The Defence of the Realm (139 page)

The most striking change is that almost 100 bodies which fell within the old criteria for checking against Security Service records now fall outside the criteria . . . Old friends who thus appear no more include the National Bus Company, the Rural Development Commission, the Sports Council and the Agricultural and Food Research Council.
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11

The Origins of the Security Service Act

Intelligence was the last taboo of British politics. For the Security Service's first seventy years it was protected from public gaze and parliamentary scrutiny by a bipartisan consensus built around two dubious constitutional principles. The first was that intelligence was wholly undiscussable in public – even in parliament. As the Foreign Secretary, Sir Austen Chamberlain, told the Commons in 1924: ‘It is of the essence of a Secret Service that it must be secret, and if you once begin disclosure it is perfectly obvious to me as to hon. members opposite that there is no longer any Secret Service and that you must do without it.'
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The inflation of the common-sense doctrine that all intelligence operations require secrecy into the bizarre requirement that intelligence must never be mentioned at all originated not as carefully considered policy but as an inherited taboo, akin to the Victorian belief that civilized life might crumble if sex were mentioned in public. In 1985 Sir Michael Howard, one of the official historians of wartime intelligence, explained the traditional British view of intelligence thus:

In Britain the activities of the intelligence and security services have always been regarded in much the same light as intra-marital sex. Everyone knows that it goes on and is quite content that it should, but to speak, write or ask questions about it is regarded as extremely bad form. So far as official government policy is concerned, the British security and intelligence services do not exist. Enemy agents are found under gooseberry bushes and intelligence is brought by the storks.
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It followed from the storks-and-gooseberry-bush tradition that the mysteries of intelligence must be left entirely to the grown-ups (the agencies and the government) and that the children (parliament and the public) must not meddle in them. The second constitutional doctrine which underpinned the traditional British view of intelligence was thus that parliament must entirely abdicate its powers in this field to the executive.

The most astonishing thing about these two dubious doctrines is that there was no serious challenge to them until the 1980s. They were defended
after his retirement even by Harold Wilson, despite his fears of a Security Service plot against him.
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In 1977, as these fears were reaching their peak, he published his distillation of the constitutional wisdom of the ages in a volume grandly entitled
The Governance of Britain
. The chapter on ‘The Prime Minister and National Security' may be the shortest ever written by a British politician. It is barely a page long and begins by quoting approvingly Macmillan's warning to the Commons after Philby's defection in 1963: ‘It is dangerous and bad for our general national interest to discuss these matters.' Wilson concluded his mini-chapter thus:

The prime minister is occasionally questioned on [security] matters arising out of his responsibility. His answers may be regarded as uniformly uninformative.

There is no further information that can usefully or properly be added before bringing this Chapter to an end.
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The Callaghan government, despite the Prime Minister's private dissatisfaction with the management of the Security Service,
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was an equally stout defender of intelligence storks and gooseberry bushes. ‘Parliament', it declared, ‘accepts that accountability must be to Ministers and trusts Ministers to discharge that responsibility faithfully.'
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During the Thatcher decade, a series of public controversies involving the intelligence services gradually eroded the all-party storks-andgooseberry-bush consensus, which was still intact when the Conservatives returned to power in 1979. The unmasking of Sir Anthony Blunt as the Fourth Man by Mrs Thatcher in the Commons shortly afterwards forced the government to concede for the first time a parliamentary debate on security of the kind previously denounced by Macmillan and Wilson as ‘dangerous and bad for our general national interest'. After the first publication of the sensational claim that Sir Roger Hollis had been a Soviet mole in Chapman Pincher's
Their Trade is Treachery
in 1981, Mrs Thatcher, to her visible dismay, was forced to breach the traditional taboo once again and make another statement to the Commons, this time to declare Hollis innocent. Further government statements followed the conviction of Geoffrey Prime, formerly of GCHQ, in 1982 and of Michael Bettaney of the Security Service in 1984. While periodically disregarding Harold Wilson's dictum that the Prime Minister's remarks to parliament on security and intelligence should be as rare as possible and ‘uniformly uninformative', Mrs Thatcher none the less insisted that the principle remained intact. She told the Commons in November 1986: ‘I repeat: the practice and the custom of all prime ministers of all parties is to adhere to the normal rule of not commenting on security matters.'

The Falklands conflict in 1982 led to a further breach of the old intelligence taboos. Faced with Opposition charges that the government had ignored intelligence warnings of an Argentinian invasion, the government appointed a commission of six Privy Counsellors (two of them Labour politicians), headed by Lord Franks, to carry out the ‘Falkland Islands Review'. The Prime Minister did not do so willingly. According to David Owen, ‘It was like dragging teeth out of her to agree to the Franks enquiry.' Mrs Thatcher's reluctance was understandable. For by establishing the Franks Committee she virtually conceded in practice the principle of an oversight committee for the intelligence community which she continued to resist. The Committee was given unrestricted access to relevant intelligence files and personnel. Having accepted the Franks Committee's findings on the Falklands conflict and its recommendations on the joint intelligence system in 1983, the Thatcher government could scarcely argue credibly that a standing committee of similar structure (such as the Intelligence and Security Committee set up a decade later) would be unworkable. It did, however, argue precisely that.
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On intelligence accountability, as on statements to parliament, Whitehall sought to preserve a status quo which had already been breached. At a meeting on 23 February 1983, chaired by the Intelligence Co-ordinator (and future DG), Sir Antony Duff, to discuss the case for and against changing the current system of oversight and accountability:

Sir Antony Acland [PUS at the FCO] began by saying that his own view and that of the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary was that there was no need to change the present policy on accountability and oversight unless there was very strong Parliamentary pressure to do so and that it was desirable to resist the attempt by various Select Committees to encroach in this area. This was a matter of political judgment but both the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary and the Chief Whip considered that the present position could be maintained.
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The case for a body on the lines of the future Intelligence and Security Committee was thus on the political agenda for the first time (though the model then most frequently suggested was a parliamentary select committee). When Christopher Andrew had suggested the idea in 1977, it had been received in Whitehall, according to Peter Hennessy in
The Times
, with all the enthusiasm normally reserved for insulting references to the Royal Family. By 1983, however, it was Party policy for both Labour and the Liberal–SDP Alliance.

A third area in which the intelligence taboos suffered significant erosion during the first two Thatcher governments concerned their use of the
Security Commission. Previous administrations had used it only to report on security breaches within Whitehall and the armed services, including those associated with sexual irregularities by ministers. Between 1982 and 1985, however, the Commission produced, at government request, four major reports on the intelligence community reviewing security procedures both in the community as a whole and individually in GCHQ, the Defence Intelligence Staff and the Security Service after the convictions of, respectively, Geoffrey Prime, Philip Aldridge and Michael Bettaney. A summary of the first report's recommendations and the bulk of the other three reports were published. They pulled few punches. Though reassuring as regards operational effectiveness, the 1985 report on the Security Service called for ‘a thorough-going re-examination of the personnel management services' – an unprecedented official public criticism of the running of the Service.
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The most influential attack on the traditional taboos came, however, from the courts. By the mid-1980s British juries were reluctant to convict under the old discredited Official Secrets legislation. The government also came under pressure from the European Court of Human Rights. In 1984 the Court upheld a complaint about the tapping of his phone by a British businessman, James Malone, who had been acquitted on a charge of receiving stolen goods. Article 8 of the Human Rights Convention requires respect for the privacy of citizens' private and family lives, homes and correspondence, but recognizes the right of public authorities, ‘in accordance with the law', to infringe these rights on specified grounds which include ‘the interests of national security' and ‘the prevention of disorder or crime'. Since, however, telephone tapping in Britain was not ‘prescribed by law', the Court found that Article 8 had been contravened. That judgment led directly to the 1985 Interception of Communications Act, which provided for a commissioner to monitor warrants for telephone tapping and a tribunal to investigate complaints.
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During the passage of the Act government spokesmen claimed that it reflected the cabinet's desire for openness and accountability in the use of the HOWs. The shadow Home Secretary, Gerald Kaufman, attacked these claims as ‘effrontery':

The Government . . . have been dragged kicking and screaming all the way. They would have continued to resist if it had not been for the Malone case. It was Mr. James Malone who, when tried for dishonestly handling stolen goods, discovered that his telephone had been tapped by the police. It was he who brought a High Court action against the Metropolitan police. It was he who, even though he lost the case, heard the judge, Sir Robert Megarry, state in court that telephone tapping
is a subject that cries out for legislation, who took his case to the European court and who then, almost a year ago, saw the House of Lords pass, against the Government's wishes, a Labour amendment to the Telecommunications Bill placing controls on interception. That is why the Government is legislating. It is not because they want to; it is because they have to.
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There was a certain amount of ‘effrontery' on Opposition benches too from former Labour ministers who protested against the breadth of the powers for the interception of communications contained in the Act. The Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, reminded them that HOWs under Labour governments had operated under ‘precisely the same criteria'. The Act did not confer ‘any additional powers whatsoever', but simply provided, ‘for the first time, a clear and comprehensive statutory framework for the interception of communications'.
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Media attacks on telephone tapping by the Security Service continued. In the
20/20 Vision
television documentary ‘MI5's Official Secrets', broadcast on Channel 4 just prior to the Commons debate on the Interception of Communications Bill, the former Security Service officer Cathy Massiter claimed that some prominent members of the peace movement and trade unions were under MI5 surveillance. Massiter, whose claims were supplemented by those of an anonymous, retired Service secretary, was clearly in breach of Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act. Both Massiter and the secretary were prohibited by the terms of their employment and declarations they had signed on their retirement from disclosing any information they had acquired while working for the Service. After an advance viewing on 20 February 1985, the Independent Broadcasting Authority decided, on the advice of its lawyers, to stop the programme being transmitted until it became clear whether or not the government intended to prosecute Massiter or the producers. In the event, the Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, decided there was to be no prosecution, almost certainly chiefly because of the belief after the trial earlier in February of the MoD official Clive Ponting that, however clear the law, a jury would not convict. So discredited had Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act become that, despite the fact that Ponting admitted leaking confidential documents on the Falklands conflict to Tam Dalyell MP and a near instruction from the judge to convict, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.
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The delay in broadcasting ‘MI5's Official Secrets' merely generated further publicity for it. Within hours of the IBA's decision to stop transmission on 20 February, videos of the programme were being shown to journalists at a London hotel and to MPs at the House of Commons.
Copies of the video were marketed by Richard Branson under the Virgin label with the title
MI5's Official Secrets – The Programme That Couldn't Be Shown
, and a lengthy extract from the script was published in the
Guardian
. On 6 March, the day after the announcement that there was to be no prosecution, the IBA lifted the ban on the programme, which was transmitted on the 8th. The government response to Cathy Massiter's televised charges against the Security Service was to ask the chairman of the Security Commission, Lord Bridge of Harwich, to investigate whether the Service had obtained the necessary warrants for telechecks and whether the criteria for phone tapping were being complied with. The investigation, like the rest of the Massiter affair, was a public relations disaster. Lord Bridge began his inquiry on 28 February and, despite sitting as a judge in the House of Lords for two days during the inquiry, reported on 6 March that all was well and that there had been no wrongdoing by either government or Security Service. In view of the fact that 6,129 HOWs had been issued over the previous fifteen years, the speed of his conclusion that the regulations were being fully observed inspired widespread scepticism. The
Daily Telegraph
described Lord Bridge's report as ‘hasty and bland', ‘the Bench's answer to fast food, a juridical Big Mac'. The former Home Secretary Roy Jenkins said that Lord Bridge had been made to appear a ‘poodle of the executive'.
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