Thatcher's Secret War

Subversion, Coercion, Secrecy and Government, 1974-90

Clive Bloom

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780750997881, 9780752499741
• eBook ISBN: 9780750958004
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: History

'Scary but enlightening' - Christopher Stone

Margaret Thatcher remains one of the United Kingdom's most polarising prime ministers. This provocative investigation sheds light on the secret, internal 'cold war' that she waged against 'the enemy within'; everyone she could not see eye to eye with. It was a campaign fuelled by paranoia on both the left and right of the political spectrum and fought with corruption, black propaganda, dirty tricks and even murder.

Expertly juxtaposing notable events with today's political arena, this new and updated edition of Thatcher's Secret War surmises that although Thatcher's ideals seem to have vanished, one remains: the power and importance of the extra parliamentary state and its surveillance methods and hidden powers in a new age of terrorism.

1

MONSTER TIME

What machinations brought Thatcher to power and what secrets helped sustain the Thatcherite revolution? This is the story of the state-within-the-state which warped Thatcher’s premiership from its inception. How was the population convinced to support an ideology designed to defeat those whom Thatcher defined as the ‘enemies within’: those with whom she could not see eye to eye? It is also about how her supporters recognised whether a civil servant, journalist, union leader or simple member of the public was ‘one of us’ rather than ‘one of them’: the subversive and unwashed socialists of whom her government was so wary. It led to a world of dirty tricks and murder.

The central argument of this book is that there was an undeclared and internal ‘cold war’ fought throughout the 1980s in which rogue elements in the government, military and secret services seemed to have free rein to distort facts and even kill opposition voices under the camouflage of black propaganda.

Everything in this book is true; everything is false. It all depends on which side of the looking glass one is standing. There will be those who might be sceptical that the evidence represented here is only a multiplicity of coincidences. Nevertheless, the coincidences do start to make patterns – a matter of point of view, perhaps.

This is not another book on the story of Thatcher or a history of her premiership; nor is it a retelling of the long (and often secret) war with the Irish Republican Army (IRA). However, it is about aggression and the world that partially grew from the Irish Troubles, much of which was exported to mainland Britain and much of which was kept secret.

My central argument is that there was not only a secret and undeclared internal ‘cold war’ fought throughout the 1980s (a war that had started in the 1970s), but that the consequences of the decisions and events that occurred in those years had huge implications for the importance and role of the state as it has evolved into the twenty-first century. It is in the years between the mid 1970s and the early 1990s that the state became a direct arm of government policy; one which pursued an undeclared agenda unexamined by parliament or voters. This led, by degrees, to the secret bureaucracy of the state metamorphosing into the real and uncontrolled hidden political power in Britain in the early twenty-first century – a power no longer decided or directed by parliamentary process.

This was a particularly contradictory situation, as Thatcher always seemed opposed to the ‘wets’ of the old boy network who made up the servants of the state. Indeed, after the final exposure of Sir Anthony Blunt’s role as a double agent in 1979, Thatcher was apparently prepared to expose the system and destroy it. Sir Bernard Ingham, Thatcher’s Press Secretary, recalled her attacking the duplicity of those controlling MI5: ‘I believe she did it because she didn’t see why the system should cover things up. This was early in her prime ministership. I think she wanted to tell the Civil Service that the politicians decide policy, not the system. She wanted them to know who was boss.’¹

It was not, however, without irony that Thatcher came to rely more and more on the secretive and American-inspired free-market experiments of economists such as Milton Friedman. Free markets (about which Thatcher insisted, ‘There [was] no alternative’) were needed if individual enterprise was to be revived in Britain. Yet the free-market system would have to be created against fierce, entrenched, organised and mainly socialist (and liberal) opposition. To achieve the changes required for the correct social engineering (although ‘There [was] no such thing as society’), Thatcher needed conservative-orientated state organisations and government policies to face down the perceived ‘enemy’ (the unions, militant activists, the anti-nuclear lobby, anti-cruise missile feminists, New Agers, gay people) and destroy them in the name of freedom of choice. This would be achieved through the narrowing of the political framework and the growing authoritarianism of state decisions.

Thatcher’s years saw the growth and frequent deployment of the Special Air Service (SAS), the Security Service (MI5), the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Special Branch, GCHQ surveillance and police powers. All were increased to deal with internal threats to perceived security. The ‘enemy within’ was to be interpreted far beyond the miners to include the real fear of the break-up of the United Kingdom through the defeat of British forces in Ireland and the potential victories of secret ‘Trotskyist’ cells planted inside unions, GCHQ and the Labour Party. Enemies grew to include Greater London councillors, Scottish nationalists, ecological protesters, poll-tax activists, inner-city youths and, it seemed, most of the population of Liverpool.

This story follows the many accusations of conspiratorial politics in the late 1970s until the early 1990s, from those of the paranoid right to those of an equally paranoid left. Because the right ultimately won the political battle, this story is framed in terms of those who were cast into the wilderness for over ten years and whose tales were dismissed as the ravings of lunatics and renegades. For the most part, the stories of murder, cover-ups, lying and institutional corruption that emerged at the time have never been proven. Nevertheless, taken together, they provide a hidden story of an era; one that, because there was prosperity and economic well-being, could be dismissed as a fantasy as long as the cash flowed. By the time the cash ran out, the stories had gone cold, or, like the miners’ strike, had become the stuff of legend, or even, like the Irish troubles, fallen on deaf ears because things needed to be forgotten if peace was to be achieved.

The period that stretches from Harold Wilson’s last term to Margaret Thatcher’s three terms in office was perhaps the most authoritarian since the first two decades of the nineteenth century, and the most secret in modern history. In effect, this is the story of the emergence in Britain of two forces: that of economic regeneration and that of Britain as a nuclear (-energy) state entangled with the United States and paranoid about communist subversion. These two propositions have immensely important significance if taken together. To achieve one of these aims required the other coming into play. Economic regeneration was intimately tied to the international arms trade which, in turn, was tied to the centrality of nuclear fuel for a modern, regenerated and internationally significant United Kingdom.

The 1980s were not just a story of yuppie success, defeated northern workers and the rise of Estuary English; they were also a tale of secret machinations, top-secret civil defence bunkers, the ever-present fear of nuclear annihilation and the overwhelming belief that Britain had been penetrated by dark forces bent on destroying the British way of life.

The United Kingdom is rapidly changing, and Thatcher’s ideals seem to have vanished – all except one: the power and importance of the extra-parliamentary state and its surveillance methods and hidden powers in a new age of terrorism. This narrative is, therefore, an exploration not only of the myth of Thatcher, but also a reminder of the real and perceived threats in a period which has been remembered in recent histories as a story entirely to do with surface matters, and sanitised and mythologised in films such as The Iron Lady.

In her beginnings were her ends. In 1971, Margaret Thatcher was voted ‘the most unpopular woman in Britain’ by readers of the Sun which even asked, ‘Is Mrs Thatcher Human?’² On 29 October 1986, Tam Dalyell broke parliamentary rules and accused Thatcher, when she was prime minister, of being a ‘bounder, a liar, a deceiver, a cheat and a crook’.³ A reckoning of sorts occurred at The Ritz on 8 April 2013 when the Iron Lady passed away, aged 87. By the time of her death, Margaret Thatcher had already reached a type of international sainthood, especially with the release of numerous films and documentaries. Her funeral on 17 April 2013 was called ‘ceremonial’, but was a state affair by another name. It had been planned before her death and was sufficiently grand to give the British people pause for thought. No commoner had had this type of funeral since Winston Churchill. The crowds watching the military procession began arriving the night before, the occasion was packed with dignitaries and there was full television coverage.

On the whole, the day was dignified. Yet all was not well. The wounds from thirty years before were opened and examined again; Thatcher’s divisive nature was revisited. In northern towns, people built bonfires in celebration of her demise as they had done hundreds of years before for other folk demons. There was a small but vocal demonstration at the funeral; someone threw something from the crowd as the bier passed and the song ‘Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead’ almost reached number one in the music charts.

All the evidence presented here is verifiable from sources elsewhere. The facts, such are they are, have accumulated in books, articles, newspapers, television programmes, government reports, parliamentary debates, individual letters, memoirs, and on the internet. This is the first time it has all been brought together in one volume and various patterns have emerged. The evidence paints a picture of an almost lost world. Most of the books I have used for research are out of print and many hard to find; the documentary programmes are now forgotten or half-remembered; the news just yesterday’s tittle-tattle. Nevertheless, these tales paint a certain picture of Britain that appears, in hindsight, both more violent and certainly more authoritarian than is usually remembered, something recognised by those in the headlights of the authorities at the time. The history that emerges is of a country not just in deep crisis before Thatcher came to power, but in a crisis that lasted throughout her three terms and continued into those of John Major – a crisis managed by unseen and dangerous people, wholly unelected and nameless.

Many of the relevant books from the 1970s and 1980s have long been out of print, and each was directed at only a single injustice. I have endeavoured to gather the numerous arguments and put them back into public view to be read alongside long-forgotten reports and pamphlets mouldering in archives and the new proliferation of internet material. The book is a compendium, of sorts, of wrongdoing, bad management and lies. It is not a particular attempt merely to put new evidence on the table, but to act as a synthesis for the great babble of competing voices which urgently need to be heard in a format easily available and in one place, where all the evidence may be impartially judged.

As such, what is recorded here is the disparate investigations of different people often working in isolation and never quite sure of what was true or false. In a sense, these pages represent speculation of a rather particular research type, half history and half the innuendo from which history is made. I am only too aware that different registers of significance will be attached to the various pieces of the jigsaw which I offer. I am also aware that conjecture does not make for facts, but my point is that in the scenarios described in this book there are few facts, if any, and the investigator is forced to make a pattern out of fragments and hearsay.

The stories are sometimes garnered from testimonial evidence, which occasionally lacks forensic corroboration. Yet testimony can be powerful, and testimony joined by logic and the overwhelming coincidence of events becomes evidence, especially when squared with the documents available and the conjectures made by political historians, investigators and journalists.

This was a world where records regularly went missing and documents were too often shredded and the media fed misinformation and reproduced it as fact. When ‘details dovetail neatly with those of others’ (to borrow a phrase from a notorious series of articles in the Independent in 1987, which were allegedly fed to journalist David McKittrick by British intelligence sources to blacken the name of whistle-blower Colin Wallace),⁴ we might be rationally inclined to agree that the pattern on the wallpaper is wholly produced from a willingness on the part of readers to fill in the blank spaces with shapes that don’t exist.

This refusal to accept that there is no pattern except in the reader’s head is what David Aaronovitch of The Times calls ‘voodoo history’.⁵ Yet the intelligence services will regularly feed stories to a newspaper in order to defuse accusations that the pattern does exist and that the dots could and should be joined; evidence dovetails because it has the traction of not being co-ordinated. It is the rational denial printed in the quality media or reproduced on the news which proves to be the false decoy by embarrassing readers and viewers into believing that they have been duped by their own credulity.

On the whole, I have used investigations into particular events and works interpreting those events to provide a micro-history which concentrates on the unfortunate men and women, some half remembered, some almost forgotten, who formed what came to be known as the ‘enemy within’, people who wittingly or unwittingly found themselves bunched together as unacknowledged conspirators in a war of ideologies, which they lost. Their defeat was the triumph of the state machine. These oppositional voices have never been fully vindicated and they probably never will. The villains of the piece were universally crowned with laurels, their crimes securely hidden and guarded, their motivations largely unknown. Officially sanctioned villainy is at the heart of this book, whether it be policy towards parliamentary procedure, the safety of British citizens or the protection of state ‘secrets’.

I have also looked at the many half-remembered actors who formed a Thatcherite right even before Thatcher knew she stood for an ideology: ideologues on both sides determine this debate. Those right-wing thinkers are not, however, characters from the fringe, but figures from the centre who, for one reason or another, have been expunged from the record or have faded into the background. By revisiting the documents relating to their activities, the reader can check every fact as well as every ‘fact’ and make their own mind up about those years leading to the end of the Cold War and just beyond.

I have tried to use only information in the public domain, being increasingly distrustful of memoirs, Thatcherite hagiographies and reminiscences that seem to skirt vital connections, or books on espionage that clearly only tell the particular ‘truth’ of those who are granted access to the information in the first place. I have also avoided those synoptic histories of the period which pour everything into a mix which includes high politics and pop music, excellent though they are.

The book is not just about Thatcher, and to blame her premiership for all that is said in the following pages would be absurd. As always, this is a story of accumulation and adaption. Nevertheless, the book does concentrate on Thatcher’s time in office, as well as on her time as leader of the opposition. To complete the story, I have strayed beyond either end of her premiership. To me it seems clear that, despite the numerous books written about her and the different aspects of the Conservative government’s decisions in office, much of the sense of the period still needs to be joined up. Unfortunately, the right’s flattery and the left’s opprobrium have left much of the field still to be explored. Indeed, the paranoia felt by the left was matched by paranoia on the right, and the usual suspects in socialist opposition may be matched by a host of figures on the Conservative and traditionalist right who felt embattled and almost defeated during the run-up to Thatcher’s first premiership.

What interests me is the activity that seems to have fallen through the net or been sidelined or ignored as if it was all merely a matter of conspiracy theory and pseudo-history. Even the nature of paranoia in the period is worth its own special study, and much of that paranoia is itself based on the deliberately disseminated half-truths and distortions put out by the Home Office, police, intelligence services, Ministry of Defence (MOD), Atomic Energy Agency, Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and army. It is hardly surprising that official versions of events, many of which appeared to the public ephemeral at the time, are distinctly more interesting when put into a pattern. It is for the reader to decide if the patterns I have identified are mere fantasy or not. They can check the records. I have tried to apply a certain logic which I hope is not false, but may seem exaggerated to some.

The debate over the role of Thatcherism’s influence on the state and the state’s influence on Thatcher has, for the most part, been ignored in the histories, but, for me, these things are central to the period and make us think again about the truth of the world around us. Thatcher’s years in office were determined by three areas of principle: the need to curb union power (and its apparently communistic corporatism); the need to create wider liberty (through authoritarian means); and the need to keep Britain central to Cold War diplomacy (by the maintenance of nuclear weapons, civil nuclear technology and military exports). The government and its servants were not always as particular as they might have been over the means to achieve these principles.

In this respect, the issue of ownership of the Falkland Islands which had festered for a long time before Thatcher came to power and caught her government by surprise is central to the distortion of ideas relating to the period. Because the resultant war was successfully concluded, it not only skewed the overall aims that Thatcher professed, but also seemed to confirm them to voters. It was a most fortuitous accidental sympt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Author
• Preface
• Acknowledgements and Permissions
• 1 Monster Time
• 2 The Fat Spider
• 3 Clockwork Orange
• 4 A Colditz Warrior in Whitehall
• 5 Shining Like Spun Gold
• 6 Brian Crozier’s Shield
• 7 Knowing You are Right
• 8 Operation Barmaid
• 9 The Show Trials of Old England
• 10 The 20 June Group
• 11 Smells Like Teen Spirits
• 12 Taking Pot-shots at Arthur
• 13 The Great Endeavour
• 14 A Manual of Basic Training
• 15 Over the Rainbow
• 16 White Noise
• 17 The Intelligence of Sleeping Dogs
• 18 Those Heavy People
• 19 The Fat Controller
• 20 Zeus and the Anglian Satanic Church
• 21 Voodoo Histories
• 22 Friends in the North
• 23 The Red Escort Comes to the Highlands
• 24 The Hooded Men
• 25 Zulu Delta 576
• 26 The Old Iron Woman
• 27 Vicarious Victimhood
• 28 Mummsie Time!
• Notes
• Bibliography