Britain Challenging Government Secrets

The barrage of media scrutiny would have been unthinkable for those two discreet representatives of Her Majesty’s Secret Service, George Smiley and James Bond. The formerly anonymous head of Britain’s MI5 counterintelligence agency, Sir John Jones, 62, was doubtless shocked to find his picture, partly blotted out by government edict, in London’s Sunday Times. A few days later, a national television audience got an unprecedented look at MI5’s internal operations in a controversial documentary. In short, last week the lid was blown off Britain’s venerable intelligence establishment. The reason, according to Liberal Party Leader David Steel: “The secret state is out of & control and democracy is threatened.”

In the eye of last week’s storm was the TV documentary on Britain’s commercial Channel 4, MI5’s Official Secrets. In it, Cathy Massiter, 37, a former agency intelligence officer, charged that for the past 15 years her ex- bosses had been illegally wiretapping British union officials as well as human-rights and political activists. Her assertions were supported by another former MI5 employee, an anonymous clerk, who said she was responsible for transcribing the intercepted phone calls. “The evidence of Ms. Cathy Massiter and her unnamed former colleague,” declared the Guardian after the story broke, “is potentially the most important blow ever delivered to the credibility of the internal activities of the British national security state.”

Among those allegedly bugged: Arthur Scargill, president of the National Union of Mineworkers; Harriet Harman, the former legal officer for the National Council for Civil Liberties and now a Member of Parliament; and Patricia Hewitt, the N.C.C.L.’s general secretary, currently an adviser to Labor Party Leader Neil Kinnock. Orga- nizations supposedly placed under surveillance because they were thought to be subversive included the N.C.C.L. and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

The televised expose was the latest in a series of incidents that has challenged the Conservative government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher over its use of Britain’s archaic security laws. Particularly under attack is the Official Secrets Act of 1911, which allows the government to withhold details of its activities, no matter how insignificant, simply by claiming that anything not officially released is a state secret. Under the law, any civil servant who reveals such secrets, as well as any journalist who publishes them, is subject to arrest and, if convicted, to a maximum sentence of two years in prison.

British legal scholars say this power to suppress exists in a democratic society because Britain has no American-style bill of rights to guarantee basic liberties or the citizen’s right to know. As a result, many Britons increasingly have come to fear that a government could use the Official Secrets Act to hide abuses of power. Last month the Thatcher government suffered an embarrassing defeat when Clive Ponting, 38, a former assistant secretary at the Ministry of Defense, was acquitted of violating the Official Secrets Act by a jury that had been virtually instructed by the trial judge to deliver a guilty verdict. Ponting was charged with giving a Labor Party Member of Parliament classified documents about the sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano by a Royal Navy submarine during the 1982 Falklands war. More than 360 Argentine sailors perished in the attack. The documents contradicted the account of the Belgrano episode given at the time to Parliament by members of the Thatcher government. The material indicated, among other things, that the Belgrano was moving away from, not toward, the British fleet when it was torpedoed. In another recent Official Secrets Act case, Sarah Tisdall, a Foreign Office clerk, was sentenced to six months in jail for revealing to the Guardian the date of the scheduled arrival in Britain of new U.S. cruise missiles. She was released last July after serving only three months.

In its handling of the Massiter affair, the government appeared to have done little to dispel public concern over potential abuses of the Official Secrets Act. At first, executives of Britain’s Independent Broadcasting Authority, the public body that regulates commercial television, were advised by their lawyers that they risked prosecution if they allowed the documentary to be televised. But more than 40 opposition Members of Parliament signed a Commons motion saying that the public had a right to see the film. Last Tuesday, Attorney General Sir Michael Havers announced that no one would be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act for appearing in the 55-minute documentary. Even before the film was aired on Friday night, a report was hurriedly released by Lord Bridge, the senior judge in charge of checking on telephone and mail interference, exonerating the government as well as previous governments from charges that they had improperly authorized phone taps.

Critics quickly labeled Lord Bridge’s report a whitewash. Noting that the report was commissioned and completed in only six days, the Daily Telegraph ridiculed it as “the bench’s answer to fast food: a juridical Big Mac.”

This week the House of Commons will debate proposed legislation that would set up a tribunal to hear complaints about unauthorized government surveillance. Those sympathetic to the intelligence services believe that limited parliamentary supervision is the only way to stop leaks while restoring public confidence. Said Labor’s shadow home secretary, Gerald Kaufman: “As long as the government refuses to treat these matters with the seriousness they deserve, people will understandably believe that it has something to hide.”