Open Secret: The Autobiography of the Former Director-General of MI5

15

The early ’80s were a time of crisis for me personally, both at work and at home. At work, in spite of my promotion I felt out of sorts with my employment. MI5 still seemed to me a male-dominated, old-fashioned organisation, which was going to take years to change. I regarded the senior management as remote and out of touch with the staff. They were not seen around as much as I thought they should be but sat in their offices, and the rest of us, even at my middle management level, only heard from them when they had something to complain about. I did not think they were at all influential in Whitehall and they did not spend any time, as far as I could see, making sure that what the Service did and why and how it did it was sufficiently well understood, either in Whitehall or more widely in the country at large.

When issues connected with the Service were raised in Whitehall or in the press they took an unnecessarily defensive line. I was not the only one who felt like this and I suppose it was inevitable that something would give in that situation. And it did. In fact, during the early 1980s, crisis seemed to follow crisis.

But before the crises started, I had decided that nothing was going to change in the foreseeable future, and I was fed up with it. So, just about the time I was promoted, I decided to look for another job and I applied for the post of Headmistress of a major girls’ boarding school, Roedean. Filling out the application form presented me with quite a difficulty. Those were the days when one was not supposed to admit one worked for MI5.

There were various formulae provided for use, if one applied for a job. But they were so downbeat and grey as almost to ensure that no prospective employer would even consider one’s application. I seem to remember you were supposed to talk about ‘research’ and the ‘management of information’. I didn’t follow the formula, but said I worked for the Security Service. I remember going for an interview with the Governors at a house in Mayfair, just round the corner from our Curzon Street offices. I think they were very puzzled about my application; the more so because due to some postal delay, my references arrived at the same time as I did, and they were reading them out of the corners of their eyes while talking to me.

Anyway, whatever they thought about my current occupation (and we had a very circuitous conversation about it as they didn’t know what they could ask and I wasn’t too sure what I should say) they clearly, and not surprisingly, thought that my lack of any teaching experience made me unsuitable for the job and I didn’t get it. I was rather surprised to find out a few years later that a copy of my application had been given to a journalist.

Meanwhile, at home, things were not improving and I decided that the best solution for John and me would be to separate. It is impossible to say at this stage whether if I had not worked, or if I had had a less stressful job, things would have turned out differently. Marriage breakdown is certainly quite a common feature of the intelligence services – whether it is more or less than in other professions I am not qualified to say. As it turned out, we never took the next step to divorce, and years later we became friendly again, though by then we had learned that we got on much better living apart than together. In the summer of 1984 we put Spion Kop on the market and I found a much smaller house in the parallel road, Alwyne Villas. In December 1984 I moved there with the girls.

The house, which was early Victorian, had just been restored in a very stark, scraped-out way, with everything painted white. At first I liked that – it felt simple and uncluttered, which was exactly what I wanted after the emotional disturbance of splitting up and the chaos of dividing one large household into two. But after a bit, I found myself inexorably homemaking, painting the sitting room and wallpapering the bedroom. How I fitted it all in I can’t now imagine. I can recall evenings spent reading Lord of the Flies with one daughter, while sticking a wallpaper frieze round the dining room and simultaneously advising the other daughter on a project on Islington in the 18th century. There was a new garden to make, and that all somehow got done. I would have been amazed, at the time we moved, to know that only seven years later this house was to appear in all the national newspapers as the home of the Director-General of MI5, and that we were going to have to leave it, in conditions of great secrecy, because staying there had become too dangerous.

Actually, we did have a bit of a forerunner not long after we moved in. One evening when we had just finished supper, there was a ring at the door. One of my daughters opened it, without checking by looking through the spyhole, as they had been warned to do. A man on the doorstep asked if I lived there. ‘Mum, someone for you,’ she yelled, leaving the door open. I went to see who it was, and as soon as I appeared at the door, there was a flash from the front garden. Just for a split second I wondered if it was a gunshot, but I realised almost at once it was a camera and slammed the door shut.

It was a journalist and photographer from the New Statesman. They had chosen to do a series of ‘exposés’ of MI5 officers, on the pretext that we were engaged in improper investigations into political figures. This involved taking snatched photographs and publishing them with a few lines of highly speculative text. Those were the days when no hard information was available, and we never in any circumstances corrected what was written about us.

The journalists and I shouted at each other through the letter box for a few minutes, as they asked me for an interview and I told them to go away. The girls were amazed and we all found it quite a frightening experience. We were to become a lot more used to this sort of thing a few years later. I’m not exactly sure how they got hold of my name in the first place, but once they had it they had acquired our new address quite easily. John had given Spion Kop as his address in his Who’s Who entry some time before, never thinking at that time that there was any reason to keep it secret. I thought I had taken care to leave no trail when we moved to our new house, but by an unfortunate coincidence, we had sold Spion Kop to the family of a girl who was in the same class at school as my younger daughter. When the New Statesman turned up at their front door and asked for me, they quite unsuspectingly told them that I had moved to the next street and gave them our new address.

The New Statesman’s efforts to photograph me at my front door were clearly not a success. I must have slammed the door too quickly. So a few days later they came back and covertly photographed me in the street as I walked up the road to catch the tube to work. The resulting rather blurred photograph of me wearing a black and white houndstooth coat and carrying my sandwiches for lunch in a small Jaeger carrier bag appeared in the magazine. I’m sure the New Statesman did not know how valuable that photograph was later to become.

When my appointment as Director-General was announced at Christmas 1991, it was the only publicly available photograph and appeared in many newspapers in this country and abroad.

They must have made a mint out of it. The Jaeger carrier bag started many years of obsessive interest in the media about where I bought my clothes.

Fundamental change in any organisation only comes through crisis. It is the way the crisis is managed which determines whether the organisation goes on to prosper or whether it goes under. In MI5 during the ’80s, we suffered two major crises and one smaller one. Those crises, which at the time seemed to be major blows, had far-reaching and ultimately beneficial effects on MI5’s internal culture as well as its external position. Because on the whole they were well handled, they had the effect of pushing us into the modern world much more quickly than would have been the case without them. The first of the shocks struck shortly after I became an Assistant Director.

In 1983, an officer in the Counter-espionage branch, Michael Bettaney, was detected passing sensitive counterespionage documents to the Russian Embassy in London and offering his services to them as a spy in place in MI5. Bettaney worked in the section where I had previously operated, investigating the activities of the Soviet intelligence residencies in London. He was therefore very well placed to know exactly what monitoring systems were in place and how best to avoid them. And he did successfully evade detection as he delivered his documents. However, two things scuppered his efforts to be a second Philby or Anthony Blunt. Firstly, the security officer at the Embassy was so suspicious of British intelligence that he did not believe that Bettaney’s offer was real. He thought it was a coat-trail operation, designed to catch him or one of his colleagues out in spying, so we could expel them. So he did not respond effectively to Bettaney’s approach. The second thing which neither he nor Bettaney knew was that MI6 had an agent inside the KGB residency in the Soviet Embassy in London, Oleg Gordievsky, who was in a position to report what was going on. So Bettaney never had a chance.

I did not know the ins and outs of all this at the time. I was not one of those who was aware of Gordievsky’s position, nor did I know how Bettaney had been detected. Even though I had been in the agent section when Gordievsky was posted to London, already a recruited MI6 agent, I was not brought into the close circle of those who knew about it. It had already been decided that I was moving very shortly to the Counter-subversion Branch and I therefore had no ‘need-to-know’. This case demonstrated the importance of the need-to-know principle, when it worked as it should. Had Michael Bettaney been part of the circle of knowledge, he might never have been caught, because he would have done his volunteering in a different way or, disastrous for Gordievsky, he might have told the Soviet Embassy of his recruitment. It was only when ‘need-to-know’ was used as an excuse for bad management and lack of communication that it was damaging.

So I knew nothing about Gordievsky’s position or the investigation and interrogation of Michael Bettaney until it was announced to a startled Service that he had been arrested for espionage. This was breathtaking news. As a section head I had to manage the shock of a number of people in my section who had known him well and liked him and could not believe what had happened.

We were still reeling from the Bettaney affair when the second crisis struck. A member of my section, a woman called Cathy Massiter, resigned and both appeared on television and gave interviews to the newspapers asserting that she had been asked to do inappropriate investigations, including spying on CND and the unions. She was the first of the so-called ‘whistle blowers’, an activity which became rather the fashion during the ’90s, and not just in the intelligence world. But then, in the mid-80s, it came as a massive shock to everyone in MI5, so unused were we in those days to any form of public exposure or to any member of the Service breaking cover. It is difficult to convey now, from the standpoint of the 21st century, how amazing and shocking this event seemed to us then. We had been brought up to accept that not only did you not talk in public about the work you did, but more than that, you did not even tell anyone that you worked for MI5. And here was this erstwhile colleague, someone we all knew well, talking about her work on nationwide TV and what’s more giving an interpretation of it which to us seemed distorted and unrecognisable. It was breathtaking.

The inevitable review took place after Cathy Massiter’s allegations. It was decided that there would be advantage in having an outsider to the intelligence services, to whom any member of those services could talk in confidence if they had anxieties about the propriety of their work, or any other problem which they did not feel able to discuss with their line management. So the Staff Counsellor was born, a post filled up to now by a retired Permanent Secretary. The existence of someone in that position is a useful outlet. Though not many people have wanted to use it over the years since it was created, enough people have for it to have proved its worth. The fact that such a post existed when David Shayler and Richard Tomlinson decided to go to the press with their allegations, saying that they were doing so as a matter of conscience, raises strong doubts for me about their real motivation.

The Staff Counsellor post, put in place in 1987, formed one plank of what later became a complex network of external scrutinies over the way the intelligence services do their work One of the problems of working in a secret organisation is maintaining a normal life outside one’s work. Making and keeping friends, even the sort of loose circles of friends and neighbours which most people have, is not straightforward when you are required to keep your employment secret. By the 1980s, the obsessive secrecy of the old days had gone. But we were still supposed to disguise where we worked, and to avoid conversations which might drift into details about work. Of course that’s much easier said than done, particularly for young people, and many of us got round the problem by making friends with each other and having quite restricted circles of close friends outside work. I can remember many occasions when I have avoided going to drinks parties with neighbours and people I didn’t know well, because I couldn’t face the inevitable question, ‘What do you do?’ and having to pretend that I bought boots for the Army or whatever story occurred to me at the time. Luckily, I never had much time to feel lonely as a single parent, which was probably just as well. If I had wanted to find a new man, I certainly would not have felt able to advertise in the lonely hearts columns or go to a marriage bureau. In one way it was a great release for me when my name was made public when I became Director-General, at least everyone then knew what I did, though that brought with it a different set of problems, as I shall explain later.

Personal problems did, of course, occur in the closed organisations of those days, with limited official and personal contacts with the outside world, and a management which was remote from the staff. It is easy for confused loyalties to develop and for loyalty to friends and colleagues to seem more important than loyalty to the organisation. Michael Bettaney had been behaving inappropriately for some time. He had been drinking excessively and behaving in ways which should have sounded loud warning bells that all was not well.

Though some of those who had seen his behaviour alerted the personnel department, it was not thought necessary to move him from his counter-espionage work. It was not surprising that the subsequent enquiry by the Security Commission, the body of the great and the good which exists to report on the circumstances surrounding any prosecution under the Official Secrets Act, and to make recommendations, commented adversely on MI5’s management practices and style. They noted and criticised the closed culture, the remote management, the things with which we, working in the organisation, had felt discontented. So, in 1985, following the retirement of the then Director-General, a new Director-General was appointed who was not a career member of the Service.

Sir Antony Duff, a Foreign Office official, a former Ambassador and a war hero from his time in submarines, was familiar with the intelligence world. He had already been Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee and Intelligence Co-ordinator. The Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, who persuaded him to take on the job when he was on the point of retirement, asked him in particular to address the criticisms the Security Commission had made about the management of the Service.

It is hardly surprising that management had become an issue. None of those who had the responsibility in those days had any training or relevant experience. What’s more, because of the closed and secretive culture of the time, they were isolated from contact with thinking that was going on elsewhere. Running a secret organisation such as MI5, within the constraints of the public service, presents some of the most difficult management issues there are. It is not a Civil Service department, responsible for creating policy and limiting risks. It is an operational organisation, where people are expected and required to take risks, sometimes risks with their own or others’ safety. They must be able and prepared to take personal initiatives and quick decisions, often out on the street, in circumstances where they cannot seek guidance from anyone else and frequently on the basis of inadequate information.

But in doing so it is vital that they work always and only in a context of strict adherence to the law and to the operational rules.

Many operations are extremely delicate, either politically or because a life-threatening situation exists. So staff have to be managed in smallish groups, both for security and so that the work can be properly supervised. But it is vital not to over-supervise, to ensure that decisions are delegated to the appropriate level, so that staff will not lose their initiative.

The motivation for people to work in this way is not money. Unlike major companies in the commercial sector, MI5 does not set out to offer top quartile executive pay with bonuses and share options. Motivation is complex. It comes from a combination of the intrinsic interest and excitement of the work itself (whether it is a painstaking espionage investigation or a fast-moving counter-terrorist operation) and a sense of the importance of the job to be done. There is also a strong sense of loyalty to the organisation, to colleagues and to the country, however that is defined and however unfashionable that may sound. It is a delicate balance to create and maintain.

Every organisation has to cope with the problems of confidentiality but in MI5 this issue exists in an extreme form. Everyone, even the most lowly member of staff, has some secret information in their head, or available to them, which could cause damage if leaked. So rigorous and intrusive security checks are required, not only when staff join in the first place, but regularly throughout their career. But at the same time it is important to avoid any sense of mutual suspicion. On the contrary, what must be generated is mutual trust and loyalty, because the success of any operation depends on teams working closely together, and people’s lives may be in the hands of their colleagues.

It is vital to balance the ‘need to know’ against the need for people to be properly informed, especially at a time of organisational upheaval, when staff need to understand and support change.

Excellent personnel management skills are required to handle any inadequate performance and to try to avoid disgruntlement. Some mistakes will inevitably be made in recruitment, as they are in every organisation. When things don’t work out, proceed with great care, because anyone who feels hard-done-by can at least guarantee to get their story on the front page of the tabloids, even if they don’t decide to become a spy for the country’s enemies. Unlike in the commercial sector, those who fail cannot be given a large sum of money to go quietly.

Then there are the families to think about. What reinforcement and reassurance is adequate and appropriate for the spouses and families of agent-runners, for example, who may be away from home erratically and at short notice, doing things and taking risks which their families will not know in detail or fully understand?

At best, a strong communal loyalty develops in organisations like this, and that is a great strength. It comes out at its strongest at times such as in June 1994, when the helicopter carrying MI5 officers and colleagues from the Army and the RUC crashed on the Mull of Kintyre. A huge sense of family loss was felt by everyone concerned.

Sir Antony Duff went about his complicated task with gusto. He had to regenerate the morale of a depressed and demotivated organisation. He had the support of practically everyone, but in particular of those who were already anxious for reform. I certainly welcomed his arrival, though he himself did not at first sight appear to me to be the model of a modern manager. He was already sixty-five when he arrived, a patrician figure, with an ambassadorial style and public school manners. But importantly he was open-minded and prepared to listen. One of the first things he did was to tour around all parts of the Service, asking the staff at all levels what they thought was wrong and what ideas they had for change.

This went down extremely well and the fact that he was well plugged in to Whitehall and had the ear of the Cabinet Secretary and the Prime Minister were just what we wanted. For me though he had one big downside, for which I never really forgave him. He addressed me as ‘dear’. I found this deeply patronising and thought it meant that he did not take me seriously.

However, he clearly took me more seriously than I thought, because in 1985, following the unexpectedly early retirement of the Director of Counter-subversion, I was made acting Director responsible for all the counter-subversion sections. This included an agent section similar to the counterespionage agent section in which I had worked earlier.

This elevation was a trial run and lasted only a few months. There was someone else thought to have more of a claim to a Director’s post, and when he was available, I was demoted again and put in charge of recruiting and staff security. I was not too upset by this because I was told that I would be a substantive Director before too long. In truth, such elevation was more than I had ever expected.