The Enemy Within by Seumas Milne

Author:Seumas Milne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Two days after Dalyell’s statement, Windsor adopted a more whimsical tone: ‘Scargill gave me the NUM job. If I had links with Stella Rimington, then so has he.’58

But Windsor would find it impossible to shake off the alleged Rimington connection. In the spring of 1993 – as the uproar over pit closures subsided and the rundown of the coalfields accelerated once again – Dalyell returned to his original Whitehall informants. I put written questions to one of Dalyell’s sources, who replied in a laconic, but explosive, manner.

Q: At what point did Roger Windsor become ‘involved’ with Stella Rimington – before he joined the NUM, during the strike or later?

A: Before.

Q: What did his ‘involvement’ amount to – in others words, was it through a third party and was he aware of it?

A: Yes, he was aware.

Q: What services did he perform for Mrs Rimington and MI5 – was it simply passing on information or was he guided in any of his behaviour inside the NUM by MI5? If the latter, what did MI5 seek to achieve by using him?

A: To ‘fuck up’ the NUM.

Q: Was his role in the 1990 campaign of allegations against Scargill and Heathfield in the Mirror and on the Cook Report in any way influenced by Mrs Rimington and MI5?

A: Sure!

A third source independently approached another Scottish Labour MP, George Galloway, who had become involved in the campaign to expose dirty tricks against the miners in 1991. When Stella Rimington became the first MI5 director-general to ‘go public’ and had herself photographed wreathed in smiles in July 1993, it became the trigger for another parliamentary motion – this time about Windsor. The initial signatories were Galloway, Dalyell, three mining MPs – Michael Clapham, Dennis Skinner and Jimmy Hood – and Robert Litherland.59

The MPs noted Stella Rimington’s ‘central role in operations against the miners during and after the coal strike of 1984–5’ and, in particular, ‘her deployment of agents provocateurs within the National Union of Mineworkers’. Among them, the MPs claimed, was Roger Windsor, ‘an agent of MI5 under Mrs Rimington, sent in to the NUM to destabilize and sabotage the union at its most critical juncture’. The Commons motion recalled that Windsor had made contact with Libyan officials through Altaf Abbasi and had ‘staged a televised meeting with Colonel Gaddafi, causing immense damage to the striking miners’. The NUM chief executive’s actions, the MPs went on, ‘led to serious and expensive internal disputes, notably a £100,000 libel damages settlement as a result of a letter Windsor forged in the name of David Prendergast of the UDM’. In March 1990, Windsor had been ‘the sole witness, paid £80,000 for his testimony by Robert Maxwell, behind allegations of corruption against the NUM leadership, published in the Daily Mirror, later proved to be entirely untrue’. Notwithstanding ‘recent cosmetic changes to its image’, the motion concluded, ‘the security service, including Mrs Rimington, has been responsible for the subversion of democratic liberties in Britain and should be brought to account’.60

This was

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