Britain Challenging Government Secrets

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The barrage of media scrutiny would have been unthinkable for those two discreet representatives of Her Majesty's Secret Service, George Smiley and James Bond. The formerly anonymous head of Britain's MI5 counterintelligence agency, Sir John Jones, 62, was doubtless shocked to find his picture, partly blotted out by government edict, in London's Sunday Times. A few days later, a national television audience got an unprecedented look at MI5's internal operations in a controversial documentary. In short, last week the lid was blown off Britain's venerable intelligence establishment. The reason, according to Liberal Party Leader David Steel: "The secret state is out of & control and democracy is threatened."

In the eye of last week's storm was the TV documentary on Britain's commercial Channel 4, MI5's Official Secrets. In it, Cathy Massiter, 37, a former agency intelligence officer, charged that for the past 15 years her ex- bosses had been illegally wiretapping British union officials as well as human-rights and political activists. Her assertions were supported by another former MI5 employee, an anonymous clerk, who said she was responsible for transcribing the intercepted phone calls. "The evidence of Ms. Cathy Massiter and her unnamed former colleague," declared the Guardian after the story broke, "is potentially the most important blow ever delivered to the credibility of the internal activities of the British national security state."

Among those allegedly bugged: Arthur Scargill, president of the National Union of Mineworkers; Harriet Harman, the former legal officer for the National Council for Civil Liberties and now a Member of Parliament; and Patricia Hewitt, the N.C.C.L.'s general secretary, currently an adviser to Labor Party Leader Neil Kinnock. Orga- nizations supposedly placed under surveillance because they were thought to be subversive included the N.C.C.L. and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

The televised expose was the latest in a series of incidents that has challenged the Conservative government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher over its use of Britain's archaic security laws. Particularly under attack is the Official Secrets Act of 1911, which allows the government to withhold details of its activities, no matter how insignificant, simply by claiming that anything not officially released is a state secret. Under the law, any civil servant who reveals such secrets, as well as any journalist who publishes them, is subject to arrest and, if convicted, to a maximum sentence of two years in prison.