They will be greatly helped by a new academic study published in “Media, War and Conflict” (Sagepublications.com) which draws on a six country study of viewers of CNN International, BBC World and Al-Jazeera English to see whether broadcasters foster cross-cultural understanding or a clash of civilizations. War or peace?

The study was carried out by Shawn Powers of the University of Southern California, and Mohammed el-Nawawy, of Queens University of Charlotte, NC, USA.

They are not impressed with the job that war correspondents have been doing. “Media coverage of contemporary conflict has been dominated by a style of ‘war journalism’ that is more likely to further international tensions between global publics,” they write.

They quote other findings by academics that suggest that the mass media are both structurally and institutionally inclined to concentrate on escalation of conflict rather than on solutions.

The journalists’ professional standards have grown to thrive on drama, sensationalism and emotion and are therefore more compatible with war than peace. “War provides visuals and images of action. It is associated with heroism and conflict, focuses on the emotional rather than on the rational and satisfies news values demands—the present, the unusual, the dramatic, simplicity, action, personalization and results.”

The authors quote “Promoting Peace through the News Media” by G. Wolfseld to explain why peace principles and media principles are contradictory. “A peace process is complicated; journalists demand simplicity. A peace process takes time to unfold and develop; journalists demand immediate results. Most of the peace process is marked by dull, tedious negotiations; journalists demand drama.”

Further, the continuous demand for news in an environment that is dominated by 24/7 satellite television has led to sensationalization and trivialization of often complex stories and a temptation to highlight the entertainment value of news.

The authors say that in times of war today’s mainstream media tend to tailor their coverage in ways that reinforce what they perceive to be the attitudes and opinions of their target audiences. They feel that it is in their best commercial interests to give their viewers what they want, or what they believe their viewers want.

The media snapped up Samuel Huntington’s theory of an inevitable clash of civilizations because it offered an explanation for the emergence of a new and uncertain international order and, more importantly, an explanation that was ideologically and structurally similar to the much-missed Cold War.

Western journalists had again the simple us-versus-them narrative that had been so effective at mobilizing Western (particularly American) public opinion during the Cold War.

But the risk of dependence on international media that tends to foster attitudes of fear and hate must be a serious threat to peace in the globalised world of the 21st century, the authors conclude.

But they have some good news. The appearance of Al-Jazeera English offers, they say, a tremendous opportunity for a new direction in the discourse of global news flow. With a potential audience of over one billion English speakers, it could have the power to change “war journalism” into “peace journalism”.

The indicators are good. The authors’ survey found that the more months a viewer had been watching Al-Jazeera English the less dogmatic they were in their thinking. For instance, viewers who were dependent on BBC World and especially on CNN International were more supportive of US foreign policy generally.

This is an area that has been crying out for examination and now that these academics have set the ball rolling those Buddhists I met years ago might yet get the answer they were seeking.

These are the homepages of distinguished journalist and author Phillip Knightley. An Australian by birth, Phillip became part of the celebrated Sunday Times Insight team from the 1950s to the 1970s, breaking such famous stories as the Kim Philby spy scandal, the Profumo sex scandal and exposing the effects of thalidomide on new-born babies.

Now an acknowledged expert in the dark arts of warfare, having written the seminal text of wartime propaganda First Casualty, he lives in London and works as a freelance journalist for publications all over the world. He is the author of some 10 books, covering in depth some of the biggest stories of recent times. Most recently he has written his autobiography A Hack’s Progress and the critically acclaimed history Australia: A Biography of a Nation.

These pages aim to provide an archive of the freelance pieces written by Phillip Knightley, as well as information about his life and work, with links to his books for those interested in reading further.

The lecture was written up by Journalism.co.uk, a short excerpt of which is below (click here for the full story).

Journalists working in a digital age should not underestimate the importance of ‘off-the-street’ whistleblowing, investigative journalist and author Phillip Knightley has said.

The transformation of newspapers into commercial machines is strangling investigative journalism and leaving huge scoops uncovered, Knightley said…. It was a ‘great mistake’ for newspapers to move from city centre premises to cheaper out-of-town locations, making access more difficult for potential sources.

The migration had severed one of the fundamental links between investigative journalists and their informants, Knightley argued. “A newspaper has got to be in the centre of things,” he said. “Prospective whistleblowers used to be able to walk down the northern side of Fleet Street and go past three or four newspapers.”

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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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.

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‘.

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.

‘He had all-round ability. There wasn’t a job in journalism he couldn’t do’

I joined The Sunday Times in 1965 and Harry Evans arrived shortly after. The paper was changing from an old-fashioned, Tory-orientated newspaper into a dynamic exposure paper, and he was a breath of fresh air.

The Insight team got going and you were seconded there when things got interesting. The idea was to tell people what was really going on. Evans’s role in that was absolute confidence in everybody working for him. He encouraged people to stretch themselves and never stinted on cost.

I realised I was working on something exceptional when someone said, “It’s Paris Fashion Week. Let’s have a new look at the fashion world”. The next day, The Sunday Times had three fashion writers there, three reporters from Insight and two cameramen - and we got about 800 words!

But we had tried. If a similar idea had come up the following week, Evans would have said, “Go for it”. He carried everybody’s loyalty because of his all-round ability. There wasn’t a job in journalism he couldn’t do.

A big story was Thalidomide. If a section editor today went to the editor and said, “I want to do a story about a drug called Thalidomide. It’s marketed for pregnant women but we suspect about 8,000 children have been born deformed because it’s not safe. It’s made by the biggest advertisers in our paper and they will fight all the way to prevent us from publishing. It mightn’t stand up in the end, and if we include legal costs it might run to a couple of million”, what editor would say go ahead?

Phillip Knightley was a Sunday Times investigative journalist for 20 years. Sir Harry Evans edited The Sunday Times from 1967 to 1981.

Photo by Dan Callister / Rex Features ( 498934E ) Sir Harold Evans, New York, 07 Oct 2004

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 Independent, London, 14 December 2005

The race riots on Sydney’s beaches - Anglo-Australians (”Aussies”) versus Lebanese (”Lebs”) - have repercussions far beyond a drink fuelled punch-up on a sweltering summer week-end.

They have revealed that the “lucky country’s” historic racism lingers on, like a sun cancer just below the skin. Given the right circumstances all the advances of recent years - the abolition of the White Australia policy, the encouragement of a multi-cultural, multi-racial society with emphasis on tolerance and harmony - can apparently vanish overnight. There was time to act to avert trouble but no one had the will.

Two weekends ago, two surf lifesavers, icons in a leisure culture based on the beach, were assaulted by a group of Australians of Lebanese origin. The reasons for the assault are disputed but remarks by one side or the other about women appear to have played a part. Throughout last week the mobile telephone text network in Sydney ran hot as Anglo-Australians (they refer to themselves as “Aussies”) called for protest action. Australia’s top “shock jock”, Alan Jones of radio 2GB, took up the cause.

He said he “understood” the Aussies’ attitude and read the most inflammatory of the messages to his listeners. “Come to Cronulla [beach] this weekend to take revenge. This Sunday every Aussie in the shire get down to North Cronulla to support the Leb and Wog bashing day.” He suggested to one caller: “We should encourage all the Pacific Island people to join in. “They don’t take any nonsense. They are proud to be here, all those Somoans and Fijians. They love being here and they say, ‘Uh huh. You step out of line and look out’.”

So on Sunday, thousands of people arrived at Cronulla and began fighting. The Aussies attacked anyone of Middle Eastern appearance, frequently shouting “terrorists”. The Lebanese retaliated. When the police tried to restore order, both sides attacked them in turn. Racist epithets were exchanged and later at a nearby beach an Australian flag was burned.

Race riots are not new to Australia. At the outbreak of the First World War mobs of Aussies in the major cities went looking for Germans to beat up. Unable to find groups of Germans worth attacking, they beat up Chinese instead. A popular slogan before the war had it “Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves. No more Chinamen in New South Wales”.

But in the late forties and fifties hundreds of thousands of war-shattered Europeans seeking a new and better life flooded to Australia. True, the first ones were chosen for their “Anglo” appearance (fair-hair and blue eyes were highly-favoured) but the net spread. Soon Christian Lebanese were making homes in Australia, then Turks. Egytians, North Africans, Indians, Pakistanis, and Afghans, all adding their colour and culture to a new land.

In 2001, the one hundreth anniverary of the founding of Australia, I wrote: “Out of the unpromising contrast of jailers and their prisoners, augmented later by waves of migrants seeking a new life and then - in a make-over the speed of which surprised the world - new settlers from all over Asia, had grown a multi-cultural society which calls itself Australia.”

But while it is now clear that this is the picture any visitor to the heart of Sydney will see, out there in the suburbs are thousands of Aussies whose resentment of immigrants has been simmering away. This became apparent during the asylum seekers crisis.

Aussies and even recently arrived migrants from Europe supported the government’s hardline attitude to “boat people”, labelling them “queue-jumpers”. They contrasted their own often-lengthy and expensive efforts to get to Australia and backed the government’s harsh attitude to asylum seekers and its cruel detention centres.

The war on terror and its demonising of the Muslim community in Australia added to resentment, suspicion and hatred for Muslim migrants, especially from the Middle East. A high-profile rape case in which the victim was an Aussie and her assailants Lebanese Australians worsened matters As Alan Jones replied last week to one caller who had reported “derogatory remarks” made by Aussies to Middle Eastern people at Cronulla: “Let’s not get too carried away. We don’t have Anglo-Saxon kids out there raping women in Western Sydney.”

The Muslim community in Sydney is not entirely blameless. Pronouncements from various Muslim religious leaders, even making allowances for rhetorical exaggeration, have upset many Australians. And at the heart of the matter, especially in this case, are different cultural attitudes to women. Muslim men consider most Australian women immodest with lax sexual mores. Aussie men (and women) cannot understand how Muslim women allow their menfolk to dictate what they should wear and how little of their body they should be allowed to expose.

In a country where both climate and a sporting culture encourage the wearing of as little clothing as possible, these differences were bound to cause trouble sooner or later. But why did no one in authority see it coming? Why are there no laws in Australia to stop the provocative excesses of the media, especially the “shock jocks”?

Those Australians who are proud of their multi-cultural, “fair go” society - and I believe that they are still a big majority - now need to recognise that a nasty side to their fellow citizens is still there and fight to preserve the new Australia they thought they had already built

Phillip Knightley is the author of Australia: A Biography of a Nation (Vintage). He divides his time–and his loyalties– between Britain and Australia.