The State of Secrecy: Spies and the Media in Britain

by Richard Norton-Taylor

(IB Tauris, £20)

IN 1985 my late father Ken Gill had a meeting with Cathy Massiter, a whistleblower from GCHQ, Britain’s eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham.

As he told me afterwards, Massiter recited a personal conversation between him and his sister that, word for word, took place at our home. It was entirely mundane and proof of the fact that our house had been bugged by the security services and that GCHQ was listening in.

It must have been very eerie for my dad, although as a boy I found it quite thrilling. My father was, after all, a leading British communist and trade unionist, and it was the height of the cold war.

Massiter’s brave exposé of the way MI5 was spying on peace activists and trade unionists features in The State of Secrecy, veteran Guardian correspondent Richard Norton-Taylor’s account of Britain’s secretive security state and his 50-year career exposing its unsavoury activities.

Soon after my dad met Massiter, Norton-Taylor covered the Australian court case in which Britain tried to stop the publication of Spycatcher by Peter Wright, the former MI5 agent. Among other things, the book described how the agency had “bugged and burgled its way across London at the state’s behest.”

As Norton-Taylor reminds us, the door between journalism and the security services is often revolving, with a long tradition of “journalists willingly co-operating with security and intelligence, in particular with MI6 in the cold war.”

Indeed, before he found his way into a job with the Guardian reporting from Brussels, Norton-Taylor was headhunted by the intelligence services. He was prime material, with a father and grandfather who had fought in many wars and education at a prep school with a strong imperial pedigree.

His first informal recruiter was his tutor at Oxford, before he was invited to a meeting at MI6’s office in Carlton Gardens. But it was not for him: “As far as I was concerned secrets, except for deeply personal ones, were for sharing.”

The Brussels he worked in on the eve of Britain’s entry into the EEC was also a hot spot for spooks — as Britain joined it also wanted to know exactly what its new partners were up to.

Readers of John le Carre will be familiar with the clubbiness of the old-boys’ network that pervades the meetings Norton-Taylor describes between security correspondents and their Whitehall contacts, with spies and civil servants offering anonymous tipoffs over boozy lunches in exclusive London clubs and Brussels restaurants.

This country’s spies are, in effect, the intelligence arm of British imperialism and its international business interests, including arms, oil and precious metals. As Norton-Taylor comments: “The relationship between Britain’s intelligence agencies and big companies such as BP, Shell and Rolls Royce is close, reflected in the number of former spymasters on their boards.”

Many defence correspondents do PR for the army, presenting their demands for bigger budgets as crusades to protect “our boys” on the front line. Norton-Taylor shows how billions of this funding is wasted on failed projects, and on wars.

The combined budgets of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ reached £3 billion in 2017, excluding counter-cyber and some counter-terrorism budgets. GCHQ employs 6,000 and MI5 5,000 people, double its staff before 9/11, and MI6 3,000.

While they may have stopped many terror plots, despite all the billions they failed to stop others. More worryingly, the intelligence services assisted the 2017 Manchester Arena bomber Salman Abedi and his brother and father to return to Libya during the 2011 Nato-backed uprising, despite their father’s history of extremism.

As for the agencies’ “foresight,” they didn’t anticipate the 1979 Iranian revolution or the 1989 fall of communism, as Norton-Taylor points out. Former Tory foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe dismissed intelligence reports as “not even straws in the wind. They are cornflakes in the wind.” The late Tory PM Edward Heath said that the agencies spouted “ridiculous nonsense.”

Secret intelligence is often bad or even fake intelligence, as it was in the Iraq war dossier. The same Joint Intelligence Committee that sexed up the threat from Saddam Hussein in 1941 rejected warnings from Britain’s ambassador to Moscow, Stafford Cripps, that Hitler was planning to invade the Soviet Union.

MI6 exaggerated threats from the Soviet Union, while MI5 did the same in regard to domestic opposition, including not just peaceniks, communists and the SWP, but the Labour Party. Michael Foot was accused of being a Soviet spy by British Soviet agent and defector Oleg Gordievsky. Foot sued the Sunday Times, which ran the story, and won.

And there was a secret file and alleged plotting by a group of paranoid intelligence figures against prime minister Harold Wilson. Forty years later, on the day of the election in June 2017, former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove declared “how profoundly dangerous it would be for the nation if Jeremy Corbyn becomes prime minister.”

From the head of the agency that most assisted Tony Blair in the pursuit of dodgy intelligence to justify the disastrous invasion of Iraq, this was rich indeed.

Such threats to democracy from Britain’s deep state have been there since universal suffrage was won, with the faked Soviet Zinoviev letter bringing down the first Labour government in 1924. Former MI5 boss Stella Rimmington once described the organisation as being full of former members of the colonial service worrying about communists in Woking.

And, in Northern Ireland, they worked with loyalist paramilitaries who had blood on their hands. Lawyer Pat Finucane was targeted by military intelligence agent Brian Nelson and killed by a gun provided by a special branch informer.

Norton-Taylor has doggedly pursued stories that the powers-that-be did not want to come out and he has clearly enjoyed it. In a great chapter on double agents and whistleblowers, he describes meeting the famous British double agent George Blake in Moscow in 1990.

Blake had fled there after breaking out of Wormwood Scrubs in 1966 after serving five out of a 42-year sentence for spying for the USSR. A courier for the resistance in the Netherlands during the war, he was later recruited by British intelligence and his gradual conversion to communism was cemented after he was captured by the North Koreans in 1950 and witnessed the horrors of the US war machine at work.

He returned to England after his release and for a decade worked as a highly effective double agent, before he was finally caught in 1961.

On the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Blake told Norton-Taylor that the problems of the Soviet system derived from trying to impose communism, which he still believed in, by force. “The people who build it must possess the highest moral qualities,” he said.

The book has many such nuggets, as well as some awful typos. Above all, it’s eloquent proof that the life of a security correspondent is never dull.