Published in The New York Review of Books, Volume 54, Number 7, 26 April 2007

Deceiving the Deceivers: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess
by S.J. Hamrick
Yale University Press, 297pp

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.

By the onset of the cold war, Philby was an officer in His Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6) in charge of Section IX, its anti-Soviet unit. Burgess was in the BBC and then the Foreign Office. Maclean was a fast-rising British diplomat—in the Paris embassy on the eve of the German invasion, later in the Washington embassy, and a member of the Joint Policy Committee, an Anglo-American group that dealt with atomic bomb matters. Cairncross was secretary to Lord Hankey, minister without portfolio in Churchill’s War Cabinet, and had such access to British secrets that he was able to tell Moscow in September 1941 that Britain was going to build an atomic bomb, only five days after the government had made that decision.[1] Blunt, the most aristocratic of the five, was a distant cousin of the Queen and a well-known scholar of seventeenth-century French art at Cambridge who later became director of the Courtauld Institute in London. As a member of MI5 during World War II, he was privy to Ultra, Britain’s top-secret code-breaking operation, and passed to Moscow what he learned from Ultra of German military plans.

By any reckoning this would make these traitors one of the most successful espionage rings in history. But now S.J. Hamrick, a former American Foreign Service officer, has plowed through practically all the books on the subject and consulted intelligence documents recently declassified in Washington, London, and Moscow and arrived at a new conclusion about them. He paid particular attention to the Venona archive, a cache of encrypted Soviet intelligence cables that were read by British and American code-breakers during the cold war. Some of the cables were released by the US National Security Agency and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in 1995 and 1996. Hamrick’s research has enabled him to show in a most convincing manner that the accepted accounts of the espionage of Philby, Burgess, and Maclean are at best flawed, and often plain wrong. Well, a lot of spy stories are wrong; neither spies nor intelligence services are given to writing to authors or newspapers to put the record straight. A book correcting errors and exaggerations in the accounts of the Ring of Five might interest spy buffs, but what new material does Hamrick claim to have?

In the second part of his book, Hamrick sets out to reveal a secret British deception operation which he says took advantage of the unfolding of the Philby, Burgess, and Maclean investigation to turn the tables on the KGB and its servants. The aim, as Hamrick suggests in his title, was to deceive the deceivers. Furthermore, argues Hamrick, this was accomplished without the permission or knowledge of the British or American governments. Nor was this Western deception trivial stuff, involving the doublecrosses, recruitment efforts, and other games usually played between rival intelligence agencies. The plan was intended to convince Moscow that the US and Britain were ready to mount a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union that could cost the lives of millions. This was not true and would have been a gigantic bluff to conceal the fact that the West did not have the means to do any such thing.

If this deception plan did exist and was put into operation, then Hamrick’s book reveals a cold war event of major historical importance. But he himself is quick to admit that he has no proof of such a plot. He writes, “Not one shred of documentary evidence has yet been found nor is ever likely to be found to support it.” From where, then, did he ever get the idea that it happened?

Mostly by deduction. He makes a good case that ranking members of British intelligence—among them Dick White, then of MI5, and Jack Easton of MI6—knew that Philby was a traitor well before the generally accepted date on which he fell under suspicion—May 1951. But since they allowed him to continue his work for Moscow, Hamrick concludes they must have been using him in a deception operation. He then produces a source to confirm both his theory and the nature of the deception:

In 1976 an experienced and respected US army intelligence officer then in retirement disclosed that Philby had been used in Washington “to pass fictitious information about the effectiveness of the Strategic Air Command and the size of the US atomic arsenal at the time of the Korean War.” The comment was made by General Edwin L. Sibert during a series of conversations with Anthony Cave Brown, an English writer researching a book on Sir Stewart Menzies, “C,” the Chief of MI6. Cave Brown included the remark in his Menzies biography published in 1988.

General Sibert gave no further details and since he died in 1977, Hamrick has only Cave Brown’s account on which to rely. Here we have a major difficulty: Cave Brown was a notoriously unreliable journalist and author, given to mixing fact and fantasy with a skill that made untangling them impossible. Cave Brown died in July 2006, and London’s Guardian newspaper said in an obituary that he was “a buccaneering journalist who seldom let the facts get in the way of a good story, which may explain why he took a special interest in espionage and conspiracy theories when he turned to writing books.”[2]

Without anything more substantial to justify Hamrick’s thesis, unless something emerges from the Venona or other archives that remain unreleased—a highly unlikely event—then the central part of his book, the deception operation, however plausibly presented, will remain no more than an interesting theory.

When the Ring of Five scandal was first exposed in 1967, not much was known to the public about Burgess and Maclean and virtually nothing was known about Philby. The British government had succeeded in painting the Burgess and Maclean defection to Moscow in May 1951 as a drunken impulse of two unimportant junior diplomats who were already punished by being forced to live in the USSR. Philby’s flight from Beirut to Moscow in 1963 was similarly dismissed and received little more than a few paragraphs in the British press. Then at the suggestion of Jeremy Isaacs, head of current affairs at Thames Television, and provoked by the remarks of a former Foreign Office official, John Sackur, who was seeking a job as a foreign correspondent—”You’ll never be able to publish the Philby story—it is a scandal that goes to the highest in the land”—the then editor of the London Sunday Times, Harold Evans, assigned the paper’s investigative team, Insight, on which I was then working, to look into Philby’s flight.

The Times’s editor in chief, Denis Hamilton, objected; publicity would help the Russians and could put SIS officers at risk. Hamilton went to see the prime minister, Harold Wilson, who arranged a meeting with the chief of SIS, Sir Dick White. Hamilton agreed that the Sunday Times would show SIS each article before it was published so as to make sure no one would be endangered. Hamilton did not inform the reporters working on the story of this deal but as I made inquiries among retired spies it became fairly clear that some sort of accommodation had been reached between the paper and SIS. Nevertheless, our findings were sensational. When we published the early results of our investigation, the British public learned for the first time of the Ring of Five’s betrayal. Philby’s attempts to undermine Western security, we found, had been constant and relentless, his access to our secrets apparently total. We homed in on two examples. The first was his job in charge of SIS’s anti-Soviet section. If the officer in charge of Britain’s anti-Soviet plans was a Soviet agent himself, how could any anti-Soviet operation succeed?

We looked particularly hard at Philby’s appointment in 1949 as liaison officer between British intelligence and the CIA/FBI. This post, we wrote, would have given him access to whatever the CIA was planning against Moscow, and names of whoever the FBI was investigating as possible KGB spies. We were soon joined by other journalists, historians, academics, and scriptwriters. I wrote so much about Philby in Washington that Hamilton chided me in his gentle manner that I had become Philby’s public relations officer. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who had worked for SIS, attracted attention when he suggested that if Philby had not been uncovered, in time he could well have become chief of the SIS and thus been in a position to run the intelligence cold war against the Soviet Union to Moscow’s advantage. But what most excited readers—and Hamrick misses this—is not what secrets the Ring of Five revealed, but who had revealed them. As le Carré later put it, “The avenger stole upon the citadel and destroyed it from within.” The very class of Englishman the British people relied on to protect the nation had betrayed them, and one of them none other than a distant member of the royal family. (A West End play by Alan Bennett had a scene in which the Queen, secretly aware of Blunt’s treachery, subtly tries to get him to confess to her.)

Among Philby’s deepest secrets, the story goes, was that he had access to the Venona intercepts, the name given to decrypts of cable traffic between the Soviet consulate in New York and Moscow. These cables were being painstakingly broken by American and British cryptographers and had a major part in most postwar spy cases. In early 1951 Philby realized from Venona transcripts that the FBI was closing in on Maclean, then head of the American Department of the Foreign Office, and that MI5 was planning to investigate him soon. Fearful that Maclean would crack, Philby sent Burgess from Washington to London to oversee Maclean’s escape.

Everything went wrong—an intelligence nightmare. Philby told me about this in a week-long interview in Moscow in January 1988. Burgess was to accompany Maclean across the Channel to France in case he tried to back out at the last minute. Instead, in May 1951, Burgess went too, all the way to Moscow, both never to return. Since Burgess, contrary to KGB rules, had shared a house in Washington with Philby, Philby was immediately under suspicion. He was ordered back to London from Washington, faced an inconclusive MI5 trial, and was sacked. Eventually he got a job as a correspondent for The Observer and The Economist in Beirut. He kept contact with SIS, but his career with the KGB was over.

When SIS had enough admissible evidence against Philby, it sent a senior officer to Beirut to try to get him to confess. Philby listened, procrastinated, and then, in January 1963, put into effect a KGB escape plan and went to Moscow, abandoning everyone and everything close to him: his wife, children, family, friends. After our series of articles in 1967, the subsequent books and articles produced little new information. Philby’s own book, My Silent War, was published in 1968. Heavily censored by the Soviets, often inaccurate, it was pored over by Western intelligence officers looking for clues, messages, and disinformation. They were disappointed. In 1988 Philby died in Moscow. He had said himself, a few months earlier, that he had no regrets, that he had made the right decision back in the 1930s to commit himself to communism and had looked forward to its coming triumphs.

Burgess had died in 1963 in Moscow and Maclean had died in 1983. Thus, none of the three lived to see the collapse of communism. With Philby’s book we could surely have been forgiven for thinking that the Ring of Five never faced justice. With Philby, Burgess, and Maclean dying in the USSR, and Cairncross dying in France, where he had moved as a precaution even though MI5 knew it lacked sufficient evidence to prosecute him, they got away with their treachery.

Blunt’s fate was quite different. In 1964 he accepted a deal. The government would grant him immunity from prosecution in return for a full confession and for revealing all he knew about his fellow traitors and their KGB controllers. Once he had his immunity, Blunt stalled. Years passed and despite regular interrogations MI5 considered it was getting nowhere. Meanwhile, Blunt was able to continue his successful academic career and his position as surveyor of the Queen’s pictures. He also kept his knighthood, which he had been awarded in 1956. A group of senior officers, outraged that Blunt had got away with his treachery and suspecting that his royal connections had something to do with it, embarked on a secret unauthorized campaign to “out” Blunt and destroy him. Influential journalists were briefed and one senior officer even managed to get into 10 Downing Street in June 1974 to warn the prime minister, Harold Wilson, through his Cabinet secretary, that there could be other cases of KGB penetration, possibly in the intelligence services themselves.

In 1979 Andrew Boyle, a former wartime intelligence officer turned author and broadcaster, published A Climate of Treason in which the main character, “Maurice,” is a thinly disguised Blunt. The press jumped on it and there were questions in the House of Commons. Briefed by MI5, the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, decided that Blunt’s immunity from prosecution did not include a guarantee to him of secrecy and she named him as a member of the Ring of Five. He was publicly disgraced, stripped of his honors, shunned by most of his friends and colleagues, and died four years later, aged seventy-five. With Philby’s death several years later, it seemed time to consign the entire story to cold war history.

Now Hamrick has put forward a radical new version of the Philby, Burgess, and Maclean story. He argues that we got a lot of it wrong. Quite likely. Trying to reconstruct a man’s life by interviewing his friends and colleagues, many of whom were in the intelligence world themselves, was journalistically perilous and my interview in Moscow with Philby himself, which had been arranged by the KGB, left many unanswered questions. Why did Moscow allow it? Was I being used? To what end?

Hamrick’s revisionist account forces anyone who ever wrote about Philby, Burgess, and Maclean to ask: Why didn’t we think of that at the time? The most glaring example was our mistaken belief that by being liaison officer to the CIA and FBI, Philby was at the heart of Western intelligence operations against communism. Hamrick reminds us that the CIA in 1949 was an incompetent small-scale spy service scattered all over Washington desperately looking for a role for itself. When it started promoting subversion behind the iron curtain, its plans—attempting to organize, for example, a Hungarian anti-Communist army in Austria—were so ill-conceived and so optimistic as to border on fantasy. When they failed, as they were bound to do, the CIA kept quiet until, in the 1960s, the growing celebrity of Philby offered the agency the possibility of blaming some of the failures on him. It was Philby, for example, who, according to US informants, betrayed the British plan in 1949 to drop anti-Communist, expatriate Albanians back into their country to sabotage the regime and create subversion. In consequence they were all arrested and executed. But Hamrick says Philby had little or nothing to do with the betrayal. He notes that the first British landings on the Albanian coast had already taken place by the time Philby arrived in Washington, and that there is no evidence that he had been informed about them. He also lacked a good courier to the KGB at that time.

Hamrick seems to me right. By an odd coincidence, I met a former high-ranking officer of the Albanian secret police at a diplomatic party in London a few years ago. He insisted that his agents had penetrated all the Albanian émigré organizations, that they knew about the British plan early on, and that Philby was not involved. His claims, if he was willing to repeat them, could have provided the beginning of an inquiry into the truth about Philby’s espionage; but such an inquiry will probably never be made.

Hamrick says that there were many strange anomalies in the Philby case that should have alerted all of us to the possibility that there was more going on in Washington at the time than we imagined. Maclean’s escape plan in retrospect seems silly. If the aim was to get Maclean to safety in Moscow before MI5 could interrogate him, and to have Burgess accompany him so that he would be sure to get there, why send Burgess to London by sea? Why allow him to hang around in New York enjoying a long goodbye before embarking? In allowing this delay, what could Philby have been thinking? Hamrick quotes Rebecca West as wondering why Philby did not simply hand over the problem to Moscow.

After all, in the summer of 1950, the KGB had quickly spirited Morris and Lona Cohen, an American husband-and-wife spy team, out of the US, a step ahead of the FBI. KGB agents since 1938, they had delivered stolen atomic secrets from Los Alamos to the Soviet consulate in New York. As Lona Cohen recalled in Moscow in 1990, “A comrade came to our apartment and wrote a note, in case the FBI was listening, ordering us to leave the country immediately. We were gone within the hour.”[3]

Much of the accepted Philby, Burgess, and Maclean story does not make sense. Hamrick’s main point is that there were people on both sides of the Atlantic in 1949 and 1950 who thought that Philby was a dubious character with a suspicious past. He had left-wing beliefs at Cambridge; in Vienna in 1934 he married Litzi Friedman, a known Communist activist; he worked for the Communist underground in Austria. Most suspicious of all, there was the case of Konstantin Volkov, a KGB officer in Turkey in 1945 who had offered to defect and bring with him the names of Soviet agents in Britain. Sent from London by SIS to handle the defection, Philby, worried that Volkov might be able to expose him, tipped off the KGB, which immediately spirited Volkov back to Moscow, never to be seen again.

As for Maclean, Hamrick says that Dick White, the chief of MI5, believed that his guilt had been established beyond question by the 1948–1950 Venona decrypts. So in 1950 we have the chief of MI5 sitting on proof that Maclean is a traitor, and several senior British intelligence officers privately convinced—but without sufficient evidence—that Philby is too. Yet they did not act on this information until a year later. It is Hamrick’s contention that some of these officers took matters into their own hands to mount a deception operation against Moscow and chose the principal traitor, Kim Philby, as their conduit to do it. Why does he believe that they would want to do this?

Hamrick recalls that in 1949 and 1950, the West was in fear of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The Red Army had 400,000 men at arms within striking distance of Berlin. A few senior military officers and Royal Air Force officers backed by some like-minded Americans believed that the threat of atomic retaliation was the most effective deterrent against Moscow. The US Air Force had a war plan: “Trojan,” which provided for the nuclear bombing of some two hundred Russian cities. The problem was that the West did not have the atomic bombs or the planes to carry out such an operation. Trojan and any other Anglo-US war plans were largely illusory and required a nuclear arsenal and a strategic strike force that would be inadequate for years to come. It was all a bluff.

Hamrick writes that the Western military planners failed to realize the respect that Stalin had for the US as the strongest nation on earth. But what mattered was what Washington and London thought Stalin believed. Many Western leaders were troubled by his apparent dismissal of the atomic bomb’s war-winning powers and troubled even more by Soviet doubt that the West was actually willing to use the bomb.

The British chiefs of staff, according to Hamrick, thought that the best deterrent against a Soviet attack would be “our known preparedness to defend ourselves and to hit back.” The only effective deterrent to a potential aggressor was tangible evidence of “known preparedness.” The vital word is “known.” It had to be known to Moscow. A propaganda campaign with blustering anti-Soviet speeches by politicians would not have worked. What the Anglo-American military planners needed was a way to let the Russians know about their plans for use of atomic weapons in retaliation for any Russian attack, and that they were willing to act on them.

The best possible way would be to get a message to Moscow through a Soviet agent so well placed in the West that theoretically he would have access to such secrets and be so completely trusted by the KGB that there would be no question about the authenticity of his information. He would need to have shown deep ideological commitment to communism and unswerving loyalty over a long period. Hamrick argues that Kim Philby, with his well-known left-wing background, would have been an ideal choice. Moreover, the way to plant the deceptive information on him without arousing his suspicions was already in place. MI6 in London ran a special high-security communications channel with the British embassy in Washington. The officer who handled the Washington end of this channel, encrypting and decrypting all the traffic, was Kim Philby.

Hamrick’s theory is that Philby would have read and passed on to Moscow a message or messages emphasizing the West’s determination to use the atomic bomb if need be, outlining collaboration between the RAF and then Strategic Air Command, and giving details of the Trojan war plan. The beauty of the plan was that if Philby were not a KGB agent, as the conspirators believed, and did not pass the information to Moscow, nothing would have been lost.

I have said earlier that the only hint that Hamrick can muster that any such deception operation occurred came to him via the work of Anthony Cave Brown, an author notorious for his cavalier attitude toward facts. And there is another difficulty with his story. Hamrick says Philby was the ideal Soviet agent on whom to plant the deceptive material because he was so well trusted by the KGB. But he was not. He had fallen prey to a paradoxical phenomenon in the intelligence game: often, the better the information a spy provides his masters, the less likely he is to be believed. Throughout Philby’s career with the KGB some new, ambitious case officer in Moscow would look at Philby’s file and wonder about the volume and apparent value of his material.

We know that in 1942 the KGB did what all intelligence services do when doubtful about an agent—it handed Philby’s entire file to a trusted desk officer who had previously had nothing to do with him and was therefore impartial, and asked for an evaluation. In Philby’s case, the officer was a woman, Elena Modrzhinskaya. According to Russian author Genrikh Borovik in his book The Philby Files,[4] the first point Elena Modrzhinskaya raised was: Could the British Secret Intelligence Service really be run by such fools that no one had noticed that precious information was leaking to Moscow? Steadily she developed the case against Philby. She noted that, without exception, his Soviet controllers had been shot for being German or Polish spies, or had defected to the West.

Then came the piece of evidence that Modrzhinskaya thought clinched matters. The British had intercepted and decoded a telegram from the Japanese ambassador in Berlin to his foreign minister in Tokyo. Philby copied it and passed it on to the KGB. But Moscow already had a copy from another source and when it compared the two, the final paragraph was missing from Philby’s version. In it the Japanese ambassador suggested that Hitler might soon try to make a separate peace with Stalin, a vital piece of information.

Philby’s controller demanded an explanation from Philby. The answer, Philby said, was simple—at the time the British intercepted the message, radio reception was very poor, so the last part was garbled and could not be decoded. The KGB refused to believe him and accepted Modrzhinskaya’s conclusion—Philby was an SIS plant and so too were Burgess, Blunt, and Cairncross. Maclean was a genuine recruit but he was being secretly manipulated by the others.

Her conclusion was, of course, totally wrong. But according to Borovik, who had access to Philby’s personal KGB file, having made this decision the KGB bosses now displayed the twisted logic that distinguishes spying from other human activities. The reasoning in Moscow went: Elena Modrzhinskaya has made out such a powerful case against Philby and his colleagues that we will have to act on it. But what if in the end she turns out to be wrong? We could be blamed for having got rid of four devoted penetration agents. We might be shot. So let’s not cut off contact with these English agents altogether. If they are working for the British they will have to give us some genuine material to maintain their credibility and that material will be valuable to us. We will pretend that nothing has happened and do our best to reinforce Philby’s conviction that we trust him and his Cambridge colleagues completely.

Hamrick is aware of this background and therefore that the deceptive operation, if it did indeed exist, could have failed because the KGB did not entirely trust Philby. (Hamrick quotes Borovik extensively, lists his book in his notes, and describes him as “a valuable source.”) But he is dismissive of the Modrzhinskaya affair: “During the 1940s,” he writes, “Moscow Center suspected [Philby] of being a disinformation agent under British control,” but he adds that those doubts had passed, a claim which, in view of the KGB’s cultivation and use of agents over decades, seems highly unlikely.

Hamrick has written a valuable book because it challenges many of our assumptions about the most-discussed espionage events of the cold war. But it fails when it tries to show that an anonymous group of Anglo-American military intelligence officers turned these events around and deceived the deceivers. Hamrick prudently excuses in advance his lack of evidence for this: “Military and intelligence operations that leave no paper behind don’t exist except in memory. And after the memories have perished, nothing is left.”

[1] See Nigel West, Mortal Crimes (Enigma, 2004), p. 15.

[2] Dan van der Vat, “Anthony Cave Brown,” The Guardian, October 17, 2006.

[3] They later turned up in London as Peter and Helen Kroger, ostensibly antiquarian book dealers, but actually communications officers for Conon Molody, who ran the Portland Naval Base spy ring. Exposed by Molody’s sloppy spycraft, they were sentenced to twenty years in jail, only to be exchanged after eight years for Gerald Brooke, a British lecturer, held in the USSR for distributing anti-Soviet pamphlets in Moscow. This was a deal so favorable to the KGB that it has remained inexplicable to this day. Lona died in Moscow in 1992 and Morris died a year later.

[4] Little, Brown, 1994.

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Published in The Independent on Sunday, 26 November 2006.

The FSB has what in police parlance is called ‘previous form’

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.

Old and new defectors rushed to agree, Oleg Gordievsky among them. President Vladimir Putin, himself a former KGB officer, has vigorously denied this charge, as has the FSB. But the trouble is spies as a breed find treachery hard to forgive. And the FSB has what in police parlance is called “previous form”. When it was still the KGB, or the Cheka, or the OGPU or the NKVD, it became notorious for boldness and ruthlessness in eliminating “enemies of the state”.

In the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, its officers struck frequently at White Russian émigrés in France. Operating out of the Soviet embassy or “safe houses”, an assassination team would find the target, drive alongside him in the street, often in daylight, shoot him dead and vanish before the police could react. The assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940 – an icepick in the head – demonstrated how far Soviet intelligence could reach.

When it was considered politically important that a death should remain unsolved, “defenestration” was the method favoured. The victim plunged to his death from a high window, leaving the possibility that he fell, jumped or was pushed – accident, suicide or murder. Poisoning has similar ambivalence.

In 1978, Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian defector, died after a Bulgarian security service officer fired a ricin-tipped dart into his leg from an umbrella gun as on Waterloo Bridge. The KGB provided the equipment.

Other techniques remain a mystery. Russian defector Walter Krivitsky, who had been a Soviet military intelligence “illegal” in western Europe until his defection to the US in 1937, was found shot dead in his Washington hotel room in 1941. The door was locked from inside and three suicide notes were found. But Krivitsky had told friends the KGB was after him and that if he were to be found dead, then he had been murdered.

But the Russian services are not alone. Frank Olson was a civilian biochemist working on biological warfare for the US Army. He also had links with the CIA which felt he was talking too freely. In November 1953 he plunged to death from the 13th floor of a hotel in New York. In 1975, a congressional inquiry was told the CIA had been experimenting with mind-bending drugs and, unknown to Olson, he was a guineapig. The CIA said he had jumped while on the drugs. Olson’s son Eric is convinced his father was murdered to silence him.

In Britain, the MI5 officer David Shayler served seven weeks in jail for breaking the Official Secrets Act by criticising MI5 and MI6 operations. The government has pursued the former MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson with legal actions after he criticised his service and revealed the names of some officers.

The former FBI agent Robert Hanssen is serving life without parole in a “supermax” US prison for passing secrets to Moscow, including the names of CIA agents there. He is allowed no visits, no letters, no phone calls and no reading matter. Spooks don’t like disloyalty. The Russians thought Litvinenko was disloyal.

Published in The Independent on Sunday, 13 August 2006

We have been conned for years over our airport security.

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.

Their assets have been seized, they are being questioned, and, after a security alert at the highest level and enormous disruption at our airports, we are getting back to normal. But consider this. Instead of celebrating the undoubted skill and dedication of MI5 and the police, the Government should also admit that the affair has revealed that we have been conned for years over our airport security.

We had been led to believe that every possible precaution had been taken to prevent a terrorist carrying a bomb on to a plane in hand luggage. This turns out not to be true. Against the type of attack the group was allegedly plotting, we would have been defenceless.

Original ideas for terrorist outrages are hard to dream up. There is a limit to what is effective, headline-grabbing and yet feasible. Al-Qa’ida’s destruction of the twin towers in 2001, by turning civilian airliners into enormous missiles, set a standard that terrorists have been trying to replicate ever since.

They have been frustrated by new anti-hijacking security measures (armoured doors to the flight deck, the banning of sharp objects from hand luggage and passenger profiling). But did no anti-terrorist officer step into a terrorist’s mindset to think, “OK, I can’t hijack the aircraft and fly it into a building. But I can still turn a plane into a missile by blowing it up from the inside while it’s over a densely- populated area of London or New York”? Then the officer would have moved on to the problem of how to get the explosive on to the aircraft. The most effective explosive made from ingredients available to amateurs involves large quantities of agricultural fertiliser. This sort of bomb, once favoured by the IRA, could be quickly ruled out because it is bulky and is hardly the sort of substance one could explain to an airport security officer searching hand luggage.

But there are other explosives that can be made from ingredients available at any chemist’s shop. The amounts needed are comparatively small and can be disguised as cosmetics, drinks or medicine. Police say that this is what the group arrested on Wednesday and Thursday was planning to use, taking the ingredients on board separately and then mixing them in the aircraft’s toilet.

Amazingly, it turns out that this had been done before. So not only did the anti-terrorist authorities fail to think like terrorists, they could not have taken sufficient note of the earlier event and the lessons it held.

In 1994, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, a Pakistani linked to al-Qa’ida, carried the ingredients for a bomb on to a Philippine Airlines flight bound for the United States. They were in his hand luggage in innocuous-looking containers, including a bottle of contact lens solution. He mixed them together in the plane’s toilet, attached a timer, put the bomb beneath a passenger seat, and then got off the plane at the next refuelling stop.

Soon after take-off the bomb exploded, killing a Japanese businessman occupying the seat and tearing a two foot hole in the cabin floor, revealing the cargo hold beneath. But the fuselage of the plane remained intact and the pilot managed to land safely at Okinawa, with the Japanese the only casualty.

But Yousef’s success in getting a bomb through security and on to a plane highlighted serious security weaknesses. While all luggage that will go into a plane’s cargo hold is screened for explosives, few pieces of hand baggage are. They go through X-ray machines which can pick up the wires of a bomb’s detonator, but X-rays and metal detectors cannot show whether a bag contains explosives – or the ingredients for explosives.

The technology is there – “puffer machines” blow air over passengers and hand baggage to detect whether either have come into contact with explosives. But Peter DeFazio, a member of the US Congress Aviation Subcommittee, says, “We have done nothing at checkpoints to detect the kind of bomb that Yousef designed and which is available to be copied on the internet. That is just unconscionable.”

The unanswered question is whether it is possible to make a chemical bomb of the kind Yousef used that would be big enough to bring down a modern airliner. Experts say that it would depend on the location of the device. If it were to destroy structural elements of the plane, or its fuel lines, then it would crash. But most planes could survive if the bomb blew out only the aluminium sheeting of the fuselage.

How much of all this did our anti-terrorism forces know? They must have studied the Yousef case. But then why did they leave it until last Thursday to implement measures to prevent bomb ingredients being carried on to aircraft in passengers’ hand baggage? And then announce it in such a dramatic manner?

The most obvious reason is that they received last-minute intelligence that the plot was reaching a climax. And without knowing much more about the plotters’ background they were unable to assess how technically competent at bomb-making they might be.

For although the ingredients for a chemical bomb are reasonably easy to obtain, it turns out that successfully mixing them is much harder and more dangerous than it at first appeared. Some of the ingredients may be commercially available but they are too diluted to be of any use in a bomb. Others require chemical refining to purify them. The terrorist could end up blowing his fingers off or setting fire to himself but leaving the aircraft toilet intact. The authorities had to assume, however, that they were dealing with skilled bomb-makers.

As for the dramatic way the news was announced, there is more than just a sneaking suspicion that it suits governments to ramp up the terrorist threat because a sliver of fear makes its citizens easier to lead and control. They can always argue, as the Prime Minister has, that it would be irresponsible not to act on warnings or unverified information – even if these turn out to be wrong – because what if they turn out to be right? In short, we can expect more warnings, not fewer.

And yet we stubbornly refuse to be moved by them. On Thursday, no one panicked. Passengers at airports, interviewed about their reaction, showed a marked reluctance to cancel their flights. The stock market shivered but recovered. On Friday the pubs and restaurants were as crowded as ever. Why aren’t we more afraid? One answer is that, although the authorities seem confident that they have thwarted a well-organised and dangerous conspiracy, we have seen previous “threats” crumble away. Since 9/11 there have been more than 600 arrests in Britain to do with terrorism matters. Only 100 of these people were charged and fewer than 20 have so far been convicted. Rightly or wrongly, there is a feeling that the security services and the police, both with increased staffing levels and better funding, want to be seen to be doing their job. Raids and arrests generate good publicity.

A journalist once put it to Dame Stella Rimington, former director-general of MI5, that the threat of terrorism had been overcooked. Surprisingly, she agreed. “You are more likely to be run over by a bus,” she said.

“It’s difficult for me to say,” she continued, “because I’ve been out of it for 10 years. I’ve no doubt, though, from what people who do know say, that there are a large number of plots. But at the back of all this, I feel we are tending towards this sense that we must all be 100 per cent safe, and I suppose my feeling is that a better way of presenting it is to say the world is a difficult and dangerous place, and we have to make choices about how much of our civil liberties we want to give up.”

So what will happen next? It’s a safe bet that the era of easy, carry-on cabin baggage is over. Security checks will get tougher and check-in times longer. We might even have to contemplate CCTV cameras in airline toilets.

And, hopefully, our anti-terrorism forces will adopt one of the few pieces of good advice that the US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has ever given. Once, when seeking to shake up the CIA, he called for a more intuitive approach to anti-terrorist intelligence. Our security services, he said, should “put themselves into the other guy’s shoes and think like him”.

Phillip Knightley is author of ‘The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century‘.

Published in The Daily Mail, 10 August 2006

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?

Those running the operation that resulted in the arrests of a group of 21 people faced this crucial decision on Wednesday night.

The group had been under investigation for several months by MI5, the police, and other agencies not yet named.

All believed that they had strong evidence that the group had been planning to attack at least ten aircraft en route to the United States, using explosives in hand luggage.

This would have caused deaths on “an unprecedented scale”, the Home Secretary said, and, according to police deputy commissioner Paul Stephenson, “it became essential we took action”.

What had suddenly happened? Why did the authorities turn the nation’s airports into “no-go” areas full of police and security guards and suggest, as the Home Secretary did, that Britain was facing as big a threat as the Second World War?

The obvious reason is that the alert level now has to be made public and enhanced security measures at airports and the cancellation of hundreds of flights made it impossible to keep this low-key.

But there is more to it than this. We have to consider how this group came to the attention of MI5 and the way, along with the police, it was running the operation. We can rule out any suggestion that MI5 stumbled on the group by accident.

Modern terrorists are sophisticated, and skilled at avoiding silly mistakes – like using mobile phones to contact each other.

They meet clandestinely and face-to-face and they are trained at avoiding even professional shadowers. So it is most likely that the group came to MI5’s attention through an informer – possibly the same one whose information led to the Forest Gate raid.

MI5 then put the key members of the group, or possibly the whole group, under electronic and visual surveillance.

John Reid hinted at this when he said that the authorities had to weigh the fact that closing down the group risked exposing sources against the need to protect public safety. There has been a suggestion that the operation was brought forward because U.S. intelligence agencies, which had been tipped off, did not have to patience to sit on the information.

Alternatively, on Wednesday night, something the group said or did made MI5 realise that if the police did not move immediately “there would be the risk of terrible consequences”. One thing could be that surveillance revealed the group had the devices it needed for its attacks on the planes.

To assess the risk we still face, we must know whether the authorities seized these devices in their raids. If they are still out there, then they are still a threat.

John Reid says that “the main players” are in custody. But what about any minor players-And what were the devices? If they were explosives, what sort were they and how come none of the detection devices at airports were capable of picking them up?

The authorities say that the group had devised an explosive made from a series of apparently innocuous ingredients. The plan was to carry them on board the aircraft disguised as shampoo, hair gel and cosmetics.

By themselves, such items would not attract the attention of the airport security guards.

Once on board the plane, the bomb ingredients could have been mixed in the toilet ready to be detonated. There is a sinister link here with the chemical weapon which the police searched for unsuccessfully during the Forest Gate raid. There the MI5 informer told of a “chemical bomb” made from ingredients that appeared harmless by themselves but which, when mixed with osmium tetroxide, turned into a weapon – the release of which could cause death by choking.

It seems likely that the idea of beating security checks by taking the ingredients on to a plane separately may have spread from one group to another.

We probably will not know until any case against the ‘players’ comes to court – or is dropped – whether the authorities were right to act when they did. But what is certain is that we can expect more warnings, not fewer.

In response, the public must strike the right balance: be calm yet vigilant, something we are rather good at.

Personally, I take comfort with this thought: if they know a terrorist attack is imminent, then why is our Prime Minister still on holiday in the West Indies?

Phillip Knightley is author of The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century.

Published in The Daily Mail, 6 June 2006

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 aim of every MI5 officer is to find and then recruit a penetration agent. This is particularly so with antiterrorist operations since 9/11, because no amount of training would enable a Western security officer to pass as a Muslim terrorist.

So what MI5 officers are always looking for is someone in a terrorist cell, someone close to the leaders and totally trusted by them. Such a recruit could be immensely valuable, and once he or she proved their worth could be kept in place for years, as was the case in Northern Ireland.

We can imagine the delight when MI5 appeared to have found and recruited a British Muslim prepared to work for it and inform on fellow Muslims who might be planning terrorist acts.

But problems arose when this agent reported to his MI5 handler that Abul Kahar Kalam, 23, and his brother Abul Koyair Kalam, 20, both British-born Muslims, were storing a tiny, homemade bomb at their home in Lansdown Road, Forest Gate.

He said he had seen the device, described it and drew a sketch of it from memory. It was small enough, he said, to be carried in a vest or jacket and he thought it contained cyanide.

The MI5 handler reported this to his superiors and it was passed up the

chain of command to the head of MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller. Then began the automatic checking for accuracy, reliability and feasibility to which any report from an agent is subjected.

The handler reported on his assessment of the agent’s reliability. Was it feasible that he was so trusted he would have been able to see the cyanide device? Yes, the handler said.

MI5’s scientific officers reported that the agent’s description of the bomb and his sketch showed no obvious flaws. Outside help was called in and experts from the Government’s biochemical centre at Porton Down said they could not dismiss the agent’s story out of hand.

This was the moment for difficult decisions. Ideally, MI5 would have liked to have tested its penetration agent over a longer period, to have gone back to him with a series of questions from the Porton Down experts, to wait to see what else he may report.

The stakes were high. If the agent’s information was correct then MI5 had a man at the heart of a terrorist group in London. It would have advance warning not only of possible attacks by this group but by others as well.

This could be a breakthrough in the war against terrorism in Britain for years to come.

But its agent had been unable to give even an estimate of when the device might be used.

There are indications that MI5 tried to find out more from other sources. Someone put the Lansdown Road house under surveillance. Locals recall suspicious cars parked at either end of the road, with bored men behind the wheel and a litter of empty coffee cups on the dashboard.

But surveillance produced nothing conclusive. Nor did a telephone tap. Time was ticking away. What if the terrorists exploded the chemical bomb in a Tube train or a pub or a disco while MI5 was still investigating how good its penetration agent’s information was?

The resulting public outcry would blow MI5 out of the water.

Finally, MI5 felt it had no choice. Dame Manningham-Buller informed the UK antiterror chief, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, of its agent and his information and at a meeting last Thursday, the matter was thrashed out.

Such meetings are always awkward. There is no love lost between the police and MI5. The police regard MI5 officers as arrogant and overpaid. They believe that they could do a much better job and do not hesitate to say so.

And they suspect both MI5 and MI6 of being in the governmentof-the-day’s pocket, of being prepared – as with the ‘dodgy dossier’ on Iraq – to bend their intelligence reports to suit their political masters.

MI5 regards the police as plodders and thief catchers, not up to the subtlety of counterterrorism work, and they resent the fact that for years they had to ask Special Branch to carry out arrests on MI5’s behalf, depriving them of the thrill of the ‘collar’.

In last week’s case, the police were reluctant to move too quickly.

If anything went wrong – as it appears to have done – they would carry the can, and after the fiasco of the shooting on the Tube of an innocent man, Jean Charles de Menezes, following the July 7 terror attacks, they would suffer a further loss of public confidence.

But MI5 was now pressing for urgent action so as to cover its own back and, authorised at the highest level, last Friday’s operation went ahead.

There is evidence of how unhappy the police were in some of their public statements.

Asked about the raid, Peter Clarke could have said: “We believed that there was a clear and present danger of a terrorist attack in London. We raided the Lansdown Road house to arrest people we had reason to fear might be connected with the planning of such an attack.”

Instead, he said that MI5 had given the police ‘very specific’ allegations: “The intelligence was such that it demanded an intensive investigation and response. The purpose of the investigation, after ensuring public safety, is to prove or disprove the intelligence that we have received.

“This is always difficult, and sometimes the only way to do so is to mount an operation such as that which we carried out.”

This was, in effect, passing the buck back to MI5. It implied that the police were doing MI5’s job for them.

If MI5 could not be certain that its agent’s information was right or wrong, then the police would find out once and for all by raiding the house mentioned in the agent’s report.

The pity is that although the agent may have been wrong about the chemical bomb, he might have come up with further information in the future that would turn out to be spot on.

But it appears that not only is he now discredited, but that his cover might have been blown and he could be in danger.

All of which shows the magnitude of the task our intelligence services face – and how important it is that they work together rather than as rivals.

Phillip Knightley is the author of The Second Oldest Profession: Spies And Spying In The 20th Century.

Published in The Bulletin, 29 April 2004

The bottom line at the top of the intelligence pyramid is protect your patch at all costs. It is a mindset that has cost many lives to terror attacks because of a lack of communication. And, amazingly, no heads have rolled, as Phillip Knightley reports.

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.

How to avoid enquiries into their efficiency? How to avoid the budget cuts which governments were demanding as a “peace dividend”? And, above all, how to avoid anyone asking:“Do we now need these organisations at all, and if so, how best to organise them?”

The CIA’s reaction was to suggest in the early 1990s that it should take over the war on the international drugs trade. It was quickly seen off by the Drug Enforcement Administration which, from years of experience, knew how to handle trespassers on its turf.

The British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) persuaded the government to expand its mission statement to include the protection of the nation’s economic well-being. It then turned to commercial and industrial espionage and took to spying on Britain’s trade rivals even if, like France and Germany, they were technically friends.

And all the while Osama bin Laden was out there plotting away, putting the finishing touches to 9/11, doing it in languages and dialects no one in the CIA, the FBI, the DIA, the NSA, GCHQ, JIC, CIS and all those other alphabet soup services could understand—even if “the listeners”, the NSA and Britain’s GCHQ, had been able to intercept them in the first place.

As for infiltrating bin Laden’s group, forget about it. Back in the 19th century the intelligence officer and Arabist Richard Burton, might have got into Mecca disguised as a Muslim pilgrim. But can anyone imagine a 21st century CIA officer, used to his office comforts, passing himself off as a bin Laden follower?

So it is accepted that 9/11 came right out of the blue and the intelligence services are blameless. President Bush says no one had any idea that terrorists might hijack a plane and fly it into a building. And even if America did, the argument goes, how could anyone have known where and when such an attack would take place?

Wait a minute. Can our memories be so short? The hijacking of aircraft by aggrieved Arab groups goes back to the 1970s – remember all those hijacked aircraft lined up on an airfield in Jordan before they were blown up? The use of trucks or boats loaded with explosives and driven by suicide bombers goes back to the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 (a truck with a suicide driver), the bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobi in August 1998 (a truck with a suicide bomber), and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000 (a boat with a suicide bomber). Did no one in the US intelligence community paid to think about these things put it all together and say, “What if instead of a truck or a boat a terrorist hijacked a plane and used it as a suicide bomb against an American target?”

What target? Well, Arab terrorists had already tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993. Did it not occur to American intelligence officers that terrorists night try it again? That leaves “When?” It has now been revealed at the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the US that there was a stream of reports between April and July 2001 that said that bin Laden was preparing a big attack.

If some bright intelligence officer had put it all together, the world might today be a different place. The sort of heavy security now in force at all American airports might, just might, have stopped the 9/11 hijackers before they got on the planes. So post Cold War western intelligence was off to a dismal start but since then has it been catching up?

Unfortunately no. Two years on, what do we really know about al-Qaida? Is it an organisation or an idea? If it is an organisation, how is it organised? How big is it? What are its aims? Where is it based? How is it controlled? (The idea that the ailing bin Laden runs the whole show from a mountain cave in Afghanistan is ludicrous.)

We are constantly told that certain terrorist organisations have “links” to al-Qaida but we are never told what these links are and how they are maintained. The only answer to any of these questions I have been able to elicit came from Professor Amin Saikal of the ANU Canberra when he spoke at the Sydney Institute on 1 April. I asked him:“What is al Qaida?” and he replied, “It’s a franchise operation.”

So the West had this catastrophic intelligence failure over 9/11. Then we had the intelligence failure of East Timor. Even though Lieut.Col. Lance Collins, probably the best and brightest military intelligence officer this country has ever produced, got it right, no one would listen to him.

Then all the intelligence services got the Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq wrong, probably because they were looking the wrong way. Here the point is that there are WMD in Iraq and they HAVE been found. They are called small arms. Most wars since World War 2 have been fought with them and every year they kill more people than the casualties caused by the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

One of the last acts of the dying regime of Saddam Hussein was to throw open Iraq’s arsenals and the largest transfer of small arms from a state to its citizens in the history of modern warfare took place. Iraqi citizens queued up to help themselves to the Kalashnikovs, rocket-propelled grenades, grenades, and pistols they are now using with such deadly effect against the Coalition forces. Philip Alpers, of the Small Arms Survey in Geneva, estimates that there are now between eight and fourteen million small arms in civilian hands in Iraq: “They have the best claim to be a weapon of mass destruction.”

He says further that efforts by the Coalition forces to tackle this huge problem are being hampered by the United States gun lobby which is pushing the view that any constitution for a new Iraq must have an American Second Amendment type clause giving citizens the right to bear arms. So we have had this long string of intelligence failures and a series of pathetic excuses – “The FBI and the CIA weren’t talking to each other… FBI agents weren’t even talking to fellow agents because they were worried that their conversations were being recorded and might be used by defence lawyers… A war game in which a plane was hijacked and flown into the Pentagon was vetoed because it didn’t fit the game’s objectives.”

And how many intelligence heads have rolled? None. Not a single one. Not here. Not in Britain. Not in the United States. The only casualties – and fatal ones at that – have been foot soldiers: Merv Jenkins in Australia and David Kelly in Britain. Each took his own life because he had been made a scapegoat. Jenkins, a Defence Intelligence Organisation officer, suicided after the Australian government discovered that, in addition to passing to his American counterparts doctored reports about the imminent turmoil in East Timor – as ordered by his bosses – he was also giving them the truth.

And in Britain, Dr. David Kelly, a Ministry of Defence intelligence intelligence expert, suicided after he was reprimanded for being too frank with a BBC journalist about the lack of evidence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. The intelligence community and its political masters have to be called to account. At the moment they are centres of power at the heart of democracies but responsible only to themselves.

How each country tackles this problem will vary. But Australia could set the trend by an early Royal Commission into the issues that Lieut.Col. Collins has so courageously raised.

Phillip Knightley is an award-winning Australian journalist who has lived most of his life in London. He is the author of several books including The First Casualty, a history of war correspondents, and Philby: KGB Masterspy.

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.

Published in The Independent, 27 February 2004

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 NSA costs at least $3.5bn (£1.9bn) a year to run. It employs at least 20,000 officers (not counting the 100,000 servicemen and civilians around the world over whom it has control). Its shredders process 40 tons of paper a day.

Its junior partner is Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, the eavesdropping organisation for which Katharine Gun worked. Like NSA, GCHQ is a highly secret operation. Until 1983, when one of its officers, Geoffrey Prime, was charged with spying for the Russians, the Government had refused to reveal what GCHQ’s real role was, no doubt because its operations in peacetime were without a legal basis. Its security is maintained by massive and deliberately intimidating security.

Newspapers have been discouraged from mentioning it; a book by a former GCHQ officer, Jock Kane, was seized by Special Branch police officers and a still photograph of its headquarters was banned by the Independent Broadcasting Authority, leaving a blank screen during a World in Action programme. As with NSA, the size of GCHQ’s staff at Cheltenham, about 6,500, gives no real indication of its strength. It has monitoring stations in Cyprus, West Germany, and Australia and smaller ones elsewhere. Much of its overseas work is done by service personnel.

Its budget is thought to be more than £300m a year. A large part of this is funded by the United States in return for the right to run NSA listening stations in Britain – Chicksands, Bedfordshire; Edzell, Scotland; Mentworth Hill, Harrogate; Brawdy, Wales – and on British territory around the world.

The collaboration between the two agencies offers many advantages to both. Not only does it make monitoring the globe easier, it solves tricky legal problems and is the basis of the Prime Minister’s statement yesterday that all Britain’s bugging is lawful. The two agencies simply swap each other’s dirty work.

GCHQ eavesdrops on calls made by American citizens and the NSA monitors calls made by British citizens, thus allowing each government plausibly to deny it has tapped its own citizens’ calls, as they do. The NSA station at Menwith Hill intercepts all international telephone calls made from Britain and GCHQ has a list of American citizens whose phone conversations interest the NSA.

The NSA request to GCHQ for help in bugging the diplomats from those nations who were holding out for a second Security Council resolution to authorise an attack on Iraq is unsurprising. Nor is it surprising that both organisations wanted to provide their political masters with recordings of private conversations of high-ranking international diplomats.

It is not difficult. Listening “bugs” can be planted in phones, electrical plugs, desk lamps and book spines. Given a clear line of sight, one device enables someone to detect and and interpret sound waves vibrating against the glass window panes of an office.

Bugging the world is not the problem. The problem is avoiding drowning in a sea of information. We should not be surprised that GCHQ and NSA eavesdrop on us. We pay them to do it. We should be asking: “Do they earn their keep?” And, unless we get a few more whistle-blowers like Ms Gun, we will not know, because both agencies surround themselves with a wall of secrecy.

Published in The Independent on Sunday, 1 February 2004

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”.

So let us do it for him and look at what was happening in the intelligence services at the time and what their relationship was with the Prime Minister.

Intelligence officers, particularly those on the security side, are by nature anti-Labour. But the Prime Minister made his peace with them early on and won them over just as he won over big business. He increased their budgets, spoke up for them in public and convinced them New Labour could be as ardent a defender of the Realm as any Conservative government.

In return they gave him what he wanted to help achieve his political ends. John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) and probably the next director general of MI6, was a “mate” of spin doctor Alastair Campbell. And even Lord Hutton thought Blair’s desire to make a strong case for war might have “sub-consciously” influenced Scarlett’s JIC dossier.

There’s not much anyone can do about this relationship because of the fascination that intelligence holds for many world leaders, from Winston Churchill through John F. Kennedy to Tony Blair. This, and the many works of spy fiction, from James Bond to John le Carré, have made the intelligence officer one of the most potent images of our age.

There was a fleeting hope that the collapse of communism and the loss of their major enemy might have weakened the power of the intelligence services. But then terrorism gave them a new lease of life with new names, new faces, new acronyms, almost limitless funding and the power to direct our lives and define reality for us. And they are brilliant bureaucrats.

The last time I looked at the reporting procedures of MI6, MI5, the listening service GCHQ and the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) it went like this: SIS reported to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), the Overseas Economic Intelligence Committee (OEIC) and the Co-ordinator of Intelligence and Security (CIS) in the Cabinet Office. MI5 reported to the OEIC, CIS and the Official Committee on Security (OCS). GCHQ reported to the JIC, OEIC, CIS and the London Signal Intelligence Board (LSIB). DIS reported to the JIC, OEIC and CIS. JIC, OEIC, CIS, LSIB, and OCS reported to the Permanent Under-Secretaries Committee on Intelligence Services (PSIS). OEIC reported to the PSIS and the Prime Minister (PM). CIS reported to the PSIS and PM. LSIB reported to the PSIS and PM, as did the OCS. What politician in this right mind would want to tangle with that lot?

They are not only skilled at bureaucratic in-fighting but flexible. They can sense new political trends and attitudes and adapt to meet them. So British intelligence officers were aware for some time before the Iraq war that leading figures in the Bush administration had been trying to impose on the CIA a major change in the way the agency operates.

The Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and some of his team felt there should be a doctrinal shift in the CIA and that the analysing of intelligence material and the use made of that material should be decided not by CIA officers but by politicians.

The traditionalists in British intelligence thought that this was a bad idea and could lead to trouble–as indeed it did. But the Young Turks here saw in such an idea a way of expanding their service’s influence. They could say to a government: “Look, in the twenty-first century, knowledge is power, information a weapon. We have the skills to use information we accumulate to manipulate people and achieve the political result you want. Let us develop plans to get the best mileage out of the material we gather.”

So instead of secret reports for ministers’ eyes only, the intelligence services began producing “dossiers” calculated, in this instance, to help the government’s case for a war against Iraq . One of the traditionalists appalled by this was the former chairman of the JIC, Sir Rodric Braithwaite.

“In the first months of this year [2003] we were bombarded with warnings that British cities might at any moment face a massive terrorist attack,” he wrote in a letter to the Financial Times. “Housewives were officially advised to lay in stock of food and water. Tanks were sent to Heathrow.”

Sir Rodric said that in this atmosphere of near hysteria, people began to believe that Britain itself was under imminent threat and that we should get our blow in first. “So the Prime Minister managed–just–to swing Parliament behind him.”

The information on which the government based its warnings and its decision to send tanks to the airport came, of course, from the intelligence and security services. It does not matter to them that their warnings turned out to be wrong. They have stock replies. The first is that that the terrorists realised that we were on to them so they aborted their plans. The second is that it is better to be safe than sorry. Both cannot be challenged.

But frightening us is not the only use that the intelligence services make of their material. A former American intelligence officer says that a member of the UN inspection team who supported the British position on Iraq arranged for “inactionable” (read “dodgy”) intelligence reports to be quietly passed on to British intelligence which would feed them to newspapers in London and elsewhere.

The New Yorker magazine quotes the intelligence officer as saying: “It was intelligence that was crap, and that we couldn’t move on, but the Brits wanted to plant stories in England and around the world.”

And former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter claims that MI6 actually ran a campaign called “Operation Mass Appeal” designed to exaggerate the threat posed by Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction.

Why would British intelligence have done this? Because a number of senior officers were convinced that Iraq was a threat to Britain and that Saddam Hussein should be toppled.

And to this end they were prepared to go beyond their traditional role of reporting their intelligence findings in an objective way and instead help the government make a case for war. In short, they were prepared to play a political role. This caused other intelligence officers deep unease and split the service.

I think the new politicised intelligence service is here to stay. In the interests of its own survival and the maintenance of its own power it has adapted to fit the new political suit created for it by the Prime Minister.

This is not to say that either Tony Blair or those intelligence officers who helped him make the case for war did it cynically. As Rodric Braithwaite aptly put it: “Fishmongers sell fish; warmongers sell war. Both may sincerely believe in their product.”