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Spycatcher, Thatcher and
the state
THATCHER'S PROLONGED battle to suppress Spycatcher, the memoirs of former MIS officer Peter Wright, have once again focussed attention on the role of the secret security and intelligence services. Enormous resources have been used to prevent Wright's disclosures reaching a mass audience. At least £1 million was spent on the civil action in the Australian courts-which led only to humiliating defeat for the government.
In Britain no attempt, so far, has been made to use the discredited Official Secrets Act against newspapers reporting Wright's allegations. But with the support of an obliging, executiveminded judiciary the government has been able to curb comment on the issues he raises. Using 'contempt of court' rulings, the government, on this issue, has gagged the press to an extent unknown outside wartime conditions.
Despite these measures, however, Spycatcher had by the Autumn of 1987 been published in the United States, Australia, and Ireland. One result is that Wright is now a very rich man, and the prospects of the government seizing his profits are slim. Moreover, the government was undoubtedly forced to the conclusion that any attempt to prevent importation of the book would be doomed to failure, however much they would have liked to have done so. But the Tories are still determined to prevent the mass circulation of Wright's material. Why?
'Domestic targets'
There is really nothing that is very new in Spycatcher. Many readers excited by the idea of reading a 'banned' book, especially if they are unfamiliar with the esoteric history of post-war espionage, will be disappointed. Most of the allegations have been aired before. some in more detail, by authors with 'inside' sources and also by more reliable investigative journalists. Nevertheless, in his memoirs Wright confirms many of these allegations with the authority of a serving intelligence officer, supplying detail that coald only come from an insider. Above all, Wright confirms the attempts, particularly in 1973-74, to discredit Harold Wilson, and subsequently to undermine or bring down the Labour government over which he presided.
If the government simply allowed Wright to publish, where would it end?
By Lynn Walsh
Other recently retired officers might go into print. Those subject to criticism might reply with their own version of events. This would open up the spectre of comprehensive exposure, from the inside, of a string of monumental failures in the field of intelligence and counter-espionage. It would unravel the systematic cover-up of successive spy scandals, revealing the intelligence chiefs' main priority to be the protection of their organisations from public scrutiny and criticism.
Above all, further public exposure would bring home the enormous scale of the security services' operations against 'domestic targets' , the Labour leaders, the Labour left, socialist newspapers and groups, trade unionists, and other organisations like the National Council For Civil Liberties and CND.
The security services are now a vast arm of the capitalist state machine, which in general has grown to monstrous proportions. In 1986 the official expenditure on MI5 (the home security service) and SIS (the overseas Secret Intelligence Service, formerly MI6) was £92 million. Informed commentators, however, estimate the real cost to be in the region of £300 million, with another £300 million being spent on GCHQ which carries out surveillance of telephone and other electronic communications.
Over this secret apparatus there is not even the semblance of democratic control. Spycatcher testifies to the contempt with which intelligence officers view the procedures of parliamentary government. They regard themselves as the ultimate guardians of the system, who, unlike civil servants and politicians, do not have to bother about the normal rules. If the cloak of secrecy slips, 'national security' can be invoked to justify their actions.
Like the police and the army, the secret services have received enormous additional resources under Thatcher-in order to combat 'the enemy within' primarily the organisations of the working class which stand in the way of policies of capitalist crisis. The link was made clear with the banning of trade unions at GCHQ, which is also part of the world-wide intelligence apparatus of the United States.
The desperate moves to suppress Spycatcher, however, have been hampered by the government's inability to use the Official Secrets Act against the author once he had taken Australian citizenship. This in turn has also constrained the government's action against the press in Britain. The difficulties of trying to utilise the civil law to enforce official secrecy has resulted in a longdrawn-out battle- during which even more information about the security services has come out into the open.
Wright's motives
Under their 'positive vetting' procedures, for instance, MIS and MI6 veto the appointment of homosexuals to "sensitive" jobs on the grounds that they are a security risk. Yet Thatcher was recently obilged to admit that the former head of SIS, Sir Maurice Oldfield. had been a homosexual! He had never been 'positively vetted' either, as until very recently this was not considered necessary for MIS and SIS recruits! It has also been revealed that MIS tried to establish 'positive vetting' for senior BBC staff, and it is not clear to what extent this was implemented. At the same time, many examples have come to light of attempts by MI5 and SIS to recruit journalists and broadcasters, and clearly these are only the unsuccessful cases!
To some extent, Thatcher's moves against Spycatcher have already
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30 MIR Winter 1988: Spycatcher
rebounded on the government and the security services. The Tories have temporarily cowed the capitalist press, which could easily have undermined judicial censorship if serious journals had the minimum determination to defend their freedom to publish the truth But the ineptly conducted legal action against Wright, and the furore in the British parliament and press over the allegations involved, have aroused the attention of much wider layers of the population than ever before. Thatcher may delay things, but it will be impossible for the ruling class to prevent indefinitely a much fuller exposure of the reactionary role of the security services. While some on the Labour left have taken up the issue in parliament and helped to expose some more of the facts, the Labour leadership has as far as possible avoided the issue. They have made token protests, but made no attempt to explain its importance to the ranks of the labour movement.
It is not a question of 'national security, which is short-hand for the interests of the ruling class, or of arcane recriminations between catchers. It is a question of the threat posed to the labour movement by the security services, which is why we must examine what really lies behind the Spycatcher affair.
Why was Wright so determined to publish his memoirs? It would be a mistake to think that he has progressive motives, or favours democratic control of the intelligence services. All the indications are that Wright is as reactionary, as anti-socialist, as anti-labour movement as his former colleagues. When the right-wing faction engaged in illegal activities against the labour government, Wright participated in the cover-up. When he first told his story to Chapman Pincher in 1980, Wright expressed-according to Pincher-no regrets about his former activities.
Wright's most obvious motive was a grievance about his pension. When, in 1954, he transferred from the Admiralty to the 'non-existent' MI5, where salaries and pensions are all discretionary, he asked what would happen to his pension rights. 'Don't worry, Old Boy, we'll sort it all out, he was assured Twenty-five years later it was not sorted out, and he retired on a minimal pension. This particular act of Whitehall parsimony was to prove very costly! It reinforced Wrighr's feeling of lowermiddle-class resentmeni at the upperclass types who dominated the MIS establishment. He left a bitter man, convinced that his bosses had not repaid his loyalty.
After retiring to Tasmania to start a stud farm, Wright mer with financial difficulties. With the continuing hoem
in spy books, he evidently decided to
market his story-which he did, to the
right-wing journalist Chapman Pincher.
Although his contribution remained a
secret until the recent legal battle,
Wright received half (£30,000) of the
royalties from Pincher's Their Trade Is
Treachery. But why stop half way?
Beyond the reach of the Official Secrets
Act, he subsequently decided to publish
his own memoirs. As an 'inside story" they could hardly fail to arouse interest.
When the government tried to suppress them, Wright hit the jackpot. But
Wright clearly has another motive, too: self-justification. Although he had started as a technical officer specialising in planting electronic listening devices, Wright spent his later years as a counter-intelligence officer investigating his colleagues. He became obsessed by the search to identify the Soviet agent or agents he was convinced were still working within British intelligence at the highest level.
This did not endear him to the colleagues he put under suspicion. It eventually brought him into collision with his bosses, moreover, who after years of chasing their own tails, wanted to bury the whole issue. Unpopular with his colleagues and repudiated by his masters, an embittered Wright clearly felt the need to vindicate his mole-hunting career.
The Philby
His literary bombshell, Spycatcher, may be seen as the latest product of the crisis provoked by the Philby affair and its long-drawn-out aftermath of interservice suspicion and recrimination. In 1963 British intelligence chiefs were forced to recognise that Kim Philby, tormerly head of counter-espionage in SIS, had been the so-called 'third man" in the Burgess/Maclean spy ring. Tipped off by Philby in 1951, they had been able to escape to the Soviet Union. Although under suspicion himself, Philby still worked for MI6 as an agent, until he too-under threat of renewed investigation-fled to Russia in 1963. The Philby scandal was a shattering blow to British intelligence, revealing to the world a devastating level of incompetence. But the main concern of the chiefs was to cover up the real extent of the penetration and manipulation achieved by the Soviet intelligence services. Other spies were given immunity from prosecution, like Sir Anthony Blunt who went on to become Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. A section of intelligence officers, dubbed the 'Young Turks' believed, however, that the service would remain fatally compromised unless there was a thorough clean-out of the old-guard and a
complete reorganisation. Some of them began to leak material to sympathetic journalists, like Andrew Boyle, for instance, whose book The Climate of
Treason (1979) brought about the exposure of Blunt- provoking a public scandal and leading to a new round of allegations in the press and parliament. Thatcher admitted that Blunt had been granted immunity, in return for "cooperation in the continuing investigations... into Soviet penetration of the security and intelligence services... This was the first official admission of any such 'penetration' • But Thatcher rejected any suggestion that there should be an enquiry or any further debate on the issue.
The official stonewalling at the top failed to satisfy the Young Turks. As far as they were concerned, the top-level 'Soviet penetration agent/s' had still to be exposed. Over a period of years, three separate enquiries-and 16 out of the 22 internal mole-hunters-were convinced that there was still an undetected soviet spy at the very top of their organisation. The problem was that they could not agree on who it was! Most of the mole-hunters divided into two factions: those who pointed the finger at Sir Roger Hollis, former Director-General, and those who accused the former Deputy Director General, Graham Mitchell-either way, a crippling handicap for a counter. espionage organisation! The suspicions of the mole-hunters were periodically fed, moreover, by new stories of traitors and moles from a series of high-ranking soviet defectors, who cach aroused more suspicion and provoked a new round of witch-hunting.
MIS was torn apart by internecine struggle. There was mutual recrimination between MI5 and MI6. and there were periodic crises of confidence between the British and US intelligence agencies. Both factions within MIS strove to prove their own case as the vital prerequisite to cleaning up organisation from within. Wright. however, claims that they were ultimately blocked by their Whitehall masters. The tops of the state machine, though always ready in public to invoke 'national security' as the highest imperative, preferred to cover up the real situation rather than expose the secret security services to further scandals and public scrutiny and criticism.
Both factions of mole-hunters therefore resorted to leaking selected information to friendly journalists and authors. Andrew Boyle was used to flush out Blunt and other spies who had been quietly pensioned off. Rupert Allason, now a Tory MP who writes under the pen-name Nigel West. was used to publish semi-official histories of MIS
[page 30]
allegations of an anti-Wilson MI5 plot was used to try and bury the whole Issue. and MI6, celebrating the heroic role of various officers. He was also the vehicle for leaking material to the press which pointed to the guilt of Graham Mitchell. Wright, who was convinced that it was Hollis, provided detailed inside material to Chapman Pincher, Their Trade Is Treachery and Too Secret Too Long, the detailed Hollis (for which an aggrieved Wright got no royalties).
When the exposure of Blunt and other revelations produced no real results, Wright decided to publish his own book. After agreeing to appear on a World In Action Programme, Wright subsequently arranged with one of the journalists involved, Paul Greengrass, Spycatcher's unacknowledged to prepare his memoirs for publication.
Spycatcher thus arose out of the long, bitter factional struggle security services. Wright's decision to publish in his own name, with the authority of an 'insider', was the culmination of the literary campaign previously pursued indirectly through jour- Wright, nalists and For authors.
Spycatcher is the continuation of molemore public, hunting other, means.
Anti-Wilson plot However, it is the section about the plot against Wilson, almost certainly stage to heighten inserted at a late interest in the book, which is most sensitive as far as Thatcher and the security chiefs are concerned. The memoirs provide new confirmation, from the inside, of the intelligence services' plot to undermine the Labour leadership around Wilson in the early 1970s. Only a few pages are devoted to this. And while he gives a lot of detail about intelligence and counter-intelligence operations (with codes names, the individuals involved, etc), Wright conspicuously avoids naming names when it comes to the illegal, subversive activity against the labour leaders. Probably, Wright added these passages when he realised he faced a legal battle with the British government. If he calculated that stirring up the controversy about the anti-Wilson plot would heighten the interest in his book, he was not wrong. If only half what Wright alleges is true, the British secret service has long been an open book for the Kremlin. It is the facts about the intelligence services' operations against the labour movement and other campaigning organisations which the government are desperate to conceal-not from their Soviet rivals, but from the British public. Details of the attempts to undermine the Wilson government and other ac- Harold Wilson his successor, James Callaghan, and right, tion against the labour movement have been reported in detail in numerous articles in Militant, many of them reprinted in the pamphlets CIA Infiltration of the Labour Movement and The State: A Warning to the Labour Movement. There is not space to deal with this again in this article, though many new details have emerged. In fact, during the government's desperate battsuppress Spycatcher other 'insiders' have come out with more information. Colin Wallace, for instance, a former captain in the army's 'psychological operations' unit in Northern Ireland, has revealed how the military intelligence waged a campaign of black propaganda and dirty tricks against "political targets', including Wilson and other labour ministers. Cathy Massiter, a former MIS officer, has shown the 'covert operations'
against the trade unions and organisations like CND have continued right up to the present time.
The Wright affair has once again highlighted the role of the judiciary in Britain. The top judges, with only a few exceptions, have demonstrated that their so-called 'independence' consists of indifference to democratic rights and a determination to back up a Tory The government could not use the Official Secrets Act against Wright in Australia and has not, so far, tried to use it against newspapers in Britain reporting Wright's allegations. The acquittal in 1985 of Clive Ponting, the senior civil servant who revealed to MPs details of the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands war, has made the Tories extremely reluctant to use Secwhose 1977 'enquiry' into tion 2 of the Official Secrets Act, which involves trial by jury.
Instead, in both Britain and Australia they have pursued civil actions for 'breach of confidence'. According to a recent report of the Law Commission, this type of action, usually arising from business disputes, "has a somewhat obscure legal basis". The government, moreover, through the Attorney-General, has conducted these actions as if they were criminal prosecutions. Their action in the Australian courts led to ignominious failure. But in Britain, with the help of a more compliant judiciary, the Tories have succeeded in enforcing a series of bonapartist bans on media reporting of the issues raised by The judiciary Through 'contempt of court' actions, in which the law has been dramatically extended by the Court of Appeal and the Lords, the government has been able to construct a new system of media censorship. Created entirely by judges, the ad hoc banning system has no basis in any parliamentary statute. At the same time, ministers are relieved of any necessity to account to parliament for their actions. Parliament has been blocked from discussing the judges'
rulings, either on grounds of 'national security' or because the issues are subjudice (ie under consideration by the courts).
Some of the injunctions granted have been draconian, banning newspapers not merely from reporting Wright's allegations but from discussing anything relating to the secret security services.
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32 MIR Winter 1988: Spycatcher
Until modified by other, less executiveminded judges, some of the orders granted to the Attorney-General even banned the reporting of court and parliamentary proceedings-unprecedented steps in recent times.
The judgement of Mr Justice Scott, 21 December 1987, in which he lifted the injunctions banning the Observer and The Guardian from reporting on Spycatcher issues, forcefully demolishes the legitimacy of this ad hoc censorship mechanism. This is far from being the end of the story, however. The government is once again appealing , to the Court of Appeal, where senior judges have several times reversed the more liberal decisions given on occasions by judges in the high court.
In Australia, however, as the Tories found to their cost, the Attorney-General could not rely on the unquestioning support of the judiciary. In the Australian courts, the judges have taken a more independent line, refusing to accept the Tories' view of Britain's 'national security' as a decisive argument.
At the action to get a permanent injunction banning Wright's memoirs, the government's lawyers declared that they would be accepting "for the purposes of the trial" that Wright's material was true. This, it was claimed, was a technical, legal device to avoid argument in court over Wright's allegations. The issue was simply one of 'breach of confidence between an employer and their former employee' . To most people this legalistic manoeuvre simply underlined the bankruptcy of the government's case. They were trying to ban memoirs of enormous public interest while denying the court an opportunity of examining the real issues.
Wright's defence was that the government had allowed the publication of several books, like those of Pincher, Boyle and West, when they knew them to be based on information from intelligence officers and had been given advanced information about their publication. Was not the government's policy inconsistent? In one of his many notorious statements in court, Sir Robert Armstrong, Thatcher's cabinet secretary and chief witness, replied: "The policy is consitent, only its application varies"! On another point, Armstrong was forced to retract, with an apology, his statement that it had been the independent decision of the Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, not to prosecute over Pincher's book (when aware that it was based on Wright's material). Havers had protested at the attempt to make him the scapegoat, the long-distance telephones buzzed, and Armstrong was forced to change his story. Again, obliged to produce documents which he had tried to withold
from the court, Armstrong was challenged about the truth of a letter. His reply will long be remembered: "It contains a misleading impression," he said, "not a lie. It was being economical with the truth." Armstrong's performance in the witness box was a rare-and chilling-public exposure of the habits of secrecy, deception and official lying cultivated by Whitehall's top mandarins.
The government might have got away with it in the British courts, but the presiding judge, Mr Justice Powell, was clearly not prepared to do Thatcher's dirty work. He expressed outrage at the governments weavinand to scatting crit
" to scathing criticism. In his judgement, Powell ruled against the British government, upholding a previous opinion of the present Australian Chief Justice, Mason, that the publication of information should not be suppressed when the only real objection is that "it enables the public to discuss, review and criticise government actions."
Law Lords'
judgement
The government appealed to the New South Wales Court of Appeal, but its three judges refused to reverse Powell's judgement. One of them commented that "Although in form (the action) is merely a claim in contract or based on the equitable duties of confidence... that is the form only. The substance is the duty of secrecy spelt out in the Official Secrets Act"-UK public law which it was not the business of the Australian courts to enforce. Once again the British government decided to appeal, to the final Court of Appeal in Canberra. This is still pending. But they failed to pursuade the Australian courts to continue the ban on publication, and Wright's book appeared in the Summer. Within weeks, Wright had netted a fortune from the Australian sales.
In Britain, meanwhile, the Independent and two London papers decided, after the government's defeat in Australa, to publish some of Wright's material. The government immediately took action against them for contempt of court, claiming they were undermining the outstanding injunctions against the papers which had previously tried to publish the Spycatcher material.
The senior judge who heard this case, however, Sir Nicolas Browne-Wilkinson, ruled against the government. The existing injunctions had not been imposed on the Independent etc, and as the law stood, they therefore could not be in contempt. The Attorney General, he said, "was seeking to widen application of the law of criminal contempt."
Here at least, one judge declined to endorse the Tory government's strong-arm tactics in the civil courts: "private rights (in civil law) should not be bolstered by a distortion of the law of contempt, in an attempt to produce a judge-made public law protecting official secrets." This spark of judicial liberalism was short-lived, however: the Court of Appeal, under Sir John Donaldson, rapidly reversed Browne- Wilkinson's decision, claiming that they were simply "declaring what the law had always been."
When it reach the House of Lords, however, the issue of the right of newspapers to publish Wright's allegations produced a sharp divergence between the Lords of Appeal, who decided 3-2 in the government's favour. Split judgements are not unusual, but the minority's criticism of the majority ruling must be unprecedented in modern legal history.
Lord Bridges, himself a tormer member of the Security Commission, a toothless watchdog over the security services, started from the obvious point that after the publication of Spycatcher in Australia, the United States and elsewhere, the information was available and 'it is nonsensical to talk about preventing its disclosure." When any intelligence service in the world could get the book, how could a blanket ban on discussion of Wright's allegations protect national security?
The majority not only banned newspapers from discussing Wright's allegations, but barred them from reporting proceedings in the Australian courts-and even moved to ban the reporting of Parliamentary debate about Spycatcher, an unprecedented suggestion from which they retreated under Bridge's criticism. Nevertheless, Bridges declared that "my confidence in the common law (ie the interpretation of legal precedent by the judges) to safeguard the fundamental freedoms essential to a free society, such as freedom of speech, is undermined."
"Freedom of speech," said Lord Bridges, "is always the first casualty under a totalitarian regime. Such a regime cannot afford to allow the free circulation of information and ideas among its citizens... The present attempt to insulate the public in this country from information which is freely available elsewhere is a significant step down that very dangerous road." He warned the government to take note that "their wafer thin majority in this litigation has been gained at a price which no government committed to upholding the values of a free society could afford to pay."
This stinging criticism Lord only underlines the
from a Law feebleness of
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the criticism of the Labour leaders in relation to the Tories' moves to suppress all public debate about the activites of the security services.
The three judges in the majority were quite blatant in spelling out why they favoured a ban. Yes, Spycatcher was published and could be imported freely into Britain, but they still had a duty to preserve the "morale of the intelligence services" and maintain "public confidence in the security service." In other words, the truth about intelligence operations, particularly those directed against the labour movement, should be kept from the majority of the public. They also want to reassure members of the intelligence services that, come what may, they • will be shielded from public criticism. "There is a great difference," said Lord Templeman, "between the power of the press operating through mass circulation and the power of Mr Wright confined to the export to this country of individual copies of Spycatcher."
Ironically, justifying his decision, Lord Templeman pronounced: " ...there is nothing to prevent the press investigating all the allegations made by Mr Wright and reporting the results of their investigations to the public. It is only unlawful for the press to publish information unlawfully disclosed by Mr Wright."
Media
censorship
Yet when journalists working for BBC Radio 4 attempted to do exactly what Templeman suggested, producing a series entitled My Country Right or injunction. This was in spite of the fact
that the BBC journalists had carried out their own independent research, interviewing a number of former intelligence officers, including some who are critical of Wright. The producer had also submitted the programme plans to the so-called 'D-Notice' Committee, a voluntary board of censors consisting of both government appointees and media nominees who vet material deemed to be 'sensitive' from a security point of view. Far from 'Denying' permission to broadcast, the committee had cleared the programme.
This dia not prevent the high court granting the government an injunction against the BBC which went far beyond any of the previous orders produced by the Spycatcher saga. Until the terms of the order were relaxed in mid-December, the BBC was banned from mentioning Wright, or the names of any other former or serving members of the intelligence services, however well known some of them are. This ban also covered the reporting of court proceed-
ings and even of parliamentary debates! MPs are protected by absolute 'privilege' (ie immunity from libel or other legal action) while speaking in the Commons-but because of 'contempt of court' rulings the media is not allowed to report what they say!
The Labour Party leadership has allowed the Tories to get away with these bonapartist measures against the media. Kinnock and Co have repeatedly opposed effective action, in relation to the miners' and the print-workers' strikes and the struggle in Liverpool, on the grounds that "we must remain within the law." But the failure to mobilise the labour movement in defence of workers' interests has allowed the Tory government to bend the law even further in the service of the capitalists interests. As a result, the freedom of the press, achieved historically through working-class struggles, has now been 'legally' curtailed by the Tories.
As the House of Lords' judgment showed, there are difterences between the judges over the issues raised by Spycatcher. Some clearly feel that the law is being stretched too far in defence of Tory secrecy. On 21 December, Mr Justice Scott explained why he was retusing to grant the government permanent injunctions against the Ubserver and the Guardian. His judgment shatters the government's case.
Scott ruled that Wright would be breaching confidentiality imposed on him as an intelligence officer, and The Times would be wrong to continue publishing excerpts from his memoirs. However, it is different for newspapers attempting to report the issues. Scott pointed once again to the obvious fact: that over a million copies of Spycatcher have been printed in English, and the book is currently being prepared for publication in twelve languages. The government took no steps to ban importation, and tens of thousands have entered the country. The information was no longer secret and any duty of confidentiality which might have been binding on s newspapers had 'evaporated'.
But the judgment also criticised the government's inconsistency. Scott lists 15 sources-books, articles, and programmes, all relying on various 'insider' information-which, before the publication of Spycatcher, publicised various allegations taken up by Wright. The government's failure to take action against any of them was clearly the result of a deliberate policy decision. So why should newspapers be banned from publishing the allegations?
Scott's defence of the press's "legitimate role in disclosing scandals in government" implicity attacked the doctrine of secrecy which both Thatcher
33
and senior judges have been trying :. establish. He attacked the idea. ==vanced by the three Law Lords, that the courts should uphold "a duty of confidence that operates to keep away from the mass of people information which is freely available to the more sophisticated or better off." A liberal view, but almost 'subversive' in the Thatcherite state.
Scott also ruled that in the case of illegal activities by members of the intelligence services any normal duty of the press to preserve confidentiality would be over-ridden by "the ability of the press freely to report allegations of scandals in government," in spite of any 'embarrassment' this might cause. This, in his view, applied to the allegations of "routine burglary and bugging by MIS officers," to the alleged plot to assassinate president Nasser of Egypt, to the plot to destabilise the Wilson government, and to allegations of Soviet penetration of MIS.
LP leaders'
response
Apart from their right, in Scott's judgement, to ban publication in Britain of Wright's actual memoirs, it is hard to see what is left of the government's case. "I found myself unable to escape the reflection," said the judge, "that the absolute protection of the Security Service that Sir Robert (Armstrong) was contending for could not be achieved this side of the Iron Curtain." Purely from the standpoint of liberal democracy and existing law-with, no doubt, an underlying fear that the judiciary may be discredited by slavish support for Tory policy-the learned judge, in the circumspect language of the courtroom, has made an attack on the government's action far more trenchant than anything coming from Labour's front bench.
Whether Scott's judgment will upheld or overturned in the Court Appeal and the House of Lords, course, remains to be seen.
Despite all the evidence of internecine struggle and illegal activities on the part of the intelligence services, Thatcher has intransigently opposed all calls for an enquiry. When Labour eventually forced a parliamentary debate, and James Callaghan at last came out for an enquiry, Thatcher announced that there had already been an investigation-carried out by MIS which, surprise, surprise, had acquitted itself of any irregularlity. MIS's Director-General had assured the prime minister that there was no truth in Wright's allegations, there had been no plot against Wilson, and Wilson had never been investigated by the security
be of of
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34 MIR Winter 1988: Spycatcher
services. Thatcher threw back at the Labour leaders the conclusion of the 1977 enquiry instigated by Callaghan, which found that there had been no plot. At the time Callaghan had used it to try to bury the whole issue. Now former ministers lamely complain that it investigated only the allegation of the bugging of Harold Wilson! A few days after Thatcher's latest absolution of MIS, a former officer named in the press as one of the plotters told the press that he had never been interviewed about the allegations.
The government's latest stance was viewed with incredulity and even dismay by the serious press. The staunchly Tory Telegraph is the only 'quality' paper which has not been hit with an injunction in the Spycatcher case. Increasing calls for a full enquiry, including from Murdoch's usually pro- Thatcher Times, undoubtedly reflect serious disquiet among the more farsighted representatives of the ruling class. Even from the point of view of the security and intelligence interests of the British ruling class, the post-war record of the secret service has hardly been one of conspicuous success. Leaving that aside, however, they fear that unless a degree of control is established, with at least the semblance of accountability, there is the danger of a massive reaction against the undemocratic activities that most people used to believe only occurred in police-states. Even the arch- Tory commentator, Ferdinand Mount writing in the Telegraph, 30 April 1987, conceded that "the operations of the secret service do not seem to be under effective control."
Serious commentators have pointed to the experience of Australia, where in the past the intelligence service engaged in activities similar to those described by Wright (and Massiter). The Labour government under Gough Whitlam (1972-75), however, took drastic action. When the secret service refused to allow ministers access to files on Labour activists, the attorney general mounted a police raid and seized the political files, which were subsequently destroyed. After an enquiry by a Royal Commission, a parliamentary 'oversight' committee and an Inspector General of Intelligence and Security were introduced. It would be a mistake to think that this would prevent the security services from working against the labour movement. In fact, Whitlam's government was arbitrarily dismissed by the Governor General, Kerr, and active pressure from the US in relation to their fears about the 'security' of the Labour government undoubtedly played a part. Nevertheless, a limited degree of accountability • was introduced which could be used by Labour, provided the
pressure of the labour movement were to be mobilised, to check the activities of the security services.
Compared with the British Labour leaders, however, the leaders of the Australian Labour Party appear like lions. Throughout the whole Spycatcher affair Thatcher's hand has been strengthened by the Opposition's reluctance to take up the issue. 'The demands for a new enquiry from people in the Labour Party who are in a position to know something about the subject (Wilson, Callaghan, Merlyn Rees-who was both Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and Home Secretary) have been, so far, somewhere between muted and non-existent," Financial Times, 1 May 1987. Mount noted that "Mr Kinnock and the Labour front bench have steered fairly clear of the whole business, for fear of being accused of being soft on security," Telegraph, 30 April 1987. He comments, with justification, that "an enquiry can only demonstrate how abysmally feeble Mrs Thatcher's Labour predessessors were in keeping the security services in their proper place."
The Tories and MI5
Given that Wilson and other former Labour ministers were the target of hostile security operations, and especially in view of Wilson's bitter complaints in 1976, their present complacency seems almost incredible. Wilson even denies that there was a plot, now. Yet even while MI5, after a token internal enquiry, was officially clearing itself, "we have MIS sources saying that, yes, there was an operation but it was legitimate and necessary..." (Peter Jenkins, writing in the Independent, 3 May 1987). This line, conveyed to the press, contains the unmistakable threat that if the labour leaders push for an enquiry the intelligence services will fight back by reviving their dirty propaganda campaign.
Unfortunately, the labour leaders have provided them, over the years, with plenty of ammunition. For a start, in the late 1950s the right wing around George Brown themselves called in MIS to help them in the struggle with the left. Under successive Labour governments, as Barbara Castle reveals in her diaries, Labour ministers used daily intelligence reports on the trade unions during disputes over pay and incomes policy. Above all, Wilson himself had personal and business links with a group of businessmen who had nothing in common with the labour movement. A number of them provided secret finance for his private office, and were later enobled by Wilson-only in several cases
to end up in jail or committing suicide under a cloud of criminal scandal. Although the MIS claim that Wilson was a 'Communist agent' or 'sympathiser' is ludicrous, exposure of the full details of Wilson's shadowy entourage could not but discredit him even further.
But the already tarnished reputations of former labour leaders should not be allowed to stand in the way of a full exposure of the security services' role. It is the interests of the movement which are at stake. The labour leaders should uncover the extensive and much more dangerous links between the intelligence services, shadowy big business organisations, private security firms-and the Tory Party.
Without giving a lot of detail, for instance, Wright has repeated the story of the plot against Wilson. But there is other evidence that in 1974 Wright himself was involved in discussions with Tory MP Airey Neave, a close associate of Thatcher (Neave was later assassinated by the NILA with a car bomb in 1979). Together with other intelligence officers, they discussed plans to oust Wilson. There is also evidence that Neave approached Collin Wallace, who was then still working for the army's propaganda organisation in Northern Ireland, asking for intelligence intormation to discredit Wilson and his allegedly left-wing associates.
A whole series of reports in the Guardian, Observer, and even the rightwing Times, based on a variety of sources, bear out these allegations. It is also significant that several of the former MIS officers named in parliamentary questions as being linked with the anti-Wilson plot are long-standing supporters of the Tory Party, belong to the exclusive Carlton Club, and have business links with MPs on the right of the Tory Party.
There exists, at the same time, a whole network of shadowy organisations linked in various ways to the Tory Party. They include the Institute of Foreign Affairs, which produces 'redscare material on the Labour left, Militant, etc; the mis-named Freedom Association, which backed the Grunwick boss in victimising Asian trade unionists and financed the infiltration of two provocateurs into Newham NE Labour Party to defend Tory-renegade Prentice; and the Institue For the Study of Conflict, a kind of private Tory intelligence organisation. All these organisations, and others, secretly financed by big business, are run by people drawn from various branches of the secret service. They are well documented, though there is not space to give all the details here.
From the point of view of movement, the case for a
the labour
thorough
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