1 March 2000. Thanks to anonymous.
See also: http://cryptome.org/e2-v-wylde.htm
The Guardian, Wednesday March 1, 2000
Isabel Hilton
When governments pour money into military research, there is often, we are told, a civilian spin off. Perhaps when I heat a cup of milk in my microwave, I should give thanks to some distant military programme.
Equally, though, when governments go to war, there is a negative pay-off - and not just in the toll of dead and wounded, of life chances lost. Where security becomes the dominant concern over liberty, authoritarianism edges civil liberties aside. Sometimes it's just a nudge. At other times it's more of a shove. And the longer the war goes on, the more civil liberties are compromised in the name of the nation's freedom.
Remember, for instance, Ollie North, the celebrated marine who had broken the laws of the US, deceived his country's elected representatives and undermined the constitution? When asked to explain himself, he said he did it to defend US freedom and democracy. Who was really the subversive here, you would be entitled to ask.
But Ollie North's thousand-yard stare could never be brought to reflect upon himself. So it is with those who undermine civil liberties in the name of defending them.
Last week, the writer Tony Geraghty celebrated with some friends the dropping of the charges against him. Those charges - under the official secrets act - had arisen from his book The Irish War. That war, he observed last week, is Britain's Algeria. And just as the war in Algeria did to France, the war in Northern Ireland has burdened Britain with shameful secrets and an over-powerful security apparatus.
But the case against Tony Geraghty has been dropped - a demonstration, surely, that our liberties are still intact. Up to a point. After more than a year of harassment, the crown admitted there is no case worth pursuing against him. Nevertheless, they are actively dissuading his publishers, HarperCollins, from issuing his book in paperback.
That is vexing enough for Mr Geraghty. But even more vexing is the attorney general's continuing intention to prosecute his fellow accused, Nigel Wylde. Under section two of the act, the crown alleges that, between November 1997 and October 1998, while employed as a government contractor, Mr Wylde made "damaging disclosures of information, documents or articles relating to defence which were in (his) possession by virtue of (his) position". He is now accused of passing five documents to Geraghty, who is no longer accused of receiving them and publishing their contents.
While we meditate on the security equivalent of one-hand clapping, consider Mr Wylde's record. He joined the army from school and went to Sandhurst, then took a commission in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps where he was trained as an ammunition technical officer, responsible for terrorist bomb disposal.
He was awarded the Queen's gallantry medal for his command of the Belfast Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit in 1974. When he returned to Northern Ireland, in 1977, it was as an intelligence officer.
In the early 80s he served in a little known East German "liaison unit" collecting intelligence, then in the late 80s, he worked in the MoD, coordinating computer and communications systems and conducting a review of technical requirements for Northern Ireland. He left the army in 1991 to work in the IT industry. In the late 90s, as a consultant, he investigated the communications and information systems used by the army in Northern Ireland. He was deeply unimpressed by what he found.
Nigel Wylde doesn't look like a man bent on bringing the state crashing about our ears. He does, though, look like a man who knows more than enough to embarrass the government and its security services, if he chose to. The recommendations of Mr Wylde's consultancy team as regards what should be done to improve the army's communications and information systems met with opposition within the MoD. Why?
Mr Wylde suggests it was because they would have introduced true accountability to the system and that, "at the highest levels" of the MoD, "there was a desire to maintain their own systems which were to a large degree hidden from the RUC".
Both Nigel Wylde and Tony Geraghty are ex-military men who would once have been regarded as outstanding members of the services. Neither has changed his attitude toward the security of serving military personnel wherever they may be: it is not something either would be willing to compromise. What, then, is the problem?
The book describes the sophisticated electronic surveillance that the British developed for use in Northern Ireland, but which is now employed on the mainland. "Cameras around sensitive areas such as the City of London, linked to computers which will automatically identify suspect vehicles within four seconds, evolved into computerised, digital maps of human faces. These have the potential to alert supermarkets to the presence of known shoplifters as well as MI5's watchers to the movement of terrorists."
The Harrods bombers Jan Taylor and Patrick Hayes were caught with such techniques and sentenced to 30 years' imprisonment in 1994. As Geraghty wrote: "The damage their war did to freedom of movement in Britain without close, intrusive state surveillance was permanent." As the Good Friday agreement bogs down, the security services continue to pursue.
He argues that Ireland needs a truth and reconciliation commission - a place in which the suppurating secrets of the war can be told and accepted. Perhaps Geraghty and Wylde are simply guilty of knowing too much - not about how to undermine state security, but how those who act in the name of the security of the state are undermining ours.
The Guardian, Saturday February 26, 2000
Politics is a difficult art. Unpredictable events would alone be enough to make that inevitable. But some public embarrassments are perfectly predictable, and there is one staring the attorney general starkly in the face at this moment. Lord Williams of Mostyn wants to go down as a reformer, as befits a former Rhyl grammar school boy who rose to be chairman of the bar council. He has spoken of the need for law reform and his determination to improve the beleaguered crown prosecution service. But before he turns to these bigger pictures, he needs to review again an individual prosecution now heading towards the courts.
The attorney general has already made one sound ruling - the decision in late December to drop the prosecution against Tony Geraghty, the first journalist to face charges under the secrecy laws for 20 years, which he made because he was not content with the case against the writer. But the prosecution of Mr Geraghty's co-defendant, Nigel Wylde, a former army colonel who won the Queen's gallantry medal in a Northern Ireland tour in which he defused 96 terrorist bombs, is - absurdly - still proceeding. He is alleged to have helped Mr Geraghty with his book, The Irish War, an account of 300 years of fighting in Ireland in which he sets out the current extent of computer-assisted surveillance of the civilian population.
From the moment the heavy ministry of defence police feet marched into Mr Geraghty's Herefordshire home, the writer insisted that he had done no damage to the national interest. As a former squadron leader in the RAF military reserve, who served with General Sir Peter de la Billiere's staff in the Gulf war, Mr Geraghty's patriotism was not in question. What he revealed was already known. It was embarrassing, but not damaging. Embarrassing the government is still, even in this authoritarian time, not a crime. The authorities seemingly concurred. There was no attempt to injunct the book either at the time of publication or even after the two men had been arrested and charged. Then, shortly after the New York Times had taken up the case, the charges against Mr Geraghty were dropped.
But this still leaves Nigel Wylde facing his prosecutors. There are several reasons why they will fail. First, because the law under which he is being prosecuted, section two of the 1989 official secrets act, is in breach of the fair trial provisions of the European convention on human rights. The section tramples over a key pillar of natural justice by reversing the onus on the burden of proof. Instead of the prosecution having to prove that the book damaged the national interest, the burden will rest with Mr Wylde to demonstrate that it did not. This invidious provision was also included in the prevention of terrorism act, which was condemned by the attorney general when in opposition. And it was while Labour was in opposition that Labour opposed the 1989 official secrets bill for failing to provide a public interest defence. Surely the attorney general has not forgotten this commitment.
All this in any case presupposes that the prosecution can prove that Mr Wylde assisted Mr Geraghty. It is time the attorney general took another urgent look at this case. He cannot seriously believe a jury would find Mr Wylde guilty when the charges against Mr Geraghty have already been dropped and the prosecution is in breach of the European convention. Lord Williams must surely see the logic of that. He should act on it.
The Guardian, Saturday February 26, 2000
Northern Ireland: special report
Tony Geraghty
"Dear Sir. . . She Who Dared ISBN No 085052 696-8. . . We must ask you immediately to return your copy of this book to us. . . We will send you a replacement copy as soon as possible. "
As a book promotion, this letter to literary editors earlier this month, from the respected military publisher Leo Cooper, obviously had hidden depths; an opacity in keeping with its subject matter: the undercover war in Northern Ireland. That an injunction had been obtained by the ministry of defence to suppress the book, two months after publication and long after the ministry itself had "cleared" (ie, censored) the work, was not mentioned.
Nor, for that matter, has HarperCollins explained to retailers why the paperback of my own book about the Troubles - The Irish War - remains unpublished following an advisory letter from MoD saying "Don't !" This deterrent was one that succeeded without even the formality of a court order to back it up.
Is this a new trend in book marketing? A negative buoyancy test to affirm the true importance of a book about Britain's last colonial war? Should publishers collude in the process? Or is the inconsistent behaviour of MoD - first allowing a book to be published, and then having a paroxysm of post-publication regret - the military equivalent of coitus interruptus , left, as so often with this technique, too late to avert disaster?
For there are, to my personal knowledge, at least three uncoordinated (and apparently competing) censorship teams setting out to hunt down wayward authors and publishers from their separate lairs within the same ministry. In view of the singular attention attached to She Who Dared, what is special about this book ?
It is one of three recent memoirs derived from the experience of the undercover, armed, plainclothes team commonly known as 14 Intelligence Company. The company comprises three detachments ("the Dets"). Their surveillance techniques include armed, illegal entry into private premises. The three authors, writing under pen-names - "Jackie George" (a woman soldier, now a freelance bodyguard), "James Rennie" (an infantry officer, now a stockbroker), and "Sarah Ford" (a woman sailor, now also a freelance bodyguard), cover the years 1983-91. All publish identically-worded health warnings at the front, a mantra apparently prescribed by Whitehall: "Owing to the sensitivity of the contents of this book, the manuscript was submitted to the ministry of defence prior to publication. At their request some changes were made to the text - including altering the names of individuals and places - in order to protect the work of the unit in their fight against terrorism."
One would think that this set all three authors on the same footing. But Jackie George's book is the one that has been blasted with an injunction. (None the less, it continues to sell well, particularly in Hereford, home of the Special Air Service.) Among many marvels attached to this decision is the fact that although recently published, it covers the most remote time-frame of the collection, 1983-88.
The censorship of Jackie George's story displayed Whitehall's characteristic incompetence even before the injunction. For example, the names and places changed include that of an SAS soldier, Al Slater, shot dead by the IRA in Fermanagh in December 1984. Why now conceal Slater's identity when it has been in the public domain - including two of my own books - for most of the preceding six years? Why cut out any reference to the deaths of two IRA men, Tony MacBride and Keiran Fleming, in the same contact? It would seem that the censor does not know what has been published already and what has not.
Yet from such ignorance is asserted the right to suppress information which, since it does not damage security, the public has a right to know.
Jackie George's book shares common features with the other two, including an account of the brutalising nature of the selection process. "Resistance-to- interrogation" licenses the selectors to deprive their masked, female subjects of the right to go to the loo. If they have the "bottle" to wet themselves before the prurient gaze of their male interrogators, that wins brownie points.
Both of the women authors, as it happens, came from dysfunctional working-class homes where violence had already marked them. Service with Britain's secret army in the war against terrorism left them psychologically more damaged than before. No help was offered to stabilise them after the trauma of blood, booze and brutality across the water.
Where Jackie George breaks the mould is in her attitude to the Royal Ulster Constabulary. (Ford, by contrast, decorated her bleak quarters with a King Billy tea-towel.) George describes the successful surveillance of a loyalist arms transfer, an operation which greatly displeased the RUC special branch. Her partner, Joe, "thought we had all done a good job in locating these terrorists, regardless of their political persuasion. However, it seemed that the RUC was only concerned with apprehending republican terrorists. We were told in no uncertain terms that we were never to work that area again. Under no circumstances were any records to be kept."
Or: "The police, who had jurisdiction over the army, seemed to believe that they could do whatever they wanted and get away with it. The sad truth was that they probably could. . . They could even arrange for you to die if it suited their purpose." Or, again: "The bitterness I felt towards the special branch of the RUC will remain with me always. Those police officers played with our lives with total indifference and many of them were no better than the terrorists they were supposed to be fighting."
To publish such sentiments at a time when the Patten report was about to recommend drastic reform - a virtual demolition - of the RUC was to invite some sort of reaction. Did anyone invite Jackie George to give evidence to Patten? It seems unlikely.
The chosen option was to shoot the messenger; or in this case at least to suppress the message. In the Irish war, truth is not just the first casualty. It promises to be the last and most permanent one also.
__________
Tony Geraghty's The Irish War is published by Johns Hopkins University Press. He was charged under the official secrets act, which led to widespread public protests; the charges were later dropped, but secrets charges are still pending against a decorated bomb-disposal officer, Colonel Nigel Wylde