MI5’s (official) secret history revealed:

The British publisher Penguin launched an unusual book Monday — an authorized history of MI5, the British domestic intelligence agency, to mark the centenary of its founding in 1909. It’s the first authorized history of any Western intelligence agency. Allowing an academic to write it and comb through the agency’s files has raised questions about why its secrets shouldn’t be kept secret.

[...]

“We thought if we had a history, we could assign to history all those allegations and stories that have been around, with someone not in the service making a professional judgment about what really happened,” [former MI5 director-general Stephen] Lander said. “And it would be possible not to have to be dragged back in the press or anywhere else to stories about the Wilson plot, or about whether we investigated John Lennon, or studied Mickey Mouse … or all the rest. The answer is, ‘Read the book.’ “

The biggest open secret is that MI5 kept a file on Harold Wilson. Unsurprising too that Margaret Thatcher wanted to use the agency to spy on trade unions. The most interesting and contemporary revelation surrounds ‘Islamist terrorism’:

“The Defence of the Realm,” by Cambridge University historian Christopher Andrew, was commissioned by the agency, MI5, to mark its 100th anniversary this year — the first time a major intelligence agency has granted an outsider access to its secret files.

The 1,000-page volume, published Monday, describes an organization that fought Hitler with stunning success but struggled to combat Soviet espionage during the Cold War and initially failed to grasp the threat from Islamic extremism.

Andrew claims MI5 was “slow to see the coming menace of Islamist terrorism.” The book says the agency’s then-head, Stella Rimington, had never heard the name al-Qaida until a meeting in Washington in 1996, during which MI5 representatives were “taken aback by the interest” in Osama bin Laden shown by the Americans.

I wonder if the links between the agency and figures like Abu Qatada are investigated in the book:

ONE of al-Qaeda’s most dangerous figures has been revealed as a double agent working for MI5, raising criticism from European governments, which repeatedly called for his arrest.

Britain ignored warnings — which began before the September 11 attacks — from half a dozen friendly governments about Abu Qatada’s links with terrorist groups and refused to arrest him. Intelligence chiefs hid from European allies their intention to use the cleric as a key informer against Islamic militants in Britain.