03.10.2001

Revealing nothing

Stella Rimington Open secret: the autobiography of the former director general of MI5 Random House, 2001, pp296, ?18.99

Anybody unfortunate enough to have been suckered by The Guardian into forking out ?18.99 for this turgid little volume of sub-literate, self-adulatory trash must be feeling cheated, but what did they expect?

?This,? trumpeted the custodian of bourgeois liberal values, ?is the book the establishment tried to stop? (September 10). True, but grotesquely disingenuous. Having failed to dissuade Mrs Rimington from going into print, the ?establishment? (MI5, MI6, the cabinet office et al) spent many months censoring her text, to the point where what we have before us, far from being in any sense damaging to the interests and safety of the state, constitutes an extended apologia for the activities of the security and intelligence services in their efforts to safeguard ?the nation? and ?democracy?.

Even the book?s title is an exercise in disinformation. Save for a couple of names - only one of which belongs to a person (Julian Faux) who may still be numbered among the living - the book ?reveals? nothing of any significance that has not already appeared in print. And as to ?secrets?, for those the reader will obviously search in vain.

Two questions arise immediately: why write the book at all, and why have it serialised in The Guardian? With a fat pension and the income she derives from such sinecures as her non-executive directorship of Marks and Spencer, Rimington certainly does not need the money, though the six-figure cheque from Random House will no doubt go some way towards alleviating those financial anxieties which constitute a leitmotif in her memoirs. To admit the truth - that it was simple vanity that led her to put pen to paper - was obviously not an option.

So, to begin with, she claimed that her autobiography was a way of letting her daughters, Sophie and Harriet, know what she had been doing all those years. The fatuousness of this cover story, which hardly attests to the woman?s fabled expertise in tradecraft, was so readily apparent that in the book itself she changes tack and tells us solemnly that ?my career has generated much interest, particularly among other women?.

Thus a new feminist icon for the 21st century is born. We are invited by The Guardian to learn about ?one woman?s journey into the heart of Britain?s secret establishment?, as ?she smashed her way through every barrier in the security service, becoming the first female intelligence officer to run agents in the field, and eventually the first female director-general of MI5?. Open secret? The book could more accurately be entitled Didn?t I do well?

While she ?tracked, trailed, bugged and burgled some of the most ruthless spies, drug-runners, subversives and terrorists of her generation? (The Guardian September 8), our heroine still found time to deal with such mundane problems as central heating boilers, dead cats, au pairs, nappies, nannies and a rather bad case of rising damp in Islington. In the meantime, her marriage to John, evidently a genuinely intelligent civil servant who, unlike Stella herself, had managed to get into Cambridge, was collapsing. Maybe he got tired of listening to her moaning about how ?disgruntled? she was at being treated like a ?second class citizen? in the office, and how infuriating she felt it to be working under men who were less competent than her.

Why The Guardian? Because Mrs Rimington is evidently engaged in the absurd and futile exercise of re-inventing herself as something of a liberal. We read that she is in favour of reforming the 1989 Official Secrets Act. Good. But then it transpires that her concern is not with opening up the secret state to genuine democratic scrutiny, but rather with those of her former colleagues who are avid to jump on the gravy train by publishing their own autobiographies - it is just ?not realistic? on the part of the establishment to try and prevent this deluge of literary endeavour. To use one of her favourite adjectives, this is an example of ?breathtaking? hypocrisy. One wonders how many times the lady waved the Official Secrets Act in the face of those old buffers who, confronted by a dull retirement of golf and gardening in Guildford, sought permission to immortalise their exploits in ?defence of the realm?.

As communists, our only reason for wading through this sad tome is to find what, if any, light it casts on the workings of the secret world of institutions, wholly unelected and unaccountable (leaving aside the ?oversight? exercised by a committee of safe parliamentary stooges), that wield great power in the state; and exclusively in the interests of the ruling class, their very raison d??tre 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.

Despite their best efforts, the censors have given us something to work on, even if it involves reading between the lines and concentrating on what is left unsaid by the author or has been excised from her manuscript.

Take the question of subversion. It was that great socialist, Clem Atlee, who, with the onset of the cold war, gave the security service its charter and charged it with, among other things, dealing with those whose activities were ?designed to undermine or overthrow parliamentary democracy, by political, violent or industrial means?: ie, communists, Trotskyites and (for form?s sake) fascists. The same definition, give or take a couple of insignificant changes, was incorporated into the Security Service Act of 1989.

Leaving aside the ?reds under the bed? paranoiacs and 110% fruitcakes like Charles Elwell, who worked as an assistant director in the F (counter-subversion) branch until the early 1980s, nobody could take seriously the revolutionary threat supposedly represented by the old Communist Party of Great Britain. All new entrants to the service were required to acquaint themselves with the enemy by studying its programme, The British road to socialism. Those few who did read it must have realised pretty quickly that they were not exactly dealing with Bolsheviks.

Yet their first job on passing out of the training section was to cut their bureaucratic teeth by toiling in F1C, the section devoted to the identification of all members and sympathisers of the CPGB. Furnished with raw data gleaned from mail, telephone and microphone intercepts, supplemented by a wealth of material from members of the CPGB who had been recruited as spies, the desk officer?s task was to open files on all those who fell within a ?recordable category?: existing and aspirant members, obviously, but also the old dears who from time to time sent a ten bob note or a postal order scrimped from their meagre incomes to Peter Pink at the Morning Star. They were clearly ?communist sympathisers?, as were those who, while not belonging to the CPGB, involved themselves in the activities of communist and Soviet ?front organisations?, like the World Peace Council. The same methods were used to identify members and sympathisers of Trotskyite organisations.

The point of all this activity was primarily to prevent people getting jobs in government departments, or ?list X? firms carrying out government contracts, where they might have access to classified information, it being axiomatic that all communists and their ?sympathisers? were actual or potential traitors.

Rimington tells us: ?I don?t want to talk too much about this, because my former colleagues aren?t going to be too happy if I raise into the headlines the issue of subversion, which for them is now a very minor issue.? Quite so. While she and the censors are not brazen enough to deny that some desk officers were ?overenthusiastic? in their carding of ?subversives?, and that files were opened on those who were in no way ?actively threatening the state?, they are clearly anxious to deflect attention away from what was incontrovertibly an endemic, politically motivated abuse of the security service?s charter.

She goes on to aver: ?The charge that MI5 was then, or at any other time, subject to political direction is unfounded? (p165). For Dame Stella, this is a particularly personal problem, because the truth is that her entire subsequent career was shaped by the fact that at a crucial time in the early 1980s she was the assistant director of F2N, the counter-subversion section whose responsibility it was to spy on trade unions and organisations like CND and the National Council for Civil Liberties.

Her targets for mail and phone taps at that time included ?communist sympathisers? like Patricia Hewitt and Harriet Harman, now respectively the trade and industry secretary and the solicitor general in Tony Blair?s government. Listen to these weasel words: ?It is an established fact that the anti-nuclear movement, in its own right an entirely legitimate protest movement, was of great interest to the Soviet Union. As part of its subversive activities in the west, the Soviet Union sought covertly to encourage anti-nuclear, ban the bomb and other such protest [sic] in many western countries, as a way of weakening the defence of their enemies.

?Of course that does not mean that everyone who joined CND was part of a subversive plot. But Soviet officials encouraged western communist parties, including the Communist Party of Great Britain, to try to infiltrate CND at key strategic levels ? Our job, and what we were doing, was to monitor those activities. Not to investigate CND, which on its own was of no interest to us. The allegation that we investigated CND has been denied on countless occasions ? but I have come to accept that no-one who firmly believes the allegation will ever cease to believe it, whatever is said? (p163). Methinks the dame doth protest too much, as she does, repeatedly, when it comes to MI5?s involvement in the greyer areas of ?subversion?.

Rimington?s real tour de force and the thing which made her name across Whitehall was her handling of the miners? Great Strike of 1984-5. Long before the strike itself Arthur Scargill had been the target of telephonic and mail interception. Once the strike began, every word uttered or written by Scargill and his comrades in the leadership of the NUM, every movement they made, was faithfully recorded by Rimington and her officers in F2N and immediately passed on to Thatcher and her cabinet. If we accept Rimington?s contention that MI5 had never been ?subject to political direction?, why did the service feel itself empowered and obliged to take sides in what was the most significant, potentially revolutionary, industrial dispute since the General Strike?

It was nothing to do with defending the interests of the capitalist class - obviously. The answer lies in the word ?industrial?, which, as we have seen, is a handy part of the state?s definition of subversion, now codified in law. Rimington would have us believe that the ?triumvirate? composed of Scargill, Mick McGahey and Peter Heathfield, far from being concerned with preventing the destruction of their industry, on which the livelihoods of tens of thousands of workers and their families depended, was actually bent on ?overthrowing parliamentary demo-cracy? by ?using the strike to bring down the elected government of Mrs Thatcher? (ibid). In fact the NUM leadership, including Scargill, did everything in its power to keep the struggle - irrespective of the militancy with which they conducted it - within the narrow parameters of an industrial dispute.

Furthermore, according to Rimington, the strike was ?actively supported? by the Communist Party. Apart from its tiny Leninist wing, whose comrades went on to found the Weekly Worker, the CPGB failed dismally in its duty to politicise the miners? head-on clash with the forces of the state. The rotten Eurocommunist gang around Marxism Today, in cahoots with the right opportunist leadership of Gordon McLennan, did their best to distance themselves from it - when they were not actually sniping at the miners? ?violence? and failure to behave in a suitable manner for recipients of charity. The clique around the Morning Star, who later broke with the Euros and formed the Communist Party of Britain, acted as uncritical cheerleaders for Scargill.

It was the security service?s politically motivated intervention in the miners? strike and its similarly political investigation of such organisations as CND and the NCCL (now Liberty) that led an F2N officer, Cathy Massiter, to become MI5?s first ?whistle-blower? in 1985, an event that Rimington describes as ?amazing and shocking? (p176). Having had the courage to voice her disquiet about what was going on in her section, Massiter was at first advised to seek the help of a psychiatrist. Eventually she became so sickened by her experiences, and by the pressure put upon her by Rimington, that she resigned and took her story to Channel 4. In the aftermath of the resulting documentary, Lord Bridge of Harwich, a trusted friend of the service, spent a couple of days supposedly examining the relevant files and assured the public that everything was in order. Massiter was never charged under the Official Secrets Act, nor have her allegations ever been formally denied.

That MI5 was actively running agents in the NUM and other trade unions is something that Rimington makes a point of denying. The case of Roger Windsor - sometime chief executive of the NUM and the key figure in an MI5 attempt to smear Scargill as corruptly using Libyan donations to the union for his own benefit - is discreetly omitted from Rimington?s text. But in the interview she gave to The Guardian, she states that ?It would be correct to say that ? Roger Windsor was never an agent in any sense of the word that you can possibly imagine ? That?s not to say that the police or special branch ? might not have been doing some of those things? (September 8). The tortured syntax gives the game away. Windsor, for reasons of obvious sensitivity, would appear never to have been a formal agent of MI5, but just a special branch informant, so his slanderous allegations are the responsibility of the police, not the security service.

Evidence of MI5?s outright partisan involvement in domestic party political and industrial affairs can readily be adduced from a variety of sources. Rimington?s anodyne assurances to the contrary count for nothing. But these issues are for the time being of merely historical interest to most observers. The one instance in which Rimington can be taken at her word is when she says that ?subversion? is now ?not a major issue?.

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, introduced a period of reaction of a special type, in which the working class finds itself atomised, passive and effectively off the historical stage. As communists and revolutionaries, we are no doubt regarded currently as a very low priority.

But let there be no mistake: when the class struggle intensifies and when our class builds an organisation worthy of the name ?Communist Party?, we shall once again be regarded as the ?subversives? whom Rimington and her like spent their lives trying to destroy.

Maurice Bernal