Authors: Timothy Garton Ash
By that standard, I find more worrying things. According to the official booklet about our security service, published in the new, post-Cold War spirit of openness, just 3 percent of MI5’s resources were devoted to countering “subversion” in 1995–96. But from retired and serving officers I learn that in the 1970s it was at least 30 percent. Their working definition of “subversion” was “actions intended to overthrow or undermine Parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means.” But how do you know what people are intending to do unless you snoop on them first?
They cast the net pretty wide. Not just over every single member of the Communist Party of Great Britain—including, presumably, my IM “Smith”—but also over far-left groups that came out of our version of ’68: the Socialist Workers Party, the International Socialists, Militant Tendency. And they had files on leading members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the National Council for Civil Liberties.
Ah, they say, but in most cases there were no consequences for those they snooped on. Even when MI5 produced firm evidence that an MP was a paid informer of the Czechoslovak intelligence service, the British courts acquitted him. This is true and an important truth. But not the whole truth. There was this worrisome thing called negative or “normal” vetting. This meant that people who applied for certain jobs were checked, without
their knowledge, against the files. If MI5 said they were a security risk, they would almost certainly not get the job—and they would not be told why they had not got it. Normal procedure in many Western countries for government jobs involving official secrets or, say, sensitive positions in companies handling defense contracts. But organizations like the BBC also seem routinely to have run their job applicants past MI5 for this secret vetting.
Now I recall that, back in the 1970s, a friend, the journalist Isabel Hilton, had her appointment as a reporter with BBC Scotland blocked for some time because, as the
Observer
later discovered, she had been negatively vetted. I ring Isabel up and she reminds me of the details: how the BBC actually had a a full-time liaison officer called Brigadier Ronnie Stonham sitting in room 105 at Broadcasting House, sending the cases over to MI5. The main evidence against her was, apparently, that she had been the secretary of an innocuous organization called the Scotland-China Association, which was, if anything, probably less fellow-traveling than the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding, to which I belonged at that time. The negative vetting hardly damaged Isabel’s career; in fact, she went on to do much more interesting things instead. But the point is: she was never told that this was why she wasn’t getting the job, never given a chance to refute the charges or appeal the verdict.
But please remember, say the anonymous gentlemen, that MI5 merely gave advice: it was for the employer to decide. This is also true. The point is as much about the people in the BBC who went along with this
procedure, and didn’t give Isabel any right of reply, as it is about the security service. Why did they go along with it? Was it because this was just “the way things are done” in secretive old postimperial Britain, with its unwritten rules and establishment habits of discreet cooperation? But also, perhaps, because at the back of their minds there was still the residual sense that “there’s a war on, isn’t there”? We did, after all, pass almost directly from the Second World War to the Cold War. Systematic vetting was introduced in the late 1940s, at a time when even George Orwell was prepared informally to finger communist fellow travelers to a close friend then working in a half-secret department of the Foreign Office. The practices of secret scrutiny then became entrenched and, in the 1970s, extended to such ludicrous extremes.
Even if MI5 officers did not in any serious sense “conspire” against the Labour government of Harold Wilson, as the disgruntled former officer Peter Wright suggested in his book
Spycatcher
, everyone agrees that there were some very right-wing, often ex-colonial types in MI5 in the 1970s and even into the 1980s. The word “barking” is used. What was to stop their going over the top? Ah well, say the anonymous gentlemen, there was “the whole ethos of the service,” “our attitudes,” the “kind of people we are.” Also, they were closely supervised by the Home Office; warrants for wiretaps, mail interceptions and break-ins had to be signed by the Home Secretary The Home Office was no pushover, you can be sure.
Even Peter Wright gives some testimony to the strictness of Home Office scrutiny. But is that really all it hung upon? On what one set of chaps thought was “reasonable”
and “decent,” checked by another set of chaps in the Home Office and occasionally by the home secretary or prime minister—who were, after all, party politicians. A pretty slender thread, even if drawn from the best British worsted.
These habits and attitudes matter. Laws and parliamentary controls are no guarantee without them. But why couldn’t we have both?
Things have changed since the world changed in 1989. At last there are laws regulating the secret services, commissioners and tribunals to which you can complain, and a parliamentary committee. There is a little guarded openness. According to new rules, people should always be told when they are being vetted. I have the impression of better management, more professionalism. I’m sure most of MI5’s work is against serious threats like IRA bombers, terrorists, foreign spies and now also against organized crime. There’s a real danger of liberal hypocrisy here: denouncing our spooks and informers while enjoying the security they help to provide. Kipling’s “makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep”—except that these soldiers wear no uniform.
Yet made sensitive, perhaps oversensitive, by the Stasi experience, I find things that worry me still. I start talking to a senior serving officer about these new legal and parliamentary forms of control. “You use the word ‘control,’” he says, “I prefer to talk of validation.” MI5 decides what are the main threats to national security; others validate their priorities. Can this be right?
These gentlemen radiate a sense of quiet power: the power that comes, that has always come, that always will
come, from secret knowledge. This power must be enhanced by new technologies. As we talk, I spy—to use a possibly appropriate phrase—a very large computer screen in the corner of the office, with an array of icons even more impressive than that on the Power Mac my children use at home. Our icons have the titles of computer games: Discworld, SimCity2000, Lemmings. I wonder, What’s their game?
Soon, I suppose, the information will all be on computer. What will happen then to the paper files that were once—we read—cheerfully mustered by pretty young debutantes traipsing around the old MI5 Registry? Altogether, I want to know more about their files, at once the historian’s and the secret-policeman’s treasure.
For a start, how many files do they have?
Answer: “In the low hundreds of thousands.”
This seems to me an awful lot of files for a free country. (And the figure doesn’t include the personal data held by the police Special Branch, said to cover as many as two million names.)
Why so many?
Well, please remember that during the Cold War they tried to keep tabs on every communist and almost every Russian in this country. That was a lot of people. Then there are Irish and other terrorists. Oh yes, and about one in five of the files is on “non-adversarial” persons, friendly contacts of various kinds.
Moreover, only a small proportion of these files is being actively worked on at any time. They have rigorous rules for when to open a file, and how long it can stay open. In fact, they have a traffic-light system: green for active investigation; amber means you don’t actively investigate,
but add to it things that come your way; red files are closed.
Yes, but the red files are not actually destroyed, are they?
No.
And would they be used in vetting?
Well, yes. But the record of some political peccadillo long ago would not lead them to assess you as a security threat now.
Can outside organizations still come to them to vet their job applicants?
Yes, but only those on a government-approved list of “consumers.”
Is the BBC still on the list?
A sudden vagueness sets in.
These are glimpses, I repeat, just glimpses, by the light of a small penlight. Here I know in advance that I can never really know—unless the British state collapses, like East Germany, which I certainly don’t wish. But there is one small discovery that I do make, just for myself. Coming to this through my Stasi file, I naturally want to know whether MI5 also has a file on me. I don’t really expect to find out, but here I am, so I pop the question.
“Do you have a file on me?”
A slight pause. An intake of breath. A man suspended between openness and secrecy. Then: “Yes, since you ask, we do. We have what’s called a white card file on you.” That means: nonadversarial.
They have me down as having “assisted SIS.”
Well, I exclaim, I didn’t
assist
SIS. I nearly joined when I was young and then decided not to, that’s all.
I mention the little approach to me more recently. Would that have been MI5? “No, that would be over there,” he says, and nods across the Thames, toward the green-glass headquarters of SIS (MI6) on the other bank. However, some record of that would also be in the file, together with a note on a couple of conversations I have had on the way here.
But, he says, this is the first time he’s told anyone that he has a file. And already he seems worried by having done so. Has he gone too far with the new openness?
Incidentally, I’m quoting from the notes I made immediately afterward—as I did for my conversations with “Michaela” and General Kratsch and all the rest. In this case, however, I trust that my interlocutors do have a precise record of our conversation, although no tape recorder was visible on their spotless coffee table.
Now, suppose I’d had an adversarial file. After all, if Isabel Hilton was negatively judged for being secretary of the Scotland-China Association, I was a member of the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding. Would they have told me about that?
“Well, we don’t tell anybody….” A dry half-laugh. “Except you just now.”
But if I were American, I could apply to read my FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act. Why not here?
Yes, well, for a start, that would double MI5’s budget at a stroke. The Americans have found that it’s a huge amount of work. (All that sifting, copying and blacking
out—and I think of the more than three thousand employees of the Gauck Authority.)
But the Americans have the money. (A small undertone of resentment there.)
And then, it would be very difficult because the IRA, foreign terrorists and other enemies could get valuable clues, even from other people’s files, about the way MI5 works. (I think, Yes, that’s probably true.)
What about much older files, for the historians?
Well, even that’s difficult. Sets a precedent. Gives clues to operational methods. Still, they are trying to help. They hope to open some files from the First World War.
Later, after discussing some more general questions, I ask point-blank, Can I read my file?
No.
Why not?
Because it’s the property of the Crown.
In most countries you cannot see the file the security service has on you, but where else in the world would you be offered that explanation? The Crown!
They give a couple of more reasons. It could set a precedent. It might compromise covert sources. But who on earth could they be—covert sources, on me? Surely not colleagues or friends? Surely.
Could those friendly British “diplomats,” at the embassy in wherever, have added a few reports? Or perhaps there is actually little or nothing on the file between, say, 1979, when I decided not to join, and 1994, when they approached me again?
“Anyway,” the other man adds helpfully, “opening files on friendly contacts is also a matter of simple politeness.
Wouldn’t it be awful if someone rang up and we couldn’t remember who he was?” How frightfully English: “We did open a file on you, old boy—just a matter of politeness.”
On the train back to Oxford I interrogate myself. What do I feel? First, satisfaction at an unexpectedly successful inquiry. Why, if the man is to be believed, I may be the first person in Britain ever to have found out, simply by asking, that he has a file. And at the same time, anger. Anger that they are still keeping tabs on me, however lightly. Also, some minor irritation. How much neater it would be if they could have had an adversarial file on me. Then one could say, “See, both the Stasi and MI5 were following me, what a fearless all-around dissident I must be!” (A lot of boasting goes on around secret files.) But life isn’t like that, most of the time anyway. It’s more complicated. The past is never quite past. Years later, some half-forgotten thing you did when you were young catches up. Somewhere, perhaps, there is your own child, growing up with someone else as his father. Or a file, growing too. And you never knew.
How many of us would face a little surprise if the British files were ever opened? Secret file-makers do see things in their own special light. I never in my life consciously “assisted” MI6, yet now I’m told this is the general category under which I’m filed. And I think of the East Germans who discovered, when the files were opened, that the Stasi had filed them as friendly contacts or even as informers. Some of them only pretended they didn’t know or had suppressed the memory. But some genuinely did not know; they were innocent.
For a moment, I imagine “Michaela” turning around and saying: “Well, you see, your own security service had you down as a British IM!” Rubbish, of course. What she did was to talk regularly, at length and in detail about colleagues, friends and family, to someone she knew was a secret-police officer. I did nothing of the kind—and anyway, it wouldn’t be the same even if I had “assisted” MI6. Assisting the foreign intelligence service of a democracy like Britain against a dictatorship like East Germany is not the same as informing for the domestic secret police of that dictatorship. Yet if I write this up honestly, I shall throw myself open even to that absurd comparison.