My new novel, The Shame Archive, began with a handful of questions. Do MI5 or MI6 have recordings of people in compromising situations? If so, how is it stored? And what would happen if it all leaked? The roots of this curiosity lay in an abiding interest in a less talked about side of intelligence, that of psychological operations. Plenty has been written about agent running, but the idea of a dirty tricks department remains somewhat taboo. Though not on the internet’s more esoteric fringes.

A decade ago, trying to research MI6, I’d regularly come across odd but detailed blogs by someone calling themselves ‘Nick’ who alleged that he was sexually abused by a group of men in the 1970s and 1980s, taken to parties where he was handed over to high-profile figures from politics, the military and intelligence services. ‘Nick’ included just enough detail to sound authentic, but the posts seemed over the top. Indeed, perhaps reflecting my own paranoia, I became suspicious that this was precisely the idea: a convenient MI6-crafted decoy to distract those Googling the dark side of intelligence work.

I didn’t think much of them again until, a few years later, I went online and saw that the claims had been picked up by a journalist, and subsequently the police who launched an investigation. This was in the wake of Savile, when accusations of abuse and cover-up had a new credibility. The operation garnered significant media attention but was later criticized for its handling and the lack of evidence. In 2016, the Metropolitan Police publicly apologized to those falsely accused and closed the investigation without bringing any charges.

‘Nick’ was discredited, and himself charged with perverting the course of justice, but the rationale put forward for an establishment cover-up intrigued me. The claim was that by suppressing these secrets, MI5 and MI6 could place pressure on individuals of interest to them. The threat of blackmail has certainly been part of tradecraft more broadly. In Northern Ireland, where all gloves were off, British security services were closely involved with the Gemini Health Studios on Antrim Road, a brothel in which cameras were used to record people and then force them to spy on the IRA. Much darker speculation surrounds the Kincora boys’ home in East Belfast, where several individuals with Loyalist ties were eventually arrested for systematic child abuse. A Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry criticised MI5 officers for consistently obstructing police investigations, and for the destruction of MI5 files relating to the home. MI5 successfully persuaded the government not to set up a full public inquiry, leaving the theory that they were in some way exploiting the perpetrators believable.

But for evidence of the amount of personal secrets that must be washing around in intelligence service archives it’s not necessary to look further than the vetting process for their own staff. Until 1991 there was a ban on gay men and women serving in MI6 or anywhere else in the Diplomatic Service. The likes of double-agents Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt had cemented an association between homosexuality and spying for the Soviet Union, and anyone harbouring a secret personal life was deemed vulnerable to blackmail. It is inevitable, therefore, that MI6 kept a close eye on the private lives of many Foreign Office employees. There was a similar situation at the BBC who, with the help of MI5, kept extensive records on their staff’s political and sexual orientation. And if this is what we do to our own, what might we do to our enemies? We don’t hesitate to attribute the art of kompromat to Russia, but how often is it practised by those tasked with protecting Western interests?

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