At the airport I bought Tom Marcus’ “Soldier Spy” (Penguin
edition, 2017)
[1].
This purports to be, and may be, an entirely true account of the life and work
of an undercover MI5 officer.
However, as a reader I have the lingering suspicion that I am
being played. As with accounts by soldiers of the SAS, a work like this
requires official permission to be published and the question arises, what
reason would MI5 have to allow this into the public domain?
I think it has to
do with public reservations about MI5’s past and present behaviour. For example, there is the alleged role of MI5 in the case of
Binyam Mohamed,
[2]
who claims that they were complicit in his illegal “extraordinary rendition” to
Morocco at the behest of the United States in 2001 and that they supplied information
and lines of questioning for his torturers.
Then there is the case of Jean Charles de Menezes, the
Brazilian electrician who was shot dead by undercover agents on the London Tube
in 2005. The press release from the BBC's Panorama programme the following year
[3]
says that the decision to pursue and kill him was a consequence of the
implementation of operation Kratos, a policy approved at MI5 headquarters in
2003. The shooting of Menezes came 15 days after the 7th of July attacks on the
London public transport and it has since been alleged that Menezes was armed
with a pistol and far from being an innocent electrician was involved in
preparing the explosive mechanisms used in those attacks. However, these allegations by Michael
Shrimpton in his 2014 book “Spyhunter” may have to be taken with a pinch of
salt, firstly because they come so late after the event and secondly because
the author himself appears to have crossed the line somehow or other - perhaps
not relating to this case - and ended up in jail.
[4]
Generally there is growing public concern about the
intrusion of the intelligence services into the daily activities of (so it
seems) almost everybody in the country. Many will still recall former agent
Peter Wright’s claim in his 1987 book “Spycatcher” that MI5 agents “bugged and
burgled their way across London at the State’s behest
while pompous, bowler-hatted civil
servants in Whitehall looked the other way."[5]
Perhaps readers will also recall how hard the British State fought in court
against the publication of Wright’s book. Since that time 30 years ago, we have
seen massive growth of spying on personal electronic communication and social
media via GCHQ and its foreign intelligence partners.
So true or not, Marcus' book comes to us in a social and
political context and therefore has to be seen as playing a part in a
“narrative”, to use a term favoured by such media spinners as Alastair
Campbell. The postmodern approach to truth is that it does not exist and to me
the implications open the road to madness, for what are we to make of the
beliefs held by the spinners themselves? Further, at the same time as taking
account of the public’s perceptions and attempting to mould them into a story
favouring the powerful, other elements are carefully excluded and if an attempt
is made to introduce them into the public discourse there are sustained attempt
to discredit the objector. For example the admittedly colourful George
Galloway’s opposition to the developing momentum for the second war on Iraq was turned into insinuations of his having
sympathy with terrorism, as indeed more recently have Labour leader Jeremy
Corbyn's remarks past and present on
similar subjects. The “military industrial complex” must be somewhat
discomfited by the fact that Corbyn's views on Gulf War Two, which he
consistently opposed, now appear to be held by the majority of people in
Britain.
Either Marcus is a gifted writer or he has been expertly
edited. He has certainly been professionally presented for a target audience.
The cover of the paperback edition shows the lower half of a face with no
visually distinguishing marks as per SAS requirements and half obscured by a
hoodie which he also wears for TV interviews.
[6] Perhaps the hoodie is a subliminal appeal
to directionless youngsters, similar to the way in which Andy McNab appears to
nod to boys and gang lads by featuring them in some of his stories. The lower cover also shows a lone
figure standing in mid-road in a cityscape, rather as in a typical Jack Reacher
tale.
Like McNab’s Nick Stone, the character of the protagonist in
“Soldier Spy” starts out as a loser from a broken home, but is saved by his determination, intelligence and
physical ability together with his courage, all qualities to be refined and
used by the Army and subsequently the Intelligence Services. He almost forces
his way into the Royal Engineers and soon makes his commanding officer retake
the physical fitness test, as a result of which the CO pushes him in the
direction of the SAS. He is later
handpicked by MI5, a rare honour. The descriptions of his undercover work with
all its danger and privations are highly thrilling but also underscore the
importance of what he does to protect the public.
At least as edited, Marcus is at pains to repeat that MI5 is
the best in the world at what it does, which might be disputed by the Israeli
intelligence services and perhaps former members of the RUC, to name a couple
of alternative contenders for the crown. This is where a little bell
rings: I recently read “Soldier Five” by
Mike Coburn, one of the members of the now famous 1991 Bravo Two Zero SAS
patrol in the Iraqi desert. This account acts as a corrective, sometimes with
embarrassing implications, to some of the earlier accounts by other members. At
the end of his book Coburn recounts the difficulties he had in getting his book
published against the wishes of the British Establishment. It appears that an important motive of the
latter was to preserve the reputation of the SAS for the purposes of
saleability of their services. Part of the court transcript
[7] runs:
WT: In your view, this case is all about enforcing the
[secrecy] contract to safeguard the employability of the Regiment, keeping
ahead of its competition within the UK and to protect your customer base…
ST: Yes the reason I hesitate to answer it kind of is
putting a market spin on this...
WT: They are words in
your cross brief document…
ST: Which words?
WT: Employability,
customer base, protecting the market, competition...
ST: Yes.
In line with what I take to be MI5’s preferred narrative,
Marcus omits mention of the cockups and issues that might detract from the
overall message of the State as guardian angel. Is there an element of brand protection and promotion here, also?
Even his motivation
is slightly incoherent, for more than once he tells his superiors that he is
not doing the job for Queen and Country but simply because he is good at it,
yet he concludes his story with a theatrically jingoistic flourish, a message
to the country’s enemies that “we are strong and united; that strength has been
built on thousands of years of hardship and if you even think about trying to
hurt us my friends will find you and f****** destroy you. Semper Vigilat.”
Just as with the latest interpretations of Batman and James
Bond, our hero is flawed and vulnerable,
having his career cut short by post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a
suffering to which Andy McNab also refers in his books, noting that the support given to its Service victims
in the UK compares unfavorably with that provided to American Special Forces. Again,
Marcus's misfortune may be perfectly true but it fits into the way that modern
hero narratives are told, appealing to
our sense of shared personal weakness and confusion while at the same time increasing our admiration for the hero.
In all these tales of derring-do there is an element of
deliberate presbyopia: we are encouraged
to focus on the challenges immediately before us and allowed a certain
blindness as to the conditions that gave rise to them. Our attention is diverted by fear and hatred from a consideration of how not to get
into such situations in the first place. Undoubtedly there are enemies who now have to be dealt with,
but there might not have been so many had we conducted ourselves in a fairer
and juster manner. If I had to choose between the life of a secret agent
fighting an endless succession of foes, and that of a public protester like
Brian Haw
[8]
trying to obviate the need for conflict (and see how the GLA and Parliament
unsuccessfully tried various sledgehammers to crack his little egg
[9]),
I hope I would follow the latter. We in the UK, who are the most CCTV-watched in the world, might then have greater privacy and personal freedom.
“Soldier Spy” is a skilfully packaged and well-sweetened coating for a pill that treats symptoms rather than causes, and has undesirable side-effects.
[1]
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/297921/soldier-spy/
[2]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/5061702/Binyam-Mohamed-MI5-torture-and-terrorism.html
[3]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2006/03_march/08/panorama.shtml
[4]
http://terroronthetube.co.uk/2015/08/20/de-menezes-the-real-story/
[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spycatcher
[6]
E.g. on 5 News, October 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13sacW50T34
[7]
Page 302 in the hardback edition:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Soldier-Five-Truth-About-Mission/dp/184018907X
[8]
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2005478/Brian-Haw-Anti-war-protester-camped-Parliament-Square-dies-aged-62.html
[9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Haw#Legal_action
