Open Secret

16

When I joined MI5 in the late 1960s recruiting was an entirely covert affair, dependent on a haphazard system of talent spotting. Since 1997, advertisements for staff have appeared in newspapers and journals. When I was briefly responsible for recruiting, in the mid-1980s, we were halfway between the two positions. It had been recognised by then that the tap-on-the-shoulder system of recruiting posed a real danger of cloning, of recruiting only people in the same mould as each other, but we were still not ready to be completely open. Such a fundamental change in positioning had to wait until a whole series of events brought about a change in the entire relationship of MI5 to the world outside it.

In my short time in recruiting I realised for the first time what a complicated task we had set ourselves, unable as we were to call fully on the advice and resources of the recruitment industry. As well as intelligence officers, usually generalist graduates, we needed experts in various fields, communicators, photographers, linguists, lawyers and many more, but only in comparatively small numbers. We also needed surveillance officers, not an employment category widely found outside the intelligence world. They fall into two types: the ‘mobiles’, those who are out on the streets in cars or on foot, covertly following targets around, for whom the main qualities are alertness, stamina, the ability to merge into the background, to drive with flair and to cope with inactivity followed by periods of extreme activity; and the ‘statics’, those who spend their days, and often nights, sitting in observation posts in houses, flats, factories or whatever, watching the comings and goings in a target premises opposite and recording what is going on. They are very different jobs, but accuracy and the ability to keep awake during the boring bits are vital to both; accurate movement information can make the difference between success and failure in an operation.

Identifying selection procedures for the surveillance officers was a challenge and I am sure that we should have taken more external advice than we did. To the final selection panels, which I chaired, came a cross-section of British society. Our static candidates ranged from an ex-policeman to a jazz trumpeter, a zoo attendant and a member of the aristocracy; judging which of them would do that particular job well was testing.

In the mid-80s most candidates were still identified covertly. A number of talent spotters in different parts of the recruitment business were on the lookout, particularly for likely graduates. If any crossed their sights, they would ask them discreetly if they would consider a job in a non-mainstream government department and those who showed interest were sent to us for a preliminary interview. This covert system was not a great success; some of our contacts disliked appearing to be part of the secret state and produced not a single candidate, others entered into what they thought was the spirit of the thing and introduced quite unsuitable James Bond lookalikes. Occasionally, a good candidate was surfaced by this route but it was haphazard.

Another method adopted in those days for identifying likely intelligence officers was the syphoning off of some applicants for the Home Civil Service. One or two were approached with the suggestion that they might consider ‘another government department’. It was not until 1996, when, as part of the new openness initiatives, MI5 began to produce recruiting literature under its own name, that it became one of the government departments from which candidates for the Civil Service could choose. Not surprisingly, a large percentage put MI5 first, to the chagrin of mainstream departments.

It was to avoid cloning that the Service had, some time before this, decided to use what was then called the Civil Service Selection Board (CSSB) to help in the selection of graduates. The difficulty came in trying to produce selection tests which would detect reliably whether a candidate had that rather odd mix of qualities and talents we were looking for. It is recorded somewhere in the records that when Vernon Kell first created MI5 in 1909, a key criterion for recruitment for men was .the ability to make notes on their shirtcuff while riding on horseback. For women it was less demanding. Kell’s only known utterance on the subject of qualifications for women is, ‘I like my girls to have good legs.’

By the time I was involved in recruiting, we were looking for people with a quite rare mix of talents. For our cadre intelligence officers we wanted people with a good brain, good analytical skills, the ability to sort out information and put it in order and to express themselves well orally and on paper. But coupled with that they needed to be self-starting, with a warm personality and the ability to persuade. And we needed people who would be good on their feet in difficult and possibly dangerous operational situations, where they could not seek advice. We also wanted common sense, balance and integrity. It’s quite a tall order.

We were constantly refining our graduate selection tests to try to identify the qualities we were seeking, but ultimately we had to accept that some of these things are difficult to detect reliably in people of only twenty-one or twenty-two whose personalities are unlikely to be fully developed. We didn’t always get the recruiting right, who does? For a time we recruited too many people with intellectual skills, but not enough practical skills, and that resulted in a crisis when we were overweighted with excellent assessment abilities but had too few people capable of gathering the raw material, the intelligence, to assess. Occasionally we recruited people who simply lacked the necessary judgement and common sense. The problem for secret organisations is that getting recruitment wrong can have more far-reaching effects than in other fields.

I had been only a year in recruiting, when, in December 1986, I was promoted to be Director of Counter-espionage, a position known in those days as ‘K’. Nearly eighty years on, I had become the modern manifestation of Brigadier Vernon Kell, the founder of MI5.

Though my promotion was seen as a breakthrough for women – I was the first to have reached this level – some of the men regarded my elevation as a step too far and I heard tell of mutterings about it in the men’s toilets. By that stage in the Service’s development there were so many women around that most people regarded it as inevitable that they would begin to rise to senior positions.

My counter-espionage credentials were good; I had worked in both the investigative and agent side of the business for a good number of years, and my management credentials were good too, having been Assistant Director in two quite different sections, and an acting Director for several months. Had I allowed myself to brood on these things, I would have felt that I had been asked to prove myself for longer and more thoroughly than any man, but I didn’t. I just felt pleased and satisfied to have made it. I also felt that the post of Director of Counter-espionage was one of the best jobs in the world.

In 1986, the intelligence services of the Warsaw Pact were still aggressively targeting the West. Though our efforts over the years, and the exclusion and expulsion policies which successive governments had operated, had made the UK a very difficult place for them to work, they had not given up, far from it, and inevitably from time to time they had successes.

One of the more unexpected things I had to do as Director of Counter-espionage was to give evidence in the trial of an ‘illegal’, a man who had come to this country under a false identity in order to collect information. Such people are the most difficult of all spies to identify. They rarely have any contact with the embassy of the country they work for, or with the intelligence officers there, who, it is assumed, will be closely watched and so might unwittingly draw attention to the illegal. This man had been successfully identified and investigated by our staff acting in close collaboration with the police. We were able to arrest him in flagrante as he was sitting in the kitchen of his flat listening to his regular short wave radio broadcast from his controllers at home. I was present in court as the ‘expert witness’ to give evidence on the significance of his activities.

Those were the days when MI5 officers appeared in court very rarely indeed and it was a disorientating experience for one whose career so far had been spent, as mine had, in an environment where one said nothing outside about one’s work. It was to become a much more common experience for MI5 officers in the years which followed, as more and more work was done in close cooperation with the police in countering terrorism. For my evidence, the press and the public were excluded from the court and the judge accepted that, in order to protect my identity, I could wear what was described as a ‘light disguise’. So I appeared at the Old Bailey feeling ridiculous and looking rather like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, with (for me) strangely curly hair, make-up which made me look ten years older, and clothes which were quite unlike my normal style. I was gratified that the defendant was convicted and amused when, a few months later, I met the judge at a dinner party and he did not recognise me.

My time as Director of Counter-espionage was very largely dominated by the third of the 1980s crises to hit MI5. In 1987, Peter Wright, that strange and untrustworthy figure of my early days, wrote his book, Spycatcher. Or it is probably more accurate to say that he told everything he could remember or had ever noted down to a journalist, who wrote it up in the most saleable way he could. The book went out of its way to mention every sensitive operation that Peter Wright had ever known about and to name every codeword he could recall. Spycatcher was a book designed to cause the maximum amount of harm and embarrassment to an organisation which Peter Wright wrongly thought had cheated him of his due.

Whistleblowing revelations, purporting to disclose something seriously wrong in an organisation, tend to reveal far more about the whistleblower than about the organisation which is having the whistle blown on it. These so-called ‘revelations’ have been, in my experience, invariably partial, one-sided and as such ultimately misleading accounts of what are usually much more complex situations than they present. I believe that such revelations are very often motivated by a grudge against the organisation as a whole, or some of the people within it, who in the whistleblower’s view have failed them in some way. Often the whistleblower has been denied the advancement in their career which they thought was their due, or it is a question of money, as with Peter Wright, who thought his pension had been unfairly calculated. (In fact, his pension entitlement had been reviewed several times both inside the Service and by an external adviser and he was given exactly what he was due.) Whistleblowing is likely to be very damaging to any public organisation, or to a company – it is not restricted to the public sector – but it is particularly damaging to the intelligence services about which conspiracy theories already abound. For the organisation concerned, the claims made are usually impossible to disprove in circumstances where all the relevant information is unlikely to be able to be revealed. The whistleblower is inevitably seized on with alacrity by the press, to whom he or she represents good, exciting headlines. The one question rarely asked is ‘Did you try to do something about it before going public?’

Peter Wright’s case is a graphic illustration of the difficulty of dealing with disgruntled employees of secret organisations, and the potential costs and problems. There is rarely a perfect solution, except of course the impossible one of never making a mistake in recruiting people in the first place or in managing them when they are in. In retrospect, it is very possible that huge expense and embarrassment for HMG might have been avoided if a little more flexibility in the matter of Peter Wright’s pension had been shown at the time.

Business is freer to adapt to circumstances, in effect to buy people off, but the public service, bound as it is by the rules of public expenditure, accountability and precedent, does not have the same level of flexibility.

The prospect of the publication of Peter Wright’s book sent the intelligence community and Whitehall into a spin. The fear was not only of what he himself might reveal but also that if he were not prevented, many members of the intelligence community from then on would blow the gaff on all the nation’s secrets. It’s the same fear that still exists today when anyone wishes to publish a book, as I know from my own experience. Though nowadays some attempt is made to distinguish between books which do damage and those which do not, every effort is still made by the Whitehall machine to prevent anyone who has been an insider writing anything about their life. In Peter Wright’s case it was decided to pursue the book through every possible legal channel, whether there was any hope of success or not. I thought at the time it was the wrong thing to do and as it turned out the huge furore merely drew attention to it and resulted in far higher sales than would otherwise have been achieved for a book which many people found disappointingly dull. His second book in the same vein passed almost unnoticed and neither book at the end of the day did any great damage to MI5’s ability to do its work.

The drama was finally enacted in Australia. The Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, was sent out as the chief witness to defend the Government’s case in the court in Sydney. At home we had teams of people scrabbling through files, trying to find out what exactly were the facts of various long-gone operations and events, so that Robert Armstrong could give as accurate evidence as possible. Although the Cabinet Secretary is the most senior Whitehall official and very close to the intelligence services, being the accounting officer for the money voted to them by Parliament, he is not responsible for their operations.

Robert Armstrong had no first-hand information about the operations which Peter Wright described and in having to answer questions about them, even with the briefing material provided for him, he was put in a very difficult if not impossible position. His appearances in the court provided Malcolm Turnbull, Peter Wright’s defence counsel, with the opportunity to make a very senior representative of the British establishment look ridiculous.

There was one allegation in Peter Wright’s book which aroused considerable interest and caused the most anxiety, the so-called ‘Wilson Plot’. This was Peter Wright’s assertion that a group of thirty MI5 officers, of which he was one, plotted to get rid of the Wilson government, because they suspected Wilson of being excessively sympathetic to the Soviet Union. Because this allegation, if it had been true, would have meant that the service whose role it is to defend our democratic system had sought to act against the democratically elected government, it was taken immensely seriously not least within MI5. Sir Antony Duff, the Director-General of the day, who was not an MI5 insider and had no personal knowledge of the Service’s activities in the period concerned, was determined that the story should be thoroughly investigated. Extensive interviews were conducted with those who had known Peter Wright and were still working; white-haired gentlemen were dug out of their retirement all over the country and asked to cast their minds back but though much reminiscing went on, no-one could recall anything that sounded like what Peter Wright was claiming had happened. Files were trawled through with the same result. Finally, a detailed report was written for Whitehall and ministers felt sufficiently confident to state publicly that no such plot had ever existed. Peter Wright later withdrew the allegation, admitting, in a Panorama programme in 1988, that what the book said about the so-called ‘plot’ was not true. However, as is always the way of these things, his retraction went almost unnoticed, and the untrue allegation stuck in some circles and remains in currency to this day.

When, much later, I was Director-General, I decided I would try once and for all to knock on the head the Wilson plot allegation. I asked some of the old grandees of the Labour Party, most of whom had at one stage been Home Secretary, to come in to Thames House to talk about it. It was clear to me then that the conviction in that generation of the Labour Party that there was some kind of a plot against them, organised by the intelligence services, runs deep. Though I tried my best to convince them that they were wrong, I knew at the end of the exercise that further efforts would be fruitless. The fact that Harold Wilson himself said, at the time he left office, that he was convinced that MI5 was spying on him, meant that through loyalty to him, if for no other reason, it was difficult for his former colleagues to accept that there was nothing in it. But one of those former colleagues did go so far as to remark to me that if Wilson had really believed that, it was very strange that he never mentioned it at the time to any of his political colleagues so that the first time they knew about it was when, like everyone else, they read what he had said about it to the Observer. I am now convinced that those who believe there was a plot want to believe it, and nothing anyone can say will change their minds.

Of course, those former Home Secretaries date back to the time when there was a great deal less close communication between the intelligence services and ministers and their Civil Service advisers than there is now. It seems to me, looking back on it, that the fault for that distance lay on both sides, and it was not a party political issue. I think that the then heads of the intelligence services probably felt that they could not trust civil servants and ministers to understand the issues and to take a balanced view of what the intelligence services were seeking to do. So they kept their distance. Ministers, for their part, may well have thought that although the intelligence services were essential, they were a potential embarrassment to the government and the less they knew about them the better. The fear was that if they knew too much they might be accused of being responsible for something awkward and difficult to explain. Or perhaps they feared that knowledge might in some way compromise their political independence. Whatever it was, I am sure that some of them had little confidence in the intelligence services’ competence or probity and thought it was safer to remain largely in ignorance.

Both sides were wrong. It seems to me that ministers in those days were avoiding their responsibilities, and heads of the services were reducing the effectiveness of their organisations by keeping their heads down and keeping their distance, rather than explaining more of what they were about and trying to correct misconceptions. Old former Home

Secretaries who pop up now saying they never really knew what MI5 was up to in their day and had the most acute suspicions of it, should ask themselves why they didn’t do more to find out. After all, it was their responsibility.

Several former Home Secretaries appeared not long ago in a television programme called How to be Home Secretary. Their replies to questions about what it was like being responsible for MI5 illustrated this attitude perfectly. Roy Jenkins, who was Home Secretary from 1965 to ’67 and again from 1974 to ’76, said that he thought that MI5 used secrecy to run rings round successive Home Secretaries. He added: ‘I didn’t form a high regard for how they discharged their duties. They were secretive vis à vis government. Living one’s life in a spy-bound world gives people a distorted view of life.’ Merlyn Rees, who was Home Secretary from 1976 to ’77, said that he did not know what MI5 was up to. But more recent Home Secretaries, speaking on the same programme, were much easier with the relationship.

Both Douglas Hurd and Michael Howard said that they felt they knew what they needed to know. Jack Straw sounded totally relaxed about the relationship. He was not at all in awe of the secret state and said it was not as big a deal as people imagined. He described himself as having got down into ‘the engine room of the business’. In my view the modern closer relationship between Home Secretaries and MI5 benefits everyone including, very importantly, the democratic process itself.

The closeness of the relationship between the government of the day and the security service should be limited only by the need to ensure that the service is not and does not appear to be the tool of the government. In my experience the limits were well understood and existed long before the relationship was embodied in legislation at the end of the 1980s.

Lord Denning’s 1963 Report on the Profumo case, to which I have already referred, explains in fascinating narrative form what a Director-General should take into account in considering what he should or should not report to ministers. As Lord Denning explains, ‘The operations of the Security Service are to be used for one purpose and one purpose only, the defence of the realm. They are not to be used to pry into any man’s private conduct or business affairs, or even into his political opinions except in so far as they are subversive.’ Denning supports the Director-General of the day for not reporting on or investigating John Profumo’s links with Christine Keeler and the Russian Military Attache, Ivanov (an intelligence officer), once he was satisfied that action had been taken to negate the Russian’s activities. The only criticism he makes is that the conduct of Mr Profumo, in having an affair with a call girl, disclosed a character defect, which pointed to his being a security risk in that the girl might try to blackmail him or bring pressure to bear on him to disclose secret information.

The Denning Report is to this day the guide for Director-Generals if they are ever in doubt as to whether they should tell the Prime Minister anything they might know about the behaviour of his colleagues. It is not the responsibility of the Director-General of MI5 to seek to protect the government of the day from political embarrassment; that is the job of the Whips. The DG should only pass on anything about behaviour if it could adversely affect security in any way, including perhaps, laying open to blackmail a minister in a department where he has access to state secrets. That responsibility is one reason why the Director-General of MI5 has the right of direct access to the Prime Minister, without going through the Home Secretary. The other reason of course is that the Prime Minister has ultimate responsibility for the security of the state and needs to know about serious threats; information of that sort would always be known to the Home Secretary as well. The Prime Minister would expect to see the DG regularly for a briefing on the security situation, but the knowledge that there is another possible reason why the Director-General might be talking to the Prime Minister can cause anxiety in some quarters. John Major liked to conduct meetings in the summer sitting in the garden at No. 10, which is overlooked by many windows. News travels fast on the Whitehall grapevine and towards the end of my time as Director-General, when John Major was governing with a very small majority and political nerves started to fray with allegations of sleaze ten a penny, I would often find myself rung up after such a meeting by someone who had seen us talking and was eager to try to get some hint of what we had been talking about.