Media Alert - Hacks And Spooks - by Richard Keeble

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Guest Media Alert - Hacks And Spooks - by Richard Keeble

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

 

March 3, 2006

 

 

GUEST MEDIA ALERT: HACKS AND SPOOKS

 

By Richard Keeble

 

 

Introduction

 

We feel incredibly fortunate to have Richard Keeble, Professor of

Journalism at the University of Lincoln, as an occasional blogger at

Media

Lens (http://www.medialens.org/weblog/) alongside Sharon Beder, Mark

Curtis, David Miller and the Media Lens editors. Richard's posts are

always tremendous, but his latest submission, below, is so important and

interesting that we feel it merits a much wider audience.

 

So how many journalists are actually agents of the state, or working

for agents of the state? We can think of several very likely candidates -

and not just in the right-wing media.

 

Best wishes

 

The Editors

 

 

Hacks And Spooks - Close Encounters Of A Strange Kind

 

And so to Nottingham University (on Sunday 26 February) for a

well-attended conference organised by the city's Student Peace

Movement. And

what a great event it turns out to be! Lots of excellent speakers –

including author and peace activist, Milan Rai, Alan Simpson MP, Dr Meryl

Aldridge, of Nottingham University, and a representative of Notts

Indymedia. And there's lots of excellent, lively and constructive

discussions.

 

I focus in my talk on the links between journalists and the

intelligence services:

 

While it might be difficult to identify precisely the impact of the

spooks (variously represented in the press as " intelligence " , " security " ,

" Whitehall " or " Home Office " sources) on mainstream politics and media,

from the limited evidence it looks to be enormous.

 

As Roy Greenslade, media specialist at the Telegraph (formerly the

Guardian), commented: " Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in

general - are playthings of MI5. " Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their

examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of " one of

Britain's most

distinguished journals " as believing that more than half its foreign

correspondents were on the MI6 payroll. And in 1991, Richard

Norton-Taylor

revealed in the Guardian that 500 prominent Britons paid by the CIA and

the now defunct Bank of Commerce and Credit International, included 90

journalists.

 

In their analysis of the contemporary secret state, Dorril and Ramsay

gave the media a crucial role. The heart of the secret state they

identified as the security services, the cabinet office and upper

echelons of

the Home and Commonwealth Offices, the armed forces and Ministry of

Defence, the nuclear power industry and its satellite ministries together

a network of senior civil servants. As " satellites " of the secret

state, their list included " agents of influence in the media, ranging

from

actual agents of the security services, conduits of official leaks, to

senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a

knighthood at the end of their career " .

 

Phillip Knightley, author of a seminal history of the intelligence

services, has even claimed that at least one intelligence agent is

working

on every Fleet Street newspaper.

 

 

A brief history

 

Going as far back as 1945, George Orwell no less became a war

correspondent for the Observer -- probably as a cover for intelligence

work.

Significantly most of the men he met in Paris on his assignment, Freddie

Ayer, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ernest Hemingway were either working for the

intelligence services or had close links to them. Stephen Dorril, in his

seminal history of MI6, reports that Orwell attended a meeting in Paris

of resistance fighters on behalf of David Astor, his editor at the

Observer and leader of the intelligence service's unit liasing with the

French resistance.

 

The release of Public Record Office documents in 1995 about some of the

operations of the MI6-financed propaganda unit, the Information

Research Department of the Foreign Office, threw light on this secret

body --

which even Orwell aided by sending them a list of " crypto-communists " .

Set up by the Labour government in 1948, it " ran " dozens of Fleet

Street journalists and a vast array of news agencies across the globe

until

it was closed down by Foreign Secretary David Owen in 1977.

 

According to John Pilger in the anti-colonial struggles in Kenya,

Malaya and Cyprus, IRD was so successful that the journalism served up

as a

record of those episodes was a cocktail of the distorted and false in

which the real aims and often atrocious behaviour of the British

intelligence agencies was hidden. And spy novelist John le Carré, who

worked

for MI6 between 1960 and 1964, has made the amazing statement that the

British secret service then controlled large parts of the press – just

as they may do today

 

In 1975, following Senate hearings on the CIA, the reports of the

Senate's Church Committee and the House of Representatives' Pike

Committee

highlighted the extent of agency recruitment of both British and US

journalists. And sources revealed that half the foreign staff of a

British

daily were on the MI6 payroll. David Leigh, in The Wilson Plot, his

seminal study of the way in which the secret service smeared through the

mainstream media and destabilised the Government of Harold Wilson before

his sudden resignation in 1976, quotes an MI5 officer: " We have

somebody in every office in Fleet Street "

 

 

Leaker King

 

And the most famous whistleblower of all, Peter (Spycatcher) Wright,

revealed that MI5 had agents in newspapers and publishing companies whose

main role was to warn them of any forthcoming " embarrassing

publications " . Wright also disclosed that the Daily Mirror tycoon,

Cecil King,

" was a longstanding agent of ours " who " made it clear he would publish

anything MI5 might care to leak in his direction " . Selective details

about

Wilson and his secretary, Marcia Falkender, were leaked by the

intelligence services to sympathetic Fleet Street journalists. Wright

comments:

" No wonder Wilson was later to claim that he was the victim of a plot "

King was also closely involved in a scheme in 1968 to oust Prime

Minister Harold Wilson and replace him with a coalition headed by Lord

Mountbatten

 

Hugh Cudlipp, editorial director of the Mirror from 1952 to 1974, was

also closely linked to intelligence, according to Chris Horrie, in his

recently published history of the newspaper. David Walker, the Mirror's

foreign correspondent in the 1950s, was named as an MI6 agent following

a security scandal while another Mirror journalist, Stanley Bonnet,

admitted working for MI5 in the 1980s investigating the Campaign for

Nuclear Disarmament.

 

 

Maxwell and Mossad

 

According to Stephen Dorril, intelligence gathering during the miners'

strike of 1984-85 was helped by the fact that during the 1970s MI5's F

Branch had made a special effort to recruit industrial correspondents –

with great success. In 1991, just before his mysterious death, Mirror

proprietor Robert Maxwell was accused by the US investigative journalist

Seymour Hersh of acting for Mossad, the Israeli secret service, though

Dorril suggests his links with MI6 were equally as strong.

 

Following the resignation from the Guardian of Richard Gott, its

literary editor in December 1994 in the wake of allegations that he was a

paid agent of the KGB, the role of journalists as spies suddenly came

under the media spotlight – and many of the leaks were fascinating. For

instance, according to The Times editorial of 16 December 1994: " Many

British journalists benefited from CIA or MI6 largesse during the Cold

War. "

 

The intimate links between journalists and the secret services were

highlighted in the autobiography of the eminent newscaster Sandy Gall. He

reports without any qualms how, after returning from one of his

reporting assignments to Afghanistan, he was asked to lunch by the

head of

MI6. " It was very informal, the cook was off so we had cold meat and

salad

with plenty of wine. He wanted to hear what I had to say about the war

in Afghanistan. I was flattered, of course, and anxious to pass on what

I could in terms of first-hand knowledge. "

 

And in January 2001, the renegade MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson,

claimed Dominic Lawson, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph and son of the

former Tory chancellor, Nigel Lawson, provided journalistic cover for an

MI6 officer on a mission to the Baltic to handle and debrief a young

Russian diplomat who was spying for Britain. Lawson strongly denied the

allegations.

 

Similarly in the reporting of Northern Ireland, there have been

longstanding concerns over security service disinformation. Susan McKay,

Northern editor of the Dublin-based Sunday Tribune, has criticised the

reckless reporting of material from " dodgy security services " . She told a

conference in Belfast in January 2003 organised by the National Union of

Journalists and the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission: " We need

to be suspicious when people are so ready to provide information and

that we are, in fact, not being used. "

(http://www.nuj.org.uk/inner.php?docid=635)

 

 

Growing power of secret state

 

Thus from this evidence alone it is clear there has been a long history

of links between hacks and spooks in both the UK and US. But as the

secret state grows in power, through massive resourcing, through a whole

raft of legislation – such as the Official Secrets Act, the

anti-terrorism legislation, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act

and so on –

and as intelligence moves into the heart of Blair's ruling clique so

these links are even more significant.

 

Since September 11 all of Fleet Street has been awash in warnings by

anonymous intelligence sources of terrorist threats. According to former

Labour minister Michael Meacher, much of this disinformation was spread

via sympathetic journalists by the Rockingham cell within the MoD. A

parallel exercise, through the office of Special Plans, was set up by

Donald Rumsfeld in the US. Thus there have been constant attempts to

scare

people – and justify still greater powers for the national security

apparatus.

 

Similarly the disinformation about Iraq's WMD was spread by dodgy

intelligence sources via gullible journalists. Thus, to take just one

example, Michael Evans, The Times defence correspondent, reported on 29

November 2002: " Saddam Hussein has ordered hundred of his officials to

conceal weapons of mass destruction components in their homes to evade

the

prying eyes of the United Nations inspectors. " The source of these

" revelations " was said to be " intelligence picked up from within Iraq " .

Early in 2004, as the battle for control of Iraq continued with mounting

casualties on both sides, it was revealed that many of the lies about

Saddam Hussein's supposed WMD had been fed to sympathetic journalists in

the US, Britain and Australia by the exile group, the Iraqi National

Congress.

 

 

Sexed up – and missed out

 

During the controversy that erupted following the end of the " war " and

the death of the arms inspector Dr David Kelly (and the ensuing Hutton

inquiry) the spotlight fell on BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan and the

claim by one of his sources that the government (in collusion with the

intelligence services) had " sexed up " a dossier justifying an attack on

Iraq. The Hutton inquiry, its every twist and turn massively covered in

the mainstream media, was the archetypal media spectacle that drew

attention from the real issue: why did the Bush and Blair governments

invade

Iraq in the face of massive global opposition? But those facts will be

forever secret. Significantly, too, the broader and more significant

issue of mainstream journalists' links with the intelligence services was

ignored by the inquiry.

 

Significantly, on 26 May 2004, the New York Times carried a 1,200-word

editorial admitting it had been duped in its coverage of WMD in the

lead-up to the invasion by dubious Iraqi defectors, informants and exiles

(though it failed to lay any blame on the US President: see Greenslade

2004). Chief among The Times' dodgy informants was Ahmad Chalabi,

leader of the Iraqi National Congress and Pentagon favourite before his

Baghdad house was raided by US forces on 20 May.

 

Then, in the Observer of 30 May 2004, David Rose admitted he had been

the victim of a " calculated set-up " devised to foster the propaganda

case for war. " In the 18 months before the invasion of March 2003, I

dealt

regularly with Chalabi and the INC and published stories based on

interviews with men they said were defectors from Saddam's regime. "

And he

concluded: " The information fog is thicker than in any previous war, as

I know now from bitter personal experience. To any journalist being

offered apparently sensational disclosures, especially from an anonymous

intelligence source, I offer two words of advice: caveat emptor. "

 

Let's not forget no British newspaper has followed the example of the

NYT and apologised for being so easily duped by the intelligence

services in the run up to the illegal invasion of Iraq.

 

 

Richard Keeble's publications include Secret State, Silent Press: New

Militarism, the Gulf and the Modern Image of Warfare (John Libbey 1997)

and The Newspapers Handbook (Routledge, fourth edition, 2005). He is

also the editor of Ethical Space: The International Journal of

Communication Ethics. Richard is also a member of the War and Media

Network.

 

 

The first Media Lens book has been published: 'Guardians of Power: The

Myth Of The Liberal Media' by David Edwards and David Cromwell (Pluto

Books, London, 2006). For further details, please

 

http://www.medialens.org/bookshop/guardians_of_power.php

 

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