On Her Majesty’s Not-So-Secret Service[

Britain’s spies are on the loose again, and the result is a volatile mixture of equal parts James Bond and Monty Python. Did MI6, Britain’s spy service, botch an attempt to assassinate Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi with a bomb in February 1996 that blew up the wrong car?

If the story is false, as the government in London emphatically claims, why is the British press forbidden to print details of the alleged plot? Who are David Shayler and Richard Tomlinson, and why does Her Majesty’s Government keep having them arrested?

Last but not least, what is the real identity of the mysterious agent code-named “Tunworth”?

Not since Peter Wright, a former member of Britain’s domestic security service, MI5, published “Spycatcher” in 1987 has there been such a brouhaha over tattletale spies in the sceptered isle.

The British are in many ways an admirable people. They stood firm against the Nazi blitz in World War II, they have produced Shakespeare, the Beatles and John Cleese. But they also have an inglorious law called the Official Secrets Act, which is supposed to keep Fleet Street from printing secrets but often serves to mask awkward details about Whitehall. When invoked, the law usually ends up making the government look like the Ministry of Silly Walks.

But to begin at the beginning. Shayler, 32, is a former employee of MI5 who claims he worked on the Libyan desk, then left the service early last year. Shayler charged publicly last year that MI5 was mismanaged. He also claimed that under the previous Conservative government, the security service kept files on several members of the current Labor government when they were active in student movements in the 1970s, including Peter Mandelson, the secretary for trade and industry. Shayler also talked of low morale, incompetence and drunks in the security service.

These accusations made the government very unhappy. MI5 is a secret agency, and ministers prefer that nothing be written about it. Whitehall did not appreciate the picture that Shayler drew of a bunch of chaps hanging about the pub when they ought to be out catching Bulgarian spies with poison-tipped umbrellas. So the government went into court and got a broad-ranging injunction that barred the British press from publishing any more of Shayler’s allegations. In addition to the injunction, the press was well aware that if it defied the government, it could be prosecuted under the draconian Official Secrets Act.

Shayler, sensing he might end up behind bars, fled to France, which has a somewhat more--zut, how shall we say?--relaxed attitude about renegade spies, as long as they are British.

Meanwhile, Tomlinson, 35, an ex-spy for MI6, the British equivalent of the CIA, was arrested last year and sentenced to a year in prison for passing secrets to an Australian publisher. That ploy had worked a decade ago for Wright, who moved to Australia and published “Spycatcher” after the British suppressed the book in England. The book later became a bestseller in Britain and in this country. Tomlinson, released on probation after serving six months, also departed for France, where the food is better and talkative former British spies may even be quietly welcome.

Shayler apparently spent some time living in a farmhouse in a remote French village with his girlfriend, Annie Machon, reportedly also an ex-MI5 employee. Recently, however, Shayler went public with his most sensational charge: A renegade Libyan official, code-named “Tunworth” by MI6, had approached the spy agency in 1995 with a plot to rub out Kadafi. “Tunworth,” according to Shayler, was paid more than $160,000, which was supposed to go to the “Islamic Fighting Group,” an organization the Libyan claimed to represent. But the Libyans acting for MI6 placed the bomb under the wrong car, according to Shayler, blowing up several people but leaving Kadafi unharmed.

It is not possible to confirm his account, because there have been no published reports of an attempt on the Libyan leader’s life in February 1996. Somebody lobbed a grenade at Kadafi in November of that year in the desert town of Brak, 400 miles south of Tripoli, but it failed to explode, according to one press account. In June of this year, Kadafi reportedly was slightly wounded in eastern Libya in an assassination attempt that killed a female bodyguard. Both reports are unconfirmed.

Shayler not only floated out the story about the botched car-bomb attempt by MI6 on Kadafi, but he also threatened to publish a 7,000-word expose of the security services on the Internet. That did it. The British government asked the French government to arrest both Shayler and Tomlinson.

On Aug. 1, agents of the DST, the French counterintelligence service, arrested Shayler at a Paris hotel, one day after they had seized Tomlinson at another Paris hotel. Shayler was packed off to La Sante prison, where he remains, but Tomlinson was questioned and let go for what the French termed “insufficient evidence.”

The British are trying to extradite Shayler and bring him back for trial in Britain under the Official Secrets Act. Libya in turn has demanded that France extradite Shayler to Tripoli and that Britain turn over the “terrorists” responsible for the alleged plot. The British press, chafing to report the story, finally got its chance Aug. 9, when Foreign Secretary Robin Cook went on the BBC’s “Breakfast With Frost,” a television program named for its host, David Frost, and denounced the Kadafi car-bomb story as “pure fantasy.” He had investigated Shayler’s charges and was “absolutely satisfied” that no such attempt was authorized and “SIS [the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6] never put forward any such proposal for an assassination attempt.” He added: “I’m fairly clear there has never been any SIS involvement.”

John Wadham, Shayler’s lawyer, immediately jumped on the phrase “fairly clear” and said it seemed to reflect a tad of uncertainty. Labor backbenchers noted that Cook’s denial did not rule out a plot by lower-level MI6 spies.

The Foreign Office would not say how Cook investigated Shayler’s charges, but he almost certainly would have had a chat with David Spedding, MI6 chief since 1994. The occupant of that office, Britain’s head spy, is traditionally known as “C,” the inspiration for “M” in Ian Fleming’s tales of Bond. Until 1967, the identity of “C” could not be published in Britain.

On the same breakfast TV show, Machon popped up to defend her friend. “I think [the ministers] are so touchy because they realize that what he’s saying is true,” she declared. “He managed to develop a particularly good working relationship with his opposite number in MI6, and I gather that is how he found out the details of the plot to kill Kadafi.”

From his prison cell in France, Shayler insisted that he briefed his boss about the plot. In a letter to the Guardian published Aug. 12 he said MI6 directly briefed at least one other MI5 official.

Cook’s denial came as efforts were being made to bring to trial at an international court in the Hague the two Libyans accused of blowing up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 270 people. The British government presumably is worried that Shayler’s allegations might cause Kadafi to refuse to turn over the pair for trial.

Beyond that, there is the embarrassing timing of Shayler’s charges. The terrorist bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania does not make this an auspicious moment for allegations, however unproved, of involvement by British intelligence in a bomb plot.

Tomlinson’s troubles, meantime, are not over. From Paris, he flew to New Zealand, but was pulled off an airplane there on Aug. 7 as he was about to go Australia, reportedly to talk about a book deal with a publishing subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. He was told he needed a visa because he had served time in a British jail.

Wadham, Shayler’s lawyer, may have had the last word, at least for the moment. “The government is saying that this story is not true,” he observed. “If this is what they truly believe, why is my client still in a French jail for disclosing it?”