How I Exposed Government Secrets & Went On The Run | Minutes With | @LADbible

we knew that we were being hunted by the special branch of secret police and also by MI5 we were pretty high level targets at that point so we knew the extent of the resources they could use against us we knew that the flat was probably bugged electronic communications were bugged computers phones that sort of thing um we knew there was a possibility we might be followed around on the streets and we also knew there was a possibility that some of our friends would be recruited to report back on u

s I was born and raised in a little island called Guernsey which is part of the Channel Islands off the coast of France British but very close to France I got a scholarship to a public school and then I got a scholarship to Cambridge so I ended up having quite a sort of um Elite type education I suppose it's best for putting it what was your career path what did you want to do go to Cambridge and it's sort of an ends to a means really it's the sort of golden ticket into the British establishment

if you want it I quite fancy being a diplat when I was young and applied to the foreign office and then I had a letter from the ministry of Defense allegedly saying there may be other jobs you'd find more interesting please call this number so I did and um then got involved in a very long recruitment process and 10 months later I found myself walking through the front door of MI5 to start work there as an intelligence officer so in the UK um there are three main intelligence agencies first of a

ll is MI5 which is officially known as the UK domestic Security Service which is there to protect us against threats within this country counter-espionage counterterrorism that sort of thing there is MI6 which is officially known as the secret intelligence service that's the sort of James Bond foreign intelligence agency and there's also the government Communications Headquarters gchq which is based down in Cheltenham and that is the listening post it eavesdrops on all of us and it's a very stra

nge feeling to have access to all this secret information you know you're reading people's private Communications or you are briefing and debriefing human agents who are infiltrating groups or you are tasking mobile surveillance officers or Statics surveillance officers to spy on people and it feels really odd to begin with but actually within a few months it becomes perfectly normal that's just a day job the other big thing though when you join something like MI5 is that even during the recruit

ment process you are not allowed to tell people where you're being recruited so we were allowed to tell our partners or very close family or our best friends if we trusted them that was it so MI5 um in the 1990s was shutting down a lot of the work they had been doing for the previous 80 years like counter Espionage against Russia which little premature perhaps nowadays looking at what's going on and also cancer version and they were beginning to move into primarily looking at counterterrorism yo

u um are basically given a Target to investigate it could be a country of Interest it could be a terrorist organization subversive organization it could be um an embassy if you know you're looking for Canter Espionage work and things like that you have the target you gather information and intelligence secret Intelligence on that Target using a variety of secret means and then you get all the information coming in assess it and then advise on what action to take I mean it might be drop the inves

tigation there's no threat or it might be we need to take action now go in and arrest someone now because they're about to plant a bomb so what was your first job assignment in MI5 you're 22 you're joining what's your first assignment my first posting was to a little section called F2 and that was cancer version I.E MI5 investigating people for their political beliefs and political activism within the UK so um there were hundreds of thousands of files held on UK citizens for in members potential

ly of the Communist party or trotsky's groups or far-right groups ni5 became incredibly paranoid after the Cambridge aspiring Scandal which was a bunch of establishment types who betrayed the country in the 1950s and 60s Burgess philby McLean people like that so they they got very paranoid about infiltration and subversion by particularly the Soviet Union but also other hostile States so you've mentioned about your second posting that it was related to Ira it was there that I met my former partn

er and colleague man who became a very notorious whistlebler called David Shaler so I worked there on political subversion and on Irish terrorism and also on International terrorism we had some good results but there are also mistakes made bombs that could and should have been prevented went off on UK streets innocent people died which is bad enough but then MI5 refused to learn from their mistakes which bombings do you think could have been prevented uh yeah there was a huge Lorry Bond called B

ishop's gate in 1993. and MI5 knew about it they bungled the early investigation into it so it could have been prevented so your third posting was investigating International terrorism can you explain what were the cases you you've investigated oh well this was mainly again going back to David Taylor because he was the primary Whistler when we decided to go public about our concerns um and he at that time was the head of the Libyan desk there are three key cases that we um heard of and witnessed

when we were in G branch in the international terrorism section first of all was an illegal telephone tap of a prominent Guardian journalist and the second one was a case of a miscarriage of Justice to Palestinian students based in London were convicted of conspiracy to bomb the Israeli Embassy in 1994 and MI5 had documents which they did not disclose to the defense and if they had disclosed the documents um it's probable that the jury would not have convicted these two young people um so they'

re covered up and continued cover-up this miscarriage of justice for many years and in fact the two students ended up serving 15 years in prison each as an appalling case but the the final case and this is why we actually resigned and why we went public a Man became known as the Gaddafi assassination plot this was a case where MI6 had a walk-in a volunteer who said that um he had a group of people who wanted to try and topple Gaddafi in 1996 they needed support from MI5 MI6 and they needed money

and even just Weaponry to try and affect the coup and MI6 started paying huge amounts money to this organization and the attack did indeed go ahead but the explosion had gone off underneath the wrong car killing innocent people and also innocent bystanders as they sort of you know stood to watch the cavalcade go by so we did raise a lot of our concerns on the inside we were told to just shut up and just follow orders and that's when we resigned in the mid-1990s to blow the whistle on a series o

f spy crimes it took a while to set up because there was a mutual distrust between the media and the Whistleblower so that has to that trust has to be built up and we became more more paranoid about how much we might be being spied on ourselves if they were getting suspicious about what we intended to do so we couldn't tell any of our friends or our family or anyone give any warning to anyone having said that for anyone coming out of the intelligence agencies or central government or the militar

y you are also risking prison because you are going to be automatically breaching the terms of the official Secrets Act 1989. so even if you are reporting the spies um crimes you will be the one who goes to prison so knowing that and knowing the risks we're taking and knowing the fact that we would become unemployable it meant that it was a there was a lot of soul-searching before we took the decision um but we felt we had no option but to try and speak out so rather than sitting around waiting

in our flat for the knock on the door from the secret police and being hauled off to a prison for a couple of years on remand a waiting trial we decided to leave the country and went on the run around Europe for a month without giving any warning to our friends and our family so the first they heard about it was when they saw the front pages for newspapers and David's picture sort of smiling out at them um so that was a huge shock for a lot of people so what was your Escape Plan uh fairly easy a

ssuming that they weren't already on to us just get the last flight out of the UK but once in Europe of course the key thing was to get through the airports to get into Europe but once in Europe it was just using trains um no cars no flights no airports nothing so you could just Hop On Hop Off trains so it was just random traveling literally across Western Europe for a month um disguises only use cash um never pre-book a hotel because spies can track you um yeah so it was very much a sort of um

gamekeeper Turned poacher scenario because we knew how we would hunt ourselves if we were investigating us how did it feel to suddenly effectively being against UK government and and being being on the Run um it was Going On The Run was a very interesting experience it actually felt much more like um the cliched sort of idea of spy work than actually working on the inside hat um we knew that we were being hunted by the special Branch secret police and also by MI5 um and we knew how we could try

and hide ourselves but even so um we were pretty high level targets at that point so we knew the extent of the resources they could use against us so for example um the Primitive mobile phones could be triangulated they could have um recording devices put in them that sort of thing uh primitive computers you know we had to have an old-fashioned camera stuck on the top rather than integrated into it could have keystroke loggers um could film you remotely it could be switched on but it was much mo

re difficult for the spies to implement all that certainly by the time David and I were living in Exile in Paris for two years before he came back to UK we knew that the flat was probably bugged electronic communications were bugged computers phones that sort of thing um we knew there was a possibility we might be followed around on the streets and we also knew there was a possibility that some of our friends would be recruited to report back on us or pressured report back on us and that turned

out to be the case in terms of our long-term aims though um we wanted to create a bit of a scandal and there might be reforms and tightening up of the laws and the oversight of the spies that's what we were aiming for and in order to do that we needed that bit of a scandal and we'd sort of thought through what this spy response would be which was they would take out gagging orders against the national media within the first week which they did which then meant that the national media got very an

gry and said we're the free British press we've got to have an inquiry into what the spies are doing so it's all beginning to go Fairly smoothly um in terms of working towards what we wanted to achieve then a week after we went on the Run um Princess Diana died in Paris which sort of Knocked every other piece of news out of the national media for weeks and weeks and weeks so we lost all our protection we lost the head of steam in terms of the press campaigning for greater oversight so we ended u

p hiding in a remote French Farmhouse for a year and then David finally got to the newspaper and BBC to go public about the Qaddafi plot which is the main reason why he wanted to blow the whistle in the summer of 1998 and immediately he was arrested when we were in Paris trying to break the story and thrown into prison because the British tried and failed to extradite him from Paris in that summer he was in prison for about four months and released because he was deemed to be a political prisone

r and so we had another two years living more openly in Exile in Paris and then he went back voluntarily to face trial in 2000 eventually after a whole series of legal hearings was put in front of a jury in 2002 and um there is no legal defense on the official Secrets act for whistleblowing so he was convicted and sent back to prison fortunately though in those days the Tariff for blowing the whistles two years in prison per charge what they're trying to do at the moment for both whistleblowers

and journalists is up that 14 years in prison per charge which is huge um anyway so he served his time he got out paid his debt to society um and then we had to try and sort of rebuild our lives with no you know career possibilities um and just after the experiences we'd had I mean the whole court case took seven years the whole case took seven years in total sort of well what do we do now um knowing what we know and having experienced what we experienced so those were pretty rough years and um

stress kill the relationship as well we separated in 2006. did you achieve anything of what you were planning to well we got a lot of information out um so there were various legal cases including appeals for the two Palestinians who were wrongfully convicted um there was never a proper inquiry into the Qaddafi plot um and of course Gaddafi himself survived and to be assassinated in 2011 by the very same groups backed by the very same people but by 2011 it was all done in the glare of the media

rather than in secret but yeah in terms of did we change anything I hate to say it I mean for a few years we gave him a good run for their money and raised a lot of questions about the nature of the official Secrets act and secrecy and privacy and surveillance and rights and subversion and you know all that sort of stuff but it doesn't change anything in the long term and that's the tragedy I think for most whistleblowers and particularly those coming out of intelligence agencies because the the

mechanism of the sort of the apparatus of the state will grind on and on and on and the whistleblowers if they're lucky Will Survive the process with their sanity and their Liberty intact but very little meaningful change and everything that is now being discussed 25 years on is exactly the sort of stuff that was being discussed when we were blowing the whistle so nothing has actually shifted I'm wondering what the what a whistleblowers handle like yours would have looked like nowadays how woul

d it would have been different I think um the options for whistleblowers are vastly improved or have been over the last decade there's no doubt about it when I first heard about the Wikileaks publishing model I thought oh wow oh I wish that had existed you know 10 years previously because Wikileaks was set up I think in 2006 2007 and only really hit major notoriety in 2010 with the Afghan warlocks um so there are greater options but also greater threats I think particularly for intelligence whis

tleblowers because having a high-tech conduit like Wikileaks where you can anonymously put information out there and or then publicly own it gives you greater control rather than having to go through the old mainstream media which is what David and I had to do however um the power of the surveillance state is exponentially bigger as well so unless you've got sort of the tech skills on a par with some like Edward Snowden it would probably be virtually impossible to get um classified information o

ut there securely and go on the run preemptively to try and avoid arrest so um ironically I think Edward Snowden even his case is nine years old now 2013 he came out he's the only other whistlebler I've ever heard of coming out of the intelligence agencies who preemptively went on the run before the story broke um how you do it now I don't know you know with all the surveillance many people talk about Chinese surveillance Russian State surveillance all the rest of it but actually what Edward Sno

wden revealed a decade ago is the sort of global panopticon of surveillance that is run by our Western democracies which is astonishing for a nation-state or for a democracy if everyone within that nation state feels they don't have sense of privacy they can't freely discuss or post or write or have freedom of conscience or whatever then suddenly that actually becomes a bit of a police state a bit like East Germany before the Berlin Wall came down and that's how democracies begin to fray and dem

ocracy can end and the slighted towards totalitarianism of police states can begin [Music] within about 30 minutes of us making that phone call the whole of the area where we were was infested with starsy vehicles so it was clear to us that the phones were all tapped to the British Embassy