When I was summoned by Cecil to be told formally of my move, I tried to look both surprised and enthusiastic. I was indeed delighted to be promoted Assistant Director, the first significant management level in the Service, which only one other woman had reached. But I was disappointed that it was not a more exciting job, and yet again I had a sense that they were being extremely cautious and that I was being tested in a way a man would not have been.
My promotion to Assistant Director brought some financial relief into our lives, and it also meant that my working hours were considerably less erratic. I led a section of some forty people, which was comparatively large. Sections varied in size depending on what they were doing. Agent sections tended to be comparatively small, because the work they were doing required close supervision. If their cases were not carefully and sensibly handled they could go quite dramatically wrong, and result in diplomatic protests and significant political embarrassment, if nothing worse. There were also ethical issues involved, which required careful handling, and not infrequently important legal issues too, particularly in running agents inside terrorist organisations.
My new post was as Assistant Director of one of the sections in the counter-subversion branch. It involved moving away from the centre of things in Gower Street to Curzon Street House, the bunker-like building next door to the Lansdowne Club, at the other end of the street from gloomy old Leconfield House where I had begun my career. Curzon Street House is yet another of the buildings we occupied in those days which has now been replaced by elegant offices. Our building had two claims to fame – the first, possibly apocryphal, that it had been specially reinforced for use by the Royal family in time of war, the second, true, that it had been the Ministry of Education when Mrs Thatcher as Minister of Education achieved notoriety as ‘Thatcher the milk snatcher’. I know this because on one of her visits to the building she broke away from socialising with the staff after a briefing to stalk the corridors, clutching her glass of whisky, looking for her old office. I did not know whether to be proud or mortified when it was found to be the one I was then occupying.
My new section did indeed turn out to be a bit of a backwater and during my first few weeks at my new desk, the telephone never rang, and no-one came into my office to see me. It was a huge change from the agent section, which had been bustling with lots of comings and goings and constant operations and excitements. However, this period of calm did not last very long; after I had prowled around a bit to see what was happening, I soon realised that there was a lot to do. As it turned out, this period presented some of the most intellectually challenging problems of my career and also proved to be one of the busiest and most interesting.
My time working in counter-subversion spanned a period of very considerable political upheaval – the miners’ strike, the Greenham Common protests, the height of CND, the growth of Militant Tendency and its activities in Liverpool and a Socialist Workers’ Party very active in universities. Most of the subversive activity, as distinct from the political protest, which was going on at that time came from communists, acting, at least at the centre, on advice and support from the Soviet Embassy, and from the Trotskyist organisations. It was, by design, focused on particularly sensitive areas of society, local authorities, education, the unions, peace movements and in the case of Militant Tendency, the Labour Party. These were the areas where the democratic system was judged, by those who wanted to destroy it, to be most vulnerable and where also any interference or monitoring by the secret state was likely to be regarded as most unacceptable. My colleagues and I had the difficult task of deciding what, if any, of this activity should be of proper concern to the Security Service, in fulfilling its function of defending democracy.
MI5’s work against subversion in the 1980s was based on the definition of subversion which had been given in Parliament in the 1970s. It is the same definition which was later incorporated into the Security Service Act of 1989, the Act of Parliament under which MI5 now operates. Subversion is defined as actions which are ‘intended to overthrow or undermine parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means’. The concept of subversion is thus focused on hostility to the democratic process itself; it has never included political dissent. We worked to the principle that the activities of organisations or individuals with subversive intent was of concern to us; the right to set up and join pressure groups and to protest was not. It was a distinction which the then Home Secretary Douglas Hurd made plain in Parliament at the end of the ’80s, at the time of the debate on the Security Service Bill. He said :
There is no power in the Bill to enable the Security Service to take any interest in any person or organisation or any activity or enterprise which presents no threat to the security of the nation as a whole. It does not matter if such people have views on the structure or organisation of Parliament or if they are involved in seeking to change industrial practices in this country or to negotiate a better deal if they are members of trade unions, or if they seek to challenge or change the Government’s policies relating to defence, employment, foreign policy or anything else. The narrow party political interests of the Government of the day have no part to play in deciding on the necessary involvement of the Security Service. Its sole criterion in relation to a subversive threat is whether there is a deliberate intention to undermine parliamentary democracy and whether that presents a real threat to the security of the nation.
We gave a great deal of careful thought to this distinction, and to establishing what we should and should not investigate and report on. I was fortunate that some of the clearest thinkers in the Service, men and women with integrity and open minds, came to join me in that section, because these were not easy issues and some of the judgements made by our predecessors had not been sufficiently rigorous.
Given all that, I don’t find it particularly surprising that this period of my career has been represented by certain commentators in various exposés as deeply murky and suspicious. I have been accused variously of seeking to undermine democratic institutions, in particular CND, and even of conspiring to have murdered Hilda Murrell, an old lady peace campaigner, who was found dead in the countryside in mysterious circumstances, a death which as far as I know is now thought to be connected with an ordinary burglary. MI5 does not kill people.
It is an established fact that the anti-nuclear movement, in its own right an entirely legitimate protest movement, was of great interest to the Soviet Union. As part of its subversive activities in the West, the Soviet Union sought covertly to encourage anti-nuclear, ban the bomb and other such protest in many Western countries, as a way of weakening the defences of their enemies. Of course that does not mean that everyone who joined CND was part of a subversive plot. But Soviet officials encouraged Western communist parties, like the Communist Party of Great Britain, to try to infiltrate CND at key strategic levels by getting their members elected as officers. The idea was that they could then direct the activities of the organisation to suit their own long-term objectives. Our job, and what we were doing, was to monitor those activities, not to investigate CND, which on its own was of no interest to us. The allegation that we investigated CND has been denied on countless occasions, including by ministers in Parliament but I have come to accept that no-one who firmly believes the allegation will ever cease to believe it whatever is said.
In similar vein, the 1984 miners’ strike was supported by a very large number of members of the NUM but it was directed by a triumvirate who had declared that they were using the strike to try to bring down the elected government of Mrs Thatcher and it was actively supported by the Communist Party. What was it legitimate for us to do about that? We quickly decided that the activities of picket lines and miners’ wives’ support groups were not our concern, even though they were of great concern to the police who had to deal with the law-and-order aspects of the strike; accusations that we were running agents or telephone interceptions to get advance warning of picket movements are wrong. We
in MI5 limited our investigations to the activities of those who were using the strike for subversive purposes.
The reports we issued to Whitehall during that time were most carefully scrutinised to ensure that they referred only to matters properly within our remit. Nevertheless, they were treated as most particularly sensitive documents, which were supposed to be returned for destruction after they had been read. I remember the panic, exacerbated by the general hysteria of those days, when a minister at the Department of Energy lost one. People were sent down to Thames House, where his office was, to search down the sides of the chairs and sofas, but when he casually remarked that he thought it might have blown away when he was reading it in his garden, we gave up and waited for the furore to start when it turned up. As far as I know it has never been seen again. When MI5 moved into Thames House and the whole place was gutted, I wondered whether the report would turn up behind the panelling, but it never did.
One of the more bizarre theories that was around at that time was that John as Director-General of the Health and Safety Executive and I were working together on behalf of Mrs Thatcher to break the NUM’s strike and destroy the union. During the mid-80s, the Health and Safety Commission was trying to replace the old and out-dated regulations governing mining safety. John, as head of the Health and Safety Executive, was seen as the front man pushing through the changes in the law. Change was much opposed by the NUM, which wanted the old regulations, one of which entailed certain manning levels, to remain in place. During the closing days of the NUM strike, NACODS, the union of mining deputies, tried to use this particular regulation to force the closure of the pits in Nottinghamshire which were standing out against the strike and continuing to work.
The level of the conspiracy theory only became clear to me in 1988. At a certain point in the contentious discussions over the new mining regulations, John happened to be travelling on a train with one of the mining union leaders. Suddenly, leaning across the carriage, John’s companion said to him, ‘They know your wife is high up in MI5.’
Piecing all this together it seems likely that certain people in the NUM, knowing I was working on counter-subversion, thought that John with his regulatory reform and I with, as they thought, my spies in the unions were part of a concerted plot to destroy them. Again, I don’t suppose that any amount of denials, mine or others’, will ever alter the minds of those who believe it, and there is little more other than denying it that can be said. The fact was that far from plotting joint strategies or sharing working secrets, John and I were barely speaking to each other in those days, and were effectively living separate lives.
The charge that MI5 was then, or at any other time, subject to political direction is unfounded. We certainly did not work as tools of Mrs Thatcher in her battle to break the miners’ strike and destroy the NUM. In all my time in MI5, at the various levels at which I worked, I am aware of only two occasions when the government of the day enquired whether it would be possible for the Service to investigate something. The miners’ strike was not one of them. In neither case did those with the authority at the time think that what was being sought was within the Service’s remit and it was not done. No Director-General as far as I am aware ever hesitated to resist an inappropriate suggestion or was ever penalised for it.
I had a strange flashback to those days recently. For some years I have been non-executive Chairman of the Institute of Cancer Research, an academic research body affiliated to London University. The Institute is a charity but it works very closely with the Royal Marsden Hospital, which is an NHS Trust, and it has been the custom for the Chairman of the Institute to sit on the Board of the Marsden Trust, in order to assist the close working of the two organisations. When I was asked to join the Board of the Marsden by the former Chairman, Marmaduke Hussey, I filled in the necessary papers from the Department of Health. There was then a very prolonged silence. Enquiries were made, and I was told that the Secretary of State, Frank Dobson, disapproved of my appointment, apparently saying that he did not want a former spook in the NHS. If this was true, he must later have been persuaded that I was not a threat to the NHS and I joined the board.
Though I can’t be sure, I should not be at all surprised if that episode does not have its origins in the time of the miners’ strike. As I guess does another. In about 1993, John was invited to address a meeting on safety in hospitals, which was also attended by several union leaders and by Frank Dobson. Mr Dobson did not shake John’s hand when introduced before the meeting and later in his speech attacked his supposed attitudes quite bitterly for, as he put it, being totally careless of the safety and welfare of coal miners. John deeply resented that charge, knowing it to be quite unfounded. His grandfather and great-grandfather had been coal miners, his father had spent his life in the mining industry, and he had a deep sympathy for those who worked in it.
My colleagues and I in the counter-subversion section spent a good deal of time thinking through what we should and should not be doing, as the files record. I believe we got it right, though it would be foolish to claim that no mistake was ever made. But we did not have sole responsibility for those decisions. It has long been a principle of investigation in MI5 that the more intrusive the form of investigation, the higher the authority must be which authorises it. This period in the 1980s was before the Acts of Parliament were passed which have now brought both external scrutiny to bear on the Service’s work and avenues for the public to lodge complaints. However, even in those days, to tap a telephone, it was necessary to have a warrant signed by a Secretary of State, usually the Home Secretary. The process of obtaining such a warrant meant that each case was scrutinised internally through the management chain up to the Deputy Director-General, then it moved on to the Home Office where it was examined by officials and finally by the Home Secretary himself before the warrant was signed. All the Home Secretaries I knew took that responsibility very seriously indeed.
After the Interception of Communications Act was passed in 1985, putting the process of telephone and mail interception on a statutory footing, an additional scrutiny was introduced in the form of a Commissioner (always a senior judge) who was responsible for reviewing retrospectively the issue of interception warrants. The Act also provided for a tribunal to investigate any complaints from the public about the interception of telephones or the mail. The Interception of Communications Act gave us our first experience of having to present our intelligence case to senior lawyers, something with which we became much more familiar during the ’90s, when the additional Acts of Parliament which now govern the Service’s work were brought in. A formal and rather stately process was created, which involved taking tea in china cups in the Deputy Director-General’s office, while explaining to a patrician figure (the first Commissioner was Lord Bridge of Harwich) the sometimes rather squalid activities in which our targets were engaged.
My team was also responsible for what was known as the ‘General Election exercise’. At each general election it was the responsibility of the Director-General to provide for the incoming Prime Minister any serious security information available on Members of Parliament of his own party, so that he could take it into account in forming his Cabinet. It was a cardinal principle of this work that information about members of one party was not made available to the other. Although the number of MPs on whom there was serious security information was minimal, completing the exercise itself was a huge chore. Most of it had to be done in the period between the election being declared and election day. It was often quite difficult to get full identifying particulars for all the parliamentary candidates because the exercise was regarded as particularly sensitive, because of the ease with which it could be misrepresented, and we were not allowed to seek any help from the parties themselves. As we did not know who was going to be elected in each constituency, let alone which party would win the election, much of the final preparation had to be done at the last minute. A further problem was the definition of what information was and
was not sufficiently serious to get a person included in the exercise. Final decisions on all this were taken at the top of the Service and not entirely surprisingly our bosses did not always agree with the assessments we had made.
I well remember the election of 1983. We had worked night and day to get everything prepared and beautifully typed, ready to go down to the Cabinet Office. I took it all in to be approved, first by my Director and then by the Director-General. Those were the days before we had word processors, and though we did have typewriters which worked off disks, so that alterations could be easily made to text, the Director-General of the day had decreed that this exercise was far too sensitive for disks to be used. I suppose he was afraid we might lose them. Unfortunately for me, both the Director, David Ranson, and the Director-General, John Jones, had in their day held the post I was then occupying, so they had very firm views on how things should be done. Firstly David wanted wholesale amendments, so everything had to be re-typed and then John Jones wanted other things changed, so it all had to be re-done again.
In parallel with the difficult issues of what we should and should not be doing, I was personally trying to work out my own style of management, with no training or advice. There were not many examples of good practice around to copy as far as I could see. Those were the days when the ‘need to know’ principle reigned supreme – the policy, essential in an intelligence organisation which held people’s lives in its hands, should be not to disseminate sensitive information unnecessarily. But it had become more of a policy of telling no-one anything unless they had a demonstrable need to know – the antithesis of communication. This was not a style with which I felt very comfortable, as my natural instinct was to consult my senior colleagues, ask their advice and run my section like a team. Having no experience to go on, I applied the same principles I used on the nannies and au pairs. One of the first things I did was to buy a very large tea pot and to institute a regular weekly tea meeting. Perhaps it was an unconscious flashback to my days working for Mr Sargeant in the Worcestershire County Archives. At least that meant that we all met each other regularly each week and all of us knew what was going on. We progressed naturally from that to formulating some strategic view of what ought to be going on and working out how we were going to ensure that it did. It all sounds very primitive stuff in these management-obsessed days of the 21st century, but in MI5 in the early 1980s these were novel ideas.
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