MI5 is in serious trouble – and has failed to learn from past scandals

The secret service faces serious questions after it lied to a court about how it dealt with a neo-Nazi spy. Robert Verkaik says the organisation has a long history of handling rogue agents and rogue officers – so how has MI5 dropped the ball so badly?

MI5 is in serious trouble. Britain’s domestic secret intelligence agency has become the story. A neo-Nazi thug who attacked his girlfriend with a machete happened to be a paid undercover agent working for MI5. When the woman took the spy to court, MI5 tried to manage the media fallout but ended up lying to the BBC and the judiciary.

The case of Agent X and the domestic abuse allegations have been a running sore for MI5 for more than four years. In 2022, Yvette Cooper, then shadow home secretary, called for an “independent assessment” of the case, looking at the way concerns about “the appalling and dangerous crime of domestic abuse” were handled by MI5.

Now it has emerged that rather than tackle the issue of domestic violence, MI5 officers chose to try to kill the story. They told the BBC, who first reported the case, that the man had not been involved in the machete attack against his girlfriend and then went to court to stop the media naming the agent. Sir Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, also telephoned the BBC’s director general Tim Davie in late 2021, to claim their planned story was “inaccurate as well as reckless”.

According to the BBC, MI5 lied three times to the court about its conversations with BBC reporter Daniel De Simone who was investigating the case. It maintained that throughout their dealings with De Simone, MI5 officers had complied with the policy of neither confirming nor denying the man was a spy. But the BBC produced a recording of a senior director of the agency telling De Simone that Agent X was a paid spy, although not active when he was alleged to have committed the domestic violence.

Rogue agents are an occupational hazard for a security agency charged with keeping the country safe from terrorist and extremist groups.

Once details of the story spill into the public domain, it becomes a case of reputational damage limitation.

As with most bad publicity concerning government agencies, it is nearly always the cover-up, rather than the original sin, that causes the greatest harm.

MI5 has now issued an “unreserved apology” to the BBC and all three courts, describing what happened as a “serious error” while the home secretary has appointed Sir Jonathan Jones KC, former head of the government legal service, as an “independent external reviewer” to investigate how MI5 came to provide false evidence to the courts.

If this was a story about a corporate institution, a government department or even the BBC, a grovelling apology followed by an undertaking to clean up its act might be enough to draw a line in the sand and move on.

But the reputation of MI5 is much more important than the public standing of any of these entities.

The Security Service, like the police, investigate and surveil with the consent of the British public. Its intelligence is used by the police and government agencies to arrest and detain members of the public. Its officers submit evidence in court which is nearly always believed and is often relied upon to deny an individual their liberty or expel them from the country.

Judges accept the veracity of what MI5 tells them because the credibility and integrity of the agency are held to the highest standard.

The case of Agent X will now allow lawyers and judges to legitimately question whether the testimony they are hearing is accurate or even true.

MI5 and MI6, the secret intelligence service, have a long history of handling rogue agents and rogue officers. Anthony Blunt, Kim Philby, David Shayler and Northern Ireland double agent “Stakeknife”, also known as Freddie Scappaticci, have all tested the agency’s PR management skills.

Art historian Anthony Blunt joined MI5 in 1940 but began to pass on information to the Soviets (PA)

I have reported on cases involving spies who were working as MI5 informants but ended up going rogue. During the rise of the Islamic State between 2012 and 2016, MI5 had to get close to terrorist cells that threatened the safety of the United Kingdom. Some informants began providing intelligence but then turned hostile against Britain and their MI5 handlers and posed a terrorist threat to the United Kingdom. Details of these cases are still subject to tight secrecy but it is now clear that the media strategy lessons have not been learned

MI5 has a duty to carefully balance the public interest in protecting the secret workings of its organisation against the public right to know what is being done in its name.

Yet it is vital MI5 officers accept that once a case has bled into the public domain it will not be possible to control all the information. Ever since the Security Service was founded more than 100 years ago, the courts have established that MI5, like everybody else, is not above the law. A failure to respect this fundamental principle of our constitution has greatly undermined the public’s trust in the national security agency that serves such a critically important role in the protection of its citizens.

Robert Verkaik’s book about MI5 officer Anthony Blunt, ‘The Traitor of Arnhem’ (Headline), will be published in paperback on 27 March 2025