Crash Bang Wallace
Libertarian political blog from Mark Wallace; political opinion, breaking news and exclusivesTinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Resident Artist
Posted on February 15, 2011Uncharacteristically, MI6 (or SIS to give them their proper name) have gone on a publicity drive. A press release yesterday announced an exhibition of paintings by James Hart Dyke, a resident artist who has been embedded within MI6 for the last year.
The good news is that Mr Hart Dyke wasn’t paid a salary by the spooks during his time with them – he will make his money from the sale of the works. Indeed, starting at £950 a sketch and rising to £25,000 for the biggest oil painting I’d say he stands a pretty good chance of making his last year worthwhile.
All the same, this project will have come at some cost to MI6. As well as providing the artist with space, you can bet he got some intensive briefing and attention from press officers. Even that might be worthwhile, I thought, seeing as it’s the Service’s anniversary, until I saw this:
the paintings do not identify actual officers, agents, operations, or actual events
Obviously, no-one would expect a secret service to give the okay for an artist to publicly release paintings of their officers or expose state secrets through the medium of oil paint. But what, really, is the point of having a resident artist embedded with you for a year if everything he paints at the end of it is made up? Particularly if the things he’s painted are, erm, the outside of the MI6 building, a man in a hotel room and two people having a meeting.
Surely they’d have achieved the same effect, without the disruption, by commissioning an artist who could sit at home using his imagination?
The spy who fell off the radar
Posted on August 27, 2010The developing story of the murder of Gareth Williams, the GCHQ staffer who was on loan to MI6, has all the elements necessary to run and run. For a start, it allows headline writers to use the word “SPY” a lot, which is both exciting and conveniently short.
Then there is the awful way in which he died and was discovered, stuffed into a holdall. Add to that the competing theories and allegations about possible terrorism or foreign espionage, and the scrutiny of his private life, and you have a really big story.
What has truly gasted my flabber about this case, though, is that MI6, MI5 and GCHQ combined don’t seem to have noticed that he was missing – never mind dead – for around two weeks. My colleagues would probably notice a (sizeable) Wallace-shaped gap in the room if I didn’t show up for a day, never mind a fortnight – and I’m not in possession of facts pertaining to national security.
Spying (and spying on other spies, and so on and so on) is, I appreciate, a difficult business – but can it really be so hard to notice the disappearance of one of your own men? If it takes two weeks to notice one of your operatives or analysts has vanished from the radar, what is to stop them defecting to a hostile power or – like the unfortunate Gareth Williams – being murdered?