My new novel, The Shame Archive,
began with a handful of questions. Do MI5 or MI6 have recordings of people in
compromising situations? If so, how is it stored? And what would happen if it all
leaked? The roots of this curiosity lay in an abiding interest in a less talked
about side of intelligence, that of psychological operations. Plenty has been
written about agent running, but the idea of a dirty tricks department remains somewhat
taboo. Though not on the internet’s more esoteric fringes.
A decade ago, trying to research
MI6, I’d regularly come across odd but detailed blogs by someone calling
themselves ‘Nick’ who alleged that he was sexually abused by a group of men in
the 1970s and 1980s, taken to parties where he was handed over to high-profile
figures from politics, the military and intelligence services. ‘Nick’ included
just enough detail to sound authentic, but the posts seemed over the top. Indeed,
perhaps reflecting my own paranoia, I became suspicious that this was precisely
the idea: a convenient MI6-crafted decoy to distract those Googling the dark
side of intelligence work.
I didn’t think much of them again
until, a few years later, I went online and saw that the claims had been picked
up by a journalist, and subsequently the police who launched an investigation.
This was in the wake of Savile, when accusations of abuse and cover-up had a
new credibility. The operation garnered significant media attention but was
later criticized for its handling and the lack of evidence. In 2016, the
Metropolitan Police publicly apologized to those falsely accused and closed the
investigation without bringing any charges.
‘Nick’ was discredited, and himself charged with perverting the course of justice, but the rationale put forward for an establishment cover-up intrigued me. The claim was that by suppressing these secrets, MI5 and MI6 could place pressure on individuals of interest to them. The threat of blackmail has certainly been part of tradecraft more broadly. In Northern Ireland, where all gloves were off, British security services were closely involved with the Gemini Health Studios on Antrim Road, a brothel in which cameras were used to record people and then force them to spy on the IRA. Much darker speculation surrounds the Kincora boys’ home in East Belfast, where several individuals with Loyalist ties were eventually arrested for systematic child abuse. A Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry criticised MI5 officers for consistently obstructing police investigations, and for the destruction of MI5 files relating to the home. MI5 successfully persuaded the government not to set up a full public inquiry, leaving the theory that they were in some way exploiting the perpetrators believable.
But for evidence of the amount of
personal secrets that must be washing around in intelligence service archives it’s
not necessary to look further than the vetting process for their own staff. Until
1991 there was a ban on gay men and women serving in MI6 or anywhere else in the
Diplomatic Service. The likes of double-agents Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt
had cemented an association between homosexuality and spying for the Soviet
Union, and anyone harbouring a secret personal life was deemed vulnerable to
blackmail. It is inevitable, therefore, that MI6 kept a close eye on the
private lives of many Foreign Office employees. There was a similar situation
at the BBC who, with the help of MI5, kept extensive records on their staff’s
political and sexual orientation. And if this is what we do to our own, what might
we do to our enemies? We don’t hesitate to attribute the art of kompromat to
Russia, but how often is it practised by those tasked with protecting Western
interests?
The final news story that inspired
my novel was that of Jeffrey Epstein, who systematically plied influential men
with young girls on his private island, and whose sudden death in custody
before he could throw any light on it all prompted speculation about why he had
done so. Was Epstein running a honey-trap operation, compromising prominent
global political figures to suit intelligence interests? William Burns,
director of the CIA, held three meetings with Epstein in 2014 while he was
deputy secretary of state. Epstein himself was likely involved in the arms
trade in the 1980s, which could have led him to work for numerous governments. Whatever
the truth, the question remains: why was he amassing this knowledge of others’ transgressions?
The Shame Archive was a way of
exploring the idea of blackmail as an intelligence tool. The idea of these secret
videos leaking seemed a much more devastating threat to the establishment than
the various recent disclosures of financial documents exposing their offshore
accounts. And if this archive of shame did make its way into the public domain,
how would the military and intelligence services respond? The idea of a very
new type of national emergency seemed more plausible than ever, as conflict moves
increasingly online. NATO now runs cyber defence HQs in Mons and Talinn. In
2015, the British Army established 77th Brigade, a hybrid unit with specialist
skills to combat new forms of information warfare. The rise of AI makes it very
possible that our next security crisis is a digital one, and the subsequent
battle takes place in our own minds, in the space between trust and prurience,
belief and doubt.
The
Shame Archive by Oliver Harris (Little Brown Publishing) Out Now
How does a secret service
confront its past, when its secrets must never be revealed? Buried deep in
MI6's digital archives is the most classified directory of all. It doesn't
contain war plans or agent profiles, but shame: the misdeeds of politicians,
royalty, business leaders and the service's own personnel. There are seven
decades' worth of images and recordings, usually acquired for the sake of
assessing risk, sometimes as a guard against betrayal, often engineered by MI6
for their own purposes. They are the most sensitive two thousand terabytes of
data in the Service's possession. When material from the archive begins
appearing online, panic spreads through the Establishment like wildfire. At
first, the security breach only manifests itself in apparently random events: a
suicide, a disappearance, a breakdown. But when it's discovered that the
individuals concerned were all contacted by the same anonymous person, a
connection comes into focus. The archive has been leaked. The hunt is now of
unprecedented urgency before the entire political and business systems are
fatally weakened. That's when they call for Elliot Kane...
More
information about Oliver Harris and his work can be found on his website. Yu can also follow him on X
@oliharris808 and on Facebook .
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