The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  Surveillance and investigation of Naseer and other students in Manchester and Liverpool with whom he was in contact (all but one of them Pakistani) had found no sign of Nadia (or of Naseer’s involvement with any other woman) and no evidence of wedding preparations. In two previous Islamist terrorist cases which had led to convictions similar coded language had been used to indicate attack planning. It thus seemed possible that the reference to 15 to 20 April (in the Islamic calendar the Easter-holiday period) referred to the planned timing of a terrorist attack, and it was decided to go ahead with the arrest of Naseer and ten of his alleged associates in Manchester and Liverpool. All but one of those arrested worked as security guards.123 At the time of their arrest, two of the Pakistani students were working for a cargo firm with access to secure areas at Manchester airport.124

  On 8 April Jonathan Evans took part in a Downing Street meeting to brief the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and senior ministers. Unlike Security Service staff, senior police officers sometimes entered Number Ten by the front door. Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick, a key counter-terrorist officer, did so when arriving for the briefing meeting. Unhappily, he had in his hand classified documents relating to the pending arrests which should have been concealed inside a briefcase or folder; some were visible in pictures taken by press photographers. The editor of the Evening Standard, Geordie Grieg, responded to an appeal from the Security Service not to publish the photographs until the following day. As a result of Quick’s indiscretion, for which he resigned the next day, the arrests had to be brought forward and began at 5.30 p.m. rather than taking place at night as had been intended.125

  Some of the arrests took place in full public view rather than more discreetly at the homes of the suspects, as would have happened during night-time arrests. Though none of those arrested offered any resistance, a number were forced to the ground before being handcuffed. Merseyside police said later that they had to take into account the possibility that those arrested might include a suicide bomber or someone with a mobile telephone capable of detonating explosive devices (as had been attempted in failed terrorist attacks against a London nightclub). Police also had in mind the murder of Detective Constable Stephen Oake during the arrest in Manchester of an Algerian Islamist in 2003. An inquiry by the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, Lord Carlile of Berriew QC, later made the curious comment that ‘the arrests lacked visual subtlety’, but concluded that ‘it is probably right that in such circumstances no chances should have been taken by the police’.126

  Gordon Brown announced on the day after the arrests:

  We are dealing with a very big terrorist plot. We have been following it for some time. There were a number of people who were suspected of it who have been arrested . . . We had to act pre-emptively to ensure the safety of the public, and the safety of the public is the paramount and utmost concern of all that we do.

  Subsequent investigation, though generating significant intelligence, failed to produce evidence for a successful prosecution. By acting ‘pre-emptively to ensure the safety of the public’, but proving unable to bring a prosecution, the Security Service and the police inevitably laid themselves open to the charge that, to quote one of those arrested, ‘It was all bullshit!’ The only British citizen among Naseer’s alleged associates was released soon after his arrest. No charges were brought against the other ten. On 22 April all were transferred to immigration custody and served by the Home Office with deportation notices.127 All maintained their innocence.128

  The later report by Lord Carlile concluded, however, after reviewing the intelligence available to the Security Service and the police, ‘There was no realistic alternative to arresting at least some of the suspects. Arrests were necessary because of public safety concerns.’129

  Though the total number of those with Islamist terrorist connections investigated by the Security Service in 2009 was little different from the totals over the previous few years, the Service reported a decline in the proportion of those engaged in ‘late stage attack planning’. Jonathan Evans told the Intelligence and Security Committee:

  We have been giving quite a lot thought as to why that is. It’s not because the people aren’t here, because they very clearly are and we believe their strategic intent is the same, but I think there are a number of factors in play. One is the very large number of cases that have come through the courts and been successfully prosecuted by the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service], which has had an effect on the willingness of groups to take risks and to do things. Secondly, I think there has been a degree of disruption, particularly in the FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas on Pakistan’s north-west frontier].130

  The Security Service believed, as it reached its centenary in 2009, that though a major Islamist terrorist attack would remain a serious danger for the foreseeable future, the observable threat was less acute than it had been in recent years.

  1 Threat levels assess the likelihood of attack; alert levels concern protective-security measures in place.

  2 The 1988 Criminal Justice Act makes it an offence for officials of any nationality intentionally to inflict severe pain or suffering on another person in the performance or purported performance of their official duties. It would be an offence for any British official to aid and abet torture by encouraging or assisting it.

  Conclusion

  The First Hundred Years of the Security Service

  When MI5’s first and youngest head, the thirty-six-year-old Vernon Kell, began work in October 1909 in the office of a private detective at 64 Victoria Street, his only target was German spies. Today’s Security Service, by contrast, is overwhelmingly a counter-terrorist agency; in 2007–8 it spent a mere 3.5 per cent of its budget on counter-espionage.1 So small were Kell’s resources, however, that before the First World War he had less to spend on counter-espionage than the Service does today. It was not until January 1911 that he was able to afford an assistant. Even at the outbreak of war Kell had a total staff of only seventeen (including himself and the caretaker) – fewer in number than the spies whose arrest he ordered in August 1914. The keys to Kell’s pre-war counter-espionage strategy – securing the co-operation of the police, using the Home Office Warrant system introduced by Churchill, establishing a state-of-the-art database – are, however, still central to Service operations in the twenty-first century. At the outbreak of war, to the fury of the Kaiser, Kell’s Bureau succeeded, with police assistance, in rounding up all the German spies of any significance, thus depriving the enemy of advance warning of the despatch of the British Expeditionary Force to the Western Front. A much expanded MI5 also defeated the wartime German espionage offensive.

  Gauging the full extent of MI5’s achievements during its first decade, as at most other periods in its history, however, is more difficult than for most government agencies and departments. The success of a security service is better judged by things that do not happen (which are necessarily unquantifiable) than by things that do. MI5’s post-war assessment of its First World War counter-espionage operations concluded: ‘It is apparently a paradox, but it is none the less true, and a most important truth, that the efficiency of a counter espionage service is not to be measured chiefly by the number of spies caught by it.’ Though MI5 caught most German spies in the first half of the war, it was even more effective in the second half when the deterrent effect of its counter-espionage successes left it with few foreign agents to catch. MI5 attributed much of its wartime success to good preventive security (later called protective security) which turned Britain into a hard target for sabotage as well as espionage. The blowing up by German saboteurs in 1916 of a huge ammunition dump at Black Tom Pier, New Jersey, destined for a Russian offensive on the Eastern Front, would undoubtedly have been replicated in Britain had protective security there been as poor as it was in the United States. The fact that there was no successful sabotage at all in mainland Britain is another indication of M15’s wartime success – and a further example of how dif
ficult it is to use the ‘performance indicators’ (commonly defined as ‘numerical measures of achievement’) fashionable in twenty-first-century government bureaucracies to measure that success.

  The First World War established as one of the enduring characteristics of the Security Service its camaraderie and esprit de corps, the main theme of its 1919 victory celebrations and ‘Hush-Hush’ Revue. It is difficult to imagine members of Lenin’s Cheka (still less of its Stalinist successors) celebrating, as the programme for the ‘Hush-Hush’ Revue did, ‘the jokes and laughter and the fun’ which had punctuated their intelligence careers. Ever since the First World War MI5’s sociable work culture has been singled out by retired staff members as one of their main memories of the Service.2

  One 1953 recruit recalls being told by a personnel officer, ‘One of the best things about working here is that the percentage of bastards is extremely low.’ The aloof management style of a number of the director generals selected by ministers and Whitehall committees during the Cold War did little to diminish the sociability of the Service as a whole. Despite the dip in morale produced by the post-Cold War cutbacks, twenty-firstcentury Staff Opinion Surveys recorded some of the highest job-satisfaction ratings in either the public or the private sector.

  During its first century the Security Service had to reorient itself repeatedly to new threats to national security which, in most cases, were difficult, if not impossible, to foresee. For eighty years its changing priorities were largely determined by unprecedented upheavals in the political systems of the two largest continental powers, Germany and Russia. The threat to British national security from Germany, which dominated MI5 operations for most of its first decade, declined dramatically after Germany’s defeat in the First World War, the abdication of the Kaiser and the foundation of the Weimar Republic with an army limited by the Treaty of Versailles to only 100,000 men. No one in August 1914 could have predicted that in the course of the war Russia would be transformed from Europe’s most authoritarian monarchy into the world’s most revolutionary regime with a following in Britain which became and remained a major preoccupation of the Service until the closing years of the Cold War. Only a few weeks before the February 1917 Revolution which overthrew the Tsar, even Lenin declared, ‘We the old [he was forty-six at the time] will probably not live to see the decisive battles of the coming revolution.’ The interwar rise of Hitler was equally unpredictable. When the former British ambassador to the Weimar Republic, Lord D’Abernon, published his two-volume memoirs in 1929, the only reference to Hitler was a footnote which mentioned that he had spent six months in prison in 1924, ‘thereafter fading into oblivion’. ‘You will not think it possible, gentlemen,’ the German President Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg told two of his generals in January 1932, ‘that I should appoint that Austrian lance-corporal Chancellor.’3

  Even when the former lance-corporal became chancellor (his first fulltime salaried civilian job) a year later at the age of forty-three, almost no one except Hitler himself could have foreseen that he would rapidly transform Germany into the most aggressive power in the history of twentieth-century Europe. In 1936, however, the Security Service became probably the first department of government to issue a warning that the vast territorial ambitions set out by Hitler in Mein Kampf should be taken seriously as a guide to his future conduct: ‘It is emphatically not a case of irresponsible utterances which have been discarded by a statesman on obtaining power.’ In the aftermath of the 1938 Munich crisis Kell personally delivered to Sir Robert Vansittart at the Foreign Office what was in effect a devastating indictment of the policy of appeasement pursued by the Chamberlain government. In the light of reliable intelligence which MI5 had provided over the last few years, there was ‘nothing surprising and nothing which could not have been foreseen’ about the coming of the Munich crisis. British policy during the crisis had convinced Hitler of ‘the weakness of England’. There are few more remarkable examples of an intelligence agency telling truth to power than Kell’s decision to inform Chamberlain that Hitler considered him an ‘arsehole’.4

  Before the Second World War, as before the First, MI5 achieved considerably more than would nowadays be expected from an agency with such slender resources. Despite having only twenty-six officers at the beginning of 1938, it had succeeded in penetrating the German embassy, the British Fascist movement and the headquarters of the CPGB. By running Major Christopher Draper as a double agent against Germany, MI5 also discovered the cover address in Hamburg used by the Abwehr agent SNOW, whose later recruitment as a double agent marked the first step in the creation of the Double-Cross System. Both before and during the Second World War, the Security Service was less successful against Soviet than against Nazi intelligence. In particular, it underestimated Soviet success in recruiting bright young British graduates as long-term penetration agents. Lacking the budget for a major staff expansion, MI5 recruited only two recent graduates in the decade before the war (each of whom later became DG) – significantly fewer than the British graduate recruits of Soviet intelligence. Even had the Service possessed greater resources and a better understanding of the NKVD’s graduate-recruitment programme, there was not much it could have done to prevent ‘Stalin’s Englishmen’ (as Peter Hennessy later called them) penetrating the corridors of power. The woeful state of interwar protective security in Whitehall made it a soft target. Before the outbreak of war the Foreign Office had no security officer, let alone a security department. At various times during the 1930s, as well as failing to prevent the haemorrhage of classified documents from the Rome embassy, many of which the Centre forwarded to Stalin, the FO employed at least four Soviet agents: two young diplomats (Donald Maclean and John Cairncross) and two FO cipher clerks (Ernest Oldham and Captain John King).

  Intelligence agencies, like governments, need, from time to time, a measure of good fortune. So far as its operations against Soviet intelligence in the 1930s were concerned, MI5 did not have it. In the summer of 1934, at the very moment when Kim Philby, who had graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in the previous year, was putting the NKVD in touch with his Trinity friend Guy Burgess, MI5 was pursuing an investigation at the College. Its target, however, was not the student body but a Trinity fellow, the Russian physicist and future Nobel laureate Pyotr Kapitsa, who there was good reason to suspect (even though the suspicions were probably unfounded) was engaged in scientific and technological espionage. With limited resources, MI5 was right to concentrate on Kapitsa, who was in contact with the leading Cambridge Communist academic Maurice Dobb, rather than on Dobb’s former pupil Philby. Though MI5 did not suspect any of the Cambridge Five until 1951, it came quite close before the war to catching their two leading controllers, Teodor Maly and Arnold Deutsch. During 1937, while Olga Gray was working as an MI5 agent for Percy Glading, the CPGB organizer of the Woolwich Arsenal spy-ring, she met both Maly and Deutsch. Had they remained in England, Deutsch in particular would probably have been tracked down because of his recurrent security lapses. As a result of the paranoia which swept through the Centre during Stalin’s Terror, however, first Maly, then Deutsch was abruptly recalled. By January 1939 only one NKVD officer remained in London. Kell drew the understandable but false conclusion that ‘[Soviet] activity in England is non-existent, in terms of both intelligence and political subversion.’5 He failed to make allowance for the remarkable motivation and determination of the Five and other agents even after they had been abandoned by their pre-war case officers. All the Cambridge Five went on to get jobs within the intelligence agencies or within other corridors of power, whence they provided so much classified material that the Centre sometimes had difficulty in keeping up with it.

  The Second World War began badly for MI5. Kell had stayed on too long as director (longer indeed than the head of any other twentieth-century government agency or department), had forgotten the lessons of the previous war and could not cope with the huge increase in wartime work. His immediate successor, Jasper Hark
er, was not up to the job. Under Sir David Petrie, however, the Service entered a golden age. In the Second World War the British intelligence community produced better (and better-used) intelligence than that available to any combatant in any previous conflict. It was taken by surprise by the extent of its own success. Though the breaking of the German Enigma machine cipher has since become perhaps the best-known intelligence success in British history, at the outbreak of war the cipher was widely regarded as unbreakable – even in Bletchley Park. Frank Birch, who became head of Bletchley’s naval section, was told ‘it wasn’t worthwhile’ trying to crack Enigma.6

  MI5 found similar difficulty in coming to terms with the astonishing fact that, in the words of J. C. Masterman, chairman of the Twenty Committee, ‘we actively ran and controlled the German espionage system in this country.’ But for that success, the FORTITUDE operations, the greatest deception in the history of warfare, on which the D-Day landings depended, would have been impossible. Masterman saw the Double-Cross System in the tradition of the Great Game, though – unlike Kipling – the game he had in mind was cricket. His friend, the Yale professor and wartime OSS officer in London Norman Holmes Pearson, called the Double-Cross System ‘the greatest test match of the century’. The ingenuity of the deceptions practised by B1a owed much to the sense of fun which was already a distinctive strand of MI5 culture in the First World War. ‘Breaking rules is fun,’ Masterman had written before the war, ‘and the middle-aged and the respectable have in this regard a capacity for innocent enjoyment at least as great as that of the youthful and rebellious.’7