Nothing, not even the spy fiction of John le Carré, Len Deighton, or Charles McCarry, compares with the real-life story of the Ring of Five. Not only was the group made up of five members of the British establishment—Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross—who had signed up to serve communism as spies when they met at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the 1930s. But by virtue of their subsequent positions within the British government, they also succeeded in transferring thousands of the most sensitive military documents to their Russian handlers.
Alexander Litvinenko’s death is unlikely to be solved for months. There are as many theories about who killed the former KGB officer as there are reporters working on the story. For my money, the circumstantial evidence points to the FSB, who took over the KGB’s role and for whom Litvinenko once worked.
Few organisations have access to Polonium-210. It is made in nuclear reactors, and with a half-life of 138 days cannot be stored; it has to be made to order. It is an almost-perfect murder weapon, although in one sense the murderer was unlucky. If Litvinenko had not died in London where all the facilities existed to detect the Polonium-210, the cause might have remained a mystery. Litvinenko himself was in no doubt. “The bastards got me,” he told a friend.
The Hutton inquiry has confirmed what we all should have guessed– Britain ’s secret intelligence services are untouchable. It does not matter how badly wrong they were on Iraq and how often they have got things wrong in the past. They will continue to go from strength to strength because, as Lord Hutton realised, they are in bed with the government and a major power in the land.
Lord Hutton’s narrow terms of reference did not allow him to examine the intelligence services’ role in making the case for war and the accuracy of the dodgy dossier. This was, he said, “beyond my remit”.
On the face of it, spying should be easy. You go out into the world and try to uncover dangers that threaten your nation. You recruit agents, bribe and blackmail people in the know, put all this into a report, give it a reliability assessment and then hope that it makes its way to someone with the power to act on it.
It’s a sexy, well paid job, certainly not nine to five, with a reasonable pension and, like the mafia, secret recognition from those in the know. There are downsides: lots of moral dilemmas, the shame of using people, bitter bureaucratic infighting and the constant nagging doubt about whether it makes any difference to the bigger picture.
Before her death six years ago, was Princess Diana under surveillance by “watchers” from MI5, the British Security Service? Yes. Did MI5 have a file on her? Yes. Were her telephone calls bugged? Yes. Were there, in the Queen’s words, “powers at work in this country of which we have no knowledge”? Yes. Did MI5 or these mysterious powers murder Diana? Emphatically, no.
The secret battle that has been raging in the secret world over the way the British government is trying to politicise our intelligence services is now in the open. The outcome will decide the path that the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) will take for the rest of this century.
At the heart of the fight is a simple question: what are intelligence services for? The traditional view is that since they owe allegiance to the realm and not the government of the day, they are there to report as objectively and as dispassionately as possible what they believe to be the state of the world? The government’s view is that, like any other department, they are there to do whatever is required of them to support government policy.
If you go to the opera you risk being taken hostage. If you go on holiday you might be blown up. If you stop for petrol you could be shot by a sniper. Open a letter – does it contain anthrax? What’s going on these days? Where will the next outrage be? People feel a sense of unease and a loss of innocence. Safer and happier times, they believe, are now gone for ever. But is life really more dangerous, or are we becoming wimps?
At the height of the Cold War, even the bitterest enemies of the Soviet Union had one good word to say about the Communists. They were hot on law and order. Moscow was one of the safest cities in the world, especially for foreign visitors. There were no muggers, there was no street crime, and there was great civic pride. Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union did the truth emerge: Moscow was actually one of the world’s more dangerous cities. Visitors thought it was safe because the Communist authorities simply suppressed the crime statistics that showed otherwise. It was all a matter of perception. People perceived Moscow to be safe, therefore it was.
The Western intelligence community is facing its biggest shake-up since the end of the Cold War. After the CIA’s miserable failure to predict the terrorist attack on the United States, its director, George Tenet, will either resign or be forced to do so, and questions will surely be asked in Britain about the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and the Security Service, MI5.
All will be asked to come up with plans for slimmer, more efficient services to face the challenges of the 21st century, so different from the comparatively simple days of the Cold War.
