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A former national security correspondent’s groundbreaking
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account of the turbulent relationship between British i
Spies, Spin and
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Intelligence and the media s
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At its most fraught, interaction between spies and journalists has been a p the Fourth Estate
battle over the primacy of national security versus freedom of speech. i
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The history of this dynamic has never before been fully documented or
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subjected to rigorous analysis.
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d and the Media
Combining his expertise as a national security correspondent and research
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academic, Paul Lashmar reveals how and why the media became more
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critical in its reporting of the secret state. He explores a series of major
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case studies including Snowden, WikiLeaks, Spycatcher, rendition and
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torture, and MI5’s vetting of the BBC – most of which he reported on
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as they happened. He discusses the issues that news coverage raises r
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for democracy and gives the reader a deeper understanding of how h
intelligence and the media function, interact and fit into structures
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of power and knowledge. s
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Paul Lashmaris Head of Journalism at City, University of London. t
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He has been an investigative journalist for television and print and on the
staff of The Observer, Granada Television’s World in Actioncurrent affairs
series and The Independent. He is also a recipient of the Reporter of The
Year award presented at the British Press Awards. P
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Cover image: © shutterstock.com
Cover design: www.hayesdesign.co.uk
ISBN 978-1-4744-4307-4
edinburghuniversitypress.com
Spies, Spin and the Fourth Estate
Anna, Ben and Arthur
Spies, Spin and the
Fourth Estate
British Intelligence and the Media
PAUL LASHMAR
Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK.
We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the
humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high
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For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com
© Paul Lashmar, 2020
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
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ISBN 978 1 4744 4307 4 (hardback)
ISBN 978 1 4744 4309 8 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 4308 1 (paperback)
ISBN 978 1 4744 4310 4 (epub)
The right of Paul Lashmar to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the
Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
CONTENTS
Preface / vii
Acknowledgements / xiv
introduction / 1
one / Setting the Scene / 20
two / The Great War / 32
three / The Interwar Years and the Dark Arts / 43
four / The Second World War / 58
five / The ‘Era of Trust’ / 72
six / Cold War Warriors / 86
seven / Agitprop / 105
eight / 1968 and All That / 121
nine / 1975: The Year of Intelligence / 132
ten / The Thatcher Years / 146
eleven / Spycatcher / 161
twelve / The Wall Comes Down / 177
thirteen / The ‘War on Terror’ / 196
fourteen / Citizenfour / 217
vi / Spies, Spin and the Fourth Estate
fifteen / Lives at Risk / 229
sixteen / Ostriches, Cheerleaders, Lemonsuckers and
Guardians / 239
seventeen / Reflections on Forty Years of Spy Watching / 250
References / 270
Index / 285
PREFACE
The Russian ‘hit’ on the spy Sergei Skripal in Britain was one of
the major news stories of 2018 and ran through much of the
year. The botched assassination attempt triggered an extensive UK
counter-terrorism investigation to identify who had tried to kill
the sixty-six-year-old Russian father and his thirty-two-year-old
daughter Yulia in a nerve agent attack on a chilly Sunday afternoon
in Salisbury, a medieval English city more noted for its cathedral’s
elegant spire than as a theatre of international intrigue.
From 1994, Sergei Skripal, a colonel in the Russian GRU intelli-
gence agency, was bribed by British Intelligence to spy on his col-
leagues, allowing them to understand the GRU’s post-Soviet role,
objectives and capabilities.1 Allegedly codenamed ‘Forthwith’ by
the British, Sergei Skripal was arrested by Russia’s security services
in 2004, convicted, imprisoned and exchanged in a spy swop in
Vienna, to be then flown to Britain and given what was presumably
meant to be a new, low-key life in Salisbury. The nerve agent attack
on the Skripals was another operation by the Russian secret services
in Britain and caused a tense international diplomatic stand-off
with President Putin’s regime. The sinister GRU agency, seemingly
tasked with assassinating Putin’s political rivals, specialise in intim-
idating those who have fallen out with the regime and covertly
manipulating the politics of target states.
As the murder plot commanded worldwide media interest, hun-
dreds of journalists and TV crews descended on the city for weeks.
While the media circus eventually moved on, the story remained
viii / Spies, Spin and the Fourth Estate
significant, providing an example of how national security is
never far from the top of the news. The Skripal story was just one
of several national security stories running at the time. Only two
weeks before the murder attempt, several British newspapers had
alleged on their front pages that Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing leader
of the UK Labour Party, had been a paid informer of the StB, the
Czechoslovakian secret service during the late Cold War. This story
was based on claims by the former Czech spy Jan Sarkocy, who,
working undercover as a diplomat, had met Corbyn several times in
London in the 1980s. After a few days the story faded as no substan-
tive corroboration was published, sparking claims it was just another
politically inspired smear operation against a Labour Party leader.
Across the Atlantic in the USA, President Trump nominated Gina
Haspel for promotion to become the Central Intelligence Agency’s
(CIA’s) first woman director, constituting a notable gender break-
through, but this was also a controversial appointment. Haspel
had worked undercover for much of her thirty-year CIA career and
while little is known about her role in covert operations, it was
on the record that in the early 2000s she had taken charge of a
secret ‘black’ CIA base in Thailand. Before she took over command,
al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah, among others, was rendered,
detained, tortured and interrogated at this CIA base.2
Such national security issues had again dominated the news
media across the Western world, to be replaced by more head-
line stories of intelligence and terrorism. The world of intelligence
exudes testosterone and stimulates the audience so it rates highly in
news values; as generations of journalists and editors have known,
spying stories are sexy (sometimes literally with honeytraps) – and
spies sell news.
Never without Strain
The worlds of spying and journalism have always been intertwined,
sometimes intimate and sometimes confrontational. Sir David
Omand, former director of the UK’s signals intelligence agency,
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), has com-
mented that the worlds of secret intelligence and journalism inter-
act, ‘but never without strain’ (2009: 38). Israeli academic Professor
Preface / ix
Shlomo Shpiro has observed the essential tension between the two
professions:
An inherent conflict exists between the open media, that wish to publish
security related information as part of their responsibility toward their
audience, and intelligence services, which work on the basis of secrecy
and often attempt to prevent the publication of information on their
activities and sources. (Shpiro 2001: 485)
The intelligence historian Richard Aldrich has observed that the
relationship between secret services and the press is long-standing
and remarkably close but it has not been systematically analysed:
‘Despite the prolific press coverage of the intelligence services since
9/11, the interaction of this secret realm of government with the
media has received little sustained analysis’ (2009: 13). This book
seeks to remedy this neglect.
It seeks to detail how, as part of examining the relationship
between the intelligence world and the media, intelligence policy,
strategy and operations have been reported. It brings together his-
tory, personal history and analysis, to give an insider’s perspective
on intelligence and the media. To provide context for the follow-
ing chapters, it describes the origins of the official UK intelligence
agencies.
Writers and journalists are there right at the creation of the
modern UK intelligence services. As we will see, the way intelli-
gence and the media interact often comes down to the relationship
between individual spies and journalists, and, as in all relation-
ships, that can vary from intimate to downright hostile. Aldrich
hints at a mutual attraction between spies and journalists; ‘Yet even
where the relationship was prickly, there remained an underlying
appreciation that journalism and espionage are cognate activities
and share common professional ethics, including the diligent pro-
tection of sources’ (Aldrich 2009: 14). Each side has been only too
willing to take advantage of the other. Intelligence agencies have
been keen to use journalism as part of their toolkit, often to give
them cover when working in dangerous foreign states. In 1977 the
Pike Report from the US House of Representatives spelt out neatly
why journalistic cover is was so attractive:
