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.
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 half way 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 alre
ady 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.
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