The project had been kept a close secret. The journalists were summoned to the Home Office for an undisclosed announcement. When they found out, they seemed both amazed at what was happening and bemused by it. Though the launch looked like a press conference, and I answered all the questions, the assembled journalists were told by the Home Office that they must not say in their newspapers who had briefed them. The journalists all knew who I was and telling them that they could not say so introduced an unnecessarily farcical element into the proceedings. It was not a very auspicious beginning to our openness programme, though the booklet was well received.
That extraordinary ruling resulted from the nightmare in Whitehall at the time that if they did not keep a very close rein on me, I would end up answering questions about security policy and usurping the Home Secretary’s role. Despite the anxiety about any public appearances I made, I was perfectly clear where my role ended and the Home Secretary’s began. If any proposal for a public appearance was put to the Home Office for clearance, a major lecture for example, the answer would come back, usually after much correspondence had been exchanged and weeks had gone by, ‘The Home Secretary agrees, provided that you don’t answer questions.’ What terrible faux pas they expected me to commit in the course of answering questions I never discovered, and of course I gave many talks on less formal occasions, which were not cleared, when I always answered questions. It was illogical and a pity because it gave the impression that I was only prepared to talk to a prepared text.
The afternoon of the booklet launch I took a photocall at the Home Office with Michael Howard, then Home Secretary, and for the first time authorised pictures appeared in the newspapers. The photographs were accompanied by much comment about my personal appearance and what I was wearing, but the comment I enjoyed most was a letter in the Spectator from someone who wrote to say that as a result of disclosures made in the name of ‘openness’, he found himself fancying the head of MI5.
From then on my life became an open secret. Though for security we still lived under cover and I used a false name in many everyday situations, I began to be recognised in the street and, like many women in public life, I also acquired my quota of telephone and letter stalkers, some of whom are still with me. Casual social contact and even transactions in shops required a snap decision about whether I should give my real name or an alias. If one or other of the girls was with me that decision obviously covered them too, something they found uncomfortable and annoying. They hated the level of intrusion of work into our private lives, caused by the security requirement.
After the booklet launch, I began to accept invitations to lunch with the media, and I realised that often on those occasions the hosts were just as apprehensive as I was. An early occasion was at ITN and prominent among the guests was Jon Snow. He proceeded to interview me over the lunch table as if I had been on Channel 4 News; he seemed amazed that I was a normal person and even said that he had expected me to be more like Rosa Kleb, the KGB officer in From Russia With Love who attacks James Bond with the knives in her boots. I went again to ITN later to do an off-the-record question and answer session over lunch and when I finally retired, they presented me with a game they had created, based on Monopoly, which was called ‘MI7 – The Game for MI5 Chiefs’. The Angel Islington, Mayfair and the other properties around the board had been replaced with ‘Bugging Kit’, ‘False Passport’, ‘Spy Satellite’ and other tools of the trade. You lost £40 if you left your unlocked briefcase on ITN’s newsdesk, though you won £100 when Channel 4 News alleged that a certain MP was a KGB agent. I played ‘MI7’ with some colleagues just before I retired and we imagined the headlines, ‘MI5 Board of Directors Plays ITN’s Game’.
When at the end of 1993 I was asked to do the next Dimbleby Lecture on BBC TV, it seemed to fit perfectly into the strategy we had adopted. It would be a high-profile, dignified opportunity to put some basic facts on the record and to raise some issues which might generate a decent debate, for example how security services should be controlled in a democracy and how far it is appropriate for the state to intrude on the privacy of the few to protect the safety of the many. These were issues about which many people had opinions, but so far because of our own secrecy the debate had not been well informed. The title ‘Security and Democracy. Is there a conflict?’ seemed appropriate. People would be able to see me, hear me speak and they could form their own judgement of what I said. What’s more, I would not be offending against the Home Office restriction on my answering questions.
But when I asked for agreement to do the lecture, all the same anxieties that had surrounded the booklet were raised again. After a prolonged period of gestation and much consultation, the answer came from Whitehall that ministers had agreed. But when we had drafted the text, everyone with any angle on anything I wanted to say had to be consulted and every word was picked over and brooded on. At one stage I feared that I would end up by merely opening and shutting my mouth and saying nothing at all. I had a meeting with the then head of the Foreign Office, David Gillmore, who appeared to have been briefed by his officials to object to practically everything about any foreign country, presumably in case someone should be upset. In the end, Robin Butler, the Cabinet Secretary, managed to ensure that I could say everything I wanted to say.
Appearing on TV to talk about MI5 was quite a dramatic thing to do, and I was extremely nervous. But I felt that it was a seminal occasion in terms of our relationship with the British public. On the whole I was pleased with the reaction. It was not all favourable of course, but some of it, at least, was serious. The Times published the text of the lecture in full and other papers and magazines printed articles discussing the issues. However, inevitably, one or two journalists wrote about my clothes and one wrote that I had very big ears, and that these must be useful for covert communications.
Our greater openness with the press and the public eventually attracted the attention of Parliament. Under the 1989 Security Service Act, which provided legal oversight of the Service’s work, no provision had been made for any form of direct parliamentary scrutiny. It was the Home Secretary who answered to Parliament for our activities. This was always seen as likely to change in time, but ministers of the day were not enthusiasts for a parliamentary committee, which would inevitably require their attendance as well as ours to answer questions. However, certain members of the Home Affairs Select Committee were eager to add the Security Service to the scope of their scrutiny. Barbara Roche, at the time a member at the Home Affairs Select Committee, hearing that I had been to lunch with various newspapers, invited me to have lunch with her at the House of Commons. This invitation somehow got into the public domain, and had I accepted, which I was rather keen to do, the occasion would have risked becoming a political statement about parliamentary oversight. Instead, it was decided that the Home Affairs Select Committee could come to our office in Gower Street for a briefing and lunch. However, it was made clear that this did not imply an acceptance on the part of the government of any jurisdiction by the Committee over the Service.
Members of the Committee accepted the invitation in that spirit, and agreed among themselves that they would keep the details of the briefing confidential. However, the press soon got wind that they were coming, and a Keystone Cops situation developed, as the cars we had sent to the House of Commons to bring the Committee to our offices in Gower Street were pursued by photographers and reporters on motor bikes. Apparently, we had not told the Committee members where they were going, not through any wish to keep it a secret, but merely because it had not occurred to us as they were being driven there, which made it seem all the more mysterious.
Meanwhile, in the calm of my office I knew nothing of the excitement down at the House of Commons, until a rather breathless and shaken Committee arrived. Entering into the spirit of the occasion, our dining-room cook had put ‘Reform cutlets’ on the menu. The menu card was purloined by one of our guests, Chris Mullin I think, and in the absence of hard i
nformation about the content of the meeting, the menu became news and was reported in various newspapers and a satirical version of it later appeared in Private Eye. Kenneth Clarke complained to me later that Reform cutlets were very old-fashioned – the joke had apparently passed him by.
At the time, I had on the wall of my office a framed quotation from Edmund Burke, which I had inherited from one of my predecessors. It read: ‘Those who would carry on great public schemes must be proof against the most fatiguing delays, the most mortifying disappointments, the most shocking insults and worst of all the presumptuous judgement of the ignorant upon their designs.’ I was rather embarrassed about this and hoped no one would notice it, but as luck would have it, Chris Mullin did, and later sent a message asking for the wording. I did not give it to him, as I suspected it would only turn up later in some sardonic article. Instead, I removed it.
Though in many ways that was a bizarre occasion, it was also a historic one, in that it marked the first formal direct contact MI5 had with Parliament, other than with ministers or shadow ministers. The Home Affairs Select Committee did not in the end acquire oversight responsibility for MI5. In 1994, the Intelligence Services Act, which provided a legal status for our two sister services, SIS and GCHQ, brought in a new parliamentary oversight committee, the Intelligence and Security Committee, to take on the parliamentary oversight function for all three services.
I became Director-General in February 1992. On 9 April the general election was called. In the period before a general election, the heads of departments customarily offer a briefing to shadow ministers. The odds were on Labour winning the 1992 election and it seemed likely that Roy Hattersley would become Home Secretary and my boss, so I invited him to visit us. I prepared carefully for his visit, conscious that it was he who had said of us in parliament during the debate on the 1989 Security Service Bill, that we were the worst security service in the world. I was determined that we should present the friendly, open and relaxed face, which was actually us and not appear defensive in the face of his criticism. I had the office specially polished up and acquired some potted plants to make it look, I hoped, warm and welcoming. I even removed a sword which had been presented to my predecessor by one of the East European security services at the end of the Cold War, because I thought it looked too militaristic. After all the trouble I took to create the right impression, I was mortified to hear him talking about the occasion in a quiz show on the BBC recently; the best he could do was to describe my office as gloomy. But that relationship was not to be. Labour did not win the election and Kenneth Clarke became Home Secretary.
Dealing with the politics at home and relationships abroad took a good deal of my time. I have mentioned the group of European Heads of Service but there was another group to which we belonged which met much less frequently but was altogether more exotic. That was the Heads of Commonwealth Security Services. The year in which I became Director-General it met in Kampala. The Ugandans looked after us superbly, but a detectable tremor went through the assembled company on the first night when at the welcoming cocktail party in the hotel grounds, we were told that the pleasant grassy hollow where we were taking our drinks was the former killing field where Idi Amin’s men had slaughtered their opponents before throwing them into the river. The long-legged Maribou Storks, which perched precariously on all the trees around, watching us in a menacing way, had apparently first arrived in the centre of town in those days, attracted by the rotting corpses. The delegates were housed in two separate hotels and I was pleased to be told that it was the other one, not the one I was staying in, that was Idi Amin’s HQ. However, one of our fellow delegates was effectively deprived of a sound night’s sleep for the duration of the conference, when he realised that the room we were being told of, where opponents of the regime had been tortured before being killed, was the very same room he had been allocated.
The Commonwealth Security Conferences – I attended two during my time as Director-General – were characterised by the very different security concerns of the delegates. At that first one, there was earnest discussion of a topic close to the hearts of some of our African colleagues, how to convince governments that there should be continuity of the security service when the government changed – in other words how to prevent the service becoming the tool of the party in power – an issue which mercifully I had never had to contend with. At the second such conference I attended, the gap was even wider. When each country was asked to say what was their top priority security concern, I said, ‘Terrorism’, and the Namibian delegate said, ‘Cattle rustling’.
Alongside all the political activity and foreign liaison, we had to get on with what we were there to do – the security intelligence work. The major task during my first year as Director-General was to implement the decision that had by then been taken that we should take over lead responsibility for intelligence work against Irish republican terrorism on the mainland of Great Britain from the Metropolitan Police Special Branch. As soon as we had finalised the details with the Metropolitan Police, which took some time, we needed to move quickly and start to try to make a difference to the level of intelligence available, so that any terrorist attacks might be thwarted. Thanks to the Treasury’s attentions, and our own analysis over the preceding few years, we had a very good idea of where our resources and costs lay, which was a great help when almost overnight we had to redirect about 25% of our effort away from the targets of the Cold War and into supplementing our existing counter-terrorist effort. Making such a change is not as radical as it may sound. The fundamentals of intelligence work are the same whether you are working against terrorists or spies. The intelligence tools are the same, the assessment skills are the same, but clearly, there is much to be learned about any new intelligence target, although we already had considerable experience working against this one in both Northern Ireland and continental Europe.
Working extremely closely with the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, in circumstances where not all of them were pleased with the change of responsibilities, was not always easy. At the beginning, we sent some of our staff down to Scotland Yard to sit in with some police teams. They were mostly female, not because of any desire to make a sexist point, but because they were the people who had been doing similar work in the Service and had the best background to make a good contribution. They got some first-hand experience of how women were treated in the police. There were small harassments of various kinds and one report came back that one of our officers found a pile of dirty washing on her desk one day, with the instruction that she was to wash it. I heard that she threw it out of the window, and was not harassed again.
The middle of a bombing campaign in Great Britain was not the best time to take on this new work and inevitably it put us in a very high-profile position. By its nature, intelligence, especially on such a well-trained, well-equipped and secure organisation as the Provisional IRA is hard to come by. In his Autobiography John Major has set out in detail the complex policy he was pursuing during these years to try to bring peace to Northern Ireland. Our job, with our other intelligence and police colleagues, was to try to ensure that he and his advisers had the best possible supply of intelligence to help them weave their way through the complexities. This meant that from time to time I brought him very unwelcome news about operations being planned or imminent, which sometimes we did not have enough intelligence to be sure of preventing. On such occasions he would look grave and say, ‘I’m relying on you, Stella,’ and I would go back to my colleagues and say, ‘The Prime Minister is relying on us,’ to which they would reply, ‘Gosh, thanks,’ as they went off to do their job.
During all that period I never felt that the political agenda in any way affected what I could or could not report. No-one ever tried to put any pressure on me to report only what they wanted to hear, or to slant intelligence briefings to fit the political agenda. In fact the only time in my whole career when I ever felt that sort of pressure was in my dealings with the A
mericans over Northern Ireland, though the FBI were always immensely cooperative and helpful, and responded magnificently to our many requests for operational assistance. But just before I retired, I was given a very hostile grilling in Washington by the then President’s national security team, who clearly had their own view of the rights and wrongs of the situation in the island of Ireland, their own sources of information, and their own political agenda. They did not wish to hear anything from me which did not fit with it and I had no confidence in what they would do with anything I told them. It was a novel, unwelcome and scary experience for me.
In all my dealings with John Major I never felt that there was any chance that he would blame us if we were unable to prevent a terrorist attack. He understood that there is no such thing as 100% intelligence or security and provided we showed professionalism, the right skills, the right strategies, and had not made some stupid mistake, he would back us up. This support was very important. When intelligence operations are successful and prevent a terrorist incident, no-one knows anything about it. It is very rare in those circumstances for anything to be said in public. The priority is to preserve the sources of intelligence. However, when intelligence fails to prevent an incident and a bomb does go off, there is a very high-profile disaster for all to see. That will inevitably happen from time to time and during those first few years we failed to prevent an attack on the City of London, the bombing in Docklands with which the ProvisionaI IRA signalled the end of its ceasefire in 1996, and the bombing of the centre of Manchester later in that year. I was in New Zealand, attending a conference, when the Provisional IRA detonated its Docklands bomb. I was at Auckland airport in February 1996, just setting off for a weekend break in the Bay of Islands to which I was greatly looking forward, when news of the Docklands bomb and the IRA’s announcement that its ceasefire was over, came over the mobile phone. I went straight from Auckland airport to the local office of the New Zealand Security Service and sat there with my New Zealand colleagues in a state of shock watching the destruction and chaos in London on CNN, waiting to hear when I could catch a plane back to London. I set off home that evening, on one of the gloomiest journeys of my life, a journey that seemed to go on for ever. I went straight to a meeting in Michael Howard’s office to review the situation, not that there was much for us to say at that point.
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