December 3, 2008

The mole truth: what are whistleblowers' motivations?

Is it public interest and courage, or sheer egotism that drives people to spill the beans about their Whitehall bosses?

When Christopher Galley, the 26-year-old civil servant who leaked Home Office documents to the Tory immigration spokesman, Damian Green, faced the media on Monday, he didn't look proud of himself; he didn't set his jaw at a defiant tilt, or cross his arms and stare out the baying mob. On the other hand, he didn't hang his head in shame, either, or do anything to indicate any great contrition for his sins.

As his solicitor adopted his most patrician tone to mount young Christopher's defence, mostly what he looked like was that person we can all remember being, but hope fervently never to have to be again after we've reached the age of majority: the abject pupil, hauled in front of the authorities after an offence for which we know we're culpable, but for which we can hardly believe that we're going to have to pay.

Galley, the silent heart of the whole business, may also be the most interesting person involved. He is certainly significantly juicier than benign old Damian Green, who most people seem to agree couldn't manipulate his way out of a wet paper bag.

But then, the mole is always a fascinating figure. We long for the moment when their lawyer will release them from the bond of silence, in the hope that they might explain everything we want to know: just what does it take to summon the will to nab a pile of documents? Is it courage, or is it arrogance? Is it bold, or is it needy? And is it born of righteousness – or nothing but the will to power? To answer these weighty questions, the best place to start is probably with what our leaker is not.

It seems pretty clear that young Christopher Galley is not Clive Ponting, the civil servant who felt he had no choice but to leak information about the General Belgrano affair to the Labour opposition in 1984. Ponting's leak showed that the Royal Navy had attacked the Argentinian warship when it was outside the exclusion zone around the Falklands, an allegation that went right to the heart of the Government's moral standing.

Even if it's hard to believe that anyone blows the whistle without at least a hint of egotistic satisfaction, it's equally hard to see Ponting's action as anything but fundamentally moral, as the jury that acquitted him of breaking the Official Secrets Act agreed. Galley's leaks, in contrast, don't have quite the same dramatic flavour: there's a legitimate public interest justification for passing on information about the Government granting security guard licences to illegal immigrants, and giving one a job. And there may even be a hazy defence for the leaking of Jacqui Smith's prediction that a recession could lead to an increase in crime – but none of these revelations can quite compete with the news that your Government has sunk a foreign battleship.

So, Galley finishes below Ponting in our moral righteousness stakes. By the same token, he's probably also lagging behind Sarah Tisdall, the FCO officer who passed information on to The Guardian in 1983 about the surreptitious arrival of American nuclear weapons; and he's trailing Katherine Gun, the GCHQ translator who revealed a US plan to bug diplomats at the UN in the run-up to the war in Iraq. After all, Tisdall went to prison, and Gun faced the prospect of a trial until the very last minute; the stakes for Galley, barring some stunning revelation in the next few days, do not seem anything like so high.

If Galley is disappointed that his heroic revelations aren't deemed quite at the top of the pile, he can at least console himself with the fact that he stands above the most despicable moles, whose actions not only exacted a terrible cost, but did so for the most trivial of reasons – or none at all. Step forward Robert Hanssen, the most shockingly successful double-agent of the Cold War, who sold US secrets to the Russians throughout a 22-year career at the FBI. At the bottom of the table, it's a close call between Hanssen and Kim Philby, our homegrown Soviet spy; but the late Philby at least had the fig leaf of ideological fervour to justify his actions. Both men caused deaths; Hanssen just did it for the money.

Where, then, is Christopher Galley left? He's hardly a moral beacon; he's nothing like a monster. Instead, he occupies the middle ground, edging slightly ahead of the ambiguous likes of David Shayler – whose whistleblowing on MI5 in the early Nineties may have been partly the result of moral outrage, but may also have involved a healthy portion of narcissism – and standing a little behind Cathy Massiter, who revealed that her MI5 boss had been bugging left-wing politicians for 15 years, but took an awfully long time to admit it.

But perhaps this is just plain wrong: perhaps Galley shouldn't be in the same league as these heroes and villains at all. Because, in the end, his apparent motivations are much too depressingly banal and familiar to stand in such high-octane company, without any of the romance his silence seems to promise. And that's the saddest thing about this case, really: probably it had something to do with genuine moral outrage, and probably something else to do with ideological zeal on behalf of the committed former Conservative council candidate. And probably it had most of all to do with rather liking the man who turned him down for a job, and rather wanting to be in the club, and being keen enough to join it to do something he might otherwise have thought better of. No wonder he looked like a little boy at Monday's press conference. In the end, his crime was less a political leak than a decision to run to Daddy.