Published in The Independent, 29 February 2004
One true spy story tells us more about the murky world of modern espionage than all the novels of Ian Fleming, John le Carre and Len Deighton. Here is such a story. A few years ago, the Chinese government grew tired of buying its artillery pieces from Britain – we make the best – and offered a large lump sum and royalties if we would teach them how to manufacture the guns themselves.
The deal was done and the British experts went out to a weapons factory in northern China to teach their Chinese counterparts the necessary skills. One of the experts was a metallurgist. On his first leave back in Britain he was approached by an officer of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).
“He told me that the chance to have someone at the heart of the Chinese armaments industry was too good to miss. He appealed to my patriotism. Would I keep my eyes open, learn as much as I could without taking any risks, and report to them every time I came home on leave? I agreed.”
But after a while SIS grew greedy. The metallurgist mentioned in passing that in the factory manager’s office was a huge iron safe. SIS now wanted to know what was in it.
“They insisted that I somehow get hold of the key and take an impression, not in a bar of soap, like in the movies, but in a piece of cuttlefish. They would then make me a key and I would open the safe, photograph what was in it and report next time I was in London.”
But no opportunity to take a impression presented itself and the metallurgist’s time in China was running out. Then SIS asked what was the make of safe. When he told his SIS contact, the officer beamed. “He said that there would be a set of keys back at SIS that would open the safe because every time a major British safe manufacturer sold a safe to any foreign buyer, the manufacturer provided SIS with a set of keys – just in case.”
The metallurgist later regretted his involvement in this espionage operation and when one of his colleagues in the arms business, the Canadian Dr Gerald Bull, the man who invented the “super-gun”, was mysteriously murdered by a professional hit man in Brussels in 1990, he gave it all up.
This story tells us just how far-reaching our spy services are, how deeply they have penetrated most aspects of our nation’s life, how broad their interests extend, and how, by appealing to our patriotism, they can persuade even the most level-headed professional to play spy games.
We have now almost forgotten that until the emphasis switched to terrorism, spying after the end of the Cold War was largely commercial and industrial. SIS’s charter specifically empowers it to do whatever is necessary to ensure the commercial well-being of the United Kingdom. As Sir Percy Cradock, former chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, put it: “We are a trading nation. We are therefore profoundly interested in international stability. We need to know where the water is going to be stormy.”
It was at this point that the concept of not spying on friends and allies went down the plughole. Cold War spying was ideologically-based. The aim was to defeat Communism and the identity of the enemy was clear. But in the harsh world of international business competition, every country is a potential enemy.
So we spy on all our European allies. And they spy on us. To give us an edge in trade negotiations, we spy on our American friends and commercial rivals and they spy on us. A recent FBI report identified 57 countries around the world that were running economic and commercial espionage operations against the United States. At least half of those were rated by the State Department as being “friendly”. Britain was one of them.
For its part, the CIA provides the relevant American departments with French and British negotiating positions at international meetings like GATT, positions that America’s National Security Agency has established by eavesdropping on British communications.
A French secret service officer was expelled from New Delhi for giving a French arms salesman details of a competing British bid. French intelligence officers in Britain receive regular “shopping lists” of commercial and industrial secrets they are to try to steal.
Our Joint Intelligence Committee sends the Bank of England a weekly assessment of the world economic and trading situation. GCHQ routinely eavesdrops on commercial satellites for intelligence on commodities markets and passes its information to big British companies like BP and ICI.
Baroness Park, a former SIS controller of many years experience, once spelt out this symbiotic relationship between the intelligence services and business and explained how relatively easy it is to recruit businessmen. “With some people it may be money, with others a little bit of help, a little bit of knowledge. For instance if you knew a British company was trying to get an order for helicopters and you knew from other sources that the French and Italians were bidding, you would certainly tell your man so that he was forearmed and knew the competition.”
Former CIA officer Earl Hopgood was serving in Hong Kong when by accident he received a diplomatic pouch that the SIS station there had intended to go to London. Naturally, he opened it. “I was stunned by the distribution list because after the local Hong Kong bureaux and all the government people you would expect, virtually every major British firm was on the list. We couldn’t imagine doing the same thing with an American company.”
The point is that the British intelligence has so thoroughly penetrated our everyday life that we should no longer be surprised to learn who they watch, bug and manipulate. Spies are here, there and everywhere.
The threat of terrorism has been a godsend for them. With fresh government support, new names, new acronyms, new funding, fresh faces and fresh targets, they are sources of secret power in our society. They frighten us, define reality for us and direct our lives. It is worrying to think that we may to have to rely on the conscience and sense of ethics of whistleblowers like Katharine Gun to protect us from the worst excesses of spies and their constant nibbling away at our rights and civil liberties.
Phillip Knightley is the author of ‘The Second Oldest Profession‘, a history of spies and spying.
