Trump versus the intelligence agencies – we’ve seen it all before

He said members of the Security Service (MI5) were “very right-wing” and “the sort of people who would have spread the stories of Number 10 and the Communist cell” – referring to claims that Wilson and his private office had been compromised by the KGB. But Wilson quickly distanced himself from the allegations. He called them “cock and bull written by two journalists of limited experience.”

Claims of the “Wilson plot” continued only thanks to the former MI5 officer Peter Wright, author of Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer. Wright’s book claimed there were up to “30 officers involved” in a plot to leak sensitive information on Wilson to domestic and overseas newspapers. Questions were to be asked in parliament in a “carbon copy” of the Zinoviev Affair. Wright was later forced, however, to admit to BBC Panorama that his claims were “unreliable” and that the maximum number of officers tasked with this was very often “only three” – including himself.

The rumors surrounding the Wilson plot continue to this day. Attempts by former MI5 director general Stella Rimmington to end the stories by talking to Labor grandees failed. She said the exercise was “fruitless” as Labor suspicions ran too deep. In 1996, a former cabinet secretary, Sir John Hunt, acknowledged a few “malcontents” in MI5, though it was unclear if this extended beyond Wright and his mates. And MI5’s authorized history – despite the best efforts of its author Christopher Andrew – has done little to put the claims to bed, with rumors that the cabinet office deleted sections of the book over claims Number 10 was secretly bugged (claims denied by government).

Dirty tricks?
President Trump’s allegation that his intelligence community is “un-American” echoes earlier intelligence-policy spats in the United States. Famously, President Lyndon B. Johnson compared the CIA to a cow swinging a “shit-smeared tail” through carefully worked out policy. President George W. Bush, too, was “at war” with the CIA over claims the agency was “just guessing” in their assessments of Iraq’s insurgency during the 2004 presidential election. Relations with the White House got so bad that the acting head of the CIA even had to reassure Bush’s team it was not supporting his opponent, John Kerry.

The history of Israeli intelligence provides similar examples. In 1963, the Director of Mossad, Isser Harel, was forced to resign having started an “unauthorized crusade” against German scientists in Egypt. He effectively began an independent foreign policy, leaking information to journalists, potentially wrecking David Ben-Gurion’s attempt to develop closer relations with West Germany.

More recently, Binyamin Netanyahu’s September 2012 claim that Iran was nearer to completing a nuclear weapon – supporting the case for an Israeli military strike – led to differences with senior intelligence and military figures.

Whether claims of dirty tricks are true remains open to question, but they upset the delicate intelligence-policymaker relationship. Past examples from Britain, the United States, and Israel show that even the suggestion that intelligence agencies are trying to undermine the government cause significant problems. History does not bode well for President Trump. Expect more problems in the future.

Dan Lomas is Program Leader, MA Intelligence and Security Studies, University of Salford. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation (under Creative Commons-Attribution / No derivative).