Annie Machon

Alan Johnson's MI5 File?

I wonder what information, if any, MI5 has on file about new-ish UK Home Secretary, Alan Johnson?  Or, more pertinently, what HE thinks the spies might have......

How else explain his recent comments in The Daily Torygraph? He said that he will be the voice of those who cannot defend themselves - ie those poor, anonymous intelligence officers in MI5.  He even drags out the hoary old chestnut that a criminal investigation into prima facie evidence that the spooks have been involved in serious crime - the torture of another human being - would damage national security. 

I'm surprised he managed to bite back Tony Blair's infamous line, that an investigation into possible spy incompetence and crime would be a "ludicrous diversion"

Ever since Labour came to power in 1997, we have had a series of Home Secretaries straining to avoid doing their job vis a vis the spooks in Thames House: the job being that of political master of MI5, thereby providing a modicum of democratic oversight to an extremely powerful and secretive organisation, holding it to account and ensuring it obeys the law. 

The role of Home Secretary is not to be the champion of unaccountable spies who are protected from investigation and oversight by a whole raft of secrecy legislation.

More and more evidence is emerging that MI5 assisted the USA's extraordinary rendition plan, that it  was complicit in torture, and that its officers have lied to cover their tracks.  Under this avalanche of scandal, some MPs have finally woken up to the fact that the Home Secretary should be ensuring MI5 obeys the law.  Some are even daringly suggesting that there should be proper Parliamentary oversight of the spies, rather than the fig leaf that is the Intelligence and Security Committee - hand-picked by and only answerable to the Prime Minister, and powerless to question intelligence officers under oath, demand papers, or look at anything more serious than policy, finance or administration.

The Metropolitan Police have even begun a criminal investigation into MI5's complicity in torture.  While I doubt any case that could, ahem,  "damage national security" will ever come to court,  a few junior officers may be asked to do the decent thing and quietly walk the plank. 

But the real issue - the closed, self-perpetuating group-think culture, where officers should just follow orders and not rock the boat - will continue unchallenged, resulting inevitably in yet more scandals.

It is time we had a Home Secretary who is up to the job and who has the backbone to initiate some meaningful reform of MI5. 

Deja Vu

I had a strong sense of deja vu today, when I read about the woes of Mrs Green, the barrister wife of Tory MP Damien Green who was arrested last November for allegedly encouraging government information leaks. 

Mr Green was arrested under an obscure and antique piece of legislation for "conspiring to commit misconduct in a public office and aiding and abetting, counselling or procuring misconduct in a public office".  This, despite the fact that civil service mandarins had persuaded the Metropolitan Police Special Branch (MPSB) to investigate him because he posed a "serious threat to national security".  The case has now been dropped and reports have now shown that these civil servants significantly overstated the case to spur the police into action. 

In such a case the obvious step would have been for the Met to have invoked the draconian 1989 Official Secrets Act.  Certainly their heavy-handed response seemed to indicate that this was how they were viewing the gravity of the case, even if they were desperately trying to avoid the attendant scandal such a step would have provoked.    Special Branch officers in the Counter-Terrorism squad are not normally sent to rip apart people's houses for minor offences.

Which takes me back to the interview with the outraged Mrs Green.  A barrister specialising in highly confidential child abuse cases, she innocently let the secret police enter her home, only to watch in disbelief as they ripped it apart in what sounds to me like a counter-terrorism style search.  They, of course, found nothing relevant to their investigation, but scoured the computers, removed the bedsheets, took away love letters between the Greens, and even rifled through the children's books. 

I suppose I was more fortunate than the hapless Mrs Green.  When the secret police ripped apart my home in the same way back in 1997, I was in Europe with my ex-partner and colleague, MI5 whistleblower David Shayler.  After we had exposed the fact that MI5 was shamelessly breaking the law, the MPSB had obtained a warrant that allowed them to search our home for material relating to our employment in MI5.  As I was away, they jackhammered the front door in, and then spent two days ripping through the flat in Pimlico.  It had been my home for 4 years. 

Naturally, the police found nothing relevant.  That did not deter them from searching the place for two days, and taking away bags of possessions, including some of my underwear, the bedsheets, photographs, and our love letters.  They also smashed up chairs and lamps, ripped the bath apart, pulled up the carpets, and scattered my remaining underwear across the bedroom floor. It looked like they had been playing with it.

I saw all this when I returned home a month later, and I felt violated.  I know this is a common reaction when one's home is burgled; but in this case my home had been despoiled by the police, not by criminals.  No doubt, some would say that we, and the Greens, deserved this treatment.  After all, we had the temerity to expose malpractice, lies, and crime within government circles.  We, of course, would argue that we had acted for the public good. 

Whatever.  I still think that a counter-terrorism style search of a whistleblower's house is over the top and deliberately intimidatory.

The police may have ransacked my home, but I was never charged with any offence.  Nor did I ever did get my underwear or love letters back..... 

MPs object to police state

An interesting political row has erupted this week in the UK about the arrest of the opposition Tory MP, Damien Green, who is also the Shadow Minister for Immigration.  He was arrested on Thursday for alleged breaches of an obscure common law  "aiding and abetting misconduct in public office".

Reports indicate that the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, or as the newspapers would have it the "anti-terrorism branch" was called in to investigate leaks from the Home Office about immigration policy, that Green was using these leaks to score points off the government, and the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith in particular.

Naturally, MPs from both sides of the House have been frothing at the mouth:  how dare Plod embarrass an MP by arresting him without warning and by conducting co-ordinated searches of his homes and offices in both Kent and London?  Newspapers, particularly on the right of the political spectrum, have been full of headlines saying that this is proof that we are living in a police state.

While I have some sympathy for the beleaguered Mr Green, having also been hauled off by the Met Special Branch and quizzed for hours for discussing sensitive information that was very much in the public interest, as well as seeing my home ripped apart in a co-ordinated counter-terrorism style raid and seen friends arrested in co-ordinated dawn raids, I am still aghast at the hypocrisy of both the politicians' and media's reaction.

Many of us are already all to painfully aware that we live in a de facto police state.  Under the notorious Section 44 of the 2000 Terrorism Act, we can all be stopped and searched for no reason - and can even be arrested purely so that a bobby on the beat can ascertain our identity.  Notices to this effect are now helpfully pinned up outside most tube stations in London.  Thousands of people are subject to this across the UK every year on the streets of Britain.

But other points rather leap to my attention from the coverage of this case.  If MPs don't like the heavy-handed use and abuse of police powers, why did they pass these laws in the first place?  Did they not think through the implications?  Or do they think that, as MPs, they are somehow above the laws of this land?

Plus, senior MPs are arguing that the use of leaks from disgruntled civil servants is a time-honoured way for HM Opposition in Parliament to hold the government to account.  Well, that might be good for the MPs' parliamentary careers, but what of the hapless and frequently brave souls within the Civil Service who face 2 years in prison for such leaks if they are convicted of a breach of the 1989 Official Secrets Act?  And, of course, there is no legal defense under the OSA of having acted "in the public interest" - the very argument that MPs are using to justify Green's exposure of Home Office cover-ups and incompetence. 

As far as I can see, there have been no comments from either journalists or MPs about the fate of the source.    The most I could find was the following in the Daily Telegraph:

"An alleged "whistleblower", thought to be a male Home Office official was arrested 10 days ago."

Either that means that journalists and MPs couldn't give a toss about the fate of this person - after all, an MP's career is far more important - or that any reporting of the arrest of the whistleblower has been injuncted in the media to the nth degree.  This would be even more troubling, as someone can just be "disappeared" into a Kafka-esque legal nightmare. 

Boiling a Frog

Last Sunday George Bush graciously flew into the UK for a final official visit before he steps down as president in January next year. PM Gordon Brown looked distinctly uncomfortable at their joint press conference, particularly when he had to announce that the UK would continue to support US military adventurism in the Middle East by sending yet more troops out there.

Of course, over the years many millions of us opposed these illegal wars, but to no avail. This was the last opportunity for peace protesters in the UK to vent their feelings towards Bush. The police responded in an increasingly heavy-handed way, penning the peaceniks up, beating innocent people around the head for no reason, and calling in the armoured riot police.

One friend of mine said that they were standing there playing protest songs when suddenly a wall of Robocop lookalikes appeared and began to advance on them. My friend, a seasoned activist, had never seen anything quite like it; even he was unnerved. Another decided to make a stand. Well, to be exact, he lay down at their feet, protected only by Solomon his trusty Peace Dog.

Despite all this, the police persisted in blaming the protesters. Deputy Assistant Commissioner Chris Allison announced that the Met would hold an enquiry and said: "We are seriously disappointed by the irresponsible and criminal action of those who have challenged police….”

Allison then went on to make a statement that chilled my heart: he said that the protest could have been used as a “cover” for terrorists targeting George Bush.

So this is what it has come to. Many intelligent commentators over recent years have said that politicians and police use the threat of terrorism to gain more and more draconian powers. Time and again we have seen innocent people stopped for no good reason under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act. Infamously, this Act was also used to throw 87 year old Walter Wolfgang out of a Labour Party conference for heckling Jack Straw. Police can even arrest you now purely to ascertain your identity.

But for a senior policeman to claim that violence is acceptable against peace campaigners as they might be harbouring terrorists is one step beyond. The tactics the US army has used so disastrously on the streets of Baghdad have now been imported to the streets of Westminster.

I have been saying for a long time that the laws are already in place for the UK to be defined as effectively a police state. The only reason that this is not yet obvious to all is because these laws are not applied more widely. But perhaps we are seeing the first signs of this now.

Where will this end? The German people did not just wake up one day in 1939 and find that they lived under a fascist regime. The process was slow, and the erosion of democracy incremental. The vast majority was not even aware of what was happening to their country until it was too late.

They say that if you put a frog in cold water, and then gradually heat up the pot, the frog cannot detect the change in temperature fast enough and will sit there boiling to death. This, I fear, is what is happening to our democracy.

The Media and the Spies

The UK mainstream media has made much this week of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s assertion that MI5 had not requested the government’s proposed extension of the imprisonment without charge of terrorist suspects from 28 to 42 days.

This statement has caused a furore in the UK, and there is a chance that the PM may lose the key vote in Parliament on this amendment tomorrow.

In fact, such has been the uproar that the Director General of MI5, Jonathan Evans, is reported by Reuters to have made a rare public statement:

"Since the security service is neither a prosecuting authority nor responsible for criminal investigations, we are not, and never have been, the appropriate body to advise the government on pre-charge detention time limits," he said in a statement on the MI5 website.

"We have not, therefore, sought to comment publicly or privately on the current proposals, except to say that we recognise the challenge posed for the police service by the increasingly complex and international character of some recent terrorist cases."

What particularly strikes me about this is an apparently insignificant phrase, “raised publicly or privately”.

In contrast to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, who admitted to “unintentionally misleading” the parliamentary Joint Committee charged with assessing the need to increase the detention limit, Evans had refused to give evidence about the 42 day issue. So he has certainly not raised this in a publicly accountable way.

It’s the word “private” that intrigues me. It reeks of sotto voce discussions between old school chums at the grander gentlemen’s clubs in London: of unattributable briefings between anonymous MI5 officers and chosen journalists; and of cosy lunches with Fleet Street editors in the DG’s dining room at Thames House, MI5’s London HQ.

While Evans denies using this methodology around the 42 day issue, his statement confirms that such private discussions do indeed play a part in influencing policy decisions and media perception.

I saw this approach first-hand in the 1990s during the whistleblowing years. In fact, it was then that MI5 stepped up its charm offensive with politicians and journalists. It was during one of the first of these cosy media lunches in Thames House, hosted by the then DG Stephen Lander, that the respected BBC Diplomatic Editor Mark Urban asked a fateful question about the Gaddafi Plot and was reportedly told by Lander that “he was not here to answer half-baked questions from smart-arse journalists”. So there were certain shortfalls in the charm, even if the lack of accountability held up well.

But there are other, more sinister ways for the spies to manipulate public opinion. MI6 has a sensitive section called Information Operations (I/Ops), which exists purely to set the news agenda for the spies. I/Ops manages this either by massaging the facts, spinning the tone of the story or, more worryingly, planting false stories in a quiescent press.

In the 1990s there was a famous case. Colonel Gaddafi’s son, Saif Al Islam, applied for a visa to come to Britain. I/Ops planted a completely false story in The Sunday Telegraph that he was involved in money laundering with Iran and, lo and behold, MI5 had the perfect excuse to deny him a visa. Al Islam subsequently sued the newspaper which, faced with Shayler's evidence, settled out of court.

A few months ago the ex-head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, gave a talk at the LSE about the intelligence agencies and the media. I went along to have a laugh, and was graciously allowed to ask a question. Naturally I raised the issue of I/Ops, its relationship with the media, and whether such a role was acceptable in a modern democracy.

In the context of the talk, what could have been more pertinent? However, Dearlove declined to answer. In fact, he went so far as to say that such a matter was “within the ring of secrecy”. At which point a journalist from a prestigious national newspaper who was sitting next to me, turned and said gleefully that this at last proved that I/Ops existed. Gratifying as this was, I shall reiterate my question: is the role of I/Ops acceptable in a modern democracy, where we are supposed to enjoy freedom of information, transparency and accountability from the powers-that-be?

Spooks leave UK vulnerable to Russian mafia

According to the Daily Mail this week, Russian security expert, Andrei Soldatov, reckons the UK is wide open to the threat of the Russian mafia. He primarily blames the froideur that has blighted Anglo-Russian relations since the Litvinenko affair. However, he also states that MI5 no longer has a role to play in investigating organised crime, and that has contributed to our vulnerability.

Naturally resisting the temptation to say that MI5’s involvement would not necessarily have afforded us any meaningful protection, I would say that this is down to a fundamental problem in how we organise our response to threats to the national security of this country.

The security infrastructure in the UK has evolved over the last century into a terribly British muddle. For historic reasons, we have a plethora of intelligence agencies, all competing for funding, power and prestige: MI5, MI6, GCHQ, the Metropolitan Police Special Branch (MPSB), special branches in every other police force, military intelligence, and HM Revenue and Customs et al. Each is supposed to work with the other, but in reality they guard their territory and intelligence jealously. After all, knowledge is power.

MI5 and MPSB have always been the lead intelligence organisations operating within the UK. As such, their covert rivalry has been protracted and bitter, but to the outside world they appeared to rub along while MI5 was primarily focusing on espionage and political subversion and the Met concentrated on the IRA. However, after the end of the Cold War, MI5 had to find new targets or lose staff, status and resources.

In 1992 the then Home Secretary, Ken Clarke, announced that MI5 was taking over the lead responsibility for investigating IRA activity on the UK mainland - work that had been done by MPSB for over 100 years. Victory was largely credited to clever Whitehall manoeuvering on the part of the head of MI5, Stella Rimington. The Met were furious, and the transfer of records was fractious, to say the least.

Also, there was a year’s delay in the handover of responsibility. So MI5 artificially maintained the perceived threat levels posed by political subversion in order to retain its staff until the transition was complete. This meant that there was no real case for the aggressive investigation of subversive groups in the UK – which made all such operations illegal. Staff in this section, including me, vociferously argued against this continued surveillance, rightly stating that such investigations were thereby flagrantly illegal, but the senior management ignored us in the interests of preserving their empires.

However, in the mid-1990s, when peace appeared to be breaking out in Northern Ireland and beyond, MI5 had to scout around for more work to justify its existence. Hence, in 1996, the Home Secretary agreed that they should play a role in tackling organised crime – but only in a supporting role to MPSB. This was never a particularly palatable answer for the spooks, so it is no surprise that they have subsequently dropped this area of work now that the threat from “Al Qaeda” has grown. Terrorism has always been perceived as higher status work. And of course this new threat has led to a slew of increased resources, powers and staff for MI5, not to mention the opening of eight regional headquarters outside London.

But should we really be approaching a subject as serious as the protection of our national security in such a haphazard way, based solely on the fact that we have these agencies in existence, so let’s give them some work?

If we are really faced with such a serious terrorist threat, would it not be smarter for our politicians to ask the basic questions: what is the realistic threat to our national security and the economic wellbeing of the state, and how can we best protect ourselves from these threats? If the most effective answer proves to be a new, dedicated counter-terrorism organisation, so be it. We Brits love a sense of history, but a new broom will often sweep clean.