Abstract
It was one of my more surreal experiences as a journalist. I sat by the speakerphone in The Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger's London office in November 2010. We were talking (off the record) to a small crowd of intelligence and state department officials in Washington DC about the 250,000 Wikileaks-leaked US diplomatic cables we possessed. Would they tell us which ones it would be genuinely harmful to publish? Maybe not. Maybe. Would we tell them in turn exactly which ones we were planning to print? Maybe. Maybe not.
Matters got sorted in the end, so we published without getting arrested and with fairly clear consciences. Then Julian Assange of Wikileaks dumped out the lot anyway, making the whole pirouette pointless.
The process was productive long term, nevertheless: a while afterwards, the NSA analyst Edward Snowden handed us far more highly classified leaks about out-of-control electronic surveillance. Even British officialdom mostly understood this time that they had to talk, and avoid hysteria. Much was successfully published, on a global scale, and open debate followed.
These sorts of uneasy negotiations, novel for the Brits, more usual for the US media, are where the tensions between spooks and hacks really come out. John Lloyd does not get down to such a gritty level, but he specifies the central problem in his academic survey As he observes, secret agents live to conceal, but reporters live to reveal. These are opposite and perhaps irreconcilable aims.
Yet since 9/11, the secret world of western intelligence agencies has expanded scarify Spooks wrote up the false WMD justifications for the mad invasion of Iraq. They have massively increased surveillance on us in the name of the war on terror. And they have been tasked to set up a netherworld of secret prisons, “rendition”, assassination and torture. Therefore, never has journalistic exposure been more necessary. But never too, perhaps, has our peacetime need been greater as citizens to be protected from those who would kill us.
Lloyd quotes John McLaughlin, a former senior CIA official and now a professor, on his disapproval of journalistic nosiness: “We have to ask the question of the media – how hard do you want my job to be?” It is one of a series of interviews Lloyd has done with top officials. One of the gems is a fascinating account by Pierre Brochand, the retired head of France's spy agency, DGSE, of how he set out to shift his own outfit's reputation away from being a moody “silent fortress”. He started, gingerly, to talk to journalists:
“We tried to show them we were not the monsters they expected us to be but devoted professionals doing their best in a difficult world … releasing once in a while tidbits of sexy information they could publish without inconvenience to us but of great value to them, since it gave them an opportunity to maintain their reputation of insiders … “
How easy to manipulate we hacks are!
Lloyd omits to cite pioneering work by my former colleague Paul Lashmar, now at Sussex University, on the planting of propaganda stories by MI6 and its sister agencies (including Lashmar's well-named 2013 paper “Urinal or conduit? Institutional information flow between the UK intelligence services and the news media”). Nor does Lloyd address the unsavoury history in Britain of MI5 blacklisting BBC staff, or MI6 enticing journalists to work for them as spies.
He does accurately see much new UK intelligence-agency “openness” as cosmetic. But he doesn't really come to grips with the bullying way MI6 and chums try to behave – they will only speak to one chosen “trusty” from each paper and they demand that their remarks are not only unattributable, but not even attributable to “intelligence sources”. So they never have to carry the can. This is not genuine engagement: it's just another attempt at manipulation. So too was the distribution of legal threats round the British media in order to deter them from following up the Snowden disclosures.
There are thus reasons why distrust exists on both sides. Nonetheless, plenty of truth has come out in the past 16 years. Lloyd gives well-deserved bouquets to The Washington Post's veteran Walter Pincus, some McClatchy reporters and Reuter's Stephen Grey, for disputing the Iraq WMD falsehoods and exposing rendition. It's a pity though that he doesn't sufficiently credit (or understand) the model way the leftist Guardian's Richard Norton-Taylor, who comes from a military family, has engaged with the spooks over many years – stern but fair. It's possible to do it.
There are a few irritating (proofreading?) slips in this book. MI5 is the security service, not the “secret service”. The journalists’ Frontline Club is owned by Vaughan Smith, not Savage. ProPublica appears as Pro Pubblica. Jonathon Freedland and Seamus Milne are misspelt. And the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London is a small training organisation that does not break stories.