My search then takes me out of these secret gardens into the gleaming white foyer of Thames House, past a large, handsome crest showing a pugnacious lion with a mermaid’s tail above the proud motto Regnum Defende, and through some automated high-security doors faintly reminiscent of Star Trek. To achieve the latter stretches of this journey, I reluctantly agree that the conversations will be “off the record.”
The results are frustrating. The great advantage of a dead secret service is that its secrets are no longer secret. About the Stasi we can know. The trouble with live secret services is that they are still secret. My “South of the River” host describes his experience of spying against the Soviet Union as being like inspecting an elephant in the dark with a penlight. I feel rather like that now. Those who agree to see me are glad to present their case, but openness and secrecy remain opposites and, even as we talk, they are visibly torn between the two. So all I emerge with are a few flashlit glimpses: here a glistening flank, there a horny proboscis.
Yes, East Germany was a “hard nut to crack,” say the gentlemen from MI6—“the friends,” as I gather they are sometimes known in Whitehall. However, they did well in the rest of the Soviet bloc. They had the Poles “almost wrapped up.” Yet they were no more prescient than anyone else in anticipating the really big political changes in the East. I probably did better as a journalist on the spot. Nonetheless, they did get at some of the other side’s important official secrets, especially military ones. And this made a small but significant difference to policy. (Three former foreign secretaries cautiously agree.)
They joined the service for all the reasons you would expect: the myth, curiosity, love of adventure, travel and “doing something for the country,” as father had in the last war. The job could be very boring. Walking around the backstreets of yet another city, looking for safe meeting places and dead-letter boxes, you sometimes wondered, What the hell am I doing with my life? And there were the office politics. But a lot of the work was terrific fun. That boyish word “fun” occurs often in these conversations. One senior retired gentleman of the service recalls: “People used to say, ‘I can’t believe that they’re paying me for doing this.’” Such fun and games.
Were they more scrupulous than the other side? Well, they say, we didn’t do assassination or kidnapping, and blackmail only rarely. It was so important for morale, says the senior retired gentleman, that our methods were moral. A very big word to use of this twilight world. I remember that Colonel Eichner of the Stasi described the British secret service as “gentlemanlike”—but he meant this by contrast with the CIA and the West German BND. Include the CIA’s record in Latin America and the moral distinction between methods (West) and methods (East) is still more blurred.
One bug is very much like another. A retired officer describes to me an authorized secret break-in to a suspect’s flat in London—“A lot of fun,” he says—while a uniformed policeman stood guard down the road. His account uncannily recalls the description I have just heard from Dr. Warmbier of a secret Stasi break-in to his flat in Leipzig. Retired officers of both sides want me to understand that their best agents were always the volunteers—people who did it for their own reasons, personal, political, whatever—not those who were bought or blackmailed. The common wisdom of the trade. Both describe to me, in almost identical terms, the unique quality of the personal tie between agent and case officer. “It’s a wonderful relationship,” says the senior retired gentleman from MI6. “You can talk about anything, your job, your personal problems, your wife, and be quite sure that it will be kept secret.” I glimpse the paradox at the heart of all spying: the key to betrayal is trust. And the proudest boast of the retired Stasi officer is that he has not betrayed his agents.
So was it the different ends that justified the same means? Good when done for a free country, bad when done for a dictatorship? Right for us, wrong for them. Well, they don’t necessarily think that spying abroad for another country was so very wrong, up to a point. For them, professionally, the other side was “the opposition” and not “the enemy.” But beyond that point, yes, it depends whom it was done for.
Here is a slippery slope. How many crimes of the twentieth century, those of communism above all, have been sanctioned by saying, “The end justifies the means.” Yet the argument cannot be dismissed. Take the extreme case. To try to assassinate Hitler, as Stauffenberg did in 1944, was a great and noble act. To try to assassinate Churchill would have been villainous and wrong—although the man who attempted it might have shown as much daring and courage as Stauffenberg, and might even have believed as fervently in the lightness of what he was doing. Same action, different moral value.
However, not only do the ends have to be good, the means must also be proportional to those ends. There is no simple rule about what justifies what. Each case is different, in each there is an invisible line. Did British spies cross to the wrong side of that line? Of course they did. But how far and how often? Without seeing the files, we outside can never know. But even those who were once inside, or are still inside, will also have forgotten, or re-remembered, as the kaleidoscope of memory keeps turning.
If the ethical line was crossed further and more often in the Cold War than we would today like to think, then I can guess at a few reasons. People were inspired by collective and family memories of war, and by literary models of the secret soldier. Even if we didn’t talk much, anymore, about “the Cold War,” many still believed that there was a kind of war on—which in a way there was. Things are justified in war that are not in peace. But what if you are somewhere between war and peace? Moreover, at the back of the mind, half examined, was “my country right or wrong.” But what if the country was not right? Or right in general but wrong in the particular case?
Too much moral refinement can be crippling. You cannot stop for a philosophy seminar in the middle of a fight. But then you live with the consequences.
Whatever can be said of our spies abroad—or of anyone else’s—the harder case is that of the domestic security service in a democracy. Here, ends and means are almost inseparable. Spying on your own citizens directly infringes the very freedom it is supposed to defend. The contradiction is real and unavoidable. But if the infringement goes too far, it begins to destroy what it is meant to preserve. And who decides what is too far?
Nothing that I have so far glimpsed of the British security service remotely suggests an apparatus like the Stasi. Not the numbers working for them. (MI5 has about 2,000 employees. Add 2,000 for Special Branch and then 16,000 for outside agents and informers—assuming, for the sake of argument, a ratio of four to one, compared to the Stasi’s two to one. You can still only reach a figure of roughly one out of every four thousand adults in Britain, compared with one in fifty for East Germany.) Not the range of targets. (The Stasi had no IRA to cope with: in fact, they supported terrorists almost as much as they countered them.) Not the ways of pressuring people into collaboration. (A major motive for the informers on my file was simply getting permission to travel abroad. Imagine that here: “Now, Mr. Evans, before we let you fly to the Costa Brava for your summer holiday, perhaps you’d just tell us a thing or two about Mr. Jones….”) Not the fear inspired. (Do we suspiciously eye the man at the next table in the pub? Is anyone in mainland Britain—apart, I hope, from terrorists and foreign spies—really afraid of MI5? When my English informer “Smith” tried to explain to me how small and relatively harmless he thought the Stasi was, he said, “something like MI5.”)
Nor can one equate the consequences for those who are spied on. (In East Germany: loss of university place, like Young Brecht; loss of job, like Eberhard Haufe; reprisals against your children, as happened to Werner, and imprisonment, as in the case of Dr. Warmbier, with the court’s sentence decided in advance—by the prosecution.) Or the political system they serve. (The Stasi was officially called “the shield and sword of the Party,” and its first task was to keep that single party in perpetual power. Even if MI5 officers ha
ve tended to lean to the Right, and some quite far to the Right, this has not prevented the democratic alternation of power between two parties, Conservative and Labour, which have in turn formed the government they serve.) And certainly not its place within the whole system. (The Stasi was not just an all-pervasive secret police; by the end it was also trying to keep the whole system working.)
A little rhetorical equation with the Stasi is so tempting: spine-chilling, sexy, a good sell. And so wrong. I’m reminded of an argument I had in the 1980s with some on the Left—“my left-wing friends,” as “Michaela” recorded my putting it—who called their British pressure-group for political reform Charter 88, by analogy with the Czechoslovak human rights movement Charter 77, or their British journal Samizdat This was, I felt, to misappropriate the honors of people who were risking imprisonment and even death for their beliefs. It was like pinning to your own chest a little badge that says “hero.” Meanwhile, Václav Havel of Charter 77 was in prison again, and the Solidarity priest Father Jerzy Popieluszko had been horribly murdered by agents of the Polish security service. Perhaps semantic degradation is the inevitable fate of all such terms. I now see in an English newspaper a reference to the government whips in the House of Commons as “that Stasi-like crew.”
However, there is an opposite fallacy: to make our own condition look better by contrasting it with something so much worse. “Mummy, this porridge is revolting.” “But, darling, think of the children in Africa who have nothing to eat.” I note with interest that, in her lecture, Mrs. Rimington of MI5 herself deploys the contrast with the Stasi. If you wish to make gray look white, put it against black. Compared with the Stasi, anything looks good. But the real comparison is with other countries in the West.
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 i
cons 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.
The File Page 19