Douglas MacLeod (Edinburgh, writer): In the six minutes or so it will take you to read this piece an application will have been received to bug the private communications of four of your fellow UK citizens. That's a thousand applications a day, every day, twenty four seven. They are made to the Interception of Communication Commissioner - a title Orwell would have been proud of - from a wide range of bodies: from Government Departments chasing terrorists to local authorities chasing fly tippers. It is time to be afraid, very afraid, and it is time for a public debate on the relationship between the Security Services, the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Executive. The tip of the surveillance iceberg emerged over the case of the Labour MP Sadiq Khan, where the so called ‘Wilson Doctrine' was breached by a junior police officer and the MP's conversation with a constituent was bugged. Now to be scrupulously fair the constituent was a terrorist suspect and it was he, not the MP who was under surveillance. Nevertheless it raises important issues.
The Green MSP Patrick Harvie has already written to the Home Secretary asking about whether any Holyrood members have been bugged and if the Wilson Doctrine applies to them. So let's remind ourselves about Harold Wilson and the Security Services. At the time it seemed as if the then Prime Minister was becoming a paranoid conspiracy theorist, whose next stop would be little green men and the grassy knoll. He believed that rogue elements in MI5 thought that he was a KGB agent, had placed him under surveillance, and were plotting his downfall. We now know, following the revelations of Peter Wright in Spycatcher, that Harold Wilson was not paranoid; they were indeed out to get him (and since the release of KGB files we know that they were also out to get him, having failed in their attempt to turn him into a Soviet asset).
Now don't get me wrong. There was a very real threat to freedom and democracy from the KGB, and it needed countering. In fact, in Russian intelligence only the acronyms change, and its successor organisation now poses a renewed and (as we've seen) sometimes murderous threat. Nor do I want to ignore the existence of the real and present danger of another terrorist attack in this country. Spooks do need powers to counter all of this; but what you don't do is leave spooks to their own devices.
Scotland especially has a long history of covert operations being carried out on its soil without any democratic scrutiny. From its inception in 1909 until John Major acknowledged its existence in 1992, MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, didn't officially exist. In this weird limbo it was prone to developing its own policies, including, at the end of the Second World War, a grand plan to recreate the Hapsburg Empire as a bulwark against Communism. Included in this was support for an insurrection in the Ukraine. To this end they brought one thousand members of the Ukrainian SS Galizien Division to a camp in Haddington to screen the men as possible agents to parachute into Ukraine. Agents were dropped, but the whole mission was betrayed by Kim Philby, and the agents were either executed or ‘turned' to radio back a stream of disinformation. When writing a book about this I learned that any fiction you could devise about spooks was easily trumped by the truth. Rendition flights arriving and leaving Prestwick at dead of night comes as no surprise to the student of the secret world.
As for internal security and MI5, Scotland is no stranger to surveillance on a large scale. I'm currently researching Red Clydeside and the intelligence services in the 1920's and 30's. In those days the spooks merely had to request a "Whitehall Warrant" from the Home Secretary to secure communications interceptions. In the days before wide spread telephone use this meant that all mail to and (as far as possible) from the individual named on the warrant passed through the hands of MI5. Vernon Kell, the then head of the service, also had a network of informants, usually the leading lights in Conservative Associations who passed on such momentous intelligence as which child in a mining community had won a trip to Moscow, and who had chalked a Marxist quote on a paving stone in Motherwell. (Though, lest someone out there is deluded enough to see leaders of "Bloody Friday" in George Square in 1919 as heroes, at least one of them ended up in the pay of Soviet Intelligence, spying for money and not for principles).
These may seem like far off things in the other country of the past but they lift the lid on the mindset of Security Services too detached from the democratic process. At one point Kell's MI5 had amassed more than forty thousand personal files, a million cross-index cards, and had placed five thousand people under intensive surveillance. Watch your computer blink, swipe your loyalty card, look up at that CCTV camera, use the ATM machine, make that mobile phone call. What wouldn't Kell have given to have all that and more in his armoury of surveillance? His successors are alive and well. It is time for a public debate in Scotland on the Security Services and their relationship with our new democratic institutions.
