20.08.1998
Anti-working class sham
State rushes to cover up its sponsored terrorism
Once again a British government is locked in a doomed struggle to prevent the media printing information about the murky world of the security and intelligence services. Readers will have seen plenty about this in the bourgeois press and the story seems set to run and run; but the questions we need to ask are what this furore is actually about and what it means for communists.
On one level you can see the Blair government’s cack-handed attempt to derail the Shayler-Tomlinson roadshow as a straight repeat of the fiasco involving Peter Wright and his book Spycatcher 10 years ago. The ingredients are similar: the deafening clanging of stable doors, a bungled and futile effort at damage limitation that actually makes things much worse, the prospect of an embarrassing court case, and unlimited quantities of bad publicity. Added to all this there is, of course, the bizarre fact that Shayler’s revelations are already in the public domain, freely accessible to anyone who has access to a computer, or, for that matter, a copy of the New York Times.
So much for the similarities with Wright, but some elements of the Shayler-Tomlinson case are significantly different. First, Wright was an ageing, eccentric former member of a rightwing clique within MI5, a tragi-comic figure hardly suitable for the role of hero or martyr. Shayler and Tomlinson, however, seem able to pose convincingly as wronged heroes, determined to expose the iniquities and inefficiencies of their respective services. Their injured innocence is, needless to say, perfect fodder for the righteous indignation of bleeding heart liberals.
Secondly, whereas Wright’s disclosures were not particularly surprising and essentially of merely historic interest - M15 agents bugging their way around London; speculation about Soviet penetration of M15; attempts to discredit Harold Wilson by suggesting he was a Soviet agent - both Shayler and Tomlinson appear to have had access to much more sensitive and current operational information, including stuff about the involvement of the secret services in criminal activity.
Perhaps the most interesting revelation to date is Shayler’s description of an alleged plot undertaken by MI6 to assassinate Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. If Shayler’s report is true, it would seem that MI6’s lawyers and the foreign secretary of the time, Malcolm Rifkind, were quite happy to authorise an MI6 plan which involved the secret service paying £100,000 to a Libyan dissident to murder Gaddafi. The operation failed and a number of innocent people were killed. This tale is, of course, an interesting example of ruling class hypocrisy - those who condemn state-sponsored terrorism in public are busy practicing it in secret - but can anyone really claim to be shocked or surprised about this?
One interesting fact which has emerged as a result of the Shayler affair is that MI6 really can be ‘licensed to kill’: subject to the foreign secretary’s prior approval, the secret service is authorised to commit or to procure the commission of any criminal act whatever, providing it takes place outside the borders of the UK (see The Guardian August 6 1998). One is left wondering whether a similar legal provision might be made in respect of actions taking place within the borders of the UK - or does one exist asa secret memorandum of understanding between the relevant departments?
Press coverage of the story so far has been pretty predictable: on the right, the Daily Telegraph’s contribution was characteristically cerebral: having made a token effort to discredit Shayler’s disclosures as “incoherent”, this paper opted to insist that “secret services must remain secret” and that Shayler should be horse-whipped. On the pinkish ‘left’, as represented by The Guardian,the emphasis is on the high-minded indignation which has become that paper’s stock in trade: what worries The Guardian is that the British public pay for the secret services and consequently have a right to know what their money is being spent on and what actions are being carried out in their name. For a more facile, archetypically illiberal approach to the question you would have to look very far indeed. As always, the question of supervision and accountability looms large, the idea being that, were the House of Commons Security and Intelligence Committee given greater operational oversight over the secret services, then all would be well. This seems to be the line taken by Tribune, which calls piously for the “accountability and scrutiny of the security services that Labour demanded when in opposition”.
What should communists make of all this? In the first place, we must protest against every act of injustice, every violation of democracy. We do so while recognising that we have before us two embittered careerists whose names we would never have heard of if they had been better treated by their personnel departments. We can be sure that, had their egos been more effectively massaged and their promotions assured, these men would be happily carrying on the fight against the working class in this country and the Blair government’s ‘enemies’ around the world.
A public trial should be unequivocally welcomed. It would present both men with the opportunity to inflict even greater damage on their respective organisations, and could help bring to light further examples of state-sponsored criminality conducted contrary to the letter and the spirit of those recent acts of parliament which farcically purported to place the security services within a legal framework.
We need to draw two main lessons from this episode. Firstly, the cult of secrecy surrounding the security services is no mere whimsical Whitehall fetish, but a very necessary device to cloak the illegal and immoral activities in which successive British governments have been happy to engage when their interests were deemed to be threatened. Secondly, communists should have no truck with the liberal bourgeois notion that all we need to do is call for a better regulated, more accountable secret service. For us, the point should be clear that these services can never function as anything other than the covert armed militia of the ruling class, and that when the political situation demands it (as one day it certainly will), they will be ruthlessly deployed, as they have been before, against communists and other progressive forces in society. That is why we demand a freedom of information act and the opening of all government files.
Viktor Melor