Nothing, not even the spy fiction of John le Carré, Len Deighton, or Charles McCarry, compares with the real-life story of the Ring of Five. Not only was the group made up of five members of the British establishment—Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross—who had signed up to serve communism as spies when they met at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1930s. But by virtue of their subsequent positions within the British government, they also succeeded in transferring thousands of the most sensitive military documents to their Russian handlers.
Alexander Litvinenko’s death is unlikely to be solved for months. There are as many theories about who killed the former KGB officer as there are reporters working on the story. For my money, the circumstantial evidence points to the FSB, who took over the KGB’s role and for whom Litvinenko once worked.
Few organisations have access to Polonium-210. It is made in nuclear reactors, and with a half-life of 138 days cannot be stored; it has to be made to order. It is an almost-perfect murder weapon, although in one sense the murderer was unlucky. If Litvinenko had not died in London where all the facilities existed to detect the Polonium-210, the cause might have remained a mystery. Litvinenko himself was in no doubt. “The bastards got me,” he told a friend.
There is something wrong with the Government’s version of our stunning success in thwarting the planned terrorist attack on aircraft bound from Britain to the United States, bombings that would have “caused loss of life on an unprecedented scale”. We are told that, thanks to the brilliance of our anti-terrorist forces, we have avoided another 9/11. Apparently faced with a bombing attack on a number of transatlantic aircraft, “part of the most sustained period of severe threat since the end of the Second World War” (our Home Secretary, John Reid’s, words), we have rounded up the “main players” just in time, and they are all in custody.
There comes a time in every anti-terrorist operation for a decision dreaded by every officer involved: Is this the moment to strike? Ideally, an investigation should run as long as possible.
No officer, no matter how experienced, can tell for certain that every angle has been covered, every possibility for gathering intelligence has been exploited, and every fragment of evidence has been noted and catalogued. But these imperatives have to be balanced against the most important one of all - are the terrorists about to attack?
The anti-terrorist raid on a house in East London to search for a chemical bomb now appears to be just another botched operation: a suspect shot in murky circumstances, conflicting accounts and unanswered questions.
In fact, the real story of this raid is that infighting between MI5 and the police may have endangered the chance of a breakthrough in gathering anti-terrorist intelligence.
Information is the life-blood of a security service. Unlike the characters in novels or in the popular TV series Spooks, real-life MI5 officers rely on the sordid but well-tried techniques of the informer, the ‘grass’, the intercepted letter, the telephone tap and the bribe, all mixed in with a dash of blackmail and coercion.
The furore about Australia’s intelligence community - its failures, tainted reports, politicisation, poor management and damaging disputes with its officers - is not unique. It is typical of what has been occuring in all Western intelligence services since 9/11 blasted them out of their complacent mind set.
Trained to cope with the major Cold War monster, the Soviet Union, they failed not only to identify the new threat but even to imagine what it might be. The collapse of communism (something which, incidentally, came as a complete surprise to every Western intelligence service) left them desperate to find ways of justifying their existence.
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.
