Spies like EU
Perhaps it is time MI5 asks itself just what are the implications of having so many members of Parliament, the Civil Service, the intelligence community, the judiciary, influential think tanks, trade unions, regulatory authorities and the media who openly pledge fealty to Brussels.
In January 1963, Nicholas Elliot travelled to Beirut. Upon arriving, he instructed his MI6 subordinates to prepare an apartment with listening devices and to post watchers at the doors and on the street outside. Then, he invited his best friend around for tea. Kim Philby knew why Elliot had asked for the meeting: to extract a confession- to find out the extent of Philby’s betrayal. However, as Ben Macintyre wrote in A Spy Among Friends, Philby had “played the game brilliantly for three decades,” and he needed to find out how much Elliot knew, even if it meant risking arrest. Over tea in the wired apartment, the two old friends engaged in an “exquisitely genteel” conversation, “lying courteously to one another” as part of an “ancient English ritual” that was in fact an “unsparing, bare-knuckle fight.”
Elliot got his confession, but Philby demurred when asked to sign a written statement. He promptly slipped his surveillance and escaped to Moscow, leaving the British intelligence community- already blinking in confusion after a series of defections had thrown open the curtains on the extent to which it had been in the dark about Soviet penetration- entirely discombobulated. It took decades for them to fully recover.
The Cambridge Five, of which Philby was the dazzling star, had all attended Britain’s elite educational institutions. However, what unified them, and the other traitors, such as George Blake, who died last year in Moscow, was a belief that communism was a better way of organising society than liberal democracy. Such men seemed to have thought that almost any action was justified if it would hasten the arrival of the inevitable socialist utopia. The interwar years and Great Depression presented the NKVD (the KGB’s predecessor) with a bounty of low hanging fruit to be harvested. During this period, the Soviets recruited the trade unionists, the immature scions of the British establishment and (if we believe Peter Wright) politicians who eventually provided access to the most sensitive reaches of the British state.
For the first time in forty years, Britain exists in a Cold War world. Our close relationships with the United States and Australia will make us a target for Chinese espionage. At the least, its sophisticated cyber capabilities threaten our intellectual property, industries, infrastructure and command and control systems. Yet this is well known. What is perhaps less widely considered is the effect on our national security of leaving the EU.
Whichever type of Brexit we might have personally hoped for, or whether we wanted to leave the EU at all, the sovereign will of the British people as expressed by the Crown in Parliament was to end ECJ supremacy in UK law, regain the power to decide how many EU citizens enter and live in the UK, free the British state from Single Market regulations, and recover the authority to sign trade deals independently, while retaining as much access to EU markets as possible. That negotiations with the EU were lengthy and fractious (and ongoing) mean, by definition, that the EU’s aims were different to ours. They still are. This is also true across a range of diplomatic, economic and security matters unrelated to Anglo-European relations.
Given these sometimes divergent national interests, perhaps it is time MI5 asks itself just what are the implications of having so many members of Parliament, the Civil Service, the intelligence community, the judiciary, influential think tanks, trade unions, regulatory authorities and the media who openly pledge fealty to Brussels- or appear to be convinced, like Philby and Blake, that British society would be better organised in another manner, and that they are therefore justified in taking actions to push the UK in their preferred direction.
In May 2019, The Telegraph reported that Tony Blair had been “secretly advising” the President of France, Emanuel Macron, “on how to force Britain to stay in the EU.” He had also “Previously met the European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker for private talks about negotiating with Britain over Brexit.” As a former Prime Minister, and still extraordinarily well connected, we might therefore wish to know what Mr. Blair advised President Macron. Did he provide broad, tactical advice, or specific information? How frequently did they meet or correspond? On behalf of whom was Mr. Blair acting? How did his contact with the presidents of France and the European Commission dovetail with his involvement in the People’s Vote campaign, which sought to overturn the original Brexit referendum result? What information did President Macron provide Mr. Blair?
On 7 March 2019, Dominic Grieve, then a Conservative MP and Privy Council member as Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, met with Nathalie Loiseau, the then-French Minister of European Affairs, to discuss how the Theresa May government might be forced to extend Article 50. Mr. Grieve was a leader of the Parliamentary efforts to delay, frustrate or prevent Brexit. To this end, he tabled several amendments to government legislation, proposed that funding for all government activities be blocked unless time was made available for a Parliamentary vote he wanted, and even co-authored a Labour Party amendment designed to prevent a so-called No Deal Brexit. When in November 2016 Mr. Grieve was awarded the Legion of Honour of the French Republic, France’s highest honour (military or civilian), the French Ambassador to Britain said, “Cher Dominic, you provide a vital link between our two countries… In the peculiar times we’re living in, your role is more important than ever.” Important to whom?
These meetings were in plain sight; however, on 9 March 2018, the London School of Economics hosted a private seminar attended by European diplomats and British Civil Servants. The Sun reported that Alastair Brockbank, the then defence advisor to the Cabinet Office, told the seminar that “Britain stood ready to continue paying ‘significant contributions’ to… common EU defence and foreign policy projects adding: ‘We are interested in it all.’” BrexitCentral wrote that he also told the attendees that “the UK was always planning to have ‘no gap’ in the UK’s subordination to EU foreign and security policy including EU defence policy.” Given the government had told Parliament that it would not be part of any EU defence or foreign policy structures, it was perhaps accurate of Victoria Billing, now HM Ambassador to Senegal, but then Deputy Director of the Department for Existing the EU, to say at the seminar that “the defence and foreign policy deal sought by the UK [is] a ‘KitKat’,” whose public face was a chocolate “‘cover’ hiding the depths of the continued agreement.” This, according to The Sun’s account of the seminar, “sparked mocking laughter,” but it also stoked enough outrage in one attendee for him to leak a recording to the UK press.
Predictably, MPs in favour of leaving the EU responded furiously: Jacob Rees-Mogg said that it appeared some civil servants were “briefing against their country.” Perhaps more tellingly, it roused Sir Richard Dearlove, the former Head of MI6, to write a scathing admonishment. He said that the civil servants quoted were “acting ultra vires” and “flagrantly in breach of the peoples’ instruction to leave the EU.”
The full extent of the injury to the UK’s national interests caused by Philby and the other British spies for the Soviet Union will never be known. However, it is clear that it led to scores of intelligence networks behind the iron curtain being rolled up (and the murder of the thousands of the brave men and women who formed them), as well as the failure of countless operations against the Eastern Bloc. Beyond the intelligence duel, it also gave the Soviet Union a huge boost in technology, military affairs and nuclear weapons. It almost irreparably damaged British relations with the CIA and FBI, who not unreasonably grew reticent to share intelligence with such a leaky vessel.
Despite some of the Eurosceptic Right’s more lurid descriptions, the EU cannot be compared with the Soviet Union, and it does not present the same category of existential threat to Britain. However, as we have seen, its interests diverge from Britain’s. For example, the EU would like to integrate Britain, as the continent of Europe’s preeminent military power, into EU defence structures. It would like to weaken the City of London’s lead in the financial sector. It made the prevention of the UK’s ability to economically “out-compete” the EU the focus of its Withdrawal Agreement and Trade Deal negotiations. It has attempted to keep the UK entirely within the EU legal, foreign policy and regulatory orbit. The Northern Ireland Protocol is living evidence of the continued diversion of interests.
Also unlike the Soviet Union, the EU does not have a powerful equivalent of the KGB. It is true that the French Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure and German Bundesnachrichtendienst are formidable intelligence agencies, but neither is likely to be aggressively recruiting agents to penetrate the higher reaches of the British state. Indeed, MI6, MI5 and GCHQ will continue sharing intelligence with them as they face common enemies. This does not mean, though, that the allies will eschew spying on each other altogether. For instance, in 2015, it emerged that the NSA, the US equivalent of GCHQ, “had targeted 125 phone numbers of top German officials for long-term surveillance,” including those of Angela Merkel and her predecessor as German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, in an operation that lasted for decades. Nor are we British above such actions. Between 1960 and 1963, MI5 and GCHQ were able to read cipher traffic to and from the French embassy in London as part of Operation STOCKADE.
Besides, neither the DGSE nor the BND would have to ‘aggressively’ recruit at all. As we have seen, there are senior current and former politicians and civil servants arrogant and solipsistic enough to believe that their own view of the British interest is ‘correct’, even if it contradicts that expressed by the people through the Crown in Parliament, and to collude against HM Government to get what they want. Many do not even bother to hide their disdain for Britain, and openly admit to feeling more loyalty to the EU than to Britain.
This is not new. George Orwell wrote in 1941 that “the English intelligentsia are Europeanized” and “ashamed of their own nationality.” He went so far as to claim that “it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God save the King than of stealing from a poor box.” The EU necessarily sinks rapaciously thirsty roots deep into its member states’ structures of sovereignty, law, identity and democracy. It has thus provided a new focal point for the British intelligentsia’s anti-British Europeanisation. The economist Sir Paul Collier argues that “The well educated metropolitans… have gradually peeled off from shared national identity. The option of being ‘European’ has perhaps been a convenient justification for them to withdraw from obligations to their provincial fellow citizens.”
We must not precipitate a McCarthyite witch hunt, but it is perhaps better to ask now whether any of the ‘well-educated metropolitans’ at the heart of the British establishment are going beyond the withdrawal of obligations to their fellow citizens and are acting, as Sir Richard Dearlove put it, ultra vires.
