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Secrets and lies

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Nick Cohen
Sunday March 12, 2000
The Observer

The 'friends of Robin Cook', as we polite journalists call the Foreign Secretary when we want to be discreet, are apprehensive. He's 'very edgy about Shayler,' they/he are whispering. He knows he hasn't 'been told the whole truth by MI6'.

Cook and just about everyone else. David Shayler alleged in 1998 that MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, had been involved in an attempted coup against Gadaffi. His former employer, MI5, meanwhile, was so lost in the hectic paranoia of the far right, its spies marked Harriet Harman, Jack Straw and Peter Mandelson as threats to an establishment they wished only to serve. Cook's response was firm and suspiciously fast. MI6 had investigated the disillusioned spook's Libyan accusations in the space of a few hours. He could assure the nation that they were nothing more than 'pure fantasy'.

Earlier this year, an MI6 report headed 'UK Eyes Alpha', was placed on the Internet. It said MI6 was indeed told by a 'delicate source' about a plot to kill the Libyan leader two months before a bungled coup took place in February 1996. Shayler, his credibility enhanced by the document's publication, filled in the details. When he was working for MI5, which spies on British citizens, he was told by an MI6 officer, who spied on foreigners, that Delicate Source was a Libyan conspirator who had walked into a British diplomatic mission and asked for support. When Gadaffi was killed, the plotter promised to make a present of the two Libyans alleged to have planted the Lockerbie bomb. Delicate Source was given at least £30,000 of your money, Shayler maintained.

It is possible that Robin Cook was fibbing when he said that Shayler was a fantasist, but not, in my view, likely. Cook's 'friends' say that MI6 told him the allegations were nonsense, and he thus backed the Foreign Office's covert wing in good faith. What else was he meant to do? Malcolm Rifkind, the Foreign Secretary in 1996, was equally gullible. When the Libyan document was leaked in February, he was dismissive. Even MI6 has not tried to pretend it is anything but genuine, but Rifkind said: 'SIS has never put forward such a proposal for an assassination attempt and in my time in office I have never seen any evidence that SIS is interested in such an escapade.' Richard Norton-Taylor of the Guardian , who knows more about the espionage bureaucracies than most, discovered with ease the service's contempt for mere elected politicians. A 'well-placed source' told him Rifkind would have been kept in ignorance. 'It was up to MI6 to judge what to tell Ministers about their activities,' the spy smugged.

By any standard, this is something of a scandal. It's 'not up to MI6' to decide what to keep secret. MI6 is a part of the Civil Service. It is meant to be answerable to Ministers, who are, in turn, meant to be answerable to Parliament, the law and the electorate. Yet here we have a Conservative Foreign Secretary who is not informed about British knowledge of a coup in Libya, where Britain has substantial oil and construction interests and many ex-pats who would have a hard time if Gadaffi thought they were guilty by association with men who wanted to shoot him. His Labour successor is then lied to - quite spectacularly. He misleads the public and is left to take the opprobrium when the fraud is exposed. After this, any government with a shred of self-respect and a belief in accountability would bring the intelligence services under democratic control.

Instead of standing up for itself - and, by extension, the voters - this Government is taking the young reporter who sits next to me at The Observer to the Old Bailey.

His name is Martin Bright. I like him not only because he's an amiable chap, who is usually hygienic and frequently sober, but because he hangs on to the belief that it is the job of a journalist to find out what the powerful are up to. In The Observer of 27 February he wrote that Shayler was naming the MI6 agents involved in the proposed insurrection in Libya. Bright did not print their names himself.

The story cannot have surprised New Labour. Bright reported that Shayler had sent Straw full details of the alleged plot on 24 November last year, including the name of an MI6 officer who ran the operation.

On Tuesday Bright will be in front of a judge. Special Branch, the coppers who act for MIs 5 and 6, will tell the court it wants to seize any notebooks he might have and browse through The Observer 's computers to see if it can find a mention of Shayler. It believes that evidence about Shayler's breaches of the Official Secrets Act may be there. The Observer will fight with vigour. No one would dream of telling a newspaper about official corruption, incompetence or crime if they thought the police - or, in this case, the secret police - might read every jotting and e-mail. If the judge backs the state, and Bright and the paper do not comply, they could face crippling fines. Or Bright and my editor could be jailed for contempt of court.

So far, so predictable. When petulant right-wing governments - which I hope you have gathered by now is exactly what New Labour is - seek to suppress democratic scrutiny, the battle always features an engagement with journalists who say they will not be able to meet their dead gaze in the bathroom mirror if they betray brave people who trusted them. But an outré twist makes this case stand out. Even our dangerous but dim intelligence apparatchiks must know who Bright's source was. The opening sentence of his 27 February piece provided a tantalising clue. It read: 'The renegade MI5 agent David Shayler last night dramatically escalated his battle with the Government when he named two serving intelligence officers who he says were involved in a covert operation to assassinate Libyan dictator Colonel Muammar Gadaffi.'

It gets more peculiar. Alongside Bright at the Old Bailey will be the Guardian , our sister paper. The Government will demand that it produces the original of a letter from Shayler, if it still has it, which the Guardian ran on 17 February this year. You do not need to be Inspector Morse to discover what was in the letter because, well, it was printed in the Guardian on 17 February. Agents who believe that Peter Mandelson, who sabotaged the Freedom of Information Act, Jack Straw, who helped him and is now doing the same to trial by jury, and Harriet Harman, who cut the benefits of the poorest women and children in the country, are dangerous radicals might require special needs teaching, but they must be able to read a letter in a national paper (or phone a friend who can read it to them). The security services must also know that Shayler has had an exile's life in a Paris apartment after the French courts ruled he was a refugee from political persecution. They don't need to get the letterhead to find his base. It's no secret. Every curious hack has knocked on his door. Why the stamping of heavy boots?

The demand for access to our computer system is suggestive - there may be all kinds of interesting nuggets in there. But the best guess is that the authorities don't care that the prosecutions make no sense. They want everyone to learn the perils of examining the secret state.

It's not only my friends and employers who are gulping at the thought of massive bills and possible imprisonment. Julie Ann Davies, a student at Kingston University and campaigner in Shayler's cause, has been arrested under the Official Secrets Act. Shayler and the Mail on Sunday are facing Government demands for compensation for causing 'injury to the national interest' for stories such as the Gadaffi plot and 'Mandy's really a red revolutionary', which both the Mail on Sunday and Panorama cleared with Whitehall before they were published or broadcast. Was the Government acting against the national interest? Why has it chosen to sue for infringing the copyright of the Crown? Is it because a judge, rather than one of those impertinent juries filled with common people with ideas above their station, will hear a civil case for compensation?

As with other forms of McCarthyism, the point here is not to uncover conspiracies and information that might harm national security, but to intimidate and humiliate and warn others of the high price of stepping out of line.

We have heard a lot about this Government's desire to rig elections and stifle debate. But it is perfectly happy to allow the security services and, often, big business to escape its clutches. The control freaks choice of what to control and what to leave in uncontrolled riot delineates a regime that controls the many, but not the few.