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).
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.
The Second Oldest Profession: The Spy as Bureaucrat, Patriot, Fantasist and Whore, Andre Deutsch (London) and as The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century, W. W. Norton (New York) is a comprehensive and controversial history of espionage in our times.
The first permanent intelligence agency was created in 1909, and within a few years all the great powers had similar agencies. Concentrating on Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States, the book reveals why these services are not worth the enormous sums they cost, are not effective in predicting enemy actions, and cause more trouble than they prevent.
Buy The Second Oldest Profession — UK | US
Philby, the agent, double agent, traitor and enigma revealed all to Knightley just before his death. Few knew the real man that for years fooled British Intelligence, the CIA and the FBI and was simultaneously head of the British Intelligence Service’s anti-Soviet section and a long-time KGB agent.
After he defected to Russia in 1963, he maintained a code of silence for 25 years - until a few weeks before his death. He invited Phillip Knightley to his Moscow apartment and in six days of conversation bared his soul.
Buy The Master Spy: The Story of Kim Philby — UK | US |
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.
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.
The importance of this book lies in the fact that it was published, not in what it has to say. Even after the Cold War ended and the government formally admitted what most of us knew all along–that we had a security service, MI5, which under the guise of protecting national security kept an eye on us all–no one dreamed that the head of such an organisation would ever dare write an autobiography.
So let me say early on, that Stella Rimington, deserves our thanks for resisting the bullying of the Cabinet Office and many of her colleagues and associates in Whitehall and pushed on to publication. This is a blow struck for a more open society, hitherto one of the most secret of the western democracies. With luck it could well end in the death of the Official Secrets Act, especially its heavy-handed suppression of any former spy who wants to write about their days in the service.
