The CLASSIFIEDS – OPEN to ALL

Each day, another breach of security is reported. Everybody tut-tuts and says that the government is hopeless. The government says it is enquiring into the breach and such things will not happen again. But they do.

This needs to be put in context. The security services have always been terrible at … um … security. We have a friend who worked at the Admiralty in the 1970s. He says that everybody was wholly cavalier with secret information. Filing cabinets of classified files were routinely left unlocked and unattended. Papers from restricted files would lie on desks for days on end. It sounds like the Ealing Comedy version of Whitehall but the reason that Ealing Comedies were so convincing is that they were true.

In those days, the professionals may have been lax but the climate was otherwise. To risk the disclosure of state secrets was thought to be the gravest of crimes. The newspapers operated a self-denying ordinance called the D-Notice whereby editors agreed that they would not publish any classified material that came into their hands. Reporters like Chapman Pincher who specialised in covering intelligence work were more likely to cooperate with the authorities than to embarrass them.

Whenever any material covered by the Official Secrets Act did leak out, the government of the day would invoke extraordinary powers to seal the leak and punish those journalists thought to wish the authorities ill. The latter would routinely be hauled before some specialist court of law and be expected to defend themselves without the prosecution being obliged to disclose fully of what they were accused.

It will be noted that the emphasis then was on the receipt rather than the delivery of classified information. For sure, “passing secrets” was a grave – at one time a capital – offence. But accepting such material, especially for the purpose of embarrassing the government, was usually considered the more heinous sin, at least by successive home secretaries.

The climate is very different now. We have become so jaded and cynical that we believe the state has no secrets worth keeping. The laxity of civil servants and jobsworths in the intelligence and other public services is now what catches the media eye. I feel sure that highly sensitive paperwork has been left on trains since Brunel’s time, but now it is reported and thought lamentable. This is primarily because a great deal more of the data now held by the authorities concerns the innocent citizenry rather than the threatening spooks. We want government to look after those interests that are more obvious and urgent to most of us than the security of the nation. What is to be done?

One thing suggests itself immediately. Make the failure to carry out the duty of care that falls on all individuals handling classified material a prosecutable offence. The nitwits who not only took home stuff that should never have left the office but forgot it when they alighted from their commuter trains should be appearing in court very soon. Let’s see who they are and be told what wince-making penalty they will suffer for their stupidity. This would certainly have a swift effect, not least pour encourager les autres.

Better yet, it would make the government appear decisive and tough-minded. Rather surprisingly, given his previous reputation for bullying and bluster, Gordon Brown has been more a mouse than a lion since receiving the keys to no 10 Downing Street. Rather too much hand-wringing – whether over Burma and Zimbabwe or the economy and the incompetence of civil servants – has been indulged. It’s high time that the government made someone a whipping boy before that role falls to the prime minister.

ON MANŒUVRES

During the near-month that I was thwarted from going on line by BT Broadband’s tardiness, arrogance and incompetence, there were many developments in the real world that made my blog finger itchy. The capture of a group of British sailors by Iranian forces, their videotaped humiliation and the self-inflicted wounds by which they handed Tehran the moral victory once back home would certainly have drawn me to the keyboard.

The misjudgment of allowing members of the apprehended party – inevitably in practice the two dumbest sailors, Mr Bean and the chain-smoking mum – to sell their accounts to the tabloids made both the military and the government a laughing stock around the world, especially in the Middle East. Which of us wouldn’t volunteer to spend a fortnight relaxing in the custody of a foreign land if the reward were a six-figure sum for confirming a tabloid editor’s prejudices? (Not me, actually, but then I’ve been to Tehran and I have no wish to return, especially not in its present volatile state).

Meanwhile there has been a will-he-won’t-he fracas – it hardly merits the word “debate” – concerning HRH Prince Harry and his loudly expressed desire to get himself killed in Iraq, either in an explosion or by beheading as a captive. When the inevitable happens, remember how I warned you that the media would hail him as a hero, whatever he was actually doing at the time of his demise.

The establishment’s need to dress up the playboy princeling’s behaviour (past, present and future) in myth-making terms is very germane to the larger point I want to make. That concerns the military’s most ill-advised accommodation with the media’s unsubtle voyeurism about any matter that can be passed off as “human interest”.

There was a time, not so long ago, when all military matters were deemed secret, confidential and not for public discussion. To report even quite banal aspects of military management was a breach of the Official Secrets Act. Of course, the culture of confidentiality allowed all manner of ills to be winked at in service life and I certainly deplore such unaccountability. Indeed, I remain of the view that no profession, including the military, should be allowed to act as judge and jury in examinations of breaches of the rules, especially where the civil law ought to take an interest.

But inevitably the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Now top brass are becoming familiar spokesmen on news bulletins, ready with their sound bites and their pat answers. Successive prime ministers and home secretaries used to hold to the line that upon military issues they never confirmed nor denied any proposal or rumour. Mr Blair still says as much on intelligence questions but we already know a great deal more about the workings of MI5 and MI6 than any previous generation did.

As far as military operations are concerned, it is now standard practice that both print and broadcast journalists talk to military personnel on the front line, before, after and sometimes during engagement with hostile forces. A new term has rapidly established itself to describe journalists who accompany troops in war situations over a sustained period: those reporters are “embedded”.

It’s hard to figure why the commanders should believe that, on balance, more is gained than lost by this dubious accessibility. War is characterized by dehumanizing tendencies. Individual combatants are rather more likely to be seen in an alarming or shaming light than in an inspiring one, even when the unheroic is only expressed in the banality of their language.

Doubtless the front line equivalent of paparazzi will hound 2nd Lieutenant Windsor – or is he a colonel by now? – to ensure that plenty of pics are seen back home. I can see it now: “Prince Wazza!!” as the poor boy makes use of the latrine he has just dug in the sand. I imagine his majestic grandmother would have preferred it if the first intelligence of Harry’s tour of duty in Iraq had emerged upon his return. On the other hand, the Palace is no doubt advised to go for the headlines just as avidly as the rest of the establishment.