Journalism in an Age of Terror

Covering and Uncovering the Secret State

John Lloyd

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786721112
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The threat of terrorism and the increasing power of terrorist groups has prompted a rapid growth of the security services and changes in legislation, permitting the collection of communications data. This provides journalism with acute dilemmas. The media claims responsibility for holding power to account, yet cannot know more than superficial details about the newly empowered secret services. This book is the first to analyze, in the aftermath of the Snowden/NSA revelations, relations between two key institutions in the modern state: the intelligence services and the news media. It provides the answers to crucial questions including: how can power be held to account if one of the greatest state powers is secret? How far have the Snowden/NSA revelations damaged the activities of the secret services? And have governments lost all trust from journalists and the public?

1

Fictions Before Facts

Discussion of the intelligence services ‘is left to inquisitive journalists, disgruntled professionals and imaginative fiction writers – categories that confusingly overlap’.

(Michael Howard, Review of Her Majesty’s Secret Service,

New York Times, 16 February 1986¹)

Journalism has not had much measure of the secret services until recently, and even now, it cannot have but a partial measure. All journalism about anything, even at its best, is a sketch of the observably and verifiably real, but in matters of security and espionage, the sketch is very sketchy indeed.

The peer-approved stance of a journalist is that of an outsider, with no potentially corrupting links to the subjects covered: it encourages a necessary scepticism, though it also denies useful knowledge of the real experience of and the pressures on the subjects, whether they are a government, the military, a bureaucracy, a political party or a family. Sidney Blumenthal left the coveted post of political editor of the New Yorker to become an aide to Bill Clinton and later wrote that ‘the decisive moment had arrived when I became a whole-hearted participant. Being on the outside in whatever capacity was never the same as being in.’² People who have ‘been in’ can provide a rich resource for journalists when they write their memoirs or speak of their experiences; they can also be helpful contacts when they are in.

But ‘being in’, or even ‘being close’, is impossible in the coverage of the secret services, since they must themselves keep the core of their activities, the business end of espionage and counter-espionage, secret. This is especially so before and during operations, but also after, since they all believe that knowledge of the individuals and tradecraft used in operations, even of many years past, will be useful to the enemy and potentially deadly to friends.

The relationship between hacks and spooks has been fraught, fevered and often mythical: it may be that it cannot fundamentally change (see an attempt to argue it can change, at least a little, in my Conclusion). The CIA’s ‘secrecy would always conflict with the openness of American democracy’, writes one of the agency’s severest journalist-critics, and quotes Dean Acheson, US Secretary of State (1949–53), as saying of the fledgling service that he had warned the President (Truman) that, as set up, ‘neither he nor the National Security Council nor anyone else would be in a position to know what it was doing or to control it’.³ Secrecy in such a critically important part of the state’s activities – one which, in the twenty-first century, has grown immensely from an already impressive size, especially in the great powers of the US, China and Russia, but also in the agencies of Europe – necessarily conflicts with democratic practice anywhere, and most of all with the most insistent claim of journalism to hold power to account.

The services have existed in organised and semi-acknowledged form since the late nineteenth century; though spying and spymasters were common enough in most states and cultures from medieval times. In Britain, writers/journalists were early hired as spies – a tradition which lasted deep into the twentieth century. The dramatist Christopher Marlowe is thought likely to have been a spy in Elizabethan times, working for Sir Francis Walsingham, known later as Elizabeth’s spymaster.⁴ Daniel Defoe was employed to spy on the anti-unionist forces in Scotland before the successful vote on Union in 1707 – a job made easier by the author’s Presbyterianism, and perhaps, from the author of Robinson Crusoe, by his imagination.

Espionage was early entwined with fiction, a constant and continuing adjunct to the craft. The coupling has a sinister side, evident in the instant effectiveness and enduring popularity among anti-Semites of ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, a document used by one of the earliest and most numerous organised secret police forces, the Tsarist Okhrana, which took up the fiction which created ‘the Elders’ as the all-powerful executive committee of worldwide Jewry, administering the conspiracy in pursuit of global domination. The Protocols is the product of a mind creative enough to envisage a world of conspiracy and control, subtle enough to make it seem real and menacing. A fiction, it moved real events – as many spy fictions have.

In the first decades of organised espionage, the conflict between journalism and the services was minor, at times apparently non-existent. The services were, self-evidently, a patriotic endeavour in and before World War I and II, when in both the UK and France spying was mainly directed against Germany. The ‘coverage’ was thus mythic rather than factual – since facts, anyway scarce, were potentially treacherous, the stuff which foreign agents were hired to discover. Propaganda, getting into its twentieth-century stride as the services became state-sponsored organisations, convinced the peoples of authoritarian states of the goodness of the security services: both the Soviet Cheka (later NKVD, then KGB) and the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst (SD, a section of the SS) were projected as the best men of the nation, ruthless to enemies and protective of the people.

Both tyrannies decreed a hyper patriotism from which it was unwise, at times fatal, to dissent. It called forth in patriots of all stripes a pride in the use of brutal force against enemies, and in ensuring the disciplining of society. In Vladimir Nabokov’s story ‘Conversation Piece 1945’,⁵ a former White Guard colonel, an exile in the US, anti-communist and Christian, says that, in spite of his views, he puts Stalin on a par with Ivan the Terrible (tsar 1547–84) and Peter the Great (tsar 1682–1721) as a mighty leader – ‘today, in every word that comes out of Russia, I feel the power, I feel the splendour of Old Mother Russia. She is again a country of soldiers, of religion and true Slavs.’

Patriotism and belief in the goodness of one’s nation was, in much less terrifying circumstances, a general sentiment in the few semidemocracies of Europe, and in North America. Military power and its projection were seen both officially and – broadly – popularly as a test of national valour. These qualities have a real and often solid base both in public and private actions; but their maintenance and support by the public depend much more on the charge of emotion than on dispassionate and neutral analysis – an approach reserved for the elite, who required it to make informed decisions.

Thus the journalism on security issues was – up to and even beyond World War II – scanty and, where it existed, depended on officially approved briefings, and on gossip. The latter was especially the case in the UK, where newspaper writing on intelligence issues was greatly influenced by the first spy fiction, often written by men who had themselves been, or still were, journalists. The tropes of these fictions entered the bloodstreams of subsequent novelists and of journalists – who depended and in some cases still depend on the support of fiction rather than research, an approach which coexists with (though sometimes trickles into) the harder edged journalism of the last half century.

The importance of fiction in the coverage of intelligence – especially in the first decades of state-organised espionage agencies when dispassionate news coverage was hard to find, officially disapproved and seen as potentially treacherous by many journalists themselves – is large. Almost all journalism operates in areas which are subject to stereotyping and mythicisation, these often created by journalism itself. Politics, foreign affairs, defence, health, the economy and many other beats are encrusted with preconceived notions of their importance, their power within societies, the activities of elites within their spheres, the trust or lack of it which citizens give them. But the business of intelligence is a special case even within areas so imaginatively perceived – since the espionage and counter-espionage trade remains in the shadows; the other beats have been, over the past century and more, the subject of much more journalistic light, much of it well focused.

The power of the early fiction, especially in the UK, was great – and it remains powerful, though the messages are less monolithically admiring. Fleming’s James Bond is without challenge in the global gallery of fictional spies, substantially because of the many successful (and some unsuccessful) film adaptations; and British secret service officers will at times admit to enjoying basking in the glow he sheds, even while dismissing his antics as ridiculous. From the US, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan and Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne have both powered best-sellers and successful films. John Le Carré’s George Smiley (in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, 1974, and again in 2011; Smiley’s People, 1979), and his later novels as The Constant Gardner (2001), Our Kind of Traitor (2010), A Delicate Truth (2013) and The Night Manager (2013), are increasingly concerned with the corruption and oppression of US, and to a lesser extent British, politics, and of corporate power. The force of their narratives both played to and helped create the default position of cynicism and suspicion among publics throughout the democratic world of the leaders they elect, the corporations which supply them and the secret services which claim to keep them secure. In the conjuring of phantasmagorical worlds where no one is what they seem, Le Carré has no peer in spy fiction – though he is resented by many of his ex-colleagues and their successors in the intelligence world for misrepresenting work they see as straightforwardly necessary and patriotic.

* * *

Among the first in a subsequently crowded field of espionage novels are Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), set in India and using the background of the ‘Great Game’ of Russian and British imperial contest for control over Central Asia; Colonel F. N. Maude’s The Sack of London in the Great French War of 1901, foreseeing a French invasion of Britain backed by the Russians (the French general staff had studied the possibility in 1900); and Erskine Childers’s 1903 novel The Riddle of the Sands. Kim, the greater fiction, is exotic and imperial in its concerns: Childers dealt with what for the British was a more potent and much closer threat. The novel, written in Childers’s imperialist phase (he later fought as an ardent Irish Republican and died in Ireland, executed by the pro-Treaty side of the Irish civil war), is a derring-do fiction in which two young English gentlemen, one a young diplomat, while on a sailing trip round the Frisian Islands off the German coast discover preparations for landing a German army in the UK. Childers described it as ‘a story with a purpose’ which was ‘written with a patriot’s natural sense of duty’.⁶ It was essentially a long and fictionalised editorial, aimed at changing the establishment view by alarming the populace. Its effect was satisfyingly large, prompting a strengthening of UK naval defences. It underscored another potent theme, in politics and journalism as well as fiction: that of a warning against governmental and military insouciance in the face of a future enemy’s steady preparation for war.

Britain, motherland of a huge empire, published the largest range of spy fiction before the 1950s (when the US took over). France, also the centre of a large empire, had a less developed tradition, though Gaston Leroux, best known for his 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera and for the 1907 The Mystery of the Yellow Room (the first mystery of a murder in a room locked from the inside, with no other means of entrance or exit), dipped into the theme with novels featuring the amateur detective Rouletabille – like the author, a newspaper reporter – notably in the 1917 book, Rouletabille chez Krupp. The novel has Rouletabille, a reporter on the Parisian daily L’Epoque, serving as a corporal at the front, recalled to his paper by the editor, who then takes him to a meeting at the Ministry of the Interior. There he hears that a scientist, Fulber, has invented a rocket with the power of an atomic bomb, and has taken it to the British, who had constructed the rocket, tested it, then had the plans, design, Fulber and his assistant all captured from them by German spies while they toasted the success in champagne. The news is brought by a high British official, Cromer – who emphasises that the Germans now have the power to destroy Paris or London in one blow. Only one with the street cunning and fluent German of the reporter Rouletabille can intervene to stop a horror and certain defeat.

The most practically influential authors in their time are not always those best remembered. The hugely prolific French/British author William Le Queux was probably the master in the early years, writing more simply and graphically than the author of The Riddle of the Sands, playing on the common fears of Germany, his status such that he could fairly claim to be an influence on the government’s creation of the first secret services. Alfred Harmsworth (later Lord Northcliffe), creator of the Daily Mail, had commissioned Le Queux to write a serial for one of his magazines on a French invasion in 1893, three years before founding the Mail. He was commissioned again by the Mail to write, in 1906, The Invasion of 1910, an attack this time by the Germans, strongly influenced by the views of Field Marshal Earl Roberts, who had tried and failed to convince the government to institute national service. The novel greatly increased the paper’s circulation, and it was changed at Harmsworth’s instructions to include a number of larger towns in the narrative, where the sales of the Mail were higher than in the villages in the original.

Le Queux occupies some 20 pages in Christopher Andrew’s Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1985). That book is subtitled ‘The Making of the British Intelligence Community’: Andrew underscores the central role of fiction in that construction, as Le Queux, enormously prolific, built up the fears of the (real) growing hostility of Germany, and the increasing conviction, including within the government, that Britain was infested with highly trained German spies. His and other authors’ books were written in a documentary style, deliberately blurring fact and fiction, the writers claiming they had done extensive research.

The more surprising element of their work was the high level of alarm these apparently trashy novels excited. Viscount Haldane, the Secretary of State for War (1905–12), educated in the universities of Edinburgh and Gottingen with a first-class degree in philosophy, was so moved by the spy fever the novels fed that he created a high-level subcommittee of the Committee of Imperial Defence which he chaired, and which included the Home Secretary, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and the First Lord of the Admiralty. Major (later General) James Edmonds, head of the Military Operations Directorate, told the committee that the rapid rise in reported cases of German espionage had happened ‘only since certain newspapers have directed attention to the subject’ – the veracity of the newspaper reports being implicitly accepted. Andrews writes that Edmonds, who believed that the German network was so extensive that ‘a German general landing a force in East Anglia would know more about the country than any British General’ was wholly ignorant of the facts – which were that the German network was small, poorly paid, part-time and had largely been closed down by the time the war began.⁷

John Buchan, a Presbyterian minister’s son born in Perth, was an editor of the Spectator in his early thirties, and a Times correspondent in France during the 1914–18 war. These spells alternated with longer periods as a political aide (in South Africa) and as Director of Propaganda in the latter part of World War I. In later life, he rose to become Governor General of Canada from 1935 until his death in 1940.

Buchan’s fiction was popular throughout his life, particularly his (shortest) novel The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) in which he introduces Richard Hannay, a Scots-born mining engineer returning to London from South Africa, who, in the course of the novel, manages to foil a German plot with the aid of a senior intelligence officer, Sir Walter Bullivant. These two are together again in Greenmantle (1916) where they once more foil a potentially fatal German plot. Greenmantle, out a year earlier than Rouletabille chez Krupp, Leroux’s tense but less jingoistic thriller (not yet translated into English), uses the same narrative lines: like Rouletabille, Hannay – a major, not a corporal – is taken away from the front; like Rouletabille, he is given a task in which he is likely to fail, and to die failing; like Rouletabille, the stakes are the highest.

In Greenmantle, Bullivant tells Hannay that he may be sending him to his death. Rouletabille’s editor also warns that the stakes are as high as saving Paris, and that his death is likely. Leroux’s means by which the Germans will succeed in conquering France and Britain is a huge rocket; in Buchan’s novel a Muslim prophet will rouse the tribes of the Middle East to support the German war effort and sweep the British forces before them.

Both authors prefigure, remarkably well, real events and developments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Leroux’s device is even a Multiple Indepen...

Table of contents

• Frontcover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Fictions Before Facts
• 2. Losing and Finding the Plot
• 3. Down with the State and its Servile Hacks!
• 4. The Breaking of Freedom’s Back?
• 5. Le jour de guerre est arrivé
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Back cover