Secret email freed Foreign Office whistleblower

[TonyGosling]

Secret email that freed the mole at the Foreign Office

The case against Derek Pasquill, accused of handing a journalist secret papers, collapsed dramatically as it became clear it could embarrass the government. Peter Beaumont reports


Sunday January 13, 2008
The Observer, bless 'em
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/homeaffairs/story/0,,2240017,00.html

The bundle of documents delivered to the Crown Prosecution Service by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on 6 December last year should have contained few nasty surprises. The files told the alarming story of Derek Pasquill, a civil servant in a hitherto obscure new unit set up to improve relations with the Islamic world, who had broken one of the golden rules of a Crown servant.

Pasquill, 48, had handed over confidential documents to an Observer journalist after becoming concerned about Foreign Office contacts with Islamic groups and individuals who backed violence. Now he was facing trial for six breaches of Section 3 of the 1989 Official Secrets Act that, according to Mariot Leslie, the Foreign Office's director of defence and intelligence, had seriously damaged UK interests abroad and endangered the life of a colleague.

The CPS and Special Branch officers who put together the case at the behest of the then Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, were convinced that the secrets case against Pasquill was watertight.

They were wrong. Included among the documents being prepared for disclosure to Pasquill's defence team was a bombshell. It was an email that should have been handed to both the defence and the CPS many months before.

What it showed was that far from unanimity existing among the mandarins at the Foreign Office's imposing King Charles Street headquarters - as expressed forcefully in Leslie's witness statement - other voices were cautioning strongly that the Official Secrets Act was not appropriate for charging him. They also argued - according to one source who was familiar with the email - that 'under no circumstances was national security threatened'.

When the current Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, became aware of the email's contents in December, and the fact that it was on its way to the defence, he told colleagues there was 'no longer any chance of a prosecution'. Last week at the Old Bailey the case against Pasquill was dropped.

Suddenly, attention turned from the prosecution of a shy man who had risked his career and future - not for money, but for something he believed was fundamentally wrong with the government's policies - and towards the Foreign Office, which was accused of being 'malicious' and politically motivated in prosecuting Pasquill.

In the words of Labour MP and former Foreign Office Minister Denis MacShane last week, the law had been used as a 'steam hammer'. Now it is the Foreign Office that seems increasingly likely to be called to account, facing the threat from Pasquill's lawyers of a suit against them for malicious prosecution.

At the centre of the argument, not for the first time in the Pasquill affair, is the controversial figure of Mockbul Ali, an ambitious young civil servant accused by his critics of being an apologist for extreme Islamist views within Whitehall.

With the backing of Straw, Ali, Pasquill believed, had soft-soaped organisations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and its spiritual leader, the controversial Islamist preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who had expressed his support for Palestinian suicide bombers and whom Ali suggested should be allowed to visit the UK. He had offered similar support for Delwar Hossain Sayeedi, a Bangladeshi MP who preaches violent hatred against the West, proclaiming him to be 'mainstream'..........................http://politics.guardian.co.uk/h omeaffairs/story/0,,2240017,00.html