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 terr
orism 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 atta
ck 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.
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