MI5's OFFICIAL HISTORY A CASE OF DAMAGE LIMITATION

When MI5 marked its centenery by opening its files to the Cambridge academic Christopher Andrew - in order to produce an official history - the result was never going to be a simplistic whitewash. Any audience that was going to bother itself with the reading of such a tome was not going to buy into a simplistic virtuous representation of the Security Services. That said, despite its being placed on a legal footing with the Intelligence Act of 1994, it was unlikely that MI5 was going to accept the kind of warts-and-all representation of its murky past as (say) the Metropolitan Police post the fundamental changes that issued from the Police and Criminal Evidence Act in 1984. These days, every graduate in Hendon learns about the the endemic police corruption and malpractice of the 1970s and has to read the contents of the McPherson Inquiry into Stephen Lawrence's murder. This deosn't prevent riot cops killing paper sellers at anti-capitalist demonstrations or beating up anti-fascist protesters but does mark a significant (if limited) change in the way that Britain is policed. MI5, like the army, has been through no such process of internal purging and soul searcing, as was attendent on Fischer, Scarman and McPherson,. Didcot and the failure to secure convictions in the Old Bailey, for the army murder of Iraqi civilians proves that.

Thirty years after alleged military coup plots in Britain, senior army officers can cynically exploit the crisis over British soldiers' sub standard equipment in Afghanistan, to intrigue against Gordon Brown's government, get Cameron elected and be rewarded with an un-elected cabinet post in a future Tory government (as if the prsent one isn't Tory enough). In much the same way, MI5 can come clean about certain aspects of its past misconduct while leaving its role in the destabilisation of the last freely elected government in this country (also its last genuine Labour government) in 1974. Christopher Andrew's book, DEFENCE OF THE REALM (WH Allen, 2009) is a product of just such a damage limitation exercise which, sadly, tells us less than we already know about the Security Services' inglorious past from Peter Wright's SPYCATCHER or contemporary works e.g. by Penrose and Courtier, in 1978, by Gordon Winter in 1981 and others.

In order to represent MI5 misdoings as disorders in a generally legitimate struggle to defend this country, certain facts that are already in the public domain are openly admitted. The fact that MI5 "suspected" Harold Wilson of Soviet sympathies and kept a file on the Labour leader (for example) cannot be denied. Nor can the fact that MI5 kept files on trade union leaders (such as Jack Jones) CND activists, Greenham Peace Protesters and senior Labour Party politicians as recently as the 1990s. These facts have been in the public domain, now, since the 1980s and are irrefutable. Christopher Andrew's argument is both that the Soviet threat to Britain was legitimate (i.e. that such a threat actually existed, when it didn't) thereby justifing its cuddling up to the enemies of any Labour government in office - much in the way that John Le Carre has candidly described it. At the same time, Andrew swears blind that any surveillence against Wilson went no further than this - that neither K-Branch nor F-Branch actively sought to undermine Wilson's government (for example) or seek a Right wing succession to Edward Heath within the Tory Party, using the crisis in Northern Ireland (via Army Information Policy and Operation Clockwork Orange 2) as part of its background.

In reality, anybody who joined the Army Intelligence Cotrps in 1978 (as I did) knew that from day to one, at the Recruitment Selection Centre at St. George's Barracks, Sutton Colefield, we were told that "the Labour government doesn't support the army" and that the trade unions were controlled from Moscow, weakening the country ahead of a Soviet invasion. And just in case anybody thinks these were the opinions of some non-too-bright Greenjackets NCO at RSC, the sma ideas were quickly reiterated by senior brass and guest lecturers from the Institute for the Study of Conflict (such as Brian Crozier, Richard Clutterbuck and Brian Moss) during corps training at Ashford, as well as by individuals like Sir Cecil King. At around the same time, TIME OUT journalists Phil Agee and Mike Hosenball (who feature in my novel, HOLLYWOOD BOWL) were demonstrating that another of Crozier and Moss's initiatives (FORUM WORLD FEATURES) which supported the Pinochet coup in Chile, was funded by the CIA through its London station.

Agee and Hosenball were duly expelled from Britain by the CIA supporting David Owen, after Jim Callaghan's engineered succession to Harold Wilson found this country capitulating to the dictates of the IMF. King had been involved in an earlier coup plot against the Wilson government in 1968, whose avowed objective had been to establish a "businessman's government" under Lord Mountbatten. King was both proprietor of THE DAILY MIRROR and a governor of the Banl of England at the time. In my novel, HOLLYWOOD BOWL, Sir Solly Zuckerman fails to talk Mountbatten out of the coup plot and it goes ahead. In real life, a military coup plot was a much more serious prospect in the 1970s, when private armies were also proliferating with financial support from the Ministry of Defence through its PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH OPERATIONS COMMITTEE. Interestingly, this formed the basis for my proposed movie script based on the 1970s TV series, THE SWEENEY, which never came to anything after I failed to track down Ian Kennedy Martin - whom Ted Childs' assures me still owns teh copyright. Meanwhile, in real life, the coup was only averted when Callaghan bent his knee to the IMF (as allegorized in the first SWEENEY movie by Ranald Graham) and when Aims of Industry, the Freedom Association and other para-political groups succeeded in securing Thatcher's succession to Heath as Tory leader. Ultimately, the coup plot dissolved only when the plotters (who all became supporters of Thatcher) became convinced that the Iron Bitch would win the 1979 election