Spy Story Private Eye, No. 1037
21 September - 4 October 2001 An interesting defence by Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger of his decision to run interminable extracts from the memoirs of former spymistress Stella Rimington: "There are no great secrets in it," he told Sky News, "and that is the irony after all this fuss." In which case, many indignant Grauniad hacks are asking, why shell out �100,000 for a book which had already been rejected by almost every other newspaper in Fleet Street on the grounds that it was utterly tedious and unrevealing? Even on the first day of the paper's Stella-mania -- launched with a huge fanfare on the front page and a 5,000 word interview inside -- Rusbridger effectively sabotaged his own hype with a curious editorial attacking those who accused Rimington of reckless indiscretion. "Dame Stella's book is -- literally -- harmless," it boasted. "Not remotely damaging to the intelligence services. Quite the opposite ... Dame Stella played her book by the book, submitting the manuscript for vetting and removing the passages she was asked to remove." Enticing, eh? No wonder most readers decided they had better things to do with their time than wade through the dreary daily instalments. Even more risible is Rubbisher's claim that Rimington's book is a breakthrough for openness and honesty about the security services. Her occasional comments on the work of MI5 -- sandwiched between pap about her clothes, her children, etc. -- range from the disingenuous to the downright dishonest. As she admitted in her famous Dimbleby lecture seven years ago: "A cynic may ask: How can I know that what you're saying is true? Well, it is difficult." It certainly is. Dealing with Peter "Spycatcher" Wright's claim of a conspiracy against Harold Wilson by some MI5 officers, she writes: "Wright later withdrew the allegation, admitting, in a Panorama programme in 1988, that what the book said about the so-called 'plot' was not true. However, as is always the way of these things, his retraction went almost unnoticed, and the untrue allegation stuck in some circles and remains in currency to this day." Rimington first peddled this story in her Dimbleby lecture on 12 June 1994. It was exploded three days later by a newspaper which dug out the Panorama transcript and quoted it at length. What Wright actually said was he and about eight other spooks intended to confront Wilson with his MI5 file and tell him that "we wanted him to resign. That there would be no publicity if he just quietly went". He added that the scheme had been "deadly serious". The newspaper which pointed all this out was, er, the Grauniad. Rimington's account of her role in the miners' strike of 1984-5, faithfully and uncritically reproduced in the Grauniad's serialisation, is equally misleading -- as, once again, the Guardian of all newspapers really ought to know. As long ago as last October it published a long feature by Seumas Milne noting that under Rimington's supervision MI5 infliltrated Arthur Scargill's inner circle, oversaw the country's largest-ever bugging and telephone-tapping effort in cooperation with GCHQ, coordinated the legal onslaught against the NUM and helped organise the strike-breaking effort. But, Milne added, "little, if any, of this can be expected to surface in whatever of Rimington's memoirs see the light of day. Even less likely to be included is an account of her close cooperation with David Hart, millionaire confidant of Thatcher and Portillo, who played a key role in organising and financing the dissident back-to-work movement." Sure enough, you will search the book in vain for any mention of Hart -- or of Roger Windsor, the NUM chief executive who was later named as an undercover MI5 agent, sent in to destabilise the union. Although Rimington's book is wittily titled Open Secret, Alan Rusbridger has ended up paying �100,000 for 300 pages of vacuous twaddle. He can't say that he wasn't warned. On 18 May last year the Guardian's own intelligence expert, Richard Norton-Taylor, wrote that Dame Stella's autobiography might seem "a rare opportunity to find out the truth about what the security service has been up to. But it will be nothing of the kind ... Her memoirs, if they do see print, will by definition be sanitised, approved in secret by a coterie of Whitehall insiders dedicated to suppressing the truth. Is she going to be allowed to, does she even want to, reveal what MI5 was up to during the 1984-5 miners' strike, or in Northern Ireland, or spying on so-called 'subversives'? Hardly." And so it proved. ===== Exclusive Serialisation of the Spy Book of the Millennium: Moneyraker, by James Bond Chapter 94 "Mr Bond. So good of you to drop in." Bond struggled against the steel wire pinning him to the chair in the control centre of Ernst Blofeld's underwater mountain lair. "You disappoint me, Mr Bond. And now you will suffer a slow a painful death," continued Blofeld, laughing sinisterly. "What have you got in mind?" spat Bond. "The rotating saw? The tank full of piranha fish? The laser gun directed at my testicles?" Blofeld stroked his white cat and laughed again. "Oh no, Mr Bond. I have something worse in mind. I am going to read you extracts from Stella Rimington's memoirs." "You bastard," whimpered Bond as Blofeld produced a copy of the Guardian from behind his back and cleared his throat. "The day I ordered more paper clips..." ===== Michael Keaney Mercuria Business School Martinlaaksontie 36 01620 Vantaa Finland [EMAIL PROTECTED]
