The death of Princess Diana in 1997 in a car accident in a tunnel in Paris led to the surfacing of one of Tomlinson’s most awkward allegations. He said he remembered a not dissimilar plan being discussed to get rid of Slobodan Milošević, the Serb leader, earlier in the decade, involving a bright light being flashed at the driver of a car to induce a crash. Could there have been a plot? Eventually an inquiry would be launched which would find no evidence for the claim that the crash was anything other than an accident. It did raise the question of whether there had been a plan for a murder in the Balkans. The inquiry found there had been only the flimsiest notion. A ‘creative’ officer had been worried about a particularly violent Serb (but not Milošević) being on the verge of riding an extreme nationalist agenda to power in elections and accelerating the genocide. The officer compared the situation to Adolf Hitler the year before he came to power, where many lives would have been saved had he been assassinated. ‘It seemed to me that we might be in the months running up to this extreme radical nationalist politician taking power. It seemed to me there might be an analogy with 1932 in Germany. So the question I was posing is whether we should have a plan to take action before the Hitler option actually took place,’ he later testified.17
A few ideas were put down in messy handwriting in the form of a contingency plan, including using special forces and internal Serbian elements to do the deed. ‘It is true that the ethos of the service was against assassination,’ the creative officer would later testify, amid evidence that new entrants to MI6 were told in their initial training that assassination was not countenanced and the subject was not up for debate. ‘Suddenly here I am confronted by a situation where we are dealing with a bloody civil war in the centre of Europe, where tens of thousands of innocent people are being killed. So it seemed to me appropriate that we should at least revisit the dictum of the services and see if we felt obliged to revise it in an exceptional case.’ When he handed the notes to his secretary, she typed them up with some surprise into a page and a half of A4. ‘I had never read or seen anything like it before,’ she later said. He decided to go round his immediate boss, whom he thought might be cold on the idea, and send it direct to the Controller for Eastern and Central Europe. His superiors stamped on the idea, hard. They told him MI6 was not in that business – it was unethical, they said, a view with which he disagreed – and instructed him to destroy all copies of the memo he had written. A senior officer stood over the secretary as she deleted it from the antiquated computer system and shredded paper copies. The days of Anthony Eden and George Kennedy Young planning to bump off Nasser were long gone. ‘We do not have a licence to kill,’ a Chief would later explain, although he hesitated when asked whether the service had ever had one.18
With a secure footing and a shiny new headquarters, MI6 just needed something to do. The shape of an intelligence service, in theory, should be dictated by the threats a country faces and by its concept of national security. But this is rarely the reality. Institutional inertia often means old structures persist even when the threats they were created for have long since passed. This was the case in the 1990s when it took a while for the contour of new threats to be discerned. The old world in which an intelligence service purely and aggressively served the ‘national’ interest by helping secure advantage against other states had not entirely passed away but was being complemented by more amorphous, less state-centric threats to security like international terrorism and groups smuggling and selling nuclear weapons technology.
The new agenda for the spies was in parts familiar and unfamiliar. The Balkans conflict caught MI6 off guard, but the service began to adapt, establishing small teams in the region and working more closely with the military and other partners. Secretly obtaining the negotiating positions of other countries was traditional territory, even if now the targets might be the Serbs in the Balkans or even European allies. Former MI6 officers claim that secret intelligence had a major impact in Britain’s negotiations for the important treaties negotiated that decade. Unsurprisingly politicians refuse to comment on that rather awkward possibility.19 Economic intelligence was a staple of the Cold War, trying to divine the reality of Soviet economic performance, but now it shaded into the greyer terrain of business and commercial secrets. What were the Germans planning when it came to interest rates and who was bribing whom for arms contracts in the Middle East? More time was spent on dealing with drug barons, working with Customs, and looking for those laundering money in the Caribbean. All of this meant dealing with other government departments and agencies and not just with the Foreign Office. In the old days, officers from MI6 would not even declare themselves within Whitehall, and the intelligence community sat at one side in its own clearly designated compartment. Now its officers were being seconded to other departments and MI6 was increasingly drawn away from pure intelligence gathering. The threats looked global, but MI6 had shrunk in size with the end of the Cold War so it was having to choose more carefully and work more closely with other countries and institutions and not just with the US. There were some Cold Warriors who simply could not make the transition, who could not see the point of it all and who could not operate without the old familiar bearings. In late 1993, McColl instituted what became known as the ‘Christmas Massacre’ in which a raft of older, senior directors were pushed out to be replaced with a younger generation. The following year a youngish new chief, David Spedding, who tellingly had risen through Middle East work rather than Sov Bloc, was appointed.
By the second half of the 1990s, a clearer sense of the new agenda was coming into view, one which occupied more comfortable terrain than the economic and commercial focus of the preceding years. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction – biological, chemical and nuclear weapons – formed one part. This had been at the cutting edge of work within the service thanks to concerns over the Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan. From the 1980s, a small group within MI6 had been tracking Khan, who had stolen plans for uranium enrichment while working in the Netherlands and then returned to his native Pakistan to build a vast procurement network to secure the specialised parts in order to build a bomb. Nuclear and other unconventional weapons programmes tend to inhabit the most secret nooks and crannies of reticent states. But the network of largely European businessmen supplying Pakistan offered one way for MI6 to try and get a handle on what Pakistan was up to. This also required talking to other countries, including some in Europe, about what they were seeing, as well as trying to piece together the bigger picture, a picture which looked alarming as the 1990s came to a close.
The second plank of the new agenda was the emergence of a new breed of international terrorism. Terrorism was not new. Palestinian hijackings and later Lockerbie had seen it rise on the agenda in the 1970s and 1980s. But it began to take on a new hue in the mid-1990s, and ambitious officers started to gravitate towards it as they would have done to Sov Bloc work before. There were studies of the threat of radical Islam, but few in MI5 and MI6 had a clear realisation of quite what was brewing, not least on their own doorstep. London, or as the French called it Londonistan, was becoming a home for dissidents and a hub for propaganda including for Osama bin Laden’s allies (the Al Qaeda leader’s claim of responsibility for the 1998 Embassy bombings in Africa came through a fax machine in North London). British officials claim they were alert to a looming threat. The more aggressive American officials dispute that, saying that Britain was only marginally ahead of other European states which showed little appetite for the issue and often seemed only to feign interest because of the American focus. ‘They thought we were as mad as March hares,’ recalls one CIA officer who frequently pushed European counterparts to do more.20
Richard Dearlove became chief of MI6 in 1999. With a few exceptions, the top job has usually gone to the most aggressive operational officers and Dearlove, always ambitious, fitted that mould. He had acquired a reputation as a moderniser keen to make MI6 relevant and to engage with the outside world and other dep
artments. Intelligence had to be useful, he argued. It was no longer about collecting against static targets like the Russian military but had, in the new world, to be about doing things. ‘My career was very much defined by the Cold War,’ Dearlove later told an audience. ‘I cannot really exaggerate the extent to which our preoccupations of national security, hitherto so very firmly anchored, were cut adrift when the Cold War ended.’21 He had joined in 1966, a time when the wounds inflicted by Philby and Blake were all too clear. He had risen through Sov Bloc which tended to produce traditionalists, like John Scarlett, who emphasised the purity of intelligence gathering. But in 1987 Dearlove had secured the plum posting of Geneva. This was traditionally one of the key Sov Bloc observation and attack posts targeting the large number of Communists who passed through the city for international summits and UN meetings. During the years of transition at the end of the Cold War, Dearlove broadened out the targets for intelligence collection, integrating technology with human sources. One of Saddam Hussein’s half-brothers was posted there and used the city as Iraq’s European hub. The Libyans and Iranians were also very active, as were the Chinese. Many influential Middle Easterners had summer houses by the lake. This opened up new targets and issues, including the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and international crime. Dearlove’s strategy was recognised as a successful model of how to address a wider range of security threats. He began to be seen as a leading moderniser and was sent to be head of station in Washington. He encountered a CIA unsure of its mission and haemorrhaging talented officers. It was also penetrated in the form of Aldrich Ames and was soon to go through its own painful polygraph-led molehunts. Dearlove, who had been educated in part in the US, built close relations which would become important later. His ambition for the top job was clear. So, just behind him, was that of John Scarlett, and the two men did not get on.
Scarlett’s and Dearlove’s rivalry was more than personal, it was also cultural, reflecting two strands in the service’s culture. ‘Roundheads and Cavaliers’ was how one colleague put it. The modernising against traditionalist divide had evolved from the time when Shergy was battling to instil a sense of professionalism against the haphazard, amateurish culture that had spawned Albania and the like. Subsequently a divide emerged between Shergy’s Moscow Men and the more adventurous Camel Drivers who focused on Africa and the Middle East and covert action rather than on pure intelligence gathering. To be successful, a Secret Service needs both types: operating in St Petersburg will always be different to operating in Oman, but there is also normally a dominant culture. At the end of the Cold War, there was some resentment at all the talk about the crisis that the Soviet bloc’s passing had caused. It had only ever been less than half the service’s work, grumbled those who plied their trade in the souks of Damascus or on the plains of Africa. Now the Sov Bloc master race came to be seen as relics of the past, relegated to the sidelines. They had become the traditionalists, and the modernisers were those who wanted to do things, work more closely with the rest of Whitehall and make sure their intelligence had impact rather than just collect it. Scarlett was a classic Moscow Man. ‘The buccaneering spirit can be overplayed because that’s part of the myth,’ he later noted. ‘Above all we need people who are disciplined.’22 After ascending to the top job in 1999, Dearlove was beginning to change the service when the world around the service suddenly changed.
John Scarlett had been in his new role as chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee for six days on the morning of 11 September 2001. His rivals at MI6 had hoped that his unusual appointment (unusual because a consumer rather than producer of intelligence normally occupied the post) would keep him out of the running to become chief of MI6 in the future. During a meeting in his office in neighbouring Downing Street someone walked in and told him to turn on the TV. The Twin Towers in New York were collapsing. The Prime Minister was already on his way back from the TUC conference in Brighton.
Within three hours of the attack, Scarlett and the head of MI5 Stephen Lander began to brief the Prime Minister at Downing Street (Dearlove was on his way back from Stockholm). Blair had already framed the attack in dramatic, almost apocalyptic terms in his own mind. It was, he thought, the first salvo in a battle over the future of the world between modernity and fanaticism.23 He immediately asked to see all the intelligence produced on Al Qaeda in the last year. He was handed thirty reports. That night he told the nation that Britain would stand ‘shoulder to shoulder with our American friends’.
Britain’s spy chiefs had known something was coming. ‘The fact that a large-scale terrorist event occurred was not a surprise,’ Dear-love said later. ‘The fear was that it would be an attack probably against American interests probably not in the mainland.’24 ‘We had prior intelligence that summer of Al Qaeda planning a major attack,’ Eliza Manningham-Buller, then the number two to Stephen Lander, recalled. ‘We didn’t know, nor did the Americans, where it was going to take place.’25 Nebulous reports had coagulated and then dissipated over the summer. In June, British and American intelligence held one of their joint summits. ‘The primary topic of discussion was a major terrorist event,’ according to Dearlove. ‘That was a routine meeting which turned into something not routine … There was an increase in chatter [intercepted communications], an increase in indicators.’26 Everyone was fearful. It was as if they were walking through a long, pitch-black corridor knowing that somewhere around them an animal was preparing to pounce. That month, the British passed on details that a senior Al Qaeda figure was planning car-bomb attacks against US targets in Saudi Arabia in the coming weeks. Nothing happened.27 A British report from 6 July read: ‘The most likely location for such an attack on western interests by UBL [Usama bin Laden] and those who share his agenda is the Gulf States, or the wider middle east.’28 A JIC report that month said that attacks were in their final stage of preparation.29 An attack had not been a surprise but its target and scale were.
At the Downing Street briefing on 9/11, Scarlett and Lander told Blair it was the work of Osama bin Laden and that no government would need to have been involved.30 Blair and his press secretary Alastair Campbell pressed them on how they could be so sure. Blair immediately feared that President Bush would be put under pressure to respond aggressively and they all knew that Washington would be looking for any evidence that Iraq, Libya or Iran were involved. A ‘ragged’ meeting of the emergency committee, COBRA, followed in a secure basement room beneath Whitehall. London’s airspace was closed and security at key buildings tightened.
Intelligence that flowed in overnight pointed even more strongly at bin Laden. The newly appointed Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said that the UK should not get ahead of the US. ‘He felt our best role was to stay close and to try and exercise influence privately,’ Alastair Campbell recorded in his diary.31 In Washington, there was an awareness that Britain wanted to be involved in any military response in Afghanistan. ‘Give them a role,’ Bush said to his aides on 13 September.32 The instinctive reaction of both Blair and his spies was the same: to get close to the Americans and find out what they were planning and to try and guide them away from any temptation towards unilateralism. Blair wrote the first of many private notes to the American President advising him on some of the diplomatic options.
A flock of spooks was despatched to Washington. Although US airspace would be closed for days, a special dispensation was made for a flight from Britain on 12 September. Richard Dearlove, Eliza Manningham-Buller and Francis Richards, head of GCHQ, all headed to an airbase where an old freight DC-10 was the only plane available to fly them across the Atlantic. The station commander would not allow it to take off. Airspace was closed, he explained. Dearlove let rip. The Prime Minister was calling the President to make sure it took off, he explained, and he would accept responsibility if there were any problems. It took off without clearance to land in the US and with the pilot keeping an eye on the fuel gauge in case he had to turn back. Some seats had been installed in the back, but
the plane was largely empty. The small group of passengers remained silent over the journey, lost in their thoughts of what the previous day meant and where it would take them.
As they flew down the eastern seaboard the spies gazed out of the window at the smoke from the burning rubble of the Twin Towers curling up into the sky. When they arrived at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington they were taken by motorcade to CIA headquarters at Langley. They were greeted at the doorstep by the normally ebullient but now sombre Director George Tenet. The delegation was too big to fit in Tenet’s personal dining room and so they used another executive room, soulless with blue walls and tables covered in crisp white linen. ‘There was an air of surrealism about the whole late-night gathering, as white-jacketed waiters moved quietly around the tables and served us food,’ recalled an American who was present.33 The Americans looked knackered, thought the British. There was not much intelligence to impart but the gesture of solidarity was appreciated by the Americans. ‘The message I was sent to Washington by Tony Blair to deliver’, Dearlove later said, ‘was that we would stand by the United States in their hour of need and we would bring to the table our capability and our assets.’34 Blair’s Foreign Affairs Adviser David Manning, who had been stranded in New York, had joined the team. ‘I hope we can all agree that we should concentrate on Afghanistan and not be tempted to launch any attacks on Iraq,’ he said at the end of the dinner as the officials broke into small groups.35 The relationship with the Americans, so close during the Cold War, had been fraying towards the end of the 1990s. The absence of a unifying threat and focus on more localised enemies like drug barons had meant that the intelligence services were not always pointing in the same direction. Britain had also edged closer to Europe. But with 9/11, old reflexes kicked back in. A CIA official told his counterpart that MI6 could play an important role in acting as a link to other European intelligence services.36
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