31.05.2000

No state secrets

Stella Rimington and MI5 spies

By seeking permission from the government to publish a volume of memoirs, Dame Stella Rimington, director general of the security service (MI5) from 1992-1996, has caused a furore among the top echelons of British intelligence and in the cabinet office.

Her move threatens to embarrass the government in a number of ways. First, if she is granted leave to publish, this may seriously damage the government's case against David Shayler and Richard Tomlinson, the 'whistleblowers' whose revelations about incompetence, alleged dirty tricks and so forth have led to their relentless persecution and exile from the UK. Secondly, given that during her tenure Rimington rigorously supported and enforced a code of lifelong silence on secret service members, it will be greeted with dismay by the establishment as an act of astounding hypocrisy and folly. Third, it will doubtless encourage other staff to go into print, and, if it leads to unsuccessful jury trials, could well threaten to make the 1989 Official Secrets Act effectively unenforceable.

None of this, it need hardly be said, is bad news for the working class. Anything which casts even a minuscule ray of light on the work of the special services or which damages them can only be good from the point of view of our movement. Even the glimpses of the affair we have received so far have served to remind us that these institutions, wholly unelected and unaccountable (leaving aside the 'oversight' exercised by a committee of safe parliamentary stooges), wield great power in the state; they do so exclusively in the interests of the ruling class, their very raison d'être being the preservation of the capitalist system, with its existing relations of property and power. They are not merely undemocratic - that much is obvious - but profoundly and actively anti-democratic, in so far as their principal goal is to suppress and where possible destroy anything that, in their wide-ranging eye, represents a threat to the 'system'.

No wonder, therefore, that, according to one report (The Sunday Times May 21), senior officers of the secret intelligence service (MI6) were so outraged that they were actually arguing that Rimington's house should be raided by special branch, that her book should be seized and that the woman herself be arrested and charged with contravening section two of the Official Secrets Act. This characteristic piece of gung-ho lunacy was dismissed with contempt and it was proposed instead that the matter be dealt with quietly 'in house' through discussions with Rimington and vetting of her manuscript. No chance. Thwarted in their first scheme, MI6 approached some of their trusted friends in the press and engineered a leak. Thus it was that The Sun, not noted for its interest in literary affairs, ran a front page story entitled "MI5 chief in book sensation" (May 17).

Give the British media's inveterate spy-mania, it was inevitable that a flurry of stories would ensue, and equally predictable that the press would be divided along the traditional political lines. For the right, Rimington's action represented if not outright treachery then at least a serious 'betrayal of trust'. Publication would be against the 'national interest' - ie, the interests of the ruling class - because it would damage "the credibility of MI5 among service personnel, friendly services, and informers", and rob the secret services of "the power of mystery" (The Daily Telegraph May 18).

Reactionary tosh, of course, but at least it has a rugged consistency as a tacit avowal of class interest. The vapourings of the bourgeois liberal centre, on the other hand, were characterised by the most startling ingenuousness. The prospect of "Dame Stella ... one of Whitehall's top women ... spilling the beans" was very welcome, as "the public might benefit", as well as the security services themselves, who do, after all, need the public's trust in carrying out their "preventive work" (The Guardian May 19). Even more ingenuously, The Independent enthused that a book by Rimington, by providing "a little honesty", could not help but "humanise" MI5 and its sister agencies - obviously a good thing (May 18).

Remarks of this kind could not make more plain the old liberal reformist illusion, or rather lie, that the agencies of the bourgeois state, even its secret services, provided they are made properly 'accountable' (to a coterie of elected MPs, and in secret, of course) can be 'humanised' and made to operate in a 'fair' and equitable manner. Ironically it was this very perceived need to make MI5 more 'human' and acceptable that led to Rimington's appointment in the first place.

Neither the fears of the right nor the hopes of the centre look like being realised. The final decision rests with home secretary Jack Straw. Leaked suggestions by home office officials that Straw could be "prevented" from denying Rimington the right to publish because of European human rights legislation guaranteeing freedom of expression are rubbish. The relevant section of the convention specifically allows governments to limit or deny such freedom where issues of 'national security' are concerned. The government and the courts will make the fullest possible use of this 'escape clause' wherever necessary.

Similarly absurd is the suggestion that Cloak without dagger, the autobiography of Sir Percy Sillitoe, another former DG of MI5, represents an awkward precedent for the government to go against. Before being foisted on a reluctant MI5, Sillitoe had spent a long career in the police force. The bulk of the book deals with this part of his life. References to his time with the security service are scant and heavily sanitised. It is, however, some indication of how much things have changed in the intervening years that to admit the very existence of MI5 in print was once regarded as an absolute sensation.

If Straw does allow the book to be published, which this writer views as improbable, it is unlikely to provide much in the way of useful intelligence about MI5's real work. It is more likely to be an essay in PR, explaining how and why MI5 is at the forefront of a battle to safeguard the liberties of the whole British people against heinous threats from wicked foreign spies, terrorists, saboteurs and international organised crime.

The real interest of the Rimington story - a story unlikely to see the light of day - is how and why she was judged to be the right person to address a number of significant challenges to the service that had been building up from the early 1980s; problems emanating from a series of internal crises and, more importantly from seismic changes in the nature of domestic and foreign politics that had a profound impact on the balance of class forces and the conduct of the class struggle.

As regards its internal affairs, the 1980s were a bad decade for MI5. First came the case of Michael Bettaney, the last British intelligence officer to spy for the USSR for ideological motives. As a section head in the K (counter-intelligence) branch of the service, he was responsible for targeting Soviet officials for recruitment as agents. His attempt to help the USSR protect itself from such threats was betrayed by OA Gordievsky, a KGB officer who was a long-term British penetration agent. Bettaney's arrest and trial, followed by Gordievsky's defection a year later, brought the service a great deal of publicity.

This was followed by the case of Cathy Massiter, a desk officer in the F (counter-subversion) branch, who worked directly under Rimington, then the head of F2N, the section responsible for spying on trade unions. Disgusted by the way in which F2N had routinely abused the provisions of the service's charter over a long period, Massiter resigned from the service and went to Channel 4 with a coherent and detailed account of the politically motivated surveillance and interception of communications carried out against Arthur Scargill and other National Union of Mineworkers leaders in order to help defeat the miners' Great Strike. She also revealed that organisations like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament were regarded as legitimate targets for hostile operations because of their supposed subversive aims. Just as Bettaney had been smeared as a drunk, Massiter was written off as a nutcase. Her allegations were reviewed by the security commission, who, after spending a whole weekend examining the files, concluded - unsurprisingly - that nothing improper had taken place.

Of course, the real cause célèbre of the 1980s was the farce that came to be known as the 'Spycatcher affair', when the Thatcher government made complete fools of themselves by attempting to prevent Peter Wright, a former senior officer in the service's A (technical) branch from revealing the extent of MI5's bugging and burgling exploits. Wright also had something to say about a period in the mid-1970s, when a clique of rightwing MI5 officers, some of them of senior rank, tried to destabilise the Wilson government by suggesting that the prime minister himself was a Soviet agent intent on Bolshevising the country.

These internal problems, reflecting MI5's partisan involvement in domestic party political and industrial affairs, were in turn overshadowed by much more serious political developments in the world at large. The collapse of the eastern European and later the Soviet regimes, together with the inevitable implosion of 'official' communism and the disintegration of much of the left, meant that MI5 was faced with the loss of two of its principal reasons for existing. Massive expenditure of resources on counter-espionage and counter-subversion could no longer be justified. Unthinkably, the prospect of redundancies loomed. The service urgently needed a 'makeover' that could simultaneously give it a public, acceptable image and a plausible role in the 'post-communist' era.

Rimington's accession to the post of director general, urged by her predecessor Sir Patrick Walker and personally approved by prime minister John Major, marked a sea change so far as image was concerned: photo calls in her Gower Street office suite, carefully packaged interviews and profiles placed in the media, and most notably her delivery of the BBC's Dimbleby Lecture, in which she presented a picture of MI5 as a collection of eminently level-headed, politically impartial, young and vigorous defenders of democracy and the British way of life. It was no coincidence that she placed the greatest emphasis on the fact that MI5 was devoting the bulk of its efforts towards combating Irish republican terrorism, since at that time a vicious turf war between MI5 and MI6 was taking place as to which service should have the commanding role in tackling this, the only really plausible target for operations and therefore the prime justification for increasing budgets, building new headquarters and so forth. Rimington won the battle, something for which MI6 never forgave her, though they got their new headquarters anyway. Later the service even opened up an anodyne website and publicised a telephone number which patriotic citizens could use to denounce their neighbours.

From MI5's point of view, the Rimington era can be seen as a successful holding operation, but the Provisional IRA's abandonment of the military struggle and the advent of the peace process now casts doubt on the wisdom of her decision to place such stress of the service's anti-terrorist role.

Where are the new enemies to be found, enemies plausible enough to warrant the continued existence of a sizeable and very powerful secret police? International crime, drugs-trafficking and money-laundering have been seized upon as suitable targets for MI5's much vaunted professional expertise, but there is still evidently a gap that needs to be filled. Hence the recent announcement that MI5 and MI6 are to devote resources to combating the scourge of bogus asylum-seekers - a classic case of that comfortable collusion whereby government and the intelligence agencies work to their mutual advantage.

Another, if anything more sinister, example of such cosy collaboration can be seen in the Blair government's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill, currently going through the Lords, which would give MI5 the power to oblige UK internet service providers to make available to them all e-mail and other internet communications coming into or going out of the UK. To soften up public opinion for what amounts to the grossest infringement of personal privacy, the home office assures us that such measures are aimed exclusively at terrorists, international criminals and paedophiles. Of course. Just as Rimington's own surveillance of trade unions, peace organisations and the like - activities that made her name in the service - were directed 'exclusively' against 'subversives' and 'extremists' who threaten 'our' democratic system.

Even from the relatively scanty materials publicly available, it can be established without any shadow of doubt that whenever the class struggle in our country has reached an intensity perceived by the government of the day and its secret agencies as being dangerous to the stability of capitalism, they have worked together, in the name of the British people and 'national security', to destroy that threat by all means available to them. The same will be true next time.