The drama was finally enacted in Australia. The Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, was sent out as the chief witness to defend the Government’s case in the court in Sydney. At home we had teams of people scrabbling through files, trying to find out what exactly were the facts of various long-gone operations and events, so that Robert Armstrong could give as accurate evidence as possible. Although the Cabinet Secretary is the most senior Whitehall official and very close to the intelligence services, being the accounting officer for the money voted to them by Parliament, he is not responsible for their operations. Robert Armstrong had no first-hand information about the operations which Peter Wright described and in having to answer questions about them, even with the briefing material provided for him, he was put in a very difficult if not impossible position. His appearances in the court provided Malcolm Turnbull, Peter Wright’s defence counsel, with the opportunity to make a very senior representative of the British establishment look ridiculous.
There was one allegation in Peter Wright’s book which aroused considerable interest and caused the most anxiety, the so-called ‘Wilson Plot’. This was Peter Wright’s assertion that a group of thirty MI5 officers, of which he was one, plotted to get rid of the Wilson government, because they suspected Wilson of being excessively sympathetic to the Soviet Union. Because this allegation, if it had been true, would have meant that the service whose role it is to defend our democratic system had sought to act against the democratically elected government, it was taken immensely seriously not least within MI5. Sir Antony Duff, the Director-General of the day, who was not an MI5 insider and had no personal knowledge of the Service’s activities in the period concerned, was determined that the story should be thoroughly investigated. Extensive interviews were conducted with those who had known Peter Wright and were still working; white-haired gentlemen were dug out of their retirement all over the country and asked to cast their minds back but though much reminiscing went on, no-one could recall anything that sounded like what Peter Wright was claiming had happened. Files were trawled through with the same result. Finally, a detailed report was written for Whitehall and ministers felt sufficiently confident to state publicly that no such plot had ever existed. Peter Wright later withdrew the allegation, admitting, in a Panorama programme in 1988, that what the book said about the so-called ‘plot’ was not true. However, as is always the way of these things, his retraction went almost unnoticed, and the untrue allegation stuck in some circles and remains in currency to this day.
When, much later, I was Director-General, I decided I would try once and for all to knock on the head the Wilson plot allegation. I asked some of the old grandees of the Labour Party, most of whom had at one stage been Home Secretary, to come in to Thames House to talk about it. It was clear to me then that the conviction in that generation of the Labour Party that there was some kind of a plot against them, organised by the intelligence services, runs deep. Though I tried my best to convince them that they were wrong, I knew at the end of the exercise that further efforts would be fruitless. The fact that Harold Wilson himself said, at the time he left office, that he was convinced that MI5 was spying on him, meant that through loyalty to him, if for no other reason, it was difficult for his former colleagues to accept that there was nothing in it. But one of those former colleagues did go so far as to remark to me that if Wilson had really believed that, it was very strange that he never mentioned it at the time to any of his political colleagues so that the first time they knew about it was when, like everyone else, they read what he had said about it to the Observer. I am now convinced that those who believe there was a plot want to believe it, and nothing anyone can say will change their minds.
Of course, those former Home Secretaries date back to the time when there was a great deal less close communication between the intelligence services and ministers and their Civil Service advisers than there is now. It seems to me, looking back on it, that the fault for that distance lay on both sides, and it was not a party political issue. I think that the then heads of the intelligence services probably felt that they could not trust civil servants and ministers to understand the issues and to take a balanced view of what the intelligence services were seeking to do. So they kept their distance. Ministers, for their part, may well have thought that although the intelligence services were essential, they were a potential embarrassment to the government and the less they knew about them the better. The fear was that if they knew too much they might be accused of being responsible for something awkward and difficult to explain. Or perhaps they feared that knowledge might in some way compromise their political independence. Whatever it was, I am sure that some of them had little confidence in the intelligence services’ competence or probity and thought it was safer to remain largely in ignorance.
Both sides were wrong. It seems to me that ministers in those days were avoiding their responsibilities, and heads of the services were reducing the effectiveness of their organisations by keeping their heads down and keeping their distance, rather than explaining more of what they were about and trying to correct misconceptions. Old former Home Secretaries who pop up now saying they never really knew what MI5 was up to in their day and had the most acute suspicions of it, should ask themselves why they didn’t do more to find out. After all, it was their responsibility.
Several former Home Secretaries appeared not long ago in a television programme called How to be Home Secretary. Their replies to questions about what it was like being responsible for MI5 illustrated this attitude perfectly. Roy Jenkins, who was Home Secretary from 1965 to ’67 and again from 1974 to ’76, said that he thought that MI5 used secrecy to run rings round successive Home Secretaries. He added: ‘I didn’t form a high regard for how they discharged their duties. They were secretive vis à vis government. Living one’s life in a spy-bound world gives people a distorted view of life.’ Merlyn Rees, who was Home Secretary from 1976 to ’77, said that he did not know what MI5 was up to. But more recent Home Secretaries, speaking on the same programme, were much easier with the relationship. Both Douglas Hurd and Michael Howard said that they felt they knew what they needed to know. Jack Straw sounded totally relaxed about the relationship. He was not at all in awe of the secret state and said it was not as big a deal as people imagined. He described himself as having got down into ‘the engine room of the business’. In my view the modern closer relationship between Home Secretaries and MI5 benefits everyone including, very importantly, the democratic process itself.
The closeness of the relationship between the government of the day and the security service should be limited only by the need to ensure that the service is not and does not appear to be the tool of the government. In my experience the limits were well understood and existed long before the relationship was embodied in legislation at the end of the 1980s. Lord Denning’s 1963 Report on the Profumo case, to which I have already referred, explains in fascinating narrative form what a Director-General should take into account in considering what he should or should not report to ministers. As Lord Denning explains, ‘The operations of the Security Service are to be used for one purpose and one purpose only, the defence of the realm. They are not to be used to pry into any man’s private conduct or business affairs, or even into his political opinions except in so far as they are subversive.’ Denning supports the Director-General of the day for not reporting on or investigating John Profumo’s links with Christine Keeler and the Russian Military Attache, Ivanov (an intelligence officer), once he was satisfied that action had been taken to negate the Russian’s activities. The only criticism he makes is that the conduct of Mr Profumo, in having an affair with a call girl, disclosed a character defect, which pointed to his being a security risk in that the girl might try to blackmail him or bring pressure to bear on him to disclose secret information.
The Denning Report is to this day the guide for Director-Generals if they are ever in doubt as to whether they should tell the Prime Minister anything they might
know about the behaviour of his colleagues. It is not the responsibility of the Director-General of MI5 to seek to protect the government of the day from political embarrassment; that is the job of the Whips. The DG should only pass on anything about behaviour if it could adversely affect security in any way, including perhaps, laying open to blackmail a minister in a department where he has access to state secrets. That responsibility is one reason why the Director-General of MI5 has the right of direct access to the Prime Minister, without going through the Home Secretary. The other reason of course is that the Prime Minister has ultimate responsibility for the security of the state and needs to know about serious threats; information of that sort would always be known to the Home Secretary as well. The Prime Minister would expect to see the DG regularly for a briefing on the security situation, but the knowledge that there is another possible reason why the Director-General might be talking to the Prime Minister can cause anxiety in some quarters. John Major liked to conduct meetings in the summer sitting in the garden at No. 10, which is overlooked by many windows. News travels fast on the Whitehall grapevine and towards the end of my time as Director-General, when John Major was governing with a very small majority and political nerves started to fray with allegations of sleaze ten a penny, I would often find myself rung up after such a meeting by someone who had seen us talking and was eager to try to get some hint of what we had been talking about.
17
THE MUCH MORE relaxed and open relationship which exists nowadays between ministers and MI5 is based more than anything on the adequacy of the law which governs MI5’s activities, the Security Service Act of 1989. Rather ironically, that is something for which we have Peter Wright to thank. He described in Spycatcher what he and his colleagues got up to in London in the 1960s and ’70s in the following terms: ‘And we did have fun. For five years we bugged and burgled our way across London at the State’s behest, while pompous bowler-hatted civil servants in Whitehall pretended to look the other way.’ He was describing in dramatic terms what has to be done to carry out eavesdropping and search operations.
To eavesdrop effectively it is obviously important to plant the microphones where they will have the best chance of picking up the targeted conversations and also where they will not be discovered, and that is usually somewhere inside the premises where you expect the conversations to take place. Such operations were carried out long before 1989 and though in those days they were carefully controlled and scrutinised for the appropriateness of the targets and though judgements were made about the balance of risk and reward, and though they were known about and tacitly approved of in Whitehall, the fact remains that those operations had no explicit statutory basis.
When, in 1985, telephone and mail interception had been legislated for under the Interception of Communications Act (IOCA), it had been thought too politically sensitive to legislate for eavesdropping. So although after 1985 the interception of communications on public systems, telephone and the mail, was surrounded by legally based regulatory checks, eavesdropping on private conversations went on as before.
The fact that it had been thought too difficult to legislate for entry into private property did not deter Sir Antony Duff. He took the view that the ambivalent position under which MI5 conducted operations, which were accepted as necessary for the effective protection of the state and were tacitly approved by its political masters, but which were not covered by statute, was totally unsatisfactory. Once the position had been highlighted in Peter Wright’s book, he was unwilling to continue to carry out such operations, and those which required entry to property were suspended. The result of that was a sudden loss of intelligence, just at a time when terrorist and other hostile activity was at a peak.
So discussions were set in train in Whitehall which eventually, after Sir Antony had retired, led to the passing through Parliament of the Security Service Act of 1989. Contrary to the way it is sometimes presented, it was MI5 who were very keen to have legislation, so that they could get on with the work they had to do and some members of the government who were very much less keen. Some ministers, including at first Mrs Thatcher, took the view, not altogether surprisingly, that setting out to legislate to allow the secret state to break into people’s property for the purpose of planting microphones to overhear their conversations would cause a terrible furore and do the government no good at all. However, they were persuaded that it was necessary to have the power, and if there was to be the power, there must be legislation. Article 8 of the European Convention set out the right of everyone to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence. And it went on to say:
‘there shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.’
By the mid-1980s, case law under the European Convention had recognised that a state may set up a security service to provide a covert response to covertly organised threats; but the state must put its security service on a clear legal basis and there must be adequate and effective guarantees against abuse including a means for the citizens to complain and seek redress. Without a law in place to take account of these points, our arrangements in this country appeared to fall foul of the European Convention. So ministers agreed to bite the bullet and legislate, both to put the Security Service on a statutory footing and to provide the power to enter property.
When the idea that we should press ministers for legislation was first proposed, I was very uncertain about it. I was not at all confident that government would be robust enough to legislate to give us the powers we needed and I was afraid that instead, the result of pushing them might be that we would permanently lose a source of vital intelligence. This seemed to me a crucial issue and quite unasked I produced a paper for the first Directors’ meeting after the idea had been mooted, setting out the pros and cons and concluding that the arguments came down, just, in favour of the cons.
In those days it was not at all usual to have papers for Directors’ meetings. The idea that important policy issues should be debated in an open way was new. Under the old regime, either there were no policy issues, because change was avoided, or those at the top decided everything without discussion. After we had discussed it and I had thought more, I changed my mind and became persuaded that the status quo could not last, and if we did nothing, we would lose the powers anyway. So I then became an enthusiast for the legislation and I sat on a small Working Group, which worked very closely with Home Office civil servants to draft the Bill.
Once it had been decided to legislate, it was clear that the law must do much more than provide the power to eavesdrop. The new law had effectively to replace the old Maxwell Fyfe Directive, under which the Service had worked since 1952, and in doing so it must define the entire task of the Service and at the same time provide the ‘adequate and effective guarantees against abuse’, which the European Convention required, for all its activities. The draft Bill which we proposed, suitably worked on and smartened up by the parliamentary draughtsmen, was piloted through Parliament by Home Office ministers. The timing of its introduction to the House of Commons was carefully planned. It came in the wake of a revision of the Official Secrets Act, which was focused on by the press and those who took a close interest in civil liberties. So when the Security Service Act came along, many of the natural opponents of such legislation had shot their bolts against the Official Secrets Act, with the result that the Security Service Act had a much smoother ride than might have been expected.
What the Act did not contain, among the various ministerial and judicial oversights it provided, was a parliamentary oversight committee. We thought hard about this and Parliament debated whether it should, but ministers, civil servants and
some in the Security Service all felt that would be a step too far at that stage, though it was not ruled out for ever. The opportunity was taken to introduce such a committee in 1994 when MI6 and GCHQ were legislated for in the same way.
Since the passing of the Security Service Act, I have several times been asked by colleagues in other countries to explain to their ministers and oversight committees why it is so important for modern security services to have the power covertly to enter private property. If it was difficult for the UK government to bring in legislation to grant such a power, with the level of the terrorist threat that existed at the time in this country, it was much more difficult for countries where there was apparently very little or no such threat. But terrorists strike against their targets where they perceive the defences are weak. US embassies have been attacked in Africa, British citizens have been kidnapped in India, British diplomats and soldiers have been murdered in mainland Europe. Effective counter-terrorism requires international cooperation, including the provision of adequate powers for security services and police. The important thing is not the provision of powers but that their use should be properly controlled.
Open Secret Page 22
