Mining the Spy World
ALAN, RAY
Euro vista BY RAY ALAN Mining the Spy World Seen from this side of the pool, Watergate and Iranscam seemed mere peccadillos compared with the skulduggery some European governments are...
...Ward's story is told by Phillip Knightley and Caroline Kennedy in An Affair of State (Atheneum, 280 pp., $18.95...
...He advocates what in the UK is a revolutionary concept: "oversight or supervision of the secret service by an independent body with statutory powers...
...Burgess, as dedicated a KGB agent as Philby, had gone straight to "the heart of policymaking" (as a crony of his, a member of Parliament and MI5-KGB moonlighter, said admiringly), having entered the Foreign Office as a protégé and personal assistant of Minister of State Hector McNeil...
...MI5 has also been accused of launching a smear campaign against Leon Brittan, home secretary in the Thatcher government until a few months ago, partly because he was Jewish...
...Archie Marshal [the trial judge] murdered Ward...
...Some ex-Security Service officers disagree with Pincher because, they say, Hollis was too stupid to be a Soviet spy...
...Here are politicians and businessmen corroded by hatred and ambition...
...weep for you, " the Walrus said...
...Blunt was a member of the coterie of Communists and fellow travelers that flourished in Cambridge University in the late 1930s and moved on to the Foreign Office, the secret services, the media, and other influential sectors of English society...
...Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover have walk-on parts...
...Noi surprisingly, I he book has become a bestseller in America (has someone at Viking gol a cousin in the Home Office...
...It lias been said that while only a minority in M15 sough...
...but answer came there none...
...Ml5 informant, social climber, and something of a voyeur —was the scapegoat chosen to alleviate the Establishment's moral binden and divert the media from Whitehall...
...Far from harming them professionally, their drunken orgies and hostility toward America seemed to win them advancement: Maclean became head of the American department of the Foreign Office, Burgess was posted to the British Embassy in Washington...
...One notorious MI5-man, Sir Anthony Blunt, who was a Soviet spy for many years, is the central figure in Conspiracy of Silence by Barrie Penrose and Simon Freeman (Farrar Straus Giroux, 616 pp., $22.95...
...That is not a joke...
...Given an account of Burgess' behavior by a colleague in London, and warned that it might get worse, the embassy security officer asked sarcastically: "What does 'worse' mean...
...Pots calling kettles black are a feature of the British security scene...
...Pincher asserts, optimistically, that the public "can no longer be hoodwinked by prime ministers claiming as triumphs what are in fact disasters in which spies have operated for years under the nose of the security authorities and been exposed only [by] some fluke circumstance...
...but the police devoted hundreds of hours to fabricating one...
...Ward's tragedy was entangled with the folly of John Profumo, war minister in Harold Macmillan's government, who shared a prostitute with a Soviet naval attach...
...Pincher outlines in this book, too, his case against Sir Roger Hollis, a former head of MI5...
...Meanwhile, good accounts of security scandals by established espiologists are becoming international bestsellers...
...He has packed into Traitors such a store of facts that it reads at times like a textbook, but it will make an ideal Christmas gift for political journalists, security lecturers and spies...
...Wrightists argue that a public employee must serve the public, not a semiofficial mafia...
...Nineteen years too late, an MI5 man told journalists about a meeting at which Home Secretary Henry Brooke urged the heads of the Security Service and the Metropolitan Police to dig up an offense that could be used to prosecute Ward...
...by seeking lo impose on it a director draw ? from the (lower-casle) police...
...As the London Economist commented, "the affair could never have happened" in the United States or any member of the European Community except Britain and Denmark, the only EC states that have not yet incorporated the European Convention of Human Rights into their domestic law...
...Basic British legislation on treason dates from the 14th century and is intended to deal with rival claims to the throne...
...In The Perfect Spy, Johnle Carré describes one such school as "a fascist state," with "the intricacies of the British hierarchical system" providing "a natural order for the exercise of sadism...
...MI5's upper ranks may have harbored fewer drunks and incompetents than thoseof SIS in recent years, but on average their caliber has been low...
...Martin's, 346 pp., $19.95), abrisk WhoWas-Who of the main espionage cases of the past 50 years...
...Wright's Establishment critics say his revelations violate the Official Secrets Act (OSA...
...This book is important and enlightening because its authors have studied not only Blunt's private life but the society that produced so astounding a crop of moral degenerates and Soviet agents...
...And a former chief of Britain's external secret service (SIS), Sir Maurice Oldfield, has been quoted as saying that an "unreliable" section of M15 may have tried to poison him...
...Their book, like Conspiracy, is a study of social and political mores as well as of an enigmatic man...
...and that by failing to do so he would share the guilt of his superior officers and their nominal political bosses...
...abject aristocrats, hookers and hacks...
...Carefully researched and well written, it is populated by a rich cast of characters...
...Blunt, Kim Philby (of the SIS), Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean (both of the Foreign Office), were all alcoholics...
...In addition, supervision might "prevent the dangerous liberties which MI5, in particular, has taken" and improve liaison with United States agencies—vital because Britain is today dependent on American services for leads from defectors and intercepts, and "for all information originating from reconnaissance satellites, having none of its own.' Does 'Worse' Mean Goats...
...One said: "I felt sorry for the man...
...Ward committed suicide a few days later...
...Euro vista BY RAY ALAN Mining the Spy World Seen from this side of the pool, Watergate and Iranscam seemed mere peccadillos compared with the skulduggery some European governments are capable of...
...Rolph, a columnist of the Police Review, a weekly read by most UK policemen, wrote recently: "Even the government's Advisory Committees on Food are covered by the Official Secrets Acts, and criminal proceedings could be launched against anyone who discovered and proclaimed the contents of the British Sausage...
...Miami Vice is adolescent fantasy compared with this mature May fair vice...
...and MI5's troops, Pinchersays, "are only too aware how poorly they have performed...
...For a time, McNeil was nominally responsible for asecret British propaganda service that contributed to tension in the Near East after 1945...
...A retired English judge has described Ward as " the victim of an historic injustice...
...Goats...
...London clubs and newsrooms were ajitter with reports of scandals but frustrated by the OSA and libel law...
...19 Years Too Late Blunt's last royal mission was in the summer of 1963...
...It needs an infusion of fresh minds and ideas—possibly, as Attlee and Wilson thought, from the police where a growing number of the younger officers today read civilized newspapers, write decent English, speak a continental language, and have heard of managerial efficiency...
...It was from Traitors that the British public first learned of Oldfield's "staggering duplicity" and compulsive homosexuality...
...Blunt, Burgess and occasionally Maclean were homosexuals as well, and their parties—even those where official secrets were discussed—were usually graced by one or two scruffy male prostitutes who had been recruited in a pub or a public toilet for the occasion...
...It's as simple as that...
...that he should ignore the OAS if this becomes necessary in order to reveal corruption and treachery...
...to undermine the Labor government, Wilson angered the service, as his Labor predecessor Clement ?ttlice had done in 1946...
...The alleged conspirators have noi been put on trial...
...The veteran spywatcher Chapman Pincher—whose Their Trade is Treachery (a 1982 Bantam paperback) was written in collaboration with Peter Wright —is back in business with Traitors (St...
...One former SIS officer is already in the market with a draft and the government, he says, wants to cut at least five chapters...
...Conspiracy of Silence is a fascinating study of personal and social tragedy...
...MI5 reported that it had no case against him...
...In the past three years, Peter Wright, formerly an assistant director of the British Security Service (better known as M15) and a close collaborator of its director-general, has been trying to tell members of Parliament and the British media about illegal activities by MI5 men, some of whom are said to have joined a few military officers and Conservative politicians in a plot to oust the 1974 Labor government and discredit its leader, Harold Wilson...
...Some of the allegations in Spycatcher have in recent weeks been strengthened by other former secret agents and journalists...
...Stephen Ward —osteopath, artist...
...and the Philby affair was festering...
...He walked into a London art exhibition and bought all the sketches on show that portrayed members of the royal family...
...The artist, Stephen Ward, was facing a rigged trial in the central criminal court for living on "immoral earnings,' and Blunt's task was, apparently, to remove traces of his royal contacts...
...Even police officers, once awed by the service, now laugh at it...
...According to a Tory member of Parliament who also worked with MI5, six members of the governmenl were "moral/political risks...
...The biographies of many Englishmen reveal the scars inflicted on them by their "public" (in fact private) boardingschools...
...As C.H...
...British law does, however, permit the publication of anti-Semitic texts such as those hoary Tsarist Protocols...
...but if Wright, who now lives in Tasmania, returns to (he UK he will probably be arrested...
...A British official who covered up for his superiors as devotedly as Colonel Oliver L. North might expect to win a promotion or a medal...
...Oldfield himself, however, a barrelbottom homosexual, was a security man's nightmare...
...and bids for serial rights have gone over the moon...
...The transcription of a 1976 (ape recording, in which ex-Prime Minister Wilson expressed his doubts aboul the loyalty of MI5, has been circulated...
...a Conservative prime minister and his cabinet floundering in incompetence and scandals...
...Yet "MI5 does not seem to learn from past mistakes...
...Pincher's purpose is to study "the anatomy of treason" and his chapters have headings like "The Lure of Adventure," "Power-Lust," "Ideology,' and "The Homosex Factor...
...and police officers, promised promotion if they "got" Ward, manipulating whores to frame him...
...An Anatomy of Treason Whitehall mandarins fear that publication of a British edition of Spycatcher would release a flood of memoirs and revelations by former gumshoemen...
...Wasn't that (they ask) one of the issues at the Nuremberg trials...
...Another lawyer says: "Ward's case was rigged...
...He would get into trouble only if he communicated to members of Parliament the sort of information North gave United States Congressmen in a public hearing...
...Penrose and Freeman follow Blunt's trail from school (where deceit and hypocrisy were essential defenses against prefects and bullies) to his involvement in pro-Soviet intrigue at Cambridge, then on to his services to M15, [he KGB and the royal family(on whose behalf he retrieved potentially embarrassing correspondence from archives in Germany), and through his years of sickening snobbery and depravity to the deal with MI5 thai gave him immunity from prosecution...
...in his opinion, a clash between Arabs and Israelis was not a bad thing...
...But most mediafolk and security men in Britain know the main purpose of the OSA is to reinforce bureaucracy and conceal facts from Parliament and the press, not from the Russians...
...British officialdom reacted hysterically lo his book, Spycatcher (see John ?. Roche's review, "Swindled by Oxbridge Nobs," NL, October 19...
...Blunt attended Marlborough where his early years were made miserable by what Louis MacNeice, another Marlburian, called the "mass sadism" and mob mentality the school's ethos fostered...
...Two detectives involved, now retired, have admitted it was baseless...
...in the UK the media were forbidden to quote or review it or report the legal proceedings in Australia...
...This, he believes, would improve their efficiency and lessen the "outrageous extent to which Parliament and public [are] misled by official statements...
...Margaret Thatcher's government banned it and earned ridicule in Australia by trying to have il banned [here...
Vol. 70 • November 1987 • No. 17
