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At a moment when talk of “broken Britain” is rife, it is comforting to find that the Chinese intelligence services (CIS) allegedly believed that it was in China’s interests to gather gossip about the shambolic Tory party leadership contest in 2022.
What makes the witness statement of the Deputy National Security Adviser, Matthew Collins, so interesting is less his supposed culpability in failing to identify China as an enemy, but rather the paltry nature of the information which he claims was obtained by China.
“None of it was protectively marked,” he wrote in his statement on 22 December, 2023, meaning that it was not classified even at the lowest level – and one can see why.
The CIS may have learned that “Jeremy Hunt MP was likely to pull out of the Conservative leadership and back Tom Tugendhat”, an MP known for his hawkish anti-China views.
“This pre-emptive knowledge may have given the Chinese state an understanding of the likely outcome of democratic process to choose the leader of the governing political party,” suggested Collins, a polite description of the back-stabbing chaos of the Tory leadership battles.
“Knowledge that IPAC [the Inter-parliamentary Party Alliance on China] was briefing Liz Truss’s campaign would also have been of great interest given the potential that she also could become prime minister,” says Collins.
I am not arguing that the CIS did not seek such titbits of information, but that it would have done them very little good. Yet the furore caused by the collapse of the trial of former parliamentary researcher Christopher Cash and academic Christopher Berry for allegedly passing on unclassified information to an interlocutor called “Alex” is scarcely surprising.
Spy scandals seldom have much to do with the true value of information sought or obtained by an outside power, and everything to do with the explosive political impact of revelations that some foreign super-menace, aided by treachery or incompetence on our side, is stealing our “secrets”.
The nature of the latter is seldom spelled out and often turn out – as in this case – to be trivial and not very secret. Yet no government with any sense of self-preservation dares play down the seriousness of a minor leak of information because they will inevitably be accused of being criminally cavalier about UK national security.
Spy scandals revolving around human intelligence enjoy vast publicity, while more serious espionage through intercepted communications and broken codes passes beneath the radar. Best-selling biographies about master spies are coy about the embarrassing fact that they did not have much impact on events. The most notorious British spy scandal of the 20th century was the defection of senior MI6 officer Kim Philby, who had been a long-time Soviet double agent. Yet during much of the period when Philby worked for the Soviet intelligence service, first the NKVD and later the KGB, they suspected that he was a triple agent still working for MI6 and ignored his information as deliberately misleading.
Even more paranoid about spying than the British, the Russians were convinced that Philby must be lying when he told them accurately, soon after joining MI6, that Britain had no spies in the Soviet Union – just as Stalin was shooting people in great numbers who had confessed under torture to being foreign agents. In the 1980s, I met a man in Moscow who, 30 years earlier, had confessed to being a foreign agent to escape torture and execution, leaving it to the NKVD to pick which country he had been spying for. “So, I spent six years in a labour camp as a spy for New Zealand,” he told me wryly.
Exaggerating the importance of spies is so universal because focusing on them as deciding the fate of nations dramatises, simplifies and humanises complex struggles between rival countries and political systems. “Confound their politics,” as the British national anthem, written in about 1745, has it. “Frustrate their knavish tricks.”
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The press has always loved real life spy dramas pitting our side against evil foreigners abroad and traitors and fools at home. Spy thrillers sell in their hundreds of millions, from John Buchan’s hero Richard Hannay unmasking a German espionage group called the Black Stone in The 39 Steps at the start of the First World War to John Le Carre’s George Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy exposing a Soviet mole in the Circus half a century later. Readable and absorbing though such fiction remains, it is as far from the real problems of gathering useful but secret information about foreign powers as western movies are from real life in the American west.
Most people understand that the torrent of fictional spy dramas in books and on film may not be a good guide to the real world of espionage. But there is a subtler misconception about “state secrets”, supposedly hidden somewhere in the depths of Washington and Whitehall, whose possession or loss will save or endanger us all. On occasion, such secrets may actually exist, such as the date and location of the D-Day landings, but, outside wartime, this rarely happens.
Cash and Berry are alleged to have given China what might be described as “inside information”. Not only the public, but governments, intelligence services and journalists tend to become over-excited and credulous when learning secret or confidential information. Yet most of what is billed as “insider information” turns out to be trivial or obvious, or could be worked out by any knowledgeable person relying on open sources and a detailed up-to-date understanding of any given situation.
Go back to Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 when the big secret was that, contrary to what the US and its allies had convinced themselves, the Taliban was still very much in business and all too likely to make a comeback. No spy was necessary to tell them this crucial fact, obvious to children selling cigarettes in the streets of Kandahar, and was only a secret because governments did not want to believe it.
The powers-that-be understand that knowledge is power and feel their authority beginning to shake when their monopoly of information is breached and becomes public knowledge. This explains why they reacted so furiously and punitively when Julian Assange and WikiLeaks published cables from Afghanistan and Iraq in 2010, though these could easily be accessed by hundreds of thousands of US service personnel by using a simple password – and had most probably already been read by intelligence services worldwide.
Threat inflation is always in the interests of intelligence agencies so their claims to be daily battling undercover assault by foreign powers – like the one just made by MI5 chief Sir Ken McCallum – should be always viewed with scepticism.
Possibly the CIS believed that they had penetrated deep into the secret heart of the British state. But, if they are silly enough to believe that, then they cannot pose much of a threat to anybody.
Further Thoughts
Some years before the Sunday Times foreign correspondent Marie Colvin was killed by a Syrian army rocket in Homs in central Syria in 2012, she told me of a curious incident that had just occurred to her in London.
She had been approached by an officer of the British security services – most probably MI5, though she did not give a name – who said that he needed to warn her about a threat to her that she was unaware of.
He explained that his office had learned that a mid-ranking diplomat at an Arab embassy, whom Marie knew slightly, had falsely claimed to his government that he had paid her £30,000 to act as an informant, and had pocketed the money himself. The security officer said that he was telling her this in case she visited the country in question whose government believed she was on the payroll and might get angry when she denied knowing what they were talking about.
Marie and I were both amused and a bit taken back by this, it not having occurred to either of us that some polite diplomat we had chatted to in Europe or the Middle East might be putting us down on their expenses for a hefty sum: “Cockburn, privy to the dark secrets of the British cabinet, but a man of exceptional greed,” paid so many thousand pounds. It seemed all too likely.
Beneath the Radar
I am fascinated by unanswered questions surrounding cyber hacks which have crippled companies like Marks and Spencer, Jaguar Land Rover and the Co-Op, costing them hundreds of millions of pounds in each case.
Is it teenagers whose cyber skills are honed on computer games, sitting in their bedrooms doing it for the hell of it? Or have they been recruited by cyber criminals seeking ransoms and protection money from targets?
The best informed article I have read on this is by Oliver Pickup in the New Statesman with the self-explanatory title: “Britain’s digital delinquents: Organised gangs and hostile states are recruiting teenage hackers to wreak havoc online”.
Cockburn’s Picks
Very little of the vast coverage of the UK’s China spy scandal is about the credibility of the government case which has now been dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service. An exception is a highly informed piece in the Financial Times by Edward White in Shanghai and David Sheppard, which quotes several China experts expressing doubts about such a senior Chinese figure meeting with a lowly British academic, as the UK government claims.
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