The Naked Diplomat

by Tom Fletcher

  In many cases, spying networks, such as the one run by Sir Francis Walsingham under Queen Elizabeth I, preceded foreign services. In his 1716 handbook for statesmen, French diplomat François de Callières called secrecy ‘the indispensable weapon of negotiation’. Renaissance diplomats recognised that their role involved a public element of representing their monarch, and a private element relying on discretion and confidentiality. There was no doubt which element they spent most energy on.

  This remained very much the case during the seventeenth century – Abraham de Wicquefort noted that an ambassador is on the one hand ‘a messenger of peace’ while on the other ‘an honourable spy’. In his massive guide to diplomacy he lists countless secret missions and meetings between the royal courts of Europe, including in the preparation of the key treaties of Münster, the Pyrenees and Ryswick. Every great European power would try to intercept and read correspondence between ambassadors and their hosts, with the Secret Office being created in 1653 in England to break the seals on diplomatic mail. Ambassadors would use secret inks or codes to try to evade oversight, and royal courts began to be accompanied by families of cryptographers.

  The twentieth century’s great wars moved spying from the individual derring-do or subterfuge of the likes of Mata Hari to the more sophisticated effort to control what might now be called big data, for example through the Enigma code-breaking machine at Bletchley Park. In an age of more clearly demarcated state/state conflict, civil libertarians do not appear to have been as worried then as now about how that information was collected, secured and used.

  The two biggest recent challenges to trust in statecraft and espionage have come from Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. Assange and his WikiLeaks insurgents have tracked down and released masses of mainly US government confidential information. They do this without discrimination, believing that everything should be out there for examination. Meanwhile, whistle-blowing US intelligence analyst Snowden lifted the lid on what he claimed were systematic efforts by Western governments to monitor the communications of other governments, and even their own populations.

  Has Assange made it harder to counter the threats we face as a global community? Many involved in diplomacy naturally believe so, arguing that the greatest threats to national security now come from modern-day Kim Philbys,1 information anarchists motivated not by creed or crusade but by a desire to get back at the system. Fight the power. American science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling judges this to be seismic – ‘Julian Assange hacked a superpower.’

  The superpower agreed. In condemning WikiLeaks, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pulled no punches. ‘It puts people’s lives in danger, threatens our national security and undermines our efforts to work with other countries to solve shared problems … disclosures like these tear at the fabric of the proper function of responsible government.’2

  WikiLeaks also creates dangerous implications for the ability of diplomats and governments to protect confidential information and exchanges. Former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband argues that

  the best diplomats, outside of formal negotiations, make a difference by being a transmission belt for valuable insights, born of real knowledge and good contacts in their host country. It is judgements, preferably expressed in memorable prose, that you most want from people on the ground. WikiLeaks makes that task tougher. It is one thing for people in politics or business to be wary of writing anything down, but quite another if they fear to say anything to foreign diplomats. And if ambassadors fear to tell it straight and loud to head office then we are all poorer.

  In reality, though, WikiLeaks was less of a shock for diplomats than many observers have suggested. Everyone in diplomacy knows that detailed records are kept by their interlocutors. For those involved, the more honest, colourful and bold that these reports are, the more useful. There is a danger that fear of disclosure makes them vanilla or substance-free. But, as Miliband also recognises, ‘WikiLeaks is not the end of diplomacy, or of secrets. It will inject caution and care, but everyone wants to influence the Americans, and many people want to impress them, so they will go on talking to them.’3 Indeed, some in the Middle East have said to me that WikiLeaks revealed the Americans to be more straightforward and honourable than they had expected or hoped.

  WikiLeaks has indeed made diplomats more cautious. They are writing less down, especially online. Historians will have less to work with as a result. But maybe the way in which we give advice to leaders will change, and so future generations analysing our decisions will have different data sets. Those seeking greater transparency will press to see emails between officials, maybe even text (gulp) or WhatsApp messages. Maybe the thirty-year rule – under which public documents are disclosed in the UK – will disappear. Maybe someone will have hacked it all by then anyway.

  WikiLeaks has given the public a greater insight into the workings of government. It has accelerated the process through which governments acknowledge the need for greater openness and transparency. It has embarrassed plenty of people, mainly American diplomats whose private views have been exposed, and their interlocutors who thought that they were sharing theirs in safety. But it has not fundamentally hacked diplomacy and government.

  In fact, Edward Snowden’s revelations were more damaging than those of WikiLeaks. Critics of Western governments claimed that the leaks of classified documents from the US National Security Agency revealed that American spies – and their British counterparts at GCHQ – now use the Internet to sweep up vast amounts of data from the digital trail people leave every day.

  Snowden has therefore displaced Assange as the poster boy of the transparency movement. Foreign Policy magazine even put him top of the list of 2013 global thinkers. Michael Hayden, a former director of both the NSA and the CIA, suggests that ‘Snowden has compromised an entire generation of investments in US tactics, techniques, and procedures. He represents the single greatest hemorrhaging of legitimate American secrets in the history of the Republic.’4 He didn’t mean it as a compliment.

  The revelations of telephone surveillance certainly triggered public and media curiosity. Plus anger – some genuine, much synthetic – from leaders who believed that their privacy had been disturbed. But it did not change the fundamentals. Every leader knows that his or her phone is vulnerable to attack from foreign powers. In government I worked on the basis that mine was regularly targeted by at least six countries. It would often halt calls and play them back to me. Diplomats and leaders speaking on an open line are careful to discuss sensitive issues cryptically or not at all. Snowden’s revelations therefore created a sense of public awkwardness for leaders in explaining this, especially to close allies. But they did not move the dial.

  So maybe Snowden has not hacked diplomacy either? Perhaps he will get just a brief mention in the history books. What did we think intelligence agencies were doing? Spies spy, get over it.

  I am evangelical about the need to shine a light into some of the darker corners of government, and to increase public awareness and oversight. But I don’t want to live in WikiWorld, as a diplomat or a citizen. The ability to do some of our policymaking and diplomacy in secret will remain essential.

  However, what Snowden and Assange have indisputably done is accelerate the loss of trust in traditional authority. Many in the media and public are more sceptical as to whether they can trust governments with the information those governments claim that they need. In fact, trust in all institutions is falling. An October 2015 YouGov survey catalogued declining British public confidence not just in journalists (down 29% in twelve years) and politicians, but also doctors (down 6%), police (down 18%) and teachers (down 9%). This is a dramatic shift in our relationship with authority.

  Increased transparency changes the relationship between the governed and the governing. Will countries with less transparency gain or lose advantage? Who curates all this data, and how do we keep them honest? Benjamin Franklin said that ‘Three may keep a secret, if two of
them are dead.’ Who do we now trust to keep our secrets, if anyone, and who should hold them to account?

  Looking back on his life, Gabriel García Márquez concluded that ‘all human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret. Secrecy is what is known, but not to everyone. Privacy is what allows us to keep what we know to ourselves.’5 But the modern reality is that the boundaries between his definitions of secrecy and privacy are now being rapidly eroded. We are not far away from a context in which we have to ask the people with whom we are having dinner whether they are filming us on their wearable technology. We’ll be in an age when nothing we say, even in what we used to call private, is off the record. That’s a problem for diplomats – most of their work has tended to be off the record, protected by codes and laws, hidden from public sight.

  It is positive, however, that Edward Snowden’s revelations have accelerated a justified debate about surveillance and the Internet. Security agencies argue that they have to mine an ocean of data to identify the new threats from legitimate intelligence targets. This means sifting through information from those who aren’t targets, in the way that a Bond-era spy looking for a SMERSH villain would cast his eyes over a crowd. As the former GCHQ director Sir Iain Lobban has put it, ‘We’re looking for the needle, not at the hay.’6 Robert Hannigan, his successor, argues that US technology giants are becoming more reluctant – following Edward Snowden’s whistle-blowing revelations – to cooperate with GCHQ, yet ‘privacy has never been an absolute right’, and US tech giants are ‘the command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals’.7 He is right that ISIL and other organised terror groups are using digital media in a more savvy and intelligent way than their predecessors, including al-Qaeda. Monitoring them is getting harder. But we have to be careful not to focus on the mechanism rather than the message. We did not ban the telephone when terrorists communicated by phone.

  Many observers, and probably many practitioners of diplomacy, wish that we remained in the Age of Bond, a time when the trade was more glamorous and when it was clearer who was the enemy – he either spoke with an Eastern European accent or had a striking quirk. Ideally both, and an improbable lair. But we are no longer facing a comprehensible, if shifting, set of alliances that would have made sense to the crafters of the Congress of Vienna. Or indeed to Genghis Khan or Ug. Instead, diplomatic alliances are more fluid, issue-based, and flexible. And so are diplomatic enemies. Those we pay to protect our security argue that they can no longer do so simply by spying on states. They need to spy on individuals.

  Meanwhile, public and media expectations of oversight of policymaking are increasing. Officials are more paranoid about leaks and inquiries than ever before – a generation of policymakers are scarred by the various Iraq inquiries, which seem to have been a constant feature of the last decade. The carefully drafted minute that looks brilliant and witty in the prime minister’s red box will seem reckless to a parliamentary committee armed with hindsight and media outrage. There is quite rightly an intense interest in what advice goes to leaders, especially on issues relating to war and peace. Recent inquiries have shown that no one comes out with much credit when their real-time communications are put under an intense spotlight. In the past, a Private Secretary might put some additional personal advice in a Post-it note on top of a submission if they wanted to avoid becoming part of the public record. That’s increasingly likely now. Advice also becomes less candid, and more cautious.

  So, faced with this context in which there is legitimate public interest in greater transparency, but also a continued and evolving security threat, it will be necessary to establish clearer international guidelines that govern twenty-first-century espionage in democratic states. What might they be?

  Firstly, clearer rules. Most of those involved in legitimate espionage genuinely want to know where the lines are. US intelligence chief Michael Hayden says, ‘Just give me that political and legal guidance, and we’ll go play hardball. We’ll stay inside the box.’8 This applies to new means of collecting intelligence too. As another former head of GCHQ, Sir David Omand, says: ‘Democratic legitimacy demands that where new methods of intelligence-gathering and use are to be introduced they should be on a firm legal basis and rest on parliamentary and public understanding of what is involved.’9

  Secondly, decent oversight. The need for secrecy cannot be a protection from scrutiny, or used to conceal mistakes. Trust cannot be taken for granted. Again, a senior civil servant in Yes, Prime Minister captures this well: ‘Politicians are dependent on us to publicise their little triumphs, the Official Secrets Acts to conceal their daily disasters.’ Liberal democracies do better when there are checks and balances, decent accountability and oversight. The perception that those with access to secret information are manipulating it or misleading their own people is deeply corrosive. We need to find a system that allows the spies to do their jobs, while reassuring the public that they are pursuing the right people.

  Thirdly, an understanding that we still need our intelligence services and those who negotiate in secret on our behalf, within a transparent set of objectives. Foreign policy should never be wholly secret, but negotiations must often be confidential. Those in the front line of protecting their countries from increasingly sophisticated terrorism need the tools and support to do their jobs. The new technological giants must be part of this discussion. They have to help set the guidelines for where freedom ends.

  As trust erodes further, we also need greater willingness of those who lead intelligence and foreign policy work to defend it. This has long been the case in the US, where intelligence chiefs account for themselves in front of public sessions of oversight committees. The appearance of the three British intelligence chiefs – John Sawers of MI6, Iain Lobban of GCHQ and Andrew Parker of MI5 – in front of a parliamentary committee in November 2013 was rightly seen as a seismic moment, creating a frisson of excitement through the parliamentary and security correspondents. Up to this point, MI6 chiefs such as Richard Dearlove had appeared in front of parliamentary inquiries, such as Lord Hutton’s into the intelligence preparations for the Iraq War, but behind a screen or hazily pixellated. For the first time, there in front of the public, three men with such responsibility for their safety could be seen. And they were – shock horror – pretty normal. Probably a bit more male and pale than the average citizen, but otherwise decent, serious officials with decent, serious jobs. They used phrases like ‘lapping it up’ in describing al-Qaeda’s reactions to the Snowden revelations. They spoke with pride about their people. This was all positive and powerful. But the business still has its idiosyncrasies. Two days after this very public appearance, I mentioned John Sawers’ name in an internal email, rather than referring to him as ‘C’ (as MI6 chiefs have always been called), and was reprimanded for undermining national security.*

  How far are we from the first Twitter account for an intelligence chief? I suspect that it will come within the first six months of the first monarch joining Twitter (in person, rather than through a communications adviser). The CIA already has an official Twitter account, which it opened in June 2014 with uncharacteristic but impressive panache by tweeting that ‘we can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet’.

  As intelligence chiefs and diplomatic mandarins fight for resources and relevance, like all of us they will also have to battle for public support and credibility. That will mean greater openness, not about their specific operations but about their objectives and oversight mechanisms. That allows the professionals to do their jobs – the shadows will still be there, and we will still need people to fight in them. It is not yet farewell, Mr Bond. But you’ll need to earn our trust.

  Those of us representing countries that claim to stand for freedoms also need to use these new tools to promote those freedoms much more aggressively online. Even without the pressures of such technological change, there is a strong case to be made for greater openness and transparency. President Obama set it out
in Shanghai in 2009: ‘The more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments accountable. They can begin to think for themselves. That generates new ideas. It encourages creativity.’ The US, more than any other nation, has sought to use this new instrument to promote democratic values in other countries, whether through presidential YouTube messages to the Iranian people or energetic defence of the rights of free speech of bloggers facing greater restrictions. That must continue.

  In the short term, this information free-for-all acts as a brake on the diplomatic flexibility of democratic leaders compared to their more dictatorial rivals. Every move by the US is heavily scrutinised, debated and exposed. The Freedom of Information Act in the UK has meant that advice becomes more cautious, and that officials spend a disproportionate amount of time managing information and responding to inquiries about what they are doing. Our opponents must chuckle. They no longer need armies of spies to expose our thinking – we do it for them. But we must hold our nerve. The response has to be to throw our openness back at them, building up coalitions for media and public freedoms in their own countries.

  Any enlightened government should therefore be getting more people online. But the reality is that, of the 5 billion people who will become connected in the next decade, most will be in more repressive societies. Some states, such as Turkey, have already taken on Twitter directly. In Russia, pro-Putin oligarchs have forced more independent operators such as Pavel Durov out of control of large sections of the Internet. Dissident sites are blocked in an increasing number of countries, as are even sites such as Wikipedia and YouTube.