Abstract
More than 20 years ago I was discussing political manipulation, censorship and sexuality with the novelist James Baldwin. Baldwin – former Harlem preacher and New York Times reporter covering the first of Martin Luther King’s marches – wore a fetching caftan. He was attended by acolytes, living as a left-handed, homosexual, black American, socialist exile in Provence. He intoned, in Bible-reading rhythms: ‘Listen! If they got you watchin’ that thing danglin’ ’tween your legs, they don’t need no CIA to watch you. And why is that you ask? Because you – You! – is watchin’ yourself!’ His cascading laughter was a shrill, mocking message that no words of mine could capture.
I have thought much of that conversation lately, since 6.50am on 3 December to be precise: the moment when six detectives from the Ministry of Defence Police knocked on the door of my 17th-century cottage, in reassuring, rustic Herefordshire, and arrested me.
Censorship, I was about to learn, was more than a concept of abstract concern to – as Alastair Campbell would put it – ‘middle class wankers’. It is a physical and psychological experience that leaves the victim feeling that he has contracted a political version of Aids, a sense that his privacy was illusory; an awareness that nothing committed to paper or computer or spoken within earshot of a microphone, in or out of the police interrogation room, is safe. The surveillance apparatus of the state marks home and hearth with an odour of fascism that no amount of liberal discussion can deodorise or exorcise. What is lost is the sense of self-possession itself, the very belief in freedom.
Was my name Geraghty? Had I written a book entitled The Irish War? Yes and yes again. I am a recidivist among writers, at it as journalist and author since I left school, aged 16, on 18 December 1948. The eerily polite MoD team, five men and one athletic woman to keep an eye on my even more athletic wife, spent the next seven hours and 30 minutes searching a home crammed with files and books. At about 2.30pm they left with my computer, modem, many files … and myself, in an unmarked car. It was not unlike a day in Nigeria in 1968, during the Biafran War, when four other polite men, their ritual scars identifying them as Yoruba, put me into an anonymous Mini for a long drive to captivity in Lagos. The only difference, this time, was that I, the prisoner, had to direct my captors to the local police station. There, the local station sergeant had trouble choosing the appropriate computer heading for my case. ‘We don’t get many official secrets cases in Leominster,’ he explained.
British soldiers on the streets of Londonderry, Northern Ireland, 1971
Credit: Bruno Barbey/Magnum
I spent the next five hours in custody for two sessions of questioning about pages in my book describing how computerised surveillance systems, necessarily evolved for an exotic war across the water, are now being deployed against civilians in mainland Britain. In particular, the MoD men wanted to know about my sources and were clearly irritated when I spoke about the ‘sanctity’ of such things, even when they are gift-wrapped by the Downing Street lobby system. Another, similar session followed on 29 January, at which point the matter was passed to the Crown Prosecution Service. The CPS, advised by the attorney general, will have to decide whether I am to be the first writer to be prosecuted under Section 5 of the Official Secrets Act 1989, that part of the censorship law specifically aimed at scribes. The maximum sentence, on conviction, is two years.
In view of the release rate of convicted terrorist murderers and other political psychopaths, I doubt whether I shall have the chance to compare notes with any of them if I go down later this year. Meanwhile my book, the source of the trouble, a hypothetical threat to national security, continues to be sold freely throughout the realm.
Whatever the outcome I am surprised, as a battle-hardened old fossil, to be scarred by the censorship experience so far. Before the raid I had had intimations that something nasty was about to happen but I disregarded most of them, not wishing to surrender to paranoia. This, after all, was Britain 1998, not 1940, not Britain with her back to the wall, the blitzed London of my childhood, and with that, the experience of being buried under a building demolished by a flying bomb. This was also Blair’s Brave New Britain. As for those Irish Republicans and their families, well of course they were asking for it. I had even made a neat, cerebral comparison in my book between the crude resettlement of hundreds of thousands of civilians into fortified villages in Malaya, necessary to win that war 40 years ago, with its modern equivalent: a selective, invisible, electronic cage that is thrown around neighbourhoods, families and individuals, thanks to systems with such engaging code-names as ‘Glutton’. But this was not the stuff of real life in the hamlet of Hope-Under-Dinmore where I had chosen to put down some roots, at last. Or so I thought.
The raid went through the dirty linen basket and the erotica, some of it collected for a novel which links themes from ancient mythology – bestiality and incest – with modern practice. The team were careful and systematic. One did the scale drawings, showing the layout of each room as it was searched. Another, donnish figure claimed to be the computer expert. Two more went for the documentary evidence. A fifth man – sweating unnaturally most of the time – claimed he was the photographer but was clearly incapable of attaching a wide-angled lens to the camera with which he seemed strangely unfamiliar.
I was reminded of an account of infantry soldiers searching homes in Northern Ireland, dressed in their camouflaged ‘cabbage suits’, accompanied by a suitably disguised technician from MI5, whose job it was to plant the bugs. The subjects of that search, veterans by now, said to each soldier: ‘Yuz are real “Angle Iron”’ [Royal Anglian Regiment] ‘but you’ – pointing accusingly at the odd man out – ‘yuz is fucking MI5. Get out of here.’
The cost of an electronic sweep for hidden microphones – £1,200 – was more than I wished to pay at this point. Instead, my wife and I now take a walk whenever we wish to discuss sensitive issues; or sit in the bathroom with the taps running. We arrange for letters that we prefer are not exposed to government spies to be sent to a friend’s address. Our neighbours, hearing of the raid, reacted like Frenchmen under Occupation and offered barns, outhouses and attics as places of further concealment, were that ever necessary.
About two days after the raid, a hazard warning light flashed on the steering wheel of my Peugeot, indicating an airbag fault. I drove to my local garage and asked the chief mechanic – an old soldier who knows the score – to check the vehicle for hidden devices. My telephone conversations are, inevitably, cryptic, and important discussions must now be face-to-face, far from any street.
Over-reaction? What is over-reaction? During my third interrogation session on 29 January it became apparent that the MoD Police (answerable to whom?) had accessed my credit card account for the preceding 13 months in order to determine on what day I had purchased a railway ticket for £27.05. The official effort invested in keeping watch on me was at a level appropriate to the sort of terrorist now being released from the Maze.
My real sin might have been to decline an invitation from a rear admiral in Whitehall, secretary of the censorship machine once known as the D-Notice Committee, to show him part of my book before it was published. The admiral, though on MoD’s payroll, with an office in MoD Main Building, serving a committee chaired by the permanent under-secretary of that ministry, denies that he is answerable to MoD. In spite of that, I declined his invitation, since the censorship system that he runs, day to day, is notionally voluntary. Why was I so obstinate? After all, the vast majority of books on military affairs in this country is thoroughly censored, though the reader who buys them is never told that. (Should they carry a health warning?)
My experience does not instil confidence in their system. In 1992, the BBC Newsnight reporter Mark Urban submitted his revealing account of the undercover war in Ireland – Big Boys’ Rules – for censorship, and he was betrayed. I know he was betrayed because an uncensored copy of the proof was passed to me in breach of the confidentiality Whitehall guarantees to those writers who collaborate with it. From the admiral’s office, proofs are distributed to such agencies as MI5, ostensibly to be sanitised in the national interest. In practice, a mole-hunt begins to identify the author’s sources. When the MoD’s detectives came upon Urban’s proof they asked: ‘Has this been published?’ I said it had. I had in mind the book, not the naughty bits. They put it back on the shelf and passed on. I now feel obliged to hide it a long way from home, just in case.
This is not quite a life on the run, but it has domestic parallels. I am now beginning – as James Baldwin said I would – to watch myself. Censorship is indeed a state of mind in which the mind is under siege. It is a process that occupies the sleeping as well as the waking state. It is a nightmare out of the pages of George Orwell and a labyrinth in which the victim encounters a minotaur partly of his own making. It is far from the Freedom of Information that Blair and his Lord Chancellor keep promising us. With luck, I might be in front of No 1 Court at the Old Bailey at about the same time as the next Queen’s Speech. At least the enemy will then be tangible if no less real. ❒