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.
The furore about Australia’s intelligence community - its failures, tainted reports, politicisation, poor management and damaging disputes with its officers - is not unique. It is typical of what has been occuring in all Western intelligence services since 9/11 blasted them out of their complacent mind set.
Trained to cope with the major Cold War monster, the Soviet Union, they failed not only to identify the new threat but even to imagine what it might be. The collapse of communism (something which, incidentally, came as a complete surprise to every Western intelligence service) left them desperate to find ways of justifying their existence.
One true spy story tells us more about the murky world of modern espionage than all the novels of Ian Fleming, John le Carre and Len Deighton. Here is such a story. A few years ago, the Chinese government grew tired of buying its artillery pieces from Britain - we make the best - and offered a large lump sum and royalties if we would teach them how to manufacture the guns themselves.
The deal was done and the British experts went out to a weapons factory in northern China to teach their Chinese counterparts the necessary skills. One of the experts was a metallurgist. On his first leave back in Britain he was approached by an officer of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).
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”.
Poor old James Bond has had a terrible thrashing this week. First former British ambassador Sir Peter Heap accused Bond and his colleagues in the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) of being useless spies who frequently made things up. Then the the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) reported that it could find no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, thus underlining a fundamental failure of intelligence and removing at a stroke Britain’s justification for going to war.
One of the Hutton Inquiry’s little surprises concerns the relationship between the Labour government and the top ranks of the British intelligence community. They are in love.
Downing Street’s Director of Communications, Alastair Campbell, regards John Scarlett, once our top spy in Moscow and now chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, as “a mate”. Tony Blair is immensely grateful for the help the intelligence services gave in the preparation of the dossier on the threat posed by Iraq. At the urging of an unnamed spymaster, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) empties its files trying to find a few nuggets to help make the dossier even stronger.
James Bond and his masters will never be the same again. The changes in the relationship between the British intelligence community and the government, revealed by the Hutton Inquiry, are–for better or worse –here to stay.
Intelligence bureaucracies such as Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and America’s Central Intelligence Agency have traditionally seen their role as identifying monsters. Their officers go out into the world, keep their eyes and ears open and return with warnings for their masters of threats to the well-being of the nation they serve.
The Hutton Inquiry has surprised everyone. It was meant to look at the circumstances surrounding the death of the government scientist Dr. David Kelly. Instead it has been revealing who wields power in Britain and how.
Most of the facts in the Kelly affair were clear in the public mind long before Lord Hutton called his first witness at the Royal Courts of Justice this week: Tony Blair wanted to attack Iraq and hoped for help from the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in making the case for war.
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.
Before it has even been screened, a new BBC drama series is under attack for turning the Cambridge spies into glamorous heroes. The spies– Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt–used their privileged positions in the British establishment to pass secrets to the Russians for thirty years. Hitherto they have been labelled sordid traitors but the BBC drama, due to hit our screens next month, treats them so sympathetically that one Russian defector, Oleg Gordievsky, says it might as well have been made in Moscow.
