Hidden world of the secret services

Press, 23 March 1985, Page 21

Hidden world of the secret services

Every year a small batch of new recruits to MIS act out a private pantomime on the streets of London. They are sent out in pairs for the day, told to pick a house, then to draw up detailed plans on how to break into it. One recent recruit described the procedure: “We were told to come back with a plan of the building,” he said. “They wanted proper floor plans with the positions of furniture, so we had to sidle up to the windows and look in.

“We had to note how busy the street was, whether the neighbours were there during the day, whether there was a nosy cleaning lady or workman around, and where the best escape routes were. “Then we took the plans back and they were looked at by the A Team, who told us we were useless and then gave us their version of how to burgle the place.”

The so-called “A Team” which teaches these new recruits hardly conforms to the routine image of British security services. They are the professional cracksmen of MIS — the locksmiths and carpenters of a section known as A1(D) and the burglers of A1(A). Their calm assumption that they may ignore the criminal law is one of the central elements in the row which now threatens to engulf MIS. The argument revolves around what Mls’s true responsibilities are and how it sets about fulfilling them. In law, MIS has no powers. There is no. statute to define its role or even register its existence. Its only constitution is a sixparagraph directive secretly issued to it in 1952, by the then Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe.

The central issue in the current dispute about MIS is that this minimal framework of rules and

supervision has collapsed under the strain of increasing Government demands for information about new targets — demands with which MIS has sometimes been only too willing to comply.

Until now, the row has been an internal one. A minority of officers — generally the younger ones — have complained, arguing that sooner or later the service would be caught out with devastating consequences for the service’s independence. Their complaints have met with little sympathy. The answer has always been: “We haven’t been caught yet, and we’re not about to start,” said one former officer. “They have refused to think about it, even though it was obvious that if we did get caught there would be such an outcry that very strict guidelines would be imposed on no ”

Now that fear is being justified, and the row is starting to surface publicly with the detailed allegations of an anonymous former MIS clerk and the former intelligence officer, Cathy Massiter, which were finally broadcast in a television documentary last week. Cathy Massiter, in particular, has become a key figure. During her 14 years in MIS, from 1970 to 1984, the service experienced a fundamental change of emphasis. It shifted from being essentially a counter-espionage organisation, aimed at hostile foreign powers, to a domestic surveillance organisation.

As the service’s aims changed, her disillusion grew. Techniques and operations which had been acceptable when they were used against a “bona fide” enemy breached both Mls’s own directive and the laws of the land when they

were turned on “soft” domestic targets. When Miss Massiter joined as a secretary in 1970, two whole branches — KX and KY — were devoted to foreign powers, while only the relatively small F Branch looked at domestic targets. By the time she left, however, KX and KY had been merged into one branch, while F had survived and expanded and spawned its own off-shoot FX. In 1970, the industrial desk, which studied trade unions, was staffed by two intelligence officers. By the time she left, it had become a sub-section in its own right, known as FSCN, with a staff of seven intelligence officers.

After less than a year, Miss Massiter became an intelligence officer. In the ensuing years, her confidence in the service was gradually undermined, partly by what she felt was the futility of the work, but more importantly by the steady politicisation of the service.

According to Miss Massiter and other intelligence sources, a series of recent incidents illustrates this change of direction:

® In 1972, MIS officers by-passed the Home Office command structure and passed to the Prime Minister, Edward Heath, security files on Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon, then the most powerful trade union leaders in the country. The Home Office tried to regain control by appointing one of its own senior officials as Director General, but it was beaten off by an MIS lobby which twisted secret intelligence reports to smear the Home Office candidate.

© After the February, 1974, General Election, the Wilson Government demanded better information on trade union leaders and Leftwing activitss in order to further its Social Contract between the trade unions and the Government. The use of agents and informers against domestic targets increased rapidly in this period.

• In the early 1980 s, the Thatcher Government pressed for more intelligence on the peace movement, culminating, as Miss Massiter described in the Channel Four documentary, in telephone tapping, the infiltration of an agent into CND headquarters and the release of intelligence to DSI9 — the Ministry of Defence’s political information unit.

As the line between security and politics became more blurred, F Branch grew and took on new responsibilities. The old simplicity of studying the Communist Party and overtly fascist groups was replaced by a complex array of targets, reflected in the branch’s current structure.

The old targets — the Communist Party and Communist front organisations such as the World Peace Council — occupy two subsections, F2(C), and F2(D). Trade Unions are studied by F2(N) with its increased staff. Teachers, students, pacifists, and M.P.s are the job of F2(R) which has recently completed special projects on journalists and lawyers. Trotskyites, Maoists, anachists, other revolutionaries, the Militant Tendency of the Labour Party, feminists, fascists, and black power activists are covered by F 7. Two other sections, F 3 and F 5, study the

“hard” targets of terrorism and the movement of arms and explosives. In addition to these investigative sections, run by desk officers, there are two sections, F 4 and F 6, run by full-time handlers who control the agents and informers who have penetrated different groups at the behest of the desk officers. Miss Massiter estimates there are “hundreds” of agents and informers in domestic targets around the country.

The service is beset by a perverse mixture of bureaucratic obsession with regulations and a wholesale disregard for the Home Office rules and the law:

The choice of targets. According to the Home Office rules, MIS can target someone as a subversive only if they are threatening the safety of the State and trying to undermine parliamentary democracy by political, industrial, or violent means.

Traditionally, MIS has used that definition to study revolutionaries and militant extremists. The bureaucrats in the Registry — the MIS “library” — have allowed files to be opened only under a limited number of headings, such as Terrorist, Terrorist Associate, Communist, Unaffiliated Revolutionary. But the new direction of F Branch has forced MIS officers to twist the definition of subversion in order to justify the new choice of targets. The most common practice is to target a non-subversive group by finding one subversive individual within it and using him as a pretext to study the organisation itself. The Scottish NUM, for example, which does not qualify as subversive, has been targeted via its president, Mick McGahey, who qualifies because of his membership of the Communist Party. The peace movement is another example. In the 19505, CND was classified as subversive because most of its leaders were Communists. Since then, however, MIS has recognised that CND is no longer subversive under the definition.

Then, after the announcement that cruise missiles were to be deployed it) Britain, the Thatcher Government decided that they wanted CND watched. So Cathy Massiter was briefed to monitor Communists and Trotskyites in CND as a pretext.

Opening a file. The simple act of putting a target on record in the MIS Registry frequently involves breaking the law in one of two ways:

1. The Registry clerks will not accept a target as a member of a subversive organisation without proof of membership. That means that a considerable amount of F Branch time is devoted to obtaining copies of membership cards. This operation, known as Still Life, often involves breaking and entering.

The most notorious example was in 1955 when MIS burgled a Mayfair flat where all of the Communist Party’s 50,000 membership files were being kept. It removed them, copied them all in one night, and returned them. News of that illegal operation leaked out only years later. Still Life remains an insistent motive to break and enter political offices.

2. Another way in which a file may involve law-breaking concerns the difficulty of clearly identifying a target. Initial checks on the electoral roll and in the General Register Office should yield an address, a date of birth, and a national insurance number. But if these inquiries yield nothing, the office will need to get access to confidential information, which may involve breaking the Official Secrets Act.

“It’s all done on a personal basis,” according to one security source. “We are all asked to supply the name of anyone we know who could be useful and that’s kept on a central index, then A Branch have their own people. They get approached with a request to help their country and turn a blind eye to the law. Which is all right if it’s a Libyan terrorist you are after, but not if it’s Bruce Kent (of CND).” The interception of phone calls and letters. According to the rules, MIS can intercept communications only if there is “a major subversive, terrorist, or espionage activity.” Contrary to what some Ministers have been saying recently, it is not enough that the target is a subversive. There must be “major subversive activity.” One case which appears to have breached this rule was the tapping of John Cox, CND’s vice-president,

in August, 1983. It is a unique case in that, through Cathy Massiter, Parliament now has all of the information which was before the Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, when he signed the warrant. According to Miss Massiter, she was specifically asked to find a “suitable candidate” for a CND tap. She chose Mr Cox because, as a member of the Communist Party, he was considered subversive. But she could find no evidence of “major subversive activity." On the contrary: “We knew from our coverage of the Communist Party that he was not getting up to anything in CND. We knew exactly what their peace committee was doing,” she said. The absence of any significant threat was minuted in Mr Cox’s MIS file. The Cox case is one that calls into question a recent report by the chairman of the Security Commission, Lord Bridge, that there was no evidence of wrongly authorised phone taps. Letter-opening takes two forms: interception at the receiving end, known as Phidias, and at the sender’s end, known as Ratcatcher. Bugging. While the tapping of telephone exchanges is covered by the law and permissible only with a warrant, MIS uses a vast array of bugging equipment which requires no warrant at all and will remain unaffected by the Government’s new Bill on the Interception of Communications which aims to tighten the law on tapping and which will be debated in the Commons soon.

This means that, if pressed, MIS can by-pass the Home Office warrant system and intercept a telephone conversation by planting a bug in the target’s phone or junction box. This operation is known to MIS as Cinnamon.

The planting of a bug in a private room frequently involves the use of the A Branch burglars. Only one form of bugging requires a Home Office warrant.

Known as Special Facility or Azure, it involves rewiring a telephone so that it becomes one big microphone which will relay all sounds in the room down G.P.O. lines to a voice-activated tape recorder. This is achieved either by breaking and entering or by causing a fault in the phone and fixing

it under the guise of repairing it. In theory, none of these abuses should occur: the Home Secretary and the Security Commission between them are supposed to monitor Mls’s performance and ensure that it sticks to its guidelines and to the law.

In reality, MIS officers are confused about what their guidelines are. They are spelled out in the directive from Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, in 1952. “We read it at some early stage in our career,” said Cathy Massiter, “but I can’t recall any occasion in which Maxwell Fyfe was invoked.” The Home Secretary is considered ineffective. “He hasn’t got a clue what is going on,” said one source. “If he comes round, you lock away any sensitive files and set up a display file specially for him to look at — a spoof file on some imaginary subversive with lots of exciting material in it. He’s not going to know any better.” Any material which has been obtained illegally is given extra security to protect MIS from discovery. “Anything from a break-in would be classified top secret. You would never put illegal material in a Box 500 report (to be circulated to Ministers) unless you had corroboration from some legitimate source. It would be asking for trouble.”

The Security Commission, like the Home Secretary, is not considered an effective watch-dog. Cathy Massiter said: “The Security Commission can’t find out what is going on unless someone tells them —

and who’s going to do that?” Now MIS faces its most serious political crisis: the internal debate has become a public controversy, the illegal nature of its operations has become a matter of record, and for the first time it has been seriously challenged to explain why it should not join other Western intelligence services in becoming accountable to its Parliament.

Secret services around the world are hated more than they are admired. Many people disapprove of their lack of official control and believe they sometimes act illegally. MIS in Britain has been bitterly attacked in recent weeks, by insiders as well as outsiders. The S.I.S. in New Zealand, too, has aroused strong antagonism. NICK DAVIES, of the London “Observer,” explores this hidden world and explains how spying on domestic targets — from trade unions to the peace movement — has become an in-built part of the system.