16.01.2014
Review: How to guard against state agents
Rob Evans and Paul Lewis Undercover: the true story of Britains secret police Faber and Faber, 2013, pp346, £12.99
A veteran of the National Union of Mineworkers recounts a tale of a telephone security measure favoured during and after the miners’ Great Strike of 1984-85 by union leader Arthur Scargill - a man with every reason to believe the secret state was out to get him, as various media exposés have since revealed. Apparently, when Arthur had some information to impart that he regarded as sensitive, he would lower his voice and begin to whisper into the mouthpiece.
Now, there is no doubt that the snooping paraphernalia available to the bourgeois state has grown impressively since the mid-1980s, both in terms of its volume and technical sophistication (the UK surveillance commissioner recorded half a million instances of personal information being accessed as of November of this year, for instance). That notwithstanding, my guess is that even back in the 1980s, the spooks still had access to volume knobs …
We do not single out comrade Scargill for any particular reason, other than that the story is deliciously ludicrous. The blunt truth is that the left as a whole - all of us, I emphasise - are rank amateurs when it comes to protecting the security of our movement against state monitoring and provocation. Indeed, the whole concept of ‘party security’ has been mangled out of shape, and is now normally perceived in terms of the need to hide the political differences within this or that organisation from other groups in the workers’ movement and - beyond that - the working class as a whole.
So this punchy little overview by Rob Evans and Paul Lewis of 40 years of undercover policing of the left and various environmental campaigns should be a ‘wakey-wakey, inhale the Columbian roast’ moment. In addition to bringing to light some specific cases of infiltration, these two Guardian journalists are able to give fascinating details of day-to-day life in the Special Demonstration Squad - a section of Special Branch (itself the operational arm of MI5 for most of its existence) established in 1968 with the express remit to plant police agents in radical social movements and political organisations.
Indeed, the book opens with dramatic panache, as a team of undercover policemen - catching some downtime in a Chiswick safe house in 1994 (on “red sofas”, we are informed in tantalisingly useless detail) - watch a TV news report of thousands of East German citizens sifting through personal files strewn around the ransacked HQ of the state’s secret police, the Stasi. One of them breaks the awkward silence: “You do realise,” he tells his colleagues, “this is going to happen to us one day. We’re going to open a book and read all about what we’ve been up to” (p1).
Salutary though this all is, there is a sense in which many will regard it as a ‘so what?’ sort of book. As I have indicated, it is interesting enough and cracks along at a decent pace in the slightly breathless style that hacks normally reserve for exposés/ scoops they believe of great portent. For the seasoned lefty, however, the news that the state spies on us, inserts agents in our ranks, manufactures dirt to discredit campaigns and that these agents on occasion have sex with the targets they are living and working with on intimate terms day-to-day is really not that shocking. This is the sort of stuff - I never tire of telling people - we pay our taxes for. (Indeed, a recent poll suggested that the wider British public are pretty sanguine about the whole scandal, with 42% still purportedly supporting government agencies bending the rules to “obtain information that helps them fight serious crime and terrorism”, as the question leadingly put it.1)
More interesting by far are the examples in this politics-lite book of the way the loyalties of some of these undercover police officers started to bifurcate, morally grey areas developed and a few - briefly - even ‘went native’.
There are some glib ways one could try to explain this, of course. A bad dose of method acting, for example. Certainly, the police operatives were required to ‘live the role’ to convince their leftwing and environmentalist targets (dubbed the “wearies”, by SDSers - a sort of backhanded compliment to activists’ tenacity). They surrendered their warrant cards. They painstakingly constructed a false life history (rather morbidly, assuming the name and birth details of dead children). They changed their appearance, most growing beards and long hair, acquiring the collective nickname of the “hairies” in the wider police service. Part of their cover would be to take on and passionately espouse causes and political ideas which had probably not troubled them before in the cloistered, complacent and relatively privileged world the police inhabit as a social group.
Evidence for the tug on an individual’s sense of self is given by one of the police spies in the London bonding session mentioned at the start of this article. He said of his very first safe-house experience: “Nothing can prepare you for it … They simply do not look like police officers at all. One of them even brought his dog with him. It’s the equivalent of turning up at a conference for people selling the Big Issue. Some of them had cans of Carling in their hands because they cannot get out of role” (pp2-3). Essentially, as one undercover cop who operated in the Socialist Workers Party in the 1980s put it, this was an operation where “people disappeared into a black hole for several years” (p16).
Could it be the ‘Tania’ effect - psychological bonding and ties of loyalty that may develop between hostages and their captors?2 This was certainly the pat explanation deployed by at least one SDSer, Mike Chitty (alias Mike Blake), after he went feral amongst animal rights campaigners in the 1980s (see p96).
Party
In fact, it is clear that politics is the answer. By this I do not mean the political strength of the various animal rights, environmental and left groups that the police had infiltrated; more the ideological brittleness of the ruling class, its loss of self-belief in its ability to bring forward positive solutions to the problems of planet Earth. To throw some light on this, a brief detour via a publication that first came out in France in 1926 is useful.
Victor Serge’s What everyone should know about state repression contains exactly what it says on the tin. It has detailed advice on how to avoid being followed, how to behave if arrested, how to take notes and write correspondence - a handbook for the survival of revolutionaries under repressive regimes of the time. But it also avoids a danger that Lenin warned of - approaching the vital question of party security from a purely technical viewpoint. Serge locates strength in politics when he comments that if “you have on your side the laws of history, the interests of the future … then you are invincible”.3
Elsewhere in this short book, Serge illustrates how this confidence of the revolutionary party and class - born of an inspiring vision of another, better world - starts to dissolve the political and ideological bonds of the old, declining society. He writes:
… the Russian police were overtaken by history. Instinctively or consciously, the overwhelming majority of the population gave their sympathy to the enemies of the old regime … On [the revolutionaries’] side they had only the moral strength, the strength of ideas and feelings. The autocracy was no longer a living principle. No-one believed it was necessary. It no longer had any ideologues.4
When [a revolutionary] was arrested it happened more and more frequently that the soldiers in charge of conveying him sympathised with him, and amongst the jailers he almost found ‘comrades’. So much so that in most prisons it was easy to communicate illegally with the outside world. This sympathy also made escape easier.5
As Serge shows, a Marxist party, democratically organised and open about its differences, but proudly and untiringly making mass propaganda for the genuinely liberating and inspiring vision of communism, can win adherents from every layer of society with its universalist message. I quoted the example above of police and jailers, as this was most relevant to the review. However, he also tells us that “over a long period, the nobility and the bourgeoisie gave the flower of their youth to the revolution”.6
The anomaly of this frustrating historical period is that capitalism is clearly a system in decline. It too has few “ideologues” to make a positive case for its continued existence - only apologists who tell us that the alternatives would be even worse. Yet, against this self-despising system, the left does not counterpose a really credible and inspiring vision. Although infinitely superior and more human to the cramped, often misanthropic world view of the likes of the environmental campaigners that swayed some undercover coppers, Marxism still has no purchase. It has to be said that this is not the problem of Marxism as a body of theory: it is the problem of the people that today purport to be ‘Marxists’.
Weakness
One example of the ruling elite’s tenuous grasp on their society is illustrated by the scale of micro-surveillance and control it feels it needs to deploy against even the most harmless forms of protest or dissent, let alone the largely phantom threat of domestic Islamic terrorism.
In the late 1990s, the definition of ‘domestic extremism’ was tweaked to encompass not simply “criminal acts of direct action in furtherance of a single-issue campaign”, but actions taken to “prevent something from happening or change legislation or domestic policy”, if the focus for this was “outside the normal democratic process” (p202).
Undercover cites some amusing examples of the sort of eminently respectable people this definition of ‘extremism’ netted. For example, there was Peter Harbour, the 69-year-old retired physicist. He was never convicted of any offence, had been security-cleared to work in government labs, but was on the list because of his involvement in a campaign to save a lake for otters and human recreation. Or John Catt, 88-year-old Brighton peacenik: he had a clean record, but an ominous habit of turning up at mild-mannered, badly attended environmental protests with a folding chair and a sketch pad (p204).
The scope of the surveillance undertaken by contemporary western governments actually underlines the weakness and lack of real control over society felt by the ruling elites. But what implications does it have for the left, broadly defined?
First, that the models of organisation favoured by the stunt-orientated environmental campaigns that were the target of some of these police stings must, in their very nature, restrict insider knowledge to an elite of (self-appointed) activists. In relative terms, organisations like this are a breeze to infiltrate and disrupt. Mass politics, organised by parties with programmes for mass mobilisations, are far more difficult propositions for the state.
Second, there is the related question of political transparency. In one sense, this is simply not an option any more for the left. As Mike Macnair has put it, addressing the urgent need for transparency and an end to manipulative frontism on the left, “… we will have to - as it were - live with our clothes off … The world is tending this way - libertarian Silicon Valley businessman Scott McNealy said in 1999: ‘You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.’”7
In other words, the scale and sophistication of the state’s monitoring of ‘private’ correspondence is now of a nature to undermine the very notion of ‘private’. As Ben Hayes of Statewatch and the Transnational Institute points out, “Presented with billions of dollars, unfettered access and a mandate to mitigate all security risks, the National Security Agency8 has established programmes allowing analysts to query ‘nearly everything a typical user does on the internet’, according to one of the NSA presentations leaked by [Edward] Snowden.”9
This nicely contextualises the farcical attempts of Socialist Workers Party apparatchiks to keep strictly private the internal e-discussions and factional arguments which have recently convulsed the organisation. But from whom exactly? It is blindingly obvious that the security services would have been able to access to every email, every discussion post, every telephone conversation or note and - depending on the level of agent penetration or the technology deployed - every important face-to-face discussion from the central committee down. As pointed out at the beginning of this article, this leaves the real security targets for the leaders of groups like the SWP (whose leaders are intelligent enough to know the huge reach of the state) first its own members, then the broader left and the workers’ movement as a whole.
In effect then - despite what are no doubt sincere intentions - such sects clumsily constitute themselves as forms of political conspiracy against the working class, but offer full transparency to the bourgeois state.
Lenin’s insistence that a mass communist organisation of the working class cannot be built without the working class having a thorough acquaintance with every political shade and nuance represented in it was intended to bring out something about the correct, transparent relationship between the party and class. What Undercover makes clear is that this form of organisation can offer both a better defence against state infiltration - the febrile, nepotistic, rumour-dominated and cloak-and-dagger inner life of the sects offers huge opportunities for a maliciously minded state provocateur with a little imagination - and also a form of offence to split and neutralise the police and security services.
After all, if groups as essentially harmless as the likes of London Greenpeace, the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army or Earth First can wobble the world view of some undercover coppers, think of the damage that Marxism’s inspiring vision of the future can do - when we Marxists clean up our act.
Mark Fischer
mark.fischer@weeklyworker.org.uk
Notes
1. Red Pepper October-November 2013.
2. ‘Tania’ was the revolutionary cadre-name adopted by Patty Hearst, an American newspaper heiress who was kidnapped by, and later joined, the urban guerrilla group, the Symbionese Liberation Army, in 1974. She explained her conversion by what became known as the ‘Stockholm syndrome’.
3. V Serge What everyone should know about state repression London 1979, p43.
8. The NSA is “tasked with the global monitoring, collection, decoding, translation and analysis of information and data for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes, including surveillance of targeted individuals on US soil” (Wikipedia).