10.08.2005

Why we pay our taxes

Annie Machon Spies, lies and whistleblowers: MI5, MI6 and the Shayler affair Book Guild, 2005, pp387, £17.95

Contrary to the suggestions of some people on the loopier fringe of the British left, David Shayler is clearly no longer a serving MI5 agent (a comment that these types will take as prima facie evidence that I am, of course). However, his worldview still has much in common with the MI5-style template - even if a rather individually eccentric one nowadays. This does not mean that the man is a Colonel Blimp - Shayler is essentially an honest left liberal. However, like the intelligence services - and the establishment itself, of course - he tends to see political events he disapproves of as shaped by conspiracy. During my conversation with him, amongst some even wilder suggestions, he described the 9/11 attacks on the USA as an "inside job"; he raised similar doubts about the 7/7 outrages in London and even floated the idea that the left's abject failure to win socialism in the 20th century was a result of the fact that it had been "thoroughly penetrated" by the intelligence services. I had a simpler explanation: "We were just crap, David," I told him. David and his partner, Annie Machon, presented an interesting session at this year's Marxism, the annual school of the Socialist Workers Party, drawing on material from Annie's new book, Spies, lies and whistleblowers. This charts the pair's brief career in the domestic intelligence service, MI5, from their 1991 recruitment to their resignation, deeply disillusioned, five years later. Also chronicled is their subsequent persecution at the hands of the Blair government after Shayler attempted to lift the lid on some of the more shady and, frankly, illegal activities of his former employers. Their problems started on their first day in the job. The service they were joining as part of a "new generation", they were told, had moved on from the days when its "counter-subversion section" conducted extensive surveillance of the left, the peace movement, trade unions, etc. Instead, their focus was to be "international terrorism" - including the Irish republican movement. However, after two weeks training Machon's first posting was to a small section, F2 - the counter-subversion section. At this stage, the section's prime target was the Militant Tendency, with the Communist Party of Britain and Class War also taking up some shelving space. The section had been dramatically scaled down from the 1980s, when it had tens of officers and hundreds of support staff, but was still a pretty considerable outfit. "Virtually every branch of the SWP had an agent in it when I joined the section," Annie told her rather outraged audience at Marxism on July 9. Machon assured the comrades that she spent much of her time running down this work, to the point that, when she left the section after two years, most of the agents had been discontinued, the phone taps on the SWP HQ had been shut down, along with "the last phone tap on an individual activist in this country, Tony Cliff". Now, whether her audience were particularly pleased by the fact that Machon considered that the SWP - a "supposed subversive group", she defined it to the assembled would-be subversives - was not worthy of extensive surveillance is a moot point. Frankly, I would have been rather put out it had it been me "¦ The Marxism session and much of the left's commentary on the book have missed the key points to be made. Annie Machon's work is an interesting read for Marxists not because of any political affinity we may have with either Shayler or herself. Both come from a very different political world than the revolutionary left. Machon's book, for example, is peppered with patriotic references to "our security interests" and she damns the likes of Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt - "ex-public schoolboys to a man", she rather needlessly reminds readers - as "traitors who gave information to the enemy, causing the deaths of dozens of brave British agents doing their best to defend the security of this country" (Spies, lies and whistleblowers, p257). Nor is it exactly startling to be told that the British security services bend and break the law, with the full connivance of the government. Anyone who has been involved in Irish politics at any level of seriousness could themselves fill a book with examples. Thus I was a little puzzled by the number of tuts, shakes of the head and raised eyebrows that greeted some of Annie Machon's revelations to the Marxism audience. The state spying on the SWP? It's what you pay your taxes for, comrades. Far more interesting from our angle should be the question of counter-surveillance. What sort of organisational and political culture needs to be nurtured on the left to help frustrate the attempts of the security services to disrupt our work as revolutionaries when they start to take us more seriously as a threat once again? David's comment in my brief interview with him below about the thorough penetration of the Communist Party is instructive in this context. As he puts it, "The Communist Party was very easy; MI5 knew more about the Communist Party than the Communist Party knew about itself." Exactly. I recall with a shudder the 'official' CPGB under the opportunists - the lack of transparency, the culture of clandestine factional warfare, the development of cliques and petty personal fiefdoms around various individuals, the absence of democratic accountability and control, the atmosphere of intrigue, poisonous character assassination and gossip. It must have been like an adventure theme park for the spooks and, yes, given the bureaucratic centralism that ruled in our party, it was no doubt true that the state's secret service knew more - far more - about the politics of the organisation than the vast majority of ordinary members. And the truth is that this shocking state of affairs persists today. Not in the Communist Party of Great Britain any more, but across the vast bulk of the left. Robert Griffiths of the Morning Star's CPB deigns to withhold his true views on Respect from the workers' movement. But you can bet your bottom dollar that David Shayler's ex-colleagues are in the know. I started by asking David why he, as an individual who had once been attracted to the left (he had attended meetings of the Revolutionary Communist Group, for example) had ended up making the career choices he had. How did you come to work for MI5? By the end of the 1980s, there was a feeling of defeat on the left, that we were not going to win any more battles. The whole thing was stacked against us in terms of the media, parliament, the House of Lords, etc. I became very disillusioned with leftwing politics, but still wanted to be a journalist. I got a job with The Sunday Times on the strength of the writing I had done at college. I didn't apply to MI5 for a job. I saw an advert in the paper that said, "Godot isn't coming." It sounded like it might be a job in journalism or something related, so I sent off my CV. I was pretty surprised at the second interview when they said, 'Guess what - this is MI5'. Even then I couldn't believe that MI5 would want to recruit me as an officer. Possibly as an agent, but nothing more. However, I started to go through the process, still not quite believing what was happening. At one point, I actually told my friends, 'Look, this is crazy, but I'm in the process of being recruited by MI5. I don't suppose I'll get there in the end, but perhaps the whole thing has been a wind-up so far.' Incredibly, I did get there in the end. There was actually a sort of perverse pleasure in getting one over on them in that sense. I liked the idea of seeing the whole thing for myself from the inside and I also had a notion of changing the institution and the people in it. What were your initial impressions? They have been very good at manufacturing their own 'heroic' myth - either in the form of James Bond or George Smiley. This doesn't reflect the truth, of course. My first impression was that it was all pretty workaday and mundane, I have to say. I was reviewing old files, that sort of thing - although I was responsible for closing down the study of Class War and the Communist Party of Britain. It was clear to me, having mixed with the left and knowing the age profile of the CPB (65-plus), that they were not about to lead a revolution in this country and MI5 was wasting their time monitoring them. They might threaten one if there was an attack on pensions, but that was about it. So I felt there was no need to be monitoring the left in the same way. It was a total over-reaction to the actual scale of the threat. I believe that it was actually being done to collect information on people who subsequently became mainstream politicians - people like Straw, Cook, Mandelson. All these people have files. The situation was obviously different with the IRA. This was an organisation that was planting bombs and threatening people's lives, so I felt it was legitimate to be closely monitoring them. But even there, I encountered a huge amount of incompetence - I wonder in hindsight if there wasn't an attempt to clog the whole thing up with bureaucracy, just to maintain the 'jobs for the boys', as it were. There was no sense of embarrassment that the IRA was actually getting through and bombs were going off. People like me who came in as part of the new wave of recruitment in the early 90s managed to detect who was doing it - without recourse to repressive measures like imprisoning people without trial, I might add - and put them behind bars. As a member of a left group, I obviously have a 'professional interest' in some of your old activities. In particular, the type of profiles you had in mind for the sort of individuals and organisation conducive to influence and infiltration. The Communist Party was quite thoroughly penetrated because its members were not, on the whole, particularly aware of security measures. It was also quite easy to 'turn' people in the CPGB. Rank and file members would be recruited and then encouraged to work their way up through the party. I knew of two agents in the Communist Party - I even remember the number of one of them: M148. Just to give you some sort of idea about the level of penetration, CPGB agents were numbered consecutively. By the time I joined the service, we were dealing with CPGB agents with four-figure numbers - so this guy was recruited a hell of a long time ago. He spent his entire adult working life reporting on the Communist Party; by the end, he was providing intelligence on the activities of the party executive, so he was a useful source. The Communist Party was very easy; MI5 knew more about the Communist Party than the Communist Party knew about itself. In this context, it is very rarely that someone is turned for money. More often they grow disillusioned with the ideology or they have personal reasons, such as a gripe against particular individuals. MI5 provides a sympathetic ear under those circumstances. These things can take different forms. Perhaps their personal ambitions in terms of promotion in the party have been thwarted or somebody has slept with their spouse - that sort of thing. The job of an agent who is looking for someone to turn is to try to find precisely these sort of very human problems that individuals may be experiencing. Strangely enough, the way most of these people are identified is through already existing agents. You ask some innocuous question about what's going on in people's personal lives and your source will gossip, not really understanding that they are helping to set up another person for potential turning. These human contacts are always the best source of intelligence. The Communist Party was tapped from when the technology became available until 1989-90. But the intelligence you gather from telephone taps is pretty poor, mostly. I recall that MI5 arranged to have a sofa sold to the party for use in its office. This sofa had a bug in it. Later, the CP decided to sell it and there was a huge fuss about trying to get the sofa back because it had a very expensive - and embarrassing - piece of equipment in it. Human contacts are much better. Interestingly, there is also a duality about the agents that you will run in an organisation like the Communist Party. They may be MI5 sources, but they are also CPGBers. You can't just pop them out of the organisation at some point and, say, put them into the IRA next. It doesn't work like that. In this context, we had an interesting case with Class War. That was slightly different, actually, in that there was this guy who was actually a copper - from the special duties section of special branch - who went under cover as an anarchist. He would spend six days a week with Class War, then go home for his day of rest with the wife and kids. But that starts to change your life, in that it affects you on a psychological level. Whatever your subjective intentions are, if you spend six days of every week pretending to be an anarchist, there is a natural tendency for you to actually become an anarchist. That's what happened to this bloke and eventually they had to pull him out before they lost him altogether. I have heard stories of special branch officers from the 1970s who were put into left organisations and who then 'went native'. Well there's always that danger; that they will come to see the sense of the arguments they are surrounded by 24 hours a day. If you immerse a human being in that atmosphere for long periods, then they are going to be susceptible to be turned the other way.