Tomlinson- AG v Times

[Donald ramsbottom]

Sorry about formatting yesterday don't know what went wrong.

Below are two articles from Today's Sunday Times on Tomlinson affair:



Russians to publish top MI6 secrets

Nick Fielding


MI6 accused its former officer Richard Tomlinson yesterday of
striking a deal with the Russian intelligence services to publish
his memoirs of life as a spy.

The book, entitled The Big Breach: From Top Secret to
Maximum Security, is due to be published shortly by a
Russian company that MI6 claims was set up for the purpose.
It has no previous publishing history.

Tomlinson's decision comes only weeks after it was revealed
that ministers are about to authorise the publication of memoirs
by Stella Rimington, the former director-general of MI5.

Tomlinson's book is likely to present ministers with even more
substantial problems. While Rimington's book has been shorn
of controversial material, his is an attack on the management of
MI6 and reveals much about its internal culture and methods.

The service is so secretive that the only previous glimpses of
its internal culture have come in highly fictionalised accounts
such as Ian Fleming's James Bond books.

MI6 has long sought to portray Tomlinson as a dangerous
maverick hell-bent on damaging the service.

It maintains he mixes up fact and fiction, though it
acknowledges that large parts of the book, a version of which it
has read, are accurate.

In the book, Tomlinson gives details of the extreme lengths that
MI6 has gone to in pursuing him around the world.

Other sections describe how MI6 carries out dirty tricks
operations and how recruits are given specialist training at Fort
Monckton in Portsmouth.

It contains details of the training exercises for new recruits, and
reveals how new officers are taught to create identities for
themselves.

The author also describes much of the organisation's tradecraft
and the way recruits are taught to hide their true careers from
family and friends. Other chapters cover his time undercover in
Bosnia, a secret mission to Russia and his role in uncovering a
plot by the Iranians to buy a chemical weapons plant.

Tomlinson says he has offered three times to submit the book
for vetting to the D-notice committee, but says MI6 has
responded "with menacing letters threatening me with
imprisonment or used my admission of having a text to
confiscate my computers." MI6 says it has never been given
the book to vet.

Tomlinson, 38, was recruited into MI6 in 1991 after getting a
first class degree in aeronautical engineering at Cambridge and
serving in the Territorial SAS. He scored top marks in his
training and was initially seen as a high-flyer. But after service
in Bosnia he received a severely critical staff assessment and
was sacked. Claiming that he had been unfairly dismissed, he
sought redress from an employment tribunal; but MI6 stepped
in with a public interest immunity certificate (PII) to block him,
citing national security.

Tomlinson claims that MI6 officers used threats of arrest and
lifelong harassment to make him hand over the copyright to
anything he wrote about his time in the secret service. He was
subsequently arrested in 1996 and sentenced to a year's
imprisonment under the Official Secrets Act for giving a
synopsis of the book to an Australian publisher.

Soon after leaving Belmarsh top security prison in May 1998 on
licence after serving part of his sentence, he fled abroad,
moving from one country to another to avoid what he insists is
harassment instigated by MI6. Intelligence organisations in
several countries, including France and Germany, have tried to
recruit him to reveal details of MI6 operations. He says he
co-operated with the Swiss.

Tomlinson says that he has been assaulted, arrested, held for
questioning or raided by armed police at least 11 times in six
countries. He is banned from America, Australia, France and
Switzerland and has been harassed in Germany and New
Zealand. He is now living in Italy and believes he is under
surveillance.

In May last year his apartment in Rimini was raided by Italian
police and his computer, mobile phone, computer disks and
legal papers were taken. They were handed over to two British
Special Branch officers and have not been returned.

Tomlinson claims that Italian private detectives hired by MI6
approached his landlady and friends in Italy and told them he
was a convicted paedophile.

A raft of injunctions and other legal actions has prevented him
from publishing his book in Britain. As a result, he has followed
the precedent of the former MI5 officer, Peter Wright, whose
book, Spycatcher, was published in Australia and the United
States after it was banned in Britain. Only after imported copies
were sold at road junctions and street markets in Britain did the
courts accept that it was pointless to keep the ban in place.

"MI6 prosecuted and imprisoned me under laws which on July
20, 2000 were scathingly condemned by a UN report in
Britain's human rights record," says Tomlinson in the book's
epilogue. "They took expensive injunctions out agains me in
the UK, Switzerland, Germany, the USA and New Zealand, all
in disregard for laws governing freedom of speech, guessing
correctly that I did not have the funds to appeal through the
courts."

His publisher in Russia has printed at least 10,000 copies of
the book, which will be distributed around the world.

Tomlinson says he will come back to Britain voluntarily, hand
over to charity his profits from the book and if necessary go to
prison again, on condition that he is first allowed to take MI6 to
an employment tribunal.

MI6 has retaliated by accusing his Russian publisher of
operating under a false name and using bogus documents to
travel regularly to the United States and Europe. The man is
said to have set up the publishing company shortly before
approaching Tomlinson with a $50,000 offer to print the book.

MI6 maintains, although it admits it has no proof, that he is a
front-man for one of three Russian intelligence services. It
believes that these services - the FSB, GRU and SVR - have
read Tomlinson's book.

Last night Tomlinson and the publisher both dismissed the
claims as "rubbish". Tomlinson said: "There is no evidence to
support these allegations, but if they are true then I'm grateful
to the Russians for supporting freedom of speech."

Last week, The Sunday Times began the process of
challenging the injunction granted by Mr Justice Toulson in
November 1996 which prevents media in Britain reporting
anything Tomlinson says or writes which he learnt as a result
of his employment at MI6.

The paper argues that the terms of the injunction are too broad
and that, once the book has been published in Russia and
becomes widely available here and abroad so that its contents
are known to every non-friendly intelligence service, it is
pointless to maintain a ban in this country.




and=20




Sunday Times challenges book ban

Ex-spy wrecks secrecy laws

Nick Fielding


THE Official Secrets Act was crumbling last night as
government law officers conceded that it was inoperable.

Ministers are privately preparing to overhaul key sections of the
act after accepting that high-profile disclosures by former
intelligence officers have left the controversial legislation
"unsustainable".

It follows a string of setbacks for the intelligence community,
culminating in the publication this week of a book in Russia by
Richard Tomlinson, a former MI6 agent.

This comes hard on the heels of the publication of allegations
by David Shayler, a former MI5 officer, books by several SAS
officers and the planned memoirs of Dame Stella Rimington,
the former MI5 director-general.

The new proposals follow Friday's dramatic events at the High
Court, where The Sunday Times was given the right to publish
extracts from Tomlinson's book once it was in the public
domain, only to be thwarted when government solicitors were
given leave to appeal.

The Sunday Times had tried to get a 1996 undertaking altered
which prohibited the newspaper from publishing anything from
Tomlinson's experience in MI6.

Despite an affidavit from "AH", head of security and
counterintelligence at MI6, Mr Justice Eady accepted the
arguments that, once the book was in the public domain
anywhere in the world, its contents could legally be reported by
this newspaper.

He stated that it was unclear whether or not the book was yet
in the public domain, but it was accepted that this was
imminent.

However, the judge granted the Treasury solicitor, acting on
behalf of MI6, leave to appeal. He also said that the variation to
the original order could not come into force pending the
outcome of the appeal.

Three appeal court judges sat at a specially convened court on
Friday evening. They refused to hear the appeal immediately,
agreeing it should come to court this week - after the book's
official launch in Moscow tomorrow.

The impact of this decision is to prevent The Sunday Times
running extracts from the book this weekend. Other
newspapers remain bound by another non-disclosure order
relating to Tomlinson's work for MI6.

Copies of Tomlinson's book, The Big Breach: From Top Secret
to Maximum Security, are already in circulation and several
have been imported into Britain. Other copies have been
distributed to the correspondents of Russian and American
newspapers.

On Friday night, two Russian television stations, NTV and First
Channel, ran substantial news stories based on the content of
the book. Already it is listed on Amazon.com as available via
the internet. The site, based on the number of orders, lists the
book as 340th out of its top 10,000 titles.

Russia's largest newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, ran an
extract from the book yesterday, describing Tomlinson's MI6
training at Fort Monkton in Portsmouth, an old naval fort.

The extract tells how new recruits to MI6 were dropped off in
the centre of the city and given an hour to obtain the name,
address, profession and passport number of a member of the
public.

Tomlinson made his way to a pub that was empty apart from
an old and gloomy barman. The hour allotted to him was ticking
away.

After three pints and more than half an hour with no contact,
two girls arrived. Swearing to himself that he would never do
this again, Tomlinson walked over and asked to join them. He
told them he was the skipper of a yacht delivering a boat
across the Channel, but that his mate had become ill. He
needed a new crew member.

The girls explained that they were nurses and fortuitously they
had both done some sailing. They agreed to replace his friend
and go with Tomlinson to France for the weekend.

The girls wrote down all the personal details he needed for his
assignment in his notebook. Tomlinson left the pub with just a
few minutes to spare, mission accomplished.

Another trainee, "Markham" (not his real name), pretended to
be a student from France and claimed that all British passport
numbers ended with 666. His intended target scoffed at the
claim, so Markham bet him =A35 that it was true. The target
hurried home to collect his passport and Markham lost his bet,
but completed his mission.

Eventually all the trainees returned with tales of their
escapades. One, called "Spencer", failed to turn up. They
found him, much the worse for wear, in another pub. He had
been playing the fruit machine and won the jackpot. Spencer
bought everyone a round of drinks, followed by more of the
same. He was hopelessly drunk and had almost forgotten
about his allotted task.

The book's Russian publisher, Sergei Korovin, is also
interviewed about how he contacted Tomlinson and
communicated with him using encrypted e-mails. He says he
met the former spy five times in Europe to discuss how they
were going to get the book published. Last night more extracts
from the book were published on Korovin's Moscow-based
website.

However, there are certain to be further legal obstacles to
publication in Britain. The government is claiming copyright,
based on a document signed by Tomlinson in Madrid in 1997.
Tomlinson refutes the claim, stating that he signed the
agreement under duress.

Senior government officials have publicly backed the Whitehall
"hawks", such as MI6, who want to press on with the Official
Secrets Act, but have conceded behind the scenes that
significant changes will have to be considered after the general
election, likely to be in May.

It is accepted that ministers, especially Tony Blair, cannot be
expected to deal with the issue in the run-up to polling day.
Already moves are under way to ensure that Shayler's trial for
alleged offences under the secrets act, scheduled for April 23,
is postponed until after the election.

It is believed that Lord Williams of Mostyn, appointed
attorney-general after a spell as a Home Office minister under
Jack Straw, the home secretary, was expected to be equally
hawkish, but has advised politicians that further
embarrassment will follow if they refuse to alter the legislation.

A Whitehall source said: "The attorney-general is making it
clear that, whether they like it or not, these books and
newspaper stories are going to set a precedent, and so are the
legal rulings, which have gone along with them. He's saying
that there's no point in continually trying to counter them with
legislation, which has consistently failed to do the job.

"He also recognises that, with the internet, there's almost no
way to keep these disclosures quiet. SIS [the Secret
Intelligence Service, or MI6] would like to try, but I think even
their legal people are having to accept that something's
shifted."

A senior Labour MP, closely involved in security issues, said:
"The prime minister is basically a tough-line man on this, and
so is Jack Straw, but they're both pragmatic. They'll go with the
legal flow. Geoff Hoon at defence won't get involved because he
doesn't want to blot any copybooks before a move elsewhere
after the election."

The issue was first raised by the publication in America of
Spycatcher, the book by Peter Wright, a former MI5 man.

Britons were banned from buying it, but tourists brought it into
the country in their hundreds and finally the Thatcher
government gave in and allowed it to be sold.

Tomlinson's revelations about his treatment and harassment by
MI6 over the past five years, published in last week's Sunday
Times, shook MI6 again. But the most devastating blow to the
supporters of secrecy within Whitehall came when Rimington
revealed last year her plans to publish her memoirs. MI5 and
MI6 have both reluctantly accepted that the book is inevitable
and have agreed a text with her in private negotiations.

The attorney-general is understood to have said that, if the
former director-general's book can be published without legal
challenge, any attempts to stop more junior staff doing the
same thing would certainly fail, and that it is best to relax the
rules in order to gain editorial control over submitted books.



Donald Ramsbottom BA LLb (Hons) PGdip
Ramsbottom & Co Solicitors
Internet and Global Encryption Law Specialists & General UK  Law Matters
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