The Big Breach: From Top Secret to Maximum Security tells the story of Richard Tomlinson's tenure with the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, which fired him ?€” without proper cause or justification, he claims ?€” after four years of active service to Her Majesty's Government. Following his dismissal, he filed for his cashiering to be reviewed by an employment tribunal, but MI6 thwarted his desire for a fair hearing by filing a public interest immunity certificate on the grounds that an open hearing of his case could damage national security interests.
Having failed to get his day in court, Tomlinson decided to move his dispute into the public arena. He attempted to interest an Australian publisher in the rights to his memoirs, but MI6 caught wind of his efforts and had him arrested, tried and sentenced to a year in the maximum security facility at Belmarsh on the grounds that he had violated the Official Secrets Act. After being released on probation he fled to Europe, where he was shadowed; his residences were raided 11 times in six different nations by British Special Branch officers working in conjunction with local government authorities.
Tomlinson also tried to travel to the United States to appear on NBC's "Today Show," but was turned away by the immigration authorities who had received a request from Britain to deny him entry at JFK airport. He ended up waiting seven hours for a flight back to Europe in a detention center along with a group of Chinese laborers who had tried to enter the United States illegally. (U.S. immigration was kind enough to give him a Big Mac and fries before sending him packing back to Switzerland, where he was living at the time.)
Click here to buy The Big Breach from Amazon.com! The ultimate aim of MI6's harassment of Tomlinson was to prevent him from writing his memoirs and/or finding a European publisher who would print them. On more than one occasion his laptop computer and the memory chip to his Psion personal data unit were seized; the work he had done on this book survived only through his ability to hide his document files on the Internet. It was after this chain of events, which effectively made it impossible for him to publish in the West, that he made his decision to go to Narodny Variant Publishers in Moscow to find an outlet for his story.
After years of reading the memoirs of intelligence agents either from the United States or the former Soviet Union, I looked forward to this book as a potentially unique departure from the usual spy soul-bearing. Tomlinson's memoirs promised one of those rare looks inside MI6, traditionally a more shadowy organization than its U.S. or Russian counterparts.
Tomlinson's is also one of the first tell-all books from the intelligence world to be largely a product of the post-Cold War environment. He examines other smaller but harder-to-confront national security dilemmas that Western intelligence services have faced since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Namely, the warring states in the Balkans, nuclear proliferation from former Soviet republics, the internationalization of organized crime, attempts by rogue states to acquire advanced defense industrial technology, etc.
However, what most distinguishes "The Big Breach" from the ever-expanding library of intelligence literature is that it is not the confessions of a defector. Most books of this genre tell the stories of individuals who decided for reasons ?€” either ideological, financial or personal ?€” to switch sides in the Cold War. Generally, they attempt to justify their decision while simultaneously inflicting as much damage on their former employers as possible with their revelations. Tomlinson, despite many attempts by MI6 to demonize him, is no Kim Philby sitting in Moscow denouncing the decadence of the West or an Aldrich Ames in prison explaining why he sold out all the CIA's human sources to the KGB.
Rather, Tomlinson's recounting of his career shows how much the intelligence business is changing in the post-Cold War era. As in the design of modern weapon systems, technology that once had to be specially developed for intelligence operations is now openly and commercially available. Agents can be sent into the field using a laptop equipped with a modem, a satellite phone and the latest release of PGP encryption software ?€” making them standalone assets that do not need the full resources of an embassy in order to operate effectively. Likewise, many of the "spy cameras" and invisible ink writing methods now used by MI6 agents are purchased on the open market rather than being developed in an underground laboratory by someone named "Q."
Some of the more interesting revelations Tomlinson makes regarding other MI6 operations are:
oKGB officer Oleg Gordievsky, who had been secretly passing information to MI6 for 11 years, was smuggled out of Moscow in 1985 in the boot of a Saab automobile driven by the No. 2 MI6 officer at the British Embassy. Gordievsky had been compromised by information passed to the KGB by CIA officer Ames. He feared imminent arrest and execution at the time, prompting him to ask MI6 to exfiltrate him as soon as possible. Several other versions of how Gordievsky had been spirited out of Moscow were circulated prior to this, including one scenario that had him making the 10-hour plus drive from Moscow to Finland hidden in the secret compartment of a specially configured Land Rover.
oProving once again that many of the most valuable intelligence coups come not as the result of tedious cultivation of sources but from "walk-in" volunteers, Tomlinson was asked to meet a Russian colonel in the Strategic Rocket Forces who had come to visit Britain and announced that he was defecting. The colonel turned out to be ?€” in the words of the MI6 officer assigned to evaluate his value ?€” a "goldmine." Among other tidbits, he showed MI6 where the Russian Defense Ministry had constructed its new underground command center similar to the NORAD complex in the United States.
oIn an effort to develop a deep-cover source on the Russian military, MI6 set up one of its resettled Russian defectors with a false name and a front company posing as a news service looking for freelance writers based in Moscow. The plan was to determine if there was a Russian journalist with high-level sources in the Defense Ministry who could be recruited as an MI6 agent. They quickly chose Segodnya correspondent Pavel Felgenhauer, who wrote several stories for the phony news agency front but subtly deflected invitations to come to London, where MI6 intended to pitch him to become an active asset. Tomlinson's management later concluded that this was because Felgenhauer was even smarter than they suspected and that the Russian journalist sensed the real reason behind the invite to London.
The sobering aspect of Tomlinson's book is that in an age when no one knows what Osama bin Laden, Kim Jong Il or Saddam Hussein might do next, Western intelligence services seem to spend more time finding cover for their mistakes than worrying about threats to the civilized world.
MI6 does not seem to have learned from the CIA and FBI's recent debacles. Many of the losses in capabilities that are now attributed to the recently arrested FBI agent Robert Hanssen had been blamed on Ames, who was discovered in 1994 to have been an agent for the KGB since the 1980s. Prior to Ames' arrest, losses of sources and capabilities had likewise been blamed on other prior security leaks and defectors. The consistent self-delusional theme is that there are no more turncoats in the ranks and that all problems are the fault of those bad eggs who have already been discovered and purged.
In the same vein, MI6 has now accused Tomlinson of publishing a list of 115 former and serving British intelligence officers on the web page of Lyndon Larouche, a perennial right-wing U.S. presidential candidate who blames all the evils of the world on the British royal family and MI6. MI6 may well have a real security breach elsewhere that is responsible for leaking this list, but then it is always more convenient to blame the devil you know.
The most damage done to MI6 by Tomlinson may have been that inflicted on its reputation as the agency of a democratic government that purports to respect human rights. In an ironic role reversal, the manner in which Tomlinson's homes and hotel rooms were repeatedly raided, his writings confiscated and his person violated by liberal use of handcuffs and physical force sounds uncomfortably like a chapter from the life of Andrei Sakharov or other Soviet dissidents under harassment from the KGB.
And, just as those Soviet writers who were published in the West were often denounced as paid agents of the CIA, Tomlinson is now being accused of making a deal with the Russian intelligence services in order to have his book published in Moscow. (Fortunately for him, the term samizdat has never been associated with a criminal act in Britain.) The famous comic strip character Pogo was right when he said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
Those who read "The Big Breach" will probably all come away asking how MI6 could have been so foolish in its decision-making and wasteful in its use of resources. Tomlinson appears to have been a better-than-average to highly competent agent who was the victim of abysmal personnel management. If there was truly dissatisfaction with his job performance, finding a way to counsel him and keep him within MI6 would seem to have been a much less disruptive and costly course of action than the road taken instead by the famed British intelligence agency. If his book causes the service some degree of difficulty, then much of it has been brought on by its own actions.
"The Big Breach: From Top Secret to Maximum Security," by Richard Tomlinson. Narodny Variant Publishers. For more information contact [email protected]
Reuben F. Johnson is an aviation and defense technology consultant, and the defense correspondent for Aviation International News. He can be contacted at [email protected]
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0970554788/themoscowtimes Click here to buy "The Big Breach: From Top Secret to Maximum Security" from Amazon.com.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1903813018/themoscowtimes00 Click here to buy "The Big Breach: From Top Secret to Maximum Security" from Amazon.co.uk.
Having failed to get his day in court, Tomlinson decided to move his dispute into the public arena. He attempted to interest an Australian publisher in the rights to his memoirs, but MI6 caught wind of his efforts and had him arrested, tried and sentenced to a year in the maximum security facility at Belmarsh on the grounds that he had violated the Official Secrets Act. After being released on probation he fled to Europe, where he was shadowed; his residences were raided 11 times in six different nations by British Special Branch officers working in conjunction with local government authorities.
Tomlinson also tried to travel to the United States to appear on NBC's "Today Show," but was turned away by the immigration authorities who had received a request from Britain to deny him entry at JFK airport. He ended up waiting seven hours for a flight back to Europe in a detention center along with a group of Chinese laborers who had tried to enter the United States illegally. (U.S. immigration was kind enough to give him a Big Mac and fries before sending him packing back to Switzerland, where he was living at the time.)
After years of reading the memoirs of intelligence agents either from the United States or the former Soviet Union, I looked forward to this book as a potentially unique departure from the usual spy soul-bearing. Tomlinson's memoirs promised one of those rare looks inside MI6, traditionally a more shadowy organization than its U.S. or Russian counterparts.
Tomlinson's is also one of the first tell-all books from the intelligence world to be largely a product of the post-Cold War environment. He examines other smaller but harder-to-confront national security dilemmas that Western intelligence services have faced since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Namely, the warring states in the Balkans, nuclear proliferation from former Soviet republics, the internationalization of organized crime, attempts by rogue states to acquire advanced defense industrial technology, etc.
However, what most distinguishes "The Big Breach" from the ever-expanding library of intelligence literature is that it is not the confessions of a defector. Most books of this genre tell the stories of individuals who decided for reasons ?€” either ideological, financial or personal ?€” to switch sides in the Cold War. Generally, they attempt to justify their decision while simultaneously inflicting as much damage on their former employers as possible with their revelations. Tomlinson, despite many attempts by MI6 to demonize him, is no Kim Philby sitting in Moscow denouncing the decadence of the West or an Aldrich Ames in prison explaining why he sold out all the CIA's human sources to the KGB.
Rather, Tomlinson's recounting of his career shows how much the intelligence business is changing in the post-Cold War era. As in the design of modern weapon systems, technology that once had to be specially developed for intelligence operations is now openly and commercially available. Agents can be sent into the field using a laptop equipped with a modem, a satellite phone and the latest release of PGP encryption software ?€” making them standalone assets that do not need the full resources of an embassy in order to operate effectively. Likewise, many of the "spy cameras" and invisible ink writing methods now used by MI6 agents are purchased on the open market rather than being developed in an underground laboratory by someone named "Q."
Some of the more interesting revelations Tomlinson makes regarding other MI6 operations are:
oKGB officer Oleg Gordievsky, who had been secretly passing information to MI6 for 11 years, was smuggled out of Moscow in 1985 in the boot of a Saab automobile driven by the No. 2 MI6 officer at the British Embassy. Gordievsky had been compromised by information passed to the KGB by CIA officer Ames. He feared imminent arrest and execution at the time, prompting him to ask MI6 to exfiltrate him as soon as possible. Several other versions of how Gordievsky had been spirited out of Moscow were circulated prior to this, including one scenario that had him making the 10-hour plus drive from Moscow to Finland hidden in the secret compartment of a specially configured Land Rover.
oProving once again that many of the most valuable intelligence coups come not as the result of tedious cultivation of sources but from "walk-in" volunteers, Tomlinson was asked to meet a Russian colonel in the Strategic Rocket Forces who had come to visit Britain and announced that he was defecting. The colonel turned out to be ?€” in the words of the MI6 officer assigned to evaluate his value ?€” a "goldmine." Among other tidbits, he showed MI6 where the Russian Defense Ministry had constructed its new underground command center similar to the NORAD complex in the United States.
oIn an effort to develop a deep-cover source on the Russian military, MI6 set up one of its resettled Russian defectors with a false name and a front company posing as a news service looking for freelance writers based in Moscow. The plan was to determine if there was a Russian journalist with high-level sources in the Defense Ministry who could be recruited as an MI6 agent. They quickly chose Segodnya correspondent Pavel Felgenhauer, who wrote several stories for the phony news agency front but subtly deflected invitations to come to London, where MI6 intended to pitch him to become an active asset. Tomlinson's management later concluded that this was because Felgenhauer was even smarter than they suspected and that the Russian journalist sensed the real reason behind the invite to London.
The sobering aspect of Tomlinson's book is that in an age when no one knows what Osama bin Laden, Kim Jong Il or Saddam Hussein might do next, Western intelligence services seem to spend more time finding cover for their mistakes than worrying about threats to the civilized world.
MI6 does not seem to have learned from the CIA and FBI's recent debacles. Many of the losses in capabilities that are now attributed to the recently arrested FBI agent Robert Hanssen had been blamed on Ames, who was discovered in 1994 to have been an agent for the KGB since the 1980s. Prior to Ames' arrest, losses of sources and capabilities had likewise been blamed on other prior security leaks and defectors. The consistent self-delusional theme is that there are no more turncoats in the ranks and that all problems are the fault of those bad eggs who have already been discovered and purged.
In the same vein, MI6 has now accused Tomlinson of publishing a list of 115 former and serving British intelligence officers on the web page of Lyndon Larouche, a perennial right-wing U.S. presidential candidate who blames all the evils of the world on the British royal family and MI6. MI6 may well have a real security breach elsewhere that is responsible for leaking this list, but then it is always more convenient to blame the devil you know.
The most damage done to MI6 by Tomlinson may have been that inflicted on its reputation as the agency of a democratic government that purports to respect human rights. In an ironic role reversal, the manner in which Tomlinson's homes and hotel rooms were repeatedly raided, his writings confiscated and his person violated by liberal use of handcuffs and physical force sounds uncomfortably like a chapter from the life of Andrei Sakharov or other Soviet dissidents under harassment from the KGB.
And, just as those Soviet writers who were published in the West were often denounced as paid agents of the CIA, Tomlinson is now being accused of making a deal with the Russian intelligence services in order to have his book published in Moscow. (Fortunately for him, the term samizdat has never been associated with a criminal act in Britain.) The famous comic strip character Pogo was right when he said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
Those who read "The Big Breach" will probably all come away asking how MI6 could have been so foolish in its decision-making and wasteful in its use of resources. Tomlinson appears to have been a better-than-average to highly competent agent who was the victim of abysmal personnel management. If there was truly dissatisfaction with his job performance, finding a way to counsel him and keep him within MI6 would seem to have been a much less disruptive and costly course of action than the road taken instead by the famed British intelligence agency. If his book causes the service some degree of difficulty, then much of it has been brought on by its own actions.
"The Big Breach: From Top Secret to Maximum Security," by Richard Tomlinson. Narodny Variant Publishers. For more information contact [email protected]
Reuben F. Johnson is an aviation and defense technology consultant, and the defense correspondent for Aviation International News. He can be contacted at [email protected]
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1903813018/themoscowtimes00 Click here to buy "The Big Breach: From Top Secret to Maximum Security" from Amazon.co.uk.
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