The State of Secrecy

Spies and the Media in Britain

Richard Norton-Taylor

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781838607425
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Richard Norton-Taylor reveals the secrets of his forty-year career as a journalist covering the world of spies and their masters in Whitehall.
Early in his career, Norton-Taylor successfully campaigned against official secrecy, gaining a reputation inside the Whitehall establishment and the outside world alike for his relentless determination to expose wrongdoing and incompetence. His special targets have always been the security and intelligence agencies and the Ministry of Defence, institutions that often hide behind the cloak of national security to protect themselves from embarrassment and being held to account. Encouraged by his trusted contacts in intelligence agencies and Whitehall departments, Norton-Taylor was among the first of the few journalists consistently to attack the planned invasion of Iraq in 2003 and subsequently covered for the Guardian the devastating evidence of every witness to the Chilcot inquiry. He also enjoyed unique access to a wide array of defence sources, giving him a rare insight into the disputes among top military commanders as they struggled to fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with under-resourced and ill-equipped troops.
Described by a former senior Intelligence official as a 'long-term thorn in the side of the intelligence establishment', and winner of numerous awards for his journalism, Norton-Taylor is one of the most respected defence and security journalists of his generation. Provocative, and rich in anecdotes, The State of Secrecy is an illuminating, critical and, at times, provocative account of the author's experiences investigating the secret world.

1

Heroes and hacks

London, 13 December 2005.

‘There is simply no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition full stop, because we never have been’ pronounced Jack Straw, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, in evidence to the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. ‘We were opposed to any use of torture. Not only did we not agree with it, we were not complicit in it and nor did we turn a blind eye to it.’

For years, Straw and his fellow ministers denied that Britain had been involved in the US practice of ‘rendering’ terror suspects – abducting them and secretly flying them to prisons, including Guantanamo Bay, where they were abused and tortured. They could not have been more wrong.

Pursuing the government over its collusion in torture was one of the most dispiriting experiences I encountered as a journalist. It certainly tested the resilience of the few of us who pursued the story. It epitomized the ups and downs of journalism, the depths of frustration that can drag you down when confronting ministers and officials protected by the wall of official secrecy. You keep going because of the potential rewards, that eventually you will succeed getting nearer to the truth – if not collapsing the wall, at least making holes in it.

Journalism is a curious profession, or trade or craft. It is actually all three. You cannot be taught it behind a desk at university. It has pathways that can be diametrically opposed. You can spend all the time banging your head against a brick wall of secrecy and lies.

You can follow the dictum of Denis Diderot, the philosopher of the French Enlightenment: ‘Scepticism is the first step towards truth.’ Or you can be credulous and wallow in byline splendour as a receptacle for ministers, intelligence agencies, lobby groups or anyone else who wants to get their message across to the public. You can indulge in hyperbole, feasting on adverbs and adjectives, offering the writer immediate gratification. And there are the calm and patient investigations of ‘slow journalism’.

Journalists can be heroes or, as many of them call themselves in a self-deprecating way, mere hacks. Nicholas Tomalin, the respected Sunday Times journalist, famously said there were three requisites for a journalist: ‘rat-like cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability’. I would add other ingredients: a photographic memory, a mischievous delight in questioning authority, any authority and resilience – the refusal to take no for an answer. The Libyan rendition story, which I will refer to later, more than once with no apologies, is a prime example of a case where resilience was the key.

Bernard Ingham, Thatcher’s gruff, straight-talking spokesman from Yorkshire (and former Guardian Labour Correspondent), divided journalists into three types: the Harry Carpenter school of journalism, which he named after the BBC’s veteran boxing correspondent whose reporting consisted of breathless, prolonged high-pitched, commentary; the John le Carré school of journalism of what he called conspiracy theorists; and those who suffered from what he called ‘columnar pox’, individuals he regarded as pontificating columnists.

I was among those accused of being a conspiracy theorist, not least by fellow journalists, by consistently questioning ministerial statements, claims and denials about the activities of MI5 and MI6, including collusion in torture. Little did those journalists who advised me to abandon that story realize that while members of the government, notably Straw, accused me of chasing hares, I was privately encouraged to pursue them by serving and former senior government officials deeply concerned about what Britain’s intelligence agencies had been up to, sometimes, but not always, with the knowledge of ministers.

At the Guardian, I was in good company, supported by a few fellow resilient and committed searchers after the truth, including David Leigh, Rob Evans, Duncan Campbell and Ian Cobain, fitfully by the editor Peter Preston and enthusiastically by his successor, Alan Rusbridger. I was helped by those indefatigable human rights groups Reprieve, Liberty, Amnesty International and the Campaign Against the Arms Trade.

Denials by Straw and obfuscations by ministers and officials alike might have been the end of the MI6 collusion in torture story had an unlikely ally not come to our aid. In 2011, NATO air strikes destroyed the offices of Moussa Koussa, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s intelligence chief. Files containing his official papers fluttered in the Tripoli breeze. Journalists could not believe their luck. The papers included a letter, dated 18 March 2004, to Moussa Koussa from Sir Mark Allen, head of counterterrorism at MI6. It revealed how Britain was directly involved in the rendition of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi, two Libyan dissidents opposed to Gaddafi, to Tripoli. The Libyan dictator, who had provided the IRA with weapons and whose intelligence officers had bombed the Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie and murdered the British police officer Yvonne Fletcher, had become Britain’s great friend.

So much so that in December 2003, after Gaddafi promised to give up his nuclear weapons programme, Allen hosted a lunch for Moussa Koussa in a private room at the Travellers Club in London’s Pall Mall where they sealed the new friendship. As we shall see later in the chapter Provoking Terror, relations between Gaddafi and the British government became so close, and for Blair so important, that he got Prince Charles to write an ingratiating letter to the Libyan dictator.

A significant obstacle to rigorous independent journalism is the lobby system, where political and specialist correspondents operate in packs, fed by official Whitehall spokespeople or ministerial advisers armed with tit-bits and spin supplied off-the-record, that is, to be used on condition the source is not identified. The most prominent and influential group is the ‘Westminster lobby’, usually referred to simply as ‘the lobby’, the primus inter pares of media lobbies. Its members are journalists officially accredited to cover Parliament and obliged to obey strict rules and protocols. Woe betide a journalist who breaks them. The lobby correspondents receive two or more daily briefings from someone normally identified only as ‘the prime minister’s official spokesperson’.

All Whitehall departments, notably the Foreign Office (FO), the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Treasury, as well as Scotland Yard, have their groups of specialist correspondents, each with their own ‘lobby’ or association. They form their own cartels, some more closed than others. There is the crime correspondents association, for example, and a defence correspondents association. There was just one occasion when I thought self-censorship was acceptable and went along with it. Prince Harry, an officer in the Army Air Corps, was desperate – as he himself later admitted – to join his comrades in Afghanistan. In 2008, General Sir Richard Dannatt, then head of the army, called us into his office at the MoD for a private chat. He told us Harry was planning to go to Afghanistan as an Apache attack helicopter crew and asked us to keep it qui et. Ministry officials made it clear that any defence correspondent who disclosed the mission would be banned forever from any future facility, as would the media organization they worked for. Harry’s presence in Afghanistan where he was responsible for targeting Taliban-led insurgents remained under wraps until it was revealed by an Australian magazine, New Idea, whose editors said they had no idea about the British media’s voluntary censorship. Harry, or Captain Wales as the army called him, was quickly spirited out of Afghanistan. He returned in 2012 as an Apache pilot. This time, it was considered to be sufficiently safe for his deployment to be reported openly.

Official spokespeople in government departments like to deal exclusively with the journalists’ lobby groups assuming their members could be trusted not to rock the boat. They assume journalists prefer to operate in cartels so that they are not scooped. I was frequently reminded of the epigrammatic ditty composed in the 1920s by Humbert Wolfe, the Italian born British poet and civil servant:

You cannot hope/To bribe or twist,/Thank God! The British journalist./But seeing what/That man will do/Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

Some journalists plough their own furrow with an exclusive story. Whitehall departments attempt to undermine them, particularly if they are critical. On occasion, when I reluctantly approached them for a response to a story I had to myself, officials spokespeople immediately alerted one of its favoured correspondents from another media organization, offering their own spin to the story, thereby sabotaging mine. When I wrote stories that displeased the FO – one I remember was about how Britain was secretly arming Pinochet’s Chile – official spokespeople told other journalists, British and foreign, that I was not an accredited ‘diplomatic correspondent’, the implication being that I was unreliable. Officials breached that crucial commodity, namely trust. Under pressure from senior officials or ministers, Whitehall spokesmen and women increasingly resorted to asking journalists who approached departments for an official response to divulge – in the interests of fairness – what article they were planning to write and when it would be published.

Despite the best efforts of its spin-doctors, one department – the MoD – laid itself open to hostile media stories, not surprisingly, given the frequency of its attempted cover-ups, waste of taxpayers’ money and, perhaps not least, the rivalry between different branches of the armed forces. The security and intelligence agencies enjoy much more, indeed unique, protection from the media. GCHQ have official, albeit not publicly named, spokespeople – a legacy of the spy agency being by far the biggest employer in Cheltenham and having to deal with the local media about such matters as building works and charity events. MI5 and MI6 do not have official spokespeople. They rely, instead, on a more personal, cosier, relationship between their officers responsible for liaising with the media and individual journalists specializing in security and intelligence stories. The arrangement suits both sides – the agencies are usually treated with kid gloves, while the journalists impress their editors by their special relationship. We will see in the following chapter how these relationships can be abused.

That editors are more likely to be criticized than praised by others for exposing excesses or wrongdoing by MI5, MI6 or GCHQ was most clearly demonstrated by the way the Guardian and its editor, Alan Rusbridger, was accused of undermining Britain and threatening the nation’s security for praising the US whistle-blower Edward Snowden. I was surprised when Chris Blackhurst, a former editor of the Independent newspaper, wrote during the controversy over the Snowden revelations: ‘If the security services insist something is contrary to the public interest, and might harm their operations, who am I (despite my grounding from Watergate onwards) to disbelieve them?’

Much of the media seemed to revel in seizing every opportunity to embarrass fellow journalists than the government. Never more than in the media does dog eat dog. Newspapers delighted in reporting how a group of backbench Tory MPs tabled a Commons motion calling on the Leader of the Opposition (Neil Kinnock) ‘to disclose the fullest details of his lengthy telephone conversation with Mr Richard Norton-Taylor, a Guardian journalist now in Australia’. It was December 1986, at the height of the Spycatcher trial that was proving highly embarrassing to the Thatcher government (as well as providing unwelcome publicity to MI5). The MPs’ intelligence was faulty. My telephone conversation with Kinnock was a myth.

I did approach individual MPs from time to time on particular issues I thought were scandals that needed pursuing. Tam Dalyell was one such MP, though he did not need any encouragement. I helped backbench MPs question ministers. A notable case was the Commons debate on the Scott arms-to-Iraq inquiry when I alerted Richard Shepherd, the fiercely independent-minded Tory backbencher and freedom of information (FoI) campaigner, to key passages in the judge’s voluminous report which a sympathetic member of Scott’s staff tipped me off about. It helped Shepherd land a heavy punch on the government front bench. Crucial passages hidden in the dense report attacked the government for obsessive secrecy and deliberately misleading Parliament about how it changed guidelines on the export of arms-related equipment to Iraq. The Major government survived the debate on the report by one vote.

I had tipped off Robin Cook, Labour’s spokesman, on Scott-related matters, about what I gleaned as a regular attender of the inquiry hearings, and I helped other committed backbenchers, including Menzies Campbell, Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, draft written parliamentary questions in the perennial, frustrating and mostly unsuccessful struggle to extract information from ministers, particularly about the plans to invade Iraq and the detention, abduction and rendering of terror suspects to ‘black prisons’ where they risked being tortured.

The Blair government went to extraordinary lengths to try and convince those few editors who opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq (and the even fewer who pursued the government’s collusion in torture). Blair invited a group of senior Guardian journalists to lunch in Downing Street. It was just two months after the invasion. There was no hint of the violence that was to come. Alastair Campbell, Blair’s chief spin-doctor, must have thought it was a good time for his boss to confront the sceptics, to get one back on those of us who opposed the invasion, confident that all would be well in Iraq. Later that day in Belfast, Blair was going to meet George Bush who had just declared the invasion a ‘mission accomplished’. The president’s visit to Northern Ireland was a small token of thanks to Blair for his enthusiastic support.

As we waited for the prime minister to come to the table, Campbell asked those who supported the invasion to put their hands up. Just two did so; both were political reporters, long-time members of the Westminster lobby. I sat immediately opposite Blair at the narrow lunch table, detec ting a sense he was worried that all might not turn out to be quite as well as it seemed. ‘I believe we did the right thing’, Blair insisted more than once. It was as though he needed to convince himself as he looked out of the Downing Street window, as if he was clinging to the righteousness of his cause, appealing to some distant figure who would judge him in the end. There were echoes of this, perhaps, when he told the Labour Party conference the following year referring to the invasion of Iraq: ‘I know this issue has divided the country. I’m like any other human being – fallible. Instinct is not science. I only know what I believe.’

It was not long after the Downing Street lunch and its veneer of smug complacency that Blair and Campbell received a brutal shock. David Kelly, Whitehall’s leading expert on Saddam Hussein’s weapons programme, committed suicide.¹ He had been the source of a devastating critique of the government’s Iraqi weapons dossier – the report ...