Quote:By AARON O. PATRICK

In the hyper-competitive world of Fleet Street, it is a burning question: how did the Daily Telegraph newspaper obtain sensitive information on politicians' expenses that have been secret for years.

The answer: an ex-British army officer who runs a security company from a small London office, John Wick.

Earlier this year Mr. Wick approached the (London) Times offering to sell details of reimbursement claims by members of Parliament going back years, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Mr. Wick said he was representing the person who obtained the data, who wanted to be paid £250,000, according a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Wick asked for £50,000 for himself to help analyze the data, according to the person familiar with the matter. A spokeswoman for the Times declined to comment.

The Times is owned by News Corp., which also owns The Wall Street Journal.

The data was later obtained by the Daily Telegraph, which has not detailed how it came upon the information or responded to suggestions that it paid to acquire it. The Daily Telegraph declined to comment on whether it acquired the data from Mr. Wick.

On Friday a London-based public relations consultant working for Mr. Wick, Henry Gewanter, said he would give The Wall Street Journal access to the reimbursement information if the Journal agreed not to identify Mr. Wick as its source. Mr. Gewanter said he was making the same offer to British newspapers and expected to complete the arrangement early next week.

"We trying to make some original source material available for research purposes," he said. "I believe in a free press."

Mr. Wick did not return phone calls.

According to corporate records, Mr. Wick is a 60-year-old director of International Security Solutions Ltd. The company's Web site says it advises the insurance industry about risk, gathers business intelligence and does investigations.

Mr. Wick served in Britain's elite Special Air Service regiment and reached the rank of major, according to Brian Goswell, a retired businessman who says he was chairman of two companies established by Mr. Wick. Sir Brian says the two companies provided securities services but were liquidated after getting into financial strife.

"He's a thoroughly agreeable man," Sir Brian said. "I haven't seen him for some time."

Quote:ISSL
Corporate Risk Management

About Us

Sir Brian Goswell
Sir Brian has a wealth of experience, an exceptional reputation and as such is a highly respected figure in the City of London. Of particular note was Sir Brian's appointment as chairman of Brent Walker Plc by its bankers, whilst the company went through a difficult period of restructuring. ISSL and its client base therefore draw upon this superb source of expertise and professionalism.

John Wick
After retiring from the military, John Wick formed ISSL and has been fundamental to the development of its core disciplines. Melding together the two aspects of security and insurance has provided a unique offering to clients. He continues to develop new products and services to reflect the current challenges of the ISSL's customer base.

Quote:Whilst continuing with strong and well established ties to the insurance market, ISSL also works with governments, financial institutions and blue chip clients to provide risk management solutions in a bespoke and discreet manner.

Quote:of leaks that rocked Westminster breaks his silence and talks of his fear of being tortured

By Jason Lewis
Last updated at 11:48 PM on 16th May 2009

A former Parachute Regiment major and an American-born City public relations man are key players behind the sensational leak of MPs’ expenses claims.

A Mail on Sunday investigation has uncovered their role in supplying computer disks containing MPs’ receipts, leading to a string of shattering revelations about politicians’ conduct.

Both acted as middlemen to negotiate the sale of the information, which they apparently obtained from another unknown source preparing it for the House of Commons authorities.


Links in the chain: Henry Gewanter with his wife Sue, pictured in 1992
Last night one of those involved claimed that they could now be made scapegoats by the Government and even feared arrest and ‘torture’.

The main conduit for the information is John Wick. He is a former soldier who is said to have served in the SAS and is now the boss of a London-based private security firm, and was directly involved in offering the computer disks to at least two newspaper groups.

Twice-married Mr Wick, 60, runs International Security Solutions Limited (ISSL), a firm specialising in helping shipping companies deal with the threat of piracy.

He is working with American-born PR man Henry Gewanter, who is known to have passed ‘samples’ of the expenses claims of individual MPs to several newspapers and allegedly asked for fees of up to £350,000, including up to £15,000 in cash just to view the material.

Neither man ever approached The Mail on Sunday.

Last night Mr Gewanter said: ‘The Government is fighting awful hard to suppress the truth about what they have been doing and I have taken a big risk, a personal risk, in bringing this story to light because it is the right thing to do.

‘If good people don’t stand up and do the right thing then the bad people get it all their own way all the time. That is not a good thing for anybody.’

How the pair first became involved in the affair is unclear, but it is believed to be linked to Mr Wick’s military background.

The House of Commons has recently employed former soldiers as ‘data controllers’ to prevent MPs’ personal information being leaked.

It would be ironic if the decision to beef up security in this way led to information being passed to Mr Wick.

Mr Gewanter, who once worked for Lord Bell, a key adviser to Baroness Thatcher when she was Prime Minister, confirmed he was acting for Mr Wick.

‘This story has not come about because of money or anything of that sort,’ said Mr Gewanter.

‘It involves very courageous people who have all taken very big risks in exposing this stuff to public scrutiny and it is incredibly important.’

He said that he and Mr Wick and the others involved now feared they would be ‘made to pay’ for the revelations, which have seen several senior politicians, including Ministers, suspended while their expenses claims are investigated.

Mr Gewanter said he and the others felt ‘a lot of pressure’ after suggestions that the police should be called in to find the moles and prosecute them.


Associate: Sir Brian Goswell, who was chairman of ISMG which collapsed with huge debts
He added: ‘There is a lot of bull about how “we have got to track them down because they having given away this private information and they could now sell it to criminals or terrorists for personal gain”.

‘But everybody involved in this has been very careful to protect the integrity and security of this information.’

Mr Gewanter said they now feared they would be arrested and even suggested they might be ‘tortured’.

He said: ‘There is a chain of people involved, and I understand that everybody is very keen to print my name or John’s name. The Government would like to catch one of us and waterboard the hell out of us until they can get the next one down the chain.’

Despite suggestions that those involved had demanded up to £350,000 for information about the expenses of all 646 MPs, Mr Gewanter said he had earned nothing from his role.

He refused to discuss the deal which saw The Daily Telegraph obtain disks containing copies of every receipt and expenses claim submitted by MPs in the past four and half years.

He said: ‘The real story in my view isn’t about individuals who have shown courage in exposing the misdeeds of public servants. The story is how elected officials have made rules to suit themselves and passed laws exempting them from tax when they steal money from us. They have been very badly behaved.

‘I have not had a penny for [my involvement in] this and it is driving me mad, taking [time] from my home life, my real business. My paying customers are going down the tubes.

‘I am an American. I was brought up there and I believe that a free Press is the most important and the only defence of our personal freedoms, our liberty and democracy.

‘This Government has been systematically cutting back on our freedoms, our liberty and democracy for some years. That is why I have done it and why I have done it for nothing.

‘Your Government seems to think that people like me are about to sell the stuff to criminals and terrorists and are undermining democracy, but I am not. I am exposing these people for what they are.’

He said his involvement would mean ‘a real serious problem. I’ll get deported or I’ll get locked up or they’ll make life miserable for me for ever’.

But he insisted that he and Mr Wick were acting for the public good and had done nothing wrong, adding: ‘No criminal acts have occurred. No criminal charges can be brought. I don’t deal in stolen goods. The stuff was not stolen. I know you don’t understand how that can be, but I can tell you it was not stolen.’

Mr Wick, meanwhile, failed to respond to several attempts by The Mail on Sunday to get him to explain his role.

He has employed many ex-military personnel and senior police officers as security consultants and it has been suggested that one of these contacts asked him to help sell information obtained from the House of Commons.

After 20 years as a security expert, Mr Wick has recently been beset by money problems.

His latest security firm was established at the end of last year after the collapse of another company, ISMG, with massive debts.

ISMG was wound up by liquidators last December after it was unable to pay nearly £400,000 it owed to creditors. Mr Wick is now desperately trying to rebuild his business.


Home: Mr Wick's girlfriend's flat in Worthing, where he is thought to live
After the financial meltdown of his firm, which saw bailiffs arrive at its City offices over an unpaid rates bill, he was forced to give up his membership of the Carlton Club, the historic Conservative gentleman’s club, and has fallen out with several of his former business associates.

His personal circumstances also appear to have suffered. At one stage Mr Wick was living in a £1 million town house in London.

But his current address, registered at Companies House, is a £110,000 flat owned by his girlfriend Tania Hayes, a blonde dental nurse aged about 40, in a rundown Victorian conversion in Worthing, West Sussex.

Mr Wick is said to have expensive tastes. Last month he was planning a trip to Venice and inquiring about £225-a-head tickets for Musica a Palazzo, where guests can dine while they enjoy a selection of famous opera duets sung at their tables.

He has also had to pay for two divorces. He has two grown-up daughters from his first marriage to Penelope, who still lives in Hereford, the military town where the SAS is based and where Mr Wick began his first security business.

More recently he was married to Fiona Antcliffe, a partner in the top public affairs firm Brunswick, who previously worked for former Tory MPs the late George Gardiner and Sports Minister Colin Moynihan, now Lord Moynihan, at the House of Commons.

Sir Brian Goswell, a respected City figure in the property and construction industry, was chairman of ISMG.

Sir Brian, who was close to Margaret Thatcher and helped to fund Michael Portillo’s Commons office, said last night: ‘John Wick is a military man. He told me he had steel pins inserted in his legs after a parachute accident while he was in the SAS. What he is not is much of a businessman.

‘I am not used to being involved with a firm that collapses and is unable to pay its debts. John Wick has listed me as a consultant with his new company and he rings me from time to time, but I do not have much to do with him now.’

Mr Wick’s co-director in ISSL is Oliver Prior, a semi-retired Lloyd’s broker and non-executive director of Oxus Gold, a mining company which was involved in a political storm when the then Prime Minister Tony Blair intervened on its behalf when it lost gold mining licences in Kyrgyzstan, the former Soviet republic.

Asked about Mr Wick’s involvement in selling the MPs’ expenses data, Mr Prior said: ‘It would not surprise me – that is the sort of deal John specialises in.

‘He is very well connected but he has not told me about it. As far as I know he is in Greece working on something connected to his anti-piracy work. We supply security advice and trained military personnel to protect ships from pirates and I think that is what he is doing. I am not due to see him until later this month.’

Others listed as consultants on ISSL’s website include a former detective chief inspector and Michael Chandler, the ex-chief investigator of the UN Security Council’s Taliban and Al Qaeda monitoring group.

According to Companies House, Mr Wick has previously employed two former Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Peter Imbert and Sir David McNee, as directors of his various firms.

Mr Wick failed to respond to messages sent via email, left on his mobile phone and at his office, a serviced building, where meeting rooms can be rented by the hour, near the Bank of England.

But following our approaches, on Friday The Mail on Sunday was contacted by Mr Gewanter.

Asked about Mr Wick’s and Mr Gewanter’s roles last night, a spokeswoman for the Daily and Sunday Telegraph refused to comment.

Quote:The gangster's daughter, the Tory billionaire and what could be the biggest divorce of our times

By Geoffrey Levy and Richard Kay
Last updated at 12:07 PM on 16th December 2008

Happy ever after? Sarah, Marchioness of Milford Haven has finally found true love with Michael Spencer
From his home in Zermatt, Switzerland, one-time East End
hardman-turned-millionaire businessman George Walker has been observing his daughter Sarah's social success in London with considerable satisfaction.

Like any father of a daughter who already has two failed marriages behind her - one to Prince Philip's cousin, the Marquess of Milford Haven, no less - it is hardly surprising that the former Billingsgate fish porter and gangland minder, now 79, has been anxious for Sarah, still glamorous at 46, to settle down.

Walker - who still spends hours on the phone every day making financial deals - is delighted that she seems finally to have found an ideal partner.

Friends say he is 'really pleased' that she is seeing moneybroker Michael Spencer, 53, millionaire treasurer of the Conservative Party and considered to be the most powerful man in the City of London.

No one is talking of marriage, because although Michael and his wife Lorraine (who have been married for a mainly happy 25 years and have three children) are separated, they are by no means divorced.
But a close friend of the Walkers says: 'George would be thrilled if his daughter married him because he's the type of bloke he really admires. It's got nothing to do with money or being an important Tory. That "toff " stuff has never bothered him - when Sarah married the Marquess, all he wanted was for her to be happy, though he was never convinced she would be.

'What he likes about Spencer is that he's a self-made man and a tough operator like himself - he's always thought Sarah was wilful and could only be really happy with someone who can control her. He thinks she may have found the right one at last.'

In Tory circles, news of the liaison has added an unexpected frisson to party gossip.

The treasurer remains remarkably relaxed and even jolly despite his personal fortune having collapsed almost £500 million in the past few weeks of the financial meltdown with the fall of his Icap shares.

The reason for his benign mood is the marchioness's 'consoling presence'.


Michael Spencer, The Tory Party Treasurer with his estranged wife Lorraine at The Tory Summer Ball
Few of Spencer's senior colleagues, from party leader David Cameron to key Tory fundraiser Lord Ashcroft (whose office is close to Spencer's at Central Office), have been formally introduced to the energetic and lively Sarah, though many are acquainted with her through party functions.

The marchioness was not at Spencer's side at last month's Tory Party conference when the faithful gathered in Birmingham.

According to a friend of Spencer, she would have been 'too much of a distraction'. Not for much longer, though, as the word is he is likely to be taking her to social events in time for Christmas. Certainly, things have moved with remarkable speed.

As recently as July, Michael and Lorraine Spencer were together at the Conservative Party's fundraising summer ball held at the Royal Hospital Gardens in Chelsea. He was heavily involved in organising the event, arranged the entertainment and even made a speech (as did Cameron).

Sarah, Marchioness of Milford Haven (as she is officially styled unless she, of course, remarries), was also there, apparently unescorted.


Proud father: George Walker, chairman of Brent Walker, is pleased his daughter has finally settled down

A mere six weeks later, it emerged that Michael and Lorraine were no longer together.

While Lorraine continues to live at the couple's elegant £8 million, white-painted house in Notting Hill, her estranged husband has moved into a suite at a London hotel. The owlishly bespectacled tycoon, who also has homes in Suffolk, New York and the south of France, has become a frequent visitor to the marchioness's home in Knightsbridge.

He has been spotted leaving the address, stepping jauntily into his chauffeured Mercedes to drive to the City office of Icap (the world's biggest money brokers he founded in 1986).

To the Spencers' friends, what has happened seems almost unimaginable. Not that Michael and Lorraine didn't have their differences. But the apparent strength of their marriage was illustrated by an incredibly warm and generous gesture less than four years ago. They took into their home - for 'as long as he needs' - family friend Michael Holland, after he lost his wife, his daughter and his mother in the tsunami that hit Thailand on Boxing Day, 2004.

Holland's wife, Jane, and daughter, Lucy, were the daughter and granddaughter of filmmaker Lord (Richard) Attenborough, who described their tragic loss in his memoirs in the Daily Mail recently. Holland spent months with the Spencers, having been, as one close friend puts it, 'scooped up by Michael and Lorraine and taken in as one of the family'.

They took him on holiday to Mustique and he was among the guests at the tycoon's lavish 50th birthday party at his house in the perfume region of Grasse, in the hills overlooking Valbonne in the south of France, where Lorraine distils her own personal fragrance.

Robbie Williams was paid a reputed £1million to entertain and was asked to sing his deeply emotional hit love-song Angels, one of Lorraine's favourites. During this period of Holland's recovery, friends could see how intensely close Lorraine felt towards him as he struggled to overcome his loss.

They particularly remember the times she took him dancing at Annabel's in Berkeley Square. Lorraine's generosity did not end there. She also took Holland's surviving daughter, Alice, shopping in Paris.

And clearly the treatment worked, for less than 15 months after his tsunami loss, Michael Holland met divorcee Denise O'Donoghue, the multi-millionaire co-founder of Hat Trick Productions, makers of television's Have I Got News For You, and married her nine months later.

Michael Spencer, meanwhile, was becoming deeply embedded in the Conservative Party as its treasurer and main fundraiser. His links go back to the John Major years, and close friends describe him as a man 'who becomes excited at the very mention of politics'. 'He'd love to have been an MP and thought about it seriously some years ago, but his business was growing fast and he knew he couldn't split himself between the City and politics,' explains a friend.

Spencer has never been troubled by City rivals' opprobrium for ruthlessly poaching their talent, nor by being referred to in some quarters as 'the vulture'. Even in these troubled times (of which he said this week: 'Nobody has ever seen anything like this, on this global scale - it makes any comparison with the Great Crash of 1929 banal and inappropriate.') the value of the business he founded and of which he owns 22 per cent is still estimated in billions.

Becoming Tory treasurer - and holding big City lunches to secure donations from rich friends - was the ideal compromise between his work and his political yearnings.

Equally, for the Tory Party, Spencer's brilliant fundraising skills enabled it to be freed from having to rely almost solely on the generosity of one man, Lord Ashcroft, whose role now is concentrating the party's financial fire on marginal seats. Spencer has promised David Cameron and Shadow Chancellor George Osborne, to whom he is also close, that if the Tories win the next election he will throw a huge celebration dinner for several hundred guests at which first growth Chateau Petrus will be served.

All this means that for the marchioness there is the exhilarating prospect of being no longer at the periphery of the political galaxy (being a stalwart for many years of the social diary of summer balls), but at its centre.

In Michael Spencer she has found, according to one of her oldest friends, 'a man who really makes her excited about what happens tomorrow, if you know what I mean. She says he's such fun but, at the same time, so positive and, of course, he is socially important'.

Of course, if the marchioness were ultimately to marry him, it could be a case of her losing one aristocratic title but gaining another for, assuming the Tories win the next General Election and David Cameron becomes Prime Minister, Michael Spencer is certain to be offered a life peerage. Men have certainly played a huge role in her life, since her father sent her and his other two children to the country's most expensive public school, Millfield, in Somerset. Having made money, Walker did what all self-made men do - he made sure his children received the polish and advantages he never had.

He was 14 when he left school in Stepney, and after becoming a professional boxer was befriended by gangster Billy Hill. He was later gaoled for two years for his part in a warehouse robbery - a fact which came to public attention in 1988, 14 years after he floated his property-to-leisure company Brent Walker on the Stock Exchange.

Walker was eventually ousted by the banks from the chairmanship of his own company, and since then his business has been up and down (currently he has substantial interests in Russia), but his children lacked for nothing through trust funds he set up for them.

Indeed, when the Marquess of Milford Haven, whose father was best man to his cousin Prince Philip, married Sarah in 1989, he went out of his way to silence those people who were claiming he married George Walker's daughter for her money. 'Love Sarah? Of course I married her for love,' he testily protested.

'Sarah's a lovely girl. She's beautiful and bright and genuine - the kind of girl any chap would want to marry just for herself.' They had two children - Lady Tatiana, 28, and Harry (his heir, the Earl of Medina), 26 - and were divorced in 1996. For the record, the Marquess is not short of money because he founded the online price comparison site uSwitch and sold out recently to an American company for £100million. Sarah had married at the age of 23 to Greek-Cypriot businessman Andreas Antoniou, but the union lasted two years.

Then there was Sarah's lengthy relationship with Peter Burrell, a one-time celebrity agent (jockey Frankie Dettori, footballer-turned-actor Vinnie Jones and Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood were clients) and now a Mayfair bookmaker. Burrell's friends still talk of the holiday that he and his then wife, Lucinda, took in Italy with their friends JCB tycoon Sir Anthony Bamford and his wife, Carol.

One night they celebrated a family anniversary by all going to the same restaurant where Burrell had proposed to Lucinda five years earlier. It was one of those wonderful evenings that linger in the memory. But within weeks the marriage was over.

A friend of Lucinda says: 'Peter came home one evening and simply told Lucinda that he was in love with Sarah Milford Haven and was leaving her. Lucinda could hardly believe what she was hearing. She and Peter had a young daughter and, until that moment, she had thought they had a perfect marriage.' Among those friends who were shattered by the sudden and totally unexpected turn of events was Andrew Lloyd Webber and his third wife, Madeleine, who had married after being introduced by Lucinda.

Sarah and Burrell set up home in a fine house in Kensington and lived together for nearly five years, but as with all her previous romantic liaisons, it didn't last. Two years ago, they parted. It was, said Burrell, 'a mutual thing - we reached a crossroads in our relationship and decided to part.' Ironically, it was Burrell who introduced Sarah to Spencer at a Tory function.

Burrell has since remarried and, for many years, Sarah's ex, the Marquess of Milford Haven, has been married to polo-playing divorcee Mrs Clare Wentworth-Stanley. But Sarah herself has never managed to settle down.

Now into her embrace steps balding, bespectacled Michael Spencer, whose business has a daily average transaction volume in excess of $1 trillion. Spencer could be facing the biggest divorce action in history if the split with his wife turns out to be permanent.

However, for Sarah, it could be true love at last.

Quote:NAOMI KLEIN: I mean, I wish things had gotten better since we last spoke. And I think I called the bank bailout the biggest heist in monetary history back then, and it’s just gotten bigger. We’ve seen just an absolutely unprecedented transfer of public wealth into private hands. And, you know, what I’ve been saying from the beginning, I think it’s becoming even clearer now, which is that the crisis in the financial sector is not being solved, it’s being moved. A private-sector crisis is being transformed into a public-sector crisis, in the sense of the huge deficit that’s being left behind because of this bailout, which isn’t even doing what it’s supposed to be doing in terms of restoring credit and fixing the real economy.

So the price of this is—if it isn’t fixed, is going to be paid in cutbacks to healthcare, to Social Security. We aren’t even—we haven’t felt the full shock yet. And that’s my concern. Yes, I’m concerned about what’s going on now, but I’m concerned about how this transfer of wealth is going to be paid for down the road in terms of the meager social services that Americans get in exchange for their tax dollars.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, and yet, you’re seeing now, at least in the stock market, the bank stocks, as well as some of the others, at least leveling off or beginning to rise again, even as unemployment continues at record levels, new people that are thrown out into the street every month.

NAOMI KLEIN: You know, and during the election campaign, you know, I think what Obama articulated so well is the fact that people realize that what’s good for Wall Street isn’t necessarily good for Main Street. And he said, you know, we’ve had this top-down approach, giving more and more to people at the top, waiting for it to trickle down, and he promised that that would change.

Quite the contrary. What’s actually happened is that homes, jobs have been sacrificed in order to stabilize the financial sector.

Paul Rigby Wrote:Annie Machon on spook control of British media:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5ljdjEvHlw&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Faangirfan%2Eblogspot%2Ecom%2F&feature=player_embedded

Here, she briefly mentions MI6’s Information Ops department – of which the Telegraph papers would assuredly be accounted the most regular and loyal conduit.

Quote:Barstow had found that the Bush Pentagon fielded a clandestine network of retired military officers and defense officials to spread administration talking points on television, radio and in print while posing as objective “military analysts.” Many of these propagandists worked for military contractors with billions of dollars of business at stake in Pentagon procurement. Many were recipients of junkets and high-level special briefings unavailable to the legitimate press. Yet the public was never told of these conflicts of interest when these “analysts” appeared on the evening news to provide rosy assessments of what they tended to call “the real situation on the ground in Iraq.”

Frank Rich, “Obama Can’t Turn the Page on Bush,” NYT, 16 May 2009

Quote:March 3, 2006

HACKS AND SPOOKS

By Professor Richard Keeble

And so to Nottingham University (on Sunday 26 February) for a well-attended conference...

I focus in my talk on the links between journalists and the intelligence services:

While it might be difficult to identify precisely the impact of the spooks (variously represented in the press as “intelligence”, “security”, “Whitehall” or “Home Office” sources) on mainstream politics and media, from the limited evidence it looks to be enormous.

As Roy Greenslade, media specialist at the Telegraph (formerly the Guardian), commented:

"Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in general - are playthings of MI5."

Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of “one of Britain’s most distinguished journals” as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll.

And in 1991, Richard Norton-Taylor revealed in the Guardian that 500 prominent Britons paid by the CIA and the now defunct Bank of Commerce and Credit International, included 90 journalists.

In their analysis of the contemporary secret state, Dorril and Ramsay gave the media a crucial role. The heart of the secret state they identified as the security services, the cabinet office and upper echelons of the Home and Commonwealth Offices, the armed forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear power industry and its satellite ministries together a network of senior civil servants.

As “satellites” of the secret state, their list included “agents of influence in the media, ranging from actual agents of the security services, conduits of official leaks, to senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a knighthood at the end of their career”.

Phillip Knightley, author of a seminal history of the intelligence services, has even claimed that at least one intelligence agent is working on every Fleet Street newspaper.

A brief history

Going as far back as 1945, George Orwell no less became a war correspondent for the Observer - probably as a cover for intelligence work. Significantly most of the men he met in Paris on his assignment, Freddie Ayer, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ernest Hemingway were either working for the intelligence services or had close links to them.

Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of MI6, reports that Orwell attended a meeting in Paris of resistance fighters on behalf of David Astor, his editor at the Observer and leader of the intelligence service’s unit liasing with the French resistance.

The release of Public Record Office documents in 1995 about some of the operations of the MI6-financed propaganda unit, the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office, threw light on this secret body - which even Orwell aided by sending them a list of “crypto-communists”. Set up by the Labour government in 1948, it “ran” dozens of Fleet Street journalists and a vast array of news agencies across the globe until it was closed down by Foreign Secretary David Owen in 1977.

According to John Pilger in the anti-colonial struggles in Kenya, Malaya and Cyprus, IRD was so successful that the journalism served up as a record of those episodes was a cocktail of the distorted and false in which the real aims and often atrocious behaviour of the British intelligence agencies was hidden.

And spy novelist John le Carré, who worked for MI6 between 1960 and 1964, has made the amazing statement that the British secret service then controlled large parts of the press – just as they may do today.

In 1975, following Senate hearings on the CIA, the reports of the Senate’s Church Committee and the House of Representatives’ Pike Committee highlighted the extent of agency recruitment of both British and US journalists.

And sources revealed that half the foreign staff of a British daily were on the MI6 payroll.

David Leigh, in The Wilson Plot, his seminal study of the way in which the secret service smeared through the mainstream media and destabilised the Government of Harold Wilson before his sudden resignation in 1976, quotes an MI5 officer: “We have somebody in every office in Fleet Street”

Leaker King

And the most famous whistleblower of all, Peter (Spycatcher) Wright, revealed that MI5 had agents in newspapers and publishing companies whose main role was to warn them of any forthcoming “embarrassing publications”.

Wright also disclosed that the Daily Mirror tycoon, Cecil King, “was a longstanding agent of ours” who “made it clear he would publish anything MI5 might care to leak in his direction”.

Selective details about Wilson and his secretary, Marcia Falkender, were leaked by the intelligence services to sympathetic Fleet Street journalists. Wright comments: “No wonder Wilson was later to claim that he was the victim of a plot”. King was also closely involved in a scheme in 1968 to oust Prime Minister Harold Wilson and replace him with a coalition headed by Lord Mountbatten.

Hugh Cudlipp, editorial director of the Mirror from 1952 to 1974, was also closely linked to intelligence, according to Chris Horrie, in his recently published history of the newspaper.

David Walker, the Mirror’s foreign correspondent in the 1950s, was named as an MI6 agent following a security scandal while another Mirror journalist, Stanley Bonnet, admitted working for MI5 in the 1980s investigating the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Maxwell and Mossad

According to Stephen Dorril, intelligence gathering during the miners’ strike of 1984-85 was helped by the fact that during the 1970s MI5’s F Branch had made a special effort to recruit industrial correspondents – with great success.

In 1991, just before his mysterious death, Mirror proprietor Robert Maxwell was accused by the US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh of acting for Mossad, the Israeli secret service, though Dorril suggests his links with MI6 were equally as strong.

Following the resignation from the Guardian of Richard Gott, its literary editor in December 1994 in the wake of allegations that he was a paid agent of the KGB, the role of journalists as spies suddenly came under the media spotlight – and many of the leaks were fascinating.

For instance, according to The Times editorial of 16 December 1994: “Many British journalists benefited from CIA or MI6 largesse during the Cold War.”

The intimate links between journalists and the secret services were highlighted in the autobiography of the eminent newscaster Sandy Gall. He reports without any qualms how, after returning from one of his reporting assignments to Afghanistan, he was asked to lunch by the head of MI6. “It was very informal, the cook was off so we had cold meat and salad with plenty of wine. He wanted to hear what I had to say about the war in Afghanistan. I was flattered, of course, and anxious to pass on what I could in terms of first-hand knowledge.”

And in January 2001, the renegade MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson, claimed Dominic Lawson, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph and son of the former Tory chancellor, Nigel Lawson, provided journalistic cover for an MI6 officer on a mission to the Baltic to handle and debrief a young Russian diplomat who was spying for Britain.

Lawson strongly denied the allegations.

Similarly in the reporting of Northern Ireland, there have been longstanding concerns over security service disinformation. Susan McKay, Northern editor of the Dublin-based Sunday Tribune, has criticised the reckless reporting of material from “dodgy security services”. She told a conference in Belfast in January 2003 organised by the National Union of Journalists and the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission: “We need to be suspicious when people are so ready to provide information and that we are, in fact, not being used.” (http://www.nuj.org.uk/inner.php?docid=635)

Growing power of secret state

Thus from this evidence alone it is clear there has been a long history of links between hacks and spooks in both the UK and US.

But as the secret state grows in power, through massive resourcing, through a whole raft of legislation – such as the Official Secrets Act, the anti-terrorism legislation, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and so on – and as intelligence moves into the heart of Blair’s ruling clique so these links are even more significant.

Since September 11 all of Fleet Street has been awash in warnings by anonymous intelligence sources of terrorist threats.

According to former Labour minister Michael Meacher, much of this disinformation was spread via sympathetic journalists by the Rockingham cell within the MoD.

A parallel exercise, through the office of Special Plans, was set up by Donald Rumsfeld in the US. Thus there have been constant attempts to scare people – and justify still greater powers for the national security apparatus.

Similarly the disinformation about Iraq’s WMD was spread by dodgy intelligence sources via gullible journalists.

Thus, to take just one example, Michael Evans, The Times defence correspondent, reported on 29 November 2002: “Saddam Hussein has ordered hundred of his officials to conceal weapons of mass destruction components in their homes to evade the prying eyes of the United Nations inspectors.” The source of these “revelations” was said to be “intelligence picked up from within Iraq”. Early in 2004, as the battle for control of Iraq continued with mounting casualties on both sides, it was revealed that many of the lies about Saddam Hussein’s supposed WMD had been fed to sympathetic journalists in the US, Britain and Australia by the exile group, the Iraqi National Congress.

Sexed up – and missed out

During the controversy that erupted following the end of the “war” and the death of the arms inspector Dr David Kelly (and the ensuing Hutton inquiry) the spotlight fell on BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan and the claim by one of his sources that the government (in collusion with the intelligence services) had “sexed up” a dossier justifying an attack on Iraq.

The Hutton inquiry, its every twist and turn massively covered in the mainstream media, was the archetypal media spectacle that drew attention from the real issue: why did the Bush and Blair governments invade Iraq in the face of massive global opposition? But those facts will be forever secret.

Significantly, too, the broader and more significant issue of mainstream journalists’ links with the intelligence services was ignored by the inquiry.

Significantly, on 26 May 2004, the New York Times carried a 1,200-word editorial admitting it had been duped in its coverage of WMD in the lead-up to the invasion by dubious Iraqi defectors, informants and exiles (though it failed to lay any blame on the US President: see Greenslade 2004). Chief among The Times’ dodgy informants was Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress and Pentagon favourite before his Baghdad house was raided by US forces on 20 May.

Then, in the Observer of 30 May 2004, David Rose admitted he had been the victim of a “calculated set-up” devised to foster the propaganda case for war. “In the 18 months before the invasion of March 2003, I dealt regularly with Chalabi and the INC and published stories based on interviews with men they said were defectors from Saddam’s regime.” And he concluded: “The information fog is thicker than in any previous war, as I know now from bitter personal experience. To any journalist being offered apparently sensational disclosures, especially from an anonymous intelligence source, I offer two words of advice: caveat emptor.”

Let’s not forget no British newspaper has followed the example of the NYT and apologised for being so easily duped by the intelligence services in the run up to the illegal invasion of Iraq.

Peter Presland Wrote:Not sure I've mentioned this before but 'Media Lens' is one of very few organisations that I support financially. Output on the site is not large - just 2-3 articles per month but always long, thoroughly researched and devastating in their 'calling to account' of the main stream media. And especially the BBC and the so called 'progressive' media in the UK (The Guardian and Independent). After all it is hardly necessary to offer a critique of the rest to anyone with half a brain.

Thinking about the MP's expenses thing, a possible overall Deep State objective suggests itself (appart from the obvious one of making a discredited parliament and its members that much less likely to take personal risks confronting the SS's and calling their promptings into question). So far, if the polls are any guide the most obvious beneficiaries in terms of political parties with any chance of getting candidates elected, are UKIP and the BNP. This whole thing has blown up at pretty much the optimum time to make a serious impact on the British European Parliament elections. Further inevitable large gains by UKIP will drive an even bigger wedge between the UK and the mainstream European project, cementing the existing UK/US covert alliances etc. which will also have negative consequences for the Euro as a nascent Dollar replacement reserve currency. More electoral success for the BNP will further that effect and give the racist, facist far right a much higher domestic policy profile too.