That argument cut no ice with the Norwegians, when I made it to their oversight committee in the early 1990s, and as far as I know they still do not have the authority to eavesdrop. In February 1999, I was asked to answer questions from the New Zealand Intelligence Oversight Committee, who were considering legislating to give their security service such powers. The New Zealand security service had, in fact, thought that it had such powers and only when their legislation was challenged in the courts was it discovered that they did not. The hearings in New Zealand were in public, and it was clear what strong emotions are raised by giving to a state body the power to, as it was put ‘enter our homes and listen to our conversations’. As someone said in evidence to the Committee, ‘While the state imprisons people for breaking and entering, it has the audacity to legislate that it is all right for the secret service to commit such crimes under the pretext of protecting its citizens.’ Those strongly held views do not weaken the case for having such powers, but they do serve to emphasise the care which must be taken in using them.
There was considerable relief, not only in MI5 but also in Whitehall when the Act finally got its Royal Assent. Antony Duff had retired by then, and his successor Patrick Walker invited all the ministers who had steered the legislation through Parliament, including the Prime Minister and the Lord Chancellor, to a party in our Gower Street Headquarters, to celebrate.
This was the first time I had had a chance to observe Mrs Thatcher at close quarters. Though I had met her when she visited the Service, as she did from time to time, those occasions had been very stage-managed, and there had not been much opportunity for anything other than formal presentations. Those were the days when the Service was still very careful indeed what it said to ministers and anyone who was to make a presentation at a ministerial visit, let alone a Prime Ministerial visit, had to rehearse it in front of their Director. In fact, Mrs Thatcher’s first visit to the Service had gone down in the memories of all those present, not because anyone fluffed their lines or got their facts wrong, but because her whisky was not mixed to the right strength. Apparently she was presented with a glass containing a gold liquid which was very pale indeed. She promptly returned it, demanding something much stronger, much to the embarrassment of those who had spent hours trying to get the occasion perfect but had forgotten to establish the facts of this vital detail.
By the time of the legislation party I was the Director in charge of Counter-terrorism. It was the period when the Provisional IRA was actively trying to kill British servicemen in Germany and my colleagues and I were closely involved in trying to thwart their operations, to identify the terrorists and to get them arrested. Just the night before, there had been an incident at a military base in Germany where the terrorists had been disturbed by a night-watchman while they were setting their bomb, and had fled before detonating it. I was well briefed on what had happened. But before I could open my mouth, the Prime Minister told me all about it at some length and with some intensity, fixing her eyes on a point somewhere over my right shoulder. I recognised points from the briefing note we had sent down to No. 10 earlier that day, but she had got some of the details wrong. For an instant I wondered whether I should correct her story, but it only took me that split second to decide that would not be wise. I am sure that was not the only occasion when cowards like me allowed her to remain misinformed.
Much had happened in the years before the legislation to change the culture of MI5. The recruitment of younger, more open-minded people from varied backgrounds, the increase in the number of women and the gradual abolition of the taboos on what they could do, the crises which had produced a much more open management style – all these influences had begun to lift the veil behind which our predecessors had hidden us and which for years had separated us from the outside world. The legislation had also set in train a course of events with a most profound effect on my own life, in that it led to the formal announcement of my name when three years later I was appointed Director-General. This pushed me into the public eye in a way that I neither expected nor was prepared for.
The first impact of the new law was that for the first time we were required to answer detailed questions from experienced lawyers about why we had reached the conclusions we had and why we had taken this or that action. These were the members of the Tribunal set up under the Act to take complaints from members of the public about anything which they thought MI5 had done to them or their property.
The first few visits of the Tribunal were tense occasions. Each side was sizing the other up. They knew nothing about us or the ethos of MI5 and did not know what unacceptable practices they might find or whether we were going to try to pull the wool over their eyes. We did not know whether they were open-minded, reasonable people or whether they would turn out to have preconceived ideas and axes to grind. Not surprisingly, they took their work very seriously. They asked for, and got, any files relevant to the complaint they were investigating, and spent a considerable time understanding what those unfamiliar papers meant. We, for our part, had to get used to the novel idea that the files, which recorded in detail what had gone on and why, files on which we had written notes and minutes, totally unaware that anyone outside the Service would ever read them, were now being scrutinised by outsiders, albeit within the ring of secrecy.
I welcomed this. We were confident in the integrity of our procedures, we were proud of what we had to show them. After their first visit, which lasted most of the day, we decided that these were indeed reasonable and sensible people and we resolved that the best way to deal with the situation was to embrace the oversight. We would arrange for them to tour the service. They should meet the ladies (and by then men as well), who worked in the Registry; the people who spent hours listening to and transcribing the often extremely crackly and blurred product of the microphones which had been installed under the new law; the desk officers who had to make the judgements about whether this or that person should have a file or be investigated. We would explain everything to them in detail, confident that if they understood the issues, they would, by and large, agree that what we had done had been appropriate. And on the whole they did. I think they were impressed with our willingness to discuss the issues and to open up frankly to their scrutiny. For our part, we had to learn to explain ourselves clearly to people whom we could not assume would necessarily think the same way as we did – and to serve dry sherry before lunch, which, we learned, is the approved drink of the Inns of Court.
In addition to the law, Antony Duff’s other great contribution was to secure Prime Ministerial backing for a new building for MI5. During his time as Director-General we occupied nine separate buildings in central London, of which the best known were Curzon Street House and the building at the top of Gower Street, above the Euston Square underground station, both now knocked down. Such a large number of separate buildings was grossly inefficient, to say nothing of the insecurity of regularly moving quantities of highly sensitive files and papers between buildings – this was before the days of computerisation. A fleet of vans drove in a continuous shuttle service from building to building several times a day, but very often when papers were needed urgently they were stuck in a traffic jam somewhere in Mayfair.
The regular shuttle service between Gower Street and Curzon Street did have the great advantage that without too much of a diversion it could pass by Marks & Spencer and staff could hitch a lift to do their shopping. It was seen as a great loss of privilege when, after a prolonged negotiation, Thames House on Millbank was acquired and after the move there was no shuttle service any more.
Tony Duff retired before many of the changes which he instigated had come to fruition, and it was left to his successors to bring them successfully home. He made a massive difference to the culture of the Service, which I was able to build on when I became Director-General and instituted a programme of greater openness. I had reason personally to be thankful to him for having recognised that I was capable of doing the most difficu
lt jobs in the Service. And in particular for having promoted me to what I thought of as the best job in the world, Director of Counter-espionage in the final days of the Cold War.
18
BY THE TIME I became Director of Counter-espionage, the girls were twelve and sixteen. Even though they did not know in any detail what I did for a living, they knew it was something secret for the government. The arrival of the New Statesman reporters at the front door had been only one in a series of strange events they had had to get used to. One evening several years before, the phone rang and I answered it. After I had put the phone down, one of them said: ‘What was that?’
‘Oh nothing’, I said absent-mindedly, ‘it was just about someone who thinks he’s been stabbed by a poisoned umbrella.’
‘Has he?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Oh,’ she said, and went back to whatever she was doing.
That, of course, was the first notification by the police of the incident when Georgi Markov was poisoned by the Bulgarian Secret Service on Waterloo Bridge. I did not take the reported stabbing seriously at first, though of course it later turned out to be true and a similar case happened in Paris shortly afterwards.
There were innumerable telephone calls at odd times of the day and night, which often resulted in my leaving home unexpectedly. There were occasions when the news reported the expulsion of certain Russian officials for ‘unacceptable activities’, when I seemed extremely interested and unusually cheerful. And later while the Provisional IRA was bombing London, I seemed always to have an anxious expression and an obsessive interest in the news on the radio, which was often the first notification of an unexpected attack.
Inevitably, the girls got involved to some extent in the life of the Service. They met many of my colleagues, and members of foreign intelligence services too, when I entertained them at home. They and various trusted boyfriends were often roped in as waiters for those occasions, just as in any other household. When I became a Director we used to have the branch planning awaydays at our house in Alwyne Villas. Over the years, the girls got to know my closest colleagues quite well, though they could never remember who was who, and complained that they all seemed to be called Chris or John. Later on, when I became Director-General, they became a lot more involved, as all three of us were swept up in the tide of media interest.
When I started to live on my own I decided that they were becoming too old to be looked after by au pair girls. By then, Sophie was only a few years younger than they were, and she resented being told what to do by ‘foreigners who can’t even speak proper English,’ and who could not cook as well as the girls themselves. When one of the German girls, distracted by Harriet and her cousin Beatrice arguing in the back seat over a bottle of orange juice, drove the car spectacularly into a line of parked cars (including a Rolls Royce) outside the gates of Waterlow Park in Highgate, we decided that we would look for some other arrangement. So from then on two local ladies came in, one to clean and one to iron on different days and the girls became latch-key children. We could cope with normal routines, but when something outside the normal occurred, as it very often did, for example if one needed extra maths coaching, or one got into a team and had to be ferried to matches it was particularly difficult. When they were doing the big public exams, they did not get the level of support I would have wanted to give them. Sophie did her A Levels when I had just taken over as Director of Counter-espionage, and Harriet was just starting work for hers when I became Director-General and the press were hounding us.
Like any working mother, I was constantly managing conflicting pressures, trying to be in two different places at once, and apparently succeeding more effectively than even the Scarlet Pimpernel. The result of all this was that the girls learned to look after themselves, to travel around London alone, and to be independent and self-reliant beyond their years.
None of this was made easier because my job as Director of Counter-espionage involved a considerable amount of travelling abroad. Since the beginning of the Cold War, one of the great strengths of the West’s counter-espionage effort had been the sharing of intelligence between the closest allies, the UK, the USA and the old Commonwealth. This survived the unfortunate paranoia-feeding between James Angleton and Peter Wright and was the foundation of the ‘special intelligence relationship’ which exists to this day. So keeping these links as close and friendly as they were was an important task for any Director of Counter-espionage. I paid several visits to the USA, and to Australia, Canada and New Zealand, while my mother came to stay to look after the girls.
Secret services are not usually associated with cooperation and sharing. It sounds like a contradiction. But in a world where the threats get more sophisticated and more global, the intelligence task gets more difficult, and cooperation between intelligence allies is vital and grows ever closer. When MI5 was first set up in 1909 it was expressly forbidden to form any foreign links at all. But even though their task in those days was limited to countering the activities of foreign spies within Great Britain, they soon found that it was very difficult to do this without any support from friendly counterparts overseas. But right up to the Second World War there was only the bare bones of any international security structure and it was not until well on into that war that any really effective security links between allies were put in place, in particular between the UK and the USA. Once those links were set up, however, they considerably increased our combined effectiveness. The exploitation of the ‘double cross’ spy cases mentioned above, which successfully misled Hitler’s Germany and contributed greatly to the success of D-Day, was an early joint effort.
After the end of the Second World War, it was the Cold War that dictated the direction of security and intelligence work and it was clear that any effective defence against the massive and sophisticated intelligence efforts of the Soviet Union and her Warsaw Pact allies could only come about through close collaboration between Western security services. But collaboration against that target was a very sensitive business. There was always the fear that one or other of the Western services might have been penetrated by the Soviet bloc, a fear which of course proved only too well-founded on several occasions. So the links that were established were mostly bilateral, service to service, cautiously and carefully done on a strictly ‘need-to-know’ basis. The exception to the bilateral rule was the link between the closest Western intelligence allies of the Cold War, the British, the Americans, the Canadians, the Australians and the New Zealanders – the so-called CAZAB link.
When I first joined the counter-espionage branch in the early 1970s, knowledge of this CAZAB link was very closely held. The knowledge of it was imparted to new officers in an ‘indoctrination’ session, after which their names were inscribed with great formality on a list of those with knowledge. There were a number of such lists of those to whom particularly tightly held information had been revealed and over a career, particularly in counter-espionage during the Cold War, you found yourself on numerous such lists, as you ‘needed to know’ secret after secret. Each list had its own codeword and unless your name was on the list for any code-worded operation, no-one might speak to you about it and you would not be permitted to see any files. There is nothing new about this, of course. In the Second World War when similar secret operation names proliferated, Winston Churchill cabled home from one of his transatlantic voyages to meet President Roosevelt, that he had been reading Hornblower and approved of it. His staff spent days trying to discover which secret plan he was referring to before they realised that Churchill had been reading C.S. Forester’s first Hornblower book.
When you leave, retire or move away to another part of the work, you have to sign off the lists. It feels like a sort of brain washing or mind-hoovering process, but there is sense behind it. It makes it quite clear that after a certain date you have no current information, so if sensitive information gets out, and there is a suspicion that there may be a spy in the organisation, it is
easier to narrow down the search. The trouble is that after a time you inevitably forget what list you are on and what particular secret operation each codeword refers to. It was quite a revelation when I retired and someone turned up in my office with innumerable lists for me to sign off which I had totally forgotten about.
The existence of CAZAB and its regular meetings was one of the factually accurate things which Peter Wright chose to reveal in his book Spycatcher. Since the end of the Cold War, it no longer exists in that form. The growth of terrorism, and the newer threats like organised crime require cooperation of a totally different type – less discreet, broader, more inclusive and above all more immediate.
In the spring of 1988 I was in Australia for a CAZAB meeting, accompanying Patrick Walker, who was then Director-General, when the Gibraltar operation went down. Also present was the head of MI6, the heads of the CIA and the FBI and the heads of the Australian, New Zealand and Canadian services – the old intelligence allies of the Cold War.
We were a small, élite and oddly assorted bunch, met together to share some of the most sensitive information we had at that time, our assessments of the current counterespionage threats and the details of current cases. The Americans, both venerable, white-haired judges, political appointees supported by professionals, were the heads of enormous organisations with vast operational and assessment resources to deploy and far more cases to draw on than any of the rest of us. Their then head of counter-espionage was a small, birdlike man of great experience and detailed knowledge, who, unlike his predecessor James Angleton, the alter-ego of Peter Wright, possessed balance and common sense. He had no notes with him but as an aide-memoire would produce a very small shiny black notebook from the top pocket of his casual shirt. I never saw inside it but considering its explosive contents it must have been written in some private code.
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