 Britain is a free open society that is a staunch defender of human rights around the world. Its footprint, while mixed, has been generally positive with the country of force for good. Torture is beneath it and its citizens can hold it to account like almost nowhere else. Well, that's not necessarily true according to Ian Cobain, journalist and author of the two books, Crawl Britannia, A Secret History of Torture and History Thieves, Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation. Ian, welcome to Navarra Media. Thank you. Your first book was about the UK's use of torture historically. Your second is about the extent to which Britain remains an incredibly secretive country about both its past and its present. And I see a bit of a thread there between these two books. Does your work effectively engage with the idea that the British don't really know who they are? That's the common theme of both books, that we British tend to have a slightly distorted view of ourselves. We have a very rosy view of what empire was and what it entailed. And we see ourselves as being adherents to the rule of law, forever decent, never abusing those under our control and being an open transparency and mature democracy. And there's elements of truth in all of that. But it's not the whole picture. It's not the whole picture at all. So a few years ago, I, whilst investigating the UK's incompetence in the Soviet World Redition Programme after 9-11, came across references to a place called the London Cage, which was a detention centre just outside London in the Second World War. And I started looking for information about this. And there was next to nothing around. But there was a little bit of information here and there. And so I started piecing together looking at all the historical papers of the National Archives of Cuba, memoirs and published memoirs, unpublished memoirs, newspaper reports. And you could piece together eventually the fact that the British military, the war office, ran an interrogation centre in Kensington, right in the heart of London, between 1940 and 1948, which very large numbers of Germans were abused, tortured. First of all, to extract militarily useful information. And then it became a war crimes investigation centre. And people who were accused of war crimes were sent there to be interrogated. And witnesses who were going to be giving evidence of prosecution at war crimes trials and post-war Germany were also sent there to prepare them for their day in court, to ensure that they'd say the right thing. And the people were actually hand at war crimes trials and hand them on the basis of the information that had been extracted forcibly at the London case. That was the military's place, the MI5 had a place outside London. So at the same time, I was investigating the UK's involvement in the abuse of detainees following 9-11. I was looking at what we were doing during and after the Second World War. And a number of people said to me, why didn't we sort of see what happened in between? Let's see if you can join the dots or let's see if there are any guns to be joined. And there were. I didn't really want to do it. I just found it was too depressing the subject. But a number of people called me and who eventually a literary agent said, well, look, just write a proposal for me. I just want a proposal. And then having encouraged me to do that, she managed to find a few publishers who wanted to publish. And eventually I realized it was a worthwhile project because what I was ended up doing was producing a book that wasn't so much about human rights abuses. It's actually about secrecy and the British culture of secrecy and the way in which we were most every colony of power resorted to torture at different times. So we probably weren't about as the Portuguese or the French. But what we're really good at was concealment. We became experts at concealment. So the first book is as much about acts of concealment as acts of torture. Do you think that the British are almost unique in the extent to which they think that they're the good guys? I mean, it's it's obviously a theme you see throughout European imperialism. You see it, you know, amongst sort of contemporary narratives around, you know, US Empire, but reading the book and reading the scale of what's happened, not just the scale, but also, you know, the historical duration. You know, we're looking at a period of more than in the case of secrecy, more than 100 years. Do you think that's something unique about how this is played out in Britain? Or do you think that's unfair? No, I don't think it is unique. I think a lot of Americans think that they're the good guys at the moment. And there's plenty of evidence that suggests that the United States isn't always a powerful good in the modern world. The I think it must be very difficult for the French to think of themselves as being the good guys because of the way in which the war in Algeria was fought very publicly. There's no great secret made of what we're doing. I don't really know how the Portuguese see themselves. But no, I don't think it is unique. But it's it is a it is a phenomenon that you see all around you. But people assume that Empire was a wonderful civilising mission. And and we always conducted it. It's a myth. It doesn't travel very far this myth. I mean, you don't have to get so many goals to sort of to find people who regard it as a myth. But you've only got to go as far as less bell fast before people start laughing at the idea that the British shoulders are holding the rule of law and decency decently. But it is a pervasive myth with the amongst the British and the English to be out. In terms of where this starts, I mean, you highlight a really interesting couple of books, which I just I've never heard of this gentleman who's a writer called William Le Cue. I hope I've said it correctly. And he's a kind of sort of conspiratorial, I don't know what you would call it, speculative fiction. We'd call it today, you know, and he's talking about potential invasions by France, one minute by Germany, the next. And there was an interesting interplay between this world of fiction and actually, you know, the intelligence community. Again, we would call it that today. It wasn't called it back then. This idea of Britain being vulnerable to invasion while at the same time, you know, having this far reaching global empire, you're saying that Britain isn't isn't unique in it's not unique in thinking it's the good guys. I probably agree with you on that. But is there an element of uniqueness in thinking that it's so vulnerable when historically, we know that was the complete opposite of the of the truth? It did genuinely seem to be quite the empires expanded very quickly towards the 19th century, and it did at times seem to be quite vulnerable. And the Boa War and the Boa Wars underlined that vulnerability because this army was being manned by people who by and large were coming from the urban slums and they were in poor shape. They were they were short. They had poor teeth. They were not strong. And the Boas were absolutely appalled when they saw the discrepancy and height between the officers and the men of the British army. The officers were big, tall, strong men. And the men were not. And so hence, hence, you know, the first Boa War ended really quite badly for the British. And so this there was a sense that we were vulnerable and at the same time, the United States was threatening the UK as a as a commercial capitalist power. And Germans were building a large navy and seemed to be threatening the maritime dominance of the Royal Navy. So there was a period in the late 19th century, early 20th century, when the British began to feel vulnerable and these invasion novels that William LeCue and others were Erskine Childers, the Riddle of the Sands is one of them, of course. Invasion, the invasion literature was was a real genre at that time. There was an awful lot of invasion novels being written and they were selling. They were selling because they were being the authors knew that some of their readers like to be scared. And they were selling these books to suggest that German invasion was just around the corner. The Q's books were being serialized by the by the Daily Mail. And and it didn't it did lead to the establishment of a committee or office to decide whether they should investigate whether there were German spies present around the south east of England. And they started receiving handwritten reports. Someone from William LeCue, oddly enough, to have the people to be seen at Portsmouth along the Kent coast with German spies. And that in itself led to the establishment of the Intelligence Bureau, which split up within a year, two MI5 and MI6. So our intelligence and domestic intelligence and security agencies were, I say, domestic as opposed to the ones based in India. They were they were actually initially created in response to a bogus threat of an invasion. And and then a little while after that, the same government introduced the 1911 official secrets act, which was intended to be both a counter espionage and counter transparency measure rolled into one. Yeah, the official secrets act is fascinating because obviously at the same time, you've got this this emergent set of social movements around civil liberties, expanding the franchise, trade unionism, etc. And it does feel like a decisive anti-democratic moment, which was sort of still living in the shadow of but nobody really sees it in that in that way. Or was there a discussion more generally with these incipient labor based movements with, you know, the Liberal Party was still a pretty strong political ideology in this country in the early 20th century. Was there a debate about what the official secrets act meant for sort of a democratic country? It was very little debate in the Commons or the Lords about the official secrets act as they were rushed through the first one. The first one was passed in 1889. They thought the problems of British government had is that the civil service, we had a permanent civil service by the 1830s, but traditionally the civil service in the UK had been a very aristocratic affair where people were bound to their political masters through bonds of class and education and very often family as well. From the mid-19th century onwards, the civil service expanded rapidly and a number of documents that were being created expanded rapidly. And a clerical class needed to be hired to transcribe or to create a lot of these documents. And they weren't very well paid, they were literate, but they went to the same class, you know, sort of the group mentality that the civil service and British government rely upon gentlemanly traditions of reticence and reserved for insurance, it's weren't exposed. That went and these poorly paid clerks realized that the press, which is also expanding rapidly at this time, lived on disclosure. The press would very often pay a lot of money for documents if they could take it to them. And the first, in order to suppress this, the government started prosecuting civil servants until the last minute. They were prosecuted for the theft of the paper. But it was that the document was written on. But juries and magistrates tended to be, tended to do something this was rather disreputable to throw it out. So it passed the first day, horribly passed an official secret act in 1889. It started like this breach of official trust bill and then became the official secret act. And it was passed so horribly that it wasn't really a collective counter-espionage measure. It only dealt with espionage in times of war, not in times of peace. And so there were various attempts made to introduce a second official secret act. And in 1911, it was successful. Section one of the 1911 Act was a counter-espionage measure. Section two was an incredibly draconian counter-transparency measure, which criminalized the unauthorized, not only the unauthorized disclosure of any official information whatsoever without authority, it also criminalized the receipt of any piece of official information whatsoever. So it effectively meant that a civil servant went home and told his or her spouse how many paper clips they'd ordered for the office that day. They were fitting events, but so too was the spouse for hearing it, unless they managed to get their fingers in there in the time he spent. And people were prosecuted for the unauthorized receipt of official information, including journalists. And that particular piece of legislation wasn't repealed until 1889. And it lived with us throughout most of the 20th century. Sorry, in 1989 it was repealed. And what's a denotus? I mean, so that's, firstly, perhaps you could explain that for our audience, but also how does it relate in terms of this broader debate between censorship within the media and an increasingly belligerent sort of government around this stuff? The denotus system was introduced around the same time as the creation of MI5 and MI6 and the passing of the 1911 Act. And the denotus committee a voluntary system of self-censorship that British media agreed to enter into. And a notice would be, a letter would be sent to the editors saying, please don't report on XYZ. And they were expected to do so. It wasn't, it didn't have a statutory basis, but there's always the understanding that if you didn't do what you were asked to do, there's the possibility that the official secret type would be sitting in the background. There's always the possibility of the official secret type. And so, but you can see that some of the denotuses that were issued early on were actually just instructions. They were issued as instructions. So during the Easter Rising, Dublin in 1916, editors receiving notices saying, you will only report what is contained in the official communicates. You won't be reporting anything else. It always had a bit of a problem because of course, prior to 1921-22, some of the letters were going out to Irish in respect to renaissance. We then sent them to their friends in New York who published what was, who published, explained to their readers what was being, what was being expressed. But the committee still exists. It's not called a denotus committee. It's going to go as changes of name every few years. And it doesn't issue notices as such. There are five, I think, standing notices, which you can find on the website. There's a degree of transparency about the work. You can find the denotuses on the website. You can find the minutes, the meetings of which journalists and defense officials meet together. And what will happen is an email is sent out saying, can we destroy your attention to standing notice number four, which might be something like, don't disclose the identity of any intelligence officer. Please don't disclose. But, and again, it's voluntary. It's a much misunderstood system of voluntary self-censorship, but it's worth bearing in mind always in the background is the official secret act. And if you choose to ignore what the denotus committee asks you to do, which a lot of journalists do a lot of the time, you're not immune from prosecution. Can you give some examples of people ignoring denotuses or disregarding them? Well, yesterday after Edward Snowden's first disclosure appeared in the Guardian, a denotus was issued. And there are a lot of people completely ignored that maybe it helps to explain the muted way in which the disclosures were followed up in some quarters. But we all know, whatever we were reading around that time, we all know what his disclosures were. And, but the denotus was issued around that time asking that the work, that the information disclosed, not the lot of people else were. So that's one good example. But journalists are still threatened with prosecution under the official secret act. Two arrested in Belfast in August 2018 and accused, they were arrested. All police came to their homes and arrested them in front of their families and took their computers and took their families' computers and burn them. Very intimidating. And they were accused of reaching the official secret act because they'd received a leak of documents. It was a document describing collusion between police officers and mass murderers in the 1990s. And they were also interestingly accused of theft in the same way as people were being accused of reaching the Larson Act in the mid-19th century. They were accused of the theft, none of the contents of the document, but the paper in which it was printed. Well, this was clearly, it wasn't going to go anywhere, but it gave the police an opportunity to go very thoroughly through their computers and their phones. And it was send a message to others, to encourage others not to make use of received leaked documents. It was intended as an act of intimidation. There's not much notice about that. And you say in History Thieves that MI6 is documentation which can go back more than a century. Not a single page of it is effective, it's sort of internal communication. There's a single page of this is in the public domain. They haven't disclosed anything. They haven't disclosed anything since they were established in, was it, was it 1908? So MI6 records on the Agadir crisis of 1911. Nobody's seen them, no historian's seen them. I suspect there's an awful lot of things destroyed. There was a foreign office historian who suggested it was because they didn't really keep many records. I don't believe that for one moment. And I suspect that some of them has been destroyed which would be unlawful because they are subjected to public records acts and they are supposed to preserve them. They are given a blanket exemption from making them public and at least rolled over every 25 years or so. But they are still subject to public records acts so it shouldn't be destroyed documents. But yes, MI5 released documents, GCHQ released documents and have done for a number of years. And it's been some very interesting for historians, I believe, quite useful disclosure. But not MI6, occasionally you'll see a letter from an MI6 officer in the files of another department somewhere, very occasionally. But that's about it really. And that speaks of a sort of culture of secrecy and retention which I think is kind of, I think that kind of is uniquely British. I don't know that there's many other countries which have managed to build up large and sophisticated archives and registries and documentation who have had quite that secrecy. And how do you think that, sorry, I was gonna say, how do you think that relates to some of the arguments you talk about actually in both books? I mean, they're both brilliant books. I think anybody who's interested in, well, my pleasure. I think anybody who's remotely interested in British foreign policy and the nexus of British foreign policy and an establishment which even today sort of thinks it can act with impunity in many cases. I think they should read both of them and I think they fit together. They dovetail really nicely. The fact that MI6 haven't got a single page of documentation in the public domain, so what extent do you think that relates to the fact that if you were to say to the average British soldiers fought alongside Japanese soldiers immediately following the Second World War in both Vietnam and Indonesia? Most Brits simply don't know that. Now, is that because people don't care or do you think there's a relationship between that culture of secrecy and a general public ignorance around these issues? Yes, the theme in a sense, the second book is that it's a simple idea, but I've not seen it expressed anywhere before, which is official secrecy doesn't just limit our knowledge of what's going on around us today and what's being done in our name today. It must limit our knowledge of what's happened in our recent past, in our recent history. Therefore, official secrecy must distort our understanding of our past. And indeed it does, it distorts our understanding of foreign policy and defence policy without a doubt. You've just mentioned the people, you've mentioned the war in Indochina, late 1945, 46, when the French couldn't fight it because they couldn't get there. Well, there was a few fishy French forces who had been stayed there throughout the war and who we re-armed, well, on arrival in 1945, but the French couldn't get their troops there because they didn't have a navy because the Royal Navy sunk the French navy off the coast of North Africa in 1941. So we lifted a division of the British Indian army out to Vietnam, plus a lot of other troops and re-armed the Japanese who've retreated to the barracks of the orders of the emperor and told them if they didn't join us in fighting Vietnamese people who were trying to assert their own government, trying to establish their own government, if we didn't do that and help the French to restore the colonial administration in French Indochina, that we were going to prosecute their officers with war criminals. And some Japanese weren't happy with this at all, but that's what we did until the French were finally able to get there in early 1946. And we did the same thing within Netherlands, East Indies and Indonesia as it is now, but there it was even more bloody of there. And there were large battles being fought against Indonesians. And yeah, I think this is fascinating. I think the fact that people, some of these matters we reported, only went well reported on, there was an awful lot going on around the world in late 1945, 46 to distract the public's attention. But now it's kind of forgotten. It's kind of forgotten. It's, and of course, we had a secret war, an entirely secret war in Southern Oman between 1965, and it's hard to say when it ended, probably about 76, I'll give you a little bit later on that. And that was just not reported, no reports on that appeared anywhere in British media. And so in 1972, we managed to fight for six and a half years, it was fought in completely. You're welcome, you're welcome. What are the sort of moments, do you think that the public aren't really aware of in the historical memory? So we've said a couple there, we've said Indonesia, Vietnam, Amman you briefly mentioned. I mean, when you talk about in the, Crawl Britannia in the book on torture, I don't want to diminish it, we're calling it the torture book because obviously not a light subject, but you talk about, you know, British involvement in Cyprus. I mean, that's just remarkable. Again, it's just so little known. This is a member state of the European Union. We view it as a sort of high GDP, liberal democracy and in living memory, we were using some pretty nasty methods of extractive information from Cyprus, Greek Cyprus. I think it's worth reminding ourselves that British retreat from empire was by and large, quite an orderly and bloodless effort compared to the experiences of some other European colonial powers. But it wasn't entirely bloodless in Kenya in particular, also Cyprus and Aden to a lesser degree in British Guiana. We were involved in trying to put down in certain cities and we did so in an absolutely ruthless fashion in some occasions with, when we were treating some of our prisoners, absolutely appalled, appalled, indeed. The abuses in Kenya became known but were always officially denied. There was less knowledge of what was happening in Aden and Cyprus, although in Aden there was an official inquiry into what was going on and it was forced upon the British from the Byanist International whose first ever investigation into a human rights abuse was into the conduct of the British in Aden. And yeah, they would last people at the affairs and people were hurt. People were very badly hurt. And again, do you think that's the fact we don't talk about it today? I mean, when I read the sort of extent of the use of torture methods and I think it's a really obviously they, Brits use torture methods before 1945 but it does seem to me that basically after the Second World War as an outgrowth of empire you have this huge apparatus which doesn't really know what to do with itself but also know-how and you see this in particular in somewhere like Malaya where there's a suppression of an uprising and actually like you say it's done really effectively. You know, it's the Briggs Plan and the use of Agent Orange that inspires what the Americans then do in Vietnam. The difference being the Americans didn't win that war whereas actually Britain repressed this insurgency tremendously successfully. So to what extent do you think was there a moment when they thought this is probably quite bad we probably shouldn't be doing this was there ever sort of like a jolting moment within the British establishment because obviously we've left all these countries today. There was points at which publicly we said this is bad and we shouldn't be doing it and at the same time privately we're making arrangements for the abuses to continue. So a lot of people who are Northern Ireland Northern Ireland students from Northern Ireland are aware of the so-called fire techniques which were imposed on the so-called hood of men in the opening of the term in August 1971. The fire techniques which were stress positions, use of noise sleep deprivation starvation and hudding they started being developed in 1945 and the British started relying upon their wartime experience to develop techniques which were intended to break down individual's resistance and indeed break down the personality as quickly as possible while leaving as few marks as possible so that you could use them in a counterinsurgency operation but you could also use them quite close to the front line of times of conflict and they were designed to be cheap you didn't need any equipment all you needed was a couple of a couple of soundbugs to pull over people's heads and easy to train easy to learn leave no marks there were four of them initially and the fifth one the use of noise was added in Oman in 1969-70 and so in 19 following their use in Northern Ireland in 1971 the Irish government started bringing proceedings against the British government in the European courts accusing them of using torture and initially the British government was convicted of torture and on appeal it was found that the techniques fell short of torture but were still cruel in human and degrading treatment I don't think you get the same finding today I think it would be an acceptance that they were tortured in 1972 after the Irish started this action Ted Heath, the prime minister stood up in Parliament and said we're not using these techniques but again they're completely banned from Northern Ireland at the same time the Ministry of Defence sent a letter to the commanding officer of the British Army's Intelligence Corps saying here's the first draft of this directive which bans these techniques but we're giving you a second draft which permits you to carry on training in the use of these techniques oh and by the way the second directive will only be in draft form it will never be published so it could always be denied it could be denied and disavowed both in Parliament and in dealings with the media there's evidence documentary evidence now available that shows that Ted Heath knew that this was happening so we have to assume that he proved it and it explains why in 2003 following the invasion of Iraq we started using the five techniques again we were hunting people sitting next to generators forcing them into stress position I call the fire techniques there was a unspoken sixth technique which is that he didn't assume there was stress position he got beaten and there's video of showing Iraqi detainees being subjected to the fire techniques which you can find on YouTube today one of the people in the video was Barham Musa who lost his life while being subjected to the fire techniques and we know that one of the things that happened in 2003 is that the British government's most senior military lawyer in Iraq a left-hand colonel called Nicholas Musa went to an interrogation centre and saw men being subjected to the fire techniques and he said look this is completely illegal it's an illegal international law and the British government bound it in 1972 and the senior interrogator there said no no no you're wrong this is standard operating procedure this is what we're trying to do and the real tragedy is that they were both right they were both right it was completely unlawful and it was standard operating procedure so there hasn't really been a point at which we abandoned these abusers what we did was to try to find ways of conceal them and in addition to using torture techniques ourselves you detail some incredible instances of extraordinary rendition I'm sure many of our audience have heard those words they probably have a vague understanding of what it means can you explain extraordinary rendition particularly under new labour and perhaps outline a few examples it is quite important euphemism extraordinary rendition we've got a very well established English word for it which is kidnap and it's an act in which governments kidnap individuals and fly them in one territory to another quite unlawfully without any opposition process or deportation process usually for the purpose of keeping them unlawful arbitrary detention and abusing them to try and extract information from I detailed in my book in 2012 I detailed what I knew then but our involvement in these abuses weren't being properly investigated by the intelligence and security committee whose job it was to keep an eye on our intelligence agencies only in 2018 which would be a good 14 years after I started investigating our problem only in 2018 would the intelligence and security committee finally publish a report which detailed what it had established about the UK's involvement in rendition as they called it and the mistreatment of detainees it was clearly far more extensive than I thought it was we were involved in hundreds of occasions in which people were being having information extracted from them when they were being tortured and mistreated or when we had good reason to believe that they were and we were involved in a great many rendition operations including financing and providing the finance for rendition operations completely unlawful and demeaning people could argue so we have been very much involved in this for years for years this is the intelligence security committee which is the committee which which is about to be reconvened and hopefully we will get to see the Russian report which is completed in October did he get extraordinary rendition did he get particularly bad under new labour because of course those are the most sort of famous examples of it most recently with Jack Straw, David Miliband absolutely I mean there is actually good reason to believe that there is good reason to believe that more or less came to an end following the 2010 election in the formation of the coalition government and it's not probably just because the liberals were trying to embarrass their Tory coalition partners into it there is no doubt that there would be a great many people in servicemen to the party who looked at the mess that the the real labour predecessors got themselves into and thought we are not going to down that way we are not going to down that way to talk there is also a great many people through principle, the likes of David Davis through principle would insist that they would not be part of a government involved in human rights abuses and that sort you can see there were still a few things lingering on in East Africa which we were involved in some way which was difficult to establish but by and large our involvement in these human rights abuses came to an end for a while for a while but for how long for how long is we have to be we have to be vigilant we have to be vigilant and when you see the intelligence secured when you see more or less a political downing you can try to be forced on the intelligence security committee as a share it doesn't do much for one's confidence in that committee's continuing I mean it hasn't happened fortunately but it doesn't do much for one's confidence in the executive's willingness to continue to continue to avoid being involved in human rights abuses So we have talked a bit about Britain's record of torture we've talked about this incredibly secretive nature of how it's administered colonial possessions can you speak a little bit about how this kind of concludes to a certain extent with some operation legacy at the tail end the final years of Britain's empire As we started withdrawing from empire we started destroying sensitive documentations falling into the hands of successive governments after independence so it started in itself in India and Palestine and in Palestine the observers correspondent noted all these poles of black smoke that started to appear about Jerusalem and realised that these were documents that were being destroyed and in Salon the colonial administrators started looking through the colonial officers files and what happens to Irish independence 20 odd years earlier and then they realised that all that existed in the colonial office files was a record of what the public was told that had happened to the files and they told there's no point in treating that as a precedent because what the public was told was certainly not true So as the process of retreating empire continued the document destruction became a lot more sophisticated colonial officials were given written instruction about what they should and shouldn't allow to fall into the hands of successive governments they were told to either destroy or fly back to London anything that might embarrass a Majesty's government, might embarrass a Majesty's own forces, a Majesty's police, might disclose sources of intelligence old, might be used unethically as the word used might be used unethically by a successor government and by that I think they mean unethically So they were also told how to destroy documents, they were told if you incinerate them you have to scatter the ashes so that nobody can see that an active incineration has taken place If you dump them at sea you must dump them as far as you possibly can from the shore, beyond coastal waters and this happened across the whole of the empire and it went on from the late 40s to the early 1970s with a global orgy destruction and for a while as it was proceeding government officials set up two separate registries of files that had one which was going to be either destroyed and or flown back to London and the second one that was going to be handed over to the successor government to be over at in some of these papers but it meant that on independence successor governments were trying to administer their territories on the basis of a very incomplete administrative up until that point which can't make for good governance and in around about 1980 the foreign office asked its various missions around the world to try and work out which former colonial possessions of ours have governments that know that this has happened and understand that we've stolen much of their documentation and the only two former colonies who understood that this has happened with Malta and Kenya and the Kenyans have been asking for their documents back for years they've been asking for years for the return of some of these documents and for years the foreign office has repeatedly and dishonestly denied that it held them in terms of the volume of documentation we still have or we think that we still have what kind of numbers are we talking about here what's the well when a group of elderly Kenyans compensation to the abuses they'd suffered when they were incarcerated the Mao Mao in the 1950s the British government was obliged to disclose to their lawyers any documentation that they had which was relevant to the court's rules of disclosure and they signed a sworn undertaking to say that they disclosed everything they had but the historians were advising the Kenyans lawyers that's not right there must be more than that we've seen eventually as a national archive of documents which haven't been disclosed and eventually the government had to admit that they held that they had thousands of documents that were relevant to the Kenyans case and then they threw their hands up and said actually this is part of a larger hold of 8,800 colonial era documents that we've just disclosed we have and they appointed a historian to oversee the process of making these documents public and he discovered it wasn't 8,800 it was more than 20,000 colonial era documents but what he wasn't told was that these 20,000 colonial era documents was part of a larger hold of 1.2 million files that the Foreign Office was holding at a repository about 50 miles north of London in a place called Councillor Park and 1.2 million I won't say a file a file could be as thick as a Hilary Mantell model there could be many hundreds of pages so for a long time the Foreign Office wouldn't let me anywhere near this building and it's surrounded by all the security and barbed wire and such and when I eventually did get in I could see that it had been opened by a Foreign Office Minister in November 1992 at an opening ceremony it was a purpose built repository in which they were holding all of these files that they were holding quite unlawfully the law doesn't allow them to do this and there's a process they have to go through if they want to withhold documents and they were holding it a purpose built repository and there was mile after mile after mile of sterling in there it just went on for miles and miles and miles there was so much and so again this speaks of a deep rooted culture of secrecy and retention they don't want to hold their information they don't want the public, they don't want the historians they don't want journalists they don't want people to know what they know so when this sort of stash of 1.2 million documents you're saying that this purpose obviously their existence precedes this purpose built building who was the first person to know of the existence of these documents in this building Foreign Office always knew publicly I mean I discovered it I landed it from a good old fashioned tip up somebody something slipped out into a public domain in the small print and I mean with the tiny print of a document relating to the government's attempts to move from what we call the 30 year rule to the 20 year rule in the UK so the historical documents are supposed to be available after 30 years a decision was taken to reduce that to 20 years they have to be done gradually because of the limited resources and there was something in one of these documents that made clear that this 1.2 million files only just being put on the legal footing by the little chancellor and somebody said have a look at this document and I said yeah I can't say anything have a look at the foot and I said I can't read it, it's too small yeah there's a reason why it's too small for you to read make sure you can see it and I think this was 2012 or 2013 wow so incredibly recent incredibly recent so some of the documentation was going back to the mid 17th century I mean there was a lot of files on the First World War, the Second World War the relationship of the United States the Cold War the World War compensation payments to slave owners and spies Soviet spies and MI6 there was masses there masses a lot of this can't be seen because of national security no foreign officers decided they just might be able to let people see it a lot of it didn't have any connection to national security at all it's just they didn't want people to know what they knew, they didn't want to hand over their documents and a lot of it's still there and I think the biggest problem our office has got is that they haven't figured out a way of explaining to the public actually we're probably never going to there's too much to disclose at all because they want to go through and read it all before it was transferred into the public domain there's anything that concerns national security or diplomatic relations and they just don't have the staff to do it it's remarkable it's remarkable another highly secretive institution is GCHQ the government when did the government actually officially sort of acknowledge its existence when the the London Listings magazine in timeout disclosed its existence in May 1976 timeout used to be a great source in the best of the journalism and in 1976 they published a two page spread called the headline of the eavesdroppers you'll find it online, you'll find it on the internet I think it's one of the most seminal pieces of British post-war journalism in which the journalist Duncan Campbell disclosed the existence of an intelligence agency far bigger and far better funded than either MI5 or MI6 I mean there'd been an existence during the Second World War at Bletchley Park there'd actually been an existence in one shape or another since the First World War but it was only in 1976 that the British public got to learn of the existence of GCHQ the Soviet Union knew about its existence of course, they had a spy there but but the British public didn't quite remarkable quite remarkable and when did the government formally acknowledge its existence was it around the same time or did we have to wait another couple of decades? no so the intelligence agencies would put on a statutory footing that is to say there's rulings in the European Court in the late 80s saying that look you can have intelligence agencies and keep them secret but you can't have them existing in some sort of legal never-never land in which they don't really appear to exist the British like to have a policy of disavow that's to say they pretend that these agencies didn't exist but as a result of these rulings in the European courts the first MI5 and then MI6 and GCHQ were put on a statutory footing in I want to say 1988 and then 1994 certainly late 80s early 90s and at that point there had to be acknowledgement of the existence of these agencies because people knew MI6, I mean people could see the new headquarters south of the Thames being built at a time when there was no efficient policy that still would disavow it was quite absurd really but the way in which the existence of GCHQ was kept secret until 1966 absolutely remarkable I suppose it's got a particular residence at the moment because we've got the Huawei sort of detente between Britain the US and China but actually Britain as part of the Five Eyes Network was a world leader in kind of intercepting not digital communications but eventually digital communications to analog communications at the time and that comes from Bletchley Parker as you say this does seem to me and obviously we're coming from a British culture we've internalised so much of this kind of false history, false consciousness to believe that we're this incredibly open culture which we're definitely not I don't think that's a particularly contentious point but it does seem that the extent of the GCHQ operation was on a par with what you see for instance in the DDR now I don't mean how pernicious it was or how authoritarian it was but its sheer technical capability was immense did that come as a shock to the British public? Was it a big story in the 1970s? It it was a big story in the 1970s and the government managed to make it bigger by prosecuting the journalists involved and putting them on trial and they were eventually prosecuted for fairly light penalties but so the government managed to shoot themselves at foot by drawing more attention to the existence of its illicit secret signals intelligence agencies there have been in the early 50s there was a couple of bleak reports about it in a student magazine in Oxford and the two student journalists found themselves going to jail and a Daily Express reporter called Chapman Pinscher managed to fight us a little bit more about it in the 1960s so there was it seems that people are reminded of the existence of this enormous and powerful agency every now and again but then it seemed to kind of forget about it so by the time Edward Snowden came on people had forgotten about the timeouts eavesdroppers at work of 1976 or by and large they had so it's as if the public need to be reminded of the size of this organization and you're right it was enormous in the summer of 1945 between the end of the war in Europe and the end of the war in the Far East the Joint Intelligent Committee in a body called the London Signals Board which was running leaching for our corporations they put their minds to thinking what happens after the war, what do we do and you can see different drafts of their correspondence at the National Archives and Q&A and the initial ambition was to capture everything and when they say capture everything the British wanted to capture Americans by the end of this sort of series of drafts they decided that what we'll do is capture everything with the help of our American partners and our Government Allies in Canada, Australia New Zealand and a lot of the documentation concerned with this would say OZ CAN NZ UK, US eyes only nobody outside those governments would have to see it created eventually to five eyes so that's where five eyes comes from I guess we'll finish up on this I just want to talk briefly about Ireland because again it feeds in particularly to the book on torture but also the secrecy stuff as well so I mean I found this really really remarkable reading it in the book I'd seen it in passing but obviously it wasn't so empirically clear what was going on the British Government had or British authorities had knowledge and some involvement with Unionist death squads right up until the early 1990s is that correct? Probably mid 1990s yeah probably mid 1990s so yes without a doubt with this idea that we were sort of a unwilling reluctant umpire trying to keep aside the part these two warring tribes couldn't really do it for me because we would work quite closely with paramilitaries from one community and yeah we were without a doubt there's evidence it's now officially acknowledged in one instance the case I talked about earlier the two of the first Germans to be arrested and accused of theft and leave documents the reason the fish was secreted out there was one concerned police collusion with murderers mass murderers from 1994 the reason why the copy that they had was so sensitive is because the name of the police officers involved as well as naming the killers none of them had been prosecuted and so yes I'm afraid it was happening and there was a policy from 1980 on using the police not as a force that was going to detect crime and prevent crime I think people do both of course continue to do that but primarily it became an intelligence gathering organization with the result that sometimes a paramilitary killer would find themselves not being prosecuted but recruited recruited put on a payroll and sometimes they would get pay rises for killing people because that would raise the level of esteem in which they were held within the position in which they were they would get pay rises to having killed somebody and there was one gentleman who leaves this all behind leaves the country he goes to Germany is that correct to south Germany and then he's dragged back into it by British authorities so it's pretty clear that they want certain people in certain positions how deep is this is it a case of authorities having autonomy from the British state and just acting in a carte blanche way a few bad apples or is it more broadly British policy in Ireland until the middle of Northern Ireland Brian Nelson a man from Northern Ireland who served in a Scottish regiment was not a very good soldier by all accounts left came involved with a loyalist paramilitary organization decided to leave that and go to Germany and work in Germany and just put it all behind him and military intelligence went out to Germany and swaggered him to come back and he was one of the people who organized the murder in 1989 of the Belfast lawyer called Pat Benutin and interestingly the the gunman the gunman of the driver involved in that and on being arrested was recruited recruited as a as a special perpetrator and there's been three separate investigations now into the British involvement and the murder of Pat Benutin and each one gives us a little bit more information about what was happening with Brian Nelson how he was recruited by military intelligence the last one I think is a remarkable investigation by a man now deceased called De Silva and the family of Pat Benutin are not completely satisfied by the report because it doesn't show that there was a single overarching conspiracy against the life of Pat Benutin there are actually several going on in tandem at the same time which is even more disturbing in my point of view but where as David Cameron was it when the report was published when he was Prime Minister incredible levels of collusion between the lawyer, the Spanish military who murdered Pat Benutin shooting in death in front of his family and the and the British state and but that's the one we know most about but it's not the only occasion when it happened through all occasions there's not evidence to share but there was collusion between the government the police the military and the murderers so I think if our audience are watching this obviously I would repeat what I've said because they should read these books and they're going to probably look at your archive on The Guardian writing about whether it's extraordinary rendition to Gaddafi's Libya or the case of Pat Benutin but then they might say well I want to do something about this what's interesting I think with more with the history thieves is you're quite pessimistic about the prospects for change in terms of a more transparent British snake presumably under the last Labour leader so many things were up for grabs it was a time of sort of political transition maybe you were a bit optimistic I'm just curious as to what you feel the prospects are for positive change now in terms of more transparent government and perhaps what our audience can do if they would like to push that cause a little bit further down the road I if I'm asked this question I've very often tend to cop saying hey I'm just a reporter it's up to you, it's up to the public my job is to find information, make sense of it put it out as before the public the public then decides but they're all practical I mean I talk to some of the people around the last Labour leader and encourage them to think about about official information and whose property it should probably be thought of as being and what the current Labour Party would do I don't know what this thinking is on that but there are practical things that can be done the UK's Freedom Information Act is very flawed it's one of the weaker freedom information acts around the world it might be but it's what we've got and it's worth defending and every now and again governments come along and try and think of ways in which they can demand it it's worth people saying to their MP we don't want to be doing this we're watching you, we think this is important our Freedom Information Act is about making sure that historical or government documents are seen as being a time to have our property and we have a right to them so it's worth people telling to their MP I take this seriously it's also worth people being aware of the fact the Conservative government and Theresa May started trying to dismantle, think of ways of dismantling the forms of the official secret act in 1989 and recriminalising the receipt of information in certain circumstances not just national security information but economic information as well and I think it's worth people saying to their MPs look, we know this was attempted and it's thought about it was fought off for the point of which the Daily Mail and the Guardian and the Times all said no this is not on Theresa May realised that she didn't want to pick a fight she didn't want to fight particularly with newspapers she wanted to regard as allies but it'll come back again they'll try it again and it's worth people being aware that this is a temptation to them saying to their members of Parliament, whatever you do don't think about doing that if you want my birds so that's just a few small practical things that I would suggest it's worth thinking about and just I don't suppose your audience needs to be told this but just bear in mind that the governments like to think that information which should probably be ours should be withheld from us and they'll do this as much as probably information is power and they'll do it by whatever means they can and how do you resist this I resist through journalism it's for others to figure out how they can do it but certainly talking to your MP and making clear that you regard the freedom of information actors as precious it's worth it I think what's unique about this particular sort of area is that often in politics or activism people say well to achieve real change it's more than just a piece of legislation but actually in terms of the Official Secrets Act being reformed or freedom of information enhanced ideally that is just a piece of legislation so it's something that I think in a way it's at least to conceive of achieving it's relatively straightforward Yes, one of the things that's happened at the moment during the coronavirus crisis is that the Information Commissioner who oversees and polices the public body's adherence to the Freedom of Information Act she's not going to she's not going to issue penalties against public bodies that don't meet the deadlines within the Act I think that was kind of a naive thing to do because they don't face penalties anyway but it sends a signal to them that they may try and evade their obligations but the statutory timelines or just that the timelines they don't have the right to ignore them but it's happening already I've submitted one to the Ministry of Defence a little while ago at the beginning of June saying I want to know how much money has been paid out in total so far in out-of-the-court settlements to Iraqi nationals who complained of either unlawful detention following the 2003 evasion and or mistreatment in British military detention and they've basically determined that they're not going to give me the information as long as possible not least because they've got this really strange piece of legislation that's run through at the moment which would offer dependencies of sorts to British service personnel Well it's been a fantastic conversation thanks so much and do you have another book out any time soon? I have another book out at the end of the year published by Karemse it's in November and it's a kind of micro history of Northern Ireland's troubles and there's a common theme of the three books look at the way in which we British possibly aren't quite who we think we are and the last one looks at the way in which Northern Ireland's enemy wasn't quite who we thought they were either so if there's a common theme that's it I look forward to reading it, maybe we'll have you back on Thank you, thanks very much Aaron Thanks very much Ian, bye and thank you for watching the Bistani Factor right here on Evara Media we broadcast every Tuesday at 8pm if you've enjoyed this interview just like it, we're tackling the big issues defining the 21st century and if you don't want to miss another one just hit the subscribe button and if you really love what we're doing go to nevaramedia.com forward slash support we're trying to build a new media for different politics and the more you help us well the more of this we can do good night