A SPY SINGS THE BLUES

Once upon a time, disgraced spooks went quietly. Now

Anne McElvoy finds they take their grievances to court

and threaten to divulge state secrets

It surprised no one very much when they put Leamas on the shelf ... For a week or two after his departure, a few people wondered what had become of him. But his former friends had already learned to keep clear of him ... Leamas' departure caused only a rip- ple on the water; with other winds and the changing of the seasons it was soon forgotten.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

Thirty-three years later, a young, real life officer with SIS (otherwise known as MI6) was sent out into the cold and — unlike Leamas — not expected to come back in again. Agent T. — as we must call him for fear of falling foul of the Official Secrets Act — did not much like it there. In July, he took his case for unfair dismissal to an industrial tribunal. It sat in Croydon symbolic humiliation in itself for a young man who had thought that his life would continue to be a frantic round of opera- tional forays into the former Soviet Union, Bosnia and the Middle East. The proceed- ings were extremely brief. The Foreign Sec- retary, Malcolm Rifkind, acting on the advice of Sir David Spedding, director-gen- eral of MI6, issued a certificate forbidding the hearing of the case on grounds of national security.

Considered an extremely promising recruit by MI6 — he had a First from Cam- bridge and had worked in the City as a management consultant before he was recruited by the foreign intelligence service — T. was allegedly entrusted with sensitive tasks like the resettlement of a Russian defector and the handling of a Tory MP who allegedly gave briefings to MI6 about Serbian donations to the Conservative Party. After he had completed his three- year probationary period, his contract with the service was not renewed — an unusual event in the intelligence services, which pride themselves on making the right selec- tion of candidates first time round.

His employers claimed that he did not possess the skill of team-play essential for a successful intelligence officer, that he had made too many errors of judgment in his operational work to rank as reliable and that he was 'short-termist' about the service. T., however, believed that he was the victim of a personality clash with a personnel man- ager and protested vehemently against the decision to terminate his contract. Attempts to resettle him in other jobs failed. He was given the statutory severance deal and left the service's new building on the South

Bank of the Thames with an appetite for what his former employers would call revenge and he would call justice.

Through John Wadham, his solicitor at Liberty, he has also lodged a pre-appeal with the European Court of Human Rights, should he fail to get satisfaction either at an employment tribunal or through the Court' of Appeal in this country. You might say, if you were prone to the George Smiley school of understatement, that Agent T. is not going quietly.

Mr Wadham believes that the rights and wrongs of MI6 and T.'s claim and counter- claim are irrelevant. 'Everyone in this coun- try should be entitled to go to an open industrial tribunal if they have been unfairly dismissed. He is being denied a fundamen- tal right.' T. also approached the Intelli- gence Services Tribunal, staffed by senior lawyers appointed by the Government. It rejected his complaint. Mr Wadham says, This tribunal does not have access to docu- mentary evidence or witnesses. It can only find in favour of the complainant if it proves that the service was 'perverse' in its treatment of him. This is not a satisfactory mechanism for dealing with complaints.'

Read the extract from le Carres novel and then Mr Wadham's words and you have a striking example of how our atti- tudes to employment, intelligence and our broader rights and duties have shifted in the last three decades. In le Carres world (which in tone, if not always in content and characterisation was an accurate rendition of the culture of SIS), spies are different from the rest of us. They are both unac- countable and unaccounted. They do not end up lodging cases before a Croydon tri- bunal and they would rather face a Russian firing squad than spill out their secrets to an Observer journalist in an attempt to curry sympathy.

In Mr Wadham's view of the world, spies are just workers who happen to deal with state secrets. Certain regular ciphers can be found in cases like this. One is that an agent or officer locked in conflict with a service he once worked for is highly likely to add to his list of grievances the accusation that the service behaved unethically. He might really believe this to be true, or he might sense (or be advised) that sections of the media and public incline to thinking that the security services are fundamentally unethical and thus ensure sympathy from the start.

The equal and opposite cipher is that the security service involved will discreetly let it be known that the person concerned is unstable and/or prone to hysteria and that they want to 'bring him back from the brink'. Again, it might be true, but it is also a predictable part of the war for public opinion.

In this context, it must also be said that the service has not had the best of times lately. It has been roundly outdone by MI5 in the recently acquired skill of public rela- tions. Domestic intelligence now sends out glossy brochures to undergraduates and has a formal recruitment policy. MI6 still has difficulty finding enough of the right peo- ple. Pay is modest and in the wake of the Cold War's end being sent abroad to spy for your country evokes less of a frisson in young breasts.

MI6 has also been the target of intense Russian intelligence activity in the immedi- ate aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. John Scarlett, the British station chief in Moscow who was renowned to be one of the best 'Russia Men' of any of the Western intelligence services was expelled in 1992. Earlier this year, a Russian counter-intelligence sting resulted in Nor- man MacSween, his successor, making an impromptu — and unconscious — appear- ance on Russia television. Russian intelli- gence claimed that MacSween had been filmed waiting to meet an agent working for the British. A tit-for-tat expulsion of diplomats followed.

In addition, MI6 still seems insecure about how, if at all, to project public image. The decision by Stella Rimington, during her short stint as head of MI5 to go public about her identity placed pressure on MI6 to do likewise. The consensus is that MI5 benefits in terms of its image in Britain and particularly, given its role in Northern Ireland — from greater openness. MI6 with its agents deep in hostile territory remains suspicious of the impression glas- nost would make on those who risk their lives to deliver us secrets.

Then there is that building. The com- bined intelligence services now sit in post- modernist splendour on the South Bank of the Thames in a building designed by Terry Farrell, rumoured to be influenced by Mayan temples, and so assertive that it practically cries out 'bug me'. Having spent £230 million on the project, it deems it wise to entertain guests from time to time. At the same time, it is prone to odd and counter-productive acts like asking the

British press not to name MacSween after his identity had been broadcast on Russian Television.

Underlying the case of T. is confusion about types of accountability which can or should be applied to intelligence services. The drift of the past few years, enshrined in the 1994 Intelligence Services Act with its candid opening sentence, 'There shall continue to be a Secret Intelligence Ser- vice' and its promises to provide oversight committees and publish expenditure, is that the services can be prone to scrutiny in the same way as a bank or company presents an annual report and invited the sharehold- ers to discuss it.

But it isn't. We can justifiably expect to understand the structure, funding and scope of the intelligence services. It is a different matter altogether to expect them to explain to outsiders why it finds a spy to be no longer fit for service when to do so inevitably involves discussion of the work he did. The first duty of a secret service, the Act might also have stated, is to keep its secrets.

T.'s supporters might care to listen to Markits Wolf, the former East German spy master on the subject of his rival service in West Germany throughout the Cold War. `We used to mock it as a "post-office" ser- vice,' he once told me. 'So many people in it were obsessed by their rights, their titles and their pensions. They thought of them- selves as bureaucrats, not as we did, as fighters on the invisible front. That gave us a huge psychological advantage.'

The old world of espionage was sus- tained by a shared belief that the calling involved special and sometimes onerous consequences for those who pursued it. Today's recruits are more likely to consider it as just another job. T. abandoned the reliable world of management consultancy for the life of an intelligence officer. When his secret world imploded, he sought a management consultant's redress.