The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  The new public profile of the Security Service was part of a more general transformation. The Service changed more during the 1990s than in any previous decade since the Second World War. Change, however, was an uncomfortable process. The end of the Cold War, which had been MI5’s chief preoccupation for much of the previous half-century, left an initial sense of disorientation which complicated H Branch’s attempt to plan the Service’s new role.1 H1/0, who was asked in February 1990 by Sir Patrick Walker to prepare a strategic review of the Service’s future, noted that when he began his review ‘there was reason to fear that world events might run away from us and that the Service would be left with its role and objectives inadequately defined in radically new international circumstances.’54 H1/0’s review, which took almost a year to complete, was, he reported, ‘without precedent in our Service’:

  Of course, major reorganisation of the Service took place in 1941 following Sir David Petrie’s report; and in 1953, following Sir Dick White’s appointment as Director General. Very great improvements in management style and policy were introduced by Sir Antony Duff. But, as far as I know, this is the first occasion on which, addressing radical changes in the world, the top management of the Service has sought to formulate a coherent strategy.55

  The Service, however, was still unused to strategic thinking. Though H1/0’s strategic review drew heavily on discussions with a small circle of fellow enthusiasts, in general he found little enthusiasm within the Service for ‘addressing radical changes’, and was disappointed by the lack of imagination shown by many of his colleagues when he discussed the future with them:

  We must recognise the fact, unfortunate though it is, that the need for us to respond to the new situation by devising an articulate and coherent strategy is appreciated by few colleagues in the Service . . . For the Service as an institution, a lack of interest in, or a hostility to, demanding strategic thinking will not do. How to overcome these incapacities is a serious question for us.56

  The future DG Jonathan Evans, then H1B/1, recalls the initial discussion of H1/0’s strategic review by the Management Board as ‘stormy!’ He and H1/0 wondered whether the Legal Adviser, David Bickford, who had clashed with Walker at the meeting, might resign (though, in the event, he did not do so).57 The controversies aroused by the review helped to produce an important cultural shift. By 1992 it was accepted that:

  Strategic planning is the principal role of the Management Board, supported by H1. Board members have corporate, non-partisan responsibilities in this regard in addition to their individual command roles.

  . . .

  Strategic planning [is] now part of annual resources management cycle of objective setting, planning and performance review. A review of strategy each summer begins the cycle.58

  (Along with the Service’s increased capacity for strategic thinking went a growing acceptance of jargon – even a belief among some staff that it was expected of them.) Debate on how far the Service should move into new areas of work – countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, supporting the police against organized crime, defending the UK’s ‘economic well-being’, investigating animal-rights extremists – continued into the mid-1990s.

  In March 1992, the Security Service proposed to the Interdepartmental Working Group on Subversion in Public Life (SPL) that it cease keeping a record of ‘rank-and-file members of subversive organisations’, once the first assignment of most new graduate entrants. The SPL agreed that ‘this change will not involve any increased risk to national security.’ The proportion of subversives detected by the Security Service during vetting had declined from 2.7 per cent of all applicants in 1971 to 0.06 per cent in 1990. ‘This decline’, it reported, ‘parallels the national decline in subversive organisations.’ Since the 1970s the number of organizations identified as subversive had fallen from over seventy to around forty-five, and their total membership from 55,000 to around 14,000. Only six of the organizations had more than 400 members. None represented any significant threat to national security. The Service had found no evidence in recent years that any subversive group had deliberately set out to obtain classified information.59

  The illusion within Whitehall that the ‘peace dividend’ produced by the end of the Cold War should extend to the intelligence community as well as to the armed services led to budget cuts for the Security Service (as for SIS and GCHQ) which made necessary the first compulsory redundancies since the Second World War.60 Like Washington and the government machines of other allies, Whitehall failed to grasp that, even though the threat of thermonuclear war was far lower than it had been for forty years, the increased diversity of potential threats to national security, especially from terrorism, pointed to a need for more, rather than less, intelligence. The culmination of the intelligence budget negotiation was a ‘Star Chamber’ in which ministers whose departments were the main intelligence consumers put to the heads of the agencies, as it seemed to Rimington, the most awkward questions their officials could devise:

  You knew that whatever you were proposing, you would be given less, and drawing attention to the comparative cost to the country of a successful IRA bomb in the City of London and a few more thousands of pounds spent on counter-terrorism never seemed to work. I came away wondering ruefully why I had put so much effort into stopping them all getting blown up.61

  In November 1993 the DG announced to staff the depressing news that the Major government had decided, on the recommendation of the PUS Committee, ‘that over the next three financial years we must find the funding for additional work necessary against PIRA from within our own resources, as well as producing some further savings on top of those already presented in our [financial] Plan, as a contribution towards reducing Government expenditure’. In the view of Stephen Lander, who became Director H in 1994,62 Rimington’s negotiating skills within Whitehall helped to ‘fight off the worst cuts’.63 Over the next two years, however, almost 300 staff were retired early. In all, the Service lost over 400 jobs, nearly 20 per cent of its total strength. As Lander later acknowledged, ‘Our success at handling this painful episode was mixed.’64 Despite Rimington’s skill in dealing with Whitehall, she seemed a somewhat remote figure to those in Thames House worried about their jobs. In Manningham-Buller’s view, she was ‘better externally than internally as DG, not always comfortable with staff’.65 The painful problems of redundancy were compounded by the travails of moving towards a record-keeping system increasingly based on computerization rather than paper files. When Lander became Director H, the Service used a Unix word-processing system called GIFTED CHILD, which malfunctioned so frequently that it was nicknamed SPOILED BRAT. Lander took the risky but ultimately successful decision to buy Linkworks, which, as well as working with Unix, enabled the Service to switch to PCs and use Microsoft software.66

  The dramatic post-Cold War shift in the Service’s operational priorities and public profile, combined with painful staff and budget cutbacks, prompted the unprecedented decision by the Board in April 1993 to put staff morale on its agenda every six months.67 Concern for morale also led three months later to the first Staff Attitude Survey.68 Seventy per cent of respondents found the Service’s work ‘a source of satisfaction’; 79 per cent described relationships with colleagues in similar terms. The staff management section found ‘the overall feedback from the survey positive and encouraging’, but must have been disconcerted to discover that only a bare majority of line managers (52 per cent) rated the support it provided to them as ‘good’ or ‘very good’.69

  In the aftermath of ASCRIBE, PIRA posed a greater mainland threat than ever before. A Cabinet Office review of the ‘United Kingdom Response to Irish Republican Terrorism’ by Joe Pilling (later PUS in the Northern Ireland Office), completed in February 1993, was the most wide-ranging since the start of the Troubles. Pilling concluded that: ‘The cost of Northern Ireland is high. But although it continues to go up it is of broadly the same order as we have been used to for many years.�
�� The frequency – though not the lethality – of PIRA mainland attacks, however, was steadily increasing. Between 1977 and 1989 there was no year during which there were more than four days on which ‘Irish Republican terrorist acts took place in Great Britain’. In 1990, however, there were nineteen days – more than during the whole of the 1980s. The total rose to a record forty-seven days in 1992. The outlook appeared bleak – not least because PIRA had begun a bombing campaign against the City of London. A Whitehall report commented:

  1992 saw the introduction to Great Britain of devices consisting of a large quantity of HME [home-made explosive]. One [at the Baltic Exchange] in the City of London led to insurance claims of around £800m. Only a combination of good intelligence, good policing and good luck prevented several more incidents on a similar scale. The cost of four or five similar explosions such as they intended last summer would have been equivalent to the contingency reserve for a financial year. There is every reason to think that PIRA see the pressure that this places on HMG . . .70

  The Service’s role in preventing a series of City bombings on the scale of that at the Baltic Exchange made an important and perhaps crucial difference to the struggle against PIRA.

  On 22 February 1993, John Major received, via the intelligence link used for secret communications between Whitehall and PIRA, a message which marked the beginning of the long and tortuous path leading eventually to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. The remarkable fact that, only two years after coming within 10 feet of killing perhaps half the cabinet, the Provisionals (though they later disputed the wording of the message quoted by Major in his memoirs) were seeking an end to the ‘armed conflict’ reflects, in part, the role of intelligence in limiting the success of their operations. It also reflected the success of Operation CHIFFON, whose aim was ‘to achieve a ceasefire and talks’ with PIRA. The principal channel through which CHIFFON operated was Brendan Duddy, the Derry businessman who had provided a back-channel to the Provisionals in the 1970s and had direct access to a senior figure in the PIRA leadership.71

  Since 1981 there had been little contact with Duddy. Early in 1991, however, he had renewed contact to say that Republican leaders were interested in peace talks.72 Thereafter the case was taken over by T Branch, which began regular meetings with Duddy, usually at fortnightly intervals.73 Martin McGuinness later acknowledged, ‘I was given the responsibility of building a bridge to the British government, building contacts, which I worked away at from the late 1980s . . .’74 On 20 February 1993 McGuinness declared publicly that the British government privately believed in the need for ‘inclusive dialogue’. He added that Republicans, for their part, would have to apply ‘new and radical thinking’ to their understanding of the Unionists. Compromise was in the air.75 Duddy’s Security Service contact wrote in a briefing for the Prime Minister in March: ‘I think it is most unlikely that we would have been able to launch CHIFFON had it not been for [Duddy] . . . He is a remarkable man who is devoted to achieving peace in Northern Ireland despite the high risk to himself . . .’76 The back-channel process, however, encouraged ambiguity. As Duddy’s first British intelligence contact had acknowledged almost twenty years earlier, ‘ambiguous phrases’ were ‘very much the currency we were involved in’.77 After the Observer revealed in November 1993 that the British government had a secret back-channel to the Provisionals, the contacts between them collapsed in acrimony with each side publishing different accounts of what had been said. John Major wrote later: ‘I regretted the loss of the back channel. It gave us some difficult moments, but it played its part. Making peace is a tricky business.’78 In Lander’s view, without the back-channel ‘there would have been no peace process.’

  While the secret contacts were still continuing, PIRA had begun a major new offensive against the City of London. On 24 April 1993 a bomb containing over a ton of HME exploded at the NatWest Tower in Bishopsgate London, killing one person, injuring more than thirty and causing damage estimated at £350 million. Stephen Lander, then Director T, remembers it as one of the low points in his career. However, Major, to whom he sent a detailed report, was sympathetic.79 In July the Provisionals made public their strategy to frighten foreign financial institutions from maintaining offices in the City of London. PIRA letters to foreign-owned City institutions warned them that the newly established security zone around the City would be powerless to prevent more attacks as devastating as those against the Baltic Exchange and the NatWest Tower. The Security Service reported: ‘The sending of these letters was not only a propaganda exercise by PIRA, but also a continuation of its campaign to damage the British economy. PIRA hopes that foreign companies will either move away from London, or be discouraged from making further investments there.’80

  Had the bombing campaign in the City continued, PIRA might well have succeeded in its aim. Scarcely had the PIRA letters been posted, however, than surveillance of one of the leading figures in the mainland bombing campaign, Robert ‘Rab’ Fryers, a senior Belfast Provisional, led to a major breakthrough. Fryers was tracked down in Scotland staying at a flat occupied by Hugh Jack, a Scot with no known PIRA links who had been chosen as his support worker.81 Surveillance revealed that, as well as preparing an attack on the City, Fryers was planning a prolonged bombing campaign in Birmingham and Manchester. Fryers was overheard telling Jack that he was going to plant a bomb within the ‘ring of steel’ which had been erected to protect the City of London from further PIRA attacks. He planned to drive south to Neasden, park his car near the Ox and Gate public house, then travel into the City with the bomb by bus, convinced that the police were stopping and searching only private vehicles.82

  After telling Hugh Jack that he had put a ‘couple of bits and pieces’ in a ‘wee bag’,83 Fryers left Jack’s flat early on the evening of 13 July, carrying a box which he appeared to be trying to conceal under his coat, and was heard telling Jack that he was driving south to the Scratchwood Service Area on the M1, where, after sleeping in his car, he would head for Neasden and catch a bus for the City. A4 followed Fryers to the Service Area, then handed over surveillance to the Met in the early hours of 14 July in preparation for his arrest. Fryers was arrested at 9.25 a.m., shortly after he had parked his car in Neasden. He was found in possession of a timer and power unit (TPU) connected to 2 pounds of Semtex explosive and a plastic container with half a gallon of petrol. On arrival at Paddington Green police station, the seriously overweight Fryers initially refused to put on any of the clothing provided for him, on the grounds that it was not big enough, and draped himself in a blanket instead. Soon afterwards Jack, together with a number of his relatives and associates, was arrested by Central Scotland police.84 A holdall dumped by Jack in local woods was found to contain six blocks of Semtex, six detonators and six TPUs which would have been used to manufacture six car bombs to continue the bombing campaign in the City begun by Fryers.85

  In the course of the investigation T2 had manned a twenty-four-hour operations room in London and co-ordinated the work in London, Scotland and Belfast of A4 static and mobile surveillance, A1 and A2 operations, the H1 and Scottish Office units which dealt with warrants, advice from the Service’s lawyers on evidential and warrantry issues, S (Special Branch surveillance) Squad, B (Special Branch Irish) Squad, SO13 (Met anti-terrorist branch), SO19 (Met firearms), several special branches, especially Central Scotland and Strathclyde, the Central Scotland technical support unit, and surveillance and armed support by the police forces of Greater Manchester, Northumbria, Lothian, Borders and West Yorkshire.86 Lander saw the operation as proof of the transformation brought about by ASCRIBE:

  The operation was an important success for the Service in its new Mainland work against PIRA. As importantly it was a clear demonstration of the ability of police forces and ourselves to work to a common end. Both the Metropolitan Police and the Scottish forces involved performed impressively as did our A and T Branch teams. These arrests will be a serious blow to PIRA’s Mainland campaign.87

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bsp; John Major sent personal congratulations to the Service on the arrests.88

  In December 1993 a report by the Intelligence Co-ordinator, Gerry Warner, concluded that the ASCRIBE changes had ‘settled down extraordinarily well’. Since October 1992 there had been over sixty actual or attempted PIRA attacks on the mainland, a few major, most minor. Thanks to good intelligence, the perpetrators of most of the attacks had been identified; forty-nine individuals associated with PIRA had been arrested and seventeen subsequently charged with serious terrorist offences.89 Despite attempted mortar attacks on Heathrow Airport in March 1994, PIRA mainland operations during the first eight months of 1994 were at a much lower level than in the previous year. The Security Service reported to Whitehall that in the twelve months up to July 1994 eighteen of thirtyfour planned PIRA mainland operations ‘were frustrated through Serviceled intelligence operations’.

  On 2 June 1994, however, the UK’s Irish operations suffered a serious setback when a Chinook helicopter carrying twenty-five British counter-terrorism personnel, among them the DCI, John Deverell, and three other members of the Security Service, crashed in the Mull of Kintyre, killing all on board. Unlike the army and the RUC, the Service was unaccustomed to facing death in the line of duty. The DDG(O) left for Belfast on the morning after the crash to visit bereaved families and staff, and to see the coffins leave Aldergrove Airport. Stella Rimington, who also visited the families, attended the funerals and went to see the crash site, remembers the tragedy as one ‘which I will never truly get over’. Many members of the Security Service still have the Order of Service for the memorial service held in the chapel at Sandhurst. Most also reflected that throughout the Troubles the far more visible RUC had paid a much heavier price than the Security Service. Despite some narrow escapes, PIRA had not succeeded in killing a single Service officer in Northern Ireland. By contrast, over 300 RUC officers were killed and more than 9,000 injured, the great majority by the Provisionals. The price paid by the army was heavier still, with 763 military personnel killed as a direct result of terrorist operations. Members of the Security Service attended many of the RUC and army funerals, sometimes – in the tradition of both Irish communities – walking behind the coffins of their former comrades.