The Big Breach – Inside the Secret World of MI6, by Richard Tomlinson
The Big Breach – Inside the Secret World of MI6 by Richard Tomlinson, Harper Collins, 2001
Book review by Nicky Hager
I did not expect to like Richard Tomlinson’s long-awaited book, The Big Breach. Books by former spies and SAS officers tend to be rollicking, boys own stuff, with little thought about the people and countries they’re spying on and shooting at or why they are doing it. This book partly fits that mould but in fact it turns out to be an interesting read.
Richard Tomlinson loved the excitement and challenge of his job in Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, MI6, and, if things had gone differently, he would probably still be working there today. He was the star pupil in his MI6 training course in 1991-1992, was soon after selected for a series of demanding overseas missions but then suddenly found himself fired from the Service. For reasons that we never get to the bottom of, some powerful members of the MI6 personnel department did not like him. One morning he arrived at work at the London headquarters to find that his access card simply did not work any more. Hurt and angry, he tried repeatedly to regain his job. Eventually he was thoroughly disillusioned with MI6 and wrote this book to reward them for treating him unfairly.
The first third of the book describes Tomlinson’s training for the British SAS and then MI6, plus other adventures he set off on around the world. He has an easy story-telling style but it is, well, light. The best part of the book is the middle 100 pages, where he describes his three years of active intelligence operations.
Using false identities and passports, he travelled into various countries to meet or cultivate paid agents who provided secret intelligence about their countries. We read about his trips to Moscow and Bosnia and also his colleagues’ work spying on numerous countries (including EU partners France and Germany). Some of the second hand stories may not be correct; and intelligence services are highly compartmentalised and secretive so we only get a picture of a small part of MI6’s operations. Still, there is a lot of significant and believable detail.
There is almost no discussion in the book about the rights and wrongs of the missions. Tomlinson states plainly that he was interested in the excitement and challenge of the job and so we get only hints of the very conservative political culture in which the operations were planned.
It is a murky business. While some of the targets seem reasonable (such as tracking European business people selling chemical weapon ingredients to Iran), other operations appear questionable. Also, it is worrying that the favorite false identities used by MI6 officers in dangerous situations were to pose as journalists and UN staff (eg in Iraq and Bosnia). This seems particularly irresponsible as must increase the risk of violence against real journalists and UN staff.
Tomlinson came to see MI6 as a law unto itself with only token political oversight; for instance easily sidestepping the legislative controls on telephone and mail monitoring. As in New Zealand, ‘national security’ was constantly used to avoid political scrutiny.
The last third of the book covers the time after he was thrown out of MI6, when he was harrassed, imprisoned and pursued around the world by MI6 as it tried to stop him writing this book. It is a disgraceful story, in which MI6 (aided by our SIS) misused its power to hound and try to silence a critic. The overwhelming impression from the book is that MI6 created it’s own problems – managing to convert an enthusiastic, loyal officer into an aggrieved and ultimately unstoppable opponent.
The Big Breach – Inside the Secret World of MI6 by Richard Tomlinson, Harper Collins, $34.95