From the April and May edition of the print magazine: a two-parter!
Frederick Forsyth the author of best-sellers The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa Files – his latest book is The Avenger- was the guest speaker at a dinner Una Riley attended recently …
I was seated next to him for the meal and had the opportunity to talk to him at length. Of course it started with the usual dinner table chit-chat but it was obvious quite quickly that this man is passionate about issues that effect our country and people. His knowledge concerning our profession was impressive and as a consequence I asked him if he would share his thoughts with our readers? Freddy duly agreed and I caught up with him a couple of days later. I asked what he thought of the recent anti-terrorist legislation that had caused so much debate in the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
“I profoundly disagree with the government of the day in this country; its attitude and in my view its idleness. It has had three and a half years since 9-11. As a government it must have been aware before 2001 of the existence of Al-Qaida who had already by then attacked two American embassies in Africa, an American warship in Aden and a French tanker off the coast of Aden and various other places. So in other words Al-Qaida was a surprise to the public but it should not have been a surprise to the government. Its declared aims had already been announced and this government had time to prepare and time to think that legislation will be necessary, detention of some kind will be necessary, identification of incoming people will be necessary, let us have something prepared … they did nothing. They even did nothing when the Lords gave warning that you cannot keep people in prison whether Brits or foreigners indefinitely without charge or trial. It was only when they finally said you are going to have to let them out on the ninth of March that they rushed to judgement and produced what can only be described as a draconian measure that absolutely antagonised most British people.” I went on to ask; do you think that the government responded in a knee-jerk reaction or do you think that it was an opportunity to abandon habeas corpus in line with Europe"? "There is no evidence that they wanted to abandon habeas corpus. Certainly by signing up to the European arrest warrant they have abandoned habeas corpus for any British citizen that is wanted abroad or in the EU, he has no habeas corpus left. For instance if he is wanted for a Greek court or a French magistrate or a German judge he has no habeas corpus left, he can simply be transported to those countries in chains without a hearing an appeal or a defence or even without knowing the charge against him. The great majority of our judiciary takes place inside this country. So I don’t know if they wanted to or if they just waited but certainly in my view it was knee-jerk panic reaction leading to a very hastily concocted idea. The idea being if we can’t keep them in prison we must keep them in their houses. It is practically going back to Longkesh and detainment without trial in Ulster and that was a disaster. Internment without charge or trial, internment on suspicion, appeared to be the only way to cope with terrorism but it proved the reverse. It was actually a recruiting sergeant for the IRA. So neither the Labour nor the Conservative government during this debate period has attempted to defend internment without trial. So internment in your own home, known as ‘house arrest’ is effectively internment without trial. So why repeat one of the most unsuccessful nostrums ever tried in this country? It’s worse in a sense than internment without trial because it’s called ‘house arrest’ but presumably all your terror suspects have to be in separate houses surrounded 24 hours a day by a team of up to 80 ‘watchers’ at the least and that is not including the technology surveillance that will be required. The cost is immense in both financial and human resource and it is extremely complicated. Nobody has actually got in to the practicalities of it; they will have to now. By the way, I was entirely opposed to it. There are two alternatives, one of course is to produce a trial and secure a conviction, this could be done providing you go down the American route and permit the [ELINT] electronic intelligence system, and they repudiated it out of hand even though the Americans broke and destroyed the Costa Nostra by listening to them talk. It’s not just phone taps – it’s bugging their cars, their apartments, anywhere they frequent and listening to them when they are outside in a car park … it’s everything.” Who were the opposition to this solution I asked? Freddy replied: “The British government…but providing it is carried out under judicial aegis then it would be honest.”
We went on to discuss the matter further and Freddy commented that even Ian Blair the new Metropolitan Police Commissioner concurred with him on this subject and had said that we must now move forward and permit ELINT evidence. The comparison was drawn with the commercial security profession and the products available today. "In the case of crime and terrorism as opposed to industrial espionage and indeed burglaries comparative types of technology are used such as heat sensors, infra-red and microwave technology surveillance and the like but we are talking here about police doing what in fact MI5 is doing all the time anyway, which is listen in. It is far less damaging to human rights than some minister who is allowed to lock someone in their home for ever. That is seriously weird.” I enquired whether the various agencies had a road map to make this type of performance work for the benefit of all concerned. “Well, we know that they are overlapping quite a lot now. It used to be in the Cold War almost everything to do with security went down to the Special Branch. Your ordinary uniform branch and the CID branch had nothing to do with watching spies. That was often to do with Special Branch working hand in glove with MI5. So they would tail them and watch them, in fact they are called watchers. So they would follow someone along the street and that person doesn’t even know they are being tailed unless maybe they were very experienced professionals, but most times they are never spotted; it is very cleverly done. The electronic side involved mainly MI5 and this involved such like as burglary without a magistrate’s warrant. Suspects’ apartments and houses were burgled, for instance the East German mission in Highgate was burgled and ‘bugs’ were planted and sometimes they were retrieved and sometimes not. MI5 didn’t need or rarely needed to bring people to court they needed to know what they were doing, what they were about, whose service they were in this country? Were they Polish intelligence, were they KGB were they STASIs form East Germany … who were they. Most importantly who were the Brits that they were contacting, who were the agents that they contacted over here. It was all very interesting but we didn’t have to bring them to court and most times they had diplomatic immunity. Now we are talking about terrorists. We have been trying to cope with IRA terrorists for 30 years and we did cope with it. Yes, we lost people and there were bombs and there were assassinations but we coped with it and we had to introduce various measures like the one judge ‘Diplock’ courts and we see now why in the most recent murder of Mr McCartney where no witnesses will come forward, they are terrified and the jury is terrified.” Such Diplock courts were in place in 1973, when a report by Lord Diplock found juries trying cases related to terrorism could be partisan or open to intimidation. In 2000, a review found the threat of intimidation still existed. If a person is arrested for a terrorist offence, including hijacking or firearms offences, they can be processed as a suspected terrorist, taken to a holding centre in Antrim and held for longer than ordinary legislation allows. They will be tried by a jury only if the director of public prosecutions decides the offence was not linked to terrorism. The police and Army have powers to stop, question, arrest, enter, search and seize without having to fill in seven sheets of paper for asking a suspects name. I asked if the Diplock Court worked. “We used the Diplock Court and we also used hooded witnesses and we got convictions.” So if we have proven solutions so why did we not use them by bringing together the various expertise? “Because we have a stupid government … It was proposed to them ages ago. Why are we refusing to permit electronically gathered evidence when almost every country in Europe and North America permits this intelligence in court proceedings. If we did we could probably get a conviction for most of these people. The other alternative is to repatriate them. It would mean rescinding not the whole of but two or three clauses in the Human Rights Act, but the Dutch have done it already. However, if you pick up a suspected terrorist and he is British born you can’t expel him.” I then said; this brings us back to the start of the conversation about house arrest and British law. Freddy replied: “We are going to have to do it but we are going to have to do it legally. I don’t believe in doing it illegally or changing 800 years of law.” I agree entirely with him but being a conspiracy theorist, as a result of all the Frederick Forsyth books I have read, I still think that it would have been an opportunity to abandon the foundation stone of English law … habeas corpus.
Biography
Frederick Forsyth was born in Ashford, Kent, England, and was educated at Tonbridge School, and later Granada University, Spain. He started work as one of the youngest pilots in the RAF at the age of 19, serving from 1956 to 1958. For the next three and a half years he worked as a reporter for the Eastern Daily Press in Norfolk, before becoming a correspondent for Reuters., first in Paris, at the age of 23, and then in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, locations which provided him with information for his first books. Returning to London in 1965, he worked as a radio and television reporter for the BBC. As assistant diplomatic correspondent, he covered the Biafran side of the Biafra-Nigeria war from July to September 1967, and this provided him with knowledge of international politics, and the world of mercenary soldiers. It was this work and related research that interested him with historical truth. In 1968 he left the BBC to return to Biafra, and he reported on the war, first as a freelance and later for the Daily Express and Time magazine. In 1970, after nine years of journalism, he decided to write a book using the research methods he had learnt while a reporter. This book, The Day of the Jackal, became an instant success, and spawned a career of many successful books. Frederick Forsyth speaks fluent French, German and Spanish, and has travelled widely in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
