INTRODUCTION

The aim of this dossier is to serve as a reference point for information on covert actions by Government agencies that are inconsistent with stated government policy or which infringe civil liberties hence subverting the normal course of decision-making in a participative democracy.

The dossier identifies some of the complicities between these agencies and the media, PR and academic communities, including the outright recruitment of journalists by the security services and the planting or slanting of news to support Government policy.

While much of the information presented in this ‘Theme of the Month’ is of a historic nature, it alerts civil society to the possibilities of surreptitious control, black propaganda, infiltration and the cavalier approach to civil liberties:

• Individual rights are threatened because it is very easy for the personnel dossiers built up by the security agencies to contain gossip and out of date information. As these files are ‘secret’, there is little recourse for data validation. In 1985 MI5’s database of names contained 500,000 entries (The Guardian, 19 August 1985). By the early 1980s the Service [MI5] had compiled a total of one million personal files, but this included ‘destroyed’ files (placed on microfiche). In Northern Ireland alone there were “at least 1m names” on some security agency’s computer (report by Richard Norton Taylor in The Guardian, 29 September 2000). By 2003, with advances in computer data storage and retrieval techniques such as data mining, it is not improbable if there are records on 10 per cent of the UK population, largely exempt from the disclosure provisions of the Data Protection Act.
• The working of civil society is undermined when full and free debate at committee meetings and other similar settings is curtailed, fearful of the presence of informers. The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) was infiltrated by agents and ‘useful idiots’ who maligned and subverted the cause during the 1984-85 miners strike (BBC2 program ‘True Spies’, 3 November 2002). An Oldham imam, Maulana Shafiqur Rehman, was deported from the UK for links with militant Kashmiri groups - lawyers for the imam claimed the deportation order was a punishment for his refusal to co-operate with the authorities and act as an informer for MI5 (BBC, 30 September 1999).
• Trust in the media is undermined when content is manipulated through the planting of information. At least three instances are now on record: during the NUM strike in the 1980s, the Balkan war a decade later, and the Saif Gaddafy libel case. Prize-winning journalist Peter Gillman noted the ‘unease’ felt by some at the extent a story on the Libyan connection with the Mineworkers was based on intelligence sources and suited the political agenda of the British government. Saif Gaddafy’s successful libel case against the Sunday Telegraph in April 2002 raised questions on the sources used by correspondent Con Coughlin (The Daily Telegraph, 17 April 2002).
• The lives of bona fide journalists are placed at risk and the profession brought into disrepute through under-cover assignments. During the Balkan Crisis, the British weekly Spectator, published articles by a Keith Craig, the cover for an MI6 agent, part of an attempt to influence public opinion by suggesting a moral equivalence between the Serbs and Bosnians – that atrocities were being carried out by all sides - and not just Bosnian Serb troops (The Guardian, 24 January 2001).
• Finally, and most alarmingly, instances are on record of under-cover agencies infiltrating a variety of organizations – from radical political groups to businesses. Something is now known of the role of agents provocateurs in Northern Ireland in the 1970s (The Guardian 2 March 1987), taking charge, supplying explosives, and planning terror incidents in order to shape public opinion. In the 1980s, ‘useful idiots’ were found who could be encouraged to trade with Iraq, to be quickly disowned and left to their fate when necessary.

The information has been collated from published sources, including the memoirs of officers of the security services press reports and records released by the Public Record Office. A small number of upright MI5 officers have questioned the activities they are asked to undertake and suffered the consequences – since the revision of Official Secrets Act in 1989 there is no ‘public interest defence’ for whistle-blowers. This is something which the Labour Party campaigned for when in opposition, but abandoned on gaining power in 1997.

A British Muslim community of under 1.8 million (in a total population of 58 million) is today in the spotlight. We see a disproportionate and opportunistic deployment of resources, from attempts to recruit informers to the planting of useful idiots – Muslim organizations have nothing to hide, but it is their duty to preserve their own institutional integrity, to be aware that journalists’ credentials are often not what they seem, and to form alliances with civil libertarians in questioning the modus operandi of the vast, lightly accountable security bureaucracies.

In the aftermath of September 11, numerous persons, mostly Muslim, have been detained and held without charge or trial in Britain. Too often, it is later uncovered that this was based on evidence that would not stand up before a court of law. These practices must come under the public spotlight and citizens alerted to miscarriages of justice. Citizens seek a secure state – not a security state.

Top	The Cold War Period