The Spectator

GOODBYE, SHAYLER

If there is one matter of concern about MI5 to have come out of the Shayler case, it is that the organisation employed him at all

Besides secret agents themselves, who face assassination should their identities become known, no man can have been more grateful for the existence of the Official Secrets Act than Ian Fleming. Had it been known back in the 1950s that MI5 and MI6 were inhabited not by suave womanisers but by dull paper-shufflers who go home on the Tube, his books would not have prospered.

Thanks to David Shayler, the former MI5 officer jailed earlier this week for breaching the Official Secrets Act, the image of the secret services now projected on to the public mind is that of any other government department: a bungling bureaucracy staffed by a mixture of the ambitious, the bored and the devious, fighting little turf wars and gradually being consumed by paperwork. It would be extraordinary if it were any other way: the aura of exoticism which long surrounded secret-service work – the sherry parties hosted by shady dons, the clandestine meetings with agents carrying rolled-up copies of the Times – cannot be expected to exempt it from the institutional arthritis which tends to afflict all large public organisations.

This magazine has some sympathy for David Shayler’s observations of life inside MI5. In 1998, during his self-imposed exile on mainland Europe, Mr Shayler wrote of his experiences twice in these pages. In one article he expanded on the frustration of ‘spending days poring over the drafting of routine documents’, and claimed that had MI5’s methods been sharper it could have prevented the IRA bombing of the City in 1993. In the other, he related his fears of what might happen to him after his account of his time at MI5 was published in the Mail on Sunday. ‘I really did feel like a dissident in the old Soviet Union,’ he wrote.

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