Peter Wilson, Europe correspondent | October 10, 2009
Article from: The Australian
CHRISTOPHER Andrew, the Cambridge University historian who this week published the first authorised history of MI5, says he has a cunning plan.
"All I have to do is get my book banned and have a farcical court case about it in an Australian court, then I might sell a million copies," he says. He is joking about the 1986 saga in a NSW court over Spycatcher, the memoirs of former British spy Peter Wright that the British government tried unsuccessfully to suppress.
Spycatcher went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, but it is the last thing that Andrew, the world's leading historian on the British intelligence services, wants his new book In Defence of the Realm to resemble.
Having had unprecedented access to MI5's archives, Andrew says Spycatcher's savage account of MI5 was grossly inaccurate, and that when Wright was an active officer his delusions and conspiracy theories did enormous damage to the secret service by wasting many of its energies and distracting it from real threats.
Wright, who died in Tasmania in 1995, may have been wrong about many of the great spy dramas of the Cold War, but Andrew says the British government's "comical" attempts to stifle his book did at least convince the spymasters and politicians in London that times had changed.
"There is a strong connection between the hopeless mishandling of the Wright affair, which included a trial in NSW that was somewhere between Monty Python and Yes Minister, and the fact I was eventually commissioned to write this book," the professor says.
At one point in the Spycatcher trial, the British government's chief witness said he could not even confirm or deny that MI5 existed, but Wright's lawyer, Malcolm Turnbull, who is now the Coalition leader, pointed out that the witness had already admitted Dick White had served as head of the service in the 1950s.
In his book, Andrew recounts that the British government's witness "was forced to give the surreal reply that while acknowledging the existence of (MI6) when White was the head of it, he could not admit it had any prior or subsequent existence".
"If you were setting out to make a fool of yourself in a court of law you could not do a better job than that," Andrew says.
"Until then the whole area of intelligence had been so secret it was a complete bipartisan taboo in British politics, and more than anything else the Spycatcher affair showed things had to change, as the taboo was counter-productive and outdated."
The embarrassment of how Spycatcher was handled weakened then prime minister Margaret Thatcher's resistance to new legislation that put MI5 on a statutory basis, and led to the decision to allow Andrew access to the secret archives to write a history of the secret service.
In Canberra, David Horner of the Australian National University, is working on a similar history of ASIO. Professor Horner told The Weekend Australian he has been given unrestricted access to ASIO's archives but is only allowed to cover the period from 1949 to 1978.
Andrew had some restrictions placed on his access to the MI5 files because his research ranged up to the present day. Both authors have had to accept having their work vetted for issues of national security and individual privacy.
Andrew's conclusions about MI5 are often unflattering.
Its agents overestimated the power of the Soviet spy network, did a poor job at the start of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and were slow to recognise the threat of Islamist terrorism, he says.
Although al-Qa'ida was formed in 1988 and reports of its activities began reaching MI5 by 1993, "a permanent file was not opened until two years later and (MI5 chief) Stella Rimington had never heard the name al-Qa'ida until March 1996, when it cropped up during a farewell visit to the US a few weeks before her retirement".
MI5 often bugged and suspected British trade union leaders and politicians of passing information to the Soviet bloc, he says, but the secret service resisted pressure from Thatcher and other government leaders to put "non-subversive" union officials under surveillance during the strikes and unrest of the 1970s and 1980s.
Andrew confirmed years of speculation by revealing that MI5 did keep a file on British Labour prime minister Harold Wilson, although he concluded it never used that information to undermine him.
However, Andrew reveals that a Wilson government minister who became notorious in Australia was "the only British politician (so far as is known) to have acted as a foreign agent while holding ministerial office".
In 1974, John Stonehouse, who had been a government minister from 1964 to 1970, "abandoned his wife, faked his own suicide, adopted a new identity and disappeared with his mistress to Australia".
When tracked down and brought back to England, Stonehouse was sentenced in 1976 to seven years' jail for fraud, and it has since been assumed that he had run away because of financial problems.
But a Czech defector proved in 1980 that Stonehouse had been a Czech agent. "Since, however, it was decided that the defector's evidence could not be used in court, Mrs Thatcher agreed that Stonehouse should not be prosecuted," Andrew writes.
Stonehouse, who had used "the money he received (from the Czechs) to fund his social life" died in 1988.
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