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So much has changed for the better in relation to public access to government information since the passage of the Public Records Act 1958 (PRA) that it is often forgotten that a significant part of this country's 20th century history remains, despite the best efforts of historians, largely hidden from view. PRA 3(4) imposes a general duty on departments to transfer public records to The National Archives once they are thirty years old. The proviso to PRA 3(4) sets out the arrangements under which the UK security and intelligence agencies (the Agencies), among others, have, with the Lord Chancellor's approval, retained custody of their own records. Those records had in consequence, until the 1990s, been unavailable for scrutiny in their entirety. Moreover, recent FOI legislation, from which the Agencies are excluded, has not changed the position that for them deposit at The National Archives remains permissive and accordingly, continues to be subject to in-house judgements about operational sensitivities and costs. As a result, much history and media commentary on the Cold War period remains distorted by the absence of key source material. A proper understanding of the intelligence context and of the contribution that intelligence made to government policy over the period is thus absent from much that is written.
The Agencies still require protection from the disclosure provisions of the relevant legislation. To conduct their business successfully, the sources of information and the methods they deploy need to be protected for current and future use. Continuing disagreements about the extent of that protection can be expected, but constraints on what can be disclosed about Agency work must remain if damage to national security is to be avoided. It is worth reflecting, however, now that Agency record releases have become almost routine, on the perverse effects of the 50 years of near invisibility after 1945 that have been the result of these necessary arrangements.
The problem is not that serious scholars have been unable to find echoes of Cold War Agency business in departmental archives or by visiting the United States, but that the context is missing, and, in the absence of the real records, the field has been invaded by commentators whose unsourced assertions might most generously be described as of uncertain merit. Those commentators are generally of two types. First are Agency renegades. Philby's efforts to justify his treachery, Peter Wright's disgruntlement about his pension, and the personal resentments of a number of more recent lesser figures, for example, have all been picked up by the media and even quoted in serious works as providing an accurate picture, presumably for want of anything more authoritative. Second are the media ‘specialists’ and the conspiracy theorists who made a living during the Cold War out of making bizarre allegations against the Agencies in the entirely justified expectation that no one in the know would contradict them. A number of their more tendentious stories (‘The Wilson Plot’, ‘Shoot to Kill’, ‘The Ring of Five’) are now in the language.
If the result is that much of the Agencies' Cold War history has, so far, been based on the views of their adversaries, then it could be argued that they have no one to blame but themselves for trying to keep too much too secret for too long. But that would be to read the story backwards. It is only since the Security Service Act 1989 and the Intelligence Services Act 1994 that the Agencies have had a formal statutory existence, and it is that public position that has made it possible, indeed in my view necessary, to adopt a more open approach about the past. Moreover, the end of the Cold War has made much that was sensitive now much less so, and that gives the Agencies of the 21st century the opportunity (where it would not cause damage) of letting go of the past, warts and all, into the custody of the historical community where it belongs.
It is against this background that the Agency for which I worked (MI5) has developed its record retention and release policies since the mid 1990s. The details are set out in the MI5 website (www.mi5.gov.uk) which reveals a commitment to resource what is effectively a fifty year release policy. To date, nearly 3,000 pieces (files and part files) have been transferred to The National Archives for public scrutiny, containing papers up to the mid 1950s. In addition, MI5 is employing Professor Christopher Andrew to write its centenary history for publication in 2009, based on exceptional access to its records and, importantly, on his enjoying independence of editorial judgement provided that what is published does not damage national security. This is a formidable undertaking, but should place before the public for the first time, and well in advance of the associated record releases, an account of MI5's past, including of what it thought it was doing during the Cold War and why and what part it played in wider national and international affairs during that period. It remains to be seen whether this authoritative account will kill off the more entrenched conspiracy theories.
Sir Stephen Lander
September 2005