There’s a new podcast that’s been running for a couple of months with the BBC’s security correspondent, Gordon Corera, and David McCloskey, a former CIA agent, now spy novelist. It’s called ‘The Rest is Classified’.
This isn’t an advert for the podcast. It’s about what it inadvertently illustrates: British governments’ obsession with secrecy, even before the original Official Secrets Act of 1911.
In one of the first episodes – ‘The First CIA Coup: Oil, Iran and MI6’, dealing with the British-US overthrow of democracy in Iran in 1953 – McCloskey quotes from declassified US sources.
Those are virtually all declassified. After all, it was 70 years ago. Almost none of the MI6 material or British government sources is
available.
Not to worry though. McCloskey can quote from them because, farcically, the Americans have declassified chunks of them in their possession too.
As long ago as 1967, the British obsession with secrecy was held up to ridicule when the press named the head of MI6 as Sir Dick White, formerly head of MI5.
Laughably, the only reason the press revealed his name was because two American magazines were about to publish it.
Even after that, the British government maintained the official fiction that there was no Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).
This British obsession has had, and continues to have, malign consequences, which we have seen playing out this week in two important court cases: the Investigatory Powers Tribunal case taken by journalists Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey, and the judicial review taken by the family of murdered GAA figure Sean Brown.
As these cases demonstrate beyond peradventure, a tradition of secrecy leads to a culture of impunity, to denial, cover-up and rule-breaking.
That is where there are rules to break, for often there are none.
This behaviour is ingrained in the culture of the PSNI, and in the NIO par excellence, with no evidence of it changing,
Individuals in the RUC in the 1980s privately asked British ministers, including on one occasion Thatcher, for rules, even official guidelines, for handling informers and agents.
They knew that the state was directing murder of its own citizens, ignoring certain murders and turning a blind eye to people perpetrating those murders.
British ministers wouldn’t provide rules until very late in the Troubles because their advisers falsely led them to believe the dirty war they were waging was necessary and effective.
Instead, Operation Kenova concluded that, far from saving lives, Britain’s top agent, Scappaticci, probably cost more lives than he saved. He wasn’t the only one.
Of course, because of Britain’s obsession, Jon Boutcher couldn’t name the person everyone knows as the top agent, Scappaticci. How ridiculous.
Thanks to the persistence of Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey, we’ve been given a glimpse of the pervasive culture of secrecy and impunity running through the PSNI like a slogan through a stick of rock.
Only a glimpse, because we’ve no idea of the names and reasons for spying on hundreds of lawyers and journalists and we only know of certain time periods when the PSNI was caught.
We can also be sure that our proconsul will be advised to appeal the High Court decision to require a public inquiry into Sean Brown’s murder.
That’s the last thing the government wants because it could reveal the extent of murderous conspiracy among the RUC, UDR, UVF, LVF
in mid-Ulster.
All kinds of reasons will be advanced to reject the public inquiry the court ordered, including, all together now, national security, cost, precedent, taking away a secretary of state’s discretion to announce a public inquiry in Britain as well as here, as well as uproar from unionists.
So far our proconsul has shown no evidence of being capable of thought or policy-making independent of officials.
The fact that he insisted, against a previous court recommendation, that the Brown family be satisfied with the Conservative government’s widely unacceptable and discredited Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Recovery (ICRIR), indicates he’s susceptible to NIO advice.
No doubt the NIO is thrashing about to find a way to make the ICRIR compatible with human rights requirements, but the Conservatives designed it not to be.
It was designed to continue the inevitable tradition of cover-up and secrecy that pervades British government.
It’s disappointing, but only to be expected, that the incoming proconsul so quickly slotted into the tradition of deny, delay, cover-up, instead of simply repealing the dreadful legacy act in toto as the Labour party promised before the election.
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