ANOTHER VOICE
The cost of listening to other people's telephone conversations
AUBERON WAUGH
It is always nice to see a rival in trouble and nobody will laugh louder than I if Mrs Thatcher succeeds in convincing the stupid country she leads that the New Statesman has been guilty of treason in printing the tedious details of Britain's proposed spy satellite over Russia, codenamed Zircon. If the details had been printed in the Sunday Times as part of a Ministry of Defence public relations exercise to justify the additional expenditure of £500 million on `intelligence' gathering, none of us would have bothered to glance at it.
It is only because the Government was trying to keep it a secret that it is of any real interest, although I must admit that the sum of £500 million, if correct — it has been disputed — does raise questions. Is any information about Russia really as valuable as that? The apparatus concerned is apparently capable of listening to tele- phone conversations in the Soviet Union. Even if it is capable of isolating the one significant conversation from all the mil- lions and millions of irrelevant ones which are being held every minute — one's own experiences of a crossed line give some indication of how boring other people's telephone conversations are — I simply do not see how any information derived from this source could be worth £500 million.
What is much more interesting to learn is that such a sum of money can be fiddled out of the Defence vote without its ever appearing on the public accounts. Even if the sum apportioned for this secret project was only £100 million, as unnamed sources in the Ministry of Defence assured the Sunday Telegraph, it occurs to me that a chap could set himself up quite well with £100 million under his belt, even nowa- days. It is too late for me to do anything on my own behalf, but I feel it might be unwise to discourage any children from joining the army . . . all they would need to do would be to buy a rubber stamp or two and classify a few invoices and pay- ment transfers as Top Secret; then they could buy Wynyard Park and spend the rest of their lives popping off at pheasants, partridges and grouse in season.
Everybody knew that there were spy satellites over Russia, taking incompre- hensible photographs and listening to wire- less conversations. Why should it be such a secret that Britain proposed to build one of these expensive toys, too? Only, I suggest, because by making it secret, the Ministry of Defence hoped to stifle any debate on its cost-effectiveness.
Plainly there is a case for some secret expenditure on defence, the most obvious example being research on secret weapons. If they were spending money on a new death-ray which 'singled out members of the Communist Party and turned them into toadstools while leaving ordinary humans unaffected, they would have every reason to keep the details secret for fear that the Russians would discover an antidote. But there is no reason at all to keep secret the information that Britain plans to spend hundreds of millions of pounds on another piece of electronic junk to collect more information — unless they already know the project is a waste of money.
This would also explain why the Govern- ment did not quite dare suppress the article by Mr Duncan Campbell, as it could easily have done if national security had genuine- ly been affected. 'Whitehall's response was that the threat to national security was so serious that a special committee of senior officials from the Defence Ministry and Foreign Office should be set up,' writes the Sunday Times political correspondent, Mr David Hughes, with a humour which is no less remarkable for being, as I suspect, unconscious.
One expects journalists to take these absurdities seriously for as long as they last. One even expects Opposition politi- cians to gain what advantage they can. `The Government because of its bungling has succeeded in handing on a plate serious intelligence information to the Soviet Un- ion, intones Dr David Owen, playing the responsible statesman again. But why, oh why, as we say on the Daily Mail, does Mrs Thatcher play along with them, calling Mr Campbell's informant 'a traitor' and de- scribing his boring article — interesting only because it is supposed to be secret 'a gift to the KGB'?
The appeal of these expensive toys is easy to understand, and if people are given unrestricted access to vast sums of money, they might easily be tempted to spend it in this way. When I was in Miami Beach a few years ago I noticed that all the millionaires' houses had these huge, saucer-shaped tele- vision aerials disfiguring their gardens. They enabled the owners to receive up to 200 television channels. But who on earth wants 200 channels? In Somerset we can receive five channels, at a pinch, each more boring that the last. I would certainly not spend a farthing to receive more. The sad truth would appear to be that even if one has all the money in the world to spend, there is only a limited number of things to spend it on, and most of them are pretty pointless. The same, I feel, is true of many modern developments. Whenever I am in Hong Kong or Tokyo I am amazed by the ingenuity of machines which tell one in- stantly the state of the stockmarket in London and New York, or the price of zinc in Rio Tinto, wherever that might be. But all these inventions rely for their justifica- tion on having something worthwhile to Communicate. While our ability to ex- change information has grown enormous- ly, the amount of useful information to be exchanged has not grown in proportion.
Thus the vast secret-intelligence- gathering and security industries have no- thing to do but invent secrets for the other side to be prevented from gathering. Peo- ple might argue that it is a comparatively harmless thing for governments to spend their surpluses of taxpayers' money on pieces of electronic junk floating round in space and listening to 'secret' defence and foreign policy communications. They might be spending it on hideous weapons to kill half the world's population and drive the other half mad. Or they might spend it promoting sexual perversion, corrupting the north with further huge hand-outs, tearing down beautiful old buildings or subsidising 'modern art'. If we argue that most forms of government expenditure are ultimately self-defeating or harmful, then this would seem a comparatively innocuous one.
For my own part, I would be happier if the money allocated to defence were spent on defending the country rather than col- lecting useless information about people I have no desire to meet and places I have no desire to visit. It should be spent inventing and developing fearsome new weapons, and making young men carry huge burdens up mountainsides at the double. Of course, if we could be certain that the Soviet Union was wasting similar sums on the same sort of spy satellites it might be different. But the Kremlin has only to take out a sub- scription to the New Statesman, Spectator and Literary Review to learn all it needs to know about what is happening in this country.
Previous page
