Open Secret

by Stella Rimington

  Intelligence on its own cannot provide all the answers to terrorism, however much resource is put into it. Hand in hand with intelligence must go protective security measures, based on the indications of targeting and method which intelligence provides and, very importantly, continuously reviewed as the intelligence changes. If it is true that the FBI had some intelligence, however vague, that a remarkable number of Islamic students were taking courses at US flying schools, amongst other things, security measures at US internal airports should have been reviewed. It is most important that protective security measures result from intelligence, so that it is the things which are genuinely vulnerable which are being protected. Otherwise security can become an industry in itself and will not be protecting what is truly at risk. Unfortunately, there is frequently an inadequate connection between intelligence and protective security measures, resulting too often in measures being put in place after the event and then gradually wound down in a comparatively short space of time when nothing further happens, in response to complaints of delays or inconvenience.

  Since the 1970s, international security and intelligence collaboration against terrorism has become increasingly close. The relevant agencies of the west have been working more and more closely together, sharing intelligence from a variety of sources and working together operationally. In the 1980s, the Provisional IRA chose to attack their targets in foreign countries, particularly in Europe, and went far afield in their search for weapons, finance and expertise. In that ‘war on terrorism’ there was much international collaboration and support from European and US police and intelligence services in particular and systems were put in place to share intelligence quickly and securely so that action could be taken where it could be most effective. It was accepted by all friendly security and intelligence agencies that, in spite of the intensely political nature of terrorism and its varied causes, a planned or actual terrorist attack on the citizens of one country was an attack on democratic values and would be investigated and countered just as seriously as an attack on their own country.

  It is vital too that not only the intelligence but also the assessment of the intelligence is shared. Effective coordination, both internationally and nationally, is essential if the counter-terrorist effort is to succeed. Without it, vital leads will be misunderstood, key pieces of information will be lost and the moment to take action will be missed. In the UK in the 1980s, in response to various high-profile terrorist acts, it was decided to appoint MI5 as the lead intelligence agency for terrorism, to provide the initial assessment of all terrorist-related intelligence and if appropriate to liaise with the police or others for preventive action. No system is perfect and whatever arrangements are in place, something may be missed or not recognised as significant, but there must be one lead point within each country, otherwise there will be inconsistency of response and confused messages going to the government, resulting in confused policy making and national response. Judging by what we are hearing now from the USA, co-ordination between and even within agencies did not work well prior to September 11th and important information that might have been developed further, slipped through the net. But co-ordination is obviously easier in a small country than it is in a country the size of the US with its more than 100 different security and intelligence related departments and agencies.

  I view with some concern the creation of yet another US agency to co-ordinate all the rest. It is a natural instinct of politicians, but one that should almost always be resisted, to create a new body when there appears to have been some sort of failure. We hear that the new Department of Homeland Security is not to control the intelligence agencies and certainly I would not expect those agencies in Europe which have well established relationships with the CIA and the FBI to allow this new department to have their most sensitive intelligence. I fear it may merely add to the confusion.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, collaboration against terrorism between intelligence and security agencies has proved easier than political collaboration even among allies. Terrorism is violence for a political purpose, so inevitably it divides the political world and in the past there has been disagreement on how to deal with it. Mrs Thatcher as Prime Minister famously asserted that Britain would not negotiate with terrorists or countries supporting terrorists. Other countries have taken a different line. Some have negotiated with hi-jackers. Some have backed sanctions regimes against countries supporting or practising terrorism. Others, while paying lip service to sanctions, have seen the opportunity for economic or political advantage in covertly ignoring them. Indeed the British government’s stance on negotiating with those with ‘weapons under the table’ has significantly changed in recent years.

  We all know the saying ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’ and there are many examples of the effect of that in practice. For years members of the Irish community in the USA have given a good deal of money to the IRA, because they supported their objective of getting the British out of Ireland and somehow did not see the IRA’s activities as terrorism.

  But the sheer extent of the destruction on September 11th has united more of the world than ever before in condemnation of the perpetrators. However startling the declaration of a ‘war on terrorism’ beginning on September 11th might be to those who have been fighting terrorism for years, it has achieved the involvement in an international coalition, uneasily in some cases, of countries whose attitude to terrorism has been ambivalent. On the principle that those who are not with us are against us, Pakistan has been persuaded to co-operate, though the traditional supporters, funders and protectors of terrorists, countries such as Syria, Libya, Iraq and Iran, who as it suited them have used terrorism almost as an arm of their foreign policy, still remain on the outside. One of the great successes of the ‘war’ must be the new co-operation between the intelligence services of Russia and the West against the common enemy of terrorism. Much valuable intelligence must be available to the Russians, with all their resources and experience. If countries were indeed to unite in denying terrorists support and the hospitality of their soil, it would be one of the most effective blows that could be struck. Keeping that coalition against terrorism together, fragile though it may be, is an essential task of diplomacy.

  Finally, the most effective way of disrupting terrorists would be to deny them the publicity they crave. But that can never be. The media and political figures will always respond in a high-profile way to major disasters, after all they have their audience to satisfy. But publicity for the atrocities terrorists commit feeds their vanity, reinforces their position in the eyes of their followers and confirms them in their view that terrorism is a successful way of bringing their cause to public attention. Publicity helps them recruit. Weak-minded people are attracted to famous causes. But in their public response politicians should use words of scorn, rather than the rhetoric of revenge. All rhetoric plays into the hands of terrorists but talk of revenge breeds yet more hatred in a never-ending cycle. When a terrorist attack succeeds, we must try not to allow our reaction to give the terrorists even greater satisfaction than they get from the death and destruction they cause.

  12 July 2002

  PROLOGUE

  When I first opened my eyes, in May 1935, I might have thought, if I’d been capable of it, that I had not got too bad a deal. The world was a fairly safe and settled place and my family seemed a satisfactory though hardly glamorous one to be born into. Admittedly, my father had been unemployed and forced to try to earn a living selling the Encyclopaedia Britannica three years before, when my brother was born, but by the time of my birth, he had a secure job as a mechanical engineer in a firm with some good contracts. My parents had just bought a house with a garden in the new suburb of South Norwood. It would have seemed to most people, observing me as I first saw the light of day, that I was pretty well set up. But the fact that it was snowing on that May day should have warned that all might not be quite as secure and predictable as it seemed. And it wasn
’t.

  By the time I was four, everything had changed. The world was at war; my father’s job had disappeared; we had left our nice new south London suburb, by then far from the secure place it was intended to be, for a series of rented homes in the north of England. My safe life had become dangerous and insecure and I had become a frightened little girl.

  From then on, nothing in my life ever turned out as expected. Having chosen a rather dull and safe career, I ended up as leader of one of the country’s intelligence agencies and a target for terrorists. Having conventionally married my schoolfriend, I ended up separated, a single parent. Having begun work in the days when women’s careers were not taken at all seriously and most lasted only between education and motherhood, I ended up advising ministers and Prime Ministers.

  During my career, I have seen myself portrayed publicly in various different guises; in the 1980s I was Mrs Thatcher’s stooge, the leader of an arm of the secret state which was helping her to beat the miners’ strike and destroy the NUM. I was portrayed as the investigator of CND and even as the one who had ordered the murder of an old lady peace campaigner. In 1992, when I first emerged into the public gaze as Director-General of MI5, I became a sort of female James Bond, ‘Housewife Superspy’, ‘Mother of Two Gets Tough with Terrorists’. And finally, with the writing of this book, I have become to some a villain, ‘Reckless Rimington’, careless of our national security, opening the door to floods of reminiscences and damaging revelations. I don’t recognise myself in any of those roles.

  The unexpected course of my life has involved me closely with some of the significant issues of the late 20th century: the rise of terrorism, the end of the Cold War and some of the big social questions – women’s place in society (how can work and family be combined?) civil liberties (how far should the state intrude on the citizens’ privacy to ensure their safety?) and open government (how much should the public know about the secret state and how should it be controlled?).

  I have observed and participated in these issues from an unusual position, inside the secret state. But that does not mean my perspective is distorted or warped. Ian Fleming and John le Carré in their different ways have done the intelligence world few favours. The vast majority of those who work inside it are balanced, sane and sensible people, with a well developed sense of humour and a down-to-earth approach to the difficult issues they have to deal with. They have all the same problems in their lives as everyone else but they are, as I said publicly in 1994 in the Dimbleby Lecture on BBC TV, ‘positive, forward-looking and flexible and work hard to defend this country and its citizens against threats to its security’.

  1

  ON A MAY day in 1940, when I was just five, I had my first experience of the ‘need to know’ principle in action. My brother Brian and I attended the primary school in Ingatestone in Essex, some five miles from the house in Margaretting which my parents had rented to get us all out of London at the beginning of the war. That day, we came out of school as usual and waited at the bus stop outside the bank for our bus to take us home. But on that particular day, though we waited and waited, no bus came. As it later turned out, all the buses, as well as all other transport, had been commandeered to help in the evacuation from Dunkirk. I suppose because it was Top Secret no warning had been given, and there we were aged five and eight, completely cut off from home, waiting and waiting for a bus to come while at the other end my mother waited and waited for us to turn up, with no idea of what had happened to us. There were no telephones and no cars and no way for the two ends to communicate. Eventually, the bank manager noticed us standing there and arranged for us to be taken home in someone’s pony and trap, the only transport available. From then until we moved on, the pony and trap became our normal mode of transport to school.

  Like those of most people born in Europe in the first half of the 1930s, all my earliest memories are dominated by the war and its anxieties and uncertainties. My father was on the high seas when war broke out, returning from working on an engineering contract in Venezuela. Though I was only four, my mother’s anxiety easily transferred itself to me. I can remember her coming out into our back garden, where Brian and I were playing in the sun. She was wearing one of those flowery wrap-around cotton aprons, which 1930s suburban housewives seem always to be wearing in photographs of that period. She had come out to tell us what she had heard on the wireless about the outbreak of war, and the latest news of where Father was. She was worried and she needed to share her anxiety. Even though I didn’t understand it all, I felt anxious for the first time in my life. It was an anxiety that was to last a long time.

  Father got home safely, and he told us about the boat drills the crew had carried out for all the passengers on board ship, in case they got torpedoed, and how they had painted a huge stars and stripes on the deck of the ship to indicate to enemy aircraft that they were neutral. Father greeted the arrival of the Second World War with immense sadness and depression. He had been seriously wounded in the Great War at Passchendaele, attempting to mine the German trenches. He had volunteered young, disguising his real age. He thought he was fighting in the war to end all wars, for a world fit for heroes to live in. He had been unemployed during the Depression and now a second war seemed to him the crowning blow.

  We lived at the time in the new house in South Norwood, which my parents had bought in 1929, shortly after they got married, in high hopes of a prosperous future. But it was obvious to Father that we could not stay there now war had broken out; the London suburbs were much too dangerous a place for his wife and young family. For a time he and Mother toyed with the idea of sending my brother and me to America to spend the war with his sister, who had emigrated to Philadelphia. In fact everything was in place for us to go, when one of the ships carrying children to Canada was torpedoed. Mother, who had never liked the idea of sending us away in the first place, decided that whatever happened we would all stay together.

  So instead we rented what seemed to me an enormous house – but was in fact a moderate-sized detached dwelling, ‘St Martins’ at Margaretting in Essex. This was the first of a whole series of rented houses which we lived in throughout my childhood. That move was financially disastrous, and effectively made it certain that my parents would never be even moderately comfortably off by middle-class standards. They let our London house to an unmarried lady for a trifling rent – the only sort of rent you could get for a house in South Norwood in 1939. She thus established a protected tenancy and, as we never returned to live in London, my parents were never afterwards able to get her out so that they could sell the house. In the 1950s, despairing of getting any of their capital back, they sold it to her for a song.

  Moving to St Martin’s in September 1939 was hugely exciting for us children. First of all came the journey in a taxi with a black fabric hood and a very small, almost opaque, cracked yellow window, through which I tried to look back as South Norwood disappeared. We went through the ‘Rotherhithe Pipe’ as the driver called it, the tunnel under the Thames, and into what was then the countryside of Essex. I remember the house well. It had a big galleried hall and a kitchen that was old-fashioned even by 1930s standards, with a door at each end. This meant that small children could rush through the kitchen and round the passages in circles, yelling with excitement and causing vast annoyance to anyone working in the kitchen. Less excitingly, for my mother at least, the house had rats in the roof, which scampered loudly overhead and seemed in imminent danger of falling through the large number of cracks in the ceiling into the bedrooms.

  My mother was a great coper. She lived through a very disturbed historical period – born in 1901, she experienced two world wars and a depression. She had trained as a midwife and worked in the 1920s in the East End of London at the Jewish Hospital. She remembered the visits paid to the hospital by Mrs Rebecca Sieff, who was a patron, and particularly that she was always sacking her chauffeurs. Every time she came to the hospital she had a new one. She used to tell the nurses
that you had to keep a very sharp eye on chauffeurs or they would use up too much petrol. Mother’s experience at the hospital, particularly in going to East End homes to deliver babies, convinced her that you should make the most of what you had, and she was not given to complaining nor was she sympathetic to anyone who did.

  This stoical attitude was certainly well tested in those early months at Margaretting. The winter of 1939–40 turned out to be excessively cold. All the pipes froze. There was no water and little heat. All able-bodied men had gone off to the Armed Forces and there was extreme difficulty in getting a builder or anyone in to help. To increase the gloom, both my brother and I got bronchitis and to his he added German measles, so he had to be isolated. Our bedrooms were kept warm with Valor paraffin stoves and I had to breathe in the fumes of Friar’s Balsam brought up steaming in a big brown bowl every few hours. The smell of paraffin and Friars Balsam still bring back to me those early days of the war.

  Father was working in London at this period and though she coped, Mother became increasingly exhausted and uncharacteristically bad-tempered, particularly when we were beginning to recover from our ailments. Spring and the warmer weather must have come as a great relief to her. We had quite a carefree early summer, spent feeding the pigs which lived in the field at the back of the house with bucket-loads of rotting apples which we found in a shed in the garden. But with May and my fifth birthday came Dunkirk. All day long and as we lay in bed at night, lorries and buses rumbled past the house, including presumably the bus which should have picked us up from school, going down to the coast, as we later found out, to help in the evacuation.