Gerry Warner had risen to be deputy chief of MI6 and then the security and intelligence co-ordinator in the Cabinet Office, responsible for overseeing the community as a whole and its health. He found he needed to traipse round departments, even the Bank of England, and ask what they actually wanted. A performance-monitoring system was instituted in which policy-makers would tick a box if they found intelligence useful. Intelligence was becoming less precautionary than it had been in the Cold War when the focus was on looking for signs of conflict or having the tactical knowledge of how to fight the war if it started. In the old days an analyst could spend his whole career watching a Soviet tank division before receiving his pension. Intelligence was now drawing closer to day-to-day decision-making. ‘In many ways the intelligence we were providing was of more immediate use to politicians than the intelligence we had provided during the Cold War, because most of the intelligence provided during the Cold War was mostly of background interest – very important, very interesting – but there wasn’t anything we could do about it,’ argues Warner.5 And even when it came to the Russians, things were a little odd.
The British Ambassador in Moscow, Rodric Braithwaite, nearly choked on his breakfast when one morning he opened up a local newspaper to find an interview, carried on two successive days, with his chauffeur. For seventeen years Konstantin had driven the Ambassador’s Rolls-Royce in and out of the grand, menacing prerevolutionary mansion on the Moscow River with its view over to the Kremlin. He was now admitting that he had spied on Braithwaite and his predecessors for the KGB. ‘You might have warned me because this could cause me serious trouble back home,’ Braithwaite told Konstantin. ‘You know, questions in the House about the limpwristed Ambassador who failed to notice his driver works for the KGB. That sort of stuff.’
‘I couldn’t,’ replied Konstantin. ‘I’m a Russian patriot.’6
Times were changing. For a while in 1991 the old KGB was in disarray and appeared out of business. Braithwaite hosted a delegation of spy-hunters from MI5 who had come to meet their former adversaries. The group were greeted at Moscow’s airport by a KGB officer bearing roses, before enjoying a meeting at the Lubyanka in which both sides felt ‘like wild animals being presented with their prey in circumstances where they couldn’t eat it’. The British asked politely if the surveillance and harassment of members of Embassy staff in Moscow could be reduced and asked if the level of Russian espionage within Britain might be limited. They received the distinct impression that these ideas were ridiculous.7 Braithwaite also had a new MI6 head of station working in the secure bubble room in the cavernous Embassy-cum-Residence. It had not been the obvious choice for an ambitious officer but Moscow was embedded deep in John Scarlett’s psyche and the chance to be the first station chief to be ‘avowed’ or declared to the Russians at such an interesting time was simply too good an opportunity to miss. The idea was that the two countries would normalise their intelligence relations and act like other countries where the head of station did not do any spying per se but acted as a liaison with the local services for the passing of agreed information. Scarlett’s past running of Oleg Gordievsky, a traitor reviled deeply by KGB types, was either unknown to the Russians or conveniently overlooked. But the old world had not entirely passed.
Dressed in shabby clothes the Russian had knocked on the door of an American embassy in one of the Baltic States. He was turned away disappointed. Defectors whom Western intelligence would have fought tooth and nail for in the past were now appearing hopefully at their doors bearing armfuls of documents and expecting dollars and visas in return. They seemed ten a penny and most got nowhere. Next stop for this man was the local British Embassy where he explained to a female diplomat that he had top-secret KGB material. The British diplomat had been trained to deal with walk-ins and glanced at the material, which had lain among bread, sausages and clothes in his bag. Vasili Mitrokhin would be one of the select few considered valuable enough to warrant assistance. He was a former archivist for the KGB who had secretly copied out and then buried large chunks of the organisation’s secret operational history in the garden of his dacha. Understanding its potential, the British diplomat told him to return again soon at an agreed date, when he would meet an MI6 officer who would come over from London. At that meeting Mitrokhin produced 2,000 pages of his notes which included details of KGB illegals. This was enough to swing the argument in London. Displaying the kind of cheek which the old Robber Barons would have enjoyed, MI6 organised for the clandestine exfiltration of Mitrokhin and his family on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Scarlett was kept out of the operation, but a young MI6 officer dug up Mitrokhin’s voluminous files and carried them to the British Embassy where they were taken to Britain in six large trunks.8
The Russians talked about ‘no spy’ deals, but there was little trust on either side. A few of the old Cold Warriors at MI6 could not quite let go and continued to want to use the defectors to turn the SVR, the renamed foreign intelligence wing of KGB, inside out and to extract every last drop of blood in revenge for Philby. MI6 even recruited one junior Russian diplomat who appeared to be mentally ill. This was a result of ambitious officers hoping to hit their ‘performance targets’ and exaggerating their successes, one disaffected colleague thought.9 As early as 1992, there were the first signs that the SVR was also up to its old tricks with a couple discovered at Helsinki airport travelling under false identity papers, claiming they had been born in Croydon and Wembley in London. They looked a lot like old-fashioned Russian illegals.10
Scarlett’s time in Moscow did not end happily. The Russians nominated one of their senior officers to take up the counterpart position as declared head of station in London. MI5, still not quite able to come to terms with the new world, kicked up a fuss. He is a spy, they said. Of course he is a spy, the Foreign Office and MI6 replied, that is the whole point. But he has had shady dealings with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, MI5 responded. It would be more of a surprise if someone who had worked for the KGB did not have a shady past, came the reply. The Russian intelligence officer was suffering from cancer and Moscow was keen for him to get to London for medical treatment, but his visa was blocked thanks to MI5. Moscow was understandably furious and decided on revenge. Scarlett was expelled under the public pretext of having recruited an agent in a military metallurgical firm. The expulsion was carried out not quietly but in a blaze of publicity, a photographer capturing an image of the publicity-shy spy in a car at the airport.
In Eastern Europe events were in some ways even stranger as MI6 officers would walk gingerly into the office of former foes and politely ask exactly what they had got up to in the past. MI6 and MI5 began a low-key role in reorganising intelligence services across what had been the Eastern bloc. This involved civilianising their services and teaching them ‘how to collect intelligence in a different environment without threatening to put someone against a wall’, as one Briton involved puts it.11 One issue was what to do with the twenty-odd illegal sleepers that the Czechs had secreted around the world. This included one or two who had been sent to Britain and now did not want to go home. It was agreed between London and Prague to leave them alone as they had never done any damage.12 As far as anyone knows, they continue to live somewhere in suburban Britain, their neighbours none the wiser about their training in servicing dead drops and sending burst transmissions.
There were old debts to be repaid as well. Agents who had been spying in place had been paid by means of escrow accounts with an understanding that one day they would be able to draw on the funds (this was always preferred by MI6 to giving them money which they could flash around, drawing attention to themselves). One agent had read the Financial Times voraciously and insisted on telling his case officer exactly how he wanted his portfolio invested. Some came out of the Cold War with a million pounds for having betrayed secrets. The valuable agent codenamed Freed had died in Czechoslovakia of a heart attack in the mid-1970s. With warm relations now established
with the Czech service, MI6 approached Václav Havel, the former dissident intellectual now running the country, and explained that there was a bank account with the money the agent had accumulated in his lengthy career spying for Her Majesty. Havel agreed to help find any remaining family. A daughter was eventually located and carefully approached. She had never guessed her father had been a spy for MI6. But, according to a British official present at a meeting, she did remember him once saying an odd thing to her: ‘I hope you marry a British officer.’ Now she understood why, and she was given details of the bank account.13
There was one final innovation, an intrusion of the modern world, welcome to some but disorienting, even terrifying to others. The Secret Service was not going to be secret any more. The timing, coming at the end of the Cold War, was largely coincidental. MI5 had already been avowed in 1989. The staff there had foisted the move on a reluctant government. They had been unhappy with having no real legal basis for their work tapping people’s phones and bugging their houses in the UK, other than a minister’s sign-off. They wanted to feel that they were working within the law, not around it. ‘It was not comfortable to be engaged in operations for which there was no proper legal cover,’ recalled Eliza Manningham-Buller. There was also the European factor. Individuals had tried to sue security services in Europe for their actions. The European Court of Human Rights had decreed that any security or intelligence service had to be on a legal footing and have a proper system of complaints. Britain had neither. MI6 would have to become ‘legal’.
There was also the rather expensive new office that MI6 was having constructed at growing expense in Vauxhall Cross. Like Century House, the building was on the south side of the river physically separating MI6 from the rest of government. But that was about the only thing the new place had in common with the old. It was flashy and very unsubtle. Gerry Warner pointed out that it would be hard to move to something that looked like an Odeon cinema and expect people not to ask what it was. The problem with Century House had been security. Not the location, which was widely known to everyone including bus conductors (‘spies alight here’ they would say as they reached the stop outside), nor even access, with its security guards who would wave people in without asking for any ID unless they did not recognise them. It was the fabric of the building itself that kept those concerned with its safety awake at night. The largely glass headquarters of the British Secret Service was housed on top of a petrol station. ‘God, we were really living on borrowed time,’ says McColl. The station was owned by Q8, the Kuwaiti petrol company. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 there was a joke doing the rounds that all the Iraqis would have to do was light a fuse to destroy the entire British Secret Service. The new architect-designed home in Vauxhall, known as Legoland by some, was secure but also a touch sterile, befitting the new era. Staff attitudes towards it were perhaps best illustrated during a special premiere for the new James Bond film The World is Not Enough in 1999, hosted inside the new headquarters. The previous year Dame Judi Dench who played M had been invited to Christmas lunch by the real C to help her gain some insight into her role. The actress who played Miss Moneypenny introduced the viewing. When the scene arrived in which a large explosion rocked the new MI6 headquarters, the assembled staff issued a loud cheer.14
The legislation which placed MI6 on a statutory footing was piloted through the House of Commons by Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, a former diplomat who had turned down an invitation to join the service in the 1950s. Serving as a diplomat out in China, he had occasionally counted railways wagons for MI6 and gazed askance at his Embassy colleagues. ‘They were odd folk by definition,’ he later recalled. ‘You found yourself maybe sitting alongside somebody who had a rather peculiar job description and you understood gradually what he or she was up to.’15 The act was passed in 1994. It answered a profound insecurity in the service. Before then, since it did not actually exist, MI6 could have been wound up or merged by the stroke of a pen and by the whim of any minister. It now had a secure foundation and at last there were fewer pretences and ums and ahs from ministers and officials when explaining exactly what bit of government they were talking about. But was there also a cost to coming out of the shadows?
There was ‘a little sorrow’ from those who had lived beneath the shroud of secrecy for so long, according to McColl. A generational divide marked attitudes within MI6 to its emergence, blinking, into the light. ‘The old people were used to the old system and they weren’t anti-avowal but they simply weren’t terribly interested in it really,’ remembers McColl, a product of Shergy’s Sov Bloc master race where secrecy was prized and something of a reluctant lifter of the veil. ‘It was always the slippery slide that we were worried about. That once you got on to the slope and you started opening things up you would run into problems over secrecy. And secrecy was and is absolutely central to the whole of our work because our work is about trust. It is about trust between the government and people running the service. It is the trust between the service and the people all over the world who are working for it, and many of them are taking great risks … they do that in the faith that we are really a secret service which means to say we are not talking and we’re not going out into the public and declaring ourselves. And I’ve always felt that that was one of our advantages. We were – and have been always – a secret service.’ The cautionary tale, McColl and others believed, was the American experience. They had watched the very public undressing of the CIA by Congress in the mid-1970s. ‘There was a sort of shudder that went through the intelligence world and it went through many of the people who were working for the Americans or working for us, because they were coming to us and saying “For God’s sake, look what’s happening in America” and “Is it going to happen to us?”’16 As MI6 stepped out, some of the older generation went around muttering to each other. ‘It will all end in tears,’ they said.
The fear was that avowal would strip the service of its mystique, a sheen of glamour and power built up largely by fiction. This had been sustained through secrecy since no one had any way of judging whether the fictional portrayal was on the mark or not. McColl traces its origins back to the late nineteenth century when Kipling and others wrote of brave British spies fighting the dastardly Russians in the Great Game over India, a tradition continued in John Buchan’s stories about the plucky Brits now defending the realm against the cunning Krauts. And then came Bond. ‘It keeps the name going doesn’t it,’ reckons McColl, who speaks freely about MI6 as a ‘brand’. ‘I mean, everybody watched Bond. And so why shouldn’t a little Bond rub off on our reputation?’ The brand, it is argued, does more than just make the service feel good about itself, it also helps with the recruitment of agents who are convinced they are dealing with an all-knowing and all-powerful organisation. If people in the Middle East want to believe that MI6 is pulling the strings behind the most unlikely events, is that really a problem if it means they will come to it when they need help (and do so in preference to another country)? Some believed that the myths of popular culture carried with them dangers. One former Foreign Secretary argued that the image of a service that always did exciting things, always won and was always right, created an exaggerated view of MI6’s potential which in turn fed into government and skewed views, particularly of inexperienced ministers, of what was possible and what was not.
The bleaker world of le Carré divided the service. ‘There were those who were furious with John le Carré because he depicts everybody as such disagreeable characters and they are always plotting against each other,’ recalls McColl, perhaps thinking of Daphne Park and her distaste for him. ‘We know we weren’t always as disagreeable as that and we certainly weren’t plotting against each other. So people got rather cross about it. But actually I thought it was terrific because, again, it carried the name that had been provided by Bond and John Buchan and everybody else. It gave us another couple of generations of being in some way special.’ But with the end of the Cold War, even the old-fashioned s
py thriller suddenly looked like a museum piece and the authors were having to search for new plotlines. Who were the bad guys now?
While MI6 did not mind the mythologising of its work in fictional literature, it was firmly determined that its own secrets should remain under lock and key. There was a strict rule that staff could not write memoirs. ‘We have always put quite a big effort into discouraging our retired people from writing books,’ explains McColl. ‘I have a lot of sympathy for them, because if you have been banging round the world for most of your life, unless you have got a very big family or a lot of old friends in the UK you come back here, you retire to some little village somewhere and it is a lonely life. You haven’t got many roots and it’s very tempting to write up some of the adventures you were involved in.’ There was one spectacular case where MI6 failed to discourage one of its own disaffected officers from talking. Richard Tomlinson had joined as a high-flyer (although those who recruited him would later rue failing to take up his references). He was eager and enthusiastic. Perhaps a bit too eager and enthusiastic, thought some of his superiors, who wondered if his notions of how to behave might display a little too much influence from the Bond films. He was also seen as something of a loner. Tomlinson himself believed he was badly treated and not given any due process before being turfed out, which is also more than plausible given the way MI6 operated. Both sides would have cause to regret the breakdown in relations, though, as Tomlinson wrote a book exposing the ins and outs of his time in the service.
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