MI5 files should be in an archive
MI5’s real history is as much about what never was in its files as about what is in those that remain
Sir, While I am convinced that Chapman Pincher (and Peter Wright) were mistaken in their belief that Roger Hollis, Director-General of MI5 from 1956-55, and for a period MI5’s chief Soviet expert, was a GRU agent, Pincher’s concerns (letter, Oct 27) about Christopher Andrew’s “authorised” history of the service will be very widely shared.
There are astonishing gaps in the text. There is nothing on MI5’s important work in western Germany after 1945, nothing on the hunt for Hitler and other Nazi war criminals led by Sir Dick White, or the neo-Nazi Naumann plot, which MI5 carefully defused; no mention of “Operation Post Report” conducted by MI5 in Britain in the early 1950s that generated intelligence on more than 200,000 immigrants to Britain from Eastern Europe and provided (in 1952) the first hard evidence that Anthony Blunt was a communist spy. There is nothing here on how “Sonia,” the GRU master spy, managed to escape to East Germany in 1947, nothing on the Stasi, active in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. Markus Wolf’s name does not appear in the index. There is no mention of the senior intelligence officer who seems to have been authorised to tell the media that Hollis might be a spy at the same time as the Government was fighting Wright in the courts. The text itself shows every sign of having been severely redacted, presumably on the orders of MI5.
In speaking to the BBC earlier this month, Professor Andrew stated that he had been “given complete access . . . to just about all of MI5’s 400,000 files”. But he apparently failed to add that there had been massive weeding of these files (as Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee pointed out in its 1997-98 report) both before 1970 and then again in 1992, reducing the holding by half. The “vast majority” of these files had to do with MI5’s struggle with communist subversion, the very issue that taxes Pincher and many other critics of MI5 in this field.
MI5’s “authorised” (but not official) is the third important project that Britain’s intelligence community has decided to hand to Andrew (Gordievsky’s and Mitrokhin’s memoirs preceded it). Would we not have been better served if MI5’s extant files had all been placed in the National Archive, as I suggested in 2005, or handed to a diverse team of historians? This manicured and airbrushed (if massive) work will not be seen as the final word, not least because MI5’s real history is as much about what never was in its files as about what is in those that remain.
Professor Anthony Glees
Director, Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies, The University of Buckingham
This is the site for the riposte with the headline their copy editor got wrong!
November 9, 2009MI5 history took courage to undertake
Professor Anthony Glees has done us great service by telling us all he can from the MI5 record that is available
Sir, Professor Anthony Glees (letter, Oct 30) makes three basic points about Professor Christopher Andrew’s history of MI5: that evidence has been destroyed to distort the record if only by silence; that Andrew does not address important operations that are not in the existing files, and that he soft-pedals the post-1945 Soviet Intelligence and subversion offensive.
Of course, the body of evidence has been sculpted. MI5 must have had millions of files, not just the existing 400,000. There are, we should be aware, official files not about Intelligence that are literally hundreds of years old (eg, about Ireland, and Napoleon) still not public. Few evidential records are complete. Andrew makes clear that his work is based on official evidence. But this has not restrained his judgments. He has obviously been concerned to bring to light as much as possible while memories and people are still alive, offering up his account to the broadest possible amendment.
Evidence is also maintained to sculpt the record, too: even complete files can mislead. Sculpting information is a prerogative of whoever owns it, in this case the darkest workings of our government. It is to the credit of MI5 that the best evidential history that could be produced clearly has been by Andrew. And it obviously took courage for Andrew to undertake his task.
An authorised history is not an unauthorised history. Andrew makes this plain and clear. To criticise him for writing an authorised account is beside the point. His book, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5, is infused with the German, Soviet, Irish and terrorist threats that have been of principal concern. He faced a ruthless and historically self-authorised organisation and it is extraordinarily to his credit — and theirs — that he has brought so much out.
In any democracy people demand to know what is done in their name. Andrew has done us great service by telling us all he can from the MI5 record that is available. It is clear that he has not written to please.
John Ranelagh
Grantchester, Cambs
