On Friday 7 August 1998, Panorama broadcast its investigation into the MI6-funded operation which saw £100,000 of taxpayers' money being supplied to a group of Islamic extremists, and innocent civilians being murdered in a terrorist attack. The story was all over the front pages until Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told Breakfast with Frost that “these allegations have no basis in fact. It [sic] is pure fantasy.” An MI6 document which appeared on the Internet and a police murder enquiry have since indicated that Cook lied.

In these circumstances, you would think that the former head of a Security Service might, if they were giving you value for money, choose to add some further insight or understanding to events which unfolded when she was en poste and then became public as she began to write. Did she for example know anything of the operation as it happened? Did MI5 have any corroborating information or collateral, as it is known in the trade, to indicate MI6's guilt? Could she confirm whether MI6 sought permission for the attack? Could she indicate whether the minister had lied? Yet there is none of this in Open Secret, not even a comment on the ethics or legality of such an operation, not even a re-assuring word to state that MI5 was not involved in this assassination attempt.

But a book by a former head of service must address these issues – otherwise its publication is unjustifiable. Some commentators have attacked Dame Stella simply for putting pen to paper in the first place. It is not an argument you will see rehearsed in other Western democracies. As long as national security is respected, former officers are allowed to write their memoirs. Only totalitarian regimes try to keep their activities secret from their people forever. The free flow of information is the lifeblood of democratic discourse. The memoirs of former intelligence officers – or spies to use the vernacular – serve a very useful public interest: they put a human face on a shadowy organisation and illuminate understanding of the vital work the services carry out in defence of democracy. But only if they give the impression that their author is being as frank as possible and only being vague or evasive for genuine reasons of national security.

Memoirs which fail this test serve only to create even greater distrust of the services, while provoking suspicion that the author is simply cashing in on the fame or notoriety of being a former spook. That charge has been levelled at Dame Stella and I have to say I agree with it wholeheartedly. Open Secret really adds very little understanding to the work of the services and the challenges they face, or sheds light on any controversial matters which continue to exercise public concern, particularly on the left.

True, she does for the first time (that I am aware) specifically deny that MI5 was involved in the murder of Hilda Murrell, the peace campaigner who allegedly had papers connected to the sinking of the Belgrano. “MI5 does not kill people,” she adds unequivocally, although I can't help feeling this denial would have looked more timely if it had been made at the time of the original allegations rather than 15 years later. Then, perhaps, most of the country wouldn't now still be thinking that MI5 did murder her.

True, she denies the central tenet of Spycatcher, the Wilson Plot, and portrays Peter Wright as he really was. She then ruins it by condescendingly blaming the public for continuing to believe Wright's account. This is hardly surprising. The authorities banned it at the time. Cabinet Secretary Sir Robert Armstrong famously admitted that governments were “economical with the truth” in his testimony to have the book banned. And there has never been any independent investigation of the claims (although MI5 did research its archives, sending a report to government saying that the allegations against itself were baseless). If Dame Stella wants to convince the public, why doesn't MI5 simply open up its archives?

Candid

True, there is an amazingly candid insight into the drinking culture and the general laxity of personnel management, but as if they were issues of the past. I raised them when I first went on the record in August 1997 and later drunken officers lost classified computers, briefcases and documents. There is no evidence in Open Secret to indicate that MI5 is dealing with this serious security issue properly.

But the overall effect of Open Secret is to convince the reader that Dame Stella's allegiances still lie with the smug secret establishment who get off on knowing what others don't, rather than with the British public whose taxes paid her wages. That in itself would not be so bad if Dame Stella was a keen observer of the human condition, or could illuminate events and situations with a deft wit and a sure writing hand, or could just make it interesting. Hell, this woman worked at the heart of a secret organisation during periods of enormous unrest and change.

She first joined the service proper in 1969. She was head of the counter-subversion section during the 1984 miners' strike. She was a director of MI5 at the time of the SAS's Gibraltar operation and when flight PA103 was blown out of the sky over Lockerbie. She was deputy DG at the time when the service struggled to come to terms with the demise of its long-standing enemies in the Eastern bloc. She was DG when MI5 took over Irish republican investigations from the Met and diplomatic moves to get the Lockerbie two to trial were at their height.

Yet she is incapable or unwilling to add any detail which might veer from the official line to make any of this new and interesting. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to give the impression intelligence work is all James Bond or even George Smiley because it's not. But the work does still involve making difficult ethical and operational decisions. If you get it wrong, innocent people die. This creates moments of high tension and emotion, although you wouldn't know that from Dame Stella's plodding catalogue of her journey through the service.

Nor is it just the order or choice of the information, it's also her writing style. In the same way that a camel is a horse designed by a committee, Open Secret is concerned with a potentially exciting world of endless possibility but observed by a sub-Pooterish bureaucrat rather than an emotionally intelligent human being. Its lack of colour, its absence of essential detail compensated by the inclusion of mind-numbingly trite truisms, its lack of any warmth, its inability to engage the audience and failure to observe or draw conclusions of any insight make Open Secret read like a Stalinist textbook written by a prize pupil desperate to maintain her personal reputation but not make a mistake or offend either the teachers or the secret police.

Despite this it is what Dame Stella unwittingly gives away which makes the book. As we glimpse the public-school-head-girl, jolly-hockey-sticks enthusiasm through the bureaucratic mire, we are not laughing with her but at her. She gives a fascinating insight into the world of the Establishment, where she tells us without shame that recruits are chosen because they are reliable – read pliant – rather than for their ability. When being recruited she does not look forward to serving her country or protecting the lives of the British public. Instead, she thought she “would get some amusement and fun out of it”. Of her first MI5 post in the counter-subversion section, she confides: “After I had found out what I was supposed to be doing, I whiled away the time reading Dornford Yates novels under the desk.

Suspicion

And then there is the naïve, almost breathtaking, hypocrisy of an account of her visit to the post-Soviet Russian intelligence services: “We had come prepared with scripts about the need for laws and oversight in democracies. We in this country had quite recent experience of setting up systems which were working well. We had up-to-date advice to offer”. Very commendable you might think. But this was 1991, when the head of the SVR, MI5's equivalent in Russia, could be named in the British press but the Director General of MI5 could not. So much for openness. (Stella became the first head of MI5 to be named publicly, later that year. On the subject of idiotic “secrets”, she also uses Open Secret to name the old MI5 buildings which until recently were still an official state “secret”. How daring can you get?). The visit took place when MI5 had spent a single year as a legally constituted organisation after spending 80 years breaking the law and in the process violating minimum human rights standards (now recognised by the Human Rights Act). It was less than two years after the passing of the 1989 Official Secrets Act, which made it an offence for an intelligence officer to report intelligence service crimes to the police, even where these might concern assassination plots. It was three years before the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee was set up in the UK under the 1994 Intelligence Services Act. Even now that committee cannot properly carry out its oversight function because it cannot compel witnesses to answer questions or the services to hand over documents.

So where is the detailed evidence to indicate that the oversight “systems... were working well”, as she confides as a result of her trip to a wintry Moscow? In fact, the book suggests the very opposite: ministers were scared of MI5. They were loath to probe too closely into its activities, a situation which MI5 did nothing to rectify: “I think the then heads of the intelligence services probably felt that they could not trust civil servants and ministers to take a balanced view of what they were seeking to do. So they kept their distance.” But this was the standard practice not just in the 1930s or the 1950s but until MI5 was put on a legal footing in 1989. Dame Stella clearly does not like this kind of democratic accountability. In this context, one sentence stands as a testament to this book: “To the unfortunate scrutinee, it seemed like a sort of competition of beastliness”. Who outside the Famous Five, Billy Bunter or Just William books uses a word like ‘beastliness'? It somehow combines all her naivety; her incomprehension of the workings of democracy; and her lack of real commitment to public service. It sounds comically innocent yet almost hides its sentiment. Dame Stella does not like scrutiny or detailed questions about the service's activities and finances.

In fact, Open Secret provides more than ample evidence to indicate that Dame Stella was not the “ruthless and wily manipulator of Whitehall” that leaks to the press claimed her to be. Although she confesses that she is rather proud of this description, she confirms: “I don't think it was very accurate”. As already admitted in the book (and known by anyone there at the time) ministers gave MI5 the lead in Irish Republican investigations on the mainland in 1992 because the Met Special Branch had failed to prevent a PIRA mortar attack on the Cabinet a year before. The decision had everything to do with the individual fears of human beings (and the fall of the Berlin Wall, which had left MI5 with little to do). It had virtually nothing to do with Dame Stella's supposed skill in dealing with Whitehall. With the comic naivety we have grown used to, she confides in this regard: “Resource management was not something that appealed to me at all.” And it showed in the service, I can tell you.

You end up worrying how on merit a sheltered and rather naïve ex-public school girl and diplomatic wife could end up running the Security Service of a supposedly mature democracy. Then you realise we are not a democracy or a meritocracy in the sense that other Western countries are. As I've always said, MI5 has rather more in common with its Stalinist counterparts than Dame Stella would ever be wise enough to realise. Middle class KGB officers got on by toeing the party line. Her book confirms that the same conformity of attitude continues to exist within MI5 and to such an extent that the service was still using the Cold-War methods it used against subversives and spies to tackle fast moving targets like the Provisional IRA in the mid-1990s. Officers knew, as Dame Stella has admitted above, they got nothing for arguing their case. As a result, British civilian lives were put at greater risk from terrorist bombing.

If of course Dame Stella had chosen to demonstrate that she is capable of real public service, she would have commented on my disclosures. After all, the vast majority of them happened when she was in charge.She is therefore responsible. They concern murder, malpractice and mismanagement to the point of criminal negligence on the part of the services. Take as a minor example the failure of MI5 to incorporate Met records before taking over Irish Republican investigations in October 1992, a very serious matter (“A security service lives by its records,” Dame Stella points out in the book). Failure to incorporate and share intelligence is therefore bad enough in itself. Consider that at the same time, MI5 was busily revalidating Met phone tap warrants – even though they were out-of-date and based on inaccuracies – rather than investigating the new targets identified by industrious desk officers. It is no wonder that in the following six months PIRA launched more attacks on the British mainland than before or since. But such matters of public interest do not seem to concern Dame Stella. She is more occupied with airbrushing me from history, although she can't quite resist the cheap dig and the quick jibe at my expense, even where I am not named. This will, I fear, cost her dear. I am fed up of MI5's agents (using the word in its wider sense) smearing me with inaccuracies and falsehoods and otherwise questioning my motives. I intend to cite her as a witness in my case. If any good comes out of Open Secret, then it will be the aid it may provide to my defence against charges under the draconian OSA.

Dame Stella also does the Establishment's PR work when she claims that MI5 was good at identifying hostile intelligence officers during the Cold War. But that is the bread and butter of intelligence work. We should expect our services to be able to identify a KGB or Stasi member posted to the UK. After all, MI5 had a permanent telephone tap and constant static surveillance of hostile embassies. The more interesting question is why were the agents of the hostile IOs – the fifth columnists, academic talent spotters and spies with access to real secrets – never arrested or put on trial? I know of at least two who escaped prosecution, even though they were bang to rights. Dame Stella does not mention any of them. Indeed, she does not comment on the KGB granny spy Melita Norwood, even though MI5 was investigating the Mitrokhin archive at the time of Stella's stewardship of the service.

Tokenism

Heads will roll over this book, but not of course in government or the intelligence services. Some poor editors at Hutchinson must be reconsidering their career options though. Hutchinson advanced Dame Stella a reported £500,000 for the book in the belief it would recoup the vast majority of its investment through newspaper serialisation. My sources on The Guardian tell me it paid Dame Stella rather nearer £5,000 than the more widely circulated but erroneous figure of £100,000 to serialise the book. If this is the case, Open Secret will have to make up the £495,000 shortfall through profits from sales alone. Even if it had revealed that Prince Philip had personally hung, drawn and quartered Princess Diana on the orders of Osama Bin Laden, it would still have struggled to break even, given the general triteness and weariness of the rest of the narrative.

Without substantive new revelations or new pertinent detail, the book brings to mind Dr Johnson. When seeing a dog taught to walk on its hind legs, he famously commented: “The wonder is not that it is done well – although it seldom is – but that it is done at all”. It is a sentiment which neatly reflects my feelings about Open Secret. If we are to allow former officers to publish their memoirs in the public interest, then they have to add value to the intelligence debate. Otherwise, the whole exercise should not be done at all.