Open Secret

by Stella Rimington

  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.

  19

  I LEFT COUNTER-TERRORISM at the end of 1990 on promotion to one of the two Deputy Director-General posts which existed at the time. I was appointed on the retirement of David Ranson, a long-time Security Service officer who had made his reputation in the counter-subversion branch at the time of the 1974 miners’ strike and had been very involved in the early days of the Service’s work in fighting international terrorism. His retirement turned out to be sadly short, as he died only a couple of years later.

  My promotion to Deputy Director-General was the first time I seriously wondered if in fact I might end up as Director-General. It still seemed to me that the other deputy, Julian Faux, was much more likely to be given the job than I. He was responsible for the operational and investigative work, had served in Moscow and had run the surveillance section. More recently he had directed the surveillance operation against Michael Bettaney which led to his arrest in 1984. Julian kept a velvet glove pinned to his office wall to remind him that in earlier days he had been accused of being rude to senior officers. My job, in charge of the support side – finances, personnel and recruiting, accommodation and all the general underpinning – was dull in comparison. It is tempting to think that it was because I was female that I was given the ‘soft’ subjects but I don’t believe that was the reason. The fact that I was a female had almost ceased to be relevant to the progress of my career by this time. As far as colleagues in the Service or in Whitehall went, I did not think it was an issue. Some of the police still found it difficult to treat a senior woman like a normal human being, and felt the need to treat all engagements with me and senior female colleagues as trials of strength they had to win, though by that time there were a considerable number of more up-to-date senior police officers who did not have that problem. Abroad, attitudes differed. Mediterranean colleagues, who were often generals or admirals, tended to be charmingly gallant. In Northern Europe, being female was not an important factor and even the French had by then ceased to hide pregnant women behind screens. The Danish intelligence service had been headed up by a woman for a few years by the time I became Deputy Director-General. I had yet to find out about the attitudes of our Cold War opponents.

  By the time I left Counter-terrorism, I was exhausted. The level of terrorist activity in both Irish and international arenas had increased to the point where, when I left, we decided to split the branch in half and two Directors were appointed to do the job I had been doing.

  I felt that what I needed more than anything else was a break before I took up my next post. I asked for and was given a short sabbatical to go off and polish up my French; I had been taking conversation lessons already for some time. So just after Christmas 1991, I set off to France in my ancient Beetle Cabriolet car to take a course of lessons at the Chamber of Commerce school in the Market Square in Lille. The French loved the Beetle, and whenever I stopped someone would come up and offer to buy it. In those days I had no commercial instinct and I never pursued their offers.

  Setting off to France, I felt more carefree than for very many years. I left the girls and MI5 behind with no qualms at all. Sophie was by then at university and Harriet went off to stay with a cousin. It was a wonderful feeling to have no responsibility for anything or anyone except myself. I stayed with a young family in a small house in the outskirts of Lille and had their young son’s bedroom. He had piled up all his stuff in the corner when he vacated his room for me, and somewhere among it all was some sort of electronic gadget which played a tune at 3.30 every morning. I never found where or what it was, so I never managed to turn it off. But this did not matter because although it usually woke me up, I had no difficulty in my responsibility-free state of mind in going back to sleep again. Even Desert Storm, the invasion of Kuwait, which I watched on the TV news, seemed remote from me, though I knew that my colleagues would be very much on the alert for any terrorist strikes by Saddam Hussein or his friends on his enemies in the West.

  In some countries, even those with a far less serious terrorist threat than we had, it would be remarkable that the deputy head of the internal security service could go off totally alone and unprotected on such an ‘ordinary’ sabbatical abroad. It was thanks to the anonymity which had been until then a feature of a career in MI5 that I was able to do so. My hosts and the teachers at the school had no idea what I did for a living, though, as ever, my job made ordinary human relations rather difficult. The teachers were anxious to help me with particular vocabulary that would be useful in my profession, but I did not think it would be appropriate to ask them for the vocabulary for surveillance and running agents and tapping telephones. So I represented myself as some kind of an expert in physical security, and engaged the Manager of the Chamber of Commerce in earnest conversation about locks and security systems, which I did not know a great deal about in English let alone in French. When, only a year later, there was much publicity about my appointment as the Director-General of MI5, they were surprised to discover whom they had been harbouring.

  I pottered about Northern France in my little car on those dark, freezing-cold January days, and watched Lille readying itself for the arrival of the cross-channel trains. And on the way home, I stopped in Bruges and re-visited the museums which I had known well when we lived in Brussels, and watched the ducks sliding on the frozen canals. But all too soon it was time to go back to work, and I returned to the gloomy Gower Street offices, where I had last worked as Director of Counter-espionage, feeling little enthusiasm for my new job.

  Resource management was not something that appealed to me at all. The Treasury was beginning to take a close interest in the resourcing of the intelligence agencies, thinking, rightly, that over the years we had got away with less rigorous scrutiny than other departments, because we had been able successfully to hide behind our veil of secrecy. So the late 1980s and early 1990s marked the introduction of a whole new system of resource and priority scrutinies, which would have made our predecessors pale. Their objective had been to keep such things away from Whitehall, particularly the Treasury, on the grounds, which they successfully held for a remarkably long time, that it was all too secret for anyone except the most closely involved to know anything about.

  In the 1970s, when Michael Hanley was Director-General, we heard tales of the DG becoming apoplectic at the insensate demands of Whitehall for information to substantiate and justify resource requirements. To do them justice, he and his successors were not seeking to cover extravagance, or anything worse, it was just that they had no faith in Whitehall as it then was to understand what the task of the intelligence agencies was, and to resource it properly. It was another manifestation of the distance and suspicion which existed in those days. Nor did that lack of openness lead to profligacy; I believe it was quite the opposite. In their desire not to raise their heads above the parapet, our predecessors may well have failed to introduce changes which might have cost money, when perhaps they should have done. The housing of the Service in so many, rather unsuitable buildings was an example.

  But in the late ’80s, as Mrs Thatcher got to grips with public expenditure, the veils of secrecy were gradually being torn away. Each year, a new system was tried for scrutinising the expenditure of the intelligence agencies. In fact the administrative time, thought and energy which went in to tackling the subject was in our case totally out of proportion to the sums involved. But it had by then become a sort of challenge and, as far as we were concerned, the torture of the public expenditure round got more and more refined as the years went on.

  Within the Service we started to make huge changes in our management processes, not
only financial management but also the way we managed our staff. We greatly improved our assessment of staff performance, we introduced performance-related pay, we made our separate businesses cost centres with their own budgets and performance targets. In doing that we took advice from a wide range of senior managers in different fields, not only in the public service. Because our business was regarded as mysterious, such people were interested to come and meet us and give us advice. So as time went on, we felt we had a good story to tell to the Whitehall scrutineers. But that did not make the process any less agonising.

  The system that had been put in place meant that the staff of the Intelligence Co-ordinator in the Cabinet Office were responsible for the first scrutiny of our plans. Then the Treasury moved in, and questioned everything in that suspicious, combative manner which was the professional style of Treasury officials in those days. They cultivated an incredulous tone of voice, designed to make one feel an idiot and I had to force myself not to get cross, which was exactly what they wanted. The whole process culminated in the heads of the intelligence agencies having to appear before a committee of the ministers of those departments which were the ‘customers’ for their product, the Home Office, the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence, the Northern Ireland Office etc, with of course the Treasury in attendance. It was a sort of refined ‘Star Chamber’, where the ministers had all been provided by their officials with the most awkward questions they could think up. To the unfortunate scrutinee, it seemed like a sort of competition of beastliness. You knew that whatever you were proposing, you would be given less, and drawing attention to the comparative cost to the country of a successful IRA bomb in the City of London and a few more thousands of pounds spent on counter-terrorism never seemed to work. I came away wondering ruefully why I had put so much effort into stopping them all getting blown up.