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).
From the National Security Agency’s imposing headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, ringed by a double-chain fence topped by barbed wire with strands of electrified wire between them, America “bugs” the world.
Nothing politically or militarily significant, whether mentioned in a telephone call, in a conversation in the office of the secretary general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, or in a company fax or e-mail, escapes its attention.
Its computers – measured in acres occupied by them rather than simple figures – “vacuum the entire electromagnetic spectrum”, homing in on “key words” which may suggest something of interest to NSA customers is being conveyed.
The Hutton inquiry has confirmed what we all should have guessed– Britain ’s secret intelligence services are untouchable. It does not matter how badly wrong they were on Iraq and how often they have got things wrong in the past. They will continue to go from strength to strength because, as Lord Hutton realised, they are in bed with the government and a major power in the land.
Lord Hutton’s narrow terms of reference did not allow him to examine the intelligence services’ role in making the case for war and the accuracy of the dodgy dossier. This was, he said, “beyond my remit”.
On the face of it, spying should be easy. You go out into the world and try to uncover dangers that threaten your nation. You recruit agents, bribe and blackmail people in the know, put all this into a report, give it a reliability assessment and then hope that it makes its way to someone with the power to act on it.
It’s a sexy, well paid job, certainly not nine to five, with a reasonable pension and, like the mafia, secret recognition from those in the know. There are downsides: lots of moral dilemmas, the shame of using people, bitter bureaucratic infighting and the constant nagging doubt about whether it makes any difference to the bigger picture.
The year 2003 marked the end of professional politics and the return of the celebrity politician, the man or woman whose face is instantly recognisable because we’ve seen it on the TV or the cinema screen but whose policies we neither know nor care about.
The election of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Governor of California after a campaign in which he refused to define what he stood for, offer the slightest hint of what he planned to do about the state’s economic crisis, or debate anything at all with his political rivals, is bound to be copied and is another blow to democratic process.
The Rugby World Cup has ended with sweet, sweet victory for England and mortification for Australia. For weeks the Aussies have been accusing the Poms of being “smug” and “arrogant”, of playing “boring and unimaginative” rugby, of being “miserable people living in a cold, old country”. Will England now justifiably rub the Australians’ faces in the mud? And will relations between the two countries never be the same again?
Of course not. Nothing will change. England has been gracious in victory. The team paid tribute to Australia’s gallant effort. English supporters joined Australians in singing “Waltzing Matilda in the stands after the match. Yes, the Australian press reported the result under the headline “Read This And Weep”– and many did. But they were often consoled by English fans who know only too well what it is like to be “gutted” by your team’s defeat.
This is history at its sparkling best–interesting, enlightening, painstaking and objective. If you want to know about prime ministers and politicians, wars and class, economics and production, religion and sport, then look elsewhere. This is a book about people, ordinary Australians, and how they organised their daily life a long while ago.
It describes where they lived, how they shopped, what they ate and how they cooked it, what they drank and why. It tell us how they kept warm and cool, how they lit their houses, what they wore and where they bought it. It begins in the middle of the 19th century when there were less than half a million white Australians and ends with the First World War when there were five million.
Before her death six years ago, was Princess Diana under surveillance by “watchers” from MI5, the British Security Service? Yes. Did MI5 have a file on her? Yes. Were her telephone calls bugged? Yes. Were there, in the Queen’s words, “powers at work in this country of which we have no knowledge”? Yes. Did MI5 or these mysterious powers murder Diana? Emphatically, no.
We can handle six weeks of World Cup rugby but can we survive six weeks of Australia? Here’s a country just a little over 100 years old, and with only 20 million people, that is a world leader in so many fields, and not afraid to boast about it. Six weeks of seeing and hearing confident, optimistic Australians enjoying their life in their Spring sunshine as our winter closes in may be too much even for Rugby fans.
