Abstract
Why do journalists abandon all critical scrutiny when the bosses of Britain’s spy agencies grant them an interview?
When the Archbishop of Canterbury is invited on to the Today programme, he is not asked how true to life the Vicar of Dibley is. When the government’s chief scientific adviser is interviewed, no one wonders if his colleagues are a bit geeky and walk around in white coats, carrying clipboards. And a Covid specialist would think it strange to be asked if medical teams carry on like they do in Carry on Doctor or the Green Wing. (This list could be endless: has Lord Rose of Monewden ever worn an Open All Hours brown coat? Does education secretary Nadhim Zahawi wear a mortar board?)
But when Richard Moore, head of MI6, appeared on the Today programme in the autumn, two of the country’s most experienced journalists nearly wet themselves with excitement. Nick Robinson and Mishal Husain dropped their weapons and came out gushing. Oooh, they gurgled. So it’s true he writes in green ink? Yes, he confirmed (as surely we all knew), and yes, there is a man called Q who does the gadgets. And no, Moore revealed with grandfatherly indulgence, C doesn’t drive an Aston Martin.
Why are the media still so excited by the world of espionage? You would think we would have twigged by now that they are as human and fallible as the rest of us, that we can aim off from Le Carré, Bond, etc. Yet when they do (drum roll, please) “come out of the shadows”, we are somehow surprised that they are “just like you and me”. So it was with Richard Moore, as affable and thoughtful a cove as you could meet, and you wonder what all the fuss is about.
But that’s the point. He’s there to be reassuring and remind us how lucky we are to have nice, “ethically literate” (his phrase) people like him who, he has admitted elsewhere, are prepared to do things in their professional life that they would never do in their private lives in order to keep us safe in our beds.
They are not, in other words, obsessive saddos with demonic intent, which we, as mere ignorant subjects of the Crown, might have feared. And, to be fair to the sceptics, that fear is not based on nothing. Since 1945, after all, our intelligence services have played host to agents of Stalin, subverters of fledgling democracies, child abusers, blackmailers, murderers of heads of state, dodgy dossier-mongers, and plotters against the UK’s own prime minister. It is surprising we think as much of them as we do and mostly leave them to do their work in the dark.
The mystique is a sophisticated one. They are now more open about recruitment but, as a journalist, you still can’t get a phone number and dial MI6 (the Foreign Office press office will pass on messages.) While in their occasional sorties into the media they are at pains to play down the James Bond bit (“completely detached from reality”), at the same time it does them no harm. As Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, has acknowledged, it is double-edged (double-edged seven?), in that many of MI6’s best intelligence cases come from “walk-ins” – people who get in touch out of the blue. In Dearlove’s estimate, the Bond franchise reaches more than a billion people, which creates a reputation and a useful myth, so if people have anything to pass on, they come to the people they have heard of. And on the margins, it must help with recruitment too.
Besides, the very fact of being in a position to protest “it isn’t really like that” makes them interesting. “Actually, a lot of intelligence work is extremely boring and lonely,” they will tell you. Yes, yes, but it’s secret, and that brings its own buzz, particularly to a journo.
The hack who can tell an expectant desk that his sources are saying X or Y, while inviting colleagues to believe these might be intelligence sources, will achieve considerable kudos in the office. The hack in question conceitedly enjoys cultivating an air of evasiveness and will be prone to even greater amounts of self-importance and, in time, idleness. The most admirable old hands retain their hunger and scepticism despite this spoonfeeding. Others, having found a news line (just one, mind), tend to put the phone on silent and knock off early for an expense account dinner (almost certainly not with a spy, whatever the exes claim might say).
In 1950s Beirut, a city of spies if ever there was one, Kim Philby had four masters: The Observer, The Economist, MI6 and the KGB. “His drinking buddies were either spooks or journalists claiming not to be spooks (like him) or both”. Perhaps the most spectacular case of a journalist with a great future behind him was the man Philby cuckolded, Sam Pope Brewer of The New York Times. The former ace reporter became co-chairman of the Ten O’Clock Club, which met in the St George’s Hotel for the first of several special mid-morning martinis. His fellow chairman was Bill Eveland, the local bag-carrier for CIA boss Allen Dulles.
Said Aburish, author of a book (soon to be republished) on the St George’s, wrote how the two of them “exchanged furtive smiles which implicitly acknowledged Sam’s sad reliance on Bill for what he wrote. No longer a great foreign correspondent, Sam had been reduced to a has-been mouthpiece for the CIA…The New York Times and the CIA huddled over Gibsons and whisky-and-soda to organise what the world was going to hear the following day, a doctored version of the US government’s point of view. In the words of a thrusting young journalist at the time, NBC’s Tom Streithorst, it was ‘a sad day for journalism’”. Harrison Salisbury, historian of The New York Times, concluded that “a potentially first-class journalist had tailed off to second rank because he tried to serve two masters”.
Top paper execs taken in by spooks [before Blair’s Iraq war]
The media-spook nexus is a good deal more sophisticated these days. A news desk’s total dependence on its reporter in a foreign field could not endure so much competition (from both professional and citizen journalists). But closer to home, most national newspapers have someone in-house – often the editor – who can be relied upon not to gibber over-excitedly if the spooks call, whether about a D-Notice or something less heavy. And if they do call, the assumption will be that the “guidance” is about something serious where the usual rules are to be applied sparingly.
This trust that they only call on when it is serious and the promise of a glimpse into the secret world still make journalists tremendously credulous. This putty-in-their-hands sense was most shockingly in evidence in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War when influential newspapers had senior spooks swarming around assuring the pliant that “if you knew what I know”, you’d have no hesitation in backing the war. And executives who should have known better went along with it.
I recall writing a profile of a new head of one of the intelligence agencies, based largely on a conversation with a close family member, who could have told me any number of untruths which I would have happily swallowed. Beggars can’t be choosers. But they can come unstuck. In London, one famous journalist relied upon a spook source to write a disobliging story about a close family member of a particularly unpleasant head of state, which presumably had a PR value for HMG.
But when the diplomatic wind changed, the tyrant’s relation came for redress, claiming to have been horribly defamed. The journo went back to his source, asking for ammunition to help fight off a libel claim, but the spy had slipped back into the shadows and said he was unable to help.
It works the other way, too, and unscrupulous journalists can on occasion use and outwit the spooks. I know someone in the pay of a red-top paper who blagged the name of a Briton shortly after he was taken hostage in the Middle East – and before his family had been told – from an unsuspecting MI6 man. Unsourced suggestions that the tapes that so embarrassed Charles, Diana and Camilla in the early 1990s might have come from security sources served both to confirm the conversations’ authenticity and to get the tabloid (as they were then called) eavesdroppers, fumbling with their scanner manuals and analogue mobile phones, off the hook. Were the defenders of the realm involved? Who knows?
I remember speaking to a dissident agitator from one tyrannical regime, who provided some detailed information on an operational matter in his country. He was tremendously helpful and hadn’t spoken to any other journalists, or so I understood. But the next day, what he told me also appeared in another newspaper (I hesitate to call it a rival, but one reputedly much better connected to the spooks than mine, the Independent on Sunday), sourced to “intelligence sources”. Was my friend recycling what he had heard from the spooks? Maybe he had briefed the spooks, who then briefed the other paper? Maybe he was a spook? Maybe the other paper thought “intelligence sources” sounded better than “dissident”. It was all “fog of war” stuff, the loose ends never tied up. Where deniability and source protection is axiomatic, “closure” is a faraway concept.
These below-the-radar games have been going on for a long time, and will continue, whether Richard Moore goes on Twitter or on the Today programme or not. Nick and Mishal surely know that, but they still think it’s appropriate both to play along with the 007 mythology and then – serious faces – ask about the chilling threats that face us all, the “lone wolf ” terror attacks, and so on (I hope I don’t belittle these – my daughter was in one of them.) And yes, of course they are major, these threats. All the more reason not to sugar-coat them with popular culture.
Since listening again to his interview with Robinson, I have heard one or two others Moore has given and watched a talk he gave to a think tank, and it makes me wince at my profession’s silliness. This man has to keep the world’s most unpleasant people at bay. He has an extraordinary amount on his shoulders, trying to make out what Russia and China are up to, preventing dirty bombs in London, fighting crime on the internet, anticipating and preventing wars, countering the effects of climate change, keeping his people in the field safe, keeping tabs on WMD across the globe, and so on. He was trying to make a serious point about MI6 needing to open up by teaming up with more data-savvy companies, yet the best of our media still asked him to indulge their feeble sallies about green ink and James Bond. The media’s obsession with Bond is not the world’s biggest crime and levity in the darkness is a wonderful part of our healthy suspicion of experts, but when dealing with the pro, is there nothing we won’t seek to triangulate with a giggle? Don’t Look Up – a film derided and admired in equal measure – was definitely on to something.
