175. Ex-Director of GCHQ: China, Russia, and the Threats Facing the UK (Jeremy Fleming)

17:02Rory Stewart:Just before we get into the weeds of where the threat's coming from, what the world's going to look like, you said something very interesting there about what we do and don't talk about National Security Council and ministers making decisions. So my experience sitting on that council was that we could waste an enormous amount of time talking about, frankly, issues which, before I joined the government, seeing American equivalents would have been decided by a two-star American general. There was absolutely no reason for us to be spending half an hour, 40 minutes talking about things which were sometimes quite tactical.

17:32Rory Stewart:The second thing that I thought is that even in the cabinet and even sitting at the NSC, the idea that we as ministers were really making decisions on these things didn't reflect the way in which our weeks worked and what we actually spent our day doing. What are we actually spending our day doing as ministers? You're trying to worry about what's hitting the headlines next morning. You might be putting leaflets through a door because you're campaigning. You might be making a speech in the House of Commons. You're getting through 14 meetings a day in your diary. There's not a great deal of space and the people making the decisions are themselves often not professionals in this area, right?

18:08This is not, they haven't been trained to think strategically in that way or engage in that way.

18:12Rory Stewart:So there's a fundamental problem, I think, right at the heart of the situation, which is we set up, I remember, for example, being called by one of your colleagues, being asked to make a decision in whatever it was, I don't know, a few minutes on doing something internationally. And I remember saying, this is quite late at night, listen, I don't know anything about it. You're telling me that we need to do this. You're telling me this is the stuff that has to happen immediately. If it makes you happier to feel that a minister has made the decision, that's fine. But just be clear about what's actually happening here, how little I know, how little qualifications I have, how little time I have to dig into this decision.

18:50Alastair Campbell:What Rory seems to be saying is that ministers have a lot less power than the spooks do? Well, maybe it's just Rory.

18:59Jeremy Fleming:I'm a fan of the National Security Council. I started to get in and around it when David Cameron created it. But it's fair to say that when you look at the span of the council, depending on who's interested in its operation and how the top group of ministers work together, it depends very strongly on how effective it is and what it does. And you won't draw me on on examples, but it has gone through peaks and drops of effectiveness. But the point is, you are bringing together senior ministers under the prime minister to be able to take national security questions. And that has to be a function which is important.

19:38Jeremy Fleming:Now, I can't recall which bit of that history you were around the table for, Rory, so forgive me. What sits under it is a whole superstructure of assessment, of intelligence collection, of discussion that brings together the agencies and Whitehall in a way which is just necessary to make the machine work. I mean, yes, it's about briefing the prime minister and ministers, but the process is not just a council meeting. It is a necessary process that brings together the system. But it's an incredibly weird process.

20:12Rory Stewart:It can be. The thing is articulated.

20:16Jeremy Fleming:But you and I have both been away from this for a while now.

20:18Rory Stewart:Sure, but this lovely language of accountability, structures, and then small groups and all this kind of stuff sounds fine in theory. But in practice, the sausage is really weird. And a lot of the things that we tell ourselves when we talk about the constitution don't really reflect the reality of where the knowledge lies, how the power works, how decisions are made, how transparent they are. And this becomes problematic when you get into optimism bias, when you get into groupthink, when you get into things that I saw really directly, and you would have seen too, you know, the catastrophic decision making around an Afghan war where the US and its allies spent nearly$2 trillion and literally invaded to get rid of the Taliban.

21:03Rory Stewart:And then at the end of the 20 years, handed the country back to the Taliban again. At no point in that period did I feel that our institutions were remotely adequate to the strategic conversation around what was a$2 trillion screw-up, right? So I want to push back at you because you got so used to defending the system.

21:23Jeremy Fleming:I'm not defending the system. And I agree with you that big strategic decisions that go beyond political lifespans are really, really hard to manage. Government has a problem with long-range continuity and strategy. I mean, not just because of change of party, you know, that's baked into the system too. So I think it is slightly, I'm not accusing you of this, but I think it's slightly, when I hear thinking that is constantly blaming the system, I feel that's slightly lazy because it's not all about that. What is it about? Well, partly it's because we've set it up with those sorts of tensions. Partly it's because of the longevity of those who are in senior positions, but it has to be about where the incentives are in the system.

22:09Jeremy Fleming:When I went to GCHQ, I went around the place. It's incredibly complicated. I thought I'd worked very, very closely with it for 20 years, 25 years. And yet when I arrived there, I'm not the foggiest. And what I found was a system of systems, incredibly complex, very careful, very clever, motivated, values-driven people doing the right thing all over the place. But in the heart of them, there was a small professional cadre of people called systems engineers. And I thought, well, I better go and see them. I've seen everyone else. And they said to me, yeah, this is how this place works. It works all on incentives.

22:43Jeremy Fleming:I was expecting a detailed plan of how this thing fits together. Complex systems work on where incentives are in the systems. And it's the same for government. It's the same for big business, the same for intelligence agencies. So it goes wrong because you haven't got the incentives in the right place.

22:59Alastair Campbell:You mentioned China, and the speech I mentioned that you made four years ago now was very much focused on China, to some extent on Russia, Ukraine, but China was your big point. Roy and I did an event earlier this week where we asked an audience of business people, financiers, quite a large group of people, who they saw as the bigger threat to global security right now, the USA or China. and by a large majority they said the usa now first of all what's your reaction to that these are quite bright wealthy business people in the uk what's your reaction to that and what's the

23:38Jeremy Fleming:danger in that yeah well i find this quite hard to talk about actually in a way because you know if you've if you've grown up in a system where you've understood where all the you know the values driven institutions sit you know what the stakes are in the ground for the international system, then it does feel like a lot of that has been thrown up in the air. When I hear you say that, I'm appalled and slightly horrified that they think that. It's a common reaction right now. I can understand it because of the turmoil. And I can understand it because of the way in which the current debate is upending so many of those things that we hold dear.

24:11Jeremy Fleming:But it's simply not true. So if I was on that stage, I'd be saying, of course, some of the actions we've seen recently we find very difficult to deal with of course we're very worried about where this goes but the reality is comparing china and america through a threat lens is that that's just not tenable at all you know right one is a communist driven back to roy's point about systems if if you

24:36Alastair Campbell:sort of wander around gchq you don't have to be long there long to be hearing american accents and you know we're very very dependent on the americans so therefore we have an inbuilt desire to believe in the system. And what we're seeing, Rory and I were both in Davos and seeing Trump and his entourage, it's quite hard to believe in it right now. I have lots of sympathy with that.

24:57Jeremy Fleming:I have real problems with the tone of the administration. I have problems with some of the actions, as I think we all do. But I think comparing America to China from a threat perspective is just completely wrong. What about the five eyes? Let me go back to your, you know, swarming with uh with americans point this is swarming i mean that's not true either but it is true that there are lots of americans inside our gchq there are also a lot of brits inside the national security agency in america and so the systems have grown up together over 80 years in a way which has kept us both safe and i'm sure will continue to keep us safe but to think of it a partnership that is...

25:43Jeremy Fleming:So the UK is a junior partner, no doubt at all, but it is a partner. It's not just a recipient here. America's security has been dependent on its UK allies at particular points in the past. What America thinks about intelligence and how I'm sure it's still reporting intelligence in its daily brief to the president will include UK intelligence. So I just push back a bit. I think that's important. Five Eyes. I mean, so I, funny enough, I always feel quite protective about this. Because Five Eyes is -

26:21Alastair Campbell:This is America, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand. Thank you. I'm not explaining to you. I've explained to the listener who may not know. No, I know.

26:27Jeremy Fleming:If you were operating to me, we're in trouble. So Five Eyes, nearly 80 years long, came out of the cooperation, Signals Intelligence Cooperation during World War II. and it later expanded as a sort of moniker for all sorts of intelligence collaboration and then defense collaboration. And then in my time, we even had Five Eyes, home office style. It became a much bigger thing than its original intent. It's not an organization with a charter and an organogram and a whole load of objectives and funding lines. It doesn't work like that. It's an alliance built on trust it's an alliance built on trust but it's also an alliance that that is where the geometry varies over time and it is not the case that everything we do in the uk is shared with the americans it's certainly not the case in the other in the other direction there have always

27:17Alastair Campbell:you worry that their services are being more politicized and does that worry you about the

27:23Jeremy Fleming:relationship at the leadership level yes i worry about that i mean my my successor i've been out of out of the intelligence world for nearly three years now my successor has had four heads of the NSA in that, or will have had four heads with the appointment of the current one. And I think it is a very worrying signal when the heads of these agencies are being moved on apparently because of the politics. So yeah, I am concerned about it.

27:44Rory Stewart:Jeremy, my understanding is when you're saying you can't compare the China to the US, you're saying one of them is an aggressive communist country, another one is a liberal democratic country and a strong ally. But when you look at threat, it's not simply a question of intent, it's also a question of capability. And probability. And probability. The US leverage over us is far beyond any kind of leverage that China can exercise. Tire cloud computing, probably the future of all the AI systems that will underwrite all of our public services, economy, defense and security, our nuclear weapons, the dollar.

28:20Rory Stewart:And these dependencies are being weaponized. And this is something the European Commission is very, very conscious of. And we saw it, just a glimpse of it over Greenland. You can see Trump being tempted to do in Europe what traditionally America did in countries which were not like us. He's currently telling one country who it can and can't have in its cabinet. He's telling another country who it can't and can't prosecute. He's able to use tariffs going up and down to do this. Surely, if you're looking at a threat assessment in five, 10 years, You need to think about resilience, you need to think about diversification, and you need to ask yourself whether you can in the long term be that vulnerable to this kind of activity.

29:03Jeremy Fleming:Well, I think you're right to bring this down to resilience. And I think we all realize that across defense, across Europe, we have for far too long relied on a generous American security umbrella. I think the UK is in a slightly different place than that.

29:20Rory Stewart:That's a very DOD way of putting it, right? For too long, we've been feeding off the American teat. I'm saying we are not resilient because their ability to weaponize vulnerability, their ability to use our vulnerability to extort concessions, to throw us off balance is extraordinary. Why did we not deal with that over 10 years? Why did we not deal with that over 50 years? Why have we allowed a system to emerge, including when you were in charge, that allowed America to have quite so much of a stranglehold on almost everything? So much so that many people in Britain and Europe will say there's we can do.

29:51Rory Stewart:It's too late. They own us.

29:52Jeremy Fleming:We can't actually diversify. Yeah. Well, I took it to the resilience and the defense point for Europe. I was going to put the UK in a slightly different position to that because we have fulfilled a different position. And historically, we've played much more of a role in security and we still do on intelligence, by the way. We massively punch above our weight in comparison to Europe and as a partner to America. So that is the fact. If you're asking me how we've created this system over the post-war period, that's probably beyond me. Think back to me as a historian. But the answer is we've done it because it's been in our national self-interest to do so.

30:32Jeremy Fleming:Because in that context, a globalised world with America as a superpower, with the only superpower following the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of the 80s, it was in our interest. With the benefit of hindsight, 2020 hindsight, I think we can say, yeah, we have created too many dependencies across the year and we haven't paid enough attention to our resilience. It's not just an America thing. I mean, COVID taught us all sorts of lessons around resilience. It comes from a massively interconnected world with technology at its core and a global trading system that's meant our supply chains. we've taken for granted.

31:13Jeremy Fleming:So yes, with 20-20 hindsight, yeah, I sort of agree with you. The context of the time and our interest at the time meant that those decisions would have been really hard decisions to take, I think.

31:23Alastair Campbell:You mentioned the role of the agencies as defending our economic interests. Do you think we were too lax and too slow to see the damage that was being done to us as a country, as an economy, as a society by Russian money. And I also, if you listen to the podcast, you may know I'm slightly obsessed with Brexit. And my sense is that the line on whether the Russians interfered in Brexit is basically, we don't really know because we never looked for the evidence. Is that a fair characterization? Because you weren't told to look for the evidence. You weren't asked to look for the evidence.

31:55Jeremy Fleming:How to get into that as a question. I don't need to listen to the podcast to know you're interested in Brexit. If you were to look back to that time and you were to think about our understanding of how misinformation could start to be exercised at scale, then I think you could say, yeah, there was some catching up to do at that point. And of course, that most dramatically is illustrated by the way in which the Russians interfered in the US presidential election. Actually, I'm trying to think how much is in the public domain, but the agencies certainly were not blind to that sort of threat and certainly were asked about it, including through the Intelligence Oversight Committee in Parliament and, you know, it looked pretty hard to see if there was any evidence.

32:43Jeremy Fleming:So it was politics that put a break on it, as it were? No, absolutely not. I mean, and that's what you need to remember as well. No, I mean in the public space. You're doing the work, but we're not told about it because it didn't suit the politics. Well, so no, I don't think that you should conclude that from what I've said. But come back to the role of the agencies. I mean, the role of the agencies is to look for threats to national security. It doesn't matter where they come from. They need to look for them. And so looking for a state-level misinformation campaign that could have undermined our security is absolutely in the wheelhouse of the agencies.

33:17Jeremy Fleming:And I think you should have expected them to have taken that seriously.

33:21Alastair Campbell:But what about the Russians just flooding the place with money and their people and the battle of the oligarchs in our courts, the takeover of our media?

33:27Rory Stewart:Today, we've got Abramovich accounts at Deutsche Bank with the federal German government sweeping, going through seven years of money laundering. And we let this guy buy Chelsea Football Club.

33:39Jeremy Fleming:I'm not sure I'm right to focus on the football. Alistair has more to say about that than me. I mean, I think you have to think back to the context of the time. If you look back and say clearly it wasn't in our interest to have so little understanding of how the money had arrived here. I mean, I think that's probably fair to say. We presumably knew Abramovich was basically a gangster. I am not going to talk about a particular individual. No, but we knew these guys.

34:01Rory Stewart:We knew. I mean, look, nobody was ignorant about how the oligarchs made their money.

34:04Jeremy Fleming:I think it was already obvious that some of the ways in which Russian society and oligarch competition play out were happening on the streets of London. You could see that. And, you know, the police could see that. We could see that.

34:15Alastair Campbell:But also, how much do you guys have felt when Lebedev, son of a KGB guy, comes in and starts buying up our media? Did that not? Were you not ringing alarm bells all over Wirehall at that time?

34:26Jeremy Fleming:There are processes in place to help understand where beneficial ownership sits and to try and make a decision on that and to warn people about that. There wasn't legislation that enabled anyone in government to do anything about that at that time.

34:41Alastair Campbell:And on China, we're talking around the time that Keir Starmer has been to Xi Jinping in Beijing and a lot of focus on this Chinese embassy. And both Roy and I have said on the podcast, we can't quite see what the fuss is about. Can I have your take on whether it is a good thing or a bad thing that the Chinese have got this mega embassy being built?

35:01Jeremy Fleming:So I always react to the mega and the super. I don't understand why we describe it like that. I mean, it's a reasonable sized building slightly outside the centre of London. So my view is that there's a lot of noise around this and probably doesn't deserve that. And so we... Well, because the decision about where to locate it and how to make sure that doesn't pose an additional threat to national security would have been thought through very seriously. Indeed, two of the heads of the agencies have written to ministers now to explain what those processes are and made it public. That's pretty unprecedented actually.

35:35Jeremy Fleming:So I think we as an ex-intelligence chief, then you can expect me to go to the real politics around all of this. Of course, the Chinese have an embassy here. The fact that it's in one place and it's not in five places around London is probably a good thing. I thought the cable stuff was a load of nonsense.

35:52Rory Stewart:Just quickly for listeners who don't get that reference, what Jeremy's saying there is that famously a fiber optic cable runs quite close to the new site of the Chinese embassy and the British media and some MPs have got very excited about the fact that this is a real reason why the embassy can't be built because they're going to be getting into that fiber optic cable. Just tell us why it's nonsense.

36:11Jeremy Fleming:Well, given that we know where the cables are and what they carry, if the Chinese decided by some long stretch of the imagination, they were going to bring in a tunneling machine and go to them and tap them. We might notice that. I mean, I think it's a good thing in that it highlights what is the situation, which is there is significant Chinese espionage activity in this country. And we need to make sure we've got that properly covered. But it won't be happening from the embassy, particularly. This is a much broader question here.

36:44Rory Stewart:Okay, Alistair, Jeremy, quick break and then back for more.

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39:02Rory Stewart:So how do you think thoughtfully through these kind of choices? So, again today, Octopus Energy has said they want to buy Chinese wind turbines, which they think are 30 % cheaper and much more efficient. Canada's allowing in Chinese electric vehicles, much, much cheaper than Tesla. You and I were in government when we were all discussing Huawei. My memory basically of that was sitting around tables where for a long time, the experts were saying, it's okay, we're not that worried about Huawei. And then suddenly we were so worried about Huawei. Huawei was all booted out and it probably cost us a couple of billion quid.

39:39Rory Stewart:How does one work our way through this? Because again, the way I've just described that doesn't make me hugely confident about what these processes are and how they operate and how one thinks reasonably and logically about what is a threat, what's the risk and how to manage it.

39:52Jeremy Fleming:Well, you know as well as I do that there are many aspects of those sorts of decisions. And there are pure security driven aspects of it. And then there are economic and there are political and they're diplomatic.

40:03Rory Stewart:They all came into space. What would your framework be? Hypothetically, how would you think through what sort of things should a policymaker think about if they're trying to think in the future about becoming very dependent on China or Russia or the US in some sector of their economy?

40:17Jeremy Fleming:I think the first thing to do is to try and understand the importance of the sector to the nation. What is the thing that we most care about that is most important for our economy, for jobs and our security and take a view on that. Because as well as a defensive posture, that also gives us the opportunity to architect things which are important to us as a country, upon which our future prosperity is going to rely. The old-fashioned way of putting that was our industrial policy. So there are two sides. So what are the things that we really care about? And they could be energy, tech, what could they say?

40:50Jeremy Fleming:Yeah, energy, tech, bioscience. Actually, the government has eight of them in the industrial strategy is a pretty good articulation of where the UK can be important and where it will get its future prosperity from. So if you're looking at something like the winter, you've decided that energy is important to you. You've decided that you want to spend on offshore energy for a whole range of policy decisions as well as economic decisions. And then you've got to look at, well, what are the vulnerabilities that you introduce into the ecosystem by doing that? And what is the opportunity for having a safe trading relationship with China or indeed any other partner on this?

41:28Jeremy Fleming:Or is this an opportunity to try and do things in a more sovereign way? And so there is a step through on all of these. I don't automatically assume that China equals bad or China equals threat from a security perspective. It's still really hard to switch things off. The sci-fi, there's a big button somewhere that someone is going to hit and the lights are going to go off everywhere. It just doesn't work like that. It can't work like that.

41:54Alastair Campbell:Give us some examples of the sort of, when we talk about cyber attacks, what sort of things are we talking about and how do they operate and how do we detect them? And when we fail to detect them, what's the worst that can happen?

42:05Jeremy Fleming:Well, I'm glad you've come on to this. 600 ,000 businesses in the UK had some sort of cyber attack last year. If you're an individual, the crime you're most likely to suffer is a cyber crime. If you took the economic benefits to cyber criminal actors and put them all together, together they would be the same as one of our most important trading partners in terms of scale. So this is a massive thing. And I'm amazed that there's not more politics around it. Because if you're an individual, if your mum is being hit by a cyber attack, or if you're a business, you're losing money, or if you're a big business in the UK and you're systemically challenged.

42:46Jeremy Fleming:This is what happened with Jaguar Land Rover. These are massive things that we need to take really seriously. The National Cyber Security Centre said last year that the number of cyber attacks that they were seeing in total had come down slightly, but the number of nationally significant ones had increased dramatically, over 200 nationally significant. And by that they mean, you know, it could have a fundamental impact on our economy or on jobs or our ability to deliver services.

43:13Alastair Campbell:Take Jaguar Land Rover. Just for somebody who doesn't get this world, what happened there and why did that end up damaging Jaguar Land Rover and therefore the economy more broadly?

43:23Jeremy Fleming:So what happened there was a cyber criminal attacker found a vulnerability in some of Jaguar Land Rover's computing systems, quite far out, not very central to their systems, and then found a way to put some malware into those systems such that they couldn't operate. And critically, they couldn't operate their supply chain effectively. And so what that does in a just-in-time industrial manufacturing process is to bring the whole thing to a halt. And with Jaguar Land Rover, for weeks on end, we didn't see cars come off the production line.

43:57Alastair Campbell:And why is it so hard to catch the criminals that are doing that?

44:00Jeremy Fleming:Well, let me just finish the... Yeah. I think Jaguar Land Rover's estimate, I think, is it costs nearly£2 billion. So this is not a sort of a niche sport. This is something that has gone systemic and strategic. You know, how do you stop this happening? Well, you pardon your defenses. It's actually a really hard thing to go after people after the event. So what you want to try and do is to make yourself as hard to attack as possible. and uh you know that is that is hard but it really is not as hard as dealing with the mess

44:31Alastair Campbell:afterwards and what sort of person is making what sort of money in essentially malwaring blackmailing these companies how do they make money and why can't we find them a large proportion

44:42Jeremy Fleming:of the of the criminal actors are in places where we don't have any law enforcement reach and that's shorthand for many of them are russian speaking and not just russian speaking

44:52Alastair Campbell:North Korea?

44:53Jeremy Fleming:A North Korean?

44:55Alastair Campbell:Iran.

44:55Jeremy Fleming:Iran. Actually, North Korea is a cyber state. It funds a significant proportion, some people think over a third and maybe as much as a half, of its budgets from cyber fraud and extortion. And it's got really good at doing it in the financial services business. So going after banks or cryptocurrency exchanges. It's doing really well at that. But there are also English-speaking cyber criminals in America and Europe, including in the UK. We can go after those. But if you compare my 600 ,000 businesses, last year in the UK there were 200 prosecutions under the Computer Misuse Act. There is a structural mismatch here.

45:36Jeremy Fleming:One of the conversations with ministers, and maybe it plays to your previous point, Rory, whenever you have a cyber attack, I think it's natural that ministers say, well, go after them, hit them back with cyber. But it doesn't work like that. You can't do it that way. You have to pursue all sorts of other means. But crucially, you have to harden your defenses. You have to make yourself less easy to attack.

45:58Alastair Campbell:And when you say Russian speaking, although they're as it were criminals, are they essentially state actors?

46:05Jeremy Fleming:Some of them are affiliated to the Russian state. Because as you know, in that society, it's quite hard to do things completely freelance. So I wouldn't say they were 100 % state actors.

46:15Rory Stewart:One interesting question is around the fact that we didn't actually set up the proper regulation and guardrails around cyber in the way that ultimately we had to around banking regulation and many of the other international agreements since 1989. And one of the reasons some people suggest why we didn't do this is because countries like America and Britain felt they benefited more from the porosity of these things, their ability to access these systems, and they would have benefited from a very tight regulatory system. So is it another example, along with your letting in Russian money, waving off globalization, where the short-term benefit meant we didn't actually take the measures that we could have taken over 15, 20 years to regulate this properly internationally.

47:02Jeremy Fleming:No, I don't think so. That was never a reason as far as I understood it for seeking to have less secure technology than we could have. In fact, that would have been, I think criminally negligent to have allowed that to happen. I used to say in GCHQ, our responsibility was for making the UK the safest place to live and do business online. You get much more advantage from making tech secure for most of the people most of the time than you would do from in theory leaving some sort of loophole. So the problems we have with international regulation were that we didn't agree internationally on how to approach it.

47:39Rory Stewart:Well, we also didn't even with the US companies, we didn't set up the standards and the regulation tight enough from the beginning. All these systems, I mean, the ability of Russian hackers, half associated with the Russian government, to get into our systems is partly to do with the way that we allowed these systems to be designed.

47:54Jeremy Fleming:Well, I agree with you that we didn't do a very good job of designing the internet in a secure way. And actually, we're doing the same again with artificial intelligence. And it's back to my point about incentives. It's not just about regulation. In fact, regulation and legislation, I think, that's the last resort. That's what happen when things go wrong. But standard setting and international agreements and collaboration on these sorts of things, we ought to do a much better job at that. And we are still suffering from poor decisions about internet protocols that were designed 30 years ago, and they're still all over the internet.

48:29Jeremy Fleming:But to suggest that we'd sort of left them there, no, I would completely disagree with that.

48:34Alastair Campbell:Presumably you worry, as I do, that artificial intelligence essentially is absolutely dominated by the two superpowers.

48:43Jeremy Fleming:Yeah, I mean, that is the reality for aspects of artificial intelligence. I mean, I hate the term. It's none of these term things. Maybe it's a bureaucrat in me. I mean, artificial intelligence covers such a wide range of things. And when we're talking about it now, then we're largely talking about the large language models, which have become so prevalent. You're talking about the next stage of technological development. So I think when you put it like that, I agree with that. there is no doubt that America and China are dominating that bit of AI, but they don't have it all their own way. Certainly, I know you've been talking a lot to Matt Clifford.

49:17Jeremy Fleming:If you talk to him about where the UK has advantage, there are places where we have advantage. But is it right for us to think that as a nation, we can go out and recreate open AI or anthropic? No, of course not. We're not going to do that. We shouldn't waste our time doing that. In fact, my view is that we should spend the marginal pound on making sure that we adopt AI properly and we adapt.

49:38Alastair Campbell:Maybe Europe needs to compete in that space.

49:40Jeremy Fleming:You think it's gone beyond? I don't think that Europe can compete exactly on those terms. But the AI that will be the next generation of AI isn't exactly the same as this one. And many people think that as they get more capable, there are going to have to be new ways of doing it. And more people think that actually you can build on the back of what has been happening there and still have a credible offer. So I don't assume that sovereignty means that we have to have all of it, a whole stack that is purely European at every point in the cycle.

50:14Rory Stewart:I was at a dinner last week with a couple of people who'd been playing around with some of the new open models. One of them had run an experiment from a university where they'd sent an email inviting people to speak on a conference. You had to click on a link. And they'd also used AI to generate a voice conversation to follow up the phone call. They managed to get 80 % of people to click on this link. And these were smart people they were targeting because the voice call follow up. Another person at the dinner was talking about how increasingly plausible it seems that you could create some pretty significant bioweapons.

50:50Rory Stewart:What does this mean in the way that you think about security threats, AI regulation standards?

50:55Jeremy Fleming:Well, as AI is an opportunity, it's also a threat and it needs to be secured. And at your dinner, I'm not surprised that you're starting to hear those sorts of conversations. I mean, the reality is that just at this period of time, then AI is an accelerant for the sorts of threats that we already see. So AI is enabling bad state actors or is enabling criminals to do more of the same sorts of things that they've done in the past, to do it more effectively, more convincingly, and in different languages. I do quite a lot of work in Japan. What's really interesting there is how large language models are allowing cyber attackers to be much more obvious in Japan than they were a few years ago when their language did quite a good job of insulating them from some aspects of the cyber threat.

51:39Jeremy Fleming:So I think the framing at the moment is to think of it as an accelerant. But what's not far around the corner is hyper-personalization, which is the sort of thing you're talking about. I used to use this story quite a bit, but I used to say, if I had come here from, I stayed last night with my friend Bob, and if Bob just now got a text from me saying, I've lost my wallet, send me 50 quid, he'd probably think, yeah, I'm not going to do that. But if Bob got a thing saying, I had an awful journey in from Teddington, and when I got here, Alistair asked me some really tricky questions. I was a bit grumpy on the way out.

52:17Jeremy Fleming:I've got a wallet still and I really can't get home. Send me 500 quid from my text number. You'd probably think twice. That's actually quite trivial if you've got access to my diary and you've got access to other sort of data about me, which is probably out there, maybe better protected, but probably out there. And so hyper-personalization at a population scale, I think, isn't that far off. And for me, whilst we like to go to the chem weapons, the bio-weapons, switching the lights off, the much more proximate and worrying threats are all about population scale harm, crime, fraud. And I don't think actually we're focusing enough of the conversation on that.

53:02Jeremy Fleming:We like going to the sci-fi end of the spectrum. That said, we need to worry about chem-bio. We need to make sure that we are looking at those tail end risks. And that's why we have a security institute here in the UK and in America and elsewhere to try and think about that.

53:17Alastair Campbell:How has this tech revolution changed the war in Ukraine, including during the period of the war? I mean, I get the sense just from reading about it, talking to people, that the war that we had when it started almost four years ago, it's been fought in a very, very different way now. How much is that about the technological change?

53:34Jeremy Fleming:It's completely different. But the change started before the invasion four years ago. I mean, the change started when Ukraine started to take its security, its cyber security really seriously after Crimea. And it did some pretty extraordinary things at that time, including taking its government into the cloud, thinking very seriously about how it brings some new technology into its defense. And that has accelerated since. Of course, Russia is an adversary has learned from that too and and what you see as you do i would say in any war in history you're seeing a technology arms race as each each party tries to bring technology to to bear well i mean i think you'd have to say that if if you were thinking about the the match at the beginning of of of this conflict a vastly smaller country less rich fewer people less armed and to say that four years later they'd still be holding Russia, Russia creeping forward, you know, a percent of Ukraine territory in the last year.

54:35Jeremy Fleming:You'd have to say that Ukraine has done a really good job here and one that many people didn't expect it to be able to do. And part of that is because it's brought technology to bear more effectively, more quickly than it's ever. And who in your assessment has the greater resilience? Well, wars are always about, you know, the will to fight as my military colleagues tell me. And for the time being, I think Ukraine is showing extraordinary resilience. But the losses, you know, the losses are significant on both sides, but there will come a point when the losses become really significant for Russia, as it has done at times in its past too.

55:11Jeremy Fleming:And if you, you know, over a million, over a million men now are dead from, or dead or badly injured from the Russian side. And, you know, that, despite their system, despite the repression and the surveillance, everything else we know about Russia, those sorts of losses, I don't believe that Russia can continue to take over the long term.

55:32Rory Stewart:Jeremy, tell us about the threat from China, because we hear about it a lot, and obviously it's absolutely central to the whole American discourse. What is the threat from China if you're trying to explain it to an ordinary person in Britain? Why should we be worried?

55:41Jeremy Fleming:This is the diplomat in me. I'd start by saying that, of course, you'd expect me to say that China is a superpower, and it's a country we need to have a relationship with and we need to have an economic relationship with it and there are opportunities from that in the future. But the balance is always a difficult one with what's the cost of that relationship and what sort of threat does China pose. I think if I was starting explaining it to a minister now, I'd be using examples of what we found them doing. And so in the last five years, we've found them not only amounting a significant number of cyber attacks, of stealing secrets, of going after IP, but also of attempting to control the diaspora here in the UK, of creating unofficial police stations that are trying to make sure that the Chinese diaspora stay in line.

56:40Jeremy Fleming:And I think you can point to areas where they're clearly not acting in our interests overseas, including supporting Russia in its fight in Ukraine. So I don't think it's very hard to paint the threat picture. The difficulty and where we always have a problem is in making the balance. Prosperity and security are not trade-offs. It's not a zero-sum game. You can have a trading relationship, you can have a grown-up intelligence, diplomatic and political relationship. But you've also got to be very clear-eyed that in some circumstances, China poses a threat. And when they pose a threat, and when we catch them at it, we call them out.

57:22Alastair Campbell:And if you add all those things together, what's their strategic goal in doing all these individual things? How do they see? What is the threat that they want to impose upon us?

57:32Jeremy Fleming:Their goal is the long-term security of the party, The continuation of the state. That's where you start any conversation on the PRC and Chinese government. And it's how President Xi thinks about the world. And so their goal in trying to mount espionage here or pose a threat to us here is to collect intelligence. It's to gain access to things which will make them more economically successful in the future. It's to undermine criticism of them as a regime. It's to reduce, in their minds, the threats that they see either the diaspora here posing or the country posing to their longer term interests.

58:12Jeremy Fleming:So I don't think it's very complicated to see why they do these things. But a different sort of threat from the threat posed by Russia. Yes, it is a different type of threat. Could you explain it? Not in every... Well, I mean, Russia's threat is much more proximate. Russia is much more in our back door. Militarily, it poses a threat in the way that China hasn't posed a threat to us yet. And we know because we deeply understand Putin's mindset, because he's told us about it for the last 20 years, how he thinks about Russia and its near abroad. So it is at the moment a different type of threat. It's sophisticated in a different way.

58:49Jeremy Fleming:And that means that it's different to counter as well. There isn't a one-size-fits-all approach.

58:55Rory Stewart:Some of the things we might say about difference between Russia and China's threat challenge me. I mean, some people would say, okay, one difference is Russia's genuine expansionist power. He makes no secret the fact he wants to add new bits of territory, which will be Russian, not just influence them, but have them. He wants to really shatter NATO. He wants to divide Europe off from the US in a very dramatic way. I mean, are there other ways of kind of explaining the different nature of the threat, Russia and China?

59:20Jeremy Fleming:I'd agree with that. I'd also say that the thresholds in the way he takes action are a completely different level. I mean, we have seen inside Europe over the last four years, increasing levels of violence, of boldness in what Russia is prepared to do in Europe. And everything from intimidation through to killing and beyond, from going after supply chains of what they perceive to be supporting the Ukrainian effort to taking steps to get inside critical and top secret systems in NATO and allied countries. So yeah, I mean, it does pose a very real threat and it's on our back door strategically. You were good enough to say that you'd listened to a very old speech of mine.

1:00:10Jeremy Fleming:I haven't listened to it recently, but I think I remember talking about the threat and talking about it as the long-term threat. And I still think we should be approaching it with at least that in mind as we pursue a broader relationship.

1:00:25Alastair Campbell:Listen, Jeremy, thanks for all your time. Just my final question. If somebody was applying for a job, not via the Ministry of Defence, but saying straight, I want to work for the security service today, what in the modern age makes a good intelligence officer? Do you have to be very tech savvy? Do you have to have an understanding of the way that this modern economy works, modern technology works? Or is it still really about kind of human analysis and connection?

1:00:53Jeremy Fleming:Well, let me answer that question from a GCHQ perspective, because it's where I spent the end of my career. So GCHQ, the biggest intelligence agency, thousands of people, and a very broad range of professions inside it. Analysts, scientists, mathematicians, linguists, people who look after the accommodation, the environment, the estate, people who are making sure that when we're deployed overseas, we're safe, and, and, and. So it's an incredibly broad range of people required to make an intelligence agency work. The happy reality is that you apply online now to publicly available job adverts. And if you are going for an intelligence officer or an intelligence analysis role, then that will be a more tech heavy role than it was at the time at which I joined.

1:01:43Jeremy Fleming:But we're looking for the same things. You know, we're looking for people who deeply care about the mission, who have very strong values, who can meet a security threshold and can be vetted. And, you know, frankly, want to be part of something which I found throughout my career to be, you know, always energizing, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately, you know, a career well spent. So if you're up for that and you listen to this, then, you know, it's still worth doing.

1:02:09Rory Stewart:What do you think we're missing about tech and tech policy in the world? What sort of things worry you that you think people aren't talking about enough?

1:02:18Jeremy Fleming:That's a really hard question after the softer Alistair one. I would answer that two ways. You've touched on it already. We have got to get around global governance for AI. We really have to get our heads around what that means. Whether we do that with an alliance of like-minded countries, or we do that through some sort of established multilateral partnership, less likely. Or if we do that starting with just a few nations, we have to get our head around this because at some time we will see something we don't like from this technology and we'll be rushing to catch up. So the first thing around tech is we have to find a way of having a global governance.

1:02:56Jeremy Fleming:You know I'm deliberately not saying regulation here. It might be that might be an aspect of it. Is that because you're working for tech companies? I'm working for tech companies. You're a quantum physicist. So I think we're definitely missing that. I think inside the UK, we need to do much more of the education stuff. I know the government's made some announcements this week, and I really welcome that. But we have to prepare population for the pace at which this is coming. And it is coming in years, not decades. And that means really upping our efforts to help the population adjust. I forget who said this, but this thought of we have always evolved alongside technology.

1:03:40Jeremy Fleming:We're going to have to evolve really quickly alongside this technology.

1:03:43Alastair Campbell:Well, thank you. Thank you, Jeremy, very much.

1:03:45Jeremy Fleming:Thank you for coming on.

1:03:48Rory Stewart:God, your questions were long, Rory. Yeah. Hey? They were. They were terribly long questions. Then let me just sort of reflect on everything. So I think what I, maybe I'm sharing too much with you in the public here. Jeremy, in private, is the most incredibly funny, quirky, outspoken person. And of course, I was reminded suddenly here that he's a spy. And he's also very conscious that he doesn't want, as the former head of GCHQ, to be causing problems for his successors for the government, et cetera. So he is a little bit more cautious in the podcast than he is one-on-one. And I guess my incredibly convoluted questions away of trying to say, come on, Jeremy, I know you really believe this.

1:04:30Rory Stewart:How am I going to get you to say what I think you believe?

1:04:32Alastair Campbell:Yeah, but listen, for those who are watching rather than listening, just look at the guy's face when he's listening. You're not going to get anything out of him he doesn't want to give. Yeah. I mean, you know, he's been trained. He's been trained. But listen, I thought he was really interesting and very thoughtful. And I think he is, look, he obviously doesn't want to criticize his own services and he doesn't want to criticize the government past or present. But I think he is alerting us and warning us of threats and of technological developments that he thinks we're somewhat behind the game.

1:05:01Rory Stewart:So he doesn't want to come with me on saying there's something wrong with our institutions, our bureaucracy, our establishment. It's a bit reluctant to do that. But the fact is, you mentioned one thing that we really screwed up on, which was Russian money. There's another thing we talked about, which is our complete failure to really create secure internet, which we're now struggling with 40 years later. I talked about the Afghan war and I saw a lot of stuff where I do not. And he said it himself, we're not good at five, 10 years planning. Yeah, that was a remarkable thing to say that we didn't really have those sorts of discussions.

1:05:33Alastair Campbell:I think what we did back in the day.

1:05:35Rory Stewart:And of course, he would say it's not just structure, it's personality. I mean, maybe Tony obviously has got a mind and Gordon likes that kind of big picture stuff. I think though it is a problem. I was sad I couldn't quite bring him with me because I came out of government really feeling we've made mistakes again and again and again and again, and there should be a much more urgent drive to reform. I was also obviously hoping that he'd come closer to me on seeing the fact that actually our vulnerabilities to the US are very, very significant.

1:06:08Alastair Campbell:Yeah, it's very hard. I mean, part of the systemic thing, if you spent your whole life hand in glove with the Americans, as he has, then it's quite hard to kind of, but I thought he acknowledged, at least acknowledged why we were worried about it, why that audience that I told him about were worried, although he was horrified, as he said, that people genuinely think America is now a bigger threat than China. And it's interesting when he talked about, Stephen Lander, who was, he was one of our, I don't think it was, was he the first? Probably your first, yeah. Yeah. And he was, you know, so we had all sorts of interaction with the heads of the agencies.

1:06:45Alastair Campbell:And I think what does happen is that, I don't know whether this is the case with Keir Starmer, who would have known a lot of these people anyway through his work in the DPP and what have you. But certainly when we got in in 1997 and Tony was prime minister, you do kind of have a sense that these guys really know what they're talking about. And I think there's also a desire to work with them, to cooperate with them. And essentially he mentioned that the head of GCHQ has seen four heads of the NSA, they have all seen this relentless churn of prime minister, foreign minister, home secretary over the last decade under the Tories.

1:07:19Alastair Campbell:And that gives them an awful lot more power. Absolutely. I'm not suggesting that they want to run the country, but why wouldn't they exploit that for their own advantage?

1:07:27Rory Stewart:Absolutely. And they will understandably think we have a very, very clear idea about what we're doing. I mean, I spent of spent many, many months trying to, as a minister, fight government policy over Syria. And I never quite got to the bottom of it, but it was quite clear the system disagreed with me on Syria and they weren't going to shift. And a lot of the time when I pushed, they'd say, oh, that's secret. You can't see that. Or there's a meeting here that you can't go to, or there's a small group there. And it's understandable because they're thinking, who the hell is this minister? Why the hell should Rory be telling us what to do in Syria?

1:08:02Rory Stewart:And I'm saying, well, I'm the minister, right? This is my job. So it's a really interesting question. And it's something you'll tease me about because you'll say this is just because they're disagreeing with me that I'm getting wound up. But I wish people were a bit more honest about it because they can't have it both ways. They can't both be like, actually, we know what's going on, the minister doesn't. And also keep saying, of course, minister, accountability, minister of society, all that stuff.

1:08:25Alastair Campbell:Yeah, it does give them a pretty... they have their cake and eat it and doing that. Yeah. But anyway, listen, I think the other thing that's really interesting about these guys, and of course, you know, back when I was a journalist, you weren't even allowed to ask questions about the security services. You weren't allowed to say they existed. It was totally absurd. And so he's come through that incredible change culturally for them. And actually, I think it's a good thing now that people of him are out there talking and John Soares and Alex Younger and these guys?

1:08:54Rory Stewart:There will be some people listening who will say we should have challenged a little bit more on the transparency legality stuff. So Jeremy absolutely sincerely, like John Soares, very much believes we're in a much, much better world because we've become much more transparent, much more legal. There are bits of the British system and a hell of a lot of bits of the American system who think that we've lost the loss of capacity by doing it. Now he'd deny it. He'd say you just get stronger by becoming more legal and more transparent. But there are many people who say, hey, well, in this operation in Syria, this operation in Iraq, this thing that we try to ask them to do, suddenly we're meeting a lot of lawyers saying, I'm sorry, the Brits or this part of the British state can't join you in that.

1:09:32Rory Stewart:It is a question. He said, you know, we don't want to be one of those agencies. But lawyers are increasingly important. And of course, they as the bosses have to keep saying to their staff, we have to remain with the law. Yeah, they can't drop people off balconies. They certainly can't drop it. And I'm not in favor of dropping people off balconies. No, but that was what I was asking.

1:09:47Alastair Campbell:Do the Russians and the Chinese and the North Korean, are they operating at an advantage

1:09:51Rory Stewart:And of course, the Americans in some areas have much more latitude than we do. The French certainly have much more latitude than we do. The Israelis have a latitude well, well, well, well beyond. And our risk assessments will be different. And who we're prepared to talk to, who we're prepared to work with, even governments. So one problem again we didn't get into is that there are some governments that we've effectively had to stop working with that many of our other partners work with because we're just like, these people are too crazy and we take too much legal risk collaborating with him. Anyway, there we are.

1:10:24Rory Stewart:Another spook. Another spook. Thank you very much indeed. And I think he's wonderful. And I really would recommend that people engage with him. He's wonderfully bright.

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