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

18

By the time I became Director of Counter-espionage, the girls were twelve and sixteen. Even though they did not know in any detail what I did for a living, they knew it was something secret for the government. The arrival of the New Statesman reporters at the front door had been only one in a series of strange events they had had to get used to. One evening several years before, the phone rang and I answered it. After I had put the phone down, one of them said: ‘What was that?’

‘Oh nothing’, I said absent-mindedly, ‘it was just about someone who thinks he’s been stabbed by a poisoned umbrella.’

‘Has he?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Oh,’ she said, and went back to whatever she was doing.

That, of course, was the first notification by the police of the incident when Georgi Markov was poisoned by the Bulgarian Secret Service on Waterloo Bridge. I did not take the reported stabbing seriously at first, though of course it later turned out to be true and a similar case happened in Paris shortly afterwards.

There were innumerable telephone calls at odd times of the day and night, which often resulted in my leaving home unexpectedly. There were occasions when the news reported the expulsion of certain Russian officials for ‘unacceptable activities’, when, I seemed extremely interested and unusually cheerful. And later while the Provisional IRA was bombing London, I seemed always to have an anxious expression and an obsessive interest in the news on the radio, which was often the first notification of an unexpected attack.

Inevitably, the girls got involved to some extent in the life of the Service. They met many of my colleagues, and members of foreign intelligence services too, when I entertained them at home. They and various trusted boyfriends were often roped in as waiters for those occasions, just as in any other household. When I became a Director we used to have the branch planning awaydays at our house in Alwyne Villas. Over the years, the girls got to know my closest colleagues quite well, though they could never remember who was who, and complained that they all seemed to be called Chris or John. Later on, when I became Director-General, they became a lot more involved, as all three of us were swept up in the tide of media interest.

When I started to live on my own I decided that they were becoming too old to be looked after by au pair girls. By then, Sophie was only a few years younger than they were, and she resented being told what to do by ‘foreigners who can’t even speak proper English,’ and who could not cook as well as the girls themselves. When one of the German girls, distracted by Harriet and her cousin Beatrice arguing in the back seat over a bottle of orange juice, drove the car spectacularly into a line of parked cars (including a Rolls Royce) outside the gates of Waterlow Park in Highgate, we decided that we would look for some other arrangement. So from then on two local ladies came in, one to clean and one to iron on different days and the girls became latch-key children. We could cope with normal routines, but when something outside the normal occurred, as it very often did, for example if one needed extra maths coaching, or one got into a team and had to be ferried to matches it was particularly difficult. When they were doing the big public exams, they did not get the level of support I would have wanted to give them. Sophie did her A Levels when I had just taken over as Director of Counter-espionage, and Harriet was just starting work for hers when I became Director-General and the press were hounding us.

Like any working mother, I was constantly managing conflicting pressures, trying to be in two different places at once, and apparently succeeding more effectively than even the Scarlet Pimpernel. The result of all this was that the girls learned to look after themselves, to travel around London alone, and to be independent and self-reliant beyond their years.

None of this was made easier because my job as Director of Counter-espionage involved a considerable amount of travelling abroad. Since the beginning of the Cold War, one of the great strengths of the West’s counter-espionage effort had been the sharing of intelligence between the closest allies, the UK, the USA and the old Commonwealth. This survived the unfortunate paranoia-feeding between James Angleton and Peter Wright and was the foundation of the ‘special intelligence relationship’ which exists to this day. So keeping these links as close and friendly as they were was an important task for any Director of Counter-espionage. I paid several visits to the USA, and to Australia, Canada and New Zealand, while my mother came to stay to look after the girls.

Secret services are not usually associated with cooperation and sharing. It sounds like a contradiction. But in a world where the threats get more sophisticated and more global, the intelligence task gets more difficult, and cooperation between intelligence allies is vital and grows ever closer. When MI5 was first set up in 1909 it was expressly forbidden to form any foreign links at all. But even though their task in those days was limited to countering the activities of foreign spies within Great Britain, they soon found that it was very difficult to do this without any support from friendly counterparts overseas. But right up to the Second World War there was only the bare bones of any international security structure and it was not until well on into that war that any really effective security links between allies were put in place, in particular between the UK and the USA. Once those links were set up, however, they considerably increased our combined effectiveness. The exploitation of the ‘double cross’ spy cases mentioned above, which successfully misled Hitler’s Germany and contributed greatly to the success of D-Day, was an early joint effort.

After the end of the Second World War, it was the Cold War that dictated the direction of security and intelligence work and it was clear that any effective defence against the massive and sophisticated intelligence efforts of the Soviet Union and her Warsaw Pact allies could only come about through close collaboration between Western security services. But collaboration against that target was a very sensitive business. There was always the fear that one or other of the Western services might have been penetrated by the Soviet bloc, a. fear which of course proved only too well-founded on several occasions. So the links that were established were mostly bilateral, service to service, cautiously and carefully done on a strictly ‘need-to-know’ basis. The exception to the bilateral rule was the link between the closest Western intelligence allies of the Cold War, the British, the Americans, the Canadians, the Australians and the New Zealanders – the so-called CAZAB link.

When I first joined the counter-espionage branch in the early 1970s, knowledge of this CAZAB link was very closely held. The knowledge of it was imparted to new officers in an ‘indoctrination’ session, after which their names were inscribed with great formality on a list of those with knowledge. There were a number of such lists of those to whom particularly tightly held information had been revealed and over a career, particularly in counterespionage during the Cold War, you found yourself on numerous such lists, as you ‘needed to know’ secret after secret. Each list had its own codeword and unless your name was on the list for any code-worded operation, no-one might speak to you about it and you would not be permitted to see any files. There is nothing new about this, of course. In the Second World War when similar secret operation names proliferated, Winston Churchill cabled home from one of his transatlantic voyages to meet President Roosevelt, that he had been reading Hornblower and approved of it. His staff spent days trying to discover which secret plan he was referring to before they realised that Churchill had been reading C.S. Forester’s first Hornblower book.

When you leave, retire or move away to another part of the work, you have to sign off the lists. It feels like a sort of brain washing or mind-hoovering process, but there is sense behind it. It makes it quite clear that after a certain date you have no current information, so if sensitive information gets out, and there is a suspicion that there may be a spy in the organisation, it is easier to narrow down the search. The trouble is that after a time you inevitably forget what list you are on and what particular secret operation each codeword refers to. It was quite a revelation when I retired and someone turned up in my office with innumerable lists for me to sign off which I had totally forgotten about.

The existence of CAZAB and its regular meetings was one of the factually accurate things which Peter Wright chose to reveal in his book Spycatcher. Since the end of the Cold War, it no longer exists in that form. The growth of terrorism, and the newer threats like organised crime require cooperation of a totally different type – less discreet, broader, more inclusive and above all more immediate.

In the spring of 1988 I was in Australia for a CAZAB meeting, accompanying Patrick Walker, who was then Director-General, when the Gibraltar operation went down. Also present was the head of MI6, the heads of the CIA and the FBI and the heads of the Australian, New Zealand and Canadian services – the old intelligence allies of the Cold War.

We were a small, elite and oddly assorted bunch, met together to share some of the most sensitive information we had at that time, our assessments of the current counterespionage threats and the details of current cases. The Americans, both venerable, white-haired judges, political appointees supported by professionals, were the heads of enormous organisations with vast operational and assessment resources to deploy and far more cases to draw on than any of the rest of us. Their then head of counter-espionage was a small, bird-like man of great experience and detailed knowledge, who, unlike his predecessor James Angleton, the alter-ego of Peter Wright, possessed balance and common sense. He had no notes with him but as an aide-memoire would produce a very small shiny black notebook from the top pocket of his casual shirt. I never saw inside it but considering its explosive contents it must have been written in some private code.

The British were the oldest services, next in size to the Americans but much smaller, greatly respected for their professionalism and headed by long-serving intelligence officers. The smallest by far were the New Zealanders, a service of tens rather than tens of thousands, but regarded as well-run and professional and led by an ex-military officer.

We met on an island off the Australian coast, which was inhabited by nothing much except kangaroos and Australian intelligence officers in training. In spite of the relaxed surroundings, the atmosphere was serious. As the only woman present I was mercifully spared the more macho aspects of the occasion, such as ferociously competitive tennis or swimming in icy water off the well-protected beach. Though we were in a remote spot, we were not exactly out of touch. The Americans, as always, had brought their vast teams of communicators and enormous satellite dishes with them. They also had their teams of armed guards who followed the heads of the FBI and the CIA everywhere, clutching their weapons in little handbag-like holders – a level of security that I personally thought was ridiculous, bearing in mind our secure environment.

At the time we had left London, intelligence was just beginning to come in about a team of Provisional IRA terrorists in Spain. Patrick had been keeping in touch as far as he could with what was going on as the action moved to Gibraltar. But the news that the Active Service Unit, as they called themselves, had been killed came as a great surprise and a shock.

That operation provides a classic example of the difficulty of counter-terrorism work.

MI5’s contribution to such operations lies in acquiring intelligence from a variety of sources and assessing it in order to try, by a combination of knowledge, experience and common sense, to work out what is really going on. The objective in a counter-terrorist operation is to be there first, so that the terrorists can be thwarted and the bomb does not go off. By the nature of things, intelligence will nearly always be partial, so it is rarely clear exactly what is planned. When a crisis develops, when the partial information indicates that a terrorist operation is imminent, it frequently comes down to assessing the risk of doing nothing against that of doing something and possibly getting it wrong.

In the case of the Gibraltar incident, a lot was known about the Provisional IRA’s then current strategy, which was to murder British military personnel outside Northern Ireland and Great Britain, because, it was thought, they would be less well defended and the security forces less focused. Much was also known about their chosen methods of attack, amongst which were shooting and car bombings. So when intelligence indicated that a group of known Provisional IRA terrorists was in Spain, it was not difficult to work out that their target might be the British military presence in Gibraltar, and so it turned out to be. Analysis and observation correctly pinned down the precise target and when the terrorists parked their car in the square in Gibraltar where the military band parades took place, it seemed likely, though there was no certainty, that they were intending to explode a car bomb.

In such circumstances difficult judgements have to be made. The risk of making arrests before there is enough evidence to hold or prosecute the terrorists, then having to let them go free to return on another occasion when there might be no intelligence of their intentions, has to be weighed against the obvious risk of letting them proceed with their operation and intervening only at the last minute when their intentions can be proved. These are difficult and stressful decisions, sometimes involving risk to members of the public and usually taken without precise information and often under acute pressure of time. They are the day-to-day currency of counter-terrorist operations.

In the case of Gibraltar, as everyone knows, the operation ended with the shooting and death of the terrorists. This was followed by the discovery that the car that was parked in the square was not the bomb itself, but a car parked to block a space for the bomb which was to be made up in another car from explosives already stored in Spain to be brought in on a later day. That operation was followed by a series of thorough examinations of the actions of all concerned, first at an inquest and then by the European Commission of Human Rights and finally by the European Court of Human Rights, seeking to determine whether the killing of the three terrorists was lawful and whether or not it constituted a use of force more than was absolutely necessary given all the circumstances.

That the inquest decided that the killing was lawful and the European Commission decided that it could be regarded as absolutely necessary for defending others from violence, whereas the European Court by a majority of ten to nine, judged that the killing of the terrorists was not a justifiable use of force in all the circumstances, serves to point up the intense difficulties which attend the conduct of this type of counter-terrorist operation. My complaint against programmes such as Death on the Rock is that in their enthusiasm to prove that the state is at fault, they appear to make no attempt to give honest consideration to the difficulties of balancing the risks in operational situations. They look only at what happened and not at what might easily have happened.

A few days later, Patrick and I were cycling gently round the island in a break in the meetings, when he asked me if I would take on the post of Director of Counter-terrorism. He wanted to send the then Director to Northern Ireland to take charge of the Service’s work there. This request came as quite a shock to me, and a fairly unwelcome one at that, knowing as I did the many difficulties of counter-terrorism work, not least those I have just described.

I had had no previous experience of working in the terrorist field and felt ill-equipped to go in at Director level. But it was flattering to be asked, as it was far and away the most difficult and exposed post at that level. I decided, without much hesitation, to take the risk and say yes.

By this time, MI5 had been working against terrorism for over twenty years. But after my involvement in 1969, as part of the tiny section formed at the very start of the new phase of the terrorist problem in Northern Ireland, my career had gone in a different direction and I had been largely focused on the Cold War. Over those years, of course, terrorism resulting from the situation in Northern Ireland had grown vastly. The Provisional IRA, well resourced by Colonel Gaddafi with arms, explosives and money, had extended its operations out of Northern Ireland to the European continent and the British mainland, and had been regularly seeking armaments, new technology and funds in North America and elsewhere. Loyalist terrorists too had developed their operations and were constantly looking to increase and upgrade their arms and equipment.

While the Northern Ireland terrorist problem was growing, as early as the late 1960s other forms of terrorism had begun to appear. Firstly in Europe, with small, violent national revolutionary groups, like the Red Brigades in Italy and the Red Army Faction in Germany, which were trying to overthrow capitalism through the use of terror. Then at about the same time, in the first manifestations of what came to be known as ‘international terrorism’, groups started to attack, apparently at random and particularly in Europe, primarily to get the attention of the world’s press focused on their particular issue. This began with Palestinian terrorists, and most people saw it for the first time in 1972 on world-wide TV when a group calling itself ‘Black September’ attacked the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. A key figure at that time was Carlos the Jackal, now languishing in a French gaol.

Palestinian terrorism on an international scale continued for many years, with hostage takings, aeroplane hi-jackings, car bombings and shootings. Even after Yasser Arafat on behalf of the PLO renounced violence in 1988, other so-called ‘rejectionist’ Palestinian organisations, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Abu Nidal group, continued the terrorist operations.

As the years went by, some threats declined but others, quite unpredictably came to take their place. Extremist Islamic terrorism grew during the ’80s and with the declaration of the West and America in particular as the ‘Great Satan’. Attacks on Western interests took place everywhere and all sorts of groups began to adopt terrorism as a means of achieving their ends, moving round the world to do their business. As Europe started to dismantle its borders, keeping track of them, knowing who was where, became increasingly difficult.

All this terrorist activity presented a great challenge for governments and their security and law enforcement agencies. It was a puzzle to know how best to deal with it, and in most countries it took a long time for sensible and suitable arrangements to be worked out.

Some countries, particularly Israel, used special military groups to assassinate the leaders, on the principle that they were ‘at war’ with the terrorists. Countries of the Soviet bloc sheltered, armed and encouraged the terrorists as a way of weakening the West. Some countries actively used terrorism as an arm of their foreign policy, particularly at various stages, Libya, Syria, Iran and Iraq.

In Western Europe and the USA, governments in their various ways tried to counter it, firstly politically, by ostracising the governments who supported terrorists and by refusing to bargain with the terrorists themselves. Mrs Thatcher took a particularly firm line, though other Western governments were more equivocal. Secondly, they tried to deal with it legally, by prosecuting and imprisoning those they caught, regarding them as criminals, not political prisoners. Thirdly they stepped up all forms of protective security arrangements, such as airline security, and protection for political figures and those thought to be most at risk. And fourthly they relied on their security and police services to get advance intelligence, so that terrorist operations could be thwarted and the terrorists arrested. In extreme circumstances, it was recognised that military assistance would be needed, and crack anti-terrorist squads such as the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team were trained specifically to deal with hi-jacks and other forms of terrorism.

All this meant that MI5 along with other Western security services had had to develop a new approach. The tried and tested techniques used to catch spies and monitor Soviet intelligence officers, which often involved painstaking, long-term investigations, did not quite fit the bill of dealing with people who were aiming to kill. We still needed these traditional investigations to understand the terrorist groups and their aims and methods, so that we could counter them. But they were difficult to monitor, being often a long way away and usually in countries which were sympathetic to them. So, as well as classic investigations, we also had to develop the ability to take rapid action, to react quickly to events as they unfolded.

To increase the chances of success in this difficult field, a way had to be found to distribute highly sensitive intelligence quickly and securely, across state borders, so as to alert whichever country was being threatened or was in a position to take some action. So a network of international contacts had been developed between security services, extending far beyond the traditional cautious, discreet and careful contacts of the counter-espionage field. It was never questioned that friendly countries would take just as seriously terrorism aimed at each other as they would that aimed at themselves. In MI5 we played a leading role in developing these networks.

One of the underpinnings of this new closer relationship in Europe was the group of Heads of European Security Services, which met twice a year. It started as a small, secretive group, but over the years it has expanded and its existence has become known. In its early years it was best known for the extravagance of the hospitality with which Heads of Service entertained each other but later it came to provide the essential glue for the close collaboration at working level between the European services. Meeting and getting to know the other heads of service was a way of judging their professionalism and the standing in their own country of the service they led. If you are to share the most sensitive intelligence, often obtained from human sources in very dangerous positions, you need to know that the service which is receiving it is competent to deal with it professionally and securely.

But all this collaboration, national and international, was not without its problems and did not settle down quickly or easily. One of the difficulties at the beginning was achieving a shared assessment of the intelligence, what it meant and what should be done about it. This is quite vital because there are obviously likely to be enormous problems if one country, on receipt of some intelligence, alerts the government, mobilises the Special Forces, grounds all aircraft and closes the frontiers, while another discounts the intelligence as a fabrication and ignores it. That sort of thing tended to happen at first, but gradually, as contacts developed, as key people met and grew to know and respect each other and as close international friendships developed, such problems became less frequent.

Because terrorist activities were politically motivated and needed a political as well as a security, intelligence and police response, some countries appointed Ministers for Terrorism. In the UK we did not, I am pleased to say. Politically, terrorism was dealt with by the Home Secretary, the Foreign Secretary or the Northern Ireland Secretary, whoever was most appropriate.

Ministers for Terrorism were, from the point of view of the intelligence professionals, nearly always a disaster. They tended to be quite junior and to see terrorism, or at least a high-profile response to terrorism, as a way to further their own political careers. They loved to tour around Europe, calling not only on ministers, but also on police and security services, accompanied by somewhat embarrassed officials from their own countries. They all had their own theses or ideas for solutions, which very often involved creating new pan-European structures to overarch the national bodies which existed already. These new bodies were rarely necessary and often turned out merely to confuse what existed, to cost money and to waste time.

Terrorism is of course an immensely political business. But MI5 is primarily a security intelligence organisation, not a policy department. Its job is the acquisition and assessment of intelligence and that is its fundamental skill. To deal with terrorism effectively, new intelligence techniques had to be developed. Terrorism required the accessing of information quickly and the old paper files and the endless brown boxes of index cards in the registry of my early career were far too slow. Files were being computerised and programmes were being developed to access them in different ways. The physical surveillance officers had also to develop new techniques. The KGB were gentlemen compared to the terrorists. They were of course well trained and often excellent at avoiding surveillance. Over the years of the Cold War they had acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of the side roads and one-way systems of London, of the Underground network and the layout of all the stations. But of one thing you could be sure, if they detected surveillance, they would not turn round and shoot.

The terrorists were not so well trained, but in similar circumstances might well shoot. So terrorism brought a different level of risk – physical danger to the staff but also of course, the risk of the death of large numbers of members of the public or massive damage to property if the intelligence were inadequate or the assessment wrong.

The need to tackle terrorism was one of the most significant influences in changing the culture and working practices of MI5. By the time I joined the counter-terrorism branch as Director, a new style of MI5 officer had emerged, quite different from those who had been around when I first entered the Service. The modern version was younger, travelled regularly, spoke foreign languages and was easy with open discussion about strategies and cases. The new breed of MI5 officer was comfortable in Whitehall, sitting on committees and discussing issues with ministers and their advisers. As more and more counter-terrorist operations were successful and ended with the arrest and trial of the suspects, giving evidence in court became much more common. Those who were able to meet these new requirements thrived and advanced, those who couldn’t either left or became back room players.

During my first few years working against terrorism the main focus was on the Provisional IRA’s efforts to kill British military personnel in Germany. The terrorists, in small secure units, would live under cover in holiday cottages in France, Belgium or the Netherlands, and travel into Germany to reconnoitre and attack their targets. Detecting, monitoring and arresting them was a joint effort between the security forces of all the countries concerned and demonstrated how well European security cooperation had developed by that time. Even when we failed to prevent the killings, we frequently managed to identify the perpetrators and a number were arrested though they were not all successfully prosecuted. In the end, the Provisional IRA decided that the losses they were sustaining made their European operations not worth the cost, and they transferred the focus of their operations to Great Britain, where they knew they would achieve much more publicity and impact.

Though a good deal of our resources were focused on terrorism from the situation in Northern Ireland, both republican and so-called loyalist, much was still going on in the international terrorist field. I had not been Director of Counter-terrorism for more than a few weeks when, one evening just before Christmas in 1988, yet another telephone call home, initially answered by one of the girls, sent me off out to work again. PanAm 103 had been blown out of the sky over Lockerbie.

That particular attack caused enormous consternation and distress, partly because it was so unforeseen, partly because so many people were killed, people who appeared to have been selected for death quite by chance, and partly because it drew everyone’s attention once again to the vulnerability of air travel to attack and its consequent attraction for terrorists. As always in these cases there was an instant demand for the answer to the question, ‘Who is responsible?’ followed almost immediately by the next obvious question, ‘Will there be another one?’ International counter-terrorist arrangements were tested to the limit as many false leads, so-called ‘intelligence’ and speculation whizzed around the world and ‘analysts’ emerged from every corner to give their view and intensify public anxiety and political pressure.

In such a fevered atmosphere it was easy to start jumping to conclusions, and we, like others, found that our early assessments later turned out to be incorrect. As always in such cases, it is from the hard, painstaking, detailed analysis that the soundest conclusions emerge.

Creating the space for that work to go on, in a fevered international climate, is the difficulty.

A team was detached to work closely with the Dumfries and Galloway police (who were faced with the prime responsibility, as the remains of the plane and its passengers came down in their area) and with forensic experts and colleagues in the USA and in Europe.

The investigation was prolonged and difficult and there were a number of false leads. It involved enquiries in many parts of the world and the detailed tracking of the bomb from its making to its explosion. The result was a brilliant fusion of forensic, intelligence and analytical skills, which ultimately resulted in the arrest, trial and conviction of one of the perpetrators.

The division of counter-terrorist responsibilities in the UK which existed when I became Director was imperfect and complicated. It was supposed to ensure that each agency and department had the opportunity to contribute in its area of expertise, while preserving certain principles, namely that ministers were answerable to Parliament and the public for the security of the state, that law and order on the street were the responsibility of the police, that diplomacy was the preserve of the Foreign Office, and that the armed forces came under the Ministry of Defence. What had resulted, as far as the security and intelligence community went, were ‘arrangements’, set out by the Joint Intelligence Committee, designed in the hope of avoiding confusion of responsibilities and conflicting interpretations of events. The arrangements made MI5 responsible for the collation, assessment and distribution of all intelligence on international terrorism affecting the UK, on Irish loyalist terrorism outside Northern Ireland and on Irish republican terrorism outside the British Isles. The RUC, with whom of course MI5 worked very closely, had the lead responsibility in Northern Ireland and the Metropolitan Police Special Branch (MPSB) was responsible for intelligence against republican terrorism in the mainland of Great Britain.

All this sounds complicated and it was. But that’s not too surprising: everything relating to running the country involves networks of liaison between departments and agencies. The important thing is that they work; that on the day everyone knows precisely what their role is and isn’t, because no counter-terrorist operation is ever exactly the same as the one before. By the time I became involved, exercises were held regularly in different parts of the country and abroad so that everyone could rehearse their role. If a terrorist incident, a hijacking or a hostage situation takes place anywhere in this country, it is the Chief Constable who is in charge, unless and until control is handed to the military. In such a situation, a confusing number of experts and advisers would descend on his patch to help the unfortunate Chief decide what to do, and if he and his staff had not had a chance to practise, they would find it hard to make sense of it all.

When exercises were being planned, there was much enthusiasm among junior staff to volunteer as ‘hostages’, especially if the exercise was overseas, in Bermuda for example. But they tended not to volunteer twice, as they often returned from playing that particular role having seen nothing of the country they were in, having had no sleep for forty-eight hours, and covered with bruises from having been hurled out of a ‘hi-jacked’ aircraft or building by their ‘rescuers’.

The exercises could be extremely realistic when you were involved at the sharp end. I was once in a room as a ‘hostage’ along with some cardboard cut out ‘terrorists’ who were due to be ‘killed’ when the military burst in to rescue us. I can still feel the wind in my hair as the bullets whistled past me and slammed into my cardboard captor. At the time I had perfect faith that our rescuers knew what they were doing, but now I do occasionally wonder if perhaps I was standing in not quite the right place and my life was more at risk than I knew.

One part of all these arrangements seemed to me to be out of date and damaging. That was that the Metropolitan Police Special Branch had retained the lead role for intelligence, as well as police work against the Provisional IRA’s operations on the mainland of Great Britain. This was a historical anomaly, which had survived the taking on by MI5 of lead responsibility for intelligence gathering, coordination and assessment work against all other forms of terrorism outside Northern Ireland. Through the work we had done against the Provisional IRA’s European campaign and with the RUC in Northern Ireland, we had learned a lot about how to counter their operations, and felt we had much to contribute to doing the same thing in Great Britain. Frankly, in my opinion, neither the intelligence-gathering techniques nor the assessment skills of the police were, in those days, up to scratch. But this was an extremely delicate issue to address without causing a furore. The Metropolitan Police, with whom we worked extremely closely and cooperatively in many fields, would inevitably regard any attempt to change the status quo as treachery. Losing their cooperation would not be in anyone’s interests. What’s more, it seemed likely that all the Chief Constables, through their powerful association ACPO, would line up together in supporting the Metropolitan Police and opposing any change. I had many discussions with colleagues about what to do and concluded that whatever the difficulties we must not let the issue drop. Our attitude was in marked contrast to that of our predecessors. Although I have no direct knowledge of this, it was widely said in MI5 that, at the time the Brighton bomb almost killed Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet at the Conservative Party conference in October 1984, there would have been the opportunity for the Service to take on the intelligence role against Provisional IRA activity in Great Britain, but our predecessors had not wanted to take on the responsibility, because they were afraid of criticism if they failed.

Eventually, after many discreet conversations, the Cabinet Office, having gained the support of No. 10 Downing Street and the military, set the ball rolling to bring about a change. The Home Office was charged with looking at the whole issue and, true to form, set up a working group, with representatives of all interested parties arguing for their own interests, which ensured that the process was not only prolonged but bloody. The working group eventually produced an ambivalent recommendation, which no-one understood and everyone interpreted differently. Ultimately, the Prime Minister and his advisers forced through the change and MI5 took on the role. I think it was the IRA mortar bombing of No. 10, which came close to killing John Major’s cabinet, which clinched it as far as he was concerned.

Those negotiations were long drawn out and uncomfortable for everyone involved and left relations with parts of the police quite rocky for some time. Many senior police officers chose to see it all as a trial of strength, which ultimately they lost, though others thought the changes were right and were extremely helpful and supportive throughout. The whole episode was made more difficult by hostile leaking to the press as the discussions went on, and I acquired a reputation as a ruthless and wily manipulator of Whitehall, of which I was rather proud, though I don’t think it was very accurate.

As the election of 1992 was called, we were still uncertain what would happen. It seemed to everyone very likely that the Labour Party would win, and all the discussions and issues would have to be aired again for new Labour ministers. However, the Conservatives won the election, Kenneth Clarke became Home Secretary and accepted the recommendation when it came onto his desk, and the changes went through.

However, patience was not one of Kenneth Clarke’s virtues, and, having agreed to the change, he wanted instantaneous results. In the summer of 1992, just after the decision had been taken, but before it had been implemented and while we were still engaged in difficult and detailed discussions with the police on exactly how we would discharge our new responsibilities, I, by then newly appointed as Director-General, was summoned down to the Home Office. Kenneth Clarke questioned me grumpily on why we had not yet made any noticeable difference to the level of IRA activity. I had to tell him that such things took time.

We would make a difference in due course. He just had to wait and give us support and encouragement.

I don’t think he found the advice very palatable. For Home Secretaries life is full of the nightmare of unpredictable disaster, so it is not surprising if they are rather jumpy. On another occasion, when I went to explain to Kenneth Clarke that we wanted to use a building in a residential part of London as a garage for cars, involving much increased traffic movement, he painted for me a nightmare picture of the large-scale protests on the street that would result, from mothers with placards pushing babies in buggies, fearful that their children would be run over. As it turned out there were no protests and everything went ahead as planned.

But of course, having taken on a responsibility, we had to work hard to deliver.

Making sure we could, and that we had and retained ministerial support, occupied the first part of my time as Director-General.