Source: Morning Star

Learning From The Secret Past: Cases in British Intelligence History

Edited by Robert Dover and Michael S Goodman (Georgetown University Press, £20.75)

Tuesday 03 April 2012

by Tom Mellen

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This book, a selection of 10 cases analysed by former and current intelligence officers, high-ranking government officials and academics, is an attempt to tackle what official MI5 historian Professor Christopher Andrew describes as the “historical attention-span deficit” afflicting Britain’s intelligence agencies.

As Richard Aldrich’s chapter on the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s “highly coercive interrogation” techniques confirms, there is a historical context of lengthy duration which led to Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and a host of other “black sites.”

He explains how British intelligence officials working in the Middle East during WWI would sit their own local intelligence agents on an “electric carpet” when questioning them.

It was a large Persian rug with electrodes hidden underneath and if agents were suspected of lying they would be subjected to “two or three electric shocks” through the legs and pelvis.

If paid local agents were considered persisent liars, British spooks would suspend them upside down and urinate into their nostrils. “The effect of this was not dissimilar to waterboarding,” Aldrich comments.

Mark Phythian’s analysis of the Butler inquiry into the notorious “dodgy dossier” on Iraq’s WMD is aptly prefaced by the Nietzsche quote that convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

An example is Daniel Pruce of the No 10 communications team. Faced with the intractable problem of what Lord Butler described as the “very thin” intelligence basis on which claims about Iraq’s alleged WMD were being made, he emailed p in September 2002 that “We need to personalise the dossier onto Saddam - we need a device to convey that he is a bad and unstable man.”

Illustrating the merging of the “intelligence machine” and government, Phythian notes that Alastair Campbell referred to Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) chairman John Scarlett, the man who formally steered the dossier process so as to ensure JIC ownership of its contents, as a “mate.”

The chapter on the 1994 Intelligence Services Act does highlight the shortcomings of the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) watchdog that it brought into being.

As Peter Gill warns, the ISC should be understood less in terms of an incoming tide of democratic oversight than as a form of risk management.

“It will be critical for the legitimacy of the ISC that it demonstrates greater political will to locate responsibility on ministers than it managed in its report on the intelligence shortcomings prior to the invasion of Iraq,” he states.

Yet despite this sordid catalogue of crimes, dirty tricks and distortion of the truth by the intelligence agencies, the book does not answer the abiding question - how to boost the accountability of the machine.

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