In Search of the Truth

All over for another year and sat at home pondering on what, if anything, to write about, my attention eventually falls upon an article from yesterday in the Guardian. This should alarm us all and it's a rare excuse to go off piste once more:-

Government admits 'losing' thousands of papers from National Archives

Thousands of government papers detailing some of the most controversial episodes in 20th-century British history have vanished after civil servants removed them from the country’s National Archives and then reported them as lost. Documents concerning the Falklands war, Northern Ireland’s Troubles and the infamous Zinoviev letter – in which MI6 officers plotted to bring about the downfall of the first Labour government - are all said to have been misplaced. Other missing files concern the British colonial administration in Palestine, tests on polio vaccines and long-running territorial disputes between the UK and Argentina.

Almost 1,000 files, each thought to contain dozens of papers, are affected. In most instances the entire file is said to have been mislaid after being removed from public view at the archives and taken back to Whitehall. An entire file on the Zinoviev letter scandal is said to have been lost after Home Office civil servants took it away. The Home Office declined to say why it was taken or when or how it was lost. Nor would its say whether any copies had been made. In other instances, papers from within files have been carefully selected and taken away.

Foreign Office officials removed a small number of papers in 2015 from a file concerning the 1978 murder of Georgi Markov, a dissident Bulgarian journalist who died after being shot in the leg with a tiny pellet containing ricin while crossing Waterloo Bridge in central London. The Foreign Office subsequently told the National Archives that the papers taken were nowhere to be found. After being questioned by the Guardian, it said it had managed to locate most of the papers and return them to the archives. A couple, however, are still missing. The FO declined to say why it had taken the papers, or whether it had copies.

Other files the National Archives has listed as “misplaced while on loan to government department” include one concerning the activities of the Communist party of Great Britain at the height of the cold war; another detailing the way in which the British government took possession of Russian government funds held in British banks after the 1917 revolution; an assessment for government ministers on the security situation in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s; and three files about defence agreements between the UK and newly independent Malaya in the late 1950s, shortly before the two countries went to war with Indonesia.

The disappearances highlight the ease with which government departments can commandeer official papers long after they have been declassified and made available to historians and the public at the archives at Kew, south-west London. A Freedom of Information Act request in 2014 showed that 9,308 files were returned to government departments in this way in 2011. The following year 7,122 files were loaned out, and 7,468 in 2013. The National Archives says Whitehall departments are strongly encouraged to promptly return them, but they are not under any obligation to do so.

“The National Archives regularly sends lists to government departments of files that they have out on loan,” a spokesperson said. “If we are notified that a file is missing, we do ask what actions have been done and what action is being taken to find the file.”

Some historians have been particularly distrustful of the Foreign Office since 2013, when the Guardian disclosed that the department had been unlawfully hoarding 1.2m historical files at a high-security compound near Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire. The hoard came to light during high court proceedings brought by a group of elderly Kenyans who were detained and abused during the Mau Mau insurgency in 1950s Kenya, when the Foreign Office admitted it had withheld thousands of colonial-era files.

A few years earlier, the Ministry of Defence refused to consider a number of files for release under the Freedom of Information Act on the grounds that they may have been exposed to asbestos. The files concerned such matters as arms sales to Saudi Arabia, UK special forces operations against Indonesia and interrogation techniques. The MoD denied it was using the presence of asbestos in an old archive building as an excuse to suppress the documents.

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Thoroughly alarmed and dismayed, I follow the trail, not only to find the hand of one Chris Grayling, but David Lidington as well. This from the Guardian 18th October 2013:- 

Foreign Office hoarding 1m historic files in secret archive

The Foreign Office has unlawfully hoarded more than a million files of historic documents that should have been declassified and handed over to the National Archives, the Guardian has discovered. The files are being kept at a secret archive at a high-security government communications centre in Buckinghamshire, north of London, where they occupy mile after mile of shelving. Most of the papers are many decades old – some were created in the 19th century – and document in fine detail British foreign relations throughout two world wars, the cold war, withdrawal from empire and entry into the common market.

They have been kept from public view in breach of the Public Records Acts, which requires that all government documents become public once they are 30 years old – a term about to be reduced to 20 years – unless the department has received permission from the lord chancellor to hold them for longer. The secret archive is also beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act.

The Foreign Office is not the only government department that has been unlawfully hoarding files. This month the Guardian disclosed that the Ministry of Defence was unlawfully holding more than 66,000 historic files at a warehouse in Derbyshire, including thousands of files from the army's Northern Ireland headquarters. However, the Foreign Office's secret archive, which is estimated to hold around 1.2m files and occupies around 15 miles of floor-to-ceiling shelving, is believed to be far larger than the combined undisclosed archives of every other government department. One of Britain's leading historians describes its size as "staggering".

A basic inventory of the hidden archive gives a clue to its enormousness: batches of files are catalogued according to the length of shelf space they occupy, with six metres and two centimetres dedicated to files about Rhodesia, for example, and four metres and 57 centimetres holding files about Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, the KGB spies who operated inside the Foreign Office and MI6. There are 50 metres of files on Hong Kong, 100.81 metres about the United States and 97.84 metres of "private office papers".

No length is given in the inventory for other categories such as Colonial Office files or records from the permanent under-secretary's department, the point of liaison between the Foreign Office and MI6. The inventory says there is one bag of records from the Foreign Office's now notorious cold war propaganda unit, the Information Research Department. And buried away within the archive, wedged between files from the British military government in post-war Germany and lists of consular officials, are papers about the treaty of Paris, which concluded the Crimean war in 1856.

The Foreign Office's realisation that it would eventually need to admit to the existence of such a vast repository appears to have come at a time when its lawyers were waging a court battle with a group of elderly Kenyans. It was a battle that it eventually lost, with the result that it was obliged to issue an unprecedented apology and pay millions of pounds in compensation to thousands of men and women who suffered severe mistreatment during the 1950s Mau Mau insurgency.

During those proceedings the Foreign Office repeatedly denied the existence of a much smaller secret archive of 8,800 colonial-era documents, known as the migrated archive. It was eventually obliged to admit that this did exist, and that its contents corroborated the Kenyans' allegations about widespread acts of murder and torture by the colonial authorities.

As a first step, the Foreign Office gave its colossal secret a name, the Special Collections. Then last November the justice secretary, Chris Grayling, was asked to sign a blanket authorisation that is said to have placed the retention of the files on a legal footing for 12 months. No announcement was made. Finally, a written statement about "public records" by the Foreign Office minister David Lidington was quietly issued in the Commons on a Friday afternoon. The statement included two sentences that referred to a "large accumulation" of documents.

As a result of the manner in which the matter was handled, the existence of the archive has remained all but unknown, even among historians. Anthony Badger, the Cambridge history professor who has been overseeing the declassification of the migrated archive, has written that he believes "it is difficult to overestimate the legacy of suspicion among historians, lawyers and journalists" that resulted from the concealment of those 8,800 files.

The discovery that the colonial-era documents are just a very small part of a hidden archive of more than a million files is certain to cause enormous damage to the Foreign Office's reputation among historians and others. A Foreign Office spokesperson said the archive had accumulated over time and that "resources have not been available to review and prepare" them for release.

The handful of historians who have become aware of the archive are deeply sceptical about this claim, however. Richard Drayton, Rhodes professor of imperial history at King's College London, said the size of the hidden archive was staggering, and it was "scandalous" that papers of such significance could be concealed for such a long time. "It's a working archive, for a department which believes it has a long-term, historic interest in many parts of the world," he said.

It was unclear whether there is any "truly explosive" material within the files, Drayton said, or whether officials were attempting to manage the country's historic reputation. "It may be that from the perspective of the state, 50 years is a short time. But the idea that the British state today has an obligation to protect the reputation of the British state of 50 years ago seems to me wholly inappropriate. It would be a manipulation of history, which we associate with iron curtain regimes during the cold war, regimes that managed and controlled the past."

Mandy Banton, senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, said it was "extremely likely" that the archive had been culled to remove material that would most damage the reputation of the UK and the Foreign Office. Banton, a Colonial Office records expert who worked at National Archives at Kew, south-west London, for 25 years, said she had been "very angry" when she discovered that the migrated archives had been withheld. "I would have been incandescent had I learned while still working there. In lying to me, the Foreign Office forced me to mislead my readers."

Freedom of information campaigners believe that the hoarding of such a huge amount of papers is symptomatic of a culture of secrecy and retention at the Foreign Office and across many other UK government departments. Maurice Frankel, director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information, an NGO that works to ensure the Freedom of Information Act is properly implemented, said: "The FoI system depends on people knowing what they hold and being transparent about what they hold."

The archive is kept at Hanslope Park, a sprawling Foreign Office and MI6 outstation in the heart of the Buckinghamshire countryside. Sometimes referred to by Foreign Office staff as "Up North" – although it is only 60 miles north of London – Hanslope Park is also home to Her Majesty's Government Communications Centre, a facility where hundreds of government scientists and technicians develop sophisticated counter-espionage measures. They include measures intended to protect the UK government and its allies from the sort of surveillance that Edward Snowden's leaks have shown to have been perfected by the National Security Agency and Britain's GCHQ.

Two wire fences, one 10ft high and topped with razor wire, encircle the cluster of buildings at Hanslope Park. Between them is a no man's land with intruder alarms. CCTV cameras are positioned every few yards and the entire perimeter is covered by floodlights. Inside, posters on the walls carry the half-joking warning: "Careless talk costs jobs."

Curiously, many of the offices are said to house row after row of typewriters rather than computers, with incinerators at the end of each room for the disposal of typewriter ribbons – a measure to reduce electromagnetic emissions, which can travel for hundreds of yards and be deciphered by foreign governments. Hanslope Park is not only a highly secure facility, it is also a place that appears to be accustomed to handling – and destroying – large amounts of paperwork. This, possibly, explains why the special collections have been held there.

The blanket authorisation signed by Grayling put the secret archive on a legal footing for 12 months, during which time the Foreign Office is expected to devise a plan for its declassification and transfer to Kew. A spokesperson said a plan would be presented next month to a committee that advises the National Archives and the Ministry of Justice.

It will be quite a task. Declassification of the migrated archive has taken two and a half years, with the final tranche of documents due to arrive at Kew next month. At that rate, clearing up the special collections would take around 340 years.

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This from the Guardian 29th November 2013:-

Revealed: the bonfire of papers at the end of Empire

The full extent of the destruction of Britain's colonial government records during the retreat from empire was disclosed on Thursday with the declassification of a small part of the Foreign Office's vast secret archive. Fifty-year-old documents that have finally been transferred to the National Archive show that bonfires were built behind diplomatic missions across the globe as the purge – codenamed Operation Legacy – accompanied the handover of each colony.

The declassified documents include copies of an instruction issued in 1961 by Iain Macleod, colonial secretary, that post-independence governments should not be handed any material that "might embarrass Her Majesty's [the] government", that could "embarrass members of the police, military forces, public servants or others eg police informers", that might betray intelligence sources, or that might "be used unethically by ministers in the successor government".

In Northern Rhodesia, colonial officials were issued with further orders to destroy "all papers which are likely to be interpreted, either reasonably or by malice, as indicating racial prejudice or religious bias on the part of Her Majesty's government".

Detailed instructions were issued over methods of destruction, in order to erase all evidence of the purge. When documents were burned, "the waste should be reduced to ash and the ashes broken up", while any that were being dumped at sea must be "packed in weighted crates and dumped in very deep and current-free water at maximum practicable distance from the coast".

Also among the documents declassified on Friday are "destruction certificates" sent to London by colonial officials as proof that they were performing their duties, and letters and memoranda that showed that some were struggling to complete their huge task before the colonies gained their independence. Officials in more than one colony warned London that they feared they would be "celebrating Independence Day with smoke".

An elaborate and at times confusing classification system was introduced, in addition to the secret/top secret classifications, to protect papers that were to be destroyed or shipped to the UK. Officials were often granted or refused security clearance on the grounds of ethnicity. Documents marked "Guard", for example, could be disclosed to non-British officials as long as if they were from the "Old Commonwealth" – Australia, New Zealand, South Africa or Canada.

Those classified as "Watch", and stamped with a red letter W, were to be removed from the country or destroyed. Steps were taken to ensure post-colonial governments would not learn that such files had ever existed, with one instruction stating: "The legacy files must leave no reference to watch material. Indeed, the very existence of the watch series, though it may be guessed at, should never be revealed." Officials were warned to keep their W stamps locked away.

The marking "DG" was said to be an abbreviation of deputy governor, but in fact was a protective code word to indicate that papers so marked were for sight by "British officers of European descent only".

As colonies passed into a transitional phase before full independence, with British civil servants working for local government ministers, an entire parallel series of documents marked Personal were created. "Personal" files could be seen only by British governors and their British aides, a system that appears to have been employed in every territory from which the British withdrew after 1961. "The existence of the 'Personal' series of correspondence must of course be scrupulously protected and no documents in this series should be transferred to ministers," colonial officials were warned.

While thousands of files were returned to London during the process of decolonisation, it is now clear that countless numbers of documents were destroyed. "Emphasis is placed upon destruction," colonial officials in Kenya were told. Officials in Aden were told to start burning in 1966, a full 12 months before the eventual British withdrawal. "It may seem a bit early to start talking about the disposal of documents prior to independence, but the sifting of documents is a considerable task and you may like to start thinking about it now."

As in many colonies, a three-man committee – comprising two senior administrators and one police special branch officer – decided what would be destroyed and what would be removed to London. The paucity of Aden documentation so far declassified may suggest that the committee decided that most files should be destroyed. In Belize, colonial administrators officials told London in October 1962 that a visiting MI5 officer had decided that all sensitive files should be destroyed by fire: "In this he was assisted by the Royal Navy and several gallons of petrol."

In British Guiana, a shortage of "British officers of European descent" resulted in the "hot and heavy" task falling to two secretaries, using a fire in an oil drum in the grounds of Government House. Eventually the army agreed to lend a hand.

The declassified papers show colonial officials asking for further advice about what should and should not be destroyed. In 1963, for example, an official in Malta asked London for advice about which files should be "spirited away out of the country", and warned that while some documents could be handed over to the new government: "There may again be others which could be given to them if they were doctored first; and there may be files which cannot be given to them under any circumstances."

In June 1966, Max Webber, the high commissioner in Brunei, asked Bernard Cheeseman, chief librarian at the Commonwealth Relations Office, for advice about 60 boxes of files. "My Dear Cheese," he wrote, "can I, off my own bat, destroy some of these papers, or should the whole lot be sent home for weeding or retention in your records?"

Not all sensitive documents were destroyed. Large amounts were transferred to London, and held in Foreign Office archives. Colonial officials were told that crates of documents sent back to the UK by sea could be entrusted only to the "care of a British ship's master on a British ship".

For example, Robert Turner, the chief secretary of the British protectorate of North Borneo, wrote to the Colonial Office library in August 1963, a few weeks before independence, saying his subordinate's monthly reports – "which would be unsuitable for the eyes of local ministers" – would be saved and sent to London, rather than destroyed. "I ... have been prevailed upon to do so on the grounds that some at least of their contents may come in handy when some future Gibbon is doing research work for his 'Decline and Fall of the British Empire'."

Those papers that were returned to London were not open to historians, however. The declassified documents made available Friday at the National Archives at Kew, south-west London, are from a cache of 8,800 of colonial-era files that the Foreign Office held for decades, in breach of the 30-years rule of the Public Records Acts and in effect beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act. They were stored behind barbed-wire fences at Hanslope Park, Buckinghamshire, a government communications research centre north of London, a facility that it operates along with MI6 and MI5.

The Foreign Office was forced eventually to admit to the existence of the hidden files during high court proceedings brought by a group of elderly Kenyans who were suing the government over the mistreatment they suffered while imprisoned during the 1950s Mau Mau insurgency. Even then, however, the Foreign Office failed to acknowledge that the 8,800 colonial files were just a small part of a secret archive of 1.2m files that it called the Special Collections, and which it had held unlawfully at Hanslope Park.

The Foreign Office is understood to have presented a plan to the National Archive earlier this month for the belated transfer of the Special Collections into the public domain. On Thursday it declined to disclose details of that plan. The newly declassified documents show that the practice of destroying papers rather than allowing them to fall into the hands of post-independence governments pre-dated Macleod's 1961 instructions.

A British colonial official in Malaya reported that in August 1957, for example, "five lorry loads of papers … were driven down to the naval base at Singapore, and destroyed in the Navy's splendid incinerator there. The Army supplied the lorries (civilian type) and laid on Field Security Personnel to move the files. Considerable pains were nevertheless taken to carry out the operations discreetly, partly to avoid exacerbating relationships between the British government and those Malayans who might not have been so understanding ... and partly to avoid comment by the press (who I understand greatly enjoyed themselves with the pall of smoke which hung over Delhi during the mass destruction of documents in 1947)."

A few years later, colonial officials in Kenya were urged not to follow the Malayan example: "It is better for too much, rather than too little, to be sent home – the wholesale destruction, as in Malaya, should not be repeated."

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From the Guardian 17th January 2015:-

The 30-year rule documents they don’t want you to see

The National Archives at Kew has just released hundreds of government files, as it has done for decades under the “30-year rule”. The archivists and press officers helpfully point journalists to records that have contemporary resonances, guaranteeing good coverage in the media.

They also helped to persuade some of the more secretive Whitehall departments to abandon their practice of blocking the release of entire files whenever there was any reference to an individual or event they did not want disclosed. Now passages are often redacted or pages removed, with a notice placed in the file to that effect.

But many files remain closed indefinitely, subject to an extraordinary, sweeping escape clause. Under section 3(4) of the 1958 Public Records Act, files can be withheld “if, in the opinion of the person who is responsible for them, they are required for administrative purposes or ought to be retained for any other special reason”. The only condition is that a minister or Whitehall official who wants to suppress a file must tell the lord chancellor (currently the justice secretary, Chris Grayling). The individual who wants to retain the file does not have to explain what “administrative purposes” they may be required for, or the nature of any “special reason” for their continued retention.

Files held back this year under the act’s section 3(4) all relate to events that took place at least 29 years ago, ie, in 1985 or earlier. (The 30-year rule is gradually being reduced, under a 10-year transition, to a 20-year rule). They include those relating to Whitehall’s joint intelligence committee, terrorism, security in the grounds of Buckingham Palace (after an incident on 2 July 1982), one titled: “The narcotics problem: proposals for greater involvement of the United Kingdom intelligence community”, one with the title: “Soviet funding of the NUM, information from Sir Bernard Braine MP”, and another on “special intelligence operations” in Northern Ireland.

The reasons for withholding these may be obvious or understandable, though not necessarily justifiable. No less easy to understand, but on the face of it even less justifiably suppressed, are a number of other files due to have been released now. These include papers, all dated 1985 or earlier, on UK nuclear tests and GCHQ. The latter documents concern funding, the ban on trade unions, official policy on the interception of communications, and on Jock Kane, the GCHQ radio operator who blew the whistle on security breaches at the centre’s former listening post at Little Sai Wan in Hong Kong. Other files held back include those marked “Falkland Islands: political”, “Gibraltar: political”, “India: political”, and “USSR: military”.

In addition to those retained indefinitely under the Public Records Act’s section 3(4) are those marked “T” – meaning they are “temporarily retained”, though there is no way of knowing when they will be released. Those marked with a “T” this time round include files relating to “public opinion and public debate on nuclear weapons issues” (a probable reference to how the Ministry of Defence used MI5 to monitor CND campaigners), “defence sales” (the Westland affair, over which Michael Heseltine resigned, and which involved the leaking of government law officers’ correspondence), the “situation in the Middle East”, and the UK’s relations with Oman and Gibraltar.

Other files retained include those relating to “Anglo-Libyan relations” after the shooting of WPC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan People’s Bureau in St James Square on 17 April 1984, and one titled “Representation of political parties at ceremonial occasions – Cenotaph and state banquets”. All these are meant to be “public records” kept on behalf of the public. The public has a right to see them, or at least to be told why they have been suppressed and when they will be released.

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Reflections

One of my favourite gifts this year has been from the BBC in the form of the complete 22 hour 'box set' of that brilliant police drama 'Line of Duty', still available on iplayer for a few more days. The villains always burn the evidence and the series ends with Supt Hastings surveying a wall of mugshots and ruefully observes that catching bent coppers "looks like a lifetimes work". 

Historical records are essential in getting to know the truth. Last month a memorial was finally unveiled commemorating a tragic event from the Second World War, the Bethnal Green Tube Disaster when 173 people died on a set of stairs leading to a shelter. It was the worst civilian disaster of the war. This from the memorial website:-

"In a book published last year we recently discovered that there was also a government cover-up after the Bethnal Green tube shelter disaster.

Rick Fountain's book 'Mr. Morrison's Conjuring Tricks' sets out the evidence that in 1941 (so, two years before the disaster) Bethnal Green Council had written to the government asking for permission to alter the station entrance and make it safer if a lot of people wanted to use it. The Government department refused and the Borough Engineer wrote a stronger worded letter explaining that the entrance and stairway needed several measures to make them safer. Again the government refused permission. The Council's borough engineer wrote a third time to plead for permission to alter the entrance, but was once more refused.

The day after the disaster all these measures sought by the Council were put in place. However, Bethnal Green Council was made to keep their earlier letters secret, under the Official Secrets Act. The Council was therefore made to take the blame. Statements given in Parliament suggested that the victims were to blame. This ensured the event was kept as secret as possible. This was partially to prevent the enemy using it for propaganda purposes, but apparently it also saved the Home Secretary of the day, Herbert Morrison, from having to resign. The Mayor of Bethnal Green was not allowed to defend herself and was largely blamed for the tragedy.

The public enquiry, and the summing-up by the judge in the one court case that followed, largely agreed that there had been no panic on the part of the victims so they were not to blame. The final statement about the enquiry was read out in Parliament by another MP as Herbert Morrison had a cold on that day. So no questions could be asked. It was the Hillsborough of its day."

Given the instruction regarding the risk of 'embarrassment' expressed by Iain Macleod in 1961, I wonder if this is not an honest view held by governments of all hues since time began and that therefore, what are the chances of ever getting to know the full truth of Hillsborough, Orgreave or Grenfell? 

In answer to my question earlier this year and addressed to a long-term friend and colleague 'is being a Probation Officer incompatible with being a civil servant?',  they replied without hesitation 'yes!'