The abandoned criminal case, involving Westminster researchers accused of passing material to Beijing, reveals the ghost in the machine: the British establishment’s rank hypocrisy over what constitutes national security. To put it simply, espionage isn’t espionage when politically it’s inconvenient. For the police and security services, this poses an obvious dilemma. Why bother chasing spies in the first place? Such hypocrisy was ever thus, from the kid-glove treatment of the Cambridge Five, to MI6’s decision to hide Michael Foot’s suspected status as a Soviet “agent of influence” before the 1983 election.

For decades, then, our political culture has been seeped in opacity and hypocrisy, something I’ve encountered myself. As a special branch detective, I remember a routine financial vetting review. This was invasive — yet entirely necessary. Any counterintelligence officer knows employees with money troubles constitute a potential point of compromise. I, a lowly detective, spent hours accounting for every penny I’d spent over the past year.

I saw other incongruities, especially where the Official Secrets Acts was concerned. When MI5 officer David Shayler removed a hoard of secret files from the records section at Thames House, we found them in a newspaper editor’s safe. This constituted several offenses, including under the 1911 Official Secrets Act, which features prominently in the Chinese scandal. Created to combat German naval espionage, it is a stuffy Edwardian sofa of a law, its definition of what constituted “damage” to the state better suited to the age of the telegram.

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Faced with these challenges in the Shayler case, our financial investigator suggested an elegant solution: simply charge the newspaper editor with the bog-standard offense of Handling Stolen Goods. This, we at Scotland Yard agreed, was a good idea; the CPS, and no doubt the Attorney General, disagreed. This was during the early days of New Labour, when news management trumped all. I later heard rumors that a senior Labour figure confessed there was no appetite for “going to war with The Mail on Sunday.”

This culture of “rules for thee but not for me” runs rampant across all political parties and Whitehall elites. That’s especially frustrating when public bodies spend precious time and resources fostering a “security culture” — one where operational security (OPSEC) is paramount. Intrusive vetting is one common tactic here, with probing questions about a candidate’s political views and private life (sex life included). So-called “clear desk” policies are obsessively policed too: leaving a document on a desk while you pop to the loo can lead to a reprimand. All the while, restrictions are habitually placed on private conduct, from being a member of a controversial political party to having contact with foreign nationals.

Then there are the so-called “STRAP” rules, a codeword to designate a ban on the use of digital devices in areas where sensitive intelligence is handled. Yet as so often, senior police officers, or civil servants, seem strangely exempt here. I remember attending a mandatory GCHQ OPSEC briefing, where a technical officer from GCHQ demonstrated how easily everyday devices can be hacked. When he asked what might shield a phone from hostile compromise, a wag put up his hand. “The rank of chief superintendent and above,” he suggested, “protects mobiles from all foreign intelligence services.”

Like much else in Britain, then, attitudes to secrecy appear two-tier. Over my own career, I often got the impression that senior officials conflate their own importance — and political hobbyhorses — with those of the wider United Kingdom. And as Jonathan Powell may yet learn, backroom deals are all very well until you piss on the wrong people. Either way, realpolitik becomes more difficult in an era of instant rebuttal, quicksilver-fast social media and febrile, impermanent governments.

You grow pretty cynical after a career in the police — but even I’m shocked by the unsightly infighting between the Government and CPS, not least because of the Prime Minister’s previous (and much-referenced) incarnation as director of public prosecutions. The current DPP, Stephen Parkinson, is a Westminster lifer, not known for rocking boats. Significantly, Parkinson is also the first DPP who served as a solicitor rather than a barrister. Could he, finally, be giving the KC old boy’s network the finger, standing his ground against the elite consensus? Such details are the cogs upon which mighty wheels turn. Then there are the Cabinet Office veterans Simon Case and Mark Sedwill, both veritable Jacques Cousteaus of the Deep State, and both immersed in national security matters.

How, then, does this Whitehall’s dead, invisible hand impact actual investigations? The China case is perhaps instructive. Unlike TV spooks, real intelligence officers don’t mysteriously appear at crime scenes and tell the cops what to do. The dark deeds are performed in the Cabinet Office, or in Whitehall pubs. Then there are the courts, where sensitive evidence is subjected to endless voire dire, or meta-trials, as lawyers join silky verbal battle to establish the admissibility of evidence. These arguments happen in camera or in a judge’s chambers, or else involve issuing “Public Interest Immunity” certificates, which render testimony secret. The whole process is typically English: nominally open, but in fact very, very closed. To be fair, opacity is sometimes needed. The state is entitled to keep secrets, but that’s exactly why the privilege shouldn’t be casually abused. Certainly, I suspect the police case was solid — the CPS don’t charge this stuff lightly.

Then there’s the issue of the Government’s attitude to counterintelligence, which occasionally acts as a brake on diplomacy. It’s difficult to drink champagne at the ambassador’s reception if the bloke who planted microphones in the Ferrero Rochers is on trial at the Old Bailey. Capacity is another factor. When I worked on the Alexander Livinenko investigation, almost 20 years ago, MI5’s Russia desk had atrophied. After 9/11, tracking foreign spies was of limited interest to a government focused on counterterrorism and, this being New Labour, “community cohesion”. Besides, City bankers were happily stuffing their Church’s brogues with pilfered Russian cash, earning Britain the nickname “The Laundry”. Given Litvinenko’s murder was a naked act of radiological terrorism, I’m amazed it never escalated further. Which brings us back to money: pre-2008, New Labour bet the bank on financial services, and lost. It’s a gamble we’ve been paying for ever since, as the Chinese know.

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This brings us to the nub of the problem, one which Keir Starmer seems to have missed: the Government’s blatant gaslighting over China. In the end, whether or not the People’s Republic constitutes an “enemy” feels insultingly nebulous; as far as I know, such considerations have never been much of an issue before. Besides, even Jonathan Hall, the government’s own advisor on national security law, agrees China is an obvious threat. And Hall, the most fair-minded and experienced barrister in his field, isn’t known for partisanship. This speaks to the depths of high-level disagreement over this issue, with China presenting a unique problem for British policymakers. The communist state views close governmental involvement in private enterprise — including intelligence — as a given. Virtually all Chinese technology, business and diplomacy serves the Communist Party’s insatiable appetite for sensitive information.

And so politicians wilfully ignore the obvious: what we see as spying, the Chinese consider due diligence, simply part of Beijing’s game of hegemonic chess with the United States. In this reckoning, the UK is basically irrelevant, whatever hawks like Tom Tugendhat might imply. We’re surely in no position to retaliate with an intelligence campaign of our own, particularly given the parlous state of our economy. And so, despite our allegedly Rolls Royce civil service, diplomatic corps and spooks, Powell seems to have decided that acquiescence is the only game in town. Counterespionage, old boy? Over-egged. Needs to be seen in context. And, perhaps, those Chinese businessmen will rescue our steel industry in return? Just, whatever you do, don’t tell the plebs.

The entire affair suggests a system in meltdown. Dysfunctional, arrogant and — crucially — impoverished, Britain is caught in a trap of its own design, where we chase Chinese pennies like paupers teased by ancien régime aristocrats. All the while, the national security charade continues. The official secrets, the MI5 briefings and intelligence-gathering. All poured into the colander that is the Cabinet Office, leaked, lost or hacked to whoever wants to steal it. Should the scandal end Starmer’s unhappy tenure as Prime Minister, it would be apt. A lawyer to his bones, he seems convinced he can prove that black is white and night is day, that a secret isn’t a secret and an enemy isn’t an enemy.

The phrase “conspiracy theory” was once synonymous with delusional, rationally absurd notions. And yet our executive, intelligence community, and Justice Department have undeniably conspired against Donald Trump and other perceived threats to the state. At the same time, Israel’s Mossad has executed unprecedented operations against its enemies, some of which would be literally unbelievable — exploding pagers? Really? — had they not actually happened. Is it conspiratorial to note that these are beloved tropes of spy fiction?

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Will Trump make me Poet Laureate?

By David Mamet

Where might Islamic Jihadists have discovered the idea of flying aircraft into iconic structures? In Tom Clancy’s techno-thriller Debt of Honor (1994), a Japanese terrorist flies a 747 into the Capitol, and in Thomas Harris’s Black Sunday (1975), Islamic terrorists rig the Goodyear blimp as a bomb and fly it into the Super Bowl.

Many writers were literally secret agents. Frederick Forsyth, the creator of the techno-thriller, was a spy for the British secret service while working as a journalist. So, too, were Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham. Ian Fleming worked in wartime London as a strategist for Churchill’s saboteurs, the Special Operations Executive. His Bond books, though enjoyable, are neither technically interesting nor especially informative. In Casino Royale, for example, Bond carries a .25 caliber Beretta, a purse pistol, which any shooter will tell you is a “good thing to have if you don’t have a gun”. In his next outing, 007 has upgraded to a .32 caliber Walther, which is not much better.

When enlisted in the War Effort, Fleming’s imagination conjured a plan to capture a German seaplane, fill it with British commandos, then stage an engine-out landing near some Nazi ship or base that needed destruction. It was never implemented.

One of the grandest wartime schemes did become a book: The Man Who Never Was. It concerns Operation Mincemeat, which was a plot whereby a British vagrant, who had died from ingesting rat poison, was dressed and accoutred as an officer in the Royal Marines. His body was carried by submarine to the coast of Spain where it was ejected and swiftly washed ashore. The briefcase handcuffed to his arm carried correspondence indicating that the upcoming British invasion would target Sardinia. The Nazis fell for the ruse, diverting forces from Sicily — the actual Allied objective. One of the authors of the original Operation Mincemeat memo was Commander Ian Fleming, so that’s a horse on me.

Operation Mincemeat was also memorialized in a rather good 1956 film starring Clifton Webb. A lesser-known version is Duff Cooper’s 1950 novel Operation Heartbreak. Not only a novelist, Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich (1890-1954) was also a prominent Tory politician, First Lord of the admiralty, and, after the war, ambassador to France. During the First World War he served in the trenches as a Lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards. During Churchill’s time in the “Wilderness”, and, in his Prime Ministry, Duff was his closest ally. In his retelling of Mincemeat, he has a British colonel, who just missed combat in the Great War, trapped on desk duty in the Second. After he dies of a heart attack, it is his body used in the ruse.

At least we know Mincemeat definitely happened. We have no such assurances for its prequel, a story that blurs the lines between fact and fiction even if it never ended up on bookshelves.

Richard Meinertzhagen was chief of British military intelligence in East Africa at the outset of the First World War. Transferred to Egypt, he operated in Palestine against the Turks. He’s most famous for the so-called Haversack Ruse, the older brother of Mincemeat. On reconnaissance, Meinertzhagen contrived to get too close to the Ottoman lines — which promptly tried to shoot him. Despite nearly falling off his horse, Meinertzhagen managed to gallop back to safety, though not before dropping a haversack full of (false) information about General Allenby’s plans for the recapture of Jerusalem. It’s a cracking tale, and as its appearance in Mincemeat suggests, a tactic probably as old as warfare. And perhaps it’s even true.

Why should I doubt it? Well, off the field, Meinertzhagen was a colossal fraud. Acclaimed as one of Britain’s premier ornithologists, he sent back undiscovered specimens from his posts around the world. Their pride of place in museums was marred only by the discovery that they were, universally, cut-and-paste assemblages of unrelated birds. Such is the fondness for Meinertzhagen in the Spy Thriller community that a homage was paid him in one of the Smiley books. Smiley has assembled and dispersed his beloved “watchers” to surveil an opponent. He names them, and among them are “the two Meinertzhagen girls”.

As a fellow fraud, John le Carré must have loved the rotter. He was one of the great writers of the 20th century and along with Patrick O’Brien, and our George V. Higgins, he elevated the genre novel to something superior — to the status of “art”. His books, like Joseph Conrad’s spy classics, are suffused with pathos and sadness. He was one of the century’s most successful writers, both artistically and financially.

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Who, then, would indict him as a fraud? Le Carré himself, self-confessed as a hypocrite — not as a writer, but as a spy. All his books concern the fight of the secret service against the Communist threat, even as its agents battle Whitehall corruption and treason. All his work is about disillusionment, none more so than A Perfect Spy (1986), whose hero, like le Carré himself, was raised by a confidence-man father. The protagonist, unlike le Carré, becomes a double-agent, so enamoured of acceptance that he serves two warring powers simultaneously. Upon being discovered, he goes mad and takes his own life.

A fictional soldier of fortune for America was Joe Gall. He featured in 20 thrillers by Philip Atlee. These were yarns featuring sadism and pornography — unsurprisingly attractive to me as an adolescent boy. In each of the books he (like James Bond) falls in love with a new woman who is murdered by the book’s end.

The mythic Gall was a contract agent for a government outfit so secret it even lacked a name. He was notable for his various martial skills, and for an absolute immorality in the service of his country. But more to the point is the author’s pedigree. Philip Atlee was James Atlee Phillips, brother of David Atlee Phillips, who, it seems, was the CIA handler of Lee Harvey Oswald. Now that we are able to peruse the JFK assassination files in which he features, we can not only enjoy the light they shed on conspiracy, but also look forward to the subsequent conclusion that the files themselves have been faked.

Yet barely had Ratcliffe opened his mouth than he faced furious attack. The CIA’s carefully cultivated friends in the press — media relations, Hollywood included, are the agency’s outstanding skill — assailed the director and the White House for a dangerous misstep. “He might be right that a leaner CIA could be meaner,” proclaimed David Ignatius in The Washington Post. “But how can he be sure the buyouts aren’t paring more muscle than fat?” Actually one must hope that many, very many, will take their chance to leave. The sad truth, confirmed by my extended work as a contractor for the CIA, to say nothing of encounters in the field, is that the Agency lost its way years ago — and now increasingly relies on secrecy to conceal its decay.

The CIA does have plenty of people who serve in “stations” overseas. That’s a dramatic term, for these places are actually humdrum offices in foreign embassies. This is where CIA officers work when they serve abroad, in full view of their host country’s intelligence services, which can keep them under constant observation if they so wish. That happens in China and Russia, of course, but also in places like Athens. Because Greece was a country where CIA employees were attacked during the Cold War, officers there are still monitored for their own good.

It is therefore obvious that officers working out of embassies find it impossible to “do things that no one else can do” — or indeed very much at all. In allied countries, CIA officers need not be detected, let alone followed, because they are “declared” to their host country. Not that this really matters: everyone knows who they are anyway.

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The CIA does have another category of officers, one it strives very hard to misrepresent as the real thing, as people willing to do “what no one else can do”. These are the NOCs — the “non-official cover officers” — who do not live in diplomatic housing and do not work in diplomatic offices. Instead they live “on the economy” in regular flats and houses, pretending to be business people, or retirees, or artists, or anything else that sounds sufficiently innocuous.

That begs the question: why is Ratcliffe complaining? In theory, NOCs seem to fit the bill of dynamic field officers, and the CIA certainly does its best to keep their true identity secret. Some years ago, in fact, its officials made a huge fuss when a NOC’s identity was compromised in the course of a political controversy leading up to the Iraq War.

What is missing though, is that crucial line: “going where no one else can go”. The truth is that the most secret of all CIA secrets is that NOCs only serve in very safe countries, most unlikely to arrest (let alone torture) agents if they are detected. Think of France, Italy or Thailand: all places where reporters, tourists and maiden aunts travel safely every day.

One NOC who tripped up while trying to cajole secrets from a trade official — the latter was willing if the NOC slept with him, became indignant when she refused, and reported her to local security — did all she did (and refused to do) in a major European capital. Once the scandal came out, she was flown back to the US without incident. Another NOC officer I knew was competent enough to operate covertly in Warsaw, but only when Poland was no longer a communist country and was trying to join NATO.

There have been a few cases of US citizens recruited to visit dangerous countries: including one case I know of which ended in disappearance and probable death. But that particular individual was not a trained CIA officer, willing to risk all for the country, but rather an older gent hired expressly for the job. Remarkably unqualified, he would not have uncovered any secrets even if he had stayed uncaught.

In other words, then, the CIA does not have true undercover agents, genuinely competent intelligence officers who can enter foreign countries covertly, that is through legal entry points but with a persuasive false identity, or else in clandestine fashion by slipping over the border undetected. Without one or the other, the CIA will always find it impossible to have officers in hostile countries.

Take Iran for example. The CIA considers the Islamic Republic a no-go zone — because, ever since the seizure of its embassy in 1979, the US has had no diplomatic presence there. For this reason, so the theory goes, Langley has no officers who can enter the Islamic Republic, blend into the population, and begin conducting operations.

Actually both those things are highly feasible: there is no way that the gendarmerie, the regular army or the Revolutionary Guards could possibly guard Iran’s 3,662 miles of land borders against infiltration. More to the point, Mossad gets in and out of Iran at will. Smuggling agents in either covertly or clandestinely, the Israelis regularly pull off spectacular coups against their Iranian foe. That includes everything from the theft of truckloads filled with nuclear documents, to the killing of heavily guarded nuclear scientists. Mossad even got to Ismail Haniyeh, the erstwhile leader of Hamas, by blowing him up while he was staying in a heavily guarded Revolutionary Guards VIP guesthouse — supposedly within a “secure” government zone in Tehran.

One could reasonably argue that the US is powerful enough not to need such exploits. Yet the CIA certainly needs to operate in Iran — and in China and Russia — to achieve something much less dramatic than assassinations: verifying “assets”. To take a theoretical example, imagine a medical doctor from Isfahan, recruited by the CIA on a visit to Frankfurt. Before returning home, he agrees to send information he hears from his son: a nuclear engineer, or perhaps an officer in the Revolutionary Guards, in exchange for money deposited to a German bank.

There is no need for James Bond skills to check the source’s credentials. A world-class holiday destination, complete with stunning Safavid architecture around its vast main square, Isfahan will always attract foreign tourists. Nor would an agent need much to verify the authenticity of the new asset. Things would be as simple as visiting the doctor in his office and verifying he exists: tourists get upset stomachs all the time. With a few questions, none of them compromising, the officer could also ensure that the man recruited in Frankfurt really is a doctor, and not a trolling security man or else just a con artist angling for a quick buck.

This is only a hypothetical, but there is clear evidence that Langley suffers in the real world too. For decades, certainly, the Agency has struggled to verify its assets: it was only after the fall of the Soviet Union that the CIA realized that, though many doubtless existed, they actually worked for the Russians, while genuine defectors were compromised by clumsy attempts at communication.

There have been more recent bungles too. After Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the Agency wrongly predicted that the Zelensky government would not fight in earnest, even suggesting Russian troops would conquer Kyiv within 24 hours. That frightened the White House into evacuating all US diplomats, which in turn caused another 20 countries to do the same. That might even have demoralized Zelensky into surrendering — but for the fact he already knew the CIA was incompetent.

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The essential challenge here is language skills. Even Obama’s CIA director, famed for his supposed Middle East expertise, apparently struggled with Arabic. Despite studying the language in Cairo, and serving in Saudi Arabia, he asked me to stick to English when we once met. With personnel like that, it obviously becomes much harder to engage with sources abroad, let alone survive for months at a time in hostile territory.

The reason for this inadequacy, it turns out, is not that Americans are notoriously lazy about learning foreign languages. Rather, the wound is self-inflicted by the Agency itself, something I totally failed to understand for many years, even though I worked closely with one CIA director and was a close friend of two more. The situation only became clear when my truly stellar research assistant, who went on to a splendid career elsewhere in government, applied to join the Agency at my suggestion.

Despite knowing two difficult languages really well, my colleague was rejected very early in the process. Why? Because of the CIA’s inflexible method of “vetting” applicants. They were not interviewed by experienced operators, nor by accomplished analysts with a deep understanding of their patch. Instead, would-be agents have to fill out tedious security forms, listing every place where they ever lived, or even just slept in for a single night. They also have to list every person they have ever had dealings with — whether tenants or landlords, lovers or friends, no matter how fleeting the relationship ultimately was.

It goes without saying that the sort of young American suited to life as a NOC — those who have studied or lived overseas, and are equally comfortable working or flirting in foreign languages — stand no hope of passing the security screening. Many of the security people I have run into seem to be Mormons, disciplined folk who forgo alcohol and even coffee. Applicants born in Utah, raised in Utah, who studied in Utah and married a spouse from Utah sail through the application process. But when tasked with working an asset overseas, they are destined to fail.

That, of course, leads to one further question: why? Why has the CIA been so obsessed with security that it excludes the people it needs? One explanation is that it is just too big. With over 20,000 staff, it employs far too many people to be vetted by individual experts. Rather, it must rely on very stringent criteria, applied by rather simple people, to exclude all risk — and the most promising candidates. Whatever the cause, anyway, it’s clear that Ratcliffe is right to make room for fresh talent, whether hard-nosed agents in the field or insightful analysts back home.

To put the recent revelations in context, Greece has as proud a tradition of politically motivated phone-tapping as any other country. I still chuckle when I recall what happened in the early hours of a May morning in 2015 during my short stint as Greece’s finance minister. Soon after I had concluded a sensitive conversation with my friend Jeff Sachs, the phone rang. It was Jeff again, this time laughing uncontrollably.

“You will not believe this,” he said. “Five minutes after we hung up, I received a call from the National Security Council. They asked me if I thought you meant what you’d told me.” I had fully expected my phone had been tapped, but two things made Jeff’s news remarkable. First, the eavesdroppers not only had the capacity to instantly recognise that what I had said to Jeff was of real significance, but they must also have had an open line to America’s NSC. Second, they had no compunction whatsoever about revealing that they were tapping my phone!

I was, of course, neither the first nor the highest-ranking Greek politician to have been honoured with such attention. We now know that, back in 2008, the phones of the then-prime minister, his wife, half the cabinet and close to 100 government officials were tapped by US agencies. Nor was eavesdropping monopolised by US agencies. In 2015, operatives of EYP — the Greek intelligence agency — dropped into my ministerial office to check for bugs, and pointed out the window at two vans which, they said, belonged to the German Embassy and contained listening equipment trained at me and my team. A few months later, the Prime Minister I was serving under told me that the EYP’s head had been spreading the toxic lie that I was in cahoots with Wolfgang Schäuble (Germany’s then Finance Minister) to get Greece out of the eurozone.

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Clearly, in view of such experiences, I was not at all surprised, let alone shocked, at the news that EYP has recently been eavesdropping on politicians and journalists. So, why am I branding this latest incident as Greece’s Watergate? Why do I go so far as to believe it poses a greater threat to democracy than Richard Nixon’s original?

The short answer is: because Nixon was forced to resign once it was revealed that he had endeavoured to cover up spying. Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the current Greek Prime Minister, has in contrast succeeded in neutralising the democratic institutions set up to maintain a semblance of legality — before they neutralised him.

The sequence of events leading to the exposure of Greece’s Watergate scandal began in July 2019, immediately after Mr Mitsotakis won the last general election on behalf of New Democracy, our conservative party. One of the very first decrees he issued, as incoming Prime Minister, was one that gave his office direct control over and responsibility for EYP. “Why on earth is the PM taking over the supervision of EYP?”, I remember a parliamentary colleague asking me that very day. It was, indeed, a curious move.

Our trepidation only grew following two personnel choices. First, Mitsotakis appointed a nephew of his, Grigoris Dimitriadis, to oversee EYP on his behalf. Secondly, he chose as EYP’s new head Panagiotis Kontoleon, the CEO of the Greek franchise of the private security firm G4 — a man with no record of public service, and whose appointment Mitsotakis could only complete after amending the relevant law to remove the prerequisite that the EYP chief holds a postgraduate degree.

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Given his concerted and very public efforts to take complete control of the state intelligence agency, something no other PM had ever done, it became impossible to shift blame to some other minister once the faeces hit the proverbial fan.

Of the more than 17,000 wiretaps that EYP admits it has placed during the last year alone, two cases are at the heart of the current scandal. The first is that of Thanasis Koukakis, an investigative journalist who dared look into Greek shipowners’ loans that had been illegally written off by the Bank of Piraeus (one of the banks that Greek taxpayers have had to repeatedly bailout). It turns out that Koukakis was one of EYP’s “subjects of interest”, an outrage that would have probably gone unnoticed without the second, higher profile, case.

It was this case that broke the camel’s back: an investigation begun by the European Parliament’s IT department accidentally revealed that Nikos Androulakis, an MEP belonging to PASOK (the formerly dominant party in Greek politics), was being phone-tapped by EYP. It was explosive news because, at the time his phone was tapped, Androulakis was contesting the leadership of PASOK — a contest that he, eventually, won. The significance of that contest cannot be understated, since its outcome mattered a great deal to Mitsotakis and his governing New Democracy party.

Since the middle of the pandemic, opinion polls have persistently suggested that the next election, which must take place by July 2023, will result in a hung parliament. While Mitsotakis’ New Democracy seemed likely to remain the largest party, it was not even close to an absolute majority. PASOK, in third place, was therefore positioned as kingmaker: whoever the party chose to side with would end up in government.

The stakes of PASOK’s leadership race suddenly seemed very high. Of the three main candidates, the one that would almost certainly choose to back New Democracy and Mitsotakis to form a government was Andreas Loverdos — an MP and former minister who had served gladly in New Democracy-PASOK coalition governments between 2011 and 2015. Every newspaper, radio and television station supporting Mitsotakis was rooting for Loverdos to beat Androulakis in the PASOK leadership primary. Is it any wonder that the revelation of EYP’s surveillance of Androulakis was big news? In a period during which the ruling party was rooting for Androulakis’s opponent, the nation’s spy agency — which ruling party’s leader and his nephew controlled and supervised to the full — was tapping Androulakis’ phone!

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As if that were not sufficiently outrageous, the Prime Minister doubled down with a disgraceful reaction to the ensuing uproar. In a six hour-long parliamentary debate on the subject, the Mitsotakis repeatedly insisted that the wiretap on Androulakis was perfectly legal, even if it was politically disingenuous. When we pressed him on the legal and logical justification for tapping Androulakis’ phone, he referred vaguely to grounds of “national security” — claiming that such sensitive matters cannot be spoken about in an open parliamentary session. At that point, we — the leaders of the opposition parties — called his bluff and voted to convene a special parliamentary Select Committee, which would debate these “national security” grounds in confidence.

And so it was that, a few days later, a Select Committee convened. Among the summoned witnesses were, naturally, the two men Mitsotakis had appointed to run EYP: Dimitriadis and Kontoleon. Both appeared in front of the Committee and both, reading from the same invisible script, repeated the same mantra: “We cannot answer your questions because the information the Select Committee seeks is privileged.” After a few pointless and cacophonous sessions, lacking any power to arrest witnesses for contempt of Parliament, the Committee disbanded and the case was closed.

And here’s the rub. Politicians, like corporations and athletes, often try out illegitimate practices to tilt the playground in their favour. In our surveillance society — in which our every move, thought or click is turned into a valuable commodity — phone-tapping is, unfortunately, commonplace. However, when a President or a Prime Minister seeks direct control over the nation’s spooks in order to press them, and their gadgets, into spying on opponents, they cross a Rubicon. If a leader is caught red-handed, our democratic institutions may be judged on whether they can neutralise him. In the case of Watergate, it was hard to unveil Nixon’s complicity, but the moment the President’s involvement was established, he was gone. In the case of Greece’s Watergate, our parliamentary sovereignty was jettisoned so that the guilty PM could stay put. In this sense, Greece’s Watergate bodes more ill for democracy than America’s original.

The reader may, understandably, ask: why should this defeat of Greece’s parliamentary democracy, however sad it may be, matter in the grander scheme of things? Because, my dear reader, you should never underestimate Greece’s capacity to be the harbinger of terrible developments that will come to your shores before you know it. Can you recall where the Cold War began? Not in the streets of Berlin in 1945, but in the streets of Athens in December 1944! Do you remember where the eurozone crisis began? Not in Italy or Spain or France, but in Greece in 2010! For some reason I am not privy to, my country has a proven record of giving birth not only to some important values, like democracy, but also to existential threats to Western civilisation. Which is why the ever-complacent West should be paying attention as our Greek Watergate scandal unfolds.