The Defence of the Realm

by Christopher Andrew

  At the beginning of 1989 Security Service staff had no more idea than the rest of the British people that before the end of the year they would see on their television screens the fall of the Berlin Wall and other unforgettable images of the collapse of Communist rule. The end of the Soviet era (finally concluded with the disintegration of the Soviet Union two years later) was almost as unexpected as its beginning almost three-quarters of a century before. Like the Bolshevik Revolution, it transformed MI5 objectives in ways no one had foreseen. It also led to some questioning of past priorities. Looking back on the way the CPGB had dwindled into insignificance well before the end of the Cold War, some – perhaps many – staff wondered if they had devoted too much of their energies to investigating subversion. Among the doubters was the officer who had served as Director F (countersubversion) from 1985 to 1987 and who concluded in retrospect that ‘we had always overstated the threat since Communists at no stage would have filled a football stadium.’28

  No one in the Security Service had taken such a relaxed view of the CPGB forty years earlier when the Cold War threatened to turn into hot war and the leadership of the Party, like many of its militants, mistook the most brutal despot in Europe, Joseph Stalin, for the hope of the human race. Service transcribers eavesdropping on Party headquarters in 1950 heard the industrial organizer, Peter Kerrigan, describe as ‘a bloody let-off’ the failure of the media to notice the links of Klaus Fuchs with British Communists. The other most important Soviet agents discovered in the early Cold War were also Communists or inspired by Communist ideology. Though confident that it knew subversion when it discovered it, the Service made no attempt to define it until 1972. Its definition then – ‘activities threatening the safety or well-being of the State and intended to undermine or overthrow Parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means’ – was adopted by the Heath government and its Labour successors.

  The suggestion that an alarmist MI5, prone to see subversives in improbable places, attempted to transfer its alarmism to the government is wholly mistaken. Though there was never any prospect of a British revolution, all governments during the Cold War were troubled from time to time by subversive attempts to undermine democracy by political or industrial means – often more troubled than the Security Service. The problem of ‘crypto-Communists’ on Labour benches in the Commons was of more concern to the Party leadership under both Attlee and Gaitskell than to MI5. The Service did not consider any of the sixteen alleged and nine ‘possible’ crypto-Communists whose names were passed to it on Gaitskell’s instructions in 1961 worth further investigation. Despite his later, unfounded suspicions of an MI5 plot against him, during the seamen’s strike in 1966 Harold Wilson showed greater enthusiasm for regular MI5 briefings than any previous prime minister during an industrial dispute. His celebrated denunciation of the strike leaders to the Commons as a ‘tightly knit group of politically motivated men’ was, like other parts of his speech, coined by the Security Service. Director F, the main Service briefer at Number Ten during the strike, was concerned, however, that Wilson might not be making adequate allowance for non-Communist as well as Communist influences on the strike. Under a series of governments, the Service had to resist repeated attempts during industrial disputes to persuade it to go beyond its Charter, which limited it to investigating the ‘actions of persons and organizations . . . which may be judged to be subversive of the state’, and therefore excluded industrial disruption by union officials who were not members of, or sympathizers with, Communist or Trotskyist movements. In December 1971, for example, after powerstation workers began a work-to-rule which threatened to disrupt electricity supplies, Heath ‘enquired about the possibility’ of the Security Service bugging the room at the Electricity Council where the four unions involved were due to meet. The Service replied that it would be a breach of its Charter ‘to seek intelligence from a target which could not properly be regarded as subversive’.

  John Jones, then DDG, wrote in 1977 that ministers and their senior officials had ‘a natural tendency’, which the Service must continue to resist, ‘to equate subversion with [any] activity which threatens a Government’s policies or may threaten its very existence’.29 Though the Service stuck to its much narrower definition of subversion, the way that it kept track of subversives fell increasingly behind the times. Much of the ritual recording of the activities and membership of the CPGB, however insignificant, struck most new recruits and a growing number of more senior staff as a waste of its resources. By the end of the Cold War the word ‘subversion’ had become an embarrassment and was omitted from the 1989 Security Service Act, though it remained the responsibility of the Service to defend the realm against ‘actions intended to overthrow or undermine parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means’. In 1992 the Service gained government permission to cease recording ‘rank-and-file members of subversive organisations’, once the first, tedious assignment at MI5 headquarters of most new graduate entrants – among them Stella Rimington, who in that year became the first female DG.

  The Security Service found it difficult to come to terms with its role in the post-Cold War world. Most staff were still unused to strategic thinking and horizon scanning. H1/0, who had been asked by the DG to prepare a strategic review, reported to the Management Board at the end of 1990: ‘We must recognise the fact, unfortunate though it is, that the need for us to respond to the new situation by devising an articulate and coherent strategy is appreciated by few colleagues in the Service.’ PIRA’s mainland bombing campaigns, however, gave the Service a renewed sense of direction. The shift in its priorities during the last two decades of the Cold War from counter-espionage and counter-subversion to counter-terrorism (CT) had been very gradual. The Service had no sense during the 1970s, or even for much of the 1980s, that CT was destined to become its main priority. Following the nearly successful PIRA attempt to fire a mortar into a cabinet meeting at Number Ten in 1991, the transfer from the MPSB of the lead intelligence role against Republican terrorism in Britain in the following year completed the Service’s emergence, for the first time in its history, as primarily a counter-terrorist agency. Terrorism, declared Stephen Lander, then Director T, ‘is here to stay. The circumstances that give rise to it may change, and terrorist organisations and state sponsors may come and go, but the phenomenon is very unlikely to disappear.’30

  Over the next few years PIRA’s bombing campaigns against the City of London threatened to put at risk its survival as Europe’s main financial capital. (Sir) Joe Pilling, later PUS at the Northern Irish Office, wrote after the destruction of the Baltic Exchange in April 1992: ‘Only a combination of good intelligence, good policing and good luck prevented several more incidents on a similar scale.’31 The same was true after the PIRA bombing of the NatWest Tower in Bishopsgate in April 1993. The Provisionals warned foreign financial institutions in the City to relocate or face a similar fate. Had the bombings continued, some might well have done so. In July, however, the UK’s most intensive counter-terrorist operation so far, co-ordinated by the Security Service, led to the arrest of the senior Belfast Provisional Rab Fryers on his way to plant another large bomb in the City. His arrest was followed by the discovery of the materials for six car bombs which PIRA had intended to use to continue its attacks on the Square Mile. Probably the most audacious of PIRA’s plans to attack London was the attempted disruption in July 1996 of the capital’s electricity supply. John Grieve, commander of SO13 at Scotland Yard, later described the ASU involved as ‘one of the best teams the IRA ever put together. We thought it was the mainland “A Team” . . .’ The fact that all were on the lookout for surveillance made the extensive surveillance mounted on them before their arrest in Operation AIRLINES all the more impressive.32 Lander, who had become DG earlier in the year, felt confident enough to declare in October: ‘Even terrorists regard the UK as a hostile and risky environment . . . No one has a better record.’33 That record, in the Service’s view, c
ontributed to PIRA’s willingness to consider a compromise political settlement which would postpone for the foreseeable future the achievement of Irish unity.

  Though effective against PIRA, the Security Service was slow to see the coming menace of Islamist terrorism. The Service told heads of special branches in December 1995 that, despite Iranian state-sponsored terrorism, with Salman Rushdie as its main British target, ‘Suggestions in the press of a world-wide Islamic extremist network poised to launch terrorist attacks against the West are greatly exaggerated.’ Bruce Hoffman, the terrorism expert who identified the future threat from Holy Terror most clearly, did so largely because he took a longer-term view than the Service. Of the sixty-four terrorist groups active in 1980, only two, both closely associated with the Islamic Revolution in Iran, had a mainly religious motivation. Over the next fifteen years, however, Hoffman noted a dramatic return to an old tradition of Holy Terror. (Until the French Revolution the only justifications advanced for terror had been religious.) By 1995 almost half the active international terrorist groups were religiously based. All the most lethal attacks that year were carried out by religious terrorists.34

  While aware of Bin Laden as a terrorist financier, Stella Rimington had never heard the name Al Qaida until March 1996, when it cropped up during talks at the White House and the CIA during her farewell visit as DG to the United States. Even when Al Qaida launched its first suicide bomb attacks against the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in the summer of 1998, there was little sense within the Security Service that similar attacks might take place in the UK.35 The Service later concluded that by late 2000, before the September 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, the UK had become an Al Qaida target.36 For over a year after 9/11, however, the Islamist threat to the UK was thought to come from abroad, not from home-grown terrorists. Once the Security Service had identified the home-grown threat in 2003, it responded quickly to it. Operation CREVICE, the largest counter-terrorist operation yet undertaken by either the Security Service or the police, forestalled attacks against nightclubs, pubs and shopping centres which were intended to cause mass casualties. For the first time in Security Service history, the DG was invited to a meeting of the full cabinet in April 2004 to be congratulated by the Prime Minister. The Service knew, however, that, because it lacked the resources to keep track of all potential Islamist terrorists, ‘it can only be a matter of time before something on a serious scale occurs in the UK.’ The suicide bombings of 7 July 2005 and the attempted bombings of 21 July caused much greater shock than surprise.

  Four advertisements from the MI5 2002–3 recruitment campaign, designed to help dispel myths about the Security Service and indicate that a sense of humour was part of Service culture.

  The Service’s strategy for extending regional coverage of Islamist terrorist networks looked back to its earliest days. In the summer of 1910 Kell established personal contact with forty English, Scottish and Welsh chief constables, all of whom ‘expressed themselves most willing to assist me in every way’. Almost a century later, one of the Service’s most successful strategies for improving its counter-terrorist operations was closer cooperation with the police at a local level through newly established MI5 regional offices. The head of Scotland Yard’s Counter-Terrorism Command, Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, declared in 2007: ‘There can be no doubt that the most important change in counter terrorism in the UK in recent years has been the development of the relationship between the police and the security service.’ MI5’s regional offices built on the experience of the regional security liaison officers during the Second World War. Though the main reason for the establishment of the wartime RSLOs had been to prepare for a German invasion which never occurred, they had been successful in bringing the Service ‘into closer touch with provincial Police Forces’.37

  While the terrorist threat to British national security will no doubt fluctuate in intensity, it may well last as long as the Cold War. During the two years from January 2007 to January 2009 eighty-six people were convicted of Islamist terrorist offences. Like the number of spies caught in the First World War, terrorist convictions are an incomplete measure of MI5 success. The best indicator of counter-espionage success in the First World War came when Britain had become such a hard target that there were few spies left to catch. Terrorists willing to sacrifice their lives are far harder to deter than the sometimes weakly motivated German agents of the First World War. Jonathan Evans noted, however, in early 2009 that the success of counter-terrorist operations over the last few years had had ‘a chilling effect on the enthusiasm of the plotters’ for mounting new attacks. It is too early to tell whether the ‘chilling effect’ is a short-term fluctuation or a long-term trend.

  Save for climate change, the study of long-term trends has had little appeal to early twenty-first-century policy-makers. The shock caused by the sub-prime crisis and credit crunch of 2008–9 derived, at least in part, from what I have termed Historical Attention Span Deficit Disorder (HASDD). To many bankers and financial commentators, the precedent of 1929 and the Wall Street Crash, to which they had previously paid little attention, suddenly seemed surprisingly relevant. Short-termism has been the distinguishing intellectual vice of the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries. For the first time in recorded history, there has been a widespread assumption that the experience of all previous generations is irrelevant to present policy.38 Institutions, like individuals, however, diminish their effectiveness if they fail to reflect on past successes and failures. The most senior MI5 officer to write some of its history was Anthony Simkins, who after his retirement collaborated with Sir Harry Hinsley in writing the official history of security and intelligence in the Second World War. ‘I would have been a better DDG’, Simkins said afterwards, ‘if I had written my history first.’39

  Even the historical profession has suffered from a degree of Historical Attention Span Deficit Disorder so far as the Security Service and the rest of the intelligence community are concerned. The well-publicized successes of British codebreakers against Germany during the First World War should have alerted historians to the possibility that there might have been similar successes in the Second World War. Until the revelation of the ULTRA secret in 1973, however, almost no historian suspected that SIGINT had played a significant role in the defeat of Nazi Germany.40 In 1984 David Dilks and I described intelligence as the ‘missing dimension’ of twentieth-century British historiography.41

  Though intelligence is no longer missing, British historians in a great variety of fields have yet to consider the relevance of Security Service history to their own research. The fact that both the first female financial controller of any British government department and the first female head of any of the world’s major intelligence services worked for MI5 has, for example, so far failed to attract the interest of gender historians. Many histories of British decolonization do not mention the role of MI5. Many biographies of British prime ministers have little, if anything, to say about their attitude to intelligence and the intelligence services. As usual, however, lapses by one generation of historians provide some of the main research opportunities for their successors.42

  The Security Service, like many other institutions, has in the past paid too little attention to the lessons of its own history. Some senior officers have mistakenly seen all but the most recent ‘lessons learned’ as a barrier to innovation. Sir David Petrie, one of the Service’s most successful DGs, believed that ‘Too much of a past that is now remote can help but little with useful lessons.’ In reality there were a number of ‘useful lessons’ from the past that senior management had overlooked. Kell had failed to heed the warning in an MI5 report at the end of the First World War that, in the event of another war, the Service would be deluged with ‘a flood of paper’. The Service’s lack of preparedness to deal with fifth-column scares in 1940 reflected a failure, once again, to learn from the experience of the last war, whose outbreak had provoked ‘a virulent e
pidemic’ of spy mania.43

  During the remainder of the twentieth century, underestimation of the deficiencies of Soviet intelligence analysis, intelligence confusion at the beginning of the Northern Ireland Troubles and delay in identifying the threat from Islamist terrorism provided further evidence of HASDD. In each instance, however, the Security Service learned from its mistakes. Within six months of the near-collapse of MI5 administration in the summer of 1940, the Twenty Committee under an MI5 chairman was running the Double-Cross System. The intelligence provided by Oleg Gordievsky later gave the Security Service, like the rest of the intelligence community, an unprecedented, if belated, insight into the blinkered mindset of the Centre and its misunderstandings of the West. Once the Service had gained the lead intelligence role in Britain against Republican terrorism in 1992, with police help it successfully prevented PIRA’s most dangerous mainland campaigns from achieving their objectives. Since MI5 began to focus fully on the threat from home-grown Islamist terrorism in 2003, it has – so far – successfully prevented the majority of planned terrorist attacks.

  Seen in long-term perspective, there is greater continuity between past and present threats to national security than is often supposed. Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate, Holocaust survivor and human rights activist, forecast several years before 9/11: ‘The principal challenge of the twenty-first century is going to be exactly the same as the principal challenge of the twentieth century: How do we deal with fanaticism armed with power?’44 The three men who have posed the greatest threats to British security since the 1930s – Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Usama bin Laden – have all been ‘fanatics armed with power’.