MI5 as a female career option. But Ms Machon says, “Programmes like Spooks are not really accurate and so glamorise the job a bit, but I also think they highlight the dangerous side to the job which may put some women off. I never saw the skills involved in gender terms. An officer requires a broad range of skills; intellect, organisational skills, analytical skills and the skill to identify a threat in the first place.
“I don’t think that women make particularly better spies than men — but I suppose the general perception of an agent is male, so when interviewing people they may open up more to a woman than a man.”
Ms Machon author of Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers: MI5 and the David Shayler Affair, said: “MI5’s wish list as far as recruits go is huge — but that doesn’t mean that the people who get through have all those things. When I was there the level of staff who were incompetent was a real worry. They have clearly broadened their recruitment policy but I expect that the long process with still be just as stringent. When I was a recruiter we had 20,000 people applying to be James Bond, but only about five got through.”
Jane Featherstone, executive producer of Spooks, said: “At first the intelligence services were resistant, and they let that be known through former members who acted as technical advisers on Spooks. Then they thought it might help to recruit new spies. They even used the first series to help with their advertising campaign. But they were deluged with people who thought the job involved walking around in Armani saving the planet.”
Miranda Raison, who plays MI5 agent Jo Portman in Spooks, said the production team tried to make the portrayal of female operatives as authentic as possible. She said the original cast had met members of the intelligence service to discuss how to play
their roles.
“They got a lot of literature together from that, and since then, cast members have been given a pack full of stories on genuine operations to learn from. There are lots of things you wouldn’t expect in there: for example, how to operate undercover, or as a honeytrap — but it’s much more brutal than you’d imagine.”
MI5 is keen to receive applications from ethnic minorities to help infiltrate Muslim terrorist groups. Its director general, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, recently warned that MI5 is investigating 30 known terror plots in the UK.
Sunday Tribune Interview, 2005
Irish Sunday Tribune, July 2005
What really went on in the secret service?
Suzanne Breen
‘THEY’RE probably out there now, walking about, looking for targets, ” says former spy, Annie Machon, as she surveys the bustling bars, restaurants and shops in Gatwick Airport. MI5 used Heathrow and Gatwick in training courses. Officers would be sent to the airports and instructed to come back with one person’s name, address, date of birth, occupation and passport or driving licence number … the basic information for MI5 to open a personal file.
“They’d have to go up to a complete stranger and start chatting to them. One male officer nearly got arrested. It was much easier for women officers … nobody’s suspicious of a woman asking questions.”
Tall, blonde and strikingly elegant, Machon (37) could have stepped out of a TV spy drama. She arrives in a simple black dress, with pearl earrings, and perfect oyster nails. She is charmingly polite but, no matter how many questions you ask, she retains the slightly detached, inscrutable air that probably made her good at her job.
A Cambridge Classics graduate, her book, <em>Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers</em>, has just been published. She worked in ‘F’ branch … MI5’s counter-subversion section … and ‘T’ branch, where she had a roving brief on Irish terrorism. MI5 took 15 months to vet the book. Sections have been blacked out. If Machon discloses further information without approval, she could face prosecution under the Official Secrets Act.
She left MI5 deeply disillusioned. In 1997, she went on the run from the UK with her boyfriend, former fellow spy David Shayler (39). He was subsequently jailed for disclosing secrets, including that MI6 had allegedly funded a plot to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi.
Machon had “responsibility and freedom” in MI5 when combating Irish terrorism. “It was wonderful when you got results, when you stopped a bomb. That was why I’d joined. There was a huge understanding of the IRA and the Northern Ireland conflict. We weren’t just a bunch of bigots saying “string up the terrorists”. Some managers might have had that attitude but it wasn’t shared by most officers. They acknowledged the IRA as the most professional terrorist organisation they’d dealt with. Loyalists, and republican splinter groups like the INLA, were a lot less sophisticated.”
Machon didn’t witness state collusion but is “watching with interest” as cases unfold. She voices some ethical concerns: MI5 ran a Garda officer as an undeclared agent, which was illegal in the Republic. If it wanted to tap a phone in the Republic, no warrant was needed and there was no oversight procedure. An MI5 officer simply asked GCHQ, which intercepts communication, to set it up.
MI5’s approach to the law led to bizarre situations:
“Officers covertly entered a house in Northern Ireland to install bugging equipment. They trashed it up and stole things to make it look like a burglary. But MI5 lawyers said it wasn’t legally acceptable to steal so the officers had to go and put the goods back which made it look even more suspicious.”
Machon attended security meetings in Northern Ireland. Her life was never in danger, she says. The only colleagues she knew who were killed were on the Chinook helicopter which crashed off the Mull of Kintyre in 1994.
Machon had joined the intelligence services three years earlier. She worked from an office in Bolton Street, Mayfair, one of MI5’s three buildings in London. “It was very dilapidated. There were ancient phones, with wires crossing the floor stuck down with tape. It had battered wooden desks and threadbare carpets. There were awful lime-green walls. The dress code in MI5 was very Marks and Spencer. MI6 (which combats terrorism abroad) was much smarter, more Saville Row.”
MI5’s presence in the building was meant to be a secret but everybody knew, says Machon: “The guide on the open-top London tour bus which passed by would tell passengers, ‘and on your right is MI5’. We were advised to get out of taxis at the top of the street, not the front door, but all the drivers knew anyway. Later, we moved to modern headquarters in Thames House.”
Being a spy isn’t what people think, Machon says. “It wasn’t exactly James Bond, with glamorous, cocktail-drinking espionage. There were exciting bits, like meeting agents in safe houses, but there were plenty of boring days. Mostly, I’d be processing ‘linen’ — the product from telephone taps … or reading intercepted mail or agents’ reports. You get to know your targets well from eavesdropping on their lives. You learn all sorts of things, like if they’re sleeping with someone behind their partner’s back. It’s surreal knowing so much about people you don’t know; and then it rapidly becomes very normal.”
Machon claims the intelligence services were often shambolic, and blunders meant three IRA bombs in 1993 … including Bishopsgate, which cost £350m …could have been prevented. “MI5 has this super-slick image but sometimes it was just a very British muddle. Tapes from telephone taps would be binned without being transcribed because there wasn’t the personnel to listen to them. On occasions, MI5 did respond quickly, but then it could take weeks to get a warrant for a phone tap because managers pondered so long over the application wording … whether to use ‘but’ or ‘however’, ‘may’ or ‘might’.
“Mobile surveillance (who follow targets) were bloody good. There were some amazingly capable officers who were often wasted. Despite everything promised about MI5 modernising, it remained very hierarchical, with the old guard, which had cut its teeth in the Cold War, dominating. They were used to a static target. They’re not up to the job of dealing with mobile extremist Islamic terrorism. We’ve been playing catch-up with al Qaeda for years.”
Machon says MI5 pays surprisingly badly: “I started on £15,000 … entrants now get about £20,000. A detective constable in the Met was on twice my salary. Of course, it’s about more than money but you must reward to keep good people. If you pay peanuts, you end up with monkeys.”
Machon grew up in Guernsey, in the Channel Islands, the daughter of a newspaper editor. “I was apolitical. My only knowledge of spying was watching John Le Carre’s drama Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” After taking Foreign Office exams, she received a letter on MoD notepaper. “There may be other jobs you would find more interesting, ” it said. Intrigued, she rang. It was MI5.
During the recruitment process, every aspect of her life from the age of 12 was investigated. “I’d to nominate four friends from different phases of my life. After they were questioned, they had to nominate another four people. I confessed to smoking dope twice. I was quizzed about my sexual history by a sweet old lady who looked like my grandmother but resembled Miss Marple in her interrogation. She asked if I was gay. The rules have since changed, but then MI5 regarded homosexuality as a defect. If you lied and were found out, you’d be sacked on the spot. In theory, they regarded promiscuity as a weakness, but there were plenty of extra-marital affairs. One couple were twice caught shagging in the office. The male officer, who was very bad at his job, was put on ‘gardening leave’ … sent home on full pay. The woman, an Arabic-speaking translator who was great at her job, was sacked.”
A culture of “rampant drunkenness” existed, says Machon: “There was an operation against a Czech diplomat who was also a spy. The officer running it got pissed, went round with his mates to the diplomat’s house, and shouted operational details through the letter-box at him.”
Recruits were encouraged to tell family and close friends they were MI5, and anyone else that they worked for the MoD.
MI5 had one million personal files (PFs), Machon says. “I came across files on celebrities, prominent politicians, lawyers, and journalists. It was ridiculous. There were files on Jack Straw, Mo Mowlam, Peter Hain, Patricia Hewitt, Ted Heath, Tony and Cherie Blair, Gareth Peirce, and Mohamed Al Fayed. There was a file on ‘subversives’ in the music industry, including the Sex Pistols and UB40.
At recruitment, I was told MI5 no longer obsessed about ‘reds under the bed’, yet there was a file on a schoolboy who had written to the Communist Party asking for information for a school project. A man divorcing his wife had written to MI5 saying she was a communist, so a file was opened on her. MI5 never destroys a file.”
The ranking in importance of targets could be surprising. PF3 was (and is) Leon Trotsky; PF2, Vladimir Ilych Lenin; PF1 was Eamon De Valera.
MI5 currently has around 3,000 employees. About a quarter are officers; the rest are technical, administrative and other support staff, according to Machon.
In recent years, MI5 appointed two female director generals … Stella Rimmington, and the current director general, Dame Eliza Manningham-Butler. “I always found Stella very cold and I wasn’t impressed with her capabilities. There was an element of tokenism in her appointment. Eliza is like Ann Widdecombe’s bossy sister, ” says Machon, mischievously raising an eyebrow. “She scares a lot of men. She is seen as hand-bagging her way to the top.”
Machon says the only way of responding to the growing terrorist threat is for the present intelligence infrastructure to be replaced by a single counter-terrorist agency. The intense rivalry between MI5, MI6, Special Branch and military intelligence means they’re often more hostile to each other than to their targets. ID cards and further draconian security legislation will offer no protection, she says.
Machon was active in the anti-war campaign. She believes there is an “80% chance” that Dr David Kelly, the government scientist who questioned the claim that Iraq could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes, didn’t commit suicide but was murdered on MI5’s instructions.
Other suspicious minds wonder if Machon and Shayler ever left MI5. Could it be an elaborate plot to make them more effective agents? By posing as whistleblowers, they gain the entry to radical, leftwing circles.
Machon dismisses this theory: “It would be very deep cover indeed to go to those lengths. Gareth Peirce is our solicitor. She trusts us and she’s no fool.” Machon says while they have no regrets, they’ve paid a huge emotional and financial price for challenging the secret state. They survive on money from the odd newspaper article and TV interview. Home is a small terraced house in Eastbourne, east Sussex, where they grow tomatoes and have two cats.
Are they still friends with serving MI5 officers? “No comment!” says Machon with a smile. These days, she goes places she never did.
When she addresses leftwing meetings, someone often approaches at the end. “You must know my file?” they say.
‘Spies, Lies & Whistleblowers’ by Annie Machon is published by The Book Guild, £17.95
May 2005 — The Times
MI5 kept schoolboy on its files
The partner of David Shayler reveals how a letter to the Communist Party brought its youthful author to the attention of the security services
August 2005
A BOY who wrote a letter to the British Communist Party for a school project ended up with his own MI5 file, a former Security Service officer claimed yesterday.
The boy had asked for information for his school topic, but his letter was secretly opened by MI5 in the 1970s when the Communist Party was still regarded as a hotbed of subversion, according to Annie Machon, who worked for the domestic intelligence service from 1991 to 1996.
Ms Machon is the partner of David Shayler, the former MI5 officer jailed under the Official Secrets Act for disclosing information acquired in the service.
In a book which has been passed for publication by her former employers, Ms Machon says that the schoolboy’s letter was copied, as was all correspondence to the British Communist Party at that time, “and used to create a PF (personal file), where he was
identified as a ‘?communist sympathiser’ ”.
On another occasion, a man who was divorcing his wife wrote to MI5 claiming that she was involved in Communism, and she was the subject of a personal file, Ms Machon claims in her book, Spies, Lies & Whistleblowers.
She saw the two files, among “more than a million” when working at MI5, and claimed that they had been in the Security Service archives for 20 years. “Why was this information still available to desk officers some 20 years after these individuals had first come to attention, in less than suspicious circumstances?” she writes.
Mr Shayler also made allegations about the contents of personal Security Service files
in 1997, after he left the agency. He said that there were files on Jack Straw, Peter Mandelson, Peter Hain, Mo Mowlam, John Lennon and the Sex Pistols, among others. Mr Shayler was charged under the Official Secrets Act for disclosing other secret information acquired when he was a serving intelligence officer, and was sentenced at the Old Bailey
to six months in prison in 2002.
Ms Machon, 36, who worked in three departments of MI5 — counter-subversion, Irish terrorism and international terrorism — joins a relatively short list of former Security Service officers who have managed to write books without ending up in jail.
The last former MI5 officer to get clearance was Dame Stella Rimington, who was
Director-General of the service from 1992 to 1996.
Peter Wright, who made allegations of bugging and burglary by the Security Service in Spycatcher, published in 1987, got away with it by moving to Tasmania.
Ms Machon repeats allegations made by Mr Shayler that MI6 helped to fund an assassination attempt against Colonel Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, in 1996. It was dismissed by Robin Cook, the former Foreign Secretary, as “pure fantasy”.
Guardian Interview 2002 — The spy who loved me
Stuart Jeffries of The Guardian interviewed me in November 2002:
The Spy who Loved Me
Annie Machon quit her job at MI5 and endured three years on the run — all for the sake of her partner David Shayler, who was jailed last week. She tells Stuart Jeffries why.
Annie Machon fell in love with a spy codenamed G9A/1. It was 1991 and she had been working in MI5’s counter-subversives section for two months. “The first thing I noticed about him is that he’s leonine,” she says over lunch. “I think he’s drop-dead gorgeous. We’d be in section meetings which we’d get dragged to occasionally and told what to think. He stood out because he asked the awkward questions. He was very clear-cut and challenging.”
G9A/1 was David Shayler, the renegade British spy who last week was sentenced to six months for breaking the Official Secrets Act after leaking secret documents to the press. He’s the one regularly branded as a fat, sweaty, boozy, big-mouthed traitor. The kind of upstart who might take his martini stirred rather than shaken. “Yes, that’s what they say, isn’t it?” says Machon, as she lights another cigarette. She exhales. “He’s nothing like that. Everybody loves to portray him as this slob from the north-east. But he’s not only a whistleblower trying to do something honourable. He’s also really intelligent. I love him, and am very proud of him for what he did.”
Some people think you’re the brains behind Shayler. “That’s not true. When I started at MI5, I went in as GD5. GD stands for general duties. It’s very gradist. Dave went in as GD4, which meant that they were fast tracking him. They thought he was really sharp. And they were right. In fact, he’s very sparky and great company. We just clicked, basically.” How did MI5 bosses feel about office romances? “They encouraged them. They regarded those sorts of relationships as politically expedient, and operationally quite sensible. There were quite a few couples at MI5.”
How did Annie Machon, a classics graduate from Girton College, Cambridge, get recruited as a spook in the first place? A nudge in the quad, a glass of sherry with a shifty don? “No, I had sat the exam to be a diplomat. Then I got a letter.” She was impressed by the 10-month recruitment process. “It was very thorough with lots of tests and background checks. It seemed like a professional organisation. We were supposed to be part of the new generation. People from different backgrounds and different experiences were supposed to be brought in — people who could think on their feet and think laterally. We both joined thinking it sounded good for the country, which sounds quite idealistic now.”
When did scepticism set in? “Very quickly.” Machon and Shayler were employed to look for reds under the bed, but they couldn’t find any, even though they studied the file on that dangerous leftwing subversive Peter Mandelson ever so assiduously. “We were basically trying to track down old communists, Trotskyists and fascists, which to us seemed like a waste of time. The Berlin Wall had come down several years before. We were both horrified that during the 1992 election we were summarising files on anybody who stood for parliament. We were also horrified by the scale of the investigations. We both argued most vociferously that we shouldn’t be doing this.”
After two years, both Machon and Shayler were moved to T‑branch, where they worked on countering Irish terrorist threats on the mainland. “We were both doing well. We were good operatives and they wanted the best in that section. I don’t want to be egotistical but that was the truth.”
The pair hoped that this relatively new section would operate better. “There were several young and talented agents who did their best. But because of management cock-ups they couldn’t do their jobs properly and peoples’ lives were lost.” What was the problem? “They had all these old managers who had been there for donkey’s years. They were caught in the wrong era — instead of dealing with static targets, they had a mobile threat in the IRA and they just couldn’t hack it. It was a nightmare, especially because there were so many agencies involved — MI5, Special Branch, the RUC, GCHQ. They all had their own interests. That was why Bishopsgate happened.” Shayler later claimed that MI5 could have stopped the 1993 IRA bombing of Bishopsgate in the City of London, which left one dead and 44 injured.
Why didn’t you leave then? “It was very easy to get into a stasis. You have lots of friends there. But when you get to a more established section like the Middle East terrorism section and you see it’s the same, then you think about quitting.”
In 1995, Shayler discovered that MI6 had paid an agent who was involved in the plot to assassinate the Libyan leader, Muammar Gadafy. Why was that wrong? “Apart from the immorality of it, the general consensus from the intelligence community was that the assassination of a well-established head of state by an Islamic fundamentalist in a very volatile area was not a good idea. It was crazy, but these bozos at MI6 wanted to have a crack at him.”
Then there was the case in which MI5 tapped a journalist’s phone. “For us, that’s what broke the camel’s back. A tap was only to be used in extremis, and this was nothing like that.”
Why didn’t you go quietly? “Well, other officers did. In the year we left, 14 officers resigned. The average figure was usually four. It was very scary. Dave is someone who thinks he should fight for what he believes in. And I knew what he was talking about. I knew he had to have the support against the massed forces of darkness. When you work there, the only person you can report something to is the head of MI5 but if you’re complaining about alleged crimes on behalf of MI5, they’re not going to allow you to do that, so you’re in a Catch 22 situation.”
In August 1997, Shayler sold his story to the Mail on Sunday. The day before publication the couple fled to Utrecht in Holland. “We left before the piece came out because they would have knocked down our doors and arrested Dave. I felt terrified. But we managed to stay one step ahead.” Why was he the whistlebower rather than you? “He had more access to what was going on — he was right in the middle of the Gadafy plot — and felt very strongly about it.”
The couple ended up in a French farmhouse. “It was in the middle of nowhere. No TV, no car. For 10 months we spent every day together. He would write his novel during the day.” What were you doing? “I was keeping house. We enjoyed each other’s company.” No rows? “Plenty.”
The couple tried to negotiate to return to Britain without Shayler being prosecuted, but with an undertaking that his allegations be officially investigated. “We got a complete lack of interest.” Then, during a stay in Paris, Shayler was arrested in a hotel lobby. “We’d just been watching Middlesbrough on TV. They lost, of course. Then I didn’t see him for two months.” He spent nearly four months in La Santé, Paris’s top-security prison which also houses Carlos the Jackal who used to yell “David English!” to the renegade spy from his cell. “I was bereft.” How are you going to deal with his current imprisonment? “I’ll just deal with it. It’s horrible, but I’m tough.”
A French judge ruled the extradition demand was politically motivated and released him. The couple then rented a flat in Paris and holed up for a year. “As far as the British authorities were concerned, we could rot. They didn’t want us to come back. We made a little money from journalism, but this wasn’t the life we wanted.” Why in August 2000 did the spies decide to come home? “We had managed to negotiate a return without risking months of remand. Dave thought he would be able to present his case to peers: yes, he did take £40,000 from the Mail on Sunday but that isn’t why he told the story. He never got the chance. In the trial they tied his hands behind his back. He couldn’t say anything to the jury. The reporting restrictions were extraordinary.”
She visited Shayler in jail for the first time on Tuesday. How was he? “He’ll be all right.” Now what? “I wait. And in the meantime, we get our legal case together. We’re going to Europe, British justice is useless.”
Wouldn’t you like to put all this behind you and get on with your lives. “We will. But not yet. It could take five years to clear his name.” Machon, poised and clad in black, turns a cigarette in her fingers. “You know, when I started this case I was in my 20s. Now I’m 34. I don’t think I’ll have finished with it until I’m in my 40s. I wish I’d never got involved with MI5. I wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole if I had my time again.” I leave Machon alone at a café table writing a letter to the man no longer codenamed G9A/1.
BBC Report on Shayler’s conviction
The BBC report after David Shayler’s conviction in November 2002:
Former MI5 agent David Shayler is facing jail after being convicted of revealing security secrets.
Shayler, 36, was found guilty on three charges of breaking the Official Secrets Act.
He revealed secret documents to the Mail on Sunday newspaper in 1997, arguing he had a public duty to expose malpractice within the security services.
But the prosecution argued Shayler, who will be sentenced on Tuesday, had potentially placed the lives of secret agents at risk. It said he betrayed a “life-long duty of confidentiality” by revealing classified matters.
Shayler, who represented himself, also told the Old Bailey jury he feared for his life at the time, because of something “far more serious” than anything published in the paper. Shayler was remanded on bail for sentencing and could face up to two years’ imprisonment on each of the three counts.
Shayler copied 28 files on seven topics before leaving MI5 in October 1996.
‘Incompetence’
Soon after, he accused MI5 of incompetence and leaked sensitive information to the Mail on Sunday, including allegations of financial links between the Provisional IRA and Libya. He then fled to France with the £40,000 he earned from his revelations, but returned to Britain after three years knowing he faced arrest.
Outside court Shayler’s girlfriend Annie Machon — also a former MI5 officer — said: “David is a whistle-blower, pure and simple. I’m shocked at the verdict. He deserves to be protected, not prosecuted. David revealed malpractice, crime and incompetence on behalf of the intelligence service and he did it in the public interest. He still believes it was right to do so. We believe judges in Europe will be more sceptical about the Official Secrets Act in this country.”
John Wadham, director of civil rights group Liberty and also Shayler’s solicitor, said they would consider taking the case to appeal and would continue their application to the European Court of Human Rights.
Pre-trial ruling
Maurice Frankel from the Campaign for Freedom of Information, said there needed to be fundamental changes to the way in which such cases were dealt with.
A House of Lords hearing before the trial ruled that Shayler could not reveal details of the “serious” matter that allegedly put his life in danger. It also refused him permission to argue his case with a “public interest defence” under the European Charter of Human Rights.
But following the conviction, Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Simon Hughes said: “Whatever the rights and wrongs of Mr Shayler’s actions, there should be a change in the law to ensure that a public interest defence can be undertaken.”
During the trial, Nigel Sweeney QC, for the Crown, said disclosure of even one piece of classified information could be the “final piece in the jigsaw” allowing hostile countries or organisations to identify British agents.
Mr Sweeney told the trial: “The nation’s agents may be unmasked.”
But Shayler told the court: “I was seeking to expose the truth.
‘No harm’
“I’m not the first person in history to stand up and tell the truth and be persecuted, and I doubt I’ll be the last.
His argument that no agents’ lives were put at risk was dismissed as “irrelevant” by the judge.
The jury was told current legislation allowed alternative action for whistle-blowing, such as telling the police or a government minister, instead of going to the media.
Jurors were allowed to see the weighty file of secret documents — but the names of agents and other ultra-sensitive information was obscured.
August 2000 — Telegraph Interview
He’s got nothing to hide, says girlfriend
DAVID SHAYLER’S girlfriend says she has no regrets about giving up her lucrative career in the City to spend three years “on the run” with a man widely denounced as a self-publicist.
Annie Machon, 32, herself a former MI5 officer and a Cambridge classics graduate, gave up her job as a management consultant to join Shayler in his self-imposed exile. She said yesterday “You don’t sacrifice that amount of time and give up your whole life for someone who just wants to have a bit of fun and do this for publicity,” .
“I went on the record, initially, because of all the misinformation that was coming out about him, backroom briefings, all sorts of lies, that he was unemployed, that he was denied promotion, that he wasn’t up to the job, even that he was sacked from MI5.
“I haven’t had much sleep,” she said after Shayler’s release on bail from Charing Cross police station in central London. “I have been quite apprehensive for some weeks, since we decided we should try to come back. Obviously neither of us knew what to expect. He’s got nothing to hide. He wants to put his case to push for more openness.
“It’s good that people are picking up on his cause and are beginning to talk about the issues he’s raised, rather than about his personality.” Money paid for a newspaper exclusive about his story sustained the two for most of their exile. They subsist now on his weekly column in Punch magazine.
But she feels neither can go back to their jobs as management consultants, which they took after they left MI5. “I think things have changed so much and we’ve been through so much it would be very difficult to go back three years to what we were then.”
The two have been together for seven and a half years since meeting in an MI5 library, but there is no talk of marriage. Instead, she seems content with social normality instead of a life spent looking over her shoulder. Returning to London with a media circus in train is a very different experience from when she skulked through the capital, expecting to be followed, bugged or arrested.
“It’s been three years almost to the day,” she said, “and it has definitely taken an emotional toll. In fact, the stress of the whole thing has been quite intense.”
Last night, she and Shayler were planning a quiet family dinner. “It will be the first time in three years that we have been able to dine out openly together in Britain,” she said. “I hope there will be no more looking over our shoulders.”
Guardian Interview 2000 — No place to hide
The Sabine Durrant interview with me in The Guardian, April 2000
No place to hide
How big a price can a woman pay for standing by her man? The partner of exiled MI6 whistleblower David Shayler lives and loves on the run — with Big Brother watching her every move
Annie Machon and her boyfriend, David Shayler, the former MI5 officers now living in Paris, have got used to feeling watched. Their phone plays up. Their emails go missing. Even the walls of their flat seem to look down on them. If they want to discuss “an issue”, they find a safe café to do it in. A different one each time? “Of course,” says Machon with a slight curve to her lips. And in bed? “We have discussed that, yes,” she says. “You just try and blank it out and get on with your life.”
She is poised and controlled. She remains cool even when recalling “sweaty coppers” reading out her love letters in the course of an interrogation. Even when describing the state of her underwear (“inside out, with the crotches turned up as if they’d been sniffing them”) after their flat in Pimlico had been searched.
Machon, who is 31, has been at Shayler’s side since he fled to France in 1997 to escape prosecution for breaking the Official Secrets Act when his claims of MI5 incompetence were first published in a Sunday newspaper. They packed for a fortnight. They’ve been gone two and a half years.
Shayler is a straightforward love or hate figure. He is either the whistleblower, fired by moral purpose to draw attention to bungling within the intelligence services, from revelations that they monitored “subversives” including such threats to national security as Harriet Harman and the reggae band UB40, to his more recent allegations that MI6 was behind an illegal assassination attempt on Muammar Gadafy, the Libyan president. Or, as MI5 would have it (in an interesting mélange of contradictions), he is the traitor, the self-publicist, the breaker of official secrets, the fantasist.
Machon has remained a much more enigmatic figure. At first she was just “Shayler’s girlfriend”. With her blonde hair and big blue eyes, she looked like a deb, a nursery school teacher, caught up in events beyond her control. A former MI5 officer herself, she made no direct allegations while supporting Shayler in his. But this may not have been caution so much as sound management.
Unlike Shayler (who spent four months in jail before extradition proceedings failed; he is now being sued in the civil courts) she is at liberty to come and go in Britain. “It’s important that I remain free to travel, important I remain out of reproach.”
Machon was in London to deliver to Scotland Yard a dossier supporting Shayler’s Gadafy claims (an MI6 file recently posted on the internet also appears to confirm the allegations). She holds press conferences. She meets with MPs. With lawyers. She wants accountability. She wants freedom of expression. She wants amnesty. She wants Shayler to be listened to. Taken seriously. To be allowed home. Then she wants to be left alone.
We meet at Vauxhall underground station, close by the MI6 building, although she doesn’t
want to hang around long. The closest café is too close. She walks very fast to the next. She doesn’t look over her shoulder once. She sees connections where others might see blank walls. There are advertisements for laptops nearby. She refers to the recent stories of the mugged MI5 officer, whose laptop was nicked and the drunken MI6 officer who mislaid his. “What a coincidence,” she smiles sardonically. If she and Shayler win their case, she says she doesn’t think they’ll ever come back to London. “Dave would feel quite uncomfortable living here,” she says. “I would too. It’s just that sense of unease all the time.”
She is all in black, although her nails are gold. She is pale and slim, unlike Shayler whose plumpness in photographs can make him look like a yob. (“He put on weight at MI5, actually. Socialising after work — that drinking culture he talked about — and also a sense
of unease. He eats when he’s feeling stressed. He’s joined a health club now. He swims nearly every day.”)
It’s not the only reason they seem an unlikely couple. A Middlesbrough boy, with working-class roots, Shayler is said to be chippy about public-school Oxbridge types.
Machon, who is the daughter of a pilot turned newspaperman, and from an old Guernsey family, went to a private girls’ school and then to Cambridge, where she studied classics. “Yes, yes, I know. I think he did think I was a bit posh at first, but he squared it with the fact that I was a scholarship girl. Also we both moved around a lot when we were young. We had that in common.”
Machon says that as soon as they met in an MI5 library they made each other laugh and that their relationship is “passionate”. There are hints of that in her story. The night before she came back to England for the first time, suspecting she would be arrested, but not sure whether they would confiscate her passport, they lay in bed and held each other and cried, “not knowing when we would see each other again”. Then, after 10 months in hiding at a farmhouse in south-west France, when he was suddenly taken into custody, for days she walked around with “no one’s hand in mine”.
Interestingly, too, while Machon looks as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth,
she found out soon after joining MI5 (after sitting the foreign office exams), that psychological profiling had marked her out as a maverick. “I was having a bit of a debate with my manager in the office and she said, ‘I’ve been warned about you’.” She smiles enigmatically. “I was quite flattered.”
She and Shayler had already left MI5 when Shayler decided to go public, both had nice well-paid jobs as management consultants. They had a nice social life, nice Pimlico flat.
She didn’t want him to go to the papers. “It wasn’t so much doubt as fear. I knew they’d come after us and I knew what they could do against us. If you’ve worked for MI5 it doesn’t help your paranoia, put it that way.”
She slips a lighter out of her cigarette packet and lights up. “And I must say I was shown to be right. Not that I’d ever say I told you so to Dave.”
The papers ran the story on a bank holiday weekend. Machon and Shayler got the last plane out of Heathrow on the Saturday night, to Amsterdam. They braced themselves. Then Diana, Princess of Wales was killed. “In one sense it was a relief because the pressure was taken off us. In another it was terrible. An injunction had been put on the paper and if she hadn’t died, Fleet Street would have been up in arms about gagging the free press, they would have been more balanced in their assessment of Dave, demanding
inquiries. As it was, there were a lot of backroom briefings against him, saying he was a loudmouth, unbalanced, and we were buried there.”
She uses the word “buried” a lot. It’s hard to tell whether it is a good thing or a bad thing for someone who needs publicity (“it’s our only protection”) and yet longs to hide. On the run, they “buried themselves” in the French countryside, a different hotel every night, paying cash.
After that they were “buried” again in a remote farmhouse near Perpignan, “freezing cold, miles from the shops”, living off their £40,000 newspaper earnings, where Shayler wrote his novel (it has since been banned) and she kept house. The British government pretended to negotiate with them, she says. “They thought we’d run out of money and rot abroad. They wanted to bury us.”
It was only when Shayler was in prison, when the worst had happened, that she got
her confidence back. “I found I was tougher than I thought. Dave had always been the more ebullient character. And suddenly when he was arrested, even though I was desperately lonely, it was, ‘Right, you’ve got to do it.’ ”
Actually, there was worse to come: an approach by an armed Libyan a week after Shayler’s release. He offered a six-figure sum in exchange for names linked to the Gadafy plot and evidence on Lockerbie (Shayler had been an expert). He followed them
when they refused. A few nights later their buzzer rang for five minutes in the night: “We cowered in the corner with our kitchen knives.” They reported the incident to MI5, and were told it was a matter for the French, who told them it was a matter for the Brits.
What does Machon hope for now? She says she can’t think what to do with her life. “I’m a different person to the one I was two years ago.” Maybe an old house in Normandy: Shayler could continue writing, novels, his column for Punch.
What about children? “I don’t want those. Neither of us does. We never have. I’m not at all maternal. I’ve never felt the desire. My brother is 11 years younger and I don’t have a
romantic view of children. I know what they’re like.”
I was going to suggest that when she hits her mid-30s she might change her mind, but then I saw the look in her eye and changes of mind didn’t seem to come into it.
Interview with Francis Wheen, 1999
An interview with Francis Wheen of The Guardian, August 1999:
The spy left out in the cold
Francis Wheen on the hounding by the authorities of MI5 whistleblower David Shayler:
Annie Machon, a former MI5 officer living in France, came to London last week. On a previous visit, in 1997, she was nabbed at Gatwick airport by a goon squad from Special Branch. This time her only ordeal was a couple of hours with me in a Soho café. It was progress of a sort, I suppose; but little else has changed.It is exactly two years since Annie’s partner, David Shayler, hit the headlines with his complaints of malpractice and incompetence at MI5. Since then the government has consistently refused to heed or
investigate his allegations, preferring to load up its rusty blunderbuss and shoot the messenger.
investigate his allegations, preferring to load up its rusty blunderbuss and shoot the messenger.
In his original interview with the Mail on Sunday, Shayler exploded the official myth that MI5 monitors only those “subversives” who wish to “overthrow democracy by violent means”, revealing that, in fact, it kept files on such harmless pussycats as Jack Straw, Peter Mandelson, Harriet Harman and the reggae band UB40. The government was outraged — not by the evidence of spooky skulduggery but by Shayler’s whistleblowing.
Tony Blair’s spokesman warned the newspaper that “the heavies would move in” unless future articles were submitted to Downing Street for vetting. When the editor refused to obey, the treasury solicitor obtained an injunction banning the media from reporting any further remarks by Shayler about misconduct or mismanagement in the security service.
Shortly afterwards, at MI5’s request, Special Branch officers raided the London flat Shayler had shared with Machon. The search warrant permitted them to look for
“evidence of an offence under the official secrets act” — which they interpreted, rather eccentrically, as a licence to smash the furniture, hurl table lamps to the floor and remove several pairs of Machon’s knickers.
Then came the absurd pantomime at Gatwick airport. Machon was obviously not going to put up a struggle: her lawyer had told the police when and where she was due, and she was armed with nothing more lethal than an overnight bag. Nevertheless, Special Branch
thought it necessary to send no fewer than six brutes to hustle her away. This crude intimidation continued during six hours of questioning at Charing Cross police station, when her interrogators read out love letters she had exchanged with Shayler — billets doux that had no conceivable relevance to the Official Secrets Act.
If Shayler had committed a serious offence, as Straw maintained, why were no charges brought against the editors and journalists who published his disclosures? The question answers itself: bullies pick on the powerless, and ministers were reluctant to antagonise the mighty Associated Newspapers. Instead, the authorities took out their frustration by harassing innocent bystanders. Shayler’s brother, Philip, was detained, as were two of his friends.
Like Machon, they were eventually released without charge — although not before the police had helpfully informed Philip’s employers that he was wanted in connection with “financial irregularities”.
From his French exile, Shayler continued to press for an inquiry. In October 1997, the
government set up a cabinet office review of the intelligence agencies to be chaired by John Alpass, a former deputy director of the security service. As Shayler points out, Alpass was scarcely a disinterested party, as “any adverse criticism of MI5 would have reflected badly on his time there”. Nevertheless, Shayler submitted a 6,000-word memo on “management problems in MI5”.
The committee refused to read it. He was given a similar brush-off by the parliamentary intelligence and security committee, supposedly responsible for holding the spooks to
account.
Last summer, in the hope of exciting some official interest, Shayler told the Mail on Sunday that MI6 had secretly paid a Libyan emigré £100,000 to assassinate Colonel Muammar Gadafy. Although the point of Shayler’s revelation was that ministers had neither known nor approved of the plot, Robin Cook felt able to issue an instant denial. “I’m perfectly clear that these allegations have no basis in fact. It is pure fantasy.”
Why, then, did the government refuse to let the MoS publish the article, arguing that it would endanger national security? And why did Straw immediately ask France to arrest
and extradite Shayler? If the story was fantasy, he hadn’t broken the official secrets act. If it was true, and British intelligence had indeed conspired to murder a foreign head of state, then it would not be Shayler who had some explaining to do.
Unable to cope with this glaring contradiction, his enemies took refuge in invective. “In a
better world,” the Daily Telegraph harrumphed, “David Shayler and his like… would be horse-whipped.”
After his release from a French jail last November, the Sunday Telegraph came up with an even more extreme solution, pointing out that if he were a renegade French spy his former employers would probably have killed him. “One wonders how Shayler would react to being shot at by MI5 agents,” the newspaper mused. “But these days,” it added regretfully, “MI5 is scrupulous in its observation of the letter of the law.”
Scrupulous as ever, MI5 tried assassinating his reputation instead, letting it be known
that he was always regarded in the service as “a Walter Mitty, a loose cannon” and “a rebel who likes to sail close to the wind”. (The last phrase, incidentally, came from a school report written before Shayler had even taken his A‑levels.)
Many tame MPs and hacks have repeated these insults without pausing to think through their logic. If Shayler is as manifestly dotty as they claim and yet managed to join the fast track at MI5 and win a performance bonus in his final year, doesn’t this confirm that the security service is indeed run by dangerous clodhoppers, as Shayler claims?
Logic, however, is seldom allowed to intrude into this case — except for the deranged logic of Catch 22. Shayler wrote a spy novel, The Organisation, assuming that this at least would be allowed. No such luck.
The treasury solicitor contacted the major London publishers warning that Shayler must not write anything, “whether presented as fact or fiction, which may be construed as relating to the security service or its membership or activities or to security or intelligence activities generally .” (My italics.) In other words, Shayler can’t publish true stories, even if the government says they are fiction; but he can’t publish fiction for fear that it might have a kernel of truth. And yet other ex-spies — John Le Carre, Ted Allbeury — have written umpteen novels about British intelligence without having injunctions hurled at them.
“It is barely believable in this day and age that a UK citizen should have to live in exile for telling the truth — or, if you believe the government, for making up stories about the intelligence services,” Shayler says. “It is doubly difficult to accept when we see that this has happened at the behest of a Labour government.”
Personally, I don’t find it at all difficult: Labour politicians have always been suckers for cloak-and-dagger nonsense. Lest we forget, it was the last Labour government that expelled the American journalists Philip Agee and Mark Hosenball at the behest of MI5, without troubling to give any reasons, and then tried to jail a colleague of mine from the New Statesman for the heinous offence of collecting ministry of defence press releases. “New” Labour has revived the tradition by prosecuting a respected defence orrespondent, Tony Geraghty, and tormenting the hapless Shayler.
Only last month the treasury solicitor sent a stern letter to Shayler’s lawyers. “Your client has been writing to various members of the government, enclosing a pamphlet which he has written entitled Secrets and Lies,” he noted. “The disclosure of this information constitutes yet a further breach by your client of the injunction against him… I am not instructed to deal in detail with the points made by your client, save to say that his allegations of impropriety on the part of the security service are rejected.”
How can ministers know that the allegations are false without bothering to check? Easy: MI5’s director, Stephen Lander, has assured Straw that everything is tickety-boo.
At the height of the Spycatcher panic, the British cabinet secretary admitted that Whitehall often found it necessary to be “economical with the truth”, and there are very few people naïve enough to assume that the professional dissimulators who run MI5 and MI6 can always be believed. Fortunately for Lander, this select band of credulous oafs includes every senior member of the Labour cabinet.
If David Shayler were a member of the Provisional IRA, Tony Blair would be happy to negotiate deals and indemnities with him. Since he is merely a public-spirited whistleblower who has never murdered anyone, he is condemned to harassment, vilification and indefinite exile.
The Point of No Return
This interview by E Jane Dickson was published in The Independent newspaper in January 1999, and covers the time “on the run”, the failed extradition attempt, and living in exile in Paris.
The pale noon of Paris fails to penetrate the hotel lobby where David Shayler is waiting. It is not a fashionable establishment; rather, one of those rackety joints where Anglophones gather to swap memories of Hershey bars and HP sauce. But, for the professional couple in the back booth, this is both a refuge and an operational HQ. This is where Annie Machon stayed when she came to visit David Shayler in gaol. This is where they gather their friends and resources and try to work out how on earth Shayler is going to get home.
Last November, when David Shayler walked free from La Sante prison, he looked like New Labour’s worst nightmare: an unreconstructed hairy lefty in a Middlesbrough FC shirt, shouting the odds about freedom of information in our brave new Britain. The French court had refused to extradite Shayler, a former MI5 agent who blew the whistle on incompetence in the Security Service, on the grounds that his revelations were a political act. He is, for the moment, a free man, but should he set foot outside any French border, it is understood that the extradition process will start all over again. “It could be worse,” says Shayler, on the way to lunch at a nearby restaurant. “lt could have been Belgium that I wasn’t extradited from.”
The grim humour is typical. For a man going nowhere, Shayler laughs a lot, but his eyes are deeply shadowed by 18 months of uncertainty. In August 1997, five months after the left the Service, Shayler decided to speak out against the culture of obsessive bureaucracy and bungling he had witnessed in MI5.
In an article in the Mail on Sunday he alleged that secret files had been held on prominent Labour politicians, including Jack Straw, Harriet Harman and Peter Mandelson. For many, this revelation was so unsurprising as to be hardly worth breaking the Official Secrets Act for. In the late Seventies and early Eighties, the thrilling prospect of your very own MI5 file was all too often the prime reason for joining university Labour clubs. It was enough, however, for the Government to slap an injunction on the Mail on Sunday to prevent any further revelations and for Shayler to skip the country with pounds 20,000 from the Mail on
Sunday for expenses.
Much more damaging were Shayler’s subsequent claims that the Government had been party to an assassination attempt on Colonel Gadaffi, the Libyan leader, something the Foreign Office strenuously denies, and that the Government had had prior warning of
terrorist attacks including the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens and the IRA bombing of the City of London. Because of a chain of incompetence within MI5, Shayler alleged, these warnings were not acted upon, resulting in avoidable injury and loss of life.
“I’m not a spy and I’m not a traitor,” says Shayler. His words are measured and inflected, like a mantra or confession of faith. “I’m not a spy and I’m not a traitor. I simply raised issues that I believe are of great importance to the nation. If I had wanted to be a traitor,
it would have been very easy for me to do it while I was in MI5. I could have sold information for millions of pounds and nobody would have been any the wiser. I didn’t do that because I believe in standing up for what I believe in.”
The Government, however, takes a dim view of Shayler’s patriotic principles and has pursued him with the full weight of international law. After a year on the run, when they buried themselves in rural France, Shayler and Machon were tracked down to Paris where he was appearing on the David Frost breakfast programme. Shayler was watching Middlesbrough play on satellite television when he was arrested. Two months in prison gave him plenty of time to consider his position, and he paces his argument like a marathon runner who knows every inch of the track.
Occasionally, however, he gathers a head of outrage that sends him pumping for the finishing line. “At one point,” he says, pink with indignation, “it looked like I was going to be extradited and General Pinochet wasn’t. Jack Straw stood up and said that they were thinking about sending Pinochet back to Chile on compassionate grounds. I read that in a French newspaper, in a French prison, and I was thinking ‘this is absolutely ridiculous’. This is a man who has murdered and tortured thousands of people. I have written a
bloody newspaper article and he {Straw} is going for me and not for this other guy. IRA prisoners are being released, people who have been in campaigns to murder people, and yet I’m being hounded for telling the truth.”
David Shayler hardly fits the perceived idea of a secret agent. Born in Middlesbrough and educated at state schools and Dundee University, he was part of MI5’s redbrick recruitment drive, a post- Cold-War initiative to democratise the Security Service. He applied for the job through the careers pages of The Independent in 1990. “Are you waiting for Godot?” ran the enigmatic advertisement, which stressed the need for people with interviewing and analytical skills.
Shayler, who had previously failed to complete The Sunday Times graduate training
programme, thought that he was applying for a job in newspapers. In the course of his second interview, he explained how, as editor of his university newspaper, he had courted controversy by publishing the banned text of Spycatcher. This information, which might have given less subtle minds pause for thought, did not deter his future employers.
Shayler rose, not rapidly, but respectably through the ranks. He met Annie Machon, a Cambridge graduate with an impeccable service record, in the MI5 library and, by 1997, the couple were sufficiently disaffected to leave and find jobs “outside” as management consultants.
“The obvious question,” says Machon, a neatly glamorous woman in ankle-length fake fur, “is why didn’t I blow the whistle when I had been there even longer than Dave? I know exactly what he’s talking about and so do a lot of other people there. They all agree with him but most people just say, ‘Well, you can’t change the system,’ and quietly leave to go on to other jobs. At the time, I really didn’t want Dave to go public. I knew what it would mean for us and I asked him not to do it. But in the end,” she says, threading her fingers round Shayler’s, “somebody has to stand up and be counted.”
Shayler seems faintly bewildered by the drubbing he has received at the hands of a free press. Much has been made of a quote by Shayler’s old headmaster, who remembers a clever boy who liked to “sail close to the wind”. “The papers just fell for this idea that because somebody was slightly rebellious when he was 17, he must be Public Enemy Number One,” says Shayler. The same teacher, pressed for further details of Shayler’s
contribution to school life, recalled a creditable performance as a madman in the school play. “The Sunday Telegraph ran a piece saying ‘Shayler was a madman’ and when my mum, who has been a Telegraph reader all her life, wrote to complain, they ran another photo with the caption, ‘Mummy’s Boy’.” Shayler spreads his curiously cherubic hands,
the soft, scrubbed paws of a choirboy, with nails gnawed to the quick. “You just can’t win.”
If Shayler is bewildered by his media image, Machon is “bloody furious” about it. “The name-calling makes me so indignant and it’s so personal. Dave is a big, well-built chap, and this is used against him, as if a heavy build is somehow morally dubious. It’s medieval,” she murmurs, gazing over to the flying buttresses of Notre Dame, “on a par with saying a hunched back is a sign of wickedness”.
Certainly the articulate and easy-humoured man on display today bears no resemblance to this shambling bogey of the Right. If he didn’t know the rules of engagement before, he certainly knows them now, so why on earth did he choose to have his image flashed
around the world in that filthy old football shirt? For the first time this afternoon, Shayler seems rattled. “I did it for the obvious reason that I wanted to stick two fingers up at ‘them’ and I thought that was the best way of doing it.” Annie sighs and pleads prettily for a spoonful of Shayler’s tiramisu. A woman less in love might have settled for a kick on the shins.
Whatever else it is, this is one hell of a love story. It has been said that Machon, the daughter of a Guernsey newspaper editor, is Shayler’s best asset, and while she spits fire at the idea, Shayler is the first to agree.
“Without a shadow of a doubt,” he says, “I couldn’t have done it without Annie. We have always had a very close relationship and this is the biggest and most controversial thing that came into it. When I was just starting with the whole idea of going public, Annie didn’t want to know about it; not because she was frightened for herself, but in case things went wrong, so that she couldn’t say anything that might damage me. That did put a bit of a
strain on our relationship, but the way it’s worked out has made us much closer. By far the worst thing about being in prison was being away from Annie. Not being able to hold her or kiss her; it sounds incredibly corny, but it was like a physical craving.”
It is the kind of closeness few couples could withstand. Since Shayler’s arrest, the
two go everywhere together, even to the shops for their morning baguette. When they were hiding out in la France profonde, 30km from the nearest train station, they often wouldn’t see another soul for days on end. “Fights were just impossible,” recalls Annie. “I’d stamp my foot and say, ‘Right then, I’m going … I’m going … up the lane.’ ”
Right now the big problem is finding reasons to get up in the morning. There is a limit to the number of romantic walks a couple can take, even in Paris. Neither has a job and funds are running low; to be precise, they have pounds 5,000, a gift from Shayler’s parents. Both speak competent French — Shayler’s improved dramatically while he was
in prison — and Shayler talks about taking up teaching English as a foreign language. They have found a cheap studio flat, but it is a temporary measure; soon they will need to apply for a Carte de Sejour, a permit to stay in France, and for that they will need proof of
income.
At the moment, they give shape to the week by regular visits to one of Paris’s Internet cafes, where they correspond with friends and supporters in Britain, and WH Smith, where they bone up on day-old news from home. There are almost daily calls to Liberty, the British civil liberties organisation, which has taken up Shayler’s case. Parisians,
Annie is pleased to report, have been amazingly friendly, not at all the stand-offish stereotype, but following family visits at Christmas the couple now find themselves feeling rather flat.
Shayler misses Middlesbrough FC and proper fried breakfasts; Annie misses having her
own things about her. After their Pimlico flat was raided by Special Branch, their worldly goods were parcelled out to friends and relatives around the UK. “You just don’t expect to be still living like students when you’re in your thirties,” she says. “There is a basic human need to settle down, which you don’t really understand until it’s denied you. And even though Dave is ‘free’ in France, we’re constantly looking over our shoulders. You never know if you’re being followed. And even if you’re not, the paranoia is exhausting. I think people underestimate what fear does to you on a daily basis. There were huge periods when we were absolutely terrified. “The one good thing to come out of all this,” jokes Machon, summoning feminine vanity like a reminder of normality “is I’ve lost loads of weight.”
The paranoia is understandable. While Britain may not want to do a deal with Shayler,
he remains vulnerable to other, possibly less scrupulous, agencies, who could use the information he is party to. “Our lives are far more like something from a Le Carre novel now than they were when we were working for MI5,” says Shayler, who started a novel of his own while he was in prison. He knows, however, that any work of fiction with the faintest reference to his former life will be injuncted before you can shake a Martini.
Meanwhile, his negotiations with the Government appear to have reached stalemate. The Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee has refused to hear his evidence and the Home Office has stated that while Shayler “insists on immunity from prosecution as his price for settling the civil proceedings, an agreement will not be possible”. For Shayler’s part, he has offered to return the money he received from the Mail on Sunday, some pounds 40,000 in total (hardly a sum to retire to Rio on). He also knows that any further revelations will risk redoubled attempts for his extradition, but he is running out
of ideas. “I said no new revelations,” he points out, “but that’s not a position I can maintain for ever.”
For all his bravura, you feel that in his heart, Shayler still can’t quite believe that the Government doesn’t care what he has to say; they just don’t want him to say it. And it is surely not unreasonable to expect more from a party that ran its Opposition on a civil liberties ticket. Most galling of all is the knowledge that if he had made his disclosures before the Conservative government tightened the Official Secrets Act in 1989, he could have cited the public interest defence which existed then and was only repealed after strenuous opposition from the Left.
“It is a matter of record that Tony Blair, Jack Straw and John Morris, the Attorney General, all voted against removing the public interest defence precisely because it would deter political whistleblowers,” explains Shayler. “So why have they changed their stance now they are in government? It seems there is no longer any embarrassment threshold in
these matters.”
Still he hasn’t given up hope — he still has his Middlesbrough FC season ticket. For Machon, without such an incentive, the prospect is not so bright. “I’m not sure how easy we’d find it to settle in England now, after everything that has happened,” she says.
“I’ll fight for the right for Dave to go back, but I’m not sure I want us to stay once we get there.” The point is, in any case, academic. “I can only assume,” says Shayler, with obvious hurt, “that the Government is quite happy to let me rot out here. I suppose they think that maybe I’ll just shut up and go away.”
The problem, both literal and metaphysical, is that Shayler simply has nowhere to go. So he might as well take the scenic route. He gathers Annie into him and their shadows merge on the grey bank of the Seine as they stroll, slowly, back the way they came.
