Jock Kane

First GCHQ employed whistleblower dies, aged 92

Missing documents.  Racketeering. Espionage. GCHQ’s Hong Kong legacy and the man who helped expose it.

Jock Kane, the first ever whistleblower employed by GCHQ, who in 1980 exposed the agency’s corruption in Hong Kong, died on 27 September 2013, aged 92.  His funeral took place on 9 October in Hampshire.

Kane, a former GCHQ radio operator, was the source for a series of reports exposing how GCHQ was involved in a ten-year cover up of serious corruption, graft and security failings at its Hong Kong base in Little Sai Wan.

According to Duncan Campbell, Kane first came to him out of the blue in 1980, frustrated at the government’s intentional failure to properly investigate his concerns.

The New Statesman, Daily Mirror and World in Action began an investigation.  Together they uncovered how GCHQ employees were abusing the allowance system, defrauding the public purse to the tune of £1m, and establishing corrupt business relationships.

The investigation also revealed how hundreds of Secret and Top Secret documents had gone missing from the base in the previous years. Security was lax, or often non-existent. Chinese contractors and cleaners were regularly permitted hours of unsupervised access to rooms holding Top Secret documents without ever being searched before they left.

The agency also permanently leased 30 rooms for visiting intelligence staff from the Lee Gardens hotel in Hong King.  The hotel was known for housing a Triad-run prostitution racket and the Kuomintang, a “nationalist Chinese subversive and intelligence organisation”.

GCHQ attempted to stymie the investigation by bugging the phone lines and hotel rooms of the reporters, and tipping off leads. The Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) also censored the World in Action programme by Paul Greengrass, now famous as the director of two of the Bourne films.

Following the revelations, former MoD official Eric Garland, public relations manager for the Lee Gardens hotel, was convicted on “17 charges of deception, accepting bribes, and using documents with intent to deceive.”

Kane wrote a book about corruption in GCHQ, but it was seized by Special Branch and has never been released.

Find the New Statesman stories below and a video of Jock Kane’s appearance on After Dark: British Intelligence programme.

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