Here’s a link to my article in The Guardian today, exploring the confused roles of modern British spies, and looking at some ways to sort out the mess.
Both the police and the spooks seem to be having a bit of an identity crisis at the moment…
I shall be returning to my alma mater next week to do a talk at the Cambridge Union Society on 28th January. I’ll be discussing spies, civil liberites, whistleblowers, Wikileaks and much more.….
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP).
Prohibition has never worked, as proven throughout history.
Around the world many judges, lawyers, officers from the police, customs, and intelligence organisations, as well as many other experts, are challenging the failed concept of the “war on drugs”. This policy, in place for decades now in many countries despite its manifest, abject and repeated failure, criminalises great swathes of our populations, causes health problems, social problems and untold suffering, and funds organised crime and terrorist groups, rather than providing potentially enormous tax revenue to the state.
It is time for a mature, calm debate about the issue, rather than hysterical, tabloid headlines.
I am honoured to be one of this group speaking out.
LEAP Statement of Principles
1. LEAP does not promote the use of drugs and is deeply concerned about the extent of drug abuse worldwide. LEAP is also deeply concerned with the destructive impact of violent drug gangs and cartels everywhere in the world. Neither problem is remedied by the current policy of drug prohibition. Indeed, drug abuse and gang violence flourish in a drug prohibition environment, just as they did during alcohol prohibition.
2. LEAP advocates the elimination of the policy of drug prohibition and the inauguration of a replacement policy of drug control and regulation, including regulations imposing appropriate age restrictions on drug sales and use, just as there are age restrictions on marriage, signing contracts, alcohol, tobacco, operating vehicles and heavy equipment, voting and so on.
3. LEAP believes that adult drug abuse is a health problem and not a law-enforcement matter, provided that the abuse does not harm other people or the property of others.
4. LEAP believes that adult drug use, however dangerous, is a matter of personal freedom as long as it does not impinge on the freedom or safety of others.
5. LEAP speakers come from a wide divergence of political thought and social conscience and recognize that in a post-prohibition world it will take time to strike a proper regulatory balance, blending private, public and medical models to best control and regulate “illicit drugs.” LEAP speakers are free to advocate their view of better post-prohibition stratagems without toeing a LEAP “party line.”
6. LEAP recognizes that even in a post-prohibition world, still, drugs can be dangerous and potentially addictive, requiring appropriate regulation and control. Even in a free-market economy, reasonable regulation for the purposes of public health is a long-standing, accepted principle. Such regulation must not allow casual, unfettered or indiscriminate drug sales.
7. LEAP believes that government has a public health obligation to accurately ascertain the risks associated with the use of each “illicit drug” and a duty to clearly communicate that information to the public by means of labeling and warnings similar to what is done regarding food, tobacco, alcohol and medicine.
8. LEAP believes that an inordinate number of people have been misguidedly incarcerated for violation of zero-tolerant, nonviolent, consensual “drug crimes.” The end of drug prohibition will allow those persons to be promptly released, to have their record of conviction expunged, and their civil rights completely restored. However, the repeal of drug prohibition does not imply the exoneration from charges for connected offenses, such as violent crimes, gun crimes, theft, or driving under the influence of drugs. Furthermore, LEAP believes that people using alcohol or other drugs must be held accountable for any misbehavior, which harms other people or property of others, while under the influence of mind-altering substances.
9. LEAP believes that persons suffering from drug abuse afflictions and addiction, who want help, should be provided with a variety of help, including drug treatment and drug maintenance, even for uninsured addicts. LEAP believes that with an end to drug prohibition and regained control of criminal justice expenditures, a fraction of those savings would be more than sufficient to pay for expanded addiction services.
10. LEAP recognizes that different “illicit drugs” pose differing risks of harm. As such, in a post-prohibition world, LEAP recognizes that an appropriate set of regulations and control for one substance may not be a suitable or sufficient regulation and control for another substance. LEAP believes that the nation states of the world and various states within the United States must be given the regulatory latitude to try new models that wisely balance the notions of freedom over one’s own body with the need for common sense regulation of drugs to reduce death, disease, addiction and harm.
Moving swiftly past the prurient, thigh-rubbing glee that most of the old media seems to be exhibiting over the alleged details of Julian Assange’s love life, let’s re-focus on the heart of the Wikileaks disclosures, and most importantly the aims underpinning them: transparency, justice, and an informed citizenry living within fully-functioning democracies. Such quaint notions.
In the media maelstrom of the Cablegate disclosures, and the resulting infantile and thuggish threats of the American political class, is easy to lose sight of the fact that many of the leaked documents refer to scandals, corruption and cover-ups in a range of countries, not just the good old US of A.
One document that recently caught my attention related to the notorious murder twenty-one years ago of civil rights activist, Pat Finucane, in Northern Ireland. Finucane was a well-known lawyer who was shot and killed in front of his wife and three small children. There has long been speculation that he was targeted by Protestant terrorist groups, in collusion with the NI secret police, the army’s notorious and now-disbanded Forces Research Unit (FRU), and/or MI5.
Well, over a decade ago former top plod, Lord (John) Stevens, began an inquiry that did indeed establish such state collusion, despite having his inquiry offices burnt out in the process by person/s allegedly unknown half-way through the investigation. Stevens fought on, producing a damning report in 2003 confirming the notion of state collusion with Irish Loyalist terrorist activities, but never did clarify exactly what had happened to poor Pat Finucane.
However, Finucane’s traumatised family has never stopped demanding justice. The recent disclosure shines a light on some of the back-room deals around this scandal, and for that I’m sure many people thank Wikileaks.
The “Troubles” in Northern Ireland — such a quintessentially British understatement, in any other country it would have been called a civil war — were deceptive, murky and vicious on both sides. “Collusion” is an elastic word that stretches beyond the strict notion of the state. It is well-known that the US organistion, NORAID, supported by many Americans claiming Irish ancestry, was a major fundraising channel for, um, Sinn Féin, the political wing of the Provisional IRA, from the 1970s onwards.
Such networks provided even more support than Colonel Gaddafi of Libya with his arms shipments, and the cash well only dried up post‑9/11. As you can see in this recent article in the The Telegraph, even the incoming Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, New York Congressman Peter King (who ironically called for the designation of Wkileaks as a “foreign terrorist organisation”) appears to have been a life long supporter of Sinn Féin.
With this in the back of our minds, it appears that Dublin and Washington kept pushing for a full inquiry into Finucane’s murder — and in 2005 it looked like MI5 would finally co-operate.
However, the devil was in the detail. Coincidentally, 2005 was the year that the UK government rushed through a new law, the Inquiries Act, which scandalously allowed any department under investigation (in this case MI5) to dictate the terms and scope of the inquiry.
Collusion by any state in the unlawful arrest, torture, and extrajudicial murder of people — whether its own citizens or others — is state terrorism. Let’s not mince our words here. Amnesty International provides a clear definition of this concept.
As the The Guardian article about Finucane so succintly puts it:
“When a state sanctions the killing of citizens, in particular citizens who are lawyers, it puts the rule of law and democracy in jeopardy. And when a state enlists auxiliary assassins, it cedes its monopoly over state secrets: it may feel omnipotent, but it is also vulnerable to disclosure.”
Indeed. Northern Ireland was like a Petri dish of human rights abuses: torture, Diplock courts (aka military tribunals), kidnappings, curfews, shoot-to-kill, informers, and state collusion in assassinations.
The infection has now spread. These are precisely the tactics currently used by the US, the UK and their “auxiliary assassins” across great swathes of the Middle East. Perhaps this explains why our nation states have been outflanked and have ceded their monopoly over secrets.
Will justice ever be done? In the past I would have said, sadly, that would be highly unlikely. However, courageous organisations like Wikileaks and its ilk are improving the odds.
Fun and games discussing the role of the female MI5 intelligence officer, and the organisation’s ongoing attempts to recruit them. The other guest on the show was MI5’s official historian, Christopher Andrew.
Link to the BBC Radio4 Woman’s Hour show.
Regular as clockwork, this story comes around every few years as you can see from this interview I did for The Independent in 2006. This suggests to me that MI5 not only has a problem recruiting female spooks, but also can’t keep hold of them!
On 6 December I appeared on RTTV’s CrossTalk discussion programme alongside whistleblowing UK ex-diplomat Carne Ross, to talk about the implications of Wikileaks:
Finally the true intentions behind the draconian British law, the Official Secrets Act, and similar espionage-related laws in other countries such as the USA, have been laid bare. All is revealed — these laws apparently have nothing whatsoever to do with protecting national security and countering espionage — their primary purpose is to stifle dissent and legitimate criticism of the state.
How can I tell? Well, look at the reaction to the ongoing Wikileaks revelations, as opposed to today’s UK spy scandal involving the parliamentary assistant of a hitherto unremarkable MP.
The now-notorious Wikileaks site has been going since 2007 and, in this brief time, has shone a bright light on such nasties as Trafigura, the BNP, Scientology, Climategate, Guantanamo, the Australian internet blacklist, Sarah Palin, and much more.
The site achieved world-wide notoriety this year with four big stories — starting with the harrowing film “Collateral Murder”, which demonstrated clearly that the Pentagon had been lying to the distraught families of the victims of this video-game nasty for years.
Since then Wikileaks has cleverly worked with selected media oulets such as The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel in Germany to give us the Afghan War logs and Iraq war files, which exposed endemic brutality, torture and war crimes (all in the name of spreading democracy, of course), and culminating over the last week with the ongoing Cablegate expose.
The response? Well the majority of the old media, particularly those that didn’t share in the juicy scoops, has been in attack mode: condemning whistleblowing; vilifying the character of Wikileaks spokesperson, Julian Assange; and gleefully reporting the widespread cyberspace crackdown (Amazon pulling the site, Paypal stopping contributions, the ongoing hack attacks).
But this is just so much hot air — what about the real substance of the disclosures? The violent horror, war crimes, and government lies? Why is our so-called Fourth Estate not demanding a response to all this terrible evidence?
However, it is the reaction of the US political class that is most gob-smackingly shocking. The half-wits call for Assange’s prosecution under the US Espionage Act (even though he’s an Australian); to have him executed, assassinated by drone attack, or unlawfully disappeared as an “unlawful combatant”; and make hysterical calls for Wikileaks to be placed on the US list of proscribed foreign terrorist organisations. Daniel Ellsberg, the famous Pentagon Papers whistleblower, fears for Assange’s life.
Well, you can always tell how effective a whistleblower is by the response you engender when telling truth to power, and this is a pretty striking vindication.
Of course, Julian Assange is not strictly speaking a whistleblower per se. He is the next generation — a highly-capable, high-tech conduit, using his “hackivist” skills to out-pace and out-smart those who seek to conceal vital information.
As he said during a TED.com interview last summer, he strives to live by the ideal that to be a man is to be “capable and generous, not to create victims, but to nurture them…”. And this is indeed the protection Wikileaks offers, an avenue of secure disclosure for people of conscience on the inside, without their having to go public to establish the bona fides of what they are saying, with the resulting victimisation, loss of career, liberty, and possibly life.
Still, politicians seem unable to make the distinction — they are solely focused on loss of face, embarrassment, and shoring up the wall of secrecy that allows them to get away with lies, torture and war crimes. I hope that common sense will prevail and Assange will not become another sacrificial victim on the altar of “national security”.
So why did I say at the start that the secrecy laws have come out of the closet? Well, in the wake of all this recent media and political hysteria about Wikileaks, this little espionage gem appeared in the UK media today. Essentially, the UK Home Secretary is booting out an alleged Russian spy, Ms Katia Zatuliveter who, despite getting through security vetting (MI5, anyone?), was really an SVR agent working as the Parliamentary assistant to Mike Hancock MP — a man who happens to have a special interest in Russia and who serves on the UK’s Parliamentary Defence Select Committee.
Now, in the old days such alleged activity would mean an automatic arrest and probable prosecution for espionage under the Official Secrets Acts (1911 and 1989). If we go with what the old media has reported, this would seem to be a clear-cut case. During the Cold War foreign spies working under diplomatic cover could be discreetly PNGed (the jargon for declaring a diplomat persona non grata). However, this young woman was working in Parliament, therefore can have no such diplomatic cover. But deportation and the avoidance of embarrassment seems to be the order of the day — as we saw also with the explusion of the Russian spy ring from the US last summer).
Which demonstrates with a startling clarity the real intentions behind the British OSA and the American Espionage Act. The full force of these laws will automatically be brought to bear against those exposing crime in high and secret places, pour enourager les autres, but will rarely be used against real spies.
Proof positive, I would suggest, that these laws were drafted to prevent criticism, dissent and whistleblowing, as I’ve written before, but not meaningfully to protect our national security. One can but hope that the Wikileaks débâcle acts as the long-overdue final nail in the OSA coffin.
Would it not be wonderful if our “esteemed” legislators could learn from recent events, draw a collective deep breath, and finally get to grips with those who pose a real threat to our nations — the people who lie to take us into illegal wars, and intelligence officers involved in torture, assassination and espionage?
First they came for the Irish in the 1980s,
But I was not Irish so I did not speak up.
Then they came for the Muslims after 9/11,
But I was not a Muslim, so I did not speak up.
Then they came for the “domestic extremists”,
But I was not an activist, so I did not speak up.
Then they came for me;
and there was nobody left to speak up for me.
And here’s the original.
Below is text of an article I wrote, published in The Sunday Telegraph a while ago about what it’s actually like to enter the wonderful world of spying (just in case it’s ever airbrushed out of history!):
“My so-called life as a spy”
Spies have always loved living in Pimlico: a civilised area in central London, handy for strolling to the office, and wonderfully convenient for that midnight dash to work if your operation suddenly goes live. Plus, the local pubs are pretty good for the customary after-work moan.
I lived there myself when I worked as an intelligence officer for MI5 in the 1990s, so the murder of Gareth Williams in a nearby street gave me a bit of a jolt. While his death remains shrouded in mystery, what has been reported of his life sounds like classic GCHQ.
There are distinct cultures within each of the three major UK spy agencies: MI5, the UK domestic security service; MI6, the overseas intelligence organisation; and GCHQ, the Government Communications HQ.
MI6 officers, as people who may have to work independently and undercover abroad, tend to be confident, individualistic and “ethically flexible”, while MI5 officers need to co-ordinate a broad range of resources and people to run an operation, which requires greater team-building. Of the three agencies, GCHQ remains the most secretive and inward-looking, and is staffed predominantly with “boffin” types. Williams, with his mathematical skills and loner tendencies, would be a typical employee.
Despite the intelligence community presenting a united front to the outside world, culture clashes between the three agencies are commonplace. Staff on secondment between agencies – as Williams was, from GCHQ to MI6 – can have a rough time fitting into a new environment, working with colleagues who eye them with suspicion, as the divisions jockey for power, prestige and resources within Whitehall.
So what is life like working as a spy? The world of intelligence is not so much isolating as insulating. Even as you proceed through the convoluted recruitment process, you find yourself entering a parallel universe, one that exists alongside your everyday life.
From that first, exploratory meeting with an intelligence officer in an unmarked building in central London, you have to withdraw a little from your old existence. You are asked not to tell your family and friends, and immediately have to sign a notification of the rigorous terms of the Official Secrets Act, whereby if you talk about your work, you risk imprisonment.
The process of induction into this world is intriguing, flattering and seductive. The agencies tend to avoid the James Bond wannabes, and those inspired by the fake glamour of Spooks. The key motivation is generally wanting to do a job that can make a difference, protect the country and potentially save lives. The secret element adds spice and perhaps compensates for the anorexic pay. When I started working for MI5 in 1991, at the fast-track graduate level, the starting salary was £14,500 pa – a good £5,000 less than my peer group from Cambridge earned in their blue-chip jobs. The pay has improved somewhat since then, but you don’t become a spy for the money.
The vetting process is protracted. For MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, officers are required to have the highest clearance – Developed Vetting. This begins with a home visit. Disconcertingly, I soon found myself in the family sitting room being grilled about my sex life by a little, grey-haired lady who looked just like a favourite grandmother, until you looked into her eyes.
Then the process widens. I had to nominate four friends who were willing to be interviewed about me, and they were asked to suggest yet more people… so secrecy becomes impossible. One friend, of a Left-wing hue, disapproved of my recruitment; even those who were supportive were reluctant to ask me too much. As I couldn’t talk to them freely about my life, they felt increasingly shut out, so I lost old friends along the way.
Unsurprisingly, new officers begin to socialise increasingly with their colleagues, and close friendships grow rapidly. Within this clique, we could talk shop at dinner parties, use the same slang and terminology, discuss our work, and whinge about our bosses. With outsiders, we could never be fully ourselves. This, inevitably, often led to more than friendships. What might otherwise be called office romances flourished. I met my former partner, David Shayler, when we were both in our first posting in MI5.
Such relationships were not exactly encouraged, but were generally seen as a good thing by management – unless, of course, it was a clandestine matter that could leave the officer vulnerable to blackmail. Such affairs were seen as vetting offences.
Among spies, an old double standard held firm. There was one couple who were caught in flagrante in the office, not once but twice. The male officer was put on “gardening leave” for six months; the woman was sacked.
For the first few weeks in the job, the feeling of unreality and dislocation is strong. The only solid information you have about your new position, as you walk into the office for the first time, is the grade at which you will be working – nothing else.
My first posting was to the small counter-subversion section, F2. Even though it was a desk job, the information I was dealing with came from sensitive sources: intercepted communications, reports from agents who had penetrated target groups, police reports. And yet, within a few weeks, the handling of such secret and intrusive information became entirely normal.
Investigations can be very fast-paced, particularly in the counter-terrorism sections. Generally, officers work regular hours but occasionally, if an operation goes live, you work around the clock. If it proves a success, there might be a news item on the television about it – but obviously without the full back story. That can be a surreal experience. You feel pride that you’ve achieved what you signed up to do, but you cannot discuss it with anybody outside the office. At such moments, the disconnect from mainstream life is intensely sharp.
However, when something goes wrong – a bomb goes off in which civilians die – the feelings are even more intense. Guilt, anger, frustration, and a scramble to ensure that the blame doesn’t attach to your section. The official motto of MI5 is Regnum Defe
nde – defence of the realm. Staff mordantly used to joke that it should more accurately be Rectum Defende.
Personal security also ensures that there is a constant barrier between you and the normal world. If you meet someone interesting at a party, you cannot say too much about what you do, and such reticence can appear unfriendly. The cover story that MI5 officers use is that they work as civil servants at the Ministry of Defence; for MI6, it is the Foreign Office. This usually stops people from asking too much more, either through discretion or, frankly, boredom. Once or twice, people pushed me for more information, and my paranoia antennae immediately began to twitch: why are they so interested? Are they spies or, God forbid, journalists?
I had the misfortune once of using this cover story at a party, only to find my interlocutor actually worked for the real Ministry of Defence, and wanted to know which section I worked in, who my colleagues were, how long I had been there… Thankfully, the magic word “Box” – slang used to describe MI5 within Whitehall, derived from the organisation’s old PO Box 500 number – brought that line of conversation to an abrupt halt.
As an intelligence officer, you quickly learn to be discreet on the telephone and in emails. Oblique conversations become the norm, and this bleeds into your personal life, too, much to the frustration of friends and family.
The internet is another challenge. As a “spook”, the last thing you want to see is your photograph on a friend’s Facebook page. Or, even worse, holiday snaps showing you in your Speedos, as the current head of MI6, Sir John Sawyer, found to his cost last year.
And what about when you come to leave the intelligence service, as I did after five years. Can you ever really have a normal life afterwards, and shake off the mindset?
Many of my former colleagues have left and built careers in a wide variety of areas. But I wonder how many still look automatically over their shoulders as they put their key in the front door; how many tear up paper before throwing it in the bin; and how many are reflexively reticent about their personal life?
Would I want to be a spy these days? No, thank you. I’m happier in the real world.
* Annie Machon is the author of Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers (Book Guild)
The most senior police officer in the UK, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Paul Stephenson no less, is saying that the British citizens are not taking the threat of terrorism seriously enough. “Al Qaeda” could strike at any minute, the enemy is within etc, etc.…
Now, for a man of his seniority, one presumes that he has served as a policeman for a fair few years — possibly in the 1970s, certainly the 80s and 90s. Which means that he should have a memory of what it means to be under the real, daily threat of bombs exploding that aimed to maim, kill and terrorize the civilian population of London and the rest of the UK. After all, throughout those decades the Provisional IRA, backed by the fund-raising activities of certain American citizens and Colonel Gaddafi of Libya — that erstwhile patron of freedom fighters everywhere, now a staunch ally of the West in the “war on terror” — was pretty much putting bombs down at will on UK streets.
During these years the UK has endured Lockerbie, Omagh, Bishopsgate, Canary Wharf, and Manchester, to name but a few major atrocities. A good summary of the terrorist attacks against London alone over the last 150 years can be found here, with the first Tube bombing occurring in 1885. A pilot, Patrick Smith, also recently wrote a great article about aircraft security and the sheer scale of the terrorist threat to the West in the 1980s — and asks a very pertinent question: just how would we collectively react to such a stream of atrocities now?
Putting aside my professional life at the time, I have personal memories of what it was like to live and work in London in the 1990s under the shadow of terrorism. I remember making my way to work when I was a fledging MI5 intelligence officer in 1991 and commuting through Victoria train station in London 10 minutes before a bomb, planted in a rubbish bin, exploded on the station concourse. One person was killed, and many sustained severe injuries. One person had their foot blown off — the image haunted me for a long time.
I also vividly remember, two years later, sitting at my desk in MI5’s Mayfair office, and hearing a dull thud in the background — this turned out to be a bomb exploding outside Harrods department store in Knightsbridge. And let’s not forget the almost daily disruption to the tube and rail networks during the 90s because of security alerts. Every Londoner was exhorted to watch out for, and report, any suspicious packages left at stations or on streets. Yet because of the preceding couple of decades, this was already a normal way of life in the city.
Londoners have grown used to inconvenience; they grumble a bit about the disruption and then get on with their lives — echoes of the “keep calm and carry on” mentality that evolved during the Blitz years. In the 1990s the only noticeable change to London’s diurnal rhythm was that there were fewer US tourists clogging up the streets — an early indication of the disproportionate, paranoid US reaction to a perceived terrorist threat.
Separate from the IRA, in 1994 a car bomb exploded outside the Israeli embassy in Kensington, London. Despite initial reports that Iranian-backed groups were responsible (and, it turns out, MI5 may have dropped the ball), Palestinian activists were blamed and convicted, wrongly it turns out, as MI5 assessed that the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, had pulled a dirty trick.
Terrorism on the streets of London was nothing new. In the early 1980s my father was in London attending an investigative journalism course and narrowly missed two bombings — one in a restaurant at Marble Arch a couple of hours after he and the rest of the course members had been eating there, and another later that night close to the hotel he was staying in at Lancaster Gate.
My Pa had another near miss in 1970 when he was a young airline pilot flying VC-10s around the world for BOAC. He was supposed to be the pilot of the VC-10 that ended up at Dawson’s Field in Jordan — hijacked by members of the PFLP and eventually blown up. He had been prevented from flying from Bahrain that day as he was suffering a bad dose of the ‘flu.
To this day, his view about both these incidents is to shrug and carry on. Yes, it was a close shave, but if you allow incidents like that to colour the rest of your life, then the concept of terrorism has already won.
The UK and its citizens have had plenty of hands-on experience of living with the reality of war, political violence and terrorism. As a result, I’m constantly flabbergasted by the global security crackdown since 9/11 and particularly in the UK after 7th July 2005. It was ghastly, and my heart bleeds for the victims, families, and survivors, but major terrorist atrocities are hardly new to the UK.
The UK government seems now to have forgotten hard-learned lessons from the 1970s and 80s in the war in Northern Ireland: that draconian measures — torture, shoot to kill, internment, military-style tribunals — not only don’t work, but also are counter-productive and act as recruiting grounds for terrorist groups. The flagrant miscarriages of justice around cases like the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six reinforced this perspective.
And the UK has not been alone in Europe when it comes to living with the daily reality of terrorism: the Spanish have endured Basque separatist attacks for four decades, as have the French — in addition to those perpetrated in Paris with devastating results by Algerian Islamic groups in the 1990s. Germany successfully dealt with the Baader-Meinhof Gang (Red Army Faction), and other European countries, such as Belgium and Italy, have endured Operation Gladio style terrorist attacks over recent decades.
But in all those years, none of our countries gave up on the concept of basic values and freedoms — indeed they seemed to learn useful lessons from the repressive, failed experiment in Northern Ireland. So why are we now falling in line, unthinkingly, with the hysterical and brutal US response post 9/11?
In the UK we are effectively living under a Big Brother surveillance state, as I have previously and extensively written. Other Northern European countries are constantly pressured to fall in line with the US “war on terror” fear mentality. To its credit Germany is reacting cautiously, even in the face of the current, hyped-up terror threat. But then we Europeans know the lessons of history — we’ve lived them, and Germany more than most. The ghosts of the Gestapo and the Stasi still create a frisson of fear in the collective Germanic memory.
But returning to that doughty crime fighter, Sir Paul Stephenson. The day after he ticked off the UK public for not taking terrorism seriously enough, he is once again in the media, predicting an era of growing civil unrest in the wake of the student riots in London, and chillingly stating that the rules of the game had changed. Forget about trying to negotiate with campaigners — now the only way to deal with them is to spy on them, as The Guardian reported:
“We have been going through a period where we have not seen that sort of violent disorder,” Stephenson said. “We had dealt with student organisers before and I think we based it too much on history. If we follow an intelligence-based model that stops you doing that. Obviously you realise the game has changed. Regrettably, the game has changed and we must act.”
Last year the same newspaper revealed that ACPO, the senior police officers’ private association, was running an illegal unit to spy on “domestic extremists” (read politically active citizens). In response to the public outcry, the head of ACPO, Sir Hugh Orde, promised to stop this Stasi-like practice. In the wake of the student protests, Sir Paul will probably see a renewed need for the unit, no doubt under another name. Big Brother grows apace — because, of course, we all know that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.…..
For a long time now I have been giving speaking out at conferences and in interviews around the world about the encroaching nature of our surveillance states.
One aspect of this, the endemic CCTV coverage in the UK, is notorious internationally. Not only the estimated 4 million+ public CCTV cameras on British streets, but also all the traffic cameras and private security cameras that sneak a peak onto our public spaces too. As if that were not enough, earlier this year it was also reported that local councils are investing in mobile CCTV smart spy cars too.
Additionally, of course, we had the issue of Google Street View invading our privacy, and the camera cars also just happened to coincidentally hoover up the private internet traffic of those too trusting to lock their wireless internet access. Unlike the UK, the Germans have thankfully said a robust “nein” to Google’s plan.
All this, as I’ve previously noted, despite the fact that the head of the Metropolitan Police department responsible for processing all this surveillance information went on the record to say that CCTV evidence is useless in helping to solve all but 3% of crimes, and those merely minor. In fact, since CCTV has been rolled out nationally, violent crime on the streets of Britain has not noticeably reduced.
But, hey, who cares about facts when security is Big Business? Someone, somewhere, is getting very rich by rolling out ever more Orwellian surveillance technology.
On the streets of Britain, it is getting progressively worse. Audiences across Europe and North America have responded with shocked laughter when I have mentioned that police trials had been conducted in the UK using talking CCTV cameras that barked orders at apparent transgressors.
In 2007 Middlesbrough, a town in the north east of the UK with a zero-tolerance policy, began a trial using these talking cameras. In line with a government review of civil liberties this year, it was reported over the summer that the use of these cameras might be phased out. Needless to say, the council is fighting a fierce rearguard action against the removal of talking CCTV — an obvious example of the inherent difficulty of trying to wrest established power from the authorities.
Then earlier this year it emerged that various British police forces and the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), have ordered military-style drones to spy on the citizenry from the skies. One drone manufacturer said that there had been enquiries about the potential for militarisation of these drones: thankfully, his response was reported as follows in The Guardian:
“Mark Lawrence, director of Air Robot UK, said: “UAVs will, to an extent, replace helicopters. Our air robots cost £30,000 compared with £10m for a fully equipped modern helicopter. We have even been asked to put weapons on them but I’m not interested in getting involved in that.”
However, Wired has reported that “non-lethal” weapons could be installed, to facilitate crowd control.
There is also the other side of the security coin to consider, of course. If these drones are implemented in the skies of Britain, how soon before some enterprising young “Al Qaeda” cadre cottons on to the idea that this could be an effective way to launch an attack? So much for all our wonderfully effective airport security measures.
Plus, these little airborne pests will prove to be a real hazard for other aircraft, as has already been noted.
Despite all this, no widespread indignation has been voiced by the UK population. When will the tipping point be reached about this incipient Orwellian nightmare?
But hope may be at hand. A somewhat frivolous article appeared today, stating that small spy drones will become the new paparazzi: Version 2.0, no doubt.
Perhaps, finally, we shall now see some meaningful opposition to this encroaching Big Brother state.
Once Bono, Sting, Saint Bob and the assembled celeb corps get on their high horses about their enshrined, fundamental right to privacy, it might finally become fashionable to discuss the very basic principles underpinning our civilisation.….
.…you remember, those fuddy-duddy ideas like the right to life, not to be tortured, not to be unlawfully imprisoned or kidnapped, free speech, fair trials, free conscience etc .…. oh, and privacy of course!
November 5th has long had many levels of resonance for me: Bonfire Night of course, when I was a child — fireworks in the garden and burnt baked potatoes from the fire; since the age of seven, celebrating the birthday of my oldest friend; and, since 2002, the memory of having to stand up in the witness stand in an Old Bailey court room in London to give a mitigation plea at the trial of my former partner, seeing his sentence reduced from the expected thirteen months to a “mere” six, and then having to deal for weeks with the media fall-out. A strange mix of memories.
David Shayler endured a “Kafkaesque trial” in 2002 in the sense that he was not allowed to make a defence due to government-imposed gagging orders, despite all the relevant material already having been widely pubished in the media. The issues were summed up well in this New Statesman article from that time.
But the current debate about control orders used against so-called terrorist suspects — my emphasis — adds a whole new dimension to the notorious phrase.
This recent, excellent article in The Guardian by lawyer Matthew Ryder about control orders sums it up. How can you defend a client if you are not even allowed access to the information that has led to the original accusation?
The Liberal Democrats, in the run-up to the General Election earlier this year, pledged to do away with control orders, as they are an affront to the British model of justice. However, MI5 is putting up a strong defence for their retention, but then they would, wouldn’t they?
Much of the “secret” evidence that leads to a control order appears to come from telephone intercept, but why on earth can this evidence not be revealed in a court of law? It’s not like the notion of telephone bugging is a state secret these days, as I argued in The Guardian way back in 2005.
Bearing all of the above in mind, do have a read of this interview with Paddy Hill, one of the victims of the notorious wrongful convictions for the IRA Birmingham pub bombings in 1974. After being arrested, threatened, tortured and traumatised, he was forced to confess to a terrible crime he had not committed.
As a result, he had to endure sixteen years in prison before his innocence was confirmed. He is still suffering the consequences, despite having found the strength to set up the “Miscarriages of Justice Organisation” to help other victims.
And then have a think about whether we should blindly trust the word of the security forces and the police when they state that we have to give away yet more of our hard-won freedoms and rights in the name of the ever-shifting, ever-nebulous “war on terror”.
Do we really need to hold terrorist suspects in police cells for 28 days without charge? Will we really continue to allow the head of MI6 to get away with blithely asserting, unchallenged, that British intelligence does its very best not to “benefit” from information extracted via unthinkable torture, as former UK ambassador Craig Murray so graphically described in his blog on 29th October?
I’ve said it before, and I shall say it again: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was put in place for a reason in 1948. Let’s all draw a breath, and remember, remember.….
For the first time in 100 years “C”, the head of the UK foreign intelligence service SIS (commonly known as MI6) has gone public.
Former career diplomat Sir John Sawers (he of Speedo fame) yesterday made a speech to the UK Society of Editors in what appeared to be a professionally diplomatic rear-guard action in response to a number of hot media topics at the moment.
Choosing both his audience wisely and his words carefully, he hit on three key areas:
Torture: Legal cases are currently going through UK courts on behalf of British victims of torture, in which MI5 and MI6 intelligence officers are alleged to have been complicit. The Metropolitan Police are currently investigating a number of cases. Over the last week, a British military training manual on “enhanced” interrogation techniques has also been made public. However, Sawers unblushingly states that MI6 abides by UK and international law and would never get involved, even tangentially, in torture cases. In fact, he goes on to assert that the UK intelligence agencies are training the rest of the world in human rights in this regard.
Whistleblowing: In the week following the latest Wikileaks coup — the Iraq War Diaries, comprising nearly 400,000 documents detailing the everyday horror of life in occupied Iraq, including war crimes such as murder, rape and torture committed by both US and UK forces — Sawers states that secrecy is not a dirty word: the intelligence agencies need to have the confidence that whistleblowers will not emerge to in order to guard agent and staff identities, as well as maintaining the confidence of their international intelligence partners that their (dirty?) secrets will remain, um, secret. One presumes he is advocating against the exposure of war crimes and justice for the victims.
This, one also presumes, is the justification for US politicians who propose cyber-attacks against Wikileaks and the declaration by some US political insiders that Julian Assange, spokesman of the organisation, should be treated as an unlawfully designated “unlawful combatant”, subject to the full rigour of extra-judicial US power, up to and including assassination.
Spurious media claims of unverified “damage” are the hoary old chestnuts always dragged out in whistleblower cases. After Wikileaks released its Afghan War Blog in July, government and intelligence commentators made apocalyptic predictions that the leak had put military and agent lives at risk. US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has since gone on the record to admit that this was simply not true.
During the Shayler whistleblowing case a decade ago, the government repeatedly tried to assert that agent lives had been put at risk, and yet the formal judgement at the end of his trial stated that this was absolutely not the case. And again, with the recent Wikileaks Iraq War Blog, government sources are using the same old mantra. When will they realise that they can only cry wolf so many times and get away with it? And when will the journalists regurgitating this spin wake up to the fact they are being played?
Accountability: Sawers goes on to describe the mechanisms of accountability, such as they are. He accurately states, as I have previously described ad nauseam, that under the 1994 Intelligence Services Act, he is notionally responsible to his political “master”, the Foreign Secretary, who has to clear in advance any legally dubious foreign operations (up to and including murder – the fabled “licence to kill” is not fiction, as you can see here).
The 1994 ISA also established the Prime Minister’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) in Parliament, which many commentators seem to believe offers meaningful oversight of the spies. However, as I have detailed before, this is a mere fig leaf to real accountability: the ISC can only investigate issues of policy, finance and administration of the spy agencies. Disclosures relating to crime, operational incompetence or involvement in torture fall outside its remit.
But what happens if intelligence officers decide to operate beyond this framework? How would ministers or the ISC ever know? Other spy masters have successfully lied to their political masters in the past, after all.
Sir John has the gall to say that, if an operation is not cleared by the Foreign Secretary, it does not proceed. But what about the Gadaffi Plot way back in 1996, when MI6 was sponsoring a group of Islamic extremist terrorists in Libya to try to assassinate Colonel Gadaffi without, it has been asserted, the prior written approval of the then-Foreign secretary, Tory politician Malcom Rifkind? This was reported extensively, including in this article by Mark Thomas in the New Statesman. What happens if rogue MI6 officers blithely side-step this notional accountability — because they can, because they know they will get away with it — because they have in the past?
In the interests of justice, UK and international law, and accountability, perhaps a new Conservative/Coalition government should now reassess its approach to intelligence whistleblowers generally, and re-examine this specific disclosure about Libya, which has been backed up by international intelligence sources, both US and French, in order to achieve some sort of closure for the innocent victims in Libya of this MI6-funded terrorist attack? And it is finally time to hold the perpetrators to account — PT16, Richard Bartlett, and PT16B, David Watson, who were the senior officers in MI6 responsible for the murder plot.
As civilised countries, we need to rethink our approach to the issue of whistleblowing. Lies, spin, prosecutions and thuggish threats of assassination are beneath us as societies that notionally adhere to the principles of democracy. If we can only realistically hope that the actions of our governments, military forces, and intelligence agencies are transparent and accountable via whistleblowers, then we need to ensure that these people are legally protected and that their voices are heard clearly.
This Saturday, October 2, I’ll be speaking at the Southwark Playhouse in London, in between the matinée and evening performances of an excellent new play by Steven Bloomer called “Boiling Frogs”. The play looks at the erosion of civil liberties in the UK, in the name of protecting us from the “war on terror”, and is being performed by The Factory, an innovative theatre troupe.
My talk will be called “Are We There Yet?”, and will assess how far down the road the UK has moved towards being a de facto police state: what do we mean by this, and what are the indicators we should watch out for?
