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Spies, Spin and the Fourth Estate British Intelligence and the Media LASHMAR_layout.qxp_Layout 1 06/03/2020 10:23 Page 1 S A former national security correspondent’s groundbreaking p i account of the turbulent relationship between British e s Intelligence and the media , S Spies, Spin and At its most fraught, interaction between spies and journalists has been a p i battle over the primacy of national security versus freedom of speech. n the Fourth Estate The history of this dynamic has never before been fully documented or a subjected to rigorous analysis. n British Intelligence d Combining his expertise as a national security correspondent and research t and the Media h academic, Paul Lashmar reveals how and why the media became more e critical in its reporting of the secret state. He explores a series of major F case studies including Snowden, WikiLeaks, Spycatcher, rendition and o Paul Lashmar torture, and MI5’s vetting of the BBC – most of which he reported on u r as they happened. He discusses the issues that news coverage raises t for democracy and gives the reader a deeper understanding of how h intelligence and the media function, interact and fit into structures E of power and knowledge. s t a t Paul Lashmar is Head of Journalism at City, University of London. e He has been an investigative journalist for television and print and on the staff of The Observer, Granada Television’s World in Action current affairs series and The Independent. He is also a recipient of the Reporter of The P Year award presented at the British Press Awards. a u l L a s h m a r Cover image: © shutterstock.com Cover design: www.hayesdesign.co.uk ISBN 978-1-4744-4307-4 edinburghuniversitypress.com Spies, Spin and the Fourth Estate British Intelligence and the Media PAUL LASHMAR Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Paul Lashmar, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10/13 Giovanni by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 4307 4 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 4309 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 4308 1 (paperback) ISBN 978 1 4744 4310 4 (epub) The right of Paul Lashmar to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). CONTENTS Preface / vii Acknowledgements / xiv INTRODUCTION / 1 ONE / Setting the Scene / 20 TWO / The Great War / 32 THREE / The Interwar Years and the Dark Arts / 43 FOUR / The Second World War / 58 FIVE / The ‘Era of Trust’ / 72 SIX / Cold War Warriors / 86 SEVEN / Agitprop / 105 EIGHT / 1968 and All That / 121 NINE / 1975: The Year of Intelligence / 132 TEN / The Thatcher Years / 146 ELEVEN / Spycatcher / 161 TWELVE / The Wall Comes Down / 177 THIRTEEN / The ‘War on Terror’ / 196 FOURTEEN / Citizenfour / 217 vi / Spies, Spin and the Fourth Estate FIFTEEN / Lives at Risk / 229 SIXTEEN / Ostriches, Cheerleaders, Lemonsuckers and Guardians / 239 SEVENTEEN / Reflections on Forty Years of Spy Watching / 250 References / 270 Index / 285 PREFACE The Russian ‘hit’ on the spy Sergei Skripal in Britain was one of the major news stories of 2018 and ran through much of the year. The botched assassination attempt triggered an extensive UK counter-terrorism investigation to identify who had tried to kill the sixty-six-year-old Russian father and his thirty-two-year-old daughter Yulia in a nerve agent attack on a chilly Sunday afternoon in Salisbury, a medieval English city more noted for its cathedral’s elegant spire than as a theatre of international intrigue. From 1994, Sergei Skripal, a colonel in the Russian GRU intelli- gence agency, was bribed by British Intelligence to spy on his col- leagues, allowing them to understand the GRU’s post-Soviet role, objectives and capabilities.1 Allegedly codenamed ‘Forthwith’ by the British, Sergei Skripal was arrested by Russia’s security services in 2004, convicted, imprisoned and exchanged in a spy swop in Vienna, to be then flown to Britain and given what was presumably meant to be a new, low-key life in Salisbury. The nerve agent attack on the Skripals was another operation by the Russian secret services in Britain and caused a tense international diplomatic stand-off with President Putin’s regime. The sinister GRU agency, seemingly tasked with assassinating Putin’s political rivals, specialise in intim- idating those who have fallen out with the regime and covertly manipulating the politics of target states. As the murder plot commanded worldwide media interest, hun- dreds of journalists and TV crews descended on the city for weeks. While the media circus eventually moved on, the story remained viii / Spies, Spin and the Fourth Estate significant, providing an example of how national security is never far from the top of the news. The Skripal story was just one of several national security stories running at the time. Only two weeks before the murder attempt, several British newspapers had alleged on their front pages that Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing leader of the UK Labour Party, had been a paid informer of the StB, the Czechoslovakian secret service during the late Cold War. This story was based on claims by the former Czech spy Jan Sarkocy, who, working undercover as a diplomat, had met Corbyn several times in London in the 1980s. After a few days the story faded as no substan- tive corroboration was published, sparking claims it was just another politically inspired smear operation against a Labour Party leader. Across the Atlantic in the USA, President Trump nominated Gina Haspel for promotion to become the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA’s) first woman director, constituting a notable gender break- through, but this was also a controversial appointment. Haspel had worked undercover for much of her thirty-year CIA career and while little is known about her role in covert operations, it was on the record that in the early 2000s she had taken charge of a secret ‘black’ CIA base in Thailand. Before she took over command, al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah, among others, was rendered, detained, tortured and interrogated at this CIA base.2 Such national security issues had again dominated the news media across the Western world, to be replaced by more head- line stories of intelligence and terrorism. The world of intelligence exudes testosterone and stimulates the audience so it rates highly in news values; as generations of journalists and editors have known, spying stories are sexy (sometimes literally with honeytraps) – and spies sell news. Never without Strain The worlds of spying and journalism have always been intertwined, sometimes intimate and sometimes confrontational. Sir David Omand, former director of the UK’s signals intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), has com- mented that the worlds of secret intelligence and journalism inter- act, ‘but never without strain’ (2009: 38). Israeli academic Professor Preface / ix Shlomo Shpiro has observed the essential tension between the two professions: An inherent conflict exists between the open media, that wish to publish security related information as part of their responsibility toward their audience, and intelligence services, which work on the basis of secrecy and often attempt to prevent the publication of information on their activities and sources. (Shpiro 2001: 485) The intelligence historian Richard Aldrich has observed that the relationship between secret services and the press is long-standing and remarkably close but it has not been systematically analysed: ‘Despite the prolific press coverage of the intelligence services since 9/11, the interaction of this secret realm of government with the media has received little sustained analysis’ (2009: 13). This book seeks to remedy this neglect. It seeks to detail how, as part of examining the relationship between the intelligence world and the media, intelligence policy, strategy and operations have been reported. It brings together his- tory, personal history and analysis, to give an insider’s perspective on intelligence and the media. To provide context for the follow- ing chapters, it describes the origins of the official UK intelligence agencies. Writers and journalists are there right at the creation of the modern UK intelligence services. As we will see, the way intelli- gence and the media interact often comes down to the relationship between individual spies and journalists, and, as in all relation- ships, that can vary from intimate to downright hostile. Aldrich hints at a mutual attraction between spies and journalists; ‘Yet even where the relationship was prickly, there remained an underlying appreciation that journalism and espionage are cognate activities and share common professional ethics, including the diligent pro- tection of sources’ (Aldrich 2009: 14). Each side has been only too willing to take advantage of the other. Intelligence agencies have been keen to use journalism as part of their toolkit, often to give them cover when working in dangerous foreign states. In 1977 the Pike Report from the US House of Representatives spelt out neatly why journalistic cover is was so attractive: x / Spies, Spin and the Fourth Estate Intelligence agencies have long prized journalists as informant and identity-covers. Newsmen generally enjoy great mobility, and are often admitted to areas denied to ordinary businessmen or to suspected intel- ligence types.
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