Abstract
Journalists are seduced by secrets, and the most carefully guarded secrets are held by spies. As Paul Lashmar notes at the beginning of his engaging book, “the world of intelligence exudes testosterone”. It stimulates the audience; spies sell news.
It is also often said, notably by academics, that spies and journalists have a lot in common. They are both in search of secrets. The only difference is that it is the job of spies to keep them but the job of journalists to expose them. It is not as simple as that. Journalists can be seduced not only by secrets but by those who keep them. The danger is that journalists, like politicians, can be embraced by the security and intelligence agencies, placing MI5, MI6 and GCHQ on a pedestal and readily deferring to their claims that secrecy is needed on grounds of “national security”. That is a phrase that can cover up a multitude of sins, including embarrassment, incompetence and lies.
What other British editor, in face of threats of criminal prosecution from the securocracy and Downing Street, would have gone ahead and published the disclosures of Edward Snowden, as Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian did? Lashmar does not ask the question. Nor does he refer to the unusually frank admission by a fellow editor. Chris Blackhurst, then “content editor” of The Independent, the Evening Standard and London Live, said he could not get “excited” by the Snowden leaks. “If the security services insist something is contrary to the public interest, and might harm their operation, who am I…to disbelieve them?” he wrote.
Claims by those agencies have been treated with too much deference. None of these agencies has spokespeople; instead, officers are designated to give off-the-record, unattributable briefings to one or two chosen journalists from the main media organisations. The temptation, as with other journalist lobbies, is to develop a cosy relationship, encouraging self-censorship and a reluctance to upset contacts for fear of being pushed out of a privileged circle.
Lashmar, a former award-winning journalist – he broke a succession of stories for The Observer, many with David Leigh, a master of investigative journalism – is head of journalism at City, University of London. He indulges in a bit too much unnecessary self-congratulation over his own past reporting role in an otherwise most readable and thought-provoking (if rather sketchy) canter, one in which he pauses only briefly to consider the significance of scandals and cover-ups. He touches on familiar subjects – the relationship between spies (including Kim Philby) and editors during the Second World War and subsequently the Cold War. He covers MI5’s vetting of the BBC, the Spycatcher trial, the Colin Wallace affair in Northern Ireland, and MI6 and GCHQ targeting of individuals (including journalists) who by no stretch of the imagination could be considered security threats in covert “information operations”.
The author was a pioneer in the exposure of the Information Research Department (IRD), the covert propaganda unit set up in the Foreign Office by the post-war Labour government whose witting or unwitting targets included many journalists. The IRD was the model for the Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU) set up in the Home Office, now secretly adapted to “counter radicalism” as part of the government’s anti-extremist Prevent project.
Lashmar recalls how, under Dominic Lawson’s editorship, The Spectator magazine published articles by an MI6 officer disguised by a pseudonym (later identified in the media, including the British Journalism Review, as Keith Craig) attacking British journalists for reporting on Bosnian Serb atrocities during the Balkan war in the 1990s and suggesting that Muslims were firing on their own people. With supreme irony, one of the articles aimed at the BBC war reporter Kate Adie carried the headline “Glamour without Responsibility”. MI6 was concerned about growing sympathy for Bosnia’s Muslim population and discreetly backed Serbia as a force for stability.
In passing, the author mentions what may be the most shameful episode in the recent history of MI5 and MI6 – their role in the abduction of terror suspects who were secretly rendered to Guantanamo Bay and, in one notorious case, to Tripoli, the Libyan capital, where they were tortured by Muammar Gaddafi’s secret police. For many years, governments covered up operations that were exposed only by the persistence of journalists, helped by a few lawyers.
Ministers and civil servants have lied on behalf of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. “In the wrong hands,” claims Lashmar, “GCHQ can now make the Stasi in East Germany look like a surveillance cottage industry.” We should trumpet the role of journalists in questioning the activities of the security and intelligence agencies. British ministers and officials, when it suits them, continue to hide behind the mantra that “we do not comment on intelligence matters” when questioned by journalists. As Lashmar makes clear, there is still far to go before the spooks, with their unprecedented access to surveillance technology, are brought properly to account.
