The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  The positioning of the [mortar] baseplate at the firing point was done with remarkable precision and the range calculations had clearly been carried out with extreme care. It was no mean feat to place round one on target, which argues for the presence of a highly experienced and capable operator.4

  The fact that none of the cabinet was killed or injured was due largely to the protective-security expertise of C Branch, which kept up to date with PIRA’s weaponry and bomb technology. During a routine visit to Number Ten in 1990, Director C had mentioned that PIRA had begun to use mortars. C Branch, which was called in to advise, recommended that the windows be fitted with reinforced laminated glass. The fitting (save for the top floor, where work had not yet begun) had only just been completed when the PIRA attack took place. Several members of C Branch heard the crump of the mortars landing while at a meeting in their Assistant Director’s office. One of those present recalls a colleague saying, ‘That sounds like mortars. I hope my glazing has stood up!’ It had. Another C Branch veteran believes that ‘Had it not been for the windows, the place would have been shredded.’ At the very least, some ministers would have been badly injured by flying glass. After the mortar attack, C Branch became heavily involved in advising on the measures needed to protect Number Ten and the surrounding area against further attack.5

  Following the Brighton bombing seven years earlier, PIRA had now come close to killing two British Prime Ministers. The near success of the mortar attack strengthened the case for Service primacy over MPSB in mainland operations against Irish Republicans.6 That case was powerfully reinforced by the Security Service’s successes against PIRA on the continent, where it already had the lead intelligence role. Less than a week after the mortar attack on Downing Street, the DG, Sir Patrick Walker, was able to report to the Prime Minister the arrest of a three-man ASU in Brussels after a combined operation with the Belgian Sûreté:7 ‘Lives were probably saved. The operation demonstrated the close cooperation which exists among European security authorities in countering Irish terrorism.’8 The Service presented the Belgian Sûreté with a case of whisky.9 Combined operations by the Security Service and the French DST also led to the discovery of PIRA arms caches hidden in the French countryside and the disruption of further Provisional operations.10

  As Director G from 1988 to 1990, Stella Rimington was the last head of counter-terrorism to be responsible for dealing with the threats from both PIRA and international terrorism. In 1990 the Service’s Irish CT responsibilities were hived off to a new T Branch.11 A ministerial meeting on 11 April 1991 approved a Service request for increased counter-terrorist resources and considered a range of possible threats from PIRA. Interestingly, in view of the Islamist terrorist threat a decade later, the worst-case scenario envisaged by the meeting was of Provisional suicide bombers.12 By June T1 had begun preparing a detailed case for the transfer of the lead intelligence role against Republican terrorism from the MPSB. The most influential Whitehall supporter of the Service case was Sir Gerry Warner, who became intelligence co-ordinator in July 1991. Warner persuaded the chairman of the JIC, Sir Percy Cradock, to visit the Service for briefing by Stephen Lander (then T5/0) and Director A. The DG was subsequently invited to a meeting with Cradock and the cabinet secretary, Sir Robin Butler, to discuss how the Service would handle the lead role if it was offered it.13 On 14 October, after consulting Butler, Warner asked the DG to provide a written statement of Service plans for taking over the lead role from MPSB.14 From this point on, recalls Lander, who prepared a draft response two days later,15 he and his colleagues were confident that the decision would go in favour of the Service.16

  A policy file to plan the transfer of intelligence primacy in counter-PIRA operations on the British mainland, codenamed ASCRIBE, was opened on 16 October. Next day the Service despatched a written case for the transfer to Sir Robin Butler, stressing the experience it had gained in the lead intelligence role on the mainland against international terrorist groups for the past two decades.17 Butler told a meeting on 21 October, attended by the DG, Cradock, Warner and Sir Clive Whitmore (PUS at the Home Office):

  Both Ministers and officials had previously taken the view that the responsibility for pre-emptive intelligence to counter Republican terrorism on the mainland would more logically rest with the Security Service than the Metropolitan Police. However, they had on previous occasions concluded that the disruption involved in a transfer of responsibility outweighed the benefits of the change. That might no longer be the case.18

  Butler’s minute for the Prime Minister was franker. He acknowledged the strengths of the Met in operational policing and post-incident investigations, but concluded that they could not match the intelligence skills and experience of the Security Service.19 On 21 November Major decided there was an ‘a priori case for the Security Service to take over intelligence operations against Republican targets on the mainland’, but, in view of the complexities of the changeover, asked for a detailed report.20 It was to be another six months before a formal decision was taken.

  At almost the same moment that Major decided in principle on the transfer of the lead role against PIRA, Sir Patrick Walker told the DDG for Administration (DDG(A)),21 Stella Rimington, who had joined the Service as clerical assistant to the SLO in New Delhi nearly a quarter of a century earlier, that she was to succeed him as DG on his retirement in February 1992. By later (and some previous) standards, the selection process was remarkably casual. No applications were invited, there was no selection panel and no interviews. Rimington was not even asked whether she wanted the job.22 The Home Secretary, Kenneth Baker, consulted Walker (as well as, doubtless, his PUS and the cabinet secretary), then wrote to the Prime Minister on 12 November, recommending Rimington’s appointment. Major agreed next day.23 Rimington first heard the news soon afterwards from a senior New Zealand intelligence officer visiting London who had been informed under liaison arrangements.24

  Though Rimington was the first female head of any of the world’s leading intelligence or security agencies, there is no convincing evidence that her gender had a significant influence on her appointment. For some years the Security Service had been recruiting probably a higher proportion of women at officer/executive level than any other branch of British government.25 Rimington believes that by the time she became DDG(A), ‘The fact that I was female had almost ceased to be relevant to the progress of my career . . . As far as colleagues in the Service or in Whitehall went, I did not think it was an issue.’26 She was chosen as DG because there was good reason to believe she was the best candidate. Stephen Lander, who served under Rimington in the mid-1980s, remembers her as ‘far and away’ the best assistant director he ever had, ‘decisive, easy, confident, assertive, supportive’.27

  Walker surprised Rimington by saying that she was to be the first British intelligence chief whose appointment was publicly announced. When Rimington raised objections, the DG replied that the decision in favour of publicity had already been approved by the Prime Minister. She then rang up Sir Clive Whitmore, who she recalls exclaiming, ‘My God, have you only just found out? We thought you had known for ages.’ Told that if she wanted to challenge the decision, she must speak to Sir Robin Butler, she decided to accept publicity as a fait accompli.28 Among those taken aback by the public announcement of her appointment was Rimington’s elder daughter, then a university student. ‘I thought you must have done something wrong’, she told her mother, ‘because I knew you were not supposed to talk about your work.’29 But, though Rimington’s name was published, no photograph was released – despite the fact that the New Statesman already had a blurred picture of her. The DG’s protective-security advisers insisted that to publish a clearer photograph would increase the risk from PIRA. ‘That’, Rimington later realized, ‘was amazingly naive because it was inevitable that the press would get a photograph. In the end it was me personally who thought, “Stuff it, I’m going to stand there and let them take a picture because I’m fed up with all this.�
� ’ The day after she allowed a picture to be taken, the Evening Standard published it with a black band superimposed across her face to conceal her identity.30

  Thereafter, Rimington recalls, her pursuit by paparazzi ‘became ludicrous’. For a few days she moved to a hotel with her younger daughter in the vain hope that the reporters and photographers camped outside her Islington house would lose interest while she was gone. But they were still there when she returned home, and she was forced to move to secure accommodation. Every detail of her unremarkable private life became a news story from shopping at Marks and Spencer to her bank account (into which a private investigator made a deposit in the name of a KGB chief).31 An unflattering photograph of Rimington shopping in old clothes, this time without her face concealed, was used to illustrate an article in the Evening Standard entitled ‘Success and the Dowdy Englishwoman’. Rimington was advised to visit ‘a decent hairdresser on a regular basis’ and use ‘some subtle make-up’.32 The Sun broke the news that she was separated from her husband in a front-page story under the sensational banner headline ‘MI5 WIFE IN SECRET LOVE SPLIT’. Other newspaper headlines included ‘HOUSEWIFE SUPERSPY’ and ‘MOTHER OF TWO GETS TOUGH WITH TERRORISTS’.33 Thanks to this mostly unwelcome publicity, Rimington was the first intelligence chief in modern British history to become something approaching a household name. The Sun invited readers to become ‘Sun secret agents’: ‘Did you go to school with her or have you met her since? Phone the special Sun spy hot-line . . . Don’t worry about the cost. We’ll ring you straight back.’34

  The most important change in the Security Service’s role during Rimington’s term as DG was the implementation of ASCRIBE. Like John Major, Ken Clarke, who became home secretary after the Conservative election victory in April 1992, was convinced that ‘only a transfer of the lead responsibility would allow the Security Service to make their maximum contribution in this crucial area.’35 The decision to give the Security Service the lead role against PIRA, taken on 30 April,36 was announced by Clarke to the Commons on 8 May. Fraught negotiations followed before the official handover from the MPSB to the Security Service on 1 October. Stephen Lander, who had become Director T in February and, as one of his fellow directors recalls, was ‘not known for being a shrinking violet’, recalls the negotiations as ‘just awful, awful, awful . . .’.37 He urged staff to be conciliatory and understanding in their dealings with MPSB: ‘The ASCRIBE review has been a wounding experience for some B [Special Branch Irish] Squad staff and they are naturally disappointed at the outcome.’ The Met’s local knowledge and expertise in law enforcement would continue to be irreplaceable in operations against PIRA38 – as was recognized by the Home Secretary’s instructions for the Service’s intelligence on mainland Republican terrorism to be shared with MPSB. Eliza Manningham-Buller, who was appointed first head of the newly founded T2 to take responsibility for mainland Republican terrorism, wisely brought in a number of Met officers on secondment.39 Her success in T2 helped to mark her out as a possible future DG. A Home Office official wrote soon after the formal handover of the lead role from Special Branch to the Security Service: ‘I have heard it said that senior police officers regard her appointment as “inspired”.’40

  Rimington wrote in July 1992, four months after becoming director general:

  The Service itself has changed out of all recognition since the late 1960s and 70s. In those days the intelligence cadre was almost entirely male, with many ex-military or Colonial Service officers in their middle years. Now we are a younger Service – the average age of our intelligence officers is 36 – drawn from varied backgrounds. Half of the Directors are under 50 and over 40% of the intelligence officers are women (the figure for the whole Service is 55%). Our detractors who accuse us of being conservative, old fashioned, Cold War warriors are a very long way from the truth. We would like to see such myths blown away.41

  Once Rimington had got over the shock of her early encounter with the paparazzi, she began to see her unprecedented public visibility as DG and the media interest in her as a possible advantage to be exploited – a means of helping to ‘blow away’ myths about the Service. Without seeking any advice from PR consultants, she and her advisers set out to develop an openness programme. The first step in what she called ‘the Service’s debut before the wider public’ was the publication of the first ever official booklet on its work with the first official photograph of the DG, which showed a smartly dressed, well-groomed woman who bore no resemblance to the ‘dowdy Englishwoman’ previously mocked by the Evening Standard.42 Unremarkable though the booklet now appears, its secret gestation caused angst in Whitehall, where every word of the draft text was minutely scrutinized. ‘The process of getting the first edition off the stocks’, Rimington recalls, ‘would have made a good episode of Yes Minister.’ In July 1993, the media were summoned without explanation to the Home Office, where, to their surprise, they were handed copies of the Security Service booklet and briefed by the DG, who also answered questions. Though Rimington took a photocall after the briefing with the Home Secretary and was filmed working at a desk, she was not allowed to speak on camera and the media were forbidden to mention that she had conducted the briefing. These farcical requirements, she believed, derived 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’.43

  The impact of the Service booklet and Rimington’s briefing was heightened by the almost simultaneous arrest in a London street, following Security Service and MPSB surveillance, of a leading Provisional, Robert ‘Rab’ Fryers, who was about to begin a major bombing campaign in the City of London and provincial cities.44 Thereafter Rimington started to accept invitations to lunch with the media and to give off-the-record briefings. Jon Snow of Channel 4 News expressed surprise that she was not more like Rosa Klebb, the fearsome female KGB officer in the James Bond film From Russia with Love.45 The DG reported after a year of such briefings: ‘Silly press speculation can never be removed entirely, but the Service’s continuing, controlled contact with senior editors and others is helping to shape a better informed and more considered attitude to the Service in the more responsible quarters of the media.’46

  As well as developing contacts with the media, Rimington became the first DG to take part in the weekly Wednesday-morning meetings of permanent under secretaries. In June 1994, with Whitehall apparently no longer fearful that Rimington might upstage the Home Secretary, she was allowed to talk in public for the first time and deliver the annual televised BBC Dimbleby Lecture on ‘Security and Democracy: Is There a Conflict?’ As the DG appeared before a hand-picked audience of 340 at Whitehall’s Banqueting House, she was probably helped by her long experience of amateur dramatics. (Her memoirs include photographs of her playing Marcelle in Hotel Paradiso in 1968 and celebrating her sixty-fourth birthday in 1999 by appearing in Tom Stoppard’s The Fifteen-Minute Hamlet at a barge theatre in Copenhagen.)47 Though Rimington was, by her own admission, ‘extremely nervous’ before giving the Dimbleby Lecture, even the Guardian, one of the Security Service’s most frequent critics, reported that ‘The first, superficial, impression was of a brilliantly accomplished performance, almost a culture shock.’ As usual, Rimington’s wardrobe aroused intense media interest:

  Commentators, including fashion editors, have dwelt at length on her powerdressing – her rather severe primrose yellow jacket – offset by her body language with the use of large, unblinking, eyes reminiscent of Princess Diana as she paused to drive a point home, or completed a well-rehearsed delivery of a light-hearted anecdote.48

  Thereafter, there was a perception in Whitehall that ‘Stella enjoyed being in the limelight’ – though she disapproved of all other members of the Service, past or present, making public appearances and vetoed a BBC invitation to her predecessor, Sir Patrick Walker, to appear on Desert Island Discs. Late in 1994, Rimington appeared for the first time b
efore the newly established oversight committee of parliamentarians, the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), for whose creation support had been growing since the final years of the Thatcher government. Michael Howard, who had become home secretary earlier in the year, was initially anxious that the Security Service might prove politically inept in its dealings with the ISC, and asked his PUS, Sir Richard Wilson, to spend some time with the DG explaining what the Committee would expect from her. Rimington, however, proved a confident and assured performer.49 At least one of the MPs on the ISC initially believed that the Service was ‘inbred and not open to outside influences’. He and the rest of the Committee seemed reassured by meeting members of staff. ‘You are obviously sane and ordinary people’ was one comment, apparently intended as a compliment.50

  Rimington believed that one of the major achievements of her term as DG was ‘the demystification of the Service and the creation of a more informed public and media perception’.51 Eliza Manningham-Buller, the next female officer to become DG, was struck by Rimington’s concern for what she called the Service’s ‘shop window’.52 The Service’s new image was epitomized by its move, publicly announced, to a new, light and airy headquarters at Thames House on Millbank where two buildings had been fused into one and skilfully modernized behind the interwar façade. Staff, who had previously been dispersed between Gower Street, Curzon Street and seven other central London offices, linked by a continuous shuttle service ferrying classified files and documents back and forth, were at last able to work together in the same building. Atriums with glass roofs at both ends of the building allowed even those rooms which had no outside window to have a view of the sky. An automated miniature monorail (an improved version of the one used at Curzon Street two decades earlier) brought files up from the basement. The official opening of the Thames House headquarters by the Prime Minister, John Major, on 30 November 1994 provided a further photo-opportunity. Less than forty years earlier Rab Butler, on becoming home secretary, had had no idea where MI5 headquarters were.53