29 October 2000. Thanks to Anonymous.

http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,389526,00.html
 
Vile bobbies

Why is this officer and gentleman being prosecuted by our secret services?: The critical mess at the head of our schools.

Special report: freedom of information

Nick Cohen
Sunday October 29, 2000

Lieutenant Colonel Nigel Wylde is an unlikely subversive - a Sandhurst education and radical dissent don't mix. Until 1997 he was just a brave soldier who received the Queen's Medal for Gallantry after testing his nerve and risking his life defusing bombs in Northern Ireland. His friends tell me that he has not aged into a Blimpish bore who boasts of his exploits to a weary audience. They describe a convivial and self-deprecating man who conforms rather well to the English ideal of a gentleman officer.

His distinguished record has not saved him from becoming the latest victim of a series of peculiar official secrecy trials which has lengthened as the threats from Moscow and Irish republicanism have diminished. Crossing the Ministry of Defence Police (Mod Plod to its detractors) dislocated what had been a conventional life and may yet bring ruin. He has lost his job. Colleagues of his wife, a teacher who has had nothing to do with the military, were interrogated and told that she too was a suspect. He is convinced that he is under surveillance. Wylde's last thoughts at night and first thoughts in the morning are: Why am I being prosecuted? Will I be convicted? He never imagined that he would be treated as a traitor by the forces he spent his youth serving.

On 8 November the Crown Prosecution Service will tell Reading Crown Court that much of his hearing should be in camera. The accusation that he passed five secret documents to a journalist requires a sacrifice of the principle that secret justice is no justice at all. Wylde has denied all charges and it will be for the court to determine his guilt. While we wait for its verdict, the rest of us can wonder why on earth he is being dragged to the dock. Even by the absurd standards of recent political trials, the case of Regina versus Nigel Norman Wylde is surreal.

The usual excuse for closing a court is that the evidence under examination is so sensitive that all means necessary must be deployed to stop it leaking. You are none the less perfectly free to read every one of the 'secrets' Wylde is alleged to have helped Tony Geraghty, a journalist and military affairs specialist, reveal in The Irish War , an account of the success and failure of the Army's campaign against the IRA.

The pages the military appear to have taken exception to (158 to 164, book lovers should note) describe the use of computer systems for military surveillance. The exploding power of information technology to wipe out privacy by matching and cross-referring data collected by 'smart' cameras is the main theme. Like many writers before him, Geraghty warns that what is introduced as an emergency measure in Ulster can quickly become a standard means of surveillance of the rest of the British population. The past 30 years have been littered with examples of the exceptional becoming commonplace - the 'temporary' 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act being the most blatant example.

For all the fuss that has followed, the Attorney General did not seek an injunction to ban distribution of The Irish War . You can buy it today in any good bookshop.

I recommend that you do, for Geraghty has done his work thoroughly. But I think he would be the first to admit that the discussion of information technology was not his most scintillating passage. The technology he described was old news when he published in 1998.

A year earlier a careless intelligence officer had thrown aerial photographs of the homes of IRA suspects and papers describing Army surveillance into his dustbin. They were taken to a Belfast dump and spotted by an alert IRA sympathiser. He handed them to the Provisionals who ran highlights in Republican News . Sinn Fein complained that the Army had a crash programme to heighten its surveillance when naïve republicans were assuming that peace and a relaxation of tensions were London's priorities.

Geraghty had not revealed anything that the IRA did not know or put in its newspaper. Geraghty and HarperCollins, his publishers, were investigated nevertheless. They expected to be charged until the case against them was dropped in February. HarperCollins is a branch of the Murdoch empire with legions of corporate lawyers at its disposal. Geraghty is a freelance journalist and he and his wife, Gill, had a rough time of it while Mod Plod was proceeding with its inquiries. But they had the advantage of a wide circle of friends in the media, which extended well beyond the liberal press. Journalists across Fleet Street took up his cause and lambasted the authorities. Prosecution bore a political cost.

Wylde had fewer allies. The criminal justice system is now after him for being the alleged source of a breach of the Official Secrets Act, while sparing the publisher and author who have received the royalties and profits from a book which remains on legal sale. Equality before the law has become something of a joke.

Inevitably, conspiracy theories are being spun to explain capricious justice. The most plausible concentrate on Wylde's work as a computer consultant after he left the forces in 1991. He was a member of a team of eight specialists who audited the Army's computer and information systems in Northern Ireland in 1997. They were shambolic - 'the worst we have seen in our collective 133 years working in the IT area'.

This conclusion probably did not endear Wylde to his former comrades. But I suspect it is a mistake to view his case in isolation. The past months have seen New Labour reach for the Official Secrets Act like an alcoholic diving for a whisky chaser. The Guardian and The Observer have been prosecuted for printing trivial information about David Shayler. The turbulent former spy has been charged himself and, as with Wylde, the law officers have insisted that his case must be heard in secret. Jawad Botmeh and Samar Alami, two Palestinians, are appealing against 20-year sentences for conspiring to blow up the Israeli Embassy. There are cogent doubts about the safety of their convictions, yet the Court of Appeal has ruled that the MI5 files which might save them must remain secret.

The end of the Cold War and the uneasy truce in Ireland upset many interests. Secrecy, unaccountable government, public servility and the ability to cover up incompetence and official villainy were threatened by the removal of justifying 'threats'.

An unwelcome peace requires official secrets cases to hold the line against demands that the public is now entitled to an honest account of what was done in its name during the twentieth century. A sharp message is being delivered to anyone thinking of speaking plainly.

'Do you really want to be a Wylde or a Geraghty or a Shayler? Are you ready for the sleepless nights, the wrecked careers, the prison terms? Are your relatives ready? Even if you win in the end, will the years of trouble and expense have been worth it? Be a smart boy. Keep your head down and your big mouth shut.'