Richard Moore Was Paid to Steal Secrets, Not Solve Mysteries

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1:46Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. I left the job after five years. I certainly haven't left the world in a better place than I found it. and I'm lucky that wasn't in my job description. Richard Moore, spy, British intelligence chief, and now in his first broadcast interview since Stepping Down, taking us into a world of secrets. What is the job of the chief of MI6? It's to serve the government of the day within the law and you provide truth to power and sometimes tell them things they really, really don't want to hear, particularly if it's a Friday afternoon. From Bloomberg Weekend, this is The Michelle Hussain Show.

2:29I'm Michelle Hussain.

2:34When I was growing up, my parents had a friend, a British diplomat in the United Arab Emirates where we lived. This was someone they liked and respected and kept in touch with as his work took him from one place to another. Only they worried about his career. they wondered why he was never appointed a British ambassador. Until one day, we heard his name on the radio because he was being appointed as chief of Britain's MI6, the secret intelligence service with the codename C. At that point, we realised there was nothing to worry about. He had never been an ordinary diplomat. And in many ways, that story, that double life, is also the story of my guest today, Richard Moore.

3:25For nearly four decades, his world was espionage. He was in MI6, the agency most people know or think they know through James Bond. But his career was the real-life version. It was all about countries or groups that would wish Britain harm and people that he could spot and recruit that he hoped would help keep it safe. Now that he's stepped down after five years in the job, he's been talking to me. You'll hear the story of how his career began with a tap on the shoulder, the moment he told his teenage children the truth about what he did for a living, and about values, challenges, responsibility and risk, from Russia to China and Venezuela to the United States.

4:18welcome thank you for doing this Richard until six weeks ago your daily work involved reading highly classified intelligence and I wonder if therefore I could start with the here and now and your perception of the world what you see as you look around the world today that me and most people watching or listening to this my Nazi thank you Michelle it's lovely to be here As I reflect, yes, a few weeks on, I think we're in an extraordinarily contested international environment. I don't think in 38 years of being an intelligence officer and a diplomat, I've seen it less well-ordered. There's just an extraordinary number of loose ends, if you like, on the international scene.

5:00And we might talk about some of those in a bit more detail, like Ukraine or what happens next in Gaza or over Iran. There are so many of these. And unfortunately, the way in which relationships have broken down between leading powers, particularly following Russian behavior in Ukraine, but also a difficult relationship undoubtedly between Washington and Beijing. some of the tram lines that we were used to in the years after 1945 are not really there to manage some of this contestation. So one thing I said as I left the job after five years is I certainly haven't left the world in a better place than I found it and I'm lucky that wasn't in my job description.

5:42More contested means more dangerous we should be clear. There's definitely dangers in the world as we look at them, and they can suddenly loom out of the mist at you. And the fact that you said that relationships fraying is a part of this, and you mentioned that the relationship between Washington and Beijing. So that has really happened much more this year, hasn't it, with the Trump administration? How does that play into what you've already made clear has been the case on your old agency and the CIA's perception of China, that it's the major intelligence challenge of the 21st century? I think there's been really issues around this relationship for some time.

6:24And in particular, I think the rupture of normal diplomatic contact that happened during the pandemic. I mean, for a number of years, senior Chinese and senior Americans just didn't meet. And that's a worrying thing. You know, you want as an intelligence officer where you can see the dangers of things, of miscalculation, those sort of issues. You want the diplomats, you want the leaders to be talking more regularly. Now, you know, the fact that President Trump and President Xi met recently, that's helpful. The tariffs is the current issue between them. But I mean, there are clearly any number of rub points between the US and China and between the US's allies and China.

7:03And help me understand how you see China, because I know you've talked about China as an opportunity and a threat. And that combination is quite hard for people like me and perhaps other outsiders to get our heads around. So it just has a complexity within it that I imagine makes it hard for someone like you to help formulate policy. How is a government supposed to deal with the country as both an opportunity and a threat? So, I mean, I think the starting point when I talk about opportunity and threat is partly because of the nature of intelligence, is that people often assume, understandably, that we're all about threats.

7:39And if you look at an organisation like MI5, that's primarily what they're there to do, is to manage the threats. The domestic intelligence agency of the UK. That's the domestic of the UK or the FBI in America, etc. But a foreign intelligence service like my former service, MI6, is there to gather intelligence on a number of global issues. And some of that intelligence is used by ministers and senior officials to exploit opportunities as well as to manage threats. That's what you meant by opportunity and threat. That it's an opportunity to gather intelligence and it is a threat. No, you gather intelligence to enable your political leadership to seize opportunities, which may be upside ones, is my point.

8:21It's not all about managing threats. And with China, clearly, you know, this is a huge and powerful country. It re-emerged onto the international scene. And its values and interests certainly don't overlap always with our own. So, you know, you are looking at it, if you are the Prime Minister of Great Britain or the President of the United States, about how do you manage that relationship in a way that means you secure UK interests. And for me, that means you are pretty robust at home. You are pretty robust about trying to deny and then to tackle any behaviour aimed at your own country, whether that is espionage or cyber attacks, etc.

9:00And does that happen all the time? It's pretty relentless, yeah. So what did you think of the collapse of the recent case against two individuals, two British men who were accused of spying for China? Well, what I'll say on that is very clearly, and I'll repeat what I just said, which is that China is intent on gathering intelligence on the UK. And we have to recognise that. And Ken McCallum, the Director General of MI5, has spoken about that. He said he was frustrated. Like him, I don't think I'll be drawn on an individual case. That's for the lawyers to resolve. But it's certainly the case that they're active in this space.

9:37But, you know, I think you have to be a little bit careful. And if you can't take people to task for acting in that space, that was the accusation against those two men, then where does it leave you as a country? What are your levers? What I'll say on that, Michelle, is clearly if you are spying for a foreign power against the United Kingdom and you are caught, then you should expect to, you know, to receive the consequences of that action. You'll understand also why I tend to discourage politicians from being too moralistic about the issue of spying in itself. The UK has rather effective intelligence organisations and we are actively gathering intelligence against other countries.

10:17I think where you have to be less tolerant is the sort of hybrid warfare activity that we're seeing from Russia, arson, attempted assassinations. That crosses a very different line for me. But against all of these, MI5, with our help and with GCHQ's help and with help of our allies, is trying to detect and deter that type of activity. So just on language, just so I understand how you see China, and therefore perhaps how you suggest we should see it. Do you see China as an active national security threat? I think clearly China is involved in activities which threaten our interests, and we should be very robust in pushing back against those.

10:56And they would expect us to do so, to be honest. and Beijing respects strengths in this space. So I think it is both the right thing to do and also is the practical and good thing to do. And I've always noticed when countries have had sort of set-tos with China, it doesn't always impact on trade. Sometimes trade goes up. You remember when David Cameron met the Dalai Lama and this caused a big sort of to-do with China. As I understand it, our trade figures went up after that incident. So stick to your values. Stick to your guns. What would you do with the Chinese embassy, the plan for the new mega embassy, would be the largest embassy in Europe on the edge of the City of London?

11:33Again, what I would say on this is that countries obviously have to have embassies. So there's clearly, you know, we need one in Beijing and it's important that we have that. So it's right and proper that the Chinese should get their embassy, whether it's this one or not, it's really not for me to judge. It's just, it's a particularly big one. It is going to be an enormous side. I'm not there to justify, you know, its size or, you know, what it does. But, you know, it is, I'm sure there has to be a way through where they get an appropriate embassy and we are allowed to retain and develop our own excellent embassy in Beijing.

12:05I do want to know about how this journey of your professional life of 40 years, nearly 40 years. Nearly 40 years to make sure you're very old. How it all began. So to cast your mind right back to your recruitment. How did that happen in the early 1980s? I'm afraid I am an almost stereotypical example of what is sometimes referred to as a tap on the shoulder and what's more, at Oxford. So, one, an academic, and let me, even now I won't name who they were, but an academic approached me and they knew that I was interested in a career and I was looking at the foreign office potentially as a route, as a career, as well as your former employer, the BBC.

12:46Oh, yes. Who rejected me without an interview, Michelle. Something I have often taken out of them. Well, I'll tell you what I'll throw back at that is that when I left university, I was not eligible to enter the service that you led because both my parents were not born in the UK. In fact, neither of my parents were born in the UK. No, and thank goodness we've changed that as we have also changed the method of approaching people. So that doesn't happen anymore, the tap on the shoulder at Oxford or elsewhere? I remember him saying, you know, would you be interested in a career in an alternative field of foreign affairs?

13:14I must have been a very naive 20-year-old, but I didn't have a clue what he meant. but one thing led to another I got a letter. So was that academic at Oxford was he in the service was that his cover? In those days no no no no in those days there was a very kind of informal set of what were called talent spotters and their job was to look at bright people coming through and who they thought might be suitable for our peculiar line of work and he you know picked me and I've no idea maybe he picked others and occasionally I meet very senior people in public life who it's always just kind of they come into my office and they sort of and it's really funny how they're still very secure about it and they look around and they check no one's there and then they declare that they were approached and for one reason or another they chose not to come in or they didn't make the grade maybe well for all those very distinguished people almost certainly in the first category but did you hesitate once you realize what the words alternative career meant?

14:11What did you think? I know your father was a foreign office man, so you knew that world. A genuine one. But spying? Yeah, you can imagine. I was intrigued by it. I thought it'd be exciting. I didn't know very much. I mean, in those days, they told you virtually nothing. So I think coming into it, it was a bit more of a punt than it would be today. I did think about it. And because I thought about the issues which are involved in it, which are quite difficult, involving a degree of deception. And so I thought about it. But I think having done some conversations and been encouraged by people, including my wonderful father, who's very, you know, so straight down the line and a man of towering integrity, and had many friends within the service.

15:01So I kind of felt my mum was cheering me on. So between that, I decided to give it a go. But the hesitation, I get the impression is not so much then about living your life with secrecy as you then had to do from most people the deception as in what did that mean well living a life of secrecy as you put it requires a degree of deception because you're not being honest with people around you yeah some close friends members of the wider family are not aware of what you're doing for a living and so yeah you have to be comfortable with that along with the character traits of also if you're desperate for recognition for what you do this is not the right profession to go into you've got to be satisfied with the intrinsic importance of the mission and the motivating power of that mission you've got to be satisfied with the comradeship the teamwork that goes with the people who are in the know and but you can't go down to the pub at the end of the week and have a brag about it to your mates.

16:01And you have to be ready for people to see your life as a kind of boring desk job a lot of the time. Indeed, including your children for the early part of their lives, this grey man in the Foreign Office. When and how did you tell your children? So it varies from family to family. It's a big decision because once you tell them, of course, you're pulling them within that circle of knowledge and you're putting something on them. They then become complicit. So you think about it. In our case, I think we decided when our kids were in their kind of early mid-teens. Seemed the right moment to do it.

16:34And the words you used were? Well, it's really funny, Michelle, because here I was, I remember with my son, I can't tell the full story. Fundamentally, you know, I should, by that stage, I'm an experienced intelligence officer, I have learned to pitch people, to put the question to them, to try and say, you know, say, will you work with us? And I've been trained to do that. Completely and utterly messed it up with my own son. So the two of us, first of all, Maggie and I made the mistake of sitting there and looking slightly nervous and solemn in front of him. So, of course, I could see in his eyes he thought we were about to announce our divorce.

17:08So then I started to gabble in front of him and just sort of spewed out in the end. And he kind of looked at me, oh, God, thank God for that, and said something which is unprintable. But Maggie, your wife, knew all along, I think, because you've known each other since you were very young. Yes, that's unusual. When I joined the service, albeit at 24, we were already married by then. So it was very much all of those, you know, thinking through the issues was done, of course, chatting it through with Maggie as well. But think again of colleagues who do begin a romantic attachment. And at some point they too, because I can't just say it on the first date.

17:49At some point they too have to find, having, you know, checked in with the office, with the service, they have to find the right time to say they might have not been entirely honest in that first phase of the relationship and that's an unusual thing. And then what happens if the relationship doesn't last and you've got someone out there in the wider world who knows something really important about you? They do so if you're going to split up then do it as amicably as possible I think would be the advice. I want to ask about what spycraft is actually like because look the time when you went into the service you will have read John le Carre and presumably Ian Fleming you know all of that kind of the classic things people know.

18:25Was it actually like that? So this is a terrible admission to make, but when I came into the job, I hadn't read a single Ian Fleming novel. So I'm desperately putting that right and reading my way through them. I had read Le Carre. I now put Mick Heron right up there in the Pantheon alongside Le Carre. I think he's a brilliant writer. The Slow Horses books, yeah. Yeah, the Slow Horses book. Many people will be more familiar perhaps with the TV than they are the books, but the books are fantastic. So there's just a massive difference. These are works of fiction, works of creativity. Clearly with Le Carre, there was, you know, he spent a short period in the service.

19:02So there was some very similitude, particularly to those portraits of early Cold War, Berlin and all the rest of it. And you occasionally will see references to tradecraft in them. And sometimes it's accurate and sometimes it isn't. But look, it's very different. Of course, it's very different in real life. But occasionally there is a degree of intrigue and excitement which touches over into that world, yeah. Isn't there a degree also of seeing the use in people and then using them? When you identify people, you are trying to work out how they can further Britain's interests and trying to get to them in one way or another.

19:39You are clearly trying to forge a relationship with another human being because you need the secrets that they possess, yeah. And therefore that, if you think through it, means you have to create a relationship of real intimacy and trust with them because you're often asking them to take risks in order to gather that intelligence and share it with you, which are significant. And they won't do it unless they can look at you and think this is a person who is professional. They're going to be competent in the managing of this relationship. And they will also, they'll be looking for something else.

20:13They'll be looking for something they can trust. They'll be looking for the values in that space. So, yeah, it's very powerful because you are about to enter into a relationship where there's a huge amount at stake. I mean, sometimes the case officers will be putting themselves in harm's way in that relationship, but nothing like that of the secret agent, the person who's agreed to do it. And sometimes you're offering money or are you often offering money? What I can say on that space is very obviously when people are going to come and talk to you and take those sort of risks, they're going to be driven by different motivations.

20:48And our job is not to be particularly judgmental, frankly, about those motivations to try and work out something that works for both parties. And if that involves some financial compensation, yeah, of course, we'll do that. But I wonder whether it means that you start to see people in a certain way or whether you ever worried about your perception of people. My grandfather worked in intelligence for about a year. The reason he left it was because he said he felt it made you suspicious of everyone. So I think it's a really profoundly important point. And when we're looking to recruit people, the sort of people who will be successful in this world, they have to be really centered individuals.

21:29They have to really know themselves and they have to be very low ego because precisely for those reasons, you are going to be bouncing up against some really difficult ethical situations in this work. So you better be very well grounded. You mean the people like you, the intelligence officers, not the agents that you recruit in different countries. I meant people within MI6. Yes, absolutely. They need to be in that place so that you don't get what you're describing there as a sort of, you know, a drift over time into doing stuff that you would have regarded as unacceptable. And therefore, you know, people are very thoughtful.

22:06I mean, throughout my career, I've really thought about these things. These things are important. And we, you know, within the organization, we give people space to think through this. that people have personal crises of conscience on this. It's very important they come, you know, they work it out within the circle of secrecy, as you can imagine. Did you ever have an agent who you'd recruited and developed who then was arrested or worse in another country? Well, I'm going to distance it a bit from me because I don't want to talk about things that I did because I'm very averse to give any clues as to who might have worked with me in the past.

22:43But, of course, from time to time, that is bound to happen. You know, our commitment to people is to keep them safe. And we will bend over backwards to do that. But, you know, in history, for reasons sometimes unconnected with what MI6 does, circumstances will lead to their arrest. And it's a very difficult moment because we really, you know, we root for those people. They are why we exist as a human intelligence service. and it's very painful when it happens. But it doesn't happen very often because we are very, very careful. And you have to be good readers of people, I imagine. You do. When you reveal yourself to someone, you have to be fairly confident.

23:22And you definitely have to have that. And you have to have this set of values which they recognize. If you've got a reputation of just using and abusing people, they're not going to choose to come and talk to you, are they? Or when you approach them, they're going to say a very abrupt no. But they know with MI6 that they will get care and attention and we'll look after them. Can I talk then about something that might have been a test or almost certainly was a test of exactly what you're saying? And it's the period after 9-11 when the US and the UK worked very closely together. The US carried out torture on detainees.

23:57We knew that from the Feinstein-led report, the US Senate report in 2014. And the UK MPs found later on in their own report went along with it. so i i'm not sure i recognize the characterization you've just given i mean we're clearly very close to the u.s i worked through that period including on difficult counterterrorism work including in in islamabad i was there when the very first al-qaeda bombs developed in fact my daughter was in a kindergarten whose windows were blown in by a bomb which exploded in the egyptian embassy so i I was right in the midst of all that, Michelle. And it's very clear that the US administration at the time did a whole pile of things which were utterly unacceptable.

24:47You know, we all know about waterboarding, which is clearly torture. But did you know about it at the time? No, because they were very, very careful to exclude us. They absolutely did not tell their UK counterpart. You see, that's not really what came out in the MP's report here in the UK after three years of looking into it. Their finding was that the UK tolerated inexcusable treatment of US detainees, and that did involve waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, being in coffin-sized boxes. And the MP said it was beyond doubt that the UK knew how the US handled some detainees. So I'm not sure I agree with beyond doubt in those terms, because I was there and they were not.

25:29Their description of the activity is perfectly valid. I agree with it. and we of course let's be clear we deal with partners around the world who employ methods that we would not countenance and we're very careful that in our engagement with them that we do not facilitate or enhance that type of behavior. The MPs were pretty thorough. British agencies continue to supply intelligence despite knowing or suspecting abuse in more than 200 cases. I'm Michelle. We're taking it into slightly different areas. Did the relationship continue with the Americans and therefore did we pass material as described by the MPs?