Numerous time-consuming (and frequently time-wasting) lines of inquiry had to be followed up, many of them involving individual passengers who were either on the plane or had left it at London. One of a series of misleading leads which received extensive publicity was a telephone call to the US embassy in Helsinki two weeks before the crash, threatening an attack on an unspecified PanAm flight. Though some media reports seized on this as an important clue, it was in reality only one of a series of similar calls which had been fully investigated by the Finnish authorities, who correctly concluded that the calls were the result of a personal vendetta and had nothing to do with the attack on PA 103. Later reinvestigation confirmed this assessment.49
Though claims of responsibility for the attack were quickly made by a series of terrorist organizations and denials issued by others, initial suspicions focused on a breakaway group from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the PFLP–GC based in Syria, a number of whose members had been arrested in Germany in late October 1988 with an explosive device including a barometric detonator. Although the possibility of Libyan (or Iranian) involvement was considered,50 it was not at first thought very likely. No significant hard evidence pointed towards Libya until some fragments of clothing classed as ‘category one blast-damaged’, and therefore from inside the case containing the bomb, were eventually traced to an outlet in Malta, where the shopkeeper recalled selling the clothing to a man resembling a suspected Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi.51 Subsequent analysis of airport baggagehandling showed that the case containing the bomb was not first loaded at Heathrow but had joined PA 103 from the connecting flight from Frankfurt, where records suggested that in all probability one item of luggage had been loaded on to the aircraft from a flight out of Malta. Some months later a tiny fragment of electronic printed circuit board found by a forensic scientist in one of the charred pieces of clothing – the neckband of a shirt – was identified by the Service’s main explosives and weapons expert as coming from a long-delay Swiss-manufactured timing mechanism. Other evidence implicated Libyan intelligence and a Libyan Airlines representative in the operation to put the suitcase containing the bomb on the flight from Malta.52
Though no one could have predicted it at the time, the Lockerbie tragedy marked the climax of Libyan terrorism against Western targets rather than the first stage in a new and particularly lethal campaign. Tired of his status as an international pariah, Qaddafi began to show signs of a desire to distance himself from his terrorist past.53 After lengthy and wearisome negotiations between Britain and Libya, Al Megrahi and another alleged Libyan intelligence officer, Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, were tried by a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands for their part in the Lockerbie disaster. In January 2001 Al Megrahi was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. Fhimah was acquitted. Without the Security Service’s analysis of intelligence leads and use of its international liaison contacts, there would have been insufficient evidence to convict Al Megrahi.54
International liaison was also crucial to the Security Service’s counter-PIRA operations. In 1988 G5 officers made more than fifty liaison visits lasting a total of 250 days, to nine different European security and intelligence services; G5 reported at the end of the year: ‘Most if not all of these liaisons have stated that they look to the Security Service to take a lead on Irish terrorist matters and to play a co-ordinating role in determining the response to specific threats.’55
Following the failure of their Gibraltar operation, the Provisionals sought to demonstrate their continued ability to strike at British targets on the continent. ASUs living under cover in holiday cottages set out to reconnoitre and attack British bases and military personnel in the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium. In a two-and-a-half-year continental campaign beginning in May 1988 PIRA killed eight British servicemen and members of service families, but in the same campaign fifteen ASU members were arrested or shot dead.56 ‘In the end’, Director G (Stella Rimington) wrote later, ‘the Provisional IRA decided that the losses they were sustaining made their European operations not worth the cost. . .’57 The Provisionals also suffered the humiliation of having to issue public apologies for several bungled attacks, among them the killing in May 1990 in the Dutch town of Roermond of two Australian tourists.58 For the Security Service, PIRA’s largely unsuccessful continental campaign had the great advantage of strengthening its collaboration with other European security and intelligence services. Stephen Lander, then G5, wrote in 1990:
Since 1988, PIRA has come to dominate the exchanges of terrorist intelligence between the security intelligence services in the centre of Western Europe. Both French services, the Belgians, the Dutch, the Danes and the Germans now all have staff working full time on PIRA, while on the periphery, the Portuguese, Spanish, Italians, Austrians, Swedes and Norwegians devote resources to PIRA work when approached for help . . . In all this work, European services work closely with the Security Service.59
Improved collaboration between the Security Service and the FBI60 led to a major success at the end of the decade against PIRA high-tech arms procurement in the United States. In 1989 the FBI arrested Richard Clark Johnson, an expert in electronic counter-measures with top-secret clearance, employed by a major US defence contractor; Martin Peter Quigley, an Irish electronics expert employed by a computer software company in Philadelphia; Christina Leigh Reid, a computer technician from California; and Gerald Hoy, a computer science lecturer in Philadelphia.61 They were later sentenced to prison terms of, respectively, ten years, eight years, forty-one months and two years for conspiracy to violate federal arms export controls. Johnson, the first to be investigated, was believed by the Security Service to have been involved with PIRA since 1978. The first breakthrough in the long investigation which culminated in the convictions came as a result of the efforts orchestrated by the Security Service’s main arms expert to track PIRA weapons components back to source. In 1984 the FX401 tone frequency switch used by the PIRA Engineering Department to protect its radio-controlled bombs from counter-measures by the security forces was traced back to an English manufacturer. An investigation by MPSB at the request of the Security Service revealed that one order of fifty switches had been sent, via the manufacturer’s US subsidiary, to Richard Clark Johnson in California.62 That the investigation continued for the next five years, despite numerous difficulties in obtaining the evidence necessary for a successful prosecution, was due largely to the persistence of the Service’s main arms expert.63
Johnson was arrested in the car park of his current employer, Mitre Corporation. On the morning of 12 July 1989 he looked out of his office window, saw two men tampering with his car and rushed downstairs to confront them. The men turned out to be FBI agents examining the car.64 A possibly over-dramatized account of what happened next was relayed to Head Office by SLO Washington. The FBI officer supervising the agents was reported to have been told by his field office: ‘Either you arrest the two FBI agents interfering with the car or you arrest Johnson.’ Having decided, without much difficulty, on the second option, the FBI officer was said to have informed Johnson, ‘Only in America do you interrupt two men breaking into your car and find that you are the one who is arrested!’65 Following the conviction of Johnson, Quigley, Reid and Hoy a year later, the FBI thanked the Service for its assistance in a prolonged investigation whose ‘successful prosecution in the US was dependent on an outstanding international cooperative effort’.66 ‘This success’, it believed, ‘has significantly damaged PIRA’s capability to produce new types of remote controlled bombs, and has completely disrupted a programme to develop anti-aircraft rockets.’67
The series of operational successes achieved by MI5 and the security forces against PIRA in the late 1980s did not, however, bring them within sight of victory. As the Security Service’s Legal Adviser reluctantly acknowledged, the Provisionals’ leadership was effectively beyond reach of the law because of the near-impossibility of obtaining enough usable e
vidence for a successful prosecution:
The sum of the intelligence gathered about Irish terrorism has identified all the leaders, the majority of the activists and details of many of their operations. If this intelligence were converted into evidence it should act as an effective deterrent by enabling many successful prosecutions. Yet in twenty years of terrorism, the upper terrorist echelons have become a bedrock, the stability of which nurtures the ranks, draws recruits and attracts steady financing.68
At the end of the Thatcher era there was clear evidence that the Provisionals were embarking on a new mainland campaign. During the spring and summer of 1990 PIRA was responsible for fifteen (mostly small-scale) mainland bomb attacks and shootings.69 The best-known fatality was Ian Gow, Conservative MP for Eastbourne, who was killed on 30 July by a bomb as he started his car in the driveway of his house. Gow was probably chosen as a target because he was both a vociferous, long-standing critic of PIRA and a friend of Margaret Thatcher. The Prime Minister felt ‘deep personal grief’ at his death: ‘I could not help thinking . . . that my daughter Carol had travelled with Ian in his car the previous weekend to take the Gows’ dog out for a walk: it might have been her too.’70 On 18 September Air Chief Marshal Sir Peter Terry, who had been governor of Gibraltar during Operation FLAVIUS, was shot and wounded at his home in Staffordshire. Next day Mrs Thatcher’s private secretary, Charles Powell, wrote to the Home Office:
The Prime Minister is most exercised about the recent increases in PIRA attacks or attempted attacks on the mainland, which seem to indicate both a stepping up of their campaign and a change in tactics with greater emphasis on the use of firearms. She thinks that Ministers need to examine urgently whether existing measures, both to protect those who are vulnerable, to apprehend those responsible and to deter further attacks, are adequate.71
Mrs Thatcher dismissed the Home Office response72 as ‘wet’ and complacent.73 At a meeting with ministers, the DG and the Commissioner of the Met on 25 October, a month before her resignation, a clearly dissatisfied Prime Minister ‘said that the steps which had been taken to investigate and counter PIRA activities in mainland Britain had not been sufficient’.74
The future DG Stephen Lander had argued for some time that, in dealing with the threat from PIRA, the MPSB were hampered by their ‘natural wish to pursue criminals rather than to obtain information’: ‘The police should leave us to do the intelligence work while they, in the form of SO13 [Anti-Terrorism Branch], should do what they are internationally respected for, the after-crime investigations.’75 The Service leadership sympathized with Lander’s argument but could not bring itself to try to wrest the lead intelligence role on the mainland from the MPSB. The DDG (Operations), Julian Faux, minuted to the DG, Sir Patrick Walker, in January 1990:
We have consistently over the last 18 months or so told the Home Office about our unease concerning the ability of MPSB to effectively investigate the PIRA threat on the mainland, and to analyse the intelligence of that threat. At the same time we have made it clear that we did not wish to unnecessarily disturb our improving relations with MPSB on the Irish question.76
For the Service to take over the lead role was ‘perhaps the ideal solution but totally impractical at the present time because we do not have the resources’.77 Walker agreed, telling the cabinet secretary, Sir Robin Butler, that ‘The Service accepted that the MPSB were in the lead and should remain in the lead on the mainland.’78
Given the decline of the Cold War, the decreasing significance of subversion and the growing threat of terrorism, Sir Tony Duff came to the conclusion while DG that both the Security Service and Whitehall needed to reassess the priorities of its work in protective security. In December 1986 Duff set out the case for a root-and-branch review of vetting in a letter to the cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong. He reported that in 1985 the Service had handled over 327,000 vetting inquiries, making about 700,000 individual checks in its records. The total number of man-hours devoted to the process came to sixty-four years. Only in 913 cases (0.28 per cent of those submitted to it) had the Service found security concerns.79 A Cabinet Office review, completed in November 1988, though more restricted than Duff had hoped, accepted the need, ‘in the light of the diminishing threat from subversion and the increasing threat from terrorism’, to ‘ensure that the effort devoted to security vetting is commensurate with the threat’. Vetting, previously covert, was to be replaced by an overt two-tier system: a reliability check for access to confidential material and positive vetting for access to secret information. A new vetting category, counter-terrorist checking (CTC), was introduced for individuals not cleared for classified material who had access to unclassified targeting or other information of interest to terrorists, or who made regular, unescorted visits to the MoD and other likely terrorist targets. The fact that, under the new clearance system, finally approved in 1990, the Security Service was not involved in reliability checks dramatically decreased its workload: from 360,000 vetting inquiries in 1990 to about 250,000 in 1991. A Home Office memorandum noted, almost nostalgically, in 1990:
The most striking change is that almost 100 bodies which fell within the old criteria for checking against Security Service records now fall outside the criteria . . . Old friends who thus appear no more include the National Bus Company, the Rural Development Commission, the Sports Council and the Agricultural and Food Research Council.80
11
The Origins of the Security Service Act
Intelligence was the last taboo of British politics. For the Security Service’s first seventy years it was protected from public gaze and parliamentary scrutiny by a bipartisan consensus built around two dubious constitutional principles. The first was that intelligence was wholly undiscussable in public – even in parliament. As the Foreign Secretary, Sir Austen Chamberlain, told the Commons in 1924: ‘It is of the essence of a Secret Service that it must be secret, and if you once begin disclosure it is perfectly obvious to me as to hon. members opposite that there is no longer any Secret Service and that you must do without it.’1 The inflation of the common-sense doctrine that all intelligence operations require secrecy into the bizarre requirement that intelligence must never be mentioned at all originated not as carefully considered policy but as an inherited taboo, akin to the Victorian belief that civilized life might crumble if sex were mentioned in public. In 1985 Sir Michael Howard, one of the official historians of wartime intelligence, explained the traditional British view of intelligence thus:
In Britain the activities of the intelligence and security services have always been regarded in much the same light as intra-marital sex. Everyone knows that it goes on and is quite content that it should, but to speak, write or ask questions about it is regarded as extremely bad form. So far as official government policy is concerned, the British security and intelligence services do not exist. Enemy agents are found under gooseberry bushes and intelligence is brought by the storks.2
It followed from the storks-and-gooseberry-bush tradition that the mysteries of intelligence must be left entirely to the grown-ups (the agencies and the government) and that the children (parliament and the public) must not meddle in them. The second constitutional doctrine which underpinned the traditional British view of intelligence was thus that parliament must entirely abdicate its powers in this field to the executive.
The most astonishing thing about these two dubious doctrines is that there was no serious challenge to them until the 1980s. They were defended after his retirement even by Harold Wilson, despite his fears of a Security Service plot against him.3 In 1977, as these fears were reaching their peak, he published his distillation of the constitutional wisdom of the ages in a volume grandly entitled The Governance of Britain. The chapter on ‘The Prime Minister and National Security’ may be the shortest ever written by a British politician. It is barely a page long and begins by quoting approvingly Macmillan’s warning to the Commons after Philby’s defection in 1963: ‘It is dangerous and bad for ou
r general national interest to discuss these matters.’ Wilson concluded his mini-chapter thus:
The prime minister is occasionally questioned on [security] matters arising out of his responsibility. His answers may be regarded as uniformly uninformative.
There is no further information that can usefully or properly be added before bringing this Chapter to an end.4
The Callaghan government, despite the Prime Minister’s private dissatisfaction with the management of the Security Service,5 was an equally stout defender of intelligence storks and gooseberry bushes. ‘Parliament’, it declared, ‘accepts that accountability must be to Ministers and trusts Ministers to discharge that responsibility faithfully.’6
During the Thatcher decade, a series of public controversies involving the intelligence services gradually eroded the all-party storks-andgooseberry-bush consensus, which was still intact when the Conservatives returned to power in 1979. The unmasking of Sir Anthony Blunt as the Fourth Man by Mrs Thatcher in the Commons shortly afterwards forced the government to concede for the first time a parliamentary debate on security of the kind previously denounced by Macmillan and Wilson as ‘dangerous and bad for our general national interest’. After the first publication of the sensational claim that Sir Roger Hollis had been a Soviet mole in Chapman Pincher’s Their Trade is Treachery in 1981, Mrs Thatcher, to her visible dismay, was forced to breach the traditional taboo once again and make another statement to the Commons, this time to declare Hollis innocent. Further government statements followed the conviction of Geoffrey Prime, formerly of GCHQ, in 1982 and of Michael Bettaney of the Security Service in 1984. While periodically disregarding Harold Wilson’s dictum that the Prime Minister’s remarks to parliament on security and intelligence should be as rare as possible and ‘uniformly uninformative’, Mrs Thatcher none the less insisted that the principle remained intact. She told the Commons in November 1986: ‘I repeat: the practice and the custom of all prime ministers of all parties is to adhere to the normal rule of not commenting on security matters.’
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