INDEX	Saturday July 16, 2022
Annie Machon: Spies, Lies & Whistleblowers
It is always dangerous to trust defectors, spies who change sides. They may have an ulterior motive. In Annie Machon's case the reason would be all too obvious: the drawback of being a secret organisation (MI5 or MI6) is that your enemy does not know how powerful and dangerous you are and so does not fear you.		See also Victoria Brittain
Engendering fear would be a powerful motivation since it might prevent terrorists and would be spies from taking up their anti social ways. That said, Machon's hatred for the bureaucrats who run the 'intelligence' services and the political masters who fail to control them, is clearly very real. If half of what she writes in her book Spies, Lies & Whistleblowers, is true, she has good reason for her revulsion. That she ends with the statement "this book is only the tip of the iceberg" would be truly frightening if people were still capable of being alarmed by the secret state. She starts by pointing out that though for the majority of its history MI5, for which she worked, tracked down spies, in recent years it "has moved into what were traditional areas of police work-- terrorism, organised crime and proliferation of WMD (weapons of mass destruction)".
The legal framework: regularly abused When they carry out covert operations like searching a home (most would call that burglary) bugging phones and intercepting mail "officers have since 1985 been required to gain the permission of government ministers". But "MI5 and MI6 regularly abused their powers". In the UK "our intelligence services work behind an unprecedent veil of secrecy".		Page 4/5.
Flimsy evidence Despite the vast resources and enormous budget MI5 has at its disposal it "makes intelligence assessments on the flimsiest of information".		Page 29.
Reds under the beds, on the beds and everywhere else! One example of the misallocation of resources is the heavy concentration on spying on communists. The CPGB (Communist Party of Great Britain) is mainly a harmless organisation consisting of well meaning, elderly men. At least it is in my experience. Yet "from the 1950s to the 1970s, around 60 desk officers-- each with a number of support staff-- spied on the CPGB". Even when Annie Machon joined MI5 in 1991 there were still "nine or ten officers and agent runners, plus around 20-30 support and secretarial staff".		Page 36.
Illegal data collection At the time she was told that there were more than a million personal files. MI5 has admitted it has an enormous number of these,though it has never publicly quoted a figure anything like this.This might be the normal MI5 deception since it operates a traffic light system for its filing and may only be admitting to the existence of the currently active category. "Even where the information is accurate, its collection and retention is clearly unlawful under the Human Rights Act." To show how ludicrous all this is she illustrates with one case: "A schoolboy had written to the Communist Party asking for information on a topic he was preparing at school. His letter was copied (all mail to the CPGB was copied by MI5) and used to create a personal file, where he was identified as a '?communist sympathiser'." MI5 has personal files on Lenin and Trotsky but refuses to place them in the public archives because this could reveal operational techniques. "The use of carrier pigeons perhaps," Annie Machon speculates.		Page 41/43.
Mindless bureaucracy The key thing to realise about MI5, she says, is that its main concern is not combatting terrorism but mindless bureaucracy (hence the extraordinary number of files). "MI5 prides itself not on stopping terrorism but on its slavish adherence to bureaucratic procedure," Annie Machon said.		Page 115.
Rimington So the route to the top for Stella Rimington, former director general of MI5, was not breaking new ground or challenging thinking but (according to Rimington's autobiography) whiling away the time 'reading Dornford Yates novels under the desk'. Get a reputation as a revolutionary and you are regarded as suspect and written off.		Page 161.
Al Qaeda associates and the Gaddafi plot One of the biggest issues during Annie Machon's time at the agency was the discovery by her partner David Shayler that MI6 had paid Al Qaeda associates to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi in Libya. Shayler attempted to bring this matter to the attention of the Government including the then foreign secretary Robin Cook and the PM Tony Blair. But they wouldn't listen.
"To this day, no government minister or member of the Intelligence and Security Committee has seen fit to hear the evidence," said Annie Machon. Yet this concerns MI6 funding Al Qaeda terrorism, bombs going off in British streets, and MI5 seeking to lock people up on trumped up charges.		Page 193.
"This decision has sent out a clear message to the intelligence services that they can fund terrorism; conspire to murder people with impunity and take enormous risks with our security," said David Shayler.		Page 165.
David Shayler's decision to blow the whistle was taken partly because he and Annie Machon were scared. "We knew that MI6 officers had conspired to murder individuals in Libya," said Annie Machon. "At the time we were the only people outside of the intelligence services who knew of the plot."		Page 193.
Stop chasing terrorists, we've run out of words! Along with the deadly (literally) serious stuff there is also the farce. The Ministry of Defence keeps a central database of codewords, used to denote specific operations. At one stage MoD advised MI5 they had run out of codewords, so MI5 couldn't start any new operations. "Why don't you just open the dictionary and put a pin in a page?" David Shayler asked MoD. But the MoD wasn't convinced it was allowed to do that.		Page 177.
Mostly harmless It is not just the big issues that raise concern. It is also the day to day work of MI5 carrying out operations "against tiny organisations and harmless individuals who pose no conceivable threat to national security".		Page 200/1.
All this is done behind not just a cloak of secrecy but a brick wall. "Obsessive secrecy means there is little or no public overview of its activities or the profligate waste of tens of millions of pounds," said Annie Machon. This secrecy is being used to hide the potential embarrassment of officials, not to protect society. Where other organisations deal with problems MI5 routinely uses secrecy to cover up its cock-ups.		Page 226.
Going native Even the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), one of the strangest parliamentary committees because it is appointed by the PM, not parliament, is under the influence of the people it is supposed to be watching. As former MP Chris Mullin said: "People who serve on such committees sometimes have the distressing tendency to go native after a while."		Page 222.
INDEX Continued, click for more. Jonathan Brind		Saturday July 16, 2022