- Britain's spies are to be vetted by psychologists
to assess whether they can be entrusted with national secrets. The move
reflects growing concern about mentally unstable agents.
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- Under proposals from the House of Commons
security watchdog, members of MI6, MI5 and other agencies would be forced
to undergo regular psychological tests to spot potential personality disorders.
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- The problem was highlighted last week
by the case of Steven Hayden, a naval intelligence officer jailed for a
year after selling a secret document to the Sun newspaper.
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- The Observer has learnt Hayden told his
superiors several times he was unfit for work because of psychiatric problems,
but his pleas were ignored.
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- The 31-year-old chief petty officer claimed
he had been sexually abused as a child, had a drink problem, was addicted
to pornography and had serious debts.
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- He spent part of the £10,000 he
was given by the Sun on funeral arrangements for a stillborn son. He also
bought a parrot and a water bed.
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- In 1995 he told a superior he feared
that he might abuse his newborn first child. After examinations by Navy
doctors he was deemed fit to continue his sensitive job.
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- Navy intelligence needed his linguistic
skills to listen to communications off the Bosnian coast. He was sent to
sea for 18 months before being transferred to a secret communications post
in Lincolnshire, 200 miles from his family in Hampshire.
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- Desperate for cash, he approached the
Sun offering to sell an intelligence report. The report - run on the newspaper's
front-page four days later - warned Saddam Hussein was attempting to flood
Britain with anthrax.
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- Following his conviction under the Official
Secrets Act last Friday, Hayden's lawyer David Lancaster said someone in
such a delicate mental state should never have been trusted with sensitive
information.
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- "He had previously taken the huge
step of admitting his mental problem only to find he was let down by the
Royal Navy," he said.
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- Such cases are of great concern to the
secret services. Last year Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) agent Richard
Tomlinson was jailed for passing the synopsis of a revealing book to an
Australian publisher.
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- While working for the agency Tomlinson
was traumatised by atrocities he witnessed and the death of his girlfriend
from cancer. After losing his job he was offered psychiatric counselling.
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- Tomlinson wrote to former colleagues
claiming his mistreatment "made the formerly unthinkable step of contacting
a hostile power as something I think of daily".
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- Partly as a result of this case the House
of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee are considering more exacting
staff scrutiny.
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- The report says: "Measures under
consideration include the involvement of clinical psychologists in the
vetting process, to help identify actual or potential personality disorders,
and more stringent controls on appointments to particularly sensitive posts."
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- Harold Macmillan once said anyone who
spent more than 10 years in the world of spies must be either weird or
mad.
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- History is full of examples. The first
chief of MI6, Sir Mansfield Cumming, wore a gold-rimmed monocle, wrote
only in green ink and trundled round his office on a child's scooter. He
regarded spying as a game. Trying to persuade the author Compton Mackenzie
to stay on in MI6, he told him: "Here, take this swordstick. I always
took it with me on spying expeditions before the war. That's when this
business was really amusing. After the war is over we'll do some amusing
secret service work together. It's capital sport."
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- Kim Philby, the most successful double
agent of the postwar era, was described by a colleague as "a schizophrenic
with a supreme talent for deception".
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- The defector George Blake -jailed in
1961 for spying on behalf of the Soviets - admitted he often looked in
the mirror and wondered who he was. More recently there was the disturbing
case of Michael Bettaney, an MI5 officer jailed in 1985 after attempting
to spy for the Soviets.
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- A Security Commission report heard evidence
of Bettaney's withdrawn and isolated lifestyle, his lack of ability to
form relationships with women and that he was acting a role in order to
impress socially.
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- He emerged as a man with a considerable
sense of inferiority and insecurity, a heavy drinker who was once arrested
for travelling on a train without paying.
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- Bettaney later claimed MI5 diverted attention
from issues by questioning his personality. "It is no doubt comforting
for my former employers and colleagues that everyone working for the Soviet
Union must be not only bad but mad, that anyone espousing revolutionary
Marxist ideals must somehow be in need of 'help'."
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- The problems are even worse in the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) if Jeanine Brookner, the organisation's first
woman station chief, is to be believed.
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- In court four years ago she claimed CIA
officers "would either be busy sleeping with each other's wives, drunk,
taking drugs, fiddling their expenses, seeing the agency psychiatrist or
perhaps doing them all at once".
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