UK Security Services Neutralized Country's Leading Liberal Newspaper
September 11, 2019
The Guardian has been successfully deterred from producing its former
adversarial reporting on the "security state," report Matt Kennard and Mark
Curtis.
By Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis
Daily Maverick
U.K. security services targeted The Guardian after the newspaper started
publishing the contents of secret U.S. government documents leaked by
National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in June 2013.
Snowden's bombshell revelations continued for months and were the
largest-ever leak of classified material covering the NSA and its U.K.
equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters. They revealed
programs of mass surveillance operated by both agencies.
According to minutes of meetings of the U.K.'s Defence and Security Media
Advisory Committee, the revelations caused alarm in the British security
services and Ministry of Defence.
"This event was very concerning because at the outset The Guardian avoided
engaging with the [committee] before publishing the first tranche of
information," state minutes of a Nov. 7 , 2013, meeting at the MOD.
The DSMA Committee, more commonly known as the D-Notice Committee, is run by
the MOD, where it meets every six months. A small number of journalists are
also invited to sit on the committee. Its stated purpose is to "prevent
inadvertent public disclosure of information that would compromise U.K.
military and intelligence operations." It can issue "notices" to the media
to encourage them not to publish certain information.
The committee is currently chaired by the MOD's Director-General of Security
Policy Dominic Wilson, who was previously director of security and
intelligence in the British Cabinet Office. Its secretary is Brigadier
Geoffrey Dodds OBE, who describes himself as an "accomplished, senior
ex-military commander with extensive experience of operational level
leadership."
The D-Notice system describes itself as voluntary, placing no obligations on
the media to comply with any notice issued. This means there should have
been no need for The Guardian to consult the MOD before publishing the
Snowden documents.
Yet committee minutes note the secretary saying: "The Guardian was obliged
to seek . advice under the terms of the DA notice code." The minutes add:
"This failure to seek advice was a key source of concern and considerable
efforts had been made to address it."
The Guardian's headquarters in London. (Bryantbob, CC BY-SA 3.0, via
Wikimedia Commons)
'Considerable Efforts'
These "considerable efforts" included a D-Notice sent out by the committee
on June 7, 2013 - the day after The Guardian published the first documents -
to all major U.K. media editors, saying they should refrain from publishing
information that would "jeopardise both national security and possibly U.K.
personnel." It was marked "private and confidential: not for publication,
broadcast or use on social media."
Clearly the committee did not want its issuing of the notice to be
publicized, and it was nearly successful. Only the right-wing blog Guido
Fawkes made it public.
At the time, according to the committee minutes, the "intelligence agencies
in particular had continued to ask for more advisories [i.e. D-Notices] to
be sent out." Such D-Notices were clearly seen by the intelligence services
not so much as a tool to advise the media but rather a way to threaten it
not to publish further Snowden revelations.
One night, amidst the first Snowden stories being published, the D-Notice
Committee's then-secretary, Air Vice-Marshal Andrew Vallance, personally
called Alan Rusbridger, then editor of The Guardian. Vallance "made clear
his concern that The Guardian had failed to consult him in advance before
telling the world," according to a Guardian journalist who interviewed
Rusbridger.
Later in the year, Prime Minister David Cameron again used the D-Notice
system as a threat to the media.
"I don't want to have to use injunctions or D-Notices or the other tougher
measures," he said in a statement to MPs. "I think it's much better to
appeal to newspapers' sense of social responsibility. But if they don't
demonstrate some social responsibility it would be very difficult for
government to stand back and not to act."
The threats worked. The Press Gazette reported at the time that "The FT
[Financial Times] and The Times did not mention it [the initial Snowden
revelations] . and the Telegraph published only a short." It continued by
noting that only The Independent "followed up the substantive allegations."
It added, "The BBC has also chosen to largely ignore the story."
The Guardian, however, remained uncowed.
Supporters of Edward Snowden demonstrate in Hong Kong, June 15, 2013.
(EPA/JEROME FAVRE)
According to the committee minutes, the fact The Guardian would not stop
publishing "undoubtedly raised questions in some minds about the system's
future usefulness." If the D-Notice system could not prevent The Guardian
publishing GCHQ's most sensitive secrets, what was it good for?
It was time to rein in The Guardian and make sure this never happened again.
GCHQ and Laptops
The security services ratcheted up their "considerable efforts" to deal with
the exposures.
On July 20, 2013, GCHQ officials entered The Guardian's offices at King's
Cross in London, six weeks after the first Snowden-related article had been
published.
At the request of the government and security services, Guardian deputy
editor Paul Johnson, along with two others, spent three hours destroying the
laptops containing the Snowden documents.
The Guardian staffers, according to one of the newspaper's reporters,
brought "angle-grinders, dremels - drills with revolving bits - and masks."
The reporter added, "The spy agency provided one piece of hi-tech equipment,
a 'degausser,' which destroys magnetic fields and erases data."
Johnson claims that the destruction of the computers was "purely a symbolic
act," adding that "the government and GCHQ knew, because we had told them,
that the material had been taken to the U.S. to be shared with The New York
Times. The reporting would go on. The episode hadn't changed anything."
Yet the episode did change something. As the D-Notice Committee minutes for
November 2013 outlined: "Towards the end of July [as the computers were
being destroyed], The Guardian had begun to seek and accept D-Notice advice
not to publish certain highly sensitive details and since then the dialogue
[with the committee] had been reasonable and improving."
The British security services had carried out more than a "symbolic act." It
was both a show of strength and a clear threat. The Guardian was then the
only major newspaper that could be relied upon by whistleblowers in the U.S.
and British security bodies to receive and cover their exposures, a
situation which posed a challenge to security agencies.
The increasingly aggressive overtures made to The Guardian worked. The
committee chair noted that after GCHQ had overseen the smashing up of the
newspaper's laptops "engagement . with The Guardian had continued to
strengthen."
Moreover, he added, there were now "regular dialogues between the secretary
and deputy secretaries and Guardian journalists." Rusbridger later testified
to the Home Affairs Committee that he and Air Vice-Marshal Vallance of the
D-Notice committee "collaborated" in the aftermath of the Snowden affair and
that Vallance had even "been at The Guardian offices to talk to all our
reporters."
But the most important part of this charm and threat offensive was getting
The Guardian to agree to take a seat on the D-Notice Committee itself. The
committee minutes are explicit on this, noting that "the process had
culminated by [sic] the appointment of Paul Johnson (deputy editor Guardian
News and Media) as a DPBAC [i.e. D-Notice Committee] member."
At some point in 2013 or early 2014, Johnson - the same deputy editor who
had smashed up his newspaper's computers under the watchful gaze of British
intelligence agents - was approached to take up a seat on the committee.
Johnson attended his first meeting in May 2014 and was to remain on it until
October 2018.
The Guardian's deputy editor went directly from the corporation's basement
with an angle-grinder to sitting on the D-Notice Committee alongside the
security service officials who had tried to stop his paper publishing.
A New Editor
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger withstood intense pressure not to publish
some of the Snowden revelations but agreed to Johnson taking a seat on the
D-Notice Committee as a tactical sop to the security services. Throughout
his tenure, The Guardian continued to publish some stories critical of the
security services.
But in March 2015, the situation changed when The Guardian appointed a new
editor, Katharine Viner, who had less experience than Rusbridger of dealing
with the security services. Viner had started out on fashion and
entertainment magazine Cosmopolitan and had no history in national security
reporting. According to insiders, she showed much less leadership during the
Snowden affair than Janine Gibson in the U.S. (Gibson was another candidate
to be Rusbridger's successor).
Viner was then editor-in-chief of Guardian Australia, which was launched
just two weeks before the first Snowden revelations were published.
Australia and New Zealand comprise two-fifths of the so-called "Five Eyes"
surveillance alliance exposed by Snowden.
This was an opportunity for the security services. It appears that their
seduction began the following year.
In November 2016, The Guardian published an unprecedented "exclusive" with
Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, Britain's domestic security service. The
article noted that this was the "first newspaper interview given by an
incumbent MI5 chief in the service's 107-year history." It was co-written by
deputy editor Paul Johnson, who had never written about the security
services before and who was still sitting on the D-Notice Committee. This
was not mentioned in the article.
The MI5 chief was given copious space to make claims about the national
security threat posed by an "increasingly aggressive" Russia. Johnson and
his co-author noted, "Parker said he was talking to the Guardian rather than
any other newspaper despite the publication of the Snowden files."
Parker told the two reporters, "We recognise that in a changing world we
have to change too. We have a responsibility to talk about our work and
explain it."
Four months after the MI5 interview, in March 2017, The Guardian published
another unprecedented "exclusive," this time with Alex Younger, the sitting
chief of MI6, Britain's external intelligence agency. This exclusive was
awarded by the Secret Intelligence Service to The Guardian's investigations
editor, Nick Hopkins, who had been appointed 14 months previously.
Alexander Younger, head of the foreign intelligence service, in 2019.
(PA-EFE/FACUNDO ARRIZABALAGA)
The interview was the first Younger had given to a national newspaper and
was again softball. Titled "MI6 returns to 'tapping up' in an effort to
recruit black and Asian officers," it focused almost entirely on the
intelligence service's stated desire to recruit from ethnic minority
communities.
"Simply, we have to attract the best of modern Britain," Younger told
Hopkins. "Every community from every part of Britain should feel they have
what it takes, no matter what their background or status."
Just two weeks before the interview with MI6's chief was published, The
Guardian itself reported on the high court stating that it would "hear an
application for a judicial review of the Crown Prosecution Service's
decision not to charge MI6's former counterterrorism director, Sir Mark
Allen, over the abduction of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his pregnant wife who
were transferred to Libya in a joint CIA-MI6 operation in 2004."
None of this featured in The Guardian article, which did, however, cover
discussions of whether the James Bond actor Daniel Craig would qualify for
the intelligence service. "He would not get into MI6," Younger told Hopkins.
More recently, in August 2019, The Guardian was awarded yet another
exclusive, this time with Metropolitan police assistant commissioner Neil
Basu, Britain's most senior counter-terrorism officer. This was Basu's
"first major interview since taking up his post" the previous year and
resulted in a three-part series of articles, one of which was entitled "Met
police examine Vladimir Putin's role in Salisbury attack."
The security services were probably feeding The Guardian these "exclusives"
as part of the process of bringing it onside and neutralizing the only
independent newspaper with the resources to receive and cover a leak such as
Snowden's. They were possibly acting to prevent any revelations of this kind
happening again.
What, if any, private conversations have taken place between Viner and the
security services during her tenure as editor are not known. But in 2018,
when Paul Johnson eventually left the D-Notice Committee, its chair, the
MOD's Dominic Wilson, praised Johnson who, he said, had been "instrumental
in re-establishing links with The Guardian."
Decline in Critical Reporting
Amidst these spoon-fed intelligence exclusives, Viner also oversaw the
breakup of The Guardian's celebrated investigative team, whose muck-racking
journalists were told to apply for other jobs outside of investigations.
One well-placed source told the Press Gazette at the time that journalists
on the investigations team "have not felt backed by senior editors over the
last year," and that "some also feel the company has become more risk-averse
in the same period."
In the period since Snowden, the Guardian has lost many of its top
investigative reporters who had covered national security issues, notably
Shiv Malik, Nick Davies, David Leigh, Richard Norton-Taylor, Ewen MacAskill
and Ian Cobain. The few journalists who were replaced were succeeded by less
experienced reporters with apparently less commitment to exposing the
security state. The current defense and security editor, Dan Sabbagh,
started at The Guardian as head of media and technology and has no history
of covering national security.
"It seems they've got rid of everyone who seemed to cover the security
services and military in an adversarial way," one current Guardian
journalist told us.
Indeed, during the last two years of Rusbridger's editorship, The Guardian
published about 110 articles per year tagged as MI6 on its website. Since
Viner took over, the average per year has halved and is decreasing year by
year.
"Effective scrutiny of the security and intelligence agencies - epitomized
by the Snowden scoops but also many other stories - appears to have been
abandoned," a former Guardian journalist told us. The former reporter added
that, in recent years, it "sometimes seems The Guardian is worried about
upsetting the spooks."
A second former Guardian journalist added: "The Guardian no longer seems to
have such a challenging relationship with the intelligence services, and is
perhaps seeking to mend fences since Snowden. This is concerning, because
spooks are always manipulative and not always to be trusted."
While some articles critical of the security services still do appear in the
paper, its "scoops" increasingly focus on issues more acceptable to them.
Since the Snowden affair, The Guardian does not appear to have published any
articles based on an intelligence or security services source that was not
officially sanctioned to speak.
The Guardian has, by contrast, published a steady stream of exclusives on
the major official enemy of the security services, Russia, exposing Putin,
his friends and the work of its intelligence services and military.
In the Panama Papers leak in April 2016, which revealed how companies and
individuals around the world were using an offshore law firm to avoid paying
tax, The Guardian's front-page launch scoop was authored by Luke Harding,
who has received many security service tips focused on the "Russia threat,"
and was titled "Revealed: the $2bn offshore trail that leads to Vladimir
Putin."
Three sentences into the piece, however, Harding notes that "the president's
name does not appear in any of the records" although he insists that "the
data reveals a pattern - his friends have earned millions from deals that
seemingly could not have been secured without his patronage."
There was a much bigger story in the Panama Papers which The Guardian chose
to downplay by leaving it to the following day. This concerned the father of
the then prime minister, David Cameron, who "ran an offshore fund that
avoided ever having to pay tax in Britain by hiring a small army of Bahamas
residents - including a part-time bishop - to sign its paperwork."
We understand there was some argument between journalists about not leading
with the Cameron story as the launch splash. Putin's friends were eventually
deemed more important than the prime minister of the country where the paper
published.
Getting Julian Assange
The Guardian also appears to have been engaged in a campaign against the
WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who had been a collaborator during the
early WikiLeaks revelations in 2010.
Julian Assange displays the Guardian during press conference in London, July
26, 2010. (EPA/STR)
One 2017 story came from investigative reporter Carole Cadwalladr, who
writes for The Guardian's sister paper The Observer, titled "When Nigel
Farage met Julian Assange." This concerned the visit of former U.K.
Independent Party leader Nigel Farage to the Ecuadorian embassy in March
2017, organized by the radio station LBC, for whom Farage worked as a
presenter. Farage's producer at LBC accompanied Farage at the meeting, but
this was not mentioned by Cadwalladr.
Rather, she posited that this meeting was "potentially . a channel of
communication" between WikiLeaks, Farage and Donald Trump, who were all said
to be closely linked to Russia, adding that these actors were in a
"political alignment" and that "WikiLeaks is, in many ways, the swirling
vortex at the centre of everything."
Yet Cadwalladr's one official on-the-record source for this speculation was
a "highly placed contact with links to US intelligence," who told her, "When
the heat is turned up and all electronic communication, you have to assume,
is being intensely monitored, then those are the times when intelligence
communication falls back on human couriers. Where you have individuals
passing information in ways and places that cannot be monitored."
It seems likely this was innuendo being fed to The Observer by an
intelligence-linked individual to promote disinformation to undermine
Assange.
In 2018, however, The Guardian's attempted vilification of Assange was
significantly stepped up. A new string of articles began on May 18, 2018,
with one alleging Assange's "long-standing relationship with RT," the
Russian state broadcaster. The series, which has been closely documented
elsewhere, lasted for several months, consistently alleging with little or
the most minimal circumstantial evidence that Assange had ties to Russia or
the Kremlin.
One story, co-authored again by Harding, claimed that "Russian diplomats
held secret talks in London . with people close to Julian Assange to assess
whether they could help him flee the U.K., the Guardian has learned." The
former consul in the Ecuadorian embassy in London at this time, Fidel
Narvaez, vigorously denies the existence of any such "escape plot" involving
Russia and is involved in a complaint process with The Guardian for
insinuating he coordinated such a plot.
This apparent mini-campaign ran until November 2018, culminating in a
front-page splash, based on anonymous sources, claiming that Assange had
three secret meetings at the Ecuadorian embassy with Trump's former campaign
manager Paul Manafort.
This "scoop" failed all tests of journalistic credibility since it would
have been impossible for anyone to have entered the highly secured
Ecuadorian embassy three times with no proof. WikiLeaks and others have
strongly argued that the story was manufactured and it is telling that The
Guardian has since failed to refer to it in its subsequent articles on the
Assange case. The Guardian, however, has still not retracted or apologized
for the story which remains on its website.
The "exclusive" appeared just two weeks after Paul Johnson had been
congratulated for "re-establishing links" between The Guardian and the
security services.
The string of Guardian articles, along with the vilification and smear
stories about Assange elsewhere in the British media, helped create the
conditions for a deal between Ecuador, the U.K. and the U.S. to expel
Assange from the embassy in April. Assange now sits in Belmarsh
maximum-security prison where he faces extradition to the U.S., and life in
prison there, on charges under the Espionage Act.
Acting for the Establishment
Another major focus of The Guardian's energies under Viner's editorship has
been to attack the leader of the U.K. Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn.
The context is that Corbyn appears to have recently been a target of the
security services. In 2015, soon after he was elected Labour leader, The
Sunday Times reported that a serving general warned that "there would be a
direct challenge from the army and mass resignations if Corbyn became prime
minister." The source told the newspaper: "The Army just wouldn't stand for
it. The general staff would not allow a prime minister to jeopardise the
security of this country and I think people would use whatever means
possible, fair or foul, to prevent that."
On May 20, 2017, a little over two weeks before the 2017 general election,
The Daily Telegraph was fed the story that "MI5 opened a file on Jeremy
Corbyn amid concerns over his links to the IRA." It formed part of a
Telegraph investigation claiming to reveal "Mr Corbyn's full links to the
IRA" and was sourced to an individual "close to" the MI5 investigation, who
said "a file had been opened on him by the early nineties."
The Metropolitan Police Special Branch was also said to be monitoring Corbyn
in the same period.
Jeremy Corbyn, Labour leader, giving speech in Manchester, Britain, Sept. 2,
2019. (EPA-EFE/PETER POWELL)
Then, on the very eve of the general election, the Telegraph gave space to
an article from Sir Richard Dearlove, the former director of MI6, under a
headline: "Jeremy Corbyn is a danger to this nation. At MI6, which I once
led, he wouldn't clear the security vetting."
Further, in September 2018, two anonymous senior government sources told The
Times that Corbyn had been "summoned" for a "'facts of life' talk on terror"
by MI5 chief Andrew Parker.
Just two weeks after news of this private meeting was leaked by the
government, The Daily Mail reported another leak, this time revealing that
"Jeremy Corbyn's most influential House of Commons adviser has been barred
from entering Ukraine on the grounds that he is a national security threat
because of his alleged links to Vladimir Putin's 'global propaganda
network.' "
The article concerned Andrew Murray, who had been working in Corbyn's office
for a year but had still not received a security pass to enter the U.K.
parliament. The Mail reported, based on what it called "a senior
parliamentary source," that Murray's application had encountered "vetting
problems."
Murray later heavily suggested that the security services had leaked the
story to the Mail. "Call me sceptical if you must, but I do not see
journalistic enterprise behind the Mail's sudden capacity to tease obscure
information out of the [Ukrainian security service]," he wrote in New
Statesman. He added, "Someone else is doing the hard work - possibly someone
being paid by the taxpayer. I doubt if their job description is preventing
the election of a Corbyn government, but who knows?"
Murray told us he was approached by New Statesman after the story about him
being banned from Ukraine was leaked. "However," he added, "I wouldn't dream
of suggesting anything like that to The Guardian, since I do not know any
journalists still working there who I could trust."
The Guardian itself has run a remarkable number of news and comment articles
criticizing Corbyn since he was elected in 2015 and the paper's clearly
hostile stance has been widely noted.
Given its appeal to traditional Labour supporters, the paper has probably
done more to undermine Corbyn than any other. In particular, its massive
coverage of alleged widespread anti-Semitism in the Labour Party has helped
to disparage Corbyn more than other smears carried in the media.
The Guardian and The Observer have published hundreds of articles on "Labour
anti-Semitism" and, since the beginning of this year, carried over 50 such
articles with headlines clearly negative to Corbyn. Typical headlines have
included "The Observer view: Labour leadership is complicit in
anti-Semitism," "Jeremy Corbyn is either blind to anti-Semitism - or he just
doesn't care," and "Labour's anti-Semitism problem is institutional. It
needs investigation."
The Guardian's coverage of anti-Semitism in Labour has been suspiciously
extensive, compared to the known extent of the problem in the party, and its
focus on Corbyn personally suggests that the issue is being used
politically.
While anti-Semitism does exist in the Labour Party, evidence suggests it is
at relatively low levels. Since September 2015, when Corbyn became Labour
leader, 0.06 percent of the Labour membership has been investigated for
anti-Semitic comments or posts.
In 2016, an independent inquiry commissioned by Labour concluded that the
party "is not overrun by anti-Semitism, Islamophobia or other forms of
racism. Further, it is the party that initiated every single United Kingdom
race equality law."
Analysis of two YouGov surveys, conducted in 2015 and 2017, shows that
anti-Semitic views held by Labour voters declined substantially in the first
two years of Corbyn's tenure and that such views were significantly more
common among Conservative voters.
Despite this, since January 2016, The Guardian has published 1,215 stories
mentioning Labour and anti-Semitism, an average of around one per day,
according to a search on Factiva, the database of newspaper articles. In the
same period, The Guardian published just 194 articles mentioning the
Conservative Party's much more serious problem with Islamophobia. A YouGov
poll in 2019, for example, found that nearly half of the Tory Party
membership would prefer not to have a Muslim prime minister.
At the same time, some stories which paint Corbyn's critics in a negative
light have been suppressed by The Guardian. According to someone with
knowledge of the matter, The Guardian declined to publish the results of a
months-long critical investigation by one of its reporters into a prominent
anti-Corbyn Labour MP, citing only vague legal issues.
In July 2016, one of this article's authors emailed a Guardian editor asking
if he could pitch an investigation about the first attempt by the right-wing
of the Labour Party to remove Corbyn, informing The Guardian of very good
inside sources on those behind the attempt and their real plans. The
approach was rejected as being of no interest before a pitch was even sent.
Reliable Publication?
On May 20, 2019, The Times newspaper reported on a Freedom of Information
request made by the Rendition Project, a group of academic experts working
on torture and rendition issues, which showed that the MOD had been
"developing a secret policy on torture that allows ministers to sign off
intelligence-sharing that could lead to the abuse of detainees."
This might traditionally have been a Guardian story, not something for the
Rupert Murdoch-owned Times. According to one civil society source, however,
many groups working in this field no longer trust The Guardian.
A former Guardian journalist similarly told us: "It is significant that
exclusive stories recently about British collusion in torture and policy
towards the interrogation of terror suspects and other detainees have been
passed to other papers including The Times rather than The Guardian."
The Times published its scoop under a strong headline, "Torture: Britain
breaks law in Ministry of Defence secret policy." However, before the
article was published, the MOD fed The Guardian the same documents The Times
was about to splash, believing it could soften the impact of the revelations
by telling its side of the story.
The Guardian posted its own article just before The Times, with a headline
that would have pleased the government: "MoD says revised torture guidance
does not lower standards."
Its lead paragraph was a simple summary of the MOD's position: "The Ministry
of Defence has insisted that newly emerged departmental guidance on the
sharing of intelligence derived from torture with allies, remains in line
with practices agreed in the aftermath of a series of scandals following the
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq." However, an inspection of the documents
showed this was clearly disinformation.
The Guardian had gone in six short years from being the natural outlet to
place stories exposing wrongdoing by the security state to a platform
trusted by the security state to amplify its information operations. A once
relatively independent media platform has been largely neutralized by U.K.
security services fearful of being exposed further. Which begs the question:
where does the next Snowden go?
The Guardian did not respond to a request for comment.
Daily Maverick will formally launch Declassified - a U.K.-focused
investigation and analysis organization run by the authors of this article -
in November 2019.
